Some Occult Connections in Weimar Germany
The wretched material conditions in Germany at this time fostered a number of apocalyptic cults. Visionary nationalism embraced all occultisms and numerous new groups sprang up, like Ariosophy (Order of the New Templars) invented by Jorg Lanz Von Lebenfels, or the Thule Bund of Theodore Fritsch. Guido Von List tried to launch as esoteric Ario-German religion.
Others created movements which focussed on the idea of the pure people or volk, and incorporated Aryan Theosophy, Astro-Archaeology, Theosophy and the Neo-Catholic Rosicrucianism of Peledan, or the French Hermeticism of Papus. The artist and illustrator Hugo Hoppner who took the pseudonym The Master Fidus was well known for numerous semi-theosophical drawings capturing the spirit of these disparate visionaries. Other leaders of semi-nationalist occult movements were Julius Langbehn, Franz Hartmann, Dietrich Eckart (enemy of Rudolf Steiner), Rudolf Von Sebottendorf, Helen Bohian and Willibald Hertschel leader of the Artamanen Bund.
It is easy to see these volkisch-occultist movements as the breeding ground of Nazism – but that is far too simplistic, even if, for instance, the Munich Cosmics adopted the swastika as their insignia. Indeed, much has been written identifying the Nazi movement as a real satanic force. Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny (1972), for instance, is well known example which purported to explore ‘the Satanic and supernatural development and faculties of Hitler’, charting the relevance of Grail lore and other Germanic legends to the Nazi ethos.
It is certainly true that some elements of National Socialist ideology can be correlated with these visionary nationalist doctrines; the idea of The Third Reich itself, for instance. It has also been asserted that the best way to understand Hitler and other fascist leaders, like Codreanu of Rumania who founded the Legion of the Archangel Michael (1930), is to interpret their actions in the context of an age-old European tradition of salvationism. This kind of fascism was driven by millenarian fanaticism and activist martyrdom recycled as a sort of collectivist myth for the age of the machine and ‘mass mobilization’. After the takeover in 1933 the Nazis liquidated almost all occult groups, and imposed what was in essence a new form of militarism; a more militant form of culture war.
Not only were they against any social deviance as represented by occultism, they were also pathologically opposed to modern art. In 1934 Hitler said: ‘The artistic cultural stuttering of Cubists, Futurists and Dadaists… be increasingly sharp in rejecting it.’
The Nazis imposed their own aesthetic of Aryan Realism and purged all modernism from Germany. Expressionism, Constructivism and Surrealism were condemned as Kunstbolschewismus as was Jazz and Serialism in music.
Modern art was pilloried in a travelling exhibition of Degenerate Art (1937) and there was similar exhibition of Degenerate Music in Dusseldorf in 1938. For Hitler, as for Stalin, all avant-garde art was ‘cosmopolitan’, degenerate or decadent. For Stalin every experimental artwork was ‘fascist’ or ‘formalist’ – a reactionary era of persecution had begun.
No doubt the Radical Right derived some elements of its ideology from the immediate cultural climate which allowed for the assimilation of mythology of apocalypse and the appropriation of the apparatus of ‘degeneracy’ and ‘decadence’ by the propaganda machine.
In the Weimar period paramilitary associations were a potent force. Veterens’ groups and militarist organizations like the Stahlhelm (Bund der Frontsoldaten), Jungdeutscher Ordern, Reichsbanner, the Freikorps and they were not only conduits for Volkisch nationalist fantasies and anti-semitism, they also introduced a lethal new element into the political arena. These groups helped create a ‘new militarism’ and a ‘new nationalism’ which perpetuated ideas of historic rebirth or apocalyptic renewal. Cultural pessimism and doctrines of degeneracy as incorporated into Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) or Nordau’s Entartung or Mario Praz’s Romantic Agony (1933) all helped foster the view, prevalent in the fin-de-siecle, that people were witnessing the Decline of the Occident. Among the ranks of the paramilitaries there were those, whose experience of Total War indicated to them that the new era had actually arrived. For them the world of Pre-1914 old style, Prussian aristocratic militarism was ‘decadent’ in literal, objective sense and further more had actually collapsed in a holocaust. These ultra-right neo-conservative visionaries saw themselves as the heralds of The New Order and to them all modern art was depraved and in itself a symptom of the collapse of all pre-war cultural values. These New Miltarists were ‘the men of the trenches’, forged into a league of activists born from the passage rite of a descent into Hell; the Hell of Ypres and other nameless battlefields. Their new state – the Frontsoldenstaat (State of the Front Soldiers) would supersede the old order.
The idea that modern art itself was a symptom of irreversible decline was after all a logical outcome of one strand of the fin-de-siecle tendency. If decadence means the decay of language and the collapse of all semiological normality direct action must be the next step.
For the writer Ernst Junger, a Shock Troop Commander, the experience of the Front was an initiation ordeal into a new plane of being. The search for ‘meaning’ becomes a new perspective on suffering and sacrifice, The ‘community of the trenches’ (Schutzengrabengemeinschaft) becomes the new model of society. The idea of ‘total mobilization’ becomes a new form of dynamic social organization. There is a nihilistic aestheticism in the ‘storm’ of modern war, which is a spiritual experience inaccessible to the civilian population.
Junger expressed these ideas in his books In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel) (1920), Die Totale Mobilmachung (Total Mobilization) (1931) and Der Arbeiter (The Worker) (1932). In his later work On the Marble Cliffs (1939) he, perhaps, changed his view in the wake of the Nazi reality But, as critic George Steiner has observed, his ‘haughty, vindictive despair’ and his dandyism of the condottiere (which fuses asceticism and courage-in-battle with elitism and nationalistic mystique) were still fractured reflections of the fin-de-siecle. Steiner detects influences of Huysmans, Leon Bloy and Octave Mirbeau and the Symbolist-Hermetic theory of the ‘alchemy of the word’ in Junger’s fascination for the ‘logic of creation’. His characters in On the Marble Cliffs inhabit a hermetic universe and are committed to uncover that ‘hidden unity’ which, as Steiner says, is
…the secret to which all magic, trance, alchemy and cabala direct their seemingly disparate but ultimately conjoined striving.
For Steiner, Junger attempted to force language into the ‘mould of total war’, but for Junger himself the experience of total war was a time when he experienced ‘the collapse of an age which was already lost’ – in ‘lethally sparkling mirrors….’
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A C EVANS
Illustration: Naked Singularity (Lethally Sparkling Mirrors)
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