Chapter 7 - German Literature and Religion 1945 to the Present Day

Summary

Religious ideas experienced a relatively brief literary renaissance following the war. Soon however references to religion were used as a means of problematizing high literary claims to promise meaning. Developments in the Federal Republic differed significantly from those in the GDR, although in the 1970s the question of literature and religion was strongly politicized in the Federal Republic too. From the 1970s onwards ‘coming to terms with the past’ (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) and related moral and aesthetic questions played an important part in the presence of religion in literature. In other respects religious forms of writing and thought were taken up in order to represent the inwardness of the New Subjectivity and to rethink the possibilities of art. Especially in drama we find a powerful engagement with ritual, and this became an important point of reference for modern ‘post-dramatic’ theatre. Finally, literature of the last few decades reflects the indeterminacy of a ‘post-secular’ age in which the modern understanding of religion and of its—marginal—place in modernity is put in question.