Longing for myth

George Williamson argues in Longing for Myth in Germany (Chicago, 2004) that the search for a “new mythology” developed from “the postrevolutionary experience of historical rupture and religious crisis.” Nationalist writers gave a particular spin to this by calling for a “German mythology.” Originally, in the early German romantics, the “project of a new mythology was conceived as the outcome of historical processes generated within modern (Christian) society,” but “over the course of the nineteenth century the discourse on myth came to be deployed in ever starker opposition to Christian modernity.” All through the century though, “supposedly secular realms of nineteenth-century art and scholarship were infused with the rhetoric, narratives, and assumptions of Christian theology.” Longing for myth, then is not secularization but “as a development within Christian (especially German Protestant) culture, as it confronted the cultural and political challenges of European modernity.”