In Germany, National Socialism sought more than an Italian-style accommodation with organised religion, or even a Spanish-style alliance. It sought nothing less than to supplant organised religion and become, in effect, the official state religion of the ‘new order’ Germany aspired to impose. Any film of the crowds at a Nuremberg rally, chanting ‘Sieg Heil!’ with hysterical rapture, reveals something more potent at work than just political commitment—it is the dynamic of an evangelical church or a revivalist meeting. This imparted to National Socialism in Germany a demonic power and hypnotic appeal that neither Italian nor Spanish totalitarianism could achieve.
In the essentially religious, carefully orchestrated and choreographed spell cast by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy, hitherto irreconcilable opposites were reconciled—as they could be only under the auspices of a religion. The German propensities for both irrationality and hyper-rationality were fused in a single all-encompassing and all-embracing euphoria. In a warped fashion that would have appalled Goethe and Heine on the one hand, Gneisenau and Yorck von Wartenburg on the other, Germany became what all of them had sought to make her: a political and nationalistic entity which, at the same time, embodied culture and the spirit. This fusion, of course, perverted, distorted and diminished its contributing components. Political and nationalistic impulses were reduced to their lowest common denominator, a crude tyranny, swaggering braggadocio and brutal self-aggrandisement. Culture, as Broch stated, was reduced to the level of kitsch; and the spirit, though energetic enough, was a malevolent one. It took the form of what Stefan George called ‘das Leichte’ (‘the Facile’): the spurious and illusory miracles performed by that false prophet, the Antichrist.
Fourteen years before Hitler came to power, C. G. Jung had issued a warning that echoed Heine’s:
As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly will the ‘blond beast’ be heard prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences.3
Three years after Hitler’s accession as Chancellor, Jung sought to explain the subterranean dynamic behind the Nazi phenomenon by invoking, metaphorically, the ancient Teutonic pantheon:
We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our opinion on economic, political and psychological factors. But if we may forget for a moment that we are living in the Year of Our Lord 1936 . . . we would find Wotan quite suitable as a causal hypothesis. In fact I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together.4
Again, Jung was echoing Heine:
No, memories of the old German religion have not been extinguished. They say there are greybeards in Westphalia who still know where the old images of the gods lie hidden; on their death-beds they tell their youngest grandchild, who carries the secret . . . In Westphalia, the former Saxony, not everything that lies buried is dead.5
Until March 1933, ‘Volkische’ ideology, specifically as it had been disseminated by the Nazis, was banned by both the Lutheran Church in Germany and by the universities. With the Nazi accession to power, this ban was lifted. In a lecture that summer, a Tübingen theologian asked whether the church was ready ‘to interpret a great turning point in German destiny as coming from the hand of God, and to take a creative part in it’.6
Other theologians responded with zest, claiming ‘It was their mission, entrusted to them by God, to interpret to the German Volk that prevenient action of God and at the same time to help shape it in unconditional solidarity with the Volk.’7
According to a prominent ecclesiastical spokesman and leader at the time:
If the Protestant church in genuine inner solidarity with the German Volk . . . wishes really to proclaim the gospel, then it has to take as its natural standpoint the circle of destiny of the National Socialist movement.8
On 22 July 1933, the annual Bayreuth festival culminated with a production of Wagner’s most loftily spiritual opera, Parsifal. Immediately after this production, Hitler gave a major radio speech, announcing his plans to create a united Reich Church. At a synod two months later, on 27 September, the church was officially established, with a fervid Nazi, Ludwig Müller, as first Reich Bishop. A liberal Protestant newspaper dared to satirise the event:
Church service. The opening hymn has ended. The
pastor stands at the altar and begins:
‘Non-Aryans are requested to leave the Church.’
No one moves.
‘Non-Aryans are requested to leave the Church imme-
diately.’
Again all remain quiet.
‘Non-Aryans are requested to leave the Church imme-
diately.’
Thereupon Christ comes down from the altar and
leaves the church.9
For publishing this, the editor of the newspaper was arrested and consigned to a concentration camp.
With the establishment of the Reich Church, Hitler himself became increasingly invested with messianic qualities. In March 1934, pastor Herman Grüner wrote: ‘The time is fulfilled for the German people in Hitler. It is because of Hitler that Christ ... has become effective among us. Therefore National Socialism is positive Christianity in action.’10 In the same year, a text was prepared for study and memorisation by schoolchildren, invoking the abortive Putsch of 1923:
As Jesus set men free from sin and hell, so Hitler rescued the German people from destruction. Both Jesus and Hitler were persecuted; but, while Jesus was crucified, Hitler was exalted to Chancellor. While the disciples of Jesus betrayed their master and left him in his distress, the sixteen friends of Hitler stood by him. The Apostles completed the work of their Lord. We hope that Hitler may lead his work to completion. Jesus built for heaven; Hitler for the German earth.11
At first the Reich Church paid at least nominal obeisance to established Christianity, but it was not long before even this was left behind. Wilhelm Hauer, Professor of Indology and Comparative Religions and founder of the so-called ‘German Faith Movement’, proclaimed in print that the epoch of Christianity was now over and only ‘German faith’ remained. Hauer was echoed by Alfred Rosenberg, the Party racial theoretician, who wrote: ‘The longing to give the Nordic race soul its form as German church under the sign of the Volk mythos, that is for me the greatest task of our century.’12
As a religious creed, Nazified paganism quickly took root. Doctor Langermann is not the only example of a former evangelical pastor conducting the funeral of an SS officer and speeding the deceased, in full dress uniform and jackboots, not to any Christian heaven, but to Wotan’s Valhalla with the words: ‘May this God send the nations of this earth clanking on their way through history. Lord bless our struggle’.13
Under SS auspices, schools called ‘Napolas’ were established for the education and indoctrination of selected members of the Hitler Youth. In his novel The Erl-King, Michel Tournier evokes the way in which, at these ‘Napolas’, future SS personnel celebrated Christmas:
All the Jungmannen were gathered in the armory around a glittering Christmas tree, for the ceremony of the Yule Festival. It was not the birth of Christ that was being celebrated, but that of the Sun Child, risen from his ashes at the winter solstice. The sun’s trajectory had reached its lowest level and the day was the shortest of the year: the death of the sun god was therefore lamented as an impending cosmic fatality. Funeral chants celebrating the woe of the earth and the inhospitableness of the sky praised the dead luminary’s virtues and begged him to return among men. And the lament was answered, for from then on every day would gain on the night, at first imperceptibly but soon with triumphant ease.14
It was as a religion, then, not as any conventional political ideology, that National Socialism was to sweep through Germany and elicit fanatical adherence from the German populace.15 Under National Socialism, the gods of the ancient Teutonic pantheon would indeed emerge anew, asserting a self-
arrogated supremacy over Judaeo-Christian tradition and theology. Wotan—the ‘berserker, god of storms, wanderer, warrior, Wunsch and Minne God, lord of the dead, Einherier, dead hero of Valhalla, magician’—would once again gust through the German collective psyche like the raging wind from which his original name derived. And, as Heine had prophesied, Thor would arise anew and, with his mighty hammer, smash the Gothic cathedrals. Nazi Germany would be the only state in modern Western history to rest ultimately not on social, economic or political principles, but on spiritual, even magical, ones. The spirituality, however, was warped, malevolent and demonic, and the magic—if magic can be defined as a metaphor for the manipulative relationship between consciousness and will on the one hand, and external phenomena and people on the other—conformed to the traditional tenets of so-called ‘black magic’. It was the magic which had first entered Christian thought through the biblical figure of Simon Magus, the Samaritan ‘Antichrist’, whose miracles, while ostensibly matching Peter’s, remained ‘a hair’s-breadth impure’ and therefore intrinsically rotten.
The religion—or, to be more accurate, the ersatz or surrogate religion—of National Socialism drew its vital sustenance from a number of diverse quarters. There was the nationalism fostered by the War of Liberation, which was augmented, and decked out with imperial grandeur, by Bismarck’s victories against Denmark, Austria and France. There was pan-Aryanism and ‘Volkische’ thought, which embedded Goethe’s ideal—a nation and people dedicated to culture and the spirit—in a mystical, pantheistic and specifically nationalistic context. There was also Hegel, who provided a lofty philosophical sanction for yoking the actual entity of das Volk to the abstract conception of the State. Other influences were at work as well in the years immediately preceding and following the First World War. All of them furthered the establishment of National Socialism on a religious foundation, and enabled it, thereby, to offer an apparent palliative and resolution to Germany’s collective identity crisis.
There was, of course, literature, both past and present. Figures by now enshrined as ‘classics’ were either quoted out of context or suborned in their entirety. Such was the fate that befell Goethe, Schiller and Herder, Hölderlin, Novalis, Heinrich von Kleist, Theodor Storm. Heine could be conveniently disparaged and dismissed. He was, after all, they felt, a ‘rootless’ Jew, and his self-imposed exile only accentuated and confirmed his ‘rootlessness’. Of more recent figures, Theodor Fontane was (when ostensibly relevant) also appropriated, as was Nietzsche. And Oswald Spengler’s opus, The Decline of the West, could be seen, even by its title, to herald the end of ‘decadent’ European civilisation and the advent of a new, apocalyptic and ‘full-blooded’ dispensation.
In a somewhat bizarre fashion, popular culture also contributed, conflated with what purported to be earnest scholarship. Germany’s landlocked inability to expand geographically or territorially had prompted Goethe to advocate a different kind of expansion or extension—into cultural and spiritual domains—but the absence of a frontier continued to foster a sense of claustrophobia. This became increasingly acute with the creation of the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War. The very name of the new imperium could not but ring slightly hollow, simply because it existed in name only. The German Empire was not, strictly speaking, an empire, because it lacked the colonies and dominions which justified imperial status. By 1871, virtually every quarter of the globe worth annexing had already been acquired by other powers; and Germany’s belated scramble for overseas possessions produced very little, apart from South-West Africa. Such as there was did not lend itself to the kind of romantic grandeur on which the very concept of empire depended.
In Britain, successive generations of youths read G. A. Henty or, were they more literate, Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, and dreamed of exotic adventures in the South Seas, in Africa, in the Raj, at the Khyber Pass on the North-west Frontier. The death of General ‘Chinese’ Gordon at Khartoum was the British equivalent of Custer’s at the Little Big Horn; and Britain had, moreover, such triumphs as Rourke’s Drift and Omdurman on which to plume herself. In the empire on which ‘the sun never set’, there was plenty to appease one’s hunger for the exotic.
France, too, could wax romantic about adventures, explorations and conquests in remote, mysterious and seemingly enchanted places. North Africa, for example, supplied France with an ample diet of such material; and thus the mystique of the Foreign Legion could inflame the popular imagination. In Russia, the Caucasus had performed a similar function, inspiring, among others, Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoy. There was also, as the nineteenth century unfolded, the Far East, Mongolia and the Chinese frontier. And like the British, the Russian imagination was stirred by the misty mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass. As for Austria-Hungary, the yearning for exoticism could be to some degree satisfied within the empire itself, where a diverse spectrum of races, cultures, traditions and peoples provided the cultivated Viennese mind with an inexhaustible source of glamorous mystery.
For Germany, the trappings of empire had no arena in which to parade themselves. German schoolboys sought some imperial extension of the country on which romantic fantasy could be projected, and they found nothing. For want of anything else, they turned in what today may seem a bizarre and improbable direction—the ‘Wild West’ of the United States. They did so under the influence and auspices of a man named Karl May.
May is unknown in the English-speaking world. Measured by aesthetic standards, he was little more than a hack, and does not even qualify for inclusion in reference works on German literature. In Germany, however, and indeed throughout central Europe, he was the most successful bestselling author of his era, casting a spell over successive generations of youth. Even today, he is still widely read.
May’s massive corpus of work (amounting, in some editions, to more than sixty volumes) was produced during the last third of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. His most popular books, derivative of Fenimore Cooper and the ‘dime novels’ then current in America, were westerns—precursors, in many respects, of the novels of Zane Grey and the more recent Louis l’Amour. In these texts, May’s own specifically Teutonic conceptions of justice, law and order were dramatised against the landscape of the American West. In a milieu today associated with John Wayne and Marlboro Country, cowboys and Indians addressed each other in German.
By modern standards some of May’s work might appear offensive. In fact, he was much more humane, ‘enlightened’ and sympathetic to the plight of the Indian than most of his American contemporaries. He was also a pacifist, and vehemently opposed to imperialism—both Germany’s and everyone else’s. In itself, his influence on the German collective psyche may have been detrimental to literary taste and discrimination, but it was otherwise harmless. It was, however, to become entangled with a much more pernicious influence—that of Heinrich von Treitschke.
Treitschke was a very different kind of writer. Among his contemporaries, he passed for an eminent and distinguished historian, with seemingly impeccable academic credentials. Unlike May, he was not read by every German schoolboy. For the most part, he was read only in the universities, but his ideas—in even more partisan and simplified form—filtered out from there. Among his major works was Das deutsche Ordensland Preussen, an evocative history, engorged with purple prose, of the medieval Teutonic Knights in Prussia and the Baltic. His orientation, in this and other works, was aggressively pan-Aryan, ‘Volkische’, nationalistic and racist. This is made clear in the analysis by D. Seward:
Reading Treitschke’s Das deutsche Ordensland one immediately recognizes his interpretation’s influence on the architects of the Third Reich. He spoke of ‘the formidable activities of our people as conqueror, teacher, discipliner of its neighbours’, of ‘those pitiless racial conflicts whose vestiges live on mysteriously in the habits of our people’ . . .16
Seward observes that the Teutonic Knights were portrayed by Treitschke as ‘medi
eval stormtroopers’. As such, they were later ‘canonised’ by the Nazis and adopted as icons by the SS. The knights’ crusade in Prussia and the Baltic was depicted as Germany’s great imperial adventure. Indeed, Treitschke credited them with having established the governing principles of the imperial policy later adopted by Europe’s major powers. Yet in fact the activities of the Teutonic Knights were to be echoed most approximately by those of the settlers and the United States Cavalry in the American West.
The crusades in Prussia and the Baltic may indeed have constituted a ‘great imperial adventure’. But for German youths of Treitschke’s era, that adventure, unfortunately, lay centuries in the past. Through Karl May’s work, it found a contemporary analogy. In the prairies, deserts and mountains of the American West, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were pursuing their ‘manifest destiny’ and, in the process, exterminating the indigenous native population in their path. Why, then, could Germany not have her own ‘manifest destiny’, which sanctioned her conquest of the ‘inferior’ races to the east? The United States was only re-enacting what the Teutonic Knights had done in the past. With this contemporary parallel to validate them, why could not a new generation of Teutonic Knights follow in the footsteps of their predecessors? Thus did Treitschke’s romanticised depiction become conflated, in the popular mind, with the mass appeal and familiar settings of Karl May. This was to be a significant impetus in the Nazi ‘Drang nach Osten’, the ‘drive to the East’.
The coalescing religion of National Socialism was to draw further sustenance, in the years just before and after the First World War, from figures of much greater literary stature than either Karl May or Treitschke. One of these was Hermann Hesse. Like May, he was a pacifist, violently opposed to German militarism and to the conflict of 1914-18. He was also fervently anti-Nazi, and prominent on the list of authors whose books the Nazis burnt when they came to power. Nevertheless, in such works as Steppenwolf and Narziss and Goldmund, German youth between the wars found both their personal and collective identity crises powerfully mirrored and dramatised. In the earlier novel Demian, they found what seemed a tangible incarnation of the Nietzschean ‘superman’. For his readers at the time, Hesse appeared to offer the same solutions to the problem of self-definition that he did to the alienated youth of the 1960s.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 26