Books
VENUSBERG TO NUREMBERG
METAPOLITICS: FROM THE ROMANTICS TO HITLER.
By
Peter
Viereck. Alfred A. Knopf.
335
pages.
$3.00.
This is an attempt to present the sources and the development of Nazi
ideology. The material is here for an important hook, hut this happens to
he an exasperatingly superficial and misleading one. Its impact should
have been that of something fresh and provoking, opening up new per–
spectives to our understanding of the recent past and the present. Unfor–
tunately, the author's a:lalytical equipment seems to consist only of an
assortment of the
e~~:sy
and too simple terms current in conventional anti–
Nazi journalism and of some of the more threadbare notions of Harvard
Humanism. The banality of Mr. Viereck's point of view would have been
less evident if only he .had not tried to provide a critique as well as a
description of Nazi ideology. For his hook does have a certain value as
information. Too little is known of Richard Wagner's role as a prophet
of reactionary politics; most English-speaking readers have never even
heard of Father Jahn, the gymnastics teacher and firebrand of the Wars
of Liberation against Napoleon, or of Paul de Lagarde and Julius Lang·
behn, the "Rembrandt German." To as many it will come as a surprise
to learn that the ideas of the Nazis, in more or less their present form,
were current among German petty bourgeois intellectuals long before
] 914, much less 1933.
Metapolitics
was a term suggested to Wagner: German politics were
to he to ordinary politics as metaphysics to physics. Mr. Viereck finds
Wagner the chief source of Hitler's ideas, with Alfred Rosenberg today
giving them their most extreme and authoritative expression. To these
two men, along with Father J ahn, the greatest part of the hoox is devoted.
They and their ideas are bracketed under "romanticism,'' which was
among other things "a .cultural and political reaction against the Roman–
French-Mediterranean spirit of clarity, rationalism, form and universal
&tandards.. .. Thereby romanticism is really the nineteenth century's
version of the perennial German revolt against the western heritage."
Romanticism with its passion, its impatience of restraint and its urge to
expand and absorb was according to the author the hearth in which
Nazism was ignited, and Nazism is its culmination.
German "romanticism,'' the author goes on, has operated upon "three
sweeping assumptions of dubious logic." The first, the "mathematical
fallacy,'' asserts a whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. The
second is that of "repetition," i.e. a proposition as to value is supported
by repetitious affirmation, not by reasoning: "Why life for life's sake?
Always the same answer: because
it
is life. Nothing is being said except
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