Junior Faculty Fellow 1999-2000
William Collins Donahue (German Language and Literature)
Rutgers University
Afterlives: The Reprise of the “Secularization
Narrative”
in Modern German Culture
From the famous moment in Goethe's Faust, when Gretchen
pointedly inquires into the quality of her lover's religious commitment
("Nun sag, wie hast du's mit der Religion?"), until that
high point in Naturalism when we encounter an avowedly atheist seminarian
in the drama The Family Selicke (Die Familie Selicke),
German literature presents an important series of interventions
in the century's great secularization debate. Unlike their French
and English counterparts, German realists remained deeply interested
in religion, though sometimes more as a problematic legacy that
can not so easily be shaken off. All the canonical "poetic
realists" have left their mark on the secularism debate with
literary masterpieces that now need to be examined specifically
within the rubric I have dubbed the "secularization narrative."
Viewing this corpus of texts as a commentary on secularization reveals
a remarkable cultural exchange, which celebrates and damns, but
also registers a depth of anguish and rich ambivalence about the
defining intellectual and spiritual controversies of the age. In
resurrecting the religious and anti-religious aspects of these texts,
I am just as concerned, however, to understand their twentieth-century
appeal, that is their modern cultural "afterlives." Critics
of this century enthusiastically return to these texts, it would
seem, not to resuscitate the particulars of the now bygone secularization
debate, but to confront related problems, such as "the crisis
of values" which troubled so many German intellectuals during
the Weimar period and again after World War II.
|
