I had been meaning for ages to look up all those famous pictures and pieces of old footage of the Nazis occult or "mediaeval" processions. It was this that eventually pushed me to find some.

The Day of German Art was held annually in Munich for about three years, from 1936 or so to about 1938. There are pictures here and here.

On this day...

The unification of Germany into a politically and administratively integrated nation state officially occurred on 18 January 1871 at the Versailles Palace'sHall of Mirrors in France. Princes of the German states gathered there to proclaim Wilhelm of Prussia as Emperor Wilhelm of the German Empire after the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War. Unofficially, the transition of most of the German-speaking populations into a federated organization of states occurred over nearly a century of experimentation. Unification exposed several glaring religious, linguistic, and cultural differences between and among the inhabitants of the new nation, suggesting that 1871 really only represents one moment in a continuum of the larger unification processes. Historians debate whether or not Otto von Bismarck, the Minister President of Prussia, had a master-plan to expand the North German Confederation of 1866 to include the remaining independent German states into a single entity, or whether he simply sought to expand the power of the Kingdom of Prussia. They conclude that factors in addition to the strength of Bismarck's Realpolitik led a collection of early modern polities to reorganize political, economic, military and diplomatic relationships in the 19th century. By establishing a Germany without Austria, the political and administrative unification in 1871 at least temporarily solved the problem of German dualism. (more...)

[Wikipedia]

The Original Scout Salute

Actually even though I think this picture was taken in Lithuania, the salute was clearly virtually the same as the salute ("raised hand", at any rate) for making the Pledge of Allegiance in America. This old way of doing things I believe pertained in America up until the 1930s, when it suddenly became politically incorrect - for some reason.

In 1939 Lord Baden-Powell noted in his diary:

Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organization etc.—and ideals which Hitler does not practice himself.

He also admired Mussolini, and some early Scouting badges had a swastika symbol on them. He maintained that his use of the symbol related to its earlier, original meaning of "good luck" in Sanskrit, for which purpose the symbol had been used for centuries prior to the rise of fascism.

Baden-Powell was a target of the Nazi regime in the Black Book, which listed individuals which were to be arrested during and after an invasion of Great Britain as part of Operation Sea Lion. Scouting was regarded as a dangerous spy organisation by the Nazis.

Tea and Death

Does David Blair really think that Iran is becoming more pro-western simply because Iranian young people are adopting western fashions, drinking Coca-Cola and ignoring the Koran?

Any visitor to Tehran is struck by how young Iranians have embraced Western – and specifically American – popular culture. This does not simply extend to fashion, films, music and the regime's famously futile attempts to ban satellite dishes. What struck me on my last visit was how the bookshops outside Tehran University sell dictionaries of American idiom and helpful guides on how to adopt an American accent.

So what, I say? Even if you approve of American culture - and I don't - it won't stop the Iranians from hating us (whether or not you even believe there is a meaningful "us" left for them to hate).

Why? Because this sort of "culture" has very little to do with anything! The worst wars ever fought have been between enemies that were culturally almost indistinguishable. For me the most startling pictures from modern histories of the Second World War aren’t the shots of death-camps and mass graves. They're the photos and bits of film footage of Hitler and his cabinet at the Berghof, dressed up in tweeds with their hair neatly parted, having afternoon tea. One can almost hear Gilbert & Sullivan playing on the gramophone. A year or so later Hitler was ordering the bombing of Britain – which, after Germany, was his favourite country. “Culture” had absolutely nothing to do with it, and trying to pretend that the current “Long War” is about culture (rather than about what every war is about – i.e. politics) is seriously to misapprehend our enemies.

Could it all come back?

The above is from a stunning collection of colour photos, apparently from Life magazine.

Could it all come back? Up to a point one would have to say certainly not. For one thing we simply no longer have a culture of militarism, either in this country or in any other (and certainly not in Germany). And nor is there even any fondness for order and discipline generally, in private life or in public. People nowadays are in love with slovenliness and degradation, and their children are always inevitably worse.

Again though, I say only up to a point. The greatest pity is that much that was wicked and evil about National Socialism (e.g. the nationalism, not to mention the socialism) is still very much alive today. For example, I'm not really into physical fitness, and whenever I've taken myself down to the gym most of the other boys and girls there have been reasonably civilised. But now it would seem that if the balding old coot on the treadmill next to yours turns out to be a ranting fascist nutter then it's not impossible that he'll be a senior civil servant at the FCO as well.

Similarly, I suspect (or is it just the usual gut instinct?) that Gerard Warner is wrong when he says that fascism is ideologically 'exhausted and discredited'. Morally, of course, fascism always was discredited. But ideologically it would seem to be very much alive. Ideologically it is, after all, merely a "scientific" approach to human existence, based on the theories (now elevated to the level of revealed truths) of Charles Darwin - who is still very much a celebrity du jour. It dismisses rationality and spirituality as mere sentimentality and weakness, prizing the will above human reason and "reality" above religion. Modern science and modern politics, which set no store by the mere humanity of their victims (whether old or unborn - to which latter extent modern doctors are a good deal worse than their Nazi forebears), simply take these principles to their logical extremes.

Fabian Hambüchen

 Preparing

Celebrating

At London 2012

A hug for the coach

 And a very brotherly hug for Dutch rival and gold medalist Epke Zonderland. (Hambüchen won silver.)

The King in Thule

Pierre Jean Van der Ouderaa, The King of Thule (1896)

Es war ein König in Thule,

Gar treu bis an das Grab,

Dem sterbend seine Buhle

einen goldnen Becher gab.

Es ging ihm nichts darüber,

Er leert' ihn jeden Schmaus;

Die Augen gingen ihm über,

So oft er trank daraus.

Und als er kam zu sterben,

Zählt' er seine Städt' im Reich,

Gönnt' alles seinen Erben,

Den Becher nicht zugleich.

Er saß beim Königsmahle,

Die Ritter um ihn her,

Auf hohem Vätersaale,

Dort auf dem Schloß am Meer.

Dort stand der alte Zecher,

Trank letzte Lebensglut,

Und warf den heiligen Becher

Hinunter in die Flut.

Er sah ihn stürzen, trinken

Und sinken tief ins Meer,

die Augen täten ihm sinken,

Trank nie einen Tropfen mehr.

There was a king in Thule,

Was faithful till the grave,

To whom his mistress, dying,

A golden goblet gave.

Nought was to him more precious;

He drained it at every bout;

His eyes with tears ran over,

As oft as he drank thereout.

When came his time of dying,

The towns in his land he told,

Nought else to his heir denying

Except the goblet of gold.

He sat at the royal banquet

With his knights of high degree,

In the lofty hall of his fathers

In the castle by the sea.

There stood the old carouser,

And drank the last life-glow;

And hurled the hallowed goblet

Into the tide below.

He saw it plunging and filling,

And sinking deep in the sea:

Then fell his eyelids for ever,

And never more drank he!

['Der König in Thule', by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

The poem was later set to music by Franz Schubert. (The visuals in the video are from Fritz Lang’s 1924 film Die Nibelungen: Siegfried, and are not directly related to the poem.)

Trank nie einen Tropfen mehr? Well, I've just given up alcohol for St Martin's Lent. (We'll see how that goes.)

"Rightwing" Gays: The French Exception?

The Pink Swastika is one of those amusing little books that fails to convince with its central thesis (which is basically that fascism = poofterism) but which nonetheless constantly entertains - nay titillates! - with its wealth of little known facts and circumstantial evidence. As such, it is very easy to dip in and out of it. Like everything on the Internet, what it has to say has to be double- and triple-checked (in other words "googled to death"), but a surprising amount of it stands up.

As I say, what the authors have to say about Nazism wears somewhat thin at times. The National Socialist German Workers Party did indeed have it roots in the barmier imaginings of a group of shell-shocked Bavarian veterans of the Great War. And apart from the fact that they were all ex-soldiers there was nothing particularly "rightwing" about them - at least until they were infiltrated by the security forces (in the person of a former Austrian corporal by the name of Adolf Heidler) and had their ideology re-modelled along the lines of Prussian Imperialism. But the presence of the notorious pervert Ernst Röhm amongst the luminaries of the early Nazi Party does not imply that the Party was a "gay" political movement, nor do its early meetings in gay nightclubs. Nor, for that matter, does Heidler's (a.k.a. Hitler's) former sideline career as a Viennese rentboy!

Where the authors are on more solid ground is with the modern "Far Right", not to mention the modern "gay rights" movement. Although the "Gay Movement" has clearly drifted towards the Left in recent years, it has in its time had a significant following on the Far Right - and conversely there is hardly a single Far Right political party in Europe today that has not had more than its fair share of gay sex scandals.

As it happens, for a long time I had assumed that the honourable exception (if that is the right phrase) to this general rule was France. Whatever one may think of Jean-Marie Le Pen (and I'm not terribly keen, I have to say) he is at least a man's man - or rather a lady's man, if you see what I mean. Unfortunately the French Right, albeit less so than the French Left, is hilariously split: monarchists here (split into legitimists, Orleanists, and ooh-la-la!), nationalists there, Gaullists and republicans and who-knows-what, pro-Americans, anti-Americans, McDonald's-bombing farmers and cinema-bombing Roman Catholics - and even the odd integrist and traditionalist kicking around. It takes all sorts!

Where the really funny stuff happens, apparently, is on the Nouvelle Droit. David Irving, who is always good for a laugh, has an old news story about a young French student called Michael Caignet in his archive.

ON January 29, 1981, Michel (Miguel) Caignet, a 26 year old doctoral candidate in English-German linguistics, was just leaving his residence in Courbevoie to attend the university when he was accosted by four individuals in the vicinity of his apartment. He was at once knocked to the ground and held down while one of his four assailants poured sulphuric acid over his face and his right hand.

Mr. Caignet had once belonged to FANE (the Fédération d'action nationale et européene) and been a revisionist. He had been denounced by the daily VSD.

As a result of the acid attack his facial features were so hideously disfigured that only two newspapers dared to publish a photograph. The identity of the main participant in the attack, Yves Aziza, a medical student and son of Charles Aziza (a pharmaceutical company employee at Montreuil) was known to police within one hour of the assault. But the French police, and French justice, allowed Y. Aziza, in circumstances of which the outrageous details are well-known, sufficient time to flee to Germany and then Israel.

At the Justice Ministry, a Mr. Main, (a director attached to the Office of Criminal Investigations headed by Raoul Béteille), adopted a sarcastic tone as he explained why it took all of 14 days before a criminal investigation into the matter finally began. ... Among Y. Aziza's accomplices one noted the name of Daniel Ziskind, son of Michèle Ziskind and sister of Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch, and the son of Jean Pierre-Bloch himself.

[David Irving's Action Report]

OK, most of those Jewish names don't mean much to me. But Michel Caignet was to go on to further notoriety by becoming the founder-editor of Gaie France - which, as the title perhaps suggests, was a rightwing French nationalist gay magazine. Which promoted pederasty!

 

In 1998, a gay newspaper in Amsterdam reported on the sorry fate of Gaie France:

Last spring the case against French publisher Michel Caignet was finally brought to a close. A Paris court barred him for life from ever publishing again, and sentenced him to serve two-and-a-half years in prison for his role in selling gay videos that allegedly showed actors under the age of eighteen, but over the age of fifteen having sex. Caignet's license to distribute his magazine Gaie France was already revoked in 1993, but Caignet ignored the censors' warnings and continued publishing under new titles. The convictions brought to a close an investigation that began with nation-wide raids in April 1996 against people on Caignet's mailing list. The day the trials opened there were more raids, this time involving some 2500 French police, who conducted 710 searches around the country. Of the 673 persons whose home were searched, 210 were charged with a crime, and 20 were kept in jail. The involvement of Caignet with porn with minors doesn't surprise someone who's familiar with the history of Gaie France. The magazine has always been controversial because the editors used the philosophy of right-wing authors as Hans Blüher to sanction their own interest in very young boys. 

[Gay News Amsterdam, #77, January 1998; Martijn.org]

So what's the connexion? Alisdair Clarke on his Aryan Futurism blog explains:

The [Euro New Right]’s “paganism” entails a naturalism towards mores and sexuality. Unlike still traditionalists, ENR members have a relatively liberated attitude towards sexuality. Thus [Alain de] Benoist had no qualms about giving an interview to Gaie France, which features homoerotic images as well as cultural commentary. ENR members have no desire to impose what they consider the patently unnatural moralism of Judeo-Christianity on sexual relations.

Ummm, Okaaay! It's interesting to read that Judeo-Christian "moralism" is "unnatural" - whereas having it off with little boys is apparently just fine.

Who are we to disagree?

A Different Sort of Scouting?

This is probably the strangest photo I've yet come across on the 'Net. It's a pic of a Hitler Youth "Jamboree", complete with the flags of different nations. The label runs,

29th July 1935: Members of the Hitler Youth under flags of the various delegations at the Hitler Youth Jamboree near Rheinsberg in Germany. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

Under the Third Reich, Scouting was of course banned in Germany, and all Scouts were forced (or perhaps just forefully encouraged) to join the Hitler Youth.

And yet the Hitler Youth was in many ways clearly inspired by the Scout Movement - right down to their uniforms and, apparently, their "jamborees".

Thoughts on Modern German History

There was less than the working lifetime of one man between 1871 and 1914, and between 1945 and 1989. The Second Reich and the German Democratic Republic lasted 43 years and 44 years respectively.

Heroes vs. Monsters - from Germany to America

The above picture got me thinking...

For a long time I've felt that comic-book superheroes were the natural successors of the heroes of legend and, to a lesser extent, myth. They inhabit the same imaginative space that St George or Siegfried or Hercules or Apollo once did. For whatever reason, we like stories about men (and sometimes women) who are like us only better and who fight terrifying monsters on our behalf.

And of course sometimes the heroic re-modelling has been quite conscious and deliberate. Was Superman unconsciously modelled on Jesus? (Or Merlin? Or Moses? Or Cyrus the Great?) Well, possibly! (He was invented by a couple of Jewish teenagers, who'd presumably heard of Nietzsche's original but hadn't read him.) But the comic-book character Wonder Woman is actually an Amazon. And the comic-book Thor is, well, Thor. It's easy to scoff at George Lucas for lifting Star Wars straight from the pages of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (though it's not quite so easy to scoff when one remembers that Lucas became a multi-millionaire on the back of it). But it had all (more or less!) been done before.

But when was the actual point of crossover? Where was the cultural nexus between the old world and the new? More specifically, when did American comics stop being about detectives (like Dick Tracy or, for that matter, The World's Greatest Detective himself - basically Sherlock Holmes in an even sillier costume - in the pages of what were then still called Detective Comics) and start being about "enhanced individuals"?

I suspect it really was in the 1930s and '40s, and as with so much of America culture the source and inspiration came from the old country. And, as with everything "all American", from apple-pie to frankfurters to jelly doughnuts to hamburgers, not to mention marching bands and blond-haired, blue-eyed, lantern-jawed jock-boys, the "old country" in particular was, of course, Germany.

By the 1930s of course Germany's heroes were back in vogue partly thanks to Wagner (who dusted down Siegfried and Parsifal and gave them their own show-stoppers) and partly thanks to Fritz Lang (who first brought the medieval world's greatest dragon-slayer to the big screen). And, let's not beat about the bush, it was partly thanks to dear old Adolf.

It's hardly surprising then that, just as Nazi Germany produced a Third Reich version of Fanta, America produced authentically Yankee versions of Norse/Arthurian heroes - just as Walt Disney would get on a produce his own Americanised versions of the Grimms' fairy stories.

Nihil sub sole novum!

America's Most Dysfunctional Family?

Obviously by comparison with real American families the Simpsons are far from dysfunctional - and to a certain extent that was part of the joke, at least at one level. Or at least it was at some point, before The Simpsons eventually ditched politically detached post-modernism and embraced out-and-out cultural Marxism.

I can't even remember which episode this is from, but it's a joke nightmare vision that Homer has in which his children appear more "realistic"/"normal"-looking. What we're to make of the idea of "typical" American children being blond-haired and blue-eyed of course will to a certain extent depend on your attitude to blond-haired blue-eyed people. German Americans are still America's largest ethnic group, but of course if people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have their way they won't be for much longer.

My point about The Simpsons is that once upon a time (when people still watched it in reasonably large numbers) it was just possible to see the humour of it as observational and perhaps even affectionate and heart-warming. In an America though where people like the Simpsons are barely tolerated, let alone celebrated for the contributions they have made to the country over the centuries, it's going to be increasingly difficult to see the programme as anything other than a nasty, unsubtle attack on family values and Nordic heritage.

Bear in mind the most famous (and potentially the most important) German American in America at the moment is Donald Trump, and that the American cultural Establishment will stop at nothing to prevent him becoming President!

Augustiner Keller München

It's still there today, but of course the main reason it's interesting is that it has the "historicity" of having been one of the places where You-Know-Who used to speak.

(For a little twerp who didn't drink alcohol, he spent an awful lot of time in beer-halls.)

Luan and Noah

Beautiful German twins boys! These two are Luan and Noah Klose, with their father Miroslav. I think he plays football, or something.

He's actually a Catholic, from Silesia, so he was born in a part of what is de facto Germany that is now de jure in Poland. And at an early age he upped sticks, became a "German citizen" and is now a German sporting hero.

Good for him, I say. And it just goes to show that sometimes things can seem to sort of work out alright.

Schuhplattler

Polish schools are… different.

I like the crucifix on the wall though, next to the Polish eagle (with crown!).

Learning the famous Bavarian “bum-slapping dance” and performing it in front of their fellows was presumably a class-project. (Either that or they lost a bet!)

It does go to show though that Catholic boys are still awesome.

Another way of selling lemonade

Two young boys buying lemonade in Berlin in 1931

'Roman Builders'

by Christian Rohifs

Bavarian National Dress

According to this blogger, his name is Maximilian and he's 12 years old.

He looks super though.

Britten's German Boy

On the 'plane, on my way to a very enjoyable and all too brief holiday in Germany, I read in The Times's obits (which I don't normally peruse because I tend to avoid the Murdoch Press but this time I was on a BA flight so it was free) the melancholy news that one of Benjamin Britten's boys had died. He was only 96.

A very handsome young German lad, whom Britten had originally met in Florence during the halcyon early days of the Nazi regime in Germany, Wolff Scherchen (who would later change his name to the more English-sounding John Woolford) described their first encounter.

They first met at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Florence in March 1934, when Wulff was 13. He was with his father, a well-known conductor, while the 20-year-old Britten was in Italy to hear a performance of his Phantasy Quartet. Scherchen’s recollection was that it poured with rain and Britten shared his raincoat. “He opened it out, stuck his right arm into the right sleeve and got me to put my left arm into the left sleeve. The mac was big enough to accommodate us both.” 

[Telegraph]

Whatever else one can say about Britten, he didn't waste time.