by Savitri Devi
The case of Sigmund Freud is a little different on account of the popularity of his works, and of the deplorable influence they have upon the lay people, especially the young. It is true that the lay people have no business reading them, and it is no fault of Freud’s if they do. Still, the fact remains that, unless strictly confined to the perusal of specialists, those works are dangerous—“likely to disintegrate” a nation’s life. They had—and have—not only in Germany but all over the world, wherever they are available in translations, a pernicious influence upon the young men and women who seek in them an opportunity of pondering over sex-pathology and of discovering, in their own lives, sex problems, real or imaginary, of which they would otherwise never have thought. The man, therefore, to the fact of being a Jew, added that of having—maybe unwillingly; but that makes no difference—a disintegrating influence. One really cannot blame the students of resurrected Germany for making a bonfire of his books along with many others, less technical in their suggestiveness. One cannot blame the Nazi government, either, for expelling Freud from Germany, a little roughly.
The attitude of National Socialism to far-fetched monstrosities or pretentious platitudes in art; to far-fetched “problems,” analysed in loose and lazy style, to mysteries about nothing, bizarrerie, childish exhibitionism in literature; to artificial sex-quack243—“sex on the brain,” as Norman Douglas would have said—to the cheap eroticism of people who have nothing better to think of, is a joyous, boisterous, defiant “Goodbye to all that!” and a triumphant feeling of riddance. We Nazis have no interest in and no sympathy for the ugly, sickly, foul-smelling capitalistic world, which we are out to kill, and which will die anyhow, even if we have not the pleasure of striking the last blow at it. Facing the future—work and song; faith, struggle, and creation—we breathe in the beauty of our tangible ideals like a gush of fresh, invigorating air from the woods after some oppressive nightmare. Yes, goodbye to all that! Or rather, “Away with all that!” What have we in common with this world of parrots shrieking meaningless words at the top of their voices, and of monkeys scratching their genitals? The culture, of which we laid the foundations during the first brief years of our power, will be something entirely different from what the modern intellectuals call “culture.”
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But an entirely new culture can hardly be conceived among people who retain the same religion as before. The Programme proclaimed at the Hofbräuhaus states, it is true, that “the Party as such stands for a positive Christianity.”244 But, as I have said before—and as all the most intelligent National Socialists I met have admitted to me—it was well-nigh impossible, in 1920, to say anything else, if one hoped at all to gather a following. And it also remains true that the very fact of replacing, as we did, the link of common faith by the link of common blood—the creedal conception of community by the racial one—is contrary to the spirit of Christianity, no less than to its practice, always and everywhere, up to this day. It remains true, in other words, that if whatever religion that is “a danger to the national State”245 is to be banned, then, Christianity must go—for nothing is more incompatible with the fundamental principles upon which rests the whole structure of any National State.
However, apart from the fact that this could not be said in a political programme in 1920—or even in 1933—it could still less be done in a day. Christianity could not be too openly and too bitterly opposed, before the Nazi philosophy of life had become widely accepted as a matter of course; before it had firmly taken root in the subconscious reactions of the German people, if not also of many foreign Aryans, so as to buttress the growth of the new—or rather of the eternal—religious conception which naturally goes hand in hand with it. Until then, it would have been premature to suppress the Christian faith radically, however obsolete it might appear to many of us. “A politician,” our Führer has said, “must estimate the value of a religion not so much in connection with the faults inherent in it, as in relation to the advantages of a substitute which may be manifestly better. But until some such substitute appears, only fools and criminals will destroy what is there, on the spot.”246
One had to prepare the ground slowly, by creating anew a thoroughly Aryan soul in the young people, through their whole education; and, at the same time—for the elder folk—by giving a precise meaning (as National Socialistic as possible) to the expression “positive Christianity.” That is what Alfred Rosenberg has endeavoured to do in his famous book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century.247 His “positive Christianity” is something indeed very different from the Christianity of any Church, nay, from the Christianity of the Bible, based as it is solely upon Rosenberg’s interpretation of what is obviously the least Jewish in the New Testament and upon Rosenberg’s own National Socialist philosophy. The Christians themselves soon discovered that it was no Christianity at all. And of all the prominent men of the Party, Alfred Rosenberg is surely the one whom they dislike the most to this day—although they are probably wrong in doing so, for there were and still are National Socialist thinkers far more radical than he. And he was, moreover, far too much a theoretician to be a real danger to the power of the Churches.
But it is certain that, under all this talk about “positive Christianity,” there was, from the beginning, in every thoughtful National Socialist, the feeling that Germany in particular and the Aryan world at large need a new religious consciousness, entirely different from and, in many ways, in vigorous contrast to the Christian one; nay, that such a consciousness is already lurking in the general discontent, disquiet, and scepticism of the modern Aryan,248 and that the Nazi Movement must sooner or later help it to awake and to express itself. Although he too speaks of “positive Christianity” and insists on the fact that “nothing is further removed from the intentions of the NSDAP than to attack the Christian religion and its worthy servants”;249 and although he is very careful to separate the Movement from every endeavour to revive the old Germanic cult of Wotan,250 Gottfried Feder cannot help mentioning that slowly rising new consciousness, and “the questions, the hopes, and the wishes whether the German people will, one day, find a new form by which to express their knowledge of God and religious life,” if only to say that such questions, hopes, etc. are “far beyond the frame even of such a revolutionary programme as the one National Socialism proclaims.”251
And it is no less certain that, although no attempt was ever made officially to overthrow the power of the Churches and to forbid the teaching of the Christian doctrine, books inspired through and through, not by the desire to revive any particular Cult of old—that of Wotan or any other God—but by the love and spirit of eternal Nordic Heathendom, some of which are exceedingly beautiful, were published under the Third Reich, and read, and sympathetically commented upon in Nazi circles; and that this was the first time that the real Heathen soul of the North—the undying Aryan soul—fully realised, after nearly fifteen hundred years, that it is alive; more so, that it is immortal, invincible. I have already quoted Heinrich Himmler’s short but splendid book, The Voice of the Ancestors, that masterful condensation of our philosophy in thirty-seven pages, which only an out-and-out Pagan could write. It contains, among other things, a bitter criticism of the Christian attitude to life—meekness, self-abnegation, delectation in the feeling of guilt and misery; “aspiration towards the dust”—and, in opposition to it, a profession of faith of the proud and of the strong and free: “We do not exhibit our faults to anyone, we Heathens—least of all to God. We keep quiet about them; and try to make good for our mistakes.”252
Of the many other books of similar inspiration, I shall recall only two far less well-known than Alfred Rosenberg’s famous Mythus but, I must say, far more radical, and deserving undoubtedly more, both the pious hatred that so many Christians of all persuasions waste upon that work and the wholehearted admiration and gratitude of all real modern Heathens: one is Ernst Bergmann’s Twenty-Five Theses of the German Religion,253 and the other, Johann von Leers’ History on
a Racial Basis.254 There, the incompatibility of the National Socialist view of life and the Christian is shown as clearly, once for all, as any uncompromising devotee of either of the two philosophies could desire:
A people that has returned to its blood and soil, and that has realised the danger of international Jewry, can no longer tolerate a religion which makes the Scriptures of the Jews the basis of its Gospel. Germany cannot be rebuilt on this lie. We must base ourselves on the Holy Scriptures which are clearly written in German hearts. Our cry is: “Away with Rome and Jerusalem! Back to our native German faith in present-day form! What is sacred in our home, what is eternal in our people, what is divine, is what we want to build.”255
And Thesis Two of the Twenty-Five Theses—the number seems to have been chosen to match the Twenty-Five Points of the National Socialist Party Programme, so as to show that the “new” (or rather eternal) “German religion” is ultimately inseparable from the creation in Germany of a true National State—the second “thesis,” I say, states that the German religion is “the form of faith appropriate to our age which we Germans would have today, if it had been granted to us to have our native German faith developed, undisturbed, to the present time.”256 As for Christianity, it is frankly called “an unhealthy and unnatural religion, which arose two thousand years ago among sick, exhausted, and despairing men, who had lost their belief in life,”257 in a word, exactly the contrary of what the German people (or, by the way, any Aryan people) need today.
I do not remember any writer having more strongly and decisively pointed out the contrast between the everlasting Aryan spirit and that of Christianity and, especially, having more clearly stressed the nature of the Aryan religion of the future. There is no question of reviving the Wotan cult, or any other national form of worship from Antiquity, as it was then. The wheel of evolution never turns backwards. The religion of resurrected Germany can only be that which would have been flourishing today, as the natural product of evolution of the old Nordic worship, had not “that Frankish murderer Karl,” as Professor Bergmann calls Charlemagne, destroyed the free expression of German faith and forced Christianity upon the Germanic race by fire and sword, in the eighth and ninth centuries; or rather, had not Rome herself fallen prey to what her early emperors called “the new superstition,” introduced by the Jews. And what can be said of the new German religion is no less true of the desirable new religion of every regenerate Aryan people, organised under a real national State.
The only international religion—if such a thing is to exist at all—should be the extremely broad and simple Religion of Life, which contains and dominates all national cults and clashes with none (provided they be true cults of the people, and not priestly distortions of such); the spontaneous worship of warmth and light—of the Life energy—which is not the natural religion of man alone, but that of all living creatures, to the extent of their consciousness. In fact, all the national religions should help to bring men to that supreme worship of the Godhead in Life; for nowhere can Divinity be collectively experienced better than in the consciousness of race and soil. And no religion definitely stamped with local characteristics, geographical or racial, should ever become international. When such a one does—as Christianity did; as Islam did—the result is the cultural enslavement of many races to the spirit of that one whence the religion sprang, or through which it first grew to prominence. An Indian Muslim, to the extent he is thoroughly Muslim, is outside the pale of Indian civilisation.258 And, to the extent he accepts Christianity, a European accepts the bondage of Jewish thought. And a Northern European, to the extent he accepts Christianity, and especially Catholicism, accepts, in addition to that, the bondage of Rome. Germany, the first Aryan nation that has rebelled on a grand scale against the Jewish yoke—cultural, no less than economical—is also the first Nordic nation to have shaken off, partly at least, in the sixteenth century, the less foreign (while Aryan259) but still foreign bondage of Rome. Nothing shows better the spirit of the religious revolution—of the religious liberation—slowly preparing itself under the influence of National Socialism, than the outcry of Ernst Bergmann which I have quoted above: “Away with Rome and Jerusalem! Back to our native German faith in its present-day form!”
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The same inspiration—the same quest of the eternal Aryan faith under its present-day Germanic form—fills Johann von Leers’ History on a Racial Basis which I mentioned. There too one finds, applied to the domain of religion and culture, that passionate assertion of the rights of the Aryan North which constitutes, perhaps, the most characteristic feature of National Socialism on the political plane. For a political awakening of the type that Adolf Hitler provoked, stirring a whole nation to its depth, cannot go without a parallel awakening in all fields of life, especially in that of culture and religion—of thought, generally speaking. There too, one finds—based this time upon the extensive researches of Herman Wirth in ancient lore—a protest against the idea, current in all the Judeo-Christian world, that the old Aryan North was something “primitive” and “barbarous”; and a vision of the future in which Germany in particular and the Aryan race at large will rise again to unprecedented greatness, having rediscovered their glorious, eternal collective Self. The passage of Johann von Leers’ book which comes a few pages after his tribute to Hitler as “the greatest regenerator of the people for thousands of years”260 is worth quoting in extenso:
After a period of decadence and race-obliteration we are now coming to a period of purification and development which will decide a new epoch in the history of the world. If we look back on the thousands of years behind us, we find that we have arrived again near the great and eternal order experienced by our forefathers. World history does not go forward in a straight line, but moves in curves. From the summit of the original Nordic culture in the Stone Age, we have passed through the deep valleys of centuries of decadence, only to rise once more to a new height. This height will not be lesser than the one once abandoned, but greater, and that, not only in the external goods of life. . . . We did not pass through the great spiritual death of the capitalistic period in order to be extinguished. We suffered it in order to rise again under the Sign that never yet failed us, the Cross of the great Stone Age, the ancient and most sacred Swastika.261
The form and particulars of a modern Aryan religion destined to rule consciences in the place of obsolete Christianity are not yet laid out—and how could they be? But the necessity of such a religion could not be more strongly felt and expressed; and its spirit and main features are already defined. It is the healthy religion of joy and power—and beauty—which I have tried to suggest in the beginning of this book. In other words, it is the eternal aspect of National Socialism itself or (which means the same) National Socialism extended to the highest sphere of life.
I have previously recalled the Führer’s words of wisdom concerning the growth of a new religion, better adapted than Christianity to the requirements of the people, namely, that “until such a new faith does appear, only fools and criminals will hurry to destroy what is there, on the spot.”262
In 1924—when he wrote Mein Kampf—he obviously felt that the time was not yet ripe for such a revolution.
From what one reads in the famous Goebbels Diaries, published by our enemies in 1948 (and therefore, no one knows to what extent genuine) he would appear to have been in perfect agreement with the Reich Propaganda Minister’s radical opposition to the Churches at the same time as with his cautious handling of the religious question during the war. As long as the war was on, it was, no doubt, not the time to promote such changes as would, perhaps, make many people realise too abruptly that they were fighting for the establishment of something which, maybe, they did not want. But, when victory would be won, then, many things that looked impossible would be made possible. According to the Diaries, the Führer was even planning, “after the war,” to encourage his people, gradually, to alter their diet, with a view to doing away with the standing horr
or of the slaughter-houses263—one of the most laudable projects ever seriously considered in the history of the West,264 which, if realised, would have at once put Germany far ahead of all other nations, raising her conception of morality much above the standard reached by Christian civilisation. He was certainly also planning the gradual formation of a religious outlook worthy of the New Order that he was bringing into being. Already, the most devotedly radical among the active Party members, the corps d’élite; the SS men—were expected to find in the National Socialist Weltanschauung alone all the elements of their inner life, without having anything to do with the Christian Churches and their philosophy. And if one recalls, not the Führer’s public statements, but some of the most striking private statements attributed to him, one feels convinced that he was aware of the inadequacy of Christianity as the religion of a healthy, self-confident, proud, and masterful people no less than any of the boldest of the National Socialist thinkers, nay, no less than Heinrich Himmler himself and those whom he had in mind when he repeatedly wrote, in his brilliant booklet, “Wir Heiden”—“We Heathens.”
