Hans Blüher, National Socialism, Freud, and Anti-Semitism

Hans Blüher (1888-1955), a German writer and philosopher, in Secessio Judaica (1922) sought to give the “philosophical foundation of the historical situation of Jewishness and the anti-Semitic movement.” In this pamphlet his definition of anti-Semitism included two main elements, the need to segregate the Jews and the “no-hate attitude”: “Such anti-Semitism that follows from the necessity of recognizing [the secession of the Jews from the host people] is therefore always sine ira et studio…There is no reason to hate and defame Jews…An anti-Semite is the one who says that a Jew is a Jew” (Secessio, p. 41). Only the first aspect of Blüher’s definition was adopted by the National Socialists.

Blüher had become famous a decade earlier through his controversial trilogy on the German Wandervogel movement (1912). He tried to show that the movement contained erotic manly bonding (as a researcher of it he held homosexuality to be quite normal) and that the members of the movement were searching for manly heroes and a new leader, an ideal father who would act as an aristocratic Kaiser for his people. The movement had been started in 1901 by Karl Fischer, who called himself Der Führer. There was a partial succession from the Wandervogel movement and its masculine-erotic heroism to the Hitler Youth and its warrior heroism. In his work Führer und Volk in der Jugendbewegung (Leader and Folk in the Youth Movement, 1918) Blüher anticipated “that the leader does not need a folk in order to be the leader, but a folk becomes a folk only through the leader” (p. 3).

During his 1924 imprisonment in Landsberg, Hitler

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had ordered Secessio Judaica for his reading and had dictated and co-written Mein Kampf. According to an eye-witness report, Hitler confessed during the third Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1927 that Blüher’s point of view regarding the practical solution of the Jewish question was also his (see Dietrich Bronder, Bevor Hitler kam: Eine historische Studie [Before Hitler Came: A Historical Study], 1964). To Blüher, Hitler was not the hoped-for ideal manly hero, and he distanced himself from the National Socialists from the summer of 1934. The Nazi regime banned Blüher from writing because he had published dubious works, like the one on the role of eroticism in the manly society (1917). After the National Socialists had lost their power, Blüher mocked Hitler as a totally un-German “Neanderthal” and an “erotic cripple.” Blüher also devalued womanly, feminized, and regression-prone mother-loving men who cling to infantile needs.

Klaus Theweleit (in his Male Fantasies, 2 vols., 1987, 1989) claimed that the manly bond (Männerbund) is armor against the emancipation of women. The fear of women surely seems to be one of the underpinnings of Männerbund, but there may be other factors working in favor of the Teutonic masculine brotherhood, for example the fear of losing unity, family, and community and the need for a Family to be reunited by the rescuing masculine group, vacillating in relation to both the nurturing Father and Mother. The manly bond was for Blüher mainly a defense organization against the sons’ regression to Mother. Blüher’s antifeminism is not so much against women (or their emancipation) but against the regressive tendencies of men.

Hans Blüher expressed antifeminism, antisocialist, and anti-Semitic views that took on aristocratic and antidemocratic overtones. Although Blüher himself had a humble background, he longed for high-society contacts. His attitude toward Jews was emotionally ambivalent and he adopted idiosyncratically some stereotypes of the Jews, put-

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ting them forth in his writings, without succumbing to likening the Jews to the parasites and the lice, as was the habit in the cruelest forms of anti-Semitism.

Blüher also practiced as a “wild” psychoanalyst whom Freud had read (the manuscript of the third volume of the work on the Wandervogel movement) and whom he first praised (in his letter to Blüher, July 10, 1912) as an intelligent, keen observer and a courageous man without many inhibitions. Blüher’s articles were published in psychoanalytic journals in the 1910s. This link was, however, broken when Blüher, in Secessio Judaica, started to identify Freud’s thinking (and Jewish socialism) as “corruptive” and, ideologically, “pure materialism,” insisting that such “trends of thought will become fruitful only when they shall pass through a German brain which is in a position to resist their perverted origin” (Secessio, pp. 23-24). Soon after this, Freud broke with Blüher, whom he saw totally separated from psychoanalysis and belonging to such German currents that were, like “folk psychoses,” strictly opposed to rational arguments.

Jewish “destructiveness” was presented by Blüher as a pact favoring modernism, which destroyed aristocratic-conservative values and used Reason as a plain instrument for free-floating, nomad-like intellectualism, engaged in philosophy, science, literature, theater, dance, gymnastics, and other cultural production. Non-Zionist Jewishness was deemed by Blühler as being “in the service of a destructive historical influence on the host peoples” (Secessio, p. 22). Jews were the “chosen people of the past,” and Germans the “chosen people of the future” (p. 43). One could not simultaneously go the Jewish way and the German way (p. 36). Blüher’s blunt folk diagnostics stated that “every Jew was substantially sick,” the “fate” of the whole Jewish people was “sick,” and the brokenness of every Jew was “incurable” (p. 20). As an omen, the “menacing world pogrom was hanging above their heads” (p. 41). Jewish corruptive thoughts and

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destructive influences necessitated the secession of the Jews as a historical event, which was corroborated by growing anti-Semitism (p. 21). Blüher even proposed that anti-Semitism was partly an “intentional product of Jewish propaganda” meant to seduce host peoples to shed Jewish blood and to make them guilty in order to serve the Jews (Blüher, Die Aristie des Jesus von Nazareth [A Collection of Words of Jesus of Nazareth], 1921, p. 313).

In favor of the Aryan mentality, Blüher described the German man as essentially healthy and heroic and claimed that the masculine German world, embedded in homosexual eroticism, will bring forth cultural and spiritual progress. The “feminized” Jews were characterized as incapable of being soldiers, of being part of any “warrior caste,” (Die Aristie, p. 58), and in need of exclusion, so that they could be both protected and controlled in their ghettos. The “feminine and servile” essence of the Jews (Die Aristie, p. 49) was ubiquitous.

Blüher’s works contained a mixture of half-truths, curious paradoxes, scandalous effects, and dandyish poses, and they attracted some members of German literate distinction, such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Werfel, Gottfried Benn, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka. For example, Kafka became Blüher’s avid reader, and after having read Secessio Judaica, he sensed an insuperable difficulty in reviewing Blüher’s work: “He calls himself an anti-Semite without hatred, sine ira et studio, and he really is that; yet he easily awakens the suspicion…that he is an enemy of the Jews, whether out of happy hatred or out of unhappy love” (Kafka, Diaries: 2, 230 [June 16, 1922]).

Blüher wrote of an unavoidable racial segregation: the “German race” and the “Jewish race” were opposed to each other, and nobody could be both German and Jewish. This opposition was reflected in anti-Semitism and Zionism

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that were worlds apart from each other. The old-style anti-Semitism tried in vain to refute Judaism by inductive reasoning, by statistics and by appealing to experience. On the other hand, Jews had in vain tried to blend in with their German host people, but their sexuality, their outlook, and their unique way of practicing “mimicry of the blood, of the name, and of the body [Gestalt]” (Secessio, p. 19) remained only superficially and temporarily westernized. Blüher argued that the Jews in Germany lived in a “latent ghetto” that will become manifest once the Jews are “reghettoized” and separated from the German body. The ghetto was for Blüher “foremost a psychic manifestation” (p. 55), but, of course, there were real-life ghettos behind such mental images.

To see Blüher as a savior of the Jews is hardly possible. His friend Hans-Joachim Schoeps, himself a leading member of the Jewish Youth movement and a pan-Germanist loyal to the National Socialists, esteemed Blüher and held Secessio Judaica as “antagonistic toward the Jews” (judengegnerisch), not distinctly anti-Semitic (see Blüher’s and Schoep’s co-work Streit um Israel [Controversy Over Israel], 1933, p. 7); the book was soon confiscated by the German authorities. Such conceptual hair splitting could not erase the Holocaust, the “world pogrom,” for which Blüher failed to set the right coordinates when he wrote his prognosis: “The world pogrom will undoubtedly arrive. Germany will be the only land that will shrink away from the act of murder…It is ignoble to torture an unarmed enemy. The German is no Frenchman” (Secessio, p. 57). That the secession of the Jews is a “painful event” and a “world catastrophe” (p. 65) was admitted by Blüher, in one of his rare clear moments.

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