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New Religions and the Nazis
This book sheds light on an important but neglected part of Nazi history – the contribution of new religions to the emergence of Nazi ideology in 1920s and 1930s Germany. Post –World War I conditions threw Germans into major turmoil. The loss of the war, the Weimar Republic and the punitive Treaty of Versailles all caused widespread discontent and resentment. As a result Germans generally and intellectuals specifically took political, paramilitary, and religious matters into their own hands to achieve national regeneration. Taken together such cultural figures as Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, Mathilde Ludendorff, Ernst Bergmann, Hans F.K. Günther, and nationalist writers like Hans Grimm created a mind-set that swept across Germany like a tidal wave. By fusing politics, religion, theology, Indo-Aryan metaphysics, literature and Darwinian science they intended to craft a new, genuinely German faith-based political community. What emerged instead was an anti-Semitic totalitarian political regime known as National Socialism. Looking at modern paganism as well as the established Church, Karla Poewe reveals that the new religions founded in the pre-Nazi and Nazi years, especially Jakob Hauer’s German Faith Movement, present a model for how German fascism distilled aspects of religious doctrine into political extremism. New Religions and the Nazis addresses one of the most important questions of the twentieth century – how and why did Germans come to embrace National Socialism? Researched from original documents, letters and unpublished papers, including the SS personnel files held in the German Federal Archives, it is an absorbing and fresh approach to the difficulties raised by this deeply significant period of history.
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First published June 1, 2004
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About the author
Karla Poewe
18 books4 followersDr. Karla O. Poewe is an anthropologist turned historian. She is the author of ten academic books and fifty peer reviewed articles in international journals. Currently Poewe is Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada and Adjunct Research Professor at Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, England. She is married to
Irving Hexham
.
Born 25 January 1941 in Königsberg, East Prussia, Poewe became a refugee at the age of three after 189 Lancaster bombers from No. 5 Group of the British RAF dropped 480 tons of bombs on the city centre. Her family was moved to a small estate in Poland, staying several weeks before being moved again. Almost six months later they found themselves in the vicinity of Dresden just in time for the bombing. From Dresden they were moved to Plauen in Saxony and eventually spent three years in Werdau before walking over 250 miles, after the death of Poewe's father, to cross into the British Zone near Göttingen. From there they went to the small town of Buxtehude. Poewe's memories of this period were published as Childhood in Germany during World War II (1988).
Poewe worked as an air hostess with Trans-Canada Airlines before entering the University of Toronto where she won several prestigious scholarships. Originally planning to study medicine, she switched to Anthropology. After completing her B.A. she enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of New Mexico where Harry Basehart was her thesis supervisor. Poewe studied for a while with John Middleton at New York University and learned Swahili and Bemba at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The fieldwork for her Ph.D. thesis was carried out in Zambia.
After the completion of her thesis she taught for a year at the University of Toronto before moving to the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. She then carried out further fieldwork funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in Namibia. During this time she published her first book, Matrilineal Ideology (1981), followed by Reflections of a Woman Anthropologist (1982). This book, which helped pioneer a new genre of anthropological writing, was, at the publisher's insistence, published under the pseudonym Manda Cesara.
After Poewe married Irving Hexham the two co-authored a book entitled Understanding Cults and New Religions (1986). They also co-authored New Religions as Global Cultures (1997). Poewe began fieldwork in South Africa where she studied the rise of Charismatic Christian Churches and the relationship of their members to apartheid. This ground-breaking work resulted in an International Conference held at the University of Calgary in 1993 on the topic of Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture[8], which led to the publication of a book with the same title.
Poewe's fieldwork in South Africa came to an end in 1989 when a close friend, the Rt. Rev. Londa Shembe, leader of one branch of the Zulu African Independent Church amaNazaretha, was brutally assassinated and two other friends were killed in the ongoing violence. These tragedies caused Poewe to redirect her research interests to looking at the role of missionaries in the areas of Africa where she had studied. Fortunately the fall of the Berlin Wall enabled her to freely access the archives of the Berlin Mission Society. While working in these archives in 1995 she discovered a large amount of material dealing with conflicts between members of the Berlin Mission and National Socialists.
This material provided the basis for a new project concerning the role of religions in the rise of National Socialism which took almost ten years to complete and resulted in her latest book, New Religions and the Nazis (2006).
Currently Poewe is studying the treatment of German refugees following the end of World War II and is interested in the impact of defeat on the defeated.
Born 25 January 1941 in Königsberg, East Prussia, Poewe became a refugee at the age of three after 189 Lancaster bombers from No. 5 Group of the British RAF dropped 480 tons of bombs on the city centre. Her family was moved to a small estate in Poland, staying several weeks before being moved again. Almost six months later they found themselves in the vicinity of Dresden just in time for the bombing. From Dresden they were moved to Plauen in Saxony and eventually spent three years in Werdau before walking over 250 miles, after the death of Poewe's father, to cross into the British Zone near Göttingen. From there they went to the small town of Buxtehude. Poewe's memories of this period were published as Childhood in Germany during World War II (1988).
Poewe worked as an air hostess with Trans-Canada Airlines before entering the University of Toronto where she won several prestigious scholarships. Originally planning to study medicine, she switched to Anthropology. After completing her B.A. she enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of New Mexico where Harry Basehart was her thesis supervisor. Poewe studied for a while with John Middleton at New York University and learned Swahili and Bemba at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The fieldwork for her Ph.D. thesis was carried out in Zambia.
After the completion of her thesis she taught for a year at the University of Toronto before moving to the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. She then carried out further fieldwork funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in Namibia. During this time she published her first book, Matrilineal Ideology (1981), followed by Reflections of a Woman Anthropologist (1982). This book, which helped pioneer a new genre of anthropological writing, was, at the publisher's insistence, published under the pseudonym Manda Cesara.
After Poewe married Irving Hexham the two co-authored a book entitled Understanding Cults and New Religions (1986). They also co-authored New Religions as Global Cultures (1997). Poewe began fieldwork in South Africa where she studied the rise of Charismatic Christian Churches and the relationship of their members to apartheid. This ground-breaking work resulted in an International Conference held at the University of Calgary in 1993 on the topic of Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture[8], which led to the publication of a book with the same title.
Poewe's fieldwork in South Africa came to an end in 1989 when a close friend, the Rt. Rev. Londa Shembe, leader of one branch of the Zulu African Independent Church amaNazaretha, was brutally assassinated and two other friends were killed in the ongoing violence. These tragedies caused Poewe to redirect her research interests to looking at the role of missionaries in the areas of Africa where she had studied. Fortunately the fall of the Berlin Wall enabled her to freely access the archives of the Berlin Mission Society. While working in these archives in 1995 she discovered a large amount of material dealing with conflicts between members of the Berlin Mission and National Socialists.
This material provided the basis for a new project concerning the role of religions in the rise of National Socialism which took almost ten years to complete and resulted in her latest book, New Religions and the Nazis (2006).
Currently Poewe is studying the treatment of German refugees following the end of World War II and is interested in the impact of defeat on the defeated.
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November 26, 2020Found out about this one from (re-)reading Pankaj Mishra's excellent NYRB essay on "Jordan Peterson and Fascist Mysticism" (it seems the lobster daddy is back and will soon publish another book of "rules for life," alas)
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