| Cultural Confessionalism: Literary Resistance and the Bekennende Kirche Contributor(s): Brown, Peter D. G. (Editor), Henley, Grant (Author) |
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ISBN: 3039102982 ISBN-13: 9783039102983 Publisher: Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publis OUR PRICE: $72.53 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: March 2007 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | European - German - Religion | Christianity - Literature & The Arts - History | Europe - Germany |
| Dewey: 830 |
| LCCN: 2007297388 |
| Series: Studies in Modern German Literature |
| Physical Information: 200 pages |
| Themes: - Religious Orientation - Christian - Cultural Region - Germany |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Pastor Martin Niem ller, 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 Niem ller revitalized Protestant homiletic discourse as a political tool in defiance of the regime. Having protested Niem ller'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 Niem ller, 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 Niem ller 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. |