This rather comfortable, if self-divided, period in
List's life came to an end after his father died in 1877, when List was
twenty-nine years old. Neither he nor his mother appear to have had the elder
List's keen sense of business, and as economic times became difficult List quit
the business to devout himself fulltime to his writing. At this time his
writing continued to be of a journalistic kind. Deprived of his ability to
travel and wander as he had before, he wrote articles for newspapers, such as the
Neue Welt, Neue deutsche Alpenzeitung, Heimat, and the Deutsche Zeitung, which
dealt with his earlier travels and mystical reflections on these Loci. Many of
these pieces were anthologised in 1891 in his famous Deutsch-mythologische
Landschaftbilder. It was also during this period, in 1878, that he married his
first wife, Helene Foster-Peters. However, the marriage was not to last through
the difficult years of this period.
Given the Pan-German nationalism of the various
groups and papers with which List had been associated throughout his career, it
seems certain that from a political standpoint he was firmly in their camp. *12
However, the nature of his mysticism at this time
seems to have been somewhat more original. Before any influence from later
Theosophical notions could have been present, he was continuing on the path of
mystical Germanic revivalism. Besides his own intuition - which, given his
results, must have been his chief source - he must have been familiar with a
variety of non-scientific, neo-romantic works on Germanic mythology and
religion popular at the time, *13 and was perhaps also aware of at least a
portion of the scientific studies. In any event, many of the uniquely Listian
notions seem to have been already solidifying in this early period.
Through these years, List was also working on his
first book-length (two-volume) effort, Carnuntum, a historical novel based on
his vision of the Kulturkampf between the Germanic and Roman worlds centred at
that location around the year 375 C.E.
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