Protestant Islam in Weimar Germany: Hugo Marcus and “The Message of the Holy Prophet Muhammad to Europe”

Abstract

The article explores the Islam envisioned in the extensive writings of one of the most prominent German converts to Islam in Weimar Germany, the Jewish poet, philosopher, and political activist Hugo Marcus (1880–1966). Marcus's understanding of Islam is a surprisingly Eurocentric and even Germanic one. It is not only the religion of the German past, Marcus claims, but also, given its faith in the intellect and in progress, the religion of the future. His ideas do not figure in the historiography of Weimar Germany. While many of the new political notions of the future that Weimar writers contemplated have been explored, scholars have paid less attention to the spiritual and religious utopias envisioned in the 1920s. This article engages with German responses to the rupture of World War I and the realm of imagined political possibilities in Weimar Germany by focusing on one such utopia overlooked in historiography, Marcus's German-Islamic synthesis.

Spiritualizing reason, rationalizing spirit: Muslim public intellectuals in the German far right

“…After the First World War, Islam emerged as a source of German renewal for both liberal-rationalist and illiberal-spiritualist politics. Fusing protestant ethics, the Enlightenment, and romanticism in a German–Islamic synthesis, Weimar intellectuals such as Jewish-Muslim convert Hugo Marcus saw in Islam ‘the most modern, progressive, advanced, and rational of religions’ in the tradition of Goethe, Hegel, and Kant (Baer, 2017: 174); conversion to Islam helped redefine and retain a spiritual Germanness in the name of progress (Baer, 2017: 184). Later, Nazi leaders idealized Islam as a soldierly religion and source of spiritual renewal against what they saw as a ‘Jewish-led rationalistic modernity’ (Motadel, 2014).…”