| My work is an interdisciplinary study that reevaluates the larger cultural significance of evolutionary theory in turn-of-the-century Germany. I argue that at the turn-of-the-century, evolutionary theory and evolutionary discourse were powerfully refracted through a spiritual discourse of the body and that this refraction accounts for its widespread circulation. To capture a broad sense of the contemporary milieu, I track four case studies from across a wide terrain of fin-de-siecle German culture, including: the 1899 runaway best-seller, Die Weltratsel , by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, Carl Jung's traumatic break with Sigmund Freud and the theory behind his own school of analytic psychology, the wildly popular pre-World War I image of Fidus' Lichtgebet and Isadora Duncan's rise to fame in Germany in 1903 and 1904. In each of these cases, the meaning of evolutionary theory was transmitted to the German people in the immediate terms of the human body. What emerged across fin-de-siecle German culture was a picture of an essentially monistic understanding of evolutionary theory, which conceived of the evolutionary body in ecstatic communion with the cosmos. As contemporaries were groping for meaning in a seemingly disenchanted and fractured modern world, evolutionary theory appeared rooted in a spiritual experience of the body. Indeed, as the force of modern science and the increasing rationalization of the everyday world seemed to erode the power of many traditional modes of thought on an intellectual level, evolutionary theory presented a unique resolution to that dilemma by offering a spiritual experience in the body and about the body without doing away with the strictures or authority of science. In line with the most recent scholarship, which no longer looks to simply mine fin-de-siecle German culture for dramatic examples of cultural pessimism or proto-fascism, I examine the contemporary hope and optimism engendered by evolutionary theory while at the same time acknowledging that the desire to create modern meaning through the evolutionary body during the fin de siecle also held other, far more pernicious possible outcomes. |
