Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-5g6vh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T17:40:23.142Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A Comparison of the Creative and Critical Achievements of the Catholic Revival in France and Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Helmut Hatzfeld*
Affiliation:
The Catholic University of America, Washington 17, D. C.

Extract

The preconditions for a truly parallel treatment of the French and German Catholic Revival of the twentieth century do not exist. The main reason is that spiritually minded great authors like Paul Claudel or François Mauriac became fervent Catholics while German religiously minded poets like Rilke and Hofmannsthal used their cultural Catholicism for secular purposes. Of course, we still can single out certain literary productions which are comparable on the basis of their subject matter and general tendency, although they may be found rather in second-class authors. As such common topics and tendencies I am inclined to consider the following: the quasi-mystical experience of the religious conversion as a challenge to a merely para-psychological explanation of spiritual events; or the defense of the Church as the only factor of salvation against any humanistic, humanitarian, or political messages; or the praise of womanhood as inspired by the virginal motherhood of Mary, opposed to modern female emancipation and stressing of sex; or the serious explanation of evil by sin and Satan, open to spiritual cures, versus any theory of the absurdity of the world or the interpretation of evil as maladjustment open only to psychiatric therapy; or along the critical line, the fullness of specific Catholic insights, culminating in charity as a basis of an empathetic understanding of literature versus any formalism or philosophically destructive criticism.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Paper read at the 75th annual meeting of the MLA, New York, 1958.

References

1 Paul Claudel, “Magnificat,” in Cinq Grandes Odes (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), p. 81.

2 Gertrud von Le Fort, Das SchweiBituch der Veronika (Munchen: Bechstein, 1946), p. 160.

3 Hymnen an die Kirche (Munchen: Bechstein, 1946), p. 15.

4 Coronal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1943), p. 66.

5 Hymnen, op. cit. p. 48.

6 Die Krone der Frau (Zurich: Verlag der Arche, 1950), p. 80.

7 Maria Eschbach, Die Bedeutung Gertrud von Le Forts in unserer Zeit (Warendorf: Schnell), 1948, pp. 86–87.

8 Heinrich Boll, Acquainted with the Night (New York: Holt, 1956), p. 173.