Source: Ernst Krieck - National Political Education. National Socialism, pp. 33-48. 1936.
Translated by Daniel Zakal, 2024
The inter-state system of Weimar is based on the liberal assumption that each individual, on the basis of his reason and autonomy, forms a political will, that he finds agreement with others of his kind on the basis of shared opinions, forms a party and program, and, through discussion and a complicated electoral process, establishes a common will and delegates it to parliament, where once again, through discussion, compromise, and the election of the leading will, state power and the ruling government come into being. This is a distillation process, which, as experience has shown, ultimately deprives all substance and willpower, not concentrating them in power but dissolving them into empty nothingness.
It leaves behind a grouping of political partial powers, which paralyze each other, with some joining together in unstable party coalitions when necessary, in order to wrest as much as possible from state power, from offices and benefits, whatever still remains and is accessible. The state has become an object of party plunder, powerless externally, disintegrating internally. This system has led to the disarmament and dissolution of the German people’s strength through organization, preventing the formation of political will and a capable state of action. It has also divided the last remnants of historically grown power into the mere masses and broken up individuals, transforming them into a people at war with itself.
The German people, in this disintegrated state, are lying powerless on the ground in the Weimar system, weakened in health, growth, and living space, and finally driven into bankruptcy in all areas of life, to the point that, in the end, there is little left of the constitution itself besides the emergency Article 48 and the small Reichswehr.
The Weimar system is the domestic political extension of the failed system of proxies that was aimed at the disarmament of German power.
National Socialism is the name for the awakening German people, who are now coming to terms with their real situation and self-awareness: a powerful freedom movement carried by national and racial elemental forces. The name includes the principle of the German revolution and the goal of the national community as a whole: the German people shall become a united political entity, a self-aware body of power, and a unified organic social structure based on the principles of social justice.
The National Socialist movement, nourished by all German tribes, confessions, classes, and social strata, is extremely rich in inner approaches, possibilities, and organic tensions. It is, at first, an elemental movement, not a rational program, and differs from the uniform proletarian movement not only in that it draws from all classes, but it fundamentally represents a movement from the instinctual depths of the people, which is not prematurely bound into an intellectualistic doctrine and dogma as is the case with Talmudic Marxism, which was delivered early to rigidity and fruitless petrification.
It must remain a directional movement without dogmatic fixation until the revolutionary principle driving it has led it to victory, to freedom, to new German state and national orders. Until then, it will have to pass through many phases of its development, adjusting to new conditions and demands – this flexibility and agility will be its fortune. National Socialism encompasses the party, the general people’s movement, the national youth movement, the Wehrverband (defense league), youth organizations, followers, political freedom movements, adult people’s and racial consciousness, social society, and economic order, national cultural maintenance, along with their respective associations and organizations all at once. Thus, it bears, though often in preliminary outlines, all elements and seeds of the future national total state, the possibility for the fulfillment of the German total task within itself.
In this, many fruitful elements and historically formative principles emerge. Adolf Hitler’s party is the only one that carries within it the vocation and ability to overcome the party system – if possible through the path over the parliament. Thus, it must, as a party, carry the possibility of transcending partisanship and embodying national unity within itself. It cannot and should not take in all individual members of the people, but it must grow to the point where its claim to embody totality is proven valid, where it represents the whole, in order to develop new state and national orders from its own inner values and approaches, and to integrate itself into the whole. Only through this can unity of will, from the most profound antagonism, become political power and organic totality, from dissolution state and form of discipline.
A party, however, will cease to be a party once it transcends itself. The people and state will demand from the party a radical process of inner purification and resolution.
The possibility for a party, i.e., a part, to become the whole lies in National Socialism, as it is the vanguard of the revolutionary principle that permeates the entire people, affecting all its members and structures, directing them toward the goal of organic totality. Thus, the party has become a general people’s movement, especially a youth movement. From the youth that represents the revolutionary principle comes the German future, the new state and national order. The nationalistic youth, with its values and alliances, already bears the preforms of new state and national orders, the seeds of an appropriate national total education.
The youth leagues are the educational precursors to political and martial alliances, where political attitude, martial spirit, and racial value systems are solidified and utilized for the formation of a new state power and order. Through them, the future state prepares a leading class, which, through heightened duty to state and people, gains increased political authority. The Wehrverbände (defense leagues) and their related or associated youth leagues are guided by national- political education as their primary purpose. The National Socialist mass movement finds in its defense leagues and youth leagues not only the backbone, the forming core of the future state’s structure, but also the formative principle of the fifth state’s political and martial side – the core of its power structure and the preform of its political selection class. Here, above all, race and discipline must become reality, firm in form and direction.
The current system is founded on formless masses and parties. The party can only be overcome by the party; the mass can only be overcome by the mass. This is the task and the path of National Socialism. As a mass movement, it presupposes the art of mass elevation: the mass must become fluid if it is to be shaped. The art of mass elevation, masterfully practiced by Hitler, has not only perfected the techniques of agitation and party leadership within the party system to their final consequences, but has also found essentially new elements and paths for mass leadership.
Hitler has succeeded in tapping into an unsuspected vein of the national life and establishing a wellspring. It is unlikely that anyone from the Weimar system and its representatives can raise any fundamental objections to this, as their own principles are being applied more effectively and powerfully than they ever dared to imagine themselves, until it overcame the other parties, surpassing the principle of the multi-party state and the party system. The constitution not only allows the legal path to formal change under certain conditions but also leaves open the internal possibility that one party will eliminate the others and bring forth a state not of many parties, but of one final party. What in its outward consequence represents the principle of the single-party state emerges from the transformation principle: from party comes mass, from mass comes people, from association comes state.
The more comprehensive the National Socialist mass movement becomes, the more elements it must incorporate, the more demands it must satisfy, the more polarities and tensions it will develop within itself. This creates the danger of fragmentation and the emergence of new parties from within. This is countered by the fundamentally different principle from other parties: the principle of comradeship, the binding to the leader, the authoritarian form of structure and leadership. The internal tensions must be overcome in a unified form. Thus, party and mass movement will be internally reshaped and consolidated: with the Führer’s authority and its value system, a bond, form, firm order, discipline, common orientation, and stance emerge – the foundation and principle of a new education.
Closely related is another element in the doctrine of National Socialist mass education and leadership, which is not so easily brought into form and concept. From the outside, this doctrine and the entire movement are primarily criticized for their „unspirituality,“ and there is indeed a legitimate rejection and aversion from within against the rational culture and the politically bound nature of intellectualism, whose empty and hollow legalism dominated, for example, in the press, in liberal discussion – the life element of liberal democracy and its parliamentarianism. This was handled masterfully by Jewish circles but has increasingly shown itself to be utterly fruitless and without any inner strength: a negative, outwardly imposed life force.
Of course, the revolutionary people’s movement had to be declared evil by the intellectuals and liberal citizens, and also by related masters of pen and a certain „education,“ simply because it ran counter to their ways of thinking. For instance, it is argued that National Socialism must not be compared with Marxism because it represents the opposite, thus preventing the association of their methods of creation and movement.
The underworld of the soul is no more evil than the cosmos; rather, it is the refuge and womb of all creative and generative forces, of all formless yet form- giving powers, of all fateful movements, both life-giving and death-bringing, just as Bachofen has revealed or at least made comprehensible to a rationalistic age through his interpretation of myth. National Socialism draws on this wellspring of all formative, history-making forces with its methods of mass movement and mass arousal, allowing them to flow into the shaping urges of a newly forming world.
From this point stems all revolutionary power, history finds its eternal source, as long as nations carry within themselves this subterranean fountain of renewal. Arising from revolutionary instinct, National Socialism’s agitation works not primarily through intellectual proof or arguments but with the primal force of rhythm, which resides on the boundary of all that is rational and irrational, and with all that is akin to rhythm and radiates its stirring power. The chant is part of this, as is the entire art of mastery, stirring, and leading mass gatherings. From the same instinct, National Socialism works more with symbols and their vivid power of expression than with rational concepts: the swastika, forms of greeting, the Third Reich, all possess the immediate, subterranean force of movement through symbolism. Call it romantic, primitive, chaotic – and one may be right. But none of this proves or refutes anything; the force lies in the movement itself, in the irrational and elemental, from which comes the shaping power of history- making, fateful movement, without which a people would perish, history would cease, yet from which new becoming in people and history arises. This process is called revolution.
Because of this origin, National Socialism is an elemental directional movement seeking its path into a new reality through the rebirth of the race. It does not arise from intellect like liberalism and Marxism. Thus, National Socialism is also not party and program but a flowing, flow-making movement that will one day culminate in new forms, order, and the nation but remains fluid as long as it must until it has permeated all of our national living space. The becoming of the new form of the people and its humanity will be the fulfillment, but it will also mark the end of the movement. If this happens before the whole is brought to form, the revolution will not be completed before its purpose has been achieved and will end in mere reaction. Then, true German freedom and form will not be won, and the realization of the old Western order will triumph once more: German history would end.
In the National Socialist art of mass arousal and mass movement, the strongest approaches, inspirations, and elemental forces for future national and political education can be found. An education will lead to the goal to the same extent that it can first make a person malleable and shapeable. Malleability is not a fixed, innate, unchangeable trait, as pedagogy usually assumes, but it is itself subject to change, capable of increase to the extent that a person is widened, elevated, set in motion internally through arousal, and thus raised in receptivity, sensitivity, and malleability. In this state, elemental views, insights, directions, and attitudes take root all the more strongly and lastingly, becoming simpler, more powerful, and express themselves more vividly in the streams of influences, opinions, words, and actions that flow through the loosened channels of the soul. At the same time, in these states of ecstatically heightened arousal, the senses become sharper, imagination expands, souls become more fluid, and the wills of a gathered crowd merge into spiritual unity, emotional alignment, and communal spirit. The mass becomes malleable and shapeable in this spiritual arousal.
Here new creative forces break in, new contents arise from the depths. Many who went to Hitler’s rallies out of curiosity returned home converted to the people, having been seized by elemental forces that had a more lasting effect on them than what school could have given them. The powers of „arousal“ are not irrational, as intellectuals might assume, but rather chaotic, unshaped, yet highly malleable and directable elemental forces.
If the pedagogues had truly grasped Pestalozzi – in all the massive literature about him – in the core of his being and work and had not always reinterpreted him into the national and intellectual, they would have recognized the forces of his educational art, the secret of his success, as it often emerges more clearly from the descriptions of his visitors than from his own clumsy theories and books, in his kinship with the art of these elementary mass arousal and mass movement forces. Pestalozzi was at heart an ecstatic, a primitive and non-intellectual man – a man cut from the same cloth as a character from a Dostoevsky novel, living in the century of Enlightenment. Pestalozzi invented the method to elevate himself and his group of children to a highly charged, highly receptive emotional state with primitive means, mostly through methods akin to chanting, although he was completely unmusical and did not, as one might expect, resort to musical instruments. Instead, he used rational, elementary forms of speech, rhythm, and space. Through these means, he not only deeply solidified and intensified the elementary impressions, but also created through constant rhythmic repetition a receptivity and sensitivity in the desired direction, sharpening the senses and so mechanically increasing the student’s activity, self-reliance, and independence, not least merging the children into a community of elevated emotional unity.
Thus, here lie the same strong means of arousal, combined with a common orientation and shaping as in the art of mass leadership.
The meaning and coherence of this method in Pestalozzi’s time are entirely different than in the National Socialist mass movement: the elements and forces of the method, however, are the same. National Socialism seeks to awaken racial consciousness through its method of mass arousal, directing it toward the great national goals and political tasks, instilling a corresponding attitude in the soul of the people. National Socialist school reformers, who will have to apply the same thing within the framework and conditions of the school as mass leadership and human shaping does in the broader movement, and who will build new content and methods for the school, will find in Pestalozzi not only a much better understanding than the subjectivist, closed-off period of school reform has provided but will also find the means for their work in him. They will no longer view Pestalozzi in the light of Rousseau. At the deepest level, these methods are related to the techniques of soul shaping and soul discipline, as India has cultivated in its yoga system and the Buddhist monasteries have developed, although the foundations, the sense, and spirit are different.
It is instructive to see how modern Japan has adopted and further developed the methods of Buddhism for the purposes of its national-political power and military discipline. These same elements are applied in the method of physical discipline and practice and are proving effective in the disciplinary forms of the Wehrverbände (defense leagues) and youth leagues, in physical care and exercise, in weapons training, in training for a common will alignment and firm character formation. Thus, the mass is simultaneously guided and prepared, the disorganized and fragmented mass is formed inwardly and outwardly into a unified fellowship, a tight-knit community, a defense league, a youth league, a professional association: the mass becomes an ordered people, an organic totality.
All education that aims to fully grasp, align, and shape a person represents a threefold task, defined by the three concepts of attitude, ability, and knowledge. The working center in a person is their attitude, their formed character, disposition, firm and reliable will. It corresponds to its own system of discipline and practice, which is fundamental for education as a whole. However, this has been pushed into the background or almost forgotten in recent periods of Western culture with its predominant emphasis on the rational and technical.
Certainly, it is possible to some extent to influence attitude and disposition through the schooling of technical abilities and through intellectually stimulating, predominantly rational instruction, as these two can influence and support each other. However, the center remains weak. At the beginning of a new epoch in history and culture, the revolutionary principle leads to the necessity of an immediate, direct discipline and shaping of humanity toward its racial order, goals, and tasks. This will provide the solid foundation and supporting backbone for the training of abilities and the acquisition of knowledge and worldview. Training systems for spiritual attitude, disposition, character, and direction are as necessary as the monastery for discipline, as are the barracks, the church like the state, the soldier as much as the craftsman. In the West, the Jesuits have shaped their system of exercises based on monastic life and ideals, developing a strict system of discipline.
Through such a system of exercises, not only are the capacities and possibilities awakened and inspired within people to carry out their tasks for the nation, but it also leads to a firm alignment, a purposeful attitude, and formative shaping. A typical and uniform attitude and direction in a group of people creates the basis for their unification into a corresponding order and organization: inner community and solidarity arise, from scattered aims come unity, from individuals, organic unity and strength. National Socialism thus takes the instincts of its leader into application, using elemental forces and methods of mass arousal and movement to build a general system of discipline, a system of exercises, which, as a whole, shapes the nation.
The people and the individual members of the nation must awaken racial values; racial traits and racial consciousness must be fully developed. This does not only shape individual members of the people but also elevates the national consciousness, thereby solidifying the communal bonds: from mass comes the people, from the people comes a racially conscious nation with unified power, with a unified political attitude and direction of will.
The method will only work where it meets the necessary conditions in the innate tendencies of the people. A discipline system aimed at developing inherent racial characteristics into political attitudes and national character will achieve its highest fulfillment only where the inherent racial values of purity and strength exist. In individuals of other races, it will be less effective or entirely fruitless. The stages of its effect create a hierarchy of humanity. This shows the way to selection of the leading, the state-carrying class, and thus a stratification of the people according to achievements, attitudes, and racial merit can occur: from the moving mass, people, nation, and state are formed.
The general method of discipline and selection finds its application, along with its adaptation to the respective special goals in army and defense associations, in political fighting leagues and their affiliated youth leagues, in student organizations, in professional associations, in schools of all levels and types. Thus, unity is established in the diversity of members, functions, bodies, and organizations, creating an organic whole.
National Socialism: The name encompasses the content, direction, and meaning of the movement. Through socialism, nationalism gains new substance, while socialism, through nationalism, gains the direction and possibility of realization. National Socialism expresses the revolutionary principle and thus directs attention to the total task set before us by fate, history, and necessity – according to racial, national-political, state-building, social, cultural, and educational aspects: all of this is encompassed by the symbolic name of the movement in its totality.
Socialism means the integration of individuals, along with their attitudes, abilities, and actions, especially their conscience, into the community: the individual becomes a conscious member of a greater whole of life, which manifests itself for us as the German people. The people are the natural historical living space in which every individual finds everything they need for their existence and development. The nature of one’s membership, the place of one’s belonging, determines one’s path in life, one’s tasks, one’s position in the whole, and thereby also the way in which one attains personal maturity and fulfillment: attitude, ability, and knowledge are typically inherent in this membership.
All of this can be realized, deepened, or embodied by the individual according to their personal law, but in their way of life and direction, the individual is ultimately determined by the whole. The people also represent the entire living space, within which all the necessary functions and tasks for its members are created and fulfilled. Here, language, religion, law, economy, politics, art, culture, education, and schools find their nurturing ground, their content, and meaning. If this consciousness of the whole permeates the individual’s membership, shaping their attitude, disposition, and worldview, while directing the life order, then organic socialism is realized.
National Socialism ultimately aims for the German people to regain the free living space necessary for its growth and unfolding so that all members can secure the necessary share of space, land, and the means for existence and development. For the time being, we must adapt to the available space as best as we can to generate new national strength. In any case, an order of society, economy, and law based on the principle of social justice and organic reciprocity is demanded within the membership. Each individual and corporative member of the people is equally vital for the health, growth, strength, and power of the people, which is why everyone must be guaranteed their space and their right to life. In this space, there is no political equality for everyone, but rather social rights according to the necessary achievement of each.
Certainly, the state is not a welfare institution for the people, but the expression and organ of its collective will, a shaper and leader of its political power. A politically powerful people can only be a socially healthy people: if the well-being, strength, and power of the whole are to be secured, then the members must have the opportunity for their own development in order to fulfill their tasks within the whole and thereby their own existence.
The German lack of freedom since Versailles is primarily manifested in the closure and restriction of living space for the German people: a people without space. This distress, combined with the internal dissolution, has inevitably led to the collapse of the capitalist economic system with its hardship. This makes the strict reshaping of the available living space, the social distribution of life’s possibilities in the sense of an emergency socialism, doubly necessary.
This is not about establishing a program for a German socialism. However, if the task of the corresponding education is at least to be outlined in broad terms, the social form of life must be examined in its essential aspects.
If it is demanded of the individual that they serve the whole and find their personal fulfillment in this, and that they, under certain circumstances, must sacrifice themselves for the whole, then the whole must in turn provide for all its members and grant each individual their right and share in life. Only in healthy members can the strength of the whole have its foundation. The state, as the organ of the will of the people, as the expression of its unified power, is the master of society and the organizer of the economy in the sense of organic justice. The economy itself must be reshaped to serve the whole, so that all members can find their livelihood and also space to develop their life’s potential. Merely providing for those who can no longer obtain work and livelihood in a disorganized economy will only keep the body of the people open to wounds. Only when a socially just, orderly national economy offers space for all willing workers can the principle be upheld: those who do not work, shall not eat. In an emergency, there is no other choice but for the state to ensure that everyone in the constrained economic system finds work and sustenance.
The state is the regulator and overseer of the economy, but not its executive organ: the nationalization of property and the economy is to be rejected. The state should only take direct control of those sectors of the economy that naturally have regulatory but not productive functions: such as monetary and credit systems, insurance systems, and so on. Other regulatory factors in the hands of the state are taxes and tariffs, control and planned regulation of imports and exports, as well as monetary and credit transactions, both abroad and domestically. Due to the collapse of the global economy and world markets, the national economy must, by necessity, become self-sufficient: it primarily has to satisfy internal needs, with the state regulating these needs and organizing and distributing economic outcomes according to a plan. The tasks of production are distributed among producers, but this is done through self-governing associations.
The executive organs of the economy are primarily the corporative bodies of trades and economic sectors, self-administrative bodies that manage their tasks cooperatively under state supervision in their respective fields. This means that the entire economic society is regulated, but not the ownership of the means of production: no individual worker or professional becomes a state official, no economic production becomes a function of a state-run administration, but rather every individual is a member of their professional and economic organization and is thus a member of the state’s corporative body. Additionally, they are rooted in their own property and land.
Economic activity, however, becomes a public service with public obligations, balanced by corresponding rights: not the right to enrich oneself at the expense of others or to secure a share of the national wealth through the rules of economic plundering, but rather the right to a fair share of property, land, income, and sustenance according to one’s contribution. The public professional association oversees each of its members in their duties and obligations, protects them in their rights; the association is responsible for the fulfillment of the economic tasks assigned to it, but also for ensuring social justice in the distribution of work and opportunities for profit, in the social design of the economic living space. The association represents the whole in relation to the members and also represents the rights of its members within the whole.
„National Economy“ only exists when the economy is bound to the national living space and adjusted to its purposes; when the economy becomes a source of national strength and national health. Every public occupational and economic association – there will no longer be any private economic society in the national community – is a type of occupational person, a derivative of the national human type: it corresponds to the association and its content with its own attitude, disposition, honor, a way of life, a corresponding typical ability, and a specific education with a worldview tailored to its members – not as though they represent a world unto themselves within their association, but rather as part of their membership and service to the national whole.
Therefore, each association is also a system of discipline for the humanity it represents: it has its own attitude, its own methods for the discipline of behavior, for training in skills, and for the education of a corresponding worldview. Self- administration includes its own judicial system with arbitration and honor courts, as well as its own disciplinary and educational system. In all of this, the association is only a special-purpose representation of the national whole. One could debate the function of the guilds in the Middle Ages, whether their ultimate purpose and essential meaning were truly economic in the narrow sense, or whether they were much more the organic integration of a sound occupational and economic discipline of a sturdy national humanity.
The corporate order of the national state will no longer organize individual associations as city-states but rather align them with a broad national community: as its economic function is aligned with this great life whole, so too is its form of discipline, its professional training, and education within the whole, along with its special-value system, its methods, its spiritual content, and its direction as a professional extension of the national whole with its values and goals. The association finds its meaning and fulfillment within the whole.
Each association has the form and methods of the whole in place and works to meet the needs and demands of the whole according to its own laws. Therefore, it develops its system of discipline, its professional and market needs, brings its demands to the public vocational school system, supervises its members in terms of attitude, disposition, and honor, and integrates its youth into its ranks through education. Already, today, the professional associations affiliated with the National Socialist movement align their content and direction with the entire movement according to their vocational specialties and create an organic connection between the whole and the associations.
Regarding the political and social side of the overall task that National Socialism, as the bearer of the revolutionary principle, must fulfill, the creation of a new culture comes third. This task is certainly extensive, and its fulfillment may still be distant, perhaps only reaching its true phase when the movement is near victory. At that point, not only new political and social forms but also the driving values, the substance of spiritual goods, can be brought to expression, raised into a shared worldview. It is appropriate to the content and goal of the National Socialist movement to build a worldview through new creations in the fields of literature and art, science and philosophy, which will play an important role in the fulfillment of our time’s assigned overall task – victory for the revolutionary principle.
The beginnings of this already exist, but one must be cautious about overestimating them: proper attitudes and good intentions alone are not sufficient currency. The fact that political leadership takes precedence in fulfilling the great task, with its decisive role, lies in the fact that the cultural function in the narrower sense does not currently hold the center of action and may therefore initially lag behind in its achievements.
The beginning of a new culture has not commenced with a revolutionary break and upheaval, as it has in politics. This is the preparatory phase of sorting and gathering: from the cultural heritage, one must choose what serves the leading racial values, what serves the national and political tasks. In doing so, the groundwork is laid for a new worldview and for the proper foundation of a new education system. Furthermore, the battle must be fought against the flood of alien and racially foreign products, which, since the collapse, threaten to overwhelm and suffocate us in the wake of everything else. All such goods, whether imports or domestically produced, must be critically examined.
The spiritual atmosphere over a world in dissolution is oppressive and stifling. What emanates from the grand department stores of urban culture over the nation reeks of decay and corruption. The influence of racially foreign elements has taken control of newspapers, theaters, publishing houses, films, and increasingly also schools and universities, with the goal of suppressing Germanness, spreading confusion, and distracting from the truth, thus complementing the political system of dependence with a corresponding „culture.“ A clever literature, predominantly of Jewish origin, completes the political task of the transitional empire on the intellectual front. Until the awakening of racial and national instincts in National Socialism, even the so-called „national“ press has either completely succumbed to these forces of dissolution or, despite good intentions, has been utterly helpless in confronting the situation. As a result, the few creative forces of the race and an emerging national consciousness in literature, art, science, and philosophy have found little resonance or strength.
However, the dawn of a new day for the German people is breaking: with Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum („A People without Space“), a vision of German humanity, German race, and German politics, German values, and worldview emerges. That this book achieved resounding success is a sign of the impending breakthrough of a German-folkish culture. And yet, Grimm, through the last generation, has only led us to the threshold of the German revolution. Here, however, literature, art, science, and philosophy set a great example, as they all contribute to the creation of images, to self-knowledge, to national and racial consciousness, and to collaborating on the German national task.
All creative minds are called upon to recognize the substance, the values, the forces in motion, the urgency, and the pressing youth of this era in a realistic manner and to elevate these realities with insight, thus creating a worldview and educational asset that can serve as the foundation and living content of future German education and schools. In this new worldview, the German revolution will find its completion.
