Hitler and his God

A Higher and a Lower Choice

The German aspiration for a new and total spiritual experience was spontaneous and sincere. The existing religions had always promised a fulfilment of all expectations in another world, but human intuition knew that, if God was something more than a simulacrum residing above the clouds, then the earth and the life of the human being must have a meaning. These were bewildering times of change, in which a new world and a new, higher human being were expected. The Enlightenment had asked all the questions, but it had given very few dependable answers. The tectonic plates of the religious and philosophical certainties were felt to be moving; the results were a series of earthquakes – one revolution after another, then one war after another – and a feeling of instability, disorientation and fear. The familiar structures of a hierarchical society had crumbled and previously unknown social phenomena – especially the human masses – had arisen and were felt as primitive and threatening, in a modern world which uprooted people and assembled them in urban agglomerates, provoking close, direct and often baffling relationships.

The “revival of the mystic spirit around the turn of the century [1900]” longed for something neither the Churches nor the philosophers had been able to provide: a sense of total fulfilment of the external and internal life, something authentic, not imported from other cultures and certainly not imposed. The Catholic Church had always been “a foreign body to the sensibility of the Germanic people, and this had created an often expressed aversion against the Paulinian-Augustinian Christianity of the father-god Jehova”. A Nazi author put it as follows: “Germany did not need oriental symbols, and in a land which had generated a religion like the German mysticism around 1300, the belief in a jealous Yahweh-god was felt as hypocritical and as an obsession.” 729

“A resolute rejection of the Jewish transcendental speculation, together with the severing of the link between the German mind and the theology of revelation” was the need at a time that the last great episode in the history of global Christianity, Protestantism, came to an end. In this context a new religion was expected to be “a religion without Jewishness, without intermediaries, without dualism: a German religion of deepest inwardness”. This was to be found in Meister Eckhart and the mystics of the Rhineland and Flanders, who constitute a unique, fascinating Western phenomenon. “There can be no doubt that our possibility to escape from the present circumstances, distorted at their origin, and to obtain a religion which is adapted to our actual way of seeing the world, can only be sought in the direction of the way as gone by Eckhart.” 730

Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) was a Dominican monk, though not the medieval monk as one might picture him in one’s imagination: living in seclusion and looking all the time upwards in contemplation of God. He was widely travelled, became a Master of Theology at the Sorbonne in Paris – even a magister actu regens, “an exceptional honour at the time which put him on a par with Thomas Aquinas” – and he was invested with some of the highest offices within his order. Eckhart’s example was Albert the Great, another towering figure of the Middle Ages, and he was an exponent of a mystic peak which, in its broadest context, produced luminaries like Hadewych and Dietrich von Freiburg. His experience, expressed not only in Latin but also in his High-German mother tongue, is so direct, pure and complete that it joins the experience of the great Eastern mystics.

It is an amazing fact that a Dominican Prior and instructor could preach that God was to be found in the heart; that He was not a mental concept but a direct, overwhelming and unutterable experience; that the “spark” of the soul was the Divine itself, and that one who lived in it fully was the Divine, in space and time and beyond it; that in the Divine all opposites fused together and disappeared in the great unity; that the Divine was everything in the manifestation, but that it was also completely itself without the manifestation. The learned Master of Theology must have taken his arduously studied texts seriously and gone, with his insight, beyond them into the experience, while simultaneously remaining the realist who found God’s presence in all things and was active in the most diverse ways. 731 His person narrowly escaped condemnation as a heretic, but some of his mystic assertions did not.

Meister Eckhart became part of “the longing for the supposedly integral culture of the Middle Ages … The endeavour of the Old Romantics was much learning and a universal humanity, and they animated their knowledge because they tried not only to think out their ideals but also to live them. The same road will be taken by the New Romantics [mainly the völkisch movement], going back to the spontaneity, originality, artistry and joy of living of the people at the time of Paracelsus and Dürer.” (Justus Ulbricht 732) A leading promoter of this movement was the publisher Eugen Diederichs, the key figure whom we have met when discussing the revival of the Germanic myths and legends, and a new, German religion. Diederichs, though, never meant to remain stuck in the past, but tried to contribute the utmost for a greater future.

He wrote in a letter: “Do not believe that I consider the new Romanticism as the goal of all development … But why would it not be a part of the development of the present man? Together with mysticism, that is … Our Protestantism would be very different from what it is now if the theologians after Luther’s death had not been such quarrelsome blockheads … I have the strong feeling that, with my publishing house, I have to steer toward a deepened religion without dogmas, and that the forthcoming period will most probably produce the men needed for this. Tolstoy, Eugen Schmitt and Emerson are for me the first steps in this direction. Also Meister Eckhart.” 733 As Ulbricht tells us, the shaken and confused intellectuals around 1900 looked for the presence of God in their own heart, something which in their cultural space they could only find in the mystics like Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Seuse and Johannes Tauler. “The renaissance of mysticism around 1900 belongs therefore to the history of the religion of the German intellectuals and their idea of self-redemption. ‘The human being redeems itself: this is the new religion’, is written already in 1892 in a notebook of the young bookseller Diederichs, whose reading of Nietzsche had obviously not remained without consequences. One also perceives in him the suffering because of the ‘death of God’ which, all the same, was seen by his generation as an opportunity for religious emancipation …

“Some ten years after the start of his activities toward a new religion, Diederichs summarized, in a prospectus for ‘Books for a religious development’, his efforts made for the liberation of the religious forces from calcification through the history process and the transmitted fixed Church forms, to bring them again in direct contact with present-day life … In the same prospectus one reads moreover: “It should be stressed emphatically that Meister Eckhart means more than Luther for Protestantism in the future development of a German religion.” Diederichs will also write: “In spite of the last 400 years [since Luther’s reformation], everything is still to be done.” 734 This evaluation encompassed more than Protestantism: it expressed the general feeling of bankruptcy of the established religions, and the longing for a new world and a new man which at last would be the justification and the wholly satisfying fulfilment of God’s creation of life on earth.

That Germany did not need “oriental religious symbols and the belief in a jealous Yahweh-god” was a quote from Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century. The reader will remember that Rosenberg was the official chief-ideologist and inspector of ideology in the Nazi Reich. (Unofficially, but most effectively, it was Adolf Hitler who held this job and who supervised the inspector.) As we have seen, what Germany needed according to Rosenberg was “a religion without Jewishness, without intermediaries, without dualism: a German religion of the deepest inwardness. And Meister Eckart was its initiator.”²

The disturbing word in this quotation is the word “German”. Meister Eckhart was no doubt of German origin, although the Germany of 1300 was very different from what is meant by the word today. But could he, a leading member of the international order of the Dominicans, Master of the Parisian Sorbonne, and above all a Roman Catholic Christian, be appropriately called a German mystic? Seen from another angle: could his integral realization of the Divine be restricted and fitted into a German framework? The great medieval mystic too was now being gleichgeschaltet, integrated into the pseudo-culture of the Nazi moloch. “In the German mystic there appears for the first time in history and fully consciously – although in the garments of his time – the new, the reborn German man.” 735

Even Eugen Diederichs let himself be enticed by the Nazi ideals and promises of a greater future, and shortly before his death he gave talks for Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur. Nazism was horrendous in its outcome, but it was also tragic at the time of its inception and growth as a movement. Whatever its inner contents, whatever the Hitlerism at the core of Nazism, the movement was a touchstone and upshot of the times, not only in Germany but in the Western world. Dogmatic religion in general had obviously failed; the painful yearning was for “a true religion”, for a spirituality which involved the whole being in this life, on this earth, proving at last worthy of a total dedication, a total self-sacrifice, in the experience of which faith would gradually turn into living Truth.

This was the aspiration behind apparently queer sects like George’s “Secret Germany”, as it was the intuition behind Nietzsche’s supermen who would be the “children of the noon”. In the Germany of our story the possibility of a choice was present: either to surpass the prevailing human condition in a (difficult) effort towards a greater tomorrow, or (with less effort) to turn back towards the past, towards the old gods, even when representatives of the purest possibilities, like Meister Eckhart, had to be incorporated into this pantheon of the past. Carrying the destiny of the world and having to choose in pressing circumstances, Germany made the easier choice.