‘Finally, may reason be our guide and willpower our strength.’
—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.
We are about to read some Nazi books. This means we will immerse ourselves in some of the most abhorrent works of the 20th century. Before we begin it must be said: Nazi writings are a curious literature. If a reader today approaches those classics of Nazi thought, like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century, they may find themselves surprised. The Nazi movement and its racial ideology have been condemned so absolutely after WWII that we forget that many Nazis were not complete idiots. Instead there is something more disturbing in their writings – a glimmer of intelligence.
Benito Mussolini called Mein Kampf a boring and unreadable tome. We are inclined to agree; nonetheless we must also acknowledge that Hitler was a man of sufficient verbosity and intelligence to author a lengthy book of mostly competent prose. Joseph Goebbels had a doctorate in romantic literature. Meanwhile Alfred Baeumler, philosophy professor at Technische Universität Dresden, understood poor Nietzsche well enough to pervert his ideas to justify Nazism. Martin Heidegger, author of Being & Time, one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century, was also a Nazi party member and Mitläufer who once instructed his students to investigate ‘world Jewry’s predisposition towards planetary criminality’ and whose wartime notebooks contain references to Jews’ ‘emphatically calculative giftedness’ and to ‘World Judaism,’ the latter being a central trope from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.1 And while Alfred Rosenberg may indeed be a ‘crackpot’ as Hannah Arendt believed,2 he was of sound enough mind to complete university studies in engineering and architecture and author a book, albeit a strange and diabolically bad one, that displays some grasp of European philosophy and art.
None of these men are stupid – that is too simple. Rather, in Nazi writing, we confront a much more bizarre phenomenon: men of at least some intelligence relentlessly pursuing an empirically untenable line of thought to its evil apogee.
Given this intelligence, the Nazis are worse than idiotic. In them we find proof that human minds can elaborate beliefs from nascence to oblivion without sparing a thought for the axioms underlying their reasoning. Nazi writers all commit this crime, which moves them beyond idiocy and genius to the lands where we confront the questions of blindness and sight. Before they began to think they decided what they would and would not see. Their evil began in that place where we decide upon the ethics of thought. The Nazis committed a violence of assumptions and it is this violence and its causes that we must appreciate.
Mein Kampf
Prolific villains that they were, we can see the disasters of Nazi belief from many angles and sources. Most relevant for us are the passages that relate to what Rosenberg called the ‘race soul’3 and the völkisch or ‘folkish’ doctrine of blood and soil; these form the basis of Dürckheim’s beliefs both during and after the war.
Völkisch thought was central to the Nazi movement. Beginning in the pre-war period, Nazi propaganda often deferred to the concept of the Volksgemeinschaft or ‘people’s community.’ The Nazis sought to unify all German people beneath this concept, which transcended class boundaries and posited both the ‘absolute equality of all Germans’ and their ‘absolute difference from all other people.’4 This difference was one of ‘nature,’5 derived from genetic and geographic idiosyncrasies, and it ensured German superiority based on ‘blood and soil.’ Völkisch thought was obviously untenable; nonetheless it formed the ground for a belief in German unity and superiority.
The notion of the German Volk was a useful political instrument for Hitler. Though he ultimately aimed at Aryan rather than German superiority, Hitler used parts of Mein Kampf to promote völkisch ideology and so gain the support of the German people.6 Völkisch thought, Hitler says, recognises the inequality of the human races, which are all endowed with varying degrees of ‘cultural creativeness’ and destructiveness.7 Hitler believed the highest potential of humanity was to cultivate a race endowed with the gift of cultural creativity, so he proclaimed that ‘primordial racial elements are of the greatest significance’ to human existence. The Aryans—those ‘creators’ and ‘custodians’ of civilisation—were the pinnacle of humanity, while the Jews, a culture destroying race, were a force of evil.8 In the interests of ‘human beauty’ and civilisation, he decreed that Aryans must purify their own racial line, abolish miscegenation and subordinate ‘inferior and weaker’ people. Apocalypse would otherwise follow. If the Aryans did not triumph over the Jews, ‘all ideals of human beauty and nobility and all hopes of an idealised future for our humanity would be lost forever’ and in a ‘few thousand years darkness will again descend on the earth, human culture will pass and the world turn to a desert.’9
One wonders if Hitler truly preferred beauty to this empty desert-world, or if he secretly wished for desolation. In any case, Hitler’s National Socialist party vowed to bring Aryan culture to its apotheosis through its program of domination. In their efforts to fulfil this promise we got the Holocaust.
We also bore witness to another small and grim irony. Revealing the self-loathing at the heart of his mission, as Führer Hitler ordered the destruction of all the artworks he created as a young man.10 The gifts of ‘cultural creativeness,’ it seems, lay beyond Hitler all his life.
The Myth of the 20th Century
Alfred Rosenberg, one of the Nazi party’s main ideologists,11 expanded upon Hitler’s awful ideas in his 1930 book The Myth of the 20th Century.12 One scholar tells us this work was ‘second in importance only to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.’13 It is certainly second in quality. A turgid, rambling tome, Rosenberg’s book brims with mystical speculations, including one particularly colourful section where he theorises floridly about man’s origins in the lost continent of Atlantis. His book is terrible. Yet no matter the quality of his historical and genealogical excursions, Rosenberg’s book offers an articulation of the völkisch doctrine that altogether exceeds Hitler’s efforts.
By his own admission, Hitler preferred dogma and faith to philosophy,14 so Rosenberg took it upon himself to secure the National-Socialist cause on the philosophical level. Unlike Mein Kampf, Rosenberg’s work draws out a metaphysics for the völkisch ideology, often by interpolating the works of Meister Eckhart, a 13th-century German Christian mystic. Rosenberg sets an ambitious end for his project. Ultimately, he writes to determine ‘the necessity of our spiritual being as such.’ Labouring beneath this lofty goal, he never defines exactly what he means by ‘spiritual being.’ Despite this omission, he clearly understands the quiddity of his concept. To him, the essence of spiritual being is ‘the racially linked soul.’15 The race soul defines every part of human life. It is manifest in individual men and shared between people of the same racial group. The race soul shapes man’s mind and community and defines their culture, beliefs and art.16 The race soul thus grounds a nation’s ‘racially linked folkhood’—the collective of genetically linked people who share the ‘farmland’ and ‘living space’ of a nation—and man’s ‘racially linked folkish consciousness.’17
In The Myth of the 20th Century, the race soul is humanity’s metaphysical condition. It is the transcendental signifier for all of life’s actions and pursuits. Our potential. The ‘forces of race, soul and nature,’ Rosenberg writes, ‘are the eternal prerequisites of existence and life.’18 Our existence and consciousness, both individual and collective, are structured by the race soul. Our being in the world also allows the race soul to elaborate itself existentially where it produces cultures shaped and guided by its values. Echoing Plato, Rosenberg declares that this uniting, transcendent force does not change as time passes. Rather, human life beneath the race soul embodies ‘the primal metaphysical law of being and becoming,’ while man is an ‘unalterable being in the act of becoming.’19
Because the race soul defines our being and existence, our potential depends on our obedience to its dictates. Denying this ‘root’ of our being and becoming—this ‘ego-ideal,’ perhaps—will condemn us and our race to unfruitfulness. Abiding by the race soul and its ‘eternal, natural, aristocratic laws of blood’ that reject ‘the weak,’20 however, will deliver us to perfection. Perfection is as essential to Rosenberg as it is to Hitler, so he implores the Aryan people to take the ‘race soul and the inward recognition of its supreme values as the guiding star of [their] entire existence.’21 Like Frankl, Peterson, and the defenders of human capitalism, Rosenberg’s philosophy therefore insists that we ‘manifest our potential.’ Where they preach individualist perfection, though, Rosenberg insists racist perfectionism is the ‘necessity of our spiritual being as such.’
This is but a glimpse of Rosenberg’s towering yet worthless philosophical system. With his notion of the race soul that subsisted in the eternal and unchanging realm of being, National Socialism could defend the claim to permanent Aryan superiority and justify their ruthless policies. Specious though they may be, Rosenberg’s pseudo-philosophical arguments defended the Third Reich in the realm of reason, if only by creating another obstacle for those who sought to criticise the regime’s rationale. The value of the work lay not in its truth but in the denied fact of its falsity. As an intellectual distraction The Myth of the 20th Century formed yet another layer of blindness for the German people. Another violence against the ethics of thought.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, p.443.
The Myth of the 20th Century, ch.1.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp.471–2.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp.471–2.
On pp.538-539 of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, we learn that senior members of the Nazi party, including Himmler, believed that the SS, not the Germans, were the ‘dawn of the master race’ that the Nazis so wished to create. They believed that the Germans were not a master race but should be led by a ‘master race.’ Hitler even issued a decree in August 1941 banning the use of the phrase ‘German race,’ as it would ‘sacrifice the racial idea’ and destroy the ‘important conceptual preconditions of our whole racial and folk policy.’
I quote from a digital version of the book, available here: https://childrenofyhwh.com/multimedia/library/Hitler/mein-kampf.pdf
Mein Kampf, pt.II, ch.2.
Mein Kampf, pt.I, ch.11.
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.
I quote from a digital edition of the work available here: http://www.nommeraadio.ee/meedia/pdf/RRS/Alfred%20Rosenberg%20-%20The%20Myth%20of%20the%2020th%20Century.pdf
See 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.
Mein Kampf, pt.I, ch.10.
The Myth of the 20th Century, p.197.
The Myth of the 20th Century, p.197.
The Myth of the 20th Century, pp.94 & 365.
The Myth of the 20th Century.
The Myth of the 20th Century, pp.120 & 463. See also Whyte, M. (2008) The Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in the Third Reich: Alfred Baeumler’s “Heroic Realism.” Journal of Contemporary History, 43(2), pp.171–194.
The Myth of the 20th Century, p.383 & 456.
The Myth of the 20th Century, p.365.