Source: Basic Ideas of
National-Socialist Cultural Policy – by prof. Wolfgang Schulz
Two dangers threaten
the developing German human being: rearing delusion and education delusion.
The educators of the old school believed that all people
are equal and education can achieve its goal with everybody. If one encounters
difficulties, then one only needs to employ more and better educators and
teachers.
Insight into the processes of hereditary and the
fatefulness of the genes has destroyed this delusion. There are limits to
rearing, even education. They can be broadened under favorable conditions and
through suitable means, but not overcome. Much that the individual educator
does not achieve can be performed by the educating force of a well delineated
community. If the necessary traits are lacking or if they are too weak, than
all effect is ultimately in vain, however.
On the other hand, if the traits are especially valuable
and decisively effect in a certain direction, they triumph even if rearing and
education have been lacking for long stretches. The young mind seizes at the
decisive moment with natural force what is necessary for its thriving and
growth and constructs for it its inner and outer life. It triumphs even against
an oppressive environment or at least can do it, in the event the outer
conditions are not all too unfavorable.
But this it not true for the average person; he needs
rearing and education, and even the extraordinary talents are endangered
without it.
The teachers of the old school believed that it depends
on knowledge. Knowledge was supposed to encompass everything worth knowing. And
what would not be worth knowing? So the subject matter burst the school, but
one did not take that too seriously. The pupils learned for test and diploma
and thereby earned their right to advancement and employment. Certainly, if he
wanted to achieve more, he had to sit longer. The ability to devote oneself to
a cause, even an intellectual one, was killed in favor of flat practicality
considerations. Nobody portrayed the moral damage of this system of
justification better than Lagarde.
It is understandable that an education that came about so
had to become a pseudo-education and stood open to all decaying influences.
Dismantling of the justification system and of the exaggerated claims for a
preliminary education for the occupations, which can only be a “bad training”
[“Verbildung”], is the next and very urgent commandment. For there depends on
this as well the lowering of the marriage age of the above-average educated
young people, who previously married the latest and reproduced below average.
The statements by Lagarde characterized the situation
already back then. The first: We cannot educate in our schools as long as the
parents of the children who sit in front of us are not educated. The second:
The pupil sits in school, gaze fixed on the door and not at the object of
instruction. The third: One cannot educate generally, rather only for
something.
In this sense, we add: We want to educate - to be
Germans.
One should overestimate education as little as physical
exercise. But one should also not underestimate both. The same is true of
knowledge. It has educational value only insofar as it has a will-shaping
effect and is mastered in the direction of the will-shaping. Used in this
sense, its educational value is decisive.
Clarifying our desire, our feelings, from knowledge, from
concept, creates, as Fichte has determined, character. Every education is in
essence character shaping. Character means what is imprinted, what is binding
according to orientation. For each, it is the prerequisite for his nationality.
Each German must wrestle for German character, for German
unique stamp. He has the raw material, because he is a German. And that means
German education. One can have it to a very high degree without much knowledge;
and a shocking lack of genuine education can easily be tied with much
knowledge.
Education is something that must ripen from the inside
toward the knowledge flowing in from outside, must receive stamp from it, must
prove itself on it and from it, yes, even, when necessary, must triumph against
this influx.
The relationship of knowledge to education is roughly
like stimulus to sensation. If the soul lacks the necessary stimuli or if it is
over- stimulated, then it dies.
Measure and selection of the allowed stimuli, educational
impulses, are already the first test of character.
Hence it is not all the same, what knowledge, what
subject matter we consume. Instead, we should nourish the little fire of our
disposition with pure woods, so that it grows into a mighty blaze giving light
and warmth.
We need orientation-forming knowledge, and this used so
that its value becomes clear for the whole, for the folk - and so that this,
too, stands out, just like all genuine knowledge is not dead information,
rather expression of living struggle.
Knowing a lot does not make it, rather each must start at
the post given him, and it will be shown that it is always a center from which
everything else opens up, if one seriously goes into the depth.
The Educational Value of the Subjects
Each field of science or subject already has its educational
value [Bildungswert] in that much must be learned, noted, clarified, before
one can build upon the fundamental realizations the higher ones. The order in
which this construction takes places and the listening in and looking in at the
object at which it is directed simultaneously pose a very essential training
value [Erziehungswert].
Each field of science furthermore has the endeavor to
comprehend the world totality from its perspective, and not, say, merely from
the portion of the world forming its object. Two sciences very diverse from
each other may serve as an example: geography and anthropology.
Although geography merely wants to describe the world, it
must, in order to do that, stray into the universe; the first pages of the
Atlases display this, and every map shows lines whose meaning points above the
earth. But it must also delve into everything that exists in and upon the
earth, into the history of the earth (geology) and into the living creatures
which populate the earth, especially man, the states, the cultures. So it
reaches into all sciences, into the natural sciences as well as the social
sciences, and the whole world is reflected in it.
Anthropology is similarly extensive. Its object, man, has
conquered the whole world, even intellectually, all knowledge of the world is
human knowledge. If one views it so, then there is nothing that does not also
belong to anthropology. Certainly, one will not always go so far and, in order
to master the object, also seek limitation.
But thrusts into the whole must occur from each subject.
Whoever is really knowledgeable in one area and has not encapsulated himself as
expert also knows how things must go in the others as well. If he even surveys
a few subjects lying farther apart from each other, then this can mean much
more than a so-called general education.
No course of instruction can be complete, none should be
that, and it is already bad, if it is overfilled; for the intellect [Geist] and
the orientation [Gesinnung] of the learning person should not become exhausted
and uprooted, rather solidified.
Above all, the teacher needs a view of the visible
totality of the world and of his own place in both. He must hold himself back
from immediately teaching much about it, since it easily has the effect of a
“tendency”. The self-willed person, who matters most, rejects it, the ambitious
person, whom we do not exactly want, exploits it. All roads then seem too
short, and their end is always viewed as the same.
Instead, the object must be sounded, and the conclusions
regarding the whole must result from this alignment. They must be conclusions
and not short circuits, steps and not leaps. They must lead to the goal, but
they must not be led by the hand. Otherwise, instead of the materialistic,
liberal, Marxist, Bolshevik, democratic, centrist tendency, we just have
another tendency again, whereas the folkish and racial fundamental idea of
National Socialism demands truthfulness and clarity.
1. Biology, Genetics, Racial Hygiene
Biology is fundamental, the
science of the driving forces of life, then its branch, genetics, which
also offers the laws of life, finally the practical application in racial
hygiene.
Biology shows creatures in
their worlds. We learn how creatures adapt to their environment, what part of
it becomes noticeable to them and how they react, become effective. There
results from this the distinction between observed world and working world and
the dovetailing of both into the environment.
The concept world receives is meaning from the observing
and working creature. With lower life forms, the observed world is often very
small and encompasses just a very few traits. With man, it achieves the highest
manifoldness. Through the sciences, it is further broadened and systematically
expanded. The technological practical applications of the sciences then also
broaden the working world of man and assure him a certain power over his
environment. In that biology unrolls this on the great background of its
material encompassing all life forms, its world-view gain is especially great.
It also provides an insight into the process how life, on
the highest level of its becoming conscious, is able to make itself so free
that it can dare, with ultimate inner responsibility, to take into its own
hand, shaping, a race advancing to such advanced knowledge, in order to assure
the escalation of this freedom and the existence and increase of its culture.
The means to achieve this goal are offered by genetics.
The genes are fate, but the laws according to which they pass down open the
prospect to guide this fate.
One can quite clearly separate the deformed, especially
in bad cases, from the well-formed, and even if one knows little about the
initial causes of the deformity, the consequences of its spread through
heredity are all the better known. This is joined by the determinations about
the frequency of bad genes and their effects. The valuation of the cases of
above-average success and its heredity likewise remains realistic.
Finally, life itself displays achievement and
confirmation.
It is to be ensured that the highly valuable reproduce
above-average and the clearly deformed not at all.
Racial hygiene then explains and
bases the individual measures; its application leads to population policy.
New moral values result. If in the old moral doctrine the
individual was of infinite value, whom one, however, in practice often treated
very badly, now the value of the individual is determined, agreeing in theory
and practice, from considerations that are aimed at the folk whole and the
culture whole.
The old medicine aimed at preserving and tending
individual life, the new one, beyond that, also has an eye on coming
generations and hence must not hesitate to limit the individual existence to
itself in case it cannot take responsibility for it reproducing.
All areas of life are affected by it: mate selection,
marriage counseling, inheritance law, criminal law, voting right, welfare,
health care, physical exercise and much more.
2. Human Science, Race Science, Folk Science
The object of human science (anthropology) is
initially the human body and the diversity of its forms among present-day and
earlier folks of the earth.
In the process, it reaches, beyond the concept population
and folk, to relatively constant, even if not “pure”, races, from whose mixture
it aims to deduce, according to the laws of heredity and with regard for
environmental influences, the physical traits of the folk tribes still close to
the beginning primal races, then individual folks [Einzelvölker], folks
[Völker] and populations [Bevölkerungen].
Its material leads in part farther back into primeval
time than the oldest remains of human activity, and it also leads to the point
where human creatures rose from the animal to above the animal. Although it has
not yet been able to provide final clarity in detail here, basically everything
fundamental has been clarified, namely the origin of man and his relationship
to the animals. His origin steps into the light of natural science, and this
simultaneously also provides the natural historical foundations for mankind’s
history of ideas, his races and folks.
We see how diverse the races and folks are,
physically and mentally, all according to their natural tendencies. From these
natural tendencies then result the structure of the cultures as self-portrayal
of the nature of their bearers.
Cultures are always driven forward and escalated only by
individuals, by individual talented human beings as well as by individual folks
and races. Others must take up the new culture-deed and pass it along.
Among the races and folks, finally, the location of one’s
own nationality determines. Culture-geography, science-geography, world
commerce and even world trade: what are they, if not in essence attachment and
expansion to this science!
3. Prehistory, World History, Culture Science
What folk science portrays primarily in space, world
history shows mainly according to time.
Not everything that has ever occurred is significant
world- historically. To write world history, means to evaluate. But evaluating
does not mean proceeding arbitrarily. Many people say: science should not
evaluate! But one can also say: who should do it, if not it?
The value of achievements, inventions, institutions shows
itself in how they prove themselves, thus over the course of time, in history.
But where a value is found, an unworthiness [Unwert] is rejected, a will stands
behind it, which stirs within us.
History hence has a will-forming effect, repelling and
attracting, character-forming, like hardly anything else. At the same time, it
is the college of politics.
Our world-historical field of vision has broadened. The
ancient history of the oldest cultures, Indo-Germanic man’s fateful path,
German prehistory, the continued effect of these mighty processes into
the present and into the questions moving it, are more complete and clear than
ever before.
It is about solidifying this intellectual possession. If
people do not know where they come from, then they also do not know where they
should go, they are like sailors without compass and stars on stormy, dark
night sea.
A special area of world history is general culture
science [allgemeine Kulturkunde], and its simultaneously plays into folk
science, while history in the narrower sense is more political history. One
will know too little about Germandom, if one does not know its place in the
building of human science and folk science and its stride through world history
and its accomplishments - measured by pictures that a general culture science
can depict.
The goal must not be sunning ourselves in what we have
achieved, rather we must measure ourselves by what others as well have become
great in.
Two individual areas especially come under consideration
in the process: religion and law.
Comparative theology shows us the religious struggle of
the folks, the abysses of the souls that open up in the process, but also their
creative energies. The great religions become comprehensible from their early
stages and prerequisites and enter into their idea-historical connections.
Another branch of culture science, jurisprudence, affects
not only valid law, rather the shaping of law overall. Beyond Roman law, we see
the German one native to us. We seek its sources in Germanic and Aryan law. But
we can adopt only the essential core, the psychological orientation
[gesinnungsmäßige Einstellung]; individual institutions only as an exception
and sensibly altered: the totally different cultural level of today separates
us from the special stamp of that time.
4. Folk Science, Language
Such considerations already lead very close to folk
science [Volkskunde].
That folk science branches off from German cultural
history and the science of folks, rests on that wherever leading social strata
have produced high cultures on the basis of lower strata, the folk custom of
the lower strata wants to be treated separately.
Folk science ascertains the survival of old customs and
traditions and thereby builds many important bridges to our own prehistory. So
it supplements homeland science. Previously, it paid too little attention to
differentiate in this tradition between native and alien and to put the native
in its Germanic and Indo-Germanic, northern racial context. It is urgently
necessary to catch up with that here.
Each should know about the totality of his nationality
and not live merely in the culture of an upper stratum. He should also know the
saga and fair-tale, folk song, dance, children’s game, practices and customs of
folkish tradition. Within it, native, old nature is contained in a plentitude
and clarity from which we can often deduce more and more that is close to
nature, more joyful, more future-mighty than from many creations of high art
and literature. Educating oneself from this property gives genuine
folk-closeness and homeland bond.
An important application of folk results are festivals,
when one tries to enliven them with old, meaningful custom. Dusty relics remain
misunderstood; and it can only hurt to heartlessly put them on display. But if
the dispositions, unnoticed and yet penetratingly, are prepared for the old and
its inner worth, which must happen with understanding and from a distance, then
even apparently already dead values can become truly alive again - like, say, a
dried out seed, that sown nonetheless still strikes roots.
Admittedly, folk science cannot overcome the difference
of the strata, but folk property bestows energy for new folkish deed, quite
similar to the traditions of the German and Germanic past standing on an older
cultural level.
There is only one more area where a similarly large
treasure of German nature lies hidden: the German language. It likewise
has something arranging, direction-giving, obligating within it.
Speak proper German! If you take that seriously, it
penetrates into all your thoughts and shapes you anew from the inside out: this
produces a self-stamp, preserves character.
The demand for proper language also leads beyond the
German to the tribe-related languages. Should one say “better than"
[“besser als”] or “better as” [“besser wie”]. Here it is
not the word usage of preferred poets of authors that can decide, rather in all
Indo-Germanic languages there is a different word for the positive than for the
comparative. Departure from this comparative word would be a further loss of
the Indo-Germanic manner of speech in German.
The demand for proper language is a good test for the
will. Whoever takes it lightly or brusquely pushes it aside, will seldom take
anything else seriously.
The same is true for the demand for language purity, for
the avoidance of dispensable foreign words, for the wrestling for the simplest,
most understandable, most suitable expression.
Finally, one should pay attention to German name-giving,
even with proper names. If they are ancient, then one should see to it that one
understands them. Relationship results from proper names that reach back to the
spiritual property of the Edda and the rest of old Nordic legacy.
5. Society, Science, State
Now one should remember that culture, law, practice,
custom, language are all just expressions of social life, in which nationality
is at work.
Certainly, today we are surrounded by a social life that
could make one despair, if one did not know that we will soon fill it with a
new spirit. We are already beginning with the festivals.
The old social doctrine with its colorless general
concept of human society was not at all aimed at answering the question about
the essence and nature of a German society as folk community, at showing
us what is historical coincidence in these institutions, how it could also be
different, and making our judgement free and the yardstick and pillar of a new
desire.
The old economic doctrine remains even more distant from
the necessary goal. One treats the manifestations of economic life as iron
necessities resulting from concepts that would have to be valid even for Mars.
That is could be about the economy of the German
folk, one left totally out of the game. And yet, it is so clear: here a land
that is delineated, economic-geographical tolerably, or actually intolerably,
and here a population in which the consciousness and desire of its nationality
nonetheless blare up again and again, giving direction.
Finally, the state as well is not an end in
itself, rather only means to an end, it must not fossilize, must remain open to
motion and serve the folk. Behind the state idea and above it, there arises the
Reich idea. Reich is more than state and timeless, inner goal of the whole
folk.
The land, the folk, its history, they are the
prerequisites for the national economy. The land places demands on the folk and
summons its unique nature, but the Nordic race still always present in this
folk despite all fateful events, the German within it, again forces it under
its power, fertilizes it with its blood, moistens it with its sweat, shapes it
according to its high, direction-giving will.
6. Mathematics, Physics
Not yet named are the sciences of inanimate nature,
physics with its branches, then mathematics, then philosophy, finally
the whole large area of technology, that means the practical application of the
various sciences from medicine to technology and in the narrower sense to
politics.
That happened with intention, even if with each of these
subjects with a different one. Not all areas of thought, research and knowledge
overall are supposed to be discussed here, rather it should be ascertained how
they in particular lead to German education.
Many of the just named sciences, so it seems, would
without major changes in their content also have to be represented in a French,
Russian, English, American, Japanese education. Mathematics and logic are valid
quite universally, the laws of nature are universal and necessary.
Nonetheless, the direction in which these realizations
are sought and found, is time-determined, location-determined,
blood-determined.
Logic and mathematics were
already discovered in everything essential by the Greeks, but not any other
folks still again.
Even among Europe’s racially closely related folks,
differences in mathematical talent show themselves.
Newton and Leibnitz, the Englishman and the German, in
the service of similar research tasks, escalate synthetic observation in
mathematics into calculus.
On the other hand, Descartes develops analytic geometry
and Galois group theory, which in its application to the fundamental principle
of algebra likewise lies in the direction of analytical thought.
A special manner to escalate the formalistic in
mathematics, even in its application to the physical, seems to characterize
Jewish thought. A perfect example is Einstein’s ever more subtle reality
theory, which, insofar as it has previously shown itself, merely shows a
seductive manner of observation, but has not yet grasped any new physical
facts. However, we do not need a game with the formal, rather contact with
reality.
The emergence and history of the sciences of inanimate
nature as well lead to the folkish and racial idea.
In Babylon, astrology sets in, a caricature of a science
of the stars, but simply not yet astronomy, the genuine science of them.
Egypt, China, Mexico as well do not create any natural
science on their own.
But when the Greeks’ knowledge of natural science sank
with the exhaustion of their race, the Germanic folks, opening up the world
through folk wandering, Viking voyages, crusades, exploration expeditions, also
take up the old voyages of discovery into the realm of world knowledge.
Viking spirit continues in nature research, heroic
devotion to the object and to truth, urgent searching for the moving causes.
It means a fateful departure from this orientation, if a
new “modem” direction in physics awards leadership to mathematics, which is
only a make-shift means through which one assures oneself that the object has
been completely thought through, instead of to the reality lying at the base of
research, which must be traced to laws.
The great nature researchers are oriented toward
knowledge, not ingenious play, also not acquisition. They are all primarily
northern racial human beings. The history of the natural sciences, the life of
the great nature researchers, gives testimony to the spirit of the Nordic race.
7. Philosophy
Philosophy can become more
essential than everything else, if it gives itself the goal of native thought.
By native kind, the Nordic one determined by race and nationality is meant.
Admittedly, previously this orientation was as good as totally lacking.
What circulates as philosophy, has very diverse worth. We
have little reason to be inwardly deeply satisfied even with the course of the
Greek and then with our own German philosophy, even though the great thinkers
tower over everybody else and, through the intrepidity of their intellect and
the strength of their character, have been the truest educators.
Greek philosophy soon collapsed from its original height
with the exhaustion of the Greek folk spirit, and the German one took up all
too much the legacies of this decline and was thereby always severely retarded.
One paid homage to an abstract thought and hence sought neither the conditions
of native thought nor did one pay attention to its sources.
The fundamental orientation was individualistic or
universalistic; one saw the distress of the individual or of mankind; one
seldom saw the distress of the folk.
The excess of unnecessary foreign terms in the affected
professional jargon, the wind-bagging with empty concepts makes the majority of
philosophical works disagreeable, and the outsider finds it difficult to
distinguish between appearance and genuine content.
Hence philosophy, as it exists, contains many dangers,
especially for an inexperienced, youthful spirit, which unrealistic,
formalistic thought only all too easily draws under its power. It can almost
more easily have a false educating than an educating effect, if care is not
taken for the necessary depth.
But it was a great German philosopher who coined the
expression of the revaluation of all values. We now prepare to carry it out. A
wealth of experience and a will aimed an inner law that goes beyond all
experience must participate in this work.
A large number of sciences strive to flow into the
future’s mentally clarified view of the world and to decisively influence it,
because they have brought to light new important results and because a spiritual
arrangement of the old with the new is necessary.
Greek philosophy developed under the leadership of
mathematics and the exact sciences. The beginning that biology and history just
barely took among the Greeks no longer succeeded, for the creative energy of
the Greeks had been paralyzed as the result of race-mixing. Similarly, the
beginnings of German philosophy, bursting the chains of scholastics, stands
under the sign of mathematics and the exact sciences. But the influx of
biology, the science of living beings, and of history, prehistory, primeval
history, cultural history, the science of folks, folk science, race science,
genetics, happens among us with much more thorough preparation, likewise at a
distance and so that the discussion of this rich property only now for the
first time comes due in a large framework.
All our philosophers would have had to philosophize
totally differently, if they had known what we know today. The thinkers of the
German future will complete the action of the new sciences coming together into
a new view of the world and have to adjust these results against the old view
of the world. There will be no lack of fertilizing minor and major crises in
the process, and a final state of knowledge, a lazy hide upon which one could
lay down to rest, will and can and should not be tanned in the process.
One cannot cheaply expect to reap high values from
philosophy, if one does not already bring something oneself. It is part of the
ever escalating misery of the time that one was again and again ready to spin
seepage of every kind from philosophy into literature to the point of game
playing, which would not have been possible at all, if they had been faced with
real knowledge and yardsticks. To possess these simultaneously means being
capable of judgment.
8. Technology
Aside from ability for judgment, we need ability for
performance. All sciences have their technological application in one form or
another. Applied science is technology.
We must never forget that the technician, in the broadest
and best sense of the word, is a world conqueror, that the Nordic blood in his
veins perhaps pulsates the strongest, and that all science that gets at the
existence of the world essence-researching owes its glory to the leadership of
this Nordic spirit.
The most pronounced representatives of these fields, in
the event their talent is so strong that they have little room left for the
others, may safely be a dram less “educated“; in exchange, they engage all the
more decisively as formative men, shaping their time, intervening into the fate
and thought of their folk.
But we may also ask of them, after all, that they see
their relationship to the whole of this folk not merely in the basic features,
rather that they have also let this knowledge and look at themselves have a
thorough effect, that they have taken it seriously, themselves act accordingly
and bring others to act accordingly.
Philology, cultural history, art have been overestimated
in our folk for centuries in an all too external manner. Now one is perhaps inclined
to again underestimate them and science overall. Instead, we must finally find
the right balance. The applied branches live from the theoretical ones and
perish, if they decay. Conversely, theory experiences its true fulfillment,
after all, in that it is applied. Only both sides of culture, the
self-reflective one and the one leading to action, produce the totality of
life.
Certainly, it is necessary that the necessary does not
merely apply, rather purposefully applies. The drive for reputation and gain
can set such goals, and a genuine idealism in the service of a higher goal can
set them. Selfishness and materialism degrade technology, action for something
higher ennobles it.
The machine is an example. One has driveled much about
its demonism. But the machine in itself is dead iron, and beyond that only what
man makes out of it. It can unburden people and free them for higher goals, and
it can crush men and make them unemployed, according to how one uses it.
Inventions only turn against their inventors, if they fail in the decisive
thing.
But our hopes for technology are very strong and aimed at
the right thinking in its application. Also, the concept of technology broads
quite a lot for us, since now not merely the sciences of inanimate nature
produce technological applications, rather also the science of animate nature
and the historical sciences now push toward cultural technology, toward the new
medicine, toward population policy and cultural policy. Just that this part of
technology is first in the process of development. But it will prove itself as
at least equally as decisive as the earlier.
Medicine is a technology, if, broadened into racial
hygiene, with utilization of the exiting insights and knowledge, it is employed
to heal the folk body, and, broadened into cultural policy, to heal the folk
spirit, so that the German folk succeeds in what the other northern racial
folks previously failed: to reach the goal.
Cultural technology, cultural policy have not merely
formative effect, insofar as the whole people knowingly absorbs them and their
goal, rather they also have a re-forming, re-shaping effect. The landscape is
re-shaped through roads, trains, bridges and much more, the economy through machines,
rationalization etc.; but that is merely environment. It goes much deeper, if
the folk itself undertakes to reshape itself and in such a way that in the
process new, higher formation becomes possible and the racial properties of the
higher order benefit the racial properties of the first order instead of
working against them.
That is not a progress that on its own guarantees the
course of the world or an absolute intellect, also not a loyal look up at a
beckoning infinity next door, rather the hard demand of self-assertion.
Standing still already means failure and is the beginning of the end.
9. Art
Similar to technology, art as well is an escalated
ability, similar as with technology, with art as well, from the beginning on,
this ability stands under an inner direction above the merely technical. This
inner life alone matters, its wealth and its power to speak to us from the
work.
The formative power of all art rests on this, both the
purely decorative, which Germanic man has brought to the highest perfection, as
well as illustrative art, in which the Greeks were for a long time rightly our
model, as well as literature, the theater and music, all three of which reach
back to Indo-Germanic root.
The art of the folks of Nordic race differentiates itself
so greatly from the art of the other folks as the respective culture and all
their spiritual products. Art can never be separated from them, the artists
always stand in the middle of the life of their folk, carried by it and
escalating it into the blossom of their art.
Art history under the leadership of the folkish and
racial idea has not yet been written. It would have to bring a similar
re-evaluation as world history on racial basis, for which as well merely the
beginnings exist.
But art history is also not the only, also hardly the
best path to art. Works of art were created so that they can speak to us
themselves. Admittedly, they are blood-determined, folk-determined, time-
determined and have, the more they stem from high cultures, also the more
manifold prerequisites. But the higher a work of art stands, the closer it gets
to the ultimate, the eternal, the more these prerequisites recede behind its
inner content, and the more compellingly it can communicate itself.
What says it? Seldom something that can be reduced to
concepts. Quite the opposite, the conceptual is easily a great enemy of the
artistic.
One also hardly reaches the core, if one characterizes
the beautiful as its goal. At least, one must view the concept beautiful for us
anew. There is much northern racial art that is not beautiful in the sense of
antiquity. Instead, it communicates an inner bearing, and this most movingly,
if this bearing is simultaneously life experience, and a final judgment and
affirmation. And therein also lies then the native or the deviation from it.
Hence the artist cannot merely be an illustrator, rather
is always also an educator, and art forms and educates at the same time. It can
point the way to new ideals, a new life bearing.
The state of art is quite similarly a test for the worth
of a culture, of a nationality, like the state of the sciences or the
employment of technology. But while the sciences are all the more difficult to
access, the farther they progress in their results, because with them one
builds on the other, art can, yes, must, again and again start anew, and the
duty for truthfulness is at work within it in such an elevated, and despite all
severity nonetheless simultaneously mitigated form, that art is all the more
easily accessible, the more it succeeds to express transfiguring the innermost
essence in the simplest manner.
The Whole Goal
In closing, let it be warned against wanting to absorb
from all these areas, subjects, curriculums something, or worse, everything;
the result would be that nothing could be saved of the whole, which is what
matters. An over-filled, over-stimulated stomach cannot digest. Better to do a
little seriously than nothing properly.
However, we need the whole picture of German
education in order to select accordingly for the respective special education
purpose, and in order to apply what is selected according to this whole
picture. The
important impulses of educational and formative value will emanate from such
teachers who are totally rooted in their subject and have developed character
therein in the ultimate spiritual-moral sense and can show their pupils what it
consists of, and can thereby put demands to them.
Education that is merely possessed is too little; it must
also have an effect in the service of the folk whole. It is a task for each
individual according to the gift and limitations bestowed upon him, but it also
a task for the whole, for the folk and the genuine folk state.
Above all, the education system has the task to
distribute in the folk the legacy of the folk, its racial properties of the
higher order, and to ensure the passing along, so that the survival and
increase of the culture is thereby ensured.
The dangers of excessive foreign influence, frequency and
misdirection must be met by the educational system as well, and since through
education it forms the ideals of the culture-bearers, it is also owed a very
significant share in the awakening of the correct and necessary yearnings and
energies of the soul and thereby the preservation of the culture.
To expel the foreign, to expand the native, preconditions
deep-reaching education. Likewise, the determination of the essential is a task
of the power of judgment schooled through education. Only both together create
the preconditions that the environment will shape as needed so that the
culture-bearing racial properties of the first order remain preserved and
become solidified.
The educated person, in the sense of German education,
must not, as the educated person previously was all too often, be an uprooted
person. Rather the roots of his education must reach back so far that he has
found his way back into his inner homeland, which emanated from the north, has
presented itself in the creations of the Indo-Germanic folks, from sacred
legacy remains at work in the German folk as the blood heir of Germanic man and
now again strikes roots in the German homeland, in the German home, and should
ripen toward a new future. It is not necessary that everybody knows all that
expressly, yes, for the majority hardly desirable. But everything that he knows
should be applied directly or indirectly according to this outline, so that at
any moment as much of it can become alive as this moment demands.
The goal is set so high and so extensive that it
obligates long-term. And we affirm this obligation long-term: first in the
schools, then in life, and so generation after generation.
The situation today is a completely different one that
even recently. The old nationalism has feed too long on the intellectual
property of unforgettable, farsighted leaders like Arndt, Jahn, Lagarde, and
has fossilized.
But now new forces are stirring in our movement. The new
nationalism has idea again, and it offers resistance to all the storms of the
present, and it has a socialist heart.
All
in all: we want unconditionally the new German future. For us, it should not be
a poor imitation of some died off past, not a helpless and feeble repetition of
what once existed. Rather we want to absorb within us all the energy of the
past and process and re-shape it within us, so that this future becomes.
It should not be a rebirth of Germanic antiquity, not a Renaissance, rather a
new birth of German essence in mind and limbs.
