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.

*  *   *

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.

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[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

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.

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[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] (1^st 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).