Following her conversion to Catholicism in 1926,
Gertrud von le Fort (1876–1971) developed literary forms in her fiction and
verse that sought to allow readers imaginative access to her sacramental vision
of reality. Le Fort’s contribution to German literature has often been
identified narrowly with the Christian inner emigration during the Third Reich.
This study’s concentration on the period 1924-46 extends the critical
perspective towards a more nuanced assessment of her work that pays appropriate
attention to the literary, theological, and socio-cultural context of German
Catholicism in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. Scholars have considered,
but by no means discussed exhaustively, whether a German literary renouveau
catholique emerged in the first half of the twentieth century akin to that
witnessed slightly earlier in France.
This study demonstrates that le Fort’s work does indeed belong to a flourishing
period of Catholic culture in Germany, but one fraught with the complexities of
the national culture out of which it emerged. The three main thematic and
chronologically arranged parts of the study address, respectively, the
importance of religious conversion in le Fort’s work; her problematic sense of
German and Catholic identity in the years immediately before the establishing
of the Third Reich; and, lastly, her literary inner emigration and response to
National Socialism. Throughout the study, the term ‘sacramental realism’ is
used to aid a new evaluation of the interdependence of theology and aesthetics
that underlies le Fort’s literary work. This study presents a revised approach
to a significant, but often misconstrued, area of Catholic literature during
the Weimar Republic and Third Reich.