View and Orientation-Bearing [Gesinnungshaltung]
Source: Basic Ideas of National-Socialist Cultural Policy – by prof. Wolfgang Schulz
All cultural technology is simultaneously cultural policy, and cultural policy the highest, if not basically the solely possible kind of politics at all. For politics is goal-driven action in the service of an idea. It does not satisfy itself with the world as it is, rather it wants to make it better.
That all kinds of incurable, immature world redeemers have brought into disrepute the serious and purified will to make it better, should not deceive us. “Doesn’t matter, do it better!” says Tölpelhans in the fairy-tale, when he surveys his damage afterward, and the next time he does it even worse - because he is simply Tölpelhans [a blockhead]. We, on the other hand, are guided by the idea, the view of the real and of its laws and the duty we receive from it. In the Edda, it is written in the great poem ’’The Prophetess’s View” (Wöluspa): Evil gets better, Baldur returns home. We do not believe in Baldur, but we understand the deep meaning of these words: How should Balder, the symbol of right and peace, return home, if we let evil proliferate from aversion toward improvement? And how should he return home, that means right and peace return to us, if we do not prepare the site for them through our work?
Politics in this sense must not limit into to the world, rather it must also start with the human being, and it must not be satisfied with the human being, rather it must also take care of the process of heredity process. For that, it must evaluate the hereditary characteristics, and it can only do that from the vantage point of folk and race. Not the human being as general concept can guide it, rather only Nordic man, capable of leading, according to the demonstration of his world- historical accomplishment, to racial properties of the highest order, and there as well not one floating in the clouds, rather the German rooted in his folk.
Whoever has clearly and compellingly seen a condition to be possible and the path to reach it, will invest everything to realize as much of this view, of this idea, as he can. That is our improving. For after struggle and work, we want genuine peace.
Hence the ideal attitude toward the future, toward our inner future as well, must root in the grasp of reality such as it presents itself now.
But each present has become and first becomes understandable as one that has become.
History continues the brief experiences of the just now living generation in great distances , where much that is now very manifold and entangled still lies there simple, and where conditions and processes that seem similar to the present ones, if one thinks about them more deeply, enlighten, warn, instruct us and school our comprehension, solidify our will. History shows how what is became so - how it quite easily could have turned out totally different - what value it has - and also how one can make it better again. One’s own life teaches much, the history of the whole folk infinitely more, but only world-history can show us world-historical goals.
Hence the view of the past, of the world from which we come, the view of the present, the world in which we live, and the view of the future, the world we want to enter, our idea, together inseparable. This third or, more accurately, first step awakens enthusiasm, the second sobers up, the historical clarifies, and only all three together provide the whole and secure that orientation-bearing
[Gesinnungshaltung] from which the politician or cultural technician again and again adapts his measures and is able to resolutely apply the available knowledge.
In the process, it is superfluous to discuss what must exist first, that three-fold view or the orientation-bearing that goes with it; for one depends on the other.
The view remains useless, if the right orientation does not accommodate it or let itself be awakened from it, and the orientation remains unsuccessful, if it lacks the overview where it should employ itself.
The orientation-bearing can be the impulse to conquer the view, and it was that among the pioneers of the folkish idea, who traced the path of the Nordic race from its origins on up to us and from that nonetheless only based what their heart had already previously felt.
Conversely, however, this view can also again awaken the bearing where it still slumbers, say, and in the completeness and wealth in which it can today already be established, it is simultaneously the strongest impulse to use it and to follow it.
Finally, view and orientation require the support in the knowledge that is to be prepared and correctly applied in order to find the path to realization. Without that, the whole great effort would be pitifully wasted.
Homeland and Love [Minne]
The orbit, in which the individual is rooted and from which he grows into the whole of the German nationality, is his homeland. It is defined in terms of landscape, dialect, tribe membership.
In the broader sense, the German homeland is the land in which the
German tribes settle, of which they took possession working and which they have turned, according to their will, into what it is.
Once it was a mere environment; but they cleared the forests, drained the swamps, constructed roads. They have imprinted the land with the stamp of their nature, insofar as that was previously possible, and with the means that their talent put at their disposal. The environment has become homeland and becomes it ever more so.
The psychological connections of the inhabitants to their land become all the more passionate, the more the external and internal reshaping and development proceeds toward homeland. Each feels from his surroundings the work, sweat and blood of his ancestors coming to meet him, and since the accomplishments of man rest on his tradition, the jointly experienced history as well, which has placed the same kind of demands all and has formed a uniform authentication and valuation, is something equalizing, binding.
Only on the soil of the homeland and before the claim of history does a folk solidify from its landscapes and tribes into that deep inner union that one calls nationality, and which always has as prerequisite that a race dominates leading and gives to all a common basic direction reinforced and confirmed by the common possessions of the land and of the history.
Only the multiple voices of the races represented in the German folk, standing close together, tied by blood and tied by fate, the diversity of the German tribes, the manifoldness of the landscapes and narrower homelands, gives German essence its full strength and greatness.
The ultimate units upon which its rests are, seen from the vantage point of the folk, the family, seen from the vantage point of the German homeland, the home. The will for the whole immediately bursts its apparent narrowness and limitation; and the force of political will formation, which today roars across Germany unifying under the sign of the ancient swastika, also creates new forms of action of the narrower homeland, of the tribes, of the provinces, for the great idea of blood and soil, race and folk. The work service at the Party Day in Nuremberg, the peasants at Bückeberg are the ultimate symbols for it. Each of these thousands and hundreds of thousands stands for home and homeland like the Wehrmacht does for the whole folk.
But where does this force come from, and where goes it want to go? The meaning of the word home can lead us to it. Home is the settlement, the farmstead and its surroundings in contrast to everything strange that pushes against it, and the word home itself is related in origin to the Greek word for sleeping place (χοίμή). The home is the place where one lies one’s head to rest and conceives one’s children, and where many generations before us have already done the same thing. The cradles of the children and the graves of the dead, both belong to home and homeland.
Among us, much has been spoken and written about the homeland. We have homeland study, homeland science, homeland history. One puts ethnology and prehistory in the service of the homeland idea. But this is not capable of a major deepening.
We build homesteads for German man, the German family. Without that, the idea of folk and race would lack the fulfilling deed. It locates the settlement above all in the country, where there is still room, and also seeks temporary solutions in the city. The congenitally healthy family must fill its home with German cultural content. Permanence and homeland feeling can grow only on such a basis.
Above the local stands then stands the German one, it receives its blood-tied meaning, determined by the work of the generations, German history. This, the succession of generations, the graves of prehistory, lead back to the Germanic settlement, and then again to the Indo- Germanic one and to the great cultural creations of the Indo-Germanic folks even far beyond the European region.
Prehistory as well never lets itself be limited to the narrower homeland. The pre-historical and world-historical bursts with irresistible force the framework of merely German or even merely Northern German homeland history and commandingly demands going into the whole process and thus the old Northern German-Scandinavian core region as it lives within us today.
The shortest path to ourselves leads through the whole world. The most thorough introspection occurs after long wandering. World expanse of knowledge and depth of soul, effectiveness toward the outside and introspection within oneself, deed and reflection demand and promote each other.
Homeland becomes what it is through the blood. When first only the Ichthyosaurs and Dinotherien lived in it, it was not yet our homeland, yes, not even our environment. The remains of such creatures, the primitive rock on its bed, are important as local facts, which the class uses practically in order to broaden the picture of the world. But the concept homeland encompasses more, something different, something more important.
Homeland leads far out into the spiritual. We remember the homeland from which we come and the other one we enter, which we want to win through work on our own soil.
So homeland means for us representatives of this new desire one of the foundations of our cultural policy orientation. And an old word offers itself for this orientation itself as well: love
[Minne].
Its basic meaning, which stretches back to the Indo-Germanic root, is deep inner self-reflection. A friendly reflection overcoming temporal and spatial distance is meant.
The monuments of prehistory are landmarks for this love for the ancestors. They keep awake the memory of the deeds of the ancestors and heroes and awaken the feeling of obligation toward the future. Since the oldest generations traced themselves to the gods, one drank the love goblet [Minnebecher] at the festival in their memory. The meaning also resulted from the friendly attitude that lies in the word love [Minne]: Friendly agreement, kind setting aside of quarrel.
These meanings are far from that eroticism, the word love [Minne] received the connection to the sexual only late and in the Northern German region characteristically not at all. But the connection to the succession of generations, of the unity of soul and blood, clearly dominates.
The world-historical and social scientific view under the sign of the racial and folkish idea and the conclusions from it hence stand for us under the sign of the deepened homeland idea and of love [Minne],
The Nordic Race in the Struggle for the Meaning of the World
What does this love then awaken within us? First, it guides our gaze into our own history, then into our prehistory, then into the history of our race. Not only the German Middle Ages, German antiquity and the other Indo-Germanic, northern race folks step before us, and their struggle as well for the leadership in the culture shaping of mankind is most deeply related to us.
So our loving, blood-bound, friendly memory, our love, broadens into a world-view and social scientific view. Its object is: the Nordic race in the struggle for the meaning of the world.
This struggle plays out today and was yesterday and blazed already in prehistory. One could thus try to proceed from what lies closest to us and trace it back step by step to its origins in the most distant past just in order to not lose, after all, the living connection with the present.
In truth, this would mean never really finding it. It can, namely, always only be carried out in details; it shrinks with the distance; for in the older times, information becomes ever sparser until it finally runs dry. So we run the risk of losing under our hands the richness that we want to look at and let glow within us, just like rivers become ever more unassuming the closer they are to their source and disappear in the rocks. In no way does one see the tree better, if one looks down from one of its branches along the trunk toward the roots. Rather one needs a decent interval in order to gain an overall view, even of the course of the rivers and of the big lakes and finally the seas and their steaming toward the sun.
All too many details are the fiercest enemies of any picture encompassing vast spaces and times. Instead, everything is shortened to the most extreme, so that the overview can first become perceivable, comprehensible, retained as such, and hence the force of a truthful view can emanate from it.
That here it is about our race, yes, our soul as well, and indeed back then and today still, must result from the overall content and not from artificially produced or preserved connections to our present.
Just like the globe has five continents, so must our world-historical and social scientific view show the Indo-Germanic personalities with their five high cultures in India, Iran, Greece, Italy and of the Germans resting on Germanic foundation. Only the combined view of these various folk personalities and their cultural creations produces the deepened overall picture of the Nordic race, of its inner diversity and of its possibilities.
One must guard against wanting to reduce such personalities, be they individual, important, creative people, be they entire folks, to a simple formula; for behind each stands a plentitude of the whole of life, and especially behind the personality of folks.
Who Goethe, Beethoven or Rembrandt is, one can hardly indicate from afar, one must absorb their works, and nothing has such an educating effect as this kind of association with leading people.
The same thing is true of the great folks clearly pronounced in their cultural works. What we indicate about them from here, cannot replace the direct contact with them, it can only lead toward them.
Also, each personality is a center point of meaning for all around it.
It gives life meaning, and it fights for it. Hence the development of the five great Indo-Germanic folk personalities in their high cultures is simultaneously the struggle for the meaning of the world.
We stand in the middle of this struggle and yet simultaneously see it from high watch as a process of fate, from which, precisely because we are born into it, we base our inviolate freedom.
Indo-Germanic People
The distribution of the great races around the end of the Stone Age corresponded, despite numerous later displacements and obliterations, basically to the picture that today still shows the racial variants in Europe’s population, on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea and in Asia Minor.
In Europe’s north, in southern Scandinavia and in Northern Germany, we have before us the core region of the Nordic race and of the Falic [fälische] race closely related to it. From the east, the Alpine race juts like a wedge deep into Europe. The Dinaric race stretches from the Pyrenees through the Alps and Balkans, and the Near Eastern race, probably originally closely related to it, through Asia Minor and the Caucasus. Behind this wall, which in earlier times was situated in front of the great mountain chain and was then pushed away under the pressure from the north, lie in the west around the Mediterranean Sea the folks of the Mediterranean race, in the orient the folks of oriental (Semitic) race closely related to them.
European peasant cultures, into which the Late Stone Age in Europe flowed, are already involved in the tense relationships between the Nordic (and Falic), the Alpine, Dinaric and Mediterranean races. But the old High Cultures lie in the orient. In Mesopotamia, on the Nile, on the Indus, the peasant settlement around the city’s castle was expanded already in the early historical period, that means in part even before the fourth millennium B.C., and a cultural movement of urbanization emanates from here which slowly but steadily over the course of millennia spreads through the Mediterranean lands to the distant west and even more slowly toward the north, only that the North resists it the most stubbornly, and up to the beginning of the German Middle Ages successfully.
The plough culture, the steer as work animal, the milk economy and the related customs, the foundations of the peasantry, however, despite their great age and their rich development in the orient, must not have their origin there, they can also already have it in the European north. The oldest plough comes from the fourth millennium B.C. and was found in Eastern Frisia.
Seats and Wanderings of the Indo-Germanic Folks
(According to Bruno R. Schultz)
Border of the Kentom and Satem folks
Europe’s Late Stone Age peasant cultures and the orient’s urban cultures show clear signs of torpidity when the Indo-Germanic folks, coming from Europe’s north, themselves grown upon peasant foundation, spread over them, advance on daring treks into the deepest southeast and complete their world-historical foundations.
The Indians and the Iranians (Persians and related ethnic groups), the Scythians in southern Russia. And later the Prussians, Latvians, Slavs belong to the eastern branch of a great family of folks whose western branch is formed by the Greeks, Thracians and Phryger, Italiker Celts, Illyrians and Germanic folks. One classifies all of the them together according to both their must distantly separated representatives, the Indians and Germanic people, by the artificial name coined merely from the language tree, of Indo-Germanic.
But not only by language, rather also by race, they originally formed a unity. The oldest testaments of the individual folks, even in the new residences, always show basically the same racial traits, at least for the upper stratum. They are the traits of the Nordic race. The ideal of beauty of the oldest poets of these folks is in agreement, and the artists portray it in their pictorial works even into the late period.
India, Iran, Armenia, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Spain, Britain, however, were first conquered by these folks. The Italiker came from beyond the Alps, the Greeks as well from the north, the Phryger from beyond the Bosphorus, to their later residences. Still in Herodof s time, in Russia merely the west and the south belonged to the Scythians. The treks of these folks show predominantly a spread from north toward south, from northwest toward southeast.
The older, still continuous settlement region before the swarming out of the individual folks, we hence imagine along a central line from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The name Nordic race is hence already sufficiently justified from this, since the core folk of Indo-Germanic man, which embodies this race the purest, yes, almost exclusively, and already possesses a significant, firmly solidified culture, according to these facts must have stemmed from Europe’s north. During their spread, however, these folks absorb into their development other, old indigenous population, presumably racially and linguistically in part more diverse than themselves, permeate them or subjugate them as well. That is the chief impulse for the formation of the individual lndo-Germanic folks.
Already early, these folks fell into two groups, and indeed according to language and culture.
In the northwest group, “hundred” is “kentom” and “horse” is “ekwos”, in the southeast group these words are satem and aswas, which means that a palatial plosive (k) has regularly become a palatial sibilant (s). The southeast group is the younger one. Furthermore, the folks in the northwest group are more settled peasants, those in the southeast group on the open steppe in part wandering herdsmen and horsemen. The split into both these groups presumably resulted, because the eastern one, the more it pushed into the Eastern European low plain and steppe, was pushed by the facts of this world into an independent development.
Initially, the main weight lies not with the eastern, linguistically as well younger group, rather with the western one, which settles accounts with the already decayed cultures of other Late Stone Age peasant folks and awakens new life from their legacy, in order to then, in the form of various individual folks, the Italiker, Greeks, Thracians, Phyrger, in part also Illyrians, penetrate deeper into the south and southeast.
The role of the southeastern Germanic people is a corresponding one and world-historically just as significant. As Indians, Iranians, Kimmerier, Scythians, they break into the super-annuated urban cultures of the southeast and of the old orient and reshape them into a new one pulsating with their new will.
What comes to us and the into the whole world from the later impulses of antiquity, of the orient as well, has all passed through the reshaping and purifying spirit of these Italikers, Greeks, Iranians, Indians and whatever they are all named, and both branches of the Indo- Germanic folks, the eastern and the western, have in the same way had a world-historically and social scientifically decisive share in the culture shaping of mankind. Even if the Nordic race is not the creator of “all” culture, nonetheless everything that surrounds us today as culture has become what it is only through the deepening intervention of the Nordic race and of the lndo-Germanic folks determined by it.
The Nordic race was in no way exhausted by the swarming out of the lndo-Germanic folks, rather it immediately planted a new seed leaf. While the lndo-Germanic land acquisition in the expanses of the south and southwest was still in full swing, the internally totally inde- pendent Germanic nationality formed in the old ancestral land of the Nordic race, in the present-day Lower German region, around 1,800 B.C., between the Illyrians in the east and southeast and the Celts in the southwest and west. It remained the solid support of the Nordic race in its ancestral regions.
Surrounded by other tribe related folks like the Illyrians and Celts, they were initially for millennia not directly involved in the mighty history of the south and southeast and could substantially develop their kind through their own energy and maintain it in great unity, until they, too, under the pressure of worsening climate, which at the end of the Bronze Age made the north inhospitable, took land in the east up to the Black Sea, won territory against the Celts in the west and south, and finally, around the end of their second millennium, through contact and fighting with the Romans become entangled in southern cultural events. The folk wandering and Viking Age, both the peak events of the third and final Germanic millennium, and the flowing of Germanicdom into Germandom, were the result.
The world historical significance of these events is determined according to the gain they have brought and how much of it has or should have an effect still today in the cultures of the leading folks, if currents and forces had not inferred that were opposed to the Nordic race and its desire for the ultimate and unconditional, [forces] which wanted to destroy the freedom of the spirit that follows from its truthfulness, and establish their own power instead. The legacy of mankind in its great cultures is simultaneously a struggle for this legacy itself, a competition of what has been found, but often also a losing or even annihilating of legacy values. Attacks seldom succeed completely. Great deeds, especially in the mind, continue to have an effect and can be deduced from the traces they leave behind. Then our own essence speaks to us again, warns and enlightens us and helps us in our own distress. It combines with all well-preserved knowledge and shows us our path.
Only in this sense can world history be practiced successfully as the history of ideas. It was also a valuation and will always remain such, but it depends on who values. Is it the ones who are biased in their intentions, who fear the truth, if it contradicts these intentions, or is it the ones who are able to stand above it?
The struggle of the races, folks and cultures is continued in the spiritual with intellectualized means, and the decisions that are made here are no less grave.
The North and the Old Orient
The great opposites are the Indo-Germanic north and the pre-Indo- Germanic, old orient. They show up more distinctly in the spiritual, in the religious.
Indo-Germanic religiosity is in its beginnings fundamentally different from everything that we know from Jewry, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, yes, even from the Mazdah doctrine of Zarathustra.
One can distinguish two large groups: Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Zarathustra and religion founders and saviors, even Jewry already knows the Messiah; that is the younger group.
To the older one belongs Jaho as city god of Jerusalem and also the Roman-Greek religion with its city divinities, as they were in vogue in the orient’s old urban culture up until the Sumerians and Akkader.
The Indo-Germanic culture, and hence also religion, on the other hand, is originally non-urban, the shrines lie far from the settlements, and one has the greatest one as hearth in one’s own home; even in the later period, the festivals are still rural.
The Indo-Germanic religion has as core the reverent attitude toward the eternally transmutable powers in effect in the universe, which, especially as heavenly light beings, are thought of as being of most general, supra-personal and almost impersonal kind. Fate is considered the larger or smaller share of man in this light world, which is determined for him through birth.
Light, right, order and the course of the world are based on each other.
For right rests on insight, this on enlightenment about one’s own inner light share. Furthermore, right creates order among people, like the divine light powers regulate the course of the world, so that an order corresponds to the other or should correspond, after all.
The worship of the ancestors depends on this light religion, on the presumption of divine descent of one’s own family. Earthly existence is considered only a segment of the great connection, the dead are forces at work in the universe just like the living. One believes that the enlightened, until their measure is full or their hour calls them, reside in the domain of heaven, or also that they regulate the fertility of the field meadow, themselves enter into the meadow, into plants and animals, and are attested in the bodies of human beings as a part of new life in that people consume the sacrificial animal or hunted animal or - in the later stage of field cultivation - the harvest yield.
Hand in hand with such doctrines, under the progressing renunciation of the supra-personal, impersonal, almost physical aspect of them, the powers are reinterpreted into personal divinities who administer specific sphere of life or of nature and, invoked through prayer or sacrifice, help human beings. But according to name and significance, the sky god goes back into the lndo-Germanic primeval period, whom the Greeks name Zeus, the Indians Djaus, the Romans Jupiter (that means Ju - father) and the Germanic people Tiwaz (Nordic Tyr, German Ziu).
The term “god” is still rooted in the impersonal stage. It means “the called one”, whereby the wish of the calling, praying, sacrificing human being, but also the power, can be meant, in which the possibility of the fulfillment of the wish is included.
One strives, perhaps already according to foreign examples, through symbolic actions, for example, in dance, to imitate the effectiveness of the powers and thereby gain influence over them and direct them according to wish. It is less magic than an escalated form of prayer. The arbitrariness in the establishment of the connections, of the symbolic similarities, is limited by a strong spiritual-moral direction. One does not so much follow obvious harmonies, rather one aims for ordered, founded connections. Certain functions, for example, braiding and weaving, serve the purpose of protecting oneself against the inclemency of weather, but also other attack. Something similar its true for squaring with the axe, hammering, defense with the sword, with the lance etc…
Therefore, among Germanic people, the powers are still called late, yet totally in the sense of the impersonal level, Hafte [fastener] and Bande [bond] in the literature of the scalds, and the “conjurer”” can himself exert power through stitching and binding; or, on the personal level, the gods obtain tools as symbols of their power, or the goddesses of fate braid, spin and weave.
The religion of the pre-Indo-Germanic orient is totally different. It comes to light complete already in the documents of the Sumerian time, and despite the great spatial and time stretch of the old orient, it has changed little.
In the city stands the house of the god who is physically portrayed by the picture of the gods. The king and priest serve him. One feeds him and gives him women. His power reaches as far as the city. If the city was defeated, then one led the god away in chains just like the ruler. The gods were also sent on visits to each other, subjugated gods housed in the side rooms of the temple. Since the chief god sought world importance, the belief in a single god grew from this. Even the intellectualized god of the Jews is totally bound to his city and his temple.
The will of God or of the gods is considered inscrutable, man ignorant and by nature sinful and exposed to attacks by demons. In the process, sin is something like impurity, and being free of it hence has little to do with mortality and this kind of purity also little to do with cleanliness.
The priests prescribe what one may eat, what is pure, pleasing to god. They try to figure out God’s will from omens and heavenly manifestations and to guide it through acts of magic and sacrifices. They determine the measures for time, space, weight in order to regulate the taxes of the subjects here below according to heavenly processes, and a caricature of the science of heavenly processes emerges, astrology.
Prophecy and magic prove that one was not able to extract a cause from the river of events and delineate its effect. Instead of searching for the cause, one proceeded from something conspicuous and compared the next conspicuous thing, not the effect. So one established arbitrary connections between such conspicuous events and fell into a kind of relationship delusion.
The practical application of such false orientation, likewise the corresponding technology, although admittedly a meaningless one, is magic. The magician squeezes water out of a sponge while he beats on a cymbal and imagines that he can thereby produce rain and thunder. Or he makes a doll of his enemy and expects this person will go blind, if it pokes out its eyes. Both times, the connection lies in an arbitrarily established similarity.
Only in beginnings do the efforts to relate the heavenly to the earthly reach into law. The divinity indeed hands King Hamurapi the law scroll, but in this stands neither that misdeed angers god nor that it provokes divine wrath. Treaties with other folks are sworn by the gods on both sides. The others are thereby entangled in the net of gods alien to them, who strike down the one who breaks the treaty. Furthermore, law has as purpose the calm and satisfaction of the subjects, the king’s fame after death.
The goal of all wishes is life, more life. For death is near and destroys all joys. The dead reside in a dark place, the grave, where rain water is their drink, clay their food.
The Indians and Iranians
The Indians first separate from the eastern group of the Indo- Germanic people, if one disregards presently still difficult to determine older strains in the Hittite Empire and elsewhere in the old orient, and one of their tribes, the Hari (the Blondes), appears around 1,400 B.C. as an ally of the Hittites. But their contact with the old orient was not lasting. Their main mass will have reached Afghanistan and the Hamunsee around 1,000 B.C., and from there they conquered the land of the five rivers.
Meanwhile, around 1,000, the first Iranians immigrate, bring down the empire of the Near Eastern Chaldaean on Wansee and gradually establish themselves in the whole of the Zagros mountain range. They are the Mede and the Persians. A main group of the Mede unites into larger states, while the Persians still sit 830 kilometers north of the Mede and only at the beginning of the 6th century arrive in Persis.
The highland of Iran, just made new homeland through the land acquisition, immediately proves itself a reliable base from which an extensive, daring foundation follows: the world empire of the Persian King Kurusch (Kyros). It stretches already around 538 from India to Egypt and Greece; Kambudschija II. (Kambyses) even conquers Egypt temporarily. Upon his death, a rebellion breaks out in the empire, but the great Darejawosch (Darius I) can quickly beat it down (519, inscription of Bagistan), the new state is secure for a long time.
Behind the rushing external events that lead to this result stands as driving force the inner opposition and fresh employment of Nordic folks against the inhabitants of the land and their super-annuated culture.
The Iranians, similar to the Indians, are in no way merely horsemen, rather simultaneously also peasant warriors, who set off with all their mobile belongings for land acquisition, but they know neither cities nor royal palaces nor images of divinities and intricate cults nor writing and everything that is connected with it.
The folks of the old orient have all possessed these institutions for millennia. The king, the priests, warriors, officials, traders, usurers degraded the citizens of the city to servile subjects, the peasants on the land to statute-laborers.
The cultures of the orient in the ancestral region have long fossilized into civilization and decayed, while the movement of urbanization that once emanated from this ancestral region has slowly but steadily spread for a good two millennia already toward the distant west and even more slowly toward the north. In Italy, the cities are just now sprouting up, when the Italiker who arrived not long ago also already grow into them, the still blossom in the Aegean circle when the Greeks take them over, in the old orient they have already become old, when the Iranians breathe new life into them.
But in all three regions, the conquerors encounter essentially fare incomparably mightier, the Iranian or even the Indian advance distances itself incomparably farther from the ancestral regions, the internal distance of the peasant-warrior culture of the Iranians from the, despite all signs of decay, mighty urban culture of the old orient is huge.
Rome could not by a long shot be something so new, so strange for Germanic people as Susa or even Babel for the Persians. For Rome had already grown from Italian-Indo-Germanic spirit and despite everything that divided them in many ways related in nature, while in the old orient Indo-Germanic nationality had never established itself anywhere before the Iranian land acquisition and empire foundation.
And one could more readily compare the Spaniards who burst into old America. But what a difference! Those zealots of a darkened Christianity do not let themselves be touched by the radiance and greatness of the old American cultures and destroy them in gold greedy rage, while the Iranians spare the alien folks understandingly and integrate them as bearers of their empire into their dominating desire.
The Name Aryan
Common to Indians and Iranians is the name Aryan. That is what the old warrior nobility called itself, and it means roughly “those bound through blood friendship, related”, and indeed in contrast to the ancient population viewed as racially inferior.
The Indians speak expressly of the light, “Aryan color” and contrast it with the dark color of the flat-noses whom they found already in the land.
The Iranians tie “Aryan” to noble descent. The name Iran comes from the form of Eran of Aryan, and that means “Aryan land”.
The great Persian King Darejawosch calls himself “Aryan of Aryan seed”. The pictorial works that portray him, his relatives and followers show Persians, Mede and Scythians as people of Nordic race.
The term Aryan also applies to the Mede and probably to the Scythians related to them, yes, it passes along to their successors, the Alans, whose name likewise developed phonetically along a different path from Arjan, finally to the Oseten, pushed off to the Caucasus, continuing with the Alan, who still today call themselves Iron, that means Iranians.
Since olden times, one also forms individual names, in whose first part one refers to the Aryandom of the bearer, for example Arjaramna (grandfather of Darejawowsch) or Arjapeithes (King of the Scythians, mentioned by Hereodotos).
According to Greek accounts, a son of Darejawosch is supposed to have been named Arjamenes, which sounds quite close to the old honorable god Arjaman shared by Iranians and Indians, who characteristically was originally the god of marriage. In India, one also designates with Arjaman the bridegroom, in Iran the clansmen, too. Besides that, the god was considered as healing, priestly physician, among the Indians still in a later time as ringleader of the ancestors, and the songs of the Rigweda already move his path to heaven. All these interpretations are internally connected. Down here, the bridegroom corresponds to the god of marriage, who as clansman takes care of the continued existence of his clan. Through this, death is conquered, similar to how a physician through healing saves the sick person from death. But all that is already presupposed in the form of the divine ancestral father, back to whom the clan of human beings trace themselves, and who as the first traveled the path of the world of the living into eternity.
So one derives the succession of noble generations from the heavenly world of light. In this sense, Darejawosch as well designates himself as “Aryan from Aryan seed”. For his word for seed actually means spark of light, according to the general Aryan view, the seed is a fluid form of the heavenly fire.
Such ideas were so powerful that even many centuries later they radiated from the Arian and Iranian influenced east to the tribe related folks, to Celts and Germanic people. For the Germanic people, the name Ariowistus proves this, that means “from Aryan seed”, which the ruler of the Sweben bears who fights with Caesar, and the name of the Goth Arjobindus, that means “Aryan allied”, in the 5th century A. D.. Both names are in the second part Germanic and so formed that they attest full understanding for the first part as well. Finally, the expression “the most Aryan of the heirs” appears on the rune stone of
Tune in Vingulmörk in southeastern Norway on the Swedish border in the 6th century A.D..
Then, a millennium and a half later, the folkish movement in Germany takes up the term Aryan from the Indians. A fundamental clarification of northern racial consciousness and the delineation against everything unconditionally alien, especially Jewry, was the result.
The Commandments of Aryan Law
Common to Indian and Iranians is furthermore the concept of order. The word for it, artam, among both folks means course of the world, world order, truth, right. Something similar is the fas
of the Roman, the Themis or Heimarmene of the Greeks, the Saelde of the Germanic people.
The order of the Artam encompasses the heavenly world of light and the generations of human beings who trace themselves from it and the whole of nature. Even the gods are only a part of it. Piety means being in accord with it.
The faith already lies in the word Aryan, and like with this one, so does one also tend to individual names with artam, for example Artaphemes (“through truth radiating”), Artachschaffa (distorted by the Greeks into Artaxerxes; “through truth ruling”). Images of god are originally alien to this view. Marriage and clan constitution, right and cult refer to the sacrifice of the hearth. Livestock and plants, receiving and giving, participate in the meal where they are cooked.
According to old Indian custom, the father of the house makes a daily fourfold sacrifice into the hearth fire: to the gods, the ancestors (parents), the heroes (from whose worship the concept of the father- land evolved), the guests. These sacrifices correspond to the same number of commandments of divine law, the Persians detest their violation as ingratitude and root of all bad.
In the old Indian law book of Manus, five commandments of human law are added to this: purity, control over the senses, abstinence from harming creatures, abstinence from unlawful acquisition, truthfulness.
In Greco-Roman law, the three vengeance demanding misdeeds that provoke the instigation of conflict correspond to the three middle commandments. They are: murder, rape, theft.
So the nine commandments of old Aryan law result: 1. honor the gods, 2. honor the parents, 3. honor the heroes (the fathers, the fatherland). 4. honor guests, 5. commandment of purity, 6. ban on murder, ban on rape, 8. ban on theft, 9. commandment of truthfulness (loyalty).
The ten commandments of the Bible (Exodus XX) are accordingly derived from an older path still to be more closely proven, and hence, if one looks closer, there are also only the following nine:
- You shall have no other gods.
- You shall make no idols.
- You shall not take the name of Jehovah frivolously.
- Remember to honor the Sabbath.
- Honor father and mother.
- You shall not kill.
- You shall not commit adultery (covet your neighbor’s wife).
- You shall not steal (not covert your neighbor’s house).
- You shall not bear false witness.
The last four commandments fit well in both series. The fifth commandment of the Bible (according to the above listing, not according to the catechism) goes: Honor father and mother, so that you live long in the land that Jehovah, your god, have given to you as your own. It hence corresponds to the second Aryan commandment (honoring of the ancestors), and the basis for the third Aryan commandment; for the fatherland is replaced by the promised land. The fourth and fifth Aryan commandments have been pushed out by the Sabbath, and the first Aryan commandment has expanded into three in the Bible. The zeal for monotheism has destroyed the balance, while the nine statutes of Aryan law are structured clear and firm.
Aryan law rests on the clan, at whose head the father of the house stands, Sumerian-Semite law on the rule of the Priest-King, who stands under the protection of the city divinity. While according to the Sumerian-Semite view the state prosecutes and punishes law violation, according to the Aryan view, the wronged party has the right to gain justice himself, and the court merely decides what is right, if the case is in dispute, without carrying out the verdict.
Aryan law fundamentally punishes only the bad intent (dolus), Sumerian-Semitic law fundamentally only the success. Also, in the case of bodily injury and similarly in other cases, the Aryan seeks to eliminate the hostility through reconciliation, while the Sumerian and Semite demand an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth. Every limb of the perpetrator should be punished which he has harmed on the injured party, while the Aryan tends to punish the one that has offended.
But all that is not merely racially determined bearing, it is also already in many things conscious world-view orientation. And it clearly pushes for comprehensive religious shaping that has prevailed most splendidly in India, but already deviating from the Aryan basis, in the creation of the Buddha, in Iran, consciously reaching back to the Aryan orientation bearing [Gesinnungshaltung], in the religion of Zarathustra.
The Indians
The Indo-Germanic folk advancing the farthest toward the southeast, the Indians, have it the hardest preserving its unique nature. Only little new blood flows to its from its ancestral regions over the course of its history. The climate is murderous for the Nordic race and a numerically vastly superior older native population has already achieved a substantial level of urban culture in the Indus region and even possesses its own pictorial alphabet, when the Indian tribes invade. The outer and inner history of the Indians is hence a moving spectacle. The Aryan energy is so great, the old native population so diverse, that a cleavage of dispositions opens before us that stretches far into the intellectual, which escalates to insanity and has its equal nowhere else.
The oldest document of the Indians, the Rigweda, a collection of songs to the gods, still stands on the Aryan level and contains isolated memories of a trek, but nothing of the pre-Indian, very noteworthy urban culture of the land, which is quite well known to us through excavations (for example, in Mohendsho Daro); just like the oldest Germanic poetry also relates nothing of Rome or Byzantine. Nonetheless, alien also penetrates already occasionally into the oldest Indian world of the gods and into the orientation with which it is cherished, and this escalates in the priestly texts (the Brahmanas), the philosophical literature (the Upanischaden), the heroic epics (the Mahabharatam and the Ramajanam).
The strangest is the inclination to withdrawal from the world, but at first it does not yet have a downright destructive effect. If the Aryan Indian had fulfilled his duties toward life, then in his old age he could devote himself to reflection about world and man. One found back then for the first time thoughts full of depth and sublimity, such as were thought again by our great philosophers only much later. Indian tradition characteristically ascribes them to members of the warrior- nobility, and the priests come to them for dialog and let themselves be taught.
But then a priesthood trapped in alien thought gains power over king and Aryan warrior-nobility, claims the noblest blood, allows the Aryan importance only in second place, and on this false foundation seeks to combat race-mixing through a law that comes much too late and can create, instead of a structuring according to blood purity or professions, merely a quite arbitrary division according to rigid castes. At the same time, one replaces the race idea, which rests on the knowledge of heredity, with the doctrine of reincarnation; according to it, after all, the Pariah as well and even any animals can hope, through services whose moral value often seems questionable, to be reborn into the highest castes.
The meaning of the nobility is thus undermined, political will paralyzed and empire foundations beyond India do not take place. The intellectual processes correspond to the political ones. The energy of philosophical thought, which had sought to overcome death through knowledge or fathom the origins of the world from the secrets of one’s own soul, soon runs dry. One does not clearly grasp the connection between cause and effect and tracks it out of religious fear, not for its own sake. Hence the Indians remain denied their own natural science.
External magic delusion and shocking superstition break in. The dispositions tom back and forth between wishes and fears accept connections, which they manufacture themselves, to be true and misunderstand the force of genuine knowledge so much that they trust in the power of these caricatures to intervene causally into reality and change its track. Yes, one becomes fixated in some crazy-sublime idea to the point of asceticism, thinks up corresponding long-term body positions that cause ecstatic conditions or surrenders oneself to horrible penitence exercises in order to gain superhuman strength or to free oneself from this valley of woe.
One ascribes universal power to the sacrifice, but only if an exaggerated, hair-splitting ritual is fulfilled. The Aryan idea of Artam, the sacred legal order, is interpreted as sacrifice arrangement, the sacrifice and the sacrifice site referenced to the creation of the world, the world regions, the gods as protectors of these world regions, and to their sacred animals, and the priests base their rule on this extravagant symbolism, which they pass off as their secret.
The heavenly fire, from which the Aryan trace their generations, is reinterpreted into the consuming sexual desire of desires and passions.
Already earthly life is viewed as hell, the body as cage. One sees a pitilessly rolling wheel in birth and death. Will and deed drive it onward. In order to come to rest, one must stop these drives. The hero’s grave in the house at the crossing of two main roads, reshaped into Stupa, into walled relic shrine amidst splendid grounds, now holds the physical remains of a savior, of Buddha, whose doctrine is based on total coming to rest and hence on nothingness: a rejection of the world full of sublimity and yet a refuge from it out of the inability to master it. And only as this rejection of oneself has Aryan thought as the doctrine of Buddha, far behind India’s Aryan part and especially outside of India, obtained the importance of a world religion of the folks of the Far East. With its organized priesthood, its cloisters, its monks and nuns, it counts there today perhaps more followers than Christianity.
The significance of Buddhism for us, however, lies not only in that it could stimulate the attention of such a clear and deep thinker as Schopenhauer or finds resonance in sect circles, rather in that it is a model wrong path. The demand to cease procreation so that the wheel stands still, the flame dies, despite everything appeals to high forces of intellect and soul, hence exterminates precisely the people who are capable of this soaring and thereby destroys the soil from which it has itself grown.
Iran
The Iranians stand closer to us than the Indians.
Indian literature is plentiful, Iranian almost lost due to the storms that have swept across the land. But the remnants and surrounding after-effects attest to the old greatness.
Four things especially move us:
first, the old Persian kingship and energy how a new one forms after Alexander’s invasion, which brings the old traditions to fresh blossoming.
second, the deep bond of the Iranian with nature, which escalates to conscience care for race and to religious emotion for it.
third, Zarathustra’s religion, in which, for the first time in mankind’s history of ideas, moral doctrine and religion become a unity;
fourth, the effect of this creation and of Iranian spirit on the surrounding folks, which in various indirect waves also reaches deeply into our German spiritual life.
Indian history is not world history; Iranian is that like hardly another and far more so than Greek.
Iran’s political history, beyond its political content, has a spiritual one that the Greek does not have; for in it, with Zarathustra’s doctrine, it is simultaneously a struggle by king, warrior-nobility and peasantry against a power-hungry, idol-serving priesthood.
Furthermore, the Persians developed a form of government that Greece does not know: its kings bestow lands and folks as fiefdoms.
Seen from Persepolis, the Greeks’ Persian wars are periphery events. We know them only in Greek portrayal, and that is not better than the World War in the portrayal by the enemy press.
The cry “They are barbarians!” echoed already back then. But the Greeks do not overthrow the great Persian Empire, rather the Macedonian overpowers them and Persia and even more.
But Alexander’s founding has no permanence. It collapses, and Iran gains strength on its ruins, first in the Parthian Empire (250 B.C.), then in the empire of the Sasaniden (226 A.D.), which only fails to the invasion by the Arabs. These empires withstood the Romans and thereby provided relief for Germanic man, fended off the Turks and fought against Byzantine, and Iran’s new radiance was shared with the folks around it, up to China and the Finns and along different paths even up into the German Middle Ages.
e="font-family: "book antiqua" , serif; font-size: 16px;">Iranian spiritual bearing
[Geisteshaltung] is the prerequisite for Iranian religious life, which has found its expression in the religion of e="font-family: "book antiqua" , serif; font-size: 16px;">Zarathustra.
Cattle as helper of the peasant with plowing is something sacred, similar to the cow as donor of milk, the horse as riding animal of the warrior, the dog and rooster as guardians of the house; even the cat has a right to a share in the milk as reward to the mice that it devours. The Iranian is grateful to his animals.
The relationship with plants is no less passionate. The king and his great men competed in the creation of glorious gardens, in which they grew beautiful and fruitful plants and kept noble animals. They thereby turned Persia, which today is largely a salt desert, into a blossoming region. The aromatic rose, the precious peach, that means the “Persian apple”, attest to their skill.
According to Iranian-Zarathustrian view, good is the earth which bears fruit, the water that makes the plants thrive, the fire that bums in the house and cooks the nourishment, and all animals that are helpful and useful for man.
The breeding experience with plants and animals one also applies to man, who takes himself under control. Valued are tall stature, strength, beauty and all spiritual virtue. The women are praised who have the most beautiful body for procreation, who are the most capable for the household. The head of the house asks for light-eyed, intelligent offspring, who are supposed to promote him, house and community, province and land, and the land’s glory. The married man has priority over the non-married, the man with many children over the childless man.
The offspring are heavenly fire realized from the seed and hence bearers of faith, whose content consists of the bond with all light. Peasant sense of reality and warrior peasant thought unite here into a highly intellectualized doctrine.
The world of faith in the good creation, to which well-mannered animals and plants also belong, is opposed by the dark, non-spiritual counter-creation of the evil one, the one: pure, victorious truth, the other:
the diabolical scheme of insubordinate lie.
Ants and snakes, wolves and other predators, all have poisons, belong to this counter-creation, and it is a service to exterminate them.
The hero who kills the dragon becomes the culture-bringer for the Iranian, who clears the thicket, drains the swamps and cultivates the field, or the knight without fear or reproach, who protects the land and his faith against the enemy army, or the wrestling human being, who in the struggle of opposing feelings holds to the good, all of them already bearers of the same spiritual-moral decision, which will take place overall at the end of things, when the god of truth along with the noblest knights take the field against the demon of lie and his spawn and defeat him in order to found his eternal empire.
e="font-family: "book antiqua" , serif; font-size: 16px;">Three waves
have transmitted Iranian spirit to us Germans, each time in different form. The first two, facilitated through Christianity, are the most important, but the third, which reached us through the advance of the Arabs, who were Iranian influenced in many things, to Spain and through the penetration of the Vikings and crusaders into the orient, is almost just as significant.
The first brought us the Old Testament of the Jews. The Jews
in Babylon stood under Persian rule and brought their holy scripture from there to Palestine. Much more than one admits, and most of what appeal to us, they owe to the Persians.
The second wave brought us the New Testament, Christianity. The gospels
contain much that is Iranian, and to elucidate that would mean that one elucidates the Aryan, the Nordic in them. That is a task for the German future and the path that German spirit finds for its inner rest.
The third wave brought us knighthood, love and mysticism, a new form of warrior life bearing, with a new trait of inclination to the eternal.
Greece
More familiar to us than Iran is Greece,
The glory of the Greeks is so great, their achievement in the pictorial arts, literature, history writing, science, life wisdom, are so well known, their culture has through humanism so very much served the leading men of our folk as example for soon half a millennium, and it is also so rich that it is neither possible nor necessary to go into detail.
The Greeks did not distance themselves from the enclosed settlement region of the Nordic folks as far as the Indians, they did not spread as such a thin ruling stratum over the folks of old high cultures as the Iranians, they took possession of a land of special favor, and they also encountered a naive population that stood not all too distant from them.
They already brought alone valuable culture goods from the Nordic homeland. For example, the rectangular house with the protruding roof supported by posts, the Magaron House, which, in stone, they transformed into the temple.
Their art embodies in many of their best works the Nordic race’s ideal of beauty. For them, beauty is an expression of physical and spiritual nobility, which keep each other in balance. Their literature, on the old level, deals with fate from a heroic life orientation and peaks in the creation of the drama.
The relentlessness of the characters and the logic of the action grip even the historian. Motive and result, cause and effect are pondered and delineated.
In natural science, important laws of nature are the result, yes, the ideal of causality in nature reveals itself to the Greek researchers: even the movement of the earth around the sun is grasped by Aristarch of Samos.
The Greeks erect the proud structure of mathematics and of logic exemplary and almost conclusively.
Their thinkers delve into the ultimate questions, and only the descendants of the Germanic people continue this legacy and increase it.
Their physicians create scientific medicine and apply it according to moral principles.
Admittedly, despite strong religious energy, Greece does not produce a religion forcing the world around it into its orbit, but it produces the bloom of philosophy, trust in eternal knowledge and conscientiousness in the knowledge of the world.
A good share of Nordic feeling, which keeps distance and is averse to exaggerations, expresses itself in it, and also in that the priesthood remains within moderate boundaries and Greek intellect unconditionally free.
It does not always remain true to itself. Two dangers threaten it: the Mediterranean tendency toward pose and the Near Eastern one toward pettifogging. Both enter into ruinous mixture in the speaker and sophist, who under the pretext of turning the weaker thing into the stronger one, bends right and, in that he manages to give himself the appearance of professional expertise, crowds out the experts.
Political division grows, the tribal feuds consume the best blood, offspring are limited, the racially alien lower stratum ascends.
Great artists, researchers, thinkers become ever rarer, and when Greece loses its independence to Rome, the Roman indeed imitates the Greek of the old time, but the Greek of this late time, the Graeculus, the bastard acting Greek, is his slave, toady, buffoon.
Rome
Along with the Greeks, inclination, struggle tie us to the Romans.
The Italiker already bring along into their land the germ of the future greatness, the fortified arrangement of their settlement, which is the image of the Roman military camp. But already early, much that is racially alien, from the Etruscans stemming from Asia Minor, flows into the state system, which under them rises to dominance, flows into what is Roman. This shows itself most clearly in its institution of foreseeing the future through superstitious means like reading entrails, or reconciling with the angry powers through sacrifice in the event of lighting, miscarriage and other frightening signs.
There unite in the Roman nature for sobriety escalated sense of reality, high mental energy in the service of an insatiable will for power, a basic tone of the dark and superstitious, strong religious bond. Lacking is the ultimate soaring toward the eternal, artistic transfiguration, the urge for knowledge aimed at the unconditional, at the universally valid. The influence of Greek settlements in Lower Italy creates no sufficient counterweight.
Rome destroys Carthage and saves the folks of the Mediterranean from the Semites, but in that it develops from city state into world power, it only represents its interests, no ideals.
Its mightiest creations, its military and its law, are exemplary, but in both, it distances itself from old Italian, Indo-Germanic foundation.
The army, originally the armed clans, become a strictly organized mercenary troop, in its mass foreign to the land, to which the state, when its own blood stream runs dry, sees itself delivered.
Law rests on the family in its relationship to clan and folk. But the family is replaced by the law-bearer, the family father, with unlimited power over his own, even his household members, and the folk tied by blood is replaced by the state, whose citizens finally even freed slaves and bastards from the conquered provinces become. Legal claim based on written law is valid and not eternal law, and the law of the Romans becomes the law for all, folk law becomes state law, and indeed in a state that falls to pieces.
The northern racial Italiker no longer has an advantage over the cunningly naturalized oriental: racial aliens win the highest offices, foreign cults find acceptance, moral decay spreads, Nordic blood seeps into the brew of folks.
Army and law, development of power and protection of interests, intellectual achievements of world-compelling might are for Rome what their religions were for India and Iran, for Greece its philosophy.
Just that the religions are fulfilling content for their followers, but both of those most intellectual creations of Rome soon just shells without core.
However, even the religious denominations have a similar path behind them, as was especially to be seen in Iran. The original doctrine, religion as well as moral doctrine, yes, even the philosophizing, were racially determined; participation in sacrifice was limited to clansmen.
Only later did religion broaden from the community of tribe relatives to the community of those bound to one another through a denomination. This new and so very much more external community then became leading in the state and exemplary for others; similar to the bestowed law, it even became for the others a kind of substitute for blood kinship, which they lacked. So denomination decided, while the race idea, the bond through blood, receded. The path to the world religions was opened.
When Christianity, nourished from Jewish and Iranian sap, comes to Rome, a new core grows in the empty shell. The Roman-Catholic church, with its clergy organized into the fighting church, continues the religion of the Roman army, with its claim to world importance, the empire’s claim to worldly power, with intellectualized, religious means.
The Germanic People [Die Germanen]
Rome does not master two enemies: the Parthians in the east and the incomparably mightier Germanic people. If one wants to correctly assess them, then one must not put them side by side at the height of their activity, rather Indians, Iranians, Greeks, Italiker are comparable to them only at the time before they had stepped upon their path of fate. But if one takes it so, then the Germanic people show themselves equal in value, yes, in many things even superior. They are the remnant that remained in the north of the race, and while the others won and failed, they grew slowly and constantly from their own strength and without the drive from foreign stimulus.
Germanic self-shaping stretches through three millennia.
Germanic man of the Bronze Age (1800 to 800 B.C.) stands close to the earliest Greek. Both know the chariot, both the decorative spiral on jewelry and weapon. But the Germanic manner of decoration is more internally unified, more inward, nobler. Germanic people practice since olden times the artistic carving of wood and are masters in shipbuilding. Sweden’s Bronze Age cliff etchings provide a rich picture of it.
Essentially, two pieces of clothing suffice for the Greek and Germanic man: shirt and overcoat, both not tailored.
Even much later, the Greeks can show nothing similar to the “Luren”, Germanic man’s large horns, poured from bronze and encompassing three octaves and over 20 notes. Germanic man shows the beginnings of a kind of cult drama already in the earliest Bronze Age as cliff etchings.
Germanic man’s twin gods are saviors and rescuers from mortal danger. The dual kingship of the Vandals linked to them has its counterpart in the Dioscuri and the dual kings of the Spartans. This faith even reaches to Iran and India.
Old Nordic praise of the god Thor (Donar) as vanquisher of monsters and giants coincides surprisingly with old Indian ones of the god Indra.
The next millennium, the early Iron Age (800 B.C. to 200 A.D.), brings hard tests for Germanic man, but also confirmation.
The north becomes cold, the tribes seek land. But an iron wall of armed folks all around must first be broken through in difficult struggle. Most important is the conflict with the Celts and then with the Romans in the west, the penetration through the Illyrians and the advance to the Black Sea in the east. From here, the Goth Empire, Germanic man rolls up the Roman border defense at the end of the millennium.
Rome recognized the greatness of Germanic man, but it did not want to acknowledge it. It considered itself superior, but its civilization was a culture of decay and mere appearance. What it wanted to impose upon Germanic man, was not very good.
The Germanic military, organized according to clans, rests on the bonds of blood, on voluntary following and daring action. One did not want to imitate Roman subservience, armament, calculation.
Measure, weight, coin stood in the service of Roman trade sucking dry.
The importation of wine was often rightly banned by Germanic tribes, but without success.
One did not need horticulture, which the Romans themselves had only recently adopted from Greece and Asia Minor.
Stone construction has suppressed the art of Germanic wood construction for a long time.
Roman law existed only for the Romans and was usually distorted into injustice.
Nothing is comparable to the atrocities of the circus and the exploitation and degradation of the slaves in Roman.
Roman religion was a mixture of disbelief and superstition. Life and deeds contradicted the higher religious values, which one proclaimed in full-sounding principles.
One limited the offspring, the Roman nationality declined.
Those Germanic tribes that slid into this ruin become warning example for the others.
Only after Rome had fallen to Germanic man did its legacy become a threat to him.
The third millennium, the late Iron Age (200 to 1,200 A.D.), then runs along two lines.
Germanic man, on the dawning foundation of the folk wandering and on the tottering one of the Viking Age,
in the exultation of his successes strides toward self-portrayal of his nature with new means of expression, deepened will for form, unerring certainty - and Germanic man loses this security everywhere, succumbs to the form imposed upon him and nonetheless makes it his own, so that the fossilized foreign civilization becomes culture under his guardianship.
During the folk wandering, Germanic man creates a decorative art, animal ornamentation, a new literary art, the heroic songs; in the Viking Age
he escalates both to works of high personal ambition; songs of praise, prose stories, the beginnings of a reality-based history writing are added.
Both these peaks of self-shaping stand in sharp contrast to two valleys of the receding of this self-shaping on the other line of the course and hence simultaneously the peak of a new foreign shaping; the Carolingian Renaissance of antiquity, which sets in about two centuries after the end of the folk wandering and has as result that the education of the Middle Ages remains folk alien, Latin; and the Italian Renaissance
with its effects toward the north. It sets in about two centuries after the end of the Viking Age, and German education remains folk alien, humanistic. Even the Reformation is not effective.
Nonetheless, the forward driving spirit of the Nordic race has meanwhile in the crusades and voyages of discovery
established contact with the intellectual achievements of other folks and cultures. The natural sciences blossom. And Germanic spirit adds a new fruit in them. The picture of the world becomes broader and clearer than ever before, and to an unexpected degree the knowledge won steps into the service of life.
What is German?
German development plays a leading role in these processes, which stretch across all following Germanic folks. But it cannot be a uniform one, for between it and what is Geimanic lie four decisive cracks.
The first crack emerges in the settlement region. As a result of the evacuation of the east, the Slavs invade and occupy all of Northern
Germany up to the Elbe, Central Germany up to the Saale, Bohemia, Moravia, Austria to the Balkans, the earlier Eastern Goth Empire up to the Black Sea. The later German colonization of the east can reverse only a portion of the loss.
The second crack is in regard to the cultural orientation. The Celts were indeed overrun, but in Lombardy, in Gaul and in Spain, the Germanic conqueror stratum is too weak, the Celtic-Roman population prevails in language and largely in civilization as well, and this swamps the bordering Germanic regions with influences that hamper strengthening on the foundation of the own nationality. The adoption of Roman law is the most conspicuous sign of this process.
e="font-family: "book antiqua" , serif; font-size: 16px;">The third crack
takes place in the form of society. During the long, fateful treks, folk assembly, army constitution, clan system and the old structure of the folk body decline. The kingship gains power, puts slaves and foreigners over the own folk, degrades it over time to subjects, creates cities and states for itself and rules through its house power and through the opposition of the professions.
The fourth crack occurs in the soul of people; for first Eastern Germanic man adopts Christianity in its Aryan form from Byzantine, and the Goth Wulsila translates the Bible around the middle of the 4th century; but then Western Germanic man and especially the Franks adopt it in its Catholic form from Rome And immediately, new fraternal feuds ignite from the religion of peace, and one exploits religion as means of power. It takes centuries before it really grows into the German soul, and the question, whether and how a genuine inner unity is possible, is due again and again. The consequences of this discord and the various, never ending attempts to rally oneself for a cure, to make the folk body as well healthier, to overcome the Roman civilization unbearable for Germanic man in favor of his own culture, and finally to banish the Slavic threat, then constitute the inner and outer history of Germandom.
The cracks heal only superficially. New ones, like the Catholic- Protestant one, are added. Even where Germandom consolidates itself again in its native property, such as in language, the disgusting swarm of foreign language art expressions remains in honor. Much is added to culture in Germany, even immortal, high culture, and yet the loss of German essence progresses every farther. Humanism brings the contact with classical antiquity, but it takes en gross and does not yet know how to separate the native from the deviant. Finally, the international Jews raises his head, humanity becomes a caricature of itself, the race comes in danger.
If after this look at the whole of the Germanic-German cultural process one wants to answer the question: What is German?, then generalizations cannot suffice such as: Being German means being truthful, being loyal, doing something for its own sake, and so forth. It is already better, when Friedrich Nietzsche responds to it: Being German means still always developing, still having a future.
One must differentiate: German de lege lata and German de lege ferenda. De lege lata, according to the law of what has already existed and what is still in effect at the present, means being German, not yet being finished with those four cracks and several others that have been added in the meantime, bearing this fate, but also again and again drawing new energies from it and developing a unique richness of culture shaping. De lege ferenda, according to the law that we want to realize in the future, however, means being German from now on: banishing old misfortune and paving the path for a happier, more unified and hence no less rich German culture.
No previous generation has had at its disposal the insights necessary for recovery like us. The whole of world history presents itself to us anew, all the past becomes, according to Nietzsche’s words, a cockcrow of our future.
Conclusions
Our own spiritual location before time and eternity is determined from the view of the world historical and idea historical path of the Nordic race, and therein lies the core of the doctrine and the beginning of all practical applications. Even if we cannot conduct systematic experiences with folks, states, cultures like in physics and chemistry, much that is diverse has nonetheless taken place in history, which, if one observes it correctly, possesses the value of such experiments.
1. The Confirmation
The folks of other races have not produced a similar confirmation as the folks of the Nordic race, neither in the past nor in the present.
Perhaps one thinks about the great prospects of the folks of the east. But the Chinese in their harbor cities and in America have for several generations been similarly able to grow into European culture as formerly Indo-Germanic man into the culture of the old orient and of the Mediterranean folks, and yet nonetheless nothing is to be seen of it that here a new race, called for intellectual-moral leadership, intervenes into world history, while among Indo-Germanic man this immediately became visible.
The Japanese, who today have a tremendous birthrate and claim half the world, stand on the foundation of European civilization and would be impotent without the weapons that we ourselves have supplied them. Whether they would succeed in advancing the adopted foreign culture on their own, must first be shown. Achievements in science and technology fundamentally exceeding the borrowed are still lacking.
The bearers of the pre-Indo-Germanic cultures of antiquity were no longer been able to continue their own culture, when Indo-Germanic man came. The other races remained in tow.
The Alpine race has no leading foundations and creations to show, neither in gray prehistory nor in its first advance toward the west nor in the numerous later destructive invasions by the folks of the east into the cultures of Asia Minor and Europe.
The Dinaric race as well has never stood out on its own politically or otherwise. Where are the empires that it founded, cultures to which it gave the stamp? One praises its musical talent. But where these folks still have music of their own old level, it is a swaying around a few protruding notes and far distant from everything that we call music in the higher sense.
The Near Eastern race standing close to the Dinaric, however, has entered into the competition of the cultures of the old orient. The empire of the Hittites and the empire of the Mitani, however, already stand under Indo-Germanic influence. One could sooner name the empire of the old Elam. But its difference from the other high cultures of the orient is not kind forming.
These high cultures of the old orient belong, like the Cretan- Mycenaean predominantly, the Egyptian almost totally, in the play area of the Mediterranean race, the old Babylonian in that of the oriental race. The role of the certainly non-lndo-Germanic Sumerians and the possibility of older northern racial cultural impulses remain open in the process.
For Europe’s Mediterranean race, these accomplishments, seen from a distance, open possibilities.
One can supplement these world historical observations with further observations of the German folk. For example, Northern Germany has not contributed nearly as much to music as Southern Germany. Or: the in no way purely Nordic, rather even relatively Alpine appearing Beethoven is a creator of German music towering over almost all others, the predominantly Falic Hindenburg the father of the fatherland,.
The other races in our folk are hence co-determining and likewise important, and only all together produce the German nationality. With the Nordic racial core, however, on their own they would hardly be able to bear a high culture in the long run and lead it forward.
Musical talent alone does not suffice; the overall skill lies in something else.
Alpine industry, Falic steadiness are also valuable, yes, they can, as Hindenburg’s example shows, be decisive in difficult moments.
Overall direction, leadership, thrust are given by the Nordic race.
The others are important admixtures and counterweights, if Nordic daring threatens to lose itself in sense of adventure, heroic spirit in pugnacity, drive for knowledge in eccentricity.
2. The Mixture
The world historical confirmation of the Nordic race overall is thus confronted among the other races important for our nationality by a confirmation before German history
individually.
It is obvious that the five great cases of Nordic determined culture: India, Iran, Greece, Italy, finally Germany, are to be explained precisely from the mixture. One says that the Nordic race on its own was incapable of these achievements; only the admixture with the other races that it encountered produced the favorable result.
In fact, the admixture runs parallel to the escalation to high culture for a stretch. But precisely this proves that it is not the cause, for otherwise it must precede the escalation. But it is the opposite: as soon as the admixture has progressed, the culture creation staggers, and amidst advanced admixture it declines.
This leads at least - to the no less false - restriction that only moderate mixing has a culture-creative effect, too far reaching a culture- destroying one. But it is just appearance that high culture appears, because race-mixing is in process. Instead, the “culture-creative” race showed its traits already earlier and more pure, even if merely as bud.
They lie in the spiritual energy and in the moral basic bearing. Here and there, the beginnings are already distinct: the Nordic Megaron house as model for the Greek temple, the old Italian fortification of the settlement as model for the Roman army camp.
It is not race-mixing that puts things into motion, rather the stimulus effect of the new environment, of the land, of the people and their culture. Their wandering put the Indo-Germanic folks to the test. Other folks wander as well, for example Huns, Mongols, Arabs; but they do not prove themselves, or only to a very limited degree. One can destroy cultures that one encounters, like the Spaniards the Central American ones, or one can use them as drive for the development of one’s one. Folks receive the opportunity to show what dwells within them, above all, through a new environment.
It immediately compels a spiritual and moral debate and awakens traits that have previously slumbered. The conquerors must learn much and apply what has been learned, and they reject much as alien to their kind or re-shape it in their sense, and from all this combined there results their new, their own thing.
The five high cultures of the Indo-Germanic folks have as precondition the cultures of the previous population. Where such stimuli are lacking, as with the Celts, Illyrians, Thracians, Baltic folks, Slavs, high cultures do not set in, despite the mixing with the previous population. The new Indo-Germanic cultures are the response of the racial nature and nationality to the new environment.
The red Chinese primrose blooms red at normal temperature, white at higher temperature. The new characteristic is the response to a new environmental stimulus. Being a red Chinese primrose means acting so.
It is a response in the bodily. Only with greater warmth can this plant display the characteristic that lies within it.
And being Indo-Germanic, northern racial folk means to responsd in the psychological as well. It means, in the north taming the steed, engaging in diary farming, cultivating the fields, creating the Megaron house and so forth, and in the new land it means building the Greek temple, creating a Greek culture. Only in Greece can this folk show what lies within it.
The Indo-Germanic folks manage such things in a few generations.
The achieved high culture then works again on its part as environment, the racial properties of the higher order, which have created the bearers of this high culture, are passed along. This happens in two directions.
The one passing along runs to the surrounding folks and especially to the tribe-related, blood-related small fanners in the north, and that is the back-flow into the homeland. The legacies of higher order that flow back to the north in this manner are no longer totally alien to it, they have already passed through tribe-related blood, are hence more easily adopted, but as a result of much bending of Nordic bearing which they have suffered, they also contain many dangers. The influence of antiquity on Germanic man from antiquity through the Renaissance to humanism is the great example for this process. Germanic man’s wanderings eventually meet it half-way. Iran’s influence also takes such paths.
The other passing along runs to the later generations of the own folk. But the mixing is already underway and has paralyzed the old energy.
If one notices the consequences, it is usually already too late. The reactions of the initially overcome foreign nature set it, create division, uncertainty, boredom.
Not the advanced mixing first leads to decline, rather already the one began introduces it.
3. The Failure
The world historical confirmation of the great Indo-Germanic foundations is hence accompanied each time by the world historical failure.
One flees from the reality that one is no longer able to overpower into the intellectual, the original orientation changes into its opposite.
If the Indian warrior nobility wanted to conquer the world through its own heroic action, then the Indian penitent of the late period seeks to overcome “the world” through self-destruction - despite all greatness and tragedy, a warning for us, not a model.
The blood-bound, religious world-view and moral doctrine of Iranian man ultimately, in the great world religions that emerge from it, become general religious affirmation, which even the foreigners make - precisely because of the tremendous effect in space and time and inwardly, a warning for us, not an example.
The nobility breeding of northern racial Greek man, based on clan formation, because municipal code in the foreign city produces majority decisions and democracy and runs dry in a general advocate- political education - although brought close to us for half a millennium by the humanists, a warning for us, not a model.
In the Roman state, the social structure and law of the Roman folk becomes a foundation alien to it, a complicated system of legal concepts is presented as universally valid, and is also imposed on us and crowds out our native law, and throughout a millennium we cannot do enough to expand the alien and lose ourselves in it - a warning for us, not a model.
Full of warnings, finally, is also our own German history. No lesser than Lagarde characterized it as the constantly advancing loss of German essence. But what has played out in the other Indo-Germanic folks, has not merely played out around us, rather also for
us.
Our special case comes into larger context and becomes comprehensible in its causes, curable in its shortcomings. What the others managed and what befell them, serves us as application and teaching.
Everything is also at work to manifold degrees in our German history of ideas, as Roman law, as Christianity and church, as humanism and in many other institutions, to each of which we stand differently, if we accept them as German fate and differently, if we are knowledgeable of the native and the alien in them and allow this knowledge to ripen within us will-forming.
Feebleness and Energy
As a result of the cracks in our nationality, of the inhibitions in its development, of the influx of exemplary results, but also the diverting wrong conclusions of tribe-related cultures, emotional remnants have set in inside our own, which must be worked out, inferiority complexes
that must be dismantled and overcome through uncovering the creative energies.
Again and again, one has hammered into us that our ancestors were coarse beasts, had nothing from themselves and owed all their education to the foreign property of the far superior east, south and west.
One spoke of our ’’inability for form” and praised antiquity, the French or even China as means to banish it; one even dared to drivel about an inability for the moral.
The opposite is true.
Old Germanic art in the Bronze Age and again, with different forms, in the animal ornamentation of the folk wandering and Viking Age, had strict style laws, Germanic literature as well an incomparably strong and high force of fashioning and its own legality. Through the favoring of the foreign forms presented as exemplary, as great and significant as they are in themselves, the soul is hindered in developing its wings for the flight to the isles of its own yearning. Form becomes prison and chain, if it does not grow from the own, and it is no wonder, if inability arises from a confusion of imposed forms.
In the moral, it is similar.
The so often championed view that before Christianity genuine morality existed nowhere, aside from perhaps the Jews, is just as outrageous as narrow-minded, and visibly false. One must not simply equate morality and Christianity as one, and there is much high morality outside of Christianity, which in its denominations encompasses only a fraction of mankind, even of cultured mankind.
We will never share the dogmatic intolerance of Catholicism and Protestantism, rather oppose it with clear determination, wherever it is challenged.
What hinges on the moral values of Germanic man shows itself especially in the north, when Christianity destroys it even before it takes inward roots itself and can truly mean something to those converted in no way voluntarily.
For the zealots of the new faith teach the eternal damnation of the ancestors, and soon grave-robbers dig up the mounds of prehistory with gold-greedy hands. Woman, up until then highly revered as close to the divinity, is now considered as in league with the devil. A previously unknown, martyr creating cruelty sets in as a result of this merciless conversion in the north.
It took centuries before the uprooting of the Germanic tribes through the folk wandering and the upheavals of the change of religion entwined with it were halfway overcome. And when Christianity, in the lust for power of its priests sunken to pastors, in the corruption of its relics, threatened to become deformed, it was Germanic morality that in the reformation saved it from shameful decline, and Germanic blood that with the help of Gustav Adolfs Dalecarlians saved it from the intervention of the Counter Reformation.
One points with pleasure again and again to alleged or actual shortcomings of Germanic man. He was a drinker, gambler, passionate - when the Romans ruined him for base profit. They practiced blood revenge against the murderer - in an age when frivolous crime was thereby effectively combated.
Germanic vengeance, which usually stood in the service of peeved honor, is gladly and often scolded, but seldom does one blame the Semites for their mercilessly cruel demand: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Not with them, no, with Germanic man did the icy air of paganism blow, or its tiger claw show itself, or however the blossoms otherwise fall from the tree of such ‘"knowledge”.
But if we try to again base the German on the Germanic from which it stems, then it is characteristic enough that it is always the moral that shines to us as model, and that this is found nowhere else in this manner.
It is not about writing in runes again, although it could in fact lead us to a straight-growing, German, festive script.
It is also not about enlivening our crafts with Germanic ornamentation, although the results would certainly soon be very important for style certainty and style formation of higher art as well.
Furthermore, it is also not about taking the old, moving heroic sagas and divinity sagas, and not always only the already so often portrayed Biblical and classical material, for a newly blossoming literature and pictorial art or also elevating the eternal values of old Germanic religiosity in artistic shaping.
Finally, it is not merely about giving our children properly grown [wuchsrecht] names.
Rather, completely different values stand before our eyes as guiding:
The leader and the following,
honor, male loyalty,
youth associations,
Germanic law,
reverence of ancestors and love for the clan, for the hereditary farmstead,
regard for the community - today we call it the social idea -,
the sanctify of woman
the family as germ cell of the folk,
the homeland, love.
They are not merely ideas, not merely views, rather also institutions. They are all blood-bound and timeless. They are valid for every cultural level. We do not need to reach back to them, we merely need to give the validity appropriate for us to the self-evident, from which we were diverted to our detriment. Solely the grasp of the Germanic core essence given to us as well is the decisive thing here.
The Path to Ourselves
Cultural institutions that we have adopted from outside, from the folks around us, are to be judged from this inwardly grasped center.
Much that is Indo-Germanic has again flowed to us through these institutions in elevated, refined, even deepened form, admittedly much also altered and alienated. We will not want to dispense with what is appropriate for us, not want to disturb what has developed historically in its genuine effects. But we must ensure with passionate devotion that what is most native to us gains room in order to grow from its own, now already long enough hampered energy.
Here it is about acting similarly as among the other racial elements that co-determine or want to co-determine German essence. What proves itself all too alien and wants to destroy us, such as the arrogant influence of Jewry on our German culture, that we reject.
The other, historically and inwardly bound to German essence, is to be either fulfilled from this or overcome. The folkish idea of National Socialism can prescribe nothing else here than the duty to inner truthfulness, responsibility, totality, and provide nothing else than elbow- room for real freedom of conscience in the opening great decisions.
Basic questions, which today are being wrestled with everywhere, are: native law, native faith, native education and rearing.
The nine commandments of Aryan law already show the direction.
For faith, important things result from the world-historical and idea- historical view. But the question of how far something Aryan lies at the basis of Christianity is not at debate here and just as little the religious question at all. Nonetheless, in this regard it should be remembered that the National Socialist German Workers Party takes the standpoint of a positive Christianity without tying itself to a specific denomination.
The attempt to infer a fundamental opposition between this position and a championing of the native is not justified. Humanism, too, did not and does not stand in opposition to Christianity, even though it conveyed the eternal values of the pagan antiquity of the Greeks and Romans. So why should it not be permissible that we finally want to know elevated the eternal values of our own antiquity and likewise of the whole northern racial legacy?
One can, if one wants, proceed from the standpoint that the religious denomination must first stand firm, before one can think about rearing and education; but one can also proceed from the standpoint that rearing and education must first provide the foundation upon which, from a sufficiently broad view of the world, a worldview can grow that is not threatened by experiences and knowledge, hence also does not need to avoid both, and lays a solid foundation for all outside the dogmatic sphere of the denominations.
In life, one cannot be separated at all from the other, faith from knowledge, affirmation from doctrine. Every nursery has its religious foundation or suffers from it being too scant, and each school aims with the knowledge that it offers at firmness of a faith or suffers from it not really succeeding in it.
Humanism and German Education
Humanism, upon which our higher education rests for centuries, is like such a faith and was, because not bound to dogmas, possible next to Christianity. Its foundation is not Greek or Roman heroism, rather a folkish idea, the idea of the towering worth of two Indo-Germanic folks, of the Greek and of the Roman, of antiquity.
It was a strong and valuable counterweight against the withdrawal from this world, into which precisely inwardly very German human beings not seldom fell due to their Christianity.
It needed the healthy balance in the nurturing of body and soul, and it needed schools with a genuine, very ambitious and completely idealistic goal of education.
Finally, it needed contact with high, and in many ways related, cultural goods and the stimulus to increase them.
But in its old form, in can nonetheless no longer satisfy us. We do not seek the classical man, rather we want the German one.
For us, the Greek has for a long time no longer been an absolute mankind value, the cosmopolitanism into which it lost itself does not mean the fulfillment, rather the loss of its folkish idea, just like Greek democracy was not the fulfillment, rather the loss of the old Greek nobility idea.
The Greeks were not able to do justice to the Persians, the Romans to Germanic man; what they did not understand, they viewed as barbaric.
Only when the all too narrow field of view of antiquity is burst, do the world-historical background of Indo-Germanic man and the idea- historical achievement of the Nordic race and the worth of old Germanic culture open up, which in its outer radiance does not radiate equally only because it is more rough and reserved; for its inner values are the greater ones in many ways.
For us as heirs of these values, Indians, Iranians and Germanic man also belong to Nordic antiquity. The philology of these folks along with the corresponding archeology can certainly not be all treated in the schools, and already the Greek and Roman have their difficulties. All the more important is the yield of this research as respectively reachable and close to life portraying, formative, will-shaping end result.
Aside from that, we demand permeation of the school, even the higher ones and the universities, with German spirit according to portrayal and content so much that antiquity reaches the correct, still guiding interval from us and gives us stimulus and room for the previously denied native foundation for what is most native to us and for a new spiritual shaping, in which all strata of our folk can participate in the appropriate interval.
Classical man becomes for us the northern racial one, and the cultures determined by different race are in part prerequisite for his creation, in part they stand at his side. So humanism and its ideal of education can flow naturally into the folkish and racial idea of National Socialism, and at the same time the path is open to also honor the other Nordic cultures and the foreign-racial determined cultures in their value. The Nordic race and the German folk do not need to be overbearing or even to degrade the other culture-folks as barbarians or incapable of genuine culture.
The result must be that a genuine German education and an energetic rearing paving its way replaces the humanism that has fulfilled its mission in the life of our folk. The results for faith and that religious affirmation can only be blessed.
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