Mythus is a rambling and inconsistent book, and consequently hard to summarise. (One example of how obscure it was: a contemporary admirer published a glossary of 850 terms that needed explaining.) It conducts a massive assault on Roman Catholicism as the main threat to German civilisation. The text stretches to more than 700 pages, with the history of Germany and German art making up more than 60 percent of the book.126 The third section is entitled ‘The Coming Reich’; other parts deal with ‘racial hygiene,’ education, and religion, with international affairs at the end. Rosenberg argues that Jesus was not Jewish and that his message had been perverted by Paul, who was Jewish, and that it was the Pauline/Roman version that had forged Christianity into its familiar mould by ignoring ideas of aristocracy and race and creating fake doctrines of original sin, the afterlife, and hell as an inferno, all of which beliefs, Rosenberg thought, were ‘unhealthy.’
Rosenberg’s aim – and at this distance his audacity is breathtaking – was to create a substitute faith for Germany. He advocated a ‘religion of the blood’ which, in effect, told Germans that they were members of a master race, with a ‘race-soul.’ Rosenberg appropriated famous German figures from the past, such as the painter Meister Eckhart and the religious leader Martin Luther, who had resisted Rome, though here again he only used those parts of the story that suited his purpose. He quoted the works of the Nazis’ chief academic racialist, H. F. K. Guenther, who ‘claimed to have established on a scientific basis the defining characteristics of the so-called Nordic-Aryan race’. As with Hitler and others before him, Rosenberg did his best to establish a connection to the ancient inhabitants of India, Greece, and Germany, and he brought in Rembrandt, Herder, Wagner, Frederick the Great, and Henry the Lion, to produce an entirely arbitrary but nonetheless heroic history specifically intended to root the NSDAP in the German past.
For Rosenberg, race – the religion of the blood – was the only force that could combat what he saw as the main engines of disintegration – individualism and universalism. ‘The individualism of economic man,’ the American ideal, he dismissed as ‘a figment of the Jewish mind to lure men to their doom.’127 At the same time he had to counter the universalism of Rome, and in creating his own new religion certain Christian symbols had to go, including the crucifix. If Germans and Germany were to be renewed after the chaos of military defeat, ‘the Crucifix was too powerful a symbol to permit of change.’ By the same token, ‘The Holy Land for Germans,’ Rosenberg wrote, ‘is not Palestine…. Our holy places are certain castles on the Rhine, the good earth of Lower Saxony and the Prussian fortress of Marienburg.’ In some respects, the Mythus fell on fertile ground. The ‘religion of the blood’ fitted in well with new rituals, already developing among the faithful, whereby Nazis who had been killed early on in the ‘struggle’ were proclaimed ‘martyrs’ and were wrapped in flags that, once tainted with their blood, became ‘blood flags’ and were paraded as totems, used in ceremonies to dedicate other flags. (Another invented tradition was for party members to shout out ‘Here’ when the names of the dead were read out during roll call.) Hitler, however, seems to have had mixed feelings about the Mythus. He held on to the manuscript for six months after Rosenberg submitted it to him, and publication was not sanctioned until 15 September 1930, after the Nazi Party’s sensational victory at the polls. Perhaps Hitler had put off approving the book until the party was strong enough to risk losing the support of Roman Catholics that would surely follow publication. The book sold 500,000 copies, but that means little, as all secondary schools and institutes of higher education were forced to buy copies.128
If Hitler did delay publication because of the effect Mythus might have on Catholics, he was being no more than realistic. The Vatican was incensed by its argument and, in 1934, placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books. Cardinal Schulte, archbishop of Cologne, set up a ‘Defence Staff of seven young priests, who worked round the clock to list the many errors in the text. These were published in a series of anonymous pamphlets printed simultaneously in five different cities to evade the Gestapo. The most brutal use of the book was as a tool to expose priests: Catholic Nazis were ordered to refer to the Mythus in the confessional, and then denounce any priest who was so duped into criticising the ideology of the NSDAP.129 For a time it seems that Rosenberg truly believed that a new religion was coming into being – he told Hermann Goring as much in August 1939. Within a month, however, Germany was at war, and after that the impact of the Mythus was patchy. Rosenberg himself remained popular with Hitler, and when the war began, he was given his own unit, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, charged with looting art.
Although they were incoherent and arbitrary, Art and Race and the Mythus were linked by the fact that each attacked the intellectual and cultural life of Germany. Whatever their shortcomings and failings, however crude and tendentious, they represented an attempt by the Nazis to focus on thought beyond the confines of party politics. In publicising such views, the Nazis now left no doubt as to what they thought was wrong with German civilisation.
With many people so worried about the direction civilisation was taking, with evidence for such a dire fate being adduced on all sides, it is perhaps not surprising that such a period, such a mood, produced one of the great works of literature of the century. One could argue that John Steinbeck was the chronicler of unemployment in the 1930s, that Christopher Isherwood’s novels about Berlin served as an antidote to the sinister absurdities of the Mythus. But the worries and the bleak mood went far wider than unemployment and Germany, and this pessimism was clearly captured by someone else – by Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World.
Seven years younger than his brother Julian, the eminent biologist, Aldous Huxley was born in 1894.130 His poor eyesight exempted him from service in World War I and he spent the time working on Lady Ottoline Morrell’s farm near Oxford, where he met Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Mark Gertler, Middleton Murry, D. H. Lawrence, and Bertrand Russell. (Eliot said Huxley showed him some early verse, which he was ‘unable to show any enthusiasm for.’)131 Very well read and deeply sceptical, Huxley had written four books by the early 1930s, including the novels Crome Yellow and Antic Hay.132 Brave New World, published in 1932, is a dystopian novel, a pessimistic taste of the possible horrific consequences of twentieth-century thought. It is, at one level, science fiction. But Brave New World was also designed to be a cautionary tale; if Freud, in Civilisation and Its Discontents, explored the superego as the basis of a new ethics, Huxley described a new ethic itself – in which the new psychology was as much to blame as anything.133