Through analysis of Max Horkheimer's 1936 review of Theodor Haecker's Der Christ und die Geschichte (), this article proposes an interdisciplinary, revisionist approach to German inner emigration after 1933 and its relationship to exile culture. Horkheimer wrote his review in American exile, adeptly deciphering the anti‐Nazi subtext of Haecker's inner‐exile argument. The left‐wing Horkheimer inevitably rejects the conservative Haecker's Catholic historiography and account of moral agency, but his review testifies to forgotten lines of continuity between inner and outer exiles. Horkheimer's commitment to a post‐metaphysical critical theory ultimately shifts focus away from Haecker's theologically framed anti‐Nazi critique, a shift from intellectual generosity to ideological foreclosure that anticipates the emergent polarization evident in postwar scholarship on exile in‐ and outside of Germany. Scrutiny of this complex critical legacy offers insight, however, into how significant theologically framed discourses remained for inner and outer exiles responding to National Socialism.
Heinrich Böll's stature in the canon of West German postwar literature grew out of his association with the so‐called cultural ‘Stunde Null’. Recent scholarship has questioned this commonplace paradigm, which suggests problematic distinctions between literature written before and after 1945 and inside and outside of the Third Reich. The posthumous publication of Böll's prewar juvenilia and wartime correspondence allows for new perspectives on his literary formation. This article demonstrates Böll's intellectual dependence on pan‐European interwar Catholic culture, in particular key German writers who became Christian ‘inner emigrants’ in the Third Reich. The motifs of this body of thought course through his wartime correspondence, so much so that his early postwar work deserves classification both as ‘Trümmerliteratur’ and as a continuation of the inner emigration. This continuity between Böll's pre‐ and post‐1945 thought contributes not just to our re‐reading of his oeuvre but also to a revision in inner emigration studies. The term deserves extension to include both writers who wrote against the grain of Nazi literary politics and their readers, with whom they formed a coherent interpretive community. Out of this shared discourse, Böll crafts a narrative of survival, foreseeing a kind of perpetual inner emigration in a dystopian and apostate postwar Germany.
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