Nationalism and Culture (58 page)

Inspired adherents of nordification a few years ago called to life a special movement for the advocacy of the so-called "Midgard marriage" whose sponsors proposed the founding and financing of special settlements where Nordic men and women selected for this purpose should, in loving collaboration, devote themselves to the exalted task of preventing the decline of the noble race. There were to be ten women for every man. The marriage was to be regarded as a sort of bond of pregnancy which was to last only till the birth of the child, unless both the mates expressed a wish to prolong the union. In his book, Weltanschauung und Men-schenzuchtung, Health Commissioner F. Dupre advocated a so-called "temporary marriage" which was to serve merely for breeding purposes. A state-appointed "Council of Elders" was to supervise these matters. "The couple must be brought together purely for the purpose of propagation," declares this curious elaboration. "When this has been accomplished they are to separate. . . . The expenses of this breeding are to be borne by the state." Very much like Hentschel, the inventor of the "Midgard marriage," Herr Walther Darre, later Germany's National Socialistic Minister of Nutrition, sets to work, in his book, Neu-Adel aus Blu( und

Boden ("A New Nobility from the Blood and the Soil"), for the breeding of a new nobility on special Hegehofen ("breeding farms"). Herr Darre wishes to bring the propagation of the nation under constant supervision by establishing "breed-wardens." For this purpose special "herd-books" and "family records" are to be prepared for all women. All virgins are to be divided into four classes to whom on the basis of special "breeding laws" marriage is to be permitted or denied according to their racial characteristics and fitness for childbearing. On March 12, 1930, the National Socialists introduced in the Reichstag the following addition to Article 218 of the Criminal Code:

Whoever undertakes artificially to restrict the natural fertility of the German people to the injury of the nation, or by word, writing, print, picture, or in any other way to assist such attempts, or whoever by mating with members of the Jewish blood-community or of the colored races contributes or threatens to contribute to the corruption and disintegration of the German people shall be punished by imprisonment for racial treason.

On December 31, 1931, the national administration of Hitler's Storm Troopers issued a decree that after January i, 1932, a marriage license should be issued to every Storm Trooper by a so-called "Race-ofiice." This curious document, which pleads for the "preservation by hygienic heredity of a distinct German-Nordic species," and makes reference to a "book of kinship of the S. S.," gave us the first foretaste of the glories of the Third Reich. It is characteristic that the same crowd which peddles its "German idealism" so insistently and with such profound moral enthusiasm combats the "materialistic debasement" of Germany, values sexual relations purely from the viewpoint of the breeder and would reduce the love-life of men to the level of the breeding stall and the stud-farm. After the "rationalization of industry," the rationalization of sexual intercourse—what a future!

But all the talk about nordification is entirely worthless because all the conditions for such a process are lacking. Even if the race were not a mere idea, but an actual living unity whose characteristics were transmitted to their progeny in their entirety, still such a project could not be undertaken. A farmer may be in a position to breed his oxen, cows or swine for the production of meat, milk or fat, but to breed human beings for definite moral and intellectual characteristics is quite another matter. All experiments which have so far been made on plants and animals have shown that a race never enters a mixture as a whole. So long as human beings with like or with very similar racial characteristics keep to themselves and propagate only within their own circle their peculiar characters reappear more or less conjoined and in like relations. When, however, mixture with other racial elements occur, then race is not inherited as a

compact unity, but each separate character by itself or in separate constellations. Therefore, not only may both pure and mixed characters occur in the offspring j there exists for each of them the possibility of every conceivable combination of the parental hereditary primordia.

There are no longer any pure races, least of all in Europe. The so-called "fundamental races" of Europe are today so thoroughly jumbled together that racially pure peoples are simply not to be found. This holds true especially for Germany, which because of its. geographical situation in the heart of the continent seems to have been made for a highway for tribes and peoples. At the time of the migration of peoples Nordic tribes left the old homeland in troops and moved towards the south, where the Nordic blood gradually fused with that of the indigenous "race-alien." Slavic tribes, which invaded the land from the east, took possession of the half-emptied territories and spread in the north as far as the Elbe and in the south as far as the Regnitz. Up to the middle of the eleventh century the Thuringian Forest was called the Slavenwald, and one can recognize in the appearance of the population there the strong influence of Slavic blood even today. The ancient population of Germany was completely recast by these continued intermixtures of blood. The Germans have long ceased to correspond to the description that Tacitus once wrote of the Germanic people. Not only have the physical characteristics altered, the mental and spiritual characters, too, have undergone a profound change. Among the sixty millions which today inhabit Germany there is probably hardly one person whom one could describe as a pure Nordic. It is, therefore, one of the strangest delusions that men have ever harbored that out of this variegated mixture there can be redistilled one of the old "basic races." One must, in fact, be a race-theoretician to be able to think such things. The whole nordification Utopia is as Brunhold Springer cleverly remarks—"not an undertaking, but an Old-German community play." 11

It is the extremes which mutually attract one another, especially in the love of the sexes. The blond will always be more drawn to the brunette than to one of his own type. It is the strange that charms and allures and sets the blood astir. The very fact that there are no pure races and that all peoples are mixtures proves that the voice of nature is stronger than that of race or of blood. Even the strictest castes of India were not able to preserve their racial purity. The "Nordic man" of Giinther and his followers is a purely imaginary picture. The belief in a race which unites in itself every feature of physical beauty along with the most exalted qualities of mind and spirit is a wonder-faith, a dream notion, which corresponds to nothing in the past or the future.

If the Nordic race were in fact the miraculous entity from which every

^^ Brunhold Springer, Die Blutmischung ah Grundgesetz des Lebens. Berlin.

human culture has proceeded, how came it that in its Nordic homeland it was unable to bring forth any culture worth mentioning? Why did its "inborn culture-making capacity" unfold only in distant zones and far from its native soil? Why must we go to Greece and Rome to find a Sophocles, a Praxiteles, a Pericles, a Demosthenes, an Alexander, an Augustus, a hundred others, who are honored by the Giinthers, Woltmanns and Hausers as representatives of the Nordic race? The fact is, alas, that the Nordic man revealed his celebrated culture-building powers only in another environment and in association with foreign peoples. For the "proud Viking voyages" with which the books on race are all ablaze could hardly be described as cultural activities. On the contrary, they all too frequently threatened culture and laid waste valuable elements of it, as the robber-raids of Goths, Vandals, Normans and other Germanic tribes show clearly enough.

All modern race theorists are, however, agreed that the capacity for state-making was the most important characteristic of Nordic man, which destined him alone to be the leader and guide of peoples and nations. If this is true, how is it that Nordic man in those very Nordic lands never set up a great kingdom, like, for example, that of Alexander, the Roman Caesars, or Genghis Khan, but always stayed shut up in little communities? It really seems rather odd that this crowd which has so much to say about the state-building genius of the blond Nordic, in the same breath bewails the eternal disunion of the Germanic tribes as one of the most lamentable manifestations of their character and warns the present-day Germans of the fatal consequences of this bad habit of their forebears. Such a state of affairs is surely hard to reconcile with the capacity to weld together great kingdoms and nations j a fact—we may remark in passing—that is no great misfortune. The impulse of the Germanic tribes to split up, which is quite proverbial, goes very poorly, in fact, with their alleged capacity for state-building. The blond Nordic acquired this only in foreign parts when the power-concepts of the Roman Empire came to him as a new revelation—and a catastrophe.

We do not mean to deny to "Nordic man" cultural capacity or other valuable characters. Nothing is farther from our intent than to fall into the opposite error from that of the race ideologists. But we guard ourselves with all modesty against the immeasurable arrogance of those persons who dare to deny to other races not only all deep feeling for culture but every idea of honor and fidelity. In the end, all the talk about the "race soul" is nothing but an idle playing with imaginary ideas. The method which brings all human groups mentally and spiritually under a single norm is a monstrosity which can but lead to the most perniciously erroneous conclusions. It is not to be disputed that men who have reproduced for centuries in the same territory and under the influence of the

same natural and social environment have certain outer and inner characters in common. These resemblances are more manifest between members of the same family than in a tribe or a people j and yet what immeasurable contrasts of character one finds when one goes deeper into the mental and spiritual make-up of the individual members of a family. In general the so-called "collective character" of a people, a nation or a race expresses merely the personal views of individuals which are taken up by others and thoughtlessly repeated.

What, for instance, are we to think when Gunther in his Rassenkunde des jiidischen Volkes has this to say about the so-called "Oriental race"? "This race came out of the desert and their mental attitude inclines them to allow formerly cultivated lands to become desert again." This is empty prattle based on nothing at all. In the first place, we lack any historical evidence that this race in fact came out of the desert j and in the next place, who is to produce proof that in the members of this race there really resides the instinct to "let cultivated lands become desert again"? But Gunther needed this construction of history to convince his readers of the utter worthlessness of the Jews. Yet, in Palestine, the Jews were an agricultural peoplej their whole legislation was built around this fact. The Arabs changed Spain into a garden of which great portions became desert again after the expulsion of the Moors.

Fear of the Jews has developed among the advocates of the race theory into a genuine race panic. It is admitted, of course, even in those circles, that actually no such thing as a Jewish race exists, and that the Jews, like all other peoples, are a mixture of every possible racial element. Modern race theoreticians go so far as to assert that along with Levantine, Oriental, Hamitic and Mongolian blood, even a drop or two of Nordic blood flows in the veins of Jews! Nevertheless, it seems that of all races the Jewish has the worst inheritance. There is hardly any evil quality that hostile imagination has not attributed to the Jew. He was the real inventor of socialism, and at the same time he let capitalism loose in the world. He has infected all countries with his liberal ideas and loosened all bonds of authority; still, his religion is a creed of strictest authority, a cult of the utmost despotism. He caused the War and invoked the revolution. He seems to have just the one secret purpose of hatching out subtle conspiracies against the noble Nordic man. We are assured that mixture of blood destroys the original characteristics of a race and diverts the course of its mental and spiritual tendencies. How comes it, then, that so highl)' mixed a race as the Jews have for two thousand years been able to preserve their religious system in spite of the horrible persecutions they have endured because of it? Must one not infer from this that there are in history other factors than hereditary racial characteristics? And how comes it that the Jews could poison the whole world with their "modern-

istic spirit" if the ideas of man are only the outcome of hereditary factors inherent in his blood? Must we not conclude from this either that the Jew is much more closely akin to us by blood than our race ideologists are willing to admit or that the blood-determined hereditary characteristics are too weak to withstand foreign ideas?

But the attacks of modern race doctrine are not directed solely against the Jews J in even greater force they are massed against a section of their own people, against the offspring of the so-called "Alpine race" which Giinther rebaptized "Eastern." When Gunther, Hauser, Clauss and their associates speak of the Eastern peoples they become downright malicious. That the Eastern race settled in the very heart of Europe is, according to Gunther, a great misfortune, for with its "impure blood" it constantly threatens the exalted Nordic, whose mixture with this "talentless," "uncreative" race leads only to ruin. The Eastern is the exact opposite of the Nordic man. If in the latter the "spirit of the commander" finds its most distinguished expression, in the former lives only the "sullen soul" of the pikeman capable of no great campaign. The Eastern is the "born pacifist," the "mass man" j hence his preference for democracy, which grows out of his need to pull down everything superior to himself. He has no heroic traits and no feeling at all for the greatness of the fatherland and the nation. The Easterns are the "men of Jean Paul, already plentiful enough, in fact, far too plentiful, in Germany." They make good subjects, but they can never be leaders; only the Nordic man is a predestined leader (see Hitler and Goebbels). But that is not all.