Koschorke, Albrecht. New York:  Columbia University Press, 2003. 208 + viii pp. $32.50 (USD). ISBN: 0-231-12756-1.

[1]  This brief, provocative cultural history looks at the holy family (Mary, Joseph and Jesus) as a code or archetype that our “postreligious society” may ignore, but for the last two millennia has infiltrated “the deep structure of its imagination” (5). Koschorke clearly loves writing about the relationship between religion and popular culture (in the broadest sense of the word) but his true expertise lies in analyzing the intersection of theology and cultural theory, and indeed the heart of the book is an analysis and extension of Freud’s literary and psychological argument about how and why Christianity supersedes Judaism. This is heavy stuff, but Koschorke’s prose remains remarkably lucid and accessible, even in translation.

[2]  The first part of The Holy Family and Its Legacy asks us to step back and look at the fundamental strangeness of a religion that gets its impetus in part from the divine invasion of the nuclear family. This arrangement produces a series of tensions;  as Koschorke puts it:

the irruption of God into the arena of the family establishes a dense web of empirical-sacral relationship options. The internal relationships within the Christian family triangle are overdetermined in a way that makes possible a staggering multiplicity of symbolic assimilations. As a result, the Holy Family has become the core complex of a cultural symbolism that, over the course of two thousand years, has hardly left any combinatorial possibility unexplored. (27)

[3]  Thus the book begins with Koschorke explaining the combinations and the ironies they engender.  Mary is both the lover and mother of Christ, and Jesus is venerated as a member of the Holy Family even as he declares that he has “come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother” (Matt. 10).  Koschorke seems to enjoy noting the most ironic figure not only in the Holy Family but the whole of the Western tradition:  Joseph, a husband cuckolded by God, and a father made impotent. Koschorke calls him “a figure who has long been the laughingstock of Western popular culture” (17).

[4]  Part III of the book (“Consequences”) skillfully examines how these deep codes play out in Western culture. Koschorke argues (not always as successfully) that the Holy Family has had an impact on history and politics. For example, he examines not only the Reformation’s updating of the iconography of the Holy Family, but how that updating affected government policy regarding the family. His central argument in this section is that, just as in the Holy Family–where the biological father (Joseph) has been replaced by a transcendent powerful father (God)–so in modernity has the biological father been replaced by the transcendent, powerful state.

[5]  The North American reader should be aware that this book’s arguments and examples are explicitly Eurocentric. For starters, Koschorke justifies this work in light of the fact that “the Christian West has entered the post-Christian era” (5).  As a European scholar of religion, Koschorke must still deal with the idea of a “secularizing process” in a way that no American scholar would or could (as Koschorke himself notes in his preface to the American edition). The latter chapters examine the role of the Holy Family in the tales of early nineteenth-century author Heinrich von Kleist, and in German romanticism and expressionism, potentially leaving the North American reader asking what role the Holy Family has played in, say, the history of American revivalism or evangelical material culture.

[6]  Finally, there is the subtitle of the book: “Religious Imagination from the Gospels to Star Wars.” Both the dust jacket and the press release promise an analysis of the Star Wars saga–as well as The Terminator film, which is never actually mentioned in the book itself.  In the last chapter (of the English translation only), a few pages are devoted to George Lucas’ overanalyzed movie product. Koschorke rehearses the Star Wars-as-heroic-journey argument (without mentioning Joseph Campbell by name) as well as acknowledging the film’s pastiche-like and intertextual qualities.  His thesis is that both the original Star Wars movie and the Phantom Menace (which, he rightly points out, tell essentially the same story) creatively use the Holy Family archetypes. Koschorke does not need to reach far into the films’ subtexts: in the stunningly literal-minded Phantom Menace, Anakin Skywalker’s mother, Shmi, announces to the Jedi delegation that her son had no earthly father. A virginal conception is not exactly subtle, but Koschorke finds more nuanced parallels between Watto, the rapacious digitally animated owner of Shmi and Anakin, and Joseph, both coded as displaced Jews. He further makes the case for the Jedi as (both) Skywalkers’ spiritual parentage and the Force as the Holy Spirit.  If Koschorke had been more fluent with American pop. culture criticism he might have productively linked the Star Wars saga’s use of the Holy Family to the antidemocratic mysticism that Robert Jewett found in the saga. Perhaps this would have required a bridging chapter on the Holy Family archetype in American mass media genres–the Western or the thriller.

[7] These are minor criticisms that do not take away from the book’s real strength: Unlike most studies of religion and popular culture, which limit their coverage of the latter to the last 20 or 30 years, Koschorke’s book discusses medieval poetry, renaissance art, and modernist drama. It is a tribute to his breadth of knowledge and measured tone that his discussion of Star Wars, cursory though it may be, seems neither less nor more serious by comparison.  The most important lesson that The Holy Family might teach a reader of this journal is that although the academic study of religion and popular culture is only a few years old, the relationship between them is many thousands of years older.

Elijah Siegler
College of Charleston
Charleston, South Carolina
sieglere@cofc.edu