Karla Poewe Quotes

Liberalism broke the ground enabling the emergence of radicalism. (p. 21)

While the constitutions of Western liberal democracies preserve the freedom of new religions, I am not sure whether new religions, including New Age and neo-Paganism, preserve western liberal democracies. In Weimar they did not.

It was precisely Hauer’s and other Nazis’ radical liberalism that led them to National Socialism. (p. 20)

The new religions founded in the pre-Nazi and Nazi years, especially Jakob Hauer’s German Faith Movement, would be a model for how German fascism distilled aspects of religious doctrine into political extremism.

The source of anti-Semitism lies elsewhere than with religion. It lies in a fundamental human divide between those people who love culture, by which I mean the poetics and politics that grew out of a very specific local condition and history, and those who love civilization, by which I mean the poetic and politics that are rooted in non-specific, universal laws meant to protect civilian, local or foreign. Hauer’s fight against Jewish-Christianity is on this divide. (p. 14)

There is no dogma, word or scripture. German morality is not rigidly chained to words but changes as reality changes and as the original nature adapts to new conditions. It is a convenient moral relativism that Hauer and his cohorts developed. In the final analysis, it is […] a fighter ethic that negates all moral ties except those with respect to the interests of one’s own Volk. (p. 15)

The whole thrust of core Nazi radicals was to overcome what they regarded as an already secularized Christianity and replace it with a faith in the ‘Third Reich’. (p. 149)

Goebbels followed the stations of political ideologization from Catholicism toward freer forms of a Christian view of the world and self (as in liberal theology) and then National-Socialism. (p. 7)

Those Germans (from Hitler, to Rosenberg, to Himmler, to Heydrich, to Klagges, to Hauer, to Grimm and innumerable others) who became prominent National Socialist ideologues, even though Grimm and other nationalists like him did not become members of the party, were uniformly obsessed with overcoming Christianity and persuading other Germans to do likewise.

[T]he variant core elements of Goebbels’ religiosity consisted of Christological symbols and Vitalism. (p. 24),

European neo-paganism sees itself as the restorer of all that it claims Christianity removed from European life and thought, that is, human godliness, the seamless unity of religion and science, and the harmony of human beings with the environment. (p. 173)

The Third Reich represented yearning for salvation from despair through the fount of power that had its source in the German people (Volkskraft), not in an otherworldly God. Krieck ended his midsummer night’s talk with a hail to the German Youth, German Volk and Third Reich. (p. 151)