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JON VANDEN HEUVEL, A German Life in the Age of Revolution: Joseph
Görres, 1776–1848 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of
America Press, 2001), xxv + 408 pp. ISBN 0 8132 0948 X. $69.95
It seems that not only books have a destiny, as Terentianus Maurus
once said, but also areas of research. There has been a wealth of individual
studies on the life and achievements of Joseph Görres. A critical
edition of his works, begun in 1926 and interrupted during the
Second World War, was resumed in 1958 only to be interrupted again
by the early death of its editor, Heribert Raab. Work re-started in
1998, but no date has been set for its completion. Despite these
unfavourable circumstances, interest in Görres has not been extinguished.
Evidence of this is provided by the two-volume selected
works, Ausgewählte Werke, edited by Wolfgang �rühwald and published
in 1978, and Bernhard Wacker’s profound study, Revolution
und Offenbarung: Das Spätwerk (1824–1848) von Joseph Görres—eine
politische Theologie (Tübingen, 1988). However, there has not yet been
a biographer capable of dealing with the complexities of this unclassifiable
politician, journalist, and scholar with both passion and
expert knowledge. Raab would have been ideally suited to this task,
which should have rounded off his life’s work.
The biography under review here comes from the USA. It is based
on a Ph.D. thesis supervised by �ritz Stern at Columbia University.
Henry Kissinger provides a foreword in which he points to the relevance
of the questions asked by Görres: ‘Where do the state’s responsibilities
and powers end? What is the role of religion in politics?’ (p.
xiv). This interest in the ‘enormous and until recently under-appreciated
role of religion in nineteenth-century German politics’ is what
inspired the author to come to grips with Görres (p. xvii). In this large
undertaking, Vanden Heuvel was able to draw on a broad base of
diversified and scattered research on Görres. Vanden Heuvel has extended
the source base through his own archival research which,
however, allows him to round off what was already known rather
than produce anything fundamentally new.
Vanden Heuvel’s strictly chronological approach combines individual
sections of the life with particular intellectual problems
addressed by his subject. This is especially appropriate in the case of
Görres, as a change of scene (such as the move to Heidelberg in 1806,
or that to Munich twenty years later) could indicate a shift in his
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