Hugo Ball und die Himmelsleiter: Ikonenlehre und Psychoanalyse in der Literatur der Moderne

Hugo Ball is a key-figure of Modernism. After he abandoned the avant-garde scene of Swiss Dada, he converts, in the post-war period, to Catholicism. His religious conversion has to be seen as a revaluation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which had characterized Ball’s experiments with Dada, according to his deep catholic and orthodox understanding of the aesthetic thought. The invention of Wortbildern and Klangfiguren in the Dadaist period finds his religious equivalent in the figure of Christ and in the orthodox theory of the icon, which celebrate the unity of word and image, of God and Man, heaven and earth, invisible and visible world. The icon of the Ladder of Paradise is therefore enlightening on the understanding of the double rule of the icon as the divine ‘archetypal image’ and as the human ‘reproduction’. As Ball in 1923 publishes his work on “Byzantine Christianity”, he confronts himself with the theme of the Divine Ladder, which breaks out as a latent image. Through the description of the works of three orthodox figures of saints, Hugo Ball offers three examples that show how the archetype of the Scala is being constantly reproduced in arts and literature. The Ladder of Paradise, however, which in Ball’s view represents an aesthetic vision rather than a moral issue, gains a further therapeutic significance. As the Ladder unifies heaven and earth, visible and invisible world, it makes it possible for the contraries to meet and find full consonance. In such a way the union of contraries fosters the outbreak of the Numinous, both as a manifestation of the psychological harmony and as the overcoming of the typical modern disease of fragmentariness and dilaceration. The Ladder finally suggests the overtaking of the dualistic thought in favor of an interdependent “chiasm-relation” between visible and invisible, bodily and spiritual world, in which each term is necessary for the perception of the other.