Table Of ContentRevisiting
the
“nazi Occult”
Histories,
realities,
legacies
edited by
MOnica black
and
eRic kuRlandeR
Revisiting the “Nazi Occult”
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German History in Context
Series editor
Bill Niven, Nottingham Trent University
Editorial Board
Stefan Berger, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Atina Grossman, Cooper Union
Andrew I. Port, Wayne State University
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Revisiting the “Nazi Occult”
Histories, Realities, Legacies
Edited by
Monica Black and Eric Kurlander
Rochester, New York
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Copyright © 2015 by the Editors and Contributors
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2015
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-906-1
ISBN-10: 1-57113-906-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Revisiting the “Nazi occult”: histories, realities, legacies / edited by Monica Black
and Eric Kurlander.
pages cm. — (German history in context)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57113-906-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) —
ISBN 1-57113-906-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. National socialism and occultism. 2. Occultism—Germany—History.
3. Mythology, Germanic. 4. Germany—Politics and government—1933–1945.
5. Secret societies—Germany. I. Black, Monica, 1968– editor. II. Kurlander, Eric,
1973– editor.
DD256.5.R4355 2015
130.943'09043—dc23 2015021140
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Monica Black and Eric Kurlander
Part I. Histories, 1890–1933
1: Esoteric Alternatives in Imperial Germany: Science, Spirit,
and the Modern Occult Revival 23
Peter Staudenmaier
2: An Elite Class of Thinkers: Monism between Science and the
Spiritual in Wilhelmine Germany 42
Perry Myers
3: Max Hoelz Haunts the Vogtland: The Visible and the
Invisible in Germany, 1914–21 65
John Ondrovcik
4: Siegfried Kracauer, Spirit, and the Soul of Weimar Germany 86
Jared Poley
Part II. Realities, 1933–1945
5: Pseudoscience Reconsidered: SS Research and the
Archaeology of Haithabu 105
Fabian Link and J. Laurence Hare
6: Hitler’s Supernatural Sciences: Astrology, Anthroposophy,
and World Ice Theory in the Third Reich 132
Eric Kurlander
7: Pragmatic Occultism in the Military History of the
Third Reich 157
Uwe Schellinger, Andreas Anton, and Michael T. Schetsche
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vi CONTENTS
8: Disruptive Potential: Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth,
National Socialism, and Democracy 181
Michael E. O’Sullivan
Part III. Legacies, 1945–Present
9: A Messiah after Hitler, and His Miracles: Bruno Gröning
and Postwar Popular Apocalypticism 205
Monica Black
10: On All Channels: Hans Bender, the Supernatural,
and the Mass Media 223
Anna Lux
11: Beyond Good and Evil: Nazis and the Supernatural in
Video Games 248
Jeff Hayton
12: The Wewelsburg Effect: Nazi Myth and Paganism in
Postwar European Popular Music 270
Oded Heilbronner
Notes on the Contributors 287
Index 291
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Acknowledgments
ALL EDITED VOLUMES ARE BY DEFINITION collective works––the product
of fifteen scholars in this case, themselves drawing on the work of
hundreds more contributors to the vast literature on National Socialism,
German occultism, science, religion, and other disciplines within the
realm of German and European studies. As such it would be impossible to
thank all the individuals whose scholarship has influenced and informed
the contributions to follow.
Nevertheless, we would like to express our gratitude to a few indi-
viduals who played a direct role in shaping the volume, providing inspira-
tion, comments, advice, and support during the three years it has taken
to bring this project to fruition. These include our friends, mentors,
(and, as it happens, respective doctoral advisors), David Blackbourn and
Alon Confino, whose cutting-edge work on popular religion, everyday
spirituality, and supernatural thinking had a lasting influence on our own
thoughts about these issues. We are thankful to Sylvia Paletschek, who
opened her University of Freiburg Historical Seminar and Research clus-
ter on parapsychology to our work and helped facilitate contacts with four
of the contributors to this volume.
Both of our respective departments and universities, Stetson
University and the University of Tennessee, provided support for our
research: through research leaves, grants, and colloquia that made much
of this work possible. The University of Tennessee also played host to the
Southeast German Studies Workshop in 2012, which gave us editors a
chance to meet in person to talk through the project.
We are likewise grateful to Owen Davies, Jonathan Barry, and
Willem de Blécourt, who offered invaluable feedback at an early stage of
the project, as well as Benita Blessing, who provided a useful comment
at a panel we put together at the German Studies Association when the
concept of this book was in its infancy. Other individuals who helped
shape the volume include Greg Eghigian, Michael Geyer, Matthew
Gillis, Jason Coy, and Jamil Khader. Mark Roseman, Devin Pendas, and
Richard Wetzell organized an exciting conference at Indiana University
in 2009 where we editors first met and began to discuss supernatural
themes in German studies.
We would be completely remiss if we neglected to thank George
Williamson, whose generous, copious, and invariably insightful comments
improved a number of the individual contributions and helped us reframe
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viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
the volume at a later stage of the process. Last but not least, we would like
to thank our editor, Jim Walker, who championed the project enthusiasti-
cally from the start. Without his unwavering support and helpful editorial
perspective, the volume would be intellectually poorer and undoubtedly
less coherent.
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Introduction
Monica Black and Eric Kurlander
WHEN WE, THE EDITORS OF THIS VOLUME, solicited essays from our
contributors, our main goal was to showcase exciting new his-
torical approaches to that perennial topic of scholarly, pseudoscholarly,
and popular interest—the Nazi occult. From supposed SS expeditions
in search of the “Spear of Destiny” to Heinrich Himmler’s fascination
with witchcraft or Adolf Hitler’s “Jewish clairvoyant,” there has been
no shortage of material over the decades suggesting a close connection
between Nazism and the occult. Exemplified in such films as Raiders of
the Lost Ark, computer games like Castle Wolfenstein, and comic books
like Hellboy, the popular image of the Nazi darkling, seeking paranor-
mal assistance in the interest of world domination, persists. The output
on these topics, however, while vast, has been decidedly uneven.1 Many
works are more speculative than grounded in archival spadework.2 The
handful of serious studies, meanwhile, tends to focus on the period before
1933, leaving open the relationship between German esotericism and
National Socialism in practice, let alone any possible connections to be
drawn between Nazism and occultism after 1945.3
To be clear from the outset, it is not our principal aim to establish a
new consensus on the question of the “occult roots of Nazism,” which has
traditionally involved determining the extent to which esoteric or occult
philosophies, “secret cults,” or millenarian networks informed the cre-
ation of Nazism or were used to further its goals.4 We endeavor instead to
solicit a variety of responses to that question, responses that both expand
on and transcend the traditional range of themes and field of inquiry asso-
ciated with Nazi occultism. As early as the interwar years, members of
a generation of scholars who would be forced into exile to escape the
Holocaust—such as Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Lotte Eisner, Fritz
Stern, and George Mosse—were emphasizing the role of mythology, irra-
tionalism, and esotericism in facilitating National Socialism’s rise and its
crimes. Probably the last and most important work in this genre, Nicholas
Goodrick-Clarke’s Occult Roots of Nazism, was published in the mid-
1980s. It represented the first serious scholarly analysis of Nazi occultism
based on exhaustive research into archival and published primary sources.
In tracing the evolution of the occult movement known as ariosophy
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