Hitler and his God

Renaissance and Reformation

Whereas the so-called Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine thought and wrote in the tradition of the medieval eccentrics, the Renaissance scholars formed a network all over Europe, sharing their erudition, discoveries and enthusiasm for “the new learning”. They were, in a way, the first Europeans. But such were those turbulent times that the universality of their learning found itself obliged in each case to chose sides, religiously or politically, and that some paid with their lives for the refusal to bow to any particularism. It was still a time of dungeons, gallows and pyres. The Christian age which we call the Middle Ages was coming to an end; the age that followed, sub-divided by the historians in various periods, is not over yet. The Renaissance rediscovered the courage and art of thinking for oneself in the way the ancient Greeks and Romans had done, but this was a very suspect exercise in the eyes of the powers-that-be. They did not like questions because they did not like being put into question.

The movement called “Renaissance” was much more complex than commonly realized. Nowadays it is superficially associated with the art of geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, and with humanist scholars like Erasmus of Rotterdam. The art of the Renaissance was of course a most important aspect of the new way of looking at the world. A certain form of art always crowns a great cultural period. Yet it is little known that another current in the movement was the rediscovery of hermetism and magic, as shown in Frances Yates’ essay Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and some of her other publications. She writes: “It cannot, I think, be sufficiently emphasized that these two Renaissance experiences [the intellectual and the magical] are of an entirely different order, using different sources in a different way, and making their appeal to different sides of the human mind.” 376 Marcello Ficino, who translated Plato, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola were not only erudite classicists, they were also magicians, as was Giordano Bruno, who was burned for it at the stake in the year 1600. On the contrary, Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More and John Colet, among many others, were literary humanists. Pico made the difference clear when he wrote to a friend: “We have lived illustrious and to posterity shall live, not in the school of the grammarians and teaching places of young minds, but in the company of the philosophers, conclaves of the sages, where the questions of debate are not concerning the mother of Andromache or the sons of Niobe and such light trifles, but of things human and divine.” 377 However, magic and occultism, although wellsprings of modern thinking and science, would remain an undercurrent in European culture and never reach the maturity they once obtained in Egypt and India. The intellectuals, “the grammarians”, would win the day and develop the “natural philosophy” we call science.

There was also a third component in the Renaissance movement, the “emotional”. In Thucydides, Demosthenes and Pericles, as in Caesar, Cicero and Tacitus, the Renaissance men rediscovered the pride and glory of belonging, of patriotism, of “the general weal”, of the heartening inspiration of tradition and the past of the body of which every citizen was a part, which was a greater ego to him and for which he was required to give his life in times of peril. The medieval society had been a caste-hierarchy in which a person had his fixed place and only a handful at the top did the thinking and made the decisions. Now the Renaissance and Reformation, examining the ways of antiquity, rediscovered the value of the individual and his faculty of thinking for himself. It would not take long before a monk at Wittenberg claimed the right for himself and for all individuals to think freely, even if he had to stand up against the highest authority. And together with the need of self-examination arose the need of a definition of the general body to which the self belonged: patriotism became part of the consciousness.

The complete edition of Tacitus’ Germania was published in 1510. “A codex containing Tacitus’ Germania had survived the Middle Ages in a monastery at Herzfeld and had been taken to Italy in the fifteenth century. The effect of the discovery of this manuscript on the image the Germans would form of themselves can hardly be overestimated, for the way in which the humanists interpreted Tacitus remained a steady reference even in the twentieth century.” 378 Germania was written in 98 CE. In this book Tacitus (c.56-c.120) composed a few sentences which would remain the pride of the Germans forever, the source of their patriotic imaginings, and the cause of much detriment. “The Germans themselves, I am inclined to think”, wrote Tacitus, “are natives of the soil and extremely little affected by immigration or friendly intercourse with other peoples … For myself I accept the view that the peoples of Germany have never been tainted by intermarriage with other peoples, and stand out as a nation peculiar, pure and unique in its kind. Hence the physical type, if one may generalize at all about so vast a population, is everywhere the same – wild, blue eyes, reddish hair and huge frames that excel only in violent effort.” 379 This text would become the principal document to justify the German claim to racial purity and superiority. Neither the obvious distance in time and space from which Tacitus wrote nor the conjectural phrasing of the sentences would deter even some of the best German brains from accepting Tacitus’ statement as the word of God. “Each one of the German humanists developed the theme of German greatness in his own way, and they were vying among themselves as to the variety and originality of their arguments.” 380

As we saw, Tacitus wrote that the Germans had caeruli oculi, rutilae comae, blue eyes, reddish hair, and that they had “huge frames”. These characteristics, together with a dolichocephalic skull, would become, especially from the last decennia of the nineteenth century onwards, the famous standard image of the racially pure German, “the Blonde Bestie” and the ideal SS-man. How misleading Tacitus assertion in this matter was, as in others which were not of his own experience, was discovered not so long ago. Caeruli oculi, rutilae comae, scholars found out, was a “topos” used by classical authors to impress their readers with the curiousness of the barbarian people they were writing about; in other words, it was a historiographers’ cliché. The Greek historian Herodotus applied the same cliché to the Scythes, and Pliny the Roman used identical words to depict the Singhalese in Ceylon! In this way myths are born, perilous myths when they are held to be the truth by armed fanatics.

One of the great German Renaissance men was the adventurous knight Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), patriot, satirist and supporter of Luther’s cause. He made the historical figure of Arminius, the Cheruscian, into “a real cult figure” of German nationalism and Nazism as the German who had stood up to the Romans and dealt them, in the year 9 CE, a deadly blow in the Teutoburg Forest. Arminius, Germanized into “Hermann”, “came from a [tribal] princely family and was educated at the Emperor’s court in Rome”. He was a typical example of the assimilation of their conquered peoples by the Romans. Arminius even became a tribune of the Roman army, a rank equivalent to lieutenant-general, and fought, like many others, against the people from whom he originated, commanding German auxiliaries. He was therefore awarded, as the first German, Roman citizenship and knighted. The reason why he turned against Rome is unclear. He became the head of a conspiracy, led three of Rome’s crack legions under Varus into a trap and annihilated them. This was the heaviest defeat the Roman legions ever suffered and the reason that their conquest halted at the Rhine. 381

The embellished story of Arminius, who was later murdered by his own people, became one of the main features in the German nationalist myth, built up from the Renaissance onwards. It became an argument in the establishment in the North-South divide which would give the Germans the feeling that they were different from the rest of the world, that they, the people in the middle, were surrounded and threatened, and that they had to stand up to the other nations. The humanists were the first to create “the Germany-Rome antithesis” (von See), which reached a climax in Luther. The Germans now felt themselves different from the Roman-Latin-Welsch peoples; Protestants would fight Catholics, Kultur would confront Zivilisation. Eventually the Germans would declare themselves the embodiment of the Spirit, some of them even affirming that they were the sole people with a soul. The Roman-Latin-Welsh, together with the coloured and all other kinds of peoples, were on the contrary “materialists”, not much more than material beings in an animal-like state, Untermenschen, i.e. subhumans, or lower humans, or half-humans, and even non-humans although human in appearance (such as the Jews).

The German stage was set for Martin Luther (1483-1546). “It fell to Luther to amplify considerably the rise of a nationalism which fused with the Reformation and gave to Lutheranism its specifically German hue.” 382 Luther had travelled to Rome and seen there with his own eyes the abominations around the Chair of the “Antichrist”. He had also felt deeply offended by the superior and disdainful attitude of the Southerners towards the backward Germans: “No nation is more despised than the German nation! Italy calls us animals; France and England mock at us; all the others do likewise.” “A certain German paranoia” (Poliakov) was building up and would be finally compensated by the conviction of being a special, superior kind of humans. In psychological language: an inferiority complex was compensated and turned into a complex of superiority.

Luther also made the German mother tongue into an honoured, well-sounding and malleable means of expression. “I thank God for being able to hear and find my God in the German language, for neither you nor me would ever have been able to find him in Latin, Greek or Hebrew.” “German was promoted to the fourth holy language, more admirable than any other and comparable only to the Hebrew spoken before the confusion of Babel, the language of Adam.” 383 Luther was not the only German in those days to think that Adam and Eve conversed in their language.

“What we see converging from German humanism is a clearly defined German romanticism”, writes Paul Joachimsen, who points to the analogy with the Romantic movement around 1810. The concept of a German nation took shape. “This concept, while extending back to the German beginnings in time, led to the elaboration of a certain ideal of the German character.” 384 What in the eyes of others was German backwardness or inferiority, not to say barbarism, was taken up by the Germans and transformed, by means of a romantic interpretation of the past, into a source of pride and self-assertion. Just as Hermann the Cheruscian had defied the Roman colossus, just so was the German Volk, with its unadulterated strength, ready again to take on the racially weakened, feminine, over-civilized Roman-Latin-Welsh peoples, and on any others who dared to challenge it.