Untitled

Confessional Drinking in Wilhelmine Germany
transmission belt for Church cultural and ideological values, workers repeatedly
asserted their independent identity. Provided fundamental theological questions
were not involved when such conflicts occurred, the KAB accommodated and
adapted rather than risk workers’ alienation from the Church.
The conflict within the clubs reinforces scholarship on alcohol consumption as
a social boundary, with boundaries serving as points of conflict and definition. 67
Important here is the contrast of alcohol’s normalized and normalizing practice
with its image as illegitimate. In Germany, this contrast served as a key social
boundary between classes, genders, and religions. Indeed, in the process of temperance’s
mass mobilization, the control or directing intention of elites often collapsed
as the mobilized lower classes asserted agency through these new social movements
to shape the institutions and values of socially superior classes. 68 KAB
members imposed a reinterpreted meaning of temperance on the temperance
movement rather than accept the imposition of outside values. The KAB provided
Catholic workers with an organizational-institutional basis from which they could
successfully defend cultural consumption patterns despite the intention of these
institutions to dictate social norms.
Though Catholic workers operated in a sometimes rigid social-religious context,
they nonetheless had mastery over this context in so far as they made choices about
their drinking habits. 69 Since the struggle over alcohol consumption did not occur
solely in the pubs or in the meetings and activities of temperance activists but
in the community, workers could rely on non-institutional domains to maintain
their identities. Like most forms of leisure, whether public or private, alcohol
consumption can only be understood in the everyday life of family, neighborhood,
and workplace. Here, Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life, has paved a
clear path for considering these non-institutional domains of social and political
life. 70 The outrage of middle-class reformers over perceived alcoholic excesses
amongst workers does not serve as credible evidence for the reality of workingclass
drinking. Indeed, their repetition of critical tropes based on misleading
presumptions and classist prejudices served more to estrange than convince. While
the Church and clubs attempted objectively to coordinate and regularize workers’
lives with the aid of the unseen forces of habit and disposition that the Church and
clubs also helped structure, workers could reject efforts to alter their drinking
patterns by relying on the strengths of other habits and traditions.
The Catholic workingmen’s clubs sought to redefine proletarian Catholic
patterns of leisure consumption to conform to an ideal Christian lifestyle based
primarily on middle-class values. This transformation meant exposing the workers
to “high” culture while simultaneously replacing older leisure practices with new
patterns. Working-class alcohol consumption, however, was too deeply ingrained
to be rooted out. Workers revealed a variegated understanding of drinking that
differentiated between social drinking, private drinking, workplace drinking, and
247