Der heilige Zeitgeist

Friedrich Wilhelm Graf's studies of Protestant theology at universities in the interwar years have repeatedly triggered controversies. Critical interpretations of the anti-liberal theologies of Karl Barth, Friedrich Gogarten and Hans-Joachim Iwand met with opposition, as did studies of the anti-democratic cult of authority of conservative Lutherans. For the history of theology in the Weimar Republic, Graf focuses on a consistent historiography and, inspired by the modern history of ideas and discourse, on the political contextualization of the theological production of knowledge. The »anti-historical revolution« in the early 1920s brought forward a radical anti-bourgeois gesture of the absolute. An emphasis on a very strong faith and a hunger for wholeness were united with a decisionist Zeitgeist which made it almost impossible to recognize the parliamentary democracy's need to compromise.