similar to that which theologians hold the human soul when they speak of anima christiana naturaliter,” as she states in Woran ich glaube. For Gertrud, poets are above all interested in failed and tragic figures, meaning that “from God’s perspective, utterly successful men and the world of mere justice and reward do not count, and that the saving mercy was elevated to the throne” (Woran ich glaube).
Love, redemption and annunciation Faithful to the romantic tradition, Le Fort seeks an extrasensory, transcendental truth, an insight to the world’s mysterious depth, making her literature wonderful, mystical and symbolic. Man and the world are not solely related to God, but, more precisely, to Christ. “Whatever the world is reaches man through Christ and must be delved into towards Christ,” German critic Hajo Jappe assures in Gertrud von le Fort. Das erzählende Werk. This relationship between man and the world with Christ is evidently present
in Le Fort’s work. We need only remember the characters of Starossow and Enzio who, in The Wreath of the Angels, do not really fear or hate God that much. For them, He is just an abstract concept. They fear, rather, the concrete figure of Christ, who demands practical things from them. Thus, G. von le Fort and Eichendorff share their belief on the transparency of the tangible world to one that is completely different: the one belonging to the spirit a nd t he super nat u ra l, wh ic h i s a l so comprehensible. Everything that is sensory and earthly can become, then, a sign of the extrasensory and the supernatural. The phenomenon of Christ means to Le Fort the elevation of God’s saving mercy to t he t hrone and wit h it “t he loving understanding of what attracts men to sin (…). The tender and severe law of the Saviour, “do not judge,” is also the commandment found in the origin of all true poetry. The muse does not condemn anyone; she only accompanies the guilty during the consequences of their actions. The core of every literary creation is not the moral sentence, but a spiritual stir.”
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