Of Marriage

 

Source: Discipline and Order - Foundations of National Socialist Ethics

 

„One could give birth to well raised children, if the parents were well raised. ”

 

Goethe

 

According to what has just been said, the sex drive cannot take a position in our life as if it stood outside the forces that should shape the community, rather it must also be included in it and serve it. The divinity has wanted it so that we do not pass along our gene pool in freedom, rather than a powerful drive forcefully influences us. It can nonetheless never be the task of the National Socialist German to unrestrained follow his drive, rather he must, with struggle and under tension, put it in the service of the German folk and its development. There is no right to live life to the full in this area, rather only a high order, a duty taken in moderation and discipline. Only the liberal person - and the Marxist teaches it logically - who is able to observe himself and his place in the folk as separated from the natural order - could demand „freedom” - it was licentiousness - in this area. The more we view the folk as the community unit, whose promotion and health is our task in this world, the more we are obligated to adapt the sex life to the folk’s life.

 

There is probably hardly a life question of our time in which such a tremendous amount of rearranging and reshaping is demanded and at the same time is so controversial as that of the sex life. In broad folk segments there still lives an ascetic medieval concept that feels the sexual as blemish and original sin, and who produce in their opponents the view that denounces any moral demand in regard to sexuality as hypocrisy. One is as wrong as the other. The instinct for self-preservation - which pulls us in the direction of ruthlessly trampling every neighbour in the struggle for existence -, has nonetheless not been able to prevent the formation of folks, rather it has been ennobled through order, through law and custom. Hence the sex drive as well is to be adapted to the folk’s higher life, not because it is to be viewed as „evil” or „sinful”, rather because its moderate bridling is a demand for the folk’s preservation. The folk of predominantly Nordic stamp views marriage as a life form in which sex is put in the service of the higher life order. We hence in no way have to ascribe to a romanticizing of a Germanic man such as existed in Tacitus’ view, who is known to have extremely praised Germanic man’s chastity. The demand for life in the service of the folk community demands - without regard and pitilessly - the same from us living today.

 

Marriage is the germ cell of the folk. This statement in no way loses its validity, may it be spoken ever so frequently and previously so little achieved. The purpose of marriage is many children for the folk’s preservation. Only children who grow up among numerous siblings learn early the integration into the smallest community determined by common blood. Here the drive of selfishness is first bent, here consideration for each other and doing without are learned early. The raising of children in the first years of life - it is much more important than generally thought - is only possible within the family, for only here can the reasonable mother guide the child to endure the pains that are spared no child, to occupy itself independently and hence to give it inner firmness. Certainly, children can be raised in a state asylum with the same values, but nobody knows her children like the real mother. A necessarily hard training by the mother in connection with mother’s love is irreplaceable.

 

If marriage is accordingly a fundamental value from which the folkish culture is able to grow, then the moral bearing of man and wife - before, inside and outside of marriage - must stand unassailable and firm. Premarital, martial and extra-marital life must not possess their own different values, which are also different for men and women, rather all three must stand in the service of one and the same great task. In the liberal epoch there was never as much lying as in the area of premarital life. The view is fundamentally false that the girl or young man should be told that the awakening sex drive also demands its immediate gratification, because otherwise healthy problems would be the result. There is nothing more awful than an unrestrained debauchery or a badly played Don Juan. Whoever gives in early here, will also easily give in with other pitiless demands of a life of honour and duty. Just as in other areas of life we become stronger and harder through tension and renunciation, so here as well. We can certainly make the demand that abstinence - for both genders in their midtwenties - is not only possible, rather also - in regard to a healthy marriage - downright desirable. Certainly, we must still relearn a lot here. Girls who reject even the most passionate wooing of the young man should not be viewed by men as cold and dry, as repulsive Brunhild types, rather they should gain value in the eyes of the men. A long and persistent wooing should be the ambition of the new German man. Men should free themselves of the crude view that a girl’s resistance only exists to be broken more or less by force. It is not the worst men who have preserved a sacred shyness toward women and especially toward untouched girlhood. In them lives the surmising of an eternal procreation, within which the individual human pair is only a tiny part. Hence jokes about sexual matters should disappear among men as well as girls. For it is an unworthy low point to make the act to which we owe our life the object of a dirty joke, since we violate our mother by it.

 

Deceitful was also the previous standpoint of so-called double standards, which demanded virginity from the girl before marriage but not from the man. Even if the reason that the girl is the receiving and the man the giving part contains a certain appearance of justification for different standards, the natural difference does not speak for a fundamentally different view for the moral bearing of girl and man. If both enter marriage untouched, each will give the other a joyful gift that lies in the soul, since body and heart are given unseparated.

 

Whoever does not promote this bearing, cannot simultaneously demand that the German folk improve racially. If girls and men are deeply gripped by the idea of being cells of a folk - which they want to improve with the effort of their whole life - then they cannot live without restraint. They must have practiced the strictest self-discipline from earlier youth onward, just as they wish to train their body for higher performance in sports. How does the elimination of genetically inferior offspring through state laws help, if men and women do not have the self-discipline to not choose a partner whose clan contains inferiority. Previously, romantic love was solely fed by the beauty of the individual person desired. In the future, we will not see solely the individual man and the individual woman with their physical, intellectual and other advantages, rather we will also observe the siblings, parents and relatives, whether they present a guarantee for healthy blood. How much sacrifice will the future demand from the National Socialist! The mother will not be able to flee the National Socialist laws, if one of her children should fall under the law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring. Many a passion will have to be overcome, because our will for the improvement of our folk demands it from us. That is the highest thing for which we can strive. We want to become racially better, but we want to assign the necessary selection for it less to state laws than to an obligating law for our life. The idea of breeding and selection has been elevated into the sphere of morality and duty. Nobody can speak disparagingly of them, unless he intends to turn against the divine command.

 

The Illegitimate Child

 

The demand for virginity before marriage should never mean that the marriage that lacks the joyful gift of mutual virginity should be damned. It should just be stressed that - in the high demand and its fulfilment - there lies for both marriage partners an infinitely firm anchor, so that the many shocks that every marriage, like life, must invariably bring, can be more easily withstood. In the judgment of the illegitimate child, it should never be claimed that every unmarried mother should be cast out in shame and misery. We do not want to fool ourselves:

 

Many girls are considered „honourable”, because they have found a „clever” man or because they themselves were „clever”, since they know the today easily accessible secrets of contraception. But the others, who - in the intoxication of the moment or in the ecstasy of passion - forgot themselves, are considered dishonourable, because they have given life to a child. This must be clearly stated. And the difficult and hardly answerable question must be raised: Who stands higher, the girl who in the passionate struggle against herself fails, or the one who gives herself and has a child, or the one that gives in and practices contraception? I believe that the order of the list as related contains the degree of their value. But let us guard ourselves against premature judgment! Not every man is a Goethe or a Hebbel or a Hermann Löns, even if many men all too gladly refer to them as their role-model to beautify their activity. Not every German girl is a Christiane Vulpius or an Elise Lensing, not every girl remains great after her „fall”.

 

In regard to the moral bearing of the great mass within our folk, the following must be stated in respect to the question of the illegitimate child: It is fundamentally false to claim that, due to our folk’s sinking birthrate, the illegitimate child should be promoted and every female should bring children into the world, regardless of inside or outside of marriage, otherwise she is not a full value member of the folk community. Whenever that was expressed by leading men, it was again and again always meant as just an ideal demand of the purest stamp, but never as a call for unrestrained life. It would also be an insult against the hundreds of thousands of German girls whose fiancé fell in the World War and who have hence made a sacrifice like hundreds of thousands of mothers.

 

The concept of „illegitimate child” naturally does not include the child born before marriage. In many regions of Germany, the birth of a child or the impregnation of the girl is a prerequisite for the conclusion of the marriage. But generally, here as well, the young man who does not marry the girl is shown scorn and contempt.

 

The illegitimate child and its position must be viewed in the same context as we view the question of our overall moral bearing. Accordingly, one can distinguish three groups of illegitimate children:

 

First: The child is born outside of marriage, because the economic circumstances do not allow a marriage. Biologically speaking, these children can be fine, but they will not grow up inside a marriage. In the most favourable case, they will be given to relatives; in the least favourable case, they will go to strangers. Such a child does not know a mother’s love, since the mother probably has a job, nor siblings. Marriage as an educational community for the National Socialist will only in the most rare cases exist as an influence on such a child.

 

Second: The man does not marry the girl - either out of frivolity or conceit or boredom. But what girl with self-respect will give herself to a man who does not have respect for her in order to share her life with him? Precisely the predominantly Nordic girl sees the fulfilment of her love life only in marriage, and for her own sake will not respect the man who for the reasons mentioned seeks to avoid this fulfilment. But the child, as in the first case, will take second place, and its life will be dominated by the mother’s bitterness that the man did not see in her the value, which had to appear to her as the highest for her fulfilment.

 

Third: The illegitimate child is born by a mother who gives herself without thought. This case will be the most frequent. The child comes from a mother who has little restraint, and a father for whom such a girl is sufficient. Hence it will not have inherited the highest values from either side. Hence it is a totally mistaken view to claim that the stain of the illegitimate child was first implanted into the German folk by the church. Instead, healthy folk judgment was correct that the majority of illegitimate children come from parents who are not exemplary in the sense of best character values and hence also do not become the most valuable folk comrades.

 

But even these illegitimate children cannot help it that fate has called them to earth under these circumstances. It is hence wrong to blindly disadvantage illegitimate children, rather both parents should be held more accountable than was previously the case. In this regard, our legislation has previously been totally un-National Socialist, when it views the illegitimate child as related solely to the mother, or if the social position of the mother alone determined the amount of child support. According to the bourgeois law book, a working class father must pay an impossible sum for the illegitimate child of a rich merchant’s daughter. But in the opposite case, the working class girl will have to accept a payment that is a pittance for the father from a higher class. Here, a fundamental change will have to be made, which above all sees to it that the illegitimate child has a blood relationship not just to the mother, rather also to the father, and has right of inheritance of the paternal fortune. Certainly, the illegitimate child must not be better off than the legitimate one; it should not even be viewed as the same legally.

 

These demands must be clearly expressed within a new development of our folkish conditions. Perhaps other folks can afford to think differently about the purity of marriage, to live with less restraint, but still not decay. German man cannot afford that. Periods of decline in German history were simultaneously times of the greatest loosening of moral life bearing. Whoever experienced November 9, 1918 and the following weeks in Germany, knows that ruinous revolt had its chief meaning for many people in the destruction of the „restraints of pious shyness”. In the area of a healthy life bearing that is valuable for the German folk, we just have to do the opposite of what the November men did in Germany. Then we will be on the right path.