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Christian Giudice's Occult Imperium explores Italian national forms of Occultism, chiefly analyzing Arturo Reghini (1878-1946), his copious writings, and Roman Traditionalism. Trained as a mathematician at the prestigious University of Pisa, Reghini was one of the three giants of occult and esoteric thought in Italy, alongside his colleagues Julius Evola (1898-1974) and Giulian Kremmerz (1861-1930). Using Reghini's articles, books, and letters, as a guide, Giudice explores the interaction between occultism, Traditionalism, and different facets of modernity in early-twentieth-century Italy. The book takes into consideration many factors particular to the Italian peninsula: the ties with avant-garde movements such as the Florentine Scapigliatura and Futurism, the occult vogues typical to Italy, the rise to power of Benito Mussolini and Fascism, and, lastly, the power of the Holy See over different expressions of spirituality. Occult Imperium explores the convergence of new forms of spirituality in early twentieth-century Italy.
The book explores the pursuit of humanitarian objectives in the face of war, exile and extreme social dislocation. Each chapter covers a pair of intellectuals and artists: Samuel Hartlib & Comenius, John Hall & William Rand, Ernst Barlach & Jakob Steinhardt, Salo & Robert Pratzer.
The relationship between Nazism and occultism has been an object of fascination and speculation for decades. Peter Staudenmaier’s Between Occultism and Nazism provides a detailed historical examination centered on the anthroposophist movement founded by Rudolf Steiner. Its surprising findings reveal a remarkable level of Nazi support for Waldorf schools, biodynamic farming, and other anthroposophist initiatives, even as Nazi officials attempted to suppress occult tendencies. The book also includes an analysis of anthroposophist involvement in the racial policies of Fascist Italy. Based on extensive archival research, this study offers rich material on controversial questions about the nature of esoteric spirituality and alternative cultural ideals and their political resonance.
An innovative, critical, historically informed, yet accessible reassessment of writers who remained in Nazi Germany and Austria yet expressed nonconformity - even dissent - through their fiction.
Norse Revival offers a thorough investigation of Germanic Neopaganism (Asatru) through an international and comprehensive historical perspective. It traces Germanic Neopaganism’s genesis in German ultra-nationalist and occultist movements around 1900. Based on ethnographic research of contemporary groups in Germany, Scandinavia and North America, the book examines this alternative Neopagan religion’s transformations towards respectability and mainstream thought after the 1970s. It asks which regressive and progressive elements of a National Romantic discourse on Norse myth have shaped Germanic Neopaganism. It demonstrates how these ambiguous ideas about Nordic myth permeate general discourses on race, religion, gender, sexuality, and aesthetics. Ultimately, Norse Revival raises the question whether Norse mythology can be freed from its reactionary ideological baggage.
These papers examine how occult and esoteric themes appear in visual and verbal media, connecting to intellectual history, literature, the arts, present day pop culture, and religious practices. The topics range from the witchcraft motives in the love poetry of the 15th-century Humanist poet, Conrad Celtis; through the activities of Polish and Russian theosophists; Croatian, Greek, Polish painters of the spiritual; the philosophy of wine by the Hungarian esoteric philosopher Béla Hamvas; to contemporary Serbian magic and neo-shamanism. Two studies touch upon the influence of Freemasonry and the Kabbalah in Western esotericism, and, although these are not specifically Central European topics, they provide parallel perspectives to what the other papers of the collection are investigating.
This book focuses on sciences in the universities of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the chapters in it provide an overview, mostly from the point of view of the history of science, of the different ways universities dealt with the institutionalization of science teaching and research. A useful book for understanding the deep changes that universities were undergoing in the last years of the 20th century. The book is organized around four central themes: 1) Universities in the longue durée; 2) Universities in diverse political contexts; 3) Universities and academic research; 4) Universities and discipline formation. The book is addressed at a broad readership which includes scholars and researchers in the field of General History, Cultural History, History of Universities, History of Education, History of Science and Technology, Science Policy, high school teachers, undergraduate and graduate students of sciences and humanities, and the general interested public.
The book offers a concise introduction to the history of art, culture and everyday life of cities in the German cultural area between renaissance and revolution. References from sources and illustrations define the text; they are together useful resources for classes at schools and universities.
This is the most comprehensive account to date of literary politics in Nazi Germany and of the institutions, organizations and people who controlled German literature during the Third Reich. Barbian details a media dictatorship-involving the persecution and control of writers, publishers and libraries, but also voluntary assimilation and pre-emptive self-censorship-that began almost immediately under the National Socialists, leading to authors' forced declarations of loyalty, literary propaganda, censorship, and book burnings. Special attention is given to Nazi regulation of the publishing industry and command over all forms of publication and dissemination, from the most presitigious publishing houses to the smallest municipal and school libraries. Barbian also shows that, although the Nazis censored books not in line with Party aims, many publishers and writers took advantage of loopholes in their system of control. Supporting his work with exhaustive research of original sources, Barbian describes a society in which everybody who was not openly opposed to it, participated in the system, whether as a writer, an editor, or even as an ordinary visitor to a library.
Derek Hastings here illuminates an important and largely overlooked aspect of early Nazi history, going back to the years after World War I--when National Socialism first emerged--to reveal its close early ties with Catholicism. Although an antagonistic relationship between the Catholic Church and Hitler's regime developed later during the Third Reich, the early Nazi movement was born in Munich, a city whose population was overwhelmingly Catholic. Focusing on Munich and the surrounding area, Hastings shows how Catholics played a central and hitherto overlooked role in the Nazi movement before the 1923 Beerhall Putsch. He examines the activism of individual Catholic writers, university students, and priests and the striking Catholic-oriented appeals and imagery formulated by the movement. He then discusses why the Nazis embarked on a different path following the party's reconstitution in early 1925, ultimately taking on an increasingly anti-Catholic and anti-Christian identity.