[Protestant healthcare? The building of denominational hospitals in Berlin during the Weimar Republic].

Abstract

This essay tries to show that, in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, Protestant hospitals were built not only to relieve the suffering of the population, but also out of a sense of inferiority to a reinvigorated Catholicism. Hospitals were consequently not only places of care and healing but also of denominational self-assertion. Based on Olaf Blaschke's thesis of a "second denominational age," this contribution tries to demonstrate that the responsible Protestant agents did not make anti-Catholic proclamations at every occasion and in all the media. The founders of the "Protestant Hospital Building Association," which this essay investigates, made deliberate use of anti-Catholic resentment, expressing it boldly when approaching the Protestant elites, while playing it down deliberately when addressing the people of Berlin. With a view to the severe economic crisis and mass unemployment prevailing from 1930, they justified the building of new hospitals with the need to create work places, without making recourse to the denomination argument. The political situation, the addressees and the hope for economic success seem to have informed the representation of denominational resentments decisively. Confessionalism therefore seemed to have been not as much a question of ideology as one of strategy.