It is October 30th, 1945. Hitler has shot himself through the head in his Berlin bunker. Auschwitz has become known to the world. Hiroshima and Nagasaki lie in ruins, levelled by America’s atomic blasts two months before. The Third Reich, Mussolini’s Italy and the Japanese Empire have fallen. World War II is over. And in Karuizawa, Japan, authorities arrest renowned Nazi propagandist Karlfried Graf Dürckheim for suspected war crimes. The police lock Dürckheim away in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison where he awaits a court trial that may end with his execution. Every day for sixteen months, Dürckheim faces the spectre of impending death. In prison, Dürckheim does not know whether salvation or destruction awaits him. In terror, in anxiety, he sleeps as though a noose knots around his neck. The stress gives him heart attacks, convulsions, insomnia. Unable to act, restrained to waiting, he retreats into his mind. He flees into the thick of ideas, and smothers the uncertainty of his world with thought. And between his cell walls, Dürckheim will have the most profound spiritual experience of his life. He will undergo what he later identifies as a radical transformation. A dissolution of the self. A tabula rasa of the ego. This shift will have consequences that reach across countries, through decades. For it will not only make him a beloved and influential spiritual leader. It will help transform Western spirituality. His new spiritual system will also be a forerunner, a pre-echo of the most influential political ideology of the late 20th century—neoliberal individualism.
Herr Dürckheim led a colourful existence in the years before his imprisonment in Japan. Born into a wealthy, aristocratic family, his whole adult life had been dedicated to serving the German state. As a young man, he served the German Empire as an officer on the frontlines of World War I. In his four years at the front, he encountered the horrors of war and violence; he spent months shadowed by the spectre of impending death. But amidst the destruction, he found that life acquired a deep meaning. Purpose followed from his ‘unquestionable, ready-to-die commitment to the Fatherland.’ Staring into a dead man’s frozen eyes, he realised he could feel ‘free and happy;’ ‘a supernatural fullness’ became clear to him against this ‘terrifying background of non-life.’ He also discovered the strange ‘pleasure’ in ‘deliberately thrusting oneself into deadly danger.’ The parasuicidal joys of ‘embarking upon a nightly assault on a wooded hill’ or ‘jumping through a defile under machine gun fire’ made him feel ‘free’ and ‘indestructible.’ ‘The greater the fear that seized me,’ he once wrote, ‘the deeper within me was the feeling of gratitude for the reclaimed and victorious life… With death in the background, I experienced the value of life.’
Dürckheim discovered that link between death, pleasure, meaning, and obedience during World War I. He acquired a taste for it and after the Empire lost the fight, he indulged further in these morbid pleasures. In 1919 he supported one of the far-right Freikorps units in their fight against the Munich Republic; later that year, he narrowly escaped his execution at the hands of Spartacist Firing Squad during the Bavarian Revolution.
But these masochistic pleasures could not last forever. One night before he was to fight with the Bavarian Freikorps against the Spartacists, Dürckheim’s conscience awakened him. In an imperious, overwhelming tone, it told him: ‘Your life as a solider is over.’ Unable to disobey this commandment, Dürckheim left the army.
In 1919, then, Dürckheim found himself at a loss. His Fatherland defeated, his nation in turmoil and his ideals wounded, he ‘felt an entire era of German history coming to an end.’ Before his eyes, he saw ‘an entire period of life whose very meaning was dying… A reality was sinking.’ Facing his country’s economic and spiritual collapse, he gave his time to intellectual pursuits. At university he studied psychology and philosophy, eventually becoming a professor; in his spare time he published leaflets promoting anti-Bolshevik attitudes and counter-revolutionary politics. Meanwhile he and his wife befriended a couple, the Weindahls. Together they formed a group called ‘The Square,’ and they spent their time discussing the texts of Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, strategies to awaken the German spirit, and the future of their Volk.
Over the next decade Dürckheim’s country descended further into economic and social turmoil: political violence, hyperinflation, poverty, and unemployment plagued the nation. People suffered from chronic anxiety, fear, powerlessness, and despair. Their ideals lost, their world ruined, and their hopes gone, many lost faith in their society, and used all their energy simply trying to survive their sadness and the terrors of disintegration. Others turned to violent political action to quell their misery and fight the sense of groundlessness within themselves and their country.
A particularly German melancholia, a Weimarian nihilism, enveloped the nation. Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler describes it aptly. ‘Then came 1923,’ he writes.
‘That extraordinary year is probably what has marked today’s Germans with those characteristics that are so strange and incomprehensible in the eyes of the world, and so different from what used to be thought of as the German character: the uncurbed, cynical imagination, the nihilistic pleasure in the impossible for its own sake, and the energy that has become an end in itself. In that year an entire generation of Germans had a spiritual organ removed: the organ that gives men steadfastness and balance, but also a certain inertia and stolidity. It may variously appear as conscience, reason, experience, respect for the law, morality, or the fear of God. A whole generation learned then—or thought it learned—to do without such ballast. The preceding years served as a novitiate in nihilism, but in 1923 its high priests were ordained. No other nation has experienced anything comparable to the events of 1923 in Germany. All nations went through the Great War, and most of them have also experienced revolutions, social crises, strikes, redistribution of wealth, and currency devaluation. None but Germany has undergone the fantastic, grotesque extreme of all these together; none has experienced the gigantic, carnival dance of death, the unending, bloody Saturnalia, in which not only money but all standards lost their value.”
Writing in 1915, Freud put it even more succinctly. ‘In the confusion of wartime,’ he wrote,
we ourselves are at a loss as to the significance of the impressions which press in upon us and as to the value of the judgements which we form. We cannot but feel that no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possessions of humanity, confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest. Science herself has lost her passionless impartiality; her deeply embittered servants seek for weapons from her with which to contribute towards the struggle with the enemy. Anthropologists feel driven to declare him inferior and degenerate, psychiatrists issue a diagnosis of his disease of mind or spirit… Then the war in which we had refused to believe broke out, and it brought—disillusionment. Not only is it more bloody and more destructive than any war of other days, because of the enormously increased perfection of weapons of attack and defence; it is at least as cruel, as embittered, as implacable as any that has preceded it.
For Freud, ‘logical bedazzlement’ was the only possible response to war.1 Among the nihilistic chaos, Dürckheim gave all his energy to his ideas. Sensing a need to revitalise his nation and discover life’s meaning, he immersed himself in the Weimar Republic’s right-wing culture. Obsessed by thoughts of Germany’s future, he tirelessly published nationalistic pamphlets; he wrote articles warning of communist revolution. And in his diary he wrote endlessly of Germany’s need for the arrival of a ‘new man’ that would revitalise the country by embodying völkisch ideals of blood and soil. Aiming for spiritual rebirth, he studied world religions, searching for their transcendent, shared truths.
Meanwhile, Dürckheim also read and approved highly of a certain book published by an aspiring German politician—Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. Its message resonated deeply with him. Perhaps it was because in Hitler’s hateful vision of domination, that deathly horizon implied by his ideas, Dürckheim once again saw the chance to grasp, ‘at the very moment of possible annihilation, in the anticipation of nothingness,’ the very meaning of life.
References
Baier, K. (2013) The Formation and Principles of Count Dürckheim’s Nazi Worldview and his Interpretation of Japanese Spirit and Zen. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 11(48), pp.1-33.
Freud, S. (1915) Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. The Standard Edition, Vol. XIV. London, Hogarth Press. pp.273-300.
Haffner, S. (2014) Defying Hitler: A Memoir. Lexington, MA, Plunkett Lake Press.
Joachim-Bieber, H. (2015) Zen and War: A Commentary on Brian Victoria and Karl Baier’s Analysis of Daisetz Suzuki and Count Dürckheim. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 13(20), pp.1-15.
Victoria, B. (2013) A Zen Nazi in Wartime Japan: Count Dürckheim and his Sources: D.T. Suzuki, Yasutani Haku’un and Eugen Herrigel. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 12(3), pp.1-52.
Wehr, G. (1997) Karlfried Graf Dürckheim: Une vie sous la signe de la transformation. Paris, Éditions Albin Michel.
‘Thoughts for the Time on War and Death’, pp.275 & 287.