Who, asks Tacitus rhetorically, would trade Asia or Africa for Germany, “a region hideous and rude, under a rigorous climate, dismal to behold or cultivate?” The German answer is obvious: the Germans. It’s the wrong answer, of course; other people live in still ruder regions without getting into trouble. But for purposes of nationalist romanticism the German answer will serve.
Romanticism is the stuff of which men’s dreams are made. National Socialism was a piece of this stuff, cut not from immanent villainy, “congenital criminality,” but from the dream of freedom from unbearable conditions which have got to be borne. Since these conditions were more unbearable in Germany than anywhere else, who but the Germans should undertake, self-sacrificially, to free the human race from the human condition?
In their dream my friends turned, regretfully, all the way from the Christian obligation to one’s fellow-men, with whom, through God, one identifies one’s self, real men in a real world, feeble, fitful men, to the altogether transcendent obligation (much heavier than that which the Cross imposes) to produce Man the Imagined, Man like God, Man Who Once Was, German Man. We must remember that racial perfection was only the means—the means, to be sure—to moral perfection. Moral perfection was possible. And moral perfection, in Germany, would alleviate the human condition everywhere, even among those who, incapable of perfection because of their lower nature, would have to have alleviation forced upon them.
Seven of my ten Nazi friends had heard the joke—it originated in Germany during Nazism—and enjoyed it: “What is an Aryan?” “An Aryan is a man who is tall like Hitler, blond like Goebbels, and lithe like Göring.” They, too, had smiled at the mass Aryanization, first of the Italians and then of the Japanese. They all knew “Aryans” who were indistinguishable from Jews and Jews who were indistinguishable from Nazis. Six of my ten friends were well below middle height, seven of them brunet, and at least seven of them brachycephalic, of the category of head breadth furthest removed from “Nordic longheadedness.” None of this mattered; all this was only reality, a parliamentary quibble.
The German, said the German philosopher, has a yesterday and a tomorrow, but no today. Out of my ten Nazi friends, the “German spirit,” manifest in the whole unbroken history of suffering and sacrifice of the whole German people, would, tomorrow at the latest, breed yesterday’s German, “blond, blue-eyed, huge,” as he appeared to the Divine Julius, who happened to be dark and squat. Men too heavy-laden can—and not only can but must—dream such dreams.
Wagnerian men like gods and Faustian men like angels people these dreamy lives—raise the tailor from his steaming bench, release the farm boy from his blistering plow handles, fit the burning feet of the shop clerk with winged sandals, transport them to dark forests (darker in Germany than anywhere else), whence, stripped to sword and shield and helmet, they hew their way to the top of the mountain. There, in a combination Walpurgis-Wartburg, they hurl Teutonic-Christian fire at the lightning, driving it and its demons away.
The incubation of Germany was terrified by das Wütende Heer, die Wilde Jagd, the Huntsman’s Wild Horde riding the night, and in the sacred groves the protective fire has never been allowed to die. In 1951 a German mayor burns the de-Nazification records in the town square. In 1952 the Berlin police stage the greatest torchlight display since Nazism. In 1953 a German pacifist—a pacifist, mind you—burns the “contractual agreement” with the Allies in public in Hamburg. And all over Germany, at the fall farm festivals, at the spring school festivals, the climax of the celebration is a fire of orgiastic proportions. In 1933 the anti-Christians burned a bonfire of books in Prussia to liberate Germany from the radical Jews; in 1817 the Christians burned a bonfire of books in Saxe-Weimar to liberate Germany from the reactionary Prussians.
On the night of June 29, 1934, Adolf Hitler burned his bridges behind him. The decision was made on the terrace of a hotel at Godesberg on the Rhine. Sitting there alone in the night, the Leader stared at a thousand men on the lawn in front of him; each of the thousand men held a torch; all of the thousand torches together formed a fiery Swastika, in his honor. The Leader, staring into that fire, made the decision to decimate the Party leadership. He left the terrace, commandeered his plane, and flew to Munich at midnight. The next morning was June 30, 1934, “the day of blood,” the nation-wide purge of National Socialism.
The world once purged by flood ends always again in the surer purgative of fire. Deviltry runs deep in the “Teutonic Spirit.” Those two little devils, “Max und Moritz,” the German counterpart of our comic-strip mischief-makers, specialize in enormities undreamed of and undreamable by Peck’s Bad Boy, Kayo Mullins, and Dennis the Menace. And, while it is a long way back from “Max und Moritz” to Martin Luther, who invited the Wittenberg students to the burning of the Papal bull which split the Church, the way is not trackless. The Lutheran Reformation, libertarian in its genesis, drove out of the religious life of the German people such sunshine as there was in Roman universalism; replaced it with a gloom which still defies theological permeation; subordinated the Church Militant to the Church Military; and re-established the sect of the patriot tribe.
It was dreadfully heroic, and dreadfully dramatic, when the Augustinian monk said, “Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders,” and defied the greatest power on earth. It was less heroic and much less dramatic but no less prophetic of the Germany to come, when he decided that to “give to him that asketh of thee” did not mean to give him what he asks but, rather, what is good for him. It had taken a century to convert the English to Christianity, seven to convert the Germans; and in some sections of the land the new faith had died out altogether as late as the end of the eleventh century.
My friend Kessler was right; the resistance of Catholics, not to dictatorship, but to nationalist dictatorship and to racism and idolatry, was stronger, if not significantly so, than Protestantism’s. The strength of the Catholic Church was the strength of the Catholic Church; the strength of the Protestant Church was the strength of the German State, whose Church dominated an almost half-Catholic country. In the Protestant north one says, “Guten Tag”; in the Catholic south, “Grüss’ Gott, God be with you.” It is a little harder (not much, but a little) to change to “Heil Hitler” from “Grüss’ Gott” than from “Guten Tag.”
The Catholic Church is, willy-nilly, protestant in a country whose State Church is Protestant. Bismarck’s campaign against it, and later Rosenberg’s and Goebbels’ (“We will deal with this crew,” wrote Goebbels of the Catholicism into which he was born, “when the war is over”), taught Catholics a little about living dangerously and cleaving joyously to a faith under fire. The common estimate that only 10 per cent of the nominal Protestants of Germany were (and are) free adherents to the State Church is, at least in Kronenberg, not low. Kronenberg had been 100 per cent Catholic until the Prince of Hesse, embracing Protestantism in 1521, suppressed the Catholic worship; from which instant on, Kronenberg had been 100 per cent Protestant. Under the American Occupation, after 1945, the Nazis’ Sunday-morning paganism was replaced, in the same theater, by popular movies during church hours, and without any Protestant protest.
This dark Church of Luther, born not of bread and wine but of blood and iron, so remote from the universal surrender and the universal embrace in which the parent Church was born (if not bred), even in Luther’s lifetime lost its libertarian impulses and has never been able to release the “little people” of Germany from the demonological terrors of the dark. They cannot resist the torchbearer who, with his torch, turns the black into day. I had several talks with a country pastor, an anti-Nazi, who, without challenging the one Scripture that “we ought to obey God rather than men,” shook his head doggedly and reverted, again and again, to the other Scripture that “the powers that be are ordained of God.” His three oldest sons had been killed in the German Army invasion of Russia; he will never, he said in tears, let “them” take his last son, Kurt; but I’m afraid he will.
So the Tree of Christ, freely planted in the fulfilment of perfect freedom, grows weak and dry beside the Oak of Odin. But it grows; believers and unbelievers and agnostics, big men and little, weak men and strong, good men and bad, left with me the conviction that there was one thing that would have made Nazism even worse than it was: the nonexistence of the Christian Church.
Tailor Schwenke may not have known what Christianity was; he may not have been a Christian; he may not have wanted to be; but he could not bear to look in the minor and say, “I am not a Christian.” As long as he could not, there was one way left to his heart, however hard or near-hopeless, that would have been closed had there been no Christian Church to claim him. He was, he assured me, “very religious, always,” adding, as he always did when he spoke of any of the virtues, “Our whole family, always.” As evidence of his religiosity, he taught me the hymns his confirmation class had sung sixty years before, Ich will dich lieben, meine Stärke (“I Will Love Thee, My Almighty”) at the beginning of the confirmation, and So nimm denn meine Hände (“Take Thou My Hands”) at the end. For a seventy-one-year-old man, who was almost fatally wounded in one war and served three years in prison after another, his baritone was remarkably beautiful.
“It was like this,” he said. “The new National Socialist faith believed in God but not in the divinity of Christ. That’s the simplest way to put it.”
I thanked him for putting it simply, and he went on. “We little people didn’t know whether or not to believe it. ‘Is it right, or isn’t it?’ we asked ourselves” (after a thousand years of “very religious” Christianity). “One believed one way, one another. It wasn’t ever decided. Perhaps, if the war had been won, it would have been decided finally.”
“By whom?”
“By the men on top. But they didn’t seem to have decided yet themselves. A man didn’t know what to think.”
This “very religious” old brute was the only one of my nine Protestant friends who left the Church. But he did not turn to the pagan Faith Movement, nor did he apostasize for religious reasons at all. It seems that in 1934 a fine young SA man wanted to be married (“He had to be,” the tailor’s wife interrupted) and told the pastor that he wanted to be married in his fine SA uniform. The pastor refused. So Tailor Schwenke, now Sturmführer Schwenke, wrote to the pastor that the young man did not have enough money to buy a suit. “Did he?” I said. “No,” said Schwenke. “Maybe not,” said Mother Schwenke. The pastor then agreed to the uniform.
After the regular service, on the appointed Sunday, Schwenke led his Storm Troop, all of them in uniform, into the gallery of the church. When the pastor, who had gone into the sacristy, came out and saw the Storm Troopers, he stood in front of the altar and the waiting couple and said to the congregation, “What kind of business is this?” Then he performed the ceremony, in brief and unfriendly fashion, and, when it was over and Schwenke tried to speak to him, he turned away.
The district Party office, having heard of the incident, suggested that the tailor apologize to the pastor, but he refused. Then the case reached the district Church Council, and the chief pastor summoned the tailor and suggested that he apologize. “He didn’t say I had to, so I didn’t. But I was disgusted by the whole thing and resigned my church membership. That’s the way I am; our whole family’s that way. I started a petition to get that pastor out of his church—his daughter was married to a half-Jew—and a year later he was pensioned. That’s all they want anyway. They just work for a salary and a pension, like everyone else. If they weren’t paid, they wouldn’t work.”
A few days after this conversation, a local pastor of my acquaintance, who knew I had been talking with the tailor, called on me and asked me if I thought that Herr Schwenke was a Christian, “a real Christian. I know that that is a peculiar question, but his application to re-enter the Church is before the Council.”
“I should guess,” I said, “that he’s as real a Christian now as he ever was, but it would only be a guess.”
“That isn’t real enough,” said the pastor.
“Why should he want to re-enter the Church if he isn’t a Christian?” I said.
“Most probably,” said the pastor, a bright young man, “to have the Church carry his Überfracht, his excess baggage, for him.”
“Isn’t that what the Church is for?” I said, just as brightly.
“Ah, yes,” said the bright young pastor, who had recently been to America, “but there’s so much Überfracht in Germany. We Germans seem to be born with it,” and he handed me an American cigar.