The German Genius

biblical historian (one of the areas where German scholarship led the world), he hated modernity as much as he loved the past. 54 He was also one of those calling for a new religion, an idea that, much later, appealed to Alfred Rosenberg, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler. Lagarde attacked Protestantism for its lack of ritual and mystery and for the fact that it was little more than secularism. In advocating a new religion, he said he wanted to see “a fusion of the old doctrines of the Gospel with the National Characteristics of the Germans.” 55 To begin with he adopted the idea of “inner emigration,” meaning people should find salvation within themselves, but then he advocated Germany’s taking over all non-German countries of the Austrian Empire. This was because the Germans were superior and all others, especially Jews, inferior.
    For Lagarde, the central aspect of Germanness was its Aryan heritage, an identity that went back to the “forest and bogs” of northern Europe and Scandinavia and provided an honorable and distinctive alternative to the classical Greek Mediterranean culture that so influenced Italy, Spain, and France. This identity and tradition, Schemann said, following Lagarde, survived in the völkish culture of Germany, a Pan-German feeling that was the sole bulwark against Europe’s cultural, social, and racial “disintegration.” Above all, Wagner’s operas were seen as the authentic re-creation of the original Aryan myths. “Bayreuth became an annual festival where Aryan-Germans could participate in ‘their primeval mysteries,’ rediscover the origins of their Kultur , and be restored to spiritual health.” 56 Lagarde’s disillusion with Germany was aggravated by his visit to Britain, “where he thought he saw a unified people, a popular monarchy, and a responsible gentry—all things that Germany lacked.” 57
    Lagarde’s reputation, which has now all but vanished, was then very high. Thomas Mann called him a “ praeceptor Germaniae ” (the same term as had been attached to Treitschke), especially for those who were dissatisfied with their “humdrum existence in bourgeois society.” In World War II, soldiers of the Third Reich were issued an anthology of Lagarde’s work. 58
    Schemann’s own writings were limited in their appeal, but not so those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Chamberlain, as his name implies, was born in England but grew up a Germanophile, married Wagner’s daughter, becoming in the process more German than the Germans, an influential member of the Bayreuth circle. In 1899, long after Wagner’s death, he published Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts ( The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century ), a rambling survey of European history, the chief arguments of which were, first, that the European achievement was owed entirely to the Aryan race, a race that kept its identity against all the odds, and survived now as the Teutons, exhibiting great “physical health and strength, great intelligence, luxuriant imagination, untiring impulse to create.” 59 Second, when Teutonic vitality was under threat, the main villain was invariably the Jews, Chamberlain claiming that the Jewish “race” was the degenerate result, he said, of “cross-breeding” between Bedouins, Hittites, Syrians, and Amorites from the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. They were a “tainted race” who deliberately tried to sabotage and pollute the world that their “Teutonic superiors” had built. 60
    His book became part of the standard history curriculum in German schools, and we know that Hitler was introduced to his doctrines by Alfred Rosenberg and Dietrich Eckhart. 61 The two men met in 1927 when Chamberlain was quite old. Goebbels was there and later described the meeting, with Hitler and Chamberlain clutching each other’s hands, the former telling the latter he was his “spiritual father.” Chamberlain wrote to Hitler a few days later: “With one blow you have transformed the state of my soul. That Germany, in her hour of need, brings forth a Hitler—that is proof of her vitality. Now I will be able to sleep peacefully and I shall have no need to wake up again. God protect you!”
    Chamberlain died before Hitler came to power, but Schemann lived on and, on his eighty-fifth birthday, received Germany’s highest literary award, the Goethe medal, from the Third Reich. 62
     
     
    As Fritz Stern has said, the “rhapsodies of irrationality…illuminate