by Greg Johnson
But the film teaches more than just the necessity of accepting death and facing it bravely. It also teaches us about the nobility of sacrifice. The scene in which Octavia dons Albrecht’s clothes and goes to greet Äls is brief but profoundly moving. Here we see that Albrecht’s description of her as übermenschlich is vindicated. If you will recall, in the scene in which he pronounces this judgment we see Octavia finally react with jealousy when Äls appears—then she follows Äls out onto the street and suffers a kind of personal crisis, feeling herself inferior to the other woman. This sequence is necessary in order to make Octavia’s final sacrifice truly meaningful. In reality, Octavia is not übermenschlich when Albrecht pronounces her so—but she becomes übermenschlich by the film’s end (though not exactly in the sense in which Nietzsche himself would use the term!).
Octavia is an unusual woman in that she lives in her head—but she is a woman nonetheless. She cannot help that she feels stirrings of resentment and even hatred toward Äls. But she is nevertheless able to see past these feelings and perceive that Äls is no monster. Recall the scene in which Matthias contrasts Octavia to Äls by telling Octavia that she is “a pure person.” Octavia rejects this, saying “she’s one too.” At the film’s climax, Octavia has completely triumphed over her emotions and, recognizing Äls’s virtues and the purity of the love between her husband and this other woman, she gives comfort to Äls in the last moments of her life.
In truth, Octavia’s Übermenschlichkeit is more Kantian than Nietzschean. (Like much else in the National Socialist canon, Opfergang draws upon Nietzsche without fully understanding him.) Octavia’s sacrifice is extraordinary, and through it she proves herself, in fact, to be the better woman. As Albrecht says, “Before Octavia’s love, everything else must be extinguished and pass away.” And, as he tells Äls in her dying reverie, “I love Octavia.” In the end, Albrecht chooses Octavia. In fact, what he is choosing is Germany.
Both women, Äls and Octavia, are Germanic—or, perhaps it would be better to say Nordic. But Äls represents a very un-German free spirit: unintellectual, spurning convention (she lives alone, she has an illegitimate child, she swims naked in the Elbe), never wanting to be tied down, abandoning her home country for a strange land, dallying with a married man, disregarding the advice of her doctor, etc.
By contrast, Octavia is almost distressingly German: somber, cerebral, uncritically pious before “high culture,” unspontaneous, dutiful, and hamstrung by social customs and boundaries. In the early scene when Albrecht first speaks to Octavia about Äls, he asks “Are you on friendly terms with her?” Octavia responds: “Good heavens! First she lives there all alone, and then you know how we are around here. Even if someone lives next door we don’t know each other. Here every house is a world in itself. It’s always been that way, and will always stay that way.”
The point I believe Harlan is making would have been made much more strongly and clearly if “the other woman” had been conceived as Italian or Spanish, or even French. But Söderbaum would not have been convincing as any of these, and Harlan would not have even considered casting another actress. So, the contrast to the very-German Octavia becomes an earthy, skinny-dipping, free-loving Swede. (Cousins, to be sure, but actually rather distant ones.)
Äls is “a pure person” in her own way, as Octavia recognizes. She represents love of life, love of love itself, and, most of all, love of the moment. Octavia is not nearly as exciting. She represents soberness, duty, loyalty, and sacrifice. But in the end, it is Octavia’s virtues that prove most worthy of being loved and admired. It is Octavia’s virtues—not those of Äls—that are necessary to sustain and preserve a culture and a people. Despite Äls’s charm, allure, and tender heart, Octavia ultimately eclipses her through a sublime act of self-sacrifice.
Opfergang shows the Germans a “way,” a path of sacrifice. It shows them what will be necessary in the coming endtime—in the time the Germans actually came to refer to as the Nullpunkt (zero point). It shows them what strength of character will be necessary to fight to the end, and emerge again from the rubble. But it also shows them how to be morally worthy of victory, even if defeat is certain. Opfergang is an extraordinarily nationalistic film—but not in a crude and obvious way. It is a remarkably beautiful, poetic assertion of Germanic moral and cultural superiority.
At the conclusion of this unforgettable film, Germany wins after all.
EDITIONS OF OPFERGANG
An inexpensive DVD of Opfergang is available from rarefilmsandmore.com. It features English subtitles. Picture quality is acceptable. A German company has also issued a beautiful, digitally remastered edition of the film as a Blu-ray and as a DVD. Unfortunately, it does not feature English subtitles. Copies are available through both American and German Amazon.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
December 16, 2011
RETHINKING DEMOCRACY:
ALAIN DE BENOIST’S THE PROBLEM OF DEMOCRACY
F. ROGER DEVLIN
Alain de Benoist
The Problem of Democracy
Arktos Media, 2011
This deceptively brief study of democracy begins from the familiar point that the term can no longer mean much in an age when all regimes claim to be democratic. Benoist suggests that the serious inquirer should turn to history and study democracy as it has actually existed, long before the modern era. One pattern which quickly becomes clear is the intimate connection between democracy and Western civilization:
In contrast to the Orient, absolute despotism has always been exceedingly rare in Europe. Whether in Rome, in the Iliad, in Vedic India or among the Hittites, already at an early date we find the existence of popular assemblies for both military and civil administration.
This does not mean that most Western polities have been democracies; they have most often been mixed regimes containing democratic elements. Yet even such elements have generally been absent in the non-Western world, where the very word for democracy is a recent import from the European languages.
More specifically, democracy was a system of government which developed in Greece during classical times. Benoist next seeks to rediscover what demokrateia meant to the men who invented it. His discussion then evolves toward a defense of this ancient conception and a corresponding critique of modern “democracies.”
The cardinal point to grasp is that the classical understanding presupposed “a relatively homogeneous community conscious of what makes it such,” or “cultural cohesion and a clear sense of shared belonging.”
The closer the members of a community are to one another, the more likely they are to have common sentiments, identical values, and the same way of viewing the world and social ties, and the easier it is for them to make collective decisions concerning the common good without the need for any form of mediation.
The citizens of a Greek polis shared a common descent, common history, common language and common form of worship. It is a moot point what demokrateia would have been in the absence of one or more of these commonalities.
Such a regime was distinguished from oligarchy or tyranny by three forms of civic equality: isonomy, or equality before the law; isotimy, or equal eligibility for public office; and isegory, or equal freedom to address one’s fellow citizens on matters of public concern. Civic equality has nothing to do with natural equality, and has no meaning outside men’s relationship to the political community of which they are members.
ATHENS
Athens is the only ancient democracy of which we have considerable knowledge. We know enough of Sparta and Rome to draw useful comparisons, but these states were mixed regimes with only certain democratic aspects.
Benoist’s too-brief historical review passes hastily over the Solonian reforms, although these certainly had a democratic tendency. In earlier times, power had been monopolized by the Eupatridai (the “well-fathered”), an aristocracy typically holding large estates and breeding horses amid the rich bottomland of Attica. By the early si
xth century BC, this class had reduced many of the smallholders of the hill country to debt-slavery. Receiving a commission to reform the laws so as to restore civil concord, Solon abolished debt-slavery and cancelled existing debts. This measure was called the seisachtheia, or shaking off of burdens. He also admitted the newly-free class of Yeomen farmers (Zeugetai, or yokefellows) to participation in the Assembly. For these reasons, Solon was often called the father of Athenian democracy. But the poorer, generally landless men known as Thetes continued to be excluded from politics.
Benoist dates Athenian Democracy to the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC. Previous to that time, Athenian society consisted of four phylai, or tribes, which were subdivided into phratria (brotherhoods) and genē (clans). Athenian citizen rolls were based upon membership in phratria. Not surprisingly, civic loyalty to Athens often had to give way to the claims of kinship. This contributed to the establishment of a tyranny by the Peisistratid family while Solon was still alive.
After helping to overthrow the Peisistratids, Cleisthenes instituted a new system of enrolling citizens by place of residence, or deme, regardless of clan or tribe. The four tribes, indeed, were abolished and replaced with ten new groupings. Although still called phylai, they were henceforth composed of demes rather than families. Cleisthenes’ great object was to substitute specifically political or civic bonds for kinship bonds.
Each of the ten new “tribes” was composed of three groups of demes, or districts: one from the plains, one from the hill country and one from the coast. The old eupatrid aristocracy was concentrated in the plains, the independent smallholders in the hills, and the coastal regions were mixed. So the reorganization forced not only different families but also different social classes to work together, forestalling the development of political factions around class interests. Cleisthenes called his system isonomia, or equality before the law, but it gradually became known as demokrateia. This term may originally have signified “rule by the demes” as much as “rule by the people” (the demos).
Forty-six years later a third and final major round of democratic reforms was carried out under the leadership of Ephialtes. Up to this time, much influence had been exerted by the Areopagus, a council of former office-holders somewhat analogous to the Roman Senate. The Areopagus had remained a stronghold of eupatrid power. Ephialtes transferred all its political prerogatives to the popular Assembly, leaving it a mere court with jurisdiction over murder and certain other capital crimes. He also opened participation in the Assembly to the Thetes. The resulting regime is often referred to as the radical democracy.
Ephialtes himself was assassinated by an aristocratic opponent within a year of carrying through his reforms, but they were consolidated by his successor Pericles. Within about fifteen years, the city’s aristocratic faction had virtually fallen apart. Athens continued to be governed democratically for over a hundred years, with two brief interruptions, until the Macedonian conquest of 338 BC. The popular assembly passed laws, made war and peace, appointed officials, and sometimes exercised judicial functions.
In 451 BC, ten years after the death of Ephialtes, a law was passed restricting Athenian citizenship to men born of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. This restriction upon the number of citizens eligible to participate in Athenian politics may strike the modern reader as a quintessentially undemocratic measure, but it was seen by contemporaries as a natural consequence of democracy itself: the extension of political rights to ever-broader classes of the population seemed to them to call for a corresponding tightening of civic membership requirements.
The Athenians liked to consider themselves autochthonous: the original inhabitants of Attica, unmixed with foreign blood. As Athens prospered, however, it attracted merchants from all over Greece and beyond. Foreign traders and their families became known as metoikoi, or “dwellers-with,” and came to form a large fraction of the resident population. Mixed marriages began to occur: for example, a resident Thracian fathered the historian Thucydides by an Athenian mother. Such foreigners could own property and enjoyed civil rights such as use of the court system, but they had no political rights of any kind.
According to the notions currently approved for our use, such exclusion was a violation of these foreigners’ “human rights” and the most unconscionable “racism.” Yet there is no evidence that they ever protested their situation. Clearly, they felt that the advantages of living in Athens outweighed the loss of any political participation they might have enjoyed back home. If there were any malcontents among them, they were sent packing by the Athenians too quickly to leave traces in the historical record.
SPARTA
What is known of the ethnography and constitution of the Spartan state also confirms Benoist’s assertion of the intimate connection between democracy and racial and social homogeneity. The Spartans never claimed to be autochthonous; they considered themselves pure “Dorians” whose ancestors had led a wandering life before settling in as the masters of Laconia. The earlier, non-Dorian natives of the land were reduced, if they were lucky, to the status of perioikoi, or “dwellers-around,” with no political rights. If they were less lucky, they became helots, or slaves of the Spartan state. The Spartans lived in continual fear of vengeful uprisings from this numerically superior slave class and dealt harshly with them. Spartans never intermarried with the despised natives of Laconia, whether perioikoi or helots.
The ancients considered the Spartan constitution a model “mixed” regime compounded of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements: it combined a dual kingship with a council of elders and a popular assembly which had to approve all legislation. Yet it must be stressed that this constitution applied only to full Spartan citizens, who formed a small minority of the total population living in Spartan-controlled territory. Considering that territory as a whole, the regime must be seen as an extremely narrow aristocracy.
Clearly, the Spartans considered their political regime essentially bound up with membership in a single clan sharing a common ancestry. Chalk up two for Benoist.
ROME
The case of Rome seems less favorable to the author’s thesis. Romans preserved the surprisingly unflattering tradition that Romulus originally populated his city by offering asylum to runaway slaves, criminals, and sundry other outcasts from the surrounding area. These being mostly men, the city only survived beyond the first generation by kidnapping women from the nearby Sabines. Two of Rome’s seven semi-legendary kings are said to have been of Etruscan origin; the Etruscans spoke a non-Indo-European language and may have originated in Anatolia.
In its early days, Rome quarreled with the independent Latin cities as much as anyone. At no point in its development was the city ever the capital of a compact, homogeneous, ethnically-based Latin nation-state; the historical record resisted the stoutest efforts of 19th-century historians, influenced by the romantic nationalism of their day, to foist such an interpretation upon it.
More important, perhaps, is the generosity with which Rome extended citizenship to subjects of proven loyalty. This was considered unusual at the time, yet it was among the most important tools of Roman policy. Potentially rebellious conquered peoples were mollified with limited civic rights and, crucially, the possibility of gaining further rights and status over time. It was a program of Romanization, and proved notably effective, yet it involved a major break with the ancient communitarian nature of politics.
Despite this liberality in extending citizenship, the Roman Republic simultaneously granted increasing powers to their popular council, the concilium plebis; in other words, it gradually became more democratic. A deeper study of the democratic component of the Roman constitution than we can undertake here might provide some modifications to Benoist’s thesis concerning ancient democracy and bio-cultural homogeneity, which he bases mainly on the case of Athens.
Of course, nothing in the Roman experience indicates the feasibility of democratic rule in a polity compounded of different “continental
population groups.”
DEMOCRACY, EQUALITY, & FREEDOM
Besides dependence on a pre-existing folk community, ancient democracy differed from modern liberal democracy in its concept of equality, which was in no way opposed to hierarchy or authority. “All ancient authors who have extolled democracy,” he writes, “praised it not because it is an intrinsically egalitarian regime but because it . . . enables a better selection of the elite.”
Elections (from the Latin eligere, ‘to choose’) are a form of selection; the very word ‘elite’ has the same etymology. Originally, democracy expressed a will to replace privilege with merit at a time when the former no longer appeared to be the logical consequence of the latter. The aim was to substitute skill for chance factors (especially birth). It is not elites which it is opposed to. . . . What regime, after all, does not seek quality in government? If democracy charmed so many spirits, this is partly because it was seen as the best means for organising elite turnover.
An equality derived from inherited ethnic membership is surely comprehensible to us, even if less familiar than the Leftist leveling impulse. Surely freedom, however, depends upon circumstance and cannot be conceived as an inherited status? Yet for the ancients, it was so:
In Greek, just as in Latin, liberty stems from one’s origin. Freeman, *(e)leuderos (Greek eleutheros), is primarily he who belongs to a certain stock (cf. the Latin word liberi, children). ‘To be born of good stock is to be free,’ Emile Benveniste writes, ‘it comes to the same thing.’ The Indo-European root *leudh-, also served to designate people as belonging to a given folk (cf. the Old Slavonic ljudú, ‘folk’ and German Leute, ‘people’). These terms all derive from a root evoking the idea of ‘growth and development.’