Orientierungsversuche im Zeitalter der Angst: Gertrud von le Forts Weg zur Mystik by Roswitha Goslich (review)

Abstract

ii 54 Reviews Thomas Mann und seine Werke', that Mann alone escaped the ban that was imposed formany years on German culture by the Israeli public in the wake of the Holocaust. University of California, Irvine Jens Rieckmann Orientierungsversuche im Zeitalter der Angst: Gertrud von le Forts Weg zur Mystik. By Roswitha Goslich. (Germanistische Texte und Studien, 71) Hildesheim: Olms. 2003. 246 pp. ?20. ISBN 3-487-11897-1. Unlike earlier studies ofthe Catholic author Gertrud von le Fort (1876-1972), which have often addressed religious questions at the expense of literary analysis, Roswitha Goslich's study is the most interdisciplinary and literary to date. Although le Fort's is today a half-forgotten name, Goslich reminds us that she enjoyed recognition during her lifetime well beyond her denominational readership: le Fort was honoured with a nomination by Hermann Hesse for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, and her prose appeared on school curricula into the 1970s. Goslich presents close readings of le Fort's four most accomplished prose works, with particular reference to what she terms 'the era of fear'?the years of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. The book sensitively recounts le Fort's personal and intellectual development and suggests that her literary output is not just a representative German contribution to the European renouveau catholique, but is also a complex response to the social, political, and existential challenges of the period. The book begins with a section that draws on le Fort's own autobiographical writ? ings and some archival sources to outline her life with greater accuracy and insight than any account hitherto. Le Fort published her firstsuccessful volume of poetry in 1924 at the age of forty-eight, not long before her conversion to Catholicism. Goslich argues, however, that le Fort's earlier works, published principally in family journals, determine the conservative, and ultimately Wilhelmine, style of her later acclaimed publications. Goslich attributes the central spiritual and social crisis of le Fort's life cumulatively to the death of her aristocratic, militaristic father (whose in? fluence curbed his daughter's interest in contemporary literature), to her exposure to the modern intellectual debates she witnessed as a student in the pre-First World War Heidelberg of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and the George circle, and to the disenfranchisement ofthe German aristocracy after 1918. She demonstrates how le Fort uses her writing to rework this personal drama, which comes to symbolize the cul? tural drama unfolding in early twentieth-century Germany. In addition, this section explains how the thought of Troeltsch, in particular his Christian personalism, his critique ofhistoricism, and his insistence on the importance of individual freedom and the reality of evil, shaped le Fort's intellectual and apparently mystical path towards the Catholic faith that she would embrace in 1926. While the argument here would gain from more empirical evidence to support the exposition of broad similarities in the thought of Troeltsch and le Fort, Goslich's remains the best available account of this important but under-researched friendship and intellectual apprenticeship. In addition to the influence of Troeltsch, Goslich foregrounds le Fort's assimilation of Kierkegaard, in particular as received via Karl Jaspers's writing, and identifies her as part of an important Christian literary reception of Kierkegaardian existential philosophy. The four texts analysed in the book's second section emerge as studies in existential fear, each presenting the individual's search for direction in histori? cal settings that correspond to the contemporary German situation. In Der romische Brunnen (1928) le Fort stages interactions between characters whose psychological and spiritual searches involve variously intellectual secularism, fin-de-siecle literary nihilism, Freudian psychoanalyis, and a mystical encounter with Roman Catholicism. MLR, 100.4,2005 1155 Most compelling is Goslich's argument about Die Letzte am Schafott (1931), a histor? ical Novelle that has often been misread as a work of anti-Nazism, but which is in fact le Fort's confrontation with what she perceived as the inevitable threat of Bolshevik revolution. Le Fort's characters, Carmelite nuns destined formartyrdom at the guillotine , function as types, each exhibiting a nuanced response of fear to an overwhelming historical threat. Dealing with the fear...