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agendas. German volkish thought, though it contained much nonsense and will always be stained in retrospect by its association with the evils of the Third Reich, at the beginning was often no better or worse than the others.
By the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, volkishness was acquiring an ominous harshness, especially in its attitude toward Jews. Popular novels like Wilhelm von Polenz's Der Büttnerbauer (1895), in which a peasant loses his land through debt to a Jew and sees it turned into the site of a factory, pictured Jews as exploiters, as bringers of the evils of capitalism, industrialism, and modernity. Above all, whatever their virtues or vices, they were increasingly portrayed as irretrievably Other, alien to the organic unity of the Volk. Hitler once said that this work had influenced him. The nationalistic historian Heinrich von Treitschke claimed that Germany was a young state searching for selfawareness, and therefore Jews should not complain if that awareness was sometimes expressed in making distinctions between Germans and Jews. 28 It was von Treitschke who also first uttered the offrepeated line, "Die Juden sind unser unglück" [The Jews are our misfortune].
AntiSemitism was by no means limited to Germany. Until the rise of the Nazi regime it took its most brutal forms in Russia and eastern Europe. At the same time, it was hardly unknown in the Englishspeaking world. "Restrictions" in housing, education, and club memberships affected "Semites" everywhere, and one could hear endless antiJewish "jokes." AntiSemitism was a dark side of the glorious mythic dimensions of race and nation. Against their bright images Jews were alien, dark shadows on the margins of social reality. One could praise them, do business with them, resent them, hate them: whatever the attitude, they were regarded them as different, other, and so a problem or potential problem.
In the Germanspeaking world antiSemitism gathered with ominous force. Not all "real Germans" advocated the physical elimination of Jews. But the idea that they were different, foreign, "other," not real Germans, in a land that truly belonged only to real Germans, was widely accepted. How one should respond to the reality of their presence—whether to like them or hate them, welcome them or make them unwelcome, tolerate them or exterminate them, were secondary matters, though of course crucial to Jews, and on them one might find differences of opinion.
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Eugen Diederichs, a notable volkish writer, editor, and publisher from the turn of the century until his death in 1927, espoused one possible opinion. Carl Jung had on his shelves several books on Gnosticism published by Diederichs. A colorful personality who lived in the small university town of Jena, this individual reportedly held court at the legendary Greek feasts of his ''Sera circle" wearing zebraskin pants and a turban as he proclaimed a "new romanticism" to counter the simplistic naturalism and rationalism of the times. His new romanticism emphasized the oneness of the world, and within it the unity of land and Volk; but Diederichs also rejected antiSemitism as he understood it. While he portrayed Jews in accordance with current stereotypes as given over to arid legalism and intellectualism, he also saw them as a distinctive people with their own spirit and organic cohesion, a culture to be set alongside others. As we shall see, the vacillations of Jung, and in their way also of Eliade and Campbell, on the Jewish issue seem at root to reveal an internal cognitive struggle between some degree of liberal democratic sensitivity and a visceral feeling that the Jew is "other." Enthusiasts of the "rooted," traditionalist, organic society, so closely aligned to the world evoked by mythology, sensed that Jews were in its terms alien and different, more a part of the forces destroying traditionalism than an antidote to the evils of modernity. But like Diederichs they were pulled both ways on the matter, unable to give up either volkishness or liberalism, or to follow either firmly and consistently to its ultimate logical outcome.
Diederichs's new romanticism could see in other peoples besides Jews counterparts to what volkishness meant to Germans. Slavs, Celts, and even nonEuropeans like Indians, Chinese, and the Islamic peoples could also be "rooted" in their own land, culture, and myths. Here lay an opening to another significant dimension of the new mythology: its attitude toward nonEuropean and nonChristian peoples. This terrain has been disputed in the wake of Edward Said's muchdiscussed Orientalism, with its argument that European scholars essentially constructed the East they purported to study in the colonial period. 29 Did Europeans approach Asian cultures with genuine openness, or did they seek there only what they wanted to find—exotic civilizations with values quite different from those at home, reservoirs of ancient wisdom like that embodied in myth, perhaps, but whose people were barely capable of abstract, rational thought? Did they merely project
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onto them the primitive world or the Orient that Europe required for its own completion? Did they want to see along the Ganges or in the Congo societies "arrested"
yet for that very reason less fragmented than their own, offering visions of constricted wholeness which, while obviously not to be taken in their entirety by more advanced persons, presented resources for the healing of the West? 30
Any "organic" society calls insistently for an Other to clarify its selfdefinition. But the Other can be, perhaps must be, both alien and reinforcing. It can function as a negative confirmation of one's own "organic" identity and values, as the Jew so served the Volk. Occasionally—but significantly—the Other can offer a superior model of civilization that confirms one's aspirations, and pointedly reinforces criticism of one's own society, as did the idealized Orient for some romantics from Thoreau to Diederichs. Luis O. Gomez has noted that Carl Jung, in his studies of India, was "also seeking in the other, in India, a selfconfirmation . . . almost as if one needed to recognize in an other parts of oneself that could not be seen as sell and would otherwise remain totally other, inaccessible, and unacceptable." 31 India represented something hidden in the European psyche, that needed the experience of India to be discovered and held up as a mirror to Europe.
The idea of the primitive and the archaic obsessed romantic mythologists. On the one hand the lost world was a glory hole holding all the most profound and most authentic sentiments of the human race, or of particular races, with which what is best today must resonate. On the other hand the primal world was too undifferentiated to be brought over whole. But there could be selective reaction.
One could of course proclaim a radical political eschatology like the utopian or Marxist envisioning a consummation that, like all great eschatologies, was mythologyfueled return to the paradise of ultimate beginnings. But political radicalism had a destructive side with which the romantic was not entirely comfortable. Furthermore, twentiethcentury futuristic utopias required confidence in the scientific, industrial, democratic, and cultural "progressive" tendencies of the modern world they would presumably fulfill, and that was a confidence the real romantic lacked. Political reaction is and was a more immediate possible consequence of modern romantic thinking. If the modern world was fallen, the shortest road to paradise might lead backward. Either way, myth contained something modernity needed.