Cultural Confessionalism: Literary Resistance and the Bekennende Kirche

ISBN-13: 9783039102983 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 200 str.

Brown, Peter D. G.

Opis

Pastor Martin Niemoller, popular author Ernst Wiechert, and the young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer were well known in the public sphere in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. As the decade of the 1930s progressed each of these figures became a vocal opponent of National Socialism. In the last twenty-eight sermons delivered before his arrest in 1937 Martin Niemoller revitalized Protestant homiletic discourse as a political tool in defiance of the regime. Having protested Niemoller s imprisonment, Ernst Wiechert was arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated at Buchenwald for three months during the summer of 1938. Wiechert chronicled his experiences in the fictional autobiography Der Totenwald (1939) a text which marks the apex of Wiechert s literary turn from Blut und Boden Dichter to outspoken critic of Nazism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a member of the Pastors Emergency League and for a time pastoral assistant to Martin Niemoller, constructed a sphere of textual resistance in his prose and poetic writings composed while imprisoned in Tegel from 1943 to 1945. This study traces the emergence of cultural confessionalism as a new literary resistance paradigm that developed out of the ideological nexus of cultural Protestantism and the confessionalist trend of the Kirchenkampf. Through literary analysis of sermons by Niemoller and written texts by both Wiechert and Bonhoeffer the book demonstrates how the textual resistance strategies of the cultural confessionalists varied from the oppositional approaches of the innere Emigration, the political resistance, and the Christian humanist tradition."

Spis treści

Contents: Cultural Protestantism - Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Confessionalism and the Kirchenkampf - German literary "inner emigration" - Ernst Wiechert's Das Einfache Leben - Resistance literature - Sermons of Martin Niemöller - Lutherdeutsch - Christian homiletic tradition - Georg Büchner's Der Hessische Landbote - Ernst Wiechert's Der Totenwald - Fictional autobiography - Ernst Wiechert's Die Majorin - Adalbert Stifter's Der Hochwald - Joseph Goebbels' novel Michael - Dietrich Bonhoeffer's fragmentary novel - Bildungsbürgertum - Dietrich Bonhoeffer's prison poems.

O autorze

The Author: Grant Henley is Associate Professor of German at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. He has a B.A. in Religion from Boston University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in German Literature from Harvard University. His previous publications include articles on Rilke's Biblical poetry in Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil and on Germanist Victor Lange.