• Project duration: 12/2025 bis 11/2027
• Project management: Matthias Däumer
• Project staff: Matthias Däumer
• Cooperation partner: SFB 1567 Virtuelle Lebenswelten (Bochum)
• Funding body: FWF / Land NÖ (Matching Funds), PAT 6459924

Virtualizing Hell / Die virtuelle Hölle

How did hell become pop? How could something that once caused existential terror become entertainment? The ‘Virtualizing Hell’ project examines influences on texts from German-speaking courts of the High and Late Middle Ages and the aesthetics that emerged there—without postulating in advance that these aesthetics must differ fundamentally from our modern ones. The texts analyzed are Middle High German translations and/or adaptations of mostly Latin journeys to the afterlife (mainly the ‘Visio Sancti Pauli’, the ‘Visio Tnugdali’, and the ‘Visio Lazari’) and texts of other genres that reflect certain themes, motifs, or media constellations of these journeys to the afterlife. The theoretical approach works with a systematic definition of ‘virtuality’ that traces modern philosophical definitions back to their historical foundations and combines them with pragmatic approaches from game studies. In this orientation, virtuality appears as a concept, in which the non-material appears quite real in reference to its possibility. This emphasizes a certain type of reception that incorporated the literary hell journeies into a system of courtly entertainment and at the same time changed this system in a virtual way. From a literary-sociological perspective, hell thus becomes a kind of laboratory in which, under negative polarity (everything that happens in hell must be negative) a space for free thought and imagination is created (everything that can be imagined could become reality). 

The project started on December 1, 2025, and will present a monograph and a thematically focused conference (in collaboration with SFB 1567 ‘Virtual Life Worlds’) by the end of 2027.