"Some academic linguists tried to discourage this neoromantic furor in their students, as did Lüders; but some were at least mildly attracted to it, and around the academy’s fringes, at least, one begins to see it seeping into scholarly circles, Both Eduard Meyer and Carl Becker — arch enemies over university reform during the Weimar period — found much to chew on in Spengler’s Decline of the West. The innovative, if peripheral, art historians Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl were drawn together by their mutual interest in the impact of oriental astrology on western art — a subject near and dear to the hearts of the “furious”’ orientalists. Academic work in the circles that surrounded Rudolf Otto, Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Heidegger, Jung, Martin Buber, Richard Wilhelm, and Josef Strzygowski increasingly took eastern forms of mysticism seriously, and faced few — like Johannes Voss or August Lobeck in the 1820s — willing and able to drag students and scholarship back into neoclassical rationalism. Some of this ferment also touched literary writers like Hesse, Thomas Mann, Alfred Déblin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Berthold Brecht, all of whom wrote orientalizing master- pieces — though of sorts that could not have been written in the mid-nineteenth century."