The Kulturkampf an Essay

Excerpt from The Kulturkampf an Essay In the spring of 1907 Gordon Boyce Thompson, a young man not yet twenty-three, just graduating at the University of Toronto, told me that he intended going to Germany and asked my advice in regard to his studies. He wished to prepare a thesis for the M.A. degree and was, he said, not afraid of hard work. He had been interested in something that I had said about Bismarck's struggle with the Church in Prussia, and I advised him to take this as his topic. Thus the so-called "Kulturkampf" became the subject of his studies and, in the winter of 1907-8, he was hard at work in Berlin. He had what he himself called "a long uphill struggle with the German language." At first he could not understand a word of the University lectures, but he made rapid progress. His bright, cheery nature attracted friends, German friends as well as those who spoke his own tongue. "I am simply bathing in German, night and day," he wrote, and he was soon deep in Reichstag and Landtag debates and in reading the wide range of other literature dealing with his subject. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.