It is not uncommon today to speak of the French ‘occult revival’ of the nineteenth century. The term is accurate enough, because the phenomenon it designated comprised a reaction to the so-called (and, some would argue, misnamed) ‘Enlightenment’ of the century before. In Germany, however, there was no need to ‘revive’ the ‘occult’, because it had never really died out, never even gone so very deeply underground. On the contrary, it had remained an ongoing theme, a recurring leitmotif, in Germanic culture.
Esotericism had reached one climax in Germany during the first half of the seventeenth century. This was the era of the famous ‘Rosicrucian Manifestos’ and what the late Dame Frances Yates has called the ‘Rosicrucian Enlightenment’. By the end of the seventeenth century, while rationalism was taking authoritative hold elsewhere, an updated version of ‘Rosicrucian’ thought was being propagated by the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. During the eighteenth century, Germany was a hotbed for the more mystically and esoterically oriented forms of Freemasonry. Under Frederick the Great’s successor, Friedrich Wilhelm II, the entire Prussian administration and government bureaucracy was the most notoriously ‘Rosicrucian’ in Europe.
What is now known as the Romantic Movement originated in Germany during the 1770s under the auspices of the young Herder, Goethe and Schiller. Initially called ‘Sturm und Drang’ (‘Storm and Stress’), romanticism was to sweep across to England, then to disseminate itself throughout the rest of European culture. Goethe himself was later to repudiate romanticism, at least nominally and in theory. In practice he was to remain more or less romantic in orientation and temperament for the rest of his life; and even after his nominal repudiation of it, romanticism was kept vigorously alive in Germany by a new generation, including Novalis, Hölderlin and E. T. A. Hoffmann.
German romanticism—as Faust most clearly demonstrates—was steeped in ‘occult’ or esoteric thought. It also yoked ‘occult’ or esoteric thought to other influences that were to play key rôles in subsequent German history. Through philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the tradition of German mysticism—now labelled ‘Idealism’—was made philosophically respectable and integrated with romantic attitudes. Gothic medievalism and a more empirical mysticism were introduced by Novalis; classical mythology was integrated by Hölderlin; the corpus of Germany’s legend, fairy tale and folklore was integrated by the brothers Grimm; and a distinctive kind of pantheistic nationalism was integrated by ‘Volkische’ ideology. By the mid-nineteenth century, these elements had fused and comprised the single most identifiable strand in Germanic culture. The symbolic figure who embodied them all, the tutelary genius presiding over the German collective psyche, was Faust. He is, of course, perhaps the supreme metaphor for the whole of modern Western civilisation, but he also remains uniquely German, uniquely identified with Germany. Thus does his twentieth-century avatar function in Mann’s Doctor Faustus.
During the mid to late nineteenth century, Faust seemed for many people, German and otherwise, to have become incarnate in the person of Richard Wagner. In European cultural circles, Wagner was seen not just as ‘the Master’ in a musical context, but as a master magician, a supreme artistic alchemist who, according to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé in France, had transmuted and fused the entire spectrum of the arts and of human endeavour into a new, higher, unprecedentedly lofty spiritual unity. Wagner effectively founded a new religion based on ‘Kultur’, and this became the official state religion if not of Germany as a whole, then certainly of Bavaria and the south.
In The Flying Dutchman, Wagner offered his own variation on the Faust story. In The Master Singers, he evoked a Germanic tradition extending from the Hohenstauffen emperors and the high Middle Ages to the Lutheran Reformation and the Free Knights of the Empire. In Tannhäuser and The Ring of the Nibelungen, he plundered Germanic myth, legend, folklore and fairy tale. In Lohengrin and Parsifal, he drew on Wolfram von Eschenbach to place the mysteries of the Grail in a new Germanic context, which was very different from that of, say, Tennyson’s contemporary Idylls of the King. Not only did Wagner shake and stir this heady cocktail of themes. He also added to it the distinctive ingredient of pan-Aryanism—an insistence, implicit and sometimes explicit, on the uniqueness and ultimately the supremacy of Germanic thought, blood, tradition and cultural heritage.
In the wake of the Second World War, Wagner has frequently been stigmatised. Even today, he remains a source of controversy. Heated debate has raged in Israel about whether his music can be played there. To some extent, this is understandable. Wagner was certainly anti-Semitic, and his music offered inspiration to Hitler and other members of the Nazi hierarchy, who annexed as much of him as they could to their cause.
Yet Wagner’s pan-Aryanism had nothing to do with political institutions or with government. It was much more spiritual, metaphorical and symbolic, much more otherworldly. In many respects, too, it was a response to other, rival, ‘isms’ then in the air. In Britain, complacent mutton-chop-whiskered Victorians were gamely shouldering the ‘white man’s burden’ of imperialism and colonialism; and others, of the British Israelite Society—precursors of today’s Christian fundamentalists—were arrogating to themselves an even more sanctimonious supremacy as ‘God’s chosen’. Across the Atlantic, America’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were zealously promulgating, against Mexicans and Indians alike, what they ultimately regarded as less the country’s than their own ‘manifest destiny’. To the east, pan-Slavism was rampant, from Petersburg down through Serbia, Bulgaria and the Balkans. Indeed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, pan-Slavism was considered a greater threat to Western Europe than pan-Aryanism. The perception was not altogether askew. It was from the revolver of a pan-Slavic agitator that the shots which precipitated the cataclysm of 1914 rang out in Sarajevo.
In his temperament and many of his attitudes, Wagner was not the most endearing of human beings, nor the most sympathetic to modern thought. He was, however, an artistic genius, and probably the single most important figure in nineteenth-century musical history. Yet if he cannot unequivocably be blamed for the noxious uses to which a later generation put him, neither can his influence on that generation be altogether dismissed. Wagner not only revitalised certain key elements of esoteric tradition. He also infused those elements, and that tradition, with a uniquely and specifically Germanic character. He himself may have disdained nationalism as a political phenomenon, but, inadvertently or otherwise, he helped to establish for that phenomenon a spiritual, quasi-religious, framework, and thereby imbued it with a new and more profound justification. Perhaps more than anyone else, Wagner furnished the sanction whereby the ideal of Germany as a nation devoted to culture and the spirit could be translated, and twisted into political terms. He also provided a conduit whereby important aspects of esotericism could be channelled into National Socialism, thus imparting to National Socialism a mystical impetus.
Except for Wagner, however, esotericism in late nineteenth-century Germany was a more or less peripheral or subterranean phenomenon. In France, the so-called ‘occult revival’ had been gaining momentum for years. The Franco-Prussian War, the fall of the Second Empire and the collapse of external social and political institutions had engendered a period of national soul-searching, and an attending uncertainty about meaning, purpose and direction. A vacuum had been created, and a multitude of sects and cults prospered because they offered a prospect of filling it. During the period of the fin-de-siècle, esotericism was able to weave itself into the very fabric of French culture at the time. It was particularly evident in the ‘school’ of French symbolist literature exemplified by Mallarmé and the playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, and in the music of Debussy.
Germany, in contrast, had entered a period of social stability. The newly created empire offered a façade of certainty and national self-confidence. External institutions appeared to be established on a solid and unshakeable foundation. Industrialisation diverted outwards the energies
which, in France, were focused on national introspection. Esotericism, therefore, played a relatively minor rôle in the national consciousness. Nevertheless, it was there and, albeit quietly, thriving. For not even the external institutions of the new imperium could altogether resolve the collective identity crisis. Nor could they altogether replace the spiritual sustenance provided by organised religion—which, faced with the challenge of Darwinian thought, was itself under serious threat and undergoing its own crisis of confidence.
In 1888, two English esotericists, Dr William Wynn Westcott and S. L. MacGregor Mathers, created the supposedly ‘Rosicrucian’ and magically-oriented Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society that was to include such figures as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Aleister Crowley and, most significantly, William Butler Yeats. Mathers later declared his organisation to have been devised, shaped and inaugurated in accordance with a blueprint received from an unidentified ‘seeress’ living in Ulm. The Order of the Golden Dawn was supposed to have been an essentially Germanic conception and, so Mathers implied, intended to complement other, similar secret societies which were already operating in Germany.
Yet a full half-century before the Golden Dawn traces of Germanic esotericism were seeping into British culture. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, one of the most popular ‘mainstream’ and typically nineteenth-century English novelists, was steeped in esoteric and ‘Rosicrucian’ thought. Although best known for such lumbering bestselling potboilers as The Last Days of Pompeii (with its oft-satirised opening sentence), Lytton also produced a number of ‘occult’ works: Zanoni, for instance, and the rather less sonorous A Strange Story, which he himself considered much more important. It was in his mantle of ‘Rosicrucian’ and esoteric propagandist that Lytton adumbrated his concept of ‘Vril’, a mysterious potency, puissance or vertu in the blood that might engender the supposed race of the future—a race of superior human beings, a master race of supermen. This concept, which was later to be of enormous influence among pre-Nazi esoteric sects in Germany, now seems to have originated in Germany in the first place. Lytton, in other words, was not its true author, but only its conduit.
Whatever the shadowy Germanic influences that so affected Lytton and Mathers, they were eclipsed, or perhaps subsumed, by much more public and prominent esoteric prophets whose work and teaching stamped European culture as a whole, but assumed a specific and distinctive character in Germany. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Theosophy, created by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, swept Europe with an impetus and energy comparable to that of Wagner or Nietzsche. Wagner may have created a religion of his own, but few people at the time would explicitly have acknowledged it to be such. Theosophy, on the other hand, did announce itself as a full-fledged organised religion—or, rather as the definitive and supreme synthesis of all religions, the universal and all-encompassing ultra-religion of the future. It thus posed a challenge and a threat to existing faiths that generated considerable alarm. With its declared foundations in what purported to be ‘esoteric Buddhism’, its hierarchy of ‘secret masters’ and its all-embracing scope, Theosophy offered a complex framework that incorporated all other creeds within itself. It exerted an appeal for eminent cultural figures like Yeats, Conan Doyle and even Stefan George. It established its primary foothold in Britain, where it survives today, but it was no less popular on the continent. In the summer of 1884, the first Theosophical Society was founded in Germany. By the turn of the century, there were similar societies across the whole of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Once again, a few farsighted artists divined a potential danger. In the early novel Young Törless, published in 1906, Robert Musil depicts a proto-Nazi youth exploiting the tenets of Theosophy for psychological manipulation and domination.
In Austria and Germany, Theosophy spawned a number of particularly noxious progeny, sects with a ‘Volkische’, pan-Aryan and viciously anti-Semitic orientation. Among other things, these sects—collectively known as ‘Ariosophy’—imparted a further esoteric and religious dimension to National Socialism, and helped provide a cosmology and a specious justification for Nazi racial theoreticians. According to Dr Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke:
The Ariosophists . . . combined German volkish nationalism and racism with occult notions borrowed from the theosophy of . . . Blavatsky, in order to prophesy and vindicate a coming era of German world rule.23
In order to disseminate their skewed vision,
the Ariosophists founded secret religious orders dedicated to the revival of the lost esoteric knowledge and racial virtue of the ancient Germans, and the corresponding creation of a new pan-German empire.24
Three Ariosophist sects, and the personalities associated with them, were particularly influential.
In 1905, a renegade Cistercian monk, Adolf Josef Lanz, assumed the spuriously noble title of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and began publishing, in Vienna, a fervently anti-Semitic journal called Ostara. Two years later, in 1907, Liebenfels founded a cranky racist secret society dubbed ‘Ordo Novi Templ’, the Order of the New Templars. On Christmas Day of that year, having purchased a small castle overlooking the Danube, he raised his order’s flag—bearing a swastika—above the tower.
Among Ostara’s most assiduous readers and avid devotees was the young and then destitute would-be painter, Adolf Hitler, who is known to have met with Liebenfels at the journal’s offices in 1909.25 The New Templars also exerted an influence on Heinrich Himmler and, through him, on the SS. Many SS rites and ceremonies, and much of the pseudo-archaic ‘runic lore’ with which SS personnel were indoctrinated, derived, directly or otherwise, from Liebenfels’s loathsome organisation. Among his beliefs was that of a universal psychic energy animating the cosmos, which had as ‘its most perfect manifestation [the] blond-haired blue-eyed Aryan’. Among the programmes he advocated was a ritualistic immolation of ‘racial inferiors’ as sacrificial offerings to pagan gods.
One of Liebenfels’s closest friends and associates was Guido von List, whom Dr Goodrick-Clarke describes as ‘the first popular writer to combine völkish ideology with occultism and theosophy’.26 In 1908, he created his own Guido von List Society, which overlapped the New Templars in its tenets and included a number of the same members. The membership also included the entire Viennese Theosophical Society. In 1912, certain of List’s disciples created another secret society, the ‘Germanenorden’ or Germanic Order.
In 1918, a Munich-based faction of the by then moribund ‘Germanenorden’ founded a new organisation, known as the ‘Thule Gesellschaft’ or ‘Thule Society’, under the leadership of an adventurer named Rudolph von Sebottendorff.27 To the beliefs of his immediate predecessors, Sebottendorff (whose real name was Adam Glauer) added the concept of ‘Vril’ previously outlined by Bulwer-Lytton. Sebottendorff bought and proceeded to edit the newspaper which would subsequently become the Volkischer Beobachter, the official organ of the National Socialist Party, and which, by 1921, was owned by Adolf Hitler. Among the members of the ‘Thule Gesellschaft’ were such later Nazi eminences as Alfred Rosenberg and Rudolf Hess. The membership also included Anton Drexler, first chairman of the National Socialist Party, and Dietrich Eckart, a demented poet who was one of Hitler’s most important early mentors and, from 1921 until his death in 1923, editor of the Volkischer Beobachter.28
In France, esotericism had acquired great influence in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, the collapse of existing social and political institutions and the ensuing crisis of faith. It helped to fill the vacuum created by a loss of national self-confidence and offered people something in which to believe. In Germany, the obverse of this situation prevailed. The apparent stability, solidity and—perhaps most significantly of all—novelty of the new social and political institutions fostered national self-confidence, and precluded the need for introspective soul-searching. In consequence, esotericism, though well entrenched, was largely confined to the periphery. In Austro-Hungary, as in Russia, the situation was something between those in France and Germany.
External social and political institutions had not yet collapsed, but they were shaky and enervated, lacking in vitality and novelty, and manifestly in a state of atrophy and decay. As a result, esotericism, in both the Habsburg and Romanov empires, was something rather more than a peripheral phenomenon; and thus it was in Vienna, rather than Berlin, that the Ariosophist sects first established themselves. After 1918, however, Germany’s condition was analogous to that of France in 1871, if not much worse; and as the kaleidoscope of relative values mutated into ever new configurations, esotericism, especially in the form of Ariosophy, moved inwards from the periphery, closer to the men and principles that shaped developments.
It was suggested earlier in this book that ‘magic’ might be defined as a metaphor reflecting the manipulative relationship between human consciousness and will on the one hand, external phenomena and people on the other. By that definition, the Ariosophist sects comprise an element of ‘black magic’ in the religious edifice of National Socialism. But there was also what might be regarded as a ‘white magic’ counter-current. As Mann said, esotericism and mystical thought have a natural affinity with totalitarianism, and are therefore susceptible to totalitarian exploitation. There are, however, exceptions that prove the rule.
For many commentators, the chief such exception—the primary embodiment of a ‘white magic’ counter-current to the Ariosophists—was Rudolf Steiner. Born in 1861 in what was then Hungarian territory, Steiner established credibility for himself as a Goethe scholar and the editor of Goethe’s scientific writings for a projected definitive edition. From his twenties on, he was also a zealous adherent of Theosophy. In 1906, he became a member of another organisation, the Ordo Templi Orientis, or O.T.O., which derived obliquely from the Golden Dawn in England and was subsequently to be presided over by Aleister Crowley.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 28