Source: Basic Ideas of National-Socialist Cultural Policy – by prof. Wolfgang
Schulz
National Socialist politics, and hence the part of it that one can
designate cultural policy, is determined and carried out by the Führer and
those summoned by him for the individual tasks.
If one wants to know what National Socialist cultural policy is, then
one should look at these men, at what they do, and to the guidelines that they
give in order to draw along responsible co-workers, and at the legislation that
paves the way for this work.
What plays out there, history will one day characterize and evaluate.
And one will then be able to write above a portion of the history of National
Socialism: National Socialist cultural policy.
The unity of action is guaranteed by the unity and organized gradation
of the leadership, by the party program and the publications of the movement,
by the common experience of the period of struggle and by the National
Socialist world-view. Its two basic ideas are race and folk.
National Socialism does not aim unconditionally at bringing new ideas,
and the ideas race and folk as well are certainly not new. But it wants
to restore the nation’s previously despised values and does this from a depth
of desire and from a totality claim that are new.
Through the movement that the Führer has called to life and carried ever
farther forward, prerequisites exist such as never before existed, and power is
also at disposal to achieve the necessary. So the overall picture is
nonetheless a totally different one, and through this the old ideas as well
gain new coloration and signification.
We do not proceed from speculations about the community, about a
theoretical universalism and about the contrast to the general concept of the
individual in order to deduce from it National Socialism, rather from our own
present-day, historical, racial, life-causal conditioned folk community itself.
This orientation is socialist down to the bone and even into its marrow. It
demands that this community guides itself according to the forces that
determine its existence and, if they are correctly used, secure, purify and
elevate it. Employment of all means of the folk community in the service
to its task - that is socialism.
A folk does not propagate itself through the race idea alone, through
knowledge of the value of its blood alone, and also not through the resultant
rebellion of thought, rather only through the mastering of all of its
life conditions, even the economic. The share of the folk comrades in this
mastering, their performance, is diverse, just as they themselves are diverse,
and maximum manifold value is determined and developed accordingly. The goal
and the means that are suitable to make it achievable for the folk comrades,
hence our socialism, is among us Germans something quite different than in any
other folk. We are simply not socialists in general, rather National
Socialists.
Everything that we have is employed. The unshakeable faith in the great
goal lays the foundation, a new way of thinking grows out of it. It is not
nourished solely by this faith, rather also purified by all attainable
knowledge coming into question for its execution, which must be made ready for
this purpose, thought through anew and conscientiously checked for its
applicability. In the process, the less important recedes and the essential in
the service of the new overall task stands out. The spiritual goods of the
nation experience a total mobilization and obtain inner direction and unity.
The racial and folkish idea stands at the focal point in the process, such as
corresponds to its fundamental importance.
How deeply this idea is rooted in German history, is illustrated by two
names: Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.
Arndt was the first who, with his little noticed “Attempt at Comparative
History of the Folks”, rolled out the history of the European folks as blood
picture. Ludwig Scheman, the renowned researcher of the history of the race
idea, passes this verdict over him: “With all enthusiasm, more Nordic prudent
than Gobineau and with all prudence more soaring than Woltmann, he was already
anticipated both in the basic doctrines.”
At Arndt’s side stands Jahn, who was the first to coin the concept and
term nationality [Volkstum], present race as core essence and pronounce the
three great demands: racial purity, folk unity, freedom of thought. This
trinity is pure, correct and leading; for half-breeds with their conflicted
souls bring conflict and prevent any unity of the folk; the spirit remains
constrained, foreign powers put it under their spell.
Freedom here is not liberalism, rather fulfillment of one’s own inner
law. The care of the race secures the unity of the folk and liberates its
genuine, culture-bearing spirit.
Since Arndt and Jahn, nothing fundamental had changed in the demand, but
much and fundamental has changed in the purification and deepening of the
ideas. Today it is also no longer about a mere demand, rather we stand in the
middle of fulfilling it.
The connection between the races, the nationalities and the cultures of
the folks was researched down to numerous details.
Comparative linguistics has outlined and presented the Indo-Germanic
branch of folks, and comparative anthropology has done the same for the Nordic
race. It has been shown that the bearing stratum of Indo-Germanic man and
the Nordic race are the same. The most important cultures of world history have
become tangible as expression of the northern racial essence. Research of
artifacts has further enriched and deepened these realizations.
The spiritual legacy of Germanic and Indo-Germanic antiquity has proven itself as unexpectedly plentiful and valuable treasure. From
Indo-Germanic man to Germanic man, a clearly discernible line of physical
descent and spiritual-moral unity runs to our German present and points into
our future.
The composition of the German folk, of its tribes and professions from
elements of various highly valuable races and the leading importance of the
Nordic racial core, which is most firmly preserved in the peasantry, clearly
stands before us. The distribution of hereditary traits in the populace is open
to our view, a number of important laws of heredity have been discovered.
All these results demand that they now finally be used, and it is self-
evident that in a time in which the distress of the folk, but also its self-
awareness and its awakened energy, demand final action, we will also really
employ them with conscientious determination.
We must prove ourselves to four great witnesses: first, to our history, second,
to our folk, third, to its culture, and fourth, to the folks and cultures
around us.
We see before us German history, full of glorious achievement,
but also burdened with many grave failures.
One should think about the words that Ulrich von Hutten spoke in 1818 in
his speech about the war with the Turks: “There lives in Germany a strong
youth, big hearts greedy for genuine glory, but the guide, the leader is
missing. So that energy dies, valor slackens, glowing thirst for deeds
decays in the darkness.”
Today we have the leader. The old
parties have been destroyed, the provinces, tribes and professions are united,
and things are achievable that recently still seemed impossible.
We see before us the German folk full of incomparable talent, but
also burdened with many defects.
Our population policy must remove the defects, secure the
procreation of the congenitally healthy and restrain the proliferation of the
congenitally ill. Our race policy must support the bearing race of our
nationality, whereas one previously despoiled it, yes, raged against it. We can
solve both tasks; for we have the realizations of genetics, the admittance of
the existence of the genes and the racial elements of the populace and the
insight into the leading importance of the Nordic race.
We see before us German culture, which is splendidly plentiful in
its scope and can compare itself with the cultures of all the folks around us,
if it does not even surpass them in many things.
But this culture as property does not yet satisfy us. We must not
merely preserve what has been achieved and secure it against decay; we must not
just administer a past. The new ideas and the new will of our present obligate
us to view our past and the opportunities of our future with new eyes, to learn
from this and to act accordingly. We see in our culture many impurities, many
tears and fissures, much foreign that was imposed upon us and contradicts our
nature, does not let us find ourselves and often does not let us be fully
happy.
So next to the comforting awareness of our old inherited and mighty culture
as possession steps the rousing demand: culture as goal. Expulsion
of the foreign, growth from the native - a long-term work, but simultaneously a
task that finally gives us a future again.
The culture-creative significance of the Nordic race, which has
presented itself in the Indo-Germanic cultures of antiquity, in Germanic
culture and in the German cultural process, is the world-historical proof that
we must nurture the core element of this race in the German folk and base the
spiritual goods of the German future upon it.
Finally, we look at the folks and cultures around us and are
aware of much respect and love, but also deepest hatred, which surround us and
threatened our existence especially seriously, when we were still defenseless.
That is past, but we need friends especially now.
The healthier we are as folk body, the more confident as bearer of a
uniform culture, the more we will be able to justify and find friendship.
The Nordic race, upon which our culture must build, does not need to
display the so-called Nordic reserve, rather it can and should also bridge
over. The more thoroughly we explore, the more clearly we see ourselves tied to
the folks around us in a great cultural community from olden times, which owe
their best in their own native manner to the same racial foundation.
Just as National Socialism is the great bulwark of Europe and of the
White race overall against Bolshevik chaos, so is the racial and folkish idea
of National Socialism the surest guarantee of peace and agreement among the
folks and simultaneously the guarantee for the preservation of the cultural
values of its old civilizations.
The doubts against the use of the racial and folkish ideas of National
Socialism and against the warriordom [Kampfertum], the “activism”, which lies
within them, are as old and baseless as the world that this combativeness has
already swept away. The representatives of that overly clever world and we -
how do we stand toward each other?
We champion the primacy of political will over the
historic process; they claim that the historical process invariably
continues on its own without this and also forms the will. We likewise believe
the latter, only with us it has a different meaning. We only shout that a will,
which revolts and with heroic determination reaches for the impossible - does
not only make it possible, rather achieves it.
We believe that from the realization of such come new
drives of the will that overcome the supposed necessities, and we use our
freedom, which lies therein; they teach that everything obeys necessity
and that it does not help to rebel against it. But they thereby deny in truth
simultaneously the possibility of all politics, such as their own as well has
turned out correspondingly poorly.
History is supposed to be a wheel that rolls across us, and it is
decried as lunacy to want to grab into the spokes. Just, what does history, a
life process, into which the decisions of the will of great men intervene again
and again, have in common with a lifeless wheel?
Or should history progress through thesis and anti-thesis to higher
union (synthesis) or higher level of culture according to an inherent
(“dialectic”) logic, and should the future be decided by this and not by
answers, found in time or fatefully neglected, to favorable or threatening
reality?
To a weak, over-stimulated thinking, the sequence of cultural levels
seemed so much like something changing and escalating due to necessary impulses
that culture was supposed to be the same thing as a structured, independent
being that comes over man; he as its booty, while he is its creator and it is
weak, if he tires.
Even Goethe thought the same thing, that the necessary constantly
repeated itself on a higher level, in the image of a spiral. But what with him
was a brilliant equation, tempted an immense throng of sophists to get on the
track of such escalating orbits and to force the numbers of world history into
simplistic formulas, yes, to want to be able to predict the future from them.
Just, the plough must not be invented, because the 500 years of whatever theory
are over, rather because a peasant folk already exists as seed that wants it.
History is instructive like life, but mostly because it never repeats
itself exactly, and because each historical situation is a unique one occurring
once, which awaits its master who overpowers it.
It is a welcomed objection that one still does not know all the laws,
that the final insight has not yet been achieved, and that hence one must not
yet apply what one already knows. One raises this objection especially gladly
against genetics and its applications in race policy and population policy.
But research is never at an end, rather must always continue. In all other
branches of science it is so, even in the so-called exact ones of mathematics,
physics and chemistry. Nonetheless, technology has never failed to use also,
immediately applying the scientific knowledge and laws that one had acquired.
Experience and growth of scientific knowledge later expands and
simplifies such applications, but both would never come about, if one wanted to
wait for a final condition of completed insight, which is eternally denied to
limited human intellect due to the infinity of nature.
Hence we must also use the knowledge of genetics that we already have
without prejudice to future knowledge that will hopefully come later. A
congenitally healthy breed, which we can already bring about with the already
known means, will also harvest such fruits sooner, and it will certainly more
easily accomplish much that we achieve only with effort. The beginning is the
hardest; it is all the more necessary. But precisely that terrifies those whose
advantages lie in the old damages.
The false doctrine that all human beings are the equal still haunts
heads and resists the fundamental truth of the inequality of human beings
according to their appearance, their genes and their accomplishments. The
valuation of human beings that results from this is portrayed as arrogance of
the more valuable, yes, as injustice.
One scorns our desire as racial arrogance, without noting that we do not
judge the individual according to race, rather according to accomplishment. But
in regard to the folk whole, we are concerned about the race, because the
Nordic race alone has over the course world history passed a performance test
that is so mighty that it obligates us to also employ this race for the new,
even far greater accomplishments that matter now.
The old cultures, and at their top the cultures of the Indo-Germanic
folks, have achieved the mightiest things, but not the final one, the securing
of their own existence. They have perished. Our culture as well is threatened
by inner dangers and by external ones. Will we reach our goal? Will we secure
the survival of our culture, and will we be able to increase it and pass it on,
elevated, to the future of our folk? If we fail, we who are basically the last
large remnant of the Nordic race, then the civilization of our race, yes, of
mankind, is for centuries and millennia in danger and probably lost. If we succeed,
then not only we are saved.
It is a world historical moment without equal that we must face, and it
is our will to make ourselves fit to pass it.
For those who view culture simply as possession, that is
incomprehensible. For them, German nationality is a pillow upon which they want
to fall asleep in laurels, while for us it is a task that places the hardest
demands, but is also full of promises.
We want to take our nationality under care, to keep it away from harmful
influences. One mocks that as prudery; the charm of culture supposedly lies
only in diversity of touches. Well, we are fed up with this over-stimulation
and will abolish it.
Or one says: Culture must grow, one cannot manufacture it artificially.
Just what previously proliferated among us were the weeds, and we want to
exterminate them so that the beautiful and noble plants, which up until now
often withered or even died, can better thrive.
Cultures need their care like forest, field and garden, and indeed a
reasonable one that accounts for the laws of nature and increases them to
greater beauty and order.
Forester, farmer and gardener must love nature, must understand it
intimately, but must also know and have learned much about it so that the
growth entrusted to them does to grow wild or become desolate.
In municipal constructions, land planning and monument maintenance, the
technical and historical knowledge comes in as well. In the trades, production,
trade, even more so in schooling and education system of a folk, in art and
science, the tasks reach down to the final demands of the moral and spiritual.
All that only grows correctly, if it is nurtured. And the same thing as
for each individual of these and for many other cultural tasks of a folk is
also true for culture overall and for all cultural policy. Love for the nature
of a folk and insight into it and the realities of the land and its resources
are the foundations, and all indifference that makes the excuse that “nothing is
to be done” is totally alien to us. Usually, it is just pretended and the cloak
behind which all kinds of groups and cliques pursue their own selfish goals,
often very unabashedly.
Or one says we have no sense for the historical realities and completed facts.
And yet, we derive precisely from the historical reality the proof for the
value of race and nationality. Certainly, we do not recognize completed facts.
Rather, as long as we are Germans, we will not tire to push for the revision of
a more than thousand-year trial, after which we are supposed to be robbed of
our legacy and forced into a straight-jacket in which the most noble limbs of
our body grow deformed.
The race of ancestors, their language, their nationality, their
spiritual-moral bearing is still alive within us. All attempts to eradicate
this have not been able to take hold. We extract from this priceless good
quality, stretching far back into prehistory and highly durable, important
yardsticks in order to measure the inner value of cultural accomplishments.
What has sprouted from the old and genuine essence and agrees with it,
we prefer. But we nonetheless do not want something old, rather something
unconditionally new, which can also still pass the check test: the test of
correctness. Our new thing must also agree with our better insight and with
reality. For the researching of this reality and the energetic determination to
also follow what has been recognized through research likewise belongs to the
decisive objective abilities of the Nordic race.
We are hence willing to prove whatever can somehow be proven, to present
evidence where it can suffice. But evidence does not reach to the ultimate, and
it is unfathomable. Nonetheless, it lives within us, and we act according to
it, and all evidence and reasons have in it their ultimate reason.
National Socialism is a world-view, it is also even more. It was
possible that hundreds gave their lives for it, thousands their blood, and
hundreds of thousands again stand ready for it at any moment. Blood sacrifice,
as is known, is not yet proof for the truth, but an infallible proof for the
obligation to something ultimate, eternal. The devotion to die for an idea
continues in the readiness to live for it, and tests itself in the ability to
transform it into the deed despite all the dullness and obstacles of daily
life.
The racial and folkish idea of National Socialism also gives this
strength. It does not give it, because it is thought, rather because it is
lived, known, believed, wanted. So it rests and works as union inside.
In order to portray it outwardly, we first ascertain the fundamental
thing, in that we trace the connection of culture and heredity, the
roots of our fate and of our freedom.
Then we broaden our view from our closest environment, of homeland and
the love for it, to the world historical and idea historical view in order to
illuminate from there the moving questions of our present.
Third, we discuss how education on a racial and folkish foundation is to
be established, so that what is already now possible and the path into the
future become visible.
Finally, we weigh against each other: faith, science and desire.
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