The German Genius

message had been perverted by Paul, who was Jewish, and that it was the Pauline/Roman version that had forged Christianity into its familiar mold by ignoring ideas of aristocracy and race and creating fake doctrines of original sin, the afterlife, and hell as an inferno, all of which beliefs, Rosenberg thought, were “unhealthy.”
    His aim—and at this distance Rosenberg’s audacity is breathtaking—was to create a substitute faith for Germany. 23 He advocated a “religion of the blood” which, in effect, told Germans that they were members of a master race, with a “race-soul.” He quoted the works of the Nazis’ chief academic racialist, H. F. K. Günther, who claimed to have established on a scientific basis “the defining characteristics of the so-called Nordic-Aryan race.” As with Hitler and others before him, Rosenberg did his best to establish a connection to the ancient inhabitants of India, Greece, and Germany, and he brought in Rembrandt, Herder, Wagner, Friedrich the Great, and Heinrich the Lion, to produce an entirely arbitrary but nonetheless heroic history specifically intended to root the NSDAP in the German past. For Rosenberg, race—the religion of the blood—was the only force that could combat what he saw as the main engines of disintegration—individualism and universalism. “The individualism of economic man,” the American ideal, he dismissed as “a figment of the Jewish mind to lure men to their doom.”
    Hitler seems to have had mixed feelings about the Mythus. He held on to the manuscript for six months after Rosenberg submitted it, and publication was not sanctioned until September 15, 1930, after the Nazi Party’s sensational victory at the polls. Perhaps Hitler put off approving the book until the party was strong enough to risk losing the support of Roman Catholics that would surely follow publication. He was being no more than realistic. The Vatican was incensed by Rosenberg’s argument and, in 1934, placed the Mythus on the Index of Prohibited Books. Cardinal Schulte, the archbishop of Cologne, set up a “Defense Staff” of seven young priests who worked round the clock to list the many errors in the text, which were published as anonymous pamphlets printed simultaneously in five different cities to evade the Gestapo. Rosenberg nonetheless remained popular with Hitler, and when the war began, he was given his own unit, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, charged with looting art.
    Although it was incoherent and arbitrary, the Mythus left no doubt as to what the Nazis thought was wrong with German civilization.
    A V IOLENT A DORATION FOR “E VERYTHING G ERMAN”
     
    We conclude this chapter with a view of Germany from outside. It was written during the Weimar years but just before the Nazis came to real prominence. For that reason it deserves to be taken more seriously as a critique. It also overlapped with earlier critiques by other non-Germans, for example, John Dewey and George Santayana.
    Julien Benda’s book, The Treason of the Learned , first appeared in 1927. The learned, or “ clercs ” in French, were not only German but also French and this too makes its arguments worth listening to: he wasn’t being narrowly nationalistic. Benda (1867–1956) came from a once-prosperous Jewish Parisian family whose firm had gone bankrupt during World War I. A prolific author of some fifty books, he was one of the defenders of Alfred Dreyfus and saw himself as a supreme rationalist in the French tradition, setting himself against the “intuitionism” of Henri Bergson. Benda’s main argument in his book was that the nineteenth century had seen the growth of political passion out of all proportion to anything that had gone before. The emergence of a bourgeois class, he said, had spawned the development of class hatred and a rise in nationalist sentiment that he put down to democracy. As Herbert Read outlined it in the introduction to the English edition, “Nationalism has become a widely diffused, mystical sentiment, with the result that national passions devastate national life.” Not least, the intensifying of Jewish nationalism had spawned a corresponding spread of anti-Semitism. 24 Benda insisted that political passions had become much more “emphatic” in the nineteenth century, in particular national passions, “not only as regards their material existence, their military power, their territorial possessions, and their economic wealth, but as