The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Whatever his other attributes, Hitler certainly thought of himself as a thinker and an artist, with a grasp of technical-military matters, of natural science, and above all of history. He was transformed into the figure he became first by World War I and the ensuing peace, but also by the education he gave himself. The Führer’s ideas, as revealed in his table talk during World War II, are directly traceable to his thinking as a young man.

  The historian George L. Mosse has disinterred the more distant intellectual origins of the Third Reich, on which this section is chiefly based.6 He shows how an amalgam of völkisch mysticism and spirituality grew up in Germany in the nineteenth century, in part a response to the Romantic movement and to the bewildering pace of industrialization, and was also an aspect of German unification. In addition to the influence of thinkers and writers who helped create this cast of mind—people like Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn, who stressed “German intuition” as a new creative force in the world, and Eugen Diederichs, who openly advocated “a culturally grounded nation guided by the initiated elite”—there were nineteenth-century German books such as that by Ludwig Woltmann, examining the art of the Renaissance, identifying “Aryans” in positions of power and showing how much the Nordic type was admired even then. Mosse also emphasizes how Social Darwinism threaded through society and describes the many German attempts at utopias—from “Aryan” colonies in Paraguay and Mexico to nudist camps in Bavaria, which tried to put völkisch principles into effect.7

  In his own book Hitler insists that while at school in Linz he “learned to understand and grasp the meaning of history.” “To ‘Learn’ history,” he explained, “means to seek and find the forces which are the causes leading to those effects which we subsequently perceive as historical events.” One of these forces, he felt (and this too he had picked up as a boy), was that Britain, France, and Russia were intent on encircling Germany, and he thereafter never rid himself of this view. For him history was invariably the work of great men—his heroes were Charlemagne, Rudolf von Hapsburg, Friedrich the Great, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Kaiser Wilhelm I. Hitler therefore was much more in the mold of Stefan George or Rainer Maria Rilke than that of Marx or Engels, for whom the history of class struggle was paramount. For Hitler, history was a catalog of racial struggles, although the outcome always depended on great men: “[History] was the sum total of struggle and war, waged by each against all with no room for either mercy or humanity.”

  Hitler’s biological thinking, says Mosse, was an amalgam of Thomas R. Malthus, Charles Darwin, Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, and William McDougall. “Man has become great through struggle…. Whatever goal man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality…All life is bound up in three theses: struggle is the father of all things, virtue lies in blood, leadership is primary and decisive…He who wants to live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world where eternal struggle is the law of life has no right to exist.”8

  Hitler’s biologism was intimately linked to his understanding of history.9 He knew very little about prehistory but certainly regarded himself as something of a classicist, fond of saying that his “natural home” was ancient Greece or Rome, and he had more than a passing acquaintance with Plato.10 Partly because of this, he considered the races of the East (the old “Barbarians”) as inferior. Organized religion, Catholicism in particular, was also doomed, owing to its anti-scientific stance and its unfortunate interest in the poor (“weaklings”). For Hitler, mankind was divided into three—creators of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture—and only the “Aryans” were capable of creating culture. The decline of culture was always due to the same reason: miscegenation.11 This helps explain Hitler’s affinity for Hegel. Hegel had argued that Europe was central in history and that Russia and the United States were peripheral. Land-locked Linz reinforced this view. “Throughout his life Hitler remained an inland-orientated German, his imagination untouched by the sea…He was completely rooted within the cultural boundaries of the old Roman Empire.” This attitude may just have led Hitler to fatally underestimate the resolve of that periphery—Britain, the United States, and Russia.

  It is doubtful that Hitler was as well read as his admirers claimed, but he did know some architecture, art, military history, general history, and technology, and also felt at home in music, biology, medicine, and the history of civilization and religion. He sometimes surprised his listeners with his knowledge in a variety of fields. One of his doctors, for example, was once astonished to discover that the Führer fully grasped the effects of nicotine on the coronary vessels. But Hitler was largely self-taught, which had significant consequences. He never had a teacher to give him a systematic or comprehensive grounding in any field. Furthermore, World War I, which began when Hitler was twenty-five, acted as a brake (and a break) in his education. Hitler’s thoughts stopped developing in 1914; thereafter, he was largely confined to the halfway house of ideas in Pan-Germany described in Chapter 22.

  We must be careful, moreover, not to pitch the Führer’s thought too high.12 As Werner Maser highlights in his psychohistory of Hitler, much of his later reading was done merely to confirm the views he already held. Second, in order to preserve a consistency in his position, he was required to do severe violence to the facts. Hitler several times argued that Germany had abandoned its expansion toward the East “six hundred years ago.” This had to do with his explanation of Germany’s failure in the past, and its future needs. Yet both the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns had had a well established “Ostpolitik”—Poland, for instance, being partitioned three times.

  CULTURAL PESSIMISM, CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTIONARIES, REACTIONARY MODERNISM

  The well-established German tradition of cultural pessimism had been continued in Weimar by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Fritz Stern describes Moeller van den Bruck as an outsider from his early years. Expelled from his Gymnasium in mysterious circumstances, he went into exile to escape military service, while the modest fortune he inherited “freed him from the obligation of steady employment.”13 He began his writing with a trilogy on modern German art but he finished only the first volume. After other books, on theater, he was finally forced into military service where, for a short time at least, he was branded a military deserter.14 He did know some of the early figures of German Expressionism, notably Ernst Barlach and certainly, to begin with, he was not anti-Semitic. But his extensive time abroad seems to have produced in him an idealized image of Germany and his eight-volume history of the Germans, Die Deutschen (1904–10) was the first expression of his nationalism. After this, he made the fateful turn to meta-history, distinguishing in Die Zeitgenossen (six volumes) between the “young peoples” and the “old peoples,” between French skepticism, English common sense, and Italian beauty, on the one hand, and German Weltanschauung, American will, and Russian soil on the other. It was at this time that he changed his name from Moeller-Bruck to Moeller van den Bruck.15

  In Die Zeitgenossen, Moeller van den Bruck lamented the absence of great spiritual and artistic interpreters of modernity (except for Walt Whitman, “the hero of the modern world”), and he decried in particular the decline of German culture since unification, arguing that Germany had “too much civilization, not enough culture.”16 His own contribution was to edit the twenty-three-volume German edition of the works of Dostoevsky. He was also involved in the Juni-Klub, an active force in German intellectual politics whose members, even in those days, were called neo-Conservatives, and with a journal, Gewissen (Conscience)¸ which had much the same aim. As Lagarde had said, liberalism was the enemy—more than ever in Weimar—in particular the enemy of Innerlichkeit, Bildung, and idealism.17 No form of social harmony was possible with liberalism.

  This was the (very rough) background to Moeller van den Bruck’s celebrated work Das dritte Reich (The Third Reich; 1922), which, again as Fritz Stern has described it, “accidentally provided the National Socialist state with its historic nam
e.” The book was a passionate polemic, an attack on liberalism and social democracy in Germany, an attack on ideal types that existed nowhere other than in Moeller van den Bruck’s imagination, in which “he reduced socialism to Marxism, Marxism to Marx, and Marx to Judaism.” This was a new theme for Moeller van den Bruck, who had not been anti-Semitic to that point. But he now criticized the Jews as an uprooted, homeless people “who had no fatherland.” His main argument was that “liberalism is the expression of a society that is no longer a community…” the pre-1914 Germans were “the freest in the world,” liberalism was synonymous with reason, which was inferior to understanding.18 Many Nazis (not least Hitler) did not embrace Moeller van den Bruck, but Goebbels did and after his suicide in 1925 the writer became a hero in right-wing circles.

  And he was far from alone. In the Weimar Republic people with Moeller van den Bruck’s way of looking at the world went by several names—cultural pessimists, conservative revolutionaries, reactionary modernists—all overlapping: figures such as Ernst Jünger, Edgar Jung, the post-Nietzschean, pre-existential philosopher Ludwig Klages, Stefan George, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Toller, Thomas Mann, who shared a view that what Germany needed was a spiritual revolution, that democracy was culturally unacceptable, that Weimar was a problem in need of a solution, and that a return to a “völkisch” community the ideal.

  Thomas Mann and Oswald Spengler have already been introduced. Among the others, Ernst Jünger stands out. A man who would live to be 102 (born in 1895, he died six weeks before his 103rd birthday in 1998), his long life enabled him (as Hans Baumann, another long-lived writer, was to say later) to correct many of his mistakes. Jünger ran away from home to join the French Foreign Legion, then fought bravely on the Western Front, being injured fourteen times and winning the Iron Cross and Pour le Mérite (the “Blue Max”) at twenty-three, one of the youngest-ever recipients. After the war he trained as an entomologist and, in 1922, published In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel), an unrestrained war memoir that does not shy away from the casualties of war but is at its most lyrical and enthusiastic when describing the fighting. It is now often contrasted with All Quiet on the Western Front, treating war as a near-mystical, elevating, “internal event.” Like many—like the Freikorps, the private armies that sprang up in Germany after World War I to combat revolutionary tendencies—Jünger, at least then, wanted Germany reinstated to a position of supremacy. For him, the Weimar Republic was a pale alternative to the “real” Germany, democracy and liberalism the twin enemies of all that is noble in life. His career would go through several twists before World War II had come and gone; he was never a Nazi but in Weimar, as Keith Bullivant has observed, he was a vivid presence among the Conservative Revolutionaries.19

  The stance of the Conservative Revolutionaries was as much aesthetic and cultural as political. It set them against such figures as Kurt Tucholsky, Alfred Döblin, the novelist and author of the picaresque Berlin Alexanderplatz, about a criminal who can’t break free from the underworld, and against Walter Benjamin. Born in Berlin in 1892, the son of a Jewish auctioneer and art dealer, Benjamin was a radical intellectual, a “cultural Zionist” as he described himself (meaning he was an advocate of Jewish liberal values in European culture), who earned his living as a historian, philosopher, art and literary critic, and journalist. Of a slightly mystical bent, Benjamin spent World War I in medical exile in Switzerland, afterward forming friendships with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Bertolt Brecht, and the founders of the Frankfurt school. In a series of essays and books—Goethes Wahlverwandschaften (Goethe’s Elective Affinities), Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama), and “The Politicisation of the Intelligentsia”—he compared and contrasted traditional and new art forms, anticipating in a general way the ideas of Raymond Williams, Andy Warhol, and Marshall McLuhan. His approach was to try to understand these new forms, not condemn them.

  In the view of the conservatives, the extraordinary Weimar culture that has been the subject of the previous chapters had as one of its main faults that it neglected or belittled the lower classes, for them the salt of the earth. This attitude combined to create another characteristic of the times—the anti-intellectual intellectual. This, in turn, with its inherent anti-Semitism, sparked a resurgence of Jewish culture—in particular what became known as the Lehrhaus Movement and the Wissenschaft des Judentums.20 By no means all of the conservatives embraced the Nazi Party (Ernst Jünger, for instance) but the general climate of opinion generated by cultural pessimism, with chaos threatening in the background, did contribute to the Nazis’ growing self-confidence.21

  THE CULTURAL/INTELLECTUAL BASIS FOR NATIONAL SOCIALISM

  During the Weimar years, as we have seen, there was a continual battle between the rationalists—the scientists and the academics—and the nationalists, the pan-Germans, who remained convinced there was some-thing special about Germany, her history, the “instinctive superiority” of her heroes. In The Decline of the West Oswald Spengler had stressed how Germany was different from France, the United States, and Britain, and this view, which appealed to Hitler, gained ground among the Nazis as they edged closer to power. From time to time Hitler attacked modern art and modern artists but, like other leading Nazis, he was by temperament an anti-intellectual; for him, most great men of history had been doers, not thinkers. There was, however, one exception to this mold, a would-be intellectual who was even more of an outsider in German society than the other leading Nazis.

  Alfred Rosenberg’s family came from Estonia, which until 1918 was one of Russia’s Baltic provinces. As a boy he was fascinated by history, especially after he encountered Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century on a family holiday in 1909. He now had a reason to hate the Jews every bit as much as his experiences in Estonia gave him reason to hate the Russians. Moving to Munich after the Armistice in 1918, he quickly joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) and began writing vicious anti-Semitic pamphlets. His writing ability, his knowledge of Russia, and his facility with Russian all helped to make him the party’s expert on the East; he also became editor of the Völkischer Beobachter (The People’s Observer), the Nazi Party’s newspaper. As the 1920s passed, Rosenberg, together with Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler, began to see the need for a Nazi ideology that went beyond Mein Kampf, and in 1930 he published what he believed provided the intellectual basis for National Socialism. In German its title was Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, usually translated into English as The Myth of the Twentieth Century.22

  Mythus is a rambling and inconsistent book. It conducts a massive assault on Roman Catholicism as the main threat to German civilization—the text stretches to more than 700 pages. The third section is titled “The Coming Reich” other parts deal with “racial hygiene,” education, and religion, with international affairs at the end. Rosenberg argues that Jesus was not Jewish and that his message had been perverted by Paul, who was Jewish, and that it was the Pauline/Roman version that had forged Christianity into its familiar mold by ignoring ideas of aristocracy and race and creating fake doctrines of original sin, the afterlife, and hell as an inferno, all of which beliefs, Rosenberg thought, were “unhealthy.”

  His aim—and at this distance Rosenberg’s audacity is breathtaking—was to create a substitute faith for Germany.23 He advocated a “religion of the blood” which, in effect, told Germans that they were members of a master race, with a “race-soul.” He quoted the works of the Nazis’ chief academic racialist, H. F. K. Günther, who claimed to have established on a scientific basis “the defining characteristics of the so-called Nordic-Aryan race.” As with Hitler and others before him, Rosenberg did his best to establish a connection to the ancient inhabitants of India, Greece, and Germany, and he brought in Rembrandt, Herder, Wagner, Friedrich the Great, and Heinrich the Lion, to produce an entirely arbitrary but nonetheless heroic history specifically intended to root the NSDAP in the German past. For Rosenberg, rac
e—the religion of the blood—was the only force that could combat what he saw as the main engines of disintegration—individualism and universalism. “The individualism of economic man,” the American ideal, he dismissed as “a figment of the Jewish mind to lure men to their doom.”

  Hitler seems to have had mixed feelings about the Mythus. He held on to the manuscript for six months after Rosenberg submitted it, and publication was not sanctioned until September 15, 1930, after the Nazi Party’s sensational victory at the polls. Perhaps Hitler put off approving the book until the party was strong enough to risk losing the support of Roman Catholics that would surely follow publication. He was being no more than realistic. The Vatican was incensed by Rosenberg’s argument and, in 1934, placed the Mythus on the Index of Prohibited Books. Cardinal Schulte, the archbishop of Cologne, set up a “Defense Staff” of seven young priests who worked round the clock to list the many errors in the text, which were published as anonymous pamphlets printed simultaneously in five different cities to evade the Gestapo. Rosenberg nonetheless remained popular with Hitler, and when the war began, he was given his own unit, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, charged with looting art.

  Although it was incoherent and arbitrary, the Mythus left no doubt as to what the Nazis thought was wrong with German civilization.

  A VIOLENT ADORATION FOR “EVERYTHING GERMAN”

  We conclude this chapter with a view of Germany from outside. It was written during the Weimar years but just before the Nazis came to real prominence. For that reason it deserves to be taken more seriously as a critique. It also overlapped with earlier critiques by other non-Germans, for example, John Dewey and George Santayana.

  Julien Benda’s book, The Treason of the Learned, first appeared in 1927. The learned, or “clercs” in French, were not only German but also French and this too makes its arguments worth listening to: he wasn’t being narrowly nationalistic. Benda (1867–1956) came from a once-prosperous Jewish Parisian family whose firm had gone bankrupt during World War I. A prolific author of some fifty books, he was one of the defenders of Alfred Dreyfus and saw himself as a supreme rationalist in the French tradition, setting himself against the “intuitionism” of Henri Bergson. Benda’s main argument in his book was that the nineteenth century had seen the growth of political passion out of all proportion to anything that had gone before. The emergence of a bourgeois class, he said, had spawned the development of class hatred and a rise in nationalist sentiment that he put down to democracy. As Herbert Read outlined it in the introduction to the English edition, “Nationalism has become a widely diffused, mystical sentiment, with the result that national passions devastate national life.” Not least, the intensifying of Jewish nationalism had spawned a corresponding spread of anti-Semitism.24 Benda insisted that political passions had become much more “emphatic” in the nineteenth century, in particular national passions, “not only as regards their material existence, their military power, their territorial possessions, and their economic wealth, but as regards their moral existence. With a hitherto unknown consciousness (prodigiously fanned by authors) every nation now hugs itself and sets itself up against all other nations as superior in language, art, literature, philosophy, civilization, ‘culture.’ Patriotism is today the assertion of one form of mind against other forms of mind.”25 It was, he added, impossible to “overstress” the novelty of this form of patriotism in history, inaugurated in Germany in 1813, and embodying three ideas—the movement against the Jews, the movement of the possessing classes against the proletariat, and the movement of the champions of authority against the democrats.26