Hitler as Philosopher : Remnants of the Enlightenment in National Socialism

Birken challenges the conventional wisdom that Hitlerism was a revolt against Western values. Utilizing Adolph Hitler's major writings, speeches, and recorded conversations, this path-breaking study in intellectual history delineates the relationship of Nazism to other European ideologies, both past and present. National Socialism, Birken maintains, was nothing less than an attempt to create a metaphysical foundation for the German nation-state after both the Frankfurt Assembly and the Bismarckian pseudo-Reich had failed to do so. In this context, Hitler can be seen as the last great exponent of the Enlightenment tradition that glorified fraternity. However, by grounding German nationalism in race, Hitler sent his country on a path toward destruction in the Second World War. Birken closes with the warning that our current failure to provide a post-modern substitute for nationalism invites the reassertion of the Enlightenment obsessions of nation and race. Speculative and far-reaching, this book will stimulate the current debate over nationalism and will be of interest to students of politics and the social sciences as well as German history buffs. Rejecting the historiographical tendency to downplay the intellectual, theoretical element in Nazism, contends that Hitler developed a coherent worldview, which proposed a kind of secular theodicy. Hitler's philosophy, which represented an Enlightenment style of thought, can be compared to the philosophies of Marx and Freud; like them, Hitler replaced God with an idealized version of man - only his criterion of humanity was different from theirs: it was creativity. Thus, the Jew, who was considered as culturally sterile as well as an exploiter and seducer, came to serve as an "un-man" and the devil. The Jew's very existence was unnatural in Hitler's view. The demonization of Jews was arbitrary in Nazi ideology; what was essential was their diaspora existence, comparable with the similar existence of Germans, which provided an opportunity to project German self-hatred on them. Dwells on the place of the Jews in Hitler's geopolitics. States that the tendency to downplay Nazism intellectually, or to stress its paradoxality and pathology, detaches it from the stock of Western culture from which it in fact stemmed. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism) Contents......Page 6 Preface......Page 8 Introduction: Hitler and the History of Ideas......Page 10 Hitler as Philosophe......Page 20 Volkish Nationalism in Perspective......Page 32 Hitlerism in Historical Context......Page 42 Fascism and the Mixed Economy......Page 54 Race: The Metaphysics of the Mixed Economy......Page 66 Anti-Semitism......Page 76 Creators, Preservers, Destroyers: Hitler’s Geopolitics......Page 90 Epilogue......Page 106 Selected Bibliography......Page 118 Index......Page 124