Activity: Hosting a visitor › Hosting an academic visitor › Academic
Description
This seminar explores the Islam envisioned in the extensive writings of one of the most prominent of German converts to Islam in Weimar Germany, the Jewish poet, philosopher, and political activist Hugo Marcus (1880-1966). Rather than an "Eastern" Islam, Marcus' understanding of that religion is a surprisingly Eurocentric and even Germanic one. To him, Islam is not only the religion of the German past, but also, given its faith in the intellect and in progress, the religion of the future. Marcus's ideas do not figure in the historiography of Weimar Germany. Primarily this is because while many of the new political notions of the future that writers contemplated have been explored, scholars have paid less attention to the spiritual and religious utopias envisioned in the 1920s. This paper engages with the question of German responses to the rupture of World War I and the realm of imagined political possibilities in Weimar Germany by focusing on one such utopia overlooked in historiography, the German-Islamic synthesis as advocated by Hugo Marcus.