I was going to post another Might is Right instalment today but I got to thinking about my recent exchanges with Benjamin in various threads, and I feel I should say a few things.
I sometimes check the number of comments on old threads, back when WDH was hosted for free by WordPress, and I’m surprised that there were threads with dozens of comments. Since I started criticising American white nationalism, calling it deficient compared to German National Socialism, and shifting my paradigm from regarding the Christian problem as infinitely more serious than the Jewish problem, the visitor traffic has collapsed.
This is compounded by the fact that, as an immense admirer of Hitler myself, the German Chancellor’s sensitivity to art and animal welfare is something that simply doesn’t exist on the American racial right.
The immense dilemma I find myself in is that this sort of thing cannot be explained by pure reason, say, by solid race realist articles like the ones Jared Taylor has been publishing for decades. It has more to do with what we might call emergent psychogenics, which I have already discussed in Day of Wrath (a book that is nothing more than a translation of some chapters of my trilogy).
Psychogenic emergency is either felt or not. Or rather: either one belongs to a higher psychoclass, or one doesn’t belong to it. As I said, it is not something that can be demonstrated by pure reason. On seeing a work of art, such as the Lorraine canvas I saw on my last trip to London, the museum visitor either feels the emergent aesthetics compared to the architectural Neanderthalism of the largest city in Europe, or he feels nothing at all. Those 18th-century Englishmen like Henry Hoare who were aesthetically emergent even designed their gardens in imitation of the Italian painter’s architecture. Either you feel art or you don’t.
Incidentally, the bridge in Stourhead’s garden whose image I posted in June in this article was also used by Kubrick in one of the scenes in Barry Lyndon: a film whose images were inspired by canvases of the period like very few films I have seen. (Perhaps the sole exception is 1956’s Lust for Life in which the director used the actual sites in Holland, Belgium and the French countryside where Vincent van Gogh lived.)
The fourteen words have to do with aesthetics, in that the white race is the only truly beautiful race from the point of view of the Gods of Olympus. The other issue is ethics, the four words, Eliminad todo sufrimiento innecesario. Like great art, you either feel the four words or you don’t. Either you are a Neanderthal (Benjamin sent me an email today describing experiments on rabbits that I don’t even want to describe) or you are an overman like Hitler, and Göring who forbade tormenting those animals.
The sad truth is that most American racialists have not reached the psychogenic level of the Führer in terms of ethics and aesthetics, and that those emergent qualities cannot be induced by arguments, criticisms or diatribes like the ones I have used in this blog. Either you start psychogenically emerging as a child or an adolescent (cf. Kubizek’s memoirs of Hitler when they were both teenagers) or you won’t.
Adolf Hitler’s second and even more shattering experience of the horror of the present Age began on the 10th of November 1918, as he stood, half-blind from the effects of poisonous gas, among his wounded comrades in a hospital hall at Pasewalk in Pomerania, and heard from the clergyman the latest news: the ‘November revolution’ and Germany’s capitulation; the tragic end of the first World War.
More than four years before, he had joined the war with enthusiasm, as a volunteer in a Bavarian regiment, not in an Austrian one, clearly showing thereby that he was prepared to die anytime for the German people and ‘for the Reich that embodied them,’[1] though not for ‘the State of the Habsburgs’—that artificial State of many nationalities. For he considered the war in no way as an Austrian concern, but as a struggle of the German people (including, naturally, those of Austria) ‘for their existence’[2]—as a just war. And, he had done his duty thoroughly; faithfully. And although he had, for months already, (especially since the general strike of 1917) been fearing —feeling—that some diabolical traitors’ intrigues were being carried on to rob the German front-soldier of a victory which he well deserved, yet he had not expected such an end, and so suddenly….
The grief, the indignation and temporary despair that took him over as he abruptly acquired ‘the most horrible certitude in his life’[3] are so eloquently described in Mein Kampf that nothing can throw more light upon the future, Führer’s state of mind than an extensive, quotation of his own words:
I could not remain any longer’ (i.e. remain hearing the news). ‘While my eyes once more stared into darkness, I sought my way back to the dormitory, threw myself upon my bed, and buried my burning head under the quilts and pillows.
Since the day I had stood before my mother’s grave, I had not wept. When, in my youth, Destiny had been mercilessly harsh to me, I had faced it with growing defiance. When during the long years of the war, death had taken many a dear comrade and friend of mine from our ranks, it would have seemed to me nearly a sin to complain—for they had died for Germany. And when, in the days of the terrible struggle, the slowly advancing gas had taken me in its grip, and begun to gnaw into my eyes, and when the fear of becoming blind for ever had made me feel, for a second, as though I would weaken, the voice of conscience had thundered to me: ‘Miserable wretch! You feel like weeping, while thousands are faring worse than yourself!’ And I had put up with my lot in silence. But now I could not help weeping. Now I experienced how completely every personal suffering fades away before the misfortune of one’s Fatherland.
So, it had all been in vain! In vain all our sacrifices, and all the hardships we had endured; in vain, hunger and thirst, for months without end; in vain, the hours in which, facing the terror of death, we had yet done our duty; and in vain, the death of two million men! Would not the graves of the hundreds of thousands who had gone forth full of faith in the Fatherland, never to return, break open and release the dumb heroes covered with mud and blood,—release them as revengeful spirits among the people at home, who had treated so disdainfully the highest sacrifice which a man can offer his country? Had they died for that, the soldiers of August and September 1914? Had the regiments of volunteers, in the autumn of the same year, followed for that the elder comrades? Had those boys of seventeen sunk for that into Flanders’ earth? Was that the object of the sacrifice that German mothers had brought the Fatherland when, with a grieving heart, they had sent the boys to their duty, never to see them, again? Had all that happened in order to enable, now, a handful of criminals to set their grip upon the Fatherland?!! … The more I tried, then, to think clearly about the monstrous event, the more my forehead burnt with indignation and shame. What was all the pain I felt in my eyes, compared with this wretchedness?
What followed, were appalling days and still worse nights. I knew that all was lost. Only fools—fools or … liars and criminals—could put their hope in the enemy’s mercy. During those nights, hatred grew in me, hatred against the originators of that deed.
In those days, I also became aware of my destiny. Now, I could only laugh at the thought of my own future, that had caused me such bitter worry only a short time before. Was it not ridiculous to build houses upon such foundations as this? At last it was clear to me that the very thing which I so often already had feared, without ever being able, in my heart, to believe it, had now happened.
Emperor William the Second had been the first German emperor to hold out his hand to the leaders of Marxism, in a gesture of reconciliation, without knowing that rascals have no honour. While they still held the Emperor’s hand in one of theirs, their other one was already seeking for the dagger.
With Jews, no pactising policy is possible, but only that of the hard ‘either—or.’
This heart-rending autobiographical account could—historically—be described as: the passage of National Socialism from the stage of an expectant or latent incarnate Idea, to that of an active one.
Surely the incarnate Idea is, when not as old as Adolf Hitler himself, at least as old as his earliest awakening to socio-political, nay, to philosophical consciousness in general. And that took place very early: already in Linz, when not before. Yet, then, and in Vienna, although his interest in social and political problems grew and grew with the daily experience of injustice and misery, and still in Münick, after 1912, the future ruler continued to think of himself primarily as of a future architect. There may have been moments, of course, in which he thought, or at least felt, differently. There were such moments—one such moment at least, and a great one,—already in his life in Linz, if we are to believe Kubizek’s account of it.[5] But the artist’s immediate goal soon reappeared. Horrible as—in Vienna, at any rate—many of them doubtless were, the experiences of daily life were not sufficiently appalling to push it out of sight altogether. Nay, during the war, when more and more aware of the necessity of opposing to the forces of international Socialism a national organisation which would be free from the weaknesses of the Parliamentary system, Hitler had begun to think seriously of becoming politically active, he had merely visualised himself speaking in public ‘while carrying on his profession.’[6] Now, his profession, nay, his art,—for he still was, and could but remain, fundamentally, an artist,—was out of question. Every activity which was not to contribute directly and immediately to free Germany from the consequences and specially from the causes of defeat, was, out of question; and that, not merely because Adolf Hitler loved Germany above all things, but because that more-than-human intuition that classes him among the few great seers of mankind, told him that Germany’s real, deeper interest was—is, absolutely,—the real interest of Creation;—the ‘interest of the Universe,’ again to quote the immortal words of the Bhagavad-Gita. (And it is not an accident,—not a mere coincidence,—that I, a non-German Aryan intimately connected with England, Greece and India, should stress this fact. It is a sign; a symbol; the first expression of the homage of worldwide Aryandom to the latest Man ‘against Time’ and to the truly chosen Nation).
Out of the abyss of powerless despair—from that bed of, suffering upon which the nameless corporal Adolf Hitler lay weeping over Germany’s fate while his blinded eyes burned in their sockets, like red-hot embers; out of his appalling certitude that ‘all was lost,’ that ‘all had been in vain’—rose the defiant Will to freedom and Will to power of an invincible people and, beyond that, and greater than that, the perennial cosmic Will to Perfection in all its majesty; the will of the German soldier who had fought in Flanders and—identical to it; expressing itself through it,—the impesonal and irresistible Will of the eternal Warrior and Seer above Time and ‘against Time’; the Will of Him Who comes back age after age, ‘when all is lost,’ ‘when evil rules supreme,’ to re-establish on earth the reign of Righteousness.
From then onwards, the age-old Struggle for Truth—the Struggle ‘against Time’—was, in the West, to enter a new phase. It was to identify itself with the political struggle to free Germany from the bondage imposed upon her by the victors of 1918, no less than with the more-than-political one against the causes of physical and moral decay that were—and still are—threatening the existence of the natural aristocracy of the Aryan race. And the National Socialist German Labourers’ Party—the famous N.S.D.A.P., which Adolf Hitler soon evolved out of the tiny group of idealists (seven, including himself) originally called Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, which he joined in 1919—was to be the one agent of the everlasting Force of Light and Life amidst the growing darkness of the Dark Age. I say: the one; for, contrarily to all other so-called movements of regeneration, religious and secular, this political and yet infinitely more than political Movement, attacked the very root of historical decay as such: biological decay, consequence of sin against the primary natural Commandant of blood purity; in other words (from the standpoint of original Perfection), sickness; tangible, physical untruth and that moral untruth (that false conception of ‘man’) which stands to the back of it.
The main reason why Hitler withdrew from party management was his plan to write a ‘large book’, which he stated clearly in the declaration announcing his decision. This project began as a quasi-legal defence of his actions for the court. It soon developed into the idea of producing, as Hitler told Siegfried Wagner in early May 1924, a ‘comprehensive settlement of accounts with those gentlemen who cheered on 9 November’, in other words Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. No doubt hopeful of signing a sensational book with high sales, various publishers offered their services to Hitler, either in person or by letter. In time, however, the emphasis of the work changed again, probably in part thanks to some sort of explicit or implicit bargain with the Bavarian state to let sleeping dogs lie in return for a mild sentence. There were also positive reasons, however, for the new approach. Hitler wanted to use the relative peace of Landsberg to write a much broader manifesto elaborating the principles of National Socialism, charting a path to power for the movement and showing how Germany could regain her independence and great power status. The first volume of Mein Kampf, most of which was written or compiled in Landsberg, seems to have been largely a solo effort, with relatively little input from others. Julius Schaub, another inmate who later became his personal adjutant, recalled that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf ‘alone and without direct input from anyone’, not even Hess, who had joined him in Landsberg. Hitler typed the book himself, reading out or summarizing large sections to his fellow prisoners, who constituted an appreciative or at any rate a captive audience. Sometimes, he was moved to tears by his own words.
Incarceration gave Hitler a chance to read more widely and gather his thoughts. One of his main preoccupations in Landsberg was the United States, which he was corning to regard as the model state and society, perhaps even more so than the British Empire. ‘He ‘devoured’ the memoirs of a returned German emigrant to the United States. ‘One should take America as a model,’ he proclaimed. Hess wrote that Hitler was captivated by Henry Ford’s methods of production which made automobiles available to the ‘broad mass’ of the people. This appears to have been the genesis of the Volkswagen. Hitler envisaged that the automobile would further serve as ‘the small man’s means of transport into nature—as in America’. He also planned to apply methods of mass production to housing, and experimented with designs for a Volkshaus for families with three to five children which would have five rooms and a bathroom with a garage in large terraced settlements. He was equally determined not be outdone in the construction of ‘skyscrapers’, and looked forward to the consternation of the ‘Deutsch-Völkisch’ elements by putting the party headquarters into such an edifice. Quite apart from showing that Hitler had an interest in vernacular architecture, and not just in monumental public buildings, these plans prove that he was thinking of elevating the condition of the German working class through American style suburban and metropolitan modernity. This was the model of an ideal society against which he wrote Mein Kampf.
Modernity was not an end in itself, but a means by which the German people, especially the German working class and German women, could be mobilized in support of the project of national revival. Hitler exalted technological development—aeroplanes, typewriters, telephones and suspension bridges, and even domestic appliances. These would free German women from drudgery and enable them to be better wives producing more children. ‘How little our poor women benefit from progress,’ he lamented, ‘there is so much one can do to make [a woman’s life] easier with the help of technology! But most people still think today that a woman is only a good housewife if she is constantly dirty and working from early until late.’ ‘And then,’ Hitler continued, ‘one is surprised when the woman is not intellectual enough for the man, when he cannot find stimulation and recuperation.’ Worse still, he went on, this was ‘bad for the race’ because it was ‘obvious that his overtired wife will not have as healthy children as one who is well rested, can read good books and so on’. The link between what Hitler would later call the racial ‘elevation’ of Germany, technological progress and maintaining the standard of living is already evident here.
Part and parcel of this programme of racial improvement was Hitler’s support for what we would today call ‘alternative’ technology. ‘Every farm,’ he demanded, ‘which does not possess any alternative source of energy’ should set up a ‘wind motor with dynamo and rechargeable batteries’. This might not be possible in the current economic climate, Hitler continued., but it would be a viable long-term investment. He rejected the idea that technological change took the romance out of farming. ‘I couldn’t care less about a romanticism,’ he exclaimed, ‘which puts people behind frosted windows in the twilight, [and] which lets women age prematurely through hard work’. Hitler therefore sneered at the city folk who went into the country for a day, enthused about the scenery and then returned to their modem and efficient homes in the city. Hitler claimed to support ‘the preservation of nature’, but in his view it should take the form of national parks in the mountains. ‘Here too,’ Hitler concluded, ‘the Americans have made the right choice with their Yellowstone Park.’
In Landsberg, Hitler did not abate his ferocious hostility to international finance capitalism. He did, however, qualify some of his earlier ideas about ‘national’ economies. Significantly, he rejected the demands of the German automobile manufacturers to be protected against competition from Henry Ford through higher tariff barriers. ‘Our industry needs to exert itself and achieve the same performance,’ Hitler remarked. Once again, the United States was the explicit model.
Hitler was also taking on board the concept of Lebensraum. This was one of the key ideas of Hess’s teacher and patron Karl Haushofer, the doyen of German Geopolitik. He visited Hess in prison, bringing him copies of Clausewitz and Friedrich Ratzel’s ‘Political Geography’, one of the seminal geopolitical texts. While there is no hard evidence that Haushofer met Hitler on those occasions it is highly likely he did so, or at any rate that his ideas found their way to him. In mid July, there was a debate about Lebensraum at Landsberg, which began with some good-natured joshing in the garden and ended with Hitler’s ‘marvelling’ inner circle being provided with a lengthy definition of the term by Hess. Its essence was simple: every people required a certain ‘living space’ to feed and accommodate its growing population. The idea seemed to provide the answer to the main challenge facing the Reich, which was the emigration of its demographic surplus to the United States. This was part of an important shift in Hitler’s thinking, away from a potential Russo German alliance and the prevention of emigration through the restitution of German colonies, towards the capture of Lebensraum in the east, contiguous to an expanded German Reich. It had less to do with hatred of Bolshevism and eastern European Jewry, and more to do with the need to prepare the Reich for a confrontation or equal coexistence with an Anglo-America whose dynamism mesmerized Hitler more than ever.
As I have previously stated, Adolf Hitler was from early adolescence, and probably from childhood, conscious of the shocking disparity that exists between ‘real life’—life under Dark Age conditions—as it drew his attention through thousand and one details, and his own conception of earthly perfection, a living reflexion of which he sought in the world of the old Germanic Sagas (transfigured, for him, in Wagner’s musical dramas) and—Kubizek tells us,—in the stately blonde young maiden to whom he never spoke, but whom he idealised from a distance as the resplendent embodiment of perfect German womanhood.[1] Instances of human misery, nay—and the importance of this can never be sufficiently stressed— instances of the age-old exploitation of animals by man,[2] which another person would have deplored, but judged unavoidable, or looked upon as trifling, or not noticed at all, provided him with an opportunity to feel indignant and to crave for entirely new conditions of life. But it is during the years of grinding poverty and complete moral solitude, which he spent in Vienna as a young man, that the experience of the wretchedness and ugliness of this present Age imposed itself upon him for the first time in all its tragic horror. He has described it in immortal words.[3] And, more than the daily contact with material misery itself (with material misery which he, by the way, not merely beheld, but actually shared), the sight of the degrading effects of that misery upon his people and upon their young children was unbearable to him.
Two facts should, at that stage of Adolf Hitler’s life, retain the attention of whoever wishes to understand him and the Movement he was to start ten years later, obviously as a political Movement for the assertion of Germany’s rights, in reality, also as the moral and metaphysical basis of a new civilisation: first, the aloofness in which he lived, amidst the surrounding misery and degradation; and then, the thoroughness and detachment with which he studied the latter, traced its deep causes under the immediate, superficial ones, and became, through that clear knowledge, more and more aware of his own predestined role in this Age of Gloom. ‘One cannot ‘study’ the social question from above,’ writes he, in Mein Kampf.[4] One has, one’s self, to experience the same perpetual insecurity of life, to be acquainted with the same pangs of hunger, to dwell in the same over-crowded, dirty, noisy surroundings as the disinherited classes, in one word, to live the wretchedness that gnaws into them and degrades them, in order to know what social misery means. The future German Führer has lived it, and suffered from it, personally, day after day, for months, for years, without it ever degrading or even changing him. He preferred to ‘exist’ on hunger rations, rather than sacrifice his independence or sell more than it was absolutely necessary of the precious time he needed to study both books and men and to think. And when he had earned a little money, he preferred to buy himself a seat in the theatre—two or three hours’ holiday in the beautiful world of the old Sagas, to the accompaniment of Wagner’s solemn music, away, far away from the daily dreary wretchedness that seemed to be his lot for ever,—rather than treat himself to a substantial meal.[5] He refused publicity—and money—rather than to allow a story which he had written to he printed by a Jew.[6] Nobody can understand him save a true artist who is, at the same time, a true revolutionary: a person of one dream and one aim, like himself. But how well every such a one—every creator and fighter of his type, when surely not of his magnitude, i.e. every person ‘against Time’—does understand him!
There is more. Not only did he live in uncompromising faithfulness to his ideals, inaccessible to the lure of material comfort and social advantages, but he shared none of the weaknesses of average mankind, not to mention the vices of that underworld into which fate had pushed him or, by the way, those of the so-called ‘better classes’ of this fallen humanity. He rigourously abstained from alcohol and tobacco; and even when, occasionally, he could afford a diet other than his usual bread and milk, he ate pastry and fruits, not meat. His deeper instinct inclined him naturally towards that sort of food which people, in whose life an immemorial Tradition still plays a great part, call ‘pure.’[7] And the dictates of serious reflexion merely confirmed in him those of deeper, healthy instinct. Adolf Hitler was, in course of life, to become a more and more convinced vegetarian; and though disaster robbed him of the opportunity of attempting ‘after the war,’ to give his views, gradually, the force of law, he remains, to my knowledge, the only ruler in the West who, both on hygienic and moral (and aesthetic) grounds, ever earnestly considered the possibility of suppressing meat-eating, and of abolishing thereby the standing horror of the slaughterhouses. This is reported by Dr. Goebbels in his ‘Diaries,’[8] and brilliantly confirmed by numerous statements ascribed to the Führer himself in the ‘Dinner-time talks,’ also printed after 1945 by the bitterest enemies of National Socialism, certainly not with the intention of exalting him.
As a young man, and nay, a very attractive one, Adolf Hitler withstood the manifold temptations of the corrupt metropolis—ignored the solicitations of women, rejected with disgust those of men, and kept the sacred ‘flame of Life’ (to use the word Kubizek quotes) pure and strong and constantly under control within himself. He did so without the slightest intention of ‘mortifying the flesh’; without the slightest desire of ‘acquiring merit’ for the salvation of his soul; simply because he respected that energy given to man for a higher purpose, and looked upon every wanton waste of it as a sin against the Race at the same time as a profanation of the divinity of Life. The ‘flame of life,’ felt he, was to be dedicated to the selfless service of the Race, visible Vehicle of Life eternal. It was to be used, like man’s whole physical and moral energy, ‘in the spirit of the Creator,’ i.e., in view of the attainment of perfection on earth. The entire National Socialist teaching concerning sex and sexual relations, with its well-known stress upon absolute health and racial purity, as laid down in Mein Kampf,’[9] has its origin and its basis in that truly religious (although anything but ‘other-worldly’) attitude; in that standpoint of the ‘Man against Time’ seeking, in defiance of the corruption of the Dark Age, to re-establish, here and now, the biological—i.e. fundamental—conditions of the earthly paradise; preparing the privileged, natural élite of mankind for the part it has to play in the formation of the god-like Race of the new earth, that will thrive in peace after this Dark Age has come to an end.
And all Adolf Hitler’s positive measures in view of the physical and moral protection of his predestined people, natural leaders of Aryan man, after he came to power: his admirable laws for the welfare of mother and child; for the creation of ideal living conditions for workmen’s families; for the education of a healthy, self-confident and self-reliant, proud and beautiful youth; and his famous ‘Nüremberg Laws,’ forwarding the growth in Germany of a pure-blooded Germanic race (forbidding sexual relations with Jews and, in fact, with non-Aryans of any description), have no other origin and no other meaning. Their aim—nay, the practical aim of National Socialism as such—was and remains not merely to improve the material lot of the German labourers (however important a part this immediate aim doubtless played in the success of the Hitler Movement in Germany, after the first World War); not merely to make the new State, comprising all people of Germanic blood—that ‘holy Reich of all Germans’[10] of which Adolf Hitler already spoke in his adolescent’s conversations with August Kubizek—a strong and prosperous State, but to regenerate the German people—the most conscious among the Aryans of the West—radically, and to organise them, in all walks of life, so as to create out of them the only dam capable of withstanding and thrusting back the threatening tide of inferior humanity, whose rise is, in this as in every Time-cycle, the increasingly tragic sign of an advanced stage of the Dark Age; capable of thrusting it back and of carrying, beyond its defeat, (and its destruction, at the very end of the Age of Gloom) the treasure of god-like life into the glory of the new Beginning.
As I said before, it is difficult to state how far Adolf Hitler could have explicitly given expression to this point of view. It was, nevertheless, in reality, his point of view. In particular, he was and remained all his life vividly aware of the compelling necessity of preserving, nay, of forwarding, at any cost the racial aristocracy of mankind—the best elements of the Aryan race,—if this planet is not, after an appalling period of chaos, (after the end of the present Time-cycle) ‘to go its way, void of human beings, through aetherial space, as it did millions of years ago.’1 Standing alone, personally untouched by Dark Age conditions at their worse, although deeply and painfully acquainted with them, he observed their effects upon the people in whom his unfailing intuition forced him to recognise, in spite of all, the predestined biological substance of an infinitely better mankind: the ones who are not yet, but who (to quote Nietzsche’s words) are ‘becoming,’ or at least are capable of becoming supermen: his own German people. And, with serenity and with realism, he sought the causes of physical and moral wretchedness; the many causes: selfishness of the owning classes; indifference or cowardice of men in power; the grip of international high finance upon national economy; the influence of Jewry upon the national body and soul, etc.; etc., but under those many causes, the one cause: the rule of false values; the exaltation of untruth, which is synonymous of sickness; in all domains, rebellion against the spirit of the divine Order of Nature. That is what he had come to fight, so that the ‘reign of Righteousnes’ be re-established.
__________
[1]Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, p. 76 and following.
In late February 1924, Hitler was brought to stand trial before the Volksgericht in Munich in the old Infantry School on the Blutenburgstrasse. He was allowed to appear in a suit rather than prison clothes and sporting his Iron Cross. Security was strict, and the press interest, including from abroad, was intense. Hitler would no doubt have been pleased to know that ‘one heard particularly many English voices’. The Reich government had wanted the trial to be held in Leipzig, but the authorities in Munich were determined to keep it local, almost certainly because they feared what might otherwise emerge about their complicity in the various plots. Berlin gave way in the context of a broader rapprochement with Bavaria. In mid February 1924, about a week before the trial began, the Bavarian Reichswehr submitted once again to command from Berlin, thus reversing Kahr and Lossow’s position in November 1923; Kahr resigned.
Hitler famously used the courtroom as a platform from which to expound his world view… The trial lasted just over a month, from 26 February to 27 March 1924… He did not deny the substance of the charges, but argued that he had acted at all times in the greater interest of Germany… Sometimes Kahr appeared so overwhelmed that his voice dropped to a whisper as the courtroom audience strained to hear him. The rampant Hitler, by contrast, was repeatedly told to lower his voice by the trial judge.
Hitler’s final speech was a triumphant reiteration of his beliefs and sense of mission. If he was a traitor, then so were Bismarck, Atatürk and Mussolini, whose treason had been ratified by success. Hitler decried that there was ‘self determination for every Negro tribe’, but that ‘Germany did not belong to the Negro tribes but stood under them’. The root of the German predicament, he continued, lay in Germany’s exposed geopolitical position in Europe. ‘The German people’, Hitler argued, ‘has perhaps the worst location of all nations in military-political terms. It is geographically extraordinarily badly located, surrounded by many rivals’. It was menaced by France’s determination to ‘Balkanize’ Germany and to reduce her population. In this context he referred to ‘Clemenceau’s [alleged] aim to exterminate 20 million Germans in Europe, to break up Germany into individual states and to prevent the emergence of another united large Reich’. It was also threatened by Britain’s supposed much broader policy of Balkanizing Europe as a whole in order to maintain the balance of power. There was no economic solution to this predicament, Hitler stressed, but only a powerful foreign policy based on the highest level of internal mobilization. Germany would need to get rid of ‘international Jewry’, which was coordinating the global forces against her. She would also need to pursue the related struggle against international capitalism. ‘The battle against international stock exchange enslavement’ and against the ‘trustification’ of the ‘entire economy’, Hitler demanded, must be taken up.
These were all familiar themes from Hitler’s previous statements, but this time he had the eyes of the German and even some of the international press upon him. His dosing speech concluded with a resounding statement that though the court might secure a conviction, posterity would surely acquit him. In an obviously choreographed sequence, the other accused said they had nothing to add, with the result that Hitler’s resonant last words were left ringing throughout the courtroom and shaped the story of the trial. He turned the defeat and humiliation of 9 November 1923 into a victorious narrative…
Hitler was now a hero not merely to the Bavarian right, but to many nationalists throughout Germany. What had begun in the public mind as the ‘Ludendorff Trial’ ended as the ‘Hitler Trial’. ‘I am occupying myself with Hitler and the National Socialist movement,’ the Rhenish student Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in early March 1923…
On his return to Landsberg to serve the rest of his sentence, Hitler was confronted with some serious strategic questions… Ernst Röhm began to revive the SA, under the cover of a front organization, and went to confer with Hitler at the very end of May 1924. Perhaps anxious not to provoke the authorities, and mindful of his inability to seize power by force, the Fuhrer insisted that the SA keep a lower profile…
Gregor Strasser and General Ludendorff strongly supported amalgamation with the DVFP to create a new National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP). Hitler reluctantly agreed in broad terms but insisted that the main base and focus of the party remain in Munich….
Gottfried Feder remarked after visiting him that Hitler was ‘depressed [and] wants to withdraw completely from the movement’ in order to ‘work’, that is, ‘write’ to earn money. Over the next two months, Hitler repeated his message publicly on a number of occasions. He was acting partly because he was disenchanted with the way in which the various mergers and collaborations were turning the party into a purely bourgeois organization, and partly because he had no real power to turn things around from prison…
One reason why Hitler wanted to lie low was fear of having his release delayed, or of being deported to Austria. The Bavarian authorities had long hoped to do the latter, and in early May 1924, the Polizeidirektion in Munich told the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior that ‘Hitler constitutes a permanent threat to the internal and external security of the state’. In late April 1924, the Austrians agreed to accept him in principle. Hitler managed to avoid deportation, but after being refused probation he failed to get out by 1 October as he originally hoped. On 16 October he made a statement that he should be allowed to stay, ‘because I never felt myself to be an Austrian citizen but only a German’. ‘My affection for my Austrian homeland is great,’ Hitler continued, ‘but so is hostility of the Austrian state’, in which—like the ‘earlier Habsburg state’—he could only see ‘an obstacle for the unification of the German people’.
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]
The Rhinemaidens in the first Bayreuther Festspiele production in 1876.
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.
A pamphlet published immediately after the failed coup, penned by either Hitler himself or someone briefed by him, traced the collapse of relations between Munich and Berlin throughout October 1923. It quoted from a conversation which allegedly took place between Hitler and Lossow, in which the latter ‘repeatedly spoke of an Ankara-government’, on the lines of the Turkish national revival under Atatürk, which would take on Berlin. The pamphlet went on to attack Kahr, who was allegedly ‘completely dependent on the Roman Jesuits’. ‘Because Hitler knew,’ it continued, ‘that the “black [i.e. clerical] danger” in Bavaria was even bigger than the red one’[emphasis by Ed.], Hitler had been compelled to pre-empt the machinations of the Jesuits, the Wittelsbach dynasty, the French, the papacy and the Habsburgs. The main lines of Hitler’s rather contradictory interpretation of the Putsch were thus clear: it had been carried out both with the collusion of the Bavarian conservatives and in order to forestall their plans for a clerical, monarchist and separatist coup at the expense of the Reich as a whole.
On 11 November, Hitler was arrested at the home of Hanfstaengl at Uffing am Staffelsee, south of Munich. Just before his capture, Hitler managed to get off a short message to Alfred Rosenberg, asking him to lead the movement in his absence. He was imprisoned at Landsberg, awaiting trial. Hitler seems at first to have undergone some kind of personal crisis, appearing depressed and even suicidal. Hess, not yet in Landsberg, spoke of him being ’emotionally very down’. Following stormy interrogations, Hitler went on a ten-day hunger strike. According to the recollection of the resident psychologist, Alois Maria Ott, Hitler was distraught at the death of his comrades and announced that ‘I have had enough, I am done, if I had a revolver I would take it.’ Ott succeeded in calming Hitler and persuaded him to call off his protest; the planned forcible feeding proved unnecessary. In early December 1923, Winifred Wagner sent him blankets, books and other items to cheer him up; she also wrote frequently. Hitler’s spirits revived, and within a fortnight he was beginning to prepare his defence.
In mid December 1923, Hitler was questioned at Landsberg by the state prosecutor, Dr Hans Ehard. Still struggling with his injured arm, Hitler vowed ‘to play his best trump-cards in the court room itself ‘, and wondered aloud whether ‘certain gentlemen’ would have the courage to perjure themselves under oath in court. This was clearly directed at Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. Ehard reported that Hitler, having initially steadfastly refused to make any sort of statements on the record, to avoid ‘having words put into his mouth’, soon began to hold ‘interminable political lectures’. He explained that he had struck because the men of the Kampf bund had been impatient for action, and could not be held back any longer. Ehard, probably acting on instructions from superiors who feared dirty linen being washed in public, asked Hitler directly whether he planned ‘to bring the question of the alleged Bavarian separatist plans into [his] defence strategy’. Hitler pointedly declined to answer, but he soon launched into a lengthy attack on ‘well-known, influential, one-sidedly religiously inclined circles, which pursued solely separatist aims and to this end pushed forward Kahr as a straw man’. ‘These circles,’ he added, ‘sought the restoration of the monarchy.’ In the context of what he called ‘French plans to break up’, these tendencies would lead to ‘the separation of Bavaria’ and the ‘disintegration of the Reich’. Itis striking that Hitler again spent far more time on these dangers to the Reich than those from the left.
Hitler soon made himself comfortable in Landsberg. Conditions were remarkably good, as both the warders and the other prisoners treated him as a celebrity, even after his sentencing. The terms of his incarceration did not involve compulsory labour, a regimented diet, prison clothes or restrictions on visitors. His main companions behind bars were his chauffeur and bodyguard Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess; his authority was unquestioned. The young Nazi Hermann Fobke related that it was not so much a question of ‘presenting to the boss’ as being ‘lectured to by the boss’. Admirers brought him books, food and flowers and news. Helene Bechstein provided cheese. In all, more than 500 people, including Elsa Bruckmann, visited him in the first few months alone. Hanfstaengl later remarked that the cell looked like a ‘delicatessen’. For all that, Hitler found captivity irksome, as he was kept cooped up and powerless to intervene in outside affairs. His surroundings were far from luxurious—Landsberg remained a prison, not a hotel. Music and hatred kept him going. ‘I let out my annoyance in my apologia/ he wrote in January 1924, ‘whose first part, at least, I hope will survive the court case and me. For the rest I am dreaming of Tristan and similar matters.’
The NSDAP, meanwhile, was in disarray. President Ebert announced that Hitler’s followers would be prosecuted for treason. The party itself was declared illegal and went underground; its press was banned, including the Völkischer Beobachter and Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer. The party premises were raided, with seven bags of potatoes being carried off by police along with all records and valuables. In Hesse and Wurttemberg the authorities moved quickly to stamp out any threatened copycat attempts. The Nazi leadership was now largely on the run, hiding among sympathizers in and around Munich. Hitler’s choice of Rosenberg to head the party in his absence took everybody by surprise and caused general consternation. Rosenberg was aloof and cerebral and had no personal following in the movement.
By contrast, the three deputies also appointed by Hitler—Julius Streicher, Max Amann and Hermann Esser—were powerful in their own right. Hitler did not explain his decision. It is possible that he saw Rosenberg as a straw man who would simply keep the seat warm for him for his release, but it may also be that he saw the main priority in his absence as the maintenance not of organizational coherence, but of ideological purity, and for that Rosenberg was the perfect fit.
As a YouTube commenter said: ‘An actual worthwhile use of AI to help people better understand history. Similar to reading a dry book and then visiting the actual place in person, this helps make the past more real’.
Indeed. Hearing uncle Adolf in English really hits harder than reading a translation. Alas, I wouldn’t be surprised if this video is removed from YouTube. With luck, these English-Hitler speeches are going to make a difference among TikTok users, where they are proliferating right now.
Update: A short clip including footage of Hitler speaking while being translated (for twenty-something seconds) can be seen here.
The ideal in the name of which Adolf Hitler constantly rebelled against practically all he saw in living life — already as an adolescent, and then more and more as a young man and as a man thirty and over thirty — was nothing less than that which I have described in this book as ‘a Golden Age ideal’; the inner vision of a healthy, beautiful and also peaceful (necessarily peaceful) world; of thereal earthly paradise, faithful image of cosmic perfection, in which righteousness prevails as a matter of course. There can be no doubt about it if one reads not only that interesting story of his youthful years which his friend A. Kubizek has written, but also all that he wrote and said himself in later, active life. And in an epoch such as that in which we are now living — when, all over the world, every possible attempt is made to present him not merely as ‘a war monger’ but as the ‘war criminal’ number one, — it is not superfluous to stress the fact that Adolf Hitler was, not only at the dawn of his awakening as a ‘Man against Time’ but all his life, ‘a bitter enemy of war’[1] as such; the fact that he was by nature ‘gifted with deep sensitiveness, and full of sympathy for others’[2]; that his programme was essentially a constructive one, his struggle, the struggle for an exalted, positive aim, his aim: the regeneration of higher mankind, of the only section of mankind worth saving […]
Editor’s interpolated note: My emphasis! Remember the Parrish painting emblematic of our ideals from the first incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour, when I was blogging on Blogspot.
[…] and, ultimately, through the survival of regenerated higher mankind, the restoration of the long-destroyed harmony between the cosmic Order and the sociopolitical conditions on earth, i.e., the restoration of Golden Age conditions; the opening not merely of a ‘new era’ for Germany, but of a new Time-cycle for the whole world.
It is not superfluous, in times like ours, to remind the reader of all the Führer’s efforts to avoid the Second World War, even at the price of heavy concessions, and then, (when this had proved impossible) to stop it, while it could yet be stopped. It is not superfluous to recall the words he addressed his old friend Kubizek on the 23rd of July 1940, i.e. when, from a military standpoint, all seemed to be going on splendidly; when the Swastika Flag was fluttering over public buildings in the capitals of seven conquered States, — ‘This war thrusts us years back in our constructive work. It is deplorable. I have not indeed become the Chancellor of the Greater German Reich in order to conduct war!’[3] Not only was he against war for war’s sake (or for the sake of worthless motives) but he was against any form of useless violence, not to speak of ‘useless cruelty,’ which was, under the Third Reich, according to law and (whenever detected) also in fact, a severely punishable offence.[4] The news of even such an understandable outburst of broad-scale revengefulness as that which took place during the ‘Kristall Nacht’ (8th-9th of November 1938) — attacks on Jews and Jewish property, and burning down of synagogues in answer to repeated Jewish provocation, — brought him ‘to the pitch of indignation.’[5]
That inborn reluctance to wanton violence is a trait common to all those whom I have called men ‘above Time’ (such as King Akhnaton, the Buddha, or Jesus Christ) and to the great fighters ‘against Time,’ Founders of new religious and cultural eras, such as Lord Krishna or, nearer to our times, the Prophet Mahomet, the only men with whom Adolf Hitler can be compared if one feels at all the necessity of drawing historical parallels.
Editor’s interpolated note: I will talk about Akhenaten at the end of this series on Savitri’s book. For now, I would just like to say that Savitri lived when historiographical criticism of many of the supposed founders of religions had not yet been done. Nowadays, some scholars have come to question the historicity of Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, and even Mohammed.
It is one of the signs that his ultimate aim remained — like theirs — a state of deep-rooted, lasting, (more-than-human) harmony, not of conflict among men; in other words, I repeat, a restoration of the original Golden Age conditions upon earth, the only conditions under which absolute health — which means: perfection, — ever prevailed. Considered in the light of such an aim, every necessary violence is a ‘deplorable’ necessity (to quote once more Adolf Hitler’s own words about, the Second World War in 1940). Every unnecessary violence is a denial of the spirit of such a struggle ‘against Time’ as that of National Socialism for power; a foolish provocation of the Dark Forces that stand in the way of its success, and. therefore a sin against the Cause of Truth. And that is the real, deep meaning of the Führer’s bitter words, addressed to Dr. Goebbels at the news of the ‘Kristall Nacht’: ‘You people have thrust back National Socialism, and spoilt my work for many years when not for good, through this nonsense!’[6]
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[1]August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfround [Adolf Hitler, Friend of my Youth] (Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1953), p. 294.
[4]It is a fact, for instance, that Martin Sommer was, in 1943, i.e. under the N.S. regime and by a N.S. tribunal, sentenced to three years imprisonment for ill-treating internees in the Buchenwald concentration Camp.
[5]Konstantin Hierl, In Dienzt für Deutschland, 1918-1945 [In Service of Germany] (Heidelberg: Vowinckel, 1954), p. 138.
[6]Hans Grimm, Warum? Woher? aber Wohin? [Why, Whence? but Whither?] (Lippoldsberg: Klosterhaus, 1954), p. 184.
Incidentally, the bridge in Stourhead’s garden whose image I posted in June in this article was also used by Kubrick in one of the scenes in Barry Lyndon: a film whose images were inspired by canvases of the period like very few films I have seen. (Perhaps the sole exception is 1956’s Lust for Life in which the director used the actual sites in Holland, Belgium and the French countryside where Vincent van Gogh lived.)
