The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (22 page)

Siegfried and Kriemhild, Brunhild and Hagen—these are the ancient heroes and heroines with whom so many modern Germans liked to identify themselves. With them, and with the world of the barbaric, pagan Nibelungs—an irrational, heroic, mystic world, beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in blood, and culminating in the
Goetterdaemmerung
, the twilight of the gods, as Valhalla, set on fire by Wotan after all his vicissitudes, goes up in flames in an orgy of self-willed annihilation which has always fascinated the German mind and answered some terrible longing in the German soul. These heroes, this primitive, demonic world, were always, in Mell’s words, “in the people’s soul.” In that German soul could be felt the struggle between the spirit of civilization and the spirit of the Nibelungs, and in the time with which this history is concerned the latter seemed to gain the upper hand. It is not at all surprising that Hitler tried to emulate Wotan when in 1945 he willed the destruction of Germany so that it might go down in flames with him.

Wagner, a man of staggering genius, an artist of incredible magnitude, stood for much more than has been set down here. The conflict in the Ring operas often revolves around the theme of greed for gold, which the composer equated with the “tragedy of modern capitalism,” and which he saw, with horror, wiping out the old virtues which had come down from an earlier day. Despite all his pagan heroes he did not entirely despair of
Christianity
, as Nietzsche did. And he had great compassion for the erring, warring human race. But Hitler was not entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.

Wagner had known, and been influenced by, first Schopenhauer and then Nietzsche, though the latter quarreled with him because he thought his operas, especially
Parsifal
, showed too much Christian renunciation. In the course of his long and stormy life, Wagner came into contact with two other men, one a Frenchman, the other an Englishman, who are important to this history not so much for the impression they made on him, though in one case it was considerable, as for their effect on the German mind, which they helped to direct toward the coming of the Third Reich.

These individuals were Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French diplomat and man of letters, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of the strangest Englishmen who ever lived.

Neither man, be it said at once, was a mountebank. Both were men of immense erudition, deep culture and wide experience of travel. Yet both concocted racial doctrines so spurious that no people, not even their own, took them seriously with the single exception of the Germans. To the Nazis their questionable theories became gospel. It is probably no exaggeration to say, as I have heard more than one follower of Hitler say, that Chamberlain was the spiritual founder of the Third Reich. This singular Englishman, who came to see in the Germans the master race, the hope of the future, worshiped Richard Wagner, one of whose daughters he eventually married; he venerated first Wilhelm II and finally Hitler and was the mentor of both. At the end of a fantastic life he could hail the Austrian corporal—and this long before Hitler came to power or had any prospect of it—as a being sent by God to lead the German people out of the wilderness. Hitler, not unnaturally, regarded Chamberlain as a prophet, as indeed he turned out to be.

What was it in the teaching of these two men that inoculated the Germans with a madness on the question of race and German destiny?

Gobineau’s chief contribution was a four-volume work which was published in Paris between 1853 and 1855, entitled
Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines
(Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). Ironically enough, this French aristocrat, after serving as an officer in the Royal Guard, had started his public career as
chef de cabinet
to Alexis de Tocqueville when the distinguished author of
Democracy in America
served a brief term of office in 1848. He had then gone to Hanover and Frankfurt as a diplomat and it was from his contact with the Germans, rather than with De Tocqueville, that he derived his theories on racial inequalities, though he once confessed that he wrote the volumes partly to prove the superiority of his own aristocratic ancestry.

To Gobineau, as he stated in his dedication of the work to the King of Hanover, the key to history and civilization was race. “The racial question dominates all the other problems of history … the inequality of races suffices to explain the whole unfolding of the destiny of peoples.” There were three principal races, white, yellow and black, and the white was the superior. “History,” he contended, “shows that all civilization flows from the white race, that no civilization can exist without the co-operation of this race.” The jewel of the white race was the Aryan, “this illustrious
human family, the noblest among the white race,” whose origins he traced back to Central Asia. Unfortunately, Gobineau says, the contemporary Aryan suffered from intermixture with inferior races, as one could see in the southern Europe of his time. However, in the northwest, above a line running roughly along the Seine and east to Switzerland, the Aryans, though far from simon-pure, still survived as a superior race. This took in some of the French, all of the English and the Irish, the people of the Low Countries and the Rhine and Hanover, and the Scandinavians. Gobineau seemingly excluded the bulk of the Germans, who lived to the east and southeast of his line—a fact which the Nazis glossed over when they embraced his teachings.

Still, to Gobineau’s mind the Germans, or at least the West Germans, were probably the best of all the Aryans, and this discovery the Nazis did
not
gloss over. Wherever they went, the Germans, he found, brought improvement. This was true even in the
Roman Empire
. The so-called barbaric German tribes who conquered the Romans and broke up their empire did a distinct service to civilization, for the Romans, by the time of the fourth century, were little better than degenerate mongrels, while the Germans were relatively pure Aryans. “The Aryan German,” he declared, “is a powerful creature … Everything he thinks, says and does is thus of major importance.”

Gobineau’s ideas were quickly taken up in Germany. Wagner, whom the Frenchman met in 1876 toward the close of his life (he died in 1882) espoused them with enthusiasm, and soon Gobineau societies sprang up all over Germany.
^*

Among the zealous members of the Gobineau Society in Germany was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose life and works constitute one of the most fascinating ironies in the inexorable course of history which led to the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

This son of an English admiral, nephew of a British field marshal, Sir Neville Chamberlain, and of two British generals, and eventually son-in-law of Richard Wagner, was born at Portsmouth in 1855. He was destined for the British Army or Navy, but his delicate health made such a calling out of the question and he was educated in France and Geneva, where French became his first language. Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen fate brought him into touch with two Germans and thereafter he was drawn irresistibly toward Germany, of which he ultimately became a citizen and one of the foremost thinkers and in whose language he wrote all of his many books, several of which had an almost blinding influence on Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler and countless lesser Germans.

In 1870, when he was fifteen, Chamberlain landed in the hands of a remarkable tutor,
Otto Kuntze
, a Prussian of the Prussians, who for four years imprinted on his receptive mind and sensitive soul the glories of militant, conquering Prussia and also—apparently unmindful of the contrasts—of such artists and poets as Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller and Wagner. At nineteen Chamberlain fell madly in love with
Anna Horst
, also a Prussian, ten years his senior and, like him, highly neurotic. In 1882, at the age of twenty-seven, he journeyed from Geneva, where he had been immersed for three years in studies of philosophy, natural history, physics, chemistry and medicine, to
Bayreuth
. There he met Wagner who, as he says, became the sun of his life, and Cosima, the composer’s wife, to whom he would remain passionately and slavishly devoted all the rest of his days. From 1885, when he went with Anna Horst, who had become his wife, to live for four years in Dresden, he became a German in thought and in language, moving on to Vienna in 1889 for a decade and finally in 1909 to Bayreuth, where he dwelt until his death in 1927. He divorced his idolized Prussian wife in 1905, when she was sixty and even more mentally and physically ill than he (the separation was so painful that he said it almost drove him mad) and three years later he married Eva Wagner and settled down near
Wahnfried
, where he could be near his wife’s mother, the revered, strong-willed Cosima.

Hypersensitive and neurotic and subject to frequent nervous breakdowns, Chamberlain was given to seeing demons who, by his own account, drove him on relentlessly to seek new fields of study and get on with his prodigious writings. One vision after another forced him to change from biology to botany to the fine arts, to music, to philosophy, to biography to history. Once, in 1896, when he was returning from Italy, the presence of a demon became so forceful that he got off the train at Gardone, shut himself up in a hotel room for eight days and, abandoning some work on music that he had contemplated, wrote feverishly on a biological thesis until he had the germ of the theme that would dominate all of his later works: race and history.

Whatever its blemishes, his mind had a vast sweep ranging over the fields of literature, music, biology, botany, religion, history and politics. There was, as Jean Réal
²⁶
has pointed out, a profound unity of inspiration in all his published works and they had a remarkable coherence. Since he felt himself goaded on by demons, his books (on Wagner, Goethe, Kant, Christianity and race) were written in the grip of a terrible fever, a veritable trance, a state of self-induced intoxication, so that, as he says in his autobiography,
Lebenswege
, he was often unable to recognize them as his own work, because they surpassed his expectations. Minds more balanced than his have subsequently demolished his theories of race and much of his history, and to such a French scholar of Germanism as Edmond Vermeil Chamberlain’s ideas were essentially “shoddy.” Yet to the anti-Nazi German biographer of Hitler,
Konrad Heiden
, who deplored the influence of his racial teachings, Chamberlain “was one of the most
astonishing talents in the history of the German mind, a mine of knowledge and profound ideas.”

The book which most profoundly influenced that mind, which sent Wilhelm II into ecstasies and provided the Nazis with their racial aberrations, was
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts
) a work of some twelve hundred pages which Chamberlain, again possessed of one of his “demons,” wrote in nineteen months between April 1, 1897, and October 31, 1898, in Vienna, and which was published in 1899.

As with Gobineau, whom he admired, Chamberlain found the key to history, indeed the basis of civilization, to be race. To explain the nineteenth century, that is, the contemporary world, one had to consider first what it had been bequeathed from ancient times. Three things, said Chamberlain: Greek philosophy and art, Roman law and the personality of Christ. There were also three legatees: the Jews and the Germans, the “two pure races,” and the half-breed Latins of the Mediterranean—“a chaos of peoples,” he called them. The Germans alone deserved such a splendid heritage. They had, it is true, come into history late, not until the thirteenth century. But even before that, in destroying the
Roman Empire
, they had proved their worth. “It is not true,” he says, “that the Teutonic barbarian conjured up the so-called ‘Night of the Middle Ages’; this night followed rather upon the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the raceless chaos of humanity which the dying Roman Empire had nurtured; but for the Teuton, everlasting night would have settled upon the world.” At the time he was writing he saw in the Teuton the only hope of the world.

Chamberlain included among the “Teutons” the Celts and the Slavs, though the Teutons were the most important element. However, he is quite woolly in his definitions and at one point declares that “whoever behaves as a Teuton is a Teuton whatever his racial origin.” Perhaps here he was thinking of his own non-German origin. Whatever he was, the Teuton, according to Chamberlain, was “the soul of our culture. The importance of each nation as a living power today is dependent upon the proportion of genuinely Teutonic blood in its population … True history begins at the moment when the Teuton, with his masterful hand, lays his grip upon the legacy of antiquity.”

And the Jews? The longest chapter in
Foundations
is devoted to them. As we have seen, Chamberlain claimed that the Jews and the Teutons were the only pure races left in the West. And in this chapter he condemns “stupid and revolting
anti-Semitism
.” The Jews, he says, are not “inferior” to the Teuton, merely “different.” They have their own grandeur; they realize the “sacred duty” of man to guard the purity of race. And yet as he proceeds to analyze the Jews, Chamberlain slips into the very vulgar anti-Semitism which he condemns in others and which leads, in the end, to the obscenities of Julius Streicher’s caricatures of the Jews in
Der Stuermer
in Hitler’s time. Indeed a good deal of the “philosophical” basis of Nazi anti-Semitism stems from this chapter.

The preposterousness of Chamberlain’s views is quickly evident. He has declared that the personality of Christ is one of the three great bequests of antiquity to modern civilization. He then sets out to “prove” that Jesus was not a Jew. His Galilean origins, his inability to utter correctly the Aramaic gutturals, are to Chamberlain “clear signs” that Jesus had “a large proportion of non-Semitic blood.” He then makes a typically flat statement: “Whoever claimed that Jesus was a Jew was either being stupid or telling a lie…. Jesus was not a Jew.”