Metapolitics

From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler

Peter Viereck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351505598
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

More than half a century after the fall of the Third Reich, Nazism, its roots and its essential nature, remain a central and unresolved enigma of the twentieth century. During the period of Hitler's ascendancy, most attempts at explaining this unprecedented phenomenon were framed in "economic, " often Marxist, sociological terms and concepts. Peter Viereck's Metapolitics, initially published in 1941, broke with this convention by indicting Hitler in terms of the Judaic-Christian ethical tradition and locating certain elements of the Nazi worldview in German romantic poetry, music, and social thought. Newly expanded, Metapolitics remains a key work in the cultural interpretation of Nazism and totalitarianism and in the psychological interpretation of Hitler as a Wagnerite and failed artist.

The term "metapolitics, " a coinage from Richard Wagner's nationalist circle, signifies an ideology resulting from five distinct strands: romanticism (embodied chiefly in the Wagnerian ethos), the pseudo-science of race, Fuehrer worship, vague economic socialism, and the alleged supernatural and unconscious force of the Volk collectivity. Together, those elements engendered an emphasis on irrationalism and hysteria and belief in a special German mission to direct the course of the world's history.

Viereck analyzes nineteenth-century German thought's conflicting attitudes toward political procedures and social arrangements rooted in classical, rational, legalistic, and Christian traditions. This edition includes an appreciation by Thomas Mann and an exchange with Jacques Barzun debating Viereck's criticism of German romanticism. Viereck's essays on the case of Albert Speer, on Claus von Stauffenberg (the German officer who led the army conspiracy to assassinate Hitler), and on the poets Stefan George and Georg Heym appear here for the first time in book form.

CHAPTER XI

Prophet Laureate of Metapolitics: Part I

A new peace shall make Germany mistress of the globe, a peace not hanging on the palm fronds of pacifist womenfolk but established by the victorious sword of a master race that takes over the world in the service of a higher Kultur.

— Joint prediction in the 1920’s by ALFRED ROSENBERG and by HITLER’S Mein Kampf

The war which began before all the world on May 10, 1940 [the date of Germany’s invasion of Holland and Belgium] is the greatest of revolutionary wars. An outworn era is crumbling to dust beneath the marching feet of the German army.

— Prediction by ROSENBERG in 1940

Who is Rosenberg?

Alfred Rosenberg is Hitler’s official highbrow, the prophet laureate of metapolitics.

Most Americans follow Rauschning’s Revolution of Nihilism in underestimating Rosenberg’s influence and in exaggerating both Nazi nihilism and Nazi cynicism about ideology. Nature abhors a vacuum even in ideology. No vacuum could give the daring Volk-armies now overrunning Europe their energetic will to power. The Nazis are nihilistic toward western and Christian civilization. But they are replacing with new values of their own this vacuum which their nihilist phase creates. Too narrow to see or to want to see these new and alien values is the doctrinaire type of anti-Nazi.

Today German youth is still being educated most uncynically and unnihilistically in that metapolitics of which Rosenberg is the most articulate example. He is editor in chief of the official Nazi newspaper, Der Völkische Beobachter (The Folkic Observer), and the official Nazi magazine, Nationalsozialistische Monathefte (National Socialist Monthly). I shall treat him less as a person than as the ablest and most revealing symbol of German metapolitics. Even if his person is ever liquidated in a new purge, thousands of younger Germans will still perpetuate the symbol. Using him as the most convenient jumping-off point, this chapter is actually a survey of current Nazi credos in general.

Many of Rosenberg’s basic assumptions are sincere and brilliant nonsense. That is no reason for America to continue ignoring them. They are tremendously important because they are nonsense: nonsense plus mass will-power is the very stuff of which history is often made. The time has come for serious analysis of this man and his works.

From 1919 on, Rosenberg has been Germany’s most ardent and consistent prophet of a “crusade” against Soviet Russia. In the 1920’s he and his friends Hess and Professor Haushofer were responsible for Hitler’s well-known Mein Kampf passages on the joys of annexing the Ukrainian wheatfields.

Rosenberg represents the moderate wing of nazism, while his enemy Goebbels represents the so-called “national bolshevist” wing. Both are anti-bourgeois, considering the bourgeois Weltanschauung synonymous with the liberalism they detest. Being literally national socialist, both have always violently opposed the so-called capitalist system of economics, which they deem synonymous with democracy (“ plutodemocracy”). But Rosenberg’s opposition tries hard to be in the lordly old Teutonic Knight tradition, with an agricultural viewpoint, while Goebbels’s opposition tries to act more proletarian, with a big-city viewpoint.

The German Who’s Who describes Alfred Rosenberg as follows: Born in 1893 in Reval. Of Protestant family. “Ancestors: Baltic merchants and manual labourers.” Since 1921, chief editor of the official Nazi paper, Der Völkische Beobachter. “Commissioned by the F⃼hrer for the entire philosophic (Weltanschaulich) education of the movement.” His chief youthful training: to be an engineer.¹

Rosenberg was brought up in Reval (Tallinn), the capital of the small Baltic state of Estonia. While he lived there, Estonia was part of the Czarist Russian Empire. He walked among the Esths (members of the “Baltic race”) with mingled rage and fear. A slave race he deemed them, who should some day be put in their place again by the German minority which had ruled them in the ancient days of the Teutonic Knights. The World War gave Estonia for the first time in history national independence from both its Russian governors and its German agricultural landlords. For twenty years the Esths could taste some democratic liberties for the first time in all their tragic history. Then Stalin reconquered Estonia in 1940, and Hitler made it a battlefield in 1941.

Rosenberg’s family was a pretty even mixture of proletarian and petty-bourgeois origins, never rich, never connected with the aristocratic German “Baltic barons” whom he so admired and who alone can claim descent from the Teutonic Knights. Unlike his rival Goebbels, Rosenberg is without scholarly training or Ph.D. Despite that, or because of it, he is the leading Nazi interpreter of German history.

A racial mixture of Bait and German, born and educated in Estonia and then spending the World War in Russia, Rosenberg is naturally a two-hundred-per-cent German patriot. The most fanatic German nationalists are generally produced outside Germany in some land where Germanism is not a matter of course, but something constantly threatened with submergence in alien culture. Too frequent to be coincidences are the following outstanding examples:

Wagner’s German nationalism was created by his lonely years in Paris. Hitler in some ways is a typical Sudeten German, surrounded by Slavs in the Hapsburg Empire. Göring, though born in Germany, was brought up in the Hapsburg province of Styria. Until the mysterious airplane flight to Scotland in May 1941, the F⃼hrer’s dearest friend and the next in succession after Göring was Rudolf Hess, whose youth was spent in Egypt. Hitler’s Minister of Agriculture and chief proclaimer of “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden) is Darré, whose youth was spent in Argentina. Goebbels’s nationalism reached its fever pitch under the Belgian and French armies of occupation in the Rhineland. The fanatically nationalist Ernst Bohle, director of all propaganda among Germans abroad, was born in England and spent his first sixteen years in South Africa.² Napoleon spoke French with an Italian accent. Stalin speaks Russian with a Georgian accent. Hitler speaks German with an Austrian accent. Rosenberg speaks German with a Baltic accent. He even reprinted, in a book of his speeches, an interview stressing his Baltic accent.³

Only the aristocratic Baltic barons could remain purely German in stock. The classes from which Rosenberg sprang, the proletarian and lower middle classes, were inextricably interbred with their Baltic neighbours. That is indisputable. German racists herd the Baits with the Slavs and Jews as the destined slaves of the nordic super-race.

Of all Nazi leaders, Rosenberg and Goebbels are the two to whom Jewish ancestry is most frequently attributed by popular German gossip. Lacking proof, such frequent gossip about them and about Hitler should be rejected as false. It is too smartly paradoxical, too obvious and cheap an anti-Nazi weapon to be trustworthy. It descends to the Nazi level of taking “race” and the Aryan nonsense seriously. But false or true, the mere existence of such gossip encourages Rosenberg and Goebbels in being Germany’s two-hundred-per-cent anti-Semites, just as such gossip encouraged the too much protesting behind Wagner’s anti-Semitism. Rosenberg’s facial and physical features are not typically German (nor Jewish) but typically those found among Baits.

Rosenberg fled to Munich from Russia’s Red revolution. In Munich, with Eckart, Röhm, Hess, and Hitler, he built the original nucleus of Hitler’s present Nazi party. In Bayreuth he was a welcome guest at the house of Wagner’s widow and children and son-in-law Chamberlain. Rosenberg impressed Munich’s bohemians, especially Hitler and Eckart, as a profound thinker because of the vagueness, obscurity, and pretentiousness of his speech.

Rosenberg is a thoroughly German thinker (with important exceptions which will be treated in the section on “Russian Influences”). He should not, except technically, be called a White Russian; and merely physically, not culturally, is he a Balt. His foreign environment only fanned the flames of his cultural Germanism. He incarnates the typical traits of German romanticism. That is why Hitler in 1934 created for Rosenberg the special office of “Director of Party Education in Weltanschauung.”

In 1936 I watched Rosenberg and Goebbels speak at the N⃼rnberg party rally. Whereas the brief tirade by Goebbels lashed the listeners into frenzy, Rosenberg’s endless schoolma’amish lecture made them fall asleep. The prophet laureate’s personality has the pedantry of a scholar without the scholar’s soundness and objective truth-seeking. An ineffectual speaker he certainly is. But as a journalist and pamphleteer he has spread nazism effectively to millions.

Goebbels wins over the proletariat by his demagogics, and many of the educated by his superior brains. Rosenberg bores both the uneducated and the well educated, but is the god of the semi-educated, whom earnest dullness and obscure grandiloquence impress as scholarly and authoritative.

Foreign Policy⁴

Unlike Ribbentrop and Goebbels, the Rosenberg group refused to work with Communists internally and preferred an English to a Russian alliance externally. Stalin should have taken warning from the ominous fact that even during the Hitler-Stalin alliance Hitler retained Rosenberg as his chief philosopher and as editor of the chief Nazi daily. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet in June of 1941 is Rosenberg’s hour of triumph.

All too sincerely Rosenberg pictures a “Jew-ruled Russia” plotting Marxist world-revolution as “mask “for “Jewish international bankers.” He is convinced that the Red revolution was secretly financed by Wall Street, by firms like Kuhn Loeb, an “alien” German myth frequently repeated by that two-hundred-per-cent American, Father Coughlin. This slander is, of course, preposterous — but no more so than the counter-slander of American Marxists that Hitler is just a tool of the capitalists. A national socialist, Rosenberg has won millions of Germans to his “mask” theory of international (Jewish) socialism by his cheaply priced pamphlets. These bear such titles as International High Finance; Plague in Russia: Bolshevism; The Mark of the Jew.⁵

Rosenberg’s and Hitler’s passionate hate of Soviet Russia is mainly anti-Semitic and anti-Comintern rather than anti-Russian. During Stalin’s purges in the 1930’s the Nazi press stressed that most of those “liquidated”were Jews and Comintern internationalists and hinted — already then — that perhaps Stalin or some other national Communist would be good for a little pact. Long before the brief Russian pact of 1939, Rosenberg envisaged “friendship” with a “nationalist Russia” at the expense of Poland. Poland, “incapable”of maintaining a state of its own, “should bear the chief burden of German expansion.”⁶

More basic than Rosenberg’s Russophobia was his dream of “Germany mistress of the globe… by the victorious sword of a master race.”⁷ “The globe” includes South America according to all existing planetary maps, but doubtless to point this out to Americans is just English-Jewish-capitalist propaganda by “hysterical war-mongers.”

Rosenberg’s consistent foreign policy was prophetically summed up in 1938 as “a sweeping extermination of honourless democracy… the spiritual undoing and historically overdue decomposition of the west, linked to an organic penetration and rearrangement of the east.” Nor was Rosenberg such a bad prophet when he wrote, prior to Hitler’s chancellorship, that “no considerations can be taken for Poles, Czechs, etc, who are as impotent as they are valueless and overbearing. They must be driven back to the east, so that the soil may become free to be tilled by the horny hands of Teutonic peasants.”⁸

Himself a product of Germany’s Drang nach Osten, Rosenberg voices the eternal mission of the mediæval Teutonic Knights: to conquer and colonize the Slavic east. Today Hitler is converting into appalling reality the Rosenberg theory about what to do with Slavs. Hitler has appointed Arthur Greiser to rule a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• The Second Coming
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition (2003)
• Thomas Mann on Metapolitics
• New Survey for the 1960’s
• METAPOLITICS
• I. The “German Problem”
• II. “Romanticism” and The Cult of “Life”: An Attempt at Definition
• III. From 1648 to 1848: The Two Souls in Action
• IV. Father Jahn, the First Storm Trooper
• V. Siegfried: The Metapolitics of Richard Wagner
• VI. Hitler and Wagner
• VII. Greenwich Village Warriors
• VIII. “O Sacred Mediterranean”: Solution to the German Problem
• IX. Realpolitik: Fichte, Hegel, Treitschke, Hitler
• X. A Different View of the German Republic
• XI. Prophet Laureate of Metapolitics: Part I
• XII. Prophet Laureate of Metapolitics: Part II
• XIII. Nazi Religion Versus Christian Religion
• XIV. Metapolitics in Action: The Theology of Terror
• The Rooted German
• DISCOVERIES IN GERMAN CULTURE
• I. Albert Speer and steeled Romanticism
• II. In Search of Stauffenberg
• III. Ogling through Ice: The Sullen Lyricism of Georg Heym
• IV. The Flawed Genius of Stefan George and His Historical Context
• V. Twilight of the Outward Life
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Appendix A: PRO AND CON:
• Appendix B: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, WAGNER’S
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS BY PETER VIERECK
• INDEX