Between the 1940s and1960s, a series of Allied war propagandists attempted to vilify German culture as being the root cause of WWII and the Holocaust. German culture, it was alleged, had always been proto-Nazi, making the rise of fascism historically inevitable. It was a reactionary attempt to counter the rather Marxian methodology which tended to analyse socio-economic and socio-political grounds for the rise of German imperialism in the form of the Third Empire, or the Dritte Reich*. Such socio-economic and socio-political analysis had to be replaced with a vision of history driven by Great Men, cultural icons whose lofty flights of celestial genius allegedly fuels the engine of history. So when an event as calamitous as WWII and the Holocaust occurs in Germany history, reading history becomes something of a “whodunit” to discover which great poet or philosopher should be held to blame for driving the German nation down the path to Auschwitz.
Amongst these reactionary cultural historians was William Shirer with his bestselling 1960 pop historiography, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
It is somewhat ironic to note that Shirer was a liberal journalist who fell victim to the McCarthy era witch hunts. His support for the Hollywood Ten resulted in him being blacklisted from broadcasting after being named in the publication Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. Unable to find regular work, Shirer turned in 1950 to lecturing and writing books, including The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, to support his family during the McCarthy era. However, already by that time, more scholarly historians had started along the track of making sense of that seminal event in history. Shirer failed to take account of the latest research, and, from the time of first publication, his book has been universally dismissed by professional historians as a piece of tabloid journalism by a dilettante, with subsequent developments having left Shirer even further behind. Despite this, Shirer's book went on to become a bestselling hit with the lay public, akin to Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners, which likewise attempted to revive the dated notion originating in Allied war propaganda that German culture was the origin of WWII and the Holocaust. Much to the chagrin of academic historians, Shirer and Goldhagen's two pop historiographies have remained the most popular accounts on the Dritte Reich era amongst the lay public, with both making lots of money peddling their populist narratives.
The most curious aspect of Shirer's book is that he replaced a post-Marxian socio-economic and socio-political structural analysis of history with a grossly reductivistic monocausal cultural historicism, of a variety usually more typically associated with right-wing historiography, differing only in that Shirer blamed Martin Luther, the religious prophet of Protestantism. In the figure of Martin Luther, Shirer identified the singular Great Man who single-handedly steered Germany down the cultural path to Auschwitz. It was possibly driven by Shirer's desire for vengeance against the Republican Christian right in an age overshadowed by the McCarthy era witch hunts against "Godless Commies". Even today, all of America's presidents, with the sole exception of Catholic John F. Kennedy, have been Protestants, and an attack on Martin Luther represented one aimed at a cornerstone of the conservative American "white Anglo-Saxon Protestant" (WASP) ethos. In short, Shirer's book is more of a polemic that was the byproduct of his own socio-political circumstance in McCarthy's America, than a sincere historiography of National Socialist Germany.
For all intents and purposes, Shirer's book is Luther's Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple. Had Shirer not had the potential threat of arrest or harassment by the CIA hanging over him, he might have felt more at liberty to write a more unbuttoned left-wing polemic against Luther, and blatantly let rip with one equally as inflammatory as Köhler's right-wing polemic against Wagner.
 |
| Shirer's book is effectively "Luther's Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple" |
Despite the constraints imposed by the political atmosphere of the era, Shirer's book was still sufficiently offensive to the Christian right that parts of it had to be censored from the official German translation of the book:
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), p. 236. The German translation Aufstieg und Fall des dritten Reichs (Frankfurt am Main: Buchgilde Gutenberg, 1962), p. 232, deleted this passage:
It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence of Martin Luther. The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of ‘all their cash and jewels and silver and gold’ and, furthermore, ‘that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed ... and they be put under a roof or stable, like gypsies ... in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us’.... Luther employed a coarseness and brutality of language unequaled in German history until the Nazi time.
Exposed by Heiko A. Oberman, “Luthers Beziehungen zu den Juden: Ahnen und Geahndete”, in Helmar Junghans, ed., Leben und Werk.
Deleted selection quoted out of Eric W. Gritsch’s book: Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism: Against his Better JudgementHowever, at one point in the book, Shirer does momentarily stop to consider the alternative Wagner hypothesis, but chooses to largely reject this hypothesis in favour of blaming Martin Luther instead.
Shirer writes in the chapter of his book entitled The Intellectual Roots of the Third Reich:
“Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”, Hitler used to say.* This may have been based on a partial misconception of the great composer, for though Richard Wagner harbored a fanatical hatred [no supportive citations], as Hitler did, for the Jews, who he was convinced were out to dominate the world with their money [no supportive citations], and though he scorned parliaments and democracy [no supportive citations] and the materialism and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie, he also fervently hoped that the Germans, “with their special gifts”, would “become not rulers, but ennoblers of the world” [no citation, but this comes from “Wollen Wir Hoffen?”].
Shirer: p.101If you look up the citation carrying the * it says this:
* My own recollection is confirmed by Otto Tolischus in his They Wanted War, p. 11.
Shirer shows unmistakable signs of familiarity with Tolischus's wartime Allied anti-German propagandist book, They Wanted War, 1940. It is equally likely that Shirer would have also been familiar with another popular book from the era that makes prominent use of the apocryphal quote "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner"—right-wing historian, Peter Viereck's Metapolitics. Viereck's 1941 book, originally his PhD thesis, shows such a pervasive influence by Tolischus as to virtually constitute outright plagiarism, and continues the propagandist line attempting to make Hitler look ridiculous by suggesting that Hitler ruled his nation according to policies based entirely on operatic principles. While this piece of political satire seems silly today, its useful propagandist tenure having long expired, it has not stopped some actually taking it seriously, with one author claiming Hitler made it his life's mission to "transform the world into a Wagnerian drama". Other authors have been taken to task by historians for similar overwrought explanations attempting to explain Hitler based entirely on Allied propagandist claims such as Hitler's missing testicle, Hitler's alleged latent homosexuality (supposedly a form of mental illness), as well as claims to having gone berserk from syphilis contracted through sex with a Jewish rentboy.
 |
| The apocryphal quote "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner" first appeared in English in 1940. It was certainly made up by Allied war propaganda to make Hitler look ridiculous by suggesting he governed a nation based entirely on operatic principles |
The fact that Shirer momentarily stops to contemplate the alternative Wagner hypothesis strongly suggests he was familiar with the popular American wartime anti-German propaganda literature of the time. However, instead of accepting that Hitler was a madman trying to "transform the world into a Wagnerian drama", he instead takes the left-wing polemicist line that, Martin Luther, the Prophet of Protestantism was singularly responsible for the calamity of World War II and the Holocaust.
It is typical of a polemicist like Shirer that he has clearly done very little in the way of carefully researching the subject matter at hand, and, although he seems to suspect some sort of "partial misconception" of Wagner, he fails to uncover just how much of a "gross exaggeration and distortion" it actually is. For example, Shirer states that Wagner was opposed to democracy, when nothing could be further from the truth. Wagner was directly involved in organising the revolutionaries, and risked his life to fight with musket in hand behind the barricades in an effort to bring socialist democracy to Germany during the 1848-49 Revolution.
The claim that Wagner was some sort of right-wing ideologue is totally unsubstantiated by anything other than by the fact that Shirer said so. In fact, if Shirer merely lost his job as a result of the McCarthy witch hunt, Wagner not only lost his job, but he only narrowly escaped arrest thanks to help from Franz Liszt before being forced into an exile that lasted over a decade of his life with the imminent threat of arrest and a death sentence hanging over his head. Wagner's fellow revolutionaries were imprisoned and given a death sentence, although the latter was never carried out, probably out of fear of provoking a backlash. Wagner's friend, the socialist anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, was so severely mistreated in prison that he developed scurvy causing all of his teeth to fall out. What Shirer suffered under McCarthyism was comparatively minor compared to that, and it is rather embarrassing to discover a pretentious armchair liberal accusing genuine revolutionaries—who endured far greater hardship than Shirer ever did—of proto-Nazism.
By taking the Luther line of argument, Shirer was to help launch a culture-war in Protestant America that had nothing whatsoever to do with the study of history, but informed us only about contemporary American culture wars. Hinlicky has put it well:
There is, say, a straight line running “Luther-Bismarck-Hitler”, or rather “Darwin-Nietzsche-Hitler”. Unsurprisingly these facile characterizations correspond to contemporary culture wars...
The "straight line" that facile right-wing polemicists like to draw is one running "Feuerbach-Wagner-Hitler" or even "Darwin-Marx-Wagner-Hitler". However, these are no less facile than Shirer's left-wing polemic drawing fictional straight lines running "Luther-Bismarck-Hitler".
However, despite Shirer's efforts, of all ideological targets of polemic, Richard Wagner has proven a far more popular target to blame for the rise of the Dritte Reich than Luther, Darwin, Marx Nietzsche, Feuerbach, and Bismarck all put together. The never-ending stream of Wagner polemics in the end even drew criticism from the right-wing Peter Viereck, who, in the final year of his life, wrote a new preface to his Metapolitics from 1941 in which he admitted that come 2006 even he had had quite enough of the "countless exaggerated articles on WagnerHitler":
[M]y Wagner-Hitler research [Metapolitics] was greeted with general skepticism in 1941. ... But today the Wagner link has gone too far in the opposite direction. Countless exaggerated articles on WagnerHitler. Today what is overlooked is the crucial differences between the two. One book (by the rebel great-grandson Gottfried Wagner) even declares that there is not a single line in Mein Kampf that doesn't derive from Wagner. Mein Kampf has major sources unconnected with Wagner, such as the lost war, German humiliation by Versailles, and the Free Corps of 1919-1920.
Peter Viereck: Metapolitics. From the preface to the 2006 edition
Unfortunately, since Viereck wrote those words in 2006, the unrelenting flood of "countless exaggerated articles on WagnerHitler" has continued unabated coming from hoards of ignorant non-historians with little education in the field, all basing their assumption on the assertion that National Socialist Party was a priori "certainly and without doubt" some sort of secret opera company that based its ideology on a bizarre Feuerbachian operatic socialism intended to "transform the world into a Wagnerian drama". In other words, Wagner is allegedly definitive proof that the left were to blame for the evils of National Socialism. It seems the right has stopped accusing the left of being "Jews" and their Judeo-Bolshevik conspirators trying to take over the world, and have now started to accuse the left of being "Nazis".
Thinking of this kind can occasionally even be found creeping into the writings of mainstream historians. In an essay by Richard J. Evans critical of a growing number of authors suggesting that German colonialism represented a form of proto-Nazism and that Richard Wagner was supportive of proto-Nazi colonialist German expansionism, Evans includes an unusually lengthy primary quote from Wagner. It appears some author has cited the following passage to insinuate that Wagner was a supporter of a colonialist form of proto-Nazism:
As the composer Richard Wagner declared in 1848, 'we will sail in ships across the sea and here and there set up a new Germany ... We will do better than the Spanish, for whom the New World became a cleric-ridden slaughterhouse, and differently from the English, for whom it became a treasure-trove. We will do it in a wonderful, German way'.
Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory (Blueprint for Genocide?)
However, this passage that has apparently been insinuated to contain a "blueprint for genocide" has been both tampered with and taken out of context from Wagner's Fatherland Reunion Paper of 1848 calling for socialist democracy in a united German republic. Compare it with a more extensive extract from the same Paper:
We further insist upon the unconditional right of every natural-born subject, when of age, to a vote. The more needy he be, the more his right, and the more earnestly will he aid in keeping the laws which he himself assisted in framing and which, henceforth, are to protect him from any similar future state of need and misery. ...
And when all who draw breath in our dear German land are united into one great free people, when class prejudices shall have ceased to exist, then do you suppose we have reached our goal?
...
When by our republican efforts we shall have solved this most important problem for the weal of society, and have established the dignity of the freed man, and established his claim to what we consider his rights, shall we then rest satisfied? No; then only are we reinvigorated for our great effort. For when we have succeeded in solving the emancipation question, thereby assisting in the regeneration of society, then will arise a new, free, and active race, then shall we have gained a new mean to aid us towards the attainments of the highest benefits, and then shall we actively disseminate our republican principles.
Then shall we traverse the ocean in our ships, and found here and there a new young Germany enriching it with the fruits of our achievements, and educating our children in our principles of human rights, so that they may be propagated everywhere. We shall do otherwise than the Spaniards, who made the new world into a papistic slaughter-house; we shall do otherwise than the English, who convert their colonies into huge shops for their own individual profit. Our colonies shall be truly German, and from sunrise to sunset we shall contemplate a beautiful, free Germany, inhabited, as in the mother country, by a free people. The sun of German freedom and German gentleness shall alike warm and elevate Cossack, Frenchmen, Bushmen, and Chinese. You see our republican zeal in this respect has no termination; it pushes on further and further from century to century, to confer happiness on the whole of the human race! Do you call this a Utopian dream?
Fatherland Union Paper quoted in Praeger. For the original German version of the text and a more detailed discussion see this post.
This is what Wagner really meant when he wrote that the Germans should “become not rulers, but ennoblers of the world”.
While this is an expression of German nationalism, as with Italian nationalism, this was, during the nineteenth century, a major left-wing cause that was pro-republican, anti-monarchist, anti-authoritarian, and pro-democratic. Doubtless, some right-wing polemicist will come along and assert that this left-wing nationalism is a declaration of support for a proto-Nazism, and a "blueprint for genocide". One right-wing author even went as far as to say that Wagner's nationalism plus his socialism equated to National Socialism:
The obvious rallying point for the National Socialists was Wagner. Indeed, he was very much the Ur-National Socialist, having been, at different stages in his life, both a nationalist and a Socialist.
Michael Haas: Forbidden Music p218
With Wagner, it seems that the a priori assumption that the National Socialists based their ideology wholesale on operatic principles is so blindly accepted that such calls by Wagner for universal democracy and ethnic tolerance are quickly twisted into "indisputable evidence" of being the very root cause of the rise of German imperialism and fascism. Little surprisingly, the National Socialists hardly any more quoted with glowing admiration from Wagner's pro-democratic and socialist Fatherland Union Paper than they did from Marx and Engel's Communist Party Manifesto, which, not coincidentally, also dated from the outbreak of the pro-democracy revolutions in 1848.
The final nail in the coffin for Shirer, though, remains that of his fundamental underlying methodological assumptions. Even after partly rejecting the argument that a nineteenth-century opera composer caused the rise of the Dritte Reich, he then embarks on a whodunnit investigation to discover which cultural figure actually caused it. Shirer begs the question whether history should even be read by "discovering" the identity of the "real" Great Man, whose lofty flights of mad genius supposedly single-handedly steered the path of history, even centuries after their death. Historians today have understandably discounted such a dated romantic Great Man theory of history, much favoured as it was by the National Socialist propagandists and their Allied counter-propagandists—one writing bombastic hagiographies of "heroic" Great Germans (or similar approved "Aryan gods" like Shakespeare and Cervantes), and the other countering with equally hyperbolic anti-German demonographies. |
| Like Wagner's Fatherland Union Paper, the Communist Party Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was also published in 1848, at the start of the 1848-49 German pro-democracy revolution. Whereas Wagner rejected communism in favour of socialist democracy, Marx and Engels believed that socialism was an intermediary stage in the eventual evolution of society towards communism. |
Today it is simply inadmissible to presuppose the correctness of such bloated romantic methodology a priori, as though it could mindlessly be taken for granted. It is simply ridiculous to assume that some grand hero or anti-hero of history could single-handedly hijack the entire history of a nation to the point that its trajectory over periods up to several centuries could be singularly determined by the thoughts and ideas of a long-since deceased individual. Even to suggest that some demonic anti-hero of German history could continue to control the destiny of his nation a half century or even centuries after his death demonstrates gross ignorance of the abrupt socio-economic and socio-political discontinuities in the world at large after either Wagner or Luther's deaths, especially changes that occur in the wake of the industrial scale mass destruction and upheaval of the Great War.
There exists a second uncritical assumption underlying Shirer's method of reading history, and the Great Man view of history is not the only problem. The second big mistake leading on from the Great Man approach is the uncritical acceptance of the Sonderweg view of German history. In German, Sonder means special or non-standard, and Weg means a way or path, and so Sonderweg is usually translated as a 'special path'. A Sonderling means an eccentric, an odd-ball—perhaps even a strangeling. It represents a form of German exceptionalism with The Germans (whatever that is) portrayed as the strangelings of European history. In this narrative, Luther and Wagner are the two favourite choice of Great Men to pick as being The Lord of the Strangelings, the demonic anti-hero who pervasively imbued The German Mind with the attributes of authoritarianism, militarism, and racism, thus singlehandedly causing the derailment of German history away from its allegedly "normal" course of development towards democracy onto the alterant path of the Sonderweg. Sir Richard J. Evans summarises the current view of the Sonderweg hypothesis of German exceptionalism:
A few decades ago, historians searching for the longer-term roots of Nazism's theory and practice looked to the ruptures and discontinuities in German history: the failed revolution of 1848; the blockage of democratic politics after unification in 1871; the continued dominance of aristocratic elites over a socially and politically supine middle class; the entrenched power of the traditionally authoritarian and belligerent Prussian military tradition - in short, everything, they argued, that had come by the outbreak of the First World War to distinguish Germany from other major European powers and set it on a 'special path' to modernity that ended not in the creation of a democratic political system and open society to go with an industrial economy, but in the rise and triumph of the Third Reich.Such arguments were discredited by the 1990s, as it became clear that imperial Germany's middle classes had been far from supine, its political culture was active and engaged, and its aristocratic elites had lost most of their power by the outbreak of the First World War. The 1848 revolution was shown to have transformed German political culture, not to have restored the old regime. Comparisons with other countries revealed similar deficits of social mobility and openness in Britain, tendencies to authoritarianism in France, military domination in Austria and more besides. [T]here was no domestic 'special path' from unification to the rise of the Third Reich...
Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory. (2. Imagining Empire)
Interesting, both the writings of Wagner and Marx-Engels contain the idea of a positive German Sonderweg, in which Germany is given a unique historical position to become the vanguard of liberalism. Marx and Engels expressed ideas in their 1848 Communist Party Manifesto that the advanced economic state of development in Germany would make it the historically inevitable launch pad for what would grow into a worldwide worker's revolution. When you read Wagner's Fatherland Union Paper, it is easy to see how he too thought that 1848 would ignite a worldwide revolution for the cause of liberty, and that it was the unique destiny of Germany to become the epicentre of that movement. It goes to show that the Sonderweg was not always a negative concept as it later became after the rise of the Third Empire.
As for Luther, Evans reminds us that:
It has been all too easy for historians to look back at the course of German history from the vantage-point of 1933 and interpret almost anything that happened in it as contributing to the rise and triumph of Nazism. This has led to all kinds of distortions, with some historians picking choice quotations from German thinkers such as Herder, the late eighteenth-century apostle of nationalism, or Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century founder of Protestantism, to illustrate what they argue are ingrained German traits of contempt for other nationalities and blind obedience to authority within their own borders. Yet when we look more closely at the work of thinkers such as these, we discover that Herder preached tolerance and sympathy for other nationalities, while Luther famously insisted on the right of the individual conscience to rebel against spiritual and intellectual authority.
The idea that some Great Man of German culture derailed German history from its rendezvous with democracy is a retrospectively constructed fairy-tale built out of the gross misuse of quotations ripped out of context both historically and texturally. The question as to whether Luther or Wagner is to blame for Auschwitz becomes, for the modern historian, a complete non-issue. Such a question is about as relevant to the historian studying the origins of National Socialist imperialism as a furious debate over whether the moon is made of Roquefort or mozzarella cheese. However, in the kangaroo court of public opinion, for all of Shirer's attempt to shift blame from Wagner to Luther, the unanimous verdict that has been issued by the kangaroo court of capitalist pop culture is that it was all the opera composer's fault. Nor does overturning the kangaroo court's verdict by stating, in effect, that the moon is made of Roquefort rather than camembert cheese, by blaming Luther instead of Wagner help the situation one iota. Once again, Professor Evans reminds us of the vast rift that has emerged between the pop literature on the history of the Dritte Reich, and the academic historiographic literature, since mainstream historians neither believe that National Socialism was a clerico-fascist movement based on Lutheran principles nor an operatico-fascist movement based on Wagnerian principles.
The more important question is that of what methodology for reading history should replace this sort of cultural historicism positing the flights of genius of great poets and philosophers as being the fuel that drives the engine of history. For that John Maynard Keynes gives us a critical insight when he wrote in the wake of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and the harshly punitive economic measures it imposed on Germany:
If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.
John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Chapter VII). 1919A decade later, after a period of frightful hyperinflation, came the Great Depression, and only with that, the National Socialist Party, which had hitherto only been an extremely marginal party, rose to the forefront of German politics:
[T]he Nazi Party did so poorly in the elections of 1928, winning less than 3 per cent of the vote, that it soft-pedalled its violent antisemitism in subsequent elections. ...
Only once the Depression of the early 1930s had bankrupted banks and businesses and put more than a third of the workforce out of a job did the Nazis win mass support; and only when they were brought into power as the conservative elites' coalition partners—the elites were seeking popular legitimacy for their plans to destroy Weimar democracy—did they unveil their visceral antisemitism once more and begin to implement it in a series of decrees and laws backed by stormtrooper violence against Nazism's opponents, above all on the left.
Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory (2. Imagining Empire)
At that juncture, every word of what Keynes prophesied came to terrifying full fruition, as the National Socialists brutally persecuted those who believed in socialist democracy for Germany. In fact, the original purpose of concentration camps was for the imprisonment, torture, and brutal murder of their political enemies on the left, and only once were they decimated did attention turn to persecution of the Jews.
It is preposterous to insist that Keynes was wrong to look at socio-economic fundamentals as the driving force of cataclysmic events in history, and that he would have more productively spent his time studying nineteenth opera libretti, or other theoretical works by Wagner—despite the complete lack of any evidence that any leading National Socialist party member had ever read any of his prose writings. Then, as now, nobody seems to have read anything out of Wagner's ten volumes of theoretical prose writing, making it rather difficult for it have influenced anything, let alone to have secretly steered the destiny of nations—a notion tantamount to a conspiracy theory.
It is preposterous to insist that Keynes was wrong to look at socio-economic fundamentals as the driving force of cataclysmic events in history, and that he would have more productively spent his time studying nineteenth opera libretti, or other theoretical works by Wagner—despite the complete lack of any evidence that any leading National Socialist party member had ever read any of his prose writings. Then, as now, nobody seems to have read anything out of Wagner's ten volumes of theoretical prose writing, making it rather difficult for it have influenced anything, let alone to have secretly steered the destiny of nations—a notion tantamount to a conspiracy theory.
After all, the greatest writers on the Holocaust have always stressed the importance of truth and justice over vengeance and emotive outbursts of anti-German hatred. A proper understanding of Richard Wagner's place in history helps to do just that. More than that, proper understanding of Wagner exposes the sheer incompetence of Nazi "beerhall philosophy" and undermines the credibility of Nazi propaganda to a degree far exceeding that of facile vilification of Wagner or Luther. As such, it is something everyone who cares about truth and justice should have reason to welcome.
Note:
* I prefer to use either the term Third Empire or the Dritte Reich. Notwithstanding the fact that English speakers are unable to even pronounce the word "Reich", I think it absurd to leave the phrase half translated whether as the Dritte Empire or Third Reich. I cringe whenever I hear English speakers mispronounce the word as "rike", and if you cannot pronounce the word Reich, you should just say "empire". The First Empire was supposedly the Holy Roman Empire and we do not call that the Holy Roman Reich. German historians talk about the Napoleonic Empire as das französche Reich and we would not speak of the French Reich. The terminology pertaining to the "First-Second-Third Empire" has theological origins, with the Third Empire being the kingdom (Reich) of the Holy Spirit which ushers in the coming Dux, and refers to the Christian third kingdom (Reich) mentioned by the Apostle Paul. The term Third Empire further parallels the French usage with the original Napoleonic Empire being called le Premier Empire, and Louis Napoleon's French empire being called le Second Empire. Likewise, the British Empire is called das britische Reich, and once again we would not speak of the British Reich except in pejorative or satirical terms. The argument goes that the word Reich in German allegedly has a profoundly different and untranslatable meaning, however there is little evidence to that effect, and it is clear that through the process of importation of the German word, Reich, into English it has acquired pejorative meanings that never existed in the original German, where it simply means "empire". By using the phrase Third Empire, it also makes it clear that the evils of National Socialism are not that of some mystical Reich, but the manifest evils of imperialism. It is thus an appallingly capitalist mystification and obfuscation to continue using the word reich in English, now rightly spelt with a small "r" and pronounced "rike", a word which has lost all meaningful connection to the original German word Reich from which it has been etymologically derived.
No comments:
Post a Comment