The Shadow: Erupting!

How could a nation, which was one of the leaders of the Enlightenment only a couple of centuries earlier, descend into such darkness as that which created the Holocaust? The question is not purely a historical one that applies only to Germany fifty years ago. 

It is also a psychological one that applies to us now, here in America, and in the rest of the world. It is a question about the human condition. 

For if what happened to a people like the Germans, whose genes and genius produced not only Hitler but Goethe, Kant, Kepler, Mozart, and Schweitzer (to mention only a few), what does this say about the rest of us? ... (p. 4)

  The Eruption of the Shadow in Nazi Germany - Michael Gellert

Of Fate & Ancestral Dreams

I approached the study of Germanic mythology with considerable anxiety, since I was aware of the massive taboo against this topic. This taboo was created by the fact that the Nazis appeared to have been deeply involved in an attempted revival of ancient Germanic religion and practices. 

 

Like most people I had an almost visceral revulsion against any belief system even remotely associated with the Nazis' genocidal ideology. Yet my study of Germanic myth did not find any resemblance to the paranoid racism that was central to the Nazi worldview.  

 

Basically, it appears that the Nazis appropriated certain themes that they claimed to have found in Germanic myth, and combined them with illusory assumptions about Aryan racial supremacy, for their own ideological, propagandistic purposes. One could say the Nazis laid a curse on Germanic mythology. 

 

Nevertheless, I found that I needed to delve into the psychological origins of the Nazi ideology, in order to separate the distortion from the reality, and try to undo the curse that they laid on ancient Germanic religion and mythology. . . . 

 

-- Ralph Metzner,  The Well of Remembrance

Germanic Mythology and the Fate of Europe - Ralph Metzner