Das Peter Hille-Buch: Genre Hybridity and the Narrativization of Mystical Experience

Abstract

This study reinterprets Das Peter Hille-Buch through the theoretical framework of genre hybridity and the poetics of mysticism, arguing that the work’s difficulty constitutes a deliberate aesthetic strategy rather than a formal weakness. The analysis focuses on the narrative structure in which biography, autobiography, religious discourse, and prose poetry are intricately interwoven, creating a hybrid form that can lead to non-representational mystical experience. Methodologically, the study examines the text’s fragmentary composition and symbol-centered narration from the perspective of mystical poetics to explore the relation between literary form and ontological perception. PHB’s symbolic and non-linear narrative is shown to be organized around the intensity and density of lived experience rather than causal events, lived experience that functions to indirectly articulate mystical experience that resists doctrinal explanation. The experiential sequence of calling, companionship, separation, and awakening narratively embodies the transformative process of mystical realization. Ultimately, the genre hybridity and expressionist experimentation of Das Peter Hille-Buch reveal literature as a performative space where experience and the transformation of being unfold.