Beyond Kant and Nietzsche

The Munich Defence of Christian Humanism

Tracey Rowland

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567703194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The Christian Humanist ideas of six Catholic scholars who were based in Munich during the first half of the 20th century are profiled in this volume. They were all interested in presenting and defending a Christian humanism in the aftermath of German Idealism and the anti-Christian humanism of Friedrich Nietzsche. They were seeking to offer hope to Christians during the darkest years of the Nazi regime and the post-Second World War era of shame, guilt and reconstruction.

Chapter 1

Carl Muth

(1867–1944)

Hochland was borne by the personality of Muth.¹

Carl Borromäus Johann Baptist Muth was born in Worms on the Upper Rhine where some five centuries ago in 1521 the Diet of Worms issued the Edict of Worms declaring Martin Luther a heretic. Worms is also associated with the Nibelungenlied whose characters include historical figures from the fifth and sixth centuries when Worms was the capital of the Kingdom of the Burgundians. Muth was a child during Bismarck’s Kulturkampf – the program of asserting Prussian government dominance over switch-points of Catholic cultural influence – and he died in November 1944 when Hitler’s regime would soon be defeated. In the era of Muth’s birth, Catholic parents distanced themselves from the Protestant majority of the Reich by giving their children unmistakably Catholic names. In his case he was named after a cardinal responsible for the reforms of the Council of Trent and St John the Baptist, otherwise known by his biblical title, ‘the voice crying in the wilderness’. Both names were to prove apt for Muth. He grew up to be both a reformer of Catholic intellectual life and one of the voices against the Nazi regime.

At the age of 14, one year after the death of his mother Katharina, he entered the boarding school of the mission house of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) located in Steyl on the Meuse River in the Netherlands. He remained there for three years before moving to Algiers to study with another missionary Order known as the White Fathers. This Order was founded in 1868 by the French Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, Archbishop of Carthage and Algiers and Primate of Africa. Muth eventually decided against a missionary vocation and returned to Germany. He was to retain an appreciation of the French Catholic spirituality he had come to know in Algiers for the rest of his life.

After military service in Mainz (1890/1) he began to study economics, constitutional law, philosophy, history and literature in Berlin (1891/2), but then changed course to art history studies in Paris (1892/3) and Rome (1893) where he built relationships within the literary circles of these great cities. A year later he married Anna Thaler from Hessen with whom he had five children (Reinhard, Lulu, Wolfgang, Othmar and Paul). Reinhard was to die in the final months of the First World War, one of the nine million military victims of this conflagration.

From 1894 to 1896 Muth worked in Strasbourg for the newspaper Der Elsässer, and from 1896 to 1902 he edited the Catholic magazine Alte und Neue Welt that was based in Einsiedeln, the Swiss town renowned for its tenth-century Benedictine Abbey of St Meinrad, and more recently as the location of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Johannes Verlag.

In 1898 Muth published a Streitschrift (polemical article) on the subject of Catholic fiction under the pseudonym Veremundus in which he was highly critical of the ghetto culture of German literary Catholicism, one of the side effects of the Kulturkampf. Having spent some time in France where ‘believing Catholics moved with great freedom in the intellectual elite of the country, taking part in the big discussions as equal partners who felt superior’, Muth wanted the same situation to prevail in Germany.² His solution was to found the journal Hochland with Paul Huber-Kempten, the director of Kösel-Verlag, a Catholic publishing company based in Munich.³

Hochland operated from 1903 to 1941 when it was shut down by the National Socialists on the bureaucratic ground of paper rationing. In reality, however, it was closed because it published articles the Nazis did not like. Hochland was ‘an ark of Christian and humanist thought during a period of total apostasy’.⁴ Some of the articles took an esoteric form. Konrad Ackermann is reported as saying, ‘We write against Napoleon and everyone knows that it is Hitler who is targeted.’⁵

Hochland reopened in 1946 and continued until 1971. From 1902 to 1932 and from 1935 to 1939 Muth was Hochland’s editor and based in Munich. During the final years of his life, from October 1941 to February 1943, he befriended Hans Scholl, one of the martyrs of the White Rose resistance movement and gave him a job putting his library in order. Speaking of the relationship of the White Rose students with Muth, Paul Shrimpton wrote:

Their encounter with Muth opened a window onto another world, as he introduced them to scholars and writers who were vehemently opposed to National Socialism, and it also effected a remarkable religious awakening in Hans, Sophie and their friends. But Muth was not just an entrée to a circle of dissidents; he had a talent for teaching and dealing with young people. The support Muth had given to hearts and minds in the face of Nazi ideology was not stifled by the suppression of Hochland in 1941; he simply diverted his energies to the Scholls and their friends. He conversed with them, lent them books, tutored them in theology, and introduced them to other writers and thinkers. In turn, this younger generation helped Muth not to lose hope that the German people would regain its conscience; for him they represented a ‘secret Germany’ who could uphold and pass on the values he cherished and had made his life’s work.⁶

In an essay of tribute to Muth published in a revived Hochland in 1946, Josef Schöningh, the new post-war editor, remarked that Muth ‘surrounded every talent he encountered with demanding care, more for their own sake than for the sake of Hochland’.⁷ He then cited Hans Scholl as an example: ‘In the Summer of 1942, when [Scholl] was cataloguing Muth’s library, he had long conversations almost every day with the sage and was confirmed in his Christian-German protest against the rule of the monsters.’⁸

In a work on the student dissidents, titled A Noble Treason: The Story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Revolt, Richard Hanser offered the following sketch of Muth:

Carl Muth lived on the outskirts of Munich in a little house surrounded by a modest garden and bulging with books, some of them written by him. He was a Catholic thinker of a high order, and the absorption of his life was to reveal and foster the relationships between the aesthetic and the spiritual. He saw the two as interlocked and inseparable. One of his most admired and widely discussed essays was called ‘Religion, Art and Poetry’. His ideas were often daring and unorthodox, and it was said that he hovered between sainthood and excommunication.⁹

In a memorial essay published in 1953, Werner Bergengruen, a Baltic German novelist and poet and Catholic convert, recounted the story of Muth’s providential escape from the Gestapo following the arrest of the Scholl siblings:

After Hans and Sophie Scholl were arrested, two Gestapo officers appeared at Muth’s house late in the evening. He was asked whether he would admit that he knew Hans Scholl and saw him often. Muth answered in the affirmative. Then you are one of the intellectual authors? In response, Muth yelled at him: ‘They’ll have to prove that to me!’ With this declaration, Muth had usurped control of the situation. When the officials, who by the way had become polite after Muth’s outburst of anger, paced over his desk, it occurred to him, simmering hot after his declaration, that the manuscript of Theodor Haecker’s ‘Day and Night Books’ was in a compartment on this desk! In the next instant it could be in the hands of the Gestapo. Haecker and Muth would both be trapped. In this moment of need Muth turned to St. Thomas More, the martyr of the upright Christian conscience. … The Gestapo officers passed over the subject, Haecker’s manuscript remained untouched.¹⁰

Hochland (literally highland) can be a reference to the Bavarian alps, but it also carries the connotation of the highest place, and it was this idea that featured in the journal’s motto: Hohen Geistes Land – Sinn dem Höchsten zugewandt (meaning to turn the realm of the spirit/mind toward the highest things). The name was initially proposed by the Alsatian writer Friedrich Lienhard (1865–1929) for another journal (Die Heimat), but when it was not taken up by the editors of Die Heimat, it was adopted by Muth. Professor Dr Alois Dempf (1891–1982), a medievalist and cultural historian, also had an integrating influence on the Hochland project, particularly in terms of the general concept of the journal.¹¹ Hochland was noted for being non-confessional and equally critical of liberalism and fascism. Its authors condemned modern individualism together with ‘shallow democratism’ as a ‘faith of the mob’ (Pöbelglaube).¹² Hochland also stood out from other journals in so far as it published articles across the whole spectrum of humanities subjects, not exclusively theology and philosophy papers but also essays on art, literature, history, politics and music. It was thus one of the earliest attempts to offer reflections on cultural life through the lens of theology and philosophy and other humanities’ disciplines. Unlike the orientation of Leonine scholasticism then dominant in the Roman academies, and unlike the universities influenced by German Idealism, especially by the ideas of Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt with their strict observance of sharp divisions between t...