I’ve been revisiting the “fascism” section of my personal library. I expect I’m not alone here.
Americans have an odd relationship with fascism. In popular discourse it is still presumptively evil, and a lifetime would hardly be sufficient to absorb every book, movie, documentary, or television series built around the Third Reich. Nevertheless, it sometimes seems that we know everything and nothing about Nazis. Many a conservative friend has told me (channeling George Orwell) that the term “fascism” is functionally meaningless; many more contend that it could in principle mean something but has no real application to the politics of today. I understand the sentiment, but it’s obtuse. Is it not obvious that Germany’s experience stands out among history’s many political-military fiascos as the one most relevant by far to our own situation? Did Indiana Jones somehow persuade us not to take this seriously?
Communism was horrific and may well be rising again in some form; it’s quite likely that the political religions of the twenty-first century will borrow elements from multiple pre-existing forms of repressive government. But communism, at least in its most unadulterated forms, tended to prey on traditional and mostly agricultural societies, making a rapid leap into modernity. Fascism drew on the deeper insecurities of already-developed societies that were struggling to cope with the bleaker consequences of their own success. When alienation and social polarization sit uneasily against the backdrop of an assumed legacy of national greatness, that’s fertile soil for fascism.
If that’s not sufficiently bracing, let me pose one simple question. Does it seem like political religions are done with the world?
The Legacy of George Mosse
Perusing my collection, one particular book seemed to leap right off the shelf. It was George L. Mosse’s The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. It’s a harrowing read. My dog-eared, yellowing copy was published in 1998 (with a first printing in 1964), but the themes feel extremely relevant. Recognizing, however, that Nazi parallels inevitably feel abusive in the context of unfolding debates, I will avoid all temptations to point fingers at contemporary figures and simply focus on revisiting certain themes from Mosse’s work that seem especially arresting, and perhaps also surprising given our comfortably settled Nazi stereotypes.
Mosse, for the unfamiliar, had significant commonalities with Hannah Arendt: both were German-born Jews who fled in 1933 and ended up in the American university system. Both produced excellent scholarly works that enhanced our understanding of Nazism. Arendt is somewhat more famous, especially for her Origins of Totalitarianism, but Mosse’s work was critical for charting the social and cultural tributaries to National Socialism. Arendt has more to offer on the level of political theory, but arguably it is Mosse, the social historian, who provides more ground-level insight into the origins of totalitarianism.
The fact that most Volkish thinkers were absurd romantics, kooks, or perhaps just vengeful grifters made it easy for their contemporaries to dismiss them as irrelevant. For the Nazis though, those qualities were a feature, not a bug.
Mosse had a particular genius for identifying second and third-rate thinkers that nevertheless had deep cultural impact, particularly in the half-century before Hitler’s rise. Figures like Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn easily fade from the historian’s view because they were gauche and intellectually unserious; revisited today, their works are easily dismissed as trash. It’s far more interesting to debate real philosophical luminaries like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, whose genuinely groundbreaking work did nevertheless have real connections to fascism. Those thinkers are extremely abstruse, however. Normal people don’t read or understand them. Mosse grasped the importance of looking at the “sub-intellectual realm,” where cranks and grifters peddle conspiracy theories and paranoid just-so stories. These, he suggests, were the men who truly paved the way for Hitler’s rise. Mosse shows how the Volkish thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developed a popular ideology and mythology that the Nazis were able to weaponize in the 1930s.
I first read Mosse some years ago, when I was taking my first steps as a public writer, and certain segments have remained seared into my memory because they spoke to this frightening truth: Irresponsible two-bit thinkers can do immense harm. Don’t ever let yourself believe that you are too inconsequential to bear full responsibility for the moral and intellectual implications of what you write.
Mythologizing the Volk
From the opening pages of Mosse’s work, one is immediately struck by two defining features of Volkish thought that are in tension with our usual vision of Nazis. It was profoundly anti-modern. And it was deeply rooted in nineteenth-century romanticism, spurning philosophical rationalism and classical economics, and embracing instead an ideology that glorified nature, rootedness, idyllic visions of pre-industrial peasant life, mystical experience, rose-tinted nostalgia for feudalism, and the promise of greater meaning and a revitalized sense of community.
This last, of course, was to be rooted in a shared Aryan identity. The word “Volk,” originally infused with heroic resonance during the Napoleonic wars, could be loosely translated as “people” or “nation,” but it had much stronger and richer emotional valences in the nineteenth century. It linked features of German landscapes and cultural life with something transcendent and mystical, a mysteriously vibrant life-force. Volkish thought moved continually in parallels, contrasting ostensibly authentic and vibrant things with the cold, rootless, rationalistic, and lifeless fruits of industrialized modernity. Rural hamlets were authentic, but cities (the natural domain of homo economicus) were not. Music and art were the height of authenticity and beauty, but the sciences were dehumanizing and soulless. Farmers and artisans were doing good and life-affirming work, but capitalists were agents of alienation, de facto enslaving their hapless worker-captives.
Mosse revisits the work of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, a nineteenth-century academic from Munich and one of the few Volkish thinkers moderately established in the German academy. (Most were disaffected outsiders, either marginalized academics or embittered would-be scholars who never secured their place.) Riehl became obsessed with finding ways to recapture the social virtues of the medieval manor. A revitalized German order could, he hoped, reestablish a clear and mutually beneficial relationship between aristocrat and peasant, connecting the people to nature and to other elemental goods. Riehl brainstormed strategies to de-alienate industrial workers, musing on schemes to give them each small parcels of land, or incorporate them into workers’ organizations that would transform their restless proletarianism into the noble authenticity of the medieval artisan. He was an armchair social engineer, persuasive in part because he seemed respectable. In Mosse’s view, his impact is partly attributable to his role in rooting the alarmingly open-ended mystical components of Volkish thought into a more settled, recognizably German social order. Mosse writes that Riehl,
was a pioneer in localizing the cosmic spirit within the confines of the Volk. He also limited the romantic concept of the infinite forms of individual expression when he rejected the restlessness peculiar to the true mystics who sought to link their souls directly to the creator’s. Instead he emphasized that the very life force that infused the individual demanded rootedness and abhorred motion. This circumscription of the individual’s striving may well have accounted for the attraction he exercised upon those who wanted to link themselves to a higher reality and at the same time find rest in a rapidly changing society.
The romanticism of Volkish thought fed into many of the early-twentieth-century social initiatives that the Nazis eventually commandeered: youth summer camps, gymnastics clubs, and neighborhood organizations built around the celebration of Volkish spirit. But the parallel structure of Volkish thought naturally sought an object or totem that could embody the antithesis of the desired thing. Several candidates suggested themselves, but the Jews were from the beginning the primary target, cast as the definitive “anti-type,” a kind of photographic negative of everything the Volk was meant to represent. Jews were presented as city-dwelling “rootless cosmopolitans,” driven by “the Jewish science” (economics), restless, dangerously entrepreneurial, and bent on quenching the vital spirit of the Volk. Clownish interpretations of the Talmud were put forward by Catholic pseudo-theologian August Rohling, who sparked a moral panic with his supposedly textually-based argument that the Jews were commanded by their own law to subjugate and murder all gentiles.
Everyone knows about the Nazi hatred of Jews. But for obvious reasons, our visions of National Socialism tend to be both modern and coldly industrial. Nazism in our minds is one of the most putrid fruits of the modern era, and keeping with that, we associate it with tanks, barbed wire, brutalist architecture, and lines of marching soldiers with shiny boots. We do not think of hordes of flower children dancing across German meadows, or of starry-eyed university students eagerly planning the rebirth of medieval guilds. That happened, though. It’s part of the story too.
Rejecting Universalism
Fascists generally cannot afford to be open enemies of tradition. If the ostensible goal is to restore some latent or suppressed national greatness, the past cannot be wholly rejected. However, a deep and dynamic attachment to tradition is an obvious obstacle to the absolute control that the totalitarian naturally seeks. Accordingly, tradition must be denuded, stripped of principles or practices that might hinder its integration into the broader political project. Any commitments with a universalist character are especially problematic and must be suppressed. That might include natural law, Christianity’s Great Commission, or any religious authorities or texts not firmly under state control.
Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn are discussed by Mosse as the two nineteenth-century thinkers most responsible for popularizing the idea of a German faith, which had some Christian elements but subordinated them to a Volkish vision. Both men in their youth had sought academic careers and been disappointed. Mosse remarks dryly that, “Their view of the contemporary society as a conspiracy of evil forces was undoubtedly reinforced by their exclusion from the social sphere to which they aspired.” In so many ways, Nazism channeled the spirit of the frustrated underachiever.
Lagarde might be seen as the original “theologian” of the German faith, and Langbehn as its first prophet. Deeply disturbed by the social dissolution of his day, Lagarde sought to lay the groundwork for a uniquely German spiritualism that would knit the people back together. He was intensely hostile to traditional Christianity (which in his view was deeply infected with the arid legalism of the Jew), thus laying the groundwork for a definitive rejection of natural law as a corruption of Christ’s true message. Across all his work, he emphasized that the Volk stood as the true good against which all other things must be measured.
Fascism was real. It had a character, an intellectual history, a social pattern. It’s easy to lose our sense of that.
Langbehn generated a cult-like following as a recluse and “holy man,” writing lurid, oracular texts that depicted Volkish ideas (and possibly himself in particular) as the forerunner of transformational change. His first book, Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Educator), was published anonymously, with the cover bearing the simple title “Von einem Deutschen” (By a German). All the kids read it and got drunk with excitement. Langbehn counseled a revivification of the German spirit through art, creative expression, and a triumph of imagination and intuition over the constraints of cold rationality. He glorified the “low German” ideal (counting Rembrandt as a “low German” even though he was Dutch), extolled the intrinsic beauty of the Aryan physique, and depicted Jews as the beady-eyed capitalists and detached intellectuals who were poisoning the Volkish spirit. Langbehn also wrote of the yearning for a Fuhrer, a wise father-figure that could help Germans transcend the challenges of modernity while restoring social peace.
Some of the absurdities of later Nazi “theologians” are perhaps better known than the work of Lagarde and Langbehn: the “Aryan Jesus” project, “de-Judaized” Bibles, and in some spheres, the straight replacement of the Bible with Mein Kampf. Mosse discusses these in the later portions of the book. But Germans were willing to accept those things in part because they had already been marinating for some time in the work of Volkish thinkers. These nineteenth-century cranks facilitated the rise of fascism by subverting rational or universalist elements of culture and traditional religion, reworking them in a nationalist key.
Lessons for Troubled Times
A short review cannot do justice to Mosse’s detailed narrative, which includes many more mediocre thinkers and a range of people we might now call “influencers”: publicists like Ernst Wachler, who churned out sensationalist novels and terrible plays; the lunatic Ellegaard Ellerbeck, who inducted large numbers of young people into bizarre neo-pagan rituals; the racialist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a British-born naturalized German who became obsessed with writing the “history” of what he viewed as a century-spanning, civilization-defining war between “Teutons” and “Semites.” Volkish thinkers wrote a lot of very bad books. That’s true in more ways than one.
The poor quality did not render them innocuous. Mosse shows this especially in the middle chapters of Crisis of German Ideology, which consider how Volkish thought disseminated through the population in schools, youth clubs, and other social institutions. The fact that most Volkish thinkers were absurd romantics, kooks, or perhaps just vengeful grifters made it easy for their contemporaries to dismiss them as irrelevant and destined for the dustbin of history. For the Nazis though, those qualities were a feature, not a bug. They were soft and malleable in exactly the right ways, leaving plenty of room for adjustment and manipulation. In many ways, the story of Nazi Germany is deeply ironic. It began with celebrations of nature and peasant life, and ended with tanks and death camps. Volkish thinkers urged Germans to escape alienation by revitalizing culture. But their legacy was a crushing national shame that scarred generations.
It’s important to keep some perspective in revisiting harrowing historical episodes. Human beings are fallen, and as a result, all human societies will mirror at least some of the defects of the Nazis. Intellectuals are fallible too, and probably all could be compared to Volkish thinkers in at least some small way. Many slightly-fascistic movements in history have not ended in mass murder, and one can’t go through life in perpetual terror, looking for Nazis behind every tree.
Nevertheless, fascism was real. It had a character, an intellectual history, a social pattern. It’s easy to lose our sense of that, sometimes around the fifty-third watching of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
We like to say “never again,” but let’s not kid ourselves. The totalitarian impulse is not dead. As Americans, we easily forget how blessed we are to have a political tradition and history that can justly inspire pride. We’ve never endured sorrow and shame on the scale of what Germans experienced in the mid-twentieth century. But that’s not a guaranteed legacy of our Founders or our Constitution. We, too, under certain conditions, are capable of such horror. Now and then, therefore, it is important to revisit this history with real attention and reflection. Let’s consider what it will take for us to be able to say not “never again,” but “never.”