Month: December 2021

Merry Christmas for 2021!

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And a Happy New Year from ARPLAN

The selection for this year’s Christmas article is a humorous, holiday-themed piece from SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps, first published on 12 December, 1935. Despite their stolid or villainous image in modern media and pop culture, humor was actually as important for National Socialists as it is for people of any other worldview. A later edition (23 July, 1936) of Das Schwarze Korps would go on to note: “People who have no sense of humor are like a punishment from God. They come in all shapes and sizes. They’re the ones who strut around like little demigods and who consider themselves above weakness and superior to everything and anything, even their fellow men,” which perhaps proves that even members of the blackshirted SS needed to laugh from time to time. Whether this particular article is genuinely funny, especially by modern sensibilities, is of course subjective, particularly as it is also intended to simultaneously act as a propaganda piece. Its topic is a satire of the absurd commercialization of National Socialism which was taking place in Germany in the aftermath of the ‘National Revolution’; much as certain transparently cynical companies today might try to move a few more products by slapping a rainbow flag on the packaging, in Germany at the time the emerging fashion was to increase sales by overzealous use of the swastika, leading to a deluge of ‘Nazi’-themed kitsch which Party-members feared would cheapen the Movement’s ideals among the public (the government did later make an active attempt to clamp down upon this practice). The Christmas theme of this piece is also interesting in light of the fact that bitter complaints about the commercialization and materialism of Christmas shopping practices are still a constant today – some things, apparently, do not change, regardless of the current government or ruling ideology! Finally, it should be noted that this article was not translated by myself, but was transcribed from the excellent collection The Third Reich Sourcebook, edited by A. Rabinbach and S.L. Gilman (I believe the translator was a Lilian Friedberg, based on the editors’ introductory notes). I hope that readers enjoy it, and I hope that you all enjoy a safe and happy Christmas.

What Will Santa Bring?
From Das Schwarze Korps of 12 December, 1935

The long December night has already descended upon the cities in the early hours of evening, and the sparkling rays of light streaming from the shop windows dissolve into nothing when they reach the middle of the sidewalk. The city streets are bustling with life. Fretting housewives carefully inspect the treasures on display, quietly calculating whether or not there’s enough in the Christmas budget to cover it.

What does Old King Cole really have in his bag? Inquisitive, bright-eyed children wonder. We’ve asked ourselves the same question and taken a careful peek in the bottomless bag of treasures, and we promise we’ll never do it again because it has ruined our Christmas surprises.

Give practical gifts! It’s been the battle cry of recent years. Oskar is in the SA and would certainly be happy to get a uniform. But who knows anything about uniforms? What color are the lapels, are the pants supposed to have piping or satin strips, or nothing at all?

But then, as coincidence would have it, the fashion pages of the Rundschau with the latest patterns appear on the table. The riddle has been solved! A delighted cry of “Eu…” leaps from the throat – but the “…reka” never escapes the lungs because the model in the sketch artist’s overimaginative design for the uniform of the SA-Gruppenführer is none other than the Führer himself! Who then would so much as dare to question the authenticity of this as a standard-issue brown suit? Aside from the fact that the epaulets are wrong, as well as the cap, and the waist belt, not to mention the fact that the Führer himself has never worn boots with shafts as stiff as that – but that’s how the sketch artist saw him; that was his vision of Adolf Hitler. Continue reading →

A ‘National’ Social-Democracy?

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A 1931 article on socialism, nationalism, and the nation, by German Social-Democrat Hermann Heller

The tumultuous interwar years in Weimar Germany were characterized by a number of unusual political trends which sought to syncretize competing ideas from both the Left and Right. National Socialism and the Conservative Revolution were the most obvious examples of this ideological synthesis, but there were manifestations of it even on the more democratic end of the political spectrum (the Jungdeutscher Orden) and also among the Communists. The Social-Democrats, despite their internationalism, were also not immune to this phenomenon; the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) too had its own small nationalist current, part of the broader reformist wing of the movement, whose members were particularly active contributors to the ‘revisionist’ journal Sozialistische Monatshefte, as well as to Die Arbeit, the official theoretical publication of the largest trade-union federation. Beginning in January 1930 these ‘neorevisionists’ also began publishing their own monthly: the Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus, which put out articles with such titles as “We and the Young Nationalists” or “The Presence and Significance of Conservative Tendencies in Social-Democracy.” This neorevisionist faction had not sprung up out of nowhere – many of its members had previously been active in the Hofgeismarkreis and the Berliner Kreis, small intellectual circles which had emerged within the SPD youth movement around the time of the 1923 Ruhr crisis, and which had sought then (somewhat controversially) to intellectually ground German Social-Democracy upon a foundation of ‘Nation’ and ‘Volk’ rather than class. Despite these unifying nationalist tendencies, the neorevisionists were in general a diverse and eclectic group, ranging from right-leaning reformists, to religious socialists, to market-socialists, to radicals whose political ideals were only vaguely distinguishable from those of Otto Strasser or Hans Zehrer. Many, curiously, were also actively involved in the leadership of the Iron Front, and most became committed activists in the antifascist resistance after 1933 (although not all – at least one, Walter Pahl, became a supporter of National Socialism, while another, Fritz Borinski, ended up in the orbit of the Black Front). One of the most prominent neorevisionist thinkers was Jewish-German jurist Hermann Heller, who today tends to be more known for his constitutional scholarship than for his socialist theorizing. Heller’s 1925 work Sozialismus und Nation (re-released in a revised edition in 1931) was held in very high regard among neorevisionists, and is probably the most detailed outline of their general, collective worldview. The short article by Heller below, which references this work, is a classic example of this style of Social-Democratic writing, dealing as it does with German socialism’s difficulties in engaging with nationalist sentiment, while also presenting Social-Democracy as the only political force truly capable of safeguarding the German nation.  

National Socialism1
Hermann Heller

First published in Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus, vol. 2, no. 4, April 1931.

Ever since the 30 Years’ War, the national destiny of the German Volk has been consistently and decisively determined by the political incompetence of its bourgeoisie. Even the state-building power of nationalism, as shaped within the bourgeois revolutions, has been incapably utilized by bourgeois politics. Since the failed revolution of 1848, the political idea of a comprehensive national cultural community has been transformed into the narrow and repressed national conception of a Treitschke.2 As recently as 1902, for example, the widely-disseminated work “Was ist national?” by Professor Kirchhoff3 was claiming that one would never be able to commit to including the German-Austrians as part of the modern German nation – the same German nation to which, meanwhile, the Prussian Poles admittedly belonged.

How meagre the sense of national responsibility of the Wilhelmine state’s ruling classes was, was demonstrated most clearly when they organized themselves after the revolution into the “German National” People’s Party, and thus made into a party name what should have been, or what should have become, an appellation for the entire Volk.

As the bourgeoisie muddled up the nation with the Prussian-German state, worshipping it with Hegel as the realization of the moral idea, as God on Earth, so did Marx-Engels now fight against this bourgeoisie with a lopsided, narrow, and repressed conception of state and nation. For them the state was always only the realization of an immoral idea, namely the necessary evil of the class state, which was to vanish with the end of class rule; just as, according to their truly Mancunian perspective, national separations and differences were destined to gradually come to an end with the development of the bourgeoisie, with free trade, the world market, and the uniformity of industrial production. Continue reading →