by Greg Johnson
There’s also the more substantial question as to whether Ulster Protestants under the Red Hand constitute a separate people, rather than simply existing as an outgrowth of British colonialism. Irish sovereignty over Ulster could be interpreted simply as another form of occupation.
However, from the viewpoint of contemporary Irish nationalists, the acquiescence to division of the country has to be seen as a disaster. The revolutionary momentum of the Free State period was ultimately lost as people reconciled themselves with the status quo of division. If a united Ireland was held to be truly non-negotiable, it had to have been accomplished within only a few years of the formation of the state. Instead, the status quo provides a fatal opening for “moderates” and “realists” to sell out the long-term dream of unity for smaller political advantages.
In fairness, Michael Collins never fully reconciled himself to the division of Ireland. At the time of his death, he was planning a new offensive in the North, this time with the backing of state power. Again, to turn to Alinsky, this is the proper course of action given political realities. Revolutionaries should always be ready to accept incremental gains, but should also continue moving the goal posts until they reach their ends. Certainly, the Left has been a master of this over the last century, as each new concession simply fuels the demand for more surrender by conservatives.
Revolutionaries should take what they can get—but never concede that the struggle is finished until they can get all of it. The tragedy for Irish nationalists is that the more “extreme” anti-Treaty partisans may have destroyed the hope of a united Ireland by killing Michael Collins. Michael Collins’s approach may have been more complicated and less ideologically satisfying, but ultimately more likely to succeed.
LESSON 10: DRAFT THE PEOPLE.
James Mason writes in Siege that white revolutionaries must see all white people as their “army.” The fact that they do not support us now is irrelevant—eventually, they will be drafted.
The IRA’s assassination campaign imposes great costs on the Irish people as a whole. The arrival of the auxiliaries and the Black and Tans unquestionably made life more difficult for ordinary people. The murder of the Cairo Gang led the British to strike back in a wild frenzy at an Irish football game, leading to the deaths of many ordinary people who had nothing to do with the political struggle. In the film, Collins rages at the brutality of the British. In practice, this is deeply dishonest. It’s only to be expected that the IRA’s campaign would lead to greater repression of the Irish people.
Terrorism and violent resistance may make life more difficult for the people you are trying to represent. This is not an unfortunate side effect—it is an intended reaction. Revolutionary movements should seek to expose the repression inherent in the system by refusing to let the authorities hide behind half measures. More importantly, a successful revolutionary campaign forces everyone in the country to take a side. It removes neutrality as an option. As the system can only maintain control by imposing greater costs upon the population, a revolutionary campaign that makes life worse for the people may have the paradoxical effect of garnering greater popular support.
As a revolutionary, you are taking upon yourself the responsibility of “dragging the people into the process of making history,” to use Dugin’s phrase. This requires a stern code of personal responsibility so as to live up to this mission. It also necessitates a willingness to pay a personal price. However, the most important quality revolutionaries have to possess is the moral courage to accept that you will be the cause of suffering among your own people. And when the time comes, like Michael Collins, you must do what is necessary to end that suffering.
LESSON 11: IMPOSE SHARED SACRIFICE AND EXPERIENCES AMONG THE LEADERSHIP.
It is no use calling for “unity” among the political leadership of revolutionary movements. By definition, anyone who is attracted to a revolutionary movement is going to be ideologically nonconformist and willing to risk all for the sake of principle. You put a group of these people in a room and they are going to fight about something eventually.
However, Michael Collins gives a different interpretation to the eventual break between Harry Boland and Michael Collins. Boland is in love with Kitty (Julia Roberts), but she wants to be with Collins. The growth of the relationship between Kitty and Collins moves in tandem with the collapse of the friendship between Boland and Collins. Though Collins continues to pledge his friendship to Boland, it is easy to understand Boland’s wrath at a man who essentially stole his girlfriend. Within the context of the film, the ideological differences between Boland and Collins seem like after-the-fact justifications for a rivalry based in petty personal conflict.
That said, there’s a deeper lesson to be seen if the romantic triangle is interpreted as just a metaphor. Boland, Collins, and de Valera are politically and personally united when they share common experiences and common struggles. When de Valera is being spirited away from British raid to flee to America, Collins tells him, “Remember one thing over there. You’re my chief—always.” It’s only after Éamon de Valera returns from America that conflicts become truly serious. Éamon de Valera is no longer a “chief” but a politician. There is a host of different experiences now separating Collins and his President.
The break between Boland and Collins follows a similar pattern. When Boland is Collins’s fellow guerrilla, they are inseparable. Despite the romantic tensions between the triangle, Kitty, Boland, and Collins are able to coexist in easy intimacy. However, when Boland and Collins develop separate institutional roles, the personal tension elevates into political rivalries and eventually, opposing camps in the government.
Revolutionary movements have to impose a common body of experience on all members insofar as it is possible. Different perspectives, backgrounds, and skills are all valuable and useful but not if they lead to division. At the risk of sounding like a sensitivity trainer, everyone involved in the movement should have a healthy respect for the circumstances and difficulties that all of them are facing in their different roles.
CONCLUSION
Several years ago, a white advocacy group created fliers with pictures of Michael Collins in his Irish Free State uniform. Our sophisticated media and the well-trained population immediately interpreted this as a picture of a “Nazi” in uniform, and there was the usual hysteria. This depressing anecdote shows that despite our information saturation, we live in a remarkably uninformed age. Even the millions of Americans of Irish descent have only the most distant knowledge of the Emerald Isle’s long struggle for independence.
White revolutionaries do not have the luxury of ignorance. If the battle for a white ethnostate is to follow the lines of an anti-colonial struggle, the Irish independence movement is the closest thing that we have to a modern model. The period of the Irish Free State and the Civil War shows not only how a successful movement can triumph, but how it can also destroy itself.
Michael Collins is a good beginning for any white revolutionary seeking to define the struggle. The quest for an ethnostate is not a struggle for “freedom” or some silly abstraction, but an order of our own and institutions of our own that will allow us to achieve what we desire as a people. To achieve this requires the power of Myth, the tactics of soldiers, and the skill of politicians. This Easter, commemorate the Rising by watching Michael Collins and absorbing its lessons. Then with more research into this movement and others, prepare for the Rising to come.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
March 31, 2013
OPFERGANG:
MASTERPIECE OF NATIONAL
SOCIALIST CINEMA
DEREK HAWTHORNE
1. INTRODUCTION
I learned about Opfergang from an unlikely source: a documentary on the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. In one segment he is shown browsing in the now-defunct Mondo Kim’s Video in Manhattan. As he does throughout the documentary, Žižek engages in a kind of frantic monologue, and at one point he names hi
s three favorite films: King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (this really surprised me), Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, and Veit Harlan’s Opfergang.
Coincidentally, around this same time I was making a study of the films produced under Hitler, acquiring quite a few DVDs from a company that specializes in Third Reich cinema: rarefilmsandmore.com. Most of what I saw disappointed me. The outright propaganda films, like Hitlerjunge Quex and SA-Mann Brand, had their merits, but weren’t that interesting. Other films, like Die grosse Liebe and Amphitryon, were mostly fluffy, innocuous, and devoid of ideological content. So, I turned to Opfergang with some curiosity—given Žižek’s recommendation—but not very high expectations.
What I discovered was exactly the sort of “National Socialist film” I had been expecting from all the others that had disappointed me. There is no overt “propaganda” in Opfergang, but there are very clear, subtle, and profound philosophical messages. In fact, the philosophy of the film is consciously and deliberately Nietzschean. And Opfergang is also a remarkably beautiful film (one of only a few color films produced under Hitler) with impressive performances and an excellent music score.396 Opfergang is a “free adaptation” of a novella of the same name by Rudolf Georg Binding (1867–1938), first published as part of a collection in 1911.
Opfergang casts a strange spell. I can think of only one other film that had a similar effect on me: Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It is a film about death and sacrifice (its title literally means “Way of Sacrifice”) made in 1942, when the disaster of Stalingrad was yet to come. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to watch this film without the conviction (perhaps irrational) that its makers felt the downfall (Untergang) approaching. But it would be wrong to say that a pall hangs over the film. Instead, the mood of Opfergang is a curious blend of the somber and the joyful. It is both “life affirming,” and “death affirming.” It teaches us to approach death and sacrifice with joy, and to affirm these in the name of life itself. As a German friend of mine put it to me, “If Harlan’s Kolberg is a botched Götterdämmerung, Opfergang is a successful Liebestod, and the true Untergangsfilm.” It is easy to see how this film was created in order to bring strength to the German people in their darkest hour—but like all great cinema, this film transcends its time and place.
When I first saw Opfergang I was so impressed by its opening scenes that I cut it off after about a half hour and then re-watched it from the beginning. Then I watched it again the next night, and the next. Then I discovered, on reading a book about Third Reich cinema, that Joseph Goebbels had done the exact same thing. Goebbels held up the release of Opfergang for over a year (releasing it only in late 1944), partly because he was dissatisfied with aspects of it. When Harlan pressed him to give reasons for the delay, Goebbels was evasive. Finally, it emerged that Goebbels had grown so attached to the film he had come to regard it as his personal possession, and had it screened for his private enjoyment over and over again. In a meeting with Harlan, he was able to quote one long dialogue scene verbatim. Goebbels knew that Germany’s defeat was imminent, and Opfergang had affected him deeply. (I must mention that there is a great deal of myth surrounding National Socialist cinema, and we have no way of knowing if this story is really true—but it comes from Harlan himself.)
My readers may know Veit Harlan as the director of the infamous Jud Süß (1940). Harlan had started off as an actor, but made the transition to director under the Third Reich. The lead actress in Opfergang, and many of Harlan’s films, was his wife, the beautiful Swedish-born Kristina Söderbaum. After the war, Harlan was put on trial for making Jud Süß (accused of breaking some ex post facto law), and successfully defended himself by claiming that Goebbels had forced him to make the film, and had controlled virtually every aspect of it. (This was not a disingenuous defense, incidentally, and is well supported by documentary evidence.) Nevertheless, while it seems clear that Harlan was not a fervent anti-Semite, I will argue that Opergang is clearly a product of deep reflection on the philosophical underpinnings of National Socialism (which is not, in the end, reducible to anti-Semitism).
2. THE STORY OF OPFERGANG
The plot concerns Albrecht Froben, scion of a wealthy shipping family in Hamburg, who returns home after a journey of several years. On a mission for the German Colonial Association, he has traveled from the old German colonies in Africa to the Japanese islands. He returns a changed man, perceiving his old life in a new light. Albrecht is soon reunited with his beautiful cousin Octavia, whom he now sees, in a real sense, for the very first time. The result is that he soon asks her to be his wife. Octavia’s family resides in a dark mansion on the Elbe. There they live out a somber existence, immersed in philosophy and literature, always with the shades drawn to keep out the sunlight. An old grandfather clock in the conservatory bears a morbid inscription: Eine dieser Stunden wird deine letzte sein (one of these hours will be your last).
Albrecht is played by Carl Raddatz, a prolific German actor who made several films with Harlan. Raddatz is not conventionally handsome, but he is very effective in the role of Albrecht, whom he plays as a man hungry for life, and impatient with what he sees as the morbid introversion of his relatives.
In one remarkable scene early in the film, he attends a Sunday afternoon “salon” in his cousins’ home on the Elbe, presided over by Octavia’s elderly father, Senator Froben. The scene opens with a close-up of some orchids, while Octavia plays a Chopin nocturne at the piano. When she finishes, the others prevail upon Senator Froben to read something aloud to them. He selects one of Nietzsche’s Dionysian Dithyrambs, “Die Sonne sinkt” (The Sun Sinks). The Senator (played by Otto Treßler) proceeds to read what is, in fact, a shortened version of the poem:
You shall not thirst much longer,
Scorched heart!
A promise is in the air,
From mouths unknown it wafts to me
—great coolness comes . . .
The air grows strange and clean.
Does night not look at me
With sidelong
Seductive eyes? . . .
Stay strong, brave heart!
Do not ask why.—
Gilded cheerfulness, come!
Sweetest, most secret
Foretaste of death!
—Did I run my course too quickly?
Only now, when my foot has grown weary,
does your glance overtake me,
does your happiness overtake me.
Seventh solitude!
Never have I felt
nearer me such sweet security,
never such sunlight warmth.
—Does the ice of my summit still glow?
Silver, light, a fish
my little boat now swims out . . .397
Treßler does a magnificent job of reading the poem, accompanied by ominous, ethereal music by Hans Otto Borgmann (more about the score later). At this point, however, Albrecht has had enough and declares the poem “frightful” (furchtbar).
“Why do you think it’s frightful, Albrecht?” Octavia asks him, horrified.
His answer to her is to throw open the door to the veranda, letting in the bright afternoon sunshine: “Darum!” (that’s why), he says, and continues:
Can someone tell me why you’re sitting here every Sunday feeling gloomy? You lower the blinds and say “the sun is sinking.” And outside the sun is shining. We’ve been sitting here for three hours talking of things philosophical, playing nocturnes—night pieces—by Chopin, reading the thoughts of a genius written shortly before he went mad. . . . It hadn’t just been [Nietzsche’s] death premonition. It had been the approaching madness he felt before his sun sank. Night, night, night. Nothing but night. And death. And outside the sun is shining.
The Frobens are all rather scandalized by this outburst, none more so than cousin Matthias (Franz Schafheitlin), a middle-aged, stuffy Orientalist who is secretly in love with Octavia.
Albrecht and Octavia step outside, and he apologizes to her for offending the other
s. Irene von Meyendorff (the stage name of Baroness Irene Isabella Margarete Pauline Caecila von Meyendorff) plays Octavia. She is such a perfect exemplar of Nordic beauty she doesn’t even seem real. Octavia is no ice queen, however. She is extraordinarily reserved, introverted, and intellectual (like her father, and her immediate relatives), but it is obvious that she is deeply in love with Albrecht, whom she treats like a mischievous child. She encourages him to go off and spend the day however he likes, while she returns to the gloomy drawing room. In truth they are mismatched. Albrecht immediately scampers down the hill to the banks of the river, while Octavia is perfectly content to return to her family for another go-round of philosophical debate. (As we shall see, Octavia is an extraordinarily self-aware portrait, on Harlan’s part, of the German soul itself.)
Albrecht’s decision to go rowing on the Elbe instead of listening to Dionysian Dithyrambs leads to his fateful meeting with the extraordinary Äls, the nickname by which everyone addresses the Froben’s next-door neighbor, Swedish expat Älskling Flodéen (Kristina Söderbaum). (“Älskling” means “darling” in Swedish.) Äls appears in the backwash of Albrecht’s boat, apparently nude (and it does indeed look like Söderbaum actually is nude). She addresses Albrecht in her native Swedish, then switches to German, claiming to be a mermaid.
Albrecht is enchanted by this brief encounter. When he returns home, he asks Octavia about this mysterious woman. It seems Äls inherited the mansion next door from her stepfather. Octavia describes her as a “migrating bird,” who leads a very unconventional lifestyle, and indicates that she barely knows Äls.
Albrecht contrives to meet Äls again, this time on horseback, as she is an avid equestrienne. (Incidentally, she wears a top hat and tails to go riding.) When Albrecht accompanies Äls to the gate of her estate, her vast brood of Danish mastiffs rushes out to greet her. Äls is a great animal lover and a great lover of life. We realize that a strong bond is forming between Albrecht and Äls well before he ever does.
