Viereck wrote the first edition of this book in 1941, when a Nazi victory in the Second World War seemed more than possible, if not likely. In the book, he traces the ideas of the German Romantics through Richard Wagner to Hitler and the Nazi Party. Wagner and his Bayreuth Circle coined the term “metapolitik.” It blended Wagnerian mysticism with political, economic, and national philosophy. Viereck states, “I shall use “metapolitics” to mean the semi-political ideology resulting from the intertwining of four distinct strands. These four are romanticism;…. the “science” of racism; a vague economic socialism, protesting sometimes demagogically and sometimes sincerely against capitalist materialism; and the alleged supernatural and unconscious forces of Volk collectivity.” Viereck claims that the German man has always had two souls beating under one breast. He contrasts these two impulses in the German psyche—western civilization rooted in the Mediterranean cultures of Athens and Jerusalem and the uniquely Teutonic Kultur. He quotes historian H.W. Steed, “the Germans understand by Kultur an intimate union between themselves and the natural forces of the Universe, whose actions they alone are capable of apprehending.” Viereck expands, “The assertion that “Germany can never be understood” by other races means that the magic word “Kultur” can never be pinned down. It is understood only by blood, by the subconscious. It is inexpressible in words. It is expressible only in feeling, the heroic feeling of German blood…. [It is] a deliberate revolt not only against reason but against all moral and political restraints, a revolt against humanity, against universals, against internationalism on behalf of the Volk and mother nature.”
This concept of Kultur, previously expressed only in poems and literature, had its militant roots in the German resistance to the invasion of Napoleon. During the War of Liberation, Father Jahn stressed the unconscious role of the Volk throughout the shaping of history. Jahn coined the term “folkdom” (Volkstum), “that which the Volk has in common, its inner existence, its movement, its ability to propagate. Because of it, there courses through all the veins of a Volk a folkic thinking and feeling, loving and hating, intuition and faith.” Wagner later coined the word Wahn, which was also incorporated into the Nazi vocabulary. Viereck states, “By Wahn, a key-word of Wagner, too ambiguous for safe translation, he means something between pragmatic myth and glorious madness. This Wahn is produced by the supernatural “spirit of the race.””
Hitler incorporated Wagner’s metapolitics, whole-hog, into the Nazi regime. “The diabolically clever combination of appeals with which Hitler won the masses consists of the very same appeals which compose Wagner’s metapolitics. These are: Pan-German nationalism; vague promises of economic socialism (the “true” anti-Marxist brand); fanatic anti-Semitism, both economic and racist; revolt against legalism; revolt against reason, especially against “alien” intellectualism; the Fuhrer principle; yearning for the organic Volk state without class distinctions; hatred of free speech and parliamentary democracy and of the international bankers supposed to control democracy; misty nordic primitivism of the Siegfried and Nibelungen sagas.” Wagner was the bridge between the Second Reich of Bismarck and the Third Reich of Hitler. However, it was only the Third Reich that fully expressed Wagnerian philosophy. “Wagner is far closer in spirit to the Nazi Third Reich of steeled romanticism than to the Prussian Second Reich of orderly bureaucracy. The latter exalted the state, whereas Wagner and Hitler exalt the Volk. The state to romantics represents lifeless form; it is static legality. The Volk represents living content; it dynamically overlaps and smashes state lines…. Americans tend toward the serious error of identifying the Second with the Third Reich. This overlooks the whole revolutionary, expansive, romantic side of nazism. The plebeian Hitler throws out not only the Junker spirit of class distinctions but also the admirable non-political civil service and non-political Reichswehr autonomy so typical of the Kaiser’s bureaucratic state.” Hitler, himself, exclaimed, “We as Aryans can only picture the state as the living organism of a nationality.”
Hitler’s court philosopher was Alfred Rosenberg. Viereck states, “Rosenberg’s philosophy stands or falls on this basic assumption: God created man not as an individual nor mankind as a whole, but individual races of men. These are the building blocks of history, the only lasting units…. A nation is the political expression of the race…. No two races have the same soul. Therefore no two races can understand each other; no two speak the same moral, aesthetic, or intellectual language…. Nazism is the revolt against conditioning by environment.” For Rosenberg, the nation is beyond good and evil. It lives only for itself, its own expansion, its own domination, and its own glory. It is ever becoming and never being. “Rejecting alike government by parliament or by kaiser (monarch), Rosenberg demands the Volk-king, the hero-dictator risen from the ranks, whom Jahn and Wagner prophesied…. The gist of the Fuhrer myth is that the Fuhrer is (incarnates) the Volk.” Rosenberg, himself, states, “We want to see in a German king a person like ourselves.”
Viereck states that Nazi ideology fed on the sympathies of the mass-man to flourish. “Nazi appeals could never work in an uneducated country. They are effective only where the masses are educated but not well enough, and not educated into individuals but into that lowest common denominator, the mass man…. Mass man is he who is laudably well educated in ideas of sweeping social change but deplorably well educated in critical discrimination between them, laudably well educated in the mass organization of vast material power but deplorably educated in the needed moral restraints of power…. An over-mechanized and over-specialized industrial society is spawning mass men, instead of responsible, self-disciplined individuals rooted in the universal moral values…. The rich are as susceptible to mass-man mentality as the poor.”
Viereck next gets a bit carried away with himself and takes on the entire regrettable sweep of German history. “If only the Teutons of heroic Hermann the Cheruscan had lost to the Romans the battle of Teutoburg Forest, if only they had become part of the great Mediterranean civitas . . . if only Germany had passed through a real eighteenth century, the mental discipline of the Latin-French tradition, that unpretentious clarity, that fastidiously classical humanism, that well-balanced scepticism, that laughing rationalism!”
Viereck, in winding down, turns back to the specifics of the present German case. “Prussianism by itself…. failed completely to attract the masses under the German Republic. Prussianism, meaning efficient state bureaucracy and aristocratic militarism, is prosaic and uninspiring to the masses. It lacks the emotional glamour of German romanticism. Nazism, unaristocratic and national-bolshevist to the root, the culmination of a hundred years of Romantic Volk movements, is not Prussianism except in spurious externals. Nazism, as Hans Kohn once brilliantly put it, is the strange new child of a marriage between romanticism and Prussianism…. The Nazi revolt against western civilization is romanticism transferred from the middle classes to the masses, welded to a sort of national bolshevism, saturated through and through in that mass-man revolt which is sweeping all mechanized industrial society.”
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