Batty Webers Kulturkampf gegen die katholische Kirche … und andere Heilsangebote

Batty Weber published his daily column Abreißkalender in the radical-liberal Luxemburger Zeitung from 1913 to 1940. This contribution examines a selection of 178 such columns with regard to his attitude towards questions of faith, religion, and the Catholic Church in Luxembourg. This chapter differentiates between Weber’s avowed “reactionary anticlericalism”, on the one, and his professed respect for individual expressions of faith and the humanistic values he attributes to Jesus Christ, on the other hand. Weber’s columns were mostly concerned with defending individualism, understood as the belief in a self-determined pursuit of happiness in life and in the personal responsibility for one's actions (e.g. by preventing the harm of others). He defended this self-determination against incursions from Church and State alike, in the form of censorship and prohibitions. This chapter shows the parallels that Weber drew between religious group mobilization and both communism and fascism, two ideologies that gained traction in the first half of the twentieth century, and fervently combatted each other. Weber opposed the antiliberal agendas of both, yet feared mostly the influence of communism on Luxembourgish politics – especially after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He even aligned himself with his erstwhile enemies to call for a prohibition of the Communist party in Luxembourg in 1937. As for the ‘salvation offer’ of national socialism, he saw it as a danger for Germany (and German Jews in particular), but did not see the threat it posed to national self-determination and individual freedom in Luxembourg.