Conversions – Mosse Lectures

Since the experience of Paulus on the road to Damascus, the profound inspiration that ›things cannot go on this way‹, has been told as individual and spiritual affair, as an evi-dential experience, but also as a narrative of cultural and political change, a transcenden-tal evocation of breakup and outbreak. Radical transition, individual or collective, consti-tutes the symbolical practice and rhetorical strategies of religious, philosophical, political and literary conversion narratives. Since the bitter fate of the conversos, the Jews at the time of the Spanish Reconquista, historical tradition has forced conversions as warning signs of violence and genocide, in modernity the racially, politically und religiously motivated expulsion and annihilation of minorities. How can possibly the radical appeal of confession and conversion be experienced, less dramatic and heroic, when practical everything is ›convertible‹, records of data and information, currencies, languages and identities? In retrospect, referring to the zone of transition, the »becoming otherwise«, the classical examples of a ›blitzconversion‹ might also reveal as a long term, manifold process of transformation, remembering e.g. the implementation of religious symbols, emblems and rites in secular forms. In the autobiographical narrations of conversion we will definitely find traces of the original culture in the text of the newly acquired living. In the program of the Mosse-Lectures the narratives of conversion from Maimonides to Heinrich Heine will be negotiated, as well as the concepts of conversion in the historical writings of religion, political philosophy, literature and anthropology.