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Revisiting the "Nazi Occult": Histories, Realities, Legacies . Edited by Monica Black and Eric Kurlander . Rochester, NY : Camden House , 2015. Pp. 306. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-1571139061 .
Book Reviews
This essay collection is a welcome contribution to the recent renaissance of interest in the complicated history of Nazism, esotericism, and the occult. Uwe Puschner and Clemens Vollnhals have characterized this history as involving "connection and conflict" (Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus. Ein Beziehung- und Konfliktgeschichte [2012]), an assessment the present work certainly confirms. With fifteen contributors and a broad range of topics, this edited volume embodies the complex, contradictory, and nuanced nature of "the Nazi occult." While standard works by George Mosse (The Crisis of German Ideology [1981]) and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (The Occult Roots of Nazism [1992]) have considered the "occult roots" of Nazism, this one seeks to extend the field--beyond even the actual bounds of the Third Reich. It is divided into three chronological sections: 1890-1933, 1933-1945, 1945-present.
A major highlight of the volume is that the authors do not shy away from the "blatant contradictions" (157) of a complex period of German history; indeed, this forms the starting point for contributors like Uwe Schellinger, Andreas Anton, and Michael Schetsche. The essentially heterogeneous nature of occultism existed well before the Nazi Party was founded, as Peter Staudenmaier points out in his chapter, "Esoteric Alternatives in Imperial Germany." He argues that the occult in Germany, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, was fluid rather than static, and that there were often no clear-cut lines between theosophy, anthroposophy, ariosophy, astrology, and the völkisch movement from which the Nazi Party arose. Many of those interested in the occult at the time belonged to several of these movements (often simultaneously), while the fractious nature of such groups led...