Chapter I: Philosophy and
Party
On February 24th, 1920, the first great mass meeting under the
auspices of the new movement took place. In the Banquet Hall of the Hofbräuhaus
in Munich the twenty-five theses which constituted the programme of our new
party were expounded to an audience of nearly two thousand people and each
thesis was enthusiastically received.
Thus we brought to the knowledge of the public those first
principles and lines of action along which the new struggle was to be conducted
for the abolition of a confused mass of obsolete ideas and opinions which had
obscure and often pernicious tendencies. A new force was to make its appearance
among the timid and feckless bourgeoisie. This force was destined to impede the
triumphant advance of the Marxists and bring the Chariot of Fate to a
standstill just as it seemed about to reach its goal.
It was evident that this new movement could gain the
public significance and support which are necessary pre-requisites in such a
gigantic struggle only if it succeeded from the very outset in awakening a
sacrosanct conviction in the hearts of its followers, that here it was not a
case of introducing a new electoral slogan into the political field but that an
entirely new world view, which was of a radical significance, had to be
promoted.
One must try to recall the miserable jumble of opinions
that used to be arrayed side by side to form the usual Party Programme, as it
was called, and one must remember how these opinions used to be brushed up or
dressed in a new form from time to time. If we would properly understand these
programmatic monstrosities we must carefully investigate the motives which
inspired the average bourgeois 'programme committee'.
Those people are always influenced by one and the same
preoccupation when they introduce something new into their programme or modify
something already contained in it. That preoccupation is directed towards the
results of the next election. The moment these artists in parliamentary
government have the first glimmering of a suspicion that their darling public
may be ready to kick up its heels and escape from the harness of the old party
wagon they begin to paint the shafts with new colours. On such occasions the
party astrologists and horoscope readers, the so-called 'experienced men' and
'experts', come forward. For the most part they are old parliamentary hands
whose political schooling has furnished them with ample experience. They can
remember former occasions when the masses showed signs of losing patience and
they now diagnose the menace of a similar situation arising. Resorting to their
old prescription, they form a 'committee'. They go around among the darling
public and listen to what is being said. They dip their noses into the
newspapers and gradually begin to scent what it is that their darlings, the
broad masses, are wishing for, what they reject and what they are hoping for.
The groups that belong to each trade or business, and even office employees,
are carefully studied and their innermost desires are investigated. The
'malicious slogans' of the opposition from which danger is threatened are now
suddenly looked upon as worthy of reconsideration, and it often happens that
these slogans, to the great astonishment of those who originally coined and
circulated them, now appear to be quite harmless and indeed are to be found
among the dogmas of the old parties.
So the committees meet to revise the old programme and
draw up a new one.
For these people change their convictions just as the
soldier changes his shirt in war – when the old one is bug-eaten. In the new
programme everyone gets everything he wants. The farmer is assured that the
interests of agriculture will be safeguarded. The industrialist is assured of
protection for his products. The consumer is assured that his interests will be
protected in the market prices. Teachers are given higher salaries and civil
servants will have better pensions. Widows and orphans will receive generous
assistance from the State. Trade will be promoted. The tariff will be lowered
and even the taxes, though they cannot be entirely abolished, will be almost
abolished. It sometimes happens that one section of the public is forgotten or
that one of the demands mooted among the public has not reached the ears of the
party. This is also hurriedly patched on to the whole, should there be any
space available for it: until finally it is felt that there are good grounds
for hoping that the whole normal host of philistines, including their wives,
will have their anxieties laid to rest and will beam with satisfaction once
again. And so, internally armed with faith in the goodness of God and the
impenetrable stupidity of the electorate, the struggle for what is called 'the
reconstruction of the Reich' can now begin.
When the election day is over and the parliamentarians
have held their last public meeting for the next five years, when they can
leave their job of getting the populace to toe the line and can now devote
themselves to higher and more pleasing tasks – then the programme committee is
dissolved and the struggle for the progressive reorganization of public affairs
becomes once again a business of earning one's daily bread, which for the
parliamentarians means merely the attendance that is required in order to be
able to draw their daily remunerations. Morning after morning the honourable
deputy wends his way to the House, and though he may not enter the Chamber
itself he gets at least as far as the front hall, where he will find the
register on which the names of the deputies in attendance have to be inscribed.
As a part of his onerous service to his constituents he enters his name, and in
return receives a small indemnity as a well-earned reward for his unceasing and
exhausting labours.
When four years have passed, or in the meantime if there
should be some critical weeks during which the parliamentary corporations have
to face the danger of being dissolved, these honourable gentlemen become
suddenly seized by an irresistible desire to act. Just as the grub-worm cannot
help growing into a cock-chafer, these parliamentarian worms leave the great
House of Puppets and flutter on new wings out among the beloved public. They
address the electors once again, give an account of the enormous labours they
have accomplished and emphasize the malicious obstinacy of their opponents.
They do not always meet with grateful applause; for occasionally the
unintelligent masses throw rude and unfriendly remarks in their faces. When
this spirit of public ingratitude reaches a certain pitch there is only one way
of saving the situation. The prestige of the party must be burnished up again.
The programme has to be amended. The committee is called into existence once
again. And the swindle begins anew. Once we understand the impenetrable
stupidity of our public we cannot be surprised that such tactics turn out
successful. Led by the Press and blinded once again by the alluring appearance
of the new programme, the bourgeois as well as the proletarian herds of voters
faithfully return to the common stall and re-elect their old deceivers. The
'people's man' and labour candidate now change back again into the
parliamentarian grub and become fat and rotund as they batten on the leaves
that grow on the tree of public life – to be retransformed into the glittering
butterfly after another four years have passed.
Scarcely anything else can be so depressing as to watch
this process in sober reality and to be the eyewitness of this repeatedly
recurring fraud. On a spiritual training ground of that kind it is not possible
for the bourgeois forces to develop the strength which is necessary to carry on
the fight against the organized might of Marxism. Indeed they have never
seriously thought of doing so. Though these parliamentary quacks who represent
the white race are generally recognized as persons of quite inferior mental
capacity, they are shrewd enough to know that they could not seriously
entertain the hope of being able to use the weapon of Western Democracy to
fight a doctrine for the advance of which Western Democracy, with all its
accessories, is employed as a means to an end. Democracy is exploited by the
Marxists for the purpose of paralysing their opponents and gaining for
themselves a free hand to put their own methods into action. When certain
groups of Marxists use all their ingenuity for the time being to make it be
believed that they are inseparably attached to the principles of democracy, it
may be well to recall the fact that when critical occasions arose these same
gentlemen snapped their fingers at the principle of decision by majority vote,
as that principle is understood by Western Democracy. Such was the case in
those days when the bourgeois parliamentarians, in their monumental
shortsightedness, believed that the security of the Reich was guaranteed
because it had an overwhelming numerical majority in its favour, and the
Marxists did not hesitate suddenly to grasp supreme power in their own hands,
backed by a mob of loafers, deserters, political place-hunters and Jewish
dilettanti. That was a blow in the face for that democracy in which so many
parliamentarians believed. Only those credulous parliamentary wizards who
represented bourgeois democracy could have believed that the brutal
determination of those whose interest it is to spread the Marxist world-pest,
of which they are the carriers, could for a moment, now or in the future, be
held in check by the magical formulas of Western Parliamentarianism. Marxism
will march shoulder to shoulder with democracy until it succeeds indirectly in
securing for its own criminal purposes even the support of those whose minds
are nationally orientated and whom Marxism strives to exterminate. But if the
Marxists should one day come to believe that there was a danger that from this
witch's cauldron of our parliamentary democracy a majority vote might be
concocted, which by reason of its numerical majority would be empowered to
enact legislation and might use that power seriously to combat Marxism, then
the whole parliamentarian hocus-pocus would be at an end. Instead of appealing
to the democratic conscience, the standard bearers of the Red International
would immediately send forth a furious rallying-cry among the proletarian
masses and the ensuing fight would not take place in the sedate atmosphere of
Parliament but in the factories and the streets. Then democracy would be
annihilated forthwith. And what the intellectual prowess of the apostles who
represented the people in Parliament had failed to accomplish would now be
successfully carried out by the crow-bar and the sledge-hammer of the
exasperated proletarian masses – just as in the autumn of 1918. At a blow they
would awaken the bourgeois world to see the madness of thinking that the Jewish
drive towards world-conquest can be effectually opposed by means of Western
Democracy.
As I have said, only a very credulous soul could think of
binding himself to observe the rules of the game when he has to face a player
for whom those rules are nothing but a mere bluff or a means of serving his own
interests, which means he will discard them when they prove no longer useful
for his purpose.
All the parties that profess so-called bourgeois
principles look upon political life as in reality a struggle for seats in
Parliament. The moment their principles and convictions are of no further use
in that struggle they are thrown overboard, as if they were sand ballast. And
the programmes are constructed in such a way that they can be dealt with in
like manner. But such practice has a correspondingly weakening effect on the
strength of those parties. They lack the great magnetic force which alone
attracts the broad masses; for these masses always respond to the compelling
force which emanates from absolute faith in the ideas put forward, combined
with an indomitable zest to fight for and defend them.
At a time in which the one side, armed with all the
fighting power that springs from a systematic conception of life – even though
it be criminal in a thousand ways – makes an attack against the established
order the other side will be able to resist when it draws its strength from a
new faith, which in our case is a political faith. This faith must supersede
the weak and cowardly command to defend. In its stead we must raise the
battle-cry of a courageous and ruthless attack. Our present movement is
accused, especially by the so-called national bourgeois cabinet ministers – the
Bavarian representatives of the Centre, for example – of heading towards a
revolution. We have one answer to give to those political pigmies. We say to
them: We are trying to make up for that which you, in your criminal stupidity,
have failed to carry out. By your parliamentarian jobbing you have helped to
drag the nation into ruin. But we, by our aggressive policy, are setting up a
new philosophy of life which we shall defend with indomitable devotion. Thus we
are building the steps on which our nation once again may ascend to the temple
of freedom.
And so during the first stages of founding our movement we
had to take special care that our militant group which fought for the
establishment of a new and exalted political faith should not degenerate into a
society for the promotion of parliamentarian interests.
The first preventive measure was to lay down a programme
which of itself would tend towards developing a certain moral greatness that
would scare away all the petty and weakling spirits who make up the bulk of our
present party politicians.
Those fatal defects which finally led to Germany's
downfall afford the clearest proof of how right we were in considering it
absolutely necessary to set up programmatic aims which were sharply and
distinctly defined.
Because we recognized the defects above mentioned, we
realized that a new conception of the State had to be formed, which in itself
became a part of our new conception of life in general.
In the first volume of this book I have already dealt
with the term völkisch, and I said then that this term has not a sufficiently
precise meaning to furnish the kernel around which a closely consolidated
militant community could be formed. All kinds of people, with all kinds of
divergent opinions, are parading about at the present moment under the device
völkisch on their banners. Before I come to deal with the purposes and aims of
the National Socialist Labour Party I want to establish a clear understanding
of what is meant by the concept völkisch and herewith explain its relation to
our party movement. The word völkisch does not express any clearly specified
idea. It may be interpreted in several ways and in practical application it is
just as general as the word 'religious', for instance. It is difficult to
attach any precise meaning to this latter word, either as a theoretical concept
or as a guiding principle in practical life. The word 'religious' acquires a
precise meaning only when it is associated with a distinct and definite form
through which the concept is put into practice. To say that a person is 'deeply
religious' may be very fine phraseology; but, generally speaking, it tells us
little or nothing. There may be some few people who are content with such a
vague description and there may even be some to whom the word conveys a more or
less definite picture of the inner quality of a person thus described. But,
since the masses of the people are not composed of philosophers or saints, such
a vague religious idea will mean for them nothing else than to justify each
individual in thinking and acting according to his own bent. It will not lead
to that practical faith into which the inner religious yearning is transformed
only when it leaves the sphere of general metaphysical ideas and is moulded to
a definite dogmatic belief. Such a belief is certainly not an end in itself,
but the means to an end. Yet it is a means without which the end could never be
reached at all. This end, however, is not merely something ideal; for at the
bottom it is eminently practical. We must always bear in mind the fact that,
generally speaking, the highest ideals are always the outcome of some profound
vital need, just as the most sublime beauty owes its nobility of shape, in the
last analysis, to the fact that the most beautiful form is the form that is
best suited to the purpose it is meant to serve.
By helping to lift the human being above the level of
mere animal existence, Faith really contributes to consolidate and safeguard
its own existence. Taking humanity as it exists today and taking into
consideration the fact that the religious beliefs which it generally holds and
which have been consolidated through our education, so that they serve as moral
standards in practical life, if we should now abolish religious teaching and
not replace it by anything of equal value the result would be that the
foundations of human existence would be seriously shaken. We may safely say
that man does not live merely to serve higher ideals, but that these ideals, in
their turn, furnish the necessary conditions of his existence as a human being.
And thus the circle is closed.
Of course, the word 'religious' implies some ideas and
beliefs that are fundamental. Among these we may reckon the belief in the
immortality of the soul, its future existence in eternity, the belief in the
existence of a Higher Being, and so on. But all these ideas, no matter how
firmly the individual believes in them, may be critically analysed by any
person and accepted or rejected accordingly, until the emotional concept or
yearning has been transformed into an active service that is governed by a
clearly defined doctrinal faith. Such a faith furnishes the practical outlet
for religious feeling to express itself and thus opens the way through which it
can be put into practice.
Without a clearly defined belief, the religious feeling
would not only be worthless for the purposes of human existence but even might
contribute towards a general disorganization, on account of its vague and
multifarious tendencies.
What I have said about the word 'religious' can also be
applied to the term völkisch. This word also implies certain fundamental ideas.
Though these ideas are very important indeed, they assume such vague and
indefinite forms that they cannot be estimated as having a greater value than
mere opinions, until they become constituent elements in the structure of a
political party. For in order to give practical force to the ideals that grow
out of philosophical ideals and to answer the demands which are a logical
consequence of such ideals, mere sentiment and inner longing are of no
practical assistance, just as freedom cannot be won by a universal yearning for
it. No. Only when the idealistic longing for independence is organized in such
a way that it can fight for its ideal with military force, only then can the
urgent wish of a people be transformed into a potent reality.
Every philosophy of life, even if it is a thousand times
correct and of the highest benefit to mankind, will be of no practical service
for the maintenance of a people as long as its principles have not yet become
the rallying point of a militant movement. And, on its own side, this movement
will remain a mere party until is has brought its ideals to victory and
transformed its party doctrines into the new foundations of a State which gives
the national community its final shape.
If an abstract conception of a general nature is to serve
as the basis of a future development, then the first prerequisite is to form a
clear understanding of the nature and character and scope of this conception.
For only on such a basis can a movement he founded which will be able to draw
the necessary fighting strength from the internal cohesion of its principles
and convictions. From general ideas a political programme must be constructed
and general ideas must receive the stamp of a definite political faith. Since
this faith must be directed towards ends that have to be attained in the world
of practical reality, not only must it serve the general ideal as such but it
must also take into consideration the means that have to be employed for the
triumph of the ideal. Here the practical wisdom of the statesman must come to
the assistance of the abstract idea, which is correct in itself. In that way an
eternal ideal, which has everlasting significance as a guiding star to mankind,
must be adapted to the exigencies of human frailty so that its practical effect
may not be frustrated at the very outset through those shortcomings which are
general to mankind. The exponent of truth must here go hand in hand with him
who has a practical knowledge of the soul of the people, so that from the realm
of eternal verities and ideals what is suited to the capacities of human nature
may be selected and given practical form.
To take abstract and general principles, derived from a
philosophy which is based on a solid foundation of truth, and transform them
into a militant community whose members have the same political faith – a
community which is precisely defined, rigidly organized, of one mind and one
will – such a transformation is the most important task of all; for the
possibility of successfully carrying out the idea is dependent on the
successful fulfilment of that task. Out of the army of millions who feel the
truth of these ideas, and even may understand them to some extent, one
man must arise. This man must have the gift of being able to expound general
ideas in a clear and definite form, and, from the world of vague ideas
shimmering before the minds of the masses, he must formulate principles that
will be as clear-cut and firm as granite. He must fight for these principles as
the only true ones, until a solid rock of common faith and common will emerges
above the troubled waves of vagrant ideas.
The general justification of such action is to be sought
in the necessity for it and the individual will be justified by his success.
If we try to penetrate to the inner meaning of the word
völkisch we arrive at the following conclusions:
The current political conception of the world is that the
State, though it possesses a creative force which can build up civilizations,
has nothing in common with the concept of race as the foundation of the State.
The State is considered rather as something which has resulted from economic
necessity, or, at best, the natural outcome of the play of political forces and
impulses. Such a conception of the foundations of the State, together with all
its logical consequences, not only ignores the primordial racial forces that
underlie the State, but it also leads to a policy in which the importance of
the individual is minimized. If it be denied that races differ from one another
in their powers of cultural creativeness, then this same erroneous notion must
necessarily influence our estimation of the value of the individual. The
assumption that all races are alike leads to the assumption that nations and
individuals are equal to one another. And international Marxism is nothing but
the application – effected by the Jew, Karl Marx – of a general conception of
life to a definite profession of political faith; but in reality that general
concept had existed long before the time of Karl Marx. If it had not already
existed as a widely diffused infection the amazing political progress of the
Marxist teaching would never have been possible. In reality what distinguished
Karl Marx from the millions who were affected in the same way was that, in a
world already in a state of gradual decomposition, he used his keen powers of
prognosis to detect the essential poisons, so as to extract them and
concentrate them, with the art of a necromancer, in a solution which would
bring about the rapid destruction of the independent nations on the globe. But
all this was done in the service of his race.
Thus the Marxist doctrine is the concentrated extract of
the mentality which underlies the general concept of life today. For this
reason alone it is out of the question and even ridiculous to think that what
is called our bourgeois world can put up any effective fight against Marxism.
For this bourgeois world is permeated with all those same poisons and its
conception of life in general differs from Marxism only in degree and in the
character of the persons who hold it. The bourgeois world is Marxist but
believes in the possibility of a certain group of people – that is to say, the
bourgeoisie – being able to dominate the world, while Marxism itself
systematically aims at delivering the world into the hands of the Jews.
Over against all this, the völkisch concept of the world recognizes
that the primordial racial elements are of the greatest significance for
mankind. In principle, the State is looked upon only as a means to an end and
this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind.
Therefore on the völkisch principle we cannot admit that one race is equal to
another. By recognizing that they are different, the völkisch concept separates
mankind into races of superior and inferior quality. On the basis of this
recognition it feels bound in conformity with the eternal Will that dominates
the universe, to postulate the victory of the better and stronger and the
subordination of the inferior and weaker. And so it pays homage to the truth
that the principle underlying all Nature's operations is the aristocratic
principle and it believes that this law holds good even down to the last
individual organism. It selects individual values from the mass and thus
operates as an organizing principle, whereas Marxism acts as a disintegrating
solvent. The völkisch belief holds that humanity must have its ideals, because
ideals are a necessary condition of human existence itself. But, on the other
hand, it denies that an ethical ideal has the right to prevail if it endangers
the existence of a race that is the standard-bearer of a higher ethical ideal.
For in a world which would be composed of mongrels and negroids all ideals of
human beauty and nobility and all hopes of an idealized future for our humanity
would be lost forever.
On this planet of ours human culture and civilization are
indissolubly bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he should be
exterminated or subjugated, then the dark shroud of a new barbarian era would
enfold the earth.
To undermine the existence of human culture by
exterminating its founders and custodians would be an execrable crime in the
eyes of those who believe that the folk-idea lies at the basis of human
existence. Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest
image of God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of
this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise.
Hence the folk concept of the world is in profound accord
with Nature's will; because it restores the free play of the forces which will
lead the race through stages of sustained reciprocal education towards a higher
type, until finally the best portion of mankind will possess the earth and will
be free to work in every domain all over the world and even reach spheres that
lie outside the earth.
We all feel that in the distant future many may be faced
with problems which can be solved only by a superior race of human beings, a
race destined to become master of all the other peoples and which will have at
its disposal the means and resources of the whole world.
It is self-evident that so general a statement of the
meaningful content of a folkish philosophy can be easily interpreted in a
thousand different ways. As a matter of fact there is scarcely one of our
recent political movements that does not refer at some point to this conception
of the world. But the fact that this conception of the world still maintains
its independent existence in face of all the others proves that their ways of
looking at life are quite difierent from this. Thus the Marxist conception,
directed by a central organization endowed with supreme authority, is opposed
by a motley crew of opinions which is not very impressive in face of the solid
phalanx presented by the enemy. Victory cannot be achieved with such weak
weapons. Only when the international idea, politically organized by Marxism, is
confronted by the folk idea, equally well organized in a systematic way and
equally well led – only then will the fighting energy in the one camp be able
to meet that of the other on an equal footing; and victory will be found on the
side of eternal truth.
But a general conception of life can never be given an
organic embodiment until it is precisely and definitely formulated. The
function which dogma fulfils in religious belief is parallel to the function
which party principles fulfil for a political party which is in the process of
being built up.
Therefore, for the conception of life that is based on
the folk idea it is necessary that an instrument be forged which can be used in
fighting for this ideal, similar to the Marxist party organization which clears
the way for internationalism.
This is the goal pursued by the National Socialist German
Workers' Party.
The folk conception must therefore be definitely
formulated so that it may be organically incorporated in the party. That is a
necessary prerequisite for the success of this idea. And that it is so is very
clearly proved even by the indirect acknowledgment of those who oppose such an
amalgamation of the folk idea with party principles. The very people who never
tire of insisting again and again that the conception of life based on the folk
idea can never be the exclusive property of a single group, because it lies
dormant or 'lives' in myriads of hearts, only confirm by their own statements
the simple fact that the general presence of such ideas in the hearts of
millions of men has not proved sufficient to impede the victory of the opposing
ideas, which are championed by a political party organized on the principle of
class conflict. If that were not so, the German people ought already to have
gained a gigantic victory instead of finding themselves on the brink of the
abyss. The international ideology achieved success because it was organized in
a militant political party which was always ready to take the offensive. If
hitherto the ideas opposed to the international concept have had to give way
before the latter the reason is that they lacked a united front to fight for
their cause. A doctrine which forms a definite outlook on life cannot struggle
and triumph by allowing the right of free interpretation of its general
teaching, but only by defining that teaching in certain articles of faith that
have to be accepted and incorporating it in a political organization.
Therefore I considered it my special duty to extract from the
extensive but vague contents of a general world view the ideas which were
essential and give them a more or less dogmatic form. Because of their precise
and clear meaning, these ideas are suited to the purpose of uniting in a common
front all those who are ready to accept them as principles. In other words: The
National Socialist German Workers' Party extracts the essential principles from
the general conception of the world which is based on the folk idea. On these
principles it establishes a political doctrine which takes into account the
practical realities of the day, the nature of the times, the available human
material and all its deficiencies. Through this political doctrine it is
possible to bring great masses of the people into an organization which is
constructed as rigidly as it could be. Such an organization is the main
preliminary that is necessary for the final triumph of this world view.
Party
On February 24th, 1920, the first great mass meeting under the
auspices of the new movement took place. In the Banquet Hall of the Hofbräuhaus
in Munich the twenty-five theses which constituted the programme of our new
party were expounded to an audience of nearly two thousand people and each
thesis was enthusiastically received.
Thus we brought to the knowledge of the public those first
principles and lines of action along which the new struggle was to be conducted
for the abolition of a confused mass of obsolete ideas and opinions which had
obscure and often pernicious tendencies. A new force was to make its appearance
among the timid and feckless bourgeoisie. This force was destined to impede the
triumphant advance of the Marxists and bring the Chariot of Fate to a
standstill just as it seemed about to reach its goal.
It was evident that this new movement could gain the
public significance and support which are necessary pre-requisites in such a
gigantic struggle only if it succeeded from the very outset in awakening a
sacrosanct conviction in the hearts of its followers, that here it was not a
case of introducing a new electoral slogan into the political field but that an
entirely new world view, which was of a radical significance, had to be
promoted.
One must try to recall the miserable jumble of opinions
that used to be arrayed side by side to form the usual Party Programme, as it
was called, and one must remember how these opinions used to be brushed up or
dressed in a new form from time to time. If we would properly understand these
programmatic monstrosities we must carefully investigate the motives which
inspired the average bourgeois 'programme committee'.
Those people are always influenced by one and the same
preoccupation when they introduce something new into their programme or modify
something already contained in it. That preoccupation is directed towards the
results of the next election. The moment these artists in parliamentary
government have the first glimmering of a suspicion that their darling public
may be ready to kick up its heels and escape from the harness of the old party
wagon they begin to paint the shafts with new colours. On such occasions the
party astrologists and horoscope readers, the so-called 'experienced men' and
'experts', come forward. For the most part they are old parliamentary hands
whose political schooling has furnished them with ample experience. They can
remember former occasions when the masses showed signs of losing patience and
they now diagnose the menace of a similar situation arising. Resorting to their
old prescription, they form a 'committee'. They go around among the darling
public and listen to what is being said. They dip their noses into the
newspapers and gradually begin to scent what it is that their darlings, the
broad masses, are wishing for, what they reject and what they are hoping for.
The groups that belong to each trade or business, and even office employees,
are carefully studied and their innermost desires are investigated. The
'malicious slogans' of the opposition from which danger is threatened are now
suddenly looked upon as worthy of reconsideration, and it often happens that
these slogans, to the great astonishment of those who originally coined and
circulated them, now appear to be quite harmless and indeed are to be found
among the dogmas of the old parties.
So the committees meet to revise the old programme and
draw up a new one.
For these people change their convictions just as the
soldier changes his shirt in war – when the old one is bug-eaten. In the new
programme everyone gets everything he wants. The farmer is assured that the
interests of agriculture will be safeguarded. The industrialist is assured of
protection for his products. The consumer is assured that his interests will be
protected in the market prices. Teachers are given higher salaries and civil
servants will have better pensions. Widows and orphans will receive generous
assistance from the State. Trade will be promoted. The tariff will be lowered
and even the taxes, though they cannot be entirely abolished, will be almost
abolished. It sometimes happens that one section of the public is forgotten or
that one of the demands mooted among the public has not reached the ears of the
party. This is also hurriedly patched on to the whole, should there be any
space available for it: until finally it is felt that there are good grounds
for hoping that the whole normal host of philistines, including their wives,
will have their anxieties laid to rest and will beam with satisfaction once
again. And so, internally armed with faith in the goodness of God and the
impenetrable stupidity of the electorate, the struggle for what is called 'the
reconstruction of the Reich' can now begin.
When the election day is over and the parliamentarians
have held their last public meeting for the next five years, when they can
leave their job of getting the populace to toe the line and can now devote
themselves to higher and more pleasing tasks – then the programme committee is
dissolved and the struggle for the progressive reorganization of public affairs
becomes once again a business of earning one's daily bread, which for the
parliamentarians means merely the attendance that is required in order to be
able to draw their daily remunerations. Morning after morning the honourable
deputy wends his way to the House, and though he may not enter the Chamber
itself he gets at least as far as the front hall, where he will find the
register on which the names of the deputies in attendance have to be inscribed.
As a part of his onerous service to his constituents he enters his name, and in
return receives a small indemnity as a well-earned reward for his unceasing and
exhausting labours.
When four years have passed, or in the meantime if there
should be some critical weeks during which the parliamentary corporations have
to face the danger of being dissolved, these honourable gentlemen become
suddenly seized by an irresistible desire to act. Just as the grub-worm cannot
help growing into a cock-chafer, these parliamentarian worms leave the great
House of Puppets and flutter on new wings out among the beloved public. They
address the electors once again, give an account of the enormous labours they
have accomplished and emphasize the malicious obstinacy of their opponents.
They do not always meet with grateful applause; for occasionally the
unintelligent masses throw rude and unfriendly remarks in their faces. When
this spirit of public ingratitude reaches a certain pitch there is only one way
of saving the situation. The prestige of the party must be burnished up again.
The programme has to be amended. The committee is called into existence once
again. And the swindle begins anew. Once we understand the impenetrable
stupidity of our public we cannot be surprised that such tactics turn out
successful. Led by the Press and blinded once again by the alluring appearance
of the new programme, the bourgeois as well as the proletarian herds of voters
faithfully return to the common stall and re-elect their old deceivers. The
'people's man' and labour candidate now change back again into the
parliamentarian grub and become fat and rotund as they batten on the leaves
that grow on the tree of public life – to be retransformed into the glittering
butterfly after another four years have passed.
Scarcely anything else can be so depressing as to watch
this process in sober reality and to be the eyewitness of this repeatedly
recurring fraud. On a spiritual training ground of that kind it is not possible
for the bourgeois forces to develop the strength which is necessary to carry on
the fight against the organized might of Marxism. Indeed they have never
seriously thought of doing so. Though these parliamentary quacks who represent
the white race are generally recognized as persons of quite inferior mental
capacity, they are shrewd enough to know that they could not seriously
entertain the hope of being able to use the weapon of Western Democracy to
fight a doctrine for the advance of which Western Democracy, with all its
accessories, is employed as a means to an end. Democracy is exploited by the
Marxists for the purpose of paralysing their opponents and gaining for
themselves a free hand to put their own methods into action. When certain
groups of Marxists use all their ingenuity for the time being to make it be
believed that they are inseparably attached to the principles of democracy, it
may be well to recall the fact that when critical occasions arose these same
gentlemen snapped their fingers at the principle of decision by majority vote,
as that principle is understood by Western Democracy. Such was the case in
those days when the bourgeois parliamentarians, in their monumental
shortsightedness, believed that the security of the Reich was guaranteed
because it had an overwhelming numerical majority in its favour, and the
Marxists did not hesitate suddenly to grasp supreme power in their own hands,
backed by a mob of loafers, deserters, political place-hunters and Jewish
dilettanti. That was a blow in the face for that democracy in which so many
parliamentarians believed. Only those credulous parliamentary wizards who
represented bourgeois democracy could have believed that the brutal
determination of those whose interest it is to spread the Marxist world-pest,
of which they are the carriers, could for a moment, now or in the future, be
held in check by the magical formulas of Western Parliamentarianism. Marxism
will march shoulder to shoulder with democracy until it succeeds indirectly in
securing for its own criminal purposes even the support of those whose minds
are nationally orientated and whom Marxism strives to exterminate. But if the
Marxists should one day come to believe that there was a danger that from this
witch's cauldron of our parliamentary democracy a majority vote might be
concocted, which by reason of its numerical majority would be empowered to
enact legislation and might use that power seriously to combat Marxism, then
the whole parliamentarian hocus-pocus would be at an end. Instead of appealing
to the democratic conscience, the standard bearers of the Red International
would immediately send forth a furious rallying-cry among the proletarian
masses and the ensuing fight would not take place in the sedate atmosphere of
Parliament but in the factories and the streets. Then democracy would be
annihilated forthwith. And what the intellectual prowess of the apostles who
represented the people in Parliament had failed to accomplish would now be
successfully carried out by the crow-bar and the sledge-hammer of the
exasperated proletarian masses – just as in the autumn of 1918. At a blow they
would awaken the bourgeois world to see the madness of thinking that the Jewish
drive towards world-conquest can be effectually opposed by means of Western
Democracy.
As I have said, only a very credulous soul could think of
binding himself to observe the rules of the game when he has to face a player
for whom those rules are nothing but a mere bluff or a means of serving his own
interests, which means he will discard them when they prove no longer useful
for his purpose.
All the parties that profess so-called bourgeois
principles look upon political life as in reality a struggle for seats in
Parliament. The moment their principles and convictions are of no further use
in that struggle they are thrown overboard, as if they were sand ballast. And
the programmes are constructed in such a way that they can be dealt with in
like manner. But such practice has a correspondingly weakening effect on the
strength of those parties. They lack the great magnetic force which alone
attracts the broad masses; for these masses always respond to the compelling
force which emanates from absolute faith in the ideas put forward, combined
with an indomitable zest to fight for and defend them.
At a time in which the one side, armed with all the
fighting power that springs from a systematic conception of life – even though
it be criminal in a thousand ways – makes an attack against the established
order the other side will be able to resist when it draws its strength from a
new faith, which in our case is a political faith. This faith must supersede
the weak and cowardly command to defend. In its stead we must raise the
battle-cry of a courageous and ruthless attack. Our present movement is
accused, especially by the so-called national bourgeois cabinet ministers – the
Bavarian representatives of the Centre, for example – of heading towards a
revolution. We have one answer to give to those political pigmies. We say to
them: We are trying to make up for that which you, in your criminal stupidity,
have failed to carry out. By your parliamentarian jobbing you have helped to
drag the nation into ruin. But we, by our aggressive policy, are setting up a
new philosophy of life which we shall defend with indomitable devotion. Thus we
are building the steps on which our nation once again may ascend to the temple
of freedom.
And so during the first stages of founding our movement we
had to take special care that our militant group which fought for the
establishment of a new and exalted political faith should not degenerate into a
society for the promotion of parliamentarian interests.
The first preventive measure was to lay down a programme
which of itself would tend towards developing a certain moral greatness that
would scare away all the petty and weakling spirits who make up the bulk of our
present party politicians.
Those fatal defects which finally led to Germany's
downfall afford the clearest proof of how right we were in considering it
absolutely necessary to set up programmatic aims which were sharply and
distinctly defined.
Because we recognized the defects above mentioned, we
realized that a new conception of the State had to be formed, which in itself
became a part of our new conception of life in general.
In the first volume of this book I have already dealt
with the term völkisch, and I said then that this term has not a sufficiently
precise meaning to furnish the kernel around which a closely consolidated
militant community could be formed. All kinds of people, with all kinds of
divergent opinions, are parading about at the present moment under the device
völkisch on their banners. Before I come to deal with the purposes and aims of
the National Socialist Labour Party I want to establish a clear understanding
of what is meant by the concept völkisch and herewith explain its relation to
our party movement. The word völkisch does not express any clearly specified
idea. It may be interpreted in several ways and in practical application it is
just as general as the word 'religious', for instance. It is difficult to
attach any precise meaning to this latter word, either as a theoretical concept
or as a guiding principle in practical life. The word 'religious' acquires a
precise meaning only when it is associated with a distinct and definite form
through which the concept is put into practice. To say that a person is 'deeply
religious' may be very fine phraseology; but, generally speaking, it tells us
little or nothing. There may be some few people who are content with such a
vague description and there may even be some to whom the word conveys a more or
less definite picture of the inner quality of a person thus described. But,
since the masses of the people are not composed of philosophers or saints, such
a vague religious idea will mean for them nothing else than to justify each
individual in thinking and acting according to his own bent. It will not lead
to that practical faith into which the inner religious yearning is transformed
only when it leaves the sphere of general metaphysical ideas and is moulded to
a definite dogmatic belief. Such a belief is certainly not an end in itself,
but the means to an end. Yet it is a means without which the end could never be
reached at all. This end, however, is not merely something ideal; for at the
bottom it is eminently practical. We must always bear in mind the fact that,
generally speaking, the highest ideals are always the outcome of some profound
vital need, just as the most sublime beauty owes its nobility of shape, in the
last analysis, to the fact that the most beautiful form is the form that is
best suited to the purpose it is meant to serve.
By helping to lift the human being above the level of
mere animal existence, Faith really contributes to consolidate and safeguard
its own existence. Taking humanity as it exists today and taking into
consideration the fact that the religious beliefs which it generally holds and
which have been consolidated through our education, so that they serve as moral
standards in practical life, if we should now abolish religious teaching and
not replace it by anything of equal value the result would be that the
foundations of human existence would be seriously shaken. We may safely say
that man does not live merely to serve higher ideals, but that these ideals, in
their turn, furnish the necessary conditions of his existence as a human being.
And thus the circle is closed.
Of course, the word 'religious' implies some ideas and
beliefs that are fundamental. Among these we may reckon the belief in the
immortality of the soul, its future existence in eternity, the belief in the
existence of a Higher Being, and so on. But all these ideas, no matter how
firmly the individual believes in them, may be critically analysed by any
person and accepted or rejected accordingly, until the emotional concept or
yearning has been transformed into an active service that is governed by a
clearly defined doctrinal faith. Such a faith furnishes the practical outlet
for religious feeling to express itself and thus opens the way through which it
can be put into practice.
Without a clearly defined belief, the religious feeling
would not only be worthless for the purposes of human existence but even might
contribute towards a general disorganization, on account of its vague and
multifarious tendencies.
What I have said about the word 'religious' can also be
applied to the term völkisch. This word also implies certain fundamental ideas.
Though these ideas are very important indeed, they assume such vague and
indefinite forms that they cannot be estimated as having a greater value than
mere opinions, until they become constituent elements in the structure of a
political party. For in order to give practical force to the ideals that grow
out of philosophical ideals and to answer the demands which are a logical
consequence of such ideals, mere sentiment and inner longing are of no
practical assistance, just as freedom cannot be won by a universal yearning for
it. No. Only when the idealistic longing for independence is organized in such
a way that it can fight for its ideal with military force, only then can the
urgent wish of a people be transformed into a potent reality.
Every philosophy of life, even if it is a thousand times
correct and of the highest benefit to mankind, will be of no practical service
for the maintenance of a people as long as its principles have not yet become
the rallying point of a militant movement. And, on its own side, this movement
will remain a mere party until is has brought its ideals to victory and
transformed its party doctrines into the new foundations of a State which gives
the national community its final shape.
If an abstract conception of a general nature is to serve
as the basis of a future development, then the first prerequisite is to form a
clear understanding of the nature and character and scope of this conception.
For only on such a basis can a movement he founded which will be able to draw
the necessary fighting strength from the internal cohesion of its principles
and convictions. From general ideas a political programme must be constructed
and general ideas must receive the stamp of a definite political faith. Since
this faith must be directed towards ends that have to be attained in the world
of practical reality, not only must it serve the general ideal as such but it
must also take into consideration the means that have to be employed for the
triumph of the ideal. Here the practical wisdom of the statesman must come to
the assistance of the abstract idea, which is correct in itself. In that way an
eternal ideal, which has everlasting significance as a guiding star to mankind,
must be adapted to the exigencies of human frailty so that its practical effect
may not be frustrated at the very outset through those shortcomings which are
general to mankind. The exponent of truth must here go hand in hand with him
who has a practical knowledge of the soul of the people, so that from the realm
of eternal verities and ideals what is suited to the capacities of human nature
may be selected and given practical form.
To take abstract and general principles, derived from a
philosophy which is based on a solid foundation of truth, and transform them
into a militant community whose members have the same political faith – a
community which is precisely defined, rigidly organized, of one mind and one
will – such a transformation is the most important task of all; for the
possibility of successfully carrying out the idea is dependent on the
successful fulfilment of that task. Out of the army of millions who feel the
truth of these ideas, and even may understand them to some extent, one
man must arise. This man must have the gift of being able to expound general
ideas in a clear and definite form, and, from the world of vague ideas
shimmering before the minds of the masses, he must formulate principles that
will be as clear-cut and firm as granite. He must fight for these principles as
the only true ones, until a solid rock of common faith and common will emerges
above the troubled waves of vagrant ideas.
The general justification of such action is to be sought
in the necessity for it and the individual will be justified by his success.
If we try to penetrate to the inner meaning of the word
völkisch we arrive at the following conclusions:
The current political conception of the world is that the
State, though it possesses a creative force which can build up civilizations,
has nothing in common with the concept of race as the foundation of the State.
The State is considered rather as something which has resulted from economic
necessity, or, at best, the natural outcome of the play of political forces and
impulses. Such a conception of the foundations of the State, together with all
its logical consequences, not only ignores the primordial racial forces that
underlie the State, but it also leads to a policy in which the importance of
the individual is minimized. If it be denied that races differ from one another
in their powers of cultural creativeness, then this same erroneous notion must
necessarily influence our estimation of the value of the individual. The
assumption that all races are alike leads to the assumption that nations and
individuals are equal to one another. And international Marxism is nothing but
the application – effected by the Jew, Karl Marx – of a general conception of
life to a definite profession of political faith; but in reality that general
concept had existed long before the time of Karl Marx. If it had not already
existed as a widely diffused infection the amazing political progress of the
Marxist teaching would never have been possible. In reality what distinguished
Karl Marx from the millions who were affected in the same way was that, in a
world already in a state of gradual decomposition, he used his keen powers of
prognosis to detect the essential poisons, so as to extract them and
concentrate them, with the art of a necromancer, in a solution which would
bring about the rapid destruction of the independent nations on the globe. But
all this was done in the service of his race.
Thus the Marxist doctrine is the concentrated extract of
the mentality which underlies the general concept of life today. For this
reason alone it is out of the question and even ridiculous to think that what
is called our bourgeois world can put up any effective fight against Marxism.
For this bourgeois world is permeated with all those same poisons and its
conception of life in general differs from Marxism only in degree and in the
character of the persons who hold it. The bourgeois world is Marxist but
believes in the possibility of a certain group of people – that is to say, the
bourgeoisie – being able to dominate the world, while Marxism itself
systematically aims at delivering the world into the hands of the Jews.
Over against all this, the völkisch concept of the world recognizes
that the primordial racial elements are of the greatest significance for
mankind. In principle, the State is looked upon only as a means to an end and
this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind.
Therefore on the völkisch principle we cannot admit that one race is equal to
another. By recognizing that they are different, the völkisch concept separates
mankind into races of superior and inferior quality. On the basis of this
recognition it feels bound in conformity with the eternal Will that dominates
the universe, to postulate the victory of the better and stronger and the
subordination of the inferior and weaker. And so it pays homage to the truth
that the principle underlying all Nature's operations is the aristocratic
principle and it believes that this law holds good even down to the last
individual organism. It selects individual values from the mass and thus
operates as an organizing principle, whereas Marxism acts as a disintegrating
solvent. The völkisch belief holds that humanity must have its ideals, because
ideals are a necessary condition of human existence itself. But, on the other
hand, it denies that an ethical ideal has the right to prevail if it endangers
the existence of a race that is the standard-bearer of a higher ethical ideal.
For in a world which would be composed of mongrels and negroids all ideals of
human beauty and nobility and all hopes of an idealized future for our humanity
would be lost forever.
On this planet of ours human culture and civilization are
indissolubly bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he should be
exterminated or subjugated, then the dark shroud of a new barbarian era would
enfold the earth.
To undermine the existence of human culture by
exterminating its founders and custodians would be an execrable crime in the
eyes of those who believe that the folk-idea lies at the basis of human
existence. Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest
image of God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of
this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise.
Hence the folk concept of the world is in profound accord
with Nature's will; because it restores the free play of the forces which will
lead the race through stages of sustained reciprocal education towards a higher
type, until finally the best portion of mankind will possess the earth and will
be free to work in every domain all over the world and even reach spheres that
lie outside the earth.
We all feel that in the distant future many may be faced
with problems which can be solved only by a superior race of human beings, a
race destined to become master of all the other peoples and which will have at
its disposal the means and resources of the whole world.
It is self-evident that so general a statement of the
meaningful content of a folkish philosophy can be easily interpreted in a
thousand different ways. As a matter of fact there is scarcely one of our
recent political movements that does not refer at some point to this conception
of the world. But the fact that this conception of the world still maintains
its independent existence in face of all the others proves that their ways of
looking at life are quite difierent from this. Thus the Marxist conception,
directed by a central organization endowed with supreme authority, is opposed
by a motley crew of opinions which is not very impressive in face of the solid
phalanx presented by the enemy. Victory cannot be achieved with such weak
weapons. Only when the international idea, politically organized by Marxism, is
confronted by the folk idea, equally well organized in a systematic way and
equally well led – only then will the fighting energy in the one camp be able
to meet that of the other on an equal footing; and victory will be found on the
side of eternal truth.
But a general conception of life can never be given an
organic embodiment until it is precisely and definitely formulated. The
function which dogma fulfils in religious belief is parallel to the function
which party principles fulfil for a political party which is in the process of
being built up.
Therefore, for the conception of life that is based on
the folk idea it is necessary that an instrument be forged which can be used in
fighting for this ideal, similar to the Marxist party organization which clears
the way for internationalism.
This is the goal pursued by the National Socialist German
Workers' Party.
The folk conception must therefore be definitely
formulated so that it may be organically incorporated in the party. That is a
necessary prerequisite for the success of this idea. And that it is so is very
clearly proved even by the indirect acknowledgment of those who oppose such an
amalgamation of the folk idea with party principles. The very people who never
tire of insisting again and again that the conception of life based on the folk
idea can never be the exclusive property of a single group, because it lies
dormant or 'lives' in myriads of hearts, only confirm by their own statements
the simple fact that the general presence of such ideas in the hearts of
millions of men has not proved sufficient to impede the victory of the opposing
ideas, which are championed by a political party organized on the principle of
class conflict. If that were not so, the German people ought already to have
gained a gigantic victory instead of finding themselves on the brink of the
abyss. The international ideology achieved success because it was organized in
a militant political party which was always ready to take the offensive. If
hitherto the ideas opposed to the international concept have had to give way
before the latter the reason is that they lacked a united front to fight for
their cause. A doctrine which forms a definite outlook on life cannot struggle
and triumph by allowing the right of free interpretation of its general
teaching, but only by defining that teaching in certain articles of faith that
have to be accepted and incorporating it in a political organization.
Therefore I considered it my special duty to extract from the
extensive but vague contents of a general world view the ideas which were
essential and give them a more or less dogmatic form. Because of their precise
and clear meaning, these ideas are suited to the purpose of uniting in a common
front all those who are ready to accept them as principles. In other words: The
National Socialist German Workers' Party extracts the essential principles from
the general conception of the world which is based on the folk idea. On these
principles it establishes a political doctrine which takes into account the
practical realities of the day, the nature of the times, the available human
material and all its deficiencies. Through this political doctrine it is
possible to bring great masses of the people into an organization which is
constructed as rigidly as it could be. Such an organization is the main
preliminary that is necessary for the final triumph of this world view.
Chapter II: The State
By 1920-1921 certain circles belonging to the present outlived
bourgeois class accused our movement again and again of taking up a negative
attitude towards the modern State. For that reason the motley gang of camp
followers attached to the various political parties, representing a
heterogeneous conglomeration of political views, assumed the right of utilizing
all available means to suppress the protagonists of this young movement which
was preaching a new political gospel. Our opponents deliberately ignored the
fact that the bourgeois class itself stood for no uniform opinion as to what
the State really meant and that the bourgeoisie did not and could not give any
coherent definition of this institution. Those whose duty it is to explain what
is meant when we speak of the State, hold chairs in State universities, often
in the department of constitutional law, and consider it their highest duty to
find explanations and justifications for the more or less fortunate existence
of that particular form of State which provides them with their daily bread.
The more absurd such a form of State is the more obscure and artificial and
incomprehensible are the definitions which are advanced to explain the purpose
of its existence. What, for instance, could a royal and imperial university
professor write about the meaning and purpose of a State in a country whose
statal form represented the greatest monstrosity of the twentieth century? That
would be a difficult undertaking indeed, in view of the fact that the
contemporary professor of constitutional law is obliged not so much to serve
the cause of truth but rather to serve a certain definite purpose. And this
purpose is to defend at all costs the existence of that monstrous human
mechanism which we now call the State. Nobody can be surprised if concrete
facts are evaded as far as possible when the problem of the State is under
discussion and if professors adopt the tactics of concealing themselves in
morass of abstract values and duties and purposes which are described as
'ethical' and 'moral'.
Generally speaking, these various theorists may be
classed in three groups:
1. Those who hold that the State is a more or less
voluntary association of men who have agreed to set up and obey a ruling
authority.
This is numerically the largest group. In its ranks are
to be found those who worship our present principle of legalized authority. In
their eyes the will of the people has no part whatever in the whole affair. For
them the fact that the State exists is sufficient reason to consider it sacred
and inviolable. To protect the madness of human brains, a positively dog-like
adoration of so-called state authority is needed. In the minds of these people
the means is substituted for the end, by a sort of sleight-of-hand movement.
The State no longer exists for the purpose of serving men but men exist for the
purpose of adoring the authority of the State, which is vested in its
functionaries, even down to the smallest official. So as to prevent this placid
and ecstatic adoration from changing into something that might become in any
way disturbing, the authority of the State is limited simply to the task of
preserving order and tranquillity. Therewith it is no longer either a means or
an end. The State must see that public peace and order are preserved and, in
their turn, order and peace must make the existence of the State possible. All
life must move between these two poles. In Bavaria this view is upheld by the
artful politicians of the Bavarian Centre, which is called the 'Bavarian
Populist Party'. In Austria the Black-and-Yellow legitimists adopt a similar
attitude. In the Reich, unfortunately, the so-called conservative elements
follow the same line of thought.
2. The second group is somewhat smaller in numbers. It
includes those who would make the existence of the State dependent on some
conditions at least. They insist that not only should there be a uniform system
of government but also, if possible, that only one language should be used,
though solely for technical reasons of administration. In this view the
authority of the State is no longer the sole and exclusive end for which the
State exists. It must also promote the good of its subjects. Ideas of
'freedom', mostly based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of that word,
enter into the concept of the State as it exists in the minds of this group.
The form of government is no longer considered inviolable simply because it
exists. It must submit to the test of practical efficiency. Its venerable age
no longer protects it from being criticized in the light of modern exigencies.
Moreover, in this view the first duty laid upon the State is to guarantee the
economic well-being of the individual citizens. Hence it is judged from the
practical standpoint and according to general principles based on the idea of
economic returns. The chief representatives of this theory of the State are to
be found among the average German bourgeoisie, especially our liberal
democrats.
3. The third group is numerically the smallest. In the
State they discover a means for the realization of tendencies that arise from a
policy of power, on the part of a people who are ethnically homogeneous and
speak the same language. But those who hold this view are not clear about what
they mean by 'tendencies arising from a policy of power'. A common language is
postulated not only because they hope that thereby the State would be furnished
with a solid basis for the extension of its power outside its own frontiers,
but also because they think – though falling into a fundamental error by doing
so – that such a common language would enable them to carry out a process of
nationalization in a definite direction.
During the last century it was lamentable for those who
had to witness it, to notice how in these circles I have just mentioned the
word 'Germanize' was frivolously played with, though the practice was often
well intended. I well remember how in the days of my youth this very term used
to give rise to notions which were false to an incredible degree. Even in
Pan-German circles one heard the opinion expressed that the Austrian Germans
might very well succeed in Germanizing the Austrian Slavs, if only the
Government would be ready to co-operate. Those people did not understand that a
policy of Germanization can be carried out only as regards human beings. What
they mostly meant by Germanization was a process of forcing other people to
speak the German language. But it is almost inconceivable how such a mistake
could be made as to think that a Negro or a Chinaman will become a German
because he has learned the German language and is willing to speak German for
the future, and even to cast his vote for a German political party. Our
bourgeois nationalists could never clearly see that such a process of
Germanization is in reality de-Germanization; for even if all the outstanding
and visible differences between the various peoples could be bridged over and
finally wiped out by the use of a common language, that would produce a process
of bastardization which in this case would not signify Germanization but the
annihilation of the German element. In the course of history it has happened
only too often that a conquering race succeeded by external force in compelling
the people whom they subjected to speak the tongue of the conqueror and that
after a thousand years their language was spoken by another people and that
thus the conqueror finally turned out to be the conquered.
What makes a people or, to be more correct, a race, is
not language but blood. Therefore it would be justifiable to speak of
Germanization only if that process could change the blood of the people who
would be subjected to it, which is obviously impossible. A change would be
possible only by a mixture of blood, but in this case the quality of the
superior race would be debased. The final result of such a mixture would be
that precisely those qualities would be destroyed which had enabled the
conquering race to achieve victory over an inferior people. It is especially
the cultural creativeness which disappears when a superior race intermixes with
an inferior one, even though the resultant mongrel race should excel a
thousandfold in speaking the language of the race that once had been superior.
For a certain time there will be a conflict between the different mentalities,
and it may be that a nation which is in a state of progressive degeneration
will at the last moment rally its cultural creative power and once again
produce striking examples of that power. But these results are due only to the
activity of elements that have remained over from the superior race or hybrids
of the first crossing in whom the superior blood has remained dominant and
seeks to assert itself. But this will never happen with the final descendants
of such hybrids. These are always in a state of cultural retrogression.
We must consider it as fortunate that a Germanization of Austria
according to the plan of Joseph II did not succeed. Probably the result would
have been that the Austrian State would have been able to survive, but at the
same time participation in the use of a common language would have debased the
racial quality of the German element. In the course of centuries a certain herd
instinct might have been developed but the herd itself would have deteriorated
in quality. A national State might have arisen, but a people who had been
culturally creative would have disappeared.
For the German nation it was better that this process of
intermixture did not take place, although it was not renounced for any
high-minded reasons but simply through the short-sighted pettiness of the
Habsburgs. If it had taken place the German people could not now be looked upon
as a cultural factor.
Not only in Austria, however, but also in the Reich, these
so-called national circles were, and still are, under the influence of similar
erroneous ideas. Unfortunately, a policy towards Poland, whereby the East was
to be Germanized, was demanded by many and was based on the same false
reasoning. Here again it was believed that the Polish people could be
Germanized by being compelled to use the German language. The result would have
been fatal. A people of foreign race would have had to use the German language
to express modes of thought that were foreign to the German, thus compromising
by its own inferiority the dignity and nobility of our nation.
It is revolting to think how much damage is indirectly
done to German prestige today through the fact that the German patois of the
Jews when they enter the United States enables them to be classed as Germans,
because many Americans are quite ignorant of German conditions. Among us,
nobody would think of taking these unhygienic immigrants from the East for
members of the German race and nation merely because they mostly speak German.
What has been beneficially Germanized in the course of history was
the land which our ancestors conquered with the sword and colonized with German
tillers of the soil. To the extent that they introduced foreign blood into our
national body in this colonization, they have helped to disintegrate our racial
character, a process which has resulted in our German hyper-individualism,
though this latter characteristic is even now frequently praised.
In this third group also there are people who, to a
certain degree, consider the State as an end in itself. Hence they consider its
preservation as one of the highest aims of human existence. Our analysis may be
summed up as follows:
All these opinions have this common feature and failing:
that they are not grounded in a recognition of the profound truth that the
capacity for creating cultural values is essentially based on the racial
element and that, in accordance with this fact, the paramount purpose of the
State is to preserve and improve the race; for this is an indispensable
condition of all progress in human civilization.
Thus the Jew, Karl Marx, was able to draw the final
conclusions from these false concepts and ideas on the nature and purpose of
the State. By eliminating from the concept of the State all thought of the
obligation which the State bears towards the race, without finding any other
formula that might be universally accepted, the bourgeois teaching prepared the
way for that doctrine which rejects the State as such.
That is why the bourgeois struggle against Marxist
internationalism is absolutely doomed to fail in this field. The bourgeois
classes have already sacrificed the basic principles which alone could furnish
a solid footing for their ideas. Their crafty opponent has perceived the
defects in their structure and advances to the assault on it with those weapons
which they themselves have placed in his hands though not meaning to do so.
Therefore any new movement which is based on the racial concept of
the world will first of all have to put forward a clear and logical doctrine of
the nature and purpose of the State.
The fundamental principle is that the State is not an end
in itself but the means to an end. It is the preliminary condition under which
alone a higher form of human civilization can be developed, but it is not the
source of such a development. This is to be sought exclusively in the actual
existence of a race which is endowed with the gift of cultural creativeness.
There may be hundreds of excellent States on this earth, and yet if the Aryan,
who is the creator and custodian of civilization, should disappear, all culture
that is on an adequate level with the spiritual needs of the superior nations
today would also disappear. We may go still further and say that the fact that
States have been created by human beings does not in the least exclude the
possiblity that the human race may become extinct, because the superior
intellectual faculties and powers of adaptation would be lost when the racial
bearer of these faculties and powers disappeared.
If, for instance, the surface of the globe should be
shaken today by some seismic convulsion and if a new Himalaya would emerge from
the waves of the sea, this one catastrophe alone might annihilate human
civilization. No State could exist any longer. All order would be shattered.
And all vestiges of cultural products which had been evolved through thousands
of years would disappear. Nothing would be left but one tremendous field of
death and destruction submerged in floods of water and mud. If, however, just a
few people would survive this terrible havoc, and if these people belonged to a
definite race that had the innate powers to build up a civilization, when the
commotion had passed, the earth would again bear witness to the creative power
of the human spirit, even though a span of a thousand years might intervene.
Only with the extermination of the last race that possesses the gift of
cultural creativeness, and indeed only if all the individuals of that race had
disappeared, would the earth definitely be turned into a desert. On the other
hand, modern history furnishes examples to show that statal institutions which
owe their beginnings to members of a race which lacks creative genius are not
made of stuff that will endure. Just as many varieties of prehistoric animals
had to give way to others and leave no trace behind them, so man will also have
to give way, if he loses that definite faculty which enables him to find the
weapons that are necessary for him to maintain his own existence.
It is not the State as such that brings about a certain
definite advance in cultural progress. The State can only protect the race that
is the cause of such progress. The State as such may well exist without
undergoing any change for hundreds of years, though the cultural faculties and
the general life of the people, which is shaped by these faculties, may have
suffered profound changes by reason of the fact that the State did not prevent
a process of racial mixture from taking place. The present State, for instance,
may continue to exist in a mere mechanical form, but the poison of
miscegenation permeating the national body brings about a cultural decadence
which manifests itself already in various symptoms that are of a detrimental
character.
Thus the indispensable prerequisite for the existence of
a superior quality of human beings is not the State but the race, which is
alone capable of producing that higher human quality.
This capacity is always there, though it will lie dormant
unless external circumstances awaken it to action. Nations, or rather races,
which are endowed with the faculty of cultural creativeness possess this
faculty in a latent form during periods when the external circumstances are
unfavourable for the time being and therefore do not allow the faculty to
express itself effectively. It is therefore outrageously unjust to speak of the
pre-Christian Germans as barbarians who had no civilization. They never have
been such. But the severity of the climate that prevailed in the northern
regions which they inhabited imposed conditions of life which hampered a free
development of their creative faculties. If they had come to the fairer climate
of the South, with no previous culture whatsoever, and if they acquired the
necessary human material – that is to say, men of an inferior race – to serve
them as working implements, the cultural faculty dormant in them would have
splendidly blossomed forth, as happened in the case of the Greeks, for example.
But this primordial creative faculty in cultural things was not solely due to
their northern climate. For the Laplanders or the Eskimos would not have become
creators of a culture if they were transplanted to the South. No, this
wonderful creative faculty is a special gift bestowed on the Aryan, whether it
lies dormant in him or becomes active, according as the adverse conditions of
nature prevent the active expression of that faculty or favourable
circumstances permit it.
From these facts the following conclusions may be drawn:
The State is only a means to an end. Its end and its purpose is to
preserve and promote a community of human beings who are physically as well as
spiritually kindred. Above all, it must preserve the existence of the race,
thereby providing the indispensable condition for the free development of all
the forces dormant in this race. A great part of these faculties will always
have to be employed in the first place to maintain the physical existence of
the race, and only a small portion will be free to work in the field of
intellectual progress. But, as a matter of fact, the one is always the
necessary counterpart of the other.
Those States which do not serve this purpose have no
justification for their existence. They are monstrosities. The fact that they
do exist is no more of a justification than the successful raids carried out by
a band of pirates can be considered a justification of piracy.
We National Socialists, who are fighting for a new
philosophy of life must never take our stand on the famous 'basis of facts',
and especially not on mistaken facts. If we did so, we should cease to be the
protagonists of a new and great idea and would become slaves in the service of
the fallacy which is dominant today. We must make a clear-cut distinction
between the vessel and its contents. The State is only the vessel and the race
is what it contains. The vessel can have a meaning only if it preserves and
safeguards the contents. Otherwise it is worthless.
Hence the supreme purpose of the folkish State is to
guard and preserve those original racial elements which, through their work in
the cultural field, create that beauty and dignity which are characteristic of
a higher mankind. We, as Aryans, can consider the State only as the living
organism of a people, an organism which does not merely maintain the existence
of a people, but functions in such a way as to lead its people to a position of
supreme liberty by the progressive development of the intellectual and cultural
faculties.
What they want to impose upon us as a State today is in
most cases nothing but a monstrosity, the product of a profound human
aberration which brings untold suffering in its train.
We National Socialists know that in holding these views we
take up a revolutionary stand in the world of today and that we are branded as
revolutionaries. But our views and our conduct will not be determined by the
approbation or disapprobation of our contemporaries, but only by our duty to
follow a truth which we have acknowledged. In doing this we have reason to
believe that posterity will have a clearer insight, and will not only
understand the work we are doing today, but will also ratify it as the right
work and will exalt it accordingly.
On these principles we National Socialists base our
standards of value in appraising a State. This value will be relative when
viewed from the particular standpoint of the individual nation, but it will be
absolute when considered from the standpoint of humanity as a whole. In other
words, this means:
The quality of a State can never be judged by the level
of its culture or the degree of importance which the outside world attaches to
its power, but that its excellence must be judged by the degree to which its
institutions serve the racial stock which belongs to it.
A State may be considered as a model example if it
adequately serves not only the vital needs of the racial stock it represents
but if it actually assures by its own existence the preservation of this same
racial stock, no matter what general cultural significance this statal
institution may have in the eyes of the rest of the world. For it is not the
task of the State to create human capabilities, but only to assure free scope
for the exercise of capabilities that already exist. Thus, conversely, a State
may be called bad if, in spite of the existence of a high cultural level, it
dooms to destruction the bearers of that culture by breaking up their racial
uniformity. For the practical effect of such a policy would be to destroy those
conditions that are indispensable for the ulterior existence of that culture,
which the State did not create but which is the fruit of the creative power
inherent in the racial stock whose existence is assured by being united in the
living organism of the State. Once again let me emphasize the fact that the
State itself is not the substance but the form. Therefore, the cultural level
is not the standard by which we can judge the value of the State in which that
people lives. It is evident that a people which is endowed with high creative
powers in the cultural sphere is of more worth than a tribe of negroes. And yet
the statal organization of the former, if judged from the standpoint of
efficiency, may be worse than that of the negroes. Not even the best of States
and statal institutions can evolve faculties from a people which they lack and
which they never possessed, but a bad State may gradually destroy the faculties
which once existed. This it can do by allowing or favouring the suppression of
those who are the bearers of a racial culture.
Therefore, the worth of a State can be determined only by
asking how far it actually succeeds in promoting the well-being of a definite
race and not by the role which it plays in the world at large. Its relative
worth can be estimated readily and accurately; but it is difficult to judge its
absolute worth, because the latter is conditioned not only by the State but
also by the quality and cultural level of the people that belong to the
individual State in question.
Therefore, when we speak of the high mission of the State
we must not forget that the high mission belongs to the people and that the
business of the State is to use its organizing powers for the purpose of
furnishing the necessary conditions which allow this people freely to unfold
its creative faculties. And if we ask what kind of statal institution we
Germans need, we must first have a clear notion as to the people which that
State must embrace and what purpose it must serve.
Unfortunately the German national being is not based on a
uniform racial type. The process of welding the original elements together has
not gone so far as to warrant us in saying that a new race has emerged. On the
contrary, the poison which has invaded the national body, especially since the
Thirty Years' War, has destroyed the uniform constitution not only of our blood
but also of our national soul. The open frontiers of our native country, the
association with non-German foreign elements in the territories that lie all
along those frontiers, and especially the strong influx of foreign blood into
the interior of the Reich itself, has prevented any complete assimilation of
those various elements, because the influx has continued steadily. Out of this
melting-pot no new race arose. The heterogeneous elements continue to exist
side by side. And the result is that, especially in times of crisis, when the
herd usually flocks together, the Germans disperse in all directions. The
fundamental racial elements are not only different in different districts, but
there are also various elements in the single districts. Beside the Nordic type
we find the East-European type, beside the Eastern there is the Dinaric, the
Western type intermingling with both, and hybrids among them all. That is a
grave drawback for us. Through it the Germans lack that strong herd instinct
which arises from unity of blood and saves nations from ruin in dangerous and
critical times; because on such occasions small differences disappear, so that
a united herd faces the enemy. What we understand by the word
hyper-individualism arises from the fact that our primordial racial elements
have existed side by side without ever consolidating. During times of peace
such a situation may offer some advantages, but, taken all in all, it has
prevented us from gaining a mastery in the world. If in its historical
development the German people had possessed the unity of herd instinct by which
other peoples have so much benefited, then the German Reich would probably be
mistress of the globe today. World history would have taken another course and
in this case no man can tell if what many blinded pacifists hope to attain by
petitioning, whining and crying, may not have been reached in this way: namely,
a peace which would not be based upon the waving of olive branches and tearful
misery-mongering of pacifist old women, but a peace that would be guaranteed by
the triumphant sword of a people endowed with the power to master the world and
administer it in the service of a higher civilization.
The fact that our people did not have a national being
based on a unity of blood has been the source of untold misery for us. To many
petty German potentates it gave residential capital cities, but the German
people as a whole was deprived of its right to rulership.
Even today our nation still suffers from this lack of
inner unity; but what has been the cause of our past and present misfortunes
may turn out a blessing for us in the future. Though on the one hand it may be
a drawback that our racial elements were not welded together, so that no
homogeneous national body could develop, on the other hand, it was fortunate
that, since at least a part of our best blood was thus kept pure, its racial
quality was not debased.
A complete assimilation of all our racial elements would
certainly have brought about a homogeneous national organism; but, as has been
proved in the case of every racial mixture, it would have been less capable of
creating a civilization than by keeping intact its best original elements. A
benefit which results from the fact that there was no all-round assimilation is
to be seen in that even now we have large groups of German Nordic people within
our national organization, and that their blood has not been mixed with the
blood of other races. We must look upon this as our most valuable treasure for
the sake of the future. During that dark period of absolute ignorance in regard
to all racial laws, when each individual was considered to be on a par with
every other, there could be no clear appreciation of the difference between the
various fundamental racial characteristics. We know today that a complete
assimilation of all the various elements which constitute the national being
might have resulted in giving us a larger share of external power: but, on the
other hand, the highest of human aims would not have been attained, because the
only kind of people which fate has obviously chosen to bring about this
perfection would have been lost in such a general mixture of races which would
constitute such a racial amalgamation.
But what has been prevented by a friendly Destiny,
without any assistance on our part, must now be reconsidered and utilized in
the light of our new knowledge.
He who talks of the German people as having a mission to
fulfil on this earth must know that this cannot be fulfilled except by the
building up of a State whose highest purpose is to preserve and promote those
nobler elements of our race and of the whole of mankind which have remained
unimpaired.
Thus for the first time a high inner purpose is
accredited to the State. In face of the ridiculous phrase that the State should
do no more than act as the guardian of public order and tranquillity, so that
everybody can peacefully dupe everybody else, it is given a very high mission
indeed to preserve and encourage the highest type of humanity which a
beneficent Creator has bestowed on this earth. Out of a dead mechanism which
claims to be an end in itself a living organism shall arise which has to serve
one purpose exclusively: and that, indeed, a purpose which belongs to a higher
order of ideas.
As a State the German Reich shall include all Germans.
Its task is not only to gather in and foster the most valuable sections of our
people but to lead them slowly and surely to a dominant position in the world.
Thus a period of stagnation is superseded by a period of
effort. And here, as in every other sphere, the proverb holds good that to rest
is to rust; and furthermore the proverb that victory will always be won by him
who attacks. The higher the final goal which we strive to reach, and the less
it be understood at the time by the broad masses, the more magnificent will be
its success. That is what the lesson of history teaches. And the achievement
will be all the more significant if the end is conceived in the right way and
the fight carried through with unswerving persistence.
Many of the officials who direct the affairs of State
nowadays may find it easier to work for the maintenance of the present
order than to fight for a new one. They will find it more comfortable to look
upon the State as a mechanism, whose purpose is its own preservation, and to
say that their lives 'belong to the State' -- as if anything that grew from the
inner life of the nation can logically serve anything but the national being,
and as if man could be made for anything else than for his fellow beings.
Naturally, it is easier, as I have said, to consider the authority of the State
as nothing but the formal mechanism of an organization, rather than as the
sovereign incarnation of a people's instinct for self-preservation on this
earth. For these weak minds the State and the authority of the State is nothing
but an aim in itself, while for us it is an effective weapon in the service of
the great and eternal struggle for existence, a weapon which everyone must
adopt, not because it is a mere formal mechanism, but because it is the main
expression of our common will to exist.
Therefore, in the fight for our new idea, which conforms
completely to the primal meaning of life, we shall find only a small number of
comrades in a social order which has become decrepit not only physically but
mentally also. From these strata of our population only a few exceptional
people will join our ranks, only those few old people whose hearts have
remained young and whose courage is still vigorous, but not those who consider
it their duty to maintain the state of affairs that exists.
Against us we have the innumerable army of all those who
are lazy-minded and indifferent rather than evil, and those whose self-interest
leads them to uphold the present state of affairs. On the apparent hopelessness
of our great struggle is based the magnitude of our task and the possibilities
of success. A battle-cry which from the very start will scare off all the petty
spirits, or at least discourage them, will become the signal for a rally of all
those temperaments that are of the real fighting metal. And it must be clearly
recognized that if a highly energetic and active body of men emerge from a
nation and unite in the fight for one goal, thereby ultimately rising above the
inert masses of the people, this small percentage will become masters of the
whole. World history is made by minorities if these numerical minorities
represent in themselves the will and energy and initiative of the people as a
whole.
What seems an obstacle to many persons is really a preliminary
condition of our victory. Just because our task is so great and because so many
difficulties have to be overcome, the highest probability is that only the best
kind of protagonists will join our ranks. This selection is the guarantee of
our success.
Nature generally takes certain measures to correct the
effect which racial mixture produces in life. She is not much in favour of the
mongrel. The later products of cross-breeding have to suffer bitterly,
especially the third, fourth and fifth generations. Not only are they deprived
of the higher qualities that belonged to the parents who participated in the
first mixture, but they also lack definite will-power and vigorous vital
energies owing to the lack of harmony in the quality of their blood. At all
critical moments in which a person of pure racial blood makes correct
decisions, that is to say, decisions that are coherent and uniform, the person
of mixed blood will become confused and take measures that are incoherent.
Hence we see that a person of mixed blood is not only relatively inferior to a
person of pure blood, but is also doomed to become extinct more rapidly. In
innumerable cases wherein the pure race holds its ground the mongrel breaks
down. Therein we witness the corrective provision which Nature adopts. She
restricts the possibilities of procreation, thus impeding the fertility of
cross-breeds and bringing them to extinction.
For instance, if an individual member of a race should
mingle his blood with the member of a superior race the first result would be a
lowering of the racial level, and furthermore the descendants of this
cross-breeding would be weaker than those of the people around them who had
maintained their blood unadulterated. Where no new blood from the superior race
enters the racial stream of the mongrels, and where those mongrels continue to
cross-breed among themselves, the latter will either die out because they have
insufficient powers of resistance, which is Nature's wise provision, or in the
course of many thousands of years they will form a new mongrel race in which
the original elements will become so wholly mixed through this millennial
crossing that traces of the original elements will be no longer recognizable.
And thus a new people would be developed which possessed a certain resistance
capacity of the herd type, but its intellectual value and its cultural
significance would be essentially inferior to those which the first
cross-breeds possessed. But even in this last case the mongrel product would
succumb in the mutual struggle for existence with a higher racial group that
had maintained its blood unmixed. The herd solidarity which this mongrel race
had developed through thousands of years will not be equal to the struggle. And
this is because it would lack elasticity and constructive capacity to prevail
over a race of homogeneous blood that was mentally and culturally superior.
Therewith we may lay down the following principle as valid:
every racial mixture leads, of necessity, sooner or later to the
downfall of the mongrel product, provided the higher racial strata of this
cross-breed has not retained within itself some sort of racial homogeneity. The
danger to the mongrels ceases only when this higher stratum, which has
maintained certain standards of homogeneous breeding, ceases to be true to its
pedigree and intermingles with the mongrels.
This principle is the source of a slow but constant
regeneration whereby all the poison which has invaded the racial body is
gradually eliminated so long as there still remains a fundamental stock of pure
racial elements which resists further crossbreeding.
Such a process may set in automatically among those people
where a strong racial instinct has remained. Among such people we may count
those elements which, for some particular cause such as coercion, have been
thrown out of the normal way of reproduction along strict racial lines. As soon
as this compulsion ceases, that part of the race which has remained intact will
tend to marry with its own kind and thus impede further intermingling. Then the
mongrels recede quite naturally into the background unless their numbers had
increased so much as to be able to withstand all serious resistance from those
elements which had preserved the purity of their race.
When men have lost their natural instincts and ignore the
obligations imposed on them by Nature, then there is no hope that Nature will
correct the loss that has been caused, until recognition of the lost instincts
has been restored. Then the task of bringing back what has been lost will have
to be accomplished. But there is serious danger that those who have become
blind once in this respect will continue more and more to break down racial
barriers and finally lose the last remnants of what is best in them. What then
remains is nothing but a uniform mish-mash, which seems to be the dream of our
fine Utopians. But that mish-mash would soon banish all ideals from the world.
Certainly a great herd could thus be formed. One can breed a herd of animals;
but from a mixture of this kind men such as have created and founded
civilizations would not be produced. The mission of humanity might then be
considered at an end.
Those who do not wish that the earth should fall into
such a condition must realize that it is the task of the German State in
particular to see to it that the process of bastardization is brought to a
stop.
Our contemporary generation of weaklings will naturally decry such a
policy and whine and complain about it as an encroachment on the most sacred of
human rights. But there is only one right that is sacrosanct and this right is
at the same time a most sacred duty. This right and obligation are: that the
purity of the racial blood should be guarded, so that the best types of human
beings may be preserved and that thus we should render possible a more noble
development of humanity itself.
A folk-State should in the first place raise matrimony
from the level of being a constant scandal to the race. The State should
consecrate it as an institution which is called upon to produce creatures made
in the likeness of the Lord and not create monsters that are a mixture of man
and ape. The protest which is put forward in the name of humanity does not fit
the mouth of a generation that makes it possible for the most depraved
degenerates to propagate themselves, thereby imposing unspeakable suffering on
their own products and their contemporaries, while on the other hand
contraceptives are permitted and sold in every drug store and even by street
hawkers, so that babies should not be born even among the healthiest of our
people. In this present State of ours, whose function it is to be the guardian
of peace and good order, our national bourgeoisie look upon it as a crime to
make procreation impossible for syphilitics and those who suffer from
tuberculosis or other hereditary diseases, also cripples and imbeciles. But the
practical prevention of procreation among millions of our very best people is
not considered as an evil, nor does it offend against the noble morality of
this social class but rather encourages their short-sightedness and mental
lethargy. For otherwise they would at least stir their brains to find an answer
to the question of how to create conditions for the feeding and maintaining of
those future beings who will be the healthy representatives of our nation and
must also provide the conditions on which the generation that is to follow them
will have to support itself and live.
How devoid of ideals and how ignoble is the whole
contemporary system! The fact that the churches join in committing this sin
against the image of God, even though they continue to emphasize the dignity of
that image, is quite in keeping with their present activities. They talk about
the Spirit, but they allow man, as the embodiment of the Spirit, to degenerate
to the proletarian level. Then they look on with amazement when they realize
how small is the influence of the Christian Faith in their own country and how
depraved and ungodly is this riff-raff which is physically degenerate and
therefore morally degenerate also. To balance this state of affairs they try to
convert the Hottentots and the Zulus and the Kaffirs and to bestow on them the
blessings of the Church. While our European people, God be praised and thanked,
are left to become the victims of moral depravity, the pious missionary goes
out to Central Africa and establishes missionary stations for negroes. Finally,
sound and healthy – though primitive and backward – people will be transformed,
under the name of our 'higher civilization', into a motley of lazy and
brutalized mongrels.
It would better accord with noble human aspirations if
our two Christian denominations would cease to bother the negroes with their
preaching, which the negroes neither desire nor understand. It would be better
if they left this work alone, and if, in its stead, they tried to teach people
in Europe, kindly and seriously, that it is much more pleasing to God if a
couple that is not of healthy stock were to show loving kindness to some poor
orphan and become a father and mother to him, rather than give life to a sickly
child that will be a cause of suffering and unhappiness to all.
In this field the People's State will have to repair the
damage that arises from the fact that the problem is at present neglected by
all the various parties concerned. It will be the task of the People's State to
make the race the centre of the life of the community. It must make sure that
the purity of the racial strain will be preserved. It must proclaim the truth
that the child is the most valuable possession a people can have. It must see
to it that only those who are healthy shall beget children; that there is only
one infamy, namely, for parents that are ill or show hereditary defects to
bring children into the world and that in such cases it is a high honour to
refrain from doing so. But, on the other hand, it must be considered as
reprehensible conduct to refrain from giving healthy children to the nation. In
this matter the State must assert itself as the trustee of a millennial future,
in face of which the egotistic desires of the individual count for nothing and
will have to give way before the ruling of the State. In order to fulfil this
duty in a practical manner the State will have to avail itself of modern
medical discoveries. It must proclaim as unfit for procreation all those who
are inflicted with some visible hereditary disease or are the carriers of it;
and practical measures must be adopted to have such people rendered sterile. On
the other hand, provision must be made for the normally fertile woman so that
she will not be restricted in child-bearing through the financial and economic
system operating in a political regime that looks upon the blessing of having
children as a curse to their parents. The State will have to abolish the
cowardly and even criminal indifference with which the problem of social
amenities for large families is treated, and it will have to be the supreme
protector of this greatest blessing that a people can boast of. Its attention
and care must be directed towards the child rather than the adult.
Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unfit must not
perpetuate their own suffering in the bodies of their children. From the
educational point of view there is here a huge task for the People's State to
accomplish. But in a future era this work will appear greater and more
significant than the victorious wars of our present bourgeois epoch. Through
educational means the State must teach individuals that illness is not a
disgrace but an unfortunate accident which has to be pitied, yet that it is a
crime and a disgrace to make this affliction all the worse by passing on
disease and defects to innocent creatures out of mere egotism. And the State
must also teach the people that it is an expression of a really noble nature
and that it is a humanitarian act worthy of admiration if a person who
innocently suffers from hereditary disease refrains from having a child of his
own but gives his love and affection to some unknown child who, through its
health, promises to become a robust member of a healthy community. In
accomplishing such an educational task the State integrates its function by
this activity in the moral sphere. It must act on this principle without paying
any attention to the question of whether its conduct will be understood or
misconstrued, blamed or praised.
If for a period of only 600 years those individuals would
be sterilized who are physically degenerate or mentally diseased, humanity
would not only be delivered from an immense misfortune but also restored to a
state of general health such as we at present can hardly imagine. If the
fecundity of the healthy portion of the nation should be made a practical
matter in a conscientious and methodical way, we should have at least the
beginnings of a race from which all those germs would be eliminated which are
today the cause of our moral and physical decadence. If a people and a State
take this course to develop that nucleus of the nation which is most valuable
from the racial standpoint and thus increase its fecundity, the people as a
whole will subsequently enjoy that most precious of gifts which consists in a
racial quality fashioned on truly noble lines.
To achieve this the State should first of all not leave
the colonization of newly acquired territory to a haphazard policy but should
have it carried out under the guidance of definite principles. Specially
competent committees ought to issue certificates to individuals entitling them
to engage in colonization work, and these certificates should guarantee the
racial purity of the individuals in question. In this way frontier colonies
could gradually be founded whose inhabitants would be of the purest racial
stock, and hence would possess the best qualities of the race. Such colonies
would be a valuable asset to the whole nation. Their development would be a
source of joy and confidence and pride to each citizen of the nation, because
they would contain the pure germ which would ultimately bring about a great
development of the nation and indeed of mankind itself.
The folkish philosophy of life which bases the State on
the racial idea must finally succeed in bringing about a nobler era, in which
men will no longer pay exclusive attention to breeding and rearing pedigree
dogs and horses and cats, but will endeavour to improve the breed of the human
race itself. That will be an era of silence and renunciation for one class of
people, while the others will give their gifts and make their sacrifices
joyfully.
That such a mentality may be possible cannot be denied in
a world where hundreds and thousands accept the principle of celibacy from
their own choice, without being obliged or pledged to do so by anything except
an ecclesiastical precept. Why should it not be possible to induce people to
make this sacrifice if, instead of such a precept, they were simply told that
they ought to put an end to this truly original sin of racial corruption which
is steadily being passed on from one generation to another. And, further, they
ought to be brought to realize that it is their bounden duty to give to the
Almighty Creator beings such as He himself made to His own image.
Naturally, our wretched army of contemporary philistines
will not understand these things. They will ridicule them or shrug their round
shoulders and groan out their everlasting excuses: "Of course it is a fine
thing, but the pity is that it cannot be carried out." And we reply: "With you
indeed it cannot be done, for your world is incapable of such an idea. You know
only one anxiety and that is for your own personal existence. You have one God,
and that is your money. We do not turn to you, however, for help, but to the
great army of those who are too poor to consider their personal existence as
the highest good on earth. They do not place their trust in money but in other
gods, into whose hands they confide their lives. Above all we turn to the vast
army of our German youth. They are coming to maturity in a great epoch, and
they will fight against the evils which were due to the laziness and
indifference of their fathers." Either the German youth will one day create a
new State founded on the racial idea or they will be the last witnesses of the
complete breakdown and death of the bourgeois world.
For if a generation suffers from defects which it
recognizes and even admits and is nevertheless quite pleased with itself, as
the bourgeois world is today, resorting to the cheap excuse that nothing can be
done to remedy the situation, then such a generation is doomed to disaster. A
marked characteristic of our bourgeois world is that they no longer can deny
the evil conditions that exist. They have to admit that there is much which is
foul and wrong; but they are not able to make up their minds to fight against
that evil, which would mean putting forth the energy to mobilize the forces of
60 or 70 million people and thus oppose this menace. They do just the opposite.
When such an effort is made elsewhere they only indulge in silly comment and
try from a safe distance to show that such an enterprise is theoretically
impossible and doomed to failure. No arguments are too stupid to be employed in
the service of their own pettifogging opinions and their knavish moral
attitude. If, for instance, a whole continent wages war against alcoholic
intoxication, so as to free a whole people from this devastating vice, our
bourgeois European does not know better than to look sideways stupidly, shake
the head in doubt and ridicule the movement with a superior sneer – a state of
mind which is effective in a society that is so ridiculous. But when all these
stupidities miss their aim and in that part of the world this sublime and
intangible attitude is treated effectively and success attends the movement,
then such success is called into question or its importance minimized. Even
moral principles are used in this slanderous campaign against a movement which
aims at suppressing a great source of immorality.
No. We must not permit ourselves to be deceived by any
illusions on this point. Our contemporary bourgeois world has become useless
for any such noble human task because it has lost all high quality and is evil,
not so much - as I think - because evil is wished but rather because these
people are too indolent to rise up against it. That is why those political
societies which call themselves 'bourgeois parties' are nothing but
associations to promote the interests of certain professional groups and
classes. Their highest aim is to defend their own egoistic interests as best
they can. It is obvious that such a guild, consisting of bourgeois politicians,
may be considered fit for anything rather than a struggle, especially when the
adversaries are not cautious shopkeepers but the proletarian masses, goaded on
to extremities and determined not to hesitate before deeds of violence.
If we consider it the first duty of the State to serve and promote
the general welfare of the people, by preserving and encouraging the
development of the best racial elements, the logical consequence is that this
task cannot be limited to measures concerning the birth of the infant members
of the race and nation but that the State will also have to adopt educational
means for making each citizen a worthy factor in the further propagation of the
racial stock.
Just as, in general, the racial quality is the preliminary
condition for the mental efficiency of any given human material, the training
of the individual will first of all have to be directed towards the development
of sound bodily health. For the general rule is that a strong and healthy mind
is found only in a strong and healthy body. The fact that men of genius are
sometimes not robust in health and stature, or even of a sickly constitution,
is no proof against the principle I have enunciated. These cases are only
exceptions which, as everywhere else, prove the rule. But when the bulk of a
nation is composed of physical degenerates it is rare for a great spirit to
arise from such a miserable motley. And in any case his activities would never
meet with great success. A degenerate mob will either be incapable of
understanding him at all or their will-power is so feeble that they cannot
follow the soaring of such an eagle.
The State that is grounded on the racial principle and is
alive to the significance of this truth will first of all have to base its
educational work not on the mere imparting of knowledge but rather on physical
training and development of healthy bodies. The cultivation of the intellectual
facilities comes only in the second place. And here again it is character which
has to be developed first of all, strength of will and decision. And the
educational system ought to foster the spirit of readiness to accept
responsibilities gladly. Formal instruction in the sciences must be considered
last in importance. Accordingly the State which is grounded on the racial idea
must start with the principle that a person whose formal education in the
sciences is relatively small but who is physically sound and robust, of a
steadfast and honest character, ready and able to make decisions and endowed
with strength of will, is a more useful member of the national community than a
weakling who is scholarly and refined. A nation composed of learned men who are
physical weaklings, hesitant about decisions of the will, and timid pacifists,
is not capable of assuring even its own existence on this earth. In the bitter
struggle which decides the destiny of man it is very rare that an individual
has succumbed because he lacked learning. Those who fail are they who try to
ignore these consequences and are too faint-hearted about putting them into
effect. There must be a certain balance between mind and body. An ill-kept body
is not made a more beautiful sight by the indwelling of a radiant spirit. We
should not be acting justly if we were to bestow the highest intellectual
training on those who are physically deformed and crippled, who lack decision
and are weak-willed and cowardly. What has made the Greek ideal of beauty
immortal is the wonderful union of a splendid physical beauty with nobility of
mind and spirit.
Moltke's saying, that in the long run fortune favours
only the efficient, is certainly valid for the relationship between body and
spirit. A mind which is sound will generally maintain its dwelling in a body
that is sound.
Accordingly, in the People's State physical training is
not a matter for the individual alone. Nor is it a duty which first devolves on
the parents and only secondly or thirdly a public interest; but it is necessary
for the preservation of the people, who are represented and protected by the
State. As regards purely formal education the State even now interferes with
the individual's right of self-determination and insists upon the right of the
community by submitting the child to an obligatory system of training, without
paying attention to the approval or disapproval of the parents. In a similar
way and to a higher degree the new People's State will one day make its
authority prevail over the ignorance and incomprehension of individuals in
problems appertaining to the safety of the nation. It must organize its
educational work in such a way that the bodies of the young will be
systematically trained from infancy onwards, so as to be tempered and hardened
for the demands to be made on them in later years. Above all, the State must
see to it that a generation of stay-at-homes is not developed.
The work of education and hygiene has to begin with the
young mother. The painstaking efforts carried on for several decades have
succeeded in abolishing septic infection at childbirth and reducing puerperal
fever to a relatively small number of cases. And so it ought to be possible by
means of instructing sisters and mothers in an opportune way, to institute a
system of training the child from early infancy onwards so that this may serve
as an excellent basis for future development.
The People's State ought to allow much more time for
physical training in the school. It is nonsense to burden young brains with a
load of material of which, as experience shows, they retain only a small part,
and mostly not the essentials, but only the secondary and useless portion;
because the young mind is incapable of sifting the right kind of learning out
of all the stuff that is pumped into it. To-day, even in the curriculum of the
high schools, only two short hours in the week are reserved for gymnastics; and
worse still, it is left to the pupils to decide whether or not they want to
take part. This shows a grave disproportion between this branch of education
and purely intellectual instruction. Not a single day should be allowed to pass
in which the young pupil does not have one hour of physical training in the
morning and one in the evening; and every kind of sport and gymnastics should
be included. There is one kind of sport which should be specially encouraged,
although many people who call themselves völkisch consider it brutal and
vulgar, and that is boxing. It is incredible how many false notions prevail
among the 'cultivated' classes. The fact that the young man learns how to fence
and then spends his time in duels is considered quite natural and respectable.
But boxing – that is brutal. Why? There is no other sport which equals this in
developing the militant spirit, none that demands such a power of rapid
decision or which gives the body the flexibility of good steel. It is no more
vulgar when two young people settle their differences with their fists than
with sharp-pointed pieces of steel. One who is attacked and defends himself
with his fists surely does not act less manly than one who runs off and yells
for the assistance of a policeman. But, above all, a healthy youth has to learn
to endure hard knocks. This principle may appear savage to our contemporary
champions who fight only with the weapons of the intellect. But it is not the
purpose of the People's State to educate a colony of æsthetic pacifists and
physical degenerates. This State does not consider that the human ideal is to
be found in the honourable philistine or the maidenly spinster, but in a
dareful personification of manly force and in women capable of bringing men
into the world.
Generally speaking, the function of sport is not only to
make the individual strong, alert and daring, but also to harden the body and
train it to endure an adverse environment.
If our superior class had not received such a
distinguished education, and if, on the contrary, they had learned boxing, it
would never have been possible for bullies and deserters and other such
canaille to carry through a German revolution. For the success of this
revolution was not due to the courageous, energetic and audacious activities of
its authors but to the lamentable cowardice and irresolution of those who ruled
the German State at that time and were responsible for it. But our educated
leaders had received only an 'intellectual' training and thus found themselves
defenceless when their adversaries used iron bars instead of intellectual
weapons. All this could happen only because our superior scholastic system did
not train men to be real men but merely to be civil servants, engineers,
technicians, chemists, litterateurs, jurists and, finally, professors; so that
intellectualism should not die out.
Our leadership in the purely intellectual sphere has
always been brilliant, but as regards will-power in practical affairs our
leadership has been beneath criticism.
Of course education cannot make a courageous man out of
one who is temperamentally a coward. But a man who naturally possesses a
certain degree of courage will not be able to develop that quality if his
defective education has made him inferior to others from the very start as
regards physical strength and prowess. The army offers the best example of the
fact that the knowledge of one's physical ability develops a man's courage and
militant spirit. Outstanding heroes are not the rule in the army, but the
average represents men of high courage. The excellent schooling which the
German soldiers received before the War imbued the members of the whole
gigantic organism with a degree of confidence in their own superiority such as
even our opponents never thought possible. All the immortal examples of
dauntless courage and daring which the German armies gave during the late
summer and autumn of 1914, as they advanced from triumph to triumph, were the
result of that education which had been pursued systematically. During those
long years of peace before the last War men who were almost physical weaklings
were made capable of incredible deeds, and thus a self-confidence was developed
which did not fail even in the most terrible battles.
It is our German people, which broke down and were
delivered over to be kicked by the rest of the world, that had need of the
power that comes by suggestion from self-confidence. But this confidence in
one's self must be instilled into our children from their very early years. The
whole system of education and training must be directed towards fostering in
the child the conviction that he is unquestionably a match for any- and
everybody. The individual has to regain his own physical strength and prowess
in order to believe in the invincibility of the nation to which he belongs.
What has formerly led the German armies to victory was the sum total of the
confidence which each individual had in himself, and which all of them had in
those who held the positions of command. What will restore the national
strength of the German people is the conviction that they will be able to
reconquer their liberty. But this conviction can only be the final product of
an equal feeling in the millions of individuals. And here again we must have no
illusions.
The collapse of our people was overwhelming, and the
efforts to put an end to so much misery must also be overwhelming. It would be
a bitter and grave error to believe that our people could be made strong again
simply by means of our present bourgeois training in good order and obedience.
That will not suffice if we are to break up the present order of things, which
now sanctions the acknowledgment of our defeat and cast the broken chains of
our slavery in the face of our opponents. Only by a superabundance of national
energy and a passionate thirst for liberty can we recover what has been lost.
Also the manner of clothing the young should be such as harmonizes
with this purpose. It is really lamentable to see how our young people have
fallen victims to a fashion mania which perverts the meaning of the old adage
that clothes make the man.
Especially in regard to young people clothes should take
their place in the service of education. The boy who walks about in summer-time
wearing long baggy trousers and clad up to the neck is hampered even by his
clothes in feeling any inclination towards strenuous physical exercise.
Ambition and, to speak quite frankly, even vanity must be appealed to. I do not
mean such vanity as leads people to want to wear fine clothes, which not
everybody can afford, but rather the vanity which inclines a person towards
developing a fine bodily physique. And this is something which everybody can
help to do.
This will come in useful also for later years. The young
girl must become acquainted with her sweetheart. If the beauty of the body were
not completely forced into the background today through our stupid manner of
dressing, it would not be possible for thousands of our girls to be led astray
by Jewish mongrels, with their repulsive crooked waddle. It is also in the
interests of the nation that those who have a beautiful physique should be
brought into the foreground, so that they might encourage the development of a
beautiful bodily form among the people in general.
Military training is excluded among us today, and
therewith the only institution which in peace-times at least partly made up for
the lack of physical training in our education. Therefore what I have suggested
is all the more necessary in our time. The success of our old military training
not only showed itself in the education of the individual but also in the
influence which it exercised over the mutual relationship between the sexes.
The young girl preferred the soldier to one who was not a soldier. The People's
State must not confine its control of physical training to the official school
period, but it must demand that, after leaving school and while the adolescent
body is still developing, the boy continues this training. For on such proper
physical development success in after-life largely depends. It is stupid to
think that the right of the State to supervise the education of its young
citizens suddenly comes to an end the moment they leave school and recommences
only with military service. This right is a duty, and as such it must continue
uninterruptedly. The present State, which does not interest itself in
developing healthy men, has criminally neglected this duty. It leaves our
contemporary youth to be corrupted on the streets and in the brothels, instead
of keeping hold of the reins and continuing the physical training of these
youths up to the time when they are grown into healthy young men and women.
For the present it is a matter of indifference what form the State
chooses for carrying on this training. The essential matter is that it should
be developed and that the most suitable ways of doing so should be
investigated. The People's State will have to consider the physical training of
the youth after the school period just as much a public duty as their
intellectual training; and this training will have to be carried out through
public institutions. Its general lines can be a preparation for subsequent
service in the army. And then it will no longer be the task of the army to
teach the young recruit the most elementary drill regulations. In fact the army
will no longer have to deal with recruits in the present sense of the word, but
it will rather have to transform into a soldier the youth whose bodily prowess
has been already fully trained.
In the People's State the army will no longer be obliged
to teach boys how to walk and stand erect, but it will be the final and supreme
school of patriotic education. In the army the young recruit will learn the art
of bearing arms, but at the same time he will be equipped for his other duties
in later life. And the supreme aim of military education must always be to
achieve that which was attributed to the old army as its highest merit: namely,
that through his military schooling the boy must be transformed into a man,
that he must not only learn to obey but also acquire the fundamentals that will
enable him one day to command. He must learn to remain silent not only when he
is rightly rebuked but also when he is wrongly rebuked.
Furthermore, on the self-consciousness of his own
strength and on the basis of that esprit de corps which inspires him and
his comrades, he must become convinced that he belongs to a people who are
invincible.
After he has completed his military training two
certificates shall be handed to the soldier. The one will be his diploma as a
citizen of the State, a juridical document which will enable him to take part
in public affairs. The second will be an attestation of his physical health,
which guarantees his fitness for marriage.
The People's State will have to direct the education of
girls just as that of boys and according to the same fundamental principles.
Here again special importance must be given to physical training, and only
after that must the importance of spiritual and mental training be taken into
account. In the education of the girl the final goal always to be kept in mind
is that she is one day to be a mother.
It is only in the second place that the People's State
must busy itself with the training of character, using all the means adapted to
that purpose.
Of course the essential traits of the individual
character are already there fundamentally before any education takes place. A
person who is fundamentally egoistic will always remain fundamentally egoistic,
and the idealist will always remain fundamentally an idealist. Besides those,
however, who already possess a definite stamp of character there are millions
of people with characters that are indefinite and vague. The born delinquent
will always remain a delinquent, but numerous people who show only a certain
tendency to commit criminal acts may become useful members of the community if
rightly trained; whereas, on the other hand, weak and unstable characters may
easily become evil elements if the system of education has been bad.
During the War it was often lamented that our people could be so
little reticent. This failing made it very difficult to keep even highly
important secrets from the knowledge of the enemy. But let us ask this
question: What did the German educational system do in pre-War times to teach
the Germans to be discreet? Did it not very often happen in schooldays that the
little tell-tale was preferred to his companions who kept their mouths shut? Is
it not true that then, as well as now, complaining about others was considered
praiseworthy 'candour', while silent discretion was taken as obstinacy? Has any
attempt ever been made to teach that discretion is a precious and manly virtue?
No, for such matters are trifles in the eyes of our educators. But these
trifles cost our State innumerable millions in legal expenses; for 90 per cent
of all the processes for defamation and such like charges arise only from a
lack of discretion. Remarks that are made without any sense of responsibility
are thoughtlessly repeated from mouth to mouth; and our economic welfare is
continually damaged because important methods of production are thus disclosed.
Secret preparations for our national defence are rendered illusory because our
people have never learned the duty of silence. They repeat everything they
happen to hear. In times of war such talkative habits may even cause the loss
of battles and therefore may contribute essentially to the unsuccessful outcome
of a campaign. Here, as in other matters, we may rest assured that adults
cannot do what they have not learnt to do in youth. A teacher must not try to
discover the wild tricks of the boys by encouraging the evil practice of
tale-bearing. Young people form a sort of State among themselves and face
adults with a certain solidarity. That is quite natural. The ties which unite
the ten-year boys to one another are stronger and more natural than their
relationship to adults. A boy who tells on his comrades commits an act of
treason and shows a bent of character which is, to speak bluntly, similar to
that of a man who commits high treason. Such a boy must not be classed as
'good', 'reliable', and so on, but rather as one with undesirable traits of
character. It may be rather convenient for the teacher to make use of such
unworthy tendencies in order to help his own work, but by such an attitude the
germ of a moral habit is sown in young hearts and may one day show fatal
consequences. It has happened more often than once that a young informer
developed into a big scoundrel.
This is only one example among many. The deliberate
training of fine and noble traits of character in our schools today is almost
negative. In the future much more emphasis will have to be laid on this side of
our educational work. Loyalty, self-sacrifice and discretion are virtues which
a great nation must possess. And the teaching and development of these in the
school is a more important matter than many others things now included in the
curriculum. To make the children give up habits of complaining and whining and
howling when they are hurt, etc., also belongs to this part of their training.
If the educational system fails to teach the child at an early age to endure
pain and injury without complaining we cannot be surprised if at a later age,
when the boy has grown to be the man and is, for example, in the trenches, the
postal service is used for nothing else than to send home letters of weeping
and complaint. If our youths, during their years in the primary schools, had
had their minds crammed with a little less knowledge, and if instead they had
been better taught how to be masters of themselves, it would have served us
well during the years 1914–1918.
In its educational system the People's State will have to
attach the highest importance to the development of character, hand-in-hand
with physical training. Many more defects which our national organism shows at
present could be at least ameliorated, if not completely eliminated, by
education of the right kind.
Extreme importance should be attached to the training of
will-power and the habit of making firm decisions, also the habit of being
always ready to accept responsibilities.
In the training of our old army the principle was in
vogue that any order is always better than no order. Applied to our youth this
principle ought to take the form that any answer is better than no answer. The
fear of replying, because one fears to be wrong, ought to be considered more
humiliating than giving the wrong reply. On this simple and primitive basis our
youth should be trained to have the courage to act.
It has been often lamented that in November and December
1918 all the authorities lost their heads and that, from the monarch down to
the last divisional commander, nobody had sufficient mettle to make a decision
on his own responsibility. That terrible fact constitutes a grave rebuke to our
educational system; because what was then revealed on a colossal scale at that
moment of catastrophe was only what happens on a smaller scale everywhere among
us. It is the lack of will-power, and not the lack of arms, which renders us
incapable of offering any serious resistance today. This defect is found
everywhere among our people and prevents decisive action wherever risks have to
be taken, as if any great action can be taken without also taking the risk.
Quite unsuspectingly, a German General found a formula for this lamentable lack
of the will-to-act when he said: "I act only when I can count on a 51 per cent
probability of success." In that '51 per cent probability' we find the very
root of the German collapse. The man who demands from Fate a guarantee of his
success deliberately denies the significance of an heroic act. For this
significance consists in the very fact that, in the definite knowledge that the
situation in question is fraught with mortal danger, an action is undertaken
which may lead to success. A patient suffering from cancer and who knows that
his death is certain if he does not undergo an operation, needs no 51 per cent
probability of a cure before facing the operation. And if the operation
promises only half of one per cent probability of success a man of courage will
risk it and would not whine if it turned out unsuccessful.
All in all, the cowardly lack of will-power and the
incapacity for making decisions are chiefly results of the erroneous education
given us in our youth. The disastrous effects of this are now widespread among
us. The crowning examples of that tragic chain of consequences are shown in the
lack of civil courage which our leading statesmen display.
The cowardice which leads nowadays to the shirking of
every kind of responsibility springs from the same roots. Here again it is the
fault of the education given our young people. This drawback permeates all
sections of public life and finds its immortal consummation in the institutions
of government that function under the parliamentary regime.
Already in the school, unfortunately, more value is
placed on 'confession and full repentance' and 'contrite renouncement', on the
part of little sinners, than on a simple and frank avowal. But this latter
seems today, in the eyes of many an educator, to savour of a spirit of utter
incorrigibility and depravation. And, though it may seem incredible, many a boy
is told that the gallows tree is waiting for him because he has shown certain
traits which might be of inestimable value in the nation as a whole.
Just as the People's State must one day give its attention to
training the will-power and capacity for decision among the youth, so too it
must inculcate in the hearts of the young generation from early childhood
onwards a readiness to accept responsibilities, and the courage of open and
frank avowal. If it recognizes the full significance of this necessity, finally
– after a century of educative work – it will succeed in building up a nation
which will no longer be subject to those defeats that have contributed so
disastrously to bring about our present overthrow.
The formal imparting of knowledge, which constitutes the
chief work of our educational system today, will be taken over by the People's
State with only few modifications. These modifications must be made in three
branches.
First of all, the brains of the young people must not
generally be burdened with subjects of which ninety-five per cent are useless
to them and are therefore forgotten again. The curriculum of the primary and
secondary schools presents an odd mixture at the present time. In many branches
of study the subject matter to be learned has become so enormous that only a
very small fraction of it can be remembered later on, and indeed only a very
small fraction of this whole mass of knowledge can be used. On the other hand,
what is learned is insufficient for anybody who wishes to specialize in any
certain branch for the purpose of earning his daily bread. Take, for example,
the average civil servant who has passed through the Gymnasium or High School,
and ask him at the age of thirty or forty how much he has retained of the
knowledge that was crammed into him with so much pains.
How much is retained from all that was stuffed into his
brain? He will certainly answer: "Well, if a mass of stuff was then taught, it
was not for the sole purpose of supplying the student with a great stock of
knowledge from which he could draw in later years, but it served to develop the
understanding, the memory, and above all it helped to strengthen the thinking
powers of the brain." That is partly true. And yet it is somewhat dangerous to
submerge a young brain in a flood of impressions which it can hardly master and
the single elements of which it cannot discern or appreciate at their just
value. It is mostly the essential part of this knowledge, and not the
accidental, that is forgotten and sacrificed. Thus the principal purpose of
this copious instruction is frustrated, for that purpose cannot be to make the
brain capable of learning by simply offering it an enormous and varied amount
of subjects for acquisition, but rather to furnish the individual with that
stock of knowledge which he will need in later life and which he can use for
the good of the community. This aim, however, is rendered illusory if, because
of the superabundance of subjects that have been crammed into his head in
childhood, a person is able to remember nothing, or at least not the essential
portion, of all this in later life. There is no reason why millions of people
should learn two or three languages during the school years, when only a very
small fraction will have the opportunity to use these languages in later life
and when most of them will therefore forget those languages completely. To take
an instance: Out of 100,000 students who learn French there are probably not
2,000 who will be in a position to make use of this accomplishment in later
life, while 98,000 will never have a chance to utilize in practice what they
have learned in youth. They have spent thousands of hours on a subject which
will afterwards be without any value or importance to them. The argument that
these matters form part of the general process of educating the mind is
invalid. It would be sound if all these people were able to use this learning
in after life. But, as the situation stands, 98,000 are tortured to no purpose
and waste their valuable time, only for the sake of the 2,000 to whom the
language will be of any use.
In the case of that language which I have chosen as an
example it cannot be said that the learning of it educates the student in
logical thinking or sharpens his mental acumen, as the learning of Latin, for
instance, might be said to do. It would therefore be much better to teach young
students only the general outline, or, better, the inner structure of such a
language: that is to say, to allow them to discern the characteristic features
of the language, or perhaps to make them acquainted with the rudiments of its
grammar, its pronunciation, its syntax, style, etc. That would be sufficient
for average students, because it would provide a clearer view of the whole and
could be more easily remembered. And it would be more practical than the
present-day attempt to cram into their heads a detailed knowledge of the whole
language, which they can never master and which they will readily forget. If
this method were adopted, then we should avoid the danger that, out of the
superabundance of matter taught, only some fragments will remain in the memory;
for the youth would then have to learn what is worth while, and the selection
between the useful and the useless would thus have been made beforehand.
As regards the majority of students the knowledge and understanding
of the rudiments of a language would be quite sufficient for the rest of their
lives. And those who really do need this language subsequently would thus have
a foundation on which to start, should they choose to make a more thorough
study of it.
By adopting such a curriculum the necessary amount of time
would be gained for physical exercises as well as for a more intense training
in the various educational fields that have already been mentioned.
A
reform of particular importance is that which ought to take place in the
present methods of teaching history. Scarcely any other people are made to
study as much of history as the Germans, and scarcely any other people make
such a bad use of their historical knowledge. If politics means history in the
making, then our way of teaching history stands condemned by the way we have
conducted our politics. But there would be no point in bewailing the lamentable
results of our political conduct unless one is now determined to give our
people a better political education. In 99 out of 100 cases the results of our
present teaching of history are deplorable. Usually only a few dates, years of
birth and names, remain in the memory, while a knowledge of the main and
clearly defined lines of historical development is completely lacking. The
essential features which are of real significance are not taught. It is left to
the more or less bright intelligence of the individual to discover the inner
motivating urge amid the mass of dates and chronological succession of events.
You may object as strongly as you like to this unpleasant statement.
But read with attention the speeches which our parliamentarians make during one
session alone on political problems and on questions of foreign policy in
particular. Remember that those gentlemen are, or claim to be, the elite of the
German nation and that at least a great number of them have sat on the benches
of our secondary schools and that many of them have passed through our
universities. Then you will realize how defective the historical education of
these people has been. If these gentlemen had never studied history at all but
had possessed a sound instinct for public affairs, things would have gone
better, and the nation would have benefited greatly thereby.
The subject matter of our historical teaching must be
curtailed. The chief value of that teaching is to make the principal lines of
historical development understood. The more our historical teaching is limited
to this task, the more we may hope that it will turn out subsequently to be of
advantage to the individual and, through the individual, to the community as a
whole. For history must not be studied merely with a view to knowing what
happened in the past but as a guide for the future, and to teach us what policy
would be the best to follow for the preservation of our own people. That is the
real end; and the teaching of history is only a means to attain this end. But
here again the means has superseded the end in our contemporary education. The
goal is completely forgotten. Do not reply that a profound study of history
demands a detailed knowledge of all these dates because otherwise we could not
fix the great lines of development. That task belongs to the professional
historians. But the average man is not a professor of history. For him history
has only one mission and that is to provide him with such an amount of
historical knowledge as is necessary in order to enable him to form an
independent opinion on the political affairs of his own country. The man who
wants to become a professor of history can devote himself to all the details
later on. Naturally he will have to occupy himself even with the smallest
details. Of course our present teaching of history is not adequate to all this.
Its scope is too vast for the average student and too limited for the student
who wishes to be an historical expert.
Finally, it is the business of the People's State to
arrange for the writing of a world history in which the race problem will
occupy a dominant position.
To sum up: The People's State must reconstruct our system
of general instruction in such a way that it will embrace only what is
essential. Beyond this it will have to make provision for a more advanced
teaching in the various subjects for those who want to specialize in them. It
will suffice for the average individual to be acquainted with the fundamentals
of the various subjects to serve as the basis of what may be called an
all-round education. He ought to study exhaustively and in detail only that
subject in which he intends to work during the rest of his life. A general
instruction in all subjects should be obligatory, and specialization should be
left to the choice of the individual.
In this way the scholastic programme would be shortened,
and thus several school hours would be gained which could be utilized for
physical training and character training, in will-power, the capacity for
making practical judgments, decisions, etc.
The little account taken by our school training today,
especially in the secondary schools, of the callings that have to be followed
in after life is demonstrated by the fact that men who are destined for the
same calling in life are educated in three different kinds of schools. What is
of decisive importance is general education only and not the special teaching.
When special knowledge is needed it cannot be given in the curriculum of our
secondary schools as they stand today.
Therefore the People's State will one day have to abolish
such half-measures.
The second modification in the curriculum which the
People's State will have to make is the following:
It is a characteristic of our materialistic epoch that our
scientific education shows a growing emphasis on what is real and practical:
such subjects, for instance, as applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.
Of course they are necessary in an age that is dominated by industrial
technology and chemistry, and where everyday life shows at least the external
manifestations of these. But it is a perilous thing to base the general culture
of a nation on the knowledge of these subjects. On the contrary, that general
culture ought always to be directed towards ideals. It ought to be founded on
the humanist disciplines and should aim at giving only the ground work of
further specialized instruction in the various practical sciences. Otherwise we
should sacrifice those forces that are more important for the preservation of
the nation than any technical knowledge. In the historical department the study
of ancient history should not be omitted. Roman history, along general lines,
is and will remain the best teacher, not only for our own time but also for the
future. And the ideal of Hellenic culture should be preserved for us in all its
marvellous beauty. The differences between the various peoples should not
prevent us from recognizing the community of race which unites them on a higher
plane. The conflict of our times is one that is being waged around great
objectives. A civilization is fighting for its existence. It is a civilization
that is the product of thousands of years of historical development, and the
Greek as well as the German forms part of it.
A clear-cut division must be made between general culture
and the special branches. To-day the latter threaten more and more to devote
themselves exclusively to the service of Mammon. To counterbalance this
tendency, general culture should be preserved, at least in its ideal forms. The
principle should be repeatedly emphasized, that industrial and technical
progress, trade and commerce, can flourish only so long as a folk community
exists whose general system of thought is inspired by ideals, since that is the
preliminary condition for a flourishing development of the enterprises I have
spoken of. That condition is not created by a spirit of materialist egotism but
by a spirit of self-denial and the joy of giving one's self in the service of
others.
The system of education which prevails today sees its principal
object in pumping into young people that knowledge which will help them to make
their way in life. This principle is expressed in the following terms: "The
young man must one day become a useful member of human society." By that phrase
they mean the ability to gain an honest daily livelihood. The superficial
training in the duties of good citizenship, which he acquires merely as an
accidental thing, has very weak foundations. For in itself the State represents
only a form, and therefore it is difficult to train people to look upon this
form as the ideal which they will have to serve and towards which they must
feel responsible. A form can be too easily broken. But, as we have seen, the
idea which people have of the State today does not represent anything clearly
defined. Therefore, there is nothing but the usual stereotyped 'patriotic'
training. In the old Germany the greatest emphasis was placed on the divine
right of the small and even the smallest potentates. The way in which this
divine right was formulated and presented was never very clever and often very
stupid. Because of the large numbers of those small potentates, it was
impossible to give adequate biographical accounts of the really great
personalities that shed their lustre on the history of the German people. The
result was that the broad masses received a very inadequate knowledge of German
history. Here, too, the great lines of development were missing.
It is evident that in such a way no real national
enthusiasm could be aroused. Our educational system proved incapable of
selecting from the general mass of our historical personages the names of a few
personalities which the German people could be proud to look upon as their own.
Thus the whole nation might have been united by the ties of a common knowledge
of this common heritage. The really important figures in German history were
not presented to the present generation. The attention of the whole nation was
not concentrated on them for the purpose of awakening a common national spirit.
From the various subjects that were taught, those who had charge of our
training seemed incapable of selecting what redounded most to the national
honour and lifting that above the common objective level, in order to inflame
the national pride in the light of such brilliant examples. At that time such a
course would have been looked upon as rank chauvinism, which did not then have
a very pleasant savour. Pettifogging dynastic patriotism was more acceptable
and more easily tolerated than the glowing fire of a supreme national pride.
The former could be always pressed into service, whereas the latter might one
day become a dominating force. Monarchist patriotism terminated in Associations
of Veterans, whereas passionate national patriotism might have opened a road
which would be difficult to determine. This national passion is like a highly
tempered thoroughbred who is discriminate about the sort of rider he will
tolerate in the saddle. No wonder that most people preferred to shirk such a
danger. Nobody seemed to think it possible that one day a war might come which
would put the mettle of this kind of patriotism to the test, in artillery
bombardment and waves of attacks with poison gas. But when it did come our lack
of this patriotic passion was avenged in a terrible way. None were very
enthusiastic about dying for their imperial and royal sovereigns; while on the
other hand the 'Nation' was not recognized by the greater number of the
soldiers.
Since the revolution broke out in Germany and the
monarchist patriotism was therefore extinguished, the purpose of teaching
history was nothing more than to add to the stock of objective knowledge. The
present State has no use for patriotic enthusiasm; but it will never obtain
what it really desires. For if dynastic patriotism failed to produce a supreme
power of resistance at a time when the principle of nationalism dominated, it
will be still less possible to arouse republican enthusiasm. There can be no
doubt that the German people would not have stood on the field of battle for
four and a half years to fight under the battle slogan 'For the Republic,' and
least of all those who created this grand institution.
In reality this Republic has been allowed to exist
undisturbed only by grace of its readiness and its promise to all and sundry,
to pay tribute and reparations to the stranger and to put its signature to any
kind of territorial renunciation. The rest of the world finds it sympathetic,
just as a weakling is always more pleasing to those who want to bend him to
their own uses than is a man who is made of harder metal. But the fact that the
enemy likes this form of government is the worst kind of condemnation. They
love the German Republic and tolerate its existence because no better
instrument could be found which would help them to keep our people in slavery.
It is to this fact alone that this magnanimous institution owes its survival.
And that is why it can renounce any real system of national education and can
feel satisfied when the heroes of the Reich banner shout their hurrahs, but in
reality these same heroes would scamper away like rabbits if called upon to
defend that banner with their blood.
The People's State will have to fight for its existence.
It will not gain or secure this existence by signing documents like that of the
Dawes Plan. But for its existence and defence it will need precisely those
things which our present system believes can be repudiated. The more worthy its
form and its inner national being. the greater will be the envy and opposition
of its adversaries. The best defence will not be in the arms it possesses but
in its citizens. Bastions of fortresses will not save it, but the living wall
of its men and women, filled with an ardent love for their country and a
passionate spirit of national patriotism.
Therefore the third point which will have to be considered
in relation to our educational system is the following:
The People's State must realize that the sciences may also
be made a means of promoting a spirit of pride in the nation. Not only the
history of the world but the history of civilization as a whole must be taught
in the light of this principle. An inventor must appear great not only as an
inventor but also, and even more so, as a member of the nation. The admiration
aroused by the contemplation of a great achievement must be transformed into a
feeling of pride and satisfaction that a man of one's own race has been chosen
to accomplish it. But out of the abundance of great names in German history the
greatest will have to be selected and presented to our young generation in such
a way as to become solid pillars of strength to support the national spirit.
The subject matter ought to be systematically organized from the
standpoint of this principle. And the teaching should be so orientated that the
boy or girl, after leaving school, will not be a semi-pacifist, a democrat or
of something else of that kind, but a whole-hearted German. So that this
national feeling be sincere from the very beginning, and not a mere pretence,
the following fundamental and inflexible principle should be impressed on the
young brain while it is yet malleable: The man who loves his nation can prove
the sincerity of this sentiment only by being ready to make sacrifices for the
nation's welfare. There is no such thing as a national sentiment which is
directed towards personal interests. And there is no such thing as a
nationalism that embraces only certain classes. Hurrahing proves nothing and
does not confer the right to call oneself national if behind that shout there
is no sincere preoccupation for the conservation of the nation's well-being.
One can be proud of one's people only if there is no class left of which one
need to be ashamed. When one half of a nation is sunk in misery and worn out by
hard distress, or even depraved or degenerate, that nation presents such an
unattractive picture that nobody can feel proud to belong to it. It is only
when a nation is sound in all its members, physically and morally, that the joy
of belonging to it can properly be intensified to the supreme feeling which we
call national pride. But this pride, in its highest form, can be felt only by
those who know the greatness of their nation.
The spirit of nationalism and a feeling for social justice
must be fused into one sentiment in the hearts of the youth. Then a day will
come when a nation of citizens will arise which will be welded together through
a common love and a common pride that shall be invincible and indestructible
for ever.
The dread of chauvinism, which is a symptom of our time,
is a sign of its impotence. Since our epoch not only lacks everything in the
nature of exuberant energy but even finds such a manifestation disagreeable,
fate will never elect it for the accomplishment of any great deeds. For the
greatest changes that have taken place on this earth would have been
inconceivable if they had not been inspired by ardent and even hysterical
passions, but only by the bourgeois virtues of peacefulness and order.
One thing is certain: our world is facing a great revolution. The
only question is whether the outcome will be propitious for the Aryan portion
of mankind or whether the everlasting Jew will profit by it.
By educating the young generation along the right lines,
the People's State will have to see to it that a generation of mankind is
formed which will be adequate to this supreme combat that will decide the
destinies of the world.
That nation will conquer which will be the first to take
this road.
The whole organization of education and training which
the People's State is to build up must take as its crowning task the work of
instilling into the hearts and brains of the youth entrusted to it the racial
instinct and understanding of the racial idea. No boy or girl must leave school
without having attained a clear insight into the meaning of racial purity and
the importance of maintaining the racial blood unadulterated. Thus the first
indispensable condition for the preservation of our race will have been
established and thus the future cultural progress of our people will be
assured.
For in the last analysis all physical and mental training
would be in vain unless it served an entity which is ready and determined to
carry on its own existence and maintain its own characteristic qualities.
If it were otherwise, something would result which we Germans have
cause to regret already, without perhaps having hitherto recognized the extent
of the tragic calamity. We should be doomed to remain also in the future only
manure for civilization. And that not in the banal sense of the contemporary
bourgeois mind, which sees in a lost fellow member of our people only a lost
citizen, but in a sense which we should have painfully to recognize: namely,
that our racial blood would be destined to disappear. By continually mixing
with other races we might lift them from their former lower level of
civilization to a higher grade; but we ourselves should descend for ever from
the heights we had reached.
Finally, from the racial standpoint this training also
must find its culmination in the military service. The term of military service
is to be a final stage of the normal training which the average German
receives.
While the People's State attaches the greatest importance
to physical and mental training, it has also to consider, and no less
importantly, the task of selecting men for the service of the State itself.
This important matter is passed over lightly at the present time. Generally the
children of parents who are for the time being in higher situations are in
their turn considered worthy of a higher education. Here talent plays a
subordinate part. But talent can be estimated only relatively. Though in
general culture he may be inferior to the city child, a peasant boy may be more
talented than the son of a family that has occupied high positions through many
generations. But the superior culture of the city child has in itself nothing
to do with a greater or lesser degree of talent; for this culture has its roots
in the more copious mass of impressions which arise from the more varied
education and the surroundings among which this child lives. If the intelligent
son of peasant parents were educated from childhood in similar surroundings his
intellectual accomplishments would be quite otherwise. In our day there is only
one sphere where the family in which a person has been born means less than his
innate gifts. That is the sphere of art. Here, where a person cannot just
'learn,' but must have innate gifts that later on may undergo a more or less
happy development (in the sense of a wise development of what is already
there), money and parental property are of no account. This is a good proof
that genius is not necessarily connected with the higher social strata or with
wealth. Not rarely the greatest artists come from poor families. And many a boy
from the country village has eventually become a celebrated master.
It
does not say much for the mental acumen of our time that advantage is not taken
of this truth for the sake of our whole intellectual life. The opinion is
advanced that this principle, though undoubtedly valid in the field of art, has
not the same validity in regard to what are called the applied sciences. It is
true that a man can be trained to a certain amount of mechanical dexterity,
just as a poodle can be taught incredible tricks by a clever master. But such
training does not bring the animal to use his intelligence in order to carry
out those tricks. And the same holds good in regard to man. It is possible to
teach men, irrespective of talent or no talent, to go through certain
scientific exercises, but in such cases the results are quite as inanimate and
mechanical as in the case of the animal. It would even be possible to force a
person of mediocre intelligence, by means of a severe course of intellectual
drilling, to acquire more than the average amount of knowledge; but that
knowledge would remain sterile. The result would be a man who might be a
walking dictionary of knowledge but who will fail miserably on every critical
occasion in life and at every juncture where vital decisions have to be taken.
Such people need to be drilled specially for every new and even most
insignificant task and will never be capable of contributing in the least to
the general progress of mankind. Knowledge that is merely drilled into people
can at best qualify them to fill government positions under our present regime.
It goes without saying that, among the sum total of individuals who
make up a nation, gifted people are always to be found in every sphere of life.
It is also quite natural that the value of knowledge will be all the greater
the more vitally the dead mass of learning is animated by the innate talent of
the individual who possesses it. Creative work in this field can be done only
through the marriage of knowledge and talent.
One example will suffice to show how much our
contemporary world is at fault in this matter. From time to time our
illustrated papers publish, for the edification of the German philistine, the
news that in some quarter or other of the globe, and for the first time in that
locality, a Negro has become a lawyer, a teacher, a pastor, even a grand opera
tenor or something else of that kind. While the bourgeois blockhead stares with
amazed admiration at the notice that tells him how marvellous are the
achievements of our modern educational technique, the more cunning Jew sees in
this fact a new proof to be utilized for the theory with which he wants to
infect the public, namely that all men are equal. It does not dawn on the murky
bourgeois mind that the fact which is published for him is a sin against reason
itself, that it is an act of criminal insanity to train a being who is only an
anthropoid by birth until the pretence can be made that he has been turned into
a lawyer; while, on the other hand, millions who belong to the most civilized
races have to remain in positions which are unworthy of their cultural level.
The bourgeois mind does not realize that it is a sin against the will of the
eternal Creator to allow hundreds of thousands of highly gifted people to
remain floundering in the swamp of proletarian misery while Hottentots and
Zulus are drilled to fill positions in the intellectual professions. For here
we have the product only of a drilling technique, just as in the case of the
performing dog. If the same amount of care and effort were applied among
intelligent races each individual would become a thousand times more capable in
such matters.
This state of affairs would become intolerable if a day
should arrive when it no longer refers to exceptional cases. But the situation
is already intolerable where talent and natural gifts are not taken as decisive
factors in qualifying for the right to a higher education. It is indeed
intolerable to think that year after year hundreds of thousands of young people
without a single vestige of talent are deemed worthy of a higher education,
while other hundreds of thousands who possess high natural gifts have to go
without any sort of higher schooling at all. The practical loss thus caused to
the nation is incalculable. If the number of important discoveries which have
been made in America has grown considerably in recent years one of the reasons
is that the number of gifted persons belonging to the lowest social classes who
were given a higher education in that country is proportionately much larger
than in Europe.
A stock of knowledge packed into the brain will not
suffice for the making of discoveries. What counts here is only that knowledge
which is illuminated by natural talent. But with us at the present time no
value is placed on such gifts. Only good school reports count.
Here is another educative work that is waiting for the
People's State to do. It will not be its task to assure a dominant influence to
a certain social class already existing, but it will be its duty to attract the
most competent brains in the total mass of the nation and promote them to place
and honour. It is not merely the duty of the State to give to the average child
a certain definite education in the primary school, but it is also its duty to
open the road to talent in the proper direction. And above all, it must open
the doors of the higher schools under the State to talent of every sort, no
matter in what social class it may appear. This is an imperative necessity; for
thus alone will it be possible to develop a talented body of public leaders
from the class which represents learning that in itself is only a dead mass.
There is still another reason why the State should provide for this
situation. Our intellectual class, particularly in Germany, is so shut up in
itself and fossilized that it lacks living contact with the classes beneath it.
Two evil consequences result from this: First, the intellectual class neither
understands nor sympathizes with the broad masses. It has been so long cut off
from all connection with them that it cannot now have the necessary
psychological ties that would enable it to understand them. It has become
estranged from the people. Secondly, the intellectual class lacks the necessary
will-power; for this faculty is always weaker in cultivated circles, which live
in seclusion, than among the primitive masses of the people. God knows we
Germans have never been lacking in abundant scientific culture, but we have
always had a considerable lack of will-power and the capacity for making
decisions. For example, the more 'intellectual' our statesmen have been the
more lacking they have been, for the most part, in practical achievement. Our
political preparation and our technical equipment for the world war were
defective, certainly not because the brains governing the nation were too
little educated, but because the men who directed our public affairs were
over-educated, filled to over-flowing with knowledge and intelligence, yet
without any sound instinct and simply without energy, or any spirit of daring.
It was our nation's tragedy to have to fight for its existence under a
Chancellor who was a dillydallying philosopher. If instead of a Bethmann von
Hollweg we had had a rough man of the people as our leader the heroic blood of
the common grenadier would not have been shed in vain. The exaggeratedly
intellectual material out of which our leaders were made proved to be the best
ally of the scoundrels who carried out the November revolution. These
intellectuals safeguarded the national wealth in a miserly fashion, instead of
launching it forth and risking it, and thus they set the conditions on which
the others won success.
Here the Catholic Church presents an instructive example.
Clerical celibacy forces the Church to recruit its priests not from their own
ranks but progressively from the masses of the people. Yet there are not many
who recognize the significance of celibacy in this relation. But therein lies
the cause of the inexhaustible vigour which characterizes that ancient
institution. For by thus unceasingly recruiting the ecclesiastical dignitaries
from the lower classes of the people, the Church is enabled not only to
maintain the contact of instinctive understanding with the masses of the
population but also to assure itself of always being able to draw upon that
fund of energy which is present in this form only among the popular masses.
Hence the surprising youthfulness of that gigantic organism, its mental
flexibility and its iron will-power.
It will be the task of the Peoples' State so to organize
and administer its educational system that the existing intellectual class will
be constantly furnished with a supply of fresh blood from beneath. From the
bulk of the nation the State must sift out with careful scrutiny those persons
who are endowed with natural talents and see that they are employed in the
service of the community. For neither the State itself nor the various
departments of State exist to furnish revenues for members of a special class,
but to fulfil the tasks allotted to them. This will be possible, however, only
if the State trains individuals specially for these offices. Such individuals
must have the necessary fundamental capabilities and will-power. The principle
does not hold true only in regard to the civil service but also in regard to
all those who are to take part in the intellectual and moral leadership of the
people, no matter in what sphere they may be employed. The greatness of a
people is partly dependent on the condition that it must succeed in training
the best brains for those branches of the public service for which they show a
special natural aptitude and in placing them in the offices where they can do
their best work for the good of the community. If two nations of equal strength
and quality engage in a mutual conflict that nation will come out victorious
which has entrusted its intellectual and moral leadership to its best talents
and that nation will go under whose government represents only a common food
trough for privileged groups or classes and where the inner talents of its
individual members are not availed of.
Of course such a reform seems impossible in the world as
it is today. The objection will at once be raised, that it is too much to
expect from the favourite son of a highly-placed civil servant, for instance,
that he shall work with his hands simply because somebody else whose parents
belong to the working-class seems more capable for a job in the civil service.
That argument may be valid as long as manual work is looked upon in the same
way as it is looked upon today. Hence the Peoples' State will have to take up
an attitude towards the appreciation of manual labour which will be
fundamentally different from that which now exists. If necessary, it will have
to organize a persistent system of teaching which will aim at abolishing the
present-day stupid habit of looking down on physical labour as an occupation to
be ashamed of.
The individual will have to be valued, not by the class
of work he does but by the way in which he does it and by its usefulness to the
community. This statement may sound monstrous in an epoch when the most
brainless columnist on a newspaper staff is more esteemed than the most expert
mechanic, merely because the former pushes a pen. But, as I have said, this
false valuation does not correspond to the nature of things. It has been
artificially introduced, and there was a time when it did not exist at all. The
present unnatural state of affairs is one of those general morbid phenomena
that have arisen from our materialistic epoch. Fundamentally every kind of work
has a double value; the one material, the other ideal. The material value
depends on the practical importance of the work to the life of the community.
The greater the number of the population who benefit from the work, directly or
indirectly, the higher will be its material value. This evaluation is expressed
in the material recompense which the individual receives for his labour. In
contradistinction to this purely material value there is the ideal value. Here
the work performed is not judged by its material importance but by the degree
to which it answers a necessity. Certainly the material utility of an invention
may be greater than that of the service rendered by an everyday workman; but it
is also certain that the community needs each of those small daily services
just as much as the greater services. From the material point of view a
distinction can be made in the evaluation of different kinds of work according
to their utility to the community, and this distinction is expressed by the
differentiation in the scale of recompense; but on the ideal or abstract plans
all workmen become equal the moment each strives to do his best in his own
field, no matter what that field may be. It is on this that a man's value must
be estimated, and not on the amount of recompense received.
In a reasonably directed State care must be taken that
each individual is given the kind of work which corresponds to his
capabilities. In other words, people will be trained for the positions
indicated by their natural endowments; but these endowments or faculties are
innate and cannot be acquired by any amount of training, being a gift from
Nature and not merited by men. Therefore, the way in which men are generally
esteemed by their fellow-citizens must not be according to the kind of work
they do, because that has been more or less assigned to the individual. Seeing
that the kind of work in which the individual is employed is to be accounted to
his inborn gifts and the resultant training which he has received from the
community, he will have to be judged by the way in which he performs this work
entrusted to him by the community. For the work which the individual performs
is not the purpose of his existence, but only a means. His real purpose in life
is to better himself and raise himself to a higher level as a human being; but
this he can only do in and through the community whose cultural life he shares.
And this community must always exist on the foundations on which the State is
based. He ought to contribute to the conservation of those foundations. Nature
determines the form of this contribution. It is the duty of the individual to
return to the community, zealously and honestly, what the community has given
him. He who does this deserves the highest respect and esteem. Material
remuneration may be given to him whose work has a corresponding utility for the
community; but the ideal recompense must lie in the esteem to which everybody
has a claim who serves his people with whatever powers Nature has bestowed upon
him and which have been developed by the training he has received from the
national community. Then it will no longer be dishonourable to be an honest
craftsman; but it will be a cause of disgrace to be an inefficient State
official, wasting God's day and filching daily bread from an honest public.
Then it will be looked upon as quite natural that positions should not be given
to persons who of their very nature are incapable of filling them.
Furthermore, this personal efficiency will be the sole criterion of
the right to take part on an equal juridical footing in general civil affairs.
The present epoch is working out its own ruin. It introduces
universal suffrage, chatters about equal rights but can find no foundation for
this equality. It considers the material wage as the expression of a man's
value and thus destroys the basis of the noblest kind of equality that can
exist. For equality cannot and does not depend on the work a man does, but only
on the manner in which each one does the particular work allotted to him. Thus
alone will mere natural chance be set aside in determining the work of a man
and thus only does the individual become the artificer of his own social worth.
At the present time, when whole groups of people estimate each
other's value only by the size of the salaries which they respectively receive,
there will be no understanding of all this. But that is no reason why we should
cease to champion those ideas. Quite the opposite: in an epoch which is
inwardly diseased and decaying anyone who would heal it must have the courage
first to lay bare the real roots of the disease. And the National Socialist
Movement must take that duty on its shoulders. It will have to lift its voice
above the heads of the small bourgeoisie and rally together and co-ordinate all
those popular forces which are ready to become the protagonists of a new
philosophy of life.
Of course the objection will be made that in general it
is difficult to differentiate between the material and ideal values of work and
that the lower prestige which is attached to physical labour is due to the fact
that smaller wages are paid for that kind of work. It will be said that the
lower wage is in its turn the reason why the manual worker has less chance to
participate in the culture of the nation; so that the ideal side of human
culture is less open to him because it has nothing to do with his daily
activities. It may be added that the reluctance to do physical work is
justified by the fact that, on account of the small income, the cultural level
of manual labourers must naturally be low, and that this in turn is a
justification for the lower estimation in which manual labour is generally
held.
There is quite a good deal of truth in all this. But that is the
very reason why we ought to see that in the future there should not be such a
wide difference in the scale of remuneration. Don't say that under such
conditions poorer work would be done. It would be the saddest symptom of
decadence if finer intellectual work could be obtained only through the
stimulus of higher payment. If that point of view had ruled the world up to now
humanity would never have acquired its greatest scientific and cultural
heritage. For all the greatest inventions, the greatest discoveries, the most
profoundly revolutionary scientific work, and the most magnificent monuments of
human culture, were never given to the world under the impulse or compulsion of
money. Quite the contrary: not rarely was their origin associated with a
renunciation of the worldly pleasures that wealth can purchase.
It may be that money has become the one power that
governs life today. Yet a time will come when men will again bow to higher
gods. Much that we have today owes its existence to the desire for money and
property; but there is very little among all this which would leave the world
poorer by its lack.
It is also one of the aims before our movement to hold
out the prospect of a time when the individual will be given what he needs for
the purposes of his life and it will be a time in which, on the other hand, the
principle will be upheld that man does not live for material enjoyment alone.
This principle will find expression in a wiser scale of wages and salaries
which will enable everyone, including the humblest workman who fulfils his
duties conscientiously, to live an honourable and decent life both as a man and
as a citizen. Let it not be said that this is merely a visionary ideal, that
this world would never tolerate it in practice and that of itself it is
impossible to attain.
Even we are not so simple as to believe that there will
ever be an age in which there will be no drawbacks. But that does not release
us from the obligation to fight for the removal of the defects which we have
recognized, to overcome the shortcomings and to strive towards the ideal. In
any case the hard reality of the facts to be faced will always place only too
many limits to our aspirations. But that is precisely why man must strive again
and again to serve the ultimate aim and no failures must induce him to renounce
his intentions, just as we cannot spurn the sway of justice because mistakes
creep into the administration of the law, and just as we cannot despise medical
science because, in spite of it, there will always be diseases.
Man should take care not to have too low an estimate of
the power of an ideal. If there are some who may feel disheartened over the
present conditions, and if they happen to have served as soldiers, I would
remind them of the time when their heroism was the most convincing example of
the power inherent in ideal motives. It was not preoccupation about their daily
bread that led men to sacrifice their lives, but the love of their country, the
faith which they had in its greatness, and an all round feeling for the honour
of the nation. Only after the German people had become estranged from these
ideals, to follow the material promises offered by the Revolution, only after
they threw away their arms to take up the rucksack, only then – instead of
entering an earthly paradise – did they sink into the purgatory of universal
contempt and at the same time universal want.
That is why we must face the calculators of the
materialist Republic with faith in an idealist Reich.
By 1920-1921 certain circles belonging to the present outlived
bourgeois class accused our movement again and again of taking up a negative
attitude towards the modern State. For that reason the motley gang of camp
followers attached to the various political parties, representing a
heterogeneous conglomeration of political views, assumed the right of utilizing
all available means to suppress the protagonists of this young movement which
was preaching a new political gospel. Our opponents deliberately ignored the
fact that the bourgeois class itself stood for no uniform opinion as to what
the State really meant and that the bourgeoisie did not and could not give any
coherent definition of this institution. Those whose duty it is to explain what
is meant when we speak of the State, hold chairs in State universities, often
in the department of constitutional law, and consider it their highest duty to
find explanations and justifications for the more or less fortunate existence
of that particular form of State which provides them with their daily bread.
The more absurd such a form of State is the more obscure and artificial and
incomprehensible are the definitions which are advanced to explain the purpose
of its existence. What, for instance, could a royal and imperial university
professor write about the meaning and purpose of a State in a country whose
statal form represented the greatest monstrosity of the twentieth century? That
would be a difficult undertaking indeed, in view of the fact that the
contemporary professor of constitutional law is obliged not so much to serve
the cause of truth but rather to serve a certain definite purpose. And this
purpose is to defend at all costs the existence of that monstrous human
mechanism which we now call the State. Nobody can be surprised if concrete
facts are evaded as far as possible when the problem of the State is under
discussion and if professors adopt the tactics of concealing themselves in
morass of abstract values and duties and purposes which are described as
'ethical' and 'moral'.
Generally speaking, these various theorists may be
classed in three groups:
1. Those who hold that the State is a more or less
voluntary association of men who have agreed to set up and obey a ruling
authority.
This is numerically the largest group. In its ranks are
to be found those who worship our present principle of legalized authority. In
their eyes the will of the people has no part whatever in the whole affair. For
them the fact that the State exists is sufficient reason to consider it sacred
and inviolable. To protect the madness of human brains, a positively dog-like
adoration of so-called state authority is needed. In the minds of these people
the means is substituted for the end, by a sort of sleight-of-hand movement.
The State no longer exists for the purpose of serving men but men exist for the
purpose of adoring the authority of the State, which is vested in its
functionaries, even down to the smallest official. So as to prevent this placid
and ecstatic adoration from changing into something that might become in any
way disturbing, the authority of the State is limited simply to the task of
preserving order and tranquillity. Therewith it is no longer either a means or
an end. The State must see that public peace and order are preserved and, in
their turn, order and peace must make the existence of the State possible. All
life must move between these two poles. In Bavaria this view is upheld by the
artful politicians of the Bavarian Centre, which is called the 'Bavarian
Populist Party'. In Austria the Black-and-Yellow legitimists adopt a similar
attitude. In the Reich, unfortunately, the so-called conservative elements
follow the same line of thought.
2. The second group is somewhat smaller in numbers. It
includes those who would make the existence of the State dependent on some
conditions at least. They insist that not only should there be a uniform system
of government but also, if possible, that only one language should be used,
though solely for technical reasons of administration. In this view the
authority of the State is no longer the sole and exclusive end for which the
State exists. It must also promote the good of its subjects. Ideas of
'freedom', mostly based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of that word,
enter into the concept of the State as it exists in the minds of this group.
The form of government is no longer considered inviolable simply because it
exists. It must submit to the test of practical efficiency. Its venerable age
no longer protects it from being criticized in the light of modern exigencies.
Moreover, in this view the first duty laid upon the State is to guarantee the
economic well-being of the individual citizens. Hence it is judged from the
practical standpoint and according to general principles based on the idea of
economic returns. The chief representatives of this theory of the State are to
be found among the average German bourgeoisie, especially our liberal
democrats.
3. The third group is numerically the smallest. In the
State they discover a means for the realization of tendencies that arise from a
policy of power, on the part of a people who are ethnically homogeneous and
speak the same language. But those who hold this view are not clear about what
they mean by 'tendencies arising from a policy of power'. A common language is
postulated not only because they hope that thereby the State would be furnished
with a solid basis for the extension of its power outside its own frontiers,
but also because they think – though falling into a fundamental error by doing
so – that such a common language would enable them to carry out a process of
nationalization in a definite direction.
During the last century it was lamentable for those who
had to witness it, to notice how in these circles I have just mentioned the
word 'Germanize' was frivolously played with, though the practice was often
well intended. I well remember how in the days of my youth this very term used
to give rise to notions which were false to an incredible degree. Even in
Pan-German circles one heard the opinion expressed that the Austrian Germans
might very well succeed in Germanizing the Austrian Slavs, if only the
Government would be ready to co-operate. Those people did not understand that a
policy of Germanization can be carried out only as regards human beings. What
they mostly meant by Germanization was a process of forcing other people to
speak the German language. But it is almost inconceivable how such a mistake
could be made as to think that a Negro or a Chinaman will become a German
because he has learned the German language and is willing to speak German for
the future, and even to cast his vote for a German political party. Our
bourgeois nationalists could never clearly see that such a process of
Germanization is in reality de-Germanization; for even if all the outstanding
and visible differences between the various peoples could be bridged over and
finally wiped out by the use of a common language, that would produce a process
of bastardization which in this case would not signify Germanization but the
annihilation of the German element. In the course of history it has happened
only too often that a conquering race succeeded by external force in compelling
the people whom they subjected to speak the tongue of the conqueror and that
after a thousand years their language was spoken by another people and that
thus the conqueror finally turned out to be the conquered.
What makes a people or, to be more correct, a race, is
not language but blood. Therefore it would be justifiable to speak of
Germanization only if that process could change the blood of the people who
would be subjected to it, which is obviously impossible. A change would be
possible only by a mixture of blood, but in this case the quality of the
superior race would be debased. The final result of such a mixture would be
that precisely those qualities would be destroyed which had enabled the
conquering race to achieve victory over an inferior people. It is especially
the cultural creativeness which disappears when a superior race intermixes with
an inferior one, even though the resultant mongrel race should excel a
thousandfold in speaking the language of the race that once had been superior.
For a certain time there will be a conflict between the different mentalities,
and it may be that a nation which is in a state of progressive degeneration
will at the last moment rally its cultural creative power and once again
produce striking examples of that power. But these results are due only to the
activity of elements that have remained over from the superior race or hybrids
of the first crossing in whom the superior blood has remained dominant and
seeks to assert itself. But this will never happen with the final descendants
of such hybrids. These are always in a state of cultural retrogression.
We must consider it as fortunate that a Germanization of Austria
according to the plan of Joseph II did not succeed. Probably the result would
have been that the Austrian State would have been able to survive, but at the
same time participation in the use of a common language would have debased the
racial quality of the German element. In the course of centuries a certain herd
instinct might have been developed but the herd itself would have deteriorated
in quality. A national State might have arisen, but a people who had been
culturally creative would have disappeared.
For the German nation it was better that this process of
intermixture did not take place, although it was not renounced for any
high-minded reasons but simply through the short-sighted pettiness of the
Habsburgs. If it had taken place the German people could not now be looked upon
as a cultural factor.
Not only in Austria, however, but also in the Reich, these
so-called national circles were, and still are, under the influence of similar
erroneous ideas. Unfortunately, a policy towards Poland, whereby the East was
to be Germanized, was demanded by many and was based on the same false
reasoning. Here again it was believed that the Polish people could be
Germanized by being compelled to use the German language. The result would have
been fatal. A people of foreign race would have had to use the German language
to express modes of thought that were foreign to the German, thus compromising
by its own inferiority the dignity and nobility of our nation.
It is revolting to think how much damage is indirectly
done to German prestige today through the fact that the German patois of the
Jews when they enter the United States enables them to be classed as Germans,
because many Americans are quite ignorant of German conditions. Among us,
nobody would think of taking these unhygienic immigrants from the East for
members of the German race and nation merely because they mostly speak German.
What has been beneficially Germanized in the course of history was
the land which our ancestors conquered with the sword and colonized with German
tillers of the soil. To the extent that they introduced foreign blood into our
national body in this colonization, they have helped to disintegrate our racial
character, a process which has resulted in our German hyper-individualism,
though this latter characteristic is even now frequently praised.
In this third group also there are people who, to a
certain degree, consider the State as an end in itself. Hence they consider its
preservation as one of the highest aims of human existence. Our analysis may be
summed up as follows:
All these opinions have this common feature and failing:
that they are not grounded in a recognition of the profound truth that the
capacity for creating cultural values is essentially based on the racial
element and that, in accordance with this fact, the paramount purpose of the
State is to preserve and improve the race; for this is an indispensable
condition of all progress in human civilization.
Thus the Jew, Karl Marx, was able to draw the final
conclusions from these false concepts and ideas on the nature and purpose of
the State. By eliminating from the concept of the State all thought of the
obligation which the State bears towards the race, without finding any other
formula that might be universally accepted, the bourgeois teaching prepared the
way for that doctrine which rejects the State as such.
That is why the bourgeois struggle against Marxist
internationalism is absolutely doomed to fail in this field. The bourgeois
classes have already sacrificed the basic principles which alone could furnish
a solid footing for their ideas. Their crafty opponent has perceived the
defects in their structure and advances to the assault on it with those weapons
which they themselves have placed in his hands though not meaning to do so.
Therefore any new movement which is based on the racial concept of
the world will first of all have to put forward a clear and logical doctrine of
the nature and purpose of the State.
The fundamental principle is that the State is not an end
in itself but the means to an end. It is the preliminary condition under which
alone a higher form of human civilization can be developed, but it is not the
source of such a development. This is to be sought exclusively in the actual
existence of a race which is endowed with the gift of cultural creativeness.
There may be hundreds of excellent States on this earth, and yet if the Aryan,
who is the creator and custodian of civilization, should disappear, all culture
that is on an adequate level with the spiritual needs of the superior nations
today would also disappear. We may go still further and say that the fact that
States have been created by human beings does not in the least exclude the
possiblity that the human race may become extinct, because the superior
intellectual faculties and powers of adaptation would be lost when the racial
bearer of these faculties and powers disappeared.
If, for instance, the surface of the globe should be
shaken today by some seismic convulsion and if a new Himalaya would emerge from
the waves of the sea, this one catastrophe alone might annihilate human
civilization. No State could exist any longer. All order would be shattered.
And all vestiges of cultural products which had been evolved through thousands
of years would disappear. Nothing would be left but one tremendous field of
death and destruction submerged in floods of water and mud. If, however, just a
few people would survive this terrible havoc, and if these people belonged to a
definite race that had the innate powers to build up a civilization, when the
commotion had passed, the earth would again bear witness to the creative power
of the human spirit, even though a span of a thousand years might intervene.
Only with the extermination of the last race that possesses the gift of
cultural creativeness, and indeed only if all the individuals of that race had
disappeared, would the earth definitely be turned into a desert. On the other
hand, modern history furnishes examples to show that statal institutions which
owe their beginnings to members of a race which lacks creative genius are not
made of stuff that will endure. Just as many varieties of prehistoric animals
had to give way to others and leave no trace behind them, so man will also have
to give way, if he loses that definite faculty which enables him to find the
weapons that are necessary for him to maintain his own existence.
It is not the State as such that brings about a certain
definite advance in cultural progress. The State can only protect the race that
is the cause of such progress. The State as such may well exist without
undergoing any change for hundreds of years, though the cultural faculties and
the general life of the people, which is shaped by these faculties, may have
suffered profound changes by reason of the fact that the State did not prevent
a process of racial mixture from taking place. The present State, for instance,
may continue to exist in a mere mechanical form, but the poison of
miscegenation permeating the national body brings about a cultural decadence
which manifests itself already in various symptoms that are of a detrimental
character.
Thus the indispensable prerequisite for the existence of
a superior quality of human beings is not the State but the race, which is
alone capable of producing that higher human quality.
This capacity is always there, though it will lie dormant
unless external circumstances awaken it to action. Nations, or rather races,
which are endowed with the faculty of cultural creativeness possess this
faculty in a latent form during periods when the external circumstances are
unfavourable for the time being and therefore do not allow the faculty to
express itself effectively. It is therefore outrageously unjust to speak of the
pre-Christian Germans as barbarians who had no civilization. They never have
been such. But the severity of the climate that prevailed in the northern
regions which they inhabited imposed conditions of life which hampered a free
development of their creative faculties. If they had come to the fairer climate
of the South, with no previous culture whatsoever, and if they acquired the
necessary human material – that is to say, men of an inferior race – to serve
them as working implements, the cultural faculty dormant in them would have
splendidly blossomed forth, as happened in the case of the Greeks, for example.
But this primordial creative faculty in cultural things was not solely due to
their northern climate. For the Laplanders or the Eskimos would not have become
creators of a culture if they were transplanted to the South. No, this
wonderful creative faculty is a special gift bestowed on the Aryan, whether it
lies dormant in him or becomes active, according as the adverse conditions of
nature prevent the active expression of that faculty or favourable
circumstances permit it.
From these facts the following conclusions may be drawn:
The State is only a means to an end. Its end and its purpose is to
preserve and promote a community of human beings who are physically as well as
spiritually kindred. Above all, it must preserve the existence of the race,
thereby providing the indispensable condition for the free development of all
the forces dormant in this race. A great part of these faculties will always
have to be employed in the first place to maintain the physical existence of
the race, and only a small portion will be free to work in the field of
intellectual progress. But, as a matter of fact, the one is always the
necessary counterpart of the other.
Those States which do not serve this purpose have no
justification for their existence. They are monstrosities. The fact that they
do exist is no more of a justification than the successful raids carried out by
a band of pirates can be considered a justification of piracy.
We National Socialists, who are fighting for a new
philosophy of life must never take our stand on the famous 'basis of facts',
and especially not on mistaken facts. If we did so, we should cease to be the
protagonists of a new and great idea and would become slaves in the service of
the fallacy which is dominant today. We must make a clear-cut distinction
between the vessel and its contents. The State is only the vessel and the race
is what it contains. The vessel can have a meaning only if it preserves and
safeguards the contents. Otherwise it is worthless.
Hence the supreme purpose of the folkish State is to
guard and preserve those original racial elements which, through their work in
the cultural field, create that beauty and dignity which are characteristic of
a higher mankind. We, as Aryans, can consider the State only as the living
organism of a people, an organism which does not merely maintain the existence
of a people, but functions in such a way as to lead its people to a position of
supreme liberty by the progressive development of the intellectual and cultural
faculties.
What they want to impose upon us as a State today is in
most cases nothing but a monstrosity, the product of a profound human
aberration which brings untold suffering in its train.
We National Socialists know that in holding these views we
take up a revolutionary stand in the world of today and that we are branded as
revolutionaries. But our views and our conduct will not be determined by the
approbation or disapprobation of our contemporaries, but only by our duty to
follow a truth which we have acknowledged. In doing this we have reason to
believe that posterity will have a clearer insight, and will not only
understand the work we are doing today, but will also ratify it as the right
work and will exalt it accordingly.
On these principles we National Socialists base our
standards of value in appraising a State. This value will be relative when
viewed from the particular standpoint of the individual nation, but it will be
absolute when considered from the standpoint of humanity as a whole. In other
words, this means:
The quality of a State can never be judged by the level
of its culture or the degree of importance which the outside world attaches to
its power, but that its excellence must be judged by the degree to which its
institutions serve the racial stock which belongs to it.
A State may be considered as a model example if it
adequately serves not only the vital needs of the racial stock it represents
but if it actually assures by its own existence the preservation of this same
racial stock, no matter what general cultural significance this statal
institution may have in the eyes of the rest of the world. For it is not the
task of the State to create human capabilities, but only to assure free scope
for the exercise of capabilities that already exist. Thus, conversely, a State
may be called bad if, in spite of the existence of a high cultural level, it
dooms to destruction the bearers of that culture by breaking up their racial
uniformity. For the practical effect of such a policy would be to destroy those
conditions that are indispensable for the ulterior existence of that culture,
which the State did not create but which is the fruit of the creative power
inherent in the racial stock whose existence is assured by being united in the
living organism of the State. Once again let me emphasize the fact that the
State itself is not the substance but the form. Therefore, the cultural level
is not the standard by which we can judge the value of the State in which that
people lives. It is evident that a people which is endowed with high creative
powers in the cultural sphere is of more worth than a tribe of negroes. And yet
the statal organization of the former, if judged from the standpoint of
efficiency, may be worse than that of the negroes. Not even the best of States
and statal institutions can evolve faculties from a people which they lack and
which they never possessed, but a bad State may gradually destroy the faculties
which once existed. This it can do by allowing or favouring the suppression of
those who are the bearers of a racial culture.
Therefore, the worth of a State can be determined only by
asking how far it actually succeeds in promoting the well-being of a definite
race and not by the role which it plays in the world at large. Its relative
worth can be estimated readily and accurately; but it is difficult to judge its
absolute worth, because the latter is conditioned not only by the State but
also by the quality and cultural level of the people that belong to the
individual State in question.
Therefore, when we speak of the high mission of the State
we must not forget that the high mission belongs to the people and that the
business of the State is to use its organizing powers for the purpose of
furnishing the necessary conditions which allow this people freely to unfold
its creative faculties. And if we ask what kind of statal institution we
Germans need, we must first have a clear notion as to the people which that
State must embrace and what purpose it must serve.
Unfortunately the German national being is not based on a
uniform racial type. The process of welding the original elements together has
not gone so far as to warrant us in saying that a new race has emerged. On the
contrary, the poison which has invaded the national body, especially since the
Thirty Years' War, has destroyed the uniform constitution not only of our blood
but also of our national soul. The open frontiers of our native country, the
association with non-German foreign elements in the territories that lie all
along those frontiers, and especially the strong influx of foreign blood into
the interior of the Reich itself, has prevented any complete assimilation of
those various elements, because the influx has continued steadily. Out of this
melting-pot no new race arose. The heterogeneous elements continue to exist
side by side. And the result is that, especially in times of crisis, when the
herd usually flocks together, the Germans disperse in all directions. The
fundamental racial elements are not only different in different districts, but
there are also various elements in the single districts. Beside the Nordic type
we find the East-European type, beside the Eastern there is the Dinaric, the
Western type intermingling with both, and hybrids among them all. That is a
grave drawback for us. Through it the Germans lack that strong herd instinct
which arises from unity of blood and saves nations from ruin in dangerous and
critical times; because on such occasions small differences disappear, so that
a united herd faces the enemy. What we understand by the word
hyper-individualism arises from the fact that our primordial racial elements
have existed side by side without ever consolidating. During times of peace
such a situation may offer some advantages, but, taken all in all, it has
prevented us from gaining a mastery in the world. If in its historical
development the German people had possessed the unity of herd instinct by which
other peoples have so much benefited, then the German Reich would probably be
mistress of the globe today. World history would have taken another course and
in this case no man can tell if what many blinded pacifists hope to attain by
petitioning, whining and crying, may not have been reached in this way: namely,
a peace which would not be based upon the waving of olive branches and tearful
misery-mongering of pacifist old women, but a peace that would be guaranteed by
the triumphant sword of a people endowed with the power to master the world and
administer it in the service of a higher civilization.
The fact that our people did not have a national being
based on a unity of blood has been the source of untold misery for us. To many
petty German potentates it gave residential capital cities, but the German
people as a whole was deprived of its right to rulership.
Even today our nation still suffers from this lack of
inner unity; but what has been the cause of our past and present misfortunes
may turn out a blessing for us in the future. Though on the one hand it may be
a drawback that our racial elements were not welded together, so that no
homogeneous national body could develop, on the other hand, it was fortunate
that, since at least a part of our best blood was thus kept pure, its racial
quality was not debased.
A complete assimilation of all our racial elements would
certainly have brought about a homogeneous national organism; but, as has been
proved in the case of every racial mixture, it would have been less capable of
creating a civilization than by keeping intact its best original elements. A
benefit which results from the fact that there was no all-round assimilation is
to be seen in that even now we have large groups of German Nordic people within
our national organization, and that their blood has not been mixed with the
blood of other races. We must look upon this as our most valuable treasure for
the sake of the future. During that dark period of absolute ignorance in regard
to all racial laws, when each individual was considered to be on a par with
every other, there could be no clear appreciation of the difference between the
various fundamental racial characteristics. We know today that a complete
assimilation of all the various elements which constitute the national being
might have resulted in giving us a larger share of external power: but, on the
other hand, the highest of human aims would not have been attained, because the
only kind of people which fate has obviously chosen to bring about this
perfection would have been lost in such a general mixture of races which would
constitute such a racial amalgamation.
But what has been prevented by a friendly Destiny,
without any assistance on our part, must now be reconsidered and utilized in
the light of our new knowledge.
He who talks of the German people as having a mission to
fulfil on this earth must know that this cannot be fulfilled except by the
building up of a State whose highest purpose is to preserve and promote those
nobler elements of our race and of the whole of mankind which have remained
unimpaired.
Thus for the first time a high inner purpose is
accredited to the State. In face of the ridiculous phrase that the State should
do no more than act as the guardian of public order and tranquillity, so that
everybody can peacefully dupe everybody else, it is given a very high mission
indeed to preserve and encourage the highest type of humanity which a
beneficent Creator has bestowed on this earth. Out of a dead mechanism which
claims to be an end in itself a living organism shall arise which has to serve
one purpose exclusively: and that, indeed, a purpose which belongs to a higher
order of ideas.
As a State the German Reich shall include all Germans.
Its task is not only to gather in and foster the most valuable sections of our
people but to lead them slowly and surely to a dominant position in the world.
Thus a period of stagnation is superseded by a period of
effort. And here, as in every other sphere, the proverb holds good that to rest
is to rust; and furthermore the proverb that victory will always be won by him
who attacks. The higher the final goal which we strive to reach, and the less
it be understood at the time by the broad masses, the more magnificent will be
its success. That is what the lesson of history teaches. And the achievement
will be all the more significant if the end is conceived in the right way and
the fight carried through with unswerving persistence.
Many of the officials who direct the affairs of State
nowadays may find it easier to work for the maintenance of the present
order than to fight for a new one. They will find it more comfortable to look
upon the State as a mechanism, whose purpose is its own preservation, and to
say that their lives 'belong to the State' -- as if anything that grew from the
inner life of the nation can logically serve anything but the national being,
and as if man could be made for anything else than for his fellow beings.
Naturally, it is easier, as I have said, to consider the authority of the State
as nothing but the formal mechanism of an organization, rather than as the
sovereign incarnation of a people's instinct for self-preservation on this
earth. For these weak minds the State and the authority of the State is nothing
but an aim in itself, while for us it is an effective weapon in the service of
the great and eternal struggle for existence, a weapon which everyone must
adopt, not because it is a mere formal mechanism, but because it is the main
expression of our common will to exist.
Therefore, in the fight for our new idea, which conforms
completely to the primal meaning of life, we shall find only a small number of
comrades in a social order which has become decrepit not only physically but
mentally also. From these strata of our population only a few exceptional
people will join our ranks, only those few old people whose hearts have
remained young and whose courage is still vigorous, but not those who consider
it their duty to maintain the state of affairs that exists.
Against us we have the innumerable army of all those who
are lazy-minded and indifferent rather than evil, and those whose self-interest
leads them to uphold the present state of affairs. On the apparent hopelessness
of our great struggle is based the magnitude of our task and the possibilities
of success. A battle-cry which from the very start will scare off all the petty
spirits, or at least discourage them, will become the signal for a rally of all
those temperaments that are of the real fighting metal. And it must be clearly
recognized that if a highly energetic and active body of men emerge from a
nation and unite in the fight for one goal, thereby ultimately rising above the
inert masses of the people, this small percentage will become masters of the
whole. World history is made by minorities if these numerical minorities
represent in themselves the will and energy and initiative of the people as a
whole.
What seems an obstacle to many persons is really a preliminary
condition of our victory. Just because our task is so great and because so many
difficulties have to be overcome, the highest probability is that only the best
kind of protagonists will join our ranks. This selection is the guarantee of
our success.
Nature generally takes certain measures to correct the
effect which racial mixture produces in life. She is not much in favour of the
mongrel. The later products of cross-breeding have to suffer bitterly,
especially the third, fourth and fifth generations. Not only are they deprived
of the higher qualities that belonged to the parents who participated in the
first mixture, but they also lack definite will-power and vigorous vital
energies owing to the lack of harmony in the quality of their blood. At all
critical moments in which a person of pure racial blood makes correct
decisions, that is to say, decisions that are coherent and uniform, the person
of mixed blood will become confused and take measures that are incoherent.
Hence we see that a person of mixed blood is not only relatively inferior to a
person of pure blood, but is also doomed to become extinct more rapidly. In
innumerable cases wherein the pure race holds its ground the mongrel breaks
down. Therein we witness the corrective provision which Nature adopts. She
restricts the possibilities of procreation, thus impeding the fertility of
cross-breeds and bringing them to extinction.
For instance, if an individual member of a race should
mingle his blood with the member of a superior race the first result would be a
lowering of the racial level, and furthermore the descendants of this
cross-breeding would be weaker than those of the people around them who had
maintained their blood unadulterated. Where no new blood from the superior race
enters the racial stream of the mongrels, and where those mongrels continue to
cross-breed among themselves, the latter will either die out because they have
insufficient powers of resistance, which is Nature's wise provision, or in the
course of many thousands of years they will form a new mongrel race in which
the original elements will become so wholly mixed through this millennial
crossing that traces of the original elements will be no longer recognizable.
And thus a new people would be developed which possessed a certain resistance
capacity of the herd type, but its intellectual value and its cultural
significance would be essentially inferior to those which the first
cross-breeds possessed. But even in this last case the mongrel product would
succumb in the mutual struggle for existence with a higher racial group that
had maintained its blood unmixed. The herd solidarity which this mongrel race
had developed through thousands of years will not be equal to the struggle. And
this is because it would lack elasticity and constructive capacity to prevail
over a race of homogeneous blood that was mentally and culturally superior.
Therewith we may lay down the following principle as valid:
every racial mixture leads, of necessity, sooner or later to the
downfall of the mongrel product, provided the higher racial strata of this
cross-breed has not retained within itself some sort of racial homogeneity. The
danger to the mongrels ceases only when this higher stratum, which has
maintained certain standards of homogeneous breeding, ceases to be true to its
pedigree and intermingles with the mongrels.
This principle is the source of a slow but constant
regeneration whereby all the poison which has invaded the racial body is
gradually eliminated so long as there still remains a fundamental stock of pure
racial elements which resists further crossbreeding.
Such a process may set in automatically among those people
where a strong racial instinct has remained. Among such people we may count
those elements which, for some particular cause such as coercion, have been
thrown out of the normal way of reproduction along strict racial lines. As soon
as this compulsion ceases, that part of the race which has remained intact will
tend to marry with its own kind and thus impede further intermingling. Then the
mongrels recede quite naturally into the background unless their numbers had
increased so much as to be able to withstand all serious resistance from those
elements which had preserved the purity of their race.
When men have lost their natural instincts and ignore the
obligations imposed on them by Nature, then there is no hope that Nature will
correct the loss that has been caused, until recognition of the lost instincts
has been restored. Then the task of bringing back what has been lost will have
to be accomplished. But there is serious danger that those who have become
blind once in this respect will continue more and more to break down racial
barriers and finally lose the last remnants of what is best in them. What then
remains is nothing but a uniform mish-mash, which seems to be the dream of our
fine Utopians. But that mish-mash would soon banish all ideals from the world.
Certainly a great herd could thus be formed. One can breed a herd of animals;
but from a mixture of this kind men such as have created and founded
civilizations would not be produced. The mission of humanity might then be
considered at an end.
Those who do not wish that the earth should fall into
such a condition must realize that it is the task of the German State in
particular to see to it that the process of bastardization is brought to a
stop.
Our contemporary generation of weaklings will naturally decry such a
policy and whine and complain about it as an encroachment on the most sacred of
human rights. But there is only one right that is sacrosanct and this right is
at the same time a most sacred duty. This right and obligation are: that the
purity of the racial blood should be guarded, so that the best types of human
beings may be preserved and that thus we should render possible a more noble
development of humanity itself.
A folk-State should in the first place raise matrimony
from the level of being a constant scandal to the race. The State should
consecrate it as an institution which is called upon to produce creatures made
in the likeness of the Lord and not create monsters that are a mixture of man
and ape. The protest which is put forward in the name of humanity does not fit
the mouth of a generation that makes it possible for the most depraved
degenerates to propagate themselves, thereby imposing unspeakable suffering on
their own products and their contemporaries, while on the other hand
contraceptives are permitted and sold in every drug store and even by street
hawkers, so that babies should not be born even among the healthiest of our
people. In this present State of ours, whose function it is to be the guardian
of peace and good order, our national bourgeoisie look upon it as a crime to
make procreation impossible for syphilitics and those who suffer from
tuberculosis or other hereditary diseases, also cripples and imbeciles. But the
practical prevention of procreation among millions of our very best people is
not considered as an evil, nor does it offend against the noble morality of
this social class but rather encourages their short-sightedness and mental
lethargy. For otherwise they would at least stir their brains to find an answer
to the question of how to create conditions for the feeding and maintaining of
those future beings who will be the healthy representatives of our nation and
must also provide the conditions on which the generation that is to follow them
will have to support itself and live.
How devoid of ideals and how ignoble is the whole
contemporary system! The fact that the churches join in committing this sin
against the image of God, even though they continue to emphasize the dignity of
that image, is quite in keeping with their present activities. They talk about
the Spirit, but they allow man, as the embodiment of the Spirit, to degenerate
to the proletarian level. Then they look on with amazement when they realize
how small is the influence of the Christian Faith in their own country and how
depraved and ungodly is this riff-raff which is physically degenerate and
therefore morally degenerate also. To balance this state of affairs they try to
convert the Hottentots and the Zulus and the Kaffirs and to bestow on them the
blessings of the Church. While our European people, God be praised and thanked,
are left to become the victims of moral depravity, the pious missionary goes
out to Central Africa and establishes missionary stations for negroes. Finally,
sound and healthy – though primitive and backward – people will be transformed,
under the name of our 'higher civilization', into a motley of lazy and
brutalized mongrels.
It would better accord with noble human aspirations if
our two Christian denominations would cease to bother the negroes with their
preaching, which the negroes neither desire nor understand. It would be better
if they left this work alone, and if, in its stead, they tried to teach people
in Europe, kindly and seriously, that it is much more pleasing to God if a
couple that is not of healthy stock were to show loving kindness to some poor
orphan and become a father and mother to him, rather than give life to a sickly
child that will be a cause of suffering and unhappiness to all.
In this field the People's State will have to repair the
damage that arises from the fact that the problem is at present neglected by
all the various parties concerned. It will be the task of the People's State to
make the race the centre of the life of the community. It must make sure that
the purity of the racial strain will be preserved. It must proclaim the truth
that the child is the most valuable possession a people can have. It must see
to it that only those who are healthy shall beget children; that there is only
one infamy, namely, for parents that are ill or show hereditary defects to
bring children into the world and that in such cases it is a high honour to
refrain from doing so. But, on the other hand, it must be considered as
reprehensible conduct to refrain from giving healthy children to the nation. In
this matter the State must assert itself as the trustee of a millennial future,
in face of which the egotistic desires of the individual count for nothing and
will have to give way before the ruling of the State. In order to fulfil this
duty in a practical manner the State will have to avail itself of modern
medical discoveries. It must proclaim as unfit for procreation all those who
are inflicted with some visible hereditary disease or are the carriers of it;
and practical measures must be adopted to have such people rendered sterile. On
the other hand, provision must be made for the normally fertile woman so that
she will not be restricted in child-bearing through the financial and economic
system operating in a political regime that looks upon the blessing of having
children as a curse to their parents. The State will have to abolish the
cowardly and even criminal indifference with which the problem of social
amenities for large families is treated, and it will have to be the supreme
protector of this greatest blessing that a people can boast of. Its attention
and care must be directed towards the child rather than the adult.
Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unfit must not
perpetuate their own suffering in the bodies of their children. From the
educational point of view there is here a huge task for the People's State to
accomplish. But in a future era this work will appear greater and more
significant than the victorious wars of our present bourgeois epoch. Through
educational means the State must teach individuals that illness is not a
disgrace but an unfortunate accident which has to be pitied, yet that it is a
crime and a disgrace to make this affliction all the worse by passing on
disease and defects to innocent creatures out of mere egotism. And the State
must also teach the people that it is an expression of a really noble nature
and that it is a humanitarian act worthy of admiration if a person who
innocently suffers from hereditary disease refrains from having a child of his
own but gives his love and affection to some unknown child who, through its
health, promises to become a robust member of a healthy community. In
accomplishing such an educational task the State integrates its function by
this activity in the moral sphere. It must act on this principle without paying
any attention to the question of whether its conduct will be understood or
misconstrued, blamed or praised.
If for a period of only 600 years those individuals would
be sterilized who are physically degenerate or mentally diseased, humanity
would not only be delivered from an immense misfortune but also restored to a
state of general health such as we at present can hardly imagine. If the
fecundity of the healthy portion of the nation should be made a practical
matter in a conscientious and methodical way, we should have at least the
beginnings of a race from which all those germs would be eliminated which are
today the cause of our moral and physical decadence. If a people and a State
take this course to develop that nucleus of the nation which is most valuable
from the racial standpoint and thus increase its fecundity, the people as a
whole will subsequently enjoy that most precious of gifts which consists in a
racial quality fashioned on truly noble lines.
To achieve this the State should first of all not leave
the colonization of newly acquired territory to a haphazard policy but should
have it carried out under the guidance of definite principles. Specially
competent committees ought to issue certificates to individuals entitling them
to engage in colonization work, and these certificates should guarantee the
racial purity of the individuals in question. In this way frontier colonies
could gradually be founded whose inhabitants would be of the purest racial
stock, and hence would possess the best qualities of the race. Such colonies
would be a valuable asset to the whole nation. Their development would be a
source of joy and confidence and pride to each citizen of the nation, because
they would contain the pure germ which would ultimately bring about a great
development of the nation and indeed of mankind itself.
The folkish philosophy of life which bases the State on
the racial idea must finally succeed in bringing about a nobler era, in which
men will no longer pay exclusive attention to breeding and rearing pedigree
dogs and horses and cats, but will endeavour to improve the breed of the human
race itself. That will be an era of silence and renunciation for one class of
people, while the others will give their gifts and make their sacrifices
joyfully.
That such a mentality may be possible cannot be denied in
a world where hundreds and thousands accept the principle of celibacy from
their own choice, without being obliged or pledged to do so by anything except
an ecclesiastical precept. Why should it not be possible to induce people to
make this sacrifice if, instead of such a precept, they were simply told that
they ought to put an end to this truly original sin of racial corruption which
is steadily being passed on from one generation to another. And, further, they
ought to be brought to realize that it is their bounden duty to give to the
Almighty Creator beings such as He himself made to His own image.
Naturally, our wretched army of contemporary philistines
will not understand these things. They will ridicule them or shrug their round
shoulders and groan out their everlasting excuses: "Of course it is a fine
thing, but the pity is that it cannot be carried out." And we reply: "With you
indeed it cannot be done, for your world is incapable of such an idea. You know
only one anxiety and that is for your own personal existence. You have one God,
and that is your money. We do not turn to you, however, for help, but to the
great army of those who are too poor to consider their personal existence as
the highest good on earth. They do not place their trust in money but in other
gods, into whose hands they confide their lives. Above all we turn to the vast
army of our German youth. They are coming to maturity in a great epoch, and
they will fight against the evils which were due to the laziness and
indifference of their fathers." Either the German youth will one day create a
new State founded on the racial idea or they will be the last witnesses of the
complete breakdown and death of the bourgeois world.
For if a generation suffers from defects which it
recognizes and even admits and is nevertheless quite pleased with itself, as
the bourgeois world is today, resorting to the cheap excuse that nothing can be
done to remedy the situation, then such a generation is doomed to disaster. A
marked characteristic of our bourgeois world is that they no longer can deny
the evil conditions that exist. They have to admit that there is much which is
foul and wrong; but they are not able to make up their minds to fight against
that evil, which would mean putting forth the energy to mobilize the forces of
60 or 70 million people and thus oppose this menace. They do just the opposite.
When such an effort is made elsewhere they only indulge in silly comment and
try from a safe distance to show that such an enterprise is theoretically
impossible and doomed to failure. No arguments are too stupid to be employed in
the service of their own pettifogging opinions and their knavish moral
attitude. If, for instance, a whole continent wages war against alcoholic
intoxication, so as to free a whole people from this devastating vice, our
bourgeois European does not know better than to look sideways stupidly, shake
the head in doubt and ridicule the movement with a superior sneer – a state of
mind which is effective in a society that is so ridiculous. But when all these
stupidities miss their aim and in that part of the world this sublime and
intangible attitude is treated effectively and success attends the movement,
then such success is called into question or its importance minimized. Even
moral principles are used in this slanderous campaign against a movement which
aims at suppressing a great source of immorality.
No. We must not permit ourselves to be deceived by any
illusions on this point. Our contemporary bourgeois world has become useless
for any such noble human task because it has lost all high quality and is evil,
not so much - as I think - because evil is wished but rather because these
people are too indolent to rise up against it. That is why those political
societies which call themselves 'bourgeois parties' are nothing but
associations to promote the interests of certain professional groups and
classes. Their highest aim is to defend their own egoistic interests as best
they can. It is obvious that such a guild, consisting of bourgeois politicians,
may be considered fit for anything rather than a struggle, especially when the
adversaries are not cautious shopkeepers but the proletarian masses, goaded on
to extremities and determined not to hesitate before deeds of violence.
If we consider it the first duty of the State to serve and promote
the general welfare of the people, by preserving and encouraging the
development of the best racial elements, the logical consequence is that this
task cannot be limited to measures concerning the birth of the infant members
of the race and nation but that the State will also have to adopt educational
means for making each citizen a worthy factor in the further propagation of the
racial stock.
Just as, in general, the racial quality is the preliminary
condition for the mental efficiency of any given human material, the training
of the individual will first of all have to be directed towards the development
of sound bodily health. For the general rule is that a strong and healthy mind
is found only in a strong and healthy body. The fact that men of genius are
sometimes not robust in health and stature, or even of a sickly constitution,
is no proof against the principle I have enunciated. These cases are only
exceptions which, as everywhere else, prove the rule. But when the bulk of a
nation is composed of physical degenerates it is rare for a great spirit to
arise from such a miserable motley. And in any case his activities would never
meet with great success. A degenerate mob will either be incapable of
understanding him at all or their will-power is so feeble that they cannot
follow the soaring of such an eagle.
The State that is grounded on the racial principle and is
alive to the significance of this truth will first of all have to base its
educational work not on the mere imparting of knowledge but rather on physical
training and development of healthy bodies. The cultivation of the intellectual
facilities comes only in the second place. And here again it is character which
has to be developed first of all, strength of will and decision. And the
educational system ought to foster the spirit of readiness to accept
responsibilities gladly. Formal instruction in the sciences must be considered
last in importance. Accordingly the State which is grounded on the racial idea
must start with the principle that a person whose formal education in the
sciences is relatively small but who is physically sound and robust, of a
steadfast and honest character, ready and able to make decisions and endowed
with strength of will, is a more useful member of the national community than a
weakling who is scholarly and refined. A nation composed of learned men who are
physical weaklings, hesitant about decisions of the will, and timid pacifists,
is not capable of assuring even its own existence on this earth. In the bitter
struggle which decides the destiny of man it is very rare that an individual
has succumbed because he lacked learning. Those who fail are they who try to
ignore these consequences and are too faint-hearted about putting them into
effect. There must be a certain balance between mind and body. An ill-kept body
is not made a more beautiful sight by the indwelling of a radiant spirit. We
should not be acting justly if we were to bestow the highest intellectual
training on those who are physically deformed and crippled, who lack decision
and are weak-willed and cowardly. What has made the Greek ideal of beauty
immortal is the wonderful union of a splendid physical beauty with nobility of
mind and spirit.
Moltke's saying, that in the long run fortune favours
only the efficient, is certainly valid for the relationship between body and
spirit. A mind which is sound will generally maintain its dwelling in a body
that is sound.
Accordingly, in the People's State physical training is
not a matter for the individual alone. Nor is it a duty which first devolves on
the parents and only secondly or thirdly a public interest; but it is necessary
for the preservation of the people, who are represented and protected by the
State. As regards purely formal education the State even now interferes with
the individual's right of self-determination and insists upon the right of the
community by submitting the child to an obligatory system of training, without
paying attention to the approval or disapproval of the parents. In a similar
way and to a higher degree the new People's State will one day make its
authority prevail over the ignorance and incomprehension of individuals in
problems appertaining to the safety of the nation. It must organize its
educational work in such a way that the bodies of the young will be
systematically trained from infancy onwards, so as to be tempered and hardened
for the demands to be made on them in later years. Above all, the State must
see to it that a generation of stay-at-homes is not developed.
The work of education and hygiene has to begin with the
young mother. The painstaking efforts carried on for several decades have
succeeded in abolishing septic infection at childbirth and reducing puerperal
fever to a relatively small number of cases. And so it ought to be possible by
means of instructing sisters and mothers in an opportune way, to institute a
system of training the child from early infancy onwards so that this may serve
as an excellent basis for future development.
The People's State ought to allow much more time for
physical training in the school. It is nonsense to burden young brains with a
load of material of which, as experience shows, they retain only a small part,
and mostly not the essentials, but only the secondary and useless portion;
because the young mind is incapable of sifting the right kind of learning out
of all the stuff that is pumped into it. To-day, even in the curriculum of the
high schools, only two short hours in the week are reserved for gymnastics; and
worse still, it is left to the pupils to decide whether or not they want to
take part. This shows a grave disproportion between this branch of education
and purely intellectual instruction. Not a single day should be allowed to pass
in which the young pupil does not have one hour of physical training in the
morning and one in the evening; and every kind of sport and gymnastics should
be included. There is one kind of sport which should be specially encouraged,
although many people who call themselves völkisch consider it brutal and
vulgar, and that is boxing. It is incredible how many false notions prevail
among the 'cultivated' classes. The fact that the young man learns how to fence
and then spends his time in duels is considered quite natural and respectable.
But boxing – that is brutal. Why? There is no other sport which equals this in
developing the militant spirit, none that demands such a power of rapid
decision or which gives the body the flexibility of good steel. It is no more
vulgar when two young people settle their differences with their fists than
with sharp-pointed pieces of steel. One who is attacked and defends himself
with his fists surely does not act less manly than one who runs off and yells
for the assistance of a policeman. But, above all, a healthy youth has to learn
to endure hard knocks. This principle may appear savage to our contemporary
champions who fight only with the weapons of the intellect. But it is not the
purpose of the People's State to educate a colony of æsthetic pacifists and
physical degenerates. This State does not consider that the human ideal is to
be found in the honourable philistine or the maidenly spinster, but in a
dareful personification of manly force and in women capable of bringing men
into the world.
Generally speaking, the function of sport is not only to
make the individual strong, alert and daring, but also to harden the body and
train it to endure an adverse environment.
If our superior class had not received such a
distinguished education, and if, on the contrary, they had learned boxing, it
would never have been possible for bullies and deserters and other such
canaille to carry through a German revolution. For the success of this
revolution was not due to the courageous, energetic and audacious activities of
its authors but to the lamentable cowardice and irresolution of those who ruled
the German State at that time and were responsible for it. But our educated
leaders had received only an 'intellectual' training and thus found themselves
defenceless when their adversaries used iron bars instead of intellectual
weapons. All this could happen only because our superior scholastic system did
not train men to be real men but merely to be civil servants, engineers,
technicians, chemists, litterateurs, jurists and, finally, professors; so that
intellectualism should not die out.
Our leadership in the purely intellectual sphere has
always been brilliant, but as regards will-power in practical affairs our
leadership has been beneath criticism.
Of course education cannot make a courageous man out of
one who is temperamentally a coward. But a man who naturally possesses a
certain degree of courage will not be able to develop that quality if his
defective education has made him inferior to others from the very start as
regards physical strength and prowess. The army offers the best example of the
fact that the knowledge of one's physical ability develops a man's courage and
militant spirit. Outstanding heroes are not the rule in the army, but the
average represents men of high courage. The excellent schooling which the
German soldiers received before the War imbued the members of the whole
gigantic organism with a degree of confidence in their own superiority such as
even our opponents never thought possible. All the immortal examples of
dauntless courage and daring which the German armies gave during the late
summer and autumn of 1914, as they advanced from triumph to triumph, were the
result of that education which had been pursued systematically. During those
long years of peace before the last War men who were almost physical weaklings
were made capable of incredible deeds, and thus a self-confidence was developed
which did not fail even in the most terrible battles.
It is our German people, which broke down and were
delivered over to be kicked by the rest of the world, that had need of the
power that comes by suggestion from self-confidence. But this confidence in
one's self must be instilled into our children from their very early years. The
whole system of education and training must be directed towards fostering in
the child the conviction that he is unquestionably a match for any- and
everybody. The individual has to regain his own physical strength and prowess
in order to believe in the invincibility of the nation to which he belongs.
What has formerly led the German armies to victory was the sum total of the
confidence which each individual had in himself, and which all of them had in
those who held the positions of command. What will restore the national
strength of the German people is the conviction that they will be able to
reconquer their liberty. But this conviction can only be the final product of
an equal feeling in the millions of individuals. And here again we must have no
illusions.
The collapse of our people was overwhelming, and the
efforts to put an end to so much misery must also be overwhelming. It would be
a bitter and grave error to believe that our people could be made strong again
simply by means of our present bourgeois training in good order and obedience.
That will not suffice if we are to break up the present order of things, which
now sanctions the acknowledgment of our defeat and cast the broken chains of
our slavery in the face of our opponents. Only by a superabundance of national
energy and a passionate thirst for liberty can we recover what has been lost.
Also the manner of clothing the young should be such as harmonizes
with this purpose. It is really lamentable to see how our young people have
fallen victims to a fashion mania which perverts the meaning of the old adage
that clothes make the man.
Especially in regard to young people clothes should take
their place in the service of education. The boy who walks about in summer-time
wearing long baggy trousers and clad up to the neck is hampered even by his
clothes in feeling any inclination towards strenuous physical exercise.
Ambition and, to speak quite frankly, even vanity must be appealed to. I do not
mean such vanity as leads people to want to wear fine clothes, which not
everybody can afford, but rather the vanity which inclines a person towards
developing a fine bodily physique. And this is something which everybody can
help to do.
This will come in useful also for later years. The young
girl must become acquainted with her sweetheart. If the beauty of the body were
not completely forced into the background today through our stupid manner of
dressing, it would not be possible for thousands of our girls to be led astray
by Jewish mongrels, with their repulsive crooked waddle. It is also in the
interests of the nation that those who have a beautiful physique should be
brought into the foreground, so that they might encourage the development of a
beautiful bodily form among the people in general.
Military training is excluded among us today, and
therewith the only institution which in peace-times at least partly made up for
the lack of physical training in our education. Therefore what I have suggested
is all the more necessary in our time. The success of our old military training
not only showed itself in the education of the individual but also in the
influence which it exercised over the mutual relationship between the sexes.
The young girl preferred the soldier to one who was not a soldier. The People's
State must not confine its control of physical training to the official school
period, but it must demand that, after leaving school and while the adolescent
body is still developing, the boy continues this training. For on such proper
physical development success in after-life largely depends. It is stupid to
think that the right of the State to supervise the education of its young
citizens suddenly comes to an end the moment they leave school and recommences
only with military service. This right is a duty, and as such it must continue
uninterruptedly. The present State, which does not interest itself in
developing healthy men, has criminally neglected this duty. It leaves our
contemporary youth to be corrupted on the streets and in the brothels, instead
of keeping hold of the reins and continuing the physical training of these
youths up to the time when they are grown into healthy young men and women.
For the present it is a matter of indifference what form the State
chooses for carrying on this training. The essential matter is that it should
be developed and that the most suitable ways of doing so should be
investigated. The People's State will have to consider the physical training of
the youth after the school period just as much a public duty as their
intellectual training; and this training will have to be carried out through
public institutions. Its general lines can be a preparation for subsequent
service in the army. And then it will no longer be the task of the army to
teach the young recruit the most elementary drill regulations. In fact the army
will no longer have to deal with recruits in the present sense of the word, but
it will rather have to transform into a soldier the youth whose bodily prowess
has been already fully trained.
In the People's State the army will no longer be obliged
to teach boys how to walk and stand erect, but it will be the final and supreme
school of patriotic education. In the army the young recruit will learn the art
of bearing arms, but at the same time he will be equipped for his other duties
in later life. And the supreme aim of military education must always be to
achieve that which was attributed to the old army as its highest merit: namely,
that through his military schooling the boy must be transformed into a man,
that he must not only learn to obey but also acquire the fundamentals that will
enable him one day to command. He must learn to remain silent not only when he
is rightly rebuked but also when he is wrongly rebuked.
Furthermore, on the self-consciousness of his own
strength and on the basis of that esprit de corps which inspires him and
his comrades, he must become convinced that he belongs to a people who are
invincible.
After he has completed his military training two
certificates shall be handed to the soldier. The one will be his diploma as a
citizen of the State, a juridical document which will enable him to take part
in public affairs. The second will be an attestation of his physical health,
which guarantees his fitness for marriage.
The People's State will have to direct the education of
girls just as that of boys and according to the same fundamental principles.
Here again special importance must be given to physical training, and only
after that must the importance of spiritual and mental training be taken into
account. In the education of the girl the final goal always to be kept in mind
is that she is one day to be a mother.
It is only in the second place that the People's State
must busy itself with the training of character, using all the means adapted to
that purpose.
Of course the essential traits of the individual
character are already there fundamentally before any education takes place. A
person who is fundamentally egoistic will always remain fundamentally egoistic,
and the idealist will always remain fundamentally an idealist. Besides those,
however, who already possess a definite stamp of character there are millions
of people with characters that are indefinite and vague. The born delinquent
will always remain a delinquent, but numerous people who show only a certain
tendency to commit criminal acts may become useful members of the community if
rightly trained; whereas, on the other hand, weak and unstable characters may
easily become evil elements if the system of education has been bad.
During the War it was often lamented that our people could be so
little reticent. This failing made it very difficult to keep even highly
important secrets from the knowledge of the enemy. But let us ask this
question: What did the German educational system do in pre-War times to teach
the Germans to be discreet? Did it not very often happen in schooldays that the
little tell-tale was preferred to his companions who kept their mouths shut? Is
it not true that then, as well as now, complaining about others was considered
praiseworthy 'candour', while silent discretion was taken as obstinacy? Has any
attempt ever been made to teach that discretion is a precious and manly virtue?
No, for such matters are trifles in the eyes of our educators. But these
trifles cost our State innumerable millions in legal expenses; for 90 per cent
of all the processes for defamation and such like charges arise only from a
lack of discretion. Remarks that are made without any sense of responsibility
are thoughtlessly repeated from mouth to mouth; and our economic welfare is
continually damaged because important methods of production are thus disclosed.
Secret preparations for our national defence are rendered illusory because our
people have never learned the duty of silence. They repeat everything they
happen to hear. In times of war such talkative habits may even cause the loss
of battles and therefore may contribute essentially to the unsuccessful outcome
of a campaign. Here, as in other matters, we may rest assured that adults
cannot do what they have not learnt to do in youth. A teacher must not try to
discover the wild tricks of the boys by encouraging the evil practice of
tale-bearing. Young people form a sort of State among themselves and face
adults with a certain solidarity. That is quite natural. The ties which unite
the ten-year boys to one another are stronger and more natural than their
relationship to adults. A boy who tells on his comrades commits an act of
treason and shows a bent of character which is, to speak bluntly, similar to
that of a man who commits high treason. Such a boy must not be classed as
'good', 'reliable', and so on, but rather as one with undesirable traits of
character. It may be rather convenient for the teacher to make use of such
unworthy tendencies in order to help his own work, but by such an attitude the
germ of a moral habit is sown in young hearts and may one day show fatal
consequences. It has happened more often than once that a young informer
developed into a big scoundrel.
This is only one example among many. The deliberate
training of fine and noble traits of character in our schools today is almost
negative. In the future much more emphasis will have to be laid on this side of
our educational work. Loyalty, self-sacrifice and discretion are virtues which
a great nation must possess. And the teaching and development of these in the
school is a more important matter than many others things now included in the
curriculum. To make the children give up habits of complaining and whining and
howling when they are hurt, etc., also belongs to this part of their training.
If the educational system fails to teach the child at an early age to endure
pain and injury without complaining we cannot be surprised if at a later age,
when the boy has grown to be the man and is, for example, in the trenches, the
postal service is used for nothing else than to send home letters of weeping
and complaint. If our youths, during their years in the primary schools, had
had their minds crammed with a little less knowledge, and if instead they had
been better taught how to be masters of themselves, it would have served us
well during the years 1914–1918.
In its educational system the People's State will have to
attach the highest importance to the development of character, hand-in-hand
with physical training. Many more defects which our national organism shows at
present could be at least ameliorated, if not completely eliminated, by
education of the right kind.
Extreme importance should be attached to the training of
will-power and the habit of making firm decisions, also the habit of being
always ready to accept responsibilities.
In the training of our old army the principle was in
vogue that any order is always better than no order. Applied to our youth this
principle ought to take the form that any answer is better than no answer. The
fear of replying, because one fears to be wrong, ought to be considered more
humiliating than giving the wrong reply. On this simple and primitive basis our
youth should be trained to have the courage to act.
It has been often lamented that in November and December
1918 all the authorities lost their heads and that, from the monarch down to
the last divisional commander, nobody had sufficient mettle to make a decision
on his own responsibility. That terrible fact constitutes a grave rebuke to our
educational system; because what was then revealed on a colossal scale at that
moment of catastrophe was only what happens on a smaller scale everywhere among
us. It is the lack of will-power, and not the lack of arms, which renders us
incapable of offering any serious resistance today. This defect is found
everywhere among our people and prevents decisive action wherever risks have to
be taken, as if any great action can be taken without also taking the risk.
Quite unsuspectingly, a German General found a formula for this lamentable lack
of the will-to-act when he said: "I act only when I can count on a 51 per cent
probability of success." In that '51 per cent probability' we find the very
root of the German collapse. The man who demands from Fate a guarantee of his
success deliberately denies the significance of an heroic act. For this
significance consists in the very fact that, in the definite knowledge that the
situation in question is fraught with mortal danger, an action is undertaken
which may lead to success. A patient suffering from cancer and who knows that
his death is certain if he does not undergo an operation, needs no 51 per cent
probability of a cure before facing the operation. And if the operation
promises only half of one per cent probability of success a man of courage will
risk it and would not whine if it turned out unsuccessful.
All in all, the cowardly lack of will-power and the
incapacity for making decisions are chiefly results of the erroneous education
given us in our youth. The disastrous effects of this are now widespread among
us. The crowning examples of that tragic chain of consequences are shown in the
lack of civil courage which our leading statesmen display.
The cowardice which leads nowadays to the shirking of
every kind of responsibility springs from the same roots. Here again it is the
fault of the education given our young people. This drawback permeates all
sections of public life and finds its immortal consummation in the institutions
of government that function under the parliamentary regime.
Already in the school, unfortunately, more value is
placed on 'confession and full repentance' and 'contrite renouncement', on the
part of little sinners, than on a simple and frank avowal. But this latter
seems today, in the eyes of many an educator, to savour of a spirit of utter
incorrigibility and depravation. And, though it may seem incredible, many a boy
is told that the gallows tree is waiting for him because he has shown certain
traits which might be of inestimable value in the nation as a whole.
Just as the People's State must one day give its attention to
training the will-power and capacity for decision among the youth, so too it
must inculcate in the hearts of the young generation from early childhood
onwards a readiness to accept responsibilities, and the courage of open and
frank avowal. If it recognizes the full significance of this necessity, finally
– after a century of educative work – it will succeed in building up a nation
which will no longer be subject to those defeats that have contributed so
disastrously to bring about our present overthrow.
The formal imparting of knowledge, which constitutes the
chief work of our educational system today, will be taken over by the People's
State with only few modifications. These modifications must be made in three
branches.
First of all, the brains of the young people must not
generally be burdened with subjects of which ninety-five per cent are useless
to them and are therefore forgotten again. The curriculum of the primary and
secondary schools presents an odd mixture at the present time. In many branches
of study the subject matter to be learned has become so enormous that only a
very small fraction of it can be remembered later on, and indeed only a very
small fraction of this whole mass of knowledge can be used. On the other hand,
what is learned is insufficient for anybody who wishes to specialize in any
certain branch for the purpose of earning his daily bread. Take, for example,
the average civil servant who has passed through the Gymnasium or High School,
and ask him at the age of thirty or forty how much he has retained of the
knowledge that was crammed into him with so much pains.
How much is retained from all that was stuffed into his
brain? He will certainly answer: "Well, if a mass of stuff was then taught, it
was not for the sole purpose of supplying the student with a great stock of
knowledge from which he could draw in later years, but it served to develop the
understanding, the memory, and above all it helped to strengthen the thinking
powers of the brain." That is partly true. And yet it is somewhat dangerous to
submerge a young brain in a flood of impressions which it can hardly master and
the single elements of which it cannot discern or appreciate at their just
value. It is mostly the essential part of this knowledge, and not the
accidental, that is forgotten and sacrificed. Thus the principal purpose of
this copious instruction is frustrated, for that purpose cannot be to make the
brain capable of learning by simply offering it an enormous and varied amount
of subjects for acquisition, but rather to furnish the individual with that
stock of knowledge which he will need in later life and which he can use for
the good of the community. This aim, however, is rendered illusory if, because
of the superabundance of subjects that have been crammed into his head in
childhood, a person is able to remember nothing, or at least not the essential
portion, of all this in later life. There is no reason why millions of people
should learn two or three languages during the school years, when only a very
small fraction will have the opportunity to use these languages in later life
and when most of them will therefore forget those languages completely. To take
an instance: Out of 100,000 students who learn French there are probably not
2,000 who will be in a position to make use of this accomplishment in later
life, while 98,000 will never have a chance to utilize in practice what they
have learned in youth. They have spent thousands of hours on a subject which
will afterwards be without any value or importance to them. The argument that
these matters form part of the general process of educating the mind is
invalid. It would be sound if all these people were able to use this learning
in after life. But, as the situation stands, 98,000 are tortured to no purpose
and waste their valuable time, only for the sake of the 2,000 to whom the
language will be of any use.
In the case of that language which I have chosen as an
example it cannot be said that the learning of it educates the student in
logical thinking or sharpens his mental acumen, as the learning of Latin, for
instance, might be said to do. It would therefore be much better to teach young
students only the general outline, or, better, the inner structure of such a
language: that is to say, to allow them to discern the characteristic features
of the language, or perhaps to make them acquainted with the rudiments of its
grammar, its pronunciation, its syntax, style, etc. That would be sufficient
for average students, because it would provide a clearer view of the whole and
could be more easily remembered. And it would be more practical than the
present-day attempt to cram into their heads a detailed knowledge of the whole
language, which they can never master and which they will readily forget. If
this method were adopted, then we should avoid the danger that, out of the
superabundance of matter taught, only some fragments will remain in the memory;
for the youth would then have to learn what is worth while, and the selection
between the useful and the useless would thus have been made beforehand.
As regards the majority of students the knowledge and understanding
of the rudiments of a language would be quite sufficient for the rest of their
lives. And those who really do need this language subsequently would thus have
a foundation on which to start, should they choose to make a more thorough
study of it.
By adopting such a curriculum the necessary amount of time
would be gained for physical exercises as well as for a more intense training
in the various educational fields that have already been mentioned.
A
reform of particular importance is that which ought to take place in the
present methods of teaching history. Scarcely any other people are made to
study as much of history as the Germans, and scarcely any other people make
such a bad use of their historical knowledge. If politics means history in the
making, then our way of teaching history stands condemned by the way we have
conducted our politics. But there would be no point in bewailing the lamentable
results of our political conduct unless one is now determined to give our
people a better political education. In 99 out of 100 cases the results of our
present teaching of history are deplorable. Usually only a few dates, years of
birth and names, remain in the memory, while a knowledge of the main and
clearly defined lines of historical development is completely lacking. The
essential features which are of real significance are not taught. It is left to
the more or less bright intelligence of the individual to discover the inner
motivating urge amid the mass of dates and chronological succession of events.
You may object as strongly as you like to this unpleasant statement.
But read with attention the speeches which our parliamentarians make during one
session alone on political problems and on questions of foreign policy in
particular. Remember that those gentlemen are, or claim to be, the elite of the
German nation and that at least a great number of them have sat on the benches
of our secondary schools and that many of them have passed through our
universities. Then you will realize how defective the historical education of
these people has been. If these gentlemen had never studied history at all but
had possessed a sound instinct for public affairs, things would have gone
better, and the nation would have benefited greatly thereby.
The subject matter of our historical teaching must be
curtailed. The chief value of that teaching is to make the principal lines of
historical development understood. The more our historical teaching is limited
to this task, the more we may hope that it will turn out subsequently to be of
advantage to the individual and, through the individual, to the community as a
whole. For history must not be studied merely with a view to knowing what
happened in the past but as a guide for the future, and to teach us what policy
would be the best to follow for the preservation of our own people. That is the
real end; and the teaching of history is only a means to attain this end. But
here again the means has superseded the end in our contemporary education. The
goal is completely forgotten. Do not reply that a profound study of history
demands a detailed knowledge of all these dates because otherwise we could not
fix the great lines of development. That task belongs to the professional
historians. But the average man is not a professor of history. For him history
has only one mission and that is to provide him with such an amount of
historical knowledge as is necessary in order to enable him to form an
independent opinion on the political affairs of his own country. The man who
wants to become a professor of history can devote himself to all the details
later on. Naturally he will have to occupy himself even with the smallest
details. Of course our present teaching of history is not adequate to all this.
Its scope is too vast for the average student and too limited for the student
who wishes to be an historical expert.
Finally, it is the business of the People's State to
arrange for the writing of a world history in which the race problem will
occupy a dominant position.
To sum up: The People's State must reconstruct our system
of general instruction in such a way that it will embrace only what is
essential. Beyond this it will have to make provision for a more advanced
teaching in the various subjects for those who want to specialize in them. It
will suffice for the average individual to be acquainted with the fundamentals
of the various subjects to serve as the basis of what may be called an
all-round education. He ought to study exhaustively and in detail only that
subject in which he intends to work during the rest of his life. A general
instruction in all subjects should be obligatory, and specialization should be
left to the choice of the individual.
In this way the scholastic programme would be shortened,
and thus several school hours would be gained which could be utilized for
physical training and character training, in will-power, the capacity for
making practical judgments, decisions, etc.
The little account taken by our school training today,
especially in the secondary schools, of the callings that have to be followed
in after life is demonstrated by the fact that men who are destined for the
same calling in life are educated in three different kinds of schools. What is
of decisive importance is general education only and not the special teaching.
When special knowledge is needed it cannot be given in the curriculum of our
secondary schools as they stand today.
Therefore the People's State will one day have to abolish
such half-measures.
The second modification in the curriculum which the
People's State will have to make is the following:
It is a characteristic of our materialistic epoch that our
scientific education shows a growing emphasis on what is real and practical:
such subjects, for instance, as applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.
Of course they are necessary in an age that is dominated by industrial
technology and chemistry, and where everyday life shows at least the external
manifestations of these. But it is a perilous thing to base the general culture
of a nation on the knowledge of these subjects. On the contrary, that general
culture ought always to be directed towards ideals. It ought to be founded on
the humanist disciplines and should aim at giving only the ground work of
further specialized instruction in the various practical sciences. Otherwise we
should sacrifice those forces that are more important for the preservation of
the nation than any technical knowledge. In the historical department the study
of ancient history should not be omitted. Roman history, along general lines,
is and will remain the best teacher, not only for our own time but also for the
future. And the ideal of Hellenic culture should be preserved for us in all its
marvellous beauty. The differences between the various peoples should not
prevent us from recognizing the community of race which unites them on a higher
plane. The conflict of our times is one that is being waged around great
objectives. A civilization is fighting for its existence. It is a civilization
that is the product of thousands of years of historical development, and the
Greek as well as the German forms part of it.
A clear-cut division must be made between general culture
and the special branches. To-day the latter threaten more and more to devote
themselves exclusively to the service of Mammon. To counterbalance this
tendency, general culture should be preserved, at least in its ideal forms. The
principle should be repeatedly emphasized, that industrial and technical
progress, trade and commerce, can flourish only so long as a folk community
exists whose general system of thought is inspired by ideals, since that is the
preliminary condition for a flourishing development of the enterprises I have
spoken of. That condition is not created by a spirit of materialist egotism but
by a spirit of self-denial and the joy of giving one's self in the service of
others.
The system of education which prevails today sees its principal
object in pumping into young people that knowledge which will help them to make
their way in life. This principle is expressed in the following terms: "The
young man must one day become a useful member of human society." By that phrase
they mean the ability to gain an honest daily livelihood. The superficial
training in the duties of good citizenship, which he acquires merely as an
accidental thing, has very weak foundations. For in itself the State represents
only a form, and therefore it is difficult to train people to look upon this
form as the ideal which they will have to serve and towards which they must
feel responsible. A form can be too easily broken. But, as we have seen, the
idea which people have of the State today does not represent anything clearly
defined. Therefore, there is nothing but the usual stereotyped 'patriotic'
training. In the old Germany the greatest emphasis was placed on the divine
right of the small and even the smallest potentates. The way in which this
divine right was formulated and presented was never very clever and often very
stupid. Because of the large numbers of those small potentates, it was
impossible to give adequate biographical accounts of the really great
personalities that shed their lustre on the history of the German people. The
result was that the broad masses received a very inadequate knowledge of German
history. Here, too, the great lines of development were missing.
It is evident that in such a way no real national
enthusiasm could be aroused. Our educational system proved incapable of
selecting from the general mass of our historical personages the names of a few
personalities which the German people could be proud to look upon as their own.
Thus the whole nation might have been united by the ties of a common knowledge
of this common heritage. The really important figures in German history were
not presented to the present generation. The attention of the whole nation was
not concentrated on them for the purpose of awakening a common national spirit.
From the various subjects that were taught, those who had charge of our
training seemed incapable of selecting what redounded most to the national
honour and lifting that above the common objective level, in order to inflame
the national pride in the light of such brilliant examples. At that time such a
course would have been looked upon as rank chauvinism, which did not then have
a very pleasant savour. Pettifogging dynastic patriotism was more acceptable
and more easily tolerated than the glowing fire of a supreme national pride.
The former could be always pressed into service, whereas the latter might one
day become a dominating force. Monarchist patriotism terminated in Associations
of Veterans, whereas passionate national patriotism might have opened a road
which would be difficult to determine. This national passion is like a highly
tempered thoroughbred who is discriminate about the sort of rider he will
tolerate in the saddle. No wonder that most people preferred to shirk such a
danger. Nobody seemed to think it possible that one day a war might come which
would put the mettle of this kind of patriotism to the test, in artillery
bombardment and waves of attacks with poison gas. But when it did come our lack
of this patriotic passion was avenged in a terrible way. None were very
enthusiastic about dying for their imperial and royal sovereigns; while on the
other hand the 'Nation' was not recognized by the greater number of the
soldiers.
Since the revolution broke out in Germany and the
monarchist patriotism was therefore extinguished, the purpose of teaching
history was nothing more than to add to the stock of objective knowledge. The
present State has no use for patriotic enthusiasm; but it will never obtain
what it really desires. For if dynastic patriotism failed to produce a supreme
power of resistance at a time when the principle of nationalism dominated, it
will be still less possible to arouse republican enthusiasm. There can be no
doubt that the German people would not have stood on the field of battle for
four and a half years to fight under the battle slogan 'For the Republic,' and
least of all those who created this grand institution.
In reality this Republic has been allowed to exist
undisturbed only by grace of its readiness and its promise to all and sundry,
to pay tribute and reparations to the stranger and to put its signature to any
kind of territorial renunciation. The rest of the world finds it sympathetic,
just as a weakling is always more pleasing to those who want to bend him to
their own uses than is a man who is made of harder metal. But the fact that the
enemy likes this form of government is the worst kind of condemnation. They
love the German Republic and tolerate its existence because no better
instrument could be found which would help them to keep our people in slavery.
It is to this fact alone that this magnanimous institution owes its survival.
And that is why it can renounce any real system of national education and can
feel satisfied when the heroes of the Reich banner shout their hurrahs, but in
reality these same heroes would scamper away like rabbits if called upon to
defend that banner with their blood.
The People's State will have to fight for its existence.
It will not gain or secure this existence by signing documents like that of the
Dawes Plan. But for its existence and defence it will need precisely those
things which our present system believes can be repudiated. The more worthy its
form and its inner national being. the greater will be the envy and opposition
of its adversaries. The best defence will not be in the arms it possesses but
in its citizens. Bastions of fortresses will not save it, but the living wall
of its men and women, filled with an ardent love for their country and a
passionate spirit of national patriotism.
Therefore the third point which will have to be considered
in relation to our educational system is the following:
The People's State must realize that the sciences may also
be made a means of promoting a spirit of pride in the nation. Not only the
history of the world but the history of civilization as a whole must be taught
in the light of this principle. An inventor must appear great not only as an
inventor but also, and even more so, as a member of the nation. The admiration
aroused by the contemplation of a great achievement must be transformed into a
feeling of pride and satisfaction that a man of one's own race has been chosen
to accomplish it. But out of the abundance of great names in German history the
greatest will have to be selected and presented to our young generation in such
a way as to become solid pillars of strength to support the national spirit.
The subject matter ought to be systematically organized from the
standpoint of this principle. And the teaching should be so orientated that the
boy or girl, after leaving school, will not be a semi-pacifist, a democrat or
of something else of that kind, but a whole-hearted German. So that this
national feeling be sincere from the very beginning, and not a mere pretence,
the following fundamental and inflexible principle should be impressed on the
young brain while it is yet malleable: The man who loves his nation can prove
the sincerity of this sentiment only by being ready to make sacrifices for the
nation's welfare. There is no such thing as a national sentiment which is
directed towards personal interests. And there is no such thing as a
nationalism that embraces only certain classes. Hurrahing proves nothing and
does not confer the right to call oneself national if behind that shout there
is no sincere preoccupation for the conservation of the nation's well-being.
One can be proud of one's people only if there is no class left of which one
need to be ashamed. When one half of a nation is sunk in misery and worn out by
hard distress, or even depraved or degenerate, that nation presents such an
unattractive picture that nobody can feel proud to belong to it. It is only
when a nation is sound in all its members, physically and morally, that the joy
of belonging to it can properly be intensified to the supreme feeling which we
call national pride. But this pride, in its highest form, can be felt only by
those who know the greatness of their nation.
The spirit of nationalism and a feeling for social justice
must be fused into one sentiment in the hearts of the youth. Then a day will
come when a nation of citizens will arise which will be welded together through
a common love and a common pride that shall be invincible and indestructible
for ever.
The dread of chauvinism, which is a symptom of our time,
is a sign of its impotence. Since our epoch not only lacks everything in the
nature of exuberant energy but even finds such a manifestation disagreeable,
fate will never elect it for the accomplishment of any great deeds. For the
greatest changes that have taken place on this earth would have been
inconceivable if they had not been inspired by ardent and even hysterical
passions, but only by the bourgeois virtues of peacefulness and order.
One thing is certain: our world is facing a great revolution. The
only question is whether the outcome will be propitious for the Aryan portion
of mankind or whether the everlasting Jew will profit by it.
By educating the young generation along the right lines,
the People's State will have to see to it that a generation of mankind is
formed which will be adequate to this supreme combat that will decide the
destinies of the world.
That nation will conquer which will be the first to take
this road.
The whole organization of education and training which
the People's State is to build up must take as its crowning task the work of
instilling into the hearts and brains of the youth entrusted to it the racial
instinct and understanding of the racial idea. No boy or girl must leave school
without having attained a clear insight into the meaning of racial purity and
the importance of maintaining the racial blood unadulterated. Thus the first
indispensable condition for the preservation of our race will have been
established and thus the future cultural progress of our people will be
assured.
For in the last analysis all physical and mental training
would be in vain unless it served an entity which is ready and determined to
carry on its own existence and maintain its own characteristic qualities.
If it were otherwise, something would result which we Germans have
cause to regret already, without perhaps having hitherto recognized the extent
of the tragic calamity. We should be doomed to remain also in the future only
manure for civilization. And that not in the banal sense of the contemporary
bourgeois mind, which sees in a lost fellow member of our people only a lost
citizen, but in a sense which we should have painfully to recognize: namely,
that our racial blood would be destined to disappear. By continually mixing
with other races we might lift them from their former lower level of
civilization to a higher grade; but we ourselves should descend for ever from
the heights we had reached.
Finally, from the racial standpoint this training also
must find its culmination in the military service. The term of military service
is to be a final stage of the normal training which the average German
receives.
While the People's State attaches the greatest importance
to physical and mental training, it has also to consider, and no less
importantly, the task of selecting men for the service of the State itself.
This important matter is passed over lightly at the present time. Generally the
children of parents who are for the time being in higher situations are in
their turn considered worthy of a higher education. Here talent plays a
subordinate part. But talent can be estimated only relatively. Though in
general culture he may be inferior to the city child, a peasant boy may be more
talented than the son of a family that has occupied high positions through many
generations. But the superior culture of the city child has in itself nothing
to do with a greater or lesser degree of talent; for this culture has its roots
in the more copious mass of impressions which arise from the more varied
education and the surroundings among which this child lives. If the intelligent
son of peasant parents were educated from childhood in similar surroundings his
intellectual accomplishments would be quite otherwise. In our day there is only
one sphere where the family in which a person has been born means less than his
innate gifts. That is the sphere of art. Here, where a person cannot just
'learn,' but must have innate gifts that later on may undergo a more or less
happy development (in the sense of a wise development of what is already
there), money and parental property are of no account. This is a good proof
that genius is not necessarily connected with the higher social strata or with
wealth. Not rarely the greatest artists come from poor families. And many a boy
from the country village has eventually become a celebrated master.
It
does not say much for the mental acumen of our time that advantage is not taken
of this truth for the sake of our whole intellectual life. The opinion is
advanced that this principle, though undoubtedly valid in the field of art, has
not the same validity in regard to what are called the applied sciences. It is
true that a man can be trained to a certain amount of mechanical dexterity,
just as a poodle can be taught incredible tricks by a clever master. But such
training does not bring the animal to use his intelligence in order to carry
out those tricks. And the same holds good in regard to man. It is possible to
teach men, irrespective of talent or no talent, to go through certain
scientific exercises, but in such cases the results are quite as inanimate and
mechanical as in the case of the animal. It would even be possible to force a
person of mediocre intelligence, by means of a severe course of intellectual
drilling, to acquire more than the average amount of knowledge; but that
knowledge would remain sterile. The result would be a man who might be a
walking dictionary of knowledge but who will fail miserably on every critical
occasion in life and at every juncture where vital decisions have to be taken.
Such people need to be drilled specially for every new and even most
insignificant task and will never be capable of contributing in the least to
the general progress of mankind. Knowledge that is merely drilled into people
can at best qualify them to fill government positions under our present regime.
It goes without saying that, among the sum total of individuals who
make up a nation, gifted people are always to be found in every sphere of life.
It is also quite natural that the value of knowledge will be all the greater
the more vitally the dead mass of learning is animated by the innate talent of
the individual who possesses it. Creative work in this field can be done only
through the marriage of knowledge and talent.
One example will suffice to show how much our
contemporary world is at fault in this matter. From time to time our
illustrated papers publish, for the edification of the German philistine, the
news that in some quarter or other of the globe, and for the first time in that
locality, a Negro has become a lawyer, a teacher, a pastor, even a grand opera
tenor or something else of that kind. While the bourgeois blockhead stares with
amazed admiration at the notice that tells him how marvellous are the
achievements of our modern educational technique, the more cunning Jew sees in
this fact a new proof to be utilized for the theory with which he wants to
infect the public, namely that all men are equal. It does not dawn on the murky
bourgeois mind that the fact which is published for him is a sin against reason
itself, that it is an act of criminal insanity to train a being who is only an
anthropoid by birth until the pretence can be made that he has been turned into
a lawyer; while, on the other hand, millions who belong to the most civilized
races have to remain in positions which are unworthy of their cultural level.
The bourgeois mind does not realize that it is a sin against the will of the
eternal Creator to allow hundreds of thousands of highly gifted people to
remain floundering in the swamp of proletarian misery while Hottentots and
Zulus are drilled to fill positions in the intellectual professions. For here
we have the product only of a drilling technique, just as in the case of the
performing dog. If the same amount of care and effort were applied among
intelligent races each individual would become a thousand times more capable in
such matters.
This state of affairs would become intolerable if a day
should arrive when it no longer refers to exceptional cases. But the situation
is already intolerable where talent and natural gifts are not taken as decisive
factors in qualifying for the right to a higher education. It is indeed
intolerable to think that year after year hundreds of thousands of young people
without a single vestige of talent are deemed worthy of a higher education,
while other hundreds of thousands who possess high natural gifts have to go
without any sort of higher schooling at all. The practical loss thus caused to
the nation is incalculable. If the number of important discoveries which have
been made in America has grown considerably in recent years one of the reasons
is that the number of gifted persons belonging to the lowest social classes who
were given a higher education in that country is proportionately much larger
than in Europe.
A stock of knowledge packed into the brain will not
suffice for the making of discoveries. What counts here is only that knowledge
which is illuminated by natural talent. But with us at the present time no
value is placed on such gifts. Only good school reports count.
Here is another educative work that is waiting for the
People's State to do. It will not be its task to assure a dominant influence to
a certain social class already existing, but it will be its duty to attract the
most competent brains in the total mass of the nation and promote them to place
and honour. It is not merely the duty of the State to give to the average child
a certain definite education in the primary school, but it is also its duty to
open the road to talent in the proper direction. And above all, it must open
the doors of the higher schools under the State to talent of every sort, no
matter in what social class it may appear. This is an imperative necessity; for
thus alone will it be possible to develop a talented body of public leaders
from the class which represents learning that in itself is only a dead mass.
There is still another reason why the State should provide for this
situation. Our intellectual class, particularly in Germany, is so shut up in
itself and fossilized that it lacks living contact with the classes beneath it.
Two evil consequences result from this: First, the intellectual class neither
understands nor sympathizes with the broad masses. It has been so long cut off
from all connection with them that it cannot now have the necessary
psychological ties that would enable it to understand them. It has become
estranged from the people. Secondly, the intellectual class lacks the necessary
will-power; for this faculty is always weaker in cultivated circles, which live
in seclusion, than among the primitive masses of the people. God knows we
Germans have never been lacking in abundant scientific culture, but we have
always had a considerable lack of will-power and the capacity for making
decisions. For example, the more 'intellectual' our statesmen have been the
more lacking they have been, for the most part, in practical achievement. Our
political preparation and our technical equipment for the world war were
defective, certainly not because the brains governing the nation were too
little educated, but because the men who directed our public affairs were
over-educated, filled to over-flowing with knowledge and intelligence, yet
without any sound instinct and simply without energy, or any spirit of daring.
It was our nation's tragedy to have to fight for its existence under a
Chancellor who was a dillydallying philosopher. If instead of a Bethmann von
Hollweg we had had a rough man of the people as our leader the heroic blood of
the common grenadier would not have been shed in vain. The exaggeratedly
intellectual material out of which our leaders were made proved to be the best
ally of the scoundrels who carried out the November revolution. These
intellectuals safeguarded the national wealth in a miserly fashion, instead of
launching it forth and risking it, and thus they set the conditions on which
the others won success.
Here the Catholic Church presents an instructive example.
Clerical celibacy forces the Church to recruit its priests not from their own
ranks but progressively from the masses of the people. Yet there are not many
who recognize the significance of celibacy in this relation. But therein lies
the cause of the inexhaustible vigour which characterizes that ancient
institution. For by thus unceasingly recruiting the ecclesiastical dignitaries
from the lower classes of the people, the Church is enabled not only to
maintain the contact of instinctive understanding with the masses of the
population but also to assure itself of always being able to draw upon that
fund of energy which is present in this form only among the popular masses.
Hence the surprising youthfulness of that gigantic organism, its mental
flexibility and its iron will-power.
It will be the task of the Peoples' State so to organize
and administer its educational system that the existing intellectual class will
be constantly furnished with a supply of fresh blood from beneath. From the
bulk of the nation the State must sift out with careful scrutiny those persons
who are endowed with natural talents and see that they are employed in the
service of the community. For neither the State itself nor the various
departments of State exist to furnish revenues for members of a special class,
but to fulfil the tasks allotted to them. This will be possible, however, only
if the State trains individuals specially for these offices. Such individuals
must have the necessary fundamental capabilities and will-power. The principle
does not hold true only in regard to the civil service but also in regard to
all those who are to take part in the intellectual and moral leadership of the
people, no matter in what sphere they may be employed. The greatness of a
people is partly dependent on the condition that it must succeed in training
the best brains for those branches of the public service for which they show a
special natural aptitude and in placing them in the offices where they can do
their best work for the good of the community. If two nations of equal strength
and quality engage in a mutual conflict that nation will come out victorious
which has entrusted its intellectual and moral leadership to its best talents
and that nation will go under whose government represents only a common food
trough for privileged groups or classes and where the inner talents of its
individual members are not availed of.
Of course such a reform seems impossible in the world as
it is today. The objection will at once be raised, that it is too much to
expect from the favourite son of a highly-placed civil servant, for instance,
that he shall work with his hands simply because somebody else whose parents
belong to the working-class seems more capable for a job in the civil service.
That argument may be valid as long as manual work is looked upon in the same
way as it is looked upon today. Hence the Peoples' State will have to take up
an attitude towards the appreciation of manual labour which will be
fundamentally different from that which now exists. If necessary, it will have
to organize a persistent system of teaching which will aim at abolishing the
present-day stupid habit of looking down on physical labour as an occupation to
be ashamed of.
The individual will have to be valued, not by the class
of work he does but by the way in which he does it and by its usefulness to the
community. This statement may sound monstrous in an epoch when the most
brainless columnist on a newspaper staff is more esteemed than the most expert
mechanic, merely because the former pushes a pen. But, as I have said, this
false valuation does not correspond to the nature of things. It has been
artificially introduced, and there was a time when it did not exist at all. The
present unnatural state of affairs is one of those general morbid phenomena
that have arisen from our materialistic epoch. Fundamentally every kind of work
has a double value; the one material, the other ideal. The material value
depends on the practical importance of the work to the life of the community.
The greater the number of the population who benefit from the work, directly or
indirectly, the higher will be its material value. This evaluation is expressed
in the material recompense which the individual receives for his labour. In
contradistinction to this purely material value there is the ideal value. Here
the work performed is not judged by its material importance but by the degree
to which it answers a necessity. Certainly the material utility of an invention
may be greater than that of the service rendered by an everyday workman; but it
is also certain that the community needs each of those small daily services
just as much as the greater services. From the material point of view a
distinction can be made in the evaluation of different kinds of work according
to their utility to the community, and this distinction is expressed by the
differentiation in the scale of recompense; but on the ideal or abstract plans
all workmen become equal the moment each strives to do his best in his own
field, no matter what that field may be. It is on this that a man's value must
be estimated, and not on the amount of recompense received.
In a reasonably directed State care must be taken that
each individual is given the kind of work which corresponds to his
capabilities. In other words, people will be trained for the positions
indicated by their natural endowments; but these endowments or faculties are
innate and cannot be acquired by any amount of training, being a gift from
Nature and not merited by men. Therefore, the way in which men are generally
esteemed by their fellow-citizens must not be according to the kind of work
they do, because that has been more or less assigned to the individual. Seeing
that the kind of work in which the individual is employed is to be accounted to
his inborn gifts and the resultant training which he has received from the
community, he will have to be judged by the way in which he performs this work
entrusted to him by the community. For the work which the individual performs
is not the purpose of his existence, but only a means. His real purpose in life
is to better himself and raise himself to a higher level as a human being; but
this he can only do in and through the community whose cultural life he shares.
And this community must always exist on the foundations on which the State is
based. He ought to contribute to the conservation of those foundations. Nature
determines the form of this contribution. It is the duty of the individual to
return to the community, zealously and honestly, what the community has given
him. He who does this deserves the highest respect and esteem. Material
remuneration may be given to him whose work has a corresponding utility for the
community; but the ideal recompense must lie in the esteem to which everybody
has a claim who serves his people with whatever powers Nature has bestowed upon
him and which have been developed by the training he has received from the
national community. Then it will no longer be dishonourable to be an honest
craftsman; but it will be a cause of disgrace to be an inefficient State
official, wasting God's day and filching daily bread from an honest public.
Then it will be looked upon as quite natural that positions should not be given
to persons who of their very nature are incapable of filling them.
Furthermore, this personal efficiency will be the sole criterion of
the right to take part on an equal juridical footing in general civil affairs.
The present epoch is working out its own ruin. It introduces
universal suffrage, chatters about equal rights but can find no foundation for
this equality. It considers the material wage as the expression of a man's
value and thus destroys the basis of the noblest kind of equality that can
exist. For equality cannot and does not depend on the work a man does, but only
on the manner in which each one does the particular work allotted to him. Thus
alone will mere natural chance be set aside in determining the work of a man
and thus only does the individual become the artificer of his own social worth.
At the present time, when whole groups of people estimate each
other's value only by the size of the salaries which they respectively receive,
there will be no understanding of all this. But that is no reason why we should
cease to champion those ideas. Quite the opposite: in an epoch which is
inwardly diseased and decaying anyone who would heal it must have the courage
first to lay bare the real roots of the disease. And the National Socialist
Movement must take that duty on its shoulders. It will have to lift its voice
above the heads of the small bourgeoisie and rally together and co-ordinate all
those popular forces which are ready to become the protagonists of a new
philosophy of life.
Of course the objection will be made that in general it
is difficult to differentiate between the material and ideal values of work and
that the lower prestige which is attached to physical labour is due to the fact
that smaller wages are paid for that kind of work. It will be said that the
lower wage is in its turn the reason why the manual worker has less chance to
participate in the culture of the nation; so that the ideal side of human
culture is less open to him because it has nothing to do with his daily
activities. It may be added that the reluctance to do physical work is
justified by the fact that, on account of the small income, the cultural level
of manual labourers must naturally be low, and that this in turn is a
justification for the lower estimation in which manual labour is generally
held.
There is quite a good deal of truth in all this. But that is the
very reason why we ought to see that in the future there should not be such a
wide difference in the scale of remuneration. Don't say that under such
conditions poorer work would be done. It would be the saddest symptom of
decadence if finer intellectual work could be obtained only through the
stimulus of higher payment. If that point of view had ruled the world up to now
humanity would never have acquired its greatest scientific and cultural
heritage. For all the greatest inventions, the greatest discoveries, the most
profoundly revolutionary scientific work, and the most magnificent monuments of
human culture, were never given to the world under the impulse or compulsion of
money. Quite the contrary: not rarely was their origin associated with a
renunciation of the worldly pleasures that wealth can purchase.
It may be that money has become the one power that
governs life today. Yet a time will come when men will again bow to higher
gods. Much that we have today owes its existence to the desire for money and
property; but there is very little among all this which would leave the world
poorer by its lack.
It is also one of the aims before our movement to hold
out the prospect of a time when the individual will be given what he needs for
the purposes of his life and it will be a time in which, on the other hand, the
principle will be upheld that man does not live for material enjoyment alone.
This principle will find expression in a wiser scale of wages and salaries
which will enable everyone, including the humblest workman who fulfils his
duties conscientiously, to live an honourable and decent life both as a man and
as a citizen. Let it not be said that this is merely a visionary ideal, that
this world would never tolerate it in practice and that of itself it is
impossible to attain.
Even we are not so simple as to believe that there will
ever be an age in which there will be no drawbacks. But that does not release
us from the obligation to fight for the removal of the defects which we have
recognized, to overcome the shortcomings and to strive towards the ideal. In
any case the hard reality of the facts to be faced will always place only too
many limits to our aspirations. But that is precisely why man must strive again
and again to serve the ultimate aim and no failures must induce him to renounce
his intentions, just as we cannot spurn the sway of justice because mistakes
creep into the administration of the law, and just as we cannot despise medical
science because, in spite of it, there will always be diseases.
Man should take care not to have too low an estimate of
the power of an ideal. If there are some who may feel disheartened over the
present conditions, and if they happen to have served as soldiers, I would
remind them of the time when their heroism was the most convincing example of
the power inherent in ideal motives. It was not preoccupation about their daily
bread that led men to sacrifice their lives, but the love of their country, the
faith which they had in its greatness, and an all round feeling for the honour
of the nation. Only after the German people had become estranged from these
ideals, to follow the material promises offered by the Revolution, only after
they threw away their arms to take up the rucksack, only then – instead of
entering an earthly paradise – did they sink into the purgatory of universal
contempt and at the same time universal want.
That is why we must face the calculators of the
materialist Republic with faith in an idealist Reich.