This chapter addresses the question of the persistent normative value of the Christian Democratic ideology. Having established in Chapters 7–9 that Christian Democracy is not necessarily in the process of disappearing as a partisan phenomenon, and also that it remains a useful category to describe distinctive features of both the EU and USA, I now move on to examine whether this is to be considered a ‘good’ thing, or rather a problem we should seek to overcome.

This chapter examines the Christian Democratic ideology’s trajectory of diffusion and implantation outside its primary context of origin, focusing in particular on the two American continents. Most of the analysis will concentrate on the experience of Latin American Christian Democracy, since this is where Christian Democratic ideas and principles have had the greatest historical impact. As I already mentioned in the Introduction, in fact, almost all Latin American countries have had some sort of Christian Democratic party compete in national elections, and in several – notably in Chile, Mexico and Venezuela – these parties also succeeded in rising to power, even though Latin American Christian Democracy never acquired the degree of political hegemony it exercised in Europe during the second postwar period. In the final section of the chapter, I will also briefly consider the question of why no comparable Christian Democratic party or movement ever developed in the United States. This will offer the opportunity to examine the historical relevance of Christian Democratic ideas and principles to this context too, and to shed further light on some of this ideology’s distinctive features.

To conclude, I provide here an overview of the answers proposed to the three main questions that have driven the analyses conducted in this book: What is Christian Democracy? What successive uses has this political ideology been put to over the course of the past few decades? And what are the prospects for its continued political relevance in the future?

This chapter reconstructs the philosophy of history on which the Christian Democratic ideology is predicated through a discussion of the role this ideological tradition has assigned to the critique of materialism and other related concepts such as naturalism, immanentism, gnosticism and atheism. Reference to these concepts is pervasive in Christian Democratic discourse. In the opening speech he gave as Secretary of the Italian PPI, at its first national congress in 1919, for instance, Luigi Sturzo asserted that the newly founded organization’s purpose was to “participate in the public life of the nation … in order to contrast the materialism and laicism in which contemporary society has become soaked, and of which it has already experienced the consequences in the catastrophic war that just ended” (Sturzo 1919b, 83).

This chapter is devoted to an exposition of the way in which the Christian Democratic ideology has historically conceived – and proposed to structure – the relationship between politics and religion. The analysis will proceed through a reconstruction of the meaning assigned to the concept of religious ‘inspiration’ of politics in this intellectual and political tradition.

This chapter explores the basic metaphysical premises on which the Christian Democratic ideology is based, focusing in particular on its conception of human nature. It does so through an engagement with the meaning this ideological tradition has historically assigned to the concept of the human “person.”

While the conflicts with the Sophien parish played out over creating a Berlin Wall Memorial, and a whole site for remembering the Berlin Wall in the former death strip, Manfred Fischer oversaw activities in his own parish to remember the Wall and its victims.

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, people around the world still remember the joyous drama of that night and the days and nights that followed. Even at a time before smartphones and Twitter helped people experience an event together, the surprise opening of the Berlin Wall was viewed by millions on television sets and splashed across headlines around the globe. For Berliners and Germans, dramatic days followed that would change their lives and their country.

With the toppling of the Berlin Wall and soon thereafter the East German SED regime, Horst Schmidt wanted to make sure “the murderers” at the Wall would pay for what they had done. His twenty-year-old son Michael had been killed on December 1, 1984 while trying to escape across the Berlin Wall. When the Wall fell, Horst and his wife Dorothea “could not feel anything of the excitement…they would have felt without Michael’s tragic death.

Just as there is a spectrum of views on the role of border soldiers in the system surrounding the Berlin Wall, so Germans have differing perspectives on the attitudes and policies of both East and West Germans regarding the Wall when it stood, on the reasons for its fall, and its legacy.

For many years after the fall of the Wall, a small minority of memory activists worked to counter the majority impulse to remove the Wall from the landscape and from memory. The combination of the physical dismantling of the Wall, the joyous performances of Beethoven, and the trials connected to deaths at the Wall were all meant to draw that period of German history to a close and allow people to move on, even as others were focused on the deeper, more problematic past connected to the Holocaust.

On October 31, 2004, two weeks in advance of the fifteenth anniversary of the toppling of the Wall, the director of the private Checkpoint Charlie Wall Museum, Alexandra Hildebrandt, unveiled 1,065 wooden crosses in memory of the people killed at the Berlin Wall and along the entire former East German border.

After years of putting the memory of the Wall aside, followed by a period of focusing on the victims of the Wall and finally on proud celebration of the brave and peaceful East German people who pushed open the Wall, the official narrative as well as its contemporary relevance changed again in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis in Germany and the resulting rise of right-wing, sometimes violent, extremism in Germany.