‚Transformation revisited‘ : die Schwellenepoche ‚Spätantike‘ im Rückblick der Epochenschwelle 1800

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Fritz Stolz (1942-2001), an eminent scholar of religion, once commented that times of transition between eras, alongside constituting paradigmatic ‚turning points in the communication behaviour of symbolic systems to individuals and vice versa‘, represents spaces where cultural traditions find themselves brought to collapse (cf. Pittrof 2015: 23). Romantic and post-Romantic intellectuals shared this insight. They identified the shift from the pagan pantheon to Judeo-Christian monotheism as the source of a cultural conflict which the latter’s political triumph drove underground, into the realm of the culturally repressed. Authors as diverse as Eichendorff and Heine traced this conflict’s after-effects into their own day, analysing them as an example of a ‚longue durée‘-transformation, the psycho-historical significance of which is encapsulated in the observation by Hugo Rahner (1900-1968) that ‚there is no such thing as no man’s land in the terrain of the psyche‘ – ‚Es gibt in den Bereichen der Psyche kein Niemandsland‘ (Rahner 1945: 270).