Page 61
contempt, though he had once given joint seminars with J. W. Hauer of Tübigen, founder of one of its instruments, the neopagan German Faith Movement, which had attemped a literal revival of Wotanism. Now he saw such fundamentalists of the new regime as themselves also victims . . . of whatever may come next. (Andrew Samuels, however, states that "It is hard to assess what Jung really thought about the German Faith movement, as he spoke of its adherents as 'decent and wellmeaning people,' but also 'possessed' by the 'god of the Germans'"—Wotan; Samuels sees these lines as "in no way a repudiation or condemnation of Hauer." 48) Despite his own inflation with some of the intellectual roots of National Socialism, it seems clear that Jung knew well enough—at least as well as anyone of comparable placement—what was really going on. But he was not sure what response to make to this monstrous yet seductive enchantment worthy of Wotan. It must be recalled that most German Protestant pastors—of the culture of Jung's ultimate roots—welcomed the accession of Hitler; they generally despised the Weimar regime for royalist reasons, because of the godless new culture arising under its aegis, and because of their denominations' relative loss of status over against Roman Catholicism in the new secular state. 49 For somewhat similar reasons of heart and status, a great number in Germany's traditionally conservative legions of scholars and professors likewise hoped for good things from Hitler. They too had found themselves in an unfamiliar land after 1918, a strange country, which had impoverished them and taken from them the unquestioning prestige they and their values had enjoyed in Wilhelmine Germany. All this too Jung undoubtedly felt, if only vicariously. But he was cautious in the face of so much force . . . and sometimes uncautious.
Jung's own attitude toward the "New Germany," especially as reflected in his acts when the presidency of the International Society for Psychotherapy fell to him in 1933 upon the resignation of the antiNazi German president, Prof. Ernst Kretschmer, has been much debated. The strong German section, under intense pressure to attain Gleichschaltung (conformity) with the ideology of the new government, was being forced to purge itself of Jews. The section contained some Nazis sympathizers, one of whom was Prof. M. H. Göring, the Reichsmarschal's cousin and a Nazi, who would become head of the German section, and who came to share with Jung the editorship of the Zentralblatt, the Germanlanguage journal of the International
Page 62
Society. During their editorship some articles appeared that were highly antiSemitic and little more than Nazi propaganda. For this Jung as well as Göring have been faulted, and understandably so. Yet on such matters one must, regrettably, understand also the subtleties of writing and working in a totalitarian environment. There is also reason to think that Göring was able to use his Nazi credentials, the prima facie evidence of some sympathetic publications, and his exalted connections to shield not a few colleagues, Jews and others, who would otherwise have fallen foul of the Gestapo. 50 The section also included Jews and others unsympathetic to the German "revolution" who were in a desperately precarious position. The society was made international in order to contain the German maelstrom within a larger context.
Aniela Jaffé, herself a GermanJewish refugee and Jung's secretary after the war, has made a reasonably convincing case that, at least on his own conscious level, Jung had no sympathy for National Socialism as such, though at first, like others, he was perhaps naive about its full potential for evil. No doubt in Jung's mind some sense of confusing contradiction may have arisen between two of his principles: on the one hand, the Party was striving to get behind the alienation of modern mass man by returning to the "roots" and "soil" from which he was estranged; on the other, the German "revolution" was an egregious display of mass man's sheeplike instincts in operation. Afterward, Jung confessed:
When Hitler seized power it became quite evident to me that a mass psychosis was boiling up in Germany. But I could not help telling myself this was after all Germany, a civilized European nation with a sense of morality and discipline. Hence the ultimate outcome of this unmistakable mass movement still seemed to me uncertain, much as the figure of the Fûhrer at first struck me as being merely ambivalent. Like many of my contemporaries, I had my doubts. 51
In any case, in his presidential role he was, Jaffé thought, trying to do the best he could as mediator in an extremely difficult situation. He also helped individual Jews in those terrible years, including his gifted disciple Erich Neumann. 52 In regard to the last, Laurens van der Post wrote: "[O]ne would be relieved forever of suspecting Jung of antiSemitism by the reading of the letters he wrote in defence of Neumann, who had escaped from Germany and settled in TelAviv. In these let
Page 63
ters he shows such a profound understanding of the plight of the Jews in history, such compassion for all they have suffered from Christian projection of the Christian shadow onto them, such appreciation of their unique and indispensable contribution to the spirit of man, that one would shed the last traces of suspecting him as anti
Semitic." 53
Yet questions remain. Jung wrote voluminously, often unguardedly, and sometimes inconsistently, leaving both critics and apologists much to quote selectively.
Moreover, like many Europeans and others, he seemed quite capable of making a distinction between individual Jews like Neumann and "the Jews"; questions regarding his attitude toward them perhaps have more to do with the full political implications of Jung's system than with any specific actions of the wellmeaning Swiss.
Problematics center around a 1934 article of his translated as "The State of Psychotherapy Today," in which he expressed some hope for fruitful development in Germany out of National Socialism. This piece was clearly a descendent of "The Role of the Unconscious" (1918) and continues its study of generic "Aryan" and Jewish psychologies. The doctor of the soul opined that the ''Aryan" unconscious contained creative tensions and, though now still possessed of a "youthfulness not yet fully weaned from barbarism," may hold the "seeds of a future yet to be born." 54 In the same essay, Jung expressed views of the Jewish psychological character which have given much offense, stating that "the Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of his own . . . since all his instincts and talents require a more or less civilized nation to act as a host for their development," and that Jews "have in common with women being physically weaker, they have to aim at chinks in the armor of their opponents . . . having a civilization twice as old, they are vastly more conscious then we of human weaknesses. . . . But the Jew like the Chinese has a wider area of psychological consciousness than we. . . . In general [it is] less dangerous for the Jew to put a negative value on the unconscious . . . The Aryan unconscious on the other hand, contains explosive fires." 55
The lines on Jews are remarkably parallel to those expressed a few years before by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf: "Since the Jew—for reasons which will at once become apparent—was never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of his intellectual work were always provided by others. His intellect at all times developed through the cultural world surrounding him." 56