The Sexcentenary Commemoration of Dante’s Death and the German Re-Confessionalization of Dante: Friedrich Muckermann and der Gral

In October 1921, the German Catholic literary monthly der Gral, under the editorship of Friedrich Muckermann, S.J., published a special issue devoted to the sexcentenary commemoration of the death of Dante. This special number is a microcosm of the issues surrounding the German Dante revival that followed the disastrous conclusion of World War I. German intellectuals of varying political and religious persuasions, especially those outside the university, were vying in the popular press to define Dante’s relationship to Germany and his meaning for the contemporary crisis. The importance assigned to Dante in German postwar reconstruction illustrates the cultural power that literature was thought to have. Discussions swirling around Dante during the sexcentenary were fraught with questions about the nature of national identity and the shape of postwar recovery. The sexcentenary coincided with the still-novel claims, especially in Germany (where Dante was often considered a precursor of Luther), that Dante was a loyal Catholic, that he should be read in relation to traditional Catholic teaching, and that, as such, his Catholic worldview supplied the undergirding of the path toward German revival in the wake of the war. The tussle between Catholics and Protestants over Dante is one of the most remarkable examples of the transmigration of a monumental literary work across religious denominations in a process we might call “re-confessionalization,” or the revisionist transformation of religious identity. Muckermann intended his special Dante issue and his own essays in it to contribute in a major way not only to this Catholic re-confessionalization of Dante, but also, through it, to a larger literary program that would