Re: Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia
Posted: Tue Mar 06, 2018 2:41 am
Munich Cosmic Circle
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/5/18
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Karl Wolfskehl, Alfred Schuler, Ludwig Klages, Stefan George, Albert Verwey. Photograph by Karl Bauer
The Munich Cosmic Circle was a group of writers and intellectuals in Munich, Germany at the turn of the 20th century, based around the mystic Alfred Schuler.[1] Along with Schuler, it consisted of the philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872-1956), the poet Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948) and the writer Ludwig Derleth (1870-1948).[2] Another member of the group was the "Bohemian Countess" of Schwabing, Fanny zu Reventlow (1871-1918). She wrote about her experiences with the group in her Roman à clef Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen (1913).[3]
Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages came to know each other in 1893. With the others they based their early association upon an appreciation of Ibsen's dramas.[4] Another interest was the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887), a Swiss anthropologist and sociologist, and his research into matriarchal clans.[5] They developed a doctrine according to which the West was plagued by downfall and degeneration, caused by the rationalizing and demythologizing effects of Christianity. A way out of this desolate state could, according to the "Cosmic" view, only be found by a return to pagan origins. Schuler was described by Theodor Lessing as "an oddity, a curious mixture of charlatan and genius, a show-off and a visionary".[6] The activities and rituals of the group were often sensationalized in bohemian fin-de-siècle Schwabing.
Some members of the Circle were also active in the group around the poet Stefan George, whom Wolfskehl introduced to the group. Ludwig Klages wrote a book praising his poetry in 1902.[7] George was not a member of the Circle, though he was in close contact with them.[8]
The group fell apart through an acrimonious dispute in 1904 between Klages, who considered himself a neo-pagan and against any form of organized religion, and the Zionist Wolfskehl, which led to charges of anti-semitism against Klages. Stefan George had also begun to distance himself from Klages' philosophy at this time and defended Wolfskehl against Schuler and Klages.[9]
Notes
1. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, By Richard Noll, p. 166-172.; Germany at the fin de siècle: culture, politics, and ideas, By Suzanne L. Marchand, David F. Lindenfeld
2. Where D.H. Lawrence was wrong about woman by Holbrook, David. Bucknell University Press, Associated University Presses, 1992
3. Gunna Wendt: Franziska zur Reventlow. Die anmutige Rebellin. Berlin 2008 (German)
4. Julia Zernack: "Nordische Mythen in der deutschen Literatur. Eddaspuren bei George und Wolfskehl", in: Annette Simonis (Hg.): Intermedialität und Kulturaustausch: Beobachtungen im Spannungsfeld von Künsten und Medien, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2009, S. 38. (German)
5. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, Cynthia Eller, esp. p. 33-34.
6. Lessing, Theodore, Einmal und Nie Wieder. Bertelsmann, Guetersloh. 1969 (German)
7. Secret Germany: Stefan George and his circle by Robert Edward Norton
8. Georg Dörr: Muttermythos und Herrschaftsmythos, S.188 (German)
9. Furness, Raymond. Zarathustra's children: a study of a lost generation of German writers, p. 95
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Accessed: 3/5/18
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One such rather influential interpretation [coming out of the modern gnostic foundation] could be found in the George circle. This so called 'cosmic circle' took shape in the Schwabing quarter of Munich at the end of the nineteenth century, around the figure and poetry of Stefan George. Among its core members were Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948), Friedrich Gundolf (1880-1931), Hans Busse (1867-1914), Friedrich Huch (1873-1913), Franziska Reventlov (1871-1918), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Alfred Schulter and Ludwig Klages.
-- Modern Gnosis and Zionism: The Crisis of Culture, Life Philosophy and Jewish National Thought, by Yotam Hotam
The irrational then, was abroad in 20th-century Germany. But so far we have examined only the secondary figures. The most influential occultists were a different caliber altogether. They can be divided into four main groups: (1) the Theosophy and Rosicrucianism of Prague and Vienna; (2) the Cosmic Circle of Munich; (3) the various colonies set up by the Progressive Underground to prepare for the coming new age; and (4) the Anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner.
-- The Occult Establishment, by James Webb
The whole of Germany was swept up in this esoteric wave, and youth more than anyone. The peculiarly nineteenth-century phenomenon, spiritualism, and its more "scientific" variation, Theosophy, in Germany were welded together with a mystical concept of the Volk as a people whose collective "soul" was more than the sum of its parts. This Aryan "soul," Germans believed, united the individual German to his geographical place. Every tree and rock of German soil was holy, and spoke to the people, shaping them and causing their creativity. The intuitive wisdom of which the Aryans, rooted in their land, were capable was hidden from the Jews, those eternal wanderers, who had no organic place of their own and, therefore, tried to usurp the fatherland of others. On this account, the Jew was most comfortable in the city, alienated from nature and the Volk Spiritualism joined itself to the idea of the Volk, in that nature emitted a vital ether, a life force, with which only the Aryan was in touch. He alone could contact an extrasensory world which would yield up its secrets and give him special powers.
The new romanticism was, above all, irrational, and this seemed to guarantee its easy acceptance. It peddled itself as more substantial than the discoveries of science, because science itself did not claim to understand the dark mysteries of the force which drove nature, whereas Madame Blavatsky and others like her did. List, borrowing her Theosophy, also did. Her "ancient wisdom," transposed by him into Germanic wisdom which had been destroyed by Christianity, could be revived through intuition, and would explain the essence of things. German mystics developed an ideology, a hodgepodge of the occult, racism, and romanticism which, while ridiculous, went down surprisingly well with youth hunting for certainties. Many young people, Walter Z. Laqueur points out in Young Germany,joined one of the many new religious and occult sects whose prophets grew like mushrooms in the volkisch camp between the First and Second World War. Of such were Mathilde Ludendorff's [the general's wife] Tannenberg Bund, Arthur Dinter's group, the Asgard Circle, or Gustav Muller's sect, which believed that the human soul was an amalgamation of three or four animal souls ("according to reliable reports from beyond"), and that the planet Mars was the place where man first appeared.
To children whose fathers had been killed in the war, the leaders of these groups became surrogates. To adolescents disturbed by a fragmented society, they offered solidity. To students who knew that nothing awaited them upon graduation from school, they offered immersion in the group. To alienated youth drifting into dreary, unfriendly cities, they offered companionship. To young people bewildered by the intricacies of sex, they offered the solution of rigorous puritanism. To children who could no longer believe in the God of their fathers, they offered a new, modern God. To those thirsting for absolute meanings, they provided absolute answers.
As one participant put it (in E. Y. Hartshorne's German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory):Mysticism and everything mystical had dominion over us. It was in our ranks that the word Fuhrer originated, with its meaning of blind obedience and devotion. The word Bund arose with us, too, with its mysterious undertone of conspiracy. And I shall never forget how in those early days we pronounced the word Gemeinschaft ["community"] with a trembling throaty note of excitement, as though it hid a deep secret.
He goes on more objectively:The tragedy of the appeal of this mysticism to the youth of the post-war period was that it offered them a dreamy haven of refuge from the pressing problems of the day.
A significant proportion of cultured idealistic youth was thus, for years on end, and at the most impressionable age, withdrawn from the tasks of their time, and estranged. Instead of learning to see things as they were, and freeing themselves from the dangerous tradition of German escape-idealism, they became victims of a deceptive mysticism which made them easy victims for the National Socialists. Furthermore, by yielding to the lure of this mysticism, toward which an attitude of rational criticism was sure to mean angry expulsion from the "group," these boys lost all capacity for criticism. At a time when the blind obedience of the soldier was regarded as unworthy of rational men, they adopted the habit of a far more sinister obedience: the servile subordination of the mind under the yoke of an ideology.
The divine essence, or elan vital, or life force, or vril, was believed to be electromagnetic -- "Theo-zoological," in Lanz's terminology. Since the sun was the repository of this energy, it became the fashion for German youth groups, as for occult groups generally, to adopt the emblem of the swastika, a symbol for the sun. The festival of the changing sun, an old pagan ritual, was given a new occult twist by the Sera Circle, in that the cosmic rays were thought to emit esoteric knowledge along with warmth. List's Armanen believed that the solar symbol held the key to an ancient "secret science" and that by communing with the ghostly spirits present in certain Germanic ruins, mysterious veils of the past would be lifted. The Cosmic Circle practiced pagan rituals intended to arouse the life force and awaken clairvoyant powers in people of Germanic blood. In their songs and dances, the groups tried to recreate that primordial kinship with nature which they supposed ancient man to have had. They abhorred science and reason as enemies of the life of the soul. Many of them became vegetarians and teetotalers, for they believed that the purification of the physical body would help the soul to see reality. They threw over orthodox medicine for spiritual and herbal healing, which were somehow felt to be closer to the primal source.
-- Gods & Beasts -- The Nazis & the Occult, by Dusty Sklar
Karl Wolfskehl, Alfred Schuler, Ludwig Klages, Stefan George, Albert Verwey. Photograph by Karl Bauer
The Munich Cosmic Circle was a group of writers and intellectuals in Munich, Germany at the turn of the 20th century, based around the mystic Alfred Schuler.[1] Along with Schuler, it consisted of the philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872-1956), the poet Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948) and the writer Ludwig Derleth (1870-1948).[2] Another member of the group was the "Bohemian Countess" of Schwabing, Fanny zu Reventlow (1871-1918). She wrote about her experiences with the group in her Roman à clef Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen (1913).[3]
Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages came to know each other in 1893. With the others they based their early association upon an appreciation of Ibsen's dramas.[4] Another interest was the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887), a Swiss anthropologist and sociologist, and his research into matriarchal clans.[5] They developed a doctrine according to which the West was plagued by downfall and degeneration, caused by the rationalizing and demythologizing effects of Christianity. A way out of this desolate state could, according to the "Cosmic" view, only be found by a return to pagan origins. Schuler was described by Theodor Lessing as "an oddity, a curious mixture of charlatan and genius, a show-off and a visionary".[6] The activities and rituals of the group were often sensationalized in bohemian fin-de-siècle Schwabing.
Some members of the Circle were also active in the group around the poet Stefan George, whom Wolfskehl introduced to the group. Ludwig Klages wrote a book praising his poetry in 1902.[7] George was not a member of the Circle, though he was in close contact with them.[8]
The group fell apart through an acrimonious dispute in 1904 between Klages, who considered himself a neo-pagan and against any form of organized religion, and the Zionist Wolfskehl, which led to charges of anti-semitism against Klages. Stefan George had also begun to distance himself from Klages' philosophy at this time and defended Wolfskehl against Schuler and Klages.[9]
Notes
1. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, By Richard Noll, p. 166-172.; Germany at the fin de siècle: culture, politics, and ideas, By Suzanne L. Marchand, David F. Lindenfeld
2. Where D.H. Lawrence was wrong about woman by Holbrook, David. Bucknell University Press, Associated University Presses, 1992
3. Gunna Wendt: Franziska zur Reventlow. Die anmutige Rebellin. Berlin 2008 (German)
4. Julia Zernack: "Nordische Mythen in der deutschen Literatur. Eddaspuren bei George und Wolfskehl", in: Annette Simonis (Hg.): Intermedialität und Kulturaustausch: Beobachtungen im Spannungsfeld von Künsten und Medien, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2009, S. 38. (German)
5. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, Cynthia Eller, esp. p. 33-34.
6. Lessing, Theodore, Einmal und Nie Wieder. Bertelsmann, Guetersloh. 1969 (German)
7. Secret Germany: Stefan George and his circle by Robert Edward Norton
8. Georg Dörr: Muttermythos und Herrschaftsmythos, S.188 (German)
9. Furness, Raymond. Zarathustra's children: a study of a lost generation of German writers, p. 95