Most of the people you meet in the November 1990 issue of the American music magazine Spin seem like they belong there – Axl Rose, Jon Bon Jovi, the Geto Boys – and then you come across the long-dead German polymath Rudolf Virchow. A giant of nineteenth-century science, Virchow was good at naming things. We owe him the words for leukaemia, embolism, and thrombosis. In the eyes of Jefferson Morley, the author of Spin’s article on ‘The Cultural Civil War in America’, Virchow had coined another useful term: Kulturkampf. This originally described the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s campaign against the Catholic Church in the 1870s. Virchow not only approved of this but thought it was part of a broader struggle for the future of civilisation. Morley saw a direct analogy to the contemporary United States, where the conflict was so pervasive, you could even hear it in hits like Papa Don’t Preach, which had divided contemporary Americans. ‘Madonna’s tale of a woman who chooses neither to have an abortion nor to listen to her father’s moralizing is a song from the Kulturkampf’ he wrote.
It is easy to forget the fact that those who first popularised the term ‘culture war’ to describe the convulsions of late twentieth-century American cultural politics did so in such explicit dialogue with nineteenth-century German history. As Andrew Hartman has shown in his history of the American culture wars, analogies to the Kulturkampf circulated widely among conservatives in the postwar decades. They typically saw themselves as victims: Catholics to the Bismarck of the post-sixties left. In 1991, the book which did most to popularise the concept of culture war – James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America – openly acknowledged that it had roots in the comparison. In fighting over schoolrooms in the 1870s, ‘German Protestants and Catholics were battling over the moral character of the nation’; so were the conservatives and progressives of the 1990s.
Did these observers remember something we have forgotten? Once Virchow had put the word Kulturkampf out into the world in 1873, it took on many layers of meaning. It was a struggle for culture, for civilisation, a duel between competing conceptions of the nation. But before and beneath all that it was a set of state actions. Through a series of laws, passed by elected bodies, the German and especially Prussian governments had tried to puncture the Catholic Church’s authority. They increased surveillance of the church’s activities and appointments, and restricted its role in state-backed institutions. By the same token, Catholic resistance involved not merely cultural mobilisation but also campaigns of civil disobedience and, critically, voting. The Kulturkampf was about many things, but it was ultimately about power.