NS Literature Archive Mirror

Human life is an eternal struggle, like Dr Faust's wrestling with good and evil, if it is to be creative and striving forward. This inner struggle is perhaps the truly formative force in the life of an individual. And the more deeply grounded a person is, the more exclusively this constant inner conflict defines their destiny, lifting them beyond the trifles of everyday life, in the generosity of an all-encompassing spirit and personality, to the truly great destinies of existence. Thus, for the heroic individual, struggle and life become one. The same thing confronts us in the history of our German people, and the two political antagonisms around which this creative struggle was waged are worthy of it in their magnitude—on the one hand, the imperial dream of world happiness, and on the other, the deeply rooted nationalism of the two great German peasant peoples, Bavaria and Lower Saxony, both originally united under the Guelph ducal crown. The tragedy of our nation to this day lies in the fact that, from the heroism of Frederick Barbarossa to the cosmopolitan age of African missions and colonial foundations, right up to our present day, this internal struggle for shaping Germany's destiny has not yielded an organic German concept of the state as a guiding principle for the future of our people. For the second time, the Reich collapsed because of this; the collapse of the Hohenstaufen Empire's crusading policies at the end of the 13th century was inevitably followed by that of the modern "crusade-like policies" of the German people before the Great War – will there be another, perhaps final and ultimately devastating collapse of Germany if the "nation of poets and thinkers" does not learn from its own history and recognize the fundamentally correct concept of the state, and if it does not choose to follow the path of the new, National Socialist Third Reich. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation pursued a global policy, seeing its true historical task in shaping foreign lands, in which its own people, the Germans, were more of a tool than an end in themselves. The purpose of German policy was not, as we might think, "struggle for living space and the development of the German people," but rather: domestic power, Christianity, world domination. Therefore, tens and hundreds of thousands of Germans had to give their lives on the Crusades. Their blood soaked foreign soil, was uselessly lost to their own people. It did not create new living space from which a new branch of German national identity could have blossomed. [...] The history of recent decades can also prove a blessing for the German people if, from the repetition of the collapse of the old medieval concept of the state, from the catastrophe of an inorganic political idea, they gain the insight that their path must lead them through the rebuilding of a genuine German peasantry; their struggle amidst the world powers can only consist of the internal growth of a healthy German state, independent of foreign influence and the world in its living conditions. Our future course will not be the crusading policies of a bygone millennium, of the Hohenstaufen Empire or the new crown. Now is the time ripe for the organic concept of the state to triumph through the two German peasant peoples, the Bavarians and the Lower Saxons—a political idea that, through the two collapses of the proud empire, now manifests itself in the concept of a German policy toward Eastern Europe. We inscribe on the German people's banner the struggle for our peasant land, the German East of the future.