Hitler and his God

A New Human Being

In the insecurity and confusion caused by the vortex of change, the longing for a meaning which would make life worthwhile was accompanied by a feeling that a new world, a new golden age was in the making. At the “historical juncture”, the Zeitbruch around 1880, the idea, not to say the need, of a new human being can be found everywhere in the expectations of thinkers, poets and artists receptive to the ambience of the times. The anticipation of a higher being with the capacities to create new values and a new world is one of the most striking signs of a fundamental change in the times.

The most perspicacious interpreter of this time-hinge period in which he was living, was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). So insightful were many of his perceptions that they would remain sources of inspiration for many philosophers throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day. When reading some of his exegetes, one is surprised by the extent to which Nietzsche’s personality is seen as detached from the Germany in which he had grown up – the background outlined in the previous chapters of our story. This is, needless to say, in direct contradiction with one of the pillars of the Nietzschean thinking: “perspectivism”, which states that any event and any being is determined by and dependent on the circumstances in which it comes about, that it is shaped by the flow of time or history in which it exists.

In Nietzsche’s writing we find, therefore, the main themes of the völkisch thought, some of them confirmed, others rebuked. His famous saying that “God is dead” means – this is often misunderstood – that the image of the Christian God has lost its general acceptance in the West. It means, as Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, “that the belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable”. This, according to Nietzsche, who wrote that book in 1882, is “the greatest recent event”. He considered “the Christian conception of God one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on earth”, mainly because it turned the fulfilment of life away from the earth toward a fictional hereafter. The death of the Christian God is for Nietzsche “the cardinal event of modern history and of the contemporary world, the ghost that looms behind his every important thought”. 686 What this pronouncement meant fundamentally was that the European Middle Ages, with their Christian civilization, were coming to an end.

As a thinker and critic of the formerly established but now disintegrating values, religious and moral, Nietzsche could not disregard the Enlightenment which claimed the superiority of reason. In general, he had the highest regard for the philosophes, knowing from his own experience what it took to formulate an unarticulated perception and to fight for one’s convictions on the battlefields of the mind. “Every smallest step in the field of free thinking, and of the personally formed life, has ever been fought for at the cost of mental and physical tortures.” He himself suffered continuously from migraines, bad eyesight and paralysis progressiva. “Change has required its innumerable martyrs … Nothing has been bought more dearly than that little bit of human reason and sense of freedom that is now the basis of our pride.” 687 Nietzsche also gave special importance to France and its “cultural superiority over Europe”, as opposed to what he called the German backwardness, heaviness and shallowness.

What Nietzsche could not accept was the monopoly or autocracy of reason. He sharply and repeatedly attacked Socrates, according to him the thinker responsible for the reverence assigned to the mind in European civilization. He called autonomous thought a deadly illness, and opposed to Apollo, the god of light and clarity, the wholeness and wholesomeness of Dionysus and the frenzied Dionysian experience. Socratic thought, said Nietzsche, was the source of Christian morality, in other words of the weakness and degradation at the roots of the Christian civilization, and responsible for its degradation and certain extinction. (Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, has been called “Nietzsche’s monkey”.) As the pathfinder of a new way Nietzsche thought of himself as an incarnation of the god Dionysus come to fight the shadow left by the dead Christian God, and as Zarathustra come to bring the new “evangel” of the superman.

As Nietzsche saw it, the mind was part of a whole consisting of the life-forces, bundled in a “will to power”. In this he made the disastrous mistake – for mind and life and matter are part of a greater, encompassing whole – which exalted him into the patron saint of the vitalist movements, including Fascism in general and Nazism in particular. As J.P. Stern has it, according to Nietzsche “life cannot be defined: to define it would be to subordinate it to reason, its servant. This logical conundrum turned out to have most disreputable consequences. It was handed down to Nietzsche from Schopenhauer, and from Nietzsche to Alfred Rosenberg, to Ernst Jünger in the twenties, Gottfried Benn in the early thirties, and a host of other influential German authors.” 688

Nietzsche had a profound disdain for the masses, one of the new social phenomena of the times. It seems that he never thought beyond the rise of the bourgeoisie, “the third estate” which carried the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and was therefore hindered by a blind spot to mark the rise of the fourth estate, the proletariat. Socialism, Marxism and their masses remained beyond his ken. He was an out-and-out individualist who saw in self-mastery, the effort of “self-overcoming”, the means of growth into a higher being. This was the manner in which the world, as a perfected aesthetic phenomenon, would become totally satisfactory. “Attacking the fashionable idea of progress, he argued that ‘the goal of humanity’ must lie ‘in its highest specimens’, and these may occur, and recur, in every age.” 689 For a vision in the Swiss mountains of Engadin had revealed to him that all things happen again eternally, in exactly the same fashion, and this filled him, strangely, with a kind of mystic exaltation. The value of Nietzsche, however, does not lie in the consistency of his philosophical system, which he never intended and even wholeheartedly despised, but in the depth of his insights which continue reverberating to this day.

“All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man? What is the ape to men? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the superman.” 690 No doubt, Nietzsche knew Darwin; Walter Kaufmann even mentions that the young Nietzsche “was aroused from his dogmatic [Protestant] slumber by Darwin”. Yet, although Nietzsche accepted the possibility of transcending a given natural state, he was “consistently hostile” to Darwinism because it was a theory of chance, numbers and pure matter, which left no place for his staunch individualism, for the effort of self-overcoming and the will to power. “The single man alone is the bestower of values … The only absolute imperative a man should obey is that of his inward potential: whatever it is given to a man to become, that should indicate the direction, and be the goal, of his intense striving, his will.” 691 Nietzschean evolution, in the human species at least, was a matter of individuals striving for greatness, not of races struggling for a momentary superiority on earth.

Another important tie of Nietzsche with the period in which he lived was his relationship with Richard Wagner. “His identity was so bound up with Wagner that it might collapse if they separated”, writes Carl Pletsch. 692 When Wagner died, Nietzsche wrote in a letter: “Wagner was by far the fullest man I have ever known.” His music “seeped into the being of its listeners and transformed them from within. Nothing in the history of music was so daring in composition and so seeringly accurate and dangerously effective in conveying the power and nature of the human Machtgefühl [feeling of power]. Wagner’s music was an extraordinary elemental embodiment of will.” (Lesley Chamberlain 693)

All the same, Nietzsche broke with Wagner when the latter became too reichsdeutsch, too much accepted, and enjoying the acceptance, by the German nationalist and conservative elite, which was riding on its wave of pride and superiority after the victory over France in 1871 and the foundation of the German nation. “‘German’ has become an argument, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles a principle; the Teutons represent the ‘moral world-order’”, wrote Nietzsche indignantly. “There is now a historiography that is reichsdeutsch; there is even, I fear, an anti-Semitic one … and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed.” 694 Wagner’s, and therefore Bayreuth’s, virulent anti-Semitism was another element inimical to Nietzsche’s feelings, who was convinced that a mixture of races would be beneficial to humanity, and proud to be an anti-anti-Semite.

It was against this background that Nietzsche’s idea of the superman took shape. It is worth noting that commentators from Walter Kaufmann onwards have become aware that “superman” is not the correct, and in fact a misleading, translation of Übermensch. A “superman” could be something like an aggrandizement of existing man, while Übermensch clearly suggests a being beyond existing man, not inflated, but on a higher level and different. Kaufmann and others use the term “overman”, which is the literal translation of Übermensch; Philip Novak, also annoyed with the word “superman”, still uses it, but along with “higher man”.¹ Awareness of these nuances may prevent misunderstandings of a word, idea and ideal which, in the wake of Nietzsche’s fame, will appear in practically all contemporary writings at the time of the dizzying turn the world was taking into – maybe – a very different and better future.

“The superman is the future of the world” stated Nietzsche. “I teach you the superman”, said his Zarathustra. “Man is something that should be overcome … Man is a rope fastened between animal and superman – a rope over an abyss … This is the great noontide: when man stands at the middle of his course between animal and superman … All gods are dead; now we want the superman to live.” And in On the Genealogy of Morals, he wrote: “This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man, this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness: he must come one day.” 695

What kind of being would Nietzsche’s superman be? Stern has composed an outline of his character from Also sprach Zarathustra: “The superman is open towards the world and its vicissitudes; trusts in others and in chance; in him the cardinal vices of lust, greed for power and egoism are transformed into positive values; and he is in love with the earth, with his own fate, with his own life, and ready to sacrifice that life for life as lived by those who are open to the world and its vicissitudes … Based on the premise of a Godless world, the superman embodies the enhancement of man’s untrammelled will to power under the quasi-religious dispensation of ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’.” 696 Alas, all this does not tell us much. It is difficult, if not impossible, to envision a being higher than oneself. An approximation may be found in the way in which humans have imagined their gods and other supernatural beings to be. Nietzsche himself projected on to or within himself a being at times like Zarathustra, and in his ultimate crisis like what he supposed to be the god Dionysus. But trying to overpass the mind is a dangerous wager for human beings and must, for those who persevere, end in a consciousness as reported by the great yogis – or, if things go wrong, in madness.

As Nietzsche’s ideal of the superman reflected the intuition and yearning of the time, and as Germany was ever more powerfully impelled to national as well as cultural superiority, it was inevitable that the superman would be hijacked by the nationalist movement and be understood to be a Darwinistic Aryan. This was completely incongruous with Nietzsche’s thought. But it was not difficult to choose many of his sharper sayings and, omitting the context, put them at the service of the völkisch convictions.

The main culprit in this art of thought laundering was Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth. In 1885 she married, to Nietzsche’s indignation, the militant anti-Semite Bernhard Förster and followed him to found a Teutonic colony in Paraguay, Nueva Germania. The aim of this colony, one of the many utopian communes of the time, was to preserve at least a handful of German Aryans from miscegenation, in order that the race might survive in some of its purest specimens and eventually be renewed by them. The colony soon succumbed to internal troubles, but some descendants still survive in the original location. In 1934 Elisabeth would receive the Chancellor of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler, at the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar with a flashy right arm salute, and create the occasion for a photo session of Hitler with the bust of Friedrich Nietzsche, symbolizing the philosophical tradition of Nazism.

Nietzsche’s superman was not the only new human being expected by Germans. There was also, for instance, the “Ario-Germanic god-man” of Guido von List. This god-man was supposed to be the present-day successor of a long line of “heirs of the sun-king” going back all the way to Atlantis: the Armanen. The Atlantidians were supposed to have been a divine race. The line of carriers of their secret knowledge and powers had never been interrupted and was surfacing again today. They would be instrumental in creating the future, for List “saw as the culminating point of the universal development the Ario-Germanic god-man”. 697

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes: “The myth of an occult elite is not new in European ideology. It has been a perennial theme of post-Enlightenment occultism, which attempts to restore the certainties and security of religious orthodoxy within a sectarian context … The hidden elite confers an unaccountable authority upon the visible representatives of the cult. The imaginary priest-kings of the past similarly endorsed List’s claims to secret knowledge and special authority. At the same time, the putative existence of a modern Armanenschaft suggested to believers that the golden age might be soon restored, and that Germany and Austria would be united in a theocratic pan-German realm, wherein non-German interests would play no part. Within thirty-five years this vision was instituted as the foreign policy of the Third Reich.” 698

The well-read Dietrich Eckart was familiar with List’s publications, a fact which we find confirmed in Ralph Reuth’s Hitler biography, and communicated this knowledge, along with much more, to his Austrian pupil. There is also the testimony of a Munich librarian that Hitler borrowed List’s books, and Brigitte Hamann mentions several occasions on which he used Listian language. 699 Intriguing, moreover, is the following fact: “In Hitler’s partially surviving personal library, there is a book by Tagore on nationalism with a handwritten dedication on the occasion of his 1921 birthday: ‘To Mr Adolf Hitler, my dear Armanist Brother, B. Steininger’. Babette Steininger has been identified as an early member of the Nazi Party in Munich.” And Hamann cogitates: “This could be an indication that Hitler had contacts with a secret organization connected with List”, adding: “The word ‘Armanist’ could also be meant generally, to stress Hitler’s high rank within the ‘Germanic’ hierarchy.” 700

The “Aryan god-man” of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels resembles in the main List’s superhuman ideal. We remember Lanz depiction of the conquest of the globe by this superior being. “Through the trampling down and eradication of the primitives and the subhumans, the higher, heroic race arises from the tomb of racial mixture and degeneration, and climbs up to godmanhood, to immortality and divinity in root and race”, wrote Lanz. “Then the blond, high bred gods walk on the earth: the races are separated again, the obstacles are eliminated. Then there is heaven on earth. And the blonds know whom to thank for that heaven: gods and goddesses with the sun in their hair and heaven in their eyes, eternally healthy and eternally young shall praise the Great Mother who suffered all for them.” 701 We saw in an earlier chapter that Lanz imagined a future order which ressembled the SS much more than what List expected, including a holocaust of the subhumans.

Another announcer of the superman was the novelist Karl May, Hitler’s favourite author. In Hamann we find that May, then seventy years of age and famous, gave a talk in Vienna on 22 March 1912 with the title: “Up toward the Reign of the Noble-man”, if this is how Edelmensch should be translated. The auditorium which could hold three thousand was full up to the last seat. May, a Protestant Christian, was fascinated by the East, occultism and magical powers. “A real great writer could not have been greeted more tumultuously and enthusiastically”, a reporter wrote. “May has always been striving towards the heights, towards a free spirited kingdom of the noble-man. He calls himself alternately a soul, a drop of water in the ocean, and especially a spiritual aviator … The most remarkable in his discourse is the seriousness, the pathetically real enthusiasm which has something of religious enthusiasm.” Karl May had given shape to his idea of the superman in Old Shatterhand, the embodiment of German superiority in action, and in Winnetou, the Apache, who was the “masterpiece” of a German professor and emigrant, Klekih-petra. Young Hitler, then wayward and poor in a Viennese men’s hostel, was present at May’s talk and was “immeasurably enthusiastic”, according to an anonymous witness. 702