Esotericists and the extreme right: Home to the Reich

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Cover image of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's book "The Little Prince": "I love sunsets very much"

The earth has seen many prophets, wandering and wise. And sometimes those that seem completely harmless at first glance. At the "Freedom Day" in Berlin last weekend, a man stepped on stage, with fluffy hair, in a T-shirt and shorts. He spoke of "peace and truth", said that he was meditating and finally asked his audience to do the same: "With your hand on your heart." Because the heart energy is the strongest energy there is.

It sounded a bit like he was quoting from the "Little Prince". "You can only see clearly with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes," said the fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's world-famous book about the little prince. The sentence has long since taken on a life of its own. It stands for the opposite pole to the prevailing rationalism. For the irrational, or in a somewhat milder form, the gentle wisdom of poetry. For the feelings to take over.

However, it was very uncomfortable feelings that haunted the speaker in Berlin: The suspicion that something is fundamentally wrong in this country, that the political class is robbing the people of freedom - and that under the pretext of a pandemic, which they are more or less thought up less. The speaker's name is Michael Ballweg. He is the founder of the Stuttgart initiative Querought711, one of the groups that are promoting the protest against the federal government's corona policy. On Saturday they called for another demonstration in Stuttgart, the "Festival for Freedom and Peace".

Bring the hippies home to the Reich

If you look at the websites of Ballweg lateral thinking711 or of other organizations that are at the forefront of the Corona protests, the "We Party", or "Resistance 2020", then they also seem as harmless as if they were for an organic store audience thought: There is talk of "mindfulness", of "loving togetherness". There is a school of fish to see, a sunset, the lowest common optical denominator of all dreamers. What did the little prince say? "I love sunsets very much".

The Berlin demonstrators, on the other hand, shouted "Merkel away!" When Ballweg spoke to them. Because the "Day of Freedom" was not a spiritual event after all. It was a public day of struggle, a demonstration of disenchantment with the system. An event that showed that the edges were continuing to erode and something new was emerging: a political esotericism that could connect the right and the once green.

"Merkel has to go," that was a slogan that was chanted by the right. And in Berlin, the insignia of the right were obvious: Reich flags in black, white and red, the Nordic cross.

The fact that esotericists turn away from the party in the green-ruled Baden-Württemberg in particular is actually only logical.

Ballweg himself recently told the Berliner Zeitung that he had already distanced himself several times from the right and the Nazis. But there are quite a few pioneers on the right who dream of the transverse front: united across the camps for the overthrow of the situation. It can only be in their interest to bring the hippies home into the kingdom as well. It would be less absurd than it seems at first glance: the dreamy, the irrational, the magical thinking and the right were for a long time ominously linked in German cultural history.

"Steel romanticism" of the Nazis

In his famous book "Considerations of an Unpolitical", published in 1918, Thomas Mann made a distinction between the civilization of the West and the culture of the Germans. He was referring to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was about "the Apollonian" and "the Dionysian", saturated with myths, the god of light on the one hand, and the god of intoxication and madness on the other. Nietzsche did not do it below. He had also made the "superman" popular, who was to play a certain role in the further course of the story. The Western powers were rational, so Mann concluded. The German Reich follows a different tradition, the irrational thinking of Romanticism.

German Romanticism was primarily a cultural and historical epoch of the 19th century. But it still shaped the zeitgeist prevailing in the educated middle class in the first half of the 20th century - and with it politics too.

A line leads from Nietzsche to esoteric, mystically sounding authors such as the poet Stefan George. And finally from his disciples to the Nazis. Goebbels spoke of the "steely romanticism" of National Socialism.

After the Second World War, magical thinking was discredited, and for the time being the Germans no longer wanted to hear about the madness. The left-wing cultural scientist Georg Lukács called Hitler the executor of Nietzsche's will. Franz-Josef Strauss' famous saying "Conservative means marching at the forefront of progress" was only paradoxical at first glance. He stood for the fact that the Christian Democrats had said goodbye to the German Sonderweg, that their policies were rational.

As long as they demonstrated against Stuttgart-21 and not against Covid-19, the freaks did not attract too much attention

Those who were less fond of such rationalism changed political camps over time. In West Germany they found their political home with the Greens. They were the corrective to a rationalism that had become technocratic, hostile to nature.

Characteristic traits of irrational, magical thinking survived in the art of Joseph Beuys, who flirted with shamanism and who had co-founded the Greens. At Walddorf schools, with homeopaths, with the Demeter farmers and in the growing esoteric scene. And even more so with anti-vaccination opponents and conspiracy theorists. The Greens took in many dreamers and quite a few weirdos. But as long as they exchanged information on leaflets and not via social media, as long as they were still demonstrating against Stuttgart-21 and not against Covid-19, the freaks did not attract too much attention.

From imagination to hallucination

That the esoteric, irrational part of the population is now turning to new political movements, especially in the green-ruled Baden-Württemberg, is actually only logical. Here the Greens embody the state. Those who distrust the state - and many Green voters have traditionally done this - can no longer vote for the party. After the Social Democracy and Christian Democracy, the third of the parties supporting the Federal Republic of Germany loses its binding force on the political fringes. The system continues to crumble.

On the right the politically homeless esotericists could well find like-minded people. Björn Höcke is also a romantic. For some Corona deniers, however, a certain part of the right is probably not at all due to its core competencies: xenophobia, the longing for the authoritarian. And not just because of the determined opposition to the federal government. But because the perceived truths prevail on both sides. In a world view in which the unleashed irrational no longer finds a corrective in the real.

But if the imagination alone determines the action, it is not too far to hallucinations. And the binding facts on which a society is based are increasingly disappearing.