  An alleged opposition between David Hilbert and Felix Klein as modern vs
countermodern has been pursued by 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.
