ABSTRACT
Paul Weindling, distinguished historian of German nineteenth-century science, noted that by the end of the century the discourse of natural science in the rigorous Gradgrindian understanding ostensibly enjoyed unchallenged authority over the German public mind. This chapter looks at the history, theory and practice of spiritualism, notably in the work of Carl du Prel and Baron Albrecht von Schrenck-Notzing. For Thomas Mann, the ghosts summoned by spiritualism were not only the Pygmalionic compensatory need to recreate the lost objects of desire, but also the return of the repressed, a confession: the amoral memories of his own homosexuality made present, conscious and public. Spiritualism is for Wilhelm Bolsche one manifestation of the historical process of cultural secularisation by which the functions of traditional religion are gradually assumed by art, emblem of nineteenth-century Germany’s predicament. The message of the Mittagsgottin is of course ultimately that modernist art, whilst not displacing science, anticipates Sigmund Freud.
