Clergy in the trenches: Catholic military chaplains of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War

My dissertation analyzes battlefield religion with a sense of subjectivity, agency, and locality that re-frames standard histories of the First World War's disenchanting industrial violence. I argue that variables both above and below the level of the nation-state created an identifiably common Catholic experience of warfare that nonetheless had extremely localized ascriptions of meaning for soldiers. These influences included unit particularities, different geographical experiences of sacrifice, the charisma of individual personalities, and the center-periphery dynamics of empires in which Catholics were a suspect minority in Germany and a favored majority in Austria-Hungary. The dissertation argues that Catholic chaplains as pastoral caregivers were figures of limited direct agency as priests at the battlefront, thus refuting the model of Catholic priests as "milieu managers." However, by studying chaplains' social position as intermediary authority figures practicing adaptive traditionalism, I analyze the boundaries of public religiosity in a military context, especially incorporating information from below the division-level of particular armies. Through its comparative analysis using personalized archival sources such as letters, diaries, and reports, my dissertation goes beyond national religious histories that focus on vitriolic war sermons and episcopal politics. This dissertation revises an instrumental reading of military religion in which religiosity was successful to the degree that it sustained victory. Instead, I argue that religious identity formation was a complex process and that Catholics from the losing powers coped with the war's violence in ways beyond the standard narratives found in reductive cultural histories of secularization and literary modernism.