This study examines a cultural resistance paradigm in the writings of three prominent Protestant figures in Germany during the Nazi regime: Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Ernst Wiechert. Against the background of the culture Protestant movement and within the confessionalist trend of the Kirchenkampf, each of these writers recuperates a part of the German literary heritage by means of “cultural confessionalism” as a way of ideologically confronting the literary and cultural aesthetics proclaimed by the National Socialists. By harking back to important German cultural figures, and in some cases by mobilizing nineteenth-century literary strategies in a way that was different from the literary “inner emigration,” Niemöller, Wiechert, and Bonhoeffer “confess” a German literary heritage that resisted the Nazi appropriation of that heritage.;Chapter one explains the origins of “cultural confessionalism” and defines the term against the historical and theological backdrop of the culture Protestant movement and its influence on Karl Barth and the members of the Pastors' Emergency League, including Bonhoeffer and Niemöller. Chapter two shows how the “cultural confesionalists” used the nineteenth-century German literary heritage in ways that varied from the strategies of the “inner emigration,” the political resistance, and the Christian humanist tradition. Chapter three explores the last twenty-eight sermons preached by Martin Niemöller before his arrest in 1937, and demonstrates how Niemöller revitalizes Lutherdeutsch as an oppositional tool. Chapter four shows the link between Martin Niemöller and Ernst Wiechert, and examines Wiechert's novel Der Totenwald (1939) as the apex of Wiechert's turn toward the “cultural confessionalist” style.;Chapter five in turn analyzes an earlier novel by Wiechert, Die Majorin (1934), which serves as an early example of Wiechert's resistance writing with its distinctive reworking of a Stifter novella, Der Hochwald (1842). Chapter six looks at Dietrich Bonhoeffer's unfinished novel written in Tegel in 1943 and shows how his literary attempts are an effort to invoke Bildungsbürgertum through “cultural confessionalism.” The final chapter explicates three of Bonhoeffer's poems, also composed during the Tegel incarceration, and explains how Bonhoeffer recuperates poetry from Goethe, Hölderlin, and Rilke as resistance literature. Overall the study explores a new mode of literary resistance that sought its ideological underpinnings from German canonical writers and Deutsches Bürgertum.
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