Neopaganism in German-speaking Europe

Neopaganism (Neuheidentum) in German-speaking Europe has since its emergence in the 1970s diversified into a wide array of traditions, particularly during the New Age boom of the 1980s.

Schmid (2006) distinguishes four main currents:

R. Gründer in Junker (2007) analyzing the role of Neopagan groups in Germany concludes that German Neopaganism has been used as a projection-screen for the attribution of anti-Christian, antisemitic, and right extremist ideologies mainly by churches and the media.

Neopaganism in Germany and Austria has been strongly influenced by the occultist Germanic mysticism pioneered by Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels in the 1890 to 1930 period. A Guido von List Society was founded 1908. Other early groups influenced by List were the Deutschgläubige Gemeinschaft (1911), the Germanenorden (1912) and the Germanische Glaubens-Gemeinschaft (1907).

The contemporary term Deutschgläubig for these movements may be translated as either "German Faith", "Teutonic Faith" or in the more archaic usage of Deutsch as "folk belief". Several of these groups came together in 1933 forming an Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Deutschen Glaubensbewegung. There was however no unified take on the contents of a Deutschgläubig religiosity, and approaches varied from a "national Christianity" based on the Arianism of the Goths, German mysticism, Humanism and free thought, as well as racialist ideas of a native Nordic or Aryan religion. The radical free-thinking tendency combined with the Nordicist one to the effect of pronounced hostility towards Christianity and the Church. Krause et al. (1977:557) distinguish four basic types subsumed under Deutschgläubig:

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