“In Deiter’s masterful study of German exceptionalism, he explores Germany’s special path to nationhood through a lens that was always hiding in plain sight: religion. He argues that the apocalyptic response of German intellectuals to the crises of two world wars cannot be disentangled from religious history. Taking inspiration from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Deiters brings four “retrospective prophets” of Germany into dialogue, untangling their many connections between politics and culture, religion and Germanness. He compares Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Catholic alternative to Prussian nationalism to the Calvinism inherent in Helmut Plessner’s study of social radicalism and Germany’s “belated nation” caused by the trauma of the Reformation. Against these positions he pits Thomas Mann’s Lutheran Protestantism in the writer’s musings about democracy and Germany, and in a prologue that is really an epilogue, Deiters looks at Hermann Cohen and his unfulfilled prophesy of redemption in a symbiosis of German and Jewish cultures. A compelling read.”

—Alison Lewis, Professor Emerita of German Studies, the University of Melbourne

“Franz-Josef Deiters has given us a work of conceptual originality, with an impressive comparative architecture and an interdisciplinary reach. The study shows convincingly how religious/confessional issues were central, not peripheral to the tradition of so-called German ‘exceptionalism’. The juxtaposition of the Catholic Hofmannsthal, the Calvinist Plessner, the Lutheran Mann and the Jewish Cohen produces illuminating connections between thinkers normally treated separately, while the concept of “retrospective prophecy” provides a particularly effective way of understanding how catastrophe reshapes historical interpretation. The placement of Cohen as an “interrogative coda” is especially powerful, since his pre-1918 confidence in German-Jewish cultural symbiosis exposes the contingency, rather than inevitability, of the dark history that was to follow. Throughout David Roberts’s translation is admirable: consistently fluent, precise and idiomatic in English, it manages to retain the conceptual rigour of the German original.”

—James Hodkinson, Associate Professor, University of Warwick

Franz-Josef Deiters is the Honorary Associate Professor in Germanic Studies at the University of Sydney and a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include Die Entweltlichung der Bühne [De-worlding the Stage] (2015), Verweltlichung der Bühne? [Re-worlding the Stage?] (2019), Neues Welttheater? [New World Theater?] (2022), and Sprechen über Deutschland – vom Standpunkt der Religion [Speaking about Germany from the Standpoint of Religion] (2024), the German edition of Retrospective Prophets.

David Roberts is the Emeritus Professor of German Studies at Monash University and an Emeritus Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His recent publications include History of the Present (2021), a translation of Hans Blumenberg’s The Readability of the World (2022), with Robert Savage, and Science Fiction and Narrative Form (2023), with Andrew Milner and Peter Murphy.

Introduction by David Roberts

1. Hofmannsthal’s Renewed Counter-Reformation as the Bridge Between a Past and Future European Civilization

2. Helmuth Plessner: The Belated Nation

3. Thomas Mann and Lutheran Self-Critique

4. Hermann Cohen: Germany and the Jews

Chapter One

“What Is German?” The Topicality of an Old Question

Chapter Two

Austrian Universalist Tradition Versus Prussian Nationalist Modernism. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Catholic Reading of German History

1. At the Outbreak of War: A Plea for the Supranational

2. World War One: A Redemptive-Historical Event

3. Against Prussian-Germany’s Nationalist Self-Enclosure: Austria’s Providential Mission

4. Post-World War One: Redemptive Signs of Religious Conversion

5. Austrian Theater: Medium of German Cultural Universalism

6. Hofmannsthal’s Own Contribution: German Theater Festivals at Salzburg

Chapter Three

The Political Seducibility of Bourgeois Spirit: Helmuth Plessner’s Calvinist Reading of German History

1. National Socialism as Starting Point and Pivot

2. German Intellectual History as the History of the Lutheran Type of Consciousness

3. The Specific Prussian Constellation

4. Economic Crisis and Political Destabilization

5. Exclusion of Catholicism and the Path Towards Völkisch Thinking

6. Limits of Community and Cultural Calvinism

Chapter Four

Thomas Mann’s Cultural Lutheran Self-Criticism

1. The Apocalyptic Narrative of the “De-Germanization” of Germany

2. Luther as the Source of the Opposition Between Spirit and Power

3. Luther’s Reformation as an Entelechy of Germanic Being

4. German History as a Genealogical Series of Protestant Founding Fathers

5. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner as the Last Nonpolitical Germans

6. Mann’s Own Literary Work as the Fulfillment of the German Götterdämmerung

7. Family Ancestry, and Fraternal Antithesis

8. Secularization as Modern Europe’s Greatest Danger

9. Continuity and Rupture in Mann’s Thinking of the 1920s

10. Admiration of Catholicism and Doubts About Protestant Inwardness

11. The Political Fatality of Lutheran Inwardness

12. Doctor Faustus as a Manifesto of Lutheran Self-Criticism

Chapter Five

Hermann Cohen’s Cultural Jewish Hope for the Future

1. The Interweaving of German and Jewish History

2. Common Origin of Modern Judaism and Germanness in Hellenism

3. Demand for Equal Rights for the Jewish Faith

4. Eternal Peace as the World-Historical Horizon of the German-Jewish Symbiosis

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index