Nationalism and Culture (57 page)

Like nearly all of the present-day race theorists Gunther in his discussions starts from the modern theories of heredity. He uses as his foundation especially the hypothetical assumptions of neo-Mendelism. According to these conceptions the hereditary primordia are not subject to any external influence, so that a change in the hereditary factors can occur only through crossing. From this it follows that man and all other living bemgs are to be regarded merely as the products of particular hereditary primordia which they received before their birth and which can be turned from their predestined course neither by the influence of the natural or social environment, nor by any other forces.

Here lies the essential error of every race theory, the reason for their inevitably false conclusions. Gunther, and with him all the other advocates of race theories, proceed from assumptions which can in no way be proved and whose untenability can always be shown by examples from daily life and from history. One could' take these assertions seriously only if their proponents were in a position to adduce conclusive proofs of these three points: first, that hereditary primordia are in fact unchangeable and are not affected by the influences of the environment; second, that physical characters must be taken as unmistakable signs of particular intellectual and moral qualities; third, that the life of man is determined entirely by

congenital factors and that acquired or imparted characters have no essential influence on his destiny.

As to the first question, we have already shown that science knows a whole series of firmly established facts which prove irrefutably that action of the environment on the hereditary factors does occur and produce changes in them. The fact that numerous investigators have succeeded in effecting a modification of hereditary factors by radiation, changes of temperature, and so on, testifies to this. Besides, we have the effects of domestication, the importance of which has been brought out with special strength by Eduard Hahn and Eugen Fischer. Indeed, Fischer was led to declare: "Man is a product of domestication, and it is domestication that has caused his great variability, or contributed to it."

Concerning the second point, no sophistry will help. Not a shadow of proof can be adduced to show that external racial characters like the shape of the skull, the color of the hair, slimmer or sturdier build, have any relation to mental, spiritual or moral factors in mankind j so that, for example, a tall, blond, blue-eyed Nordic because of his external physical characters should possess moral and mental qualities which one would not find in descendants of some other race. Our race ideologists claim this, it is true, but their doctrine is completely untenable, and based on assertions for the correctness of which they have not the slightest proof.

We have already emphasized that in the long line of persons of genius who deserve credit for the intellectual culture of Germany there is hardly one whose appearance corresponds even halfway to the ideal concept of the "Nordic man." And it is precisely the greatest of them who are physically farthest from the fanciful picture of the Gunthers, Hausers and Clausses. We need but think of Luther, Goethe, Beethoven, who lacked almost completely the external marks of the "Nordic race," and whom even the most outstanding exponents of the race theory characterize as hybrids with Oriental, Levantine and Negro-Malayan strains in them. It would look even worse if one should go so far as to apply the blood-test to the champions in the arena of the race struggle like Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Goebbels, Streicher, for example, and give these worthy representatives of the Nordic race and the national interest the opportunity to confirm their rulership of the Third Reich by virtue of their blood.*

* The well-known race hygienist of Munich, Max von Gruber, President of the Bavarian Academy of Science and a leading mind in the race movement in Germany, certainly an unprejudiced witness, has drawn the following picture of Hitler: "Today 1 saw Hitler close-up for the first time. Face and head of a bad race, a mixture. Low, retreating forehead, ugly nose, wide cheek-bones, little eyes, dark hair. A tiny tooth-brush mustache, only as wide as his nose, gives his face a defiant aspect. His expression is not that of a self-controlled commander, but of a crazy emotionalist. Repeated twitchings of the facial muscles. Final expression that of happy self-satisfaction." {Essener Volkswacht of November 9, 1929.)

If it is indisputable that men like Socrates, Horace, Michelangelo, Dante, Luther, Galileo, Rembrandt, Goya, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Herder, Goethe, Beethoven, Byron, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, Balzac, Dumas, Poe, Strindberg, Ibsen, Zola, and hundreds of others were of mixed race, this is surely a proof that external race-marks have nothing to do with the intellectual and moral qualities in man. It is really amusing to observe with what excuses our modern race fetishists try to overcome these difficulties. Thus, Dr. Clauss accounted for Beethoven's inconvenient race affinities quite simply by declaring: "Beethoven was, so far as his musical ability is concerned, a Nordic man. The style of his work proves this clearly enough j and this is not altered at all by the fact that his body— anthropologically considered, that is, just the mass and weight of his body —perhaps was fairly pure Oriental." ^"

As we see, the purest metempsychosis. What mysterious forces were at work when the "Nordic race-soul" of Beethoven was stuck into a vile Oriental body? Or did, perhaps, the Jews or the Freemasons have a hand in it!

There remains the last question, whether the qualities which man acquires during the course of his life or which are imparted to him by the culture in which he lives have actually no influence on his inherited factors. If this could be proved, then indeed should we be compelled to speak of a "Kismet of the blood" which no one could withstand. But how does the matter stand in reality? The power of the acquired characters reveals itself every day in our lives and constantly conceals the inherited factors with which we began our life journey. As examples we may take the two strongest impulses—which in all living beings and in men of every race and clime reveal themselves as equally powerful—hunger and love. Man has surrounded these two instincts in which the whole vital energy of the individual and the race exhausts itself, with such a network of age-old customs and usages, which in the course of time have been erected into definite ethical principles, that the inborn urge in most cases no longer asserts itself against this web of imparted and acquired concepts. Do we not see every day how in our great cities thousands of miserable, starving human beings silently sneak past the rich display in the show-windows of our food stores? They devour these splendors with greedy eyes, but very seldom does one of them dare to yield to the inborn impulse and take what would serve for t|ie satisfaction of his most urgent needs. Fear of the law, dread of public opinion, inculcated respect for the rights of property of others prove stronger than the drive of the inborn impulse. And yet we are dealing here with acquired characters which are no more transmissible by heredity than are the calloused hands of the blacksmith.

^° Rasse und Seele. Munich, 1925, p. 60.

The child confronts these things quite without comprehension until it gradually learns to adjust itself to them.

And love? With how many prohibitions, duties and grotesque customs has man hedged in this most elemental of his impulses. Even among primitive peoples there exist a great mass of morals and customs which are sanctified by usage and respected by public opinion. Human imagination invented the cult of Astarte in Babylon and that of Mylitta in Assyria, the sexual religions of India and the asceticism of the Christian saints. It created all the institutions of sexual behavior: polygamy, polyandry, monogamy, and all of the forms of promiscuity from the "sacred prostitution" of the Semitic peoples to the sequestration by the state of the women of the street. It brought the whole gamut of sexual passion under strict rule and developed definite views which today are deeply rooted in the minds of men. And yet here are at work also merely acquired concepts, customs, institutions, which have found emotional expression in definite trained-in characteristics. And it is just these characteristics which direct the love-life of man Into definite courses and constantly impel the individual to quite distressing suppression of his inborn impulses. Even the most cunning sophistry cannot avoid these facts.

Every phase of human history shows us the powerful influence of religious, political and moral ideas on the social development of men, the strong influence of the social conditions under which they live and which in their turn react on the form of their ideas and opinions. This eternal reciprocal influence constitutes the whole content of history. Hundreds of thousands of men have gone to their death for particular ideas, very often with the most frightful accompaniments, and have by their conduct defied the strongest inborn impulse that exists in every living being. And this has happened under the overpowering influence of acquired Ideas. Religions like Islam and Christianity have drawn peoples of all races into their bonds. The same may be said of all the great popular movements of history. We need but think of the Christian movement in the decaying Roman Empire, of the great movements of the time of the Reformation, of International floods of ideas like liberalism, democracy or socialism, which have been able to exert their proselyting power upon men and women of every social class and enlist them under their banners. The peoples of the "Nordic race" have been no exception to this rule.

Our race alchemists have tried to save their faces by maintaining that the peoples of the Nordic race have all too often been misled by ideas that are racially alien to them and for which they had no real inner inclination. They call this incomprehensible Invasion by "foreign custom" and "foreign spirit" one of the most lamentable aspects of Germanism and of the Nordic race In general. Such outbursts, which are quite common with Gunther, Hauser, Neuner, and others, seem rather odd. What sort of

remarkable race is this which allegedly feels itself drawn toward foreign ideas and foreign customs as iron is drawn to the magnet? This unnatural phenomenon might easily make us think that we have here a morbid degenerate form of the "Nordic race-soul"—which otherwise is shown clearly enough by the whole "race" rubbish of our time. It is still more remarkable that the enraptured worshipers of the Nordic wonder-race constantly strive to eliminate these moral blemishes of their idol and in the same breath announce that race is destiny. If this is true, what is the use of all the indoctrination? Of what use that Gunther and his "Nordic Ring"—a sort of Blue-Blond International—try by all means to prevent a war between the Nordic peoples in the future j or that Otto Hauser proclaims to an astonished world that the principal strategists of the World War on both sides were blond Nordics and honors the French General Joffre as a "blond Goth"? All the worse if this is so. It then merely proves that blond Nordics on opposite sides have killed one another for a cause which according to their blood was alien to themj above all it proves that the inborn "voice of the blood" could not prevail against the economic and political interests about which the war was fought.

The French race ideologist, Vacher de Lapouge, once announced that in the twentieth century "we shall kill one another by the millions because of one or two degrees more or less in the cephalic index," and that "by this sign, which will replace the biblical shibboleth and kinship of language, related races will recognize one another, and the last sentimentalist will live to see a mighty extermination of peoples." Even the bald and terrible reality of the war was less fantastic than the bloodthirsty imagination of this race fetishist. In the World War we did not smash skulls because they were a little longer or shorter, but because the opposing interests within the capitalistic world had grown to such a degree that the war seemed to the ruling classes the only available way by which they could hope to escape from the blind alley into which they had gotten themselves. In the late World War the most various races fought shoulder to shoulder on both sides. We even drew black men and yellow into the catastrophe with us, without any hindrance from the "voice of the blood," to let themselves be slaughtered for interests which were certainly not their own.

Peoples have not infrequently undergone a fundamental change in their morals and customs which could in no way be traced to racial crossing. According to the unanimous testimony of all recognized race theorists, men of the Nordic race are-today most numerous in the Scandinavian countries, especially in Sweden. But these very Swedes, Norwegians and Danes have in the course of their history experienced a profound change in their ancient ways of living. Those very countries which were once hated and feared as the home of the most warlike tribes in Europe now harbor the most peaceful population on the continent. The famous "spirit

of the Vikings" which is supposed to have been the outstanding characteristic of Nordic race is, in these same Scandinavian lands, as good as extinguished. The phrase "born pacifists," which was invented by Giinther and his satellites especially to bring the so-called "Oriental man" into moral disrepute, fits no one better than the present-day Scandinavians. They merely show that the latest destiny-faith of race is the shallowest fatalism that has ever been devised j it is the most pitiful and degrading surrender of the spirit to the cannibalistic delusion of the "voice of the blood."

In order to prevent the submersion of the "Noble Race" they have hit, in Germany, on the grand idea of "nordification," which has led cunning minds to the most daring proposals. The nordification theory has during the past ten years called forth a whole flood of literary productions than which anything more grotesque would be hard to find. No other country can approach Germany in this. Most of those strange saints who obtrude themselves in Germany today as reformers of sexual relations wish to put procreation under the controlling hand of the state. Others stand openly for the legal introduction of polygamy in order to put the Nordic race the quicker on its somewhat weakened legs. And, so that the lord of the family may come into his rights "in the midst of this effeminate old world"—as Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's spiritual adviser, so pic" turesquely expresses it—Herr Richard Rudolf in his essay, Geschlechts-moraly defends polygamy, not only because it provides a means for raising the fecundity of the Nordic race to its highest capacity, but also because this institution better corresponds to the polygamous instincts of the male.