Martin Luther and the Origins of Political Authoritarianism

For seventy years now, a biblical lifetime, varieties of democratic liberalism have charmed the common folk with magical realism, tales of everlasting progress and human perfectibility. Twice gulled, it seems, the folk are drawn to authoritarianism. What are its origins?

The Reformation’s recent Five Hundredth has shone light on this, with new reviews of October 31, 1517, when it is said Luther nailed ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg, a small town in Germany. Luther, once called a “new Paul”, more recently a “religious nuclear weapon”, split the thousand-year Latin empire, sparked revolution in Germany and rekindled ancient Eastern European and Russian hatreds of the European West. Within eight years, his revolution was over. On the killing fields of the Peasants War, German princes slaughtered 100,000 common folk, a campaign they continued off and on for the next century, blazing humanity’s well-travelled road to Bosnia. Luther, who hated both princes and peasants as much as he did the Latin Church, had to call in secular authority to restore peace. He did so ungraciously, citing Isaiah’s sour prophecy, God would give the folk “children for princes”. The princes took over Luther’s new Christianity, excising the essence of personal religion he had sought. Luther began with a quest for a new kind of religion but ended with a new kind of state. How did this happen to the “new Paul”? What was Luther’s prophecy worth?

The scholarly literature on Luther is immense, apparently growing each year by more than a thousand items, recently including dense new biographies from Germany, England and France.¹ Indeed, at fifty-seven volumes, Luther’s own output is immense, even without glancing at his hyperactive life, a twenty-four-seven publicist punching and counterpunching anyone on any issue at any time. Nothing was too small to escape instant praise, rage or vilification from Luther.

A colourful picture emerges from excellent modern scholarship, although a fault, if excellent modern scholarship has a fault, is that it can make the wood hard to tell from the trees. These books make intensive study of Luther and are psychologically acute, especially the English one by Lyndal Roper, but think the terms for understanding his leadership are unfamiliar to us, which is wide of the mark. Luther’s leadership type is only too well known to us. Herewith, a broad view of the wood, and Luther’s place in our mental landscape today.

Luther’s father, a peasant from poor Thuringian farmlands, migrated to Germany’s mining belt where he became a self-made engineer in a boom created by new-minted money magnates, a separate gold rush from the Catholic-led globalisation of the Americas. The father was able to provide his son—a normal boy but prone to solitary melancholy in forests—with a life, education (Erfurt, a top university) and career options he never had himself. He wanted the son to choose law. The son then burst out in violent quarrel with the father and vice versa, a well-known European family trait, whether you accept Freud’s view of the human underground or not. It is visible in the Assisi Francis family, French circles of Joan of Arc, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and on the evidence, Luke Skywalker and online hate posts. Luther echoed St Francis and St Joan, down to nation-building, the pivot to national languages and expulsion of alien forces under divine direction.

Beset within, Luther was also beset without. The Turk was at the gates but Luther thought the Pope a greater threat to Christendom than the Turk, as did Erasmus until he got to know Luther better, when he changed his mind. Luther’s “beloved” Germany—he hated Italy—was also living through times of change. Apocalypse, he thought, was now. A brew of archaic institutions, humanist learning, abuses in the Latin Church, wilful princes, new town classes, and new mass media made the times ripe for the right personality.²

Luther was that personality. He was a scholar-monk—a trained Augustinian—with an intellectual and seriously charismatic personality, but chose to tell the world tales about a poor unlearned man of the forests. This myth held sway for centuries because Luther was determined history should treat him kindly, and like Churchill later, determined to write it himself. His homespun Tischreden are still read in Germany, and in translation around the world. But this man of the people was also a master of logic, rhetoric, original Biblical tongues and modern German, a language he has been justly credited with inventing.

He was first to use the new social media—cheap printed fliers, pamphlets, letters copied everywhere, mass-produced woodcuts, crowd events, and church doors, chat-rooms of his day where everyone knocked. Luther’s speed, decisiveness and spell-binding loquacity caught the establishment flat-footed, in Germany, Italy, everywhere really. His opponents had arguments, some of them good, and could have been more nimble, had they not grown comfortable with wealth, power and flattery, not to mention failing to keep up with new technology and the common folk. Printing was an upstart industry drawn from among the people, and naturally printed the reformers books fast. Lack of willing printing houses forced years of delay on Luther’s opponents. Luther thus outplayed the establishments of several countries. He had, in a proverb he liked and repeated often, “fire in his arse”.³

He quarrelled definitively with Rome, but human, all too human, was justly afraid of papal summonses, of meetings with inquisitors, ministries of fear with procedures for recantation, excommunication and burning to hand.⁴ He yet managed to turn meetings into public spectacles, parading to them barefoot across Central Germany, to Augsburg, Worms and Leipzig for weeks on end, a strictly unnecessary procedure as the boom made inter-city communications good. Then as now, however, foot-dragging obedience is a ruse that infuriates or delights; it infuriated Rome and delighted Luther’s public. Crowds gathered at every road and square along his way. As ringmeister Luther knew to make each move more extreme than the last. He dominated and delighted crowds, debate and media with torrents of ridicule, satire, anger, contempt, hatred, threats, foul language and evident piety. German expressions for “shat upon” emerge coyly from a background of abuse heightened by metaphors of sexual hatred against enemies. In this theatre of humiliation, which anticipates Alfred Jarry, Jean Genet and Michel Houellebecq by five centuries, the “devil” plays major roles: ally of popes, princes, peasants and occasional visitor even unto Luther himself. Luther was as anti-Jewish and anti-humanist as he was anti-Rome. He made sure friends and fellow travellers understood the Reformation was his invention, not theirs. In his diplomacy, he cajoled, pleaded, scorned, bullied and flattered.

For all these skills, or perhaps because of them, he was not much of a courtier. He needed civil protection, which came from Frederick the Wise of Saxony, a model prince, too wise to meet Luther himself.⁵ Protection came indirectly via the good offices of Luther’s less-learned friend and one-time mentor, Spalatin, courtier to Frederick. Spalatin made up for lack of learning by smoothness about which stops to play, and when, as courtiers perhaps still do. But he was unable to smooth Luther’s rough edges; late in life, their friendship ended. Luther’s young collaborator, Melanchthon, also tried smoothing, also to no avail. The gatekeepers could not box Luther in. This failure proved unimportant. In an age of showy codpieces, princes in Germany quickly saw merit in anti-Latin revolution on their lands even as they intervened to stop chaos. As Luther’s message spread, peasantry and repressed city denizens alike misread it as a call to revolution and salvation on earth, consequences unintended by Luther, an Augustinian, for whom heavenly salvation was the only purpose of human life.

Luther was, however, more self-aware than this may sound. He had painful wrestling matches with his own conscience which spared his thigh but wounded his pride. His original conversion experience—a scare in a thunderstorm—was not numinous in the classic way of mystics for he did not believe the Deity spoke directly to anyone.⁶ He was antagonistic to reason, a “whore”, and so did not reason his way forward. He read scripture—a dangerous experience as the Latin Church knew—that gave Luther a sense of monopoly on indirect spiritual wisdom. In his view, his view of the Word of God was self-evident; and what was thus evident could not be countered by what was evident to anyone else. His friends pointed out to him that his ego came to take pride of place in his logic. But Luther held friends, logic and reason in contempt, except when he was using them, and he was happy in self-contradiction.

Thus far, Luther’s diplomacy shows boldness but arguably no new idea.⁷ Luther’s thought had a long line of predecessors—Augustine (in part), Eckhart, Tauler, Hus and the Theologica Germanicus—and was exposed through them to primitive Christianity, archaic Eastern thought and the history of popular uprisings. Eckhart’s mystical views were banned (for 400 years) but alive in the underground.⁸ (Eckhart also came from Thuringia.) Wycliffe proposed the main tenets of the Reformation 150 years before Luther. The Luther factor was more political method than substance: concentrated purpose backed by a practical talent for tactics, how to forge identity politics, how to promote friends to key positions, how to spin on a coin. Along with old mysteries of political leadership, he understood the new mysteries of nationalism. And like all leaders, he had the face to make outrageous claims without compromise or apology: first, for example, the Pope had no authority, then he became the Anti-Christ; first the curia should be abolished, then the entire Latin Church. But Luther had no real idea of strategy. Finally, he was led by events as much as leading.

Heinz Schilling, a historian, thinks “worldly tactical thinking” alien to Luther’s intention but this misses the point: practical reason performs the same tasks in spiritual or secular matters, as the writings and career of, say, Aquinas show.¹⁰ Neither’s personal talents were lost in his faith. Luther’s peculiar abilities appear less from the Theses than from his key political pamphlets, beginning with An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation: Von des christlichen Standes Verbesserung, 1520, still a delight to read, despite old-fashioned spelling.⁹ He comes across as, say, Dryden or Swift still do in English, a breath of fresh air compared to, say, overripe Shakespeare. His pamphlets are succinct and sharp, only ten to a hundred pages, yet seem more informative than a long book. His main works show his political skills—and strategic limitations.

The title alone of the first major piece, feebly known in English as Address to the Christian Nobility, is a masterstroke. The full German title is an instant appeal to the secular authorities of a German nation to discipline abuses in the church. It is instant provocation on the defining issue of the times: the Latin Church’s centuries of rejection of secular jurisdiction over its affairs. The Church regarded its own jurisdiction as universal, a hierarchy of priests, clergy and lay people without distinction of nationality. Luther’s title rejects all this, claims a separate German spiritual nation, appeals for help from princes, and finally, dances beyond control by the latter. The word German walls his nation off from the Latin Church, while the word spiritual in fact walls off the princes. Faster than a tweet today, Luther sets multiple agendas: against the Church, for the princes, and then against them both.

Luther’s call was not to form a state in the modern sense, as Machiavelli, Dante and Ockham had all wanted in their various ways. That idea is a misinterpretation of Bronowski and Mazlish, and would have been absurd, if not terrifying, to German princes.¹¹ The princes’ prime interest lay in keeping hold of their own territories, however tiny. Francois I, for example, lost his bid to become Holy Roman Emperor the moment he tried seducing German princes with guarantees of national peace and security, which from their point of view was a threat, not a promise. Luther knew his princes better. In the Address his claim is for a “nation” that is only spiritual, and thus no threat to the princes’ actual territories. But if he takes no position on secular power as such he equally says nothing prejudicial to his own ambitions of running the “spiritual” nation. In a classic ploy, he says no more than he needs, and leaves the princes to see the call to nationalist revolution they wish to see.

His develops his position on secular political power more in his 1523 booklet, On Temporal Authority, where he repeats Augustine’s model of the two cities, the eternal and the earthly. “The sword”, secular political power, is unnecessary in the former by definition and unavoidable in the latter because man is a fallen creature. Luther regarded secular princes, in fact rulers in general, as a miserable species for the same reasons he thought the same of spiritual rulers in the Latin Church: overweening pride, arrogance and luxury. But three years on, Luther comes clean on how he sees the role of princes in the “nation”: if necessary they are only minor officers, without glory or status. Luther, who always intended to control his own turf, has in effect ambushed the princes.

Two years later again, in his response to the “Peasants War”, Admonition to Peace (1525), Luther then attacked the peasant and lower city folk who had taken his rhetoric too literally, at least too literally for him. This war took off in South-West Germany and peaked between February and May 1525. It was led by Thomas Münzer, another erstwhile colleague become personal enemy, one of the vast numbers of people who read or heard about Luther’s fliers and saw them as a trumpet call for paradise here and now. Münzer aimed to create a proto-communist state, much as similar movements of primitive Christianity in previous centuries had done—the “free spirits”, Wycliffe, Hus and so on—although for Münzer this involved sexual freedom too. The princes put down the insurgency bloodily, capturing and executing Münzer. Luther regarded this brutal violence as only right: “The peasants, no matter how many thousands of them there are, are all thieves and murderers.” He condemned Münzer and the peasants for misinterpreting his prophecy: the new “nation” was spiritual, life on earth was irrelevant, and to seek paradise on earth was merely to mirror Rome upside down.

The Admonition also turns the screw on the princes. Luther claims the peasants’ rebellion was inspired by God to punish them for their vicious ways, and denounces their “pride and egoism”, which may be thought fairly rich coming from Luther. He manages to lash both Münzer for the revolt and the princes for allowing it to happen in the first place. He at once validates the people’s complaints against princes and condemns the people for rebelling. There are those today who would regard this as a political tour de force.

In Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants (1525), Luther famously urges the princes to stab and kill peasants, rebels and Münzer, whom he calls a devil and a murderer. Besides personal enmity, Luther thought Münzer’s liberation theology confused heaven and earth, preventing salvation in either place. In the end, for Luther, the Christian duty to secular authorities is wholly submissive. By way of counter-weight, he urges a duty of clemency upon the princes, aiming to humble them before eternal verities. Luther consistently manages to take a position above and beyond everyone else.¹³

The revolution is over

In the end, to save anything of his new Church from the mob, Luther had to appeal to the princes and cede control of it to them. They set up a moderate Lutheran state church and stamped out Luther’s central object, the individual spiritual vision. For decades, indeed for centuries, German princes—and rulers such as Henry VIII in England—spent iron and blood to ensure no such visions arose again. They all reinforced their rule over their churches and formed coalitions of the willing to extinguish the enthusiastic sects Luther failed to see would arise in his name.¹² Luther wound up in a permanently conflicted position: his Church was established in his name, sang his hymns and read his Bible, but was blunted on one side by rulers he hated, and riven on the other by sects of traitorous friends and followers hated by both him and the princes. The official Reformation continued but Luther’s revolution was over. He became increasingly bitter. His vanity and ego—he was fully comparable in this to Henry VIII, yet another enemy—chained him to the politics of religious identity for life.¹⁴

Official repression long continued in Europe. The savagery of 1525 early ended any prospect in Germany of revolution along the lines of either England in 1688 or France in 1789. In both revolutions, the ruling classes had to make concessions to the ruled, as perhaps they still do today. The German exceptionalism arose from the sheer numbers of their princes, who—unlike in England, France, Holland or even Spain—could micro-manage their peoples and freeze them in antiquated social forms. The surviving sects remained militant and militarised but rather in vain: battle and harassment across Germany drove them underground and to the mountainous south and borderlands of the east, where princely control fell away. In the east the sects were met by an oddly similar spirituality flowing westwards from the Russian Orthodox Church, the same poor folk who later populated Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and in fact Tolstoy’s life. This Church, a derivative of the Eastern Church, had inherited the latter’s sense of humiliation at the hands of the Latin Church, the great split that lies at the origin of Eastern hatred of the humanist West.¹⁵ Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground remains perhaps the most accessible analysis of these hidden layers of the human underground, of hatreds and anti-humanist self-hatred, of nihilism.

The type of the wandering non-conformist, a type probably best represented by Dostoevsky himself, first arose in numbers in Germany and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Lutheran revolution. Rulers persecuted and impoverished dissenters, thrusting them out of society as a despised class. But as wanderers, dissenters were highly mobile, and as educated people, they were articulate and often intelligent preachers, teachers and writers, active in the miserable European social underground well into the nineteenth century.¹⁶ Persons who were excluded from a share in ruling—virtually all German people and any folk east of there—lived by definition without dignity in a society dominated by a narrow class of privilege. In Russia they were serfs. In such circumstances, with no practical outlet, the natural compensation became inner spiritualism, idealism and sometimes dreams of messianism for the German nation (one of those mysteries of nationalism in general). This, in fact, is what key German and Russian writings into the nineteenth century reflect.¹⁷ This mentality could and often did become a worldview, that of a self-elected “chosen people”, carried by mass emigration to America and other places in the New World. Germany is the source of the largest—33 per cent—single population group in America today.¹⁷ England, the second-largest source (28 per cent), was also a nation deeply imprinted with Hebrew ideas of a “chosen people”, through its own immense biblical traditions and its singular derivative cultural notion of the “gentleman”.¹⁸ Two or three such peoples in combination may explain that curious prophetic sense of global vocation that resonates in America more so than anywhere else.

Conclusion

Luther threw stones at sectarian leaders, accusing them of irresponsibility in spreading radical ideas to people not prepared for them. Yet Luther is open to stoning too, perhaps more so. He spoke and wrote more astutely than they but with no more restraint, and unlike them, accepted no responsibility for consequences. To him this may have seemed only just, for few or none of his consequences were intended. But there is irony. Luther exchanged ritual bondage to Rome for iron-clad bondage to secular authority. He tried to legitimise personal spiritual life but ensured its repression under secular authority. The inner life became easier but was excluded from public discussion where debate became harder, even anti-social, a shadow seen perhaps among the political-correctness commandoes of our own day.¹⁹

Luther thought earthly life worthless yet released torrential desires for paradise now—furies intensified later and elsewhere in the Puritan revolution, the French revolution, Russian and Chinese successors, and continuing waves in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia today.²⁰

There may be sermons in stones. As mentioned above, primal sectarian ideas settled in the remote Austro-German mountain valleys from which Hitler sprang. They fused naturally there with archaic—ultimately Middle Eastern—ideas firmly alive in the folk imagination. One lesson of repression may thus be that ideas cannot be repressed. Religious and political fanaticism has deep roots and passionate survival power against official extirpation, including by massive coalitions of the nations. The reason is that these roots do not lie in the way the world is but in the way human life is, in reactions or abreactions to the short span of human life disclosed by primal layers of the human personality. The layers are secret, perhaps, but vulnerable to shamans, charismatics, actors and showmen, persons possessing the dark arts of touching those layers and whose egoism feeds off the energy released. For those attracted to Condorcet’s old belief in the infinite perfectibility of human nature, this may be a depressing conclusion. But faced by the evidence of centuries, looking square on at Condorcet seems a better option than holding his or anyone else’s head in the sand.²¹

Luther’s leadership type is well known and ever recurrent: inspirational, blinkered and irresponsible as to consequences, according to Golo Mann, a demagogue.²² Wherever Luther went, chaos was sure to follow. With outbreaks today of official and unofficial authoritarianism today, this judgment is pertinent. Angela Nagle’s recent book, Kill All Normies, documents in the march of the online trolls familiar European underground language and tactics. They have resurfaced on the internet unchanged by the centuries, sometimes in spiritual and spiritualist ways, always dispensing with reason and discourse, humanism and debate, in favour of rank emotions, thuggery and violence, even sexual indecency, perversion and cruelty.²³ Amidst terrorism from abroad, also obviously rooted in streams of the Middle Eastern underground, European authorities are again at the task of repressing their own rebellious youth. With these events, Luther’s form of identity politics—the idea that only identity counts—is back, fighting against and within ruling classes. Luther’s ways are not confined to his own day; they are archetypal, sub-conscious models for those who channel energy released from the human underground.

A glance at history shows that outbursts of such energy are the normal run of events. The dry rationality of the eighteenth century, for example, neglected the irrational human underground, allowing the lush irrationality of romanticism obvious opportunity to tap deeply into it. This in turn gave way to dry-ish—at least as Bentham and Mill wrote them—nineteenth-century ideals of a brave new world driven by illimitable secular progress while the restless inner spirit contented itself with visits to temples of the theatre and Berlioz’s stage cannon.

The historiographers are wont to speak of a “pendulum”, or (Hegel) “spiral” movement of history. They may be right. In ways not yet perhaps fully understood, history seems to rebalance in periodic shifts of political power from the upper few to the many below, and possibly back up again. Today’s outbursts from the underground arise when more people on the planet than ever have enjoyed profitable lives but the shadow of rational scientific management discourse, weary, flat, stale and unprofitable, may have clouded the achievement. But the underground which seeks to “kill all normies” may have overlooked its own end to come, shortly enough. Any new normal eventually entails exhaustion, blasted hopes and quite possibly lives. The next one, and the one after that, will likely arise within that margin of advance or recension that history seems to impose on all extreme politico-religious movements.

Whatever the march of the trolls, few think the march of history likely to let up any time soon. But Luther’s gift of prophecy is still worth bearing in mind. Quoting Isaiah, he said, in German that is still current, “Ich will yhn kinder zu fursten geben und maulaffen sollen iyr herrn seyn”—“I will give you children for princes and loudmouths for masters”.

John Goodman is a former New Zealand diplomat and Visiting Scholar, Auckland University School of Law.

Notes

1. Matthieu Arnold, Luther, Paris, 2017; Heinz Schilling, Martin Luther, Rebel in an Age of Upheaval (2012), Eng. Trans., Oxford, 2017; Marc Lienhard, Luther, Geneva, 2016; Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet, London, 2016; all are scholarly “revisions” presenting more the later “paternal” Luther, but perhaps underestimating his other qualities.
2. Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, How the Renaissance began, London, 2012, fails to say how the Renaissance began but details abuses in the Papal Court system and humanist circles. Contemporary views on apocalypse, including Luther’s, are set out in Ernest Lee Tuveson’s Millennium and Utopia, Berkeley, 1949, Harper Torchbook, 1964, p.26.
3. Schilling, op cit, p.459.
4. Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish The Bearing of the Cross, 1505, Beaux Arts, Ghent, captures the physicality of the zeitgeist, and Goya’s ghastly The Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition, 1808-1815, Academia de San Fernando, Madrid, the psychological terror.
5. Schilling, op cit, , p.105.
6. Schilling, op cit. pp.57-58. Fully reviewing historical direct testimony, William James shows cognitive reasoning plays a key role for mystics, Christian, Middle Eastern or Indian, when they come to reflect on their experiences, whether they seem to get them directly or indirectly from the Deity or as they sometimes think, from the devil. Varieties of Religious Experience, 1901-2, Lectures XVII and XVIII. Theodore Reik asserts the same distinctions for our own times: Der eigene und der fremde Gott, Frankfurt, 1972, p.130.
7. F J C Hearnshaw, Sociological and Political Ideas of Some Great Medieval Thinkers, 1923, p.216-23. Aimé Richardt, Jean Huss, précurseur de Luther (1370-1415), Paris, 2014.
8. Greenblatt shows official suppression impossible (using the two thousand year effort to suppress Lucretius’ De rerum naturae), and how ideas circulate unofficially. Modern examples from de Sade to James Joyce and Lawrence may be added. Nicole de Laharpe analyses Luther’s national stereotypes in Image de l‘autre et image de soi, Paris, 2002.
9. Reklam, Stuttgart, 1962 ; other German texts in Luther et l’autorité temporelle, ed. Joel Lefebvre, Paris, 1973. In English: Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther, Captain Henry Bell trans, Dodo Press, n.d.; The Ninety-Five Theses and other works cited are in Theodore C Tappet, ed., Selected Writings of Martin Luther, first 3 vols, Philadelphia, 1967.
10. Schilling, Op cit, p.133. Lucien Febvre recognises Luther as both genuinely “pious” and a “born polemicist”, Martin Luther, un destin, Paris, 1928, p.76, 100.
11. The Western Intellectual Tradition, 1958, London, p.110. Michael Walzer shows how different Luther’s ideas of government were from Machiavelli’s, The Revolution of the Saints, a study in the origins of radical politics, London, 1966, pp.1-3. Walter Ullmann, Medieval Papalism, the political theories of the medieval canonists, London, 1949, Ch. V.
12. Heinz Schilling, in Mitten in Europa, ed H Boockmann et al, Berlin , 1999, p.171.
13. Basing himself on the same Biblical quotes as Luther, Samuel Marsden in Australia had the same idea: Andrew Sharp, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Auckland, 2016, Ch. 11.
14. Cranach’s Luther, 1525, Basel, Art Museum, and Holbein’s Henry VIII, 1540, National Gallery, Rome, capture the iron-clad egoism of their respective subjects. Lienhardt and Mattieu feature the more benign portrait cited as held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
15. R W Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, London, 1970, Ch. 3. Michail Sokolski, Die tausendjährige Spaltung, Rußland: Geschichte, Geist, Gefahren, Marburg, 1997, Ch.4. Tony Judt sought to reverse tendencies he saw among modern historians to overlook, if not repress, the realities of Central and Eastern European history, “Freedom and Freedonia,” in When the Facts Change, Essays 1995- 2010, London, 2015.
16. The contempt of rulers for the “swarming” mass of lower and impoverished classes is well-documented; Henry Mayhew, German Life and Manners, London, 1805, is a contemporary English account which also covers poverty in Luther’s ancestral homelands.
17. For example, Schiller depicts his Karl, Mary, Wilhelm, and Wallenstein less as political activists than as victims of an inner psycho-drama in which some form of guilt inevitably arises from the exercise of political power to determine the future.
18. Klaus J Bade, Europa in Bewegung, Munich, 2000, Part II. On the English influence, among Kipling’s repertoire Stalky and Co summarises the point; also: John Goodman, “Global Ethical Mission of the United States, Quadrant, May, 2017.
19. Thomas Nipperdy says German inner orientation is a way station for the modern Western cult of “self-realization”, Martin Luther and the Formation of the Germans, Bonn, 1983, p.22.
20. The “American Revolution” is different, possibly a misnomer, in the sense that not everyone understood it to be revolution but the assertion by Englishmen of the inalienable rights of Englishmen. R R Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, Princeton, 1959, pp.185-6.
21. Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler, Anatomie einer politisichen Religiosität, Berlin 1989. Jules Paquier thinks ideas and mentalités run through the centuries in subterranean ways, and are all the more dangerous for that – Le protestantisme allemand: Luther, Kant, Nietzsche, Paris, 1915, p.48. Those who doubt historians may prefer Conrad, who knew from experience: “Descended from generations victimized by the instruments of an arbitrary power, [Vladimir] was racially, nationally, and individually afraid of the police. It was an inherited weakness, altogether independent of his judgment, of his reason, of his experience. He was born to it.” The Secret Agent, 1907, Penguin, p183. Umberto Eco reminds repressing historical memory is not an option: “repression causes neurosis”, “Ur-Fascism”, in Five Moral Pieces, 1997, Alastair McEwen trans., London, 2002, p.69.
22. The History of Germany since 1789, Eng. Translation, London, 1968, p.9.
23. Winchester and Washington, 2017. Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain documents the shadowy underground in modern politics, in this regard at least, perhaps a twenty-first century parallel to the sociology of the Peasants uprising, New York, 2017. Umberto Eco identifies the use of emotional judgement without reason and discourse as the thinking style of ur-fascism, op.cit., p.65. There is also the historical link between sexual incapacity and the craving for attention and violence, a theme usually illustrated by the old men of England, Germany, Turkey and China in the run-up to the First World War.