Brownshirt Princess: A Study of the "Nazi Conscience"

Abstract

In the year 1921 a slim volume of verse entitled Gott in mir [God in Me] appeared in Bremen, Germany. (See online Appendix A). One of the first books to be published by the Angelsachsen Verlag [Anglo-Saxon Publishing Company], founded in 1921 by Ludwig Roselius, a wealthy Bremen merchant in the overseas trade, 1 it consisted of 41 printed pages, interspersed by eight blank pages, along with a title page, a page containing an epigraph, and another containing an envoy of four well-known lines from Goethe's West-östlicher Divan. A frontispiece illustration (fig. 1) -a somewhat altered version of a pen and ink drawing of 1914, entitled variously Neugeburt [New Birth], Ekstase [Ecstasy] and Eine Vision, that first appeared in Franz Pfemfert's dissident, anti-militarist and anti-chauvinist weekly Die Aktion [Action] (fig. 2) and clearly purports to evoke the dawning of a new day, the beginning of a vita nuova -was by the then still well-known, Bremenborn Jugendstil artist Heinrich Vogeler, in the expressionist manner with which he was experimenting at the time. 2 The spacious layout of the book, in no way cramped or economical, and the exceptionally high quality of the rag paper give no hint of the hard times Germany was going through when the book was produced. Everything points rather to a well-financed small edition for a select clientele. The book is in fact listed in only five library catalogues world-wide. 3 The author is given as Marie Adelheid Prinzessin Reuß-zur Lippe.Gott in mir is of interest not so much because of its rarity as because it is an unusual testimonial to the situation in Germany at the time of its publication. The blue-blooded but rebellious God-seeking author subsequently became an ardent National Socialist, was employed as an aide to the Nazi Minister of Food and Agriculture, R. Walther Darré, one 8 Brownshirt Princess them acquired by Dreier in the 1920s. Entitled Eine Vision [A Vision], it combines a representation of the head of a sleeping Buddha, emerging from a background of plants, with a semi-abstract Soviet star motif. 13 In a study of the Worpswede artists put out in 1922 by the same Angelsachsen Verlag that published Gott in mir, the popular Bremen writer S. D. Gallwitz wrote that while Vogeler "enthusiastically called himself a Communist, his Communism was of a very individualist character.[…] Organized, politically oriented Communism had so little use for him that it considered him a spoiler.[…] The alpha and omega of all his demands was in the last instance religious in nature." 14 Vogeler's second wife, Zofia ("Sonja")Marchlewska -the daughter of a leading Polish Communist activist, art critic, and collaborator of Lenin -confirms that observation. Vogeler's publications in the early to mid-1920s, she notes in her memoirs, were all "composed in a mystical language that demonstrates how far the artist still was from understanding the ways and goals of Communism." 15 The future Communist who felt "ein gesetzmäßiges Werden in mir" [an orderly Becoming in me], who described the...

Conceptualising magic in 1950s Germany

“…Beyond theology and church history, historical research has documented various currents of occultism and spiritualism, including the völkisch variants, and a broad field of activities and orientations that thrived between 1900 and 1940 (see e.g. Treitel 2004;Wolffram 2009;Gossman 2009). After World War II though, a large gap seems to extend until the late 1960s, when the New Age movement crossed the Atlantic and contemporary spirituality began to emerge in Western Germany.…”