Fraenkel Prize Lecture: Hello to All That: Catholicism in Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War

Offering a more nuanced approach to religious belief during the Great War, Patrick J. Houlihan's talk shares research from his book analyzing the lived religion of everyday Catholic belief beyond stark dichotomies. Houlihan's book, Catholicism and the Great War, which received the Fraenkel Prize in 2015, illuminates the spectrum of belief and unbelief during the Great War, thus revising master narratives of secularization and modernism that dominate the First World War’s cultural history. This book highlights the comparative relevance for the trajectories of Central Europe's Protestants, Catholics, and Jews into the cataclysm of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Dr. Patrick J. Houlihan is Research Fellow in History at the University of Oxford. He received his PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 2011. Since 2016, he is a member of Oxford's "Globalising and Localising the Great War" project, particularly its focus on Global Religions, which has received major multi-year funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom. His publications include Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), the manuscript of which was awarded in 2015 the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Wiener Library.