THE SOCIALIST ROOTS OF NAZISM

All anti-liberal forces are combining against everything that is liberal. A. Moeller van den Bruck.

It is a common mistake to regard National-Socialism as a mere:

• revolt against reason
• irrational movement without intellectual background

If that were so, the movement would be much less dangerous than it is.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

The doctrines of National Socialism are the culmination of a long evolution of thought.

The men who produced the new doctrines were powerful writers.

But it is simply collectivism freed from all traces of an individualist tradition which might hamper its realisation.

Though in this development German thinkers have taken the lead, they were by no means alone.

Thomas Carlyle and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Auguste Comte and Georges Sorel are as much a part of that continuous development as any Germans. The development of this strand of thought within Germany has been well traced recently by Mr. R. D. Butler in his study of The Roots of National Socialism. But although its persistence there through a hundred and fifty years in almost unchanged and ever-recurring form, which emerges from that study, is rather frightening, it is easy to exaggerate the importance these ideas had in Germany before 1914. They were only one strand of thought among a people then perhaps more varied in its views than any other. And they were on the whole represented by a small minority and held in as great contempt by the majority of Germans as they were in other countries.

What, then, caused these views held by a reactionary minority finally to gain the support of the great majority of Germans and practically the whole of her youth? It was not merely the defeat, the suffering, and the wave of nationalism which led to their success. Still less was the cause, as so many people wish to believe, a capitalist reaction against the advance of socialism. On the contrary, the support which brought these ideas to power came precisely from the socialist camp. It was certainly not through the bourgeoisie, but rather the absence of a strong bourgeoisie, by which they were helped to power.

The doctrines which had guided the ruling elements in Germany for the past generation were not opposed to the socialism in Marxism, but to the liberal elements contained in it, its internationalism and its democracy. And as it became increasingly clear that it was just these elements which formed obstacles to the realisation of socialism, the socialists of the left approached more and more to those of the right. It was the union of the anti-capitalist forces ofthe right and the left, the fusion ofradical and conservative socialism, which drove out from Germany everything that was liberal.

The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of National~Socialism-Fichte,Rodbertus, and Lassall-are at the same time acknowledged fathers ofsocialism. While theoretical socialism in its Marxist form was directing the German labour movement, the authoritarian and nationalist element receded for a time into the background.

But not for long.

1 From 1914 onwards there arose from the ranks of Marxist socialism one teacher after another who led, not the conservatives and reactionaries, but the hardworking labourer and idealist youth into the national-socialist fold. It was only thereafter that the tide of nationalist socialism attained major importance and rapidly grew into the Hitlerian doctrine. The war hysteria of 1914, which, just because of the German defeat, was never fully cured, is the beginning of the modern development which produced National-Socialism, and it was largely with the assistance of old socialists that it rose during this period.

Perhaps the first, and in some ways the most characteristic, representative of this development is the late Professor Werner Sombart, whose notorious Handler und Helden (Merchants and Heroes) appeared in 1915. Sombart had begun as a Marxian socialist, and as late as 1909 could assert with pride that he had devoted the greater part of his life to fighting for the ideas of Karl Marx. He had done as much as any man to spread socialist ideas and anti-capitalist resentment of varying shades throughout Germany; and ifGerman thought became penetrated with Marxian elements in a way that was true of no other country till the Russian revolution, this was in a large measure due to Sombart. At one time he was regarded as the outstanding representative of the persecuted socialist intelligentsia, unable, because of his radical views, to obtain a University chair. And even after the last war the influence, inside and outside Germany of his work as a historian, which remained Marxist in approach after he had ceased to be a Marxist in politics, was most extensive and is particularly noticeable in the works of many of the English and American planners.

I And only partially. In 1892 one of the leaders of the social-democratic party, August Bebel, was able to tell Bismarck that “the Imperial Chancellor can rest assured that German Social Democracy is a sort of preparatory school for militarism” !

In his war book, he welcomed the “German War” as the inevitable conflict between the commercial civilisation of England and the heroic culture of Germany. His contempt for the “commercial” views of the English people, who had lost all warlike instincts, is unlimited.

Nothing is more contemptible in his eyes than the universal striving after the happiness ofthe individual; and what he describes as the leading maxim of English morals: be just “that it may be well with thee and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the land” is to him “the most infamous maxim which has ever been pronounced by a commercial mind”. The “German idea of the state” as formulated by Fichte, Lassalle, and Rodbertus, is that the state is neither founded nor formed by individuals, nor an aggregate of individuals, nor is its purpose to serve any interest of individuals. It is a Volksgemeinschaft in which the individual has no rights but only duties.

Claims of the individual are always an outcome of the commercial spirit.

“The ideas of 1789”-Liberty, Equality Fraternity-are characteristically commercial ideals which have no other purpose but to secure certain advantages to individuals. Before 1914 all the true German ideals of a heroic life were in deadly danger before the continuous advance of English commercial ideals, English comfort, and English sport. The English people had not only themselves become completely corrupted, every trade unionist being sunk in the “morass of comfort”, but they had begun to infect all other peoples. Only the war had helped the Germans to remember that they were really a people of warriors, a people among whom all activities and particularly all economic activities were subordinated to military ends. Sombart knew that the Germans were held in contempt by other people because they regard war as sacredbut he glories in it. To regard war as inhuman and senseless is a product of commercial views. There is a life higher than the individual life, the life ofthe people and the life ofthe state, and it is the purpose of the individual to sacrifice himself for that higher life. War is to Sombart the consummation of the heroic view of life, and the war against England is the war against the opposite ideal, the commercial ideal of individual freedom and ofEnglish comfort, which in his eyes finds its most contemptible expression in-the safety-razors found in the English trenches.