Hitler and his God

Austrian Visionaries

Around 1880 a remarkable change took place in the European consciousness. The acquisitions of the Enlightenment had already been questioned by the Romantic movement at the beginning of the century. Now a powerful wave of vitalism and intuitionalism restated the rights of the emotional components of human nature. This change was initiated in the arts, foremost by the Impressionist “light explosion”. In quick succession Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson and Proust – to name only a few of the important innovators – appeared on the cultural scene. All contended the sole rule of reason; the human being burst out of the straight-jacket of the rational mind. The result was that it felt in some ways disoriented in its newly acquired liberty, while in other ways it felt dizzy because of the new perspectives and possibilities. It was the time that the coming of one kind of “superman” after another was proclaimed to be the destiny of humanity. Nietzsche’s “re-evaluation of all values” created a euphoria and simultaneously a deep fear, for most customary and trusted beacons seemed to vanish.

An important role in this cultural upheaval – which would create the tension that led to the First World War – was played by the Theosophical Society, founded by H.P. Blavatsky and H.S. Olcott in 1875. That Theosophy spread so fast and so widely proves that it provided some answers to deep and unfulfilled needs in the human being. The human being is more complex than thought by Descartes and his philosophical progeny: rationalism, materialism, positivism, scientism, reductionism. In the human being there is of course the material part, but there is also the vital part with the life forces, the mental part (considered no more than an “epiphenomenon” by Descartes) and a soul. Theosophy borrowed from the Eastern wisdom a view of the multi-layered nature of our being, of the corresponding layers of the cosmos, and of a history of mankind going back much further than the improbably short time span accepted by the academic sciences at present. Reincarnation gave a new value to the small number of years of the human life, suggesting that it had meaning after all. And, not least, Theosophy proposed a new, no longer anthropomorphic image of God, asserting that all was “That” and that That could be directly contacted and even realized, for that That was the living Presence in the soul.

“The modern German [and Austrian] occult revival owes its inceptions to the popularity of Theosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world during the 1880s”, writes Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. 33 He situates this revival in the period 1880-1910 and notes that Theosophy “made a deeper impression in Germany than in other European countries”. The reason was that in Germany a strong opposition was growing against the ideals of the Enlightenment due to the particular development of a German nationalistic spirit, in the margin as it were and even contrary to modern cultural acquisitions in other West-European countries. This specifically German path is sometimes called Sonderweg, Germany’s “road apart”.

In Austria were invented some fundamental beliefs and convictions which would lead to Nazism. This is not always recognized because this beautiful country is usually associated with Tyrolean hats, yodelling and Gemütlichkeit, and also because in the tense political situation between the post-war occupying powers Austria escaped its own Nuremberg trial. The feeling of cultural and racial superiority in the Austrian Germans, leading to pan-German fanaticism, was the result of the hostile relations between the various races and language communities in the ever less governable empire-cum-kingdom of Austria-Hungary. There the German speaking population had to fight for the preservation of their leadership status against no less patriotic or racist Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Serbo-Croats, Italians, and others. “In Vienna there lived at the time more Czechs than in Prague, more Jews than in Jerusalem and more Croats than in Zagreb.” 34

The new ideas of Theosophy together with the growing self-awareness of the Austrian Pan-Germans explain in part a figure like Guido von List (1848-1919). List was a romantic visionary whose writings glorified a mythic Germanic past. The Ario-Germanic god-man was the highest type humanity had ever produced and would again become “the highest form of life ever to evolve in the universe”. 35 The Ario-Germanics had known an exoteric and an esoteric form of religious practice, the former Wotanist, the latter Armanist. In the far North the line of Armanist initiates had continued to exist uninterruptedly from times immemorial until the present day. This elite, the Armanenschaft, had to be revived and made conscious of its sacred task to create the future race of god-men.

List supported his visions with pseudo-historical narrations, created interest in the remains of the great Ario-Germanic past in the monuments, landscapes and archaeological discoveries of central and northern Europe, wrote volumes about the sacred runes – and doing all that revivified the anti-Roman, anti-Catholic sentiments which had been present in the German conscience from times before Luther. The titles of his books are instructive: German Mythological Landscapes; The Original Language of the Ario-Germanics and the Language of Their Mysteries; The Religion of the Ario-Germanics – Its Esoterics and Exoterics; The Armanenhood of the Ario-Germans; The Secret of the Runes …

List’s influence spread widely; List Societies and secret Armanen loges were founded in many towns in Austria and still more in Germany. No doubt, his books bolstered the Germanic ego by the evocation of a glorious past and a radiant future. And in List many read for the first time about reincarnation and karma. Much that the brutish imposition of the Christian faith had suppressed in the German psyche found resonance and expression in List’s visionary writings, which would become a substantial element in the völkisch, i.e. Germanic racist, movement. “List became virtually the guru of the pan-Germans”, writes Peter Orzechowski. “In a contemporary biography he was lauded as ‘the rediscoverer of age-old Aryan wisdom’. With such publicity there could be little delay before the mythical glorification of Germanhood was also spread, through the members of the List Society, in the empire of William II.” 36

List’s revelations were supported and in a way complemented by the publications of another Austrian, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954). Not only was Lanz acquainted with List, Brigitte Hamann sees Lanz as his “closest disciple and follower”. 37 It was Lanz who coined the term “ariosophy”, applicable to his own and List’s teachings (and showing the influence of theosophy). Ex-monk Lanz was also a learned student of the Bible, for the “true” understanding of which he invented a new key, and he felt a deep longing to realize the ideals of the Knights Templar, or what he supposed those ideals to have been. In later years he would found the “Order of the New Templars”.

He wrote books with titles like Theo-Zoology or the Lore of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods (1905). But his most influential essays appeared in his periodical Ostara, actually a series of brochures on single themes. Some titles of these booklets are: Race and Woman, and Her Preferences for the Male of the Lower Species; The Dangers of Women’s Rights and the Necessity of a Superior Morality Based on the Right of Men; The Sexual and the Love Life of the Blonds and the Dark Skinned; Introduction to Sexual Physics; The Blonds as Creators of Language … As these titles tell us, the obsessions of the former monk were more vicious than List’s. He seems to have been a badly frustrated man. No wonder that one of the reasons for his expulsion from the Cistercian Order was formulated as amori carnati captus, meaning that he was taken by carnal love, apparently homosexual.

Lanz’s fundamental revelation was the existence of an unbridgeable gap between the higher, noble, god-like beings, and the lower, monstrous, animal-like beings whom he called Chandalas, apelings or Schrättlinge, i.e. mongrels, monstrosities. The higher beings were “the blond Ario-heroic races of all peoples and nations”. Alas, the women of these exalted beings let themselves be seduced by the mongrels, who delighted in thus contaminating the blood of the noble races. They steadily degraded all that was blond, and consequently noble, pure and creative, into the transmogrified image of themselves, nearer to the animal than to the human being. It was through the women that sin had come into the world, for they were far more prone to bestial lust than men.

The ravings of Lanz did not remain confined within an obscure group or sect. The Ostara was printed in great numbers and widely read. In Lanz’s ideas, as in those of List, resounded the feelings of racial superiority, supported by Darwinism, but also inspired by the longing for the realization of higher ideals that were rife at that time in Germany and Austria. Such feelings were among the driving forces of the multifarious völkisch¹ movement, and they will form an integral part of Nazism.

It should be mentioned here that several authoritative writers give credence to Lanz’s statement that Hitler was a reader of Ostara during his years in Vienna. Lanz himself wrote in 1932: “Hitler is one of our pupils.” 38 He was, just like Sebottendorff, silenced for his impudence. The saddest fact, however, is that so many of Lanz’s ideas were put into practice by Nazism, especially by Himmler’s Black Knights, the SS. Lanz von Liebenfels even found pleasure in imagining that his quasi-human mongrels would be sacrificed as a holocaust, a burnt offering, to the gods. And he wrote: “Amid the jubilation of the god-men we will conquer the whole planet.” 39