*1 Von Hildebrand’s lifelong nickname.
*2 Arthur Seyss-Inquart (1892–1946), Austrian Nazi politician, appointed to Schuschnigg’s cabinet at Hitler’s demand.
PART II
WRITINGS AGAINST THE NAZI IDEOLOGY*
God is offended regardless of whether the victim of a murder is a Jew, a Socialist, or a bishop. Innocent blood cries out to heaven.
— DIETRICH VON HILDEBRAND
We know from the memoirs that the main instrument by which Dietrich von Hildebrand fought against Nazism and for the independence of Austria was the journal he founded in Vienna, Der christliche Ständestaat. He fought as a philosopher; he fought at the level of first principles. Despite the lengthening shadow cast by Nazi Germany on Austria, despite the approach of the world war, despite the fact that he lived in Vienna in constant danger of assassination, he did not withdraw from his vocation as philosopher. He did not think that the time for examining first principles was past; he did not think that making fundamental distinctions was irrelevant to the needs of the time.
We have heard in the memoirs the story of how he launched the journal with the help of the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. We want now to hear the voice of von Hildebrand speaking in the pages of the journal, speaking as his contemporaries heard him. It is one thing to hear von Hildebrand recalling in his memoirs a quarter of a century later the tumultuous years in Vienna, but it is something else to hear him speaking in those years, in the midst of the tumult. Thus the essays that follow complete the memoirs.
* * *
* Some of the texts that follow are complete essays, some are excerpts. With two exceptions the essays were all first published in Der christliche Ständestaat.
AUSTRIA AND NATIONALISM
Der christliche Ständestaat
December 16, 1934
In April of 1921 von Hildebrand was invited to Paris as a German representative to an international peace conference organized by the eminent French Catholic pacifist Marc Sangnier. This eventful trip is vividly described in the opening portion of the memoirs. At one point during the conference, von Hildebrand was asked what he thought about the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. His answer, “It was an atrocious crime.” This earned him great respect among his French hosts, yet he set off a controversy in the German press back home, for nationalism and militarism were alive and well in Germany. Von Hildebrand was an archenemy of nationalism.
When Hitler began to rise in German political life, von Hildebrand thought that he was appealing (among other things) to the worst kind of German nationalism. Hence one great theme in his anti-Nazi writings is the evil of nationalism. He abhorred the saying “My country, right or wrong.”
He was glad that he could conduct his opposition to Hitler from Vienna, the Austrian capital, since the multinational structure of the old Austrian Empire of the Habsburgs, he said, secured Austria against nationalism. He felt that he was calling Austria back to its multinational roots and to its true identity when he urged it to become a bulwark against German nationalism.
In this essay he explains some of these ideas, and he also lays out the important contrast between nationalism and patriotism by drawing a parallel with the contrast between egoistic self-love and a rightly ordered self-love.
Since the very beginning of its existence, Austria has embodied an antithesis to nationalism. As the eastern district of the Holy Roman Empire, which was itself the worldly representation of Christianity and thus free of all national narrowness, Austria exercised a purely Christian and Western European mission before the period of the Christianization of Hungary. Later, as the head of the Holy Roman Empire, it had a supranational character, not only because it always embraced non-Germanic nations such as the Bohemians, Hungarians, and southern Slavs, but also because it was interiorly united and formed by an ideal that was religious, multi-national, cultural, and dynastic in character. This was even more true of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. And although the population of present-day Austria is almost entirely German, it nevertheless retains its mission of opposing nationalism. Through its independence and autonomy vis-à-vis Germany, Austria embodies an emphatic denial of the great heresy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: nationalism.
What is nationalism? This terrible error exists in many degrees, starting with the identification of nation and state and reaching all the way to committing idolatry toward a nation, that is, making the nation the highest criterion for the whole of life and making it the ultimate goal and highest good. We will content ourselves here with pointing out the distinction between nationalism and genuine patriotism, without going into all the other possible forms of deifying a nation.
Genuine patriotism and nationalism are as different from each other as the true, divinely ordained love of self is from egoistic self-love. Genuine patriotism and genuine love of the nation to which one belongs—two concepts that are by no means identical—are both morally positive and indeed, obligatory attitudes, like every divinely ordained, well-ordered love. To begin with, this love affirms the value that resides in the national community as such, considered as a spiritual space with an individually distinctive cultural character, a space into which the individual has been placed (usually not as a result of any effort on his own part) and which sustains and nourishes him like spiritual soil.
The affirmation of the general value that lies in the nation as such, and takes on a vivid, concrete form for each person with regard to his own nation, includes a special sense of belonging to the nation of which one is a member, love for the “divine idea” which this particular nation represents, a special familiarity and solidarity with it, gratitude for everything that one receives from it, a special understanding one possesses for it, and finally the task that one is given through belonging to it. All of these elements are contained in genuine patriotism as well as in true love of one’s nation.
This attitude also entails that one acknowledges every foreign nation in its particular character as something justified and valuable. Certainly, a person’s love for his own nation will be greater, more intense, and of a different kind. But every person who refuses to grant other nations the right to develop freely, who holds that he can ignore their rights and justified wishes, and who imagines that he may trample them underfoot if it should be advantageous to his own country, thereby contradicts the very foundation that validates his love for his own country. He is, to put it bluntly, incapable of truly loving his own country. His behavior is no longer the result of love, but of collective egoism—indeed, of nationalism.
The first characteristic of nationalism is thus a collective egoism that disavows respect and concern for foreign nations and evaluates the rights of one’s own nation according to criteria different from those applied to other nations. It fails to see the beam in the eye of one’s own country, while only seeing the splinter in the eye of the foreign countries. This fundamental error fails to recognize that nations need one another, even from a purely cultural perspective; that nations are created for each other’s sake; and that pitting one’s own nation against another and indulging in the delusion of every nation’s cultural self-sufficiency actually hollows out and sterilizes the genius of one’s own nation.
Nationalism is also present wherever the nation is ranked above communities of even higher value, such as larger communities of peoples or mankind as a whole. The German nationalist, for instance, maintains that the well-being of his own country is more important than the bonum commune of Europe or even of mankind. Here too, collective egoism is evident. This perversion reaches its culmination when the nation is ranked above the highest community of them all, namely the supernatural community of the Church understood as the mystical body of Christ. This phenomenon has occurred again and again throughout history, from Barbarossa, Louis of Bavaria, and Philip the Fair, down to our own days.
Another expression of nationalism manifests itself when the individual is regarded as a mere means for the nation to exploit. As soon as the good and ill
of a nation, or even its mere existence, is ranked higher than the immortal soul of a human being, his immortal soul, and his salvation, the true hierarchy of values has been reversed and one falls prey to the heresy of nationalism. Whoever regards the unity of the nation as the ultimate and most vital bond of community and does not maintain that the unity of the living members of the Mystical Body of Christ constitutes a more authentic, more profound, and more living unity has also committed the error of nationalism. Anyone who does not see in other persons first and foremost a soul created by God and for God has already succumbed to this heresy, and the same is true of the one who sees a German, Frenchman, or Italian first, rather than a human being with whom he shares a profound connection through their great shared destiny, which encompasses birth, death, personal creatureliness, and the ordination toward eternity.
Finally, anyone who holds that state and nation are so interrelated that every nation requires the existence of a corresponding state, and who therefore sees a disvalue in the situation where either one and the same nation is present in several states, or various nations are joined together into a single state, is also a nationalist. He fails to see that a national bond of unity is not the only factor that contributes to the formation of a thriving state. He does not understand that, in order to be able to develop fully, it may make sense for certain nations to be present in several states. This is because he confuses the true value of his own nation with an imperialistic need to command the attention of other nations.
This brings us to the decisive point: the nationalistic ethos. No act of idolization originates in a real recognition of value; in fact, it necessarily blocks a recognition of the value proper to a good, for it does not recognize how this good is an image of God. The same is true of nationalism. Nationalists never see the true values of their nation, its cultural nobility, or the deeper significance of its national genius. All they see is its power, its gloire, its political influence. The decisive point, which makes the nationalist’s breast swell with pride, is not the sublimity of his culture, but the number of square kilometers in his country and the size of its army.
The nationalist’s love is not a greater love, but an inferior and impure love. Fundamentally, it is not love at all; it is self-assertion, the will to power, the drive for prestige, and self-glorification. No amount of sacrifices made on behalf of the nation in a time of war can in any way change this. The nationalist is incapable of genuine love, for love of a good is always genuine only to the extent that it participates in the love with which God loves it.
The horrible heresy of nationalism not only destroys the unity of the West, but also corrodes each individual nation from within. It is a terrible misfortune for any country, but for Austria, it is the negation of its very meaning and essence.… The meaning of Austria’s present mission is to be an outright repudiation of nationalism. Even today, although Austria has a population that is almost entirely German, it is not a mere branch of the German nation, nor a mere portion of the German cultural sphere; still less is it simply Germany’s outpost in the East. Austria constitutes a cultural space all its own, a totally unique form of German character that differs as greatly from Germany as America does from England. As I have already shown in these pages, Austria embodies the noblest and most authentic development of the German spirit.
And Austria still retains its abiding mission of universality today. It must always continue to be an organic marriage between the essence of East and West, between the spirit of North and South, between Germanic and Latin culture. Its purpose and meaning has never been simply to Germanize its neighbors; every imperialistic, centralizing, or colonizing attitude contradicts its very essence and mission. Its policy has never been militant subjugation, but rather the organic unification of different cultures. This is why the old saying applies to the cultural sphere as well, “Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube!” (Let other countries wage war, you, O happy Austria, expand by marrying.) Even the Austria of today, small as it is, has been charged with the mission of being a bastion against National Socialism and Bolshevism and to remain the West in microcosm, a building block for the reconstruction of Europe in the Catholic and Western spirit. Austria must lead Europe in its return to Christ and its liberation from the heresy of nationalism. Austrian patriotism has always consisted in avowing those principles of unity which rank higher than a purely national principle. Above all, it has embraced these three crucial elements: the Catholic idea, the Western idea, and the idea of a universal, federative, and dynastic bond among peoples.
Even today, every true Austrian who loves his country, who knows its tradition and history, and who understands its meaning and mission, must profess his allegiance to supranational principles of unity and possess the universal Western spirit. Genuine patriotism and nationalism are always mutually exclusive, but Austrian patriotism and Austrian nationalism contradict one another in an especially egregious manner. The patriotism of the Austrian, if he has understood anything at all of Austria’s genius, must be relaxed, harmonious, and well-ordered for it is necessarily more than the mere expression of his self-assertion or will to live: it is his profession of allegiance to the supranational, Catholic, and cultural idea which unites peoples. An affirmation of Austria and a commitment to its existence and flourishing always entails an affirmation of even higher values as well. This glorious country, which lies at the heart of Europe in more than a merely geographical sense—this unparalleled microcosm of the West, with its radiant, gentle, reconciling, unifying, Catholic atmosphere that surrounds us on all sides and elevates all whom it envelops—this nation at the heart of Europe gives birth to a consciousness of community that offers the true antidote to nationalism.
The political orientation of Austria must always do justice to its mission. If Austria wishes to remain true to its innermost identity, it must never conduct nationalistic politics in concert with Germany—not even with a Germany freed of National Socialism. Rather, its politics must be always and exclusively European. Austria will always side with those countries whose politics are inspired not by nationalistic dreams of power, but by the bonum commune of Europe; for one is a true Austrian only if one is also a European. And it is precisely loyalty to this universal character of political action and to the true legacy of the old imperial idea that gives rise to the great mission which the independent nation of Austria has taken up on behalf of German culture as a whole, namely the inner liberation of Germany from an un-German, Prussian hegemony.…
GERMAN CULTURE AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Der christliche Ständestaat
June 3, 1934
We saw in the introduction to this book that von Hildebrand, as the son of a great German sculptor, was a man of profound artistic sensibility. Here he denounces Nazism on the basis of his artistic culture. In the essays that follow we will see him usually speaking as a personalist philosopher, but here he speaks as a man of culture. We are reminded of the moving passage in the memoirs where he hears his wife Gretchen playing Bach on the piano and is overwhelmed by the contrast between the world of Bach and the world of Nazi Germany.
This essay is important in another respect: it shows that von Hildebrand’s antinationalism, as expressed in the previous essay, did not prevent him from having a particularly deep understanding for and ardent love of his own German nation. He never adhered to the cosmopolitan mentality of those who feel themselves to be “citizens of the world” with no particular attachment to their native nation. The talk of “German culture” in the title of this essay encompasses both Austria and Germany, and it does not refer to Germany in distinction to Austria, as in the previous essay.
Again and again, one encounters the fatal error of equating the battle against National Socialism with a battle against Germany. Only a confused, short-sighted way of thinking could identify one particular government with an entire people, much less a nation. It has not, for instance, occurred to anyone to identify the Austrian Social Democratic government of 192
0 with the Austrian people, thereby construing all attacks on socialism and its spokesmen as attacks on the Austrian people.…
The un-German character of National Socialism can be seen not only in its basic blindness and hostility to other nations, but also in the following points.
Anyone who can appreciate the nature of the great, noble German nation sees that its particular strength lies entirely in the realm of the spirit. Germany’s greatness resides not only to an eminent degree in the realms of theoretical knowledge, art, and especially sublime spiritual music; it also boasts a remarkable wealth of geniuses and outstanding individual personalities. But the particular strength of the German nation is not the culture of daily life, nor the formation of the vital-psychical sphere that is so appealing in the English, nor the enchantment of comportment and demeanor, the grace and charm of temperament that is so striking in the Romanic and Slavic peoples. The German strength lies in specific expressions of the spirit.
Perhaps the Germans are often less loved than people of other nations because, in order to grasp their unique value, one must penetrate all the way into the hidden sphere of the spirit—a requirement not especially apt to make a people outstandingly likeable. To transfer a nation’s center of gravity to the vital sphere generally entails a misconception of its genius, quite apart from any distortions that may have arisen from an ideological heresy. In the case of the German genius, however, it entails a very specific error. If the glorious treasures of German culture are to be brought to light, the German must turn all his attention to the sphere of the spirit.
For the German, the cultivation of the vital sphere is much more embarrassing than for the Englishman or the Italian. Though he is disposed to be more dualistic than the other two, he is also constrained to master everything (including the vital-psychical realm) precisely by first anchoring himself in the sphere of the spirit. Yet for this very reason, we also encounter a spiritual alertness and richness in the German that is otherwise rare in such large groups of persons: and in this respect, there is something to be said for the hackneyed expression about the Germans as a people of “poets and thinkers.” This specifically spiritual trait of the German nature is also revealed in the German’s undeniable longing to see the whole of life as anchored in the spirit. The German is specifically “unfrivolous”: the sub-spiritual sphere never suffices for him. Thus he becomes especially prone to creating idols. For even when he loses his way in the lowlands of life, he always tries to undergird baser things spiritually and, whenever possible, metaphysically.
My Battle Against Hitler Page 28