In this compact study, Klaus Vondung, professor emeritus of German language and literature studies at the University of Siegen, analyzes the language National Socialists employed to create a cult that functioned much like a traditional faith tradition. Further, Vondung demonstrates how National Socialists sought to replicate the faith, commitment, and obedience conventional religions demand.
Vondung investigates the meaning of “redemption” as National Socialists understood it. He argues that their particular definition of redemption went beyond overcoming the defeat of 1918, the parliamentary form of government, and the physical suffering of hungry Germans (10). Vondung traces the concept back at least to the days of the wars against Napoleon. He analyzes how nineteenth-century thinkers like Arndt, Fichte, and others understood the term. An essential element of the early nineteenth-century definition of redemption involves overcoming the enemy as a struggle against evil. The concept of redemption also permeated Wagner's Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser. German thinkers popularized the idea again during World War I. They did not consider it an intellectual construct but an article of faith. According to Vondung, these largely right-wing thinkers “combined their search for personal meaning with the question of the meaning of the nation and interpreted the latter as part of their religious quest for redemption” (15). While the thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century considered redemption in this world, the term's association with religious salvation lends the secular concept of national redemption a religious connotation: the redemption from evil and sin (19).
Vondung explains that National Socialists intentionally employed “redemption” because they ultimately desired the people's faith in Hitler and National Socialism, not merely formal party membership. Thus, the regime and especially Hitler created a series of rituals and celebrations akin to religious services. Hitler himself was hailed as the redeemer. Vondung engages critics of categorizing National Socialist practices as a religion. He quotes Hans Mommsen, who argued that it was “in every way a mere imitative movement” (30) and lacked the originality necessary to establish a political religion. Vondung agrees with Mommsen and disagrees with his doctoral advisor, political philosopher Eric Voegelin, who argued that race, blood, and soil constitute the dogmatic center of the National Socialist political religion. Vondung argues that there is no “racially pure blood” and that “the Volksgemeinschaft is the production of a dream”(31). Only the Führer was real, and many Germans had faith in him. National Socialists encouraged this faith to secure commitment and readiness for self-sacrifice.
Although Hitler insisted that National Socialism was not a cult, it promoted many cult-like activities. These cultic events, especially the large public assemblies, ceased during the war. Local ceremonies, especially those intended to replace the Christian sacraments, became the focus of cultic activities. Literary criticism became religious because National Socialists believed that literature, especially poetry, gave meaning to life. National Socialism promoted literature to compete with Scripture and other established texts. Thus, the 1933 book burning became a purging of the soul (114).
In the last chapter of the work, Vondung discusses the National Socialist use of the term “apocalypse.” He points out that in Greek, “apocalypse” means revelation, as, for example, in the title of the last book of the New Testament. For Hitler, the apocalypse would not sweep down from the heavens but would be brought about by Germans in a great struggle to birth a new nation. To bring about paradise through the apocalypse requires the elimination of the Bolshevik and Jewish enemies. National Socialist leaders often passionately hated Jews, but others, in the words of Götz Aly, engaged without reflection in a “muffled and vague antisemitism.” Vondung rejects Daniel Goldhagen's “quasi-genetic” explanation for the German origins of the Holocaust. Instead, he blames it on “a mental and indeed habitual inclination that has been taught in the humanities and social sciences” (134).
Unfortunately, Vondung does not offer a narrative or analytical conclusion. Nonetheless, the study constitutes a nuanced analysis of the importance of religious terminology in justifying National Socialist ideology and gaining Germans' virtually boundless loyalty. From a historian's perspective, there are few things to criticize. First, Vondung does not engage in some controversial historical scholarship on National Socialist religion. He mentions neither Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, nor the many responses to that work, foremost among them that of Doris Bergen. Also, relying in part on Joachim Fest's Hitler biography, now almost fifty years old and superseded by the many excellent biographies such as the ones by Ian Kershaw and Volker Ullrich, is problematic. Finally, while the German edition of Vondung's volume appeared before the annotated edition of Mein Kampf was published, the English edition would have benefited from some analysis of Hitler's extensive comments on religion.
Overall, however, this work fulfills its purpose. Vondung shows that while appropriating all that religion offers and demands, ultimately, National Socialism is not a political religion. The work benefits those scholars who seek to understand how National Socialism won the support of the people. Like Victor Klemperer in The Language of the Third Reich, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook, Vondung's work reminds us of the importance of language itself as historical evidence.
