Wolfgang Hardtwig's lecture sets up a series of challenging interpretive questions forged from a single familiar fact. As we know from numerous statistical analyses of national voting results after 1928, the NSDAP was highly successful in gaining support among German Protestants in its electoral drive for power and by 1932 had made considerable inroads into the more impervious Catholic vote, as well. But, familiar though it is, what does this apparent relationship between National Socialism and Christian affiliation mean, and how is it to be explained? One representative and authoritative account of the Nazi electorate, Thomas Childers's The Nazi Voter, reads the party's attitude toward the Christian religion as largely defensive and propagandistic. Childers emphasizes the NSDAP's repudiation of accusations that it was an enemy of Christianity and its claims that it was the only political movement capable of overcoming the nation's confessional as well as class divisions.1 This political interpretation is consistent with his wider argument, now well established in the literature, that after 1930 the NSDAP became a "catch-all party of protest," an unstable alignment of voters united only in their frustration and despair at the apparent insolubility of Germany's economic and political crisis.2 A logical corollary to this would be that the association of religious belief and National Socialism was as shallow and evanescent as any of the other miscellaneous beliefs and expectations that brought more than one in three of Germany's voters into the Nazi camp by July 1932 - and that the convergence was opportunistic on both sides of the electoral equation: The relationship was exploited by a party that, as we know, was willing to adopt any position that would assist its ruthless pursuit of electoral legitimation.
This type of electoral analysis occupied center stage in the explanations of the Nazi rise to power until a few years ago. It aimed to test the inherited truism that the NSDAP was essentially a lower-middle-class movement - a hypothesis that was already under attack and that did not survive such intensive scrutiny unscathed.3 But although these efforts yielded massive new evidence about how Germans voted, they were less conclusive in answering the question why voters made their choices; or, in other words, in bridging the inferential gaps between voters and their motives, between evidence and its explanation. Electoral analysis, perhaps too much in conformity with its own premises, tended to yield somewhat pragmatic accounts of voter preferences in Weimar Germany. Older emphases on the appeal of Nazi ideology were rejected in favor of more rationalist explanations of how voter groups assessed their material interests and how the NSDAP targeted these with cynically skilled propaganda. But as materialist explanations of historical processes lost ground at the end of the 1980s, in a secular movement of ideas that needs no reiteration here, so a renewed interest in the operations and mechanisms of ideology has reopened the question of Nazism as ideology and restored a prominence that had been eclipsed by structural and procedural accounts of the movement's successes and failure.
Hardtwig's lecture takes this move a step further by invoking that species of ideological conviction we call religious belief and suggesting that it is "the extreme irrationality of the National Socialist regime and its crimes [that] forces us to take religious concepts and interpretations into consideration." An interesting paradox this, if we recall that it was the perceived inadequacy of irrationalist models of Nazism that led historians in the first place to embark on the statistical studies that provide the empirical starting point of this lecture. But this equation of religion and irrationality may almost be unnecessary because the questions posed by Hardtwig are far more concrete and open to empirical investigation than it implies, even if they also return to the terrain of ideology. Hardtwig asks whether the appeal of National Socialism can be explained by the state of Christian belief in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s; whether the character of the Nazi movement, its ideology, and its leadership actively sought to respond to the aspirations of frustrated and needy Christian believers; whether National Socialism was able to commandeer Germans' religious beliefs and longings for political purposes because it was, or presented itself as, a kind of political religion.
To ask these questions is to release a Pandora's flight of historical and conceptual questions, which Hardtwig recaptures with an impressive grasp and expertise. Political religion is the key term here, and it may need some introduction. Although this concept has had a presence in debates about National Socialism since the 1930s, it is probably less familiar to anglophone historians as an interpretive tool than the concepts of mass society and mass politics, or of totalitarianism, with which it has some affinities. Still, the idea of political religion has experienced something of a revival, especially among the German and French academics to whose works Hardtwig refers.4 This resurgence of interest has been accompanied by a new depth of empirical and contextual information about the religious affiliations of Nazi ideologists and their ideas, especially through the work of Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch. Not only has Bärsch reassessed the ideas of ideologues like Dietrich Eckart and Alfred Rosenberg, he also has reanchored the potentially loose and amorphous idea of political religion in the core concepts of ecclesia, political community, and state sovereignty advanced by Erich Voegelin and, before him, Carl Schmitt.5 Meanwhile, other scholars, such as Karl Schreiner, have been exploring the ideological crisis of German Christian belief in the 1920s and depicting the accumulation of salvationist hopes for a political Messiah.6
Hardtwig's discussion of these demanding and sometimes abstruse literatures conveys their richness and complexity while at the same time making them comprehensible to readers who are unfamiliar with them. His overarching question is whether the concept of political religion might help us to explain both the attractiveness of the Nazi movement in Germany before 1933 and the apocalyptic character and actions of the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Hardtwig concentrates mainly on the first question, basing his remarks on the empirical fact already noted above: the strong statistical correlation between the Protestant electorate and support for the NSDAP. He begins by considering some of the more familiar cultic attributes of the Nazi movement, ideology, and leadership: the calendar of rituals, for example, or the conceptual vocabulary of Eckart and Joseph Goebbels. He then moves outward to situate this in the language and mentality of a broader swathe of Germans in the 1920s and 1930s, looking for what might be called parallel dispositions or overlaps between the Nazi and Christian ideational worlds. He suggests that an apocalyptic representation of national crisis gained currency in Germany immediately after World War I and again under the impact of the depression, creating a favorable climate for a charismatic leader to claim wide legitimacy. And, extending this discussion, Hardtwig also takes us much further back into the history of convergences between the languages of politics and religion in Germany. He considers the specifically Protestant forms of this mentality in the nineteenth century and the range of disappointments and resentments felt by what had once been a Protestant ascendancy in the face of a new "red-black" Socialist-Catholic coalition after 1918.
In a conclusion that is perhaps the most difficult part of the lecture to grasp, Hardtwig contrasts the character of religious and political discourse as such. If I follow his text correctly here, he argues that, on the one hand, religion offers transcendent meaning to, but no practical resolution of, the essential contingency or uncontrollability of human existence, notably its openness to death; whereas on the other hand, politics operates with a notion of problems that can in fact be solved. Religion, in a word, offers deliverance in return for the recognition that human control is finite; politics offers control but not transcendence. But what National Socialism did, with its racialized postulate of an essential struggle between the Aryans and their enemies, was to invest the religious experience of contingency with the political mantle of solubility. In other words, it suggested that the core challenges of human existence that religion responds to could in fact become the stuff of political resolution. This was a strategy that fatally politicized the existential challenge of death: And, in attempting to master death, National Socialism created a virtual cult of death.7 (In this sense Nazism was an inherently apocalyptic ideology, in contrast to the reconciliationist promise - however compromised in practice - of the ideologies of socialism and communism, which limits their comparability with Nazism.) Thus Hardtwig finally judges National Socialism to be a secular movement that vacated the true ground of religion when it claimed to offer solutions to what is humanly insoluble. The lesson of his lecture is that National Socialism was able to capitalize on the religious discontent of the 1920s and 1930s but that this does not justify seeing the Nazi movement itself as a political religion. In other words, Hardtwig concludes, the concept is useful as a means to understand the popular appeal of Nazism but not its own character as a political movement. With this discriminating judgment Hardtwig seems to be in syntactic agreement with Philippe Burrin's suggestion that, in the concept of political religion, "the adjective is more important than the noun."8
This lecture thus presents us with an enormous range of issues, from the meaning of religious belief as such to the history of German political and religious languages, to Hitler's beliefs and his status among his followers, to the precise circumstances of the Nazi rise to power. Without hope of addressing them all, I trust that what I have selected for this comment will not appear too idiosyncratic; or if it does, that it will stimulate readers to ideas and responses of their own.
First, a comment on the initial argument - that the Nazi Party's appeal to Christians derived from its own quasi-religious characteristics. For the Weimar period, as I have said, this sets up the challenging task of explaining the relationship between the religious dispositions described in the lecture and the empirical pattern of voter choices, of bridging the motivational and interpretive gaps. Here the lecture presents some creative approaches that also engender new questions. Hardtwig's description of sectarian religious confusion in Weimar offers a suggestive parallel to the more familiar picture of contemporary party political confusion. He depicts a proliferating market of religious sects to which Nazism offered a vision of reunification, in a striking parallel to the familiar picture of the fragmentation of the political middle that underpins much of the empirical research into electoral choice. Is this image - a crisis of religious loyalty paralleling the crisis of political loyalty - an artifact of research perspectives and existing models, or is it a real parallel that might provide some ways to construct those necessary bridges between climates and behaviors?
Hardtwig also depicts with great cogency the way in which the Nazi Party's quasi-religious rituals tapped into the climate of salvationist longing and the repertoire of religious symbolism in the 1920s and 1930s. But how differently did Protestants and Catholics respond to this, and why? How were the ideas identifiable in theological and ideological tracts translated into the means of political decisionmaking or mobilization? We know, for example, that Catholic voters remained more committed to their own political party, the Center, than did Protestants to the German National People's Party (Deutsche Nationale Volkspartei, or DNVP) - a fact that suggests the importance of a triangular comparison of the religious appeal of Center, DNVP, and NSDAP. Similarly, women were at first less attracted than male voters to the NSDAP, and Catholic women least of all: Do the manipulations of political religion help to explain this gender gap or the fact that it was finally and dramatically overcome in 1932? One might also raise questions from the internal history of the Protestant church: its leadership's cautious stance vis-à-vis the Nazi movement before 1931, its internal struggles with the German Christian movement, its members' decisions at the church's own elections as well as in state elections.9 All these examples suggest that the bridge linking religious beliefs or deficits with voting decisions still has to be paved once it has been erected.
The largest issue raised by this lecture obviously is the value of the concept of political religion itself to our understanding of National Socialism or, for that matter, of other political movements. The term itself is explored by Hardtwig, and I will not repeat it here. Academic interest in it is attested, as I have already mentioned, by the small mountain of new books, essays, and conference papers that have appeared in Germany and France in the past few years, although not in the United States or Britain. The context in which the concept of political religion has claimed a new prominence is clearly shared by both European and U.S. academics, namely, the collapse of the Soviet system, which has changed the historical and intellectual climate for the study of Europe's twentieth-century dictatorships. In the United States, however, historians will probably be much more familiar with the revival of debate about totalitarianism in the 1990s, in which the concept of political religion has barely been mentioned. However, another more locally domesticated concept that has not undergone the same revival is that of mass society, an idea that - unlike its more politically self-conscious cousin, populism - has always seemed to me compromised by its frank contempt for the political potential of democracy. In any case, with some exceptions American scholars have recently contributed much more to the exploration of the political ritualism of Italian fascism than of Nazism, in studies that barely acknowledge the concept of political religion. They draw instead on theories of aesthetics, of spectacles and representation, or the construction of self.10 Even in the absorbing study of fascism published by the English intellectual historian Roger Griffin in 1991, for example, which breathed new life into a flagging debate, the concept of political religion was sternly dismissed as irrelevant to secular political movements.11 This distribution of international intellectual labor reveals the intellectual contrast between an anglophone world that has largely ignored the concept and a Franco-German debate that has itself been conducted as much by theologians and religious philosophers as historians and political scientists. In this context, Hardtwig deserves the gratitude of his American colleagues for drawing our attention back across the Atlantic and over the borders into neighboring disciplines.
I end by putting into play a couple of additional perspectives or concepts offered to students of Nazism by two other scholars from neighboring fields. If political religion occupies a kind of middle rank in the hierarchy of conceptual tools, the concept of "political myth" proposed by Griffin takes us up a step, to what he calls the "irrational mainspring of all ideologies irrespective of their surface rationality or apparent 'common sense.'"12 Under this umbrella, religions and political belief systems are both examples of ideologies. This, to shift metaphors drastically, would provide us with a kind of Ockham's razor to cut through a lot of debate about the distinction between "political belief" as such and "religious belief" as such, because the argument is that they both share the same ground. Griffin puts the razor to use with his core definition of fascism as "a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism": It is the palingenetic quality that is most pertinent to this lecture, that is, the myth of rebirth or regeneration, fascism's promise of a "revolutionary new order," that offers the key overlap between Nazi and Christian ideology.13
Now to step downward, to the world of symbols and signs. Nazism confronts us with a movement and ideology that were peculiarly plastic and parasitic, as Hardtwig's lecture has demonstrated. Its appropriation of a repertoire of religious, that is, familiar, symbols and rituals after 1933 strikes me as utterly mimetic and in no way comparable to the originary appropriations made by the revolutionary regime in France that have been so well depicted by François Furet, Monique Ozouf, and Lynn Hunt. But what of the central symbol of the movement itself, the swastika? In a fascinating cross-disciplinary study published a few years ago, Malcolm Quinn anatomized the transformation of this occult symbol into a self-referential corporate logo, a tautology that substituted self-representation for communication, that "sold the German back to her/himself as an Aryan."14 The swastika substituted a system of racial recognition for one of communication: "Racism," writes Quinn, "creates community without responsibility: It is a magical representation which allows people to believe that they share a fellowship of 'blood' without the burden of social or civic obligations . . . [it is an] easily digestible representation . . . which establish[es] 'birthrights' rather than duties. Racism . . . accomplishes the same feat with language, privileging a 'common' speech over the act of communication; meaning then becomes something which is simply recognised, which need not be articulated or explained."15 I offer this reference partly because it suggests an additional angle of vision on the secularized symbolism of National Socialism, one in which the symbols and rituals are related not to transformations of religious belief but to the mechanisms of the sign, and which draw further attention to the character of propaganda as well as the content of ideology. But Quinn's characterization of the swastika as a sign of recognition rather than communication also condenses something else important about National Socialist ideology, namely, not only its parasitism on inherited symbolic structures - as Hardtwig shows us here in relation to Christian symbolism, and as Alf Lüdtke has shown in relation to the symbols of labor16 - but ultimately its obliteration of meaning. In both of these textual examples the affinity of the movement to religion becomes epiphenomenal rather than essential. Perhaps paradoxically, this putting of religion in its place may in fact strengthen rather than weaken the kind of cultural and ideological analysis Wolfgang Hardtwig has offered us.