Preliminary remark of the editor: It is not only worthwhile to inspect the bookshelves of people who deal professionally with religion and testimonies on Christian holidays. Because these people are almost always excellently read – and practically never only in their profession. This is especially true in the case of Friedrich Wilhelm Graf.
The Protestant theologian, who taught at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich until his retirement in 2014, has written countless writings, on Protestantism as well as on the relationship between church and state in modern times. Anyone who doesn’t yet know how well Graf can write should urgently read his current Ernst Troeltsch biography. In it, he portrays an intellectual figure from the German Empire, who explains a great deal about the cultural significance of religion. Below, in his own words, he reveals which books Graf learned from for his own life.
Judith Kerr: When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit
I often flew all over the world and neglected my family. When I ended up back in Munich feeling guilty, I gladly and happily read to our two children in the evenings in the nursery – until they fell asleep. At that time I also wrote a few reviews of children’s books for the “FAZ”. Georg-Friedrich, Marie-Sophie and I read wonderful books together.
One book stands out in our collective memory to this day: Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit, published in English in 1971. The daughter of the composer Julia Kerr and the famous theater critic Alfred Kerr describes her family’s escape via Switzerland in 1933 and France to England. The daughter not only loses her dearly beloved pink stuffed animal. Everyone suffers much more: the loss of their home in Berlin.
Source: Ravensburger
CW Ceram: Gods, Tombs and Scholars
A wonderfully liberal godfather gave me “gods, graves and scholars” for my confirmation in 1963. A 1949 best-selling book that author CW Ceram himself called a “novel of archaeology.” Of course, I didn’t know at the time that CW Ceram was a pseudonym used by the former Nazi propagandist Kurt Wilhelm Marek to hide his authorship just four years after the end of Hitler’s dictatorship – he made Kurt Curt and Marek into Turn der Sequence of letters, again transforming K into C, ceram.
The book fascinated me and shaped me – even if one should be skeptical about the construction of continuity in one’s own life story. Winckelmann’s love for ancient young men, inquisitive outsiders like Heinrich Schliemann and Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb taught me that curiosity combined with the willingness to go your own way, even against the prevailing science, is the most important virtue of a researching intellectual. Only skepticism and questions, not supposed certainties, advance science.
Theodor W. Adorno: Minima Moralia
I already read Adorno in the upper grades of my very Protestant high school in Westphalia. School friends and I went to Frankfurt several times to hear him. The “Minima Moralia” with the subtitle “Reflections from the damaged life” overwhelmed me. But at the same time they fascinated. Above all, it was one sentence that occupied me with far-reaching consequences: “Few things distinguish the way of life that befits the intellectual so profoundly from that of the bourgeois as that the latter does not recognize the alternative of work and pleasure.”
Since I had decided somewhat pathetically to become an intellectual (that is, not to study law) despite my origins in the business community, I turned my intellectual work into a thoroughly strenuous pleasure. I never leave the house without a book or a scholarly essay.
Thomas Mann: Dr. Faustus
Like artists, intellectuals tend towards self-referentiality. In any case, they like to read books about other intellectuals. So it is not surprising that I read Thomas Mann’s “Dr. Faustus” with great enthusiasm, initially on the recommendation of my German teacher in the upper grades of high school. Of course, I was much too young to understand all the German abysmal scholarship that Mann had woven into Adrian Leverkuhn’s pact with the devil.
But the great poet’s “life and secret work” inspired a determined search for presence of mind. “A lonely thinker and researcher, a theologian and philosopher in his cell, who, out of desire for world enjoyment and world domination, gives his soul to the devil” – that was material I could identify with. In any case, I didn’t want to be the boring, healthy and harmonious Serenus Zeitblom.
Dietrich Rössler: The Reason of Religion
In 1919 the Marburg German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen published his important “Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism”. Of course, the theologian Dietrich Rössler knew the book. But he reversed the title and showed in his little paperback published in 1976 that religious belief is not irrational as such, but can be reasonable in terms of life-serving intentions. Rössler was a modest, ironic and highly reflective person, the only one among my academic teachers to whom I attribute wisdom.
Source: Friedrich Wilhelm Graf
The specialist in psychiatry became a professor of practical theology in Tübingen (the topics of which are preaching, pastoral care and religious education) and at the same time, as a member of the medical faculty, a founding father of German medical ethics. May life succeed if we convert the elementary dependency in which we were born into self-determination and at the same time grateful acceptance of our finitude. A forgotten but truly great book on religion!
Karl Marx: Outline of Political Economy
During my studies, the many left-wing student groups, who were at loggerheads with each other, held so-called “Capital courses”, in which sections of Marx’s main work “Capital” were read. I had heard from someone that Marx’s 1857 and 1858 “Grundrisse der Politische Wirtschaft” were much more relevant than just preliminary work for “Das Kapital” and generally much more relevant for a critical analysis of the production and functional mechanisms of capitalist economic activity.
So some friends and I met twice a week in the evening to read the “Fundamentals”. Since then, I have seen the harsh, often morally scandalous realities of capitalist societies more clearly and at the same time more soberly. Moral indignation will not change cruel conditions. Clever political commitment is required.
David Friedrich Strauss: The Christian doctrine of faith in the struggle with modern science
I occupied myself with this book from 1840 for years. It was the most important source for my dissertation on the Protestant theologian David Friedrich Strauss, who in 1835 published what was probably the most important theological book of the century before last. In “The Life of Jesus, Critically Edited”, the tutor at the Tübingen monastery showed that the gospels were largely just the products of a religious consciousness that produced myths.
On the orders of the Stuttgart government, the police picked him up from the monastery so that he would not pass on his critical insights to the students. In his “Doctrine of Faith” Strauss analyzed the many contradictions in the dogmas of the Christian churches with unsparing brilliance, but at the same time sought to discover a rational core in them. What church doctrine had exclusively ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth, the sonship of God, is not the predicate of an individual, but of the human species as a whole. Everyone is God’s son or daughter. This is a religious metaphor for the pre-state dignity of every human being.
Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Strictly speaking, this is not a book. These are two essays from the “Archive for Social Science and Social Policy”, which social scientists from all over the world cite year after year as the most important sociological text of the 20th century. This is surprising because the text is very demanding and anything but easy to read. Why are the two essays so important? They show how religious certainties shape the lifestyle of the pious.
Even if religion is only one cultural sphere among others, it still exerts strong effects on these others: even, as Weber shows with the example of the Puritans, on economic life. There are thousands of books on the “Weber thesis”. Her “inner-worldly asceticism” created the ethos that was necessary for successful economic activity. If that’s true? It is still debated in thousands of books and scholarly treatises.
Thomas Bernhard: My prices
I could also name other titles by Bernhard. But in the aggressive, uncompromising manner and hate-filled egocentricity that characterizes Bernhard, “My Prices” makes many mendacity of the German-speaking cultural scene transparent. The topic is nine prizes that have been awarded to him in his home country and here with us. The organizations that award “their” prize are often not concerned with who they have honored, but rather with staging their own significance.
“The gift of honor from the culture group of the Federation of German Industries” also honors German industry, which can now attribute cultural competence to itself. The “Austrian Federal Chamber of Commerce” awards its “literature prize” to the country’s most important poet even if he publicly despises his economic and political elite as unbearably corrupt.
The awards ceremony can only be characterized by embarrassment and absurd misunderstandings. Bernhard reveals this with his very own mixture of cynicism and irony, for which he rightly pocketed prize money that he urgently needed.