It has been frequently demonstrated that the catastrophe of the First World War left German classical studies in a precarious position. University philologists, who had been trained in the methods of historical research institutionalized by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, invariably found themselves embroiled in a national Bildungskrise. Here the current demands of academic inquiry, restraining itself to a remarkable level of particularity and specialization, were divorced from the issues of moral and philosophical education formerly associated with the classical tradition. As a result classicists could expect attacks from two distinct angles among Weimar intellectuals. On the one side, there were voices such as Oswald Spengler's, heard already before the war—for example, in the youth movement and the debates over school reform—that denounced the Gymnasium's emphasis on Greek and Latin as elitist and irrelevant. Now, given the academy's excessive concentration on the minute historical details of Greco-Roman Antiquity, the discipline had been definitively cut off from the aims of society at large. Consequently, in the view of some devout anti-humanists, classical studies should be abandoned altogether. On the other side, there were those who still attached themselves to the philhellenic circle around the poet Stefan George. Although they also rejected the strictly historicist approach of Wilamowitz, they never relinquished a Greek ideal. Antiquity was not to be discarded, but re-vitalized—eroticized. In anticipation of the trends that would coalesce beneath the banner of Lebensphilosophie, George prophesied the redemption of the German Spirit in the hope of restoring the life that had been lost through decades of bookwormishness.