Editor’s note: This is an interesting historical document illustrating common attitudes among NS-leaning German intellectuals toward Jews during the 1920s. Alexander Jacob, who translated this work, provides an informative introduction. This is a very long document in 4 parts. Part 3 has an 8500-word critique of Spinoza, Marx, and Einstein as illustrating Jewish thought patterns, included here because of its historical interest. Much of it will likely not be of interest to readers.

Otto Dickel (1880–1944) was the founder of the Völkisch German Work Community (Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft) movement which sought to develop a nationalist socio-political model on the basis of the trade union system. Dickel studied natural science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. From 1909, he worked at the Realgymnasium as a gymnastics teacher and, from 1918, as a teacher of natural science. He joined the NSDAP in 1921 and entered into negotiations with the National Socialist Party under Anton Drexler to merge Dickel’s grouping with the Drexler’s. But Hitler refused such an alliance and even considered Dickel’s left-tending ideology as being opposed to National Socialism. Dickel was therefore forced to leave the NSDAP. In 1934, Dickel was arrested for his association with the Leftist National Socialist, Otto Strasser, and sentenced to ten months in prison. At the beginning of the Second World War, he established contacts with opposition groups. But in 1944, fearing arrest by the Gestapo, he committed suicide.

Dickel wrote Die Auferstehung des Abendlandes (Resurgence of the West) in 1921 (second edition 1922) in order to demonstrate that the West is not in decline, as Oswald Spengler had maintained, but rather on the path to a new resurgence. As an anti-capitalist, Dickel placed his hopes on the development of the notion of trade unions into work communities, rather in the corporative sense.

His conception of historical development is—unlike the fanciful Spenglerian depiction of organic cycles of civilization that undergo birth, development and decline—based on a deeper understanding of the racial conflict at the heart of modern European history. As he declared in the preface to the second edition of his work, the fundamental idea of his book was

to reveal cultures as symbols of racial souls, to present the history of the last century as the battle between the Jewish and Germanic minds, and to draw the correct conclusions from this knowledge.

The book is divided into two parts, the first dealing with ‘Western culture and its enemies’ and the second with ‘The destiny of the West and Germany’. The first part consists of an introduction and six chapters devoted to ‘The character of Cultures’, ‘The West’, ‘Centralism’, ‘Jewry’, ‘Capitalism’, ‘Trade Unions and Socialism’. I present here only the chapter on Jewry since it is essential to an understanding of Dickel’s worldview, which informs his study of German history as well as his optimistic predictions of Germany’s future. The second part consists of an introduction and four chapters on ‘Our religious destiny’, ‘Our Foreign Political Fate’, ‘Our Internal Political Fate’ and ‘The Mothers’, respectively. I have translated the section on foreign policy since it expands Dickel’s insights into the Jewish psyche onto the international political scene.

* * *

Dickel’s opposition to Jewry is based on his perception of the fundamental intellectual and spiritual differences between Jews and Germans and the danger to the Germans posed by the materialistic, utilitarian and internationalist mentality of the Jews. Dickel’s study of Jewry is, in some ways, an extension of Eugen Dühring’s in his 1881 work Die Judenfrage. Dickel was clearly inspired by the latter work since he develops many of the arguments presented in it.

However, regarding the cultural capacity of the Jews, while Dühring considered the artistic sterility of the Jews as being due to their lack of “that free and unselfish activity of the mind which alone ad­vances to uninterested truth and beauty”, Dickel points to the lack of inwardness and depth of soul in their works as their main defect. It is interesting to note here that his discussion of the artistic poverty of the Jews is immediately followed by an analysis of the materialistic physics of Einstein since they both arise from a defective materialistic quality of the Jewish psyche. All of Einstein’s theses are based on a sterile conception of time as dependent on physical movement, whereas, for the Western European, time has always been an independent force of life itself and thus naturally related to the living observer rather than to moving material objects. While Western physics is based on notion of lines of force, Einstein posits matter imbued with force. This is a confirmation of his, and the Jewish, materialistic worldview.

While Dühring focused in his economic treatise Waffen, Capital und Arbeit (1906) on the egoism and lack of conscience of the Jewish character as being the chief obstacles to the establishment of real social justice, Dickel points to the utilitarianism that results from this egoism as the chief defect of Jewish economic and political systems. Marx’s ideology reveals the Jewish addiction to utilitarian goals in its depiction of history as an inexorable progress of society according to the commercial benefits of its economic infrastructures.

Both Marx’s and Einstein’s worldviews are indeed continuations of that of Spinoza, who also had considered matter and spirit as two aspects of the same Being, or God, or Nature. Thus, in the final analysis, the egoism that Dühring had pointed to as the defect of the Jew is more precisely identified in its dangerous quality as being due to the peculiarly undeveloped spiritual condition of the Jewish ego, which cannot abstract itself from matter since its God, or Substance is the same as Nature.

Spinoza’s political philosophy is a further confirmation of his utilitarianist thought. The state, according to Spinoza, is only an institution that would guarantee the protection of property. This is because Spinoza’s ethics is based squarely on knowledge, that is, the knowledge of that which is useful to any particular individual or individuals. In nineteenth-century socialism, this utilitarian function of the state is, of course, quickened by the state’s appropriation of all private property.

Dickel’s answer to the dangers of Jewish Socialism is the cultivation of trade unions, which he considers as a counter-revolutionary movement to the Jewish Socialism:

Socialism wishes to make everything equal, standardized, programmed, it wishes to drag down into the dull skeletal structure of the proletariat, wishes to form and administer everything in a centralistic manner, to force the free man into the compulsory guidance of the ‘ladder of humanity’ because it arises from the kismet-directed materialistic, internationalist Jewish worldview. Its character is fanaticism. Its means are political struggle, its goal is battle with slogans against wealth. That is, in every point, the direct opposite of the trade unions. The latter wish to raise the individuals from the uniform stream of the masses, they wish to create personality values, want a guarantee of individual standpoints and autonomy. They wish to create free, self-conscious and responsible men because the trade unions arise from the Western planetary worldview of force and of the dissolution of the finite into the infinite, of the individual into his profession and his fatherland. Its character is struggle and creation, in small things and big, is action. Its means are the work community, struggle for cultural and economic goods that are reachable. Its goal is battle against poverty. Trade unions and socialism are deadly enemies. (Ch.VI)

It is within the framework of the trade union that Dickel envisages his ideal work community of the nation:

In all parts of the fatherland the true intellectual leaders should join in a union that points out to the masses the great cultural connections that lead to the Church, the fatherland and the trade union. A union of German men should arise that will find the truly great creative minds, that produces not statutes but works, by bearing the great cultural idea in all professional associations and trade unions—each as seems best to it—that brings together the fragmented, that undertakes to exert influence on the press and, if it wishes to do something more that is unfortunately necessary, provides the means of publicization. A union that is conscious of the fact that its lifespan ends with the consummation of its work—an inwardly united fatherland. (Ch. X)

The Jewish economic utilitarianism is bound to a total lack of personal feeling for the land in which one has grown up and a disdain for all patriotism. And laissez-faire economics leads, through the establishment of world markets, inevitably to internationalism. The total disparity between the Jewish worldview and the Western European is thus responsible for the revolutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The lack of patriotic feeling among the Jews led to their exploitation of the economic discontent that may have been present in the working classes of some nations in such a way that, overriding the natural patriotic feeling of the Western European, the Jews fostered among them internationalist economic schemes such as the Communist International.

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An excerpt from Otto Dickel’s The Resurgence of the West, Part I, Chapter 4: Jewry

With the discussion of the character of Jewish culture I touch on a question that nobody can ignore for whom the fate of his nation lies close to his heart. Spengler too dealt with it—in an uncommon way. He proposes the bold opinion that the Jews, who today represent a world-ruling power, have sunk to the status of a fellah people [i.e., peasant, agricultural worker]. That sounds like contempt. It is possible that he is led to this by an unexpressed point of view that we cannot perceive. He lets us grope in the dark. The Jewish question is not an internal German matter that seems more important to some and less to others; it is the most important matter of the entire West today. Its presence can be denied only by dishonesty or stupidity. Its practical solution is a question of life for millions of Europe’s inhabitants. The large masses of the nation, including the educated strata, are not yet clear about this. Among the many causes of this strange phenomenon, the way in which the battle between the hostile parties is conducted plays a decisive role.

We are in desperate need of a defensive front against the Jewish rule and the enslavement of the nation. The dedicated pioneers who wish to establish this accomplish a patriotic deed. They have not all gathered under the flag of anti-Semitism. They know that its champions often follow false paths and only too easily fall under the influence of people for whom the feeling of patriotism and healthy racial feeling of the German man was always a means of satisfying their own lust for power. The people are only too well aware of this fact. The Jew exploits it. He hammers into the masses without judgement who read only his press false associations of ideas such as—swastika-bearers: reactionaries; nationalist movement: endangered republic; anti-Semite: enemy of the workers. In addition, the German bears in his breast the soul of the West and therefore rejects violence and blood-letting so long as the most frightful pressure does not force his impetuous revolt. These are some of the many reasons that make the defence against anti-Semitism easy for the Jews. He knows the mood of the people; he knows how to throw the effective catchwords to the crowds and thereby exploits skillfully and efficiently the power that gives him almost exclusive rights to the press. His marked acting talent comes in very handy that enables him to perform in a masterly manner the role of the liberator and friend of the people. But he is brutal; he understands only moods not souls. For this reason, he hopes to master through force the growing spiritual movement, thinks he is safe and pushes things too far. That will be bitterly avenged.

As everywhere, in the present day an aimless back and forth has become the characteristic of the situation. The practical, non-violent solution of the question is the correct, reachable goal. It serves the peaceful development of the whole and therefore serves the true benefit of the nation.

One who wishes to solve the Jewish question—and it must be solved—must dig deep. He must recognise that the Jew prospers only where decay rules, that he comes to power and becomes a frightful pestilence where no barrier is offered to his profiteering mentality. That can be reached only on one path: through the creation of a German law that makes it impossible that the source of all national cultural and economic life, the land, falls victim to exploitation through usury and through which the slavery to interest and its protector, the party system, is removed. The Jew fears these constructive demands, not anti-Semitism, especially when its representatives all too often depend on secret Jewish ties. They see to it that reason becomes nonsense, good deeds a plague, and instruction incitement. No word of condemnation is sharp enough against that instinct that has as its goal the arousal of tendencies to pogroms. Unfettered passions have never yet brought benefit to a nation, always severe harm. Passion makes one dumb and blind against truth and reason. Therefore, once it is released, it tears down all dams. One who was even a leader must a few hours later obey and is torn apart with the flood. The nation is not an engine that can be stopped and started again.

Our nation needs not exaggeration and lies but knowledge and awareness, and it needs these more than any other because, in it, the concept of the retention of the sacredness of the blood has become a habit since ancestral times. But the truth is that a deep gap divides the German from the Jew. In everybody there lives the soul of his culture and they are essentially different one from the other. Therefore the two cannot understand each other. And furthermore: that is why every Jew who interferes in our affairs, occupies an official position or influences public opinion is, consciously or unconsciously, an enemy of our fatherland. One who contests this statement allows himself to be deceived by superficialities. The term ‘patriotic Jew’, no matter whether he be born in Germany, France or England, is the same absurdity as a black mould. Only babblers can point here to Disraeli. This Jewish statesman at the head of the English Empire never thought other than as a Jew. His own statements and writings present eloquent proof of this.

Part 1

The Valhalla of the West lies somewhere in the infinite. Only active, brave men will have a share in it. The paradise of the Arabs lies somewhere in a magical place that we cannot also experience. There, for the believer who lives and dies for Allah, beckon rich sensual enjoyments, there beautiful houris [i.e., maiden women with beautiful eyes who are described as a reward for the faithful] solicit him. The paradise of the Jews lies on earth. He does not fight to possess it. It will come. The earthly thousand-year Reich in which he will rule over all nations, in which—as is said in one of their best prophets Isaiah II—the kings will lick the dust off his shoes and all the wealth of the world will belong to him has been assured to him by his God repeatedly.

The Jewish paradise is on earth. Of that there is no possible doubt. After the creation of Eve, when Adam still lived in paradise, the Lord speaks to him: ‘Fill the earth and make it subject to you!’ This passage is completely nonsensical if earth and paradise are not made equivalent to each other. This worldview speaks more clearly to us in the passage after the Fall, where it says: ‘And the Lord God drove Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden and placed before the garden the cherubim with sharp hewing swords so that they would not return and eat of the tree of life.’ One may try to place oneself into this worldview. It is simply impossible. According to the Western way of feeling, paradise should, at the moment of expulsion, have wafted away into a cloudy infinity and been lost forever to man. Thus, quite apart from the fact that it is impossible for the German man to imagine working by the sweat of his brow as the punishment of God, his mythology can never, to his mind, express the idea of a return of one who is expelled to the Garden of Eden—on which no mortal can, from that time on, set foot again. One might be tempted to consider this biblical passage as a relic from earlier times that bears along with it a pure, rationally elaborated religious doctrine akin to Puritanism if the history of the origins of the Old Testament did not bluntly contradict this interpretation. Even though the Old Testament was often revised, changed and falsified by the authoritative Jewish religious leaders, it doubtless essentially reflects the original version of the worldview of these people.

Whereas the soul of our culture forces us to cover the infinite to seek our Valhalla, that of the Jew forces him to seek felicity on earth. His soul wanders up and down, unsteady and fluctuating, and it seeks the earthly thousand-year Reich. That is the basic view of these people that becomes for us the key to the solution of many riddles that they present to us. It explains their strange lust for gold and money, their complete lack of feeling for a native land and fatherland in the sense of spiritual growth, historical feeling, their utilitarian standpoint, their extraordinarily strongly marked communistic impulses on one hand and their lust for power on the other, their internationalism and imperialism. For every Jew, no matter how he may be, is both. But only for his person. Hence arise the contradictions that we can follow in all his doctrines, in all fields. For him they are not contradictions. Each erects for himself a small Reich, his earthly paradise, in which he stands as the central point, in which each must follow his will unconditionally. Unconditionally! That characterises him as a Semite, as a slave-owner. Whether he is a gentle or cruel master is a matter of personal disposition.

The Jew is a stranger on Western soil. We therefore confuse concepts when we evaluate him with our measures, judge him from our moral code. There are as many moral codes as there are people. No Westerner can experience the Jewish one. His concept of good and evil is fundamentally different from ours. This wall of differentiation that cannot be overcome differentiates him and us from each other. The saying that is often heard, that the Jew has no character, is false. On the contrary, he has a very marked character and remains true to it. That which is good and that which is useful are the same thing for him. I have demonstrated the reason for this. That is why he does only that which brings him direct or indirect benefit. Here springs the font of hard-heartedness that can be heightened to immeasurable cruelty when he considers it necessary to remove obstacles to his striving for that which is useful to him. Every impartial person knows that this characteristic—which is repulsive to us—is to be found in all Jews, except that some are able to hide it more skillfully than others. Selfless self-sacrifice is something completely incomprehensible to him.

The same is true of compassion, as far as non-Jews are concerned. He can observe the sorrows of others without the least emotion if only his own advantage remains preserved. As long as he cannot exploit a distress to his advantage, he does not move a finger. On the other hand, he strives with all his force there to bring as many people as possible to helpless dependency on himself. Thence arises his extraordinarily strongly developed mistrust. Since the useful is good, every means to attain it is right, even when he goes against the law thereby. Punishment therefore is nothing dishonourable for him. Especially strongly marked is his cunning and his art of disguise. The role of rescuer, of the best friend in misery, of the commiserating brother he plays excellently, and creeps under this mask into the heart of his victim, whom he sucks dry mercilessly as soon as he has lured him into his net.

The basic character of his nature produces also his good characteristics. When he sees his benefit bound to that of his occupation, be it as a merchant, doctor, press representative or state employee, he is indefatigably active. Here the average German man may learn from his example. It is true that many, certainly not all, Jews push themselves forward. Their great influence in professional associations is, however, almost always well deserved. Here he works, while others sit at home, here especially his strongly developed sense of reality is valuable. He intervenes and tackles matters appropriately whereas many of his opponents generally do not go beyond the forging of plans and deliberations to action.

Again, it is quite different where he plays the leader of the masses. There, just words are necessary for him that he knows to form into catchwords in a masterly manner. The happiness of those he leads which he always talks about is to him totally a matter of indifference. He pursues his own goals, which—for example, in the battle against feudalism—coincide to a certain degree with those of his followers. He knows how to skillfully hide his cloven foot until he thinks it is no longer necessary to show it openly. Trotsky provides us an object lesson on this in a grand manner. Is that alone not enough to hate the Jew? Now, hatred is a matter of one’s disposition and taste. It is useless for a defence against evils. For that, in the special case of politics, there is only one means: to appear before the masses as a true friend of the people without any ulterior motives. Today that is difficult. On account of one’s own fault. The Jew has, through decades-long activity been able to tear the soul out of the breast of the people because he had opportunities for his subversive activity in bountiful measure. The word ‘ethnic people’ was not heard gladly. It sounded so hostile, so revolutionary.

What is useful is good and therefore allowed. That is the entire content of the Jewish spiritual view. And he acts according to it. He cannot act differently, even if—an unimaginable case—he would like to do it very much. We should not persist any longer in the folly of past centuries, to the spread of which Roman law and the Churches of both confessions have contributed heartily—that there is a human culture that rises in a straight line, that human action and thought is the result of education and training. This dull, rationalistic conception has brought us to misery. In the course of many ages, it has alienated the propertied classes from their culture, removed the priority of their understanding over the heart, and forced them onto paths that the Jew traverses through his inner instinct. Marx once said something like this: The Jew is emancipated through the Judaisation of the bourgeois. He was exactly right. But the soul of the West is not dead for that reason. It breaks through repeatedly. Its voice does not allow itself to be ignored for a long time with impunity. That is called conscience.

2

The soul wandering unsteadily up and down the earth could not, through the people of their sort, produce any great buildings and artworks, no philosophy and mathematics of their own and no states. Nowhere in the thousands of years of the history of Jewry do we find a great creative mind. The only unique thing that the Jewish mind has produced are some psalms. They cannot, even on a generous judgement, be characterised as powerful intellectual accomplishments. This nation was not even able to build its temple in Jerusalem without foreign help. The short-lived states that the image of its history shows are the works of foreign racial leaders. Its philosophy and mathematics are imitations and elaborations of the creations of other cultures into which it has infused its own worldview. Indeed, it has not even formed a religion, in our sense, through its own force. Whereas all other religions, including those of primitive peoples, are interwoven with an abundance of poetry and sagas, the Jewish religion is lacking in all mythology. What is present of it in the Old Testament is borrowed from foreign cultures. Into its pure images the Jew has infused his own character—kismet, materialism and internationalism—and distorted them into caricatures.

On this much has been written by serious, strictly examining researchers who were, for the most part, friends and admirers of the Jews. It is well-nigh impossible to add something new. I shall nevertheless attempt it but cannot thereby avoid referring to that which is already known for the sake of the whole overview.

The religion of the Jews is a contract between two parties. Jacob says to Yahweh: If you fulfil these five points, then you shall be my God. In the Germanic worldview this biblical passage signifies blasphemy. But it is the mirror of the Jewish soul: action demands a counteraction. Not in heaven but on earth. What is of no use to me I will not do. If you want me to revere you then, good, tell me what you will give me in return. That is why the Old Testament swarms with promises of rule, of the treasures of the world, of a fruitful seed, that is why it is repeatedly announced through the mouths of the prophets: You are my chosen people, my own, I wish to make you a great people. Wherever Yahweh makes a commandment there follows immediately the promise of a reward.

In the Old Testament, one will seek in vain for moral commandments in the sense of Western culture. This fact comes to light most clearly in the Ten Prohibitions that are remarkably designated as Ten Commandments—a whiplash for the pure Germanic sense of language. The Western moral law knows only one ‘Thou shalt’. It is summarised in the glorious sentence: ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself!’ This ‘thou shalt’ is Kant’s categorical imperative: ‘Act in such a way that the maxim of your will may at all times serve simultaneously as the principle of a universal legislation.’ That sounds striking next to the ‘Thou shalt not’—have other gods, take my name in vain, kill, commit adultery, steal, give false witness, covet. All these commandments belong in a penal code. Nowhere else. As in a penal code, there immediately follows also in the Old Testament the threat of frightful visitation up to the third and fourth generation in the case of wrongdoing. However, at the same time, the promise: ‘therefore love me and follow my commandments, them I shall bless up to the thousandth generation.’ It is significant that the only commandment that contains moral worth is based on utility in this world: ‘Honour thy father and mother so that you may be blessed and live long on earth!’

The first commandment is especially remarkable in its reference to other gods. Only a church doctrine that, in the course of its historical development, belongs to three basically different cultural circles, has been transformed by them and carries with it many extra-biblical things from past times, can falsely interpret this unequivocal passage. It maintains that the Jew is a monotheist. He himself has never maintained that, insofar as he was honest. He could not at all because this idea goes against his entire worldview. Yahweh is his god, the god of the chosen people. He is ‘a’ powerful god, as he himself declares, not ‘the’ God. The entire covenant, the foundation of the Jewish faith, would be meaningless if other peoples too shared in it. Thereby the promise of the thousand-year Reich, the sole rights over the wealth of the world, would be worthless. That is why Jewry have—apart from a quite short period of attempts at conversion—always conducted themselves negatively against the entry of others into their religious community. The recognition of the apparent monotheism of the Jew is indeed denied by no impartial person. On the other hand, the objection is often raised that the Jew of today is different from that of three thousand years ago. That is already false because the Jew has maintained his race on the male side in a quite extraordinarily pure way. In this instinctive aversion to miscegenation lies his strength. He lets his daughters marry without difficulty men of other races. For his men, however—insofar as they too are not corrupted—the thought of not producing a pure son as a legal heir is an anguish. So long as a race follows the law of ‘racial purity’, so long too there lives in it the soul of its culture, in this case—where it is only a matter of rationalistic activity, where one cannot strictly speak of its culture—its civilisation. The Jew today thinks, feels and acts exactly like his racial ancestors, exactly like the pure Chinese or pure German. The worldview has not changed and where it has been forced onto false paths it always rectifies itself. Only the external forms in which it is expressed have changed.

The Germanic peoples were always, and are still, monotheists, even if they may call themselves pantheists, monists or atheists. ‘They call gods the sacred numen before which they tremble’, writes Tacitus. Indeed, even the forms in which they symbolise the natural forces and to which they sacrifice are so dimly delineated that already for many the research into our ancient religious system has been ruined. Our god is the infinite, almighty, ubiquitous creator, beside whom no other god has a place. Whether we express this fundamental feeling in a physical, mathematical or biological way is just a matter of taste. In the final analysis, there always remains the eternal, the inscrutable, that we cannot know. Precisely on this point there gapes a deep gap between us and the Jews. For him, the purely rationalistic man, there is nothing that he cannot comprehend through rational inferences. We do not understand this feeling but we observe it in all the important Jews.

Only very superficial minds can point in this context to the veneration of Mary and the saints of the Catholic Church. They are not gods. They are intercessors, assistants, protectors that man inserts in the correct feeling of his powerlessness and helplessness between himself and the lofty, infinite God, quite apart from the fact that their origin for the most part is to be traced back to the influences of the ancient, Eastern Christianity, thus of one that is developed in a way that is quite other than Germanic.

The god of the Jews is only his god. The two are bound to each other by a covenant. I recall only the passage of the narrative of the golden calf. Yahweh speaks to Moses: ‘Go down, for your people, whom you have led out of Egypt, have corrupted themselves; and now leave me so that my wrath may consume them; in this way will I make you a great people.’ But Moses does not leave him but holds out to him the covenants sworn with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. ‘And the Lord repented’.

Even today the contract is everything to the Jew. It is his weapon, which he sharpens and to whose wording he adheres. The un-German law gives him the opportunity for this. For the German man the law is a sacred moral law. Quite unconsciously he inserts cultural values into its rigid form. For the Jew it is the wording of written clauses whose skilled application brings him benefits. Here flows the font of the often-observed superiority and competence of Jewish lawyers. Give the German a German law, and it will dry up.

The Jewish religious doctrine is characterised by a total lack of the concept of force and action, thus precisely of that which constitutes the content of our mentality. Its place is taken by ‘kismet’. Man is exposed to the strong willfulness of the strong god which he conciliates by the fulfilment of the imposed duties, no matter how senseless they may be, as the sacrifice of Abraham shows. Obedience is demanded under all circumstances. As reward there follows blessing. This basic idea is hammered into the people of Israel in hundreds of narrations. If it is obedient, then there will come the earthly thousand-year Reich that is not obtained through bold deeds and not in our sense of a moral transformation of one’s life, but through the fulfilment of the external form that the commandment orders, through the observance of the law. Only this kismet idea makes explicable the unshakeable belief of the Jews in their future rule that has so often been belied in history and soon will come true.

This worldview infuses him even when he denies it. Facts prove this statement, and the present is a single great demonstration of it. From this belief arises his internationalism. Every Jew is an internationalist. He cannot at all think and feel in a nationalist way. He may many times simulate nationalist feeling to himself. Always something different emerges from it. He sets love of the fatherland as posts in his plan of the construction of his world-rule, each according to the circumstances. Disraeli had to act in this manner. His path to New Jerusalem passed through London. But in general, the Jew combats nationalist thought—partly through hatred of the ruling classes, but more through inner instinct. He does not understand foreign culture. He mocks, undermines and subverts it. One who fights for the idea of internationalism fights for Jewish imperialism.

I have restricted myself to a few remarks on the main features of the Jewish character. We cannot change it any more than the Jew himself can. It is the a priori of his worldview that stands in stark contrast to ours. Here planetary world-experience, there kismet; here dissolution of the finite, there materialism; here love of the fatherland, there internationalism. It will be good to consolidate these general remarks with some noteworthy examples.

Part 3

The philosophy of Spinoza is a remarkable amalgamation of the views of Descartes, Giordano Bruno, and the Jewish conceptual world. It is created from the deep conviction that nothing can remain hidden to human reason, that it can track and expose worldly phenomena in their most secret recesses. Creatively Spinoza is a cipher. What he has produced is the result of dogged rationalist activity. He develops his conclusions from principles that he has borrowed from elsewhere and remodeled for his goals, which he pursues to their extreme end without consideration of the demands of the mentality and the a priori’s of the Westerner. The results of his different series of thoughts therefore contradict one another—according to the opinion of our philosophers, who do not observe that here cultures stand opposed to each other. Not according to his opinion, for nowhere does he make an attempt at bridging the gap. We would have made an attempt to convince him of his errors in vain. On the contrary. He would have shaken his head in despair about our false presuppositions and enormous false conclusions just as Marx would have done and Einstein today does.

Both kismet and materialism are expressed in the sentence that stands at the centre of the Spinozist doctrine: deus natura sive substantia. God, whether Nature, or Substance.

It cannot be overemphasized how the rest of Spinoza’s philosophy—his philosophy of mind, his epistemology, his psychology, his moral philosophy, his political philosophy, and his philosophy of religion—flows more or less directly from the metaphysical underpinnings in Part I of the Ethics. Let it be expressly highlighted that Spinoza was indeed aware that his god has nothing in common with the god of our Christian conception, is not a creator, not an active power. The concept of power is fully lacking in him. Therein lies the fundamental difference between his and the Brunonian purposeful pantheism. There is, Spinoza teaches, only one substance that we call God or Nature. Body and soul are not separated entities, as Descartes stressed so sharply. Therefore the question of their mutual interaction is irrelevant; since they are not present, they cannot operate on each other. Rather, material and spiritual phenomena are only two sides of the same world process. The thinking and extended individual objects are merely changing conditions of the uniform base of the world. To speak of independent objects or, indeed, of their purpose and development is not permissible, for they are only appearance and deception. They are neither created by Substance nor do they separate themselves from it—contrary to the Talmudic doctrine—but they follow necessarily from the nature of Substance, just as ‘from the nature of the triangle it follows that the sum of their angles is equal to two right angles’. All of Being is uniformity and necessity. Only God, Nature, Substance acts fully freely because he does nothing that contradicts his nature. He follows only self-ordained laws. Indeed, what should be able to force him to act differently since nothing exists outside him. Individual objects, thus also men, are effects and dependencies of the Substance, are particularities of the universal. From this it follows that man does not possess freewill.

Substance is something real, material. There can be a doubt of that only for those who forcibly wish to interpolate something forcibly into Spinoza that is not contained in his doctrine. He says expressly that Substance is the Being in things, constitutes their reality, manifests and bears them. Corporeality and reality coincide fully in him. He interchanges the concepts res and corpora at will. The ideas are only mirror images of the real. The last doubt regarding this materialistic conception disappears in an examination of the fourth definition: By attributes is to be understood what the reason understands as ‘that which constitutes the nature of substance’. Here it is unequivocally expressed that the attributes are real, not characteristics that are thought of, in other words, characteristics that the substance also possesses independent of the observer. From this conclusion are produced for us irresoluble contradictions in the Spinozist doctrine. Every attempt at explanation and interpretation of these is superfluous and false from the start. The Jew indeed thinks differently from us.

The profound intellectual difference comes most clearly to light in Spinoza’s ethical doctrine. Will and understanding are the same, a notion that is the obvious consequence of the missing conception of power. Virtue is based only on knowledge just as even today the wise Jew is considered the virtuous one. Self-maintenance is the foundation of virtue, for how could anybody act well if he does not wish to live. Self-love is a demand of Nature or, in other words, of God or Substance. Therefore everything that serves it—the useful—is allowed. Useful is that which heightens our power, activity or perfection, or promotes wisdom. To act virtuously means to follow the leadership of the understanding in self-maintenance. A greater difference between this demand and the categorical imperative of Kant, or the Jewish and Western worldview, is just not thinkable.

From this foundation Spinoza comes to his strange political doctrine, which is nothing but an international society for the protection of property. His thought-process is as follows: There is in general no injustice as such, for unjust is indeed only that which is not useful. But nobody will have a desire to do anything that goes against his benefit. The coming together of many men who are ruled by their passions each of whom has a claim to everything useful makes an order based on the reasonability of the whole seem desirable. They form a state which has the function to protect them from illegal encroachments into their property. Only from this moment on does there exist an injustice. In addition, the state has to take care of the education that likewise serves the utility of the individual. The state obviously signifies a restriction of personal authority. It is therefore not useful. But since it brings order, the wise man will risk the minor harm.

The foundation of the state is material, its highest ideal!

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Is that not the same that we find again in Marx? Unfortunately, Marx was not able to bring to fruition his plan to write a philosophy. It would apparently have turned out to be nothing but an improved Spinoza. An indication of this is given by the following passage from which it emerges at the same time that the much-discussed idea of development of Marx has a quite different significance than we attribute to it, a markedly Jewish one. The passage is found in the Foreword to the second edition of Das Kapital:

My dialectical method is not only basically different from the Hegelian but its direct opposite. For him the thought process, which he transforms, under the name of idea, into an independent subject, is the demiurge of reality, which forms only its outer appearance. For me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing but matter transferred and translated into the human mind. Here the passage from the ‘Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law’ also deserves mention: ‘It is therefore the duty of history to establish the truth—after the world beyond has disappeared—within this world.’

Let us cite especially these very clear sentences:

From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and nourished with the Kantian and Fichtean, I came to seek the idea in reality itself. If the gods had earlier dwelt over the earth, now they had become its centre.

I had read fragments of the Hegelian philosophy, whose grotesque, rocky melody did not please me. I wanted to dive down into that ocean one more time, but with the definite intention of finding that spirit is as necessarily, concretely and firmly grounded as matter, of no longer wanting to practice the fencing arts, but of drawing pure pearls out into the sunlight.

I wrote a dialogue of about 24 pages: “Cleanthes, or the Starting Point and Necessary Progress of Philosophy.” Here, art and science, which had gotten entirely separated from each other, were to some extent united, and like a robust wanderer began the work itself, a philosophical dialectical progress of divinity, how it manifests itself as a notion in itself as religion, nature and history. My last sentence was the beginning of the Hegelian system.

This materialistic conception of the world forms the foundation of Marx’s historical doctrine. It is a classic example of the kismet worldview of the Jews. That is why almost every German worker and every trade unionist, without exception, opposes his new Bible. Marxist Socialism does not in the least intend to improve the economic situation of the workers. In general, it does not have any goals. The deficient knowledge of the fundamental significance of the materialistic conception of history and the amazingly enormous ignorance of its character in worker and bourgeois circles is the consequence of the cultural difference between Jewry and the West. The two do not understand each other. The German wants action, force, life. To the Jew these are unknown concepts, just words to which he attributes a completely different meaning. For Marx the worker is a totally powerless product of the economic system. It is quite useless for him to want to revolt against the existing conditions. He can only wait until the structure of the present social order collapses. That will occur without any help from outside or inside:

At a certain stage of development the material productivity of society will contradict the conditions of productivity or—to use the legal expression for it—the ownership conditions within which it had moved. From the developmental forms of the productive force these conditions are transformed into its own chains. There then enters an epoch of social revolution: With the change of the organic foundation, the entire enormous superstructure is revolutionised slowly or rapidly.

It is revolutionised slowly or rapidly, but it is not the subversive masses who revolutionise it. This sentence says everything. But it seems to me to be important to cite a further number of passages because one cannot do enough to reveal the real Marxist doctrine to the public, not the exploited catchwords as have become commonplace. Only then will it become indisputably clear how completely impossible it is for every Westerner who wishes to see actions and defend ideas to belong to the Marxist association.

It (the working class) does not have to realise any ideals; it only has to liberate the elements of the new society that have already developed in the lap of the collapsing bourgeois society.

The revolution is not an act of the will. It follows from the nature of the existing society. This conception has been stated quite unequivocally by Marx in his Communist Manifesto:

The theoretical propositions of the Communists do not consist in any way of ideas, of principles that were invented or discovered by any world-improvers. They are only a general expression of the actual conditions of an existing class struggle, of a historical movement that is taking place in front of our eyes.

The success of this movement will be the thousand-year Reich on earth in which the exploited will rule over the exploiters. At the same time, it follows that, according to the Marxist doctrine, a class struggle can never be an economic struggle. He expresses that in the sentence: ‘Every class struggle is a political struggle.’ In other words, a struggle for power, for the centralist state authority, for it is a matter only of a takeover of an exaggerated centralism. In simple language it means that the existing conditions will increasingly strive for a high point, then the names of the powerholders will change, nothing more. Therewith the worker is naturally not helped. Marx did not draw—and, as a Jew, he could not indeed draw this conclusion—the only one permissible according to Western ways of thought. He does not notice the deep contradiction in his conclusions—as little as Spinoza in his political doctrine. On the other hand, his conduct with regard to the trade unions was logical. He did not combat them but dealt with them coolly. Its activity—which has improved the economic condition of its members, as can be contested by nobody today—seemed to him to be as worthless as the consumer associations.

The third characteristic of Jewish thought, internationalism, is especially marked in Marx. Here it can be easily followed on what paths the kismet worldview leads to internationalism: the bourgeois society has successfully undertaken the attempt to make the world-market an object of exploitation. Both production and consumption have accordingly cast off their national costume; they extend to the entire world. The rage and anger that the nationalist circles show against this phenomenon cannot change this process in the least. It can as little prevent even the last remnant of native industry from being absorbed and incorporated in the realm of world industry. In lockstep therewith the worker becomes increasingly deprived of a fatherland. He must perforce become a world citizen. From the core of these conditions there arises automatically the international amalgamation. The day of the First International signifies the signal fires of a new rising world.

Even here the prophet stands in stark contradiction to reality. He reads within his own soul and thinks that he reads that of the Western worker. The idea that an English worker thinks in an international manner is so nonsensical that one hardly dares to express it. A glance at any work of Jaurès shows that, in France, even enthusiastic Socialists cannot accommodate themselves to such ideas and every superficial observer has seen in the events that have played out in 1918 beyond the Rhine how deep-rooted the love of the fatherland is in France, how everyone thinking otherwise is exposed to contempt and persecution. In ingenious speeches the Frenchman lets fall the word Internationalism. Anything beyond that is too much for him. But among the Germans, so I hear, the international idea has found a great expansion.

This opinion is simply stupid. The German thinks in a Bavarian, Saxon, Prussian way. Indeed, not even that. He thinks as a Berliner, Frankfurter, Kölner, Swabian, Frank, Lower Bavarian, Pfālzer. I was very glad when I heard a speech of a convinced Socialist on international workers who then, to tumultuous applause, pronounced as his strongest trump card the sentence: ‘When we have reached our goal we would like to speak to the bourgeoisie in good Upper Bavarian German.’ The German worker has been fully stuffed with empty catchwords. As soon as it is a matter of deeds, the Westerner comes to the forefront. Our actual workers indeed think in an essentially German way as only the best among us do. We are, thanks to a one-sided education, much too accustomed to considering our Roman-Prussian constitutional form—up to now built on commands and obedience, on bureaucratism and schematism—as the only possible political form, so that we consider every proposal of a firm comprehensive change, of a total restructuring, that does not have any resemblance any more to a power state, as ‘hostile to the fatherland’. The workers revolt against this old power state with full justification; for that reason, they are characterised by the ruling classes as ‘enemies of the fatherland’; the senseless fool of the bourgeoisie joins in the clamour and the worker imagines that he is international. If you give the German nation a German constitution instead of the present purely Jewish one, you will see how the Second, Third and further Internationals will dissolve into smoke and mirrors.

* * *

I single out as a counterpart to Marx a man of the ruling social class, the representative of high finance and of ethnic Jewry of the purest stamp: Rathenau. Stinnes has characterised him and his accomplices as men ‘with an un-German spiritual constitution’. Therewith he has hit the nail on the head. Even with the best of intentions Rathenau cannot think other than as a Jew. He lacks the basis of German feeling: German blood. Precisely for that reason is it important to dwell on him for a moment. For, if a man like Marx was filled with a fervent hatred against government and society and gave his life to the nonsense of socialism, the objection would be conceivable that here obstinacy, pettiness and personal destiny had played the driving roles, and made him blind to the fact that socialism leads not to liberty, equality and fraternity but to the most unscrupulous tyranny of the masses according to the will of a few, to outrageous suppression of freedom in all fields, to exploitation in the worst form and the total impoverishment of the nation, that it does not inaugurate a new, finer world but the underworld of Hell. But when Rathenau—through the institution of the war economy, through his international economic plans, his planned economy, his ideas on autonomous economic strategies, through his organisation of Russian Bolshevism and further through his statement, ‘economics is destiny’—shows that he is inspired by the same thoughts as Marx, then every deception is excluded about the fact that the kismet idea, internationalism and materialism are the fundamental spiritual views of the Jews and constitute his worldview.

Rathenau would indeed not have had any reason to lose himself in such ways of thought. He grew up as a spoiled child of affluence; all educational institutions that could provide him German knowledge and character, German art and science, were open to him; he played such a preferred role in the Imperial Court that he could look down with scorn on the feudal nobility and military aristocracy and, after the collapse, all positions of honour and ministerial posts were open to him. And yet he cannot think in a German way. Blood decides.

A German man would never have been able to describe the fate of the German nation as that of one that was buried alive without using this representation as a call, without straining his every nerve to avert this frightful fate. Rathenau did it. Furthermore, in the anti-German Zürcher Zeitung, in Spring 1919, when he wrote:

One who visits Germany in the twenties, which he knew as one of the most prosperous countries of the earth, will fall to his knees in shame and sorrow. The big cities of antiquity, Babylon, Nineveh, Thebes were built of soft clay. Nature let them collapse and smoothed out the land and the hills. The German cities will not stand as ruins but as half-dead stone blocks, still partly inhabited by miserable men. A couple of quarters are alive bu