Kulturförderverein Ruhrgebiet: The Atlantidic View of Life - a theory of national socialism [Atlantis Thule Nationalsocialism] - English abstract

The Atlantidic View of Life - a theory of national socialism
- English abstract -
by Franz Wegener, M.A.

translated by Werner Habel and Eva-Maria Stuckel

Is there a reason also today, in 1998, to occupy oneself with some eccentric authors from the Twenties, specialized in theories about the decline of Atlantis? Yes, because they are all united by a certain mentality, the Atlantdic View of Life, that in the Twenties had already made headway and brought about devastating consequences in the following decades: the national socialism.

German original.

The subject of the research: The reception of preculture in the Twenties. In various popular-scientific writings on the subject Atlantis the same connection of nordism (the belief in the precultural existence of a nordic race on Atlantis, a blond, blue-eyed and superior race, the founders of european culture), racism, and an utopian island society appears again and again. What are the psychological reasons for the authors of this pseudo-scientific books?

The yearning for the lost paradise like an island is explained by Jacques Lacan on the basis of child-development and psychoanalysis [1] with "this premature separation that during birth removes the child from the womb and creates a lack that no motherly care can soften". In its further life, the child is anxious to reach again this secure, safe, prenatal condition. It is controlled by the mother's image existing in the unconscious, the "Mutterimago". This longing for the uterus can later be sublimated by searching for a wordly, lost paradise or also death: "The analysis of these cases [of suicide] shows that the subject in its abandonment to death seeks to find the Mutterimago again. This mental association is not simply pathological. It is generic[2] as one recognizes by the usage of funeral that in some forms clearly reveals the psychological sense of a return to the mother's lap; as furthermore the connections show that both the magical technologies and the antique theologies create between mother and death.. If the most general form had to be defined in which it [the Mutterimago] arises again... one would recognize the longings of humanity: ... all types of homesickness for a paradise lost before birth and the darkest strivings for death."[3]

Actually the longing for death and Mutterimago appears again and again in the investigated books. So, according to Wieland, the Atlantis was also called by the immigrants ´Idafeld´ from ´Ida´ which means "arch-mother"[4]. The authors of the Tempelhof-Association fabulate something about "home to the Great Mother" [5] and Herrmann refers in his book on the Atlantis on the Ura-Linda-Chronic that he thinks to be authentic if he postulates that the state was guided by a people's mother. [6] In 1932 Bessmertny mentions, too, that the authors he deals with, the "Atlantomanen", as he names them, are threatened by the Mutterimago. [7]

The myth of the arch-mother makes use of the paradise-story of Atlantis as a carrier-structure. But this myth of the arch-mother itself carries as parasitarian, secondary, semiological system the abstractum death. Nevertheless, compared to other escapistic utopias of islands, the myth of Atlantis yet possesses the largest psychological authenticity because it also represents transparently the sublimation of death postulated by Lacan: The island sinks, people drown in the floods. The implicit longing for death, for "decline", is proved by the following quotations in which the downfall is on the one hand welcomed laughingly and is on the other hand considered - with the help of euphemistic attributes - as 'gruesomely beautiful' and 'wonderful'[8]:

"I saw fate twitching out of distant haze and fog like a flickering lightning, very clearly I felt the magical hoop that wounded strangling around wealthy Atlantis, more closely closing in slow motion, as if a terrible snake ties up its giant body around a defenseless victim's neck.. I climbed slowly to the valley and called ... [at] the people on the ship that helplessly stood at the cliff and observed the disaster with burning, crazy eyes. And they were surprised that I laughed again instead of looking haggardly on the misfortune like them... "[9] "The downfall of Atlantis was a gruesomely beautiful play of terrifying greatness.. In one hour the culture of ten thousands of years had sunken into the deep, and the dim, smoking, and steaming floods of the ocean rolled over the grave of 64 million people. "[10]

Armin Mohler judges the conservative revolutionaries of the Twenties that he deals with in a mental-historical way - they would long for the eternal return of growing and decay in the circulation of nature. Stefan Breuer as a mentalhistorian considers the aspect of apocalypse to be to the fore of the New Nationalists of the Twenties that he deals with: The destruction is passed through as purifying bath, as crossing into a - in christian tradition - better tomorrow.[11] But both approaches step back in the nordic myths of Atlantis behind the dominating image of final collective suicide. Are only façade of a psychologically far-reaching mentality, the Atlantidic View of Life. The fascination of this type of melting together - the suicide's "going into the water" - is legendary and, at the latest, Luc Besson in his cineastic masterpiece "The Big Blue" has put it perfectly into an atlantidical sign: During the night a young diver is tawn by the help of leaden weights in depths he never reached before. At the end of the line a dolphin appears, the diver loosens the cushions of oxygens which are to rescue him and follows the dolphin into the deep of the moisty darkness.

So the books are suitable as an example for the survey of an "apology of suicide", which is called for by Mohler, in the surging "mixture of thoughts, images and dreams" [12] of the Twenties, in the phase of incubation of a political movement which according to Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel carried with the swastika in front of it the sign of the mother. In 1988, in her preface to Peter Zagermann's "Eros and Thanatos", the psychoanalytic explains the relations between the Mutterimago and national socialism: At the beginning of her observations there is Freud's assumption of a death-drive that might even have a biological root. It's about the drive which strives to transform the living into the anorganic again. A drive which causes the efforts of searching for the identity of subject and object, for a melting together of drive-object and ego and so the nullification of individuality, of psychical life. By refering to Thomas Mann's thesis of the attraction of "motherly chtonic dephts" on the german people in "brown" years Chasseguet-Smirgel objects to the thesis of Wilhelm Reich's and others that national socialism is a flowing out of patriarchy, of an authoritarian structure, and that the origin of all evil is the father. She writes: "The myths of the Nazis represent the ideal mother with whom the subject wants to be a whole. But the Father-God of monotheistic religions - and especially the Old Testament's God - has been expelled. And so all hindrances that stand in the way of this uniting are destroyed by warriors who carry the symbols of the dangerous Mutterimago also skulls that symbolize the archaic Terrible Mother." [13]

In 1927 Hermann Hesse, a german novelist, wrote - at the same time as his famous novel "Steppenwolf" - a collection of poems with the title "Crisis - A Piece of Diary". Among these poems there is also the following one that verifies the psychological dimension of the Steppenwolf, the connection of Mutterimago and death:

Devotion

You dark one, Arch-mother of all lust,
That I flew, that I cursed so often,
Who despite all has always searched for me,
Finally I throw myself to your bosom!
Take me in you, terrible Mother Night,
Lust for death it is to embrace you,
Secretly out of hot abyss there laughs
Presentiment of salvation, of mercy.
Deep in your black eyes there burns
Your dismal love's glimm so painfully,
Your love's, that wholly recognizes me,
Whose cry of death I wholly understand.
Willing, I follow you through blood and fear,
Feeling how you want me back again,
To name me once again your child,
To burn me in a kiss. [14]

Chasseguet-Smirgel sweepingly judges that there is a "very german tendency to call away from reason, from the father in order to melt into the fascinating arch-mother" [15]. In 1927, Hesse apologetically judges in a similar way: "I don't know if there are many countries left where a whole nation's hatred against all good sense is so unanimous and nearly organised as in Germany." [16] Nevertheless the Atlantidic View of Life which can be visualized by the image of a whirl is definitely not a specifically german mentality; rather, it has to be seen individually.

Being too coward to draw the knife for oneself individually, this suicide is happily delegated to the leader, the "Führer", to become a collective suicide, commited from above. A collective suicide that becomes mass-murder for all of those who do not belong to the Atlantidic View of Life.

Franz Wegener, M.A.
info@franz-wegener.de

Book: Wegener, Franz: Das atlantidische Weltbild - Nationalsozialismus und Neue Rechte auf der Suche nach der versunkenen Atlantis, Gladbeck, KFVR 2000, 158 Seiten, 17,79 Euro. Buy it at amazon.de .

Criticism:

„Literatur und Links“, Redaktionsempfehlung des ZDF – Rubrik Wissen + Entdeckungen
„empfehlenswert“, Sabine Engertsberger: „Atlantis – Die Freude am Untergang“, unter: paranormal.de
„Herausragender wissenschaftlicher Beitrag zu den Abgründen in der Atlantis-Szene von Franz Wegener. Muß man gelesen haben!“, Rainer Lorenz: „Das alte Ägypten“, unter: benben.de
Literaturempfehlung, Adrian Kupfer: „Im Kreis der schwarzen Sonne“, in: Telepolis – Magazin der Netzkultur – Heise Verlag
„lesenswert und lehrreich“, Redaktion Perseus: „Zum Rassismus-Vorwurf gegenüber der Geisteswissenschaft R. Steiners“, unter: perseus.ch
„Dieser objektiven Kritik möchte ich mich anschließen“, Ernst Rodlymayr, in: „Platon und Atlantis – Kritias“
Literaturempfehlung, Redaktion GRAECA.DE, Rubrik Atlantis – Atlantissage

Annotations:

1 I see the problematic nature of psychoanalysis - as Jung noted it already for the arche types, in the possibility, that images are only exegeted with new images. Freud´s resort to antique myths for the nomination of various complexes clarifies this danger. In the result, there are only tautologic explanations and remythologisations - but no empirical explanations, which could be proofed. On the other side, a consequent agnosticism wouldn´t help. Optimally suited for introduction to this matter: Walter Schönau: Einführung in die psychoanalytische Literaturwissenschaft, Stuttgart 1991.
2 the species concerning
3 Lacan, Jacques: Schriften III, Olten und Freiburg im Breisgau 1980, 52f.
4 Wieland, Hermann: Atlantis, Edda und Bibel. 200 000 Jahre germanischer Weltkultur und das Geheimnis der Heiligen Schrift, Weißenburg in Bayern 1925, 25
5 Tempelhofgesellschaft (Hrsg.): Einblicke in die magische Weltsicht und die magischen Prozesse, Wien 1987, 59
6 Hermann, Albert. Unsere Ahnen und Atlantis - Nordische Seeherrschaft von Skandinavien bis nach Nordafrika, Berlin 1934, 30
7 Bessmertny, Alexander: Das Atlantisrätsel - Geschichte und Erklärung der Atlantishypothesen, Leipzig 1932, 163
8 Euphemistic expressions dealing to death the literature offers already at the end of the 19. century. The palliation of death does not have its origin - like Vondung assesses - in longing for death longing but rather in anxiety of. It is an effort to master the anxieties, which the consciousness of crisis during the Fin de Siècle produced by an aesthetisation of death. [Vondung, Klaus: Die Apokalypse in Deutschland, München 1988, 357] The movement consequently didn´t lead to death but it rather removed from it.
9 Kiß, Edmund: Die letzte Königin von Atlantis, Leipzig 1931, 101
10 Wieland, 132f.
11 Breuer, Stefan: Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution, Darmstadt 1993, 39ff.
12 Mohler, Armin: Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932 - Ein Handbuch, 4. Auflage, Darmstadt 1994, 18
13 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine: Vorwort, in: Zagermann, Peter: Eros und Thanatos - Psychoanalytische Untersuchungen zu einer Objektbeziehungstheorie der Triebe, Darmstadt 1988, Xvff.
14 Michels, Volker (Editor): Materialien zu Hermann Hesses "Der Steppenwolf", Frankfurt am Main 1972, 162, 168. In 1913 Hesse has published an exclusive collection of romantic poems. In this collection there is also a poem by Justinus Kerner published with the title "Zur Ruh, zur Ruh": To eternal rest, to eternal rest, you tired limbs! Close firmly, you eyelids! I am alone, the earth is gone; it must be night that light comes along my way. O lead me entirely, you inner powers! Away to brightness of deepest nights. Out of the space of earth´s pains through night and dream to mother´s heart. [Der Zauberbrunnen - Die Lieder der deutschen Romantik - Ausgewählt von Hermann Hesse - Mit Holzschnitten von Ludwig Richter, Frankfurt am Main 1977, 136]
15 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Vorwort, in: Zagermann, XV
16 Hesse, letter ca. Juli 1927 to Hilde Jung-Neugeboren, in: Michels, Materialien, 122

GESCHICHTE | LITERATUR | ZUKUNFT | PSYCHOLOGIE | KULTUR | DAUBE | WEBIMPRESSUM | FITUG | START
© KFVR 2001
Buch jetzt kaufen? Amazon!

	The Atlantidic View of Life - a theory of national socialism - English abstract - by Franz Wegener, M.A. translated by Werner Habel and Eva-Maria Stuckel

Is there a reason also today, in 1998, to occupy oneself with some eccentric authors from the Twenties, specialized in theories about the decline of Atlantis? Yes, because they are all united by a certain mentality, the Atlantdic View of Life, that in the Twenties had already made headway and brought about devastating consequences in the following decades: the national socialism. German original. The subject of the research: The reception of preculture in the Twenties. In various popular-scientific writings on the subject Atlantis the same connection of nordism (the belief in the precultural existence of a nordic race on Atlantis, a blond, blue-eyed and superior race, the founders of european culture), racism, and an utopian island society appears again and again. What are the psychological reasons for the authors of this pseudo-scientific books? The yearning for the lost paradise like an island is explained by Jacques Lacan on the basis of child-development and psychoanalysis [1] with "this premature separation that during birth removes the child from the womb and creates a lack that no motherly care can soften". In its further life, the child is anxious to reach again this secure, safe, prenatal condition. It is controlled by the mother's image existing in the unconscious, the "Mutterimago". This longing for the uterus can later be sublimated by searching for a wordly, lost paradise or also death: "The analysis of these cases [of suicide] shows that the subject in its abandonment to death seeks to find the Mutterimago again. This mental association is not simply pathological. It is generic[2] as one recognizes by the usage of funeral that in some forms clearly reveals the psychological sense of a return to the mother's lap; as furthermore the connections show that both the magical technologies and the antique theologies create between mother and death.. If the most general form had to be defined in which it [the Mutterimago] arises again... one would recognize the longings of humanity: ... all types of homesickness for a paradise lost before birth and the darkest strivings for death."[3] Actually the longing for death and Mutterimago appears again and again in the investigated books. So, according to Wieland, the Atlantis was also called by the immigrants ´Idafeld´ from ´Ida´ which means "arch-mother"[4]. The authors of the Tempelhof-Association fabulate something about "home to the Great Mother" [5] and Herrmann refers in his book on the Atlantis on the Ura-Linda-Chronic that he thinks to be authentic if he postulates that the state was guided by a people's mother. [6] In 1932 Bessmertny mentions, too, that the authors he deals with, the "Atlantomanen", as he names them, are threatened by the Mutterimago. [7] The myth of the arch-mother makes use of the paradise-story of Atlantis as a carrier-structure. But this myth of the arch-mother itself carries as parasitarian, secondary, semiological system the abstractum death. Nevertheless, compared to other escapistic utopias of islands, the myth of Atlantis yet possesses the largest psychological authenticity because it also represents transparently the sublimation of death postulated by Lacan: The island sinks, people drown in the floods. The implicit longing for death, for "decline", is proved by the following quotations in which the downfall is on the one hand welcomed laughingly and is on the other hand considered - with the help of euphemistic attributes - as 'gruesomely beautiful' and 'wonderful'[8]: "I saw fate twitching out of distant haze and fog like a flickering lightning, very clearly I felt the magical hoop that wounded strangling around wealthy Atlantis, more closely closing in slow motion, as if a terrible snake ties up its giant body around a defenseless victim's neck.. I climbed slowly to the valley and called ... [at] the people on the ship that helplessly stood at the cliff and observed the disaster with burning, crazy eyes. And they were surprised that I laughed again instead of looking haggardly on the misfortune like them... "[9] "The downfall of Atlantis was a gruesomely beautiful play of terrifying greatness.. In one hour the culture of ten thousands of years had sunken into the deep, and the dim, smoking, and steaming floods of the ocean rolled over the grave of 64 million people. "[10] Armin Mohler judges the conservative revolutionaries of the Twenties that he deals with in a mental-historical way - they would long for the eternal return of growing and decay in the circulation of nature. Stefan Breuer as a mentalhistorian considers the aspect of apocalypse to be to the fore of the New Nationalists of the Twenties that he deals with: The destruction is passed through as purifying bath, as crossing into a - in christian tradition - better tomorrow.[11] But both approaches step back in the nordic myths of Atlantis behind the dominating image of final collective suicide. Are only façade of a psychologically far-reaching mentality, the Atlantidic View of Life. The fascination of this type of melting together - the suicide's "going into the water" - is legendary and, at the latest, Luc Besson in his cineastic masterpiece "The Big Blue" has put it perfectly into an atlantidical sign: During the night a young diver is tawn by the help of leaden weights in depths he never reached before. At the end of the line a dolphin appears, the diver loosens the cushions of oxygens which are to rescue him and follows the dolphin into the deep of the moisty darkness. So the books are suitable as an example for the survey of an "apology of suicide", which is called for by Mohler, in the surging "mixture of thoughts, images and dreams" [12] of the Twenties, in the phase of incubation of a political movement which according to Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel carried with the swastika in front of it the sign of the mother. In 1988, in her preface to Peter Zagermann's "Eros and Thanatos", the psychoanalytic explains the relations between the Mutterimago and national socialism: At the beginning of her observations there is Freud's assumption of a death-drive that might even have a biological root. It's about the drive which strives to transform the living into the anorganic again. A drive which causes the efforts of searching for the identity of subject and object, for a melting together of drive-object and ego and so the nullification of individuality, of psychical life. By refering to Thomas Mann's thesis of the attraction of "motherly chtonic dephts" on the german people in "brown" years Chasseguet-Smirgel objects to the thesis of Wilhelm Reich's and others that national socialism is a flowing out of patriarchy, of an authoritarian structure, and that the origin of all evil is the father. She writes: "The myths of the Nazis represent the ideal mother with whom the subject wants to be a whole. But the Father-God of monotheistic religions - and especially the Old Testament's God - has been expelled. And so all hindrances that stand in the way of this uniting are destroyed by warriors who carry the symbols of the dangerous Mutterimago also skulls that symbolize the archaic Terrible Mother." [13] In 1927 Hermann Hesse, a german novelist, wrote - at the same time as his famous novel "Steppenwolf" - a collection of poems with the title "Crisis - A Piece of Diary". Among these poems there is also the following one that verifies the psychological dimension of the Steppenwolf, the connection of Mutterimago and death: Devotion You dark one, Arch-mother of all lust, That I flew, that I cursed so often, Who despite all has always searched for me, Finally I throw myself to your bosom! Take me in you, terrible Mother Night, Lust for death it is to embrace you, Secretly out of hot abyss there laughs Presentiment of salvation, of mercy. Deep in your black eyes there burns Your dismal love's glimm so painfully, Your love's, that wholly recognizes me, Whose cry of death I wholly understand. Willing, I follow you through blood and fear, Feeling how you want me back again, To name me once again your child, To burn me in a kiss. [14] Chasseguet-Smirgel sweepingly judges that there is a "very german tendency to call away from reason, from the father in order to melt into the fascinating arch-mother" [15]. In 1927, Hesse apologetically judges in a similar way: "I don't know if there are many countries left where a whole nation's hatred against all good sense is so unanimous and nearly organised as in Germany." [16] Nevertheless the Atlantidic View of Life which can be visualized by the image of a whirl is definitely not a specifically german mentality; rather, it has to be seen individually. Being too coward to draw the knife for oneself individually, this suicide is happily delegated to the leader, the "Führer", to become a collective suicide, commited from above. A collective suicide that becomes mass-murder for all of those who do not belong to the Atlantidic View of Life. Franz Wegener, M.A. info@franz-wegener.de Book: Wegener, Franz: Das atlantidische Weltbild - Nationalsozialismus und Neue Rechte auf der Suche nach der versunkenen Atlantis, Gladbeck, KFVR 2000, 158 Seiten, 17,79 Euro. Buy it at amazon.de . Criticism: „Literatur und Links“, Redaktionsempfehlung des ZDF – Rubrik Wissen + Entdeckungen „empfehlenswert“, Sabine Engertsberger: „Atlantis – Die Freude am Untergang“, unter: paranormal.de „Herausragender wissenschaftlicher Beitrag zu den Abgründen in der Atlantis-Szene von Franz Wegener. Muß man gelesen haben!“, Rainer Lorenz: „Das alte Ägypten“, unter: benben.de Literaturempfehlung, Adrian Kupfer: „Im Kreis der schwarzen Sonne“, in: Telepolis – Magazin der Netzkultur – Heise Verlag „lesenswert und lehrreich“, Redaktion Perseus: „Zum Rassismus-Vorwurf gegenüber der Geisteswissenschaft R. Steiners“, unter: perseus.ch „Dieser objektiven Kritik möchte ich mich anschließen“, Ernst Rodlymayr, in: „Platon und Atlantis – Kritias“ Literaturempfehlung, Redaktion GRAECA.DE, Rubrik Atlantis – Atlantissage Annotations: 1 I see the problematic nature of psychoanalysis - as Jung noted it already for the arche types, in the possibility, that images are only exegeted with new images. Freud´s resort to antique myths for the nomination of various complexes clarifies this danger. In the result, there are only tautologic explanations and remythologisations - but no empirical explanations, which could be proofed. On the other side, a consequent agnosticism wouldn´t help. Optimally suited for introduction to this matter: Walter Schönau: Einführung in die psychoanalytische Literaturwissenschaft, Stuttgart 1991. 2 the species concerning 3 Lacan, Jacques: Schriften III, Olten und Freiburg im Breisgau 1980, 52f. 4 Wieland, Hermann: Atlantis, Edda und Bibel. 200 000 Jahre germanischer Weltkultur und das Geheimnis der Heiligen Schrift, Weißenburg in Bayern 1925, 25 5 Tempelhofgesellschaft (Hrsg.): Einblicke in die magische Weltsicht und die magischen Prozesse, Wien 1987, 59 6 Hermann, Albert. Unsere Ahnen und Atlantis - Nordische Seeherrschaft von Skandinavien bis nach Nordafrika, Berlin 1934, 30 7 Bessmertny, Alexander: Das Atlantisrätsel - Geschichte und Erklärung der Atlantishypothesen, Leipzig 1932, 163 8 Euphemistic expressions dealing to death the literature offers already at the end of the 19. century. The palliation of death does not have its origin - like Vondung assesses - in longing for death longing but rather in anxiety of. It is an effort to master the anxieties, which the consciousness of crisis during the Fin de Siècle produced by an aesthetisation of death. [Vondung, Klaus: Die Apokalypse in Deutschland, München 1988, 357] The movement consequently didn´t lead to death but it rather removed from it. 9 Kiß, Edmund: Die letzte Königin von Atlantis, Leipzig 1931, 101 10 Wieland, 132f. 11 Breuer, Stefan: Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution, Darmstadt 1993, 39ff. 12 Mohler, Armin: Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932 - Ein Handbuch, 4. Auflage, Darmstadt 1994, 18 13 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine: Vorwort, in: Zagermann, Peter: Eros und Thanatos - Psychoanalytische Untersuchungen zu einer Objektbeziehungstheorie der Triebe, Darmstadt 1988, Xvff. 14 Michels, Volker (Editor): Materialien zu Hermann Hesses "Der Steppenwolf", Frankfurt am Main 1972, 162, 168. In 1913 Hesse has published an exclusive collection of romantic poems. In this collection there is also a poem by Justinus Kerner published with the title "Zur Ruh, zur Ruh": To eternal rest, to eternal rest, you tired limbs! Close firmly, you eyelids! I am alone, the earth is gone; it must be night that light comes along my way. O lead me entirely, you inner powers! Away to brightness of deepest nights. Out of the space of earth´s pains through night and dream to mother´s heart. [Der Zauberbrunnen - Die Lieder der deutschen Romantik - Ausgewählt von Hermann Hesse - Mit Holzschnitten von Ludwig Richter, Frankfurt am Main 1977, 136] 15 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Vorwort, in: Zagermann, XV 16 Hesse, letter ca. Juli 1927 to Hilde Jung-Neugeboren, in: Michels, Materialien, 122


GESCHICHTE \| LITERATUR \| ZUKUNFT \| PSYCHOLOGIE \| KULTUR \| DAUBE \| WEBIMPRESSUM \| FITUG \| START	© KFVR 2001 Buch jetzt kaufen? Amazon!

The Atlantidic View of Life - a theory of national socialism - English abstract - by Franz Wegener, M.A.

The Atlantidic View of Life - a theory of national socialism
- English abstract -
by Franz Wegener, M.A.