“Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler” by Peter Viereck

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.”

“Your Name Here” by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff

This novel is weird, very weird. There are autobiographical elements, it references its own creation often, there is a novel within the novel (that involves Orthodox Jewish charity and a futuristic luck-lottery machine), a large cache of “real” email correspondence, a primer on how to learn Arabic, and DeWitt is both a character in her own right and thinly disguised as the pseudonym, Rachel Zozanian. There are also many narrative voices that alternate between the chapters, including sections narrated by “you” the reader. It is all very odd. And brilliant. “It’s not that I think children should be seen and not heard. Why stop at children? How many adults generate utterances equivalent to the paragraph of Spinoza one could have read in the time taken up by the utterance? Chances are the utterances of Spinoza himself would not have achieved equivalence, because I can read 900 words a minute and it is unlikely Spinoza could speak at that speed, let alone speak at that speed while maintaining the level of excellence of his writing.”

Suicide is a reoccurring theme. “I have a large handsome apartment in Berlin, 450 euros a month. I came to Berlin partly because someone once recommended KaDeWe as a suicide spot and partly because I thought I should not be at large with a gun. There are 38 states where one can buy a gun without a license and where the police are not allowed to keep records of sales. A voice in the head had said Let’s buy a gun for purposes of research…. The body wandered the streets of New York. No one died. It got on a train and got off a train. No one died. It got on a train and got off a train. No one died. The gun and its bullets were buried behind the tennis court of a thirty-room Victorian frolic in Newport, Rhode Island. The body got on a plane and got off a plane.”

The stresses throughout the process of creating a novel is also a recurrent theme. “Stare at the screen. Tough it out. Don’t drink. Philip Pullman writes Three pages a day. Philip Pullman doesn’t drink. There’s a lesson to be learnt. It’s arsenic hour. I have a Bushmill’s on the rocks. I then have a brilliant idea. What if the book becomes Kaufmanesque in its self-absorption (and so destined to be a cult classic), what if it’s a book about a character who, unable to endure the influx of sounds, negotiates a contract permitting him to avoid speech by typesetting his book in TeX? Foiled by the sort of contractual minutiae seldom seen in fiction, he finds himself writing a book about a character who is unable to endure the influx of sounds, who in turn finds himself writing a book about a character who is unable to endure the influx of sounds, who in turn finds himself writing a book about a character…. A brilliant idea that will decrease the likelihood that the betazoid is my agent to, at an educated guess, 3.17 percent…. Philip Pullman doesn’t write this kind of agent-divesting drivel. Philip Pullman doesn’t drink. There’s a lesson to be learnt…. Will there be Munchkins? Will there be Flying Monkeys? What if. What if. What if. Forget the readers, forget the betazoid. What if I have no idea what happens next?”

DeWitt literally gets into the reader’s head. “You’re on page 475 and you still have no idea what’s going on. Zozanian has embarked on a book with your character, so now we have a book-within-a-book-within-a-book-within-a and you seem to be the minimost perestroikist in a nest of Gorbidolls. A cast of extraneous characters seems to be multiplying like rabbits. Rabbits in a Viagra trial. Rabbits in a Viagra trial designed to tackle the freak four-hour erection problem. Who are these people? What are they doing here? It’s like the finale of Blazing fucking Saddles…. Exakt. DeWitt has lost the plot.”

The novel is hilarious, even more so if you are familiar with DeWitt’s unique style of humor. “You’re reading Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt. You’re not a typical reader. Sometimes you wonder if you’re a robot. Not only do you wonder if you’re a robot, you hope you’re a robot (and what force do “wonder” and “hope” have if you are?) because if you’re the kind of robot that’s capable of wondering whether it’s a robot and hoping that it is a robot you’re an exceptionally sophisticated robot, the triumph of an unknown Frankenstein, a creation that raises profound philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness, the self, persons, rights, language, if you watch pornography, play with kittens, explore philosophical questions this shows that you are a miracle of cybernetic art. If you’re not a robot, wondering if you’re a robot shows you’re the kind of person who sits around wondering if he’s a robot. If you’re a robot, it’s even more impressive that someone came up with a robot that could worry about whether it was the kind of self-obsessed geek who sits around wondering whether he’s a robot, your creator is a genius, you’d like to meet him, even though he’s probably the kind of person who sits around wondering if he’s a robot…. Maybe this is not the best book to be reading. A self-referential book that raises metaphysical questions as a pretext for talking about itself, doesn’t the book simply replicate the very neurosis that makes it so hard for you to be spontaneous except in the calculating, premeditated way that made you wonder whether you were a robot in the first place?”

“Solenoid” by Mircea Cartarescu (translated by Sean Cotter)

This sprawling philosophical novel takes a little time to get going, but the action gets compulsive as the plot gets odder and odder. The narrator spends a lot of time contemplating death, “Why will the world end with me? We age: we stand quietly in line with those condemned to death. We are executed one after the other in a sinister extermination camp. We are first stripped of our beauty, youth, and hope. We are next wrapped in the penitential robe of illness, weariness, and decay. Our grandparents die, our parents are executed in front of us, and suddenly time gets short, you suddenly see your reflection in the axeblade. And only then do you realize you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes…. That we all come into this world from a frightening abyss without our memories, that we suffer unimaginably on a speck of dust, and that we then perish, all in a nanosecond, as though we had never lived, as though we had never been.” Around a hundred and fifty pages later, the narrator is still mulling over his own death. The nature of consciousness and of humanity’s existence are other recurring themes in the book, “It is beyond the limits of evil that a creature should understand its own fate. It is crude, barbarous, and pointless to bring a spirit into the world after an infinite ight, just to cast it out again, after a nanosecond of chaotic life, back into another, endless night. It is sadistic to give it, ahead of time, full knowledge of the fate that awaits it.”

The essence of living, humanity’s purpose on earth, and the reason for each single life are all conundrums the narrator fears he will fail to ever solve, “I was enveloped in a fear that I had never felt before, even in my most terrifying dreams; not of death, not of suffering, not of terrible diseases, not of the sun going dark, but fear at the thought that I will never understand, that my life was not long enough and my mind not good enough to understand. That I had been given many signs and I didn’t know how to read them. That like everyone else I will rot in vain, in my sins and stupidity and ignorance, while the dense, intricate, overwhelming riddle of the world will continue on, clear as though it were in your hand, as natural as breathing, as simple as love, and it will flow into the void, pristine and unsolved.”