ONE OF THE YOUNGEST of nonconformist writers, Stefan Andres was an exceptional inner emigrant in the sense that he spent the greater part of the Nazi period abroad, in what might be termed “semi-exile” in occupied southern Italy, though like other writers discussed here he could continue to publish with relative ease in Germany. He gained a reputation over the years as an able prose writer in the conservative narrative tradition of the nineteenth century but is probably best known for his two so-called master novellas, El Greco malt den Großinquisitor (1936, English translation El Greco Paints the Grand Inquisitor, 1989) and Wir sind Utopia (1942, English translation We Are God's Utopia, 1950), which became staple reading in German schools and many universities after the war. In recent years there has been a degree of renewed interest in Andres, with the discovery of a number of camouflaged short stories, legends, and anecdotes published under National Socialism and the appearance of a ten-volume works edition published by Wallstein.

Religion, Flight, Commitment, and Withdrawal

The crucial formative influences on the young Andres were, on the one hand, his father's rich, colorful, but undogmatic Catholic faith, and on the other the decision to dedicate him, even before he was born, to the Catholic priesthood. His boyhood and youth were consequently marked by a protracted spiritual and physical itinerancy: first, as a pupil in a strict Redemptorist college in Vaals, Holland, which he endured for just over two years; subsequently, at the age of fifteen, as assistant in a charitable institution for the mentally sick and terminally ill in Trier; then, from 1923 to 1926, at a Franciscan school near Vaals and later in Neuss, where he trained to be a teacher (33). Still believing he had a vocation, he later became a novice in the Capuchin order in Krefeld but was released, as he was deemed unsuited to the religious life.

Deciding on a role as a “lay priest,” from 1928 to 1929 he edited the Franciscan monthly journal Marienborn in Leipzig, where he published his first literary works, including poems, religious tales for children, his first novel Das heilige Heimweh (Sacred longing, 1928/29), and his first drawings. Keen to study theology at university and explore his ideas for reform of Catholic dogma, Andres abruptly changed his mind following a negative encounter with church orthodoxy and bureaucracy (34).