German Modernity

In the course of a review of Timothy Ryback’s recent book on Hitler’s library, Anthony Grafton comments on the connection between critique and occultism in early twentieth-century thought: “it is wrong to dismissed the esoteric strains in German thought in the early decades of the twentieth century simply because they now seem laughable. In a time when all values – from the objective ones of natural science to the traditional ones of the established churches – came into question, many Germans, some of them very well-born and educated, found more than cheap potato soup for the soul in these pursuits. Occultism offered new spiritual revelations to replace the old, and new scientific revelations that made for dazzling seances, and new insight (or so many serious artists thought) into the nature of the creative unconscious. The rise of occultism in all its forms, from good old-fashioned astrology to the spiritualism nourished by the war’s vast toll of death, marked a distinctive part of Germany’s strange path to modernity.”