Le origini culturali del Terzo Reich

by George L. Mosse

Come è stato possibile che, nel cuore della vecchia Europa, persone "perbene", intelligenti e istruite abbiano aderito in massa alla causa del nazismo, abbracciandone i valori? Molti vedono nell'ideologia nazionalsocialista il prodotto di poche menti squilibrate, o una mera costruzione propagandistica per conquistare il consenso popolare. Ma l'ascesa di Hitler non fu un incidente della storia. Il Saggiatore ripropone al lettore italiano "Le origini culturali del Terzo Reich" il primo saggio ad aver esaminato il nazismo come sistema di pensiero capace di comporre - attraverso il collante dell'antisemitismo - convinzioni e ideali che da tempo circolavano nella società tedesca: il misticismo naturalistico del Volk, l'irrazionalismo neoromantico, l'ossessiva riscoperta di un passato mitologico, il rifiuto del governo rappresentativo e dell'urbanizzazione, il razzismo. Un'ideologia "nazional-patriottica" che si era accesa nelle circostanze dettate dalla travagliata unificazione tedesca e dall'impatto della rivoluzione industriale su una società prevalentemente agricola, e che divampò in seguito al diktat del trattato di Versailles e all'enorme instabilità della Repubblica di Weimar. Il nazismo fu la tragica risposta a una crisi del pensiero e della politica che in Germania imperversava da decenni.

Genres: History, Politics, Germany, Philosophy, Nonfiction, European History, Sociology

455 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

German-born American social and cultural historian.

Mosse authored 25 books on a variety of fields, from English constitutional law, Lutheran theology, to the history of fascism, Jewish history, and the history of masculinity.

He was perhaps best-known for his books and articles that redefined the discussion and interpretation of Nazism.

Reviews

[hay man · Rating 3 out of 5]

get ready to read the word völkisch probably a billion times

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a complex and dense book, not so much at the level of the sentence or paragraph - it's fairly comprehensible down there - but as whole, synthesized material. Mosse examines a number of 19th and early 20th century writers, thinkers, philosophers, academicians, etc. and finds in their ideas on culture, nature, biology, and religion/spirituality the seeds of Hitler & Co, or maybe more so the seeds of the popular support for the Nazis. Probably 80% of these were people I'd never heard of. He describes how these ideas were strengthened and institutionalized via education, both high school and university, the university fraternities, and the Bunds. Not all of the Volkish ideas met with Nazi approval. The nude male outdoor activities and the notions of sublimated Eros between men were excised from the Nazi handbook. The exaltation of the peasant and the land, the anti-intellectualism, and the anti-Semitism remained. I don't know if this 1964 book is still read seriously by historiographers of the Third Reich.

[Martina☽ · Rating 3 out of 5]

«Questo saggio è un’analisi storica che ha per oggetto individui a tal punto prigionieri di un’ideologia, da perdere di vista le leggi della civiltà e i relativi atteggiamenti verso i loro simili. Possiamo solo sperare che in nessuna parte del mondo l’ideologia nazional-patriottica serva più da soluzione a una crisi del pensiero e della politica.»

[Komal Mahmood · Rating 4 out of 5]

So finally it’s finished. This was a tough read, maybe because I read it on a fever simultaneously juggling another book.
I dont know I am very confused, after reading this and the Mass Psychology of Fascism. I mean I get where both Mosse and Reich are coming from, but they both have several points of divergence despite their thesis being the same (more or less): mysticism was key in Hitler’s rise to power!

Now how the two writers elaborate this mysticism is where the differences start. I’ll write a review on Reich’s book soon (I’m still trying to absorb it).

This book should have been titled 'The Volk’, because that is basically what it’s all about. Next time someone brings up the topic of Nazi ideology, I’m just going to say Volk and that’s it. It’s their job to go into the semantics of the question, I just did my part. Right? Maybe not.

I’m beginning to wonder if all these revolutions and wars were not merely the result of deluded men trying hard to make sense of their world view? Surely seems like it. For if they truly did hold onto these strange beliefs then....oh well. I mean even someone like Stalin was surprised when Hitler decided to break off their nonaggression treaty and invade Russia.
Then there is Kant. Seriously Herr Emanuel is starting to come off as a very divisive agent. The mister practically had a knack for leveling off opposing playing fields and then inciting people to his 'neutral' battleground. That’s how he played an agent prior to the French revolution by uniting Christian Unitarian radicalism and the Moderate Democrats. And he does it again with the Volks, by lending a spiritual essence outside comprehension to his otherwise pragmatic philosophy and giving fodder to deranged minds.

Apparently, Volk was what I came to perceive, a receptacle for the development of pretty much every Germanic ideology be it philosophical, racial, sociopolitical, religious, intellectual, artistic, literary etc you name it. All of it penetrated this unit called the Volk. I can’t say if the arguments in this book are still valid in the twenty first century or how seriously to take its thesis regardless, the ideology which propelled the brutality of the Nazi regime was deep rooted and had been forming long before the 1848 revolution.
It was irrational, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, and mystic. The Volkish movement, a unit of 'rooted' peoples who received the cosmic life force identified themselves through their relation to the 'regional' aspects of nature. This meant not an international nature open to all, rather a selective nationalist one, concerned with the exclusively Germanic landscape, architecture, and history; all three of which served to locate the individual German to a universe detached from the impetuous onslaught of modernity, industrialization, urbanization, and antireligionism.

In a land fraught with foreign occupation, wars of liberation, and displacement, the isolated and alienated individual sought placement which he achieved by means of attaching himself to a unit of the Volk.
It’s hard to see how this ideology was different from what Hannah Arendt identifies as the 'totalitarian personality’: someone who seeks validation only via attachment with a group.

Regardless, this Volk which first through the writings of several writers idealized a version of the 'kind peasant' who, owing to his idyllic work and vision symbolized an endearing attachment to his land, was the epitome of what every Volkish member should aspire to. The Volkish peasant was the hero of Germanic lore. He was all good and gentle. He was as close to nature and history as can be. Gradually this aspect of the gentle peasant distorted into the cruel and the menacing peasant locked within a state of nature. His proximity to his landscape urged him to embrace the ferocity 'necessary' to protect his home. To many this veneer of civilization was peeled away by the Thirty Year’s War wherein the peasant realized he ought to embrace his wild self in order to get security from the elements of modernity. Such an element of the peasant embracing his brutality was brought forth in the book Der Werevolves.

And as the ideal Volkish hero was mythologized, so was the enemy of the Volk. This character soon acquired all aspects of the Jew. The Jew was often a middleman, one selling cattle, or procuring land. As Hannah Arendt calls them in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism', an 'inter-European element'. As the peasant had a proximity with his landscape, so did the Jew with the urban aspects of the emerging cities. He was the snake coiling at the base of the tree representing the peasant class. Perhaps one piece of German literature which most neatly deconstructed the idea of the cruel Jew, and which is believed to have influenced Adolph Hitler, was the work 'The Jew of Buttner’.

What truly organized and politicized the Volkish movement however, was the intellectual revivalism of the Volkish personality by two disappointed academicians, Lagarde and Langbehn, who sought professorships but did not receive it until later. Their writings, promulgating the abandonment of materialism, intellectual rationalism, positivism in favor of a new Germanic faith which stripped away the Hebrew law from the true Christian dynamism to reveal the nativity and Divine proximity of Biblical fathers, was more divisive than spiritual. Germanism in the attitude and not the blood, Lagarde’s words, were wrongly interpreted to have been echoing an attitude inherent in the Aryan race, although he would have been unaware of the racial theory which gained full ground in 1870 by the time Lagarde’s ideology was already concrete. Lagarde like Reihl favored a feudal hierarchical structure of the middle ages with a contempt for democratization attempting to eliminate that order.
With Langbehn, antisemitism became stronger. Jews were identified as that 'state within a state' who occupy a separate space within German society and belonged to a religion which had lost its originality long ago.
Langbehn, was more attuned to the originality of the ancient prophets prior to being codified and 'mechanized' by the Hebraic law.

Then there was this near preposterous activity where history was interpreted in terms that all victorious nations were, in reality, German. Nazis believed that Tacitus was in awe of German splendor, and that the Romans were Germanic in essence as were the Visigoths. Truly mind-boggling stuff there.

But having consumed plenty popular culture interpretations of Nazi Germany (Fatherland; Fullmetal Alchemist; Hellsing to name a few), I have an inkling that many people find it quite interesting (and most probably believable). It definitely stimulates the mind to find the impact of mystical ideologies in political discourse.

There is a strong Nietzschean element as well and Mosse cites the philosopher as having a powerful impact on the German mysticism, their admiration for the ancient Greeks, and their shocking marginalization of the rational and the logical.

Regardless, it could be taken as a reworking of the old conservative thought from the time of Hobbes, Paine, Napoleon, along more 'antipolitical' and 'fantastic' lines. For instance Mosse’s explication of the old Germanic guild structures comprising the merchant, the apprentice, the foreman, the journeyman, reminded me of the Hobbesian monarch who is the eponymous Leviathan keeping the dissident subjects under control and Napoleon's thought that there is a natural hierarchy and that equality is a myth.

It’s definitely a must read if you’re into popular takes on Hitler psychosis as well as delving deep into the mind of nineteenth to twentieth century Germanic racial thought!

[Ismael Seijo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es una obra muy completa, con un trabajo detrás que es digno de admirar. Explora con mucha profundidad las raíces ideológicas del nazismo, concretamente el pensamiento völkisch. Como punto negativo, exagera con la excepcionalidad alemana para explicar el auge del nazismo y en su análisis queda en un plano muy secundario (aunque mencionado y reconocido, algo más explícito al final de la obra) el rol del antisocialismo en todo este proceso.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't a history of the Third Reich or the National Socialist party. Nor is it a particularly accessible work of broad intellectual history.

Mosse gets deep into the weeds of particular currents in late 19th and early 20th Germany that eventually merged to lay the groundwork for Nazism and Hitler.

A gay, Jewish academic born at the tail-end of WWI Berlin, Mosse was an adolescent when the Weimar Republic suffered a crisis of legitimacy and eventual dissolution (aka. the rise of Hitler). His family left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933 and then split up. Mosse found himself alone in Great Britain as a teenager before eventually building himself up as a prominent history professor in the American Midwest. He's known for several studies of Nazi Germany, and this volume is one of his earlier works.

The key concept in most studies of late Weimar Germany and Nazism is the "volk," a German noun that loosely translates into the "people." But as Mosse explains with great acuity, the term refers more accurately to Germans' sense of their special connection to Nature, through which they received the unique, creative life force of the universe. Other peoples may have similar capabilities, but no other group possesses this unique German volkish energy or connection (least of all the Jews, whose Semitic ethnicity is connected to the barren and useless desert).

This sense of collectivism existed as an elitist ideological response by the German bourgeoisie to modern industrial urbanization and globalization. The older, rigidly hierarchical world of German aristocracy was being shaken up after the unification of Germany in 1871, which many conservative nationalists hoped would facilitate a true "spiritual" unity as well. The changing times brought the opposite: individualism, urbanism, international commerce, depersonalized industrialism, Jewish and female emancipation (to a degree), etc.

The elite with their old money didn't like this, and overcompensated with a new German Romanticism centred on the perceived distinctiveness of the German Volk. International capitalism and Marxism were both rejected as foreign invasions brought about by Jewish conspiracies. Volkish ideology was seen as a truly Germanic and spiritually fecund "third way." The rise of racial science and occult theosophy helped shape out and transfer different versions of such ideas throughout Germany. Mosse recalls dozens of figures—artists, ideologues, novelists, politicians, etc.—who helped this process along.

The great lesson here is that Hitler and the Nazis didn't conjure up organized Anti-Semitic and their racist worldview out of thin air. Volkish ideology was gradually developing over decades into more concrete and programmatic ideas and initiatives, particularly through the concept of the "bund." This is another German noun that refers to a truly organic community of German males connected via cosmically unique volkish ties, as opposed to the fake bonds of modern political parties, mass movements, or commercialism.

The Nazis first came onto the scene (before Hitler) as a "bundish" group (with a post-1918 paramilitary pedigree) opposed to capitalism and the bourgeoisie, but also to communism. They looked to lure the German worker away from communism toward a more volkish nationalism, where the men would be devoted to each other not by material or class interests, but by a true Eros arising from volkish commonalities. A bourgeois current thus expanded into a mass movement.

Mosse then meticulously documents the concretization of broad, volkish ideology and bundish initiatives into a true anti-Jewish revolution. Adolf Hitler is to thank for this eventual shift, as he snatched volkish ideology from the German elite and turned it into mass politics. His conservative, anti-Semitic rivals thought this was too vulgar and missed their turn at power. What they wanted in the face of industrial modernization was a spiritual revolution that didn't threaten their social and economic status; people would set up non-governmental organizations and gatherings to facilitate an elite-led volkish transformation.

Hitler saw the logical terminus of such vague ideas, already popular and pervasive in social spaces like universities, youth movements, and certain political sectors. He just gave it true programmatic political shape, which helped him towards absolute power.

Instead of talking about social challenges or whether to move away from capitalism/socialism, Hitler standardized the party agenda by taking aim at the Jew, that foreign agent of both international commerce and Marxism. If you get rid of the foreign agent Jew (who has been bleeding True Germans dry all these years), then concrete results will surely follow. His rhetoric and uncompromising style forced major mainstream conservatives (who basically believed in the same ideas) to accommodate the Nazi Party, and ultimately become outflanked by them.

Mosse's treatment goes a lot into the minute historical dynamics and struggles between certain figures and groups. I found a lot of that to be pretty tedious, but the resulting overview of such a harrowing time is very useful. There's a lot of talk about fascism today and the debate over what to tolerate as an acceptable idea has boiled over online. It helps to set these often confusing and ambiguous contemporary developments against a society that literally, materially, and unambiguously descended into anti-Semitic fascism and genocide.

[Bernard English · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of the decades leading up to the Nazi takeover which avoids the cliche of blaming everything on the eternal German enmity towards Jews or attributing everything to the singular evil genius of Hitler. The book is easy to read in so far as the various ideologies which culminated in Hitler's maniacal war against Jews are fairly simple to understand and need not be analyzed in too much detail since there is little systemic or rational thought behind them. On the other hand, it is a bit hard to follow the numerous variations of Volkish thought that have influenced each other and often overlap.

Mosse does make it clear there were real problems in Germany which prompted some of these perverse movements: industrialization, urbanism, a fear of modernism, a romanticism veering towards mysticism and occultism. One lesson is that irrationalist and anti-Semitic elements, which seemed to be in the background of many of these movements, will not always remain restricted to the periphery of society--any degree of irrationalism can wreak havoc as it spreads and becomes ever more bizarre. The Volkish ideology simply became more "respectable" and more extreme until it was finally hijacked by Hitler and morphed into Nazism.

His detailed account is well worth reading for the many similarities which will noticed between the decades preceding the Nazi triumph and the last several years in the United States.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book. Mosse makes a very sound and logical case for a sequence of events and influences which he argues laid the foundations for German ideology during the rise of the Nazi party. In summary, this can be broken down to three components; historical events of the 19th and early 20th century which created the environment for the Nazi movement, the establishment of Volkism which was crucial the foundations of Nazi thought, and the institutions/organizations which consolidated power to replace the Weimar Republic.

19th century Germany, like much of Europe, was undergoing very rapid industrialization and urban centers were growing dramatically, particularly with immigrants. Then, by 1871, Germans found themselves in Bismarck's new forced state of unification which brought together culturally disparate regions. Together, these circumstances left many feeling insecure, threatened, and seeking a stable identity as the century came to a close. By just a few decades into the 20th century, things would get much worse for Germany as a result of WW1 and punishing war reparations, devastating hyperinflation, and the great depression.

Volkish ideology arose from these century-long feelings of dissatisfaction. Volkish theory stated that the rationality of enlightenment was disingenuous. Instead, the true meaning of life depends more on a romantic view of nature and a nostalgic past. Nature was actually depicted to be a landscape that was unique to the regional German populations and represented enduring stability and happiness which was termed “rootedness”. By embracing this concept, people could become a part of the whole larger life force of mankind and regain self identity and salvation. Enemies to this concept were modernization, globalization, cities, capitalism, materialism, foreigners, Jews, migrant workers, and proletariat in the cities. In particular, Jews had a traditional role as money lenders and middle men supplying peasants with goods. In hard times, Jews were scapegoated and equated with the evil influence of “non rooted” foreigners and capitalists ( and later seen as drivers of communism). Peasants were seen as traditional heroes of Volkism. These ideas were popularized in novels during the 1800’s and also permeated culture in the form of art and plays. These novels began to depict the hero peasants as being more and more violent in their protection of historic nature based ways. By the beginning of the 1900’s Volk thinkers began to invoke the history of ancient German Goth peoples who, according to Tacitus, were a superior Aryan race of beautiful, strong, and morally superior warriors. It was these ideas that eventually laid the foundation for the severe anti- semitic attitude and Nazi racial cleansing.


With the environment of severe dissatisfaction and a pervasive ideology in place, all that was left was to consolidate this into a national party movement. Events following the German revolution of 1918 put this into motion. The ruling monarch was overthrown and a new parliamentary government, The Weimar Republic, was installed to take over and negotiate the treaty of Versailles. This was the first time Germany was a democracy. This was successful mostly in the North of Germany but the South was temporarily ruled by a communist republic. Soon the Great Depression hit and Germany was in great economic turmoil in addition to the great fear of communism within its own borders. This led to many political factions and general government instability as new ideologies competed for control of the German future. Volkism played a big role in influencing the direction of these new parties as did the conservative elites and wealthy industrialists. These wealthy influential members of the Conservative Party in Germany convinced the then president of the Weimar party ( Von Hindenburg) to appoint Hitler as the leader of the presidential cabinet because he controlled the populist Volk vote which was felt to be needed in order to unite the country and defeat communism. ( around 1932). Hitler quickly consolidated this power and became dictator as head of the National Socialist Party (Nazi party).

Of course, much is left out in a quick summary but suffice it to say that Mosse was very thorough in his detailed account. What I found most interesting is how he compared and contrasted Germany during this time to the rest of Europe, particularly France. Much of the historical influences and events were the same in both countries but the uniqueness of Volkism dramatically shaped the differing ideologies of Germany and France. The historical environment was ripe for intellectuals to disseminate the ideas of Volkism and it took hold deeply. When Hitler came to the scene, he was able to tap into this ideology and use it for the base and momentum of his Nazi party. I would highly recommend this book for anyone seeking some understanding of how the German Nazi party was able to come into power.

[Graham Cammock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Earth shattering!

This book has blown me away! If you think you know how bad Nazism was, think again and read this jaw dropping book. I had no understanding of the concept of a Volk, Volkish thought, Volkish ideology or a Germanic faith. I had no idea how heathen, evil and pagan Germany (or the “Volk”) were in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I had no idea that the Holocaust was about so much more than Adolf Hitler. There were a myriad of anti-Semitic philosophers, intellectuals, writers, Youth Movements and organisations in Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The educational establishment was rife with anti-Semitism and for example the vast majority of teachers and professors in German schools and universities were Volkish anti-Semites. Honestly Germany was riddled with Volkish ideology and anti-Semitism before Adolf Hitler was even born. The Holocaust was a huge collective effort or a culmination of Germany’s or the Volk’s evil destiny. Basically the Volk knew that they couldn’t conquer the world by being Christian, so they decided to be heathen and pagan and to extirpate Judeo-Christianity instead. The German people or the Volk voted for violent anti-Semitism when the Nazis gained power in 1933. Adolf Hitler simply fulfilled or consummated the wishes and long term, deep seated desires of the German people and the Volk. Honestly, it’s a whole country not Hitler. I had no idea that the Volk and Nazism were actually religious and spiritual in their aspirations, goals and causes, in their attempts to uproot Judeo-Christianity from the world. Collectively, what happened in Germany in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the weirdest and strangest thing that ever happened in the universe. I just cannot believe it! Trust me, after reading The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of The Third Reich, by George L. Moses, I know and I understand that the Germans or more accurately the Volk actually racially and spiritually separated (with their blonde hair and blue eyes) from the rest of Europe or more accurately, Southern Europeans and the Levant, on this side of life and the next. They actually totally committed and fought to the very end and to the death, in order to make this racial and spiritual separation (as a distinct northern blonde haired and blue eyed race) happen. They spiritually separated from the slightly more brunette and brown eyed Southern Europeans. Honestly, they separated with eye colour. I said they racially and spiritually separated from Southern Europe on this side of life and the next because, they exterminated the Jews (which simply represents this spiritual separation) in order to uproot and extirpate their Biblical spiritual heritage which comes from Western Asia, the holy land or the Levant. The Volk wanted a separate and different afterlife or heaven from the rest of us Europeans, they wanted Valhalla and not a Christian or Judeo-Christian afterlife or heaven. You would be very surprised as to how spiritual and religious Nazism, Volkish ideology and the Holocaust actually were. Honestly, the Norwegians and Swedes get one less freckle than the more Southern Europeans and the Germans or the Volk tried to turn this one less freckle into another, separate and distinct race of northern Europeans. This is why World War Two happened. The world blew up because of this European racial and spiritual separation. This Germanic separation was an ultimatum to Britain and the rest of Europe. They left us no choice but to fight to the death for Christianity. This book literally has made me feel sick. Why? Because the Volk tried to uproot or extirpate Judeo-Christianity and even actually questioned our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 🤮 Volkish ideology is 100% pure evil. The truth of Germany’s history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries really makes you feel hopeless for Europeans as a people. I have a bad case of the Volkish blues! However, I believe in Jesus Christ and I pray that He will save us Europeans from this evil! I command you to read this book, in fact it should be compulsory reading in all European schools and for anyone of European ancestry anywhere on Earth. Read it now!

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ocurrió a finales del siglo XIX en la Alemania recién unificada que iniciaba una industrialización acelerada y masiva. Dos académicos excéntricos y resentidos porque sus aspiraciones profesionales no habían logrado las metas que creían merecer, comenzaron a observar la sociedad contemporánea como una oscura conspiración de fuerzas malignas. Paul de Lagarde y Julius Langbehn despreciaban la democracia y el capitalismo y postulaban en libros y cátedras una unidad de la patria que fuera mucho más allá de la política y revitalizara el espíritu único y diferenciado de los antiguos germanos. Aquellas ideas minoritarias junto a otras aún más extrañas que conspiraban en las zonas de sombra de la modernización acabarían por prender la mecha de un movimiento ideológico de indudable éxito cuya estación final sería Auschwitz: el völkisch, de völk, una de esas intraducibles palabras alemanas que puede significar 'pueblo' y a la vez mucho más.

Escribió Heine que las ideas urdidas en la penumbra del despacho de un pensador puede destruir civilizaciones. No hay mejor resumen de la originalísima y fascinante tesis que defendió el historiador estadounidense de origen alemán George L. Mosse (1918-1999) en un libro ya clásico que ahora La Esfera de los Libros ha tenido la buena fortuna de publicar por primera vez en español traducido por Verónica Puertollano, 'Los orígenes intelectuales del Tercer Reich: historia de una crisis ideológica' (2023). En sus páginas Mosse busca cifrar la peculiaridad excepcional del nazismo entre los fascismos de entreguerras. Para ello, y a la contra de las explicaciones marxistas y economicistas tantas veces aludidas para dar cuenta de Hitler como el producto de la crisis material del sistema de Weimar, aquí lo que vemos en acción es el terrible poder, tantas veces minusvalorado, de las ideas.

[HedyTech · Rating 3 out of 5]

Allora forse è un po' colpa mia che mi aspettavo qualcosa di diverso. Per quello che avrei voluto leggere, è anche troppo approfondito. Interessante sicuramente, in certe parti molto lento ma penso sia normale.

[Nevzat · Rating 3 out of 5]

learned a lot about 19th century thought world of Germany but was lost a bit on how it translated into nazism and how nazism differentiated from other right wing anti Semitic movements of Europe.

[Landis Duffett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fasicsm is not like other theoretical concepts. Any analysis of fascism has to, at the same time, serve as an argument that there is such a thing as fascism, that it has a definite ontological status. Most analyses don't go this far. As such, each such analysis remains a kind of a posteriori assemblage of contingent traits and events from particular historical manifestations of fascism. (In _The Crisis of Germany Ideology_, Mosse offers a very comprehensive catalog of völikisch groups and ideologies, but a mere catalog nonetheless.) There is a structure and shape to fascism, though, a discrete sign system that can be understood in its uniqueness as something ontologically substantive that does real political work every time it is hauled out of the historical shed and powered up. No analysis of fascism gets to its essence that ignores its use as a tool by which a minority gains and keeps power. Experimental explorations of other purported motors of fascism (setting one eye color against another, as seen in the documentary "A Class Divided" or, even more ridiculous, simple group cohesion (?), as seen in "The Third Wave"), quite ironically, domesticate fascism to the American environment even while they offer (and thus appear to make more persuasive and plausible) a warning that becomes a warning against a straw man, however entertaining the movie version ends up being. To posit some substantive platform to a fascist movement as those experiments do, actually treats a given instance of fascism as a sincere ideology. After all, how can somebody argue against people of one eye color hating people of another eye color...it's clear to anybody who can see, that there really IS such a difference in eye color. Similarly, group cohesion is real, so why should we denounce a movement that harbors it and builds upon it? Anyone who posits a theory of fascism without considering the role of a cynical minority who is exploiting the masses for his or her own aggrandizement has still not come close to understanding the phenomenon, let alone preventing it. The methods that this minority (or often single individual, though the single individual usually has a close inner circle who also benefit in real terms--in contrast to the masses who are made only to believe that they are benefiting) uses for their own political aggrandizement exploit the uncertainty the masses have within modernity. (No modernity, no fascism.) This is the nature of modernity, after all--all that is solid melts into air. The fascist offers certainty in the form of a renewal or rebirth of a past glory. But, of course, just this promise is never enough. Why not? Because that past glory, and the concomitant groundedness and security that it offered, is no more. Modernity has ground it up and cast it to the wind. The fascist movement can only celebrate the past, the purported ground of authenticity and meaning, as a simulacrum and a sign because that is all it is anymore. Bemoan this or don't, but nothing can bring that past back again. Fascism doesn't try to deny that this past glory exists now only as a tenuous and airy abstraction. Everyone can see that. The invoking of a glorious past and the promise to restore it do not comprise the mechanism by which the fascist comes to power and maintains it. How can you restore something as brittle and vaporous as a mere symbol? (That's what cosplay is for, not a political movement.) Rather, the fascist acknowledges that this past has a tenuous connection to reality but, most importantly, blames someone else for the tenuousness of this connection. It is not that that glorious past (pre-industrial Germany, 1950s America) has become permanently tenuous or inauthentic. Rather, this is the state we find it in because some group of people (Jews, liberals?) are preventing our connection to it. That group of people is driving the wedge of modernity between us and that glorious past, for the sole purpose of keeping us from it. (There were völkisch movements in pre-Nazi Germany that were simply "Germanic" and were not antisemitic. Few people today have ever heard of them. Apart from Wandervogel, none ever attained a membership greater than a few thousand. ) Now, miraculously, according to the fascist, for the first time, we have agency once again in the face of modernity: we need only eliminate (kill, expose the conspiracy of...do both?) that group that is preventing our authentic connection to the past and--presto--that past will return! Of course, the fascist doesn't himself or herself believe this. And, in fact, the worst possible thing for the fascist would be for either the glorious past to be restored or for the group supposedly preventing that restoration to be definitively eliminated/conquered/cast aside--either of those would put a premature end to the fascist's hold on power by either making him or her unnecessary (the first) or revealing him or her as a fraud (the second). So, the fascist project is always both just around the corner and impossible. And in that space between those two temporal endpoints, the fascist, and no one else, thrives--the tick on the cow slowly enlarging itself while its host dies.

[Ruby Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Also, read this for a class, good introduction to the Volksich movement and its impact on later german far-right descendants.

[Juan Antonio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro muy interesante que rastrea los orígenes de los ingredientes principales del nazismo, el nacionalismo (Volkish) y el antisemitismo a los finales del S. XIX.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very informative book, with a detailed history of the thought that led to and then supported the Nazi ideology. Much of the detail is hardly useful to the general reader now, so many years after the rise of Volkish thought. Nevertheless, it provides a significant record of the seeds, roots, shoots and branches of the Volk movement with its attendant fear of the stranger, suspicion of "new money" and vilification of Jews. These ideas led to some of the most barbaric behavior in what we call Western Civilization.

It is worth learning how such horrors become acceptable to a middle class modern country, especially as we learn of current militant white supremacist Christian groups such as Quiverful, TeenPact, Generation Joshua and Teenage Republicans (TARS). The thinking that gave rise to militant fascism in Germany is outlined here, and it is most instructive, especially now in 2017.

[Jonathan]

None

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing and perfectly written. A feeling almost of contemporary thought goes through the mind.