The Politics of Prophecy: Reformation Memory and German Exceptionalism in Weimar Thought

In the German-speaking world, the memory of the Reformation has often been closely connected to the theory of German historical exceptionalism, the idea that Germany’s historical development took a ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) to modernity. Yet considering how much attention has been paid to the question of a German Sonderweg and the significance of Weimar as a turning point in the story, scholars have paid little attention to the ideology of exceptionalism in the Weimar Republic itself. This article contributes to the historiography of the Sonderweg debate by examining the complex ways in which the poet Hugo Ball (1886-1927) and the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) traced a narrative of German exceptionalism back to the Reformation era. It argues that these writers appealed to the intellectual and political legacies of the Reformation in an attempt to explain the formative events of their own time: the First World War, and the Russian and German Revolutions. The divergent ideological conclusions they drew reveals much about the conflicted atmosphere of Weimar thought, in which German intellectuals struggled to bridge the gap between crisis and tradition.