In the age of confessionalism from the early 16th century onwards, there was a sharp dividing line between Protestant and Catholic literature. In the course of the so-called Counter-Reformation in Catholic Bavaria, there was a veritable explosion of literature. This, of course, crossed borders. The Jesuits in Ingolstadt and Munich also relied on the tried and tested Augsburg printing press. In addition, this literature with influences from Romania had a supranational flavour. Last but not least, the marriages of the Wittelsbachs with princesses from Italy, for example, played an important role here.
Catholic literature from the 16th to the 18th century - and this applies equally to Bavaria and Austria - is anything but characterised by national German narrowness. Outstanding representatives such as Abraham a Sancta Clara were, however, already caricatured by the pietist Friedrich Schiller in the Capuchin sermon of his 'Wallenstein'.
Renouveau Catholique in Bavaria
In the long 19th century after the so-called Wars of Liberation, Catholic literature had an increasingly difficult time in terms of literary history, but also in the canon of the new science of German studies. The rhetoric of the Kulturkampf and small German national-liberal endeavours, as well as the establishment of the Duden standard, were generally not favourable to Catholic literature with its southern German influence. A movement that ultimately originated in France sought to put a stop to this. The roots of the Renouveau Catholique in Bavaria and especially in Swabia, where this literary movement was strong, actually lie in Berlin and date back to the 19th century. This was because the so-called Kulturkampf (cultural struggle) instigated by Chancellor Bismarck, which served to combat the Centre Party and Polish political Catholicism, gave rise to fears among Catholic intellectuals that they would be marginalised not only politically but also culturally in Bismarck's Protestant-dominated empire.
The threat from Berlin was compounded by an attitude in Rome that was deeply hostile to anything modern, and not just since the Risorgimento. Moreover, the Roman Curia ensured that it was precisely the more progressive Catholics who found themselves exposed to the persecution emanating from Rome of a liberal attitude that was open to progress and committed to the sciences. The fighting concept of modernism litterarius particularly affected the more ambitious and cosmopolitan Catholic writers. The journal Hochland, which was founded by Carl Muth in 1903 and existed until 1971, was intended to remedy this situation as a publication for these progressive Catholic intellectuals. One of its early contributors was Konrad Weiß, who became known for his poetry collection Tantum dic verbo and worked as an art consultant for Hochland in Munich from 1905. The magazine eventually became a forum for the German branch of the European Renouveau Catholique movement, which had its intellectual centre in France. The Renouveau Catholique was thus characterised by an international orientation towards the West and the South, in stark contrast to the hatred of France (Sedan celebrations!) and national self-sufficiency of the Wilhelmine zeitgeist during the Kulturkampf.
Productive representatives
One of the most prolific representatives of the German-language Renouveau Catholique was Peter Dörfler, who lived in Munich for a long time but came from Swabia and was once considered a successful writer. He became famous with Als Mutter noch lebte (1912) and Die Papstfahrt durch Schwaben (1923), among others. His artist's novel Die Wessobrunner (The Wessobrunners), which created a literary monument to the epochal high point of Bavarian church building in the Pfaffenwinkel region in the 18th century, was also a sales success right up to the time of the economic miracle.
Joseph Bernhart was similarly successful to Peter Dörfler with his autobiographically inspired novel Der Kaplan, whose protagonist, with his mixture of literary enthusiasm and openness to progress, corresponded almost ideally to the programme of the Renouveau Catholique. He clearly stands out from the plethora of chaplaincy novels fashionable at the time due to his particular literary ambition. This also applies to Joseph Bernhart's poems, which have yet to be discovered. He can also be considered a pioneer of Catholic mysticism research and his translation of St Augustine is still a classic today. In any case, Joseph Bernhart found like-minded people in the 'Hochland' circle. This circle around Carl Muth's magazine Hochland also included writers such as Ruth Schaumann, author of poems and mystery plays, as well as Regina Ullmann.
A spirit of resistance was expressed by Joseph Bernhart in the historical novels Rudolf von Schlüsselberg and Thomas More, which were at odds with the jingoism of the First World War. Thomas More also appears on stage as the patron saint of conscience against state despotism in the play of the same name by Albrecht Haushofer, who was murdered in Gestapo custody and came from an old Bavarian family of artists. His famous Moabite sonnets were hidden from the Gestapo and passed on to posterity, such as Qui resurrexit:
I have seen him in a thousand pictures.
As a judge of the world, angry and exalted,
as a thorn-crowned man, as a Madonna boy, -
but none of them wanted to exist completely in me.
Now I feel that only one thing is valid:
As shown to the master Mathis Er -
but not the pale one who leans towards death -
the one surrounded by light: this is the Christian.
Human art alone did not paint like this.
Floating weightlessly away from the darkness of the grave,
the head wreathed in a golden glow.
Ghostly illuminated by all colours,
still being, yet boundless,
God's Son ascends to God's bosom.
It was in a similar spirit that Joseph Bernhart fought against National Socialism both early on and resolutely in his publications. Joseph Bernhart, a Swabian living here in Munich, had made an enemy of Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of National Socialism. Bernhart apparently only escaped arrest because Mussolini is said to have supported the internationally renowned author of The Vatican as a World Power. Particularly towards the end of the war - Joseph Bernhart was banned from writing and speaking in 1941 - he therefore preferred to get out of the line of fire of the Nazi regime by retreating from Munich to rural Swabia, his true home, and the Allgäu.
Before this withdrawal, Joseph Bernhart published in the magazine Hochland, which was opposed to the nationalist and neo-pagan spirit on a Catholic basis, as did the well-known poet Gertrud von Le Fort (who died in 1971 in Oberstdorf, her late place of residence) and Werner Bergengruen, who was widely read in the post-war period. Theodor Haecker, who last lived in Ustersbach in Swabia, should also be mentioned as a Hochland author and staunch opponent of National Socialism. After the magazine was discontinued by the Nazi regime, it was not able to reappear until 1946 under Franz Josef Schöningh and Karl Schaezler in Munich. In Augsburg, the Catholic-orientated journal Neues Abendland was published as a counterpart from 1946 under the direction of Johann Wilhelm Naumann, which - as a lesson from the collapse in 1945 - sought to counter the "Prussianised" view of history that had prevailed until then with a "federalist-universalist" understanding of history in line with Bavaria.
Appreciation and potential
As the representatives of the Renouveau Catholique had survived the dictatorship comparatively unscathed, indeed often as victims, they were able to regain a foothold in the literary world after 1945. In an intellectual and moral vacuum, they were often virtually showered with honorary posts and the like, such as Joseph Bernhart, who was accepted into the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. The same applies to the aforementioned Werner Bergengruen, whose Römisches Erinnerungsbuch (1949) also pointed the way from Germanophile hubris back to the Catholic West.
In any case, the representatives of the Renouveau Catholique could hope for support not only as (largely) opponents of the Nazis, but also with their ideological and cultural European southern and western orientation, which had always been decisive for Bavaria in literary and cultural terms, in the politically and geographically similar Bavarian cultural policy after 1945. This was reflected, for example, in an honorary doctorate from Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University for Werner Bergengruen (1958). Significantly, the winners of the City of Munich's literature prize were Peter Dörfler from Swabia in 1945 and Gertrud von Le Fort from the Allgäu in 1947, whose novel Das Schweißtuch der Veronica can be considered a classic of the German-language Renouveau Catholique and who had been nominated for the Nobel Prize by Hermann Hesse.
The fact that the representatives of the Renouveau Catholique even had innovative potential is demonstrated by a view that was ultimately based on creation theology, but was completely new at the time, which can be found in Reinhold Schneider as well as surprisingly early on in Joseph Bernhart, whose essays Die unbeweinte Kreatur. Reflections on the Animal (1961) or Saints and Animals, Joseph Bernhart can be said to have developed an ecological way of thinking that was far ahead of his time and, against the backdrop of the belief in technology at the time, seems almost revolutionary. Perhaps this could also draw a line to Bavaria's Carl Amery, who can also be described as a literary hero of the ecology movement.
Against this background of literary history, I hope that the conference at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria will provide a strong impetus for a re-evaluation of Catholicism in the literary life of our time.
Finally, the following works are recommended for further exploration of the topic: Klaus Wolf, Joseph Bernhart - an author of the Renouveau Catholique? In: Perspektiven bayerisch-schwäbischer Literaturgeschichtsschreibung, edited by Thomas Groll and Klaus Wolf and Klaus Wolf, Bayerische Literaturgeschichte. From Tassilo to Gerhard Polt.
