INTRODUCTION: IMAGINING THE BELIEFS OF OTHERS IN GERMAN LITERATURE FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE PRESENT

The theologian imagines the imaginative life of the Christian – a life of enviable vividness – through a tactful gesture towards the limits of his own religious imagination. We are drawn to picture the fervent believer in the bodily expression of his devotion, in which a mental image of God as man provides grist for his spiritual longing and a bridge between earthly and divine. But the devotion of the Christian – for whom this bridge is no imaginative tool, but a reality – surpasses imagination.

Kermani's book is made up of a set of attempts towards an understanding of a religious and cultural other: the energetically and sometimes grotesquely visual Christianity, Catholic and Orthodox, of central and southern Europe. Through describing the experience of viewing works of Christian art, Kermani, a Muslim, enters into its aesthetic life – a life that is not detached from belief, but intertwined with it. Thanks to this book and his other writing and speeches, Kermani has become a key representative of a varied body of contemporary German thought which has critically examined ideas of religious dialogue and toleration, particularly since the first decades of the twenty-first century when a straightforward picture of secularisation showed itself to be inadequate.2 What distinguishes the work of Kermani from the philosophically, politically and sociologically oriented approaches which characterise this thought is his emphasis on the aesthetic and imaginative aspects of belief. It is these aspects that this special number of German Life and Letters wishes to address. The following articles draw on 250 years of German literature, across prose fiction, poetry, drama and the essay, to examine the way writers have drawn on the imagination – or have made demands on their readers’ imaginations – in presenting and exploring religious difference. In so doing, they challenge simplistic notions of dialogue – between religions, within them, or between believers and the secular world. By bringing attention to the imagination, the articles foreground the creative and transformative potential of both art and religion, as well as the limits and dangers of the imagination in acts of interreligious engagement.

This special number thus contributes to the growing field of literature and religion within German Studies. In its focus on the imagination it throws down a challenge to the model of interreligious dialogue which seeks to find commonalities or parallels, a feature seen in initiatives such as the ‘House of One’, a multi-religious place of worship in Berlin Mitte, which explicitly calls on the doctrinal similarities of the three monotheistic faiths, scriptural overlaps and shared figures.3 This emphasis is often unhelpfully simplistic. It presupposes not only a similar attitude to the alleged commonalities, such as scripture, but also towards what a religion is, and where the boundaries of each religion, or what counts as religious, might lie. For example, to call on shared Biblical figures, such as Abraham, is to ignore that they have more often been the source of disagreement than harmony, as Aaron W. Hughes has shown, with Abraham used by each religious tradition to stake out a unique claim to truth and authenticity.4

Such a critical view of the self can guard against the assimilation of the other, which in turn allows for a love of the other which enables the self to be transformed and the other to remain other, as was the case with Dall'Oglio's view of Islam. Şenocak has also emphasised in his work the importance of such critical self-reflection with regard to intra-religious dialogue, and the need to find strangeness and alterity within ourselves and our own traditions – whether across time, as in his translations of the medieval poet and mystic Yunus Emre, or within a falsely homogenous picture of religion.7 The internal heterogeneity of religions across time and space features in several articles in this special number.

Yet while Gellner and Langenhorst present imaginative literature as a tool for affirming and consolidating liberal toleration, many of the authors they discuss, such as Benjamin Stein, Barbara Frischmuth and SAID appear rather to frustrate interreligious understanding – for instance, by depicting spiritual experiences in strange, alienating ways; and some authors, such as Şenocak and Kermani, have questioned the reductive and essentialising processes implied in conceptions of interreligious dialogue. Şenocak, for example, has referred pejoratively to religious leaders who presume to represent the Muslim community in such a dialogue as ‘Lückenbüßer einer nicht exisitierenden islamischen Öffentlichkeit’.9 Kermani, for his part, has insisted on the fact that literature is not a representative expression of an entire community, but ‘notwendig Zeugnis eines Einzelnen, der sich im Glauben oder Unglauben, im Zweifel oder in der Erkenntnis mit religiösen Erfahrungen, Texten und Traditionen auseinandersetzt’, adding that this is rarely to the satisfaction of those who represent the religion ‘qua Ausbildung und Amt’.10

While Gellner and Langenhorst are attuned to the possibilities of imaginative literature for explorations of, rather than representations of, religious identities, their book relies on texts being more or less stable and – crucially – authentic records of a particular experience of religion from which a well-intentioned reader can learn about others, treating art as testimony (as indeed Kermani does, above). But art is more than this. As Leslie A. Adelson has suggested in discussing Turkish-German literature, a view of art as merely reflecting and representing what is already known nullifies its creative potential to bring forth new ways of imagining the world.11 Rather than treating works of imaginative literature as authentic ‘Spiegelungen’12 from which we can learn about existing religions, we can see them instead as sites of imagination, experimentation, contestation and production. In the German context, this idea has been developed in different ways, depending on critical approach. Ludmila Peters, for example, following Arthur L. Greil and David G. Bromley, understands religion as a ‘category of discourse […] whose precise meaning and implications are continually being negotiated in the course of social interaction’, and sees literature as a participant in these processes of negotiation, determined by them and reflecting on them.13 Silke Horstkotte, in her discussion of the ‘religious turn’ in the German literature of the 1990s, argues that references to religion in contemporary texts must be viewed as a genuine attempt to reckon with the ‘Suche nach und Erfahrung von großen Transzendenzen’: that is, not merely a representation of religious identities or historical events featuring religious figures, but rather an experimental inquiry into ‘neue Möglichkeiten des Glaubens im Anschluss an die Postmoderne’.14 Margaret Littler takes this further in viewing religion in literary texts as a destabilising force that disrupts fixed identities. In her Deleuzian approach to the subject, religion can function in literary texts ‘not so much [as] content or theme, but [as] a source of creative intensity that erupts into settled notions of established religious practices and cultural identities’.15 The idea that authors represent a given reality obscures an ultimately unknowable, radical heterogeneity, as Judith Butler argues: ‘Language remains alive when it refuses to “encapsulate” or “capture” the events and lives it describes. But when it seeks to effect that capture, language not only loses its vitality, but acquires its own violent force.’16

A picture of literary texts representing or serving as an authentic witness to belief presumes that an author is depicting their ‘own’ religion. The limits of this approach are particularly clear in the depictions of the beliefs of others. Within the German literary canon a key example of an act of interreligious imagination is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's West-östlicher Divan (1819), with its explicit reference to Islam and the spirituality of the Sufi Hafez in particular. One position, held by, among others, Michael Hofmann, is of Goethe as a proponent of interculturality avant la lettre for embracing Oriental poetical forms. Hofmann regards the Divan as ‘weder ein Element der fremden Kultur noch eigentlich ein Element der eigenen, sondern “ein Drittes”, das die “Originalität” der “Nation” des Übersetzers überwindet und so das Produkt einer Kulturmischung darstellt’.17 Such a reading of the Divan that locates it in a ‘third space’ arguably leaves German and Persian culture intact, minimising the text's transformative potential for German culture. Moreover, such approaches to intercultural production have been reluctant to acknowledge the role of power dynamics in cultural exchange. Yomb May has discussed Goethe in this context, pointing out that although the Divan avoids a narrative of conflict, it is nevertheless ‘part of a process of asymmetrical intercultural encounter and represents a more complex endeavour, which cannot be absolved of contradiction and essentialism’.18 Şenocak has similarly criticised Goethe's reliance on Orientalising stereotypes, such as the attribution of essentially bellicose and conservative mindset to ‘Orientals’ in Goethe's explanatory Noten und Abhandlungen on the Divan.19 The demands, Şenocak believes, of a truly intercultural project are great: it would require ‘eine Ästhetik […], die sich selbst nicht vergißt, wenn sie den Anderen betrachtet, und den Anderen im Gedächtnis behält, wenn sie zu sich zurückgekehrt ist. Eine Ästhetik der Grenzerfahrungen und ständigen Berührung.’20

Imagining the other brings with it, then, ethical perils, as well as epistemological and theological anxieties. Matthew Potts, in his chapter on imagination for the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion, reminds us that an association between theology and the imagination seems to undermine the truth claims of religion and has therefore been treated by religious thinkers with caution; he also reminds us of the rigidity with which this association is made by secular and scientific discourses, in which all religion is pure fancy.21 But in recent decades there has been a renewed interest in imagination within (particularly Christian) theology, particularly in its role of enabling belief, as al-Jāḥiz recognised in the ninth century.22 It is the imagination which renders ‘das Nicht-Beschreib- oder -Greifbare vorstellbar, beschreibbar, behandelbar – kurz: religiös verfügbar’, as Lucia Traut and Annette Wilke suggest.23 Or, as Douglas Hedley puts it: ‘Through the “inner eye” of imagination, finite beings can apprehend eternal and immutable Forms.’24

In contemporary accounts, the strict distinction between imagination and reality and an association of imagination with invention, both of which have governed an understanding of the role of the imagination for most of the twentieth century, are questioned. It is imagination which allows us to represent things to ourselves that we understand to be part of reality, whether black holes or viruses, ‘Mardi Gras in New Orleans or the Battle of the Bulge’.25 And it is imagination which makes the category of the transcendent even possible, as Traut and Wilke have suggested. The imagination, in straddling immanent and transcendent, allows for the simultaneous existence of everyday and religious realities and indeed for a merging of the two.26 Potts situates the current and more subtle understanding of the relationship between imagination and the world in the intellectual history of the late twentieth century, with the postmodern rejection of the ‘view from nowhere’, and the insistence that ‘each subjective insight will be socially and historically situated, that there is no mode of knowledge or thought left unfiltered by interpretation’. ‘Imagination’, that is, ‘is […] not some whimsical invention set aside from rigorous thought. Rather, it inspires and conspires with thinking itself.’27

There is not, on these accounts, a clear distinction in activity between believer and non-believer in the mental representation of religious concepts: both rely on imagination, as Amber L. Griffioen suggests in a discussion of the possibility of religious experience without belief. What is imagined, far from being necessarily a ‘whimsical invention’ on the part of the imagining subject, comes from without, challenging both believer and non-believer, brought to ‘the very limits of what we as finite human subjects can represent to ourselves’.28 That is, while our conceptual capacities limit what we can imagine, the act of imagination posits something beyond those capacities.

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German-language cultural production is of particular importance in understanding the relationship between literature and religion. In Literature and Religion in the German-Speaking World: From 1200 to the Present Day, Ian Cooper and John Walker make the claim that literature and religion form ‘an intellectual relationship which is richer in German than in any other European culture’.33 Indeed, Heinrich Heine credits the language of Martin Luther's Bible translation with giving ‘diesem politisch und religiös zerstückelten Lande eine literärische [sic] Einheit’.34 As Margaret Littler's discussion of Feridun Zaimoglu's ‘Luther-Roman’ Evangelio (2017) in  our current special number shows, Luther is still a source of great creative potential – and of discord. If there is renewed interest in religion in German literature over the past forty years – the ‘religious turn’ – it is more likely to be seen as a source of diversity and dissonance.35

This special number begins with the Enlightenment as the moment when religion's place as the organising principle of society is being challenged, with 1770 the ‘highpoint […] of those trained in theology turning to secular forms of self-expression, especially literature’.36 The first three articles, which lead us from Enlightenment to Modernism, each deal implicitly or explicitly with relations between orthodox religious beliefs and practices and the modern, secularising world. In his article on representations of Christian–Muslim relations in literature around 1800, James Hodkinson begins with Lessing, whose presentation of relations with Muslims in Nathan der Weise (1779) relies on shared human morality rather than the specifics of religion. Hodkinson's focus is on the trope of family resemblance, which appears both in Nathan der Weise, where it is understood in the physical terms of blood relations, and in Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801), where resemblance between Christians and Muslims is not based in physiology but in an act of poetic imagination. The use of family resemblance in these examples resonates with contemporary ideas of ‘similarity’ that attempt to get beyond a binary of self and other, but also helps to make visible the problems with similarity as a guiding idea. Similarity can imply cultural homogeneity but, at the same time, can require vagueness and neglect of the specifics of belief. Yet the family, particularly as imagined by Novalis, also offers a model of a relationship that is dynamic and subject to ongoing re-imagination – an interactive model akin to that involved in the creation and reading of literature. These are models informing interfaith relations today, with Lessing's approach favoured in institutionalised dialogue (as in House of One, mentioned above); while other articles collected here show that the approaches taken within literature are more experimental and imaginative, as heirs to (and sometimes explicit reinterpreters of) Novalis.

In her article, Yael Almog goes beyond the usual frameworks for scholarship on Judaism in German literature that focus either on the representation of Jews by non-Jews or see work by Jews as part of the construction of modern German-Jewish identity. Instead, she looks at the depiction of observant Jews by three assimilated Jewish writers from Romanticism to Modernism, in the context of sexological discourses which associate Jewishness with femininity. The three writers – Heinrich Heine, Otto Weininger and Joseph Roth – each negotiate in different ways their roles as mediators between Jewishness and secular or Christian societies, but common to all three is an anxiety around identity, linked in part to a discourse which associates Jewishness with a particularly heightened bodiliness. A depiction of traditional Jews may be intended to consolidate the position of assimilated Jews as, by contrast, familiar, modern and western, but it also runs the risk of associating the assimilated Jewish author – who is unable to leave their Jewishness behind – with this ‘other’.

Deborah Lewer deals with another figure who sought to mediate between orthodox religious belief and a secular world: the avant-garde poet and convert, or ‘revert’, Hugo Ball. Ball's conversion can be seen in the context of a larger ‘movement’ of literary converts to Catholicism, from Friedrich Stolberg and Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel to Alfred Döblin; his conversion, like theirs, was met with mockery and condescension. These conversions, as Winfried Eckel and Nikolaus Wegmann have pointed out, have a paradoxical character: they require a freedom to choose between worldviews that involves choosing against that very freedom; these conversions are, in a similar paradox, ‘zugleich die “höchste Steigerung von Subjectivität und deren Aufhebung”’.37 Conversion poses a challenge to the imaginative powers of the secular commentator or critic, for such modern conversions involve, as Charles Taylor has argued, ‘break[ing] from the immanent order to a larger, more encompassing one, which includes it while disrupting it’.38 Reviewing a biography of Hugo Ball, Ritchie Robertson put it thus: ‘Ball's vagaries make sense (though they remain vagaries) only within a religious horizon. […] for a secular consciousness, someone like Ball can be understood only by a feat of imaginative sympathy.’39 Lewer discusses Ball's own theorising of his conversion – which he understood in part in political terms – with reference to Ball's idea of the importance of childlikeness in both art and religion as well as in the context of his interest in early Christian mysticism and in the psychology of religious experience.

If Ball sought to theologise politics, the two plays discussed by Cordula Böcking use religion and religious experience as a way of imagining political transformation. Böcking compares the texts of Anna Seghers's radio play Der Prozess der Jeanne d'Arc zu Rouen 1431 (1937) and Brecht's 1952 adaptation of it for the stage, which both understand Jeanne's – here Johanna's – religious experience as the catalyst of political action; but where Brecht locates Johanna's voices in the people, thus disallowing a religious interpretation, Seghers leaves their source ambiguous, posing an imaginative challenge to the modern, secular listener. Böcking focuses on Seghers' ‘lacunary’ presentation of Johanna's religious experiences, in which the historical Jeanne's refusal to talk about her voices is central to the radio play, arguing that this creates barriers to comprehension both between Johanna and her learned interrogators and between Johanna and the audience. A ‘modern’ emphasis on private belief and personal experience is used to present the otherness of pre-modern belief, and at the same time to portray the psychology of resistance. By confronting the audience with Johanna's religiosity, Böcking suggests, the play opens up space for imagining alternatives to the current, specifically political, order.

The coexistence of different religions has gained new relevance in the wake of post-war waves of migration. Contemporary literature is particularly preoccupied with this issue, bringing Lessing's concerns into a twenty-first century context. Often, it is Muslims who are viewed as being particularly deficient and unwilling to integrate, testing the limits of Germany's diversity, and this is regarded as being linked to their (often racialised) religious identity, as opposed to other factors, such as class and citizenship. Both Joseph Twist's and Littler's articles focus on authors who identify as Muslim, but who treat religious experiences in their chosen texts as something that has the potential to point beyond pre-existing identities and institutionalised faiths. Twist investigates how Christian art opens up new spiritual possibilities for Kermani and Zaimoglu through an aesthetic understanding of the divine that draws on both Christian and Sufi thought. The trace of Lessing's and Novalis's thinking, as outlined by Hodkinson, is also visible here. In his book Ungläubiges Staunen, Kermani explores parallels and resemblances between Christian and Islamic traditions that suggest underlying similarities (Lessing's approach). However, Twist also explores, in dialogue with Jean-Luc Marion's identity-exploding conceptualisation of the ‘icon’, how Kermani's meditations on Christian art can open the door to unexpected spiritual insights. In particular, depictions of the human form, including Jesus, but also church architecture and other types of art, spark ideas about the divine potential within humans, suggesting that an imaginative engagement with other religions can be a productive process, albeit one that disturbs the boundaries of one's own religious identity. This has been compared with Novalis's writing on religion: ‘als Versuch, die eigene Religiosität auf einem Umweg über das Exotische an ihr Ziel zu führen’.40 Similarly, Zaimoglu's artistic engagement with the icon tradition in his ink portraits of Jesus and other Biblical figures is understood as drawing upon this Christian artistic tradition in order to hint at the non-hierarchical belief that the divine can be accessed through potentially any human – as opposed to the Christian belief that ‘no one comes to the father except through [Jesus]’ (John 14:6). Kermani and Zaimoglu therefore find not only an aesthetic significance in ‘graven images’. Their engagement with them, despite Islam's widespread aniconism, also has a spiritual meaning that points towards a sense of the sacred beyond religious divides.

Margaret Littler turns in her article to Zaimoglu's novel Evangelio, which, like Zaimoglu's icon-inspired drawings, draws on Christian perspectives to tell the story of Martin Luther's stay at the Wartburg (1521–2) and his experience of translating the Bible from the perspective of his Catholic bodyguard. Her reading of the novel also foregrounds the religious dimension of aesthetic experience in an analysis of the relationship between the novel's language (inspired by Luther's early modern German) and its exploration of the competing and co-existing religiosities of the volatile Reformation era, as well as Luther's virulent anti-Semitism and his obsession with demonic forces. Just as Luther's language is credited with aiding the spread of Protestantism, Zaimoglu's ‘Kunstsprache’ plays a key role in how religion is understood by the reader, since the novel's difficult language, laced with archaic grammatical forms and vocabulary, together with its depiction of religion, provide an immersive experience that disorientates readers by denying them a stable outside position. In this regard, Zaimoglu returns his readers to an imagined version of the sixteenth century in order to explore the shifting nature of belief, how it figures in the material world, and how it transforms those who experience its power. This is theorised, using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the war machine, as a disruptive force that breaks out of and transforms already existing paradigms in unpredictable ways. Parallels can thus be drawn with Jeanne d'Arc's disruptive and radical religiosity that brings about social change in Seghers' radio play – although not in the thoroughly secular depiction in Brecht's adaptation.

Both Kermani and Zaimoglu are influenced and fascinated by mystical interpretations of religion and this is also true of the poet and Christian theologian Christian Lehnert, who is interviewed here by Hanna Bingel-Jones. She discusses Lehnert's interest in the German tradition of nature mysticism, in which he imagines, not the beliefs of other humans, but the spiritual lives of other species, such as plants and even bacteria: ‘diese Gedichte arbeiten mit der großen These, dass ich auch mit einem Kolibakterium und auch mit dem Plankton einen solchen gemeinsamen Horizont finden kann – denn wir bewohnen dasselbe All und teilen eine Ganzheit der Existenz.’41 The focus is thus not on unbridgeable differences in Lehnert's writing, but on poetry's ability to create a space for resonances between self and other, involving an ethical openness that refuses to instrumentalise or to pin down. He addresses his poems to a ‘Du’, rather than to God – to an other defined only by the fact that it is bound up in a relation. He draws on the idea of ‘contemplatio’, a two-directional form of engagement with the other which entails an engagement with the otherness within oneself, one that could well be destructive, even revolutionary. The imagery of breath is especially important in this context, he suggests: breath points to the fact that our existence and identity already come from outside us.

Lehnert's understanding of religion is influenced by the historical circumstances within which he first encountered it, in the GDR, where the Church offered ‘eine grundstürzend andere Wirklichkeit’.42 Even now the Church, with its deep entanglement in structures of power, can offer a critical foothold through its ability to give a view from without. It is this foothold that motivates many of the writers discussed in this special number. Although the texts and authors under discussion here are very much rooted in the German context, be it Lehnert's experience in the GDR, Seghers' exile from National Socialist Germany, or Zaimoglu's engagement with the life and work of Luther, they also have a much broader relevance. Religion offers a framework that allows for a critical view of prevailing structures of power and the model par excellence of an encounter with the other. As the following articles show, an imaginative encounter with the beliefs of the other requires an unsettling departure from the familiar and a reorientation of one's own ways of thinking, seeing and believing.