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The following extracts from New Religions and the Nazis give the reader some idea of the topics covered in the book which is based on extensive historical research in German archives. For the purposes of this preview specific references have been removed from the text. Interested readers can find them in the book. | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter One: Introduction
After the defeat of World War I, some National Socialists intended to force (although they gave lip service to the word grow) a new Germany into existence immediately. To this end, Joseph Goebbels added with missionary zeal a propaganda strategy that proclaimed the "positive" qualities of Kampf, intolerance, and speakers capable of "convicting" audiences with their "sermons." He preferred hard-hitting terse texts on placards, terror and brutality in halls and on the streets, and an army of what he called "völkisch apostles and revivalists". Chapter Two: An Overview
Cancik sees in Hauer's anti-colonialism, his sympathy for Gandhi and India's insurgent movement, among other things, the last vestiges of Weimar liberalism. In the process, Cancik overlooks two attitudes shared by the Old and New Right to this day. First, he ignores Nazi empathy for underdogs precisely because they saw themselves as underdogs during the Versailles treaty era. Second, he fails to understand that it was precisely Hauer's and other Nazis' radical liberalism that led them to National Socialism. More about this later suffice it to say with Haffner that Hitler could as easily be ordered into the extreme left as the opposite. In fact, the traditional conservative opposition saw Hitler as standing left. Chapter Three: Hauer and the Bünde: becoming a National Socialist
That politics could be harnessed effectively by well educated young people had to do with the existence of an ever growing number of small organizations including the Youth Movement, reading circles, circles focused on the struggle (Kampf Bünde), paramilitary groups (Freischar), and an ever growing number of philosophical, poetic, political, and/or religious Bünde. Respected intellectuals like Heidegger, Haushofer, and Hauer built student circles around themselves. Less mainstream intellectuals like anthropologists Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Hans F. K. Günther, and theologians who were still officially linked to the church like Hermann Mandel became itinerant speakers at Bünde meetings and conferences. The reading circles and literary conferences organized by Hans Grimm, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, Hans Friedrich Blunck, Hans Carossa, and others, and coordinated by the energetic library director of Stettin Erwin Ackerknecht, likewise encouraged a nationalism based on notions of autochthony that is, "the völkisch belief in the rootedness of the homeland and in ancestral kinship." Chapter four: The Push toward Nazism: Youths and Leaders
To German theologians, who regarded themselves as having overhauled Christianity, this was worse than heresy. Barth, however, merely made a factual observation. Modern German theology was founded not on the Bible but on the human being: on ego-supporting human spiritual experiences and anthropological categories of Volk and Volkstum. Christ had been secularized many times over for the sake of political theology, racial science, academic fraud, new religions, and warring nations. Now He was to be betrayed again for the sake of National Socialism. Barth refused. Chapter Five: Hauer's View of Religion
Hauer started with the assumption that German philosophical Idealism is a religion. His inaugural lecture of 1921 was, therefore, the first hint of his effort to trace that lineage of thought (going back to medieval mystics like Eckhart) that would later come to be known as German Faith. Important was that its representatives were at one time or another accused of being heretics. By 1930 he remembered his work in India and realized what a strong attraction the Bhagavad-Gita had for him. Hauer soon juxtaposed the philosophy of religious experience as it is expounded in the Bhagavad-Gita with Germanic mysticism, sagas, and literature and kept them in a state of creative tension. Chapter Six: The Germanic-deutsch Leg of Hauer's German Faith
What is most important to Hauer, of course, is to underline the total difference of German Faith from Christianity. The evidence that the lineage of thought as represented by Eckhart, Goethe, German Idealism and so forth survived as a distinct German Faith in the midst of Christendom is not enough. Hauer looks for another source. And this source, he thinks, is found in the fact that ancestral Germans affirmed as self-evident truth the fundamental ideas of the Indo-Germanic realm while they rejected instinctively Christianity. The source is therefore a race related (arteigene) experience of religion. Hauer implies that because our natures are not receptive to everything, we can only accept that from another which is already alive in us. This in turn means, so Hauer, gaining actual consciousness of a reality that is already there. Chapter Seven: Organizational Help from Wehrwolf and the SS
Kloppe confirmed what he thought Hauer expressed in his letters to him, namely, that the leadership (Führung) must be supported by a strong organization. To that end he made three suggestions. First, he told Hauer that of the former Wehrwölfe with whom he had a ten-year relationship 80% are Sturmführer in the SA and are in charge of a considerable part of the youth. The majority of these Sturmführer answered his letters and confirmed that young people longed for a new faith, what was needed was a point of attraction. And that point of attraction had to be a Führer. Kloppe would therefore take over the organization of the fighting troops and would "represent the Ernst Röhm of the German Faith Movement." Chapter Eight: Hauer and the War of Attrition against Christianity
Hauer reacted swiftly to the rumor in June that there would be a new Evangelical Church Constitution which, as said above, would leave the Reformation Confession untouched. This was the moment to confront the Protestant Church with its utter hypocrisy and its consequent two options. To that end Hauer rushed off an open letter addressed to the Protestant Church Commission and the Reich Leadership of the German Christians. In it he wrote that he was puzzled that the church did not consider the needs of those who, on the basis of their convictions, were no longer bound to that Confession nor to the Old and New Testament as the measuring rod of their lives and beliefs. It is deceitful for the church to remain tied to the Old and New Testaments when many members and clerics did not believe in them or in the traditional presentation of Jesus. Were the church honest, he argued, it would take the final step in the liberal direction and make room for all those others who simply had faith. Only a church that accepts German faith is “pure protestant-German in its attitude.” … Since this would not happen, Hauer expected German Christians to join his movement… Did any of the German Christians join the German Faith Movement as Hauer hoped? Existing correspondence affirm that some did. For example, Hauer observed Krause’s German People’s Church Movement and the two had contact. On the sixteenth of January 1934 Hauer wrote him: “I have long been of the opinion that the German Christians should have left a church bound by a Confession. What brought the Faith Movement of the German Christians down is in my view the contradiction between Confession and a free German Faith.” Hauer hoped that the German People’s Church that Krause now led would break all compromises. “That would mean a free German Faith. And if I understand your letter, you already have that. For (Rosenberg’s) ‘Myth of the Twentieth Century’ is one of the foundations of this German Faith. For those who confess it, however, it means the end of the Christian church.” [Back to Top]
The young men born between 1900 and 1910 were referred to as the “war youth generation” (Kriegsjugendgeneration). They did not experience the front but they were deeply affected by shifting news and especially defeat, which was accompanied by hunger, deprivation, poverty and destitution. This generation witnessed the complete breakdown of the world of their fathers and all that it meant. Old values were overthrown or revaluated and with it came the development of the child’s soul for the bigger whole and, generally, for völkisch and collective experiences. As well, the usual class differences between workers and intellectuals softened. Witnesses of that time remembered that Volk, Nation and evil enemies (böse Feinde) were living concepts in these young minds. Especially Prussian and Rheinland youths who had direct contact with the enemy after the war had a deep sense of “home.” Their love of country and post-war experience was radical. They knew on whom to blame their collective impoverishment and loss of privileged career prospects, something that is also echoed in the lives of Werner Best (1900 – 1989), Heinrich Himmler (1900 – 1945), Reinhard Heydrich (1904 – 1942), and their somewhat older compatriot Joseph Goebbels (1897 – 1945). Chapter Ten: The Faith of the Nationalists: Narrative and the Third Reich
In the worldview of nationalist and National Socialist authors Christianity was dead – rejected, overcome, ineffectual, or its symbols used and abused to make political points. Even when Jesus is mentioned he is ideologically interpreted as a heroic warring figure. As Goebbels, who wrote a book entitled Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Pages, has his protagonist Michael proclaim after he freed himself of the notion that Christ is love, “Enlightenment overcame me; I shall write a drama, Jesus Christ as hero”. It is after his protagonist reached this stage of secular enlightenment that Goebbels frees his venomous tongue against Jews whose “physical being” he finds “revolting” (ein körperlicher Ekel). “Religion?” so Goebbels, “Naïve as you are. What has this to do with Religion or Christianity?” Speaking of Jews he says, “He destroys us or we render him harmless, anything else is unthinkable”. Chapter Eleven: Scientific Neo-Paganism and the Extreme Right Then and Today
The guiding ideas of the Conservative Revolution saturated the cultic milieu of Weimar. They were held by six hundred thousand German Christians, by one hundred thousand adherents of Erich and Mathilde Ludendorff’s movement, by Hauer’s faith movement and the free religious, by numerous paramilitary groups like Steel Helmet (Stahlhelm) and Freischar, by the four hundred thousand strong German Youth League (Jungdeutscher Orden) and the millions of readers of literature that was at once religious, political, and militaristic. Neither academics, nor Christians who formed the Confessional Church, were immune to these ideas. Worse still, most members of these groups were leaders of their own reading or student circles. The Hitler Youth, the NSDAP, and the SS were schooled in these ideas. The impact was overwhelming and its presence is still felt today. The knowledge of the certainty of death warns the human being to use each day of his existence meaningfully. In death the self-consciousness of the human being disappears. Nothing other than a non-conscious godly volition that also lives in all material dwells in the cells of the body until these cells decay into the basic forms from which they were constructed. Before this death, however, the human being can as often and as long as he wants participate in the godly, or the immortal; he can experience “eternities” that are not subject to time. Furthermore, he can radiate his godliness-experience onto his undying Volk, just as he passes on his inheritance through his children to future generations. ...The human being dies for the sake of his sublime office, aware of experiencing immortality; immortal, however, is his Volk. [Back to Top]
The turning point from the Old Right to what today is called, for lack of a better term; the New Right came in 1936. In April of that year Hauer was deposed as leader of the German Faith Movement. In his despair and still singing the tired radical song, namely, that the Deutsche Christen were raping the German Volk in the name of National Socialism, he appealed to Günther for help. Having never compromised his elitism, Günther gave Hauer the following advice. Leave radicalism to the young radicals, place your focus where it once was on the sophisticated segment of society, and find a new form for a truly free German Faith. This is the insight that informs the strategy of the New Right today. The thinking elite, having rehabilitated the ideas and language of Hauer and his cohorts, work out their metapolitical program on a religious pagan foundation, while young radicals in national revolutionary parties, like the NPD, do the work of radicalism. It is fair to say, therefore, that in Germany as well as France neo-paganism was and is the heart of fascism and the New Right. It constitutes a radical criticism and rejection of Jewish-Christianity. It rejects Christianity for its imperialism, its radical judgments, its totalitarianism, its privileging of the sense of incurred injury (Leid), its linear history, its denigration of woman and humanity, and its source in the culture of the Hurriter (Jews). One has to be blind not to see anti-Semitism here. Hunke’s “sense of incurred injury” points directly at Neo-pagan impatience with the Holocaust. Memory culture, Jewish versus German, Holocaust versus civilian bombing is one of the footballs being kicked around the political arena defined by the pagan New Right and its loosely affiliated national-revolutionary parties. |
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