Hammer of the Gods

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This is a surprisingly interesting history about an extremely obscure moment in German history. Although the “occult” angle is titillating, what this history actually does is to draw the curtain back on the odd world of Volkisch Nationalism in the period prior to and immediately after World War I. In doing so, the author illuminates a lot of the culture of National Socialism.

The first thing to understand is that this is a well-researched work of scholarship. Rightwing nationalists may have had strange and eclectic beliefs, but their beliefs are part of the data and qualia of the historical record. Nothing in this book suggests in any way that the author holds these beliefs or expects the readers to give them any credence. Rather, author David Luhrssen approaches the subject as a combination of intellectual and political history.

The most surprising detail for me was how little I really knew about the Communist take-over of Munich in 1918-1919. Generally, this episode gets footnote treatment as an odd experiment that was quickly unraveled, but it is an event that winds its way through a lot of history. Thus, the future Pius XII had a run in with the Communists running Munich and Dietrich von Hildebrandt had to flee Communist Munich just as he would have to flee Nazi Germany twenty years later. For the people living through the event, Red Munich highlighted the threat that they were living under and demonstrated that an answer to the threat was violence and conspiracy.

Luhrssen begins his history in the concrete reality of the Communists executing six members of the Thule society. When we return to these executions many chapters later - after we trace the development of the Thule Society through its predecessors and personalities - we will learn that the Thule Society was establishing and funding the Freikorps that were attacking the Bolshevik state. Although it had Volkish interests, such as study societies devoted to deciphering rune, the Thule Society reached the zenith of its influence at this moment under the mercurial Rudolf von Sebottendorff, who is a character that a fantasy writer would be hard-pressed to invent - Luhrssen calls him “Munchausen incarnate” - by running an effective conspiracy that seemed to place its agents within the ranks of the Communists.

Luhrssen is an effective guide to the crazy quilt of groups and ideologies that made up part of the current that the Nazis grew out of. For example, I've often heard of Blavatsky's Theosophy, but never had any interest in learning about that subject. Apparently, it was a kind of pantheism, which is interesting in light of Richard Weikart's recent book that argues that Hitler's “religiosity” was “panentheist.” According to Luhrssen, “Theosophy embodied a subversive countertendency in Western thought. It opposed the evils of Western materialism with an eclectic synthesis of ideas, many of them adopted from Hindu and Buddhist cosmology.” (Weikart's observations about the popularity of Schopenhauer, who was similar influenced by Eastern ideas comes to mind. Luhrssen notes that “A stream of translations of the Bhagavad Gita and other sacred texts had already encouraged interest in faiths born in India.5 Prominent German thinkers such as Novalis, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer were fascinated by Indian philosophy, as were the New England circles of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.) Theosophy posited the existence of the “Aryan race” and gave rise to “Arisophy,” which devoted interest in an imagined Western mystical tradition of runes and paganism. These influences also brought in the symbol of the swastika.

Theosophy also brought with a kind of idea of teleological evolution where the existing race would be supplanted by a “new race.”

“Theosophy also taught that a new race would soon emerge to supplant the existing human genus. It was on the subject of race that mysticism intersected with the materialistic science of the day. Bigotry based on inherited physical characteristics has a long history. However, not until the height of the Enlightenment, in 1735, when Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus devised the modern system for classifying plants and animals, was a hierarchy of races proposed upon a scientific foundation. Even before Charles Darwin, evolutionists wondered whether certain races were better suited and adaptable than others to a wider scope of environments, and whether the world could be seen as populated by many races at different stages of evolution. Perhaps there were different human breeds, even breeds that scarcely deserved to be classed as human, such as the Pygmies of Equatorial Africa, whose humanity was often questioned. Rancorous debate erupted during the early nineteenth century between monogenists, who believed that homo sapiens descended from the same line, and polygenists, whose argument for the separate origin of various races undercut the Judeo-Christian brotherhood of man and its political corollary of universal human rights.”

(I want to note that this debate is answered in Catholicism by Humani Generis which dogmatically holds for a single human origin.)

Luhrssen takes the reader through personalities like Guido von List whose pro-pagan, anti-Catholic books become popular in the late 19th century:

“With the publication of his historical novel Carnuntum (1888), a glorification of the ancient Aryans and their struggle with the Romans, List graduated from obscurity to celebrity among Pan-Germans. Carnuntum was not merely historical fiction but a metaphor of contemporary cultural politics. Like the Roman legions of old, the Roman Catholic Church was an alien intrusion to be repelled before a genuinely Teutonic civilization could be restored. In Carnuntum, the ancient Germans who dwelled in what became Austria spearheaded the reversal of Roman fortune that culminated in the sack of Rome, a notion that swelled the pride of German Austrians.”

This was a feature of German nationalism. In my review of [[ASIN:0674065638 Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification (Harvard Historical Studies)]], I noted:

“For their part, the nationalists are still drawing their support from university students and dueling societies and are positing a world where primitive Germanness - pagan Germanness - is better because it is more authentic, and it is more authentic because it is untainted by non-German, ultramontane, Roman influences. Leading Nazis such as Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg took the idea of a pagan Germany that was unsullied by Jewish/Christian influence, and in Rosenberg's case, Jewish-Catholic influences, and have made that an explicit part of how they define the good society they wanted to create.”

Luhrssen notes that Rosenberg, Himmler and Hesse were all part of the Thule Society.

“List Societies” were formed to discuss the ideas of List. Out of the List Society, the Thule Society was formed to discuss the Eddas and Nordic mythology. In July of 1919, the Thule Society acquired control of a minor Munich weekly whose named he changed to the Münchener Beobachter und Sportblatt (Munich Observer and Sports Sheet). After publishing this newspaper for a time, it was eventually transferred to the fledgling Nazi party - actually to its leader Adolf Hitler - by way of a loan from Ernst Hanfstaengl, and, eventually, Alfred Rosenberg became its publisher. (Luhrssen says that “In December 1920 the German military under its Bavarian commander, Franz Ritter von Epp, using Thule Society member Dietrich Eckart as intermediary, covertly provided the rising National Socialist German Workers' Party with funds to purchase the Beobachter.”)

In addition, the Thule Society also set up a front organization, known as the Workers' Circle under Karl Harrer, which quickly became the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) that Adolf Hitler joined in September 1919.

Hitler was surrounded by Thule Society members and influence. His mentor, Dietrich Eckart, was a Thule Society member as were many founding members of the DAP. Subsequently, Hitler distanced the NSDAP, as it became, from the Thule Society, presumably so that the myth that he had created it virtually by himelf could be developed. There is some debate about whether Hitler was a member of the Thule Society; although Hitler denied that he was, Sebottendorff claimed that Hitler was a member, and was imprisoned for that claim. Hitler may or may not have been formally a member of the Thule Society, but Luhrssen observes:

“Hitler did not undermine Thule's leadership of the party before being influenced by members of the Society. The damp clay of prejudices and anxieties that constituted Hitler's internal life when he returned to Munich after war's end, much of it already molded by his encounter with Ariosophical publications and völkisch militants in Vienna, was given final shape by Thulists. Regardless of whether Hitler actually joined the Society as Sebottendorff stated, or if he merely came to the September 12 German Workers' Party meeting with more knowledge than he later admitted, Hitler was by the fall of 1919 under the influence of Thulists and their confederates in the party's membership, notably Eckart, Rosenberg, and Feder. Eckart's impact on Hitler is undisputed. However, Eckart's ties through Thule to Rosenberg, Feder, Drexler, and Harrer are overlooked by historians who concur with Hitler that only one or two individuals influenced him in postwar Munich, not a network of individuals linked to the Thule Society.”

Rosenberg is a key element of this connection. Most histories tend to portray Rosenberg as a bit of a buffoon that Hitler mocked, but Rosenberg did win the first Nazi version of the Nobel prize, and he was given control of the NSDAP when Hitler was in prison, and Rosenberg was given control over Nazi ideological formation. Rosenberg was and remained a surprisingly key figure in Hitler's life, at least until the war, when the key figures became military figures. Luhrssen points out:

“Jewish conspiracy. It was a theme he repeated in issue after issue of Eckart's paper, and in books and policy papers written after he became a Nazi.75 While no one disputes that Hitler was, to a large degree, Eckart's apprentice at the beginning of their friendship, Rosenberg's influence has been more controversial. Although it is now generally acknowledged that Hitler's preoccupation with combating Bolshevism was “influenced above all by Alfred Rosenberg,”76 many historians have followed the path of those unable to take the Nazi Party's chief philosopher seriously because of the strangeness of his ideas. From this perspective it is easy to pretend that Rosenberg was the butt of Hitler's scorn in the inner sanctuary of Nazism. Support for this view rests uncomfortably on Hitler's supposed statement that he read no more than a few pages of Rosenberg's major philosophical tome, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, because it was too difficult to understand. 77 This statement comes from transcripts of Hitler's private conversations, edited with an eye toward inclusion in some future Nazi archive, by one of Rosenberg's opponents, party boss Martin Bormann. While it is likely that Hitler would eventually grow impatient with Rosenberg's mediocre aptitude for leadership, eyewitness accounts contradict the notion that Hitler tolerated Rosenberg as a harmless eccentric. Hitler's friend Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl abhorred Rosenberg but admitted, “I soon found that he [Hitler] was deeply under the spell of Rosenberg” and esteemed him highly as a writer and philosopher.78 Careful scrutiny of Hitler's earliest recorded speeches shows the influence of Rosenberg's ideas.79 In commenting on the Mythus, Hitler said, “That book contains much that is true, but it is not timely. It is not intended for the masses; it is rather ideological education for the intelligentsia.”80 When Rosenberg issued a veiled attack on Goebbels's tolerance of modern art in the Völkischer Beobachter, his remarks “were incorporated almost verbatim” in Hitler's speech on culture at the 1933 Nazi Party rally.81 Kurt Luedecke, a well-connected adventurer who joined the Nazi Party in the summer 1922 and became one of its major early financial donors, would later recount that Hitler told him to get to know Rosenberg: “Get on good terms with him. He's the only man I always listen to. He is a thinker.””

And:

“Although Hitler never publicly echoed the anti-Christianity of the Mythus, his personal hostility to Christian teaching was reflected in the book's content and in private conversations recorded for posterity.92 Hitler's silence on questions raised by the controversial book was a tactical maneuver to reassure German church leaders and the faithful. As the party's ideological spokesman, Rosenberg would never have been permitted to publish the book had Hitler opposed its message. The Mythus would not have been imposed on the curriculum of German schools if Hitler had found it objectionable.”

In summary, what you get from this book is a key piece of backstory, an insight into the place where things connect. These insights offer a different view of the Nazi error, even if all of that rune and occult stuff is mostly silly nonsense, but dangerous silly nonsense because some of these men who would become very dangerous believed bis and pieces of it.

All in all, I found this a fascinating read.