‘Above all: Gemeinschaft, which literally means Community, but which sounds deeply mystical and supernatural to a German ear’ (Halkett 1939, 94). G. R. Halkett's words form a useful starting point for this conclusion. They link the notion of community with German sensibility, and they perhaps inevitably call to mind the work of Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, where the notion of community was developed and defended under the guise of impartial social science. The three movements that we have considered in this book all take the form of communities, and all have roots in German culture. Halkett's comment appears to place the whole subject into question. For him there is something deeply problematic about this German talk of Gemeinschaft. We saw what he felt it led into. To conclude, we might consider some questions raised by our discussions. Have we been considering backward-looking, Romantic movements that seek to (re)create an illusion, fighting against the mainstream of modern life? Do their histories and ideologies tell us something of significance about German, and indeed perhaps European, life and culture in the twentieth century? Let us start by addressing the issue of whether they were backward-looking. Perhaps the best way to face this is to consider their relationship to Romanticism.

ROMANTICISM AND UTOPIA

Earlier in this book the political breadth of the neo-Romantic trend was highlighted by reference to arguments advanced by Michael Löwy. It is to Löwy's work that we can now return in order to probe a little further into what this might mean in the context of the movements studied in this book. In work done jointly with Robert Sayre, Löwy developed a clear conception of Romanticism taken not simply as a literary phenomenon, but also as a social movement. ‘At the root of the Romantic worldview is a hostility towards present reality, a rejection of the present that is often quasi-total and heavily charged with emotion … Moreover the Romantic sensibility perceives in the present reality – more or less consciously and explicitly – essential characteristics of modern capitalism’ (Sayre and Löwy 1984, 54–55).