Date Published:

Abstract:

Writing in the years before, during, and right after WWI, Christian Friedrich Weiser published scholarly and political-utopian works of planning for a German victory: Germany’s idealist philosophy, when realized as a political reality, would offer the world a beneficial alternative to the poverty of “Anglo-Saxon” pragmatism. To give imaginative shape to his plans, Weiser also wrote a novella, Die Hoffnung des Iren (1915). Translated into English as The Faith of an Irishman, it latches on to the Irish hatred of the English, the Irish for whom the “German Day” would also come as liberation. In his scholarly book, Shaftesbury und das deutsche Geistesleben (1916), Weiser represents Shaftesbury as inspiration for German idealism. The utopianism in his pamphlets and his fiction is informed by his experiences as a returning immigrant: he believes that ethnic Germans outside the Reich must take the lead in realizing the “German Day.”

October 2025: Rudolphus Teeuwen (PhD Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania) recently retired as professor of English at National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where he taught for nearly 30 years. He now lives in his native the Netherlands. He taught courses related to eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, aesthetics, the utopian imagination, and literary theory, and published on these matters in edited volumes and in journals such as Cultural Critique, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Theory, Culture & Society, Philosophy and Literature, and Symplokē. A special subject of interest to him has been Roland Barthes’s approach to life and letters, and the place of mysticism and utopian imagining in it. Questions of migration, exile, and nostalgia are also of prime interest to him. These elements— mysticism, utopianism, and migration — inform his contribution to Partial Answers as well. With Steffen Hantke he edited Gypsy Scholars, Migrant Teachers and the Global Academic Proletariat (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).