Excerpt from
Eco­fas­cism: Lessons from the Ger­man Expe­ri­ence
by Janet Biehl and Peter Stau­den­maier
1995, AK Press
ISBN 1–873176 73 2

pp 4–12

“We rec­og­nize that sep­a­rat­ing human­ity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruc­tion and to the death of nations. Only through a rein­te­gra­tion of human­ity into the whole of nature can our peo­ple be made stronger. That is the fun­da­men­tal point of the bio­log­i­cal tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole ... This striv­ing toward con­nect­ed­ness with the total­ity of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deep­est mean­ing and the true essence of National Social­ist thought.“1

In our zeal to con­demn the sta­tus quo, rad­i­cals often care­lessly toss about epi­thets like “fas­cist” and “eco­fas­cist,” thus con­tribut­ing to a sort of con­cep­tual infla­tion that in no way fur­thers effec­tive social cri­tique. In such a sit­u­a­tion, it is easy to over­look the fact that there are still vir­u­lent strains of fas­cism in our polit­i­cal cul­ture which, how­ever mar­ginal, demand our atten­tion. One of the least rec­og­nized or under­stood of these strains is the phe­nom­e­non one might call “actu­ally exist­ing eco­fas­cism,” that is, the pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of authen­ti­cally fas­cist move­ments with envi­ron­men­tal­ist con­cerns. In order to grasp the pecu­liar inten­sity and endurance of this affil­i­a­tion, we would do well to exam­ine more closely its most noto­ri­ous his­tor­i­cal incar­na­tion, the so-called “green wing” of Ger­man National Socialism.

Despite an exten­sive doc­u­men­tary record, the sub­ject remains an elu­sive one, under appre­ci­ated by pro­fes­sional his­to­ri­ans and envi­ron­men­tal activists alike. In English-speaking coun­tries as well as in Ger­many itself, the very exis­tence of a “green wing” in the Nazi move­ment, much less its inspi­ra­tion, goals, and con­se­quences, has yet to be ade­quately researched and ana­lyzed. Most of the hand­ful of avail­able inter­pre­ta­tions suc­cumb to either an alarm­ing intel­lec­tual affin­ity with their sub­ject (2) or a naive refusal to exam­ine the full extent of the “ide­o­log­i­cal over­lap between nature con­ser­va­tion and National Socialism.“3 This arti­cle presents a brief and nec­es­sar­ily schematic overview of the eco­log­i­cal com­po­nents of Nazism, empha­siz­ing both their cen­tral role in Nazi ide­ol­ogy and their prac­ti­cal imple­men­ta­tion dur­ing the Third Reich. A pre­lim­i­nary sur­vey of nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­tury pre­cur­sors to clas­si­cal eco­fas­cism should serve to illu­mi­nate the con­cep­tual under­pin­nings com­mon to all forms of reac­tionary ecology.

Two ini­tial clar­i­fi­ca­tions are in order. First, the terms “envi­ron­men­tal” and “eco­log­i­cal” are here used more or less inter­change­ably to denote ideas, atti­tudes, and prac­tices com­monly asso­ci­ated with the con­tem­po­rary envi­ron­men­tal move­ment. This is not an anachro­nism; it sim­ply indi­cates an inter­pre­tive approach which high­lights con­nec­tions to present-day con­cerns. Sec­ond, this approach is not meant to endorse the his­to­ri­o­graph­i­cally dis­cred­ited notion that pre-1933 his­tor­i­cal data can or should be read as “lead­ing inex­orably” to the Nazi calamity. Rather, our con­cern here is with dis­cern­ing ide­o­log­i­cal con­ti­nu­ities and trac­ing polit­i­cal genealo­gies, in an attempt to under­stand the past in light of our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion — to make his­tory rel­e­vant to the present social and eco­log­i­cal crisis.

THE ROOTS OF THE BLOOD AND SOIL MYSTIQUE

Ger­many is not only the birth­place of the sci­ence of ecol­ogy and the site of Green pol­i­tics’ rise to promi­nence; it has also been home to a pecu­liar syn­the­sis of nat­u­ral­ism and nation­al­ism forged under the influ­ence of the Roman­tic tradition’s anti Enlight­en­ment irra­tional­ism. Two nine­teenth cen­tury fig­ures exem­plify this omi­nous con­junc­tion: Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wil­helm Hein­rich Riehl.

While best known in Ger­many for his fanat­i­cal nation­al­ism, Arndt was also ded­i­cated to the cause of the peas­antry, which lead him to a con­cern for the wel­fare of the land itself. His­to­ri­ans of Ger­man envi­ron­men­tal­ism men­tion him as the ear­li­est exam­ple of ‘eco­log­i­cal’ think­ing in the mod­ern sense.4 His remark­able 1815 arti­cle On the Care and Con­ser­va­tion of Forests, writ­ten at the dawn of indus­tri­al­iza­tion in Cen­tral Europe, rails against short­sighted exploita­tion of wood­lands and soil, con­demn­ing defor­esta­tion and its eco­nomic causes. At times he wrote in terms strik­ingly sim­i­lar to those of con­tem­po­rary bio­cen­trism: “When one sees nature in a nec­es­sary con­nect­ed­ness and inter­re­la­tion­ship, then all things are equally impor­tant — shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, noth­ing first or last, but all one sin­gle unity.“5

Arndt’s envi­ron­men­tal­ism, how­ever, was inex­tri­ca­bly bound up with vir­u­lently xeno­pho­bic nation­al­ism. His elo­quent and pre­scient appeals for eco­log­i­cal sen­si­tiv­ity were couched always in terms of the well-being of the Ger­man soil and the Ger­man peo­ple, and his repeated lunatic polemics against mis­ce­gena­tion, demands for teu­tonic racial purity, and epi­thets against the French, Slavs, and Jews marked every aspect of his thought. At the very out­set of the nine­teenth cen­tury the deadly con­nec­tion between love of land and mil­i­tant racist nation­al­ism was firmly set in place.

Riehl, a stu­dent of Arndt, fur­ther devel­oped this sin­is­ter tra­di­tion. In some respects his’green’ streak went sig­nif­i­cantly deeper than Arndt’s; pre­sag­ing cer­tain ten­den­cies in recent envi­ron­men­tal activism, his 1853 essay Field and For­est ended with a call to fight for “the rights of wilder­ness.” But even here nation­al­ist pathos set the tone: “We must save the for­est, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in win­ter, but also so that the pulse of life of the peo­ple con­tin­ues to beat warm and joy­fully, so that Ger­many remains German.“6 Riehl was an (implaca­ble oppo­nent of the rise of indus­tri­al­ism and urban­iza­tion; his overtly anti­se­mitic glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of rural peas­ant val­ues and undif­fer­en­ti­ated con­dem­na­tion of moder­nity estab­lished him as the “founder of agrar­ian roman­ti­cism and antiurbanism.“7

These lat­ter two fix­a­tions matured in the sec­ond half of the nine­teenth cen­tury in the con­text of the völkisch move­ment, a pow­er­ful cul­tural dis­po­si­tion and social ten­dency which united eth­no­cen­tric pop­ulism with nature mys­ti­cism. At the heart of the völkisch temp­ta­tion was a patho­log­i­cal response to moder­nity. In the face of the very real dis­lo­ca­tions brought on by the tri­umph of indus­trial cap­i­tal­ism and national uni­fi­ca­tion, volkisch thinkers preached a return to the land, to the sim­plic­ity and whole­ness of a life attuned to nature’s purity. The mys­ti­cal effu­sive­ness of this per­verted utopi­anism was matched by its polit­i­cal vul­gar­ity. While “the Volk­ish move­ment aspired to recon­struct the soci­ety that was sanc­tioned by his­tory, rooted in nature, and in com­mu­nion with the cos­mic life spirit,“8 it point­edly refused to locate the sources of alien­ation, root­less­ness and envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion in social struc­tures, lay­ing the blame instead to ratio­nal­ism, cos­mopoli­tanism, and urban civ­i­liza­tion. The stand-in for all of these was the age-old object of peas­ant hatred and middle-class resent­ment: the Jews. “The Ger­mans were in search of a mys­te­ri­ous whole­ness that would restore them to primeval hap­pi­ness, destroy­ing the hos­tile milieu of urban indus­trial civ­i­liza­tion that the Jew­ish con­spir­acy had foisted on them.“9

Refor­mu­lat­ing tra­di­tional Ger­man anti­semitism into nature friendly terms, the völkisch move­ment car­ried a volatile amal­gam of nine­teenth cen­tury cul­tural prej­u­dices,
Roman­tic obses­sions with purity, and anti-Enlightenment sen­ti­ment into twen­ti­eth cen­tury polit­i­cal dis­course. The emer­gence of mod­ern ecol­ogy forged the final link in the fate­ful chain which bound together aggres­sive nation­al­ism, mys­ti­cally charged racism, and envi­ron­men­tal­ist predilec­tions. In 1867 the Ger­man zool­o­gist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ‘ecol­ogy’ and began to estab­lish it as a sci­en­tific dis­ci­pline ded­i­cated to study­ing the inter­ac­tions between organ­ism and envi­ron­ment. Haeckel was also the chief pop­u­lar­izer of Dar­win and evo­lu­tion­ary the­ory for the German-speaking world, and devel­oped a pecu­liar sort of social dar­win­ist phi­los­o­phy he called ‘monism.’ The Ger­man Monist League he founded com­bined sci­en­tif­i­cally based eco­log­i­cal holism with völkisch social views. Haeckel believed in nordic racial supe­ri­or­ity, stren­u­ously opposed race mix­ing and enthu­si­as­ti­cally sup­ported racial eugen­ics. His fer­vent nation­al­ism became fanat­i­cal with the onset of World War I, and he ful­mi­nated in anti­se­mitic tones against the post-war Coun­cil Repub­lic in Bavaria.

In this way “Haeckel con­tributed to that spe­cial vari­ety of Ger­man thought which served as the seed bed for National Social­ism. He became one of Germany’s major ide­ol­o­gists for racism, nation­al­ism and imperialism.“10 Near the end of his life he joined the Thule Soci­ety, “a secret, rad­i­cally right-wing orga­ni­za­tion which played a key role in the estab­lish­ment of the Nazi movement.“11 But more than merely per­sonal con­ti­nu­ities are at stake here. The pio­neer of sci­en­tific ecol­ogy, along with his dis­ci­ples Willibald Hentschel, Wil­helm Bolsche and Bruno Wille, pro­foundly shaped the think­ing of sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of envi­ron­men­tal­ists by embed­ding con­cern for the nat­ural world in a tightly woven­web of regres­sive social themes. From its very begin­nings, then, ecol­ogy was bound up in an intensely reac­tionary polit­i­cal framework.

The spe­cific con­tours of this early mar­riage of ecol­ogy and author­i­tar­ian social views are highly instruc­tive. At the cen­ter of this ide­o­log­i­cal com­plex is the direct, unmedi­ated appli­ca­tion of bio­log­i­cal cat­e­gories to the social realm. Haeckel held that “civ­i­liza­tion and the life of nations are gov­erned by the same laws as pre­vail through­out nature and organic life.“12 This notion of ‘nat­ural laws’ or ‘nat­ural order’ has long been a main­stay of reac­tionary envi­ron­men­tal thought. Its con­comi­tant is anti-humanism:

Thus, for the Monists, per­haps the most per­ni­cious fea­ture of Euro­pean bour­geois civ­i­liza­tion was the inflated impor­tance which it attached to the idea of man in gen­eral, to his exis­tence and to his tal­ents, and to the belief that through his unique ratio­nal fac­ul­ties man could essen­tially recre­ate the world and bring about a uni­ver­sally more har­mo­nious and eth­i­cally just social order. [Humankind was] an insignif­i­cant crea­ture when viewed as part of and mea­sured against the vast­ness of the cos­mos and the over­whelm­ing forces of nature.13

Other Monists extended this anti-humanist empha­sis and mixed it with the tra­di­tional völkisch motifs of indis­crim­i­nate anti-industrialism and anti-urbanism as well as the newly emerg­ing pseudo-scientific racism. The linch­pin, once again, was the con­fla­tion of bio­log­i­cal and social cat­e­gories. The biol­o­gist Raoul Francé, found­ing mem­ber of the Monist League, elab­o­rated so called Lebens­ge­setze, ‘laws of life’ through which the nat­ural order deter­mines the social order. He opposed racial mix­ing, for exam­ple, as “unnat­ural.” Francé is acclaimed by con­tem­po­rary eco­fas­cists as a “pio­neer of the ecol­ogy movement.“14

Francé’s col­league Lud­wig Wolt­mann, another stu­dent of Haeckel, insisted on a bio­log­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion for all soci­etal phe­nom­ena, from cul­tural atti­tudes to eco­nomic arrange­ments. He stressed the sup­posed con­nec­tion between envi­ron­men­tal purity and ‘racial’ purity: “Wolt­mann took a neg­a­tive atti­tude toward mod­ern indus­tri­al­ism. He claimed that the change from an agrar­ian to an indus­trial soci­ety had has­tened the decline of the race. In con­trast to nature, which engen­dered the har­monic forms of Ger­man­ism, there were the big cities, dia­bol­i­cal and inor­ganic, destroy­ing the virtues of the race.“15

Thus by the early years of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury a cer­tain type of ‘eco­log­i­cal’ argu­men­ta­tion, sat­u­rated with right-wing polit­i­cal con­tent, had attained a mea­sure of respectabil­ity within the polit­i­cal cul­ture of Ger­many. Dur­ing the tur­bu­lent period sur­round­ing World War I, the mix­ture of eth­no­cen­tric fanati­cism, regres­sive rejec­tion of moder­nity and gen­uine envi­ron­men­tal con­cern proved to be a very potent potion indeed.

THE YOUTH MOVEMENT AND THE WEIMAR ERA

The chief vehi­cle for car­ry­ing this ide­o­log­i­cal con­stel­la­tion to promi­nence was the youth move­ment, an amor­phous phe­nom­e­non which played a deci­sive but highly ambiva­lent role in shap­ing Ger­man pop­u­lar cul­ture dur­ing the first three tumul­tuous decades of this cen­tury. Also known as the Wan­dervögel (which trans­lates roughly as ‘wan­der­ing free spir­its’), the youth move­ment was a hodge-podge of coun­ter­cul­tural ele­ments, blend­ing neo-Romanticism, East­ern philoso­phies, nature mys­ti­cism, hos­til­ity to rea­son, and a strong com­mu­nal impulse in a con­fused but no less ardent search for authen­tic, non-alienated social rela­tions. Their back-to-the-land empha­sis spurred a pas­sion­ate sen­si­tiv­ity to the nat­ural world and the dam­age it suf­fered. They have been aptly char­ac­ter­ized as ‘right-wing hip­pies,’ for although some sec­tors of the move­ment grav­i­tated toward var­i­ous forms of eman­ci­pa­tory pol­i­tics (though usu­ally shed­ding their envi­ron­men­tal­ist trap­pings in the process), most of the Wan­dervögel were even­tu­ally absorbed by the Nazis. This shift from nature wor­ship to Führer wor­ship is worth examining.

The var­i­ous strands of the youth move­ment shared a com­mon self-conception: they were a pur­port­edly ‘non-political’ response to a deep cul­tural cri­sis, stress­ing the pri­macy of direct emo­tional expe­ri­ence over social cri­tique and action. They pushed the con­tra­dic­tions of their time to the break­ing point, but were unable or unwill­ing to take the final step toward orga­nized, focused social rebel­lion, “con­vinced that the changes they wanted to effect in soci­ety could not be brought about by polit­i­cal means, but only by the improve­ment of the individual.“16 This proved to be a fatal error. “Broadly speak­ing, two ways of revolt were open to them: they could have pur­sued their rad­i­cal cri­tique of soci­ety, which in due course would have brought them into the camp of social rev­o­lu­tion. [But] the Wan­dervögel chose the other form of protest against soci­ety — roman­ti­cism.” 17

This pos­ture lent itself all too read­ily to a very dif­fer­ent kind of polit­i­cal mobi­liza­tion: the ‘unpo­lit­i­cal’ zealotry of fas­cism. The youth move­ment did not sim­ply fail in its cho­sen form of protest, it was actively realigned when its mem­bers went over to the Nazis by the thou­sands. Its coun­ter­cul­tural ener­gies and its dreams of har­mony with nature bore the bit­ter­est fruit. This is, per­haps, the unavoid­able tra­jec­tory of any move­ment which acknowl­edges and opposes social and eco­log­i­cal prob­lems but does not rec­og­nize their sys­temic roots or actively resist the polit­i­cal and eco­nomic struc­tures which gen­er­ate them. Eschew­ing soci­etal trans­for­ma­tion in favor of per­sonal change, an osten­si­bly apo­lit­i­cal dis­af­fec­tion can, in times of cri­sis, yield bar­baric results.

The attrac­tion such per­spec­tives exer­cised on ide­al­is­tic youth is clear: the enor­mity of the cri­sis seemed to enjoin a total rejec­tion of its appar­ent causes. It is in the spe­cific form of this rejec­tion that the dan­ger lies. Here the work of sev­eral more the­o­ret­i­cal minds from the period is instruc­tive. The philo
sopher Lud­wig Klages pro­foundly influ­enced the youth move­ment and par­tic­u­larly shaped their eco­log­i­cal con­scious­ness. He authored a tremen­dously impor­tant essay titled “Man and Earth” for the leg­endary Meiss­ner gath­er­ing of the Wan­dervögel in 1913.18 An extra­or­di­nar­ily poignant text and the best known of all Klages’ work, it is not only “one of the very great­est man­i­festoes of the rad­i­cal eco­paci­fist­move­ment in Germany,“19 but also a clas­sic exam­ple of the seduc­tive ter­mi­nol­ogy of reac­tionary ecology.

“Man and Earth” antic­i­pated just about all of the themes of the con­tem­po­rary ecol­ogy move­ment. It decried the accel­er­at­ing extinc­tion of species, dis­tur­bance of global ecosys­temic bal­ance, defor­esta­tion, destruc­tion of abo­rig­i­nal peo­ples and of wild habi­tats, urban sprawl, and the increas­ing alien­ation of peo­ple from nature. In emphatic terms it dis­par­aged Chris­tian­ity, cap­i­tal­ism, eco­nomic util­i­tar­i­an­ism, hyper con­sump­tio­nand the ide­ol­ogy of ‘progress.’ It even con­demned the envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tive­ness of ram­pant tourism and the slaugh­ter of whales, and dis­played a clear recog­ni­tion of the planet as an eco­log­i­cal total­ity. All of this in 1913 !

It may come as a sur­prise, then, to learn that Klages was through­out his life polit­i­cally arch­con­ser­v­a­tive and a ven­omous anti­semite. One his­to­rian labels him a “Volk­ish fanatic” and another con­sid­ers him sim­ply “an intel­lec­tual pace­maker for the Third Reich” who “paved the way for fas­cist phi­los­o­phy in many impor­tant respects.“20 In “Man and Earth” a gen­uine out­rage at the dev­as­ta­tion of the nat­ural envi­ron­ment is cou­pled with a polit­i­cal sub­text of cul­tural despair.21 Klages’ diag­no­sis of the ills of mod­ern soci­ety, for all its decla­ma­tions about cap­i­tal­ism, returns always to a sin­gle cul­prit: “Geist.” His idio­syn­cratic use of this term, which means mind or intel­lect, was meant to denounce not only hyper­ra­tional­ism or instru­men­tal rea­son, but ratio­nal thought itself. Such a whole­sale indict­ment of rea­son can­not help but have sav­age polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions. It fore­closes any chance of ratio­nally recon­struct­ing society’s rela­tion­ship with nature and jus­ti­fies the most bru­tal author­i­tar­i­an­ism. But the lessons of Klages’ life and work have been hard for ecol­o­gists to learn. In 1980, “Man and Earth” was repub­lished as an esteemed and sem­i­nal trea­tise to accom­pany the birth of the Ger­man Greens.