Utterly different from Hesse, but equally influential, was Ernst Jünger. During the First World War, Jünger had enlisted in the ranks, earned a field commission and established a reputation for heroic exploits as a leader of elite storm troops. He survived the conflict and emerged as one of Germany’s most frequently wounded, and most highly decorated, soldiers. Although loftily contemptuous and hostile towards National Socialism, he was to serve in the Second World War as one of the Wehrmacht’s most admired and respected officers. In such works as Storm of Steel (1920), Jünger expounded a creed of macho martial mysticism that readers today might associate with the Samurai of Japan. He endorsed a Samurai-like fusion of sensitivity with hardness, resilience and tenacity. In prose of an incandescent, almost visionary intensity, he extolled the fraternal ‘bonding’ of men in combat, and, even more, the transforming effects of danger, stress, violence and physical suffering. He was neither political nor nationalistic in any conventional sense, but war became for him a kind of supernal rite of passage through which men fulfilled themselves and established contact with the numinous. He embodied, in effect, the quality Heine had described: ‘that lust for battle which we find among the ancient Germans and which fights not in order to destroy, nor in order to win, but simply in order to fight’.17 It is not therefore surprising that, despite his disdain for them, Jünger was adopted as an icon by the SS.
Although diametrically opposed in sensibility, temperament and Weltanschauung, Hesse and Jünger both exerted a profound influence on German youth between the two world wars, but there was another literary figure whose influence, and artistic stature, was appreciably greater. Knut Hamsun was not even German, although as a Norwegian he could still officially be classified as ‘Nordic’ and Aryan. Hamsun was one of the half-dozen or so most important cultural influences of his age. Although subsequently eclipsed by some of his disciples, his work contributed decisively to the transformation of prose fiction in the twentieth century; and as a prophet, he was considered by his contemporaries to equal Nietzsche, many of whose attitudes he shared. Since the 1890s, Hamsun had been advocating a pantheistic ‘return to nature’. In novels with such evocative titles as Pan, Mysteries, Vagabonds and The Road to the Open, he depicted a sequence of alienated and solitary wanderers living in mystical communion with the unsullied and untainted wilderness. In 1920 he won the Nobel Prize for his most popular (if not best) work, Growth of the Soil, a sustained prose hymn to the rhythms of the earth and the cycle of the seasons—with which, he insisted, humanity had to place itself in accord.
For the youth of Stauffenberg’s generation, Hamsun’s work represented the apotheosis of the novel as both art and prophecy. For the Wandervögel in particular, his work was a manifesto, a credo, a bible. His attitudes and values were, again, only too easily pressed into service by National Socialism—and, in Hamsun’s case, with his consent. Although an old man at the time, and verging on senility, he applauded the Third Reich and subsequently welcomed the German invasion of Norway. For this transgression, he was blisteringly castigated and stigmatised after the war, and only narrowly escaped punishment as a collaborator. Not until the 1960s was his artistic reputation rehabilitated; but even today, in Scandinavia, a residue of odium attaches to his name.
Different though they were, writers such as Hesse, Jünger and Hamsun all put forward an essentially ‘religious’ or, to be more accurate, ‘spiritual’ vision which lent itself to appropriation and exploitation by National Socialism. The youths who read and revered them, such as the Wandervögel, were youths in quest of a religious answer to problems of meaning, purpose, self-definition, and individual and collective identity. The otherworldly yearnings of these youths rendered them particularly vulnerable to National Socialism’s allure. Their religious energy could be channelled into the National Socialist cause and could thereby impart to it an intensified religious dimension.
The Wandervögel were officially founded in a Berlin suburb in 1901, initially as a ‘hiking association for schoolboys’. In the beginning, they comprised a centralised organisation with an hierarchical structure. As the movement proliferated, however, it also fragmented. Eventually there were some forty separate Wandervögel associations and numerous splinter groups. The ‘New Pathfinders’, the Wandervögel cadre to which the Stauffenberg brothers belonged, had been founded in 1920. Unlike most, it included Jewish members. In 1913-14, 92 per cent of all Wandervögel chapters had no Jewish members, and 84 per cent had clauses explicitly forbidding the admission of Jews.18
In The Erl-King, one of Michel Tournier’s characters vividly evokes the spirit of the Wandervögel in the aftermath of the First World War:
The Wandervögel movement, named after the migratoty birds, was first of all an act by which the younger generation cut loose from its elders. We didn’t want anything to do with the defeat, the poverty, the unemployment, the political agitation. We threw back in our fathers’ faces the sordid heritage they were trying to fasten on us. We refused their ethic of expiation, their corseted wives, their stifling apartments stuffed with drapes and curtains and tasselled cushions, their smoky factories, their money. We went around in little groups with our arms linked, singing, in rags but with flowers in our battered hats, our only baggage a guitar over the shoulder. And we discovered the great pure German forest with its fountains and its nymphs. Thin, dirty and lyrical, we slept in lofts and mangers and lived on love and cold water. What united us first and foremost was belonging to the same generation. We kept up a sort of freemasonry of the young.19
In many respects, the Wandervögel, with their ‘earth mysticism’ and idealism, anticipated the hippies of the 60s and the so-called New Age Travellers of today, except that they were primarily middle-class and did not pursue their activities on a full-time basis, only on weekends and holidays. Bands of Wandervögel would embark on the kind of diversions familiar enough to our own epoch: camping and hiking forays into the mountains and forests, nights spent convivially around campfires, folksinging, storytelling, poetry reading. At the simplest level, they advocated an even then clichéd ‘return to nature’. The more sophisticated of them embraced a kind of romantic pantheism and a strikingly modern insistence on ecology and environmental conservation. ‘Volkische’ ideology figured prominently in the Wandervögel movement, and there was much talk of Herder’s ‘folk soul’, of pagan Germanic culture, of the mystique of the German forest and its nurturing power, as well as of the need to reconcile spirit and nature, and to establish a new basis for man’s relationship to his environment and the natural world around him.
At their best, the Wandervögel could be a positive and healthy force. They included in their ranks a number of future thinkers and cultural figures, as well, of course, as the Stauffenberg brothers. They espoused a number of values and attitudes which would be found congenial today. They offered a respite, even if only temporarily, from the dire social and economic conditions that prevailed in Germany, and they represented a positive alternative to hard-line left-wing agitators who sought to foment in Germany a Russian-style revolution. Yet it is also easy to see how the Wandervögel, in their youthful idealism and gullibility, could be co-opted for purposes more sinister than they themselves recognised at the time.
Shortly after the Nazi accession to power, all youth movements, including the Wandervögel, were subsumed into a single, all-encompassing organisation, the Hitler Youth. Unlike its more bohemian predecessors, the Hitler Youth stressed obedience, hierarchy and discipline, and incorporated a specifically martial dimension. Uniforms were worn, activities were expanded to include marching and drill manoeuvres, and a military-style command structure was introduced. A new aggressiveness supplanted the old pacifism, as exemplified by the organisation’s official song:
Who’er against us stands
Shall fall beneath our hands.
Our lives and loyalty,
Our Führer, are pledged to thee.20
There were also lectures in ‘racial biology’, and oth
er such typical National Socialist preoccupations. The diffuse, more or less inchoate religious gropings of the earlier Wandervögel were not only reinforced, but also given a sharper, more specific, focus. Members of the Hitler Youth were initiated into neo-pagan rituals and taught, quite explicitly, that Hitler was the representative on earth of the divine.21 Service to Hitler, and to Hitler’s Germany, was invested with a sacred and consecrated status.
If the Wandervögel anticipated developments of the 60s, so, too, did another element in the air immediately preceding and following the First World War. This, too, helped National Socialism to establish itself as a surrogate religion. Freud, Jung, Adler and Otto Rank had only just opened up the vast, new and uncharted territory of depth psychology and the unconscious. The vistas it afforded were as revelatory, and as exciting, as those following the discovery of America in the late fifteenth century. In those first heady days, psychology was able to arrogate to itself the status of a legitimate and recognised science, with all the prestige and credibility that science enjoyed. But if the psychologist was deemed analogous to the discoverer of a new continent, the true ‘conquistador’ of the unconscious was the artist. Not just individual figures, but whole schools—the Surrealists in France, for example, and the Expressionists in Germany—attempted to hurl themselves into the unconscious as if into a welcoming pool. When they surfaced, they triumphantly proclaimed the unconscious to be a conduit to the numinous. Through such figures as the Surrealists and the Expressionists, psychology was made to converge with religion, and to open out, like a funnel, into a specifically religious domain. There thus arose a preoccupation with the mystical or numinous experience as a psychological phenomenon, and with what, during the 1960s, would come to be called ‘altered states of consciousness’. As in the 1960s, this preoccupation was to receive an added stimulus and impetus from drugs.
Drugs were not, of course, unique to Germany. Nor were they in any sense new. Ergot had been used across Europe since pre-Christian times, and was an integral component of the medieval Walpurgisnacht or ‘Witches’ Sabbath’. Addiction to opium, in the form of laudanum, had been common in England since the early nineteenth century, when Coleridge, De Quincey and James Hogg both cursed it and drew upon it for inspiration. Absinthe had long been familiar in France and, following French conquests in North Africa, had been complemented by hashish. Both figured prominently in the works of Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine; and both, by the end of the century, had become inseparable from Parisian cultural and bohemian life. Morphine was prevalent across the whole of Europe, and not even Sherlock Holmes was proof against it. Cocaine, too, was everywhere, and included Sigmund Freud among its devotees. But the drugs that began to appear in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century were altogether different in kind; and the experience they offered lent itself very specifically to a religious interpretation.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Germany, like most other European countries, sent successive waves of emigrants across the Atlantic, Since the explorations of Alexander von Humboldt in the early years of the century, Germany had felt a particular affinity with Latin America, which had, after all, first been colonised by the conquistadores of the Habsburg emperor Charles V. In consequence, many German settlers found their way not to the United States, but to Mexico and points south. Many of them, too, formed themselves into tightly knit sects, cults and religious communities there. It was not the ‘hippies’ of the 1960s who ‘discovered’ mescaline and promoted the active ingredient of the peyote cactus around the world. It was, in fact, the German settlers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the end of the First World War, mescaline was readily available in Europe, and especially in Germany. Among the best-known experimenters with the drug was Hermann Hesse. It is now generally recognised that Steppenwolf reflects, fairly explicitly, his experience with mescaline. In the novel, the drug experience converges with a kind of spiritual or religious experience, and as a result Steppenwolf became as much a ‘manual’ for Germany’s alienated youth between the wars as it did for America’s alienated youth of the 1960s.
As in the United States of the 1960s, drugs were used between the wars in Germany to induce an ‘altered state of consciousness’ with a distinctly religious tinge. It was in precisely this domain that National Socialism manipulatively trafficked.
In The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, Thomas Mann repeatedly stresses the ease with which the mystical sensibility and so-called ‘esoteric’ thought can be exploited by totalitarian interests—and, indeed, can themselves become totalitarian. Once again, Mann was far-sighted. The mystical sensibility and esoteric thought were very influential in Germany between the wars. Like so much else, they were skilfully redirected and channelled into the swelling mainstream of National Socialism, and imparted to National Socialism something of their own character, energy, and orientation. They played, in fact, a significant rôle in establishing Nazism as an ersatz or surrogate religion.
During the post-war trials of the International. Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, material relating to the influence of esoteric thought on National Socialism and the Nazi hierarchy was deliberately suppressed, and has been lost to the record. According to one of the British prosecutors, the late Airey Neave, large bodies of existing evidence were too bizarre to be admitted: they would have permitted too many high-ranking Nazi Party members to plead insanity and thereby escape retribution on grounds of diminished responsibility.22 There was also a general recoil, by the Western democracies and the Soviet Union, from the very nature of the evidence itself. The Western democracies, after all, and even more so the Soviet Union, could at least claim to represent the principle of reason, the supremacy of rationality. So flagrant an eruption of the irrational as the Third Reich represented was uncomfortable, disturbing and potentially dangerous. For the world to be made aware of the sheer potency of the irrational, on so awesome a collective level, would have been to open a Pandora’s box of incipient ills for the future. And it would have been profoundly unsettling, for citizens of both the Western democracies and the Soviet Union, to confront too blatantly what precisely they had been up against. After all, its latent power resided within themselves, within all humanity, as much as it did within the German people. It may perhaps have been more difficult to tap, to mobilise and channel, but it was none the less there.
In consequence, for a generation of post-war historians and commentators, the rôle of esotericism in the rise of Nazi Germany was never accorded the attention it deserved. Instead of being assessed and explored as what it was, the religious dimension of National Socialism was nervously dismissed by such facile formulations as ‘mass madness’, ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘mass hypnosis’, and then subordinated to theories of economics, sociology and so-called political science. A few novelists attempted to address the matter honestly. Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch, both of whom had been among the first to warn against the religious principle at work in Nazi Germany, performed the most comprehensive autopsies of it in such works as Doctor Faustus and The Guiltless. They were later followed by Michel Tournier in The Erl-King, by some of the Latin American novelists and by George Steiner in The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. But historians chose deliberately to ignore the entire issue for more than twenty years. When it was finally acknowledged, it was acknowledged by ‘fringe’ historians, who, with dubious ‘facts’ and luridly spurious theories, swung the pendulum wildly in the opposite direction.
In 1960 there appeared in France Le matin des mages by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. This book, published three years later in Britain as The Dawn of Magic and in the States as The Morning of the Magicians, became an international bestseller and one of the most influential works of its time, especially for the youth of the era. Hitching a ride on the prevailing Zeitgeist, Pauwels and Bergier posited an elaborate conspiracy theory of history, which rested ultimately on ‘occult’ or esoteric principles. In the course of their exegesis, they d
epicted National Socialism and the Third Reich as essentially ‘occult’ or esoteric phenomena.
During the decade and a half that followed, the tantalising hints and snippets of evidence assembled by Pauwels and Bergier were woven into elaborate cosmic dramas, the most famous of which perhaps was The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft. But Ravenscroft’s book was only one in a chain reaction of exegeses, which still continues today. Thus Nazi Germany has been interpreted in terms of alchemy, astrology, satanism, ritual magic, theosophy, anthroposophy and virtually every other such system that might come to hand.
For the most part, these interpretations toppled headlong into crankiness, if not certifiable dementia—when, that is, they were not flagrantly and perhaps cynically invented or fabricated, as many of the ‘facts’ on which they rested demonstrably were. In the resulting miasma, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from the wilder reaches of fantasy, which gave more sober orthodox historians fresh grounds for ignoring the subject entirely. Yet while most accounts of esotericism in relation to the Third Reich were arrant nonsense or worse, there lay neglected behind them a tenuous thread of validity. Only recently has this been seriously examined. Dr Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s 1985 study, The Occult Roots of Nazism, constitutes a landmark of scholarship in the field.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 27