Crumbs from the Table

Die Erweckung (literally, "the Revival") is a name for the revival of evangelical Christianity in Germany in the 1800s. It has overlap with the Réveil in Switzerland, France and the Netherlands, and also with the second Evangelical Revival in Britain and the Second Great Awakening in America. The Pietist movement, which began during the Baroque era around 1675 under the leadership of Philip Spener, had waned by the 1730s. By this time, Halle university, originally founded by Pietists and a flagship of the movement, became a centre for rationalism under academics such as Christian Wolff (1679–1754).  In the interim, Pietism was kept alive in part by a network of small groups (the Diaspora) which followed the spirituality of the Moravian Christians, a movement similar to Pietism but with its own church structures under the leadership of Von Zinzendorf. There was also the Basle-based Christentumsgesellschaft founded by Urlsperger in 1780, a society founded to counter the ratio...

When strongmen rulers appeal to the "moral majority", and claim to uphold traditional values against the onslaught of liberal decadence, they follow in the footsteps of rulers who have gone before them, not least Adolf Hitler.   The period between the First and Second World Wars in Germany is known as the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). This followed defeat in World War One, and various attempted uprisings at that time. The Weimar Republic was an attempt to introduce liberal democracy to Germany, however it ultimately served as the prelude to the rise of the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler. As well as the infamous hyper-inflation and the inept divisions in party politics, the Weimar Republic was a time of moral decadence. Berlin was particularly notorious for this decadence, represented by figures such as Anita Berber (painted by Otto Dix - left) or night clubs such as the Eldorado or Moka Efti. The Nazi party was able to capitalise on popular revulsion towards the moral decadence o...