MESSIANIC TIME AND GERMAN POLITICS BETWEEN THE WARS (1919-1940): A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE WRITINGS OF PAUL TILLICH AND WALTER BENJAMIN

With the collapse of Wihelmine rule in 1918, the post-war period and the Weimar period which followed presented the long-awaited opportunity for the creation of a new German society based upon the ideals of democracy and socialism. Yet, for two German intellectuals, the revolution could not be the outcome of an historical dynamic alone. To them the revolutionary moment was fused by the coincidence of two orders, the secular and the messianic, which illumined the past and anticipated the coming of divine justice. Hence, both rejected the rationalist presuppositions of social democratic and dialectical materialist political theory.;The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how these two German intellectuals came to integrate this central doctrine of the Judeo-Christian tradition into their respective philosophical worldviews, how the concept of messianism played a pivotal rather than ancillary role in their developing socio-political attitudes, and how the intellectual configuration of messianic time differed significantly in the work of Benjamin and Tillich. Although in the wake of dissatisfaction with Kantian Idealism both men framed their messianic philosophies in German Romantic terms, Benjamin and Tillich parted company over political praxis. Whereas Tillich's kairotic religious socialism argued that realization of the Kairos had already occurred in the Christ event, Benjamin's messianic materialism held that the Jetztzeit of redemption could only happen through a political revolution.;By invoking the concepts of Kairos and Jetztzeit respectively, Tillich and Benjamin sketched the outline for historical redemption based upon a common expectation: the advent of messianic time. This notion of messianic time was to shape the political thought of Paul Tillich, the religious socialist whose seminal essays of the Weimar period were to presage his celebrated Systematic Theology written in America after World War II, and Walter Benjamin, the Jewish Marxist literary critic whose work became identified with the Institut fur Sozialforschung and whose intellectual legacy has been the subject of much controversy in Marxist, theological and literary circles over the past two decades.