1 Restoring Wholeness in an Age of Disorder: Europe's Long Spiritual
1 Restoring Wholeness in an Age of Disorder: Europe’s Long Spiritual Crisis and the Genealogy of Slavophile Religious Thought, 1835-1860 Patrick Lally Michelson September 2008 Many German writers, journalists, and scholars who witnessed the collapse of the Wilhelmine Reich in 1918 interpreted this event as the culmination of a protracted, European-wide crisis that had originated more than a century before in the breakdown of traditional political institutions, socioeconomic structures, moral values, and forms of epistemology, anthropology, and religiosity. For these intellectuals, as well as anyone else who sought to restore what they considered to be Germany’s spiritual vitality, one of the immediate tasks of the early Weimar years was to articulate authentic, viable modes of being and consciousness that would generate personal and communal wholeness in a society out of joint.1 Among the dizzying array of responses formulated at that time, several of the most provocative drew upon disparate, even antagonistic strands of Protestantism in the hope that the proper appropriation of Germany’s dominant confession could help the country overcome its long spiritual crisis.2 1 The Weimar Dilemma: Intellectuals in the Weimar Republic, edited by Anthony Phelan (Manchester University Press, 1985); Dagmar Barnouw, Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity (Indiana University Press, 1988); and Intellektuelle in der Weimarer Republik, revised edition, edited by Wolfgang Bialas and Georg G. Iggers (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997). For impressionistic accounts, see Egon Friedell, A Cultural History of the Modern Age: The Crisis of the European Soul from the Black Death to the World War, 3 vols., translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: A.
[Show full text]