From Saint Francis to the footballer Maradona – famous figures serve as projection screens and ambassadors for our values. Literary scholar Nicolas Detering is investigating how this works.

“How is literature connected to society and culture? How can it help to answer the questions of the present while keeping an eye on the past? How does it convey identity, values or crises?” Nicolas Detering’s research not only takes place in libraries and archives, but also when reading the newspaper, in art museums and when travelling. His current research project on the poetics of the sacred, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), began on a trip through Italy. Originally from Hamburg and now Professor of Modern German Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Bern, Detering regularly travels to Switzerland’s southern neighbour, not least because his wife has family there. While in Naples, he observed that Diego Maradona is revered like a saint, which is apparent from the omnipresent images of the footballer that usually depict him with a halo.

This observation, among many others, opened the literary scholar’s eyes to just how often the images and lives of saints continue to be referenced in literature, visual arts and popular culture – even in societies considered to be secular. “Saints’ lives were the dominant literary genre in the Middle Ages in Europe. During the Reformation, and particularly the Enlightenment, they came under criticism along with the entire cult of saints.” These stories did not disappear, however, but were gradually repurposed. To this day, they are used to address certain values, such as environmental issues, equality, gender or sexual identity, “by projecting them onto these figures.” This is the case with Maradona, for example, who also represents the idea that one can come from a disadvantaged, lower class background, lead an unusual life and still become a kind of saint.

A fine line between sainthood and stigma

Detering explains why the figures of saints lend themselves to these kinds of projections: “Unlike what we in the literary field are used to, saints are not active figures who undergo a development and behave according to psychologically plausible criteria. They are merely individuals who dedicate their lives entirely to God, who guides them.” At the same time – and this is what makes them so interesting to modern literature – they are often considered outsiders and lunatics who break with our social order, for example by not marrying, not having a family and not conforming to heteronormativity.

“The use of saintly figures is in no way a niche phenomenon but has run through all of literature – canonical included – since the early modern period. Heinrich von Kleist wrote legends of saints, as did Gottfried Keller, Thomas Mann, Emmy Hennings, Anne Seghers and many more.” According to Detering, one of the best-known examples of modern legends of saints is “The Legend of the Holy Drinker” by Joseph Roth. It employs a narrative characteristic of saints’ lives, namely the proximity in content of sainthood and social stigma, to portray the misery of a homeless alcoholic in Paris.

Other variants include actual legends of saints that are used in modern literature to convey topical ideas. For instance, in Renaissance paintings, Saint Sebastian is depicted as a young, handsome but vulnerable naked youth pierced by arrows and has increasingly become a symbol of homoerotic desire over the centuries. He is used as an icon of sexual and emotional alienation in the American author David Leavitt’s 1986 novel “The Lost Language of Cranes” about the coming out of a young homosexual man. Similarly, Saint Francis, who talks to animals, is still used today to discuss environmental issues. Detering argues that authors use the figures of saints as projection screens to broach taboo subjects such as homosexuality, prostitution and psychopathologies. This enables authors to develop a subversive power by provoking and stimulating thought.

How literature has moved away from dialect

When talking about his research, Detering repeatedly makes connections to the challenges of the present. This also applies to his latest project, which questions why Swiss literature has mostly been written in standard German since the Peace of Westphalia and Switzerland’s departure from the Holy Roman Empire in 1648, despite previously having been in Swiss dialect. This fundamental question only occurred to the German national once in Switzerland. “I had never considered these issues of standard German and dialect and multilingualism in literature. I had also never noticed that Thomas Mann, for example, often veers towards dialect.”

--------------------------------
Profile

Nicolas Detering was born in Hamburg and studied German and English literature. He wrote his dissertation on the history of European discourse in 2016. He completed his habilitation on the subject of martyrs and legends at the University of Konstanz in 2023, where he taught between 2017 and 2019. He has been Professor of Modern German Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Bern since 2019. His main research interests include early modern European literature, 19th-century literature and religion, German literature during the First World War, the history of the press and journalistic narrative, literary temporal semantics and narratology.
--------------------------------

The text of this press release, a download image and further information are available on the website of the Swiss National Science Foundation.