Alfred Baeumler on Global Democracy and National Socialism: Extracts from ‘Weltdemokratie und Nationalsozialismus’ (1943)

Translated and with an Introduction by Alexander Jacob

Introduction

Alfred Baeumler (1887–1968) was an Austrian German philosopher who was considered one of the major National Socialist ideologues. He received his doctorate at the University of Munich in 1914 with a dissertation on Kant’s aesthetics and taught at the Technical University of Dresden from 1924. Already in the thirties he was associated with National Socialist circles including Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg. In 1930 he joined Rosenberg’s anti-Semitic organization, ‘Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur’. And in 1933 he was nominated to the chair of philosophy and political pedagogy at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. His inaugural address on this occasion was followed by his march, along with his students, to the book burning in the square at which Goebbels spoke.

In his pedagogical lectures and in his 1934 work Männerbund und Wissenschaft he encouraged students to follow a manly, soldierly model that would exclude feminine democratic elements. In 1934, Baeumler was appointed Head of Science in Rosenberg’s Office for the supervision of intellectual training of the NSDAP and, in 1941, he became head of the service, serving as the liaison between Rosenberg and the universities. Heidegger, who was, from 1933, Rector at the University of Freiburg, was a friend of Baeumler’s but did not support the racialist emphases of the latter.

In his 1943 work, Weltdemokratie und National Sozialismus – an essay in six sections, of which I present here the last three — Baeumler promoted racial states based on the creative ‘force’, or energy, of the members of a national community rather than on the acquisitive ‘power’ of their financial elites. He decried the false power of capitalistic democracies that aim at conquering the world through money while disregarding the racial forces that originally formed and consolidated the individual nations of the world. His conflation of the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘space’ are also evidently a justification of the ‘Lebensraum’ doctrine that considered the Germans as endowed with greater racial strengths and therefore suited to rule over the new anti-democratic Europe that National Socialism was determined to develop.

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Section 4

One of the few things that democracy is adept at is the exploitation of intellectual laziness to promote an anti-German propaganda. It is so easy to declare to the world that National Socialism refuses peace (because it recognizes the law of war), that it is an opponent of reconciliation (because it finds the idea of a world-order sustained by police force ridiculous). Nobody can do it so easily as one who appeals to old ways of thought. It is considered a weakness of National Socialism that it demands that men think. Men — whom we not accidentally call animals of custom — prefer to do everything else but think. because thinking means detaching oneself from habits.

The pleasant habit of considering all concrete peace as a mere preparation for eternal peace, of thinking that there is above every condition of power yet another by which it is held in check, the fantasy that a power can be brought by ideologies to set limits for itself, all that is forever cancelled by National Socialism. Our worldview demands of everybody the abandonment of all prejudices and an intellect that is capable of recognizing the world as it is. When we say ‘race’ we think not only of the multiplicity of racial types that experience presents to us but, above all, of a general law of life: the law that similar things are brought forth only by similar things and that the vital forces [of each race] are constant.

In the humanities, through the discovery of races, a situation has been removed that recalled the alchemy of the Middle Ages. So long as one did not recognize the constancy of forces it was possible for one to adhere to fantastic ideas on the development and transformation of natural forces, ideas that resembled those of alchemists. One day, they thought, we must even succeed in producing gold, one day, the philosophers thought and the politicians pretended to think, the condition of eternal peace must indeed be realized. The recognition of racial forces as of that which is lasting and creative in every ethnic community places the thought of modern science on the same level as mediaeval dreams. This recognition removes all errors and gives to thought a new and fruitful impulse. Human history now appears no longer as a heap of errors and violence; even in its most frightful errors we recognize the ruling law. By recognizing the activity of human forces in their regularity our eyes are opened for a realistic observation of historical realities in general. Along with the conditions of race there enter into our field of vision the conditions of space [i.e., lebensraum; see Introduction]. In a field where up to now secret natures roamed about, the phenomena are with one stroke ordered into clearly knowable entities grasping the nexus of which presents new challenges to the understanding.

The picture of history that is determined by the realities of race and space is dynamic. Wherever men enter into relation with one another we see forces striving with one another. History is not the evolution of some uniform substance but a vital opposition and collaboration of substantial forces — forces that construct the power structures the recording of whose rise, spread, fall or self-maintenance is the task of the historical writer. A philosophy of history enriched by the idea of race has recognized how many confusions have been produced by not holding the categories of force [i.e., racial vitality] and power [of financial elites] separate and by repeatedly transferring the conditions of one reality to the other. In this way the law of ‘power’ of maintaining itself through expansion was always equated with the striving of ‘force’ towards action. Thereby the right estimation of both realities was made impossible. To the derivative entity of power, a value was attributed that it does not possess. On the other hand, the burden of everything that totally unrestricted power had always caused was placed on the natural creative forces [of race]. The destruction that was caused by this misunderstanding reached to the depths of being. Power was increased with everything that belongs to force and then cursed; the sphere of innocence in which vital forces freely move was thrown into the darkness of this curse and became contemptible. Thereby all the conditions were destroyed on the basis of which alone a human and realistic treatment of political problems is possible.

Power has its own law. Precisely because it is not a force but a reality with its own structure, it displays that characteristic for which it is constantly blamed, pleonexia [i.e., the avarice of financial elites].[1] A condition of power can exist for a long time independent of the forces that have brought it forth and it can rise above itself. In the latter case, power detaches itself from the vital forces, becomes abstract and begins to proliferate. When a rule has achieved recognizable and useful forms, these forms continue to exist through their own authority as it were — often against all vital forces that stir in the community. That is the phenomenal form of power that has, through the ages, exposed this entity, which in itself is so human and necessary, to hatred.

Section 5

It is not a question of suppressing power but of giving it a human form. Is it then so dangerous that every power freely expands itself but never restricts itself freely? This would indeed be disastrous only if there were nothing that sets limits to expansion. So long as one must wait until another power arises to hold the expanding power within limits we will not emerge from a condition of war. It is precisely the characteristic of the modern world that pays homage to the idea of peace that it does not have anything to oppose to the pleonexia [of financial elites]. Under the disguise of humanitarian slogans is hidden the most unrestricted adulation of violence that the world has ever seen. ‘Battle’ and ‘war’ are proscribed concepts, the soldier is considered as a relic from backward times, the peasant is scorned. To the democratic bourgeois society only trade and financial business are sacred; the stock exchange and civilization are here inseparable ideas, the spell of money overpowers minds. Economics is destiny. An open secret that cannot be touched by anybody is the key to all the phenomena of the democratic system: power cannot become visible anywhere. The leadership principle is hidden behind parliamentarism. Rule is permitted only in the most dishonest, cruellest and most deplorable of all forms — as the rule of money. Power assumes the form of exploitation. There are only rich men, who possess everything, and poor, who possess nothing. Democratic ‘freedom’ consists in maintaining the unpropertied in the belief that through free acquisition they can one day rise to the ranks of the propertied. The ideology of this society declares that everybody can do what he likes; climbing up or starving is a choice given to everybody. In fact, a small stratum of immeasurably rich men about whom nothing can be publicly discussed hold rule in their merciless hands. One who has money participates in ruling, one who does not belongs to the million slaves of the plutocratic system.

Since the principle of economic ‘freedom’ (everybody can buy and sell as much as he ‘wants’) rules, the system of naked violence is at the same time the system of freedom. This cunning hypocrisy is possible only because rule has assumed the form of economic exploitation and become invisible as it were. No genuine representation takes place  — the parliaments are indeed there only to hinder all representation. Thus modern democracy is in every aspect the system of absolute mendacity — pressure, surrounded by the fine appearance of ‘freedom’.

The same principle of exploitation also rules in foreign policy, which is essentially colonial policy. The colonies are ruthlessly exploited — they have to provide raw materials and soldiers; what happens to the peoples who inhabit the conquered territories in other continents is a matter of indifference. Equally indifferent is whether the raw material sources are properly exhausted or not and whether the acquired products satisfy the needs that exist in other parts of the earth. Only the present profit is decisive. Plutocratic society is insatiable in its hunger for money: nations die, regions become deserted, but the paper notes rise. The increase in wealth, the security of affluence and luxury that is guaranteed with it, that one may permit oneself is the only thing that interests one.

A state of democratic form consists of a small number of immoderately rich men who consider it their sole political task to make others work for them. Here it makes no difference if the other citizens of the nation are colonial slaves or allies. The net of guarantee-contracts with which Great Britain recently sought to bind the nations is a characteristic expression of the parasitical thought of plutocracy. Its power,  corresponding to the nature of capital, seeks constantly to surpass itself and spills into the unlimited. A guarantee-contract has a meaning only when some real forces stand behind it. The contracts that Great Britain recently offered to every state that could be reached operated without any disguise of realities. They gave the power of Great Britain an appearance of prolonged benefit, while to the contracted powers they meant destruction. It did not bother the democratic politicians one moment what living forces were dragged into this political destruction and whether thereby valuable nations were destroyed. The coldest will to rule made its calculations in the icy room of empty power.

An Englishman can objectively say: We do not possess a square metre outside our own borders; what we have is  merely the friendship of those to whom the land belongs. He just forgets to add a detail: the friendship — and the control — of money, that is, of the work of those to whom we have left the land for the purpose of cultivation. One does not speak of the power of money. Of course, one admits that trade follows the flag, but not that friendship as a political phenomenon has as its precondition the soft pressure of capital without which it would probably have been subjected to all too strong fluctuations.

Every power is simultaneously affirmative and negative; it can build up only by rejecting or fighting against that which stands in its way. The power of capital differs from every other form of power in the fact that it, of course, achieves blinding momentary successes but never has a constructive effect. Its chief instrument is credit, which disguises itself as aid that is provided through sheer ‘objectivity’ and pure ‘understanding’. In fact, it is the rope that is laid around the neck of the ‘economically weaker man’. It needs only a light tug — the use of violence is of course forbidden — and the victim flounders on the ground. A democratic great power is characterized by the fact that it can grant credit. So long as men are so foolish to believe in money, they can also be ruled by withdrawals of credit — that is the formula of the Jewish democratic world rule. When everything is money and money is everything, the world cannot be anything but the field of activity of economic corporations and stock-exchange speculators. To the financial empires a human interest in land and people is unknown. Capital wishes constantly only to multiply itself; it goes ruthlessly on its way over all factual bindings. Preservation of living forces, whether it is the forces of a people or of the soil, respect for Nature, consideration for the desire for the life of others are ridiculous concepts from its viewpoint. Pure financial interests accomplish success after success and draw all destructive men into its circle — one day, however, to bump into the realities denied by it. The most abstract form of power that we know, whose striving for more can apparently be halted by nothing, finally collapses at the reality of the living forces that it has denied.

Properly speaking, one cannot speak of ‘states’ of democratic type at all. There is a state only when an organic political order is related to a living nation. There are no democratic states, there is only a democratic society that, with the help of the banks, supervises the so-called states. This society is single; it has its representatives everywhere in the world, in Europe as well as in Africa, in America as well as in Australia. Considered historically it is the successor of the supranational feudal stratum of earlier times. The supranational knightly society corresponded to the religious universalism of the Middle Ages; to the no longer religious pseudo-universalism of modern times corresponds the plutocratic elite that, up until recently, possessed or controlled the production of raw materials and trade all over the world. The centre of this money-possessing elite has been up to today London. In time a second centre developed in America that was viewed until recently from London with hardly concealed contempt. The ideal of the ‘rich man’ is the same in both places. The stratum of rich men sets the tone — how they think, how they live, how they dress is decisive for everybody who wishes to be worth something in this world. By ‘rich man’ one should hereby not imagine in the European fashion just a millionaire. There is no question here of poor people. One understands what wealth is only by understanding where the plutocracy has its origins. Men who have no idea of what it means to exploit Egypt and India cannot imagine the wealth of an English lord. And much less can they know what a magical influence emanates from this wealth. The world has not been conquered in the last centuries by Liberal ‘ideas’ or by English lifestyles (all of that merely follows) — it was conquered by rich men. Freemasonry is indeed one, but not the only, form in which the rich men exercise influence on states. Only when the idol of gold no longer enchants the world will there be an end of the rule of that small class who allow their representatives, their banknotes and much else to circulate in every capital. The end of plutocracy is the birthday of national states. After the disempowerment of the monied international elite, men to whom peace means something else than a moralistic catchword for the camouflage of businesses can take over rulership everywhere. These men are the leaders of their nations. They vouch with their lives that with peace the honour and security of the nation is preserved. Aeroplanes to which they can entrust their precious lives when it becomes dangerous do not stand in readiness for them. Such a thing belongs to the lifestyle of that international group of politicians who, from everywhere and at any time, can withdraw into the centre of global democracy as into their true homeland.

Section 6

Even politics is bound by laws; it cannot deny its own natural law if it wishes not just to have successes but to succeed.  True power is oriented to duration. If it proceeds against the law of its own nature, it is condemned to collapse. What we experience today is not only the collapse of some democratic states, it is the collapse of the democratic system. A political genius has, through tremendous work, gathered together all the forces that have been scorned by democracy. In the first place stands the force of the living national community. National Socialism does not criticize the mistakes of democracy but realizes a principle of construction that is opposed to the plutocratic one. In the centre of its thought there stands the creative man. He cannot be dissuaded by the fake power of the banks and colonial possessions from the conviction that it is finally men — their natural dispostions, their work, their industry, and their spirit — that decide on the worth and the existence of a state. It depends not on the accumulated instruments of power but on the force of men whether a state has duration. States are only changing organizational forms  that nations give themselves. The core of every nation is constituted by the natural force of procreation through which a deeply hidden, secret life-will is expressed. Thus what is decisive is what direction this life-will takes and what its accomplishments are. Every living force has a definite character and is qualitatively defined. Force is not a quantitative but a qualitative concept. A numerically small nation that is infused with a strong life-will and brings forth men of higher quality and a will to extraordinary accomplishments can be superior in force to a quantitatively stronger nation. The disposition to technology, to art and science is of striking significance for the total quality of a nation. In the native speech and customs, in the feeling for justice, in the inherited lifestyles and education, in the national poetry and the consciousness that a nation has of itself, is rooted the energy with which it can establish itself.

The living force of a nation does not appear equally at all times. The movement of life pulls also the national forces into the rhythm of ebb and flow, and times of courage and greatness alternate with times of low entrepreneurial spirit. But in the depths persists the indomitable, live creative force. It is the indestructible reality from which the national mythos derives its force, it gives to the great individuals who emerge as representatives before their people in order to lead them the impetus of faith that pulls everything along with it and is necessary to wake the world out of its ‘sleep’ in order to bring the power relations that have got bogged down once again in harmony with the demands of life.

Among the forces with which a genuine power has to reckon is the space that a nation inhabits, the land that it cultivates, and the treasures of raw materials that slumber in the depths. Of course, the space is never determinative, for only men are determinative, but a favourable system of communication, suitable borders, fruitful land, and rich raw materials add the force of the elements to the human force that is able to make use of it. In this way arises from blood and soil, race and space, those great energies of the national communities whose separation and cooperation constitute the content of world history.

Politics that leaves these energies out of consideration or denies them — whether it is conducted by Freemasons, Jewish financiers, stock-exchange speculators, shipping magnates or lords — can perhaps accumulate wealth for some generations in individual houses; but it bears within itself the kernel of destruction because it has no connection to the creative forces. National Socialism is combated by democracy and by international capital (which is identical to it) because it is determined to conduct the new construction of Europe with those forces that are present in every nation to make an end of the false rule of money and to establish a new political order on the basis of nationalities.

The decisive characteristic of the political system that already begins to take shape in this war is the new significance that it lends to power. National Socialism puts an end to the confusing and destructive theory that power is always power and it does not matter how a power is constituted. It teaches one to distinguish between different powers. Through its own preconditions and principles it affirms every condition of power that supports itself on the natural forces of a healthy nation and bases itself on the necessities of the living spaces of nations. It thereby does not open up a new age of imperialism but ends forever the age of artificial power structures in order to prepare a new age of power that is bound by force [racial vitality].

Only the vital forces are capable of holding power within the limits that are appropriate to it. Left to itself. power stretches into the limitless; on the other hand, forces indeed demand activation but can never succumb to the pleonexia that is characteristic of power. Power is a creation of men, forces on the other hand are a gift of Nature and bear within themselves the moderation of their origin. Man cannot soar above either his  own force or the forces of the land into the limitless. It is life itself that advises him not to exploit or overstretch the natural forces but to cohabit with them. When man learns to listen to the voice of life he becomes measured because he strives only for that which is natural and healthy. The mistake of the past was to mistrust forces and to attribute to them a striving for infinity that they do not have. Just as a man as a personality fulfils himself most purely when he conducts his existence trusting in life, politics also needs this trust to avoid cramping and overreaching. By constantly keeping in view the living realities, the politician binds power to force. He does not go beyond what the living forces permit, he takes care not to overstretch power and strive for momentary successes. The binding of power by force means the limitation of power — not by itself, since that is impossible, but by the measure that lies within reality itself.

The politics of the binding of power by force is the politics of National Socialism. Even this politics cannot be spared conflicts. But it is something different if conflicts are dealt with from the standpoint of naked power and, left to themselves, if they proceed to some violent solution or if they are mastered in light of a great and true principle.

When at a suitable time a nation was able to acquire colonies for itself and to establish on this basis a financial power that did not correspond to its natural forces that was a process that people up to now, trapped in shortsighted ideas of the welfare of individuals, considered as very gratifying or at least harmless. A way of thinking that considers the nations as realities and not only as backdrops for powers alien to blood and soil, and recognizing a danger for all in the process of this sort of wealth acquisition. For, an artificial power that is maintained not by the force of its national community but by a monied stratum will naturally seek connection and security with other powers that have the same structure. In this way arise cross-connections, pacts, systems of pacts — in short, an enterprise of financial powers that follows its own interests and hinders all efforts at practical solutions of ethnic or geopolitical problems because finance imperialism does not tolerate any other points of view alongside it. Relations between the states are reduced to financial relations, in all decisive questions capital becomes authoritative, the condition of international politics becomes fully corrupt.

It is a poisoning of the political atmosphere in every respect when the sheer power legitimized by force becomes authoritative in international relations. What a small capital has to suggest to a larger one is well-known — nothing. The relations between capitalist powers are as unequivocal as they are empty since they are relations of sheer power. A game between one quantity and another is always tedious. Only when power is borne by a unique, irreplaceable, indissoluble force does the game of relations between the individual powers receive a human character. For, a power relationship that is based on a natural hierarchical order of forces that cannot be derived from anything else lacks any irritating element. Whereas a small quantity has no respectability in the presence of greater quantities, a natural force always maintains its dignity. Even the weaker force is a manifestation of unfathomable life. Reich leader Alfred Rosenberg declared in a speech of 13 March 1940 in Vienna that a small nation reluctantly, or never, subjects itself to a relatively large nation; but it does not renounce any of its self-respect if it places itself within the great space of a large nation and binds its destiny to the latter. ‘This nation then has the political and moral duty not to transform the spirit and culture of the smaller nation living in its living space. It must respect and be considerate of this nation — if it shows that it is creative — as a natural and historical formation.’

In the rule of democracies it is forbidden to speak of power in general. The power relations of the democratic age were also of such a sort that it was better not to speak of them. Such a brutal power as capital is — the age of imperialism is at the same time the age of capital — must do its work silently. The power relations that are produced by the natural and historically conditioned relations of effective forces do not need to be spoken of in whispers by anybody. There exists no occasion to suppress the consciousness of the presence of dependencies when these dependencies are based on the nature of things and never lead to the infringement of a natural worth and character. That a nation in which enormous spiritual and intellectual energies slumber can constitute a power that exceeds others cannot confuse one who recognizes the laws of life. If smaller nations give themselves up to the protection of larger ones they do not thereby become tributaries — like the weaker capital powers in relation to the stronger — but they maintain themselves within the limits that Nature has placed on them in an order that creates political will without damaging the respect for Nature.

Democracy claimed to be the embodiment of eternal justice. National Socialism despises false slogans. It trusts in the justice of life that teaches us to never discard or devalue battle but also never to consider it as a goal in itself. War is conducted so that a more just order can enter in the place of an empty false order. Every war has peace as its goal and purpose. Not peace at any price, and not ‘eternal’ peace, but the peace that guarantees every nation its life and its sphere of activity.

A thousand-year old epoch is coming to an end, Europe lies in the light of dawn of a new day. It no longer requires the Western ‘unity’ that resulted in such frightful wars. From a geographical concept Europe has become a political concept. The younger nations have gathered around under a new sign. The mindless movement hither and thither of power positions is forever at an end, a new order is announced. It is the idea of the nation that produces this order from itself. The living forces of the national community that up to now could develop politically only with restrictions and fragmentations through the Western universalist ideology obtain freedom of movement for the first time. The new order is not based on a new ‘ideology’ but on the recognition of those realities through which the nations were created. New political structures will arise on a firm ground that is common to all. They are quickened through the idea of the nation that is as superior to every mere ideology as reality is to imagination; they  are limited by the principle that every genuine power must correspond to the vital forces that bear them. The new order bears its  principle within itself; its inner measure is allied to the equity of life.

[1] Avarice, desire for more than one’s share, is discussed by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics as the root of injustice.