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Confessional Drinking in Wilhelmine Germany
for an abstinence pledge “as an example to those endangered and as a support for
those susceptible to alcoholism.” 50 The Cologne archdiocese encouraged all clubs
to join the anti-alcohol Men’s Association for the Struggle Against Public
Immorality and the Kreuzbündnis. 51 The 1913 congress discussed “The Workingmen’s
Clubs and the Anti-Alcohol Movement” with the following conclusion:
The workingmen’s clubs were requested to instruct their members over the consequences
of alcohol abuse in the laboring estate and in the worker’s family, whereby it was not
just a matter of pointing out the economic causes of excessive alcohol use, but also,
through individual education and education of family members, of pointing out the duty
to overcome the dangers and opportunities for alcohol abuse. Lectures to this purpose
have been held in a large number of clubs, especially in the Aachen, Essen, and Krefeld
districts. 52
The congress report referred to the 1912–13 winter program, which included a
meeting on “Our Workingmen’s Clubs in the Fight against Alcoholism,” as a
positive step on the local level. 53
Through temperance, the clubs sought to mold proletarian leisure consumption
to an ideal Christian lifestyle. Indeed, cultural and moral uplifting and sobriety
remained firmly intertwined. 54 Within the clubs, the German Catholic Church thus
participated in a broad Christian anti-alcohol crusade epiphenomenal to industrialization
in all societies. 55 At the same time, the factors that created such
noticeable variations in drinking patterns also contoured the meaning of temperance.
German temperance, most closely associated with the German Association
for the Prevention of Alcohol Abuse founded in 1883, eschewed teetotalism and
prohibitionism, and women played a minor role, at best. Britain and North
America, in contrast, embraced an evangelically derived abstinence program
largely led by women that culminated in American prohibition. The origins of this
distinction rest in the respective social, cultural, and political systems and in the
groups that advanced temperance. Ideationally, Catholic and evangelical orientations
differed fundamentally on a world-affirming versus world-denying attitudinal
aesthetic. While evangelicals primarily carried temperance in the Anglo-American
world, in Germany, although containing an undeniable religious element, temperance
grew from a combination of progressive-liberal traditions and Catholic
initiatives that prioritized moderation rather than abstinence. Further, even in
Germany the movement fractured along political/cultural/religious fault lines as
both the Catholic and socialist labor movements revealed deep ambiguities within
their temperance initiatives, most clearly revealed in the failure of the socialist
schnapps boycott of 1909 not only to convince the SPD of its program but also to
collaborate with non-socialist temperance initiatives.
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