by Philipp Blom
Foremost among these conservative racial mystics was the novelist Guido von List (1848-1919; the noble ‘von’ was awarded by himself), who discovered a world of hidden truths after a period of temporary blindness, during which he saw occult aspects of the world in a series of visions. Having recovered from his illness, he penned a memorandum about his findings and sent it to the Austrian Academy of Sciences, only to see it returned without comment. Embittered by establishment enmity towards his genius and higher perception, von List published his books himself and devoted the remainder of his life to extolling the virtues of Aryanism and the purification of the Nordic master race and the fight against ‘herd peoples’, dark races and Jews.
Like Steiner, List was influenced by the writings of Madame Blavatsky and, like Steiner, he believed that the German culture had a historical mission willed by ancient mythical forces. List believed he had found this truth through his studies of Germanic runes, whose interpretation, he held, unlocked the secrets of the universe, particularly the historical greatness of the Aryans as symbolized by the most powerful of runes, the swastika. Christianity had strangled the human spirit by alienating it from the ecstatic, the sensual, from true spirituality, List taught, and the answer to the limitations of his time was to return to an earlier form of spirituality - in his case, what he believed to be a Germanic, Aryan religion. One can hear echoes of other critiques of modernity in his writings. Christianity, he thought, was about to destroy the ‘noble race of heroes’, the Germans,
and breed a people of slaves, which will descend to the level of Australian negroes in its dull shamanic rites... As the people of our contemporary age cannot deny the primeval natural laws despite being caught in a religious system which is negating the life force, a crooked morality has developed, spreading hypercritical semblance of reality over hidden doings, showing all those sick phenomena of modern life which are beginning to disgust us in their hollowness and putrification.
Modernity, List argued, had not discovered but lost the principle of selective breeding. The goal of all right-thinking people in German lands had to be to reclaim the national, racial foundation of their culture as expressed in Germanic mythology, but this project had a powerful adversary: ‘Today’s Jews - the poor rascals, we know why! - are born internationals and therefore from the beginning “decided enemies” of any attempt to ground a culture in a national soil.’
In List’s grand vision, members of ‘inferior races’ would have no citizenship rights and would be prevented from owning land or businesses, or receiving a higher education. All this would help the Aryan to re-emerge from the shadows and assume the historic place he had so long been denied by a conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons and Catholic clergymen. Then, and only then, could Germans of purified blood and unsullied ancestry rise ‘toward the ancient heights of pure-blooded German heroism, toward the Holy Grail, toward Aryo-Germanism’. As the mystic seal of this quest, List used an old Germanic and Indian symbol, the swastika. It comes as little surprise to learn that the young Hitler was one of List’s most ardent readers.
While List liked to stylize himself in his photographs as prophet, with beard and velvet beret, one of his pupils, the defrocked priest and hysterical antisemite Baron Dr Johann Lancz de Liebenfels, preferred the pseudo-medieval cloak of a knight with a Maltese cross on his chest, an incongruous outfit, given his bald patch and wire-rimmed glasses. Liebenfels worked on the fault line between scientific heredity and Manichean mysticism. During the ancient Babylonian empire, he claimed, the superior Aryan race had committed bestiality with an extinct race of animals who were similar to pygmies and who carried evil in them, a sin that brought into the world the non-blond, non-Nordic races. In his 1905 book, fancifully entitled Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Äfflingen und dem Götter-Elektron (Theozoology, or On the Little Monkeys of Sodom and the Electrons of the Gods), Liebenfels argued that higher men were contaminated to various degrees by primeval animalism and wickedness, which still lived on as barely understood feelings in the different races:
Just as every Aryan feels overwhelming repulsion at the sight of a Mongol’s distorted mug or a Negro’s grotesque visage... so the eyes of any member of an inferior race flare up in age-old vicious hatred at the sight of a paleface. One feels his own superiority and recognizes his divine origins, and the other still has the feelings of the untamed, savage ape which at such moments awaken as the inheritance from the ancient past.
This gnostic world-view, the eternal struggle of good against evil, was further seasoned with ‘proofs’ from recent scientific discoveries such as radioactivity, X-rays and electrical phenomena.
Such brutalist racial thinking was not the domain of mystical cranks. The respected pathologist Hugo Ribbert, who held successive chairs at famous universities, claimed: ‘The man who is thoroughly healthy in every respect simply cannot act badly or wickedly; his actions are necessarily good, that is to say, properly adapted to the evolution of the human race, in harmony with the cosmos.’ The Vienna member of parliament and philosopher Bartholomaeus von Carneri, a personal friend of Ernst Haeckel’s, claimed: ‘Entire human tribes stand lower than the animals … the mental activity of the elephant, the horse, and the dog [is] significantly better developed than the lowest human species.’ Such statements from within the scientific and literary establishment were numerous, while on the margins of academic respectability the likes of Otto Weininger and Houston Stewart Chamberlain attracted huge readerships with their racially motivated pseudo-scientific bestsellers.
At the intersection of Catholicism and ethnic strife, Austria-Hungary produced a particularly mystical form of the racist ideas which had become a fixed part of debate throughout the West. Maurice Barrès in France, Francis Galton in Britain and Russian Slavophile thinkers such as Vladimir Soloviev were every bit as racist as their German and Austro-Hungarian counterparts, but their racial thought articulated itself along different lines, following different national cultures of debate.
The intellectual corner-posts of eugenic and racial thinking nevertheless corresponded to certain general preoccupations of the period. Acceptance of traditional religious models was in decline (witness the separation of Church and State in 1905), and science increasingly replaced religion as the dominant paradigm for understanding the world. At the same time, the banality and anonymity of life in an urban, consumer society created a need for new models, in response to change and to the annihilation of old certainties. Any theory pretending to offer a solution to the perceived degeneracy of modernity had to use the vocabulary of science: explaining life in terms of evolutionary mechanisms and even electricity. At the same time, it had to address what was perhaps the most deeply felt change on a personal level: the shift in the relationship between men and women, male and female social roles. Darwinist thinking and theories on heredity were ideal vehicles for this, as they put sexual roles and mechanisms at the very heart of human history.
Thanks to Darwin, the world, its ills and goals could be explained in terms of sex. The levelling impact of a democratized culture of education and entertainment, as well as the rise of socialism, found its match in the perceived menace of ‘lower races’ taking over a high culture that was cast as originally European. The claims for universal human rights and Bertha von Suttner’s peace movement could be countered by arguing in terms of a struggle for survival that was not a mere cultural construct, but part of the Darwinian, natural, order of things. Changing moral norms could be demonized ‘scientifically’ in terms of a degeneration of racial purity; individualism rejected by putting the needs and future of the race before concerns about personal happiness. It was science, after all: objective fact, unassailable by sentiment or more trivial concerns. Waking up in a disenchanted world, eugenicists and racial theorists sought to rob those they despised of the last of all human rights, the right to live.
14
1913: Wagner’s Crime
Today humanity…sees its evolution accelerating too furiou
sly, just as all long falls into the abyss accelerate.
- Pierre Loti, Quelques aspects du vertige mondial
How I hate the man who talks about the ‘brute creation’, with an
ugly emphasis on brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for
me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a
jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once
a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has
come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and
Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange
these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?
W. N. P. Barbellion, Diary, 22 July 1910
On 4 September 1913 Ernst August Wagner, aspiring author and conscientious headmaster of a provincial elementary school in Swabia, southern Germany, woke up in the early morning, got out of bed, took a bludgeon and a knife and butchered his wife and four children. He then mounted his bicycle and rode to a nearby railway station, not forgetting to order three pints of milk for the next day. He visited his brother’s family and enjoyed a pitcher of beer with his sister-in-law. One of his nephews showed him his new rabbit hutch. After riding a considerable distance and posting some letters, Wagner arrived in the little town of Mühlhausen, where he had been teacher some years earlier, around eleven at night. He set fire to four houses, produced two Mauser handguns from his travel bag, and shot all men who happened to be in the street, killing eight and wounding another twelve, before being overpowered by a police constable and several local men. He was severely beaten in the struggle, and left for dead. When the police realized that he was still alive they arrested the injured murderer, who regained consciousness and refused to make any statement.
Before launching into his bloody frenzy, Ernst Wagner had, to all intents and purposes, been a normal, even an exemplary citizen, a German success story. Born into an impoverished farming family in 1874, as one of twelve children, the bright and lively boy had made it to teachers’ college and had held a succession of junior teaching posts before rising through the ranks and becoming assistant teacher at a good provincial school at the age of twenty-seven. He had written poetry and tried his hand at historical drama. In 1903 he had married the daughter of an innkeeper who was comfortably off. By now a senior teacher with his own small school, he had been a solid family man, a valued member of the community.
His life story can be narrated very differently, though. He had lost his father at the age of two, and his mother had not been able to keep her huge hungry family afloat. She had struggled to build up a small shop, and failed, had sought refuge in the arms of a succession of different men, had married again, then divorced. Her sensitive son had seen all of this and had retained a powerful ambivalence towards women, towards trust, towards sex. As a young adult, he was suspicious of everyone. Unable to work due to ‘extreme nervous excitability’, he had spent six months travelling through Switzerland, desperately trying to regain his calm, his zest for life.
On his return, nothing was gained. He was distrustful, arrogant, irritable. Humiliated by his position as assistant teacher, and overwhelmed by lonely lust and self-disgust, he took out his sexual urges on farm animals. He devoured all kinds of literature he could find and lived in a dream world; only a few beers at the local would relax him and make him friendlier - so much so that one of the innkeeper’s daughters had fallen pregnant to him. He was transferred to a smaller school as punishment. Now headmaster, he felt compelled to marry the young woman who was carrying his child. He despised her, along with his colleagues, his pupils, everyone. To escape the drudgery of teaching the ABC to farmers’ children, he read more than before, spending a quarter of his annual salary on books. After his crime, the police found a collection of hundreds of titles, from ancient Greek authors, Shakespeare and the German classics to works by Maksim Gorky, Ernst Haeckel, Hendrik Ibsen and Friedrich Nietzsche. He had also written stage works on biblical themes and on the life of the emperor Nero. When he could find no publishers for them, he had paid for the publication out of his own pocket. He was convinced that he was destined for greatness.
The young teacher had become notorious for his edginess and megalomania. At the local inn he was heard to shout: ‘Goethe? Schiller? I am the greatest German dramatist!’ He wore extravagant clothes and yellow shoes. In a region famous for its hard-working but provincial citizens he, a local man, insisted on speaking high German instead of Swabian dialect. Unbeknown to those around him, he often carried a concealed gun. He was certain that people were laughing about him behind his back, ridiculing him, plotting to harm him. He had planned the murders for years, carefully buying up ammunition and weapons, going into the forest for shooting practice, scouting out locations and planning his every move on that decisive day. He had finally settled on a day in late September, at the end of the summer holidays, as if he had expected to resume teaching a few days later.
The sensational murder of thirteen people was headline news in Germany and beyond. The French paper Paris Midi found it a wonderful vehicle for attacking the old enemy, Germany: ‘Life is not a pleasant affair. If you add the misfortune of being born a German, one could call it terrible ...Is this man mad? What does it matter if he is a monster? Kill him! It would be too much honour to talk about him even for two days.’ Newspapers all over Europe reported, screamed, speculated - not least (journalistic intellectual shortcuts haven’t changed much) about the similarities between the teacher and Germany’s other remarkable Mr Wagner, with his apocalyptic fantasies.
The murderer himself, meanwhile, had been transferred to a psychiatric hospital, where he was examined by an eminent doctor in the field, Robert Gaupp of Tübingen University, who was very surprised by his patient’s appearance and bearing: ‘I had expected a fearsome, vicious man of animal brutality and had therefore taken special precautions... [But] when he was led into my examination room I immediately saw that I had been wrong. A serious man stepped forward, crooked with sadness and with a dignified air about him; polite, ready to go along with anything, and in his entire comportment an educated man.’ Gaupp had the task of deciding whether or not Wagner would be facing the death penalty, but the psychiatrist’s report quickly made clear that the criminal could not be held responsible for his acts. The case against Wagner was closed and he was incarcerated in the Winnetal mental asylum.
Ernst Wagner was not only a brutal paranoiac but also a remarkably articulate man, a fact which allows us to gain insight into his motives even today. The mail he had posted during the afternoon of that bloody September fourth contained three letters justifying his actions. He had also written, apart from his plays, a lengthy autobiography. This revealed that his plan had been much more ambitious than was immediately realized. His original project had been to kill all men in the village of Mühlbach and then to kill his brother’s family (‘I shall be like the angel of death in his house, the angel of mercy’), and to drive to the nearby town of Ludwigsburg in a hijacked train: ‘I kill. Into the castle. I kill. I burn and am burned. […] And I can burn myself in the bed of the duchess. That’s why I wished the duchess were young.’
But what had forced him to create the apocalypse in the heart of rural Swabia? Wagner’s own letters and the account of his life throw light on his motivation and draw a picture of a child of his time in the worst and saddest sense. One of the letters posted on the day of the murders was addressed to ‘My People’.
There are far too many people [on earth]. Half of them should be beaten to death immediately. They are not worth feeding, because they are of rotten body. Of all of man’s creations, man himself is the worst. If I were not stopped from doing so by looking at my own lamentable likeness, I would tell you how much I am disgusted by all these ugly, weedy, sick people.
Whence does this misery come? Nobody, I believe, is better suited to explaining this than I. It comes from sexual abnormality. Today’s gener
ation suffers from their sex [Das heutige Geschlecht leidet am Geschlecht].
The killing of his family, Wagner claimed, had been necessary to protect them from his own persecutors, a measure of pity towards his innocent children who would otherwise be in the hands of his torturers. As for the men of Mühlbach, he had wanted to purge his shame and wreak revenge for the shame of having been forced to marry a girl he did not love and for being sent away to a different school, a smaller village. He closed the letter by writing: ‘Finally I permit myself to remember myself in a friendly way and to come to the following judgement about myself: Subtracting the sexual element from my life, I have been of all the people I know the best by far.’
What was ‘the sexual element’ that must be subtracted from his life to show his moral purity? This Wagner elucidated in his memoir:
So that I can get rid of this confession immediately: I am a sodomite. It’s happily out and I don’t want to talk of it any more; your lecherousness is not worth one minute of despising myself. My self despisal and sadness have turned me grey, and I am only 34 years old. This is how long I have suffered. I ask you: Take the Nazarene down from his cross and pin me to it, I am suffering turned flesh. Yes, when I think of the sacrificial lamb at Golgotha, I can only smile.
Unsurprisingly, Dr Gaupp immediately fixed his attention on this aspect of his patient’s personality. Was he a homosexual? Was it true that he had repeatedly committed bestiality? His search for incontrovertible proof yielded nothing. People in the village kept silent. Only his one-time maid stated that his boots had sometimes been very dirty ‘as if he had stepped into cow pats’ and that she had once found short, red hairs like a cow’s on the front of his jacket. The psychiatrist thought this was enough to come to the conclusion that Wagner had subconsciously wanted to punish his mother: ‘This is how dirty you are. This is sexuality, so deeply dirty, so filthy. […] This is what you, my mother, are doing with men, now that father is no longer alive.’