Hitler and his God

Schwabing

“The part of Munich called Schwabing is at that time a hotbed of the most different groups. Theosophists, mystics, Gnostics, Taoists, Mazdaists, Buddhists, Neo-Buddhists, Zionists, nihilists, trade-unionists, Bolsheviks and pacifists: all are searching for an explanation of the historical occurrences and looking for disciples”, writes Peter Orzechowski, who omits a few – anthroposophists, spiritists, black magicians – as it is impossible to remember them all. 703 Besides, Orzechowski enumerates only philosophical, religious and occult groups, while in Schwabing these were intermingling with writers, poets and artists, among whom were some of the very greatest then alive. This colourful mixture of all expressions and explorations of the human spirit has lead many commentators on that period to stick the label “bohemian” on Schwabing, which is as misleading as calling Dietrich Eckart a comical, half-crazed poet. For sure, the whole fauna of the bohemian scene was present at Schwabing, but the place, like Montmartre and Ascona, was one of the cultural centres of Europe were the future was prepared and the remnants of the past put to the test.

These were “good times for religion, good times for prophets, gurus and saviours who claim being able to bring order in the chaos by simple truths”. 704 Such types were also present in Schwabing, for instance Rudolf Pannwitz, whose book German Teaching was intended as a prophecy and a charter for the religion of a new Europe. He was “a prophet of the Hyperboreans” who filled more than four hundred pages with admonitions, commands and exhortations, all of them beginning with “the Spirit of your God speaks as follows”, and whose new religion would contain the knowledge and love of all past and present religions. And there was Ludwig Derleth, “the Prophet of Schwabing”, who wanted to clean up and reform the Church, and found a new theocracy in which he himself would hold the highest office. He wanted to reactivate a militant and heroic Christianity and to revive the original Christian values in a degraded world. His Christian elite troops, living under the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, would follow the example of the Sufi order of the Assassins, of the Knights Templar and of the Jesuits, and wage a holy war against the mob, the democratic ways of the modern world, the nation state, the market economy, and a Christian Church which had torn itself from its roots. Conquest of Europe, subjugation of the world and the foundation of a global dictatorship would be the ultimate objectives of Derleth’s legions. 705

And there was also “The Cosmic Circle”, often called “the Cosmics” or “the Enormous”, a small but qualitatively significant group. The Cosmics, according to David Clay Large, wanted to rejuvenate a calcified and too much intellectually shaped modern world through a renaissance of paganism. Their common points, however much they may have differed on others, were again the rejection of industrial modernity, liberal rationalism, parliamentarian democracy and orthodox Christianity. They had an inclination toward mysticism and occultism. They wanted to gain access to higher states of consciousness by penetrating into the hidden, dark parts of the human personality, following as their guides Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Johann Bachofen. Those who mastered such perilous paths would become a new kind of supermen. The efforts of the Cosmics, writes Large, showed “a fascinating mixture of unconditional absolutism, hunger for great solutions, hero worship and readiness for sacrifice in the name of a fundamental purification and salvation”. When Thomas Mann looked back half a century later on his brief contact with them, he located the roots of the German catastrophe in these milieus of an all-absorbing feeling of superiority. 706

Spiritist séances were common practice in Schwabing. When studying that period through some of its representatives “it is possible to sense that very special climate”, namely “a vivid religious interest but very critical towards the teaching of the established Churches, and seeking for an alternative transcendence of mystical and occult inspiration”, writes Hildegard Châtellier. In her study of the Munich poet Hanns von Gumppenberg, who wrote a play called The Spiritists as early as 1885, and who faithfully noted down the instructions of his spirit guide Geben, she finds once more the awareness of a new turn to take, together with the will to overcome the pure rationalism inherited from the Enlightenment and to go beyond the traditional religious forms. What counts is the unity of all that exists. “God is pure spirit; but as matter exists, his creation demands the perfection of God.” The unity of all existence implies also “a continuity between all forms of life; the world, in this manner, represents a hierarchical system consisting of many tiers, and there is an uninterrupted concatenation of the spirits, the human beings, the animals, the plants, and matter. Life does not end with death, for after death the soul continues its evolution in a succession of supra-terrestrial worlds. The earth and humanity are part of the cosmic whole.” 707

The dictations Gumppenberg received from his spirit mentor seem almost classical in their genre. The spiritist séances in the Cosmic Circle were much more violent, bordering on the demoniac and sometimes overstepping these borders. This does not mean that the Cosmics were crazy nitwits. Karl Wolfskehl was a renowned professor of German literature at Munich and Heidelberg (where Joseph Goebbels was one of his admirers); Alfred Schuler was a propagator of Nietzschean ideas, flavoured according to his own recipe, and an habitué at the Bruckmann salon, frequented by Rilke and other celebrities (and soon by Adolf Hitler); and Ludwig Klages would write The Mind as the Opponent of the Soul, a book of lasting interest (and he would join the Nazis). And for a while, during his stay in Munich, there was Stefan George, whose contact with the Cosmics nearly proved fatal.

Schuler, involved in black magic, was always in search of spiritist mediums who, he imagined, would effect a new breakthrough of the cosmic powers which had been repressed by patriarchal, mammonist and rationalist forces. To this end, he tried to force into collaboration the soul of Stefan George, then already reputed as a poet, during a “Roman” feast in which all the participants would dress up and endeavour to act like Romans. The feast took place in Schuler’s house and soon turned into a spiritist séance, during which George grew more and more excited and showed all signs of becoming possessed. He would confess afterwards that he had been suffering for a long time from the consequences of “the poisoned magic of that nightly session”. George managed to distance himself from the Cosmics and founded his own group, “The George Circle”.