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Is it possible to class the pseudo-religious background of neo-fascism as civil religion? Ted H. Wägner Introduction At the end of the millenium the western societies are marked by numerous opposite developments, which hardly can be reduced to a common denominator. Among them are modernization processes, globalization on the one hand and the return of nationalism or better antimodern demarcation on the other hand. In particular the relationship of the various social processes of the secularization in politics and society and religions and religiosity bear a lot of tension. In the case of Germany, neo-fascistic groups increasingly used the political vacuum in the formerly communist governed parts of the country, regrouped and have now begun to rephrase their ideological background and advocate a pseudo/pagan-religious system formulated in the beginning of the century. In this short paper I will try to portray the history of this pseudo-religious system and look into whether it can be classed as a form of civil religion. To summon the paper I will try to establish a few thoughts as to how the apparent problems of disorientation and the apparent lack of information can be solved. The history of the neo-pagan pseudo religious system of Germany´s National Socialist Party NSDAP On April 6th, 1919, in Bavaria, left wing socialists and anarchists proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The brains of the revolution were a group of writers who had little idea of administration. The counter-revolutionary forces, the whites, composed of various groups of decommissioned soldiers known as "Freikorps", equipped and financed by the mysterious "Thule Society", defeated the Bavarian Soviet within a matter of weeks. Many other decommissioned soldiers waited out the turbulence in barracks, Pfc. Adolf Hitler among them. After Eisner´s People´s Republic of Bavaria collapsed in 1919, Hitler¨s superiors put him to work in the post revolution investigating commission. He was ordered to attend special anticommunist training courses and seminars, which were financed by the Reichswehr administration and by private donors from the Thule Society. Back in 1912, several German occultists with radical anti-Semitic inclinations decided to form a "magic" lodge, which they named the Order of Teutons. The main founders were Theodor Fritsch, a publisher of an anti-Semitic journal; Philipp Stauff, pupil of the racist Guido von List, and Hermann Pohl, the order¨s chancellor. The Order of Teutons was organized along the lines of the Free Masons or the Rosicrucians, having differing degrees of initiation, only persons who could fully document that they were of pure "Aryan" ancestry were allowed to join. In 1915, a Rudolf Glauer, who held a Turkish passport and who had made contact with Rosicrucians in Turkey and practiced Sufi meditation, joined Pohl. Glauer also was an amateur in astrology and an admirer of Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List, both outspoken anti-Semitic¿s. While staying in Turkey Glauer had changed his name to Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorf. He became the Grand Master of the Bavarian Order and with Pohl¨s approval he founded the Thule Society in 1918. The journalist Karl Harrer was given the job of founding a political "worker circle". He realized that the workers would reject any program that was presented to them by a member of the conservative "privileged" class. Harrer knew that the mechanic Anton Drexler, who was working for the railroads, was a well-known anti-Semite, chauvinist and proletarian. With Drexler as nominal chairman, Harrer founded the German Workers Party (DAP Deutsche Arbeiter Partei) in January 1919. The DAP was only one of many associations founded and controlled by the "Thule Gesellschaft" (Thule Society). The Thule Society was the "mother" to the German Socialist Party, led by Julius Streicher, and the right-wing radical Oberland Freikorps (Oberland Free Corps). Hitler became the most prominent personality in the party. He caused Harrer to drop out and he pushed Drexler, the nominal chairman, to the sidelines. He filled key positions with his own friends from the Thule Society and the Army. During the summer of 1920, upon his suggestion, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Worker Party (NSDAP). The new name was intended to equally attract nationalists and proletarians. To go along with the new name his mass movement also required a flag with a powerful symbol. Among many designs under consideration, Hitler picked the one suggested by Thule-member Dr. Krohn: a red cloth with a white circle in the middle containing a black swastika. Actually the Swastika is the oldest cross and emblem in the world. To this day it is widely used as a Hinduist/Buddhist idol in Asia and earlier it has been found in ancient Rome, excavations in Grecian cities, on Chinese coins dated 315 BC and in North America the Indian tribes of the southwest plains use it as an amulet. In Central America the natives consider the "Swastika" a charm to drive away evil and bring good luck, long life and prosperity to the possessor all this representing an ancient tradition of great value, which was sullied by the Nazi´s. Hitler¿s real breakthrough came in the end of the 1919 when he met Dietrich Eckart. Eckart was the wealthy publisher and editor-in-chief of an anti-Semitic journal, which he called "In Plain German". Eckart was also a committed occultist and as an initiate, Eckart belonged to the inner circle of the Thule Society as well as other esoteric orders. Briefly, the creed of the Thule Society inner circle was as follows: Thule was a legendary island in the far north, similar to Atlantis, supposedly the center of a lost, high-level civilization. But not all secrets of that civilization had been completely wiped out. Those that remained were being guarded by ancient, highly intelligent beings. The truly initiated could establish contact with these beings by means of magic-mystical rituals. The "Masters" or "Ancients" allegedly would be able to endow the initiated with supernatural strength and energy. With the help of these energies the goal of the initiated was to create a race of Supermen of "Aryan" stock who would exterminate all "inferior" races. A frequent visitor to prison in Landsberg, where Hitler was writing "Mein Kampf" with the help of Rudolf Hess, was General Karl Haushofer, a university professor and director of the Munich Institute of Geopolitics. Haushofer, Hitler, and Hess had long conversations together and Hess kept records of these conversations. Hitler¿s demands for German "Lebensraum im Osten" (living space in the east) at the expense of the Slavic nations were based on the geopolitical theories of the learned professor. Haushofer was also inclined toward the esoteric. As military attaché in Japan, he had studied Zen-Buddhism. He had also gone through initiations at the hands of Tibetan Lamas. He became Hitler¿s second "esoteric mentor", replacing Dietrich Eckart. In Berlin, Haushofer had founded the Luminous Lodge or the "Vril Society". The lodge¿s objective was to explore the origins of the Aryan race and to perform exercises in concentration to awaken the cosmic forces of what they called "Vril", which stood in place of Newtonian physics, the bizarre geology known as the hollow earth theory, and the frigid cosmology of Hanns Hörbiger´s "Welteislehre" (the doctrine of eternal ice). There was an occult frappe composed of the mysticism of Russian mystic Gurdijeff, the theosophy of Madame Helena Blavatsky and the archetypes of Nordic mythology. Hörbiger¿s physics derived from an intuitive flash he experienced late in the nineteenth century. In his work Hörbiger described that as a young engineer he was watching one day some molten steel being poured on wet ground covered with snow: the ground exploded after some delay and with great violence. This conflict of opposites, of fire and ice, is a theme that inspired Hörbiger and resonated for German nationalists because it recurs in the Icelandic Eddas, the sourcebooks of Teutonic mythology. As grounds for a cosmology it is rather questionable, if not say dubious. Nevertheless, Nazi science was influential out of all proportion to its objective validity and Hörbiger was immensely influential in the Third Reich. His followers numbered in the tens of thousands. The "Welteislehre" managed to thrive even after Hitler´s Nazi-Germany had been defeated in 1945. In a 1953 survey conducted by Martin Gardner showed that more than a million people in Germany, England, and the U.S. believed that Hörbiger was right. The Hörbigerian cosmology posited an early epoch, some fifteen million years ago, during which a huge moon moved across the sky very near the earth. Its gravitational attraction gave rise to a race of our ancestors, the giants. These giants, who appear in the ancient Norse and Icelandic sagas, sleep, yet they are alive. To the Nazis, they were Supermen. In one set of myths, contained in the "Nibelungenlied", they lived beneath Teutonic mountains. In another they were prototype Aryans from the East, inhabiting vast Tibetan caverns. What regards Madame Helena Blavatsky, it needs to be said, that the German occult societies appropriated some theosophical ideas but her doctrine of the "Six Root Races" - Astral, Hyperborean, Lemurian, Atlantean, Aryan, and the Coming Race - did not assign much importance to the Aryan race. The Aryans would also be supplanted in turn by the Sixth Root Race, which would arise out of all the existing races and nations, sort of like a "mutant" strain. Blavatsky does not attach much importance to racial magic, which she puts in the category of "sorcery." From the 1920´s Hitler´s commandos ruthlessly attacked and killed adherents of Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Freemasons and others who shared the same occult doctrines; he banned their groups from the Third Reich, and publicly denounced occultists such as Rudolf Steiner and Allister Crowley. This can be easily understood, however, in terms of perceived threat; Hitler simply recognized occult power in each of the banned groups which could be used to rival his own "'Thule Society", and eliminated them from the field. Those occult groups who presented no threat he left alone. It is also possible that Hitler was determined to keep the Thule Society´s roots hidden from the general public; the groups and individuals he targeted for elimination were those who knew of those roots (and who might disclose him). This would explain why the Nazis burned every available book of Thule Society founder Rudolf Heinrich von Sebottendorf, which spoke of those roots, why they confiscated all the books of the occult groups they outlawed, and why Rudolf Hess´s defection to the England in 1941 prompted Hitler to outlaw all remaining occultists in the Third Reich, such as astrologers, mediums - even parlor magicians. In conjunction with mysticism stands the fact that Hitler played the role of High Priest of National Socialism. There was, for example, a ceremony which only Hitler was allowed to perform in which he "blessed" new Nazi flags by touching them against the "sacred" flag which had been carried by party members during the Munich riot at the "Bürgerbräukeller" (Munich-based beer hall) in 1923. It was designed to convey the idea that the supposed "sacred" nature of the first swastika flag could somehow, as if by magic, convey something of its "sacred" nature to the other Nazi flags which were to fly over the nation. The occult nature of National Socialism did not end with the ceremony of the flags, or any of the other phenomenons with which the public is well aware. Rather, it started with them. For the entire purpose of the Nürnberg rallies and other such nocturnal party events, which were so rich in displays of light, preaching, ceremony, and music, was meant to appeal to the religious nature in people. In 1936 the "National Reich Church" was established, and in it only national orators of the Reich were allowed to speak. The National Reich Church demanded an immediate stop to the printing and sale of the Bible in Germany and it planned to have the Bible, the cross and all Christian religious objects removed from the altars of the Christian churches. The altars should display nothing but "Mein Kampf", and to the left of this a sword. Then of course there was the SS. The very symbol of the organization was occult in nature, the lightning bolts having originated in the Runes of the ancient Germanic. To Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS, the group was effectively a new order of Teutonic Knights. In 1936, he sent out a memorandum defining the holidays, which were to be based upon paganism and Nazism; Hitler¿s Birthday (April, 20th), May Day, Summer Solstice, Harvest Feast, The Beer Hall Putsch Anniversary (Nov., 9th), and Winter Solstice. He also devised ceremonies meant to eventually replace Christian rituals in the New Order; naming rites to replace Christian baptism as an example. His most ambitious occult project however was the restoration of Wewelsburg Castle in Westfalen. It was ultimately envisioned as serving as the "Holy City" of an SS State. In 1934 Himmler selected the moldering cliff-top castle to serve as the SS high temple. Known as Wewelsburg, the seventeenth century fortress was overhauled at a cost of more than three million dollars, an impressive sum considering that labor was extracted free from concentration camp inmates. The shrine included a 12.000-volume library of Aryan lore and a cavernous dining hall with an Arthurian round table for Himmler and twelve trusted lieutenants. Reportedly, each knight of Himmler¿s round table received a coat of arms; at the man¿s death, his emblem was to be incinerated in the pit of the Supreme Leaders¿ Hall, and the ashes placed in an urn atop one of twelve pedestals there. The choice of the number 12 for the number of Himmler¿s "Apostles" was not made at random; it was purposely reminiscent of Christ and his 12 Apostles. Wewelsburg itself was meant to have become the centerpoint of a new city, which would be surrounded by walls 40 feet high. The Nazis were convinced that they had succeeded in combining the realms of nature and spirit, that the product of this fusion would be the natural Aryan man, and that the process of reforming a decadent bourgeois world with a new nature-mythos required the elimination (sacrifice) of those, whose existence - as they believed, was an insult to the laws of life. The swastika, chosen by Dr. Krohn, was a symbol of the sun and of life. In their own mind Nazis were frontrunners for a globalization in the sense that they believed in world dictatorship with Germany at the head. Can this form of a religious movement be classed as a civil religion? Today the value of religion in present-day Europe differs according to region. In the west, where gradual secularization has left a residue of civil religion, that is, values and norms lending basic orientation, traditionally institutionalized religion continues to decline, while fundamentalist and neo-religious movements are apparently growing. In the eastern parts of Germany, following the collapse of socialism, religious revitalization has emerged and the neo-fascistic movement used its heritage of mixing religion and nationalism, which in turn can lead to aggressive and often violent behavior. Nationalism at the Nazi level is a form of pagan, which suggests the individual blending into the masses and human sacrifice, the essence of totalitarianism. Human sacrifice was widespread in pagan religions. The recently unearthed peat bog men of ancient Britain, probably undesirables of their tribe, were sacrificed to the Earth Goddess, according to the Roman historian Tacitus. The impulse to sacrifice to appease the gods is a powerful and universal human tendency. It was of course transformed into the somewhat less lethal Catholic mass but breaks out to this day in times of stress, in witch-hunts, pogroms and Holocausts. Even if one agrees to that sacrificial mechanisms can organize group identity, what view of the world could permit anyone to regard today´s neo-fascistic movement as religious or even civil religion? The reality of this neo-fascistic civil religious movement might be rejected on the grounds that it makes inadequate appeal to a supernatural metaphysics. Normally a religion is defined as an explanatory system based in a cult of divine, sacred beings. The definition of the sacred is the point of conflict between those for whom civil religion usefully describes patriotic practices and those for whom it does not. If one contends that the doctrines and ceremonies of nationalism clearly reference the sacred, then the divine beings appealed to by the movements rituals are the dead, which this movement or party embodied as heroes in its flag. But this is not the only standard such a pseudo-religious system would have to fulfill if one would want to class it as a form of civil religion. It also would have to be a justification and consolation for the most wrenching human tragedies, especially mortality; a guide to one¿s dignity of place and meaning in the cosmos, especially in view of personal inadequacy and the need of atonement; and a primary bond of social cohesion expressed in rituals or ceremonies that connect human beings to each other and the sacred. Whether or not one approves of the answers, these are the questions to which the present right wing nationalism addresses itself. Normally genuine religions exhibit five features. These are cultic aspects (such as the provision for frequent ceremony and ritual); recognized leadership invested with effective authority; explicitly defined individual participation that establishes grounds for membership; doctrines of correct belief, and a coherence among these categories that makes the concept of religion applicable. Right wing nationalism supplies all these in abundance. So far this movement has no single leader but it is at an early stage of what could eventually become a fascist revival. While conceding that it is oversimplified, I believe that it is possible to state that the neo-fascistic religious movement cultivates an antirational climate. The innermost metaphysical position of the movement, the worship of an immanent, divine nature, is a Nazi position. In other words, Nazism was a manifestation of neo-paganism in a particular historical context. Nazism was the culmination of 19th century romanticism. Awakening these kinds of myths in the subconscious could, when combined with a political and economic crisis, induce something like Nazism to arise and education is not a defense: Germany was the best-read country in the world in the 1930´s. Civil religion through its combination of religious and nationalist terminology encourages the people to believe that the nation has a religious destiny. This self-serving piety is in conflict with the global universality of other religious systems. Civil religion is more related to order, law, and right than salvation and love. Civil religion and other religions are in fact rivals because of the purpose of the civil religion to unify the nation behind what is perceived as right and wrong. For example Christianity should be driven by concern to overcome social injustices; that are revealed through what is taught in the Gospels. The rivalry is present because civil religion has no founding principles save for the principle of the dominator and law-giver. Christianity is meant to be driven by action towards the beaten, the poor, the despised, and the hungry - by the grace-giver. Civil religion expresses its purposes in endurance of concepts of right and wrong and founded upon ideals of nationalism and the conceived righteousness of the state. Civil religion dangerously has the power to influence the powers of other religions. This integration results in a loss of foundation in the other mainstream religions (f.ex. Christianity), which is supplemented by a foundation on patriotism. Civil leadership has a great amount of power and it must be recognized that this person can be recognized as possessing a higher level of religious insight. Civil religion with the proper leadership can offer the country much in return for faith. Conclusion What regards a classification as civil religion, one has to make a clear distinction between the pseudo-religious background of the German fascism/or today`s neo-fascism and Hitler´s Nazi/NSDAP-movement of. While I believe that the pseudo-religious background of today´s neo-fascism does not have what it takes to be classed as a civil religion, the case is somewhat different what regards the former NSDAP. The Nazi-party movement developed its mass movement along the line that could be drawn as a "guide-line" for civil religions. There are however certain significant aspects, which the NSDAP did not fulfill. In my opinion the party and its present neo-fascistic follow-up organizations did and do not present sufficient answers that could serve as justification and consolation for the most demanding human questions (f.ex. mortality, illness, reason for suffering, meaning of the individual in the cosmos - especially in view of personal inadequacy and the need of atonement). I therefor conclude, that even though certain elements in the Nazi-parties structure could be evaluated as basic features characterizing a civil religion (patriotism, leadership, nationalism etc.), the lack of the above mentioned aspects does allow a position stating that the movement does not qualify as civil religion. Nevertheless, neo-fascism (classified civil religion or not) indeed still remains as a threat for the multicultural society. If the churches are to play a role in helping to solve the current problems of orientation and nationalism, they must first of all engage in reflection, that is, theology. In their struggle to find their place in the larger society, theologians and scholars of religious studies from east and west Europe and especially in Germany will have to come up with some new ideas regarding their cooperation. In the light of scientifically investigated events in western societies, an exchange of views, explanation, and observation related to the wording and understanding of theology must focus on the question on how the churches deal with these problems. Inasmuch as they engage in reflection, that is, theology, they are required to confront these basic problems related to social orientation. The social contract on civil religion presents a puzzle. According to Rousseau, no state has ever been founded that did not have religion as its base. But which religion? Christianity is not an option. Paganism is not an option. Monotheistic theocracy is not an option. What does that leave? By a process of elimination, we are left with an enlightenment religion of tolerance and mutual patience, which one who agrees with Rousseau might see as no religion at all. There are many reasons why the critical examination of neo-fascism and its pseudo religious background is especially urgent. The most immediate and obvious is the resurgence of neo-nazism and the extreme right, and the subsequent need to understand how these movements operate so that they can be resisted more effectively. Nineteen ninety-eight marks the 53rd year after the end of the European holocaust and the beginning of international recognition of its crimes and atrocities. Although this part of history has had a very important role in contemporary understanding of fascism, we are still far from acknowledging its full significance and consequences. As the recent development in Bosnia, Kosovo or Iraq clearly has shown, we are no less immune to ethnically and racially motivated violence. The contemporary political climate is characterized by a sense of scarcity, opposing trends in economic and cultural globalization, as well as fractious micro-politics. The subsequent environment of uncertainty, friction and fear certainly holds every aspect of a potential a fertile breeding ground for fascism. It is our task as a global society to tackle these problems, to disseminate comprehensive information about our diverse background and to establish social conditions and which contribute to the cultural variety of our present society. After all, a society that gives up the privilege of critical thinking is prime fodder for the next totalitarian cult that comes along. I want to close this paper with a quote from Voltaire, which gave me a few moments of thinking: "As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities". |
