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Protestantism In the years before the outbreak of war, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism made repeated efforts to establish closer international relations with other churches. The World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, financially supported by the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, with Friedrich Siegmund Schultze as its German contact, had called its founding assembly in Constance for the 3rd and 4th August of 1914. However, as the war began all the churches qui…

Scheler, Max Ferdinand (August 22, 1874, Munich – May 19, 1928, Frankfurt am Main), German philosopher, a pupil of Rudolf Eucken. After losing his unsalaried post at the University of Munich, Scheler lived in Göttingen and Berlin as a private scholar and freelance author. His book The Genius of War and the German War (1915) made him one of the protagonists of the “Ideas of 1914.” At the same time, as a convert to Catholicism, he undertook lecture tours on behalf of the Foreign Office in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Austria, with the aim of for…

Troeltsch, Ernst (February 17, 1865, Haunstetten near Augsburg – February 1, 1923, Berlin), German theologian, philosopher of culture and historian. In the first two years of the war, Troeltsch, with the authority of a German professor of theology, used his great influence to define public debate about the World War as a “culture war,” providing it with memorable slogans. As early as August 2, 1914, he gave a notable speech to the city and University of Heidelberg announcing his commitment to the …

[German Version] The life reform movement emerged in the second half of the 19th century as an increasingly broad and complex coalition of groups ¶ dedicated to a more natural lifestyle. Vegetarianism (Dietary laws: I), naturopathy, nudism (Clothing and nakedness), clothing reform, housing reform, school reform, the settlement movement, the garden city movement – from Eden-Oranienburg to Monte Verita in Ascona – displayed highly heterogeneous features of a religiosity outside of the church. In their call for a “new huma…

[German Version] (Jul 17, 1874, Königsberg – Apr 30, 1930, Osthausen, Thuringia), first studied Protestant theology in Tübingen, Berlin, and Leipzig. After his theological examinations and additional studies in economics, philosophy, and history, he received his Dr.Phil. in Leipzig in 1898 with his dissertation on “Thomas Aquinas's Position on the Economic Life of His Time.” After a short time as a religious instructor in Zwickau, he became the general secretary in F. Naumann's Nationalsozialer Ve…

[German Version] (May 29, 1880, Blankenburg, Harz – May 8, 1936, Munich), cultural philosopher and political writer. After studying natural and humane sciences in Halle, Munich, and Berlin, Spenger received his doctorate from Halle in 1904, with a dissertation about Heraclitus directed by the Neo-Kantian Alois Riehl. From 1907 to 1912 he taught mathematics, natural science, German, and history at a Gymnasium in Hamburg. In 1913, working as an independent scholar, he started on his major work, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918/1922), in which he described world history as …

[German Version] (ennobled in 1865; Dec 21, 1795, Wiehe an der Unstrut – May 23, 1886, Berlin), historian. After studying theology and philology in Leipzig and Halle and teaching in the Gymnasium in Frankfurt an der Oder, Ranke was appointed associate professor of history in Berlin in 1825; he taught as full professor from 1834 to 1871. Ranke helped make the study of history (Historiography: V, 2) an independent discipline based on critical analysis of sources, but he also viewed the work of a his…

[German Version] (Mar 5, 1850, Barmen – May 11, 1906, Bremen). Kalthoff studied Protestant theology in Berlin, gained his Dr.phil. in Halle in 1874, and obtained his first preaching post in Berlin in the same year. In 1875, he assumed the pastorate in the Brandenburg village of Nickern. Kalthoff became widely known through his dismissal from office in 1878, after he rejected in a public self-indictment the authority of the Prussian Evangelical High Consistory to issue directives on all questions o…

[German Version] (Jan 11, 1869, Rielingshausen, Württemberg – Sep 11, 1956, Munich-Solln), Protestant clergyman, journalist, and politician. Traub was one of the most active political pastors during the Empire and the Weimar Republic. He served as a pastor in Dortmund, sat on the board of J.F. Naumann’s National Social Association and became a centralfigure in M. Rade’s Freunde der Christlichen Welt (Christliche Welt). His intervention in the ecclesiastical proceedings against K. Jatho (Apostolicu…

[German Version] The German Monist League was founded in Jena in 1906 under the influence of zoologist E. Haeckel. Haeckel helped C. Darwin's theory of evolution (Evolution: I) to become accepted as a worldview in Germany; he wrote about Monism as a link between religion and science (1892). His philosophy-of-nature book Die Welträtsel (ET: The Riddle of the Universe) became a bestseller in 1900 and stimulated the formation of the first Monist society in 1903. Out of this grew the Monist League, with a more fixed organizational structure. Its first pres…

[German Version] (Jun 29, 1869, Irgen, Kurland – Jul 20, 1956, Langenburg, Württemberg), Protestant theologian, journalist, colonial politician, and travel writer. After studying theology in Berlin, especially under A. v. Harnack, from 1898 to 1901, Rohrbach became general secretary of the Evangelisch-Sozialer Kongreß. His book Deutschland unter den Weltvölkern [Germany among the world nations] (1903) underlines his preference for a religiously based “liberal imperialism.” Rohrbach worked in various positions in the German colonial service in…

[German Version] I. Politics and Culture On Nov 9, 1918 the foundation of a parliamentary and democratic form of government was laid for the first German republic. On Jan 19, 1919, still in the radicalizing phase of the revolution, the National Assembly was elected to draw up a constitution. It included the “Weimar Coalition,” in which Majority Social Democracy, the German Democratic Party and the Center Party formed a majority. On Aug 11, 1919 the Weimar Constitution came into force. It had been larg…

[German Version] I. Concept, Historical and Legal Foundations The concept of the party has always been polyvalent in the political semantics of European modernity, while the historical configurations of parties have been subject to extreme variations. As intermediary, organizationally cemented groups representing shared views and positioned between the general population and the government, and legitimized by the respective national electoral law, parties have helped promote the parliamentarization and …

[German Version] I. Religio-Cultural Journals – II. Journals of Religious Studies – III. Christianity – IV. Judaism – V. Islam I. Religio-Cultural Journals During the second half of the 19th century, the publication of German-language journals experienced a tremendous upsurge. While the year 1890 saw the publication of 3,203 individual titles, the number had grown to 5,231 by the year 1900 and to 6,689 by 1914. Journals became the preferred medium in academia and culture. In the field of theology, the proportion …