Read Nationalism and Culture Online
Authors: Rudolf Rocker
Tags: #General, #History, #Sociology, #Social Science, #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Culture, #Multicultural Education, #Nationalism and nationality, #Education, #Nationalism, #Nationalism & Patriotism
Nationalism and Culture (59 page)
"Sexual intercourse among near relatives, also between brothers and sisters and parents and children, is, I am assured by country doctors, said not to be unusual in those districts settled by Easterns. The Eastern mind, perhaps because of its origin, is not acquainted with the idea of incest." ^^
Otto Hauser has the worst things to say about Eastern man, of whom he presents the following charming picture:
He will do anything for money. He would unhesitatingly sell his honor if he had any. He is the born democrat and capitalist. . . . The Eastern man is more lascivious than the pure races or than the other mixed races. He makes men and women dance naked on the stage or wrestle with one another. He loves to read about perversions and practices them when he can afford it. He enslaves woman and is enslaved by her. He advocates individualism in the sense that everyone is to do what he pleases, violate girls and young boys, employ any means in social, mental, or political contests. And though it is contrary to all rules of sportsmanship to grasp an opponent by the genitals, he, who advocates in general the freeing of all desire, likes to make use of the practice when he wants to drag down to his own level
^^ L. F, Clauss, Rassc und SeeU, p. 118.
those inconvenient geniuses whom he, the devoid of genius, cannot beat in fair fight.^^
In another place in his works Hauser tells his readers:
The Eastern is vulgar in his sexuality. One cannot be with him half an hour before he begins telling not merely indecent stories, but his own sex experiences and possibly even those of his wife; and the women entertain the listeners with accounts of their menstrual difficulties. His brats bedaub the walls with vulvas and phalluses and make dates for sexual intercourse at public comfort-stations.
One can hardly trust one's eyes when one reads such stuff. The first impression is that one is dealing with a diseased mind, for this joyous wallowing in the imagined sexuality of another surely springs from a perverted disposition and a morbid imagination incapable of healthy perceptions. Let us be clear about the monstrousness of these accusations which are published thus to the whole world. They throw this filth at a whole body of human beings, numbering millions in their own countries, and ascribe to them alleged "character traits" which really spring only from their own diseased and unclean imagination. This sort of "demonstration" is characteristic of the methods of the present-day race ideologists j it also is typical of the mental degradation of the men who do not hesitate even to draw on the secrets of the comfort-station in order to hang something on the "racial enemy" and so to satisfy their own dirty instincts. And this poison has been poured into the country for years by countless books, pamphlets and newspaper articles. Let no one be surprised if this sowing of dragon's teeth shall some day germinate. For the absurdity of the present-day nationalistic movement in Germany is just this: that it rests on the race theory and that its advocates in their blindness fail to see that they are destroying with their own hands the strongest bulwark of the nation, the inbred feeling of national cohesion.
If one is not sufficiently deluded to be able thus to insult the members of his own nation, he can easily see how this race fatalism must operate against other peoples. Out of the shortsighted belief in the divinely ordained superiority of the noble race follows logically the belief in its "historical mission." Race becomes a question of destiny, a dream of the renewal of the world by the conscious will of Germankind. And since one cannot admit that all peoples will view the approaching destiny from just the same angle of vision, war becomes the only solution. Experience has shown us where that leads. The belief that "In Germankind the world once more its weal will find" (Am deutschen Wesen e'lnmal noch die Welt genesen) rouses in just those classes which had the greatest influence on
" Rasse und Kultur. Braunschweig, p. 69.
the fate of Germany the conviction of the inevitability of the "German war," of which they talked so much in Chamberlain's circle. In a widely circulated work in which war is hailed as "midwife of all culture" Othmar Spann declares: "We must desire this war just to prove that all its burden will rest on us, that we alone must fight it out with all the power that the lordly Germanic race has manifested throughout the millennia." ^* -
This spirit was cherished through the decades and gradually reared to that fatalistic delusion which views all history under the aspect of race. Spann was not the only one who played with the race war of the future. At the conference of the All-deutscher Verband ("All-German Union") of November 30, 1912, the question of the coming war held the most prominent place. There was talk of the "decisive struggle between the collective Slavic peoples and Germankind" by Baron von Stossel and others J and Dr. Reuter-Hamburg declared that it "is our chief task to inform the people about the real grounds of the war which is probably coming," which is to be regarded only as a "battle of united Slavism against Germanism." When the German administration brought in its new safety proposals in April, 1913, Bethmann-Holweg based the new provisions on the necessity of preparing for the threatened clash between Slavs and Germans. Although the groupings of the powers at the beginning of war must prove to every person of insight that there could be no talk here of a "war of the races," there were still not lacking those who saw in the frightful catastrophe only the inevitable impact of races. Even so widely known a historiographer as Karl Lamprecht published in the Berliner Tagehlatt of August 23, 1914, an essay in which he spoke of a "war of Germandom and Latin [Catholic] Slavdom against the invading Oriental barbarism."
Lamprecht discovered then that Scandinavia, Holland, Switzerland, and America had been led by racial feeling to favor the German cause, and he announced jubilantly "Blood will tell!" The illusion of having America as an ally even led him to proclaim the living future of a "Teutonic-Germanic race!" And since very finally England did not fit into this scheme, the great historian emphasizes: "Just observe that the central land of the British world-empire is no longer dominated by a pure Germanic spirit, but rather by the Celtic." ^^
If the race theory can produce such incurable delusion in the brain of a scholar of worldwide renown, need we wonder at the crazy presumption of an economist like Sombart, who at that day of the world could announce: "Just as the German bird, the Eagle, soars high above all other animals on earth, just so shall the German feel himself exalted above all that
^* Zur Soziologie und Philosofhie des Krieges, 1913. ^^ F. Hertz: Rasse und Kultur.
mankind which surrounds him and which he sees at an infinite distance beneath him." ^^
We do not maintain that only the German is capable of such deluded notions. Every belief in a chosen religion, nation or race leads to similar monstrosities. But we must recognize that among no other people has the race theory found such wide acceptance or inspired a literature of such general circulation as among the Germans. It seems almost as if the Germany of 1871 had wished to make up for what its greatest spirits before the foundation of the empire, because of their broadly humanistic attitude, had fortunately omitted.
The exponents of race doctrine find themselves in the enviable position that they can venture the most extravagant assertions with no need to trouble themselves about intelligible proofs. Since they themselves know that most of these assertions cannot be maintained on the basis of their scientific value, they appeal to the infallibility of the race instinct, which allegedly gives clearer insight than is vouchsafed to the painstaking experience of scientific research. If this famous instinct of race were real and demonstrable to everybody it would get along very nicely with science, since the "inner voice" or "race in one's own bosom" would bring certainty to men on every difficult question, even when science failed. But in that event we should expect at least the most distinguished advocates of the race theory to be in complete agreement and to voice a certain unanim.ity in their conclusions. But here is just the trouble. There is hardly a single question of fundamental importance about which those in the camp of the race ideologists are even halfway agreed. Often their views are so far apart that no bridging of the difference is conceivable. Just a few instances of this from the thousands:
In his work, Rasse und Kullur, Otto Hauser informs us that the Greeks "were a strictly blond people who, quite of themselves, attained to a height of culture that will always arouse admiration, will always serve as a model as long as the related Nordic blood flows in any people, in any human being." Woltmann, Giinther, and others have said the same thing in other words—basing their opinion, doubtless, on the same "Nordic instinct" which permeates the related blood through the millennia. But Gobineau, the real founder of the race theory, found nothing good to say of the Greeks j rather he constantly disparaged them in every way, because of his ingrained hatred of democracy. In his i,2C»page Histoire des Parses he praises the culture of the Persians in exaggerated terms and pictures Greece as a half-barbaric country with no culture of its own worth mentioning. Gobineau even denies to the Hellenes ever>' moral quality
^* Werner Sombart, Handler und Heldcn, Patriotische Besinnungen. Munich, 1915, p. 143.
and declares that they had no understanding of the sentiment of honor— as we see, the purest "Oriental."
For Chamberlain, Christianity is the highest expression of the Aryan spirit J in the Christian faith the Germanic soul reveals itself in its true profundity and divorces itself most definitely from every Semitic religious concept. For Judaism is the complete antithesis of the Christian religion j any philosophic synthesis of the Jewish and the Germanic mind, even in religion, is quite unthinkable. On the other hand, Albrecht Wirth sees in Christianity a product of the Jewish-Hellenic mind, which undertook, as the "despised Jew fled from the misery of the outer world, to erect about it a higher inner world." ^'^ While Eugen Diihring condemns Christianity utterly because by its influence the Judaizing of the Aryan mind was accomplished.^* Ludwig Neuner accuses the Frankish kings of having stolen from our ancestors and utterly destroyed "the ancient, indigenous faith that sprang from a childlike view of nature" and forcing on them instead "a harsh system of religion of outspokenly international character." ^® Then Erich Mahlmeister assures us, in his essay. Fur deutsche Geistesjreiheit: "Christianity is of an unmanly, slavish nature, directly opposed to the German nature." On the person of Christ he passes judgment thus: "The outcast traitor to his country of a hatred race is the God before whom the German is expected to bend his knee."
Gunther, Hauser, Clauss, see in Protestantism a spiritual movement of the Nordic race, and Lapouge, as well, sees in it "the attempt to adapt Christianity to the specific type of the Aryan race." Chamberlain, too, is a decided opponent of the Catholic church and refers in his Grundlagen to the Semitic origin of the Papacy. He sees in the latter the exact antithesis of the Germanic spirit, which recognizes no priestly caste and is emotionally opposed to a world hierarchy. For him, therefore, the Reformation is the revolt of Nordic man against the Semitic Caesarism of Rome and one of the greatest deeds of Germanism in general. Against this, Woltmann exalts the Papacy as the glorffication of Germanism and takes great pains to demonstrate the Germanic descent of most of the popes. He was especially impressed by that "child of the Goths," Hildebrandt, who sat on the papal throne as Gregory VII and was the real founder of the temporal power of the Papacy. Otto Hauser, however, explains this patent confusion of the Germanic spirit as follows: "It is characteristic of the power hunger of Nordic mail that he is able to employ all his force in every undertaking and unhesitatingly makes use of every means to an end. We know how extremely frivolous was the attitude of many of the
" Das Auf und Ab der Vblker. Leipzig, 1920, p. 84.
^® Die Judenfrage als Frage der Rassensch'ddlichkeit fiir Existenz, SiUe und Kultur der Volker. See also, Sache, Leben und Feinde. ^' Deutsche Gott-Natur-Kunde.
popes toward the Papacy and Christianity. So, while the Papacy was represented for a while by an almost uninterrupted line of Germans, it was nevertheless an un-German, un-Nordic idea." ^^
How are we to find our way in all this? What sort of strange thing is this "Nordic racial soul"? It glimmers with all the colors of a chameleon. It is popish and antipopish, Catholic and Protestant. The Voice of the Blood in it is opposed to the rulership of a privileged priestly caste and rejects the thought of a world hierarchy, but at the same time its representatives exert every effort to bring the world under the yoke of the Papacy, whose forms are derived from "the Oriental despotism of the Semites" j and the matter becomes still more interesting when we learn that Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, was a blond-haired descendant of Germans—as Woltmann and Hauser assert. Here, as in the case of Beethoven, it seems that a dirty trick was played on nature. Think of it: Loyola, a blond-haired, blue-eyed German, the warlike herald and acknowledged preacher of the counter-Reformation; and Martin Luther, the "soul of the German Reformation," a dark-haired man, of stocky figure, with brown eyes, who exhibits so plainly the outward characteristics of the "Eastern" that even Giinther, Hauser and Woltmann cannot deny this! That Gobineau in his work on race and elsewhere makes laudatory mention of the controlling hand of the Catholic church, and in his Otlar Jarl damns heartily every heresy against Holy Mother Church, does not tend to simplify the matter. And, as if all this were not enough, Hauser assures us that the Reformation was a "movement of the blood" and indicates the "displacing of the mixed-race spirit by the Nordic." -^ And he says this just after he has, a few pages farther back, drawn for us this picture of the men of the Reformation: "What was left of Germany had reached the lowest point of its cultural and racial ebb about 1500. The Germans were at that time usually so ugly that Durer and his forerunners and contemporaries in their realistic paintings are almost never able to present a beautiful, clear-cut, noble countenance, only features of a quite beastly repulsiveness; and even in their representations of the divine personages and saints from sacred history they were very seldom able to depict a halfway beautiful being because they had not even models to follow." But these men of the "racial ebb," after all, made the Reformation. How explain that this "movement of the blood" which displaced the "mixed-race spirit" occurred just at the time when, according to Hauser's own statement, Germany had reached the "lowest point of its cultural and racial ebb"?
Let one take any period whatever of human history and one stumbles always on these same contradictions. There is, for example, the great
^° Die Germanert in Euro pa ^ p. 112. -' Rasse und Kultur, p. 331.
French Revolution. It is mere matter of course that one finds among the exponents of the race theory no trace of understanding of the economic, political and social causes of that great European upheaval. Just as gypsies read the fate of a man in the lines in his hand, so the soothsayers of the race theory read from the portraits of the leading spirits of that storm-lashed time the whole story of the Revolution and its "blood-determined" causes. "We know that a man must of necessity behave as his appearance indicates, and that this law can manifest itself as well in the most primitive as well as in the most complicated and confused fullness of expression, that it must remain always and everywhere the timeless and unchanging law of the inheritance of life." ^^
This masterly exposition, which disposes of the most difficult question with which science has dealt for many decades as if it were the most matter of course affair in the world, is quite astounding. "We know!" Who knows? How do we know? Who established this "law" of which our author speaks? No one! No science! We are dealing here merely with an empty assertion that is not worth a bad penny. In fact, the author tried from the portraits of Louis XVI, Mirabeau, Madame Roland, Robespierre, Danton, Marat, to establish the inner law of their behavior and to infer it from the degree of their racial mixture. Unfortunately this deduction rests on no law but merely on imagination, which is neither "timeless" nor "unchanging." There may be men whose character is written on their forehead, but there are not many of themj for types like Karl and Franz Moor live only in works of fiction j in actual life one seldom meets them. No one is able to recognize the mental and moral characters of a man from his external features; the most expert physiognomists could hardly read the importance of any of the great personages of history from their faces. This ability is usually revealed only when one knows with whom he is dealing; and it would not have been so easy for the author of our selected work to pass judgment on persons like Mirabeau, Robespierre, Marat or Danton if these men had their historic roles still to play.
Gobineau saw in the great revolution only the revolt of "Celto-Romanic mongreldom" against the Germanic ruling class of the French nobility and damned the whole tremendous movement with the virulent hatred of the royalist, who on principle condemned every attempt to destroy the divinely ordained order. The revolution was for him the slave-revolt of men of baser race, whom he already despised because they were the exponents of those modern revolutionary and democratic ideas in Europe which had struck a death-blow at the ancient master caste. Chamberlain judged the revolution from a like point of view, since he, like Gobineau, saw in democracy and liberalism the deadly foe of the Germanic spirit. In contrast, Woltmann saw in the revolution a demonstration of that
^^ A. Harrar, Rasse Menschen von Gestern und Moi-gen. Leipzig, p. 86.
same Germanic spirit and in support of this view tried to prove that most of the leading minds of the revolution were of German origin. While for Gobineau the slogan of the revolution, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," was merely the utterance of a completely unleashed racial mixture, Hauser tells us: "The demand for liberty, equality and fraternity is genuinely Protestant, but it holds good only for the selection which Protestantism makes, only for groups like that." In another place in the same work he says: "The revolution begins as the work of Germans and Germanoids and on the basis of a Germanic ideaj it finds an echo in all those of higher racej but it ends in the witches' sabbath of the unshackled impulse of the baseborn mass, which has made use of the Germanic 'heavenly light' only *to be beastlier than any beast.' " ^^ Now does this mean that the Germanic descent of the French nobility of which Gobineau tells us was just an idle boast, or are we here dealing with an annihilating war of Germans against Germans, a sort of race-suicide?
That Marx and Lassalle were Jews by descent is, for men of the stamp of Philipp Stauff and Theodor Fritsch and their kind, the best proof that the socialist doctrine is based on the Jewish mentality and is alien to the racial feeling of Nordic man. That the enormous majority of the founders of socialism were non-Jews and that the socialist movement found quite as easy entrance into Germanic countries as into Romanic and Slavic has for these gentlemen just as little significance as the fact that Marx and Lassalle were influenced most deeply and permanently in their mental development, not by the ideology of Judaism, but by the philosophy of Hegel. As for the idea of socialism itself, Woltmann explains, that it has its most convinced adherents in the German sections of the proletarian population on account of their blood, because in the Germanic elements the urge to freedom finds strongest expression. Gobineau, on the contrary, recognizes in socialism a typical sign of Mongolism and the covetousness of the born slave, hence his outspoken contempt for the workers, to whom he denies any sustained cultural ambition. Driesmans designates the socialists as "Celto-Mongolians." Chamberlain scents in the socialistic movement everywhere the influence of Jewish ideology, which in this movement pursues its aim of utterly destroying the Germanic spirit in Germans. Diihring, however, declared categorically: "The Jewish social democracy is a reactionary gang whose state-enforced activities tend, not toward freedom and good husbandry, but toward the universality of bondage and exploitation through enforced service to the state in the interest of leading Jews and associations of Jews." "* And so that nothing might be lacking to this crazy pot-pourri, the "rough riders" of the race theory in Germany declared a holy war against Judaized Marxism and proclaimed a so-called
^^ Die Germanen in Europe, pp. 149-150. ^* Sache, Leben, und Feinde, p. 207.
"national socialism" that probably presents the most gruesome enlivening of capitalistic platitudes with worn-out socialistic slogans that was ever thought of. Under this banner, and with the lovely motto, "Germany, awake! Judah, perish!" they made their way into the Dritte Reich.
But crazier still was the picture when the advocates of the race theory set themselves to subject to the Nordic blood-test the great personalities of history. What they got out of it could be written on no single parchment, though it were made from the skin of the famous Cloud-cow Audumla of the Norse saga. First, there is Goethe, whose character portrait in the race-books is suspiciously shaky. The appearance of this "most German of all Germans" is certainly very little like the representation of a Germanic man. To begin with, he lacked the "sparkling sky-blue eye," the blond hair and several other features which alone make the 100 percent Nordic. Regardless of this. Chamberlain rates him as the most perfect genius of the Germanic race and recognizes in Faust the ripest product of the German mind. Albrecht Wirth is of the opinion, in which anthropologists seem to be fairly well agreed, that Goethe was a non-Nordic j and most anthropologists see in him a product of the Alpine race. Lenz recognizes in Goethe a Levantine-Germanic hybrid. Diihring questions the Aryan descent of Goethe and believes that he recognizes in him Semitic traits. Hans Hermann goes farthest of all. In his Sanatorium of Free Love he presents this picture of the greatest of German poets: "One looks now at Goethe; these protruding brown eyes, this nose slightly hooked at the tip, this long body with its short legs, with even a slightly 'melancholy' expression j and we have before us the very prototype of a descendant of Abraham."
Lessing, whose creative work was of such decisive and profound significance for the intellectual development of Germany, is honored by Driesmans as the living embodiment of the German spirit. Diihring, on the contrary, sought to adduce proofs that the author of Nathan had Jewish blood in his veins. Even the noses of Schiller and Richard Wagner aroused the scorn of the race snifBers, and Schiller was as good as done for when Adolf Bartels, the literary pope in the present Hitlerite state, traced the "un-Germanic" in Schiller's works to Celtic admixtures in his blood.
For Chamberlain Napoleon I was the living embodiment of all Non-Germandom. But Woltmann discovered in him a blond-haired German, and Hauser opines: "If one sees in him a 'Corsican' one assigns him to a group in which he is an exception; in the North Italian nobility, however, to which he belongs, one finds all the splendid condottieri of the Renaissance and perceives at once that he is to be counted with these." ^^ As to this, we may note that the notion that Napoleon sprang from a line of
