Die Deutschen Briefe: Gurian and the German Crisis

Author(s): M. A. Fitzsimons
Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 17, No. 1, The Gurian Memorial Issue (Jan., 1955), pp. 47-
72
Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of
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 Die Deutschen Briefe: Gurian and the
German Crisis
by M. A. Fitzsimons

N 1934 Waldemar Gurian had the wriest of pleasures. when

he was forced to recognize that his very pessimistic analysis
of the National-Socialist movement was correct. He fled from
Germany to Switzerland where he was soon joined by his wife
and daughter. In the extremely straitened circumstances of an
emigre, soon to receive official notification that he was a state-
less person, he had to face simultaneously the tasks of earning a
living and of carrying on his work as a Catholic writer who com-
bined scholarship and publicism. He was a profound student of
Bolshevism. But his study, personal experience and the progress
of events emphasized that Europe then faced a more dangerous
threat than Russian Bolshevism. The threat stemmed from the
control of Germany by the National-Socialists, who skilfully
exploited a moral crisis in Germany and all of Europe, to gain
and, then systematically and totally, to consolidate power in
Germany. The menace to Europe was all the more dire, be-
cause the Nazis had disguised their totalitarian movement in
the mask of anti-Bolshevism and so the danger went unrecog-
nized.
The task was to awaken Europe to the crisis created by the
Party, which had used the slogan "Germany, awake." Gurian
was a publicist but was incapable of propaganda, for he moved
most familiarly in the world of ideas. Indeed, as he saw it, the
European crisis manifested itself in the unscrupulous use of slo-
gans and in an irresponsibility that would not take principles
seriously. Polemical party journalism was not for him. But as a
missionary in the moder world, for him the task of the Catho-
lic publicist, he had to rouse those, who might hear and under-
stand him, to the urgency of the European situation. Principles,
even grotesque and incredible views, had to be taken seriously.
Perhaps, he might be heard and widely heard, for, unlike many
intellectuals, he never restricted his sights to a precious circle
47
48 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

of a precious few, to a self-acclaimed vanguard, so far out in

front of mankind that obviously they could not be heard except
by themselves. He treasured the marks of critical understanding,
yes, and hopefully and, sometimes, pathetically the more doubt-
ful outward signs of recognition. No publisher ever followed
sales more avidly than he scrutinized book-ordersand subscrip-
tions at Notre Dame. This hope was surely present, but only
the Christian hope expressed in "The Catholic Publicist" tamed
his massive doubts and restrained the harrowing fears, personal,
family and financial, of an emigre.
His thoughts settled on the establishment of a news service
devoted exclusively to the political and socio-philosophicalanaly-
sis of National Socialism.This work, which also involved a special
emphasis on the religious aspect of the actual historical problem
as it presented itself in the unfolding of events, would enable the
author to use fully his almost unique combination of a power-
ful, analytic mind, rich in knowledge and understanding, with
the publicist's concern about contemporary problems. But the
labor, also, required a journalist and business manager, functions
for which Gurian had an astonishing incapacity. During the
summer of 1934 the happy accident of a meeting in Lucerne with
a recent German emigre, Otto M. Knab, enabled Gurian to
secure the necessary partner. Knab, a man of literary interests,
had been editor, later editor-in-chiefof the Starnberg Land und
Seebote, a Catholic daily paper. The two began cooperation
almost immediately, and after two experimental issues had been
prepared, Die deutschen Briefe appeared with its first number
dated, October 5, 1934.
The Deutsche Briefe was a mimeographed weekly, usually
eight pages of single-spacedtyping. It appeared under the name
of the Swiss publishing house, Liga Verlag. The editors alter-
nately used the mimeograph machines of two Swiss business es-
tablishments.Other Swiss friends advanced small sums of money
for paper and ink. The enterprise was begun with a capital of
less than 100 Swiss francs.
Gurian's analytical writings comprised about 75% of the is-
sues until the summer of 1937 when he set out for the United
States and Notre Dame. His partner, who prepared synopses
from Nazi publications and speeches, and did some satirical
notices in addition to handling technical and business affairs,
 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 49

has noted that Gurian helped faithfully with the folding and
enclosing of each weekly issue.
It was two years before the Deutsche Briefe had a subscrip-
tion list of one hundred and the number never reached two hun-
dred. There were two types of subscription: individuals, who paid
two Swiss francs monthly, and newspapers, which, in proportion
to their circulation, paid up to ten Swiss francs monthly. Most
of the individual subscribers were Swiss. The newspaper sub-
scribers amounted to about two dozen. After the first few
months, the work provided the editors with a small but increas-
ing income.
The information in the Deutsche Briefe was drawn from per-
sons in the German government and from ecclesiastical sources
in Germany and from a wide reading of German and European
newspapers, periodicals and books. The Gestapo made several
unsuccessful and clumsy attempts to discover the informants.
On a number of occasions German bishops, whose cooperation
with the Nazis had been described in the Deutsche Briefe, sent
emissaries to explain their case to the editors, for the German
bishops were made aware that their actions were being scruti-
nized and publicized. The influence was seen in Swiss editorial
comments, occasionally in Le Temps, and on one occasion Os-
servatore Romano used material published exclusively in the
Deutsche Briefe.
After Gurian's departure Otto Knab carried on until the
following spring. But the work became more difficult after Hit-
ler's seizure of Austria. Once again, the prophetic realism of
Gurian's dark analysis of Nazism in being justified by events made
the paper's work impossible. Switzerland became understand-
ably less cordial to a paper, critical of Nazism and edited by
German emigres. The last issue of the Deutsche Briefe, Number
178, appeared on April 15, 1938. An attempt to save the idea of
the paper by placing it under the nominal editorship of a Swiss
and changing the name to Eidgenossische Besinnung did not sur-
vive three issues.1
It is a curious irony that Gurian's Russian birth and his study
1 Otto M. Knab furnished much of the information on which the account
of the Deutsche Briefe was based. He, also, generously gave the University of
Notre Dame Library a complete set of the paper, from which much of the
following pages is drawn.
50 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

of Bolshevism played a decisive role in his interpretation of the

German crisis. His mother became a Catholic, had him baptized,
and sent him to a Dutch Catholic school. Catholicism bound
him to the west, but not wholly to Germany, for he loved France
and was wittiest and most graceful, when dealing with French
subjects. He loved, also, the academic, intellectual and Catholic
world of Germany, its conflicts and its challenging movements.
There, he became, as he was always known at Notre Dame,
Doctor Gurian, not Professor Gurian. There he defined the
work of the Catholic publicist, his own vocation. But he, also,
loved Russia and the study of its life and history. He was a
Russian, and he resented and feared German efficiency. He had
something of the old Russian habit of looking upon all attempts
to impose external regularity and order as the enemy of the
human spirit, or, at any rate, as the enemy. When the Germans
despised Slavic and Russian lack of organization, Gurian was
inclined to echo the Russian view that the Germans make good
governesses, though he preferred his Russian nurse.

I. POST-WAR AND PRE-HITLER GERMANY

Until his later years (after 1947), when he concentrated his

attention on the Soviet Union, Gurian looked on the moder
world's troubles as part of a general crisis, the disruption of the
liberal European society of the nineteenth century. The First
World War was the violent midwife of this crisis, for it re-
vealed the resources of power accessible to those who might con-
trol the state, produced in Soviet Russia the first striking mani-
festation of a total state, using moral claims and demands solely
for power purposes, and left Germany with a legacy of infla-
tion and defeat that compounded the particular and general
aspects of the crisis in Germany.
The general aspects of the: crisis derived from the decline of
liberalism, where it had been a class-outlook instead of a na-
tional tradition expressing itself in national institutions. Liberal-
ism, as a class creed, no longer had content and a program,
and was doomed to be swept away by the postwar nationalism
of Europe, often an integral nationalism, in confronting and
answering the demands for a new economic and social order.
This hope and belief in the future expressed a rejection of the
 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 51

present, a sickness that could easily become worse, for it created

a temper and a situation favorable to the use of principles for
power's sake.
This crisis of morals and faith was strikingly evident in
the history of Marxism and European socialism. The dissolution
of society and the state in Russia had enabled the Bolshevik
Marxists to seize power. Thereafter, Marxism there gradually
ceased to be of importance, for theory became simply the justi-
fication of the demands of those wielding power and seeking total
power. Elsewhere, socialism had so accommodated itself to
liberal democracy that it was bound up in the fate of the liberal
world. Where, as in Germany, that was dying, the socialists
could offer no alternative course. Marxian socialism aroused
fears by its preaching, but could not practice what it preached.
It was fatally a part of the political ideas of the nineteenth cen-
tury and was incapable of meeting the crisis of the bourgeois
society "with a new state and a new society."2
In Germany this emptiness of the socialists was markedly
evident, when they failed to establish a socialist Germany in
1918-1919 and in founding the Weimar Republic provided for
the continuation of Wilhelmian Germany in a regime of com-
promise, plagued by a double fear.3 The socialists with their
democratic and Catholic Centre collaborators in the Cabinet
and Reichstag, lacking faith in themselves and their programs,
anxiously sought the support of the elites of Imperial Germany,
the bureaucracy and the Army. But the war, defeat and its after-
math had shocked the conservatives so that they had lost con-
fidence in their mission to rule. The masses had become im-
portant, as was revealed in the Revolution of 1918 and in the
failure of the Kapp Putsch (1920). Obviously something had
been wrong in the relations of the ruling elites of Wilhelmian
Germany with the masses.
2 Gurian, The Rise and Decline of Marxism (London, 1938), p. 81. This
is a translation of Marxismus am Ende (Einsiedeln, 1936). Gurian expressed
this view in numerous writings, notably in Um des Reiches Zuku'nft published
in Freiburg in 1932 under the name Walter Gerhart. This volume, subtitled
"National Rebirth or Political Reaction," presents a lucid and subtle account
of the nationalist currents in post-war Germany.
3 In a later writing Gurian noted that Fritz Ebert, the German socialist

leader, had been angered "by the hasty proclamation of the republic." Quoted
from "The Sources of Hitler's Power," The Review of Politics, IV (October,
1942), 386.
52 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

Gurian saw this latter issue posed by the National Social

writings of Friedrich Naumann and by Max Weber, who in
his inaugural lecture at Freiburg (1895) had argued that, fail-
ing the inclusion of the workers into the national society and
the state, Germany as united by Bismarck had not become a
political nation. Weber and Naumann agreed that this extension
of the national community must be achieved if Germany were
to become a truly modem economic state and a dominant world
power. The World War had undermined the bourgeoisie and
while destroying the assurance of the traditional elites had made
patent the unseriousness of the German Marxists.
The Weimar Republic, the regime of defeat and compromise,
offered a favorable ground for the groups, which "believed
themselves charged with the same vocation as the Bolshevik
Party in Russia." But, because of the loss of faith in liberalism
and socialism, they "could not, if they were to have any pros-
pect of success, employ the same nineteenth century watch-
words."4 Thus, in Italy and Germany the revolution against the
nineteenth century was, also, presented as a struggle against
Marxist and Asiatic-Russian Bolshevism. The Nazis, exploiting
a general mentality which considered political and social mat-
ters as the only issues that mattered, and intensifying and ex-
ploiting a pragmatic activism, which emphasized organization
and practice to the neglect or oppression of the spirit, proposed
an ideology, taken seriously by few, but appealing to the whole
range of German hopes and frustrations.
The ideology was not taken seriously, and so an ironical re-
venge was taken on a generation, which took so few things
seriously. But the slogans and the propaganda were effective,
all the more because the Nazi Party's program was not believed.
The Nazi leaders, however, had to simulate the conditions of
anarchy, which would justify their claim to total power, a claim
by which they rejected the nineteenth century.
Anarchy could not be achieved in Germany as easily as it
had been in Russia. The German state, indeed, was weakened
by "an excessive social organization," and this power of social
organization created the appearance of a nation divided into

4Gurian, The Future of Bolshevism (New York, 1936), p. 51. This is a

translation of Bolschewismus als Weltgefahr (I,ucerne, 1935).
 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 53

discrete, competing groups which reduced the state to little

"more than a permanent compromise between" them, an en-
tity without "any firm will of its own." The Nazis, thereby,
persuading the Rightist groups, sought to discredit this system
by the sustained abuse of its "freedom from restraints." Any
attempt to check the abuse created a "martyr" and the abuse
was advanced as proof of the anarchy from which the Nazis
would save the nation.5
As early as 1932 Gurian had equated Nazism and Bolshe-
vism. The Nazi demand, the total state, with its trappings of
heroism, revealed symptomatically the belief in the exclusive su-
premacy of political and social questions, for in the total state
there is nothing but the political. For it the existence of the
nation is the single fundamental and the only justification, as
is the belief in the future classless society for Bolshevism.6
The socialists grew weaker, and Hitler finally had to deal
only with right-wing German leaders, who were ready victims
of the Nazi leader because they hoped to use him as the tamer
of the masses. The regular leftist charge that Hitler was a Con-
servative pawn provided Hitler with respectability and encour-
aged the right in its delusion that it could exploit Hitler. The
Nazi leader was "the great exploiter of the weakness of his
opponents." His vagueness and contradictions made him the
great simplifier of German nationalism.
"The conservatives first abandoned the position of the chancellor
because they believed that Papen and his friends would be the
real rulers. Then they put their confidence in the army, then they
hoped that the experts would prevent the worst ... they relied on
the National Socialist Right Wing. . . . Finally it became mani-
fest that small payments had become a large amount, and that
the installment rates had given Hitler everything. It was the
fear of risking everything which paralyzed all will of resistance
against Hitler."7
Gurian saw this folly of the Conservatives and of the Centre

5 The quotations are from The Future of Bolshevism, pp. 52, 55, 57.
6 Um des Reiches Zukunft, p. 120. Gurian learned much about the kin-
ship of the Bolsheviks and Nazis from the German legal scholar, Karl Schmitt,
who became a servant of the Nazi state. The Deutsche Briefe often cite
Schmitt as an example of the reckless time-servers, who helped the Nazis.
7 "The Sources of Hitler's Power," Review of Politics, IV (October, 1942),
394-395.
54 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

Party partially as the product of conditions that were peculiar

to Germany. Although in Imperial Germany the nationalists and
conservatives were reluctant to oppose the government, they
were opposed to the Weimar Republic as the government of
defeat, of the left and of continued frustration of national life.
Unfortunately, even the Centre Party had become too accus-
tomed to power and tired, inclined to think in terms of tac-
tics rather than principles and to try to solve difficulties by dip-
lomacy or temporizing adjustments. Thus, Hitler won the game.
In a notable essay Gurian used Jacob Burckhardt's lecture notes
on Mohammed to explain his own view of Hitler. Burckhardt
described Mohammed as a fanatical and radical simplifier, whose
crude eclecticism provided something familiar for the whole,
quarreling Arab world, uniting a divided people and keeping
them together by the provision of concrete aims acceptable and
pleasing to all. Great effects do not necessarily stem from great
persons.
Hitler was the fanatical simplifier and unifier of various
German traditions "in the service of simple national aims."
Distortedly and with exaggeration Hitler appeared to many
differing, German groups "as the fulfiller of their wishes and
sharer of their beliefs." Gurian rejected proportional representa-
tion as a major explanation for the failure of the Weimar Re-
public, for the clumsy German party system had also existed in
Imperial Germany without proportional representation. He, also,
rejected an economic cause as a major explanation of Hitler's
rise, for he believed that the spiritual and intellectual outlook
were decisive. Hitler's success derived from his ability to appeal
to and to trick most of the segments of German life. His success
was not the simple result of the numbers of the Nazi Party.
His lack of traditions and his very insignificance, grounds
for which the Conservatives did not take him seriously, gave
him the advantage of being unconnected with the old regime
and of appearing as the representative of new forces. This and
his exploitation of their grievances, hopes and pride, won the
masses to his side. It should be noted that Gurian does not con-
sider a democratic alternative because he believed that democracy
was of slight importance in pre-Hitler Germany and unaccept-
 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 55

able to all important nationalist groups. Hitler was in the worst

sense a genius of the twentieth century in his recognition of the
all-importance of mass propaganda and in his talents for it. The
putsch of 1923 taught him that the Republic would have to
be destroyed by using its civil liberties against itself. He quickly
outclassed the nationalist sects and fashioned a disciplined and
organized leadership group combined with a mass party. The
content of the propaganda did not appear to be original but
its presentation was systematically effective and to the masses he
gave it a new meaning. Along with the Right Hitler made
much of the "stab in the back" of the German army. But Hit-
ler intended it not only as a denunciation of the Republic and
the socialists but as a revolutionary indictment of the old re-
gime for its inability to restrain the internationalist and Jewish
forces. His nationalism combining protests against Versailles
and Germany's economic difficulties with the claims of security,
Lebensraum and resistance to encirclement, also united the ap-
pearance of a return to German conservative order with a twen-
tieth-century revolutionary "ruthless realism and activism" that
was later to win the bureaucracy and the army to supine service
to the Nazi state. His nationalism and its simplification, fanaticism
and ambiguity enabled Hitler to paralyze his rivals and adversaries
by dividing them and using them for his own ends.8
In this simplifying work of union Nazi anti-Semitism played
an important role, for all the nationalistic secret and military
organizations of the early years of the Weimar Republic were
anti-Semitic. His anti-Semitism involved the crude assertion that
the Jews were a "parasitic and inferior counter-race." But its
crudity and assurance, its assumption of being self-evident, ap-
pealed to the masses, weary of debate and eager to have the
burden of decision lifted from them. At the same time, it drew
Conservative groups into the Nazi orbit or made them friendly,
for it appeared as a protest against the hated Republic. "Anti-
Semitism was the form in which radical negation of the existing
order could be most easily expressed by groups which had no
revolutionary tradition." Anti-Semitism provided the basis for

8 The preceding three paragraphs are largely based on "The Sources of

Hitler's Power," previously cited, and "Hitler-Simplifier of German Nation-
alism," Review of Politics, VII (July, 1945), 316-324.
56 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

drawing in the masses for the transformation of liberal national-

ism into a totalitarian one.9
II. THE NAZIS IN POWER
Gurian and Otto Knab began the Deutsche Briefe about
eighteen months after Hitler had taken office as Chancellor of
Germany. This paper reveals a powerful and restrained concen-
tration of purpose. The editors, except in their books, are not
concerned with historical analysis, for history would have been
a cause of distraction and dissension from the major task, the
analysis of the nature of Nazism. At the end of 1934 the editors
published a statement of their purpose. The Deutsche Briefe was
not concerned with sensational news. Instead, it would explain
the sources of strength of Nazism which the urgency and ex-
citement of daily journalism are likely to overlook. Nazism is the
expression of Bolshevization, all the more dangerous in that it
calls itself Positive Christianity. It is no more permissible to take
an exclusively tactical position concerning it than concerning
the Soviet Union. The Deutsche Briefe has no political goals
but seeks to make recognizable in their true shape the anti-
Christian forces in the contemporary world.10
Gurian only summarized a host of German Nazis, and, un-
fortunately, scholars, when he defined Nazi ideology: "The will
of the Fuehrer is the content of the National Socialist ideology."'1
This emphasis on the Fuehrer made a dramatically simple appeal
to the masses. The Fuehrer embodies the will of the Party and
the people, whose best and most truly knowledgeable representa-
tives are the Party members. Just as the Bolsheviks justify their
monopoly of power on the grounds that they know the law
and movement of history to the classless society, so the Nazis
and the Fuehrer in their Weltanschauung claim to express the
elite of Germanism. The Fuehrer acts as the expression of the
will of the German folk, and so Karl Schmitt presented a true
Nazi view when he said that in the blood purge of June 30,
1934, the Fuehrer acted as justice. Just because Germans and
9 Gurian's
major writing on anti-Semitism is "Anti-Semitism in Modem
Germany" which was printed in the second edition of Koppel Pinson (editor),
Essays on Antisemitism (New York, 1946).
lo Deutsche Briefe, December 28, 1934.
11 A quotation from The Future of Bolshevism in the Deutsche Briefe,
March 13, 1935.
 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 57

foreigners did not take this as a serious claim, and Gurian did,
he carefully noted the occasions on which such claims were made,
for example, the statement of a Nazi leader that the Germans
have no need of a written constitution-the will of Hitler is
constitution enough. Similarly, the Bolsheviks always sought to
preserve their freedom of action in the face of written law.
The comparison, Gurian insisted, was not arbitrary. Karl Schmitt
in Staat, Bewegung, Volk (State, Movement, Folk) described
the Soviet Union as "an example of the type of state charac-
teristic of the twentieth century, as contrasted with the typical
nineteenth century state."12 The distinction of state, nation and
society is abolished. The Party or movement dominates the
state, and dominates and leads the people.
When the Bavarian Minister of Worship in a speech at Dan-
zig described the differing religious groups as "way stations on
the road to God," he coupled it with the claim of Nazism "to
shape the whole future of the German people."'3 Only by taking
this claim and the Nazi Weltanschauung seriously can the mean-
ing of Nazism be understood. Gurian often wondered at the
fact that so few people had read, and fewer understood Mein
Kampf, a fact which contributed to Hitler's success. The claim
of Nazism to determine all of Germany's life was the expression
of a will for change and unification that would stop at nothing,
that considered everything as material to be used for the power
demands and power expansion of Hitler's state.14
This claim distinguished the Nazi party and state from other
regimes of the German past, which did not have such all-em-
bracing ambitions in the field of culture. The first goal of the
Nazis was the negative one of eliminating all anti-Nazi elements
from public and social life. Spiritual or social barriers or limits
were not recognized. Only the Nazi Party and the folk were
autonomous. Everything was coordinated with the Nazi regime.
The press and libraries were supervised and the direction was
not limited to politics. State financial contributions were used to

12 The Future of Bolshevism, p. 53.

13 The early numbers of the Deutsche Briefe abound in such salient quo-
tations as this from the issue of October 26, 1934.
14
Ibid., November 30, 1934. This is one of a notable series of articles on
"National Socialist Cultural Policies," summarized in the following four
paragraphs.
58 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

reenforce this coordination. The negative objective was furthered

by the purging of representatives of the former parties and of
non-Aryan individuals.
The Nazi student Fuehrer explained that this purging is a
continuous thing. Just as Lenin recognized that the Soviet
regime could not at once replace all the professors in the Russian
universities, so Hitler will proceed only gradually to transform
the German universities. The goal was to have the universities
exclusively occupied by professors schooled in the Nazi Weltan-
schauung of Hitler and Rosenberg.
Under close inspection the positive side of this program was
merged in the unlimited claim that the Nazi Party and Hitler,
who embodies it, had been called to the leadership of the Ger-
man people and that their opponents are either bad Germans or,
at best, under the influence of an anti-German education. The
unconditional character of this claim to dominance stopped at
nothing. The Nazis were the agents of the best in the race.
This racial community must be guided by the Party to its proper
supremacy, before which nothing else takes precedence. Aryanism
was an end in itself and race took the place of God.15 Just as
the Bolshevik belief in man's self-sufficiency in the classless so-
ciety determines its atheism and hostility to religion, so the Nazi
divinization of the German race dictated its opposition to Cath-
olic and Christian beliefs. Religion only had a racial significance
as the expression of the soul of a people.
Only these Nazi views may be expressed without criticism.
Occasionally, more detailed points were made as they suited the
Nazi leaders. Schiller was hailed as a forerunner of Nazism and
Hindemith's music was banned. But the reality was that all
phases of life were used simply in the service of the Nazi state.
Nazi cultural, and all other Nazi policies, end in the education
and exploitation of the German people as an instrument of the
state. Everything that served the power of the state was prized
and this power was identified with that of the Nazi Party. This
made for a mechanization of the whole of life, for whatever hap-
pened was presented as the will of the people which always coin-
cided with Nazi interest. Thus, the Nazi promise of a purge and

15 Ibid., May 24, 1935, where Bolshevism is described as the deification of

man and work and Nazism as the deification of the racial community.
 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 59

renewal of German cultural life became the basis for a crippling

power which actually crushed its free development.
The preceding paragraphs, barring religion and the German
names, could as well be a description of Soviet cultural policies.
But the Nazis had to proceed more cautiously than the Bol-
sheviks, who could move more daringly in the anarchic condi-
tions of Russia. The Nazis legally took over a strong and intact
state and an undisintegrated society. The Nazis, therefore, con-
centrated on coordinating the various institutions of German life.
Some of this coordination, Gurian believed, was achieved with
shameful or disturbing ease, for example, the self-dissolution of
the Centre Party. Franz Seldte, leader of the nationalist Stahl-
helm, was ready to compromise everything to maintain his min-
isterial post. To save his scientific work, Max Planck wired to
Hitler: "Only under your aegis can science exist."'6 This kind of
submission encouraged the submission of more humble people.
Moreover, the easy coordination helped the Nazi regime to
maintain its voluntary appearance. The regime, as did the Bol-
sheviks, sought mass manifestations of popular support to main-
tain the fiction of its embodiment of the national will. Its author-
ity was ratified by mass meetings and this manipulation of the
masses into the outward show of frenzied unity provided the
basis for the totalitarian boast that it had, thereby, demonstrat-
ed its superiority to the parliamentary system with its relatively
rare manifestations of unity. The concern with power and unity
caused totalitarian public life to be in a constant state of high
tension. "Abnormal conditions are the normal conditions of both
systems of government."17
This was the secret of the appearance of general enthusiasm
for the Nazi government. Their use of propaganda, reenforced
by terror, involved "a methodical debasement of values by a kind
of mass-suggestion."18 This was something historically new. But
"the secret of the German secret" was the subtle use of terror
in the early years of the regime. The purge of June 30, 1934,

16 Ibid., February 7, 1936.

17 The Future of Bolshevism, p. 71.
18 Deutsche Briefe, June 21, 1934. "To comprehend National Socialism
one must go to its propaganda, for propaganda is one of its decisive weapons.
Indeed, it may be argued that in its systematic perfection propaganda is the
salient feature of Nazism." Ibid., June 5, 1936.
60 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

was a public exception for which Gurian did not have an ex-
planation. The absence of public terror was necessary because
of Germany's more civilized level as compared with Russia and
the desire to foster foreign misunderstanding of the nature of
Nazism. The terror operated more by threat than violence. There
was first the threat of economic pressures such as dismissal and
boycott and fear of public defamation, of being charged "with
lack of patriotism."19 The coordination, the terror and
propaganda served to destroy society as an independent and
free entity. The individual was reduced to himself and impo-
tent. Thereafter, the reiteration of propaganda, sometimes de-
liberately absurd in itself, served to force the individual to ac-
cept commands and explanations as self-evident.20 If the indi-
vidual was to work and to live, he was inevitably coordinated
and a National-Socialist.
The specifically German features in Nazism arose from the
efficiency and outlook of the German bureaucracy and army.
Gurian insisted that there was a general moral crisis but the Nazi
danger to Europe was greatly enhanced by the skill and power
that the bureaucracy and the army gave to Hitler. Both groups
represented in Gurian's mind the striking examples of incomplete
men, specialists concerned only with their own technical func-
tioning, satisfied and unprepared to question, if they were kept
busy with blue prints, projects and rearmament. "Hitler's irra-
tional will to power would have remained unimportant if he had
not had German institutions at his disposal."21 Hitler needed their
rational methods for his irrational aims, but they, also, needed
Hitler because he made possible the gigantic undertakings and
organizations that these crippled human beings regarded as the
fulfillment of their life. As a rule, they did not like Hitler and
the Nazis as persons. They feared and then admired his daring,
when he was successful. They did not favor Nazi brutalities or
19 Ibid., June 14, 1935 and April 10, 1936.
20Ibid., January 25, 1935.
21 "The Sources of Hitler's Power," Review of Politics, IV (October,
1942), 397, 379-408. In this article, Gurian's major consideration of the role
of the bureaucracy and army, he emphatically related these institutions to the
general crisis. "Though German institutions such as the army and bureaucracy
did not originate as instruments of a pure will to power, they became such
instruments after the social environments in which they originated disap-
peared."
 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 61

the launching of war. But their opposition was not based on

principles, on the rejection of war and conquests. They merely
feared the consequences of political or military catastrophe. This
outlook meant that they could only be impressed by successful
daring or by brute facts. "Therefore they found their master
in Hitler, who saved them in order to exploit them as accom-
plices, and who rewarded them by the destruction of others, bind-
ing them much closer to himself."22
Gurian frequently pointed out that the belief in the likeli-
hood of the German Army restraining Hitler was groundless but
did help Hitler. The Fuehrer was not the prisoner of the Reichs-
wehr because the army did not have its own policy. For it the
decisive fact was that Hitler had initiated rearmament. The
Nazi leader had understood the fact that the army was domi-
nated by military specialists, of whom he could be more sure
than he could be of some elements of the Brown Shirt leader-
ship. 23 Thus, when R6hm played with the idea of becoming
war minister and bringing the Brown Shirts into the German
Army, Hitler decided in favor of the army and Rohm was
assassinated.
This severe judgment of the German specialists gained
strength from Gurian's deepest convictions. To him, the incom-
plete man, the specialist concentrating on a part of reality and
unconcerned about its relations to the whole, was the betrayer
of the mind, a danger to the world of scholarship, to the state
and the whole of human society. He was impatient with the
absence of the technical competence that came easily to him. But
his monumental impatience was reserved for those who made a
self-contained universe of their own specialization. He insisted on
the primary honesty and necessity of presenting the writer's point
of view, his awareness of the relationship of part and whole,
if only in an awareness of mystery. Gurian's rejection of positivist
scholarship was based on philosophy, but in Um des Reiches
Zukunft he argued that positivist scholarship too readily enabled
an author to disguise his unexamined values and conclusions as
scientific dictates. As an occasion of scholarly pride and pre-
sumption, positivism was all the more dangerous.
22Ibid., 397.
23 Deutsche Briefe, February 1, 1935, January 3, 1936.
62 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

Though Gurian in the Deutsche Briefe and into the war

years devoted himself to the Nazi threat to Europe and the
world and sought to clarify the unique German features of Nazi
totalitarianism, he maintained his view that the European world
was in a general crisis. The identity of Bolshevism and Nazism
evidenced this. In describing Propaganda and National Power
(1933) by Hadamovsky, an influential associate of Joseph Goeb-
bels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Gurian was at pains to
demonstrate that the leading Nazis were aware of the "intrin-
sic relationship of their methods to Bolshevik methods." This
identity consisted in their overriding concern with power and
with the total supremacy of the political and social. Hadamovsky,
having described the methods of the Soviet Cheka, commented
that it would be a serious "mistake to restrict the principles in-
volved in these methods to Russia or a particular time. . .
Certainly, unbridled instincts require brutal measures, but civil-
ized nations need not experience bloodbaths, as did the Russian
people under the Soviets, except in cases of extreme danger."
Gurian emphasized the importance of this work for the additional
reason that it revealed the Nazi sense of tactics, the necessity
of a gradual approach to the realization of their aims.
Nazi anti-Bolshevism, then, was not to be taken seriously. It
was not fundamental, but a propaganda weapon. Nazi "hostility
to Bolshevism is at most an expression of a competitive struggle
between two different groups. For both power is the pivotal
consideration, power which they seek to wield by the same
methods. Thus, it is understandable that they fight each other,
although they are children of the same spirit."24 This point about
identity, supported by detailed comparisons in his books and
articles, is inseparably connected with Gurian's views about the
general crisis. The German army and bueaucracy are unique
in their efficiency but in their unconcern about the whole they
are only extreme representatives of a general outlook. The su-
preme irony and tragedy is that each of two identical systems,
aspiring to totality of power and dehumanizing men in the di-
vinization of a class or race, is genuinely taken as a redeemer
from the peril offered by the other.
The Communist Party is forbidden in Germany but that

24Ibid., May 31, 1936.

 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 63

does not mean that the Bolshevist danger has been lifted from
Germany. Bolshevism does not mean a particular party; it means
a certain fundamental standpoint to all questions of society, which
may also be shared by those who profess to be anti-Bolshevik.
It is a world danger because it deifies the state and the party
which controls the state. This domination shapes the whole of
life and is grounded on a Weltanschauung.25 Indeed, Soviet
Communism, with its remnants of rationalism and of a tradition
of objectivity and natural law, yields to the irrationality of Naz-
ism, which, therefore, "displays most clearly the ideal Bolshevik
ideology."26
The decay of the bourgeoisie was most pronounced in Ger-
many, but not confined to Germany. The decomposition trans-
cended political and national borders. Liberalism was dead or
dying and the new forces at work since the First World War were
reactions to and heirs of the secularization, accomplished by lib-
eralism, although Gurian insisted that many believing Christians
were affected by the outlook of their time, for example, in over-
prizing organizations and influence, and in blurring their principles
or in being silent about them.

"It is a fundamental error to consider National Socialism as a

political phenomenon. It is an ideology, a substitute for religion,
for Christianity which has disappeared from so much of society.
Some decades ago the Russian philosopher, Rozanov, had already
envisioned our time correctly: 'The basic cause of what happens
in Europe today is that the disappearance of Christianity has left
vast abysses in European society. Everything is falling into those
gaps'."27

III. NAZISM AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

More than half of the pages of the Deutsche Briefe are de-
voted to the religious history of Germany under the Nazis. This
emphasis is not only the result of Gurian's and Knab's interest
25Ibid., April 12, 1935.
26 The Future of Bolshevism, p. 81.
27 Deutche Briefe, April 17, 1936. It is worthy of note that Gurian greatly
admired Leon Bloy and read widely in Russian religious literature, and in
philosophy, theology and 'Church history. He repeated the judgment expressed
by Rozanov in his last major writings on totalitarianism. See "Totalitarianism
as Political Religion" in C. J. Friedrich (editor), Totalitarianism (Cambridge,
Mass., 1954), pp. 119-129.
64 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

but reflects their earnest desire to warn the German and Euro-
pean Christians and to elicit from the authorities of the Catho-
lic Church in Germany and the world an explicit condemna-
tion of Nazism as unChristian. The moral crisis could be lessen-
ed only by clarity about moral ends and by the example of
sincerity. Gurian several times referred to the astonishment of the
first Nazi Minister of Worship and Education in Prussia at the
fact that he encountered so little opposition from the German
teaching profession: "These people do not believe in what they
profess to stand for."28 If principles are not taken seriously by
believers, the game, in the best case, goes to the materialist and
opportunist.
In the conclusion of his book on religion in Nazi Germany
Gurian summarized his position: "We see, then, that the tasks
that lie before the Catholic and the Confessional Churches are
essentially the same. ... If faith is to be more than a personal,
private affair it must be proclaimed to the world at large as
the unconditional and uncompromising belief in Christ, just
as it is proclaimed at every divine service."29 In Gurian's analy-
sis, various historical conditions helped to explain the differing
reactions of the Protestant Churches and the Catholic Church.
The first and decisive tradition, of which the Nazis made
use for the establishment of a German Church, solely dedicated to
the expression of the German soul, was the longing for a Third
Church, which would obliterate the religious divisions of Ger-
many. This longing had taken an early form in the Interim
of Augsburg, and more seriously in Hohenzollern Church policy.
After German Idealism and the Higher Criticism had eroded
the substance of the orthodox Christianity of many German
Protestant thinkers, an almost wholly secularized and humanist
Third Church seemed both possible and desirable. The com-
radeship of the First World War and its following nationalism
potently supported the same expectation. Hitler proposed his
Weltanschauung as the ultimate fulfillment of the Third Church.
Two forces rendered the German Protestant Churches in-
28 Ibid., February 7, 1936.
29Hitler and the Christians (New York, 1936), p. 168. It is mournful to
recall that this book attracted little critical notice. Some Catholic journals
persisted in regarding Soviet Russia as the enemy and Nazi Germany, as a
bulwark state, unfortunately guilty of some excesses.
 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 65

itially susceptible to the Nazi attempt to undermine them. These

were theological liberalism, a powerful preparer of the general
crisis, and their tradition of nationalism. Often, these went hand
in hand, and theological liberalism sometimes anticipated or
even approved the extremist racism of the Nazis. Under the
Republic the Protestant nationalists had been in opposition but
many gladly returned to the older policy of patriotic obedience.
In Gurian's eyes the early Protestant resistance to the Nazis in
power had been mainly caused by Nazi clumsiness and tactically
premature expressions of anti-Christian sentiments, and reflected
an opportunist struggle for preferment.30 Later Nazi attacks,
however, prompted such unequivocal confessions of Christian
faith as the Evangelical resolutions at Barmen and Dahlem, and
Karl Barth's lecture "The Church and the Churches," when a
considerable portion of German Protestantism had already been
"coordinated" with the regime.
Hitler could not use the same tactics against the Catholic
Church with its hierarchical character and teaching authority.
But specific German Catholic traditions and outlooks provided
other opportunities. There were a widespread Catholic fear of
not appearing to be national enough and a profound hostility to
Communism. In spite of these traditions a number of bishops
were highly critical of Nazism, when it assumed power. But
some of these protests had been associated with calls for sup-
port of the Centre Party. Thus, the Nazis objected to what they
called "Political Catholicism." This attack was really a rejection
of the public independence of the Church.31 But the charge
had effect and the circumstances favored it.
After this early period the Pope and the German Bishops
sought to arrive at an understanding, which took shape in the
Concordat (1933). The later history of the Concordat is the
story of persistent undermining of its basis, while observing its
external obligations. Until 1936 these breaches were met by
individual and collective episcopal protests, but these protests
usually contained professions of loyalty and did not recognize

30 Hitler and the Christians, p. 93. My summary barely does justice to

Gurian's close analysis in this book and in the Deutsche Briefe, which has per-
manent value for the religious history of the early Nazi Reich.
31 Deutsche Briefe, August 16, 1935.
66 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

Nazism as evil in itself.32 By this time the Catholic press was

powerless under heavy censorship, and in Gurian's eyes only the
most forthright condemnation could save the situation.
There had been moments of tactical appeasementon the part
of the Nazis, for example, as a preparation for the Saar Plebi-
cite. But when in 1935 sisters and priests were tried, first for
infractions of currency regulations and then on charges of im-
morality, the Deutsche Briefe began to sound a note of the most
anxious urgency. Gurian emphasizedthat Hitler would not make
martyrsby persecutingthe clergy openly. They would be discred-
ited as criminals. He called for an authoritative judgment on
Nazism from the German bishops and from Rome before the
time was too late.
It was, indeed, late. By 1935 the Nazis had so consolidated
their power that the German bishops could not even be sure of
having their protests publicly heard. The tactical and diplomatic
approach, a characteristicof the modem crisis and a legacy of
the Centre Party, had failed. The strategy of the Nazis had been
met by a tactical willingness for accommodation. As Nazi tac-
tics were extended in the face of such flexibility, the Nazis were
marching towards their goal and the condition of the German
Catholics deteriorated to the point where it was necessary to
speak out clearly and boldly lest wrong really be made to ap-
pear as right. The Fulda Pastoral Letter (1935) did not name
Nazism as the enemy. In it the bishops again professed their
unwillingnessto deal with matters that concerned the Party and
the state. But as the very goal of Nazism was the divinization
of German man and state, Nazism was inherently evil and had
so to be named. The Bishops could not beat Hitler in the game
of tactics and in a struggle for the soul of the German people,
this judgment of Nazism had to be made.33
Gurian was acutely aware of the difficulties of making such
a move. But, he asked, if the word could not be spoken in Ger-
many, what better proof of the Church's perilous estate there
could be given? Gurian spoke as a Catholic. At the same time,
he believed that the grave weakening of the Christian Churches
32 On coming to the United States Gurian wrote "Hitler'sUndeclared War
on the Catholic Church," Foreign Affairs, XVI (January, 1938), 260-271.
33This paragraph is a summaryof the issues of 1935.
 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 67

in Germany would mean the complete triumph of Nazism and

the destruction of all humane values in the country. The decay
of the German bourgeoisie and its current mentality posed the
most serious problem of the future, for the mind is the hardest
thing to make good again.34
He insistently returned to his point that Nazism was a politi-
cal religion. Rosenberg and Hitler presented it as such. Baldur
von Schirach, the Fuehrer of the Hitler Youth, had proclaimed
Nazi policy when he said: "The way of the German youth is
the way of Rosenberg." Contempt for the shallowness and
monumental ignorance of Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth
Century could not change the fact that it presented the religious
objectives of the Nazi Reich. Gurian rigidly distinguished the
German Christians and the neo-pagans as unimportant features
of the regime. They were used to attack the Churches but the
Church journals were allowed to attack them. This made for
an appearance of freedom in Germany. But Rosenberg's and
Hitler's views could not be attacked. The Nazis were gradually
developing a ritual and liturgy of their own. But for this early
Nazi period the important policy was the attack on the public
independence of the churches in the name of a united German
Church. Goebbels had deliberately compared Germany to one
big church, encompassing all classes, professions, and denomina-
tions, with Hitler as its advocate and intercessor. The German
racial community is weakened by its membership in various
churches, presented as power structures and instruments. Nazi
religion means belief in the race, a belief that transcends any
"narrow denominational faith." A Rhineland Gauleiter, Grohe,
expressed the objective in a notably frank manner:

"It cannot be fate that men in whose veins flows the same blood
and who are designed by Divine Providence to be one people,
should suffer a permanent spiritual division . . . we now have to
buttress our people spiritually and intellectually as the basis of
our unity. In spite of the alien doctrines of the Churches, not
because we oppose the religions but because we love our people,
we must form a folkish unity which will embrace all the millions of
our countrymen and be a spiritual home for every German."35

a4 Deutsche Briefe, February 7, 1936.

35 Ibid., Oct. 22, 1936; January 3, March 6, 1936.
68 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

IV. NAZISM AND EUROPE

The Nazi threat to Europe derived not only from the power
afforded Hitler by German institutions but from the general
crisis, which made the European states incapable of understand-
ing Nazi-Bolshevism. Hitler's destructive powers increased with
his success and his success was made possible by the other Eu-
ropean powers. After 1933 those powers played the dubious role
that the German Conservatives enacted in the period before
Hitler's accession to power. Their moral lethargy painfully re-
flects an apparent inability to take their own ideals seriously.
Hitler simplified German nationalism but he performed a
similar function on the international scene. His anti-Bolshevism
was taken at face value and won him the acquiescence of many
French and English Conservatives. His anti-Semitism gained
further strength for him, because some conservatives and other
politicians regarded opposition to the Nazis as a Jewish cause.36
This unconcern or carelessness about principles may, also, be
seen in the democracies' weak will to defend themselves and in
their effective confusion by Hitler's propaganda. In this situation
alliances against Hitler would not be effective. "The vital issue
is whether or not there are moral forces sufficiently strong to
oppose to the Bolshevizing process, . . . a resistance which is not
merely political."37
The crisis in the western world took the special form of an
outlook for which

"peace and security, law and order are possessionswhich demand

no struggle or risk for their maintenance and are therefore in
jeopardy the moment a power arises which has the courage to act
with determination and work systematically for its own sovereign-
ty by cynically exploiting pacific and legal phraseology."38

Hitler turned the allied war propaganda of the First World

War against the Versailles settlement. Thus, while professing
peace, he helped to weaken and confuse the west. Even the en-
emies of Hitler came to believe that the order established at
36 Gurian made this
point most strikingly in his essay in Koppel Pinson's
volume I, already cited.
37 The Future of Bolshevism, p. 120.
as bid., pp. 119-120.
 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 69

Versailles was responsible for the insecurity of Europe. This led

to the conclusion that the undoing of Versailles will, in the long
run, produce a more peaceful order. Hitler's profession of pacific
intentions assuaged domestic German misgivings, and paralyzed
the widespread pacifist mentality. The Nazi leader's power of
initiative was supported by other considerations. France in 1934-
1935 used German rearmament as a pretext for seeking diplo-
matic allies. But the flimsy coalition governments of France
would regularly fall when a military alliance was called for.
Thus, the end result of French policy would be the militariza-
tion of Germany. Britain, on the other hand, wanted no alliances
and believed that its prestige would not be lowered by efforts
to reach an accommodation with Germany.39
But Hitler's demand for equality of rights for Germany had
a special folkish content. Equality of rights initially meant secur-
ing the conditions of honorable national existence, and the end
of all restrictions on German sovereignty. German sovereignty,
however, was viewed as an eternal right nullifying all agreements
that infringe it. His offers of peace involved this conception, and
yet, when they were turned down, the negators were made to
appear as the enemies of peace. In the rapid pace of events people
quickly forgot his own contradictory statements and his threats.
Many western politicians ignored the program of Mein Kampf
and took much more seriously the slogans of their own leftist
rivals. Hitler could move from one fait accompli to another and
each one made him stronger. The folkish concept of peace
meant that peace is the dominance of the best race.
The international situation could only grow worse. Equality
of rights in Nazi terms meant that Nazi Germany alone decided
on its rights. German power was, therefore, decisive, and Hitler

39 Deutche Briefe, February 22, 1935, April 3, 1936. Gurian understood

Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain only too well. He had a Catholic and con-
tinental approach to England, a dislike of English Puritanism and smugness.
On one occasion he told me with an apologetic smile that as a very young
man he had come to dislike England for its treatment of Oscar Wilde. He
admired Swift and Newman with reservations. The playful and humorous tra-
dition of England wearied him. His own penchant was for irony, "cast irony"
as one of his colleagues put it. Hobbes fascinated him and one of my own
dreams was to hear Gurian lecturing to an English audience on Hobbes as a
representative Englishman, "the practical Englishman." But when he was
present at denunciations of British imperialism or "tyranny," he usually indi-
cated that he would find Anglo-Saxon tyranny endurable.
70 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

had been able to rearm without hindrance. In assessing Ger-

many's international position this was the only significant real-
ity. Hitler had the initiative, for while he talked peace, he did
not shrink from war. But the western powers did. They were
making the fundamental mistake of trying to restrain an elemen-
tal force by dealing with it as though it was satisfied with the
existing order.40

V. LAST WRITINGS AND REVISIONS

Gurian believed that the appeasement mentality would con-
tinue to prevail through 1939. He anticipated the collapse of
France but was almost afraid to believe in the "Churchillian
Renaissance." When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Gurian
increasingly devoted himself to his Soviet studies. He was tor-
tured by the dilemma of cooperation with the Soviet Union,
although he continued to regard Nazism as the supreme threat
to Europe and the world. He had earlier argued that a tactical
position to Nazism was no more possible than to Soviet Com-
munism. But his analysis had not found wide acceptance and
events had posed the problem of survival in terms that Gurian
did not wholly illuminate and, for that matter, our own leaders
could not solve.
Shortly after the war's end Gurian resumed his German
contacts. In a little while the Gurian household had become a
clearing-house for pleas of assistance from Germany, and a pri-
vate but extensive relief organization. Food, clothing, books and
subscriptions to the New York Times were sent with an uncal-
culating charity that could not be maintained. The need and his
own insufficient resources caused him to make several public
appeals for help. He quickly renewed or made new contacts
with German scholars and, eventually, Notre Dame was visited
by hosts of touring Germans.
Gurian made a number of trips to the new Germany, but it
is difficult for me to recall more than a few hints of his views
of the new Germany. He could be a superb conversationalist,
but this was the product of a special effort. With his closest as-
sociates he relaxed in gossip or lapsed into what he apparently
40 Deutsche
Briefe, November 23, 1934, December 14, 1934, February 22,
1935, April 3, 1936, April 17, 1936, July 10, 1936, passim.
 GURIAN AND THE GERMAN CRISIS 71

considered a "sociable silence," which at times was an expres-

sion of weariness and of a brooding sense of futility, not despair.
His first major report on post-Hitler Germany recalled his
early analysis: it was entitled "The German Vacuum."41 In a
later writing he returned to familiar themes and quoted ap-
provingly the judgment of Monsignor Grosche of Cologne that
German Catholicism still overestimated a traditionalist bour-
geois Catholicism with its emphasis on externals. It placed too
much trust in organizations that suppress the creativity of the
individual and sought to restore a world doomed with the dis-
appearance of the nineteenth century bourgeois security. Gurian
added to his agreement his protest "against an attitude which
regards the terrible crisis of the twentieth century, expressed in
the rise of Hitler and his regime, merely as a kind of incident
after which one can return with some industry to normalcy."42
First, the kingdom of God, and no confusion of it with an
earthly reality, a socialist Europe or a conservative, Christian
west.
The confusion appeared in its most extreme form in the
totalitarian states. In them secularism assumed a kind of venge-
ful form. The totalitarian state limits man to this earth, a grim
secularism. The classless society or the racial community be-
comes the kingdom of God. Totalitarianism means the secular-
ization of religion itself. For doctrines on the creation and end
of man are substituted the laws of history or social development.
"The doctrine enforced by the totalitarian power determines the
reality; enemies, betrayers, evil contaminating forces are con-
stantly created. There seems to be no other aim and purpose than
the existence of totalitarian power and its leadership. Totalitarian
terror-this must be emphasized-is not primarily directed against
real or even potential enemies; it is directed against those who are
declared to be enemies; what is real, is determined by the declara-
tion of the totalitarian masters, and of course, corresponding facts
must and can easily be found."43

41 The Commonweal,Dec. 2, 1949.

42 "The Catholic Church in Germany," an unpublished paper, delivered
at a Symposium on The Catholic Church in World Affairs, Notre Dame
(1951).
43 "Totalitarianism as Political
Religion" in C. J. Friedrich (editor), To-
talitarianism, pp. 126-127. Gurian noted that only in the last years of the
war did the Nazis move to a pure form of totalitarianism.
72 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

The ideology is a doctrine which replaces reality. Gurian's an-

alysis agrees with Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism
in his following remark:
This analytical survey of Gurian's thought on Germany was
conceived as a tribute to a friend, who, as a colleague, opened
up to me the dimensions of the modem crisis with its intellectual
and moral features. At first, I only intended to describe his
valiant work for the Deutsche Briefe, an aspect of his life and
character, unknown to most of his friends. But I found myself
constantly driven to refer to his general analysis. Finally, I de-
cided that his views on Germany provided the proper subject,
for it reveals the wholeness of his thought and the completeness
of the man: his youthful precocity, his profound Catholicism,
his interest in intellectual history and modem politics, and the
luminous penetration and consistency of his analysis of the mod-
em crisis. He was obviously a publicist and a scholar. But his
analysis of the modem crisis reveals something greater and more
unexpected; the combination of moral critic and scholar. And
the lucid power of his work largely derived from his kinship
with the line of Rozanov, Soloviev and Leon Bloy, to name but
a few of many moral critics and religious philosophers who in-
fluenced him.