ALONG WITH SUCH figures as Georges Bernanos, Graham Greene, and Werner Bergengruen, Gertrud von le Fort was one of the foremost Catholic writers of the twentieth century. Since her death in 1971, a small number of her works have remained popular and been widely translated, although there is still no critical or complete edition available, nor even an authoritative biography. Discussion of her writing has for several years been hampered by a tendency toward the “hagiographic,” and the substantial religious content of her work has attracted several interpretations by theologians, which usually feature a narrow focus on the spirituality underlying character and plot. This has resulted in less attention being paid than one might expect to the nature of her particular form of inner emigration.

The Prussian Aristocrat in Search of Religious Meaning

Compared with the many inner emigrants who were ready to share their recollections of the period 1933–45, le Fort was decidedly reserved. All her autobiographical material was published after 1950, and a grand total of 180 pages for someone who, in 1965, was almost ninety represents thin pickings, suggesting extreme selectivity and close editing of her reminiscences. This makes things difficult for the biographer but also renders more complex the job of exploring le Fort as an inner emigrant writer.

Her father was a major in the Prussian army and her religious mother, a descendant of an old Huguenot family, came from landed gentry in the Mark Brandenburg. Le Fort had a privileged upbringing but a deficient informal education. However, under the influence of her father's fascination with both military and general European history, the intellectually gifted youth was, by the age of sixteen, already reading Ranke and Kant. A key experience for the adult le Fort in the period 1904–7, and a possible factor in the later development of her notion of representative sacrifice, was her secret love for a Catholic priest, a love she was forced to renounce. At the age of thirty-two she began to attend university in Heidelberg, studying theology, religion, and history, and it was during her six-year period at the university that she fell under the influence of the cultural historian and theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who was to become her mentor and whose posthumous Glaubenslehre (Dogmatics, 1925) she was later to edit.