Third Humanism: A Brief Constellational “Biography”

This article presents a constellational biography of Third Humanism, a current in German classical philology that emerged during the Weimar Republic and peaked in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Through the methodological lens ofKonstellationsforschung, it reconstructs the network of scholars – Werner Jaeger, Julius Stenzel, Otto Regenbogen, Richard Harder, and others – whose shared yetcontested readings of classical texts offered original interpretations and sought toredefine classical studies as a vehicle for cultural regeneration and political renewal, while rejecting both historicist positivism and irrationalist mysticism. Rather than tracing linear genealogies, the analysis highlights the tensions animating this constellation: between humanist universalism and German nationalism; between scholarly objectivity and pedagogical mission; and between the normative authority of the classical tradition and the exigencies of contemporary crisis. Engaging Plato, Cicero, and key concepts like paideia, humanitas, and Bildung, this current fused philological scholarship with a normative vision of human formation. The article traces its institutional consolidation through journals, associations, and reform, before turning to the divergent positions its members adopted under National Socialism. Drawing on primary sources – including correspondence, reviews, and policy documents – it shows how this attempt to revive classical education was both ideologically vulnerable and intellectually productive.