Vom Messias. Kulturphilosophische Essays  – On a Heidelberg Circle of Windelband’s Doctoral Students

This article reconstructs the intellectual profile of a largely neglected Heidelberg circle of young philosophers around Wilhelm Windelband and examines their 1909 essay collection Vom Messias within the broader context of Southwest German Neo-Kantianism. While Windelband diagnosed the crisis of modern culture in terms of relativism, historicism, and the retreat of philosophy into epistemology, he nonetheless defended a renewed reflection on enduring values grounded in critical idealism. By contrast, his students – Richard Kroner, Nicolai von Bubnoff, Georg Mehlis, Sergius Hessen, and Fedor Stepun – articulated a markedly different response. Their essays express a messianic and Counter-Enlightenment mood, combining cultural pessimism with prophetic expectations of spiritual and political renewal. By examining this contrast, the article argues that Vom Messias marks an early and programmatic shift away from Neo-Kantian rationalism toward forms of Romanticism, political theology, and cultural nationalism.