Alfred Rosenberg

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Alfred Rosenberg's
"Mythos des XX. Jahrhunderts"
"The Myth Of The 20th Century" - 1925-1930

The Myth of the Twentieth Century at Amazon.com
The Alternative You Never Knew You Had
Reviewer: A reader
In this, his seminal work, Alfred Rosenberg offers the reader a genuine alternative to the political and spiritual attitudes which modern Western society leads us to believe are our only options. From every center of power tod
y we are told that we MUST accept democracy as the only "good" form of government, that we MUST choose either the Judeo-Christian tradition, the New Age movement, or secular humanism as our faith, and
that we MUST look to either Adam Smith or Karl Marx for economic wisdom.
In "The Myth of the Twentieth Century,
" Rosenberg takes aim at all of these assumptions and presents us with a worldview entirely different from any of those based upon them--one with its roots deep in those primeval affective, aesthetic, and intellectual inclinations characteristic of the Caucasian race. He argues powerfully for an organic polity as opposed to a universalist one--most specifically in the Germany of his time--but more generally for Western Civilization as a whole.
At the heart of his argument is the provocative thesis that each of the races of the human species possesses a different kind of "soul," which is the origin of human cultural diversity. Environmental influences cannot acco
unt for the differences in style and achievement among the races, he argues; the respective environmental conditions under which they have lived have been far too similar to admit of such an explanation. Ad
vancements in the scientific understanding of genetics made since Rosenberg's death, moreover, lend weight to his thesis and make it well w
orth a thoughful look.
"The Myth of the Twentieth Century" will be of interest to those searching for their identity and its significance amid the anomic trends of contemporary Western life, as well as those looking for a socially relavent philosophy with some depth as an alternative to Establishment prejudices and platitudes.

 

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(Der Mythos des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts)
-- -- Alfred Rosenberg

The Life and Death of Alfred Rosenberg
by Peter Peel
http://www.ety.com/berlin/peel.htm
Why should anyone read the Mythos today? It is open to much criticism as a book. It is not a scientific treatise on race. It is not a lofty, detached (I will not say "impartial" because historical impartiality is a noble illusion, impossible to attain) work of history, Rosenberg is no stylist. His mind races ahead of his syntax and one subordinate c
ause after another attach themselves to his original sentences. The result, all too often, reminds the reader of Mark Twain's dictum: "whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is th
e last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with the verb in his mouth." His
citations do not conform to the accepted canons of scholarship. While patently honest and authentic, they are often incomplete as to publishing data.

But when all these negative aspects have been given due notice, there remains a battery of the most powerful arguments for reading him. For students of history, the Mythos is an important historical document. For students of politics and political psychology, it is equally so. There is vast and most impressive erudition. It might not be too high-flown to say that there is the soul of a man and, perhaps of a nation-or at least of an epoch-on display. Our knowledge and understanding of the ideology and the Zeitgeist of the Third Reich
and, indeed, of its immediate antecedents, is seriously incomplete without the Mythos.

 

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from Alfred Rosenberg's "The Myth Of The 20th Century"
Book III, Chapter 7
http://www.ety.com/HRP/booksonline/mythos/mythosb3chap07.htm
A people is lost as a people and is dead, if, in surveying its history and in testing its will to the future, it cannot discover unity. No matter what forms the past may have taken in its course, when a nation arrives at the point of truly denying the allegorical images which stem from its first awakening, then it has denied the roots of its being and of its becoming and it has condemned itself to unfruitfulness. For history is not a development from nothing to something, nor from something insignificant to something great. It is not even the transformation of an essence into something completely different. Rather, the first racial folkish awakeni
ng brought about by heroes, gods and poets is the ultimate ach
ievement for all times. This first great supreme MYTHIC achievement cannot, in essence, be perfected. It can merely take on other new forms. The value breathed into a god or hero is what is eternal in good and evil. Homeros represented the highest enhancement of what was Greek and guarded this even in decline. Jehovah is the symbol of unbridled J*wry. The belief in Jehovah is the strength of even the lowest J*wish haggler in Poland.

This unity also holds for German history, for its men, its values, for the very old and new Myth, and for the supporting ideas of German folkhood. One form of Odin is dead, that is, the Odin who was the highest of the many gods who appeared as the embodiment of a generation still given up to natural symbolisms. Bu
t Odin as the eternal mirrored image of the primal spiritual powers of Nordic man lives today just as he did over 5,000 years ago. Hermann Wirth finds traces of decline also in the ancient world of g
ods and influences of the Eskimo race. This may be so, but does no
t influence what is actually Germanic. He embodies himself in honour and heroism, in the creation of song and or art, in the protection of law and in the eternal search for wisdom. Odin learned that through the guilt of the gods, through the breaking of the bond to the builders of Valhalla, the race of the gods must perish. Despite this decline, he nevertheless commanded Heimdall to summon the Aesir with his horn for the final decisive battle. Dissatisfied, eternally searching, the god wandered through the universe to try to fathom his destiny and the nature of his being. He sacrificed an eye so that he might participate in the deepest wisdom. As an eternal wanderer he is a symbol of the eternally searching and becoming Nordic soul which cannot withdraw self confidently back to Jehovah and his representatives. The headstrong activity of the will, which, at first, drives so roughly through the Nordic lands in the battle songs about Thor, showed
directly at their first appearance the innate, striving, wisdom s
eeking, metaphysical side in Odin the Wanderer. But the same spirit is revealed once again with the great, free Ostrogoths and the devout Ulfilas. It is also revealed, in accordance with the times, in the strengthened Knights Order and in the great Nordic western mystics as seen in their greatest spirit, Meister Eckehart. When, in Frederick's Prussia, the soul which once gave birth to Odin was revived at Hohenfriedberg and Leuthen, it was also reborn in the soul of the Thomas church cantor, Bach, and in Goethe. From this viewpoint our assertion will appear deeply justified, that a heroic Nordic saga, a Prussian march, a composition by Bach, a sermon by Eckehart, and a monologue by Faust, are only varied experiences of one and the same soul. They are creations of the same will. They are eternal powers which were first united under the name Odin and which later gained form in Frederick the Great and Bismarck. As long as these powers are operat
ive, as long as Nordic blood mixes with a Nordic soul and will, No
rdic man will be active and work in mystic union. This is the prerequisite of every true to type creation.

 

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The prominent Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was, together with the agricultural minister Walther DarrÃÆ’ ÃƒÆ’”�Å¡©, the chief proponent of Blut und Boden which emphasized the importance of reconnecting with the race and the land and fighting the evils of urbanisation and industrial society. Rosenberg wrote: "Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the threads which bind humanity to nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colours, thereby fostering racial chaos." This idea is closely connected to Nazi expansionism. Germany needed "Lebensraum" to the east, in order to be able to move back to a simple, agrarian society. DarrÃÆ’ ÃƒÆ’”�Å¡© wrote: "The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral right to take back as much land in the East as is necessary to establish a
harmony between the body of our Volk an
d the geopolitical space."

http://www.techcentralstation.com/070202M.html

 

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Gnostic Origins of Alfred Rosenberg's Thought
JAMES B. WHISKER
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v04/v04p335_Whisker.html

It has been said that the Christian opponent of Judaism has but two alternatives: to de-judaize Christ or to deny Him. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, following many theologians of middle Europe in the 19th Century, attempted to prove that Jesus was an Aryan living in an isolated area of Gallilee, and separated racially from the rest of the peoples of the region. The author of Foundations of the 19th Century attempted to show that an isolated group of Nordics had been cut off from the mainstream of the nation, and that Christ was descended from such people. Field Marshal Ludendorf and others merely denied the relevance of Jesus, and were anti-Christian as well as anti-Hebrew. These two traditions ac
cepted in common the idea that the Bible, Old an
d New Testaments alike, was literal history.

A third possibility underlies Rosenberg's thought. The origins are rooted in pre-Christian ideas and practices commonly known in the West as gnosticism. Like many other generic terms, gnosticism is used by many to cover a wide variety of philosophical-theological ideas. Because of the success of the Western church, including its more recent Protestant forms, the systems which were vanquished in the long struggle for religious supremacy in Christendom are thought of in a totally negative context. Such names as Marcionite, gnostic, Manichaean, and Bogomilite, are perjoratives. Most of what was known about them was either secretly guarded or was learned from reading the refutations of opponents or the accounts of one or another Inquisition, including the interrogations (most often of unlearned members under torture) of those who were accused of heresy.

In the 20th Century there have been two major devel
opments which have changed what we know about the various
"heresies." One is the discovery of major documents and treatises either by leading gnostics or by their closest disciples and followers. The other development is the interest shown by leaders of the Third Reich in these movements, and the subsequent study of the ideology in terms of such thought. Among the major works to appear reinterpreting the National Socialist movement in such terms are Pauwels and Bergiers' The Morning of the Magician (in French, and translated into many languages), Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny and The Cup of Destiny and Angebert's The Occult and the Third Reich.

Most of the authors who have rediscovered the gnostics and their influence on the Third Reich have assumed that the leaders kept the bases of knowledge secret, usually in the SS shrines and rituals, and that this special knowledge was never intended for mass distribution. Only the few specially selected SS types could be entrusted with
the age-old secrets. Even in the pre-Third Reich State, Rosenberg had distrib
uted his essay on the origins of Nazi ideology (actually written before the NSDAP was formed). His Myth of the 20th Century discussed one particularly gnostic sect, the Cathars (Holy or Purified Ones), in great detail, but stopped short of offering a simplified version of the Cathar religionphilosophy as the new religion (or reinstated religion) of Germany.

It is my contention here that Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the 20th Century is quintessentially a gnostic work which attempted to set the stage for subsequent works which would have taken Germany back in time to a stage in which a simplified, anti-Jewish religion was the common practice in the West among the common peoples. It was designed not as a final statement on the New Nordic Religion, but was to serve as a trial balloon, a precursor of what was to come. In the early 1920s Rosenberg was not prepared to offer a final statement of this philosophy. The research necess
ary to the full creation had not yet been completed. It was a promise of things to
come. It was a quest which may, in his terms, be likened unto King Arthur's setting the Knights of the Round Table on the quest for the Holy Grail.