-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
--[12b]--
In many respects, the Wandervogel, with their 'earth mysticism' and idealism,
anticipated the hippies of the 60s and the so-called New Age Travellers of
today, except that they were primarily middle-class and did not pursue their
activities on a full-time basis, only on weekends and holidays. Bands of
Wandervogel would embark on the kind of diversions familiar enough to our own
epoch: camping and hiking forays into the mountains and forests, nights spent
convivially around campfires, folksinging, storytelling, poetry reading. At
the simplest level, they advocated an even then cliched 'return to nature'.
The more sophisticated of them embraced a kind of romantic pantheism and a
strikingly modem insistence on ecology and environmental conservation. '
Volkische' ideology figured prominently in the Wandervogel movement, and
there was much talk of Herder's 'folk soul', of pagan Germanic culture, of
the mystique of the German forest and its nurturing power, as well as of the
need to reconcile spirit and nature, and to establish a new basis for man's
relationship to his environment and the natural world around him.
At their best, the Wandervogel could be a positive and healthy force. They
included in their ranks a number of future thinkers and cultural figures, as
well, of course, as the Stauffenberg brothers. They espoused a number of
values and attitudes which would be found congenial today. They offered a
respite, even if only temporarily, from the dire social and economic
conditions that prevailed in Germany, and they represented a positive
alternative to hard-line left-wing agitators who sought to foment in Germany
a Russian-style revolution. Yet it is also easy to see how the Wandervogel,
in their youthful idealism and gullibility, could be co-opted for purposes
more sinister than they themselves recognised at the time.
Shortly after the Nazi accession to power, all youth movements, including the
Wandervogel, were subsumed into a single, all-encompassing organisation, the
Hitler Youth. Unlike its more bohemian predecessors, the Hitler Youth
stressed obedience, hierarchy and discipline, and incorporated a specifically
martial dimension. Uniforms were worn, activities were expanded to include
marching and drill manoeuvres, and a military-style command structure was
introduced. A new aggressiveness supplanted the old pacifism, as exemplified
by the organisation's official song:
Who'er against us stands
Shall fall beneath our hands.
Our lives and loyalty,
Our Fuhrer, are pledged to thee.[20]
There were also lectures in 'racial biology', and other such typical National
Socialist preoccupations. The diffuse, more or less inchoate religious
gropings of the earlier Wandervogel were not only reinforced, but also given
a sharper, more specific, focus. Members of the Hitler Youth were initiated
into neo-pagan rituals and taught, quite explicitly, that Hitler was the
representative on earth of the divine.[21] Service to Hitler, and to Hitler's
Germany, was invested with a sacred and consecrated status.
If the Wandervogel anticipated developments of the 60s, so, too, did another
element in the air immediately preceding and following the First World War.
This, too, helped National Socialism to establish itself as a surrogate
religion. Freud, Jung, Adler and Otto Rank had only just opened up the vast,
new and uncharted territory of depth psychology and the unconscious. The
vistas it afforded were as revelatory, and as exciting, as those following
the discovery of America in the late fifteenth century. In those first heady
days, psychology was able to arrogate to itself the status of a legitimate
and recognised science, with all the prestige and credibility that science
enjoyed. But if the psychologist was deemed analogous to the discoverer of a
new continent, the true 'conquistadore' of the unconscious was the artist.
Not just individual figures, but whole schools - the Surrealists in France,
for example, and the Expressionists in Germany - attempted to hurl themselves
into the unconscious as if into a welcoming pool. When they surfaced, they
triumphantly proclaimed the unconscious to be a conduit to the numinous.
Through such figures as the Surrealists and the Expressionists, psychology
was made to converge with religion, and to open out, like a funnel, into a
specifically religious domain. There thus arose a preoccupation with the
mystical or numinous experience as a psychological phenomenon, and with what,
during the 1960s, would come to be called 'altered states of consciousness'.
As in the 19605, this preoccupation was to receive an added stimulus and
impetus from drugs.
Drugs were not, of course, unique to Germany. Nor were they in any sense new.
Ergot had been used across Europe since pre-Christian times, and was an
integral component of the medieval Walpurgisnacht or 'Witches' Sabbath'.
Addiction to opium, in the form of laudanum, had been common in England since
the early nineteenth century, when Coleridge, De Quincey and James Hogg both
cursed it and drew upon it for inspiration. Absinthe had long been familiar
in France and, following French conquests in North Africa, had been
complemented by hashish. Both figured prominently in the works of Nerval,
Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine; and both, by the end of the century, had
become inseparable from Parisian cultural and bohemian life. Morphine was
prevalent across the whole of Europe, and not even Sherlock Holmes was proof
against it. Cocaine, too, was everywhere, and included Sigmund Freud among
its devotees. But the drugs that began to appear in Germany at the beginning
of the twentieth century were altogether different in kind; and the
experience they offered lent, itself very specifically to a religious
interpretation.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Germany, like most other
European countries, sent successive waves of emigrants across the Atlantic.
Since the explorations of Alexander von Humboldt in the early years of the
century, Germany had felt a particular affinity with Latin America, which
had, after all, first been colonised by the conquistadores of the Habsburg
emperor Charles V. In consequence, many German settlers found their way not
to the United States, but to Mexico and points south. Many of them, too,
formed themselves into tightly knit sects, cults and religious communities
there. It was not the 'hippies' of the 19605 who 'discovered' mescaline and
promoted the active ingredient of the peyote cactus around the world. It was,
in fact, the German settlers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. By the end of the First World War, mescaline was readily available
in Europe, and especially in Germany. Among the best-known experimenters with
the drug was Hermann Hesse. It is now generally recognised that Steppenwolf
reflects, fairly explicitly, his experience with mescaline. In the novel, the
drug experience converges with a kind of spiritual or religious experience,
and as a result Steppenwolf became as much a 'manual' for Germany's alienated
youth between the wars as it did for America's alienated youth of the 1960s.
As in the United States of the 1960s, drugs were used between the wars in
Germany to induce an 'altered state of consciousness' with a distinctly
religious tinge. It was in precisely this domain that National Socialism
manipulatively trafficked.
In The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, Thomas Mann repeatedly stresses the
ease with which the mystical sensibility and so-called 'esoteric' thought can
be exploited by totalitarian interests - and, indeed, can themselves become
totalitarian. Once again, Mann was far-sighted. The mystical sensibility and
esoteric thought were very influential in Germany between the wars. Like so
much else, they were skilfully redirected and channelled into the swelling
mainstream of National Socialism, and imparted to National Socialism
something of their own character, energy, and orientation. They played, in
fact, a significant role in establishing Nazism as an ersatz or surrogate
religion.
During the post-war trials of the International Military Tribunal at
Nuremberg, material relating to the influence of esoteric thought on National
Socialism and the Nazi hierarchy was deliberately suppressed, and has been
lost to the record. According to one of the British prosecutors, the late
Airey Neave, large bodies of existing evidence were too bizarre to be
admitted: they would have permitted too many high-ranking Nazi Party members
to plead insanity and thereby escape retribution on grounds of diminished
responsibility.[22] There was also a general recoil, by the Western
democracies and the Soviet Union, from the very nature of the evidence
itself. The Western democracies, after all, and even more so the Soviet
Union, could at least claim to represent the principle of reason, the
supremacy of rationality. So flagrant an eruption of the irrational as the
Third Reich represented was uncomfortable disturbing and potentially
dangerous. For the world to be made aware of the sheer potency of the
irrational, on so awesome a collective level, would have been to open a
Pandora's box of incipient ills for the future. And it would have been
profoundly unsettling, for citizens of both the Western democracies and the
Soviet Union, to confront too blatantly what precisely they had been up
against. After all, its latent power resided within themselves, within all
humanity, as much as it did within the German people. It may perhaps have
been more difficult to tap, to mobilise and channel, but it was none the less
there.
In consequence, for a generation of post-war historians and commentators, the
role of esotericism in the rise of Nazi Germany was never accorded the
attention it deserved. Instead of being assessed and explored as what it was,
the religious dimension of National Socialism was nervously dismissed by such
facile formulations as 'mass madness', 'mass hysteria' and 'mass hypnosis',
and then subordinated to theories of economics, sociology and so-called
political science. A few novelists attempted to address the matter honestly.
Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch, both of whom had been among the first to warn
against the religious principle at work in Nazi Germany, performed the most
comprehensive autopsies of it in such works as Doctor Faustus and The
Guiltless. They were later followed by Michel Tournier in The Erl-King, by
some of the Latin American novelists and by George Steiner in The Portage to
San Cristobal of A.H. But historians chose deliberately to ignore the entire
issue for more than twenty years. When it was finally acknowledged, it was
acknowledged by 'fringe' historians, who, -with dubious 'facts' and luridly
spurious theories, swung the pendulum wildly in the opposite direction.
In 1960 there appeared in France 'Le matin des mages' by Louis Pauwels and
Jacques Bergier. This book, published three years later in Britain as The
Dawn of Magic and in the States as The Morning of the Magicians, became an
international bestseller and one of the most influential works of its time,
especially for the youth of the era. Hitching a ride on the prevailing
Zeitgeist, Pauwels and Bergier posited an elaborate conspiracy theory of
history, which rested ultimately on 'occult' or esoteric principles. In the
course of their exegesis, they depicted National Socialism and the Third
Reich as essentially 'occult' or esoteric phenomena.
During the decade and a half that followed, the tantalising hints and
snippets of evidence assembled by Pauwels and Bergier were woven into
elaborate cosmic dramas, the most famous of which perhaps was The Spear of
Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft. But Ravenscroft's book was only one in a chain
reaction of exegeses, which still continues today. Thus Nazi Germany has been
interpreted in terms of alchemy, astrology, satanism, ritual magic,
theosophy, anthroposophy and virtually every other such system that might
come to hand.
For the most part, these interpretations toppled headlong into crankiness, if
not certifiable dementia - when, that is, they were not flagrantly and
perhaps cynically invented or fabricated, as many of the 'facts' on which
they rested demonstrably were. In the resulting miasma, it became
increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from the wilder reaches of
fantasy, which gave more sober orthodox
historians fresh grounds for ignoring the subject entirely. Yet while most
accounts of esotericism in relation to the Third Reich were arrant nonsense
or worse, there lay neglected behind them a tenuous thread of validity. Only
recently has this been seriously examined. Dr Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's 1985
study, The Occult Roots of Nazism, constitutes a landmark of scholarship in
the field.
It is not uncommon today to speak of the French 'occult revival' of the
nineteenth century. The term is accurate enough, because the phenomenon it
designated comprised a reaction to the so-called (and, some would argue,
misnamed) 'enlightenment' of the century before. In Germany, however, there
was no need to 'revive' the 'occult', because it had never really died out,
never even gone so very deeply underground. On the contrary, it had remained
an ongoing theme, a recurring leitmotif, in Germanic culture.
Esotericism had reached one climax in Germany during the first half of the
seventeenth century. This was the era of the famous 'Rosicrucian Manifestos'
and what the late Dame Frances Yates has called the 'Rosicrucian
Enlightenment'. By the end of the seventeenth century, while rationalism was
taking authoritative hold elsewhere, an updated version of 'Rosicrucian'
thought was being propagated by the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz.
During the eighteenth century, Germany was a hotbed for the more mystically
and esoterically oriented forms of Freemasonry. Under Frederick the Great's
successor, Friedrich Wilhelm II, the entire Prussian administration and
government bureaucracy was the most notoriously 'Rosicrucian' in Europe.
What is now known as the Romantic Movement originated in Germany during the
1770S under the auspices of the young Herder, Goethe and Schiller. Initially
called 'Sturm und Drang' ('Storm and Stress'), romanticism was to sweep
across to England, then to disseminate itself throughout the rest of European
culture. Goethe himself was later to repudiate romanticism, at least
nominally and in theory. In practice he was to remain more or less romantic
in orientation and temperament for the rest of his life; and even after his
nominal repudiation of it, romanticism was kept vigorously alive in Germany
by a new generation, including Novalis, Holderlin and E. T. A. Hoffmann.
German romanticism - as Faust most clearly demonstrates - was steeped in
'occult' or esoteric thought. It also yoked 'occult' or esoteric thought to
other influences that were to play key roles in subsequent German history.
Through philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the
tradition of German mysticism - now labelled 'Idealism' - was made
philosophically respectable and integrated with romantic attitudes. Gothic
medievalism and a more empirical mysticism were introduced by Novalis;
classical mythology was integrated by Holderlin; the corpus of Germany's
legend, fairy tale and folklore was integrated by the brothers Grimm; and a
distinctive kind of pantheistic nationalism was integrated by ' Volkische'
ideology. By the mid-nineteenth century, these elements had fused and
comprised the single most identifiable strand in Germanic culture. The
symbolic figure who embodied them all, the tutelary genius presiding over the
German collective psyche, was Faust. He is, of course, perhaps the supreme
metaphor for the whole of modern Western civilisation, but he also remains
uniquely German, uniquely identified with Germany. Thus does his
twentieth-century avatar function in Mann's Doctor Faustus.
During the mid to late nineteenth century, Faust seemed for many people,
German and otherwise, to have become incarnate in the person of Richard
Wagner. In European cultural circles, Wagner was seen not just as 'the
Master' in a musical context, but as a master magician, a supreme artistic
alchemist who, according to the poet Stephane Mallarme in France, had
transmuted and fused the entire spectrum of the arts and of human endeavour
into a new, higher, unprecedentedly lofty spiritual unity. Wagner effectively
founded a new religion based on 'Kultur', and this became the official state
religion if not of Germany as a whole, then certainly of Bavaria and the
south.
In The Flying Dutchman, Wagner offered his own variation on the Faust story.
In The Master Singers, he evoked a Germanic tradition extending from the
Hohenstauffen emperors and the high Middle Ages to the Lutheran Reformation
and the Free Knights of the Empire. In Tannhauser and The Ring of the
Nibelungen, he plundered Germanic myth, legend, folklore and fairy tale. In
Lohengrin and Parsifal, he drew on Wolfram von Eschenbach to place the
mysteries of the Grail in a new Germanic context, which was very different
from that of, say, Tennyson's contemporary Idylls of the King. Not only did
Wagner shake and stir this heady cocktail of themes. He also added to it the
distinctive ingredient of pan-Aryanism - an insistence, implicit and
sometimes explicit, on the uniqueness and ultimately the supremacy of
Germanic thought, blood, tradition and cultural heritage.
In the wake of the Second World War, Wagner has frequently been stigmatised.
Even today, he remains a source of controversy. Heated debate has raged in
Israel about whether his music can be played there. To some extent, this is
understandable. Wagner was certainly anti-Semitic, and his music offered
inspiration to Hitler and other members of the Nazi hierarchy, who annexed as
much of him as they could to their cause.
Yet Wagner's pan-Aryanism had nothing to do with political institutions or
with government. It was much more spiritual metaphorical and symbolic, much
more otherworldly. In many respects, too, it was a response to other, rival,
'isms' then in the air. In Britain, complacent mutton-chop-whiskered
Victorians were gamely shouldering the 'white man's burden' of imperialism
and colonialism; and others, of the British Israelite Society - precursors of
today's Christian fundamentalists - were arrogating to themselves an even
more sanctimonious supremacy as 'God's chosen'. Across the Atlantic,
America's white Anglo-Saxon Protestants -were zealously promulgating, against
Mexicans and Indians alike, what they ultimately regarded as less the
country's than their own 'manifest destiny'. To the east, pan-Slavism was
rampant, from Petersburg down through Serbia, Bulgaria and the Balkans.
Indeed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, pan-Slavism was considered
a greater threat to Western Europe than pan-Aryanism. The perception was not
altogether askew. It was from the revolver of a pan-Slavic agitator that the
shots which precipitated the cataclysm of 1914 rang out in Sarajevo.
In his temperament and many of his attitudes, Wagner was not the most
endearing of human beings, nor the most sympathetic to modern thought. He
was, however, an artistic genius, and probably the single most important
figure in nineteenth-century musical history. Yet "if he cannot unequivocably
be blamed for the noxious uses to which a later generation put him, neither
can his influence on that generation be altogether dismissed. Wagner not only
revitalised certain key elements of esoteric tradition. He also infused those
elements and that tradition, with a uniquely and specifically Germanic
character. He himself may have disdained nationalism as a political
phenomenon, but, inadvertently or otherwise, he helped to establish for that
phenomenon a spiritual, quasi-religious, framework, and thereby imbued it
with a new and more profound justification. Perhaps more than anyone else,
Wagner furnished the sanction whereby the ideal of Germany as a nation
devoted to culture and the spirit could be translated, and twisted into
political terms. He also provided a conduit whereby important aspects of
esotericism could be channelled into National Socialism, thus imparting to
National Socialism a mystical impetus.
Except for Wagner, however, esotericism in late nineteenth-century Germany
was a more or less peripheral or subterranean phenomenon. In France, the
so-called 'occult revival' had been gaining momentum for years. The
Franco-Prussian War, the fall of the Second Empire and the collapse of
external social and political institutions had engendered a period of
national soul-searching, and an attending uncertainty about meaning, purpose
and direction. A vacuum had been created, and a multitude of sects and cults
prospered because they offered a prospect of filling it. During the period of
the fin-de-siecle, esotericism was able to weave itself into the very fabric
of French culture at the time. It was particularly evident in the 'school' of
French symbolist literature exemplified by Mallarme and the playwright
Maurice Maeterlinck, and in the music of Debussy.
Germany, in contrast, had entered a period of social stability. The newly
created empire offered a facade of certainty and national self-confidence.
External institutions appeared to be established on a solid and unshakeable
foundation. Industrialisation diverted outwards the energies which, in
France, were focused on national introspection. Esotericism, therefore,
played a relatively minor role in the national consciousness. Nevertheless,
it was there and, albeit quietly, thriving. For not even the external
institutions of the new imperium could altogether resolve the collective
identity crisis. Nor could they altogether replace the spiritual sustenance
provided by organised religion - which, faced with the challenge of Darwinian
thought, was itself under serious threat and undergoing its own crisis of
confidence.
In 1888, two English esotericists, Dr William Wynn Westcott and S. L.
MacGregor Mathers, created the supposedly 'Rosicrucian' and
magically-oriented Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society that was to
include such figures as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Aleister Crowley
and, most significantly, William Butler Yeats. Mathers later declared his
organisation to have been devised, shaped and inaugurated in accordance with
a blueprint received from an unidentified 'seeress' living in Ulm. The Order
of the Golden Dawn was supposed to have been an essentially Germanic
conception and, so Mathers implied, intended to complement other, similar
secret societies which were already operating in Germany.
Yet a full half-century before the Golden Dawn traces of Germanic esotericism
were seeping into British culture. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, one of the most
popular 'mainstream' and typically nineteenth-century English novelists, was
steeped in esoteric and 'Rosicrucian' thought. Although best known for such
lumbering bestselling potboilers as The Last Days of Pompeii (with its
oft-satirised opening sentence), Lytton also produced a number of 'occult'
works: Zanoni, for instance, and the rather less sonorous A Strange Story,
which he himself considered much more important. It was in his mantle of
'Rosicrucian' and esoteric propagandist that Lytton adumbrated his concept of
'Vril', a mysterious potency, puissance or vertu in the blood that might
engender the supposed race of the future - a race of superior human beings, a
master race of supermen. This concept, which was later to be of enormous
influence among pre-Nazi esoteric sects in Germany, now seems to have
originated in Germany in the first place. Lytton, in other words, was not its
true author, but only its conduit.
Whatever the shadowy Germanic influences that so affected Lytton and Mathers,
they were eclipsed, or perhaps subsumed, by much more public and prominent
esoteric prophets whose work and teaching stamped European culture as a
whole, but assumed a specific and distinctive character in Germany. During
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Theosophy, created by Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky, swept Europe with an impetus and energy
comparable to that of Wagner or Nietzsche. Wagner may have created a religion
of his own, but few people at the time would explicitly have acknowledged it
to be such. Theosophy; on the other hand, did announce itself as a
full-fledged organised religion - or, rather as the definitive and supreme
synthesis of all religions, the universal and all-encompassing ultra-religion
of the future. It thus posed a challenge and a threat to existing faiths that
generated considerable alarm. With its declared foundations in what purported
to be 'esoteric Buddhism', its hierarchy of 'secret masters' and its
all-embracing scope, Theosophy offered a complex framework that incorporated
all other creeds within itself. It exerted an appeal for eminent cultural
figures like Yeats, Conan Doyle and even Stefan George. It established its
primary foothold in Britain, where it survives today, but it was no less
popular on the continent. In the summer of 1884, the first Theosophical
Society was founded in Germany. By the tarn of the century, there were
similar societies across the whole of the German and Austro-Hungarian
empires. Once again, a few far-sighted artists divined a potential danger. In
the early novel Young Torless, published in 1906, Robert Musil depicts a
proto-Nazi youth exploiting the tenets of Theosophy for psychological
manipulation and domination.
In Austria and Germany, Theosophy spawned a number of particularly noxious
progeny, sects with a ' Volkische', pan-Aryan and viciously anti-Semitic
orientation. Among other things, these sects - collectively known as
'Ariosophy' - imparted a further esoteric and religious dimension to National
Socialism, and helped provide a cosmology and a specious justification for
Nazi racial theoreticians. According. to Dr Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke:
The Ariosophists . . . combined German volkish nationalism and racism with
occult notions borrowed from the theosophy of. . . Blavatsky, in order to
prophesy and vindicate a coming era of
German world rule.[23]
In order to disseminate their skewed vision, the Ariosophists founded secret
religious orders dedicated to the revival of the lost esoteric knowledge and
racial virtue of the ancient Germans, and the corresponding creation of a new
pan-German empire.[24]
Three Ariosophist sects, and the personalities associated with them, were
particularly influential.
In 1905, a renegade Cistercian monk, Adolf Josef Lanz, assumed the spuriously
noble title of Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and began publishing, in Vienna, a
fervently anti-Semitic journal called Ostara. Two years later, in 1907,
Liebenfels founded a cranky racist secret society dubbed 'Ordo Novi Templi',
the Order of the New Templars. On Christmas Day of that year, having
purchased a small castle overlooking the Danube, he raised his order's flag -
bearing a swastika - above the tower.
Among Ostara's most assiduous readers and avid devotees was the young and
then destitute would-be painter, Adolf Hitler, who is known to have met with
Liebenfels at the journal's offices in 19O9 [25] The New Templars also
exerted an influence on Heinrich Himmler and, through him, on the SS. Many SS
rites and ceremonies, and
much of the pseudo-archaic 'runic lore' with which SS personnel were
indoctrinated, derived, directly or otherwise, from Liebenfels's loathsome
organisation. Among his beliefs was that of a universal psychic energy
animating the cosmos, which had as 'its most perfect manifestation [the]
blond-haired blue-eyed Aryan'.
Among the programmes he advocated was a ritualistic immolation of 'racial
inferiors' as sacrificial offerings to pagan gods.
One of Liebenfels's closest friends and associates was Guido von List, whom
Dr Goodrick-Clarke describes as 'the first popular writer to combine volkish
ideology with occultism and theosophy'.[26] In 1908 he created his own Guido
von List Society, which overlapped the New Templars in its tenets and
included a number of the same members. The membership also included the
entire Viennese Theosophical Society. In 1912, certain of List's disciples
created another secret society, the 'Germanenorden' or Germanic Order.
In 1918, a Munich-based faction of the by then moribund 'Germanenorden'
founded a new organisation, known as the 'Thule Gesellschaft' or 'Thule
Society', under the leadership of an adventurer named Rudolph von
Sebottendorff.[27] To the beliefs of his immediate predecessors,
Sebottendorff (whose real name was Adam Glauer) added the concept of 'Vril'
previously outlined by Bulwer-Lytton. Sebottendorff bought and proceeded to
edit the newspaper which would subsequently become the Volkischer Beobachter,
the official organ of the National Socialist Party, and which, by 1921, was
owned by Adolf Hitler. Among the members of the ' Thule Gesellschaft' were
such later Nazi eminences as Alfred Rosenburg and Rudolf Hess. The membership
also included Anton Drexler, first chairman of the National Socialist Party,
and Dietrich Eckart, a demented poet who was one of Hitler's most important
early mentors and, from 1921 until his death in 1923, editor of the
Volkischer Beobachter.[28]
In France, esotericism had acquired great influence in the wake of the
Franco-Prussian War, the collapse of existing social and political
institutions and the ensuing crisis of faith. It helped to fill the vacuum
created by a loss of national self-confidence and offered people something in
which to believe. In Germany, the obverse of this situation prevailed. The
apparent stability, solidity- and - perhaps most significantly of all -
novelty of the new social and political institutions fostered national
self-confidence, and precluded the need for introspective soul-searching. In
consequence, esotericism, though well entrenched, was largely confined to the
periphery. In Austro-Hungary, as in Russia, the situation was something
between those in France and Germany. External social and political
institutions had not yet collapsed, but they were shaky and enervated,
lacking in vitality and novelty, and manifestly in a state of atrophy and
decay. As a result, esotericism, in both the Habsburg and Romanov empires,
was something rather more than a peripheral phenomenon; and thus it was in
Vienna, rather than Berlin, that the Ariosophist sects first established
themselves. After 1918, however, Germany's condition was analogous to that of
France in 1871, if not much worse; and as the kaleidoscope of relative values
mutated into ever new configurations, esotericism, especially in the form of
Ariosophy, moved inwards from the periphery, closer to the men and principles
that shaped developments.
It was suggested earlier in this book that 'magic' might be defined as a
metaphor reflecting the manipulative relationship between human consciousness
and will on the one hand, external phenomena and people on the other. By that
definition, the Ariosophist sects comprise an element of 'black magic' in the
religious edifice of National Socialism. But there was also what might be
regarded as a 'white magic' counter-current. As Mann said, esotericism and
mystical thought have a natural affinity with totalitarianism, and are
therefore susceptible to totalitarian exploitation. There are, however,
exceptions that prove the rule.
For many commentators, the chief such exception - the primary embodiment of a
'white magic' counter-current to the Ariosophists - was Rudolf Steiner. Born
in 1861 in what was then Hungarian territory, Steiner established credibility
for himself as a Goethe scholar and the editor of Goethe's scientific
writings for a projected definitive edition. From his twenties on, he was
also a zealous adherent of Theosophy. In 1906, he became a member of another
organisation, the Ordo Templi Orientis, or O.T.O., which derived obliquely
from the Golden Dawn in England and was subsequently to be presided over by
Aleister Crowley.
In 1913, Steiner and an entourage of primarily German disciples defected from
Theosophy and created their own rival system, Anthroposophy. Steiner
described Anthroposophy as 'spiritual science'. Ultimately, it was a
re-vamped and updated variant of Theosophy, embedded in a specifically
Christian context. It also stripped Theosophy of many of the tenets that lent
themselves to racist interpretation. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Steiner
became singled out for vilification and attack by the Ariosophists and, as it
consolidated power, the National Socialist Party. Nazi propaganda regularly
castigated Anthroposophy as an integral component in the alleged
international Jewish-Masonic conspiracy.
On the whole, Anthroposophy tended to exert a beneficent influence. Among its
most enthusiastic adherents, sponsors and financial supporters were the
family of Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of Germany's Imperial General Staff on
the outbreak of the First World War and nephew of the earlier Helmuth von
Moltke, architect of victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Another adherent, at
least for a time, was the great Russian novelist, poet and aesthetic theorist
Andrey Bely. The currency that Steiner's thought enjoyed in such social and
cultural circles attests to its influence and its aura of legitimacy and
respectability. That aura remains largely intact even today. It has been
reinforced by the promotion of Goethe studies, by other literary scholarship,
by publishing ventures which have restored to print a number of important but
neglected works, and by the network of Steiner Schools in Germany and
elsewhere across the world, including Britain.
It is not altogether inappropriate, therefore, to see Steiner as a species of
'white magic' counter-current to the 'black magic' of the Ariosophists and
National Socialism. Nor is it inappropriate to compare him in certain
respects to Stefan George. But there were important differences between the
two men. Steiner actively sought and recruited disciples. Like H. P.
Blavatsky, he dreamed of establishing a new religious system, if not, indeed,
a new religion. He created a large, widespread and diffuse organisation and,
as a necessary corollary of this, was perfectly content to delegate
authority. And although he himself was repeatedly attacked by the Nazis, he
did not counter-attack. On the contrary, his particular form of mysticism - a
latterday variant of German pietist tradition - led him to a sage-like
pacifism reminiscent of Gandhi's.
George was much more haughtily Olympian than Steiner, much more aloof, much
more fastidiously selective, much more patrician, much more 'elitist'. He did
not actively seek disciples; would-be followers had first to petition him,
and then pass through a stringent assessment before they were deemed worthy
to sit at his feet. Unlike Steiner, George recoiled with distaste from all
mass movements, which were, for him, synonymous with the mob. He had no
interest in founding an organisation, for, among other things, that would
have entailed delegating authority, the very suggestion of which would have
been inconceivable to him. There was, and could only ever be, one Stefan
George. While Steiner's gentle and accommodating Weltanschauung led him to a
tolerant pacifism, the much more aggressive George insisted on the necessity
for action.
Steiner died in 1927, when the prospects of National Socialism acquiring
power in Germany still seemed remote. George died in 1933, when the Nazi
accession to power had just become a fan' accompli. We cannot know how these
two men, in their differing fashions, might have reacted to subsequent
developments. Both, however, through their respective disciples and proteges,
were to oppose the Third Reich from beyond the grave. Yet it was George's
influence, operating through Claus von Stauffenberg, that came closest to
striking a decisive blow which would have transformed the course of
twentieth-century history.
pp.217-252
--[notes]--
11 Myth and Might
1 Broch, The Sleepwalkers, p. 373.
2 Ibid., p.647.
3 Jung, 'The Role of the Unconscious', Civilisation in Transition (Collected
Works, vol. 10), p.13.
4 Jung, 'Wotan', op.cit., p.184.
5 Brod, Heinrich Heine, p.21.
6 Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, vol. I, p.417.
7 Ibid., vol. I, p.420
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., vol. I, p.531.
10 Robertson, Christians against Hitler, p.25
11 Ibid., p.18.
12 Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth century' p.387.
13Jung, Civilisation IN Transition, p.190. n.16.
14 Tournier, The Erl-King, p. 228.
15 For a discussion of the religious aspects of National Socialism see M.
Baigent, R. Leigh and H. Lincoln, The Messianic Legacy, London, 1986, pp.
135ff.
16 Seward, The Monks of War, P 135
17 Heine, 'Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany' in
Selected Work, p.417.
18 Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, p. 184.
19 Tournier, op.cit., p.231.
20 Siemsen, Hitler Youth, p.65.
21 Much of this information was given in the trial of Baldur von Schirach at
Nuremberg, see: Trials of the Major War Criminals, Proceedings . . . Part 14,
pp.360-408, especially pp.396-400; See also ibid., Part 15, pp.l-30. The
following song was sung by members of the Hitler Youth at the Party Rally,
1934:
We are the rollicking Hitler Youth:
We have no need of Christian truth;
For Adolf Hitler is our Leader
And our Interceder.
No evil old priest these ties can sever;
We're Hitler's children now and ever.
This was presented as evidence for the prosecution. See ibid., Part 14, p.
397.
22 Bentine, The Door Marked Summer, p.291..
23 Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, p.2.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p. 195.
26 Ibid., p. 33.
27 For the Thule Gesellschaft see: Phelps, 'Before Hitler Came', Journal of
Modern
28 History, xxxv, 1963, pp.251ff; and Goodrick-Clarke, op.cit., pp.144ff. 28
A list of Thule members and sympathisers is given in Sebottendorf, Bevor
29 Hitler Kam, pp.221ff
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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