“None are so deaf as those who are determined not to hear. The universal passivity in regard to the Third Reich was indeed the result of the paralysis produced by a spiritual and moral poisoning, and of the determination to ignore the writing on the wall in order to postpone the day of reckoning and to purchase a few years of peace and comfort, at the price of a most terrible final catastrophe.’’
‘Spiritual and moral poison’? Are we now seeing a new dose in the mental food of this world?
“The study, however, of the German problem, conceived in a broad historical and sociological sense, is scarcely less revealing in another respect. Not until we have grasped the fateful development of Germany since 1866 do we reach a full understanding of many symptoms of decay in the social, economic, and intellectual life of the West. Not until then is the full significance realised of the dangerous currents that are due, almost everywhere, either directly to German influence or to conditions similar to the German conditions.’’
Röpke penned this in 1945. Seventy years later this connection of twentieth century German experience with the ‘many symptoms of decay in the west’ seems even more appropriate. This work identifies ideas that have reappeared - or perhaps never left.
“The investigation of the German problem means the study of the social and cultural crisis of the West in the special case of a nation that has fallen a victim to it in an almost unique way, and has become one of the worst sources of infection of the rest of the world. It means the setting up of a warning beacon for all; but our situation would be indeed desperate if we were to do this without any hope—hope for Germany as well as for the rest of the world.’’
Professor Röpke was German. Graduate of German university, then professor. So his critical, even cutting words are not observations from the distance, but from one who ran from the evil after denouncing it from inside.
He has earned our respect. He deserves our attention.
“Nazism was a mixture of the ebullient feelings and the uncontrolled energies of boy scouts with cynicism, opportunism, brutality, mendacity, with hatred, envy, ambition, faithlessness, and intrigue, and with lewd sexuality. It was a barbarism, the barbarism not of immaturity but of rottenness, a barbarism the more repulsive since it was deliberate, studied, and pseudo-scientifically formulated. It was a hysterical orgy of decadent irresponsible intellectuals, who whipped up the masses with their phrases and turned their heads with their distortions of a language that had once been that of Lessing, Goethe, and Schopenhauer.’’
Wow!
Nevertheless, can we dare ignore the reappearance of these? Do we see them again? However, not isolated to Germany, but worldwide?
The Tragedy of a Great Nation
Part I
The Third Reich and its End
Germans and National Socialism
World’s Share of Responsibility
Nazism as Totalitarianism
The peculiar features of Nazism
The Relentless Machinery of Totalitarianism
The German Responsibility
General and Group Responsibility
The Intellectuals
Intellectual Resistance
Part II
The Historic Roots
On the German National Character
The Pathology of German History
Fallacies and Half-truths
The Course of Intellectual Evolution and German Collective Morality
Greater Prussia from Bismarck to Hitler
The Meeting of the Currents of German and Prussian History
The Transformation of the German into the Bismarckian Empire
“Even the racial mania which seems to be an exclusive domain of German totalitarianism, was presented to the Germans by foreigners—particularly by the French writer Gobineau, who himself simply elaborated an idea that dates back to the eighteenth century. The racial delusion may be described as a cross between those foreign germs and the specifically German ethical romanticism which will occupy us later.’’
What ‘foreign germs’?
“While these and other precursors of the Nazi racial doctrine have nothing in common with the appalling delusionary character of that doctrine, the fact remains that that is the abyss into which we are inevitably plunged in the end, if we once pursue the mistaken path of the biologism of which Darwin and his school laid the foundations.’’
‘Darwin and his school’! Röpke is one of many scholars who identify this connection.
“The Nazi racial doctrine is the final putrid product of the decay of an intellectual process by which in the course of the Nineteenth Century man was degraded, with the zeal of a misunderstood science, to a subject of zoology and stud farming; but in this process all the principal countries of the West took part. The death chambers of Auschwitz and Maidanek are the final gruesome result of certain scientific ideas having ultimately found their way in the course of a century to the morally and mentally lowest levels of humanity, to a group which then, through a social catastrophe of inconceivable dimensions, became the rulers of a great people.’’
‘Certain scientific ideas’. Röpke explains these clearly in this work.
Also refers several times to Heinrich Heine, leading German poet and essayist of the nineteenth century . . .
“Heinrich Heine, who wrote in 1834 in his Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland these prophetic words:
“Once the taming talisman, the Cross, breaks to pieces, there rattles out again the savagery of the old fighting men, the unreasoning berserk fury of which the Nordic poets sing and say so much. That talisman is rotten, and come the day will when it will pathetically collapse. The thought precedes the deed, as lightning thunder. The German thunder is, indeed, German, and is not very nimble, and rolls along a bit tardily; but come it will, and when once you hear its crash, as it has never yet crashed in the world’s history, know ye: the German thunder has at last attained its object. At that roar the eagles will fall dead from the sky, and the lions in the farthest deserts of Africa will put their tails between their legs and creep into their royal dens. There will be produced in Germany a play compared with which the French Revolution may well seem no more than an innocent idyll.”
His comment ‘the cross breaks to pieces’ is the poets way of noting the . . .
“There is scarcely another class in Germany that failed so fatally as that of the intellectuals in general, with the exception of a large part of the clergy of both confessions. This failure was so fatal because it resulted in a crippling of the conscience of the German nation. At a later stage we shall go thoroughly into the deeper historical roots of the betrayal of their mission by the German intellectual leaders. It was, in point of fact, a long process of degeneration and perversion of which we have here to describe the final steps.’’
This work is written for the general reader. Not superficial, and not pedantic. Clear, serious, trenchant, erudite and cutting. The words of a German thinker, scholar and historian.
Remember, Röpke wrote in 1945. Gives this plea - this insight - real force.
Each reader can make any connection to current thought that seems valid.
I found a disturbing number. Sad.
(See also “The Holocaust and the Crisis of human behavior’’ by George Kren. This from 1980 and is even more critical of the west for what happened. Show how may reoccur in any land. Eye opening!)
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‘Universal passivity to the Third Reich was the result of the paralysis produced by a spiritual and moral poisoning’
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 5, 2017
