Peter Viereck (1916–2006)

Despite his unquestioned righteousness and knowledge of German culture, this book was a bit off-angle even when it was published, and now, to no discredit to its author, completed out-dated. Those with an interest in these matters are urged to read the works of George L. Mosse, and secondarily of Walter Laquer and Peter Gay. Still, I will always be grateful to Viereck for his good intentions, especially at the time this book was written, and more specificallyt for a great though historically show more inconsequential anecdote about the hyper-Voelkisch ideologue Mathilde Ludendorff (wife of the infamous General): not content with blaming the Jews, the Bolsheviks, and the Freemasons for all the world's miseries, she saw those forces as merely pawns in the hands of Secret Chiefs in Tibet! Actually, that may NOT have been utterly inconsequential, as as it is well-known that Himmler later despatched a special task-force in that direction. And Dwight MacDonald writes somwhere (in POLITICS PAST perhaps?) about two Tibetans who somehow ended-up in the Wehrmacht . . . but anyway, thanks to the sainted shade of Professor Viereck, but I insist that this book is best seen not as a history of National Soialist ideology, but as a case-study in attitudes toward that ideology, surely a very different thing indeed. show less

This is about freedom and totalitarianism, and the struggle for the private life. The issues may persist, but the discussions and edge are very 1950s.

Selfless sacrifice, holy pain, and the fight for the private life are involved in the struggle for the inner imagination against outer mechanization.

Adaptation of a lecture at Kenyon College in 1957 at a conference titled "The Essentials of Freedom"