The Myth of the Twentieth Century
The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Ger. Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts) is a book by Alfred Rosenberg, one of the principal ideologists of the Nazi party and editor of the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter. It was the most influential Nazi text after Hitler's Mein Kampf. The "myth" is "the myth of blood, which under the sign of the swastika unchains the racial world-revolution. It is the awakening of the race soul, which after long sleep victoriously ends the race chaos" (quoted in Viereck, 2003, p. 229).
Rosenberg was inspired by Meister Eckhart, the racist theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagner's romanticism and also by Aryanism. He believed that God created man as separate races, not as individuals or mankind as a whole, and that only the race has a soul. The Myth of the Twentieth Century was conceived of as a sequel to Chamberlain's The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century (Yahil, 1991, p. 41).
Rosenberg's racial interpretation of history concentrates on the supposedly negative influence of the Jewish race in contrast to the Aryan race. He equates the latter with the Nordic peoples of northern Europe. According to Rosenberg, modern culture has been corrupted by Semitic influences, which has produced degenerate modern art, along with moral and social degeneration. In contrast, Aryan culture is defined by innate moral sensibility and an energetic will to power. Rosenberg believed that the higher races must rule over the lower and not interbreed with them, because cross-breeding destroys the divine combination of physical heredity and spirit. He uses an organic metaphor of the race and the State and argues that the Nazis must purify the race soul by eliminating non-Aryan elements in much the same ruthless and uncompromising way in which a surgeon would cut a cancer from a diseased body.
In Rosenberg's pseudohistory migrating Atlanteans were responsible for Nordic culture and for Aryan ruling castes, which spread across the world in four waves: over North Africa; the Indo-Aryan migration to Persia and India, and the Doric Greeks and Latins; the Teutonic migration; and the colonization by Germanic Western Europe. Rosenberg's "positive" Christianity, which was actually based on pantheistic pagan nature worship and Teutonic Gods, underpins a mystic conception of race in which the Germans are the Chosen people and Hitler is the Messiah sent by God.
This tendentious account of world history is used to support his Manichean model of human experience, as are ideas co-opted from Nietzsche and Darwinian writers of the era.
Thanks to Nazi support the book sold more than one million copies by 1944. Hitler is said never to have read the book (Lukacs, 1998, p. xix). Joseph Goebbels, who in his novel "Michael - a German fate in diary notes" expressed strong Christian beliefs, even called it a "philosophical burp".
See also
References
- Ball, Terence and Bellamy, Richard (2003). The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56354-2
- Lukacs, John (1998). "Introduction to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler". Houghton Mifflin Books. ISBN 0-395-92503-7
- McIver, Tom (1992). Anti-Evolution: A Reader's Guide to Writings Before and After Darwin. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-4520-3
- Snyder, Louis L. (1998). Encyclopedia of the Third Reich Crown Quarto. Wordsworth Editions. ISBN 1-85326-684-1
- Viereck, Peter Robert Edwin (2003). Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-7658-0510-3
- Yahil, Leni (1991). The Holocaust: The Fate of the European Jewry, 1932-1945. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504523-8