Johann Chapoutot, “The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi” (2018) (translated from the French by Miranda Richmond Mouillot) – I’m behind on reviews. I finished this one at least a week ago. “‘It was a lot,’ the reviewer said with all the eloquence one has come to expect of millennials.” Johann Chapoutot brings the approach of the new cultural history (well, not that new anymore, but newer than the old cultural history ala Burckhardt) to Nazism. He combs over Nazi novels (acknowledging a major debt to Klaus Theweleit, who did something similar with a gendered reading of Freikorps literature), policy manuals, legal arguments, and so on to reconstruct “the mental universe in which Nazi crimes took place and held meaning.”

Chapoutot locates the source of meaning for Nazi ideology in a succession of bad biological metaphors popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “struggle for existence” is a big one, as is stuff about nature’s balance, purity, the kind of stuff popular in contemporary pop evo-psych, etc. Unlike Enlightenment philosophers who used the concept of the “body politic” to argue for a rationally organized state, the Nazis understood the social body as answering to romantic imperatives of blood, with predictable results. Chapoutot isn’t an intellectual historian- he doesn’t trace these ideas back to a source (though others, like George Mosse, do). Instead he explores their development and application by people like Nazi lawyers, SS bureaucrats, SA memoirists, etc. They have the naivety one sees in the self-justification of doltish men with power. I think there’s a lot to this approach — call it the intellectual history of dullards — and would like to see it more broadly applied.

The worldview and the actions taken to sustain or instantiate it exist in a permanent feedback loop. Trying to suss out which came first is a chicken-egg question, the kind historians spend pointless decades on. Take Nazi legal theory. The Nazis believed in something like “natural law,” not in the sense Aquinas might have meant it but in an altogether dumber way. The law of nature is that which allows the best to thrive; Aryans are the best, the peak of creation; ergo, what is good for Aryans is the law. Thinking of law as an actual set of rules with meaning was just a Jewish mania for dead abstractions that the legal profession needed to guard against. This was both deeply felt and highly expedient for a dictatorship that didn’t want fetters on its behavior, both domestic and foreign. In the typical fashion of ambitious dolts making up rules as they go according to aesthetics, this tended to bite them in the ass. Their ideas about racial conflict dictated they had to be as cruel as possible to the Slavic inhabitants of the places they conquered in their war with the Soviets- by the time they realized they were only multiplying their problems with partisans, it was too late to do anything about it.

Over four hundred pages of this! There’s some interesting tid bits… arguing for the “ideology over function” side, did you know that the Nazis didn’t really pursue non-Germans for homosexuality? They considered it a problem for Germans because it took men away from their breeding responsibilities, but if French or Polish people or whoever did it, they didn’t care- let them weaken the rival races. Nazis also paid little attention to lesbianism, considering it a temporary expedient produced by the loss of men during the war(!) that they’d soon fix. Chapoutot enlivens the proceedings with a little sarcasm here and there, something of a relief- enough for at least one fashy goodreads reviewer I saw to get all huffy about it, worth a laugh on its own…

The picture that emerges here is not the sinister iron men of the Indiana Jones movies or whatever, or even the heel-clicking bureaucrats of popular comedic imagination. The picture of lockstep conformity and control that earlier depictions of Nazism stressed seems increasingly dated. Nazism according to Chapoutot and other recent historians isn’t any kind of fulfillment of western modernist bureaucratic rationality, but an attempt to re-enchant the world by marrying the means and methods of modernity with the (fraudulent, made-up) primeval values of blood and soil. That, in their view, implied giving ultimate power to the Fuhrer and through him his henchmen- that’s not the same thing as subjecting everything to rules, laws, procedures etc., which were specifically eschewed as unnatural and limiting. It was actually crazier than that: rule by vague concepts — blood, race, volk — that Chapoutot argues were meant less to guide and define than to act as incantations, mantras to guide one into a certain frame of mind that was the Nazi end goal. One gets the sneaking suspicion that many of the earlier drafts of interpretations of the Nazis had a lot more to do with what was expedient — for the Cold War, among other things — than what made sense.

Listen… I get that Nazi comparisons are lame and overdone. But I think that at least part of the problem with them is that we use them to distance unpleasant things from a supposedly good normative universe, because we’re using the Nazi as alien-monster-robot paradigm. Even arguments about the “banality of evil” and the “ordinary men” who committed the crimes can be used in this way- anyone can lose their humanity and become Nazis instead if they’re not careful.

But even if we and Chapoutot agree that Nazism was “inhuman” as in “extremely bad,” the picture that emerges from “The Law of Blood” is quite human, in the sense of being a muddle of contingency and misplaced sincerity, self-serving and fanatical by turns, the sort of thing we can easily imagine the sort of dopes who really go in for a certain kind of sentimental, chintzy conceptions of meaning buying into. We see similar arguments from nature all the time- think about the familiar cop spiels about them being “sheepdogs,” guarding us “sheep” from those evil “wolves.” Think about the sheer yearning, always there but which burbles to the surface at certain times, to violently dispense with everything — laws, norms, truth, science, history — that prevents a certain kind of people from living out some fatuous heroic narrative, articulated (if you want to call it that) in uncountable mutually-exclusive personal imaginings, but somehow all converging on the same sort of destruction… that’s where Nazism takes its place, in the long history of reactionary fantasy and efforts to make it reality. These fantasies share elements across modernity, and efforts to make them real share many elements too, regardless of how many people have abused comparison by doing it poorly. *****

Elaine Frantz Parsons, “Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction” (2015) – This is a very strong, subtle, and frightening work of cultural history. “Ku-Klux” is a history of an organization that has been defined in no small part by the specters and myths it generates. Parsons manages a very intricate task in reading the very real, material violence the Klan afflicted (and it’s material consequences) in relation to the Klan as an idea, a set of narratives and images deployed by a number of different actors to various ends (note- Parsons uses “Ku-Klux” instead of “Klan,” in keeping with practice during the nineteenth century- I’m using “Klan” out of convenience).

It’s important to note that Parsons is writing specifically about the Reconstruction-era Klan, or the “First Klan” as it’s sometimes called. Much of our imagery of the Klan comes from the “Second” (1920s) or “Third” (civil rights era) Klans. The early klan was much more loosely organized, and did not have a standardized appearance- the uniform white sheets and hoods. Instead, local klan groups self-organized, and dressed in a bewildering variety of costumes, from pretty basic hoods to what were basically clown costumes to full-on drag. Basically, Halloween- like those creepy old Halloween pictures.

And that might be the central point Parsons gets across- the early Klan very cleverly manipulated the line between serious and playful and between truth and myth. The bizarre costuming and other ritual aspects of the early Klan served a number of purposes, and weren’t as good at anonymizing their members as you may think. What they did do was create a space where the normal rules, not just of law and morality but of reality in general, didn’t apply. The message was clear- any attempt to challenge white dominance would not only lead to violence, but to a nightmarish overturning of order in general. It wasn’t enough to beat, maim, rape, and kill- the Klan also forced its victims into sadistic fantasy tableaux of white dominance.

Parsons also makes clear the ways in which politicians and publics in the north helped constitute the Klan as a concept- and in a way that helped make the Klan’s efforts successful. From the start, the Klan borrowed from northern commercial culture, most notably taking elements of gothic fiction and minstrel shows to structure their statements and rituals. Northern politicians and newspapers eagerly followed stories of Klan atrocities, especially when they could use them to argue for increased Republican power over the South. But as time wore on, several elements of the Klan’s cultural operations began to warp the story in directions favorable to them. Democrats and rival Republican factions began casting doubt on Klan stories- and one of the ways in which their outlandish ritual character helped the Klan was in sowing that seed of doubt.

Worst of all, Republican politicians waving the bloody shirt insisted on the image of pitiful black victims, and often literally shushed black survivors who attempted to tell their stories of resistance, even just to the point of refusing to play along with the Klan’s ritual grotesquerie. Along with amplifying the Klan’s cultural power by making resistance seem impossible, it eventually created a picture of the South where blacks were, always and inevitably, simple victims of the violence that’s just generated, like maggots from old meat, by white revanchism- and that there’s nothing anyone, certainly not northern politicians, could do to help. This dovetailed nicely with the declining Republican interest in the Reconstruction project, and helped make itself a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Historical analogy is a tricky game in any event. It’s made worse by the blindness to the many-fold axes of comparison that our language (and, one suspects, popular culture) encourages. So, the very first thing anyone goes to to dismiss an analogy that makes them uncomfortable are differences in size and scale- thing A can’t be like thing B because B effected more people, lasted longer, etc. And there’s often good reason to do this- think about the reductio ad hitlerum arguments that fly all over the place… though now that it’s the right that cries genocide much of the time, I guess we might rename it reductio ad stalinum (or maoum).

But… especially for a book published and 2015, and presumably conceived and written years before, there’s a lot here that illuminates dynamics in the contemporary far right. I know that will be enough of a stretch for some people, but if I really wanted to stretch, I’d say something like: the Klan is a notch in the belt of a specifically Anglo-Protestant modality of irregular war, attuned to the lifeways of the people pursuing it in the same way the Mongols’ way of war was essentially their way of surviving on the steppe, militarized.

But we’ll stick with the shorter stretch for now. The most obvious is the Klan’s use of performance, irony, and the prevailing pop culture narratives of the day, and the way that finds echoes in the contemporary altright. This practice creates multiple faces for different audiences, making it hard to get a grip on the phenomenon as a whole, and more than that works to confuse people and lead them to believe the rules aren’t working anymore- witness the altright belief in “meme magic.” And in a sense, it does work- not for their maximalist goals, which are absurd, but for making the society that much more violent and paranoid and making it harder to make any real social progress.

A related unfortunate parallel is the way portions of the commentariat who really should know better can’t seem to get their heads around the fact that people can be silly and ironic and also deadly earnest and violent. I wonder where that comes from. Did they not go to high school? Hell, I didn’t go to real high school and even I know that!

On a somewhat more positive note, there were people with power at the time who took the Klan seriously. Parsons tells the story of a Major Lewis Merrill, a Union army intelligence man who did the obvious things in his area of operations in South Carolina. He formed relationships with and gained the trust of the part of the community that he could work with (i.e., the black people), created a network of informants, arrested the Klan leaders they accurately fingered (it’s a myth that people didn’t know who was leading these things- these are small communities), and supported efforts to build a political base for a non-white-supremacist system. Remarkable how these things work with a clear head, some solid working partnerships, and a little elbow grease. *****

Jeffrey Herf, “Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich” (1984) – Sometimes a book succeeds so well in getting its ideas across that in subsequent decades it doesn’t hold the fascination it might once have had. Historian Jeffrey Herf coined the phrase “reactionary modernism” to describe the combination of disdain for rationalism, yearning for the past, fascination with technology, and future-oriented vision that you saw in Nazi ideology. Arguably, he did so well that this is no longer really that odd-seeming to us. The idea that ideology can bend itself to include these seemingly paradoxical elements — like thinking that science disenchants the world but technology re-enchants it — doesn’t really seem that mind-blowing, especially when applied to people like the Nazis.

Herf was writing in the 1980s in a tradition of historical sociology steeped in functionalism. Functionalist history and sociology seemingly en bloc decided that the Nazis were a revolt against modernity, and that’s much of the reason they failed- their form (this whacked out mythologized racial imperialism) failed to correspond with functions (running a modern state). There was (is) much truth to this, but it was more complicated than that, as functionalists like Franz Neumann tried to illustrate. But functionalism came out of root-sociology: Weber, Durkheim, Simmel et all trying to figure out capital-M Modernity. Anti-modern modernism threw their inheritors for a loop.

Herf remains loyal to his roots, sticking with his framework for all its flaws and piously averring Marxist and Frankfurt School explanations, which, truth be told, don’t always get to the heart of the matter either. Needless to say, his methodological conservatism doesn’t get him anywhere close to post-structuralism or anything else that might break down the ideology-structure-function relationship. You have to figure the propagation of other ways of looking at the relationship between ideas and power probably helped get the meme of “reactionary modernism” across in the thirty years since this book came out, but Herf wasn’t having any of it.

But he does pretty good anyway. He methodically goes through a number of German intellectuals of the Weimar period — Ernst Junger, Werner Sombart, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, various others — and examines their attitudes towards different aspects of modernity. The rough lineaments of the “reactionary modernist” attitude he draws from them are like this: German “kultur” is about the superior truth of Life and Will against the technical but lame truth of facts and reason. “Real” worthwhile science (and politics and literature) etc engages this sense of life and defies rationality. The other, lame kind explains away and demystifies thing. The former is associated with Germans, the latter with Americans, French, and above all, you guessed it, the Jews. This creates a dyad of good, German aspects of modernity — technology (a lot of rhapsodizing the power of engines, the clean lines of skyscrapers etc), “productive” entrepreneurship, mechanized warfare — with their bad, vaguely Jewish opposites: abstract science, mere “circulatory” capitalism, parliamentary politics, and so on.

This scheme became widely popular in right-leaning circles in Germany during the Weimar period. It caught on especially well with engineers, who started feeling their political muscle at the time. It got more or less officially interwoven into the ideology of the Third Reich. Among its more famous results was the rejection of the “Jewish physics” of general and special relativity, which would come back to bite the Nazi regime pretty hard.

Sometimes you still get people — people who write about these things, people who should know better — scratching their heads at how avowed despisers of modernity embrace certain aspects of it, especially technology, so hard. This isn’t just the Nazis- the Confederacy, for all of its maudlin rural nostalgia, was very interested in modern capitalism and technological improvement. ISIS fighters may refuse to use toothbrushes, preferring the chewing twig the Prophet and his followers supposedly used, but nothing in their peculiar reading of the holy books says anything about not using social media to recruit more jihadis.

So this stuff shouldn’t surprise us, and Herf’s book has been an important part of helping us all get that. Ironically, people have probably taken it further than Herf himself would like. He got pretty close to being able to say that the relationship between ideology and social function maybe isn’t as tight as his school of historical sociology would have it, and maybe new methods of investigating these things are called for… but no such luck. Herf tried to dunk on both Marxists and the totalitarianism school by insisting that reactionary modernism was a purely German thing, and that proves that the German case of fascism was truly unique, etc. Well, the obvious applicability of the phrase to the contemporary altright, especially in the US, sort of gives the lie to that. Herf went on to become a liberal hawk, Iraq War booster, and his historical work has an increasingly rabid Zionist bent. But now the world has his concept, and we can use it how we like. ****

Richard Wolin, “Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse” (2001) – There’s no saltiness quite like that of an academic vindicated in a long-held, long-dismissed belief. Intellectual historian Richard Wolin had been beating the drum about the Nazi past of Martin Heidegger, the greatest (in the sense of being a big deal) philosopher of the twentieth century, for years. Heidegger is as big of a deal as he is because his influence goes well beyond philosophy departments into… well, other university departments- literature, architecture, etc. His phenomenological framework is sufficiently powerful, flexible, and more than anything else, glamorously incomprehensible, that he was useful and appealing to a lot of people. They all knew he was a Nazi party member. Most of them probably knew that his excuses for it — he felt pressure, he tried to avoid politicizing the university, etc etc — were specious at best. They must have noticed certain, shall we say, elective affinities between Heidegger’s critique of modernity and some of the “Völkisch” tendencies that went into Nazism. But it was all vague enough to be waved away, at least during Heidegger’s lifetime.

Wolin didn’t buy it in the nineties, when he became embroiled in the Heidegger Controversy (it gets caps- Wolin edited a collection on it) and when he was writing “Heidegger’s Children,” and his exasperation with the defenses of the Black Forest Sage shines through the text. It examines four of Heidegger’s major students – Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse being the best known, though I’d say Löwith is also worth reading – all of whom were Germanized Jews, and their relationships with their teacher. Even his pre-Black Notebook defenders admit Heidegger had an anti-semitic streak (not that it stopped him from sleeping with his grad student Hannah Arendt, which, you know, not exactly what you want in a sage either). But evidently his charisma and philosophical powers were enough that it attracted these students. Wolin argues that the degree and kind of assimilation on the part of middle-class German Jews played a crucial role in allowing these relationships to take place despite the master’s distaste for Jews. I don’t know enough about German culture at the time to say, but it sounds both basically accurate and overstated, perhaps majorly so.

Wolin goes through each one, considers parts of their oeuvure, and in each case condemns the philosopher in question for not separating themselves far enough from Heidegger and his elitist anti-modernism. He attributes the flaws in Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” and her bien-pensant liberal elitism to the same flaws that led her to play a weird double game for Heidegger even after their affair. Hans Jonas (whose work I don’t know) seeded the German Green movement with bizarre and unhelpful antimodern sentiments drawn from Heidegger, the master he abandoned decades before. Marcuse managed to escape his gravitational pull more — he had more independence from Heidegger, in large part due to his Marxist commitments – but still meandered through efforts to square the circle of reconciling Heidegerrian phenomenology and Marxism. Löwith… I don’t remember what his issue was and I haven’t got the book in front of me. He did something wrong, and it was the fault of whatever it was drew the guy to Heidegger.

All this, in 2001, before the Black Notebooks came to be published to the extent they have, and Heidegger’s genuine enthusiasm for Nazism became impossible to hide! My edition has an extended preface where Wolin relishes dunking on Heidegger’s assorted defenders. It’s hard not to appreciate his enthusiasm- even if you take something from the philosopher’s work, his academic defenders were a trendy lot (there’s a hipster architecture magazine called “Dwell,” a self-conscious nod to one of Heidegger’s later philosophical hobby-horses), their prevarication was pretty weak, and it’s satisfying to see the historical record get its due. That being said, it leaves a larger question – what do we do with important cultural figures with abhorrent political views? – unanswered.

Several times, Wolin insists on Heidegger’s brilliance and importance, while also condemning his work tout court as fruit of the poison tree of German reaction. We are left with no idea of how to reconcile that. For my money, he’s right- Heidegger is both brilliant and toxic. We make use of many toxic, dangerous substances, and the work and ideas of those who walked on the dark side of modernity – by no means restricted to fascism – should qualify, if radioactive materials do. Heidegger asked a lot of questions in a very provocative way, and helped break up the staid academic philosophy of the early twentieth century (with a lot of help, including from mentors he spited, like Husserl). He isn’t someone you should take moral (or political) advice from, and maybe this is just my materialism talking, but that seems to be the problem more than anything. Both Wolin and the Heideggerians he puts on the dock tried to get usable morals out of a twentieth century philosopher. Classic mistake! ***’