Black Metal: Conservative Revolution in Modern Popular Culture, Part 2

Völkisch Thought and the Conservative Revolution

Some of the most fascinating aspects of Black Metal are its parallels with the ideas and sensibilities of the Conservative Revolution and the wider völkisch (populist) movement that swept Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These similarities are so striking that Black Metal may well be considered, if not the continuation, then at least the revival of the Conservative Revolution on the plane of modern popular culture.

Black Metal is, moreover, part of a growing subculture of resistance to the anti-white system. This subculture consists of a constellation of interconnected musical genres and subgenres, religious practices, philosophical and political thinkers and schools, websites, booksellers, publications, and cultural activities, such as battle re-enactment. This subculture sustains itself by providing its members with a positive identity that is not dependent on the system of status awards maintained by the present sociocultural and political dispensation. Moreover, if, as Jacques Attali has proposed, the music of the present is the noise of the future, then, in a coded way, Black Metal could well be more symptomatic of things to come than of things as they are.[1]

The Conservative Revolution was entirely different from modern American conservatism, which is merely a form of classical liberalism allied with socially conservative views. American conservatives believe in progress, democracy, equality before the law, and free markets; their ideology derives from the Enlightenment as formulated by John Locke and Adam Smith. They are closely associated with libertarianism. They regard man as a rational, sovereign individual, and they tend to have a linear, progressivist conception of history. The German Conservative Revolutionaries, like other völkisch movements, were reacting against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and, in American terms, have much in common with the Southern Agrarians. Their common enemies were modernity, urbanism, and industrialism.

Völkisch thought is characterized by a romantic focus on the “organic,” German folklore, local history, blood and soil, and nature mysticism. The term derives from the German word Volk, which corresponds to “people,” or “folk,” but with the added connotations of folklore, race, and nation. Among the German romantics, “Volk” “signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental essence,” the fusion of man with nature (particularly his native landscape, following Wilhelm Riehl), mythos, or the cosmos, wherein man found “the source of his creativity, his depth of feeling, his individuality, and his unity with other members of the Volk.”[2] A related concept is “Volkstum,” a term that combines the notions of folklore and ethnicity.

Völkisch thought arose from the Romantic nationalism of the early nineteenth century, particularly that of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who, along with Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, “began to conceive of the Volk in heroic terms during the wars of liberation against Napoleon.”[3] Völkisch thought emerged at a time when Germany existed as a collection of semi-feudal principalities. As political unity eluded them for more than half a century, völkisch thinkers were forced to emphasize cultural and spiritual rather than political dimensions of unity. Thus they came to idealize, even mystify, the concept of nationhood. This process attained such momentum that when political unification finally came in 1871, the prosaic nature of Bismarck’s Realpolitik led to a tremendous sense of disappointment.

Völkisch thought also coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the attendant destruction of the German landscape, dislocations of the population, obsolescence of traditional crafts and tools, social alienation, political upheavals (e.g., the revolutions of 1848), and economic crises. These led eventually to disenchantment and finally to the wholesale rejection of industrial society and modernity, which came to be seen as materialistic, soulless, rootless, abstract, mechanical, alienating, cosmopolitan, and irreconcilable with national self-identification. Völkisch thought was a quest for rootedness, for the “inward correspondence between the individual, the native soil, the Volk, and the universe.”[4] Hence the calls for a “‘German revolution’ to liquidate the dangerous new developments and to guide the nation back to its original purpose.” Unsurprisingly, völkisch ideologists saw “traditional politics as exemplifying the worst aspect of the world in which they lived,” and “rejected political parties as artificial,” favoring instead an “elitism that derived from their semi-mystical conceptions of nature and man.”[5]

The völkisch rejection of modernity was sometimes combined with racialist occult and esoteric doctrines exemplified by runologist Guido von List, author of The Secret of the Runes. List’s racialist reading of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy proved influential in occult circles. The Guido von List Society (Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft), which he founded, included among its members the sexo-racialist Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, author of Theozoologie, founder of the esoteric order, Ordo Novi Templi (Order of the New Templars), and founder and editor of the magazine Ostara. Lanz glorified the Aryan race as Gottmenschen and advocated the sterilization of the unfit and the inferior races. Lanz’s “theozoology” eventually evolved into “ariosophy”—the study of occult wisdom concerning the Aryans. Other List disciples became involved in the Reichshammerbund and the Germanenorden, organised by Theodor Fritsch, a prominent activist in the German anti-Semitic movement.

When the Germanenorden split into two schismatic factions (the Germanenorden and the Germanenorden Walvater of the Holy Grail), Hermann Pohl, the order’s first leader, was joined by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a Freemason who was also an admirer of List and Liebenfels. Sebottendorff eventually contacted Walter Nauhaus, leader of the Germanenorden and head of the Thule Society, a Germanic study group. Sebottendorff adopted the name of this study group as a cover name for his Munich lodge of the Germanenorden Walvater, which was run jointly by him and Nauhaus. In time the Thule Society came to organize the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), which was renamed the Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) in 1920, months after Adolf Hitler, once a reader of Liebenfels’ Ostara magazine, joined the party.

This occult branch of völkisch thought, which during the post-World War II years produced writers like Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano, adopted elements from Eastern mythology: a cyclical view of history (mirrored in Oswald Spengler’s metahistory) followed the Hindu model of the four successively degenerative ages, or Yugas; while the swastika, ubiquitous in India and the Far East, was adopted by numerous organizations before the NSDAP, from Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society to Lanz’s Ordo Novi Templi (the first to use the swastika in an Aryan context) to Fritsch’s Germanenorden to Sebottendorf’s Thule Society.

Although dismissed by some völkisch thinkers, the Jewish question acquired added importance during this period. As a people of the desert, Jews came to be “viewed as shallow, arid, ‘dry’ . . . devoid of profundity and totally lacking in creativity.” This contrasted with the Germans, “who, living in the dark, mist-shrouded forests [were deemed] deep, mysterious, [and] profound.”[6] Moreover, because the Jews thrived in the liberal, secular, commercial, urban context, they came to be seen as the incarnation of modernity, and hence a corrupting, conspiring outsider, an insidious agent of dissolution.[7] Indeed, Jews had grown closely connected to the liberals on the road to emancipation and, in particular, to the Revolution of 1848.

Because of its links to Judaism, Christianity also came under scrutiny: “in common with most völkisch thinkers, [Paul de] Lagarde blamed St. Paul for having enveloped untainted Christianity in sterile Hebrew law” and advocated a Germanic religion through which a “realignment of the spiritual forces [could] effect a true unity of the Volk.”[8] Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity as a debilitating agent was influenced by the anti-Jewish, but nevertheless still Christian, Lagarde. By the time Savitri Devi wrote Defiance and Gold in the Furnace, shortly after World War II, however, radical hostility to Christianity was tightly bound to radical anti-Jewish sentiments.[9]

Following World War I, the völkisch ideology “acquired a mass political base,”[10] propelled by the anguish of Germany’s military defeat in a context where völkisch ideas had long been disseminated within German institutions. The Conservative Revolution emerged at this time as a predominantly völkisch movement: it thought organically rather than mechanistically, emphasized quality as opposed to quantity, prized folk-community (Volksgemeinschaft) as opposed to class conflict, believed in the Führerprizip as opposed to ochlocracy and parliamentarism, glorified war as opposed to unheroic economism, and rejected progressive liberalism, egalitarianism, and the banal commercial culture of urban industrial civilization.

The Conservative Revolutionaries were revolutionaries because they realized that culture was threatened not merely by liberalism and Communism, but by the entire political order, which had to be replaced—using revolutionary means if necessary—by a new order based on conservative principles.[11] Although the term existed prior to the end of World War I, it entered general use only after it was popularized by Hugo von Hoffmannstahl and Edgar Julius Jung during the Weimar Republic. Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt, along with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (who coined the phrase “Third Reich”) were representative of this movement. Völkisch ideas enjoyed considerable social prominence and institutional legitimacy long before the National Socialists came to power. They were, however, marginalized and suppressed by the Allied Occupation regime and the new post-war dispensation following Germany’s military defeat in 1945.

Part 2 of 3. Read Part 1 here.

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[1] Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985).

[2] George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).

[3] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 14.

[4] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 6.

[5] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 3.

[6] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 5.

[7] Fritz R. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

[8] Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 33.

[9] Savitri Devi, Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in Post-War Germany, 3rd ed., ed. R. G. Fowler (Atlanta: The Savitri Devi Archive, 2008) and Savitri Devi, Defiance, 2nd ed., ed. R. G. Fowler (Atlanta: The Savitri Devi Archive, 2009).

[10] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 5.

[11] Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair.