This chapter shows how antisemitism built on Christian anti-Judaism, including blood libel accusations but also the appearance of Christian philosemitism. Documents show Zionism was a reaction to antisemitism as well as to the rise of nationalism and also benefited from Christian restorationism.

In this concluding chapter, the authors summarize the findings of the volume’s contributions and further develop the notion of the Weimar analogy as providing central clues about conceptions of modernity in the postwar era. It further emphasizes the multiple ways in which Weimar has been mobilized in different contexts, how it has worked as a cultural symbol, and why it has had such a profound impact on postwar political thinking in the West. The chapter, finally, expands on what we may take away from the studies in this volume for a more general understanding of the role of analogies and historical lessons for political thought.

The nature of culture and cosmologies, the role of utopian thinking in modern societies, and the limits of social change and activism.

A general introduction, with a description of the author’s intention, personal background, and approach.

Chapter 30 examines Goethe’s relationship with America. The country was for him an imagined space full of possibility, a historical frontier which opened onto modernity. The chapter considers the transatlantic network which, in the post-Napoleonic period, linked Harvard, Göttingen and Weimar, and would prove particularly important for Goethe’s geological studies. It also describes the – at times ambivalent – perspectives on American democracy that reached Goethe from Prince Bernhard, the son of Carl August, during his American travels, before moving to an analysis of American influences on and representations of America in Goethe’s literary work.

Chapter 35 examines Goethe’s awareness of the impact of human activity on the physical environment and his often prescient depictions of damage to natural systems. These are shaped by a range of perspectives and experiences, from Goethe’s work as a civil servant, to his scientific study, to his lifelong passion for nature. The chapter traces two themes in particular that run through his literary work: first, flooding, and second, fire and the destruction of forests. It also examines Goethe’s historical position, between the pre-industrial world and capitalist modernity.

Chapter 32 considers the question of modernity as explored in Goethe’s Faust. In his hands, the cast of mind of the restless central character constitutes an analogy of modernity. The chapter argues that the duo of Faust and Mephistopheles epitomises the mood of Goethe’s own time, which paved the way for the modern industrial era. It demonstrates that Part I radicalises the revolt against tradition which is an essential part of the original Faust legend, while Part II thematises incipient capitalist economics and the manipulation of nature through technology.

Chapter 13 examines the development of Weimar Classicism, from the impact of Goethe’s own experiences in Italy to his collaboration with Friedrich Schiller. A crucial factor in any classicism, including that of Goethe and Schiller, is the absence of the ancients, and the chapter argues that Weimar Classicism was far from the settled, canonical project for which it is often taken. Rather, it emerged from historical crisis, above all the French Revolution, and it is characterised by internal tensions, between antiquity and modernity, desire and restraint.

The relationship between feminism and sexuality in the long twentieth century is both complex and multifaceted. Whether sexuality is understood as congenital or acquired, defined by object choice or aim, central to the character of an individual or the health of a population, it is a highly contested and contradictory set of discourses and institutional practices. Feminism is similarly impossible to define as a coherent ideology or political praxis. At once a historically specific political and cultural phenomenon emerging in the first decades of the twentieth century, feminism is also a highly differentiated transnational event that belies a single origin, set of beliefs, or constituency. Organized around two key historical figures–the modern girl and the feminist-as-lesbian–this essay draws on feminist, queer, and historical studies of the world-wide feminist movements of the 1910s-1930s, and of the women’s liberation era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to trace the connections between the commodification and politicization of women’s sexuality as two axes around which the unsettled and generative relationship between modern sexuality and feminism revolves.

This concluding chapter briefly considers the puzzle of why belief in the supernatural is endemic in certain times and places but not, for the most part, in modern Western Europe. It explores a range of theoretical possibilities: salience; the theory dependence of observation; the effects of language, concepts, cultural conditioning; and what might be called cultural and scientific myths and liturgies. It then moves to a brief consideration of how the general thesis of the book relates to other ‘modernity stories’, including those of Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, John Milbank, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Drawing upon their respective expertise in early twentieth-century literature and music, Matthew Ingleby and Ceri Owen explore the centrality of literature within Vaughan Williams’s work and career, demonstrating that his literariness was not simply an outgrowth of his personal artistic proclivities, but rather was mediated by several institutions that were key to the production of a new sense of English national identity during the first half of the twentieth century. By contextualizing Vaughan Williams’s literary tastes and choices for musical settings – including his interest in historically remote, non-contemporary, and Anglophone writers and texts – it is argued that such choices should be read less as evidence of the reactionary, conservative nationalism with which he has often been associated, and more as an indication of his participation in forward-looking currents within twentieth-century literary culture. Ingleby and Owen conclude by proposing that, while the nation may have been the frame through which Vaughan Williams often articulated a complex relation to modernity, his powerful interest in internationalist figures such as Walt Whitman and William Blake suggest that his cultural nationalism formed part of a broader humanitarian aspiration, one that was implicitly indebted to his literary imagination.

After World War One, new institutions and gadgets gave reality to a changing landscape of public culture. Therefore, in this chapter, we explore applied science in the inter-war public realm. Society’s usage interacted with officials’ language as public and bureaucratic discussions of applied science intertwined. Talk about applied science connected intimately with an intense discussion of ‘modern civilisation’ to make sense of science too. Amidst anxiety, the separation of pure and applied became important to science’s standing. To some, the process by which scientific research led to a multitude of new gadgets was frighteningly dangerous. To others, science was exploited too slowly due to the historical inadequacy of British industry. Both branch of government and a cathedral of applied science, the Science Museum displayed linkages between science and technical wonders. Debates were conducted over the new radio service and in newspapers, and were contested by bishops as well as politicians.

In his essay On Humor, Pirandello effectively places himself in the tradition of Cervantes, who engaged modern problematic subjectivity, not with the tragic relativism of his contemporary Hamlet but with a nimble comic irony that learns to live within the condition. Some three centuries later, growing dissatisfied with the realist tradition Cervantes had helped to found, a number of early twentieth-century European writers, largely influenced by Nietzsche, including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann, turned to myth not only as a literary form but also as a form of life. In their work, the poetic imagination seeks to become mythopoeic and thereby affirm the mythic basis of human culture. In three late plays – Lazarus, The New Colony, and the unfinished The Mountain Giants – Pirandello also turned to mythic motifs, but these works are not attempts at mythopoeic creation so much as they are political and moral allegories using mythic themes.