Hitler and his God

Gobineau and Vacher de Lapouge

At the beginning of every history of modern racism, in Germany as in the whole of Europe, one finds the name of the French aristocrat Joseph de Gobineau (1816-82). Some even call him “the father of racial theory”. His fame is based chiefly on his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, (essay on the inequality of the human races) published in four volumes in the years 1853-55. This major work met with little success for several decades. “Not until 1894 [i.e. after Gobineau’s death] was there a concerted attempt to introduce Gobineau’s ideas into Germany”, writes George Mosse. “In that year, Ludwig Schemann founded the Gobineau Society to honour his name and revive his theories both in Germany and France. The French branch received little support and never really flourished. It was not really popular in Germany either, but there it received the wholehearted support of the Richard Wagner circle, of which Schemann was a member. In addition, Schemann, active on the board of the Pan-Germans, was able to obtain the support of this significant conservative group for the cause of racial theory. In the end, his assertion proved correct: ‘Only Germany can be the receptacle for Gobineau and his ideas’.” 430

The sequence of events as sketched here by Mosse has to be somewhat adjusted. According to Cosima Wagner, Gobineau, a very cultured and widely-travelled man, had obtained access into the circle around her husband, Richard Wagner, and had found compensation in the composer’s “enthusiastic response” for the general neglect of his racial theory. “It was thanks to Wagner that the Frenchman became the inspirational source of the future pure Aryan state. But it was soon forgotten that behind Gobineau’s popularity, as well as behind the popularity of Chamberlain, stood the Master of Bayreuth.” 431 According to Joachim Köhler, Schemann’s Gobineau Society was started with the blessings of Cosima, one of whose friends was Heinrich Class, chairman of the Pan-German League, of which Schemann was a member. So we meet once more, at the end of several converging lines, the Bayreuth Circle, which seems actually to have been a most active secret society for the promotion of nationalism and racism, and the well-heeled, influential, omnipresent Pan-Germans, who in their turn supported the Germanenorden. These were the three power centres without whose support nothing much of importance could happen on the nationalist-racist scene in Germany. They directed the events – visible like the Kapp-Putsch and invisible like many underhand dealings and “physical eliminations” – which led straight to Adolf Hitler, whom they thought would execute their designs and be the puppet dancing on their strings.

What did they find that was so special in Gobineau, whose name today hardly rings a bell? He was the first to explain that race was the determining factor in the evolution and composition of mankind; he taught that the mixing of pure with impure blood was the cause of race deterioration; and his reasonings pointed back to the existence of an original master race with uncontaminated blood. What suited the völkisch-minded Germans of the aforementioned societies also was that Gobineau was a through and through reactionary and anti-modernist. He was, moreover, a highly cultured writer who could muster a wealth of arguments and historical facts to confer an appearance of veracity to his theses. And his theories preceded those of Darwin, for the four volumes of his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races were written before the publication of The Origin of Species.

Yet, “Gobineau was not a biologist but a literary man of the nineteenth century, and his work [the Essay] contains not exactly what its title announces.” 432 He was “a diplomat of inferior rank who wrote novels and essays” and who acquired a permanent place in French literature with works like The Pleiades, Tales of Asia, History of the Persians and The Renaissance. “His Essay has in common with Darwin’s Origin that it is much more often mentioned than actually read … Gobineau’s racism really has not much to do with the biological notion of race. His inspiration is not so much taxonomy as a certain social order, and even an order of the world modelled on the principle of the Indian castes. This racism should therefore be seen in the context of the Aryan myth, which also relates to India.” 433 The white race, with its highly developed civilization, is evidently superior to the others; it is even the only truly civilized race. The black race is hardly capable of becoming civilized, and the yellow race has a place somewhere in between.

The nobleman Gobineau was a devout Catholic, shocked by the turn things were taking because of the French Revolution, the titanic actions of Napoleon and the industrial revolution. He, like so many others still deeply rooted in the ancient régime, felt like a fish out of water in a century which ideals had become secular and centred on the well-being and progress of humanity. Therefore Gobineau was a pessimist through and through, and, like the Catholic Church at the time, “terribly reactionary and retrograde”.

Taking all this into account, Gobineau could never agree with Darwin. As a Catholic he had to stick to the biblical story of the creation of man and could not try to provide a scientific explanation. He had no justification for the existence of a superior race, or races, for if all human beings originated from Adam and Eve, and some of them were of pure blood, then where might the others come from, the unpure contaminators?

There was no doubt in the minds of Gobineau and many of his disoriented contemporaries that the world was sliding towards its doom. It should be kept in mind what a traumatic series of events the French Revolution had been for the ancien régime, in the first place for the nobility and the clergy, and how firmly they were still anchored in the religious, social and cultural structures of the Middle Ages. The new rationalist philosophers no longer had faith in the Word of God and some of them put it outright into question or even ridiculed it. A world based on such principles of theistic, atheistic or materialistic modernism could only lead to perdition. To take an anti-modernist stance was a matter of life and death for the likes of Gobineau. And deeply felt convictions of the kind he and many others nurtured always find the intellectual, philosophical and “scientific” arguments with which to attire their essential nudity.

That humanity will “devolve” into a uniform miscellany of animal-like imbeciles and finally die out was, according to Gobineau, certain. What then about the German Herrenmenschen and the future glories of the Third Reich – the aspirations of a country in which a French count was honoured as a pioneer of racist thought? Honoured perhaps, but probably little studied. People’s movements thrive on slogans, and the thinking with which political parties justify their programmes and actions consists of little more than some elementary ideas, formulated in a few thoughts knitted together and not seldom contradictory. Although man is a rational being, thinking for himself is felt to be a burden, and it is astonishing to what extent even people who are trained, professional thinkers parrot the thoughts of others. The general trend of Gobineau’s world-view was diametrically opposite to the world-view of the Nazis, but they would nevertheless refer to him appreciatively in their racist writings.

Hitler was a “practical thinker”, in the sense that he picked out what fitted into his peculiar mental framework and memorized it, with the purpose of having those thoughts at his disposal when he needed them. He did this quite systematically and defended his way of acquiring this kind of knowledge in Mein Kampf. That he had heard of Gobineau is undeniable when one reads the following passage in Mein Kampf: “When men have lost their natural instincts and ignore the obligations imposed on them by nature, then there is no hope that nature will correct the loss that has been caused, until recognition of the lost instincts has been restored. Then the task of bringing back what has been lost will have to be accomplished. But there is serious danger that those who have once become blind in this respects will continue more and more to break down racial barriers and finally lose the last remnant of what is best in them. What then remains is nothing but a uniform mishmash, which seems to be the dream of our fine Utopians. [Here Hitler has a go at the democrats and socialists.] But that mishmash would soon banish all ideals from the world. Certainly a great herd could thus be formed. One can breed a herd of animals; but from a mixture of this kind men such as have created and founded civilizations would not be produced. The mission of humanity might then be considered at an end.” 434

The most dangerous contamination in Hitler’s eyes was, of course, the Jew. (“He poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated.”) In the following paragraph of Mein Kampf, one of the most often quoted, one again hears an unmistakable echo from Gobineau: “If with the help of his Marxist faith the Jew is victorious against the peoples of this world, then his crown will be a dance of death of humanity and this planet, empty of human beings, will again wander through space for millions of years. Eternal Nature avenges inexorably the trespassing of her laws. This is why I believe that today I act in conformity with the intention of the almighty Creator: in acting against the Jews I fight for the work of the Lord.” 435

A name often read in connection with Gobineau’s is that of Vacher de Lapouge. Strange to say, Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936) too was a Frenchman, a count, and not a qualified scientist. Mosse writes that “he was widely admired in Germany”, which is true. According to Bronder he was a “professor at the University of Montpellier”, which is not true: he was assistant-librarian at the university of Montpellier and in later years librarian at Rennes and Poitiers. He had actually studied law, but never practised either as a barrister or as a magistrate. He preferred to read books, acquired an enormous erudition and a steadily growing fame as “free lecturer”, and became the author of essays like The Social Selections (1896), The Fundamental Law of Anthroposociology (1897) and The Aryan – His special role (1899).

Like Haeckel and Gobineau, Vacher de Lapouge was convinced that race was the determining factor in the development of humanity and the relations between the human groupings. He too conceived a hierarchy of the human races and, of course, put the Aryans on top. We know now that all this racial “science” was actually the result of a very time-embedded and “Eurocentric” vision of the global relations in an era of colonialism. Yet Vacher de Lapouge surprises us by elevating not the Germans but the Anglo-Saxons on top of the human ladder as “the most Aryan people in the world”: “The British Isles are almost the only place to show us the physical type and the quite robust character of the first inhabitants of Europe.” Pichot writes: “In those days, the Aryan theories tended as much, if not more, towards the Anglo-Saxon mania as towards the German barbarians.” And he quotes Vacher de Lapouge: “The superiority of the Yankee [of Aryan stock], the Englishman, the Dutchman and the Scandiavian over the Frenchman, the Italian, the Spaniard and the South American is not only the consequence of the superiority of the race but also of the blood.” 436

“The great future of the British Isles is the result of the fortunate fact that brachycephalics have never set foot there”, reveals Vacher. For it was he who drew the attention of the racial scientists to the distinction between people with a narrow, longish skull, the dolichocephalics, and people with a round skull, the brachycephalics – another of those zany racial specifications which have led to piles of learned nonsense and much injustice and suffering in the racists’ victims. “The main characteristic of the thought [of Vacher de Lapouge] is an obsession with the shape of the skull: he studied the dolichocephalic or brachycephalic character of all imaginable populations and in every possible manner. One of the most comical examples was the relation between the shape of the skull and the use of the bicycle, evaluated according to the taxes paid by the various populations.” Vacher’s conclusion was that longish skulls showed more interest for the new invention which the bicycle was at the time, and that round skulls remained immune to it, as well as to all other forms of progress. “Vacher de Lapouge is an extremely heterogeneous author, now lucid and prophetic, then again completely ridiculous. The least mistaken evaluation of him is that his works provide a fairly successful caricature of the socio-biological ideas of his time”, concludes Pichot.

What Vacher also shared with Gobineau was “an absolute pessimism”, for he was convinced that “the final catastrophe” and “the annihilation of the species” were unavoidable. He wrote: “An analysis of the social selections leads ultimately to absolutely pessimistic conclusions. The future does not belong to the fittest, but in the best case to the mediocre. The benefits of the natural selection change, as civilization develops, into scourges setting upon humanity … Civilization shifts ceaselessly. It has now reached the west and north-west of Europe, and we feel at present that the life of Europe is coming to a standstill and that the days of our world are numbered. [Oswald Spengler was already conceiving his Decline of the West.] There is no race which can withstand the inevitable decay … This is the last stage. It will last as long as the active elements of the race will last, and it will end when only the passive elements remain, however blond and dolichocephalic they may be. Humanity is in ferment. It has reached the threshold of a long period of convulsions beyond which the beginning of the decline can be perceived. The sum of knowledge and material means will increase into an ever greater accumulation, but man will stop growing in valour, and the shining future dreamed by utopians for generations yet to come will be lived only by mediocrities, fathers of still lesser mediocrities.” 437