Ineffable histories: German mysticism at the Jahrhundertwende

This dissertation investigates aspects of the rhetoric of mysticism that shape German modernism between 1890 and 1905. It exposes mysticism as a constituent and pervasive element of modernism, one that manifests the dynamic tension between demystification and nostalgia characteristic of the Jahrhundertwende. It begins by analyzing key works of cultural criticism by Max Nordau, Hermann Bahr, Samuel Lublinksi and Heinrich Hart that show how mysticism functions as a pivotal conceptual frame for the study of literary production around 1890. Next, I evaluate nineteenth-century texts from different genres, all of which illustrate the substantial semantic shifts in the German word Mystik. The term came to signify not occult, irrational phenomena but rational ways of knowing union or unity. The fervent reception of the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart at the end of the nineteenth century significantly affects this semantic shift. Eckhart's work redefines the modern and modernist understanding of mysticism, as well as the form and function of mystical writing. I then examine four modernist authors---Fritz Mauthner, Gustav Landauer, Rudolf Steiner and Wilhelm Bolsche---who compose theories of expression based on their interpretations of Eckhart and the Baroque mystic Angelus Silesius. They interpret the German mystical tradition as a template for a potentially revolutionary critical-hermeneutic enterprise. Finally, I analyze a selection of texts by central progenitors of German naturalism that synthesize religious and scientific worldviews. These forms of synthesis buttress the rhetoric of both spiritual and national unity. I locate the naturalists' mystical turn in the gesture to establish lateral, immanent sites of unity through ideal forms of social organization. Forms of social union like Gemeinschaft [community] and Volk play a central role in dozens of late nineteenth-century manifestos and works of literary criticism. This testifies to the importance of modern mysticism as a vehicle for the consolidation of a body politic. With this analysis, I reevaluate the wide-spread critical assumption that a progressive or rational modernism is interrupted by a reactionary anti-modernism and show how a drive towards mystical unity informs modernism from its very inception.