Word: viereck
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...Carl Schurz is proof that a man of German descent can be a damned good American, even by American standards," Peter Viereck '37, son of a Nazi agent, contended in an interview yesterday. Viereck was completely sincere in this statement for his latest book "Metapolitics" disproves any ideological connection he might have with his very Nazi father, George Sylvester Viereck, chief German Propaganda Agent in this country, now on trial in Washington...
...Metapolitics" contains a summary of all of Viereck's views on Nazlism. It also is a seeming paradox, since it contains those sentiments of diehard opposition to totalitarian principles one would least expect from a man of his parentage. But Viereck has led a very individual life...
...Viereck has a sensitive appreciation for the ideas of his former native land. The problem of the German, as he sees it, is the struggle between his "two souls." Viereck finds that Germans from the days when Rome walled them off from the civilized world have developed a self-consciousness. The ideas of the western world ever since have found a distinctively German world-view from which even intellectuals like Thomas Mann are not entirely free. But Viereck has added something new and solid to this rather debatable conception of German history. He has found in the Romantic movement...
...values of "metapolitics" are the "intertwining of four strands, Romanticism, the "science" of racism, a vague economic socialism, and Volk collectivity," Wagner is analyzed to show his peculiar position as forerunner of the Nazis. Their idealism is precisely the "soaring into metapolitics" Wagner wrote of. This theory of Wagner Viereck holds in common with Jacques Barzun and Reinhold Niebuhr, and is backed up by Hitler's own words. Nazi metapolitics, however, though a definite creed, runs across the grain of western life. It exalts irrationality and denounces reason...
This book belongs to the recent reaction against finding the origins of Nazism in the immediate past. But by revealing the sources of Nazi irrationality, it warns us of the Nazi lurking even in the most rational westerner. For even he is not always perfectly adjusted to society. Viereck gives us an insight that can be a potent weapon for combatting Nazism at its roots...