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The Rise of the National Socialists to power in Germany has stimulated the minds of many who have sought to determine how and why such a movement could have gained momentum and completely engulfed a sober nation. Ludwig Lewisohn, writing in the August issue of Harper’s, states that the people have become possessed by a demon.

“The demon by which the German people is possessed is no night fear of the Middle Ages,” he says. “To say, as has been done, that National-Socialism is a throwback to medievalism is to misunderstand the movement. The demon is the old pagan demon which the Christian Middle Ages sought to exorcise and to drive out forever. German nationalism today is a revolt against Christianity in it broadest as well as in its deepest sense; it is a pagan revolt against the whole of Christian civilization; its dreams, spinning like a dervish, of Nordic armies overrunning the earth, of berserker rage in battle, of the ecstasy of death and blood, To think of the Nazis merely as hoodlums and fools stung into action by hunger and demagogues is gravely to underestimate both the force and the menace of the movement, which has its mad but highly articulate prophets, which has at the core of its inner circle as its ultimate leader, of whom the Hitlers and Goebbels are only vulgar echoes, that extraordinarily gifted poet, Stefan George.”

In order to prove that his statement is not as fantastic as it may seem, Mr. Lewisohn points out that “the Catholic Church is profoundly aware of the pagan character of the German revolution and of its symbolical re-crucifixion of Christ. It was not for nothing that the Prince Bishop of Cologne pleaded for the Jews up to the last possible moment; it was not for nothing that the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris commended the persecuted Jews of Germany to the prayers of the faithful of his diocese. These prelates were motivated by no shallow humanitarianism. They protested in the name of human catholicity of the Church against pagan-racist particularism of the Nazis; they protested against the symbolical pagan attack upon the very roots of the Judaeo-Christian ethical and humane tradition.”

The recent pronouncement of the Nazi restrictions against the activities of women are the natural consequence of the return of an entire society to a pagan, pre-Christian level. The re-subjection of women, Mr. Lewisohn states, is an undeniable tendency of the the Third Reich. Stefan George wrote “Das Weib gebiert das Tier” (Woman Bears But the Beast). Mr. Lewisohn interprets that that statement announces “not only the lower, merely physically generative function of woman; it announces equally the repudiation of Christian romantic love with its mutual respect and faithfulness. In actual practice many thousands of the younger National Socialists are in fact substituting love and loyalty toward male-comrades and toward their leaders for the love of woman, who is limited to breeding and caring for the very young. As in Greece (note again the return to paganism) and as among certain very primitive peoples with their “men’s houses”, this society of heroes and henchmen, of leaders and blindly obedient warriors is to be an exclusively male society.”

The question which Mr. Lewisohn tries to answer is how and why did they get that way. His theory is that the Germans are, as a mass, neurotic which prevents them from having fortitude, the fruit of a calm self-esteem, and that neuroticism, coupled with an inferiority complex, has set the wheels of the Nazi revolution in motion.