The German Occult Scene at the Beginning of the Nazi Era

While both the US and Europe have a history of a belief in the occult, this while Naturopathy currently a valid system of modern medicine while not recognized anymore as 'medicine' in the US because of a special law from the Nazi era still survives in German University's today.

Leave our food as natural as possible was a slogan coined in 1942 by Nazi physician Werner Kollath.

This emphasis on eating right for the Reich was partly about building the Aryan super race,  regenerating the Aryan body that is, plus also may an urge toward national food self-sufficiency (so as not to lose another war to encroaching hunger, as in WWI): all of which stranded neatly into the “Blut und Boden” (Blood and Soil) ethos that wove localism, nationalism, and racism into a single driving slogan. There was this idea that the natural food for the German or the Aryan body is the food that grows from German soil.

In fact already during the early part of the 20th century the occult became also in Germany the core of a mass movement similar to England, France and the USA, not just because individual men and women found it efficacious but also because it adapted itself very quickly to the exigen­cies of modern consumer culture.

Observers at that time put the absolute number of Germans involved in some capacity in the occult movement in the tens of thousands. And during a widely publicized attempt to unmask the medium Anna Rothe at the turn of the century, Berlin had at least six hundred mediums working in 1900. Rothe, whose fame garnered her what were probably very large crowds for a mediumistic perfor­mance, reportedly drew one thousand people to one of the seances she staged for a meeting of a Berlin Theosophical Society in 1901.

At the height of the Rothe scandal in 1902, a local newspaper stated that Berlin alone contained ten thousand spiritualists, and between fifteen and twenty spiritualist clubs. Observers identified Munich, too, as a hotbed of occultism. A representative of the Roman Catholic Church there noted with concern in 1923 that in Munich alone more than ten thousand families had reportedly held seances .

Reports that hundreds of people flocked to occult groups also came in from Germany's smaller cities. A representative of a Protestant church in Chemnitz a very small town, estimated that the local branch of the Gottesbund Tanatra (Tanatra association of God), an international group mixing spiritualist and Christian teachings, had 150 members. Other smaller towns, like Oldenburg, Kunzendorf and Waldenburg (both in Silesia), and Limbach, Glauchau, and Mulsen St. Niklas (all in Saxony) had spiritualist clubs by 1900.

In fact more than two hundred clubs devoted to a wide variety of occult pursuits flourished from the last third of the nineteenth century until 1937, when the Nazi regime officially banned all occult groups. Berlin and Munich together accounted for nearly eighty of these, with other large cities (e.g., Hamburg and Leipzig) housing ten or more each. Urban centers such as these proved hot­beds of occultism not just because of their educated and bohemian popula­tions but also because their infrastructure allowed the curious masses ease access to events. In Munich, for instance, lecturers often appeared in public places: local drinking establishments (where Freemasonry started in London early on) , train stations, and hotels.

The writer Max Kemmerich spoke about astrology and its implications for human freedom to a meeting of the Uranus Gesellschaft fur astrologische Forschung (Society for astrological research Uranus) in 1927 in the big hall of the Kreuzbrau. Similarly, meetings of the Gesellschaft fur psychische Forschung (Society for psychical research) and the Astrologische Gesellschaft (Astrological society) always drew a crowd to the restaurant at the Holzkirchener train station outside Munich.

Famous among these was Monte Verity, near Ascona in Switzerland, which had close ties to Munich's Schwabing subculture in the years before World War 1. Other rural retreats flourished in the years after the war, including the Theosophically tinged Jungborn sanitarium in the Harz mountains. The occult, in short, had an established presence in late ­nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany.

Another sign of the occult movement's mass character was that it at­tracted Germans of widely divergent backgrounds, from the lowest to the highest echelons of the class hierarchy. A good proletarian representative was Joseph Weissenberg, who adroitly traded his occult talents to achieve both leadership and wealth. The son of day laborers in the small Silesian town of Fehebeutel, Weissenberg went to Berlin, where by 1907 he established a prac­tice as a magnetist in a working-class slum. By 1926 he had become the leader of Friedensstadt, a spiritualist settlement that counted thousands of mem­bers, among them men and women from middle-class and aristocratic back­grounds.

Weissenberg was not alone in using his occult gifts to lift his class profile: the Viennese-born clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen (pseudonym of Her­mann Steinschneider), who earned a good income as an occult lecturer and performer in Weimar Germany, was the son of poor traveling actors. His fame earned him the wrath of the Nazi regime, which murdered him in 1933, and the attention of the director Istvan Szabo, who in 1989 produced a film about Hanussen's life.

Men and women of petty bourgeois origins also embraced the occult with enthusiasm. A case in point, Adolbert Haugg, was a postal worker turned "private scholar" who ran his own spiritualist club in Munich during World War I. The Verein Freibund, as it was called, met in local beer halls or hotels and featured Haugg's lectures and demonstrations on "the will." Typically drawing audiences of a few dozen people, these meetings often showcased one of the female audience members acting as a medium, while Haugg served as the hypnotist.

A policeman who attended a club meeting at a local hotel in 1917 noted in his report that of the twenty-seven people present, sixteen were women. That evening, the audience listened to a lecture on the history of hypnotism by Haugg, then watched as he hypnotized a volunteer named Maria Schiessl, a housewife married to a carter. To the amazement and delight of his audience, Haugg successfully took away Schiefs ability to count higher than five.

Although Haugg did not seek to make a living by occult means, other Ger­mans of his class background did. The Bavarian medium Claire Reichart, the daughter of a tailor, had worked as a salesgirl in her hometown of Hattenhofen, come to Munich as a dancer, and then set herself up as a fee-charging clairvoyant during the Weimar years.

In 1924, the Munich police department claimed to know of three hundred fortune-tellers work­ing in the city, most of whom seemed to be either young women from the Berufsklassen (former waitresses, widows, and wives of civil servants) or men previously active as tailors and shoemakers. This observation linking medi­umship with class rather than merely the sex of the practitioners reflected a larger reality: men of petty bourgeois background (in marked contrast to their brothers from the higher classes) often worked as mediums.

Rudi Schneider, who achieved fame as the investigative subject of Schrenck-Notzing's mate­rialization experiments in the 1920’s, was a good example of this pattern. Born into a lowly typesetter's family in a small Austrian town, in exchange for his mediumistic services to Schrenck-Notzing he was given training as a me­chanic, which allowed him to achieve an independent economic existence in the big city.

Whereas du Prel and Hubbe-Schleiden had always stressed the scientific and scholarly underpin­nings of the transcendent worldview and had indeed avoided using the word occult in the subtitle, Paul Zillmann took a more populist approach. He made no bones, for instance, about the explicitly occult focus of his journal, subtitling it as a "monthly journal for the study of practical metaphysics, psychology, oriental philosophy, and general Occultism. With no pretensions about ca­tering to an exclusively educated audience, he carried a jumble of articles and reports whose tone spanned everything from the scholarly to the sensational­ist. Breathless reports on mediumism, astrology, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, rays, phrenology, and yoga sat side by side with more serious pieces by Theo­dor Lipps and Carl du Prel. There were also diverse contributions from inter­national authors, including the Austrian Ariosophical theorist Guido von List, the Russian-born Theosophical leader H. P Blavatsky, and the British astrol­oger Alan Leo.

Supplementing these were bulletins on Nietzsche's deteriorat­ing mental condition, a notice on an upcoming Zionist congress, obituaries for contemporary alchemists, and reports on recent scientific discoveries as di­verse as the sighting of lights on Mars and a Dusseldorf magnetist's successful treatment of a case of eczema .

While proletarian and petty bourgeois Germans clustered heavily in spiri­tualist circles, the propertied and educated middle classes maintained a sig­nificant presence in a variety of occult sectors and dominated psychical re­search and Theosophy.

Members in three key early psychical research and Theosophical clubs were drawn heavily from the bour­geois professions of law, medicine, business, and journalism. The son of the composer Karl Maria von Weber, founded the Verein zur Bekampfung der .- visektion (Society for the fight against vivisection) and converted Richard Wagner to the cause of anti­isectionism.

Long before university professors began to embrace the occult in significant numbers, bourgeois professionalism had become a marker of status in the occult milieu. One sign of this was that many occultists carrying profess­ional titles had not earned them, but rather assumed them spontaneously.

Hugo Vollrath, Franz Hartmann's secretary at the turn of the century

went on to become a prominent Theosophical publisher, dubbed himself "Dr." Vollrath, although he had no university degree. Hartmann himself had practiced as a medical doctor without ever having earned the title. By the time his obituary appeared in 1912, he had also managed to assume the honorary "doctor of philosophy."

The trappings of profession­alism were particularly sought after in the astrological and characterological sections of the occult revival, where special certification procedures, schools, and titles were set up to demarcate "scientific" astrologers and characterologists from their "amateur" competitors.

Although the professional element in the German occult movement was largely male, neither maleness nor professionalism fully described the move­ment's bourgeois composition and character. Their names did not often ap­pear on lists of occult authors or leaders, but nonetheless, middle-class women were present in large numbers in the occult movement. Early on, they played a key role in introducing and spreading occultism. Max Dessoir, in fact, recalled that he had begun his mediumistic forays in the company of several artisti­cally inclined women before going on to help found the Gesellschaft fur Experimental-psychologie.

Bourgeois women also founded, led, and spoke at their own occult societies. One such woman was Hanna Vogt-Vilseck, a writer and singer who formed the spiritualist circle Die Sucher (The seekers) in Munich in 1918. Her group, which purported to combine the mental edification of its members with scien­tific research, featured lectures (mostly delivered by Vogt-Vilseck herself) on a wide range of topics: spiritualism, astrology, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and even Goethe's theory of light. The lecture roster for the five Monday evening meetings of the Astrologische Gesellschaft Munchen (Munich astrological society) in 1932, for instance, included two women.

As audience members, women demanded-and received-presentations tailored to their interests and expertise. At a meeting of the Astrologische Gesellschaft Munchen in 1927, one observer noted that the large audience consisted mostly of women, the majority of whom already seemed to possess a sophisticated understanding of astrology. Amazed, the reporter wrote that they looked like innocent knitters rather than Schwabing bohemians-and their astrological proficiency.

Similarly, a lecture delivered in Munich in 1930 by the astrologer (and lawyer) Hubert Korsch on the topic "Why Study Astrology?" drew 180 people, of whom two-thirds were women. Korsch pitched his lecture to the interests of his sexually mixed audience, stressing the importance of astrology to child rearing and getting married as well as to practicing law or medicine and choosing a profession .

If bourgeois women showed up in significant majorities as audience mem­bers at many occult events, they also vastly outnumbered bourgeois men as mediums. Madeleine Guipet, for instance, who first achieved fame in Munich as the "dream-dancer Madeleine G.," was the wife of a well-to-do French businessman; and the writer Harms von Gumppen­berg had his first convincing exposure to spiritualism through an unnamed woman from Munich's genteel society who had previously granted sittings to Schrenck-Notzing.

Occult clubs also drew their membership from Germany's social upper crust. Albert von Schrenck­Notzing, for instance, was born with an aristocratic title, and his marriage to the heiress Gabriele Siegle gave him access to a large fortune and landed him on the board of directors at the chemical concern I. G. Farben. Schrenck­Notzing used the wealth he thus acquired to fund his occult projects, hiring mediums like Rudi Schneider and building an elaborate research laboratory in his Munich villa. His money also helped him make his occult experiments a passion of Munich's high society. The elegant seances he staged at his home, which usually featured lower-class mediums, were thus both scientific experi­ments and social events for the city's economic and social elites. Nor was Schrenck-Notzing by any means alone among German elites, as participants and observers alike regularly noted. The psychiatrist Albert Moll recalled the enthusiasm with which Eliza von Moltke, the wife of the famous general, had embraced spiritualism .Similarly, when he first made contact with the Mu­nich community of spiritualists, psychical researchers, and Theosophists in 1888, Max Dessoir marveled at the energy of the women helping to pioneer the new worldview locally. Among them were Albertine du Prel, Emma von Max, and the countess Caroline von Spreti.

Occult activities even touched the social sphere of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Three members of the aristocratic Liebenberg Circle within which Wilhelm did so much of his socializing were heavily involved in spiritualism: Philipp zu Eulen­burg, Axel von Varnbuler, and Kuno Moltke. Eulenburg, who sought spiritualist treatments for his neurasthenia, headed a family of devoted spiritualists and even used his spiritualist experiences to entertain the Kaiser. Wilhelm participated in at least one seance in 1888, but he did not share Eulenburg's passion for them .

The Kaiser, in fact, clearly feared that his friends' spiritualist interests might give political opponents a weapon against him. Thus he warned Eulenburg in 1903 to avoid revealing his occult predilections, explaining that such publicity might hand the Social Democrats a tool to use in their cam­paign to discredit the Kaiserreich.

Wilhelm also expressed disapproval over the involvement of civil servants in the occult movement. And if the news­papers were an accurate gauge, the occult had indeed spread into such circles. The periodical Reichsbote, for instance, blamed highly placed officers and civil servants for having introduced spiritualism to Potsdam just after the turn of the century.

If the occult's appeal to Germans at all levels of the class hierarchy was yet one more indication that this was a truly mass movement, two final signs were the movement's cultural tenor, which was decisively syncretic, and its political valence, which was diverse. Germans eager to invigorate their spiritual lives looked to other parts of the world for inspiration, particularly to the East. In a revealing phrase, the writer and Schwabing resident Annie France-Harrar noted that in the 1890’s her circle of bohemian friends had experienced a "spiritual wind blowing from East to West.

As her examples of Theosophy and Buddhism (whose re-invented importation from India was facilitated by Theosophy) indicated (See: and ) East could mean from the European or Asian orient. Indeed, when Theosophy arrived in Germany in 1884, it had already been deeply affected by its founders' contact with Buddhism in India, where Blavatsky and her followers had moved earlier in the decade. Spiritual journeys eastward were also an important rite of passage for serious occultists. Franz Hartmann had lived in India in the early 1880’s; Wilhelm Hubbe-Schleiden had been there for several years in the 189o’s. Nor were such journeys limited to Theosophists, as the case of the astrologer Rudolf von Sebottendorf demonstrates. Sebottendorf, the son of a Saxon train driver, had quit his engineering studies at the Berlin polytechnic and spent several years in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s adventuring in Anatolia, where he also became a student of occultism in Istanbul.

While many participants in the German movement thus embraced occult­ism flowing from Eastern sources, other Germans were not so ready to give up on Western traditions. These men and women experimented with joining the occult to a revamped Christianity, a pattern particularly visible in the spiritual­ist context. The cover of the spiritualist periodical Zeitschrift fur Seelenleben (Newspaper for spiritual life), for instance, featured a logo arranged around the central figure of a Christian cross. Nor was it uncommon for Christian elements to enter into the staging of occult events. In Munich in 1898, a Protestant minister from Berlin, Max Gubalke, chaired the congress held by the spiritualist Verband deutscher Okkultisten (Association of German occultists). In 1929, the successor to this group, the Bund fur Seelenkultur (Association for spiritual culture), opened its annual convention with a re­ligious song.

These Christian strains in the German occult movement pointed to an important Western dimension that coexisted with its orientalism. Franz Hart­mann and Georg von Langsdorff, it is worth remembering, were both initially exposed to spiritualism in the United States, and many members of Germany's first Theosophical society had close contacts with American Theosophists.

In addition, many of the professional mediums traveling the German occult circuit came from the United States. Germany also had important occult connections visa- verse with its southern neighbors. From Italy came the famous medium Eusapia Paladino, a woman from Naples, and Austria, too, sent many mediums north­. Their ranks included Willi and Rudi Schneider, Karl Weber, Erik Jan rianussen, Rafael Schermann, and Maria Silbert.

If participants jumbled Eastern and Western elements in their bid to inte­rtain the occult with modern life, the movement as a whole also encompassed a variety of political orientations. One, volkisch. Ariosoph­y clubs in particular joined their occult pursuits with programs for racial

purity and Germanic nationalism . Another was commu­arian, the Oschm-Rahmah-Johjihjah Lodge, for instance, consisted of nineteen women and five men, who lived together in a Theosophical commune in southeast Berlin just after the turn of the century. Despite the lodge's communal lifestyle, its focus on the spiritual journey of the individual was in keeping with the dominant bourgeois center of the move­ment, whose main project had less to do with wholesale political or social reform than self-reform.

It should not surprise us, in any case, that the occult movement could encompass such widely divergent cultural and political in­flections. Participants felt a deep alienation from the status quo and repeat­edly showed their willingness to experiment widely to find a more satisfying alternative.

Hans Fischer was an alienated office worker who often wondered if life held nothing more for him than the dull, daily routine of typing and filing in a small room shut off from the wider world. Introduced to the reform movements-vegetarianism, naturopathy [Naturheilkunde], Theosophy, and nudism, prompted him to join a nudist club. And it was on one of the club's outings that Hans finally encountered the occult in the figure of a certain Dr. Korn. With two nude female companions happily splash­ing in the water nearby, Hans and Dr. Korn lay unclothed in the open air and spoke about the world of immaterial spirits and occult medicine. Hans now resolved to study the occult sciences with Dr. Korn, whom he dubbed the "en­lightener of the enlightened.”

This account of the making of a Lebensreformer first appeared in 1922 in an autobiographical novel written by an early leader of the German nudist move­ment named Egbert Falk (pseudonym for Georg Furhmann). Although fic­tional, the story of Hans Fischer's education and reform captured important historical realities pertinent to the study of the German occult movement. Like Hans, many Germans found their way into the world of Lebensreform, includ­ing its occult variants, through texts published by the numerous small presses that proliferated from the imperial era onward.

The modernist writer Gustav Meyrink, for instance, reported that he had been on the verge of suicide when an occult pamphlet shoved underneath his apartment door led him to embrace a Theosophical life instead. Al­tough Meyrink probably mixed fact and fiction to dramatize this story, text­-related conversions like his were widely reported by his contemporaries. Early German spiritualist Georg von Langsdorff in 1859, chanced upon a newspaper article reporting the: discovery of the spirit world . Similarly, Gottfried Kratt recalled being a materialist, atheist, and socialist until his "conversion" to occultism in 1892, this occurred while browsing in a bookstore, where he hadchanced upon a cheap edition of Carl du Prel's Der Spiritismus, which con­vinced him to trade in his former commitments for the new worldview of occultism.

In addition to being stimuli to conversion, the many texts of the occult movement also functioned as informative billboards. Typically, occult texts came bundled with several pages of advertisements for related books or ser­vices that readers might find of interest. The advertisements accompanying E. Honold's spiritualist memoirs featured several volumes on dreams, life after death, somnambulism, and mind reading; manuals instructing readers on how to conduct their own seance or analyze their own handwriting; therapeutic cookbooks for those suffering from intestinal disorders or the diseases com­mon to "mental workers" (Kopfarbeiter); self-help medical texts on under­standing one's hemorrhoids and the disease-producing aspects of processed sugar; many books on human sexuality; and several inexpensive pamphlets directed to "everyman," whose titles-for example, "How Do I Become an Athlete?" and "How Do I Become Rich?"-indicated their contents . Book covers became places to advertise not just further texts for readers to buy but also clubs they might join, bookstores they might patronize, and products they might sample. The Berlin spiritualist club Sphinx for example, directed aspirants to the spiritualist bookstore run by I. F. Conrad on Berlin's fashionable Friedrichstrasse, and plugged the virtues of Himalayan "elephant tea" for mediums .

Many presses published manuals that provided simple, step-by-step instructions on how to cast one's own horoscope, conduct a family seance, or use a dowsing rod. In 1925, the butcher Johannes Reichardt achieved fame as the "Alchemist of Gunzenhausen" for allegedly transmuting lead into gold with the help of pow­ders and directions uncovered in his hometown of Gunzenhausen. Reichardt's discovery of these tools followed a prophecy Paracelsus had supposedly made in the sixteenth century. A small press with the catchy name Cloud Traveler had reissued the script of this prophecy in 1923, just in time to help Reichardt make his newsworthy alchemical discovery in 1925.

Those with a commitment to the scientific study of mediumism and allied psychic phenomena could consult Psychische Studien (f. 1874), which remained the preeminent journal of German psychical re­search until the 1930s and retained this position when it resumed publishing after World War II. From the 1880’s onward, readers eager to learn more about Theosophy had an equally large range of publications at their disposal. Preemi­nent among these were Sphinx (1886-96), edited by Wilhelm Hiibbe-Schleiden and heavily influenced in its outlook by the psychical researcher Carl du Prel; Lotusbliithen (1892-1900), edited by Franz Hartmann; and Neue Meta­physische Rundschau (1896-1918), published and edited by Paul Zillmann. Following the establishment in 1909 of Astrologische Rundschau, Germany's first periodical exclusively devoted to astrology, over the next three decades more than two dozen German-language periodicals devoted to astrological topics appeared.

A few presses sat at the interface between the occult and volkisch strains of German modernism. One was the press of Max Altmann, who took over the German lead in Theosophical publishing after the initial work had been done by Wilhelm Friedrich. Devoted primarily to occult and Theosophical topics, this Leipzig house also published a few volkisch tracts. The press of Paul Zill­mann also sponsored volkisch authors, particularly in its journal Neue Meta­physische Rundschau, which carried several articles by prominent Ariosophists like Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Whereas neither Altmann nor Zillmann made the link between the occult and volkisch modernism central to their publishing record, other presses did. These included all Ariosophical establishments and several astrological presses.

Bur whereas the houses run by Oswald Mutze, Max Spohr, and Max Altmann brought out hundreds of titles each, even the most active of these volkisch presses produced no more than a dozen texts, and many published fewer than ten. Another peculiarity was that these presses shunned the eclectic and international approach taken by the occult mainstream. Instead, these presses tended to feature the works of a small group of German-speaking volkisch authors like Guido von List, Lanz von Liebenfels, Herbert Reichstein, A. M. Grimm, and E. Issberner-Haldane. In 1935 Herbert Reichstein published a list of recommendations for the reader dedicated to "the development of his charac­ter and his Nordic and Aryan world ... view." The list began with Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf and included Julius Langbehn's Rembrandt als Erzieher, several works by the "philosopher" of National Socialism Alfred Rosenberg, and a series of Ariosophical classics. Standard works of the mainstream occult movement like du Prel's Der Spiritismus or Karl Kiesewetter's occult history did not appear on this list.  

 

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