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Journalof Contemporary
HistoryCopyright? 2004 SAGEPublications,London,Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi, Vol 39(2), 255-270. ISSN0022-0094.
DOI: 10.1177/0022009404042131
BernardMees
If anything is unfolkish, it is this tossing around of old Germanic expressions which neither
fit into the present period nor represent anything definite.... I had to warn again and again
against those deutschvolkisch wandering scholars . . . [who] rave about old Germanic
heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes, spear and shield.'
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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
cation of the old Germanic past was a leading feature of volkisch groups in the
giddy days, as the Thule Society's Rudolf von Sebottendorff was later to style
them, 'before Hitler came'.6
Despite the favouring of Germanistic trappings by many in the old radical
national movement, Hitler's disdain for the 'wandering scholars' who had
become attached to this early manifestation of the volkisch enterprise seems
clear in the passage quoted above from Mein Kampf. Yet a comparative perspective to fascism calls us to look again at the use and understanding of the
old Germanic past in German fascism. Not only was romanita (Romanness) a
leading feature of the imagery of Italian fascism,7 the contemporary rise in
interest in Germanentum (Germanicness) in Germany was clearly supported
by senior members of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg8 and Himmler9 both had a
special and abiding interest in Germanic antiquity, as is most clearly symbolized in the support for antiquarian Germanistic study shown by their respective educational institutions: Rosenberg's Amt, which had evolved out of the
Kampfbund fur deutsche Kultur in 193410 and the SS-Ahnenerbe, founded by
Himmler and Darre in 1935.11
Although the researchers accumulated by Rosenberg and Himmler in their
Party research bodies are often treated with scorn today, many were leading
university Germanists. This is especially true of Party-funded archaeology, and
although several mystics and many more antiquarian enthusiasts beside found
their way into the SS, respectable academics were equally amenable to the call
that the respected Indo-Europeanist Hermann Guintert (Dean of the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Heidelberg and sometime editor of the
Ahnenerbe's leading linguistics journal) described in 1938 as 'service to our
people'. 12
Hitler, too, evidently had some sensibility of the old Germanic past. He uses
the image of the Germanic on several occasions in Mein Kampf, most prominently in his emphatic call at the end of the eleventh chapter 'Volk and race'
for 'a Germanic state of the German nation'.13Previous discussions of Hitler's
notion and use of the image of Germanic antiquity have often focused on his
dismissal of the 'deutschvblkisch wandering scholars', but have ignored, over-
6 Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Bevor Hitler kam (Munich 1933); Reginald H. Phelps, "'Before
Hitler Came": Thule Society and Germanen Orden', Journal of Modern History, 35 (1963),
245-61.
7 Romke Visser, 'Fascist Doctrine and the Cult of Romanita', Journal of Contemporary History,
27, 1 (January 1992), 5-22.
8 Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race (London 1972), 1 f.
9 Joseph Ackermann, Heinrich Himmler als Ideologe (Gottingen 1970), 32ff.
10 Properly the 'Beauftragen des Fiihrers fur die Uberwachung der gesamten geistigen und
weltanschaulichen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP'; Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg
und seine Gegner (Stuttgart 1970).
11 Michael H. Kater, Das 'Ahnenerbe' der SS 1935-1945 (Stuttgart 1974).
12 Hermann Gintert, 'Neue Zeit- neues Ziel', Worter und Sachen, 19 [= NF 1] (1938), 11.
13 Hitler, trans. Mannheim, Mein Kampf, op. cit., 299.
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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
In 1938, a collaborative academic work on Germanic antiquity was published that is held up by antiquarian Germanists today as a sober representative of the best of the Germanistic scholarship of the dictatorship.'8 Its editor,
the philologist Hermann Schneider (the postwar rector of the University of
Tiibingen) reflected in De Gruyter's popularizing German academic journal,
Research and Progress, at the beginning of 1939:
The year 1933 witnessed the victory of an attitude towards the history of the culture of
Germany which gave the Germanic element of all that is German a significance previously
unthought of. 'The best of what is German', it was declared, 'is Germanic and must be found
in purer form in early Germanic times.'19
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259
But it was not until Heusler rescued the term in the new century that it began
to feature more regularly in Germanistic or indeed general discourse.
In 1887 the literary Germanist Leo Berg had described the positive German
reception of the works of the Norwegian playwright Ibsen as deriving from a
shared spirit of Germanentum.2s Heusler, grappling for a term to describe the
cultural genius he saw in the Old Norse sagas, subsequently adopted the term
to apply to the heroic mentalite he saw exemplified in the Old Germanic past.
In 1908 in an address occasioning his induction into the Prussian Academy of
Sciences, Heusler spelled out precisely what he meant by Germanicness, and
soon the word spread throughout the academic antiquarian community.26
The launch of Heusler's Germanicness signalled an explosion in publications on the old Germanic past. His own publications concentrated mainly on
interpretations of medieval literature and he soon became a significant figure
in popularizations of antiquarian Germanistic study, perhaps most prominently in the Thule series of translations of medieval Scandinavian literature,
which by 1933 had sold some 98,000 copies.27 Kossinna and his students
quickly took up the new expression as part of their Germanomaniacal 'settlement archaeology'. Heusler's wider influence did not end there, however. In
1934 a collection of his essays was published under the title Germanentum,
and quickly went through several editions.28Reviewed widely, Heusler's book
popularized the term so thoroughly that by the late 1930s Germanentum had
even come to feature as a category in nazi political literature. The concept of
Germanicness is clearly enunciated in official German educational literature
from the late 1930s and early 1940s, and its appearance was even remarked
upon by foreign critics of the educational policies of the nazi regime. For
example, Wilhelm Frick required that 15 basic points of German history were
to be stressed under the nazis. Of these points, cited disparagingly in 1944 in
an Allied survey of higher education in Germany, over half refer to the old
Germanic past.29 The compiler of this work, the English science historian
Abraham Wolf, also mentions an old Germanic chronicle, the Ura-Linda
Book (properly the Dutch/Frisian Oera Linda Book, a Germanomaniacal
25 Leo Berg, Henrik Ibsen und das Germanenthum in den modernen Literatur (Berlin 1887).
26 Andreas Heusler, 'Antrittsrede in der PreuRischenAkademie der Wissenschaften',
Sitzungsberichte der Preuf/ischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Klasse (1908), 712-14 [=
Kleine Schriften, ed. Helga Reuschel and Stefan Sonderegger (2 vols, Berlin 1942-69), II, 14-15].
27 Felix Niedner (ed.), Thule (24 vols, Jena 1911-30); Gary D. Stark, Entrepreneurs of
Ideology
(Chapel Hill, NC 1981), 94; cf. also Julia Zernack, Geschichten aus Thule (Berlin 1994); idem,
'Anschauungen vom Norden im deutschen Kaiserreich' in Puschner et al. (eds), Handbuch zur
'Volkischen Bewegung', op. cit., 504ff.
28 Andreas Heusler, Germanentum (Heidelberg 1934, 4th edn 1943).
29 Abraham Wolf, Higher Education in Nazi Germany (London 1944), 79-81. For a
(preMolotov-Ribbentrop pact) Soviet perspective see Evgenii Georgievic Kagarov, 'Fal'sifikacja istorii
rannegermanskogo obscestva fasistskimi lieucenymi' in Filipp Iosifovic Notovic et al. (eds), Protiv
fagistskoj fal'sifikacii istorii (Moscow 1939), 83-103, a reference for which I am grateful to Neile
A. Kirk.
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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
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Faschismus(1933 bis 1945)' in Max Steinmetz(ed.), Geschichteder UniversitatJena 1548/581958 (2 vols, Jena 1958), I, 615-70.
37 JohannesBiihler,'Germanentum
und Deutschtum',GeistigeArbeit,1, 3 (1934), 7-8.
38 WilhelmTeudt, GermanischeHeiligtiimer(Jena1929); RudolfBiinte(ed.), WilhelmTeudt
im Kampfum Germanenehre:
Auswahlvon TeudtsSchriften(Bielefeld1940);John Michell,A
LittleHistoryof Astro-Archaeology
(London1977), 58-65; MartinSchmidtand Uta Halle, 'On
the Folkloreof the Externsteine:Or a Centrefor Germanomaniacs'
in Amy Gazin-Schwartz
and
CorneliusHoltorf(eds),Archaeologyand Folklore(London1999), 158-74.
39 For the developmentof the genre of Atlantidthoughtin Germanysee GeorgBiedenkapp,
Der Nordpolals Volkerheimat(Jena1906); KarlGeorgZschaetzsch,Atlantis:Die Urheimatder
Arier(Berlin1922, 4th edn 1937); FranzWegener,Das atlantidischeWeltbild(Gladbeck2000).
40 HermanWirth,Der AufgangderMenschheit(Jena1928);IngoWiwjorra,'HermanWirth
Ein gescheiterterIdeologezwischen"Ahnenerbe"und Atlantis'in BarbaraDanckwott,Thorsten
Quergand ClaudiaSchoningh(eds),HistorischeRassismusforschung
(Hamburg1995), 91-112.
41 Hans-JiirgenLange,Weisthor(Engerd1998).
42 Germanien:Bldtterfur FreundegermanischerVorgeschichte,1-4 (Bielefeld1929-32); thereafter Germanien:Monatshefte fur Vorgeschichtezur Erkenntnis deutschen Wesens (zur
5-10 and 11-14 [= NF 1-4] (Leipzig1933-43).
Germanenkunde),
43 Kater,Das 'Ahnenerbe'der SS,op. cit., 80ff.; MichaelBurleigh,GermanyTurnsEastwards
und Nationalsozialismus(Tiibingen
(Cambridge1988), 242; AllanA. Lund,Germanenideologie
1995), 80f. (andfig. 9); HenningHautemann,'Archaeologyin the "ThirdReich"'in Harke(ed.),
Archaeology,Ideology,and Society,op. cit., 101, 110f.
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262
was found)44and ultimately the organized looting of Eastern European antiquarian collections by SS-Sonderkommando led by academic prehistorians with
archaeological shopping lists.45Some of Himmler's musings on archaeology,
such as his 1937 attack on Slavic scholars who (apparently) misrepresented and
covered over ancient Germanic remains, represent a sophisticated understanding of an archaeological controversy that had been inaugurated by Kossinna in
1912 and continued by his students.46 Similarly, Darre's wild theories on
German agriculture were clearly informed by antiquarian scholarship and not
just the obscurantistic, anti-Christian and racialized type which he encountered
in groups such as the Nordischer Ring.47He and his followers cite learned
examinations of medieval Scandinavian law codes in their works, a link that is
epitomized in Odal, Darre's politico-cultural journal which took its description
from a type of ancient Scandinavian legal tenure that also happened to be the
name of the runic letter o (R).48 Darre's focus on the Old Germanic past also fed
straight into his conceptualization of Lebensraum - after all, Kossinna was not
the only academic to consider that ancient Germanic settlements in Eastern
Europe validated German claims for sovereignty over Slav-populated regions.49
Indeed, by the early 1940s ancient Germanic expansion in Eastern Europe was
being used in nazi literature to justify Hitler's war aims of the (then) present day
44 T.L. Markey, 'A Tale of Two Helmets: The Negau A and B Inscriptions', Journal of IndoEuropean Studies. 29 (2001), 76.
45 Kater, Das 'Ahnenerbe' der SS, op. cit., 147ff.; Haugmann, 'Archaeology in the "Third
Reich"', op. cit., 107; Anja Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub (Heidelberg 2000). The activities of
Jankuhn, the archaeological looter of the Ukraine, are often still treated defensively by his former
students; see Heiko Steuer, 'Herbert Jankuhn und seine Darstellung zur Germanen- und
Wikingerzeit' in idem (ed.), Eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft (Berlin 2001), 417ff.
46 Gustaf Kossinna, 'Zur alteren Bronzezeit Mitteleuropas', Mannus, 4 (1912), 184; idem, Die
deutsche Ostmark (Kattowitz 1919); J6zef Kostrzewski, Wielkopolska w czasach przedhistorycznych (Poznan 1914); Heinrich Himmler, Document 1992(A)-PS, from 'National Political
Studies for the Armed Forces' (January 1937) in International Military Tribunal, Trial of the
Major War Criminals, XXIX (Nuremberg 1948), 225-6 [= trans. apud Benjamin C. Sax and
Dieter Kuntz (eds), Inside Hitler's Germany (Lexington, MA 1992), 376]; Eggers, Einfiihrung in
die Vorgeschichte, op. cit., 202ff.; Leo S. Klejn, 'Kossinna im Abstand von vierzig Jahren',
Jahresschrift far mitteldeutsche Vorgeschichte, 58 (1974), 29ff.; cf. Burleigh, Germany Turns
Eastwards, op. cit., 23f., 52, 241ff.
47 Anne Bramwell, Blood and Soil (Bourne End 1985), 46ff.
48 Deutsche Agrarpolitik: Monatsschrift far deutsches Bauerntum, 1, 1-2, 3 (Berlin 1932-33);
thereafter Odal: Monatsschrift far Blut und Boden 2, 4-11 (Berlin, then Goslar 1933-42); thereafter Deutsche Agrarpolitik, NF 1, 1-3, 12 (Berlin 1942-44); Knut Robberstad, Magnus Mar
Larusson and Gerhard Hafstrom, 'Odelsrett' in Johannes Brondsted et al. (eds), Kulturhistorisk
leksikon for nordisk middelalder, XII (Copenhagen 1967), 493-503; Gabriele von Olberg, 'Odal'
in Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann (eds), Handw6rterbuch zur deutschen RechtsII
geschichte, II (Berlin 1982), 1178-84; Andrea d'Onofrio, Ruralismo e storia nel Terzo Reich:
caso 'Odal' (Naples 1997).
49 Kossinna, Die deutsche Ostmark, op. cit. and cf. Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, op.
cit., 52, 242-3. This remarkable book, which was retitled Das Weichselland, ein uralter Heimatboden der Germanen in later editions, was especially written to attempt to influence the outcome
of the Versailles peace conference; see Eggers, Einfahrung in die Vorgeschichte, op. cit., 236; Veit,
'Gustaf Kossinna and his Concept of a National Ideology', op. cit., 47.
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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
ing passage quoted here from Mein Kampf, as Ger is a revived medieval
German term: the usual word for 'spear' in German is Speer - Ger signifies
the spear of the ancient Germanic tribes. Hence at the same time that he is
ridiculing antiquity enthusiasts among the old right, he is using their very
language. In contrast, when Hitler opined against Himmler and his enthusiasm
for archaeology in his table-talk, the dictator, although understanding the
essential Germanomania inherent in the new post-classicist archaeology, did
not use technical terms similar to Ger: 'At a time when our forebears were
producing the stone troughs and clay vessels about which our archaeologists
have made such a to-do, the Greeks were building the Acropolis.'68In fact,
his young friend Kubizek notes that Hitler had a fascination for Germanic
antiquity in his youth and his love for Wagner is well known.69In a speech in
1934, Hitler is recorded saying that 'a thousand years before Rome was
founded, the Germanic tribes had already reached a high cultural level' - a
statement reminiscent of the Kossinna school-inspired deliberations of
Himmler70- and like Himmler, Hitler visited archaeological digs such as
those at the Kyffhiiuser.71Indeed, by 1942 the dictator is recorded as having
formed an opinion on Detmold's Extern Stones: he was willing to believe that
they were important to the ancient Germanic tribes, but despite the wild astroarchaeological theories of Teudt and the similarly Germanomaniacal musings
of Himmler's academic prehistorians, they were 'clearly not a cultic site, but
rather a place of refuge'.72Hitler certainly had a sensibility for antiquarian
concerns beyond his pronounced Graecophilia - he even seems to have reacted positively toward Wirth and his Germanomaniacal gnostic 'Sinnbildforschung'.73The dictator's negative comments about those who wallowed in a
Germanomania more abject than his own require contextualization, given his
informed understanding of the old Germanic past.
Hitler's attitude to Germanicness is explained by his dislike of Wotanists or
their latter-day racialist equivalents who styled themselves 'Ariosophists'.
Hitler was such a myth-maker in matters such as antisemitism and equally
68 Hitler, 7 July 1942, apud Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgespriiche im Fiihrer Hauptquartier
(3rd edn, Stuttgart 1976), 426 [= trans. apud Werner Maser, trans. Peter and Betty Ross, Hitler
(London 1973), 138-9]. Cf. also, Speer, Inside the Third Reich, op. cit., 94f.
69 Birgitte Hamann, trans. Thomas Thornton, Hitler's Vienna (New York 1999), 210.
70 Hitler, 5 December 1934, apud Lund, Germanenideologie, op. cit., 103-4; cf. Himmler,
Document 1992(A)-PS, op. cit.
71 Haugmann, 'Archaeology in the "Third Reich"', op. cit., 70 (with a photograph from Hitler's
visit).
72 Hitler, 4 February 1942, apud Picker, Hitlers Tischgespriiche, op. cit., 101.
73 Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London 1939), 225; Rauschning is a controversial
source, but his recollection here appears to be independently supported by Wirth's own statements: see Poliakov and Wulf (eds), Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker, op. cit., 243 and Martin
Broszat, 'Enthiillung? Die Rauschning Kontroverse', Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 September 1985 [= idem, Nach Hitler, ed. Hermann Graml and Klaus-Dieter Henke (2nd edn, Munich
1987), 249-511. In fact an inscribed copy of one of Wirth's books (Was hei/ft deutsch? [Jena
1931]) is to be found in the remains of Hitler's library in the Library of Congress, Washington (LC
CB213).
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such an avid consumer of Wagner, that it would otherwise seem strange that
he did not make the idealizing of Germanic antiquity one of his concerns. But
he had little time for patent Germanomaniacal fantasies. Rauchning has Hitler
say in 1933: 'These professors and mystery-men who want to found Nordic
religions merely get in my way.'74So, similarly, in Mein Kampf Hitler attacks
'so-called religious reformers' who wanted to return German religiosity to 'an
old Germanic basis'.75This passage seems to be a reference directly aimed not
at the German Christianity of Lagarde, the Deutsche Christen and J. Wilhelm
Hauer's Deutsche Glaubensbewegung, however, but at Ariosophists like Lanz
von Liebenfels and his German counterparts. The old Austrian radical-right
enjoyed a strong obscurantistic connection: Schonerer, for example, had been
a Wotanist and an associate of the Ariosophical founder Guido (von) List.76
The Thule Society, too, was dominated by Ariosophical concerns; its very
symbol - a burning swastika imposed on a Bronze Age dagger - fairly reeks
of the mystical. Brigitte Hamann's linkage of Hitler with the writings of List
seems misinformed, however: her connection of List's Secret of the Runes to
an illustrated book seen carried by Hitler in his youth seems a bad guess, as
List's work has only one page of illustration.77 Hitler's vegetarianism also
appears to be a reflection of his relationship to the gnostic far-right - like
Wagner, many of the old Viennese right had promoted this radical aspect of
life reform, as did several of the German obscurantists who had been drawn to
National Socialism.78Mysticists in the 1920s certainly counted Hitler as one of
their number.79But it is evident that the one-time drummer had little time for
the more extreme Germanicist religionists.
The only mention of Wotanists and Ariosophists in Mein Kampf is this brief
dismissal found immediately after Hitler's similar attack on the 'deutschvolkisch wandering scholars'. His ambivalence to Germanic antiquity seems to
stem from a rejection of the mystical nationalism of these groups as well as a
desire to mark out the 'young movement' from the failed, impotent, often
Germanomaniacal, antiquarian-enthusing old right. Where a member of the
pre-war radical-right might have stressed Germanicness, in Mein Kampf
instead we find Aryans.
Hitler's repeated stress on the Aryan (and even the 'German-Aryan') seems
74 Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, op. cit., 59.
75 Hitler, trans. Mannheim, Mein Kampf, op. cit., 328.
76 Andrew G. Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools (Berkeley, CA 1975), 8ff.
77 Guido von List, Das Geheimnis der Runen (Gross Lichterfelde [1907]); Hamann, Hitler's
Vienna, op. cit.
78 Hitler cited Wagner's dietary ideal to justify his vegetarianism, but his doctors report that he
ascribed his herbivorous diet to positive effects on his bodily functions, ones which seem quite
unlike those typically experienced by vegetarians today. His complete conversion is often connected with the death of his niece, Geli, but this is also obviously the time that he was introduced
to the ideas of vegetarian obscurantists such as Wirth. Robert G.L. Waite, The Psychopathic God
(New York 1979), 75-6; Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris (London 1998), 703, n. 186.
79 Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, op. cit., 192ff.
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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
80 Suzanne L. Marchand, 'The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism:
The Case of Josef Strzygowski', History and Theory, suppl. 33 (1994), 106ff.
81 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, op. cit., 255ff.; Marchand, Down from Olympus, op. cit., 348 et
seq.; cf. Puschner, Die v6lkische Bewegung, op. cit., 66ff.
82 Karlheinz Weitfmann, Schwarze Fahnen, Runenzeichen (Dusseldorf 1991), 58-73; Malcolm
Quinn, The Swastika (London 1994), 22ff.
83 Hitler, 13 August 1920, apud Jackel (ed.), Samtliche Aufzeichnungen, op. cit., 186-7.
84 Cf. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, op. cit., 151.
85 Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, op. cit., 62-3.
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86
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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
Bernard Mees
is a Fellow in the History Department at the University of
Melbourne. He is the author of many articles on both old Germanic
philology and modern German history and is currently working on a
study of the influence of German exiles in the Middle East in the
1950s and 1960s.
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