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Having married the girl he was going out with (the hasty marriage later ended in divorce), young Tillich marched off to the front as a chaplain. What he saw, he says, "absolutely transformed me." First there was the impact of the "lower classes," with whom he was dealing for the first time; he began to think about their exploitation at the hands of the powers he had taken for granted—the landed aristocracy, the army and the church. "But the real transformation happened at the Battle of Champagne in 1915. A night attack came, and all night long I moved among the wounded and dying as they were brought in—many of them my close friends. All that horrible, long night I walked along the rows of dying men, and much of my German classical philosophy broke down that night—the belief that man could master cognitively the essence of his being, the belief in the identity of essence and existence . . .
"I well remember sitting in the woods in France reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, as many other German soldiers did, in a continuous state of exaltation. This was the final liberation from heteronomy. European nihilism carried Nietzsche's prophetic word that 'God is dead.' Well, the traditional concept of God was dead."
Religious Socialism. In the chaos of postwar Germany, Tillich and a group of his fellow intellectuals gathered in Berlin's cafés to discuss the positive possibilities behind the ecstatic iconoclasm of Nietzsche, and to discover new meanings for religion in the great Danish Christian existentialist, Soren Kierkegaard. They saw the uncertainty and ferment around them as a time of kairos—a Greek word for the Scriptural "fullness of time" in which the eternal could penetrate the temporal order. Their prescription for the world was "Religious Socialism." Without a religious foundation, they insisted, "no planned society could avoid its eventual destruction." Not surprisingly, such highflown talk had little appeal either for practical politicians or practical church men. "If the Social Democrats had accepted us," muses Tillich wistfully today, "or if the churches had put their influence behind our movement rather than at tempting to retrieve the old traditional orthodoxy, perhaps Hitler would not have come to power."
Berlin in the '20s was perhaps the gayest capital in the world, and Paul Tillich was no stranger to night life. During one of the art students' fancy-dress balls, at which he turned up in a cutaway and turban, he met a handsome girl in long green silk stockings, named Hannah Werner. As Tillich put it recently: "Things went on from there."
Gathering Darkness. Things went on to marriage and a three-month walking trip through Italy, where Art Student Hannah introduced her fascinated husband to the wonders of medieval and Renaissance painting and architecture. "For years afterward," says Tillich, "I dreamed of the 24 hours we spent in Ravenna." Tillich built up an increasingly fruitful career of writing and lecturing; between 1924 and 1933, he taught theology and philosophy at the universities of Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig and Frankfurt. But darkness was closing in: "Gradually life changed around us, became rigid and timid."