In 2025 at Harvard, Madeline
Levy presented her dissertation in progress in a graduate-student research workshop,
which I was privileged to attend in my capacity as a research scholar at
Harvard. She was presenting how the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany
appropriated from religion politically, thus in a secular context yet with the
aura of a religious cult. Interestingly, most of the kids in the program had
been in church groups. Almost two decades earlier, I had audited a course on
Nazi Cinema at another university; the course was taught by an 81-year-old
German man who had been forced into Hitler Youth. Unlike Stalin’s cinema, which
was blatant Soviet propaganda, Nazi cinema was escapist (not counting the anti-Jew
propaganda “documentaries”). In contrast, Hitler Youth was hardly escapist, as the
program was steeped in Nazi ideology. Although that ideology was secular,
casting even Catholic Europe as an enemy, Levy was making the case that
religious paraphernalia was incorporated in the program nonetheless. She brought
up the element on ontology, or being, which in turn led me to draw on
philosophy to explain the kids as becoming moral agents in a Kantian sense. Although
philosophy and theology are distinct, both can be applied to political theory in
a historical context.
In using the term, political
religion, Levy related another expression, that of the “sacralization of
politics,” which can include the appropriation of religious language, rituals,
and symbols to the exclusion of traditional religions, and tying of these
artifacts to secularization narratives. That
affect and motive are salient, according to Levy, is interesting because belief
(a type of cognition) has been so salient in the Abrahamic religions. Even in
Hitler Youth, there was a creed, and perhaps a “confirmation” event at which
the kids, assuming agency, formally assented to the set of beliefs.
In thinking more generally of
religious appropriation by the Nazi Party, I raised the question of whether Leni
Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will evinces religious-like ritual, as, for
example, in showing the torch march, in which neo-pagan/druidic elements may be
present. In showing an event—the annual Nazi party meeting—the film can be said
to have a narrative structure, as does myth. Furthermore, regarding the Nazi
flag with blood stains from the brief Nazi uprising in Munich in 1923, Hitler touching
other flags with that flag in order to “sacralize” them treats that flag as a
sacred object having a distinct, set-apart, ontological status powerful enough
to “turn on” those other battle-flags. Images of Jews in a synagogue touching a
wrapped Torah as it is led down an aisle may come to mind, to which Levy
brought up the sacral object consecrated in the Christian Eucharistic liturgy
and even processed.
Levy also claimed that Hitler
was held up as a prophet in the sense of being an intermediary, and even as truth
to power before 1933. In the Old Testament, the prophets tended to be thorns in
the side of rulers, such as Nathan is to King David, whereas even before
assuming power in Germany, Hitler’s role within the party, and later,
Deutschland, was that of power. Therefore, it seems to be that Hitler’s
intermediary role can be better labeled in terms of the divine right of kings, by
which God sanctions absolute political (not divine!) power to human kings, who in
turn can be thought of as partaking in a finite means of the divine attribute
of omnipotence, without being divinized.
Unlike the practice of the
ancient Romans, Hitler did not claim to be, and was not, divinized. Instead,
after the failed assassination attempt in 1944, Hitler claimed on the radio
that he had been narrowly spared by divine providence to complete his mission;
President Trump would make the same claim in after having narrowly missed a
bullet at a campaign event in 2024. In the case of Hitler, the irony in implicitly
invoking the Abrahamic deity as sparing Hitler so he could finish the Final
Solution reflects Hitler’s distinction of the Jews from Judaism, which in turn made
it possible for him to appropriate from religion, including in the Hitler Youth
program.
Levy’s thought on appropriation
of religious symbol, myth, and ritual in the Hitler Youth program centered on
ontology (i.e., reality) as the nature of being, as in holy blood being related
as Germanic spirit to the human soul. Here, the sacred is a marking out of
being, whereas the profane is non-being. In this sense, Leibniz’s notion of God
as perfect being is relevant. In setting apart a special race, which itself may
remind us of God having a “chosen people” in Judaism, the “setting apart”
feature of the process of sacralization is evinced even in terms of sacred
objects, such as a flag, that are ritually and mythically set apart ontologically
in going beyond mere symbol. Even though the Aryan race is “set apart” in Nazi
ideology, individual Germans, even the young people in Hitler Youth, knew that
the individual can and even should be expendable for the collective. That is to
say, a young person in Hitler Youth reached the point of being a moral agent in
being able to realize the moral duty of sacrifice as binding even as the agent
thereby knows oneself to have freedom (of choice). This is basic Kantianism applied
here not to critique the Nazi ideology, but to understand moral agency within
it.
Kant argues that the moral law
applies to finite rational beings (i.e. us), and that the recognition of being
a moral agent (i.e., in realizing that I ought to have a certain motive or do
something) must be premised on being free to do otherwise. I ought to do
X means that I have the freedom not to do X. Kant’s theory maintains
that such freedom is ontological, or noumenal, rather than being merely in the
realm of appearance. Paradoxically, the necessitation of the moral law is
conditioned on the reality of freedom of moral agents.
Whether Hitler Youth had a “confirmation”
ceremony or not, at some point, a participant would have realized that the
freedom of the individual includes the moral law’s necessity as the duty to
sacrifice oneself for the collective. Because reason has absolute value as the means
by which value is assigned to things (and other rational beings), and
individuals are finite rational beings, however, the duty of an individual
rational being to be sacrificed for a collective, which is not a rational
being, is ethically problematic. Even Hobbes insists that individuals have the
right to act to extend their self-preservation even when the political sovereign
is trying to kill them. Even so, that Kant’s moral theory can be used to
critique the deontological or deontic, duty-based, moral dimension of Hitler
Youth is not to say that the participants were not intended to become moral, duty-based
(rather than utilitarian) agents. Perhaps this gets at Levy’s interest in the role
of agency in Hitler Youth.
In short, the secularization of religious symbol, myth, and ritual played a political role in Nazi Germany, including in Hitler Youth. This is not to say that Hitler was divinized or that any religion was adopted as the state religion, as in a theocracy. In terms of the duty-based ethics that ironically discounted to ontology of the individual in favor of that of the collective, the Germanic people, the political “religion” could only play a supporting, or background, role because theology and philosophical ethics are distinct domains even though they intersect. Levy’s notion of ontology as existentialist (i.e., of being) can be bifurcated between that of a distinctly religious transcendent ontology and an ethical ontology, such as Kant’s claim that the freedom of the will is “a fact of reason” that has a noumenal rather than merely phenomenological basis. The difference is that a distinctly religious transcendent referent is inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (Pseudo-Dionysius), whereas Kant’s fact of reason is, well, of reason, and is thus not transcendent in the sense that a religious object is. Therefore, although capable of being related, theology, philosophy (i.e., ontology and ethics) and political theory should not be conflated. Perhaps this too is a fact of reason.
