With its rapid industrialization, modernization, and gradual democratization, Imperial Germany has typically been understood in secular terms. However, religion and religious actors actually played crucial roles in the history of the Kaiserreich, a fact that becomes particularly evident when viewed through a transnational lens. In this volume, leading scholars of sociology, religious studies, and history study the interplay of secular and religious worldviews beyond the simple interrelation of practices and ideas. By exploring secular perspectives, belief systems, and rituals in a transnational context, they provide new ways of understanding how the borders between Imperial Germany’s secular and religious spheres were continually made and remade.
Table of Content
Introduction: Negotiating the Religious and the Secular in Modern German History
Rebekka Habermas
PART I: RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR: SCIENTIFIC DEBATES
Chapter 1. A Secular Age? The ‘Modern World’ and the Beginnings of the Sociology of Religion
Wolfgang Knöbl
Chapter 2. The Silence on the Land: Ancient Israel versus Modern Palestine in Scientific Theology
Paul Michael Kurtz
PART II: RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR: PUBLIC DEBATES
Chapter 3. What Means to Be ‘Secular’ in the German Kaiserreich? An Intervention
Lucian Hölscher
Chapter 4. Secularism in the Long Nineteenth Century between the Global and the Local
Rebekka Habermas
PART III: RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR: NEGOTIATING BOUNDARIES
Chapter 5. Retrieving Tradition? The Secular-Religious Ambiguity in Nineteenth Century German-Jewish Anarchism
Carolin Kosuch
Chapter 6. Catholic Women as Global Actors of the Religious and the Secular
Relinde Meiwes
Chapter 7. Negotiating the Fundamentals? German Missions and the Experience of the Contact Zone, 1850–1918
Richard Hölzl and Karolin Wetjen
Index
About the author
Rebekka Habermas is Professor of Modern German History at the University of Göttingen. She has also been a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at Oxford University and Theodor Heuss Professor at The New School in New York. Her publications include Frauen und Männer des Bürgertums: Eine Familiengeschichte (2000), Thieves in Court: The Making of the German Legal System in the Nineteenth Century (2016), and Skandal in Togo: Ein Kapitel deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (2016).
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