Hauspostille: linguaggio teologico-negativo e negazione della teologia nel giovane Brecht

The present paper aims to investigate Brecht’s early interpretation of the divine and to show to what extent the Hauspostille poetic collection adopts formal strategies similar to those of the negative theology. As Hans Mayer has already pointed out, the Hauspostille is in fact an “umfunktionierte Theologie”, framed not only as a simple ironic-atheistic twisting of the theological discourse, but also as an attempt to re-function, in a secularized form, certain linguistic garments and structures of thought proper to the religious tradition. “Umfunktionierte Theologie”: recovering this formula, we refer to a theology that is not only re-functionalized, but also overturned. In an attempt to bring the notion of deus absconditus to its extreme consequences and, at the same time, to turn man’s attention towards the cold reality of immanence, Brecht would end up preparing a secularized version, in an aesthetic sense, of Luther’s own theologia crucis and propose a negative theology that presents, as its only aim, that of denying theology itself.