by Alfred Baeumler
Introduction by Juan Sebastián Gómez Jeria
One
of Alfred Baeumler’s several excellent texts are dedicated
to political philosopher Alfred
Rosenberg’s masterpiece, entitled
‘The Myth
of the 20th
Century’ (Rosenberg, 2004; Rosenberg
& Scholle,
1999). Here
we present what we believe
to be
the first
English translation
of this
text. In
our opinion, and given the complexity of Rosenberg’s text, we suggest
that those interested read the
text presented here first because it will provide
them with an
excellent basic approach.
We have
used the
1943 edition
(A. Baeumler, 1943). This
text, like
others before
it, is
a translation that I hope will be
improved and commented on by future researchers who are not afraid
to do so.
The quotations contained
in this
text are
from the
original edition and, in the future, they would have to be modified to the
extent that there is a complete standard
text of
the Myth
in English to
cite. For suggestions
and comments, please contact the translator.
Alfred Rosenberg and
the Myth of the 20th Century
On
the eastern
border of
Estonia stand
two fortresses, facing each other.
On the
west bank
of the
Narva River
rises Hermannsburg,
built by
the Teutonic Order: imposing and clearly structured, firmly rooted and
at the same time projecting aloft,
with sharp
contours, the
image of
a force that, resting on
itself, turns towards the world to dominate it spiritually.
On
the eastern
bank lies
the Slavic
fortress of
Ivangorod. Endlessly piling up new
masses, the
barely articulated construction spills
into space. Their
proportions and
measurements are
almost unhuman.
While the
tower here in the
West reminds
us of
the posture
of a
warrior who
sits calm
and secure in the chair,
there in
the East the
idea of
a humane
and chivalrous attitude cannot
be presented. These misshapen walls must hide terrible secrets. Before our
spiritual eyes there appears an inhuman despotism and an
equally inhuman servitude. Every
medieval fortress
has its
dungeons, but
this castle looks like a
single, gloomy dungeon. We miss in this construction
any resonance of a joyful and free creation. The hopelessness of a soul
opposed to the German seems to have
created in him its symbol.
Figure
1. Left.
Hermann Castle
(also Hermannsburg, Herman Castle,
Narva Castle, Narva fortress, and Hermanni linnus) in Narva,
eastern Estonia. Right. Ivangorod
fortress (Ivangorod, Russia).
German
form and
Asian infinity:
in the
narrow space
of the eastern border of the
Baltic lands meet. From the silent absolutism of
the architectural appearance,
emerge with unprecedented force the characters that are the destiny of
peoples.
As an East German, in an
outpost of the ethnic group, Alfred Rosenberg was born. In the destiny-laden space where the
form-rich center of Europe meets the
immensely monotonous East, in the field of tension of
two races and
cultures, he
received his
first impressions. The Balts
have united against the strangeness that surrounds them and have
developed a closed, familiar tribal
feeling. As if they represented a single European
noble family, they
opposed Russian
breadth. In
their stately
estates and
in their
cities they cultivated the strict forms of humane chivalrous
treatment, consciously erecting a protective wall of human measure
against the foreign Tartar excess.
Figure 2. A map of the
Baltic Tribes, around year 1200. The Eastern Balts
are shown in brown hues while the Western Balts are shown in green.
The boundaries are approximate (Wikipedia).
Hermannsburg is a true
symbol of the Balt essence: something
German, which could just
as well
be in
Franconia, but here
adopts a
special stance: looking
down with
distant restraint
on a
world that
does not
and will never know the
European form.
It is characteristic of the
Balt to act through being. It is not proper
for the Balts
to attack
this or
that directly
and change
it by
force. The
Balts does not gladly deny it.
He never rushes into details to destroy them; he waits
until he can
oppose the
New as
a Whole
to the
Old. When
he has
fully conformed to the New, no
one can be more implacable than he, and nothing will
prevent him from preferring the Right and Noble to the False and Ignoble.
There
is something
about the
Balt that
could be
called a
sense of humanity,
a special sense
of the
relationship between human
beings. This sense
is something different
from mere
social touch,
it is
a certain
way of seeing the
world. A
Balt always
sees the
world through
the medium
of the human being. It cannot and will never abstract from the
human. Everywhere he looks through,
from the
work to
the creator,
from the
achievement to the one who does
it.
In
a very
profound sense,
he is
the man
of the
anecdote. Who
could rejoice more cordially over
an anecdote
than he?
But what
is an
anecdote? The revelation, reduced to its bare minimum, of a human
character or situation. The interest
in characters and situations is a Baltic tribal peculiarity and it must be added
that, in spite of all aesthetic talent, this interest
is essentially ethical. What matters is how the whole human being
behaves, how he answers a question in life, how he relates to the world and to
other human beings.
In the unique and special
thing that Rosenberg’s work has brought
to the German spirit, we recognize a historical gift from the East at the
center of German
collective life.
What the
Fatherland gave
him, he
gives back
to the spiritual Fatherland to
which the Baltic people have always been
united. Goethe and Schopenhauer educated Rosenberg, and he never denied
his inner affinity
with the spirit of Kant. In the face of his work, schematisms that
seek to bring the East
back to
the ‘Prussian
style’ or
to Herder’s
empathic capacity fail.
The Baltic
essence cannot
be defined
by the
‘Prussian style’ or by the
romantic richness of the soul. The proximity of Russia’s
immense space
and its configurations
of power
have generated
in the
Baltic an internal breadth that
has become alien to the German interior, which in
the course of the tragic history
of the Reich became too narrow within
small political territories. Nowhere else in the total German space has anything
been formed that could be compared to the attitude of the Baltic:
hardness in the innermost core, which joins an unusual breadth of
horizons in a
unique character. It is only on the border, in constant coexistence with
a foreign ethnic group, that
sensibility for human beings and wills can be developed, which, together with
the breadth of the soul, constitutes
the particularity of the Baltic.
Baltic Germanism is in the
early nineteenth century in a similar relationship to the core territory as Southeastern
Germanism is to Bismarck’s Empire.
Neither the
Protestant Northeast nor the
Catholic Southeast
fit into the educational atmosphere of Bismarck’s Empire. Neither is
touched by
the state’s conception
of the
nuclear territory,
which combines
the realism of a new age with
the philosophical idealism of Fichte and Hegel in a mixture.
The dangers that lay in the idealistic statism of Bismarck’s Empire did
not exist for the
eastern frontier regions
of the
old empire.
Here there
was maintained
a disposition to see the political and the spiritual in new ways, a
disposition that in inner Germany had
disappeared under the pressure of statist narrowing. It
is impossible to consider it a coincidence that the two books that
revolutionized the political and spiritual attitude of the nuclear
territory, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf
and Rosenberg’s
The Myth
of the
Twentieth Century,
were written
by Germans from the northeastern and southeastern periphery of the
former Reich.
The
boy who
was born
on January
12, 1893
in a
bourgeois house
in the town
of Reval
on the
Estonian coast,
fate had
not put
an easy
life in
the cradle. The Balto does
not carry
the heart
on his
tongue; but
even from
the sinnest indications the vital feeling of a soul can be guessed. Even
the imprisoned Kant has been recognized as melancholy. Rosenberg’s
literary oeuvre remains completely free of all painting, mood, and
conceptual lyricism; From this man for whom only action and form count, a
direct manifestation of feeling is not to be expected. And yet in his
work a continuous trait of feeling is clearly perceptible. It is the human
appeal of this work
that its
triumphant content is
sustained by
the slow movement
of a melancholy
soul. Rosenberg’s heart is
not casually
attached to
the vast and severe
landscape of his homeland; where you should feel at home in
the middle of forests, fields and meadows, it has to be ‘like in
Estonia’. Something of the pastoral
mode of
the third
act of
‘Tristan und
Isolde’, of
a longing for infinity that
goes beyond all forms, is found in this
melancholy, before
which the world sometimes seems
to recede
like a
shadow. For
such a soul, life is sometimes
perceived as a melancholy affair.
This state of mind has been compressed by Schopenhauer (in the poem on Kant’s
death) in the wonderful
verse:
‘The world is barren,
and life is long’.
Spiritual creation can
never be deduced from temperament. But surely the secret of creative impulses is closely connected with
the type and color of temperament.
Figure 3. Alfred
Rosenberg.
At the end of the first book
of ‘The Myth’, Rosenberg draws a
picture of Germanic man. He is the man of ‘ecstasy’, with this
word Chamberlain had already
given the concept of idealism, the man
of discoveries and audacity, of
scientific knowledge and personal
artistic creation. Rosenberg characterizes ecstasy more closely as ‘maximum
mental disposition
for action’.
But in the deepest depths
of this
disposition for action
he discovers
what has
just given this
image its true
Nordic depth:
the feeling of the oneness and
singularity of the soul, which is the presupposition of
all freedom
and greatness,
and the consciousness
of solitude
that arises
from it.
‘Everything stands colored
and configured in a
peculiar way, intuited and strange at the same time, and in the middle
and next to it I find myself, the
Nordic man, the consciousness that has
become the mystery of existence, solitary’ (The Myth, p. 271).
Description and confession
merge in this sentence, and it is precisely on this
that the
objective truth
of the work
that contains
it is
based. Solitude and
action condition each
other in
the Germanic personality.
For the
action here is not a senseless and violent activity or an inner
restlessness that moves on
pre-written tracks,
but the
creative movement
of a
self-surrendered self. The
action of the Nordic man is born of the dream of the soul, the great
doers of the north are at the same time the eternal dreamers. There is
nothing indeterminate and ‘dreamy’ about this concept of dreaming; as
Rosenberg uses this expression, it is
a clear term of genuine psychological depth. Dreamers
in this sense
are people
who splurge
generously on the
world. Whoever
knows how to
speak of
dreams in
this way
knows the
presuppositions of
world- historical action. Before all decisive action there is the
audacious project, that inner action
which is initially only the most secret possession of an
individual and is revealed by
decision. With
this he
enters the
conditions of
time and falls under the power
of fate. But even the work, dismembered by
the necessities of existence, is haloed by the brilliance of the soul
that once dreamed of it.
Even the most rationally
lucid creative man is never a purely rational being.
From a center which always
remains in darkness arises all that
suddenly rises
before us,
as if
sprung up
‘out of
nothing’, the
free projects
of the soul, for which there is no previous trace in the given connection
of things. Anyone who
builds something
out of his own
strength somehow
makes his way from darkness to
light. In some, one project follows another until
finally the last one becomes a work. Others carry out only a single
thought apprehended with foreboding and clarity in youth. So it was with
Schopenhauer, and similarly with
Rosenberg.
The dispositions which are
united in it are maintained in their diversity
with the
greatest severity
by the
unity of
character. On
the basic disposition for the
configuring vision and the configuring creation,
he initially embraces the
profession of architect. The internal dynamics of
his nature
push him beyond the realm
of artistic
creation, without
changing the configuring
impulse. The only thing that transforms is the form of
expression you choose. Under the constraint of an internal necessity,
the innate configuring force shifts from the artistic to the real human;
the action of men in their characterological conditioning attracts interest upon
themselves. He recognizes it as his life’s task to see, distinguish
and make
forms in
this area. It
moves away
from stone,
metal and
wood to
turn to the noblest and most difficult
material that exists: the human being.
From the artist emerges the
politician and philosopher of culture. Perhaps here
it may
be recalled
that Westphalia,
the homeland
of the
Balt tribe, is the
land that
in two
apparently opposite
spheres has
produced forms of maximum
simplicity and strength: within the art of the Romanesque style, a
proud succession of magnificent
constructions and in
the sphere
of human coexistence, an
exemplary juridical thought. Understanding
the relationships between
people in their
structure as
buildings, understanding the
juridical- political systems almost architecturally and conceiving them as an expression of human
characters, has always remained the strength of Balt Rosenberg.
As
if driven
by an
inner force,
at the
age of
24 he
begins to
write thoughts, not knowing where
that will
take him.
The innate
gift for configuration means
that, from the first attempt, he achieves closed
texts, and his
formulations have
an astonishing certainty and
maturity. But
the most remarkable thing
is that
this young
writer makes
decisions that
he will not need to retract in his entire life. We are faced with the
rare case of a
perfectly straightforward inner development, which is nevertheless not
rigid at all, which can only be explained by an extraordinary firmness of
character. Rosenberg’s reflexive
and political
talents are
not two different
dispositions that somehow interact, but only two forms
of expression of the same
unitary fundamental force. The closed
personality unfolds its activity in two
opposite directions, which we usually
find distributed in different
personalities. So sure is this personality of itself,
so firmly rested in confidence in
its star, that it can afford
the freest movement. The
thinker communicates
his firmness
to the politician, the
politician to the thinker his unconditionality.
Rosenberg’s thought is
political not only because it chooses political objects such
as Judaism
or the
diversity of
nations, but
in a
much deeper sense. We must call
a thought
truly political
when it
is not
satisfied with
the description of human phenomena, but advances to the motive forces
that determine the
life of
the individual
and of
the community.
Guided by his unusual
ability to
grasp the
essentially human,
Rosenberg has
developed his own style of
political knowledge. It has taught us to recognize
essential features and forms even
where before
everything seemed to
dissolve into
an amorphous subjectivism and an
accidental moralism. In
all that
is human- historical,
he knows how
to discover
with the
sense of
smell of
a hunter
the determining and configuring impulses. He knows no realm of pure forms
that rests in itself and
is enjoyed
by a
contemplative spirit. All
that is spiritual autotelic is
alien to him. Form is action. Every artistic or
political form is born from a fluid igneous nucleus, it is the revelation of
a soul. In the end, there is no form at
all that is nothing but form: form is conformation. And all conformation is the
action of a personality. Wherever
we look
in the
human sphere, everywhere we
find form,
both in
the daily life of a people and in its legal system or in its art. For
this thought there is nothing fortuitous or isolated. Whether he is a statesman,
an artist,
a writer,
or a
Jewish merchant,
Rosenberg relentlessly
examines his
work in
terms of
the internal
form from which
it proceeds.
There is
no room
for evasion
or excuse
here; There
is no retreat
to an absolute
spirit or
good intentions: everything that happens is an expression of a
mentality. Everyone must resign themselves to being held responsible for
what they do. Form and consciousness
are not on different
planes that are separated as
‘ethics’ and
‘aesthetics’, but
are one,
and that
is why Rosenberg must always
understand conformation when he
says form. The
produced is
unthinkable without the producer, and the producer is always the personality.
Without reflection, only
guided by his instinct, Rosenberg has
introduced configurative thinking into political and historical knowledge. Each
form corresponds to a certain attitude of mind, the forms struggle with
each other for their self-affirmation
and validity, their struggle is the
content of universal history; Germanic dynamism cannot imagine life in any other
way than as a struggle of forces with each other. Not to
have understood
this struggle as a
mere animal
struggle for
existence, but as
a struggle
of form against
form, that
is, of
value against
value, is
the decisive achievement in Rosenberg’s thought. ‘Force against
force, in God is compensation’. In
this formula, to which Hebbel reduced
Germanic dynamism, Rosenberg’s basic assumption is also expressed. The subtitle
of his major work, which reads:
‘An Assessment of the Soul-Spiritual
Shaping Struggles of Our Time’,
should not have been overlooked. To see in the
daily struggle the battle of the spirits, not to idly contemplate the
struggle of the
spirits, to awaken and maintain in the midst of tumult the consciousness
of the greatness and historical scope
of the political event, this is the art in
which Rosenberg is a master and in which no one surpasses him.
The book of his life, the
foundations of which were already laid by his first
essays, was
born of
struggle and
yet is
at the
same time
the work of profound justice.
Nothing can be called more Germanic and at the
same time more German than this
union of combative attitude and justice,
which remains eternally
incomprehensible to the pure man of violence. Pure
violence lacks that with which the noble soul instinctively begins:
the recognition of form.
At
the same
time, Rosenberg’s
work repels
all those
who want
to be satisfied
with the mere
contemplation of forms.
The ‘Myth’
has revealed
the spiritual-historical wanderers on the battlefields for what they
are: undecided spectators of a
drama in which they would be obliged
to participate. What is a character
that only dreams of itself and renounces
to fight in the hostile world
for its existence and its honor? Whoever sees
the shaping struggles of his
time must also struggle with them. Not to see is not
to want to see. Contemplative knowledge obliges. There is in this
a debasement of man by
refraining from taking a practical position
and abandoning values in the
space of the spirit to their destiny. For a value
is really value only when it is affirmed
by living men with all the devotion
of their person and, if necessary, defended in the concrete clash. The
coincidence of the philosophical and political orientation of the forces
in Rosenberg’s
personality is based
on the
fact that
the spiritual form is seen as
compelling action.
The first notes in which
Rosenberg attempts to give an account of
his time and his position in it appeared in 1917 in Moscow. The
Higher Technical School in Riga,
where he had studied, was transferred to Moscow
in 1915. In the same year that the Russian state collapsed, the
student Rosenberg prepared his
drawings for the state examination in architecture
and in early 1918 passed the
examination. On November 30, 1918,
Rosenberg rented the great hall of the
Black-headed House in Reval and gave a lecture on the subject ‘The Jewish
Question’. On the same night of this
talk, he left Reval and traveled to
Berlin. With instinctive certainty he had
grasped one of the central themes and tasks
of his
life. A
short time
later he
became a
contributor in
Munich to
a political magazine
entitled ‘In
Good German,
Weekly for Order and Law’. Its founder and publisher is Dietrich Eckart.
In the eighth issue of this
magazine appears Rosenberg’s first article
against Bolshevism: ‘The Russo-Jewish Revolution’.
It
was a
lucky star
who guided
Rosenberg to
Munich. In
the Munich State Library his
spirit of
learning found
rich nourishment. Through tireless
reading he unconsciously created the necessary prerequisites so that
the thoughts conceived in Moscow and Reval could mature into a book. But
also politically, Munich
was the
right ground
for the
young writer
who saw
the problems of the
time from
the Jewish
question. The Baltic
linguistic variety did not
prevent the
comrade from
the far
north, who
did not
even possess German
citizenship, from being well received by the Bavarians fighting Judaism. The firm
stand on the Jewish question was a credential
of character that meant more than any paper and even more than the vernacular. At Dietrich Eckart’s house, Rosenberg meets
Adolf Hitler for the first time.
The
young National
Socialist movement
immediately found
in him one of its most active
collaborators. His instinct for what was happening in the depths of time had led
him single-handedly to speak to excited
people surrounding Maria’s column on Marienplatz and to hand out
pamphlets together with Dietrich Eckart
from a
car. When,
from January
1, 1921,
the movement’s fighting newspaper, the ‘Völkischer Beobachter’, began to
be published in the possession of the party, he stood out with his first
article in it (On Zionism),
which was immediately followed by others
on Freemasonry. In August 1921
he and Dietrich Eckart took over the
management of the ‘Völkischer Beobachter’. After (in February 1923)
the ‘Völkischer Beobachter’ had
become a daily newspaper, on March 10, 1923, he published on
the front page the note: ‘From today I have assumed the main editorship. Alfred
Rosenberg’.
Figure
4a. Völkischer
Beobachter. It started
life in
1887 as
the Münchener Beobachter.
In 1918 Rudolf von
Sebottendorff,
a member of the Thule Society, a right-wing, völkisch and partially secret and
esoteric group, acquired the newspaper. Early in 1920, the name was changed
to Völkischer Beobachter.
Figure 4b. Völkischer
Beobachter.
In the historical
‘consultation hours’, in which under the fiery breath of the time and the
spiritual guidance of Adolf Hitler the ideas and tactical principles of the movement were shaped, Rosenberg
always participates.
On 14 October
1922 he was with
the Leader
on the
decisive day in Coburg. On the
night of November 8, 1923, he accompanied the
Leader with
his pistol
in his hand
to the
hall of
the Bürgerbräukeller,
with pistol
in hand,
and on
the morning of November
9 he
marched at
the head of the column that
took the road to the Feldherrnhalle. The development of
the man
of action
runs as straight as the
spiritual unfolding.
Figure 5a. Alfred
Rosenberg with Adolf Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch
in Munich, November 1923.
Figure
5b. Hitler
in Munich
addressing a meeting
of the
NSDAP in
1925. Third to the left of Hitler is Alfred Rosenberg, on the right are
Gregor Strasser and Heinrich Himmler (Photo Heinrich Hoffmann).
Today one can scarcely
imagine how much strength of character was then required to wage the seemingly hopeless struggle against
the Jewish power. Anyone who rebelled
against Judaism was branded a ‘popular
instigator’; It
seemed unthinkable
that a
spiritual man
could be
anti-Jewish [changed from ‘anti-Semitic’,
translator’s note].
But it
was precisely
in the formation of a new
spiritual attitude that the revolutionary nature of the National Socialist movement consisted. The fatal mistake
of its (non-Jewish) opponents was to
suppose that this movement had adopted the program of
the old ‘anti-Judaism’. They did not see that this was not an ‘anti’,
i.e., a struggle
against the
Jew as
an opponent
placed on
the same
plane, but
something completely new.
In
the struggle
of the
National Socialist
movement against Jewish rule,
nothing of the narrow-mindedness which accompanied
the previous ‘anti-Semitism’ [anti-Judaism] is perceptible, in spite of
all its firmness of character.
Rosenberg’s early combat writings are not a continuation of the illustrated
literature on Jews and Freemasons
represented by the names of Fritsch and Wichtl.
The young National
Socialist movement owes much to these men,
but all its
literature is
something other
than a
continuation of
what they
started. While these men certainly
already show
an awareness of the
connections in which modern Judaism and Freemasonry are to be viewed, it is
only through the NSDAP that the
struggle against the supranational powers has
been conducted as truly political. The confrontation could only become
truly penetrating if not only material was gathered, but also if the
present representatives of
these powers
in Germany
were concretely
attacked, with the aim of eliminating them. But this, in turn, was only
possible if there was a clear idea of
what should take the place of the corrupt system that handed over the political
and spiritual life of the people to international powers. Only
from the positive
side could
the struggle
be conducted
effectively and in
a new style.
For the men who fought with
Adolf Hitler, an attitude that was probably unique in history was characteristic. The fanaticism
of this entourage is well known; less well known is that inner unconditionality
was accompanied by a cheerful superiority, which often turned into joviality.
The Leader’s Shakespearean humor very often resonated in liberating
laughter with the
temperaments of his
closest associates.
It must
not be
forgotten that National
Socialism not only had to fight against Jews, Communists
and Freemasons, but at the same time had to distance itself from
numerous nationalist and solitary groups that sought to wage the same
struggle, when in fact they were still deeply attached to the ideas of the past.
To have prevented all mixing with
folkloric-archaic circles belongs to the Leader’s
greatest achievements; and it was precisely in this struggle that he
found in Rosenberg the strongest support. Very late in life, many
opponents realized that National
Socialism, in the midst
of daily
struggle, also
represented a
spiritual attitude that had
previously been unknown.
Political
decision and
smiling security, fanaticism and
détente were united
in a
unity in
this attitude. The superiority
that Adolf
Hitler’s fighters felt in
themselves was
nothing more
than a
psychological oddity: it had a historical
basis, for
it was an
expression of the
distance that separated the
Leader and his entourage from their
time.
During the period of the
party’s ban, when the Völkischer Beobachter also did
not appear,
Rosenberg founded
the magazine
‘Der Welt
Kampf’ [The World Struggle], in which he continued the struggle against
the supranational powers
from 1924
to 1930
(the year
of the
founding of
the National Socialist Monthly, ‘Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte’).
For years, ‘The World Struggle’
was the
spiritual compilation
of material
for those
who led the movement to
victory in
all German districts.
The most
pressing task was
to show
the German
people that
the pitiful
state in
which they
found themselves was not
due to
the failure
of their
own forces,
but that
certain individuals, whose
names were
on everyone’s
lips, were
to blame,
because they practiced
a policy
of subjugation
instead of
a policy of
resistance and reconstruction. At the same time, it had to be shown that
these so-called German
politicians did not
really have
command in
hand but were
led by those who were not
always based in Germany.
The journalistic attack on
the Invisibles was anything but easy. Information from the enemy camp was completely missing.
The National Socialist combat
journalist depended on what Freemasons and
Jews intentionally or unintentionally revealed in their newspapers,
magazines, and books.
As he immediately
recognized, it was
not at
all a
question of
having information about the people and companies of the opposing side,
but rather of making
visible the
adversary’s way
of feeling
and valuing.
Only when
the opponent had become a figure could the real fight against him begin.
The facts that could be known
had been known for some time; but knowledge
remained dead as long as
the adversary
was not
a figure.
To condense
it into
a figure and
thereby give the
defensive forces
goal, momentum,
and direction, which was
Rosenberg’s feat.
His
ability to
grasp what
is humanly
essential and
characteristic was fully developed.
With the
conscience of a
passionate, tenacious and fierce fighter,
endowed with an infallible sense of smell and backed by
his excellent
memory, he
devoted himself
to the pursuit of
his adversary. From the self-
incriminations of cynical and shameless impostors, he
extracts all that there is to
extract. Woe to him whom I have ever caught! He
forgets no one, he lets go of
none. He knows how to grab the opponent at the
decisive point and knock him down or, when knocking him down is
not possible, hit him in a way
that hurts. An irritated patriot or an
offended
moralist does not speak here, but the world-historical adversary of Jewish-democratic internationalism speaks here.
The journalist Rosenberg does
not fight
against Mr.
Schmidt or
Mr. Cohn, but he fights
against the demon made visible, which is the mortal enemy of Germanness.
It awakens in the reader the
feeling: here it is a matter of life or death, it can only be You or Us!
In Rosenberg’s articles and
pamphlets from the early years of the
movement’s struggle, German
nationalism takes on
a new
depth. It
is neither literature nor
historical knowledge prolonged to the present, when
Rosenberg treats international capital as ‘Moloch’ and its servants as
servants of Moloch. Gold has
been called
an ‘idol’
a thousand
times, but
no one had
had the courage to recognize
that Jewish capitalism is true idolatry. Such
recognition could only come
from one
who clearly
felt that
the worshippers
of Moloch were
only triumphing because
the servants
of the
national gods
had become weary, indolent,
and skeptical. For Rosenberg, nationalism is something different
from a
matter of
economics, but
also something different
from a matter of morality. The nation demands the whole man and thus
aligns itself with the series of
religious powers. But once the German has
recognized what the nation demands of him, then he is certainly the God of
Abraham, that very real Hebrew God who
is worshipped even more in the stock
markets than in the synagogues.
Figure 6a. Left. Modern
Moloch (Quentin Massys or Metsys, 1466–1530).
Figure 6b. The Modern
Golden Calf (Henri Meyer, 1841-1899).
It
is a
simple but
coercive logic
that underlies
Rosenberg’s position: you have
to take
your adversary
seriously, you
have to
recognize that
these people have to act this way because they are like that, and
therefore they will never change.
They have their gods, but we have
ours!
If, in the struggle against
Jews and Freemasons, Rosenberg moved
in a field
where much
of what
he had
already achieved
helped him,
in taking
a stand against Bolshevism he found himself completely reverted to
himself, to his instinct and
his experiences. The Bolshevik revolution was still
in its infancy, everything seemed to be still open and any evaluation
possible. According to the usual economic, psychological, and political consideration, it would have been necessary to
postpone the final judgment even
further, or the idea of a pact with the new state of things in
the East would have been incurred. That there was a rejection of
Bolshevism no less unconditional
than the rejection of Judaism is to the credit of the NSDAP, which, however ridiculous it might have seemed to the learned and
knowledgeable at the time, assumed
responsibility for the existence of Europe. Rosenberg had as a
basis for his judgment
only his
assessment of the
Bolshevik leadership,
in which there were also many
Jews, and his knowledge of the Russian people. As
Balt, he knew what could
and could
not be
expected from
a Russian. While
all around him he dreamed and fantasized, while Oswald Spengler and then
many others, seduced by Dostoevsky, raved about the ‘soul of the East’,
Rosenberg remained sober
and realistic.
His unerring
instinct for
the human
didn’t fail him
here either.
He recognized
that the
new state
order of
the East
at its innermost core was not
constructive, but chaotic.
Rosenberg
always left
open what
might become
of the
peoples who inhabit
the vast
Russia. But
he defended
with the
greatest determination
the thought that the Bolshevik system was a calamity to that country and a menace to
Europe. Nothing
dazzled or
diverted him.
His position
was not determined by isolated
impressions or feelings, but was based, like that of
his compatriot Victor Hehn (‘De moribus Ruthenorum’), on objective
knowledge. Along with this,
of course,
in something
else: in
the deep knowledge
about what makes peoples
small or
great, what
is alive
or dead,
what is
fertile or parasitic.
The enormous
effect
of his
stance was
due to
the fact
that it was perceived: this assessment
truly points
to the
whole. Here
it is
not decided according to momentary impressions or immediate advantage,
but according to
determining motives.
A new notion of
politics struggles
to come to light. That the
Bolshevik leadership was especially prominent
in Jews might be objectively unimportant; as a symptom it was decisive.
The two adversaries presented by
Rosenberg to the German people went
together. Their political unity could only be made visible to those
who recognized
the values
that both annihilated
or at least
threatened. It is
not arbitrariness, but arises from an internal necessity, that alongside
the series of writings directed against Judaism (‘The Trail of the Jew Through
the Changes of the Ages’, ‘Immorality in the Talmud’, ‘Zionism Enemy of
the State’, ‘The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion’, ‘Jewish World Politics’) there
is the writing ‘Plague in Russia’.
And alongside these combat
writings stands the first official writing of the
movement in
which its
positive aspect
is exposed:
the ‘Principles and Objectives
of the NSDAP’.
A
word must
be said
about the
manner in
which this
struggle for
the German nation was waged by Rosenberg. The clever could twist the
gesture at the use
of something like the
‘Protocols of the
Elders of
Zion’. They
were sitting in the
living room
of good
taste and
scientific ‘objectivity’,
and it
was simply impossible
for them
that one
day a
Bolshevik would ever
appear to smash their
bourgeois porcelain and burn the contents of their libraries.
How could they
have any
idea that
Judaism, which
they regarded
as harmless, collaborated with
Bolshevism, and what danger it threatened
Western civilization? But those who got into the tumult of the struggle
to defend European
culture from
Germany in
the turbulent
times after
the World
War had to
look for weapons
and could
not make
too long
considerations. The origin of the ‘Protocols’ remained obscure, something
Rosenberg did not hide. With remarkable prudence,
in the
midst of
the fighting, he
pointed out
that there was
no definitive
proof of its origin.
But it
would be
a grave
mistake to infer from this that
he had taken a possibility for reality and thrown
the documents into the
fray without
objective examination.
The content
of the ‘Protocols’ was clear
and unambiguous. It did not contradict in any way what could be
deduced from
other Jewish
manifestations and
from the
actions of international
Jewry. Rosenberg approached the product from
the physiognomic side. The Jewish will to power, which in economics and
politics was blatantly exposed everywhere, but in literature was
only occasionally apprehended, expressed itself openly (perhaps too
openly) in the product. To make this
will to power existing in reality also visible in
literature could seem permissible to the fighter. Anyone who demands of a
fighter that he
wait until
there are
more tests
like that
has no
idea what
a world-historic confrontation
is.
With the youthful strength
of an early self-reliance that measures
the world by
clearly recognized ideals, Rosenberg
has thrown
himself into
the fray. A
fortunate star
led him
to the
small group
of unknown
men in Munich who had
taken up
a seemingly hopeless
struggle for
Germany’s freedom.
In Munich he was
soon united
by a
virile friendship
with the
somewhat older Dietrich Eckart,
who was a staunch admirer of Schopenhauer. It was
an alliance such as is
only possible
between people
of different
temperaments who
are united
in a
common commitment to a
great cause.
He later wrote to both Chamberlain and
Eckart.
The event that decided
Rosenberg’s later life was the encounter
with Adolf Hitler. In
the young
soldier at
the front, in
whom an
immense shaping force
struggled for
the form
of activity
that suited
him and
which had
an almost magical
effect
on all
the people
with whom
he came
in contact, he immediately
recognized the emotional and political center of a
new Germany. He
saw in him
the born
leader of
all those
who trusted
more in
the faith of their hearts and in the strength of their will than in the
calculations of prudence. Adolf Hitler was for him the soul-awakening of
the nation and at the same time the only one whom he believed capable of
assuming and bearing responsibility for the whole. He always saw him
as man, taken in the
world-historical sense. ‘Whether on the battlefields of France, before thousands
of his friends and enemies, before a court, he is always the same: the leader, the man who embodied the longing
for the best, who gave expression to their urgency to action, beyond
action’. So Rosenberg wrote
during Hitler’s
trial in
February 1924,
in the
darkest of times, when he was working on the reconstruction of the
shattered party, in
the ‘Great
German Newspaper’ which
was then
trying to
replace the
‘Völkischer Beobachter’. The bravery and faith of the fighters who had
once been touched by the
Leader’s mysteriously cool force remained unshaken. For these men, who did politics not only
with their
heads but
also with
their hearts,
it could
not be
otherwise that Adolf Hitler would one day determine the fate of Germany.
‘If the German essence
is not
a dream
of a
sunken past,
but still
lies as
a dormant psychic force in
the people,
then this
people will
certainly one
day raise its alarm
clock as
leader to
the place
where it
belongs. Whatever
may be
the outcome of the process,
love and
veneration will invariably
accompany in loyal fidelity the man whose heart knows only one thing: the
German fatherland, the German people, German freedom’.
With these words Rosenberg
spoke to the hearts of an ever-increasing number of Germans. Even in the formulation, words
like these are characteristic
of his
way of
being. In
it, you
always perceive
that you
are not saying something that
is only valid for the moment. He never appears
merely as a transmitter of thoughts or as a mere propagandist of an idea.
He is always with
his whole personality
behind what
he says,
and the
formulation reveals that thought
is his
psychic property
and his
most personal
experience. But every thought,
every experience, and this is only what is proper to it, is immediately related to the center of the worldview of the
thinking and living: Rosenberg never
moves on the periphery of his world; In everything he thinks and writes, he goes from the center of the soul outwards.
When he has nothing to say that
relates to the core of his being, then he doesn’t speak up.
Language is not intended for him for games, but only for the utmost
seriousness.
From the constant reference
of all manifestations to the center of
the personality comes the
dignity proper
to all
that Rosenberg
says, and
which finds its proper
expression in the
attitude of
his style. This
style lacks all rhetoric, all
superfluous ornamentation. Thought always rushes
to the essential, which is pointed out as briefly and forcefully as
possible. The peculiarity of his
style derives
from the
fact that
Rosenberg never
writes or speaks
without having
before his
soul an
intuitive image
of his object. He never
surrenders to the word as such, he never lets himself be carried away by the
expressive medium. From the greatness
and seriousness of the object which he has in mind, the seriousness of the
style follows of itself.
If, from the earliest days
of the movement’s struggle, Rosenberg’s demonstrations always seemed to many party comrades
the purest proclamations of a new
worldview, this is not least due to the ethical evidence of his
writings and
speeches. They
are self-evident because they
arise from the immediate
relationship with their objects and problems, ethically
evident because their objects and problems are the highest and most
serious that exist, and because their
presentification is carried out with the
utmost responsibility. This man
has never been moved and occupied by
anything other than the fate of his
people. It is always the same question
that moves his
heart and
his brain: What will become of the German essence?
Others
have also
lived in
concern about
the future
of the
nation and have striven for the
stance of their idiosyncrasies. In the spiritual struggle for the idea of the
nation, the Leader’s comrade in struggle has given a new
tone. He sees
and experiences that Adolf
Hitler not
only knows
how to reawaken faith in the indestructible strength of the German
people everywhere, but that the Leader
and his movement are themselves this reborn force. The immediate experience of this imperishable force contrasts sharply
with what the post-war present
shows everywhere
with its
decomposition and
discouragement. The group of men
gathered around
the Leader
are animated
by a
single thought: Where
the Leader
is, there
is Germany.
What claims
to represent
Germany officially today is
not Germany
at all.
In the
movement it
is not
a question
of the ‘pretense
of power’
of any
new party,
but only
of making
manifest the truth: Germany can
only be
where freedom
and honor
are fought,
and not where politicians of
compliance haggle over
the facilitations
of a
state that they themselves have
brought about
by their
lack of
decisiveness. From
this National Socialist
attitude is
drawn all
that Rosenberg has written
and said. His task was
to develop,
on the
basis of
the faith in
the eternal Germany
which he had
awakened by
the effectiveness
of the
Leader, a
new and truer picture of the German essence and of German
history.
No one was better prepared
for this task than the frontier German,
for whom the
fundamental experience of his
youth, the
self-assertion of
Baltic Germanness, had
opened up
history to
him from its
decisive side.
It was obvious to him
that in
life and
in history
it is
always the
character of
people that decides. Character is not something that changes because of
the collapse of institutions, it is the Permanent in the change of
things, on which it can be built when
everything seems to collapse. What does ‘State’ matter, what
does ‘Culture’ matter? Away with abstractions! As long as there are
Germans willing to fight for the honor of the nation, the state and
culture can
re-emerge at any time. Only one thing can never lead to a political
and spiritual
revival: the inactive contemplation
of one’s
own past.
It is
only through action, not contemplation, that the present is raised to the
height of the past.
In such recognitions lay
the overcoming of historicism, the hereditary disease of
German culture
from the
nineteenth century. Historicism
sees the present as something
to become, not as something to be configured.
Whoever has ever fallen into the historical consideration of things,
sees only developments and
conditionings, only states and not actions. The idea of race, which contains the enormous knowledge of the constancy of
living forces and of the eternal presence of innate character in the flow of
events, is incomprehensible to him. The imposition of National Socialism found
precisely in the well-disposed
a mode
of consideration
which took only
the state and
culture as
states, whose
law was
slow ‘development’.
One was not able to assume these states from within, dynamically, as
the creations of men of a
particular type and race. The revolutionary effect
exerted by Rosenberg’s image of history was based on the fact that it not
only dissolved
historicism, a corrosive
critique would
have let
it pass
at most, but spiritually
replaced it with a completely unusual totally new
worldview.
By taking seriously the
idea that all
historical life
is determined by men
of a
particular type and
race, by penetrating
the stratum
of states
and advancing
everywhere with implacable
consequence to the configuring center, Rosenberg had not only to
pronounce new assessments in numerous particular cases, but also to
destroy the central political
dogma of historicism. For historicism it was obvious that all historically
converted states were ‘legitimate’ and that
the meaning of history could
only be sought in a balance of opposing
states. No one believed it possible to unite historical consciousness with
something other than the conservation, cultivation and balance of what exists.
The new historical
consciousness which arose from the struggle of
the National Socialist movement against the Weimar Republic turned its
back on the
optimism of the
historically educated bourgeoisie
and opposed
to it
its own, deeper
and more
correct vision
of historical life, with
an implacability such as only
the seriousness of responsibility for the future can
bestow. ‘Contrasts must
not be
balanced but
must be
resolved in
struggle’. With
this phrase Rosenberg
reduced the
new dynamism to
the shortest
formula in
a retrospective of ten years of lived history (‘Ten Years of Revolt’,
1928).
On the unconscious
assumption that the meaning of world history
can only be sought in something common to all peoples, time and again
attempts have been made to
reduce human
history to
a single formula.
The flexible complaint about the discord of nations and about the struggle
of spirits is the inevitable
reverse of such attempts. A historian like Heinrich
von Treitschke spoke virile words about the necessity of war, starting
from an understanding of the great
powers and the living conditions of peoples.
Rosenberg’s recognition is
broader and
goes deeper.
It is one thing to justify war, and another to recognize that struggle
is the fundamental category of history as such. The life of peoples is not only
a struggle for power, but also a struggle for ideas. Religious
clashes do not go
back to the whim of some theologians; in them, racial souls fight
against each other. The contention of figures and characters with each
other is given by their existence; war, then, is only a form of manifestation
of the original tensions that are placed with the historical existence of
man.
Where it was previously
believed to perceive spiritual movements
and developments of unreal units, the configuring eye recognizes processes
of an entirely
different nature. Rosenberg
drew attention
to one
of these
processes with the concept
he coined
of ‘character
protest’. The German
Reformation, which arose from Luther’s action, is not to be understood as a
piece of ‘ecclesiastical history’ but can only be understood as a
character protest of the German-German soul against a foreign
coercive religious system. Such a protest of character is a unique
historical event; It is at the same
time a revelation of enduring racial substance.
The peculiarity and value of
the new concept consists in the fact that
here character is recognized as a historical power. It is not an
anonymous ‘spirit’, it is not abstract ideas that give rise to historical crises. One
character, i.e., one attitude of mind, rebels against another, and only where at
the same time a character acts in an ethical sense
is there the prospect of beginning and implementing such a protest of
character against the overwhelming supremacy of one tradition.
The shaping of the new
conception of history meant much more than an outstanding spiritual achievement that had practical
value for the struggle of
the movement
and especially
for ideological
formation. Before National
Socialism could
demonstrate in the
political and social
fields its
capacity to shape real
life, its
picture of
history was
the only
convincing proof
that it arose not only from a transitory discontent, but that it
proceeded from the
real and lasting foundations of German life, and that therefore its
opposition was of a positive and not a negative character.
The
struggle against
the Communists and the
Jews, which
had to
be waged relentlessly, was, in spite of all its harshness and all the
sacrifices, that only a struggle in the previous camp demanded; it was
necessary because the coalition
between political Catholicism and international
Social Democracy, on which the existence of the Republic rested,
paralyzed all constructive forces and
gave free rein to the underworld. The real
historical adversary was the black-red coalition in conjunction with all
the bourgeois parties that believed they could justify a pact with those
who had
submitted to the will of the enemy. Within the black-red coalition,
tactical as well as ideological leadership resided in political Catholicism. It
was not worth wasting a word
about the more or less honest insignificance of the Social-Democratic
functionaries and their rickety
Enlightenment ideology, whereas the Centre was a religious and political power whose roots went deep
into the past. If the struggle was to be waged from the essential
foundations, then the movement had to win first of all on the terrain on which
its strength seemed to lie against this adversary. The struggle had to move from the social and political ‘previous field’
to the ideological
center. It
had to be
shown that
the ignominious alliance of
German political
Catholicism with
international Marxism was more
than a
tactical error
of some
parliamentarians, that
the Catholic Church was of internal necessity opposed to the
racial-popular awakening. In the midst of the hubbub of political
confrontation, false theories of universal-historical scope had to be destroyed,
an edifice of thought had to be convincingly built in their place, and a concrete interpretation
of Europe’s
past and
present had
to be given.
Thus, from the situation of struggle, the plan of ‘The Myth of the
Twentieth Century’ emerged.
At the end of the World
War, a man, completely self-devoted,
begins to reflect on
himself, on
the fate of
Germany and
on the peoples
of Europe. Disposition and
inclination lead his thoughts, he is an architect,
to be organized
around the
problem of
art. H.
St. Chamberlain’s ‘Fundamentals of
the Nineteenth Century’ gives
him the
idea of
race. The special situation in
which he finds himself as Balt at the beginning of
the Bolshevik revolution poses to him the problem of the Jew and the
future of Russia. A deep inclination to spiritual clarity and self-account
led him to a personal appropriation of the thoughts of certain German thinkers:
Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schiller, Kant. The history of Deussen’s
philosophy gave him his first connection
with the spiritual world of India. From these elements,
the first notes
were made
in 1917.
In the thick oilcloth
notebooks, acquired in Moscow, which contain in tight but readable writing
excerpts, aphorisms, notes and elaborate essays, some in double versions,
lies before us the germ of ‘The Myth’. The thoughts formulated here for the first
time unfold in a book that in 1922 was
announced under the title ‘Philosophy of
Germanic Art’,
completed as
a draft
in 1925.
The title
now is:
‘Race and Honor’. A further reworking and expansion led to the definitive
version whose title, from January 1928, was ‘The Myth of the
Twentieth Century’ and which
appeared in the autumn of 1930.
Rosenberg’s inner
development from architecture to politics is carried out on the basis of his
configurative thinking, without any tension or difficulty.
At the
core of
his being
is the
courage to
recognize and
carry out and defend in life
what is recognized. The displacement of total
activity from the
artistic to
the political
sphere is
the natural
consequence of their
fighting spirit.
‘The
Myth’ was
born out
of political
struggle; with
the same
right, it could
be said that Rosenberg’s
political struggle
was born
out of
‘The Myth’. For the
philosophical and political position represented in ‘The Myth’
is already developed
in its
essential features
in its
fundamental features
in the first
drafts, so
much so
that Rosenberg, when he
wrote his
first articles in Munich and then
when he
devoted himself
to the
writing of
his major
work, was often able to take literally passages from the sketches of his
youth in later
works.
At first glance, many are
tempted to understand ‘The Myth’ only as
a polemical writing. The combative nature of its author is expressed so
strongly, the allusions to the present are so many, that the idea of
an occasional writing may well
be presented. But a glance at the history of
the work’s genesis shows that
first impressions can be deceiving. It is
precisely the decisive feature
in the development of Rosenberg and his work that the fundamental thoughts and
the inner procedure remain unchanged
from the outset. Because of its genesis, ‘The Myth’ cannot be anything other than an occasional written polemic. His references to the
present spring from the same philosophical- historical thought as from the
situation of struggle. A thinker who
sees that the character of individuals and
peoples never changes
in its
decisive features, must
necessarily see past and present as one.
The Jew of antiquity is
the same Jew who will later corrupt the princely electors.
The germinal core of the book does not lie in the
polemical intentions, but rather in the positive, in the vision of a new
image of man and humanity. Denials and
attacks spring
from the
affirmation
of a
great figure whose contours embrace the phenomena of the present in
the presentation of the whole
but determined nevertheless in each singular
feature. The immense abundance
of the material is contained in the unity of conception.
Decadence emerges from something nebulous-indeterminate to a concrete
figure, it goes from
the ‘what’
to the
‘how’. But
this concrete
seeing does
not bear
fruit only
in a
method that
is then
to be
applied; a
verse or
a thought
suffices
to bring before
him a man,
a style
of existence,
an epoch
in its
peculiarity. What makes it fruitful is the leap, the gift that cannot be
further derived from external
phenomena, but of immediately extracting the essential features.
The
method is
physiognomic, it
does not
aim at
connections, but
at those essences that we call characters. Taken in itself, this method
could lead to
a collection
of historical
portraits, to a
historical album of
figures. In a peculiar way,
however, in Rosenberg the physiognomic procedure is combined with a
diametrically opposed one. The same spirit that refers everything that happens
to human characters also knows how to
abstract and recognize great
connections. The characterization does not become biographical, intimate,
but historical, philosophical. Each character reveals itself in its
‘principles’, in
what it recognizes as its highest values. The struggle of characters
against each other must
therefore be conceived at the same time as the struggle
of historical
systems of
values. The
physiognomic procedure thus
leads to the confrontation of historical systems of values and worldviews. A worldview is not a collection of eternal truths in itself
resting, whose point of reference is unknown; it always remains
inseparable from the subject who
produces it and represents it in all its actions and creations.
This subject cannot be
an isolated
individual, but only
a historical
individuality, within which singular individuals have life and
subsistence. Only the original subjects of
the historical
movement, the
peoples, have
a worldview
of their own.
The worldview
is always
the place
of origin
and at
the same
time the concrete compendium of
the supreme values of a
natural-historical community.
The procedure of an
ethical-historical physiognomics of peoples,
men and institutions has been developed by Rosenberg with
instinctive consequentiality, not derived from logical principles. He,
who has recognized the unity of his procedure is in a position to
determine the relationship between ‘The
Myth’ and ‘Foundations of the Nineteenth Century’. Many
seem to imagine that ‘The Myth’ has somehow developed from Chamberlain’s
work. But what Chamberlain did in Rosenberg was a general thing; The
impulse and scope of the
whole and
the coining
force of
the writer’s
language were
a model for
him, not
the doctrine.
In adopting
expressions such as
‘chaos of peoples’ and
‘coercive dogma of faith’, Rosenberg demonstrated a
happy literary nose. What
worked upon
him in
terms of
content was
Chamberlain’s philosophy of religion, in which there is much general
German spiritual material. With the
indeterminacy of the ‘Foundations’, however, he could
not do much. In this exposition, which was too closely linked to the
latest scientific literature
of the
time, I
must have
missed a
unitary procedure.
The author of the ‘Fundamentals’ indulges in his witticisms; Often
your intuition
is lucky, sometimes not.
Despite some brilliant
characterological achievements (such as the confrontation of Luther and Ignatius of Loyola), the unity of
a physiognomic system
is lacking.
Chamberlain’s devaluation of
the political-historical
must also contradict Rosenberg’s sense of realism. From the very
beginning, a more accurate picture of
human destinies lies before Rosenberg’s eyes.
Chamberlain dwells on the
general notion
of an
Aryan creative
capacity; Rosenberg
sets himself the task of concretely showing this force in its historical
particularities and in its struggle with the powers that oppose it. It does not
want to develop assumptions,
‘foundations’, but
to describe
a unique
course of
struggles. His gaze is
attached to events and their connection, he remains close to
historical powers, while Chamberlain has art first and foremost in mind.
His last word
is culture, Rosenberg’s last word is worldview.
While Chamberlain, in
accordance with his concept of race, broadens the concept of culture as much as possible, the
philosophical-cultural approach acts in a limiting way on its total conception
(the acting man regresses), while the
concepts of character, worldview, and value
that Rosenberg uses are in immediate relation to the world of the acting
man.
The most important effect
Chamberlain had on Rosenberg was to
draw the young architecture student’s attention to Goethe and Kant. The
two beautiful books that
Chamberlain dedicated to
Goethe and
Kant were more significant for
the author of ‘The Myth’ than the ‘Foundations of the Nineteenth Century’. The
philosophical flow of these works came
to meet
a still misunderstood
impulse that
he felt
in his
own soul.
In the
contemplation of the great personality, his conviction of the dignity of
the Self was strengthened. What ultimately drew Rosenberg
to Chamberlain was to find vividly expressed in him the fundamental
feeling of his soul. The
thought that had been born with him attained
complete confirmation. Personality was inflamed with personality. It was
the thought of the personality
itself in which the coincidence resided. In an
even more emphatic and effective
way, because more realistic and historical, the younger one was to bring the
archaic German-German thought to the
consciousness of the time.
It
is an
often confirmed
experience that
‘The Myth
of the
Twentieth Century’ is a difficult
book. The cause
cannot be sought either in the
disposition or in the expression. It is certainly not obvious at first glance,
but it is understandable and comprehensible; This is often
idiosyncratic and unusual, but
plastic and
clear. On
the contrary,
it must be said: despite the
author’s unusual stylistic means, the whole remains difficult to capture. In the
abundance of elaborated material, the cause of this cannot be sought, this abundance is also found in books of fluid
reading such as the
‘Fundamentals of the Nineteenth
Century’ and
‘The Decline
of the West’, the
physiognomic procedure should
make ‘The
Myth’ an
attractive book,
if not even exciting. However, this work remains today a spiritual massif
that is difficult
to access in the midst of German culture. Rosenberg’s abbreviating and
concentrating style, which is a consequence of his intuitive thinking,
may well have contributed to the difficulty
of comprehension. All these
prolixities, sometimes linked to a logically strict mode of
expression, which clarifies relationships, are odious to the author of
‘The Myth’. He
always takes what he senses to the most compressed formula and does
not shrink from the boldest
abbreviations either. Once one has penetrated into
this abbreviated style, not only is its individually founded necessity
perceived, but it is no longer possible to escape the attraction of this mode
of expression. However, the real cause of the difficulty
of understanding his
work must be sought in a deeper layer.
The author of the
‘Foundations of the Nineteenth Century’ caused
an immense commotion by
introducing the idea
of race
into the
presentation of historical links. The attempt first undertaken by Gobineau of a
racial consideration of history was continued by him under new
assumptions on the basis
of studies
of the
natural sciences.
Richard Wagner’s
world of
thought, with which he always remained united, in all its audacity, did
not correspond at all in all its
features to the revolutionary spirit which the idea
of race was to breathe into
German thought. The strictly self-contained system of Bayreuthian conceptions
contained not only the theory of the
total work
of art but
was itself
a kind
of total
work of
art, a
synthesis between the classical
spirit of Weimar, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and
Wagnerian music: a combination into which the idea of race entered as one
moment, among others. However, the whole has not been determined. The resulting
contradictions were certainly saved personally, but not ideologically, by the
veneration of the Wagnerian genius who had been able to weave it all together.
The task of drawing the necessary
revolutionary consequences from the concept of race remained invisible
and unresolved. It was believed
that a bridge could be built between the concept
of race
and idealist
humanism, between Gobineau and Herder and Schiller, between Goethe and
Mendel.
However
great Wagner’s
synthesis was,
as soon as
he turned
to the political and the
problem of the worldview and an attitude in accordance
with it arose, the internal incompatibility of the various moments of
that total spiritual work of art had
to become apparent.
Rosenberg did not grow up
in the air of classicist humanism. When he devoured
all Goethe,
he was
self-absorbed and assimilated
only what
was in accordance with his
nature.
That which does not
concern you, they must not suffer
it...
It was always his favorite
quote. The brief sketch of Goethe contained in
‘The Myth’ allows us to recognize in which direction his appropriation
went. It was the advantage of his
youth spent in Reval to be able to develop with
complete independence in
order to
achieve the
same autonomy
that distinguishes
his compatriots Karl Ernst
von Baer
and Viktor
Hehn. It
was not
by chance
that Hehn became the author of the most anti-classicist book in all
Goethe literature. His example shows with what realistic energy even classicism
could be transformed into something of its own in the border region.
To energetic natures who participate in German spiritual development
outside the borders of the State, the
distance from the mother country affords
them other possibilities
of choice
and of
undisturbed harmonization of
the assimilated formative elements than to those who, living in a closed
formative atmosphere, have never felt the sharpening breath of
the contours of a strange
world. With utter nonchalance, the young Rosenberg was able to let the elements
of his spiritual development, Goethe
and Schopenhauer, Kant and India, grow together into a whole. It was
a highly personal and individual whole that thus came about, and he had
only the
purity and
strength of
his instincts to thank that
something very
eccentric and capricious did not spring up in this way.
The
act that
arose from
this assumption was the
overcoming of the historicism of
classical formation. Convincing and just, scientifically irreproachable
and valid
for all
time, seemed
to be
the nineteenth-century image of history. Classicism and Romanticism had
worked on it, but Classicism had proved stronger. At the center of
world history was what was
called ‘the West’, that is, the European synthesis
of antiquity, Germanity and
Christianity. It was the image that Hegel
had brought into an easily comprehensible formula in his brilliant
construction of world history, and which still underlay Ranke’s
more realistic historiography.
Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem were the
stations through which the universal spirit moved. Germanness had been
recognized as
a universal-historical
force, but
it remained essentially subordinate
to the history of the Christian churches. The intuition gained
by philology of the affinity
of the Indo-Germanic peoples had not
been incorporated into the overall picture. Hellenicity, Romanity and Germanness
seemed to
be connected
to each
other only
by historical
effects
(receptions), while
the essential unity between
ancient India,
Iran, Hellenic culture, the Roman Empire and the Germanic world was
severed by the classicist concept of the development of a single
West.
The
nineteenth century failed
to resume
the once-cut
threads. The science of the
Indo-Germanic could only develop in a secondary
line, culminating in Leopold von Schröder (also a compatriot of
Rosenberg); German philology and historical science followed a different
path. The immediate cause of their abstention lay in the lack of reliable
research results. Although such
a foundation
cannot be
denied recognition, the omission to follow the path taken by Bopp can only be
explained by a
concrete-historical- philosophical, and therefore ideological,
unconscious assumption. Humanist representations, coupled with Christian
ties, kept the
classicist tradition alive even when the science of the shovel, year
after year,
brought stone after stone to light that belonged to a construction
very different
from the one that classicism had dreamed
of.
With
all its
great merits
for a
deeper understanding of Hellenic
and Roman culture, classical archaeology in particular suffered
from an unprejudiced appreciation of the results of prehistoric research. The
unity of the Indo-Germanic
remained merely a content of consciousness,
nowhere did it become a lived,
sap-filled reality that could have fertilized research
and led it down new paths. It was shameful to see how stubbornly Germanic
civilization in
its breadth
and nobility
was ignored
and interpreted from the Roman-Christian
perspective.
Despite
the high
level of
his achievements, when
the idea
of race burst like lightning
into this situation, which was not very glorious for German historical science,
a revolution of the humanities could
theoretically have taken place. The heroes of German romantic historiography at
the beginning of the previous
century could
have risen
from their
graves and enthused their belated
successors to take
up the
grandiose projects that
they themselves could not carry out because the scientific requirements
were still lacking. His revived
example might have put an end to the time of discouragement from excessive scientific caution; the
idea of race would have been
greeted with
jubilation as
confirmation of
the intuition of a primordial Indo-Germanic people and made a methodological
guide to a new science of Indian, Iranian, Hellenic, Roman and Germanic
‘Antiquity’.
None of that happened. A
figure as powerful in spirit as Chamberlain was not received with benevolent high esteem as a
necessary correction of
a science petrified
in its
disciplinary limits,
but with
silence, ridicule or petty specialized criticism, the concept of race was
outlawed, classicism and Hegelianism, in the face of real investigation, for the
pure philosophical- historical reaction celebrated their last
triumph without glory.
The fear of using results
that are not completely undoubted should
not have gone so far! It was precisely German research, under the
guidance of the concept of race, which
should have recognized the Indo-Germanic as a
closed cosmos.
This
is the
situation in which
the young
Rosenberg, an admirer
of Schopenhauer and Indian
philosophy, thinks and
plans, without
having any notion of it. In
the Indian example it had been revealed to him what the
unity of the Indo-Germanic means. This unity had become an experience
that determined his further
thinking. There
is nothing
simpler than
the path
to greatness. One only
has to
have experiences
that relate
to the
order of
things as it
really is,
and to
have the
courage to
hold on
to one’s
own experiences, even
when the
actual existence
of that
relationship is
not yet
demonstrable. Fidelity to oneself is the prerequisite of every feat that
subdues souls. German research had
become unfaithful to its great beginnings in the
nineteenth century; Today, therefore, we must allow ourselves to be told
truths by those who have been
able to
remain faithful
to an
authentic conception,
rooted in the reality of things
themselves.
In fundamental conceptions
it is not so much important that they contain many details, but rather that they lead in the
course of investigation to the
correct details. Indeterminacy is not in itself a deficiency.
Indeterminacy becomes
dangerous only
when it
wants to
take the
place of determination.
Then private
research can
be stopped, errors
are dogmatized, and the well- known phenomenon arises of
the pseudo-scientific exposition
of connections that we do not yet know in
their realities. A distinction
must be made between the form-pregnant
indeterminacy of a genuine idea and the confusion resulting from an
appropriation of isolated facts not guided by any instinct or method. It is
a fundamental mistake of German specialized science to equate
fecund indeterminacy with
infecund indeterminacy,
and to
give nothing
for an idea until it has yet fulfilled realities.
The Indian has always
retained for Rosenberg, from the point of view of philosophy, a particular
brilliance. He never allowed himself to be seduced into
undervaluing and
setting aside
this magnificent
appearance of the
Indo- Germanic because it did not fit into the scheme of ‘universal
history’. Something similar happened to him with Iranian. Unobfuscated by
the construction of
‘Western’ development,
always guided
by a
lively sense of popular character and by the unmistakable physiognomy of
a spiritual creation,
he followed
in his
own way
the trail
of historical
links. He did not seek to
establish temporal relationships and dependencies,
but to recognize
affinity,
that is,
the internal
relationship of characters
and creations to each other. In this way he arrived at a concrete notion
of the course of world history that departed completely from the
traditional one. He
saw the
ebb and flow
of the Nordic
spirit from
the East
through the
perspective of
India and Iran,
and wondered
if a
development very different
from the real one might not have been possible. The actual course of history,
passing through Jerusalem and Rome, condemned a large part of the Germanic world
to destruction, and only belatedly and
fragmentarily led to the emergence of a Germanic Europe, seemed to him to be
devoid of internal necessity and inevitability. Far from him was the
idea of wanting to correct the course of world history, his sense for
what Chamberlain so beautifully called the ‘majesty of facts’ remained
ever alert, but he could never convince himself that everything must happen as
it did. This did not come from a craving for playful assumptions or an
inclination to
self-sufficiency,
but from
a keen
feeling for
the possibilities that
lie dormant in all living
forces. Before his eyes was the image of a powerful shaping soul who, unaware of itself in its passage
through time, had been harassed and
often hindered in its unfolding by other forces. Who can say
that world
history had to run through Rome and Augustine,
Bishop of Hippo? Is it not
conceivable an entirely different
course of things, a universal
history without
Jerusalem and
Rome, the
main content of which would have been a
fertilization of the Germanic spirit by the spirit of India and Iran?
No one who has ever
recognized what a race is can deny the legitimacy of
such considerations.
In the
constancy of
the racial character
of the great
peoples there
are contained
real possibilities
which the
traditional conception does not know. The difference
between possibilities and realities
remains unquestionable, but the word possibility acquires a
new meaning in the racial
consideration of history. Although the possibilities are not yet realities, the
idea of a possible course, when founded on the
racial dispositions of peoples,
is capable of displaying an
extraordinary fruitfulness. It gives judgments an evaluative scale that is more
than just an
arbitrary assumption or subjective
imagination.
In the idea of a universal
history without Rome lies the key to
Rosenberg’s philosophy of concrete history. What seems critical
and destructive in
‘The Myth’
is superficial,
conditioned by a
representation of very high positive content and revolutionary force that
acts in the depths. The adversary
is not arbitrarily placed or attacked from a subjective point of
view. The strength of the work’s conviction is based precisely on the
fact that
every negation
springs from
a position and
that everything
underlies a single
scale of
affirmation. Whoever wants
to engage
in a
confrontation with this book must not cling to this or that singular
detail but must confront
himself with
the scale that is applied
here. But
this scale
is not
so much
a personal taste as a scientifically
well-founded conviction.
Factual research in recent
decades has elevated to the rank of incontrovertible
certainty the
fact that
what we
call world
history is
a single gigantic
confrontation between peoples of Indo-Germanic and
non-Indo- Germanic descent. The East-West antithesis, which dominated the
old historical conception,
has dissolved
and given
way to
the antithesis
of two ‘linguistic’
groups of
races and
cultures. Deep
in the
‘West’ extends
the non- Indo-Germanic,
and likewise
in the
depths of
the ‘East’
the Indo-Germanic spreads.
The traditional scheme
placed a
unity where
essential antagonisms had
concluded a temporally limited truce and overlooked deeply
founded affinities
that by the ‘chance of universal history’ had been
excluded from historical realization. What form would the European spirit
have today if
the metaphysics of
India and
Iran, united
with the
philosophy of the Hellenic
world, had acted directly on Germanness? If Hellas had not had to be recovered
by Winckelmann, Goethe, and Hölderlin, if India had not only had to be recovered by Germanic science but had not had
to pass through
the gorge of
Rome and
Jerusalem, they
had merged
in the lap of the spiritual
forces of Germania into a universal
Indo-Germanic worldview. World history
would have taken a different
course. But the depth of the
historical being is diminished not only by thinking of it
as composed of pure chance in the empirical sense, but also by
representing it as simply necessary. Happening cannot be constructed. There are
only developments, but not a
‘development’ whose linear course could
claim necessity for itself. The
reality of the course that led to the present state must be recognized; its
necessity is never demonstrable. In the
representation of
another course,
when it is not
merely assumed arbitrarily, there
resides a
regulative force
which the
representation of the necessary development is entirely lacking. The
latter will always lead to a justification
of the
factual in
every form
of manifestation. Hidden in the
traditional concept of the linear development of a single West is a
dogma: the dogma of the
necessity of all temporal events. It is one of the greatest achievements of the
thinker Rosenberg to have quietly overcome
this dogma already in the assumptions of his
work.
When,
in ‘The
Myth’, states
of affairs
and ways
of thinking
of the post-war era are treated with the sharpest polemics, this does not
spring from a
limited ‘party
politics’ or
from conjunctural considerations of
any passing utility. Rather, this polemic is the reverse of what
constitutes the
object of the exhibition: the shaping struggles of the past. It is not
the author’s
intention to
‘attack’ current
powers; Rather,
it wants
to make visible a system of
values from which follows the refutation of the powers that are unleashed in the
decomposition of German and European life. That
is an entirely different
and more effective
method of refutation than direct attack.
Every immediate polemic suffers
from the weakness that one confronts one’s adversary on the same plane and
thereby relativizes one’s
own position, which
is only
the ‘other’.
The author
of ‘The
Myth’ does
not even think of attacking,
for example,
from the
position of
the German spirit the Roman Church, as his course is almost always
misunderstood. The force of his
polemic comes rather precisely from the fact that he does not take the adversary
as equally existent, but only assigns to him
the historical place that
corresponds to him. ‘You really shouldn’t exist at all,’ he rebukes his
opponents. „It is high time that you cede the field to
the powers and values that have so far been prevented from their
free deployment by a long and
hard history.“ It is a question of liberating these values, and the controversy
follows from that by itself. The
adversary is not sought in his place
and fought with effort
but is swept away like a
storm. This storm arises from the pressure difference
that arises of its own
accord as soon as the original Indo-Germanic value system is confronted
with the system that is revealed in post-war Europe.
Rosenberg has created a new
procedure of political confrontation. By showing the supposed aims of the movement’s struggle in the
gigantic struggle of
the times,
it employs
history for
the first
time on
a large scale politically.
This has
nothing to
do with ‘political
history’ in
the sense of the
nineteenth century. The past, understood as an incessant struggle of some
worldviews corresponding to
the decisive
racial groups:
this is the seminal idea of
‘The Myth’. ‘Fight’ against ‘evolution’! ‘Contrasts must
not be
balanced but must be
resolved in
struggle’. Out
of the
current chaos has arisen the
mindless hodgepodge of values, which ends in bastardization, which means lack of
character. The reception of the Jew
into the European community of peoples is the symptom of the general decomposition. The attitude toward Judaism makes it
possible to guess
where whole forces are still stirring. It is only from men in whom there
lives an
instinct which
rejects the
Jew that
anything can
be expected
for the reconstruction of
Germany and Europe. It is foolish to speak here of ‘anti-Semitism’
(anti-Semitism). It is not a question
of denial and criticism, and
still less
of a
critique of
the incapable of any
great Jewish people scattered throughout the world. It is about
restoring the forces that have created
all that is inwardly powerful and noble that fills
our existence. Only one way
of salvation
and liberation
is open:
the way
back to the value system that
corresponds to our innate character.
His physiognomic method has
put Rosenberg in a position to transform this
understanding into concrete
knowledge. During long
years of tireless
work, he immersed
himself in
the literature offered
to him
and chose the features by which
he could most effectively
present the picture of history that
emerges from
its few
fundamental assumptions. It is
utterly insufficient
and erroneous to reproach him with dependence on the literature of his time or the
use of dubious sources.
That is
a criticism
intended for immature ears.
‘The Myth’ does not compile cultural oddities that could
be examined one
by one in
terms of
their authenticity
but develops
a total conception of history
from the point of view that it is always character
that manifests itself in all
events. The task of a scientific critique would be to
deal with
this total conception.
That there
has so
far been
no criticism worthy of being
taken seriously can surprise no one. The historical image
of tradition does not have the
power to confront the revolutionary vision that
is in accord with reality.
With
astonishing certainty,
Rosenberg’s first
sketches of
1917 (first published in the ‘Writings and Discourses’) delineate the
fertile germ from which all that was to come was to spring. A sketch with
the title
‘Nirvana and Personality’ allows us to recognize at what point the
incipient reflective work begins.
The starting point is the
‘configuring principle’ turned towards the Eternal, which, essentially like the mysterious
primordial background of
the world, prevails in all the great Indo-Germanic creations. From the
confrontation between Goethe and Indian philosophy, the
following thoughts develop: the
purification of the human personality is
the common goal to which the extreme modes of thought of the
Indo-Germans tend. The Hindu believes that he attains this goal by
withdrawing from the
world; the German, dedicating himself to the finite, which he conceives as
a symbol of the infinite. Both build from the inside out, but in different
ways. The Hindu sees only the
barrier as an obstacle; Goethe sees it as a
condition for greatness. What
they have in common is an enormous shaping
force. Strength in one case
tends to purification, seeking to divest oneself
of personality; in the
other case,
by elevating it.
From the very beginning of
the thought, the opponent is also considered. The
Jew is
measured according
to the
Indo-Germanic notion
of personality; It
becomes clear
that for
him it
is not
a question
of stripping himself or of
elevating the personality, but of destroying it. In the Jewish
idea of the
messiah lies
the claim
to world
domination. Because it
lacks shaping forces, the
Jewish people always remains as it is; We certainly find in him
the ‘marked character’, but not
raised to
the ‘dignity
of personality’.
‘That is
why these people hate everything that is not like them, that is why there
should be no
tolerance towards them’
(Rosenberg: ‘Writings and
Discourses’, Vol. I,
p. 16).
It is a thought of Goethe’s
that stimulates Rosenberg to go on. ‘Meaning widens,
but paralyzes;
action gives
life, but
it limits’.
By a
very independent and audacious extension, this important thought acquires
the character of a philosophical principle. The alternation between sense
and action is, comparable to inspiration and expiration, the rhythm of
life as such. Inspiration is sense,
exhalation is action. By inspiring, we surrender
to meaning, we open ourselves to the depths of the world and aspire to
encompass everything; By exhaling we limit ourselves, we act in the finite, we
work. The Hindus offer
us the example of extreme feeling; the
Germans, that of
extreme action.
In the
idea of
personality the
two are
united. The
German makes unity a historical reality and elevates it to philosophical
consciousness. That is why the German must become the
universal-historical adversary
of the Jew, who
not only
has no
idea of
the systole
and diastole
of the
personality, but in his
blind thirst
for power
even strives
to destroy everything that
this cosmic rhythm carries within it.
No
one can
deny his
admiration for this
sketch, written
only in
key words, which so fortunately unites the philosophical with the
political. It follows that Rosenberg
did not have to wait for Spengler’s characterization
of the ‘Faustian’ man. From
his confrontation
of Goethe
and Tolstoy,
as well
as from numerous other characterizations, it is evident that at the time
the puzzling book with the
title ‘The
Decline of
the West’ appeared,
he already carried
within him
all those
clear and
fruitful thoughts
that would
later be shaped
in ‘The
Myth’. Spengler’s
‘Faustian man’
agrees in
essential features with
Chamberlain and Rosenberg’s ‘Germanic man’, which should not
be surprising given that these characterizations contemplate the same
reality. Man characterized by
the thirst
for discovery
and audacity,
science and
art, technology and work, is the one who has created the world in which
we live. But within this ‘Faustian’ culture, abysses have opened,
problems have arisen that can no
longer be solved by simple cultural considerations. A philosophy of
culture that
in this
desperate conjuncture does not
seek to
increase chaos but
to dissipate and build
it, must
be determined
by a
central thought
in accordance with the powers that created Europe and clearly delimit
itself from everything that has
brought ‘the
West’ to
the brink
of perdition. The mystical concept
of an
elusive ‘cultural
soul’ is
incapable of
this, and
‘morphological’ comparisons between all the cultures of the Earth may
perhaps satisfy curiosity but not
provide the
European with
clarity about
himself (Compare Rosenberg’s
1925 essay on Spengler).
It is only in the face of
attempts such as Spengler’s, along with
which one could also name the failed efforts
of Ernst Troeltsch (not to mention
other insignificant ones), that the constructive force that lies in
Rosenberg’s sketch becomes very
evident. Otherwise, one might be tempted, for simplicity’s
sake, to take his fundamental thoughts for granted. What could be simpler
and more obvious than such a thought
of personality as the center of the
Indo-Germanic world? However, it is decisive, first, that here personality is
seen together with race. Already in the first proposition, both the abstract
concept of
personality of theoretical idealism and
the concept
of culture
without race in modern times
are overcome. Then there is the breadth and depth
with which the personality
is apprehended. How seductively
close it
is to overestimate the antithesis between Indian passivity and
European activity to the point of turning it into the opposition of two
‘cultures’ separated by
worlds! Rosenberg recognizes
even in
the idea
of the
negation of one’s own self
the tendency towards
the purification of
the personality. On the other
hand, he does not allow himself to be dragged by the idea of personality into
individualistic discourses. It is only in action against and
on behalf of other forces that man experiences the increase that is
possible for
him. Two
tendencies fill his
life: the
one towards
personality and the
one towards dedication to the community. Neither should weaken the
other. ‘That is why it
is necessary
to cultivate solitude
and introspection
temporarily, and it is only in this pulsation of two tendencies, guided
by conscience, that man is born’ (‘Writings and Discourses’, Volume I, p.
18).
Under ‘man’ is not meant
an abstract homo sapiens, but the man
who makes up
the great
story, the
Aryan personality.
From this
man who
knows ‘ecstasy’ separates himself that selfish human being whose only
relation to the world is an impulse
of power
that nothing
can delimit:
the Jew.
Rosenberg tackles the problem of the Jew at the decisive point, at the
root of personality. He distinguishes
(in a 1919 essay) between person and personality.
It designates as a person the selfish and natural impulse of man’s affirmation,
so strongly developed in
the Jew.
Not only
the individual,
but the
whole Jewish people is entirely
a ‘person’, so that its only guiding notion is that of
dominion over other men.
The fullness
and breadth
of the
world, the
freedom of
the spirit, remain
completely forbidden
to the
person. Personality,
on the
other hand, is possessed only by a being capable of self-denial and who
thus becomes aware of his freedom. The principle of freedom has not
been developed among
the Jews;
it has
ventured only
into a
few individuals. The pernicious action of Judaism is based on the fact that it
did not leave free rein to the ideal
power of the personality, in so far as it developed it, but even
put that power
at the
service of
the person.
‘While other
peoples were
internally divided and contained by their religion and morality in order
to impose themselves without consideration, here morality and
religion were placed entirely at the
service of unlimited selfishness’ (‘Writings
and Discourses’, Vol. I, p. 122).
As the attempt at this
distinction between person and personality shows, Rosenberg strives to arrive at a new
philosophical concept of man. At the
heart of
it is
the configuring
principle; But man
is something
other than, for example, only
the individuation of a general shaping force. Such
a representation would lead
to an
abstract-metaphysical or
aesthetic-vitalistic theory of man. Both erroneous paths are avoided with
fine skill. Rather, Rosenberg tries
to clarify
a notion
according to which
man is neither quite nature
nor entirely freedom. It is nature because it is
a natural being
and belongs to
a certain
race; It
is freedom
because it
is only by rising above nature that it is truly man (personality) and
only by intensifying itself
does it reach its height. This is the fundamental definition already present in
1917: ‘Personality is a conscious recognition of a unity of nature and freedom’
(‘Writings and Discourses’, Volume I, p. 10).
In
a lengthy
confrontation with Schopenhauer’s
doctrine of
the will, Rosenberg
attempted to
clarify his
concept of
man in
1918. To
the unconscious and instinctive impulse to which Schopenhauer refers
everything, he contrasts the properly human, the ‘configuring’ will. He
assumes, then, back to man what in Schopenhauer was separated from man as the
realm of ideas. In
art, religion,
and philosophy,
we see
at work
a ‘formal
impulse’ (Schiller) that is
equally human, in an even deeper sense, than the natural
impulse. We can’t say more about it. ‘We only know conformation when
it manifests itself, in art, in
science, and in philosophy; Its essence is
completely enigmatic to us. We
can only say that it is the most profound creative
human activity, opposed to
nature, based on the idea of freedom’ (‘Writings
and Discourses’, Volume I, p.
63).
In ‘The Myth’ an entire
chapter is devoted to Schopenhauer (‘Will
and Impulse’, pp. 323
ff).
There is the sentence: ‘One of the most important recognitions about the essence
of man is that of the existence of the
fact that he
is a configuring
creature’ (Myth,
p. 343).
In a
further development, five directions of the configuring will are distinguished: religion, morality, art, science, philosophy. In
all these directions the unity of the
personality is manifested.
The recognition of man as a
configuring being proved fertile for Rosenberg,
first in
the field
in which
he had
reached this conception, the
artistic. The oldest part of ‘The Myth’ is the second book,
in which
is elaborated the material that
was once
to serve
for a
‘Philosophy of Germanic Art’. It is a symbol of Rosenberg’s personality
that the fundamental thought of
his political-revolutionary book is developed in an aesthetic treatise. The
essay ‘On Form and Conformation in the Work
of Art’
of May
1918 presents the first sketch
of that
interlocking of thoughts
that in the finished work has not without reason received the title
‘The Essence of Germanic Art’.
Man as a personality is a
configuring will; this will is racially conditioned (Myth, p. 279). When
Rosenberg titles the last chapter of
the second book of ‘The Myth’: ‘The Aesthetic Will’, he
consciously contradicts all the
theories that
claim to
be able
to apprehend the work of
art from
the formal side. The
work of
art certainly
has its
own formal law, but it is
equally a product of the shaping forces of the soul like
all the other creations of man.
It is, therefore, a mistake
when many aesthetes believe that they can
dispense with the content
of the
work of
art. The
content itself
is a
formal problem (Myth, p. 304).
When the
work of
art is
understood as an
act of
racially conditioned personality, aesthetics must become a new meaning in
the aesthetics of content. ‘The choice or exclusion of certain elements
of the content is for us already a
configuring process, entirely artistic’ (Myth, p. 304). The artist’s choice
and conformation of the material are mutually connected
internally. It
was not
only his
own artistic
inclination that led
Rosenberg to develop
his thought
of personality
as an
act in
an aesthetic problem. In the
aesthetics of the nineteenth century, he was confronted with a conceptual edifice
that gave consistent expression to a false
conception of
man. Through the formalism
of this
aesthetic, the work
of art had been detached from
the creative interiority of the artist and erected in a certain way on itself;
By emphasizing the content, the personality
was restored to its rights. By
means of the theory of contemplation, a moment of artistic apprehension and
comprehension had been isolated and exaggerated. The refutation of this doctrine
was singularly adequate to assert the correct
conception of man as an active configuring
being. Aesthetics necessarily goes
astray when
it stops
at the consideration
of the
work. Its task is to trace the path from the work of art to the
artistic conformation, that
is, ‘to
understand representation as a necessary effluence
of the internal process’ (‘Writings and Discourses’,
Volume I, p.
39). Only
the activation of the
concept of
form puts
us in
a position to do justice to the reality of the work of art in all its
depth.
By form Rosenberg means the
external artistic process, by conformation the
inner artistic
process. Artistic
creation is
a characteristic example
of human
activity in
general. Personality is synthetic
activity. ‘This inner creative process, this inner synthesis of the world
pouring in from without, this living
uniting of apparently divergent tendencies, which is what
I want to designate as conformation. It is the inner reaction to the
world and at the
same time a
human force
that spontaneously
tests itself
in the
world and strives to unite the
singular into an organic unity’ (ibid., p. 36).
To properly understand the
term conformation, which is fundamental to all of Rosenberg’s thought, one must free oneself
from all ‘aesthetic’ prejudices.
The word
designates the human
personality in its
relation to
the world at large. Its meaning is epistemological rather than
‘aesthetic’. It is hardly supposed
that Rosenberg,
when he
coined this
thought, already
knew anything of Kant’s ‘synthetic unity of apperception’; However, his
concept of conformation comes very
close to
this central
concept of
pure reason. It
is only for
man as
a shaping
being that
the world
is constituted.
As an
artist, he creates
from the material
of his
experience a world
under a
specific formal law, an artistic
world. ‘Conformation
is the
profoundly internal activity
that occurs in the artist when matter and content, coming from
outside and inside, want to merge into a whole; it is the quiet middle
center where
the true
work of art
has its
beginning, the
axis around
which the
analysis of the outer and inner world is rotated until a synthesis as an
artistic world’ (ibid., p. 37).
The
point to
which all
these considerations
are directed,
and from which
they at the
same time
start, is
the active
interiority of man,
that is,
the personality. By means
of a
philosophy of interiority,
the contradictions
and problems in which a thought that does not know the essence of the
act necessarily becomes entangled must be resolved. Rosenberg carefully
avoids the dangers that lie in wait for a philosophy of interiority. One
of these dangers is psychologism,
that is, that form of consideration which takes
man as a psychological subject isolated from the world and from things.
The personality in Rosenberg
never becomes
a merely
‘experiencing’ individual. The essence of all Western art is for him: ‘that the
Nordic soul is not contemplative, that
it does not lose itself in individual psychology, but that
it experiences cosmic-psychic laws volitionally and configures them
spiritually- architecturally’
(Myth, p.
433). The
other danger
is spiritualism, that is, the
tendency to conceive of man as detached from the senses and
the body, from nature and
matter, and to apprehend him as an absolute self, as pure
interiority. Once this
step has
been taken,
there is
no possible return to the world, to the community, to the destiny and to
the tasks of history.
Man
is, in
Dürer’s words,
‘inwardly full
of figure’.
Interiority should not
be understood
as a
passive experience
or an
amorphous surrender, but rather a configuring creation from that
igneous-fluid nucleus that we try to circumscribe with words such as personality
or will. From this
philosophy of conformation any notion of ‘subjectivism’ must
be kept
completely away. The inner
is always
referred to
the outer, soul
and world need each other. Only with a false notion of interiority,
where everything dissolves into spiritual smoke, can nature and the
artist’s work be
volatilized in a non-objectual way. Already in the essay on form and conformation,
Rosenberg therefore directs the strongest attention to the matter and technique
of the work of art. In Futurism’s lack of
nature and purpose, he recognizes a clear sign of dissolution. Great art
is for him realistic precisely because it is the art of personality. He declares
that he has put matter first with a certain one- sidedness because it
is important to him ‘to
highlight the dignity of the object in the face of
an unbridled subjectivism’
(‘Writings and Discourses’, Volume I, p. 35).
From the opposition between
interior and exterior follow two distinct possibilities
of artistic
style. The
configuration may be
conditioned more by the
subjective moment or
more by
the objective.
If the
objective moment predominates
entirely, we are
faced with
pure construction, the engineering style; If the subject predominates entirely, a
fantastic art of unbridled imagination arises. In great art, both moments are
recognized; however, they do
not have
to be
in balance.
Through the
predominance of
one or
the other moment, two opposing
styles emerge.
This is
the subject
of an essay entitled ‘Objective
and Individual Style’, which is immediately
linked temporally and thematically to the essay on form and
conformation (compare Myth, pp. 345 ff.:
‘Personality Style and Objectual Style’). As early as 1918 Rosenberg compared this
contrast to
that of
the Doric
temple and
the Gothic
cathedral. The Greeks follow
the law
that resides
in matter,
‘they closely adapt their creation to their material and try to represent
the various functions of the material in clearer and clearer forms. They
go back, so to speak, to the necessary alphabet and construct from the
objective, with the greatest restraint, a fine feeling of measure and
harmony, their individual’ (‘Writings and Discourses’, Volume I, p. 49).
In a
similar way they built the Romanesque and the Renaissance. ‘The Romanesque style
rests on the primordial forms of stone construction, the cube and the semicircular arch. To these fundamental elements all
the principal forms may easily be referred, they also give us, like
many forms of the Greeks, the coined alphabet of architecture’ (ibid.).
Conversely, in the
Gothic period,
human individuality
boldly imprinted
its own forms
on matter.
From this
emerges an
individual and
inimitable style, closed in on itself,
limited to
a certain period.
The forms
of the
individual style in architecture are
almost unusable.
‘While Greek
formal beauty
had universal objective validity and could be built up over millennia,
Gothic had a markedly shaped
character for a few generations’ (‘Writings and
Discourses’, Volume I, pp. 49
ff).
In the essay on objective
and individual style this distinction
is expressly kept free from any value judgment. The exposition of thought in
the Myth, on the other
hand, is
partly burdened
by the
value judgment
that is linked to the
Spenglerian opposition between Apollonian and Faustian culture. The neutral
distinction between objective and individual style is put in relation to the
metaphysical antithesis between space and time, and
the conception arises that the Hellenic style would correspond to an
ideal of bodily-static beauty, while
the Nordic-Germanic style would correspond to
a dynamic ideal of will. Since Rosenberg now equates this difference
with that of form
and conformation,
it is
an assessment
that apparently degrades the
classical style of the Hellenes. It now seems as if the ideal
of harmonic beauty and Hellenic
art are a counterexample to Nordic volitional art. Rosenberg goes so far as to assign Greek
beauty to the body and Germanic beauty
to the soul. Since man as a person, according to their terminology and
in contrast to man as personality, belongs to the objectual world (Myth, p.
349), individuality is the union of person
and personality (Myth, p. 369;
compare p. 389 ff),
the appearance arises that the
classical art of
the Greeks
would no longer
belong to
the great
Indo-Germanic art of personality. There can be no doubt, however, that
the art produced by the Doric temple
and the sculptures of the Parthenon is also
an art of the deepest interiority and shows that surplus of soul power
which distinguishes all the great Indo-Germanic creations.
The distinction between
form and formation is of exceptional
systematic importance.
On the
one hand,
it points
to the
relationship that exists between the world and the self, matter, technology
and spirit, by linking training to
form, and on the other hand it offers
the possibility of distinguishing
levels of
formation. However,
there is
always the
danger of exaggeration when a
systematic distinction is applied to historical
reality. What matters to Rosenberg is clear: he wants to free the art of
northern Germany from the
disfiguring painting that
has been
inflicted on
it by an aesthetic that
is under
the spell
of a
false ideal
of harmony.
To this
end, the concept of
conformation as opposed to that of ‘harmony’ is excellent.
But the art of the Hellenes
cannot be treated on the same level as
formalist aesthetics,
which is
only based
on a
misunderstanding of
classical harmony. In Greek and Nordic-Germanic art, we encounter two
different kinds of conformation. A closer examination of classical art would
show that
even in the serene calm of his most finished works dwells that
mysterious surplus of soul
which has led Rosenberg to the concept of conformation.
In the end, the confrontation
of Germanic and Greek art was for him only
a means of presenting his
notion of character as the substratum of the
artistic creation
of both in the
most plastic
way possible.
It was
never his
intention to point out essential
oppositions that did not exist within the
Indo-Germanic sphere. Only a philosopher of culture like Spengler, who overlooks
the majesty of racial realities, can erect absolute antitheses such
as ‘Apollonian’
and ‘Faustian’,
of whom
Rosenberg says:
‘He does
not see
soul-racial powers shaping
worlds, but invents abstract schemes’ (Myth, p. 404).
What
Rosenberg misses
in Greek
art, he
has clearly
expressed in
the confrontation of the Iliad and the Song of the Nibelungs, already
carried out in the sketches of
1918. It
is far
from wanting
to belittle
Homer as
a creator (Myth,
p. 307). Rather,
for him,
it is
a question
of delimiting
the completely different
world of
the north from
the world
of Homer.
His reasoning
is as follows:
the Homeric
poem is
not built
on the
actions of
men as effluvia
of their inner being. The course of events is, so to speak, random. The poet of the Song
of the
Nibelungen, on
the other
hand, derives
the events themselves from within his characters. It is simply an
injustice to link
an aesthetic
critique to the sometimes
clumsy technique
of the
Song of
the Nibelungen, for the creation of characters such as Siegfried,
Crimilda, Rüdiger, Hagen, and the concatenation of a course of action
arising from their attitude towards
fate with inner necessity, constitute an
artistic achievement. A narrow
concept of form has so far prevented critics
from seeing this. ‘Their
actions flow from the will of internal forces and conflicts; they act according to
an internal consequence and according to a certain disposition of the soul. It
is the interweaving of action born
from within oneself that has just woven the tragic antithesis that leads to catastrophe’ (Myth, p. 307).
The
concept of
conformation proves
to be
immediately productive here. It is
foolish to
quarrel over
details when
the wall
of an
old prejudice
is collapsing, kicking up dust with a roar. Rosenberg has put an end to
an aesthetic discussion that brought nothing new and has opened the door
to new insights. ‘For to
recognize a work
of art
that presents
strong personalities means to
recognize an equivalent creative shaping force that has created
them’ (Myth, p.
307). By
means of
the new
procedure the
work of
art is
not simply brought back to
the artist,
as has
often happened
before, but
to a racially determined
and lawful force of mind. From the inner temper of the soul follows the
style. By
referring to
a characterological disposition, the
artistic work is not dissolved in the psychology and biography of the
artist but understood
as an organism
from the
racially shaped
personality. The
artistic form of the Song
of the
Nibelungs must
be sought in
a deeper
layer than where
it was hitherto
thought to
be found. The
concept of
racial character explodes the
categorical system of formal aesthetics. The art of
North Germanic art has the
form according
to its
content. From
a poem whose
art lies in
the knotting of
the dramatic
knot, one
cannot expect,
by invoking
the laws of the ‘epic’, Homer’s mode of representation.
Every great content creates
for itself the form that belongs to it
alone, and it is
only from
the configuring
forces that
the definitive
form can be understood. The
application of patterns of absolute aesthetics leads
to the gravest injustice. The
point is
to eliminate this
injustice, not that Homer’s
critique is correct in every detail. He who only criticizes
criticism only shows that he
has not grasped the decisive point.
‘Every figure is an act,
every act is essentially a discharged will’ (Myth, pp. 316
ff).
‘The Greek, too, was in the depths of his will at
the time of the birth of his
art’ (Myth, p. 318). The development towards form
that is later produced in him takes place in a different
way in the Nordic
artist. The
lack of ‘form’
in it is
not an
aesthetic deficiency,
but a consequence of its
artistic conception. For the German, ‘personality’ always means an antithesis to
matter, an ‘active, attacking and
tireless effort
to transfigure matter into an allegory of the innermost will and of
the forces shaping art’ (Myth, p. 302). The Hellenic, on the other hand,
seeks the balance between the internal impulse and the external form, between
conformation and
form. That
is the meaning of Greek
beauty and
‘harmony’. The will to style and the work come to coincide here, while
the feeling of infinity and the
consciousness of gravity of the Nordic soul
oppose a harmonization of the internal and the external and lead to
the predominance of the will to form in artistic representation.
Every book of profound effect
has its secret.
The secret of ‘The Myth’ is that its
author has taken the thought of personality seriously.
Philosophical- artistic treatises will only be read correctly when they
are conceived as a way to a deeper
knowledge of the Nordic soul of itself. Behind the aesthetic
value stands an extra-aesthetic value (Myth, p. 449). Nordic art is the
way it is only because the ‘idea
of the
imperishable personality’ is
a ‘declaration
of war’
on the world of appearances (Myth, p. 389). The more man becomes aware
of his personal existence, of his
uniqueness and imperishability, the more distant
the world becomes to him
as a
mere interlock
of appearances.
‘In the
idea of personality
the metaphysical problem is
condensed into one
point’ (Myth,
p. 392). Rosenberg has described the temper of the solitary self,
according to his personal temperament, in the Myth, pp. 388
ff.
But he utters the decisive
word where he
points out
the connection between the
idea of
personality and the concept of
destiny. The relation of the Germanic soul to fate has nothing to
do with fatalism or magic. Self and fate confront each other with no
causal connection. It is not without good reason that Rosenberg recalls
in this important statement the
conceptions of Luther and Kant and at the same
time refers to Hölderlin (Myth,
pp. 397
ff).
By its
own act,
the self
summons the
destiny that
it assumes
as inescapable
and yet
self-willed. Freedom is
not an enigmatic faculty of doing as one pleases, but the disposition of
mind that
has dared to ‘declare war’
on the
world of
appearances, in the
face of
almighty destiny. The Nordic
man knows
that he
is free
because he
has the certainty that he can inwardly endure everything that comes
his way, even if it is at the price of
his own life. Freedom is where their honor lies. ‘The idea
of honor is inseparable from the idea of freedom’ (Myth, p.
532).
In
the northern
sense, honor
is not
a social
phenomenon, it
is not honor to others, but
honor to oneself. In the Germanic world, personal honor is everywhere
encountered as the ‘center of all existence’ (Myth, p. 598);
Life is worth
nothing in
the face
of honor.
It is no coincidence
that the
great Germanic poet chooses
conflict as
his subject, for
in conflict
honor shines brightly. Honor
and destiny
are correlative
concepts: only
those who have honor can also have a destiny. In the ancient Song of Hildebrand this appears
with marvelous clarity: ‘In the fulfilment of the self-engendered law of
honor, old Hildebrand sees at once the prevailing destiny...’ (Myth,
p. 399).
In ‘The Myth’, for the first
time honor has been placed at the center
of extensive philosophical and historical exhibitions. Chamberlain had
understood loyalty as a fundamental feature of the Germanic
world. However
profound and
correct this
may have
been, a
decisive point
had not yet been touched;
moreover, Chamberlain had stopped at the
mere ascertainment of the
facts. Rosenberg discovers honor as the unitary point
of the Germanic world and not
only gives a description of this fact
but recognizes honor as ‘the supreme value of Germanic man’. It allows us to see
the civilization
of the north,
so to speak,
from the
inside as
a whole,
and not only as a past, but
ever-present whole. Times come and go, times change, but the supreme
‘characterological value’ always remains the same. Much can
change, freedom and honor must remain at the center if there is to be a European civilization with a Germanic imprint.
For the idea of liberty
of conscience and honor ‘was fought on
every battlefield, in
every scholarly
study, and
if this
idea does
not triumph
in the next
great contest, the
West and
its blood
will perish,
as India
and Hellas disappeared one day
forever in chaos’
(Myth, p. 115).
These two sentences, which
close the imposing characterization of
the gigantic spiritual event of the West, contain the program of Rosenberg’s
life’s work:
„With this recognition that
Europe in all its creations has been creatively shaped by character alone, the theme of both
European religion and
Germanic
science, but
also of
the new
Germanic politics,
is revealed.
To become aware
of this fact,
to live
it with
all the
ardor of
a heroic
heart, is
the prerequisite for every
future rebirth.
This knowledge is the
basis of
a new worldview, of
a new-old
idea of
the State
that generates
a new
vital feeling that will only
give us the strength for the liquidation of the usurped
dominion of the non-European
and for
the creation
of a
civilization of our
own that permeates all spheres
of life’ (Myth, p. 115).
The
idea of
freedom is
not empirically collected
in ‘The
Myth’ as
an isolated moment and
placed at
the beginning of
the work
but is
developed from the central thought of the work with consequent logical
necessity. If the book
were not
built on
the consistently
realized concept
of man
as an
active and configuring being, if action did not occupy the center of his
anthropology, then the idea of honor would be completely groundless.
It would lose none of its significance,
but the
force of
conviction of
‘The Myth’ would
be less.
The peculiarity of this
work in
relation to
the ‘Fundamentals of
the Nineteenth Century’ finally consists in an internal systematicity,
which is not recognized by every
reader, but felt by the majority.
The philosophy of modern
history has taught us to regard the emergence of
the complex
and tangled
whole we
call culture
as the
work of configuring, so to
speak, natural forces acting in silence. Culture was an ‘objective’ spirit; The
individual did not enter into consideration,
the violence of
the form seemed
to direct
everything by itself.
Frobenius concluded that culture is not created by men, but ‘lives’ in
men. In the
morphological method, this form of consideration of culture,
which starts from the external configuration and its formal metamorphosis, reached its zenith. With this attitude, the
present remains a white spot on
the map; We have to wait and see what the mysterious forces of
culture have in mind, and a cultural policy cannot be derived from this
philosophy. Like
all spiritual beatitude, it
only leads to all powers, even corrupting ones, having a free hand.
Rosenberg’s
approach of
understanding culture
from within,
that is, from its supreme
value, opens up entirely new possibilities. We can now understand culture as
an organism without, however, falling into the
passivity of an organic-morphological consideration; at the center of all
cultural creation is man,
not as
an accidental
individual, but as
a personality,
who is unique and yet in all his
decisive manifestations appears as the
representative of something universal.
For the
supreme value
of a
race is
at once
personal and universal.
It is
‘universal’ not in
the sense
of a
universal human culture, but in
the sense of a civilization shaped by a certain character
which, notwithstanding all change of form, remains the same in its
essence.
Another
advantage of
the concept of
‘supreme value’
is that
it has
an immediate bearing
on all
areas of
human creation
and action.
This precludes any
reduction of the
concept of
culture to
a mere
doctrine of
forms. The
idea of supreme value is
all-encompassing; It does
not place
man’s action
from a unilaterally aesthetic, technical
or ethical
point of
view. If
we wanted
to use these
categories at
all, we
would have
to find
a predominance of the
ethical point of view. But what is decisive is that these categories
no longer fit together, because man is understood here as a configuring
being as such, as a creative
personality, before whose unity the autonomy of those ‘singular’ spheres recedes.
The most important
advantage of the doctrine of supreme
value, however, is that it forces us to conceive of culture not only as
something past, but at
the same
time as
something extremely
present.
In
the clear
light of
the thought that each race has only one supreme ideal (Myth, p. 116) and
cannot renounce its supreme value without sinking the culture formed by
it into chaos, neither a sweet abyss in expectant contemplation nor a literary prophesying of sunsets or sunrises are possible. The
supreme value rules unconditionally
and at all times. It is not necessary to wait first for the
results of the philosophy
of culture
to know
what to
do. It
is in
one’s own
heart that each one must discover what matters and on which all
civilization rests. Through fundamental characterological value,
everything else is organized. ‘For a supreme value requires a definite
grouping of the other
precepts of
life conditioned by it,
that is,
it determines
the style
of existence of a race, of a
people...’ (Myth, pp. 116 ff).
The present must not only be
understood from the past, but also the past from the present.
Those characterological
values that once clashed, are
still clashing
today. The shaping struggle
that was taking place in the Reichstag of
post-war Germany is the same
one that led to the Concordat of Worms in 1122. Every historical figure is
referred to certain characteristics and cannot
be detached from them; Happening is always a struggle of man against man,
of character against character, whether it be works of art or ideas,
legal principles or educational
forms. From one human character to another there
is no ‘development’, there is only self-affirmation
or self-immolation. Western culture
is not
a melting
pot in
which the
spiritual contents of all areas and
peoples, by virtue of a mysterious law, are ‘developed’ into a
‘cultural synthesis’, but
a characterological
unity that
must be
affirmed
if chaos is not to ensue. It is
precisely from the current references to
Judaism and democracy, to
Marxism and liberalism that the seriousness of
historical consciousness speaks.
He who
does not
see the
dissolution and
its exponent, Judaism, does not recognize what is positive and healthy
either. The struggle against Judaism
and the corrupting phenomena of the present is the guarantee that the past has
been correctly understood.
The
recognition of historical
figures, Rosenberg
shows us,
does not have to lead to
a passive
attitude. Rather
it is
the other
way around:
nothing can strengthen
the will
to struggle
of an
inwardly whole
man more
than the insight that history
is not
self-producing ‘development’, but
a struggle from man to man. Before Rosenberg, the philosophy of
culture knew struggle only in the form
of a completely ahistorical critique as
the Enlightenment practiced it with everything traditional. It is
only recently that ‘The Myth’ has shown how the recognition of historical figures
can be combined with the struggle for a
certain supreme value that in itself is of a historical nature. The form of
this work is
not a
historical exposition peppered with
anti-Semitic excurses, the typical
misunderstanding of those who measure Rosenberg against the standards he
has left
behind, but
a new procedure
based on
intuition and reflection that is
followed with the need for the thought of a
characterological value that encompasses past and present.
While
around that
small number
of men
at whose
center the
Leader stood, anxious but confused minds demanded and sketched out a new
art out of
art, a new
education out
of education, Rosenberg
wrote the
simple and clear recognition
that was so thoroughly tested in the struggle of the movement:
the new race
of Germany
is looking
for a
new art,
‘but with
the knowledge of what it will not be born of before a new noble
value, dominating all life, takes
possession of us’
(Myth, p.
449). How
little can
be meant by
the wealth of
‘cultural goods’ that
accumulates in a
‘sympathetic’ soul when the
living presence
of a
supreme ordering
value is
lacking! What man does and
creates dissipates like chaff
to the wind when it is not determined and sustained from a center.
The nineteenth century
immeasurably expanded our knowledge of
the cultures of the earth; this century developed at the same time
enormous economic and political activity. In all areas, the men of the
twentieth century are faced with
a vast
heritage. And
yet, there
was once
nothing heavier
and more oppressive than taking on this inheritance. For the century of
the greatest effort of all
forces and
of the
most visible
successes was
at the same time
the epoch
of a
gigantic weakness
of the
will. It
might be called the century of
Schopenhauer, whose theory of the will was at the
same time the most seductive doctrine of the absence of will. Will is not
just impulse. Nor is it just a
mindless restlessness directed by the intellect.
A great will presupposes
a great
faith. When a
strong disposition to volitional activity does not find its proper goals,
then arises that
restless attitude
which has
so often been praised as
a sense
of Western
culture, and which nevertheless was only the reverse of an inner
perplexity and a despair of the soul. The nineteenth century lacked faith
in itself and so, despite its entrepreneurial zeal and its capacity for performance, it was
a time of unhappiness and weakness of will. In
the present there was no longer
any greatness believed, everything great
receded into
the distance
and became
‘culture’. When the
men of
this admirable but unfortunate
age turned
to the
past, it
was not
with a
feeling of veneration and
at the
same time
self-victory, but
from the
dark impulse
to assuage a
hidden discontent and rest in the contemplation of the past greatness of
the feverish aimless toil of the present.
The greatest
diagnostician of this epoch, Nietzsche, recognized
with real insight
in historicism
the expression
of the
incredulity and weakness
of the will of his century.
From the past contemplated
without will, no goals can ever be
derived. An age that does not muster courage in itself cannot
become greater and richer through the vaster and more abundant past. It
was the misfortune of ‘historical
formation’ to forget that action does not spring
from knowledge of what happened, but from faith in the presence of forces
shaping history.
Rosenberg’s first answer to
the nineteenth-century problem was a clear and sure instinctive rejection of
historicism. Already the first
notes allow us to
recognize that
from the
beginning only
one question
moved him:
What will become of us? Where are we going? What task has been imposed
on us? From an upright interior and a hopeful soul, he outlines the
thought of conformation, to which he has always remained faithful. Against
Schopenhauer he formulates his fundamental conception of the creative will: ‘Not the suppression of suffering,
nor the satisfaction of a desire, and
therefore of a tendency of the will, but the
spontaneous creator, the legislator, the inspiration, the command,
however one describes the inner
activities whose essentiality is embraced and exhausted by the concept of conformation. that is what brings happiness,
bliss’ (‘Writings
and Discourses’,
Volume I,
p. 64). Starting
from the intuition
of a
new epoch to come, he summons the courage to write: ‘The classical period
of Europe,
especially of Germany,
is yet
to come (ibid.)’.
The experience of the great
personality of the leader and the overwhelming force of the National Socialist movement
reinforces his certainty. The
formative power of the great will, which he feels within himself, erupts as a
bold action. From a passionately felt present, the image of Indo-Germanic prehistory is shaped. The weakness of
historicism is not only recognized but
overcome from within. The new era is here. Against the ‘dreamless destroyers’, against the black magic of
anti-Germanic dreamers such
as Jews
and Jesuits,
a new
creative dream
vision arises
(Myth, pp.
455, 459 and ff).
It has not been incubated in isolated brains; with a soul- subjugating power, it
is born in moved hearts that
immediately recognize in it with
veneration the legacy of a powerful remote
past.
Everything that is great
in the past and belongs to us, everything
that is a present force carrying the future within itself, Rosenberg
condenses into the
concept of
myth. Myth
is the
creative dream
of reality
of a soul; not
a subjective dreaming, but an objectively powerful image of what will
be. Nothing in the world
arises without
faith; all
the men
who transformed the face of the Earth have lived proceeding from a myth. The
will to shape a new world
is never
born from
the contemplation
of existing
forms, it
can only
be born from
the strength
for shaping.
A creative
force that
knows itself
to be powerfully
capable of
shaping feels
itself as
mythical. In
this sense,
all great cultures have arisen
from myths,
and even
the work
of an
Ignatius of
Loyola was rooted
in a
‘myth’ (Myth,
p. 456).
Without the
dream force
of a race, nothing arises that gains any powerful existence in
history.
The
myth is
presaged and
outlined by
creative individuals but can never be
psychologically understood from isolated individuals. Its content
is universal, it is the substance of a race, of a people. ‘The
inscrutable integration of all
the directions
of the
self, of
the people, in
general of
a community, constitutes its myth’
(Myth, p.
459). The
myth is
not a
unique figure, but an enduring shaping principle, it is the primordial
foundation of all forms, the creative center of the life of a natural-historical
community.
If
a people,
in the
course of
its history,
is displaced
from its
myth, it suffers
a disturbance in its self-consciousness. Between the soul of the
people of that
people and
reality, the
image of
the world
designed by
the soul of another race confusedly interposes itself. Feeling and acting
become hesitant, darkness and
division take the place of original naivety and
unity. Certainly, life gains
tensions and colors that it probably would never have gained without that
disturbance, but that richness is paid for dearly. Through a divided
self-consciousness, a gifted and
enterprising people can be brought to the brink of destruction. Even if it
finally manages to prevail in countless political and spiritual struggles,
its history will not lose
its tragic
character, and only after
enormous efforts
and repeated
spiritual revolutions
will it
find the way back to
its origin.
Until Rosenberg,
it had
been considered
obvious that only the
richness of
a people’s experiences and
creations was decisive in judging its evolution. Through the ‘myth’, the crucial thought has been
introduced into historical
contemplation that the evolution of a people must be judged according to the unity and cohesion of its attitude.
The health and strength
of both individuals and peoples
manifest themselves in
their ability
to distinguish
the myths
that belong
to them
from those that are
harmful to
them. The
19th century
lacked this
capacity for discernment,
allowing itself to be seduced by doubt and criticism to
equalize all myths. But neutrality equals dissolution, for neutrality is
but another word for lack of faith.
The paralysis of the 19th century’s will is rooted in its lack
of faith, which ultimately led to the myth of a people of foreign race,
the soulless myth of
money and
world domination, becoming the
idol of
the West.
Under the triumphal
din of
an apparent
victory, this
idol had
been erected
over all peoples
in Versailles in
1919. The
Führer’s struggle
against Versailles was the struggle against the Jewish-democratic myth. Rosenberg’s
task was to bring
this struggle
to its
conclusion on the
fundamental plane. The
Führer’s comrade-in-arms resolved the task by demonstrating that world
history cannot be
understood as an
imaginary ‘development’ toward
an imaginary goal, but rather
is the self-affirmation
and struggle of myth-shaping forms of being against one another.
With
bold apprehension,
Rosenberg has thus
resolved the
decisive problem of
the philosophy of history,
over which
people have
been racking their brains for
centuries. Every authentic
myth is
a myth
of blood.
Blood is the
ultimate historical reality
we know.
Whatever form
a myth takes,
it is always a self-affirmation
of whoever shapes it. The difficulty
of historical understanding
lies in
the fact
that the
myth-generating communities do not glimpse the correlation of what they
produce with themselves. The fertile
mantle that forms around them, they consider a
gift from the gods. The myth in which
the shaping
principle carried within
the community
first expresses itself becomes mere doctrine, that is, a teaching detached
from its
subject; life denies itself and turns against life. By discovering that
every formulated myth, every
historical religion
is born of blood,
life returns
to itself. The myth of blood is not a ‘mythology’ among others, it does
not establish a ‘new’ religion
alongside the old religions, but rather has as
its content the mysterious primordial origin of all mythological shaping.
All mythologies proceed from a
shaping principle; the knowledge of this principle is not in turn a mythology, but the very ‘myth’
contemplated with veneration as life.
The antithetical concept
to myth is dogma. A dogma too can originally
be a
true myth
born of
blood. A
myth becomes
a dogma
when it
is detached from man and
elevated to
unconditional truth.
In the
name of
this unconditionality, it
can be
imposed on
men of
another blood
as the
truth par excellence.
Myth is
not as
transferable as
blood; it
is not
universal and
can never become universal. Dogma,
on the
other hand,
is already
universal by virtue of its
absoluteness and hence eminently useful as a means of universal propaganda. The antithesis of myth-dogma reflects the
antithesis of organic- historical
popular unity and universal church.
The decisive question
posed by Rosenberg’s concept of myth is:
How is it possible to speak of a new myth when it is a matter of the myth
of blood? In what
sense is
this myth
a myth
of the
20th century?
The answer
is simple. The
myth of blood
is not
only the
myth of
the 20th
century because
it will determine this century
and those to come, but also the myth of our
time because only our time
could recognize
it. As
a recognized
myth it
is new,
its discovery a revolutionary
event. In
its content it
is ancestral,
as old
as the history of peoples. No
one had known of this myth until now, and yet
everyone has lived according
to it.
The discovery
of its
hidden reality
is the
change of era.
The
myth is
always the
myth of
a community. It refers
to those
who believe it and make it reality; implicit in its concept is the
relation to a human belief
and action,
with an
author and
center. For
this reason,
the concept
of myth cannot simply be
replaced by
the concept of
idea. The
idea exists
by itself, detached,
absolute. Its validity
consists precisely
in its
not relating
to anything else. Like revelation, the ‘idealistically’ understood idea
comes ‘vertically from above’.
Only through a reinterpretation can the idea
become an ‘idea for me’ (‘idea for us’). The myth does not need a
humanizing reinterpretation; as the myth of blood, it is human from the
beginning.
Through
the concept
of myth,
all absolutist
misunderstandings are discarded from the outset. Ideas do not exist without
racial-popular bearers. ‘Ideas are
racially conditioned, just like volitional values’
(Myth, p. 20).
Only a racial soul can
be the
bearer of
a reality-shaping
idea. Rosenberg
calls myth the ‘idea’ of a history-bearing racial soul. His work presents
world history as the ‘dramatic struggle of enemy racial souls’ (Myth, p. 8).
Based on myth, the word
idea acquires a new concrete meaning. The idea
is the
myth that
has passed
through the
spirit and
will of
an individual and arrived at
consciousness. It is
great individuals
who time
and again
set before the eyes of a community the values it lives by.
The value that surpasses
the others and to which all values somehow refer,
Rosenberg calls
the supreme
value of
a race
or people.
With this,
the term idea
is happily translated
into German:
supreme value
is the
duty that
a historical community imposes upon itself.
The
myth is
the creative
force and
life itself;
it is the source
of all values
and valuations, the
origin of
all historical
meaning and
the creative unity of
all actions.
It is
not because
he proclaimed
ideas that
contradict the value patterns
of the confessions, or because he made some
‘amusing annotations on the
European church’,
that Rosenberg
has been
taken up
by the representatives
of the
church and
blacklisted, but
because he
has carried honesty and consequence
to their
ultimate consequences,
to the
point where the decision has
to be made. The struggle around the ‘myth’ does not deal
with this or that value,
this or
that historical
fact, but
with value
itself and
the meaning of human-historical
existence in general.
All the
historical-critical manifestations about the ‘myth’, whether from the
theological or non- theological side,
whether in the guise of scientific innocuousness or intellectual
arrogance, can
only provoke
yawns in
an attentive
and honest reader of the
book. It
must be
recognized that in
the Protestant
field, voices have been raised more than once that found this kind
of ‘criticism’ consisting of
juxtaposing critical objections to historical
details instead
of addressing
the work as
a whole,
shameful. From the
clergy of
the church, confused by the continued study of scholasticism, no
more than hypocritical ‘objectivity’ could be expected. Some Protestant
preachers were weak enough to lean on
this pseudo-historical criticism. But
many nevertheless recognized that
the ‘myth’ posed
a question to
their church
that could only be answered
from the very center of the church. The reaction to
the ‘myth’
only deserves
to be
taken seriously where it
is theological,
for only the theological
response does justice to the fact that Rosenberg
questions the church itself, not by means of denials in the liberal style,
but by expounding the creative unity from which man truly lives. The
theological response at least
recognizes the plane on which Rosenberg’s work moves.
For that pastor from
Schleswig-Holstein who contrasts with refreshing naivety the myth of the blood
of man to the message of faith in the blood of
Jesus Christ,
Rosenberg is
a lost soul,
but he
has correctly determined the
rank of his work. ‘He knows’, he says of Rosenberg, ‘that
there exists a truth superior to all other realities, a supreme value by
which all other values are measured,
that there exists a force which is the primordial source
of all force and all life, an ultimate meaning and a definitive
interpretation of all being, which has
unconditional validity’.
To speak theologically
means to encompass the whole. The theological response does justice to Rosenberg at least
insofar as it recognizes that his
work encompasses
the whole.
It makes
no sense
to respond theologically
to an
enlightened thinker,
because he
does not
attack from
a plane corresponding to the theological. Between Voltaire and Rosenberg
there is not a difference
of degree, but of nature. The witty mocker Voltaire stands beyond all confessions and nations; Rosenberg speaks from a
concrete historical position. He does not feign a timeless superiority of
reason, which does
not exist,
does not
speak in
the abstract but
with responsibility as a German from a certain point in German history.
Like Nietzsche, Rosenberg
proceeds historically from German Protestantism; the incomprehensible phenomenon
for the theologian consists in the fact
that neither the Thuringian nor
the Baltic shows the slightest personal contact
with the Christian spirit.
The
personal detachment
from Christianity is often
presented as the result of hard
struggles of the soul. A convincing description of such
struggles has not yet
been given;
in most
cases the
idea of
these struggles
seems to simply
arise from the
vague feeling
of obligation
that they
should actually exist.
However, it
is only
a legend
invented by
theologians that a
position outside the church must be linked to some struggle or agony. A
large number of
intellectually and
socially active
Germans live
quite naturally
outside the church. ‘Properly religious
problems I
do not know
from experience...’.
This phrase from Nietzsche’s ‘Ecce Homo’ expresses a possibility, too
unfamiliar in the theologized
Germany, which it is high time to take note of.
It has sometimes been
assumed that the author of the ‘Myth’ is somehow influenced by Nietzsche. In reality, Nietzsche has
contributed nothing to the formation of the ‘Myth’, just as
German Romanticism has not
influenced it either; Rosenberg’s spiritual liberators have been exclusively
Goethe and Schopenhauer. Since Frederick II
of Hohenstaufen, there have been great Germans time and again who, without knowing of each
other, led an existence free from all ecclesiastical ties.
There has been talk of an anima naturaliter christiana [phrase by
Tertullian of Carthage, translator’s
note], the independent spirits were qualified
as exceptions, as
‘heretics’. It is
time to speak
of an anima
naturaliter germanica and
to cease considering the history of the German spirit from the history of the
church. Only in the eyes of theologians who believe
in an eternal
duration of
the Christian
era can
the independent spirits appear as
‘heretics’. The Christian era was a world- historical episode. Christianity
is only
tradition; it no
longer has
any power that stirs the
soul. The
inner life
of the
era stirs
today in
those who
in other times would have ended
up at the stake for their convictions.
The
enormous commotion
aroused by
Rosenberg’s work
should not be
judged by
the arguments
that were
opposed to
it. No impartial
person would deny today
that the
apologetic movement that
attempted to rise
up against the ‘Myth’
has been
stifled by
its own
spiritual sterility.
The book against which the apologists of the churches directed their
sermons was
full of vivid experiences, it was ardent, sustained by a suprapersonal conviction
and therefore captivating and overwhelming. What was opposed to it lacked
everywhere the tone that
moves the
soul. In
front of
the lived
idea stood
the unlived dogma, in
front of
the myth
stood the
‘word’, in
front of
the certainty of faith stood
the certainty
of the
institution. And yet,
the unique
excitement surrounding the
‘Myth’ is
a symptom
of great
importance. In this
agitation manifests what was literally taken seriously by the defenders
of the churches: the awareness that a
new era of struggle around Christianity has
begun. Before, the church
claimed to
measure everything that happened
by its
own standards; now a
new measure
has been
erected: the
reality of
the German people and their
history.
We are not the ones who
have to justify ourselves before the
Church, but rather
the Church
that has
to justify
itself before
us: this
is the
decisive understanding to
which every
reader of
the ‘Myth’
must arrive,
if they
do not allow
themselves to
be captivated by a
mysterious ‘word’ that
demands the sacrifice of their
reason. The
Germanic substance, the racial soul of
the German people
existed before
there was
a Christianity in the
north; it
has determined the history of the German faith and has produced Christian
art; it will continue to determine our
history even when Christianity is no longer
the religion of our
people. There
is no
choice: either
one recognizes what the world
and life
prove everywhere,
that everything
great is
produced by
man thanks to the grace of his blood, that the history of each people is
a great unity and that
the individual
must find
the place
that corresponds
to him
in that unity; or one claims to derive the Supreme from a revealed
‘word’, not
bound to race, and with that one immediately falls into insoluble difficulties,
especially when
it comes
to delimiting
that Supreme
from the
less elevated, that is, that produced by man. The hopeless confusion
into which
theological thought falls as soon
as it
is confronted
with the
realities of life
and history (theology
is not a
discipline of
faith but of
subtlety, it
needs it!) has
become completely visible for
the first
time thanks
to Rosenberg’s decisive
thinking. By having placed the myth at the center as
the supreme value, he has forced theology into a very unfavorable
battlefield for it. Supreme value is at the same time a religious,
ethical and historical concept. Whoever allows themselves to be guided by
this concept is capable of comprehending the world and life in a unified way.
Under the theological assumption, on the other hand, this
concept loses its applicability.
Precisely the
supreme value cannot be ‘revealed’
but must come from man himself;
the other values join it organically. If, on
the contrary, a revelation
is assumed,
then the
historical world fragments. The
sacrifice of reason before the claim of revelation means at the same time
the renunciation of the understanding of history.
The theological literature
on the ‘Myth’ reveals that the apologists
of the confessions find themselves in a quandary for the first time. It is
a matter of concealing through much
talking the fatal circumstance that the
point from which they can respond has not yet been found. But such a
point will never be found,
because it does not exist. The traditional
categories of apologetics break down before a thought that is neither
enlightened-denying nor
romantic-constructive but moves in realities. Theology only exercises its
power as long as life
has not
yet come
to find
itself. It
can dominate theories.
Realities and history escape it.
Over the myth of blood, it has no power at all, because it
is not an
abstract philosopheme, but life
itself that
has become
conscious of itself. The
sacrifice made by the German people in the First and Second World Wars can no
longer be dissolved into a series of individual acts of devotion, as required by
theological thought removed from reality. In the necessity of the
times of war, an ‘impersonal collective’ has been born; the community of the
sacrifices made by it unites the millions ‘together with their children and more distant descendants’ (Myth, p. 449).
‘Patriotism’ no
longer exists; in its place, a ‘mythical, real experience’ has come
about. A new sense of reality gathers individuals into an indestructible unity,
into a community of suprapersonal
consecration. In the thunder of battles, the
people have experienced ‘that the old will of blood still lives’ (Myth,
p. 700). The community of blood has helped itself: before this experience,
the old legends of the East pale. A new legend does not replace the old
one; the object dissolves into nothingness before the eyes of the
diligent apologists. Before the
reality of
the dawning day, the phantoms vanish.
It
has never
been properly
understood what it
means that
Rosenberg rejects not
only the
dogmas of
the Christian
churches, but
any formation
of dogmas. Through the
‘Myth’, not
only is
the epoch
of all Enlightenment and
liberal argumentation against Christianity and the church ended, but through
it any attempt at a ‘romantic’ restoration of the Middle Ages
becomes impossible; rather, the entire situation in which Christianity
can even be discussed in the future
fundamentally changes. How childish the enterprise
of continuing to speak of
a new
‘rational religion’
seems in
the face
of such
a revolution in the mode of thought, and of continuing to oppose
‘revelation’ to ‘individual reason’.
The historical thought that Rosenberg applies with
the utmost consistency is not the thought of the historical biblical
criticism of the 19th century. The
author of the ‘Myth’ is not a descendant of
Ludwig Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss, but the founder of a
new understanding of human-historical
existence. He does not
proclaim any
new dogma or institution but speaks from the certainty of a new faith in the eternal, reality-creating powers. It borders on the
comical when a theological reader
believes he
can determine that
Rosenberg presents us
with a
liberal content in mythical
garb. It
has always been
attempted, on the
part of
the historical powers whose
time had
passed, to
press the
New into
the thought forms of the
Decrepit, in
order to
make it
appear at
least for
a brief
period harmless. But such artifices no longer have any effect
in the face of an honesty that only expresses what is. Rosenberg only expresses
what he has experienced, his instinct
for the
real enables
him to
distinguish the essential from the
inessential and preserves him from getting lost in dialectical justifications of
what is merely transmitted and still existing.
For him, faith is not
any kind
of assent,
but the
relation of
the soul
to what
effectively
acts in the
creative depths and
moves in
a formative
way. Faith
is a
feeling for
the real. A
new epoch
is born
from a
new sense
of reality:
that is
the meaning
of the ‘Myth of the 20th Century’. Precisely the distancing from all
false ‘myths’, dogmas and fictions is
what is subversive about this work that has
arisen from
honesty, which
does not
proclaim more
than the
author knows
and can take responsibility
for, but which also does not shy away from drawing the ultimate consequences
from the experience of the change of
eras. Rosenberg’s importance for our time is based on the fact that he
has succeeded in making
visible, by spiritual means, the event and experience
of the renaissance of the
German-Germanic popular soul.
About
a process
surrounded by the
mystery of
creative life,
one can only speak in
allusions. As energetic as the language of the ‘Myth’
may become when it comes to describing historical characters and
institutions, it is nevertheless always restrained
when referring
to the
new faith.
In this,
the difference
between a mere literato and a writer who speaks and acts by historical mandate
becomes manifest: whoever wants to
give expression to what moves their epoch without contact with hidden realities will
not only
go astray but
will also
betray themselves by the
strident tone with
which they speak precisely of
what they
consider germinal
life; whereas he
who really sees what wants
to come
into being
involuntarily becomes quiet (as by the cradle of a newborn).
The
theological critics of
the ‘Myth’
have lacked
any disposition
to notice the
reserve with
which Rosenberg
speaks of
the essential.
Instead of treating
his phrases
as expressions
of a
faith, they
considered them finished and smooth formulas; instead of as allusions to an
inexhaustible content, they took
them as
dogmatic statements.
Even this
had to
be the
final result
of the habit
of speaking dogmatically
about faith:
to no
longer perceive real faith when one encounters it. None of the Christian
churches today has the openness to welcome living faith into its fold
and appropriate it, an openness
that once made the church a historical
power.
The sense of reality of a
powerful movement has shattered the barriers
that in
Western Christendom
the churches
imposed on
the spiritual outbursts
of the European
nations. Once
the Franciscan movement of
Italy flowed into the Roman church, once the Pietistic current renewed
Protestantism in Germany. Today, Christianity no longer manages to transform
living faith into dogma, experience into
institution. Powerless, the churches
have to watch
as the
political and
intellectual life
of the
era shapes itself outside their
traditional forms. In
the shadow
of Versailles, facing the Jewish-Bolshevik danger, the Christianity of
the churches has demonstrated its incapacity for a formative and
creative intervention; it is
indifferent
how many adherents the Christian
churches count today: whoever
understands the language spoken by the history
of peoples
knows what
is coming
now. The churches
have abandoned
the peoples; spiritual powers
do not overcome such defeats.
In this context, the
struggle surrounding the ‘Myth’ reveals itself as
an event of symbolic significance. The apologists of the Protestant church
believed they
could consider
Rosenberg as
an individualist
and thus
combat him, and ‘refuted’ the myth of blood from the basis of old dogmas
and institutions as a new popular religion. This whole
intellectual game is nothing
more than a superficial process; in the depths of reality, something quite different
has been fulfilled.
Only in appearance did theology attack an individual;
in truth, it
was felt
with precision
that here
an individual was not simply speaking with subjective authority
and expounding a ‘rational
religion’ invented by him, but that a new era had
taken the floor. For the first
time, the Christian church truly finds itself, not
just in form, on the defensive.
And that is the event of reforming significance
that is linked with the ‘Myth of the 20th Century’: the greatest event
of Western history, the
separation of the European spirit from Christianity predicted
by Nietzsche, is recognized in this book as a real historical
process in the present German context and affirmed
with a truthfulness that admits
no compromises.
The total
collapse of
1918 had
to mean the end of
the existence
of the
German people,
if an
advance toward
a new form
of existence
did not
take place.
Only a
miracle could
still save
the German spirit. This miracle
has been accomplished by the faith that the World
War kindled
in Adolf
Hitler and
some other
brave men.
The German
people will always be grateful
to the
man who
wrote these
words in
a politically desperate
situation:
‘We proclaim, after this
experience, as the religion of the future German, that we, politically defeated today, humiliated and
persecuted, have found
the root
of our
strength, in
reality we
have discovered it for
the first time and have revived it with a force like no previous
generation. The mythical apprehension and the conscious recognition
face each other today for the
first time, in
the sense
of German
renewal thought, not as enemies but mutually stimulating each other: the
most ardent nationalism no longer directed at tribes, dynasties, confessions,
but at the primordial substance, at the essence bound to race, is the
message that
will one
day fuse
all dross
to bring forth the noble and extirpate the ignoble’ (Myth, p. 85).
It
was to
be expected
that the
theologians, the only
ones who
have seriously dealt with the ‘Myth’, would transfer the confrontation
with Rosenberg to their terrain;
however, this
does not
change the
fact that
their apologetic efforts do not
do justice
to the
book to
which they
are dedicated.
The theologian
always starts
from the
assumption that Rosenberg
arrives at his own position from a critique of Christianity.
In reality, this critique is secondary; the position itself is primary.
Rosenberg is
not a biblical critic who approaches Christianity from a standpoint
devised at the desk, but a man
in the storm of the times, who passionately experiences
the rebirth
of the German
people and
who, in
his endeavor
to make comprehensible to
others the position attained in
combative existence and intellectual work, takes a stance towards the
historical phenomenon of Christianity. The ‘Myth’ is completely
misunderstood if one asks what it has to say for or
against Christianity and then judges it accordingly. The author of
the ‘Myth’ does not confront
Christianity as a theologian confronts another theology; as a
political man, he seeks to correctly understand the history of the German
people. Since this purpose was
not taken
seriously, the theological
literature of refutation has
been papier-mâché
from the
outset; but
where it
was not
‘refuted’ in
the abstract but asked concretely,
it was
also felt
that the
questioner was shaken by
Rosenberg’s vision and felt the ground shifting under his feet. The myth
of race and the discourse
of revelation
cannot be
connected in
any way. The Roman
church had no doubt about this. It put the work on the Index
of Forbidden Books and prohibited its servants from following its line
of argument in any way. Its so-called scientific refutation was only
a diversionary maneuver
for the
credulous and ignorant,
with which
it was
to be concealed
that no
confrontation over
the content
was entered
into. The Vatican gave the instruction: this event has not taken
place; race is not spoken of; we do
not know an autonomous history of peoples! The
German Protestantism does not have it so easy. Since it has distanced
itself from Karl Barth,
it is
not willing
to separate
itself from
German history.
In general,
it takes the
problems of
historical existence very seriously
and recognizes
that history must also be viewed under the aspect of race and blood. The
question facing German Protestantism today
as its
question of
destiny is:
how is
faith in a
racially unbound
revelation still
possible once
the idea
of race
has been generally recognized?
The same thing happens with this thought as
with gravitation. Like
it, it
cannot be
suspended for
a moment
(in the
interest of ‘revelation’)
without everything bursting apart. One can only view the
history of man in
the light
of an
alleged revelation
or in
the light
of racial
thought. There is no third option. The attempt at a synthesis always has
to be something transitory and will ultimately necessarily lead to the
racial- historical consideration of man. Without sacrificing his reason,
today no one can
renounce the
historical interpretation of
his own
existence; the key to deciphering, however, lies in the recognition of man
as a racially shaped character, not
in a revelation that evades historical knowledge.
The aspect of the content
of Rosenberg’s confrontation with Christianity, put in the foreground by the
theological critics, is not at all decisive for
the total
understanding of the
‘Myth’. Rosenberg
did not
initiate this confrontation; it has a venerable prehistory whose context
and significance to characterize was certainly not in the interest of the
apologists. Since the great doctrinal disputes of the Middle Ages, since
Count Gottschalk and Master
Eckhart (to whom the ‘Myth’ not without reason accords
a decisive
place), the
German spirit
has grappled
with the
paradoxes of Christianity. It sought the inner center that a foreign
religion could not give it. It has accomplished tremendous things in
the endeavor
to inwardly
appropriate the paradox of
the cross,
the mystery
of the incarnation
and the
doctrine of
the trinity, until at least
in part
it succeeded in giving even the
most strange and contradictory a Germanic
face. These
efforts
never reached
an end, and the history of German philosophy represents the monumental
proof that there
was always something that
did not
let the
German man
rest and
again and
again sent him on a pilgrimage in search of the truth. Since Kant, the
search for the inner center of
the German soul has entered a ‘critical’ stage.
Only those who do not want to
see could fail to recognize that an inner
necessity reigns in the confrontation of German thought with Christianity.
From Kant and Fichte there leads a straight line to Lagarde, Chamberlain
and Rosenberg. In making this
observation, one must bear in mind that here we
are not speaking of the National Socialist Rosenberg and the core of his
work, but solely of the spiritual context in which his confrontation
with Christianity is inscribed. Neither Fichte nor Chamberlain,
neither Lagarde nor Nietzsche can be identified with National Socialism, for
National Socialism does not exist before Adolf Hitler. But those men were
already on the front on which, through the great spiritual movement of our
time, the
decisive victory
has been won.
On the path of the Germanic
spirit towards itself, critical philosophy is the decisive achievement. With
veneration Rosenberg names Kant, he refers to the critique of knowledge. Through
his critique of knowledge, Kant laid
the philosophical foundations for
the definitive
liberation of the
spirit from the fantasy of
ecclesiastical dogmas; through his ethics of duty he
restored honor to
man. Although
the revolution
provoked by
Kant remained
limited to the sciences and philosophy, the critique of knowledge
ultimately became,
in its effects,
the precursor
of a
Europe after
the Middle
Ages. And yet, alongside the
harshest judgments on ecclesiastical institutions, in Kant there is not a word against Christian doctrine. Kant, on
the contrary, strives to bring the
content of his ethics into harmony with the teachings of Christ, and defines religion as the ‘fulfillment of our duties
as divine commands’. This turn can be considered a classic formula of the
era of reconciliation between independent Germanic philosophy and the
Christian tradition. Duty, that
is, action, comes first for the German thinker; although the moral law is
grounded in man independently of God,
he nevertheless considers the fulfillment of this as religion and endeavors
to demonstrate the conformity of
its demands with the teachings of Christ.
The priority of action
stemming from inner freedom, the veneration
of the person
of Jesus,
the rejection
of the Old Testament
and the
apostle Paul, the struggle
against dogma and the sacraments, against the
ecclesiastical notion of office
and hierarchy, are fundamental invariable traits in
the confrontation of the German spirit with Christianity for the past 150
years. It was quite crude on the part
of the church apologists to pretend that Rosenberg had raised new assertions in
this regard. The author of the ‘Myth’
never thought of presenting
himself as
a theologian. As
a German
man, he arrived at the same
free conception of Christianity that has been in
the possession of the revolutionary minds of his people since Leibniz and
Lessing.
The idea of a
non-ecclesiastical Christianity is the ultimate and most
delicate result of a secular labor of the European spirit on the medieval
tradition. On German
soil, this
labor has
found its
crowning, and
here too
it has
been ended. That the Germans clung to a Christianity that had passed
through the Nordic spirit, liberated
from all
magic and
purified of
Judaism, that
they sometimes finally identified Germanity and Christianity, cannot
surprise a historical observer.
The little understanding
that Rosenberg’s adversaries showed towards his inner
attitude and
the lack of
justice they
evidenced is
illustrated by
the fact that they did not have a word for the spiritual development that
issues in the ‘Myth’. Precisely
Rosenberg’s relationship with Christianity reveals that
he was never an iconoclast. He contemplated with veneration the image
of Christianity coined in German history. For the German it is so easy
to rediscover himself in the Germanized Christianity. Only gradually did
he recognize that the transfer of Christianity to the Germanic world of
the north was
a fateful
destiny, and
only slowly
did he
come to
the conviction
that no religious
power resides
even in
the person
of the
founder of
Christianity. Finally, the
person of
Jesus became
for him
a mere
venerable memory,
a figure who by virtue of his historical-universal effect
is better kept out of any confrontation with historical Christianity. Towards the
Germanized Christianity, Rosenberg has refrained from any hurtful attack;
he has
always followed the principle
that he
formulated in
a speech in
Aachen (1939): ‘that all the great movements that were once shapers of
history are already ennobled by the mere fact that Germans believed
in them’.
His internal confrontation
with Christianity was essentially
determined, as in many others, by the experiences that the national
fighter had to undergo in
Republican Germany with the political efficacy
of the Christian confessions. The core religious and political problems
clashed in the Jewish question. The
decision had to fall in the face of the
Jewish problem.
Rosenberg finds himself in
agreement with the best of his people
when in
the most
substantial of his
early struggle
writings, ‘The Crime of
Freemasonry’, he defends the philosophical-Christian attitude
of Lagarde and Chamberlain
against modern disintegration and sees in the attacks
of the Freemasons and Jews
on the
religion of
these men
an undermining of the foundations of our existence, Christianity (‘The
Crime of Freemasonry’, p. 67). A weakening of Christianity, which is of course never equated with ecclesiastical Christianity, must be
seen here as a weakening
of Germanity, the
defense of Christianity
becomes a
national duty. And when in his early writings Rosenberg emphatically
points to Jesus, he does so because he believes he can rediscover the most
ancient Aryan
knowledge of
the oneness and dignity of
the personality
in some phrases of the New
Testament (‘The Crime of Freemasonry’, p. 177). It
is the same motive that also
guided Kant. The new thing is that Rosenberg
has recognized the abysmal difference
that separates Germanic-Christian
metaphysics from the legalistic religion and lack of personality of Judaism.
This
inclusion of
Judaism means
more than
a mere
enrichment of knowledge. Since emancipation,
the Jewish
race has
been attacking
the vital fabric
of old Europe.
It seeks
allies among
the possessive
instincts of
noble but tired and unproductive peoples and among all the disintegrating elements of modern
society in
order to
finally realize
in the
age of
the stock
exchange the ancient dream of Jewish world domination. In such a
situation, the religious
decision becomes
political and
politics at
the same time religious.
The question of whether
a Jew
enters or
does not
enter the
German popular community through baptism, for example, carries political
and religious consequences by which the general state of
our civilization is affected.
In
this situation,
Rosenberg has
posed the
existential question
to the Church.
With intuitive
certainty, he reduced
the bewildering
multiplicity of particular issues to the single and essential question that
contains them all. His reasoning
is of
a persuasive
simplicity: if there
exists a
value that
is above national honor, then a
struggle that must lead to the liberation and recovery
of the people is impossible. Only a supreme value understood and affirmed
by all is capable of
engendering that decision which is necessary to break all resistance. Whoever
truly wants the salvation of the German people
from the Jewish embrace, will
not be diverted from the pursuit of their goal by anything. A community of
struggle will form that will take possession
of the law of action; the
attitude of each individual towards this community of struggle will reveal their
real position. Whoever is bound to
values other than the honor and freedom of the nation will be left
behind. The renaissance will be
accompanied by a division of spirits.
The Christian confessions cannot remain outside the struggle. If this were
granted, a second supreme value would have been recognized, which contradicts the concept of supreme value and is therefore absurd.
National honor, if taken
seriously, cannot be a value among others; it can only be
the supreme value or nothing. For this reason, the Christian confessions
are faced with the demand to separate
themselves not only from Rome but also from
Jerusalem (‘The Crime
of Freemasonry’,
p. 159).
What Rosenberg did was not
to attack the confessions and put a
new confession alongside the
old ones,
but to
place the
confessions, and not
only the confessions,
before the
decision. It
is a
mistake to
assume that
National Socialism was active from the beginning on the confessional
question. Rather, in the early
years of
the political struggle,
the Christian
confessions were treated with
all the
consideration and respect
corresponding to the
German tradition. The question was whether the confessions would
recognize what it was about. They would
have had to let themselves be transformed by the
New that was
breaking into
existence with
such overwhelming force, if
they still carried
the future within
them. Only
the Roman
church, which
had already been unable to
absorb the
movement unleashed
by Luther
into its
bosom in the
16th century,
immediately closed
itself off
to
the utmost
hostility.
The
Protestant church had just
been diverted from the path traced for it
by Schleiermacher by the Calvinist Karl Barth. Absorbed in this internal
crisis, it was
unable to hear
the call
that was
addressed to
it. There were
more than enough
brave Lutherans, willing
to give
the nation
the honor
it was
due. But the church was not
open enough to find the way to life from Judaic theology.
For a moment, one believes
one can feel how universal history contains the
breath. The
moment passes,
in the churches no
one has
noticed anything. In Alfred Rosenberg’s soul, all dreams and thoughts
converge on the conception
of the ‘Myth’.
When the
book appears,
it arrives
just in
time to make
visible the situation
that had
formed in
the first
ten years
of struggle. The Roman church is in open attack, Protestantism has
refused the
movement. It already carries
within itself
the tendency
of the ‘Confessing Church’. A universal-historical confrontation has
begun. The clarity and decisiveness
with which Rosenberg expounds the supra-political meaning of the present
convulsion, proclaiming a ‘myth rich in content, full of blood,
a life-feeling that
possesses a center
around which
everything forms and configures
itself’ (Myth, p. 613), causes the representatives of the confessions to go on the attack. The serious question posed by
Rosenberg’s work is not heard, the ‘response to the myth’ becomes a task of
church politics, the theological dispute begins. But intangible like
a spirit, the book in which for
the first time national honor is planted at
the center of human existence
passes through the combatants. The response to
the ‘Myth’
does not
occur from
the pulpits;
the question is directed at the 20th century; the century will respond.
Only
that ‘profound
inner confidence
in one’s
own kind’
(Myth, p. 611) that integral
peoples have
and that
we have
unfortunately lost can
be at the
center of our
civilization. The ‘creation
of a
feeling of
supreme value’ (Myth, p.
611) is
the prerequisite of all culture. Since
the Christian confessions have been unable to prevent our political
and intellectual life from falling into corruption, it would be a
punishable illusionism to
suppose that the
restoration of
the German
people could
arise from anything other than
a new spiritual center.
‘The
prerequisite for all
German education
is the
recognition of
the fact that it was not Christianity that brought us civilization, but
rather Christianity owes its enduring values to the Germanic character
(which is the reason
why it does
not present
these values
in some
states). Therefore, the values of the Germanic character are the eternal to which
everything else must adapt. Whoever
does not want this renounces a German renaissance and dictates to themselves the sentence of spiritual death. But a
man or a movement
that wants
to help
these values
to total
victory has
the moral
right not to be indulgent with the opposite. He has the duty to overcome
it spiritually, let it wither organizationally, and keep it politically
impotent. For if
a cultural
will is
not made
into a
drive for
power, it
would be
better if
the struggle had not even begun’ (Myth, p. 636). Let it be called
intolerance if you will... without
this intolerance nothing great has yet been created in the world.
A
racial soul
can only
have one
supreme value
above it.
When this value, from a
certain point on, is not only felt unconsciously but
also recognized and affirmed
consciously, when the myth of blood has once entered into the
historical consciousness of
the people,
then it becomes the most
important internal task of the nation to create a type
that corresponds
to the myth.
‘...type is
the plastic form,
bound to
an era,
of an eternal racial- psychic
content...’ (Myth, p. 531). The myth of blood is in
itself untouched by the conditions of time; blood is the source of all
historical configuration, but in itself it is not a form bound to an era.
From
the mythical
maternal womb
great creative
personalities arise directly;
the type, on the other hand, is not an immediate birth from
the mythical basis, but the temporal-personal creation of great
individualities acting with the full
power of
a historical
mandate. Personality
and the
idea proclaimed and lived by
it are
the shapers
of types.
The primordial
mythical basis constitutes the prerequisite for a genuine and enduring
type to be able to emerge. Names
like Frederick
the Great
and Moltke
designate at
the same time German
personalities and an
idea. Elusive,
mythical and
yet real,
the Germanic hereditary union stands behind them.
Each
era is
always posed
anew with
the task
of producing a certain type.
The task
of our
era is,
after overcoming
the dissolution of the
19th century, to first
recover the
myth, ‘to
create a
new human
type from
a new life-myth’ (Myth, p.
2). The
myth itself
cannot be
created; its
rediscovery is not
action but
experience, birth
(comp. Myth,
p. 481).
This experience has been
gifted to
the German
people by
the fateful
event of
the World
War. In August
1914, the supreme
value of
the Moltkean army
became the supreme value of the entire people (Myth, p. 520). What was
then a
passing event
must now,
after the
myth of
blood has
been reborn
from the events of the Great War, become, from the unconscious depths of
the racial substance and yet completely consciously, the goal of the
education of the entire nation.
The fundamental concept of
type for education can only be correctly understood if it is taken from the context in which it
is introduced by Rosenberg.
What a
genuine type
means, that
is, one
referred to
a myth,
can only be understood after clarifying the concepts of authority and
freedom. As long as there was
no notion
of the
racially formed
personality, only
abstract ‘authority’ could be contrasted with abstract freedom. However,
‘authority without race’ is just as chaotic and incapable of founding politics
and education as freedom
without race.
Authority is
only genuine
and enduring where
it is
linked to
life; a
freedom not
linked to
life, on
the other
hand, is merely another word
for anarchy. True freedom can always only be
the freedom of life toward itself. Rosenberg calls this freedom ‘organic
freedom’ (Myth, p. 529).
Only a
dominion that
asserts the
same vital
values to
which everyone feels inwardly obligated possesses true authority, and
only a system of
increasing freedom
can be
safe from
both anarchism
and despotism.
The life-bound personality moves in full independence within the margin
set for it by natural forces and dispositions.
It is their own living
forces that demand guidance and direction, without which they are unable to have activity and
elevation within the historical
community. The
stronger the
personality, the
stronger the
demand for ‘discipline and inner edification’ (Myth, p. 530). The era
that allowed individual forces to grow unchecked has passed. A new era of
strict breeding of types has
begun. ‘Today the strongest personality no
longer demands personality but type’ (Myth, p. 531).
The
type cannot
be more
distorted than
by confusing it,
as a
great historical form which is naturally something completely different
from a social ‘type’,
with a
schema. The
type arises
through the
shaping power of great
historical goals referred to living forces and corresponding
to these forces. Within it, the greatest diversity is possible. For the
individual grasps, those goals
from within themselves through their own imagination, understanding and will.
The type is fiery and animating, the
abstract schema is arid. It does not arise from the living forces
themselves but is stamped upon them
without consideration for their own character and stubbornness. The type is the
vital form of freedom; schematization
has been in all times a means of servitude.
The sociology of the past
has counterposed the social principle to
the individual principle and
has ultimately
believed it
could trace
all ideological antitheses
back to
the difference
between individualism
and universalism. It was
a spiritual
decision of
high rank
when Rosenberg opposed the abstract
doctrine of totality and showed that an idealism of totality
that does not recognize ‘the
racially bound
soul of
the people
as the measure of all our thoughts, will-desires and actions, as the
ultimate measure of our values’
(Myth, p. 697), is not ideologically distinguished from the combated
individualism. Universalism is only a twin brother of individualism (Myth,
p. 695), both lack race and nature.
It
is deceptive
and dangerous
to construct
an ‘organic’
system in
the realm of
pure spirit,
alien to
blood and
without a
people, if
the true
organic center, the natural-historically unique racial soul of the
people, does not constitute the starting
point and
end of
the entire
construction. Neither
an abstract individualism nor an abstract universalism or socialism molds
peoples ‘descending as it were from the clouds’; racially healthy peoples
know neither the one nor the other measure (Myth, p. 539). A state system
is socialist when its measures serve the whole (Myth, p. 541). This
political goal is not achieved
through universalist doctrines, but through National
Socialist leadership and
the education of everyone
in an
organic worldview
at whose center stands the
idea of the honor of the nation as a biological-spiritual
unity. Socialism cannot be defined as the subordination of the individual
to the will of
any collective
(Myth, p.
534 f).
The subordination
of the
individual only makes sense when the collective has a true content and a
fiery center. Subordination to a life-hostile power has nothing to do with
socialism.
Abstract
principles, whether
individualistic or
universalistic, always
lead to anarchy and decadence.
‘Only their consequence can show whether a measure is
socialist...’ (Myth,
p. 535).
National Socialism
does not
want to
realize nationalism and socialism, but to lead the German people to the
supreme form contained within it.
‘The German people does not exist to defend any
abstract schema with its blood, but rather, all schemas, systems of
thought and values are in our eyes
only means to strengthen the vital struggle of the
nation outwardly and elevate the
internal strength
through a
just and
appropriate organization’ (Myth, p. 644).
Myth and type are the
fundamental concepts of Rosenberg’s work
of thought. There are
few books
that include
within the
circle of
their observation and judgment so many problems of a religious,
political, philosophical and
practical nature
as the
‘Myth of
the 20th
Century’. Almost unfathomable
is the diversity of life unfolded here, the abundance of
mastered material. That this book nevertheless represents a victorious
unity is due to the fact that it has
arisen from
a single
spiritual decision
that penetrates everything
with its
clarity and
consequence and
assigns each
detail its
place within the whole. The book that deals with personality is at the
same time the imprint of a closed
personality in the midst of thought. The reduction
carried out here of everything
that has
happened and
is still happening
in the
vast realm of historical being and life to the character of man is
therefore convincing because the author confirms it by demonstrating it.
His philosophy of action
subjugates the reader because it itself is action.
Everything is developed
from a single premise, what man creates and produces, communal orders and religions, buildings and
symphonies, philosophical systems and technical solutions, is an
expression of his character. It arises
from an animistic center that is inserted into the
organism of the natural-historical unity from which it originates. Every
spiritual measure is false and
in its
ultimate consequences
pernicious if
it does
not grow from the relation
of the
individual to the
center of
the racial-popular whole. From the lack of center of gravity and
center of the past epoch stem all
those phenomena
of decomposition
whose terrifying
revelation in the
time after the First World War caused the will for renewal to arise from
the healthy core of the German
popular being. While others were still trying
to find positive aspects in decadence, the Führer saw salvation only in
the renaissance of the nation.
Through the
force of
his heart
and will, National Socialism
became the center of a new life. In place of
unthinking customs and
bloodless concepts came fiery communal forms and great
ideas. The nation once again felt itself in the service of a historical
task.
From the experience of the
renaissance of the German people through National Socialism, Rosenberg took the strength to trace
the chaotic situation into
which modern
Europe had
fallen back
to a
few simple
lines and
lay the foundation for an
ideational mastery of problems that seemed to have
become insoluble. The principle that guided him in this has been
expounded by us. It can be formulated in the following general formula: the
value patterns of life and all its
creations cannot be conceived as ideas or spiritual essences
existing in themselves, without
doing violence
to life
and putting
it in
mortal danger. For
all the values
that shape
and elevate
existence come
from life
and are bound to life. A
thought that posits values and forms in absolute terms
springs from a worldview that is hostile to life in its deepest
foundation. Therefore, it must
not be treated as
an inaccessible
guild matter
immune to
criticism but must
be examined
from the
center of
life. This
examination was initiated
by Rosenberg with a
critique of
the hypostasis of
the aesthetic
form. The
result was that
absolute aesthetics is based
on a
misunderstanding of the
aesthetic will. It constructs
a beauty
in empty
space without
consideration for
living man, for whom alone
beauty can
exist. Every
artistic creation
refers to
the man who produces it and thereby to the racial soul that determines
his creation.
Art does not exist, nor
religion, nor the State, nor the law; there
exist only human characters
and orientations
of will,
from which
everything that presents itself
to us
in historical
experience arises. Religious,
legal, political and spiritual
antitheses and struggles are ultimately struggles of
psychic attitudes against each other. Universal history will never be
comprehensible to us if we contemplate
it as a development of ‘humanity’ towards some
fabulous goal. Experience everywhere
shows us
only living
centers of
communities that seek to realize and carry forward their supreme value.
All confusion and decomposition in the
existence of peoples
has its
cause in
the fact that
men have hitherto not known the law that reigns in all living events and
that knows nothing of arbitrary
changes of innate orientations of the will. The
constancy of character given with the continuity of blood is the primary
phenomenon of the
human-historical world.
The religion
and law,
art and
poetry, ethics
and politics of a popular community are most closely intertwined with
each other because they
are only
diverse manifestations
of the
same fundamental will. The concordance of these manifestations with each other
constitutes the essence of the
culture of a community. In the past, the unity of culture had
to be wrested from opposed universalist tendencies, by which mixture
and alienation were fostered. For centuries, the psychic-racial-popular
characters managed to establish a unity of culture despite all
universalist counter-effects.
Finally, the strength was exhausted. The international
Jew, taking advantage of
monetary thought, rose to become the master of the world and
threatened to destroy all
fiery creative
power; Bolshevism
set out
to physically annihilate the
nations. Then
the need
of the
time engendered in the most threatened people the will and knowledge that led to
a renaissance. National Socialism put
in place of the confused mixture of
general representations and ideals that was designated as the spirit of
humanity or the idea of Western culture, an organically founded worldview. It
was not content with symptomatically curing decadence
but attacked the evil at its root.
When Rosenberg recognized
the idea of honor as the spiritual center of the Germanic world and determined
national honor as the supreme value of all our
creation and
action, not
only was
the lost
connection of
our system
of values with the mode
of valuation
of our
ancestors restored.
More happened than a mere
correction of our
measures of
value: the
reinstatement of
the supreme value of honor
brings with
it a
new hierarchical
order of
all values and
at the same
time a
style of
feeling and
thinking values
that makes
a relapse into the universalist error of the past impossible.
The
past Christian
era elevated
the idea
of love
(caritas), which is
in inner connection with the virtues of mercy and humility, to the
supreme value of Western culture.
Although European history was always very far
from corresponding in any
way to
this supreme
value, it
was a fictitious,
not real supreme value; the
hierarchy of values once established (by the Church) remained in force, although
it was demonstrated time and again
that this order of values had no
constructive power, put the sick and weak
before the healthy and strong,
and moreover did nothing but favor hypocrisy. Modern humanitarian democracy has
emerged from this ideology, whose
morality was characterized by Nietzsche as the morality of ‘descending life’.
The overcoming of democratic decadence by National Socialism restored the
aristocratism of nature. A social order
that is not diverted from its essential tasks by the idea of love will
also take care
of the
sick and
weak, without having
to construct its
educational and value system on the care of the needy. After all, the
institutions that serve the sick
and weak
are also
created and
sustained by
those who
do not
belong to
the sick
and weak.
Through the
re- establishment of
the aristocratic order of
values, at the center of which stands honor, to which belong the
virtues of
valor and
truthfulness, society
is not only
liberated from the unfruitful
principle of compassion, but also redeemed from the spirit
of untruthfulness that
the idea
of ‘love’
has brought
upon all public
life. For complete self-denial may well become a reality at some point
in individuals of special
constitution and lead to phenomena such as those
we know from the history of some religions. But the healthy strength of
a community can never
be put
into the
service of
breeding such
individuals. They remain exceptions and may well serve a religious
institution for recruitment, but never
as models for a political community.
A
fatal devaluation
of all
the values
on which
strong life
stands, and an
irremediable corruption of truthfulness
and education,
must result
when love is
introduced as
the universal value of
a social
order and
as a shaping power of
types. Love may well be universalized (one can speak of love), but
it can never
shape a
type, because
it does
not develop
from natural
forces, but can
only be
taught to
them, which
in the face of
the persistence
of human dispositions leads
only to contradiction and insincerity.
It
is one
of the
deepest insights
we owe
to Rosenberg that love
and honor are the central values of two opposed systems of values, and
that unlike the system of honor, the
system of love has no inherent power to shape
types (Myth, p. 158). The chaotic state that Western culture had reached
by the end of the
19th century
revealed the
contradiction into which
Germanic Europe had fallen
because of the ideology of ‘love’. Under the dominion of the idea
of love, nowhere
could a worldview and
life order
corresponding to real
forces take shape. All power spoke the language of love, and the more
unnatural and violent its dominion was,
the more loving its ideology was.
From
the doctrine
of the
supreme value
it follows
that a people can only
live happily
if it
shapes its
existence in
accordance with
itself, that
is, if all
its thinking
and acting
springs from
a single root.
If religion
and politics come from different
roots, the contradiction, in other words fundamental untruthfulness, has to
become a permanent state. Only after
overcoming this contradiction is an authentic shaping of types possible,
for the prerequisite of all real
education is the unity of life and
doctrine.
Considered
as a
shaper of
history, and
not in itself
or in
isolated individuals, the idea of love reveals itself under the aspect of
education as the true misfortune
of Western
culture. The
institution that
introduced this
idea into the formation of
the European
peoples has
become the
great school
of disloyalty. ‘The
Church itself,
as a
form of
discipline, could
not and
should not know any love in order to maintain itself and continue to
impose itself as a type-shaping power. But it could conduct power politics with
the help of love’ (Myth,
p. 159). Power
politics with
the help
of love
means debasing
the idea to a mere means,
thereby abolishing the unity of life and doctrine, politics
and spirit, indispensable for
the education
of the
Germanic-German man. Only
a revolution that stripped the idea of love of its dominant position
could create the
prerequisites for
a German
education of
Germanic character. By putting the idea of
honor in place of the idea of caritas, Rosenberg restored to
German education and at
the same
time to
European culture
the essence
it should never have lost. The
personality shaped by the supreme value of honor is the human type whose dominion will put an end to the split
between politics and spirit.
The era
of the
contradiction between the
expansionist politics without
ideas of great and
small nations
on the
one hand
and a
‘democratic’ humanitarian-charitable ideology on the other (its most
hypocritical formula was Commonwealth)
is over.
The
revolution of National
Socialism does
not consist
in replacing one
ideology with
another, but
in redirecting the thinking
and acting
of the German
man to the
living center
from which
all human
creations flow. That center is
what the word worldview points to. By worldview, National Socialism understands
that unity conditioned by the racial
disposition of the psychic attitude on which is founded the possibility
of mastering all problems of
life and thought.
Under the supreme value of
honor, life and doctrine, politics and spirit, can only unfold unitarily. ‘The idea of honor,
national honor, will be for us the
principle and end of all our thinking and acting. It tolerates no center
of equal force
beside itself,
neither Christian
love, nor
Masonic humanity,
nor Roman philosophy’ (Myth, p. 514).
In the world of the German
soldier, honor has always been the supreme value.
Rosenberg’s work consists
as little
as Kant’s
ethics in
having found a completely
new principle,
which certainly
counts as
a dubious
merit in the
realm of
ethics. However,
new and
audacious is the
knowledge that honor is
the center
of being
and life
not only
of an
estate but
of the
entire nation, and the
clear vision
of the
central position
of the
idea of
honor in
its relation to other values.
The
supreme value
of honor
impels the
personality to
achieve the utmost in performance.
That is
the reason
why this
supreme value
radiates over the
entire life
of the
individual as
well as
the community. The fundamental values closest to honor are those of loyalty and
duty.
Honor is first and foremost
always the honor of a concrete personality; it is inseparable from the will to
self-affirmation
and the real existence of
the one
who possesses
it. Honor
can never become universal:
honor can always only be the honor of this or that
particular man; honor does not exist. In this is founded that under
the dominion of the supreme
value of honor that decadence of morals which
was inevitable under the dominion of the universalist idea of love cannot
arise. The idea of love can be abused as a means, the idea of honor can
only ever be realized in concrete personal representation. An
existence under the supreme
value of honor has to be a life in
truthfulness.
Extending
from the
center of
personality (‘personal honor, honor
of lineage, honor of the tribe, popular honor’, Myth, p. 162), honor
remains always linked
to personality and opposes
an insuperable
resistance to any
universalization and absolutization. Within the Germanic-German vital
order, no other value
can occupy
the place
of the
supreme value.
The idea
of honor is inseparable from
the idea of freedom (Myth, p. 532). The
personality conscious of honor cannot
exist except
in freedom;
the Germanic-German forms of
dominion are always at the same time forms of freedom. The
deepest reason that the
Nordic soul
cannot but
behave in
protest against
the Roman Church lies in
the fact
that the
Church aspires
to dominion
over souls.
‘The Church wanted to
reign through
love, the
Nordic Europeans wanted to
live free through honor or die free with honor’ (Myth, p. 146).
Will, honor, freedom, which
is the heroic triptych in which the unitary personality unfolds. In
considerations on the concept of personality, the central
concept of
the cosmovision’s
awakening, we
have found
the germ
of the ‘Myth of the 20th Century’. Volition has revealed itself, on
closer examination, as
the fundamental character of
the human
being; in
honor we find the supreme value
of the will and in freedom the fundamental value
of all the
political and spiritual
creations of
man existing under
the idea
of honor. The common opposing
point of reference of will, honor and freedom is destiny. According to the
Germanic-German conception, I and
destiny face each other without the I being able to subjugate destiny
or destiny oppress the
I.
‘In the
fulfillment of
the self-generated law
of honor,
old Hildebrando
sees at the same time the prevailing destiny’ (Myth, p. 399). Destiny
and personality are
always referred
to each
other, destiny
cannot be
understood without personality,
personality not
without destiny.
With this
observation, Rosenberg reaches the highest point of the latent
philosophical system that is perceptible everywhere in his work of thought.
The
‘Myth of
the 20th
Century’, which
was elaborated in its
current form towards the middle of 1928, was published in October 1930.
Until then, through his speeches and
struggle pamphlets, through the ‘Völkischer Beobachter’ and ‘World Struggle’, Rosenberg had
tirelessly promoted the spiritual
revolution of the German people and the formation of the party’s will. In the
‘Völkischer Beobachter’ and ‘World Struggle’ the National
Socialist speakers found an
essential part of
the material
they needed
to channel
the formation of political opinion in the German people, led astray by a
thousand false doctrines,
onto new
paths. What
a writing
like ‘The
Evolution of
the Party Program’
(‘Essence, Principles
and Objectives
of the
NSDAP’, 1922) meant for the
internal union of the party can hardly be overestimated. For
the isolated fighter in the countryside as in the midst of the human
masses of the big
cities, who
daily faced
a torrent
of questions
and problems,
Rosenberg’s speeches, articles and writings were like a constellation
that invariably pointed
to the Führer’s
will as
the North
Star. In
1932 the
writing ‘Essence, Principles and Objectives of the NSDAP’ was completed
with the closed expositions of the work ‘The Essential
Structure of National Socialism’.
With
the publication
of the
‘Myth’ a
new era began
in Rosenberg’s activity. After
the immediate success of this book, surprising given
the difficulty of the
work, the
book slowly
gained, inside
and outside
the party, the position
alongside the Führer’s work. In 1930
Rosenberg founded the ‘National Socialist Monthly Notebooks’. Their task was
and remains today the positive
continuation of the cultural work of National Socialism and the treatment of all questions of the
movement that require discussion and
exposition.
In
the midst
of an
extraordinarily broad and
intense literary
activity, Rosenberg has
always been
present as
an active
political fighter
as well.
He has never fallen into the old German error of forgetting, absorbed in
intellectual work
and the
treatment of
domestic political issues, the
fact that the German people
has to assert itself in the struggle with other
nations and
in friendly relations
with kindred
national aspirations
in the
world. The
fighter for ideology and borders
Rosenberg, for whom
the intellectual
and political action of
man springs
from the
same attitude,
always keeps foreign policy
with its problems at the center of his attention. In 1927
he published
the bold book
titled ‘The Future
Path of
a German
Foreign Policy’. As the NSDAP’s representative on the Foreign Policy
Commission of the German Reichstag, he delivered two speeches on the
Polish question. In November 1931 and May 1933 he was in London to awaken understanding for the
German revolution in circles of the English people, an attempt which, faced with the
opposing
Jewish-reactionary
forces, had
to be denied
success. A
culminating point
of his political activity is the speech he delivered in November 1932 at
the Volta Congress
of the
Italian Academy.
In this
speech (‘Crisis
and New Birth of Europe’)
he characterized
with impressive
force the
peculiar character
and position of
the four
great nations
in Europe
and called
for the
conclusion of the four-power
pact, that
is, the
only policy
capable of
avoiding war
among the European
peoples. With
the founding
of the
Foreign Policy
Office
of the NSDAP under the command
of Reichsleiter Rosenberg, this activity
was put
on a
broader organizational
footing. In
the new
office,
problems of
the East received
special attention,
without the
office’s
activity being
limited to the East.
The founding
of the
Nordic Society
based in
Lübeck bears witness
to this. For
obvious reasons,
however, nothing
more precise
can be said today about the
initiatives of the Foreign Policy Office
in the different
realms.
In January 1934, Rosenberg
was charged by the Führer with overseeing all
the ideological
and spiritual
formation and education
of the NSDAP. At the 1937
party congress, Rosenberg was decorated by the
Führer, as the first
among the
living, with
the newly
instituted National
Prize for
Art and Science. It is not our task here to take even a cursory look at
the subsequent development of Rosenberg’s manifold activity. For
the defense against the pseudo-scientific attacks by the Roman church, Rosenberg published
in 1934
the writing
‘To the Pope and
the Roman Church’, which once
again set forth the position of National Socialism
towards obscurantism and hostility to culture. In 1937 the writing
titled ‘The Protestant Forgers’ followed this. In the lively discussion
that accompanied the internal confrontation of the National Socialist
worldview with the spiritual forces of the German tradition, Rosenberg intervened
decisively time and
again in
the years from
1933 until
the outbreak of the Second World
War. With constant readiness to turn
towards all sides, he watched that not
only every open attack but also every
falsification or
trivialization of the
spiritual will
of the party that
approached ‘in rubber slippers’ was immediately rejected. In doing so,
he never contented himself with merely defending or denying. Each of
his rectifications was at the same time an interpretation of the
essential. His critique was never impressionistic and in no case limited itself
to symptoms, it always aimed at
the center of the issue. Even in the period
after the
seizure of power,
his awareness
of the
problems of
the era
and the
demands of the day remained highly alive. The current occasion
was always for him merely an opportunity to develop and deepen the
worldview of
National Socialism in certain
directions. What took
the form
of critique was always at the same time a ‘shaping of the idea’ in the
thick of
the present.
To the
impulses ever
anew emanating
from Rosenberg,
the party formation owes its
determined attitude and its clear ideological orientation.
The image of history
outlined in the ‘Myth’ was developed by Rosenberg in some of its features and fundamentally shaped.
Here, above all, the speeches ‘The First German Reich’ (1935), ‘The Expansion of
the German
Image of History’ (1935)
and ‘The Struggle for the German Past’ (1939)
must be mentioned. In a speech at the Sports Palace on German law
(1934), Rosenberg coined that formula which illuminates the course of
German history, and which
can help
some apolitical
contemporaries understand the meaning
of the
NSDAP’s ideological
struggle: ‘One
can never
wage a
great struggle in world history with a prospect of lasting success if one
still remains within the ideology and
worldview of one’s adversaries’. In this
phrase, fraught with meaning, we
can see
summarized at once
the political
strategy and the ethics of its author. Later, a subsequent era will
venerate Rosenberg as one of
the greatest
German educators.
Some believe,
because they
do not know what history is, or because they even confuse history
with a train schedule, that the future can be ‘made’. The fighter Rosenberg
triumphed because he understood German history, because he understood what the
German spirit is. It was always a heartfelt certainty for
him that the truth of a conviction is proven solely in
struggle.
Figure 6a. Alfred
Rosenberg.
Figure 6b. Alfred
Rosenberg.
Figure 6c. Alfred
Rosenberg.
Plastically,
Rosenberg has
delimited from
the historical thought the spirit of
the popular community versus the charitable spirit of bourgeois society in a
speech at the Sports Palace on law and equity.
‘Today we do not give
out of clemency but
give out
of duty.
We no
longer hand
over our donations with
condescension, but conscious of the equal value of
the recipient. We no longer sacrifice by grace, but by obligation
towards the people to which we belong. We want to build a new world
community’.
Special
importance corresponds to
the speeches
that Rosenberg
has delivered at the cultural gatherings of the Reich Culture Chamber
directed by him. From
the very first
moment after
the seizure
of power,
he took
a stance against the
degeneration of German culture. On different
occasions he set forth the principles that have determined the
movement’s struggle against the
Jewish and intellectualist disintegration of
German culture. With the finest understanding he has always conceived of
technology and its future task.
Of the commemorative
speeches that Rosenberg has dedicated to great Germans in order to keep them in
the memory of the Germans, those on Fichte, Kepler,
Kant, Ulrich
von Hutten,
Gutenberg and
Lagarde should
be mentioned. That the grandest of these commemorative speeches was
dedicated to Arthur Schopenhauer, the man and fighter (delivered on February 22, 1937),
corresponds to the spiritual essence of its author.
On repeated occasions
Rosenberg has given strong personal
expression to
his love
for philosophy.
In a
speech on
science and
research (1936) he voiced the conviction that one day there will exist a
National Socialist philosophy. Before Humboldt University he said:
„National Socialism does not demand the renunciation of the object and
subject of scientific attention and
endeavor; the scientific spirit is an essential
moment of the National
Socialist worldview itself.“ To the cognitive audacity
of the Nordic man, Europe owes having been liberated from the oppression
of medieval superstition. But even in the world already
illuminated by science, obscurantist forces attempt to infiltrate by
manifold detours. Against all
these enemies of reason, Rosenberg opposed himself with biting clarity, with the
awakened consciousness that there is
scarcely anything more important for our civilization than the freedom of
research. It belongs to the most
brilliant aspects of his work that he makes its historical place in the struggle
of Germanic knowledge for the conquest
of our worldview. Of the speeches that
Rosenberg has delivered on the theme of
worldview and science, two must be especially highlighted. On November
7, 1934
he spoke
(at the
University of Munich) on the
freedom of
science. On
February 16,
1938 he
professed in
a major
speech (at
the University
of Halle) on ‘The Struggle for
the Freedom of Research’ his adherence to
the spirit that sees the
essence of
science in
the exploration of the inner lawfulness of things. Formative knowledge,
he says in this speech, differs
from mere
empirical and
magical contemplation of this world. It is
fantasy to bid farewell to causal investigation conquered by
great minds under any pretext. If we were to attack causality and wanted
to transfer concepts from the inner
moral realm to the universe, he continued
expounding in the speech on Copernicus and Kant, ‘then the enthusiasts of
our time would consequently, from their
vision, also have to declare that in the end our
Earth revolves around the Sun out of duty and the Moon accompanies the
Earth out of love’.
The political revolution
cannot be separated from the spiritual revolution; but the political separation from the past
occurs abruptly, while the spiritual overcoming of the past can only take place
through internal confrontations.
Therefore, the time scale of the two revolutions is
different. In the Halle speech he says: ‘The replacement of one world
conception by another is subject to very different
lapses of time than a political revolution...’. The measure imposed by this understanding on the
ideological confrontations of our days has never been exceeded by Rosenberg.
If nevertheless he belongs to
the admiration of all National Socialist fighters, this is based on the fact that within the limits imposed
by the era and the
nature of man he has inflexibly advocated for what he has recognized
as correct. When he underscores the special time scale of spiritual
revolutions, no one fears that this is happening in order to beat retreat. He
simply expresses the recognition of the
law of the matter.
In two lectures (1936
and 1938), Rosenberg has addressed the
error that confuses
the popular
community with
the mass.
The
comradeship that unites all members of a living people does not exclude the
individual having a right to solitude.
No creator can exist without hours of recollection,
and solitude relates to
comradeship as exhalation
to inhalation.
The life
of the community too, like all
life, is bound to polarities. The overcoming
of individualism does not
mean the
abolition of personality.
Only through
the implacable extirpation of
all false
adoration of individuality
can personality enter into its
rights. Not only can a new art arise solely from the cultivation
of the ‘silent
forces’; the
new way of
life that
we hope
for can
also only
come from within,
from an
‘impalpable state
of mind
which is
nevertheless more solid than
granite in a firm person’. Through external doing
and the accumulation of masses, no culture arises. Culture can only ever
be the enveloping form
that the
pressing force
of an
inner form
constructs around itself.
If
Rosenberg has
been able
to say
so much
essential and
convincing precisely on the problems
of cultural
formation, this is
due to
his incredible sense
of what he
himself has
called the
‘law of
the inner
form’. His independent
thinking began with the understanding of the importance of personality; in the ever-renewed demonstration by new paths
that in all realms of
life only
the pure
personality, obedient to
its inner
law, can
be creative,
it finds its culmination. In the powerful spiritual convulsion that we
experience today, Rosenberg stands as one of the most vigorous defenders
of all that to which Indo-Germanism has owed its greatness and
world-historical influence in all times.
The Western world has fallen into formlessness through
the cult of empty forms; Bolshevism has annihilated the form-shaping principle
wherever it could. The new world can only be
born from the re-establishment
of the form-shaping soul. National Socialism
did not arise from the analysis of the world and man, but from a
new contemplation of the world
and man. The spiritual development of Alfred Rosenberg that we have outlined offers
a great example of this
observation. Rosenberg has
fulfilled in
an exemplarily German way
Goethe’s demand that distinguishing and uniting must always go
together. The union of
tradition and revolution that characterizes the Führer’s work
is also the decisive feature of his spiritual labor.
References.
- Baeumler, A. (1943).
Alfred Rosenberg Und Der Mythus Des 20. Jahrhunderts. München:
Hoheneichen-Verlag.
-
Rosenberg, A. (2004). The myth of the
twentieth century: an evaluation of the
spiritual-intellectual confrontations of our age. Sussex,
England: Historical Review Press.
- Rosenberg, A., &
Scholle, A.
v. (1999).
Le
Mythe du
XXe siècle:
bilan des combats culturels et
spirituels de notre temps. Paris: Éd. Déterna.
