Source:
The Racial Elements of European History
- by Hans F. K. Günther
If
degeneration (that is, a heavy increase in inferior hereditary tendencies) and
denordization (that is, disappearance of the Nordic blood) have brought the
Asiatic and south European peoples of Indo-European speech to their decay and
fall, and if degeneration and denordization now, in turn, threaten the decay and
fall of the peoples of Germanic speech, then the task is clearly to be seen
which must be taken in hand, if there is still enough power of judgment left:
the advancement of the peoples of Germanic speech will be brought about through
an increase of the valuable and healthy hereditary tendencies, and an increase
of the Nordic blood. The works on general eugenics show how the valuable
hereditary tendencies can be increased. Here, therefore, we will only deal with
the question of the renewal of the Nordic element.
The French Count
Arthur Gobineau (1816-82), was the first to point out in his work, Essai sur
l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-5), the importance of the Nordic race
for the life of the peoples. Count Gobineau, too, was the first to see that,
through the mixture of the Nordic with other races, the way was being prepared
for what today (with Spengler) is called the ‘Fall of the West’. Gobineau’s
personality as investigator and poet (‘all the conquering strength of this man’)
has been described by Schemann,1 and it is, thanks to Schemann,
through his foundation in 1894 of the Gobineau Society (to further Gobineau’s
ideas), and through his translation of the Essay on the Inequality of Human
Races, which appeared 1898-1901, that Gobineau’s name and the foundations he
traced for the Nordic ideal have not fallen into forgetfulness.2 The
very great importance of Gobineau’s work in the history of the culture of our
day is shown by Schemann in his book, Gobineaus Rassenwerk (1910).
It is evident that
Gobineau’s work on race, which was carried out before investigations into race
had reached any tangible results, is in many of its details no longer tenable
today. The basic thought of this work, however, stands secure. From the
standpoint of racial science we may express ourselves as to Gobineau’s work in
somewhat the same way as Eugen Fischer, the anthropologist: ‘The racial ideal
must and will force its way, if not quite in the form given it by Gobineau, at
any rate from the wider point of view quite in his sense; he was the great
forerunner.’3
H. S.
Chamberlain, at the time of writing the Grundlagen
Count Gobineau,
painting: Countess La Tour
The turn of the
century, when Schemann’s translation appeared, may be said to be the time from
which onwards a certain interest in racial questions was aroused. About the same
time, too, in 1899, appeared the work which for the first time brought the
racial ideal, and particularly the Nordic ideal, into the consciousness of a
very wide circle through the enthusiasm, and also the opposition, which it
aroused: this work was The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by H.
S. Chamberlain (born 1855), at that time an Englishman, now a German. On this
work from the standpoint of racial science we may pass a judgment somewhat like
that of Eugen Fischer: ‘Undeterred by the weak foundations of many details, and
recklessly changing even well-established conceptions to serve his purpose, he
raises a bold structure of thought, which thus naturally offers a thousand
points for attack, so that the real core of the matter escapes attack – and it
would stand against it.’4
Since the works of
Gobineau and Chamberlain appeared, many investigators, in the realms of natural
and social science, have devoted themselves eagerly to bringing light into
racial questions, so that today not only the core of the theory both of Gobineau
and of Chamberlain stands secure, but also much new territory has been won for
an ideal of the Nordic race. A new standpoint in history, the ‘racial historical
standpoint,’ is shaping itself.
The Nordic race
ideal naturally meets with most attention among those peoples which today still
have a strong strain of Nordic blood, of whom some are even still very
predominantly Nordic – that is, among the peoples of Germanic speech in Europe
and North America. It is unlikely that Gobineau’s thought will find a home among
the peoples of Romance speech, even though the first scientific work from the
racial historical standpoint, L’Aryen, son rôle social (which likewise
appeared in 1899), has a Frenchman, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, for its author.
Denordization has probably already gone too far in France also. Any great
attention towards race questions is unlikely, too, among peoples of Slav speech.
But the result was
bound to be that in all those peoples who came to know Gobineau’s theory there
were some persons who were deeply moved by them. Since the end of last century
we can, as was said above, even speak of a growing interest in race questions,
although we cannot yet speak of a spread of clear ideas. Following the terms
used by Gobineau and Chamberlain, we come here and there upon more or less clear
conceptions of the need for keeping the ‘Germanic’ blood pure, or (following
Lapouge) of keeping the ‘Aryan’ blood pure.5 In this way the door is
always left wide open to the confusion of race and people or of racial and
linguistic membership, and a clear definition of aims is impossible. What was
(and still is) lacking is a knowledge of the conception of ‘race’, and a
knowledge of the races making up the Germanic peoples (that is, peoples speaking
Germanic tongues) and the Indo-European peoples (that is, peoples speaking
Indo-European tongues). There was (and still is) lacking a due consideration of
the racial idiotype (hereditary formation) of the Nordic man, as the creator of
the values which characterize the culture of the Indo-European (‘Aryan’) and the
Germanic peoples. A racial anthropology of Europe could not be written in
Gobineau’s time. Many detailed investigations were still needed.6
But more was (and
is still) wanting: Gobineau, like his contemporaries, had as yet no knowledge of
the importance of selection for the life of peoples. The Nordic race may go
under without having been mixed with other races, if it loses to other races in
the competition of the birth-rate, if in the Nordic race the marriage rate is
smaller, the marrying age higher, and the births fewer. Besides an insight into
the ‘unique importance of the Nordic race’ (Lenz) there must be also a due
knowledge of the laws of heredity and the phenomena of selection, and this
knowledge is just beginning to have its deeper effect on some of the members of
various nations.
Maupertius (1744,
1746) and Kant (1775, 1785, 1790) had been the first to point out the importance
of selection for living beings. But the influence of the conception of selection
only really begins to show itself after the foundations of modern biology were
laid by Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. The conception of selection
was bound to have an effect on the view taken of the destiny of the peoples.
Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton (1822-1911), the ‘father of eugenics,’ was the
first to see this.7 He was the first to show that it is not
environment but heredity which is the decisive factor for all living beings, and
therefore for man too, and drew the outlines of a theory of eugenics in the
knowledge that the improvement of a people is only possible by a sensible
increase of the higher hereditary qualities. But it took nearly forty years for
Galton’s importance to be rightly understood and for his work to bear fruit.
Galton’s views had
as yet no scientific theory of heredity on which to build. This was created in
its main outlines by Johann Mendel (1822-84), an Augustinian father in Brünn (in
religion he was known as Gregor), whose life-work, after its recovery in 1900,
had so deep an effect that research after research was undertaken, and today a
wide-embracing science of heredity stands secure.
Through researches
such as these Gobineau’s teachings received a deeper meaning, and found fresh
support from all these sources, from the sciences of heredity, eugenics, and
race: the Nordic movement was born. It had to come into being in those countries
where there was still enough Nordic blood running in the peoples to make a
Nordic new birth possible. Thus in Germany societies have been founded aiming at
the propagation of the Nordic ideal; thus societies of the same kind have been
founded in the United States; and such societies would seem sometimes to go
beyond these countries.
If the Nordic ideal
in Germany has been active longer than in other countries, it would seem, owing
to the splitting up of its followers into small groups, not to have found the
same diffu-west European immigration, and to put a bar on the unwished-for
immigration from south and east Europe. Immigration from Asia, and the
immigration of undesirables in general, is forbidden. Grant himself has been
chosen as vice-president of the Immigration Restriction League. It may be
presumed that the Immigration Laws as now passed are only the first step to
still more definite laws dealing with race and eugenics. In North America,
especially, where there is the opportunity to examine the races and racial
mixtures of Europe from the point of view of their civic worth, the importance
of the Nordic race could not stay hidden. Leading statesmen have seen the
importance of this race, and are proclaiming their knowledge.9 In
North America a significant change is taking place in our own day: Europe as an
area of emigration is no longer looked at in the light of its states or peoples,
but in the light of its races. How Germany (or the pick of German emigrants) in
this regard strikes America, may be seen from the fact that Germany, as a land
of emigrants, is the most highly favoured of all European countries.
The peril of
denordization (Finis Americae, Grant) has been recognized by many
Americans since Grant’s book appeared. Associations have been formed among the
Nordic and predominantly Nordic Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent, such as ‘The
Nordic Guard,’ and among Americans of German descent (‘The Nordic Aryan
Federation,’ and so on). Some of the Nordic-minded North Americans seem to have
joined together in co-operative unions, so as to make themselves gradually
economically independent of big capital in non-Nordic hands. It would seem as
though the Nordic-minded sections of North America had begun with great
forethought and efficiency to take steps for the maintenance and increase of
Nordic blood. A better insight, however, is perhaps still needed into the
importance of the birth-rate for all such aims.
When it is
remembered that the Nordic ideal in Germany had taken root here and there as
long ago as the end of last century, we do not get, on the whole, from the
Nordic strivings of this country that picture of unity and purpose which is
shown by North America. However, we must not overlook the economically very
straitened circumstances in which the German followers of the Nordic ideal, who
in greatest part belong to the middle classes, find themselves – circumstances
which are always piling up hindrances to any forward striving. The hindrances,
however, in the path of a Nordic movement lie partly in the German nature
itself, in the splitting up into small exclusive groups each with its own
‘standpoint,’ which is found over and over again. This splitting up is the
reason why the ‘societies for the defence of the Nordic race’ (Ploetz) in
Germany can only be looked on as the beginning of an interest in race questions,
and why we must agree with Ploetz when he speaks of10 these
‘defensive societies’ as being ‘considerably poorer in membership and influence
than those of the Jews’; indeed, we cannot yet speak of any ‘influence’ of the
Nordic ideal.
These endeavours
along Nordic lines, however, are not to be undervalued as tokens of an awakening
attention to race questions. Those among the youth who have been gripped by the
Nordic ideal have already done much to spread their views, even under the
crushing conditions of today in Germany, and in spite of the lack of money. The
beginnings may be humble, but the deep change is full of importance;
‘Individualism,’ so highly prized in the nineteenth century, and still loudly
proclaimed by yesterday’s generation, is coming to an end. The stress laid on
each man’s individuality, which up till yesterday was proclaimed with the
resounding shout of ‘Be thyself,’ has become a matter of doubt, even of
contempt, to a newer generation. It set me pondering, when, during the writing
of this book, the statement of the aims of a ‘Young Nordic Association’ reached
me, in which I find the following sentence: ‘We wish to keep the thought always
before us that, if our race is not to perish, it is a question not only of
choosing a Nordic mate, but over and above this, of helping our race through our
marriage to a victorious birth-rate.’
Up to the other day
such a view of life would not have met with any understanding, and to
yesterday’s generation it must still seem beyond comprehension. The present age,
indeed, was brought up amidst the ideas of the ‘natural equality of all men,’
and of the distinct individuality of each one of us (‘Individualism,’
‘Cultivation of personality’). When we look back today, we are astonished to see
how long the biologically untenable theories of the Age of Enlightenment and of
Rousseau (1712-78) could hold the field, and how, even today, they determine the
attitude towards life of great masses of men, although men like Fichte and
Carlyle had already gone beyond such views.11 Although really
discredited, the ideas of equality and individualism still hold the field, since
they satisfy the impulses of an age of advanced degeneration and denordization,
or at least hold out hopes of doing so, and yield a good profit to those
exploiting this age. If, without giving any heed to the definitions of current
political theories, we investigate quite empirically what is the prevailing idea
among the Western peoples of the essential nature of a nation, we shall find
that by a nation no more is generally understood than the sum of the now living
citizens of a given State. We shall find, further, that the purpose of the State
is generally held to be no more than the satisfaction of the daily needs of this
sum of individuals, or else only of the sum of individuals who are banded
together to make up a majority. The greatest possible amount of ‘happiness’ for
individuals is to be won by majority decisions.12
Racial and eugenic
insight brings a different idea of the true nature of a people. A people is then
looked upon as a fellowship with a common destiny of the past, the living, and
the coming generations – a fellowship with one destiny, rooted in responsibility
towards the nation’s past, and looking towards its responsibility to the
nation’s future, to the coming generations. The generation living at any time
within such a people is seen by the Nordic ideal as a fellowship of aims, which
strives for an ever purer presentment of the Nordic nature in this people. It is
thus only that the individual takes a directive share in the national life
through his active responsibility. But in this fellowship of aims it is the
predominantly Nordic men who have the heaviest duties: ‘O, my brothers, I
dedicate and appoint you to a new nobility: ye shall become my shapers and
begetters, and sowers of the future’ (Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra).
The striving that
can be seen among the youth for an ‘organic’ philosophy of life – that is, a
philosophy sprung from the people and the native land, bound up with the laws of
life, and opposed to all ‘individualism’ – must in the end bind this youth to
the life of the homeland and of its people, just as the German felt himself
bound in early times, to whom the clan tie was the very core of his life. It
could be shown that the old German view of life was so in harmony with the laws
of life that it was bound to increase the racial and eugenic qualities of the
Germans, and that, with the disappearance of this view of life in the Middle
Ages, both the race and the inheritance of health were bound to be endangered.
And a Nordic movement will always seek models for its spiritual guidance in the
old Germanic world, which was an unsullied expression of the Nordic nature.13
In the nations of
Germanic speech the Nordic ideal still links always with popular traditions
handed down from Germanic forbears whose Nordic appearance and nature is still
within the knowledge of many. Unexplained beliefs, unconscious racial insight,
are always showing themselves; this is seen in the fact that in Germany a tall,
fair, blue-eyed person is felt to be a ‘true German,’ and in the fact that the
public adoption offices in Germany are asked by childless couples wishing to
adopt children far oftener for fair, blue-eyed, than for dark ones. The Nordic
ideal as the conception of an aim has no difficulty in taking root within the
peoples of Germanic speech, for in these peoples the attributes of the healthy,
capable, and high-minded, and of the handsome man, are more or less consciously
still summed up in the Nordic figure. Thus the Nordic ideal becomes an ideal of
unity: that which is common to all the divisions of the German people – although
they may have strains of other races, and so differ from one another – is the
Nordic strain. What is common to northern and to southern England – although the
south may show a stronger Mediterranean strain – is the Nordic strain. It is to
be particularly noted that in the parts of the German-speaking area which are on
the whole predominantly Dinaric, and in Austria, too, the Nordic ideal has taken
root, and unions of predominantly Nordic men have been formed.
Thus a hope opens
out for some union among the peoples of Germanic speech; what is common to these
peoples, although they may show strains of various races, is the Nordic strain.
If the Nordic ideal takes root within them, it must necessarily come to be an
ideal of harmony and peace. Nothing could be a better foundation and bulwark of
peace among the leading peoples than the awakening of the racial consciousness
of the peoples of Germanic speech. During the Great War Grant had written14
that this was essentially a civil war, and had compared this war in its racially
destructive effects to the Peloponnesian War between the two leading Hellenic
tribes. The Nordic-minded men within the peoples of Germanic speech must strive
after such an influence on the governments and public opinion, that a war which
has so destroyed the stock of Nordic blood as the Great War has done shall never
again be possible, nor a war in the future into which the nations are dragged in
the way described by Morhardt, the former president of the French League for the
Rights of Man, in his book, Les preuves (Paris, 1925). The Nordic ideal
must widen out into the All-Nordic ideal; and in its objects and nature the
All-Nordic ideal would necessarily be at the same time the ideal of the
sacredness of peace among the peoples of Germanic speech.
Madison Grant,
bronze bust by Chester Beach
Lothrop
Stoddard, C, 76, E, grey
In the war of
today, and still more in that of tomorrow, there can no longer be any thought of
a ‘prize of victory’ which could outweigh the contra-selection necessarily bound
up with any war. For anyone who has come to see this, it seems very doubtful
whether even the most favourable political result of a contest deserves to be
called a ‘victory,’ if the fruits of this ‘victory’ fall to those elements of a
nation who, as a result of their hereditary qualities, have slipped through the
meshes of the modern war-sieve. The real victims in any future war between the
Great Powers, whether in the losing or in the ‘winning’ nation, are the
hereditary classes standing out by their capacity in war and spirit of
sacrifice. It will be one of the tasks of the followers of the Nordic ideal to
bring this home to their peoples and governments.
If this prospect of
a political influence wielded by the Nordic ideal seems today a very bold
forecast, yet the task of bringing about a Nordic revival seems to arise very
obviously from the history of the (Indo-European) peoples under Nordic
leadership, as the most natural ideal to set against the ‘decline’ which today
is also threatening the peoples of Germanic speech. There is no objection
against the Nordic ideal15 which can be given any weight in the face
of a situation which Eugen Fischer (in 1910) described as follows for the German
people: ‘today in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, the Germanic blood, the Nordic
race, has already disappeared. Decline, in part insignificance, is the result.
France is the next nation that will feel the truth of this; and then it will be
our turn, without any doubt whatever, if things go on as they have gone and are
going today.’16 And since this utterance there has been the dreadful
contra-selection of the Great War.
This being the
situation, the problem is how to put a stop to denordization, and how to find
means to bring about a Nordic revival. How are Nordics and those partly Nordic
to attain to earlier marriages and larger families? – that is the question from
the physical side of life. How is the spirit of responsibility, of efficiency,
and of devotion to racial aims to be aroused in a world of selfishness, of
degeneration, and of unbounded ‘individualism’? – that is the question from the
spiritual side of life.
Once this question
is seen by thoughtful men in the peoples of Germanic speech to be the one vital
question for these peoples, then they will have to strive to implant in the
predominantly Nordic people of all classes a spirit of racial responsibility,
and to summon their whole nation to a community of aims. An age of unlimited
racial mixture has left the men of the present day physically and mentally
rudderless, and thus powerless for any clear decision. There is no longer any
ideal of physical beauty and spiritual strength to make that bracing call on the
living energies which fell to the lot of earlier times. If selection within a
people cannot be directed towards an ideal, unconsciously or consciously
pursued, then its power to raise to a higher level grows weaker and weaker, and
it ends by changing its direction, turning its action towards the less creative
races, and the inferior hereditary tendencies. Every people has had assigned to
it a particular direction of development, its own special path of selective
advance. The selective advance in the peoples of Germanic speech can have as its
goal only the physical and spiritual picture presented by the Nordic race. In
this sense the Nordic race is (to use Kant’s expression) not given as a gift but
as a task; and in this sense it was that, in speaking of ‘the Nordic ideal among
the Germans,’ we necessarily spoke of the Nordic man as the model for the
working of selection in the German people, and showed that no less a task is
laid on the Nordic movement than the revival of a whole culture.
The question is not
so much whether we men now living are more or less Nordic; but the question put
to us is whether we have courage enough to make ready for future generations a
world cleansing itself racially and eugenically. When any people of
Indo-European speech has been denordicized, the process has always gone on for
centuries; the will of Nordic-minded men must boldly span the centuries. Where
selection is in question, it is many generations that must be taken into the
reckoning, and the Nordic-minded men of the present can only expect one reward
in their lifetime for their striving: the consciousness of their courage. Race
theory and investigations on heredity call forth and give strength to a New
Nobility: the youth, that is, with lofty aims in all ranks which, urged on like
Faust, seeks to set its will towards a goal which calls to it from far beyond
the individual life.17
Since within such a
movement profit and gain is not to be looked for, it will always be the movement
of a minority. But the spirit of any age has always been formed by minorities
only, and so, too, the spirit of that age of the masses in which we live. The
Nordic movement in the end seeks to determine the spirit of the age, and more
than this spirit, from out of itself. If it did not securely hold this confident
hope, there would be no meaning or purpose in any longer thinking the thoughts
of Gobineau.
Footnotes
1
Gobineau (vol. i., 1913; vol. ii., 1916). As many will probably not read
Gobineau’s Essai because of its length, Kleinecke’s Gobineaus
Rassenlehre, 1920, may here be mentioned. Gobineau’s life and works are also
shortly described in Hahne’s Gobineau (Reclam 6517-18).
2
Although in France a statesman and historian like Alexis de Tocqueville and an
anthropologist like Broca had been attracted by Gobineau’s work on race; while
men like Renan and Viollet-le-Duc had been influenced by him, and men like
Albert Sorel and Le Bon had become his followers – it was not till late years
that the importance of Gobineau was again recognized. But in Germany, too, where
men such as A. von Humboldt, I. H. Fichte (Fichte’s son), A. von Keller, and,
above all, Richard Wagner were his champions, and where Lotze came under his
influence, Gobineau would probably have been forgotten without Schemann’s
efforts. In our day (1924) Gobineau is fashionable in France. His imaginative
works are coming out in new editions; well-known reviews devote special numbers
to Gobineau, the artist; indeed, we may speak of an over-valuation of this side
of Gobineau’s work, while the very small number of the followers of his
race-theory is dwindling more and more in France.
3
Following Schemann, Neues aus d. Welt Gobineaus; reprinted from the
Polit.-anthrop. Revue, 1912.
4
In Handwörterbuch d. Naturw., under ‘Sozialanthropologie.’
5
Philology used formerly often give the name of Aryan to the Indo-European
languages; nowadays the term ‘Aryan’ is mostly applied only to the Indo-Persian
branch of these. Racial investigation in the beginning sometimes called the
(non-existing) white or Caucasian race Aryan; later the peoples of Indo-European
speech were occasionally called Aryan; and finally the Nordic race also was
termed Aryan. today the term Aryan has gone out of scientific use, and its use
is not advisable, especially since in lay circles the word Aryan is current in
still other meanings, and mostly with a very confused application to the peoples
who do not speak Semitic languages; the ‘Semites’ are then opposed to the
‘Aryans.’ The term ‘Semites,’ however, has been likewise given up in
anthropology, since men and peoples of very various racial descent speak Semitic
tongues (cp. on this the fourth chapter above).
6
Cp. the section, ‘Einiges zur Geschichte der Rassenkunde,’ etc., in my
Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes.
7
For an account of Galton, cp. K. Pearson’s Francis Galton, 1922.
8
Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 4th ed., 1921. Stoddard, The
Rising Tide of Color, 1919; The Revolt against Civilization, 1924;
and Racial Realities in Europe, 1925.
9
Thus, quite lately Davis, the Minister for Labour. The Oslo newspaper,
Morgenbladet, of 1st July 1924, writes after his astonishingly frank
utterances: ‘It is, anyhow, an undisputed fact that it was the so-called Nordic
race which, coming as immigrants into America, has taken on the heaviest
burdens. They have driven the road, ploughed the land, built up industry, while
the Italians and Greeks polish boots, sell fruit, and make bombs for "use at
home," and the Jews lead an easy life in their Loan Banks and secondhand shops,
and on friendly loans at 20 per cent. This is, of course, speaking in general
terms, but it hits the nail on the head. If you travel towards the north-west,
you understand what has been done by the Nordic race, and particularly the
Scandinavians, for agriculture. Most of them began with two empty hands and an
iron will. The result can be seen in the form of flourishing districts. If you
go into the great towns and wander through the various "Little Italys" and
"Little Greeces" and through the Jewish quarters, and then take a trip to where
"our people" live, you will feel relief at once again breathing clean air.’
10
Op. cit.
11
L. F. Clauss has arrived at a statement of aims in accordance with the Nordic
ideal by a philosophical investigation from the phenomenological standpoint; see
his Die Nordische Seele, 1923, and Rasse und Seele, 1926.
12
Faguet shows (Le culte de l’incompétence, 1921) that the political
theories of the nineteenth century and the present time have had the effect only
of ‘worshipping incapacity.’ The historical causes of this worship are set out
by Le Bon, Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples, 17th ed.,
1922.
13
Hence we will here refer the reader to Neckel, Die Altnordische Literatur,
1923, and Altgermanische Kultur, 1925. As the most profound description
of the old Germanic world may be mentioned the work in four volumes of V.
Grönbech, Vor Folkeaet i Oldtiden, which appeared 1909-12. Of Grönbech it
may be truly said that his investigation reaches the innermost being of the old
Germanic soul.
14
Op. cit.
15
In Der Nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen, 1925, I have tried to sift
and refute many of the objections against the Nordic ideal.
16
Sozialanthropologie, etc., 1910.
17
‘Neo-Aristocracy,’ the spirit of a new nobility, is what Stoddard, too, seeks to
rouse with the last section of his book, The Revolt against Civilization.
