Elective Divinities: Exile and Religious Conversion in Alfred Döblin'sSchicksalsreise (Destiny's Journey), Karl Jakob Hirsch'sHeimkehr zu Gott (Return to God), and Karl Stern'sthe Pillar of Fire

Abstract

But paradise is sealed and the cherub stands behind us; we must make the journey around the world and see if it is open somewhere from behind ... --Heinrich von Kleist, On the Marionette Theater (342) (1) While escaping from the advancing German army in 1940 and trying to find his family in the south of France, the exiled German author and psychologist Alfred Doblin (1878-1957) had a powerful religious experience that eventually led to his conversion from Judaism to Christianity in 1941. At his own sixty-fifth birthday party in California in 1943, Doblin announced to a group of his fellow exiles and friends that he had been baptized and become a member of the Catholic Church (Emde 15). Although Doblin considered his conversion to be an integral part of his intellectual and artistic progression, his announcement earned him the scorn of his fellow in exile. Bertolt Brecht memorialized the announcement in his vindictive poem Peinlicher Vorfall (Embarrassing Incident) by painting a snide picture of Doblin decked out in a moth-eaten priest's hat and defiling the platform that belongs to the artists (Brecht 91). (2) A devout convert could not possibly be at the same time a serious artist and intellectual, only a ridiculous caricature. Doblin's announcement of his conversion separated him from the secular political movements championed by many of his fellow exiled intellectuals. This secularism was so integral to the projects of the most influential members of the exile community that, as Wolfgang Fruhwald puts it, every step from the path of this ideal was seen as betrayal and was subsequently stigmatized (240). (3) Criticized by Jewish Nationalists and Marxists (Fruhwald 240-41, Emde 15-17, Muller-Salget 153-54) and scrutinized by their North American hosts, (4) Doblin and other emigres who converted to another religion (5) followed a conviction that exile was best explained and experienced in tandem with a deeply personal spiritual quest. Those whose quests led to conversion from Judaism to Christianity not only provoked their secular colleagues in exile, they purposefully withdrew themselves from a religious and cultural community that was reeling from the incomprehensible scope and brutality of the Holocaust. These individual conversions had enormous ramifications for the larger group of traumatized and crisis-weary European exiles: How could the converts appropriately address the political, aesthetical and ethical dilemmas caused by their highly personal spiritual experiences? In this article, I will investigate three conversion narratives written by Jewish intellectuals who converted to Christianity while in exile in North America: Alfred Doblin's Schicksalsreise: Bericht und Bekenntnis (published in English as Destiny's Journey: Flight from the Nazis), Karl Jakob Hirsch's Heimkehr zu Gott: Briefe an meinen Sohn (Returning Home to God: Letters To My Son), and Karl Stern's The Pillar of Fire. The authors of these texts, I will demonstrate, use their conversion narratives to infuse their own brand of spirituality into the aesthetic and political doctrines that surround them. In order to do so, Doblin, Hirsch, and Stern employ similar strategies to minimize the potential ethical problems of their conversions. By portraying their processes of Christianization as a natural outgrowth of the suffering of the exile experience or from their spiritual rediscoveries of Judaism, these authors attempt to create an ethically unencumbered viewpoint from which to criticize the secularized aesthetics of the European exile community. After Hitler seized political power in 1933, many German and Austrian artists, writers and intellectuals were forced to seek refuge in other countries. (6) In spite of their common situation and common enemy, those driven into exile represented a diverse collection of different political and aesthetic ideologies. (7) The situations and locations of those in exile also varied greatly, from relative economic comfort to intense poverty and political insecurity (Moore). …