The Coming of the Third Reich (11 page)

Both antisemitism and racial hygiene were to be key components of Nazi ideology. They were both part of a general secularization of thought in the late nineteenth century, aspects of a far wider rebellion against what increasing numbers of writers and thinkers were coming to see as the stolid and stultifying complacency of the liberal, bourgeois attitudes that had dominated Germany in the middle part of the century. The self-satisfaction of so many educated and middle-class Germans at the achievement of nationhood in the 1870s was giving way to a variety of dissatisfactions born of a feeling that Germany’s spiritual and political development had come to a halt and needed pushing forward again. These were expressed forcefully by the sociologist Max Weber’s inaugural lecture, in which he dubbed the unification of 1871 a ‘youthful prank’ of the German nation.
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The most influential prophet of such views was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who railed in powerful, punchy prose against the ethical conservatism of his day. In many ways he was a comparable figure to Wagner, whom he hugely admired for much of his life. Like Wagner, he was a complex figure whose work was capable of being interpreted in a wide variety of senses. His writings argued for the individual to be freed from the conventional moral restrictions of the time. They were commonly interpreted before 1914 as a call for personal emancipation. They had a strong influence on a variety of liberal and radical groups, including, for example, the feminist movement, where one of the most imaginative figures, Helene Stocker, penned numerous essays in sub-Nietzschean prose, declaring the master’s message to be that women should be free to develop their own sexuality outside marriage, with the aid of mechanical contraceptives and equal rights for illegitimate children.
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Yet others took a different lesson altogether from the writings of the great philosopher. Nietzsche was a vigorous opponent of antisemitism, he was deeply critical of the vulgar worship of power and success which had resulted (in his view) from the unification of Germany by military force in 1871, and his most famous concepts, such as the ‘will to power’ and the ‘superman’ were intended by him to apply only to the sphere of thought and ideas, not to politics or action. But the power of his prose allowed such phrases to be reduced all too easily to slogans, ripped from their philosophical context and applied in ways of which he would have greatly disapproved. His concept of an ideal human being, freed from moral constraints and triumphing through will-power over the weak, could be appropriated without too much difficulty by those who believed, as he did not, in the breeding of the human race according to racial and eugenic criteria. Central to such interpretations was the influence of his sister Elisabeth Förster, who vulgarized and popularized his ideas, emphasizing their brutal, elitist aspects, and made them palatable to extreme right-wing nationalists. Writers such as Ernst Bertram, Alfred Bäumler and Hans Günther reduced Nietzsche to a prophet of power, and his concept of the superman to a plea for the coming of a great German leader unfettered by moral constraints or Christian theology.
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Others, drawing on German anthropological studies of indigenous societies in New Guinea and other parts of the German colonial empire, took Nietzsche’s spiritual elitism a step further and called for the creation of a new society ruled by a band of brothers, an elite of vigorous young men who would rule the state rather like a medieval knightly brotherhood. In this deeply misogynistic view of the world, women would have no role to play except to breed the elite of the future, a belief shared in less radical ways by many of the eugenicists and racial hygienists. Academic . writers like Heinrich Schurtz propagated the ideology of the band of brothers through a variety of publications, but it had its greatest effect in areas such as the youth movement, in which young, mostly middle-class men devoted themselves to hiking, communing with nature, singing nationalist songs around camp fires and pouring scorn on the staid politics, hypocritical morality and social artificiality of the adult world. Writers such as Hans Blüher, strongly influenced by the youth movement, went to even greater extremes in their plea for the state to be reorganized along anti-democratic lines and led by a close-knit group of heroic men united by homoerotic ties of love and affection. Advocates of such ideas already began to found pseudo-monastic, conspiratorial organizations before the First World War, notably the Germanic Order, established in 1912. In the world of such tiny secular sects, ‘Aryan’ symbolism and ritual played a central role, as their members reclaimed runes and sun-worship as essential signs of Germanness, and adopted the Indian symbol of the swastika as an ‘Aryan’ device, under the influence of the Munich poet Alfred Schuler and the race theorist Lanz von Liebenfels, who flew a swastika flag from his castle in Austria in 1907. Strange though ideas like these were, their influence on many young middle-class men who passed through the youth movement organizations before the First World War should not be underestimated. If nothing else, they contributed to a widespread revolt against bourgeois convention in the generation born in the 1890s and 1900s.
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What such currents of thought emphasized was in sharp contrast to the bourgeois virtues of sobriety and self-restraint, and diametrically opposite to the principles on which liberal nationalism rested, such as freedom of thought, representative government, tolerance for the opinions of others and the fundamental rights of the individual. The great majority of Germans still most probably believed in these things at the turn of the century. Certainly Germany’s most popular political party, the Social Democrats, regarded itself as the guardian of the principles which the German liberals, in their view, had so signally failed to defend. The liberals themselves were still very much a force to be reckoned with, and there were even signs of a modest liberal revival in the last years of peace before 1914.
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But already by this time, serious attempts had begun to weld together some of the ideas of extreme nationalism, antisemitism and the revolt against convention into a new synthesis, and to give it organizational shape. The political maelstrom of radical ideologies out of which Nazism would eventually emerge was already swirling powerfully well before the First World War.
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THE SPIRIT OF 1914

I

Across the border, in German-speaking Austria, another version of radical antisemitism was provided by Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the son of a railway engineer who had been given a title of nobility by the Habsburg Emperor as a reward for his services to the state. The year after its defeat by Prussia in 1866, the Habsburg monarchy had restructured itself into two equal halves, Austria and Hungary, bound together by the person of the Emperor, Franz Josef, and his central administration in Vienna. That administration was staffed overwhelmingly by German-speakers, and the six million or so Austrian Germans reconciled themselves to their expulsion from the German Confederation by identifying strongly with the Habsburgs and regarding themselves as the Empire’s ruling group. But Schönerer was not satisfied with this. ‘If only we belonged to the German Empire!’ he exclaimed in the Austrian Parliament in 1878. A radical, improving landlord, Schönerer was a proponent of universal manhood suffrage, the complete secularization of education, the nationalization of the railways—a reflection, perhaps, of his father’s occupation - and state support for small farmers and artisans. He regarded the Hungarians and the other nationalities in the Habsburg monarchy as brakes on the progress of the Germans, who would, he thought, do far better economically and socially in a union with the German Reich.
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As time went on, Schönerer’s belief in German racial superiority became allied to an increasingly intense form of antisemitism. He augmented his eleven-point German-nationalist Linz Programme of 1879 with a twelfth point in 1885, demanding ‘the removal of Jewish influence from all sections of public life’ as a precondition for the reforms he wanted to achieve. Schönerer’s presence in the Austrian Parliament allowed him to campaign against the influence of Jews in, for example, railway companies, and gave him immunity from prosecution when he used extravagant language to condemn them. He founded a series of organizations to propagate his views, and one of them, the Pan-German Association, succeeded in getting twenty-one deputies elected to the Parliament in 1901. It soon broke up amid bitter personal quarrels among the leadership. But its example spawned other antisemitic organizations as well. Its constant harping upon the supposedly evil influence of the Jews made it easier for a cynical communal politician such as the Christian-Social conservative Karl Lueger to use antisemitic demagogy to win enough support to install him as Mayor of Vienna on behalf of the rising right-wing Christian Social Party in 1897. Lueger held this post for the next decade, stamping his influence indelibly on the city through a mixture of rabble-rousing populism and imaginative, socially progressive municipal reform.
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Schönerer never enjoyed this kind of popular support. But where Lueger’s antisemitism, though influential, was essentially opportunistic—‘I decide who’s a Yid’, he once famously said, when criticized for dining with influential Jews in Vienna - Schönerer’s was visceral and unyielding. He proclaimed antisemitism, indeed, ‘the greatest achievement of the century’.
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As time went on, his ideas became even more extreme. Describing himself as a pagan, Schönerer spearheaded an anti-Catholic movement under the slogan ‘away from Rome’, and coined the pseudo-medieval greeting ‘hail!’—
Heil!
—using it in Parliament, to the general outrage of the deputies, in 1902, when he ended a speech by declaring his allegiance to the German rather than the Austrian royal family - ‘Up with and hail to the Hohenzollerns!’ Schonerer’s followers called him ‘the Leader’ (
Führer
), another term which his movement probably introduced into the political vocabulary of the far right. He proposed to rename annual festivals and the months of the year by Germanic titles such as ‘Yulefest’ (Christmas) and ‘Haymoon’ (June). Even more eccentric was his proposal for a new calendar dating from the defeat of a Roman army by the Germanic Cimbri at the battle of Noreia in 118 BC. Schönerer actually held a (not very successful) festival to inaugurate the new millennium with the year 2001 n.N. (the initials standing for
nach Noreia,
‘after Noreia’).
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Schönerer was an uncompromising racial antisemite. ‘Religion’s all the same, it’s race that is to blame’, was one of his typically catchy slogans. His extremism got him into trouble with the authorities on more than one occasion, notably in 1888, when a false newspaper report of the death of Kaiser Wilhelm I caused him to storm into the guilty newspaper’s offices and physically attack members of its staff. After he had publicly toasted Wilhelm as ‘our glorious Emperor’, the outraged Habsburg Emperor, Franz Josef, deprived him of his noble title, while the Parliament waived his immunity so that he could serve a four-month term in gaol. This did not prevent him from declaring after his release that ‘he longed for the day when a German army would march into Austria and destroy it’. Such extremism meant that Schönerer never really left the fringes of politics. In 1907, indeed, he failed to secure re-election to the Austrian Parliament and the number of deputies who followed his line dwindled to three. Schönerer was perhaps more interested in spreading ideas than in winning power. But in this guise, he was to have a considerable influence on Nazism later on.
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Antisemitism in Austria was far from being a separate phenomenon from its German counterpart. The common language and common culture with Germany, and the fact that Austria had been part of the ‘Holy Roman Reich of the German Nation’ for over a thousand years, and then of the German Confederation until its rude expulsion by Bismarck in 1866, meant that intellectual and political influences crossed the border without too much difficulty. Schönerer, for example, was a self-confessed disciple of the German antisemite Eugen Dühring. Citizens of the German Reich, particularly in the Catholic south, who looked to Vienna for inspiration, could not help but notice Lueger’s combination of social reform, Catholic allegiance and antisemitic rhetoric. Schönerer’s racial definition of the Jews, his cult of the ‘Aryan’ myth, his avowed paganism and distaste for Christianity, his belief in the superiority of the Germans and his contempt for other races, especially the Slavs, were in part shared by the more extreme antisemites within the German Empire. None of his ideas could be seen as alien; they were essentially part of the same extremist current of thought. Schönerer’s Pan-Germanism doomed him to failure while the Habsburg monarchy continued to exist. But if it should ever fall, then its German-speaking minorities would be confronted in an acute form with the question of whether they wanted to join the German Reich or form a separate state on their own. In this eventuality, Pan-Germanism would come into its own.

II

In the German Reich itself, the accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1888 quickly led to a serious weakening of Bismarck’s position as Reich Chancellor. When the two differed over the renewal or the lapsing of the Anti-Socialist Law, with its manifold restrictions on civil liberties, Bismarck was forced to resign. The lapsing of the law gave rise to a whole range of new social and political movements in all parts of the political spectrum. New, colourful figures appeared on the political scene, contrasting with the drabness of Bismarck’s immediate successors as Chancellor, Caprivi and Hohenlohe. Among them was one at least who attracted admiration as precisely the kind of hero the German nationalists were looking for. Carl Peters was a classic colonial adventurer of the late nineteenth century, whose exploits quickly became the stuff of legend. When Bismarck reluctantly acquired nominal German colonies in 1884, Peters set out to turn his paper conquests into real ones. On reaching the East African coast, he organized an expedition and departed for the interior, where he concluded a number of treaties with indigenous rulers. Characteristically, he had neglected to consult the German government about this, and Bismarck repudiated the treaties when he heard about them. Peters got into further trouble when it was revealed that he had not only been maltreating his bearers but had also had sexual relations with African women. Reports of his misdemeanours shocked bourgeois opinion. But this did not deter Peters from pursuing his quest to found a great German Empire in Africa.
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