Throughout his life, he wrote many articles, plays, and biographical essays. His Kampf um Berlin is a well-known work among these, and it chronicles the rise of the Sturmabteilung (or SA) during the hard years of struggle in Berlin. One of his most interesting works, however, and the topic of this short review, is 1921's Michael, a book that I myself consider to be his most heartfelt and personal work, written well before politics consumed the rest of his life.

The story follows a young student named Michael, clearly a self-insert of the author. In contrast to Goebbels himself, the titular character did fight in the Great War. A veteran of the trenches, the young man returns to the university city of Heidelberg to pick up the threads of his life again. There, he struggles with politics, faith, friendship, and love. He reads Nietzsche and Goethe, listens to Wagner and Beethoven, and tries to win the heart of the woman he loves. He develops his own political thought, mixing genuine socialism, true Christian ethics, and a burning nationalism, an idealism that eventually leads him to quit his studies and become a miner instead. It is a choice that ultimately ends in blood. Or, as Michael himself notes: "we all have to make sacrifices!"

The two years in which the novel is set are known for their political and social upheaval. From 1919 until 1921, Germany saw a plethora of armed revolts, political murders, and new ideologies pass by. Goebbels uses this turbulent period as a backdrop to tell a deeply personal story. The passages about Christianity are extremely strong, and they evoke an almost compassionate feeling. One can see inside the soul of not only Michael himself, but also the author. According to German historian and biographer Joachim Clemens Fest (1926–2006), the novel sheds light on the deeply ambitious and sensitive mind of Joseph Goebbels. In his biography of Goebbels, The Face of the Third Reich, Fest confirms that "the very name of the hero, Michael, to whom he [Goebbels] gave many autobiographical features, suggests the way his self-identification was pointing: a figure of light, radiant, tall, unconquerable."

Akin to Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Michael seems to be written for the sensitive young man: the poet, the writer, the activist, or the fella on the dole. It is written for one who does not merely live life, but feels it, deeply and often painfully so. An English translation was already published by Amok Press back in 1987, but throughout the decades this edition has become hard to come by, leaving many readers reliant on secondhand copies or library archives.

Luckily, in 2023, Antelope Hill Publishing published a newly translated and updated version of the novel, translated by one Olivia Van Dorn. Aside from one small mistake in the endnotes (a Kneipe is not a type of student fraternity, but rather a student tradition involving the singing of traditional songs and the drinking of copious amounts of beer), the translation is without fault, and a genuine pleasure to read.

The quality of the work is without a doubt great, and hasn't aged: men like Goebbels, disillusioned men sick of contemporary society, still walk the streets of our towns and cities. They are men who want nothing more than complete upheaval, a total revolution. These men may work lowly jobs or reach the highest peaks, may wear tracksuits or a shirt and tie, may be workers or students. As history teaches us, it is these men, these strong and wilful men, that make our people great. Michael is, for me, the archetype of this historical man.

Interested readers can buy ‘Michael: a German destiny in diary form’ by Dr. Joseph Goebbels by clicking on the link here.

4. Direct action

4.1. Agonal and abstract attitude

It has become customary to draw a straight line from texts such as the quoted ones by Benn and Jünger to Auschwitz. This is connected to the biblical literalism into which the Germans fled after the war. It allows those concerned to believe that the utterance of certain words has clear and definite consequences in the real world.

The death that the fascist has before his eyes concerns, in the first place, his own death, and only then that of the equally-valued opponent. It is, moreover, death as a destiny, which comes to every human being and must be endured well. And there is more. It is, with certainty, not the industrial killing of the defenseless, of masses of people set apart according to abstract principles. For such killing presupposes, after all, the belief that one possesses the generally valid truth. It presupposes an abstract ordering system, according to which people are divided, on the basis of general characteristics, into good — meaning “to be kept alive” — and evil — meaning “to be destroyed” — specimens. Without a consciousness of mission, which clothes its followers subjectively with a judicial, indeed even avenging and purifying, function, this is not possible.

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1. Demarcations

This treatise (dedicated “to Ludwig Blanck-Conrady”) was written for the collective volume Konservatismus International, edited by Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner (Tübingen 1973, Seewald Verlag). The author revised it slightly in 1974 for his own book Von Rechts gesehen (also published by Seewald). Since that book, too, has long been out of print, and since the theme of “fascism” has lost none of its topicality, we are taking it up again here, in a thoroughly reworked form. The treatise was an attempt to give renewed, concrete content to the concept of “fascism,” which had become completely confused by 1973. The method chosen for this was that of “physiognomic reinforcement.” It suits the author well, who is, not by coincidence, trained as an art historian: he responds first to the visual, and only in the second instance to the acoustic, to the comprehensible. Thinking that is not visual is, for him, the same as a loss of reality. The author wants above all to rid himself of all theoretical and moralizing bias and to approach historical phenomena such as “fascism” and “National Socialism” calmly and as such — that is to say: to look at them and to examine them. That was, of course, far too ambitious in 1973/1974. Under the sign of “acceptance,” something may in the meantime have changed.

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1.1. Confusion of tongues

There are certainly very few historical phenomena whose contours have become as blurred as fascism. The word seems to have lost all content. Everyone takes the word into their mouth, but always for something different, until eventually it clings to nothing at all. Through a strange automatism, labels such as “fascist,” “fascistic,” “fascism” are stuck onto such widely differing persons, organizations, informal groupuscules, and even onto scholarly studies, that one feels as if in an occupied country where the signposts, twisted in every possible direction, are meant to fool the occupiers. With astonishment we take note of a politics in which everyone has, at some point, been someone else’s “fascist.” Specifications such as “pre-fascist,” “post-fascist,” and “clerico-fascist” bring absolutely no change to this inflation. They do not limit the phenomenon at all, but rather tend, like the root terms themselves, toward generalization and hence toward vagueness. The high point of all this lies in the adjective “fascistoid.”

This confusion of tongues tempted a few linguistically conscious Frenchmen into a wordplay that non-French speakers do not even hear, let alone understand. From the verb “se fâcher” — “to get angry” — they brewed the neologism “tachiste,” as a nickname for a “fascist-hunter.” The actual word “fascist” remains for them a description reserved for concrete fascism up to 1945. Since 1945, no serious political grouping anywhere in the world has described itself as “fascist.” This label is reserved for a few stubborn individuals — some from the so-called lunatic fringe, or for a writer such as Maurice Bardèche, who clings to the term in memory of his brother-in-law and fellow writer Robert Brasillach, murdered in 1945 as a “collaborator” (see his Qu’est-ce que le fascisme, Paris, 1961).

“Fascistic” has long ceased to be a descriptive term and has simply become an expression of resentment, a venting of one’s own soul and conscience. Precisely through this, political concepts are hollowed out and eventually die off. It is no coincidence that occupying oneself with the very extensive fields of interest of theories about “fascism” — its origin, classification, and psychoanalysis — has become a flourishing branch of ideology research.

1.2 Sweeping it under the leftist rug?

Fascism has, in any case, something to do with the right, if not with conservatism — although conservatives, in their camp under fire from all sides, have always tried to push phenomena such as fascism and National Socialism to the left of themselves. Both after 1933 and after 1945 they gave what others have called “right-wing totalitarianism” a leftist ancestry, in order to place it, in this way, at the opposite end of the political spectrum. In the case of a Catholic conservative like Emil Franzel, this is already apparent in the very title of his work, Die braunen Jakobiner. Der Nationalsozialismus als geschichtliche Erscheinung (Munich, 1964).

For this “shoving aside” or pushing away of fascism/National Socialism there are, of course, certain arguments to be found — for example historical-philosophical considerations, or fascist texts with a clearly leftist vocabulary. Far less convincing, in our view, is the reference to the leftist origins of prominent fascist leaders such as the socialist Mussolini or the communist Doriot. Does it say anything about the conservative Catholic that Franzel, in his younger years, was a very orthodox Marxist? Might something new not arise out of such back-and-forth travel — a kind of Third Way? The following observation is in order. The book Ni droite ni gauche by the historian Zeev Sternhell, published in Paris in 1983, has fundamentally shaken up fascism research. According to Sternhell, fascism arose because radical left, unable to forgive moderate left for having struck compromises with the liberal center, allied itself with radical right, which reproached the moderates in its own camp with the same thing. Fascism, then, as an amalgam of disillusioned figures of the right and disillusioned figures of the left, of leftist and rightist “revisionists.” That is why, for Sternhell, fascism stands outside the left-right schema. It stands there as something revolutionary, as something of a Third Way.

At the end of the Weimar Republic there also existed something like a good image of the political model that announced the abolition of the left-right mechanism in a new, third system. It had the shape of a horseshoe. The ends of the horseshoe, “far left” and “far right,” curved away from the slow, heavily burdened center and approached each other. And just as there existed, in the horseshoe, an attractive force between the ends growing toward one another, so people at that time also believed they could observe, in political reality, the growing-together of things that their forebears had thought lay miles apart. At first it was only splinter groups and lone individuals who, in the early 1930s (of the last century), were caught up in this whirlpool. The large groups of left and right approached each other only twice. The first time for a single week, the second time for about two years. The joining of the National Socialists and the Communists during the Berlin transport strike (2 to 7 November 1932) made the republic tremble to its foundations. The Reichswehr drew up scenarios at the time for a coup, in order to save the republic in this way from the SA and the Rote Frontkämpferbund. During the Hitler-Stalin Pact (23 August 1939 to 22 June 1941), the trembling of fear even exceeded the borders of the republic. On the horizon, after all, an alliance was taking shape between the three “have-nots,” Japan, Russia, and Germany, against the liberal world — an alliance that wanted to change the world not only in Haushofer’s sense.

The outcome of the war decided otherwise. The borders between leftist and rightist mass movements were drawn in streams of blood. That cannot so easily be wiped away. Certainly many conservatives, too, proved their enmity toward “right-wing totalitarianism” with their deaths or with long years in prison. In Germany they form, after the Jews, the largest contingent of victims. But this less conspicuous demarcation carries less historical weight than the more visible one. In the upheaval of the scale and dynamic of the Second World War, work was done with a coarse shovel. In the end, even Jacques Doriot, leader of the Parti Populaire Français, who wanted to make the Right have nothing to do with Hitler, was thrown onto the great dungheap of the defeated. The Right as a whole lost this war, even in those countries that won the war. And because everyone would rather belong to the victors than to the losing camp, we are faced everywhere, not only in Germany, with the same situation. Facing a very timid rightist movement, which constantly apologizes for still existing, stands a cheerful, fresh, unhindered leftist group, which knows how to seize its opportunities. To the unimaginative and sluggish center it suggests slogans and political agenda items, and plays cat-and-mouse with all participants. In this situation only two categories of people can afford to use the word “fascism”: either they are very naïve people, or they are people who know very well what they are up to with it. That is why it is important to know what really existing fascism between 1919 and 1945 was, and what it was not.

1.3 The “physiognomic grip”

For fascism research in Germany, the name of Ernst Nolte immediately stands out. This historian has the merit of having freed the study of fascism from popular-pedagogical bias. Out of a mere term of abuse he has once again conjured up a concept that seeks to embrace a piece of historical reality. He limits fascism to a particular historical period, the time between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second World War. He has, admittedly, given in to the temptation of then subsuming the entire period under the keyword “fascism.” Here Nolte’s origin as a philosopher becomes clear: in historiography he loves the great, summarizing vaults, and becomes easily impatient in the confrontation with historical detail. It is a violation of history when Nolte — in order to preserve the closedness of his system — forces such diverse historical phenomena as Maurras’s “Action Française,” Mussolini’s fascism, and Hitler’s National Socialism into one logically flowing sequence. The philosophical urge to subsume everything under one concept is nowhere less appropriate than in a historical sequence which, on closer inspection, presents itself as a chain of paradoxes.

Nolte’s use of the concept of fascism for the entire period between the world wars is, so to speak, the maximal pole of fascism research. The minimal opposite pole is formed by those scholars who want to apply the concept of the Italian movement only to the one who invented it, and in any case to the state it designed. Behind this restriction there stands, in any case, the laudable intention of once again giving concrete content to the badly tortured word. It seems to us, however, that a certain expansion of the concept of “fascism” is possible, and indeed necessary, without it losing its contours. Fascism seems to us to be, rather, an attitude, a “style,” which in the period between the wars crosses with other attitudes, and only together with them makes up the style of that period. Unlike Nolte (and certainly unlike all leftist “fascism” theories), we do not believe that all states and political movements that turned against the liberal world as well as against left-wing radicalism during that period can be subsumed under the concept of “fascism.” Among them, too, fascism is only one ingredient among others — stronger in one country under certain conditions and situations, weaker again in others.

Here no attempt is made to understand fascism primarily from its theoretical expressions, or to reduce it to a theory (which is not the same thing). In the field of fascism, the relationship to the concept is, after all, instrumental, indirect, retrospective. What comes first is a decision toward a gesture, toward a certain rhythm, in short toward a certain “style.” Certainly this can also express itself in certain words — but these are not there to maintain a logical coherence. Their function is rather to set a certain tone, to create a certain climate, to evoke associations. The path toward abstract concepts, toward a system of thought, is here, unlike with the left and with liberalism, only hesitantly sought and only rarely found. Usually it leads to accidental and arbitrary results. Nevertheless, we will quote extensively from fascist texts — this sounds like a paradox, but is nonetheless very apt. In summary, we can say that fascists apparently make short work of differences of opinion regarding theory. Their mutual understanding takes place along the direct route, that of “style.”

Historical tact compels a physiognomic approach to the phenomenon and only rarely leads to textbook-ready clarity. The present treatise is the result of a physiognomic voyage of discovery. The author has established that certain traits of Italian fascism are also found in other countries. At first he thought of a “Mediterranean” correspondence. He had to abandon this hypothesis when he occupied himself with the five politicians who, alongside Mussolini, generally pass as the most important “fascist” leaders: the Spaniard José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the Belgian Léon Degrelle, the Englishman Oswald Mosley, the Frenchman Jacques Doriot, and the Romanian Corneliu Codreanu. With the first three, surprising stylistic correspondences with the Italian “model” occurred down to the smallest details. Doriot and Codreanu functioned as foreign elements in the comparison, so that the expansion of the concept of fascism was in itself not very credible. This, of course, overturned every classification by country and even by geographic zone.

Even more confusing was the study of the “Iron Guard” of Romania, led first by Codreanu and, after his murder in 1938, by the less charismatic Horia Sima — also called the Legion of the “Archangel Michael.” Among fascism specialists it was considered “the most radical fascist movement that existed.” It is even said to have surpassed the Croatian Ustasha movement in the systematic slaughter of its political enemies. Just like the “Old Man of the Mountain” in eleventh-century Persia, Codreanu could, in carrying out such assignments, call upon a band of assassins. After the murder, the men did not bring themselves to safety but crowned the execution with their own deaths. Beyond this, the Iron Guard also showed many archaic elements that did not fit into the essentially metropolitan, modern fascism. It was of rural and peasant origin. Its deeply Christian faith became visible in the fact that columns of Guardists marched through the cities in formation, shaped as great living crosses. In the Paris of the 1950s, then known as the Mecca of political refugees from the entire world, the author came to know fairly closed groups of former Iron Guardists. They added yet more picturesque traits to the already complicated image of this “fascist movement.” They moved about with great self-assurance within the refugee milieu carefully watched by the French police, since most of them could be certified as “victims of fascism.” These were not falsified credentials. In the war, Hitler had, after all, to decide whom he wanted to make his partner in Romania: the conservatives gathered around General Antonescu, or the Iron Guard (for whom these conservatives were merely a bunch of freemasons and “servants of the Jews”). The German leadership decided to draw on Antonescu. Was the Iron Guard too gruesome? Or did the bourgeois general simply have the greatest economic-military potential for the new alliance? In any case, the Germans brought together all the Guardists they could catch (many had already perished in the Romanian civil war, others had gone underground at the right moment) from 1941 to 1944, in a kind of “internment camp under conditions” on the grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp. The credentials as “victims of fascism,” if not legitimate, were at least legally valid. Thus it came about that, for the “most radical fascist movement,” something that proved so paralyzing for the survivors of other fascist movements did not apply: the “borders drawn in streams of blood” between the two totalitarianisms.

Experiences and discoveries of this kind are inconvenient when drawing great arcs in fascism research. Fascism did not, as a whole, constitute the era between 1919 and 1945, as Ernst Nolte would like it to. The only thing one can say with certainty is that fascism was one of the three or four threads that were, at the time, interwoven in an adventurous manner. The peculiar tapestry that thus arose is what we, from a distance, observe as the era of the two world wars. What historical fascism was can, with some care and empathy, be reconstructed from that tapestry. In any case, it has little to do with what the propaganda of the victors after 1945 made of the term of abuse “fascism.”

2. The witness Gottfried Benn

2.1 “Cold style, fast”

The following entry into our theme forces itself upon us. In the middle of the 1930s, a prominent German in Berlin welcomes a distinguished guest from abroad, from Italy, who is regarded as the embodiment of fascism. The German, a master of the word, delivers an anything-but-conventional speech of welcome. He declares how he sees and understands the guest from Rome — and one senses that he feels a kinship of spirit with the guest. A fascist welcomes a fascist. We now know that the German fell into disgrace shortly afterward — as a fascist. This gives the encounter, seen from a distance, a stereo effect. Are there better vantage points from which to discover what a fascist is? In the spring of 1934, Tommaso Marinetti, the theorist of Futurism, by then risen to the rank of a dignitary of the state, visits Hitler’s Germany. In a personal union, he is both the spokesman of a disturbingly modern art movement, Italian Futurism, and a representative of the state. Thus he is received in Berlin with great honour, but a feeling of strangeness and uncertainty toward the guest from the south cannot be avoided — the German Reich has not yet fully grown out of its role as Mussolini’s junior partner.

Apparently only one person receives the Italian art theorist as an equal: Gottfried Benn, who welcomes him as vice-president of the banquet organised for Marinetti by the “Union of National Writers.” Benn speaks as a substitute for the president, Hanns Johst, who is abroad and who, like Benn, comes from Expressionism, but who, with his more jovial art decorated with folklore, fits better than Benn into National Socialist cultural policy (Benn will, in that same year of 1934, withdraw into inner emigration, in the role of an inconspicuous army physician).

From Benn’s speech it can be seen that he did not have to force himself into a role. There is even a sense of relief noticeable in him. What matters is that Benn does not address the Italian in terms of a shared disposition or a community of ideas. According to him, it is far more the task of Germany and Italy “to contribute to the untheatrical, to the great, cold style in which Europe is growing.” In Futurism Benn praises above all the fact that it “threw off the stupid psychology of naturalism, pierced through the spoiled and toughened massif of the bourgeois novel, and, with the sparkling and swift throat-song of your hymns” — Benn addressed Marinetti directly here — “arrived at the very foundational law of art itself: creation and style.” Even the attacks are already interesting. One goes to war against psychology, against the theatrical in the sense of peep-show theater, against the petty, thoroughly bourgeois culture. And with the positive appreciation, a large part of the fascist sentiment has already come to the fore: cold, fast, sparkling, grand.

What Benn addresses in his guest in the further course of the speech are, accordingly, not contents in the normal sense of the word — it is a certain dynamism, a rhythm. “In the middle of an age of instincts that had become dull, false, and overloaded, you wished for and founded an art that did not contradict the fire of battle and the assault of heroes (…) You called for the ‘love of danger,’ the ‘habituation to energy and recklessness,’ ‘courage,’ ‘fearlessness,’ ‘rebellion,’ ‘the moment of attack,’ the ‘charge,’ the ‘leap to death,’ and you described that as ‘the beautiful ideas for which one dies.’” With these words from Marinetti’s work, Benn sets the tone of what is shared — above all the descent from war. War is here not seen in the National Socialist sense of a war of liberation of a besieged people, but war is rather a struggle in itself, in which it matters little that the person addressed stood on the other side. This kind of war creates a particular brotherhood among those fighting each other. They stand closer to one another than the “bourgeois,” the petty bourgeois of one’s own camp.

Benn also speaks of the “three fundamental values of fascism.” Following from this, these are not general ideas, not even ethical imperatives, but — surprising yet quite consistent — three forms: “The black shirt, in the color of the terror of death, the battle cry a noi, and the battle song Giovinezza.” That Benn is not merely citing this as an Italian peculiarity becomes immediately clear when, in the following sentence, he uses “we.” “We here… who carry these European moods and this European compulsion toward a certain form within us…” And he clearly places the accent on the futuristic, on what is directed toward the future, when, against those “friendly turns of phrase of the epigones,” he points to “the hardness of creative life”: “to the strict, resolute, position-certain nature of the spirit that works on its worlds, and that always makes, for art, the definitive moral decision against mere matter, nature, chaos, regression, formlessness.”

2.2 What is “purely aesthetic”?

Benn’s sentence about “the position-certain nature of the spirit that works on its worlds” is the decisive sentence in his speech to Marinetti: the identification of art (and, more broadly, style) with “moral decision” fundamentally subordinates morality to style. Style, then, takes precedence over opinion, and form ranks ahead of idea. That must surely strike anyone who comes after the Enlightenment as a provocation?

What is at stake here is something much more pointed than the conflict between an ethics of conviction and an ethics of responsibility, in which the left and liberals usually become entangled in their discussions with the right. Any such conflict he can at least understand in its origin. Here, faced with “the fascist,” he is confronted with something entirely incomprehensible. He believes he is “encountering only aesthetic categories, and nothing else.” We know this evasion. It has to conceal the blindness of the left and of liberals toward a fundamental human attitude foreign to them. And both leftists and liberals try, from the outset, to stigmatize a type of human being who reacts to reality so differently from themselves with the well-meant label of “mere aesthetics.” Behind this hides a semantic trick that has led to today’s confusion of tongues. For the average educated person, “aesthetic” is synonymous with “finicky,” hence arbitrary, accidental, without seriousness. The word “aesthetic,” however, has a much clearer and deeper meaning than this moribund form. It derives from the Greek word “aisthanesthai,” which is close to the words “to perceive” and “to observe.” An “aesthetic attitude,” in a strict sense of the word, thus consists in the refusal to move from abstractions, from a “system,” to reality. It does not, then, want to force the world into a predetermined scheme, but actually wishes only to perceive what is there. Every other meaning of “aesthetic” is polemical.

In any case, the guise in which this “aesthetic” renunciation of predetermined opinions appears makes it easy for opponents to start a polemic. The revolt against universalist doctrines of salvation (against the “meta-narratives,” as Lyotard writes) breaks out fully, after a few non-sentimental beginnings in early Romanticism, around the turn of the previous century.

It is the age of “décadence.” This decadence, too, is best not represented too simply. It is not only dissolution, nervousness, sweet indolence — it is likewise a transition, or, to describe it with a favorite word of that time, a “turn” (”Umschlag”) toward something harder. Nietzsche, the very embodiment of this turning point, spoke at the beginning of Ecce Homo of “a double descent,” at once “from the highest and the lowest branch on the tree of life,” at once decadent and beginning (a passage, incidentally, originally set in italics by Nietzsche himself).

Fascism itself, too, arises in a turning-time; it did not arise in the First World War. Whoever searches for the roots of fascism will, sooner or later, come upon some of the figures of this “décadence”: Maurice Barrès, writer and politician, who began as a dandy and ended as a political symbolic figure. In his work and his attitude, fascism already finds itself confronted with paradoxical stances, so that his disciples Drieu La Rochelle and Brasillach seem mere weak echoes when set against this father-figure.

In any case, one must not, because of so colorful and impressive a figure as Barrès, focus exclusively on the shower of sparks at the turn of the century. Keywords such as “aestheticism” and “décadence” point to a trail that, in time and space, rises far above the world of Barrès, d’Annunzio, and Hugues Rebell. They are symptoms of an event that took place throughout the entire West over the last two and a half centuries. One could — connecting here to the medieval struggle between universalists and nominalists — call it the nominalist turn of the modern era. The word means that the universal keys of the past no longer fit. The old systems that explained the world, that had a ready answer for everyone and everything, seem to dissolve. The more one abandons these all-encompassing explanations of the world, the more clearly the individual, the particular, stands out — that which distinguishes itself, as form, from the formless. That is Benn’s “decision against mere matter, nature, chaos, regression, formlessness.” It always brings with it a distancing from universal morality valid for all: what becomes “moral” is the particular, the bond that defies chaos. Facing the egalitarianism that arose out of universalism, there now suddenly stands the value of the individual, the particular, the different. In more common terms, this concerns the victory of existentialism over idealism. In any case, “existentialism” here means more than a few competing philosophical schools — these are merely the shining lights on a current that spread ever more widely between early Romanticism and the era of the world wars, and has meanwhile permeated all areas of life.

2.3. The state and art

Against this sketched background, the leitmotifs that Benn invoked in his speech before Marinetti fall into place. The “strict style” — that is the form that sets itself against chaos and against the unformed. It is a style that lives in the tension between futuristic youth and black death. A style that necessarily includes the anti-bourgeois affect within itself and emphasizes instinct and energy. Equally typical, in any case, is that the contents that were valid in 1934 are entirely absent: tradition and rectitude just as much as national community, moralizing and the apostolate of health, the national and the social, soil and race (when Benn, in those years, speaks of “breeding” and “cultivating,” he is not speaking of racial hygiene). The boundary was fairly sharp.

In any case, it is not the boundary between someone who is in opposition and someone who is loyal to the state. At that moment Benn still identifies with the Third Reich, in whose name he says to the guest from Italy: “Form — in its name everything that you see around you in Germany was won through struggle: form and discipline, the two symbols of new empires. Form and discipline in the state and in art: the foundations of an imperative world-view that I see coming. The entire future that we have is this: the state and art.” That Benn speaks of “the state” and not of “the people” is no coincidence. It is “the political as an aesthetic force,” which is the subject of a peculiar collection of texts by Benn’s disciples, published a year after the Marinetti address by a bündisch publishing house.

Now, Benn’s identification was not accepted — soon after the quoted speech he was pushed into inner emigration. His conviction of 1933/34 is later explained, both by his disciples and by most critics, as a traffic accident, a brief weakness of character. It was a characteristic example of the so-called retrospective optics that determines most statements about the Third Reich. In 1934 it had not yet been decided at all which sphere of influence of German politics would come to dominate in the Third Reich — just as the National Socialist movement was, in no way, as closed as one imagines today. From these grounds one can survey the inner logic that leads, in Benn’s work, from the earlier Rönne novellas via poems such as Schädelstätten and Quartär, to the Marinetti address. This has also been contributed to by the primitive argumentation with which Benn was pushed out from 1934 onward. It can be found in the vocabulary of “degenerate art,” and is directed against the Expressionist early period of Benn’s work — as if Expressionism had been, from the outset, a “leftist” or “liberal” art movement. The terms of abuse are well known: “unnatural swine,” “filth of excrement,” etc. On the other hand, it was at the time impossible to publicly denounce Benn’s texts of 1933/34 as “fascist.” The esteem for Italy, which was allied with Germany, prevented that.

Internally, however, throughout the Third Reich, “fascist” was a favored term of criticism used by orthodox National Socialists to stigmatize heretics. This meant not only criticism and bitter demarcation. Underneath there also flowed a condescending sense of superiority of the serious “Northerners” toward the not-too-seriously-to-be-taken people of the Mediterranean region. This can be traced even in legal and national-economic literature. The discussion preferably takes place in dissertations devoted to the comparison of the systems of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy: Ernst Raue, Die ideologischen Grundlagen der Staats- und Wirtschaftsauffassung des Nationalsozialismus mit vergleichender Betrachtung des Faschismus, University of Berlin, 1934; Kurt Ziegler, Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus. Eine politisch-ökonomische Untersuchung, University of Heidelberg, 1936; Werner Rössler, Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus. Eine Untersuchung sozialer und politischer Wesensunterschiede an Hand eines Vergleichs der Carta del Lavoro mit dem Gesetz zur Ordnung der nationalen Arbeit, University of Heidelberg, 1938; Wilhelm Scheler, Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus, University of Cologne, 1939. Anyone who merely takes note of the word choice of these academic works and the treacherous shift in tone will no longer pour National Socialism and fascism into the same cup. The main aim of the research is the demarcation of National Socialism from the leftist, liberal, and confessional opposition. In doing so, it is overlooked that National Socialism has a more painful demarcation problem: that with non-conformist minds who can be counted neither among the left, nor among liberals, nor among the old conservatives. On this “sensitive” level the discussion took place within the framework of two different demarcation formulas. A harsher one, which came very close to denunciation to the Gestapo, was called “Black Front.” The name was derived from the movement of the same name led by Otto Strasser, and it encompassed, besides the actual National Bolsheviks, above all national-revolutionary figures and splinter groups in the field of tension between Ernst von Salomon, the peasant leader Claus Heim, and the former Jungdo chief Arthur Mahraun (Jungdeutscher Orden). The word “fascist,” on the other hand — meant only for internal use, not for the public — was more differentiated. Its aim was not outlawing, but spiritual discrimination.

3. Witness Ernst Jünger

3.1. The adventurous heart

A second witness for what may be described as “fascist” presents himself. In 1942, during my studies in Berlin, I mentioned the name of Ernst Jünger to a senior school official. The man, loyal to the party line, looked at me suspiciously and said, with a disapproving tone: “Jünger is a fascist.” And at my surprised look he leaned toward me: “Jünger did not fight for his people; in the war he fought for the sake of fighting itself…” Because the word “fascist” was evidently used with sharp disapproval by this National Socialist, I became, from then on, attentive to its use. Jünger himself never called himself a fascist. But there are texts of his, between 1929 and 1934, that actually say the same thing as Benn’s Marinetti address — even though Jünger often used different words than Benn, who was nine years his senior, and his “fascism” had a different resonance than that of Benn’s Dorische Welt. Among the official literary custodians of the Third Reich the attitude toward the work of Ernst Jünger was divided. Jünger’s four books on the First World War were still counted as part of the corpus of national literature. The works that followed were either entirely avoided by the official cultural guardians and critics, or treated with timidity and caution. The reason: in these books Ernst Jünger leaves behind naïve front-soldier nationalism. He goes through a phase of “Prussian anarchism” and turns toward ever subtler questions. This concerns above all the first edition of Das Abenteuerliche Herz (1929, a wholly different book from the one published in 1938 under the same title). The same applies to the book Der Arbeiter (1932), as well as to the essays Die Totale Mobilmachung (1931) and Über den Schmerz (1934). In German intellectual history they have a function similar to Benn’s texts of 1933/34. They cultivate a certain attitude of mind and a certain style so precisely that National Socialism, despite certain initial tones on the surface, instinctively senses their otherness and responds with the reproach of “fascism.” The rejection aims, with Jünger as with Benn, at the same thing: at the “coldness” and at the “self-centeredness.” This type of author is concerned rather with the perfecting of form than with service to the people, with enjoyment rather than duty; the gesture matters more to them than the confession of faith; the convinced opponent stands closer to them than the average fellow countryman. One seems to look with suspicion upon a new aristocratism. Ernst Jünger, from whom comes the saying: “In company one can no longer concern oneself with Germany today” (and of whom it was suspected that he had not changed this opinion of 1929 even after 1933) — well, this Jünger passed just as much for a dandy as Henry de Montherlant or Gabriele d’Annunzio, indeed even as Maurice Barrès. The National Socialist reproach of fascism always turns on internationalist, “un-German” — meaning Romance — influences.

Benn and Ernst Jünger belong to the same “spiritual family,” but in different branches. In Jünger’s case there is something additional, which does not appear in this expression in Benn, who is a decade older (there are situations in which — individuals aside — a distance of nine years amounts to almost a generational difference). The world traversed by Das Abenteuerliche Herz comes into its own as the nocturnal side of Benn’s sun-woven Dorische Welt.

3.2. Magical zero point

In the almost untraceable first publication of Das Abenteuerliche Herz, the young Ernst Jünger wrote sentences that, in a certain, numerically thin layer, have engraved themselves deep into memory. “We have the reputation in the world that we are capable of destroying cathedrals. That means a great deal in an age in which the awareness of infertility pushes up one museum after another… We worked stiffly nihilistic, and renounced even the most inconspicuous fig leaf of the actual question, and shot the 19th century to pieces down to the ground. Only right at the end did the means and men of the 20th century emerge from the darkness. We Germans have given Europe no chance to lose.”

In these much-quoted, but also much superficially explained, sentences the nominalist affect becomes clear: the resistance against emptied generalities (the fig leaf of the question), the direction of attack against the universalist (Europe).

In Jünger this passion appears for the first time in a magazine article that he later did not include in his books, Das Sonderrecht der Nationalisten (in issue 1927/4 of the magazine Arminius, edited by Jünger himself). The lack of nuance, measured against the texts in his books, in any case brings the fundamental sharpness to the fore: “We nationalists do not believe in general truths. We do not believe in a general morality. We do not believe in humanity as a collective being with a central conscience and a unified law. We believe, rather, in a very clearly determined being of truth, law, and morality through time, space, and blood.” It should be noted that “blood,” in Jünger, just like the word “race” in Spengler, is not meant in the sense of a zoological racial doctrine. It is much more a matter of “being-in-form.”

That the emphasis on “the nominalist passion” in Ernst Jünger is no violent intrusion is proven by the survival of this magazine contribution in book form — elsewhere (p. 189) in the already-mentioned Das Abenteuerliche Herz of 1929. There Jünger speaks of “the consistent effort of mankind to find the human being sooner in every Bushman than in ourselves (hence, too — insofar as we are Europeans — our ever-recurring shyness before ourselves. Excellent, and above all no self-pity! That is a position from which we can work. To measure ourselves against the secret standard-meter of civilization kept in Paris — that means, for us, to lose the lost war completely at the end — means the consistent carrying-through of a nihilistic act to the fatal point. We have long been marching in the direction of a magical zero point, from which only those will escape who have other, invisible sources of power at their disposal.” It would be nonsensical to still interpret sentences such as these as “German-nationalist.” The “German” that resounds in “us” and “we” does not stand in opposition to “French” or “English” (Jünger knows no such enmities). Here it means, rather, the refusal to recognize any standard-meter at all.

What one is attempting here to describe as “fascism” is, in itself, a peculiar way of binding oneself back to existence amid the debacle of generalities and of systems. Above all, one must not lose sight of the peculiar interplay between destruction, anarchy on the one hand, and form, style on the other. In the book mentioned above (p. 222) Jünger describes this polarity (a tension, then, not a separation) as follows: “Our hope rests on the young people who suffer from a rise in temperature, because in them the green pus of aversion gnaws, in the souls of grandezza, whose bearers we see creeping in as invalids among the ranks of the feeding troughs. It rests on the revolt that turns against the rule of ‘Gemütlichkeit’, and that needs weapons of destruction against the world of forms — explosives, that is — so that living space is cleared for a new hierarchy.” Anyone unfamiliar with the reading of such texts will claim that Jünger wants to destroy “forms,” while Benn precisely praises them. Here “forms” is naturally meant in the sense of “ossified forms,” as the very opposition of “forms” and “new hierarchy” already shows. In texts of this order, clinging to individual words has little sense, because the words do not carry the same fixed meaning as in systematic thought. A Benn would certainly not have called for “destruction directed against the world of forms.” But with the polarity of “revolt” and “new hierarchy,” Jünger actually takes the same position as Benn.

3.3. “Viva la muerte!”

Ernst Jünger was a war volunteer in the First World War, and the phenomenon we are trying to describe here is indeed unthinkable without that group of young people who, in that period, throughout the whole of Europe, voluntarily took up arms, away from the school benches and after passing so-called emergency examinations. Often they had to hide their much too young age. If one examines the testimonies of this “upheaval” without bias, one comes across almost never any hatred toward “the enemy” (that was mainly a matter for the home front, for the media). Behind the foregrounded protection of the fatherland, something more urgent became palpable: the longing (Sehnsucht) for another, more absolute form of life. It was, admittedly, quickly dampened by the monotony of trench warfare, broken by the omnipresence of death. But those who survived brought precisely this tension of youth into their liberal home world, which had remained unchanged, and could not forget it.

Of this, too, we find impressive formulations in Ernst Jünger. At the end of the first edition of Das Abenteuerliche Herz (p. 260) he worked this out clearly, one against the other. On the one hand he conjures up “the glowing dreams that are the privilege of youth, the proud, secret game that runs ahead of the soul’s rays of light before the sun rises.” And he continues: “Among the most threatening doubts of becoming belongs, certainly in a time in which meanness hides behind the mask of higher humanity, the doubt about the reality of the dream, about the existence of a zone in which the appreciation for a bolder life holds validity…” On the other hand, the “nameless ones and those who vanished without a trace” remind him of a certain “hidden brotherhood,” a certain “higher circle of life, sustained by the spiritual bread of sacrifice.” And Jünger speaks of “the airy fire that the soul needs in order to breathe.” It creates the necessity “that continually, day and night, someone dies alone. In the hours in which youth unfolds its inner wings, while it peers from its attic window over the houses of the market vendors, it must sense that out there, far away, at the borders of the unknown, in no-man’s-land, every standard is guarded and every outpost manned.”

A text such as this feels — sixty years later — strange, and not only because of the imagery. And it could shock. We quote it, along with Benn’s Marinetti address, because from these texts access to the heavily loaded slogans of the political actuality of that time comes about more quickly. In any case, a misunderstanding must be cleared out of the way that keeps rearing its head in connection with the political texts of Ernst Jünger. These texts are often held to be the utterances of a highly educated outsider, who could only have been binding for himself and, at best, for a few other lone individuals. Certainly there were, at the time, only very few who knew how to formulate such content in such a brilliant manner. Comparable things are found only in a Montherlant, a Drieu La Rochelle, a René Quinton, and, somewhat more flowery, in d’Annunzio. These authors formulated what many felt.

This is also true of the tension between youth and death. In the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, which was at the same time also the emotional high point of European fascism (in our sense), the cry “Viva la muerte” (”Long live death”) served as the slogan of both camps. In its paradox (life-death), it was one and the same, and a model of the tension, brought into one formula.

Originally it was the cry of the Spanish Foreign Legion, the “Tercio Extranjero,” made up mainly of Spaniards, and is said to have originated with its founder, General José Millán Astray. In any case, such a quotation of the general has come down to us from the year 1936 (when he had a meeting in Seville with Queipo de Llano and Franco). When, during the course of the gathering, the cry “Viva Millán Astray” rings out, he answers: “What is that supposed to mean? No vivas for me. Let us all shout: Viva la muerte! Abajo la inteligencia! There — and now the reds may come.” Astray, incidentally, knew very well what he was talking about. In the war in Morocco he had lost an eye, a leg, and an arm.1

Certainly, each country has a particular vocation, and methods of action suited to other structures cannot simply be transplanted onto it. But one must not exaggerate this difficulty. It is the incredible ignorance of History and current affairs on the part of French nationalist leaders that has led to this state of affairs. It is therefore possible to learn from other nationalist organisations, making the effort of adaptation needed to correctly interpret the strategy and tactics followed by those movements.

The programme of nationalist action presented here is directly born of this awakening: revolutionary nationalism represents a universal value that each people discovers in its own way, while sharing a common foundation. Our task is to define this “French Path to the Nationalist Revolution” — the only possibility our cause has of fighting for victory rather than for yet more defeats!

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About a week ago, from the 8th to the 10th of May, I was in Paris. As you may have discovered from my article on the Remigration demonstration in Leuven on the 26th of March, I like to travel around the continent to visit comrades, partake in events and remember those who came before us. This trip was something special though.

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Arriving in Paris by way of train on Friday, I embarked towards my Airbnb. The location I had chosen was not too far from the ‘Port Royal’, the traditional meeting place for the demo on Saturday. After a bit of rest, a hearty meal in a traditional French restaurant and a short walk, I arrived at an old part of town. There, I met nationalists from all over Europe, gathering to partake in a night of camaraderie and networking. At an undisclosed pub, I saw old and new friends; People from all over the continent met to have a few beers. The heart of Europe beats wherever Europeans come together, and meetings like this are the perfect example.

At around 23:00, I decided to cut my night short. A ban imposed on the demonstration by the French state could mix things up the next day, and in my view a good nights rest and a clear head would be a massive help on Saturday.

One Uber-ride and a short walk up the stairs later, I laid my head on the pillow and dozed off. At 09:00, my alarm sounded. Well-rested, I showered and dressed myself accordingly. A black T-shirt (Fred Perry, of course), a chino, black Adidas shoes, a cap and sunglasses. I couldn’t look more nationalist if I tried to! Fate, though, had something else in mind. Some hours later, around lunchtime, I heard that the demo was definitively banned by the French state and Parisian council. But why?

To determine the why, we first have to look at the what. What is this demo, this ‘Comité du 9 Mai?’ Why is it a yearly tradition? And why does it attract more and more nationalists from all over the West every single year?

Let’s start at the beginning: the 7th of May 1994. the ‘Groupe Union Défense’, or GUD for short, is holding a demonstration in Paris in collaboration with the ‘Jeunesses Nationalistes Révolutionnaires’, or JNR. The demonstration, which focuses on the rejection of American imperialism and as a consequence has the title “Bienvenue aux ennemis de l’Europe!” (“Welcome to the enemies of Europe!”) is promptly banned by the state authorities. Despite the ban, many nationalists still gather. One of them is the young Sébastien Deyzieu: a 22 year old student and activist. The police is ordered to break up the demo. Chaos ensues. Between all the violence, Deyzieu flees from police forces, but is pursued. He dies under suspicious circumstances, “falling” from a window in the ‘rue de Chartreux.’

Since that year, the ‘Comité du 9 Mai’ has existed. Headed by different nationalist groups from all over the country, coming together to make it happen. The demo has been a constant event almost every year. In the mid 2000’s it was banned, but came back in force the year after. During the rise of the French Identitarian movement, National-Revolutionary groups like the GUD went into decline, which endangered the existence of the remembrance march. After the ban on ‘Génération Identitaire’ in 2021, it flourished again. In one way or another it has always existed. And that brings us to the current year.

The ban hit like a nuke. People who just looked like nationalists were dragged off the streets and arrested for hours. One group of activist even got arrested inside of their rented Airbnb. An alternative meeting place was proposed to the city council. This proposal was equally shot down. What now? Via trustworthy contacts, I heard the night would not end yet.

I’m not at liberty to talk about what happened during the evening, but let it be sure that it was a night filled with even more camaraderie. I met old friends who I saw on my previous trips and enjoyed myself immensely. Afterwards, we moved ourselves towards a special location. A remembrance would take place, against the will of city and state.

A walk through a dark forest, stumbling about, keeping up with the rest. A burning torch. The slow beating of the drums. The wind coldly blowing. A moment to never forget. All of us have seen the video by now, but to have been there? Incredible. To stand in a field with a thousand comrades, rejecting the will of presidents and mayors, to see the Celtic Cross fly… it does make your heart skip a beat. Europe truly lives. It lives in us. In our remembrance of Sébastien, killed by the police, lapdogs of the state. It lives in our ode to Quentin, murdered by antifascist scum. It lives in the hearts of every single one of us that remembers the Southport killings, the Brussels bombings and the Cologne rapes. Our victory is inevitable, and our marches of war will make the world tremble.

The almost mythological being that is Léon Degrelle needs no introduction. From the student-journalist to the political powerhouse, from the brave soldier to the larger-than-life godfather of the European right: all know his name. The legends surrounding his meetings with Adolf Hitler, his daring feats at the Eastern Front, his almost unbelievable flight to Spain and his evasion of capture do very much sketch a portrait of a man who fought for what he believed in and did not compromise. We know he was Belgian, that for a time he saw a new Burgundian Empire as the compromise between the Latin and Germanic world, but what was his view on Europe itself?

This text is part one in a series of articles on the European visions of historical and contemporary thinkers, activists, leaders and writers. Expect the ideas of Sir Oswald Mosley, Guillaume Faye, Francis Parker Yockey, Jacques Doriot and many more personalities to be explained and expanded on.

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The air is thick with excitement, tension, and the smell of the Stella Artois brewery as I drive into Leuven by way of train on the 25th of March, 2026. It is a Wednesday afternoon. The weather is a bit dreary, as it always is in the proud nation of Flanders, but somehow small moments of sunshine show the city in its true, beautiful colours. Leuven: a city of traders and dukes, peasants and kings, philosophers, professors, tramps, politicians and, above all, students. Yes; students are what have made the city work for hundreds of years now. Ever since the founding of the University of Leuven in 1425, the city has been the intellectual hotspot for anyone seeking higher education. From popes to princes, many have studied under the roofs of this prestigious temple of knowledge.

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Knowledge, though, wasn’t the main attraction for the night. The ‘Nationalistische Studentenvereniging’ (NSV!: Nationalist Student Union) was holding their yearly demonstration on Thursday the 26th of March. Every year, the demo switches between the three main university-cities of the country: Antwerp, Ghent and Leuven. And, just like last year, a lecture is held by the foreign guest of honour. The evening before the Remigration-demo in Ghent, Austrian Identitarian activist Martin Sellner spoke on the importance of activism. This year, the speaker was the great American patriot Jared Taylor: founder of the American Renaissance Institute and one of the greatest advocates for White self-rule in the last 40 years.

Mr. Taylor spoke on a great many things. In a secret, undisclosed location near the centre of town, debates were held on race relations, the history of the Jamestown Colony, and the future of our people. Taylor places the Americans on equal footing as us Europeans, saying we all belong to a greater Worldwide European Brotherhood: something Dominique Venner also wrote about in the 1960’s. Our people need to stick together to weather this storm, to fight the multicultural hell we all live in, to hold those who did this to us responsible: punish the traitors, take back our nations, protect our own. All of this can only be done by uniting, by realising that we are indeed all branches of one great tree: a tree called Europe.

After some beers and good conversations, I wandered back to my hotel. I needed the sleep, as I would meet comrades from all over Europe again the next morning. And so I did: after a shower, some breakfast and a short walk through town, I arrived at the bar where we would meet. There, people from Flanders, the Netherlands, South-Africa, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Spain, France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Norway and America had gathered to talk about what was about to happen in this quaint city. Wandering through the streets one could see a ridiculous amount of police vehicles, cops searching random people who looked suspicious, leftist sympathisers anxiously avoiding certain parts of the city. Antifa-channels on Telegram were blowing up, spying on us at the café, counting the amount of “fascists” in attendance. To give our side some more credit: it was quite clear who was a nationalist activist just by looking at them. Hair cut short on the sides, Barbour-jackets, Fred Perry clothes, black turtlenecks, dark New Balance or Adidas shoes; the far-right has never looked so good. This in contrast to the shabby, blue haired, filthy communists, affronts to mankind.

At 6pm, the demo against fascism started near the central station. Around 600 mentally handicapped creatures made it clear that the NSV! did not have a place in their city. But what actually is the NSV!? It seems their fame has skyrocketed these last two years after the successes of their previous demonstrations in Antwerp and Ghent, but I doubt many people actually know what they stand for. The NSV! is a Flemish-nationalist, economically Solidarist, National-Revolutionary student union founded in 1976 in Antwerp, and can be recognised by their iconic black-white-red student ribbons and their grey student hats. A separate article on European student culture is in the works, so I will not expand on the meaning and history of these attributes yet, but I can say that this group works as a sort of middle ground between the more radical National-Revolutionary movements (CasaPound Italy, Groupe Union Défense) and the Identitarian groups (Identitäre Bewegung, Geuzenbond). The fact that one student union can connect these two streams of nationalist thought to work towards one goal is quite the feat on its own. The unity that I saw in Leuven is something we should strive for at all times.

Around 8pm, our large group (at least 200 men and women) made their way to the Herbert Hoover-square in the centre of town, next to the beautiful University Library. The nationalist demo would start there in thirty minutes time. Slowly, 1.100 nationalists gathered there, filling the air with chants and our hearts with courage. Members of NSV! walked around with megaphones, others with banners, many more with Flemish flags. The show was about to start. A loud shout from the front of our nationalist train replaced the tense whispers: ‘Europa - Jeugd - Revolutie!’ Yes! Europe, Youth, Revolution: The three cornerstones of our lifestyle, ideas one would fight and die for.

No twenty meters we would walk before the first clashes started. Fireworks flew around, punches were thrown, hundreds of nationalists fought the reds in the middle of the street. A member of the security service was hit on the head with a wooden plank filled with nails, the incompetence of the local police could not hold back this massive tide of violence. Students, politicians, journalists, activists, football hooligans: all united to hold back this wave of communist sympathisers, and in the end the streets were ours.

After one hour and a half we arrived back on the square where it all started. We showed the city who owned it, showed our enemies what we can do. Speeches by members of the NSV! were held, announcing the coming of a new era. Chants for Remigration and Revolution could be heard far and wide. Andrea Ballarati, leader of the Italian ‘Giovani Identitari’ also held a speech, calling upon the leaders of Europe to “send them back!” After singing the national anthems (The Flemish ‘De Vlaamse Leeuw’, the Dutch ‘Wilhelmus’ and the South-African ‘Die Stem van Suid-Afrika’) and the anthem of the NSV! (‘Hier Komt het Oud Sint-Jorisgild’), groups of students left the square to prepare for the afterparty.

And what an afterparty it was! Local beers, music, raids on leftist bars, comradeship and victory announced the end of my few days in Leuven. Happy but melancholic I left this city of Revolution. With my mind towards the future and my heart filled with fire I can say that not only Flanders but all of Europe is in good hands if the activists I have met will be the elite of tomorrow. With a youth as intelligent, active and strong as this, how can we lose?

Supporting the NSV! can be done by clicking the link here.

The foam of the sea, an eccentric writer, camaraderie, blood, bullets, love, the essence of life and death. I could continue writing words that may seem mundane and quite normal to the man or woman who has not heard of the latest literary shift on the nationalist X-scene, but for those who have, flashes of a city on the edge of the Adriatic Sea may fill their minds. Flashes of daggers raised up in the air, glistening in the sun. Flashes of smoky bars filled to the brim with men dressed in black, of nights spent in the arms of a lover, of long, speedy drives through the countryside, of discussions on art, sex, violence and what it means to be alive. Flashes that can be found inside the pages of ‘The Fire and the Sea’ by renowned ‘anon’ and ‘gemposter’ Karl Reiter.1

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‘The Fire and the Sea’ is historical fiction, set in the Italian (now Croatian) city of Fiume, right after the end of the First World War. It follows the story of two Naval ensigns: the young, shy Achille Giuliani and the brash, handsome Vitale Ambrosino. Both men get pulled into the violent, quick and intense maelstrom of the famous Fiume endeavour, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s attempt to annex the port city for the Italian Kingdom. I am here to review the book itself, not to give a history lesson. Besides, I expect my readers to have a certain knowledge on this topic, as D’Annunzio’s war against the world has gained a mythical status in the online spheres of the Right-Wing, much like the Spanish Civil War2 or Léon Degrelle’s adventures in Russia.3

On their adventure, Vitale and Achille meet a plethora of interesting characters, most of them based on real-life revolutionaries who were, at one point or another, active in Fiume. Think of Guido Keller, the leader of the elite ‘Uscocchi’: pirates drunk on alcohol and energised by cocaine, who raid the shorelines of Yugoslavia in search of gold and glory. Or Harukichi Shimoi, the Japanese poet who stood silently by D’Annunzio’s side, a voice of heroic reason in a sea of madness. My personal favourite character is actually one that is completely fictional, but acts like a mouthpiece of the Futurist movement and its founder Marinetti, namely Fiore: a young, hotheaded radical who ends up being one of the pivotal players in the development of both Achille and Vitale as characters.

Of course, there is an elephant in the room: Gabriele D’Annunzio. I would be unable to write this article without talking about the man himself. Poet, playwright, author, politician, activist, war hero; there are too many words to describe this monolith of a human, and even then none do him justice. His endeavour to retake Fiume, even going so far as to declare it a regency under his rule, is one of the principal examples of what it means to dare. ‘Memento audere semper’: these words, the personal motto of D’Annunzio, ring through every chapter, every page, every character.

But outside all of these interesting figures, fictional or historical, the real main character of the story is the city itself. The lights and restaurants, bars, bedrooms, streets and hotels are practically characters on their own. You don’t just read about the city in this book: it feels like you are there yourself. One can easily imagine sitting next to D’Annunzio in his favourite restaurant, the ‘Ornitorinco’, sipping on ‘Sangue Morlacco.’ When one reads of nightly raids on Italian ships or evenings spent training with the elite troops, one could imagine oneself standing next to these brave men. There have only been a few novels that are able to capture the mind like this, and for that I wholeheartedly congratulate the author.

It was my honour to have read this book, practically lived through it, and I highly recommend anyone who is interested to buy it and read it for themselves. I have heard rumours that translations into different languages are on the way, and I am sure Reiter’s work will be a hit with the wider nationalist audiences in Europe and beyond. I am very happy I was able to write the first long, proper review of this monumental work, and I look forward to the next book the author will write. With more men like him on the frontlines of the arts, our enemies don’t stand a chance. ‘Eia Eia Alalà!’

‘The Fire and the Sea’ by Karl Reiter can be bought by clicking the link here.

“Be radical, have principles, be absolute, be that which the bourgeoisie calls an extremist: give yourself without counting or calculating, don’t accept what they call ‘the reality of life’ and act in such a way that you won’t be accepted by that kind of ‘life’, never abandon the principle of struggle.”

Every nationalist and their mother knows this quote, as it has floated around on the internet ever since the world wide web was first conceived. This call to action is almost always attributed to Baron Julius Evola, an Italian artist, poet, philosopher and aristocrat who is lauded as one of the greatest thinkers the revolutionary right has to offer. I have read my fair share of his works, and though I do find him somewhat overrated and blown out of proportion, the effects he has had on the philosophical formation of many an activist and thinker cannot be understated. Evola has certainly earned his place in the pantheon of great men who paved the way for us. Despite this, his most famous quote — the one cited above — is actually not his at all.

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Though falsely attributed, the quote certainly is Evolean in nature. The call to be radical, the rejection of bourgeois morality, struggle as an integral part of life: it surely sounds like something the good baron would write down. While many think it is a sentence from his 1934 work ‘Revolt Against the Modern World’, nobody can offer a page-number. The actual writer wasn’t a daring mountaineer from Italy, who dabbled in dark magic and held multiple lovers. No, the man who came up with this brilliant quote was a silent catholic man from Flanders, a little nation by the North Sea. A youth leader, a separatist: Ernest Van der Hallen.

Van der Hallen was born in Lier on the 2nd of June 1898. At the time of his birth, the Flemish, a Dutch-speaking people and the majority population of Belgium, were repressed by the French speaking elites of the country. The Flemish movement at the time existed largely out of literary groups that tried to protect their language against French imperialism at all costs. That changed during World War One, when French-speaking officers refused to give orders in the language of their troops, with much confusion and many deaths as the result. Dutch was seen as a language for Germanic peasants, after all. During the very last attack on the German positions in 1918, the Belgian high command knowingly placed most leaders of the ‘Frontbeweging’ — Flemish nationalists active in the trenches — on the front lines, where most of them perished in the fire of no man’s land.

This radicalised the Flemish movement, and during the interwar period groups calling for secession popped up everywhere. Van der Hallen, who did not fight during the war but did actively support the Flemish activists, also turned from a romantic cultural patriot into a fervent separatist. Student movements were, as in many cases throughout history, the avant-garde of this new age. Throughout his entire life Van der Hallen supported these youth movements, and tried to instil in them a sense of ancient catholic camaraderie. This is why, in 1932 (two years before ‘Revolt Against the Modern World’ was released), he wrote a little book called ‘Brieven aan ‘n Jonge Vriend’ (Letters to a Young Friend). This is where the aforementioned endlessly repeated and misquoted citation actually comes from. In the original 1932 version we can find it in letter number six, on page 100.1

This short article was written to dispel a myth and to correctly acknowledge Ernest Van der Hallen as the conceiver of this radical parole, in the hopes of finally granting him his own place in our nationalist pantheon. Maybe I will write more on Van der Hallen, Evola or the Flemish movement in other articles, but let us at least conclude this one first.

In Lier, where Van der Hallen lived and died, stands a memorial stone. On it is inscribed in big letters “geef nooit het strijdbeginsel op”: never abandon the principle of struggle.2 Whoever the writer and whatever the book, truer words I cannot think of. They rang true then as they ring true now. If every single one of us keeps this in mind, victory will inevitably be ours.

On the 21st of May 2013, it was a rainy Tuesday afternoon, a shot rang out across the roofs, paved streets and bar terraces of Paris. Out of the most well known Catholic structure in the entire world, the Notre-Dame de Paris, almost 15,000 people had to be evacuated. It was said someone committed suicide, news agencies confirmed the fact. An older gentleman, almost unknown to the world, decided to end his life in front of the altar. The discovery of his identity made the wishes of well-being and heartfelt condolences turn into libel, hate and mocking.

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I am of course talking about Dominique Venner. You may have heard of him. You may have even read one or two of his books. But I believe that is not enough: to know the man is to understand the man, which will in turn help you understand his works far better. I have taken it upon myself to sketch a portrait of this great European, using his own works to create a clear but concise biography.

Dominique Venner was born on April 16th, 1935, to loving parents Odette Manson and Charles Venner. His father, an architect and member of Jaques Doriot’s collaborationist Fascist party ‘Parti populaire française’, sent the young man to the Bossuet College in Paris for his education. Afterwards, the young Venner would also attend Oakland College in Hertfordshire, England, for a while.

Venner, still a child during the Second World War, saw the Germans come and go in a matter of a few years. Sadly, his mother died of Tuberculosis in 1942, which instilled in him a taste for solitude. The months after the war were not easy for the family, a hardship caused by both the broken economy and the repercussions of his fathers’ time in the PPF. Those who know history, also know what immediately comes after this destructive Brother-War: decolonisation.

The winds of change that blew over from Dutch-held Indonesia and French Indochina didn’t take long to reach the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In 1954 Algeria, which had been an integral part of France for 120 years, decided to break loose from the loving embrace of its Gallic mother. Venner, who was enrolled in the military school of Rouffach since 1952, decided to join in the defence of this nation. He volunteered to become a sergeant in the infantry, more exactly the ‘4e Bataillon de Chasseurs à pied’, and left for the front.

What followed were two gruelling years of guerrilla warfare against militants of the FLN, or ‘Front de Libération Nationale’, an Algerian nationalist movement known for its cruelty against both soldiers and the French people who had lived in Algeria for generations. Venner described the war as medieval, and wrote extensively on his life as a soldier in his autobiographical work ‘Le Coeur Rebelle.’ The descriptions of Algerian cruelty, the inability of the French soldiers to do anything to protect the civilians they were sworn to defend: it made Venner disillusioned, almost nihilistic. He left the war in 1956, old beyond his years, but with a fire burning in his heart.1

The cowardice of the French state, lead by the left-wing Radical Party, in its dealings with the Algerian crisis lead to many soldiers and civilians radicalising beyond belief. Nationalist movements popped up like mushrooms out of the ground. On this Venner later wrote in ‘Le Coeur Rebelle’: “A Europe of youth, of brothers and comrades, began to awaken. Algeria seemed to be the torch with which it was possible to set France and all of Europe ablaze.”2

One of these groups, ‘Jeune Nation’, was the driving force behind many of the greatest and most violent actions against the government. The militant group was founded in 1949 by Pierre Sidos, a neo-Pétainist activist and ex-member of the collaborationist ‘Mouvement Franciste’ during the war. Besides its clandestine activities and violent rhetoric, what the group is best known for is the icon it chose to fly on its banners: a white Celtic cross. A symbol that is now so widely used all over Europe, from Lisbon to Kiev and from Brussels to Athens, found its first home in this young French movement.

Venner, who joined the group almost immediately after his return from the Algerian front, saw in it the perfect tool to use this fire burning within him for something good. The young Frenchman became on of its most prolific propagandists and violent but effective activists. He engaged in street battles, lead nightly raids across the city; he even partook in the 1956 storming of the Communist Party headquarters in Paris, revenge for the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising. In 1958, right after the infamous Algiers Putsch, the dawn of the Fifth Republic and the ascension of Charles de Gaulle as president, Jeune Nation was banned by the government.

Despite this, the lives of these young militants did not stop there. Venner and his comrades partook in many more clandestine meetings in smoky bar-rooms, brawls under the metal greatness of the Eiffel Tower, anti-Algerian actions in the ghetto’s of the once-so-great capital of France. By 1961, the law finally caught up to him: a plot to end the presidency of the “traitor” De Gaulle by one means or another was uncovered by the secret police, and many of the conspirators were promptly jailed. Here begins possibly the most important period of Venner’s life: his 18 month long spell in La Santé prison.

In prison, Venner met many other people. Falangists who would start every day with a loud greeting towards the little picture of the Spanish martyr José Antonio Primo de Rivera nailed to their wall. Communists who secluded themselves, reading Chairman Mao’s little red book over and over again. Other nationalist militants, imprisoned for crimes they did or did not commit. These long 18 months gave Venner time to think, to philosophise, to read, to correspond by way of letters with other activists from all over Europe (he would later write on all the letters he received, including ones from Jean Thiriart), to talk, to explore his own mind. What went wrong? How did he get caught? Despite years of activism, did he actually attain even any semblance of success? The answer to this last, very existential question was a short but bitter: no. No, the nationalist movement, despite its size, its leaders, its militants did not get anywhere. They succeeded in pressuring De Gaulle to become president, sure, but where did that get them? Banned, betrayed and jailed. Venner concluded that the nationalist movement of the future needed a doctrinal change. This conclusion paved the way for modern activism.

The manifesto that flowed out of his pen would be published anonymously at first, “by a militant, for other militants.” Only later would he confess to the writing of this small yet monumental work, named ‘Pour une critique positive.’ In this book, Venner explained the need for a new type of nationalism. Not inherently violent, but not pacifist either. Not anti-intellectual, but against the boring and unfulfilling lives of the intelligentsia. National, but also international. Metapolitical, strong and active: that was the correct assessment Venner made of how we were to be.3

In 1963, Venner decided to turn his theory into praxis. The founding of what was to become both a magazine and a movement, ‘Europe-Action’ (clearly a name very dear to my heart) was the beginning of this political adventure. The group around Venner existed out of many young people whose careers were kickstarted by Europe-Action: Alain de Benoist, François Duprat, Jean Mabire: all of these would make a name for themselves later in life as thinkers, politicians and writers, but would have gotten nowhere without the initial help of Venner. In contrast to other nationalist movements in France, Europe-Action was explicitly Pan-European. It refused to give into small-minded chauvinism, and as a result came into conflict with Pierre Sidos and other French nationalists who held on to the old, pre-war tactics and ideas. Despite the tension between these groups, the core message did not change much: anti-liberalism, anti-migration, anti-communism and anti-egalitarianism were still the parole of the day. It just gave these standpoints an intellectual reason for existing, something that had been needed for a long time.

The French and European right weren’t the only things that were changing. Venner, marked by his experiences in Algeria and in prison, grew tired of the activist lifestyle. In 1965, Europe-Action would serve as an official mouthpiece for the failed presidential campaign of the far-right candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt. Herein, it was supported by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was an associate of Venner. After the massive letdown of the elections, members of the movement would found their own party: ‘Rassemblement Européen pour la Liberté’, or REL for short. Venner would serve as its first president for just one year. In the legislative elections of March 1967, the party gained 2.5% of the national vote. Many members, including the party president, resigned. Europe-Action would cease to exist that same year, its activists and writers scattered to the winds. One last political adventure in 1968 — as we all know a year of serious political upheaval all over Europe — also ended in disbandment and failure.

During the decades that followed, Venner focussed on his true love: history. In the 1990’s and 2000’s, Venner directed multiple historical journals. The most important of these, ‘La Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire’, is still seen by both friend and foe as an honest and objective source of historical research. Besides this, many great works ended up being written by the aging Frenchman: ‘Baltikum’ in 1974, a great historical book on the German Freikorps, recently translated into German for those who can read it.4 Or ‘Westerling: Guerrilla Story’, a biography on the Dutch soldier and adventurer Raymond Westerling, published in 1977 and later translated into the Dutch language.5 His ‘Histoire de l’Armée Rouge’, a history of the Red Army6, even netted him some national fame and recognition by one of the most prestigious literary academies in the country. Many works would follow on dozens of topics, ranging from Charles de Gaulle7, a man he once actively fought against, to his monumental ‘Histoire et tradition des Europeéns’ in 2002.8 His biography of Ernst Jünger, published in 2009 and translated into English by Arktos Publishing for the wider public in 20249, gained wide acclaim both within the political right and outside of it. In 2011 one of his most important and interesting works appeared: ‘Le Choc de l’Histoire’ (translated by Arktos in 2015) gives a very rare insight into this secluded man. The book consists of 11 interviews, taken by his wife Clotilde Venner under the pseudonym Pauline Lecompte. In it, he explains his views on his time as an activist and his turn to historical work, his thoughts on politics and Homer, among many other things.10 For readers at the time, the little book filled with interviews seemed maybe a bit strange, a rarity, not something Venner had ever done or would have been expected to do. Two years later, the reason for these interviews became clear to all. As to the peculiar title of this work, Venner explained that “we live in the shock of history, without understanding that we do.”11

When the Japanese writer, actor and bodybuilder Yukio Mishima left his house on the 25th of November 1970 to enact the ultimate form of self-sacrifice, he left open on his desk his last book, ‘The Decay of the Angel.’ The words written on the open page made clear what his own philosophy was: “perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”12 Venner, who had been both a great fan of Mishima and a staunch opponent of suicide during his younger years, was shocked by the voluntary death of his Japanese idol. Throughout the years, it seems he changed his mind on this. Voluntary death wasn’t an easy way out, wasn’t cowardice or anything of the sort: for Venner, as it was for the ancients, suicide was one of the purest forms of death one could attain. As he would write in his last ever work, ‘Un samouraï d’Occident’: “Only suffered death has no meaning. Willed, it has the meaning one gives it, even when it is without practical utility.”13 This work would be his manifesto, his goodbye to the world, his final act of resistance. After sending notes to multiple friends and accomplices from over the years, including Alain de Benoist, and seeing to it that his publisher would receive his last ever written work, Dominique Venner walked out of this world and into the pages of history

His closest confidants were not surprised when hearing of his suicide. His enemies celebrated his death, cheered and made a mockery of him. Politicians such as Marine Le Pen shared their condolences. But very quietly, almost invisibly, a small flame was lit in the hearts of young Europeans. A flame that has fanned out by now, and became a roaring fire, consuming all. These last few years, the works of Venner have been read more and more all over the continent and beyond. ‘Pour une critique positive’ is mandatory reading for new members in most activist groups, and his image hangs in every nationalist bar and patriotic student housing in Europe. Even after death, Venner lives. I hope his spirit looks upon us with pride, knowing that the future of our race is in good hands.