BOOKS
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"French-Roman-Medite_rranean spirit of rationalism, clarity and form,"
German Romanticism did not repudiate all rationalism, all clarity and all
form in generaL Romanticism as a whole, including its German version,
was the expression of a revolt against a
particular
rationalism, a
particular
clarity and a
particular
sense of form. It was the negation heralding a
new social order pregnant with its own rationalism, clarity and form.
(And the "perennial German revolt against the West" was in this case as
in every other a revolt against a comity of which the Germans as a
national and cultural whole were the victims instead of the beneficiaries.)
It is indisputable that Romanticism is the most important single
source of Nazi doctrine. But there was nothing in Romanticism that made
this doctrine inevitable, nothing that made Romanticism
responsible
for
it, try as Mr. Viereck may to show the contrary by means of his "assump–
tions." What then is the filial relationship of Nazism to Romanticism?
Any one who tries to answer this question must take into account the
inextricable and ambiguous connections that exist between ideas and the
milieux in which and the material circumstances under whose pressure
they arose. Mr. Viereck treats ideas as the determinants of history; there–
fore he can
blame
Romanticism for Hitler, and pure Evil for Roman–
ticism, and he can scold them both with that self-righteousness possible
only to academists and journalists. Only they can find it so easy to shut
out the uncontrollable complexity of that which actually happens. Only
academists can "refute" Romanticism, and only journalists Hitler, so con–
clusively. But they cannot explain either; and certainly they cannot arm
us against the latter.
Metapolitics
does indeed touch upon some of the historical events
that share the responsibility for Nazi ideas, but the author treats them on
the level of a high school textbook, at their most obvious, and neglects
entirely the very fundamental connection between proto-Nazi ideas and
the late and hurried development of Germany as an industrial power.
Fichte, for example, was a German super-nationalist, but he was not a
proto-Nazi. Paul de Lagarde, who appears fifty years later, was. There
is a great difference. Why?
But perhaps I am misrepresenting the nature of this book by empha–
sizing its tendency rather than its substance, and what is left out rather
than what is put in. A good half and more is taken up by an account,
valuable for its information, of the activities and the ideas of Jahn, Wag–
ner, Rosenberg and others. Mr. Viereck remarks the fact that so many
Nazi leaders are intellectuals and artists
manques,
and correctly makes
this responsible for the particular flavor and decor of Hitler's movement,
and for that extraordinarily bitter resentment of the surface phenomena
of capitalist society which could only have come from frustration-a feel–
ing, Mr. Viereck should have pointed out, peculiar today to the petty
bourgeoisie. But it is typical of the book that it should have failed to
have hinted even at such things as that; and typical too of Mr. Viereck's
