The Federal Republic of Germany is a "land of the godless", Hilmar Schmundt stated in the summer of 2022, echoing the current talk of the "churches in crisis" (Der SPIEGEL 34/2022, p. 94) - one example of many, mentioned here by way of example. The treatment of church/religion/God in the literary field is also characterised by similar crisis diagnoses. It was not so long ago that Arnold Stadler, in Ein hinreissender Schrotthändler, criticised 'the word God' with the remark that to speak of God was "to cause public offence" (Berlin 1999, p. 34), effectively staged 'the word God' - a word that has since been particularly 'indulged' (Andreas Maier, in: Die Zeit No. 12, 17 March 2005, p. 33) or at least admitted that "God is missing" (Martin Walser: Über Rechtfertigung, eine Versuchung. Reinbek near Hamburg 2012, p. 33).
At the same time, this interest in religion coincided with a period in which the thesis of the secularity of modernity was being re-modelled, e.g. there was explicit talk of a "return of religions" (Martin Riesebrodt 2000) or of the "desecularisation" of all areas of life (Peter L. Berger 1999). The fact that these developments themselves are also part of the process of secularisation is well known and has been considered many times over; there is no need to go into it in detail here. What is interesting for me instead is: What has become of this with regard to the literature of our immediate present? And why?
Contemporary diagnosis "Religion passé?"
An initial finding: the idea of a return of religion has lost its plausibility. If an author (as in this case Judith Kuckart with Café der Unsichtbaren, 2022) is suspected of having presented "a metaphysical novel", this is now considered "out of date, if not out of touch", as Hubert Winkels (Die Zeit no. 23, 2 June 2022, p. 58) says, after all, we live "in serenely secular times". Or perhaps in times of post-secularity? Briefly on the category: If 'desecularisation' refers to processes of a reversal of processes of 'secularisation', 'desecularity' refers to their results, e.g. the increased and explicit emergence of 'the word God' in contemporary German-language literature. Post-secularity then refers to the fact that although it is no longer possible to go back behind these processes, a new phase in dealing with religion and God's speech (etc.) can nevertheless be observed.
My contribution would like to present a thesis on precisely this: Contemporary German-language literature since the turn of the millennium has been guided by an idea that I would like to call the ego paradigm. Within this paradigm, a shift in emphasis can be observed in recent years: from religion to literature of origin and to (auto)sociobiography. Here are some observations based on the examples of Angela Lehner, Christian Baron, Andreas Maier and Ralf Rothmann.
"Religion no longer plays a major role in 2001". Angela Lehner
Two decades after Ein hinreissender Schrotthändler (Munich 2019), the young Austrian author Angela Lehner takes the use of the F-word to extremes in her debut novel Vater unser (Our Father, Munich 2019) as if she were referring to Arnold Stadler's assertions of taboo and links this word almost manically to the topic of 'Catholic socialisation'. Lehner's novel thrives on gargantuan exaggeration, and because "we Christians [...] habitually like to [say] everything three times" (p. 49), the F-word is also repeated at least three times ("'Fuck, fuck, fuck', I slapped my thighs", p. 52).
The word 'God' is linked to faecalised and metaphorised consumption, which transfers the Eucharistic act of communion into purely biological processes ("'You know, I recognise God in this scene: Vomiting. Vomit. Shitting on. Shitting out. And again from the beginning: that is catharsis'", p. 51). The ritualised repetition also characterises the disposition and style of the novel, whose three parts in "The Father", "The Son" and "The Holy Spirit" suggest and counteract a gesture of blessing. The Catholicism that becomes the subject here is an imposition.
Two years later, Angela Lehner published her second novel: 2001 (München 2021). Here too, as Nicole Henneberg notes, "the idyll is a single abyss of hypocrisy and cruelty". Her observation is therefore more striking: "Religion no longer plays a major role in 2001" (in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung no. 226, 29 September 2021, p. 10). Now it is about something else: no longer about the confrontation with religion (Our Father), but about the confrontation with one's own class (2001). Like Lehner's debut, 2001 is again set in a culturally Christian environment. In contrast to the previous novel, however, this Christian-religious profile is of no interest either as the main controlling element for personality development or as the cause of psychological deformities, for example. It has no independent weight, but somehow belongs to it. This is precisely why it can also serve (as in this case) to create and illuminate social distinctions.
The novel tells the story of what it is like to grow up in a rural area at the turn of the millennium from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old called Julia Hofer. Local industry has been brought to its knees by globalisation and young people are moving to more urban regions. Julia, however, is one of those who have no chance. This is because life in "Tal" is characterised by inequality, and it is precisely this issue that now dominates and for which religion, among other things, is functionalised. "Class permeates everything", according to Anke Stelling 2021 (https://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2021-02/mittelschicht-anke-stelling-schaefchen-im-trockenen), including Lehner's novel 2001: Julia Hofer has no access to the "better houses" in "Tal", no contact with the "better children" (p. 167) and, unlike these "better ones", she cannot afford a "drinks subscription" at school: "When I'm thirsty, I drink at the residual waste sink" (p. 17).
The fact that she belongs to a different, inferior 'class' is shown precisely by the fact that "her peers" ("[s]olves like us") are not allowed to "join in" with the carol singers or the local traditional costume association (p. 8). This is precisely the reason why the "Three Wise Men [...] are always late in Tal". There is "a shortage of holy, decent children", and so "the few have to fulfil all church obligations" (ibid.). The exclusion of their "crew" (ibid.), their peer group, is based on the usual ingredients of classism, above all on the clear stigmatisation through material poverty.
Short: In Angela Lehner's Our Father, 'religion' in the sense of her own Christian-religious socialisation is still existential for the homodiegetically positioned protagonist; it has developed a formative force that the adolescent cannot escape. The first-person narrator in 2001, on the other hand, perceives religious practices as one cultural form of expression among others, and only because she can use them to reassure herself of her own social status. Institutions that are still important for living together in rural areas, such as the church or the traditional costume club, define ingroup affiliations; in the text, they serve as a kind of catalyser of othering, i.e. the exclusion of Julia Hofer and her "crew", which is the very reason they come together as a (conceivably heterogeneous) group in the first place.
Lehner's novels are not among the currently highly regarded autosociobiographies, even though 2001 is part of the sociologically interested literature (on this, see generally Philipp Böttcher: Der Mythos von der 'nivellierten Mittelstandsgesellschaft' und die Soziologie der Gegenwartsliteratur, in: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft LXV/2021, pp. 271-307). Auto-sociobiographies focus on the origins of their authors in order to find explanations for their own self from their respective socialisation - an example of this is Christian Baron's Ein Mann seiner Klasse (2020).
Literature of origin. Religion with Christian Baron
Christian Baron comes from Kaiserslautern; he is the son of an (unskilled) labourer. But what does it mean that, according to Baron, his own father should be considered "a man of his class", as his eponymous debut states? What characterises this father must always be considered socially and understood sociologically. In a supposedly flexible 'society of singularities', a 'man of this class' has "hardly any choice", "because he had to become what he was because of his violent father and a society that did not support him." The epilogue is telling: "That excuses nothing, but it explains everything." (Berlin 2020, p. 19)
Religion only occurs here in negation, and even then only in the mode of 'empty promise' - like "society", faith simply does not 'catch' people of this "class": "I never believed in God. But who would that ever have stopped from praying? So I lay whispering under the duvet: Tonight, just tonight, may the storm please pass quickly" (p. 6) - this 'I' is the author-narrator as a child, the "storm" depicts the violent father returning in the evening, drunk. The plea remains in vain - and is never repeated again. Religion did not help, it was not missing, it did not exist, it did not disturb (once). If it is alluded to, then as a social factor.
Baron's follow-up project Schön ist die Nacht (Berlin 2022), now labelled as a "novel", also demonstrates the shift in focus in contemporary German literature from religion to sociology. As a (fictionalised) prequel to the childhood story, it now focuses on the grandparents' and parents' generation. Even references to a kind of Christian socialisation in the narrator's milieu must be sought with a magnifying glass (pp. 67, 85, 235, 312, 327); they serve solely to provide a (negatively critically connoted) enabling condition for the social hopelessness of the novel's protagonists.
But what about authors who are regularly categorised in journalism and research as representatives of a literature that cultivates a special relationship to (Catholic-influenced) religiosity? Ralf Rothmann and Andreas Maier, for example?
"You can't get out of your life, can you?" Ralf Rothmann
Ralf Rothmann, who was socialised as a Catholic, stands for a type of literature that succeeds in combining the aesthetic, in the sense of 'poetically designed', with the religious in a particularly striking way. The religious underlies the poetic as a kind of palimpsest, shining through it. In Rothmann's novel Junges Licht (2004), for example, "the numinous shimmering from transcendence into immanence becomes a stylistic principle" (Georg Langenhorst: "Ich gönne mir das Wort Gott". God and religion in the literature of the 21st century. Freiburg-Basel-Vienna 2009, p. 112).
Rothmann's more recent novels - Im Frühling sterben (2015), Der Gott jenes Sommers (2018) and Die Nacht unterm Schnee (2022) - form a trilogy set 'around 1945' with biographical echoes of his own parents. With regard to my research question, the differences in public perception between the novels from 2018 and 2022 are striking: The novel Der Gott jenes Sommers was described as being "close to God" (in: Süddeutsche Zeitung No. 105, 8 May 2018, p. 14), "in places" the novel was "somewhat penetratingly Catholic, but without any Sunday-speech rubbish" (in: Die Welt No. 109, 12.5.2018, p. 28), etc. The novel reflects the last days of the war in 1945 with episodes from the Thirty Years' War of the 17th century and thus places itself in a cultural-historical environment in which, when one died, one still 'blessed the temporal'. The motto from Andreas Gryphius' epitaph Marianae Gryphiae ("I have looked upon this world and soon blessed it"; Berlin 2018, n.p.), which precedes the novel, evokes this context that spans the centuries.
In contrast, the consistently euphoric reviews (especially in: Die ZEIT No. 29, 14 July 2022, p. 51) of Die Nacht unterm Schnee make no reference whatsoever to 'God', 'religion' or 'church'. One of the central characteristics of Rothmann's work, the "numinous" as a "stylistic principle", has, it seems, had its day. Instead, the novel focuses on a different subject area: the issue of social inequality. "So, save yourself the expensive books, child, they're not written for us" (Berlin 2022, p. 84), says Elisabeth, the wife of milker Walter, to the narrator Luisa, who is pursuing an academic education. The "working-class woman" (p. 213) Elisabeth is trapped in her class and cannot escape it. Mobility is at best horizontal, "[a]fter the stable dung into the soot, from the flat land into the coal mine. You can't get out of your life, can you?" (p. 245), Elisabeth says to Luisa. "Yes, that's our life. We sit in the slurry, we wash ourselves with slurry, and we smell like slurry, and that's how it will always be" (p. 246). The novel contains echoes of Rothmann's parents and of the author himself (cf. pp. 287-291), turning the socially interested novel into a sociobiographical structure.
'God' in the bypass. Andreas Maier
Andreas Maier, on the other hand, is one of the most influential protagonists of 'the word God' in literature. With Sanssouci, he published a prototypical novel of secularisation in 2009 (see Claudia Stockinger: Desäkularisierung als sprachbildende Kraft. On the relationship between contemporary literature and religion using the example of Andreas Maier. In: Bildung und Wissenschaft im Horizont von Interkulturalität, ed. by Heinrich Geiger et al. Ostfildern 2019, pp. 81-96), and his still current project, the autofictional novel series Ortsumgehung, is heading towards a final volume entitled Der liebe Gott according to the early plan (cf. Andreas Maier: Das Haus. Roman. Berlin 2011, p. 92). On the other hand, Maier, whose Ortsumgehung project has been declared the "biggest case of self-doping in German literature" (according to Christian Metz in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung No. 185, 12 August 2015, p. 10), must be considered one of the most successful representatives of autosocio-biographical (origin) literature in the German-speaking world. The "I" used as a "pose" (Maier: Der Ort. Roman. Berlin 2015, p. 24) has been at least as prevalent in Maier's work since his poetry lectures of the same name in 2006 as "the word God". However, a closer look at the parts of the series in chronological order also reveals this: 'God' currently hardly stands a chance against the 'I'. The interest in one's own origins dominates. Is the project losing 'the good Lord'?
Looking back at the texts published since the mid-2000s, it is striking that Maier's interest in 'God' goes hand in hand with a frequently perspectivised critique of capitalist logics of growth and increase. The insistence on the experience of difference becomes the guiding idea: the other, the outsider, is profiled as a favoured way of life and figure. With the fourth volume, The Place, the social position shifts - the more successfully the author/narrator becomes himself, the more unquestioningly he takes a place "in the front ranks of school society" (p. 44). The focus is now on (worldly) love. On the one hand, it replaces religion or takes its place; on the other hand, both this love and the religious experience are profaned when they are tentatively equated with a state of being 'stoned' (cf. p. 59). The analogisation of art as a (new) religion culminates in the fifth volume, Der Kreis (2016). The novel describes the initiation of the artist in the young man through various musical experiences. The key term for these experiences is "Durchwehen". This refers to an effect that creates, as the text puts it, "a sacredness similar to that of Sundays in church" (Maier: Der Kreis. Roman. Berlin 2016, p. 16), and is therefore a suitable substitute for religion.
Consequently, the sixth volume, Die Universität (2018), tells of a life as (if it were) literature. The novel is based on the motto of the poetry lectures held over a decade ago: "Ich, das ist der Mittelteil des Wortes Nichts" (Maier: Die Universität. Roman. Berlin 2018, n.p.). In the lectures, however, this 'nothing' that surrounded the author ("I") was itself surrounded by a greatness that remains omitted in the 2018 citation: "[T]hereabouts", it had been said in Ich weiter, "is the good Lord" (Maier: Ich. Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen. Frankfurt/M. 2006, p. 124).
Even more significant for the current transformation, however, is the fact that in Ich the Gospel of Matthew is presented as the text guiding all considerations, the "greatest philosophical work of the West" (Maier: Ich, p. 88). This reference, which was decisive for the theological-ethical foundation of the poetry lectures, no longer plays a role in The University or, as will be discussed later, does not yet play a role. In short: although the novel is based on the motto of the I-lectures, it cuts short their religion-sensitive orientation, the poetics of a transcendence of otherness based on the Gospel of St Matthew. No God, nowhere.
The seventh volume, Die Familie (2019), marks an (involuntary, according to the production) break in the narrative cosmos. The "family saga" (Maier: Die Familie. Roman. Berlin 2019, p. 17) collapses because the family legacy is based on tabooed guilt. The family had appropriated Jewish property during the Nazi era. This realisation is also likely to have consequences for the rest of the bypass project. The family, designed in the series as a "metaphysical construct" (p. 151), never existed in this form. Literature of origin has to be remodelled like a ship on the high seas, as it were, while it is still in operation, and we are observing it in the process.
The eighth volume, Die Städte (2021), which focusses on the 'I''s early travel experiences, is remarkably unimpressed by the experiences portrayed as incisive in Die Familie; more precisely, the narrative remains true to its radical perspectivism. The absence of God/religion in the autosocio-biographical structure can be explained narratologically: The internal focalisation virtually obliges the project to lead up to the self-revelations of the Frankfurt poetics lectures based on the Gospel of Matthew.
The literary strategy of the series therefore focused on 'God' as a blank space, as the omitted centre of the whole, and "Der liebe Gott" (see above) would then indeed be the final stage of a work project whose narrative period is likely to end in the mid-2000s. However, if the absence of God is a consequence of the specifically autobiographical structure of Ortsumgehung, and if one reads the earlier texts Ich and Sanssouci as evidence of the 'return of religion in contemporary literature', then post-secularisation in Maier's case means granting a separate narrative cycle to that phase of his own origin in which not believing anymore or/and not yet believing again, the "I did not pray" (Maier: Die Universität, p. 142), determined his own existence.
Religion/God in the first-person paradigm of contemporary German literature. An attempt at an explanation
The commitment to self-realisation through choice, which sociological models have emphasised since the 1980s (see Claudia Stockinger: Der 'Feuilletonkatholizismus' und die Ästhetisierung der Religion nach 2000. In: Kunstreligion. Bd. 3: Diversifizierung des Konzepts um 2000, ed. by Albert Meier et al. Berlin-Boston 2014, pp. 11-42), the 'I-saying' is once again coming more to the fore. In the "expressivist culture" (Charles Taylor: Ein säkulares Zeitalter. Frankfurt/M. 2009, p. 857) of the present, the (current) decision for or against religion is also always subject to the primacy of self-realisation. The fictional and factual (auto)sociobiographies of the present make the status quo of social post-secularity observable, one of the characteristics of which is the individualisation of dealing with religion (among other things).
Relieving oneself of the pressure of the electoral imperative can therefore mean many things: in order to occupy a position that secures attention, it has proven useful since the turn of the millennium, for example, to de-taboo the talk of God (Stadler et al. (Stadler et al.), to campaign for the construct of a 'pre-conciliar Catholic Church' (Mosebach et al.) or to focus on the social question, classism (Baron et al.) as well as gender and/or race (Jackie Thomae et al.).
The fact that "the social science discourse of the 2000s and 2010s 'turns' quite dominantly to socio-structural inequality and crisis phenomena" (Jan Delhey/Christian Schneickert: Aufstieg, Fall oder Wandel der Erlebnisorientierung? Eine Positionsbestimmung nach 30 Jahren "Erlebnisgesellschaft", in: ZfS 51/2022, 2, pp. 114-130, here p. 118), can now also be seen in contemporary German-language literature. Since the 1990s, the topic of the economisation of the literary field has dominated the discourse, especially in the feuilleton. When the economic dimension of literature takes centre stage, the focus is primarily on sales figures, distribution channels, target groups and media logics.
This is not without consequences for the understanding of literature: Its image is de-idealised. Literature is robbed of the intrinsic value that was attributed to it in the Sattelzeit (around 1800). Arnold Stadler's provocation from 1999, already recalled at the beginning, can also be related to this context ("[v]on Ficken hätte ich hätte sprechen könnte, das war nun möglich [...], nicht aber von Gott"; Ein hinreissender Schrotthändler, p. 34). The finding, which primarily alludes to questions of social morality, can be turned into an economic one and summarised in the formula: 'Sex sells, God doesn't'. Only against this background does it become understandable why one has to explicitly 'treat oneself to the word God' (as Andreas Maier does), as if it were a particularly costly, or at least economically unpromising, acquisition.
What is interesting for me is what can be concluded from this and (in fact does) follow. Both literature, against the background of the idea of its autonomy, and religion live from a kind of surplus economy. To put it positively, they transport an added value that cannot be captured in purely economic terms. To react to the talk of the economisation of literature that has dominated since around 2000 with a salto mortale into religion of all things (such as Stadler, Maier and others), created remarkable feedback effects by giving literature a new value.
Post-secularity as an attempt to "transcend secularity with secularity" (Martin Stobbe: Postsäkular erzählen. Münster 2018, p. 3) also means that talk of religion/God became a gesture of distinction against contemporary dominant literary movements, which in turn successfully served the economic discourse, such as 'around 2000', for example, so-called pop literature. Religion/God thus became an enabling space for precisely that intrinsic value of literature that was (also) in danger of being lost in the public discourse of an economisation of literature.
The fact that, within the ego paradigm outlined above, the trend towards (auto)sociobiographical literature has shifted attention towards an interest in literary explanations of social (mis)conditions harbours opportunities (some of which have already been exploited), particularly for the subject area of religion/God. Examples such as Ulrich Greiner's public advocacy of the Mysterium Fidei in 2020 (in: Die ZEIT no. 49, 26 November 2020, p. 62), which testifies to the continued existence of the feuilleton Catholicism that was already declared dead in 2010 (Gustav Seibt, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung no. 88, 17/18 April 2010, p. V2/5), not only prove the simultaneity of the discourses.
The topic of religion/God is perhaps less highlighted at the moment, but it is visible and, unlike the sociologically interested, socially critical novels, points to the actual function of literature, which is not to be an instrument for analysing social conditions. Rather, its very own tasks include "the interpretation of existence within the horizon of its randomness, finiteness, need for happiness and communicativeness". Like religion, it can contribute to 'illuminating the unavailable' (Peter Sloterdijk: Den Himmel zum Sprechen bringen. On theopoetry. Berlin 2020, pp. 334, 331). Literature that can be read as genuinely Catholic, such as Peter Handke's current novella Mein Tag im anderen Land (2021), is particularly revealing in this respect.
