Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Bismarck’s Kulturkampf; he was wary of profiting excessively from the new balance of forces and thereby risking renewed conflict around the relations of church and state, especially in the aftermath of the German churches’ distinctly un-heroic record under the Nazis. From the outset, therefore, he sought to make of his party a nationwide Christian electoral vehicle rather than an exclusively Catholic one, emphasizing the socially ecumenical appeal of Christian Democracy. In this he was distinctly successful: the CDU/CSU only narrowly beat the Social Democrats in the first elections of 1949, but by 1957 their vote had almost doubled and the winners’ share of the turnout topped 50 percent.