Section 3
But that didn't happen; I moved to Norway in 1923 and married a Norwegian woman in her home town of Skien, the capital of the Telemark region, whom I had met as a music student in Dresden. So - in Norway, as in Germany, I didn't subscribe to a newspaper - I only heard about Hitler now and then through newspaper reports, and later in Sweden through Swedish ones. I noticed that the socialist papers in particular wrote of Hitler contemptuously as a "journeyman bricklayer", as if talented people couldn't also emerge from the working class.
On November 9, 1923, there was an appearance in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, which Norwegian newspapers reported on - as I recall, partly with astonishment, partly with rejection and ridicule of such political conditions. In front of an excited audience, von Kahr, von Lossow and Seisser were discussing the domestic political situation on stage, Bavaria's rejection of the Reich, which was heading towards civil war, when Hitler, who felt betrayed by the three advisers, jumped onto the stage from the side, pistol in hand, fired a shot at the ceiling and took control of the proceedings. After reading the newspaper reports, I found this incident embarrassing and explained to inquiring Norwegians with a regretful smile that, thanks to the
Treaty of Versailles and the further treatment of Germany by the other powers, the situation in Germany had now reached the point where we Germans would gradually have to get used to the pistol policy of Central and South American states. Such events can hardly be understood from Scandinavia.
In 1925 my wife and I moved to Uppsala (Sweden) after I had been invited by the State Institute for Racial Biology to give guest lectures and to work there occasionally, and in this way I got to know Uppsala and the institute, where the world's relevant journals were available in various languages - a unique opportunity for further training. In 1927, as our furnished apartment in Uppsala had been taken back by the owner, a Swedish officer with his family, we moved to the island of Lidingö off Stockholm. From there, however, I continued to visit the State Institute in Uppsala.
In both Norway and Sweden, which at that time were still countries where the spirit of Germanic freedom blew, a freedom for individuals, I felt “at home”, just as at home as I had in Germany before 1919. Ubi bene, ibi patria!?
What I took abroad with me as an inalienable asset, as an inner home, was German intellectual life, whose greatness, indeed - if one considers its heights in the arts and philosophy - whose incomparability up to the beginning of the 20th century, I had first felt in Paris, despite all my high regard for the French spirit, and which now became all the more dear to me after losing my external home through the alienating state life of the Weimar Republic. I was now able to introduce my Norwegian wife, who loved German music above all else, to this inner home of mine - also by linking her to the high intellectual life of North Germanic, especially Icelandic-Norwegian antiquity. I hoped that the nationalist idea would renew this German spirit from its Germanic roots - also to restore an external home. From Scandinavia, I equated this ethnic idea with National Socialism, whose anti-ethnic, namely mass (ochlocratic) spirit I only gradually recognized from 1930 onwards.
Almost every year I now travelled to my publisher, J. F. Lehmann in Munich, an elderly gentleman who was proud that, as a civilian who knew the streets, he had penetrated through rifle fire at the head of Swabian soldiers into "red" Munich, from which the Swabians and other troops chased the revolutionaries away in street fighting. On the way there and back I always stayed in Saaleck near Kösen in the house of the architect Schultze-Naumburg, who had already invited me there by letter to Uppsala and with whom I soon became friends.
Hitler was also a guest in this house, a kind of mansion with parkland above the Saale, from time to time, but never in my presence. There I briefly met the young Baldur von Schirach, whom Schultze-Naumburg described as a kind of "pet child of Hitler's", and later, in my friend's house, I also got to know Richard Walter Darr &; even later, when I was already teaching in Jena, I occasionally met Dr. Frick, first a Thuringian and later a Reich Minister. Darre was moved by the idea of "blood and soil", which would not have been so easily ridiculed after 1945 if its North American equivalent, the blood and the land nexus, had been known to the foolish scoffers.\
In the Schultze-Naumburg house I had the opportunity to learn something about Hitler, who was increasingly being celebrated by his party as the great "Führer" during these years. What I learned there neither attracted nor repelled me. But like Schultze-Naumburg, I wanted to hope that Hitler would help me realize the nationalist ideas that connected me with Schultze-Naumburg. I have tried to explain what we mean by "nationalist" on page 6 [note from the VS editor: in this text page 4].
The NSDAP never attracted me, not even as a party, because I had always found all party politics tasteless and European politics since 1919 to be degrading. I was always attracted to individuals, never to larger groups: “Join the smallest group!” (Goethe)
But my stay in Norway and Sweden and my preference for the individualistic nature of many Scandinavians at the time had prevented me from considering joining a party. Like the Norwegian Ibsen, I also found any "compact majority" repugnant. Among Ibsen's characters, I was always drawn to the former apostate pastor Rosmer at Rosmersholm. What I learned about Germany in Skien, Uppsala and Lidingö made me suspicious of all German parties and also of Hitler - despite my continued hope that Hitler would ultimately pursue nationalist goals in addition to the necessary defense against communism, which for me meant the complete destruction of all freedom of the individual.
During one of our annual visits to the house of my publisher J. F. Lehmann in Munich - it may have been in 1928 - the publisher and I were walking along the banks of the Isar from Großhesselohe, where the publisher lived, when the conversation turned to Hitler, who had otherwise been mentioned very little in our conversations. The publisher, an elderly gentleman who had made a great contribution to the nationalist cause, particularly hereditary research (genetics, eugenics), told me that when he learned that Hitler had summoned Röhm, a German officer from the World War, from South America to lead his SA, he had written to Hitler that he had reliable information about Röhm and therefore had to urgently warn Hitler not to vote for this man. Now J. F. Lehmann stopped, looked at me and after a pause said that Hitler had answered him or had him answer, that he, J. F. Lehmann, should not interfere in such matters: "What do you say to that?" - I no longer remember what I replied, but I do know that I said to myself that only an uncouth lout could answer a deserving older gentleman in such a way.
As far as I remember, this conversation on the banks of the Isar did not contribute much to my impression or pre-impression of Adolf Hitler. Anyone like me who came to Germany from Scandinavia at that time quickly had to get used to general rudeness. The Reich was threatened by the wildest communism and the population was torn apart by mutual incitement between the parties, to the point of daily violence - just remember Spartacus. Mutual jealousies, still very rare in Scandinavia at that time, were not exceptions. Adolf Hitler was certainly not the only one in Germany at that time who brusquely rejected the admonitions and warnings of old men.
In 1929, a global economic crisis began to shake the money market of all countries. The result was increased unemployment and impoverishment. Sales in the book trade also shrank. My
income from book sales decreased rapidly; we could no longer live in Sweden. So I left the country, which I loved as much as Norway, with my family and moved to Dresden. Wilhelm Hartnacke, the head of the unusually high-quality Dresden school system, had written to me that he would try to get me a half-time teaching position at a Dresden school, half-time so that I could be free to do my own work. He even managed to do this in such a way that I had the prospect of half the corresponding pension. -
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