'Ecology' and the Modernization of Fascism in the German Ultra-right

Janet Biehl

It is an incontestable fact that the ecology crisis today is real. In a vast number of ways and places, the biosphere of this planet is undergoing a great deal of damage. Parts of the environment have already been rendered uninhabitable through toxic wastes and nuclear power plant disasters, while systemic pollution, ozone holes, global warming, and other disasters are increasingly tearing the fabric on which all life depends. That such damage is wrought overwhelmingly by corporations in a competitive international market economy has never been clearer, while the need to replace the existing society with one such as social ecology advances has never been more urgent. ¹

At a time when worsening economic conditions and strong political disaffection occur along with ecological dislocations, however, nationalist and even fascist ideas are gaining an increasingly high profile in Europe, particularly, but not only, in the Federal Republic of Germany. With social tensions exacerbated, neofascist groups of various kinds are winning electoral representation, even as their loosely linked cohorts commit acts of violence against foreigners. Such groups, both skinhead and 'intellectual,' are part of a 'New' Right that explicitly draws its ideas from classical fascism. They are updating the old nationalist, mystical, and misanthropic themes of the 'Old' Right, writes Jutta Ditfurth, in a "modernization of fascism." Among other things, they are using a right-wing interpretation of ecology "as an ideological 'hinge' for organizing the extreme-right and neofascist scene." ²

Today's fascists have a distinct ideological legacy from their fascist forebears upon which to draw. Indeed, 'ecology' and a mystical reverence for the natural world are hardly new to German nationalism. At the end of the nineteenth century, a cultural revolt against positivism swept much of Europe, as George L. Mosse writes, and in Germany it became infused with both nature-mysticism and racial nationalism. This revolt

became intimately bound up with a belief in nature's cosmic life force, a dark force whose mysteries could be understood, not through science, but through the occult. An ideology based upon such premises was fused with the glories of an Aryan past, and in turn, that past received a thoroughly romantic and mystical interpretation. ³

Culminating in the 1920s, an assortment of occult and pseudo-scientific ideas coalesced around the idea of a German Volk into a romantic nationalism, romantic racism, and a mystical nature-worshipping faith. Indeed, as Mosse observes, the German word Volk

is a much more comprehensive term than "people," for to German thinkers ever since the birth of German romanticism in the late eighteenth century "Volk" signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental "essence." This "essence" might be called "nature" or "cosmos" or "mythos," but in each instance it was fused to man's innermost nature, and represented the source of his creativity, his depth of feeling, his individuality, and his unity with other members of the Volk. ⁴

The völkisch movement of the 1920s regarded modern materialism, urbanism, rationalism, and science as artificial and evil, alien to this 'essence.'⁵ In a time of bitter social dislocation, it saw Weimar democracy as the product of Western democratic and liberal ideals and, further, as a puppet regime controlled by people who did not represent German 'essence.' Many alleged that a Jewish world conspiracy lay behind the discontents of modernism, including materialistic consumerism, soulless industrialism, a homogenized commercial culture, and excessive modern technology, all of which were said to be systematically destroying traditional German values. Only true patriots could save Germans from ruin, thought the extreme right -- themselves.

This movement sought to assert a truly Germanic alternative -- one as racialist as it was nationalist in nature. The popular writings of Paul Lagarde and Julius Langbehn favored an aristocratic social order in which Germans would rule the world. It invoked a nature-romanticism in which a closeness to the natural landscape was to give people a heightened sense of aliveness and 'authenticity.' It advanced a new cosmic faith, embodied in 'Aryan' blood, that was to be grasped through intuition rather than science in a plethora of occult and esoteric spiritualistic faiths that abounded in Germany in the 1920s. Mystical belief-systems like Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and Ariosophy (a mystical Aryanism) abounded and were rife with Germanicnationalist components, such that they could be used to mystify an 'ecological' nationalism.

However inadvertently, the romantic nationalists of the völkisch movement became an important source for National Socialist ideology, which ironically drew on its antimodern sentiments even as it built a technologically modern and virulently nationalistic and genocidal totalitarian state. Demagogically appealing to a very real sense of alienation, the Nazis stage-managed indoctrination extravaganzas that promised 'authenticity' in a mystical, romantic nationalism that was 'closer to nature,' even as they engaged in mass murder. Stressing the need to return to simpler, healthier, and more 'natural' lifeways, they advanced the idea and practice of a 'Nordic peasantry' tied organically to the soil -- even as they constructed a society that was industrially more modernized and rationalized than any German society had seen to that time.

The so-called 'New' Right today appeals to themes reminiscent of the völkisch movement in pre-Nazi Germany. It, too, presents itself as offering an 'ecological' alternative to modern society. In the view of the 'New' Right today, the destruction of the environment and the repression of nationalities have a common root in 'Semitic' monotheism and universalism. In its later form, Christianity, and in its subsequent secularized forms, liberalism and Marxism, this dualistic, homogenizing universalism is alleged to have brought on both the ecological crisis and the suppression of national identity. Just as Judeo-Christian universalism was destructive of authentic cultures when Christian missionaries went out into the world, so too is modernity eliminating ethnic and national cultures. Moreover, through the unbridled technology to which it gave rise, this modern universalism is said to have perpetrated not only the destruction of nature but an annihilation of the spirit; the destruction of nature, it is said, is life-threatening in the spiritual sense as well as the physical, since when people deny pristine nature, their access to their 'authentic' self is blocked.

The dualistic yet universalistic 'Semitic' legacy is borne today most egregiously, in 'New' Right ideology, by the United States, in whose 'mongrel' culture -- egalitarian democracy -- all cultures and races are mixed together, forming a crass, soulless society. American cultural imperialism is genocidal of other cultures around the world, and its technological imperialism is destroying the global environment. The fascist quest for 'national identity' and ecological salvation seeks to counter 'Western civilization' -- that is, the United States, as opposed to 'European civilization' -- by advancing a notion of 'ethnopluralism' that seeks for all cultures to have sovereignty over themselves and their environment. Europe should become, instead of a modernized monoculture, a 'Europe of fatherlands,' with autonomy for all its peoples. Just as Turks should live in Turkey and Senegalese in Senegal, Germans should have Germany for themselves, 'New' Right ideologues argue.

Ecology can easily be perverted to justify this 'ethnopluralism' -- that is, nationalism. Conceptions of one's region as one's 'homeland,' or Heimat, can be perverted into a nationalistic regionalism when a region's traditions and language are mystically tied to an 'ancestral' landscape. (The word Heimat connotes as well a turn toward the past, an anti-urban mood, a familiar community, and proximity to nature. For several decades the concept was looked upon with disfavor because the Nazis had used it, but intellectuals rediscovered it in the 1970s, after further decades of capitalist industrialization.) For a people seeking to assert themselves against an outside intruder, an 'ecologized' Heimat in which they are biologically embedded can become a useful tool not only against imperialism but against immigration, foreigners, and 'overpopulation.' Elaborate justifications for opposing Third World immigration are disguised as diversity, drawing on 'ecological' arguments against 'overpopulation.' Today it is not only fascists who invoke Heimat; in September 1989, for example, the head of the respectable League for the Protection of the Environment and Nature (Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz, or BUND), environmentalist Hubert Weinzierl, remarked that

only when humanity's main concern, the diminution of the stream of overpopulation, has been accomplished, will there be any meaning or any prospect of building an environment that is capable of improvement, of configuring the landscape of our civilization in such a way that it remains worthy of being called Heimat. ⁶

An ecology that is mystical, in turn, may become a justification for a nationalism that is mystical. In the New Age milieu of today, with its affinities for ecology, the ultra-right may well find the mystical component it needs to make a truly updated, modernized authoritarian nationalism. As in Germany between the two world wars, antirational cults of the New Age -- primitivistic, esoteric -- abound in both the Federal Republic and the Anglo-American world. Such antirationalism and mysticism are appealed to by the 'New' Right; as anarchist publisher Wolfgang Haug observes, "The New Right, in effect, wants above all to redefine social norms so that rational doubt is regarded as decadent and eliminated, and new 'natural' norms are established." ⁷

Neofascist 'Ecology'

Ecology is warped for mystical-nationalist ends by a whole series of neofascist groups and parties. Indeed, so multifarious are the ecofascist parties that have arisen, and so much do their memberships overlap, that they form what antifascist researcher Volkmar Wölk calls an "ecofascist network." ⁸ Their programmatic literature often combines ecology and nationalism in ways that are designed to appeal to people who do not consider themselves fascists, while at the same time they ideologically support neo-Nazi street-fighting skinheads who commit acts of violence against foreigners.

National Revolutionaries⁹

The National Revolutionaries (NRs) manipulatively mix themes of left and right in their uses of nationalism and ecology, in an attempt to cross ideological lines. They draw on an old tenet of right-wing dissent in Germany -- the belief that a 'Third Way' between capitalism and socialism is necessary and that Germany is predestined to lead humankind toward it. ¹⁰ The NRs' 'Third Way' is based on nationalism, a socialism "of the specific national way" ¹¹ -- in short, a 'national socialism.' A wing of the NRs today, called the Solidaristen, identifies itself with the Strasser brothers, two 1920s Nazi Party members who took the 'Socialism' in 'National Socialism' seriously and represented the 'left' anticapitalist wing of the Nazis. Today, the Solidaristen and other NRs regard Otto Strasser in particular as the 'Trotsky of National Socialism' because of his 1920s intraparty power struggle with Hitler; Hitler's ejection of this fascist in 1930 was, for them, a betrayal of National Socialism.

Today's leading NR ideologist, Henning Eichberg, calls for the assertion of "national identity" and a "liberation nationalism." Seeking to appeal to left and right, NR publications have supported national liberation movements from across the traditional political spectrum, including the Irish, Basques, Ukrainians, and Afghans, as well as Sandinistas. ¹² They regarded divided Germany as an occupied country, "the result of the imperialist politics of the occupation forces," and they sought to "liberate" it -- including Austria. Now that Germany has been freed from this "occupation," the National Revolutionaries are free to concentrate on "reunifying" with Austria.

Eichberg regards Judeo-Christianity as the ultimate root of all present evils, since it is overly intellectual and alienates humanity both from itself and from the divine; it neglects the emotions and the body. Tied in as it is with the logic of productivism, Christianity, Eichberg writes, is the "religion of growth" that must be fought at all costs. To help cultivate 'national identity,' he proposes instead a new religion that mixes together neopagan Germanic, Celtic, and Indian religions with old völkisch-nationalistic ideas. It is to be based on "the sensuality-physicality of dance and ritual, ceremony and taboo, meditation, prayer, and ecstasy. In essence, [this religion] constitutes itself as a form of praxis" against the "religion of growth" since its "sensuous counter-experiences" can restore humanity to closer contact with nature. Sounding like many New Agers in the United States, Eichberg calls for a return to pristine nature, to the alleged primordial sources of people's lives, psyches, and authentic cultures, and for people to heal themselves within as part of healing the ecological crisis, overcoming their own alienation, and rediscovering themselves. ¹³

National Revolutionaries exploit ecological themes not only to construct primitivistic New Age religions but for political activity as well. During the 1970s they organized around opposition to nuclear energy at about the same time as the citizens' initiative movement did. "With their ecological and antinuclear enthusiasm," observes Walter Laqueur,

their cultural anti-Americanism and their support for movements of national liberation in many parts of the world, the "national revolutionaries" tried, in fact, to outflank their left-wing contemporaries. Some regarded Sinn Fein as a model for the German national revolutionaries, others suggested "political Balkanization" in Germany and Europe as a solution to all outstanding questions. ¹⁴

Other National Revolutionaries took a different political approach: at the end of the 1970s, they joined the newly emerging Greens, where some of their number succeeded in holding office for a time. In October 1980, the Alternative List of West Berlin, for one, decided they could not work with National Revolutionaries, whom they considered even more dangerous than overt neo-Nazis because they hid their true intentions behind a veil of grassroots democratic and ecological programs. They were mostly driven out of the Greens, at least as far as observers seem aware today. ¹⁵

The Freedom German Workers Party ¹⁶

Like the National Revolutionaries, the Freedom German Workers Party (Freiheitliche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or FAP) calls for a 'national socialism,' albeit one based on "a sense of community instead of class struggle." The FAP seeks no rapprochement with leftists; it openly and militantly proclaims its support for Nazi ideas, celebrates race and nation, and is pro-Hitler rather than Strasserite. It praises German soldiers, whose "achievements" in two world wars will "still be admired in a thousand years." The FAP is largely controlled by The Movement (Die Bewegung), which seeks to reestablish the NSDAP (the Nazi Party) in the Federal Republic and unite all fascist groups under its aegis. ¹⁷

The FAP recruits from among skinheads and soccer fans, and its activities include acts of violence, arson, and racial attacks on foreigners. It advances the crudest 'Germany for Germans -- foreigners out' slogans. ¹⁸ When it engages in electoral activity, its programmatic demands have included "German jobs for German workers," "repatriation for foreigners," "no franchise for foreigners," and an end to the "crazy enthusiasm for integration." ¹⁹ Germans today must not ruin the "legacy of our fathers," the "cultural landscape"; Alsace-Lorraine, the South Tyrol, and Austria should all be returned to Germany.

FAP Nazis especially loathe "humanistically oriented cosmopolitanism." Marxism, liberalism, and Christianity "have torn humanity from its connectedness to the natural cycles of our earth." No "technical environmentalism" will succeed against the "increasingly obvious ecological catastrophe," they believe. Rather, the "disrupted relations between humanity and the rest of nature" require an "ecological revolution" and a "radical revolution in consciousness" that will "lead humanity to a reintegration with the structure of planetary life." We need a new ethics, they maintain, one in which "humanity, animals and nature are regarded as a unity. Animals are not things" but are "life-forms that feel joy and pain and need our protection." Not surprisingly, the FAP regards abortion as a "crime against the laws of a healthy nature and against God."

In a blatant self-contradiction, their concrete environmental demands are in fact friendly to capitalism: They want "continued economic growth," yet less profit-seeking. "Ecological necessities . . . must be brought into accordance with a functioning economy," they believe, while "the cyclical system of nature should . . . be incorporated into the economic realm."

The Republicans ²⁰

The Republicans, a political party founded by former Waffen-SS member Franz Schönhuber in 1983, have made numerous disavowals of any association with the Nazis -- they present themselves as nothing more than a "community of German patriots." Yet this does not stop them from taking explicitly anti-immigrant stances, especially against Turks, or from exploiting discontents about the influx of foreigners generally, or from maintaining that Germany should be "for Germans." The presence of a "tidal wave" of asylum-seekers in the Federal Republic, they believe, causes "the importation of criminals," "social tensions," and "financial burdens."

The Republicans call for the "preservation of the existence of the German Volk, its health and its ecological living-space [Lebensraum] as a priority for domestic policy. This goal," they add, "will also foster environmental protection." Indeed, ecological dislocations are endangering Germans' "health" -- and by 'health' they mean the 'genetic health' of the German people. Such 'health' has "a higher value than short-term profits and striving for a standard of living." Protecting and maintaining a "healthy environment" not only assures the "security of the means of life of our people" but is "a patriotic duty." The Republicans are stringently antiabortion for German women, yet for the Third World, "meaningful family planning" is necessary to end the "population explosion" and its consequent threat to the environment; without it there will be "natural catastrophe and starvation."

The National Democratic Party ²¹

The National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NPD), founded in 1964 mainly by people who had been active Nazis before 1945, rose to prominence during the 1960s. This aggressively nationalist party long called for German reunification, while its programmatic literature complains that "two wars within one generation . . . have eaten away at the substantive health of the German people." (It does not mention what those wars did to the Jews, as Ditfurth dryly notes.) The NPD laments the destruction of the environment, which "has disadvantageous effects on the Volk-health." Germans should not be exposed to "chemical dyes" and should be protected from "congenital illness," while people with AIDS should be required to "register." The "preservation" of the "German people" requires that German women prolifically give birth, and therefore the NPD is against the "devaluation and destruction of the family." Since abortion threatens "the biological existence of our people," women who have abortions should be punished. The party calls for maternal and housekeeping training for "feminine youth."

In 1973, the NPD drew up an "Ecological Manifesto" that invoked "the laws of nature" to justify a hierarchically structured, "organic" order that would govern social relationships. ²² It inveighs against "the environment polluted and poisoned by a humanity that lives increasingly isolated in a degraded mass," which "is only the most noticeable symptom of the ruined equilibrium of humanity and nature." In the years since then, the NPD's rhetoric has become increasingly New Age oriented; it now calls for "reachieving . . . an environmental consciousness, so necessary for life." Achieving this consciousness, the 1988 NPD program states, "first requires an inner revolution in human thought. It is not the unlimited accumulation of material goods or boundless consumption that gives meaning to human life and happiness, but the experience of nature, concern for cultural values, and social security in the family and Volk." Indeed, "Volk-consciousness and environmental consciousness are inseparable," since "millions of strangers" threaten "our Volk in its existence."

The German People's Union²³

The German People's Union (Deutsche Volksunion, or DVU) was founded by Dr. Gerhard Frey (born in 1933), a longtime ultra-right activist and publisher. Still its leading figure, Frey has been fixated for decades on the Second World War in DVU publications, casting doubts on the concentration camps as they are normally depicted and generally denying German guilt; his publications offer Nazi memorabilia for sale. The DVU proclaims that "Germany should remain German" and calls for "priority in German housing for Germans" and "national identity and self-determination." For the DVU, environmental protection means passing "stringent laws against polluters," "strict examination of imported foodstuffs," and imposing restrictions on animal experimentation and on "the torture of animals." Protecting life means "an end to abortion abuse."

Anthroposophy and the World League for the Protection of Life

Political parties like these have an assortment of 'Old' Right -- that is, Nazi -- connections upon which they may draw in their search for 'ecological' modernization. One such connection is the World League for the Protection of Life (Weltbund Schutz des Lebens, or WSL). This group is not without a certain general appeal in the Federal Republic, since its outlook is based on Anthroposophy, a body of occult ideas formulated earlier in this century by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Steiner, the leading German figure in the nineteenth-century esoteric 'wisdom' cult Theosophy, founded the German Theosophical Society; he went on to found his own doctrine, Anthroposophy, and the Anthroposophical Society thereafter. He wrote many books on his occult spiritualistic philosophy.

Anthroposophy holds a particular attraction in the German counterculture today, as it did in the völkisch movement of the 1920s. The Waldorf Schools, for example, were founded on Steiner's educational principles and are respectable in many German and American countercultural circles. (There are more than sixty in the Federal Republic today.) Founded by Steiner in 1920, they provide children with an alternative, reformed education, one that is free from aggression and from pressures to achieve, one that places emphasis on the musical aspects of life and on feelings over understanding. Steiner is also the founder of biodynamic farming, a form of organic agriculture that does without pesticides and tries to foster a more organic relationship between cultivator and soil. Biodynamic agriculturists today produce a line of organic foods under the brand name Demeter and a line of cosmetics under the name Weleda. Many people have been and continue to be innocently attracted to these efforts and to Anthroposophy without any notion of the less savory aspects of Steiner's work.

Yet not all of Steiner's beliefs were benignly ecospiritual. For one thing, Anthroposophy classifies humanity into 'root races' in an esoteric evolutionary theory. ²⁴ Building on a similar doctrine in Theosophy, the root-race theory is integral to Anthroposophy's cosmology. According to this doctrine, a series of root races of human beings evolved sequentially over the millennia, each superior to the ones that preceded it, each with a higher level of development of self-consciousness. The first two root races, the Polar and Hyperborean, were 'astral-etheric'; they are now extinct -- the evolutionary process superseded them. The next people to evolve were a bit higher, but they were still half animal, purely instinctive, lacking the capacity for conceptual thought and memory. The fourth root race finally began to be recognizably human; finally came the Atlantans, to which Europeans belong. The European whites, as the most highly developed so far, are at the summit of the hierarchical scale of humanity; they have brought everything that is good to humanity, since they "are the only ones who have developed humanity within themselves." ²⁵ These various races have been mostly killed off in various catastrophes of one kind or another, after which only certain people -- presumably the fittest -- survived; "in the case of the inferior kinds of human beings," wrote Steiner, ". . . the life body was not sufficiently protected to enable it to withstand the Luciferic influence." ²⁶ There are numerous subdivisions within these basic root races. Blacks, for example, must live in Africa, we learn, a land of much heat and light; blacks soak up this heat and light, and their brains are specially constructed to process it; their supposed highly instinctual nature results from all this processing.

And since the sun, light, and heat are retained in his epidermis, [the black's] whole metabolism proceeds as if he were being cooked inside himself by the sun. From this results his instinctive life. Within the black, he is continuously being cooked, and what stokes this fire is his posterior brain. ²⁷

Once blacks emigrate out of Africa, the balance of light and heat is different, and therefore they will die out -- "they are in fact a declining race, they will die out of their own nature, since they are receiving too little light and heat." ²⁸ Such a theory would justify accelerating the extinction of races since they are presumably going to die off anyway. In the future, wrote Steiner in 1909, certain people who have not reached a "high level of development" will incline toward evil: "The laggard souls will have accumulated in their karma so much error, ugliness, and evil that there will form, for the time being, a special union of evil and aberrant human beings who voluntarily oppose the community of good men." ²⁹

Perhaps this root-race theory was what appealed to Rudolf Hess about Anthroposophy, for he became an Anthroposophist. As Ditfurth points out, "The root-race ideology of the Theosophists and the Anthroposophists melded seamlessly into the National Socialist idea of the purity of the 'Aryan race.'"³⁰ Certainly Steiner's ideas on biodynamic farming influenced some National Socialists. Anthroposophical ideas are eminently usable by ecofascists today, and there is a strong right wing within the Anthroposophists that is closely connected with the ultra-right. Author Günther Bartsch is an Anthroposophist who is also a National Revolutionary of the Solidarist variety; the author of an adulatory 1989 biography of Otto Strasser, he attempts in his publications to synthesize ecological themes based on Steiner's ideas with Strasser's political ideas. ³¹ It should be noted that Anthroposophy is also well funded by huge multinational corporations like Siemens and Bertelsmann. ³²

Among the ultra-right adherents of Anthroposophy today are officials of the World League for the Protection of Life (WSL), a small but influential and very wealthy environmental organization in the Federal Republic. The garden at its educational center is cultivated according to biodynamic methods, and visitors are served organic refreshments. Yet this organization was founded in 1958 by former members of the National Socialist party, and today it links protection of 'life' (that is, 'right-to-life') themes and the environment with racism and a revival of völkisch ideology. The 'life' it is most interested in protecting is of course German 'life'; thus the WSL is rabidly anti-abortion, believing that German women should be devoted to giving birth to 'Aryan' babies.

The spiritual leader of the WSL and its key figure for most of its history has been Werner Georg Haverbeck. Born in 1909, Haverbeck became an active Nazi at an early age; it should be recalled that Nazism was largely a youth movement, so that members like Haverbeck are still alive. ³³ Haverbeck joined the SA in 1928 and from 1929 to 1932 was a member of the Reich Administration for the National Socialist Student League (Reichsleitung der NSDAP-Studentenschaft) and a leader of the Reich Youth Leadership of the Hitler Youth (Reichjugendführung der Hitlerjugend). He served as a leading official of the Strength Through Joy organization, which controlled recreational activities under the Third Reich; in 1933 Rudolf Hess saw to it that Haverbeck's passport was stamped "This man is not to be arrested." He survived the Röhm purge to help organize the Nuremberg Party Congress and join Hess's staff. It was Hess who converted him to Anthroposophy. During the war he conducted radio propaganda in Denmark and worked in South America; by the end of the war he was an officer. ³⁴

After the Allies rudely aborted Haverbeck's many efforts on behalf of the Third Reich, he contented himself for a time working as a pastor for the Anthroposophical Christian community. He founded an educational center called the Collegium Humanum in 1963, where today ecofascist, esoteric, völkisch, Anthroposophist, neopagan, and primitivist groups meet and hold workshops. He co-founded the WSL and served as its president from 1974 to 1982. In 1981, he was a signatory of the notorious Heidelberg Manifesto, a document drawn up by a group of professors to warn the German people of the dangers that immigration posed to them. Its first draft began:

With great concern we observe the subversion of the German people through the influx of many millions of foreigners and their families, the foreignization of our language, our culture, and our nationhood. . . . Already many Germans have become foreigners in their living districts and workplaces, and thus in their own Heimat.³⁵

Routine as this language may sound now, when opposition to immigration in the Federal Republic is much more tolerated and neofascists pander to it relentlessly, the Manifesto had to be toned down at the time (1981) because of the public outcry it raised.

In accordance with Anthroposophical root-race beliefs, Haverbeck is notable for propounding the thesis that the two world wars in this century in fact constituted a thirty years' war waged by foreign aggressors against the German people and their spiritual life. Apparently, German spiritual life stood in the way of "the strivings for world domination by the Anglo-Saxon race," behind which lay "the intensive image of a call to world dominance, like the old Jewish consciousness." Indeed, Haverbeck maintains, the two world wars amounted to a conspiracy against the German people and spiritual life. It is a "historical lie" that the Nazis ran "mass-murder camps," argues Haverbeck, and is actually "enemy propaganda." It was Russia that was the aggressor in the Second World War. ³⁶

In his 1989 book Rudolf Steiner: Advocate for Germany, Haverbeck lauds Steiner (who died in 1925) for understanding the existence of this ongoing conspiracy early on.

During the first world war, Rudolf Steiner delivered a multitude of lectures about contemporary history, and he toiled inexhaustibly for the truth about the question of "war guilt." . . . Steiner presented his listeners with maps that showed that goals that had been proclaimed back in 1889 were being fulfilled [during World War I]. These maps anticipated the separation of Central Europe that would be ultimately achieved with the loss of East Germany. . . . What was not fully achieved through the Versailles treaty in 1919 was in fact completed in 1945: the demolition of Germany. . . . The leading forces of both parties to the cold war were united in this common struggle against spiritual Germany. "This war [World War I] was a conspiracy against German spiritual life," said Steiner. ³⁷

When Haverbeck's book on Steiner's nationalism was published, it caused an outcry of protest among outraged countercultural Anthroposophists who send their children to Waldorf Schools, use Demeter products, and are in no way racists or fascists. Yet as researcher Wölk points out, their protests were unwarranted, since Haverbeck was only presenting Steiner as what he actually was -- "a crude nationalist whose demonizations were shared by the völkisch groups of his day" -- to show his usefulness for nationalist and neofascist groups today. ³⁸

This alleged conspiracy against German spiritual life pervades much of the WSL's current thinking, notes Wölk. WSLers consider the "flood of asylum-seekers," the destruction of the environment, and the ongoing transformation of the Federal Republic into a multicultural society to be part of the spiritual war against the Germans. They regard the protection of the environment as part of the protection of a people, of its biological "substance" and its national identity. Indeed, WSLers see the battle for a healthy environment as part of the all-encompassing spiritual struggle against the homogenizing forces of modernity and "Western civilization." Haverbeck's wife, Ursula Haverbeck-Wetzel, another former WSL president who "for religious reasons refuses to dissociate herself from any human being, including Adolf Hitler," ³⁹ observes:

Whenever a person comes to feel that he belongs to the cultural strain that is deeply rooted in his people which has not only a material existence but a spiritual reality that is superior to the material plane -- he has broken out from being a manipulated consumer. He has escaped the mass homogenization of completely manipulated people who are "amusing themselves to death" (as Neil Postman put it), which is the goal of "One World" advocates, intent on power and domination. The person who is faithful to his religious convictions and attentive and caring to his culture and customs, they consider dangerous. ⁴⁰

Ernst Otto Cohrs, the WSL's president since 1989, is another devotee of Rudolf Steiner, having been an Anthroposophist since 1961. Today Cohrs's interests seem to lie in promulgating race theories, and publishing and distributing anti-Semitic literature. In 1982, an official of the WSL's Bavarian chapter made a public issue of Cohrs's activities inside the WSL. He wrote a letter to a WSL membership assembly saying that it should dissociate itself from Cohrs because, among other things, he was sending anti-Semitic literature to WSL members, running advertisements in ultra-right magazines like Bauernschaft (the journal of the notorious Holocaust-denier Thies Christophersen), permitting neofascist periodicals to reprint WSL leaflets, and himself distributing such writings as There Were No Gas Chambers and The Auschwitz Myth.⁴¹ Many members withdrew from the WSL as a result of this letter; those who remained were overwhelmingly those who shared Cohrs's anti-Semitic ideas and were not disposed to contradict him. Among them was Baldur Springmann, the 'ecofarmer' who was involved in the Greens in the early days, whose book Partner Erde (Partner Earth) was published by an ultra-right publisher (Arndt Verlag), and who writes for the 'New' Right publication Nation Europa; and Dr. Arnold Neugebohrn, a Republican candidate for the provincial legislature who takes pride in his NSDAP 'gold medal.' Concludes Wölk, "The internal crisis caused by Cohrs's activities in 1981-82 may have diminished the ranks of the WSL, but it also strengthened the WSL's neofascist orientation." Cohrs's current activities are still primarily the dissemination of Holocaust-denial literature. ⁴²

One collective member of the WSL is a Hamburg-based organization known as the Society for Biological Anthropology, Eugenics, and Behavioral Research (Gesellschaft für biologische Anthropologie, Eugenik, und Verhaltensforschung, or GfbAEV), whose head is Jürgen Rieger, a "neo-Nazi in lawyer's robes" (as the newspaper Die Zeit called him) who is currently defending two fascist groups that the Federal Republic banned in 1992; one of the GfbAEV's fellows is the leading ideologue of the French Nouvelle Droite, Alain de Benoist. Its periodical is the notorious quarterly journal Neue Anthropologie, which maintains, among other things, that there has always been environmental destruction in the history of humanity, that in fact one could even say this was part of human nature were it not for one sole exception:

Only the Germans were different. In pagan times they worshipped groves and trees, and because of their closeness to nature, they had a caring orientation toward nature. Even the love of animals is much more pronounced among the Germanic peoples than it is, for example, among the Romance-language-speaking peoples. It is thus no coincidence that even today the most stalwart environmentalist efforts -- private as well as state -- are those conducted by peoples who have a larger proportion of the Nordic race. ⁴³

Rudolf Bahro:Völkisch Spirituality

If fascists are using ecological themes to update their racial and nationalist aims, other thinkers are developing an ecological spiritualism along New Age lines that bears no small resemblance to the völkisch Germanic spirituality of the 1920s. Indeed, "a great part of the literature about close-to-nature spirituality that the alternative scene is reading is permeated with reactionary, völkisch, or even National Socialist content," writes Ditfurth. "We find neofascist and ultra-right positions not only in the various political and even ecological groups, but also . . . in neopagan, esoteric and occult circles." ⁴⁴

Perhaps the most prominent figure in this connection is Rudolf Bahro. Many German 'new social movement' circles previously accepted Bahro as a social theorist contributing to a 'socialism with a human face' and continue to regard him as part of the independent left; leftist periodicals publish uncritical interviews with him. In the Anglo-American world, too, many ecological radicals still consider Bahro as representing something 'leftist.' Yet Bahro no longer considers himself a leftist; indeed, he is a vehement critic of the left⁴⁵ and of "comrades without fatherland." ⁴⁶ In fact, as antifascist researcher Roger Niedenführ argues, since the mid-1980s Bahro has been contributing to the development of a "spiritual fascism" that has the effect of "rehabilitating National Socialism," openly calling for reclaiming the "positive" side of the Nazi movement. Not only does Bahro appeal to a mystical Germanist spirituality like the völkisch ideologues of the 1920s, he even sees the need for a "Green Adolf" who will lead Germans out of their own "folk-depths" and into ecological "salvation.

Bahro originally became well known as the author of The Alternative in Eastern Europe, which he wrote during the 1970s while he was a dissident Marxist and party member in the former East Germany. In 1977, the ruling Communist government sentenced him to prison; in 1979, he was deported. Once arrived in what was then West Germany, Bahro became involved with the nascent German Greens, affirming that "red and green go well together." ⁴⁸ In the early 1980s peace movement, he alarmed many by enunciating nationalistic arguments against the deployment of Pershing missiles. ⁴⁹ He began to speak less in political terms and more in religious terms, asking that "the emphasis [be] shifted from politics and the question of power towards the cultural level . . . to the prophetic level. . . . Our aim has to be the 'reconstruction of God.'"⁵⁰ He became a vocal 'fundamentalist' critic of the realo wing of the Greens (those who became generally committed to exercising parliamentary power) and ultimately left the party in 1985. In a parting speech in Hamburg, he said there were structural similarities between the Greens and the Nazi movement that the Greens were not taking advantage of but should; then he gave his 'fundamentalist' alternative: "the other republic that we want will be an association of communities of life-communities in which God and Goddess are at the center." ⁵¹

Bahro thereafter moved increasingly toward the New Age esoteric milieu. His major concern remained "the ecological crisis," whose "deep structures" must be investigated, but he now thinks ecology "has nothing to do with left and right." ⁵² Today Bahro is one of the leading spokespeople and theorists of New Age ideas in the Federal Republic. "The most important thing," he rambles,

is that . . . [people] take the path "back" and align themselves with the Great Equilibrium, in the harmony between the human order and the Tao of life. I think the "esoteric"-political theme of "king and queen of the world" is basically the question of how men and women are to comprehend and interact with each other in a spiritually comprehensive way. Whoever does not bring themselves to cooperate with the world government [Weltregierung] will get their due. ⁵³

In 1989, Bahro cofounded a combination educational center and commune near Trier, the Lernwerkstatt (an "ecological academy for one world"), whose purpose is to synthesize spirituality and politics, "to come to a new personal and social orientation." It presents lectures, cultural events, and weekend workshops on various New Age themes, including deep ecology, ecofeminism, Zen Buddhism, holistic nutrition, Sufism, and the like -- as well as German identity. ⁵⁴ His 1987 book Logik der Rettung marked an overt embrace of authoritarian theological concepts that shocked many former admirers. ⁵⁵

Bahro also holds a professorship at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he conducts a seminar whose sessions are usually filled to overflowing. At Humboldt, he holds a chair in 'social ecology,' and he refers to his 'science' by this name, but Bahro's work is not to be confused with the social ecology conceived and developed by Murray Bookchin. Although the two theorists agree that class contradictions are not the exclusive social contradiction, Bookchin regards hierarchy as basic, while emphasizing the importance of class interests. Bahro, by contrast, points to "tribal consciousness" as rooted "more deeply than class consciousness," even in the spiritually "deepest layers" of a people. "The national question is an objective reality," Bahro says, that is on a much "deeper basis than the class question." ⁵⁶

Moreover, whereas Bookchin's consistently internationalist social ecology affirms reason and naturalism and repeatedly criticizes ecomysticism and ecotheology, Bahro's version of 'social ecology' is overwhelmingly spiritualistic. Indeed, in late 1990, when Bookchin spoke at the Humboldt seminar at Bahro's invitation, Bahro told Bookchin that his (Bahro's) own 'social ecology' was actually an attempt to synthesize Bookchin's social ecology with deep ecology. ⁵⁷ Politics must be based on spiritualistic values today, in Bahro's view, because "without a return to the spiritual source," politics "will not be worthy of that name." ⁵⁸ Not only are those who see spirituality and politics as opposites fundamentally wrong, he argues, but our global ecological problems are in fact a material reflection of the inner spiritual "sickness" that separates them. It is a religious "politics of consciousness" -- that is, the implanting of spiritualistic ideas -- that can arrest the global ecological crisis and prepare people for the new political order. ⁵⁹

Bahro's spiritualistic approach has a distinctly ethno-cultural dimension. He speaks of peoples as if they had unique spiritual 'essences' that are indissoluble, that cannot be destroyed over time. ⁶⁰ He is particularly concerned with the 'German essence' (deutsche Wesenheit) and its various manifestations on the material plane. ⁶¹ In approaching the ecological crisis, the German 'essence' demands the incorporation of spiritualism, particularly the mystical tradition initiated by Meister Eckhart, whom "we Germans should read." ⁶² Bahro favorably contrasts this "German legacy"⁶³ with socialism and the Enlightenment.

It appears not to alarm Bahro, as antifascist researcher Peter Kratz points out, that his mystical Germanism closely resembles the mystical Germanism of the völkisch movement. ⁶⁴ Bahro, in fact, consciously associates himself with the völkisch movement -- he says he wants an "awakening in the Volk"⁶⁵ -- and with the 1920s Conservative Revolution against the Enlightenment generally. ⁶⁶ Indeed, Bahro is critical of the Greens, among other things, because they did "not attend to this völkisch moment." ⁶⁷ Kratz warns that this gives Bahro's approach "the same potential for political catastrophe that the völkisch movement had, even though this would please Bahro as little as it would have pleased the originators of the völkisch movement." ⁶⁸

'Essences' like the 'German essence' cannot remain in the spiritual plane; they must be manifested in concrete reality -- that is, in politics, history, and society. In Bahro's prospectus (and in stark contrast to Bookchin's anarchist libertarian municipalism), these manifestations will not take the form of democratic institutions, since "to say that we will create grassroots democracy now, among these wolves, is nonsense." ⁶⁹ Bahro criticizes the "bean-counting voting" process of democracy and prefers a spiritual consensus process for decision making. ⁷⁰ Although he is currently receiving state support from Saxony for an eco-communal demonstration project (thanks largely to his friend and visiting lecturer at Humboldt, Saxon prime minister Kurt Biedenkopf), Bahro also rejects the state: "Society's rule of law," he asserts, "may no longer be based on the state or on any other existing forces that are even less legitimate." ⁷¹

Despite his antistatist assertions, which may make him appear attractively anti-authoritarian, like many 'New' Rightists Bahro expressly believes that the ecological crisis is resolvable only through authoritarian means. He calls for a spiritually based and hierarchically elitist "salvation government" (Rettungsregierung) or a "god-state" (Gottesstaat)⁷² that will be run by a "new political authority at the highest level": a "prince of the ecological turn." ⁷³ The "prince," which apparently may be a collective entity, will constitute a spiritual elite, an oligarchy responsible only to God. As a "voice of the divine," ⁷⁴ this guru elite will dictate the law of God and nature, in order to convert the present society to the "order according to nature"⁷⁵ that Bahro sees as desirable. People should not "be afraid" of the advent of this "prince," says Bahro, since "a bit of 'ecodictatorship' is needed" to handle our problems today. ⁷⁶ Besides, "it is a matter of absolute indifference whether [this prince] is a man or a woman," he assures us, "it is a question of structure. That is the German moment in this Green movement." ⁷⁷ But today it is important to develop a broad spiritual consciousness in the general population, for "without a spiritual determination, there will be no new redemptive institutionalization" -- that is, no "prince." ⁷⁸ It is presumably cheering that "in spite of all bad experiences . . . the strongest political-psychological dispositions of our people" make "the Germans more responsive than other peoples to charismatic leadership." ⁷⁹

Liberating the 'Brown Parts'

Since the mid-1980s, Bahro has been remarkably open about proclaiming his embrace of the spiritual content of fascism for the 'salvation' of nature and humanity. In The Logic of Salvation, he asks, "Is there really no thought more reprehensible than a new 1933?" -- that is, Hitler's rise to state power. "But that is precisely what can save us! The ecology and peace movement is the first popular German movement since the Nazi movement. It must co-redeem [miterlösen] Hitler." ⁸⁰ Indeed, "the Nazi movement [was] among other things an early reading of the ecology movement." ⁸¹ Germans are to look for "the positive that may lie buried in the Nazi movement" and reclaim it, he says, "because if we do not, we will remain cut off from our roots, the roots from which will grow that which will save us." ⁸² Today one must "liberate" the "brown parts" in the German character. ⁸³ The fact is, says Bahro, that today "there is a call in the depths of the Volk for a Green Adolf." ⁸⁴

When Bahro's critics reproach him for this assertion, Bahro responds that no, he does not mean Adolf Hitler. That his leftist critics think he means Adolf Hitler shows that the left "responds only with fear, instead of comprehending that a Green Adolf would be an entirely different Adolf from the one we know about." ⁸⁵ Yet as Kratz points out, Bahro himself is evasive about what this 'Green Adolf' actually would be: perhaps a personified Führer, perhaps a spiritual elite, or perhaps some inner self-recognition that within each of us there is supposedly a 'Green Adolf,' to whom we must subordinate ourselves voluntarily through spiritual insight. This evasiveness is itself a matter of concern. Kratz believes that Bahro really means a personified Führer; for one thing, Bahro invokes the 'sleeping emperor' myth, ⁸⁶ the nationalistic notion that the Emperor Barbarossa is sleeping in the Kyffhäuser Mountain and will one day come back as the Führer and rescue Germany from dire straits⁸⁷ -- an idea that is also one of the foundations of the Nazi Führer principle.

For Bahro, this Führer will clearly be a spiritualistic leader. In a foreword to a book by his colleague Jochen Kirchhoff, he argued that National Socialism had had the right spiritual aims: it sought to manifest the 'German essence' on the material plane. It went wrong in the execution -- for one thing, it was very violent. But even this was understandable since, arising as it did in the 1920s, it was the task of National Socialism to make the first real spiritual revolt against the overwhelming materialism of the age. Thus, the materialistic thinking of the Weimar era, against which National Socialism rebelled, was the real cause of the Nazis' material "vehemence"-- that is, mass murder. ⁸⁸

The materialistic thinking of Weimar modernity that the Nazis were so correct to oppose, says Bahro, is also today the immediate cause of the ecological crisis. Only the spiritualization of consciousness, Bahro believes, can prevail over biosphere-destroying materialism. Hence Germans today have no alternative but to invoke the spiritually "deep forces" from the Nazi movement -- in order to "be present with our whole potential." ⁸⁹

But it must be a strictly spiritual endeavor: undertaking concrete political resistance on the material plane is, for Bahro, itself an integral component of materialistic secularism, an expression of negative spirituality. Those who engage in politics on the material plane today, he says, in fact politically resemble -- Nazis! True, the Nazis had to struggle in the twenties, but at least they had the right spiritual ideas. But "revolt (under the conditions of our imperial situation) is fascistic. That is to say, it redeems [rettet] nothing." ⁹⁰ Bahro's religious dispensation thus does not synthesize spirituality and politics at all, as critic Niedenführ points out; on the contrary, it simply eliminates political action. ⁹¹

Repelled by these ideas, critics have denounced The Logic of Salvation as fascistic or 'fascistoid' -- potentially fascist. Bahro responds that such "faint-hearted antifascism" has "refused" to "look for the strength that lay beneath the brown movement." ⁹² Precisely because the left rejects the insights of spirituality, it can never see the necessity of völkisch-authoritarian structures and therefore can never give material form to the 'German essence,' he believes. Bahro replied further in his next book, Rückkehr:

It can be instructive that there was a strong wing of the Nazis that wanted to be socially and culturally revolutionary. This wing was not consolidated, and the Hitler movement went on to serve a regenerated German capitalism. . . . We can no longer allow fascism to be a taboo subject.

It should be noted that fascism has hardly been a 'taboo subject' in the Federal Republic -- on the contrary, it has been much discussed. What has been rightly rejected -- and hardly merely 'taboo,' since a taboo begs to be broken -- is sympathy for the Nazis. Bahro continues:

I can't rule out the possibility that at the end of the 1920s I wouldn't have gone with the Nazis. And it's very important that we be prepared to ask such a question. As for what would have happened later, I don't know. There were people in the Nazi movement who gave it up before 1933; there were people who saw the light with the Röhm affair; some went into the resistance; others were executed. But we're not supposed to imagine what we ourselves would have done. And I was ready and am ready to go into such questions. I think that if we are serious about forming a popular movement and overcoming the ecological crisis, and if we are really to address what comes out of the depths, we will have to have a lot to do with what it was that found expression then and that is seeking another, better expression this time. That can go well only if there is a great deal of consciousness about whatever unhappy mechanisms lie in all of us, the resentment reactions, mere rebellion instead of revolution. ⁹³

Posing as a courageous inquiry into the breaking of taboos, such practices do nothing more than give people permission to envision themselves as Nazis -- a horrifying dispensation in any era, but particularly in one when present-day Nazis routinely attack foreigners in German towns and cities and when fascist parties are having electoral victories.

Some of Bahro's associates add to the strong suspicion that his 'Green Adolf' refers to a new Führer. One of his fellow teachers at the Lernwerkstatt, for example, is Rainer Langhans, a former anarchistic 'wild man' of the 1960s German student organization SDS who writes today that "spirituality in Germany is named Hitler. And only when you have gone a little bit further can you go beyond it. Until then, however, you must reclaim the inheritance . . . not in the sense of this fine exclusionary antifascism but in the sense of further developing what Hitler tried to do." And: "This dumb Enlightenment, which builds up dams against so-called 'outbreaks of the irrational,' is actually merely laughable as an antifascist syndrome." And: "We have to be, so to speak, the better fascists." ⁹⁴ Another of Bahro's fellow teachers at the Lernwerkstatt is Jochen Kirchhoff, who writes that "National Socialism was a botched attempt at healing the world . . . and to ground politics in the spiritual." ⁹⁵

To speak at his seminar at Humboldt, Bahro also invited Wolfgang Deppert, a onetime head of the völkisch-racist sect German Unitary Religion Community (DUR), even though at the end of 1990 Deppert permitted the publication in one of his periodicals of an article by Princess Marie-Adelheld Reuss-zur-Lippe. Earlier in her life, in the 1920s, this person was a founder of the 'Nordic Ring' and later a close political and personal confidante of the Third Reich's Agriculture Minister, Walther Darré, who called her "my little sister." In 1985, she was the editor-in-chief of the journal Bauernschaft (Peasantry), whose publisher is Thies Christophersen, the notorious author of the despicable 1973 pamphlet Die Auschwitz Lüge (The Auschwitz Lie). ⁹⁶ Deppert, apparently, spoke at the Humboldt seminar on philosophy and science.

But whatever happened at that lecture, Murray Bookchin's appearance at the seminar on November 21, 1990, did not go over well with the host. Bahro had asked Bookchin to address such questions as "Is the alternative to ecological destruction freedom from domination or an 'ecological' dictatorship?" Bookchin replied that "an 'ecological' dictatorship would not be ecological -- it would finally finish off the planet altogether. It would be the glorification, the hypostasization, of social control, of manipulation, the objectification of human beings, the denial of human freedom and selfconsciousness, in the name of ecological problems. . . . An 'ecological' dictatorship is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron."

When Bookchin had finished his presentation, the following exchange took place:

Bahro: You put such a spotlight on the positive side of human nature -- cooperation and so on -- that if that were true, it's improbable that again and again we would have fallen back into egotism and competition. You see human nature predominantly as positive. But more often than not, it has worked out for the worse rather than for the better. Most often the institutions that the human species has created have had hierarchy and domination. The fact that they did so must have a foundation in human nature. . . .

When you talk about rationality, Geist, the fully developed capacity of being human, you are confronting this side least -- the "dark side." Because that is what gives us the capacity to dominate, this Geist, our rationality. You don't want to confront that as fundamental. . . .

Bookchin: I don't ignore the "dark side" of humanity . . . But if the "dark side" exists everywhere, then why has it been necessary for the "dark side" to express itself in institutions of the most barbarous kind? Why did there have to be coercion? Why does that "dark side" always have to be institutionalized through force, through superstition, through fear, through threat, and through ideologies of the most barbarous nature? . . . There's no question that there is a"dark side" to human history. . . . But it's very hard to find the biological reasons for that "dark side." Because that "dark side" has always operated through the institutions of a minority who relied on force and depended on propaganda and superstition, and on the worst things that the human mind can develop, to suppress the millions and millions.

Bahro: But does it have natural foundations?

Bookchin: It emerges from a social foundation. . . . If the "dark side" is natural, why is it that in all the great revolutions that we know of, people have broken out with a generosity of spirit that is incredible? They have been willing to trust, to care, to feel the pain even of their masters -- when their masters tried to oppress them, owing to their own insecurities. . . . In warrior societies, to make the adolescent transformation into a warrior, you have to inflict pain upon him. You have to spoil him, to make him a sufferer in order to make him part of the community of warriors. . . . I don't see the "dark side" of human nature, but of social nature. ⁹⁷

After Bookchin gave his lecture, Bahro told Bookchin that he would not invite him to speak again.

Social Darwinist 'Ecology': Herbert Gruhl

Bahro, let it be said, claims to look for the roots of the ecological crisis in the "sickness" in "white Nordic humanity." But the far right most often locates these roots in non-Europeans and uses 'ecology' to marshal classic racist arguments against Third World immigration. In the "Europe of fatherlands" of the "ethnopluralism" concept, each Volk requires its own specific, familiar home environment in order to thrive. Interference from outside -- including immigration -- disturbs that natural environment, the "natural ecology of the Volk." Most often, the far right claims to be defending cultures rather than races; if the Nazis persecuted those who practiced 'race mixing' and sought to preserve 'racial purity,' today's fascists say they oppose cultural mixing and seek to preserve their culture. Thus, the ecofascist and misleadingly named Ecological Democratic Party (Ökologische Demokratische Partei, or ÖDP) calls for "asylum-seekers [to] be accepted by countries that belong to the same cultural area as the asylum seekers themselves," and they call for "Heimat instead of multiculture." ⁹⁸

The hollowness of such claims becomes evident, however, when they are clothed in terms of 'ecology.' For the far right's notion of ecology is in fact nothing more than social Darwinism, the reactionary ideology that biology dictates the form of society, that genes rather than environment determine culture. Social Darwinist 'ecology' can then advance seemingly 'ecological' reasons for keeping out immigrants and for asserting ethnic or national identity -- while avoiding the terminology of race.

Social Darwinism has deep roots in the German ultra-right. When it first emerged as a doctrine in the nineteenth century, its German form was very different from its Anglo-American form. Like Anglo-American social Darwinism, German social Darwinism projected human social institutions onto the nonhuman world as 'natural laws,' then invoked those 'laws' to justify the human social arrangements as 'natural.' It also applied the maxim 'survival of the fittest' to society. But where Anglo-American social Darwinism conceived the 'fittest' as the individual entrepreneur in a 'bloody tooth and claw' capitalist jungle, German social Darwinism overwhelmingly conceived the 'fittest' in terms of race. Thus, the 'fittest' race not only would but should survive, vanquishing all its competitors in its 'struggle for existence.' As historian Daniel Gasman observes:

It may be said that if Darwinism in England was an extension of laissez faire individualism projected from the social world to the natural world, [in Germany it was] a projection of German romanticism and philosophical idealism. . . . The form which social Darwinism took in Germany was a pseudo-scientific religion of nature worship and nature-mysticism combined with notions of racism. ⁹⁹

Since this social Darwinism seemed to give a 'scientific' basis to racism, National Socialism drew heavily on it to provide 'scientific' grounds for its virulent racism. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, for example, that people "owe their higher existence, not to the ideas of a few crazy ideologists, but to the knowledge and ruthless application of Nature's stern and rigid laws." Among these 'laws': "Nature usually makes certain corrective decisions with regard to the racial purity of earthly creatures. She has little love for bastards." ¹⁰⁰ To establish their totalitarian regime and implement genocide, the Nazis easily drew on the common ideology that the Volk mediates between individual and cosmos, rendering the individual mainly a member of a larger whole, the 'Volk whole' or 'Volk community.'

It is well known among ecological activists today that Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology in the 1860s; what is less known is that Haeckel was the primary spokesperson for German social Darwinism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as Gasman shows. German social Darwinism was thus almost immediately married to the concept of ecology. Haeckel was also a believer in mystical racism and nationalism, so that German social Darwinism was from the beginning a political concept that lent romantic racism and nationalism a pseudo-biological basis. In fact, as Gasman argues,

racially inspired social Darwinism in Germany . . . was almost completely indebted to Haeckel for its creation. . . . His ideas served to unite into a full-bodied ideology the trends of racism, imperialism, romanticism, anti-Semitism and nationalism. . . . It was Haeckel who brought the full weight of science down hard on the side of what were Volkism's essentially irrational and mystical ideas. ¹⁰¹

Haeckel himself was a proponent of carrying over concepts like 'selective breeding' and 'racial hygiene' from nonhuman nature into human society.

Despite the widely different scientific concepts of ecology that have emerged since Haeckel's day, the 'ecology' that today's ecofascists draw upon is essentially the social Darwinism of Haeckel. Perhaps the most prominent social Darwinist-'ecological' racist in Germany today is Herbert Gruhl, ¹⁰² a former Christian Democrat parliamentarian whose best-selling 1975 book, A Planet Is Plundered: The Balance of Terror of Our Politics, makes an explicit social Darwinist interpretation of ecology. ¹⁰³ In the late 1970s and early 1980s Gruhl participated in the formation of the German Greens with a new political group he had founded, Green Action Future (GAZ). It was Gruhl who created the slogan "We are neither left nor right; we are in front," according to Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra. ¹⁰⁴ In the early 1980s, ultrarightists, including Gruhl's GAZ, struggled with leftists and centrists for the direction of the Green Party; the center-left ultimately took control. "It is to the credit of the leftist tendencies in the founding phases of the Greens," writes Ditfurth, "that the ultra-right and neofascists were prevented from taking over ecological politics, as they were threatening to do at the time." ¹⁰⁵

Gruhl, on the losing end, concluded that the Greens had given up their "concern for ecology in favor of a leftist ideology of emancipation" and walked out of the party. He continued his fight for his conception of ecology outside the Greens, however; with his fellow ultra-rightist Baldur Springmann, he founded the Ecological Democratic Party (ÖDP) in 1982 and wrote most of its programmatic literature, orienting ecology toward fascism and endowing racism and population policy with an 'ecological' legitimation. In 1989, when an ÖDP party congress dared to pass a resolution formally distancing the party from the NPD and the Republicans, this 'leftist victory' was too much for Gruhl, and he left to form yet another group. Since the mid-1980s, Gruhl has appeared as a guest speaker at various neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denial events and continues to publish books on 'ecology.'

Gruhl's social Darwinist 'ecology' reduces human beings to their biological attributes and applies the 'laws' of nature to society: "All laws that apply to living nature generally apply to people as well, since people themselves are part of living nature," he maintains. ¹⁰⁷ These 'natural laws' dictate that people should accept the present social order as it is. Domination, hierarchy, and exploitation should be accepted, since "the swan is white, without anyone artificially cleaning it. The raven is black, and everything is in its natural place of its own accord. This is good. All the strivings of people . . . for organized justice are simply hopeless." ¹⁰⁸ People should adapt to existing conditions instead of making futile attempts to change them, since "every life-form accommodates itself to that which it cannot change." ¹⁰⁹

If society were set up according to nature, Gruhl believes, cultures would institute prescriptions against those who deviate from their existing norms, since "in the hunting grounds of the wilderness, if an animal breaks the unwritten law of the herd and goes its own way, it generally pays for this independence with its life." ¹¹⁰ Moreover, cultures should be kept separate from one another: "When many cultures are all jumbled together in the same area, the result will be that they live alongside each other, in conflict with each other, or . . . they will undergo entropy, becoming a mixture whose value lessens with every intermixing, until in the last analysis it has no more worth." The reason for cultural separation too has its basis in 'natural law,' "a law of entropy which we particularly have in ecology, and this law also holds for human cultures." ¹¹¹

In the coming years, Gruhl believes that cultures around the globe will compete for survival over the means of life, in a social Darwinist struggle for existence. "There is no doubt that the wars of the future will be fought over shares in the basic foundations of life -- that is, over the basis of nutrition and the increasingly precious fruits of the soil. Under these circumstances, future wars will far surpass in frightfulness all previous wars." ¹¹² The peoples who have the best prospects for survival will be those who are best armed and who best conserve their resources; those who "succeed in bringing their military preparedness to the highest level, while keeping their standard of living low, will have an enormous advantage." ¹¹³

In the interests of this struggle, Germans must not only arm themselves but preserve their environment by keeping the number of people who inhabit it down: "Violations of ecological equilibrium and the destruction of natural living spaces [Lebensäume] are directly related to population density."

"Overpopulation" in the Third World, however, has produced "armies of job-seekers" who are entering Germany with a "capacity for annihilation" comparable to a "nuclear bomb," Gruhl writes. This "tidal wave of humanity" is a primary menace that will cause "all order to break down" in Europe. Third World immigrants are thus threatening European culture itself, which will "perish not because of the degeneration of its own people, as previous high civilizations have, but because of physical laws: the constantly overflowing mass of humanity on an earth's surface that remains constant." ¹¹⁵ Therefore, there is no room for immigrants in the Federal Republic: "Because of its high population density, the Federal Republic of Germany, one of the most densely settled countries on earth, cannot be a destination country for immigrants. We therefore reject the unlimited acceptance of foreigners." ¹¹⁶ Accordingly, Gruhl demands "an end to immigration for ecological reasons." ¹¹⁷

The 'laws of nature,' for Gruhl, offer a solution to Third World immigration, especially the 'law' that "the only acceptable currency with which violations of natural law can be paid for is death. Death brings the equalization; it cuts back all life that has overgrown on this planet, so that the planet can once again come into equilibrium." ¹¹⁸ Fortunately, in his view, Third World people will accept this lethal solution since their lives "rest on a completely different basic outlook on life from our own: their own death, like that of their children, is accepted as fate." ¹¹⁹

Needless to say, Gruhl does not think democracy is the most efficient way to address these problems. After all, this situation "will take on the proportions of an emergency in coming years, and attempts that will be made to prevail in it will produce a permanent state of emergency." ¹²⁰ In an interview with the editors of Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom), the flagship publication of the National Revolutionaries, Gruhl was asked whether the problems of protecting the environment and life can be solved within a democracy. "Probably not," he replied, "because democracies follow the Zeitgeist, and in all countries of the world today the Zeitgeist is to raise the standard of living further. Parties that warn about this and advocate renunciation of consumption seem to have little chance." Instead, Gruhl demands a "strong state," strong both internationally and domestically -- if possible, even a state with "dictatorial powers." ¹²¹

In the autumn of 1991, the environmental minister of Lower Saxony shocked many observers by awarding Herbert Gruhl a highly prestigious state honor. "With his international best-seller A Planet Is Plundered," minister Monika Greifahn said, Gruhl has "placed ideas of environmental protection and care at the forefront of public political consciousness." ¹²²

A Social Ecology of Freedom

" A combination of nationalism, authoritarianism, and yearnings for charismatic leaders that is legitimated by a mystical and biologistic 'ecology' is potentially socially catastrophic. Just as the völkisch movement ultimately was channeled into the Nazi movement, so too new social movements that appeal to these concepts must be mindful of their potential for political and social catastrophe if they are channeled into a dangerous political direction that draws on mysticism.

" A love of the natural world and alienation from modern society are in themselves innocent and legitimate ideas, and it was by no means a historical necessity that they be permutated into a justification for mass murder. Nor is 'ecology' limited to an interpretation as a social Darwinist racial jungle, or politicized along tribal, regional, and nationalist lines. Nor is 'ecology' inherently an antirational, mystical concept. Finally, the ecological crisis can hardly be dismissed; it is itself very real and is worsening rapidly. Indeed, the politicization of ecology is not only desirable but necessary.

" Although this article has focused on the 'ecological' right in the Federal Republic, 'ecological' fascism is hardly limited to that country. In Britain, a wing of the National Front issues the cry, "Racial preservation is Green!" In the United States, the notorious white supremacist Tom Metzger remarks:

I've noticed that there's an increased number of young people in the white racialist movement who are also quite interested in ecology, protecting the animals from cruelty and things like that, and it seems to me that as we are becoming more aware of our precarious state, the white man, the white woman's, state in the world, being only about 10 percent of the population, we begin to sympathize, empathize more, with the wolves and other animals." ¹²³

" His colleague Monique Wolfing agrees: "Well, naturally. They're in the same position we are. Why would we want something created for ourselves and yet watch nature be destroyed? We work hand in hand with nature and we should save nature along with trying to save our race." ¹²⁴ The noted U.S. deep ecologist Bill Devall, who is certainly not a fascist, has allowed anti-immigration themes to enter his views: He notes with apparent relief that while "population is beginning to stabilize in Western Europe and North America," there is a caveat -- "in-migration." Devall chastises those who would "justify large-scale in-migration to Western Europe and North America from Latin America and Africa" as guilty of "misplaced humanism." ¹²⁵

" What is clearly crucial is how an ecological politics is conceived. If the Green slogan "we are neither left nor right but up front" was ever meaningful, the emergence of an 'ecological right' defines the slogan's bankruptcy conclusively. The need for an ecological left is urgent, especially one that is firmly committed to a clear, coherent set of anticapitalist, democratic, antihierarchical views. It must have firm roots in the internationalism of the left and the rational, humanistic, and genuinely egalitarian critique of social oppression that was part of the Enlightenment, particularly its revolutionary libertarian offshoot.

" But an ecologically oriented politics must deal with biological phenomena warily, since interpretations of them can serve sinister ends. When 'respect for Nature' comes to mean 'reverence,' it can mutate ecological politics into a religion that 'Green Adolfs' can effectively use for authoritarian ends. When 'Nature,' in turn, becomes a metaphor legitimating sociobiology's 'morality of the gene,' the glories of 'racial purity,' 'love of Heimat,' 'woman equals nature,' or 'Pleistocene consciousness,' the cultural setting is created for reaction. 'Ecological' fascism is a cynical but potentially politically effective attempt to mystically link genuine concern for present-day environmental problems with time-honored fears of the 'outsider' or the 'new,' indeed the best elements of the Enlightenment, through ecological verbiage. Authoritarian mystifications need not be the fate of today's ecology movement, as social ecology demonstrates. But they could become its fate if ecomystics, ecoprimitivists, misanthropes, and antirationalists have their way."

Footnotes

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The Green Wing of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents by Peter Staudenmaier
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