All great movements are popular movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people. - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

As I have written a few corrective words for the “normie” struggling to process Italian fascism from the standpoint of his or her received liberal wisdom, I thought I might extend the dread offence to writing if not about the German equivalent, exactly, at least about a photograph of perfectly normal Germans of the pre-war period, which I saw long ago.  Or I would begin this essay by writing about it.  Or my memory of it, to be more precise, because I did not copy it to file and have never found it on the net since.

Where and when I came across it that one time I have no memory.  It may have been a good couple of decades ago, and may have been via a google search.  Perhaps an eponymous unhappy German-American had posted it on some verboten WN site to demonstrate the undoubted enthusiasm of ordinary Germans for their Führer.  Hundreds of such images were accessible, probably many more then than now.  Those were the days when Google was just a search engine and not a surreptitious guardian and shaper of our thoughts. 

This one was a quite tightly cropped black-and-white image of a section of the crowd, showing perhaps twenty-five to thirty people.  From memory, they were waiting at the roadside, (I think) behind some metal crowd-control barriers.  One presumes, of course, that the wait was for Adolf Hitler’s motorcade to pass by.  That was hardly an unusual photographic subject for the time.  National Socialist ideology was in its pomp; and pomp and pride, power and purpose were precisely what the uniforms, the rallies, the architecture, the idealised presentation of the German folk and of Hitler himself was designed to generate.  The thing is, though, that this photo differed from the general run in so much as there was no Führer in it, or any high NSDAP functionary in his expensively tailored, pseudo-military garb.  There was not a single sun-wheel, not one Roman salute, not one phalanx of blond Hitlerjugend marching en route to Speer’s Zeppelinfeld.  There was just this section of crowd – ordinary men and women, and their children watched over benignly from the other side of the barriers by a couple of soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets.

The soldiers seemed to have no fear of a lurking loner with a luger.  The mood simply precluded that possibility.  Neither was this a crowd in some manufactured hysteria, primed at the sight of the object of its devotion to lose its head and flood forward, blocking the way.  It needed no policing.  This was a crowd with a clear and abiding sense of its own disposition at that moment and in that place.  A positive, pellucid life-energy leapt out of the bromide.  It was in everyone, soldier and civilian alike.  It was in the lad who had clambered up a lamp post, holding on precariously with one hand and waving the other (I think, holding a cap) in celebration.  Every single face was animated and smiling.  Yet the focus of that boisterous microcosm of humanity somehow seemed not to leave its own bounds, as if an invisible centrifugal force was gifting singularity and concert to that which, at any other time, would diffuse and dissipate away.  One could quite believe that it was coming not from an anticipated sighting of the national leader but from the simple, shared gladness in being German in those days.

Of course, believing is not knowing. We cannot know for sure.  But we can investigate the possibility (I would say probability).  We can go some way to confirming that this was indeed the phenomenon of a general awakening of the like that nationalists would give their eye teeth for today, which confirmation is the simple part and the purpose of this Part One post.

Conventional wisdom has it that NSDAP’s moving spirits – political novices off the streets of Munich and Berlin - managed to generate this vanishingly rare identitarian phenomenon by delivering the nation from the humiliations of defeat in 1918 and, subsequently, at Versailles and St Germain.  Further they delivered it from ruinous hyper-inflation and economic collapse, and from the liberalistic decadence and rot of Weimar.  As Hitler himself stated:

Everything on this earth can be made into something better. Every defeat may be made the foundation of a future victory. Every lost war may be the cause of a later resurgence. Every visitation of distress can give a new impetus to human energy. And out of every oppression those forces can develop which bring about a new rebirth.

So, governing order where there was chaos, bread and work where there was immiseration, autobahns and the people’s car where there was stagnation, the military re-occupation of the Rhineland where there was powerlessness … these were perfectly rational reasons why Germans should laud a national renewal.  But “national” is not the same as “ethnic” (or, indeed, “racial”, though we’ll use ethnic for the purposes of this thesis), and renewal does not have to involve an ethnic self-appropriation and affirmation.  “National renewal” might equally be associated with the political excitement at any of Donald Trump’s election rallies in 2016.  As Steve Bannon pointedly stated:

I’m an economic nationalist.  I am an ‘‘America first” guy. And I have admired nationalist movements throughout the world, have said repeatedly strong nations make great neighbors.  I’ve also said repeatedly that the ethno-nationalist movement, prominent in Europe, will change over time.  I’ve never been a supporter of ethno-nationalism.

Trump and Bannon were only promising to Make America’s Economy Great Again.  Hitler, however, had promised two much larger prizes.  The first was a Greater Germany, achieved via (a) Anschluss on 12th March 1938, (b) the incorporation of the Sudetanland, Moravia-Silesia, and Bohemia between 1st October 1938 and 16th March 1939, and (c) the recovery of East Prussia from 23rd March 1939 to 8th October 1939 (ie, after the declaration of war by Britain and France on 3rd September 1939).  Second, and fatefully, Hitler promised Lebensraum, a modern colonisation project which he justified by the tribal struggles of the ancient Germanic past.  Hitler again:

And so, we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre–War period.  We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago.  We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the East.  At long last, we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre–War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.

While the unification programme addressed the misfortunes of the German past, the land-grab looked to a German demographic future.  It was not driven by over-population in Germany, but was predicated ideologically on population expansion after the new living space was secured by warfare and the subjugation and expulsion of the existing peoples:

Increase [of] our peasant population is the only effective defense against the influx of the Slav working-class masses from the East.  As six hundred years ago, the German peasant’s destiny must be to preserve and increase the German people’s patrimony in their holy mother earth battle against the Slav race.

This latter especially, I think, would be unlikely to engender the kind of ethnic self-awareness I am talking about.  Settled peoples do not demand the lands of their neighbours, let alone be brought to self—awareness by the prospect.  But even the unification programme was likely quite mixed in that respect.  One must allow that in the 1930s East Prussia belonged within Germany.  Even the Sudetan Germans – 3.2 million of them – were definitively German.  But that is less true of Austrians, whom the practise of (even early) gene-mapping identified as a separate cluster to Germans, notwithstanding the customary clining at the Bavarian edges:

Anschluss, then, stood in only a tangential relation to rising ethnic self-awareness.  It made not a direct appeal to the core German identity but, rather, to inclusion of an Austrian Other that, albeit at only a small tribal remove, was historically and culturally distinct until that moment.  In truth, then, it called for a blurring and stretching of identity, ie, a pretence fashioned from two singularities.  While such confections can be made to work - look at the generations of English people who determinedly thought themselves “British first” - it can’t happen overnight.  It’s a generational process, and it can’t lead to an Heideggerian awakening.  An uncovering of natural identity by a people can only occur within the people.  One can, then, safely conclude that the immediate popular response to Anschluss would have tended more to national pride than an explicit ethnic focus (and still more so within Austrians, whose particular national and ethnic identities were being relegated in favour of the “German” taxonomy and the ideological and even more generic and tendentious “Aryan”).

National pride … patriotism ... is, then, categorically distinct from ethnic self-awareness, and bears a relationship to it of civic to ethnic nationalism.  Any form of national pride is incidental to ethnic nationalism but is the whole point in civic nationalism (in which any focus on ethnicity is specifically avoided).  National Socialism was nothing if not ethnic (and racial too, of course).  It treated citizenship wholly on the basis of the primacy of blood, as per point 4 of the original movement’s 25-point programme dating from 1920:

None but members of the nation may be citizens of the state. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed may be.  No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation.

… a point later amplified by Hitler himself in Mein Kampf, discarding the inclusive civic value of citizenship for an exclusive honorific:

... after completion of his military duty, the right of citizenship is most solemnly bestowed on the irreproachable, healthy young man.  It is the most precious document for his whole life on earth.  With it he enters upon all the rights of citizen and partakes of all his advantages.  For the state must make a sharp distinction between those who, as national comrades, are the cause and bearer of its existence and its greatness, and those who only take up residence within a state, as ‘earning’ elements.

The bestowal of the certificate of citizenship must be associated with a solemn oath to the national community and the state.  In this document there must lie a common bond which bridges all other gaps.  It must be a greater honor to be a street-cleaner and citizen of this Reich than a king in a foreign state.

The citizen is privileged as against the foreigner.  He is the lord of the Reich.  But this higher dignity also obligates. The man without honour or character, the common criminal, the traitor to the fatherland, etc, can at any time be divested of this honour.  He thus again becomes a subject.

So on that basis alone we can, I think, safely conclude that these outpourings of public enthusiasm from these “lords of the Reich” were no populist glorification of the Reich ... of the German civic state ... for its own sake but an implicit, commonly possessed experience of German kinship as a fundamental and animating truth of self and kind.  This directness-to-source is a principal point of difference between National Socialism and Italian fascism, as well as civic nationalism.  By comparison to awakening a people from centuries of formative Christian and then liberal influence, to fill a people with patriotic fervour is a commonplace.  Hitler was deceptive on the question of Christianity, at times claiming to be Catholic himself (because of Catholicism’s healthy conservatism), but at other times he was more frank:

The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity.  Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child.  Both are inventions of the Jew.

On (post-) Christianity’s liberal child, meanwhile, he was definite and not without sophistication, discriminating self as concept from self in Nature:

The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute for them the folk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood.

With those two modern illusions of self no longer affirmed, we may come with due finality to awakening.  Which will be no surprise, I know, but the journey had to be undertaken.  Now, I do not believe that the party hierarchy, including the Reich Minister of Propaganda, understood enough (or any) Heidegger for delivery of a calculated, as they say nowadays, “nudge” towards a general affirmation and ownership.  Instead, along with Hitler’s architect Albert Speer and his documentary-maker Leni Riefenstahl – both authentic artists of National Socialism’s militarism and totalitarianism - Goebbels surpassed himself in his presentation of an otherwise unprepossessing physical specimen with a faintly ridiculous toothbrush moustache as a leader not only in the most heroic mould:

Hitler idealised as a Teutonic knight and standard-bearer of the folk in the war declared against their enemies, ethnic, racial and ideological.

… but as a messiah of whom, when on 25 February 1934 about a million NSDAP officials gathered in various places around Germany to swear an oath to Hitler, Goebbels could deliver himself of the Christian-esque sentiment:

Do not seek Adolf Hitler with your mind.  You will find him through the strength of your hearts.

By way of a political reality check, Margaret Thatcher was originally dubbed the Iron Lady by the Soviets, as a term of ridicule.  In fact, it was a propaganda gift and she was duly lionised for it.  But I don’t recall Saatchi & Saatchi mythicising it.  Such things are not found in liberal democratic politics.  Even the Soviet propagandists did not inflate the image of their Man of Steel as Goebbels – a religious man - did with Hitler.  The effect, of course, was to provide a focal point as visible to the German political consciousness as the sun in the sky.  Indeed, it is on an historical par with Louis XIV who was portrayed as Jupiter 370 years before the vainglorious sprat Macron, and famously cultivated the title of le Roi Soleil ... the centre of the universe sans pareil.  There is an interesting remark by Hitler which may link to something similar.  I don’t actually know whether he was making a commendation to his party members or to Germans in general, or was speaking only of himself, or of all three, when he said:

If you want to shine like the sun first you have to burn like it.

Really, it does not matter which it is, because the effect upon the German masses would have been exactly the same, namely the appearance among them of a shining avatar for German self-hood, kinship, nation and home.  Hitler’s political vision of strident national confidence, hyper-racism, and audacious expansionism connected seamlessly to it but was not it, was not its equal in the matter of ethnic and racial awareness.  To be precise, the causal factor was the German people’s inescapable act of attention to Hitler as this strange and irresistible, self-proclaimed messiah who could emerge from the political wilderness and, alone among his generation, name the true god of the Germans:

We do not want any other god than Germany itself.  It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany.

In Part Two we will examine the specifics of attention and the natural ordering it engenders.  We will endeavour to answer the question of whether a European, or European-descended, people can similarly awaken en masse in this century of human smallness and confusion, and whether an awakening can be achieved without the services of a cultic leader and his hyper-ised and dangerous politics of power.