Background:
Hans Schemm, Gauleiter
of Bayerische Ostmark, was an early member of the party particularly interested
in educational issues. He founded the Nazi teachers’ organization in 1927. He died
in a plane crash in 1935. According to the book’s editor: “At the beginning of
January 1935 I was invited by Hans Schemm to come to Bayreuth. Schemm gave me
the task of organizing his work into a systematic book.” The editor had some
chance to work with Schemm before his death on early March. I here translate
several sections of the book. The whole book runs over 300 pages, and is an
interesting attempt to bring together National Socialist thinking in a somewhat
organized fashion. However, Schemm does not seem to have had lasting influence,
since his book is not often cited in subsequent Nazi literature. I do include a
link in the text to one of the weekly quotation posters the Nazis issued with a
quotation from this material.
The
source: G. Kahl-Furthmann (ed.), Hans Schemm spricht: Seine Reden und sein Werk
(Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark, 1935).
Introduction
The greatest era in world
history has begun! We are the living generation born in a wonderful era, and it
is our task to seize opportunities previously undreamt of. Under the leadership
of our Führer Adolf Hitler, our people has taken the greatest step that any
people on this earth has ever taken in history. We stand at a great turning
point of German history; never before was there as significant a solstice in
the political and spiritual sense as today.
You, German youth, have been
born in the greatest age of your people’s history.
I wish the vast greatness of
the age to burn in the hearts of my readers. I know that fate has decreed what
is happening in Germany. The Lord God has torn us from the path we followed for
fourteen years, and that led only to the grave, and led us back again with
unspeakable grace to give new meaning to world history through the new life of
the German people.
We thank the Lord God that he
has let us work and fight in the greatest age of the German people! [p. 3]
I. Race
a) The significance of racial
philosophy
We must be clear about the
force and greatness of today’s events. All the events of the past two thousand
years are trivial in comparison. He who dares to think that the great events of
German history such as the Reformation, the Seven-Years-War, Napoleon and the
Battle of Nations at Leipzig, are equal to those of today has not recognized
the greatness of the age we live in. However, our age has not yet reached its
fullest extent.
Why is this age so great? Why
is what is happening so powerful? There were great battles and events in the
past. States and federations of states lived through great events and crises.
However, the greatest, most valuable, most important factor was missing: the
greatest factor that a people possesses, and that it must realize that it has,
what its existence on this earth rests upon; this factor has only recently
driven itself into the minds, into the hearts, into the consciousness of the
German. For the first time, the National Socialist movement has fought a battle
that can be described by the word “race.”
However often I glance through
or study history, I can find no people that has, as the German people of this
generation, placed with such awareness racial thinking in the center of
political battle.
We National Socialists formed
life and opened the door to freedom with the concept of race, which had never
before been seen with the clarity with which it is seen today.
We must see the broad sweep of
history with all its events and happenings from the birth of Christ through the
Day of Potsdam [21 March 1933] as one great whole if we are to
understand what a fortunate generation we who live today are, standing at the
beginning of a new age.
One may not see such periods
of the past, those of Hermann the Liberator, the Reformation, the Wars of
Liberation, the World War, the various developmental periods in the area of
art, literature, philosophy, and religion, all of which can be seen as epochs
of world history, as being of the same magnitude as the period of history that
is beginning today. No, the past belongs to a great historical whole that is
now completed; today something entirely new is beginning. Today marks a new era
after two thousand years.
For the first time since
German history began to be written, since people fought and sacrificed, bled
and prayed, laughed and wept, the German people stands racially aware and
united as an acting, living thing.
Therefore we live in the
greatest age of German history, since individual and the people, as well as
politicians and the government, have become aware of the greatest value of the
German people, race. We therefore stand at the threshold of the greatest
spiritual, cultural, and political development of our people. The German people
is building its government through National Socialism on the eternal foundation
of its race. For the first time in millennia, German blood and German soul are
coming into their own.
The racial and spiritual
values of the German have been mobilized today because he recognizes: what
speaks to me, what drives me on, is the voice of my blood, the language of my
race. Adolf Hitler raised race, the eternal foundation of the German, from the
unconscious to consciousness. Adolf Hitler recognized race as that which is
eternal.
Germany proves that nothing
can resist the idea of race, because Hitler made history with it, throwing the
greatest ethnic force on earth onto the scales that weigh the fates of peoples.
We thank the Creator that
after long, long centuries of searching in vain for the correct worldview, for
the proper foundation, the Führer brought our people to this knowledge. Many
came before, many prophets arose. It remained for Adolf Hitler to make this
knowledge the common property of the people.
Previously Germany was the
battle ground of various worldviews. When German fought against German, the
reason lay in the depths of the German people, which has a uniquely deep
understanding for cosmic and great ideas, for ultimate things. We Germans are
interesting in everything deep in us and around us. New ideas become dangerous
for us Germans only with some partial area, dogma, or worldview calcifies and
claims to dominate everything. Then German fights against German.
How many things assailed the
German people from the outside! Remember Catholicism, the history of dogmas,
the French Revolution, materialism, and nationalism! During the Reformation and
the Thirty Years War, some Catholics, some papists in Germany felt they had
much more in common with French or Spanish papists that with German
Protestants. And what about the recent past? A German Social Democrat felt much
closer to a French Social Democrat than to a German National Socialist. Many
major worldviews were brought to Germany, whether good or bad, and put into
practice. When a few worldviews had come, we Germans accepted them and fought
about them, always to our disadvantage. Why? Because we had not found anything
more powerful, more unifying.
Now we stand on firm ground.
Until today, we had not established racial roots. When we attempted to
understand race, no one came along to take us further. We lived, as it were, on
the surface of nationalist understanding, never going any deeper. We were
always unsteady, and had to endure the fourteen post-war years. During this
period, one attempted to twist racial thinking into internationalism and
religious longing, Christianity into Bolshevist materialistic atheism. But that
is the path into the abyss.
One sought a crushing blow
against German seekers after the eternal. The insanity of international
humanitarianism was set against German racial pride. Pacifism was set against
innate German heroism, atheism against the concept of internal spirituality.
Class warfare was set against the people’s community, and in the arts jazz and
Negroism were set against German music. The flat roof fought against a Gothic
style that longs for light.
Shortly before the Day of
Potsdam, the German people was in danger of spiritual death, of sinking into
decline, for the language of Germany during the previous fifteen years was a
Babylonian confusion of tongues. We stood at the grave of the nation, at the
grave of the German people, at the grave of its cultural, spiritual, political,
and physical desires, at the grave of its will to life.
Rising unemployment was an
example of the change in our people. Ever decreasing movement, ever decreasing
enterprise, ever fewer deeds could be seen, and just as with an individual,
that leads to death. Everything was slower. There were fewer signs of life in
every area. No power of decision, no will, no future, no faith, no goal.
Without Adolf Hitler, we would have sunk into death. [pp. 4-8]
b) Race in Light of Ethnic
Science
c) Race in the Light of
Biology
d. Race and Soul
Many opponents of National
Socialism accuse us of racial materialism, since race is in the blood and blood
is physical. Yes, blood is physical, but not physical in the false
materialistic sense, but in the sense of home and earth and racial value. They,
however, are eternal sacraments.
The concept of blood does not
simply mean looking at its physical nature from a racial standpoint, but also
at what is connected to German blood with regards to intellectual and spiritual
values. Blood is the symbol of our racial soul; the racial soul is something
purely spiritual. Blood is thus both something physical and metaphysical at the
same time, connecting us to the earth, to family, and to people as a
God-ordained whole.
We know that there is a blood
that is not material, but yet has within itself the very essence of life. That
is spiritual life, the blood of the German people that has flowed through the
German people for centuries and millennia, expressing the longing of the German
in spiritual and philosophical ways, like that of Faust, which always come to
expression.
Physical blood in the racial
sense and this spiritual stream of life are always deeply bound to each other.
There is a deep connection between physical and spiritual things, between body
and soul. They cannot be separated. We demand that the spirit, intellect, and
character rule the body, however. Only then is life healthy. We are therefore
absolutely correct when we focus our German people first on the importance of a
healthy race. If one recognizes this spiritual racial nature, proper conduct
will of necessity follow with respect to the blood of the physical race that is
bound to it. [I omit a footnote on the background of the word “race.”]
The impact of race depends on
the morals of a people. Morality is obedience to the laws of blood. One can see
a people’s morals as its racial memory. Woe to that people that loses its
racial memory, that denies its morals. Morality is an expression of commonality
in feeling, will, thinking, and understanding, not a matter of the individual,
but of the entire people. When we demand that one follow Germanic morality and
customs, that is nothing but an affirmation by us of our people’s God-given
race.
I cannot imagine anything
greater that the concepts of race and soul, which are bound together
inextricably. Race and soul are the foundation of our National Socialist
worldview. We could also say physical and spiritual, or people and God.
Blood is the tie that holds us
together on earth as a God-ordained whole. We see this race and the maintenance
of racial purity, as well as the preservation of our German, Nordic, Aryan race
as obedience to a natural law for humanity. And nature’s laws are God’s laws.
Race is God-ordained. Each sin against
racial purity is a sin against God’s will and the created order. If we
fail honor our blood, we sin against the will of God; to serve our race, to
maintain its purity, is to fulfill God’s will. To ignore blood, to fail to hear
the voice of blood, to fail to respect race, is to destroy that instrument
given to us by the creator of the world to enable us to hold our own in the
cosmos.
From the point of view of our
racial organism, no thought, no idea of National Socialism is in conflict with
the laws and harmony of the cosmos. For the first time, our whole racial
organism affirms its own blood and the relationship of its community of blood
with the environment. National Socialism is nothing other than a seeking after
this last and eternal source of strength.
The creator of the world
created the races according to his will, and everything that is follows the
great paths ordained by God.
The racial human being is the
product of God’s creation, the only way through which God works his will in a
child. Pure race is the way through which providence works on us. The purer and
cleaner humans correspond to the will of God, the more clearly God’s will and
nature are reflected in them. Just as a clean and well-tuned instrument
produces clear notes, which is why one can play best on a properly tuned violin,
the nature of the creator is best seen in instruments that have remained true
to what God ordains, in racially pure human beings who give it the clearest,
soundest, most glorious expression. Only if we affirm racial thinking on earth,
only if we have not ruined the instrument necessary to receive divine
vibrations, will we be one with the laws of nature, with the cosmos, with God!
The highest divine command,
and the most important task of a race on this earth, is to understand and
incorporate into itself the eternal harmonies of the universe, along with the
more immediate laws governing landscapes and neighbors.
For the first time, Adolf
Hitler made a whole people receptive to cosmic influences. As our German people
drinks in ever more deeply those eternal harmonies, it will be ever more able
in coming years, decades, and centuries to develop and form its life and
actions in ways consistent with the nature of the cosmos. [pp. 22-25]
III. The German People
a) Becoming a People
1. The Proclamation of a People’s
Community
2. Germany in the Past
3. Germany Today
4. The People as an Organism
After the family, the next
God-ordained whole is the people. Today — and that is the greatness of the age
— the German people is a united acting living thing; that is how it stands.
This fact proves the complete hopelessness of all attempts to fight against
this state or to reduce the creative strength of the people.
The people is not the sum of
individuals, but rather a living principle of flesh and blood, a unique,
unified, organized living thing, just as the family is.
Everything a living thing does
depends on the possibilities and abilities, in the capacities that the living
thing possesses. The higher the organization of a living thing is, the greater
its capacities. As we move from a one-celled to two- or multi-celled things,
from animals living in water to those living on land, the level of development
steadily increases. We find that the greater the number of cells, the more organized
the living thing is, the more advanced its nature.
The same laws apply to
individuals and groups of individuals. If we look back in history, we see
family life, tribes, occupations, classes, countries, dynasties, various
structures, groups, organizations, with increasing capacities. The people is
the most highly organized living thing on this planet. It is incontrovertible
that we live in a wonderful age, since we see the most prefect imaginable
expression of the racial soul.
Until now, we have wasted
German strength against each other. Here something was done, there something
else, but they were not working toward the same goal. Today, all Germans march
together in the same direction. Think of what can be accomplished if each
person knows that he is a part of the whole organism of the people, if he
delights in being part of it and strives to become an ever more important part
of it!
We are at the beginning of an
era that will achieve things that will make the achievements of the past look
small. The most highly organized individual [Hitler] stands today on the
world stage and writes with eternal force.
Today’s battle is a battle of
the German; that also explains the spiritual nature of today’s wonderful
struggles. We see ourselves as a people, as a highly organized organism, that
does not merely live and act in its motherland, reflecting its strength only
there, but rather from the standpoint of blood and race everywhere it had
organs and limbs. Just as a hand or a finger will perish if blood from the heart
does not reach them, and then flow back to the heart, so Germandom abroad will
die and lose its meaning if it does not maintain a living connection to the
deepest intellectual, spiritual, and blood-life of the motherland and people,
even to the last German abroad. Just as between a mother and her children,
there is here a band of blood.
Life in this world is the life
of peoples. The people is a powerful spiritual force on this planet that never
rests, but rather always wants to become stronger. It is the highest entity
striving toward God. We must, therefore, become accustomed to using the word
“people” [Volk] with the same reverence and respect that we give
to the concepts of God and religion. [pp. 38-39]
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