Beyond Faith and Reason: Postsecular Genealogies in Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World, Ilija Trojanow’s The Collector of Worlds, and Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s Blumenberg

This article approaches postsecularity from a historical angle by considering three recent German-language novels which reflect present-day ambivalences regarding religion and secularity through a genealogy of the present. Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World, Ilija Trojanow’s Collector of Worlds, and Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s Blumenberg explore the gaps, fissures, and contradictions in the dichotomy of faith and reason which so haunts the present engagement with religion. They depict nineteenth- and twentieth-century protagonists who embrace a disenchanted outlook on the world, yet struggle with the specters of an older, enchanted cosmos. Through variants of the literary fantastic, and unreliable and polyperspectival narration, these books develop a view of the world that goes beyond facile dichotomies of faith and reason.