Hello, non‑German speaker – Books and Translations
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Unfortunately, most of our works have not yet been translated. This should change, especially regarding philosophical literature. If your native language is not German and you have studied the philosophy of Mathilde Ludendorff or are deeply interested in it, please get in touch with us.
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Ludendorff, Mathilde: History of Creation - used
In her second major work, The Origin and Nature of the Soul, Mathilde Ludendorff examines in depth the prerequisites and the nature of the experience of God within the human soul, indeed all the fundamental laws of the soul of living beings. Her doctrine of the soul begins with the first part, the history of creation. All of creation has been a preliminary stage of the soul. Anyone who wishes to understand its crowning achievement, the human soul, must first grasp the other stages of creation, beginning with ether and primordial nebulae. The human soul is the microcosm in which all stages of creation of the macrocosm are once again reflected. It creates the conscious cosmos within itself. It is not essentially separated from the unconscious cellular soul and the subconscious animal soul, but rather encompasses both within itself, enriched by the experience of consciousness. In this work, the highest philosophy and religion unite with natural science in order to enable us human beings to transcend ourselves. All unresolved enigmas of the laws of the soul are made comprehensible from the clear light of fundamental insight, in wondrous harmony with all the facts of experience and science. Since for all times this greatly enhances for many the evidential power of this monumental philosophical vision, we welcome the fact that the philosopher proclaimed and described the preliminary stage to the first living being—one that natural science had sought in vain—and that fourteen years after the first publication of the work (1923), natural science discovered the protein or colloid crystal named and described by the philosopher. In the spring of 1939, the poetic work The Song of Creation in Sacred Nights was created for this book and now, as its first part, enriches the work immeasurably. Just as in the work Triumph of the Will to Immortality the poem How the Soul Experienced It, through the poetic beauty of its form, profoundly conveys the rich content of insight to the human being, so even more so here, where the becoming of the universe is contemplated from the nature of God and bestowed upon the reader in poetic beauty. A further enrichment of the work is provided by the artistic drawings of Lina Richter, which depict the most essential stages of creation in artistic perfection and at the same time with scientific fidelity. 154 pagesTopics:Doctrine of the Soul · Philosophy · Experience of God · Creation · Natural Science · Cosmos
Ludendorff, Mathilde: Selfcreation
Philosophy · Doctrine of the Soul · Self-CreationSelf-Creation of the Soul – Freedom, Will, and Spiritual DevelopmentThe third volume of the three-part work The Origin and Nature of the Soul deals, in a vivid and illustrative manner that is accessible to the general reader, with the wondrous yet profoundly serious laws governing the self-formation of the soul. It describes the soul’s liberation from the bonds of a self-preservative will enslaved to pleasure and utility, and its ascent to those heights where the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are willed for their own sake, far removed from any purpose-bound intention. In other words, it is self-creation.Mathilde Ludendorff affirms human freedom of will. Human beings possess the freedom to decide for or against the Divine, and it is precisely this freedom of decision that bestows its consecration upon reverence for God. In the magnificent and richly elaborated image of the mountain and the shaft, the prerequisites and forms of self-creation are portrayed. With masterly clarity, the author shows how differences in racial and personal hereditary dispositions influence the soul’s standpoint for self-creation, how this process may be facilitated or hindered by such dispositions, yet remains possible for every human being.Among those who accomplish self-creation, the author distinguishes three types: the chattering dead, those united with God, and the utterly perfected devils. We are all familiar with the chattering dead. They are those people who fill their lives exclusively with whatever promises utility and pleasure, and who have banished all higher experience from within themselves.Topics:Self-Creation · Freedom of Will · Soul · Philosophy · Spiritual Maturation
Ludendorff, Mathilde: Selfcreation - used
Philosophy · Doctrine of the Soul · Self-CreationSelf-Creation of the Soul – Freedom, Will, and Spiritual DevelopmentThe third volume of the three-part work The Origin and Nature of the Soul deals, in a vivid and illustrative manner that is accessible to the general reader, with the wondrous yet profoundly serious laws governing the self-formation of the soul. It describes the soul’s liberation from the bonds of a self-preservative will enslaved to pleasure and utility, and its ascent to those heights where the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are willed for their own sake, far removed from any purpose-bound intention. In other words, it is self-creation.Mathilde Ludendorff affirms human freedom of will. Human beings possess the freedom to decide for or against the Divine, and it is precisely this freedom of decision that bestows its consecration upon reverence for God. In the magnificent and richly elaborated image of the mountain and the shaft, the prerequisites and forms of self-creation are portrayed. With masterly clarity, the author shows how differences in racial and personal hereditary dispositions influence the soul’s standpoint for self-creation, how this process may be facilitated or hindered by such dispositions, yet remains possible for every human being.Among those who accomplish self-creation, the author distinguishes three types: the chattering dead, those united with God, and the utterly perfected devils. We are all familiar with the chattering dead. They are those people who fill their lives exclusively with whatever promises utility and pleasure, and who have banished all higher experience from within themselves.Topics:Self-Creation · Freedom of Will · Soul · Philosophy · Spiritual Maturation
Ludendorff, Mathilde: Soul of Man
Alongside the foundational works “Triumph des Unsterblichkeitwillens” (“The Triumph of the Will to Immortality”) and “Schöpfungsgeschichte” (“History of Creation”), the doctrine of God-cognition comprises further writings. “Des Menschen Seele” (“The Soul of Man”) and “Selbstschöpfung” (“Self-Creation”) address the laws of the human soul and its levels of consciousness. With “Des Kindes Seele und der Eltern Amt” (“The Child’s Soul and the Parents’ Duty”), “Die Volkseele und ihre Machtgestalter” (“The People’s Soul and the Shapers of Its Power”), and “Das Gottlied der Völker” (“The Divine Song of the Peoples”), Mathilde Ludendorff presents a philosophy of education, history, and cultures. Her later works illuminate the divine content of the human soul, revealing the self as its transcendent good. Taken as a whole, God-cognition stands in full harmony with the reliable findings of the natural sciences, including the most recent.
Ludendorff, Mathilde: The Triumph of the Immortality-Will - used
Hermann Rehwaldt on The Triumph of the Will to Immortality:“I opened the first page and stopped short: verses! And what kind of verses they were. I had received a ‘humanistic’ education, that is, I had been trained in the criteria of classical poetry with its iambs, trochees, hexameters, and all the various metrical forms. But this could not be fitted into any classical metre, not even into alliterative verse.‘Like fleeting shadows, generations of mankind glide across the earth,They bloom and pass away, and in doing so they sing the lofty,Never-silent song of immortal life.’At that time, the beauty of the wording did not speak to me. I leafed a little further, then closed the book and put it into my folder. ‘Pathetic and bombastic,’ was my verdict. How can one expect the reader nowadays to put up with something like this! And this was the wife of General Ludendorff?The name Ludendorff was a symbol to us front-line soldiers. A symbol of the German will to victory, of German military strength, of the German army as such. As long as he stood at the head of the Supreme Army Command, nothing was lost. Fourteen days after his dismissal by the Kaiser, we no longer had a Kaiser at all. And since I spent the early years of the war abroad, I knew from the enemy press who the real commander on the German side was—not the wooden representative figure of Hindenburg. For us members of the Freikorps, and later in the so-called patriotic associations, Ludendorff was regarded as our supreme patron, our last hope. But his wife, this former Dr. med. M. v. Kemnitz, meant nothing to us. A woman who wrote such objectively scientific and yet deeply stirring books as The Erotic Rebirth—and then such verses!The book stood on my bookshelf for more than a year without my taking it out again. It was only when I moved house, when I had to pack my books from the shelf into boxes, that one suddenly fell out and opened at a page. I picked it up. Prose. Involuntarily, I began to read. An entirely unfamiliar subject—yet I had no unread books on my shelf, or at least believed I had none. Philosophy; biology; the history of religion. I leafed back to the title page: M. v. Kemnitz, The Triumph of the Will to Immortality.The verses formed the first part and were entitled: ‘How the Soul Experienced It’. And the second, the prose part: ‘How Reason Saw It’.I read this second part first.The world revealed itself to me in an entirely different light. The chaos cleared and took on meaning. How simple everything was, and how sublime! How many errors resolved themselves as if by their own accord. And the more one read, the stronger the conviction became: you yourself had somehow dimly sensed this, without being able to put it into concepts and words—and now it lay before you, unfolded by this woman. And before long I also came to terms with the author’s unique language, indeed, in time, even with the verses.”How we describe it:The Triumph of the Will to Immortality is the title of the first of the twelve works that make up the complete oeuvre of the philosopher Mathilde Ludendorff. It was first published in 1922. In today’s fast-moving age, with events constantly overtaking one another and with what was only just considered ‘modern’ rapidly becoming obsolete, the question arises as to whether a work that is now almost one hundred years old is still worth reading and relevant, or whether it is primarily of historical value.Yet even the rapid progress of scientific knowledge, followed by technological developments, and the ever deeper revelations of the microcosm and the macrocosm through research, have not silenced the age-old questions of humanity.The progress achieved is not capable of answering the questions that lie behind it. A sense of unease about our ‘sober’ world takes hold of us. To the extent that asking about the why, the whence and the whither, about the meaning of this world and of our existence, is ‘modern’, so too are the philosophical questions and answers of Mathilde Ludendorff’s work. The Triumph of the Will to Immortality is nothing less than the longed-for harmony between philosophical and scientific understanding, both united into a coherent world-view through creative vision.To this day, the latest findings of natural science do not contradict the philosophy of Mathilde Ludendorff. On the contrary: in her contemplation of the deepest questions, the philosopher arrived at insights and gave them linguistic form that were in part only discovered later by natural science and subsequently confirmed by it. Younger scientific research could therefore have led to no other philosophical conclusions.Mathilde Ludendorff’s first philosophical work, The Triumph of the Will to Immortality, thus represents the harmony between philosophical and scientific understanding that serious philosophers had long sought for centuries, rooted in a clear and conscious experience of God. This work (as well as the six that followed) was published by the author in a dual form: in lyrical form (How the Soul Experienced It) and in free prose (How Reason Saw It). She proceeds from the assumption that the religious concepts of the past were decisively shaped by the longing for immortality that lives within every human being, a longing that seeks to come to terms with the fact of physical death. In religious myth, human beings created for themselves the consolation of belief in an eternal personal existence after death, without becoming aware that an endless compulsion to exist as a conscious individual would not mean redemption, but rather something akin to torture. After science recognised the binding of ego-consciousness to living brain cells and destroyed the myth of the immortal, bodiless soul, Darwinism offered, as a new consolation for the necessity of personal death, the doctrine of the immortality of the species. But even this substitute cannot satisfy the longing of the individual human being, because it is indelibly anchored in the inherited memory of the soul. And this is what is so profoundly moving about Mathilde Ludendorff’s work: that she shows human beings, with a clarity never before experienced, the path towards a spiritualisation of their will to immortality that at the same time signifies their redemption and fulfilment. 308 pages plus a 12-page appendix