It is important to note what Jung had in common with the precursors of fascism and National Socialism, and what he did not. He shared with Ortega y Gasset and Nietzsche much of their critique of modern
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mass man and his problems—though to be sure Jung's tone was more moderate than their shrill and extreme tirades. Jung had always a capacity, uncommon in persons of the antimodern party, for balance and selfcorrection. He was aware that he was dealing with subtle levels of soul, not street politics. Undoubtedly in Jung, as in Ortega, there was too much of the selfdubbed aristocrat; both came from an oldfashioned Europe in which scholars and intellectuals were spiritual aristocrats or pretended to be. Both the Swiss and the Spaniard had the nobleman's unfortunate readiness to oversimplify and stereotype the subjective life of the "common"
masses. Jung preferred that his psychiatric clients be from the educated genteel classes. Yet the analytic psychologist could in the end—after some initial fascination—
express anger and despair at those mana personalities, like the one across the border in Germany, who took advantage of mass man's psychic deprivation to promote their own megalomania. Jung may have shared the intellectual's tendency to overemphasize the helplessness of the masses, but he approached them, at least on the professional level, with the heart of a healer, not of a tyrant.
Perhaps for this reason he did not also share the frenetic and overaesthetic mood of what Andrew Hewitt has called, in the title of his book on the subject, Fascist Modernism—the style of fascist worldview that proved so attractive and exciting to a generation of writers and artists of the "avant garde." Such poets and painters as Ezra Pound, Tommasso Marinetti, and the "Futurist" school loved the "postdecadent" irrationalism and imperialism they saw encapsulated in powerful machines, spectacles, the dramatic gesture, the aesthetics of struggle. 38 Their view of art was better expressed in dynamic movement than the nineteenthcentury sort of stationary scene; they thereby adored technology, movement, the new art of the cinema, all well exploited by the propaganda of the new order. This side of fascism was admittedly more Italian than German, but certainly not unknown in the staged dramas being unveiled north of the Alps. But Jung was more interested in deeper matters.
The terrible trauma of Germany's defeat in World War I pushed those who thought about their nation in volkish terms in the direction of reactionary modernism: the mists of myth with technological teeth in them, but little regard for democracy. Books came out like Oswald Spengler's famous Der Untergang des Abendlandes ( The Decline of the West), with its calls for the defeat of democracy, liberalism, and money
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in favor of a "life energy" that is "blind and cosmic" but racially bound to the soil, and carried by an elite of "higher men" who make "great decisions." The writer Ernst Jünger shared with others of his type the fronterlebnis, frontline experience, in the Great War, and found—as did Adolf Hitler—that war could be the forge of heroes and a profoundly liberating and transformative adventure. In such books as Der Kampf as inneres Erlebnis ( Battle as Inner Experience; 1922) and Feuer und Blut ( Fire and Blood; 1926) Jünger celebrated the heroic dimensions of war together with the technology of modern combat, with its ''storms of iron" and vulturelike bombers. He did much to prepare German consciousness for Nazidom, though he himself never joined the Party; he found the Nazis a bit plebeian, lacking his level of aristocratic refinement in contemplating the aesthetics of blood and death on the field of honor. (After the war he was to establish the journal Antaios with Mircea Eliade and Ortega y Gasset and, himself avoiding all the century's storms of iron, died in 1998 at the age of 102.) Carl Jung, as a neutral Swiss, had no combat experience in either war and, apart from his role as a medical officer in the Swiss Reserves, no special interest in combat beyond the archetypal hero myth. But he shared in the world of spiritual crisis in which an Ernst Jünger could find a voice.
Perhaps the reactionary modernist whose role most paralleled Jung's was the worldclass philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose brief career as a public exponent of Nazism in 1933 and 1934, while he was rector of the University of Freiburg, has been much discussed. In his notorious inaugural address as rector in April 1933, and in subsequent proNazi speeches, Heidegger stressed, in language comparable to Jungian inwardness, the radical subjectivism and collectivism of the Party, as over against the rationalism and individualism of other politics. Hitler, he said, had awakened the will of the German Völk "and brought this will together into a single decision." 39 As a recent biographer has put it, "Heidegger's Nazism was decisionist," and in this sense he was not antiSemitic, "certainly not in the sense of the ideological lunacy of Nazism." 40 Although Jung never embraced the newly triumphant ideology and its political practitioners as openly as did Heidegger, it was in the same years that the Swiss psychiatrist made what compromising utterances he was to make; like the German (although Heidegger remained a member of the party to the bitter end), by 1939 he was well into disillusionment. Both Heidegger and Jung
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found themselves unable to accept crucial aspects of the new Reich: Heidegger, what he saw as Nazi compromise with technology; 41 Jung the way in which the
"single decision" appeared to be a new a terrible manifestation of mass man rather than a purifying archetype of the nation.
The German Problem
Like not a few romantics, including Nietzsche, Jung was of two minds about Germany. At its greatest it was a land of incomparably exalted culture and vision. At the same time, it boasted the deadliest of bourgeois civilizations, and beneath all ran dark and terrible undercurrents. In his 1918 essay "The Role of the Unconscious,"
Jung declared that the source of the "German problem" lay in the way Christianity had "split the Germanic barbarian into an upper and a lower half, and enabled him, by repressing the dark side, to domesticate the brighter half and fit it for civilization." But, needless to say, the lower half, the caged but restless "blond beast," was still there, awaiting its hour of return and revenge.
Plowing ahead with his summary treatment of Germany's unconscious in that year of her greatest defeat to date, Jung turned his attention to the country's highly visible Jewish population. For them, he said, the German splitunconscious problem did not exist. Rather than precariously living half civilized and half barbarian, they had taken over the culture of the ancient world, and on top of it had placed the cultures of the nations among which they dwelt. This meant that the Jew "was domesticated to a higher degree than we are, but he is badly at a loss for that quality in man which roots him to the earth and draws new strength from below"—a "chthonic quality"
which was, on the other hand, "found in dangerous concentration in the Germanic peoples." The Jews had too little of this, the Germans too much. 42