The Lightning

and the Sun, 5

Adolf Hitler’s leading emotion is obviously his ‘love beyond all measure’[1] for Germany and all that is German. ‘He lived in the German people; nothing counted for him, save they.’[2] These words, describing the future ruler’s feelings al-ready in early youth, are true at all stages of his life. And his main intellectual, or rather, spiritual, feature, is perhaps that inborn, baffling intuition of history in the broadest sense of the word — of history as our planet’s destiny, — which lifts him straight above all politicians, generals and actual kings, to the level of the great Seers, and gives his whole career that extraordinary, ‘dream-like’[3] character of which Hans Grimm so appropriately speaks. The originality of his genius lies in the fact that he lived his German patriotism from a cosmic point of view, giving both Germany and the history of our times their true significance in the light of not merely human but cosmic evolution.

I do not know whether Adolf Hitler would have been, at any period of his career, in a position to give a learned lecture about the cyclic conception of history according to ancient Wisdom. But I am absolutely sure that he felt, thought and acted, from beginning to end, in full consciousness of the eternal truth — both biological and metaphysical, — which this conception expresses. His writings — specially the general statements which he laid down in Chapter XI of the first part of Mein Kampf— his speeches before and after his rise to power, and more eloquently than anything, the great decisions of his life, prove that he did. The basic tenets and entire spirit of the National Socialist doctrine prove that he did. For what is the latter, if not a passionate denial of the wide-spread belief in the ‘dignity’ of ‘man’ as such (of any human creature of any race) and of the no less wide-spread and no less arbitrary idea of man’s ‘mastery’ over Nature, and of his illimited ‘progress’? The denial of these dogmas in favour of an aristocratic conception of the Universe and, in particular, of history, in the light of which the noble races (and, among them, in first rank, the Aryan, the noblest of all) are alone capable of bringing collectively into material fulfilment, the whole wealth of higher human possibilities? Their denial, also, in favour of the bold assertion that history is, — in fact, has always been, — a long process of more or less slow decay from original perfection to a final state of chaos out of which one rises once more not through regular, unbroken evolution, but abruptly, — i.e., through revolutionary methods — to the state of health, virtue and beauty, i.e., of earthly godhead, which marks the springtime (all the successive spring-times) of Creation?

Considered in its essence, it is, indeed, that, before anything else. More so: the fact that it is that governs, as we shall see, its attitude, — determines its position, — with regard to the various ‘questions’ of our times, from the all-important, worldwide Jewish problem (which is anything but ‘modern’) to those affairs which, at first sight, seem to concern Germany alone. (And there lies precisely the hidden but actual source of its unpopularity in this Dark Age.)

Years before he came to power; nay, years before he started his political career, — Adolf Hitler was vividly aware of that incompatibility between this Age, this world as we see it, and the healthy, glorious world of his dreams. And he sought the reality of the latter, when not in the historical Golden Age of our Time-cycle — so far behind us and so different from all we know that it is practically unthinkable, — at least in as remote a past as his imagination could reach: in the legendary Age before the dawn of recorded German history; the Age pictured in the old Germanic sagas. He did not study that age, as a student of archaeology would have. He lived in it through his own visionary’s intuition and through the magic of Richard Wagner’s music, which he loved. And far from being the mere product of an ephemeral youthful enthusiasm, that consciousness of the World of the Sagas was precisely that which, more decisively than anything else, ‘conditioned his historical and political views.’[4] It was the consciousness of the world ‘to which he felt he actually belonged.’ And ‘all through his life, he found nothing for which he could stand with such pious devotion as he did for that world, which the Sagas of the German heroes had opened to him.’[5]

In other words, it is the healthy, strong, beautiful Germans of the heroic Age who, in his eyes, represented real Germany; eternal Germany. Maybe they have, historically, lived only a few millenniums before the beginning of the present Dark Age (in what the Sanskrit authors call the Dwapara Yuga; the third of the four great Ages) maybe, already within this present Age of Gloom itself (I mean, in the very first part of it).

That is not the point. The point is that, faithful in fact to Tradition, Adolf Hitler believed in the existence of earthly perfection as a reality both of the future and of a very, very remote past. The point is that, whatever might have been the epoch in which they — or their historical prototypes — actually lived, the men and women of the hallowed ‘world of the Sagas’ signified, symbolised, for him, that earthly perfection, that humanity without a flaw for which he yearned with all the ardour of his heart and nearer and nearer to which one reaches to the extent one follows Time further and further upstream.

There is more. Strange as this statement may seem to the European, nay to the German reader himself, Adolf Hitler’s ‘immeasurable love’ for his people is something greater than usual patriotism. It is, no doubt, rooted in that natural feeling of blood — solidarity which binds most individuals — and certainly all Germans, — to their countrymen. But it is, at the same time, the immediate outcome of a staggering intuitive knowledge; the expression of actual insight into the nature, meaning and destiny of Germany as the privileged Nation among all those of the same blood: the most gifted; the most conscious; the most fit to rule; in one word, the most objectively valuable section of Aryan mankind. It is, in spite of what many may think, nay, in spite of the judgement passed upon it by such a prominent figure of the National Socialist regime as Konstantin Hierl,[6] anything but the German counterpart of the British chauvinist’s attitude rendered in the well-known motto: ‘My country, right or wrong!’

True, Adolf Hitler himself has written in Mein Kampf that, had he ‘been French,’ and had France’s greatness meant to him all that Germany’s in fact did, he ‘could not and would not have acted any differently from Clemenceau.’[7] But, if one is to consider him, and to try to interpret his historical career in the light of Ancient Wisdom, (and subsequently, in connection with the destiny of the whole world) one is forced to say: he could not have been French — nor English; nor even Scandinavian. He could not have been anything else but German, nay, anything else but a frontier German, doubly aware of the tragic injustice of man-made frontiers and of the natural unity of the Reich beyond and in spite of them-and of the natural unity of the Aryan race beyond and in spite of the boundaries of the Reich. More still: one is bound to admit that, far from exalting Germany merely because he was a German, it is, on the contrary, he who chose to be born a German because of the predestined — God-ordained — part that Germany has played and is more and more called to play on the side of the eternal Forces of Light and Life in their struggle against the Forces of disintegration, now, as the end of this Dark Age is drawing nigh; because, objectively speaking, the earthly salvation of the Aryan race — the regeneration of higher mankind — can only come from and through Germany: the one Aryan Nation in which the race is still sufficiently pure to be, under given circumstances, capable of total regeneration, while, at the same time it has, through the unbroken experience of danger, remained sufficiently awake to be fully awakened, and sufficiently warrior-like to carry on, to its end, the struggle against Dark Age conditions: the perennial Struggle ‘against Time,’ for integral Truth.

In other words, both the quality of her biological substance and the particular stamp which history has left upon her, have made Germany the one Nation capable of taking the lead of Western Aryandom (when not also of Aryandom as a whole) in the last life and death struggle — the struggle for the survival and rule of the best, who are the predestined founders of the next Golden Age; the last phase of the perennial Struggle ‘against Time,’ marking the end of the present Age of Gloom. And the inspired Man ‘against Time’ who was, at the beginning of that phase, to act on behalf of the Forces of Light and Life, was bound to be a German, nay, the very embodiment of eternal Germany. And Adolf Hitler was that Man. And he knew it in the depth of his heart. He was perfectly conscious of the fact that his policy, both at home and abroad, was the only real German policy, and therefore the only conceivable one in the interest of Aryan mankind as a whole and — consequently — of the whole realm of Lift the only conceivable one ‘in the interest of the Universe,’ to quote the words of the Book of books. For alone regenerate Aryan man can and will save what is, in spite of all, worth saving in this doomed world, and build a new earth — open a new Time-cycle — on the basis of principles eternally true. Adolf Hitler has repeatedly said so in his speeches. And repeatedly expressed in Mein Kampf the same fact, namely that he was acting ‘in the spirit of the almighty Creator’ and struggling ‘for the Lord’s own work’[8] i.e. for Truth upon this earth: earthly Perfection; and that his ‘new ideas’ are ‘in harmony with the primeaval meaning of things.’[9]

What August Kubizek relates of his life in Linz and Vienna from 1904 to 1908, shows how early the future ruler had acquired a clear conception of his ultimate aim — the ‘ideal State’ — and become aware of the spirit of the whole programme he was, one day, to set forth and to work out, with the help of enthusiastic millions of people; how early he knew what his policy would be (what, in fact, any policy in accordance with truth, i.e. with Nature, can only be): — at the same time national and socialistic; nay, socialistic because it was to be — is too be — national in the full sense of the word, first in the sense of racial; and national in that sense because that Godhead within us which is real Godhead, is nothing else but the latent glory of our race in its original perfection.

To urge the German and, beyond the pale of the Reich, the Aryan in general — the youngest race of our Time — cycle, destined to the lordship of the divine Beginning of the next cycle — to yearn for and to strive with all his enlightened might towards that perfection on all planes, and to bring it, here and now, collectively as well as individually, into being (to the extent this is exceptionally possible, already during the Dark Age); to urge him to be, now, against the prevailing spirit of general contamination and general decay — against the current of Time, — the witness and the herald of the coming Dawn, and that, on a national, or rather on a racial scale, such is and remains the actual goal of National Socialism, the Hitler faith, however astounding this may yet appear to most people, to-day, in Year 22[10] after ‘the first Seizure of power.[11] Important as they may have been after 1918 — or as they may be now after 1945, — the immediate political aims which could not and cannot be separated from the persecuted Weltanschauung are mere steps towards that one great positive, permanent goal.

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[1] Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, p. 292.

[2] Ibid., p. 115.

[3] Traumhaft is the word Grimm repeatedly uses in Warum? Woher? Aber Wohin?

[4] Kubizek, p. 99.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Hierl, In Dienst für Deutschland.

[7] Mein Kampf, p. 766.

[8] Ibid., p. 76.

[9] Ibid., p. 440.

[10] These words were written in 1955.

[11] Machtübernahme—which took place on the 30th Jan. 1933.