contributors

Andreas Anton and Ina Schmied-Knittel

Andreas Anton is PhD in Social Sciences and researchers at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene, Freiburg, Germany. He focuses on occultism and parapsychologyical topics in the GDR and has a research interest in anomalistics and conspiracy theories.

Ina Schmied-Knittel is PhD in Social Sciences and researchers at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene, Freiburg, Germany. Research focus is on the sociology of knowledge and religion; Specifically, she deals with social discourses and cultural patterns of interpretation of occult phenomena and extraordinary experiences such as near-death experiences.

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Articles by Andreas Anton and Ina Schmied-Knittel

  1. Occultism in the GDR? The paranormal as heterodoxy of scientific worldview

    The article summarizes the main findings of a socio-historical study devoted to the question of the political and social handling of “paranormal,” “parapsychological” or “occult” knowledge, experiences, and practices in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The “scientific worldview” derived from Marxism-Leninism and propagated in the GDR was essentially a scientistic conception of reality. Against this background, all occult or paranormal topics were rigorously rejected in the public discourse of the GDR.

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