by Frits Clausen
When the peace bells rang after the first great war, the powerful drive for life, which had been held back so many years by the war, again awoke in the folks.
Now everything that had been missed because of the war was supposed to be made up for, now everything that it had destroyed was supposed to be rebuilt. A happy future should enable the memory of its horrors to be forgotten, and a joyous affirmation of life should dry the tears of suffering. But it seemed as if - together with the many brave and capable men, whom the war had swept away, and with the many strong women, whom it had broken - all the strength that should have formed this future had also perished.
The youth, who had dreamed of being allowed to show their strength, now instead had to experience the misery of unemployment. The men who strove to expand home and workplace had to recognize that employment and wage had already been mortgaged, and that they themselves had to pay that mortgage. The old and sickly, who had hoped for the support and help of the youth and of the strong men, had to beg in order to starve of deprivation and need.
The bloodletting of the war was continued in bloody revolts and fighting, in which countryman stood against countryman. New hatred and new hostility grew among the people. The denying and destroying forces, which had made themselves masters during the war, did not lose their mastery even after its end.
The dream of happiness changed into a restless hunt for profit. The yearnings for a mighty future had to make way for the demands of the day. An unfeeling, life- denying money-power had put a stranglehold on the people and created out of life-affirmation life-weariness, so that constantly growing numbers of people voluntarily ended their life. The unfeeling money-power bred a likewise unfeeling and life-denying generation, which - instead of fixing their gaze across the deep sea of eternity and endlessness - fixed it on the worldly finite and earth- bound and hence broke the bridge that bound them, through the eternal chain of generations, with eternity.
With blind frivolity and in irresponsible indifference, the folks of Europe approached their decline and annihilation. That did not only happen in those countries which had participated in the bloody conflict, it not only occurred among the folks who had been defeated, rather also among those who had not participated in the struggle at all.
The responsible heads of state and leading politicians did not want to see and break with a development in which the denying and destroying forces everywhere possessed the dominant influence. They faced all the anti-life and subversive efforts without feeling or action.
The rulers only strove to give the impression of their own indispensability by participating in the many international congresses and conferences which marked the post-war period, or by visiting the many useless parliamentary negotiations. And while these parliamentary negotiations were still in process, the denying forces made themselves the unlimited masters in one of the largest and richest countries in the world.
Over mountains of corpses and indescribable misery, they made into reality the words of Friedrich Engels, that “general destruction is the first prerequisite for the world revolution”.
From the empire whose basic form had once been created by the Nordic Viking spirit, they again and again declared as their goal their desire the extinguish and destroy all that this spirit and the other formative forces of the world had created. From here, they directed the growth of the communist parties of all countries, which, as they themselves informed the world during their world congress in the year 1928, were only sections of a great, world-encompassing communist party.
Here they organized the Red Army, whose task it was to violently wipe out the uniqueness of the folks, and everything which had been created in the way of values by this uniqueness in the various countries.
And one even received their messengers in these countries, and one enabled heads of state to shake the hands of these messengers, which were still red with the blood of the nearest relatives of these heads of state.
But just as Europe’s leading man faced this development, blinded and irresponsible, so did forces arise in all countries which rebelled against them. Many of the names of those who tried to change this development have been forgotten, and many were never know; for their attempts to fight off the destruction became stranded too early or took false paths.
So was final victory denied to the victorious German free corps, because the then democratic-Marxist Reich government - giving in to the pressure of the world democracies - forced them to abandon their fight.
A mighty resistance arose in Italy, where the corporal Benito Mussolini, who had been severely wounded in the world war, built up the fascist movement for the fight against the collapse.
At a time when the communist Red Republic had already been declared in southern Germany and Hungary and Soviet rule appeared to have been fully secured in Russia, he assembled his fascist battle formations and led them to Rome, where he was named Minister-President of Italy by the king. During the reconstruction of a strong and energetic state-power, Mussolini was able to gather in his folk from the many parties and chasms which had torn it apart. His goal was to again awaken the strong state-building forces of the great ancient Rome. He saw the collaboration between world capital and Marxism and its effects in the great secret lodges of freemasonry.
In Germany, Adolf Hitler fought against the same enemies and their common Jewish source. He proceeded from the idea that the life-content of the folks must be regenerated.
He gave the German folk the task of reflecting on its original strength.
He awakened this strength in a society whose major strengths had already been deeply buried by the forces of subversion… in a folk in which everyone already stood against everyone else… in a state whose foundations had already been shaken by an imminent communist revolution. The folk-strength newly awakened by him was so strong that it not only beat down the subversive forces in his own folk, rather it could also annihilate them everywhere where they threatened Germany and Europe from other countries.
When General Franco called awake these forces in the Spanish folk in the year 1936 in order to halt the communist destruction and red murder which plagued the land, it was Adolf Hitler’s Condor Legion which, together with Spanish and Italian allies, could secure victory. Adolf Hitler did not only awaken his folk to become conscious of the necessity of a solution to the many demands of the time; he led it to a recognition of the eternal demands of life. He again awakened in his folk the dream and yearning to strive out across time and space; he awoke the will to give form to this life-view inside of time and space. He knew how closely man is bound to his clan, and how the certainty lies precisely here to be able to build a bridge into the future. He knew that this recognition of the great miracle of blood-relation and heredity leads to insight into that godly law which determines life and that is the highest expression of every human community.
Through this recognition Adolf Hitler’s calling has grown far beyond a merely German mission; he is far more than only the protector of European lands in the general sense. He is the great discoverer and architect of the European folks, and not least of all of those folks whose close relation by blood to his own folk he himself so often strongly stressed.
So, his mission is also valid for Denmark. The development in Denmark does not vary in the least from the one in other European countries, and if Denmark belongs to those countries which during the First World War made money, so was the post-war period here, too, given its stamp by unemployment, economic crises, with their bankruptcies and forced auctions, social need, growing crime and suicide, and a declining birth-rate.
In this country, too, did one try to dam this development. One tried to change the laws in that one set up new political parties, whose goals and paths, however, have been forgotten; one tried to break the old parties; but the men who undertook this died in poverty and forgotten.
One created movements and prepared massive transformations of state, without being able, however, to eliminate the denying and destroying forces, and without being able to prevent that the same destruction befell Denmark that had been planned for the European folks, if Adolf Hitler had not beaten these forces down.
If Denmark, however, again experienced a national awakening, then it is not to be ascribed solely to the external defence - which Adolf Hitler has created for us, too, against the forces of destruction - rather to this great mission to show our folk, too, the path to the collection of its original values.
He is for our time, too, the only conceivable force which can form an Odin figure in Denmark out of Ymir’s dead body, so that both, spirit and will, can find a common expression in an available figure. He has not only shown us Danes that path back to the subline life- view of the heroic era, rather he has led our youth to a new struggle against the world enemy on that war theatre where we were once given our national symbol, the Dannebrog, by the mighty forces of heaven. He also awakened the faith in us that once again beautiful works of art and architecture may emerge similar to those which still attest to the striving of our folk across space and to its dream across time - in contrast to those life-denying and dead monstrosities produced in our empty time.
Through this great life-effort alone can we Danes again reach that straight, joyous and active life here on earth of which Grundtvig sings, and again walk in the upright stride of our noble fathers, again live with the same value in castle and hut, and again see with eyes which were created to gaze skyward, awake for everything beautiful and great down here, and nonetheless intimate with deep yearning and filled with the splendour of eternity.
The great Norwegian poet Henrik Ibsen wrote to his friend, the Schleswig-Holstein writer Strodtmann, about the inner bound of Scandinavia with the newly arisen German Reich:
“I view Scandinavian humanity only as an intermediate stage toward a union of the entire, great Germanic tribe.”
“If I thought that we would, after all, stand still with an isolated Scandinavian society, then I would never again put my pen to ink to promote this thing.”
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