| This dissertation reconsiders the interconnection of nationalism and mysticism in German language texts of the early-to mid-twentieth century. From c. 1900, writers as different as Gustav Landauer and Alfred Rosenberg focused on the writings of medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. While part of a fascination with mysticism that characterized the age, this movement also constituted an effort to analyze the links between individuals and a larger community. My thesis considers how the early twentieth-century turn to mysticism provided both a thematic and a rhetorical structure for imagining the nation. In Eckhartian sermons, Landauer and Rosenberg discovered a mystical rhetoric that deconstructs the individual and re-constructs him in relation to God. Similarly, the national individual is deconstructed, then reconstructed as bound to the nation.; Critics from Benedict Anderson to Homi Bhabha to Timothy Brennan have emphasized the role texts play in the construction of the nation. Anderson links the rise of the nation to print-capitalism, the newspaper and the novel. For him, imaginative literature accompanied both the rise of nations in the nineteenth century and nationalism's persistence in post-industrial and post-colonial societies. The three novels I read—one German (Hermann Hesse's Demian), one Austrian (Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), and one Swiss (Max Frisch's Gantenbein)—contain solitary individuals imagining themselves part of a larger collective. Where Anderson represents the newspaper- or novel-reader consciously imagining the national community, I analyze nationalism as a by-product of the individual's creation through mysticism. In Germany, the question of nationalism is complicated by the history of Nazism, associated with irrationalism, mysticism and the occult—elements distinct from those treated by theorists of “nation and narration.” In contrast, I locate mysticism not in irrationalism but in quotidian practices like reading the newspaper, or listening to the radio, as well as in clearly mystical experiences. Through everyday acts, the solitary protagonist's identity is deconstructed and re-constructed in unio mystica with the collective, a conversion experience that occurs transparently in the everyday. Thus mystical elements in the modern novel, like the Eckhartian strain in Musil's Mann ohne Eigenschaften, are as much about the nation as about mysticism. |
