Re: The Occult Roots of Nazism, by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 4:47 am
7: The German Millennium
FRITZ SAXL, the German historian of Renaissance ideas, was an early observer of the renewed interest in fortune-telling at the beginning of the twentieth century. He dated its origins to around 1910, while noting that a number of periodicals devoted to astrology sprang up over the next decade in Germany, accompanied by textbooks, prophecies and reprints of astrological classics. In due course palmistry, numerology, cabbalism and tarot supplemented astrology to form the principal scientific bases of a popular divinatory movement which grew prodigiously in the 1920s. Saxl reflected that, although these sciences may be erroneous from a logical point of view, the imaginative or religious background of such a popular movement is of the greatest importance. A theoretical concern with the measurement of data for a system of correspondences between natural phenomena and human affairs retains a neutral scientific status, but its predictive tenor can be regarded legitimately as a function of human hopes and needs. Indeed, such foretelling of future events may become vitally important to individuals and groups that are subject to anxiety or deprivation. Saxl similarly regarded prophecy as a symptom of widespread social unease at a time when the traditional expectations of certain groups appeared to be frustrated. He considered its modern manifestation to be one of the omens of the First World War. [1]
List's prophecies were addressed collectively to the German nation and appeared to fulfil a similar function to individual fortune-telling. He foretold that an age of universal prosperity was approaching to alleviate the tribulations of German nationalists in Central Europe. This optimistic forward-looking attitude did not contradict his paeans to the past. The prophecy of a happy national future complemented his nostalgia for a lost golden age inasmuch as it denoted the restoration of his imaginary traditional world. Past and future represented the twin poles of a counter-ideal in time generated by a profound disenchantment with the present; the secret Armanist heritage throughout the allegedly benighted Christian epoch formed a bridge between these two ideal ages; such Armanist survivals were both the relics of the old dispensation and the heralds of the new order. This chapter examines the nature of List's prophecy and assesses its social significance and appeal, showing how his cyclical conception of time initially sponsored the idea of fluctuatory fortune, and how these sentiments were later modified by the idea of ultimate salvation and a linear conception of history.
List's cyclical vision of time was derived from his three sources of theological inspiration: the holy world of Nature, Norse mythology and modern theosophy. It has already been shown how the elementary content of Armanist doctrine focused upon the 'laws of nature', which ostensibly determined the periodicity of all planetary and organic cycles in the cosmos. List frequently invoked these cosmic rhythms in his early pieces on national landscape: [2] that their sustaining laws assumed the status of a divine principle in his later writings testifies to his belief in cyclical time. Secondly, one must consider the import of Norse myths in this respect. List's references to the Fimbulwinter and the Gotterdammerung suggest that he was familiar with those pagan legends, according to which there came a mighty winter after which the whole earth was consumed by fire and flood before rising anew, 'fertile, green and fair as never before, cleansed of all its sufferings and evil'. [3] According to these myths, the cycle of destruction and creation was repeated indefinitely. Lastly, List's adoption of theosophy with its cosmic rounds, and the individual's successive reincarnation in each round, served to confirm his conviction in the recurrence of all things.
Such cyclical notions of time may coexist with ideas of salvation and redemption, but these cannot enjoy any unique or final status. The termination of any given cycle heralds spiritual evolution and cosmic renovation, but the implacable logic of the cycle will still prevail: the organism will decline and perish recurrently into eternity. List rejected this oriental fatalism regarding time and destiny in favour of Judaeo-Christian notions of salvation. Although he had adopted theosophical materials for his cosmology, he was loath to accept its limited soteriology. His hopes for a restoration of the traditional world and a national revival led him to the materials of Western apocalyptic. Its explicit assumptions of linear time and a unique, final redemption jar continually with the cyclical implications of theosophy throughout his writings. In the light of List's vilification of Christianity, this adoption is ironic. In due course List's vision of a pan-German empire was almost wholly based on Western apocalyptic.
Both Jewish and Christian apocalypses distinguish themselves from other forms of prophecy by asserting an absolute and qualitative difference between the present age and the future. This dualistic and linear time scheme is represented by the juxtaposition of a pessimistic view of the present with a fantastic and joyful image of the future. The present age is devalued by a depressing account of the hardships and misfortunes that have befallen the people. The apocalyptic writer often indicates that the world is subject to an increasing physical and moral degeneration: mundus iam senescit. These complaints can extend to the charge that the world is under the dominion of Satan or other evil powers. At a point in the narrative coincident with the time of the apocalypse's composition, this historical survey gives way to prophecy proper. It is predicted that the former ills will be exacerbated by yet worse adversities. There will be signs of an ultimate catastrophe, such as violent climatic changes, drought, earthquakes and fire. Finally the evil spirit of this first age may appear as a dragon or other beast to torment mankind. The end of this age approaches as these so-called 'messianic woes' become increasingly intolerable. A divine warrior-leader will suddenly intervene to liberate his chosen people from their affliction. This messiah will bind or destroy the evil tyrant before establishing his own divine and incorruptible kingdom on earth. These acts initiate a new second age, when the joyful elect of the redeemed will know no suffering nor want; this new world will not be subject to the ordinary laws of nature and physical limitation; happiness and good fortune will reign eternally. [4]
The essential features of Western apocalyptic prophecy can be discerned in these broad outlines. A first, woeful, even evil age proceeds to its climax, when a new age dawns wherein the former sufferers will be redeemed and exalted. Such prophecy possesses enormous appeal for those beset by severe adversity. Norman Cohn has shown how certain disoriented social groups in medieval Europe took these apocalypses quite literally. [5] Whenever particular hardships occurred, apocalyptic groups would discern the traditional signs of those final 'messianic woes'. Tyrants were regularly identified with the monstrous beast of the last days, an incarnation of the Antichrist. The sufferers took comfort in expectation of a messianic redeemer, who would fulfil the prophecy by establishing the felicitous millennium in which they would participate as an elect. These hopes might lead the sufferers to conceive of themselves as a messianic vanguard and they engaged in rebellious activities against the Establishment in order to secure themselves a worthy place in the new world. The degree of such militancy would stand in a relationship to the supposed proximity of salvation. [6]
The survival of these ancient religious fantasies in the landscape of Western revolutionary imagination suggests that these myths satisfy a deep-seated demand for comfort and hope at times of oppression and strife. But poverty, pestilence, and war were all commonplace in medieval Europe and did not in themselves generate apocalyptic beliefs: a millenarian tradition had also to be present. Once a personal Lebenswelt has been upset by disaster it is easy to see apocalyptic as a fundamental and religious system of explanation. The putative source of the disaster is identified as an absolute evil power, the destruction of which is anticipated with hopes of the millenium. Absolute categories of good and evil, order and sin, restore cognitive harmony in the minds of the deprived and disoriented. Eschatological ideas have thus remained a perennial fantasy within the Judaeo-Christian orbit of religious influence.
List echoed traditional apocalyptic by expressing extreme pessimism about many aspects of modern Austrian society. His concern was greatest with regard to the nationality question. The status of German language and culture in Austria had been increasingly challenged by the Slavs of the empire over the preceding decades. The process had been furthered by the Taafe government or 'Iron Ring', which had derived its support from a broad base of clerical, conservative, and slavophile interests from 1879 until 1893. A triumph of Slav interests appeared to have been achieved in 1897 when Count Badeni introduced his language decrees, whereby all civil servants in Bohemia would have to speak both Czech and German, a qualification which would have clearly discriminated against the Germans. List fulminated against the clerical and socialist parties that favoured Slav interests and, drawing on the contemporary slogans of the Schonererite Pan- German and Los von Rom movements, he denounced the national outrage of Czech priests being appointed to German parishes in the ethnic borderlands and decried the preponderance of Slav civil servants in the bureaucracy. [7]
His critique of contemporary Austria also embraced wider social and economic issues. He bemoaned the current economic tendencies towards laissez-faire capitalism and large-scale enterprise, because they undermined the existence of artisans, craftsmen and small middleclass entrepreneurs. He complained that commerce had lost its former ethical code and regarded the decline of the guilds as the collapse of the 'bastions of the burgher-world'. [8] List's own concept of economic order was based nostalgically on those pre-capitalist modes of finance and production which were hard-pressed by modernization. He viewed the growth of modern banking and other financial institutions as the machinations of an immoral minority who speculated with paper tokens at the expense of honest men engaged in the production of tangible and proper goods. He condemned all finance as usury and indulged in period anti-Semitic sentiments culled from the newspapers of Georg von Schonerer and Aurelius Polzer. He finally recounted the story of the Vienna stock exchange crash of 1873 as the inevitable outcome of modern business practice.
List's critique of the new economics actually typified the attitude of many Austrian contemporaries. Since only a fraction of industrialization could be ascribed to autochthonous entrepreneurs, with the State and foreign investors playing the major role, domestic investment generally came from the banks and credit institutions. For this reason capitalism was regarded as the preserve of a small, closed group. This attitude was reinforced after the 1873 crash, when the wider public had no further desire to speculate in equities. Pulzer has commented that, when the growth of capitalism was a process with which the majority of the population could not identify itself, feelings of pessimistic anger and pseudo-revolutionary conservatism were bound to assert themselves. [9] List's innovation consisted in channelling these sentiments into an expression of apocalyptic protest.
List was no less pessimistic concerning modern political and cultural tendencies. A staunch defender of the monarchical principle and the Habsburg dynasty, he denounced all popular and democratic institutions of representation. Parliamentarianism was pure nonsense since it was based on the premiss that a majority of votes, however well or ill informed, should determine policy. [10] Contemporary cultural movements were condemned likewise: feminism testified to the worthlessness of the age; modern painting (the Seccessionists) represented the rape of German art; theatre was dominated by foreign and Jewish patrons. These period cliches reflected the apocaplyptic notion that the world was subject to a process of physical and moral degeneration.
Following the idiom of other contemporary volkisch writers, List regarded the rural peasantry as the physical guarantors of a healthy nation. As a result of urban migration in the late nineteenth century, this peasantry was decreasing. List visited abandoned and depopulated farmsteads in Lower Austria, forming a dismal opinion of their wider implications. The decline of the peasant estate was, in his view, symptomatic of national decrepitude. Moreover, while the rural population dwindled, the increasing urban population gave further cause for dismay. The population of Vienna had tripled between 1870 and 1890 and urban services had clearly failed to keep pace. One-third of the city residents lived in dwellings of two rooms or less, and the city possessed one of the highest tuberculosis rates in Europe." List observed that the majority of rural immigrants fell victim to these overcrowded conditions; wretched accommodation and poor food completed the debilitation of the nation's youth. This physical decay of the nation was accompanied by moral degeneration. Like a medieval moralist enumerating the deadly sins, List compared modern urban culture to the perversions of the late Roman and Byzantine civilizations. [12]
It is evident that List's description of contemporary Austria amounted to a fundamental devaluation of the present. The entire industrial-urban complex together with its emergent social and political institutions was utterly condemned. List followed the apocalyptic model even further by claiming that this situation was due to the dominion of evil powers. The dissolution of traditional social practices and institutions posited, in List's view, a simpler and more conscious agent of change than the play of market forces, social circumstances, and structural changes of the economy. List sought a more concrete personification of these widespread socio-economic transformations in the monolithic conspiracy of the Great International Party. This imaginary body represented an anthropomorphic conception of social forces, whereby all historical change was explained by reference to agents with volition. Its origins could be detected in the Christian conspiracy against the old Ario-Germanic hierarchy. In the present the wiles of the Great International Party could be discerned in the financial institutions, the political parties and their neglect of German national interests, and in the advocates of emancipation, reform and international co-operation. The obvious paradox of a monolithic agency working behind the manifest pluralism of modern secular society should not obscure List's debt to apocalyptic logic: the identification of a single nefarious power lent a religious and revolutionary appeal to his critique of Austrian society. The Great International Party was the satanic incarnation of the present age, intangible yet monstrous and malevolent. [13]
In the face of this oppression List began to search for the signs of national salvation in accordance with the traditional apocalyptic model. He devised several theories to prove that these signs were already evident by borrowing chronological notions from Hindu cosmology and Western astrology. By 1910 he had developed an interest in cosmic cycles following their theosophical popularization as rounds. These speculations concerning the regular creation and destruction of all organisms within the cosmos enabled List to invoke apocalyptic hopes by positing the end of a cycle close in time to his own day: the start of another cycle corresponded to the adventof a new age. List indulged in abstruse calculations based on Blavatsky's figures concerning the cycles, in order to conclude that a significant cycle had terminated in 1897. [14] A further quarry of apocalyptic calculation was found in the materials of the contemporary German astrological revival amongst theosophists. Blavatsky had already referred to the solar or sidereal year, which was the time taken by the planets to take up their original alignment in the next house of the zodiac. She defined this period as c.25,868 terrestrial years. List quoted this very figure and thus derived the sidereal season, which 12.sted c.6,467 terrestrial years. Since seasonal changes played a central role in his pantheistic mythology, his application of the sidereal concept to apocalyptic was logical. In a series of articles published during the war, List claimed that the 'cosmic-fluid influences of the sidereal seasons' exercised a powerful force upon human affairs. [15] An 'armanisto-cabbalistic' calculation convinced him that the winter solstice of 1899 had simultaneously been the winter solstice of the current sidereal year. The tribulations of the modern age and the suffering unleashed by the First World War were regarded as manifestations of those cosmic equinoctial gales before the onset of the sidereal spring. This season represented an absolutely and qualitatively distinct period in the history of mankind. Within this astrological framework of speculation, the 'messianic woes' appeared as the cosmically determined heralds of redemption. [16]
Another sign, which gave List cause for messianic optimism, was his receipt of a letter in November 1911 from an individual calling himself Tarnhari. This man, whose name literally meant 'the hidden lord', claimed to be descended from the ancient tribe of the Wolsungen. This mysterious emissary from the distant past assured List that his rediscoveries concerning the Ario-Germanic past tallied with his own ancestral-clairvoyant memories. Tarnhari also confirmed the existence of the Armanenschaft: he claimed that he had been earlier reincarnated as a leading priest- king of the old elite. [17] Although Tarnhari primarily vindicated the past pole of his fantasy, List regarded the appearance of this reincarnated chieftain as a good omen of imminent national redemption on the future pole. [18] A further indication of the messianic hopes attaching to Tarnhari may be deduced from a letter from Friedrich Wannieck to List, written in the early months of the war. The old patron suggested that Tarnhari should reveal himself openly, now that Germany stood in an hour of need. [19]
These various signs indicated the imminent destruction of the satanic antagonist. List demanded the annihilation of the Great International Party in order that the Ario-Germans could enter the promised land of happiness and prosperity. [20] In 1911 he voiced a prophecy of millenarian combat, which strangely anticipated the naval and military hostilities of the First World War:
These battles are consistent with the apocalyptic model. An enormous revolt, redolent of the twilight of the gods or the barbarian migrations, will smash the infernal enemy to create a righteous and pan-German order.
This prognostication of a German war of aggression against the non-German world was rooted in List's desire for apocalyptic vengeance. He recognized that an international war could satisfy his demand for a more visible, tangible, and anti-German enemy than the imaginary Great International Party. This translation of millenarian struggle into a war of nations also spared List the hopeless and undesirable revolt against the domestic establishment, the traditional features of which he was anxious to conserve. This conjunction of chiliastic bellicosity and a disinclination towards authentic social revolution is corroborated by the predilection for national wars on the part of many conservative revolutionaries and fascists in Europe. [22]
The outbreak of the First World War was greeted with jubilation in all belligerent countries. Some historians have suggested that this popular response evidenced a widespread desire for novelty after several seemingly stagnant decades. Others have noted a burgeoning imperialism coupled with the wish for distraction from pressing social reforms. In Germany there flourished the 'Ideas of 1914', an intellectual formulation of the general feeling of relief that national unity had overcome social division in the face of a foreign enemy. The pre-war cultural pessimists identified the former national ills with the insidious influence of the western democracies, which were now to be vanquished by the sword. It is against this euphoric reaction that List's apocalyptic attitude to the war must be understood. [23]
In April 1915 List convened a meeting of the HAO in Vienna. He delivered an Easter oration in which he welcomed the war as the onset of a millenarian struggle that would usher in the new age. He warned that this age of transition would initially witness a sharpening of adversity, 'frightful outrages and maddening torments'. But these trials would eventually separate the good from the bad for all time, since all true Germans 'were preparing a new age, in which nothing pertaining to the old age could survive unless it was Armanist in nature'. [24] The war played an important role in List's millenarian fantasy. International hostilities represented the 'messianic woes' with their increasingly intolerable misfortunes and also acted as a divine court of judgement which would divide the people into the eschatological camps of the saved and the damned. He closed his oration with an expression of temporal dualism perfectly consistent with traditional Western apocalyptic.
The attitudes of his cult followers towards the war corresponded closely to his own. Tarnhari spoke of the war as a 'holy august emergency', while Ellegaard Ellerbek dated his letters according to the day of 'the holiest war'. List adopted a similar chronology by completing his apocalyptic piece entitled 'Es wird einmal ... !' with the date 'Vienna, on the thousandth day of the Holiest War, 22 April 1917', and celebrating the day by having a studio-photograph taken of himself working in his study. Numerous other pieces of correspondence from List's circle repeat this view of the war as a sacred crusade against the demonic hosts; its harsh trials, whether encountered in the trenches or the hungry cities, were to be borne joyfully on account of their apocalyptic significance. [25]
This positive attitude towards suffering prompts its comparison with a phenomenon that Michael Barkun has defined as the 'disaster utopia'. Barkun observes the ambiguity of disaster which, while obviously subjecting people to deprivation, can also produce unusual feelings of well-being. He notes that disasters often induce a temporary sense of common purpose and that 'invidious social distinctions disappear in a suddenly opened and democratized atmosphere'. [26] This evaluation accords well with the euphoria implicit in the 'Ideas of 1914', and also illuminates List's enthusiasm for the actual hardships of war. Because a belief in the millennium often assumes the occurrence of disasters that precede the epiphany, the sense of fellowship in the midst of actual disasters can appear to confirm the millenarian expectations. For List, suffering augured salvation. [27]
How did List actually envisage this collective salvation? For his descriptions of the millennium he tended to make use of mythological materials drawn from medieval German apocalyptic, Norse legends, and modern theosophy in order to convey its fantastic nature. He related the medieval tale of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa who lay sleeping inside the Kyffhauser mountain. Once he awakened, Barbarossa would unleash a wave of Teutonic fury across the world prior to the establishment of German hegemony. This tale owed its inspiration to a complex of medieval millenarian hopes which had originally crystallized around the Hohenstauffen emperors in the thirteenth century. Owing to a variety of historical and cultural circumstances, these hopes later lit upon the Habsburg emperors Frederick IV and Maximilian I in the fifteenth century. One millenarian tract of the period entitled Gamaleon had told of a future German emperor who was to overthrow the French monarchy and the Papacy. The Church of Rome would be expropriated and all its clergy exterminated. Once their oppressors had been vanquished, the Germans would be exalted over all other peoples. In place of the Pope a new German patriarch at Mainz would preside over a new Church subordinate to the emperor, a new Frederick, whose dominion would embrace the entire earth. [28]
List's own vision of the Armanist millennium owed much to this mixture of crude early nationalism with the tradition of popular eschatology. As in those early modern manifestoes one finds the same belief in a primitive German world in which the divine will was once realized and which had been the source of all good until it was undermined by a conspiracy of inferior, non-Germanic peoples, the Church, the capitalists, the Jews, the liberals, or whatever. This ideal world would be restored by a new aristocracy under a God-sent saviour who would fulfil the religious and political expectations of the oppressed. List drew upon the traditions of this obscure historical chiliasm by claiming that the reigns of Frederick IV and Maximilian I betokened a renaissance of the Armanist spirit, the thrust of which had been sadly aborted by the conspiratorial Lutheran Reformation. [29] Itis further significant that List was attracted to the ideas of Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century philosopher and heretic. Bruno had proclaimed thatJudaism and Christianity had corrupted the ancient and true religion, by which he meant the mysticism and the magic of the Egyptian Hermetica, which had enjoyed considerable popularity amongst the Neoplatonists of the Renaissance. Bruno also wanted a new dispensation based on the rediscovered ancient gnosis. This conjunction of millenarian hopes and cabbalistic thought also appeared in List's vision of the new Germany. With great approval he quoted Bruno: 'O Jove, let the Germans realise their own strength ... and they will not be men, but gods'. [30]
A particular Norse legend offered another vision of the millenium which is important for this analysis. As early as 1891, List had discovered a verse of the 'Voluspa' which invoked an awesome and benevolent messianic figure:
This Starke von Oben (Strong One from Above) became a stock phrase in all List's subsequent references to the millennium. An ostensibly superhuman individual would end all human factions and confusion with the establishment of an eternal order. This divine dictator possessed particular appeal for those who lamented the uncertain nature of industrial society. List eagerly anticipated the advent of this leader, whose monolithic world of certainties would fulfil the sociopolitical conditions of his national millennium.
Lastly, theosophy offered an occult vision of the millennium. Towards the end of the war, List suggested that the Austrian and German victims of the slaughter on the battle-fronts would be reincarnated as a collective messianic body. He applied the principle of karma to claim that the hundred thousands of war-dead would be reborn with innate millenarian fervour: these young men would then form the elite messianic corps in a later post-war national revolution. From his calculations based on 'cosmic and astrological laws', List deduced that the years 1914, 1923 and 1932 had an intimate relation with the coming Armanist millennium. He favoured the year 1932 as the time when a divine force would possess the collective unconsciousness of the German people. This generation of resurrected revolutionaries would become sensitive to the divine force and constitute a fanatic league which would usher in the new age. Order, national revenge, and fervour would then transform modern pluralist society into a monolithic, eternal, and incorruptible state. [32] This totalitarian vision was List's blueprint for the future Greater Germanic Reich. In his anticipation of Nazi Germany, his calculation was only one year out.
FRITZ SAXL, the German historian of Renaissance ideas, was an early observer of the renewed interest in fortune-telling at the beginning of the twentieth century. He dated its origins to around 1910, while noting that a number of periodicals devoted to astrology sprang up over the next decade in Germany, accompanied by textbooks, prophecies and reprints of astrological classics. In due course palmistry, numerology, cabbalism and tarot supplemented astrology to form the principal scientific bases of a popular divinatory movement which grew prodigiously in the 1920s. Saxl reflected that, although these sciences may be erroneous from a logical point of view, the imaginative or religious background of such a popular movement is of the greatest importance. A theoretical concern with the measurement of data for a system of correspondences between natural phenomena and human affairs retains a neutral scientific status, but its predictive tenor can be regarded legitimately as a function of human hopes and needs. Indeed, such foretelling of future events may become vitally important to individuals and groups that are subject to anxiety or deprivation. Saxl similarly regarded prophecy as a symptom of widespread social unease at a time when the traditional expectations of certain groups appeared to be frustrated. He considered its modern manifestation to be one of the omens of the First World War. [1]
List's prophecies were addressed collectively to the German nation and appeared to fulfil a similar function to individual fortune-telling. He foretold that an age of universal prosperity was approaching to alleviate the tribulations of German nationalists in Central Europe. This optimistic forward-looking attitude did not contradict his paeans to the past. The prophecy of a happy national future complemented his nostalgia for a lost golden age inasmuch as it denoted the restoration of his imaginary traditional world. Past and future represented the twin poles of a counter-ideal in time generated by a profound disenchantment with the present; the secret Armanist heritage throughout the allegedly benighted Christian epoch formed a bridge between these two ideal ages; such Armanist survivals were both the relics of the old dispensation and the heralds of the new order. This chapter examines the nature of List's prophecy and assesses its social significance and appeal, showing how his cyclical conception of time initially sponsored the idea of fluctuatory fortune, and how these sentiments were later modified by the idea of ultimate salvation and a linear conception of history.
List's cyclical vision of time was derived from his three sources of theological inspiration: the holy world of Nature, Norse mythology and modern theosophy. It has already been shown how the elementary content of Armanist doctrine focused upon the 'laws of nature', which ostensibly determined the periodicity of all planetary and organic cycles in the cosmos. List frequently invoked these cosmic rhythms in his early pieces on national landscape: [2] that their sustaining laws assumed the status of a divine principle in his later writings testifies to his belief in cyclical time. Secondly, one must consider the import of Norse myths in this respect. List's references to the Fimbulwinter and the Gotterdammerung suggest that he was familiar with those pagan legends, according to which there came a mighty winter after which the whole earth was consumed by fire and flood before rising anew, 'fertile, green and fair as never before, cleansed of all its sufferings and evil'. [3] According to these myths, the cycle of destruction and creation was repeated indefinitely. Lastly, List's adoption of theosophy with its cosmic rounds, and the individual's successive reincarnation in each round, served to confirm his conviction in the recurrence of all things.
Such cyclical notions of time may coexist with ideas of salvation and redemption, but these cannot enjoy any unique or final status. The termination of any given cycle heralds spiritual evolution and cosmic renovation, but the implacable logic of the cycle will still prevail: the organism will decline and perish recurrently into eternity. List rejected this oriental fatalism regarding time and destiny in favour of Judaeo-Christian notions of salvation. Although he had adopted theosophical materials for his cosmology, he was loath to accept its limited soteriology. His hopes for a restoration of the traditional world and a national revival led him to the materials of Western apocalyptic. Its explicit assumptions of linear time and a unique, final redemption jar continually with the cyclical implications of theosophy throughout his writings. In the light of List's vilification of Christianity, this adoption is ironic. In due course List's vision of a pan-German empire was almost wholly based on Western apocalyptic.
Both Jewish and Christian apocalypses distinguish themselves from other forms of prophecy by asserting an absolute and qualitative difference between the present age and the future. This dualistic and linear time scheme is represented by the juxtaposition of a pessimistic view of the present with a fantastic and joyful image of the future. The present age is devalued by a depressing account of the hardships and misfortunes that have befallen the people. The apocalyptic writer often indicates that the world is subject to an increasing physical and moral degeneration: mundus iam senescit. These complaints can extend to the charge that the world is under the dominion of Satan or other evil powers. At a point in the narrative coincident with the time of the apocalypse's composition, this historical survey gives way to prophecy proper. It is predicted that the former ills will be exacerbated by yet worse adversities. There will be signs of an ultimate catastrophe, such as violent climatic changes, drought, earthquakes and fire. Finally the evil spirit of this first age may appear as a dragon or other beast to torment mankind. The end of this age approaches as these so-called 'messianic woes' become increasingly intolerable. A divine warrior-leader will suddenly intervene to liberate his chosen people from their affliction. This messiah will bind or destroy the evil tyrant before establishing his own divine and incorruptible kingdom on earth. These acts initiate a new second age, when the joyful elect of the redeemed will know no suffering nor want; this new world will not be subject to the ordinary laws of nature and physical limitation; happiness and good fortune will reign eternally. [4]
The essential features of Western apocalyptic prophecy can be discerned in these broad outlines. A first, woeful, even evil age proceeds to its climax, when a new age dawns wherein the former sufferers will be redeemed and exalted. Such prophecy possesses enormous appeal for those beset by severe adversity. Norman Cohn has shown how certain disoriented social groups in medieval Europe took these apocalypses quite literally. [5] Whenever particular hardships occurred, apocalyptic groups would discern the traditional signs of those final 'messianic woes'. Tyrants were regularly identified with the monstrous beast of the last days, an incarnation of the Antichrist. The sufferers took comfort in expectation of a messianic redeemer, who would fulfil the prophecy by establishing the felicitous millennium in which they would participate as an elect. These hopes might lead the sufferers to conceive of themselves as a messianic vanguard and they engaged in rebellious activities against the Establishment in order to secure themselves a worthy place in the new world. The degree of such militancy would stand in a relationship to the supposed proximity of salvation. [6]
The survival of these ancient religious fantasies in the landscape of Western revolutionary imagination suggests that these myths satisfy a deep-seated demand for comfort and hope at times of oppression and strife. But poverty, pestilence, and war were all commonplace in medieval Europe and did not in themselves generate apocalyptic beliefs: a millenarian tradition had also to be present. Once a personal Lebenswelt has been upset by disaster it is easy to see apocalyptic as a fundamental and religious system of explanation. The putative source of the disaster is identified as an absolute evil power, the destruction of which is anticipated with hopes of the millenium. Absolute categories of good and evil, order and sin, restore cognitive harmony in the minds of the deprived and disoriented. Eschatological ideas have thus remained a perennial fantasy within the Judaeo-Christian orbit of religious influence.
List echoed traditional apocalyptic by expressing extreme pessimism about many aspects of modern Austrian society. His concern was greatest with regard to the nationality question. The status of German language and culture in Austria had been increasingly challenged by the Slavs of the empire over the preceding decades. The process had been furthered by the Taafe government or 'Iron Ring', which had derived its support from a broad base of clerical, conservative, and slavophile interests from 1879 until 1893. A triumph of Slav interests appeared to have been achieved in 1897 when Count Badeni introduced his language decrees, whereby all civil servants in Bohemia would have to speak both Czech and German, a qualification which would have clearly discriminated against the Germans. List fulminated against the clerical and socialist parties that favoured Slav interests and, drawing on the contemporary slogans of the Schonererite Pan- German and Los von Rom movements, he denounced the national outrage of Czech priests being appointed to German parishes in the ethnic borderlands and decried the preponderance of Slav civil servants in the bureaucracy. [7]
His critique of contemporary Austria also embraced wider social and economic issues. He bemoaned the current economic tendencies towards laissez-faire capitalism and large-scale enterprise, because they undermined the existence of artisans, craftsmen and small middleclass entrepreneurs. He complained that commerce had lost its former ethical code and regarded the decline of the guilds as the collapse of the 'bastions of the burgher-world'. [8] List's own concept of economic order was based nostalgically on those pre-capitalist modes of finance and production which were hard-pressed by modernization. He viewed the growth of modern banking and other financial institutions as the machinations of an immoral minority who speculated with paper tokens at the expense of honest men engaged in the production of tangible and proper goods. He condemned all finance as usury and indulged in period anti-Semitic sentiments culled from the newspapers of Georg von Schonerer and Aurelius Polzer. He finally recounted the story of the Vienna stock exchange crash of 1873 as the inevitable outcome of modern business practice.
List's critique of the new economics actually typified the attitude of many Austrian contemporaries. Since only a fraction of industrialization could be ascribed to autochthonous entrepreneurs, with the State and foreign investors playing the major role, domestic investment generally came from the banks and credit institutions. For this reason capitalism was regarded as the preserve of a small, closed group. This attitude was reinforced after the 1873 crash, when the wider public had no further desire to speculate in equities. Pulzer has commented that, when the growth of capitalism was a process with which the majority of the population could not identify itself, feelings of pessimistic anger and pseudo-revolutionary conservatism were bound to assert themselves. [9] List's innovation consisted in channelling these sentiments into an expression of apocalyptic protest.
List was no less pessimistic concerning modern political and cultural tendencies. A staunch defender of the monarchical principle and the Habsburg dynasty, he denounced all popular and democratic institutions of representation. Parliamentarianism was pure nonsense since it was based on the premiss that a majority of votes, however well or ill informed, should determine policy. [10] Contemporary cultural movements were condemned likewise: feminism testified to the worthlessness of the age; modern painting (the Seccessionists) represented the rape of German art; theatre was dominated by foreign and Jewish patrons. These period cliches reflected the apocaplyptic notion that the world was subject to a process of physical and moral degeneration.
Following the idiom of other contemporary volkisch writers, List regarded the rural peasantry as the physical guarantors of a healthy nation. As a result of urban migration in the late nineteenth century, this peasantry was decreasing. List visited abandoned and depopulated farmsteads in Lower Austria, forming a dismal opinion of their wider implications. The decline of the peasant estate was, in his view, symptomatic of national decrepitude. Moreover, while the rural population dwindled, the increasing urban population gave further cause for dismay. The population of Vienna had tripled between 1870 and 1890 and urban services had clearly failed to keep pace. One-third of the city residents lived in dwellings of two rooms or less, and the city possessed one of the highest tuberculosis rates in Europe." List observed that the majority of rural immigrants fell victim to these overcrowded conditions; wretched accommodation and poor food completed the debilitation of the nation's youth. This physical decay of the nation was accompanied by moral degeneration. Like a medieval moralist enumerating the deadly sins, List compared modern urban culture to the perversions of the late Roman and Byzantine civilizations. [12]
It is evident that List's description of contemporary Austria amounted to a fundamental devaluation of the present. The entire industrial-urban complex together with its emergent social and political institutions was utterly condemned. List followed the apocalyptic model even further by claiming that this situation was due to the dominion of evil powers. The dissolution of traditional social practices and institutions posited, in List's view, a simpler and more conscious agent of change than the play of market forces, social circumstances, and structural changes of the economy. List sought a more concrete personification of these widespread socio-economic transformations in the monolithic conspiracy of the Great International Party. This imaginary body represented an anthropomorphic conception of social forces, whereby all historical change was explained by reference to agents with volition. Its origins could be detected in the Christian conspiracy against the old Ario-Germanic hierarchy. In the present the wiles of the Great International Party could be discerned in the financial institutions, the political parties and their neglect of German national interests, and in the advocates of emancipation, reform and international co-operation. The obvious paradox of a monolithic agency working behind the manifest pluralism of modern secular society should not obscure List's debt to apocalyptic logic: the identification of a single nefarious power lent a religious and revolutionary appeal to his critique of Austrian society. The Great International Party was the satanic incarnation of the present age, intangible yet monstrous and malevolent. [13]
In the face of this oppression List began to search for the signs of national salvation in accordance with the traditional apocalyptic model. He devised several theories to prove that these signs were already evident by borrowing chronological notions from Hindu cosmology and Western astrology. By 1910 he had developed an interest in cosmic cycles following their theosophical popularization as rounds. These speculations concerning the regular creation and destruction of all organisms within the cosmos enabled List to invoke apocalyptic hopes by positing the end of a cycle close in time to his own day: the start of another cycle corresponded to the adventof a new age. List indulged in abstruse calculations based on Blavatsky's figures concerning the cycles, in order to conclude that a significant cycle had terminated in 1897. [14] A further quarry of apocalyptic calculation was found in the materials of the contemporary German astrological revival amongst theosophists. Blavatsky had already referred to the solar or sidereal year, which was the time taken by the planets to take up their original alignment in the next house of the zodiac. She defined this period as c.25,868 terrestrial years. List quoted this very figure and thus derived the sidereal season, which 12.sted c.6,467 terrestrial years. Since seasonal changes played a central role in his pantheistic mythology, his application of the sidereal concept to apocalyptic was logical. In a series of articles published during the war, List claimed that the 'cosmic-fluid influences of the sidereal seasons' exercised a powerful force upon human affairs. [15] An 'armanisto-cabbalistic' calculation convinced him that the winter solstice of 1899 had simultaneously been the winter solstice of the current sidereal year. The tribulations of the modern age and the suffering unleashed by the First World War were regarded as manifestations of those cosmic equinoctial gales before the onset of the sidereal spring. This season represented an absolutely and qualitatively distinct period in the history of mankind. Within this astrological framework of speculation, the 'messianic woes' appeared as the cosmically determined heralds of redemption. [16]
Another sign, which gave List cause for messianic optimism, was his receipt of a letter in November 1911 from an individual calling himself Tarnhari. This man, whose name literally meant 'the hidden lord', claimed to be descended from the ancient tribe of the Wolsungen. This mysterious emissary from the distant past assured List that his rediscoveries concerning the Ario-Germanic past tallied with his own ancestral-clairvoyant memories. Tarnhari also confirmed the existence of the Armanenschaft: he claimed that he had been earlier reincarnated as a leading priest- king of the old elite. [17] Although Tarnhari primarily vindicated the past pole of his fantasy, List regarded the appearance of this reincarnated chieftain as a good omen of imminent national redemption on the future pole. [18] A further indication of the messianic hopes attaching to Tarnhari may be deduced from a letter from Friedrich Wannieck to List, written in the early months of the war. The old patron suggested that Tarnhari should reveal himself openly, now that Germany stood in an hour of need. [19]
These various signs indicated the imminent destruction of the satanic antagonist. List demanded the annihilation of the Great International Party in order that the Ario-Germans could enter the promised land of happiness and prosperity. [20] In 1911 he voiced a prophecy of millenarian combat, which strangely anticipated the naval and military hostilities of the First World War:
Ja, noch einmal sollen die Funken aus den ario-germanisch-deutschen-osterreichichischen Schlachtschiffen stieben, noch einmal sollen Donars Schlachtenblitze aus den Kolossalkanonen unserer Dreadnoughts zischelnd zungeln, noch einmal sollen unsere Volkerheere ... nach Suden und Westen ... wettern, um [den Feind] U schlagen ... damit Ordnung geschaffen werde. [21]
[Yes, the Ario-German-Austrian battleships shall once more send sparks flying, Donar's lightning shall once more shoot sizzling from the giant guns of our dreadnoughts, our national armies shall once more storm southwards and westwards to smash the enemy and create order.]
These battles are consistent with the apocalyptic model. An enormous revolt, redolent of the twilight of the gods or the barbarian migrations, will smash the infernal enemy to create a righteous and pan-German order.
This prognostication of a German war of aggression against the non-German world was rooted in List's desire for apocalyptic vengeance. He recognized that an international war could satisfy his demand for a more visible, tangible, and anti-German enemy than the imaginary Great International Party. This translation of millenarian struggle into a war of nations also spared List the hopeless and undesirable revolt against the domestic establishment, the traditional features of which he was anxious to conserve. This conjunction of chiliastic bellicosity and a disinclination towards authentic social revolution is corroborated by the predilection for national wars on the part of many conservative revolutionaries and fascists in Europe. [22]
The outbreak of the First World War was greeted with jubilation in all belligerent countries. Some historians have suggested that this popular response evidenced a widespread desire for novelty after several seemingly stagnant decades. Others have noted a burgeoning imperialism coupled with the wish for distraction from pressing social reforms. In Germany there flourished the 'Ideas of 1914', an intellectual formulation of the general feeling of relief that national unity had overcome social division in the face of a foreign enemy. The pre-war cultural pessimists identified the former national ills with the insidious influence of the western democracies, which were now to be vanquished by the sword. It is against this euphoric reaction that List's apocalyptic attitude to the war must be understood. [23]
In April 1915 List convened a meeting of the HAO in Vienna. He delivered an Easter oration in which he welcomed the war as the onset of a millenarian struggle that would usher in the new age. He warned that this age of transition would initially witness a sharpening of adversity, 'frightful outrages and maddening torments'. But these trials would eventually separate the good from the bad for all time, since all true Germans 'were preparing a new age, in which nothing pertaining to the old age could survive unless it was Armanist in nature'. [24] The war played an important role in List's millenarian fantasy. International hostilities represented the 'messianic woes' with their increasingly intolerable misfortunes and also acted as a divine court of judgement which would divide the people into the eschatological camps of the saved and the damned. He closed his oration with an expression of temporal dualism perfectly consistent with traditional Western apocalyptic.
The attitudes of his cult followers towards the war corresponded closely to his own. Tarnhari spoke of the war as a 'holy august emergency', while Ellegaard Ellerbek dated his letters according to the day of 'the holiest war'. List adopted a similar chronology by completing his apocalyptic piece entitled 'Es wird einmal ... !' with the date 'Vienna, on the thousandth day of the Holiest War, 22 April 1917', and celebrating the day by having a studio-photograph taken of himself working in his study. Numerous other pieces of correspondence from List's circle repeat this view of the war as a sacred crusade against the demonic hosts; its harsh trials, whether encountered in the trenches or the hungry cities, were to be borne joyfully on account of their apocalyptic significance. [25]
This positive attitude towards suffering prompts its comparison with a phenomenon that Michael Barkun has defined as the 'disaster utopia'. Barkun observes the ambiguity of disaster which, while obviously subjecting people to deprivation, can also produce unusual feelings of well-being. He notes that disasters often induce a temporary sense of common purpose and that 'invidious social distinctions disappear in a suddenly opened and democratized atmosphere'. [26] This evaluation accords well with the euphoria implicit in the 'Ideas of 1914', and also illuminates List's enthusiasm for the actual hardships of war. Because a belief in the millennium often assumes the occurrence of disasters that precede the epiphany, the sense of fellowship in the midst of actual disasters can appear to confirm the millenarian expectations. For List, suffering augured salvation. [27]
How did List actually envisage this collective salvation? For his descriptions of the millennium he tended to make use of mythological materials drawn from medieval German apocalyptic, Norse legends, and modern theosophy in order to convey its fantastic nature. He related the medieval tale of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa who lay sleeping inside the Kyffhauser mountain. Once he awakened, Barbarossa would unleash a wave of Teutonic fury across the world prior to the establishment of German hegemony. This tale owed its inspiration to a complex of medieval millenarian hopes which had originally crystallized around the Hohenstauffen emperors in the thirteenth century. Owing to a variety of historical and cultural circumstances, these hopes later lit upon the Habsburg emperors Frederick IV and Maximilian I in the fifteenth century. One millenarian tract of the period entitled Gamaleon had told of a future German emperor who was to overthrow the French monarchy and the Papacy. The Church of Rome would be expropriated and all its clergy exterminated. Once their oppressors had been vanquished, the Germans would be exalted over all other peoples. In place of the Pope a new German patriarch at Mainz would preside over a new Church subordinate to the emperor, a new Frederick, whose dominion would embrace the entire earth. [28]
List's own vision of the Armanist millennium owed much to this mixture of crude early nationalism with the tradition of popular eschatology. As in those early modern manifestoes one finds the same belief in a primitive German world in which the divine will was once realized and which had been the source of all good until it was undermined by a conspiracy of inferior, non-Germanic peoples, the Church, the capitalists, the Jews, the liberals, or whatever. This ideal world would be restored by a new aristocracy under a God-sent saviour who would fulfil the religious and political expectations of the oppressed. List drew upon the traditions of this obscure historical chiliasm by claiming that the reigns of Frederick IV and Maximilian I betokened a renaissance of the Armanist spirit, the thrust of which had been sadly aborted by the conspiratorial Lutheran Reformation. [29] Itis further significant that List was attracted to the ideas of Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century philosopher and heretic. Bruno had proclaimed thatJudaism and Christianity had corrupted the ancient and true religion, by which he meant the mysticism and the magic of the Egyptian Hermetica, which had enjoyed considerable popularity amongst the Neoplatonists of the Renaissance. Bruno also wanted a new dispensation based on the rediscovered ancient gnosis. This conjunction of millenarian hopes and cabbalistic thought also appeared in List's vision of the new Germany. With great approval he quoted Bruno: 'O Jove, let the Germans realise their own strength ... and they will not be men, but gods'. [30]
A particular Norse legend offered another vision of the millenium which is important for this analysis. As early as 1891, List had discovered a verse of the 'Voluspa' which invoked an awesome and benevolent messianic figure:
Denn es kommt ein Reicher zum Ringe der Rater, Ein Starke von Oben beendet den Streit, Mit schlichtenden Schlussen entscheidet er alles, Bleiben soll ewig, was er gebeut [gebot]. [31]
[A wealthy man joins the circle of counsellors, A Strong One from Above ends the faction, He settles everything with fair decisions, Whatever he ordains shall endure for ever.]
This Starke von Oben (Strong One from Above) became a stock phrase in all List's subsequent references to the millennium. An ostensibly superhuman individual would end all human factions and confusion with the establishment of an eternal order. This divine dictator possessed particular appeal for those who lamented the uncertain nature of industrial society. List eagerly anticipated the advent of this leader, whose monolithic world of certainties would fulfil the sociopolitical conditions of his national millennium.
Lastly, theosophy offered an occult vision of the millennium. Towards the end of the war, List suggested that the Austrian and German victims of the slaughter on the battle-fronts would be reincarnated as a collective messianic body. He applied the principle of karma to claim that the hundred thousands of war-dead would be reborn with innate millenarian fervour: these young men would then form the elite messianic corps in a later post-war national revolution. From his calculations based on 'cosmic and astrological laws', List deduced that the years 1914, 1923 and 1932 had an intimate relation with the coming Armanist millennium. He favoured the year 1932 as the time when a divine force would possess the collective unconsciousness of the German people. This generation of resurrected revolutionaries would become sensitive to the divine force and constitute a fanatic league which would usher in the new age. Order, national revenge, and fervour would then transform modern pluralist society into a monolithic, eternal, and incorruptible state. [32] This totalitarian vision was List's blueprint for the future Greater Germanic Reich. In his anticipation of Nazi Germany, his calculation was only one year out.