On Sunday, May 17 at 3 pm Eastern Time, Professor Eric Kurlander, History Department Chair at Stetson University in Florida will join us for a Casual Conversation. Professor Kurlander is the author of Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (Yale University Press 2017).
Before we go any further, Professor Kurlander disclosed this important qualification to speak with us: “My sister is also a Dartmouth alumna (class of 2001)”.
Here is the link to Professor Kurlander’s Stetson faculty listing: https://www.stetson.edu/other/faculty/eric-kurlander.php. “Kurlander earned his BA at Bowdoin College and his MA and PhD at Harvard University, teaching three years at Harvard before coming to Stetson in 2001. He offers courses on Modern German, European and World History.” The subject of the book he will speak with us about is described in his biography as follows:
His last monograph, Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich . . ., offers the first comprehensive study of the supernatural in Nazi Germany, illustrating how the Third Reich drew upon a wide variety of occult practices, esoteric sciences and pagan religious ideas to gain power, shape propaganda and policy and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire. The book has been reviewed positively in the Washington Post, Times of London, Der Spiegel and the National Review, as well as other prominent periodicals in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France and Italy. The book has also been translated into Chinese, Russian, Italian, Polish, Czech, Croatian and Estonian (with Portuguese and Japanese editions appearing next year).
Perhaps Michael Dirda’s review in the Washington Post (when the paper had a book review section and when Dirda was one of its finest reviewers) best summarizes the book’s theses and offers a good description of the most crackpot, and pernicious, of the supernatural theories that helped Hitler coalesce the German people (dare I say the German volk?) into an army of like-minded fanatics:
As Kurlander stresses, Hitler's rise to power resulted from multiple factors — Germany's military defeat, onerous war reparations, economic chaos — but esoteric mumbo-jumbo clearly played its part. He examines the popularity of the extremist horror writer Hanns Heinz Ewers and parses the racist imagery of expressionist films such as "Nosferatu " and "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." Hitler apparently studied Ernst Schertel's "Magic" as a self-help manual, underlining personally useful passages, among them "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world." Such a channeling of demonic power or "mana" has always been central to occultism. The psychologist Carl Jung would even assert that Hitler was a medium, a "mouthpiece of the gods of old."
. . .
As late as 1942, Hitler could declare himself a “supporter” of World Ice Theory. “Glacial cosmogony,” as it was also known, maintained that “icy moons had crashed into the earth,” causing floods and geophysical damage, but also bringing “living kernels” from outer space that would evolve into Aryan superbeings. According to SS chief Heinrich Himmler, perhaps the most ardent Nazi occultist, these Ur-Aryans possessed paranormal powers and extraordinary weapons, one dimly recalled as Thor’s thunder hammer. Himmler would send an expedition to Tibet to search for traces of this primordial civilization.
Yes, that’s right, all of you Jungians: your god had feet of (blood soaked) clay!
This is a fascinating and important book. You will learn a new taxonomy of “esoteric mumbo-jumbo,” as Dirda states. Instead of two non-overlapping magisteria of religion and science, the Nazis offered the “reenchanted sciences” of what became known as “border sciences” of parapsychology, astrology, graphology, telepathy, characterology, radiesthesia, and dowsing. (Yes, bring your forked stick or your hanging pyramid to find water (or spiritual channels) coursing through the Gobi Desert and die of thirst.) And, of course, homeopathy. All of this to create an Aryan cosmology founded on a mélange of origin theories including that the Aryan people came from roots in northern India and the Middle East. Indo-Aryanism was important because it separated the German volk from the rest of Europe and its Christian heritage.
Funny? Yes. But deadly in the way that eugenics in search of the pure Aryan race and culture led to the eliminationist murders of 6 million Jews, and the slaughter of countless Slavs and others who did not fit into the New Order.
Does this book tell us everything about how the Nazis came to their hateful ideology? No, but to ignore this is to fail to understand an important part of the story. We may even have a chance to discuss a bit of the why people turned to this magical and anti-scientific thinking. You don’t, of course, believe in any of this, do you?
Come learn when we have a chance on Sunday, May 17 to speak with Professor Kurlander. Email me atarthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com by Friday, May 15 by the close of business if you wish to be part of this Casual Conversation.
Arthur Fergenson