The Devil and Kaiser Bill: Victor Kroemer and the World Crisis of 1914-15

The apocalyptic writings of Victor Eugene Kroemer (1883–1930) provide us with an insight into millenarian responses to the outbreak of the Great War, a subject that has been little noticed in research on Australian religious history. This article, however, will also show that a study of Kroemer's occult beliefs can illuminate larger themes in the Australian cultural response to the war. Kroemer's interpretation of the war as an essentially spiritual conflict between the forces of Zion (Great Britain) and Babylon (Germany) was not confined to the religiously unorthodox, nor did his belief in the appearance of battlefield angels and other supernatural phenomena fail to find echoes among more conventional believers. Much research in Australia and overseas in the last thirty years has challenged the notion of the Great War as a modernising and secularising experience and this article, through a study of a single Australian author and activist, draws attention to the quest of occult authors in Australia and Great Britain to explain the 'world crisis' in spiritual terms to a range of audiences.