Rosenberg

Editor’s Note: Below I quote excerpts from a speech by Alfred Rosenberg at a commemorative event on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Friedrich Nietzsche on October 15, 1944, in Weimar (the full speech can be read here):

Nietzsche also knew this very well when he wrote: ‘The discipline of suffering, of great suffering, do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?’ Only such common suffering heightens the tension of the soul, only the sight of a great and general fate strengthens the spirit of invention and bravery in the struggle. Only such suffering can call upon human beings, i.e., an entire community that feels suffering in common, to great achievements. And this prerequisite for the transformation of his prophecy into a people reflecting upon itself had to be denied to Friedrich Nietzsche…

That is in line with what we have recently been saying: that the white man must suffer once again to cleanse himself of all the mental infection he suffers from, even if that means the suffering resulting from a Third World War.

‘But may it [the German spirit] never believe’, Nietzsche added at that time, anticipating almost everything, ‘that it can fight similar battles without its household Gods, without its mythical homeland, without a “return” of all German things!’ ‘Let no one believe that the German spirit has forever lost its mythical homeland, for so clearly it still understands the birdsongs that tell tales of that homeland. One day it will awaken, in all the morning freshness of a monstrous sleep: then it will slay dragons, annihilate treacherous dwarves, and awaken Brünnhilde, and Wotan’s spear itself will not be able to bar its way!’

See what I said in January of last year about The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. With the honourable exception of Carolyn Yeager, who never played degenerate music on her podcasts, this is something that contemporary neo-Nazis will never understand.

Here a hope was expressed that literally went to everything, demanded not only a cleansing from all overgrowing foreign plants and their juices but confidently expected it, a true inner rebirth leading back to the ultimate roots from which it longed for the supply of power for a great future…

‘The time for small politics is past: the next century already brings the struggle for domination of the earth, the compulsion to great politics’.

Given this overall evaluation as well he still hopes once more for a rigorous German heart, for the German form of scepticism, for a ‘spiritualized Fridericianism’, and he expresses it more than once that today, where in Europe only the herd animal comes to honour and bestows honours, an entirely different human type would have to assume rule to reverse this destiny.

Thus a profound criticism of the entire social structure sets in, a criticism of the Marxist, even then already falsely termed socialist movement, as it cannot be thought out more consistently and annihilatingly even today. For him Marxism is the thoroughly thought-out tyranny of the lowliest and dumbest, that is of the superficial, envious and three-quarters actors; it is indeed the conclusion of ‘modern ideas’ and their latent anarchism. Nietzsche turns above all against the attempt to abolish the concept of property because abolishing this concept of property had to breed a destructive struggle for existence; for man has no providence or self-sacrifice towards anything that he possesses only temporarily; he deals with it exploitatively, as robber or as dissolute squanderer. And amidst this criticism already arises the indication of a way out:

Keep all paths to small fortunes open, but prevent effortless, sudden enrichment; withdraw all branches of transport and trade that favour the accumulation of large fortunes, which is to say, especially money trading, from the hands of private individuals and companies, and regard both those who own too much and those who own nothing as dangerous creatures to the community…

With that, the presentiment of the Marxist dictatorship which we see marching against us as a mortal enemy from Moscow is clearly predicted. It has allied itself with that force which Nietzsche presented as particularly dangerous, without our wanting to assert that he was then able to survey the whole structure and psychology of the East in every detail.

But Nietzsche knows that probably, despite all cognition, the development once initiated cannot be reversed in a short time, and therefore he predicts that from this mixture of liberalism, plutocracy and anarchy the great crisis of Germany and the whole European continent would have to emerge. He is profoundly convinced that from this hodgepodge initiated by the entire liberal movement, meanwhile expressing an untiring hatred against Rousseau as the intellectual originator of these currents, Europe would someday have to arrive at the most terrible all-encompassing confrontations, but then perhaps also at severe tyrannical phenomena. He writes: ‘The democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary event for breeding tyrants, understanding the word in every sense, including the most spiritual’…

He was looking for this voice of wanting to understand and friendship. He also made some friends, but gradually, with an ever-sharper realization of an impending spiritual and political fate, his former companions also stepped back. The companions of his scholarly years sink into the bourgeois world. Richard Wagner also does not seem to want to go the way forward, and in this painful yet to the end still distant reverence, the greatest inner crisis in Nietzsche’s life comes to light, when he declares that Wagner, as an artist, to whom he now believes he must spiritually oppose, also alienates those people in Germany who are worth working on…

While this or that of those prophets of our time may be particularly close to us in some areas, Friedrich Nietzsche was probably the greatest figure in the German and European intellectual world of his day as an overall personality and as an unswerving recognizer of an entire epoch that was about to perish! One thing must be considered with all his later confessions and criticisms: if in his remarks he only suffered wounds and therefore took a fighting stance against the immediate causes of these wounds, the same would have happened if he had lived in France or England or another state for a long time. Because everywhere the same phenomena of decline were at work to decompose old grown traditions without thereby creating new ties and setting up new ideals. The whole world paid homage to base values.

This evokes what I recently said about internal jihad: that one must repudiate one’s nation project to save the Aryan, referring to a ‘nation’ that has been founded on the worship of Mammon (and this even refers to post-WWII Germany).

The revaluation of the values of passing liberal humanity into an ideal of the noble, hard personality, making greatness possible, is essentially Nietzsche’s doctrine that runs through all his works. If in recent times his ‘will to power’ has been particularly emphasized, this core has been rightly highlighted as that character resistance centre from which both the well-founded treatises and the ecstatic proclamations of ‘Zarathustra’ and the harsh attacks of his last writings can be explained…

In truth, there have been no power institutions that have had as hyenas of life an effect like the heartless capitalists of the international stock exchanges, never such a chloroformization of entire peoples as has happened through the all-Jewish press, and never has a power attack on the great culture of a continent been prepared more insidiously than after these influences through the Marxist dictatorship movement. What Nietzsche prophesied, European anarchism, was on the way…

So the forces that are now struggling with each other have not newly emerged; they are prefigured by the liberal movements of the 19th century, by the over-technicization of a new era, by the unbridled rule of money and gold, by the monopolization of the entire news system in Europe by racially alien hands. The European cultural citizens, tired of the sedation of their resistance forces, are now overwhelmed by a long-dammed destructive passion from the East, which, in a strange alliance with Jewish-West-leaning Marxism, has shaken not only Germany but the whole European continent to its foundations. When we proudly declare that National Socialist Germany alone still defends this old Europe today, when we can perhaps say in a slightly different sense than Nietzsche in the 19th century, but still from an even greater depth, that we are the ‘good Europeans’ today, that is a historically honestly won right…

But despite this realization, we still feel in our experience the great train of a new era and know that what has carried us and gives the German nation the inner will to inflexible resistance today is also based on that deep shock of the lonely Nietzsche, which carried him through a painful life, which often led to despair and accusations in solitude, but was always at the same time driven forward by the unconditional necessity of such an avowal to the future…

This is how we, National Socialists, see the workings of those powers today which, coming from the past, began to become a dangerous force of disintegration in the 19th century and today lead to the most terrible disease of the European essence in a large, suppurating process, and at the same time we see some prophets demandingly raise their voices amidst this fateful currents to break these creation-hostile values to help realize a new order of life.

Among them, we honour the lonely Friedrich Nietzsche today. After stripping away all that is tied to the times and all too human, this figure stands spiritually beside us today, and we greet him across the times as a close relative, as a spiritual brother in the struggle for the rebirth of great German spirituality, for the shaping of generous and spacious thinking and as a proclaimer of European unity as a necessity for the creative life of our old continent, rejuvenating itself today in a great revolution.

If a new visitor is not familiar with our recent psychobiography on Nietzsche, he could do so now.