Post-totalitarian Christianity

Abstract

Abstract This chapter deals with religion in the work of one of the greatest German novelists of the twentieth century, Alfred Döblin, and specifically with his two religious dialogues of 1942–1943 and 1950–1952. In the literary form of a dialogue between a believing older man and an unbelieving younger one, Döblin articulates in argumentative form his own journey from the secular Judaism of his early years to the Catholic Christianity of his later life. For him this was a path leading not to the restoration of Christianity as it had been, but to a “post-totalitarian” Christianity, that is, to a Christianity shaped by the experiences of totalitarianism and the twentieth-century history of violence.