Marpingen

ISBN-13: 9780198217831 / Angielski / Twarda / 1993 / 480 str.

David Blackbourn

Opis

In July 1876 three eight-year-old girls from Marpingen, a village in the west German border region of Saarland, claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Their visions attracted tens of thousands of pilgrims and prompted numerous claims of miraculous cures. They also led to military intervention, the dispatching of an undercover detective, parliamentary debate, and a dramatic trial. This book examines an episode that contemporaries dubbed the `German Lourdes', its background and its repercussions.David Blackbourn sets out to recreate the Catholic world of Bismarckian Germany through a detailed analysis of the changing social, economic, and community structures in which it was embedded, and a sensitive account of popular religious beliefs. He powerfully evokes the crisis-laden atmosphere of the 1870s, and offers a subtle interpretation of the interplay between politics and religion in newly unified Germany. The book ranges boldly across the fields of social, cultural and political history, in an engrossing story with many contemporary resonances.

In July 1876 three eight-year-old girls from Marpingen, a village in the west German border region of Saarland, claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Their visions attracted thousands of pilgrims and led to many claims of miraculous cures, but led also to military intervention, parliamentary debate, and a dramatic trial. Blackbourn casts unfamiliar light on Bismarkian Germany in his gripping study of the background and repercussions of the episode dubbed the `German Lourdes'.

Recenzje

As David Blackbourn presents it, Marpingen becomes a magnifying glass for state and society during the Bismarck period. the author paints a graphic and very precise picture...the broad sweep of narration is given structure and focus by precise reflections on political activity, social intercourse, and changes in mentalities...Blackbourn's book...brilliantly illuminates a turbulent period in Germany's history when things moved fast and generated tensions...Blackbourn's penetrating book makes an unusually creative contribution, in terms both of contents and of method, to the history of Germany in the nineteenth century. It certainly cannot be ignored.

O autorze

David Blackbourn is author of: Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Yale, London & New Haven, 1980), The Peculiarities of German History (co-author, O.U.P. 1984), Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern Germany (Unwin Hyman, 1987), and The German Bourgeoisie (co-editor, Routledge, 1991. He is currently writing a History of Nineteenth-Century Germany (for end 1994) Harper-Collins/Fontana UK, and for O.U.P. New York in the USA. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, member of the Editorial Board of Past and Present, and former secretary of the German History Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.