Hitler and his God

In Defiance of Reason

The rejection of reason as the guiding light of man, of the revolutionary changes the Enlightenment had brought about, and of the new world and the civilization it attempted to realize, are characteristic of all trends within the völkisch movement. The völkisch experience derived in a straight line from the great romanticist period which had declared that reason was an usurper of the authentic life experience, and that tradition, the racial roots and the soul of the Volk were the true sustenance on which that Volk should thrive. Sünner describes the general mood as follows: “The people felt civilization as something cold and dark … One heard of fatigue, coldness, decadence and darkness, of aversion for a rational world in which the traditional religion neither had any stamina left for new spiritual impulses.” 520

Again there are some passages in Spengler’s Decline of the West worth mentioning if only because of the resonance this book had in Germany, also on people who were not markedly völkisch or Nazis. (The Nazis tried to win over Spengler to their cause, for at first he had greeted their rise with enthusiasm; when he openly professed his growing disillusion, he was allowed to withdraw in silence till his death, in 1936.) “The French Revolution”, wrote Spengler, “is no more than a result of rationalism. The Western races carry the dynastic sense in their blood, which is the reason why they loathe the mind. For a dynasty represents history, she is the incarnated history of a country, while mind is located outside time and is a-historical … The common rights of men, freedom and equality are literature and abstraction, not facts.”

We remember Spengler’s hymnal praise of the peasant and his abomination of the city, “made of stone and making everything into stone”. The city is the sure sign that mind has triumphed over life, that culture has been converted into civilization and that the end of civilization is near. “In stead of a world: a city, a spot, in which all life of large countries concentrates while the rest withers. In stead of a healthy Volk, grown one with the soil: a new nomad, a parasite, the inhabitant of the city, pragmatic man, without tradition, drifting in a formless, fluctuating mass, without religion, brainy, impotent, with a deep-seated repulsion against the peasantry – which means a decisive step towards the inorganic, towards the End.” 521 Hitler too will rail against the city, but only occasionally, for instance when in Mein Kampf he tried to get the proletariat on his hand, “those decent working people … who could not and did not grasp the downright infamy of the doctrine taught by the socialist agitators”. 522 It were of course the cities and towns who formed the basis of his movement – Munich, the “capital of the movement”, Dinter’s Weimar, Streicher’s Nuremberg, Winifred Wagner’s Bayreuth, Goebbels’ Berlin – and on the streets of which the Nazis did battle with the Reds, those “decent, misguided working people”.

Klaus von See relates the saying of a classical Roman author that the Germanic tribes, at home in the woods, evaded the towns “as if they were tombs wrapped in nets”, and that they considered the walls of a town as “ramparts of servitude”. The aversion to the town and everything it stood for must have been a deep-seated trait of the German psyche to have remained so pronounced at the time Germany was the foremost industrial nation in the world and worked hard to make everybody else recognize this. It is a curious paradox that, while battleships and Zeppelins were being built, the German dreamt of a life-giving traditional “culture” in opposition to the detestable life-taking modern “civilization”; that while the Berlin-Baghdad Railway was being constructed he suffered from Kulturpessimismus; that, while the whole world was using his precision instruments, paints and chemicals, he felt himself “uncomfortable with civilization”. Here surely a psychological anomaly was festering which before long could reach a critical state, for the Germans did not see the split in their national personality as a threat to their country’s health but as a source of strength.

“[Germany’s] neurotic relationship with the modern world narrowed its view and made it primitive; it was always the German fields, the German forest or glistening snow-capped peaks that were played off against the urban scene, the philistine existence of peasants was played off against metropolitan civilization, the cult of Wotan against the conveyor belt, the ways of the Northmen against present-day social structures. It was with a false inwardness that it meditated upon essentials behind shuttered windows: the plough, the sword, and then in the evening happiness under the linden tree.” 523

That Joachim Fest, who wrote this, was not exaggerating one jot may be shown by a paragraph from the German author Ernst Wiechert, written in 1949 (four years after World War II): “It has appeared to seers and interpreters of the present time and history that Western man of the last two hundred years has been committing the most disastrous sin of them all: the sin of the intellect. The intellect has left behind the grace of the Middle Ages and the ancient times in order to be like God. It has left the magical soil in which rest the primitive ones … It has enthroned the ratio which lives in the conscious mind and only in the conscious mind, and for which the unconscious is a stupidity and a source of irritation. As to me, however, I am certain that they, the “unconscious” ones, will remain as the last ones, when the purple mantle of the “clear-minded”, those who “know”, will slide from their shoulders as a worn-out piece of cloth. Those who shall remain will be the seers, the true artists, the true believers, and the children. They are the ones who will bring their works to the surface from the dark depths of the soil where no intelligence can reach, no mathematical or chemical formula, no philosophical theory, no human questioning”. 524

This mentality, the essence of the völkisch movement, is strongly denounced by Joachim Fest: “National Socialism laid bare phenomena of which the movement itself was in turn only a symptom: the most consistent expression in the field of political power groupings of a multiplicity of pseudo-religious longings, a need for fundamental certainty, intellectual discontent, and impulses to escape from practical intellectual activity into the more hospitable semi-darkness of substitute metaphysical realms. These motivations in turn were permeated by the longing of the intellectual, isolated in the world of his letters, for solidarity with the masses, for a share in their unthinking vitality and closeness to nature, but also in their force and historical effectiveness as expressed in the myth of the national community. Fundamentally National Socialism represented a politically organized contempt for the mind …

“Its hostility to reason was intellectual, just as it was essentially a movement of failed intellectuals who had lost their faith in reason. It was intellectuals above all who made possible that intellectual façade without which, in a scientific age, it is impossible to win over the petty-bourgeois masses: even the denial of reason must be represented in intellectual terms …

“Such corrupting cultural and ethical criteria were the outcome of a long process reaching back far into the nineteenth century, in the course of which the mind turned away from itself in the name of a philosophy of life, of the will to power, of rough dynamic vitality, and continually renounced the European rationalist tradition. Generations of philosophers, historians, sociologists and psychologists had a hand in bringing the ‘mind as the adversary of the soul’ [this is the title of an influential book by Ludwig Klages] into disrepute and replacing it by intuition, blood, instinct, to which it gave a status that inevitably raised stupidity to the level of an authority and produced a moral indigence, a ‘defeatism of humanity’ such as had never been seen before …

“This vehement anti-enlightenment, fed by romantic impulses, was a phenomenon common to the whole of Europe; names like Carlyle, Sorel and Bergson underline this and at the same time indicate some of the main lines along which this reversal in the history of ideas moved. But nowhere did this critique of reason so fully expand into a ‘destruction of reason’, nowhere was it carried out with such a vengeful thoroughness as in Germany.” 525 These insights were formulated in 1963 and they retain their validity.

Let us now listen to what Hitler himself had to say to Rauschning on the subject. “We stand at the end of the era of the intellect.” “The mind, glorifying itself, has become an illusion of life. Our [National Socialist] revolution is not only political and social: we stand before an enormous change in the moral concepts and the intellectual orientation of the people. It is only now, with our movement, that the middle period, the Middle Ages, are brought to a conclusion. We put an end to a wrong path taken by humanity. The tables of Mount Sinai have lost their validity … A new era of a magical interpretation of the world is commencing, an interpretation by the will, not by knowledge.

“It is only in an upsurge of feeling and in action that one comes into contact with the true being of the world. I don’t like Goethe, but I am inclined to overlook a lot of him for one thing he has said: ‘In the beginning was the deed’. Only the man of action becomes conscious of the true being of the world. Man abuses his intellect. It is not the seat of a special human dignity: it is no more than an expedient in the struggle for life. Man is there to do things. It is only as a being in action that he fulfils his national destiny. Contemplative natures, retrospective like all religious people, are dead beings who miss out on the meaning of life. Precisely the Germans, who have spent so much time floating in thoughts and dreams, had to rediscover the truth that only action and unending movement can give meaning to life.” 526