Socialist Mysticism, Mystical Socialism: Gustav Landauer, Ernst Bloch, and Alternative Religious Movements in the Early Twentieth Century

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Julian Strube
• Subject Area: Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 546559804

Throughout history, religious and socialist movements overlapped in complex ways. Scholars have demonstrated how, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, socialist movements were perceived as “heretical” and “mystical”, and how they intersected with alternative religious movements, such as spiritualism and Theosophy. Such connections, however, generally remain unexplored in the study of religion. The proposed project will contribute to this gap by tracing entanglements between religion and socialism in the early twentieth century. The works of anarchist writer, Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), and Marxist philosopher, Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), are particularly instructive in this regard. Their “mystical” understandings of “socialism” will be explained in their religious historical context, generating both novel perspectives on their work, as well as on larger developments at the intersection of religion and socialism. Moreover, a critical analysis of the terms “socialism”, “mysticism”, “esotericism”, and “occultism” in Landauer’s and Bloch’s work will contribute to and revise the theoretical and terminological repertoire of religious studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants