Is the return of religion a thing of the past? A fascinating question. In any case, it can be said that the topos of the "return of religion" (Willi Oelmüller) has been recurring with periodic regularity since 1984, so much so that there has recently been talk of a "narrative of the return of religion". This raises the question of whether what is supposed to return here has ever completely disappeared.
Religion in literature
Religion, one could argue, has always been there, even in literature, but nobody noticed it or wanted to notice it! However, the objection that religion in modern societies demonstrates an astonishing resistance to secularisation would probably underestimate the upheaval and change in the shape of the religious field. Without bringing any special expertise in the sociology of religion to the table, I assume that (1) we are in a transition from homogeneous Christian societies to pluralistic religious societies, and that this transition (2) is accompanied by ongoing waves of secularisation.
Despite all the talk of the return of religion, the number of non-religious and non-denominational people is growing. While it was a matter of course to believe in God until the middle of the 20th century, it has now become a matter of course in this country to no longer believe in God. Faith has become an option that requires justification. You can lament this and tell the story of this change as a history of subtraction in the light of the history of decline. However, this change can also be welcomed because it provides an opportunity for a more conscious, resolute religiosity. In any case, the transmission belts of religious tradition are worn out. The ferryman service of translation is needed. Those who try to arrive too quickly risk losing precious treasures. In societies whose functional processes are characterised by accelerando, phases of deceleration in the sense of ritardando are vital. The gradual transition from communicative to cultural memory also requires storage media that keep what has been present for what is to come.
Alongside film and art, literature in particular is a medium that preserves the past. In contemporary literature, Botho Strauß and Thomas Hürlimann are authors who, each in their own way, have expressed unease at the accelerated pace of change in modern societies and set anamnestic counterweights so as not to abandon themselves uncritically to the fashions of contemporary taste. They seek a connection to the past and thus see the present more clearly. A book title such as Der Fortführer by Botho Strauß indicates that threads of tradition are not simply cut off here, but continued to be spun. Records continue to weave the text that others have begun to weave before us.
Thomas Hürlimann as a chronicler of lost worlds - sources of his writing
The Swiss writer Thomas Hürlimann, born in Zug in 1950, has made a name for himself as a refined dramatist, gifted storyteller and lucid essayist. His writing draws on at least four sources. Firstly, there is (1) the Catholic influence not only from his family, but also from his years as a pupil at Einsiedeln Abbey School - a world with its own rules and clear boundaries, which the 15-year-old Hürlimann rebelled against as a member of the "Club of Atheists". He lets a paper aeroplane sail down through a hatch from the roof truss of the collegiate church, labelled with Nietzsche's dictum: "Religion is the will to hibernate" and rebelling against rites that have become hollow and fading catechism truths.
As a monastery student, Hürlimann spent crucial years in the resonance chamber of the Benedictines, he saluted the Black Madonna in Einsiedeln Abbey Church every day and became familiar with the colour and formal language of the Latin liturgy. He familiarised himself with authors such as Plato, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and absorbed the rhythm of time through the chimes of the bells and the Liturgy of the Hours. The "eternal day" in the monastery made him sensitive to the changes of time that broke into the citadel of the monastery after the Council and divided the Fathers into two parties.
The clear order of the small world and its hierarchies later taught Hürlimann to see the order of the big world and its hierarchies - and at the same time sharpened his sense for the fine cracks, but also the exceptions to the rule that you have to know in order to survive. This world of origin remains, even if you turn your back on it, as Hürlimann did when he went to study philosophy at the Free University in West Berlin. There he appreciated the increase in freedom, but soon realised that his metaphysical antennae were fidgeting in the void when God, metaphysics and transcendence were blandly dismissed as "old hats".
No less important for Hürlimann's work is (2) the microcosm of his own family. The cancer and the early death of his brother are incisive experiences. Anyone who has experienced being thrown out of a pub because they are travelling with someone whose body has been emaciated by chemotherapy will never forget it. The hours spent at his brother's deathbed, which are reflected in the story Die Tessinerin, unleashed a desire for expression that went beyond playful experimentation with language and forms. "My brother's death turned me into a writer." He was also influenced by his father, who strongly advocated conservative positions in politics and cunningly catered to expectations in order to advance his career. A patriarchal figure that youthful rebellion can rub up against. But the subtle mother, who refrains from giving space to her artistic talents, has also left her mark on the work. Behind the cocoon of elegant manners, abysses yawn. Not forgetting the uncle, a priest and theologian who heads the renowned Abbey Library of St Gallen. Through the maternal line, the family history has Jewish roots that reach back genealogically to Galicia and are interwoven with the black shadows of the violent history of the 20th century, the Shoah.
Finally, beyond the Einsiedeln monastery and the family (3), Switzerland is present as a background experience, the country with the white cross inscribed on its coat of arms and where the father climbed the political ladder to become Federal Councillor and President. Hürlimann was acutely aware of the social changes in Switzerland from the late 1950s onwards, the melting away of confessional milieus, the hollowing out of religious rituals, but also the hypocrisies in dealing with one's own past. From the distance of West Berlin, he repeatedly took aim at his homeland - satirical criticism as a mode of solidarity!
"Where the hour of literature strikes ..." - Keep what disappears!
However, literature is different and more than the sum of biographical and social influences - and it would be wrong to try to pin it down to this. The decisive factor is the transformation of these experiences into language and form. The literary development of life, which is reflected in books such as Das Gartenhaus, Der große Kater, Fräulein Stark, Vierzig Rosen, Heimkehr and most recently Der rote Diamant, did not take place without transformation and poetic creativity. At the Vienna Poetry Lectureship in 2017, Hürlimann ascribed to literature the role of capturing what is fading. The task of writing is to be a chronicler of time, to record what is disappearing and being forgotten.
This also applies to religious topics - and so it could be said with regard to the conference topic: On the one hand, literature is alert to the creeping abandonment of tradition, the diminishing binding force of rituals and the erosion of faith. On the other hand, it is the custodian and chronicler of what has been lost. What is pushed into the background or forgotten in theology and the church due to a lack of compatibility with modernity returns in the medium of literature and is preserved there. In Hürlimann's narrative cosmos, this applies at least to religious subjects such as 'limbo' and 'angels', which appear again and again alongside death, theodicy and the cross.
Trauma Limbus: The Limbus puerorum
The Limbus puerorum is located in the topography of the afterlife between heaven and hell. It is the eschatological place for children who have died without being baptised. Hürlimann first addresses the motif of limbo in the novella Fräulein Stark (2001). Right at the beginning, from the perspective of the budding convent pupil, it is hinted at why his parents take him to his uncle, the Abbey Librarian of St. Gallen, during the summer holidays: "[...] it was nicer here than at home, where they had once again set up the changing table, covered the cradle, designed the birth announcements and bought powder, baby powder. It happened for the third or fourth time, and we all suspected that it would go wrong this time too, that mum would only give birth to something dead, a bloody, slimy lump that would be given to the pig farmers at the back door of the clinic. I wanted nothing to do with that." (13) The distance is clear. The son has no sense of the hardships that the mother went through with each new pregnancy, of the pressure of expectation that she was under to give birth to a healthy child. With little empathy, he calls the stillborn babies "slimy lumps", which are disposed of in the skip for the pigs.
There is still no theological reference. This is added at a later point in the novella. Here, the protagonist recalls earlier visits to the St. Gallen Abbey Library and reports how he once spent "almost the whole day with the mummy at the back of the book church" as a child. "Yes, those afternoons were endless, endless and desolate, full of homesickness for Mum, who was already trying to hatch a little brother back then, in vain of course, what comes out, the little lady told me one evening after night prayers, cannot be baptised, it goes into the pig bucket and then into limbo, the place for unbaptised flesh." (112)
The drastic combination of pig bucket and limbo catches the eye. However, the place for "the unbaptised flesh" is by no means the product of Miss Stark's imagination. Rather, the resolute housekeeper of the abbey librarian, who is described as a devout nun, learned about the fate of children who died unbaptised from the catechism. In this respect, it is a strategy of easy forgetting when it was said at the end of the 20th century that limbo was merely a theological hypothesis. It traumatised many mothers - and Hürlimann resists easy forgetting when he recalls the depressing experience of women who gave birth to dead babies. The pain of losing a child was compounded by the pain of a heaven that was forever blocked.
Epiphany in white - or the return of the angels
Hürlimann takes up the theme of Limbo, which appears only marginally in Fräulein Stark, again in his novel Vierzig Rosen (2006) and now combines it with the appearance of an angel. The constellation of characters is similar, only the names are different. Marie is the mother who has given birth to dead twins, her brother is a strict, catechism-pious monsignor. Immediately after the hapless birth, he visits his sister in hospital, who is unable to recognise him, let alone speak to him, due to total exhaustion. Nevertheless, his visit and the roses he leaves behind cause a change in the atmosphere, which Marie realises after waking up and finds distressing. She has no one to talk to. Something happens.
In the evening sunlight shining through the slats of the closed blinds, a white wing appears, travelling across the floor of the sickroom, feeling its way to Marie's bed and resting warmly on her empty stomach. In this epiphany of light, she sees an angel whom she can speak to in order to clarify what has been going on: "I suspect that my brother has told me something terrible. Something that threatens me day and night. Something that makes me ill. Help me! Be kind! Let me finally know what has happened to my children." The angel is silent. But glistening light and cosy warmth are quiet signs of his presence.
He finally responds to Marie's urgent request, and one can surmise that a soliloquy is being staged in two voices: "Marie, we have to believe, even if it hurts us: we have to believe. - I understand, she said dully. We have to believe that my twins will never go to heaven. That bliss will remain closed to them forever. - Yes, he admitted, unfortunately they couldn't be baptised. - But that's not their fault! - No. It's not their fault. - They are completely innocent, without any sin! - Of course they are. However, you should know from the catechism that only the baptised have the right to see the face of God. - One last question, begged Marie, where have they been taken? - Into limbo. - Do you know where that is? - Between heaven and hell, between bliss and damnation, between
Light and ..." (250f).
Nobody talks to Marie about what has happened. She is all alone with her grief. No one tells her that the girls she gave birth to are dead. The conversation with the angel replaces the conversations with her husband, her brother, the doctor or the hospital nurses. Marie's indignation that eternal bliss should be denied to underage children, who are blameless, just because they have not been baptised, breaks out. "The theologians who claim in all seriousness that every life returns to the Creator when the trumpets sound, every leg, every arm, every tongue, except for stillborn babies, of course, are crazy. They are banished to limbo for all time," Marie says indignantly years later during a Christmas conversation with her priest brother and her husband.
She imagines the resurrection according to the model of a physicalist restitution and affirms that she takes the dogmas of the church seriously. "I believe in God. I even feel a little sorry for him. He refuses to resurrect innocent children, and what does he get out of it? At the last judgement, the skin lamps from Auschwitz will fly around his ears." (299) The conversation pauses and the brother, a convert who hides his Jewish roots under his cassock, surmises: "If I understand you correctly, you are more sympathetic to our father's faith." The answer is prompt: "At least the Jews don't have a limbo." The brother replies that the afterlife of the Jews consists of stories - and that you can't get anywhere with stillborn children because you can't tell anything about them. An afterlife like limbo, a "shadowy realm full of splendour, full of light" would be better.
Suddenly Marie laughs and says: "You're right, my girls haven't lived a single second - and yet they have a story. They don't get any older on their birthdays." This sentence is the hermeneutic key to the whole novelThe story of the children reflects the story of the mother, who is given "forty roses" for her birthday every year as if she is not getting any older. Her husband treats her as if she no longer has a story, as if she is already dead.
The scandal of the cross
In 2017, Thomas Hürlimann spoke about the cross in modern literature at the Vienna Poetry Lectureship on Literature and Religion. There he said that the hour of literature comes when something slips out of consciousness. The crosses are in decline. Tourism managers would ensure that it is removed from the mountain peaks of Switzerland, as it is not acceptable to visitors of other faiths and non-believers; Real Madrid football club has had the symbol in the royal coat of arms removed from its jerseys to accommodate Arab sponsors. Patient Hürlimann has also missed the cross in hospital rooms and chapels. Literature resists such self-amputation in the name of tolerance. Using passages from works by Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth, Michael Bulgakov, Gertrud Fussenegger and Leon Bloy and others, Hürlimann has clarified the presence of religious symbols in literature and differentiated between two processes: Approach through distancing or identification.
In doing so, he did not fail to formulate a wish for theology: What is foolishness to the pagans and a scandal to the Jews, he wanted to see at the centre of Christian theology. "The belief that death can be taken away by taking down the cross is a fatal error. No, we are not hanging up death, we are walking towards it, and it is precisely for this reason that we should leave the cross standing as a sign of hope and survival" (Das Symbol des Kreuzes, in: J.-H. Tück/ T. Mayer (eds.), Das vermisste Antlitz. Suchbewegungen zwischen Poetik und Religion, Freiburg 2022, 141-149). In this context, Hürlimann shared a biographical experience. In order to prepare for an examination at Zurich University Hospital, he repeatedly walked a Way of the Cross. He wanted to be able to go through the individual stations of the via crucis in his memory so as not to panic during the half hour in the tube.
"You can easily memorise a work of art like this. Each passus of the passio follows from the other. You walk through a stepped structure and realise how valid, how beautiful, how logical these steps are." (Who could not love the one thing today? 14 Stations, in: J.-H. Tück (ed.), "Der große Niemand". Religiöse Motive im literarischen Werk von Thomas Hürlimann, Freiburg 2018, 274-286, here 282). He interpreted his recovery from a serious illness, which brought him to the brink of death, in the light of the biblical story of the resurrection of Lazarus. This brings me to Botho Strauß, the second protagonist, who realised early on that technology was about to inherit the hope of Easter. He spoke pointedly of "resurrection technology" as the true apocalypse.
Botho Strauß - a transcendence-sensitive contemporary diagnostician
Botho Strauß has a keen sense of what is lost. However, his world of origin is different from Hürlimann's. He was born in Naumburg in 1944 and has Protestant roots. Strauß, who studied German language and literature, theatre studies and sociology in Cologne and Munich, became famous early on as a playwright and is a master of prose sketches that capture the changing, often fragile worlds of relationships. Just as Rodin puts a nude on paper with inimitable precision in a single pencil stroke, Strauß creates miniatures that capture a person's physiognomy and attitude in just a few sentences. Strauß has also emerged as a narrator, essayist and aphorist, who seeks a connection to the past in his notes in order to be able to see the present more clearly.
In doing so, he often positions himself off the beaten track. For example, he once takes aim at the key word of communication: "If I were allowed to choose the unword of the age, only one thing would come into question: communicate. An author does not communicate with his reader. He seeks to seduce, amuse, provoke and revitalise them. What a wealth of (still lively) inner movements and corresponding expressions are swallowed up by such a brutal rubbish word! Man and woman do not communicate with each other. The manifold riddles they pose to each other would find their most stale solution as soon as this meaningless term comes between them. A Catholic who thinks he communicates with God should be excommunicated on the spot. One prays to God, and one does not entertain, but receives Holy Communion." (Der Untenstehende auf Zehenspitzen, Munich 2004, 41) The sensitivity for discretion and the reality of the sacred is combined with a pronounced sense of justice.
Strauß clearly quantified the consequential costs of a free society and spoke of something that is otherwise conspicuously silent: "The many crimes of intimacy alone that remain unpunished! The many dismal falsities and deceptions of living together, the deviousness of love, vulgarities and injuries that would be unthinkable in any other social sphere ... Is intimacy not a social sphere? I see guilt and wrongdoing, but the circumstances tell me something about reciprocity, a difficult childhood, weakness in lifestyle, a lack of awareness of guilt, moods and lost control. The circumstances plead for forgiveness where I can only recognise the unforgivable. For me, the crimes of emotion are not excusable from a superior social or psychological point of view. I regret that in the civilised world there is no instance of justice to punish them." (ibid. 109).
Pseudomorphoses of eschatology
With the instance of justice, an eschatological vanishing point is implied that could illuminate, judge and straighten out the opaque web of human stories. But little is said about death and judgement. Strauß agrees with Hürlimann in his diagnosis that death is taboo: "People used to be afraid of the afterlife, today they are afraid of death." (78) This fear of death has not only triggered an entire industry of anti-ageing and life extension, but has also unleashed biotechnological promises that Strauß exposed early on as pseudomorphoses of eschatology. Firstly, he noticed the dynamic of crossing boundaries.
The "trasumanar", which Dante still reserved for God, is now taken into man's own hands and mimics God: "A so-called scientist recently declared that man had now attained God's status and that it was therefore his moral duty to behave like God. The genetic inventors and tinkerers can no longer measure themselves, it seems, for all their nanometrics. And as they measure themselves, they become smaller and smaller. The Creator God, reduced to the germ line? Prometheus, who did not raise his forehead to the heavens but concentrated on collecting matches, would be an imp for Zeus. So no matter how much the engineers puff themselves up with their self-deification, they do not leave the spell of human failure. They have nothing to oppose him with." (58)
Transhumanists are convinced that we will soon have the technical means to not only live longer, but to live forever. Other variants of technognosis also promise to be able to transform the body-bound human spirit into a technology-based intelligence. If they consider the body as a mortal shell to be negligible, they undercut an integral view of fulfilment, such as that which guides the Christian belief in resurrection. Botho Strauß has deciphered the self-transgression that leaves the body of the old man behind as a gnostic bisection of man: "There is a new cult of body despisers, they call themselves extropists and rave about saving the human spirit into the machine so that it can escape the rotten planet at the last minute. Theology of the ejector seat. His spirit, his will to know, is supposed to lift itself above man - probably with the driving force of the primordial curse - and will finally wander through space without him, completely disembodied, a noetic ecstasy." (97)
The voices of technognosis see progress in disincarnation, in shedding the "crutch" of the flesh in order to continue to exist virtually. However, the self-made immortality brought about by biotechnological innovation would only benefit a very few. It would be in the mode of surrender and betrayal of a hope that includes everyone. A final note takes the idea of the alienation of the Logos, of kenosis, further: "Kenosis, becoming empty, alienation, through which the Son of Man gave himself up to divine omnipotence and took on the form of a servant.
Kenosis is now imitated by man, the son of the machine, who - renouncing his humanity - goes among things. Perhaps to redeem them from their materiality? He goes under the wood, the string of pearls and all silicon compounds. However, he cannot bring humanity home from things. 'For your sake, you things, he who was rich has become poor. So according to 2 Cor. 8:9." (Lights of the Fool, Munich 2013, 119).
The return of religion - passé?
Is religion making a comeback in literature? Or is this question already passé? Neither, one has to say with regard to Thomas Hürlimann. In addition to his alert description of the fading of hollowed-out forms of religion, there is also a persistent presence of religious, indeed specifically Catholic motifs. First of all, limbo: the question of the fate of children who have died unbaptised may be dismissed as a theological-historical curiosity that no longer has any significance for an enlightened and universalist theology of salvation. However, the doctrine of the limbus puerorum has left traumatic traces in the affective household of many parents. This has almost been forgotten - and there is a danger of allowing oneself to be easily forgotten when it comes to limbus, without taking into account the suffering of the mothers of stillborn children. Hürlimann counters the easy forgetting with the difficult memory of the often decades-long trauma suffered by the mothers, who were coldly told that their children would never see heaven again.
remain blocked.
He registered with relief that his protest against "an embryonic concentration camp located in the afterlife" has now found a Roman response (Der große Pan ist tot, in: J.-H. Tück/T. Mayer (eds.), Nah - und schwer zu fassen. Im Zwischenraum von Literatur und Religion, Freiburg i. Br. 2017, 43-53, here 46). Benedict XVI abolished the doctrine of limbo in 2013. Angels, these fleeting ciphers of transcendence, also play a role in Hürlimann's work. While the angelology treatise has almost disappeared from the handbooks of dogmatic theology and migrated into spiritual advice literature and esotericism, they appear in the novel Forty Roses, but also in The Red Diamond, without being captured in a figurative way. Here, bright white becomes a marker of alterity of the sacred.
Ultimately, Hürlimann's work is a loud protest against the quiet disappearance of crosses from the secular public sphere. What is taken down because it is considered offensive remains preserved in the medium of literature - and the religious symbol has not disappeared as long as there are people reading. For Hürlimann, however, the cross is the offensive symbol of death, which nobody likes to be reminded of, but which is inevitable. An innocent man has been martyred here and brutally tortured to death. Exposing this sign in public is a scandal that is disturbing but healing. It reminds us of the vulnerability and mortality of human existence, it is a mirror of fallibility and interrupts the irritating climate of having to be right. At the same time, the cross as a tree of life is a symbol of the Easter conquest of death.
Botho Strauß is also a writer sensitive to transcendence, and traces of his religious heritage are present in his writings. The silence of God, the kenosis, the reservation towards an inflationary communication with the sacred can be found in them. Strauß has repeatedly recognised the metaphysical dullness and religious deafness of the contemporary cultural scene as a symptom of flattening. In his notations on the progress of biotechnology, he has clearly registered the pseudomorphosis of eschatology. The promise of an integral life after death is halved when the body as a medium of sensual expression falls by the wayside in transhumanism. Perfection without God, as is implied between the lines, does not lead to heaven, but to self-created paradises, which could easily turn out to be dystopias.
Because there would only be room for small elites, if at all, and instead of peace and joy in abundance, yawning boredom could quickly spread. The infinite extension of lifespan does not guarantee salvation and redemption: "An over-aged society may inject itself with a lot of artificial youthfulness serum. But no one becomes young without young time" (Der Untenstehende auf Zehenspitzen, 13). A digital double or an identity transferred to the machine betrays the hope preserved in the Apostles' Creed. There, the resurrection of the dead is promised, the anti-docetic thrust of which Tertullian put into the beautiful formula: Caro cardo salutis - the flesh is the pivot of salvation.
