ADRIANO ROMUALDI’S INTRODUCTION TO HANS GÜNTHER’S ESSAY “HUMANITAS”
On the 25th of September 1968 Hans F.K. Günther died in Freiburg, where he was born on the 16th of February 1891.
Thus one of the most significant voices of European culture passes away, the most important race theorist of the 20th Century who, with a great culture and a strong ability to synthetize, reshaped Gobineau’s precursory statements within a steadfast doctrinal organism.
Hans F.K. Günther’s first book appeared in 1920, “Ritter, Tod und Teufel – der Heldische Gedanke”. A youthful book, with strong romantic veins and influences of Nietzsche and Carlyle. The subtitle, the “heroic thought”, seemed as a defiance in such a sad year for Germany in which every national value seemed lost and the Jew Ernst Toller could write «no dumber ideal exists than the heroic one»:
«This book must announce the hero. Thus it can’t help but be hostile to its time. It must talk of the knight, of death and of the devil in an age of masses, in an era that seems unworthy of death itself, an era that is pleased to understand and to “progressively” forgive each man's sordidness… What is the task of this sort of book in such an era? It must talk about things whose meaning has been subtracted for a long time by this age: it must preach the hero, and this age has chosen comfort a long time ago; it must talk of the hero’s destiny: this age knows nothing more than a mechanical progress; of his passion: this age knows nothing more than covetousness; of his love: and this age can only think about sex and instantly ogles lewd views…
This book must talk of heroic hate: and this age raises loud shrieks of complaint and, as whenever one must shroud something rotten, resorts to a foreign word: “humanitarianism”. And so on: the terms may be the same, but the spirit with which they are used is different: one of them is the meaning that the age gives them, the other one is that which they hold in this book. But what already shapes, as an ideal, a life and its works, yearns to become reality, and believes in its own value. Thus this book and its certainty have, despite everything, a place in their age.»
(Bitter, Tod und Teufel, introduction)
In this first book, Günther already summarized in one sentence his vocation of life «It is a heroic duty to sustain oneself. Surrender is the original sin.» A vocation of life to which, through years of struggles, persecutions, economic difficulties, he will remain faithful.
After this first book, Günther’s heroic conception defines itself more rigorously, beyond the vague romantic inspirations, within a precise historical and racial context. The heroic idea took shape as a Nordic idea and the Nordic thought placed itself as «the natural-scientific, biological and racial-political well-thought-out and well-structured Heroic Thought»:
«If one truly wishes to know what it means to embody the heroic spirit, to live in origins, filled with a creative force, one must penetrate the structure of our fathers’ languages. They have been named “Indo-European languages”: they are the languages of strains of Nordic blood that, moving from North to South and penetrating right inside Asia, imposed their language and their culture on foreign peoples.»
(Bitter, Tod und Teufel)
In 1922, in Munich the “Racial Study of the German People” is published, in the following thirteen years it will be reprinted sixteen times in more than a hundred thousand specimens and, in its reduced form, the Volksgünther (The People’s Günther), will reach every German house. Through the work, Günther established himself as the most authoritative race ideologist and his classifications will be welcomed even by official anthropology. In it, the value of the nordic race is asserted as the most noble and constructive element of the German Volk:
«One must clearly state that – within the German nation – the Nordic blood must be considered “desirable”, while the non-Nordic blood “less desirable”. It is the same criterion that inspired the immigration law currently enforced in America, according to which Nordic blood represents, indeed, the most desirable. Such a criterion, obtained from the observation of important general circumstances, isn’t aimed against the singular non-Nordic individual, it only aims at preventing non-Nordic blood from running rampant, or rather: it aims at defending the desired Nordic blood from the risk of extinction and at increasing this desirable blood by all means. Genetics’ teaching that “the value of a man as an individual is different from his value as a parent” must inspire every thought of ours. There were and there are individual bearers of a cheap biological heritage who could give the German people high spiritual values, but from whom no wise person would wish for an offspring».
(Racial Study of the German People)
In 1923 Günther, to avoid the moral and material misery of the German post-war, moves to Skien, in Norway – where he marries a teacher’s daughter, Maggen Blom – and then to Stockholm. Results from this Scandinavian period are: Racial Studies of Europe, which expands his racial survey from Germany to Europe, Race and Style, Nobility and Race and a photographic anthology, German Skulls of Nordic Race.
After returning to Germany, he writes the “Racial Studies of the Jewish People”, the most complete and insightful analysis of the jewish soul that has ever been published. And, however, it is impossible to find, in Günther’s book, a call for persecution: he limits himself to hoping for a migration of Jews from Europe and the establishment of a Jewish state, the same solution to which Jews came by themselves with the Israeli State.
Despite the continuous production of books, the editorial incomes could not prevent Günther from grave economic difficulties. The official culture boycotts his works and the academics ignore this «amateur». But, in the meanwhile, the political situation has been brightening. National Socialism is at the doors and Günther’s work is already an integral part of the movement’s ideology, which, in Mein Kampf, made a program of racial renewal of the German people its own.
In 1930, the National Socialist party wins the majority in the first Land, Thuringia. Among the first actions of the new regional government was that of calling Hans F.K. Günther to the chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Jena. The academic senate resists, taking refuge behind the objection that Günther is, rather, a philologist, not an anthropologist; the Jewish press triggers a defamatory campaign and rambles about an antisemitism given chair; the controversies will reach such a point that a jobless man will attempt to shoot Günther to «take revenge against a high representative of fascism». Günther’s first universitary prolusion, “On the causes of the racial decay of the German People since the migratory period”, was attended by Adolf Hitler; in the evening, National Socialist students parade with torches in front of Günther’s house.
Now a very important period for Günther begins. From his new position he can influence a number of magazines and associations. In 1933, following Minister Frick, who had called him to Jena, he moves to Berlin’s University. These are the years in which the problem of Indo European origins surges in Germany. Through great doctrine and rich archeological and anthropological documentation, Günther proves the genuine Nordic character of the original Indo European races. The “Racial Studies of the Hellenic and Roman People”, which appeared in 1929, is followed by “The Nordic Race in Indo European Asia” and “Racial History of the Germans”.
In the essay “Germanism and Indo Europeanism seen from a Racial Scientific standpoint”, published in a festschrift for the philologist Hermann Hirt, Günther agrees to the archeologists’ opinion on the Indo Europeans’ origins from the Saxothuringian Corded Ware culture group, he emphasizes the Nordic character of the ancient Greeks, Italics, Persians, Indians, and admonishes the people of Northern Europe not to follow them on the way of decay:
“Most people who today speak Indo European languages mainly maintain the linguistic heritage, not the blood heritage of Indo Europeans. The Germanic people are threatened by the same fate if an upheaval does not occur at the last minute. National Socialist Germany has already initiated such upheaval.»
In “The Religious Attitudes of the Indo Europeans”, he outlines the Nordic traits of Indo European religiosity; In “The Farmers’ Faith”, he proves how the spontaneous Indo European religious sentiment was maintained among German Farmers:
«To Indo Europeans, and especially to Persians, there is always a fight between a divine will that demands form, social order, and a foe will that fosters decomposition, degeneration, corruption of all germs, between the god Ahura Mazda and the anti-god Angra Mainyu (Ahriman). Midgard, the world of order, preserves and renews itself through the constant and heroic fight of the man who, alongside the deity, battles against Utgard, against the powers that are hostile to the divine spirit. Midgard is the most profound representation of the collaboration of all divine laws with all human values. The conception of Rita, Asha, that of Kosmos, that of Ratio, that of Midgard show us how Indo European religiosity was a religiosity connected to a concept of life enrichment, a religiosity that held all accretive values as the highest, a religiosity by virtue of which the man who matured the “great soul” within himself, could appear before the deity as a Mahatma (Great-souled), as a Megalopsychos, with the authentic, aryan magnitudo animi, with the stormenska, the Icelanders’ high feeling, the hochgemeute of the German Middle Ages’ knights. A great heart and a broad gaze distinguish, according to the words of a Frisian saying, the Nordic Aryan even in the field of religiosity, the noble religiosity of a farmer aristocracy».
Günther contributes to the construction of the new National Socialist state with writings that reiterate the importance of selection within the political dominion: the essay on Plato (Plato as a Defender of Life) and four political essays later collected in “Nobility through Clan Care”. In 1935 he was granted the National Socialist Party Award for Science, in 1941 the Goethe Medal for Art and Science.
Nonetheless, despite all of this official acknowledgement, Günther will always remain an individualist, a stranger to a certain regime conformism. As many old card-carrying members, who had followed the rise of National Socialism with grand idealism and pureness of intentions, he will be disappointed by some of the men placed by Hitler in command posts and he will assert a need for a «remediation» of the party. He will also hold a hostile position towards the growing leveling (inevitable, on the other hand, because of necessities of war) and he will remain aloof from the excesses committed during the course of the conflict.
This did not prevent the victors’ «justice» from interning him in a concentration camp in 1945, in not so different conditions (hunger, ill-treatment) from those imposed by the SS on the Jews. After being released in 1948, he becomes the subject of a violent defamatory campaign, excluded from University, attacked by the press. His figure is rehabilitated by Americans first: in 1953 the American Society of Human Genetics appoints him as honorary member.
After the war he further writes “Form and Prehistory of Matrimony”, “The Choice of a Spouse for Marital Bliss and Hereditary Suitability” – in which Günther deals with the issue, fundamental in his thought, of matrimony and heritability. “A Biography of the Roman People” and “A Biography of the Hellenic People” come out, in these works he returns, in two volumes worthy of the subject’s importance, to the matter briefly dealt with in the «Racial Studies of the Hellenic and Roman People»:
«The decline of the hellenic world must be blamed on the destructive outcome of a millennium of wars and internal disputes and, moreover, on those political and spiritual transformations that damaged those bloodlines whose Indo European ancestors, of predominantly Nordic race, had descended from Central Europe, particularly from Central Germany; denordification is the primary cause of such decay, the same denordification that so impressed Walther Rathenau, whose love for the Nordic race is testified to us by his friend Count Harry Kessler. Rathenau had written: “the focal point of the history of the world, of the history of humanity, is the tragedy of the Aryan lineage”.
A beautiful and blond race grows in the North. In her inextinguishable fertility she sends always new migratory waves towards the Southern lands. Every migration is conquest, every conquest is a germ of thought and civilization. But, with the growing of the planet’s population, the mass of the dark races progressively tightens itself around it, and the circle increasingly clenches. Rathenau presaged that the ‘tragedy’, ‘the decline of the West’, would loom over the peoples of Central and North-Western Europe, with the extinction and the degeneration of those bloodlines upon whose abilities the political and spiritual life of the West was founded. Today the people of Germanic language, who, during the course of their “Peloponnesian War”, the First World War, shed their best blood, are heading towards decay, exactly like the Hellenics of the Fourth Century BC.» (A Biography of the Hellenic People)
Through the Biography of the Roman People and the Biography of the Hellenic People, Günther had returned to the sources of his spiritual formation, essentially classical and philological. Günther’s philosophy of race is an attempt at re-establishing the notions of humanitas, of kalokagathìa, as they were conceived in the ancient world, i.e. as educational canons for a human type that is high and noble, but also strong, high-performing, handsome:
«The nordic idea aims at a kind of integral culture, capable of propitiating the selection of a healthy and nordic human type; therefore this integral culture must express itself in something similar to what the palaistra, the gymnasion, was in classical Greece. Our gymnasium, as all of our current cultural institutions, isn’t inspired by the gymnasion’s model, but by the erudition of degenerate and denordified hellenism: Alexandrianism, Hellenism, the neutral and indifferent erudition, the ‘culture’ so despised by Hebbel and Langbehn. The integral culture of the palaistra had man and the education of men as its purpose. Greeks didn’t consider a man whose body was not hardened and trained as his spirit to be well educated. “Uncultured”, was also whoever, for example, couldn’t swim, or wasn’t capable of appreciating the health and the beauty of the body».
(Religious Attitudes of the Indo Europeans)
It is easy to detect, in these tones, the echoes of the Platonic Republic, the Platonic theory of the education of the φυλακες as perfect guardians and as an élite of good and beautiful. The Platonic form, the perfect human specimen, is attainable only through a biological selection, the selection of an élite always more and more transparently Nordic, through which the blonde image of the deity can shine. The Good and the Beautiful acquire concrete reality «when they are personified before our eyes. This fertile thought enlivens the hellenic notion of kalokagathìa, of Good-Beauty, and kalokagathìa is not only an ideal of individual perfection, but much more: it’s the ideal of the breeding of a superior humanity. Only breeding and selection can ensure that the Good and the Beautiful will one day be personified before us.» (Plato as a Defender of Life)
Despite the naturalistic premises, Günther’s philosophy of race almost results in metaphysics of form, of Gestalt, in the Jüngerian sense of the term. Thereby, it transcends itself, it goes beyond its Darwinism and from the plane of becoming it looks out on that of Being. Race is not only a biological factor. It is an archetype, a form, in the sense that Plato gave to this word. It is less a zoological collective criterion to which the individual must conform, and more a norm of human perfection, norm – therefore Richtschnur, Regel, Vorschrift, Vorbild: «One cannot ask a people to aim at the average. A true tension of the body and the soul can only be awakened by the image of a heroic humanity: the image of a healthy, noble and beautiful man».
«We are nothing; what we are looking for, is everything»: these words of Hölderlin were chosen by Günther as a symbol of Nordic religiosity.
The Nordic race, in Günther’s conception, takes on the value of a metaphysical presence, a presence of Order, of kósmos, in the world of men. Significantly, in the introduction to The Religious Attitudes of the Indo Europeans, the words of Heraclitus return: «Enter, here too the gods dwell»
«Family, lineage, state, religion and right, the course of the year and festivity, the moral and spiritual prescriptions: all brings us back to a cosmic Order, and in this Order man lives as member of a lineage that perpetuates itself through the generational order that was enlivened in Greece by the cult of Hestia, and finds expression among all Aryan peoples in the cult of the sacred fireplace. Inside the great cosmic Order there is the sacred generational order responsible for the custody of blood, of biological heritage, within noble bloodlines: thus the defense of race configures itself as a requirement that is deductible from the totality of the cosmic Order and as a spontaneous manifestation of Indo European religiosity.
In India, the concept of a genetic order is still retained by the Manava-Dharmasastra (X, 61): ‘But that kingdom in which such bastards, sullying (the purity of) the castes, are born, perishes quickly together with its inhabitants’. Hence the Indo European sanctification of sexual life, the veneration of the bride (déspoina, matrona) as the keeper of biological heritage; hence the inclination of Indo European religiosity to result in the ‘breeding’ of men, through the attentive choice of the spouse, through eugéneia, therefore through the desire of an ever-growing nobility of blood» (The Religious Attitudes of the Indo Europeans)
Here a glimmer over Günther’s personality hatches, which, beyond a faint veil of scientific pedantry, was the personality of a profoundly religious man. A man who lived in the contemplation of an image, the image of the Nordic race, conceived as the most noble apparition of nature. The sentiment with which he approaches this image is that of veneration and amazement, and shines through the epigraph verses to Nobility through Clan Care:
«Ein Rätsel ist Reinentsprungenes. Auch
Der Gesang kaum darf es enthullen. Denn
Wie du anfingst, wirst du bleiben,
So viel auch wirket die Not,
Und die Zucht, das meiste nämlich
Vermag die Geburt,
Und der Lichtstrahl, der
Dem Neugebornen begegnet.»
[Pure source is a riddle. Poems even
May hardly show the solutions. For as
You started, you will continue,
Whatever the workings of discipline
Or necessity; for most is
Achieved by birth
And the ray of light
That meets the new-born infant.]
(Hölderlin, Der Rhein)
Despite the efforts of the press and politicians to seize his name, despite his vast work as propagandist in the national Right-wing environment, Günther always remained a solitaire absorbed in his vision. His books were written and thought of in the solitude of woods, in small locations across the Schwarzwald or the Thuringian Forest, around Norway’s fjords or Dalarna’s valleys. In this respect, his personality was distinctly German, Nordic, for his love of solitude, of distance from other men: someone called the love of nature «Germans’ secret religion». The tradition of his thought was also German, as well as his classicism, which is that of Winckelmann, of Schiller, of Goethe. On the backdrop of Günther’s work there is the faith of Goethe, of Walther Otto, in a state of perpetual theophany, and the ability to perceive the Olympians not as a distant myth, but as an ordinary reality:
«'Twas but through Beauty’s morning-entrance
That you the land of knowledge gained»
(Schiller, Die Künstler)
We [Ar Editions] had contacted Günther two years ago to ask about an Italian translation of The Religious Attitudes of the Indo Europeans. He had responded kindly, providing a number of indications, of tips, of recommendations. We had hoped that he could witness the publishing of his book in this country to which he is now tied by multiple bonds – both of Günther’s daughters married two Italians. Unfortunately this did not happen:
We are still left with the commitment that this translation may soon see the light.
Here we want to report an important essay by Günther on Greco-Roman humanism, first appeared in 1937 as the appendix of the book “The Values of the Italian Bloodline”, which is currently the only writing of his that has been published in Italy. It was put together polemically with certain German super-nationalists who claimed that Greek and Latin were anything extraneous to the genuine German spirit, and it may also be useful for certain Italian super-nationalists who ignore that the Nordic idea, rather than contradicting our classical tradition, represents its necessary integration.
May it be dedicated to the memory of Hans F.K. Günther and to his daughters Ingrid and Sigrun.
ADRIANO ROMUALDI