Otto Dickel on the Jews: An excerpt from The Resurgence of the West, Ch.4: Jewry

Otto Dickel (1880—1944) was the founder of the Völkisch German Work Community (Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft) movement which sought to develop a nationalist socio-political model on the basis of the trade union system. Dickel studied natural science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. From 1909, he worked at the Realgymnasium as a gymnastics teacher and, from 1918, as a teacher of natural science. He joined the NSDAP in 1921 and entered into negotiations with the National Socialist Party under Anton Drexler to merge Dickel’s grouping with the latter’s. But Hitler refused such an alliance and even considered Dickel’s left-tending ideology as being opposed to National Socialism. Dickel was therefore forced to leave the NSDAP. In 1934, Dickel was arrested for his association with the Leftist National Socialist, Otto Strasser, and sentenced to ten months in prison. At the beginning of the Second World War, he established contacts with opposition groups. But in 1944, fearing arrest by the Gestapo, he committed suicide.

Dickel wrote Die Auferstehung des Abendlandes in 1921 (second edition 1922) in order to demonstrate that the West is not in decline, as Oswald Spengler had maintained, but rather on the path to a new resurgence. As an anti-capitalist Dickel placed his hopes on the development of the notion of trade unions into work communities, rather in the corporative sense.

His conception of historical development is—unlike the fanciful Spenglerian depiction of organic cycles of civilization that undergo birth, development and decline—based on a deeper understanding of the racial conflict at the heart of modern European history. As he declared in the preface to the second edition of his work, the fundamental idea of his book was

to reveal cultures as symbols of racial souls, to present the history of the last century as the battle between the Jewish and Germanic minds, and to draw the correct conclusions from this knowledge.

The book is divided into two parts, the first dealing with ‘Western culture and its enemies’ and the second with ‘The destiny of the West and Germany’. The first part consists of an introductory and six chapters devoted to ‘The character of cultures’, ‘The West’, ‘Centralism’, ‘Jewry’, ‘Capitalism’, ‘Trade Unions and Socialism’. I present here only the chapter on Jewry since it is essential to an understanding of Dickel’s worldview, which informs his study of German history as well as his optimistic predictions of Germany’s future.

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Dickel’s opposition to Jewry is based on his perception of the fundamental intellectual and spiritual differences between Jews and Germans and the danger to the Germans posed by the materialistic, utilitarian and internationalist mentality of the Jews. Dickel’s study of Jewry is, in some ways, an extension of Eugen Dühring’s in his 1881 work Die Judenfrage.[1] Dickel was clearly inspired by the latter work since he develops many of the arguments presented in it.

However, regarding the cultural capacity of the Jews, while Dühring considered the artistic sterility of the Jews as being due to their lack of “that free and unselfish activity of the mind which alone ad­vances to uninterested truth and beauty”, Dickel points to the lack of inwardness and depth of soul in their works as their main defect. It is interesting to note here that his discussion of the artistic poverty of the Jews is immediately followed by an analysis of the materialistic physics of Einstein since they both arise from a defective materialistic quality of the Jewish psyche. All of Einstein’s theses are based on a sterile conception of time as dependent on physical movement, whereas, for the Western European, time has always been an independent force of life itself and thus naturally related to the living observer rather than to moving material objects. While Western physics is based on notion of lines of force, Einstein posits matter imbued with force. This is a confirmation of his, and the Jewish, materialistic worldview.

While Dühring focused in his economic treatise Waffen, Capital und Arbeit (1906) on the egoism and lack of conscience of the Jewish character as being the chief obstacles to the establishment of real social justice, Dickel points to the utilitarianism that results from this egoism as the chief defect of Jewish economic and political systems. Marx’s ideology reveals the Jewish addiction to utilitarian goals in its depiction of history as an inexorable progress of society according to the commercial benefits of its economic infrastructures.

Both Marx’s and Einstein’s worldviews are indeed continuations of that of Spinoza, who also had considered matter and spirit as two aspects of the same Being, or God, or Nature. Thus, in the final analysis, the egoism that Dühring had pointed to as the defect of the Jew is more precisely identified in its dangerous quality as being due to the peculiarly undeveloped spiritual condition of the Jewish ego, which cannot abstract itself from matter since its God, or Substance is the same as Nature.

Spinoza’s political philosophy is a further confirmation of his utilitarianist thought. The state, according to Spinoza, is only an institution that would guarantee the protection of property. This is because Spinoza’s ethics is based squarely on knowledge, that is, the knowledge of that which is useful to any particular individual or individuals. In nineteenth-century socialism, this utilitarian function of the state is, of course, quickened by the state’s appropriation of all private property.

Dickel’s answer to the dangers of Jewish Socialism is the cultivation of trade unions, which he considers as a counter-revolutionary movement to the Socialist:

Socialism wishes to make everything equal, standardized, programmed, it wishes to drag down into the dull skeletal structure of the proletariat, wishes to form and administer everything in a centralistic manner, to force the free man into the compulsory guidance of the ‘ladder of humanity’ because it arises from the kismet-directed materialistic, internationalist Jewish worldview. Its character is fanaticism. Its means are political struggle, its goal is battle with slogans against wealth. That is, in every point, the direct opposite of the trade unions. The latter wish to raise the individuals from the uniform stream of the masses, they wish to create personality values, want a guarantee of individual standpoints and autonomy. They wish to create free, self-conscious and responsible men because the trade unions arise from the Western planetary worldview of force and of the dissolution of the finite into the infinite, of the individual into his profession and his fatherland. Its character is struggle and creation, in small things and big, is action. Its means are the work community, struggle for cultural and economic goods that are reachable. Its goal is battle against poverty. Trade unions and socialism are deadly enemies. (Ch.VI)

It is within the framework of the trade union that Dickel envisages his ideal work community of the nation:

In all parts of the fatherland the true intellectual leaders should join in a union that points out to the masses the great cultural connections that lead to the Church, the fatherland and the trade union. A union of German men should arise that will find the truly great creative minds, that produces not statutes but works, by bearing the great cultural idea in all professional associations and trade unions — each as seems best to it — that brings together the fragmented, that undertakes to exert influence on the press and, if it wishes to do something more that is unfortunately necessary, provides the means of publicisation. A union that is conscious of the fact that its lifespan ends with the consummation of its work — an inwardly united fatherland. (Ch. X)

The Jewish economic utilitarianism is bound to a total lack of personal feeling for the land in which one has grown up and a disdain for all patriotism. And laissez-faire economics leads, through the establishment of world markets, inevitably to internationalism. The total disparity between the Jewish worldview and the Western European is thus responsible for the revolutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The lack of patriotic feeling among the Jews led to their exploitation of the economic discontent that may have been present in the working classes of some nations in such a way that, overriding the natural patriotic feeling of the Western European, the Jews fostered among them internationalist economic schemes such as the Communist International.

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With the discussion of the character of Jewish culture I touch on a question that nobody can ignore for whom the fate of his nation lies close to his heart. Spengler too dealt with it—in an uncommon way. He proposes the bold opinion that the Jews, who today represent a world-ruling power, have sunk to the status of a fellah people. That sounds like contempt. It is possible that he is led to this by an unexpressed point of view that we cannot perceive. He lets us grope in the dark. The Jewish question is not an internal German matter that seems more important to some and less to others; it is the most important matter of the entire West today. Its presence can be denied only by dishonesty or stupidity. Its practical solution is a question of life for millions of Europe’s inhabitants. The large masses of the nation, including the educated strata, are not yet clear about this. Among the many causes of this strange phenomenon, the way in which the battle between the hostile parties is conducted plays a decisive role.

We are in desperate need of a defensive front against the Jewish rule and the enslavement of the nation. The dedicated pioneers who wish to establish this accomplish a patriotic deed. They have not all gathered under the flag of anti-Semitism. They know that its champions often follow false paths and only too easily fall under the influence of people for whom the feeling of patriotism and healthy racial feeling of the German man was always a means of satisfying their own lust for power. The people are only too well aware of this fact. The Jew exploits it. He hammers into the masses without judgement who read only his press false associations of ideas such as — swastika-bearers: reactionaries; nationalist movement: endangered republic; anti-Semite: enemy of the workers. In addition, the German bears in his breast the soul of the West and therefore rejects violence and blood-letting so long as the most frightful pressure does not force his impetuous revolt. These are some of the many reasons that make the defence against anti-Semitism easy for the Jews. He knows the mood of the people, he knows how to throw the effective catchwords to the crowds and thereby exploits skillfully and efficiently the power that gives him almost exclusive rights to the press.  His marked acting talent comes in very handy that enables him to perform in a masterly manner the role of the liberator and friend of the people. But he is brutal; he understands only moods not souls. For this reason, he hopes to master through force the growing spiritual movement, thinks he is safe and pushes things too far. That will be bitterly avenged.

As everywhere, in the present day an aimless back and forth has become the characteristic of the situation. The practical, non-violent solution of the question is the correct, reachable goal. It serves the peaceful development of the whole and therefore serves the true benefit of the nation. One who wishes to solve the Jewish question — and it must be solved — must dig deep. He must recognise that the Jew prospers only where decay rules, that he comes to power and becomes a frightful pestilence where no halt is offered to his profiteering mentality. That can be reached only on one path: through the creation of a German law that makes it impossible that the source of all national cultural and economic life, the land, falls victim to exploitation through usury and through which the slavery to interest and its protector, the party system, is removed. The Jew fears these constructive demands, not anti-Semitism, especially when its representatives all too often depend on secret Jewish ties. They see to it that reason becomes nonsense, good deeds a plague and instruction incitement. No word of condemnation is sharp enough against that instinct that has as its goal the arousal of tendencies to pogroms. Unfettered passions have never yet brought benefit to a nation, always severe harm. Passion makes one dumb and blind against truth and reason. Therefore, once it is released, it tears down all dams. One who was even a leader must a few hours later obey and is torn apart with the flood. The nation is not an engine that can be stopped and started again.

Our nation needs not exaggeration and lies but knowledge and awareness and it needs these more than any other because, in it, the concept of the retention of the sacredness of the blood has become a habit since ancestral times. But the truth is that a deep gap divides the German from the Jew. In everybody there lives the soul of his culture and they are essentially different one from the other. Therefore the two cannot understand each other. And furthermore: that is why every Jew who interferes in our affairs, occupies an official position or influences public opinion is, consciously or unconsciously, an enemy of our fatherland. One who contests this statement allows himself to be deceived by superficialities. The term ‘patriotic Jew’, no matter whether he be born in Germany, France or England, is the same absurdity as a black mould. Only babblers can point here to Disraeli. This Jewish statesman at the head of the English Empire never thought other than as a Jew. His own statements and writings present eloquent proof of this.

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The Valhalla of the West lies somewhere in the infinite. Only active, brave men will have a share in it. The paradise of the Arabs lies somewhere in a magical place that we cannot also experience. There, for the believer who lives and dies for Allah, beckon rich sensual enjoyments, there beautiful houris solicit him. The paradise of the Jews lies on earth. He does not fight to possess it. It will come. The earthly thousand-year Reich in which he will rule over all nations, in which — as is said in one of their best prophets Isaiah II[2] — the kings will lick the dust off his shoes and all the wealth of the world will belong to him has been assured to him by his God repeatedly.

The Jewish paradise is on earth. Of that there is no possible doubt. After the creation of Eve, when Adam still lived in paradise, the Lord speaks to him: ‘Fill the earth and make it subject to you!’ This passage is completely nonsensical if earth and paradise are not made equivalent to each other. This worldview speaks more clearly to us in the passage after the Fall, where it says: ‘And the Lord God drove Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden and placed before the garden the cherubims with sharp hewing swords so that they would not return and eat of the tree of life.’ One may try to place oneself into this worldview. It is simply impossible. According to the Western way of feeling, paradise should, at the moment of expulsion, have wafted away into a cloudy infinity and been lost forever to man. Thus, quite apart from the fact that it is impossible for the German man to imagine working in the sweat of his brow as the punishment of God, his mythology can never, to his mind, express the idea of a return of one who is expelled to the Garden of Eden — on which no mortal can, from that time on, set foot again. One might be tempted to consider this biblical passage as a relic from earlier times that bears along with it a purely rationally elaborated religious doctrine akin to Puritanism if the history of the origins of the Old Testament did not bluntly contradict this interpretation. Even though the Old Testament was often revised, changed and falsified by the authoritative Jewish religious leaders, it doubtless essentially reflects the original version of the worldview of these people.

Whereas the soul of our culture forces us to cover the infinite to seek our Valhalla, that of the Jew forces him to seek felicity on earth. His soul wanders up and down, unsteady and fluctuating, and it seeks the earthly thousand-year Reich. That is the basic view of these people that becomes for us the key to the solution of many riddles that they present to us. It explains their strange lust for gold and money, their complete lack of feeling for a native land and fatherland in the sense of spiritual growth, historical feeling, their utilitarian standpoint, their extraordinarily strongly marked communistic impulses on one hand and their lust for power on the other, their internationalism and imperialism. For every Jew, no matter how he may be, is both. But only for his person. Hence arise the contradictions that we can follow in all his doctrines, in all fields. For him they are not contradictions. Each erects for himself a small Reich, his earthly paradise, in which he stands as the central point, in which each must follow his will unconditionally. Unconditionally! That characterises him as a Semite, as a slave-owner. Whether he is a gentle or cruel master is a matter of personal disposition.

The Jew is a stranger on Western soil. We therefore confuse concepts when we evaluate him with our measures, judge him from our moral code. There are as many moral codes as there are people. No Westerner can experience the Jewish one. His concept of good and evil is fundamentally different from ours. This wall of differentiation that cannot be overcome differentiates him and us from each other. The saying that is often heard, that the Jew has no character, is false.  On the contrary, he has a very marked character and remains true to it. That which is good and that which is useful are the same thing for him. I have demonstrated the reason for this. That is why he does only that which brings him direct or indirect benefit. Here springs the font of hard-heartedness that can be heightened to immeasurable cruelty when he considers it necessary to remove obstacles to his striving for that which is useful to him. Every impartial person knows that this characteristic — which is repulsive to us — is to be found in all Jews, except that some are able to hide it more skillfully than others. Selfless self-sacrifice is something completely incomprehensible to him. The same is true of compassion, as far as non-Jews are concerned. He can observe the sorrows of others without the least emotion if only his own advantage remains preserved. As long as he cannot exploit a distress to his advantage he does not move a finger. On the other hand, he strives with all his force there to bring as many people as possible to helpless dependency on himself. Thence arises his extraordinarily strongly developed mistrust. Since the useful is good, every means to attain it is right even when he goes against the law thereby. Punishment therefore is nothing dishonourable for him. Especially strongly marked is his cunning and his art of disguise. The role of rescuer, of the best friend in misery, of the commiserating brother he plays excellently, and creeps under this mask into the heart of his victim, whom he sucks dry mercilessly as soon as he has lured him into his net.

The basic character of his nature produces also his good characteristics. When he sees his benefit bound to that of his occupation, be it as a merchant, doctor, press representative or state employee, he is indefatigably active. Here the average German man may learn from his example. It is true that many, certainly not all, Jews push themselves forward. Their great influence in professional associations is, however, almost always well deserved. Here he works, while others sit at home, here especially his strongly developed sense of reality is valuable. He intervenes and tackles matters appropriately whereas many of his opponents generally do not go beyond the forging of plans and deliberations to action. Again, it is quite different where he plays the leader of the masses. There, just words are necessary for him that he knows to form into catchwords in a masterly manner. The happiness of those he leads which he always talks about is to him totally a matter of indifference. He pursues his own goals, which — for example, in the battle against feudalism — coincide to a certain degree with those of his followers. He knows how to skillfully hide his cloven foot until he thinks it is no longer necessary to show it openly. Trotsky provides us an object lesson on this in a grand manner. Is that alone not enough to hate the Jew? Now, hatred is a matter of one’s disposition and taste. It is useless for a defence against evils. For that, in the special case of politics, there is only one means: to appear before the masses as a true friend of the people without any ulterior motives. Today that is difficult. On account of one’s own fault. The Jew has, through decades-long activity been able to tear the soul out of the breast of the people because he had opportunities for his subversive activity in bountiful measure. The word ‘ethnic people’[3] was not heard gladly. It sounded so hostile, so revolutionary.

What is useful is good and therefore allowed. That is the entire content of the Jewish spiritual view. And he acts according to it. He cannot act differently, even if — an unimaginable case — he would like to do it very much. We should not persist any longer in the folly of past centuries, to the spread of which Roman law and the Churches of both confessions have contributed heartily — that there is a human culture that rises in a straight line, that human action and thought is the result of education and training. This dull, rationalistic conception has brought us to misery. In the course of many ages, it has alienated the propertied classes from their culture, removed the priority of their understanding over the heart, and forced them onto paths that the Jew traverses through his inner instinct. Marx once said something like this: The Jew is emancipated through the Judaisation of the bourgeois.[4] He was exactly right. But the soul of the West is not dead for that reason. It breaks through repeatedly. Its voice does not allow itself to be ignored for a long time with impunity. That is called conscience.

2

The soul wandering unsteadily up and down the earth could not, through the people of their sort, produce any great buildings and artworks, no philosophy and mathematics of their own and no states. Nowhere in the thousands of years of the history of Jewry do we find a great creative mind. The only unique thing that the Jewish mind has produced are some psalms.[5] They cannot, even on a generous judgement, be characterised as powerful intellectual accomplishments. This nation was not even able to build its temple in Jerusalem without foreign help.[6] The short-lived states that the image of its history shows are the works of foreign racial leaders. Its philosophy and mathematics are imitations and elaborations of the creations of other cultures into which it has infused its own worldview. Indeed, it has not even formed a religion, in our sense, through its own force.  Whereas all other religions, including those of primitive peoples, are interwoven with an abundance of poetry and sagas, the Jewish religion is lacking in all mythology.  What is present of it in the Old Testament is borrowed from foreign cultures. Into its pure images the Jew has infused his own character — kismet,[7] materialism and internationalism — and distorted them into caricatures.

On this much has been written by serious, strictly examining researchers who were, for the most part, friends and admirers of the Jews. It is well-nigh impossible to add something new. I shall nevertheless attempt it but cannot thereby avoid referring to that which is already known for the sake of the whole overview.

The religion of the Jews is a contract between two parties. Jacob says to Yahweh: If you fulfil these five points, then you shall be my God. In the Germanic worldview this biblical passage signifies blasphemy. But it is the mirror of the Jewish soul: action demands a counteraction. Not in heaven but on earth. What is of no use to me I will not do. If you want me to revere you then, good, tell me what you will give me in return. That is why the Old Testament swarms with promises of rule, of the treasures of the world, of a fruitful seed, that is why it is repeatedly announced through the mouths of the prophets: You are my chosen people, my own, I wish to make you a great people. Wherever Yahweh makes a commandment there follows immediately the promise of a reward. In the Old Testament, one will seek in vain for moral commandments in the sense of Western culture. This fact comes to light most clearly in the Ten Prohibitions that are remarkably designated as Ten Commandments[8] — a whiplash for the pure Germanic sense of language. The Western moral law knows only one ‘Thou shalt’. It is summarised in the glorious sentence: ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself!’[9] This ‘thou shalt’ is Kant’s categorical imperative: ‘Act in such a way that the maxim of your will may at all times serve simultaneously as the principle of a universal legislation.’ That sounds striking next to the ‘Thou shalt not’ — have other gods, take my name in vain, kill, commit adultery, steal, give false witness, covet. All these commandments belong in a penal code. Nowhere else. As in a penal code, there immediately follows also in the Old Testament the threat of frightful visitation up to the third and fourth generation in the case of wrongdoing.[10] However, at the same time, the promise: ‘therefore love me and follow my commandments, them I shall bless up  to the thousandth generation.’[11] It is significant that the only commandment that contains moral worth is based on utility in this world: ‘Honour thy father and mother so that you may be blessed and live long on earth!’

The first commandment is especially remarkable in its reference to other gods. Only a church doctrine that, in the course of its historical development, belongs to three basically different cultural circles, has been transformed by them and carries with it many extra-biblical things from past times, can falsely interpret this unequivocal passage. It maintains that the Jew is a monotheist. He himself has never maintained that, insofar as he was honest. He could not at all because this idea goes against his entire worldview. Yahweh is his god, the god of the chosen people. He is ‘a’ powerful god, as he himself declares, not ‘the’ God. The entire covenant, the foundation of the Jewish faith, would be meaningless if other peoples too shared in it. Thereby the promise of the thousand-year Reich, the sole rights over the wealth of the world, would be worthless. That is why Jewry have — apart from a quite short period of attempts at conversion — always conducted themselves negatively against the entry of others into their religious community. The recognition of the apparent monotheism of the Jew is indeed denied by no impartial person. On the other hand, the objection is often raised that the Jew of today is different from that of three thousand years ago. That is already false because the Jew has maintained his race on the male side in a quite extraordinarily pure way. In this instinctive aversion to miscegenation lies his strength. He lets his daughters marry without difficulty men of other races. For his men, however — insofar as they too are not corrupted — the thought of not producing a pure son as a legal heir is an anguish.  So long as a race follows the law of ‘racial purity’ so long too there lives in it the soul of its culture, in this case — where it is only a matter of rationalistic activity, where one cannot strictly speak of culture — its civilisation. The Jew today thinks, feels and acts exactly like his racial ancestors, exactly like the pure Chinese or pure German. The worldview has not changed and where it has been forced onto false paths it always rectifies itself. Only the external forms in which it is expressed have changed.

The Germanic peoples were always, and are still, monotheists, even if they may call themselves pantheists, monists or atheists. ‘They call gods the sacred numen before which they tremble’, writes Tacitus.[12] Indeed, even the forms in which they symbolise the natural forces and to which they sacrifice are so dimly delineated that already for many the research into our ancient religious system has been ruined. Our god is the infinite, almighty, ubiquitous creator, beside whom no other god has a place. Whether we express this fundamental feeling in a physical, mathematical or biological way is just a matter of taste. In the final analysis, there always remains the eternal, the inscrutable, that we cannot know. Precisely on this point there gapes a deep gap between us and the Jews. For him, the purely rationalistic man, there is nothing that he cannot comprehend through rational inferences. We do not understand this feeling but we observe it in all the major Jews.

Only very superficial minds can point in this context to the veneration of Mary and the saints of the Catholic Church. They are not gods. They are intercessors, assistants, protectors that man inserts in the correct feeling of his powerlessness and helplessness between himself and the lofty, infinite God, quite apart from the fact that their origin for the most part is to be traced back to the influences of the ancient, Eastern Christianity, thus of one that is developed in a way that is quite other than Germanic.

The god of the Jews is only his god. The two are bound to each other by a covenant. I recall only the passage of the narrative of the golden calf.[13] Yahweh speaks to Moses: ‘Go down, for  your people, whom you have led out of Egypt, have corrupted themselves; and now leave me so that my wrath may consume them; in this way will I make you a great people.’ But Moses does not leave him but holds out to him the covenants sworn with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. ‘And the Lord repented’.

Even today the contract is everything to the Jew. It is his weapon, which he sharpens and to whose wording he adheres. The un-German law gives him the opportunity for this. For the German man the law is a sacred moral law. Quite unconsciously he inserts cultural values into its rigid form. For the Jew it is the wording of written clauses whose skilled application brings him benefits. Here flows the font of the often-observed superiority and competence of Jewish lawyers. Give the German a German law, and it will dry up.

The Jewish religious doctrine is characterised by a total lack of the concept of force and action, thus precisely of that which constitutes the content of our mentality. Its place is taken by ‘kismet’. Man is exposed to the strong willfulness of the strong god which he conciliates by the fulfilment of the imposed duties, no matter how senseless they may be, as the sacrifice of Abraham shows. Obedience is demanded under all circumstances. As reward there follows blessing. This basic idea is hammered into the people of Israel in hundreds of narrations. If it is obedient, then there will come the earthly thousand-year Reich that is not obtained through bold deeds and not in our sense of a moral transformation of one’s life but through the fulfilment of the external form that the commandment orders, through the observance of the law. Only this kismet idea makes explicable the unshakeable belief of the Jews in their future rule that has so often been belied in history and soon will come true. This worldview infuses him even when he denies it. Facts prove this statement, and the present is a single great demonstration of it. From this belief arises his internationalism. Every Jew is an internationalist. He cannot at all think and feel in a nationalist way. He may many times simulate nationalist feeling to himself. Always something different emerges from it. He sets love of the fatherland as posts in his plan of the construction of his world-rule, each according to the circumstances. Disraeli had to act in this manner. His path to New Jerusalem passed through London. But generally the Jew combats nationalist thought. Partly through hatred of the ruling classes, but more through inner instinct. He does not understand foreign culture. He mocks, undermines and subverts it. One who fights for the idea of internationalism fights for Jewish imperialism.

I have restricted myself to a few remarks on the main features of the Jewish character. We cannot change it any more than the Jew himself can. It is the a priori of his worldview that stands in stark contrast to ours. Here planetary world-experience, there kismet; here dissolution of the finite, there materialism; here love of the fatherland, there internationalism. It will be good to consolidate the general remarks with some noteworthy examples.

3.

The philosophy of Spinoza is a remarkable amalgamation of the views of Descartes, Giordano Bruno and the Jewish conceptual world. It is created from the deep conviction that nothing can remain hidden to human reason, that it can track and expose worldly phenomena in their most secret recesses. Creatively Spinoza is a cipher. What he has produced is the result of dogged rationalist activity. He develops his conclusions from principles that he has borrowed from elsewhere and remodelled for his goals, which he pursues to their extreme end without consideration of the demands of the mentality and the a priori’s of the Westerner. The results of his different series of thoughts therefore contradict one another — according to the opinion of our philosophers, who do not observe that here cultures stand opposed to each other. Not according to his opinion, for nowhere does he make an attempt at bridging. We would have made an attempt to convince him of his errors in vain. On the contrary. He would have shaken his head in despair about our false presuppositions and enormous false conclusions just as Marx would have done and Einstein today does.

Both kismet and materialism are expressed in the sentence that stands at the centre of the Spinozist doctrine: deus natura sive substantia. God, whether Nature, or Substance.[14] Let it be expressly highlighted that Spinoza was indeed aware that his god has nothing in common with the god of our Christian conception, is not a creator, not an active power. The concept of power is fully lacking in him. Therein lies the fundamental difference between his and the Brunonian purposeful pantheism. There is, Spinoza teaches, only one substance that we call God or Nature. Body and soul are not separated entities, as Descartes stressed so sharply. Therefore the question of their mutual interaction is irrelevant; since they are not present, they cannot operate on each other. Rather, material and spiritual phenomena are only two sides of the same world process. The thinking and extended individual objects are merely changing conditions of the uniform base of the world. To speak of independent objects or, indeed, of their purpose and development is not permissible, for they are only appearance and deceptive. They are neither created by Substance nor do they separate themselves from it — contrarily to the Talmudic doctrine — but they follow necessarily from the nature of Substance, just as ‘from the nature of the triangle it follows that the sum of their angles is equal to two right angles’.[15] All of Being is uniformity and necessity. Only God, Nature, Substance acts fully freely because he does nothing that contradicts his nature. He follows only self-ordained laws. Indeed, what should be able to force him to act differently since nothing exists outside him. Individual objects, thus also men, are effects and dependencies of the Substance, are particularities of the universal. From this it follows that man does not possess freewill.

Substance is something real, material. There can be a doubt of that only for those who forcibly wish to interpolate something forcibly into Spinoza that is not contained in his doctrine. He says expressly that Substance is the Being in things, constitutes their reality, manifests and bears them. Corporeality and reality coincide fully in him. He interchanges the concepts res[16] and corpora[17] at will. The ideas are only mirror images of the real. The last doubt regarding this materialistic conception disappears in an examination of the fourth definition:[18] By attributes is to be understood what the reason understands as ‘that which constitutes the nature of substance’. Here it is unequivocally expressed that the attributes are real, not characteristics that are thought of, in other words, characteristics that the substance also possesses independent of the observer. From this conclusion are produced for us irresoluble contradictions in the Spinozist doctrine. Every attempt at explanation and interpretation of these is superfluous and from the start false. The Jew indeed thinks differently from us.

The profound intellectual difference comes most clearly to light in Spinoza’s ethical doctrine. Will and understanding are the same, a notion that is the obvious consequence of the missing conception of power. Virtue is based only on knowledge just as even today the wise Jew is considered the virtuous one. Self-maintenance is the foundation of virtue, for how could anybody act well if he does not wish to live. Self-love is a demand of Nature or, in other words, of God or Substance. Therefore everything that serves it — the useful — is allowed. Useful is that which heightens our power, activity or perfection, or promotes wisdom. To act virtuously means to follow the leadership of the understanding in self-maintenance. A greater difference between this demand and the categorical imperative of Kant, or the Jewish and Western worldview, is just not thinkable.

From this foundation Spinoza comes to his strange political doctrine, which is nothing but an international society for the protection of property. His thought-process is as follows: There is in general no injustice as such, for unjust is indeed only that which is not useful. But nobody will have a desire to do anything that goes against his benefit. The coming together of many men who are ruled by their passions each of whom has a claim to everything useful makes an order based on the reasonability of the whole seem desirable. They form a state which has the function to protect them from illegal encroachments into their property. Only from this moment on does there exist an injustice. In addition, the state has to take care of the education that likewise serves the utility of the individual. The state obviously signifies a restriction of personal authority. It is therefore not useful. But since it brings order the wise man will risk the minor harm.

The foundation of the state is material, its height ideal!

*   *   *

Is that not the same that we find again in Marx? Unfortunately, Marx was not able to bring to fruition his plan to write a philosophy. It would apparently have turned out to be nothing but an improved Spinoza. An indication of this is given by the following passage from which it emerges at the same time that the much-discussed idea of development of Marx has a quite different significance than we attribute to it, a markedly Jewish one. The passage is found in the Foreword to the second edition of Das Kapital:

My dialectical method is not only basically different from the Hegelian but its direct opposite. For him the thought process, which he transforms, under the name of idea, into an independent subject, is the demiurge of reality, which forms only its outer appearance. For me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing but matter transferred and translated into the human mind. Here the passage from the ‘Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law’[19] also deserves mention: ‘It is therefore the duty of history to establish the truth — after the world beyond has disappeared — within this world.’

Let us cite especially these very clear sentences: [20]

From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and nourished with the Kantian and Fichtean, I came to seek the idea in reality itself. If the gods had earlier dwelt over the earth, now they had become its centre.

I had read fragments of the Hegelian philosophy, whose grotesque, rocky melody did not please me. I wanted to dive down into that ocean one more time, but with the definite intention of finding that spirit is as necessarily, concretely and firmly grounded as matter, of no longer wanting to practice the fencing arts, but of drawing pure pearls out into the sunlight.

I wrote a dialogue of about 24 pages: “Cleanthes, or the Starting Point and Necessary Progress of Philosophy.”[21] Here, art and science, which had gotten entirely separated from each other, were to some extent united, and like a robust wanderer began the work itself, a philosophical dialectical progress of divinity, how it manifests itself as a notion in itself as religion, nature and history. My last sentence was the beginning of the Hegelian system.

This materialistic conception of the world forms the foundation of Marx’s historical doctrine. It is a classic example of the kismet worldview of the Jews. That is why almost every German worker and every trade unionist, without exception, opposes his new Bible. Marxist Socialism does not in the least intend to improve the economic situation of the workers. In general, it does not have any goals. The deficient knowledge of the fundamental significance of the materialistic conception of history and the amazingly enormous ignorance of its character in worker and bourgeois circles is the consequence of the cultural difference between Jewry and the West. The two do not understand each other. The German wants action, force, life. To the Jew these are unknown concepts, just words to which he attributes a completely different meaning. For Marx the worker is a totally powerless product of the economic system. It is quite useless for him to want to revolt against the existing conditions. He can only wait until the structure of the present social order collapses. That will occur without any help from outside or inside:

At a certain stage of development the material productivity of society will contradict the conditions of productivity or — to use the legal expression for it — the ownership conditions within which it had moved. From the developmental forms of the productive force these conditions are transformed into its own chains. There then enters an epoch of social revolution: With the change of the organic foundation, the entire enormous superstructure is revolutionised slowly or rapidly.[22]

It is revolutionised slowly or rapidly, it is not the subversive masses who revolutionise it. This sentence says everything. But it seems to me to be important to cite a further number of passages because one cannot do enough to reveal the real Marxist doctrine to the public, not the exploited catchwords as have become commonplace. Only then will it become indisputably clear how completely impossible it is for every Westerner who wishes to see actions and defend ideas to belong to the Marxist association.

It (the working class) does not have to realise any ideals; it only has to liberate the elements of the new society that have already developed in the lap of the collapsing bourgeois society.

The revolution is not an act of the will. It follows from the nature of the existing society. This conception has been stated quite unequivocally by Marx in his Communist Manifesto:

The theoretical propositions of the Communists do not consist in any way of ideas, of principles that were invented or discovered by any world-improvers. They are only a general expression of the actual conditions of an existing class struggle, of a historical movement that is taking place in front of our eyes.

The success of this movement will be the thousand-year Reich on earth in which the exploited will rule over the exploiters. At the same time, it follows that, according to the Marxist doctrine, a class struggle can never be an economic struggle. He expresses that in the sentence: ‘Every class struggle is a political struggle.’ In other words, a struggle for power, for the centralist state authority, for it is a matter only of a takeover of an exaggerated centralism. In simple language it means that the existing conditions will increasingly strive for a high point, then the names of the powerholders will change, nothing more. Therewith the worker is naturally not helped. Marx did not draw — and, as a Jew, could not indeed draw this conclusion — the only one permissible according to Western ways of thought. He does not notice the deep contradiction in his conclusions — as little as Spinoza in his political doctrine. On the other hand, his conduct with regard to the trade unions was logical. He did not combat them but dealt with them coolly. Its activity — which has improved the economic condition of its members, as can be contested by nobody today — seemed to him to be as worthless as the consumer associations.

The third characteristic of Jewish thought, internationalism, is especially marked in Marx. Here it can be easily followed on what paths the kismet worldview leads to internationalism: the bourgeois society has successfully undertaken the attempt to make the world-market an object of exploitation. Both production and consumption have accordingly cast off their national costume; they extend to the entire world. The rage and anger that the nationalist circles show against this phenomenon cannot change this process in the least. It can as little prevent even the last remnant of the native industry from being absorbed and incorporated in the realm of world industry. In lockstep therewith the worker becomes increasingly deprived of a fatherland. He must perforce become a world citizen. From the core of these conditions there arises automatically the international amalgamation. The day of the first International signifies the signal fires of a new rising world.

Even here the prophet stands in stark contradiction to reality. He reads within his own soul and thinks that he reads that of the Western worker. The idea that an English worker thinks in an international manner is so nonsensical that one hardly dares to express it. A glance at any work of Jaurès[23] shows that, in France, even enthusiastic Socialists cannot accommodate themselves to such ideas and every superficial observer has seen in the events that have played out in 1918 beyond the Rhine how deep-rooted the love of the fatherland is in France, how everyone thinking otherwise is exposed to contempt and persecution. In ingenious speeches the Frenchman lets fall the word Internationalism. Anything beyond that is too much for him. But among the Germans, so I hear, the international idea has found a great expansion. This opinion is simply stupid. The German thinks in a Bavarian, Saxon, Prussian way. Indeed, not even that. He thinks as a Berliner, Frankfurter, Kölner, Swabian, Frank, Lower Bavarian, Pfālzer. I was very glad when I heard a speech of a convinced Socialist on international workers who then, to tumultuous applause, pronounced as his strongest trump card the sentence: ‘When we have reached our goal we would like to speak to the bourgeoisie in good Upper Bavarian German.’ The German worker has been fully stuffed with empty catchwords. As soon as it is a matter of deeds the Westerner comes to the forefront. Our actual workers indeed think in an essentially German way as only the best among us do. We are, thanks to a one-sided education, much too accustomed to considering our Roman-Prussian constitutional form — up to now built on commands and obedience, on bureaucratism and schematism – as the only possible political form, so that we consider every proposal of a firm comprehensive change, of a total restructuring, that does not have any resemblance any more to a power state, as ‘hostile to the fatherland’. The workers revolt against this old power state with full justification; for that reason they are characterised by the ruling classes as ‘enemies of the fatherland’; the senseless fool of the bourgeoisie joins in the clamour and the worker imagines that he is international. If you give the German nation a German constitution instead of the present purely Jewish one, you will see how the second, third[24] and further Internationals will dissolve into smoke and mirrors.

*   *   *

I single out as a counterpart to Marx a man of the ruling social class, the representative of high finance and of ethnic Jewry of the purest stamp: Rathenau.[25] Stinnes has characterised him and his accomplices as men ‘with an un-German spiritual constitution’.[26] Therewith he has hit the nail on the head. Even with the best of intentions Rathenau cannot think other than as a Jew. He lacks the basis of German feeling: German blood. Precisely for that reason is it important to dwell on him for a moment. For, if a man like Marx was filled with a fervent hatred against government and society and gave his life to the nonsense of socialism, the objection would be conceivable that here obstinacy, pettiness and personal destiny had played the driving roles, and made him blind to the fact that socialism leads not to liberty, equality and fraternity but to the most unscrupulous tyranny of the masses according to the will of a few, to outrageous suppression of freedom in all fields, to exploitation in the worst form and the total impoverishment of the nation, that it does not inaugurate a new, finer world but the underworld of Hell. But when Rathenau — through the institution of the war economy, through his international economic plans, his planned economy, his ideas on autonomous economic strategies, through his organisation of Russian Bolshevism and further through his statement, ‘economics is destiny’ — shows that he is inspired by the same thoughts as Marx, then every deception is excluded about the fact that the kismet idea, internationalism and materialism are the fundamental spiritual views of the Jews and constitute his worldview.

Rathenau would indeed not have had any reason to lose himself in such ways of thought. He grew up as a spoiled child of affluence; all educational institutions that could provide him German knowledge and character, German art and science, were open to him; he played such a preferred role in the Imperial Court that he could look down with scorn on the feudal nobility and military aristocracy and, after the collapse, all positions of honour and ministerial posts were open to him. And yet he cannot think in a German way. Blood decides.

A German man would never have been able to describe the fate of the German nation as that of one that was buried alive without using this representation as a call, without straining his every nerve to avert this frightful fate. Rathenau did it. Furthermore, in the anti-German Zürcher Zeitung, in Spring 1919, when he wrote:

One who visits Germany in the twenties, which he knew as one of the most prosperous countries of the earth, will fall to his knees in shame and sorrow. The big cities of antiquity, Babylon, Nineveh, Thebes were built of soft clay, Nature let them collapse and smoothed out the land and the hills. The German cities will not stand as ruins but as half-dead stone blocks, still partly inhabited by miserable men. A couple of quarters are alive but all radiance and gaiety have disappeared. Tired friends move on the brittle plaster, bars are illuminated, the country roads are trodden down, the woods are hewed down, on the fields thirsty seed germinates. Harbours, roads, canals are squalid and everywhere stand sad apartments, the high weathered buildings from the time of greatness. All round, strengthened, there blossom new and old provinces in the shine and vitality of new technology and energy, nourished by the blood of the dead province, served by its expelled sons. The German spirit, which has sung and laughed for the world, becomes a past. A nation that God brought to life, that is still young and strong, lives — and is dead.

With such thoughts the blood surges in every German. He would simply not have been able to write them. His inner spirit revolts against it in anger. The love of the fatherland is aroused. That is to the Jew an unknown feeling, it is only a word that sounds, in the best case, a coin that rings. The deep spiritual processes that this concept encompasses are to him incomprehensible. Precisely the writings of Rathenau present an abundance of evidentiary materials for this. One senses from them how he studies the role of friend of the fatherland because he cannot produce from his own depths German feeling for the fatherland.

That is impossible. The love of the fatherland of the Westerner is a piece of his own life and that of his fathers, grandfathers and ancestors. It is growing up with the breath of the homeland, with that which has become and is growing. It is rooted in the native soil. If the Westerner is torn away from it, his soul too is torn, for the love of the fatherland remains, seeks to throw down roots and finds no soil. There the soul becomes sick; it becomes feverish. It drives the man through life in a feverish delirium. He longs for happiness, beauty, for pure, simple joy, and cannot find them because he lacks one thing: his own home, his own piece of the fatherland.

The Jew cannot experience this feeling. He can only understand it through reason. Perhaps the native soil is dear and valuable to him but, in the final analysis, only as a ware. Therefore he gets derailed without noticing it as soon as he writes about the fatherland. He substitutes rational observation for feelings rooted deep in the soul. Thus we read in An Deutschlands Jugend the wonderful sentences:

The nations with whom national memories were identified in moments of celebration do not live any longer. The Italians are not Romans, the French are not Franks, the Germans are not Germanic peoples. The mixture with subjugated and with one’s own unknown strata has transformed the peoples not only fundamentally but also, far more than one is inclined to admit, made similar to one another. The intellectual and physical differences of the proletarians of Europe, who already make up the predominant masses of the nations, and therefore are also the only ones who conduct wars, are seen to be very small. From the movement towards regrouping that in Germany covers the last five centuries arises the very visible change of our people.[27]

These foolish reports of miscegenation one can read also in historical works that are otherwise useful. We must reeducate ourselves there too, as everywhere. We need not speak further about it here. But perhaps about the fact that the present nations still in celebratory moments, in moments of action — this concept that the Jew cannot comprehend — are one with their memory of the fatherland. Rathenau contests that. Has he not heard anything about 3 Februrary 1813?[28] Did he not experience the first days of August 1914?[29] Well, his racial comrades will recognise that this memory, as a supremely powerful noble force, holds the national body together in an indivisible unity when the awakened German soul rises.

To kismet as a worldview corresponds centralism as a life concept. (This centralism indeed is the same — as may be mentioned incidentally here — as the Roman in its influence on us Westerners, but is nevertheless, already differing in its form, essentially different from it in its character because the Roman centralism arises from the worldview of fatalism. Fatalism and kismet have, as I shall show, different origins.) Rathenau has given a great example of Jewish centralism through the building up and expansion of the war economy. He created it, as he himself has elaborately described, and, in spite of resistances arising from strong Western feeling, brought it to fruition. The circumstance that its removal from the nation was felt as a salvation, even if so many propagandists maintain the opposite, did not teach him a lesson. His plans for the building up of our collapsed fatherland culminate once again in centralism. We observe the same, with an especially clear kismet stamp, in his outlines of an international economic union.

His literary attack on Richard Wagner arises from the same worldview; he calls him a pest of the German nation because through his bold heroic characters, his praise of Siegfried, his glorification of the brave man, who banishes misery everywhere with violent action, had helped to direct the thought of the nation onto false paths. For Rathenau it is incomprehensible that these warrior figures did not create the nation but the nation created these warrior figures. He will never understand that in them the life-feeling of the Westerner is reflected: action and loyalty. Here kismet and planetary worldview face each other in mutual incomprehension.

*   *   *

Internationalism gives the Jew the stamp of his character to such a degree that it is noticeable even in the field of art. Heine and Börne are examples of this. That Heine was not a creative mind but understood and exploited German feeling in a rationalist way is immediately clear. Individual creation is sacred to every man. Indeed, he is often shy, through fear of scorn, of distributing his small works before the public. He hides them quietly in his chamber but he also feels that they are his work, a piece of his life, that he carefully protects from dirt and gossip. In this way did great mathematicians like Gauss[30] and Cantor[31] keep their powerful creations secret for years. Heine’s work lacks this inwardness, this feeling of the sacred. His songs are poisoned, as he himself once said. Ugly appendages contaminate the pure air that his fine, apparently deeply felt verses breathe. Apparently. They are the work of the understanding, otherwise he could not have proceeded in this manner.

In the field of music many Jewish names can be named, for the Jew likes music very much. But precisely in the conception of our noblest art is it shown so clearly that he cannot experience it inwardly. One may name many Jewish conductors, but they are all highly praised by their own racial comrades. None of them is capable of rendering a work of Bach or a Beethoven symphony with total inwardness. Music for the Jew is only tones and technique. And since we poor Germans from tender childhood onwards have been trained in foreign systems, to external forms, since, for that reason, most have lost the capacity to judge from their own inner life, they parrot what Jewish critics write in Jewish newspapers. If they do not feel the flippancy of an Offenbach,[32] they glorify the prolific Halévy[33] and enthuse about Leoncavallo and Bizet, who are presented to them as Frenchmen and Italians.

From a comparative cultural standpoint Meyerbeer’s[34] works are especially noteworthy. In Robert le diable,[35] and Les Huguenots,[36] German music is approximated to the French understanding, in Le Prophète[37] and l’Africaine,[38] it becomes international. In Robert le diable, he first frees himself from the Rossinian school and reveals his character, apart from the songs, whose composition preserves the Italian stamp. This does not arise from some creative vision but is based on clever calculation of effects. In the Huguenots, about which Friedrich Wilhelm IV said scornfully, or indignantly, ‘Protestants and Catholics kill one another and the Jew makes music of it’, the Meyerbeerian style is carried to its extreme. This music awakens dissatisfaction in anybody who is capable of experiencing music with devotion because here the external means of producing effects are heaped up excessively, because here the exaggerated raffinement with which he seeks to make an impression on the listeners is expressed even in the details. That blows like an icy wind over every warm heart that is receptive to sacred experiences. For, genuine music must speak to the heart not to the understanding; genuine music is religion set to music. The Jew is a master only in presentation. That is his nature. Richard Wagner’s words in his work, Das Judentum in der Musik,[39] are always true of his music:

Here nothing has been developed for centuries out a fullness of inner life but everything has, as in Jewry in general, remained rigidly frozen in shape and form. But a form that is never quickened by renewal of its content decomposes; an expression whose content has for a long time not been felt to be alive becomes senseless and distorts itself.

So long as the musical art had in itself a need of real organic life … there was nowhere a Jewish composer; it was impossible for an element totally foreign to this living organism to take part in the forms of this life. Only when the inner death of an organism is apparent do the elements lying externally obtain the power to master it but only to decompose it.

*   *   *

Already Spengler pointed to the fact that Hertz,[40] the only Jew among the great physicists, attempted to resolve the difficulties into which his science had fallen through the deployment of the concept of force. He contradicts his kismet worldview; The same phenomenon, combined with the materialistic worldview, finds a major expression in Einstein’s relativity theory.

Time has very little, directly nothing at all, to do with mathematics. We shall speak more of that later. In this context it suffices to point to Spengler’s apt explanations, of which a couple of sentences may be cited:

In the terms ‘time’ and ‘destiny’, life itself is, for one who uses them instinctively, touched in its deepest core, the whole of life, which is not to be separated from the lived experience. But physics, the understanding, must separate them. That which is experienced, separated from the living action of the observer, becomes an object, dead, inorganic, rigid — that is now Nature as mechanism, that is, as something to be exhausted mathematically. In this sense natural knowledge is a measuring activity.

Consequently, it knows time only as extension; consequently, it is forced to conceive of movement as a mathematically determinable quantity, as a denomination of the pure numbers obtained in experiment and set down in formulas. ‘Physics is the total and simple description of movements’ (Kirchhoff).[41] That was always its intention. But a movement within Nature conceived according to the understanding is nothing but that metaphysical entity in which the experience of the observer itself — through which alone a consciousness of a continuous succession arises — emerges. The momentary act of knowledge in itself causes a timeless condition that is consequently free of movement. That is ‘becoming’. Only from the organic series of these actions is there produced the impression of a movement. The content of this term touches the physicist not as an intellect but as a whole man whose constant vital function is not Nature but the entire world. That is the eternal quandary of all physics as the expression of a soul. All physics is the treatment of the problem of movement in which the problem of life itself lies — not as if it would one day be resolved, but even though it is irresoluble.[42]

Physics is the doctrine of laws that prevail in lifeless things. Presumptuous with a feeling of brimming power, it has to approach the solution of questions that can only grasp but not recognise spiritual experience, intellectual views — questions that mock explanation because they are answered by the a priori of our worldview. This effort had to suffer a shipwreck. That is the deep significance of the doctrine that mass increases with speed and, at the speed of light, is infinitely great, a doctrine that broke ground only at the moment when materialism had reached its high point in science, when its storming pioneers believed that they would be able to deduce final things through the understanding with the help of electromagnetism. In the field of physics, it corresponds to that which the world war was in the political and economic: the revolution of the organic against the mechanical. The same is true of Lorentz’s[43] relativity remarks. Both are symbols of the Western worldview. We shall speak more of that later.

Einstein’s doctrine is something quite different. It is a reflection of Jewish views, of the thought of a pure rationalistic man. His worldview prohibits him — as we were able so well to observe in the case of Spinoza and Marx — to stop where the Westerner comes up against his a priori. He builds up his system without consideration of the emotional values; removes without qualms the obstacles of the unconscious because he cannot at all understand them.

Western physics instinctively took into consideration the inner contradiction into which it had been led through the addition of the concept of time into its formulas by attributing to time a very independent role. It was absolute. It was considered as identical for all valid frameworks. It flowed through space as an eternal unchanging current. This conception, which was raised to an unquestionable principle of belief, enabled it to measure the processes of motion. Einstein changed that with one stroke. He attributed to time a slavish dependence on motion; in other words, he opposes most seriously the basic Western view hidden in the term ‘time’, the feeling of action. He separates not only the living, creative, organic from the lived, the dead, but subordinates it to the latter.  He writes:

In fact, according to classical physics, time is an absolute, that is, independent of the situation and the condition of motion of the framework. This is expressed in the last equation of the Galilean transformation t¹=t.[44] Through the relativity theory, the four-dimensional way of the observation of the world[45] is offered since, according to this theory, time is robbed of its independence, as the fourth of Lorentz’s equations of transformation instructs us.

Here lies the key to the oddities that Einstein presents to us. Just the circumstance that our physicists and mathematicians are almost all rationalists and are no longer creative-religious minds could allow them to neglect this source of error that strikes anyone viewing things in a spiritual way. Time is life itself. It cannot be robbed of its independence, or life is killed. Then everything stops, including science. Here therefore is to be placed the lever of the person judging. Einstein’s premise is false, is basically perverted.

It is not my task to refute Einstein, which — as emerges from what has been said — can never be accomplished in a mathematical way but only in philosophically. I wish at the moment only to point to the cultural comparison why Westerners will never understand him and in this way explain the apparently incomprehensible phenomenon why he and his opponents — of whom the most significant is the Heidelberg physicist Lenard[46] — always talk at cross purposes. But I would like to point to one circumstance that is produced automatically from that which has been said. Einstein is especially proud of his discovery of the ‘relativity of synchronicity’ and describes vividly how this idea seized him quite suddenly. His followers shout to the world with cries of victory that therein lies the superhuman powerful deed. They do not know, or are silent about, the fact that already Kant, indeed in a strikingly powerful manner, presented this idea and that, further, the personal comparison of the astronomers already a long time ago realised the knowledge of the relativity of synchronicity. This ‘personal comparison’ has been precisely investigated by Bessel (Abhandlungen, Vol.3).[47] His researches lead him to the conclusion that no observer ‘can be certain of stating absolute moments of time’. This phenomenon is inexplicable to him, but its determinations are a sign of the penetrating insight that processes that are separated by measurable times — by measurable extensions, according to what was said earlier — can be synchronous to the observer or also seem to follow one another immediately.

But Einstein maintains something quite different from the ‘relativity of synchronicity’. He maintains the dependence of time on motion and, indeed, on mechanical motion. But, now, the ‘relativity of synchronicity’ is — and that is the salient point that has been overlooked up to now – dependent on the fact that living things change their position, in other words, motion is dependent on life, whereby I ignore the fact that sensory perceptions likewise presuppose living things. The favourite examples of the travelling train whose speed can be transferred relatively to the track cannot belie this. So why does the train travel? Who produced it in general? Only living beings, more precisely only Westerners, who thereby symbolised their views of time and action. The dependence of motion on life becomes clearer still when we refer to an example of Einstein’s. A train finds itself in motion relative to the tracks. On its closed roof a ball is rolled back and forth, whereby it is ignored that this movement of the ball can be originated only through the direct or indirect effect of living beings. The ball’s movement can then be transferred relative to the tracks. But how is it when, instead of the ball, a man runs back and forth constantly? Can his self-motion born vitally be set physcially equivalently to the movement of the ball? That would doubtless be false. But, further, if this man, as a result of his over-exertion due to the running, suddenly falls dead. Then his movement stops with his life. His life-span has run its course. Can this life-span be transferred relatively to the track?

Einstein’s followers draw this conclusion. They must do so in order to save the doctrine of their master. Mathematicians however should have made use here of an old form of argumentation that says: I start from an unknown premise — for the relativity of time is a supposition that is neither established by Einstein nor one that can be established for all time — calculate correctly and come to a correct conclusion. Therefore the premise is correct. In the special case at hand I reach a nonsensical conclusion, consequently the premise is false and the doctrine of Einstein worthless. Relative is only that which has become, the dead, space, extension. Within the realm of physics, there are only relative movements, as the ‘classical relativity principle’ of Newton already showed for translated movements. If the Einsteinian doctrine is considered an extension of this Newtonian relativity principle, as its application to the great speeds of light and electricity, one can say something about it, even speak of a scientific service of Einstein’s. On the other hand, it can never raise its present claim to the role of a universally valid natural law and wish to draw supra-mechanical life into it because it then leads to monstrosities. The hardest task of Western physics – in total opposition to Einstein — consists in removing time from its formulas. Whether it seeks to do that, whether the attempt is successful, even the specialist physicist cannot decide today.

The example cited by me of the man running back and forth on the roof and finally collapsing dead suffices — both on account of the self-motion and of the life-span conditioning it — to throw the Einstein theory overboard. Materialists who imagine that they can explain life from death, who think that in it only mechanical laws prevail, will contest that. For all others, that is, for all clear-thinking Westerners, on the other hand, this small proof is conclusive and sufficient. It would have to be so for Einstein too if he were able to think in a way other than mechanical-materialistically. For Einstein himself writes:

Every universal natural law must be so constituted that it passes over into a law of precisely the same structure when one introduces, instead of the space-time variable r,v,z,t of the original system of coordinates K, a new space-time variable r’,v’,z’,t’ … If a universal natural law were discovered that does not correspond to that condition, at least one of the two fundamental premises of the theory would be refuted.

Now, in life there prevail not just one but very many such laws. Life is a flat refutation of the Einsteinian theory and must be, as is seen from the true nature of time.

Spinoza says that worldly things relate to God the way the characteristics of a geometric figure do to their concepts, as a proposition to an axiom, as an inference to a principle. Spinoza confuses the logical mathematical result with the effect in reality. He becomes a slave of mathematics. We find something similar in Einstein. He turns the relationship of mathematics and physics upside down. The physicist — I recall the former bookbinding assistant Faraday,[48] who was not a mathematician at all — seeks to establish laws through experiments and derives his formulae from these results. Einstein, on the other hand, proceeds from mathematics, especially from the Lorenz transformations, and prescribes laws to Nature. That corresponds completely to his worldview. Only this knowledge makes comprehensible his sentence: ‘This is a definite mathematical condition that the relativity theory prescribes to a natural law.’ Further, the cultural alienness of character of Einstein in the West emerges clearly in the case of the arrogant rejection of mathematical axioms, which are nothing but our worldview moving over solid bodies. It is a sign of scientific decline that Einstein, on the question of the truth of certain principles of our mathematics, could write with impunity the sentence that it is ‘not only unanswerable by the geometrical method but is generally nonsensical.’

In his doctrine of the relativity of movement we find again in perhaps the most marked form the Jewish worldview, kismet and materialism. For the time being I ignore the representation of four-dimensional space, of the Minkowski[49] universe, and use the term ‘infinite space’. We Westerners think it filled with geometric lines along which forces move. The great commander of experiments summarises this idea in the sentence: ‘I assume in any part of space, no matter it if is, in the common language, empty or filled with matter, nothing really but forces and lines along which they are exerted.’ These lines run, as is expressed here unobjectionably, independently of matter. Any other idea is impossible for us. The concept of force forms the foundation of our physics. It is the a priori of our planetary worldview. It is senseless if we break our head about the nature of gravitation, of centrifugal and centripetal forces. For us they are a given. The forces, whose nature we neither can nor wish to determine, influence one another and disturb their paths mutually. The first law of motion, which is also known under the name of the law of inertia to those who are not trained in natural science, speaks unequivocally about this: Every time that a body moves non-uniformly, that is, its movement changes either in direction or speed, this change can be attributed to the influence of another body. This influence of bodies on one another is called force. Force is the cause of a change that a movement experiences, whether it be in direction or speed or both. Instead of this concept of force, of the entire content of our cultural soul, the Einstein doctrine places something quite different. Of course, it does not deny inertia but explains it as compelled conduction. This compulsory conduction determines the direction and — what is totally incomprehensible to us — the speed of a body. It provides it with its ‘natural motion’, from which it can be drawn out only through external influences. It is, according to the Einstein doctrine, comparable to an electrical field that likewise corresponds once again to the Jewish worldview and sharply contradicts the Western. Indeed, in it, Einstein glimpses the evidence for the fact that the lines imagined by our physics, the geometric structure, are in truth real material paths. According to his doctrine they are operative forces in whom a power is innate that can, under certain circumstances, lead to frightful disturbances. The field of conduction stands, accordingly, in constant mutual interaction with matter and changes according to its circumstances. What Einstein calls force we would characterize as power.

By transferring these ideas to the planetary orbits, he comes to the conclusion that even the planetary bodies are subject to the forced conduction, of which gravitation is only a part. He presents the bold opinion that gravity is only a result of compulsion that should belie the difficulties that the planetary orbits offered to the Galilean doctrine. For, the planetary bodies must indeed move in straight lines and may not move in elliptical paths. The followers of Einstein are particularly proud of this discovery.

It cannot be represented in a more unequivocal way — what has escaped observation up to now — that we today possess two physics: a Jewish one built up in a rational way, but not creatively formed on the principles of our worldview, and a Western one. The former as a symbol of the materialistic, kismet-directed worldview and the latter of the Faustian planetary.

That even the third fundamental characteristic, the international, is not lacking in Einstein is obvious. It emerges in the discussion of the question that is raised in conjunction with his theory: Is the Copernican or the Ptolemaic system correct? Our answer corresponds to our worldview, to the evaluation of our standpoints. It says: for us Westerners only the Copernican is correct. Our innermost selves revolt against the acknowledgement of Ptolemy’s epicycles.[50] For him and the members of his cultural circle the former system was correct. An agreement between the two is impossible. It is out of the question that we, in the sense of the Einstein theory, sometimes place ourselves on a Ptolemaic standpoint and at others on a Copernican according to which of the two suits our purposes.

So long as Einstein saw in his doctrine an attempt at an explanation of the Michelson[51] conclusions, so long as there was a debate about it in the circle of a few specialist researchers who are able to follow him in detail and with judgement, there was no reason to deal with them publicly. Today it is different. Einstein raises a claim to be taken seriously. Good, that should happen: The Einstein relativity theory possesses an extraordinarily high value for that science which in the future will bloom with an unimagined beauty that does not yet exist in the scholarly world — the science of comparative culture.

But that is not all. Until recently the Einstein character was made the object of glorification in a simply repulsive manner. With or against his will does not matter. Now it has suddenly become remarkably quiet. Perhaps because important voices have exposed him as a plagiarist. Essays that begin as follows are no longer possible: ‘When you see Einstein do not forget that you stand before the greatest man of the century!’ In a leading Social Democrat newspaper a new work considered to be nationalist was praised in a book review that was supposed to familiarize even the simplest man with this theory and it was pointed out that it was the duty of every person to familiarize himself with this powerful work. Just imagine: a doctrine that presupposes even in its point of departure a considerable amount of physical and mathematical knowledge is presented to our workers who, even if through no fault of theirs, can hardly follow the development of the law of gravity or of the Archimedean principle of buoyancy, that is, laws that fall within their horizon and that can be explained through visible experiments. That only confusion is sowed in their heads is clear. For the editors it is not a matter of making the treasures of our science accessible to the people — which is not possible without years-long strenuous study of it — but of praising Einstein because he is a Jew. The people should learn to think that +Jewry has brought forth the greatest mind on earth. In view of this state of affairs I declare: A theory that maintains that force can exist independently of matter but itself possesses matter, that, for example, a body gets heated because to its matter the matter of force enters has for us Westerners the worth of the entertainment section of a carnival newspaper.

Perhaps this judgement may seem all too harsh to many readers who have been confused by the illustrated local representations of the ‘liberating action’ of Einstein. So some examples may follow that show where the relativity theory of motion leads. It teaches that time is dependent on motion. That is why, as Einstein himself explains, the clocks in a moving train go slower than in a stationary one. Here are revealed clearly the consequences of the confusion of the concepts of time and extension. The hour of the clock face is the twenty fourth part of that lifetime that appears to us as a day and a night. On this lifetime, and on the clock participating in its course, the movement of the train does not have the least influence. The followers of Einstein do not perceive this. They relate relativity not only to the standpoint of the observer of a process taking place in death but make it the master of his life. Thus it is recommended to everybody who wishes to live long to become fast train drivers because then his life-clock will go slower. In the thousand-year Reich one will let the great men live, not loftily, but long, by setting them in a Zeppelin built by themselves and letting them go round the earth in a crazy speed until they, having become older than Methuselah,[52] resort to a Steinach rejuvenation treatment. [53] Of course, thereby they must take into account that they are visibly crumpled and take care that a gust of wind does not sweep them away because they have become featherlight in the course of the travel. For, all mass becomes smaller with increasing speed and all weights decrease. Einstein does not notice that with this result of his doctrine he runs into an irresoluble contradiction with his principle of the independence of the natural laws – because the Jewish natural laws are totally different from the Western.

But, one may object, these examples have been dragged in by their hair. But do not get angry. That is not the case. Let us quote an enthusiastic champion of the Einstein affair. On page 22 of Pflüger’s[54] Das Einsteinsche Relativitātsprinzip, we read:

Like the progress of the clocks even the temporal course of all natural phenomena is influenced. With bold imagination one will say: one lives in different warps at different speeds so that of two twins one, whom one had taken after birth to the realm of another warp, would seem after his return to still look rather like a schoolboy whereas his brother is an old man with white hair.

And such nonsense is thrown among the masses with a market cry. Perhaps it now becomes clear of what sort the ‘liberation’ by Einstein is. It is, in the field of physics, the same thing that the ‘liberating’ Bolshevism is in the field of politics — a jail for non-Jews. The Einstein doctrine — it could be maintained in the West — would let our science and therewith our entire life be levelled out permanently.

Even in essays that are considered scholarly one encounters the one-sided representation as if the Einstein doctrine had now finally solved the three difficult questions regarding the causes of the perihelion movement of Mercury, the deviation of light rays when passing over heavenly bodies, and the supposed shifts in the spectrum. To that it should be answered that the perihelion movement is well explicable by two theories that are rooted in Western thought, that the Western explanation of the deviation of the light rays is satisfactory, whereas the Einstein calculations deviate so far from the observed phenomena that they are not explanations, and that the shifts in the spectrum, in spite of all the talk recently about it, are quite uncertain.

4

Like everything, even the Einstein fanfare has a good side. It has stirred up the people so much that the mood has been transformed, with the emergence of disillusionment, into its opposite. The people will recognize where it must lead to when our universities are further Judaised with frenzied speed. In the institutions that we create for the promotion of our cultural life the Jew has at most something to look for as a student. As a teacher, no matter whether at the primary, secondary or high school, only men thinking and feeling in a genuine German way should be employed. We cannot poison our youth with materialistic, internationalist and kismet ideas. The words of a teacher have an effect throughout one’s life. Precisely for that reason does the Jew push into our educational system in order to, from here, fill politics, economics and jurisprudence with his mentality in a permanent manner. For, one who has the youth has the future. To what extent he is aware of the scope of his action is proved by his great efforts in the orientation to this goal. I recall the case of Löwenstein as well as the concealment of the origin of Jewish teachers and university lecturers through conversion to Christianity or — what is precisely the same thing to them — to liberalism.

We Germans can learn something great from the Jew: the tacit and never stressed closedness to the outside world. If the members of this race, corresponding to their utilitarian culture, are at loggerheads with one another, they still all work together with admirable solidarity for the conquest of the world and the consolidation of the Jewish power. They know that the Westerner, in the final analysis, always searches for and inquires about spiritual values. That is why the most insignificant work that arises from their circle — no matter whether a book, essay, painting or musical composition or a scientific accomplishment — is so loudly praised. How deliberately they go about this is proved — to give just one example — by the performance of Toller’s work, Masse Mensch,[55] in a private performance before the Nuremberg trade unions. They hammer into the people day in and day out its intellectual ‘significance’. They transfer the principles of their commercial life — market shouting — to all fields and support one another. Thereby their gift for acting, the power of their press and the power of their money likewise come in handy. To us Germans it is not yet clear that we sit intellectually in the ghetto. No essay that is unpleasant to the Jew is published. The Jewish newspapers, that is the majority, do not accept it and the others fear the threat that is always repeated: suspension of advertising. This suspension is — as anybody who has an insight into the press system knows — enforced unscrupulously.

Instead of many, I shall cite only the example of a Bavarian Centre Party newspaper, which, on account of a communication of only two lines that displeased Jewry, received within a few days the cancellation of permanent advertisements to the amount of 30,000 marks. The couple of anti-Semitic newspapers do not get through to the nation. Their readers are constituted of circles that anyway know in what a frightful situation we find ourselves. It will serve the benefit of all, and not least Jewry, if a change occurs here. Things are heading to a point where a sudden awakening will follow that will be frightful for the guilty. Only the Westerner can read the soul of the Westerner. The Jew deceives himself if he thinks that he will have the masses permanently behind him or can later subjugate them permanently. Matters are still in progress. They will end with the liberation from centralism, from fatalism as well as from kismetism. If one succeeds in the last moment in setting the development onto peaceful tracks, all participants, also the Jews, fare well. If one does not, then there will follow a frightful collapse. Not of the West. It is too vital for that. On the contrary, it will heal itself quickly. The coming decades will bring it an unexpected efflorescence.

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[1] See my English edition, Eugen Dühring, The Jewish Question as a racial, moral and cultural question, with a world-historical answer (Ostara Publications, 2019).

[2] Isaiah 49:23: ‘And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers: they shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet; and thou shalt know that I am the Lord: for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me.’ (All notes are by the translator.)

[3] Volk.

[4] See Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1844): ‘The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.’

[5] This praise of the lyricism of the psalms is found also in Eugen Dühring’s Die Judenfrage (1881), Ch.III.

[6] Solomon sent for help from the king of Tyre to build his temple (see, for example, I Kings 5, 1-11).

[7] The Turkish word for destiny.

[8] Exodus 20.

[9] Matthew 22 35-40 (This – Jesus’ second choice of two great commandments – refers to a passage in Leviticus 19:18. The other commandment that Jesus chooses is ‘Ye shall love the Lord your God with all your heart’).

[10] Exodus 34:7.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Cf. Tacitus, Germania, ch.40.

[13] Exodus 32:10-14.

[14] Wikipedia: Spinoza’s metaphysics consists of one thing, substance, and its modifications (modes). Early in The Ethics Spinoza argues that only one substance is absolutely infinite, self-caused, and eternal. He calls this substance “God”, or “Nature”. He takes these two terms to be synonymous (the Latin the phrase he uses is “Deus sive Natura”). For Spinoza, the whole of the natural universe consists of one substance, God, or, what is the same, Nature, and its modifications (modes).

It cannot be overemphasized how the rest of Spinoza’s philosophy—his philosophy of mind, his epistemology, his psychology, his moral philosophy, his political philosophy, and his philosophy of religion—flows more or less directly from the metaphysical underpinnings in Part I of the Ethics.

[15] See, for instance, Spinoza, Ethics, I, Prop.XVII.

[16] things

[17] bodies

[18] See Ethics, I, Definition 4.

[19] Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie was an unpublished manuscript that Marx wrote in 1843.

[20] Karl Marx, ‘Letter to is his father’, 10 November, 1837, published in Die neue Zeit, I (1897).

[21] This early work has not survived.

[22] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of political economy, 1867.

[23] Jean Jaurès (1859-1914) was a French socialist leader.

[24] The Second International was formed in 1889, the Third (Comintern) in 1919.

[25] Walther Rathenau (1867-1922) was a German Jewish industrialist and politician who served as Foreign Minister of the ‘Weimar’ Republic in 1922.

[26] Hugo Stinnes (1870-1924) was an industrialist and member of the Reichstag from 1920.

[27] An Deutschlands Jugend was published in 1918.

[28] The date on which a Prussian volunteer corps was created to fight Napoleon, who was defeated in the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813.

[29] The German Empire declared war on the Russian Empire on 1 August 1914.

[30] Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) was a distinguished German mathematician and physicist.

[31] Georg Cantor (1845-1918) was a German mathematician of Jewish origin who helped in the development of the set theory.

[32] Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) was a German Jewish composer of French operettas.

[33] Jacques Fromental Halévy (1799-1862) was a French Jewish composer of operas including La Juive (1835).

[34] Giacomo (Jakob) Meyerbeer (1791-1864) was a German Jewish composer of operas who was influential in both Berlin and Paris.

[35] Robert le diable (1831) was one of Meyerbeer’s first successful operas.

[36] Les Huguenots was first performed in 1836.

[37] Le Prophète was composed in 1849.

[38]  L’Africaine was Meyerbeer’s last opera, performed posthumously in 1865.

[39] Das Judenthum in der Musik (Jewry in Music) was first published by Wagner anonymously in 1850 and, in 1869, under his own name. In this essay he points out the shortcomings of Jewish composers, especially Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn.

[40] Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) was a German Jewish physicist who made significant contributions to the study of electromagnetic waves.

[41] Gustav Kirchhoff (1824-1887) was a German physicist noted for his researches in electrical circuits and spectroscopy.

[42] Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, I, Ch.6.

[43] Hendrik Lorentz (1853-1928) was a Dutch physicist noted for the ‘Lorentz transformation’ of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which concerns the relationship between space and time.

[44] In the special theory of relativity the Galilean transformation is replaced by the Lorentz transformation.

[45] As if one could speak at all of four-dimensionality in the sphere of the dead. (Dickel’s note.)

[46] Philipp Lenard (1852-1947) was a Hungarian German physicist who made significant contributions to the study of cathode rays. He attacked Einstein’s theories as ‘Jewish physics’.

[47] Friedrich Bessel (1784-1846) was a German astronomer and physicist. His treatises were edited in three volumes of Abhandlungen (1875-1876) by Rudolf Engelmann.

[48] Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was an English scientist who made notable contributions to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry.

[49] Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909) was a German Jewish mathematician who invented the concept of four-dimensional space that is now called ‘Minkowski spacetime’.

[50] Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer of the 2^nd c. B.C., as well as Claudius Ptolemaeus, the Hellenistic astronomer of the 2^nd c. A.D., employed geometrical models involving epicycles to explain variations in the speed and direction of heavenly bodies.

[51] Albert Michelson (1852-1931) was a German Jewish physicist known for his study of the speed of light. His Michelson-Morley experiment was influential in the development of Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

[52] In Genesis 5:27 Methuselah is mentioned as a grandfather of Noah and said to have lived for 969 years.

[53] Eugen Steinach (1861-1944) was an Austrian physiologist who developed a method of human rejuvenation.

[54] Alexander Pflüger (1869-1946) was Professor of Physics at the University of Bonn. His book, Das Einsteinsche Relativitātsprinzip, was published in 1920.

[55] Ernst Toller (1893-1939) was a German Jewish playwright and Social Democrat who served as head of the Bavarian Soviet Republic for six days in April 1919 before he was ousted by the Communist Party. When the Bavarian Soviet Republic was defeated by the Freikorps in May 1919, he was sentenced to five years in prison. His play Masse Mensch was written in 1921 while he was serving his sentence.