The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (43 page)

According to some scholars, Hauer had it in mind to create a political religion in that, like Rosenberg, he wanted his ideas to be the ideological basis for National Socialism—though he never had the ear of senior Nazi figures as the latter did. Much impressed by Rudolf Steiner and his anthroposophy movement, which he thought heralded a new era of spiritual creativity, Hauer inhabited the same intellectual and cultural milieu as Rosenberg. He held mystic notions of the
Volk
and medievalism, and of the Indo-Germanic tradition that saw a line of influence stretching from Buddhism and Hinduism through Greece to medieval Germany, then on into the Nordic realm as far as the Eddas and sagas and the Icelandic myths.

In addition, he had three interdependent concepts: being “grasped” by the sacred, being led by a powerful personality and understanding the needs of the time. These should come together, he thought, or hoped, in a religious/political genius who related instinctively to his time and place—that is, to an ethnically specific predicament. To this was added a social Darwinism (and a Nietzscheanism) in which the “undeniable hardness” of the world was to be appreciated—the need for conflict and its associated sense of heroism “with which we can enjoy life’s battle, where we win and lose, have joy and suffering, pain and delight, the will to live and preparedness to die.” By means of a religion of the blood and soil (a wearily familiar German concept), a
Volk
could not renew itself through a Christian idea of salvation. Rather, it must realize its renewal as coming from its own psychological center.
26

Apart from the notion that only a politico-religious leader could help Germans find the truth, Hauer laid down several specific aspects of “concrete content” for his German faith: namely, that the great figures of German history were prophets, that the German domain was where the revelations took place, that God favored the Germans and the German way, that the German will was a specific form of revealed divinity, that battle and tragedy were the eternal law of human beings, making the German homeland “nearer to heaven than any paradise.” “Obedience to the leader is the highest fortune and the most blissful peace.”
27
His faith, essentially
pagan, evolved its own symbols, and its main cohesive force was an unremitting war of attrition against Christianity.
28
Hauer wanted to destroy what he called “secularized Christianity” and replace it with faith in the Third Reich.

Around him were a number of other neo-pagan sects, including Mathilde Ludendorff’s Society for God Knowledge, an extreme form of nationalism, whose aim was the “immortality of the race or nation” via sticking closely to certain precepts—notably, that since death is inevitable, not a day must be wasted in working for the benefit of the
Volk
. Another such sect was Sigrid Hunke’s Unitarians, who maintained that everyone differs in their spirituality but that, even so, people should live in communities that constantly challenge their beliefs, which may thus go on changing throughout life.

At the root of all these manifestations is Nietzsche’s idea of a “will to a stronger and higher existence.”
29

•   •   •

Despite such eloquent and (often pseudo-sophisticated) ideas and rationalizations for Nazi practices from the Protestant theologians and would-be theologians, assaults on Christianity in the Third Reich grew in intensity as Nazi confidence solidified. Although religious instruction was at first compulsory, attendance at school prayers was later made optional and religion was dropped as a subject from school-leaving examinations. Then priests were forbidden to teach religious classes. In 1935, by Bryan Moynahan’s count, the Gestapo arrested seven hundred Protestant pastors for condemning Nazi neo-paganism from the pulpit. In 1937, the Gestapo declared that the education of candidates for the Confessional Church was illegal, and Martin Niemöller, its leading light, was condemned to a concentration camp, refusing the offer of release because it required his collaboration.
30
(The medical orderly in Sachsenhausen found him to be “a man of iron.”)

In 1936, the assault on Catholic monasteries and convents began: they were accused of illegal currency trading and sexual offenses. In that year, too, the Nuremberg rallies bore an aura of paganism—the songs, or hymns, were pastiches redolent of traditional Christian worship:

Führer my Führer

Thou hast rescued Germany from deepest distress

I thank thee for my daily bread

Abide thou long with me, forsake me not

Führer my Führer, my faith and light.

All this was part of the initiative to “dechristianize” rituals and festivals. At weddings, for instance, bride and groom would be blessed by “Mother Earth, Father Sky and all the beneficent powers of the air,” and extracts from Nordic sagas would be read out. At “christenings” the infant was cradled on a Teutonic shield, swaddled in a blanket adorned with oak leaves and swastikas. The celebration of Christmas—the word itself was replaced by “Yuletide”—was exchanged for a “festival of the winter solstice,” held on December 21. The cross was never abolished; attempts
were
made in 1937 to take it out of school classrooms, but the measure had to be rescinded (perhaps confirming that Himmler did see Christianity as the paramount threat). The Vatican complained formally to Berlin almost monthly, but the regime took next to no notice. Some of the Nazi innovations eerily echoed what had already been tried in Stalinist Russia.

From Hitler’s point of view, probably his greatest achievement was in nullifying the oppositional potential that the church—had it so minded—could have mustered. This is worth underlining: at a time when religious faith was most needed, it failed to rise to the challenge. Too little is made of this.

PART THREE

Humanity at and after Zero Hour

17

The Aftermath of the Aftermath

“W
e were born at the beginning of the First World War. As adolescents we had the crisis of 1929; at twenty, Hitler. Then came the Ethiopian War, the Civil War in Spain, and Munich. These were the foundations of our education. Next came the Second World War, the defeat, and Hitler in our homes and cities. Born and bred in such a world, what did we believe in? Nothing. Nothing except the obstinate negation in which we were forced to clothe ourselves from the very beginning. The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge. . . . If the problem had been the bankruptcy of a political ideology or a system of government, it would have been simple enough. But what happened came from the very root of man and society. There was no doubt about this, and it was confirmed day after day not so much by the behavior of the criminals but by that of the average man. . . . Now that Hitler has gone, we know a certain number of things. The first is that the poison which impregnated Hitlerism has not been eliminated; it is present in each of us. . . . Another thing we have learned is that we cannot accept any optimistic conception of existence, any happy ending whatsoever. But if we believe that optimism is silly, we also know that pessimism about the action of man among his fellows is cowardly.”
1

Albert Camus delivered these words in 1946 at Columbia University in New York. An Algerian-born French journalist and philosopher whose father had been killed in the First World War, a onetime Communist and anarchist, Camus had worked for the Resistance newspaper
Combat
dur
ing the Second World War. In his first novel,
The Outsider
(
L’Étranger
, 1942), the main character, Meursault, has killed a man and is scheduled to be executed; he is pondering Camus’s central concern, the “absurdist” position that a life so important to him (his own) can have so little meaning, if any, in the wider scheme of things.

Though his talk at Columbia was clearly personal, it reflects European and French experience and exemplifies a generation of intellectuals. Trapped in an untidy and unpredictable chain of bloody events catalyzed by 1914–18, Camus and his generation were subjected to what Jeffrey Isaac has called “a particularly brutal form of intellectual shock therapy.” As Nicola Chiaromonte recalled, “I remember being totally obsessed by a single thought: we had arrived at humanity’s zero hour and history was senseless.” Even the more conservative and religious thinkers, who for years had drawn attention to what they saw as the threat of modern secularism and the original and unremitting sinfulness of human impulses, could not escape the feeling that “all bets were off,” that traditional ways of understanding ourselves—via class, community, nation, church, God—were now simply inadequate to the problems facing the post-war world.
2

Chicago was no different from Paris or New York. When the American philosopher Allan Bloom first attended university in Chicago just after the Second World War, one of the things he soon noticed was that “American university life was being revolutionized by German thought.” At that time, in Chicago anyway, Marx was revered, he said, but the two thinkers who generated most enthusiasm were the sociologist Max Weber and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who in turn had both been profoundly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche.

It is not hard to see why such pessimism—even nihilism—should prevail. Soviet troops had reached Auschwitz on January 27 the year before; the Soviet news agency TASS had published a special bulletin, an interview with two hundred survivors, on May 7, twenty-four hours before V-E Day in Europe. The atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, and on Nagasaki three days later. Pierre Laval, who had served twice as head of the Vichy regime, had been shot for collaboration on October 15, and Vidkun Quisling, who had seized power in Norway in 1940 in a Nazi-backed coup, had been executed in the same way and for the same
offense nine days later. Civil war had broken out in China at the beginning of 1946; Winston Churchill had drawn attention to the existence of the Iron Curtain at much the same time; war-crimes trials were being held in Nuremberg (ten people had already been sentenced to death) and Tokyo; an anti-Jewish pogrom had taken place in Kielce in Poland, despite the Auschwitz revelations; and French troops had bombarded Haiphong in northeast Vietnam, killing twenty thousand.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, as Camus said, this was itself an aftermath of sorts, following on from so many catastrophic and bloody events that had occurred since 1914. However, it is three longer-term consequences of the war that are our focus here.

The first was the germination, predominantly in France, of the existential philosophy that had begun with the phenomenological ideas of Edmund Husserl but had come to fruition in the cauldron of war and occupation. Second was a broad change that had been registered in American society, a change that might well have happened anyway but was certainly accelerated by the war. This has been called “the permissive turn,” the development of much more liberal attitudes and practices, a lurch forward in secularization that resulted in the fairly rapid replacement of religious understandings of society and people by a psychological understanding. And the third consequence was the effect that the Holocaust had on Jewish thinking. How could a God who loved his people have allowed such terrible things to happen? How could Jews
be
Jews after the death camps? Was the Holocaust the greatest nihilistic act of all time? What were the causes and the implications?

These three consequences of the Second World War were big events, concerns that reached well beyond the end of hostilities and shaped thinking and culture—and continue to shape thinking and culture today—in both the religious and the secular context.

18

The Warmth of Acts

T
he response to the outbreak of the Second World War was nothing like the response to that of the Great War. There was no euphoria, no aggressive manifesto produced by scores of intellectuals, no rush of poets to enlist, certainly no feeling among the general public that more fighting would bring about spiritual renewal. But there was the “phoney war,” as it came to be called, when after the blitzkrieg
on Poland in September 1939 nothing much of military significance occurred until April 1940, and many of the children evacuated from Britain’s major cities had begun to drift back home again. Winston Churchill called it the Twilight War, while the Germans called it
Sitzkrieg
, the sitting war.

But the second war did produce some major changes in the way people thought, which rivaled the transformations in sensibility wrought by the earlier conflict.

Some of the ideas that emerged are less surprising in retrospect than they seemed at the time. They were encapsulated in a series of works reassessing the way humans can live together to the benefit of all—war is, perhaps, exactly the time when such reassessments take place. These were Joseph Schumpeter’s
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
(1942), in which the author argued that entrepreneurs, not capitalists as such, are the motivating force of capitalism; and Karl Mannheim’s
Diagnosis of Our Time
, published a year later, in which he advocated a new “planned order”; there could be “no way back” to the old laissez-faire capitalism that had produced the Crash and the Depression. Then, in 1944, Friedrich von Hayek produced
The Road to Serfdom
, which opposed planning: we
should put our faith in “the invisible hand” and look to “the spontaneous social order” for guidance, because it had evolved by itself to safeguard internal peace and individual freedom, without which no satisfying life is possible. And Karl Popper wrote
The Open Society and Its Enemies
, which argued that political solutions are like scientific ones in that they “can never be more than provisional and are always open to improvements”; life has to move forward by trial and error, there is no “iron law” of history.

These four authors, all Austro-Hungarian, produced short books (because of paper rationing) that were hard-hitting in a down-to-earth, practical sense. Neither religion nor salvation featured. Here is another occasion when we do well to remind ourselves that the everyday practicalities of life are, for many people, far more pressing than metaphysical matters.

This was underlined by William Temple’s
Christianity and the Social Order
. Temple, archbishop of Canterbury, argued for the church’s right to “interfere” (his word) in social issues that could not help but have political consequences. In the body of the book, he kept his remarks general (about fellowship in the workplace, the nature of freedom, and so on), but in an appendix he firmly aligned himself with Mannheim on planning; he argued for a Royal Commission on housing that would decide how everyone could be properly housed, giving commissioners draconian powers to avoid land speculation; he wanted the school-leaving age raised from fourteen to eighteen; the return of the guilds, with all three parties—workers, management and capital—represented; and a five-day work week, so everyone would have enough leisure.

Many of these recommendations were incorporated, to a degree, in
Social Insurance and Allied Services
, better known as the Beveridge Report; published in November 1942, it became the basis of Britain’s modern welfare state. The idea would spread and solidify after the war (Bismarck had originally introduced it in late-nineteenth-century Germany).

Across the ocean, a rather different report appeared just as the war was turning in the Allies’ favor, in January 1944. This was
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy
by the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal. Well aware, as others were, that many blacks were fighting in Europe and the Pacific, Myrdal was asking: “[If]
they were expected to risk their lives equally with whites, why shouldn’t they enjoy equality afterward?” This was not the only spur to the civil rights movement, but it was an early indication of an awareness of the imbalance in American society; and concerns over race would, in a relatively short time, incorporate demands for equality among other minority groups, women and homosexuals in particular.

So the Second World War was a seed ground for many of the social advances that would be made, on either side of the Atlantic, in the second half of the twentieth century—purely secular maneuvers enabling many more than ever before to lead fulfilling lives in all realms of activity. This should never be lost sight of. Everyday practicalities are no small thing.
1

RESISTANCE AND RITZKRIEG

One of the curious paradoxes at the end of the Second World War was that Paris, which had been occupied for so long, was perceived as a livelier city than London, which had never suffered such indignity. (The French capital, after all, had been spared the Blitz.) Visiting London, the American writer Edmund Wilson said that he found there “a sense of depression and anti-climax.” Graham Greene even admitted he felt “a nostalgia for the hum of a robot bomb.” Though Paris—indeed, the whole of France—was bankrupt, the Liberation was a powerful symbol of hope. “It was an article of faith that ideas would triumph over ‘filthy money.’”

The French were naturally relieved to see the back of the Germans, and Paris in particular was inundated with sophisticated Anglophone visitors who had been starved of Parisian culture for too long. Jean Cocteau held court at the Hôtel Saint-Yves on the rue Jacob, where he was famous for his monologues (“the spoken word was his language and he used it with the virtuosity of an acrobat”). Picasso and Dora Maar could be found on the rue des Grands Augustins at Le Catalan, virtually an extension of his studio. Jean-Paul Sartre and his companion Simone de Beauvoir wrote for six hours a day at the Café Flore, or the Deux Magots, though Brasserie Lipp on Boulevard St.-Germain was out of favor for a time because its Alsatian dishes had proved popular with German officers.

The autumn of 1945 saw what Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper called “the great existentialist boom,” though it was in truth a time of general cultural innovation. An astonishing number of newspapers and literary magazines were launched (despite the paper shortage being so acute that
Le Monde
was reduced from a broadsheet to tabloid size, becoming known as “
Le Demi-Monde
”). Theatres proliferated, as did jazz and cabaret: Juliette Gréco and Marlene Dietrich had stayed at the Ritz—“Ritzkrieg,” it came to be called—in between entertaining the troops at the front. And there was a vogue for American novels, now that they could be freely obtained. All this was happening in an atmosphere of such penury that people took to using 1920s-style cigarette holders, so they could smoke their Gauloises and Gitanes down to the very end. (When she was introduced to Sartre by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Juliette Gréco was amused to see that he left his silver cigarette case with the management at the Flore as a deposit against settling his bill.)
2

Sartre was to be a central figure in the “existentialist boom,” which began—in the popular mind at least—with a lecture he gave at the Club Maintenant in Paris in the autumn of 1945. It came to be regarded as a seminal event, one of the best accounts being that by the French writer and journalist Michel Tournier in his autobiography: “On October 28, 1945, Sartre called us together. It was a mob scene. An enormous crowd pressed against the walls of the tiny hall. The exits were blocked by those who had not managed to gain entry to the sanctuary, and women who fainted had to be piled on a convenient grand piano. The wildly acclaimed lecturer was lifted bodily over the crowd and on to the podium. Such popularity should have alerted us. Already the suspect tag ‘existentialism’ had been attached to the new system. Having tumbled into the darkened nightclubs of Paris, the new star attracted a grotesque fauna of singers, jazz musicians, soldiers of the Resistance, drunkards, and Stalinists. So what was existentialism? We were soon to find out. Sartre’s message could be stated in six words: existentialism is a form of humanism. . . . We were floored. Our master had gone and fished up that worn-out old duffer Humanism, still stinking with sweat and ‘inner life,’ from the trash heap where we had left him, and now he trotted him out along with the absurd idea of existentialism as if he had invented both. And everyone applauded.”
3

How very French: an enjoyable account that also manages to be a stylish put-down. But Tournier’s observations were true enough in that, although for many people Sartre’s lecture had kick-started a new philosophy—and a new way to attempt to live without God—in practice the ideas he made use of had been germinating in France and Germany all through the 1930s and even during the war, with the not necessarily paradoxical result that several leading Resistance figures continued to read and follow the teachings of the German philosopher, and notorious Nazi sympathizer, Martin Heidegger.

This way of thinking began, as perhaps it was bound to, with the successive disasters and catastrophes of the First World War, the terror and purges in Stalin’s Russia, the stock market crash and the ensuing Depression, the Spanish Civil War and its horrors, such as the bombing of Guernica. Against this background such figures as Alexandre Kojève, Alexandre Koyré and Georges Bataille, following Heidegger, found traditional atheism—replacing God with man, history, nations and states—a “sinister impoverishment.” They were also at pains to point out that their ideas were an “anti-humanism.” Humanism, they went so far as to say, had led to fascism. What they meant by this was that humanism, even atheistic humanism, carried with it the idea that man was an end, a
fixed
end, a form of unchanging perfection already created. For them, this manifestly wasn’t true—man is still in the process of being formed, and it was the very idea that we understand what man
is
that had led to the catastrophes, as the dictators and other politicians tried to force man into a set mold. “Neither Marxists nor Capitalists nor humanists . . . can fully explain mankind, they are incomplete (and possibly erroneous) ways to understand ourselves.”
4

Kojève et al. were much influenced by science, especially by what was then recent science, advances in physics, mathematics and anthropology in particular. Science in general they thought had impoverished us because “completeness” is inherent in scientific and mathematical thought; this was not only itself a limiting factor and/or metaphor, but also where the idea of “perfection” had come from in the first place. But the findings of physics and mathematics—in particular, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—had shown that we are not separate from nature, that the very meas
urement of the “outside” world is affected by our presence; and in any case, as Kurt Gödel had shown, there are logical limits to what we can know. Moreover, there is no such thing as Nature with a capital
N
, there is no
fixed
nature because science is always advancing our grasp of what nature consists of.

The discoveries of anthropology had shown, furthermore, that there are very great differences between peoples, not least in their understanding of God. Therefore, there is no such thing as
being
in the abstract; to
be
exists only at a specific time and a specific location, we can understand ourselves only via the immediacy of the concrete, meaning there is no “pure,” privileged perspective on life, we cannot avoid having a central standpoint. This was all derived, ultimately, from Heidegger, Husserl and the phenomenologists.

THE BATTLE OVER TRANSCENDENCE

And what follows from this, they deduced, is that we can have no access to transcendence. We cannot step back from the world, as Heidegger said, with Kojève and the others following; there is no “nature” prior to its interaction with man, man cannot be “outside” the world in some way, meaning that transcendence is simply not possible, not available. There is no teleology, no direction to the world. One aim of life is to surpass oneself; but even here no generalizations are possible because no generally agreed
direction
can exist,
even in principle
, since man cannot transcend his subjectivity.

All we can hope for, as Emmanuel Lévinas put it in a useful neologism, is “excendence,” a striving to escape from our condition. But even this is at least partially doomed; Lévinas also espoused the concept of “subjective insufficiency”—meaning is not controlled by man, by the subject, and so, as Valéry said, we are condemned to live within limits and with disappointment.
5

All this amounted to a re-proportioning of man, and here violence played a crucial role. Before the disasters of the twentieth century, violence had been regarded as what the historian Stefanos Geroulanos of New York University has called, in a nice phrase, “the left-over darkness” of the
Enlightenment, occurring in places “where the light of reason had not yet reached.” But violence—the violence of the Gulag and the Holocaust death camps, for example—was no longer just that. Violence, by this account, was inescapable in modern society, because reason isn’t something that exists prior to man, but has to be
constructed
. We are, in effect, “emptied out,” there is no stability in human nature, there are no absolutes, no idealized understanding of humanity. We must seek what satisfaction we can here on earth, within the state and with all the shortcomings that carries with it, implying that our existence is invariably and always one of struggle and, if we are not to descend into further catastrophe,
constant criticism
.
6

And it was this set of ideas, sometimes called proto-existentialism, that concerned the Resistance during the war. In addition to Sartre, other figures active here included Jean Beaufret, Gaston Fessard and Joseph Rovan. Beaufret first encountered the ideas of Heidegger while in the Resistance network Pericles in the mountains around Lyon, when he was given a copy of
Being and Time
by Rovan, who had translated part of the book into French. (Rovan was an important
résistant
himself, a talented forger of identity papers.) Beaufret published his own writings on Heidegger in
Confluences
and
Fontaine
, both of which, like Sartre’s
Les Temps modernes
, were journals inspired by the Resistance. So integral was his “resistantialism” to his reading of Heidegger that, on the very day the Allies launched the Normandy invasion, June 6, 1944, Beaufret claimed that “he reproached himself for rejoicing more for realizing some of what Heidegger was all about than about being told about the invasion itself.” Again, how very French. Fessard, Jesuit theologian and philosopher, taught Heidegger throughout the occupation. As Geroulanos sums up: “Not only did these figures relegitimate the study of Heidegger’s thought during and after the occupation, they also helped make Heidegger . . . a cornerstone of
Résistance
morality.”
7