Memory and Appropriation: Remembering Dante in Germany During the Sexcentenary of 1921

Abstract

The commemorations in Germany for the sexcentenary of Dante’s death in 1921 can be understood through Jan Assmann’s classic explanation of how institutions construct collective memory as a “contemporized past” for present purposes. Assmann’s view of collective memory can be further extended to explore how rival institutions work to construct competing memories, or how an institution attempts to wrest memory from another institution. Dante was taken off the Index of Prohibited Books only in the late nineteenth century and was fully promoted as an exemplary Catholic poet only in 1921 in Benedict XV’s encyclical. German Catholic writers used the sexcentenary as an occasion to “remember” Dante as a Catholic writer and thinker in opposition to those who more traditionally commemorated Dante because of his anti-papal attitudes, as a proto-Protestant precursor of Luther. This rival confessional memorial reconstruction of Dante by competing institutions was eschewed by professional, academic scholars in university departments of Romance Philology, and was instead carried out in the popular press by writers, intellectuals, and politicians in newspapers and periodicals with broad audiences. Making no claim for original research, articles in these outlets typically assert partisan positions by providing rival pedigrees that link Dante either to a German anti-papal legacy or to a German Catholic legacy. For example, Dante commemoration in newspaper articles by the poet and Reichstag secretary Hans Benzmann exemplifies the anti-Catholic view of Dante, while the commemorative newspaper article by the Catholic publicist, member of the Catholic Centre Party, public health reformer, and professor in an agricultural university Martin Fassbender exemplifies the Catholic community’s attempt to bring Dante into its fold. Moreover, because memory of Dante was being offered to the German nation as a spiritual and political model for recovery from the catastrophe of the First World War, a Catholic Dante implied a Catholic role in post-war German renewal after years of Catholic repression. Catholic institutional memory of Dante during the sexcentenary thus not only sought to reclaim its cultural patrimony from another community that it thought had misappropriated it, but it also functioned as a proxy for memory of the war.

I wish to express my gratitude to the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturfosrschung Berlin, a grant from which made research for this article possible; I wish also to express my gratitude to Sherry Warman and her staff at Interlibrary Loan in the Brooklyn College Library, CUNY, for their invaluable help with the research for this article.