Hitler and his God

Völkisch Romanticism

The importance of the völkisch movement can be deduced from its diversity, by which it adapted itself to all aspects of German life, and from the number of its adherents. This was a popular movement in the real sense of the word. It found much of its justification in the enduring appraisal of the literature of the great romanticists Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and others. A supposedly glorious past, the communication with that past in the sanctuaries of nature and at the sites of the prehistoric monuments, a contact with the deepest individual soul fusing with the soul of the Volk, and an experience of the forces of nature, which were the forces of gods thought to have been long dead and forgotten but in fact still very much alive – these main romanticist themes were now revived and felt to be more important than ever. The reason was the increasingly intense confrontation with the modern, urban way of living in the West. The German “new romanticism” corresponded exactly with the great European period of intellectual upheaval and innovation which started around 1880.

“Besides the orders founded by List and Lanz, dozens of other völkisch-esoteric groups shot up from the soil which began to fill the intellectual and religious vacuum … with a kind of secret underground movement”, writes Sünner. “Next to the Neo-Germanics appear also free religious movements, associations of vegetarians, nudists and Heimat-lovers along with theosophical and anthropological circles. The Wandervögel [migratory birds, sometimes translated as “birds of passage”] too belong to this large mass of people in search of meaning. In them a gradual development takes place from beginnings in romanticism and a mysticism of nature to an ever stronger ideological polarization, till in the end their members enter practically without friction into the youth movements of the National-Socialist regime … Dozens of such organizations are founded with names which most often already tell the way they intend to follow”. Sünner gives a few examples: Midgard Fraternity [in Nordic mythology “Midgard” is the garden at the centre of the world], Young Germans, Goths, Order of Young Germans, Nordic Tribe, League of Loyalty for an Uplifting Life, Friends of the Light, Vikings, Eagle and Falcon, Storm Bird, etc. 468

All these groups of very dedicated and mostly young people – National Socialism too has been characterized as a youth movement – turned their back on the present and sought meaning and solace in the past. There were similar movements in other countries, but not on this scale or with this intensity. Most amazingly, Germany, at a time of an unheard-of economic and material expansion, turned inwardly away from a modern, progressive world with which it could not identify and to which it felt superior. Considering the dimension of this singular movement by an entire nation, soon to be equipped with the most advanced means for peace and war, a confrontation with its rival nations was practically inevitable – and would occur in the summer of 1914. Indeed, “the turning back towards the past is the political programme of all nationalists; they see in the revival of myth their political future”. (Michael Ley 469) After all we have seen in the last chapters there can be no doubt that Germany identified itself as a nation with the future of the world, which it had to rule and lead on the right path – something which could only come about after a series of armed conflicts.

Considerations of this kind make Michael Burleigh quip that Germany was “going boldly into the future in search of an imaginary past”. 470 Volker Mauersberger, narrating the surrender to the Nazis of Weimar – as the town of Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche a symbol of German culture – quotes a historian who said that the völkisch movement, culminating in Nazism, was “the reconstruction of a past which was resplendently gilded in the collective memory of the Germans”. 471 It is an amazing fact that so many learned and highly cultured intellectuals, expressing the spirit of a Volk, could turn a mostly fictional past into a sequence of manifestations of paradise upon earth, although they had the historical sources demonstrating the contrary at their disposal. To the insecure and fearful human species the future is a constant threat and the present a problem that is never solved, while the past becomes more and more embellished, “gilded”, the farther it drops away.

“O what a delightful time the Middle Ages were, when everything was learned under the guidance of masters”, mused Paul de Lagarde 472 – when knights in shining armour lived in draughty, crowded castles and died of the most common illnesses because there was no known cure, and when the major part of the population lived the miserable existence of serfs. Greatly admired by the German youth were the orders of fighting monks, especially the Knights Templar and the Teutonic Knights, because they put their lives unconditionally at the service of an ideal. It is typical for the admirers of olden times to fancy themselves in the most glamorous roles, where they never have to smell the stench of rottenness, suffering and death.

Another much sung period was that of the Vikings, who were not Germans but Danes, Norwegians and Swedes. Bands of marauding adventurers in their long boats, they were allotted by their völkisch-minded admirers the role of conquerors and dispensers of culture. It is true that, in spite of themselves, History knew how to use their bold spirit of enterprise. It were Vikings who, having become the French-speaking Normans, won the Battle of Hastings in 1066; who, as settlers in southern Italy, participated in the First Crusade under king Bohemund; who descended the great Russian rivers and traded at Kiev; who even became the palace guard of the Emperor at Constantinople.

“The German, in his historic reality, is hardly more than a fiction”, states Klaus von See. 473 In how far were the Nibelungs Germanic? Brunehild was “Norse”, probably Icelandic; Siegfried came from Xanten, in the present-day Netherlands; the good king Gunther and his knights were Burgundians; and Kriemhild married Attila the Hun. Nevertheless, the Nibelungen Treue, the legendary loyalty of the Nibelungs, would become the highest praised of German virtues, and Himmler had it embroidered on the sleeves of his SS: Meine Ehre heisst Treue, loyalty is what honour means to me – loyalty to the death.

Following the sources of the main German myths backward in time, we arrive at Arminius the Cheruscian, the illustrious Hermann, slayer of three Roman legions in the year 9 CE and later murdered by people of his own tribe. The völkisch attitude towards the Romans remained ambivalent, for the Romans, inheritors of the Greek culture, had been undoubtedly a civilized people; but they were “southerners” who had intended to conquer the Germans, which would have cut the latter from their racial roots and bastardized them. To quote Fichte: “If the Romans had succeeded in subjugating the German people too, and to annihilate them as a nation [which they were not], then the whole further development of humanity would have taken a different, probably less pleasant direction.” 474 Moreover, had not the Romans allowed Jewish Christianity to erode their strength from within, a neglect which would lead to the dissolution of their empire?

More securely appreciated than the Romans were the ancient Greeks, not only because they had never confronted the Germanic tribes but also because their culture was evidently of a higher order than the Roman civilization, which had borrowed so much from them and still remained practical and square. The Greeks, as well as the Romans, had been of Germanic stock. Indeed, the simplest logical reasoning showed you that, if all higher culture was originally due to the Aryans, cultured peoples like the Greeks and the Romans must have been of Aryan blood, and Aryan meant the same as Germanic. Hitler, borrowing from the völkisch tradition when it suited him or when he did not know better, was of the same opinion. “By the Greeks he meant the Dorians. Naturally his view was affected by the theory, fostered by the scientists of his period, that the Dorian tribe which migrated into Greece from the north had been of Germanic origin and that, therefore, its culture had not belonged to the Mediterranean world.” 475 When one asks who were our forefathers, we must always point back to the Greeks”, Hitler said. 476

Everything belonging to this exalted but fictitious past shared in the völkisch adulation. The runes, used from the second century CE till the end of the Middle Ages, and brought back into the focus of völkisch attention by Guido von List, were widely studied as symbols and sacred signs of power. Most (in)famous would become the double sig rune which the SS wore on the lapels of their uniforms, while their honorific ring, designed by the magician Weisthor, a friend of Himmler, was also inscripted with runic signs. “Prehistorians generally accepted that the runes had possessed a symbolism over and above their phonetic value and use in writing, so that they were accordingly used for divination, the casting of lots, magical invocations, and the preparation of amulets and charms.” 477 To the followers of the völkisch movement, the runes became a sacred, quasi initiatory alphabet.

This sacral character was assigned to anything which had survived from ancient times or which was assumed to have any connection with those times. Former holy shrines, like the Extern Rocks, became places of pilgrimage and improvised neo-pagan rites. “You wander through the expanses of the German heath, where loneliness is most deeply felt, and you stand there fascinated by the remains of the mighty burial sites of your forefathers. Suddenly you hear whispered words, uttered in silent earnest, about your fathers, o German! These words keep resounding in your memory and you understand them, the silent language of life long past but eternally renewed … Names and pictures resurface from history and from the realm of legend, and you envision again their deepest meaning!” Sünner quotes these words from one of the völkisch periodicals, Nordland.

“Such thoughts were often found in books and reviews of the Third Reich”, continues Sünner. “Their aim was to replace gradually the Christian prayers and visits to the church by a new creed and ‘Germanic places of worship’. Especially the SS re-evaluated the megalithic burial sites as ‘sanctuaries of stone’ and ‘houses of eternity’ … The people of six thousand years ago, said the SS review Das Schwarze Korps, had piled blocks weighing many tonnes one upon another ‘to tell their descendants in times to come about their distant era before history and the greatness of their people. The eternal succession, passed on by the blood from father to son of the same Nordic leadership from millennium to millennium, found in these ancient family tombs – for this is what they were, the colossal megalithic structures in the North – its most meaningful symbolical expression. Born from the soil, built with material provided by Nature and with a gigantic combination of human strength, these structures of eternity are meant to survive millennia without number and to inform us about the dawn of history, when for the first time generations of leaders emerged and began to guide the people’.”

And Sünner concludes: “Today we know very little about the so-called ‘megalithic culture’ whose dolmen, stone circles and burial hills have been erected everywhere in Europe since circa 4000 BCE; they seem to tell of a religion which must have had command, before the Egyptian pyramids, of considerable technical and astronomical knowledge. To this culture belong not only Stonehenge in England and Newgrange in Ireland, but also similar megalithic constructions in Portugal, Spain and the island of Malta. Whether they originated in north-western Europe and spread from there towards the east, or vice versa, remains controversial among the experts … These stone relicts have hardly any connection with the early history of the Germanic tribes or with the Germans.” 478