Roots of Nazism

...the current involvement in civil rights, peace, and other good causes leaves the majority of students untouched...

...Could the extreme right in the United States ever repeat Hitler's rise to power...

...Professor George L. Mosse rejects both of these explanations...

...There were the advocates of a Germanic Christianity, of a weird paganism, sun worship, and other irrational creeds later to achieve full flowering during the reign of the Nazis...

...After Germany's defeat in World War I, the Volkish ideology acquired a mass political base...

...In this carefully researched book he argues convincingly that the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was not an accident of history and that the particularly hideous form this fascist regime took in Germany cannot be accounted for in terms of an ideological evolution common to the rest of Europe...

...Building upon romanticism, it preached man's regeneration through rootedness in nature and in the history of the Volk...

...This "Volkish" ideology (the English translation of Volk into folk or people inadequately reproduces the racist and chauvinistic flavor of the German word volkisch) stood opposed to the progress and modernization that transformed Nineteenth Century Europe...

...Mosse substantiates this thesis in seventeen well written chapters which discuss in detail the emergence and eventual triumph of the Volkish ideology...

...But America has never faced a situation where, as in Germany, whole generations of youth held the democratic process in utter contempt and increasingly turned to a mystical ideology characterized by xenophobia and chauvinism...

...Mosse reminds us that the importance of the Volkish movement never consisted in sheer strength of numbers but in the ideas which it propelled onto the national scene, in the institutions it infiltrated, and in the mood it was able to spread among people who did not necessarily join in any organized effort...

...And yet, it is precisely the value of Mosse's study to point out the peculiar constellation of factors existing in Germany and not present anywhere else, then, now, or in the foreseeable future...

...This difference is crucial, especially as it concerns the impact on the young intellectual elite entrusted to these educators...

...The reader becomes acquainted with the prophets of the Germanic revolution, Lagarde and Langbehn, who in the late Nineteenth Century called for the rule of the superior races and the extermination of the Jews...

...Will a historian in the year 2000 have to write a companion study to Mosse's work, a study of the intellectual origins of American fascism, pointing to its roots in the frontier spirit of violence and anti-in-tellectualism, in racism, in the frustrations produced by decades of cold war and the loss of Southeast Asia to the Communists...

...but, pointing to fascism in Italy and other European countries, they deny that National Socialism was a typically German phenomenon...

...The "German catastrophe," then, did not have to happen, but neither must it remain an enigma...

...Helped along by objective factors like the delayed unification of Germany, overly rapid industrialization, the national frustrations produced by the loss of World War I, and the economic dislocation of the Twenties, millions of Germans became captives of this set of ideas well before 1933...

...Reviewed by Guenter Lewy Why did a people who had given rise to Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Beethoven, allow the political triumph of the Hitler movement with its well known commitment to anti-intel-lectualism and brute force...

...the Jew became the villain sapping the nation's strength...

...The faculties of American universities and elsewhere, as Mosse rightly insists, in large part are politically passive and desire only peace and quiet to conduct their researches...

...American academics, as the McCarthy period revealed, may not be heroes prepared to do battle for civil liberties, but neither are they a corrosive force undermining democratic institutions...

...It was "the genius of Adolf Hitler," Mosse writes, "to wed the Volkish flight from reality to political discipline and efficient political organization...

...Mosse insists that the triumph of National Socialism grew out of a unique crisis in German thought that began in the 1870's and resulted in the absorption of "Volkish" ideas by large numbers of the German people...

...How uniquely German was the Nazi descent into barbarism...

...At the same time, his book can also serve as a reminder of the real strength which this tradition still occupies in this country and beyond...

...Hence vigilance, Mosse cautions, is in order...

...This question continues to occupy professional historians as well as interested laymen...

...The world paid dearly for underestimating both Hitler's capacity for leadership and the support which his ideas had attained...

...They should not encourage complacency, but they do introduce perspective...

...This is a far cry from the situation in Germany where professors at best displayed a detached passivity, lending their sympathetic ears to the racist harangues of colleagues, and more frequently joined in the Volkish movement and in the harassment of Jewish and leftist educators...

...There are other important differences which cannot be detailed here...

...American college students at times have earned the title "the silent generation...

...The German peasant, strong and ruthless, was held up as the hero...

...Can it happen elsewhere...

...Here, too, the differences are telling...

...Such absurd ideas did not remain the stock of lunatic fringe groups only but were taught in the schools, especially in the universities, the youth movement, veterans' organizations, and political parties...

...Others, like the German historian Gerhard Ritter, admit that the Nazis rode into power on the wings of an ideology appealing to wide segments of the nation...

...Only in Germany, Mosse maintains, did this ideology penetrate deeply into the national fabric, including the educational establishment...

...It is the great merit of Mosse's work to show why Germany deserted the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution...

...For some the explanation lies in the person of the arch demagogue Hitler himself who, it is argued, beguiled the Germans in a moment of grave national crisis...

...Under the impact of a misunderstood Darwinism, racial theories were born which saw history as an incessant struggle between pure and contaminated races...