The Intellectual Legacy of Christoph Steding: Anti-individualism and the Primacy of the Political and Military

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The Reich and the Disease of European Culture —Part II: The Reich and Culture, Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, translated, introduced and annotated by Dr. Alexander Jacob
Christoph Steding
Uthwita Press

This nicely presented volume resurrects from obscurity the first English translation of a German work that provides an added methodology in analyzing the pathogens afflicting Europeans worldwide. Published posthumously in 1938 from a manuscript written in 1937 by a young German philosopher, Christoph Steding, the insights are applicable today, because the author’s premise, that of a dichotomy between state building and “neutrality” has progressed across the world in a myriad of forms.

Steding is an advocate for the Third Reich. He sees this as a development from the hard realism that premised the Second Reich of Bismarck, to which he frequently alludes. He contrasts the Bismarckian with the Wilhelmian, seeing the latter as play-acting with grandiose and childish gestures, in the manner of the “cultural nation,” which is synonymous with the “neutral nation,” as culture and aesthetics become substitutes for power by nations that have become ahistorical.

We might say that such nations are all glitz and no substance, blustering verbosely and moralizing obsessively on the world stage because they are powerless in real — political and military — terms. Such nations are what Steding calls “neutral,” and what could be called neutered. 

Neutral States

Steding traveled extensively in Switzerland, The Netherlands and Scandinavia in 1932, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, having attained his doctorate the previous year. His subject was the role played by these neutral states on Bismarck’s Reich. He visited Basel, Zurich, Bern, Geneva, The Hague, and others; centers of the “neutral states” that were to direct their ire against the “cultureless” Third Reich on the world stage.

It was on returning to Gemany in 1935 that Steding began work on The Reich and the Disease of European Culture. He saw in the Prussian spirit the antithesis of what he had observed in Scandinavia, Switzerland and The Netherlands, which accounted for the vehemence from these states directed towards the Third Reich.

Culture in Context

Steding condemns “culture.” This might seem to be falling into the stereotypical cliché of the “Nazi barbarian;” “The Hun” of both world wars—brutish and primitive, and recalls the quip falsely attributed to Göring that whenever he hears the word “culture” he wants to reach for his revolver. Steding means something specific however and relates “culture” to what he calls the “neutral states,” which he sees as lacking the serious purpose of state building.

It would be easy for antagonists to paint Steding as The Hun with a will-to-destroy, in the sense that the “Nazi” state and ideology are often portrayed, but which runs closer to Bolshevism. Rather, Steding places “culture” in historical context. He wants a “new political reality” that opens to a “new possibility of culture,” citing Bismarck as the precursor.[1] He sees Germany as having a mission to reorder Europe, the states having fallen into decay.

The National Socialist regime, far from establishing itself as hostile to the arts, pursued what it considered as rescuing the arts from the formlessness of what was called “cultural-Bolshevism.” Hitler envisaged the Third Reich as the center of European culture.[2] This was not a culture-state, however, but a political state that sought the flourishing of culture as an expression of a collective folk identity.

What Steding objects to is those which advocate the “culture state,” which politically becomes the “neutral state (we might say, the neutered state). These states have their own mission as neutering other states. The League of Nations was a primary example of the mechanism used by the neutral states to destroy those who sought resurgence.

Cultural History vs. Political History

The “culture state lives off the past,”[3] hence, Steding is opposed to the “culture historian” as distinct from the political historian. The latter does not demean culture, but to the contrary, places culture within context, returning it to origins, a constant theme in the volume.

The culture historian arises within an old nation that has exhausted its political possibilities and justifies its static existence with “neutralization.”[4] The new political history places the past in harmony with the future,[5] rather than maintaining it as a museum piece; an ethnographic curio studied within “world culture” or as a focus of nostalgia by those who have no future. Hence for Steding the focus should be on “national culture,” not “cultural history,” which is the pastime of a society that has become Fellaheen, to borrow a term from Spengler.

However, the neutral states, while recording their cultures, are detached from their origins, no longer seeing the past as a forerunner of the future. True historical writing, Steding said, examines the “stages of reality,” which are the “stages of politics.”[6] This is what Spengler undertook, his “cultural epochs” being within the context of “political epochs,” “spiritual epochs,” and “historical epochs.”

As a National Socialist, Steding adds “racial science,” used to explain Germany’s “mission” as the “ordering, nurturing center of Europe.”[7] The new Reich is inspired by “Nordic” traditions,” hence the affirmation of tradition, in contrast to the “neutralization” of history as merely a record of the past, written up as “cultural history,” and “neutral” insofar as it becomes part of a nebulous “world history,” where conflict between two New Guinean tribes is no less relevant than the Siege of Vienna.

In this racialization of Europe, the Dinaric stands in partnership with the Nordic[8] in forging new possibilities, while the Alpine has a merchant disposition and has replaced the Nordic in the rulership strata of the neutral states, The Netherlands, Scandinavia and Switzerland. The Dinaric is seen as a merchant, aligned with Jewish financial commerce.[9]

Contra Nietzsche

There are anomalies about Steding as a National Socialist philosopher, placing him in an original mode within the regime. In particular, he is scathing of Nietzsche.

While one might account for the surprising lack of totalitarian conformity in philosophical and other matters in the Third Reich by viewing National Socialism as philosophically dialectical, with a number of doctrines competing in the process of synthesis, there was no synthesis between Steding and Nietzsche. He saw Nietzsche as a representative of “culture” of the type that hindered the building of the State and the Reich. This was part of the conflict between the “neutral”, that is to say “culture” states, and the Reich.

Nietzsche was an advocate of the “culture state,” against the “political state.” He was a critic of the Reich and of Bismarck, disparaging of Germans, and more admiring of the Jews. He was part of Romanticism, as distinct from Classicism. Dionysian contra Apollonian. Steding regarded his “will-to-power” doctrine as “the hysterical theories of the impotent in impotent and unrealistic times.”[10]

The reader might recall Nietzsche’s contempt for the “State” and readily comprehend the meaning of Steding’s doctrine by contrasting it to Nietzsche’s. The latter elevates the “individual,” “Higher Man,” whose freebooting character is in opposition to the State. Nietzsche is apolitical and hence antithetical to the doctrine of Steding who is thoroughly political. Hence, Nietzsche writes that,

political and economic affairs are not worthy of being the enforced concern of society’s most gifted spirits: such a wasteful use of the spirit is at bottom worse than having none at all. They are and remain domains for lesser heads, and others than lesser heads ought not to be in the service of these workshops: better for the machinery to fall to pieces again![11]

Nietzsche is therefore a spokesman for the apolitical, and hence the “neutral” who take flight into aesthetics, in Steding’s estimation.

For Steding, by contrast, the State being realized by the Reich, formed an organic totality that encompassed all constituent parts in a system of order and law. Steding cites Aristotle that man is a “political animal.” For Nietzsche, politics was anathema because of its suppression of “noble” individuality.

For Nietzsche, “the state is a prudent institution for the protection of individuals against one another: if it is completed and perfected too far it will in the end enfeeble the individual and, indeed, dissolve him—that is to say, thwart the original purpose of the state in the most thorough way possible.”[12]

While Nietzsche is considered to epitomize the antithesis of Liberalism, his definition of the State seems to be that of the “social contract,” with his allusion to the purpose of the State being “the protection of individuals against one another.” Where he departs from Liberalism here is his rejection of the “general will” that Liberalism postulated to justify the elimination of those who break the “social contract,” and hence the institution for example of the guillotine in the interests of “public safety.” However, increasing draconianism is paradoxically where the “social contract” leads, no matter what extent of its Liberal rationalization. Bolshevism, whatever its label, is the natural development of Liberalism.

Steding sees State-building in a distinctly Prussian style, which results not in the suppression of the individual in the interests of a “social contract,” or in the name of the “general will,” as Rousseau called it, but in the citizen as a constituent part of an organic community. This is the corporative (as in corpus) state that National Socialism and the many variants of Fascism sought to enact.

Dionysian vs. Apollonian

What Steding wants to impart can be conveniently understood by his opposition to Nietzsche’s celebration of the “Dionysian” as the act of “play” that creates culture: Steding championed the Apollonian; Nietzsche the Dionysian. In The Brith of Tragedy Nietzsche describes the origins of European art in Greece as a dialectical play between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics, when once we have perceived not only by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the duplexity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: in like manner as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening reconciliations. These names we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the intelligent observer the profound mysteries of their view of art, not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively clear figures of their world of deities. It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term “Art;” till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic tragedy.[13]

Here we see what Steding means when he condemns the “play” of “aesthetics” as the disease of European culture. For Steding there is no “pairing” of the Apollonian and Dionysian in a playful creative dance, but an irreconcilable opposition that is reflected in conflict of outlook in art, state, politics, and economics.

In the Apollonian and the Dionysian there is a polarity that can be seen as underlying Steding’s theory. This polarity remains in conflict and any synthesis is a “mush,” and not the high art as Nietzsche would have it. Such is Steding’s opposition to Nietzsche, that it often seems that Nietzsche is at the foundation of Steding’s thinking, by way of opposition.

Apollo is form, and order; Dionysius, formlessness and disorder. Steding concisely critiques Nietzsche when referring to his cultural ideal as “Dionysiac enthusiasm, a lack of moderation, and restraint,” Steding uses the Medieval epoch by way of contrast, as expressing the Apollonian.[14]

The opposition between the doctrines of Steding and Nietzsche reflected the unresolved dichotomies of the regime, raising questions as to really how totalitarian the Reich should be considered. In this instance, according to Dr. Jacob, Walter Frank (head of the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany), who met Steding in 1935 and 1937, prepared Steding’s manuscript for publication and issued it in five editions, until 1944. The run of editions indicates its success and importance. On the other hand, the work was opposed by Alfred Rosenberg and critiqued by his ideological faction. Interestingly, both Steding’s work and a selection of Nietzschean aphorisms were issued to frontline soldiers.[15]

There were other figures peripheral to the “Right” or to National Socialism, who were rejected by Steding, including the Swedish novelist Strindberg, Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, and C. G. Jung, whom Steding regarded as representing the “culture” of the “neutral Swiss,” and thus as objectionable to Steding as the Jewish psychology of Freud.[16] It is evident that Steding regarded Jung as a universalist, and his psychology as having a dissolutive effect.

While it might be disputed as to whether Jung was part of the dissolutive process of psychology, with his theory of racial archetypes, on the other hand, in justifying Steding’s criticism, one could cite Jung’s 1936 essay “Wotan.” In this essay Jung explains the Third Reich psychoanalytically as an atavistic resurgence of the leader of the Wild Hunt, which would make the Reich a Dionysiac frenzy rather than an Apollonian will-to-form. This Steding, who must have been familiar with the essay, would see as evidence of Jung’s alignment with the “neutral” offensive against the Reich.      

Analogies with Spengler

There are numerous parallels between Steding and Oswald Spengler. Although Spengler died in 1936, he had already become persona non grata at the beginning of the Reich. Perhaps that accounts for a passing rebuttal of Spengler by Steding?

Stylistically, both use many metaphors and analogies. In particular, both see in Prussia the foundation of the building of the authentic State. Spengler referred to the State-building ethos as “Prussian socialism,”[17] with a stern realism that seems to accord with that of Steding. For Spengler Prussianism is service; for Steding, it is duty.

Perhaps the most salient similarity is that Steding contended that when a state focuses on “culture” it has returned to a stage of primitivity after having exhausted its historical possibilities, becoming “ahistorical,” or “outside of history.” Spengler referred to this cyclical process as returning to a Fellaheen stage, after a civilization has become etiolated, again, having exhausted its historical possibilities.[18]

Steding refers to the ahistorical phase of a late culture “dissolving itself into pure culture.” He also referred to analogous “stages,” [19] while Spengler refers to analogous “epochs.”

Spengler is alluded to briefly as among those historians engaged in the “disintegration of politics,”[20] and as being a product of his time. Steding contends that Spengler considered the past and future without an order. This seems precisely what Spengler did not do. Steding regards Spengler as among the “melancholy” culture historians. Spengler was during his time and to the present assumed to be a “pessimist,” to the extent that he wrote an essay attempting to repudiate the assumption of inevitable decay,[21] because he saw historical cycles as inexorable, while Steding referred to the “wheel of history,” and the decay of nations. Spengler’s essay “Pessimism” concludes in a manner that seems close, perhaps identical, to that of Steding:

Politics, yes, but in the hands of statesmen and not idealists. Nothing else will be of consequence. And we must never lose sight of what lies behind and ahead of us citizens of this century. Germans will never again produce a Goethe, but indeed a Caesar.[22]

This seems close to Steding. Spengler was not only a philosopher but was engaged in a vigorous political campaign against Weimar.

Steding rejects Spengler for not retracting his distance from the “national revolution,” and for not having converted to National Socialism. Spengler died persona non grata during the Reich, despite the efforts of the regime to enlist his support. Hence Steding refers to Spengler’s “tragic greatness”[23] (sic), which hardly seems a repudiation Spengler, but rather a lament that he did not join the ranks of National Socialism, which he regarded as inadequate.

 

State vs. Money

To both Spengler and Steding politics stood in opposition to economics, Steding stating that economic man is not interested in political questions. He pointed to Basel as the typical merchant city that was apolitical.[24] In relation to the Reich these “neutral” financial centers acted as negations, one might say. The subordination of money to politics brought the Reich into conflict with the international money markets.

The primacy of the economic is contrary to community building; in this instance that of the organic state. Steding refers to this contrast with the money-centered politically neutral, and ahistorical cities and states, which were involved with the literary, economic and diplomatic assault on the Reich.

Again, there is a similarity with Spengler: both see politics and economics in opposition. Spengler wrote that in the finale of a civilization, forces arise to restore vigor as a political not a cultural State, where “Money is overthrown.” In what seems analogous to Steding’s outlook, Spengler closes his magnum opus referring to History as “life and life only,” in favor of the “stronger, fuller and more self-assured life.” The “dictature of money,” “and its political weapon democracy” are broken.[25]

For both politics dominates economics; in contrast to the “freedom” ascribed to culture, where the political—the state—is subordinated to other interests.[26]

Neutral Diplomacy

For Steding the neutral states attempt to maintain relevance by focusing on the arts, especially literary arts, presenting themselves as the centers of civilization. Such a state can only politically express itself and give the appearance of relevance on the world stage, by declaring itself “neutral” and therefore presenting itself as the arbiter of disputes between states that continue to make history. One might say that the attempt to neuter states is what gives the neutral centers their relevance.[27] Their role in history is as a negation.

The Hague, Basel, and Bern, become “neutral” world centers. Woodrow Wilson’s democratic internationalism summarized in “The Fourteen Points” aimed to establish the United States as a world power by an act of negation against states maintaining or entering an historic destiny. “The Fourteen Points” were formulated to neuter the potentiality of States.

Although Steding does not use the example of Wilson or the U.S. in his critique of “neutral states” as harboring the “disease of Europe,” it is an example of how Steding’s theory as a methodology remains relevant. The U.S. was formed as a detachment from European origins and founded on ideologies that had emanated from intellectualizing among the decadent bourgeois and debased aristocracy of European salons. The U.S. was the product of the end-phase of European civilization; not the start of a new national adventure. The American ideology was based on Locke and Rousseau. The U.S. carried the “European disease” back to Europe in exaggerated forms. As a “neutral” nation it sought to neuter the European states even from the nineteenth century with its diplomatic maneuvers against Spain in Latin America; it presented itself as the arbiter of the world.

Classicism vs. Romanticism

One of the most vociferous condemnations of the Third Reich was its alleged suppression of artistic creativity—in this instance the suppression of the freedom of individual artistic expression. Here we see the spirit of the atomized man, deracinated, rootless, and his neurosis commodified on an international market. This is artistic freedom.

The Reich saw the artist as an integral part of the organic community, and art as reflecting that bond. Hence, it is easy to consider Steding as demeaning art, while it is Liberalism, and the dissolutive neutering impact of economics applied to the arts that relegates culture to a detached “play.” The Reich’s architecture and sculpture for example were in the monumental style, hard, enduring, classical, associated with names such as Arno Breker, Albert Speer, and Jospeh Thorak.

Much literary criticism has been expended on ridiculing the Reich style as barbarian and tasteless by those who champion Abstract Expressionism, Dadaism, etc., which are the liquidation of form. Thus Steding sees the “squiggles” of economic transactions and of art as part of the same disease. It is the “mush” of drunken Dionysus, frenzied, deracinated and formless, capable of quick production and marketing, like an automobile or refrigerator.

Steding alludes to classicism in referring to Rome as being called by culture-historians a “barbaric state,” Germany being called the same, and in particular Prussia.[28] Steding sees Prussia as premising the Third Reich as it did the Second under Bismarck. He defines the Prussian ethos as analogous to that of the Roman. Contrary to the condemnation of such an ethos as “barbaric,” according to the democratic conception of freedom, Steding contends that it is only the restoration of a Classical-Prussian ethos that can prevent the world from sinking into the barbaric.

Psychology

Steding saw numerous manifestations of barbarian resurgence, such as Freudian and seemingly all other forms of psychology, the aim of which was to study the abnormality of the individual.[29]

Steding states that in the Reich psychology was not regarded seriously because the preoccupation of psychology was with the individual. The focus of the Reich was with the national, folkish health, as a collectivity.

Ironically, the Reich and National Socialism as an ideology, are condemned as collective psychosis. Post-1945 the Critical Theorists use this antifascism as the foundation from which to pathologize all attachments that they and their sponsors seek to destroy.[30] Steding explains that for the Reich the health of the individual is inseparable from that of the national community. The answer of the Reich to the questions of mental health amidst Late Civilization, to borrow a phrase from Spengler, is the “removal of all diseases that arise from the separation of the individual from the whole of his nation and state.”[31] Madness arises from individualism and the destruction of social life.[32] This might also be seen as part of his objection to Nietzsche.

While Marxism claims to address the alienation caused by capitalism, it did so by destroying the very attachments that are the foundation of social life—foundations that were fractured by capitalism and by industrialism. Rather than seeking their restoration and invigoration, the bond of pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, pre-urbanized, attachments to the land, church, town, family and guild were all — without exception—targeted by Marxism, including the neo-Marxian Critical Theorists of the present era. This is why both Steding and Spengler, and others on the “Right” could state that Marxism is a product of capitalism, and not an answer to it.

Jung as a Swiss is criticized for seeing life “from the perspective of the abnormal,” and as “only corporeal, like the body.” This dismissal of Jung on such a basis might seem questionable, as Jung had famously broken with “Jewish psychiatry” over such matters 25 years previously.

Marxism

Marxism was as much part of the destructive process as finance-capital, as the relationship was recognized by Steding, referring to a common worldview in that both capitalism and Marxism sought a leveling of life. In Steding’s metaphor of “play,” while finance-capital was the “phantom dance” that strangled the life-force out of the peasantry as the basis of the organic community, Marxism was the “dance of death.” It drained the lifeblood literally, and again the peasantry was particularly victimized.

In the neutral cities, socialism thrived beside the literary arts, the latter being the most vociferous in its opposition to the Reich. In the same ahistorical current stood Rousseau, who sought to neutralize the historical “wheel of fortune” (to use one of Steding’s phrases) by the social contract, and under which many currently exiting states exist today as merely groupings of individuals legally bound for the purposes of peaceful commerce. Hence, in the socialist atmosphere of Geneva during Steding’s time he refers to the city as “Voltaire-Rousseau like.”[33] Here Rousseau was born and remains honored. Voltaire lived in Switzerland for over 20 years, up to his death. Nietzsche started his career at Basel university for a decade from 1869. In 1914 Lenin settled in Switzerland, which hosted key international socialist conferences (Zimmerwald, Kiental). The socialist leaders were writers and lawyers, and one might say, in keeping with Steding’s metaphors, that both played a dance with words. Marx us prototypical—his only regular income was journalism for The New York Daily Tribune, the largest newspaper of the time.

 

Play of Cultureulturally, as “world citizens,” and what Steding calls “deracinated,” the neutrals are arbiters of world culture. Steding sees this both culturally and politically as a process of liquification. Everything merges into “play,” which might become increasingly grandiose to compensate for lack of potency. Here, Steding again somewhat controversially vis-à-vis the (German) Right, condemns Kaiser Wilhelm II for his public displays of royal grandeur and what Steding sees as an aspect of such a character: a preoccupation with artistic and archaeological interests. The Kaiser was oblivious to the grand politics swirling around him, later claiming this as proof of his innocence of war-guilt.

This “play” of the neutrals” grabs everything within its clutch, which it deracinates, liquifies, and makes formless.

Steding had come to his conclusions through firsthand observations among those nations he sees as most representative of the “cultured,” that is to say, “neutral,” as ahistorical bystanders. Their acts of negation paradoxically did affect history, with the playacting that was typical of those states that could only assert themselves at the League of Nations, and no less now by the even more numerous states that perform at the United Nations. Hence, The Hague hosted the Court of Arbitration to impart laws that were devoid of historical meaning; Geneva: the League of Nations; Basel: the Bank of International Settlements. With such international bodies, there is the “game of debates.”[34]

Cultural History

The “cultural historian” is a primary target for Steding. Cultural historians have detached cultures from nations, and neutralized them into an amorphous mass. A “world culture” we might see as supplementing the “world citizen” and the “world state.” The Western aesthete belongs to no nation, state or folk.

Steding advocated for “political history,” explaining that “the object of political history is not man in general. Man in general is the object of ‘cultural history’… It is thereby relatively a matter of indifference if the man is a Chilean or a German, Germanic or a Negro; in this history everything is dealt with in equal manner.”[35] The “cultural historian” speaks of “humanity” instead of “nationalities.”[36]

Into this “mush” (sic) the Reich throws the “lighting of Apollo.”[37] It strikes at the “Dionysiac” which “generates formless mush,” Steding cites the post-political epochs of classical Greece and Rome as examples of where the Dionysiac ascended, resulting in “syncretic religions” and “ecstatic cults.” That is to say, the Dionysian symbolized the decay of the Classical civilizations.[38] 

Banking and Aesthetics

The “play” of “culture” as in politics puts its impress also on banking, by which money becomes a symbol designating play. This sham of international finance we might compare metaphorically to juggling. It is a juggling with figures. There is nothing tangible about it; nothing creative, and here again is the “neutrality” of “high culture;” the rendering of money as “the phantom dance of figures,” “mysterious numerical formulae” “etching” on “flat surfaces” and targeting “real life”—“the working peasants and laborers to the game of squiggles.”[39]

Steding notes a relationship between those involved with the game of art and the game of finance. He refers to Aby Moritz Warburg, art historian and cultural theorist, a scion of the international banking family. Steding writes that Aby Warburg sought by means of scholarship to achieve what his brothers achieved by banking. Art becomes a “transaction” like money.[40] Aby Warburg, the art scholar, and Max, Felix, and Paul, his banker brothers, were all agents of formlessness, internationalization, and deracination. It is of added interest that Aby Warburg entered into an intellectual collaboration with fellow cultural theorist James Loeb,[41] a scion of the Loeb banking family, Paul Warburg being a partner in Kuhn, Loeb& Co.

In seeking to establish a “state” to fulfil an historical destiny the Third Reich intrinsically conflicted with those numerous and only seemingly disparate, but actually intertwined, aspects that Steding calls collectively the “disease of European culture.” The Reich aimed to purge the social organism of these maladies in art, politics, and banking. Of the latter, we come to a factor that is generally overlooked but of central importance in understanding the conflicts of the era. The organic state was impossible to create without relegating the role of money from master to servant. This necessitated a creative role for finance, in opposition to the “the phantom dance” that destroys “real life.” Hence the Reich laws on banking and trade that liberated the workers and the peasants from the thrall of usury, and the German state from the dictates of international finance.[42] 

Post-1945 Kulturkampf

The United States accords with Steding’s theory in presenting itself on the world stage as an international artistic icon, an arbiter of taste, from which the new in the arts emanate, aligned with global marketing and diplomacy—e.g., Abstract Expressionism and Jazz used as propaganda by Washington during the Cold War epoch; “Hip Hop diplomacy” (sic) at the present time).

Steding’s theory on the use of the arts as a means of neutralization, has continuing relevance when we consider that in the aftermath of World War II the U.S. embarked on a “cultural cold war.” Much money was expended in recruiting mainly Leftwing literati into the U.S. orbit.[43] Their primary organ was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, chaired by the veteran Sidney Hook, the New York Intellectual and a central figure on the anti-Stalinist left who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. The founding conference significantly was in Berlin in 1950, drawing writers from across Europe under CIA auspices. Steding would have seen this use of aesthetics, in which Abstract Expressionism and Jazz played significant roles, as a continuation of the “disease of Europe” brought back to the Occident where it had been temporarily purged. Oligarchs played significant roles as arbiters of Europe’s cultural taste, the Rockefeller Museum of Modern Art being a primary factor.

Steding’s resurrection from the Memory Hole thanks to this translation by Dr. Jacob is therefore a service not only as a matter of historical interest (as a curio of the Reich) but provides a useful tool with which to examine the present, where world diplomacy is played out on an international stage, as it was during Steding’s time, and involves the same “mush” of fracture, and dissolution, now called “globalization.” As in post-1918, in post-1945 the Dionysiac was unleashed over the world, in a chaotic dance that even renders “genders” as literally neutered, and all other organic identities, as subjects of dissolution. The battleplanes remain between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

[1] Steding, 206.

[2] F. Spotts, Hitler & the Power of Aesthetics (Random House, 2002).

[3] Steding, 210.

[4] Steding, 220.

[5] Steding, 202.

[6] Steding, 238.

[7] Steding, 229.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Steding, 230.

[10] Steding, 211.

[11] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1880] 1997), 108.

[12] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 113.

[13] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), (1).

[14] Steding, 58.

[15] F. Nietzsche, Sword of the Spirit [1940] (1st English edition, D. H. Wright, London: Black House Publishing 2018).

[16] Steding, 155.

[17] Spengler, “Prussian Socialism (1919)” in Bolton (ed.) Oswald Spengler: Prussian Socialism & Other Essays (London: Black House Publishing, 2018).

[18] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West (London: George Allen & Unwin, [1928] 1971), Vol. II, 105.

[19] Steding, 152.

[20] Steding, 307.

[21] Spengler, “Pessimism” (1921) in Oswald Spengler: Prussian Socialism & Other Essays, 127-142.

[22] Ibid., 142.

[23] Steding, 311.

[24] Steding, 45.

[25] Spengler, The Decline of The West, Vol. II, 506, 507.

[26] Steding, 46.

[27] The etymology of neutral is neuter, Latin meaning “neither one nor the other.”

[28] Steding, 51.

[29] Steding, 52.

[30] K. R. Bolton, The Perversion of Normality (London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2011), 153-184.

[31] Steding, 272.

[32] Steding, 272-272, citing Hegel, “Proposals for the Reform of the German Constitution” (1802).

[33] Steding, 155.

[34] Steding, 156.

[35] Steding, 246.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Steding, 247.

[38] Steding, 262.

[39] Steding, 156.

[40] Steding, 159.

[41] D. McEwan, Studies on Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing (Routledge, 2023).

[42] K. R. Bolton, “The Myth of the Big Business-Nazi Axis,” Journal of Inconvenient History, September 4, 2015, https://codoh.com/library/document/the-myth-of-the-big-business-nazi-axis/

[43] Francis Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA & the World of Arts & Letters (New Press, 2001).

Joseph Goebbels’ Battle for Berlin: The Beginning (1934)

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Translated and with an introduction by Alexander Jacob

Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) was born in Rheydt, near Düsseldorf, in a Roman Catholic family and studied literature and history at the universities of Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg and Munich. He obtained his doctorate in philology from the University of Heidelberg in 1921. He became interested in Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist movement from 1924, when Hitler was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. Goebbels first worked for the socialist-minded Gregor Strasser, who headed the north-western districts of Germany, as editor of the party newspaper and secretary of the regional party offices. In 1926, When Hitler decided to dissolve the north-western district offices of Gregor Strasser, Goebbels was appointed Gauleiter of Berlin.

Goebbels produced a newspaper for the Berlin Gau called Der Angriff in 1927 and developed his public speaking skills in the several mass meetings organized by the NSDAP. However, the party itself was banned by the Jewish Police Commissioner of Berlin, Dr. Bernhard Weiß, on 5 May, 1927. Weiß was the object of several sharp critiques penned by Goebbels, whom Weiß repeatedly sued and prevented from speaking at National Socialist meetings. The Berlin ban on the party was, however, lifted for the election campaign of May 1928 and Goebbels himself was elected National Socialist representative in the Reichstag. In 1930, Hitler appointed Goebbels propaganda leader of the National Socialist party, a position formerly occupied by Strasser, who left the party that year.

In 1932, Goebbels published an account of the party’s struggles for political victory in the German capital in his Kampf um Berlin, Band I: Der Anfang.  This was the first volume of a planned two-volume work. However, a second volume was not published, and when the work appeared in 1934 in the Zentralverlag der NSDAP (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger), it continued to be called Kampf um Berlin: Der Anfang. It contained illustrations by ‘Mjölnir’ (Hans Herbert Schweitzer).

Goebbels’ commitment to the National Socialist movement is clearly evident in the concluding remarks of his Introduction to the work:

The one who wrote these pages was involved in a significant and highly responsible way in the course of things. He therefore represents the party in every sense of the word. He only cherishes the hope of recording in this presentation, from the heart, what was placed as a heavy responsibility on it during the five-year long battle. It should be for those who participated in and fought for the glorious rise of the Berlin movement a consolation and incentive, for those who stood aside doubtful and indifferent an admonition and reminder to their conscience, and for those who opposed our victorious march a warning and declaration of war.

Ch.8, Part 1: “Agitation and Persecution”

The victorious course of the young National Socialist movement in the Reich capital had now temporarily received a short and sudden end through the party ban declared by the Police Commissioner. The public effectiveness of the party was prohibited, the organization was smashed, the propaganda crippled, the bands of followers scattered in the winds and every direct contact of the leadership with the party comrades broken off. The prohibition of the party was implemented by the authorities with a bullying severity. It was of course not declared on the grounds of the law of the republic and therefore impossible to penalise individual transgressions with harsh financial and imprisonment penalties. It was based on the Prussian Civil Code dating already from the time of Frederick the Great and was, on well considered grounds, motivated not by political but by penal code arguments. It was imposed by the Police and not by the Ministry and was for that reason easier and less dangerous to circumvent than a political ban that is decreed normally with the threat of severe political penalties.

Already in the ban the Police Commissioner had overstepped his authority in a flagrant manner. He had declared the ban for Berlin and the Margraviate of Brandenburg even though he clearly lacked any authority for that, at least as regards Brandenburg. The Police Commissioner could at best prohibit the party for Berlin; and if, in justifying it, it were said that the party had become guilty of punishable offences, one could in this case—presuming that that corresponded to the facts—rightly speak of a party ban only if the public peace and security were endangered by the continued existence of the party.

But that did not seriously come into question. Our party comrades had been attacked by political opponents and had put up a fight. They had thereby claimed for themselves also the most original right that pertains to a citizen, the right to self-defence. Our people had never been the attackers but always only the attacked. Nowhere could one speak of excesses on our side. We used brute force only to the extent that we defended with it our life and our health.

Besides, nowhere could the evidence be brought forth that the party itself had encouraged such activity or taken responsibility for it; that every party comrade should save his skin where that was necessary was clearly understandable and did not have anything at all to with the party as such. The Police Commissioner was also perhaps fully aware of the tenuousness and indefensibility of his legal argument in the establishment of the ban. We immediately lodged complaints against the ban with the Prefecture and later with the Upper Administrative Court. But the trial was protracted—through the fact that the Police Commissioner constantly sought a delay of the deadline for the procurement of the necessary materials—for years and came to a verdict only when the ban had already long been revoked. The Upper Administrative Court then tried to hide behind a small legal ruling which would apparently have turned out to be devastating for the Police Commissioner since it stated that the deadline had not been maintained and the complainant lacked the necessary standing for a suit. But even the fact that the Police Commissioner was not in a position to make available the necessary materials for the trial was evidence enough that the party ban represented a political act and had little to do with the objective conduct of his office.

In the meanwhile, however, all conceivable chicaneries were effected against us. They sought to fully stop the pubic activity of the party and to rob it too of its last financial means through the destruction of the organization. We still had at that time no party press in Berlin. The propagandistic work of the movement consisted almost exclusively in the organization of mass meetings. One could not, even with the broadest interpretation of the clauses, forbid canvassing for any worldview under any name in the Reich capital. There was always the possibility of convening meetings under assumed names in which people spoke about National Socialism. At first we tried that too, but the Police Commissioner struck back and forbade all meetings on a case by case basis under the provision that they disturbed public peace and safety and were to be seen as the continuation of a forbidden organization.

That was clear arbitrariness but it did not fail to achieve its aim. Therewith it was made impossible to bring into public discussion the concept of National Socialism; the police authorities intervened immediately when there was even the remotest reference to it.

Our next attempt sought to allow our representatives in parliament to speak before the Berlin electorate. On me personally a prohibition of public speaking was soon imposed. In my place an entire series of parliamentary representatives of the party came into action. Mass meetings were convened in which our delegates spoke. There, comments were made on the contemporary questions of politics and naturally the opportunity was not missed to appropriately denounce the persecutory methods of the Berlin police against the NSDAP.

The prohibition of public speaking affected me personally very badly. Indeed, I had no other possibility of maintaining the necessary contact with my party comrades. We still lacked the press with which I could conduct agitations with my pen. All meetings in which I wished to speak were forbidden. If representatives were to appear in our meetings, these too were very often met with express bans at the last minute and the party comrades that had remained faithful were thereby driven into a steadily increasing fury and indignation.

It was not the fact that we were persecuted, but how and with what methods the movement was suppressed and beaten down produced in our ranks a mood of hatred and anger that occasioned great concern. The Police Commissioner apparently derived pleasure in always forbidding our meetings at the last moment, clearly with the transparent intention of removing from the party the possibility of informing the meeting attendees of the ban in time. Most often hundreds and thousands set out and encountered at the meeting venue only closed doors and a tight cordon of police officials.

Therewith it was made easy for numerous informers and provocateurs to instigate the leaderless masses and to incite them to assaults against the police and political dissidents. Often small attack squads separated themselves from the enraged masses that sought their political pleasure by going to the Kurfürstendamm Street and giving vent to their rage by boxing and beating harmless passers-by with a Jewish appearance.

That was naturally presented in the press in the most demagogic manner into an accusation of the party, which was however banned and therefore had no possibility of influencing its masses of followers in any way. The public space resounded with the noise and outcry of the threatened Jewry. They sought to produce the impression in the entire country that pogroms against the Jewish population were organized every evening in Berlin in the midst of the most profound peace, that the NSDAP had established a secret headquarters from which these excesses were organized.

Put an end to these Kurfürstendamm riots!

It must be made impossible that the brutal acts of the National Socialists on the Kurfürstendamm become a customary entertainment of these youths. Berlin West belongs to the most prestigious areas of Berlin, its discrediting by such despicable, base scenes gives Berlin the worst reputation. Now that the preference of the swastika group for the Kurfürstendamm is now sufficiently known to the police it must crack down not merely after riots that have taken place but take precautionary measures beforehand on every day of a National Socialist rowdy meeting.

Thus did the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag write on 13 May 1927.

The blame for these events, insofar as they actually took place, was borne solely by the Police Commissioner. It was in his power to give us the possibility of meeting with our mass of followers and of influencing them in a pacifying manner. But since he removed this from us on every occasion, deliberately or not, he caused precisely those excesses of the political battle that were the necessary consequences of such a procedure.

Perhaps he was also quite glad to see that matters developed in this manner. There were not sufficient grounds to justify the further prohibition of the party to the public. So they sought to create an alibi for themselves. The public had to point a finger at us. The opinion had to consolidated that this party was only a riotous collection of criminal elements and that the authorities only did their duty when they kept them away from every further possibility of life.

The National Socialist movement is centred like no other party on the idea of the Führer. In it, the Führer and his authority are everything. It lies in the hands of the Führer to maintain the party in discipline or to let it sink into anarchy. If one takes away the leaders from the party and thereby destroys the fount of authority that its organization maintains, then one makes the masses leaderless and stupidities are always the consequence. We could no longer influence the masses. The masses became rebellious and one could not in the end complain that they proceeded to bloody excesses.

The ruling system in Germany can in general, and on the whole, be thankful—as absurd as that may sound—to the National Socialist movement that it exists. The rage and indignation against the consequences of the insane reparations policy conducted since 1918 is so great that, if they were not subdued and disciplined by our movement, they would in the shortest time plunge Germany into a bloodbath. The National Socialist agitation has not led our nation into a catastrophe, as the professional catastrophic politicians would repeatedly like people to believe. We have only recognized the catastrophe in the right time and have never made a secret of our opinions on the chaotic situation in Germany. It is not the one who calls a catastrophe a catastrophe who is a catastrophic politician but the one who causes it. And one cannot indeed say that of us. We had never yet participated in any government coalition. We had, as long as the movement existed, stood in the opposition and fought the course of German politics in the most severe and relentless manner. We had predicted from the beginning the consequences that began now to be apparent in ever clearer contours on the political horizon.

Our insights were so natural and compelling that the masses sympathised increasingly with them. So long as we had the onrush of the people against the reparations policy in control and rendered it extremely disciplined at least the danger did not exist that the waves of rage did not batter the ruling government in forms that could no longer be controlled. Without doubt, the National Socialist agitation was, and is, the spokesman for the national adversary. But, so long as it is tolerated, one can control the rage of the populace and thereby ensure that it is expressed in legal and tolerable methods.

If one takes away from the people the representatives and interpreters of their suffering, then one opens the door to anarchy; for, it is not we who declare the most radical and ruthless verdict on the ruling government. More radically and ruthlessly than us do the masses themselves think and also the small man of the people who has not learnt how to mince his words, who speaks his mind, and expresses his increasing rage in increasingly sharper forms.

The National Socialist agitation is in a way a safety outlet for the ruling class. Through this safety outlet the indignation of the masses finds some ventilation. If one blocks it, then rage and hatred will be driven back into the masses themselves and seethe there in uncontrollable swirls.

Political criticism is always oriented towards the failures of the system that is to be criticised. If the mistakes are of a slight sort and if one cannot withhold goodwill from the one who makes them, the criticism will always be conducted in civilised and fair ways. But if the mistakes are of a fundamental sort, if they threaten the very bases of the state system, and if, beyond that, one has reason to suspect that those who commit them are not marked by goodwill at all but, on the contrary, place their own persons above the state and the common good, then the criticism will also become more massive and unrestrained. The radicalism of the agitation stands always in direct proportion to the radicalism that the ruling system is guilty of. If the mistakes made are so disastrous that they threaten finally to plunge the people and the economy, indeed the entire national culture, into ruin, then the opposition can no longer be satisfied with denouncing the symptoms of the disease and demanding their removal, then it must proceed to attack the system itself. It is then radical insofar as it searches out the mistakes to their roots and strives to remove them radically.

Before the prohibition of the party, we had our masses of followers firmly under control. The Police Commissioner had the possibility of supervising in the sharpest manner the party in its organization and propaganda. Every party-political excess could be immediately and directly punished. It had now become different after the party ban. The party itself did not exist any longer, its organization was destroyed, one could no longer make the leaders of the party responsible for what took place in their name, since every possibility of influencing their followers had been taken away from them. I was now a civilian and did not in any way have any intention of assuming the responsibility for the bad concomitant effects of the political battle that the Police Commissioner produced through his repeated chicaneries. In addition, it happened that the Jewish tabloid journals seemed to derive special pleasure in increasingly attacking me personally, when I had no possibilities at all of defending myself against attacks of a political and personal sort, perhaps in the hope of alienating the masses—with whom I had lost all contact—from the movement and from me and to making them therewith vulnerable to the shrewd demagogic blandishments of, especially, Communist agents.

I experienced then for the first time what it means to be the chosen favorite of the Jewish press. There was simply nothing that they did not complain about with regard to me, and everything was, so to speak, dreamed up. Obviously, I did not have the time or the inclination to undertake anything at all against it. The uninitiated person often wonders why National Socialist leaders react so seldom to Jewish slander with legal means. Surely, one can send in corrections to the tabloids, one can sue them for defamation, one can take them to court.

But that is easier said than done. In some Berlin newspaper a lie appears and then makes its rounds through hundreds of provincial newspapers that are dependent on it. Every single provincial newspaper adds its own commentary to it and, if one begins making corrections, there is no end to it. That is precisely what the Jewish press wishes to achieve. For, in the invention of lies, the Jew, whom Schopenhauer indeed characterised as the master of lies, is inexhaustible. Hardly has one corrected a false piece of news today than it is tomorrow surpassed by a new one and, if one proceeds against the second lie, who can prevent such a reptilian press from inventing a third one the day after tomorrow? And then go to court? Are National Socialist leaders there only to drag themselves around to criminal courts against Jewish libellers? In all cases, the state attorneys avoid interventions in our favor stating a lack of public interest. One is directed to private suits. That costs much time and even more money. One would have to spend an entire life and huge sums of money in order to restore one’s reputation before the courts of the republic against Jewish hacks.

Such a trial takes at least half a year, and often much longer. In the meantime, the public has long forgotten the object of the trial; the Jewish hack then simply declares before the judge that he has been the victim of a mistake and gets at most a penalty of fifty to seventy marks for it, and that is naturally gladly compensated to him by the publishers. But the newspaper itself issues on the next day a report about the trial from which the reader must suppose that the Jewish liar was absolutely in the right, that perhaps there must have been something true about the slander, which can readily be concluded from the fact that the court had let the accused off with such a lenient penalty. And thereby the Jewish press has indeed achieved everything that it wanted to achieve. It has first of all discredited and tarnished the honor of the political opponent before the public; it has robbed him of time and money. It makes a triumph out of the defeat in court, and sometimes an insensitive judge, granting the protection of eligible interests, even helps the libeller to go scot-free.

There are no suitable means to counteract personal libel by the Jewish press. A man in public life must be clear of the fact that, when he tackles a criminal politics, the latter very soon defends itself with the cry, “Stop the thief!” and now tries to replace the lack of powerful objective evidence with personal slanders. He must therefore develop a thick skin, must be entirely indifferent to Jewish lies, and above all, in times when he strikes with hard political blows, be cold-blooded and strong-nerved. He must know that every time that he becomes dangerous to the enemy the enemy attacks him personally. Then he will never experience unpleasant surprises. On the contrary! In the end, he is even glad that he is insulted and besmirched by the tabloids, for that is for him, finally, the most infallible proof that he is on the right track and has wounded the enemy in his vulnerable spot.

I was able to reach this stoic point of view only with difficulty. In the early times of my Berlin work I had to suffer extremely under attacks of the press. I took all of it much too seriously and often despaired that there was clearly no possibility of maintaining one’s political honor pure and clean in the political battle. In time that changed fully. Especially the excessive number of press attacks killed in me all sensitivity to them. When I knew or suspected that the press besmirched me personally, I read no Jewish newspaper for weeks and thereby preserved my calm deliberation and cold determination. If one reads the lie-machine some weeks after it is printed, it totally loses all significance. Then one sees how empty and purposeless all this ado is; and above all one gradually obtains thereby also the ability to perceive the true backgrounds of such press campaigns.

Today there are in Germany, in general, only two possibilities of becoming famous: either toady utterly to the Jew, if I may say so, or fight him ruthlessly and with all severity. While the former comes into question only for representatives of democratic civilisation and career-minded intellectual chameleons, we National Socialists have decided on the latter. And this decision should also be carried out with complete logicality. Up to now we have not had to complain about success. In his senseless fear of our massive attacks, the Jew has lost all his composure. When it comes to harshness, he is just a stupid devil. One often exaggerates, especially in the circles of the German intelligentsia, the so-called farsightedness, cleverness and intellectual acumen of the Jew. The Jew always judges clearly only when he is in possession of all instruments of power. If a political opponent accosts him severely and ruthlessly and makes it quite clear that now it is a matter of life and death, then the Jew immediately loses all calmness and sobriety of deliberation. He is— and this perhaps represents the distinguishing mark of his character—infused to the depths of his personality with a feeling of his own inferiority. One could even describe the Jew as the repressed incarnation of the inferiority complex. One therefore does not wound him more deeply than when one recognises him in his essential character. Call him a scoundrel, a rascal, liar, criminal, murderer and killer—that will hardly affect him inwardly. Look at him in the eye for a while and then say to him: ‘You’re just a Jew!’ And you will notice with astonishment how unsure, embarrassed, and self-conscious he immediately becomes.

Herein lies the explanation of the fact that prominent Jews always resort to criminal justice when they are called Jews. It will never occur to a German to complain that he has been called a German, for the German always feels only honor, and never shame, in membership in his ethnos. The Jew complains when he is designated as a Jew because he is convinced in his innermost self that that is something despicable and that there can be no worse insult than to be designated as such.

We have never occupied ourselves much with opposing Jewish libel. We knew that we were being slandered. We adapted ourselves in time to that and did not see our task in the refutation of individual lies but in the undermining of the credibility of Jewish tabloid journalism.

And we succeeded fully in that too in the course of the years. If one lets a lie remain undisturbed, then it will soon fizzle out in its own excessive charge. The Jew nowadays invents in his desperation such outrageous insults and perfidies that even the most credulous educated philistine is no longer taken in by them.

‘They lie! They lie!’ With this battle-cry did we confront the Jewish cannonade of filth. Gradually we withdrew ourselves from the entire libellous heap of individual lies in which one could concretely point to the baseness of the tabloid journals. And from that we concluded: Do not believe anything from them! They lie because they must lie, because they have nothing else to bring forward.

It produces a grotesque effect and is nauseating when a Jewish tabloid professes that its mission is to snoop around the private lives of National Socialist leaders in order to find there some dark facts. A race that for two thousand years has brought upon itself a veritable Atlas-burden of guilt and crime, especially against the German people, really possesses no mandate to venture on the cleansing of public life among decent men. First of all, it is not a matter for debate whether occasionally a National Socialist leader conducted himself in this or that manner. The sole matter of debate is who has led the German nation into its unspeakable misfortune, who paved the way to this misfortune with catch-phrases and hypocritical promises, looked on with folded arms when an entire nation threatened to sink into chaos. When this question has been solved and the guilty have been brought to justice, then one may research where we failed.

We cannot bypass without comment the cowardly lack of character with which the bourgeois press up to the present day bows down without resistance to the shameless journalistic activity of Jewish hack writers. The bourgeois press is otherwise always ready at hand when it is necessary to wipe out a nationalist politician or to denounce so-called excesses of the National Socialist press. Compared to the Jewish tabloid journalism, on the other hand, it is of an incomprehensible, even irresponsible broadmindedness. They are afraid of the publicist-sharpness and ruthlessness of the tabloid journalism. They clearly have no desire to enter into the danger zone. With regard to the Jew, they are filled with an insurmountable inferiority complex and leave no stone unturned to live in peace with him.

If the bourgeois press plucks up courage even once to mention a mild critical word against Jewish libellers that is already a lot. Most often it perseveres in staid indifference and polite silence and withdraws into the safety of the saying, “One who handles filth dirties himself.”