"After the defeat of liberalism in the Revolution of 1848 and during the dramatic revival of popular Catholicism, German liberals used anti-Catholicism to orient themselves culturally in a new age of capitalist economics, industrial expansion, and national unification. Michael B. Gross argues that anti-Catholicism and specifically the Kulturkampf, the campaign against the Catholic Church in the 1870s, were not meant simply to break the power of the church and secure the autonomy of the state. He demonstrates that the liberals' declaration of war against Catholicism and the Catholic Church was instead a more complex attempt to preserve moral, social, political, and sexual order during a period of far-reaching change." "Gross explores how images of priests, monks, nuns, and Catholics as medieval, "un-German," and feminine asserted the liberal middle-class claim to social authority in the decades between the 1848 Revolution and German unification. Anticlericalism, Jesuitphobia, and antimonastic hysteria were, according to Gross, ways for liberals to envision, as well as express anxieties about, the modern identity of Germany. He shows that in the liberal imagination was laced with misogyny and coupled with fears of mass culture and democratization. In doing so, Gross identifies the social, cultural, and gendered meaning of the Kulturkampf." "With an interpretation of anti-Catholicism and a major reappraisal of the Kulturkampf, this work ultimately demonstrates that in Germany, liberalism itself contributed to a culture of intolerance that would prove to be a serious liability in the twentieth century. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of culture, ideology, religion, and politics."--BOOK JACKET.