Zusammenfassung / Abstract
“German without Borders. The National Question in the Priests’ College at Campo Santo Teutonico up to the First World War” – The statutes of the “Archconfraternity of Our Lady of Sorrows at Campo Santo of the Germans and Flemings” of 1876 are also considered the founding of the priests’ college there, which since then was considered the main task of the confraternity. In the age of an exuberant nationalism, both institutions were under the question of how “German” was to be understood here. The priest Anton de Waal, born in the Lower Rhine region, who always saw himself as a Prussian subject and was rector of the Archconfraternity from 1872 until the First World War (he died 1917), is the key figure in the Campo Santo Teutonico’s national self-image. Whereas until then only the institution of the Anima, had been in the public consciousness in Rome as a German national foundation, de Waal shaped the Campo Santo into a second “German national foundation” during his 45-year rectorship, whereby he understood “German” in terms of his patriotic feeling as actually reichsdeutsch, but in a historical perspective as großdeutsch.