The writer Martin Mosebach, who celebrates his 70th birthday on July 31, has not lacked insightful encouragement. The list of his lobbies is so heterogeneous that even skeptics should be curious. Robert Gernhardt, Brigitte Kronauer, Eckhard Henscheid, Navid Kermani, Michael Maar: If you have such admirers, you may not even need big prizes, which Mosebach did, however, including the Büchner Prize.
But this solid fame contrasts with unmistakable reserves in professional literary criticism. To this day, Mosebach has never remained undisputed, not because of political and ideological provocations, but because of certain external signals that indicate his relationship to the present. The key words are “pocket handkerchief” and “Catholicism”, they concern, in a completely arbitrary combination, the habitus and the belief. The latter is not a question of habitus, so no “feuilleton Catholicism” at all, but really religion. Both point to a distance from the present, a non-presence that is obviously more provocative than individual expressions of opinion. Which then explains why his case is different from that of Handke, Walser or Botho Strauss, who are resented by concrete views, while Mosebach has so far got away with provocations without a long thunderstorm of debates. Why also publicly reprimand an author who doesn’t want to play along anyway? After all, Mosebach does not even separate itself privately, religiously and deliberately; he remains unimpressed with himself close to the world.
How Catholic is the writer Mosebach? That it is the person remains unmistakable, Mosebach is one of the most ingenious voices of Catholicism, bitingly critical of its present form, ultramontane, committed to the Roman center, in a historical sense. There are also books, essays and interviews in abundance, the best known being the defense of the Tridentine mass in “The Heresy of Formlessness”.
For Mosebach, realism is a view of the world that can only be identified through language
At the same time, however, Mosebach has always rejected ideological literature that filters reality according to opinions, without denying its temporary effectiveness. Reading Émile Zola’s novel “Germinal” made him a communist for a few days, he confessed. He astutely analyzed the private religiosity of the Catholic poet Stefan George as a dead end and, in contrast, worked out the Catholic in James Joyce and Marcel Proust, two almost non-religious portal figures in the modern novel.
Recognizing a host in Proust’s Madeleine tea biscuits, which, when immersed in a cup of tea, triggers cascades of memories, just as bread and wine denote the Lord’s presence in the Lord’s Supper, may seem obvious; James Joyce’s claim to extract art from unprocessed linguistic finds from everyday life is bolder. This, too, is a sublimating “change” that for Mosebach still shares in the mystery of faith.
So Mosebach has a poetics, and its key witness is not dogma, but the literary historian Erich Auerbach. Auerbach founded post-ancient European literature by amalgamating the styles of the sublime and the low or the comic (sermo sublimis and sermo humilis), which were separate in antiquity. Tragedy and comedy came together in the prose of the novella and novel and thus opened up a view of the totality of the world and society. The Son of God is born in an animal pen and the story is dated after an emperor. That is already fashionable. For Mosebach, however, realism is not a journalistically researched naturalism, not a statistical-photographic portrayal, but the representation of a certain mode of experience, an involuntary view of the world that can only be identified through language. Description of reality in words is one of the transformations into something spiritual, which from a distance always corresponds to the transformation of the Mass.
The sensual presence of the novels is beguiling, he portrays people, gestures and things with brilliant precision
At the same time, Mosebach recognizes the possibility of making empirical reality symbolically transparent in the biblical method of interpretation, which reads the Old and New Testaments in relation to each other. The subtle chains of motifs in modern novels make use of an associative reference technique which, for example, recognizes a premonition of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the Joseph story, as Thomas Mann, who was not particularly valued by Mosebach, worked out from the oldest models. But in a further twist, Mosebach has turned away from the pedantry of such procedures – the distance to Thomas Mann is not a matter of taste. As a reader and as an author, he repeatedly celebrates the meaningless reality that means nothing but itself – it is enough that it has incarnated in the word. “With the idea of the incarnation, this Christian key concept, it is connected that the incarnating spirit receives new, enriching properties through the matter in which it is embodied. Truth is form and not doctrine.”
And this is where the secret nests, which the reader of Mosebach’s many novels keeps jumping to. Their sensual presence is beguiling, hardly anyone can describe people, their gestures, clothes, surroundings, but also things and animals of all kinds so brilliantly, in any case richer than Peter Handke with his polemics against insufficiency of description. At the same time, these descriptions never merge into a narrative function; Mosebach’s writing is not functionalist-hierarchical, it has something broadly stored, lushly picturesque, like Dutch landscapes or the background of Titian.
Since, the later, the more he has developed an interest in the technical user interfaces of our present, who can make smartphones appear better? -, at the same time for her clothing fashions and manners, from book to book an increasingly fun fresco of our time emerges from it. His heroines and heroes are predominantly dubious, dubious figures, often failed existences, bankrupts, people with unclear financial sources and precarious life situations, a Henscheid world transposed into the rich and beautiful. In this, too, he is as unprotestant as possible; the Calvinist renunciation of instincts never irritated the novelist Mosebach.
And that doesn’t even name the most striking characteristic of Mosebach’s novels, their consistent planetary multipolarity. You move naturally between Frankfurt, India, Anatolia, Egypt, Morocco. In doing so, they prove a world-religious musicality, which is the best antidote to today’s cultural struggles. Mosebach was able to write a book about Coptic martyrs who were massacred by the “Islamic State” without adopting a single anti-Islamic tone that is common today. The expansive world this writer lives in has made him a free and witty contemporary. In any case, there is hardly a second writer living today who is so easily trusted to assert himself in the witty salons of the 18th century. Because of course this intellectual Catholicism comes to itself most clearly in contact with everything that opposes it. The time stranger paints the clearest pictures of the present.