The Myth of the Twentieth Century found a huge readership. A Protestant pastor, one Heinrich Hueffmeier, who published his own refutation of Mythus in 1935, nonetheless admitted that the book was read “by all those who made the least pretensions to intellectual development.”24 Which may explain why none of Rosenberg’s fellow defendants at Nuremberg would confess to having read it.
THE “UNDENIABLE HARDNESS” OF THE WORLD
The theologian who had the greatest ambitions, after Rosenberg, was Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881–1962), founder of the German Faith Movement. He had millions of followers, according to the historian and anthropologist Karla Poewe, including luminaries such as Mathilde Ludendorff, Dietrich Klagges, the best-selling novelist Hans Grimm and the popular writer on anthropology H. F. K. Günther.25
According to some scholars, Hauer had it in mind to create a political religion in that, like Rosenberg, he wanted his ideas to be the ideological basis for National Socialism—though he never had the ear of senior Nazi figures as the latter did. Much impressed by Rudolf Steiner and his anthroposophy movement, which he thought heralded a new era of spiritual creativity, Hauer inhabited the same intellectual and cultural milieu as Rosenberg. He held mystic notions of the Volk and medievalism, and of the Indo-Germanic tradition that saw a line of influence stretching from Buddhism and Hinduism through Greece to medieval Germany, then on into the Nordic realm as far as the Eddas and sagas and the Icelandic myths.
In addition, he had three interdependent concepts: being “grasped” by the sacred, being led by a powerful personality and understanding the needs of the time. These should come together, he thought, or hoped, in a religious/political genius who related instinctively to his time and place—that is, to an ethnically specific predicament. To this was added a social Darwinism (and a Nietzscheanism) in which the “undeniable hardness” of the world was to be appreciated—the need for conflict and its associated sense of heroism “with which we can enjoy life’s battle, where we win and lose, have joy and suffering, pain and delight, the will to live and preparedness to die.” By means of a religion of the blood and soil (a wearily familiar German concept), a Volk could not renew itself through a Christian idea of salvation. Rather, it must realize its renewal as coming from its own psychological center.26
Apart from the notion that only a politico-religious leader could help Germans find the truth, Hauer laid down several specific aspects of “concrete content” for his German faith: namely, that the great figures of German history were prophets, that the German domain was where the revelations took place, that God favored the Germans and the German way, that the German will was a specific form of revealed divinity, that battle and tragedy were the eternal law of human beings, making the German homeland “nearer to heaven than any paradise.” “Obedience to the leader is the highest fortune and the most blissful peace.”27 His faith, essentially pagan, evolved its own symbols, and its main cohesive force was an unremitting war of attrition against Christianity.28 Hauer wanted to destroy what he called “secularized Christianity” and replace it with faith in the Third Reich.
Around him were a number of other neo-pagan sects, including Mathilde Ludendorff’s Society for God Knowledge, an extreme form of nationalism, whose aim was the “immortality of the race or nation” via sticking closely to certain precepts—notably, that since death is inevitable, not a day must be wasted in working for the benefit of the Volk. Another such sect was Sigrid Hunke’s Unitarians, who maintained that everyone differs in their spirituality but that, even so, people should live in communities that constantly challenge their beliefs, which may thus go on changing throughout life.
At the root of all these manifestations is Nietzsche’s idea of a “will to a stronger and higher existence.”29
• • •
Despite such eloquent and (often pseudo-sophisticated) ideas and rationalizations for Nazi practices from the Protestant theologians and would-be theologians, assaults on Christianity in the Third Reich grew in intensity as Nazi confidence solidified. Although religious instruction was at first compulsory, attendance at school prayers was later made optional and religion was dropped as a subject from school-leaving examinations. Then priests were forbidden to teach religious classes. In 1935, by Bryan Moynahan’s count, the Gestapo arrested seven hundred Protestant pastors for condemning Nazi neo-paganism from the pulpit. In 1937, the Gestapo declared that the education of candidates for the Confessional Church was illegal, and Martin Niemöller, its leading light, was condemned to a concentration camp, refusing the offer of release because it required his collaboration.30 (The medical orderly in Sachsenhausen found him to be “a man of iron.”)
In 1936, the assault on Catholic monasteries and convents began: they were accused of illegal currency trading and sexual offenses. In that year, too, the Nuremberg rallies bore an aura of paganism—the songs, or hymns, were pastiches redolent of traditional Christian worship:
Führer my Führer
Thou hast rescued Germany from deepest distress
I thank thee for my daily bread
Abide thou long with me, forsake me not
Führer my Führer, my faith and light.
All this was part of the initiative to “dechristianize” rituals and festivals. At weddings, for instance, bride and groom would be blessed by “Mother Earth, Father Sky and all the beneficent powers of the air,” and extracts from Nordic sagas would be read out. At “christenings” the infant was cradled on a Teutonic shield, swaddled in a blanket adorned with oak leaves and swastikas. The celebration of Christmas—the word itself was replaced by “Yuletide”—was exchanged for a “festival of the winter solstice,” held on December 21. The cross was never abolished; attempts were made in 1937 to take it out of school classrooms, but the measure had to be rescinded (perhaps confirming that Himmler did see Christianity as the paramount threat). The Vatican complained formally to Berlin almost monthly, but the regime took next to no notice. Some of the Nazi innovations eerily echoed what had already been tried in Stalinist Russia.
From Hitler’s point of view, probably his greatest achievement was in nullifying the oppositional potential that the church—had it so minded—could have mustered. This is worth underlining: at a time when religious faith was most needed, it failed to rise to the challenge. Too little is made of this.
* * *
I. His controversial career falls outside the scope of this book.
II. Mussolini declared: “Fascism is a religious conception in which man’s immanent relationship with a superior law, and with an objective Will that transcends that particular individual, raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society.” Gordon Lynch says that the cult of personality established around Mussolini became an idealized embodiment of this sacred national community and even led to the creation of a new School of Fascist Mysticism, led by Mussolini’s brother, which devoted itself to the study of the dictator’s thought.17
PART THREE
Humanity at and after Zero Hour
17
The Aftermath of the Aftermath
“W
e were born at the beginning of the First World War. As adolescents we had the crisis of 1929; at twenty, Hitler. Then came the Ethiopian War, the Civil War in Spain, and Munich. These were the foundations of our education. Next came the Second World War, the defeat, and Hitler in our homes and cities. Born and bred in such a world, what did we believe in? Nothing. Nothing except the obstinate negation in which we were forced to clothe ourselves from the very beginning. The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge. . . . If the problem had been the bankruptcy of a political ideology or a system of government, it would have been simple enough. But what happened came from the very root of man and society. There was no doubt about this, and it was confirmed day after day not so much by the behavior of the criminals but by that of
the average man. . . . Now that Hitler has gone, we know a certain number of things. The first is that the poison which impregnated Hitlerism has not been eliminated; it is present in each of us. . . . Another thing we have learned is that we cannot accept any optimistic conception of existence, any happy ending whatsoever. But if we believe that optimism is silly, we also know that pessimism about the action of man among his fellows is cowardly.”1
Albert Camus delivered these words in 1946 at Columbia University in New York. An Algerian-born French journalist and philosopher whose father had been killed in the First World War, a onetime Communist and anarchist, Camus had worked for the Resistance newspaper Combat during the Second World War. In his first novel, The Outsider (L’Étranger, 1942), the main character, Meursault, has killed a man and is scheduled to be executed; he is pondering Camus’s central concern, the “absurdist” position that a life so important to him (his own) can have so little meaning, if any, in the wider scheme of things.
Though his talk at Columbia was clearly personal, it reflects European and French experience and exemplifies a generation of intellectuals. Trapped in an untidy and unpredictable chain of bloody events catalyzed by 1914–18, Camus and his generation were subjected to what Jeffrey Isaac has called “a particularly brutal form of intellectual shock therapy.” As Nicola Chiaromonte recalled, “I remember being totally obsessed by a single thought: we had arrived at humanity’s zero hour and history was senseless.” Even the more conservative and religious thinkers, who for years had drawn attention to what they saw as the threat of modern secularism and the original and unremitting sinfulness of human impulses, could not escape the feeling that “all bets were off,” that traditional ways of understanding ourselves—via class, community, nation, church, God—were now simply inadequate to the problems facing the post-war world.2
Chicago was no different from Paris or New York. When the American philosopher Allan Bloom first attended university in Chicago just after the Second World War, one of the things he soon noticed was that “American university life was being revolutionized by German thought.” At that time, in Chicago anyway, Marx was revered, he said, but the two thinkers who generated most enthusiasm were the sociologist Max Weber and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who in turn had both been profoundly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche.
It is not hard to see why such pessimism—even nihilism—should prevail. Soviet troops had reached Auschwitz on January 27 the year before; the Soviet news agency TASS had published a special bulletin, an interview with two hundred survivors, on May 7, twenty-four hours before V-E Day in Europe. The atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, and on Nagasaki three days later. Pierre Laval, who had served twice as head of the Vichy regime, had been shot for collaboration on October 15, and Vidkun Quisling, who had seized power in Norway in 1940 in a Nazi-backed coup, had been executed in the same way and for the same offense nine days later. Civil war had broken out in China at the beginning of 1946; Winston Churchill had drawn attention to the existence of the Iron Curtain at much the same time; war-crimes trials were being held in Nuremberg (ten people had already been sentenced to death) and Tokyo; an anti-Jewish pogrom had taken place in Kielce in Poland, despite the Auschwitz revelations; and French troops had bombarded Haiphong in northeast Vietnam, killing twenty thousand.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, as Camus said, this was itself an aftermath of sorts, following on from so many catastrophic and bloody events that had occurred since 1914. However, it is three longer-term consequences of the war that are our focus here.
The first was the germination, predominantly in France, of the existential philosophy that had begun with the phenomenological ideas of Edmund Husserl but had come to fruition in the cauldron of war and occupation. Second was a broad change that had been registered in American society, a change that might well have happened anyway but was certainly accelerated by the war. This has been called “the permissive turn,” the development of much more liberal attitudes and practices, a lurch forward in secularization that resulted in the fairly rapid replacement of religious understandings of society and people by a psychological understanding. And the third consequence was the effect that the Holocaust had on Jewish thinking. How could a God who loved his people have allowed such terrible things to happen? How could Jews be Jews after the death camps? Was the Holocaust the greatest nihilistic act of all time? What were the causes and the implications?
These three consequences of the Second World War were big events, concerns that reached well beyond the end of hostilities and shaped thinking and culture—and continue to shape thinking and culture today—in both the religious and the secular context.
18
The Warmth of Acts
T
he response to the outbreak of the Second World War was nothing like the response to that of the Great War. There was no euphoria, no aggressive manifesto produced by scores of intellectuals, no rush of poets to enlist, certainly no feeling among the general public that more fighting would bring about spiritual renewal. But there was the “phoney war,” as it came to be called, when after the blitzkrieg on Poland in September 1939 nothing much of military significance occurred until April 1940, and many of the children evacuated from Britain’s major cities had begun to drift back home again. Winston Churchill called it the Twilight War, while the Germans called it Sitzkrieg, the sitting war.
But the second war did produce some major changes in the way people thought, which rivaled the transformations in sensibility wrought by the earlier conflict.
Some of the ideas that emerged are less surprising in retrospect than they seemed at the time. They were encapsulated in a series of works reassessing the way humans can live together to the benefit of all—war is, perhaps, exactly the time when such reassessments take place. These were Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), in which the author argued that entrepreneurs, not capitalists as such, are the motivating force of capitalism; and Karl Mannheim’s Diagnosis of Our Time, published a year later, in which he advocated a new “planned order”; there could be “no way back” to the old laissez-faire capitalism that had produced the Crash and the Depression. Then, in 1944, Friedrich von Hayek produced The Road to Serfdom, which opposed planning: we should put our faith in “the invisible hand” and look to “the spontaneous social order” for guidance, because it had evolved by itself to safeguard internal peace and individual freedom, without which no satisfying life is possible. And Karl Popper wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, which argued that political solutions are like scientific ones in that they “can never be more than provisional and are always open to improvements”; life has to move forward by trial and error, there is no “iron law” of history.
These four authors, all Austro-Hungarian, produced short books (because of paper rationing) that were hard-hitting in a down-to-earth, practical sense. Neither religion nor salvation featured. Here is another occasion when we do well to remind ourselves that the everyday practicalities of life are, for many people, far more pressing than metaphysical matters.
This was underlined by William Temple’s Christianity and the Social Order. Temple, archbishop of Canterbury, argued for the church’s right to “interfere” (his word) in social issues that could not help but have political consequences. In the body of the book, he kept his remarks general (about fellowship in the workplace, the nature of freedom, and so on), but in an appendix he firmly aligned himself with Mannheim on planning; he argued for a Royal Commission on housing that would decide how everyone could be properly housed, giving commissioners draconian powers to avoid land speculation; he wanted the school-leaving age raised from fourteen to eighteen; the return of the guilds, with all three parties—workers, management and capital—represented; and a five-day work week, so everyone would have enough leisure.
Many of these recommendations were incorporated, to a degree, in Social Insurance a
nd Allied Services, better known as the Beveridge Report; published in November 1942, it became the basis of Britain’s modern welfare state. The idea would spread and solidify after the war (Bismarck had originally introduced it in late-nineteenth-century Germany).
Across the ocean, a rather different report appeared just as the war was turning in the Allies’ favor, in January 1944. This was An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy by the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal. Well aware, as others were, that many blacks were fighting in Europe and the Pacific, Myrdal was asking: “[If] they were expected to risk their lives equally with whites, why shouldn’t they enjoy equality afterward?” This was not the only spur to the civil rights movement, but it was an early indication of an awareness of the imbalance in American society; and concerns over race would, in a relatively short time, incorporate demands for equality among other minority groups, women and homosexuals in particular.
So the Second World War was a seed ground for many of the social advances that would be made, on either side of the Atlantic, in the second half of the twentieth century—purely secular maneuvers enabling many more than ever before to lead fulfilling lives in all realms of activity. This should never be lost sight of. Everyday practicalities are no small thing.1
RESISTANCE AND RITZKRIEG
One of the curious paradoxes at the end of the Second World War was that Paris, which had been occupied for so long, was perceived as a livelier city than London, which had never suffered such indignity. (The French capital, after all, had been spared the Blitz.) Visiting London, the American writer Edmund Wilson said that he found there “a sense of depression and anti-climax.” Graham Greene even admitted he felt “a nostalgia for the hum of a robot bomb.” Though Paris—indeed, the whole of France—was bankrupt, the Liberation was a powerful symbol of hope. “It was an article of faith that ideas would triumph over ‘filthy money.’”
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