ABSTRACT
Perhaps as a supplement to your lecture, I would like to remind you of a
very simple finding. You have very impressively interpreted these texts by Gerhard Schumann and Hanns Johst, yet these texts also stand in a formal
connection, or a formal historical connection, with something like Expres-
sionism. Johst begins as an Expressionist; he also begins as an extreme leftist.
Here too – or with Arnolt Bronnen – we find similar phenomena: literary
texts are, as it were, liturgically functionalised; they make use of liturgical
linguistic forms. This is one connection, and I would ask how you would
understand political religions in terms of this connection. For this too is
political religiosity, even if not the religious faith that was specific to National Socialist or to Communist goals. One might also recall Georg
Kaiser’s Gas or a whole variety of Expressionist texts.
