Dissertation Fellow 2004-05
Kevin Ostoyich
Harvard University
The Transatlantic Soul: German Catholic Emigration
during the Nineteenth Century
Historians have studied European migration primarily through a
socioeconomic framework based on the “pushes” of rising
population, restrictive enclosures, altered inheritance, and shifting
crop systems, and the “pulls” of a growing industrial
wage economy within an increasingly Atlantic-based world economy.
Believing that I could offer little more to this dialogue than perhaps
a fine-tuning of the socioeconomic peaks and valleys, I have chosen
religion as my prism and posed different questions to the documents.
I have found that the great migration brought Catholics to
and through the Protestant port cities of northern Germany—generating
confessional dilemmas in the process. For example, would the Senate
of the German city-state of Bremen strike the balance in favor of
confession or trade when faced with an application for a Catholic
church in Bremerhaven? And how would an association formed for German
Catholic emigrants react when Polish emigrants started knocking
on the door? These questions touch on issues of church-state, nationalism
and confessional conflict—the answers have an import that
transcends the boundaries of German history. In my dissertation
I reconstruct the dialogue between the Catholic Church and the patrician
Senate. Furthermore I trace the development of Catholic support
networks, from the early efforts of Catholic missionaries, through
the foundation of a lay Catholic association, the St. Raphaelsverein,
to the rumblings of the First World War. In this development I perceive
dynamism in the Catholic conception of nationalism and emigration.
The dissertation has a large, transatlantic scope; my desire has
been to build upon and then transcend a plethora of historical literatures
including among others: European emigration, United States immigration,
Catholicism (both German and American) during the nineteenth century,
German American studies (with a particular focus on assimilation),
nationalism, and confessional conflict. Furthermore I present microcosmic
narratives of German Catholic associational life, Catholic missionary
priest actions, and the construction and local reaction to Catholic
chapels and churches within the port cities. With my dissertation
I hope to add to our current understanding of emigration in three
ways: first, it emphasizes the importance of human emotion in the
history of migration; second, it explores the importance of institutional
support networks in addressing both the physical and spiritual needs
of emigrants; and third, it addresses the religious association
as a dynamic entity, which eventually transcended confessional
and national conceptions in order to promote international
assistance.
|
