Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany

"David Blackbourn is an incredible historian. I encountered him because I was looking for a readable history of Germany in the 19th century, which is the time it becomes really, really important. He’s a British guy who is a professor at Harvard now and he writes really well and clearly, mostly in an overarching analytical style, and he’s writing histories of centuries. Marpingen is the opposite. It’s an incredibly detailed, minute study of what happens in one village at a time of crisis. It’s the 1870s, and it’s a tiny mining village in the Saarland, on the border between France and Germany. The Franco-Prussian War had just ended. There had been a lot of fighting in that area, and people from the village had been killed. As a result of the war, the German Empire has been formed by Bismarck. Before that, at one point Germany was several thousand tiny little territories that were part of the Holy Roman Empire, and up to the 1870s there were still three dozen separate jurisdictions, from quite large kingdoms down to little city states. Bismarck wanted to turn all these people into Germans. One of the chief dangers he faced was from the Catholic Church, so he introduced Kulturkampf , the Culture War, which was an attempt to stop Catholics from being loyal to the pope and to undermine their influence in the German Empire. Marpingen was predominantly Catholic and was placed under tremendous stress and threat by this. One of the ways in which it responded is that a whole series of visions of the Virgin Mary were seen by two or three village girls. The place then became a huge place of pilgrimage and it was the Lourdes of Germany for more than a year. Blackbourn did this unbelievably detailed study – looking through all the ecclesiastical archives and the local archives that nobody else had ever bothered to look at – to understand why these visions were taking place in this village, what had caused it and how they responded. I’m very interested in how strange events like this happen, and he’s the person who has done the best, and by far the most detailed and revealing, research on this. He’s certainly not a believer that the Virgin Mary literally appeared there. One of the reasons Blackbourn is so good is that he explains it terribly well from original testimony. These girls were out in the forest picking bilberries at twilight. They came back past a large stack of wood, with the light side facing outward. In the gloaming, it looked sort of white. So they saw something which didn’t look at all like the Virgin Mary, and yet they reported it as the Virgin. The interesting thing is that originally only one of them said that she saw Mary, and the others went along with it, which is quite typical for these types of visions. To explain all that, you have to understand all the stresses and strains in their society. There was obviously a longing for something to happen. Blackbourn is very good on what that longing is and where it comes from. For quite a long time it did appear likely that it could turn into another major miracle site. What you need is a combination of circumstances: You need to have a village priest who backs it, you need to have people in the village who believe in it, you need to get some profits from it, I suspect, as well, and for a while Marpingen did make quite a lot of money out of the trade. But things didn’t quite coalesce. The priest wasn’t sufficiently in favour of it, the girls weren’t quite credible enough, they wavered a little bit in their stories. People started leaping on it, and German society was, perhaps, more sceptical of these visions because, unlike France or Portugal, it wasn’t an entirely Catholic society. There was more sceptical examination of these stories than maybe took place in some purely Catholic societies."

"You’ve got Christopher Clark and James Sheehan giving rounded, comprehensive surveys of German society and Prussian society and politics, then you have Jonathan Steinberg’s book, focusing on the most important person, without a doubt, in 19th century Germany—Otto von Bismarck. I wanted to take it down a bit to another level and there are so many choices I could have made. There are a lot of wonderful books about the Social Democrats and working class society and so on, but very few of them are very readable. David Blackbourn’s book was published in 1993, and it’s a very unusual and imaginative take on 19th century German society. He’s a British historian, who has been teaching in America, first of all at Harvard and then at Vanderbilt, which has become a major centre of German historical scholarship in recent years. His book is a narrative of what happened in 1876 with three eight-year-old girls in Marpingen, a village in the far west German state of Saarland, then ruled by Prussia. They claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. Not long before, in 1858, Saint Bernadette had had her great visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes; she was eventually canonized as a result. This is a time when the Catholic Church was being persecuted by Bismarck. Bismarck thought that Catholics and, later on, socialists, were enemies of the Reich. Catholics were about 36% or 37% of the population of the newly unified Reich and they were centred in states like Bavaria that had fought against Prussia in the war of 1866. Bismarck thought they were disloyal because Catholics owed their allegiance to the Pope, not to the Emperor. This is a time when, across Europe, the Pope, because he had lost his territorial sovereignty over the middle of Italy in the process of Italian unification, was tightening his grip on the Catholic community, with papal infallibility and The Syllabus of Errors. In general, he was trying to rally Catholics worldwide as a substitute for being able to rule over central Italy. “Catholic priests were arrested for refusing to obey the state. Lots of them were imprisoned” You have these struggles going on in France, Italy, Germany and, to a degree in Austria, between the newly founded states or renewed states, Germany and the French Third Republic, and the Catholic Church. David Blackbourn’s book really brings home the sheer severity of what was called by the Liberals, who supported Bismarck in this, the Kulturkampf —the clash of civilizations, something we’ve heard about more recently with reference to Islam. Catholic priests and bishops had to get the approval of the state for their appointments. They resisted, so bishoprics were left vacant. Catholic priests were arrested for refusing to obey the state. Lots of them were imprisoned. It’s a really desperate period for the Catholic Church. And, in this context, the Catholic community in Saarland was incredibly keen to gain prestige, because they felt they were excluded from the main institutions of German society and persecuted to a quite extraordinary degree. So, when the eight-year-old girls in Marpingen went back to the village in Saarland and said they’d seen the Virgin Mary, the whole Catholic community said, ‘Great. Fantastic. The French can do it; we can do it.’ It was a slight echo of Liberals saying, ‘If the Italians can unify, the Germans can unify.’ Before long, you had mass demonstrations, with people coming in thousands from all over Germany to pay homage to these girls. There are other elements. Saarland is an industrial area, a mining area. It’s not a backward part of Germany. It’s an area that industrialized rapidly and was fast-changing. People there were connected to the wider world. Bismarck and the Prussian state responded with massive repression. They sent in the army. They sent in the police, who broke up the demonstrations. The book gets you into the operations on the ground of the Prussian state and the police. The Prussian state hired a detective who, rather wonderfully, was called Marlow which, of course, is not just the name of Raymond Chandler’s sleuth—it’s also the name of the man in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , who goes up river to see the heart of darkness in colonial Africa. The novel came later, but that’s what the Prussians thought they were doing. They were penetrating and trying to control a hotbed of superstition and rebellion, of resistance to the Prussian state and modern rationality. It’s a wonderful book, beautifully written and it’s very carefully researched—a lot of original sources. The Prussian state was bureaucratic and the police left loads of records. There were plenty of testimonies, including from the Catholic Church’s investigators. This is not as long a book as some of my other choices, although it’s still about 400 pages long. It’s an absolutely fascinating story that lifts the lid on many different aspects of Imperial Germany. Nothing is really spontaneous, but these demonstrations were not supported by the Catholic hierarchy or by the Pope. And—spoiler alert—the girls eventually confessed they’d made it all up. The way in which they described the visions was confused. They didn’t have that luminous clarity or simple faith that made Bernadette such a powerful figure in France and Lourdes. It was a much more compromised account. They said they’d done it for fun and they were completely shocked by this huge outburst of support. Eventually the Catholic Church didn’t back them. It was in response to the Kulturkampf . That was the way the Catholic community organised itself to have a political voice in the Reichstag. It became a very successful party because the Liberals, who had the majority in the 1860s, were a middle-class vote. The peasants and the workers were very slow to take up the franchise. But the Catholic community mobilized itself through the Centre Party, which became very large and very successful, the largest party in the Reichstag until the Social Democrats overtook it in 1912. Interestingly, the Kulturkampf was, to some degree, a success. By the time it was relaxed, Bismarck wanted to renew the ban on the Socialists in 1890, who had taken over from the Catholics as his bugbear. And that’s why he was kicked out by Wilhelm II, because the new Kaiser did not want to renew the ban. The anti-Catholic provisions were relaxed bit by bit; deals were done. The Catholic Centre Party became very strongly nationalist and supported the Empire. They wanted to show that they were real Germans. They were more German than the Germans, almost. They still had this Achilles heel, of being heavily influenced by the Pope. There was no way Bismarck could have changed that. In 1933, they agreed to dissolve themselves when Hitler promised—a promise as worthless as all of Hitler’s other promises—to respect their institutions and the Church’s autonomy, if the Centre Party abolished itself. They weren’t always uncritical of the Reich and its policies. After the turn of the century, particularly in 1905-06, the Catholic Party led the charge in the Reichstag, with the Socialists, against the colonial atrocities, which were being committed by the German army in Namibia in South West Africa. But by the early 1930s, they had lost this oppositional character."