Moabit monastery tower

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The Moabiter Klostersturm was the attack by a group of Berliners of around 3,000 people on a recently consecrated Catholic chapel in the Berlin working-class district of Moabit in August 1869. This was preceded by the establishment of an orphanage by Franciscans , who were joined shortly afterwards by two Dominicans who took the workers in wanted to take care of the neighboring factories. The Moabiter Klostersturm is one of the events that occurred due to the growing anti-Catholic mood in parts of the Prussian population.

Background: The Catholic renewal after 1848

In 1848, during a meeting in Würzburg , the bishops of the German dioceses decided to renew and strengthen the faith of German Catholics with a popular mission . This popular mission was only ended in 1872 by decrees in the context of the culture war between the German Empire and the Catholic Church. The people's missionaries were mainly members of the religious orders of the Jesuits , Franciscans , Redemptorists , Capuchins and Lazarists , who traveled all over Germany in small groups of mostly three, rarely eight clergy and held at least 4,000 large missionary events until 1872. In the so-called reaction era after the revolutionary years of 1848/1849 , the missionary movement stood for an anti-liberal, counter-revolutionary and anti- Enlightenment movement that served not only the interests of the church but also the German princely states.

Towards the end of the 1860s, Protestant factory owners also gave their workers free time so that they could take part in the proselytizing events, whose sermons were directed against alcohol abuse and sexual permissiveness, among other things, and which demanded a moral life of integrity from their listeners. As early as the 1850s, however, Prussian politicians and officials began to see the dangers of the increasing influence of the Jesuit order, which was assumed to be anti-Prussian and ultra-montane . A Protestant counter-movement to the Catholic renewal movement that ran parallel to this led to the two denominations becoming more distinct from one another. The increasingly anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit attitude of the representatives of the Protestant Church essentially ensured that the attacks on the Catholic Church became more intense and that it was increasingly isolated in its struggle to maintain the influence of the religious in public and in politics. At the same time, after the era of reaction, which ended in 1857 with the accession to the throne of Wilhelm I , the liberal forces formed anew, which also turned sharply against the Catholic Church, which was increasingly perceived as hostile to progress. Widespread reports in the press about the " Ubryk Affair ", about the relationship between a Dominican father from Düsseldorf and a young woman, and the allegations against another Dominican that he had sexually assaulted two girls contributed to the increasingly negative attitude of the public .

Course of the Moabit monastery tower

Logo of the Berlin Wasps 1868

For liberal Berlin citizens, the establishment of an alleged monastery in Moabit, which is characterized by industry, seemed out of date and represented a provocation. For liberal newspapers such as the Vossische Zeitung , the Kladderadatsch or the satirical newspaper Berliner Wespen , the branch of the friars was an occasion to talk about it very widely. that they were members of contemplative orders who went to beg where progress and work would rule. One of the caricatures that appeared in Berliner Wespen showed a woman being raped by two friars outside the gates of a factory, while two nuns were prostituting themselves on the street, a heretic was burned at the stake and another brother was walking along a Judengasse Torch and dagger storms. After an article about sexual permissiveness in monasteries and the ugly details of the "Ubryk Affair", the Moabit branch of the religious became a place of excursion for hundreds of Berliners, who harassed the brothers with jokes and questions. In mid-August 1869, the mood among parts of the Berlin population was so heated that a crowd of around three to four thousand people gathered in front of the gates, initially throwing stones and excrement. After dark, people armed with axes and crowbars began to pull down the fence. They then stormed into the forecourt and the chapel, the windows of which were destroyed by stones being thrown. The friars were forced to flee. The intervention of police officers to restore public order was carried out at gunpoint and resulted in arrests. Two of those wounded by police sabers died from their injuries.

In order to end the unrest, the Berlin authorities were forced to have twelve police officers pull up in front of the buildings the next day. Eighty mounted policemen secured the area. The measures had to be continued for a little over ten weeks. Courts also ruled that the city of Berlin had to compensate the responsible diocese of Breslau with an amount of 425 gold marks for failing to ensure adequate security. It was only belatedly that the Berlin police chief informed the public that the complex was not a monastery but an orphanage with a chapel.

supporting documents

literature

  • H. Engel , St. Jersch-Wenzel , W. Treue (Ed.): Tiergarten. Part 2. Moabit. Nicolai, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-87584-221-9 ( Berlin History Landscape - Places and Events. Volume 3).
  • Archbishop's Ordinariat Berlin (ed.), Text by Dieter Hanky: In the sign of the cross. From the medieval dioceses to the diocese of Berlin. A walk through 1000 years of church history , Servi, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-933757-002
  • Michael B. Gross: The War against Catholicism - Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany , The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2007, ISBN 0-472-11383-6
  • Ronald J. Ross: The Failure of Bismarck's Kulturkampf - Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 1871–1887 , The Catholic University of America Press, Washington 1998, ISBN 0-8132-1023-2

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Gross, p. 30 - p. 32, p. 35 and p. 36
  2. ↑ Gross, p. 35
  3. ↑ Gross, p. 39
  4. ↑ Gross, p. 68 and p. 69
  5. ↑ Gross, pp. 87 to 89
  6. ↑ Gross, p. 171
  7. ↑ Gross, p. 173 and p. 174
  8. ↑ Gross, p. 176
  9. ^ Gross, p. 174 and p. 175
  10. ↑ Ross, p. 26; see. Another source, which, according to the police, names 15,000 people, in: Imzeichen des Kreuzes , Berlin 1998, page 44
  11. ↑ Engel, Jersch-Wenzel, Treue, 1987, p. 275
  12. ↑ Ross, p. 26 and p. 27
  13. ↑ Gross, p. 177