Discourses on War and Peace (1914/18-1939/1945)Munich between Cultural Pluralism and its Status as 'Capital of the NS-Movement'

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas Holzem
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 160996723

Discourses about war not only dominated private and public spheres during the two world wars (1914-18 and 1939-45). They also influenced to a great extent the peace discussions within the inter-war period.While war experiences could be shared against the background of the wars' indisputable reality, the inter-war period was not a convincingly communicated peace experience, because peace itself was not considered as "real". Within the public sphere, discourse battles continued in an effort to achieve a "real" peace by revising the conditions that were the result of ceasefire negotiations.These discussions, conceptualized as "Kriegsfriedensdiskurse (discourses on war and peace)", recovered the potential of legitimation and interpretation of a second World War that was only too sure to come. However, these theoretical constructions during the Weimar years were not necessarily legitimations of the Nazi war of conquest and of the Holocaust later on.Since September 2009, this research project has been successfully attending to the questions of these inter-war period battles of discourse as they occurred in Munich. Munich was a capital of pluralism on religious, cultural, societal, and political levels during the good, even golden years of the Weimar Republic. Nevertheless, the city was being forced into the status of "capital of Hitlers NS-movement (Hauptstadt der Bewegung)" at the same time. This project brings into focus the socio-political and ideological positioning of Bavarian Catholics and zooms in on their relationships to contrasting concepts of war and peace from other confessional, religious, and socio-political groups.This approach has proven to be extraordinarily fruitful and productive. The research project would have been completed according to its original schedule by autumn 2013 and therefore within the submitted grant period. However, recently and quite unpredictably, new and highly relevant source materials have been uncovered and have become accessible to researchers and the public. These are documents that until now were completely unknown and that must be integrated into the analysis to make sure that the outcome of the project is comprehensive.These documents are "visitors' logs (Besucher-Tagebücher)" that belonged to the archbishop of Munich Cardinal Michael Faulhaber and other important materials from his estate. This research project has identified Cardinal Faulhaber as the uncontested linchpin in all war-and-peace discourses in Munich. To comprehend the network of relevant participants and the topics of these debates, it is indispensable to evaluate these documents in addition to all the documents previously mentioned in the first project proposal for the funding period 2010-2013. Therefore, this application is a request to prolong this research project for ca. two years.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants