Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany, 1890–1933 , by Todd H. Weir

In Paul Krannhals’s Das organische Weltbild (1928), the Baltic German philosopher distinguished his own right-wing, organicist philosophy from what he called ‘die “Weltanschauung” der Sozialdemokratie’. This baleful Weltanschauung, he argued, erred by virtue of its adoption of a ‘materialist, natural-scientific standpoint’. In making this remark, Krannhals was not thinking primarily of Marxism as the primary source of the social-democratic worldview. He was instead thinking of monism, which Krannhals viewed as ‘that eminently cheap natural philosophy’ espoused by scientific writers such as Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Ostwald. The terms in which Krannhals criticised the social-democratic left attest to the vitality of the specifically secularist dimension of late nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century German socialism. Todd H. Weir’s book offers a forceful contextualisation of a phenomenon which has, so far, lacked full historical analysis. The time is certainly ripe for such a book. As Weir notes in the introduction, the decline of old-fashioned secularisation theory, which treated religious change as a mechanical by-product of modernity, has made historians more sensitive to the fact that secularism, as an ideological stance and cultural practice, itself has a history. The idea that secularism had a complex and creative genesis would not have surprised many of its adherents, or indeed opponents, in the period Weir places in focus. But intellectual change in the middle and later twentieth century made secularism look more marginal to modern history than it once appeared. In West Germany during the Cold War, Weir explains, historians’ interest in the supposed evolution of ‘utopian’ into ‘pragmatic’ socialism, an interest often aimed at distancing socialism from extreme ‘political religions’ in the present day, tended to marginalise the thinking of an earlier generation of socialists who saw religious critique as inseparable from societal transformation. Secularist socialism thus fell victim to the condescension of posterity. One of the foremost historians of secularism writing today, Weir has now given ‘red secularism’ in Germany its due.