ID: 04ANKARA7211
Dokument dato: 2004-12-30 05:05:00
Release dato: 2010-11-28 18:06:00
Kilde: Embassy Ankara
header:

This record is a partial extract of the original cable. The full text of the original cable is not available.

[...]

SUBJECT: ERDOGAN AND AK PARTY AFTER TWO YEARS IN POWER: TRYING TO GET A GRIP ON THEMSELVES, ON TURKEY, ON EUROPE

1. (C) Summary: PM Erdogan and his ruling AK Party seem to have a firm grip on power — if for no other reasons that there is currently no viable alternative and inertia weighs heavily in politics. Nevertheless, Erdogan and his party face enormous challenges if they are successfully to embrace core principles of open society, carry out EU harmonization, and develop and implement foreign policies in harmony with core U.S. interests. End summary.

…

5. (C) Yet Erdogan and AKP face politically fateful challenges in three areas: foreign policy (EU, Iraq, Cyprus); quality and sustainability of leadership and governance; and resolution of questions fundamental to creation of an open, prosperous society integrated with the broader world (place of religion; identity and history; rule of law).

…

7. (C) But there”s always a Monday morning and the debate on the ground here is not so neat. With euphoria at getting a date having faded in 48 hours, Erdogan”s political survival and the difficulty of the tasks before him have become substantially clearer. Nationalists on right and left have resumed accusations that Erdogan sold out Turkish national interests (Cyprus) and Turkish traditions. Core institutions of the Turkish state, which remain at best wary of AKP, have once again begun to probe for weaknesses and to feed insinuations into the press in parallel with the nationalists’ assertions. In the face of this Euro-aversion, neither Erdogan nor his government has taken even minimal steps to prepare the bureaucracy or public opinion to begin tackling the fundamental — some Turks would say insidious — legal, social, intellectual and spiritual changes that must occur to turn harmonization on paper into true reform. The road ahead will surely be hard.

8. (U) High-profile naysayers like main opposition CHP chairman Baykal, former Ambassador Gunduz Aktan, and political scientist Hasan Unal continue to castigate Erdogan. But theirs is a routine whine. More significant for us is that many of our contacts cloak their lack of self-confidence at Turkey’s ability to join in expressions of skepticism that the EU will let Turkey in. And there is parallel widespread skepticism that the EU will be around in attractive form in ten years.

…

10. (C) AKP”s lack of cohesion as a party and lack of openness as a government is reflected in the range of murky, muddled motives for wanting to join the EU we have encountered among those AKPers who say they favor pursuing membership…or at least the process. Some see the process as the way to marginalize the Turkish military and what remains of the arid “secularism” of Kemalism.

We have also run into the rarely openly-spoken, but widespread belief among adherents of the Turk-Islam synthesis that Turkey”s role is to spread Islam in Europe, “to take back Andalusia and avenge the defeat at the siege of Vienna in 1683″ as one participant in a recent meeting at AKP’s main think tank put it.

This thinking parallels the logic behind the approach of FonMin Gul ally and chief foreign policy advisor in the Prime Ministry Ahmet Davutoglu, whose muddy opinion piece in the Dec. 13 International Herald Tribune is in essence a call for one-way multi-cultural tolerance, i.e., on the part of the EU.

…

11. (C) Those from the more overtly religious side of AKP whinge that the EU is a Christian club. While some assert that it is only through Turkish membership and spread of Turkish values that the world can avoid the clash of civilizations they allege the West is fomenting, others express concern that harmonization and membership will water down Islam and associated traditions in Turkey. Indeed, as AKP whip Sadullah Ergin confided to us recently, “If the EU says yes, everything will look rosy for a short while. Then the real difficulties will start for AKP. If the EU says no, it will be initially difficult, but much easier over the long run.”

…

13. (C) At the same time the government must reportedly hire a couple thousand people skilled in English or other major EU languages and up to the bureaucratic demands of interfacing with the Eurocrats who descend on ministries as harmonization starts. If the government continues to hire on the basis of “one of us”, i.e., from the Sunni brotherhood and lodge milieu that has been serving as the pool for AKP’s civil service hiring, lack of competence will be a problem. If the government hires on the base of competence, its new hires will be frustrated by the incompetence of AKP”s previous hires at all levels.

…

Two Big Questions
—————–

24. (C) Turkey”s EU bid has brought forth reams of pronouncements and articles — Mustafa Akyol”s Gulenist-tinged “Thanksgiving for Turkey” in Dec. 27 Weekly Standard is one of the latest — attempting to portray Islam in Turkey as distinctively moderate and tolerant with a strong mystical (Sufi) underpinning. Certainly, one can see in Turkey”s theology faculties some attempts to wrestle with the problems of critical thinking, free will, and precedent (ictihad), attempts which, compared to what goes on in theology faculties in the Arab world, may appear relatively progressive.

25. (C) However, the broad, rubber-meets-the-road reality is that Islam in Turkey is caught in a vise of

(1) 100 years of “secular” pressure to hide itself from public view,
(2) pressure and competition from brotherhoods and lodges to follow their narrow, occult “true way”, and
(3) the faction-and positivism-ridden aridity of the Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet).

As a result, Islam as it is lived in Turkey is stultified, riddled with hypocrisy, ignorant and intolerant of other religions’ presence in Turkey, and unable to eject those who would politicize it in a radical, anti-Western way. Imams are for the most part poorly educated and all too ready to insinuate anti-Western, anti-Christian or anti-Jewish sentiments into their sermons. Exceptionally few Muslims in Turkey have the courage to challenge conventional Sunni thinking about jihad or, e.g., verses in the Repentance shura of the Koran which have for so long been used to justify violence against “infidels”.

26. (C) The problem is compounded by the willingness of politicians such as Gul to play elusively with politicized Islam. Until Turkey ensures that the humanist strain in Islam prevails here, Islam in Turkey will remain a troubled, defensive force, hypocritical to an extreme degree and unwilling to adapt to the challenges of open society.

27. (C) A second question is the relation of Turkey and its citizens to history — the history of this land and citizens’ individual history. Subject to rigid taboos, denial, fears, and mandatory gross distortions, the study of history and practice of historiography in the Republic of Turkey remind one of an old Soviet academic joke: the faculty party chief assembles his party cadres and, warning against various ideological threats, proclaims, “The future is certain. It’s only that damned past that keeps changing.”

28. (C) Until Turkey can reconcile itself to its past, including the troubling aspects of its Ottoman past, in free and open debate, how will Turkey reconcile itself to the concept and practice of reconciliation in the EU? How will it have the self confidence to take decisions and formulate policies responsive to U.S. interests? Some in AKP are joining what is still only a handful of others to take tentative, but nonetheless inspiring, steps in this regard. However, the road ahead will require a massive overhaul of education, the introduction and acceptance of rule of law, and a fundamental redefinition of the relation between citizen and state. In the words of the great (Alevi) Anatolian bard Asik Veysel, this is a “long and delicate road.”

A historic interview conducted by Andre Müller in 1979 with Arno Breker, Hitler’s favourite sculptor

Artist Arno Breker became notorious as Hitler’s favourite sculptor during the Nazi years, when he took on commissions from National Socialist government, created heroic, monumental figures and led Hitler around Paris. The first solo show of his sculptures in Germany since World War II opened July 22 in Schwerin, prompting much discussion on how Breker’s works should be shown today (review here). On this occasion we have translated a lengthy interview with Breker conducted in 1979 by Andre Müller, one of the most respected interviewers of his generation.

Interviewer Andre Müller introduces this discussion with sculptor Arno Breker with the following words:

During this interview, which was conducted at Breker’s Düsseldorf home, his wife and his art dealer, Joe F. Bodenstein, to whom the artist is bound by contract, were in attendance. Each of them interrupted the conversation a number of times to prevent the discussion from centring for too long on the topic of the artist’s political situation. Breker himself made no objections. When he mentioned the tragic consequences of his professional activities under Hitler, his isolation and desperation, his wife trembled with laughter. When I asked her what she found so amusing, she replied that normally her husband spoke in a completely different way. During a stroll around the garden, where several sculptures dating from the National Socialist period were on display, she told me: “I don’t listen when he tries to discuss politics, it bores me.” A macabre incident occurred when I asked the sculptor about his attitude toward the gassing of the Jews. Precisely at that moment, Bodenstein inserted a new tape into his recorder and mistakenly pressed the play button, so that my words were accompanied by a few bars of dance music. The autobiography mentioned in this interview first appeared in French under the title “Paris, Hitler et Moi.” The title of the German edition is “Im Strahlungsfeld der Ereignisse” (In the Radiation Field of Events). Breker’s first sentence when I mentioned the subject I wanted to discuss was: “I’m not afraid of politics.”

Andre Müller: Reading your autobiography, I have the impression you’re immensely dissatisfied. What’s the source of this dissatisfaction?

Arno Breker: You know, you can’t just say all the time that I made my large figures out of sheer perverseness. My artistic situation has been completely devalued by political history, cast in a false light. I don’t make large figures out of megalomania, as many people assume.

I don’t assume that. But I will say that your figures are expressions of your client’s, of Hitler’s megalomania.

That’s not true. That’s mistaken. I became close to him only very late, in 1936, when I won the silver medal in the sculpture competition at the Olympic Games. In the beginning, I wasn’t even participating in the competition. But the president of the committee, an Italian, knew my work and came to Rome where I was living on a scholarship from the German Academy, and said to me: I don’t have anything from you. That’s how I came to participate.

That does nothing to invalidate the assertion that you produced sculptures on commission from Hitler which gave expression to the regime’s ideology. Alexander Mitscherlich called this ideology “infantile fantasies of omnipotence” lacking any basis in reality. Wasn’t it all doomed to failure from the very beginning, based as it was on unreal assumptions?

No, look at the redesigning of Berlin, which I participated in. That wasn’t unreal. There are precedents from ancient history, from antiquity. They also made large buildings back then. Hitler was compelled to redesign the city as a consequence of increased traffic flow. New axes had to be created.

To what purpose?

To channel the traffic. He also began building highways for purely technical reasons related to traffic flow.

Yes, in order to create routes for his tanks.

As to that, I can tell you the following. We were planning something quite large, a grand arch sketched by Hitler when he was in a military hospital after being wounded in World War I, and for which I was supposed to design the figural decorations and reliefs. He never called it a victory arch, always a grand arch. Now here’s the important thing: Hitler had conceived the arch on a scale that was typical for the time, around 30 meters in height. The Arc de Triomphe in Paris is 40 meters high. But then there was this massive axis through Berlin, which called for an appropriate terminus, so Speer raised its height to 120 meters.

Against Hitler’s intentions?

No, but it was meant to be a surprise. It was now so large that the Arc de Triomphe could easily have fit into the passageway. But then the following happened: although the arch had now acquired these new dimensions, Speer was intent on slavishly adopting the old architectural plans. We had a talk. I’m an architect by training, and I told him it couldn’t possibly be done like that. If the arch is 120 meters high, then the architecture must have a different design. But Speer said: There’ll be no talk, it stays like that. And then a model was prepared. We had a marvellous team of sculptors, who fashioned it in such a way that it was just like standing in front of the finished city. Hitler came right from launching the “Deutschland” battle cruiser, and he was really moved by this structure. It flattered him. He said, look here, the entire new design costs as much as a single battle cruiser, but in perhaps three years time, the battle cruiser will already be scrap metal …

And the same was true of Berlin. But I want to get back to the question of your dissatisfaction. Today you are one of the busiest sculptors in Germany. Soon after the war, despite your National Socialist past, you were already receiving large architectural commissions. In the early 1950s, you were chief architect of the Gerling Company. Why then this sense of dissatisfaction?

Well, of course, political defamation had consequences.

Such as?

Such as the idea that I had nothing more to express as a sculptor. In 35 years, I received only two official commissions.

But certainly that has nothing to do with defamation. Your expressive force was lost because the regime to which your aesthetic mode of expression was so well suited now lay in the past. Surely it’s naive to think the Federal Republic of Germany would award you commissions on the same scale as Hitler, who led this country into the abyss?

I fail to see why an artist has to be somehow political, just because he’s received a commission. In that case, Hitler’s favourite firm, namely Mercedes, would no longer have any right to exist.

But Mercedes is a private enterprise.

I am also a private enterprise.

Yes, but you expect the state to give you work. As a private enterprise, you have enough customers to provide you with a secure life. Why then do you want state commissions?

I don’t want anything. I want peace and quiet, you understand? I’ve done nothing that went against artistic values or the dignity of the artistic vocation.

In what way have you been harassed then?

After the war, I could no longer exhibit. I was simply no longer invited.

Well then you had the peace and quiet you desired.

Pardon me, but I lost everything with the German defeat.

But you gained peace and quiet.

Yes, but peace and quiet alone can’t keep you alive. Sculpting is an enterprise requiring a great deal of money. You need models. You need plaster casters. You need bronze casters. Fortunately I’d studied architecture, and was able to live for 12 years designing for Gerling.

Did you have financial difficulties?

Yes, of course. During the third Reich, the fees I received were just enough to cover necessities. Speer told me the taxes were so high they would devour everything, and that I should wait until after the war to collect my fees. But after the war they were gone. When we had to flee Berlin, we had the 100,000 Reichmarks my wife had been able to save, and we deposited them at the Bavarian Hypothekenbank in Starnberg. But then it was confiscated by the state of Bavaria. So that was gone too. Then there was also the fact that I was denazified only very late, and by one of the strictest officers, a communist who’d been spent a long time in a concentration camp.

Fair enough, everyone was poor back then, for understandable reasons.

I don’t regret that I was poor. I come from a modest background, I’ve always known how to economize. Up to the present I’ve never taken vacations, and I’ve never had a passion for big cars or beautiful horses or glamorous women.

Which makes it all the more difficult for me to understand your complaints.

After the war, I lacked the resources needed to develop further.

So did everyone else. Surely you can’t expect that a country that had suffered such a defeat – and, moreover, for which it alone was responsible – could simply keep going as if nothing had happened?

Yes, that is difficult to accept.

The defeat?

No, the personal consequences.

Yes, that’s difficult. In such a situation, there are only two possibilities: one you live out the despair, or you repress it.

I suffered my first heart failure at the time.

In 1945?

Yes, after the defeat. If not for that, we wouldn’t be sitting here today. I’d received a series of offers to go abroad. When the war was over, I immediately received invitations from Peron, Franco and Stalin. When Stalin invited me, the American NATO general came to Bavaria personally to take me to Russia. That’s how much respect the Americans had for an offer like that.

It’s most illuminating that your art was appreciated so highly by dictators. But for now I’m more interested in your psychological state at that time. What was the source of this irrepressible drive to fling yourself immediately into your work, as though nothing had even happened?

I’m a vigorous worker, and I had a lot of ideas I wanted to realize. The sculptor Despiau, who was a friend of mine, once wrote a book about me which ended with a sentence expressing his amazement at my formidable stamina.

Do you know Mitscherlichs’ book “The Inability to Mourn”?

I mourned mightily.

What about?

About the defeat and the collapse of Germany. But there’s an aspect to this collapse you’re not aware of. We owned a house about 75 km east of Berlin, it was our refuge during the war. I could no longer work in Berlin, and my three Paris studios had been damaged by bombing raids. So we moved to the country. Then came the first attempt at Russian penetration. The attack was repelled, but at half past eleven we got a call from the Nazi district officer telling us we had to abandon everything within half an hour. We departed amid heavy snowfall. I had no idea why we had to leave so suddenly. I thought we’d be able to return the next day. As we sat in the car, Speer said: That’s out of the question. My wife asked me: What do you think? I answered that I felt liberated from my crushing work schedule. I’d been under pressure to finish the sculptures for the great arch.

Had Hitler put pressure on you?

No, never. He never pushed me, never gave me any kind of instructions. Everything I did, I did in complete freedom and under my own responsibility.

I’d like to confront you with a text you wrote in 1940. It appeared in a brochure about the construction of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. There, you wrote the following about your work with Speer: “No discussions, no trials preceded our work together. Speer gave the marching orders in Prussian style, and we met again when our results were integrated into the larger organism…”

Oh, you’re going back to my first commission?

Yes, for the sculptures for the Reich Chancellery. Someone else gave the marching orders, and you were only there to execute them.

No, no, look here, I’ll explain it to you. I’d like to tell you exactly how things were. I’d already wanted to offer my talents to Speer, I wrote him letters then tore them up and threw them into the wastepaper basket, never even sent them. Then suddenly I got a call, he wanted to speak to me. So I went to him, and he took me into the Academy of Arts, and I went inside and saw an architectural model which I considered highly successful, an inner courtyard with very good proportions, good profiles, restrained profiles, and so on. It was a model of the court of honour for the Reich Chancellery. I liked it, and I saw the two blocks on each side of the the staircase leading to the entranceway. My figures were to make sweeping gestures away from the entrance, and to have a relationship to the building. I could hardly install Adam and Eve there. In my view, the only sensible embellishment was to set a spiritual man on one side, symbolized by a flame, and on the other, the defender of the country, a man with a sword. So I set to work on it at home, and came back two weeks later with my sketches. They were displayed, and Speer didn’t say much. Then we parted. He immediately called Hitler, who saw them and was instantly enthralled. The names of the figures, “Party” and “Wehrmacht,” were his invention.

Good. So much for your story. But your text goes further. You write: “I perceive in this uncompromising collaboration the first elementary, energising heartbeats of a new style, one that can only become actualized in the intact community of equal natures, unified by the march set by the greatest renovator and perfecter of German being.” So once again, no talk about artistic freedom, but instead orders and marching.

I’d like to tell you the following. Listen carefully. I come from the Ruhr District. I studied there, experienced the total political disintegration after World War I when everything was destroyed. A little bit more and it would have been utterly destroyed. Then I turned the page, went to Paris, and made a new start there. The really big spiritual crisis came not after World War II, but after World War I. Things went so far that people wanted to burn down the museums, because they felt the entire past, and art as well, were responsible for the war and its aftermath. And then someone came along with a real concept. I didn’t experience Hitler’s rise to power, the rise of National Socialism that is, because I was in France at the time.

But you did experience how he organised the “Degenerate Art” exhibitions. You’d been back for a long time by then. And among the artists affected were many you held in esteem. How did you feel when these artists were defamed and banned?

You mean the business with Hausenstein?

What business?

The art historian Hausenstein, who was a friend of mine, came to see me in Rome and said: You’ve got to come back to Germany and save whatever can be saved. He meant I should bring my influence to bear, and in fact I was on the jury for the first Great German Art Exhibition in Munich.

Despite that, you did acquiesce to the “degenerate art” action. Why did you continue to obey a political system that did such things?

If I had opposed Hitler, I wouldn’t have been able to help my persecuted friends. I saved Hausenstein’s wife from imprisonment. I got Maillol’s Jewish model out of prison, and prevented Picasso from falling into the hands of the Gestapo.

Did you ever consider leaving Germany?

Yes, repeatedly. Later, there were great disappointments, because in 1943, the situation really did become grim. But where would I have gone? I had my studio here, my work. The most important thing for me was my work. I thought only of myself and my work.

I want to come back to the shock you suffered after the war. What was the immediate occasion for your collapse?

The Americans had destroyed 90% of my Berlin sculptures, and my money was gone.

Wasn’t it far worse to witness the destruction of the ideals in which you had believed for 10 years?

Yes, they were gone. My ideals, that is, everything that had driven me to execute the monumental sculptures, that was gone. On this subject, I must tell you about my artistic development. In Paris, I was still strongly influenced by Rodin. But through my own work I realized that Rodin’s sculptures lacked volume. His surfaces were dissolved. They never had the effect of light and shadow I was after. The volume is the place where a sculpture captures light and shadow. So the volumes must be shaped with great clarity. That’s how I arrived at my sleek, monumental forms.

And that was exactly what Hitler wanted.

No, at first, not at all. In the beginning, the National Socialist press didn’t support me at all. I didn’t know what Hitler wanted. I had never read “Mein Kampf.” The contents of my art were entirely my own affair, there was no political background.

What kind of background did they have, if not a political one?

The origin of my sculptural work is the beauty of the human body. My human forms are always intact. I come from a very wholesome family that was strongly influenced by Christianity on my mother’s side. My grandfather was a minister. I had a fantastic family life. We were a marvellous entity. My father was a highly gifted sculptor, who was derailed from the profession by fate, so to speak, because his father died young, and he had to feed a family of seven. For him, I represented the overcoming of his unhappy fate, because I achieved what he had aspired to.

So your task was to compensate for your father’s failure?

I wouldn’t put it like that. My affinity for beautiful bodies had other origins. The strengthening of the body, the vitality of sports and the prevalence of sports, a hunger for nature, even for a culture of nudity, nude bathing out of doors: all of these things are elements of the feeling of being safely enclosed in a shell, in which we travel through the world.

So nude bathing was an important source of beauty for you. That’s certainly quite consistent with the kind of twaddle the National Socialists liked to peddle to people: that everything would be grand, that a thousand years of paradise was just around the corner. A couple of years later, everything fell apart. What happened inside of you then?

I entered a clinic, and wasn’t able to work for a whole year. I was totally debilitated.

Did you experience anything like anger against the regime, or against the people who had deceived you so dreadfully?

May I say the following: in Berlin during the war, we had many parties, and at every one, politics was discussed, which I found nauseating, because it was always the same thing. But I was fortunate enough to have access to music. I was on a first name basis with Wilhelm Kempff and Alfred Cortot. My brother-in-law is a pianist. Elly Ney was also a friend of mine. So to avoid all of that, we had only musical evenings. On one of these evenings the situation in Stalingrad was acute, and people were terribly agitated. Speer was there, and so were some other government ministers, and I said to Speer: either you people know a way out of this situation, or else you’re all criminals.

That’s hardly an answer to my question. I want to know what you felt in 1945 when you realized that these people with whom you’d been together on a daily basis had murdered six million Jews. Was your image of the human being still perfectly intact? Or did you repress it all?

Today I’ve repressed it. Today it’s gone. Because I’m still living, and I have the drive to develop further. Last year I had a heart attack, but after eight days I already had my sketchbook with me under the covers.

Did you continue to produce the same heroic figures after 1945, or did the contents of your sculptural work change?

No, not at all. Look here, I’ve got a problem right now. I’ve received an invitation from Greece to produce a monument to Alexander the Great. Of course, It’s a wonderful thing for me. But I’m 79 years old. I can no longer produce figures that are 10 meters tall. I’m restricted by my age. But the theme, this look, it still fascinates me.

Nevertheless, it’s possible that your conception of the human form underwent a change. It’s not purely a question of the size of the figures. Did you ever produce after the war the kind of giant statue you made for the National Socialists?

Excuse me… you’re assuming once more that a political component was in play.

No, I am assuming that personal experiences can alter an individual’s world picture.

About that I can say: I’ve just made a sculpture of Europa. In political terms, I have only a single concern: the association between Germany and France. If these two states come together, everything will be fine. As far as my picture of the world goes, it has remained unaltered despite the catastrophe, or has slowly recovered after the catastrophe.

What was decisive for this recovery?

My enthusiasm for people, for beautiful people. Last Sunday, I watched a tennis match. The six or seven players I saw would have been superb models for me. When I look at these athletes, I feel confirmed in my point of view. My ideal image of humanity is reinforced. Alongside the other kinds of proportionality, shouldn’t the artist disclose the inner beauty of the human form before all else? I’ve come to realize that the man who is outwardly perfect is also inwardly beautiful. I had such a perfect man available to me in the decathlete Gustav Stührk. He was the model for most of my male nudes.

Could you also talk with him?

Yes, of course. He was highly-educated. You can visit him in Munich. He’s still alive. I’d be happy to give you his address.

If he really was a brilliant man, then you failed to capture his intellectual qualities in your sculptures. Have you ever done a bust of him?

No, never.

So you were only interested in his body?

Yes, he was the best-looking athlete in Germany at the time. And above all, he was a decathlete. Decathletes are uniformly developed. Tennis players aren’t developed like that, neither are sprinters. They have well-developed muscles in their legs, but the upper body and arms are not correspondingly well-developed. But these are really specialized requirements. I aspire toward the divine, the perfected human being.

Does this mean that with divine humans, breast and leg musculature must always be in harmony?

Yes.

But then Gerhart Hauptmann, for example, whose portrait you did, was not divine, nor was Cocteau. He was rather thin.

No, you see, in order to look like Stührk, you have to do physical training. An intellectual type like Hauptmann, who writes books, can’t possibly spend enough hours every day cultivating his body. That’s why in antiquity, they modelled their heroes and emperors not as whole figures, but instead set the heads of emperors on muscular statues that has been done previously. I’m quite sure Pericles was no athlete, nor Socrates, but they certainly had interesting heads, and because the Greek sought wholeness, they set their heads on the bodies of athletes. In their studios, the sculptors had breast pieces with splendid drapery folds, and above was a space, a cavity where a head could be inserted.

Then you should have set Hauptmann’s head on Stührk’s body. But Hitler might not have liked that. Your mistake is to perpetually confuse Ancient Greece with National Socialist Germany. The political situation and the situation of art in Germany were totally different from those in antiquity. You’ve described the situation in your autobiography. There was a gap between the people and the artists, and Hitler, in order to draw close to the masses, attempted to bridge the gap. He eliminated the artist and heralded a utilitarian art, that is to say, he sought to channel that which you refer to in your book as the “stream of average talents” into a solitary, officially sanctioned direction.

Yes, there he was mistaken.

How so?

In setting this direction. He admitted this to me later on. He wanted me to straighten things out. He told me himself that he’d been wrong. Hitler was an artist by nature, and he had no reservations against French culture, as many people believed. And if fate hadn’t driven him into the arms of politics, he would have become a painter. The measures he took in the area of the arts had purely political motives. You simply have to understand how things were. As a politician, he wanted to bring art closer to the people, and he could only do that with the help of artists with an intact image of the human form. He turned away only from those who transformed the image of the human form, to an extent destroying it, occasionally disintegrating it. He resisted this. His mistake was to have thrown out the baby with the bath water.

I refuse to accept your attempts at justification. There are no excuses. Inexcusable things happened. What I do accept is your distress, your despair, your attempts at reflection.

Perhaps you think I don’t suffer? You won’t get a photo of me smiling today. I can’t smile into the camera any more. You should write: Breker has been deserted by laughter. I’m a beaten man, a victim of the times. I’ve been totally deprived of the impact of my artistic achievement. Fifty years from now, when someone looks at my figures impartially because the political point of reference will no longer apply, then my works – and your presence here shows their actuality – will be seen for how I depicted arms and legs and human beings in general. And then I will be understood.

You can have that kind of understanding from me already today. I have no ulterior political motives when I find the sculptures you made for Hitler repellent.

What don’t you like about them?

Their cold, necrophilic aesthetic, the ludicrous poses, the primitivity of expression.

Fair enough, it’s a question of perception.

I’m not reproaching you for having worked for the NS state, but because even today you remain blind to certain things expressed in your works.

You’ll have to be more precise.

I mean you do not see any difference between your early things, the ones produced in Paris, and the sculptures for the new Reich Chancellery, for example.

All right, then you would have to say that I went in a false direction by moving away from studio pieces and turning to public sculpture. I wanted my sculptures to have an impact on the public. In order to do so, they required architecture, and, so to speak, urbanistic features. I wanted to pursue the figure in an architectonic direction. My earlier works were influenced by Rodin. Later, I found my ideal in the Greeks.

There is absolutely nothing Greek about National Socialist buildings. This pseudo-Classicism has nothing whatever to do with Ancient Greece. But I realize I can talk for hours, I’ll never be able to get anything across to you. You were under influences, no matter which ones, and you excelled at delivering what was required of you. Take your figure “Die Flehende” (Supplicating Woman), for example, created in your Rodin phase. What were you trying to express there?

I wanted to show that there are abysses that human beings are unable to overcome. She begins to pray, to make an appeal, to return from total isolation to normality, to enter a protective atmosphere.

And as a comparison, your sculpture “Bereitschaft” (Readiness), which crowned Berlin’s Mussolini Memorial. What is expressed there?

My model was Germany’s youth, who were soldiers in body and soul. That really made an impression on me.

Were you conscious of the political symbolism of these sculptures?

No, my work is too realistic for that. My point of departure is the human form. I am guided solely by the human image.

Here, I really must confront you, once again, with something you yourself wrote. “The obsessive will to immortalize National Socialist Germany through native cultural creations has been realized in a grandiose manner. The path toward the representation of form develops with elementary fury… The building as such is a symbol of our political situation and of our world view… Here, this symbolism speaks its most convincing language… The rooms are aglow with the fire of political power…” And so on and so forth.

Where’s that written?

In the same brochure I cited earlier, the one on the construction of the new Reich Chancellery.

No, I didn’t write that. I’m anything but a coward. I stand by what I’ve done in my life, I have a clear conscience, I’ve helped persecuted people, I’ve helped Jews, I saved Picasso from being arrested … but I’ve never spoken in such a bombastic manner. That’s not my style. You got that from the newspapers. I can’t possibly have written that. My orientation was entirely French, that is to say, what the French refer to as ‘mesure’, good measure in judging all things. If you want to condemn me, Herr Müller, you’re doing a good job. Politically, that’s exactly what’s in vogue today.

But I’m not condemning you at all. I’m only trying to make you aware of what happened back then, to your own benefit. An artist can’t create out of repression. Whether you wanted to or not, you fulfilled the intentions of your client with exactitude. That’s not a reproach, it’s a fact.

Michelangelo received commissions from the popes.

Yes, but above all, he had an idea. He didn’t adopt the ideology of the papacy as the content of his creative work. On the contrary, he used the papacy to realize his own conceptions. No one denies your technical abilities. What distinguishes you from Michelangelo is the absence of any idea. That’s why you’ve been so incapable of resisting all manner of external influences. After the war, you suddenly began to do abstract work again.

I made abstract things after World War I, in the wake of the shattering experience of defeat, when the human image had nothing more to say. At the art academy in Düsseldorf, where I studied, I was considered to be on the Left. Unfortunately, all of those things were lost. You’d be amazed at the fantastic abstract works I did back then.

I’ll take your word for it that in the wake of events you functioned very well. You also produced abstract works after World War II.

No, not after World War II.

Of course you did. There is the “Gewandfigur” (Robed Figure) you made for Mannheim, and the figures of girls in the 1950s, those are very stylized.

In Mannheim, I had to adapt to the given architectural conditions. The building had a completely smooth facade.

That’s what I’m saying: you’ve always conformed to existing conditions.

That goes without saying. I’m a visual person.

All right, but then it’s not really correct to say you made the same kind of things after the war as you did under Hitler, namely heroes.

Look here, I wouldn’t have made so many heroes if I hadn’t had to produce the reliefs for the grand arch in Berlin. It was to have been a memorial to German warriors of all historical epochs, it was conceived in their honour, so I was confined to a very narrow framework, it took me a long time, because construction work could only be started once the reliefs were finished.

So Hitler wanted heroes, and you delivered them.

Yes, what was I supposed to do? Tell me someone who would have done things right.

It’s not a question of right or wrong, but of giving some thought to the causes when you’ve become as entangled as you were.

You’re preaching to the choir there. Look here, I myself want to be finished with these things, with all of these problems. But for that, I would need time and quiet. My commissioned activities are not so great that I could speak of financial independence. I live from hand to mouth. Just consider the cost of bronze casting. With a larger sculpture, you have to reckon with 40,000 marks just for casting alone. Today, the bronze caster drives a Mercedes, but not the sculptor.

I wouldn’t say that in your place. First of all, you do drive a Mercedes. Secondly, you don’t necessarily need to insist upon making such enormous things.

Look, if you’re a sculptor with a penchant for the monumental, now and then you have to produce a large sculpture. It’s only human. You could call it human weakness. The impulse toward monumentality is a part of me. The monumental is my sickness. I’m always delighted to see a successful monumental sculpture, whether it’s Michelangelo’s David, or Andrea del Verrocchio’s statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, or the Venus de Milo.

But none of that is comparable to the sculptures you made during the NS era. The monstrosity of your figures is not merely a function of their size, but of their habitus, their cramped pathos.

You’ll have to define that more precisely.

I hinted at it earlier. The roots of your susceptibility to National Socialism lay in the fact that failure never manifests itself in your image of humanity. Of course, that suits the Nazis, for whom the possibility of defeat had to be repressed. There was the ultimate victory and the Thousand Year Reich, and right up to the end there was the possibility of a meaningful death for the sake of this phantasmatic empire. In this way, quasi-religious sentiments of sacrifice replaced fears of death, and out of gratitude for this liberation from the pressure of fear, millions of people allowed themselves to be slaughtered. In reality, human existence is a thoroughly broken one, full of hesitations and doubts.

Not for me. There is no hint of decadence in me, you know.

Human doubt, fear, ambivalence, you call that decadence?

The disintegration of the human image, as we are experiencing it today, that is undoubtedly a manifestation of decadence.

Then Michelangelo was also decadent. Virtually no one else ever gave form to human imperfection in such a harrowing way.

Listen, in Michelangelo’s case, there were purely technical reasons. There was a series of figures he wasn’t able to complete. He wouldn’t have left them unfinished if the pope hadn’t compelled him to work on other commissions.

I’m not talking about the incomplete works, but about the element of incompletion in the finished works.

There is none.

I disagree. Take David for example. It’s quite large, obviously, but it entirely lacks the tacked-on triumphalism of your heroic figures.

Look, the kind of relaxed stance we find among the Italians, it never existed among northern peoples. Christianity expunged the motif of the supporting and non-supporting leg, because it called the worldly sphere into doubt, transporting it to another plane.

Yes, to the level of a stability that is possible only in the ideal or in the divine. But Hitler was no God, even if he perhaps liked to pose as one.

I’d to say the following about that: clarifying that remains a matter for historians. This is where words come in. You need the distance of time, a voltage curve lasting a few months, in order to formulate that. I can’t discuss such a far-reaching things with you now. I’m not prepared to do so. I’m not an author, not a man of words.

Do you find it insulting when I characterize you as an artisan?

No, not at all. I come from the crafts, my father was a stonemason, and the artisan is hardly a rewarding object for psychologists. I have a friend, he’s the director of an insane asylum, his name is Heinrich, a highly gifted man, he gave a speech at the Rotary Club on schizophrenia among artists. I said to him: there’s one profession you’ve left out, the sculptor. If you look at history, you’ll see there are no schizophrenic sculptors, because sculpture comes from the handicrafts, and has a completely different basis, for example, than music or poetry. Just consider the degree of schizophrenia Richard Wagner managed to attain. Just read the diaries of Cosima Wagner: what a titan of neuroses! It’s exactly the same with painters and writers. Many authors have been psychopaths. We sculptors, however, are too close to the material. We have to deal with stone, with the material. The overcoming of the material is a monumental task, one that challenges me from the moment my day begins. If you like, you might classify me among the naive.

Precisely that is the tragedy of your life. Because you arrived at a time when there was only one thing that was entirely impermissible, namely being naive.

I wasn’t in a position to choose the moment of my birth, otherwise I would have waited.

Or better: set the date back in time.

Fair enough, there was Rodin, and before Rodin there was Carpeaux, also a giant, and afterwards came Maillol and Despiau, and today, its over. Today things are quiet, the quiet before the storm. Today, humanity is only occupied with various materials. Someone takes a piece of railroad track and sets it on a lawn, and that’s supposed to be art.

It bespeaks a profound scepticism about inherited values.

Really?

Yes, it must have some reason for being. There’s no more trust in the order of things, in the health of the world.

Well I have it. My relationship to humanity is unbroken.

You see, that’s exactly what I’m unable to comprehend, after everything that’s happened, and after what you must have experienced.

If I may reply in a rather grandiloquently way: in this context, I am a real phenomenon.

In which context?

To be able to see people the way I see them, despite everything.

In fact, it’s phenomenal, an impressive kind of obstinacy.

I don’t find it at all obstinate. It’s just how I am. The French like to say; c’est a prendre ou a laisser, take it or leave it. I was recently in Paris again, and I went to a fruit stand, there were bananas there, all the same size, but with different prices. I must have had a funny look because the seller said: c’est a prendre ou a laisser, either take it or else leave. That’s how it is. That’s how things are. I see something that irritates me, and I try to fathom the reason for the irritation, and then I’m rebuked by the seller, who was observing me.

Then why did you put up with it?

What was I supposed to have done? Should I have said: I don’t understand why they have different prices? Then I would have had to endure a longer explanation. That wouldn’t have done any good.

You never know until you try. Maybe it would have irritated the banana seller. No one stop you from reflecting.

He was so categorical. I just tipped my hat and left.

That was a mistake. But I don’t want to delve into that right now. I want to come back to the question of how you manage, after all the experiences you have behind you, to hold onto your healthy image of humanity. What significance does the gassing of the Jews have for your thinking?

I can give you a very simple answer. I belong to the so-called believers. The Jews, that is to say, the fact of the Jewish people, is a part of the history of creation. No one has the right to interfere with the history of creation, whether it’s a question of millions of deaths or only a single one. That’s my point of view.

When did you learn of the gassing for the first time?

After the war was over. If I’d known earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to work. Not a single word was ever spoken about the concentration camps. I lived like a pure fool during this period. I lived for my work alone. It was really a formidable achievement in terms of sheer volume. I won’t say anything right now about the quality. I worked, and that was all. I was completely blind to my surroundings.

In retrospect, how did you reconcile yourself to having befriended people who turned out to be mass murderers?

I was never a friend of Hitler’s. Nor was I, as people always say, his favourite sculptor. That was Thorak. For years, Hitler didn’t want to know anything about my work. And I only received the commission for the Reich Chancellery because he had rejected the proposals of his favourite sculptor. Speer said: Führer, I don’t know what to do next. Hitler replied: Why not try Breker? I only had one an intensive conversation with him. It was on the day the peace treaty was signed with France, after I’d shown him around Paris. After dinner, he came outside, I was standing with the officers, and he came up, pointed to me and said: Breker, I want to speak with you. Then he went with me into the woods, and once we were out of sight he stood still and grasped my right hand with both of his hands and said: I really must apologise to you formally. For years I was wrong about you, I was the victim of informers… so I was not his friend. He had no friends at all. He was a historical phenomenon, I just want to be through with all that. But I need time. To define Hitler is the task of the historian, not the artist. I say he was a reaction to the Treaty of Versailles. Had there never been a Treaty of Versailles, there never would’ve been a Hitler. That’s the most concise way to sum things up. The time is not yet ripe to bring all of the components together objectively. When this period is written about objectively, in accordance with the facts, then these things will quickly be overcome, and no longer worthy of conversation.

What will remain, I would argue, is an awareness that belief in salvation and promises of salvation are well-adapted to the exercise of power and the subjugation of human beings. This does not necessarily have anything to do with politics. The consequence of this knowledge is – as you can observe in my case – an incapacity for idealism.

There, I am your polar opposite. My energy and drive for work are directed toward overcoming the disintegration of the image of the human being. I want to bring back the human being as he is.

But first you have to recognize reality. The human being, as he has been experienced in Germany after the war, is nothing more than a pile of bones.

To that, I can only say, let’s hope very soon I can close my eyes too, and just be done with the whole business.

The interview originally appeared in German in the book “Entblößungen” (Disrobements – Goldmann Verlag) in 1979. Excerpts were printed by the Berliner Zeitung on July 29, 2006. English version – Andre Müller, Arno Breker: “The monumental is my sickness” Sightandsound.com, 3rd August 2006.

André Müller is one of the foremost journalists of his generation, and one of Germany’s most feared – and respected – interviewers.

Translation: Ian Pepper.

Faye also provides a critique of the New Right; an analysis of the continuing damage being done by Western liberalism, political inertia, unrestrained immigration and ethnic self-hatred; and the need to abandon past positions and dare to face the realities of the present in order to realise the ideology of the future. He prophesises a series of catastrophes between 2010 and 2020, brought about by the unsustainability of the present world order, which he asserts will offer an opportunity to rebuild the West and put Archeofuturism into practice on a grand scale.

The book is avalaible directly from the publisher HERE, or through Delian diver bookstore (via Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk).

This book is a must-read for anyone concerned with the course that the Right must chart in order to deal with the increasing crises and challenges it will face in the coming decades.

Guillaume Faye was one of the principal members of the famed French New Right organisation GRECE in the 1970s and ’80s. After departing in 1986 due to his disagreement with its strategy, he had a successful career on French television and radio before returning to the stage of political philosophy as a powerful alternative voice with the publication of Archeofuturism. Since then he has continued to challenge the status quo within the Right in his writings, earning him both the admiration and disdain of his colleagues.

‘Archeofuturism is thus both archaic and futuristic, for it validates the primordiality of Homer’s epic values in the same breath that it advances the most daring contemporary science.’ –Michael O’Meara, from the Foreword.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Michael O’Meara
A Note from the Editor
Introduction

1. An Assessment of the Nouvelle Droite
2. A Subversive Idea: Archeofuturism as an Answer to the Catastrophe of Modernity and an Alternative to Traditionalism
3. Ideologically Dissident Statements
4. For a Two-Tier World Economy
5. The Ethnic Question and the European
6. A Day in the Life of Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov – A Chronicle of Archeofuturist Times

Additional Information

Author: Guillaume Faye
Full Title: Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Arktos Media (2010)
Pages: 249
ISBN: 978-1-907166-09-9
Language: English

Edgar Julius Jung and metaphysical foundations of the Conservative Revolution

Edgar J. Jung (1894–1934) was the mastermind of the „Young Conservatives“ in the Conservative Revolutionary movement in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Jung’s voluminous work, The Rule of the Inferior (1927/30), in which he outlines his autoritarian weltanschauung, is a radical rejection of democracy and egalitarianism. Instead, Jung evokes the myth of the eternal Reich, the foundations of which he sees not in blood, like the Nazis, but in spirit.

But Jung was not content with giving intellectual guidelines. Quite the contrary, he intended to interfere in politics. Franz von Papen, the German vice-chancellor, for whom Jung wrote political speeches, seemed to be an ideal mouthpiece for Jung’s ideas. In Marburg, on June 17th, 1934 von Papen gave a speech which was of Jung’s making. The so-called “Marburg Speech“ attacked the German government and was meant to break loose a national conservative uprising.

But Jung had underestimated the general well-esteem among the German people of the NS government, and, moreover, bad timing made Jung’s attempt to take over power coincide with the Röhm-Putsch, the failed coup d’état of SA leader Ernst Röhm.

Jung was arrested, and on July 1st, 1934 his body was found shot near Berlin. With Edgar J. Jung one of the outstanding protagonists of the Conservative Revolutionary school of thought was dead.

In this scholarly study in German, the author, Sebastian Maass, traces Jung’s way and puts focus on his radical weltanschauung and thought, as laid down particularly in The Rule of the Inferior. Jung’s intellectual work is portrayed in detail and carefully judged in a non-leftist way. The book has nearly 300 footnotes and the appendix contains the complete text of the infamous “Marburg Speech.“

In his preface, Dr. Karlheinz Weissmann stresses the importance of this thoroughly researched work for the understanding of the Conservative Revolutionary movement.

Die andere deutsche Revolution
Edgar Julius Jung und die metaphysischen Grundlagen der Konservativen Revolution

Author: Sebastian Maass
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Regin Verlag
Language: German
Product Dimensions: 14,5 x 22,5 cm
ISBN: 978-3-941247-20-8

The book is available through Regin Verlag website.

Související články:

1. Jiná německá revoluce

Book Description

Julius Evola was a renowned Dadaist artist, Idealist philosopher, critic of politics and Fascism, ‘mystic’, anti-modernist, and scholar of world religions. Evola was all of these things, but he saw each of them as no more than stops along the path to life’s true goal: the realisation of oneself as a truly absolute and free individual living one’s life in accordance with the eternal doctrines of the Primordial Tradition. Much more than an autobiography, The Cinnabar Path in describing the course of Evola‘s life illuminates how the traditionally-oriented individual might avoid the many pitfalls awaiting him in the modern world. More a record of Evola‘s thought process than a recitation of biographical facts, one will here find the distilled essence of a lifetime spent in pursuit of wisdom, in what is surely one of his most important works.

Table of Contents

Foreword

A Note from the Editor

A Note from the Publisher

1. The Path of Cinnabar

2. Personal Background and Early Experiences

3. Abstract Art and Dadaism

4. The Speculative Period of Magical Idealism and the Theory of the Absolute Individual

5. My Encounters with the East and ‘Pagan’ Myth

6. The ‘Ur Group’

7. My Exploration of Origins and Tradition

8. My Experience with ‘La Torre’ and Its Implications

9. Hermeticism and My Critique of Contemporary Spiritualism – The Catholic Problem

10. ‘Revolt Against the Modern World’ and the Mystery of the Grail

11. My Work in Germany and the ‘Doctrine of Awakening’

12. The Issue of Race

13. In Search of Men Among the Ruins

14. Bachofen, Spengler, the ‘Metaphysics of Sex’ and the ‘Left-Hand Path’

15. From the ‘Worker’ to ‘Ride the Tiger’

Appendix: Interviews with Julius Evola (1964-1972)

Additional Information

Title: Julius Evola: The Path of Cinnabar

Author: Evola, Julius

Full Title: The Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography

Binding: Softcover (also avalaible in a hardback edition)

Publisher: Integral Tradition (2009) – Arktos

Pages: 302

ISBN: 9781907166020

Language: English

Customer review (Source: Amazon.com)

James J. Omeara: Tradition and “The Personal Equation”

The author and translator are both quick to point out that this may be the strangest autobiography ever. Almost completely lacking in clichéd “personal details,” they also both suggest that the book is best regarded as a “guide to [Evola].” As such, this book, long out of print even in Italy, will be self-recommending to the vast and ever-growing crowd of what author and translator jokingly call “evolomaniacs.”

As already noted, Evola provides few if any details of childhood rebellion, love affairs, etc., although there is this cryptic remark: “A spontaneous detachment from … what is generally regarded as normal, particularly in the sphere of affection, emerged as one of my distinctive traits when I was still in my early youth; or rather, it emerged ESPECIALLY in my early youth.” [page 6, emphasis Evola]. In fact, Evola denies any relevance to his environment or heredity, at least in biological terms.

Instead, Evola provides us with his `personal equation,’ a predisposition that he is, indeed, predisposed to attribute to a pre-natal, pre-human existence, taking the form of an thirst for transcendence, what he elsewhere calls “the life which is more than life,” combined with, in Hindu terms, “a kshatriya bent,” manifesting as an hierarchical, aristocratic, and feudal taste.

These two somewhat contradictory features, a “longing for liberation” and an urge for action resulting in self-affirmation, would form his “existential task” and only be reconciled in “my definition of ‘traditionalism’ in my later works.”

Each chapter, then, details the various intellectual and political milieus that Evola found available in the first half of the XXth century, and how he approached, assimilated, and in some cases, most notably the Traditionalist current promoted by Rene Guenon, re-designed each for his own purposes, in accordance with the aforementioned `personal equation.’

Speaking of `tradition:’ Since the ‘evolomaniacs’ will want this book for the content anyway, the only question relevant here is: how well have the publishers `handed on’ [traditio] Evola‘s guide to himself? How well have the translator and editors done their job?

Lacking not only a knowledge of Italian but even the Italian text, I am not of course in a position to offer an authoritative critique of Segio Knipe’s work. However, I can convey my impressions of the result, both as a native speaker of English, as well as a reader with some background in a least one of the many areas of “the Baron’s” expertise.

[Speaking of "The Baron," although the translator, like many others, refers to him as such, there is no evidence in this book, or anywhere else that I have looked, such as the Almanach de Gotha, to show that he was, in fact, an aristocrat -- other than one of the Spirit. Indeed, Evola himself not only never calls himself `Baron,` and slyly says on page 10 that while he never took a university degree because he didn't want to be addressed by some bourgeois title, "I was later to be addressed with all sorts of titles which I do not, in fact, possess." Until proven otherwise, I will insist that his title has the same authenticity as "Baron" Corvo's].

To start with the area of expertise: having been a student of German Idealism in my university days, the chapter I most looked forward to was the one dealing with Evola‘s attempt to master, and then dominate, the [according to him] sorry state of Italian Idealism [Croce, Gentile, etc.] with his own doctrine of Magical Idealism, especially since not even the texts themselves have been translated [other than some lectures available at the Gornahoor site].

Unfortunately, this chapter, the longest in the book, seems to have taken Fichte rather than Schopenhauer as its model, and even someone with the aforementioned scholastic background would find it tough going. Of course, this is Evola‘s fault, not the translator’s; however, the translator has not made things any easier by some idiosyncratic renderings of frequent, and important, terms: most particularly, `placing’ for what is usually translated from German as `positing,’ and `conscience’ in some places for what must be the Italian for `consciousness.’ Although this may reflect some nuance in Italian discussions of Idealism, I think it will needlessly confuse the neophyte, who will have enough problems with Evola‘s Magical Idealism itself.

A few other infelicities: the Fascist publisher Bottai presumably “turned on” Evola, rather than “turned down,” since the articles did appear, but generated a firestorm of protest; and while a `disproval’ is indeed English, it’s an awkward way to `disprove’ something. Otherwise, the translation is quite flowing and idiomatic, even a pleasure to read.

As for the editor’s contributions, these include nearly all of the many footnotes, which provide annotations that go beyond merely filling in names and dates [for which Evola seems to have had an aristocratic disdain, especially English names -- "Mutton' for "Musson,' etc.] to include extensive cross references to books and online resources for further research. I can find no controversial area of Evola studies, from anti-Semitism to National Socialism to sex magic, that the editors have failed to anticipate and provide appropriate guidance.

Of course, one can always find areas of disagreement. The note on page 76 implies that Nietzsche simply “rejected” the antithesis between Apollonian and Dionysian as propounded in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. This is far too blunt; at best, Nietzsche continued to refine the contrast, and Julian Young has argued convincingly that it continued to ground his thought right to the end.

Also, the note on page 17, while containing valuable references to Wasson and Furst, fails to take into account more recent research, by Michael Hoffman for example, which would correct Evola and the editors’ claim that the Greek mystery religions used “wine or other drugs;” Greek wine was no more hallucinogenic than our own, and rather than assuming, as some scholars have, that the Greeks had a different metabolism than our own, we can infer that additional drugs were added to the wine when “mixed” for serving.

Finally, the note on page 151 misleadingly cites a French translation of Hans Bluher as if it were in English; given the almost total lack of English versions of Bluher’s work, despite his influence from the Wandervogel to Francis Parker Yockey, it might have been good to refer the reader to such related works as Hubert Kennedy’s collection, Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany.

The editors have also included translations of six interviews of various lengths, one new, the rest having appeared in the appendix to the Italian edition of Ride the Tiger, totaling 20pp of additional material. Providing clarification on some points, and bringing in Evola‘s views on the contemporary scene, they also provide some charmingly dated slang: “beat girls”? And what on Earth was “the nude look”? Yowsa!

As for the book’s production, the only outright error I can find in the text is `bow’ on page 236, where Evola has already explained that word, appearing in his title, The Bow and the Club, and must now be explaining the `club.’ Also, while there is a beautiful and appropriate cover by Michael Lujan, one wonders whether some of Evola‘s own Dadaist paintings could not have been included as well.

All in all, this is a exceptionally fine edition of an essential book by one of the XXth century’s most essential thinkers. Since the Italian edition is out of print, and given the valuable editorial additions and appendices, this English language version will be the one everyone should get from now on. The publishers are to be congratulated, and above all rewarded with massive sales!

Comment

Author: Stanislav Maselnik

Denis de Rougemont was a main thinker of the so-called non-conformistes des années trente, a movement of young intellectuals that appeared in France at the morrow of the turbulent 1930s, in opposition to both individualism represented by liberalism and rising collectivism. [1] The main bulk of their work was published between 1930-34 and was concentrated around three separate currents.

• The founders and members of L’Ordre nouveau. An intellectual movement established by the Russian migrant Alexandre Marc (born in 1904 in Odessa as Aleksander Markovitch Lipiansky), its goal was to prepare the conditions for a ‘spiritual rebirth’ of the European culture. Its effort was concentrated on going beyond such dualistic divisions as nationalism-internationalism and capitalism-communism. Its inspirations came, among other sources, from the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard, the federalism of Proudhon, the great critique of Modernity Nietzsche, or from the historicism of Péguy. The thinkers who were a part of L’Ordre nouveau also included Robert Aron, Arnaud Dandieu, Daniel-Rops, Jean Jardin and finally Denis de Rougemont.

• The Catholic revue L’Esprit of Emmanuel Mounier, founded in 1932. From the beginning it evolved in tight collaboration with L’Ordre nouveau. In reaction to the events of the Second World War it radically shifted to the political left , in order to slowly move back to more moderate positions of the ‘New Left’, under which it still publishes to this date.
• Young thinkers of Jeune Droite, who were mostly dissidents of the French reactionary and monarchistic right Açtion française. These thinkers included Jean de Fabrègues, Jean-Pierre Maxence and Thierry Maulnier.

Furthermore, Ferdinand Kinsky also includes among them those thinkers, from whom the non-conformists drew their inspiration: Stern, Blondel, Buber, Nédoncelle, Karl Barth, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain or Nicholas Berdiaeff.[2]

Although the non-conformists came from different backgrounds and their thinking took on some issues rather opposing positions, they all subscribed to the doctrine of ‘personalism’, and, consequently, to federalism. The non-conformists converged on the point that

‘man was above all not an “individual.” He is a “person,” that is both responsible and free, committed and autonomous, a being in himself, but related to his fellowmen by his responsibility’.[3]

As a person, human being is not a lonely monad, not even a rational being, which could exist outside of society, but a social entity whose nature is fulfilled only by sharing his life in common with others. To live within a society does not mean to be enclosed in a ‘homogeneous’ nation-state, but to be a part of multiple and overlapping ‘intermediary’ communities, which are most naturally formed around family, territory, or profession. For the non-conformists/personalists, these intermediary communities both historically and philosophically ultimately share the common European ‘well’ from which they draw their actual particular ideas and traditions. Europe and its culture for them necessarily precede nations and nation-states. The thinkers such as the Schlegels or Herder constructed the idea of a self-sufficient nation from already present, primordial European philosophical and historical traditions. The English historian Christopher Dawson best summarises this position in his 1932 work The Making of Europe, when he notes that

‘The evil of nationalism does not consist in its loyalty to the traditions of the past or in its vindication of national unity and right of self determination. What is wrong is the identification of this unity with the ultimate and inclusive unity of culture which is a supernatural thing.

The ultimate foundation of our culture is not the national state, but the European unity’.[4]

The nation-state was thus only one realised possibility of the European culture. A peculiar thing about nationalist movements was that they consciously denied the notion of their own continuity and grounding in the common European history and philosophical thought. Martin Heidegger would say this was a perfect manifestation of the ‘metaphysics of subjectivity’ – they picked up one particular set of characteristics out of their European heritage and by intellectual sleight of hand, suppressing the memory of their nations continuity with other European sources,[5] argued for their ‘homogeneity and cultural self-sufficiency’.

The French thinker Alain de Benoist recently argued from the same perspective, when he distinguished our ‘objective’ history as ‘a pile of representations of identity of past times and past protagonists’,[6] from our actual-assumed identity, whose dimension is always political since it is based on the projection of our past towards the future. In other words, our actual identity (in the 19^th and 20^th c., it was that of nations and nation-states), always grounds the collective ‘I’ in the past, based on values and necessities of the present and possibilities of the future. As Alain de Benoist adds, ‘memory screens [our timely, historical identity] and retains what conforms to its idea of the past and to the image it wants to give in order to give it a meaning’.[7]

Diversity of European identities

The purpose of Denis de Rougemont’s book The Idea of Europe is precisely to rip off our identity from the grip of the present and selective memory of nation-states and ground it in the timely and space-bound objective narrative of Europe. Rougemont’s preface to the book also forms the general leitmotif that weaves through the whole work:

‘ Europe is much older than the European nations. Their lack of unity and their ever more illusory claims to absolute sovereignty endanger its very existence. If only they could unite, Europe would be saved, and with it all that remains valuable in its richly creative diversity’.[8]

‘from that time onward the name of Europe and the concept of Europe will recur in even more solemn contexts down to the Carolingian Empire, in apostrophes to the Pope, in ecclesiastical panegyrics, in prose and verse chronicles, and in the lives of the saints’.[12]

The final step was taken with Charlemagne, whose dominium was called ‘Europe vel Regnum Caroli’ and on whom his court poet Angilbert bestowed the titles of ‘head of the world . . . summit [or tiara] of Europe . . . supreme father’.[13] Europe thus becomes a political entity, which is not merely constructed as one of the contemporary three divisions of the map of the world (Europe, Libya or Africa, Asia), it is finally an ‘autonomous entity, endowed with spiritual virtues’.[14]

As we know however, this was a premature spring and the fragmentation of Charlemagne’s empire under his three sons soon followed, as if in the anticipation of the things to come in the period from the 17^th to 20^th century. On 434 pages, Denis de Rougemont continues to recount various conceptualisations of Europe that followed. Nevertheless, what is probably the most intriguing section of the book is part seven,[15] where he tries to mend together various 20^th century historians and thinkers to give us an idea what ‘European identity’ means, if it went through such diverse historical manifestations.

Rougemont’s conceptualisation of European identity

First of all, through his overview of different conceptualisations of Europe, Rougemont lead us to reject the idea that there could be one ‘ true’ atemporal European essence, which could be taken as the lowest ‘common denominator’ of everything European.[16] Europe is above all the totality of its representations – and a European is in the first instance the one who finds in its diversity something that resonates with his ‘present I’. The first step in the formation of any identity is thus conscious self-identification, finding one’s possibilities not by ‘returning to the sources’, but by resorting to the sources in order to discover how do they fit into one’s present and future. It might be therefore said that there are ‘two Europes’, the one which is philosophical and historical, i.e., the one which provides us through its totality with different representations of what it has meant to be a European, and the other which is inherently bound to politics. The latter is dependent on the way one answers the question of what one wants Europe to be – 0n the way how does one ‘chooses’ one’s identity from the possible sources. In other words, in one way Europe (‘unconsciously’) already ‘is’, but in the other way it is still dormant, waiting to be appropriated as a political project – consciously adopted as a part of our own present identity. Only when Europe materialises through the political process as a cultural entity, it will be possible to ‘grasp’ it and built upon it in our social life in new ways.

This idea of ‘two Europes’ is in fact very close to the constitutive or expressivist theory of language of Herder. Its importance was recently recognised by the Canadian communitarian thinker Charles Taylor.[17] Herder, and through him Taylor, argued that the language not only describes the reality (‘what is already there’, on the background), as such theorists as Condillac claimed, but also constitutes and recreates it anew, under a different perspective. For Condillac or Locke, linguistic expression was always linked to some pre-existing content, to the idea that ‘at each stage of [linguistic] process, the idea precede[d] its naming, albeit its discriminability results from a previous act of naming’.[18] Herder, however, adds to the language a new, ‘expressive’ dimension, claiming that the interlocution not only describes, but that ‘it also open[s] possibilities for us which would not be there in its absence’.[19] In other words, by saying something, we do not only describe what is already there, but also shape it to a new dimension. By creating a political Europe, we do not only re-represent what is already there, but we are giving Europe a new dimension by the creative process itself.

Perhaps this was also a reason why Heidegger in his later thought credited the poetry for allowing us to temporally ascend to the ‘authentic’ Being. As one of Heidegger’s interpreters Richard Polt notices, ‘if Heidegger is right, then our most authentic relation to language is poetic. Instead of using language as a tool for representation, we should respect it as a rich source of poetic revelation’.[20] The poet thus represents an authentic existence – instead of using old words and worn out meanings, he ‘appropriates’ the reality in relation to his own person. Does it mean that all great minds who try to build Europe politically are also poets?

This excurse to the theory of language might help us appreciate what Denis de Rougemont is ultimately suggesting in his search for ‘the’ European identity. Although there are undeniable sources of European culture such the ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity, the Celts, or the ancient German tribes, what Europe is for us will in the last instance depend on what do we want it to be. It is true that the most of the European thought arose as the positive or negative reaction to the ancient Greeks, be it the Romans with their sombre gravitas who unsuccessfully tried to emulate the joyous Greek spirit, or the Christians who upheld the rational Apollo at the expense of Dionysos. Nevertheless, in the last instance it always depends on ourselves whether we identify with these sources or not. Paul Valéry for instance felt closest to the Greeks, claiming that

‘what we owe to Greece is perhaps what has most profoundly distinguished us from the rest of humanity. To her we owe the discipline of the Mind, the extraordinary example of perfection in everything. To her we owe the method of thought that tends to relate all things to man, the complete man. Man became for himself the system of reference to which all things must in the end relate. He must therefore develop all the parts of his being and maintain them in a harmony as clear and even as evident as possible. He must develop both body and mind’.[21]

Denis de Rougemont would have certainly agreed with Valéry. One might even argue that personalism itself – with its conception of a person as against the liberal idea of a self-sufficient individual, is the conscious adoption of the Greek heritage on the part of the non-conformists. Rougemont keenly notices that our Greek heritage has become in the recent years more important, arguing that

‘the revival of our interest in things Greek is reflected in the twentieth century by the most varied symptoms: discovery of the pre-Socratic philosophers . . . the vogue for mythology (Freud’s Oedipus complex, the Ulysses of Joyce or Kazantzakis, Spitteler’s Prometheus, Gide’s Theseus, Cocteau’s Orpheus, etc); revival of the themes and titles of Greek tragedy by many playwrights, poets, and composers (“Choephores and Eumenides,” by Claudel and Darius Milhaud, to mention only one example, re-created the sacred thrill of the ancient drama, of which a poet like Racine retained only the plot); rediscovery of the secret of the Doric style; passionate researches into the mystery religions . . .[22]‘.

Philosophically and historically, as Denis de Rougemont shows us in The Idea of Europe, we therefore already are Europeans. Politically and in our memory, some still consider themselves to be enclosed within ‘homogeneous’ national entities and deny their shared European roots. Only the future will shows us, however, whether we will also manage to appropriate our identity politically.

The Laws of the Military Houses

In the Roman Empire and other universal states in the days of their decline, attempts were made to arrest the course of deterioration by “freezing” an existing legal or social situation. The Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan was perhaps unique among universal states in applying this prescription of “freezing” from first to last and in achieving the tour de force of arresting change in the outward forms of social life (though not, of course, in the inward realities) over a span of more than 250 years.

In the domain of law the Tokugawa régime, so far from regarding equality before a uniform law as being a desirable ideal, exerted itself to accentuate and perpetuate a caste division between the feudal aristocracy [daimyōs] and their [samurai] retainers on the one side and the rest of the population on the other which was one of the worst of the wounds that the Japanese Society had inflicted on itself during a foregoing Time of Troubles. The cue was given by Tokugawa leyasu’s predecessor and patron Hideyoshi in an edict of A.D. 1587 (popularly known as “the Taiko’s Sword Hunt”) [Taikō was a title given to a retired kampaku, or adviser to an emperor, and is often applied to Hideyoshi] ordering all non-samurai to surrender any weapons in their possession.

The recently and arduously established central government further sweetened the pill for the feudal lords whom it had deprived of their long-abused de facto local independence by leaving them a very free hand to maintain and develop as they pleased, in all matters that the central government did not consider pertinent to the preservation of its own authority, the variegated “house laws” which the ruling family of each fief had gradually hammered out and enforced, within the limits of its own parochial jurisdiction, during the later stages of the foregoing Time of Troubles, particularly during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era.

The edict entitled “the Laws of the Military Houses” which Tokugawa leyasu promulgated in A.D. 1615, on the morrow of his crushing retort to the last challenge to his absolute authority, “is a document which, like the formularies and ‘house laws’ of earlier times, is not so much a systematic collection of specific injunctions and prohibitions as a group of maxims, in somewhat vague language, supported by learned extracts from the Chinese and Japanese classics.” [This quotation and those that follow are from Sansom, Sir G.: Japan, A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press).]

“This ‘Constitution’ … was regarded by the Shogunate as fundamentally unchangeable. It was re-affirmed by each shogun on his succession, in a solemn ceremony attended by all his vassals; and, though circumstances sometimes forced them to alter it in detail, they never admitted or even contemplated any deviation from its essential principles, and they punished without mercy any breach of its commands.”

This in spite of the edict being vaguely-worded and in spite of the freedom allowed to the feudal lords in particular matters.
It is noteworthy that under this ultra-conservative régime a tendency towards the standardization of local laws did nevertheless declare itself.

“Within their own fiefs the barons enjoyed a very full measure of autonomy. … But the Shogunate, without interfering, used to keep a sharp watch on the conduct of the feudatories, and it was one of the chief duties of the censors (metsuke) and their travelling inspectors to report upon affairs in the fiefs. For this and similar reasons there was a general tendency among the daimyō to assimilate their administrative and judicial methods to those of the central authority, and the legislation in which the Shoguns freely indulged soon began to displace the ‘house laws’ of the fiefs where it did not clash with local sentiment and habit.”

The prestige of the Imperial office in Japan

We have [...] to explain why an Imperial House which exercised effective authority for less than three hundred years after the reorganization of the Imperial Government on a Chinese model in A.D. 645 should have survived for another thousand years in impotence as the sole fount of honour and dispenser of legitimacy. All the de facto rulers of Japan, since the time in the tenth century of the Christian Era when the Imperial Government had lost control, had felt it necessary to do their ruling in the Emperor’s name. At the time of writing, an utterly victorious occupying Power was finding it convenient to administer the country through a native Japanese Government acting in the name of the Emperor of the day.

This extraordinary vitality of the prestige of the Japanese Imperial House had been attributed by the Japanese themselves to their own official belief that the Imperial Family were descendants, in unbroken line, from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. But, though, no doubt, this myth went back to the dawn of Japanese history, the deliberate exploitation of it for a political purpose seemed to be no older than the Meiji Period, when the new masters of Japan, who had wrested the de facto power from the last of the Tokugawa shoguns in A.D. 1868 and had appropriated to themselves the manipulation of the indispensable Imperial puppet under pretence of “restoring” him to the status enjoyed by his forefathers, were concerned to enhance the prestige of the institution in whose name they had to rule.

Moreover, the Emperor Hirohito did not seem to have forfeited his hold on the allegiance of the Japanese people by his public declaration to them, on New Year’s Day 1946, that he was not a god but a man. [Footnote: In his rescript of that date, the Emperor Hirohito declared: “The ties between us and our people have always stood upon mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races and fated to rule the World” (English text published in The New York Times, 1st January, 1946).] It therefore looked as if there were some firm foundation, other than the Sun Goddess myth, for the immense esteem which the Imperial House had continued to enjoy through all vicissitudes of their fortunes and Japan’s, and this foundation might perhaps be discovered in the historic “reception”, in A.D. 645, of the Chinese Imperial Constitution of that age.

This bureaucratic system of administration was far too elaborate and refined to be practicable under the rude conditions of contemporary Japanese society. Yet its exotic character, which doomed it to a speedy failure in the field of practical politics, may have been the very feature that ensured its age-long preservation as a palladium of the Japanese polity; for the Japanese Imperial Constitution of A.D. 645 was modelled on that of the then reigning Chinese dynasty of the T’ang, and the T’ang Empire had been a resuscitation of the Han Empire, which had been the Sinic Society’s universal state. On this showing, the Japanese Imperial Office in the twentieth century of the Christian Era was living on political capital that had been accumulated by Han Liu Pang in the second century B.C.

Social change under the Tokugawa Shogunate

The Tokugawa régime [1603-1868] set itself to insulate Japan from the rest of the World, and was successful for nearly two and a half centuries [just over two if you reckon from 1641 to 1853] in maintaining this political tour de force; but it found itself powerless to arrest the course of social change within an insulated Japanese Empire, in spite of its efforts to petrify a feudal system, inherited from the preceding “Time of Troubles”, into a permanent dispensation.

“The penetration of money economy in Japan … caused a slow but irresistible revolution, culminating in the breakdown of feudal government and the resumption of intercourse with foreign countries after more than two hundred years of seclusion. What opened the doors was not a summons from without but an explosion from within. … One of [the] first effects [of the new economic forces] was an increase in the wealth of the townspeople, gained at the expense of the samurai and also of the peasants. … The daimyō and their retainers spent their money on luxuries produced by the artisans and sold by the tradesmen, so that by about the year [A.D.] 1700, it is said, nearly all their gold and silver had passed into the hands of the townspeople. They then began to buy goods on credit. Before long they were deeply indebted to the merchant class, and were obliged to pledge, or to make forced sales of, their tax-rice. … Abuses and disaster followed thick and fast. The merchants took to rice-broking, and then to speculating. … It was the members of one class only, and not all of them, who profited by these conditions. These were the merchants, in particular the brokers and money-lenders, despised chōnin or townsmen, who in theory might be killed with impunity by any samurai for mere disrespectful language.

Their social status still remained low, but they held the purse and they were in the ascendant. By the year 1700 they were already one of the strongest and most enterprising elements in the state, and the military caste was slowly losing its influence.” [Square brackets in the original.] [Footnote: Sansom, G. B.: Japan: A Short Cultural History (London 1931, Cresset Press), pp. 460-2. See further eundem: The Western World and Japan (London 1950, Cresset Press), chaps. ix-xi (pp. 177-289).]

If we regard the year 1590 of the Christian Era, in which Hideyoshi overcame the last resistance to his dictatorship, as the date of the foundation of the Japanese universal state, we perceive that it took little more than a century for the rising of the lower layers of water from the depths to the surface to produce a bloodless social revolution in a society which Hideyoshi’s successor Tokugawa leyasu and his heirs had sought to freeze into an almost Platonically Utopian immobility. This social upheaval was a result of the operation of internal forces within a closed system, without any impulsion from outside the frontiers of the Japanese universal state.

The extent of the resultant change is impressive – and the more so, considering that, for a universal state, the Tokugawa Shogunate was culturally homogeneous to an unusually high degree. Apart from a little pariah community of Dutch business men who were strictly segregated on the islet of Deshima, the only heterogeneous element in the otherwise culturally uniform Japanese life of that age was a barbarian Ainu strain that was socially impotent in so far as it was not already culturally assimilated.
But the Dutch were not the only people permitted to trade: the Chinese traded, too, and lived in a special quarter of Nagasaki.
The Tokugawa Shoguns ruled from Edo or Tokyo. The rise of the merchants was the making of the city.
Deshima has since been absorbed by reclaimed land, becoming part of Nagasaki, but the settlement has been restored and can be visited.

The strictest period of isolation (sakoku) lasted from 1641, when Deshima was estabished, to 1853, when Commodore Perry arrived in Edo Bay with his warships. But a considerable branch of learning – Rangaku (literally “Dutch learning”, by extension “Western learning”) – was developed by Japan through its contacts with the Dutch enclave. Dutch learning allowed Japan to keep abreast of Western technology and medicine and was an incubator for the vaster project of learning and absorption which began after 1853 and gained strength after the Meiji restoration. It remained illegal for Japanese to leave Japan until after the restoration.

Originally published in A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

The article was assumed from Synergies européennes.