A review of "A Nazi Interior: Quisling´s Hidden Philosophy"
Vidkun Quisling was a
Norwegian fascist whose last name became synonymous with “collaborator” or
“traitor”. During World War II, Quisling and his fascist group NS (which had
virtually no support) were elevated into ruling position in Norway by the Nazi
German occupation army. After the war, Quisling was condemned to death as a war
criminal and executed. He is still the most unpopular man in Norwegian history,
with the possible exception of recent Nazi mass murderer Anders Behring
Breivik. Before becoming a Nazi collaborator, Quisling had a distinguished
career behind him as an officer, diplomat, and minister of defence. He had even
worked for Fridtjof Nansen's humanitarian missions in the Soviet Union (!).
Both Quisling's wives were Ukrainians.
In private, Quisling was a self-proclaimed philosopher. He called his philosophy “Universism”, but his plans to write a voluminous treatise on the subject was interrupted by the war and his subsequent downfall and execution. With some difficulty, Universism can be reconstructed from Quisling's private papers. However, it is not an “unpublished manuscript of nearly 600 pages” (as often claimed), but rather a notebook-like compilation of random thoughts and quotations. Many of the manuscript pages only contain a few sentences, with the rest of the page left blank. Else Margarete Barth's book “A Nazi Interior” seems to be the only book-length attempt to describe and analyze Quisling's Universist philosophy. The author is described as a Norwegian-Dutch philosopher on the back cover of the book.
Universism turns out to be heavily indebted to German Idealism and perhaps to esoteric sources (which do underlie Idealism itself). The cosmos is interpreted in vitalistic terms and is seen as teleological and constantly evolving. “The Ground of Being” and other spiritual truths can be grasped through intuition. Polarity and opposition are important, especially the opposition between Male and Female, which permeates the entire universe. Quisling seems to have misinterpreted the Taoist duality between Yin and Yang as a Manichean conflict between two opposing principles, not seeing their fundamental unity. Hierarchy is another important concept, including social hierarchy. Interestingly, Universism doesn't seem to be anti-Semitic. Rather, the Jews are seen as one of the more clever races! As a Nazi collaborator, Quisling had some very different things to say about the Jews…
Quisling wanted to create a secret order (perhaps modelled on the Templars) of holy warriors who practice renunciation of worldly goods and pleasures. The order was to be based on the principle “Tat tvam asi” (Thou art that), the Hindu Upanishads' description of the relationship between Atman and Brahman. Indeed, Quisling said that every human – or at least every aristocratic human – posses a divine spark: “God, that is me”. Apart from Universism, Quisling also referred to his system as Arism, a reference to aristocracy. Bizarrely, the future Norwegian Nazi collaborator actually called for a Greater Norway dominating Northern Europe, and a “new papacy” based in Oslo, the Norwegian capital!
Universism is contradictory at several points. Sometimes, its view of freedom is deterministic. Freedom means to act in accordance with the Ground of Being. This is similar to Hegel's idea that “freedom” means to grasp necessity and act accordingly (Marx took over this notion). At other times, however, Universism has a voluntarist view of freedom as the feeling and power of *independence* from the Ground of Being and the causality of the universe. The strong individual, perhaps a Nietzschean Superman, is free in this sense. Universist morality is contradictory in a similar fashion. Is morality to act according to evolution, according to the needs of your society, or to obtain individual heroic power?
Unfortunately, “A Nazi Interior” is written by an author who not only hates Quisling (which is perfectly understandable), but also loathes everything that smacks of Platonism, Idealism or occultism. Here's a quotation, to give you a feel for Barth's style of reasoning (and slightly unreadable style in general): “Joseph de Maistre wrote in the early nineteenth century: `God, who has created sovereignty, has also made punishment; he has fixed the earth upon these two poles: for Jehovah is master of the twin poles and upon them he market turn the world (1 Samuel 2:8).' This, too, reminds one of the two `poles' in Taoism, Yin and Yang. There have been famous Taoists in Europe – Schelling might well be described as one. Some of them were Nazis: Schmitt took up Taoism after the war, and Heidegger has been called `a Schwabian Taoist'. The similarity with the philosophy of the Soviet Union is particularly strong regarding polarities”.
To Barth, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Augustine, Swedenborg, Taoism, Gnosticism and Anthroposophy are all essentially fascist. She even claims that Quisling must have been mentally deranged. This is apparently a common position in Norway among Quisling-watchers, and a somewhat strange one, since one doesn't usually execute the mentally deranged – they can plead insanity! The collaborators mental illness was directly caused by his Neo-Platonism: “What seems certain is that Quisling suffered from a permanent derangement of his apparatus of thought that affected his capacity for reasoning”. Sometimes, Barth's attacks on Quisling are almost comic, as when she claims that the future Norwegian Führer must have been obsessed by the German philosopher Max Scheler since – wait for it – Scheler's third wife was brown-haired and named Maria, same as Quisling's second wife (yes, she too was named Maria and was brown-haired to boot). Besides, both men were bigamists. Sounds almost like “meaningful coincidences”, but who is appealing to them here? Quisling? Or Barth herself? At another point, Barth quotes a letter in which a somewhat despondent Quisling writes to his brother that he can't publish a book on Universism due to the success of Oswald Spengler's “The Decline of the West”. Barth dismisses this out of hand, instead suggesting that some other authors (for which there is no evidence that Quisling ever read) must have been responsible for Quisling's discouragement. This is scholarly research?
Barth discusses Quisling's Universism in relation to Scheler, Jünger, Schmitt, Sorel and Marinetti. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but Barth is then forced to admit that no hard evidence exists for Quisling having read any of their works. They are not included in his private library. She further speculates that Quisling may have joined a secretive “School of Wisdom” in Germany headed by Keyserling. Once again, no evidence. Another comic high pitch is reached when Barth claims that Quisling must have read Wilhelm Reich's books on orgasm, being shocked by the libertine Jewish author's Idealism and talk about polarities in the universe… How could Quisling's own philosophy lead to orgasmic-orgiastic consequences of this kind? The poor fascist was never the same again, but got his revenge when all Jews were sent to Auschwitz… Except, of course, that no evidence exists that Quisling ever bothered to read Reich (who lived in Norway as a refugee from Nazi Germany before moving to the United States).
In the end, I will only give “A Nazi Interior” two stars. I have no problem with Quisling-bashing. However, when somebody uses Quisling's philosophy to “prove” that the Hermetic tradition or Taoism is inherently totalitarian, fascist or Leninist, things have gone seriously out of hand. For more on this subject, see “The New Inquisitions” by Arthur Versluis.
In private, Quisling was a self-proclaimed philosopher. He called his philosophy “Universism”, but his plans to write a voluminous treatise on the subject was interrupted by the war and his subsequent downfall and execution. With some difficulty, Universism can be reconstructed from Quisling's private papers. However, it is not an “unpublished manuscript of nearly 600 pages” (as often claimed), but rather a notebook-like compilation of random thoughts and quotations. Many of the manuscript pages only contain a few sentences, with the rest of the page left blank. Else Margarete Barth's book “A Nazi Interior” seems to be the only book-length attempt to describe and analyze Quisling's Universist philosophy. The author is described as a Norwegian-Dutch philosopher on the back cover of the book.
Universism turns out to be heavily indebted to German Idealism and perhaps to esoteric sources (which do underlie Idealism itself). The cosmos is interpreted in vitalistic terms and is seen as teleological and constantly evolving. “The Ground of Being” and other spiritual truths can be grasped through intuition. Polarity and opposition are important, especially the opposition between Male and Female, which permeates the entire universe. Quisling seems to have misinterpreted the Taoist duality between Yin and Yang as a Manichean conflict between two opposing principles, not seeing their fundamental unity. Hierarchy is another important concept, including social hierarchy. Interestingly, Universism doesn't seem to be anti-Semitic. Rather, the Jews are seen as one of the more clever races! As a Nazi collaborator, Quisling had some very different things to say about the Jews…
Quisling wanted to create a secret order (perhaps modelled on the Templars) of holy warriors who practice renunciation of worldly goods and pleasures. The order was to be based on the principle “Tat tvam asi” (Thou art that), the Hindu Upanishads' description of the relationship between Atman and Brahman. Indeed, Quisling said that every human – or at least every aristocratic human – posses a divine spark: “God, that is me”. Apart from Universism, Quisling also referred to his system as Arism, a reference to aristocracy. Bizarrely, the future Norwegian Nazi collaborator actually called for a Greater Norway dominating Northern Europe, and a “new papacy” based in Oslo, the Norwegian capital!
Universism is contradictory at several points. Sometimes, its view of freedom is deterministic. Freedom means to act in accordance with the Ground of Being. This is similar to Hegel's idea that “freedom” means to grasp necessity and act accordingly (Marx took over this notion). At other times, however, Universism has a voluntarist view of freedom as the feeling and power of *independence* from the Ground of Being and the causality of the universe. The strong individual, perhaps a Nietzschean Superman, is free in this sense. Universist morality is contradictory in a similar fashion. Is morality to act according to evolution, according to the needs of your society, or to obtain individual heroic power?
Unfortunately, “A Nazi Interior” is written by an author who not only hates Quisling (which is perfectly understandable), but also loathes everything that smacks of Platonism, Idealism or occultism. Here's a quotation, to give you a feel for Barth's style of reasoning (and slightly unreadable style in general): “Joseph de Maistre wrote in the early nineteenth century: `God, who has created sovereignty, has also made punishment; he has fixed the earth upon these two poles: for Jehovah is master of the twin poles and upon them he market turn the world (1 Samuel 2:8).' This, too, reminds one of the two `poles' in Taoism, Yin and Yang. There have been famous Taoists in Europe – Schelling might well be described as one. Some of them were Nazis: Schmitt took up Taoism after the war, and Heidegger has been called `a Schwabian Taoist'. The similarity with the philosophy of the Soviet Union is particularly strong regarding polarities”.
To Barth, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Augustine, Swedenborg, Taoism, Gnosticism and Anthroposophy are all essentially fascist. She even claims that Quisling must have been mentally deranged. This is apparently a common position in Norway among Quisling-watchers, and a somewhat strange one, since one doesn't usually execute the mentally deranged – they can plead insanity! The collaborators mental illness was directly caused by his Neo-Platonism: “What seems certain is that Quisling suffered from a permanent derangement of his apparatus of thought that affected his capacity for reasoning”. Sometimes, Barth's attacks on Quisling are almost comic, as when she claims that the future Norwegian Führer must have been obsessed by the German philosopher Max Scheler since – wait for it – Scheler's third wife was brown-haired and named Maria, same as Quisling's second wife (yes, she too was named Maria and was brown-haired to boot). Besides, both men were bigamists. Sounds almost like “meaningful coincidences”, but who is appealing to them here? Quisling? Or Barth herself? At another point, Barth quotes a letter in which a somewhat despondent Quisling writes to his brother that he can't publish a book on Universism due to the success of Oswald Spengler's “The Decline of the West”. Barth dismisses this out of hand, instead suggesting that some other authors (for which there is no evidence that Quisling ever read) must have been responsible for Quisling's discouragement. This is scholarly research?
Barth discusses Quisling's Universism in relation to Scheler, Jünger, Schmitt, Sorel and Marinetti. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but Barth is then forced to admit that no hard evidence exists for Quisling having read any of their works. They are not included in his private library. She further speculates that Quisling may have joined a secretive “School of Wisdom” in Germany headed by Keyserling. Once again, no evidence. Another comic high pitch is reached when Barth claims that Quisling must have read Wilhelm Reich's books on orgasm, being shocked by the libertine Jewish author's Idealism and talk about polarities in the universe… How could Quisling's own philosophy lead to orgasmic-orgiastic consequences of this kind? The poor fascist was never the same again, but got his revenge when all Jews were sent to Auschwitz… Except, of course, that no evidence exists that Quisling ever bothered to read Reich (who lived in Norway as a refugee from Nazi Germany before moving to the United States).
In the end, I will only give “A Nazi Interior” two stars. I have no problem with Quisling-bashing. However, when somebody uses Quisling's philosophy to “prove” that the Hermetic tradition or Taoism is inherently totalitarian, fascist or Leninist, things have gone seriously out of hand. For more on this subject, see “The New Inquisitions” by Arthur Versluis.
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