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Category: Autobiography

Categories
Autobiography Pedagogy Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 22

the-real-hitler

 

Night of 27th-28th September 1941

Misery—Social discrimination
—Organisation of study.
 
 
If my parents had been sufficiently well-to-do to send me to a School of Art, I should not have made the acquaintance of poverty, as I did. Whoever lives outside poverty cannot really become aware of it, unless by over-throwing a wall. The years of experience I owe to poverty—a poverty that I knew in my own flesh—are a blessing for the German nation.

We must pay attention to two things: 1. That all gifted adolescents are educated at the State’s expense. 2. That no door is closed to them.

Since I hadn’t been able to finish my secondary studies, an officer’s career would have been closed to me, even if by working I had learnt more about it than is proper for a boy who has matriculated to know. Only an officer could win the Pour le Mérite. And at that, it was quite exceptional for an officer of middle-class origin to receive it.

In that closed society, every man existed only by virtue of his origin. The man who lacked this origin, and university degrees into the bargain, could not dream of becoming a Minister, for example, except by the short-cut of Social Democracy.

The view that suppression of these discriminations would be harmful to authority proved to be without foundation. A competent man always has the authority he needs. A man who is not superior by his talent invariably lacks authority, whatever his job may be.

Categories
Autobiography Conservatism Egalitarianism Liberalism Racial studies Roger Devlin

Why I Write

by Roger Devlin


 
I came late to the issues characteristically discussed in The Occidental Quarterly.

I had no interest in politics during my early adult years, a circumstance for which I am now grateful. Like most Americans, I assumed that “politics” meant electoral contests between hardly-distinguishable parties.

In early adulthood I encountered The Gulag Archipelago and gained a proper appreciation of just how high the stakes of politics could be. Initially, I gravitated toward that combination of anti-Communism and status quo Social Democracy known as neo-conservatism. In the academic bubble I then inhabited, such a stance was viewed as radical.

As a college instructor, I was baffled to receive student essays vehemently maintaining the “equality” of black and white, or singing the heroism of Rosa Parks. My classes were in philosophy, and I never mentioned race at all. Clearly, this was the stuff students had been taught to write for their professors before they got to me.

The stridency of their language suggested they were defending an idea under heavy attack. But where was the attack? All I had ever heard anyone say about races is that they were “equal.” If this is all the students wanted to say, what were they getting so worked up about? They wrote as if they were trying to scratch an itch.

I wished to devote my life to learning and scholarship, with no thought of practical application beyond eventually sharing my knowledge with the generation that came after me. Of course, I quickly learned that few of my colleagues shared this elevated, quasi-monastic notion of the scholar’s calling. Some turned out to hold beliefs weirdly similar to the jailors described by Solzhenitsyn; many more did not, but were untroubled by—or afraid of—those who did.

Accordingly, my first practical cause belonged to the realm of academic politics: defending the life of the mind from ideological corruption. I was also fascinated by the sheer power which ideology exercised over many men’s minds, and by how a band of resentful mediocrities armed with little else had infiltrated and virtually subjugated an institution made up of highly intelligent people.

The ideologues talked a great deal about race, of course; but this did not lead me to take any interest in the subject myself. I vaguely hoped that once the imposters had been purged from the academy we could forget about race and get back to learning and teaching.

I devoted several years to investigating the first principles of modern “progressive” thought, publishing a little philosophical primer on the subject (Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought). But this still did not lead me to the issue of racial differences, which are an empirical rather than philosophical matter. The entire drama of ideological politics can be played out within a homogeneous society, as students of the French Revolution know.

Nevertheless, I have come to the point where I prefer to publish even purely sociological analysis (e.g., “From Salon to Guillotine,” Summer 2008) in an explicitly racial-realist venue such as The Occidental Quarterly.

Here is why. Those traditional conservatives who continue to admonish us against the dangers of “biological determinism” are increasingly condemning themselves to irrelevance. The plea that “race isn’t everything” is valid per se, but not especially germane to the situation in which we find ourselves. For we are not the aggressors in the battle now being fought. And in any battle, it is the aggressors’ prerogative to choose the point of attack: if they come at you by land, you do not have the option of fighting them at sea.

Race is everything to our enemies, and it is the angle from which they have chosen to attack our entire civilization. It is also where they have achieved their greatest victories: you can see this from the way “conservative” groups feel they must parrot the language of the egalitarians just to get a hearing (see: here). Such well-meaning but naive friends of our civilization are in effect consenting to occupy the status of a “kept” opposition.

The more we try to avoid confronting race directly, the more our enemies will press their advantage at precisely this point. Tactically, they are correct to do so. And they will continue until we abandon our defensive posture and turn to attack them on their own chosen ground.

The Occidental Quarterly is blessed with contributors who have made racial differences and ethnic conflict their lives’ study, and I cannot match them in their own fields. But I prefer to throw in my lot with them because they are unambiguously not part of any “kept” opposition. Being a pariah at least keeps one honest.

A turning point for me was reading Glayde Whitney’s “The Biological Reality of Race” in American Renaissance (October 1999). Like everyone else in America, I had been subjected to years of race-talk, but the aim had always been to lead me to “feel” in a predetermined way. Even my students’ papers had been apprentice work in this genre. Whitney, by contrast, was simply setting forth information. Reading him was like being addressed as an adult after years of being talked down to. This by itself was enough to get me to sit up and take notice of what he was saying.

Moreover, he contradicted everything I had ever been told. And he did so while showing that race could be as interesting as any other scientific topic. I had never seen anyone actually diagram the human family tree, showing which groups were most closely related and which most distantly separated. I was particularly struck by the revelation that the deepest evolutionary cleft within the human race was that between black Africans and everyone else.

But even a complete racial science based upon exhaustive knowledge of the human genome would never make a dent in anti-white ideology. This is because ideologies are not scientific theories: they are systems of ideas mobilized by groups of men in their struggle to acquire or maintain power over other men. They are a misuse—a prostitution—of the faculty of human reason, whose proper end is the discovery of the true. Ideological doctrines are true, in the best of cases, only per accidens; more often they are falsehoods publicly maintained through violence and intimidation.

Not being based upon knowledge, the content of ideologies change with the elites and counter-elites which champion them. Past ideological regimes have been governed by Marxists who spoke of class rather than race. Still earlier regimes (and revolutionaries) invoked religious concepts. And, yes, racial science itself has been prostituted in the service of what was essentially a political ideology.

The masters of the West long ago ceased performing even the minimum function required of any governing elite: seeing to the physical survival of the people it rules. Instead, it maintains its power by setting its clients (“designated victims”) against the rest of us. “Antiracism” is the ideology, but what is really going on underneath is the mobilization of envy, covetousness, and the libido dominandi.

Much of the elite itself is white, of course. But this is really no more paradoxical than a company getting rich by staging a “going out of business sale” that never ends. Except, of course, that the “white anti-racism” game will have to end soon.

The regime’s greatest crime, however, lies not in setting its clients against us; it is what it has done to our own young people. Those indoctrinated students whose essays so perplexed me had been formed into instruments of an alien will: pawns in a struggle inimical to their own interests, and whose real nature they could not grasp. They were no less victims for being willing.

Writing for The Occidental Quarterly is essentially a continuation of the work I had always intended to do, adapted to a hostile political situation I have come to understand better. In the most general terms, this work remains: the pursuit of knowledge, teaching, and the fight against the same ideological enemies I encountered in the academy. For a professor-manqué, writing for an independent journal is the equivalent of what home-schooling is for a parent: a quiet revolt against institutions which have lost all claim to allegiance.

TOQ Online, October 1, 2009

Categories
Autobiography Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 64

the-real-hitler

 

Night of 8th-9th January 1942

Childhood memories—Religious instruction—The Abbé Schwarz — “Sit down, Hitler!” — The story of Petronella.
 

In Austria, religious instruction was given by priests. I was the eternal asker of questions. Since I was completely master of the material, I was unassailable. I always had the best marks.

On the other hand, I was less impeccable under the heading of Behaviour. I had a particular liking for the delicate subjects in the Bible, and I took a naughty pleasure in asking embarrassing questions.

Father Schwarz, our teacher, was clever at giving me evasive answers. So I kept on insisting until he lost his patience. One day—I’ve forgotten with reference to what—he asked me if I said my prayers in the morning, at midday and at night. “No, sir, I don’t say prayers. Besides, I don’t see how God could be interested in the prayers of a secondary schoolboy.” “Sit down, then!”

young adolph

Every pupil took to some new occupation. For my part, I used to excite him by waving pencils in the colours of Greater Germany. “Put away those abominable colours at once!” he’d say. The whole class would answer with a long howl of disapproval. Then I would get up and explain to him that it was the symbol of our national ideal. “You should have no other ideal in your heart but that of our beloved country and our beloved house of Hapsburg. Whoever does not love the Imperial family, does not love the Church, and whoever does not love the Church, does not love God. Sit down, Hitler!” If there hadn’t been a few teachers who would intercede for me on occasion, the affair would have ended badly for me.

Before Easter we had lessons to prepare us for confession. It was a tremendous rag. Often I promised myself to moderate my ways, but I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t endure all those hypocrisies. I can still see that Schwarz, with his long nose. I saw red when I looked at him. And I retorted as best I could! One day my mother came to the school, and he took the opportunity to pounce on her and explain that I was a lost soul. “You, unhappy boy…” he apostrophised me.

“But I’m not unhappy, sir.”

“You’ll realise you are, in the Next World.”

“I’ve heard about a scientist who doubts whether there is a Next World.”

“What do you (in German, ‘Du’) mean?”

“I must inform you, sir, that you are addressing me as ‘thou’.”

“You won’t go to Heaven.”

“Not even if I buy an indulgence?”

I was very fond of visiting the cathedral. Without my realising it, this was because I liked architecture. Somebody must have informed Father Schwarz of these visits, and he supposed I went there for some secret reason. The fact was, I was full of respect for the majesty of the place. One day, on leaving, I found myself face to face with the priest. “And there was I thinking you were a lost soul, my son! Now I see you’re nothing of the sort.”

At Steyr we had a Jew as teacher. One day we shut him up in his laboratory. In his class things were like in a Jewish school— everything was anarchy. This teacher had no authority at all. The boys were afraid of him at first, so it seems—because he used to howl like a madman. Unfortunately for him, one day he was caught laughing immediately after being angry. The boys realised that his bouts of anger were mere play-acting, and that was the end of his authority.

I always had the habit of reading during lessons—reading books, of course, that had nothing to do with the aforesaid lessons. One day I was reading a book on diseases caused by microbes, when the teacher pounced on me, tore the book from my hands, and threw it into a corner. “You should take an example from me, and read serious works, if read you must.”

Steyr was an unpleasant town—the opposite of Linz. Linz, full of national spirit. Steyr, black and red—the clergy and Marxism. I lodged with a school-companion in Grünmarkt, No. 9, in a little room overlooking the courtyard.

After the examinations, we organised a great party. It’s the only time in my life I’ve been drunk. I had obtained my certificate, next day I was to leave Steyr and return to my mother. My comrades and I secretly gathered over a quart of local wine. I’ve completely forgotten what happened during that night. I simply remember that I was awoken at dawn, by a milk woman, on the road from Steyr to Karsten. I was in a lamentable state when I got back to the house of my crux. I had a bath and drank a cup of coffee. Then Petronella asked me whether I had obtained my certificate. I wanted to show it to her, I rummaged in my pockets, I turned them inside out.

Not a trace of my certificate! What could I have done with it, and what was I to show my mother? I was already thinking up an explanation: I had unfolded it in the train, in front of an open window, and a gust of wind had carried it off! Petronella did not agree with me, and suggested that it would be better to ask at the school for a duplicate of the document. And, since I had drunk away all my money, she carried her kindness so far as to lend me five gulden.

The director began by keeping me waiting for quite a long time. My certificate had been brought back to the school, but torn into four pieces, and in a somewhat inglorious condition. It appeared that, in the absent-mindedness of intoxication, I had confused the precious parchment with toilet paper. I was overwhelmed.

I cannot tell you what the director said to me, I am still humiliated, even from here. I made a promise to myself that I would never get drunk again, and I’ve kept my promise.

(G. D. asked whether any of Hitler’s teachers had witnessed his rise to power.) Yes, some of them. I was not a model pupil, but none of them has forgotten me. What a proof of my character!

Categories
Autobiography George Lincoln Rockwell

This Time, 6

rockwell

A passage from This Time the World
by George Lincoln Rockwell

But Allen’s wife, Portland, gave me the shock of my fourteen or fifteen years when she was the first woman I ever heard say a filthy word—and in our living room, at that. She used the Anglo-Saxon word for body waste to express her distaste for some idea or other—and I will never forget the experience. Never, in all those young years, had I heard a female say such a word and I thought of her immediately as an object of unbelievable disgust. In discussing the matter later, with my father, I learned that she was Jewish. I asked him if Jewishness had anything to do with it and he said they were very “sophisticated people” who meant no harm by it. But he also told me of Henry Ford’s accusations against the Jews and how they forced him to apologize, and said there was no getting away from the power of the Jews, “They’re too smart.”

Except for the permanent memory of my shock at hearing that awful word from a lady in our family drawing room, I thought no more of it and don’t even remember thinking of Portland as anything but a woman who said a horrible, vulgar word for the first time in my presence.

I know the Jews and ‘liberals’ and Freudians will once again leap like trout to the fly here, and be sure this is the source of my ‘hatred’ of Jews. But it is simply not true. I assimilated this experience with millions of others and did not even notice whether the hundreds of Jews in Atlantic City High School, where I went for four years and many of whom were my best friends, were Jews or Hottentots. That may be an unfortunate choice of words, because hundreds of my school comrades in Atlantic City were Hottentots! And I didn’t particularly notice or care about this either.

The Jews simply cannot accept it, of course and the brainwashed will not accept it, but my hatred of organized Jewry stems directly and only from the discovery of what most—but not all—Jews are doing to the Nation and the People I love. There may have been some slight vestiges of prejudice in my upbringing, but no more than in the upbringing of millions of other American boys who are not leading Hitler movements.

Categories
Autobiography George Lincoln Rockwell Hate Real men Swastika

This Time, 3

rockwell

A passage from This Time the World
by George Lincoln Rockwell

In addition to this positive motivation for my activities, there is a negative hate—a burning hate which alone can drive me to lose my temper, a thing I almost never do. Bullying—the beating or torturing of an innocent or helpless creature by an overpowering creature or group of creatures, for the sheer pleasure of bullying and torture, drives me to a frenzy such that it is difficult to control myself.

The combination of these two overpowering drives from deep within me, I believe, are the underlying motivations which sent me down to the mail, wearing a Swastika armband, ready to die, if necessary and dumped me, for the moment, in the smelly little cell in the basement of the Washington, D.C., Police Headquarters.

Categories
¿Me Ayudarás? (book) Autobiography Degenerate art George Orwell Music Pedagogy Sexual "liberation"

Extermination • V

Libro
 
Below, six translated
excerpts from the chapter
“Musical betrayal”:
 
 

His phobia toward the degenerative aspects of the culture that began to appear in Mexico, especially in music, continued throughout the 1960s and early 70s, when I was already studying in his method. Rock music bothered him and even predicted, more than once, that in a hundred years mankind would continue listening to Beethoven but no one would remember the Beatles.

* * *

At that time [the 1990s] I did translation work. That same year [1993] I quoted something in my diary that I had translated that vindicates what my father said about musical pedagogy. I do not know if the quotes are accurate as the translated text was informal. But the question is to collect what comes in my diary: “Plato and Aristotle discussed the role of music as ‘harmonizing body and soul’. Plato went further: ‘The type of music of a nation cannot be altered without changing the customs and institutions of the state’.”

Very true. The “sexual liberation”—permissiveness of promiscuity and debauchery in plain English—modified the type of music in the West. My father never noticed that music education lies primarily in preventing the child or adolescent of the dissipation forces that became fashionable since the 1960s. A hard ethos as that of the Republican Romans would, I believe, repudiate the degenerate music insofar as the ethos and the musical tastes are two sides of the same coin. My father certainly heard the musical degeneration when it initiated in Mexico; he criticized it and resented much what he heard but eventually he followed the crowd [esp. Hollywood] and his descendants strayed even further. Rephrasing Plato, my brothers and nephews completely disharmonized their souls because of such bad manners. In other words, any pedagogic method that fails to separate the child from the surrounding culture of our time won’t work.

* * *

I must clarify that, although the rhythmic exercises taught in [school X] are indeed silly and childish, they do not reach what my beloved Nazis called “degenerate music.” This leads to the simplistic melodies of “disipacionism” to use the term of Hajo Liaucius in the book that I compiled; the obvious and inane tunes that move us into hedonistic relaxation, so well exemplified in the music that horrified Solzhenitsyn when America sheltered him for a few years and harshly scolded the gringos at Harvard. As unlike Solzhenitsyn almost everyone, including white nationalists, are addicted to degenerate music, they have been unable to realize that the best minds sensed that such “music” would be used by the System to degrade the spirit of the population, and to control it. A passage in 1984, for example, written before the birth of rock, proved prophetic. The music in the totalitarian world, Orwell says: “had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum… The proles had taken a fancy to it.”

* * *

In another of my ring-binders (my texts are scattered in many places), in April 18, 2005 I wrote that the methods of Orff and Kodály were also fraudulent “if they don’t produce aversion in the pupils towards the music of Neanderthals, like rap.” In other words, it is impossible to have a double life: say, a traditional marriage with children and maintaining a lasting relationship with a homosexual lover. My brother and his musical colleagues do something similar to this hypothetical bisexual: they studied classical music and go to table dances or dance salsas; they have read the classics but plug their minds to the idiot box called television; they married in the church and get civil divorces before the first conjugal dispute; they teach Bach and in their cars listen disco music.

* * *

One time my nephew visited my parents and confessed to my father that, with his cousins, he was composing music for their rock group. My father did some technical questions and my nephew [who studies music composition] answered. Then, my father delivered a very gentle speech about rock. He said it was a “rhythmic, monotonous and a highly repetitive cry; very simple.” My nephew, incidentally, played the rubbish of progressive rock from his cell phone to show the grandfather the new ringtones. My father continued his criticism of rock concerts: “The volume is so tremendous that equalizes everything; what you hear is a barking rhythm,” just what Orwell said in his best-achieved novel.

Then my father spoke of an old article by a commentator on classical music that had opined about rock. He mentioned the name of the critic (that I failed to annotate), who had written about the “tremendous, crushing phenomenon” which was rock in its origins. My father spoke at length about African rhythms as a preamble to classify the rock. That they play it “to the extent that hypnotize” and the members of the tribe do not dance in dancing couples. Rather, the ritual ends in rapes that surprise the tourists. “I see the same in rock. The volume is so strong and it is so much of it that the affair ends really badly.”

* * *

What I said in my dairies was true: only by cutting off the child from the failed culture that surrounds him it is possible to educate him. We need a Fourth Reich to put things in order.

Categories
Autobiography Miscegenation Nordicism Psychology Racial studies

Latin American loyalties

Recently I was asked these questions:

Are there any prospects that White Hispanics in Mexico and other Latin American countries might be willing to participate in a general revival of White interests? Or are they too cramped by the label Latino to identify as White? Or are racial categories in Latin America so imperceptible—due to the subtle gradations of white, near-white, off-white, almost white, mestizo—that forging a White identity is impossible?

I responded thus:

“Latin” America is in a far worse shape than the North. With 500 years of miscegenating experience these guys [“whites”] have lost almost all pride of their white skin (what remains of it). I have some writings about the subject in Spanish.

However, there’s something important missing in my reply. The real trouble I see in this part of the continent lies in the fact that, once you tolerate a few Amerindian genes in your bloodline, the race barrier is gone. The reason of this is not complicated. Due to Mendel laws, if you have an Amerind ancestor, even if you are predominantly white some of your offspring will come up darker that the rest.
mis primosThis for example is a 1960s photo of my cousins of two different families when they were children. (The blondest one passed away a couple of years ago as a mature adult.) You can see that my cousin at the bottom is darker than the one who had Scandinavian blond hair, his (now deceased) brother. This makes my point. Once you have darker brethren the ethnic barrier collapses within your psyche. You won’t be dismayed when, say, your whitest son starts dating a swarthy girl in Mexico because you already produced a child who, phenotypically, cannot be considered properly white.

This behavior produces a downward spiral of miscegenation due to the fact that most Mexicans are browns. The whitest genes dilute more and more in each generation, insofar as the browns are prolific and phenotypical whites not.

I have lived half a century in Mexico. I know the dynamics of mestization. Several people in white nationalism have criticized my one-drop-rule stance. For example, Andrew Anglin wrote about me: “He gets way into the Nordic stuff in a way that I find basically religious.” That’s only because Anglin et al completely ignore the psychological dynamics of mestization, especially the loyalties with swarthier offspring and cousins and uncles and aunts—and thus with who’s dating your daughter—once your bloodline is not pure.

Earlier this month I said, “Race-wise Americans should consider the sociology down the south of Río Grande.” However, I acknowledge it must be difficult for an American or European to figure out the psychological aspects of blood mixing throughout Latin America, unless he has lived in one of these countries for a long time.

Categories
Autobiography

Facebook pic

A couple of days ago I added a photo of myself on Facebook but it was taken when I was a little younger… ☺

Categories
Autobiography Hitler Youth Pedagogy Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 178

the-real-hitler

29th August 1942, evening

Do we keep Belgium, France and Norway?—We must adopt the arrogance of Britain—Education and stuffed heads—The safety valve of military service—Once we were a people of energy.

Fundamentally speaking, Belgium, France and Norway are not our natural enemies. I have no desire to incorporate all Frenchmen in the Reich; those who dwell on our borders and with whom we have contact were all Germans four hundred years ago.

With our eighty-five million Germans, we have in the Reich itself a major part of the population of the Germanic races.

No other nation possesses so strong a proportion of these elements. It would then be a sorry business if, with such strength at our disposal, we failed to bring law and order to ancient Europe. We may have a hundred years of struggle before us; if so, all the better—it will prevent us from going to sleep! People sometimes say to me: “Be careful! You will have twenty years of guerrilla warfare on your hands!” I am delighted at the prospect! With a number of small armies we can continue to dominate a large number of peoples. In the future our divisions will not be in dull garrison towns like Lechfeld and Hommerburg, but will be sent to the Caucasus! Our lads have always shouted with joy at the prospect of service abroad, and I shall see to it that in the future they range the four corners of the world. Germany will remain in a state of perpetual alertness.

We will adopt the British attitude of arrogance. In the time of the old German Emperors, let it not be forgotten, the Kings of England were of little more account than the King of Denmark today. In the first war, we found, on going through the paybooks of prisoners of war, that many of them had served in the South African War, They had been all over the world, and for them the fatherland was their Regiment! With men like that, nothing is impossible!

For the future it will, I think, be essential to introduce a three-year period of military service; only by so doing can we ensure efficiency in the handling of new technical weapons. A three-year period will be a great advantage to those who later propose to adopt a learned profession, for it will give them ample time to forget all the muck that was jammed into their heads at school; they will have time to discard everything which will not be of future use to them, and that, in itself, is most valuable.

Everybody, for example, learns two or three foreign languages, which is a complete waste of time. The little one learns is not of the slightest use when one goes abroad. Everybody, I agree, should receive a basic education. But the whole method of instruction in secondary and higher schools is just so much nonsense. Instead of receiving a sound basic education, the student finds his head crammed with a mass of useless learning, and in the end is still ill-equipped to face life.

Lucky are those who have the happy knack of being able to forget most of what they have been taught. Those who cannot forget are ripe to become professors—a race apart. And that is not intended as a compliment! In 1933 things were still being taught in the higher educational establishments which had been proven by science to be false as long ago as 1899.

When I was a schoolboy, I did all I could to get out into the open air as much as possible—my school reports bear witness to that! In spite of this, I grew up into a reasonably intelligent young man, I developed along very normal lines, and I learnt a lot of things of which my schoolfellows learnt nothing. In short, our system of education is the exact opposite of that practised in the gymnasia of ancient days. The Greek of the golden age sought a harmonious education; we succeed only in producing intellectual monsters.

The primary task of education is to train the brain of the young. It is quite impossible to recognise the potential aspirations of a child of ten. In old days teachers strove always to seek out each pupil’s weak point, and by exposing and dwelling on it, they successfully killed the child’s self-confidence. Had they, on the contrary, striven to find the direction in which each pupil’s talents lay, and then concentrated on the development of those talents, they would have furthered education in its true sense. Instead, they sought mass-production by means of endless generalisations.

A child who could not solve a mathematical equation, they said, would do no good in life. It is a wonder that they did not prophesy that he would come to a bad and shameful end! Have things changed much today, I wonder? I am not sure, and many of the things I see around me incline me to the opinion that they have not. I was shown a questionnaire drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior, which it was proposed to put to people whom it was deemed desirable to sterilise. At least three-quarters of the questions asked would have defeated my own good mother. One I recall was: “Why does a ship made of steel float in the water?”

If this system had been introduced before my birth, I am pretty sure I should never have been born at all! Let us, for God’s sake, throw upon the windows and let the fresh air blow away nonsense of this nature! Put the young men into the Army, whence they will return refreshed and cleansed of eight years of scholastic slime!

In the olden days we were an energetic people; but gradually we developed into a people of poets and thinkers. Poets do not matter, for no one takes them seriously; but the world is greatly overburdened with “thinkers.” I keep a bust of Scharnhorst on my table; it is he who started our people back on the road to sanity. The world at large welcomed this Germany of poets and thinkers, because it knew how they sapped our virility.

Still, we have made progress in the field of education, in spite of having a pedant at the head of the Educational Department. With another in control, progress would have been more rapid.

Just think how in the old days a bit of paper could alter the course of one’s whole life! Look at my school reports—I got bad marks in German! My disgusting teacher had succeeded in giving me an intense dislike for my mother tongue! He asserted that I would never be capable of writing a decent letter! If this blundering little fool had given me a grade five, I should have been precluded from becoming a technician! Now, thank God, we have the Hitler Youth, where the child is judged on all his qualities, and not solely on his scholastic attainments; character is taken into consideration, the talent of leadership is encouraged, and every child has the legal right to show what he can do.

_____________________________

Consider obtaining a copy of the complete notes
published by Ostara Publications.

Categories
Autobiography Hojas Susurrantes (book) Literature Oracle of Delphi Psychology Stefan Zweig

New literary genre

“Know thyself” (gnōthi seafton)
Delphic maxim in the Temple of Apollo

 

I started Hojas Susurrantes (HS) in 1988 and added the last touchups last year. It is neither a novel nor an essay; nor memoirs in the traditional sense nor a pamphlet or poetry. It is difficult to define this non-fictional genre in few words. My first reader, Andreas Wirsén, a Swede lover of literature, wrote in an online forum that I am “a pioneer developing a new sport.”

As stated in Day of Wrath which contains a Spanish-English translation of the longest chapter of HS, Stefan Zweig wrote in Adepts in Self-Portraiture that when Western literature began with Hesiod and Heraclitus it was still poetry, and of the inevitability of a decline in the mythopoetic talent of Greece when a more Aristotelian thought evolved. As compensation for this loss, says Zweig, modern man obtained with the novel an approach to a science of the mind. But the novel genre does not represent the ultimate degree of self-knowledge:

Autobiography is the hardest of all forms of literary art. Why, then, do new aspirants, generation after generation, try to solve this almost insoluble problem?

[For a] honest autobiography […] he must have a combination of qualities which will hardly be found once in a million instances. To expect perfect sincerity on self-portraiture would be as absurd as to expect absolute justice, freedom, and perfection here on earth. No doubt the pseudo-confession, as Goethe called it, confession under the rose, in the diaphanous veil of novel or poem, is much easier, and is often far more convincing from the artistic point of view, than an account with no assumption of reserve. Autobiography, precisely because it requires, not truth alone, but naked truth, demands from the artist an act of peculiar heroism; for the autobiographer must play the traitor to himself.

Gnothi_seautonOnly a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts.

Zweig then devotes a long paragraph to St Augustine’s Confessions, the thinker I abhor the most of all Western tradition and whose theology about Hell caused massive psychological damage in my own life (also recounted in HS). Then Zweig wrote:

Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake, and was to be amazed and startled at the novelty of his enterprise. Stendhal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Amiel, the intrepid Hans Jaeger, have disclosed unsuspected realms of self-knowledge by self-portraiture. Their successors, provided with more delicate implements of research, will be able to penetrate stratum by stratum, room by room, farther and yet farther into our new universe, into the depths of the human mind.

This quote explains why I decided to devise a hybrid genre between the self-portraiture that betrays the author and thus penetrates beyond the strata pondered by Romantic autobiographers. Over the boards anti-Nazis have been making fun about my experiences in London last year. They have no idea what I am trying to say because they completely lack context. Together with the Zweig quote my December 31 entry, “Etiology,” provides a bit of the context of what I’m trying to say in the book I’m presently writing.