Konnersreuth was the hometown of the stigmatized Therese Neumann (1898 - 1962), whose process of beatification began in February 2005. Together with the priest of the parish, she created the representative “spiritual landscape” of Konnersreuth. The image of Konnersreuth is dominated by the church, the monastery Theresianum and the school for future priest canditates. The house of Therese Neumann, “Resl’s garden”, and her grave on the local cemetery are centres of the pilgrims’ adoration, also grottoes of Lourdes, statues of Fatima, and a fountain with the statue of St. Therese of Lisieux.
Taking Konnersreuth as an example, the paper will discuss how pilgrim places become “spiritual landscapes”, in representing and producing negotiations of religious divisions of labour, gender, collective identities and memory. They form a culturally constructed space of experience, where forms of piety and religious sensibility are produced and appropriated. The paper will argue that “spiritual landscapes” form a sensual representation of Christian spatiotemporal concepts. It will elaborate on methodological questions such as how participant observation, narrative interviews, mental maps and interpretation of archival material can help to reconstruct the intentions of the inventors of the spiritual landscape of Konnersreuth and how pilgrims (re-)produce, experience, and transform “spiritual landscapes”. Particular attention will be paid to the question, how believers interpret transnational repetitions and differences of “spiritual landscapes” in context with discourses about Christian universality, transnationality, and locality.