In July 1876 three eight-year-old girls from Marpingen, a village in the Saarland region of south-west Germany, claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Their visions attracted tens of thousands of pilgrims and led to hundreds of claims of miraculous cures. This book is a study of the phenomenon that was widely discussed at the time as the `German Lourdes', its background and its repercussions. David Blackbourn sets out to recreate the Catholic world of Bismarckian Germany through a detailed analysis of the social, economic and community structures in which it was embedded, and a reconstruction of the "mentalite" of the Catholic community in the Saarland. He evokes the crisis-laden atmosphere of the 1870s, and offers an interpretation of the interaction between politics and religion in newly-unified Germany.
It had won the Hans Rosenberg Book Prize of 1992-93 from Central European History Society.