Religious Conversions in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Clemens Brentano, Georg Buechner, and Heinrich Hein

Friedrich Nietzsche was not the first German author to declare that God was dead, as stated famously by the madman in Die frohliche Wissenschaft (1882): ''Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getotet!'' Nearly fifty years earlier, Heinrich Heine had declared God dead in his essay Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (1834): ''Unsere Brust ist voll von entsetzlichem Mitleid --- es ist der alte Jehova selber, der sich zum Tode bereitet'' (HSA 8:191). He claimed that Immanuel Kant had initiated "eine geistige Revoluzion in Deutschland" (HSA 8:191) with his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), an irreversible "Bruch mit der Vergangenheit" (HSA 8:191) that meant the downfall of deism. Although Heine would later disavow this claim, he was firm in his belief during the 1830s that God was dying, if not dead already, and that Kant had been the catalyst for the collapse of deism. Bruno Hillebrand has noted that declarations of God's death such as Nietzsche's were not new in 1882, but they were in fact ''neu erlebt'' and ''umfassender in ihrer Konsequenz.'' Between the writings of Kant and Nietzsche was a period in which the old religious institutions struggled to find a new role in a society that was radically changing. While these institutions sought renewal and transformation, so did believers on an individual level, as they began to see religion as a private choice that was meant to address their personal needs and reflect their personalities. Belief in God, or in any specific version of a god, was no longer a public and obligatory aspect of one's identity, but simply one option among others. This created a larger number of religious seekers, the natural consequence of which was conversion in its myriad forms: for example, from one mainline religion to another, from orthodoxy to heterodoxy, or from apathy to complete devotion. This dissertation argues that the early nineteenth century was a time of conversion in Germany by investigating the constellation of theological, philosophical, and political factors leading up to the time in which three of the most notable converts of this time --- Clemens Brentano, Georg Buchner, and Heinrich Heine --- grappled with the notion of conversion, not only in their personal writings such as correspondence and memoirs, but also in their literary works. These three authors are only a few examples of the many conversions that began during German Romanticism, one of the most famous of which was Friedrich Schlegel, who turned to Catholicism in 1808. Goethe described Schlegel's conversion in a letter to Karl Friedrich Reinhard on 22 June 1808 as a ''Zeichen der Zeit,'' referring to the many other converts to Catholicism during this time: Friedrich Leopold Stolberg, Adam Muller, Zacharias Werner, Clemens Brentano, Johannes and Philipp Veit, and Johann Friedrich Overbeck, just to name a few. But this ''Konversionsbewegung,'' as described by Winfried Eckel and Nikolaus Wegmann, was not limited to Catholicism. This dissertation uncovers the underlying historical and intellectual conditions during the beginning of the nineteenth century that created an environment that was highly conducive to conversions in all directions.;The first chapter explores the diverse definitions of conversion and secularization in the fields of sociology, psychology, theology, and history. Specifically, it addresses contemporary studies in conversion conducted by Lewis R. Rambo, William Bainbridge, John D. Barbour, Heinz Streib, and Charles Taylor. Each of them approaches the religious shifts represented by conversion and secularization in a slightly different way, and a synthesis of these definitions will lead to a working definition to be used throughout the dissertation: Conversion denotes a reorientation of religious affiliation (switching religions or denominations) or a transformation of religious identity (a change in religious role or a dramatic intensification of belief) with characteristics that can fall anywhere along the spectrums of gradual to instantaneous, passive to active, private to public, coerced to voluntary, and emotional to intellectual. This definition is intentionally broad because conversion is ultimately a personal experience that is unique to each religious seeker. Deconversion is a special type of conversion, and shares many characteristics with the concept of conversion in the traditional sense. Deconversions can occur on their own, or as part of a larger deconversion and reconversion process resulting in reaffiliation with another religion. The chapter addresses the concept of deconversion in some detail, as outlined in studies by John D. Barbour and Heinz Streib. The relatively new term ''deconversion'' is a necessary replacement for older discriminatory terms such as ''apostasy'' and ''defection.''.;Secularization is defined in this chapter as the phenomenon in which religion became a private rather than a public affair, a shift from ''traditional religion'' to ''individualized religion,'' as Steve Bruce has suggested. Secularization is not simply the decline of religion, but rather a change in how religion is practiced. And according to Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2007), secularization is ''a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others." This can be traced in the difference in the reactions to writers who were critical of Christianity as time progressed: Reimarus did not dare to publish his Apologie oder Schutzschrift fur die vernunftigen Verehrer Gottes (1768) during his lifetime in the mideighteenth century, but by the early nineteenth century, Strauss and Feuerbach had the courage to publish theirs. They did, however, pay the price for their unorthodox writings in their severely damaged reputations and careers and were ostracized by the academic and theological communities. By the time Nietzsche continued this demythologizing process by declaring God dead through the mouth of his madman in 1882, he did so in a religious environment that had radically changed from the beginning of the nineteenth century: one in which religion was one option for guidance among others, rather than being the dominant, unproblematic source of authority. God was still alive, but his characteristics had changed; he was no longer the source of ultimate authority and the sole bestower of meaning and purpose in human life. In this sense, it was not only individuals who underwent conversions during the nineteenth century, but the concept of God itself had been transformed as a result of the shifting Zeitgeist that sustained him. At the same time that conversions took place in great numbers on an individual level, the concept of God itself was undergoing a conversion in this process of secularization. This phenomenon is symptomatic of modernity, which Eckel and Wegmann define as ''den Zerfall ubergreifender holistischer Weltbilder, Prozesse der Partikularisierung und Pluralisierung, diskursive oder systematische Differenzierung, zugleich aber auch [...] eine wachsende Freiheit fur das Individuum, seinen Weg in einer unubersichtlichen Welt selbst zu bestimmen.'' In this sense, modernity and conversion go hand in hand: the combination of religious pluralism and individual freedom to explore religious options is the ideal environment for a conversion. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).