Carl Muth

Muth attended the gymnasium in Worms from 1877 to 1881. With the intention of becoming a missionary, he attended the school of the Steyler Missionaries from 1882 to 1884 and the missionary school in Algiers of the White Fathers from 1884 to 1885. He undertook military service in Mainz in 1890 and 1891, then studied for a year at the University of Berlin, taking classes in philosophy, history, and literature. He studied history and art in Paris (1892–1893) and Rome (1893), began writing for the Mainzer Journal, and befriended Georges Goyau. In 1894, he became editor at the newspaper Der Elsässer in Strasbourg, and he married Anna Thaler from Fulda in the same year. From 1895 to 1902 he worked as editor at the Catholic monthly family magazine Alte und Neue Welt.Becker par. 1.

Prompted by a public debate over the "inferiority of German Catholics," Muth began publishing on Catholic literature; furthermore, he began to call for an end to the confessionalism that remained from the Kulturkampf, with its attendant narrow-minded morality, apathy, and prudery. Under the influence of Martin Deutinger, he emphasized the interaction between religion and art and maintained that a decrease in religious awareness also entailed a decrease in art's creativity. Muth's main accomplishment was founding and then editing Hochland, a magazine with a "supraconfessional" group of contributors, writing on sciences, poetry, arts, and music. The magazine soon attained a leading status in Catholic spiritual life. During World War I, he defended German culture, and after the war Hochland attacked the primitivism and nihilism of Nazism; throughout the 1930s the magazine spoke out, partly covertly, against the perversion of (Christianity-derived) justice and the destruction of societal order.Becker par. 1.

After Hochland was definitively banned in 1941, Muth successfully managed to avoid being arrested in connection with the White Rose. He died alone in a hospital in Bad Reichenhall.Becker par. 1.

Muth, whom historian David Blackbourn calls a "self-conscious Catholic modernist,"Blackbourn 298. was a patriot, though he never claimed to be a nationalist, and, in a defense of Germany's involvement in World War I, said: "Our ambition is not rooted in a conceited belief that we are fit and destined to lord it over the globe. Our heart is not set on industrial subjugation or commercial supremacy. We simply have a keen inborn sense that mother nature has made us a many-sided and objective sort of folk. We think we have a duty to ripen in ourselves a humanity that shall unite in harmony the several forces and faculties. A limited, self-centred, bigoted nationalism is foreign to our deeper character....The idea of universalism, catholicity, and world-embracing solidarity is essentially Christian. There is a natural kinship, then, between Christianity and German universalism."Muth 394-95.

{{main article|Hochland (magazine)}}

Muth founded Hochland in 1903 and edited it from 1903 to 1932 and again from 1935 to 1939. Hochland, a Catholic magazine devoted to religion and culture, loosened its strictly confessional attitude and became under his direction a forum for dialogue with other denominations and even with secular thinkers.{{sfn|Ackermann, Hochland. Monatsschrift für...}} The articles he published were to elucidate how art and aesthetics could influence politics and religions, and they never followed any party's line;Zankel 208.

Among his "friends", those authors who published regularly on Hochland, were such notables people as Theodor Haecker, Ruth Schaumann, Gertrud von Le Fort, Werner Bergengruen Sigrid Undset, Stefan Andres, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Romano Guardini, Max Scheler, Carl Schmitt (until 1930), Peter Wust, and Theodor Schieffer.Grosse 127.{{sfn|Ackermann, Hochland. Monatsschrift für...}}

Muth, personally and through Hochland, influenced Gertrud von Le Fort,Ziolkowski 224. and Hans and Sophie Scholl,Zankel 208. who rented a room in his house.Axelrod 53.

{{Reflist|20em}}

• {{cite web |last=Ackermann |first=Konrad |title=Hochland. Monatsschrift für alle Gebiete des Wissens, der Literatur und Kunst |website=Historisches Lexikon Bayerns |language=de |url=https://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/Hochland._Monatsschrift_f%C3%BCr_alle_Gebiete_des_Wissens,_der_Literatur_und_Kunst |accessdate=1 May 2016 |ref=CITEREFAckermann, Hochland. Monatsschrift für... }}
• {{cite book|last=Axelrod|first=Toby|title=Hans and Sophie Scholl: German Resisters of the White Rose|year=2001|publisher=Rosen|isbn=978-0-8239-3316-7|url=https://archive.org/details/hanssophiescholl00axel|url-access=registration|page=[https://archive.org/details/hanssophiescholl00axel/page/53 53]}}
• {{BBKL|m/muth_c_b_j_b|band=6|autor= Winfried Becker|spalten=396-402}}
• {{cite book|last=Blackbourn|first=David|title=History of Germany, 1780-1918: the long nineteenth century|year=2003|publisher=Wiley-Blackwell|isbn=978-0-631-23196-7|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-ERoXBVT7fYC&pg=PA298|author-link=David Blackbourn|accessdate=23 July 2010}}
• {{cite book|last=Gottfried|first=Paul|title=Carl Schmitt|year=1990|publisher=Continuum|isbn=978-1-870626-46-0|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qGjAUgmJtgYC&pg=PA9}}
• {{cite book|last=Grosse|first=Rolf|title=Das Deutsche Historische Institut Paris und seine Gründungsväter: ein personengeschichtlicher Ansatz|year=2007|publisher=Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag|isbn=978-3-486-58519-3|pages=119–38|editor=Ulrich Pfeil|editor-link=Ulrich Pfeil|chapter=Theodor Schieffer: Ein rheinischer Historiker und seine 'Begegnung mit der romanisch-französischen Welt'}}
• {{cite book|last=McBrien|first=Richard P.|title=The HarperCollins encyclopedia of Catholicism|year=1995|publisher=HarperCollins|isbn=978-0-06-065338-5|url=https://archive.org/details/harpercollinsenc00mcbr|url-access=registration|page=[https://archive.org/details/harpercollinsenc00mcbr/page/616 616]|author2=Harold W. Attridge |accessdate=22 July 2010}}
• {{cite book|last=Muth|first=Karl|title=German culture catholicism and the world war: a defense against the book, La guerre allemande et le catholicisme|year=1916|publisher=Wanderer|pages=[https://archive.org/details/germanculturecat00pfeiuoft/page/379 379]–95|url=https://archive.org/details/germanculturecat00pfeiuoft|editor=George Pfeilschifter|accessdate=23 July 2010|chapter=Ideal Humanity Interpreted in German Thought and Art}}
• {{cite book|last=Schmitt|first=Carl|title=The crisis of parliamentary democracy|year=1988|publisher=MIT Press|isbn=978-0-262-69126-0|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=czvjz6O0JssC&pg=PR15|author-link=Carl Schmitt|editor=Ellen Kennedy|accessdate=23 July 2010}}
• {{cite book|last=Zankel|first=Sönke|title=Mit Flugblättern gegen Hitler: der Widerstandskreis um Hans Scholl und Alexander Schmorell|year=2008|publisher=Böhlau Verlag|isbn=978-3-412-20038-1|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=KNbxBmp2CAcC&pg=PA208}}
• {{cite book|last=Ziolkowski|first=Theodore|title=Modes of faith: secular surrogates for lost religious belief|year=2007|publisher=U of Chicago P|isbn=978-0-226-98363-9|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9o9F4N0IvF8C&pg=PA224}}

• [https://web.archive.org/web/20120304201359/http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/document/artikel_44729_bilder_value_4_hochland4.jpg Foto Carl Muth]

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Category:1867 births

Category:1944 deaths

Category:People from Worms, Germany

Category:German magazine editors

Category:People from Rhenish Hesse