From A Most Dangerous Book (Christopher B. Krebs, 2011) pp214-7
A Bible for National Socialists
We believe with [Tacitus] in the indigenousness [of the Germanic race] as well as the race itself with all the anthropological characteristics that [Tacitus] assigns to it.
—Professor Hans Naumann, 1934
A FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT noted the “breathless silence in the mighty room.” When the cardinal-archbishop of Munich and Freising, Michael von Faulhaber, ascended the pulpit of Saint Michael’s Church in Munich to deliver his New Year’s address, he held the heightened attention not just of his audience, with its numerous journalists from around the world: The newly installed National Socialist regime also listened uneasily. It was December 31, 1933. The Weimar Republic was dead but its gravediggers not yet certain of their power, and the cardinal made them nervous. Saint Michael’s, the largest Renaissance church north of the Alps, on the preceding Sundays of Advent had proved too small to host all who wanted to attend, so Faulhaber’s sermons were transmitted by loudspeaker to two other churches, both filled to the last seat. With forthright eloquence “welded in the fiery forge of the . . . prophets of the Old Testament,” Faulhaber had addressed inopportune issues. While the National Socialist program contained an article (number 24) that decried the Old Testament as an offense against the “moral sense and the sense of decency of the Germanic race,” he had spoken about its value. And although he was careful to qualify his statements, he “should” have foreseen, in the words of the Security Service (SD), that in praising the people of Israel for having “exhibited the noblest religious values,” he would outrage some and comfort many others. Julius Schulhoff, a German Jew, thanked the cardinal in a letter, expressing his hope that God would strengthen his “wonderful courage.” Michael von Faulhaber showed courage again in his fifth sermon that New Year’s Eve; he would need more for many weeks after. The telling topic on the last day of the year was “Christianity and Germanicness” (Christentum und Germanentum).’ The archbishop worried that there was “a movement afoot to establish a Nordic or Germanic religion.“ The merits of Christianity were being cast into doubt. But who could possibly take a look at the Germanic existence before Christianization and doubt them? To explain his surprise the cardinal proceeded to rouse a drowsy specter of the Germanic barbarian from 450 years of sleep: Wittingly or not, the picture he sketched was almost an exact replica of the barbaric Germane that Enea Silvio Piccolomini had brought to the fore in his influential treatise in the fifteenth century. Like his predecessor Faulhaber used “a small but valuable historical source,” and with it painted for his congregation an abhorrent picture of polytheism, human sacrifices, and “savage superstition.” He disapproved of the pre-Christians’ warrior existence with its primitive “obligation of the vendetta” and denounced their “proverbial indolence, mania for drinking,” carousals, and “passion for dice playing.” The list of shortcomings was long, and all were substantiated using Tacitus’s text. To Faulhaber’s eyes the admirable and duly mentioned qualities – loyalty, hospitality, and marital fidelity – hardly lightened the overall impression that there was no “civilization properly so called among the Germans of the pre-Christian era.” It was Christianity that brought civilization to these heathen backwaters; more important, the many Germanic tribes – some fifty of which Tacitus listed – were joined as one nation first and only under its roof of faith. The German nation, the cardinal provocatively concluded, owed its civilization and very existence to Christianity. Doubts about its merits were simply groundless.
A secret SD memo reported that all live speeches met with an “enormous resonance,” but none more than the New Year’s address.‘ The national and international press – including the Bayerische Staatszeitung, the New York Times, Le Temps (Paris), and Il Lavoro (Geneva) – all covered it. National Socialists of all ages and ranks refuted, scorned, and attacked the address in journals like Germanien, People and Race, and the Vanguard. It was “a political crime,” they said, and its speaker, “a categorical and determined enemy of the National Socialist state.” Alfred Rosenberg, the regime’s chief ideologue, charged the cardinal with “severely disgracing the process of self-reflection which [was] under way in the Third Reich.” But the German people would not, he added threateningly, “quietly accept such utterances.” Far from acquiescing, Nazi opposition took violent form during the night of January 27, when two shots were fired into the living room of the cardinal’s home. No one was hurt. The book containing the sermons came under fire as well. Members of the Hitler Youth, “with the warrior passion of the ancient Germanen,” tried to disrupt its distribution. Just as in May 1933, when the Bebelplatz in Berlin had crackled, ablaze with a bonfire of books, they burned it in the course of a demonstration (to no avail it sold at least 150,000 copies and was translated into eleven languages). A caricature ominously suggested that a similar fate might be in store for its author. Even though some critics occasionally ventured into the territory of rational argument, all in all the reactions “cast the contemporary cultural sophistication in a less than flattering light: as the archbishop wryly wrote.’° When he uncovered the barbarian past, barbarity reared up in the present.
But to National Socialists such behavior represented a valid response to a bold challenge. The New Year’s address had depicted the Germanic past disparagingly. It was therefore regarded as a “declaration of war,” flying straight in the face of those who believed that the regime change in 1933 heralded “an understanding of German cultural and intellectual history that valued its Germanic element higher than ever before?“ The Germanic race, with its alleged high culture in the Bronze Age, its “eternal values” grounded in a hard and simple peasant lifestyle, and its blood’s purity mythically originating in the nourishing soil (Blut und Baden), formed an integral part of the National Socialists’ Germanic revolution. The new age promised a return to olden days: Followers would not be taken to “new unknown shores”; on the contrary, sailing closely on newly freshened Nordic winds they would be carried “home in the ultimate sense of the word,” back to a timeless, placeless, utopian Germanien. In the Third Reich the Germania, Roman fiction, served as a blueprint for Nazi German reality and inspired politics and laws, and “old Aryan peasant blood” was believed to have run through Tacitus’s veins. Faulhaber had committed a “cardinal” sin by attacking the revered past and its sacred text. The Germania, Nazis insisted, was a “bible that every thinking German should possess, as this booklet by the Roman patriot fills us with pride in our forefathers’ superior character.” Racial purity and death-defying loyalty were its most important commandments.
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