"Past and Present"
I.
A people that does not learn from its history is doomed to perish, for history is nothing other than the sum of the insights and experiences that the great collective known as a people has gathered over the course of its long existence - if any present generation were to disregard the rich treasure of all these painstakingly acquired and, for the most part, hard-won insights, it would be acting no differently than a foolish old man who throws the hard-won experiences of his own long life to the wind and acts, time and again, like a clueless youth.
Historical consciousness is therefore, at its core, nothing other than the living memory of the people as a whole, and for this reason, only those who view the present as a link in the eternal chain of time will be able to see and experience it correctly, in its full scope and with all its prerequisites.
Driven by the inevitable passage of time, what is “the people” today will become the irretrievable “yesterday” as early as tomorrow, and for the same reason that everything we create today in the light of day will already belong to the past by tomorrow, we must also recognize the past as part of ourselves, for the enduring unity of the people does not measure itself in human generations.
On this evergreen tree, new leaves spring forth eternally from the same ancient root that once nourished the young sapling - thus, the past is nothing other than a faithful mirror that shows us other possibilities of life inherent in our very nature: they are realities of life that may have taken shape under different circumstances, but whose prerequisites and forces are also at work within us.
In other words: whoever disregards the history of his people sins against the future, for he contributes to a situation in which stupidity and laziness prevent the people from making use of the rich treasure of their historical experiences in such a way as to find the best possible path into the future.
If, then, historical consciousness is the most vibrant part of a nation’s intellectual life, it must never, under any circumstances, become dead scholarship, for nothing has harmed the people as a whole as much as the criminal delusion of materialism, which seeks to alienate historical fields of knowledge from the public consciousness through excessive specialization: just as our art must always remain close to the people, so too is the noblest task of historical scholarship to abandon its previous reclusive isolation and once again make itself and its work accessible to all educated people.
The dead weight of knowledge accumulated during the liberalist century benefits neither the people nor the state, and we have no desire to tolerate any longer the arrogance of certain paid civil servants who, invoking a supposed autonomy of science, claim the right to continue pursuing matters that do not interest the people, and are therefore of no use to them.
II.
“Threefold is the step of time!”
Anyone who wishes to understand the present—anyone who attempts to assess the intellectual and, in particular, the political forces at work in their own environment and society in terms of their true causes—is immediately confronted with one of the most difficult questions of destiny that exists, for, mindful of Goethe’s words that the present “flees as swiftly as an arrow,” one must immediately decide which events that have just occurred still possess a lingering vitality at this very moment of reflection, and which others—even if they belong to the very recent past—are already imbued with the breath of death simply by virtue of having passed.
The present, perpetually caught between the two poles of past and future, is for this reason always the enemy of all that is eternal, and since in this world only that which possesses a solid measure of eternity has lasting value, the present—with all its problems and struggles, with all its labors and achievements—is insignificant as long as it is not consciously viewed as a bridge to the future.
For this reason alone, the past is never for us merely that which is dead and gone, but—in the sense of our own objectives—the path, experienced through our own blood, leading to ourselves, to the present, and to our own future and that of our people: such a fundamental attitude toward the past must lead to a revolutionary reordering of all previous historical assessments, and it goes without saying that in this process, the pale universalism of the liberalist century must give way to a conscious and significant overemphasis on those historical events in which we see the foundations of our present national and racial existence.
In no other field of knowledge and understanding does our worldview divide minds more decisively than here, where the task is to construct a new worldview: we are aware that everything the new Reich has created so far and will yet create will endure only if the rising generation infuses the structures we have created with new and independent life, for the inescapable law of time renders what was true yesterday—and even what is true today—obsolete by tomorrow.
We realize that the youth of our people will not judge us or our work by our own standards, nor do we have any inclination to fall into the delusion of all those nostalgic old-timers who, when they speak of the “good old days,” embarrassingly display their lack of adaptability, their lack of creativity, and above all, their inability to recognize themselves.
III.
The liberalist era viewed history as a relatively dry field of knowledge, the study of which was left to the experts: the result was an unprecedented desolation of this entire intellectual realm.
Scholars, wherever they were left to their own devices, have always staked their honor on cultivating a field, one that was removed from the concern of the masses and the interest of so-called broader strata: this was done in a manner that, within a short time, made it impossible for the people as a whole to participate in this work.
The reason for this approach—still familiar to older scholars today—was that dangerous principle of the materialist worldview, namely, that human beings, with all their deeds and aspirations, are always merely the product of their material environment, and that, consequently, historiography, wherever it deals with past life, must take the utmost care to exclude everything contemporary and living - in this way, historiography became a museum-like curiosity that dealt only with what was absolutely dead and was therefore itself shrouded in the stench of the morgue.
The consequence of this fundamental attitude was the peculiar scholarly delusion that it was already an intellectual achievement to tackle past eras and their records using the dangerously fraying tools of source criticism; these indeed useful but inconsequential henchmen of science forgot that creative scholarship begins only where their work ends, for what matters is the reconstruction of past life, not its registration and archival cataloging, however necessary these may be.
The overwhelming majority of today’s scholars have not yet abandoned this outdated viewpoint of yesteryear, and do not yet realize that, from the people’s perspective, the detailed work of individual disciplines must remain insignificant piecemeal efforts unless, immediately and simultaneously with it, a creative synthesis of the material studied takes place in a form accessible to the entire population.
This criticism applies in particular to the field of German prehistory, where—since Gustaf Kossinna’s outstanding achievement—and despite all the efforts of the new state, no handbook has been produced that is even remotely suitable for public use that makes the immense findings of this very branch of science accessible to the educated public as a whole.
IV.
Scholars do not falsify history, apart from a few who, for political reasons—mostly as henchmen of supranational powers—lend themselves to this - there is, however, a category of contemporaries who, for reasons that are sometimes quite honorable, distort historical facts simply because the true historical picture was not at all accessible to their understanding: this sort of scientific parasite is far more dangerous than solitary scholarship, and there is nothing from which the new, people-oriented science must distance itself more decisively than from those laypeople who believe they must substitute their ignorance with fantasies.
History is a field of knowledge that requires the most precise training and the strictest scientific discipline - it is unacceptable to disregard the fundamental prerequisites of scholarly work, which, as the basis of all knowledge, demand the most meticulous evaluation of sources.
It is a sign of limited receptivity and even less capacity for independent thought when someone, for example, by misappropriating Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century, presumes to portray the formidable figure of Charlemagne—solely because of the chapter on the massacre of the Saxons, which is indeed more than tragic for us as a loss of blood—as nothing but a devil, black on black, as if this towering Germanic king, whose blood is of our finest stock, had not, on the other hand, saved the threatened tribes of Germany by uniting them (against their will!).
It is equally foolish to condemn the Italian policy of the greatest German kings of the Middle Ages with cheap slogans as merely unpatriotic and alien to the country, as if these rulers had not, precisely because, as German kings, they wore the Roman imperial crown and were therefore called to be rulers of Western Christendom, sought to find confirmation of the true power and greatness of the German people in Italy, the threatened southern land of Germany.
In other words: specialized knowledge of individual minor events is by no means sufficient for a true understanding of history, for it takes far more than mere specialization to view events correctly, and above all, to recognize the broader contexts in their fateful interconnection.
This applies in particular to those interdisciplinary fields of scholarship that have unfortunately become a popular playground for so-called amateur researchers today: as much as the scientific community may rejoice that unbiased minds are finally participating in its work again—that, through the collaboration of all fellow citizens, scholarship is finally reestablishing a vital connection with the demands of the present—it must be equally wary of the cheap prejudices that cling to every obsession, even the noblest, for it would amount to falsifying history if, for whatever reason, one were to distort the picture of the past through fixed ideas.
V.
Finally, however, there is also a clouding of consciousness that is far more dangerous than the delusions of specialists and the fantasies of laypeople - it is the inescapable fact that, almost without exception, all educated members of our generation were educated at institutions oriented either toward classical humanism or liberal realism, which leads to a disastrous distortion not only of the body of knowledge itself, but also of the very foundations of all knowledge.
It requires a task as arduous as it is protracted to free oneself from the ways of thinking that have been, so to speak, absorbed with one’s mother’s milk, and have therefore mostly become subconscious—ways of thinking that are rooted, without exception, in liberal-materialist ideology.
Disguised materialism is more dangerous than openly admitted materialism: what good does it do us if such minds pretend to march in our ranks while, in reality, with their thinking—which runs counter to our worldview—they undermine the foundation of the new state?
It is not knowledge—nor is it information—that matters, for both are the self-evident prerequisites of all scientific activity: what we demand is that all who wish to contribute to the portrayal of our people’s history find that decisive shift in thought and feeling within themselves which is the prerequisite for the new state, a resolute turning away from matter as such, and the whole person’s enthusiastic devotion to the idea, wherever it has been and is active in the past and present.
We are not interested in the past, but in creative achievements from historians, achievements that have something to say to us, for history is nothing other than the sum of insights and experiences that the great unity known as the people has gathered over the course of a long life.
From “Vergangenheit und Gegenwart”, published in “Weltanschauliche Betrachtungen” (Reflections on Worldview) by Heinar Schilling, 1938, originally featured in Das Schwarze Korps, 1936.