Nazi Romantics

Never let it be said that I don’t make sacrifices for my art.

Right now I’m wading through a LOT of factual accounts of the Nazis’ coming to power: Grunberger’s social history of the Reich, the Toland biography of Hitler (thanks, Matt), the Reuth biography of Goebbels, Shirer, Goebbels’ journals, stuff like that. I’m doing this mainly because of the arc that follows “Inside Man,” starting with The Unwritten#10.

Okay, “wading through” is the wrong way to put it: it’s actually fascinating stuff, for the most part. There are all sorts of surprises, although maybe the fact that they’re surprising just reflects my own political naivety. It’s amazing, for example, how much of the far right’s rhetoric is unchanged from the 1920s and 1930s: there isn’t an English word that accurately translates “Volk”, but the stalking horses of racial purity and cultural contamination are still used by the BNP in ways that are very similar to how they were used by the National Socialists. Their motto seems to be “If it ain’t broke, carry on using it until it falls apart in your hands.” This in spite of the fact that there’s no such thing as British culture: we’ve always been a strange amalgamation of cultures, including bits and pieces of the culture of every nation that’s successfully invaded us, from the Angles and the Saxons on down.

But what I’ve been struck by, reading all this Nazi stuff, is how romantic it all is. I don’t mean in terms of evoking warm, gooey emotions and focusing on Hitler’s love life. I mean, the Nazi movement and the philosophy that underpins it sits squarely in the framework of late Romantic ideas and iconography. This is clearest of all in the Führerprinzip itself: all the Nazi thinkers, including Hitler himself, talk endlessly about how the perfect model for a state depends not on democratic processes and checks and balances but on finding the one man who most perfectly embodies the Volkisch qualities of will, determination, courage, ruthlessness and idealism. And when you find Mr. Right (or Mr. Far Right), you have to immerse your own will in his, subordinate yourself in him, and find yourself in that willed act of surrender.

This means, of course, that when you follow the Führer, you’re not rationally screening your actions – but being romantics, the Nazis didn’t think much of reason. In fact, they thought it was pretty suspect.  If you’re thinking things through too much, then you’re stemming the tide of your emotions. You have to let the tide carry you on, which means you can never stop to examine it: just do what your blood tells you to do, and find out afterwards what the final score is.

Umm… yeah. Good luck with that, guys.

Here’s something that’s kind of funny, though. When I was about fifteen, I can remember reading an old Captain America reprint, in which a Nazi bad guy attacks an American unit screaming “Down with democracy! Down with freedom!” I chuckled at this, because I had the idea even then that most bad guys think they’re the good guys. They wouldn’t see themselves as trampling on virtue, they’d see themselves as embodying it.

But the Nazis were explicitly against democracy, not just on pragmatic grounds but on philosophical ones: they equated democracy with weakness and compromise, the tyranny of the mediocre and the venal. They dreamed of coming to power in a bloody revolution, and some of them were a bit sheepish that they were given the reins by due and democratic process. Of course, the first thing they did was to kick away the ladder: they weren’t going to take the chance of being voted out in the same way.

I pulled out the Hitler biography at the T-Party writers’ group meeting I went to last Saturday, and said I was finding it pretty fascinating reading. A voice from the back of the room piped up “He dies at the end.”