An Efficient “Propagandistic Instrument of Mobilisation”

Over the past few years, much has been written about Germany’s Nazis and about ideology, but not too much has been published on Nazi ideology. Norwegian author Carl Müller Frøland has divided his study Understanding Nazi Ideology into seven parts. Most suitably, he starts with German Romanticism (I) and the Völkische Ideology (II). “Völkisch” remains a nearly untranslatable word (probably something like pagan-folk-nativist culture). Part III is about Nietzsche’s “will to power” while part IV illuminates the growth of Nazi ideology. This is then followed by the Führer cult (V). The book ends with “The SS” (VI), and The Conceptual Universe of Nazism (VII).

In his Preface, Frøland notes that “surprisingly little has been written on why Nazi ideology had such appeal” (1). Perhaps one reason why—while not being a coherent system of ideas, is precisely that: an incoherent jumble. The foundations of Nazi ideology consisted of a disjointed mishmash—in which the German word would be Flickenteppich. In other words, it was a pernicious patchwork of rodomontade and tub-thumping hate speech, a Versatzstücke, words and ideas mixed up using incongruous substitutes. These were cobbled together indiscriminately. This makeshift so-called ideology was spiced up by philosophical half-truths and, more or less, deliberate misinterpretations often adjusted to suit the violent political and social purposes of Nazism. All of this allowed Nazi ideology to seem to be all things to all people, from conservatives to reactionaries, and from God-fearing Christians to “back-to-nature” romantics.

Nazism, like Italian fascism, is a call to action and therefore does not need much of a philosophical or ideological grounding or background. One of the prime reasons for the existence of this nonsense dressed up as Nazi ideology is that it was a highly efficient “propagandistic instrument of mobilisation” (9), and it was one of the first movements to utilize modern media, street parades, and mass rallies.

Frøland notes that “Thomas Mann was one of the first to describe Nazism as an ideology,” and—himself a conservative—he “found the roots of Nazism in German Romanticism” (10). Yet not every romanticist marching through the woods in Lederhosen and singing self-congratulatory songs was a Nazi, and not every Nazi was a romanticist. Sadly, Frøland’s book does not include Umbero Eco’s Ur-Fascism (1995) that describes fascist ideology—and by inference to Nazi ideology—to near perfection. Eco’s fourteen elements remain highly relevant to Italian fascist ideology as well as to German Nazi ideology. He shows that neither forms “a system of thought”: there simply is no “cohesively [written] individual Nazi text” (14) on ideology, not even Hitler’s convoluted drivel called Mein Kampf [My struggle] (1925). On a more serious note, Frøland is correct to say that Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) introduced the notion that Germany (not yet a country in his time) was ideally “a national community of destiny” (34) (which might fit with the concept of Volkisch), and Johann Gottlieb Herder (1744–1803), who thought of the Fatherland in terms of “Volkstum” seen as a “blood community (Blutsgemeinschaft)” (33), another way of describing the Volk in the conjunction of Blood, Soil and Folk—became key elements of Nazi ideology.

Worse, Fichte saw “the nation [as] a Sippengemeinschaft … that is superior to all other nations” (35). Hence the German anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles.” Of course, this racist ideal carries connotations of a mythical Aryan community (Gemeinschaft) of the Sippe (the clan, or in its North American understanding, the Klu Klux Klan). It also means that non-Aryans, such as the Jews, are excluded, which for anti-Semite “Ernst Moritz Arndt [meant that] Jews have no place” in Germany (47). Super-anti-Semite Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s “extreme hatred of Jews [introduced] blood guilt, the mixing of German blood with foreign 'impure' blood” (47), the idea of which came from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in their dealings with insincerely converted and genuinely converted Jews, neither of whom could ever be treated as proper Christians.

Unlike Nazi ideology, Germany’s nineteenth-century anti-Semitism still “distinguishes between assimilated and non-assimilated Jews” (59). For Nazi ideology, however, Jews can never be assimilated into Germany’s community, as they constitute a different race—or species of sub-humans (Untermenschen). Thus Nazi ideology is not about religion: It is about pseudo-biological science. In addition, it is about a racially motivated exclusion of Jews. Frøland is also correct to outline Ferdinand Tönnies’s (1855–1887) distinction between community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft). Nazi ideology is about a mythical Aryan community, not about a modern democratic society of freely associating individuals. Nazi ideology rejects the latter.

Why and how Jews—framed in quasi-Darwinian terms as a different race—undermine the mystical unity of German blood has been outlined by Richard Wagner (1813–1883). At this point, it might appear as if Frøland somewhat underestimates the importance of Wagner’s anti-Semitic essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik” [Judaism in Music] (1869). In his seminal work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer states that “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner,” Hitler used to say.¹ Frøland might have taken note of this. In any case, Wagner’s and Hitler’s hatred of Jews was powerfully supported, according to Frøland, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s (1878–1905) “racial struggle … between the Teutons and the Jews” (69). It likes to pretend that Germans suffer under Jews.

Perhaps more important than Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788–1860) view that “human life is full of suffering [and his] primacy of the Will” (79), is “Nietzsche’s glorification of creation and destruction” (82), highlighting “the inhuman, brutal, cruel, and destructive aspect of human life” (85) from which creative violence is by nature excluded. This is something that fits very well into Nazi ideology. So does Nietzsche’s idea that “War is the father of all things” (85). Perhaps, the worst of Nazism isn’t even Richard Wagner himself but his sister Cosima Wagner, who edited his books before going mad.

What also fits well are Nietzsche’s thoughts of “Europe [being] characterised by decadence and degeneration … the fin-de-siècle era, [and] the superhuman as the law-giver” (88). It even fits well with Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) hallucination that “The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law.” German Nazis treasured Nietzsche’s vision that “the masses … can function as human material” (89). In the end, it wasn’t Heidegger‘s dream of becoming the “philosophical Führer of the Führer,” and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), but Nietzsche who provided (in the version that Cosima gave them) many philosophical underpinnings to Nazi ideology, inane as such a hodgepodge of false and vicious ideals it turned out to be.

Much more important than any philosopher (Fichte, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, etc.) to Nazi ideology was Ernst Jünger’s (1895–1998) glorification of a heroic battle in his memoir The Storm of Steel. Jünger’s killer-handbook Stahlgewitter not only supported the senseless death of thousands of men in WWI, but it also supported even more senseless deaths in WWII. But Nazi ideology faced a problem that Jünger helped solving. Not many men have an “overwhelming desire to kill” (100) and a “spirit of the slaughter” (103), as Steven Pinker, R. M. Hare, and de Waal would later correctly argue.² Because of this, a particular evil ideology was needed to make men kill others. As a consequence, Nazi ideology encouraged, created, and supported “ruthlessly, wildly and brutally [battles as well as] the final triumph of a fantastic horror” (103). This had to be introduced via an ideology—the ideology of Ernst Jünger.

Of course, Jünger not only glorified war as such. He also worshipped the “storm troopers” (108). World War I storm troopers became the iconic image of Germany’s death squads murdering rafts of political opponents (including, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Kurt Eisner, Matthias Erzberger, Phillip Scheidemann, Walter Rathenau, and others) during the Weimar era (1919–1933). These storm troopers also became Hitler’s feared, brutal and ruthless Sturmabteilung (112), the SA. Eventually, a new organization took over, the SS. They became even more lethal, tasked with the Final Solution and the running of the Nazi death camps.

Instrumental in creating an ideology that supported the Nazi mass murders throughout Europe was Hitler’s official ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century that advocated one of the first steps leading to the Holocaust: “the dehumanising of Jews” (129). Rosenberg and others mark an important shift in anti-Semitism from its religiously medieval motivations to a nineteenth-century “theory of race” (130). From then on, Jews could no longer escape pogroms by converting to Catholicism. Even though the idea of different races had always been an un-scientific nonsense and the more we advance in genetics, the more this becomes evident, Nazi ideology lived and breathed racism setting “the Jews at the diametrical opposite of the Aryans” (130).

Two other elements support Nazi race ideology: (1) the heritage of Martin Luther’s religious anti-Semitism; and (2) the application of Carl Schmitt’s (1888–1985) “friend (Freund) and foe (Feind)” to the Nazi ideology of different races (209). As a consequence, Nazi ideology demanded “a complete dejudaisation” (134), by defaming the Jews as cosmopolitan and urban, that is, as rootless and unattached to the soil of the Fatherland. Meanwhile, Nazi ideology advocated a deeply-rooted “race [based on] Blut und Boden (blood and soil)” (141), which gave rise to an Aryan Schicksalsgemeinschaft, the racial destiny of the Germans.

This race-based Aryan community was manifested by the “collective ecstasy [of] the Nuremberg rallies” (163) adoring the “charismatic leadership” (169) of “the cult of the Führer” (180), which created “a political religion” (180). Frøland argues that Nazism represents something like a political religion, which may be somewhat hard to sustain. Hitler was a lifelong Catholic and the Catholic Church never excommunicated him. Instead, the Catholic Church in Germany, as well as the Vatican in Rome, supported both Italian fascism and German Nazism.

Yet the Nazis weren’t religious people and their ideology wasn’t based on religious ideas. To be sure, the SS was not a religious organisation.³ And although Nazi ideology incorporated some religious terms and images, this does not turn it into a religious discourse. It is indeed much more workable to argue that the Nazi ideology was “a kind of a substitute religion (Ersatzreligion)” (184). While some of the Protestant Churches in Germany and some of the great theologians of the period opposed Nazism, there was no popular opposition to the Hitlerite regime.

Instead of a religion, it is more accurate to argue that there was an “SS system of beliefs” (190), which was less religious and more a distorted reflection of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886). The SS, as well as Nazi ideology rejected any system of morality based on Christianity or, in fact, any other religion. “The SS worldview” or Weltanschuung (190) was about “combatting every racial enemy” (191). This was a matter of a spurious “racial hygiene” rather than any morality: in fact, combatting every racial enemy might be seen as the very core of Nazi ideology.

For the SS and for Nazi ideology, the Jew is the foe and the Aryan is the friend—simple but lethal. This led directly to, as Frøland calls it, “a cleansing violence … in Eastern Europe” (211), “genocide” being the word coined to describe this new violation of human rights (229), which along with “extermination” (242) also explain the role of “the Waffen-SS in battle” (251) as it achieved parity with Germany’s Wehrmacht—Hitler’s regular army and willing executioners.

Frøland closes his book by emphasizing that “this ideology did not suddenly emerge” (275), but was the outcome of many ideological and semi-philosophical streams established during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Put together, these created what we today describe as Nazi ideology. These streams might indeed boil down to one: “racial ultra-nationalism [cranked up with] the Aryan race” (275). Reduced to just three key elements, Nazi ideology may indeed be about “Führer, race, and blood” (280).

The two shortcomings of the book are that Frøland never tells his readers what he means by “ideology,” and he makes no mention of the leading Nazi ideologue Moeller van den Bruck (1876–1925), one of Hitler’s favoured philosophers whose seminal book, Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich) became required Nazi reading.⁴ Despite these minor lapses, Frøland’s book is a highly readable, important, and timely contribution to our understanding of Nazi ideology.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 101.

² See Pinker, The Blank Slate and Rationality; de Waal, Good Natured; Hare, Freedom and Reason, and Moral Thinking; and Hare and Woods, Survival of the Friendliest.

³ Klikauer, “Organisational Reasons for the Holocaust,” 209–16.

⁴ Klikauer, “Hitler’s Philosophers/Believe and Destroy,” 198–202.