Trauma, Religion and Spirituality in Germany during the First World War, by Jason Crouthamel

Scholars have long questioned the relationship between the First World War and religious belief. Did the Great War increase the hold of Judeo-Christian beliefs among those confronted with more than four years of devastation and insecurity? Or did it cause mass disillusionment that religion could in any way adequately explain the situation or even merely console those in the face of such horrors? Jason Crouthamel brings this issue front and centre again in his book. Yet he advises the reader to set aside this way of formulating the issues of religious belief in the wake of the war and instead to interrogate the topic in a different manner, asking not so much about more or less religious belief, but about ‘the complicated ways in which war transformed religiosity’ (p. 11). Shifting the focus away from the question of more or less religiosity is certainly a tall order, and Crouthamel himself at times entertains this formulation of the issue. Yet he always reminds the reader to return to considering the process of change in all its varied paths. Indeed, Crouthamel effectively shows that one of the general conclusions that can be made about religion during the war is—if anything—that the traumatic experiences heightened the degree to which responses became more individualised and resistant to systematic pronouncements.

Crouthamel does have to provide a general, shared foundation from which to begin this process of transformation, and that is the basis for Chapter One. Focusing on the situation ‘from above’, he recounts how military and religious authorities used religion to bolster support for the war and to convey supposedly appropriate spiritual and emotional responses. Articles in civilian outlets and in trench publications as well as sermons given during religious services held in the field all spoke of how ‘God favored Germans’, and many even argued for the moral righteousness of hate for one’s enemies (p. 18). Those on the home front were not free from such attempts to ‘weaponize religion’ either, as religious pronouncements laid out roles not only for soldiers but also for their supporting womenfolk (p. 16).

Yet such top-down efforts to sculpt a willing military and home front quickly broke down, as Crouthamel shows beginning in Chapter Two, in the face of individuals attempting to make sense of their lived, traumatic experiences during the war. Early letters do include a fair amount of repetition of the ‘dominant religious ideas’, but the reality of long-term warfare saw such ‘nationalistic, collectivist rhetoric’ quickly cast aside in correspondence in favour of grasping at any ‘individual emotional comfort and support’ religion could provide (p. 35). Sometimes speaking in religious terms helped soldiers connect to their loved ones on the home front despite the distances and vastly different settings. Far from feeling a morally justified hatred for enemies, some soldiers—much to the concern of military authorities—went so far as to empathise with co-religionists on the other sides of national borders as well. Beyond merely using religion as a way to maintain human connections, individuals created ‘a form of self-therapy in the language of religion’ that helped—alongside the medicalised notions—to bolster the flagging ‘nerves’ of traumatised soldiers, as Chapter Three illuminates (p. 63). Despite the efforts to find succour in religion, Chapter Four shows that for many the attempt clearly had its limits. Indeed, Crouthamel is careful to contextualise the individual cases he highlights here to indicate they were just that, individual cases. Yet, as noted above, at times even he cannot avoid taking a stab at the question of more or less and writes, ‘the trauma of the front experience damaged not only bodies and minds but it also wounded faith’ (p. 82). Not for all soldiers or civilians, and maybe not a fatal ‘wound’, but religious belief certainly took a hit during the war.

Chapter Five is an overview of research undertaken by contemporaries during and shortly after the war to investigate the interplay between war and religion. The positioning of this chapter in the midst of highly detailed accounts of the ways in which individuals responded to the trauma of war might sit a bit oddly, and perhaps would have been better earlier in the book or as part of the Introduction itself. Regardless, the material included does help bolster Crouthamel’s approach—the same as that highlighted by scholars during the war—to focus on transformations of religiosity in preference to the dichotomy of more or less.

The last principal chapters—Six and Seven—highlight that as reactions became increasingly personalised and distant from the ‘hegemonic’ systems, individuals created new ways of expressing religiosity that included everything from reliance on talismans to espousal of Nordic gods to systems that focused worship on values such as violence (Ernst Jünger) or ‘humanistic awakening’ (Käthe Kollwitz) (p. 166). Indeed, one of the advantages of Crouthamel’s entire book is that it often returns some agency—undoubtedly limited in nature—to contemporaries attempting to create belief patterns (religious and otherwise) that helped them move forward given their predicaments. He notes this mainly in reference to those who ‘became enamored of violence’, but it seems likely not to have been limited to those who chose that path (p. 11).

Of course, as with any book, there are things that might have been done differently or given more attention. The book might have benefited from a sharper distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism, especially as it does appear to hold some weight the few times it is highlighted. The book might also have discussed more whether there was something particularly ‘German’ in all of this, a topic that is touched upon here and there but not discussed in depth. Crouthamel admirably tries to bring gender and the women on the home front into the analysis, but the book remains largely about soldiers and the combat front. Moreover, the reader gets almost no sense of how the religious gendering of soldiers and faithful wives may have played out for men not serving on the front, let alone those not in the military at all.

Yet this is not the book Crouthamel chose to write; and we are perhaps lucky he did not. What Crouthamel does do is intricately recreate the shifts in religious beliefs and the creation of systems or—in most cases—unsystematic streams of thought that countless individuals experienced during the Great War. We might note the limitations of the types of sources Crouthamel uses and the lack of any statistical analysis that results from it. Yet, more indicative of the quality of this book is the close attention to detail and the careful mining of sources which are often difficult to work with to present what sometimes read like mini-biographies of types of people who are often elusive to the historian and forgotten in the history books. As hard as it might be to forgo the question of more or less religion and clear-cut answers in favour of looking at transformations that played out in a variety of ways, Crouthamel’s book shows that this can lead to very fruitful results.