Exploring Felix Klein’s contested modernism

An alleged opposition between David Hilbert and Felix Klein as modern vs countermodern1 has been pursued by the marxist historian Herbert Mehrtens and others. Scholars such as Epple, Grattan-Guinness, Gray, Quinn, Rowe, and recently Siegmund-Schultze and Mazzotti have voiced a range of opinions concerning Mehrtens’ dialectical methodology. We explore contrasting perspectives on Klein’s contested modernism as well as Hilbert’s and Klein’s views on intuition, logic, and physics. We analyze Jeremy Gray’s comment on Klein’s ethnographic speculations concerning Jewish mathematicians and find it to be untenable. We argue that Mehrtens was looking for countermoderns at the wrong address.