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[German Version] I. Terminology No term equivalent to vocation is found in classical Greek and Latin. An officium was exercised by virtue of a preexisting status, usually by birth. Trades (including medicine) fulfilled the conditions of a regular vocation (τέχνη/ téchnē), but had no self-awareness reflected in terminology. In the New Testament, κλῆσις/ klḗsis mostly refers to the “calling” of a Christian (1 Cor 7:20); in the national church of Late Antiquity, it referred primarily to the call to the religious life ( vocatio) in contrast to lay status. In Middle High German mys…

Concepts and Contexts 1. Since the Second World War, the concept of the industrial society has become a broadly accepted earmark of that technologically and economically highly developed society that has replaced the primarily agricultural and laboring ‘pre-industrial' society in North America and Europe, just as, increasingly, in the countries of the ‘Third World’ as well. The denomination indicates, first and foremost, the dominant importance of the industrial method of production. In this method, a technic…

Determination of Concept and Contexts 1. As a neologism derived from the adjective ‘modern’ (Middle Latin, modernus, ‘new,’ from modo, ‘right now’), ‘modernity,’ became a broadly familiar catchword around 1900 for avant-garde revolutions in literature (applied to naturalism by Ernst Wolff in 1886, and broadened by Hermann Bahr in 1890 to include the post-naturalistic currents) and art as an expression of an epochal new departure. Moderne (Ger., ‘Modernity’) was listed in the Brockhaus dictionary as early as 1902, as an “embodiment of the most recent social, l…