Calling, charisma, and the war of material: The First World War in the politics of Ernst Toller, Ernst Junger, and Max Weber.

Abstract

This dissertation presents a new interpretation of three positions that defined the bourgeois political landscape of the Weimar Republic---the fascist, the split and then homeless leftist, and the republican of reason. Focusing on three figures, Ernst Junger, Ernst Toller, and Max Weber, I show how the political positions that they each sounded out in the early years of the Weimar Republic were refinements of a critical discourse on modern life that was already pronouncedly stark in the early twentieth century and was largely carried over from the <italic>Kaiserreich</italic> to the Weimar Republic in representations of the First World War. I reveal strong continuities that persisted in this discourse, which already assumed the world was in a crisis of materialistic rationalism, as my three subjects wrote about World War I as the first war of material. First received as a means of escape, the war, which dragged on in deadly stalemate, was most influential in the cultural politics of the Weimar Republic as a figure <italic>par excellence </italic> of an inescapable and nefarious materialistic age. All three of my subjects used writing about the war to present a critical interpretation of the features and flaws of this materialistic modernity and to propose what kind of charismatic political authority could assert control over it. The bulk of my research considers the earliest writings of Ernst Toller and Ernst Junger---Toller's poems about the war and his earliest political writings, and Junger's first book, In <italic>Stah1gewittern,</italic> as well as his first political essays and five articles on infantry tactics. Weber is a subject of my study, but he also furnishes my epistemological framework. Using his theory of the types of legitimate authority, specifically on the tension between rational-bureaucratic and charismatic authority, I explore similarities that existed across the political spectrum and draw attention to the broad continuities between pre-war critiques of modernity, the enthusiastic reception of the war, and the reevaluations of it that were deployed to articulate new political positions in the Weimar Republic.