NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN THE

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN THE

Postby admin » Wed Jun 17, 2015 11:17 pm

Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich
by George L. Mosse
© 1966 by George L. Mosse
Translations by Salvator Attanasio and others

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Table of Contents:

Back Cover
Advisory Board
Acknowledgments
Editor's Note
INTRODUCTION
I. HITLER SETS THE TONE
Editor's Introduction
FROM CULTURE AS THE FAITH IN AN IDEAL REICH TO ITS DIFFUSION AMONG THE MASSES
The Power of Ideals
The Aryan as Custodian of Culture
The State Is Not an End But a Means
The Jew Has No Culture
The Necessity of Propaganda
How Hitler Viewed the Masses
Education Must Be Based on Ideals
Education, Instinct, and Will
HITLER DEFINES CULTURE IN DEFINING ART
The Cultural Renascence
2. WHAT SORT OF A REVOLUTION?
Editor's Introduction
THE GOOD FIGHT
Here Marched the New Germany, by FRIEDRICH JOACHIM KLAEHN
A Meeting-Hall Brawl, by KURT MASSMANN
THE BONDS OF FAMILY
National Socialism Has Restored the Family, by HANNS ANDERLAHN
The German Volk Is an Interlacing of Families, by LUDWIG LEONHARDT
Marriage, Morality, and Property, by HERMANN PAULL
THE IDEAL OF WOMANHOOD
The Tasks of Women, by ADOLF HITLER
Emancipation from the Emancipation Movement, ALFRED ROSENBERG
Domestic Diligence from Blood and Soil
The Female Bird, by JOSEPH GOEBBELS
Women That We Can Love
Frau Goebbels on German Women
The Blond Craze
A Shiny Nose and the German Nation
Faith and Beauty
Right Conduct
The Honor Cross of the German Mother
The Woman Student
Against the Political Woman, by ENGELBERT HUBER
THE SOCIAL REALITY
Does the Five O'Clock Tea Suit Our Time?
Fairytale Scenes on Peacock Island
Beautiful Gowns at the Annual Press Ball
Wanted: Croupiers
3. THE FOUNDATION: RACISM
Editor's Introduction
The Nordic Race as "Ideal Type", by HANS F. K. GUNTHER
Racial Soul, Landscape, and World Domination, by LUDWIG FERDINAND CLAUSS
The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul, by ALFRED ROSENBERG
Heredity and Racial Biology for Students, by JAKOB GRAF
The New Biology: Training in Racial Citizenship, by PAUL BROHMER
To Preserve the Strength of the Race: Compulsory Sterilization, by ERICH RISTOW
4. BUILDING MYTHS AND HEROES
Editor's Introduction
Nietzsche and National Socialism, by ALFRED BAEUMLER
A Soldier Believes in Plain Talk, by ERNST ROHM
Michael: A German Fate, by JOSEPH GOEBBELS
Germany Must Live, by FRIEDRICH BUBENDEN
The Difference Between Generations, by HANNS JOHST
Fritz Todt: Contemporary Hero, by EDUARD SCHONLEBEN
Frederick the Great: Prussian Hero, by WILHELM IHDE
The Diary of an SA Man's Bride, by GUDRUN STREITER
On Festivities in the School, by HERMANN KLAUSS
5. TOWARD A TOTAL CULTURE
Editor's Introduction
Intellectuals Must Belong to the People, by HERMANN BURTE
The Birth of Intellectuals
Streicher the Intellectual
A Balance Is Necessary
The German Peasant Formed German History, by R. WALTHER DARRE
Freedom and Organization, by JOSEPH GOEBBELS
On the National Responsibility of Publishers, by ADOLF SPEMANN
Goebbels Forbids Art Criticism
What Is German in German Art?, by KURT KARL EBERLEIN
The Poet Summoned by History, by HEINRICH ZILLICH
Wulfe's Manor: Two Episodes in a Peasant's Life, by JOSEFA BERENS-TOTENOHL
A Rowdy as Hero: From an Anti-Jewish Novel, by TUDEL WELLER
Events at the Prussian State Theater, by ECKART VON NASO
Playbills of the Herne City Theater, 1936-1940
The Winter Program of the German Radio, 1936
Fundamental Features of Radio Programming, 1938
German Films for Venice, 1938
The Film Public Is Not So Stupid
6. SCIENCE AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Editor's Introduction
The Limits of Science, by PHILIPP LENARD
Respect for Facts and Aptitude for Exact Observation Reside in the Nordic Race, by JOHANNES STARK
Nature Presupposes a Spiritual Disposition, by BRUNO THURING
Psychotherapy and Political World View, by KURT GAUGER
The Physician Must Come to Terms with the Irrational, by HANNS LOHR
7. CHRISTIANITY
Editor's Introduction
The Fuhrer Bequeathed to Me by the Lord
Christ in the Community of Blood and Fate
The Task of Proclaiming Christ among the German People
National Socialist and Christian Concepts Are Incompatible, by MARTIN BORMANN
The Epistle of St. Paul Is in Error
To Capture Youth
Judaism, Christianity, and Germany, by CARDINAL FAULHABER
Nurses and Philosophy
8. THE KEY: EDUCATION OF YOUTH
Editor's Introduction
INSIDE THE SCHOOL
To Be Part of a Movement!, by INGE SCHOLL
The Parents Abdicate, by PAUL OESTREICH
Skepticism and Participation, by ILSE MCKEE
The Lively Youngster
The Test, by L. GRUNBERG
Physical Education and National Socialism
Ten Calories More Character, by HANS SCHEMM
The Fellowship of Battle
Racial Instruction and the National Community
Do Not Stand Apart!, by LUCIE ALEXANDER
Can Youth Be National Socialist?, by RUDOLPH RAMLOW
A SCHOOLBOOK SAMPLER
The Fuhrer of Elementary-School Children
From the Oak Tree to Certain Victory, by WILHELM STECKELINGS
The Sun as a Symbol of Dedicated Youth, by BALDUR VON SCHIRACH
A Flight Through the Storm and Hitler's Mission, by OTTO DIETRICH
Essays with Right Answers
THE PRESSURES OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL
The Hitler Youth, by BALDUR VON SCHIRACH
The Development of the SS Man
THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY
The Renovation of the Academic Community, by GERHARD KRUGER
Work Is Future, by WEINER BEUMELBURG
Admission to the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin
New Courses for a New Reich
The Nature of Academic Freedom, by WALTER SCHULTZE
Jewish Graduates Are Numbers, Not Persons
9. WHAT IS THE STATE AND WHO ARE ITS CITIZENS?
Editor's Introduction
Public Law in a New Context, by CARL SCHMITT
Civil Rights and the Natural Inequality of Man, by WILHELM STUCKART AND HANS GLOBKE
The Reich Citizenship Law
The Jew Is Outside the Law, by WALTHER BUCH
Anchoring the Civil Service in the Nation, by ROLAND FREISLER
10. WORKERS AND SHOPKEEPERS
Editor's Introduction
THE WORKER: IDEAL AND REALITY
Statistics on Occupational Composition of Members of the Nazi Party
The Struggle for the Achievement of German Socialism
The Correct Attitude Toward Work
Plant Managers -- This Must Not Be!
A Wage Freeze for Stenographers
The Conversion of "Comrade" Muller, by WALTER DACH
THE BILL IS PRESENTED
What the German People Pay in Taxes, 1939
The Cost of Living, 1933-1937
They Who Serve Are Well Paid
The Situation of the German Retail Trade
Throttling the Retail Trade
The Price Police
A Butcher Resists
11. THE ASSUMPTION OF POWER
Editor's Introduction
Our Town under the Swastika, by OTTO MICHAEL KNAB
The Changed Tempo of Life: The City of Herne
The Nazis Take Over Cologne
Little Things Create Pressures, by HERMANN STRESAU
Vanishing Friends, by ERICH EBERMAYER
Illustrations
"The Four Elements," a painting which hung over the mantelpiece in Hitler's house in Munich
The ideal Aryan family as represented on a calendar [From Kaknder des rassenpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP, 1938.
An example of the kind of poster art that played an important role in Nazi propaganda [From Anschlage, deutsche Plakate als Dokumente der Zeit (Munich, 1963)]
The Honor Cross of the German Mother [From Das Jahr IV (Berlin, 1939)]
Adolf Ziegler's "The Judgment of Paris," illustrating ideal Aryan types [From Die Kunst im dritten Reich (1939)]
"Awakening" by Richard Klein, which was shown at the 1937 Exhibition of German Art [From Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937]
A painting of the ideal German girl [From N. S. Frauenvarte, Heft I, Jahrg. 8 (July 1939)]
A film advertisement, 1936 [From Schleisische Tageszeitung, November 16, 1936 (Wiener Library Clipping Collection).)
Arno Brecker's sculpture representing an idealized Germanic hero [From Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung 1942]
"The Guardian" by Arno Brecker, one of Hitler's favorite sculptors [From Franz Rodens, Vom Wesen deutscher Kunst (Berlin, 1941)]
A mural idealizing active youth [From Die Kunst im dritten Reich (1939)]
Works by George Grosz and Elk Eber, a confrontation between "degenerate art" and "true" Nazi art [From(Deutsche Kunst und entartete Kunst, edited by Adolf Dresler (Munich, 1928)]
A peasant house built after 1933, but in the style of the Middle Ages [From Die neue Heimat (Munich, 1940)]
A "shrine of honor" of the Hitler Youth; a faithful copy of an ancient German hall [From Die neue Heimat (Munich, 1940)]
The House of German Art in Munich, designed by Hitler's favorite architect, Paul Ludwig Troost [From Franz Rodens, Vom Wesen deutscher Kunst (Berlin, 1941).]
A painting by Adolf Hitler [From N. S. Frauenwarte, Heft III, Jahrg. 6 (August 1937)]
Hitler as the "friend of children" [From Fibel fur die Grundschule (Gutersloth, 1935)]
German school children in uniform [From NSDAP Standarten Kalender 1939.]
German girls in the dress of the Bronze Age [From N. S. Frauenhuch (Wiener Library Photographic Archives).]
An open-air theater in the kind of romantic setting popular under the Third Reich [From A Nation Builds (New York: German Information Library, 1940).]
The actor Werner Krauss in the 1940 film Jew Suss [From H. H. Wollenberg, Fifty Years of German Film (London, 1948)]
The actor Lothar Muthel as Schlageter, in the famous Nazi drama of the same name [From Berliner Illustrierte (1933), No. 17]
A mythological painting of Hitler speaking to his early followers [From Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937, p. 48.]
Monumental buildings designed as a setting for mass meetings and parades at Nuremberg [From Die Kunst im dritten Reich (1937)]
An advertisement exhorting the people to observe the weekly "one pot" meal [From Ewiges Deutschland, Heft III, Jahrg. 4 (March 1939)]
Hitler addressing a Party Day meeting in Nuremberg, 1935 [From Leni Riefenstahl, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag
Films (Munich, 1935)]
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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Back Cover

"For the sanity of the human race it is essential that the record of Hitler's Germany should remain alive and be retold again and again as a warning for the future. Professor Mosse's book helps keep the record alive." -- Saturday Review

What was life like under the Third Reich? What went on between parents and children? What were the prevailing attitudes about sex, morality, religion? How did workers perceive the effects of the New Order in the workplace? What were the cultural currents in art, music, science, education, drama, and on the radio?

Professor Mosse's extensive analysis of Nazi culture -- groundbreaking upon its original publication in 1966 -- is now offered to readers of a new generation, selections from newspapers, novellas, plays, and diaries as well as the public pronouncements of Nazi leaders, churchmen, and professors describe National Socialism in practice and explore what it meant for the average German, By recapturing the texture of culture and thought under the Third Reich, Mosse's work still resonates today as an illustration of everyday life in one of history's darkest eras and as a living memory that reminds us never to forget.

"Very illuminating." -- Walter Laqueur, New York Times Book Review

"A magnificently edited collection." -- Chicago Tribune

"A full picture of the scope and methods of the anti-cultural vandalism of the Nazis." -- Christian Science Monitor

George L. Mosse (1919-1999) was the John C. Bascom Professor of European History and the Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was also the Koebner Professor of History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was selected to be the first scholar-in-residence at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. He had also taught at the University of Iowa, Cornell University, Cambridge university, and Tel Aviv University. He was the author of more than two dozen books, including The Crisis of German Ideology, Nationalism and Sexuality, Toward the Final Solution, and his memoir, Confronting History.

George L. Mosse Series in Modern European cultural and Intellectual History

Advisory Board

Steven E. Aschheim, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Annette Becker, Universiti Paris X-Nanterre

Christopher Browning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Natalie Zemon Davis, University of Toronto

Saul Friedlander, University of California, Los Angeles

Emilio Gentile, Universitii di Roma "La Sapienza"

Gert Hekma, University of Amsterdam

Stanley G. Payne, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University

David J. Sorkin, University of Wisconsin-Madison

John S. Tortorice, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Joan Wallach Scott, Institute for Advanced Study

Jay Winter, Princeton University

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my special gratitude to Howard Fertig, who first suggested the making of this book and who as a sympathetic and understanding editor did much to further its completion. Jack Lynch proved to be a superb copy editor. Michael Ledeen helped with the research and the finding of documents. Burton Pines aided in reading the proofs. To all of these friends and colleagues I owe a debt of gratitude.

Many of the documents and all of the illustrations were procured in the Wiener Library, London; in addition, that library's collection of newspaper clippings proved to be a treasure trove. The excellent National Socialist collection of the University of Wisconsin Library was also of great use in selecting the documents reproduced in this book. In all cases, the librarians concerned were helpful beyond the call of duty.

This book deals with Nazi culture itself; those who want a closer look at the historical background which produced this culture are referred to my book The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (Schocken Books).

Finally, it seems most fitting to dedicate this book not to anyone individual but to all men of good will who are ready to learn a lesson for the present from the history of the past.

G.L.M.
Madison, Wisconsin
October 1965

EDITOR'S NOTE

None of the footnotes in this book were part of the original documents; all have been supplied by the editor. Also, in most cases, the editor is responsible for the titles of the various selections.
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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PART 1 OF 2

Introduction

THE THIRD REICH has made a deep impression upon our civilization, and its impact has not diminished with the passing years. How this regime could have come to power in a civilized nation and what was the nature of life under the Nazis are questions that are still asked -- especially among those too young to remember what National Socialism meant and those who never lived under the regime. This book seeks to illuminate the nature of the Third Reich through original documents of the period; in this way the flavor and purpose of the regime can best be recaptured. The central question which we seek to answer is a fairly simple one: What was life like under Hitler? Or: How did National Socialism impinge upon the consciousness of those who lived under it?

For this reason documents on foreign policy and on internal administration have been omitted, in favor of those on cultural life and social life. Moreover, in order to give a truer picture of the regime, the book concentrates on the years between 1933 and 1939. The impact of the war heightened many aspects of the ideas and actions which appear in these pages, but it seemed better to look at National Socialism in power before the extreme situation of a war. In any case, not much new was added after 1939 in cultural and social life, as the Nazis wished it to be understood. It is their view of the "good society" which this book seeks to illustrate.

This society would not allow for the differentiation between politics and daily life which many of us naturally make. Today, in most of the non-Communist Western world, politics is regarded as merely one compartment of life; it does not have to penetrate our very thought and being. But Hitler's aim was to construct an organic society in which every aspect of life would be integrated with its basic purpose. And in the terms in which this purpose was promulgated by the National Socialist party, no one could be allowed to stand aside. Politics was not just one side of life, or one among many other sciences; it was instead the concrete expression of the Nazi world view. This world view was held to be the very crux of what it meant to be a German, and therefore politics was the consciousness of race, blood, and soil, the essence of the Nazi definition of human nature.

This is what Hitler meant when he talked about the "nationalization of the masses"; will and power were the keys to winning the hearts of the masses, for they could lead the people back to the consciousness of their race. [1] Such a total view of politics meant -- as it was called after January 1933 -- Gleichschaltung, "equalizing the gears" of the nation. All individuals and all organizations in Germany had to be "nationalized," in the sense of making them subject to party control; for the party was the guardian of the Germanic world view and through the will and power of its chief, the Fuhrer, the good society would be brought into being. Thus trade unions were abolished and in their place the "German Workers' Front," which was under party control, was created. Educational institutions were integrated, as the party exercised control over students and teachers. A whole network of party organizations controlled professional and workers' groups, membership in which was compulsory. In addition, individuals were organized in other groups which sought mastery over their private lives, outside their professions -- from the Hitler Youth to the organization for "German mothers." The boundaries between public and private activities were abolished, just as the dividing line between politics and the totality of life had ceased to exist.

This was the totalitarian state, and the Nazi party, like the spider in its web, controlled all the lifelines of the nation. For us such a society means that all aspects of life are subordinated to the demands of politics. But the Nazis did not see their society in these terms. Political parties and other independent national groupings had to be abolished, for they were a part of that liberal politics which had torn the nation asunder, had set man against man and class against class. In contrast, under the Nazis the individual German had found a sense of belonging, based upon his membership in a community which through its world view reflected his own inner strivings. A party publication, one year after Hitler's seizure of power, sums this up: "The concept of 'political man' typifies a bourgeois mentality. Being 'political' means to act consistently according to a set standard of behavior. Political behavior is not one attitude among others; it must form the basic attitude toward life." [2] In an age of industrialization and class conflict man was to be integrated into his Volk; his true self would be activated and his feeling of alienation transformed into one of belonging.

Such was Nazi theory, even if in practice many people did manage to stand aside from this integration. The phrase "inner emigration" assumed some importance during the period of Nazi rule, for this seemed the only privacy left. There were no groups with an identity separate from party and state which one could join, no kind of group identification which was not in some way related to the "new Germany." To be sure, several important institutions managed to preserve their identity (at least on the surface): the churches, the bureaucracy, some economic organizations, and the military. But these were eventually brought under control by various indirect methods of persuasion. Against the churches a more sustained battle had to be fought, as some of our documents show. Yet this was never waged against a united front of all churches; indeed many important Catholic and Lutheran prelates collaborated enthusiastically from the very beginning of the Third Reich. Moreover, churches were under great pressure from their own members to "equalize their gears." The sad truth is that there was little opposition anywhere in 1933, and even when this developed later it was ineffective in breaking through the cultural conformity of National Socialist Germany.

Censorship was imposed upon foreign books, periodicals, and newspapers, and all domestic literary and artistic output was rigidly controlled. A wall was built around the nation, nonetheless effective for lacking stone and mortar. Within this wall Nazi culture had a free hand to determine, if it could, every man's attitude toward life.

The Nazis started on their course immediately after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich. A constant barrage of propaganda and exhortations and frequent mass meetings whipped up enthusiasm. This was accompanied by book burnings in every town, the Gleichschaltung of all cultural and social endeavors -- the insistence of a show of conformity to the revolution which had won the day. To be sure, by the summer of 1933 people did start to weary of the speeches, the constant mass meetings and parades which took up all free time. [3] At this point the Nazis applied increased pressures to counter the indifference, much of which came from sheer exhaustion. But by that time the battle for cultural conformity was won; nor did many (especially among the youth) slacken in their original enthusiasm.

The kind of culture that the Nazis, in their barrage, unloosed upon the population and then enforced is illustrated in this book. Within this culture there is no progression, no development, for "truth" was accepted as "given," laid down forever by the race -- as eternal as the Aryan himself. We must not, however, think of it as something merely imposed upon the majority by a ruling minority. The soil had been prepared for many decades, during which the German Right, in its opposition to modernity, had developed the identical kind of art, literature, and racial thought. Moreover, Nazi culture appealed to an unchanging popular taste, a fact to which we shall return. Nazi opposition to artistic and literary innovation had solid backing from people everywhere. Thus there was a static quality to this culture, and it would serve no purpose to divide our subject matter by dates or to attempt to show any cultural development, for it did not exist. What developed between 1933 and 1939 was the level of effective enforcement, not the kind of culture which was to be enforced.

Our presentation of Nazi cultural documents provides a further explanation of why so many people accepted and indeed helped to strengthen the Nazi rule. For we are dealing with an emotionally charged and unified ideology which was translated into fact by 1934. This ideology not only stands at the very core of this book but is also the crux of what the "good society" was all about. Adolf Hitler always stressed the ideological factor, the world view, which was of overriding importance to him. The new Germany was to be built upon the foundations of the "new man," and this man in turn was the product of the correct world view. The world view, or ideology (and the terms can be used interchangeably), was all-inclusive: a true instrument of reform. Originating in the wellsprings of man's nature, it pushed outward into all aspects of human life. Because this world view arose from the depths of the human soul, its expression must be cultural and not material. As a leading Romanian fascist put it: "History is an aspect of the majestic life of the spirit." [4]

That is why Hitler himself put such a high valuation upon artistic endeavors, and his own artistic ambitions must have played a part in this emphasis. The speech he delivered at the House of German Art in 1937 illustrates this stress upon the primacy of culture as truly expressive of the eternally creative essence of the race. The "new man" must be a culturally centered, creative person who through his creative drives activates his "Germanism." This idea had always been in the mainstream of German nationalism, and it aptly reflected, in its emphasis upon creativity, the frustration of the individual in an ever more impersonal society.

Throughout these documents we shall see the attempt to form this "new man," a process which began with early childhood and pervaded the whole tenor of adult life. Hitler really believed in the world view of race, Volk, and soil, and he had well-developed notions on how to transmit it to the people themselves. This above all else he considered essential.

"Every world view, be it correct and useful a thousand times over, will be without importance for the life of a Volk unless its basic tenets are written upon the banners of a fighting movement." [5] Such a movement must be highly organized in order to capture power in the nation, but this organization must, in turn, be securely rooted in the world view. Propaganda was therefore of the highest importance, though the word "propaganda" itself can be misleading. Hitler never thought you could sell National Socialism as one sells toothpaste or cigarettes; a much more sophisticated theory was involved.

Georges Sorel, to whom fascism is so much indebted, wrote at the beginning of our century that all great movements are compelled by "myths." A myth is the strongest belief held by a group, and its adherents feel themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil. Some years earlier, in 1895, the French psychologist Gustav Le Bon had written of the "conservatism of crowds" which cling tenaciously to traditional ideas. Hitler took the basic nationalism of the German tradition and the longing for the stable personal relationships of olden times, and built upon them as the strongest belief of the group. In the diffusion of the "myth" Hitler fulfilled what Le Bon had forecast: that "magical powers" were needed to control the crowd. The Fuhrer himself wrote of the "magic influence" of mass suggestion and the liturgical aspects of his movement, and its success as a mass religion bore out the truth of this view. [6]

It is not necessary to ask whether Hitler had read either Sorel or Le Bon. The point is that all of them were expressing the problems of the mass society which the Industrial Revolution had produced and the doubts about the rationality of human nature which came with what Le Bon called the "era of crowds." The basic problem is illustrated by a quotation from Le Bon which Hitler, years later, acted upon with fatal decisiveness: "We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning, by means of suggestion and contagion, of the feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individuals that form a crowd." [7]

The irrational behavior characteristic of a mass society had been clearly formulated by the end of the nineteenth century, and the actual behavior of the crowds during the Dreyfusard struggles in France and during the first big anti-Semitic wave in Germany bore out the theories. In the world that industrialism had produced, the individual was alienated not only from his society but also from his rational nature. This was the all-encompassing problem, and Sorel as well as Le Bon envisioned the specter of a wild irrationality, which had to be directed by a leader into positive, constructive channels.

Industrialism seemed to such men to have destroyed the traditional relationships among men and to have exposed the basic irrationality of human nature. There were others, like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were also concerned with the "alienation" of man from his society, but they continued to hold to a belief in man's basic rationality. Hitler, needless to say, was not the heir of this tradition. He placed himself instead in the camp of Sorel and Le Bon. Hitler's understanding of this approach enabled him to take the road to power in a nation ravaged by crises and defeat. The use of basically irrational prejudices and predilections helped to bring about the acceptance of the Germanic world view which was Hitler's solution for ending the modern alienation of man.

For example, Hitler believed the mass meeting necessary because it enabled man to step "out of his workshop," in which he feels small, and to become part of a body of "thousands and thousands of people with a like conviction." [8] Thus he succumbs to mass suggestion. Alienation was to be exorcised, but the irrationality of human nature was basic to Hitler's own view of the world. These meetings were liturgical rites, staged with close attention to detail and purpose. We have reproduced accounts of two such festivals -- one that was frequently held in the schools, the other a summer-solstice festival. The individual, Hitler held, was obsessed by anxiety, and in the mass meeting he received courage and strength through a feeling of belonging to a greater emotional community.

The mass meeting became one of the most important techniques of the Nazi movement, especially in the years of its rise to power, when there were almost daily meetings of this sort in various regions of the Reich. But by themselves such meetings could not accomplish very much; mass suggestion had to pervade every area of culture: literature, painting and sculpture, the theater, films, and education. As a "total culture" it would animate the basic nationalist prejudices of the people, overcome their feeling of isolation, and direct their creative drives into the proper channels of race and soil. This is why there is an astonishing coherence among the documents of Nazi culture, for they all served the same basic purpose.

A part of this pattern is the "dynamic," the urge to fight against evil. We are dealing here with a revolution and therefore the book begins with documents that serve to clarify what sort of a revolution this was supposed to be. There was violence: the battles of the SA, for example. "The masses do not understand handshakes," as Hitler himself put it. [9] But equal emphasis was put upon the "traditional links" of man: the Volk, his family, the proper morality. When the revolutionary impetus clashed with that of the traditional bonds, the latter won out. Hanns Anderlahn's account of a debate in the SA is especially revealing in this regard. The whole Nazi position on women and family is amazingly conservative, even if the Nazis tried to justify it on racial grounds.

The reason for this is clear: the ideology of the Nazi revolution was based upon what were presumed to be Germanic traditions; while the revolution looked to the future, it tried to recapture a mythical past and with it the old traditions which to many people provided the only hope of overcoming the chaos of the present. The omnipresent nationalism was combined with an attempt to recapture a morality attributed to the Volk's past. But that morality was not the one which the ancient Germans had practiced in their forests, or which the peasant, close to the soil, was supposed to exemplify in modern times. Yet this is a belief which the Nazi ideology encouraged and which novels like that of Josefa Berens-Totenohl proclaimed. In reality the morality which National Socialism offered as typically Germanic was the bourgeois morality of the nineteenth century: the sanctity of the family, of marriage, and of the unostentatious, dedicated life. Dedicated to the Volk, not to the making of money: the modern bourgeoisie was condemned because it had become "Judaicized." Nothing could be more typical of such attitudes than the speech given by Hans Naumann, a professor of literature at the University of Berlin, on the occasion of the burning of books in 1933. [10] He begins by stressing the urge to action: it is time to act against the un-German spirit, and if too many rather than too few books are given to the flames, what matter? He ends by stating that such activism is necessary to "make holy" once again the "pious bonds" of family, native land, and blood. The interplay between "heroic" activism and traditionalism dominates the movement.

Hitler called this the "greatest racial revolution in world history," a "revolution of the spirit." [11] It was a cultural revolution, and was not directed at instituting economic changes. He could thus appeal to old prejudices without threatening the existing economic system. This appealed, above all, to white-collar workers and the small entrepreneurs, as some of the statistics presented in this book will demonstrate. It was their kind of revolution: the ideology would give them a new status, free them from isolation in industrial society, and give them a purpose in life. But it would not threaten any of their vested interests; indeed it would reinforce their bourgeois predilections toward family and Gemutlichkeit, and restore the "good old values" which had been so sadly dismantled by modernity. This attitude should not be unfamiliar, for it pervades Gaullism in France and much of conservatism in the United States.

But the Nazi revolution was connected to a definite world view in which Hitler deeply believed and which is Central European rather than Western. Racism provided the foundations, as shown in our selections from the writings of three leading theoreticians, Hans F. K. Gunther, Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, and Alfred Rosenberg. Both Gunther and Clauss were university teachers. Their ideas were highly abstract, yet they were made concrete: the outward racial form was linked to the "race soul." From these ideas "stereotypes" emerged -- of the Aryan and the enemy, the Jew. Stereotyping was essential to the transformation of the ideology into a "fighting movement," for it made the abstract concrete for the purposes of mass suggestion. The other extracts in the section on the racial foundations point up extensions and practical applications of the theory, from the new biology (so important a foundation of racial thought!) to a guide for high-school students on how to recognize the racial soul of a person.

A race needs its heroes, and no revolution has ever succeeded without heroic examples. The hero the Nazis presented to their people was rooted in Hitler's world view and was equipped with great power of will. The proper use of the will was what made a man into a hero. It provided the impetus for transforming aspiration into reality. Here the Germans' interpretation of the philosophy of Nietzsche lay ready to hand, ideas which had influenced German intellectuals since the beginning of the century. Nietzsche's "will to power" became the will to actualize Hitler's good society. Alfred Baeumler, perhaps the most important academic philosopher of the Third Reich, shows the consequences of this use of Nietzsche. Emphasis upon the power of the individual will could be combined with memories of the war, where this power seemed to have been put to use. Ernst Rohm's exaltation of the soldier is typical in this connection. The SA leader himself had fought in the war and afterward with the Free Corps. Rohm illustrates the role which nostalgic memories of the war experience played in the Nazi movement. Adolf Hitler himself glorified the army, in which he had served, as the educator in decision making, courage, and responsibility. It represented, so he held, the antipode to the stock exchange. [12]

Activism was important. After all, the Nazis conceived of their party as a "movement." This and the irrational foundations of their world view represented strong opposition to intellectualism. Hitler summarized his own viewpoint in 1938: "What we suffer from today is an excess of education. Nothing is appreciated except knowledge. The wiseacres, however, are the enemies of action. What we require is instinct and will." [13] "Instinct" meant the love of Volk and race which came from a realm beyond empirical knowledge, from the soul. "Will" further emphasized the drive to transform this love into reality. The hero is no academic, no man of knowledge, but one who has developed his power of will to the fullest in order to activate his "healthy" instinct for what is right.

Joseph Goebbels' fictional hero, Michael, rejects university studies in order to join the Volk at work and help to save it. Michael reflects the greater social emphasis of the future propaganda minister, the socialism of National Socialism, which meant integration of the individual into the organic whole of the Volk. To the contemporary heroes, of whom Fritz Todt, the builder of the Autobahnen, may stand as example, were joined the heroes of the past. Frederick the Great of Prussia was transformed from the flute-playing friend of Voltaire into a militant activist. The revered Prussian monarch had to be dissociated from the Enlightenment, which stood for hated rationalism.

Albert Leo Schlageter occupies a place of his own in the Nazi gallery of heroes. An early Nazi, he fell in battle fighting against the French in 1923, and the afterword to an edition of his letters is a good example of the homage paid to him. Schlageter, like all Nazi heroes, symbolizes the "new man." The conversation between his friend August and August's father shows quite clearly the exaltation of this "new man" -- the young generation. Hanns Johst, the most famous of the playwrights who wrote for the Third Reich, had dramatic power, and his play Schlageter was often performed, especially in the early days of the regime.

Other components of the myth have already been mentioned. The flag-raising ceremony for school children shows how the myth was implanted: the set pieces, the constant repetitions -- in fact, the whole liturgical form. The description of the summer-solstice festival gives us some idea of the effect such ceremonies (and the real-life heroes) must have had upon susceptible youth. This was not as formal as the flag-raising ceremony, but its content was more fluid, more directly emotional.

The task of culture was laid down, and it held a central place in the Nazi scheme, as we have already made clear: the spreading and rooting of the world view for whose sake the revolution had been made. It built upon the inclinations of the audience. Throughout the extracts in this book there run not only the themes of race and Volk but also the drive for rootedness in the Volk. Intellectualism was decried, for the Volk is one and culture must not separate itself from these roots. This is what Hitler meant when he said that "to be German means to have clarity"; thus his pride in having boiled down the Nazi ideology to a mere twenty-five points in the party platform. [14]

But the purpose that culture served must never be lost from view: it clarified the world view, it spread it and evoked an enthusiastic reception for it. Once again it was built upon popular taste and prejudices. The masses of people (and not just in Germany) do not like "problem art," do not care for the distorted pictures of expressionists: they do not understand the searchings of such art. The same can be said about literature, indeed all cultural endeavor. People like their pictures simple and easily understandable and their novels should have gripping plots and large amounts of sentiment. The lowest common denominator of popular taste has a sameness about it which does not vary from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, or indeed from country to country -- whether we think of the "shilling shocker" in England or the novels of a Courths-Mahler in Germany (without varying her sentimentality or simplicity of style, Courths-Mahler, between 1864 and 1950, wrote more than two hundred nearly identical novels, which had a combined sale of 27 million copies). But in Germany the popular taste was skillfully used as a vital part of a whole world view in the name of creating an "organic" Volk. Goebbels' "cleansing of art" catered to this taste, which was said to represent the "healthy instinct of the Volk." That instinct, then, was conservative (as it is today) and was used for the purposes of the Nazi ideology.

In this effort the historical connections with the past were exploited (to Sorel a vital ingredient of the myth), and the virtues of pre-industrial society were stressed. How typical that in the great Exhibition of German Art in 1937, rural and family motifs overwhelmingly predominated. In contrast to the uprooted worker, filled with the anxiety of his alienation, the peasant, rooted in the soil, became the prototype of the "new man." The novel was the great popularizer of this image. Josefa Berens-Totenohl sold over a quarter of a million copies of Der Femhof during the Third Reich, from which we offer an excerpt designed to show the idealized peasant and what he stood for. Berens-Totenohl's work is typical of a host of sentimental novels popular during the Third Reich. Their essential crudeness was tempered by a viable plot and, at times, passable writing. Tudel Weller's Rabauken! on the other hand can serve to show the Nazi novel at its most racially crude and blatant.

The theater, radio, and films entered the fray. The typical playbill, the description of what happened to the theater at the beginning of the regime, the list of film titles given in this section will serve to show how the Nazis made use of these media. Radio plays a part of particular importance, for Hitler had great respect for the effectiveness of the spoken word. Speeches played a central role in the Nazi liturgy, whether at mass meetings or festivals. Radio carried the word to the masses. Not only were cheap radio sets put on the market, but loudspeakers were hung in the streets.

Yet, the pace of this cultural drive was always difficult to sustain. The very sentimentality which made it appealing to the public worked against the standards of morality for which Nazism stood. They stressed the bonds of the family, moderation in sexual and social behavior in consideration of the duties owed to the Volk. But the romanticism involved in the ideology could lead to a celebration of love for its own sake as well as abandonment to the pleasures of the flesh, and such attitudes also became part of the social reality. Popular sentimentality easily slips into forbidden regions, and a ruling class is apt to become detached from its own moral strictures -- though Hitler himself, in spite of his unpublicized attachment to Eva Braun, never really did so.

This irrationalism seems to clash with what is popularly regarded as the essence of the natural sciences. However, as science had become ever more specialized during the nineteenth century it had withdrawn from a concern with the world as a whole. The age of Newton was long past and the modern scientist could view his specialty according to one set of criteria and the world as a whole according to another. Rationalism in the laboratory could be combined with irrationalism in the scientists' world view. Nazi science went a step beyond this. Here the ideology was so strong, so dominant, that it penetrated into the laboratory. The gap between science and the world was overcome, not in favor of a scientific method but of an irrational ideology. Both Johannes Stark and Philip Lenard were famous Nobel Prize-winning scientists. How they attempted to introduce Nazi ideology into their science, the documents themselves explain. The idea behind such attempts was always to strive for an organic unity between science and the Nazi world view, just as the Volk itself should be an organic whole. Alienation must be ended here as well as in all other fields of endeavor.

It is therefore not surprising that the astronomer Bruno Thuring goes back to an older tradition, that of Newton and Kepler, who had stressed the peaceful harmony of the world, in order to demonstrate the supposed unsoundness of Einstein's theory of relativity. Once more ideological considerations are overriding: Thuring uses racial rather than scientific proof to discredit Einstein's work. The consequences of this "Nazi science" came back to haunt the party. In 1944 Gauleiter Josef Wagner denounced Thuring, among others, for having discredited the "new physics" to such an extent that they were damaging the war effort. Wagner recognized, without mentioning Einstein, that the theoretical physics necessary for wartime scientific development had been stifled by the party in favor of merely one-directional research. [15]
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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PART 2 OF 2

Medicine followed the pattern of the other sciences. Objective research was rejected for the organic, for the treatment of the whole patient, including his soul -- and the ideological was again the decisive element. As Hans Schemm, the first Nazi Minister of Culture in Bavaria, put it: "We are not objective, we are German." [16] This becomes obvious in the speech of Kurt Gauger and in the extract from the pen of the medical director of the University Hospital at Kiel. Gauger's references to Jung must be seen in the context of the role this eminent psychiatrist played in Nazi Germany. Jung had accepted the presidency of the German Society for Psychotherapy after Hitler's rise to power, and identified himself with the "expanding form" and "formative seed" of the Aryan as opposed to the Jewish unconscious.

National Socialism was a religion; the depth of the ideology, the liturgy, the element of hope, all helped to give the movement the character of a new faith. It has been shown that Goebbels quite consciously used a religious terminology in many of his speeches. Moreover, Nazism was a total world view which by its very nature excluded all others. From this it followed that traditional Christianity was a rival, not a friend. But here Hitler at first went very slowly indeed, for he needed (and got) the support of the majority of the Christian churches. Since he was appealing to the bourgeois, as we have seen, it was difficult to uphold the bonds of family and the traditional morality and at the same time exclude traditional Christianity. Yet such was Hitler's purpose and he hoped that the penetration of his world view would work first to weaken and then to shut out Christianity altogether from the German mind. Completely heathen prayers, like the one reproduced in the section on religion, were the exception, though there was an attempt from the first to substitute a Nazi ceremony for Protestant Confirmation. The main effort was centered on combining Christ and the Volk by stripping Christianity of its historical element. Like science, Christianity should be absorbed into the ideology. The so-called "German Christians" noisily devoted themselves to this task. Though they were held down in favor of the established churches, which were supported by the majority of the population, the Nazi future would have lain with the Evangelical Christians had the war been won.

Other selections in this section show how the Nazi effort against traditional Christianity worked in practice and affected the lives of the people. It was covert and cautious in comparison with Nazi activities in other cultural areas. Much has been written about the reaction of the churches, which was slow and only partial at best. But Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich preached a series of Advent sermons which created a sensation at the time for their bravery. This in itself tells a great deal about the atmosphere under the Third Reich as early as 1933. For Faulhaber merely defended the Old Testament and not only was silent about the persecution of Jews that had already begun but also made a clear distinction between the Jews in the time of Christ and those who came after. Theologically well-founded as this may be, it can hardly be called resistance, except when viewed in the context of the ever greater momentum of the Nazi drive for a total culture. Thus he illustrates not only the reluctance of the churches to take a clear stand against the Nazis but also the direction and depth of the Germanic awakening, in which these sermons could be regarded as a trumpet call against the regime.

Faulhaber, like most church leaders, was an old-line conservative, not a Nazi. The Nazis believed that such older men could never really accept their Weltanschauung, even if they were not confessed Christians. The movement made much of the difference between generations. The young were set off against the old, and the same distinction that was made between the old and young nations was operative within the Volk itself. When Hitler damned the bourgeoisie, he was inveighing against the older generation, brought up under the Empire. Hanns Johst expresses this condemnation in his play Schlageter. The son, August, is fire and flame for the Nazi hero and his adventurous fight for the Fatherland. Schneider, the father, counsels caution. Moreover, typically enough, the father thinks in terms of social classes and making money (the two go together in the Nazi ideology), while the son wants "not to earn but to serve." The older man ridicules this attitude as "adolescent romanticism," but this romanticism symbolizes in reality the son's urge to "belong" to his Volk.

This emphasis on youth is common to most revolutions, and was employed by the National Socialists from the very beginning. To be vigorous meant to be youthful, the "new man" of heroic will had to be a figure of youth: killed in action against the enemy like Schlageter, dying while vigorously engaged in a great and strenuous effort like the constructor of the Autobahnen, Fritz Todt. The Nazi leadership itself was young; Hitler was only forty-four years old when he came to power. Moreover, the Nazis realized that if youth could be captured by their world view, the future was assured. Once again we find an attitude typical of all modern revolutions. Fascism in all countries made a fetish of youthfulness. What a contrast this offered to the elderly politicians haggling in parliaments or to the fossilized bureaucracies which ran the nations (and the political parties) of Europe. The Nazis capitalized on the discontent of youth, its spirit of rebellion against parents and school. Ever since the end of the last century a large and vocal section of bourgeois youth had wanted to detach itself from the "respectable" society into which it had been born. Hitler offered them a way, and many young people (not just the unemployed) streamed into the party ranks, lured by the activism of the Nazis, their stress on the heroic will, and their well-defined goals. They could criticize the "bourgeoisie" -- meaning their elders -- and still retain their deeply inbred bourgeois prejudices. For many young people, the ideal of action, adventure, and movement may initially have concealed the rights and wrongs of the Nazi goals themselves. The extract from Inge Scholl's memoirs is especially telling here. For her brother passed from enthusiasm to disillusionment and (unlike the majority of youth) to organizing an anti-Nazi resistance which ended in his death.

Evidence that Nazism appealed to youth comes to us from all sides, and the Nazis themselves saw in the young people the key to the future of the movement. That is why we have devoted one of the longest sections in the book to youth. Education is crucial here, for if an ideology can be institutionalized through the educational establishment it has won a major battle. The Nazis realized this only too well, and youth in its turn seemed ready for the message. The account of Paul Oestreich, an anti-Nazi progressive educator, provides additional testimony.

The initial enthusiasm of youth was carefully directed and exploited, as the subsequent extracts demonstrate. They are taken from elementary-school readers, books for young boys, as well as readings for the upper classes of high schools. Some of the themes are constantly repeated. For example, Otto Dietrich's story about the "daring flight" is taken from a primer for the upper grades, but the theme recurs throughout other textbooks as well. In linking the daring flight in stormy weather to Hitler's dominance over the elements, the Nazi party press chief made a point which did not need elaboration. Even the young could understand the analogy with Germany's perilous state in the world. The symbols of sun and fire, so prevalent in the Nazi ideology, are also used in profusion. Baldur von Schirach's "victory" makes use of the myth of the sun and makes it understandable to the students. It is of a piece with the exaltation of the sun and fire at the summer solstice, described in a previous section. The tone which prevailed in the schools is indicated by the list of the subjects which students were required to write on at the end of each school year, or by the way in which an alumni address list handles the Jewish alumni of an earlier day. They are simply grouped together as numbers, not as persons with individuality.

Some readings on education have been used earlier in the book, for they document so well the application of the Nazi theory. Thus the description of the teaching of the new biology could have been placed in this section, or the guide for students on how to read the racial soul. Race was central to the world view, and education was the most important instrument for its diffusion. Educational examples were therefore necessary in discussing the foundations of the ideology.

Education was not merely the concern of the schools. Hitler's emphasis upon organization has already been mentioned, and this included the purposeful organization of leisure time. Membership in the Hitler Youth was all but compulsory. The principles upon which it was run are best seen through the eyes of its leader, Baldur von Schirach. What if this extracurricular activity came into conflict with the family and the school? It is clear from the readings that Schirach wanted to avoid such a clash, but in the last resort the ideology triumphed over other considerations, and the Hitler Youth was the organization directly concerned with strengthening the Nazi world view among the young. It is not difficult to say which would prevail if family and school did not fit themselves into the organic Volk.

The university continued the indoctrination toward a total culture, and not only by offering courses on race and the Volk. Both student and professor were integrated into the Nazi conception of the German people. At the university level too the students were required to take part in an extracurricular activity -- the compulsory Labor Service (Arbeitsdienst). Like Goebbels' Michael, they should not stand apart, but should learn to share the physical labor of the people. The criteria for admission to the University of Berlin, which applied to all universities, indicate what kind of students were desired. The student organization within the university was a branch of the party. Its leader, Gerhard Kruger, uses the word "socialism" to denote the total service to the Volk which was demanded of students. This was designed to keep the students from viewing themselves as an elite within the nation. The party leadership brooked no rival elites.

National unity was also a prime consideration in the role of the professors, not only unity with the Volk but also an organic unity between the world view and the various academic disciplines. This is the essence of the talk given by the leader of the Association of University Professors, in which he defines academic freedom as the fulfillment of this task of unity. We have already seen a similar spirit guiding attempts to create a new kind of natural science. The organic ideal always stands in the forefront. The intellectual was to give up his illusions of superior status, just as the worker was to renounce the concept of class struggle. These were divisive forces and therefore evil.

The Volk encompassed all of life, and life gained its fulfillment within it. There could exist no "eternal" criteria outside this final good; hence the law too had to be adjusted to this "fact." The concept of law as reflecting a system of values transcending the Nazi world view was condemned as liberal, serving merely to fragment the nation. Carl Schmitt, the most celebrated jurist of the Third Reich, explains this in constitutional terms. A new state has been created in which all power, and therefore all law, springs from the needs of the Volk as directed by the leader.

The leadership structure was central to the government of the state, and the organizational principle of the Nazi party was applied to the whole nation: the leader and followers were the poles around which the public life of Germany was to be organized -- and as there was to be no division between public and private life, this took in all aspects of human endeavor. The Third Reich sought to create a new hierarchy, once more a part of the urge to substitute fixed personal relationships for the fluidities in human life which industrialization had brought about.

But this hierarchy was not the traditional one of nobility, bourgeois, and working class. The Nazis hated the old nobility and thought that the bourgeoisie had failed. Leadership was to be based on that personality, regardless of background, which had the will and power to actualize the Volksstaat (the state of the Volk). In Hitler's view, man's progress had not derived from the activities of the majority, but was the product of the individual personality, its genius and will to action. [17] The "new men" were the leaders, and as they had led the party to victory so they must now lead the state. Hitler envisaged the government of the Reich as a hierarchy of leadership: from the local leaders up to himself as the Fuhrer of all the people. In reality the Third Reich was a network of rival leaders, each with his own followers and his own patronage. Hitler kept them competing against one another and in this way was able to control the whole leadership structure.

The rejection of majority rule meant that all leaders were appointed by those who were above them in the hierarchy and, in the last resort, by the highest leader of them all, the Fuhrer himself. A government of this type has the appearance of being imposed upon the people: they had no say in its making and no control over its activities. Schmitt's stress upon the Artgleichheit (equality in kind) between leader and Volk is meant to answer this criticism. For the Nazi system was not to be a mere dictatorship from above, but was supposed to be based upon a truly democratic principle of government.

The world view is basic once again to an understanding of the Nazi meaning of democracy. Fuhrer and Volk were equal in kind because they shared the same race and blood; the human nature of each individual German and that of his leaders was thought to be identical. Therefore their aims must be identical as well, as both wanted to fulfill themselves by bringing about the true Germanic state. Leader and led were a part of the same organic Volk. What distinguished the leader from the masses was his ability to make them conscious of their peoplehood and to lead them toward its fulfillment. He had all the attributes of those heroes whom we mentioned earlier.

No independent groupings could exist outside this structure, and no one should think himself superior to his fellow men. Indeed, even the leaders must never have a superior attitude; rather they should be devoted to service and responsibility. This explains Hitler's special concern that intellectuals would feel superior to others because of their knowledge and thus form a separate group within the Volk which would be difficult to control. In the section on education we have shown the attempts to keep students and professors from thinking of themselves as distinct from the "people at work." In the new Germany there could be only appointed leaders and the masses, both tied together by a common race and peoplehood, serving a shared goal which expressed everyone's inner convictions.

Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke, in their official commentary on the Nazi citizenship law, clarify further the implications of the Nazi concept of government. They repeat the contention that the individual can only be thought of as a member of a community -- and the German community is one of blood and race. Citizenship in the Reich therefore is based no longer upon mere territorial considerations, but upon the Aryan race. Roland Freisler, later to become the notorious judge of the People's Court, draws the logical conclusions from this view of law and citizenship when he calls for the abolition of an "impartial" officialdom. He holds out the hope that both bureaucratic formalism and legalism (especially rampant in Germany) would be eliminated and a new spirit prevail. If an official is imbued with the principles of National Socialism he will be a flexible new man -- having his eye not on the legal paragraph but upon the final goal.

In the documents presented so far both theory and practice mix with one another. The theory was put into practice and made itself felt in the lives of the people. But how did the "little man" actually fare? The workers had never given heavy support to the Nazis in their rise to power, but the Nazis nevertheless had an idealized picture of the worker ready at hand. He works diligently and aims at quality, in the tradition of the medieval artisan. In addition, he seeks ideological strength by attending evening courses offered by the party. If he has been a Marxist, like Muller, he soon finds out how he has been duped: for his Aryan honesty and strength will rebel against Marxist tactics (from which, however, Hitler admitted in Mein Kampf that he had learned a great deal). Like Muller, the German worker was, after all, a Volksgenosse -- a member of the Volk. The ugly reality of course was quite different: it was necessary to forbid strikes, and one reading shows how the cause of the Volk could be used to terrorize workers into being content with their present position and wages.

If the workers had never given the Nazis their wholehearted support, the petit bourgeois had. Their position in the Third Reich is shown by a schedule of tax distribution and living costs, as well as by an account of the attempt to reduce the number of independent retail enterprises. In contrast to the peasant, the "trader" had, it must be remembered, always been in bad repute, as a symbol of hated modernity: the ideology supported economic policy. But if the petit bourgeois were disappointed, they failed to show it, except in isolated instances. They seemed to play no part in such small resistance groups as existed. The ideology may well have kept its hold over them to the last.

The assumption of power in the spring of 1933 and how it affected the people has been left to the end. For this will be more meaningful if the whole Nazi revolution has first been understood. From the documents given here it is plain that the revolution arrived not with a rush but covertly and, at times, even comically. There were no battles to fight, no bastilles to storm. Men and women fell into the arms of the new Reich like ripe fruit from a tree. The remarkable account of the Nazi seizure of the City Council of Cologne shows the relative ease with which the change of government was accomplished -- here, in the Catholic Rhineland, in a city which had been ruled the previous sixteen years by its mayor Konrad Adenauer. Carl Schmitt could boast with some justice that the Nazi revolution was orderly and disciplined. But the reason lies not so much within the Nazis themselves as in the lack of an effective opposition. For millions the Nazi ideology did assuage their anxiety, did end their alienation, and did give hope for a better future. Other millions watched passively, not deeply committed to resistance. "Let them have a chance" was a typical attitude. Hitler took the chance and made the most of it.

This book begins with an analysis of the nature of the Nazi revolution and ends with the actual assumption of power. In between we have attempted to show what Hitler's call to activate the world view actually meant and how it affected the lives of the whole population. One important aspect of the Third Reich would seem to have been neglected: the increasing terror which accompanied the drive for a total culture. Though many of the readings presented in this book reflect the pressures brought to bear on the people to conform (especially in the section on Christianity), we have not specifically documented the terror itself. The true nature of the terror has to be experienced and cannot be captured in the printed word. How can one convey through documents the hasty glance over the shoulder, the sudden silence in front of a stranger?

No section has been devoted to the real victims of the regime, to those against whom the "spiritual" revolution was in the end directed: the Jews. It would have been artificial to separate the "Jewish question" from the rest of the ideology and from the cultural drive of which it was an inseparable part. Every section of this book is filled with the Nazis' anti-Jewish obsession. They are the liberals who have to be liquidated, the Marxists who must be destroyed -- in short, the all-pervasive enemy of the race. The bourgeois emphasis upon family, morality, and traditional bonds did not apply to them: their families could be torn asunder, their property could be looted and confiscated, their roots in Germany torn up. As the Nazi revolution focused upon the Jewish stereotype, it entered into every facet of Nazi thought.

The Jewish problem was carried to the people as an integral part of the whole "renaissance of the Volk." It had its impact on mass consciousness as such, and was not something isolated or detached. The Jew was but a protruding peak of the ideological iceberg, and we have tried to convey an impression of the iceberg as a whole, for this is what the Nazis themselves wanted to convey to the people. If for Hitler the Jew was a "principle," [18] for the average German he must have been similarly abstract. Perhaps he witnessed the arrests of Jews and felt sympathy, or saw the burning of the synagogues on November 10, 1938 -- but his personal involvement would have been small. There were those who tried to help, but this was asking for martyrdom, self-sacrifice; it required a heroism that has always been rare in history. Aiding the "enemy" of the race called for a true heroism, quite different from that which the Nazis advocated. For their heroes were part of a group, the Volk, which gave them strength but also sheltered them. Helping Jews against the "fury of the people" had to be a lonely, individual action. It should not surprise us that so few took this course; it is surprising that there were so many thousands who did. In a book devoted to how the Third Reich affected Germans it would be misleading to give a separate treatment to the Jewish question.

This book does not pretend to give a complete picture. Rather it aims to offer a taste of what National Socialism wanted to create, how it met the crisis of the post-World War I world, and how it affected the German population. But these documents also convey an idea of how "mass consciousness" can be created and manipulated in a nation. Hitler and his fellow leaders genuinely believed in their world view, but they also sought quite consciously to induce the population to share this belief. It is no coincidence that the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment became so important, or that Hitler was personally closest to Joseph Goebbels, the expert manipulator of mass opinion.

Yet it would all have come to naught if the world view itself had not reflected already existing prejudices among the people, The bourgeois ideas which had become rooted in the German mind during the nineteenth century were combined with an omnipresent nationalism, and both were built into the ideology of race, blood, and soil. For those millions who yearned for a restoration of morality and family life, and for those who wanted Germany to take its rightful place among the nations, Hitler offered hope -- even if they rejected most of his racial ideas. How many said: "He will become respectable in office," and repudiated his racism, which "no sensible person could believe"! But the racism and all that it meant proved to be not excesses but an integral part of the ideology, and those who hoped differently were doomed to disappointment. They became the "old generation" whom Hitler called the "bourgeoisie which is finished" [19] though he had skillfully used their moral values and their nationalism on his road to power. By "used" we do not mean to imply that these ideas were not part of a world view genuinely held by Hitler. We have mentioned before the constant interplay between theory and application, but to this must be added the equally close interplay between genuinely held belief and its manipulation for the purpose of making it the sole national religion.

There is one late development in Nazism which falls outside the scope of this book: that of the SS. It came to be of truly great importance only after 1939. Here, among those who considered themselves the racial elite, both the bourgeois values and the nationalism tended eventually to drop away. During the war the SS was made up of not only Germans from the Reich but Aryans from other countries as well. Moreover, the bourgeois morality, the traditional family bonds, had little standing in the eyes of men who regarded themselves as a new order (Orden) of knights. To them only race and power counted. But this was a late development and did not affect the population as a whole -- though it would have done so if the war had been won.

Hitler's world has gone forever [?!]. But many of the basic attitudes and prejudices which went into his world view are still with us, waiting to be actualized, to be directed into a new mass consciousness. The documents which follow may seem to the reader, thirty years later, to be so outrageous as to verge on the comical. Yet we must remember that at one point in history a regime did take these ideas seriously and so did millions who lived under it. Nazism was overthrown by a foreign war, not by internal revolution, and a larger resistance to Nazism grew up only as the war was being lost. This is partly explained by Hitler's successes: both in foreign policy and internally. During the years when these documents were written and their ideas put into practice, unemployment had vanished (there were over 6 million unemployed in 1933), the boundaries of Germany were being extended, and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles was being liquidated. The world view was spread against the background of considerable success.

Yet the world view for which Hitler stood is in itself a part of this success. That some of its basic attitudes are still with us should give pause for thought. Perhaps far from being farfetched and almost comical, this ideology appeals to a basic need for an organic community, for historical continuity, and for the shelter of a firm and established morality. A revolution of the spirit is for many men more tempting than one which brings about social or economic changes and which might lead to chaos instead of cementing order. Nazism exemplifies the dangers which can lurk behind this facade of conservatism, a modern conservatism which is vulnerable to extreme views even if it rejects them. It is unfashionable to speak of the lessons of history, but perhaps there is a lesson for the present hidden among these documents of the past.

_______________

Notes:

1. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich, 1934), p. 373.

2. Kampf: Lebensdokumente deutscher Jugend (Leipzig, 1934), p. 307.

3. For a good description of this process, see William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1930-1935 (Chicago, 1965), Chapter 17.

4. Horia Sima, Destinee du nationalisme (Paris, n.d.), p. 19.

5. Mein Kampf, p. 418.

6. Ibid., pp. 116 ff.

7. Gustave Le Bou, The Crowd (London, 1922), pp. 35-36.

8. Mein Kampf, p. 536.

9. Ibid., pp. 371-372.

10. Reprinted in Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg, 1963), p. 188.

11. Quoted in the Frankfurter Neue Presse, Jan. 28, 1958; and in Ernst Deuerlein, "Hitlers Eintritt in die Politik und die Reichswehr," Viertelsjahrschrift fur Zeitgeschichte, 7 Jahrg., Heft 2 (April 1959), p. 219.

12. Mein Kampf, p. 306.

13. Quoted in the Danziger Vorposten, May 2, 1938.

14. Mein Kampf, pp. 423-424; The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, trans. by Norman Baynes (London, 1942), Vol. 1, p. 587.

15. “Gegenwartige Lage in der Physik," Aktenvermerk fur den Reichsleiter (Alfred Rosenberg) von J. Wagner, reprinted in Leon Poliakov and Josef Wulf, Das dritte Reich und seine Denker (Berlin, 1959), pp. 101-103.

16. Benedikt Lochmuller, Hans Schemm (Bayreuth, 1935), Vol. 1, p. 40.

17. Mein Kampf, p. 379.

18. Hermann Rauschning, Gesprache mit Hitler (New York, 1940), p. 220.

19. Ibid., p, 44.
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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NAZI CULTURE

1. Hitler Sets the Tone

Editor's Introduction


WHAT DID ADOLF HITLER himself have to say about Nazi culture? His ideas are written large in all the documents in this book, for he dominated the Third Reich in every phase of its activities. It is therefore only fitting that we should hear from him before we start Our inquiry. Hitler wrote and talked continually, and what he had to say about cultural activity would fill many volumes. The purpose of our small selection is merely to reflect in his own words the direction of thought contained in the material which follows.

The first group of selections is taken from Mein Kampf. There are two reasons for quoting from Hitler's only published book. Mein Kampf was required reading in the schools of the Third Reich (see page 278) as well as in many other organizations. Secondly, even if the book was not read, the speeches made by the Nazis and a host of other books and articles reflect the contents of Mein Kampf with great faithfulness. Hitler never changed the world view he had laid down when he started on the road to power, and Nazi culture reflected his all-encompassing ideology. Mein Kampf in fact would have been a successful book even if it had never been read: its contents were spread throughout the nation by the whole Nazi cultural drive.

Hitler dictated the book to his deputy, Rudolf Hess, from July to December 1924, when they were in easy confinement in the Bavarian Landsberg fortress as a result of the unsuccessful Nazi putsch of November 8-9, 1923. At first Hitler wanted to write his autobiography, but he decided instead to combine the story of his life with an account of the National Socialist world view and party organization. There was good reason for Hitler's change of mind: by fusing his own personality with the Nazi party the book would help him regain undisputed party leadership when he left prison. The cry, so often heard in the Third Reich, that "Hitler is Germany, and Germany Hitler" had to be preceded by the cry that "Hitler is the party." Though it took several years after he left Landsberg to re-establish his ascendancy, there can be little doubt that Mein Kampf helped him in this process. However, the book had more than a political purpose; it also represented his most profound beliefs.

These beliefs were based upon the primacy of the world view in determining man's fate. The power of an ideal was all-important, and in one passage Hitler links this to the war experience. Idealism is contrasted with materialism, symbolized by what he calls the teachings of Marxism which have also infected the bourgeoisie. His own world view is Volkish: based upon the racial principles which are fundamental to all of life. Thus race is the foundation of all culture. The state is only a means to the end of preserving the race, and we will find this concept of the state made law ten years later in his Third Reich (see page 327). Racial ideas are combined with a belief in an aristocracy which rises from the mass of the population. Hitler stressed the "great personality" who made history -- but always on the foundation of a common racism: personal ethics must be related to this basic factor of life. All culture is the product of the Aryan: only he can produce true personalities.

As culture is the expression of an ideal, materialism can never produce culture. Materialism has taken hold of the bourgeoisie through the influence of Marxism, an invention of the Jews. They are the true adversary of the Germanic world view and must be dealt with ruthlessly. Jews cannot produce culture, but they do serve a function: symbolizing all that is evil, they spur the Aryan on to struggle against them and thus to become ever more conscious of his own race. Therefore Hitler, adopting a phrase of Goethe, calls Jews a power which wants evil but produces good.

The "revolution in world view" can succeed only if it becomes part of a mass movement. Propaganda is designed to accomplish this but it must be backed up by an effective party organization. It is worth remembering that Hitler devotes half of Mein Kampf to problems of political organization.

Because of his belief that an ideology is unimportant unless it is embodied in a mass movement, Hitler's concept of the masses is of the greatest importance. He recognizes the imperative of giving status to the people, but this is secondary to the techniques necessary to "unlock their souls." The masses are swayed by emotion and feeling: they are a part of primeval nature itself, which reflects not the rational handiwork of God but instead an irrational view of man and the world. Hitler builds upon the romantic tradition. Throughout Nazi culture the parallel between man and nature will be drawn in this manner. The masses of Aryans are as "genuine" in their basic emotions as Nature herself. The task of the leader is to awaken these emotions, to bring to the surface the belief in race and blood which provide the foundations. From these presuppositions it follows that, as the people are a part of nature, their feelings are simple, direct, and partisan. Simple and direct because Nature herself is held to be such, in contrast with the artificiality of a materialist civilization; partisan because, in the last resort, the voice of the race will be heard.

This view of the masses is allied with the culture necessary to activate them in the struggle. Propaganda, as Hitler used the word and as the Nazis put it into practice, is the infusion of cultural attitudes into the mass of Germans. The anti-intellectualism which resulted will run like a theme throughout this book. Hitler's own view of the nature of education will provide the foundation for the attempt to capture youth. He calls for general rather than specialized education, meaning that the teaching of the Nazi world view must take precedence.

When he was at the height of his power Hitler gave a succinct summary of his concept of culture -- at the opening of the first "Exhibition of German Art" (July 18, 1937), for this was more than just another art exhibit. The exhibition, in a new building specially constructed for it, was to exemplify the entire direction of Nazi culture through the instrumentality of visual art. Representations of nature played a leading role (40 per cent of the pictures), but peasant and family motifs also abounded. Art must have clarity, as Hitler stated, and the idyllic pictures symbolize well the traditionalism of the framework within which National Socialism did its work. The exhibition was a success; the sales figures reached extraordinary heights.

The Aryan needed an adversary in his struggle. We have seen how the Jews fulfilled this function and On this occasion too an enemy was represented. The "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" was held nearby, providing an object lesson for a people who, as Hitler put it, did not "understand handshakes." The modems were hung under the appropriate slogans: "German peasants through Jewish eyes," "Blaspheming the German heroes of the world war," and "Making fun of German womanhood." What a contrast with the ideal types of peasants, heroes and women who graced the "Exhibition of German Art." We shall meet these ideal types throughout our documents.

This, then, is the setting in which Hitler defined culture, a definition which had already been put into practice throughout the Third Reich. When Hitler spoke in Munich, the "revolution of the world view" was already four and a half years old.

G.L.M.

FROM CULTURE AS THE FAITH IN AN IDEAL REICH TO ITS DIFFUSION AMONG THE MASSES

The Power of Ideals


One should beware of evaluating the force of an ideal too little. Those who today become faint-hearted in this regard, I would like to remind, in case they once were soldiers, of a time the heroism of which was the most overwhelming profession of the force of ideal motives. For, what made people die at that time was not care of their daily bread, but the love of their country, the confidence in its greatness, the general feeling for the honor of the nation. And only after the German people turned its back on these ideals in order to follow the material promises of the Revolution, and after it exchanged the gun for the knapsack, it came, instead of into an earthly heaven, into the purgatory of general disdain and, not less, of general distress.

Therefore it is all the more necessary to oppose the calculating masters of the erstwhile material Republic with the faith in an ideal Reich.

The Aryan as Custodian of Culture

The Marxist doctrine is the brief spiritual extract of the view of life that is generally valid today. Merely for this reason every fight by our so-called bourgeois world against it is impossible, even ridiculous, as this bourgeois world also is essentially interspersed with all these poison elements, and worships a view of life which in general is distinguished from the Marxian view only by degrees or persons. The bourgeois world is Marxist, but it believes in the possibility of a domination of certain human groups (bourgeoisie), while Marxism itself plans to transmit the world systematically into the hands of Jewry.

In opposition to this, the Volkish view recognizes the importance of mankind in its racially innate elements. In principle, it sees in the state only a means to an end, and as its end it considers the preservation of the racial existence of men. Thus it by no means believes in an equality of the races, but with their differences it also recognizes their superior and inferior values, and by this recognition it feels the obligation in accordance with the Eternal Will that dominates this universe to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and the weaker. Thus in principle it favors also the fundamental aristocratic thought of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual. It sees not only the different values of the races, but also the different values of individual man. In its opinion, out of the masses emerges the importance of the person, but by this it has an organizing effect, as contrasted with disorganizing Marxism. It believes in the necessity of idealizing mankind, as, in turn, it sees in this the only presumption for the existence of mankind. But it cannot grant the right of existence to an ethical idea, if this idea represents a danger for the racial life of the bearers of higher ethics; for in a hybridized and negrified world all conceptions of the humanly beautiful and sublime, as well as all conceptions of an idealized future of our mankind, would be lost forever.

In this world human culture and civilization are inseparably bound up with the existence of the Aryan. His dying off or his decline would again lower upon this earth the dark veils of a time without culture.

The undermining of the existence of human culture by destroying its supporters appears, in a Volkish view of life, as the most execrable crime. He who dares to lay hand upon the highest image of the Lord sins against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and helps in the expulsion from Paradise.

The State Is Not an End But a Means

The basic realization is that the state represents not an end but a means. It is indeed the presumption for the formation of a higher human culture, but not its cause. On the contrary, the latter lies exclusively in the existence of a race capable of culture. Hundreds of exemplary states may exist on this globe, but in case of a dying off of the Aryan culture supporter, no culture would exist which would correspond to the spiritual level of the highest peoples of today. One can even go further and say that the fact of human state formation would not in the least exclude the possibility of the destruction of the human race, insofar as the superior intellectual ability and elasticity, in consequence of the lack of its racial supporters, would be lost.

The Jew Has No Culture

The Jewish people, with all its apparent intellectual qualities, is nevertheless without any true culture, especially without a culture of its own. For the sham culture which the Jew possesses today is the property of other peoples, and is mostly spoiled in his hands.

When judging Jewry in its attitude toward the question of human culture, one has to keep before one's eye as an essential characteristic that there never has been and consequently that today also there is no Jewish art; that above all the two queens of all arts, architecture and music, owe nothing original to Jewry. What he achieves in the field of art is either bowdlerization or intellectual theft. With this, the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish creatively and, with it, culturally blessed races.

The Necessity of Propaganda

The most striking success of the revolution of a view of life will always be Won whenever the new view of life is, if possible, taught to all people, and, if necessary, is later forced upon them, while the organization of the idea -- that is, the movement -- has to embrace only so many people as absolutely necessary for the Occupation of the nerve centers of the state involved.

That means, in other words:

In every really great revolutionary movement propaganda will first have to spread the idea of this movement. Thus, it will untiringly try to make clear to the others the new train of thought, to draw them over to its own ground, or at least to make them doubtful of their own previous conviction. Since the propagation of a doctrine -- that is, this propaganda -- has to have a backbone, the doctrine will have to give itself a solid organization. The organization receives its members from the followers in general won by propaganda. The latter will grow the more quickly, the more intensively propaganda is carried out, and the latter in turn is able to work the better, the stronger and the more vigorous the organization is that stands behind it.

How Hitler Viewed the Masses

The national education of the great masses can only take place through the detour of a social uplift, since exclusively by this all those general economic presuppositions are created which permit the individual to take part in the cultural goods of the nation.

The nationalization of the great masses can never take place by way of half measures, by a weak emphasis upon a so-called objective viewpoint, but by a ruthless and fanatically one-sided orientation as to the goal to be aimed at. That means, therefore, one cannot make a people "national" in the meaning of our present "bourgeoisie," that is, with so and so many restrictions, but only nationalistic with the entire vehemence which is harbored in the extreme. Poison is only checked by antidote, and only the insipidity of a bourgeois mind can conceive the middle line as the way to heaven.

The great mass of a people consists neither of professors nor of diplomats. The small abstract knowledge it possesses directs its sentiments rather to the world of feeling. In this is rooted either its negative or positive attitude. It is open only to the expression of force in one of these directions, and never to a half measure swaying between them. Their sentimental attitude, however, is caused by their exceeding stability. It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to respect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward.

He who would win the great masses must know the key which opens the door to their hearts. Its name is not objectivity -- that is, weakness-but will power and strength.

One can only succeed in winning the soul of a people if, apart from a positive fighting of one's own for one's own aims, One also destroys at the same time the supporter of the contrary.

In the ruthless attack upon an adversary the people sees at all times a proof of its own right, and it perceives the renunciation of his destruction as an uncertainty as regards its own right, if not as a sign of its own wrong.

The great masses are only a part of nature, and this feeling does not understand the mutual handshake of people who assert that they want various things. What they want is the victory of the stronger and the annihilation or the unconditional surrender of the weaker.

The nationalization of our masses will only be successful if, along with all positive fighting for the soul of our people, its international poisoners are extirpated.

All great questions of the times are questions of the moment, and they represent only consequences of certain causes. Only one of them is of causal importance, that is, the question of the racial preservation of the nationality. In the blood alone there rests the strength as well as the weakness of man. As long as the people do not recognize and pay attention to the importance of their racial foundation, they resemble people who would like to teach the greyhound's qualities to poodles, without realizing that the greyhound's speed and the poodle's docility are qualities which are not taught, but are peculiar to the race. Peoples who renounce the preservation of their racial purity renounce also the unity of their soul in all its expressions. The torn condition of their nature is the natural, necessary consequence of the torn condition of their blood, and the change in their spiritual and creative force is only the effect of the change in their racial foundations.

He who wants to redeem the German people from the qualities and the vices which are alien to its original nature will have to redeem it first from the alien originators of these expressions.

Without the clearest recognition of the race problem and, with it, of the Jewish question, there will be no rise of the German nation.

The race question not only furnishes the key to world history, but also to human culture as a whole.

Education Must Be Based on Ideals

It is a characteristic of our present materialized time that our scientific education turns more and more toward the subjects of natural science only, namely, mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. No matter how necessary this is for a time in which techniques and chemistry dominate in daily life and represent its symptoms, at least as far as outwardly recognizable, it is just as dangerous if the general education of a nation is always directed exclusively at this. On the contrary, this education has always to be an ideal one. It has to correspond more to the classic subjects and should only offer the foundations of a later training in a special field. Otherwise, one renounces forces which are still more important for the preservation of the nation than any technical or other ability. Especially in history instruction one should not let oneself be deterred from studying antiquity. Roman history, rightly conceived in very broad outlines, is and remains the best teacher not only for today but probably for all times. The Hellenic ideal of culture, too, should be preserved for us in its exemplary beauty. One must not allow the differences of the individual races to tear up the greater racial community. The struggle that rages today involves very great aims: a culture fights for its existence, which combines millenniums and embraces Hellenism and Germanity together.

A sharp difference should be made between general education and specialized knowledge. Since the latter, today more than ever, threatens to sink into the service of pure mammon, general education, at least in its more ideal orientation, has to be preserved as a counterbalance. Here, too, one has continuously to inculcate the principle that industry and techniques, trade and professions are able to flourish only as long as an idealistically disposed national community offers the necessary presuppositions. But the latter do not lie in material egoism, but in a joyous readiness to renounce and to sacrifice.

Education, Instinct, and Will

A change in education is a further necessity: today we suffer from over-education. Only knowledge is prized. The know-it-alls are the enemies of action. What is needed is instinct and will.

All but one of the preceding extracts are from Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1926), translation by Helmut Ripperger (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), pp. 651, 579-581, 592, 416-417, 852, 466-470, 631-632. The extract entitled "Education, Instinct, and Will" is from a speech by Adolf Hitler, Munich, April 27, 1923, published in Werner Siebarth, Hitlers Wollen (Munich: Frz. Eher Verlag, 1936), p. 132.

HITLER DEFINES CULTURE IN DEFINING ART

The Cultural Renascence


On July 18, 1937, Hitler delivered a speech at the opening of the House of German Art in Munich, which was to take the place of the former "Glass Palace." In the collapse of Germany after the war, he said, the economic decline had been generally felt, the political decline had been denied by many, the cultural decline had not even been observed by the majority of the people. It was an age of phrases and catchwords: in the economic sphere the hard facts of misery and unemployment deprived these phrases of their force: in the political sphere such phrases as "international solidarity" had more success and veiled from the German people the extent of the political collapse. But in the long run the failure of the parliamentary-democratic form of government, copied from the West -- a West which regardless of this democratic form still continued to extort from Germany whatever there remained to extort -- defeated the phrase-mongers. Far more lasting was the effect of these phrases in the cultural field, where they resulted in a complete confusion concerning the essential character of culture. Here the influence of the Jews was paramount and through their control of the press they were able to intimidate those who desired to champion "the normal sound intelligence and instinct of men," Art was said to be "an international experience," and thus all comprehension of its intimate association with a people was stifled: it was said that there was no such thing as the art of a people or, better, of a race: there was only the art of a certain period. Thus it was not Greeks who created the art of Greece, Romans the art of Rome, etc. -- a particular period had found in each art its expression. Art is a "time- conditioned phenomenon." So today there is not a German or a French art, 'hut a "modern art." This is to reduce art to the level of fashions in dress, with the motto "Every year something fresh" -- Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, perhaps also Dadaism. These newly created art phrases would be comic, if they were not tragic.

The result was uncertainty in judgments passed on art and the silencing of those who might otherwise have protested against this Kulturbolschewismus, while the press continued to poison our sound appreciation of art. And just as in fashions one must wear "modern" clothes whether they are beautiful or not, so the great masters of the past were decried. But true art is and remains eternal, it does not follow the law of the season's fashions: its effect is that of a revelation arising from the depths of the essential character of a people which successive generations can inherit. But those who do not create for eternity do not readily talk of eternities: they seek to dim the radiance of these giants who reach out of the past into the future in order that contemporaries may discover their own tiny flames. These facile daubers in art are but the products of a day: yesterday, nonexistent: today, modern: tomorrow, out of date. The Jewish discovery that art was just the affair of a period was for them a godsend: theirs could be the art of the present time. Theirs was a small art -- small in form and substance -- and at the same time intolerant of the masters of the past and the rivals of the present. There was a conspiracy of incapacity and mediocrity against better work of any age. The new rich, having no judgment of their own in art matters, accepted these artists at their own valuation. It was only an attraction that these works of art were difficult to understand and on that account very costly: no one wished to admit lack of comprehension or insufficient means! And if one does not oneself understand, probably one's neighbor will not either, and he will admire one's comprehension of obscurity.

For this "modern art" National Socialism desires to substitute a "German" art and an eternal art. This House of German Art is designed for the art of the German people -- not for an international art. "The people in the flux of phenomena is the one constant point. It is that which is abiding and permanent, and therefore art as the expression of the essential character of the abiding people must be an eternal monument, itself abiding and permanent; there can be therefore no standard of yesterday and today, of modern or unmodern: there can be only the standard of 'valueless' or 'valuable,' of 'eternal' or 'transitory.''' "And therefore in speaking of German art I shall see the standard for that art in the German people, in its character and life, in its feeling, its emotions, and its development."

From the history of the development of our people we know that it is composed of a number of more or less distinct races which in the course of millennia through the formative influence of a certain outstanding racial kernel produced that mixture which we see before us in Our people today. This force which formed the people in time past and which still today continues that formative activity lies in the same Aryan branch of mankind which we recognize not only as the support of our own civilization but of the earlier civilizations of the ancient world.

The way in which our people was composed has produced the many-sidedness of our own cultural development, but as we look upon the final result of this process we cannot but wish for an art which may correspond to the increasing homogeneity of our racial composition, and thus present in itself the characteristics of unity and homogeneity. Many attempts have been made through the centuries to define what "to be German" really means. I would not seek to give an explanation in the first instance. I would rather state a law -- a law previously expressed by a great German: "To be German is to be clear," and that means that to be German is to be logical and true. It is this spirit which has always lived in our people, which has inspired painters, sculptors, architects, thinkers, poets, and above all our musicians. When on June 6, 1931, the Glass Palace was burned down there perished with it an immortal treasure of German art. The artists were called Romantics, and yet they were but the finest representatives of that German search for the real and true character of our people, for an honest and decent expression of this law of life divined by our people. For it was not only their choice of subject which was decisive but the clear and simple mode of rendering these sentiments. Many of their original works are lost, we possess only copies or reproductions, but the works of these masters are removed by a great gulf from the pitiable products of our modern so-called "creative artists." These masters felt themselves to be Germans, and consequently they created works which should be valued as long as there should be a German people to appreciate them. But these modern works we would also preserve as documents illustrating the depths of that decline into which the people had fallen. The "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" is intended as a useful lesson.

During the long years in which I planned the formation of a new Reich I gave much thought to the tasks which would await us in the cultural cleansing of the people's life: there was to be a cultural renascence as well as a political and economic reform. I was convinced that peoples which have been trodden underfoot by the whole world of their day have all the greater duty consciously to assert their own value before their oppressors, and there is no prouder proof of the highest rights of a people to its own life than immortal cultural achievements. I was therefore always determined that if fate should one day give us power I would discuss these matters with no one but would form my own decisions, for it is not given to all to have an understanding for tasks as great as these. Among the plans which floated before me in my mind both during the war and after the collapse was the idea of building a great new exhibition palace in Munich; and many years ago I thought of the place where the building now stands. In 1931 I feared that I should be anticipated and that the "men of November" would erect an exhibition building. Plans indeed were produced for an edifice which might well have served for a railway station or a swimming bath. But when we came to power in 1933 the plan had not been executed: the erection of the building was left to the Third Reich. And the building is so unique, so individual, that it cannot be compared with anything else: it is a true monument for this city and more than that -- for German art.... It represents a turning point, the first of the new buildings which will take their place among the immortal achievements of German artistic life.

But the House is not enough: it must house an Exhibition, and if now I venture to speak of art I can claim a title to do so from the contribution which I myself have made to the restoration of German art. For our modern German state that I with my associates have created has alone brought into existence the conditions for a new, vigorous flowering of art. It is not Bolshevist art collectors or their henchmen who have laid the foundations: we have provided vast sums for the encouragement of art, we have set before art itself great, new tasks. As in politics, so in German art-life: we are determined to make a clean sweep of phrases. Ability is the necessary qualification if an artist wishes his work to be exhibited here. People have attempted to recommend modern art by saying that it is the expression of a new age: but art does not create a new age, it is the general life of peoples which fashions itself anew and therefore often seeks after a new expression. A new epoch is not created by litterateurs but by the fighters, those who really fashion and lead peoples, who thus make history. It is either impudent effrontery or stark stupidity to exhibit to the people of today works which perhaps ten or twenty thousand years ago might have been made by a man of the Stone Age. They talk of primitive art, but they forget that it is not the function of art to retreat backward from the stage of development which a people has already reached: its sole function must be to symbolize that development.

The new age of today is at work on a new human type. Men and women are to be more healthy, stronger: there is a new feeling of life, a new joy in life. Never was humanity in its external appearance and in its frame of mind nearer to the ancient world than it is today. Hitler spoke of the Olympic Games, of sport, of the radiant, proud bodily vigor of youth. This, my good prehistoric art-stutterers, is the type of the new age. And what do you manufacture? Misformed cripples and cretins, women who inspire only disgust, men who are more like wild beasts, children who, were they alive, must be regarded as cursed of God. And let no one say to me that that is how these artists see things. From the pictures sent in for exhibition it is clear that the eye of some men shows them things otherwise than as they are -- that there really are men who on principle feel meadows to be blue, the heaven green, clouds sulphur-yellow -- or as they perhaps prefer to say "experience" them thus. I need not ask whether they really do see or feel things in this way, but in the name of the German people I have only to prevent these pitiable unfortunates who clearly suffer from defects of vision from attempting with violence to persuade contemporaries by their chatter that these faults of observation are indeed realities or from presenting them as "Art." Here only two possibilities are open: either these "artists" do really see things in this way and believe in that which they represent -- then one has but to ask how the defect in vision arose, and if it is hereditary the Minister of the Interior will have to see to it that so ghastly a defect of vision shall not be allowed to perpetuate itself -- or if they do not believe in the reality of such impressions but seek on other grounds to impose upon the nation by this humbug, then it is a matter for a criminal court. There is no place for such works in this building. The industry of architects and workmen was not spent to house canvases which were daubed over in five hours, the painters being assured that the boldness of the pricing could not fail to produce its effect, that the canvas would be hailed as the most brilliant lightning-birth of a genius. No, they can be left to cackle over each other's eggs!

The artist does not create for the artist: he creates for the people and we will see to it that henceforth the people will be called in to judge its art. No one must say that the people has no understanding for a really valuable enrichment of its cultural life. Before the critics did justice to the genius of a Richard Wagner he had the people on his side, while the people has had nothing to do with so-called "modern art." The people regarded this art as the outcome of an impudent and unashamed arrogance or of a simply shocking lack of skill; it felt that this art-stammer -- these achievements which might have been produced by untalented children of from eight to ten years old -- could never be valued as an expression of our own times or of the German future. When we know today that the development of millions of years repeats itself in every individual compressed into a few decades, then this art, we realize, is not "modern"; it is on the contrary in the highest degree "archaic," far older probably than the Stone Age. The people when it passes through these galleries will recognize in me its own spokesman and counselor: it will draw a sigh of relief and express its glad agreement with this purification of art. And that is decisive: an art which cannot count on the readiest and most intimate agreement of the great mass of the people, an art which must rely upon the support of small cliques, is intolerable. Such an art does but endeavor to confuse, instead of gladly reinforcing, the sure and healthy instinct of a people. The artist cannot stand aloof from his people. This exhibition is but a beginning, yet the end of the artistic stultification of Germany has begun. Now is the opportunity for youth to start its industrious apprenticeship, and when a sacred conscientiousness at last comes into its own, then I doubt not that the Almighty, from the mass of these decent creators of art, will once more raise up individuals to the eternal starry heaven of the imperishable God-favored artists of the great periods. We believe that especially today, when in so many spheres the highest individual achievements are being manifested, so also in art the highest value of personality will once again assert itself.

From The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, translated and edited by Norman H. Baynes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), Vol. I, pp. 584-592. (Reprinted by permission.)
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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PART 1 OF 2

2. What Sort of a Revolution?

Editor's Introduction


THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST REVOLUTION stressed both the dynamic of the movement and the "taming" of that dynamic through an appeal to tradition and sentiment. The following documents illustrate this double aspect of the movement. The SA came to symbolize the violence and the fighting spirit of the Nazis before their accession to power. Founded in 1921 for the purpose of providing protection at Nazi meetings, they soon found themselves embroiled in pitched battles (Saalschlachten) at these meetings against left-wing elements or those loyal to the Republic. It was not long before the SA themselves began to provoke "the enemy," seeking them out in order to do battle or marching through the streets singing songs of triumph and hate. The SA men were young, drawn largely from the ranks of the unemployed, and less interested in long-range goals than in immediate and violent change. By 1933 nearly 300,000 men had joined the organization. Most of their leaders were former soldiers who had been unable to demobilize and in their brown uniforms carried on the "war experience" which they could not forget.

Ernst Rohm, who became SA chief of staff in 1930, was such a man. He glorified his war experiences (see page 101) and gave little thought to the long-range purposes and goals which Hitler had in mind. Small wonder that the SA proved a constant challenge to party discipline. The Nazi seizure of power eliminated the enemy who had to be fought in meeting halls and on the streets. The SA was no longer necessary -- the struggle for power was a thing of the past -- and on June 30, 1934, Hitler acted to bring this restless organization under control. Ernst Rohm and other SA leaders were shot in the "night of the long knives." Not only was the power of the SA destroyed, but Nazi leaders took the opportunity to eliminate other personal enemies as well. From that point on the SA played a minor role in the Third Reich: politically its time was past, but its battles during the Nazi rise to power were idealized in memory. The hard fight in which the Nazis had triumphed was thought to provide a necessary myth for the existence of the Third Reich, but, for all that, it was true that such battles had actually taken place.

Friedrich Joachim Klaehn describes one SA unit's successful attempt to conduct a meeting against the opposition of the regular and auxiliary police as well as that of the Reichsbanner, an organization of volunteers formed to demonstrate for and to protect the Republic. The incident took place in September 1932 after the brief and abortive attempt by the Reich government to ban the SA (April 13- June 14). Instead, a new wave of SA terrorism spread throughout Germany. The restrictions described in this extract are therefore local measures directed against the intimidation of the population by Hitler's Storm Troops. Such restrictions were doubly desirable because of the approach of a November election, which spurred the SA to redouble their efforts. Hitler lost votes in that Reichstag election, and the result only added to the SA's impatience with the Fuhrer's attempt to find a legal road to power, a disillusionment with legal methods which had set in much earlier among the SA. Friedrich Klaehn was well fitted to idealize this incident. He was a propagandist for the SA and, perhaps, a leader of a troop (Sturm) himself.

The radical spirit within the SA is further illustrated by Kurt Massmann's account of a meeting-hall brawl. Massmann acted as the leader for South Hanover and Brunswick of the Strength Through Joy movement of the Labor Front (see page 341). The SA leader, the "bear" whom he describes, represents the ideal type of SA man, uncouth and thus a simple man of the people, honest and strong. This idealization of the "days of struggle" was published in a volume which intended to show German youth in action against the Republic. The Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, wrote the preface. Both Klaehn's and Massmann's stories were meant to glorify the past struggles of the National Socialists on behalf of the "German spirit" -- but they do illustrate the radicalism prevalent among the Storm Troops.

The taming of this radicalism proved no easy task, and Hanns Anderlahn, a prolific writer of books about the SA, warns against the expanding revolutionary spirit. The rejection of all family ties, advocated by some SA men in this meeting, focuses the problem. The rejection of such traditional ties meant a clear and present danger to the Nazi world view. This was anchored in an idealization of the past which included an emphasis upon bourgeois morality. The taming of the activism through an "embourgeoisement" of the SA was accomplished by stressing the importance of founding a family -- the wife must be regarded as a "comrade." This extract shows clearly how the activism was supposedly combined with harmless relaxation in which the wife could participate. From marching and doing battle the SA passed to drama societies, from cracking skulls to comfortable "togetherness."

The family was the true cell of the state. Not merely was the ardor of the SA tamed through this emphasis, but it was an intrinsic part of the racial world view. Ludwig Leonhardt, an expert on racial theory, clearly states that the family is part of the whole biological inheritance of the individual, and such inheritance is crucial in the formation of a race. Genealogical research must be undertaken in order to discover the importance of one's racial origins. Beyond this, such research is essential in order to make the right kind of marriage, and Leonhardt's book Heirat und Rassenpflege (Marriage and Racial Hygiene) was designed for marriage counseling.

How far such counseling should go, another expert on racial hygiene, the physician Hermann Paull, takes pains to describe. If one acquires a wealthy husband or wife, one also marries into a high-grade biological and racial inheritance, for such wealth could not have been amassed without native ability typical of the superior race. The bourgeois cast of National Socialism could hardly find a better illustration, and what Paull has to say on the benefits of marriage itself further underlines this. Free love is dangerous to racial health. The puritanical element in the Nazi world view is pushed to the forefront.

This emphasis upon family and marriage brings home the fact that violence, such as that of the SA, was good only if directed against the enemy, those who opposed the Nazi revolution. Within the movement, and within a racially pure Germany, the "holy bonds" of tradition, including the family, had to be preserved.

The ideal of womanhood is a good illustration of the traditionalism, indeed the conservatism, which pervaded National Socialism and added so much to its attractiveness for the middle classes. Hitler's views on the place of women in society are essentially those of the mid-nineteenth century, and he was followed in this by the other National Socialists whose words are reproduced here. Man was the master -- about that there must be no doubt -- and it was he who determined the course of politics, of the law, indeed of all public affairs. The woman's sphere was the family, it was her duty to safeguard this cell from which the race has its being. The Nazis attacked the ideal of equal rights for women and rejected the woman's emancipation movement. This movement had been connected with that socialism and liberalism which the Nazis hated so much, but the vision of an idealized past also played its role. Alfred Rosenberg, in his Der Mythos des XX. Jahrhunderts (The Mythos of the Twentieth Century) (1930), typically enough inveighs against the emancipation movement as an affront to the true role of woman, who is an integral part of his historic Volk. Living up to this ideal could mean going back to work at the spinning wheel and the weaving loom, as suggested by the Volkischer Beobachter.

Joseph Goebbels, in his novel Michael (1929), presents this ideal of womanhood in so-called poetic form (for more from this novel, see page 104), while Rudolf Hess, the Fuhrer's deputy, discusses "women we can love." The stereotype of the ideal woman is always the same: guardian of the family, mother of her children, and obedient helpmate to her husband. Throughout the Third Reich, Magda Goebbels was put forward as the ideal German woman. While his enemies called her husband a "shrunken Teuton gone dark" (nachgedunkelter Schrumpfgermane), Magda Goebbels was blond, tall, and the mother of numerous children. Blond hair and blue eyes were essential elements in the stereotype of the Aryan woman as it had grown up in racial thought. Small wonder that in 1937 an SS leader could condemn the "blond craze," the more so as some girls seem to have thought that by itself blond hair would serve as proof of their Aryan descent -- a proof necessary for marriage to an SS man. But here racial thought had only itself to blame, for outward appearance was always stressed as a sign of the correct racial soul (see page 64).

Simplicity was an integral part of Aryan beauty. In an earlier extract the ideal SA leader was glowingly described as uncouth -- that is, simple and straightforward. This kind of primitive simplicity was transferred to the comportment of the female sex. The Nazis condemned lipstick, powder, and other make-up as relics of an age which had substituted artificiality for the naturalness that was intrinsic to the "genuine" Germanic race. The whole opposition of the Nazi world view to "artificial" modernity was involved here. For racial thought, living close to nature was regarded as proof that Germans had not lost touch with the roots of their race. The Labor Service which every German youth had to undergo helped to inculcate this idea. Working with the spade on the land meant a return to the foundations of national life. But such puritanism could go too far, even for Goebbels' paper, Der Angriff -- the female bird must pretty itself, as Goebbels put it in his novel. A shiny nose did not serve the Volk. But this article does show what had become the practice in the girls' branch of the Labor Service.

The BDM project "Faith and Beauty" seems closer to the ideal of the Labor Service than to that of Der Angriff. The BDM (Bund Deutscher Madel) was the party youth organization to which every girl, up to the age of eighteen, should belong -- it was the female counterpart to the Hitler Youth. "Faith" is acquired through ideological indoctrination in various subjects, such as foreign affairs and folklore. "Beauty" means gymnastics, hygiene, etc., but not "beauty culture" as we understand it -- learning to make up one's face, to dye one's hair, or to obtain the right figure. The Nazi ideal of female comportment is illustrated once more in an official order concerning women charged with forging a close connection between shop or plant and the National Socialist movement. The NSBO (National Sozialistischer Betriebs Obman) was a part of the official labor organization, the Labor Front (see page 341). This office, purely honorary, was now opened to women -- but not to those who were painted and powdered or who smoked in public.

In describing the Aryan woman's duties to the Volk, the Nazis often employed a distinctly military vocabulary. The Honor Cross of the German Mother was established (1938) in order to recognize the most important service a woman could render: the bearing of children. Long before this, families with many children had obtained special tax benefits (see page 358). Typically enough, the German mother was likened to the soldier in the front-line trenches. But these trenches were different from those occupied by men. Women students from the universities might proclaim their usefulness to the Volk, and stress their National Socialism, but to little or no avail -- though the Volkischer Beobachter might occasionally print one of their statements in order to restore a balance in the Nazi view of women. More typical, however, is the pronouncement of the official Nazi publication which strongly rejects the existence of "political women" within the party and demands their return to the sphere of family and motherhood.

The Nazi ideal of womanhood illustrates well the traditionalism of their revolution. They believed they were pursuing the ideal of the Germanic race of ancient times, but in reality they had embraced merely the bourgeois ideal of the nineteenth century: the simple but devoted housewife and mother who lives solely for her family and behaves dutifully toward her husband. The modern concept of beauty is rejected together with the contemporary emancipation of women. Every revolution is puritanical, for men's thoughts should be on "higher" matters than those of the flesh. Did not Robespierre during the French Revolution assert that "virtue must be woman's only ornament." But here this female ideal illustrates the embourgeoisement of the Nazi movement, the taming of the activism typified by the SA.

The social reality had to be adjusted to these ideals. The condemnation of the afternoon "tea and dancing" is significant in this regard. "Tea and dancing" was a regular part of the social life of the upper classes in Germany as well as throughout the rest of Europe. The Nazis' condemnation of this custom illuminates some deep preconceptions of their ideology. "Tea and dancing" is international and therefore not properly German; at a time when Hitler stressed the rootedness of the arts such music and dancing represented a cosmopolitan vagabondage. Moreover, puritanism comes to the fore once more: the kind of conversation encouraged here is superficial, not concerned with those essentials upon which the German mind should focus. National Socialism regarded modern dancing as harmful to its ideal of womanhood for its rhythms were thought to be an open incitement to sexual promiscuity. Such dancing amounted to an Asiatic orgy-typified by the "Negro music" of jazz (though the Soviet Union under Stalin, Marxist and Asiatic in Nazi eyes, shared an identical attitude toward jazz and modern dancing).

"Tea and dancing" was a symptom of modernity, of a piece with the degeneracy of modern music and modern art. Such modern art could be seen in the same year that this article was published (1937), in the Munich "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" (see page 11). "Tea and dancing," like everything else, was seen in terms of the Nazi ideology: it is no coincidence that this article was published in the newspaper of the SA, who prided themselves on being the "simple" and unsophisticated representatives of the Nazi movement.

Reality in some cases tended to escape the clutches of ideology, especially when the Nazi elite gave a party. The "love gods" who danced on Peacock Island (near Berlin) and the use of the best dance bands are difficult to reconcile with the criticisms of "tea and dancing" made a year later. Joseph Goebbels gave this party in July 1936, and it was attended by some three thousand guests. To be sure, it was meant to impress the many foreigners who were present, for the Minister of Propaganda was playing host to the participants in the Olympic Games and their guests. However, the entertainment could have been more subdued, folk-dancing exhibitions could have taken the place of dancing to the international tunes of excellent jazz orchestras. The love gods, it must be added, were clad, however lightly. Goebbels did make an effort to see that as little of the festivities as possible got to the press. At his luxurious estate at Schwanenwerder he gave many other parties of this sort; he did not need an international congress to justify a gay time.

Nor did puritan simplicity extend to festive occasions, such as the annual hall for the press. Gambling too was not affected, even in wartime. The advertisement for croupier candidates was published in the official paper of the Karlsruhe NSDAP. This hardly sounds like a fit occupation for the ideal Aryan as represented by the "bear" of an SA leader.

For all this, the leadership as a whole, and especially Adolf Hitler, tended to be frugal and generally lived up to the desired morality. This bourgeois morality served to tame the activism, to channel it against the enemies of the Reich. The Nazi world view, and the culture which sprang from it, made a puritanical, moral ideal its own concern. Thus the Nazi revolution could appeal to traditionalism, to the good old times, and yet provide an outlet for the activism so vital for the dynamic of the movement.

G.L.M.

THE GOOD FIGHT

Here Marched the New Germany, by FRIEDRICH JOACHIM KLAEHN


September 1932! The old system still triumphed, the bigwigs in office clung to their titular dignities, the police still wielded their clubs viciously. But we didn't let anyone get the best of us. We wanted to prove to these people that their positions were crumbling beneath them and to show with what holy faith we await the future Reich of Adolf Hitler.

The SA unit had to be defended. For this reason we were called together one evening in the meeting hall of the capital city of the province.

It was forbidden for the assault troops to march in closed ranks. If here and there four or five men started out toward the meeting hall together, a patrol wagon would suddenly appear and the police would begin to swing their rubber truncheons without warning.

Singing was forbidden.

Carrying banners was forbidden.

Transportation by trucks, private automobiles, bicycles, and other means was forbidden.

It was forbidden for the SA units to stand outside the meeting hall. The rabble gathered on the streets. But on this day they did not dare to make themselves conspicuous by shouting or spitting, for then they could be beaten up.

These comrades of the darkness waited for individual SA men in dark doorways and on lonely streets. The patrol wagons of the defense police whizzed over the cobbled streets, and played searchlights over the crowd streaming toward the meeting hall, in order to see whether any formations of SA men were being assembled.

Police patrols streamed through the dark training area behind the hall, not to protect us against the Communists who were lurking about, but lustily looking for Brown-shirt victims for their clubs.

The meeting hall, which could hold 7,000 persons, was gaily decorated -- at least to the extent that the police had allowed, for the display of posters with inciting inscriptions was thought to endanger the Republic.

A giant rectangle had been kept clear in the middle of the hall. The seats to the right and left of it had been occupied long before the beginning of the celebration by civilians, by the relatives of SA men, by their women and children, and by people for whom the SA had become what it should be: the last hope for and the last faith in the Fatherland.

By way of exception, the police allowed the assault troops to form outside the hall. But on this night, to be sure, the same thing occurred as always: the commanding lieutenant (Krauth was the scoundrel's name) of the police unit professed ignorance of this permission on the part of the police authorities and many telephone calls had to be made before the matter was cleared up in our favor.

But now the friction had begun. The SA formed itself into one block, forty men abreast in forty ranks, banners waving in the first ranks.

This block now was to march through the doors of the meeting hall to the tune of "The Badenweiler March" in a broad front and occupy the space in the hall that had been left vacant.

The SA-unit band had already begun to strike up the tune, but the SA did not come, because First Lieutenant Krauth would not permit the side doors to be opened.

The standard-bearer argued with the First Lieutenant and the Reichsbanner [1] leader, while the SA stood at parade rest.

Hard words were exchanged. At the very moment when the First Lieutenant began to shout in a shrill voice and he was about to call out to his unit to arrest the standard-bearer, the latter's command resounded loudly: "Clear the way!"

The block marched and the police stepped back in the face of the rhythmically raised SA boots and legs. Slowly the block of the SA, flawlessly lined up on the point man and the rear man, moved into the meeting hall. The music boomed out and the civilians stood up and raised their hands in salute. Brightly lit eyes greeted us! Many eyes filled with tears. Here marched the new Germany. Here ancient Germany was reawakening. They are the men who will save us, who are our future.

Then joy broke out and all the annoyance over the chicanery of the police disappeared. What was it to us that these men were still there, confused, with woebegone faces, trying to preserve their rotten system? Soon these men would be forgotten, swept away, liquidated! Germany would awake!

Commands resound. The SA stands!

The standard-bearer ascended the broad podium. His gaze swept over his unit, over the glorious banners, and over the people awaiting the future men of the Third Reich. At a celebration like this, there was no point in excoriating the existing system. But the leader could not refrain from dealing it a sudden blow with a trenchant observation to the overzealous police who were present. He said that we National Socialists could not imagine that those who were there today in green uniforms, allegedly in order to preserve order and peace, and who today were called police but who in actuality extended protection only to their like-minded comrades, that these men someday would exercise the same function in our Reich. When soon the swastika waves from all public buildings, this green phantom and terror will vanish.

Before the police had fully understood these words and before the thunderous applause, the standard- earer returned to his theme and said: "You are SA men not just for these years of struggle or during the service that you are now performing; you are SA men for your whole life. All the spiritual and physical energy that you possess, all your time and means, belongs to the people and to the Fatherland and to the Fuhrer, even life itself. Now the oath! Attention!"

The civilians rose from their seats. The oath of loyalty and commitment was pronounced, word by word, loudly and clearly, by the SA men. Then the standard-bearer paced off and every SA man stepped forward from the ranks, and placing his hand on the banner, declared: "I pledge it to my Fuhrer!"

The "Horst Wessel" song and the "Deutschland Lied" ended this unforgettable celebration.

During the night the patrol wagons roared through the streets. The police were in a state of heightened preparedness.

The SA men went back to their homes one by one. There were many bloody heads that night, but it wasn't only among us, for now One couldn't attack SA men with impunity.

At this celebration the unit leader took leave of his troop. But he did not tell anybody, since here the individual is nothing, everything.

From Friedrich Joachim Klaehn, Sturm 138: Ernstes und viel Heiteres aus dem SA-Leben (Leipzig: Verlag H. Schaufuss, 1934), pp. 202-207.

_______________

Notes:

1. The Reichsbanner was a voluntary defense organization composed of men loyal to the Republic.

A Meeting-Hall Brawl, by KURT MASSMANN

Once we held a meeting in a workers' suburb. The meeting had been called by us National Socialist students.

It was a very small meeting hall. One SA troop sufficed to guard the gathering. Around nine-thirty another SA troop was expected to show up at the close of the meeting in order to protect the participants from possible attack....

At eight o'clock the giant Schirmer, who was to speak that night, rolled up his shirt sleeves and with a friendly smile spat into his hands, which were as big as an average-sized trunk. He had been in Russia for three years and was familiar with the whole swindle there. Upon his return to Germany he became a National Socialist with all heart and soul, one of those who cause shivers to go through the hearts of the timid bourgeois, anxious over the dangerous "Socialism" rampant among the National Socialists! A splendid fellow! A man to whom one could entrust all one's money and who would sooner kick the bucket from hunger before he would take a penny of it.

It is said that one day he was introduced to the Fuhrer. The tall, uncouth lad, who otherwise was never at a loss for words, just stood there, swallowed hard, wiped his eyes with his fore-paw, and finally stammered: "Well, Adolf Hitler ..." and exuberantly shook his hand. Then he came to his senses, blushed fiery red -- oh, holy miracle! -- pulled himself to his full height, saluted, and marched off with a smart about-face.

The SA man pushed himself through the roaring crowd, which had been staging a noisy reception for fifteen minutes, and took his place in a very narrow space in front of the podium.

It was a remarkable situation! There was a terrible ruckus lasting a half hour, nothing but a deafening din. There was no act of violence. Schirmer, the bear, stood on the podium, his mighty arms crossed, and smiled at the goings-on in the hall with a relaxed, unconcerned air....

Gradually this smile produced its effect. The din slowly died down and gave way to an air of tense expectancy.

Around eight-thirty Schirmer grabbed the water carafe, placed it to his lips, took a hearty swallow, and then poured the water into a glass that had been placed alongside the carafe. He took this glass and directed the water most skillfully over the heads of the SA and right into the neck of a man in the first row who had been yelling and egging on the crowd in the hall the whole time. Then Schirmer, abruptly and with a powerful voice, roared: "Quiet! Now I'll do the talking!" And indeed quiet descended on the hall in an instant.

Then he let loose. He spoke in simple, plain words, in the everyday speech of these workers. They listened to him.

In the middle of the hall, which had been the source of the din the whole evening, a little Jew with horn-rimmed spectacles set on a thick nose climbed on a chair and began to give an opposing speech in an unpleasant and high-pitched voice like that of a eunuch.

Schirmer made a contemptuous motion with his hand and continued speaking in a voice that was so powerful that the echo reverberated from the walls and completely drowned out the whimpering of the little man on the chair.

But the little man persisted in his aim to break up the meeting and ranted on and on with an unheard-of display of gestures.

When Schirmer, who had just spoken about the community of fate of the Volk, paused for a moment, the little Jew could be heard screaming: "Workers! Proletarians! Your front is the international proletariat! ... Your ..." No further words were heard. Schirmer had pushed his way through the thick chain of the SA men and went all by himself through the shouting crowd straight up to the little Jew, the spokesman and leader of the Communists. The Jew cut his speech short in astonishment, and although he was surrounded by three hundred and fifty comrades, he climbed down from the chair with a monkeylike agility and stepped back a few rows. Schirmer shrugged his shoulders, and had a grim expression on his face. Then he roared at the people in the hall: "Workers, look at the toad who brought you here and then look at me! I'm a worker like you are! I produce with my fists like you! Do you belong to him over there or to me?"

The Jew, meanwhile, was screaming: "Comrades, he wants to provoke us.!" Schirmer could no longer speak amid the tumult that had been unleashed: Grimly, he returned to the podium and continued to speak from there.

But the little Jew had climbed on his chair once more. He certainly had reason to fear that his people could be influenced by this speaker, and he gave the signal to break up the meeting. "Let's go!" he screamed. "Moscow! Let's go!"

In a moment the hall resounded with yells, ear-shattering noises, blows, and wild screaming.

Schirmer stood on the podium and roared a few times the word "Germany!" into the hall with such strength that it could be heard above the din. "Germany!" It sounded like a trumpet call. I did not know whether this word was actually part of his speech or whether it was a last exhortation thrown into the meeting-hall brawl. After uttering it he sprang into the fray with a mighty leap.

At that moment the main door of the hall was opened and the second SA troop stormed in. The little Jew, who a minute ago had still looked like an unlucky Napoleon, stood on his chair as if paralyzed. Schirmer, who was knocking down his opponents right and left, had already gotten close to the Jewish ringleader along with a couple of SA men. In a really artistic movement, the Jew leaped from his chair, ran like a weasel through the hall, between the brawlers, and jumped through the closed window into the courtyard, the shattered glass panes crashing on the ground with him.

For a moment a current of laughter coursed through the hall.

Most of the Communists, above all the main hecklers, had already fled through the side door. Only a little band of Reds tenaciously defended themselves in a comer. I saw that those who resisted were precisely the best-looking among the Communists, mostly older workers.

Soon even the resistance of these people was broken. They were allowed to leave unmolested, after they had given up.

The hall was a scene of desolation. It was covered with blood, not a single chair was in one piece, wreckage was strewn everywhere. Some of the Communists, not those of the last group, had fought with beer bottles and glasses!

About eight SA men had received head injuries from these rude and contemptible weapons. The faces of same of them were so en crusted with blood that it covered their eyes and they groped around the hall like blind men.

Several Communists remained stretched out on the floor. When the SA medics began to attend to their injuries, an older worker with a good clean-cut face, who had fought to the last and defended himself with real courage, exchanging blow for blow, took his party book from his pocket, tore his party badge from his lapel, and handed both to the giant Schirmer, whom he had demanded to see. He shook his hand and said: "So, now I'm cured!" After he was bandaged he signed an entry blank to join the National Socialist Workers' Party....

The eternal petit bourgeois complained about the "primitivization of politics." They said that things would not improve in Germany by people busting one another's heads in.

They had no idea of what was at stake! The fight for the soul of German man and the new Germany was being fought even in such assemblies and in such brawls at meeting halls!

We National Socialist students did not go into working-class quarters to have our heads broken for nothing! Neither did we do it to win a dozen votes for some election or other, which wouldn't have been worth the effort. We could have held academic discussion evenings, which at least would have been less dangerous.

We fought for the German worker. We wanted to help the worker take his place in the nation!

Often we had to use fists and chair legs in order to reach him and to drive out the racially alien "leaders" and their bodyguards who stood between them and us!

From Kampf: Lebensdokumente deutscher Jugend von 1914-1934, compiled and edited by Bert Roth (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam jun., Verlag, 1934), pp. 228-232.

THE BONDS OF FAMILY

National Socialism Has Restored the Family, by HANNS ANDERLAHN


"The family ..." Wernicke began falteringly, not knowing just what to say. If the others up front would start laughing, he was thinking, then I could get out of it. I have nothing to say on the subject! But they all kept looking at him. The Assault Leader had an ice-cold expression on his face, full of scorn and anger. The minutes became nerve-racking, hammering, overwhelming eternities.

"The family is of no concern to us!" A voice from the audience finally came to his assistance. "We are SA men, we do our duty, we are National Socialists, and nothing else concerns us."

For a moment this seemed to be satisfactory. Indeed, it was very decent of the Assault Leader to come to his aid. So he parroted after him: "Nothing else concerns us!" But this didn't sound quite right. Hadn't the Assault Leader hammered into him a hundred times the phrase: "The service of an SA man never ends"? Wernicke remained silent. He paced up and down, unsure of himself, and then suddenly the pallid, tear-stained face of his wife stood before him: "What am I supposed to fill the children's bellies with?" Perhaps the comrades also saw that face now, and Wernicke felt the hot blood rushing to his brain.

"So you can't say anything on the subject? I thought so. So sit down!" The Assault Leader said nothing else, but every word had felt like a blow, cut him like a lash, and left behind a painful feeling of shame.

SA man Dietrich took great delight in being told to get up and speak. "The family is the most important cell of the state. Whoever disturbs the family acts against the well-being of the state. National Socialism has restored the family to its rightful place. We do not want any petit-bourgeois ideal in the family, with its plush-sofa psychology and walking mannikins, with its contempt for and degradation of the woman and effeminization of the children. We know that the wife has a heavy burden to bear. The National Socialist stands beside her because she lends him a helping hand. The wife is a comrade, a fellow combatant." Everything he said was simple and clear; everybody could understand him, even Wernicke. "What am I supposed to fill the children's bellies with?" How that bored through him and pained him at that moment.

"How was it before?" asked the Assault Leader, his eyes still blazing with anger and contempt.

Otto Dennig had not been asked at all, but he stood up and talked because he had to speak now: "In my assault troop at that time there was one who was married. The young bride knew us all, and if things got tough with someone and he didn't have a place to stay or was hungry, all he had to do was show up at the flat and everything would be all right. Then came a time when her husband would not be at home in the evening for weeks on end. In those days we would travel to the villages on our bikes. We tried to protect each other at our meetings, but when the others lay in ambush for us, there would be bandaged heads.

"The young bride stood at the window every evening until we came back, and sometimes we would not return until dawn. We always saw the light burning from afar; it was like a symbol to us. Before going to our own homes we usually sat around together in the tiny kitchen awhile, unwinding and telling jokes.

"One evening they threw garbage at us in the street. They outnumbered us and occupied well- efended positions. Here retreat was the best defense. We got on our bikes and started down the steep hill. One of our group fell off his bike at the bottom of the hill. We didn't notice it until after we had gone a little further. We turned back and found him lying unconscious under his bike. He died on the way to the hospital without regaining consciousness. And now we had to break the news to the young bride. It was terrible for all of us to see how she wept softly to herself, because she loved him very, very much. But never once did she ask: 'Why?'

"Later she moved back with her parents, for he had had no one besides her and us. When in 1933 we held a great torchlight parade, she suddenly appeared. She went up to each one of us, and when the order came: 'SA, halt! Forward in equal step ... march!' we saw her smiling. We passed by her, eyes right, as though he stood there too, and a couple of us had to make odd movements with our faces to control our feelings. That was a young family, and at that time I had swam to myself: No petit- bourgeois marriage for me, no lazy lounging around on a plush sofa and in indifferent luxury. The girl that I marry must be like that young bride. Yes, that's how it's going to be with me. And I am getting married next month,"

All this had little or nothing to do with ideology and education. Or did it?

The Assault Leader bowed to Otto Dennig. "Thanks!" Was he referring to the story or to the announcement of the marriage? Actually, he wanted to break off the discussion here. For Wernicke it was enough for the time being, but now the discussion was in full swing. "That's the way it was before, but now it's easier. Life and health are no longer at stake, only comfort. What still remains is the inner sense of commitment and he who does not possess it is not with us. Some have already been weakened by the chatter of their relatives, the plush sofa, the creature comforts. Or the wife bends their ears, nagging them because she gets anxious at night or because she finds it too boring to be alone, she has perhaps no mission, and then the men get upset, become lax and listless, and stay away....

"In the evening each one of us gladly stretches out his legs and sits back and rests, with the thought: 'At last, I'm at home!' But this sitting around and relaxing must not become a purpose in itself and a world view. The purpose of rest is to release energies for a new struggle and for the further march forward...."

Couldn't someone think up an activity in which wives and young women could also participate, so that everyone could get acquainted with each other? Then maybe some would have a different view. Three, four voices expressed this wish. All the others nodded their heads in agreement, and one man immediately developed a program: charades, for example, the dying warrior, and then perhaps a play - Homecoming in the Dawn -- and, in between, battle songs....

"Waving banners, patriotic speeches, and then three cheers," Otto Hallmann said, grinning. "It's not so easy to bury this idea of a dramatic group, my boys. Your proposal sounds like something that would be better left to lackluster bowling leagues. If we're going to do anything, let's do it with sense and understanding. In the afternoon, athletics, in conjunction with other branches of the party. In the evening, a big cultural gathering, and SA man Dietrich will be responsible for carrying it out. Then we can also see whether we understood what the Fuhrer has prescribed for us in the way of intellectual orientation."

"Yes, sir, Assault Leader. I'll lay the program before you the evening of the day after tomorrow."

From Hanns Anderlahn, Gegner erkannt! Kampferlebnisse der SA. (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1937), pp. 60-63.

The German Volk Is an Interlacing of Families, by LUDWIG LEONHARDT

Deeply perceiving the source of the renewal of the Volk, National Socialism considers the family to be the foundation of the state. In order to grasp the importance of this statement and to evaluate it properly, we must look more closely at the concept of "family." By family we must not understand only parents and children. To a family, in our sense of the word, belong not only those who bear the name or who possess a piece of land or some other property. Neither do legal relationships alone encompass the concept. Rather, the family embraces everything that existed spiritually and psychically as a living patrimony in a definite circle of persons. What we are, what we accomplish, is not due to our own merit; in the last analysis we owe it to our parents and grandparents, our whole line of ancestors, whose heritage we carry within ourselves. In short, we owe it to the spiritual values which have been transmitted to us and which we are to pass on to our children and the children of our children. All this belongs to the family, whose importance in the life of the nation the new state is ready to acknowledge in the fullest sense. And we must always keep in mind that we are not the last configuration of these multiple endowments, that we are destined to pass them on pure and unspoiled in order to continue what we call the family, and to push our heritage ever forward, so that a German Volk may emerge out of an ever-repeated interlacing of families.

In this goal, however, it is clear that each of us bears an enormous responsibility. Just as we cannot let such a precious heritage go to ruin, just as we cannot allow ourselves to be guilty of harming it, so must we strive to extirpate, to overcome, or to destroy the bad and the inferior. How can the individual get a clear idea of just how he represents this responsibility toward the Volk? Can he do this without a precise knowledge of his whole hereditary and physical picture, hence without an exact knowledge of his own being and of the being of his ancestors? No! He who loves only for the day, who is indifferent to the roots from which he sprang, who does not realize the importance of the words "forefathers" and "posterity" in their deepest sense, cannot be regarded as a responsibility-conscious member of the Volk community.

Therefore let us begin by studying our own family picture! It will require a good deal of work in the case of those families where no records of any kind have been made or kept, but it must be done. If we wish to be honest, we must confess that in only the fewest instances is our information adequate for providing even a moderately clear picture. Unfortunately, many people hardly know the color of the eyes of their parents and of their brothers and sisters, much less their grandparents, not to speak of the more important characteristics of mind and disposition. Thus each one of us has the duty to inform himself in the greatest possible detail on this, to find out from which stock he springs....

From Ludwig Leonhardt, Heirat und Rassenpflege: Ein Berater fur Eheanwarter (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1934), pp. 7-8.

Marriage, Morality, and Property, by HERMANN PAULL

I come back to genealogy. This is possible only where monogamy has led to the formation of the family and thus to clearly perceptible biological hereditary stocks. With free love, which aims to offer man many possibilities of change in the exercise of sexual intercourse and in human breeding, a wholly unsurveyable ancestral series comes into being whose biological investigation is much too complicated and therefore wholly impossible. In free love, in which the mutual impulse to union is contained exclusively in erotic feelings, the confluence of the germ-plasma endowments of both parents is left exclusively to chance, whereas monogamy, through the elaboration of perceptible biological hereditary stocks, enables human reason to bring together high-grade hereditary stocks for human breeding and to exterminate hereditary stocks of inferior grade.

In this context free love means the admission of inferior biological ancestry to human breeding and the necessary squandering of high-grade germ endowments, whereas monogamy at least offers the opportunity for biological selection and preservation of the high-grade germ plasma.

Thus biological investigation has uncovered a series of families in which, as a result of the entry of individuals or even only one person of low-grade quality, the whole subsequent generation was ruined. The Kallikak family in America and the Zeros in Switzerland are now universally recognized as prototypes for the degeneration of whole families through the infiltration of inferior individuals.

On the other hand, we are acquainted with a sufficient number of families in which the preservation of a family tradition which took account of soundness and excellence has engendered a great number of high-grade persons. Here I shall mention the clan of Johann Sebastian Bach of Thuringen, which has been thoroughly investigated biologically, and which rightly can serve as a textbook example of the preservation and higher development of a good biological heritage.

Thus the family is the most important instrument of eugenics. It will become even more clear later that the eugenic concept of "family" in its deepest essence is synonymous with the Christian concept of a "religious-moral family," which rests upon the twin pillars of "premarital chastity" and "conjugal fidelity."

The free-thinker: Where in any part of the world have people based their marriage choices on such biological principles? It can be proved that men have indeed never known about the doctrine of the germ plasma and of the law of heredity. And prostitution in all times has found room for itself between the pillars of "premarital chastity" and "conjugal fidelity." Hence mankind should have gone to ruin a long time ago because of the squandering of germ plasma.

Eros is too much of a roguish lad for him ever to bother about the Jaw of heredity, or ever to give it a thought.

The doctor: This objection is not correct in this sharp form, for it can easily be shown that the bonds of a religious, ethical, and economic kind, under which the men living in the times before industrialization, which with some justice can be called the "good, old times," made their marriage choice, to a great measure have had the effect of specializing and breeding germ plasma. Naturally the biological power of these bonds was not always known to man, but this did not limit their effectiveness.

Let us for a moment return to the roots of human culture.

The introduction of monogamy -- that is, the overcoming of promiscuity, of the general mixing, of the belonging to all in sexual intercourse -- was the first germ-plasma specializing bond. Further, it signifies the fettering, the bridling of the naturally polygamous instinct of the male sex, as opposed to the female sex.

This fettering raised the male Eros out of the depths of the purely animal instincts to the heights of a moral happiness. It freed woman from the immoral and undignified position of being the object of man's lust, and placed her alongside him as an equal marriage partner.

Woman's honor, woman's dignity and material happiness, owe their existence to this fettering of the male Eros through monogamy.

Hence monogamy also stands at the beginning of our culture. It led to a further bond through which germ-plasma breeding was enormously fostered, generally accepted "morals." Morals and morality strive to attain something lofty, to overcome bad conditions, Morality strives for health and beauty. "Good morality" demanded a far-reaching purity in sexual life and it also prevented prostitution in Germany from assuming dimensions that would have been immensely harmful to the people's welfare, at least in the times under discussion here.

It was good morals for a woman to have several children. A childless married woman was regarded as inferior, as was a woman who had many miscarriages, or who brought deformed, sick, or sickly children into the world.

In former times, the doubtlessly greater concern of the parents not only with the moral but especially with the material welfare of their children, the greater feeling of responsibility for the future generation, is closely connected with this. A man who was not yet in a position to feed a wife and a troop of children either had to renounce marriage temporarily or had to rely on his wife's dowry.

In other words, one married frequently, or mostly, on the basis of property. But in those days, since there was no shareholder's right and no mammon-like capital formations, property was linked to the ability of the men concerned. Capital did not yet work independently of the ability of an individual proprietor. Whoever had possessed a fortune either had acquired it through his own ability or had inherited it through his parents, who had acquired it through their ability. The increase and preservation of property could take place only through the ability of the individual proprietor. Property-possessing families therefore were also proficient families. Whoever married property also married a high-grade biological heritage.

The history professor: The guild system also surely worked favorably in a biological sense. Membership in a guild presupposed an extensive proficiency. This was in the nature of the guild. One preferably married within one's own guild or took his life comrade from another guild. This provided a certain guarantee for happiness in life. For in this way high-grade biological heritage was brought together for human breeding.

It is certainly no accident that the musical endowments of the Bach family, cultivated over two centuries in a wholly special way through guild marriages, vanished from the biological heritage of the Bachs with the cessation of the guild system.

The doctor: To be dependent upon others ran counter to the general bourgeois concept of honor. Upon entering a marriage the bourgeois so arranged his affairs that he could live independently as a free man. He strove to acquire esteem among his fellow burghers for himself and his wife. Therefore he looked for a wife in esteemed, proficient families and in consequence of such considerations also married a high-grade biological heritage.

The situation has become wholly different as a result of the extensive industrialization and especially the Marxist spirit of the postwar age.

Thanks to public welfare, broad strata of the people no longer need to concern themselves with the material upbringing of their children. When money for the vital necessities cannot be procured by the parents, the welfare agency takes over this task. This happens especially in the case of children whose progenitors have no reason to be proud of their biological heritage and who therefore, in a biological sense, are unsuitable for producing children. It is well known that the greatest lack of scruples with regard to producing children prevails among inferior-grade families.

Thus, according to the findings of an inquiry made in 1928, the children in the Welfare School in Stuttgart came from families who had an average of 4.6 children. On the other hand, the average number of children possessed by the totality of fruitful married couples of the middle class in Stuttgart is 2.3, and that of the whole population 2.32.

These few figures express the serious life crisis in which the German people finds itself at this time.

From Hermann Paull, Deutsche Rassenhygiene: Ein gemeinverstandliches Gesprach uber Vererbungslehre, Eugenik, Familie, Sippe, Rasse und Volkstum, Part II: Erbgesundheitspflege (Eugenik) , Rassenpflege (Gorlitz: Verlag fur Sippenforschung und Wappenkunde, C. A. Starke, 1934), pp. 17-21.
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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PART 2 OF 2

THE IDEAL OF WOMANHOOD

The Tasks of Women, by ADOLF HITLER


... So long as we possess a healthy manly race -- and we National Socialists will attend to that -- we will form no female mortar battalions and no female sharpshooter corps. For that is not equality of rights, but a diminution of the rights of woman....

An unlimited range of work opportunities exists for women. For us the woman has always been man's most loyal comrade in work and in life. I am often told: You want to drive women out of the professions. Not at all. I wish only to create the broadest measure of possibility for her to co-found her own family and to be able to have children, because by so doing she most benefits our Volk! ...

If today a female jurist accomplishes ever so much and next door there lives a mother with five, six, seven children, who are all healthy and well-brought-up, then I would like to say: From the standpoint of the eternal value of our people the woman who has given birth to children and raised them and who thereby has given back our people life for the future has accomplished more and does more!

From a speech to the National Socialist women's organization (Die Frauenschaft), published in the Volkischer Beobachter, Sept. 13, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.

The so-called granting of equal rights to women, which Marxism demands, in reality does not grant equal rights but constitutes a deprivation of rights, since it draws the woman into an area in which she will necessarily be inferior. It places the woman in situations that cannot strengthen her position -- vis- a-vis both man and society -- but only weaken it....

I would be ashamed to be a German man if in the event of a war even only one woman had to go to the front. The woman has her own battlefield. With every child that she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation. The man stands up for the Volk, exactly as the woman stands up for the family.

From a speech to the National Socialist Women's Congress, published in the Volkischer Beobachter, Sept. 15, 1935. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Emancipation from the Emancipation Movement, by ALFRED ROSENBERG

Emancipation of woman from the women's emancipation movement is the first demand of a generation of women which would like to save the Volk and the race, the Eternal-Unconscious, the foundation of all culture, from decline and fall.

The age of Victorianism and the "dreamy romantic girl's life" are naturally finished once and for all. The woman belongs deeply to the total life of the people. All educational opportunities must remain open to her. Through rhythmics, gymnastics, and sport the same care must be given to her physical training as is the case with men. Nor should any difficulties be created for her in the vocational world under present-day social conditions (whereby the Law for the Protection of Mothers should be more strongly implemented). Doubtless, however, the efforts of those who would renew our Volkdom, after breaking up the Volk-alien democratic-Marxist system, must prepare the way for a social order which no longer forces young women (as is today the case) to stream in droves to the labor markets of life which use up the most important feminine energies. Hence all possibilities for the development of a woman's energies should remain open to her. But there must be clarity on one point: only man must be and remain a judge, soldier, and ruler of the state.

From Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythos des XX. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1930), p. 512. (This extract has been taken from the 1938 edition.)

Domestic Diligence from Blood and Soil

It might seem amazing that women and girls should return to work at spinning wheels and weaving looms. But this is wholly natural. It was something that could have been foreseen. This work must be taken up again by the women and girls of the Third Reich.

From the Volkischer Beobachter, Feb. 2, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

The Female Bird, by JOSEPH GOEBBELS

The mission of woman is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world. This is not at all as rude and unmodern as it sounds. The female bird pretties herself for her mate and hatches the eggs for him. In exchange, the mate takes care of gathering the food, and stands guard and wards off the enemy.

From Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblattern (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1929), p. 41. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.) (This extract has been taken from the 1934 edition.)

Women That We Can Love

After a performance by an a cappella choir, the Fuhrer's deputy, Reich Minister Hess, took the floor and was jubilantly greeted by those present.

The Fuhrer's deputy began his speech with the remark that in Germany the honorable place held by woman as mother, as comrade of her husband, and as an equal member of the Volk community is taken as a matter of course. Then he briefly contested the views of German women that have been spread abroad, and compared the foreign concepts of woman with the type of woman which the new Germany aims to produce: "We want women in whose life and work the characteristically feminine is preserved -- women that we can love!

"We grant the rest of the world the ideal type of woman that it wishes for itself, but the rest of the world should kindly grant us the woman which is most suitable to us. Not that 'Gretchen type' which foreigners imagine as being a somewhat limited, indeed unintellectual creature, but a woman who is capable of intellectually standing at her husband's side in his interests, in his struggle for existence, who makes the world more beautiful and richer in content for him. This is the ideal woman of the German man of today. She is a woman who, above all, is also able to be a mother.

"And it is one of the greatest achievements of National Socialism," continued the Fuhrer's deputy, "that it made it possible for more women in Germany today to become mothers than ever before. They become mothers not merely because the state wants it so or because their husbands want it so. Rather, they become mothers because they themselves are proud to bring healthy children into the world, to bring them up for the nation, and in this way to do their part in the preservation of the life of their Volk."

From an account of a mass meeting of the Berlin National Socialist women's organization (Die Frauenschaft) and the Frauenwerk (Women's Social Welfare) in the Deutschland-Hall, published in the Volkischer Beobachter, May 27, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Frau Goebbels on German Women

A woman reporter of the London Daily Mail came to Heiligendamm to visit Frau Magda Goebbels, whom she had called "the ideal woman of Germany." She wanted to learn more details about the new status of women in Germany. Frau Goebbels told her visitor that the accounts printed in England about the expulsion of women from their jobs are highly exaggerated. The German woman has been excluded from only three professions: the military (as is the case all over the world), government, and the practice of law.

If the German girl is faced with a choice of marriage or a career, she will always be encouraged to marry, since this undoubtedly is best for a woman. According to the report of the English woman journalist, Frau Goebbels said: "I am trying to make the German woman more beautiful."

From the Vossische Zeitung, July 6, 1933. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

The Blond Craze

Brunswick, May 31. -- SS Chief Group Leader Jeckeln attacked the "blond craze" at a meeting of the NSDAP. Blond hair and blue eyes by themselves, he said, were not convincing proof that one belongs to the Nordic race. A girl who wants to marry an SS man today must be above reproach in every respect. Therefore she is required to possess the Reich sports medal. Many people, perhaps even today, could not understand the reason for this requirement. Germany does not need women who can dance beautifully at five o'clock teas, but women who have given proof of their health through accomplishments in the field of sport. "The javelin and the springboard are more useful than lipstick in promoting health."

From the Frankfurter Zeitung, June 1, 1937. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

A Shiny Nose and the German Nation

Recently we read the following in an article on girls' Labor Service camps. It set us to thinking:

The physical facilities of the camp must never go beyond a certain simplicity, for the girl must be trained along Spartan lines in the Labor Service -- by habituation to the pallet of straw, to early risings in the morning-cold, to the simplest washing facilities, to the renunciation of all beauty aids and treatments, to the simplest clothing, which is to be as uniform as possible.


But what is too much, is too much. Even we consider early rising one of the virtues of woman. But to habituate "to early risings in the morning-cold"? Wouldn't it be all right also without the morning-cold? And as far as the "simplest washing facilities" are concerned, this can mean either magic or a country water pump. We don't know whether the author is married or not. In the last analysis this is his private affair. But anyone who writes for life must not sit at his writing desk and dream of a "tough" race and of the old Spartans, who, as is known, knew how to distinguish between the education of men and women on the basis of well-considered reasons. We want German women and not tough-eggs as our comrades along life's path. There is no woman who renounces "all beauty aids and treatments,'" which we must not confuse with the fabrication of masks in the style of the Kurfurstendamm. [1]

We would still like to meet an acceptable woman who for hygienic reasons will give up, say, powder when her little nose shines ... and anyone who demands this categorically must, to be consistent, say with Orpheus the Second:

Only when your countenance shines like bacon,
Do you fulfill the purpose of the German nation!


Why must we always have such gross exaggerations anyway?

From Der Angriff, Jan. 16, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection. )

_______________

Notes:

1. The Kurfurstendamm was a main street of Berlin where the most fashionable shops and restaurants were located. To the Nazis it was synonymous with decadent "Jewish" culture, and before 1933 they staged many disturbances there.

Faith and Beauty

Jutta Rudiger, the Reich reporter of the Bund Deutscher Madel, has on several occasions discussed the tasks of the BDM project "Faith and Beauty," such as at a convention of Hitler Youth leaders in Hammersbach on February 9 and in the Reich Youth Press Service.

According to her reports, the BDM program "Faith and Beauty" is not a radical departure for the BDM, but marks a logical step forward in the development of this girls' organization. Hence the usual uniform of the BDM will be maintained and participants in the program will be distinguished only by a special badge. It is planned to set up work communities for gymnastics, handicrafts, folklore, foreign affairs, games and music, health service, and the like. The groups meet weekly, and once a month the meetings take the form of evenings-at-home which are devoted to discussions of cultural life and the structuring and guidance of one's personal life.

From Das Archiv: Nachschlagewerk fur Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur, No. 47, Feb. 1938 (Berlin: Verlagsanstalt D. Stollberg, 1938), p. 1393.

Right Conduct

The district plant department of the NSBO [1] in Unterfranken published a regulation in which it is stated that lately a great number of women had been accepted. This is a privilege of which women can be proud, and therefore it is also their duty to conduct themselves in a true National Socialist manner. It was therefore announced that painted and powdered women will be forbidden entry to all NSBO gatherings. Women who smoke in public -- in hotels, in cafes, on the street, and so forth -- will be expelled from the NSBO. Local officials are instructed to adopt similar rules.

From the Frankfurter Zeitung, Aug. 11, 1933. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

_______________

Notes:

1. National Sozialistischer Betriebs Obman (see page 21),

The Honor Cross of the German Mother

"The prolific German mother is to be accorded the same place of honor in the German Volk community as the combat soldier, since she risks her body and her life for the people and the Fatherland as much as the combat soldier does in the roar and thunder of battle." With these words, Reich Physician Leader Dr. Wagner, head of the People's Health Section in the Reich leadership of the party, at the behest of the Fuhrer, announced the creation of a Medal of Honor for prolific German mothers at the Party Day of Labor.

Three million German mothers, on the German Mother's Day in 1939, for the first time will be solemnly awarded the new badge of honor by the leaders of the party. These celebrations are to be held every year on Mother's Day and on the Awarding of Medals Day for prolific mothers.

The youth above all must be brought up with a reverence for the mothers of the people. Thus the honoring of German mothers with many children is not to be limited only to Mother's Day and to the Awarding of Medals Day. In the future the prolific mother will occupy the place that is due her in public life. The young National Socialist will show his respect for her through the obligatory salute of all members of the youth formations of the party. In addition, the wearers of the Honor Cross of the German Mother will henceforth enjoy all those privileges which are already possessed as a matter of course by meritorious racial comrades, disabled war veterans, and the martyrs of the National Socialist revolution -- such privileges as honorary seats at party and government-sponsored gatherings, special treatment in government offices, and preferred seats assigned by conductors in rail coaches and trolley cars. Further, they are to be provided with old-age care and be given priority for acceptance in homes for the aged or in special sections of such homes already in existence.

For this honoring of the prolific mother and especially of the German aged mother by the Fuhrer is not only an expression of thanks, but at the same time expresses the trust that the Fuhrer, and with him the whole German people, has in all German mothers, that they will continue to help to pave the way for our people, and that they will make us a gift of that youth which, after perilous times, will crown the rise of our Volk....

From the Volkischer Beobachter, Dec. 25, 1938. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

The Woman Student

"Woman student, what do you want in the Third Reich?" "After all, your place is at the cooking pot!" "The Fuhrer does not want you to study." "Intellectual work is harmful to women!" After the seizure of power, we National Socialist women students repeatedly heard such statements. In fact, we still hear them once in a while.

How can it be, we asked ourselves, that anyone would want a National Socialist university without German women?

The National Socialist woman student places her whole life and achievement in the service of the German people. The tasks that are hers to fulfill clearly grow out of this attitude.

From the Volkischer Beobachter, Dec. 11, 1935. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Against the Political Woman, ENGELBERT HUBER

There is no place for the political woman in the ideological world of National Socialism....

The intellectual attitude of the movement on this score is opposed to the political woman. It refers the woman back to her nature-given sphere of the family and to her tasks as wife and mother. The postwar phenomenon of the political woman, who rarely cuts a good figure in parliamentary debates, signifies robbing woman of her dignity.

The German resurrection is a male event.

From Engelbert Huber, Das ist Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1933), pp. 121-122.

THE SOCIAL REALITY

Does the Five O'Clock Tea Suit Our Time?


The German people and all cultural-minded people in other countries are still feeling the impact of the Fuhrer's speech at the Munich art festival. This speech is undoubtedly the most important cultural-political document of modern times. [1] And it did not take long to make itself felt in a practical way. The custodians of all government and private museums and art collections are busy removing the most hideous creations of a degenerate humanity and of a pathological generation of "artists" and in this way are helping to bring recognition to a true art imbued with a German spirit. This cleaning out of all works that bear this same Western Asiatic stamp has been set in motion in the field of literature as well, having begun with the symbolic burning of the most evil products of Jewish scribblers shortly after the seizure of power. On the other hand, the fact that a racially alien spirit, in conjunction with artistic impotence here and there, still produces swamp weeds in one of the most important fields of artistic creation, namely music, that even today it still asserts itself in the pages of a gutter journal of a disreputable tradition which doesn't seem to understand what coordination in music means, that it still disseminates an artistic interpretation and gives expression to the glorifiers of Negro music, is betrayed by a feuilleton [2] (this word alone is a fitting designation of this mental attitude) of a Berlin afternoon newspaper of August 19 of this year under the heading "Tea and Dancing." Either the author of this effusion has been living on the moon these past four years, or the dog days are responsible for this remarkable product of his Dada brain.

Tea and dancing: this is not only an excellent alliteration [3] but also an amalgamation of two concepts which, in content and in consonance with each other, are intimately and naturally connected, like the terms of such other alliterations as house and home, [4] bag and baggage. [5] Therefore, we must deal with them together, as a unit, in order to recognize and overcome the inner hollowness and the danger to the Volk posed by these forms of international civilized life.

One may think what one pleases about the custom of afternoon tea. No one can prescribe what beverages are most suitable for drinking, although the good old German coffee hour for family and good-fellowship has a tradition at least as glorious as the custom of the tea hour taken over from northern countries. After all, this is a question of taste, perhaps even of temperament. Fundamentally, however, we should reject the custom of the five o'clock tea which came to us from England, where it is already a degenerate social form. We Germans have never known a five o'clock tea. First it was the modern way of life, shaped by the Jewish spirit, which, through the adoption of alien customs, has in all fields tried to hide the fact that it has no values and cultural forms of its own. Properly understood, it is not a question of the kind of beverage, much less the time of day which one devotes to this pleasure, since the author of the above-mentioned article recommends that in Berlin the tea hour be changed from five to four o'clock and, indeed, that one should not drink tea at all but "preferably coffee." Rather it is much more a question of a wholly distinct form of social life bearing the mark of an alien spirit.

By five o'clock tea, if it takes place in a private circle, one understands a chattering, sandwich-eating, tea-drinking, cigarette-puffing group of people circulating about a rubber-wheeled tea wagon which sets down the expensive cups now here and now there, wherever one pauses momentarily in one's wandering, only to pick them up again immediately thereafter. Five o'clock tea: that is to say, a social gathering in which one cultivates not conversation but gossip. In particular, it is thought that through this abominable American custom (namely, eating and drinking standing up) an especially agreeable and spontaneous conversation can develop, whereas actually only chatter is achieved, not conversation, if one walks up and down in a room with his hat, gloves and cookies in his hand, so that a clumsy waiter can knock over the full cup held with two fingers into the hat which floats from the third finger. One is not supposed to rest in this society, not even in his chair. This, however, is not the German "custom of the house," but Jewish vagabondage which has been transplanted to the salon. These are not community-conscious, sociable German men, but "stray international gypsies on a parquet floor."

Five o'clock tea: according to the writer of the article in the 12-Uhr-Blatt, [6] this is the domain of the young man in his busy "public life." Here he takes his new suit for a stroll. Here he practices the difficult art of "conquering the fair sex." And the conversation! Let no one faint at these flashes of wit: "Do you often come here, my dear?"; "The orchestra plays very nicely indeed, but did I hear one in St. Moritz! ..."; "At the moment I'm still working in the office, but in six months at the latest I'm going into films"; and such other platitudes as are further wrenched from these lame brains.

Five o'clock tea: this means above all, however, the "third" and most important "prerequisite": "There's dancing!" And what kind of dancing! One dances swing -- one hears all the latest hits and learns to recognize all the famous dance orchestras. Actually all this would be no more than a harmless waste of time for the "nice young man" if, a few lines further down, this choppy, noisy, meaningless squeaking were not described as "good music." We most decisively reject the possibility that, in the Third Reich, a newspaper can still exist and serve as the advocate of the Jewish impulse which has been done with once and for all, that a spirit against which the Fuhrer, and with him the whole healthy-minded German people, has declared a war to the death, can again be allowed to worm its way into the field of music.

Let it be clearly understood that we have nothing against light music. Indeed we demand such music and are convinced that composers will find rewarding tasks in this field. We consider it one of the most deplorable losses in the field of music that a specializing, intellectual consideration of art has led German artists to regard light music as commonplace, stale, and second-rate, as an accommodation of the lowest tastes of the people, and that the artist must offer not something simple but something extreme and lofty, in a complicated form with a great display of elaborate technique.

This elaborate technique is in keeping with an intensified experience, whereas simple structure and an ordinary experience supposedly have lesser artistic value. It is not the ordinary general human sensibility, but the effect, the rarefied feeling, that sets the work of art in motion. With respect to his conception we see in light (but nevertheless content-rich) music a conceivably lofty artistic task which our greatest composers have willingly undertaken. It suffices to recall Bruckner, who, unaffected by the international trends in art, dedicated himself to simple, unpretentious musical composition. This was not a concession to a fashion in popular taste, or a mirroring in musical form of a current tasteless literature, or a display of clever contrivances and technique. Rather, his compositions attested to the bond of a creative artist to his Volk, which in the monumentality of their form inevitably drew closer to the simplicity of Volkish song and dance types.

Thus we, too, believe that light music is neither a primitive art expression nor cheap sentimentality, but an interplay of folk-song and folk-dance rhythmics. Behind them stands neither the thinker, nor the world-denying ascetic, nor the dubious genius, but an original, joyously sensual, world-asserting musician who lets the energies of life with its multiple forms flow into his art, smoothly and simply into a structure of meaning and beauty. This music is not a borrowing from alien sources, but an ideal which the artist shapes into significant form.

His relation to light music is not limited to taking over national and Volkish melody types; it also includes finding and developing new forms and melodies in the genre of the folk song and the folk dance. The German people urgently need this light music. One cannot listen to Beethoven, Bach, or Handel every hour of the day. For that one goes to the concert hall, not to the coffeehouse. After all, there is an enormous difference between digestible light music and a din of drums, washboards, guitars, cowbells, rattlers, and other noise-makers, the same difference as exists, say, between the intoxicating spirit of the German waltz and the rhumba or swing, or between a good newspaper supplement and the feuilleton-scribbling of the 12-Uhr-Blatt.

We gladly leave Kestenberger, Schonberg, and Stravinsky to the civilized and pretentious art circles abroad. We, the young German generation, are in any case aware of the fact that the legacy of a great past in the field of music places a special obligation on us. We, the people of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Handel, cannot and will not any longer allow one of the noblest blooms of cultural life to fall increasingly victim to degeneration and to ultimate degradation to satisfy the demands of big-city night clubs and international bordellos.

For this it is necessary that we destroy once and for all the deeper ideological roots of this monstrous degeneration. The issue here is wholly different from the struggle for a new musical style, for the "ideal" of a new formal linear structure independent of harmonics, for the burgeoning powers of a new tonal sensibility, or however the philosophical ornaments of these confusions may be called. Rather, this music quite simply represents the outbreak of the nihilism of the postwar period, and accordingly is no longer expression, revelation, but a shriek, an unbridled discharge of its raw material. "Contemporary music" quite clearly presents both types of every phenomenon of decay.

One of these works almost entirely on the intellect, the other on the nerves. The former can be called paper music, the latter nerve music. Here too the usual dichotomy between soul and body emerges, which is the mark of the Western Asiatic racial and cultural expression. Both types are out of contact with the emotional life and try to make a virtue out of this shortcoming: in the place of intuitively grasped ideas they set rationally constructed work.

The first type comes from mechanistically ill-structured brains. A noisy, meaningless music is its means of expression. The second type is the product of jaded, diseased nerves. The effect achieved constitutes its principal means of expression: complicated cacophony resembling noise and choppy rhythm. It loves to simulate temperament, but in reality it is nothing but impulse. Both types are one-sided, and as a result their effect is weakened. What is more obvious now than the attempt to amalgamate both tendencies, which bear in themselves the germ of quick decay, in order to prolong their short life! But in vain! An amalgamation proved itself to be impossible.

The result was a combination of over-stimulated intellect and pathological impulse. Technique was the only element that held them together. But even technique can only couple; it cannot unite, for it is nothing but an external emergency measure. Besides, "contemporary music" itself leads to absurdity. It has gone beyond itself; it is no longer the expression of feeling but corresponds to the pleasure which the intellect takes in forming combinations and to the craving of the nerves for sensations. No doubt this music is difficult to master, but one can recognize it. It is no longer a rare novelty; it has lost its uniqueness. But it wanted above all to be unique, and rarefied! Thus the level of this music gradually sank lower and lower. It became a kind of night plant living under electric lights in an atmosphere of bad air, cheap perfume, and sticky tobacco smoke, even if it was produced in a setting of "high" society.

Alongside this ideological and general human degeneration there emerged the doctrine of the so-called international character of art and its independence from the Volk spirit and temporal events. The organic relationship between the creative artist and the people was denied. Denied also was the fact that Volk and race constitute the roots of every artistic creation, that, above all, music also is subject to the conditions and uniformities of biological data, that the energies of the people contribute to creativity, just as in a tree the sap rises from the root to the blossom. In this way the artist became incapable of shaping the elements of art, and thus the primordial symbol of his people, into significant form. He borrowed the art forms of alien peoples and races....

From Der SA-Mann, Sept. 18, 1937. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

_______________

Notes:

1. For this speech, see p. 11.

2. Referring, to the cultural section of the press. Ever since this had developed in the nineteenth century, its style was highly subjective, introverted, and critical of all aspects of life. The Nazis put an end to it.

3. In German: Tee und Tanz.

4. Haus und Hof.

5. Kind und Kegel.

6. A Berlin daily newspaper which featured articles on sports and the theater, light and amusingly written.

Fairytale Scenes on Peacock Island

On the eve of the festival days, when the great Olympic Games came to an end, the Reich Minister for the People's Enlightenment and Propaganda, in the name of the German Reich Government, invited the honored guests of the contests to a summer festival on romantic Peacock Island.

Under the command of Major Henke, army engineers on Saturday night dismantled the pontoon bridges leading to the platforms that had been built on the water at Grunau and then put them up again between the shore of Nikolskoe and the island. The flags of many nations fluttered in the breeze from the masts which were fastened to the pontoons. The lights of hundreds of sailboats and canoes were reflected in the dark waters of the Havel, and when the guests arrived at the scene they were encircled by a picture of magical beauty. A chain of pages dressed in white led the way to the great meadow. Numerous lanterns cast a resplendent, hundredfold light; melodies played by the state orchestra of the [NSDAP] district of Berlin, under the direction of conductors Spiess and Wicke, rang out on the air. Loudspeakers carried the music to the remotest corners of the island. A magic light radiated from hedges and bushes, filtering through the lush green of the leaves. Giant night moths glowed in the centuries-old linden and oak trees. The special setting of the festival was created under the general direction of chief government councillor Gutterer and of Reich stage designer Benno von Arent, who was responsible for the decorative scheme and who masterfully transformed the beauties of the romantic island in the Havel into a fairyland. The evening sky of a mild summer night stood over the scene of joy and splendor.

The summer festival of the German Reich Government was especially enhanced by the artistic presentations. Famous soloists and the entire ensemble of the German Opera House of Berlin, under the direction of ballet master Rudolf Kolling, were part of the colorful program, which began with a dance of the Olympic Games to the tunes of the old maestro Johann Strauss.

Love gods from the eighteenth century, with various robes and colorful wings, which had been modeled after figurines from the age of Frederick the Great, fluttered like porcelain figures on the tables as gifts for the ladies. The enormous dancing area, set amid the majestic groves of trees, filled up with couples who danced to the music of bandleader Oskar Joost of the "Femina," Eugen Wolff of the "Eden," and Emanuel Rambourn of the "Kaiserhof."

Late at night a splendid fireworks display won the special applause and admiration of the many guests.

From Der Angriff, Aug. 18, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Beautiful Gowns at the Annual Press Ball

One of the most beautiful gowns consisted of pale-blue, delicately threaded mat crepe set off by a short, saddlelike ruffle in the front and a very deep One in the back made of pearl-studded circular figures of the same color.... A similar effect was created by a snow-white tulle gown which was not so theatrically insubstantial that it threatened to fly off in a draft of air. ... No doubt the tulle ruffles, despite their unreal delicacy, had surprisingly great body thanks to an invisible stiffening of their base with horsehair tulle strips.... One saw heavily embroidered silver edges combined with blue velvet which formed a contrast to fine-meshed, very thinly woven edges. ... Half of a heavily ruffled, strongly shaped side was made of strawberry-colored satin silk and the other half of black velvet as a seam end for a freely 'swinging frock.... Wine-red and blue-gray scintillating taffeta with the front part delicately tucked in.... Smoothness and dignity were also the leitmotifs of the dancing gowns.

From Die Neue WeItbuhne, Vol. I, No.7 (1934), p. 215. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Wanted: Croupiers

Several croupier candidates, 25 to 35 years of age, wanted for a training course. Knowledge of languages and skill in dealing with figures required as well as no previous criminal record. Written applications only, to be sent to the management of the Casino, Personnel Division, Baden-Baden.

From Der Fuhrer, May 4, 1940. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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PART 1 OF 2

3. The Foundations: Racism

Editor's Introduction


THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENTS, written by the most important racial theoreticians of the Nazi movement, present the racist ideas that were fundamental to the National Socialist culture. Hans F. K. Gunther (b. 1891) became a professor at the University of Jena in 1930, before Hitler's accession to power, and held the newly established chair of "racial science." Hitler himself had been deeply interested in Gunther's appointment and the then National Socialist government of Thuringia had brought it about. While Gunther's personal relationships with the party were stormy at times, his racial ideas were accepted, and his books, such as Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Short Ethnology of the German People) (1929), were sold and distributed in many editions throughout the Third Reich. The Short Ethnology sold 272,000 copies between 1929 and 1943. The extract we have chosen is especially important, for it demonstrates a crucial point about "racial science." At first glance it reads like a reasonable discussion of anthropology with emphasis on the absence of pure races. But Gunther soon introduces the notion that while a race may not be pure, its members share certain dominant characteristics, thus paving the way for stereotyping. For there is a racial "ideal type," as the final part of the extract makes clear. Though not all Aryans are Nordic, they all to some extent share in the "ideal type." In contrast, the Jews are a mere mixture of races. Moreover, physical appearance is important, for Gunther uses anthropological measurements of skulls, etc., as well as descriptions of a race's outward appearance.

Gunther thus has his cake and eats it too. Obviously not all Nordics are blond or tall, but all have a predominance of such characteristics. Thus a race can be stereotyped. Hitler, after all, had dark hair but was supposedly of the Nordic race.

We have selected a longer extract from Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss's Die nordische Seele (The Nordic Soul) (1932). Clauss (b. 1892), a lecturer at the University of Berlin, was another contributor to "racial science"; his book sold 30,000 copies in the first five years of publication. Eventually it went through eight editions. But this extract illustrates more than Clauss's own point of view; it is typical of the general view of Nordic superiority. The qualities of a race are linked to its "genuine" environment, the landscape in which it had grown up for centuries. The picture of the ideal Nordic which is painted here will become common coin, for it combines a longing for power with an equally strong nostalgia for rootedness in the soil. The opposition to the city, which symbolizes modernity, is combined with domination over. natural resources and over other races. As with Gunther, physical appearance is involved; for the body is the showplace of the soul. But the soul is primary: it is formed by an interplay with nature -- the wide spaces and energies which characterize the Nordic.

Clauss's passages about the Nordic's longing to surpass himself, his involvement with higher powers of nature, find echoes in Alfred Rosenberg. The Jews have none of this capacity; they are the very opposite of all that makes man great. Rosenberg continues Clauss's basic argument and applies it to the Jews: he does not borrow directly, for such ideas were general in all of racial thought. Rosenberg (18931946), well known for his Der Mythos des XX. Jahrhunderts (Mythos of the Twentieth Century), was one of Hitler's close associates from early party days, and from 1934 on was charged by the Fuhrer with watching over the ideological education of the party itself. He wrote the introduction to the memorial volume dedicated to Dietrich Eckart (1928). Eckart had a great influence on Hitler and probably did more than any other man to put him on the road to political success. He befriended the future Fuhrer from 1919 to his early death in 1923. It was Eckart who deepened Hitler's anti-Semitism: he had made his mark as a minor writer and the editor of a violently anti-Jewish paper called Auf Gut Deutsch (In Plain German). Hitler was always grateful to him, and he ended Mein Kampf with a dedication to his former mentor. Rosenberg had equal reason to be grateful: not only did Eckart introduce him to Hitler, but he became Eckart's successor as editor of the party paper, the Volkischer Beobaehter. Small wonder that Rosenberg, in the 1934 edition of the book, added triumphantly: "Today Eckart is with us again and a part of our Reich."

Jakob Graf, a teacher, in these selections from his textbooks on the family and racial biology, begins by giving an account of the dominance of the Aryan race throughout history. His approach adds a historical dimension to Clauss's ideas of racial superiority. He proceeds to assign various exercises which will enable schoolboys to identify a person's race at a glance. In this simplified form, racism filtered down to the rest of the population.

Instruction in race became compulsory in the Prussian schools after September 1933 and eventually in all German schools. Secondary schools were required to teach heredity, racial science, and family as well as population policies. The essentials of these subjects were to be a part of the instruction in biology. A biologist, Paul Brohmer, shows how this should be done, and how from out of this subject matter the teacher can construct a proper view of man for the student. Darwinism is rejected as mechanistic; rather, nature and man must be viewed as living interrelated entities, conforming to one eternally fixed organic plan. But they are such entities only within their own landscape and their own race. Once more, this follows up the theme raised by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. Brohmer also stresses the importance of the family, and we have seen in the previous section how this was part of the emphasis on tradition which National Socialism used for its ideological purposes. Brohmer integrates into his version of biological science all the fundamentals of the world view: life rooted in nature and Volk, the importance of German living space, and the demand for purity of race.

These "racial insights" were put into practice in the Nuremberg Laws and the Citizenship Laws which expelled the Jews from the Volk (see page 335) . But they were also applied soon after the seizure of power in the Hereditary Health Law (Gesetz zur Verhutung des erbkranken Nachwuches), which was supposed to make sure that the "less valuable" members of the Volk did not contaminate the community with sick offspring. Similar legislation had been discussed as a matter of hygiene, not race, during the Republic, but the possibilities of abuse had kept the proposals from becoming law. Hitler decreed such a law on July 14, 1933. In justifying the measure, the ideas of men like Gunther were brought forward as expert testimony -- the race had to be kept strong. Moreover, where Republican drafts of the law had required the consent of the person to be sterilized, Hitler's law did not do so. A director of a clinic or a prison (for habitual criminals were also involved) as well as the person's legal guardian could initiate the process. The final decision on whether or not the person was to be kept from having children was up to the health courts, with a possible appeal to a "superior health court." The members of these courts (two doctors and a judge) were official appointees, and the family doctor was excluded from taking part in the proceedings. The extract from the law presented here derives from the official commentary upon the law itself.

For the sake of racial purity a fundamental change could be made in an individual's biological makeup if the "possibility" existed that his offspring would be physically or mentally sick. The official commentary on Nazi legislation [1] contrasts this attitude toward man quite rightly with the humanitarianism derived from the French Revolution which was now at an end. This law begins the process that led to euthanasia, finally decreed by Hitler in 1939. Euthanasia, or mercy killing, provided a laboratory for the eventual mass murder of Jews.

Racial thought and its consequences are fundamental to the whole cultural drive of the Third Reich. Once this has been understood, everything else will follow.

G.L.M.

_______________

Notes:

1. Hans Frank, Nationalsozialistisches Handbuch fur Recht und Gesetzgebung (Munich, 1934), pp. 812-827.

The Nordic Race as "Ideal Type", by HANS F. K. GUNTHER

Much has already been written on man, on the individual races of man -- or what were regarded as such -- on the "race problem" and the racial composition of nations. This literature gave rise to a long-drawn-out controversy because it dealt with the question of man's race. The reason for such a protracted and relatively unfruitful dispute over the "race question" lay in the fact that both sides did not clearly understand the concept of "race." In most cases the controversy was not even concerned with races, but with tribes, nations of mixed racial stock, or groups of peoples belonging to the same linguistic family. The dispute raged over the recognition or importance of a "Germanic race" as opposed to a "Latin race" or a "Slavic race"; the concept of a "Jewish race" or a "Semitic race" was put forward. In the process these writers must have completely forgotten that we may designate a human group as a race only when all of their representatives show the identical physical and spiritual features in the most important points. How could anyone speak of a "Jewish race," seeing that there are tall and short, slim and stocky, light and dark Jews with thin and broad faces, Jews with "Jewish noses" and those without them, not to mention the differences in the mental configurations and attitudes of individual Jews?

The idea of a "Germanic race" was put forward, and the race was described as tall, blond, and blue-eyed, and occasionally as long- or oval-headed and thin-faced. Its psychic essence was also more or less defined. Now, the fact that frequently very "un-Germanic" people, in both a physical and a mental sense, could be found among the peoples of Germanic language -- as, for example, among the English, the Dutch, the Germans, and the Danes -- should have served as a warning against presenting a concept of a "Germanic race"; so, too, the fact that people of typical "Germanic" appearance and comportment were often present among the peoples of the Slavic and Romance languages, and even among Caucasian tribes and Kurds. Further, in view of the large variety of human types among the peoples of the Semitic languages, how could one speak of a "Semitic race"?

In short, a proper distinction was not made between the concepts of "race" and "people" or "group of people." Membership in a language group was confused with membership in a racial group, and there was a desire to see racial borders where they were really only language and Volkdom borders. It was only when the concept of "race" was strictly defined and when it found currency among at least a few educated people that a valid and fruitful discussion of the "race problem" or of various "race problems" became possible. Anyone who continued to speak of a "German race" or an "English race," of a "Latin race" or a "Jewish race," betrayed an ignorance of the basic concepts of the subject he wanted to discuss.

"Race" is a concept of anthropology, which has been established in the same way as the sciences of zoology and botany (fauna and flora) and which, like them, discusses families, genera, species, and varieties. Eugen Fischer, [1] director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for the Study of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem, has called the following assertion by Grosse the best definition of the concept of "race."

"By race, anthropology understands a large group of people who are related to one another through the common possession of a certain inherited complex of physical and spiritual characteristics which also distinguishes them from other similar groups."

Consequently, a race must necessarily show, in all its representatives, a uniformity of physical and spiritual features, and must continue to reproduce from within itself people with the same physical and spiritual characteristics. Where there exist in a group of people essential differences in physical and spiritual endowment, where children essentially differ from their parents, or from one of them, there can be no question of a race or of parents with the same inherited set of features. I regard the following definition of the concept of "race" as useful:

A race is made up of a group of people which is distinguished from all other groups of people by a combination of endowed physical features and spiritual characteristics and which repeatedly reproduces only its own kind.

Hence a race is a group of people possessing an identical hereditary endowment. Whoever tries in this way to visualize the nature of a race must immediately admit that it is hardly possible to find a race anywhere in the world as a self-enclosed human group. The human groups in this world that are linked by the same language, the same customs, or the same faith and thereby constitute a nation are, with hardly a single exception, a mixture of races, not races. All Western nations are mixtures of races which include, in certain percentages, pure and mixed, all the races of Europe, or in which, at least, several European races are represented.

What is different from nation to nation -- from the ethnological viewpoint -- is not, for instance, the race as such, but the proportion in which the races are mixed. In the mixture of one nation one or more races may be more strongly represented than in the race mixture of another nation. Anyone who would try to gather together the peoples of Europe who are related by race -- or, rather, the people who appear to be related by race (since the inherited and the apparent image do not necessarily correspond) -- in order to form uniform groups of people who appear to possess identical hereditary endowments, would have to collect these people from among all the nations of Europe. At the same time he would discover that these uniform groups of people are small minorities, in comparison with the great mass of Europe's population, since the majority of the people of the West, as well as of the whole world, consist of a blend of two or more races.

From the standpoint of the definitions given above, the Jews cannot be viewed as a race. Rather, they constitute a nation of mixed races. If popular usage is reluctant to give up the term "race" in the case of the Jews, the reason lies in the fact that in the racial mixture of the Jewish people physical and spiritual hereditary endowments of non-European peoples are predominant and these are quite noticeable when seen among the differently composed racial mixtures of the European population and especially that of northwestern Europe. The average European in Europe is not regarded as the bearer of racial features, but this is certainly the case with the average Jew. Therefore, popular usage will continue for a long time to speak of a "Jewish race," even though educated persons will long have recognized that the Jews, like other peoples, represent a mixture of races.

For the research of the races of mankind according to their physical appearance, for the identification of different human races in a certain geographical area where various race mixtures are found (tribes, nations, national groups), anthropology avails itself of specific procedures of the measurement and description of physical features which cannot be indicated here in detail....

The Nordic race is tall, long-legged, slim, with an average height, among males, of above 1.74 meters. [2] The limbs, the neck, the shape of the hands and feet are vigorous and slender in appearance. The Nordic race is long-legged and narrow-faced, with a cephalic index of around 75 and a facial index above 90. As in all races, at least in the medium- and long-headed ones, the female head, in comparison with that of the male, appears to have a higher cephalic index and a lower facial index. The back of the Nordic head characteristically projects far beyond the nape of the neck. The projecting part of the back of the head, however, is comparatively low, so that in Nordic people the head springs backward, as it were, over the part of the neck visible above the collar. The face is narrow, with a rather narrow forehead, a narrow, high-built nose, and a narrow lower jaw and prominent chin.

The cut of the face of the Nordic race -- at least in the male -- creates the effect of a unique boldness through three striking traits in the lines of the profile: first in the flat, backward-tilting forehead, then in the straight or outwardly curved nose springing from high nasal roots, finally in the prominent chin. The smooth parts of the face support the expression of clean-cut physiognomy. In the female the chin is mostly arched rather than tilted backward; the nose is less sharply delineated, and the chin less prominent.

The skin of the Nordic race is roseate-bright and the blood shines through, so that it looks especially enlivened, and at the same time mostly somewhat cool or fresh. The facial complexion, at least among the youth and among the females, often looks like "milk and blood" even in middle age. The hair is smooth-straight or wavy; in childhood also curly. The individual hairs are soft and thin. The hair color is blond; among most of the existing types it can extend from a pink undertone of light blond to golden blond up to dark blond. Nordic children are often white-blond. People who were light blond during their youth will later become dark blond, dark-haired, a phenomenon which is called "darkening" and which is viewed as a sign of Nordic (or also Phalian or East Baltic) strain also among non-Nordic peoples....

If an illustrator, painter, or sculptor wants to represent the image of a bold, goal-determined, resolute person, or of a noble, superior, and heroic human being, man or woman, he will in most cases create an image which more or less approximates the image of the Nordic race. He will also create a man who will be regarded as a typical representative of the upper social strata. For example, the artists for the humorous journals will endow their creations with the features of the Nordic race rather than the features of the non-Nordic races of Europe.

Actually, one could conceivably designate will power, a definite faculty of judgment rooted in a coolly deliberating sense of reality, the impulse to truthfulness, an inclination to knightly justice, as the repeatedly striking psychical features of Nordic men. Such features can be intensified in individuals within the Nordic race to a pronouncedly heroic disposition, to a transcendent leadership in statesmanship or creativity in technology, science, and art. The relatively great number of Nordic people among the famous and outstanding men and women of all Western countries is striking, as also is the relatively low number of famous men and women without noticeable Nordic strain.

From Hans F. K. Gunther, Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Munich, 1929), pp.-9-13, 21- 25, 59. (This extract has been taken from the 1933 edition.)

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Notes:

1. Here one so-called "respectable" racist cites another. Engen Fischer (b. 1874) was a world-famous anthropologist who became an advocate of the "eternal race" and was much respected and cited by the Nazis.

2. Approximately 5 feet 8-1/2 inches.

Racial Soul, Landscape, and World Domination, by LUDWIG FERDINAND CLAUSS

The manner in which the soul reaches out into its world fashions the geographical area of this world into a "landscape." A landscape is not something that the soul alights upon, as it were, something readymade. Rather, it is something that it fashions by virtue of its species-determined way of viewing its environment. It cannot, of course, arbitrarily fashion any landscape out of any kind of geographical area. The area is the matter, so to speak, into which the soul projects its style and thus transforms it into a landscape. But not every matter lends itself to the same formative activity of the soul. The area offers the soul possibilities for shaping it in accordance with the soul's unique manner of perceiving it. But not every area offers the same possibilities. An area that is "proper" to the man who reaches out into the world, the accomplishment-oriented man, and can become expressive of his style, must be differently constituted than an area that other races find suitable for the formation of landscapes. The area that contains regions suitable for landscape formation in the accomplishment-oriented style is the "Nordic" geographical area. It provides the proper background for his style. Hence we call the style peculiar to him the Nordic style and we call him Nordic man.

We shall now contrast the Nordic landscape of Nordic man with a landscape of another style which constitutes the background, the living area suited to the style of another race, the Mediterranean-land race, so-called because of its landscape, namely, the landscape of the Mediterranean region suited to its style. The designation of the landscape of a particular race is at the same time an interpretation of the style of this race. According to its style, the Mediterranean race is clearly to be distinguished from the Nordic as well as the Eastern race.

Anyone who has sailed in the heavy seas around Cape Skagen has experienced how, at that point, two seas rush into each other with a deafening roar, each one having a different color and a different groundswell in terms of rhythm and pace: the gray-green North Sea has long-drawn-out, mile-long, high waves, whereas the bluer Kattegat thunders with waves of a shorter length. Here everything seems to become closer and narrower, everywhere we see the shores or sense their existence, and even beyond the Oresund and the "open" Baltic Sea we never again fully get that feeling of limitless expanse, infinite distance, we never again get that compelling feeling of power which the landscape of the North Sea gives. Nevertheless, the landscape styles of the two seas seem similar to the person who compares them with the landscape of the Mediterranean. Indeed, the Adriatic Sea is, seemingly, somewhat like the Baltic Sea. But anyone who travels southward through the narrow strait between the Albanian mainland and the Greek "Kerkyra" (Corfu) experiences clearly how the sea here differs from the other.... When the northern sea storms and rages with a terrific uproar, with a wind that rushes from one distant point to another, then the sea around Greece moves in moderately high but always even waves -- strong but powerfully restrained in the entirety of its motion.

If one knows the northern sea and is familiar with its style, or, even more, if one feels its wave rhythm in his own soul, it would seem to him that the Greek sea was no sea at all and that we must find another word to describe it.... The south, the Mediterranean and its shores invite the beholder to a permanent stay: here everything is nearness, presence.

We have grasped the landscape of the north as the land of the North Sea and the landscape of the south as the Mediterranean land; thus we look upon these lands as the shores of the seas which determine their style. The land of the North Sea is characterized by distance and movement; over broad stretches it is integrated into the depths of space....

The will for space awakens in the soul that is born in this landscape and truly lives in it. The Nordic space drags one along into the distance. It wants to be overcome. The overcoming of space means speed, the will for space urges and impels one to race through space. The Nordic landscape cries out to be traversed by rails over which express trains can speed. It is a characteristic of all Nordic vehicles to increase their speed. Ever-increasing velocity is a built-in characteristic of the rails themselves, the rails by which, in the Nordic experience of the world, the whole world is penetrated. Rails that are already in existence and those that must constantly be constructed for ever newer, ever faster vehicles on which men who experience the world Nordically may strive toward ever new goals. The Nordic soul experiences its world as a structure made up of countless thoroughfares -- those already at hand and those still to be created -- on land, on water, in the air, and in the stratosphere. It races like a fever through all segments of the Nordic community, a fever of speed which, infectiously, reaches out far beyond the world of the north and attacks souls who are not Nordic and for whom, at bottom, such action is contrary to their style and senseless.

In the Nordic landscape everything points to places beyond and tempts the soul, born of it, to cross the borders of this landscape. The Nordic soul has an innate urge to push on into the distance, and this means mostly southward. Anyone who has crossed the southern barrier of the northern geographical area -- past the St. Gotthard range, for example -- knows what is happening there. The northern region is perhaps enveloped in a thick fog, so that from the train we can see only the trunks of the mountains; then we plunge into the night of the tunnel and, suddenly, a radiantly blue day lights up our darkened eyes. And all the travelers, as with one voice, utter a cry of joy. The light of the south is like a benediction to the Nordic soul, blissful and at the same time fatal, like the light of the candle for the moth. First we feel as if we were wonderfully liberated from the call of distance, the urgent forward movement of the north, for here everything is simply present, magnificently beautiful and consummately finished. But then the eternal nearness of this landscape envelops the soul and stifles it to the point of suffocation. We may not really say that this landscape is "narrow"; it is not exactly without a certain distance from the soul. Such words do not do justice to its character. And in our language we probably cannot find the right word to express its character because all our words are fashioned out of the Nordic way of perceiving our world. We can say only what this landscape, in terms of ours, is not: it is without distance, without a deep movement; it is magnificent surface with nothing behind it -- it is devoid of enigma, bereft of mystery. What it is, according to its nature, might perhaps best be expressed by a foreign word -- it is imposant.

Wherever the human eye wanders -- and it cannot really wander much here -- it comes smack up against mountains which ring the region, high and beautifully curved, all of them seeming to know and assert how beautiful they are. It is as though they point to themselves with an imposing gesture and demand: "Look at me!" When the land does open into a broader vista, it is only in a prescribed circle -- one's gaze looks downward, then upward, around and along the crests of the mountains, and finally back to its starting point. Nowhere, not even on the sea, can one truly look out into the great beyond. Everything goes back and forth in a circle. Even the clouds seem to follow no path or direction, but stroll, so to speak, in a circle. Here reigns Zeus, the "gatherer of clouds," not Wodan, the wild hunter who roars with his armies high above -- no one knows whence and whither....

The mountains of the south are bare. Above them the glaring sun paints everything with a dazzling color and lights up every crevice. The light forces itself upon, intrudes upon everything, wherever we may look. Several times I caught myself saying: "This shameless sun!" Here there is no darkening mountain forest hiding a fairy tale, no night with flowing fog formations, with "a thousand monsters," no castle enveloped by a whispering legend. Here everything is clear, there is nothing but utter clarity. The Acropolis towers magnificently over the countryside, a miracle in white on blue. It tells us gripping tales from a time that no longer reaches into the present; it tells us very much, but it does not whisper to us. Even the wind knows of no mystery, it caresses. Even the storm wind still caresses although it tugs at your hair.

We said that the Mediterranean invites one to stay forever. But we must ask further: Whom does it invite? The person who was born in this landscape and who perceives in its style the style of his own soul -- namely, the person who has it in himself as his inner landscape. Such a person is able to "tarry" in the authentic sense of the word. When, however, persons whose inner landscape is the north succumb to the enticement of the south and stay there and settle down (as some Nordic tribes did in ancient times), the first generations will live in opposition, albeit unconscious, to the landscape which is alien to their kind. Gradually, then, the style of the souls undergoes a change. They do not change their race, they will not become Mediterranean people -- in the strict meaning of the word as used here -- but their Nordic style will undergo a transformation which ultimately will make them into a southern variety of Nordic man. In their eyes the southern landscape will not be the same as that seen with the eyes of those who are the children of this landscape. Through their Nordic way of seeing, the landscape will acquire a new, northern type of configuration. The landscape forms the soul, but the soul also forms the landscape. And when both, the Mediterranean man and the Nordic man who has settled in the south, look into the same geographical setting, each sees a different landscape -- until, finally, miscegenation tears down the barriers and victory (that is, duration) is on the side of those who come from this soil.

This was the fate of the early Greeks, of the Romans, and of all peoples of Nordic origin who settled in the south....

Among non-Nordics the Nordic man is frequently considered to be cold and without passion. The combination of concepts -- "cold and without passion" -- completely misunderstands the very roots of the Nordic soul. Indeed it is precisely this feature that is characteristically Nordic: to combine an outer coldness with the deepest passion, or, at least, to be able to effect this combination. All the "coldness" of Nordic man stems from the distance which separates him from his environment and which he cannot violate without violating his style, the law of his breed. To describe the Nordic soul's mode of experiencing the world is equivalent, first of all, to showing the possibilities of experience arising from this distance. A description of the Nordic soul must begin with its characteristic reaching out within the frame of distance.

We shall begin with examples from everyday life. When Nordic people enter a train they will with great thoroughness look for the coach that is least occupied, and then, if possible, will sit down in a seat where there are no neighbors. If, however, they get into a confining situation in which they are closely surrounded by fellow passengers, they will not establish any psychological contact with them except for the superficial courtesies -- "Do you mind if I open the window?" -- which can exhaust a conversation for hours. Perhaps they may even feel a compulsion to strike up a conversation; perhaps they find the person near them very attractive. But between each individual and his neighbor lies an unbridgeable distance and therefore they are not able to find the level of true conversation. Nordic man can overcome almost everything in the world save the distance separating man from man. In general, he is never really able to surmount it: the distance remains to the last, even in the most intimate community.

When a Nordic enters an inn, he looks for the last vacant table. If he cannot find one, it can happen that, despite his hunger, he will leave the inn to look for another, which he hopes will be empty. If he is distinguished, he is sensitive at table: the "good" society of Nordic style has developed special laws of etiquette, a strict set of table manners excluding all "letting oneself go," thereby protecting each individual from untoward familiarities. A violation of such table discipline has the effect of a violation of the distance -- the discipline guarantees distance. The use of the toothpick in company first began in the German south and east, becoming generally more widespread and flourishing in countries where other needs are publicly satisfied, needs which the Nordic satisfies in privacy.

The Nordic endeavors to live alone -- alone with his kin group, far away from neighbors. Even when he is at a summer resort, he keeps away from others as much as possible. For a time I lived in an old castle, on what for the time being is Italian territory, which now, like so many others, is operated as a resort hotel. In this old structure the rooms were widely spaced out and there were several small towers in the immediate vicinity. A new section had been added in which the rooms were close together. The towers and the rooms that were spaced out were occupied by Germans and Americans, the new section by Italians. The Nordic man never feels comfortable in apartment houses where the tenants live piled in layers upon one another and where the most intimate sounds penetrate everywhere. He is least comfortable in one of those large blocks of flats where sometimes ten people are crowded into one room. Under these circumstances, the Nordic people are the first to languish, to die, first spiritually and then physically: they succumb because of the loss of physical distance and perish because of the lack of social distance. The Nordic man can no more live without external and internal distance than fish can live without water. Nordic men cannot thrive between the stone walls of long lines of streets which deprive them of all distance -- in other words, in the large city. If they cannot afford to take up residence beyond the city, then they succumb to emotional and psychological atrophy. Perhaps they are unaware of it, but they are forced to overcome an unconscious opposition; nevertheless, the Nordic soul is slowly stifled. The sins that parents have committed against their own soul-style is avenged in their children. Nobody who lives contrary to the law of his species goes unpunished.

The style of distance determines that Nordic man cannot live unpunished in regions which are narrow in terms of his law of style. The big city is not the only example of this; there is also the valley in the high mountains, and the sea inlet surrounded by high walls. In the Black Forest, for example, the wide valleys as well as the grassy lands and plateaus were settled by the Alemanni -- that is, Germanic peoples -- whereas the narrow valleys here and there remained predominantly in the hands of the original Eastern population. The difference between these two types of people in this area is so strikingly obvious that even as a boy, before I ever knew anything about races, I was sometimes surprised to hear these people, too, speak the Alemannic dialect. They seemed so strange to me then that I expected to hear them talk an entirely foreign language.

Now it can happen, however, that Nordic people nevertheless live in narrow regions. This habitation has a special meaning. We arc thinking of the inhabitants of the deep-set fjords of the Norwegian coast. There the mountain wall, on both sides, grows precipitously out of the sea, solidly with no break, so that the sun never penetrates to the narrowest points. Settlements are spread out few and far between, only in the wholly low-lying areas where the fjord widens or where the mountainside clings to a ridge. The people there feel hemmed in, confined, and yearn to get to the top of the Fjell and beyond it where there is no limiting barrier. Their sons, to the extent they are still authentic racial types, go to sea or emigrate and, often, even the young girls cannot be held back....

There is another kind of narrowness, however, for the Nordic soul, another lack of distance in space. It is not felt as distinctly as the narrowness of close walls but it has an effect on the soul at a deeper level. This is found in the area of the southern landscape alien to the north, namely, the "closeness" we mentioned above; that sundrenched closeness which at first delights the person accustomed to northern climes and then, increasingly -- perhaps imperceptibly -- cuts off his breath and makes him homesick for infinite expanses. This is why the Germanic people who migrated southward did not find in the Mediterranean land what it can give -- only to its own children! -- the bliss of a sojourn in the sun. They were driven on and on, this way and that, in every direction. It was from the southern lands that the whole earth for the first time was circled by Nordic people. We are thinking of Marco Polo, the Venetian, and of Columbus, the Genoese: both men had a Nordic countenance and a Nordic style of soul. And once the example was set, it was as if a storm went through the sons of the aristocracy of northern origin, so that they set out -- from Portugal, from Spain -- one after the other, in order to bring the most distant parts of the world within Europe's ken and to open them up to its trading centers for their peoples. They were the grandchildren of those elements of the Germanic people who had traveled farthest, the grandchildren of the Suevi and Goths who, centuries before, had subjugated the Iberian Peninsula. Although the blood of the ancestors might no longer be pure in the grandchildren, and not without an admixture of southern blood, obviously the northern style of life-experience was stronger in them than in many others whose ancestors had never left the north. [1] They were the descendants of those among the Germanic people who most enjoyed plying the seas, those who reached out furthest into the world, the grandchildren of the most Nordic among the Nordic peoples. There is a variation in the extent to which a soul is perfected in terms of its type. Applied to the Nordic type, this means that the power and capacity to reach outward is variable. The highest peak of a species-style is not necessarily broken or weakened in the first instances of blood-mixing. Indeed, the Nordic style of reaching out may become more rugged in the miscegenated soul because it is continuously forced to fight against what is alien to its soul, and as a result it becomes more conscious of itself and feels a compulsion over and over again to confirm its existence to itself. What the pure-blooded father did under the lash of obscure urges, the sons and grandsons do in response to a more conscious urge, and they nurture and intensify this urge in order to remain worthy of the fathers. Of course, the more that foreign blood is injected into the veins and souls of those who are born later, the more the example of the fathers is suspended in mid-air, as it were, and also more and more is there a decrease of tension between the Nordic style of the soul and the style of the landscape alien to the north -- the very tension which drove those who had gone south out into the open spaces with an intensified power, thrust, and impetus. Nevertheless, the Nordic blood has not completely run dry in the nations of the south, and there is still an urge in these late descendants which drives them out to sea. Still today we can find among Italian sailors, for example, many types who really belong on northland coasts.

The Nordic style of reaching out, in its ultimate and boldest intensification, obliges us to broaden the concept of the Nordic landscape in a unique sense: in a sense which, for example, is not viable with respect to the concept of the Mediterranean landscape. In this expanded sense, the whole earth, finally even the whole universe, becomes a Nordic landscape to the Nordic soul, for, in its reaching out it aims to penetrate simply everything, and, accordingly, to integrate it into its style and subject it to its law. Everything that has not yet been grasped and stamped by it, stretches out before it as a new land- ts new land -- which must be discovered, explored, put under cultivation, and hence conquered. In the last analysis it will recognize only the limits of the possible as its own limits. It may even happen that at this point it will fall ill and will try to ignore all limitations -- a characteristically Nordic illness.

After the surface of the globe had been traversed so far and wide that there were now only a few small unknown spots left on the map -- when there was no longer any new land left to discover -- the Nordic craving for the faraway found other outlets. If there was no new region to be found, the Nordic now took the whole global space more firmly into his grasp. The enveloping of the earth took the place of discovery. Here the craving for speed, which we mentioned earlier, finds its real meaning; it is the urge to grasp the entire world with one grip. All the same, the spiritual homeland, in accordance with the style of Nordic man, will always be -- and can only be -- the north. Nordic man carries it around with him as his inner landscape wherever he might roam or settle. If in his inner self he becomes unfaithful to it, he loses himself, becoming rudderless and anchorless: from a man of enterprise he becomes a calculating predator, transformed from hero to monster. But for a long time now the northern region of the earth no longer provides him with sufficient space to develop his physical existence in accordance with his style. Every bit of ground is occupied and distributed, the smallest piece of land is recorded in a land register. The Nordic soul, needful of space, had no choice but to recast the whole world in accordance with its image and inner landscape. If today trains race through the desert on rails, airplanes build a quick bridge from one part of the globe to the other, and the radio in a few minutes flashes news of an event in Peking to London, this means that the will to space of Nordic man has reached out beyond the natural border of his landscape and has placed the stamp of his style on the entire globe. The others, the non-Nordic inhabitants of the world, the Mediterraneans, the Eastern peoples, and, further, the East Asians and even the Negroes -- all are forced to cooperate, they now must traverse their own regions in the Nordic way, and this means that they have to give up their own space and exchange it for the space, the global space, which has now become a Nordic-tilled field. They must give up their space, yet they cannot do it without giving themselves up, for every authentic racial stock is bound up with its space. A Chinese racing through the countryside in an automobile is an absurdity, like the pheasant that would imitate the flight and grip of an eagle. Nevertheless it is a reality. The world increasingly assumes a Germanic exterior appearance and with it destroys the stamp of the unique character of its non-Nordic racial stocks. Almost everybody today wears a Germanic costume. (By this I do not mean only clothing, although the victory of the Germanic style of clothing -- even in the time of the Romans long pants was the characteristic Germanic mode of dress-has a much greater importance than the superficial observer may believe. The mode of dress is expression, and it determines the appearance of the body, which, after all, is the first and most important showplace of the soul; it makes a difference whether someone moves around in a dinner jacket or a caftan.) It lies in the essence of the Nordic soul to resolve that it must penetrate the whole world with its style and Nordicize and hence falsify what lies beyond the natural border of the Nordic style. No Nordic enthusiasm should deceive us on this score, namely, that the Nordic encircling of the world, albeit necessary as a result of the Nordic law of species, is a falsification and a destruction from the point of view of the law of the other racial stocks. Whatever Nordic man may bring, for the others it is bound to be a garment which is not cut for their particular figure and which disfigures them. They will have to change their gait and bearing in order to wear it. Some are able to copy the northern gait most accurately, but this does not make them into Nordic people. To assert that the world becomes Nordic means that countless hidden values are being opened up and made useful and productive -- mines of iron are, oil wells, water power, as well as animal and man power; they are made useful in the Nordic sense, they become material to be formed by Nordic hands. But it is through this very action that this man power loses its own specific value; as a racial stock the Nordic stamp devalues its inner essence. Nordic man goes out as a bearer of culture and believes he is bringing gifts to the world, and he has often celebrated himself in this role, especially in recent times. He has been praised as a savior who sacrifices himself for the world.

From Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Die nordische Seele: Eine Einfuhrung in die Rassenseelenkunde (Munich, 1932), pp. 19-32. (This extract has been taken from the fifth edition, 1936.)

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Notes:

1. There is not the slightest evidence that the ancestors of men like Marco Polo or Columbus had ever lived in the north. This is a typical line of reasoning, using racial presuppositions to establish a fact.
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

Postby admin » Wed Jun 17, 2015 11:27 pm

PART 2 OF 2

The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul, by ALFRED ROSENBERG

Let us repeat once more, and again and again, the most important point that has been made up to now: the Jewish religion completely lacks the belief in a supra-sensible Beyond. Indeed, one even gets an almost positive impression that, in the course of time, everything that in the least could foster a belief in an incorporeal life after death was intentionally eliminated. The Jews, with their religion oriented to purely earthly affairs, stand alone in the world! This should not be forgotten for a single moment; it is highly significant. For it is this exceptional situation which explains why a "shady nation" such as that of the Jews has survived the greatest and most glorious nations, and will continue to survive, until the end of all time, until the hour of salvation strikes for all mankind. The Jewish nation will not perish before this hour strikes. The world is preserved, as we shall see, only by a positive yea-saying to the world. Among the Jewish people this world-affirmation is totally pure, without any admixture of world-denial. All other nations that have ever existed, and exist today, had, or have, such an admixture, characterized by the idea of a Hereafter, even if only a trace of it. This mere trace would have sufficed, or would suffice, to provide the necessary counterweight to the unadulterated yea-saying to the world, as embodied in the Jewish people. For the inner light-and belief in immortality is the inner light-does not need always to shine with the brightest glow in order to produce an effect; it must simply be there, it must not be allowed to be snuffed out, or otherwise mankind would be lost forever to the terrestrial world. Everything takes its own time, however, a fact which is all too often overlooked. The denial of the world needs a still longer time in order to grow so that it will acquire a lasting predominance over affirmation of the world. At this time it seems again to have sunk to a zero point; its opposite, symbolized by the Jewish people, is triumphant as never before. It seems as if the inner light has completely vanished from this earth. But, to anticipate, it merely seems that way. Denial of the world cannot perish because it is part of the soul of mankind and the soul is immortal. Where the idea of the immortal dwells, the longing for the eternal or the withdrawal from temporality must always emerge again; hence a denial of the world will always reappear. And this is the meaning of the non-Jewish peoples: they are the custodians of world-negation, of the idea of the Hereafter, even if they maintain it in the poorest way. Hence, One or another of them can quietly go under, but what really matters lives on in their descendants. If, however, the Jewish people were to perish, no nation would be left which would hold world-affirmation in high esteem -- the end of all time would be here.

This would also be the case if the Zionist idea were to become a reality, namely, if the entire Jewish people would unite to become a national entity in Palestine Or somewhere else. Such a unification of Jews has never existed before: this must be stressed not twice but three times, inasmuch as it is little known. Long before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem a large part of the Jews lived in the diaspora, that is, dispersed among the "heathen" people. And, as every schoolboy knows, at the beginning of their history they were "guests" among the Egyptians. What arose afterward in Palestine was anything but a state structure. At best it was an attempt to build one, when it was not a preparatory school for the exploitation or the destruction of foreign peoples. To the Jew Weininger [1] his own nation is like an invisible cohesive web of slime fungus (plasmodium), existing since time immemorial and spread over the entire earth; and this expansionism, as he correctly observes (without, of course, proving it), is an essential component of the idea, of the nature of Judaism. This immediately becomes clear if we again regard the Jewish people as the embodiment of world-affirmation. Without it, nothing of a terrestrial character, and thus no nation, is conceivable. Hence, the Jew, the only consistent and consequently the only viable yea-sayer to the world, must be found wherever other men bear in themselves -- if only in the tiniest degree -- a compulsion to overcome the world. The Jew represents the still necessary counterweight to them; otherwise that urgent craving would be fulfilled immediately and thereby would not usher in the salvation of the world (since the Jewish people would still remain in existence), but would destroy it in a different way through the elimination of the spiritual power without which it cannot exist either. I will discuss this idea more fully later on; here I wish merely to demonstrate that the world could not exist if the Jews were living by themselves. This is why an old prophecy proclaims that the end of the world will arrive on the day when the Jews will have established the state of Palestine ...

From all this it follows that Judaism is part of the organism of mankind just as, let us say, certain bacteria are part of man's body, and indeed the Jews are as necessary as bacteria. The body contains, as we know, a host of tiny organisms without which it would perish, even though they feed on it. Similarly, mankind needs the Jewish strain in order to preserve its vitality until its earthly mission is fulfilled. In other words, the world-affirmation exemplified by Judaism in its purest form, though disastrous in itself, is a condition of man's earthly being -- as long as men exist -- and we cannot even imagine its nonexistence. It will collapse only when all mankind is redeemed.

Thus, we are obliged to accept the Jews among us as a necessary evil, for who knows how many thousands of years to come. But just as the body would become stunted if the bacteria increased beyond a salutary number, our nation too -- to describe a more limited circle -- would gradually succumb to a spiritual malady if the Jew were to become too much for it. Were he to leave us entirely (this is the aim of Zionism, or at least what it pretends to be) it would be just as disastrous as if he were to dominate us. The mission of the German nation will come to an end -- and this is my firm conviction-with the last hour of mankind. But we could never reach it if we lost world affirmation, the Jew among us, because no life is possible without world-affirmation. On the other hand, if the Jew were continually to stifle us, we would never be able to fulfill our mission, which is the salvation of the world, but would, to be frank, succumb to insanity, for pure world-affirmation, the unrestrained will for a vain existence, leads to no other goal. It would literally lead to a void, to the destruction not only of the illusory earthly world but also of the truly existent, the spiritual. Considered in himself the Jew represents nothing else but this blind will for destruction, the insanity of mankind. It is known that Jewish people are especially prone to mental disease. "Dominated by delusions," said Schopenhauer about the Jew.... To strip the world of its soul, that and nothing else is what Judaism wants. This, however, would be tantamount to the world's destruction.

Even now, while the Jews still live among us, all their undertakings reveal this aim, and necessarily so. Their aim is to strip mankind of its soul.
This is why they endeavor to break any form behind which the living soul is operative. For as arch-materialists it is their insane opinion that it is precisely the spiritual, which they sense only obscurely, that is connected with the form as a matter of life and death and must perish with it. Hence they are also, all and sundry, anarchists, consciously or unconsciously. In fact, they cannot be anything else but opponents of order and law, because order and law, in a unique way, bear the radiant imprint of a purer world. Schiller calls order "the daughter of heaven," and for the divine origin of law we find much evidence in Schiller and still more in Goethe.

Without order and law no conception of state can be actualized, since they are the indispensable foundation for it. For this very reason, the Jew, the mortal enemy of order and law, can never create a viable state in Palestine. The result would again be chaos. For this word, correctly translated, means an infinite void, nothingness.

[From Dietrich Eckart: Ein Vermachtnis, edited by Alfred Rosenberg (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher Nachf., 1928), pp. 214-219.]

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Notes:

1. Otto Weininger (1880-1903) wrote Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) (1903), which became a classic not only of Jewish self-hate but also of racist literature.

Heredity and Racial Biology for Students, by JAKOB GRAF

The Aryan: The Creative Force in Human History

In the second millennium B.C. the Aryans (the Nordic race) invaded India and established Aryan culture there. A branch related to the Aryans created the foundations for the power and the flowering of the Persian empire. Ancient Hellenic culture likewise is traceable to the blood of Nordic immigrants. Paintings that have come down to us, as well as descriptions dating from that period, attest to the fact that the Hellenes, as long as they kept their race pure, were tall, light-skinned, light-eyed, blond people. The Roman Empire was founded by the Italics, who were related to the Celts. With the vanishing of the Nordic component-that is, with the disappearance of Nordic blood-the fate of these proud empires was sealed. The Goths, Franks, Vandals, and Normans, too, were peoples of Nordic blood. A renaissance took place only in the Western Roman Empire, not in its eastern counterpart, because in the west Nordic blood developed its creative power in the form of the Longobards. Remnants of the western Goths created a Spanish empire. The spread of Christianity in northern and eastern Europe was in the main supported by Nordic people, and the Nordic longing for freedom of the spirit found powerful expression in the Reformation. It was Nordic energy and boldness that were responsible for the power and prestige enjoyed by small nations such as the Netherlands and Sweden. The successors of the northern Franks, Goths, and Germanic peoples created the might and greatness of France in the past centuries, and even the Russian empire was founded by Normans. The opening up of North America, South Africa, and Australia was carried out with unequaled success by the Anglo-Saxons, the descendants of the Saxons and Normans. Everywhere Nordic creative power has built mighty empires with high-minded ideas, and to this very day Aryan languages and cultural values are spread over a large part of the world, though the creative Nordic blood has long since vanished in many places. Ethnological historical research has proved that the Nordic race has produced a great many more highly talented people than any other race.

Nordic boldness not only is a precondition for the martial exploits of nations of Nordic origin, but it is also a prerequisite for the courageous profession of new, great ideas.

How We Can Learn to Recognize a Person's Race

ASSIGNMENTS

I. Summarize the spiritual characteristics of the individual races.

2. Collect from stories, essays, and poems examples of ethnological illustrations. Underline those terms which describe the type and mode of the expression of the soul.

3. What are the expressions, gestures, and movements which allow us to make conclusions as to the attitude of the racial soul?

4. Determine also the physical features which go hand in hand with the specific racial soul characteristics of the individual figures.

5. Try to discover the intrinsic nature of the racial soul through the characters in stories and poetical works in terms of their inner attitude. Apply this mode of observation to persons in your own environment.

6. Collect propaganda posters and caricatures tor your race book and arrange them according to a racial scheme. What image of beauty is emphasized by the artist (a) in posters publicizing sports and travel? (b) in publicity for cosmetics? How are hunters, mountain climbers, and shepherds drawn?

7. Collect from illustrated magazines, newspapers, etc., pictures of great scholars, statesmen, artists, and others who distinguished themselves by their special accomplishments (for example, in economic life, politics, sports). Determine the preponderant race and admixture, according to physical characteristics. Repeat this exercise with the pictures of great men of all nations and times.

8. When viewing monuments, busts, etc., be sure to pay attention to the race of the person portrayed with respect to figure, bearing, and physical characteristics. Try to harmonize these determinations with the features of the racial soul.

9. Observe people whose special racial features have drawn your attention, also with respect to their bearing when moving or when speaking. Observe their expressions and gestures.

10. Observe the Jew: his way of walking, his bearing, gestures, and movements when talking.

11. What strikes you about the way a Jew talks and sings?

12. What are the occupations engaged in by the Jews of your acquaintance?

13. What are the occupations in which Jews are not to be found? Explain this phenomenon on the basis of the character of the Jew's soul.

14. In what stories, descriptions, and poems do you find the psychical character of the Jew pertinently portrayed. ("The Jew in the Prickle" from Grimm's Fairy Tales; Debit and Credit by Gustav Freytag; Ut mine Stromtid by Fritz Reuter; The Hunger Pastor by Wilhelm Raabe; The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare. [1]) Give more examples.

From Jakob Graf, Familienkunde und Rassenbiologie fur Schuler (2nd ed.; Munich, 1935), pp. 107, 114-115.

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Notes:

1. All these works were widely read, and in all of them the Jewish stereotype appears, even if not yet dressed up in racial garb. With the exception of Shakespeare, the authors lived in the nineteenth century.

The New Biology: Training in Racial Citizenship, by PAUL BROHMER

How did it come about that Darwin's doctrine aroused his contemporaries to such a pitch of violence, that passionate quarrels broke out for and against the new theory? His fellow biologists soon espoused one or the other shadings of the Law of Descent.... The success of this doctrine derived from the fact that all events in nature were reduced to a single formula by which everything was explained.... In addition, there was also the strong desire for a mechanistic explanation of events, as this also found expression in the philosophy of positivism. Darwin's theory, however, is purely mechanistic....

From our pedagogical standpoint, which considers the task of the school to be the inculcation of Volkish thinking and volition, in opposition to the carrying-over of Darwinian ideas to the teaching of biology in schools, it can be objected that teaching these ideas will hardly serve this pedagogical aim. These teachings are, so to speak, international, since they examine all the countries of the world for the phenomena which the laws of the theory of descent supposedly predict. Thus, we find that textbooks deal with almost more foreign animals and plants than native ones; the selection is made on the basis of localities where the phenomena under consideration -- mimesis, protective coloration, adaptation -- can best be recognized. Thus the student learns all about the Indian meal moth, the walking-stick insect, the walking leaf, but not about the parasites which destroy the harvest in our own orchards or cause enormous losses in the fields of German agriculture. The student might be familiar with the Australian monotremes and marsupials, but know hardly anything about the animals and plants that are most frequently come upon in the fields and forests of the homeland.

Such knowledge may well be of use to the researcher, but not to the German who is not an expert in the field of biology. It is no exaggeration to assert that much of the subject matter of biology teaching is alien to life, the homeland, and the Volk. The reason for this aberrant development in the teaching of biology lies mainly in the fact that, owing to the tendencies of the time, the Darwinian ideas became the principal content of instruction in the schools....

***

The inclusion of physiological viewpoints in the teaching of biology leads to a specific technical procedure, to an elaboration of biology as subject matter for the school based on instructive work-experience. In this sense there has already been a great improvement in the past few years. But this is not the essential problem. It is not just a question of improving the teaching procedure, but rather of transforming the content of our subject, of guiding the student to a new conception of nature! To accomplish this, teachings taken from physiology must be introduced. Consequently, this purpose is not served if a number of physiological experiments are carried out and interpreted as postscripts or appendices, so to speak. Here, too, from the very beginning the student must be guided to an over-all, total view, and not, say, to one that is encyclopedic. He should perceive and feel that behind the individual achievement there is a meaningful plan, that behind it stands the whole organism. Let us take, for example, an experiment showing the action of saliva in changing starch into sugar. This is not just a random interesting fact, but a real accomplishment, a process in the service of the preservation of the whole organism. Or, let us consider the process of seeing: the eye by itself is not able to produce any visual images but requires the cooperation of a number of organs. Thus, the act of seeing is also an accomplishment achieved by the entire organism.

These examples show us two ways in which physiology considers the whole: first, in that the accomplishment is in the service of the whole; second, in that it is achieved by the whole. Hence these two methods of observing an event from the standpoint of the whole organism are intimately connected: the conception that every occurrence is planned, as a part of the total accomplishment, and the conception of the organism as a totality, in which everything that occurs is conditioned and regulated by a meaningful plan. If we guide the student to this conception of nature as a unified totality by way of repeated concrete examples, we shall have helped to provide him, at least in this branch of biology, with a modern method of observation and he will have acquired the basis for an organic Volkish-based thinking. Naturally, this must also be done in the other branches of our subject....

The importance of emphasizing physiological ideas in the teaching of botany and zoology is also to be found in the fact that the way for it is prepared by the new teaching of anthropology. The physiological processes in plants and animals with which the student becomes acquainted create a basis for an understanding of the corresponding processes in man. In the actual teaching of anthropology, however, a strong emphasis on physiology is necessary because it prepares the way for teaching hygiene, and it certainly is a task of this branch of instruction in biology to provide a guide for a rational way of life. Individual hygiene, again, is a prerequisite for racial hygiene, which is so important. Thus the study of physiology is likewise connected with this problem. It can be successfully utilized, however, only on the basis of a total view, which must be introduced into all branches of the teaching of biology.

The concept of the total view will come to the fore in the study of living plant or animal communities more than it will in any other branch of biology teaching.... Unfortunately this idea has been understood by many methodologists in a purely external way as a principle of the organization of matter. It is more than that. Behind it stands a repudiation of an outmoded tendency in research; the aim should be to present a view of the whole, to apply methods of instruction relevant to the subject matter, to arrive at a national formulation of biology teaching and the discovery of internal interconnections in the occurrences of life. The metabolic changes in a closed biotic community reveal a meaningful plan in the greater occurrences of nature, and when we come to understand that the whole world is a living space for one biotic community, we can then discover ultimate interconnections, and finally arrive at a concept of nature that does not conflict with religious experience, whereas this was necessarily the case with the former purely mechanistic attitude.

Introducing the student to this mode of observation is in the spirit of a Volkish education. On the basis of the elaboration of the laws of biology we turn to the emotional life of the student: he must come to see Germany as his "living space" and himself as a link in the German biotic community and the German destiny; and he must regard all Germans as his blood relations, his brothers. If we reach this goal, then all party and class divisions sink into nothingness, and more is accomplished for education in citizenship than is done by studying governmental and administrative structures.

For the very reason that the theory of the biotic community is so important for the development of biological knowledge and for education in organic Volkish thinking, it would be expedient to base the school curriculum on this idea. When we go into the free, open spaces we always come upon animals and plants in their specific living space in which they form biotic communities. It is not a mechanical system which orders the natural arrangement of organisms, but the living space. This living space not only presents an external frame of community but links its inhabitants to each other with indissoluble bonds. Whoever, in teaching the concept of the biotic community, utilizes it only as a principle of the organization of matter has not grasped the deeper meaning of bionomics. He stands, as it were, in front of a deep well of precious water and draws nothing from it although his companions are dying of thirst. Thus it is a question of opening up Volkish values to the students.

At the same time this produces effects which, from a didactic point of view, are not to be scorned. For one thing, instruction along the lines of the concept of the living community compels the teacher to take his students on frequent trips outside the classroom and to collect observations for later evaluation. Thus a true teaching of life is striven for, not just an accumulation of knowledge acquired by studying "animal skeletons and dead bones." There is little justification for a "museum" biology in the instruction which we are striving to establish. Even the illustrative specimens, which in many school lessons still must serve as a substitute for nature, can be dispensed with in most cases. They may still serve as a supplement to what has been seen in a living context, but they can no longer be the source for the formation of views.

It is not enough to make one visit to a biotic community, such as a beech wood. Rather, it must be visited at least once every season. How different is the effect which a beech wood, for example, makes on us in early spring, when the ground is covered with a carpet of anemones, from that which it makes on us in midsummer, when a mysterious penumbra prevails, when it looks to us like a cathedral with high, slender columns! Anyone who absorbs the atmosphere of the landscape, its soul, begins to love his homeland, and it is precisely love of the homeland which we want to arouse and can arouse with the help of the concept of the biotic community. It is almost self-evident that educational hikes to the biotic communities in his regional environment provide the student with a knowledge that is not limited to the field of biology but includes knowledge about the homeland.

It is necessary to take several such hikes through a biotic community in order to be able to grasp fully the metabolic changes which take place within it. The seasonal changes in the world of the organisms play an important part in this metabolism. From this results a methodological conclusion of great significance. For most schools it is not feasible to deal with only one kind of biotic community in the course of a school year. Even though this would involve a very thorough investigation of one living space and its inhabitants, it is opposed by the requirements of life, which demand a certain versatility. According to my experience, it is easily possible in one school year to deal with three or four biotic communities, putting more stress on one than on the others. If it is desired to visit each one of these biotic communities at least once every season, then it is impossible to treat the individual biotic communities as self-contained teaching units -- for example, by dealing with one in the first semester, the second in the following semester, etc. Rather, the treatment of the three or four biotic communities prescribed by the school curriculum for one year would parallel each other. In this way the summer can be used mainly for gathering observations and the winter can serve more as a period of evaluation....

Another change we must make in the teaching of biology if its cultural value is to be increased concerns the position of man in our discipline. In the usual textbooks, anthropology is treated as a supplement to biology; man is dealt with in somewhat more detail than any other mammal, but according to the same points of view. The only difference is that, on the basis of the knowledge of the structure and functioning of the organs, some rules on health may be offered, and it has been said that the teaching of anthropology should offer the student a guide to intelligent living. No doubt, anthropology should fulfill this task too. But all it does is promote knowledge as such; it does not add to the growth of the student's intellectual or religious culture.... Furthermore, knowledge as an individual accomplishment must be supplemented by a knowledge of a supra-individual character, because German man must not think only of himself, but should be cognizant of his duty to place himself in the service of the people.

Our aim is not merely that man be made the object of the study of nature, but that he should also be placed as subject in the biological consideration of nature. To be sure, everybody must have a certain fund of knowledge about the structure and function of his "body tools," and everybody should also know how to keep healthy. Hence we should welcome the methodological demand that the road to the teaching of anthropology should always be prepared by the teaching of biology. Consequently, it is possible in zoology to elaborate, for example, on the nature of digestion, breathing, etc., and then refer back to it in anthropology. The study of botany, too, offers many opportunities for preparing the way for anthropological knowledge....

Beyond and above this, the place of man vis-a-vis nature must constantly be discussed in the teaching of biology. This is made easy precisely by arranging the subject matter, and the insights deriving from it, in terms of a biotic-community approach. We would start with -- since our concept of biotic community is a broad one -- the domain of "house and home." In it man is the master; he has taken into his household the animals and plants which he keeps either for his use or for his pleasure. He gives them shelter, food, and care; he has changed them through breeding and he holds their lives in his hands. Without him most of the organisms he keeps as domestic animals or indoor plants would perish. At this point we can discuss in an elementary way the attitude of man toward nature. In this biotic community we meet first and foremost the will to rule over nature, the viewpoint of utilitarianism, which is, however, accompanied by the joy in the beauty of the things of nature and love of nature itself. Similar discussions will come up in the study of biotic communities in the garden, field, and meadow.

It might be thought that with the "anthropological idea," as I should like to designate the emphasis on anthropology in biology teaching, our aim is to return to the anthropocentric point of view which has been justifiably attacked; or that we wish to foster a utilitarian pedagogy by discussing more thoroughly than was done in the past domestic animals, useful plants and their parasites, and eugenics from the viewpoint of the individual and the race. It is anthropocentric if it is assumed that nature has been created only for man. We decisively reject this attitude. According to our conception of nature, man is a link in the chain of living nature just as any other organism. On the other hand, it is a fact that man has made himself master of nature, and that he will increasingly aim to widen this mastery. The teaching of natural history must contribute to this. Thus its task is not merely to transmit theoretical knowledge, to foster joy in nature, to arouse love of one's homeland and one's country; it has, in addition, practical aims. One may call this utilitarian pedagogy if one so pleases. But in our view instruction in biology that does not take the problems of agriculture, forestry, gardening, and fishing into consideration is a failure; it is a form of teaching that is alien to the practical life of our people. School is not a research laboratory, but an institution which aims to educate Germans, and these should stand at their posts in the life of the German Volk. We are as far removed from a one-sided utilitarian viewpoint as we are from pedagogy that is alien to life....

Still more important, it seems to me, is the fact that the task of biology teaching, briefly referred to above, can be fulfilled by an orientation toward the concept of the biotic community. It must be grasped here once more on the basis of another idea. We have said that the student must be led to the conception that Germany is his living space to which he is linked by the bond of blood. We have explained in detail that the bionomic approach teaches that the organisms within a living space are dependent on each other as well as dependent upon the whole, and that each link must perform an indispensable function in the total accomplishment. When this insight is applied to the human biotic community, when the future German racial-comrade feels himself to be a link in the German biotic community, and when he is imbued with the idea of the blood relationship of all Germans, then class differences and class hatred cannot take acute forms, as was often the case in the past due to a misunderstanding of the actual bond that unites all estates together. Once every German regards Germany as his living space and feels himself to be a link in the German biotic community, he will be fully conscious of the fact that every individual within the metabolism of the biotic community into which he was born must fulfill his own important task. Thus a supra-individualistic attitude is created which constitutes the best possible foundation for training in citizenship. Indeed, it can be said that it has achieved its deepest fulfillment once this attitude is transformed into action.

Racial eugenics works in the same direction, namely, the education of the student in a national sense. Although it constitutes the finishing touch of biology teaching, its concepts should from the very beginning permeate all biological instruction in all types of schools, and not be left for discussion in anthropology, which concludes the study of biology. It should be repeatedly emphasized that the biological laws operative in animals and plants apply also to man; for example, that the knowledge acquired from studying the genetics of these organisms can, in a general way, be applied to man. Thus, the teaching of animal breeding and plant cultivation can effectively prepare the way for conceptions of racial biology. Naturally, a more systematic discussion of these questions will first take place in the teaching of anthropology.

It is not so much a matter of making the student knowledgeable on all questions of eugenics, but of creating motives for his action. Racial eugenics is particularly valuable for school because of its educational significance. If the emphasis on the ideology of the biotic community creates a feeling of belonging to our people and state, then racial eugenics creates the will to struggle, body and soul, for the growth and health of this biotic community.

This is also the place for discussing, from a biological viewpoint, the family as a value, and the improvement of the sense of family which has been sorely neglected by many modern pedagogues. The family, after all, is the smallest biotic community since it forms the germ cell of the state. If we take up these questions, the fields of individual hygiene and racial eugenics, of genetics and sex education, combine to form a meaningful unit, just as, generally, the teaching of biology, which in the past was fragmented into many unrelated individual fields, will be fused into a unified whole once our efforts achieve fruition. In these discussions on the family we are less concerned with the student's enlarging his knowledge and more with the aim that he be imbued with a sense of responsibility, that he begin to sense that the deepest meaning of human life is to grow beyond himself in his children, and that nothing he could leave to them would be more valuable than the German heritage which he has received from his ancestors, and that, through race mixing, he could taint and impair his progeny in a most unfavorable way.

Such ideas lead to an ethnology of the German people, which we mentioned earlier by way of a few pedagogical observations. All that remains to be discussed is at what stage it should be introduced. As we have explained, the way to it is already prepared in zoology and botany and it is concluded in the teaching of anthropology. Now a short remark on the goal of ethnology: the knowledge of physical and spiritual features of the individual races has little value if it does not lead to the firm will to fight against the racial deterioration of the German nation and if it does not imbue the student with the conviction that the fact of belonging to a race imposes a responsibility....

The actual method of teaching racial eugenics of necessity will vary with the individual types of schools. Even the simplest village school may not pass over these problems. It can build upon the children's own radius of experience in the fields of animal breeding and plant cultivation. From this, simple rules of heredity can be deduced; these, however, do not need to involve cellular research and the theory of chromosomes. Children are familiar with symptoms of degeneration in animals and plants, and not much initiative is required to find such signs of degeneration and decline in man too. Thus a point of departure is created for introducing racial eugenics during instruction in zoology and botany. At suitable opportunities -- this can also be done in the teaching of geography and history -- such ideas will be elaborated further until they are most fully treated in the teaching of anthropology. Not one elementary-school pupil should leave school without having internalized the iron command that he is to bear part of the responsibility for the fate of his fatherland, without the awareness that he is only a link in the chain of his ancestors and descendants and the carrier of the future generation. The higher schools can devote more time to racial eugenics: the students in the later classes are more mature than those in the elementary and intermediate schools. Here, too, the way will be prepared in zoology and botany. Further, the teaching of history can be made very meaningful through racial eugenics, since we know that modern historians consider the cause of the collapse of the ancient world to lie in non-eugenic racial mixtures....

When teaching the theory of family and race, as well as eugenics, it is methodologically important to stimulate independent activity on the part of the student to the greatest possible degree. It can be suggested that the student draw up a genealogical chart of his family as far back as he can go. In addition, he can be asked questions about the physical characteristics of his parents and other forebears as far as they can be determined (size, figure, shape of head and face, color of hair and eyes, form of nose, etc.), about their intellectual and characterological qualities, their special achievements (for example, rescues during the war, scientific or literary publications, compositions), their life span and cause of death. In given cases, deformities and hereditary diseases should also be reported. The number of children produced by the student's ancestors should be determined. This is the kind of material in which the student will be directly interested. But when explaining hereditary diseases the teacher must take care not to arouse feelings of inferiority or fear of such diseases in students who come from families with handicaps of a hereditary character. It also goes without saying that he is duty-bound to keep certain information confidential as far as the other students are concerned. In every class, then, there will be sufficient usable material which can serve as a basis for teaching in the afore-mentioned fields.

From Paul Brohmer, Biologieunterricht und volkische Erziehung (Frankfurt: Verlag Moritz Diesterweg, 1933), pp. 8-10, 68-72, 74-80.

To Preserve the Strength of the Race: Compulsory Sterilization, by ERICH RISTOW

There is complete unanimity on the decision which stipulates that a recommendation of sterilization is not to be postponed for the reason that the person subject to this measure is pregnant. Consequently, the measure has to be carried out and the order thereto is to be issued by the Hereditary Health Law Court (Erbgesundheits-Gericht). [1]

The decision of the Hereditary Health Law Courts will be carried out in such a way that the ovaries of the woman are removed or unbound. Care must be taken to make it as difficult as possible, if not in fact impossible, for surgery to undo this measure, so as to avoid the rejoining of the parts that have been separated.... Persons who have been sterilized must be prevented from traveling abroad in order to have physicians there counter the effect of the surgery.

When a Hereditary Health Law Court has legally decreed the sterilization of a woman who is pregnant at the time this measure is to be carried out, the pregnancy can be interrupted with the permission of the pregnant woman, except when the fetus is already in a stage of viability or if the interruption of pregnancy would seriously endanger the woman's life or health.

From Erich Ristow, Erbgesundheitsrecht (Stuttgart and Berlin: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1935), pp. 127, 159, 226, 256.

_______________

Notes:

1. These courts were composed of two doctors and one judge.
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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PART 1 OF 2

4. Building Myths and Heroes

Editor's Introduction


MYTHS AND HEROES were all-important in what Hitler called the "magic influence" of mass suggestion. A myth is an image which can inspire men. It must have some element of truth in it, but it is twisted into a vision that conforms to the desired ideal. Nietzsche did live, and his name was familiar to most Germans, but Alfred Baeumler (b. 1887) transformed Nietzsche's thought into a myth which put the famous philosopher at the service of the Nazi world view. Baeumler stresses Nietzsche's heroism, his emphasis upon the power of the will, and his advocacy of an aristocratic community. Such ideas can be found in Nietzsche, who was a singularly unsystematic philosopher, and there can be little doubt about Nietzsche's opposition to Christianity and democracy. However, Baeumler does not mention the philosopher's hatred of nationalism and his contempt for Germans. The philosopher of the "heroic" became a part of the Nazi world view. Baeumler himself was one of the leading academic philosophers of the Third Reich. As professor at the University of Berlin, he became the chief liaison man between the German universities and Alfred Rosenberg's office, which was charged with the ideological education of the Nazi party.

Baeumler connects Nietzsche's activism to Nordic and soldierly virtues. Indeed, the war experience produced an important renewal of supposedly heroic virtues. Ernst Rohm (1887-1934) catalogues them 'for us: plain talk, defiance, passion, and hate-a soldier is rough and direct. These virtues are identical with those "genuine" qualities of the Volk which the Nazis praised so much: they are natural as opposed to artificial (see page 27). Rohm himself had fought in the First World War, and afterward against the left-wing uprisings in northern and southern Germany. Soldiering was his whole life, and he continued it when he became the leader of the SA. Rohm's autobiography is called Die Geschichte eines Hochverraters (The Story of a Traitor), and it was as a traitor that Hitler regarded him when he was murdered in 1934. In reality, he was done away with because the independence, power, and revolutionary fervor of the SA had to be brought under the Fuhrer's control.

The idealized war experience was made to serve the Nazi ideology just as Baeumler had transformed Nietzsche into a prophet for the Third Reich. Joseph Goebbels' Michael is the hero who sacrifices himself for his people. Goebbels always had literary ambitions, but Michael (1929) was his only novel, though by 1942 it had gone through seventeen editions. Michael gives up his studies to go down to the people at work, to "a war without cannons." The experience of the trenches becomes a court of appeal: there all Germans had been united, regardless of class, through their work for the Fatherland, and now they must recapture this unity once again. The anti-bourgeois prejudice of Goebbels comes through in this novel. Soldiers, students, and workers will build the new Reich. But for Goebbels, as for Hitler, "bourgeois" is not a class term, but rather a label for the older generation still imprisoned in liberalism and held enthralled by the lure of Mammon.

Michael does not succeed. At the end of the novel he is killed in a mining accident. But a heroic death in a just cause is an important factor in the building of heroes. Albert Leo Schlageter (1894-1923) became one of the most celebrated heroes of the Third Reich. He had fought against the French when they occupied the Ruhr Valley in order to obtain reparations for war damages. The French captured Schlageter, probably while he was performing an act of sabotage. He was condemned to death by a military tribunal and shot. Like Michael, he was in search of his people and, like Michael too, he died in their cause. But he was also a soldier (he had fought in the Free Corps after the war), and the slim memorial volume of his letters stresses his simplicity as well as his activism -- a note very similar to that of Rohm's autobiography and Baeumler's essay on Nietzsche.

Hanns Johst's play Schlageter had its premiere in Hitler's presence and on Hitler's birthday (April 20, 1933). It was performed throughout the Reich by a series of theatrical touring companies. Johst (b. 1890) was the only distinguished playwright to put himself wholly at the service of the Nazi cause, becoming president of the Reichsschriftstumskammer (see page 13 5). The excerpt from the play illustrates the stress put upon the differences between generations. The son wants to join his hero, Schlageter, while the father holds back. The "young generation" were the "new men" who confront the old bourgeois generation, which (so the Nazis hoped) was "finished."

Fritz Todt (1891-1942) died in the glory of his great accomplishment: the building of the Autobahnen. He was burned alive in a plane crash while returning from a visit with Hitler, whom he was then serving as Minister of Munitions. Here was a contemporary hero for whom the superhighway was symbolic of speed and activism in the service of his leader. Moreover, his work is linked to a lively sense of history and an appreciation of the genuineness of nature. But what about heroes of the past? The cult of Frederick the Great goes back to the party's years of struggle and was expanded during the war. Goebbels was the high priest of this cult. [1] Wilhelm Ihde puts forward the Nazi version of the Prussian King. His strength of will stands in the foreground, while his artistic interests and his philosophical predilections are relegated to unimportance. Such had to be the case, for Frederick was, after all, a man of the hated Enlightenment. Ihde himself was a former journalist who rose to high rank in the SS (Obersturmfuhrer) and became the director of the Reichsschriftstumskammer.

The creation of heroes and the creation of myths are closely interrelated. No doubt, for the young SA bride Hermann Goring was a living hero, surrounded as he was by the acted-out mythology of the summer solstice celebration. The marching, the torches, the fire -- this was the "magic" that produced enthusiasm among many a youth (see page 271). This account of a Nazi experience was written four years before Hitler came to power, at a time when Nazi strength had not yet made an impact upon the voting behavior of the boys' and girls' parents.

The myth was institutionalized; it became a part of the official rhythm of the Third Reich. As the instructions for festivities in the school state, the teacher battles for the human soul on the cultural- political front. Here celebrations are important, because they help root the mythology of the movement in that soul; they are indeed "confessions of faith." Like all Nazi festivities, these are set up in the form of recitations, responses, and choruses: the Christian liturgical framework is adapted to the content of the Nazi world view.

Building myths and heroes was an integral part of the Nazi cultural drive. The theme, specifically illustrated here, runs throughout this book. Racial thought produced strong myths and the peasant provided the constant culture hero of National Socialism. The flight from reason became a search for myths and heroes to believe in, and National Socialism was only too glad to provide both in full measure.

G.L.M.

_______________

Notes:

1. Ernest K. Bramsted, Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda, 1925-1945 (East Lansing, Mich., 1965), pp. 444-445.

Nietzsche and National Socialism, by ALFRED BAEUMLER

Nietzsche and National Socialism stand on the other side of the traditions of the German bourgeoisie. What does that mean? The spiritual forces which have formed the German bourgeoisie in the last several centuries have been Pietism, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. Pietism was the last truly revolutionary religious movement on Lutheran soil. It led men from a hopeless political reality back into their own selves and gathered them together in small private circles. It was a religious individualism which strengthened the inclination toward concern with self, toward psychological analysis and biographical examination. Every apolitical state-alien tendency necessarily had to find support and nourishment in Pietistic Germany. The wholly different individualism of the Enlightenment also worked in this direction. This individualism was not of a religious-sentimental character. It believed in reason, it was rational, but it was "political" only in that it denied the feudal system; it was unable to erect an enduring political system of its own and was capable only of breaking the path for the economic system of capitalism. Man was viewed as a wholly individual entity, cut off from all original orders and relations, a fictitious person responsible only to himself. In contrast, Romanticism saw man again in the light of his natural and historical ties. Romanticism opened our eyes to the night, the past, our ancestors, to the mythos and the Volk. The movement that led from Herder to Gorres, to the brothers Grimm, Eichendorff, Arnim, and Savigny, [1] is the only spiritual movement that is still fully alive. It is the only movement with which Nietzsche had to wrestle....

When we call National Socialism a world view we mean that not only the bourgeois parties but also their ideologies have been annihilated. Only ill-willed persons could maintain that everything that has been created by the past must now be negated. Rather, we mean that we have entered into a new relationship with our past, that our view has been cleared for what was truly forceful in this past but which had been clouded by bourgeois ideology. In a word, we have discovered new possibilities for understanding the essence of German existence. Precisely in this Nietzsche has preceded us. We hold a view of Romanticism that is different from his. But his most personal and lonely possession, the negation of bourgeois ideology as a whole, has today become the property of a generation....

The foundations of Christian morality -- religious individualism, a guilty conscience, meekness, concern for the eternal salvation of the soul -- all are absolutely foreign to Nietzsche. He revolts against the concept of repentance: "I do not like this kind of cowardice about one's own action; one should not leave one's own self in the lurch before the assault of unexpected disgrace and vexation. Rather, an extreme pride is in order here. For, finally, what is the use! No deed can be undone by repentance." What he means here is not a reduction of responsibility, but rather its intensification. Here speaks the man who knows how much courage, how much pride, is necessary to maintain himself in the face of Fate. Out of his amor fati Nietzsche spoke contemptuously about Christianity with its "perspective of salvation." As a Nordic man he never understood for what purpose he should be "redeemed." The Mediterranean religion of salvation is alien to and far removed from his Nordic attitude. He can understand man only as a warrior against Fate. A mode of thought which sees struggle and work only as a penance appears incomprehensible to him. "Our real life is a false, apostatic, and sinful existence, a penalty existence." Sorrow, battle, work, death, are merely taken as objections to life. "Man as innocent, idle, immortal, happy -- this concept of 'highest desirability' especially must be criticized." Nietzsche turns passionately upon the monastic vita contemplativa, against Augustine's "Sabbath of all Sabbaths." He praises Luther for having made an end of the vita contemplativa. The Nordic melody of strife and labor sounds strong and clear here. The accent with which we pronounce these words today we heard from Nietzsche for the first time.

We call Nietzsche the philosopher of heroism. But that is only a half-truth if we do not regard him at the same time as the philosopher of activism. He considered himself the world-historical counterpart to Plato. "Works" result not from the desire for display, not from the acknowledgment of "extramundane" values, but from practice, from the ever repeated deed. Nietzsche employs a famous antithesis to make this clear: "First and above all there is the work. And that means training, training, training! The accompanying faith will come by itself -- of that you can be certain." Nietzsche opposes the Christian proscription of the political sphere, of the sphere of action altogether, with the thesis that also overcame the contrast between Catholicism and Protestantism (work and faith): "One has to train oneself not in the strengthening of value feelings, but in action; One has to know how to do something." In this way he re-established the purity of the sphere of action, of the political sphere.

Nietzsche's "values" have nothing to do with the Beyond, and therefore cannot be petrified into dogma. In ourselves, through us, they rise struggling to the surface; they exist only as long as we make ourselves responsible for them. When Nietzsche warns, "Be true to the Earth!" he reminds us of the idea that is rooted in our strength but does not hope for "realization" in a distant Beyond. It is not enough to point out the "this-worldly" character of Nietzsche's values if one at the same time does not want to refute the notion that values are "realized" by action. Something inferior is always attached to the "realization" of given values whether these values are of a mundane or extramundane character....

Nietzsche's Nordic and soldierly valuation opposes that of the Mediterranean world and that of the priests. His critique of religion is a criticism of the priest, and arises from the point of view of the warrior, since Nietzsche demonstrates that even the origin of religion lies in the realm of power. This explains the fateful contradiction in a morality based on the Christian religion. "To secure the rule of moral values, all kinds of unmoral forces and passions have to be enlisted. The development of moral values is the work of unmoral passions and considerations." Morality, therefore, is the creation of unmorality. "How to bring virtue to rule: This treatise deals with the great politics of virtue." It teaches for the first time "that one cannot bring about the reign of virtue by the same means used to establish any kind of rule, least of all through virtue." "One has to be very unmoral to make morality through deeds." Nietzsche replaces the bourgeois moral philosophy with the philosophy of the will to power -- in other words with the philosophy of politics. If in doing so he becomes the apologist for the "unconscious," this "unconscious" is not to be understood in terms of depth psychology. Here the concern is not with the instinctive and unconscious drives of an individual. Rather, "unconscious" here means "perfect" and "able." And beyond that, "unconscious" also means life as such, the organism, the "great reason" of the body.

Consciousness is only a tool, a detail in the totality of life. In opposition to the philosophy of the conscious, Nietzsche asserts the aristocracy of nature. But for thousands of years a life-weary morality has opposed the aristocracy of the strong and healthy. Like National Socialism, Nietzsche sees in the state, in society, the "great mandatory of life," responsible for each life's failure to life itself. "The species requires the extinction of the misfits, weaklings, and degenerates: but Christianity as a conserving force appeals especially to them." Here we encounter the basic contradiction: whether one proceeds from a natural life context or from an equality of individual souls before God. Ultimately the ideal of democratic equality rests upon the latter assumption. The former contains the foundations of a new policy. It takes unexcelled boldness to base a state upon the race. A new order of things is the natural consequence. It is this order which Nietzsche undertook to establish in opposition to the existing one.

In the face of the overpowering strength of the race, what happens to the individual? He returns -- as a single member in a community. The herd instinct is basically altogether different from the instinct of an "aristocratic society," composed of strong, natural men who do not permit their basic instincts to languish in favor of a mediocre average -- men who know how to curb and control their passions instead of weakening or negating them. This again must not be understood from an individualistic point of view. For a long time emotions will have to be kept under "tyrannical" control. This can be done only by one community, one race, one people....

If there ever was a truly German expression, it is this: One must have the need to be strong, otherwise one never will be. We Germans know what it means to maintain ourselves against all opposition. We understand the "will to power" -- even if in an altogether different manner than our enemies assume. Even in this connection, Nietzsche has supplied the deepest meaning: "We Germans demand something from ourselves that nobody expected from us -- we want more."

If today we see German youth on the march under the banner of the swastika, we are reminded of Nietzsche's "untimely meditations" in which this youth was appealed to for the first time. It is our greatest hope that the state today is wide open to our youth. And if today we shout "Heil Hitler!" to this youth, at the same time we are also hailing Nietzsche.

From Alfred Baeumler, Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: Junker und Dunnhaupt Verlag, 1937), pp. 283-285, 288-294.

_______________

Notes:

1. These are all Romantic writers of the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century.

A Soldier Believes in Plain Talk, by ERNST ROHM

I have opened here the book of my life to the understanding friend as well as to the nagging philistine.

The narrow-minded petit bourgeois may find my attitude injudicious, but that does not bother me.

Many books have been written, but few with such reckless frankness.

Even my political friends may have found some of my opinions objectionable; my soldier's sensibility compelled me, in spite of the prevalent onesidedness of thought and feeling, to recognize the merits of the enemy no less than the shortcomings of the friend.

I am a believer in plain talk and have not hid my heart like a skeleton in the closet.

I must write without fear, with defiance -- just as it comes from my soul.

And yet nothing was further from my intention than to offend or to injure anyone. Soldiers' talk is rough and direct, but we soldiers all speak the same language and understand each other.

The "soldiers' emperor," Napoleon, is reported to have said on one occasion during his exile: "Soldiers will never be able to hate me, even if they have faced me on the battlefield."

The wife of a soldier in my company, whose political convictions were far removed from mine, said to me on one occasion: "In the heart of my husband, his captain takes the first place; there is nobody to outrank him. Only then come his mother and I."

And another of my soldiers, a Communist, during the period of the soldiers' councils, jumped up in a meeting at which the officers were being denounced, and shouted: "I don't know whether what you are saying about the officers is true, but I know that as far as my captain is concerned, it's not true."

This is the way in which the hand of a soldier reaches out beyond all differences of class,. rank, and political philosophy. Soldierly comradeship, cemented with blood, can perhaps temporarily relax, but it can never be torn out of the heart, it cannot be exterminated.

Still, all of Germany has not been awakened yet -- despite National Socialism. My words shall be a trumpet call to those who are still asleep.

I am not appealing to the hustling and sneaky trader who has made accursed gold his God, but to the warrior who is struggling in the battle of life, who wants to win freedom and with it the kingdom of heaven.

I approve of whatever serves the purpose of German freedom. I oppose whatever runs counter to it. Europe, aye, the whole world, may go down in flames -- what concern is it of ours? Germany must live and be free.

One may call me a bigoted fool -- I can't help that. I am opposed to sport in its present form and to its effects. Moreover, I consider it a definite national danger. We cannot rebuild the Fatherland with champions and artificially nurtured "big guns of sport." Only the most careful development which provides physical strength and capability, with spiritual elasticity and ethical backbone, can be of use to the Volk community. Indeed, it is in keeping with these times of pretense and advertising: rubbish, confusion of the senses and sensation, have no enduring essence. I leave the sport mania to Ullstein and Mosse. [1] I remain with Jahn. [2]

The Germans have forgotten how to hate.

Virile hate has been replaced by feminine lamentation. But he who is unable to hate cannot love either. Fanatical love and hate -- their fires kindle flames of freedom.

Passionlessness, matter-of-factness, objectivity, are impersonality, are sophistry.

Only passion gives knowledge, creates wisdom.

"Peace and order" is the battle cry of people living on pensions. In the last analysis you cannot govern a state on the basis of the needs of pensioners.

"One is being circumspect," wrote the Munchner Zeitung in 1927 on the occasion of French attacks in the occupied zone, [3] "if one peacefully takes a punch in the ears."

Translated into German it means "peace and order," hence simply shaking at the knees.

Once more to hell with this peace and prudence, with the halfhearted, the middlings, the cowards!

"Non-circumspect" persons fought four and a half years at the front! The "circumspect" ones remained at home!

"Immature" persons fought in Upper Silesia for the preservation of the Reich. The "mature" persons locked themselves behind their doors.

"Irresponsible dreamers" for years and years have called upon the people to rise up against enslavement and oppression. The "responsible politicians" of the new Germany in these same years have sold Germany lock, stock, and barrel.

Our people and Fatherland are slowly but surely going under because of "circumspection" and "maturity."

From time immemorial Germany was not suited to "diplomacy" and "politics." The sword has always determined the greatness of its history.

"I most respectfully beg of the diplomats not to lose again what the soldier has gained with his blood." This is what Blucher had to write his king, Frederick William II, after the Battle of "Belle-Alliance." [4]

Only the soldier could lead his people and Fatherland out of wretchedness and shame to freedom and honor.

From Ernst Rohm, Die Geschichte eines Hochverraters (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher Nachf., 1928), pp. 365-367. (This extract has been taken from the seventh edition, 1934.)

_______________

Notes:

1. The two leading publishing houses of Germany.

2. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852) combined patriotism, defined as allegiance to the Volkdom, with preparedness through physical fitness. He founded the gymnastic associations and the modern fraternity movement.

3. That is, the French occupation of the Ruhr Valley.

4. A battle in the wars of liberation against Napoleon.

Michael: A German Fate, by JOSEPH GOEBBELS

June 3

Intellectualism is becoming a big bore to me. I feel nauseous at every printed word. I don't find anything in it that could redeem me.

Richard wants to help me in small ways.

I cannot very well speak uncivilly to him.

***

Sometimes I sit for hours in listless indecisiveness, do nothing, and think nothing. Then again I am pursued by a thousand demons and forge plan after plan.

But I don't begin to carry any of them out. Every evening I read the Sermon on the Mount. I find no consolation in it, only despair and shame. Something is wrong about it.

***

In Germany's higher schools much work is done, but little of it for the future. It is all only day laborer's work.

The wisdom of university chairs will never be able to redeem us!

***

June7

If Christ were to be restored as he was, perhaps that would be our redemption.

***

June 10

Before me rises a new fatherland.

I am learning to love this fatherland again. And the more disgraceful its shame, the more ardent becomes my love for it.

When I see the new man, I seek first for the German man.

I will root myself in the soil of this fatherland. It is the mother of my thoughts and longings.

We will not be blind to its failures and shortcomings. But we shall love these too, because they are our failures and shortcomings.

The new nationalism desires Germany's future, not the restoration of a broken past.

What does nationalism mean? We stand by Germany because we are Germans and because Germany is Our fatherland, the German soul is our soul, because each of us is a piece of Germany's soul.

I hate the tongue-warriors who always carry the words "fatherland" and "patriotism" in their mouths.

Fatherland: that must again become something that is self-evident to us.

All of German history is nothing but a continuous chain of the battles of the German soul against its enemies.

The German soul is Faustian! In it lies the instinctive bent toward work and its possibilities and the longing for redemption from the mind.

There is a German idea, just as there is a Russian idea. They both will have to take each other's measure in the future.

***

June 15

The battle that is raging through Europe today is a battle between newly emerging aristocratic classes.

Every history-making epoch has been created by aristocrats. Aristocracy = the rule of the best.

Never do the people rule themselves. This madness has been invented by liberalism. Behind its concept of the sovereignty of the people hide the most corrupt rogues, who do not want to be recognized.

It is easy to see that it is all a cheap swindle, which can deceive only a fool whose head is stuffed with straw.

The mass is victorious: what madness! Just as if I were to say: marble makes the statue. No work of art without its creator. No people without a statesman. No world without God!

History is a sequence of many virile decisions. Armies are not victorious, but men within armies.

Europe will be reconstructed by peoples who will be the first to overcome the mass madness and find their way back to the principle of personality.

However, the new aristocracy is being created on the basis of new law. Tradition is being replaced by ability. The Best One! This title is not inherited, it has to be earned.

Geniuses are only the highest forms of expression of the national will. They represent, so to speak, the incarnation of the creative Volkdom.

No oak tree grows without soil, root, and strength. No man comes out of the unsubstantial. The people are his soil, history his root, blood his strength.

Great ideas are always championed by minorities. In the end, however, they create a condition which enables whole nations to exist.

Works of art, inventions, ideas, battles, laws, and states -- at the beginning of all of them stands always the man.

Race is the matrix of all creative forces. Humanity -- that is a mere supposition. Reality is only the Volk. Humanity is nothing but a multitude of peoples. A people is an organic entity. Humanity has only the chance to become organic.

To be organic means to possess within oneself the capability of creating organic life.

The forest is only a multiplicity of trees.

I cannot destroy nations and keep humanity alive, just as I could not uproot the trees and keep the forest.

Trees -- that is, in their totality a forest.

Peoples -- that is, in their totality humanity.

The stronger the oak grows, the more will it beautify the forest.

The more thoroughly a people is people, the greater its service to humanity ...

Everything else is invented, not organically grown. For that reason it cannot stand up to history.

A minority, if it includes the best, will turn the German fate.

We must, therefore, be more courageous, more clever, more radical, and have more character than the majority; then we will automatically be victorious.

That other peoples are ruled by their social scum should give us no headaches. The better the prospect of our success.

If the most courageous hold the helm, they shall openly pronounce: We practice dictatorship! We assume responsibility before history -- who will cast the first stone at us?

But if the cowards have the helm in their hand, they say: The people rule. They avoid responsibility and stone all those who unite to turn against this hypocrisy.

Rule will always be an affair of a minority. The people have only the choice to live under the open dictatorship of the courageous, or to die under the hypocritical democracy of cowards.

This is an account that is as simple as it is logical....

***

July 2

"1 will have to go to work, Agnes Stahl. It is my only salvation."

"You always worked."

"No, I was a dreamer, an aesthete, a fine talker.

"I wanted to redeem the world with phrases.

"I had a high regard for myself.

"But now I would like to take my place in the middle of things. Nobody can remain neutral when two enemies, armed to the teeth, battle each other for the future."

"Two enemies? Where and when?"

"Yes, you don't see it, you don't want to see it. But it's so just the same. Money has made slaves of us, but work shall make us free. With the political bourgeoisie we staggered on the edge of an abyss; but with the political working class we will achieve a resurrection."

"But you are opposed to the class struggle, and now you preach the rule of a class?"

"Labor is no class. Class derived from the economic sphere. But labor has its roots in politics. It is a historical social estate. Nations have importance only if their ruling social estate has reality. The political bourgeoisie is nothing and does not want to be anything. It wants only to live, to live wholly primitively. For that reason it is doomed to destruction.

"We can maintain life only if we are ready to die for it!

"But the working class, on the other hand, has to fulfill a mission, above all in Germany. It must free the German people internally and externally. This is a world mission. If Germany goes under, the light of the world will be extinguished."

"You are not very modest."

"Only scoundrels are modest. The less I ask for myself, the more passionately I fight for the rights of my Volk. And since I see this sold out and betrayed by the bourgeoisie, I write off the past and begin with my work from the bottom up."

"You may make revolutions, as many as you want. Fat will always swim on the surface."

"Correct, the fat ones will always say the big words; they will own country villas and will deliver the speeches on national holidays. Mass man rules today and the morrow as well. But we will engrave our name on history. We alone!

"The others live only for today. That is why they will be dead in the future. But those who are willing to renounce life today will be alive tomorrow."

"Why renunciation? Who will thank you for it?"

"Thank? I don't know the word. I want no thanks. What difference does this bit of life make?"

"But you yourself come from the bourgeoisie."

"That is why I learned to hate it so devoutly. One has to experience a thing in order to learn either to love or hate it thoroughly.

"I hate the bourgeois because he is a coward and no longer wants to fight. He is only a zoological organism, nothing else.

"Soldiers, students, and workers will build the new Reich. I was a soldier, I am a student, I want to be a worker. I have to go through all three steps to show the way. I was not granted the word, so I must begin to act. Each one to his post."

"You love to sacrifice?"

"Yes, sacrifice is necessary. I don't like it, but I must do it. I must descend to the deepest abyss. We have to begin from below.

"Up to now we were inheritors. We have accepted what was transmitted to us with thanks.

"But we must start from the beginning.

"I shall be most ruthless and completely commit myself."

"You have always been totally committed. You were always all ardor and sacrifice,"

"But in connection with wrong things. The new German man will be born in the workshops, not in books.

"We have written, twaddled, and romanticized enough. Now we must work."

"You will ruin yourself in the attempt."

"No, I shall live. I want to make a beginning."

"Work will reduce you to serfdom."

"No, I shall ennoble my work. Work is not a thing in itself, it is only a step."

"You put us all to shame."

"I can take no credit for it; I have to be and act the way I am."

Both of us are silent for a long while; it is getting late and the day is dying....

***

September 15

I feel good only if it crashes and thunders down there. When the pit props crash and the stone breaks. When the noise of work roars so that you can't hear your own voice.

Symphony of work!

Satiated, full life!

Creation! Work! To use one's hands!

To be master! Conqueror! King of life!

And then I yearn again for the divine loneliness of the mountains and the virgin white snow.

***

September 18

It is not the spirit that sets us free, nor is it work. Both are only forms of a higher power.

Struggle stands at the beginning and at the end. I have undertaken the struggle with myself. We must first overcome the scoundrel in ourselves. The rest is child's play.

Out of spirit, work, and struggle we create the motor which will set our age into motion.

It will be an age of the newly formed aristocracy of achievement.

***

September 20

Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.

I hate Mammon.

It breeds sloth and satiated rest. It poisons our own values and subjects us to the service of low and base instincts.

To me the worst day of the week is payday. They throw the money at us like bones to a dog.

This world is hard and cruel. As hard as money in the thin hands of a miser.

Thrift is a sticky virtue.

Let them collect treasures and gold -- I shall be spendthrift with the surplus of my soul.

***

Money is the yardstick for the values of liberalism. So insubstantial is this concept that it can elevate mere appearance to reality. That is what will eventually lead to its ruin. Money is the curse of labor.

One cannot set money above life. Where that is done, all noble forces must run dry.

Money is a means to an end, not an end in itself. If it becomes a purpose unto itself, then it must of necessity devaluate all labor until it becomes the means to an end.

A Volk which evaluates everything in terms of money already stands before its own dark end. It will slowly be eaten up by the disintegrating forces of gold, which since time immemorial have led peoples and cultures to ruin.

While the soldiers in the Great War offered their bodies for the protection of their homes and two million of them bled to death, the speculators coined gold out of their red and noble blood. And they later used this gold to cheat the returning soldiers out of house and home.

The war was won by money and lost by labor. The peoples are not the victors or the vanquished. They performed only day labor in the service of money, or defended work against this slave labor.

Germany battled for work. France fought for money. Labor lost the battle. Money won it.

Money rules the world! If true, this is a horrible statement. But today we die because it is a reality. Money and Jew -- they belong together.

Money is without roots. It stands above the races. Slowly it eats its way into the sound bodies of nations and little by little poisons their creative force.

We must deliver ourselves from money through struggle and work. We must destroy this delusion in ourselves. Then the Golden Calf will come crashing down.

In its deepest sense, liberalism is the philosophy of money.

Liberalism means: I believe in Mammon.

Socialism means: I believe in work. . . .

***

September 28

I'm beginning to gain recognition among my fellow workers.

Here and there one of them says a word to me. Some of them even initiate me into their sorrows and hardships.

Slowly their distrust vanishes.

Even my landlords become friendlier.

This afternoon I found a few modest flowers on my table.

How they filled me with joy!

The children now call me by name when they see me and hang on to to my hands.

***

October 3

"You're wearing yourself out, Michael. You can't keep it up. You will ruin yourself."

"A man can endue more than we think. One can't take care of oneself. One has to assume great burdens in life.

"During the war we wrested even more from our bodies and our defiance and we didn't go to ruin."

"But we suffered grievously in body and soul."

''True, Matthias, it was not easy to overcome it all. But see here, we did it together, worker and master.

"We lay together in the trenches, he who came from a palace and he who hailed from a miner's cottage.

"We clung together, became friends, and for the first time knew each other.

"But when the war was over, the unholy cleavage opened up again.

"Work is a war without cannons. Here too we must hold together, brawn and brain. We must for once understand each other, the sooner the better.

"Life is difficult. We don't have time enough to be each other's enemy. We must raise bread for the millions already born and for the millions yet to come. Otherwise, sooner or later we go to ruin."

"Yes, but none of them up there thinks as you do: only money and power count with them."

"These creatures have to be forced. There are people who are impressed only by the fist under their nose. There can be no special considerations. We young people have the greater right before history.

"The old ones don't even want to understand that we young people even exist. They defend their power to the last.

"But one day they will be defeated after all. Youth finally must be victorious.

"We young ones, we shall attack. The attacker is always stronger than the defender.

"If we free ourselves, we can also liberate the whole working class. And the liberated working class will release the Fatherland from its chains."

"What you said about labor and war is absolutely right. And the most beautiful part of it is that you yourself make these words come true.

"You do not merely mouth phrases like the others. You act.

"As soon as you arrived here, when I saw you for the first time, I knew that you were a pioneer of the idea of labor.

"Alas, we see many university students here. They are all eager and do their duty below in the pit.

"But most of them fail to understand us miners. They climb down to us. Moreover, they condescend to come down to our level. There always remains an open space between them and us. That is the reason for the brooding hatred between us and the 'white hands.'

"You will find here much animosity against the students. But I know that you want to improve things. You don't want to come down to us, you want to help us to come up to you.

"You understand how to grasp this correctly, because you see the comrade in us. Therefore you easily find the right word that opens our hearts."

I kneel beside Matthias Grutzer deep down in the pit during our breakfast break. We can only talk after long intervals and must shout in order to understand each other.

From Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblattern (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1929), pp. 112-115, 118-120, 137-142.
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