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Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2007
New Religions and the Nazis
By Karla Poewe
Routledge. December 19, 2005. ISBN: 0415290244 (hardcover), $97.00; ISBN:
0415290252 (paperback), $26.95. 218 pages
Professor Poewe’s documentary text, New Religions and
the Nazis, posed a most discomforting challenge for me. The text is
liberally sprinkled with German terminology, and while parenthetically
translated as it goes, it contains no glossary to aid the non-German-speaking
reader.
This is not a book for pleasure reading. It is an
extensively researched and well executed
study of the period, and of the key
personalities who affected—and perhaps
“infected”—their young target German
population with their philosophies, their celebrity, and their influence. These
were the intellectually elite of their time; and many
followers, grounded and not, lived, hung, and moved on their every word.
For those engaged in research, this book might well be a
volume to include on their library shelves. For those merely interested in what
is clearly the largest political cult of its day and perhaps all of history,
this is a formidable piece of quotable work, but it also is plodding. It
certainly addresses strongly the reason for the popular
expression that religion and politics don’t
mix. I was reminded of George Orwell’s “Newspeak” as I read.
For me, the burden of constantly
turning back to the author’s first use to find the meaning of a word—to
redefine the terminology as I proceeded,
proved to be more than I chose to pursue. The
book did not retain my
interest, although it included topics of great personal interest and
importance to me. Its views on the “others,” as in the then-failed
German
political and economic system, Christianity, and Judaism, are instructive for
understanding Nazi intellectuals’
thinking.
In summary, Dr. Poewe’s conclusion states that
(Jakob Wilhelm) Hauer’s, (Hans F.
K.) Gunther’s, and (Hans) Grimm’s primary motives were to usher in a holy new
society that respected and groomed its race-specific biological and cultural
heritage. To bring this about, they [felt they] needed a race-specific religion.
This religion was a form of paganism called German Faith. For Grimm, who was
more comfortable finding religion in poetics, his friend Moeller van den Brock’s
notion of the Third Reich became the religious hope of salvation from the
grinding needs of Germans during the Versailles era. (p.172)
As one reads, it becomes increasingly clear that this
stance implies that any variation by anyone or anything on this theme is totally
unacceptable. This is cult thinking. If one disagrees with the leader, to the
extent of the disagreement the leader is always right and the one disagreeing is
always wrong.
I wonder whether some of the ideas posited in this book
have not influenced the radical thinking of contemporary extremist groups
operating in our own era some 70 to 90 years later and who might still be
thinking, “Tomorrow, the world.”
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