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.

 

Johann von Leers on Spengler’s geopolitical system and National  Socialism

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was, in the thirties of  the last century, already famous for his major work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1918,1922), which presented a panoramic view of civilisations as social entities that are born, grow and decay like biological organisms. However, Spengler’s portrayal of World War I as an inevitable change in the cycle of civilisations was rather suspect in the eyes of German nationalists. What was worse was that Spengler’s philosophy of history was an essentially pessimistic one since, according to his doctrine of cycles of civilisations, the West was doomed to decline and  the only solution to the inevitable dissolution was a static adherence to one’s own cultural superiority. Spengler’s conservatism did not really value the maintenance of tradition so much as it wished to accustom Germans to the inevitable transformation of world history into a cosmopolitanism that would eventually be ruled by a universal Caesar. Spengler’s Caesarism may seem prophetic in our century with the advent of the Trumpism in the United States but it was not a notion that could be welcomed by National Socialists.

In 1931 Spengler published another work on Der Mensch und die Technik (Man and Technology) which criticized the spirit of industrialization and predicted that it would lead to the encroachment of Western civilization by ‘coloured races’ that would soon be acquiring the new technological expertise necessary to compete economically and politically with the White nations. All this seemed to accord with National Socialist ideas, except that Spengler was directly opposed to the National Socialist emphasis on race as a determinative biological reality.

The reason for Spengler’s refusal  to accept the racialist biology of the National Socialists was that he was himself of partly Jewish ancestry. Spengler’s maternal great-grandfather, Friedrich Wilhelm Grantzow, a tailor’s apprentice in Berlin, had three children out of wedlock with a Jewish woman named Bräunchen Moses ( c. 1769–1849) whom he later married, on 26 May 1799. Of the five children the couple had after their marriage, Gustav Adolf Grantzow (1811–1883) was Oswald Spengler’s maternal grand-father. Given such a background it is not surprising that Spengler did not join the National Socialist party and, when he personally met Hitler in 1933, he reported that he had been unimpressed.

It may be recalled also that Spengler’s economic discussions in his various works do not refer much to the Jewish bases of modern economics. In his work  Preussentum und Sozialismus (Prussianism and Socialism, 1919), for example,  Spengler constantly refers to Marx chiefly as a student and product of English society: ‘Everything that Marx has to say with grudging admiration about “capitalistic society” refers principally to English, and not to a universal, economic instinct.’[1] Spengler’s tacit admiration of Jews is also clear in the Untergang, Vol. II, where he talks of the ‘European Jew with his immense race-energy and his thousand years of ghetto life’, while in Jahre der Entscheidung he praises Disraeli as one of few statesmen who “possessed of the true political instinct, see what is going on and whither it is leading and exert themselves to prevent, moderate, or divert accordingly.”[2]

Spengler’s last major work Jahre der Entscheidung published in 1933 indeed contained a harsh repudiation of the National Socialist racialist emphases. Arthur Zweiniger wrote a critique of Spengler’s work in 1933 called Spengler im Dritten Reich and this was followed by Leers’ Spenglers weltpolitisches Sytem und der Nationalsozialismus in 1934.

Johann von Leers (1902–1965) was a National Socialist party member from 1929 and was invited by Goebbels in 1933 to work in the propaganda ministry where he produced several books and booklets until 1945 including a study of the Weimar Republic,  14 Jahre Judenrepublik. Die Geschichte eines Rassenkampfes  (1933) and books on National Socialism, Adolf Hitler (1933), Entwicklung des Nationalsozialismus von seinem Anfang bis zur Gegenwart (The development of National Socialism from its beginning to the present,1936) and Jewry, Judentum und Gaunertum (Jewry and the Underworld, 1940), Juden hinter Stalin (Jews behind Stalin, 1941), Die Verbrechernatur der Juden (The criminal nature of the Jews,1944), etc.

While Leers was a racialist like other National Socialists he did not subscribe to Spengler’s narrow view of Aryanism that considered even southern Italians and southern Spaniards as ‘coloureds’. He in fact wrote a perceptive article in 1942 in the journal Die Judenfrage on ‘Judentum und Islam als Gegensätze’[3] which revealed his support of Arab nationalism.

After the war, Leers fled from Germany to Italy, where he lived for five years. In 1950, he emigrated to Argentina, where he edited a journal called Der Weg. Later, in 1956 Leers emigrated to Egypt accepting an invitation by Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian mufti who had been supportive of the Third Reich. Under al-Hussein’s influence Leers converted to Islam and called himself Omar Amin. During the last years of his life Leers served as head of Nasser’s Israeli propaganda unit in Egypt.

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Leers’ anti-Spenglerian work is significant not only for its criticism of Spenglerian historical determinism but also for its revelation of Spengler’s cosmopolitan capitalism. Spengler’s conservatism is, according to Leers, the opposite of the National Socialist concern for the workers of Germany. Leers’ arguments thus remind us of the socialist aspect of National Socialism that was included in the name of the party (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party)—largely ignored by modern historians of the movement.

Leers is, like most National Socialists, opposed to the historical determinism of Spengler’s philosophy of history. Leers points out that this notion was indeed not original with Spengler  since the Russian naturalist and pan-Slavist historian Nikolay Danilevsky (1822–1885) had already propounded such a theory—with greater clarity than Spengler—in his Russia and Europe (1869).  Leers also gives the further example of Karl Marx as a proponent of historical determinism in his theory of the dialectical evolution of societies through economic stimuli. The defect of these historical determinist theories, according to Leers, is that both Marx and Spengler consider history independent of the national character of the people who undergo civilizational changes. Like Hitler, Leers considers the history of the Aryan and German people as dependent on their special character and free from any cyclical developmental processes that are common to all civilisations. Like Hitler too, Leers maintains that miscegenation is what causes the decay of a civilization and not any cyclical principle within a nation as an ‘organism’.

Leers subscribes to the fundamental National Socialist view that the Aryan is the most creative of races and that because of his idealistic readiness to sacrifice his individual ego for the betterment of his community. As Hitler had expressed it in Mein Kampf (1925):

This self-sacrificing will to give one’s personal labor and if necessary one’s own life for others is most strongly developed in the Aryan. The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities as such, but in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community. In him the instinct of self-preservation has reached the noblest form, since he willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.

This idealistic attitude ennobles the concept of ‘work’ itself:

Now, for example, [the Aryan] no longer works directly for himself, but with his activity articulates himself with the community, not only for his own advantage, but for the advantage of all. The most wonderful elucidation of this attitude is provided by his word ‘work,’ by which he does not mean an activity for maintaining life in itself, but exclusively a creative effort that does not conflict with the interests of the community. Otherwise he designates human activity, in so far as it serves the instinct of self-preservation without consideration for his fellow men, as theft, usury, robbery, burglary, etc. …

Every worker, every peasant, every inventor, official, etc., who works without ever being able to achieve any happiness or prosperity for himself, is a representative of this lofty idea, even if the deeper meaning of his activity remains hidden in him.

And this is also, according to Hitler, the crucial difference between the Aryan and the Jew:

For if the Jewish people’s instinct of self-preservation is not smaller but larger than that of other peoples, if his intellectual faculties can easily arouse the impression that they are equal to the intellectual gifts of other races, he lacks completely the most essential requirement for a cultured people, the idealistic attitude.

Hitler’s aversion to Russian Bolshevism is also due to the Jewish domination of the Revolution in Russia:

where he killed or starved about thirty million people with positively fanatical savagery, in part amid inhuman tortures, in order to give a gang of Jewish journalists and stock exchange bandits domination over a great people.

Like Hitler Leers combines the notion of racial distinction with that of German socialism:

[Spengler] does not consider and recognize that the workers, that the millions of our industrial workers, exactly like the other strata of the nation, are bearers of the legacy of the race, of the future of the nation. He sees in them — as in the dusty pages of Manchester Liberalism — only increasingly expensive devourers of the revenue of production.

Leers thus notes the principal difference between the National Socialist ideology and the Spenglerian:

Behind Oswald Spengler’s heroic slogan is hidden an icy contempt for the people, behind the  seduction of his pseudo-Prussian slogans appears the rule of a leader whom he envisages as detached from the people — in the place of Adolf Hitler a Caesar who will force the German workers to  the living standards of negro workforces, in the place of a reliable cooperation of productive nations the unrestrained rule of ‘economic leaders’ and Caesars,  in the place of the Nordic light-bearing race the beast of prey – that is the Spenglerian idea.

As an anti-socialist Spengler was particularly angered by the increased wages of workers that have resulted from recent workers’ agitations, for that, according to him, debilitates the national economy:

Spengler is of the conviction that the ‘high’ wages of the German workers, especially of the ‘white workers’, make the product made here uncompetitive on the world market. He is of the conviction that these wares burdened with ‘high’ wages cannot be maintained in comparison to the competition of non-European continents.

Leers particularly criticizes Spengler for his attack on the trade unions along with his contempt of the workers in general:

The existence of the alliances of working men against the amalgamation of money, the existence of a desire to rise among the creative men of the German nation that manifested itself even under a Marxist form, enraged Spengler. … For him it was not a matter of the creation of a German Socialism. For him it was not a matter of the incorporation of the working class into the nation, for him indeed it was not a matter of a real national community.

However, Leers fails to note what Hitler had noted in Mein Kampf, that the trade unions were dominated by Jews. As Hitler had remarked,

the Jewish leadership in trade-union affairs remains uncontested. … In keeping with all his inner rapacious brutality, he at once teaches the trade-union movement the most brutal use of violence.

Nevertheless, Leers endorses the trade union idea as one that unites the workers against the capitalists, who are for Leers the chief enemy:

It is not the worker or even his Marxist leaders who are solely to blame but the guilt of the propertied strata, the guilt  of their capitalist leaders —- who have also conducted an equally resolute class struggle but were just cunning enough not to speak much of it — is at least as great.

By contrast, Leers points out that Spengler is, in general, in favour of the capitalists:

Here the counter-revolution is being ideologically prepared! Here the weapons are being forged to set up, in the place of a state of creative work, of National Socialism and the German community, a tyrannical state of big capital with a Caesarean leadership supported by mercenaries and without any connection to the vital national community.

Spengler is thus opposed to German socialism as much as he is to Bolshevism:

In their social rise, in their will to rise socially he sees only a burdening of the ‘national economy’. If the youth of the nation, even of the strata not belonging to the industrial workers, consider the solution of the workers’ question as a moral duty and the economic uplift of the industrial worker as their comradely obligation, Oswald Spengler wishes to see therein ‘half Bolshevist’ currents.

Spengler’s opposition to socialism is so extreme that he even opposes the Youth movements in National Socialist Germany as being ‘Asiatic’ forms of collectivism that go against the individualistic character of the Germans:

It is the impersonal Asiatic collectivism of the East, the spirit of great levelling in combination with the Western levée en masse of 1792.

Spengler’s well-known criticism of parliamentarism is also seen to be not a tool of socialist thought such as that of the National Socialists but a bourgeois ruse wherewith capitalism could entrench itself in the state at the expense of the national community and especially of its workers. Spengler is indeed opposed to any form of state socialism which he considers as differing little from Communism. As he said:

[The economic leader] wants economic State Socialism, the suppression of private initiative, a planned economy, all of which is fundamentally the same thing, that is, Communism.

Leers’ major complaint against Spengler’s economic theories is that they are not based on the ‘national economy’:

[It is] not an economy that is conducted for the nation and in the interest of the nation, but something quite detached, something that occurs without relation to the living national body. For him there is no workers’ question nor the compulsion to maintain the masses of millions of healthy and poor national comrades not only economically but also to allow them to participate in the largest numbers in the spiritual life of the nation (and even if that were only so that they do not leave this nation in the lurch in the hour of danger).

More alarming is the fact that Spengler does not really work towards any change in the status quo:

His idea of the economy is a very simple one: “Every person, like every animal, has to defend himself against an unpredictable fate or else bear it. Everybody has his personal care, full responsibility for himself, the need to fight for himself and his own goals in all dangers on the basis of his own decision.”

It is clear that this Nietzschean aspect of Spengler’s doctrine is indeed the basis of his secret championing of Caesarism.

Leers goes on to emphasise that Spengler’s state is indeed a ruthless bourgeois one that has little sympathy for the working class:

The one born for rule can use them but he despises them.’ They may naturally shoot themselves for him … He has no idea of the comradely disposition between the leader and his followers, the common service to the people and the country is foreign to him. His vision goes farther, the Spengler state does not need a national chancellor and a beloved leader – he calls for a Caesar, a predator king.

What is startling is that the Spengler’s admiration of ‘Prussianism’ in his “Preussentum und Sozialismus” is merged with his secret extolment of Caesarism. As Spengler put it:

As a  form-giving power there remains only the ‘Prussian’ spirit, everywhere, not just in Germany. Destiny, once agglomerated in momentous forms and great traditions, will make history in the shape of formless autocracies. The legions of Caesar awake once again.

Thus Leers declares:

[H]ere the confused and capitalist imperialism  of the pre-war period mirroring itself once again separates itself clearly from the nationalism based on cultivation and construction of national culture as Adolf Hitler represents it. Even here Spengler is the man of the strata living on export at any cost, of the imperialistic rule of the world. Even here he is, just as in his opposition to the worker, a West European imperialist of the pre-war period who goes to the logical extreme but not a nationalist, let alone a National Socialist.

Leers contrasts Spengler’s Caesarism with his own view of National Socialism as a movement not for imperialistic expansion such as the Western powers had long indulged in but for nationalistic consolidation.

The ultimate danger that this imperialism poses is the debilitation of the creative forces of the nation:

In the midst of the ethnic awakening [the Spenglerians] approach the new Germany with the idols of a fallen age and direct it onto paths on which their profit may flourish a little but which would at the same time be the end of the creative race in our nation.

Spengler’s fears of socialism are inextricably linked to his fears of the impending rise of coloured nations with newly acquired technology:

For behind the world wars and the proletarian world revolution that has not yet been concluded emerges the greatest of all dangers, the coloured, and everything that is still connected to “race” among the white peoples will be necessary to confront it …

Leers, on the other hand, sees through Spengler’s appeals to the “white race” as being a mere pretext for capitalist imperialism, in which Germany has no major role to play:

To these coloured peoples Spengler opposes the ‘imperium of the white nations’. By this he clearly understands in the first place the English and French, as well as North American, colonial rule. In it he sees the rule of the ‘white man’ in the world. That Germany has no part in it is, for him, not a reason not to champion its maintenance passionately.

Spengler points to the Bolshevik Revolution as a sign of the rise of the “Asiatic,” Mongol race in revolt against European Russians. But Leers believes that, just as the Germans defeated the Socialist Weimar Republic, they should be able to withstand the Bolshevism of the Russians and even cooperate with the latter so long as neither country interfered in the affairs of the other.

As for Japan, the other fear of Spengler, Leers points to the case of the nationalist war minister  of Japan, Araki, who displayed conservative tendencies that strongly resembled those of the National Socialists. Leers is, in fact, more generous to non-European races than Hitler, who in Mein Kampf had declared;

If beginning today all further Aryan influence on Japan should stop, assuming that Europe and America should perish, Japan’s present rise in science and technology might continue for a short time; but even in a few years the well would dry up, the Japanese special character would gain, but the present culture would freeze and sink back into the slumber from which it was awakened seven decades ago by the wave of Aryan culture.[4]

On the whole, Leers considers the general grouping of nations into “white nations” and “coloured nations” as both imprecise and historically useless since Germany itself had not benefited from colonialism in its history and would have suffered more from the Western imperialist powers if the latter had not been distracted from continental problems by their overseas colonies. So, unlike Spengler, he sees no need to defend the other “white nations” in the fight against rising independence movements.

That Leers was sympathetic to other races is evident also in his post-war collaboration with the Egyptians and in his correspondence, where a letter to an unidentified African written in 1955[5] expresses his interest in the American Africanist W.E.B. Dubois’ histories of the African peoples and wishes the negroes success in their efforts to obtain civil rights. He points to the German colonial experience as being quite beneficial to the natives and highlights the case of Jewish financial interests spurring the British against the Germans in Southwest Africa.

As far as Germany’s own territorial ambitions, Leers believes that they should be restricted to the European geographical space in which Germany finds itself:

The real interests of the German nation do not signify for Germany an imperialist battle in alien continents for foreign master races but a peaceful and federalist collection of nations in the eastern and central European space. This is necessary also in an economic sense.

Spengler opposed the migration of German industries and workers to lands that have cheap labour but suggested that international competition can be offset only by reducing the German worker’s ‘luxury wages’. But this would be impossible since German workers cannot live in a lifestyle that is common in less developed countries. This is, for Leers, a further example of Spengler’s disregard for the welfare of the German workers.

Leers exposes the imperialistic economics of the Western powers by pointing to the desire to rule colonial peoples by selling them cheap, low-quality products. Germany, on the other hand, has no imperialistic ambitions and should not trade in cheap products that it can manufacture at home but only import commodities that Germany does not possess and in return export specialized, high-quality products that it manufactures.

Leers concludes his critique of Spengler with a reminder of the essential question that Spengler’s Jahre der Entscheidung raises:

Should National Socialism be the final form of the German nation and develop itself further organically into an ethnic state of Germans or should National Socialism be replaced by a Caesarean rule that, with mercenary troops, socially suppresses the masses of workers of the nation into the depths and conducts an imperialistic great power politics?

The real danger in the Spenglerian ideology is indeed that

in the long term, after the defeat of Marxism on the left, a “Marxism turned on its head,” a sort of Marxism of wealth, should succeed  in crippling the realization of the National Socialist will in such a way that finally an ossification results. There are many examples of a refined counter-revolution that is seldom carried out at the barricades but much rather fights with intellectual and financial weapons succeeding in crippling revolutionary resurgences.


[1] Oswald Spengler, Prussianism and Socialism and other essays, translated by D.O. White.

[2] The Hour of Decision, Part I: Germany and World-historical Evolution, translated by C.F. Atkinson.

[3] See my translation ‘Johann von Leers: ‘Judaism and Islam as Opposites (1942)’, Occidental Observer, September 24, 2024.

[4] Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Mannheim.

[5] https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b144-i264

The Lesser of Two Evils: Responding to Joel Davis and Keith Woods

1559 Words

Before a hot war begins, when the bullets start flying and the bombs start exploding, political warfare rages. We witness political warfare these days almost every time politicians open their mouths. Before political warfare, however, we have cultural warfare, which is where metapolitics becomes important. This kind of warfare consists of various historical, ideological, or religious narratives which shape the worldview of ordinary (read: non-political) people. These narratives compete to the point where politicians become champions for the dominant narratives of the people who elect them. And if such narratives become anti-White in nature, so be it. In fact, anti-White politics have become the norm among most non-White politicians in America these days (as well among quite a few White ones).

My job as a pro-White dissident writer is to frame or re-frame narratives which will assist ordinary Whites in combating such anti-White narratives. Metapolitics, basically. In metapolitics it is not necessary to surpass or deny a narrative. It is necessary only to match it with a counter-narrative. Victory in such conflicts depends as much upon the spirit of the interlocuters as it does on logic, evidence, and clarity. A side could be dead wrong in the face of the facts, but if they possess greater spirit than their opponents, then they will have greater influence in steering the dominant culture into the future. This is what we see with narratives that favor both Black and Jewish history.

I was reminded of this while reading about the recent debate between Joel Davis and Keith Woods. Davis, an Australian nationalist, finds that rehabilitating Adolf Hitler and National Socialism is crucial for today’s White Nationalism, while Woods, who is from Ireland, feels that the various stripes of White Nationalism do not need either to thrive. It was a fascinating and civil metapolitical exchange, and it greatly benefited the Right. In effect, the men differ on how to counter the prevailing Jewish narrative which claims that A) Hitler and the Nazis were a uniquely odious evil, and B) anyone who professes beliefs even remotely close to Hitler’s is potentially genocidal and should be suppressed.

In basic terms, Davis attempts to surpass the Jewish narrative with a unabashedly pro-Nazi one, while Woods attempts to go around it by not emphasizing Nazism at all. Both sides of the debate possess profound elements of truth and deserve respect from the Dissident Right. Yet, I find both sides a bit wanting. I also think that both men are working too hard, thereby requiring their followers to work too hard as well. For example, ascribing to Davis’ position 85 years after the fall of Nazism would require a lot of reading and documentary viewing as well as the ability to discern good sources from bad. By the same token, ascribing to Woods’ position would require some fairly deft mental gymnastics to articulate a rightist position that does not evoke the Nazis in the minds of a disinterested audience. The bar for entry here is a little too high.

There is a third way, however, one that combines the strengths of both sides of the debate and, in its simplicity and directness, promises the substantial metapolitical victory that has been eluding White people since the end of World War II.

But first, why are both sides wanting? Because Davis’s approach entails too much risk to be successful, and Woods’ approach ultimately leaves the Jewish narrative uncontested. Since in metapolitics truth often plays second fiddle to spirit, it doesn’t really matter how correct either side is, how well-researched or watertight their arguments are, or how persuasive their advocates are. What matters is how well either side can galvanize the spirit—or enthusiasm—of their followers. Unfortunately, neither Davis nor Woods make the most of Rightist spirit. Anyone goosestepping in Davis’ pro-Nazi direction would have to wade into the teeth of the globalist Left, which means giving up on the idea of having a career and children, and accepting a life of constant struggle and danger. For ordinary people, this is a spirit killer. On the other hand, side-stepping along with Woods offers no defense to the Nazi/genocide charge coming from the proponents of the uncontested Jewish narrative. By attempting to go around the narrative rather than face it head on, Woods appears to tacitly concede the truth behind it. He can invoke Irish or Slavic nationalists all he likes, but in the eyes of a disinterested audience, this will come across as a bit of a dodge. This is also a spirit killer.

While neither approach is without merit, each gets us closer to our ultimate goal of White ethnostates only by baby steps—steps which may or may not keep up with the vagaries of history.

The third way I’m promoting entails meeting—but not defeating—the Jewish metapolitical Nazi narrative. This has the advantage of being less risky than Davis’ approach yet more direct than Woods’. It’s also easier to swallow than either counter-narrative, and no less true. Basically, we need to look at Nazism as a defensive wartime ideology, which was preferrable to its alternative: Bolshevism. At its worst, it was evil, sure. But it was the lesser of two evils.

This is it. This is all one needs to rouse the spirit of the Right and stem the odious tide of the Left. For one, it widens the tent to include both Davis and Woods. People in both camps can agree that the swastika, for all its merits and demerits, was morally superior to and less destructive than the hammer and sickle. This history is undeniable. Secondly, by keeping the reasoning so basic and simple, most White people will not need to read lengthy essays or watch obscure documentaries to climb on board. All they need to know is that the Bolsheviks killed more people than the Nazis did, and for less reason. The Nazis at least had the decency to wait until England and France had declared war on them before kicking their atrocities into high gear. The Soviets, on the other hand, had no such qualms and put to death tens of millions between 1924 and 1939, when they were at war with no one. We should also note that England and France had been egged on the entire time by US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had a clear anti-Nazi bias. How do we know this? Because the Allies had declared war on Germany for invading Poland, but not on the Soviet Union, which had done the exact same thing. Again, very simple. If the Allies were really on the side of good in 1939, why didn’t they attack the Soviets who had over an order of magnitude more deaths on their heads than the Nazis did? It’s a fair question, and one that the defenders of the prevailing narrative would have a hard time answering without resorting to blatant Jewish chauvinism.

We should also remember this passage from Hitler’s Reichstag speech of January 1939, as channeled through notorious Hitler hater William Shirer in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

If the international Jewish financiers . . . should again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.

See that? Hitler was actually being comparatively nice here by warning the Jews what would happen to them if they instigated another world war (which they did, they totally did). Did Stalin offer such consideration before murdering 15 million in the Holodomor and untold millions more in the Great Terror and the Gulag Archipelago during the 1920s and 1930s? Of course not. Hence the Nazis were the lesser of two evils. Does this seem like a weaker claim than what either Joel Davis or Keith Woods is offering? That’s because it is, and that is a good thing. I call it the Weak Claim Paradox.

There’s another reason for this as well. I personally am not a Nazi. However, gun to head, if I had to choose sides during Ragnarök, I would plop for the Nazis over the Bolsheviks. Why? Because as a White, straight, conservative male who is not consumed with guilt and self-hatred, the Nazis are much less likely to shoot me. This is an excellent reason. And given how prone the disproportionately Jewish Soviets were to shooting White people, Whites today should realize that Jews were not the only ones who suffered during the 20th century—nor were they absent among the people inflicting the suffering. In fact, it could be argued that they did more of the latter than the former.

None of this means that Joel Davis or Keith Woods should change their beliefs. Davis should continue praising the Nazis, and Woods should continue eschewing them. There is truth on both sides, and it is good they balance themselves out in pro-White circles. However, it couldn’t hurt if both men and their followers were to employ the Weak Claim Paradox from time to time when reaching out to normies. Believe what you want about the Nazis, but they were and still are objectively better than the alternative. And what we’re getting today with unfettered globalism, immigration, crime, and degeneracy is the alternative.

And if anyone hits back with the Nazi smear, simply respond, “At least we’re not Bolsheviks. They were worse.”

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

5442 words

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)

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 AnfangThis 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.”