A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (review)

A Generation of Materialism, the descriptive title that Carlton Hayes used for his book (1941) more than half a century ago to capture the essence of the European world between 1870 and 1914, appears, over the last decade and a half, to have lost much of its luster. Many new and impressive studies of the same era stress the alternate and culturally vital importance of spiritualism, The Other World that Jane Oppenheim describes in her book on English occultism (1985)—analyses that substantially modify the assumed prevalence of a dominant materialism that suffused European civilization at the fin de siècle.

Corinna Treitel's new book reveals a deep understanding of how impassioned the quest after spiritual certainty was for important segments of German scientific and cultural life in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. In a detailed and highly revisionist analysis of the history of occultism and theosophy in Germany after 1850, Treitel uncovers interesting source material that illustrates the growth of a spiritualist consciousness not just among charlatans, who achieved surprising popular acclaim, but also in the nascent world of academic psychology and many branches of the sciences. Very importantly, she also demonstrates that immersion in the revelations of the spiritual world stimulated the artistic insight of leading painters and writers whose creativity led to the birth of avant-garde modernism.

But there is also a deeper agenda that Treitel has set for herself. The literature on German occultism has often linked it with the intellectual and cultural forces that gave rise to National Socialism, as, for example, in the writings of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Treitel desires to put this idea to rest and to stress the spiritualist movement as a generally positive force in German life. In striving to accomplish this, however, she most likely encountered a major obstacle. The history of occultism and theosophy in Germany has been intimately linked with the monism of the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, who has also been cited as a possible source of Nazi ideology. Treitel does not explicitly deny any connection between monism and theosophy—rather, she fails to discuss its existence. Scholarly citations that might demonstrate such a connection are not to be found in her book, and this hiatus in the literature consulted raises a question as to the ultimate reliability of her analysis.

Many, if not most, of the figures that are named as theosophical leaders by Treitel either enthusiastically declared their loyalty to Haeckel's monism, or were compelled in some way to interact with it; and the two movements virtually merged during the latter part of the nineteenth century, a fact generally well known to historians and graphically illustrated in a major exhibition about German culture and art at the conclusion of the nineteenth century, organized by the Berlin Academy of the Arts in September 1984.¹ Treitel, however, says not a word about all this, and mentions Haeckel only once in passing. Major theosophical figures like Rudolf Steiner, Carl du Prel, Edgar Dacqué, and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, or psychologists like Eduard von Hartmann, Carl Gustav Jung, and Sigmund Freud, were all intellectually active within a monist context; and other prominent individuals mentioned by Treitel, outside the German-speaking world—like the French and Swiss psychologists Charles Richet and Auguste Forel, or the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso—also maintained close links to monism. The main occult journal in Germany, Sphinx (as Treitel mentions, but only in passing), opens with a declaration of its monist goals and outlook (p. 52). It was monism that provided the scientific authority that made possible the theosophical understanding of the nature of soul, spirit, and matter. Monism also aided in theosophy's rebellion against Christianity and its questioning of traditional Western culture and values, and it was monism that provided much of the foundation for ariosophy, a branch of theosophy that was close...