The Crisis of Modern Times: Perspectives from The Review of Politics, 1939-1962

4 “Passion and the Origin of Hitlerism” (1941)

C h a p t e r 4 Passion and the Origin of Hitlerism Denis de Rougemont Denis de Rougemont (1906–1985) was born in Naissance à Couvet, Switzerland. He studied psychology under Jean Piaget at the University of Neuchâtel, and German and Latin at the Universities of Vienna and Geneva. De Rougemont then moved to Paris, where he became associated with the Christian philosopher Emmanuel Mounier who sought to affirm the value of the human person in the face of modern materialism. As a result of regular contributions to French literary magazines, his connection to Mounier’s school of “personalists,” and his publications of the works of Christian philosophers and theologians, such as Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, de Rougemont became convinced about the power of European culture and ideals to bring his divided continent together. After a sojourn in the United States during World War II, he returned to Europe to promote the cause of European unity. As both philosopher and promoter of unification, de Rougemont was instrumental in founding several centers devoted to European studies, including the Bureau of European Studies in Geneva, the European Cultural Studies Center, and the Association Écologique Européenne. In a highly influential work, Love in the Western World, Rougemont explored the passion of love in relation to different myths of love and the mystery of the person. He believed that there was a direct relationship between the highest levels of human passion and the rise of totalitarian movements. Hitlerism is not the creation of a single individual, the personal creation of Hitler: it is a mass phenomenon. Nor is it the necessary result of a determined economic system, since we see individuals in the most dissimilar countries, who are “converted ”: rich and poor, industrialists and farmers, intellectuals and army men. 67 The enumeration of the more or less immediate historical causes of Hitler’s success, such as Eternal Germanism, the Versailles Treaty, inflation, the fear of Bolshevism, the Dictator’s personality, the defects of the democracies, the complicity of big business, does not suffice to explain why they have all converged to the same result. Viewing the breadth and depth of the phenomenon, these heterogeneous “causes” seem to play the part of mere pretexts, of catalyzing agents determined, orientated and carried along by the phenomenon itself which, therefore , still remains to be explained. What then is the cohesive principle of the Hitler movement? What is the secret of its contagious power? This principle and this secret seem to me to reside in the two following facts: (1) Hitlerism comes as an answer to the communitarian aspiration of modern times, as a remedy for the individualistic decomposition of modern society. (2) Hitlerism effects a gigantic transfer of individualistic passions to the Nation, represented by the Party and its Führer. The following essay is intended to examine this second thesis. I. Passion in the Western World Almost all our sociology, as a science, rests on rationalistic or materialistic presuppositions . Let it suffice to mention its ancestors: Hegel, Auguste Comte, and Marx. Since Levy-Bruhl, it is true, we have attempted to describe and interpret certain collective phenomena of a non-rational nature. Curiously, however, we have sought to localize them among so-called “primitive” peoples. The study of passion in the bosom of civilized societies has hardly been started by such marksmen as Georges Sorel, Le Bon, or Keyserling. Valuable elements would be found in the psychoanalysis of the collective Unconscious, as conceived by C.G. Jung. To me, such a study alone, systematically pursued, would appear capable of explaining the mass phenomena that dominate our times. For a mass does not react as an ensemble of reasonable individuals. A mass reacts according to the dialectic of the Unconscious, and, in particular, of passion in a pure state. Therefore the phenomenon of passion in itself is to be first of all examined. I shall here use certain results of a study which I conducted on the evolution of the love-passion and mystical passion in the Western world, from the Middle Ages to our own times.1 We are aware that the twelfth century witnessed what I shall not hesitate to call an affective revolution: that century in truth saw the almost simultaneous 68 Denis de Rougemont apparition of the first Christian mystic of Divine Love, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux ; the first story...