Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [71]
Sean always felt that Germans hated Jews because they wanted to return to the forest. He felt the Germans loved their warrior gods; the Berwins and the Siegfrieds and identified with them more than they loved Christ and more than they identified themselves as Christians. Sean knew the old thesis that to be truly anti-Jewish, one must be anti-Christ. When you destroy the Jew, you also must destroy Christ. Therefore, the German protests Christianity by destroying the Jew.
A doctor of the mind would call the German a schizophrenic. He is, in truth, two distinct people.
One part of this two people gave man its highest and most enriching contributions to civilization through the Beethovens and Bachs and Kants and Schillers and Freuds and Mozarts and Goethes.
But the other! The hate-filled and muddled ramblings of Nietzsche and of Schopenhauer and of Hegel, of Treitschke and Fichte. And the staggering genius of Richard Wagner whose magnificent sounds extolled the glory of death, the fatherland, the chosen people ... chosen of pagan gods. And who is to say that Wagner is not part and parcel of the soul of the German people?
Adolf Hitler understood this desire for paganism in the German people and exploited it. The uniforms, the blood ceremonies, the rallies were nothing more or less than pagan rituals. Hitler deliberately played to the German people’s desire to identify themselves with paganism by the destruction of the Jews.
Hitler was indeed another pagan god, calling for the German people to destroy themselves in a death orgy and they answered with “sieg heil.”
Sean began to recall the ramblings of the sick philosophers. Schopenhauer ... the only honest wish man could have was that of total annihilation. Hegel, a personal beloved idol of Adolf Hitler who wrote ... the spirit dies in order to live and that he who yields himself in death is merely yielding one’s self to his other self for life is death; and Hegel wrote further that ... every state must accept the divine right of oppression that belongs to it as a necessary state in the evolution of government; Nietzsche ... I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud; Fichte, who named the Latins and French and Jews as subhumans, and Treitschke, who put the final amen on the German character ... it does not matter what you think as long as you obey.
So, it all fit together, Sean thought. The Legend of Rombaden had produced a magic key he had sought for years that explained the anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-Jewish perversion as a drive to return to paganism.
This, then, was the answer to Count Ludwig Von Romstein and the others who argued that the Nazi era was a unique phenomenon that resulted from the First World War and a set of following crises. This was a lie, for the roots of Nazism were deep within the hearts and minds of the German people, and all of it, Aryanism, paganism, love of death, the forest, superhumanism, had been part of them for centuries and centuries!
The Nazi era then was a combined will of most of the German people over hundreds of years of cultivation and growth. The drive toward self-destruction was inevitable!
To Sean, Hinterseer and the Legend of Rombaden even spelled out more. The startling discovery that the Germans worshiped death! The German approached death in a different manner than any other Western people, who either feared it or looked upon it as an end of mortal suffering. To the German, death alone was a state of existence more wonderful than life, and the moment of death was to be worshiped as the moment of supreme exaltation!
Did this not begin to give answers, that such a people were capable of running death factories in Dachau and Schwabenwald? If death is a desirable superstate in their mystic and pagan subconscious, then it is not a mortal “Christian” sin to commit murder.
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