Chapter 10 (of the revised version of New Religions and the Nazis to come out with Vogelstein Press Calgary), is important for our Times. The Chapter deals with the following:
1. The Protest Years (1918-1932)
2. Writers shaping the Nazi worldview
2. The New Faith of Male privilege, strength, ruthlessness
3. The forced creation a homoerotic culture
4. Determination to destroy Christianity
While it was a different period of history, some things have an uncanny resemblance to what is going on today. It is not the same, but it encourages thoughtfulness.
10 The Faith
of the Nationalists: Narrative and the Third Reich
Allegorically speaking, God too would not be
able to stand this world for eight days if he were not a creator.
Reference
to the conditions in Germany after World War I,
Erwin Ackerknecht[i]
(1918)
At present our ‘face’ is so badly destroyed,
as it never was for any other peoples in similar situations, not Athens, nor
Aigospotamoi and Chaironais, or even France in 1871...
Max Weber[ii]
(1921)
Introduction
Germany’s slow crab crawl toward democracy since 1848 came to a complete
halt in 1933. The revolutionary change that ushered in Hitler’s dictatorship
took 13 years to prepare from 1919 to 1932. In the literature of nationalist
storytellers like Hans Grimm they came to be known as the protest years.
During
these years, and as a direct response to the defeat of World War I and the
revenge-spirited Treaty of Versailles, a “new faith” was born (Grimm 1954: 260;
Keynes 1920: 56). As we already know, the key elements of that faith were the
concept of a Third Reich, the Führer principle and a unified Volk.
But there was more. The faith was centered on male privilege, male strength,
male ruthlessness, and male forcefulness (Durchsetzungsvermögen).
A homoerotic culture was forced into existence. Women worth admiring were
starkly beautiful, hard, taciturn,
described in terms of their aristocratic bearing, loyal mothers and above all
loyal political partners to philandering husbands married to politics and Nazi
party formations. Where they existed, men’s homosexual predilections were
constrained only by the duty, if he had recognizable Nordic qualities, to
copulate with an attractive woman in order to top up the Nordic element of an
otherwise genetically mixed—some argued degenerate, population. The popular anthropologist
of race, Hans F. K. Günther (1936; 1941) wrote books and articles about the
right kind of marriage, while in Bünde circles and later in SA and SS
circles homoeroticism was rampant and homosexuality practiced.[iii]
This
male-focused faith became deed (Tat)
in 1933. Carl Schmitt (1938: 614) called it a totalitarian “moment.”[iv]
At the time of his writing Schmitt could not have guessed how right he was. The
totalitarian dictatorship lasted until 1945. With the total defeat of World War
II and this time with the determined presence of the allies in Germany,
especially Britain and America—the crab walk toward democracy, based on the
“other faith” as Grimm called it,[v]
started again and has continued since. In this turning, first toward National
Socialism and then after World War II toward democracy, the press and
nationalist authors played a major role.
Because
the Nazi revolution was unrelentingly brutal towards its self-defined enemy—Christianity,
Marxism, and European Jews—many scholars have tried to find an explanation for
what they regarded to be unexplainable in the distant German past (Berlin 1999;
Mosse 1981a; and 1981b; Polniakov 1974). The implied assumption seems to be
that something so brutal must have taken a long time to develop. Other scholars
have gone even further. They explain the end result of Nazi brutality, the
Holocaust, in terms of a specifically German eliminationist anti-Semitism
rooted in Christianity (Goldhagen 1996, 2002; Steigmann-Gall 2003).
The
evidence of this research shows that their arguments, though understandable,
are wrong. These scholars have simply not researched the specific slant that
National Socialists forced upon politics in handwritten documents and similar
sources, namely, that of privileging and worshiping male force and ruthlessness
in the context of a new political religion.
The
sanctification of politics and the privileging of male ruthlessness was
supported by specific publishing firms and nationalist authors who, through
uncountable well organized and well-attended public events throughout the
1920’s and early 1930’s, created a large following of their starkly new
romantic worldview. As Schulze (1998:
220) points out: “Of the thirty-four German book titles that sold more than
half a million copies between 1918 and 1933, only three were written by figures
identified with Weimar culture.” They were Kästner, Remarque, and Thomas Mann.
By contrast, the favored authors included Hermann Löns, Hans Carossa, Walter
Flex, Hans Grimm, and Clara Viebig (p. 220; Axmann 1995: 185). There were in
fact several others, all of them associated with Hans Grimm and his annual
conferences for nationalist poets (Dichtertagungen).
Furthermore, Schulze does not include in this list of authors Hitler,
Rosenberg, and Goebbels.
In
the worldview of nationalist and National Socialist authors, Christianity was
dead — rejected, overcome, ineffectual, or its symbols used and abused to make
political points. Even when Jesus is mentioned he is ideologically interpreted
as a heroic warring figure (Klagges1934). As Goebbels who wrote a book entitled
Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Page
(1929)[vi]
has his protagonist Michael proclaim after he freed himself of the notion that
Christ is love, “Enlightenment overcame me; I shall write a drama, Jesus Christ
as hero” (1929: 52). It is after his protagonist reached this stage of secular
enlightenment that Goebbels frees his venomous tongue against Jews whose
“physical being” he finds “revolting” (ein
körperlicher Ekel) (ibid.: 57). “Religion?” so Goebbels, “Naïve as you are.
What has this to do with Religion or Christianity?” Speaking of Jews, he says,
“He destroys us or we render him harmless, anything else is unthinkable” (ibid.:
57).
Unlike
Goebbels, whose effort to turn Christianity into a secular Germanic faith was
wasteful of mental and emotional energy, Grimm was an agnostic from the start
who wrote with an amazing psychological efficiency. He abhorred wasting words
to express emotions that were entirely beside the point. According to Grimm,
human fortunes are determined by luck, time, fate, and, above all, by the
country (that is its history and its imperial reach) into which one was born.
It is the nation that sets the parameters for the individual’s development of
personality and character not the other way around. Uprooted individuals and
families who do not find their way back to their roots are no more than a flash
in the pan, there and soon expired forever (1918a). But this formational
direction of what it is to be human (Entfaltung)
is only visible at times of crisis. And it is times following the Jameson Raid,
the Anglo-Boer war, and World War I in South
Africa, Namibia,
and Cameroon,
that Grimm writes about. His ideal was imperial England
whose countrymen he experienced personally in England and abroad. He claims that
it was a major shock to learn that the English some of whose traits he
idealized insisted on being Germany’s
and Germans’ most determined enemy.
In
their letters to one another Grimm and his cohorts expressed being for the
“Third Reich,” against “anti-Germanism,” and indifferent to Jews. Grimm claims
that he is not an anti-Semite but an a-Semite.[vii]
But
what is meant by Third Reich? Grimm, following his deceased friend Moeller van
den Bruck meant to express with it the religious hope of salvation from the
grinding needs of Germans during the Versailles era – an era that robbed young
Germans, especially, of the hope of developing their talents freely anywhere in
the world. The contrast is with England
whose people could unfold their talents in numerous colonies.
Closed
off from the world, German salvation was to come, however, not from God but
from the “fount of the power within the Volk”
(Grimm 1931 speech: 11). That is what “Third Reich” meant – a fount of power
expressed by its best poets. He meant from poets and writers like him. Grimm’s
merciless pessimism, which he expresses in all books, is intended to inspire
people, as peculiar as that might seem to fight the fight that fate has thrown
at them (Grimm 1918a, 1918b; 1926). And the fight that destiny predetermined is
one that is invariably forced upon a man by an external aggressor.[viii]
The
main characters (usually men) in the presence of such a confrontation have but
two choices, to appropriate his (usually) lost or diminished sense of national
identity and fight, or to avoid such appropriation and be but a flash in a pan
facing final extinction (Grimm 1918 a; 1918 b). Why does he have to appropriate
a seemingly lost identity? Because—unlike Britons—Germans were usually and
after 1918 always Germans in someone else’s colonies. In Grimm’s experience the
aggressor was invariably England,
not because the English were uniquely pugnacious, but because England was an empire. It was a
people with space where its young could spread their wings, while Germany, especially after Versailles when its colonies were taken from
it, was a people without space and thus without prospects of development (Grimm
1926). From the British perspective, so Grimm, Germans were always unwelcome
interlopers.
Two
epitomizing experiences shaped Grimm’s religious poetics. One was his
experience of England’s wars
and economic ambitions in Southern Africa before he returned to Germany
in 1910 to become a writer. The other was his experience of the First World War
where, as an intelligence officer, he became the unwilling witness of the
disloyalty of German soldiers who were inspired by the writings of the Jew,
Walter Rathenau (Grimm 1954: 92-93).
Grimm
was sensitive to anti-German feelings from his early years in England (1896) and South Africa (1897-1910). There he
read the Saturday Review which
already in 1897 discussed the necessity of war with Germany.[ix]
He also witnessed the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902) and claims to have helped
concentration camp victims. The English attitude toward Germany, perceived as it was as an
unwelcome rival that must be eliminated,[x]
shocked him to the core and he remained pathetically obsessed with
English-German relations throughout his life.
Following
his two epitomizing experiences, Grimm became acutely aware of any
anti-Germanism. Although he rarely did so publicly, in 1931 he wrote a piece
where he is pointing a finger at Jews who, in his view, are pouring “blind
hate” on an “awakening soul” whose time has come (Grimm 1931 in 1980 reprint:
13). What is threatening here, although in none of his writings does Grimm see
it, is his unwavering determination to serve the nationalist cause even if that
means putting Hitler into power. He makes this feeling clear 1932 in letters to
Alfred Hugenberg[xi] and,
later, in a letter to Ilse Hess (wife of Rudolf Hess) dated 6 May 1938, “Until
now I have only known one sole passion, despite some irritations (with National
Socialist behaviors), namely that Germany succeed, and Germany can only succeed
today if National Socialism succeeds.”[xii]
The Writers
Few
scholars have taken seriously the simple fact that a limited number of
determined radical believers could do formidable damage in a relatively short
period of historical time. Thus, enthralled by a specific vision and drive, by
told and written stories reinforcing the fulfillment of one deed, Hitler’s
National Socialists were eased into government.
In
the 1920’s and early 1930’s, behind the background of a left-liberal democracy,
three political blocks vied with one another in print and deed to destroy the
Republic. There was firstly the Catholic Zentrum
party that stood for a morality linked to Rom. In the time period considered
here, the left condemned its authoritarianism, the right its internationalism.
The
second group—and the one that is of interest to us here is the splintered,
elitist, but highly determined and energetic nationalist block. It is from this
corner of writers and publishers (Lehmann, Diederichs, Georg-Müller,
Albert-Langen) that a new German nationalistic literature was developed (Günther
1935b). Ignored by the mainline press, some of them established a major
publishing firm in 1931 by merging into one three presses Georg-Müller, the
Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, and Albert-Langen. Its goal was to further German
and Nordic authors and it did so with great success (Stapel 1931). The books of
Ernst Jünger, Hans Grimm, Ernst Wiechert, Winnig, Binding, Blunck, Carossa,
Claudius, Löns, Kolbenheyer among many others became as noted previously
bestsellers, selling tens and hundreds of thousands of copies, making several
authors millionaires. These nationalists supported (apparently not without some
misgivings) the NSDAP because they saw it as a tool to break down the liberal Weimar Republic.
The
National Socialists were the third major block. They shared with the
nationalists the determination to destroy Weimar.
But where the nationalists did not have a clear sense of what kind of
government would replace the democratic republic, so long as it represented Deutschtum, the Nazis did. They too had
their own publishers, for example Franz Eher, München, who published the terror
inspiring Völkischer Beobachter on
which Adolf Hitler was listed on the masthead as “editor” until March 1933;
Armanen Verlag, Leipzig; Karl Gutbrod Verlag, Stuttgart; and numerous others.
In
their obsession to turn the liberal wasteland (Leerraum) of Weimar
into a dynamic German force, Zentrum
and the Nationalists became so preoccupied with immediate petty political
maneuvers that they lost sight of both the big picture and the dirt at their
feet. In the process, they conceded the necessity of a totalitarian and
anti-Semitic “moment,” only to find themselves faced some years later with the
destruction of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Development of the New Faith: Not Christ but
the Third Reich
As
pointed out above, in the early 1920’s radical young Germans, among them
students, professors and writers, sought to overcome their doubts and despair
over the dismal political, economic, intellectual and spiritual conditions of
their defeated country, one they saw as “culturally occupied,” by seeking
salvation (Erlösung) through their
own “German soul” (Reuth 2000: 57). What this meant varied, but the major idea
had to do with encouraging young Germans to have faith, religious faith, in
something called the “German Reich within” or the “Third Reich.”[xiii]
In other words, instead of the Word of God, a universalistic faith, the Word of
the Third Reich, a local faith rooted somehow in the German soul was
propagated. The whole thrust of core Nazi radicals was to overcome what they
regarded an already secularized Christianity and replace it with a faith in the
“Third Reich.”
Let
us look again at the example of Ernst Krieck. It will be remembered that he was
professor of pedagogy in Frankfurt and a
participant in Hauer’s annual conference. Like many who emerged from the Bünde
movement, he was fond of sitting with his students around a bonfire to
celebrate the summer solstice and sermonize about the “Word of the Third Reich.” [xiv]
At
one such bewitching moment, he told his students the story about a Calabrian
monk who, at a time of crisis 700 years ago announced a word of yearning and
glad tidings that was passed on by the young Franciscan movement until it
became an awakening among peoples. It was not the word of Christ that was
passed on but the word of the Third Reich—by which was meant, so Krieck, a
religious and political yearning for a higher sense of communal existence. But
because the Word, Third Reich, was not then rooted in the solid soil of a
specific Volk and state (as
Christianity’s roots were) it lost its symbolic meaning. But then in 1923,[xv]
the Word of the Third Reich was preached again, this time by Moeller van den
Bruck (1876-1925). Moeller understood it as a deep religious hope but rooted it
in current reality and history. The Third Reich represented yearning for
salvation from despair through the fount of power that had its source in the
German people (Volkskraft), not in an
otherworldly God. Krieck ended his midsummer night’s talk with a hale to the
German Youth, German Volk, and Third Reich (Grimm 1931).
Grimm
wrote this piece quoting Krieck in 1931, and it was republished in 1980.
Krieck’s midnight ritual talk was observed by a Jewish colleague (named
Jourdan), a Social Democrat and congresswoman for Frankfurt who reported it to
the authorities causing Krieck to lose his Frankfurt
position. Grimm knew both Moeller and Krieck personally from Versailles days. Krieck’s forced removal from
his job (he was moved to another town) frustrated Grimm, who contrasted his own
“a-Semitism,” (not anti-Semitism) with Jewish “Anti-Germanism” and the blind
hate that went with it (ibid.:12).
Those
Germans (from Hitler, to Rosenberg, to Himmler, to Heydrich, to Klagges, to
Hauer, to Grimm and innumerable others) who became prominent National Socialist
ideologues, even though Grimm and other nationalists like him did not become
members of the party, were uniformly obsessed with overcoming Christianity and
persuading other Germans to do likewise. The discomfiture with Christianity (as
with Jews, even when they were “friends”) is one of “the silences” or a
self-imposed discretion that is an essential ingredient of Grimm’s story
telling (Grimm 1918a; 1918 b).[xvi]
Grimm did not hate, perhaps because he regarded it as too direct an emotion or
as incompatible with his upbringing. Curiously enough, though, he perceived
that the English (and it would seem Jews) hated Germans.
At
any rate, Nazi ideologues started from the position that Germany was in a serious crisis, as
they were personally, and both nation and person had to be renewed radically. Since, however, all foreign isms (from
Bolshevism, to liberalism, to capitalism, to imperialism) were contemptible
because they were associated with the victors, they had to come up with
something “genuinely German” and with it create a German faith put in an
appropriate German form.
The
crude version of this faith was the slogans that one saw splashed on cathedrals
in the 1930’s. For example, they said, “Germany’s
Youth believes only in Germany!”
(Deutschlands Jugend glaubt nur an Deutschland!) Or “We would rather
drive into hell with Rosenberg than into heaven with the Pope” (Wir wollen lieber mit Rosenberg in die Hölle
fahren, als mit dem Papst in den Himmel!”) [xvii]
The
more sophisticated version had a different beginning and medium. To create a
new faith that would grasp young radicals, writers in the nationalist fold
looked to two experiences: (1) the war in the trenches and (2) the current life
of the common folk. Furthermore, there were already popular (völkisch)
ideas published about how a people fall apart (Spengler 1923, Moeller van den
Bruck 1923) and how such a people, by going back to natural fundamentals like
race and the religion specific to it, might raise themselves up again (Chamberlain
1899; 1916). This literature, rather than church dogma, was the measure of the
worth of their interpreted experiences.
As
we saw in previous chapters, Hauer’s works too show that the essence of
National Socialism sits on experiences and experiential knowledge. It is
experience-near and this was the source of its persuasive power. Furthermore,
personal and national experiences were fused by subsuming the former under the
latter. All else was dogma to be destroyed. This kind of experience-near
writing and the indiscriminate fusing of personal with national, religion with
politics, and of the past with the present, became useful propaganda tools.
More
sophisticated authors like Grimm (1918a; 1918b) and Blunck (1936) wrote in the
form of sagas or family epics. Sagas have a very anthropological look, at a
time when anthropology, especially physical and psychological anthropology, was
popular. Epics retained a sense of history while achieving an aesthetic
distance. The reader was taken back centuries or to exotic parts of the world
where Vandals and Boers on horse and oxcarts were pursued by the imperialist
armies of Romans and Britons. Even the unschooled readers could tell, however,
that the local (meaning German Volk and Nation) was good while the
global (meaning intrusive people sometimes Romans and Britons, after 1918 Jews
and Internationalism) was bad.
Grimm’s
concern about Jews was rarely expressed openly. But being exceedingly frustrated
with Thomas Mann’s wholesale condemnation of German conduct from 1918 to 1945,
he did so in an open letter to Thomas Mann. The letter was apparently written
in the summer of 1945 but not published until 1972.[xviii]
Grimm regarded Thomas Mann to be a civilization-writer (Zivilationsliterat) rather than a völkisch writer.[xix]
With the term Zivilisationsliterat
Grimm accused Thomas Mann of the same thing of which Thomas Mann had accused
his brother Heinrich Mann after the First World War. At that time Thomas Mann
was in fact a Conservative Revolutionary while Heinrich Mann was liberal.[xx]
Because the goal of civilization-writers was the democratization and thus
de-Germanization of Germany,
Thomas Mann in effect accused his brother and others who wrote in his vein of
being against nationalism and anti-German. Hans Grimm accuses Thomas Mann of
insensitivity and an inflated sense of self-importance that he could only have
acquired in America.
With this in mind, and in the context of his usual litany of worries related to
the protest years (1918-1932), Hans Grimm also listed the “clumsy
self-importance of Jews” (ungeschickte
Vordringlichkeit der Juden) (1972a: 19) and the “intrusion of Jews into key
intellectual positions” (Eindringen der
Juden in unsere geistige Schlüsselstellungen) (ibid.: 24).[xxi]
Grimm
saw himself and saw other writers of his ilk as having to do a specific task
during a dangerously impenetrable time for his Volk. He was a
self-conscious political writer, not at all interested in the weaknesses, flaws
and failures of individual psyches. Where individuals were concerned, he
conceded that the great German classics from Goethe and Schiller to Thomas Mann
remained unsurpassed. He did not see himself as having anything useful to
contribute here. Grimm was driven to achieve something else. He called it “political
art,” an art of “experienced causes there, where formerly one talked of ‘guilt’
and where one lived as an I-person (Ichmensch)
in what one thought to be a formed world, once and for all” (1954: 84). His
favorite political poet was Rudyard Kipling (Grimm 1938).
Initially,
Grimm’s idea was to write a “novel of a country,” and so he chose what at that
time was called Cafraria in South
Africa.[xxii]
This is a part of the world with which he was personally familiar because he
lived there as an employed and later independent businessman until 1908. It
covered the eastern part of the Cape surrounding East London and reaching to
the Transkei.
Following the first conflict between English settlers and local Blacks, German
legionnaires of the Crimean war were called in to help. When they failed, the
English governor encouraged 450 landless German families from Pomerania and Brandenburg to settle
here. Grimm’s aim was not to write a history, but to write what he would write
forever after, namely, a “fate driven happening among human beings” (1954: 85).
It
is possible that the work on Cafraria was never completed because its author
lacked the second epitomizing experience, namely, the First World War and Germany’s
defeat. Defeat helped define how and why Grimm wanted to write political novels
about countries rather than individuals.
One
of Grimm’s most self-aware ideological statements about what Germans in the
1920s and 1930s were up to was given in 1935 before a German American audience
in New York.[xxiii]
Grimm started his talk by raising a question that he thought Americans might
ask, namely, what is the nature of the belief in humanity (Menschheit) that Germany,
in an uncertain time, is trying to turn into a useful and duty inspiring
reality? (Grimm1972: 259). The belief is, so Grimm, “that the competent have
more right than the incompetent, that the orderly have more right than the
disorderly, that the healthy have more right than the sick, that the gifted
have more right than the ungifted, that the innovator has more right than the
imitator … that these rights come from a man’s gifts, achievements, and duties”
(ibid.: 260).
And
what is the other faith, the one opposed to the above, asks Grimm. “The other
faith puts the masses before the Volk, class before nation, the dull
before the gifted, the weak before the strong, the ignorant before the learned,
the tired before the energetic …” (ibid.: 260).
Then
Grimm asks a third question that he imagined German Americans might wish to
have answered, namely, why Germans who were once renowned for their
universalism came to this new belief? His answer is revealing.
“My
listeners, when we Germans in Germany lost the World War, when the guilt for
the war was put solely on us without trial, when no state in the world had pity
on us, when Wilson’s fourteen points were ignored, when the hunger blockade was
continued, when Versailles came, when the stupid injustice of Memel happened
and the heavy injustice of Upper Silesia, when the Ruhr occupation occurred
then the other faith became attractive to the masses.” The other faith was
clearly Communism. It even won over some achievers (Leistungsmenschen) who were by nature deeply opposed to it (ibid.:
261). “Yes, where good German nationalists came together in those days one
could hear them suggest that, being an oppressed people ourselves we should get
together with other oppressed people … and destroy the thoroughly untruthful
West.” But Germany stepped back from this passion for dissolution, revenge and
destruction (ibid.: 262).
“My
listeners, in Germany today under difficult circumstance we are leading the
battle for the mind (Geisteskampf) in
the direction of emphasizing the responsibilities of achievers but also their
privileges, responsibilities of the healthy but also their privileges, and
responsibilities of the gifted but also their preferential rights” (ibid.: 262).
Grimm considered this elitism to be part of Nordic nature or of the rights of
gentlemen (Herrenrecht). Beyond his untranslatable rhetoric, Grimm
simply showed that Communism was warded off by National Socialism and the
latter was but a form of hard-nosed social Darwinism. Grimm recognized the
motive of revenge and destruction in Communism but not in National Socialism.
Hitler and Goebbels as Writers
The
genres of the 1920s that are guided by the above mentioned experientially-based
priorities emphasize subjectivity and experienced truth and reality (Wahrheit and Wirklichkeit) above objectivity and non-experienced, conceptual
truth. Addressing academics, for example, Goebbels (1929: 78) called out “Why
do they not have the courage to practice free subjectivism.” At any rate
objectivity and conceptual truth were thought to be artificial and arbitrary—in
other words, driven by special interests especially those of Jews. By contrast,
experiences are driven by destiny (Schicksal)
especially that of the nation.[xxiv]
Thus Goebbels (1929: 35) wrote, for example, “political miracles occur only
within things national. The international is only a teaching of reason directed
against the blood,”[xxv]
where blood stood for the combination of race, Volk, nation which reason undermined.
The
greatest push to make the point that destiny drives experiences came of course
from Adolf Hitler whose two volumes of Mein
Kampf (My Struggle) published in 1924 and 1925/26 is an autobiography of a
political pioneer and his party. It is significant that the book is not a
theoretical work but a narrative about the young man Hitler who, according to
his self-interpretation, experienced his society as having fallen on evil
times. Disturbed by the decay and indifference that surrounded him he began to
search for its cause. Two major experiences soon took him to it: that of his
youth in Vienna
where he viewed with despair the Czechoslovakianization[xxvi]
of society which marginalized things German and that of his early manhood in
the trenches of the First World War with its bitter and unacceptable defeat.[xxvii]
Hitler’s
conclusions start with the demand for a united Reich of people who share
the same blood and are prepared to fight against foreign rule. They end with
his distinction between “pure” versus “real force.” According to Hitler, pure
force is merely destructive and therefore reactive. By contrast, real force,
the only force that is capable of totally destroying the enemy, is motivated by
a worldview that pushes its believers to achieve a positive goal (Zehnpfennig
2000: 93). The means to this end, suggests Hitler, are uncompromising
determination and hardness, ruthless destruction of existing traditions,
effective propaganda, political instrumentalisation of religion, and
intolerance of anything not German (p. 122). Hauer, Grimm and their colleagues
helped cultivate these qualities in followers of the movement.
Zehnpfennig
(2000: 44) points out that Hitler’s book is intentionally written as a story
that reveals chance happenings as actually guided by an unseen power toward a
predetermined and necessary development. Readers are to discover for themselves
that Hitler and his project are guided by destiny, but a destiny that affects
not only one individual but the whole Volk. The story gives Hitler
charisma and the party its brutal determination.
Core
National Socialist ideologues initially saw themselves as a small number of
fanatical co-plotters each with his own, personally organized circle of
followers, and all fiercely loyal to their prophet-politician, the Führer.
I think Hans Grimm may be believed when he reports that Hitler told him at
their first meeting in Munich
in 1926: “Until 1923 I made a big mistake. I thought that the important factor
was quantity and especially the number of fellow combatants. What is necessary,
however, is an unconditionally reliable circle of co-plotters among whom no one
wants anything for himself” (Grimm 1954:114).
In
the 1920’s most co-plotters saw themselves as
preparers of the way or as prophets calling in the wilderness. Thus during his
born-again experience—born-again as National Socialist—Goebbels who has his
protagonist listening to Hitler wrote “That is not a speaker. That is a
prophet!” (1929: 102). The implied biblical reference is not agreement with it
but nose-thumbing. It is to remind Christians that what was done within the
context of one structure, namely, the church can be done much more effectively
within another structure, namely, the party. Christ is mere man (he is
overcome) (ibid.: 50-65). Hitler is the
man (Persönlichkeit) (whose hour has
come).
As
Payne (2002: 124) points out in his review of Emilio Gentile’s Historical Analysis and Taxonomy of Political
Religions, like Bolshevism so National Socialism shows the “recapitulation
and secularist imitation of key traditional religious themes” at an early date,
and like Bolshevist liturgy so National Socialism would develop its own liturgy.
To
keep the reader focused on the secular impulse that directs his religious
imitation Goebbels wrote (1929:114), “History is a flow of manly decisions. Not armies win,
but men with armies.” …
“Art, discovery, ideas, battles, laws, states—at their beginning and end is
always Man. Race is the
fertile soil from which emerges all creative power. Humanity is but an assumption.
Volk is reality” (ibid.: 114).[xxviii]
Humanity is thought, Volk is grown (ibid.: 115), and all of life is war
(ibid.: 117). Without defeat, without Versailles no one would have listened.
The personal and collective experiences of defeat and denigration, specifically
of German men, lent Hitler’s, Goebbels’ and Grimm’s words substance.
Conclusion
There
were also gentler voices that nevertheless made similar points and earlier, but
after the defeat of World War I. On 12 December 1918 Erwin Ackerknecht, then a
librarian who furthered those who were driven to be “servants of the word, the
German word,”[xxix] wrote
Hans Grimm a consoling letter. Both were in despair about the conditions of
their country. As Ackerknecht expressed it, defeat was as if one’s religion
were shattered and trampled underfoot. But some of us who provide national
education (Volksbildung), argued
Ackerknecht, are called to serve, although only in a preparatory way. When we
approach the best of these men, we cannot fail to recognize that they are
comparable to the ‘voice of a preacher in the wilderness.’ One anticipates that
someone bigger, something bigger, must come, namely a founder of a new
religion.[xxx]
Ackerknecht,
Grimm, and Hauer were believers in the “German word,” not the Christian one.
Their ideological writing was what Payne (2002: 124) said fascism is, namely,
“the recapitulation and secularist imitation of key traditional religious
themes.”
[i] Letter by Erwin Ackerknecht to Hans Grimm, 27 December1918. A: Grimm, Briefe von Ackerknecht an Grimm
1916-1921, Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA), Marbach.
[iii] It should be noted that Peter Kratz of
the Berliner Institute für
Faschismus-Forschung und Antifaschistische Aktion objects to Machtan’s book
Hitlers Geheimnis (2003, Fischer). I have only read Machtan’s book, The Hidden Hitler (2001).
Kratz who excels in uncovering links between extreme rightwing personalities
past and present and politicians currently in power argues that Machtan’s new
thesis claims that the origins of Nazi Germany are Hitler’s inhibited sexuality
as a disguised homosexual. This would of course be absurd. I can only assume that
Kratz has made a mistake in his interpretation of Machtan’s work.
[iv] Schmitt (1938: 614) wrote citing Dr. Georg Daskalakis, a Greek
scholar, “… the total (totalitarian) state is not a state in itself, but only a
moment in the life of a state…” (My insert). Every state has the potential to
be totalitarian, but a state only follows through with totalitarianism in very
specific dangerous situations (ibi.: 614).
[v] Grimm used the terms “new faith” (referring to the nationalism of
National Socialism) and “other faith” (referring to Communism and/or Socialism)
in his American speech in New York before a German American audience 6 October
1935. It is explained later in the chapter.
[vi] The German title is Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern. Goebbels published plays and diary-form books some years before he
became propaganda minister under Hitler. Most were a type of political
confessional autobiography, a mixed genre that combined his own life
experiences, primarily political ones, with those of his friends. The aim was
to describe paths toward becoming a committed National Socialist. Stations on
the way always included a Bünde phase, overcoming Christianity, and
discovering a vengeful anti-Semitism.
[vii] Grimm (1931) reprinted in Grimm (1980: 10-14). The reprint is as
the original.
[viii] Grimm’s female characters are not developed. Usually, they play a
secondary role to men.
[ix] For example, he refers to the 11 September 1897 issue of Saturday Review. The article seems to
give a Darwinian capitalist explanation of why England’s
immediate enemy was Germany.
Grimm is intrigued by this and other SR arguments because, of course, they feed
his developing ideas about Nordic elitism, the white man, and survival of the
fittest nation (Grimm 1954: 58-59).
[x] He claims the SR article ended with “Germaniam esse delendam” (Grimm 1954: 59). This 1954 book he
started to write in 1945, after the defeat and in response to Thomas Mann who
condemned German atrocities. Grimm used Mann’s letter as an excuse to be
himself heard in England (Grimm to Stapel 12 September 1945, A: Grimm, DLA,
Marbach).
[xi] Grimm to Hugenberg 15 March 1932 and 31 March 1932
A: Grimm, from Grimm to Alfred Hugenberg 1930-1951, DLA. Grimm had occasional doubts about the National Socialists but none
about the Nationalists. Nor did he doubt that, in the end, the Nazis would
serve the Nationalists.
[xii] Grimm to Ilse Hess 6 May 1938, A: Grimm, DLA. The explanation in
brackets is inserted by me.
[xiii] Letter of librarian Erwin Ackerknecht to novelist Hans Grimm, 27
December 1918, where he talks about faith in the “German Reich in us” being
inexhaustible. A: Grimm, DLA.
[xiv] From a speech Grimm gave
October 1931 entitled Political Interpreters
(Politische Dolmetscher),
reprinted in Grimm 1980: 10-14. Grimm responded here to a specific event where
a Jewish woman, a Social Democrat and parliamentarian, informed the government
about Ernst Krieck. Krieck was professor at the Pedagogical
Academy in Frankfurt
from which he was subsequently removed to another post. The informer told the
government about a nationalistic vigil that he held with his students during
which he haled the Third Reich. It will come up later.
[xv] 1923 is the publication date
of Moeller van den Bruck’s book, “The Third Reich.”
[xvi] Grimm’s book, Die Olewagen
Saga, was first published in 1918 by the Albert Langen Verlag in Munich. In a 1942 Preface
to the 1972 reprint of this book from his own publishing firm called Klosterhaus
Verlag, he discussed the importance of “silence” (p. III). I wondered, he
wrote, how much, by virtue of its form, was not said in the saga only to be
expressed anyway by virtue of having been kept silent or unspoken. All of Grimm’s
writing fascinates by virtue of what his “silences,” his self-imposed
discretion, in fact say without being said.
[xvii] Acta Bekenntniskirche 1934/36, Ref. IV Kirchenkampf und Luth. Vereinigung, Berlin Mission Society,
Berlin, Germany.
[xviii] On 30 October 1945 Grimm wrote Alfred Hugenberg that his Thomas
Mann answer was finished but that he was not sure whether it would pass
American censorship. (See A: Grimm, letter of Grimm to Hugenberg 30 October 1945,
DLA, Marbach).
[xix] The play is on the civilization versus culture differences.
[xx] Grimm is thinking of Thomas Mann’s 1918 book, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen.
[xxi] In fairness to Grimm, the worry about Jewish intrusiveness was but
one worry among many in what Grimm called the protest years between 1918 and
1932. The more important worries included the Scheidemann revolution, the
broken promise of Wilson’s fourteen points, Versailles, and the profiteering
attitude of parliamentarianism (Grimm 1972a: 19). These were popular
perceptions during Weimar
and Nazi Germany. Jewish success was presented as statistics about Jews in the
general population as against their presence in the professions, media, and Weimar government.
[xxii] Kaffernland was written
between 1911 and 1915 and never completed. Fragments were first published in
1935 (Grimm 1978: 266) and then in 1961 in Grimm’s Klosterhaus Verlag,
Lippoldsberg. It was reprinted 1978. Kaffernland
is his most anthropological narrative, perhaps because it is not as
ideologically determined as are his post-1918 publications. Like most of his
works it sits on variously archived documents. His first paragraph reminds of
Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country but beyond that lacks entirely Paton’s
Christian viewpoint. Grimm begins his books with a description that celebrates Africa’s beauty with all senses. He starts: “There is a
smell in the air as of open fires. It sounds as if cattle …” (p. 7).
[xxiii] Grimm received an invitation
to give his talk before German Americans on 6 October 1935, the occasion of
German Day (Grimm to Gutsche 4 September 1935, A: Grimm, Grimm to Hugo Gutsche
1933–1955, DLA).
[xxiv] For example, June 11, 1931, Emanuel Hirsch, a nationalistic
Protestant theologian wrote Hans Grimm “a Mr. Mendelssohn–he is baptized–is
outraged in the name of Christ about our political phrases and he made the
glorious suggestion that we replace the word ‘Nation’ with ‘Heimat’.” Hirsch
worried that Jewish voices in the church might become strong enough to disavow
“German conscience and will.” (A: Grimm, Emanuel Hirsch to Hans Grimm, DLA).
[xxv] Goebbels (1929:35) makes reference to what Russians call
international, namely, a mix of “Jewish kabalistic, cowardly blood-terror,” and
such that he sees as forced onto the world by but one man, Lenin. “Without
Lenin, no Bolshevism.”
[xxvi] Hitler argued that Slavs and their culture were being favored.
[xxvii] See here the critical edition of Hitler’s writing by Christian
Hartmann, Thomas Vordermayer, Othmar Plöckinger, Roman Töppel, eds. (2016), “Hitler,
Mein Kampf: Eine kritische Edition.” Vol. I, Vol. II. München – Berlin: Im Auftrag des Instituts für
Zeitgeschichte.
[xxviii] Here is the big man theory that was also popular among
anthropologists of the time.
[xxix] The German Word not the Word of God.
[xxx] Dr. Erwin Ackerknecht to Hans Grimm 27
December 1918. A: Grimm, Briefe von Ackerknecht, Erwin an Grimm, DLA, Marbach. After the war Ackerknecht became the director of the Schiller Museum and this archive.
