Central European History 52 (2019), 252–288.
© Central European History Society of the American Historical
Association, 2019
doi:10.1017/S0008938919000189
The Metaphysics of Race: Revisiting Nazism and Religion
Amit Varshizky
ABSTRACT. This article redresses the interpretative lacunae of historians’ conceptions of Nazi
racism by overcoming their attempts to comprehend it from either a secular/scientific or a
religious/theological perspective. Drawing on a variety of anthropological, philosophical, and
political-theoretical works, the article illustrates how Nazi racial ideas were formulated not
only in accordance with the latest discoveries in the field of human heredity, but also in correspondence to contemporary debates over secularization, value-free science, and biological determinism.
It argues that the Nazi conception of race constituted a new form of religiosity, which did not draw
on supernatural beliefs or theological narratives, but rather on vitalist-oriented metaphysics, shifting
the object of faith from the transcendent realm of God to the immanent sphere of racial inwardness. Redefining faith in vitalist-existentialist terms corresponded with the Nazi aspiration to
overcome the fragmentation of modernity, overturn the nihilistic threat posed by materialist
society, and carry out a spiritual renaissance built upon immanent-biological foundations.
In diesem Aufsatz werden die interpretativen Lücken innerhalb der unter Historikern gängigen
Konzeptionen des nationalsozialistischen Rassismus beseitigt, indem deren Versuche, diesen
entweder von einer säkularen/wissenschaftlichen oder einer religiös/theologischen
Perspektive zu begreifen, überwunden werden. Mit Hilfe einer Vielfalt von anthropologischen,
philosophischen und politisch-theoretischen Arbeiten illustriert der Aufsatz, wie nationalsozialistische Ideen über Rasse nicht nur in Übereinstimmung mit den jüngsten Entdeckungen in
den Forschungen zu menschlicher Vererbung, sondern auch in Bezug auf zeitgenössische
Debatten über Säkularisierung, wertfreie Wissenschaft und biologischen Determinismus formuliert wurden. Dabei wird argumentiert, dass die nationalsozialistische Konzeption von Rasse eine
neue Form der Religiosität darstellte, die nicht auf einem Glauben an das Übernatürliche oder
theologischen Narrativen beruhte, sondern vielmehr auf einer am Vitalismus orientierten
Metaphysik: das Objekt des Glaubens wurde vom transzendenten Reich Gottes zur immanenten
Sphäre rassischer Innerlichkeit verschoben. Diese Neudefinition von Glauben in vitalistischexistentialistischen Begriffen korrespondierte mit dem Ziel der Nationalsozialisten, die
Fragmentierung der Moderne zu überwinden, die durch die materialistische Gesellschaft
bedingte Bedrohung durch den Nihilismus abzuwenden und eine, auf einer immanentbiologischen Fundierung beruhende, geistige Renaissance durchzuführen.
T
Nazi approach toward religion, in general, and toward Christianity, in particular,
has been the focus of study for an impressive number of historians, and it has had a
profound effect on the study of Nazi ideology and politics. Early historians interpreted the Nazi movement as an anti-Christian movement, that aimed, in the long run, to
HE
My sincere thanks to Shulamit Volkov and Shalom Ratzabi from Tel Aviv University for their invaluable
mentorship. I also owe a special debt of thanks to Manuela Consonni from Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
to Dan Michman from Bar Ilan University, to Norbert Frei from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena,
and to Susannah Heschel from Dartmouth College; and, finally, to Andrew I. Port and the journal’s two
anonymous reviewers for their highly useful comments.
252
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
253
eradicate Christianity and to replace it with a new racial ethics that drew its legitimacy from
the laws of nature. Within this frame of reference, some historians attributed the Nazi antiChristian sentiment to its secular, anticlerical, and atheistic agenda, whereas others saw
Nazism as a “pagan assault” on Western Christian civilization.1 By contrast, various studies
have pointed to the disturbing affinities among Nazi ideology, Christian antisemitism, and
anti-Marxism, or have addressed the way in which Nazi ideologues and theologians
attempted to synthesize Christian theology and racial ideas, opting for a “positive
Christianity” purified from its Judaic roots.2 This perspective ranged from positioning
1
There are many studies that support the “anti-Christian” view, and some of the more prominent works
in this field were written by historians of the church under Nazism. See John Conway, The Nazi Persecution of
the Churches (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968); Beate Ruhm von Oppen, Religion and Resistance in the
Third Reich (Princeton, NJ: Center of International Studies, Princeton University, 1971); Klaus Scholder,
The Churches and the Third Reich, 2 vols. (London: Fortress Press, 1987–1988). This is also the view of
more recent scholars of Nazism: Joseph W. Bendersky, A Concise History of Nazi Germany (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 147; Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York:
Penguin Books, 2009), 547; Roger Griffin, “Fascism’s relation to religion,” in World Fascism: A Historical
Encyclopedia, ed. Cyprian P. Blamires (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 1:10–11; Wolfgang
Dierker, Himmlers Glaubenskrieger. Der Sicherheitsdienst der SS und seine Religionspolitik 1933–1941
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002). The “pagan” argument was posed for the first time in the early 1930s by
intellectuals who saw Nazism as a pagan revolt against the Christian world. See, e.g., Ludwig Lewison,
“The Revolt against Civilization,” in Nazism: Assault on Civilization, ed. Pierre van Paassen and James
Waterman Wise (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934), 143–60. During World War II,
the Western Allies adopted this narrative as part of their anti-Nazi propaganda. See, e.g., Lewis Spence,
The Occult Causes of the Present War (London: Rider & Co., 1940). The literature on Nazi “paganism”
and “occultism” is vast. Prominent examples include Hans Joachim Gamm, Der braune Kult: Das Dritte
Reich und seine Ersatzreligion (Hamburg: Rütten & Loening, 1962); Ulrich Hunger, Die Runenkunde im
Dritten Reich (Bern: Lang, 1984); Robert Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (London:
Croom Helm, 1986); Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their
Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1992); James Webb, The Occult
Establishment (Glasgow: Richard Drew Publishing, 1981); Karla Poewe, New Religions and the Nazis
(New York: Routledge, 2006); Julian Strube, “Die Erfindung des esoterischen Nationalsozialismus im
Zeichen der Schwarzen Sonne,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 20, no. 2 (2012): 223–68; Herbert
Rätz, Die Religion der Reinheit. Reformbewegung, Okkultismus und Nationalsozialismus. Geschichte und
Struktur einer Alltagsreligion (Saarbrücken: Conte, 2006); Monica Black and Eric Kurlander, eds., Revisiting
the “Nazi Occult”: Histories, Realities, Legacies (New York: Camden House, 2015). For a comprehensive
review of the current study of the Christian, pagan, and occult influences on Nazi ideology, see Uwe
Puschner and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus: Eine
Beziehungs- und Konfliktgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012).
2
For studies that concern Nazi intervention in Christianity and attempts to “nazify” Christianity, see, e.g.,
Robert P. Erickson, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the
Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz,
ed., Christlicher Antijudaismus und Antisemitismus. Theologische und kirchliche Programme deutscher Christen
(Frankfurt/Main: Haag & Herchen, 1994); Kurt Meier, Kreuz und Hakenkreuz: Die evangelische Kirche im
Dritten Reich (Munich: dtv, 2001); Rainer Lächele, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Glaube: Die “Deutschen
Christen” in Württemberg 1925–1960 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1994); Rainer Lächele, “Germanisierung des
Christentums—Heroisierung Christi,” in Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne. Entwürfe “arteigener”
Glaubenssysteme seit der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Stefanie von Schnurbein and Justus H. Ulbricht (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2001); Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of
Christianity 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Derek Hastings, “How
‘Catholic’ Was the Early Nazi Movement? Religion, Race, and Culture in Munich, 1919–1923,” Central
European History 36, no. 3 (2003): 383–87; Sussanah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and
the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
Christianity as the fundamental cornerstone of Nazi ideology—including depicting the Nazi
campaign against Germany’s enemies as a battle in the name of Christianity—to portraying it
as a tactical instrument for the sacralization of politics in the Third Reich.3 Within this
context, Nazism was represented as a “secular” or “political religion” that offered the
German masses an atheistic ersatz for Christianity.4
Accordingly, one can point to three main historical approaches to the relation between
Nazism and religion. The first portrays Nazism as a secular and atheistic—mostly
nihilistic—movement that strove to eliminate all confessions of faith, while embracing religious motives, symbols, and liturgy for political needs. The second approach emphasizes the
anti-Christian impulse that underlay Nazi ideology, tagging it as “pagan.” The third
approach highlights the ideological and institutional links between Nazism and
Christianity (usually Protestantism), and its longtime, deeply-rooted hatred of the Jews.
Each of these three narratives refers to a certain stream that existed within the Nazi ideological
establishment and, together, they reflect the hybrid and adaptive nature of Nazi ideology.
Recent studies have redressed the dynamics of rivalry between these different forms of
belief on the ideological and institutional levels. Whereas historians such as Richard
Steigmann-Gall and Derek Hastings have argued for a strict dichotomy between
“Christian” and “pagan” Nazis, describing them as two rival camps battling for hegemony
within the Nazi party, Samuel Koehne has offered a way out of this dichotomy by
3
This provocative argument was raised in Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich. See also the critique of
Steigmann-Gall’s thesis in Irvin Hexham, “Inventing ‘Paganists’: A Close Reading of Richard
Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (2007): 59–78.
4
Among the first to use the term political religion to refer to National Socialism were Catholic and
Protestant scholars in the 1930s. Contemporary observers, such as Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Adolf
Keller, Gerhardt Leibholz, Waldemar Gurian, and Eric Voegelin recognized the Nazis’ tactical use of
sacral instruments to give their regime a sacred status. Other intellectuals who followed this approach
include Karl Polanyi, Raymond Aron, and Yaacov Talmon, whose pioneering studies on political religions
in the 1950s paved the way for later research on the topic. See Eric Voegelin, “The Political Religions,” in
The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5: Modernity Without Restraint, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2000), 19–75; Raymond Aron, “L’ere des tyrannies d’Elie Hal’evy,” Revue de
Metaphysique et de Morale 46, no. 2 (1939): 283–307; Waldemar Gurian, “Totalitarianism as Political
Religion,” in Totalitarianism, ed. Carl Joachim Friedrich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1964), 120–23, 125–29; Jacob Leib Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker &
Warburg, 1952). For more central studies concerned with the “political religious” aspects of Nazism, see
Klaus Vondung, Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971); George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses:
Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich
(New York: Universal Library, 1975); James M. Rhodes, The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian
Revolution (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1980); Jean-Pierre Sironneau, Secularisation et religions
politiques (The Hague: Mouton, 1982); Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Third Reich: Selected
Essays (New York: Routledge, 2004); Michael Ley and Julius H. Schoeps, eds., Der Nationalsozialismus
als politische Religion (Bodenheim: Philo Verlagsges, 1997); Hans Maier and Michael Schäfer, eds.,
Totalitarismus und politische Religionen, 3 vols. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996, 1997, 2003); Roger Griffin,
The Nature of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1991); Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History
(London: Pan Macmillan, 2000); Emilio Gentile, “Facism as Political Religion,” Journal for Contemporary
History 25, no. 2/3 (1990): 229–51; Clauss-Ekkehard Bärsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus:
Die religiöse Dimension der NS-Ideologie in den Schriften von Dietrich Eckart, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg
und Adolf Hitler (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998). Also see the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political
Religions (currently Politics, Religion & Ideology), established by Michael Burleigh in 2000.
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
255
demonstrating that, as early as the 1920s, Nazi ideology had already absorbed a fusion of
Christian and pagan ideas.5
Indeed, as Philip Burrin has suggested, much of the Nazi ideological appeal could be
attributed to its syncretism and its ability to bring together Christian apocalyptic motives,
occultist and neopagans ideas, and biological naturalism.6 But this prompts an important
question: was this “syncretism” a result of the lack of ideological consistency, or of a desire
to appeal to the largest possible range of public feelings and opinions? Would it then be
right to accept Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach’s claim that Nazi ideology was
more of “an ethos or Gesinnung, a willingness to adhere to the general precepts of the
worldview, which was vague and indistinct enough to embrace a variety of related perspectives”?7 Of the many attempts to conceptualize Nazism in religious terms, this last observation is the most acceptable one.
The present article nevertheless offers an alternative way to approach this question. It
addresses Nazi “syncretism” neither as a product of political manipulation or ideological
inconsistency, nor as a simplistic appropriation or “secularization” of common religious
forms, but rather as a consequence of a nuanced conceptualization of biology and race
that, to a certain degree, possessed its own philosophical consistency. This perspective
draws on the way in which prominent Nazi thinkers articulated their political “faith,” not
as a systematic or organized form of religion (i.e., a supernatural belief that possesses a set of
sanctified texts and traditional ritual practices), but rather as a racialized form of religiosity,
which drew on bio-vitalist and phenomenological expositions and was articulated in experiential and existential terms, namely, as an act of self-knowledge and self-affirmation. Seen in
this light, faith was reconceptualized as natural phenomena and introduced as an active manifestation of the racial soul in its striving for self-realization. Despite its anti-transcendence and
anticlericalism, this race-based religiosity was nonetheless articulated in anti-secular terms and
presented as an authentic actualization of real spirituality and its liberation from the constraints of institutional, abstracted, and dogmatic religion.
This view was valorized through the efflorescence of romantic and holistic science in
postwar Germany and through the assimilation of vitalism into racial discourse during the
1920s and 1930s. Bio-vitalism never achieved a formal stature in the Third Reich, but it
inspired a wide range of scientists and race theoreticians, providing them with a conceptual
framework while confronting them with the problem of biological determinism and the
moral and philosophical dilemmas it evoked. Vitalism thus played a pivotal role in their
attempts to bypass the obstacles of “mechanistic” biology and Mendelian genetics, to
5
Steigmann-Gall has argued that it was the “positive (protestant) Christians” who were dominant in the
Nazi milieu in the 1920s and the 1930s; he has also pointed to a shift in the balance of power in favor of the
“pagans” by 1939. Hastings, by contrast, claims that an “overt Catholic engagement” in the early Nazi
movement “reached an especially high degree of visibility in 1923,” before the ill-fated putsch of
November 9, which led to the triumph of the völkisch, anti-Catholic branch of the NSDAP and the squeezing out of its Catholics. See Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 13–114, 259–60; Hastings, “How ‘Catholic’ Was
the Early Nazi Movement?,” 384; Samuel Koehne, “Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party?
Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas,” Central European History 47, no. 4 (2014): 760–90.
6
Philippe Burrin, “Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept,” History and Memory 9, no. 1/2
(1997): 341.
7
Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach, “Introduction: The Humanities in Nazi Germany,” in The
Humanities in Nazi Germany, ed. Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach (Oxford: Oneworld
Publications, 2006), xxxviii.
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
overcome what they saw as the existential threat posed by the regnant materialism of the era,
to dismantle the positivistic division between fact and value, and, ultimately, to lay the
groundwork for a new ethical and philosophical worldview based on biological totality.
By giving more attention to these biological nuances, this article seeks to redress some of
the major problems concerning historians’ general approach toward Nazi racism, which tends
to impose the standards of “liberal,” positivistic, and “value-free” science upon a strain of
thought that was deliberately anti-positivistic and “value-laden,” and hence projects their
own rational criteria on an all-encompassing worldview that never pretended to be a
mere scientific system. In drawing attention to the ways in which science and religion
were brought together under the banner of vitalist biology, this article questions the actual
efficiency of implementing dichotomies such as rational/irrational, secular/sacral, and atheistic/theistic to describing Nazi ideology, as scholars in the field often do.8 Finally, this perspective enables us to examine the “syncretic” and adaptive nature of Nazi ideology, without
undermining its systematic logic and conceptual coherence. As we will see, by redefining religion in vitalist and phenomenological terms, Nazi intellectuals not only undermined the
antagonism between prevalent “positive Christian” and “pagan” attitudes, but also blurred
the distinction between secular and sacred, thus providing a philosophical grounding for a
transvaluation of values.
The point is not that the Nazi approach toward religion was, in any sense, monolithic or
homogeneous; rivalries, tensions, and controversies were an integral part of this discourse, as
much as they were for any other ideological issue in the Third Reich. The claim here is nevertheless that the Nazi worldview, though far from being coherent or systematic, and despite
the multitude of conflicts, tensions, and rivals among its adherents, provided a fundamental
outlook on basic ontological and metaphysical issues, while, to a large extent, relying on the
prevailing intellectual tone of the day and on the overall sense of cultural and epistemological
crisis. Thus, even as Nazi racism proved to be a quarrelsome and multifaceted phenomenon,
certain recurring themes and problems made up, in other respects, a coherent conceptual grid
that largely leaned on a consensual negation of material monism, on the one hand, and on an
undisputed rejection of psychophysical dualism (or parallelism), on the other. This position
8
For example, Dan Stone therefore recently suggested distinguishing between Nazi race science and “race
mysticism,” arguing that “Nazi race science was placed at the service of a fundamentally mystical ‘nonrational’ idea, one that really owed nothing to science: the idea of an Aryan salvation history that understood
History as the clash of Aryan and non-Aryan forces.” See Dan Stone, “Race Science, Race Mysticism, and
the Racial State,” in Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany, ed. Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman,
and Richard Wetzell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 179. The question of the secular/
sacral, atheistic/theistic character of Nazism also stands at the heart of the debate over its definition as a “political religion” or “secular religion”; this is discussed in the closing section of this article. A good demonstration
of the difficulty historians experience in breaking away from this rigorous binary can be found in SteigmannGall’s rejection of the concepts of “political religion” in favor of “religious politics,” and in Milan Babík’s
critique of that rejection. Milan Bablik criticized Steigmann-Gall’s argument that “Nazism was not the
result of a ‘Death of God’ in secularized society, but rather a radicalized and singular attempt to preserve
God against secularized society.” See Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 12; idem, “Nazism and the Revival of
Political Religion Theory,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5, no. 3 (2004): 376–96. Drawing
on the Löwith-Blumenberg debate on secularization, Bablik emphasized the compatibility of SteigmannGall’s findings with the theory of political religion: “the term ‘secularization’ does not necessarily signify
de-Christianization, but primarily the process of orienting transcendent (Augustinian) eschatology to this
world (ad saeculum)…” See Milan Babík, “Nazism as a Secular Religion,” History and Theory 45, no. 3
(2006): 376.
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
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gave rise to an assortment of metaphysical and quasi-religious formulations that drew their
vocabulary from the paradigmatic transitions in philosophical and scientific thought during
the years that followed World War I.
It is in this historical context that the article addresses two major discourses that shaped
the intellectual climate of the day and were assimilated into Nazi thought: the philosophical
and theological-political discourse concerning secularization and the crisis of modernity, and
the influence of life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) on the emergence of a new biocentric
jargon. By addressing these discourses and the way in which they intermingled with Nazi
racial ideas, the article illustrates how biological vocabulary and metaphysical speculations
were combined in order to constitute a “worldview” that would provide relevant solutions
to contemporary problems.
The Theological Roots of Modernity and Its Crisis
After 1900, German thinkers increasingly turned to theological explanations in an effort to
understand the roots of modernity and its crisis. Rooted in the cultural pessimism of the fin de
siècle, much of this scholarship tended to comprehend secularization in terms of a continuity
of theological thinking, rather than as a departure from it.9 Modern rational progressivism
was hence perceived as a secularized extension of Christian eschatology, one that replaced
Christian providentialism with the idea of history as revolutionary progress leading to a
utopian society. The philosophy of history and all historical speculations that attributed to
history a recognizable movement toward an ultimate meaning or goal were consequently
identified as a secularization of the Judeo-Christian eschaton. As the theologian and philosopher Ernst Troeltsch claimed, the modern concept of progress is “the secularization of
Christian eschatology,” which transfers the thought of a “universal goal to be reached by
mankind from the sphere of miracle and transcendence into that of natural explanation
and immanence.”10
To many German intellectuals, the process of secularization was the real historical force
behind modernity and its crisis; it proceeded against and beyond religion rather than through
it. From this perspective, the Judeo-Christian tradition was perceived not only as the historical cradle of modern Western culture, but also as its internal theological content, which
underwent a process of “secularization” or “de-theologization.” The attempts to formulate
possible solutions to the crisis of modernity ranged from protecting modernity to an outright
negation of it. Both advocates and critics of modernity nevertheless wished to comprehend
the theological framework from within, not from without. By seeing the process of secularization as the acme of a theological crisis, German thinkers wished to shed light on the
complex relationship between secularization and the biblical historical consciousness from
which it had emerged. Though coming from different religious and confessional backgrounds, prominent thinkers such as Max Weber, Hermann Cohen, Carl Schmitt, and
Werner Sombart showed, each in his own way, how theological components underwent
9
On secularization and the immanent tension between the theological and the political, see Eric
Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1952); Karl Löwith, Meaning
in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press,
1949); Jacob Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1991 [1947]).
10
Ernst Troeltsch, quoted in Klaus Vondung, The Apocalypse in Germany (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2000), 39.
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
a process of secularization, yet were sustained as the actual living strata that underlay modern
consciousness.11 Since secularization was understood in theological terms, scholars were
heavily engaged with issues concerning the relationship between the Christian canonical tradition and heresy. This relationship was perceived as harboring answers that pertained to the
relationship between theology and secularization, and as allowing a new outlook on issues
related to modernity. It was notably “Gnosticism” and “pantheism,” which were identified
as the most radical and fundamental forms of heresy, that served in this context as fruitful strategies for overcoming the crisis of modernity and for renovating spiritual and cultural life.12
Most central to this issue was the place of Judaism, which was identified as the theological
source of modern Western culture. Thus, while Protestant theologians such as Adolf von
Harnack sought to overcome the spiritual crisis of modernity by cleansing Christianity of
its Jewish roots and by renewing it in the spirit of its allegedly Hellenistic-Gnostic origins,
Jewish philosophers such as Hermann Cohen described Judaism as the foundation of
Western morality and ethics.13 Polemics about “the essence of Christianity” and “the
essence of Judaism” were therefore perceived as having broad cultural and political significance, and they represented Judaism not only as the historical-genealogical source of
modern culture, but also as its internal theological core.14
Recognizing Judaism as the source of modernity and its crisis also served to grease the
wheels of antisemitic ideas that were largely nourished within völkisch-national and conservative revolutionary circles, which strove to revive German nationhood by releasing it from
the shackles of the “Jewish spirit.” “The Jew,” as Norman Cohn noted, had become a
“symbol of the modern world,” and antisemitism became an inseparable companion to a
variety of antimodern attitudes and nostalgia for a preindustrial past.15 Under the merging
influence of racial and biological thinking, however, the concept of “Judaism” underwent
semantic transitions and was reformulated in accordance with the new innovative scientific
tone.
The question of the continuity or contingency of modern Jew-hatred has obviously been
a focus of an impressive body of scholarship. Yet, whereas the question about the influence of
Christian Jew-hatred on modern racial antisemitism has been the topic of long-standing and
11
See Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik, 20, no. 1 (1904): 1–54, and 21, no. 1 (1905): 1–110; Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das
Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1911); Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den
Quellen des Judentums (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1919); Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur
Lehre von der Souveränität (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1922).
12
For a historical perspective on the heretical discourse in interwar Germany, see Benjamin Lazier, God
Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2008); Christoph Schmidt, Der häretische Imperativ: Überlegungen zur theologischen Dialektik der
Kulturwissenschaft in Deutschland (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000); Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity: A
Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularization, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past,” Totalitarian
Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 3 (2007): 591–97.
13
Adolf von Harnack, Marcion. Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1924); Cohen,
Die Religion der Vernuft.
14
See, e.g., Adolf von Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrich’sche Buchhandlung,
1902); Leo Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums (Berlin: Nathansen & Lamm, 1905).
15
Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 23–24.
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
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intense disagreements, little attention has been paid to the way in which theological patterns
were reformulated in accordance with the prevailing biocentric jargon of the day.16
As Uwe Puschner has shown, religion was, despite the various ideologies and political
agendas that constituted the völkisch movement, “the ‘Archimedean point’ of the völkisch
worldview.”17 Völkisch thinkers evoked the “unity of blood and faith” while portraying
world history in apocalyptic and eschatological terms.18 They “naturalized” the cosmic
drama by applying racial and biological categories that enabled them not only to unveil
the mysteries of the past, but also to provide an appealing explanation for the entropy and
crisis of the present time. The most influential work of this kind, which became the prototype for many subsequent works, was Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des
neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) of 1899.19 In this work,
the British-born German philosopher portrayed history as a battlefield for an everlasting
struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish race, which manifested two opposing
systems of values striving for world dominance. Chamberlain’s conception of race nevertheless undermined the naturalistic and anthropological terminology of his day and was infused
with new metaphysical meanings. Anne Harrington has already shown how Chamberlain
employed the Goethean concept of Gestalt in order to construct his racial mythology.20
16
See, e.g., Jonathan Frankel, ed., The Fate of the European Jews, 1939–1945: Continuity or Contingency?
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany
from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Olaf Blaschke, Katholizismus und
Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprech, 1997).
17
Uwe Puschner, Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich. Sprache—Rasse—Religion
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001), 17. There has been a good deal of writing on the
encounter between German völkisch thinking and religious and occult ideas. See, e.g., Jean Réal, “The
Religious Conception of Race: Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Germanic Christianity,” in The Third
Reich, ed. Jacques Rueff (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955), 243–86; George L. Mosse, The Crisis
of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Universal Library, 1964); Fritz Stern,
The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (New York: Anchor Books,
1965); Wolfgang Tilgner, Volksnomostheologie und Schöpfungsglaube: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des
Kirchenkampfes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966); Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots;
Wolfgang Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: Über religiös begründete Gegensätze und
nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1992); Rainer Lächele, “Protestantismus und völkische Religion im deutschen Kaiserrreich,” in
Handbuch zur “Völkischen Bewegung” 1871–1918, ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus Ulbricht
(Munich: K. G. Saur, 1996); Peter Staudenmaier, “Occultism, Race and Politics in German-Speaking
Europe, 1880–1940: A Survey of Historical Literature,” European History Quarter 39, no. 1 (2009): 47–70;
Barbara Liedtke, Völkisches Denken und Verkündigung des Evangeliums. Die Rezeption Houston Stewart
Chamberlains in evangelischer Theologie und Kirche während der Zeit des Dritten Reiches (Leipzig: Evangelische
Verlagsanstalt, 2012).
18
See Uwe Puschner, “Rasse und Religion. Die ideologie arteigener Religionsentwürfe,” in Stefan
George und die Religion, ed. Wolfgang Braungart (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 145–57.
19
Apart from Chamberlain, there were many other popular völkisch writers who infused their racial
message with apocalyptic and redemptive overtones. This was one legacy of the “Ariosophers” Guido
von List, Lanz von Liebenfels, and Theodor Fritsch, who portrayed history as a Manichean struggle
between the Aryan, the bearer of the light, and the Jew, an anti-Christ who strives for world dominance.
On List, Liebenfels, and Fritsch, see Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots, 33–134. This narrative also prevails
in the writings of Dietrich Eckart, an early protagonist of the Nazi movement who was also known to be
Hitler’s mentor. See Dietrich Eckart, Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zwiegespräch zwischen Adolf
Hitler und mir (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1924).
20
Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 106–8.
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
According to this view, life manifests itself morphologically through the organic forms of
races and species, and it can therefore be comprehended only aesthetically. Capturing race
in its whole essence thus eludes all natural scientific endeavors and is possible only
through the act of Anschauung, which brings together science, religion, and art in its
merging of systematic observation, sensitive intuition, and active imagination.21 In his
1905 book, Arische Weltanschauung (Aryan Worldview), Chamberlain went further to conceptualize the racialized-völkisch worldview in quasi-religious terms, while elaborating on his
profoundly vitalist premises. The “Aryan religion,” he wrote, is never “a search for explanation of external or temporal things, but it is a symbolical formation of an internal, unmechanical, timeless experience.”22 Aryan morality can therefore never be subjected to an external
system of reward and punishment, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it is founded on the
“awe of man before himself.”23 The “Aryan religion” is therefore opposed to all creeds and
dogmas; it rejects all beliefs in transcendent entities or supranatural beings; it is an existential
position that derives purely from the Aryan’s directed and unmediated life experience—
hence Chamberlain’s declaration that “religion is present, not past or future.”24 This type
of racialized, existential religiosity prepared the soil upon which later Nazi ideologues and
race theoreticians would formulate their racial creed.
This stance drew much of its legitimacy from the increasing influence of Lebensphilosophie
and the emergence of a new biocentric jargon in the early twentieth century.
Implementation of bio-vitalist expositions within theological (or “heretical”) narratives in
the prewar years can already be found in Alfred Schuler’s Gnosticism or in the quasipantheistic philosophy of Ludwig Klages. Klages’s opposition between “spirit” (Geist) and
“life” (Leben), i.e., between the prehistorical “cosmic” man and the historical self-alienated
man, illustrates the way in which vitalist language intermingled with theological narratives
and metahistorical explanations, culminating in a new salvationist mode of thinking.25
The increasing sense of social fragmentation and political polarization, which flourished
under the newly established Weimar Republic, inflamed the German “hunger for wholeness” (Peter Gay) and the search for a new integrative Weltanschauung.26 Large segments of
the educated classes not only felt threatened by a vision of a mechanistic–technocratic
society, but also feared a growing materialization of life. In response, an inchoate and scattered intellectual movement took shape, which raised the banner of organicism, holism,
and vitalism as an antidote to the sweeping sense of spiritual and existential decay.
Against this background, Lebensphilosophie gained dominance among many educated
Germans and became, to use Georg Lukács terms, the dominant, bourgeois
Weltanschauung in the post-Bismarckian era.27 Different historians have already pointed out
the hybrid and pluralistic nature of its terminology, which showed itself in the many political
21
Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1981), 281–91.
22
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arische Weltanschauung (Berlin: Bruckmann, 1905), 78.
23
Ibid., 79.
24
Ibid.
25
See Ludwig Klages, Mensch und Erde (Jena: Diederichs, 1913). For further reading, see Nitzan Lebovic,
The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013); Per Leo, Der Wille zum Wesen. Weltanschauungskultur, charakterologisches Denken und
Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland 1890–1940 (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013).
26
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968), 70–102.
27
Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin: Howard Fertig, 1954), 318.
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
261
and ideological streams that embraced it.28 The images of unity and wholeness, of internal
and external harmony, had great appeal for many Germans, who experienced the crisis of
modernity as a spiritual deficiency. Among them were ultranationalist intellectuals, who
embraced the holistic metaphors of Ganzheit and Einheit in response to the political disintegration and the social fragmentation of the German nation.29 Moreover, within the chaotic
atmosphere of the postwar years, this “hunger for wholeness” gained a new ideological
potency under the increasing popularity of biological racism.
During the 1920s, the concept of “race” largely associated by conservative and protofascist thinkers with metaphysical and idealistic ideas was reconceptualized to accord with
the latest discoveries in the field of genetics.30 It is therefore impossible to identify any
common denominator across these diverse discourses about the definition of race and its
study. Race was not an isolated “scientific” concept, but rather a broad cultural and epistemological category that played a central role in redefining social and political issues of the
time. Given the flexibility of the concept and the diverse and heterogeneous functions it
entailed within different discourses, one must carefully examine it within the concrete cultural and epistemological context of the day. In order to understand the idiosyncratic nature
of Nazi racism and its racial-metaphysical nexus, one must therefore first consider the rapid
conceptual transitions in scientific thought on the eve of World War I—and especially in its
aftermath.
From Science to Weltanschauung:
Racial Anthropology and the Search for Values in Biology
During the 1920s, German anthropology underwent a series of profound metamorphoses.
Based on new discoveries in the field of genetics and human heredity, a new generation
28
See Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992); Lebovic, The Philosophy of Life and Death. For a concise outlook on vitalist thinking
in interwar Germany, with a focus on the revival of Naturphilosophie and Aristotelian entelechy, thanks to the
work of Hans Driesch, see Bruce Rosenstock, Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 1–42.
29
Some historians sought to explain the emergence of holistic, organic, and synthetic ideas in German
thought by emphasizing the political fragmentation of nineteenth-century Germany and the social atomization of the Bismarckian Reich. According to this view, one must understand German intellectuals’ continuing search for wholeness and unity as a response, at first, to the political division and lack of defined
territorial boundaries; later, as an antidote to the social disintegration resulting from the accelerating processes
of industrialization and liberalization in the Bismarckian Reich; and, finally, in the post-World War I era, as
an integrative tool to rehabilitate national power and social solidarity. See John Reddick, “‘The Shattered
Whole’: George Büchner and Naturphilosophie,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham
and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 322–41; Keith Anderton, “The
Limits of Science: A Social, Political, and Moral Agenda for Epistemology in Nineteenth-Century
Germany” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1993); Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 7–12; Timothy
Lenoir, “Social Interests and the Organic Physics,” in Science in Reflection, ed. Edna Ullmann-Margalit
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 169–91.
30
Oswald Spengler, for example, rejected any biological determination of race, proclaiming that “races”
are “ideal basic forms” and “expressions of the soul” that cannot be classified or comprehended in “scientific”
and “objective” ways. See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. II, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(New York: Knopf, 1957), 129. In a somewhat similar vein, Ernst Jünger insisted that the ideas of “blood”
and “race” are “metaphysical” rather than “primarily biological” ideas. See Jünger, quoted in Jeffrey Herf,
Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), 86.
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
of German anthropologists took up the task of establishing a new racial science that would be
liberated from the limitations set by physical anthropologists in the second half of the nineteenth century.31 The desire to overcome the limits of physical anthropology was motivated
not only by mere scientific or professional considerations, but also by philosophical, ethical,
and political reasons; it was largely intensified by an overall sense of crisis in scientific thought
and by frequent calls for a “revolution in science” and for the return of “its meaning for
life.”32 This general protest against scientific positivism also revolved around the ongoing
controversy about the neutrality and autonomy of science. The notion of a “value-free
science” (wertfreie Wissenschaft), as propounded by figures like Max Weber and Werner
Sombart in the years preceding World War I, was criticized strongly in its aftermath
because of the destructive manifestations of modern technology. Facing the total collapse
of technological optimism, many scientists and intellectuals raised doubts concerning the
“neutral” and “value-free” character of science; they emphasized the need to set clear
limits for science and to subjugate its methods and goals to a strict system of values, i.e., to
a fixed Weltanschauung.33 Others pointed at the inherent logical failure of “objective”
science, which, they argued, completely ignores the subjective nature of logical and empirical
processes, eventually leading to a “science” that is no more than a sum of unrelated facts.34
Racial scientists were heavily invested in these questions of value and science. For
example, the anthropologist Walter Scheidt, a leading spokesman for the new Rassenkunde
(study of race) and the first director of the “institute for racial and cultural biology” at the
University of Hamburg, argued that science by itself lacks any “moral scale” (Wertmaßtab)
and that it must therefore be subordinated to “cultural politics” (Kulturpolitik).35 The prominent race theoretician Hans F. K. Günther similarly rejected any attempt to establish the new
31
See further Robert Proctor, “From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German Anthropological
Tradition,” in Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr.
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 138–79; Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer:
Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Volksgeist as Method
and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W. Stocking,
Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 79–154; Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and
Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Andrew D. Evans,
Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2010).
32
Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Revolution in der Wissenschaft,” Schmollers Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung
und Volkswirtschaft 45 (1921): 1001–30; Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die
transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Elisabeth Ströker (Hamburg: Meiner, 2012 [1936]), 52.
33
See, e.g., Wilhelm Stern’s statement, quoted in Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins:
The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 254.
For a comprehensive discussion of the “value-neutrality” debate and the prevalent call for the exclusion
of politics and morals from science in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, see Robert
Proctor, Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991); Anderton, “The Limits of Science”; Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 511–68; Albert Gert, “Der Werturteilsstreit,” in
Soziologische Kontroversen, ed. Georg Kneer and Stephan Moebius (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2010),
14–45; Johannes Glaeser, Der Werturteilsstreit in der deutschen Nationalökonomie: Max Weber, Werner Sombart
und die Ideale der Sozialpolitik (Marburg: Metropolis, 2014).
34
This postulate, for example, stands at the core of Edmund Husserl’s critique of naturalism in Die Krisis der
europäischen Wissenschaften (1936). On this subject, see also Siegfried Kracauer’s critique in Proctor, Value-Free
Science?, 157.
35
Walter Scheidt, Die Träger der Kultur (Berlin: Alfred Metsner, 1934), 81. On Scheidt and his scientific
and political activity, see Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was vor und nach 1945
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
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doctrine of Rassenkunde on the principles of natural science, arguing that the racial question
was in itself a question of value; it could therefore not be measured using the quantitative
methods of exact science.36 Even Sombart, a leading advocate of “value-free science”
during the early years of the twentieth century, was, by the late 1930s, justifying the Nazi
politicization of science by asserting that “a value, as well as a value judgment, exist
outside the scope of practical and empirical knowledge, i.e., what we call science. This is
why they belong much more to the realm of philosophical (or religious) knowledge.”37
Underlying such ideas was the understanding that science cannot determine values and
therefore cannot provide a groundwork for a spiritual, moral, and political renovation
based on racial principles. In other words, science can only describe processes but never
essences; it can explain the “how” but never the “what” or the “what for”—or, to quote
Max Weber’s well-known aphorism: science can say what there is (das Seiende) but not
what ought to be (das Seinsollende).
During the 1920s, Weber’s aphorism was largely adopted and manipulated by leading
race scientists, who used it as ideological ammunition to mobilize scientific racism in the
service of national politics.38 This argument also aided Nazi ideologues in their attacks on
the adherents of liberal science, and it was used as well to legitimize the nazification of sciences during the 1930s.39 Because genetics, and natural sciences in general, are based on
causal-mechanistic principles that explain life through physicochemical processes bounded
by cause and effect, they result in a determinism that rules out any possibility of free will
or moral choice. According to this logic, the theoretical foundations for the new
Weltanschauung and its racialized ethics are thus not to be looked for in the realm of
scientific-mechanistic biology but rather in the realm of holistic thought. The distinction
between fact and value, between “is” and “ought,” which has been the mainstay of positivism, therefore motivated race scientists to employ a new conception of “biology” that undermined causal-mechanistic determinations and was no longer detached from the core
problems of moral life and value. Already in the early 1920’s, Günther criticized “all those
‘biological’ and ‘biologistic’ worldviews positioned today at the forefront of racial science,
which are damaging to German renewal.” According to him, “biology as an autonomous
science will never be able to serve as a basis for a worldview.”40 Ernst Krieck, a leading intellectual authority in the early years of the Third Reich, stressed that “biology” as a scientific
(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2013), 529; Michael Vetsch, Ideologisierte Wissenschaft: Rassentheorien deutscher
Anthropologen zwischen 1918 und 1933 (Bern: Grin, 2003), 82–89.
36
Hans F. K. Günther, Der nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns, 1925), 81.
37
Werner Sombart, Weltanschauung, Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft (Berlin: Buchholz Weißwange, 1938),
16–17.
38
Leading racial scientists such as Fritz Lenz, Hans Günther, and Walter Scheidt explicitly cited this statement in their writings, using it to justify their calls for the politicization of science. See Fritz Lenz, Menschliche
Auslese und Rassenhygiene (Eugenik) (1921), 3rd ed., published as vol. 2 of Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and
Fritz Lenz, Grundriß der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1932), 9;
Walter Scheidt, Die Träger der Kultur, 13; Günther, Der nordische Gedanke, 81.
39
According to Walter Gross, the head of the Office of Racial Policy, “Political science means a practical
implementation of the principle of value [Wertprinzip] … This means that, from the outset, science—
exactly because it is value-charged—does not make do with determining what there is, but rather claims
to realize what ought to be.” See Walter Gross, “Rasse und Weltanschauung,” Ziel und Weg. Zeitschrift
des Nationalsozialistichen Deutschen Ärzte Bundes 22 (1934): 30.
40
Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1925), 414.
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category must be differentiated from a “biological worldview,” which is based on the principle of “holistic,” “comprehensive,” and “autonomous life.” According to Krieck, while
scientific and “mechanistic biology” sharply separated matter from spirit, body from soul,
and organic from inorganic nature, thereby reducing “life” to narrow physical and materialistic categories, the völkisch-anthropological conception of biology underpinned a new
“image of man” and a “holistic-biological world-picture” ( gesamtbiologisches Weltbild).41
This distinction between biology as a science and biology as a Weltanschauung also gained official Nazi party approval. Walter Gross, the head of the Office of Racial Policy and the man
charged with forging a public consensus in support of Nazi racial programs, thus asserted in
one of his speeches, “The revival of racial-völkisch thought was not the result of scientific discoveries, and biology and anthropology in recent decades cannot claim to be the heralds of
the new ideological movement.”42
Racial scientists and eugenicists celebrated the triumph of genetics, as well as new discoveries in the field of human heredity that intensified the belief that natural heredity, not environmental factors, was the main force behind racial differences. The rediscovery of
Mendelian laws in 1900 and their successful implementation in the field of human heredity
generated the reconceptualization of “race” from a physical and anatomical category (the
norm in the descriptive and morphological vein of nineteenth-century anthropology) into
a “group of identical genetic traits, which constitute physical, anatomical, and psychological
characteristics …”43 One cannot overestimate the significance of genetic science for the
emergence of a new conception of race, but its impact on German racial scientists needs
to be reexamined within the particular cultural and epistemological context of postwar
Germany—and the general climate of intellectual insecurity that characterized it. Genetics
offered an endorsement for eugenic and racial-social claims, but it also spurred a series of
new problems that exposed the inherent tensions in the newly conceived Rassenkunde.
The first problem concerned the Mendelian method itself. According to Mendel’s second
law—known also as “the law of independent assortment”—different genes independently
separate from one another when reproductive cells develop. Racial scientists were fully
aware of the basic difficulty of proving the distribution of mental traits according to the
Mendelian scheme, especially of proving a correlation between phenotype (i.e., the
genetic potential actually realized in the individual) and the genotype (the overall, nonactualized, and “invisible” genetic “code” that constitutes the same individual).44 Another
41
Ernst Krieck, Völkisch-politische Anthropologie. I: Die Wirklichkeit (Leipzig: Armanen Verlag, 1936), 5–7.
Walter Gross, Rasse, Weltanschauung, Wissenschaft. Zwei Universitätsreden (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt,
1936), 22.
43
Eugen Fischer, Rasse und Rasse-Entstehung beim Menschen (Berlin: Ullstein, 1927), 11.
44
Fritz Lenz, the prominent racial hygienist, discussed this problem in his writings: “Since, among racially
mixed societies, different hereditary units are still independently passed from one generation to another,
there is a basic difficulty in deducing mental traits from physical characteristics … [Therefore] there is a possibility that a blond person with blue eyes will have a similar mental structure as a person of a dark race.”
According to Lenz, this explained how peasants from Lower Saxony, who had short heads and dark hair,
could have Nordic mental traits that were not common among Jews with long heads and blond hair. “In
the end,” he concluded, “a blond Jew is nonetheless a Jew.” For these reasons, Lenz emphasized, “the category of ‘non-Aryans’ [Nichtarier] has been determined, within the legislative system of the National
Socialist state, according to hereditary conditions [Abstammung abhängig] and not according to external
racial traits.” See Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene
(Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1936 [1921]), 759.
42
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
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problem was the deterministic and mechanistic nature of genetic explanations and the moral
problems they evoked. From an ethical and philosophical point of view, many racial scientists
were uncomfortable with the causal-deterministic implications of genetic science, and they
were eager to formulate a scientific paradigm that would overcome the gap between biological determinism and free will—two principles perceived as essential for mobilizing racial sciences as an ideological and political tool. The problem of free will occupied the minds of
many racial scientists, though it was usually perceived as part of a broader psycho-physical
problem that exceeded the limits of pure scientific enquiry.45 Even so, it raised a series of
unresolved questions that the adherents of racial determinism were forced to face.
Accepting biological determinism as an all-encompassing principle implied deep recognition
of the fundamental inability to induce change. Racial hygienists consequently sought to formulate a path that would reconcile the genetic evidence of racial predispositions with
humans’ capacity to overcome nature and to shape human life by virtue of reason and free
will. The internal contradiction nevertheless remained: if a person can surpass biological predispositions, what is the value of biological determinism? Hence, where choice and free will
exist, determinism fails.
Fritz Lenz, one of Germany’s most eminent racial hygienist during the interwar period,
addressed this problem intensively in his writings, concluding that it was “an intractable and
perhaps even unsolvable question.”46 This issue also dictated Lenz’s attitude toward the role
of science and its limitations in social life. According to Lenz, science’s value-neutrality and
the irresolvable tension between biological-scientific “necessity” (Notwendigkeit) and moral
“freedom” (Freiheit) justify the politicization of science and its subordination to an ethical
and political Weltanschauung. Already in 1921, he stated that the role of science was
neither to create values nor to dictate ideological and moral goals; he added, however,
that it may “grant us the means to fulfill our [ideological] causes.”47 In October 1933,
several months after the Nazi seizure of power, Lenz confessed, “I do not believe any
more that philosophy or any ethical doctrine [Wertlehre] is feasible as science … Value
45
For this reason, racial scientists often chose to overlook questions of a philosophical nature and to focus
instead only on more practical issues concerning the theory of heredity, concluding that they were incapable
of providing a complete picture of psychic reality. For example, Johannes Schottky, the head of the registry
office in Walther Darré’s Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, noted that, because the natural sciences
were not capable of solving the mind–body problem, they must adhere to the materialistic method of
biology. See Johannes Schottky, “Einführung,” in Die Persönlichkeit im Lichte der Erblehre, ed. Johannes
Schottky (Leipzig: B. S. Teubner, 1936), 4. For similar reasons, physician Hans Burkhardt saw fit to
commend psychiatric studies conducted on mentally ill patients by Hermann Hoffmann, Ernst
Kretschmer, and Ernst Rüdin, claiming that their efficiency derived from their practical nature and lack
of dependency on philosophical theories related to the mind-body problem. See Hans Burkhardt,
“Psychiatrische Beiträge zur Rassenseelenkunde,” Volk und Rasse 3 (1936): 85. Kurt Gottschaldt, the
head of the department for hereditary psychology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, also noted the difficulties
posed by the mind–body problem (which he also dubbed the Ganzheitsproblem) to the study of mental
heredity, which is based on the laws of functionality and causality. According to Gottschaldt, the issue
that most clearly demonstrated the limitations of empirical science on this subject was the “act of the
will” (Willensakt) and “the perception of the will” (Willenshaltung). See Kurt Gottschaldt, “Die Methodik
der Persönlichkeitsforschung in der Erbpsychologie,” in Erbpsychologie. Arbeiten zur Erb und
Umweltforschung, ed. Eugen Fischer und Kurt Gottschaldt (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1942),
130–31, 157.
46
Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 706. See also Lenz, Menschliche Auslese,
554.
47
Lenz, Menschliche Auslese, 556.
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cannot be ‘proven’ scientifically.”48 In the absence of any objective or positive scale for valuejudgment, Lenz thus called for the formation of race as an “ethical principle” (Wertprinzip).49
Regarding the unscientific basis of value, he came to the conclusion that the actuality of race
lay not in its empirical validity but in its ethical potency: “Even though, in the factual world,
race does not exist as a coherent unity [geschlossene Einheit], facts do not carry much weight
in the world of values.”50 Race could, as a consequence, no longer be defined by scientific
knowledge; rather, it had to be redefined through immediate feeling and intuition—i.e., as
an object of faith. This shift was crucial, because it alone could provide an “ethical” ground
for the cultivation of a new and substantial Weltanschauung, one that could lead the Germans
to embark on a new political and social path. Lenz thus rejected the feasibility of any “scientific knowledge” (wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis) of race and opted instead for an imperative of
“faith in race” (Rasseglaube): “The National Socialist worldview is based on faith in race
[Glauben an die Rasse]. It is not based on scientific knowledge regarding the essence of
race and its life regulations. First and foremost, it is the will for self-assertion [der Wille zur
Selbstbehauptung] of race itself; this will is prior to any scientific perception and its
derivatives.”51
The role of science was, in this sense, very clear: it was perceived as an instrument to
improve reality but never to dictate it, a medium to mobilize nature and master it but
never to penetrate into its deepest secrets. Science thus gained a new meaning here: it is
no longer an organized system of principles and regulations directed to achieve meaningful
insights about the world; rather, it is an instrument in the service of a political worldview to
be established by virtue of internal conviction and formative will. The existence of race as an
empirical phenomenon is therefore no longer determined by logical reasoning and scientific
generalizations; race is a total reality, verified by its own factuality from its being-in-itself. It
therefore does not need any external justifications, since the experience of race precedes any
logical affirmation or conceptual articulation. Biology as such can, accordingly, only be
understood as a living experience in its qualitative irreducibility to physico-chemical
processes.
During the 1920s, leading racial theoreticians and anthropologists were eager to adopt
physiognomic, holistic, and phenomenological strategies that would verify the correlation
between body and soul, and, ostensibly, also to corroborate the mental and cognitive differences between the races, without committing to material monism. Günther, for example,
employed the Goethean conception of lebende Anschauung as a means to overcome the
“unimaginative” (Unbildigkeit), natural-scientific world-picture. A real and substantial racial
science, he argued, must be based on a “racial-scholarly gaze” (rassenkundlicher Blick) that
encompasses the whole “human Gestalt” (Menschengestalt) and not just its partial physical
or morphological features.52 Scheidt opted for a phenomenology-based “cultural biology”
48
Fritz Lenz, Die Rasse als Wertprinzip. Zur Erneuerung der Ethik (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1933), 7.
Lenz’s philosophical inquiries into the question of value are summarized in his 1933 essay, “Die Rasse als
Wertprinzip,” which was based on a much earlier version, “Zur Erneuerung der Ethik,” published in 1917,
in Deutschlands Erneuerung 1 (1917): 35–56.
50
Lenz, Rasse als Wertprinzip, 17.
51
Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 769. Also see Amit Varshizky, “Between
Science and Metaphysics: Fritz Lenz and Racial Anthropology in Interwar Germany,” Intellectual History
Review 27, no. 2 (2017): 247–72.
52
Günther, Rassenkunde, 1–2.
49
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
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and proclaimed that cultural and spiritual products provide comprehensive descriptions of
performance (Leistungsbeschreibungen); one could deduce from these performances the
psycho-biological capabilities that gave rise to them.53 The highly influential anthropologist
Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß went even further by establishing his racial psychology
(Rassenseelenkunde) on vitalist and phenomenological principles, proclaiming race to be an
organic manifestation of a particular “style of experience” (Stil des Erlebnisses) that revealed
itself as a “living Gestalt” (lebendige Gestalt).54 Though clearly differing in their approaches
and methods, these theoreticians were all motivated by a desire to provide a new understanding of human biology and to break down the barriers between the spiritual and the physical,
between scholarship and Weltanschauung, between science and life.
Vitalist biology allowed race anthropologists to connect their racial theories to much older
spiritual and philosophical “German” traditions, and also to engage with a new ethically and
existentially meaningful picture of human existence. The adherents of the new Rassenkunde
were eager to appropriate a vitalist conception of biology because it enabled them to overcome the obstacles raised by Mendelian genetics and to inject biology with “value.” In this
way, exterior empirical phenomena were perceived as a manifestation and expression of an
essential interior—of elemental and intrinsic value encoded in the organic matter itself.
This laid the foundation for a new conception of race, which was no longer bound to the
descriptive and reductionist categories of scientific biology. According to Walter Gross,
“race is not a measuring principle of random external physical characteristics, but rather a
form in which life manifests itself as such, even when the hereditary traits are not clear
enough.”55 The aforementioned anthropological stances had already been formulated in
the early 1920s, but they were injected into the new, everyday political and revolutionary
jargon after the Nazi seizure of power. Nazi racism was thus introduced as a triumph of vitalist
biology over mechanistic biology, of “life experience” over abstract rationalism. According to
Erich Rudolf Jaensch, one of Germany’s most eminent racial psychologists in the interwar
period and the chairman of the German Society for Psychology in 1936–1937, Nazism
placed “life” at the center of all scientific and philosophical endeavors, thus establishing for
the first time a Kulturpolitik based on the “laws of life.”56
Unlike the “neutral” and “objective” science of biology, which is based on empirical or
theoretical knowledge about life, the Nazi value-laden “biological worldview” promoted a
new conception of knowing, applied merely within the realm of “life experience.” This
stance was justified biologically by vitalist and phenomenological introspections. Because
the natural sciences could only describe the relations between phenomena, but never
grasp their inner meaning (i.e., their intrinsic value), Nazi ideologues sought to establish a
new holistic science that would bring together science, metaphysics, and aesthetics under
the notion of biological totality.
53
See Walter Scheidt, Allgemeine Rassenkunde: Als Einführung in das Studium der Menschenrassen (Munich:
J. F. Lehmann, 1925). For a critical review of Scheidt’s theory, see Eric Voegelin, Race and State, in The
Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 2., ed. Klaus Vondung (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1997), 76–83.
54
Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß, Rasse ist Gestalt (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1937), 17.
55
Groß, Rasse, Weltanschauung, Wissenschaft, 23.
56
Erich Rudolf Jaensch, Der Gegentypus: Psychologisch-anthropologische Grundlagen deutscher
Kulturphilosophie, ausgehend von dem was wir überwinden wollen (Leipzig: Barth, 1938), xli.
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
The Hunger for Wholeness and the Nazi Symbiosis between
“Knowledge” and “Faith”
The early 1930s saw an increasing attempt to establish an “Aryan science” that would conjoin
with the antimaterialistic and anti-mechanistic overtone of the day and overcome what Adolf
Hitler had already defined in Mein Kampf as a “materialistic” (vermaterialisierte) era, dictated by
“degenerate science” that is “estranged from life.”57 Ardent scientific endeavors, such as the
attempts to constitute “Aryan physics,” “Aryan mathematics,” or “Aryan biology,” achieved
a certain degree of popularization during the early years of the Third Reich, but they gradually proved to be insufficient in the wake of new military and technological needs in the late
1930s.58 This was also the case for the holistic and bio-vitalist scholarship that prevailed in the
early phases of the Nazi period and that correlated with the revolutionary message of the new
regime. Because of the increasing demands for mobilizing and militarizing the state, and also
because the 1936 declaration of the Four-Year Plan for Germany rearmament, holistic thinking was gradually pushed to the margins in favor of a more applied-scientific and technocratic
mindset. As the practical use of science began to obscure its ideological value, the balance of
power increasingly shifted toward the army and the Schutzstaffel (SS) technocrats.59 The
outcome of this shift was not, however, the weakening of ideology vis-à-vis science, but
rather the overriding of the more orthodox scientific establishment’s beliefs by political
and ideologically-oriented considerations.60
Although holistic and vitalist biology diminished somewhat during the late 1930s, it continued to appeal to Nazi-minded scientists and was considered highly useful in the hands of
military and SS psychologists. As Ulfried Geuter has shown, Lebensphilosophie, Klagesian characterology, and expression psychology were extensively employed by military psychologists in
the Wehrmacht, who, as part of their daily tasks, were asked to diagnose the suitability of officer
candidates.61 Geoffrey Cocks has also pointed to the influence of German Romantic and
holistic ideas on Nazi psychotherapy and to the ways in which the Göring Institute in
Berlin implemented holistically oriented psychotherapy for the benefit of its German
57
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1938), 469–70.
On the attempts to establish “Aryan physics,” see Alan Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1977). On Ludwig Bieberbach’s “Aryan mathematics,” see Sanford L. Segal,
Mathematicians under the Nazis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Herbert Mehrtens,
“Ludwig Bieberbach and ‘Deutsche Mathematik,’” in Studies in the History of Mathematics, ed. E. R. Phillips
(Washington, D.C.: Mathematical Association of America, 1987), 195–241. On Ernst Lehmann’s
“German biology,” see Ute Deichmann, Biologen unter Hitler. Porträt einer Wissenschaft im NS-Staat
(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1995), 74–89.
59
Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 198; Christopher Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial
Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 172–73.
60
Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 514.
61
Relying on vitalist assumptions, Wehrmacht psychologists sought to develop new methods that would
enable the measuring of will power, which was considered to be highly important given the nature of the
tasks that soldiers were required to perform on the battlefield. Because the human psyche manifests itself
through the movements and expressions of the living body, according to this view, Wehrmacht psychologists
developed new methods for analyzing mental qualities and emotional expressions by means of body language, gestures, facial expressions, muscle tension, and voice. See Ulfried Geuter, The Professionalization of
Psychology in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 94–98.
58
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
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patients.62 Other historians have shown how holistic medicine was incorporated into medical
school programs or used to reinforce naturopathic practices in the Third Reich.63
Several historians mark as the shifting point from “holistic” to “mechanistic” Nazi science
the year 1936, but that year also signaled a simultaneous increase in the use of holistic rhetoric
to justify the Nazi “coordination” (Gleichschaltgung) of science and the universities.64 In a
speech delivered at the University of Heidelberg in 1936, Bernhard Rust, the Reich’s
Minister of Science, Education, and National Culture, proclaimed that Nazism had achieved
a reversal of the long process of fragmentation in the sciences by replacing liberal, positivistic,
“value-free” science with ideology-oriented science that restores man’s lost unity. A year
later, at a rally of the National Socialist German Lecturers League (Nationalsozialistischer
Deutscher Dozentenbund), Franz Bachér, the head of the so-called Academic
Department in Rust’s office, repeated his superior’s proclamations while addressing the
role of German universities in implementing the goals of the Four-Year Plan. Bachér used
the metaphor of mountain peaks and valleys, asserting that, before the Nazi seizure of
power, the liberal sciences had been mountain peaks lacking unity, whereas, under
National Socialism, they were regrouped into a unified “common peak.”65 These statements
referred to the accelerated process of centralization and unification of the Prussian and Reich
ministries for education and science under the undisputed authority of the recently founded
Reich Ministry of Science, Education, and National Culture (Reichserziehungsministerium).
The party’s ideologues enlisted holistic and synthetic metaphors to justify the nazification
of science and to present it as a part of a revolutionary enterprise to incite a spiritual renewal of
German life in its entirety. In a 1937 speech, Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the
Nazi movement, declared that “the great mission of our period is to merge the different fields
of science as an expression of a new experience and understanding of elements that belong to
one another, and to raise a new foundation for the sciences.”66 This call was not new,
however, and it reflected the long-term pursuit of German racial scientists to combine naturalistic with humanistic methods, and to understand cultural and psychological phenomena
on the basis of biology. Using the principles of holistic and vitalist biology, Nazi ideologues
sought to undertake a revolutionary enterprise which, in their view, would both undermine
the liberal, “mechanistic” differentiation between the various fields of knowledge, and
expand the theoretical and practical horizons of science. A year earlier, Gross had clarified
this goal as follows: “Our perception of human physicality and spirituality as a fundamental
expression of life itself can provide a new attitude toward the establishment of new methods
62
Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985).
63
Sheila Weiss, “Pedagogy, Professionalism, and Politics: Biology Instruction during the Third Reich,” in
Science, Technology, and National Socialism, ed. Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 184–96; Walter Wuttke-Groneberg, ed., Medizin im Nationalsozialismus: Ein
Arbeitsbuch (Tübingen: Schwäbische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1980).
64
See Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 193–200; Geuter, The Professionalization of Psychology, 171–74;
Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 172–73.
65
Kristie Macrakis, Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 75–76.
66
Alfred Rosenberg, “Weltanschauung und Wissenschaft,” in Weltanschauung und Wissenschaft. 5 Vorträge
der dritten Reichsarbeitstagung der Dienststelle für Schrifttumspflege bei dem Beauftragten des Führers für die gesamte
geistige und weltanschauliche Erziehung der NSDAP und der Reichstelle zur Förderung des deutschen Schrifttums
(Bayreuth: Bayerische Ostmark, 1937), 4.
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
in our scientific life, and, through a new stimulating synthesis, help overcome the increasing
hostility and alienation between the natural sciences and the humanities.”67
In a similar vein, the philosopher and pedagogue Alfred Baeumler, who led the
Department of Science in Rosenberg’s office and was at the forefront of Nazi reforms in the
academy, called for “a struggle for a new German life-enhancing science [lebensfördernde
Wissenschaft] that is anchored in reality.”68 In his view, since science is value-laden by its
very nature, it reflects the prevailing political system of its time. Accordingly, the scientific
division of disciplines and subdisciplines should be related directly to the logic of the liberalparliamentary system: “The atomization of science can be explained not only by the differentiation of modern aspects of life, but also by the political-ideological chaos of the period.”69
Moreover, this scientific “atomization” not only reproduced the “chaotic” form of democratic
liberalism, but also justified its logic and methods by defining it as “apolitical,” “objective,”
“ideologically neutral,” etc.70 According to this logic, the dualistic, Cartesian, and mechanistic
worldview had led to a sharp split between the fields of knowledge, but Nazi holistic biology
had unified them anew under the principle of organic life.
In taking up the call for holistic science, Nazi ideologues emphasized, however, a message
that was also being articulated in different ways outside the sciences and that was connected to
the broader conception of life as a total experience. Echoing the Goethean view of
Anschauung, they sought to transform science into an enterprise rooted in both reason and intuition, capable of uniting its insights with those of aesthetics and religion. In a 1934 article, Gross
declared that the “great shift in the German sciences enabled a new outlook on nature and its
phenomena by merging science and religion.” At the core of every scientific endeavor, Gross
explained, lies “the question of the unity behind multiplicity; the search for the meaning of
things, which can only be perceived in our senses as partial and fragmental impressions.”71
Therefore, alongside the natural sciences, which are subjected to causal mechanistic principles
and limited to empirical preconditions, there is “the mystical urge [der mystische Trieb] …
which proclaims the renewal of the way that has been long forgotten, that leads to the
essence of things, and that declares war on mechanistic empiricism …”72 The Nazi “spiritual
revolution,” he concluded, calls for a total synthesis between empirical observation and mystical experience. The Nordic Weltanschauung thus “brings together again—though never in
total harmony—the essential unity between the empirical exploration of the multiplicity of
phenomena and the unmediated religious experience.”73 As Claudia Koonz has shown, this
sort of racialized spiritual urge was at the root of Gross’s political activities, which aimed to synthesize scientific data with popularized racial thinking.74 Thus, in his many speeches and talks,
he frequently appropriated religious language and defined racial policy as “religious work”
standing above “contentious academic circles that place ideas above real pulsating life.”75
67
Gross, Rasse, Weltanschauung, Wissenschaft, 25.
Budesarchive Berlin-Lichterfelde, NS-15/347, Alfred Baeumler, “Weltanschauung und Wissenschaft.”
69
Ibid.
70
Ibid.
71
Walter Gross, “Naturwissenschaft und Religion,” Ziel und Weg. Zeitschrift des Nationalsozialistichen
Deutschen Ärzte Bundes 20 (1934): 758.
72
Ibid.
73
Ibid., 759.
74
See Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 103–30.
75
Gross, quoted in ibid., 124.
68
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
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This symbiosis between science and religion was accepted in the Third Reich by many
scholars and intellectuals, who set out to extend biological thinking into the realm of metaphysics. Sigrid Hunke, a scholar of religion who completed her dissertation under the supervision of Clauß and later joined Heinrich Himmler’s German Scientific Service
(Germanistischer Wissenschafteinsatz) in the early 1940s, therefore stressed, for example, that
only a “unification of science and metaphysics, of an external experience and an introspective
subjective observation,” could achieve “racial-psychological knowledge” (Rassenseelenforschung
Erkenntnis).76 The Marburg psychologist Jaensch even went a step further in calling for a “religious renewal” (religiöse Erneuerung), arguing for the immanent spirituality embedded in “living
nature” (lebendige Natur) and rejecting scientific “knowledge” as a means for capturing life in its
totality. “In the last three hundred years,” he wrote, “science is a narrow strip of light in a dark
endless space. From here stems the popular but mistaken belief that what [science] illuminates is
necessarily absolute. There is not only ‘reality’ [Wirklichkeit], however, but also meta-reality
[Überwirklichkeit], which is commonly called the other world [Überwelt].” Reality, he clarified, was nothing more than “a small part of the overall existence of meta-reality.”77 This was
why scientific rationalism could not penetrate the mysteries of life and gain real knowledge
about existence. “Modern science,” Jaensch concluded, “remains connected deeply to the religious perspective [because] religious mysticism strives toward the timeless by overcoming the
temporary.”78
According to this logic, empirical observation could provide some helpful insights about
phenomena, but it could never say anything about the thing-in-itself. That role was left to
metaphysics, which would not offer a transcendent or speculative view about the unconditioned beyond experience, but instead be immanent and remain strictly within the limits of
experience. In the absence of any transcendent or objective truth, “living” experience
became the only source for substantial knowledge and value judgment. As Rosenberg
explained:
The life of a race, of a Volk, is not a philosophically logical development, or even a process that
unfolds in terms of natural law. It is a formation of a mystical synthesis, of an activity of the soul
(Seelenbetätigung), which cannot be explained by rational deduction or made intelligible through
analysis of cause and effect … Any philosophy that goes beyond formal rational criticism is less a
perception than a confession of faith: a spiritual and racial credo and an avowal of character
values.79
In this way, Rosenberg and other Nazi ideologues thought to abolish the age-old hostility
between science and religion. They could thus proclaim that “knowledge” (Wissen)
and “faith” (Glauben) were not contradictory, but rather complement one another.80
76
Sigrid Hunke,“Verstehen,” Rasse. Monatsschrift der Nordischen Bewegung (1936): 91. On Sigrid Hunke,
see Hurst Junginger, “Sigrid Hunke (1913–1999): Europe’s New Religion and its Old Stereotypes,” in
Antisemitismus, Paganismus, völkische Religion, ed. Hubert Cancik and Uwe Puschner (Munich: Saur,
2004), 151–62.
77
Jaensch, Der Gegentypus, 493.
78
Erich Rudolf Jaensch, “Die Wissenschaft und die deutsche völkische Bewegung,” in Die deutsche
Hochschule, ed. Ernst Krieck and Friedrich Klausing (Marburg: N. G. Elwertsche, 1936), 6.
79
Alferd Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe
unserer Zeit (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1934 [1930]), 117.
80
Ibid., 684, 699; Gottfried Griesmayr, Zwei Welten (s.l.: Bozner, 194?), 15.
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Rosenberg could therefore declare that Nazi Rassenkunde was not, by any means, atheistic; it
was also not hostile to religion, but, in fact, compatible with it.81
The attempt to bend such a fusion of “knowledge” with “faith” in holistic directions ultimately failed to meet Germany’s increasing demand for an action-oriented and applied
science. Yet, this imperative became a guiding principle in Nazi pedagogy and its goal of creating a new type of man under the banner of “body-soul unity” (Leib-Seele-Einheit). Baldur
von Schirach, the head of the Hitler Youth, called for the return of German education to
holistic Goethean teaching, which, he thought, stood for the “unity of character” (Einheit
des Charakters). According to Schirach, Goethe “sought to shape the whole man and not
only his intellect, exactly the same way as we seek to do one hundred years later.”82
Jaensch similarly determined that the objective of academic education was to foster in the
German student an “appearance that is faithful to life” and an ability “to comprehend the
whole man, not just his abstract intellect.”83 A guidebook for the Hitler Youth explained
that fostering Nazi character in the younger generation was based on the principle of “the
unity of emotion and cognition, of heart and intellect”; the supreme task of Nazi education
was thus “always to address the whole man, as he is an inseparable unity of body, soul, and
spirit.”84 Accordingly, education, “which emanates from the body and seizes the soul,”
should aim to regulate the emotions of youths, strengthen their willpower, and shape
their political awareness in a sectarian-like and quasi-religious fashion.85 Students at training
colleges for aspiring officers and political leaders were also required to adhere to a “totally
new method of education” that sought a “synthesis between body, soul, and spirit.”86
This method, as Deputy Gauleiter Friedrich Schmidt mentioned in 1939, had not yet
been fully implemented, but it alone would meet the need to shape a new type of man
and “educate the young leadership in the spirit of the myth of the National Socialist
worldview.”87
Holistic rhetoric offered a stock of metaphors that proved to be highly malleable to the
Nazi cause. It provided a complete set of images and symbols that affirmed the supremacy
of the whole (the Volk) over its parts (individuals), and it supported eugenic claims for cleansing the organic whole of all the “racial-alien” and fragmentary elements operating within
it.88 Yet, as much as these images served as an effective tool in the hands of the propagandists,
they were also supported by a comprehensive intellectual endeavor aimed at verifying these
so-called German and life-affirming values on new historical and philosophical grounds. The
Nazi synthesis between “knowledge” and “faith” thus became a cornerstone for a new
81
Alfred Rosenberg, Tradition und Gegenwart: Reden und Aufsätze 1936–1940 (Munich: Zentralverlag der
NSDAP, 1943), 25.
82
Baldur von Schirach, “Goethe in unserer Zeit,” in Revolution der Erziehung. Reden aus den Jahren des
Aufbaus (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1942), 177.
83
Jaensch, “Die Wissenschaft und die deutsche völkische Bewegung,” 64.
84
Gottfried Griesmayr, Wir Hitlerjungen. Unsere Weltanschauung in Frage und Antwort (Berlin: s.n., 1936), 3.
85
Harald Scholtz, Erziehung und Unterricht unterm Hakenkreuz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1985), 125–26.
86
Friedrich Gottlob Schmidt, “Grundlagen und Methoden der Erziehung des politischen Leiterkorps der
NSDAP,” Sammelheft ausgewählter Vorträge und Reden. Für Schulung in nationalsozialisticher Weltanschauung und
nationalpolitischer Zielsetzung (1939): 138.
87
Ibid., 139.
88
Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 185–88.
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philosophy of history, a new revolutionary understanding of human nature that was to lead
the German Volk to embark on a new spiritual and political path.
Racial Eschatology:
The Triumph of the “Whole Man” over the “Split Man”
One of the most profound attempts to formulate Nazi ideology as a systematic philosophy
was that of Alfred Rosenberg in Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth
Century) of 1930. The fundamental message of Rosenberg’s Mythus was that a true understanding of history must acknowledge the underlying metaphysical struggle between opposing spiritual values embedded in the human races, namely, the “immutable and basic laws
that, although they contend [with each other] in various forms, nevertheless remain constant
in the direction of their effect.”89 This acknowledgment would supposedly reveal the mysteries of the past and shed new light on the present: “Past and present suddenly appear in a
new light, and a new mission would emerge for the future. History and the task of the future
no longer signify the struggle of class against class or the conflict between one church dogma
and another, but rather the confrontation between blood and blood, race and race, Volk and
Volk. And that means: the struggle of spiritual values against each other.”90
In Rosenberg’s view, this “struggle of values” (Ringen der Werte) served as the elemental
key for deciphering historical dynamics and the political upheavals of the day. He therefore
deliberately detached himself from the mechanistic and Darwinist overtone of scientific
biology and instead articulated his racial philosophy in clear spiritual terms: “Racial history
is therefore simultaneously natural history and soul mystique [Seelen-Mystik].”91
Rosenberg’s philosophy clearly demonstrates the way in which biological racism intermingled with theological narratives employing vitalist language. Rosenberg portrayed a dichotomous, metahistorical system, at the center of which two opposing powers are counterpoised,
representing contrasting values and beliefs whose clash dictates the course of human history.
On the one hand, there is a pure racial element that affirms life, vitality, and cultural regeneration, whose most prominent representative is the Nordic race. On the other hand, there is an
antiracial element that is identified with the negation of life, static dogmatism, chaos, and cultural degeneration, and that has manifested itself historically in the form of Judaism and
Catholicism. According to Rosenberg, the state of affairs in the modern world directly
stems from the increasing power of antiracial forces and the weakening of vital racial elements.
The entire liberal-bourgeois order, including its belief in rationalism, scientific positivism, and
universal progress, reflects an antiracial system of values, whose roots are found in the “spiritual
dogmatism” of the Mosaic Law and the Catholic Church.92
The Judeo-Christian conception of a transcendent and omnipotent God that created the
world ex nihilo defines man, Rosenberg argued further, as shackled to an extraneous divine
89
Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 122. As shown by Samuel Koehne, Rosenberg’s idea of historical, racializedmetaphysical conflict also stands at the core of his Nazi Party program commentary from 1923. This commentary was promoted by the party as officially representing the Nazis’ programmatic and ideological views,
and it sought to offer “ordinary people” an accessible explanation of the Nazi worldview. See Samuel
Koehne, “The Racial Yardstick and Official Nazi Views on Religion,” German Studies Review 3, no. 3
(2014): 582.
90
Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 1–2.
91
Ibid., 23.
92
Ibid., 16.
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
law that never allows him to be genuinely free. The gap between the human and the divine,
and man’s constant striving after a divine objective source that is extraneous to himself, result
in a materialistic and rational worldview that seeks absolute eternal truths and thereby negates
the generative power of “life.”93 Moreover, the definition of the moment of creation as a
point in time beyond which nothing exists dictates a deterministic or “dogmatic” view
that sees history as a linear process, embedded in Christian eschatology, which eventually
culminates in the rational and secular ethos of progress. This theological consciousness is,
fundamentally, the real driving force behind modernity and its crisis; it is the reason for
the decline of Western civilization and the downfall of the Germanic Volk.
According to this logic, modern universal humanistic values are nothing more than
secular variants of Judeo-Christian theology; they reflect the ongoing subversion of antiracial
elements beneath the vital foundations of racial life.94 The two major materialist ideologies of
the modern age, liberal capitalism and Marxist communism, are consequently the offspring
of Judeo-Christian monotheism and stem from the very same “static instinct” of the Jewish
soul.95 Thus, whereas the Nordic racial soul manifests itself in “organic vitalism” and “lifedynamic affirmation,” the Jewish soul reflects a static, dogmatic, dualistic, and life-negating
force, which culminates in a rationalistic, materialistic, and utilitarian worldview.
This rhetoric of wholeness and splitting was enlisted for the sake of creating ideal racial
types, and it was widely used by Nazi ideologues and race theoreticians during the 1930s.
Within this context, “vitalism” and “dualism,” “wholeness” and “split,” became codes for
opposite metaphysical positions derived from different psycho-biological roots. “Dualism”
was thus perceived of as an expression of the “Jewish escape from the world,” i.e., as an
anti-organic stance that aimed to “eliminate the Aryan peoples from within.”96 It was
described as a “rupture of life” (Zerreißung des Lebens), a “destruction of organic unity”
(Zerstörung der organischen Einheit), and as a “suppression of the personality” (Zerschlagung
der Persönlichkeit). Although dualism was ultimately identified with Judeo-Christian, transcendent monotheism, it was also perceived as the cradle of secularization, since it marked
a “de-divinization of the world” (Entgöttlichung der Welt) and was the cause of the “desacralization of life” (Entheiligung des Lebens).97 According to this perspective, the racial mixture
that constitutes “Jewish biology” manifests itself in a psycho-physical disintegration and
self-alienation, which resulted in a harsh dualistic worldview that promoted a total split
between the corporal and the mental, between the natural and the spiritual, between this
world and the afterlife. The Nazi philosopher Hans Alfred Grunsky, who also served as a
main lector in Rosenberg’s office, argued that, because “the racial mixture in the Jewish
soul is so intense …, it is the best nutrient soil for the division of spirit [Geist] and blood,
which is precisely the reason why—paradoxically speaking—the Jews exist in their blood
from the beginning.”98 The “Jewish dualism,” which stands for “blood without spirit and
93
Ibid., 249.
Ibid., 169.
95
Ibid., 127–28.
96
Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 2.
97
Ibid., 8.
98
Hans Alfred Grunsky, Seele und Staat: Die psychologischen Grundlagen des nationalsozialistischen Siegs über
den bürgerlichen und bolschewistischen Menschen (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1935), 107. On Grunsky, see
Klee, Das Personenlexikon, 207.
94
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
275
spirit without blood,” was thus considered to be the source of all degeneration in the modern
era, and it was the very “principle behind all Bolshevistic manifestations.”99
By contrast, “holism,” “vitalism,” and “pantheism” were all perceived to be the hallmarks
of Nordic cultures. Nazi scholars could thus draw a straight line between the kalokagathia of
the ancient Greeks, Teutonic paganism, German Romantic pantheism, and, finally, Nazi
racial ideas. In this vein, Günther proclaimed that
what has been called ‘Lebensphilosophie’ more or less bypasses the school of German Idealism,
moves from Goethe and some of the impulses derived from Romanticism’s so-called philosophy
of nature, via Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and, as many people believe, ultimately to Ludwig
Klages. We recognize in all of these thinkers … a firm belief in the very body-soul unity that
was prevalent in the thought of the ancient Indogermanic peoples, a unity that is also confirmed
by present-day biology.100
Günther identified the cradle of the European Nordic culture in ancient Greece and its
ideal of kalokagathia. “For the Greeks,” he wrote, “there was nothing mental that was
not concerned with the corporeal, and nothing corporeal that was not concerned
with the mental. This is the spirit of the Nordic race.”101 Carl Haeberlin, a doctor at
the sanitarium in Bad Nauheim and a member in the Nazi Physician League, similarly
portrayed the shift from “logocentric science” to “biocentric characterology” as a
triumph of “German psychotherapy,” which marked the vital unity of body and soul
(leib-seelische Einheit), as reflected in Western philosophy from Heraclitus to Goethe
and Nietzsche.102
Within this frame of reference, history was injected with redemptive meanings.
Historical events were introduced as an outcome of a Manichaean battle between two
metaphysical and value-determined forces that have taken different forms throughout
history, but that have always maintained their intrinsic character, their inner value. This
dynamic of everlasting struggle between, on the one hand, “Jewish” dualism, which
splits body and soul, nature and spirit, world and God, and, on the other, “Nordic”
holism, which strives to rehabilitate the harmony between them, was perceived as the
real catalyst behind world history. The Nazi rise to power was therefore introduced as
the final stage in this metahistorical drama: as a total negation of a longstanding JudeoChristian dualism and its endeavor to “objectify” the world. As a result, overcoming the
crisis of modernity was meant to eliminate the Jewish transcendental “split” and to constitute a new, all-encompassing symbiosis between body and soul, form and content,
being and consciousness. This could be achieved by a total revolution in human life
and thought, one that would harmonize the physical with the mental, the biological
with the metaphysical, and it would synthesize knowledge and faith under the concept
of biological totality.
99
Grunsky, Seele und Staat, 108.
Günther, quoted in Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz
(Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 271–72.
101
Hans F. K. Günther, Platon als Hüter des Lebens: Platons Zucht und Erziehungs-Gedanken und deren
Bedeutung für die Gegenwart (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns, 1928), 39.
102
Carl Haeberlin, “Die Bedeutung von Ludwig Klages und Hans Prinzhorn für die deutsche
Psychotherapie,” Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie 7 (1934): 39. On Haeberlin, see Cocks, Psychotherapy in the
Third Reich, 83–84.
100
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
“A New Attitude between Man and God”:
Nazism and the “Resacralization” of the World
Although Nazi racial vitalism never gained a systematic formulation, it proved to be fairly
coherent in its basic outlines. Nazi ideologues and theoreticians evoked the total unity of
body and soul, yet they consistently rejected material monism while emphasizing the predominance of mind (or the will) over pure material corporeality. Karl Ludwig Lechler, a physician and the head of the Office of Racial Police in Stuttgart, asserted that, “while the notion
of body without a spirit might have been acceptable, the notion of a spirit without a body is
nothing more than a conceptual abstraction.”103 When dealing with human development,
Lechler clarified, there is no doubt concerning the priority of the spiritual over the corporal.
However, “one must not forget that even the mightiest spirit needs a corporal substrate,
which is the only way for it to become active and to be realized in the world.”104 At this
point, Lechler explicitly referred to his direct supervisor, Walter Gross, repeating his call to
eradicate the abstract and racial-alien idea of human progress, and to replace it with an
organic view of history based on the “facts of life.”105 “Life,” he concluded, was “neither
mere material nor mere spirit, but rather body and soul in a mysterious marriage.”106
Lechler’s and Gross’ views echoed the stance of their ultimate superior, Alfred
Rosenberg, who had already expressed in Mythus his commitment to a vitalist conception
of race: “Soul means race seen from within. And, conversely, race is the external expression
of a soul.”107 Rosenberg’s racial vitalism, which stood for the predominance of the organicmental power over the material body, had already prevailed, however, among racial theoreticians and völkish thinkers in the early 1920s, and it had been widely popularized by figures
like Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß.108 The body, Clauß argued, is a “site” (Schauplatz) for the soul
to express itself; it is “something-for-soul” (Etwas-für-Seele), i.e., a medium for the realization
of racial-mental qualities.109 According to this logic, the soul is not an autonomous substance, extraneous to the material body (Körper), as perceived, for example, in Christian cosmology or in Cartesian dualism; it is a nonphysical, vital impetus that constitutes the “living
body” (Leib), which is an “ensouled” (beseelte) organic matter. This is also why this “living
body” cannot be captured by scientific quantitative methods, which reduce the phenomenon of life to physicochemical processes and narrow it to its material components, as postulated by material monism. Clauß was careful enough not to fuse his “scientific” observations
with metaphysical speculations, but his Nazi disciples did not feel beholden to their mentor’s
cautious formulations, and they did not hesitate to interpret his teachings in a much more
103
Karl Ludwig Lechler, “Blut und Geist,” Ziel und Weg. Zeitschrift des Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen
Ärzte-Bundes 15 (1935): 327.
104
Ibid.
105
Ibid.; Walter Groß, “Von der politischen zur geistigen Revolution,” Ziel und Weg. Zeitschrift des
Nationalsozialistichen Deutschen Ärzte Bundes 13 (1934): 484.
106
Lechler, “Blut und Geist,” 330.
107
Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 22.
108
On Clauß, see Peter Weingart, Doppel-Leben. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss: Zwischen Rassenforschung und
Wiederstand (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1995); Felix Wiedemann, “Der doppelte Orient: Zur völkischen
Orientromantik des Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 61, no. 1
(2009): 1–24; Gray, About Face, 273–333.
109
Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß, Von Seele und Antlitz der Rassen und Völker: Eine Einführung in die vergleichende
Ausdrucksforschung (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1929), 73–74.
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
277
“religious” vein.110 Thus, for example, his disciple and benefactor, Prince Wilhelm of Lippe,
provided his own religious version of the Claußian idea of racial Gestalt, asserting that “racial
style” derives from a “Godly source” and therefore “represents a unique expression of God,
which manifests itself here and there in the world.”111
This interweaving of scientific and religious ideas gave rise to an assortment of metaphysical positions that entailed a vague recognition of the immanent spirituality embedded in
“living nature.” This served as fertile ground for a variety of quasi-religious formulations,
which, though different in many aspects, all presumed some sort of pantheism or “immanent
transcendence.” However, as we will see, pantheism as such should not be considered to be
the main identifying feature of Nazi religiosity.
Many senior Nazi leaders claimed to have deep religious feelings, and they emphasized
the faith-based character of Nazism. Hitler’s inconsistent attitude toward religion is welldocumented. Alongside his aggressive attacks on Christianity, his denunciation of it as
“the heaviest blow that ever struck humanity” and as “the deliberate lie [that] was introduced
into the world,” one can also find countless statements that affirm his positive attitude
toward religion.112 Rosenberg emphasized the religious character of Nazism in his many
writings and speeches, although he vigorously rejected all attempts to articulate Nazism in
terms of a “substitute religion” (Ersatzreligion), “catechism” (Katechismus), or “creed”
(Glaubenslehre).113 Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess are known for their affection for esoteric and occult ideas, and even Joseph Goebbels, well known for his hatred of Christianity,
wrote in his diary that Nazism had “brought back the image of Christ.”114 In general, one can
110
See, for example, the apologetic tone that Clauß takes in Rasse ist Gestalt, when discussing the role of
genetics in verifying racial Gestalt. While proclaiming the super-individualistic nature of the racial subject and
determining racial types as products of a “timeless-valid” (Zeitlos-Gültige) regularity, he nevertheless insists
that this must not be seen as a “mysticism of two worlds,” but rather as a sober and realistic view of life
itself. See Clauß, Rasse ist Gestalt, 5.
111
Wilhelm Prinz zur Lippe, Angewandte Rassenseelenkunde: Eine Aufsatz-Sammlung von Wissenschaft und
Wirklichkeit (Leipzig: Adolf Klein, 1931), 15. See also Hunke, “Verstehen,” 86–91.
112
See entry no. 4 (July 11/12, 1941), in H. R. Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, trans.
Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), 7. Hitler discussed at
length in Mein Kampf the affinities between religion and the völkisch worldview, and he attributed significant
importance to the quasi-religious enthusiasm that a political movement must invoke in the hearts of its disciples. See Hitler, Mein Kampf, 415–19. On December 29, 1939, Goebbels noted in his diary that “the
Führer possesses a deep religious feeling, although completely anti-Christian. He sees Christianity as a
symptom of decay.” Later on, Goebbels confirmed that he agreed with Hitler on this issue. See Elke
Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Aufzeichnungen 1923–41 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998),
1363. On Hitler’s attitude toward religion, see Friedrich Heer, Die Glaube des Adolf Hitler: Anatomie einer
politischen Religiosität (Munich: Bechtle, 1968); Klaus Scholder, “Judaism and Christianity in the Ideology
and Politics of National Socialism,” in Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism, ed.
Otto Dov Kulka and Paul Mendes-Flohr (Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel and the Zalman Shazar
Center for Jewish History, 1987), 183–97; Michael Hesemann, Hitlers Religion. Die fatale Heilslehre des
Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Pattloch, 2014); Bärsch, Die politische Religion, 267–325; Hans Christian
Meiser, Hitlers Religion. Die fatale Heilslehre des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Pattloch, 2004); Rainer
Bucher, Hitlers Theologie (Würzburg: Echter, 2008).
113
See, for example, Rosenberg’s speech on November 5, 1938, when he introduced the differences and
similarities between Weltanschauung and Glaubenslehre, in Alfred Rosenberg, “Weltanschauung und
Glaubenslehre,” in Tradition und Gegenwart, 174–87.
114
Goebbels, quoted in Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 54. On Goebbels’s “political Catechism,” see Bärsch,
Politische Religion, 91–131. On Himmler’s occultism, see Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs: 1940–1945
(New York: Macmillan, 1957). Also see Franz Wegener, Heinrich Himmler: Deutscher Spiritismus,
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
say that the prevailing attitude among Nazi leaders was indeed anticlerical, but certainly not
atheistic.115 In fact, they rejected “atheistic” and “secular” views for being “materialistic” and
“Jewish,” an outcome of the increasing influence of the Jewish spirit on Western culture.
Nazi ideologues consistently considered religion to be not a theological or confessional
question, but rather a biological and anthropological one. They accepted the modern philosophical criticism of religion, such as Ludwig Feuerbach’s psychological analysis of religious
belief. But they rejected its atheism. Because secularization was perceived as a degenerate offspring of Judeo-Christian theology, the Nazi Weltanschauung was illustrated in utterly antisecular terms. Whereas dualistic metaphysics was perceived as a process of desacralization
of the world, which instigated a sharp split between God and nature, the Nazi
Weltanschauung was perceived as its antidote and was therefore introduced in terms of resacralization, i.e., a process that “brings back man’s godlike nature [göttliche Artung].”116 The
rejection of the Christian doctrine of “two worlds” and its perception of God’s transcendence
were thus not described in a secular atheistic vein, but rather as the release of a real, authentic
religiosity from the shackles of institutional and artificial religion. According to a pamphlet
published by Rosenberg’s office, “the rejection of the [Christian] God ideal does not
mean that man is left without God!”117 Gottfried Griesmayr, the head of the Office for
Political Education in the Reich’s youth leadership, similarly stated that National
Socialism was not “areligious” and did not reflect “racial-materialism”; rather, it expressed
“a new attitude between man and God.”118
Nazi scholars emphasized the deep bonds between German nationalism and religion, and
race anthropologists emphasized the religious character of the Nordic racial type, which was
endowed with “inwardness” (Innerlichkeit) and a clear tendency toward the metaphysical.119
Both were deeply preoccupied with the ancient Germanic faith, and they often proclaimed it
to be an archaic form of eugenics that had allegedly existed among the Germans for thousands
of years. Such interpretations frequently employed a sharp differentiation between “religion,” which referred to an established system of extraneous practices, rules, and regulations,
and “religiosity,” which was perceived as an intimate, internal, and unmediated human experience of the divine. Most often, the “Germanic religion” was portrayed in pietistic terms of
“piety” (Frömmigkeit) or “religiosity” (Religiosität) because of the intimate and subjective associations it evoked. Hans F. K. Günther, for example, declared that “religiosity,” rather than
“religion,” characterized the Hindu-Germanic type.120 This religiosity was, accordingly,
natural and immanent, an “inner-worldly piety” (Diesseitsfrömmigkeit) that sanctified natural
französischer Okkultismus und der Reichsführer SS (Gladbeck: Kulturförderverein Ruhrgebiet, 2014);
Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots, 177–191. On Rudolf Hess’s affection for esoteric ideas, see
Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots, 219–21, 223; Webb, Occult Establishment, 307–8, 319, 325, 493–94.
115
This attitude was primarily reflected in the Nazi designation of gottgläubig (“believing in God”). Starting
in late 1936, many Nazis decided to leave their churches in what became known as the Kirchenaustritt. The
description of Gottgläubige was meant to prevent the public from claiming that these church dissidents were
“without belief” ( glaubenslos), but also to emphasize their faith-based position, which was, by no means,
subjected to church authority. See Dierker, Himmlers Glaubenskrieger; Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 218–61.
116
Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 15.
117
Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, NS-15/346, anon., “Wesensgefüge des Christentum.”
118
Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 19–20.
119
See, e.g., Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 746; Günther, Der nordische,
55–56.
120
Hans F. K. Günther, Frömmigkeit nordischer Artung (Jena: Eugen Diederich, 1934), 14.
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
279
life.121 On another occasion, he wrote that “the Hindu-Germanic piety sees this world … as the
greatest realization of the godly order.” Its objective was the “reinforcing [of] life by accepting it
as a total unity between body and soul.”122 This pantheistic religiosity, he added, was eminent
proof of a racial, hygienic thinking among the Germanic people in the pre-Christian era.123
Similar to religious experience, the Nazi Weltanschauung was introduced in terms of an
internal feeling, an “impulse of the blood,” which emerged instinctively and intuitively
from the individual’s racial soul, thus dictating that person’s own way of observing and experiencing the world. “A Weltanschauung,” wrote the Austrian physician and hygienist Lothar
Gottlieb Tirala, “is not a robe one can acquire or remove as ready-made, for it stems naturally
from the blood, thoughts, feelings, and judgmental decisions that are dictated by the very
essence of the race.”124 Given this logic, it is understandable why Nazi ideologues often articulated their Weltanschauung in a quasi-mystical fashion: “a Weltanschauung is the very essence
of my existence; it fills me with energies and powers, which flow as a fundamental force from
an unknown depth.”125 In a somewhat similar vein, Hermann Schwarz, the notable Nazi
philosopher and rector of Greifswald University, proclaimed that National Socialism was
“a religious experience; [it] gives rise to a new spiritual reality within the soul … It begins
with political regulations and ends with religious experience.”126
In this way, religious rapture and exaltation were channeled into the realm of racial thinking and reconceptualized in accordance with the latest biological determinations. But this
prompts two questions: what is the real nature of this experience, and to what extent
should it be included under the general definition of “religious experience”? Before
turning to this issue, the following section first examines the ways in which the Nazis themselves articulated their religiosity.
“A Living Experience of the Racial Soul”:
The Racial Existential Religiosity
By 1934, the Catholic Church had banned two major works of Nazi philosophers and listed
them in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. One was Rosenberg’s Mythus and the other Ernst
Bergmann’s Die deutsche Nationalkirche (The German National Church), which had appeared
a year earlier. It is therefore not surprising that these works were labeled as “pagan” not
only by Christian opponents of the Nazi regime, but also by historians who embraced, sometimes without noticing, the simplistic and somewhat vague pagan-Christian dichotomy
promoted by the Church. An examination of Rosenberg’s and Bergmann’s “neopaganism” (Neuheidentum) reveals a systematic and cohesive approach toward religion that
goes beyond the schematic categorization of pagan-versus-positive Christianity.
121
Ibid., 16. See also Günther, Der nordische, 55–56.
Hans F. K. Günther, “Die Rasse und Erbgesundheitspflege der Germanen und ihr Arsprung aus der
germanischen Frömmigkeit,” Rasse. Monatsschrift der Nordischen Bewegung (1934): 240–41.
123
Günther, “Die Rasse und Erbgesundheitspflege der Germanen,” 241.
124
Lothar Gottleib Tirala, Rasse, Geist und Seele (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1935), 32.
125
Harry Griessdorf, Unsere Weltanschauung: Gedanken über Alfred Rosenberg: Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts
(Berlin: Nordland, 1941), 86.
126
Hermann Schwarz, Deutscher Glaube am Scheidewege: Ewiges Sein oder werdende Gottheit? (Berlin: Junker
& Dünnhaupt, 1936), 13. On Schwarz and his intellectual career, see Christoph Henning, Der Denkweg von
Hermann Schwarz: Vom unselbstischen Handeln zur handelnden Ewigkeit: 53 Jahre Philosophie in Deutschland
1892–1945 (MA thesis, Technische Universität Dresden, 1999).
122
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Bergmann was known to be a highly influential völkisch thinker in the late 1920s and
during the Third Reich. As a leading ideologue of the German Faith Movement (Die
Deutsche Glaubensbewegung) and the founder of the Association for German Volk
Religion (Die Gemeinschaft Deutsche Volksreligion), he became a major spokesman for a
new, racially based “German religion.”127 In his 1934 catechism, Die 25 Thesen der
Deutschreligion (25 Theses of the German Religion), he wrote that “we who belong to the
German religion are often called ‘heathens.’ We reject this characterization, if it refers to a
religion belonging to a past age.”128 In a later work he explained this point: “The völkischGerman religion is not antique but rather modern; it is not based on the experience of a scattered people who lived 2,000 years ago, but on contemporary experience.”129 Bergmann
defined the “German religion” as a “contemporary religious form” (zeitgemäße
Glaubensform). He emphasized that there were not only foreign religions in terms of “racial
differences” (artfremde Religionen), but also foreign religions in terms of their period in time
(zeitfremde Religionen), even though they were all Nordic in their essence.130 The German
religion was based not on archaic traditions and mythologies, but rather on the experience
of the “living religious soul” (lebendige religiöse Seele). According to Bergmann, “every creative
people and every vital age create their own particular religion, which manifests their eternal
values in a contemporary and race-conditioned fashion.”131 That was why modern genetics
was not opposed to the German religion, but instead supported it, for it emphasized the
human psychophysical unity through which man serves as an “arena for the incarnation of
God.”132 “We believe,” he explained further, “that the birth of God within Man must be
both physical and mental because these are two sides that constitute our united whole.
Belief in the body-soul unity, as it is included in social anthropology, belongs to the most
supreme human faith of the German religion.”133 Bergmann’s stance was clear: religious
authenticity lies neither in the adaptations of traditional dogmas and theological narratives,
nor in supernatural or transcendent beliefs, but rather in a spiritual-existential experience
determined by racial predispositions.134
This type of immanent-existential religiosity found its most comprehensive formulation
in Rosenberg’s Mythus, which one of the author’s contemporaries described as the canon of
127
On Bergmann’s central place in the völkisch movement and on his relationship to Hitler and the Nazi
milieu, see Horst Junginger, “Die Deutsche Glaubensbewegung als ideologisches Zentrum der völkischreligiösen Bewegung,” in Puschner and Vollnhals, Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung, 73–81.
128
Bergmann, Die 25 Thesen, 10.
129
Ernst Bergmann, Kleines System der deutschen Volksreligion (Prague: Burg, 1941), 9. See also idem,
Richtlinien für den deutsch-religiösen Jugendweih-Vorbereitungs-Unterricht (Leipzig: Fahrenkrog, 1938), 8. A
similar approach can be found in Mathilde Ludendorff’s völkisch religiosity; see Bettina Amm, “Die
Ludendorff-Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus—Annäherung und Abgrenzungsversuche,” in Puschner
and Vollnhals, Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung, 103–27.
130
Bergmann, Die 25 Thesen, 9–10.
131
Ibid., 10.
132
Ibid., 40. See also Bergmann, Kleines System, 15–17.
133
Bergmann, Die 25 Thesen, 41.
134
Bergmann defines the “German religion” as a “natural religion” (Naturreligion) in the Goethian sense
(i.e., free of supernaturalism), as a high-spirited religion (Hohe-Geist-Religion) in the Kantian sense (i.e., free
of spirit-absolutism), and as a religion based on experience (Erlebnisreligion) in Meister Eckhart’s sense (i.e.,
free of a belief in the afterlife and of salvation dogmatism). See Ernst Bergmann, Die Deutsche Nationalkirsche
(Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, 1933), 266.
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
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“our new religious Weltanschauung, which is based on racial foundations.”135 As noted earlier,
Rosenberg approached history as a hermeneutic system for exploring ahistorical forces that
determine human existence. “History,” he wrote, “is a development neither from nothing
to something, nor from something insignificant to something great. It is not even the transformation of an essence into something completely different.”136 History was a changing
arena for unchanging forces, which take different forms in different times. Racial history,
therefore, should be defined as a Mythus and experienced as an ongoing struggle of the
racial soul for self-affirmation and self-realization. The Mythus is thus the “formative force
of a type,” a synthesis of the entirety of organic forces at work at the core of racial
existence.137
The Mythus is thus an expression of the infinity through the finite, the metaphysical
through the physical; it is a temporal-historical manifestation of ahistorical force. It therefore
has no consistent form: “It can merely take different forms every time, in accordance with our
world perception.”138 In other words, the Mythus should not be seen in terms of progress or
evolution; its content can be revealed only in the cultural and spiritual context of the period.
That is why the Mythus should not be viewed as a mythological narrative, and also why it
should not be reduced to a mere account or representation, or to any object. The Nordic
Mythus is therefore not mythological and it should not be sought after in the depths of the
past. Nordic mythology, according to Rosenberg, constitutes only a coarse and archaic
form of mythic experience, and it can no longer express its real essence. It is but a “frivolous
symbolization of nature,” and it reflects a primitive and naïve era.139 There is therefore a need
for a new Mythus that will emerge from the contemporary struggle of the German Volk:
a “religion of blood” that corresponds to the current Zeitgeist, supersedes degenerate
Christianity and its sacraments, and revitalizes the Germanic faith. 140
Like Bergmann, Rosenberg utterly rejected all historical forms of faith—“pagan” or
“Christian”—as models for the new German faith, which had to be modern and innovative
in every way, manifesting itself in the spirit of the time. This stance had a great appeal for
many Nazi intellectuals. Krieck, for example, firmly criticized any attempt to merge
Nazism with traditional religious and spiritual forms: “Gnosis—German mysticism—
German idealism? No: The racial-völkisch-political human image, the reality of völkisch communal life in the Third Reich, derive from a new basic religious decision [einer neuen
religiösen Grundentscheidung].”141 The German religion, he stressed, asks to return
neither to Christian history nor to an “ancient pre-Christian era.” Its only aim was to
create “a new future in the Third Reich.” 142
In the absence of any extraneous godly authority, nature becomes the only source for certainty and moral judgment. But this nature is not to be perceived in mere material or physical
terms (as it is seen through the scientific-mechanistic prism), but rather as a “living nature”
135
Helmuth Schreiner, Der Nationalsozialismus vor der Gottesfrage. Illusion oder Evangelium? (Berlin:
Wichern, 1931), 28.
136
Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 678.
137
Ibid., 699.
138
Ibid., 687.
139
Ibid., 219.
140
Ibid., 114.
141
Krieck, Völkisch-politische Anthropologie, 69.
142
Ibid., 63.
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
animated with “immanent transcendence.” Pantheism was therefore perceived as an authentic German stance flowing throughout history, beginning with an early Hindu-Germanic
faith, moving through German romanticism, and culminating in the “scientific pantheism”
of National Socialism.143 As a result, Nazism was introduced as a contemporary, modern,
and “scientific” form of pantheistic religiosity, which complied with the particular character
of the Nordic racial soul. It ultimately reflected the very essence of the Germanic
spirit, which, according to Bergmann, could be summed up as “a unified view
[Einheitsanschauung] of God and the world in the sense of a creative self-evolution of
God-nature.”144 One can therefore find a variety of Nazi pantheistic attributes attached to
God: “immanent God” (inner weltischer Gott),” “All-God” (All-Gott), “World-soul”
(Weltseele), “God-world” (Gott-Welt), etc.145
Defining Nazi religiosity as a modern form of pantheism is nevertheless inadequate and too
simplistic. Nazi intellectuals held different, sometimes quarreling religious beliefs. But, as
Samuel Koehne has noted, they all agreed on one point: religion had to be evaluated in accordance with their “hyperracialized and antisemitic ideology.”146 The demand to reconcile all
religious views with “the moral feelings of the Germanic race,” as outlined in the twentyfourth point of the Nazi Party Program of 1920, resulted in a largely cohesive, if flexible,
attitude toward religion. Because racial “morality and ethics” were perceived to be the official
yardstick by which belief was to be measured, it was unanimously agreed that all spiritual values
were ultimately race-determined and only to be found within the immanent sphere of biological life.147 As a result, whereas Nazi intellectuals who were supportive of positive Christianity
remained loyal to a somewhat distorted theistic conception of transcendent God, anti-Christian
thinkers vigorously put forward a radical version of religious existentialism, one in which the
image of an omnipotent transcendent God was replaced by the immanent residence of the
racial soul.148 It was in this way that the “godly” became an anthropological expression of
the humanly, but, at the same time, catalyzed man’s self-awareness and self-realization.
Since, according to the racial anthropological perspective, religion is a psycho-cultural
product determined by racial-biological predispositions, different races give birth to different
religions, reflecting different psycho-biological structures. Every race nurtures a different
God-ideal and is characterized by a particular attitude toward the “absolute,” which is, in practice, a psychological projection of its own subjectivity on the divine. “God,” as a pamphlet of
the German Faith Movement explained, “is not a reality, but a race-based fiction [rassisch
bedingte Fiktion].” 149 Religious and theological structures therefore became a measure for
evaluating racial mental predispositions. Jaensch, for example, connected a schizoid personality
disorder, which he identified with the Jewish anti-type (Gegentypus), with a dualistic, Cartesian,
and mechanistic worldview.150 The Nazi theologian and publicist Herbert Grabert also tied
143
Schwarz, Deutscher Glaube, 66.
Bergmann, Die 25 Thesen, 28.
145
Ibid., 33; Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 44; Tirala, Rasse, Geist und Seele, 239; Schwarz, Deutscher Glaube, 21.
146
Koehne, “Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party?,” 790.
147
See Koehne, “The Racial Yardstick.”
148
See also Ericksen, Theologians; Meier, Kreuz und Hakenkreuz; Bergen, Twisted Cross; Heschel, Aryan
Jesus; Lächele, “Germanisierung des Christentums.”
149
Evang. Preßverband für Deutschland, ed., Rasse und Rassenseele (Berlin: Evang. Preßverband für
Deutschland, 1935), 8.
150
Jaensch, Die Wissenschaft, 18–20.
144
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
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psychological pathology to “Jewish religious-dualistic life-emotion,” which necessarily led to a
“supranational philosophy [übervölkische Philosophie] and to material monism.”151
The racial-anthropological perspective diverted the scholarly preoccupation with religion
from the metaphysical to the bio-psychological realm. In a paraphrase of the famous aphorism “as a man’s faith is, so is he,” Nazi theoreticians could thus proclaim that, “as man is, so is
his faith” (Wie der Mensch, so sein Glaube).152 But given the prevailing negation of materialism
within Nazi and völkisch milieus, this premise opened the door for various quasi-mystical formulations that ended up in the apotheosis of blood, race, and Volk. At this point, the human
subject becomes not only the bearer of godly faith, but also an arena for its ultimate incarnation—or, as Bergmann put it: “God cannot be ‘God’ without the help of man.”153
Yet, this raises the question of whether man constructs God as a faith-based decision, i.e.,
as an existential and subjective “leap of faith.” Or does he accept God as an ultimate metaphysical truth? The answer to this question lies partly in the way in which leading Nazi intellectuals defined the concept of God.
The “Metaphysics of Unification” and the Birth of the God-Man
Nazi intellectuals undermined the existence of an absolute transcendent truth, but they were
committed to locating the ultimate value in life itself. The racial-anthropological perspective
therefore served as a platform for a new, vitalist metaphysics that strove to harmonize all
dimensions of human existence under the principle of organic life, namely, race. This
urge for existential wholeness found its most radical formulation in the idea of metaphysical
polarity, as formulated by Rosenberg and other Nazi ideologues. According to Gottfried
Griesmayr, “German metaphysics acknowledges reality as an existence between two
poles—internal, which we call God, and external, which is called world. These two are
inseparable.”154 These poles regulate the limits of human perception, through which the
soul becomes aware of its surroundings. The source of this metaphysics is found in
Rosenberg’s Mythus. The polarity of God-man, and the dialectical tension it constitutes,
gain an essential role in this philosophy, because they generate the necessary vital and
dynamic pulse of organic life: “God and self are spiritual polarities. Every perfected union
is an act of creation, calling up renewed dynamic forces.”155 In Rosenberg’s view, God
and soul are two poles that dictate human experience in the world. The unbridgeable
gap between them generates the vital tension that facilitates all organic development.
God is thus perceived of as a self-projected image of man himself, as he strives for existential
unity.
Schwarz, an adherent of Rosenberg’s views and an advocate of the German Faith
Movement, also posed the eschatological tension between God and man as the most fundamental aspect of the Nordic life experience. This tension had accelerated in the modern era
because of the “intellectualization of the world” and the deepening of the dualistic split
between body and soul, world and God, as promoted by Judeo-Christian agents. Yet, this
151
Herbert Grabert, Die völkische Aufgabe der Religionswissenschaft (Stuttgart: Georg Truckenmüller, 1938),
55.
152
Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 15; Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 684.
Bergmann, Kleines System, 47.
154
Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 38.
155
Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 248.
153
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
experience of deficiency was crucial for the awakening of the racial-spiritual consciousness,
since it accelerated the Nordic man’s self-alienation and pushed him to rebel in order to
achieve freedom. This revolt, directed toward the disintegrating and splitting forces that
operate at the heart of modern culture, calls for bypassing rational cognition and for ascending
into the realm of the total subjectivity of the blood. Schwarz described such an act as
“becoming aware of God’s dwelling in us, which leads to theistic and pantheistic comprehensions of the divine.”156 Griesmayr similarly described this pantheistic unification as the
epitome of Nordic metaphysical experience and as the most inner crux of the Nazi
Weltanschauung: “The experience of an all-encompassing unity [All-Einheit] is the source
of our unification with nature and of our love of nature. To pursue wholeness as the multifaceted form of the same essence—here lies our metaphysical mystery.”157
Nazi racial-religiosity was thus articulated in an existential vein of will for self-affirmation.
It was conceptualized in pure vitalist terms, and it was characterized as an inner urge of the
Nordic man to create himself out of himself, to undergo a constant becoming from the
inside, moving toward the authentic and primal core of his very existence. As a result, dynamics, struggle, and overcoming were perceived as the fundamental elements of this metaphysics, and they redefined the battle with Judaism as an act of self-redemption. In this fashion,
Rosenberg declared that the “Germanic religion” was a “permanent condition of becoming
[Werden] as a struggle for being [Sein] …”158 The struggle against Judaism was thus invested
with new eschatological meanings, which were simultaneously historical and metahistorical,
ontological and metaphysical, biological and religious. This “metaphysical revolt” was perceived as a vital urge for life-affirmation and self-realization. It required a radical rejection of
the contemporary world order and a total eradication of the rational, materialistic, and secular
world, which was nothing more than Jewish theology in disguise.
Here lies the fundamental structure of this religiosity: the yearning for the divine is
replaced by the longing to achieve a total wholeness within man himself. The transcendent
objectivity of God is rejected in favor of the immanent subjectivity of the racial soul. “God”
functions here as a regulative idea and as a psychological projection. The ideal of God does
not refer therefore to any supernatural entity but rather, as Rosenberg defined it, to “an
object of the soul,” which generates the Nordic’s vitalist striving for existential and supraindividual unity, deeply rooted in his internal, primal racial core. This explains the apparent
paradox in Griesmayr’s statement that “National Socialism is our religion,” which he simultaneously explains in this way: “Just as an idea cannot exist on its own, [so, too,] does God not
exist in itself. Ideas without people are not real.”159 This credo was summarized in the most
profound way by Franz Fischer, a Protestant pedagogue and professor in the University of
Vienna, who proclaimed that the “Nordic Mythus is a logical religion … without God.
God is a mere philosophical idea of the soul, through which polarity is created, thus
helping us to become aware of our internal metaphysical essence.”160 What is the real
meaning of this religiosity, then? Is it atheistic or theistic, a “Christian” or “pagan” form
156
Schwarz, Deutsche Gotteserkenntnis, 93; Schwarz, Deutscher Glaube, 15.
Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 40.
158
Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 134.
159
Giesmayr, Zwei Welten, 22.
160
Franz Fischer, Der Nordische Mythus oder der biblische Christus? (Vienna: Evangelischer Preßverband für
Österreich, 1935), 9.
157
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
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of faith? Finally, can it be included at all under the definition of “religion” or even “religious
attitude”? The remainder of this article addresses these fundamental questions.
The Question of Transcendence
Many historians have objected to the portrayal of Nazism in religious terms. The most significant controversy surrounding this issue was prompted by the revival of the concept of
“political religion” in the early 1990s, and by the attempt of a few historians to renew the
political religious discourse of the 1930s and 1950s. Hans Mommsen, for example, insisted
on the “non-applicability of the concept to National Socialism,” noting Hitler’s firm objection to presenting Nazism in religious terms. Hermann Lübbe suggested the term of “antireligion,” whereas Konrad Repgen opted for the concept of “a counter-church.”161
Historians such as Richard Evans, Wolfgang Hardtwig, and Stanley Stowers have criticized
the appropriation of the concept of “religion” to Nazism because the latter did not contain
any belief in a supernatural or transcendental entity.162
This controversy echoed the debate that had taken place between George Mosse and
Ernst Nolte over the latter’s definition of fascism as a “battle against transcendence” and
against all religious worldviews. Nolte saw Nazism as an attempt to implement “laws of
nature” politically, basing his understanding on Hitler’s anticlerical statements.163 Mosse
was extremely critical of Nolte’s stance, especially the way he related to the concept of “transcendence” in the fascist context:
Fascism was a new religion … and it gave to its followers their own feeling of transcendence, to be
sure, not transcendence in Nolte’s definition, but this very definition can lead to a failure to
understand the movement on its own terms, the meaning it contained for its followers.
Fascism did hold that man will reach an absolute whole through the release of his creative
instincts, that he will recapture his own personality. But its worldview also restrained the flight
into transcendence, for it opposed the messianic tradition.164
According to Nolte, there was no real theoretical or empirical basis to address Nazism in religious terms because of its manifest anticlerical policies and the absence of any transcendent
element in its approach to the world, which clearly pointed to its atheistic and anti-religious
character. In this sense, any attempt to place Nazism in the category of “political religion”
would empty the concept of “religion” of any meaning and content. This conclusion
appears logical, given the approach of these scholars to the concept of “religion.” Yet, this
conception greatly reduces religious life to a monolithic and narrow phenomenon,
completely ignoring the wide array of phenomenological and psychological aspects of religious experience as described and analyzed by philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists of
religion.
161
Juan Linz, “Concluding Discussion,” in Totalitarianism and Political Religions, vol. 1, ed. Hans Maier
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 279.
162
Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Political Religion in Modern Germany: Reflections on Nationalism, Socialism,
and National Socialism,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 28 (2001): 3–23; Stanley Stowers, “The Concepts
of ‘Religion,’ ‘Political Religion’ and the Study of Nazism,” and Richard J. Evans, “Nazism, Christianity
and Political Religion: A Debate,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (2007): 9–27, 5–7.
163
Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche: Die Action française, der italienische Faschismus, der
Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Piper, 1984): 504–6.
164
George L. Mosse, “Review of E. Nolte on ‘Three Faces of Fascism,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 27,
no. 4 (1966): 623.
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In his 1902 study, The Varieties of Religious Experience, the American psychologist and philosopher William James distinguished between the external and organized aspect of religions,
on the one hand, and, on the other, the psychological events described by those who report
having religious experiences. James shifted the focus of religion from metaphysics to the interior psychic dimension of human life, defining religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences
of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to
whatever they may consider the divine.”165 Hence, he adds, “when in our definition of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to ‘what he considers the divine,’ we must interpret
the term ‘divine’ very broadly, as denoting any object that is god-like, whether it be a concrete deity or not.”166 A religious experience, according to James, may wrap itself in a secular,
even atheistic garment, and it does not require belief in a divine presence. In this sense, even
objects lacking any transcendental dimension may become the object of religious devotion.
There are clear echoes of this phenomenology in Eric Voegelin’s pioneering definition of
Nazism as a “political religion.” In his 1938 book, Die politischen Religionen (The Political
Religions), Voegelin claimed that Nazism should be seen as a political religion, not only
because of its appropriation of the symbols and rituals from Christianity, but also because
it consisted of a true religious core and because it evoked an authentic religious experience
that was translated into a declaration of faith. According to Voegelin, Nazism was an “innerworldly religion” (innerweltliche Religion) that searched for the divine in the immanent world,
substituting a transcendent god with a Volksgeist. It did not matter, in this sense, whether
National Socialism presented an organized and coherent ideological doctrine. Its ability to
appeal to the religious sentiments of the masses and to channel these feelings into a political
activism motivated by the power of a blazing faith was at the base of its suggestive power, and
it was what defined the reality of political life in the Third Reich. In other words, the real
“content” of the “Nazi religion” was its outward “form,” which acquired substance as
soon as it became real in the minds of its followers: “Whenever a reality discloses itself in
the religious experience as sacred, it becomes the most real, a realissimum.”167 Voegelin developed his theory in the historical context of Vienna in 1938, and it was deeply rooted in his
Christian anthropology. His emphasis on “form” rather than on “content” led him to undermine the philosophical and metaphysical core of the Nazis’ religious ideas. It eventually
resulted in an inclusive theory that brought together Nazism, fascism, and communism, all
of which he saw as the “universal-historical” products of secularization.168
The phenomenological approach to religion not only makes possible new reflections on
Nazi “religiosity” or “transcendence,” but also corresponds to the way in which many Nazi
ideologues and intellectuals defined their religious attitude, given that they explicitly
165
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Rockville, MD: Arc
Manor, 2008 [1902]), 31.
166
James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 33.
167
Voegelin, Political Religion, 32.
168
This view was elaborated and systematized in Voegelin’s later works, in which he characterized all
modern ideologies as modern forms of “Gnosis” because they seek perfection through revolutionary transfiguration. In The New Science of Politics (1952), he claimed that modern ideologies offered an escape from the
uncertainty of human existence by replacing it with a search for absolute “scientific” knowledge. He identified this process as “immanentization of transcendence” (Immanentisierung der Transzendenz), a transfiguration of the divine into the worldly and mundane sphere of political human existence. See Eric Voegelin,
“The New Science of Politics: An Introduction,” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5: Modernity
Without Restraint, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 75–243.
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REVISITING NAZISM AND RELIGION
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differentiated between “religion” and “religiosity.”169 They therefore articulated their religiosity in accordance with their vitalist conception of biology, while presenting it in terms
of “inner striving,” “vital impetus,” “dynamic becoming,” or “mythical experience.” The
point of departure for this definition of “religion” is, therefore, not to be found in a transcendent faith or belief in a divine entity, but rather in the human’s subjective yearning for and
striving toward an absolute reconciling of the warring aspects of human existence. This
fundamental striving for coincidentia oppositorum underpinned the imagination of major
Nazi intellectuals and constituted the very substance of their Weltanschauung.
Conclusion
Nazi racial ideas were shaped in an atmosphere of a severe crisis that saturated all spheres of life
and that was radicalized by the political and social upheavals of the Weimar era. While mostly
scattered and lacking consistent official formulation, these ideas nonetheless possessed a fairly
cohesive conceptual grid, which corresponded to the varied intellectual and cultural vicissitudes of the day, and which captured the widespread yearning for a new and all-encompassing Weltanschauung. On the surface, the Nazi worldview infused racial determinations with a
far more populist accent, providing the masses with a complete set of images and symbols that
operated on the immediate psychological and emotional level. Yet, as much as these images
served as effective tools in the hands of the propagandists, they were supported by a sincere
and comprehensive intellectual endeavor to overturn the triumph of the cosmopolitan, soulless, and techno-materialistic spirit of modernity, and to revitalize national life on the basis of
holistic and vitalist-oriented biology. This hyper-biocentric language emphasized unity and
wholeness and glorified faith and idealistic urge, as opposed to the disruptive categories of
reductionist and materialistic thinking; it offered a new, redemptive narrative in the age of
reason and science, a spiritual antidote to the growing materialization and mechanization
of human life.
The obvious merit of this language lay in its integrative potency, bringing together a
variety of intellectual traditions and warring views. The critique of modern Zivilisation had
become an obligatory intellectual imperative for Nazi thinkers, who sought to overcome
the problem of modern nihilism by redrawing the sphere of pure racialized inwardness
and thus by upholding the intrinsic values that reside beyond the fallen and fragmental landscape of empirical objectivity. Turning to a vision of biological totality evoked not only a
new form of racialized spirituality that emphasized the metaphysical gaps between races,
but also incorporated a new conception of human history as an arena for the cominginto-realization of suprapersonal, nonspatial, and nontemporal teloses actualized biologically
in human races.
By redefining religion phenomenologically, Nazi intellectuals sought not only to blunt
confessional disagreements, including those between “positive Christians” and “pagans,”
but also to undermine the rigid division between the sacred and the secular, the divine
and the worldly. Seen in this light, this race-based religiosity should not be comprehended
in terms of “secularization” or “de-theologization”—as it has been portrayed by the “political religion” thesis—but rather as a counterresponse to modern secularized culture and its
169
Hans F. K. Günther relies on James’s definition in his discussion of “Hindu-Germanic religiosity.” See
Günther, Frömmigkeit, 23.
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AMIT VARSHIZKY
spiritual decay, and as an attempt to carry out a religious renaissance built upon modern and
“secular” foundations. Put simply, Nazism, according to its adherents, was the liberator of real
authentic spirituality from the shackles of false religions and distorted faith.
Nazi intellectuals did not consider “religion” to be mediated through theological or
mythological narratives, or through obsolete rites and sacred traditions, but rather as a
biologically-based spirituality that takes the form of an existential urge toward self-awarness
and self-realization. Nazi religiosity thus offered a faithful antidote to the increasing disintegration of the “disenchanted” modern world, a new ethical and existential fulcrum in the
“Death of God” era, and, last but not least, redemption from the vicissitudes of modern
nihilism.
HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM
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