Hitler and his God

The 1880 Watershed

At this point we have to direct our attention once more to the important change in the European cultural landscape which took place around 1880, and which announced the global upheavals of the twentieth century. The importance of those years – called by one German author Zeitbruch 1880, a break or dividing line in the times, something like the great moments of change which Karl Jaspers called Achsenzeiten, axis times – is not yet generally recognized in official history. “A wild pain is felt in this time and the suffering is no longer bearable. The call for a saviour is common and the crucified are everywhere. Is this a great dying that has come into the world? It is possible that we have reached the end, the death of an exhausted humanity, and that these are nothing but the last convulsions. It is also possible that we are at the beginning, at the birth of a new humanity.” 646 The questioning of the Renaissance and the reign of the intellect in the Age of Reason had undermined the age-old Christian tradition and tried to install the foundations of a new future. The certainties of the past had decayed, but Reason could not tell what the new future would be.

George Mosse wrote, as we have seen above, that “the search for a viable ‘third way’ was an integral part of the völkisch concern”, and that this “third way” was “an alternative to capitalism and Marxism”. For once we have to disagree with him. The third way the völkisch movement was looking for, and with them all those who suffered the pain of the insecurity in the period 1880-1914, was not an alternative to capitalism and Marxism: it was an alternative on the one hand to the lost certainties of the Christian past and, on the other hand, to the fear of an unknown “modern” future, including capitalism as well as Marxism – as well as the steamrolling industrialization and urbanization which crushed all accepted and familiar traditions. If there is one thing the ignorant and vulnerable human beings abhor, it is change.

Dissatisfied, not to say disillusioned, with the temporary tyranny of Reason, which in Germany had anyway been treated with suspicion, the völkisch and like-minded people were looking for teachings and practices which could satisfy the needs of the whole person. Man does not live by bread alone, and neither does he live by the intellect alone. In him there are the realms of the life-forces, impulses and feelings; there is the physical body with its hunger, its need of movement, sexual satisfaction and health; and there is the soul at the centre of the being, the place where one feels connected with the soul of the Volk, with nature, and with God. The traditional, dogmatic answers did not any longer satisfy a generation which, after all, had come alive to the questions and criticisms of the Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers – not to forget the stance taken by Martin Luther of the individual’s right to turn towards God directly and be saved by his personal faith, without the interference of a religious institution.

H.P. Blavatsky’s Theosophy, founded in 1875, had the effect of a revelation and spread from America to Europe and India in no time. (The first German section was started as early as 1884.) Here at last, as noted in a previous chapter, was a teaching which involved the whole person, which taught that God was within and could be contacted and even realized there, and which put an end to the fear of eternal damnation. Theosophy offered a practical spiritual programme, provided an explanation of humanity’s past, related to identical views in other religions, and even had space for the theories and discoveries of science.

“Theosophy swept Europe with an impetus and energy comparable to that of Wagner or Nietzsche. Wagner may have created a religion of his own, but few people at the time would explicitly have acknowledged it to be such. Theosophy, on the other hand, did announce itself as a full-fledged organized religion – or rather as the definitive and supreme synthesis of all religions, the universal and all-encompassing ultra-religion of the future. It thus posed a challenge and a threat to existing faiths that generated considerable alarm. With its declared foundations in what purported to be ‘esoteric Buddhism’, its hierarchy of ‘secret masters’ and its all-embracing scope, Theosophy offered a complex framework that incorporated all other creeds within itself.” 647

Together with Theosophy re-emerged occultism, the exploration of realities which are not accessible to our ordinary senses. Because the human being has been constituted complex and diverse, occultism has always been its natural, prime fascination, along with religion. The practice of both is in fact one and the same – a Church which condemns occultism will use magical formulas to change bread and wine into the body and the blood of its God – and it is only in the “great” religions that both are separated. If one defines spirituality as the essence of religion, as authentic religion without dogma, one can even maintain that all spirituality is of necessity occult, although all occultism is not necessarily spiritual.

Occultism has always been part of the European culture, but it was often driven underground because the impatient European temperament never allowed it to reach maturity. (“Most Western occultism is long on text and short on practice – contrary to forms of occultism found in the East, which rely on strict discipline, rigorous mental and physical exercises, and the constant supervision of a teacher or ‘guru’.” Peter Levenda 648) Paradoxically, the Age of Reason was also one of the most active occult periods. “No historical period is so rich in successful spiritists, magicians, charlatans, etc., as the period which is commonly classified under the labels of enlightenment and reason … Since the Enlightenment the shadow sides of the reason exert an unprecedented fascination; they are, apparently, the inevitable counterbalance to the pronounced rationality of the bourgeois period.” 649 Now, in the years following 1880, the fault line between two worlds, the occult aspects of existence came to the fore again.

This actually seems a “normal” development when put against the background of those years. Heinrich Hertz produced electromagnetic waves, Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the X-rays, Giuglielmo Marconi sent the first messages on invisible waves, and Henri Becquerel, followed by Marie and Pierre Curie, discovered the first elements which radiated in the dark without apparent reason. At a time when renowned scientists proclaimed that science had reached its limits and only a few gaps remained to be filled up, physics broke through the barriers of tridimensionality into the realms of relativity and quantum mechanics. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote almost simultaneously his works about the “will to power” and the “superman”, aiming at a “transvaluation of all values”. His work and that of his admirer Henri Bergson, who thought out the philosophy of the stream of consciousness and the élan vital, would lead the human reflection from the fortress of positivism unto new paths of vitalism and to Sigmund Freud. In 1880 Impressionism had reached its zenith and was already splitting up into other, no less amazing or disturbing schools of art. In its footsteps followed the literary symbolism of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Valéry, now venerated as god-like statues at the gates of all modernist writing.

“It may be pure accident or arbitrary selection”, writes Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Empire 1875-1914, “that Planck’s quantum theory, the rediscovery of Mendel, Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Cézanne’s Still Life with Onions can all be dated 1900 … but the coincidence of dramatic innovation in several fields remains striking”. Then, a few pages further he writes casually: “We are apt to overlook the vogue for occultism, necromancy, magic, parapsychology (which preoccupied some leading British intellectuals) and various versions of eastern mysticism and religiosity, which swept along the fringes of western culture.” 650 We, his readers, are not apt to overlook a sweeping “vogue” which was part of the still unnamed revolution at a fault line in history which would cause the devastating earthquake of the First World War. And we remember that all revolutionary movements originated in the fringes of one or other established paradigm, as Impressionism did in the fringes of classicist painting, and as Nazism, led by an unknown Austrian corporal, did in the fringes of a Germany in turmoil.