Ludendorff and Spiritual Nationalism

The basis for future research.

In 1919, Germany was divided largely between two camps: the center left, and the Catholic Center Party.

Among troops who were still stationed in areas such as Poland, the Catholic Center party won less than 1% of the vote. Why was this? German Political Catholicism held the following goals:

1. To end the separation of Church and state in favor of the Catholic church (by Concordat);

2. To entice Jews to convert to Catholicism by changing Catholic doctrine and fighting antisemitism;

3. To agitate for or encourage separatism in Catholic regions, especially Bavaria;

4. To fight paganism or spiritual nationalism.

These goals were extremely hostile to the majority of German soldiers, even those were were baptized Catholics. The average German soldier was a leftist — not religious — and felt that the war had been a gigantic disaster, a ruinous adventure forced on Germany by an arcane series of alliances to Catholic Austria and Muslim Turkey. Although the NSDAP did not exist in 1919, the combination of “nationalism” and “socialism” best describes the attitude of the majority of German soldiers at this time.

It is no surprise then that the Catholic Center Party could not even achieve 1% of the vote of German veterans. The Catholic Center had aligned itself with theocracy, separatism, and was hostile to spiritual notions of the nation.

It is today thought that the only form of spiritual German nationalism was Nazi antisemitism. While it is true that antisemitism and German nationalism were not foreign to one another, the 1848 Revolutions proposed the emancipation of the Jews, not their elimination. In order to best understand the Nationalist Revolutionaries of 1848, the most recent examples would be climate or racial activists. Those who spray-paint the Mona Lisa, block roads, march for BLM, and take rubber bullets to the face have a genuinely spiritual, religious, and fanatical devotion to their ideals. It is not appropriate to view these movements as merely mechanical, opportunistic, or pragmatic. They have a Dionysian element which introduces the ecstatic religious experience into the political sphere.

Ernst Jünger, in his most famous work, Storm of Steel, captures the almost supernatural effect of the battlefield. Aside from the Nazis, Spengler, drawing from Goethe and Nietzsche, theorized that a nation was like a biological organism, which was connected by a common spiritual energy or vital force. Theosophists and Nordicists, incuding the Thulegesellschaft and Reichshammerbund, called this force vril. These views were not exclusive to the Nazis. In July 1918, general Seeckt stated: "Any consideration, Christian, sentimental or political, must be eclipsed by its clear necessity for the war effort."¹

The focus of today’s study will be Erich Ludendorff, the Supreme Commander of the German armed forces after 1916.²

The war was extremely hard on Ludendorff. Ludendorff had achieved spectacular victories and was an extremely competent commander. The British historian John Wheeler-Bennett wrote that he was “one of the greatest routine military organizers that the world has ever seen.”³ Toward the end, as the front collapsed, he was scapegoated and blamed for everything that went wrong. He could barely sleep, and alternated between extreme rage and breaking down crying.

After the defeat, he dedicated himself to his memoirs, in which he wrote that “the German people fought as men have never fought before,”⁴ Germans were now “helots in the service of foreigners and foreign capital.”⁵ To fully appreciate Ludendroff’s spiritual conception of war, I will quote extensively from his 1919 memoirs.⁶