Hugo Ball’s religious conversion

Lewer, D. (2023) Hugo Ball’s religious conversion. German Life and Letters, (doi: 10.1111/glal.12378) (Early Online Publication)

Abstract

This essay investigates the German ex-Dadaist Hugo Ball (1886–1927) and his 1920s work on religious conversion from Paul, Augustine and Francis to writers and poets in modernity. This intense engagement was rooted in Ball's own radical conversion, or ‘re-conversion’, to an austere form of the Catholicism of his childhood in 1920, just a few years after breaking with the Dada movement he had helped found in Zurich in 1916. In letters, books, his edited diaries and essays such as ‘Die religiöse Konversion’ of 1925, Ball wrestled with the phenomenon of conversion. He traced it in religious culture, monasticism, psychiatry and politics. This article explores Ball's imaginative emphasis on the condition of chaos that precedes resolution into ‘order’ in the convert. It considers his model of conversion not only as salvific but also as remedial and therapeutic. Further, it interrogates his connection of conversion with the breakdown of language in mysticism and in Dada. Ball's intensive study of the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and others provided much of the epistemological ground for this work. More provocative was his imagined possibility of collective national ‘conversion’ to Catholicism – for the whole of Germany.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Early Online Publication
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Lewer, Dr Deborah
• Authors: Lewer, D.
• College/School: College of Arts > School of Culture and Creative Arts > History of Art
• Journal Name: German Life and Letters
• Publisher: Wiley
• ISSN: 0016-8777
• ISSN (Online): 1468-0483
• Published Online: 21 May 2023
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 The Author
• First Published: First published in German Life and Letters 2023
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License