Hitler and his God

Romanticism (1770-1840)

The three trends we distinguished in the Renaissance continued to dominate the cultural and intellectual life in Europe – and do so even today, quite simply because they are elementary aspects of the human make-up. This consists of an emotional, a mental and a spiritual part, in whatever way they are mixed and expressed. To these three elements should be added the material domain of the human personality, which is its basis on this Earth, and which in most cases remains its principal interest. Intellect and emotion went on affirming themselves in the centuries following the Renaissance, more often in discordance than in harmony. (In Europe the magical, occult, semi-spiritual side of existence would remain in the background, although it was always present behind the other two elements of the triad.) Bearing this in mind, it is no simplification to state that the Romantic movement throughout Europe was a reaction against the preponderant role Reason played in “the Age of Reason”, as the century of the Enlightenment was called (in German Aufklärung, in French les Lumières).

German Romanticism presented the world with some of the greatest novelists, poets, philosophers and musicians: the literary men Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Heine, Hölderlin; the philosophers Fichte, Schlegel, Hegel, all of them having to define themselves against Kant, paragon of the Aufklärung; and musicians of the stature of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, who even today delight so many hearts with an art incomparably refined, profound and sublime.

The Age of Reason, especially in its French representatives, the philosophes Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, d’Holbach, de la Mettrie, and others, dominated the European scene, making French the common language of the nobility, the intellectuals and the international relations between countries. It was the time that Voltaire stayed at the court of the Prussian King Frederick II, and Diderot held long conversations with Catherine II of Russia, emphasizing his words with forceful taps on her thigh. But Reason was a newcomer on this scene, in the sense that previously, in the Middle Ages, it had been no more than “the handmaid of faith”, whereas now it showed pretences to the throne of absolute ruler. True, Reason, after its long sleep since the heydays of classical Greece and Rome, had to regain its freedom to make the human personality, stunted without it, complete. But such fundamental changes or reorientations in the human condition do not come about easily; like all important changes in history they provoke resistance and often passionate enmity. The existential and ideological growth of humanity was mostly fought out on the battlefield (and so was its spiritual growth).

The role of the emotions or life-forces in humanity can be followed, in their dialectical battle with reason, from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance into the Romantic period. The importance of all this for our story is that this development leads directly to the völkisch movement, Fascism in general and Nazism in particular. Passions clashed with the effort to render humanity reasonable; nature was extolled against the modern city, farming and the corporate system against industrialisation, the traditional past against change and progress. The Volk, embodiment of a living soul, was put against the individual and individualization – and if the individual genius was so highly considered by the Romantics, it was because he or she was the channel through which the soul of the Volk could communicate with God, or with the World Soul, or with the universal Spirit. The greatest genius was to be the Leader of the Volk, the Great One sent to do great deeds. Such were some of the themes which later also dominated the mind of the many thousands involved in völkisch, nationalist and pan-German organizations.

The great hero of the romantic period was Napoléon Bonaparte, much admired and not less hated, riding through Europe at the head of his armies and implementing the ideals of the French Revolution, which were the ideals of the Enlightenment. “Napoleon burst upon the Germans like a hurricane. He dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, replacing hundreds of separate sovereignties with thirty-eight; outraging clergy, he abolished ecclesiastical states, church courts, tithes, monasteries, and convents and seized church property. Nobles fumed as he abolished their feudal states, feudal dues, and tax exemptions, broke up large estates, and cut their power over their peasants. Decreeing equality before the law, Napoleon opened public office to the middle class, guaranteed private property, established modern economic laws and institutions, and built public works, roads, canals, and bridges. He created secular public schools to spread the ideals of the revolution. Most shocking of all, he not only destroyed the ghettos, he gave Jews freedom of worship and the right to own land and practice trades.” 385

All this happened at the time of dominance of the French culture and its vehicle, the French language. The political and cultural reaction against this “Welsh” imperialism grew vehement and became an important step in the evolution of the German self-consciousness. “The German wave of liberation against the French conqueror and ruler by force, Napoleon I, definitively awakened the national awareness in the German people. It awakened such a plenitude of national enthusiasm, force and longing … that whole future generations would be nurtured by its inheritance.” 386

It is rather puzzling that some of the foremost mouthpieces of this heightened German national awareness were the philosophers, discoursing from their influential positions at the universities. Puzzling this is because as a whole they formed the school of “German Idealism”, which attained some of the most elevated and abstract thinking in the history of philosophy, and is therefore often compared with the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle period in classical Athens. Nonetheless, figures of the format of Fichte, Schlegel and Hegel were so much embedded in the German awakening that, in one way or another, they managed to regard their idea of Germany as the culmination of world history and world culture. “With the significant exception of Slavs and Jews, Fichte [1762-1814] believed all Europeans to be related by blood. But the Germans were the only people who retained their ancient spirit undistorted by foreign influences. While the French adopted a Latin language, Germans kept their original tongue, retaining the spiritual qualities as ‘the original race’. Still close to the ways of their tribal warrior-ancestors, they were free of Latin, French and Jewish individualism, obsession with property, and the crass pursuit of material well-being. We alone, Fichte said, still feel as did the ancient Germanic tribes: duties and rights are derived from subordination to the common will. Only Germans are fit for the new era of social cooperation and collective moral idealism.” 387 This anti-individualistic thinking will lead directly to the bonding of the völkisch youth organizations and the Nazi slogan Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles: you are nothing, your people is everything.

But Fichte went still further when in his Addresses to the German Nation (1807-08) he proclaimed: “It is you Germans who, of all peoples, possess most clearly the germ of human perfectibility, and to whom belongs the leadership in the development of mankind … There is no alternative: if you sink, then mankind sinks with you, without any hope of resurrection.” 388 “Fichte and other Romantics radicalized the Christian apocalyptic”, writes Michael Ley, “the salvation of humanity is no longer the task of God but of Man, in whom God incarnates himself. The new bringers of salvation and redeemers of the world are the Germans … The Germans will build a worldwide empire of the spirit … The Jews incorporate the Antichrist, who must be subjugated … To protect oneself from the Jews Fichte proposes either to cut their heads off or to send them into the Promised Land.” 389

According to Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) the sense of history consists in the working out of the Idea of the Spirit, unfolding itself in phases. For there is a World Spirit which incarnates itself in world history, thereby aiming at a cosmic salvation. The dominant people in the ongoing phase of world history were, taught Hegel, the Germans. “The other peoples have no rights against the absolute right of the Germans to be the carriers of the present phase of the development of the World Spirit”, and the other peoples “do not count any longer in world history”. To the Germans fell the mission once entrusted by God to the Jews. On the shoulders of the Germans rested therefore the salvation of the world. And (once again) the freedom of the individual lay in the voluntary submission to the State, which was to be revered as something divine in an earthly form. Such a kind of thinking, comments Ley, “means factually the incorporation of the individuals in the state and encourages any kind of totalitarianism”. 390

These are a few examples of a school of thought which has deeply influenced German thinking by positing the superiority of the German people and its mission for the salvation of humankind, the insignificance of the individual and the all-importance of the State. These ideas can be found, sometimes verbatim, in the völkisch publications, in those of the Pan-Germans and in the literature of the Nazis. In fact, several anthologies of sayings by the romantic and idealist thinkers were published in the later part of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Some such anthologies, for instance Treitschke’s Handbuch des Judentums, sold in enormous numbers and were reprinted till the end of the Third Reich.

What the nationalist literature did not promulgate were the visionary predictions of a Romantic like Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who was a Jew. “Christianity – and this is its nicest merit – has somewhat softened the crude German fighting spirit but could not eradicate it, and when the taming Talisman, the Cross, falls to pieces, then the savagery of the old fighters will erupt again, the senseless rage of the berserker, of which the Nordic poets sang and spoke so much. That talisman is now corroded and the day will come when it will collapse. Then old stony gods will arise and rub the dust of millennia from their eyes, and Thor with his gigantic hammer will jump up at last and smash the gothic cathedrals …

“And when the time comes when you hear the cracking of a thunder as it has never cracked before in the history of the world, know: the German thunder has finally struck its aim. At this terrible noise the eagles will drop from the sky and the lions in the farthest deserts of Africa will draw their tails between their legs and crawl into their royal dens. A play will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French revolution was but an innocent idyll. And that time shall come.” 391