Hitler and his God

Dietrich Eckart

Brigitte Hamann, in her highly rated Hitlers Wien (1998), calls Dietrich Eckart the “closest friend and mentor” of Hitler. 107 In this she is not alone. Actually, most students of Hitler’s life say the same and use identical words. A “mentor”, according to the dictionaries, is “a wise and trusted adviser and guide”, “a wise and trusted counsellor or teacher”.

One obtains a somewhat different impression about Eckart from Joachim Fest: “A roughhewn and comical figure, with his thick round head, his partiality for good wine and crude talk, Eckart had missed the great success he hoped for as a poet and a dramatist … In compensation he had thrown himself into that bohemian group which indulged in politics.” 108 And John Toland writes: “Dietrich Eckart – poet, playwright, coffeehouse intellectual – was a tall, bald, burly eccentric who spent much of his time in cafés and beer halls giving equal attention to drink and talk.” 109 The correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung Konrad Heiden, though, who was an eye-witness and an opponent of the rise of the NSDAP in Munich, reports: “… The recognized spiritual leader of the small group [around Hitler] was Eckart, the journalist and poet, twenty-one years older than Hitler … He had a strong influence on the younger man, probably the strongest anyone ever has had on him”. 110

In The Crisis of German Ideology, George Mosse agrees that Dietrich Eckart was “the man who exercised the greatest influence on Adolf Hitler in the immediate postwar years”. In his opinion “this important figure in the völkisch movement played the key role in crystallizing Hitler’s attitudes … The two formed a team in which Hitler was the avid and quickly learning disciple”. And Mosse adds quite rightly: “Thus it is indeed surprising that historians have failed to give Eckart due credit for his contribution to the viability of National Socialism.” 111 François Delpla puts it bluntly: “History has not been interested in Eckart.” 112 In their Hitler biographies Fest (1973) dedicates to Eckart one page, Toland (1976) one and a half paragraph, Steinert (1991) two paragraphs, and Kershaw (1998) also two paragraphs, although he thinks that “Eckart’s role was crucial.

This gaping lacuna in the life of Adolf Hitler and the history of Nazism is still more amazing as there is no lack of documents. Eckart’s considerable literary and journalistic oeuvre could have been studied if sought for; Ernst Nolte, one of the dominant German historians, has drawn attention to the relevance of Eckart’s Zwiegespräch, a so-called dialogue with Hitler, in 1969; and Margarete Plewnia’s biography of Eckart was published in 1970. But the main source indicating Eckart’s historical importance was Adolf Hitler himself. Here the abundance of references is really overwhelming, taking into account that Hitler as a rule blotted out all traces leading towards his pre-public past and in many cases eliminated the persons connected with it. (“A Führer can never admit that what he advocates, he got from others.” 113)

The greatest honour Hitler did to Eckart was highlighting his name as the last two words of Mein Kampf: “Here at the end of this second volume¹ let me again bring those men to the memory of the adherents and champions of our ideals, as heroes who, in the full consciousness of what they were doing, sacrificed their lives for us all … Together with those, and as one of the best of all, I should like to mention the name of a man who devoted his life to reawakening his and our people, through his writing and his ideas, and finally through positive action: Dietrich Eckart.” 114

Hitler bought, with funds provided by an industrialist supporter, the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse in Munich and had it renovated into the local Nazi headquarters by his favourite architect, who was soon to die, Paul Troost. Two busts were installed in what was called the “Senate Hall”: the one of Otto von Bismarck, the other of Dietrich Eckart. In the canteen of that building was a seat permanently reserved for the Führer, under a bust of Eckart.

The person most often mentioned in Hitler’s monologues at his Head Quarters in Rastenburg, on the eastern front, was Dietrich Eckart, some twenty years after his death. One of Hitler’s secretaries has said that tears would well in Hitler’s eyes every time he remembered the man he once called his “fatherly friend”. “Eckart’s merits are imperishable”, he said, and: “It is deeply tragic that Dietrich Eckart has not lived to see the rise [of the Nazi Party].” 115 He reminisced about his discovery, thanks to Eckart, of the Obersalzberg and the house there that would become his villa k, and how one night he had woken Eckart up unannounced, and how Eckart had opened the door in his night-shirt, showing his hairy legs. “Today, we have all come a step further; therefore we do not realize what [Eckart] was at the time: a polar star.”

When the Reichstag building had burned and the Reichstag, the German parliament, met for the first time in the Kroll Opera House, its president Hermann Göring opened the session with a memorial address on Dietrich Eckart. A statue of the poet was inaugurated in his birthplace, Neumarkt, by the Führer himself, as was an open air theatre, named after Eckart, in Berlin. There were Dietrich Eckart Societies and Dietrich Eckart Homes in Dortmund and in many other places. His poems were learned by heart in the schools and university students wrote theses on his oeuvre; his birthday was commemorated in the press; his plays were, sometimes at the instigation of the Führer, revived in many theatres. Eckart was made posthumously into “the symbolic figure of the young [NSDAP] Party”. 116

Dietrich Eckart was born in Neumarkt in 1866 as the son of a royal notary. 117 He studied medicine – and also law for some time, according to Hitler – but he never finished his studies because of illness. Delicate health will remain a factor throughout his life and be the cause of his dependence on pain-killing morphine. In 1899 Eckart went to live in Berlin, where he tried to realize his literary ambitions and led the bohemian life in literary circles and cafés. This and the fact that he was a generous, uncalculating man, at times even a spendthrift, soon finished the money he had inherited after his father’s death and turned his Berlin period into “twelve hungry years”. It was then that he wrote most of his plays, such as Father of a Family, A Fellow who Speculates and King of the Frogs. The plays were put on the stage but met with no more than moderate success. In the meantime he kept himself afloat with journalistic work and by writing literary and political essays – besides his production as a poet, which he essentially was.

However, one of his plays, The Hereditary Count, was attended by Emperor Wilhelm II, who liked it so much that he went to enjoy the next performance. It was at this time that Eckart’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt obtained an unprecedented success and became the most often performed play of the Hofbühne¸ the Court Theatre, of which the emperor was the protector. As a consequence the emperor commissioned Eckart to write a play for the marriage of his daughter with the Duke of Brunswick. The play, Heinrich the Hohenstauffer, had its premiere in 1915.

1915, the second year of the Great War, was also the year that Eckart shifted from Berlin to Munich, where he felt much more at home and where he became involved in political circles and in journalistic skirmishes with leftist newspapers, for during the first war years he had turned into a fervent nationalist and a rabid anti-Semite. The reasons for this portentous change in his mental outlook are not clear. A spiteful reaction to the non-acceptance or the critical failure of some of his plays does not seem a sufficient explanation. Contact with circles like the Thule Society may have been a more adequate reason. Eckart is mentioned as a “guest” of Thule in Before Hitler Came, and many of the new features of Eckart’s thought fit closely with those of the Thule as presented by Sebottendorff in the same book. That both men knew each other is confirmed by Sebottendorff’s words about the publication of Eckart’s magazine In Plain German: “The launching of this magazine was the cause of Eckart’s enmity towards Sebottendorff” (Sebottendorff writes here in the third person), because the latter could or would not provide the former with the necessary finance. 118 The underlying cause of the friction may have been that both strong characters refused to cede part of their turf to each other.

The first issue of In Plain German came out on 7 December 1918, less than a month after the armistice and during the short-lived presidency of Kurt Eisner. Among the first well-wishers of the new magazine, in principle a fortnightly but reflecting Eckart’s character by its irregularity, were, significantly, Wolfgang Kapp and Captain Karl Mayr. Mayr bought clandestinely a great number of copies for distribution among the military. How well-known Eckart actually was is shown by the names of the collaborators to his magazine. They included many prominent nationalist and anti-Semitic writers, and In Plain German was praised by Theodor Fritsch himself, the founder and supreme Grand Master of the Germanenorden. The main themes of the polemical publication were: 1. the spreading of the Dolchstosslegende: Germany had not been defeated but stabbed in the back by the internal enemy, Jewish Bolshevism; 2. the Jews, who in a worldwide conspiracy were striving for world hegemony and were focusing particularly on Germany; 3. democracy, socialism and communism, all Jewish inventions and machinations to bring chaos into the world and destroy the German soul; 4. Germany, which had to become a strong and self-conscious unified nation; therefore the traditional Bavarian tendency towards separatism was to be condemned and the feeling of national unity promoted. 119 All four themes would become pillars of Hitler’s thought. (It was the fourth point which provoked Hitler’s fiery intervention on the occasion of his first contact with the DAP.)

It is difficult to say who determined the political course of the Thule Society – probably to a great extent Sebottendorff himself. Yet it is striking that the goals of the Society intimately agreed with those of an independent personality like Eckart. The exchange of opinions between the dominating Thule members must have been frequent and intense. Eckart also vividly felt the need to reach out to the workers and convert them from socialist internationalists into nationalistic Germans, because the primordial requirement of a unified Volk and nation could not be attained otherwise. He did not see the body of the German Volk as consisting of Volksgenossen (racial compatriots) but of Bürger, a body of “citizens” forming a natural hierarchy, based upon the individual state of psychological perfection, which would constitute the nation of all Germans. To that end Eckart founded a “Citizens’ Association” for the unification of all “workers of the head and the hand”. The association never took off. Still Eckart tried to make himself useful by participating in the Thule resistance against the communist Republic of Councils. The result was that the Reds caught him, and that his name could very well have been on the list of the executed Thule members, had he not managed to talk himself out of a risky and totally unnecessary situation.

It was around this time that Alfred Rosenberg, a German Balt who had emigrated from Russia and arrived in Munich in November 1918, went knocking on Eckart’s door, looking for support and possibly a job. Rosenberg describes Eckart on that occasion: “From behind a desk covered with papers rose a tall man with a shaven head, a deeply furrowed forehead and horn-rimmed spectacles before blue eyes. The slightly curved nose was rather short and fleshy. He had a full mouth and a broad, one might say aggressive chin.” 120 Eckart took Rosenberg under his wing, improved his knowledge of the German language, made him a collaborator of In Plain German, and got in return a fanatical anti-Semite who would be the main advocate of the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, the faked, widespread anti-Semitic pamphlet which has done so much damage.

This brief biographical sketch of Dietrich Eckart would remain incomplete without mentioning another aspect of his personality, the side turned towards the philosophical, the occult and the spiritual. He was, like Hitler, an admirer of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). (Hitler has said that during the war he always carried in his knapsack the five small volumes of the Reclam edition of Schopenhauer’s work.) The thought of this philosopher is one long but well-written lamento on the misery of all existence, supported and ever impelled by Desire, which he names “Will”. Because of his stress on the Life Force and his disparagement of reason, Schopenhauer became an inspirer of the völkisch movement. He was also the philosopher who, as one of the first Westerners, discovered Buddhism and its techniques of world-negation as a means of escape from an absurd, blindly desire-driven world subjected to Maya.

Eckart was, moreover, a devoted admirer of Angelus Silesius (1624-77), of whom he could quote whole passages by heart. Eckart was of the opinion that what counted in life was “to wake up the Divinity in man”, and that nobility was not a matter of birth but of the spirit. In his hierarchical view of humanity he was strongly anti-materialistic, and therefore against the ideals of the Enlightenment, modernity, industrialization and progress. (Plewnia defined him in the title of her book as “a völkisch publicist”.) The more spiritual and the greater the portion of the Divine in man, the higher the degree he will occupy in the human hierarchy. Eckart, like others at that time, conceived of a higher, internalized man, a “superman”, i.e. a chosen being, child of the Light, who would react against all forms of materialism. If the Germans became aware of their superior soul quality, they would become such supermen. They had to fight against the increasing materialism and cultivate their superior Aryan soul. The German people were destined to redeem the world.

As high as the Aryan Germans stood on the hierarchical ladder of humanity, so low stood the Jews. “The Jew has no sense of the experience of what is eternal or of the need of immortality. Ergo: he has no soul, and is therefore the opposite pole of the Germans, who are always striving for something higher. They are as light is to darkness.” 121 The Jews are materialistic, intellectual, world-bound, egoistic, children of darkness; the Aryans (read: Germans) are noble, pure, idealistic, aspiring for the light, selfless world-negators, worthy of ruling the world.

This kind of thinking was common among the German nationalists and volkists, whose sources were Luther, Wagner, Houston Chamberlain and Theodor Fritsch, to name only four of the most influential. Less common was Eckart’s “dualism”, his conviction that idealism and materialism, light and darkness, the Aryan and the Jewish side of the scale, were present in humanity since its beginning and therefore in every individual. In the eternal struggle between good and evil for dominion over the world the Germans constituted the vanguard. This battle must not only be fought in the open, between the opponents in society, but first of all in every individual, for only mastery within himself of the Aryan over the Jew could lead to mastery over the world. The Jews “belong to ‘the organism of humanity’ as certain bacteria do to the human body. … We have to endure the Jews among us as a necessary evil, who knows for how many millennia more.” 122 Hitler will take over Eckart’s ideas to a certain degree and speak about an “anti-Semitism of the reason” in contrast to the impulsive anti-Semitism of the pogroms, but he will found his eschatological world view on a crude racist, Darwinian theoretical basis.

All this makes one see Eckart in a way quite different from the usual manner of depicting him as a Bavarian Stammtisch hero. This he was also, but this aspect of his character would certainly not suffice to explain his influence on Hitler and on the budding Nazist movement. A crude, impulsive and comical beer swiller would not have built up the wide network of prominent people throughout Germany which could be contacted by Eckart. Nor would a cultured man-of-the-world like Ernst Hanfstängl have written: “[Eckart] was a man of education, a poet, whose German version of Peer Gynt remains the standard translation … He it was who had first taken Hitler under his wing in the Party … Eckart has always been one of my favourites, a big bear of a man with sparkling eyes and a genuine sense of humour.” 123

Eckart made the existential choice to try out the realization of world-negation in the world. We will follow him there for a while.