The Myth of the Twentieth Century (German:Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts) is an influential, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-historical book byAlfred Rosenberg, aNazi theorist[1] who was one of the principal ideologues of theNazi Party and editor of the party newspaper,Völkischer Beobachter. Rosenberg was later convicted forcrimes against humanity at theNuremberg trials and executed in 1946.
In the book, Rosenberg contends that theAryan race is the originator of ancient civilizations which later declined and fell due to inter-marriage with "lesser races". Holding what he considers Aryan civilizations to be the pinnacle of humanity, he blamesJewish influences for moral and social degradation, and holds that the State must ensure that "higher" races must rule over the "lower" races and notinterbreed with them.
Published in 1930, the book sold more than one million copies by 1944 thanks to Nazi support. Hitler awarded aState Prize for Art and Science to Rosenberg for the book in 1937. The document accompanying the prize "praises Rosenberg as a 'person who has, in a scientific and penetrating manner, laid the firm foundation for an understanding of the ideological bases of National Socialism'".[2] The content of the book is a mix of racistpseudo-science and mysticism which makes the claim that the "Nordic race" originated inAtlantis and that their nobility justified the enslavement and even mass murder of non-Aryan races.[3]
Some members of the Nazi leadership found some of this material embarrassing, but it was also publicly praised,[4] often by the same Nazi leaders who disparaged the work in private.[5][6][7]
Rosenberg followed a long line of European racialist authors,[8] includingArthur de Gobineau (author ofAn Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) but his most important "source" was the British philosopher and scientific racistHouston Stewart Chamberlain. Rosenberg conceived of his book as a sequel to Chamberlain's 1899 bookThe Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.[9]
Other influences included a dubious reading ofFriedrich Nietzsche,Richard Wagner'sHoly Grail romanticism (Chamberlain was Wagner's son-in-law),Haeckelian mystical vitalism, the medieval German philosopherMeister Eckhart and the heirs of his mysticism andNordicistAryanism in general.[citation needed].
"Racism substituted myth for reality; and the world that it created with its stereotypes, virtues and vices, was a fairytale world, which dangled a utopia before the eyes of those who longed for a way out of the confusion of modernity and the rush of time. It made the sun stand still and abolished change. All evil was blamed on the restless inferior races who lacked appreciation of the settled order of things.
— George L. Mosse,Towards the final solution: A history of European Racism (1978)[10]
 | This sectionrelies largely or entirely on asingle source. Relevant discussion may be found on thetalk page. Please helpimprove this article byintroducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(November 2021) |
Rosenberg'sracial theories involve a mix of pseudo-biology and alternative history about the putative negative influence of theJewish race in contrast to theAryan race. He equates the latter with theNordic peoples of northern Europe and also includes theBerbers fromNorth Africa (this story apparently deriving from theKabyle myth invented by French colonists) and the upper classes ofAncient Egypt (all presumably migrating from Atlantis). According to Rosenberg, modern culture has been corrupted bySemitic influences (cf.anti-Semitism), which have produceddegeneratemodern art, along withmoral and socialdegeneration. Rosenberg believed that the higher races should rule over the lower and notinterbreed with them. He argues that the Nazis must purify the race soul by eliminating non-Aryan elements in much the same ruthless and uncompromising way in which a surgeon would cut a cancer from a diseased body.
In Rosenberg's mythological take on world history, migrating Aryans founded various ancient civilizations which later declined and fell due to inter-marriage with lesser races. These civilizations included theAryan,ancient pre-Islamic Persia,Greece,India, andRome. He saw the ancient Germanic invasions of the Roman empire as saving its civilization, which had been corrupted both by race mixing and by Judaized-cosmopolitan “negative” Christianity. Furthermore, he claimed that thepersecutions of Protestants in France and other areas represented the wiping out of the last remnants of the Aryan element in those areas, a process completed by the French revolution. In contemporary Europe, he saw the northern areas that embraced Protestantism as closest to the Aryan racial and spiritual ideal, however referred to both Catholicism and Protestantism as Negative Christianity, seeing Protestantism as only half a protest. He held much higher regard for pre-Christian Germans and the earlier Arian Christian church.
Following H. S. Chamberlain and othervölkisch theorists, Rosenberg claimed that Jesus was half German which he extended to Aryans and half Jewish, and that original Christianity was a German-Aryan (Iranian) religion admixed with the Jewish cult of Jehovah, but had beencorrupted by the followers ofPaul of Tarsus. The Mythus is both anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant, seeing the Church's cosmopolitanism and Judaised version of Christianity as one of the factors in Germany's spiritual decline. Rosenberg particularly emphasizes the supposedly anti-Judaic teachings of the heresiesMarcionism and Aryo-PersianManicheanism as more representative of the true, anti-JudaicJesus Christ and more suited to the Nordic world-view. Rosenberg sawMartin Luther and theReformation as merely step toward reasserting the Aryan spirit but still opposed Protestantism as not going far enough, equating it with an invasive form of Christianity from Charlemagne unsuited to the German spirit.
When he discussed the future of religion, he suggested that a multiplicity of forms be tolerated, includingPositive Christianity. He stated that both the cult ofJehovah and the cult ofWotan were dead, but respected Wotan due to being German and equated him with later German philosophers. Rosenberg wroteanti-Indian racist statements regardingHinduism, but respected the earlier forms of it which he saw as not being racially admixed with thenatives of India.
Another myth, to which he gave credence, was the idea ofAtlantis, which he claimed might preserve a memory of an ancient Aryan homeland:
And so today the long derived hypothesis becomes a probability, namely that from a northern centre of creation which, without postulating an actual submerged Atlantic continent, we may call Atlantis, swarms of warriors once fanned out in obedience to the ever renewed and incarnate Nordic longing for distance to conquer and space to shape.[citation needed]
Rosenberg condemnsIslam in the book, describing it as anti-Christian and anti-European and as being evidence of “inner spiritual poverty” ofArabs, and compares its idea of an after life with that ofJudaism.
Johannes Steizinger writes "Rosenberg clearly played a major role in the establishment of Nazi ideology" and that "Ideology is regarded as a necessary, but not sufficient cause for participation in genocide"[11]
During theNuremberg Trials, JusticeRobert H. Jackson referred to the book as a "dreary treatise[s] advocating a new and weird Nazi religion".[12] "Mythus" is written as an imitation of a scholarly book and Viereck notes that "Rosenberg bores both the uneducated and the well educated, but is the god of the semi-educated, whom earnest dullness and obscure grandiloquence impress as scholarly and authoritative".[13] In his Nuremberg Trials testimony, theextermination camp commandantRudolf Höss said that this book was one of the sources of his own anti-Semitism.[14]
Despite Nazi official support forThe Myth of the Twentieth Century and Rosenberg's prominent role in promoting Nazi ideologyAdolf Hitler declared that it was not to be considered official ideology of theNazi Party[15] and he privately described the book as "mysticism" and "nonsense".[16]Albert Speer claimed that Goebbels mocked Alfred Rosenberg.[17] Goebbels also called the book a "philosophical belch".[5][6][18]Hermann Göring said: "if Rosenberg was to decide ... we would only have rite,thing, myth and such kind of swindle."[19]Gustave Gilbert, the prison psychologist during theNuremberg Trials, reported that none of the Nazi leaders he interviewed had read Rosenberg's writings.[20] However Gilbert's notes from the Nuremberg trials repeatedly show Rosenberg's influence[21]
At lunch von Papen commented, "Dodd asked him if he knew that Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, had read his works. That was, of course, the crux of the whole thing. Rosenberg just gave an evasive answer."
Although he did take very high-level positions within the Nazi state in managing propaganda, looting artworks, and overseeing Nazi rule in the Baltics and Soviet territories, the overtanti-Christian sentiment in Rosenberg's book made it awkward to give Rosenberg positions of prominence when the Nazis ascended to power.[22] Even in their stronghold Hamburg only 0.49% of the inhabitants identified as belonging to the anti-Christian neopagan faith movement (in 1937),[23] whereas theGerman Christians and theirPositive Christianity had a strong standing. Many of the attacks on the book after its 1930 publication came from its explicit anti-Christian message. In 1934,The Myth of the Twentieth Century was put into theIndex Librorum Prohibitorum (the official list of books forbidden by the Catholic Church) by decree of theHoly Office for scorning and rejecting "all dogmas of the Catholic Church, and the very fundamentals of the Christian religion".[24]
Rosenberg wrote two supplements to the work, replying to Catholic and Protestant critics. In the first,On the Dark Men of Our Times: A Reply to Critics of the Myth of the Twentieth Century, he accused Catholics of attempting to destroy the national character by promoting separatism within Catholic parts of the country.[25] His second reply,Protestant Pilgrims to Rome: The Treason Against Luther and the Myth of the Twentieth Century, argued that modernLutheranism was becoming too close to Catholicism.[25]On the Dark Men of Our Times was also put into theIndex Librorum Prohibitorum in 1935.[26]
Goebbels was characteristically succinct, describing the book as an 'ideological belch.'
As he told a circle of confidants, 'What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind, and now he wants to start that all over again. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! [...]'
Goebbels was characteristically succinct, describing the book as an 'ideological belch.'
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
.svg)
