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Die Deutschen Briefe: Gurian and the German Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

M. A. Fitzsimons
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Extract

In 1934 Waldemar Gurian had the wriest of pleasures, when he was forced to recognize that his very pessimistic analysis of the National-Socialist movement was correct. He fled from Germany to Switzerland where he was soon joined by his wife and daughter. In the extremely straitened circumstances of an emigré, soon to receive official notification that he was a stateless person, he had to face simultaneously the tasks of earning a living and of carrying on his work as a Catholic writer who combined scholarship and publicism. He was a profound student of Bolshevism. But his study, personal experience and the progress of events emphasized that Europe then faced a more dangerous threat than Russian Bolshevism. The threat stemmed from the control of Germany by the National-Socialists, who skilfully exploited a moral crisis in Germany and all of Europe, to gain and, then systematically and totally, to consolidate power in Germany. The menace to Europe was all the more dire, because the Nazis had disguised their totalitarian movement in the mask of anti-Bolshevism and so the danger went unrecognized.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 1955 , pp. 47 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1955

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References

1 Otto M. Knab furnished much of the information on which the account of the Deutsche Briefe was based. He, also, generously gave the University of Notre Dame Library a complete set of the paper, from which much of the following pages is drawn.

2 Gurian, , The Rise and Decline of Marxism (London, 1938), p. 81Google Scholar. This is a translation of Marxismus am Ende (Einsiedeln, 1936)Google Scholar. Gurian expressed this view in numerous writings, notably in Um des Reiches Zukunft published in Freiburg in 1932 under the name Walter Gerhart. This volume, subtitled “National Rebirth or Political Reaction,” presents a lucid and subtle account of the nationalist currents in post-war Germany.

3 In a later writing Gurian noted that Fritz Ebert, the German socialist leader, had been angered “by the hasty proclamation of the republic.” Quoted from “The Sources of Hitler's Power,” The Review of Politics, IV (10, 1942), 386.Google Scholar

4 Gurian, , The Future of Bolshevism (New York, 1936), p. 51Google Scholar. This is a translation of Bolschewismus als Weltgefahr (Lucerne, 1935).Google Scholar

5 The quotations are from The Future of Bolshevism, pp. 52, 55, 57.Google Scholar

6 Um des Reiches Zukunft, p. 120Google Scholar. Gurian learned much about the kinship of the Bolsheviks and Nazis from the German legal scholar, Karl Schmitt, who became a servant of the Nazi state. The Deutsche Briefe often cite Schmitt as an example of the reckless time-servers, who hselped the Nazis.

7 “The Sources of Hitler's Power,” Review of Politics, IV (10, 1942), 394–395.Google Scholar

8 The preceding three paragraphs are largely based on “The Sources of Hitler's Power,” previously cited, and “Hitler—Simplifier of German Nationalism,” Review of Politics, VII (07, 1945), 316–324.Google Scholar

9 Gurian's major writing on anti-Semitism is “Anti-Semitism in Modern Germany” which was printed in the second edition of Pinson, Koppel (editor), Essays on Antisemitism (New York, 1946).Google Scholar

10 Deutsche Briefe, 12 28, 1934.Google Scholar

11 A quotation from The Future of Bolshevism in the Deutsche Briefe, 03 13, 1935.Google Scholar

12 The Future of Bolshevism, p. 53.Google Scholar

13 The early numbers of the Deutsche Briefe abound in such salient quotations as this from the issue of October 26, 1934.

14 Ibid., November 30, 1934. This is one of a notable series of articles on “National Socialist Cultural Policies,” summarized in the following four paragraphs.

15 Ibid., May 24, 1935, where Bolshevism is described as the deification of man and work and Nazism as the deification of the racial community.

16 Ibid., February 7, 1936.

17 The Future of Bolshevism, p. 71.Google Scholar

18 Deutsche Briefe, 06 21, 1934Google Scholar. “To comprehend National Socialism one must go to its propaganda, for propaganda is one of its decisive weapons. Indeed, it may be argued that in its systematic perfection propaganda is the salient feature of Nazism.” Ibid., June 5, 1936.

19 Ibid., June 14, 1935 and April 10, 1936.

20 Ibid., January 25, 1935.

21 “The Sources of Hitler's Power,” Review of Politics, IV (10, 1942), 397, 379–408Google Scholar. In this article, Gurian's major consideration of the role of the bureaucracy and army, he emphatically related these institutions to the general crisis. “Though German institutions such as the army and bureaucracy did not originate as instruments of a pure will to power, they became such instruments after the social environments in which they originated disappeared.”

22 Ibid., 397.

23 Deutsche Briefe, 02 1, 1935, 01 3, 1936.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., May 31, 1936.

25 Ibid., April 12, 1935.

26 The Future of Bolshevism, p. 81.Google Scholar

27 Deutche Briefe, 04 17, 1936Google Scholar. It is worthy of note that Gurian greatly admired Leon Bloy and read widely in Russian religious literature, and in philosophy, theology and Church history. He repeated the judgment expressed by Rozanov in his last major writings on totalitarianism. See “Totalitarianism as Political Religion” in Friedrich, C. J. (editor), Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 119–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Ibid., February 7, 1936.

29 Hitler and the Christians (New York, 1936), p. 168Google Scholar. It is mournful to recall that this book attracted little critical notice. Some Catholic journals persisted in regarding Soviet Russia as the enemy and Nazi Germany, as a bulwark state, unfortunately guilty of some excesses.

30 Hitler and the Christians, p. 93Google Scholar. My summary barely does justice to Gurian's close analysis in this book and in the Deutsche Briefe, which has permanent value for the religious history of the early Nazi Reich.

31 Deutsche Briefe, 08 16, 1935.Google Scholar

32 On coining to the United States Gurian wrote “Hitler's Undeclared War on the Catholic Church,” Foreign Affairs, XVI (01, 1938), 260–271.Google Scholar

33 This paragraph is a summary of the issues of 1935.

34 Deutsche Briefe, 02 7, 1936.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., Oct. 22, 1936; January 3, March 6, 1936.

36 Gurian made this point most strikingly in his essay in Koppel Pinson's volume I, already cited.

37 The Future of Bolshevism, p. 120.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., pp. 119–120.

39 Deutche Briefe, 02 22, 1935, 04 3, 1936Google Scholar. Gurian understood Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain only too well. He had a Catholic and continental approach to England, a dislike of English Puritanism and smugness. On one occasion he told me with an apologetic smile that as a very young man he had come to dislike England for its treatment of Oscar Wilde. He admired Swift and Newman with reservations. The playful and humorous tradition of England wearied him. His own penchant was for irony, “cast irony” as one of his colleagues put it. Hobbes fascinated him and one of my own dreams was to hear Gurian lecturing to an English audience on Hobbes as a representative Englishman, “the practical Englishman.” But when he was present at denunciations of British imperialism or “tyranny,” he usually indicated that he would find Anglo-Saxon tyranny endurable.

40 Deutsche Briefe, 11 23, 1934Google Scholar, December 14, 1934, February 22, 1935, April 3, 1936, April 17, 1936, July 10, 1936, passim.

41 The Commonweal, 12 2, 1949.Google Scholar

42 “The Catholic Church in Germany,” an unpublished paper, delivered at a Symposium on The Catholic Church in World Affairs, Notre Dame (1951).

43 “Totalitarianism as Political Religion” in Friedrich, C. J. (editor), Totalitarianism, pp. 126–127Google Scholar. Gurian noted that only in the last years of the war did the Nazis move to a pure form of totalitarianism.