-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Secret Germany - Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh,(C) 1994
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd. 27 Wrights Lane London W8 3TZ, England
--[12a]--
11
Myth and Might
For most English-speaking readers today, and especially for those who fought
it, the Second World War was probably as close as one can imagine to a just
war. It had a clearly discernible and defined justification and sanction.
Moral issues were starkly delineated. There was no question of who was right,
who wrong. Distance in time has, of course, rendered certain Allied actions
and policies - the bombing of Dresden, for example - difficult, if not
impossible, to condone; but except for the occasional warped would-be
historian, no one has attempted to excuse or 'rehabilitate' Nazi Germany.
If the Second World War was indeed a just conflict, it was so because it
constituted a moral contest, a crusade against madness and recognisable
'evil'. General Eisenhower could title his account Crusade in Europe without
seeming guilty of pretentiousness, portentousness or rhetorical hyperbole. To
the extent that Nazi Germany could be seen as embodying and incarnating the
potential madness and 'evil' of all mankind, that madness and 'evil' became
endowed with form; and once something is endowed with form, it can be opposed.
One knows what one is fighting against, and this clarifies and crystallises
what one is fighting for. If one knows what one is fighting for, the fight is
meaningful and justifiable.
By incarnating madness and 'evil' within itself, the Nazi regime,
paradoxically, 'redeemed' the rest of the Western world into sanity and
virtue. This, with typical Olympian irony, Thomas Mann demonstrates in Doctor
Faustus; and other writers, from George Steiner in England to Jorge Luis
Borges and Carlos Fuentes in Latin America, have since picked up the theme. It
took Nazi Germany to teach us the meaning of atrocity and outrage. It took
Auschwitz and Treblinka to remind us of what we as human beings are capable of
perpetrating, despite our veneer of civilisation, and to make us wish to
disown such propensities. Nazi Germany rendered us, albeit only temporarily
perhaps, a degree or two more moral, more decent - a degree or two more
sensitive to such things as, for example, 'ethnic cleansing' in what used to
be Yugoslavia. To that extent, and however uncomfortably the recognition may
sit with us, we are in Nazi Germany's debt.
If the Second World War made sense and rested on some moral basis, the First
World War did not. On the contrary, the First World War was the most
terrifyingly insane conflict in the whole of modem European history, not
excepting the Thirty Years War of 1618-48. It was insane in its causes (or
lack thereof), its motivation (or lack thereof), and the policies (or lack
thereof) that precipitated it. It was pre-eminently insane in its conduct. On
the opening day of the Battle of the Somme on I July 1916, more than a hundred
thousand British and French soldiers, forming three lines fifteen miles long,
clambered out of their trenches. Each bearing sixty pounds of equipment on his
back, they then proceeded not to charge, not to duck or dodge, but to march,
as if on parade, into the face of machine guns firing more than a hundred
rounds per minute. By the end of the first day - the single most costly day in
the history of the British Army - 57,470 had fallen. By the end of the battle,
the toll on all sides amounted to a million and a half. The territory gained
at this price came to an average, along the front, of five miles - five miles
of mud, of shell craters, rubble and devastated fields.
This was insanity, and the insanity was repeated at Verdun, at Ypres and
Passchendaele, at Gallipoli, on the Russian and Italian fronts. Never had
mankind engaged in such wholesale and mindless slaughter to so little purpose,
with so little to show for it. And while this orgy of carnage enacted itself,
arms merchants and munitions manufacturers in Britain, France and Germany were
negotiating business deals and trade agreements with each other, keeping the
blood flowing because it was profitable to do so.
There have been numerous evocations of the First World War's madness. Some of
the best, and most penetrating, can be found in Hermann Broch's novel The
Sleepwalkers, first published in 1931.
The unreal is the illogical. And this age seems to have a capacity for
surpassing even the acme of illogicality . . . it is as if the monstrous
reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy has
become logical reality . . . An age that is softer and more cowardly than any
preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and poison-gas; nations of bank
clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire . . . Amid a blurring
of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly
world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail
thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is
nothing but a nightmare to him. [1]
The madness of the First World War achieved the scale it did because it
consisted; as Broch says, of 'a blurring of all forms'. In effect, and in
contrast to that of the Second World War, the madness had no form. In the
Second World War, Nazi Germany incarnated and gave form to human madness. In
the conflict of 1914-18, the
madness was rampant, diffuse, omnipresent, devoid of shape or contour - like
the clouds of poison gas sifting insidiously over the trenches. The madness
was everywhere, suffusing everyone and everything, extending from hapless
soldiers in their dug-outs to army commanders in their chateaux, corporate
executives in their
boardrooms and heads of state in their offices. No one side, in the First
World War, could exercise a monopoly on guilt. Despite all the propaganda,
there were no clearly defined villains or culprits. Everyone was to blame -
and, therefore, no one was entirely to blame. The conflict has generally, and
not inaccurately, been seen as
the culmination of a subterranean dynamic inherent in Western civilisation - -
the consummation, so to speak, of a long-standing, long-evolving collective
European death wish. It was all the more traumatic by virtue of what had
immediately preceded it.
On the eve of the war, during the first decade of the twentieth century,
Western society appeared to have reached a zenith in its development. Never
before had a culture achieved such a degree of opulence, luxury, refinement,
cosmopolitanism and sophistication.
Never had optimism been greater or more unqualified. 'Civilisation' had
conferred seemingly inestimable benefits on Western Europe and was now, under
the aegis of imperialism, bringing those benefits to more 'benighted' sectors
of the globe. Medicine was making such strides as to foster belief in the
eventual eradication of all disease. Science was opening dramatic and exciting
new vistas on past, present and future. Psychology was promising to eliminate
all disorders, maladjustments and 'abnormalities' of the mind. Technology was
advancing at a pace that would transform the entire world of human activity.
Travel had attained the level of comfort and extravagance embodied by the
'Orient Express' and the great ocean liners, and the conquest of the air was
imminent. 'Kultur' had imparted taste, sensitivity and discrimination to
social life. Education was becoming ever more widespread. Across the entire
Occident, a complacent sense of order and stability prevailed. In every sphere
of human endeavour, it appeared that things could only become better. A
fervent, unquestioning belief in 'Progress' and its bounty constituted, in
effect, the dominant religion of the age.
In fact, however, the most apposite symbol of the age was the Titanic. The
faith reposed in 'Progress' culminated only in the horror of' the war to end
all wars'. The conflict of 1914-18 was not only the most appalling bloodbath
in Western history. It was also the single most profound and traumatic
betrayal of faith, of hope, of optimism, of aspirations and expectations.
Everything that had previously seemed to promise so much proved treacherous,
not serving to improve man's lot, but to augment his capacity for
destructiveness. Civilisation, despite its refinements, had led to the
primitive barbarity of the trenches and to abattoirs like the Somme, where men
died as if on an assembly line, regardless of class, calling, aptitude or
educational background. Science and technology had led not to an improvement
of the human condition, but to Zeppelins, to explosives raining from the sky,
to combat aircraft, tanks, submarines and ever more efficient engines for
killing - as well as to the ultimate nightmare of poison gas, a weapon so
terrifying even Hitler was to shrink from employing it. Religion, which plumed
itself on bringing enlightenment to the 'heathen', proved unable to curb the
bloodlust of its own devotees. As Heine had prophesied, cathedrals such as
Amiens were indeed pulverised by Thor's hammer, disguised as Krupp howitzer
shells.
Since the Thirty Years War, certain 'rules of warfare' had been observed.
Among other things, civilian populations were supposed to be exempt from the
depredations of conflict. Now, in flagrant repudiation of everything
'civilisation' was alleged to stand for, the world's great cities and their
populations comprised a new front line. The bombs dropped on London by
Zeppelins did scant damage and caused few casualties, but the mere fact that
an urban centre could become a target for aerial bombardment introduced a
dimension unknown in war since the seventeenth century - and established a new
precedent which Hitler would ruthlessly exploit.
In the cataclysm of the First World War, virtually an entire generation of
young men fell. The casualties inevitably included many of the best and
brightest, the most original and imaginative, the most highly educated, the
most qualified for future leadership. Altogether, more than 65 million men had
been engaged in combat. More than half were killed, wounded or 'missing'. The
British Empire lost 2 million, Austria-Hungary 5 million, France 6 million,
Germany 8 million, Russia as many as 2 million. When the war was over, there
were 2 million demobilised, maimed and often unemployable veterans wandering
in the streets of Britain and her dominions; 3.6 million in Austria; more than
4 million in France, and another 4 million in Germany's fledgling Weimar
Republic.
Those who survived became known, not inaccurately, as the 'lost generation',
chronicled by such writers as Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. For this
generation, the betrayals of the First World War had left nothing in which to
believe any longer, no authority worthy of honour. The result was not just
disillusion. It was what Broch depicted in The Sleepwalkers as an utter and
total 'disintegration of values'. The optimism and confidence, the certainty
and complacency of 1914 had given way to a vista of emptiness, apathy and
relativism. Robert Musil, Broch's compatriot and contemporary, succinctly
characterised the prevailing mood as 'a relativity of perspective verging on
epistemological panic'.
In Germany, the 'disintegration of values' was particularly pervasive and
debilitating. However appalling their losses, the Allies could at least muster
rhetoric to congratulate themselves on what purported to be victory and claim
substantial war reparations. Russia had lost her reigning dynasty and imperial
status; but she had at least the illusion - like a rainbow arching beyond the
horrors of revolution and civil war - of a new and bright future in which to
believe. Austria, too, had lost her reigning dynasty, but a sizeable portion
of her former population - in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia -
could find hope in independence and freshly formed democratic republics,
however artificially contrived.
Germany had no such solace. Europe's most recently created imperial-power - so
recently created she had not yet had time to take her status for granted, had
still been glorying in that status - was now bereft of her ruling dynasty and
imperial splendour. The Weimar Republic, whose very name was intended to
embody Goethe's old ideal of a nation dedicated to culture and the spirit,
offered little palliative, little to replace what had been lost. For one
thing, the new republic was not accepted by Germans because it was less an
organic development than an artificial construct: a dictated and imposed
national identity, based on foreigners' conceptions of what Germany was
supposed to be. It reflected other people's ideal of Germany, in an
environment that militated against idealism of any kind. And the Weimar
Republic could not cope with the apathy, the numbness, the privation, the
starvation, the ruined infrastructure, the dingy greyness that prevailed. For
Germany, there appeared to be no future, illusory or otherwise, and the
present entailed extreme hardship, which was only intensified by soaring
inflation and economic depression of such proportions as virtually to wipe out
the middle class, the traditional bulwark against extremism. To exacerbate the
situation further, there were crippling war reparations to pay.
There were other humiliations as well, less tangible perhaps, but none the
less devastating to the country's morale. As both soldiers and civilians
recognised, Germany's military machine had acquitted itself impressively
enough - as well as those of its adversaries, if not indeed, better. That had
not, however, prevented defeat; and defeat seemingly inexplicable, had to be
ascribed to someone or something, thus fostering a quest for a scapegoat.
Equally baffling was the fact that Germany, in the eyes of the world, was held
solely responsible for the cataclysm - as if Germany alone had instigated it,
as if Austria and Russia, Britain and France, had been altogether innocent.
Certainly Germany had been guilty of a serious transgression in violating
Belgian neutrality, and her ruling dynasty made mistakes. But the ruling
dynasty had paid for their mistakes with their throne, and the country as a
whole had paid for the 'rape of Belgium' with casualties exceeding those of
the Western Allies. So far as the causes of the war were concerned, Germans
felt themselves no more culpable than the conflict's other belligerents. The
debacle had begun, after all, with a dispute between Austria and Russia.
Russia had declared war on Germany, not Germany on Russia. Given these
circumstances, it seemed monstrously unfair that Germany alone should have to
bear the weight of the world's opprobrium.
These factors converged to engender a national crisis. Contrary to the
assertions of many historians, this crisis was not simply economic, social or
political, nor even a combination of these. It was, in fact, Germany's old,
long-standing and deep-rooted collective identity crisis - the crisis of
collective self-definition, collective self-assessment and self-esteem,
collective orientation, direction and purpose. But now, with the collapse of
the institutions that had previously masked or sublimated it, that crisis no
longer smouldered in the background, beneath the surface or behind transient
facades. It dominated the foreground of German consciousness.
In the wake of the First World War Germany required not just a social,
political or economic palliative, still less an idealised and somewhat
saccharine conception of Weimar imposed by foreigners. The country needed an
entirely new raison d'etre, an entirely new sense of purpose, direction and
self-definition. Such needs can seldom, if ever, be fulfilled by political,
social or economic programmes. Such needs cannot even be satisfactorily
fulfilled by ideologies. But such needs have traditionally been fulfilled by
religions. This, ultimately, was what National Socialism offered.
Great is the anguish of the man who becomes aware of his isolation and seeks
to escape from his own memory . . . And in his fear of the voice of judgement
that threatens to issue from thedarkness, there awakens within him a doubly
strong yearning for a Leader to take him tenderly and lightly by the hand, to
set things in order and show him the way . . . [2]
Thus Broch wrote prophetically in 1929. And thus, in a drama only too familiar
today, does the lonely self-alienated youth - in the throes of an identity
crisis, fearing responsibility, seeking meaning, purpose and direction for his
existence - find illusory solace and a supposed sense of 'belonging' in one or
another sect or cult, presided over by a self-appointed guru or messiah
figure. Thus does one fall prey to the likes of Charles Manson in California,
Jim Jones in Guiana, David Koresh in Waco and, on a much more cataclysmic
scale, Adolf Hitler.
Under Mussolini, Fascism in Italy never amounted to more than a political
ideology. It made no attempt whatever to activate, channel and exploit the
religious impulse, but contrived instead a'live-and-let-live' accommodation
with the Catholic Church, according Rome certain prerogatives and then
proceeding to implement its own purely secular programmes. To that extent,
Italian Fascism may have had a qualified, abstract intellectual appeal for
more simplistic minds, but it made no corresponding emotional appeal. It
offered only a superficial vainglorious nationalism, a crude jingoistic
imperialism and a pompous facade of grandeur and splendour. There was little
in all this to elicit a visceral response from hearts or souls. Hearts and
souls were left to the custody of the Church. As a result, Italian Fascism,
compared to other mass movements of the period between the wars, was puerile,
often laughable. While not underestimating its more sinister aspects, Thomas
Mann could depict it farcically in 'Mario and the Magician'. In Spain,
Franco's kind of Fascism was more sophisticated. It took pains not just to
reach an accommodation with organised religion, but to align itself explicitly
with organised religion. Franco's movement was therefore more than a mere
ideology. It yoked itself to the religious impulses and yearnings of the
Spanish people, or at least many of them, and could thereby arrogate a kind of
divine sanction or mandate. Spanish Falangists did not tacitly assume that God
was on their side. Through such organisations as Opus Dei and El Cristo Rey,
they dragooned Him into being so, attaching Him inseparably to Franco's cause.
Franco could thus present himself as a latterday crusader, engaged in an
enterprise ordained and endorsed by heaven. By tapping the reservoir of
religious energy, Franco could appeal to hearts and souls in a way that
Mussolini could not. This imparted to his movement an impetus and a vicious
fanaticism that Mussolini's never displayed.
In Germany, National Socialism sought more than an Italian-style accommodation
with organised religion, or even a Spanish-style alliance. It sought nothing
less than to supplant organised religion and become, in effect, the official
state religion of the 'new order' Germany aspired to impose. Any film of the
crowds at a Nuremberg rally, chanting 'Sieg Heil!' with hysterical rapture,
reveals something more potent at work than just political commitment - it is
the dynamic of an evangelical church or a revivalist meeting. This imparted to
National Socialism in Germany a demonic power and hypnotic appeal that neither
Italian nor Spanish totalitarianism could achieve.
In the essentially religious, carefully orchestrated and choreographed spell
cast by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy, hitherto irreconcilable opposites were
reconciled - as they could be only under the auspices of a religion. The
German propensities for both irrationality and hyper-rationality were fused in
a single all-encompassing and all-embracing euphoria. In a warped fashion that
would have appalled Goethe and Heine on the one hand, Gneisenau and Yorck von
Wartenburg on the other, Germany became what all of them had sought to make
her: a political and nationalistic entity which, at the same time, embodied
culture and the spirit. This fusion, of course, perverted, distorted and
diminished its contributing components. Political and nationalistic impulses
were reduced to their lowest common denominator, a crude tyranny, swaggering
braggadocio and brutal self-aggrandisement. Culture, as Broch stated, was
reduced to the level of kitsch; and the spirit, though energetic enough, was a
malevolent one. It took the form of what Stefan George called 'das Leichte'
('the Facile'): the spurious and illusory miracles performed by that false
prophet, the Antichrist.
Fourteen years before Hitler came to power, C. G. Jung had issued a warning
that echoed Heine's:
As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly
will the 'blond beast' be heard prowling about in its underground prison,
ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences.[3]
Three years after Hitler's accession as Chancellor, Jung sought to explain the
subterranean dynamic behind the Nazi phenomenon by invoking, metaphorically,
the ancient Teutonic pantheon:
We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing
our opinion on economic, political and psychological factors. But if we may
forget for a moment that we are living in the Year of Our Lord 1936 . . . we
would find Wotan quite suitable as a causal hypothesis. In fact I venture the
heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan's character explain
more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together.[4]
Again, Jung was echoing Heine:
No, memories of the old German religion have not been extinguished. They say
there are graybeards in Westphalia who still know where the old images of the
gods lie hidden; on their death-beds they tell their youngest grandchild, who
carries the secret . . . In Westphalia, the former Saxony, not everything that
lies buried is dead.[5]
Until March 1933, ' Volkische' ideology, specifically as it had been
disseminated by the Nazis, was banned by both the Lutheran Church in Germany
and by the universities. With the Nazi accession to power, this ban was
lifted. In a lecture that summer, a Tubingen theologian asked whether the
church was ready 'to interpret a great turning point in German destiny as
coming from the hand of God, and to take a creative part in it'.[6]
Other theologians responded with zest, claiming 'It was their mission,
entrusted to them by God, to interpret to the German yolk that prevenient
action of God and at the same time to help shape it in unconditional
solidarity with the Volk.'[7]
According to a prominent ecclesiastical spokesman and leader a the time:
If the Protestant church in genuine inner solidarity with the German yolk . .
. wishes really to proclaim the gospel, then it has to take as its natural
standpoint the circle of destiny of the National Socialist movement.[8]
On 22 duly 1933, the annual Bayreuth festival culminated with a production of
Wagner's most loftily spiritual opera, Parsifal. Immediately after this
production, Hitler gave a major radio speech, announcing his plans to create a
united Reich Church. At a synod two months later, on 27 September, the church
was officially established, with a fervid Nazi, Ludwig Muller, as first Reich
Bishop. A liberal Protestant newspaper dared to satirise the event:
Church service. The opening hymn has ended. The pastor stands at the altar and
begins:
'Non-Aryans are requested to leave the Church.'
No one moves.
'Non-Aryans are requested to leave the Church immediately.'
Again all remain quiet.
'Non-Aryans are requested to leave the Church immediately.'
Thereupon Christ comes down from the altar and leaves the church.[9]
For publishing this, the editor of the newspaper was arrested and consigned to
a concentration camp.
With the establishment of the Reich Church, Hitler himself became increasingly
invested with messianic qualities. In March 1934, pastor Herman Gruner wrote:
'The time is fulfilled for the German people in Hitler. It is because of
Hitler that Christ . . . has become effective among us. Therefore National
Socialism is positive Christianity in action." In the same year, a text was
prepared for study and memorisation by schoolchildren, invoking the abortive
Putsch of 1923:
As Jesus set men free from sin and hell, so Hitler rescued the German people
from destruction. Both Jesus and Hitler were persecuted; but, while Jesus was
crucified, Hitler was exalted to Chancellor. While the disciples of Jesus
betrayed their master and left him in his distress, the sixteen friends of
Hitler stood by him. The Apostles completed the work of their Lord. We hope
that Hitler may lead his work to completion. Jesus built for heaven
Hitler for the German earth.[11]
At first the Reich Church paid at least nominal obeisance to established
Christianity, but it was not long before even this was left behind. Wilhelm
Hauer, Professor of Indology and Comparative Religions and founder of the so-
called 'German Faith Movement', proclaimed in print that the epoch of
Christianity was now over and only 'German faith' remained. Hauer was echoed
by Alfred Rosenberg, the Party racial theoretician, who wrote: 'The longing to
give the Nordic race soul its form as German church under the sign of the yolk
mythos, that is for me the greatest task of our century. '[12]
As a religious creed, Nazified paganism quickly took root. Doctor Langermann
is not the only example of a former evangelical pastor conducting the funeral
of an SS officer and speeding the deceased, in full dress uniform and
jackboots, not to any Christian heaven, but to Wotan's Valhalla with the
words: 'May this God send the nations of this earth clanking on their way
through history. Lord bless our struggle.'[13]
Under SS auspices, schools called 'Napolas' were established for the education
and indoctrination of selected members of the Hitler Youth. In his novel The
Erl-King, Michel Tournier evokes the way in which, at these 'Napolas', future
SS personnel celebrated Christmas:
All the Jungmannen were gathered in the armory around a glittering Christmas
tree, for the ceremony of the Yule Festival. It was not the birth of Christ
that was being celebrated, but that of the Sun Child, risen from his ashes at
the winter solstice. The sun's trajectory had reached its lowest level and the
day was the shortest of the year: the death of the sun god was therefore
lamented as an impending cosmic fatality. Funeral chants celebrating the woe
of the earth and the inhospitableness of the sky praised the dead luminary's
virtues and begged him to return among men. And the lament was answered, for
from then on every day would gain on the night, at first imperceptibly but
soon with triumphant ease. [14]
It was as a religion, then, not as any conventional political ideology, that
National Socialism was to sweep through Germany and elicit fanatical adherence
from the German populace.[15] Under National Socialism, the gods of the
ancient Teutonic pantheon would indeed emerge anew, asserting a self-arrogated
supremacy over Judaeo-Christian tradition and theology. Wotan - the
'berserker, god of storms, wanderer, warrior, Wunsch and Minne God, lord of
the dead, Einherier, dead hero of Valhalla, magician' - would once again gust
through the German collective psyche like the raging wind from which his
original name derived. And, as Heine had prophesied, Thor would arise anew
and, with his mighty hammer, smash the Gothic cathedrals. Nazi Germany would
be the only state in modern Western history to rest ultimately not on social,
economic 'or political principles, but on spiritual, even magical, ones. The
spirituality, however, was warped, malevolent and demonic, and the magic - if
magic can be defined as a metaphor for the manipulative relationship between
consciousness and will on the one hand, and external phenomena and people on
the other - conformed to the traditional tenets of so-called 'black magic'. It
was the magic which had first entered Christian thought through the biblical
figure of Simon Magus, the Samaritan 'Antichrist', whose miracles, while
ostensibly matching Peter's, remained 'a hair's-breadth impure' and therefore
intrinsically rotten.
The religion - or, to be more accurate, the ersatz or surrogate religion - of
National Socialism drew its vital sustenance from a number of diverse
quarters. There was the nationalism fostered by the War of Liberation, which
was augmented, and decked out with imperial grandeur, by Bismarck's victories
against Denmark, Austria and France. There was pan-Aryanism and ' Volkische'
thought, which embedded Goethe's ideal - a nation and people dedicated to
culture and the spirit- in a mystical, pantheistic and specifically
nationalistic context. There was also Hegel, who provided a lofty
philosophical sanction for yoking the actual entity of das Volk to the
abstract conception of the State. Other influences were at work as well in the
years immediately preceding and following the First World War. All of them
furthered the establishment of National Socialism on a religious foundation,
and enabled it, thereby, to offer an apparent palliative and resolution to
Germany's collective identity crisis.
There was, of course, literature, both past and present. Figures by now
enshrined as 'classics' were either quoted out of context or suborned in their
entirety. Such was the fate that befell Goethe Schiller and Herder, Holderlin,
Novalis, Heinrich von Kleist Theodor Storm. Heine could be conveniently
disparaged and dismissed. He was, after all, they felt, a 'roofless' dew, and
his self-imposed exile only accentuated and confirmed his 'rootlessness'. Of
more recent figures, Theodor Fontane was (when ostensibly relevant) also
appropriated, as was Nietzsche. And Oswald Spengler's opus, The Decline of the
West, could be seen, even by its title, to herald the end of 'decadent'
European civilisation and the advent of a new, apocalyptic and 'full-blooded'
dispensation.
In a somewhat bizarre fashion, popular culture also contributed, conflated
with what purported to be earnest scholarship. Germany's landlocked inability
to expand geographically or territorially had prompted Goethe to advocate a
different kind of expansion or extension - into cultural and spiritual domains
- but the absence of a frontier continued to foster a sense of claustrophobia.
This became increasingly acute with the creation of the German Empire after
the Franco-Prussian War. The very name of the new imperium could not but ring
slightly hollow, simply because it existed in name only. The German Empire was
not, strictly speaking, an empire, because it lacked the colonies and
dominions which justified imperial status. By 1871, virtually every quarter of
the globe worth annexing had already been acquired by other powers; and
Germany's belated scramble for overseas possessions produced very little,
apart from South-West Africa. Such as there was did not lend itself to the
kind of romantic grandeur on which the very concept of empire depended.
In Britain, successive generations of youths read G. A. Henty or, were they
more literate, Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, and dreamed of exotic
adventures in the South Seas, in Africa, in the Raj, at the Khyber Pass on the
North-west Frontier. The death of General 'Chinese' Gordon at Khartoum was the
British equivalent of Custer's at the Little Big Horn; and Britain had,
moreover, such triumphs as Rourke's Drift and Omdurman on which to plume
herself. In the empire on which 'tine sun never set', there was plenty to
appease one's hunger for the exotic.
France, too, could wax romantic about adventures, explorations and conquests
in remote, mysterious and seemingly enchanted places. North Africa, for
example, supplied France with an ample diet of such material; and thus the
mystique of the Foreign Legion could enflame the popular imagination. In
Russia, the Caucasus had performed a similar function, inspiring, among
others, Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoy. There was also, as the nineteenth
century unfolded, the Far East, Mongolia and the Chinese frontier. And like
the British, the Russian imagination was stirred by the misty mountain
fastnesses of Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass. As for Austria-Hungary, the
yearning for exoticism could be to some degree satisfied within the empire
itself, where a diverse spectrum of races, cultures, traditions and peoples
provided the cultivated Viennese mind with an inexhaustible source of
glamorous mystery.
For Germany, the trappings of empire had no arena in which to parade
themselves. German schoolboys sought some imperial extension of the country on
which romantic fantasy could be projected, and they found nothing. For want of
anything else, they turned in what today may seem a bizarre and improbable
direction - the 'Wild West' of the United States. They did so under the
influence and auspices of a man named Karl May.
May is unknown in the English-speaking world. Measured by aesthetic standards,
he was little more than a hack, and does not even qualify for inclusion in
reference works on German literature. In Germany, however, and indeed
throughout central Europe, he was the most successful bestselling author of
his era, casting a spell over successive generations of youth. Even today, he
is still widely read.
May's massive corpus of work (amounting, in some editions, to more than sixty
volumes) was produced during the last third of the nineteenth century and the
first decade of the twentieth. His most popular books, derivative of Fenimore
Cooper and the 'dime novels' then current in America, were westerns -
precursors, in many respects, of the novels of Zane Grey and the more recent
Louis l'Amour. In these texts, May's own specifically Teutonic conceptions of
justice, law and order were dramatised against the landscape of the American
West. In a milieu today associated with John Wayne and Marlboro Country,
cowboys and Indians addressed each other in German.
By modern standards some of May's work might appear offensive. In fact, he was
much more humane, 'enlightened' and sympathetic to the plight of the Indian
than most of his American contemporaries. He was also a pacifist, and
vehemently opposed to imperialism - both Germany's and everyone else's. In
itself, his influence on the German collective psyche may have been
detrimental to literary taste and discrimination, but it was otherwise
harmless. It was, however, to become entangled with a much more pernicious
influence - that of Heinrich von Treitschke.
Treitschke was a very different kind of writer. Among his contemporaries, he
passed for an eminent and distinguished historian, with seemingly impeccable
academic credentials. Unlike May, he was not read by every German schoolboy.
For the most part, he was read only in the universities, but his ideas - in
even more partisan and simplified form - filtered out from there. Among his
major works was Das deutsche Ordensland Preussen, an evocative history,
engorged with purple prose, of the medieval Teutonic Knights in Prussia and
the Baltic. His orientation, in this and other works, was aggressively pan-
Aryan, ' Volkische', nationalistic and racist. This is made clear in the
analysis by D. Seward:
Reading Treitschke's Das deutsche Ordensland one immediately recognizes his
interpretation's influence on the architects of the Third Reich. He spoke of
the formidable activities of our people as conqueror, teacher, discipliner of
its neighbours', of 'those pitiless racial conflicts whose vestiges live on
mysteriously in the habits of our people'[16]
Seward observes that the Teutonic Knights were portrayed by Treitschke as
'medieval stormtroopers'. As such, they were later 'canonised' by the Nazis
and adopted as icons by the SS. The knights' crusade in Prussia and the Baltic
was depicted as Germany's great imperial adventure. Indeed, Treitschke
credited them with having established the governing principles of the imperial
policy later adopted by Europe's major powers. Yet in fact the activities of
the Teutonic Knights were to be echoed most approximately by those of the
settlers and the United States Cavalry in the American west.
The crusades in Prussia and the Baltic may indeed have constituted a 'great
imperial adventure'. But for German youths of Treitschke's era, that
adventure, unfortunately, lay centuries in the past. Through Karl May's work,
it found a contemporary analogy. In the prairies, deserts and mountains of the
American west, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were pursuing their 'manifest
destiny' and, in the process, exterminating the indigenous native population
in their path. Why, then, could Germany not have her own 'manifest destiny',
which sanctioned her conquest of the 'inferior' races to the east? The United
States was only re-enacting what the Teutonic Knights had done in the past.
With this contemporary parallel to validate them, why could not a new
generation of Teutonic Knights follow in the footsteps of their predecessors?
Thus did Treitschke's romanticised depiction become conflated, in the popular
mind, with the mass appeal and familiar settings of Karl May. This was to be a
significant impetus in the Nazi 'Drang nach Osten', the 'drive to the East'.
The coalescing religion of National Socialism was to draw further sustenance,
in the years just before and after the First World War, from figures of much
greater literary stature than either Karl May or Treitschke. One of these was
Hermann Hesse. Like May, he was a pactfist, violently opposed to German
militarism and to the conflict of 1914-18. He was also fervently anti-Nazi,
and prominent on the list of authors whose books the Nazis burnt when they
came to power. Nevertheless, in such works as Steppenwolf and Narziss and
Goldmund, German youth between the wars found both their personal and
collective identity crises powerfully mirrored and dramatised. In the earlier
novel Demian, they found what seemed a tangible incarnation of the Nietzschean
'superman'. For his readers at the time, Hesse appeared to offer the same
solutions to the problem of self-definition that he did to the alienated youth
of the 1960s.
Utterly different from Hesse, but equally influential, was Ernst Junger.
During the First World War, Junger had enlisted in the ranks, earned a field
commission and established a reputation for heroic exploits as a leader of
elite storm troops. He survived the conflict and emerged as one of Germany's
most frequently wounded, and most highly decorated, soldiers. Although loftily
contemptuous and hostile towards National Socialism, he was to serve in the
Second World War as one of the Wehrmacht's most admired and respected
officers. In such works as Storm of Steel (1920), Junger expounded a creed of
macho martial mysticism that readers today might associate with the Samurai of
Japan. He endorsed a Samurai-like fusion of sensitivity with hardness,
resilience and tenacity. In prose of an incandescent, almost visionary
intensity, he extolled the fraternal 'bonding' of men in combat, and, even
more, the transforming effects of danger, stress, violence and physical
suffering. He was neither political nor nationalistic in any conventional
sense, but war became for him a kind of supernal rite of passage through which
men fulfilled themselves and established contact with the numinous. He
embodied, in effect, the quality Heine had described: 'that lust for battle
which we find among the ancient Germans and which fights not in order to
destroy, nor in order to win, but simply in order to fight.'[17] It is not
therefore surprising that, despite his disdain for them, Junger was adopted as
an icon by the SS.
Although diametrically opposed in sensibility, temperament and Weltanschanung,
Hesse and Junger both exerted a profound influence on German youth between the
two world wars, but there was another literary figure whose influence, and
artistic stature, was appreciably greater. Knut Hamsun was not even German,
although as a Norwegian he could still officially be classified as 'Nordic'
and Aryan. Hamsun was one of the half-dozen or so most important cultural
influences of his age. Although subsequently eclipsed by some of his
disciples, his work contributed decisively to the transformation of prose
fiction in the twentieth century; and as a prophet, he was considered by his
contemporaries to equal Nietzsche, many of whose attitudes he shared. Since
the 18905 Hamsun had been advocating a pantheistic 'return to nature'. In
novels with such evocative titles as Pan, Mysteries, Vagabonds and The Road to
the Open, he depicted a sequence of alienated and solitary wanderers living in
mystical communion with the unsullied and untainted wilderness. In 1920 he won
the Nobel Prize for his most popular (if not best) work, Growth of the Soil, a
sustained prose hymn to the rhythms of the earth and the cycle of the seasons
- with which, he insisted, humanity had to place itself in accord.
For the youth of Stauffenberg's generation, Hamsun's work represented the
apotheosis of the novel as both art and prophecy. For the Wandervogel in
particular, his work was a manifesto, a credo, a bible. His attitudes and
values were, again, only too easily pressed into service by National Socialism
- and, in Hamsun's case, with his consent. Although an old man at the time,
and verging on senility, he applauded the Third Reich and subsequently
welcomed the German invasion of Norway. For this transgression, he was
blisteringly castigated and stigmatised after the war, and only narrowly
escaped punishment as a collaborator. Not until the 19605 was his artistic
reputation rehabilitated; but even today, in Scandinavia, a residue of odium
attaches to his name.
Different though they were, writers such as Hesse, Junger and Hamsun all put
forward an essentially 'religious' or, to be more accurate, 'spiritual' vision
which lent itself to appropriation and exploitation by National Socialism. The
youths who read and revered them, such as the Wandervogel, were youths in
quest of a religious answer to problems of meaning, purpose, self-definition,
and individual and collective identity. The otherworldly yearnings of these
youths rendered them particularly vulnerable to National Socialism's allure.
Their religious energy could be channelled into the National Socialist cause
and could thereby impart to it an intensified religious dimension.
The Wandervogel were officially founded in a Berlin suburb in 1901 initially
as a 'hiking association for schoolboys'. In the beginning, they comprised a
centralised organisation with an hierarchical structure. As the movement
proliferated, however, it also fragmented. Eventually there were some forty
separate Wandervogel associations and numerous splinter groups. The 'New
Pathfinders', the Wandervogel cadre to which the Stauffenberg brothers
belonged, had been founded in 1920. Unlike most, it included Jewish members.
In 1913-14, 92 per cent of all Wandervogel chapters had no Jewish members, and
84 per cent had clauses explicitly forbidding the admission of Jews.[18]
In The Erl-King, one of Michel Toumier's characters vividly evokes the spirit
of the Wandervogel in the aftermath of the First World War:
The Wandervogel movement, named after the migratory birds, was first of all an
act by which the younger generation cut loose from its elders. We didn't want
anything to do with the defeat, the poverty, the unemployment, the political
agitation. We threw back in our fathers' faces the sordid heritage they were
trying to fasten on us. We refused their ethic of expiation, their corseted
wives, their stifling apartments stuffed with drapes and curtains and
tasselled cushions, their smoky factories, their money. We went around in
little groups with our arms linked, singing, in rags but with flowers in our
battered hats, our only baggage a guitar over the shoulder. And we discovered
the great pure German forest with its fountains and its nymphs. Thin, dirty
and Iyrical, we slept in lofts and mangers and lived on love and cold water.
What united us first and foremost was belonging to the same generation. We
kept up a sort of freemasonry of the young.[19]
--cont--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
