"Rootedness," that staple of volkish thought, emphasized the differences in the thought processes of different peoples, claiming that a special quality of mind obtained in those who, like the Germans of the countryside, had a particularly close bonding to the land on which they dwelt. Jung professed only to be saying that different peoples had different methods to attain psychological wholeness. The concept of racial psychospiritual differences did not necessarily imply that one race was innately superior to another, and Jung spend a lot of time in
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the middle thirties, and after, explaining that that was not what he meant. But the apologetics were required because "rootedness" and racial differences in the unconscious were ideas the moved disturbingly close to treacherous terrain. Surely it was unfortunate that Jung took racial and national psychologies and collective strata of the unconscious so seriously, particularly at the expense of as much attention to individual differences within them. (These were progressively harder to see, the farther from one's own kind one got.) But on the other hand such notions were parts of the intellectual world in which he lived, all too lightly taken for granted as part of what "everyone knows."
But if ideas like these were dangerous yet not serious, what was the cause of the virulent evil, above all the deadly antiSemitism, culminating in the unspeakable holocaust of Jews, which swept Germany in the twelve years of the Third Reich? Numerous theories have been advanced, from demonic possession or dark occult enchantment to notions that it was nothing more than an acute case of ordinary politics, or no more than an expression of an antiSemitism that had been a firm fixture of the "ordinary" German mind, and German life, for centuries.
This is not the place to sort out all the factors in this dreadful conundrum. But here are a couple of reflections that may be of some relevance to the mythological issues, and the politics of mythologists, at hand. First, the point must be made that evil is, by its intrinsic nature, irrational. If it were not so, if an occasion of evil, even one as vast and horrifying as the holocaust, could be found to have a complete and wholly satisfying rational explanation, then it would be less than what evil appears to be as it confronts us—that which should not be, yet is: the mystery of iniquity, the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not. While of course it is appropriate to look for the causes of evil with a view to understanding and healing, one will never follow all threads to the end and uncover all causes. Answered questions lead to new questions, firstlevel causes to deeper causes, until one comes up to ultimate mysteries built into human nature and the universe itself. It is important to understand this, for tooeasy a finality will not quiet all the demons.
Second, on the plane of firstlevel causes, it is necessary to accept another perhaps unsatisfying but profoundly human observation: that what happens does not usually happen out of irresistible destiny, implanted malignant viruses, or supernatural curses, but out of ordi
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nary human choices, more or less freely made but, like all such, colored by predisposition and limited by imperfect wisdom. If anything is clear about the political machinations that led to the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, it is that it did not have to happen, and was not meant to happen, in the sense of being predetermined by some transcendent cause. Of course Nazidom was made possible by flaws in both national and individual character. The later Jung emphasized the German "inferiority complex" calling for redress by psychic inflation, and the need for compensation—a major Jungian term—for the humiliation of the Versailles treaty. But as witless and unscrupulous as the principal players—von Hindenburg, von Papen, von Schleicher, Brüning—may have been, the Hitler state was not what they had intended. In its fully developed form, perhaps it was not even what the millions who cheered that winter night had intended. Yet it happened. Beyond pure happenstance, short of the fullblown demon theory, maybe Jung was as right as anyone, as he folded those ominous developments into his psychic theory of history, that outer events are expressions of the movement, and successive emergence, of archetypes in the collective unconscious. At least that view places any explanation in the realm of the nonrational, while relating it to what was at least possible in the psychic context of Germany in those years.
So it was that Jung's particular theory of German culture, expressed back in 1923, contended that a "mutilation" of the Germanic soul had resulted from the grafting of
"a wholly incongruous Christianity, born of monotheism on a much higher level," together with a veneer of Mediterranean civilization, onto the primitive German religion. But the superficial southern polish concealed a plethora of barbarian attitudes, a problem that was to plague Germanic culture down through the centuries:
"There is a whole lot of primitivity in us to be made good." Further progress toward civilization could involve going back to those neglected primitive roots and "giving the suppressed primitive man in ourselves a chance to develop." 43 Here are the tangled roots of a deep tension in Jungian thought, one which will be seen to have profound political implications—the collective unconscious versus therapeutic individualism. Any notion that letting the primitive out might be healthy was in conflict with another: the idea that "all human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement,'' as Jung put it in an essay soon to be considered,
"Wotan."
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In the Europe of his time Jung had considerable occasion to observe the processes of mass man and of mana personality, and to see his views apparently confirmed, the most egregious case being across the border from his native Switzerland in National Socialist Germany. In 1945, in the red light of Germany's Götterdämmerung, Jung described the age's own mana personality vividly and bitingly enough:
Hitler's theatrical, obviously hysterical gestures struck all foreigners (with a few amazing exceptions) as purely ridiculous. When I saw him with my own eyes, he suggested a psychic scarecrow (with a broomstick for an outstretched arm) rather than a human being. . . . A sorry lack of education, conceit that bordered on madness, a very mediocre intelligence combined with the hysteric's cunning and the power fantasies of an adolescent, were written all over this demagogue's face. His gesticulations were all put on, devised by a hysterical mind intent only on making an impression. He behaved in public like a man living his own biography, in this case as the somber, daemonic "man of iron" of popular fiction. 44
Jung's words at the time of the hysteric's rise to power were less dismissive though deeply uneasy. In a 1933 interview on Radio Berlin, Jung had commented: As Hitler said recently, the leader ( Führer) must be able to be alone and must have the courage to go his own way. But if he doesn't know himself, how is he to lead others? That is why the true leader is always one who has the courage to be himself, and can look not only others in the eye but above all himself. . . . Every movement culminates organically in a leader, who embodies in his whole being the meaning and purpose of the popular movement. 45
By the time of his remarkable 1936 essay "Wotan," Jung could describe more fully the volcanolike upsurge of raw longrepressed, irrational psychic energy that had produced the Hitler state. 46 This famous and controversial piece of writing displays an obvious poetic feel for the Wotan archetype in all its Nietzschean power.
Wotan is the restless wanderer (like Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew), the god of storm, and capable of possessing persons. In the new Germany, one man, "who is obviously 'possessed,' has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course toward perdition." 47 Jung here appears to me to treat that nation's pretentious Germanic spirituality movement with amused