The German Genius

Social-Darwinistic mythos of “fateful struggle” for survival, an emphasis on the dark and tragic (the twilight of the gods) and the defamation of foreign influences. High culture, in this view, was “like a slut” that ran after every foreign influence that came its way. In 1928 William Stapel said that anyone who wanted to experience Germanness must have “lived in German forests, he must have courted German girls, and must have done German farming and German handiwork.” 18
    Hermann Strobach noted that the League of German Societies for Folklore reacted immediately and “conspicuously” to the advent of the Nazis into power and at its conference in October 1933 there were lectures on “National Socialism and Folklore” and “The Sociopolitical Task of Folklore.” At its conference the following year, the folklorists sent a telegram to Hitler, vowing that they would work toward “strengthening and increasing the Germanness of our people.” 19
    Christoph Daxelmüller says that Jewish Volkskunde had developed since 1898 thanks to the cooperation of both east and west European scholars, with organizational centers for the “Science of Jewishness” in Hamburg and Vienna, and that there was also in Berlin an Academy for the Science of Judaism, and a Teaching Institute for Judaic Studies, plus a Jewish-Theological Seminar in Breslau. There was also a Society for Jewish Folklore. All of these were closed down and their assets—such as their books—destroyed or scattered. These closures were countered by the opening of several institutes “For the Study of the Jewish Question.” The main one, in Berlin, was run by Wilhelm Ziegler, who became the “Jewish expert” for the Propaganda Ministry. Alfred Rosenberg’s Institute for Research on the Jewish Question, founded in Frankfurt am Main in 1941, annexed the Bibliothek Rothschild from Paris, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and the Librairie Lipschutz. 20 This institute saw itself as the coordinating center for a “unified solution” to the Jewish question. *
    In the spring of 1934 a new journal appeared, Volkstum und Heimat (Folk-Nation and Homeland), which was the organ for the Der Reichsbund Volkstum und Heimat (Reich Union for Folk-Nation and Homeland). By the time the journal appeared, there were some 10,000 politically coordinated societies, about 4 million people, who were members of the Reich Union, though it was an “organization” with a difference. Specialisms were eschewed, instead “authentic, characteristic and valuable fellows,” whose enthusiasm for local culture would impress itself on followers, were sought to lead local groups by example. Festivals were planned where local groups would parade showing their local attributes—workers with spades on their shoulders, “maidens” pulling plows, farmers with sowing bags wrapped around them. The job of the union was to glorify peasant life and rural values.
    Anna Oesterle has examined the Office of Ancestral Inheritance, the Ahnenerbe, and its effect on folklore scholarship. It appears to have been a cesspit of rivalries and jealousies, involving itself in folksong research and religious folklore; it began as a private outfit, started with private money, called the Intellectual History Association. 21 Many of those involved in the early days were academics schooled in the Indo-Germanic tradition, and their main interests, to begin with, were ancient intellectual history. Herman Wirth, for instance, had an interest in the “strengthening of genuine German spirituality,” hoping for “a rebirth of the Nordic race and the freeing of humanity from the curse of civilisation.”
    Himmler, who was the undisputed leader of the Ahnenerbe, though he often had to quibble with either Rosenberg or Göring, gradually took the SS further into academic life via the Ahnenerbe. 22 One central concern of Himmler’s was German origins. In his mind there were two elements, a concern to trace the “Nordic” ancestry of the Germans and a profound interest in the so-called Aryan race in Central Asia, which he felt held the key to ancient religions and mythology and constituted the “founder” race of the Teutons. He enlisted the aid of more or less eminent—and more or less opportunist—anthropologists, ethnologists, orientalists, runologists, philologists, heraldry experts, and archaeologists, in a number of well-funded expeditions in Finland, Iceland, Mesopotamia, the Canary Islands