Shadows Behind the Neon: The Occult in Weimar Germany
4th April 2026
When society collapsed through the catastrophes of 1918-1923, many Germans sought explanation, understanding, and meaning elsewhere. This is the background to the novella at the heart of the new book Anna & Matchstick and Other Berlin Stories. Here is a little of the history behind it.
There is a particular quality to the desperation that follows catastrophe. Not the clean, acute desperation of a single loss or disaster, but the slow, corrosive despair settles into a society like groundwater, finding every crack, every weakness, every unlit corner of the human spirit. Weimar Germany was saturated with that kind of desperation, and it produced, among its many strange fruits, one of the most intense flowerings of occultism in modern European history.
To understand why, you must begin with the dead.
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Jason Collings
April 2026