Intimate Relationships Across Boundaries

Julia Moses, Julia Woesthoff, Julia Moses, Julia Woesthoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000386882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This collection investigates intermarriage and related relationships around the world since the eighteenth century.

The contributors explore how intimate relationships challenged boundary crossings of various kinds – social, geographic, religious, ethnic. To this end, the volume considers a range of related issues: Who participated in these unions? How common were they, and in which circumstances were they practised (or banned)? Taking a global view, the book also questions some of the categories behind these relationships. For example, how did geographical boundaries – across national lines, distinctions between colonies and metropoles or metaphors of the 'East' and the 'West' – shape the treatment of intermarriage? What role have social and symbolic boundaries, such as presumed racial, religious or socio-economic divides, played? To what extent and how were those boundaries blurred in the eyes of contemporaries? Not least, how have bureaucracies and law contributed to the creation of boundaries preventing romantic unions? Intimate relationships, the contributors suggest, brought into sharp relief assumptions not only about community and culture, but also about the sanctity of the sphere of love and family.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The History of the Family.

From faith to race? ‘Mixed marriage’ and the politics of difference in Imperial Germany

Julia Moses

ABSTRACT

Intermarriage was a key site for testing politics of difference within the multicultural German Empire. Across the German states in the mid-nineteenth century, marriage between members of different religions frequently proved impossible. Until various civil marriage laws were introduced between the 1840s and 1870s, marriage remained within the remit of the church. As a consequence, marrying across confessional lines was rarely permitted. The implications were clear: marriage was seen as the embodiment of one’s culture – defined primarily in confessional (alongside socio-economic) terms, and it was also viewed as a key transmitter of culture by producing new generations of faithful observers of particular denominations. As a country divided between three confessions, religion in mid- to late nineteenth-century Germany proved an important aspect of difference within the new German nation state. By the end of the nineteenth century, following the introduction of civil marriage, mass waves of migration, the growth of urbanization and the expansion of the German overseas empire, the connotation of ‘mixed marriage’ in Germany appeared to have shifted. It remained a code for crossing confessional lines, but its resonance had changed. By the late nineteenth century, ‘mixed marriage’ had come to characterize another kind of cultural mixing as well: that between races, both at home within Germany and abroad within its colonies and diasporic outposts. And, between 1905 and 1912, ‘mixed marriage’ between Germans and ‘natives’ had been banned in German Southwest Africa, East Africa and Samoa. Why and how was intermarriage a flashpoint in debates on German identity politics at the turn of the twentieth century? As this article shows, intermarriage in the German Empire mattered to families, broader communities, and legislators because it was a pivotal means through which social groups formed, interacted and maintained boundaries at a time when visions of Germany were expanding.

‘I am setting my entire hope on you’, declared Anna Kleeblatt Modistie to the Chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck. The stark appeal made in 1872 had nothing to do with high politics. Anna wanted to marry her lover. Living in Munich, in predominantly Catholic Bavaria, her desired marriage to a Jew was not possible.¹ Anna was Catholic, and the Catholic Church did not allow intermarriage, and Bavaria did not have a policy on civil marriage at the time. As a result, the only way for Anna to marry was through the Church or converting to Judaism and then marrying through the synagogue of her fiancé. ‘Your highness would have the thanks of a thousand hearts on your head. All people are equal, all have only one God, so why should belief make such an enormous difference? God wants of course that all of his children are happy’, she explained. However, her parents and siblings were against the union, and others were against it, too, she decried. Nonetheless, it was ‘only [a matter of] love of a man of the Jewish confession … if God brings two hearts together, why would people separate them?’² In order to address her heartbreak, Anna pleaded with Bismarck to introduce civil marriage as a national law across recently unified Germany. When Anna wrote, just a year after unification, the issue was already on the national policy agenda and widely discussed in the press. By 1875, civil marriage was rolled out across the country, in theory, solving Anna’s problem, though of course not undoing the disapproval of her parents, her Church and her broader community.

Across the German states in the mid-nineteenth century, marriage between members of different religions frequently proved impossible. Prior to national unification in 1871, marriage and family law were handled by the over 30 kingdoms, duchies, principalities and other bodies that would later become united as Germany, alongside various religious authorities such as the Catholic Church and the Protestant congregations that often operated at state level like the Prussian Protestant Church. Until various civil marriage laws were introduced within the individual German states between the 1840s and 1870s, and with the national policy in 1875, the act of marriage itself remained within the remit of the church. Until 1900, with the introduction of Germany’s Civil Code, family law was still governed by individual German states, and some aspects of family life – such as the religious education of children from interconfessional unions – continued to be decided at state level even afterward. The civil marriage laws of the mid-nineteenth century thus effectively (if not entirely) secularized marriage, even if churches (and families) could disapprove of interconfessional unions. Indeed, the national policy was introduced during a period of broader ‘Cultural Struggle’, or Kulturkampf, to render control from the Church and transfer it to the state (for background, see Clark & Kaiser, 2003). Prior to the enactment of these laws, therefore, marrying across confessional lines was rarely permitted – unless, of course, one of the betrothed converted. The implications were clear: marriage was seen as the embodiment of one’s culture – defined primarily in confessional (alongside socio-economic) terms, and it was also viewed as a key transmitter of culture by bringing about new generations of faithful observers of particular denominations. As a country divided between three confessions, consisting of a small majority of Protestants, followed by a large minority of Catholics and a small minority of Jews, religion in mid- to late nineteenth-century Germany proved an important aspect of cultural difference within the new German nation state (Walser Smith, 2001). As a consequence, contemporaries saw ‘mixed marriages’ (Mischehen) between confessions as contentious, resulting in various kinds of bans alongside individual plights to circumvent confessional rules on intermarriage (on the broader context, see Freist, 2017; Luebke & Lindemann, 2014).

By the end of the nineteenth century, following the introduction of civil marriage laws, mass waves of internal and external migration, the growth of urbanization and the expansion of the German overseas empire, the connotation of ‘mixed marriage’ in Germany appeared to have shifted. It remained a code for crossing confessional lines, but its resonance had changed. By the late nineteenth century, ‘mixed marriage’ had come to characterize another kind of cultural mixing: that between races, both at home within Germany and abroad within its colonies and diasporic outposts. And, between 1905 and 1912, ‘mixed marriage’ between Germans and ‘natives’ had been banned in German Southwest Africa, East Africa and Samoa (for a related observation, see Essner, 1997). For some scholars, these early German bans on intermarriage – alongside everyday politics of interracial relationships and families on the colonial ground – even seemed to foreshadow later National Socialist policies on race, including the prohibition of Christian-Jewish unions (for example, Kundrus, 2003; Zimmerer, 2004; Essner, 2005, 2017; Grosse, 2005; Fitzpatrick, 2009).

In various ways, as this article argues, intermarriage was a key site for testing the politics of difference within the multicultural German Empire. To be sure, there were other and related battlegrounds within Germany and the neighbouring German lands in which politics of difference were hashed out during this period. As Tara Zahra has shown for the vast and multiethnic Austrian Empire, the rearing of children proved a central point of contestation in shaping identities, as individuals, charitable groups and the state worked to claim the next generation in their own image. And yet, understandings of difference, community and individuality remained complex, as individuals often remained ‘indifferen[t]’ to the trappings of national identity such as language and, in particular, the use of German, even if they cultivated particular aspects of that identity to assimilate or move ahead socially (Zahra, 2006, 2008, 2010). In the German lands, the complexities of identity were manifested in a variety of practices and beliefs, such as localism and an emphasis on Heimat (the homeland), local and regional customs and celebrations, as well as the adoration of local notables and royals. Social movements across the political spectrum, from the pro-imperial Pan-German League and Navy League to the Wandervögel (literally: birds of passage) youth movement that espoused communing with nature as an alternative to city life, played critical roles in defining ‘Germanness’ during this period (for example, Applegate, 1990; Blackbourn & Retallack, 2007). The sexual reform movement and women’s movements that expanded considerably from the late nineteenth century posited new and alternative visions to German identity and, in particular, the nature of the family within it (for example, Allen, 2005; Dickinson, 2014). Not least, the growth of Germany’s overseas empire and diaspora communities, as well as the experience of mass migration to and from Germany over the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, shaped understandings of German identity decisively (for example, O’Donnell, 2005; Schulze, 2016). Imperial Germany was characterized, then, by tensions over identity and cultural diversity, leading some scholars to suggest a crisis of modernity within the country at the turn of the twentieth century (for example, Eley, Jenkins, & Matysik, 2016).

Intermarriage was a focal point in Imperial Germany’s conflicts over diversity, not least because it was part and parcel of a broader experience of grappling with cultural difference in an era of explicit and increasingly tangible nationalism. It tested a core challenge of multiculturalism: assimilation (Hartmann & Gerteis, 2005). Whose religion, language, and values would predominate within the family created out of a ‘mixed marriage’? Was it possible to overcome cultural and social differences within a family? What were the implications for creating a coherent German national identity? Behind these questions lay core assumptions about the formation of both symbolic and social boundaries that were critical in the new German nation state and its expanding empire. In the case of intermarriage, these boundaries interacted closely. As Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár have noted, ‘symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices and even time and space…. [they] separate people into groups and generate feelings of similarity and group membership’. Social boundaries draw on their symbolic counterparts and serve as ‘objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social opportunities’ (Lamont & Molnár, 2002, at, p. 168). In this sense, intermarriage tested both endogamy – staying within one’s group – and homogamy – keeping within one’s social status, not least because ‘the children of mixed marriages are less likely to identify themselves with a single group’ (Kalmijn, 1998, p. 396). Intermarriage mattered to families and broader communities, including, in certain instances, legislators and government bureaucrats, then, because it was a pivotal means through which social groups formed, interacted and maintained boundaries. Those groups were not, however, rigidly defined and were instead characterized by complex understandings of religious, ethno-linguistic, racial, gender and class-based identities.

Why and how was intermarriage a flashpoint in debates on German identity politics at the turn of the twentieth century? With these questions in view, I aim in this article to explore the form and function of contestation about intermarriage in Imperial Germany. To this end, I bring together the rich secondary literature on intermarriage, including between Jews and Christians but also between colonial subjects and colonizers, which, to date, has generally been examined separately even if parallels have been drawn between these two cases (for example, Kundrus, 2003; Zimmerer, 2004; Davis, 2012, pp. 77–8, 119–29). I also draw on a wide variety of archival materials and contemporary pamphlets, periodicals, legislative debates and books concerned with marriage and the family. I shall explore these issues in three steps, first examining confessional understandings of intermarriage as a potentially taboo practice and then analyzing the transposition of discourses about ‘mixed marriage’ to colonial settings. In the final section, I shall consider how marriage – and, with it, the family – in the German Empire came to be redefined in ostensibly inclusive terms through a new and specific imaginary of German national identity.

1. Crossing the confessional line

Anna Modistie’s plight points to perhaps the most examined example of intermarriage in German history: that between Jews and Christians. This important history has been told widely elsewhere, and this article does not attempt to retrace in detail this complex terrain but rather to situate it within the broader landscape in which confessional difference mattered for marriage within Imperial Germany. The experience of National Socialism, in particular, has played a prominent role in both popular memory and historical scholarship on intermarriage in Germany, and has, in turn, shaped scholarship on intermarriage in Imperial Germany. We can think here, for example, of the 1935 Law for the Protection of Blood and Honour that banned intermarriage with Jews (Mouton, 2007; Wildt, 2012, ch., p. 6) as well as the everyday attempts by courts and individuals to prevent new Jewish-Christian intermarriages and undo existing ones through quick divorces (Kaplan, 1998, pp. 89–93). We can think, too, of the daily plights of individuals under National Socialism who were married across confessional lines, such as the non-Jewish women of the Rosenstrasse protest who, together with relatives and friends, lobbied to prevent their Jewish husbands from deportation to concentration camps (Stoltzfus, 1996). It is important to note, however, that the Nuremberg Laws and the contestation around them drew on a view within National Socialism that Jews were not simply a religious minority; they stemmed from an entirely different race, with different blood, that should be kept separate from ‘pure’ Germans (Szobar, 2002). Under National Socialism, as at other junctures, then, the line between race and religion was of...