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SCHOPENHAUER AT YPRES
Charles Wing-Uexküll
“Every grade of the will’s objectification fights for the matter, the space, and the time of another.” – Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, book II
“He who would live must fight.” – Hitler, My Struggle
In the pre-dawn darkness on the morning of October 29, 1914, the soldiers of the newlyformed 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment marched toward the burning villages surrounding Ypres. The reservists, all young volunteers, had departed Munich on trains a week before in high spirits, full of nationalist fervor, some of them even expecting to participate in an amphibious assault on England. But now they were hungry, tired, and paranoid. The regimental field kitchen had gotten lost the night before, so the men missed supper. A nearby battery firing two shells every fifteen minutes through the night deprived them of rest. On the journey to the front, half-burnt Lille was a depressing sight, and rumors of civilian spies and saboteurs in the hinterland had the regiment on edge. A messenger on horseback had been shot by a Belgian civilian insurgent, and soldiers from the 16th, named the “List Regiment” after its commanding officer, arrested the villagers and wanted to hang them, but nothing had come of it.
The situation in Belgium was developing into a dangerous stalemate for the Imperial German Army. Invading neutral Belgium had been a calculated risk: although the violation of the rules of war and the subsequent collateral damage inflamed international opinion against Germany, the prospect of driving straight to the ocean, capturing ports, and outflanking the French and British defensive lines was too good to pass up. But multiple attempts by German cavalry to outflank the British on the ten mile-wide strip of flat, sandy soil by the sea had already been rebuffed in the late summer and fall of 1914.
On October 27, the Belgians opened the floodgates at Nieuwpoort at high tide and inundated the low-lying lands near the water, cutting off the northern route around Ypres and focusing the struggle on the town itself. After the Fourth Army’s advance bogged down, the decision was made to concentrate a new force and attempt a breakthrough in the British lines. Army Supreme Command issued an order on October 28, the day before the List Regiment’s assault, to assemble Army Group Fabeck out of elements of the XV Corps and II Bavarian Corps, along with the 26th Infantry Division and the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division (the List Regiment’s division)—this force would be thrown at Ypres along the southeast-northwest road running from Menin to the center of Ypres. On the largest scale, the situation was bafflingly complex, with army commanders balancing their inventory of artillery shells, the exhaustion and capabilities of their troops, and the capacity of their supply lines for replenishment against inclement weather, incomplete intelligence, and a strategic situation that was rapidly devolving into positional warfare. But on the individual scale, things were simpler.
The List Regiment arrived at its assembly point just below the crest of a hill behind the front. Private Adolf Hitler fixed his bayonet to his Gewehr 98, a bolt-action rifle with a five round magazine, surrounded by freshly dug graves of German soldiers, each topped with a steel helmet. The task was to assault in a northwesterly direction up the road toward the town of Geluvelt, where an 18th century chateau and windmill commanded the nearby fields and hedges. Units from the British Expeditionary Force’s York Regiment, the 1st Coldstream Guards, 1st Black Watch, 1st Grenadier Guards, and 2nd Gordon Highlanders awaited the Bavarians in the village, the chateau and its outbuildings, and snipers hid in a nearby tobacco field. The British troops had already been fighting for weeks and were low on ammunition, but an intercepted message warned them of the impending attack.
The List Regiment came under artillery fire well before it reached the British positions, but pressed forward amidst a German counter-barrage. The inexperienced reservists crossed British trenches before they had been cleared and were shot from the sides and from behind; some platoons were ordered to hold back and fire, while others were told to advance without stopping. One man in the List Regiment reported being so frightened at seeing his comrades cut down by rifle and artillery fire that he kept running forward without looking back; others were completely overwhelmed and deserted on the spot, returning to the unit several days later. British machine gun fire from the windmill and snipers in the tobacco field chewed through the regiment; the survivors found themselves fighting for their lives in British trenches with their bayonets. The regiment suffered 349 fatalities on October 29, a grim harvest on its first day in action.
Hitler and the List Regiment spent the night in trenches at the bottom of the hill below the village. The next morning brought a cold rain, and Hitler’s battalion fought its way up most of the hill, although its manpower had been cut in half. Captain Rubenhauer pled against another assault on the village and its chateau, but he was overridden. On the 31st, elements of the List Regiment took Geluvelt and cleared the chateau, but paid dearly for it. Colonel Julius List was shot and killed as he entered the park of the chateau, and his adjutant was wounded. The chateau’s ruined grounds—shattered greenhouses, blasted formal gardens, splintered tree stumps—were partially recaptured by troops from the 2nd Worcesters later that day. Hitler spent the night of the 31st in a formerly British trench with the rest of the 1st Battalion. Hitler had been in combat continuously for 72 hours and his regiment was decimated: the enlisted men had been reduced from approximately 3,000 to 725 men, and there were only 4 officers left from the original 25. What remained of the List Regiment was withdrawn to rest in Wervicq on the evening of November 1. In the next week and a half, the front would barely advance another few kilometers toward Ypres, and would remain roughly static through the first half of 1917; the British had withstood the assault in a bloody defensive contest they would later call the ‘Three Great Days.’
The battle for Geluvelt, itself part of a larger German failed breakthrough attempt, was a unique experience for Hitler during the war. The List Regiment’s entry into combat occurred prior to Hitler’s promotion to Gefreiter and before he had been assigned to the regimental staff as a dispatch runner: at the beginning of Ypres, he fought as a regular infantrymen. By the winter of 1914, Hitler already seemed harder, and somewhat distant from the other enlisted men of the regiment—he strongly disapproved of the ‘Christmas truce’ members of the List Regiment held when they crossed lines, exchanged gifts, and sang carols with troops from the British 5th Division. Heinrich Lugauer, a fellow regimental messenger, reported that Corporal Hitler was enraged by the behavior of the German men and said “Something like this should not even be up for discussion during wartime.”
Incidents like Hitler’s reaction to the Christmas truce, and scattered letters he wrote to his former landlord, have been mined by historians looking for the origin of Hitler’s radical nationalism and anti-Semitism. The tendency of contemporary Hitler biographers is to try to push the date of Hitler’s radicalization as far forward as possible and to attribute it to propaganda encountered in Munich after the war ended. Ian Kershaw went so far as to claim that Hitler back-dated his conversion to radical politics as part of a self-reinvention during the 1920s as someone who had “struggled from the first,” asking in Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (1998) “Why might Hitler fabricate the claim that he had become an ideological antisemite in Vienna?”
Thus Brigitte Hamann in Hitler’s Vienna (1999), while noting the grievances that ethnic Germans in Austria had with the tottering, cobbled-together multinational Habsburg Empire, works hard to present the young Hitler as a shiftless bohemian uninterested in politics. Hamann’s Hitler was happy to use Jewish art dealers such as Jakob Altenberg to move his postcard-paintings and, while surrounded by volksich and anti-Semitic pamphlets and newspapers, never joined a pan-German organization and was therefore merely a “right-wing chauvinist” and not yet a radical. She devotes a whole chapter to Hitler’s “Political Role Models,” especially anti-Semitic and pan-German nationalist parliamentarian Georg Schönerer, whose followers greeted each other with “Heil!” and called him “Führer,” only to commit herself to the absurd argument that Hitler modeled himself on Schönerer after the First World War, after he left Vienna. In Vienna, Hitler was supposed to be pedantic, inflexible, afraid of women, choleric. Hamann insists that in Vienna, Hitler was not in any way charismatic and even attributes the “compelling force of Hitler’s blue eyes” to later practice and actors’ training. Hamann concludes near the end of her study: “In any case, Hitler’s career cannot be derived, let alone understood, from his situation in Vienna.”
Similarly, Thomas Weber’s Hitler’s First War (2010) deconstructs and downplays Hitler’s wartime letter of February 5, 1915 to his acquaintance Ernst Hepp, where he hopes that he will “return to the fatherland [to] find it a purer place”, and that the sacrifice of blood his comrades made will smash Germany’s outside foes but also its “inner internationalism.” Weber likewise dismisses the explicit völkisch-ness of some of the List Regiment’s soldiers. Weber narrates each battle of the List Regiment in order, in each case finding that the fighting’s effects on the men’s political and social attitudes were indeterminate. Of the Battle in Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, Weber writes: “It was still unclear what impact the battle had had on the attitudes and political mentalities of Private Hitler and the men of his regiment” (this was after the ‘sacrifice of blood’ letter to Hepp). He needs to find that Hitler was not ‘made’ by the First World War, that the experience of the war didn’t radicalize him; to make that argument, of course, Weber must ignore the broader context of the Freikorps and the many men who manifestly were radicalized by the war. But to locate the origin of Hitler’s ‘evil’ in real ethnic dispossession as in Germanspeaking Austria or in his wartime experience, is to legitimate and ground it in the minds of contemporary historians. So instead, they imbue the anti-Semitic mind virus spread by Munich rabble-rousers with ultimate responsibility, in order to make Hitler’s radicalism contingent and opportunistic rather than inevitable, and a matter of personal vice rather than a structural necessity.
But there is another potential source for the kernel of Hitler’s weltanschauung: his study of Schopenhauer during the Great War. August Kubizek, Hitler’s close boyhood friend in Linz and then roommate in Vienna, reported that Hitler read Schopenhauer closely even before the war. Hans Frank said that Hitler told him he read Schopenhauer during the Great War, and Nietzsche during his imprisonment at Landsberg in 1924. According to his Table Talk, on May 19, 1944, Hitler said that he had carried Schopenhauer’s works with him in his rucksack, presumably instead of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which was issued to Imperial German troops in a special military edition. His secretary, Christa Schroeder, wrote that she recognized one of Hitler’s seemingly impromptu speeches as “a rendition of a page of Schopenhauer”, an anecdote cited by Hitler biographies as evidence of the derivative nature of his thought, but one which supports the notion that he had a deep familiarity with Schopenhauer’s work.
By directing our attention to Hitler’s reading of Schopenhauer during the Great War— potentially even at Ypres, as his regiment fought in Flanders for years, through Passchendaele in late 1917—we decenter the anti-Semitism and German nationalism as the ‘core’ of Hitler’s worldview. In our analysis, those ideologies look more like consequents of a metaphysics rather than its core postulates. We consider a dangerous question in intellectual history: what if the Third Reich and its war was not merely motivated by cheap demagoguery, but by a profound philosophy with unsettling implications for the society and people we care about? And we gain a glimpse into a more fundamental, alien landscape: a world where an aimless, blind Will writhes without ceasing, and pieces of it that we objectify as individual beings engage in desperate combat with each other over living space, energy, and time.
Underneath the grievances of Viennese-German nationalism and the postwar beerhall conspiracy theories lies a vision strange and cold: species of animals and types of human emerge from raw matter as expressions of an eternal Idea and kill and take from each other to perpetuate themselves in space and time. As Schopenhauer writes in the second book of The World as Will and Representation: “Persistent matter must constantly change the form, since, under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear, snatch the matter from one another, for each wishes to reveal its own Idea.” A decade after Ypres, Hitler would write in My Struggle “that is why the struggle between the various species does not arise from a feeling of mutual antipathy, but rather from hunger and love. In both cases Nature looks on calmly and is even pleased with what happens.”
Even those scholars who acknowledge that Hitler studied Schopenhauer typically understand his reading of the pessimist in the context of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics in the third book of his great work. Schopenhauer placed a great importance on art—by engaging the intellect and disarming the will’s gnawing hungers, art allowed for the contemplation of the Ideas that stand behind the objectified beings we perceive and the momentary dissolution of the pains of being human. Art is one of the things that makes human life bearable, Schopenhauer thought; Hitler was artist; ergo, if Hitler read Schopenhauer as an artist, it was for his aesthetics. Yet Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in the second book of World as Will and Representation appear to be even more important to Hitler, especially to his subsequent thought. Toward the end of that book, Schopenhauer pauses to consider the progress of his argument in words that could have been in My Struggle: “We have considered the great multiplicity and diversity of the phenomena in which the will objectifies itself; indeed, we have seen their endless and implacable struggles with one another.”
The endless struggle between species and races depicted in My Struggle is commonly thought to be ‘Darwinian’ or ‘social Darwinist’, but this isn’t accurate. Hitler does not emphasize evolution and speciation; while the Aryans emerged into being at a specific point in history, he does not call for their transformation into a higher, different form. Instead, struggle improves the race in the sense that it becomes more itself; the races are discrete entities placed upon the earth by nature and tasked to guard the purity of their blood and perpetuate themselves. Hitler writes in the “Nation and Race” chapter of My Struggle:
This passage doesn’t simply refer to the reproductive isolation inherent in the definition of a ‘species’—Hitler considers hybridization unnatural and deleterious to the “higher development of organic life”, a phrase more redolent of Schopenhauer’s progressive stages of the objectification of the will than the random variation in Origin of Species. Hitler views the races— Aryans, but also Jews—more like defined, metaphysically distinct types that are called forth to specific destinies rather than temporary, accidental varietals of a unified human species. And that view is in keeping with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the animal kingdom, which treats each species as the Will’s expression of an Idea that exists outside of space and time; there is no room for random evolution in Schopenhauer’s natural world, only a species becoming more perfectly itself, more fully expressing the Idea inherent to it.
If Hitler read Schopenhauer at Ypres, he would have encountered a powerful synergy between the pessimist’s thinking of space and territoriality and the practice of static, positional warfare. Fighting in, over, and through the disintegrated and churned up Flanders silt, rendered into a featureless mud by innumerable artillery shells—enough that the soil around Ypres is ‘enriched’ with copper and lead to this day—would have transformed Schopenhauer’s abstract vision of the primordial war over matter into a vivid reality. But there is evidence that Schopenhauer’s metaphysics could have made sense of the slaughter at Ypres in a way even more significant to Hitler, judging by his later writings.
The horrifying attrition the List Regiment bore in the three days around Geluvelt would have found a kind of metaphysical grounding in the way that Schopenhauer thought about the relationship between the individual being and its species. Nature is heedless of the individual, Schopenhauer thought: witness the waste of plant seeds, the carelessness with which it disposes of the eggs and young of insects, fishes; tabulate the ruthless elimination of the majority of every litter of rodents that must occur, else the earth be overwhelmed and utterly consumed by rats. Schopenhauer writes:
The apparent waste of individual lives in the fruitless combat around Ypres was, perhaps, a microcosm of nature itself, which is prepared to expend without limit individual bodies to preserve the Idea of the species. That the Bavarians, Prussians, and Saxons falling in Flanders were clad in uniform clothes and coated in a monochromatic mud underscored their ultimate interchangeability and expendability, especially in a war for the preservation of a national ‘species.’ The destruction and replacement of infantry units on the front “is everywhere nothing but a constant change of matter under a fixed permanence of form; and this is precisely the transitoriness of the individuals with respect to the imperishableness of the species,” in Schopenhauer’s words. In some passages in My Struggle, Hitler recasts the biological phenomenon of the strife between human races in cosmic terms that Schopenhauer himself might have used:
Here, racial warfare is not just an ecological Darwinian competition over territory, food, and mates, but is a consequence of the structure of the universe. The mastery of the strong over the weak is shown to be fundamentally the same “eternal struggle” as gravity, the force by which a larger or “stronger” mass attracts and captures smaller or “weaker” masses. The hierarchies and enmities between peoples do not arise from mere xenophobia or strategic contests—they are cut sharply etched patterns in deep congruence not only with the rest of the living world but with inorganic and even astronomical forces. The butchery of modern warfare is no different than the movement and transformation of other forms of matter, whether it is the violent uplifting of a sublime chain of mountain peaks and its gradual erosion by the forces of ice and wind back into boulders, gravel, and sand, or the compaction of space dust into planets set into motion by the immensely strong will of a star.
If the plurality of individual entities was merely a phenomenal illusion, an effect of human perception that objectifies the eternal Will into discrete things, likewise are the various events of history. Schopenhauer rejected both of the prevailing styles of historical research in 19th century German universities: the antiquarian accumulation of facts and dates into an overwhelming mass of material and the Hegelian philosophy of history that purported to trace the gradual unfolding of the World Spirit in time. For Schopenhauer, “external events are mere configurations of the phenomenal world… the attempt to explain and expound them is like the attempt to see groups of persons and animals in the forms of clouds. What history relates is in fact only the long, heavy, and confused dream of mankind.” Perhaps the interminable repetition of trench warfare and its miniscule advances and retreats over the same obliterated earth illustrated Schopenhauer’s vision, which always everywhere tries to gaze through the insubstantial clothing of phenomena and see the indifferent, monstrous, thing-in-itself. Whether or not Hitler saw Schopenhauer’s thoughts on history mirrored in his wartime experience, he grew to share those thoughts, and in My Struggle criticized the teaching of history in Germany. Schopenhauer saw in the events of history the repetitive striving and suffering of an unchanging, essential mankind in different guises; Hitler denigrated the study of dates and details and called for the “völkisch state to arrange for the writing of a world history in which the racial problem will occupy a dominant position.” History, in other words, is not the story of a progressive development of culture and technology or some other social process, but the expression in time of a permanent human essence.
Hitler was inspired by the self-sacrifice of his comrades for greater Germany, which was both an aspirational people and territory because he was able to see beyond what Schopenhauer called the principium individuationis to the racial Idea behind it. In My Struggle, he insists again and again on the stakes for which the game of nations is played: if the Aryan race were to disappear, humanity would sink into a cultureless abyss for millennia, inventing, discovering, or thinking nothing for eons as it dissolved into the putrefaction of an animalistic existence. “Human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert,” Hitler wrote. For Hitler, not only were the races of man expressions of nature’s Ideas, but each race bore its own culture-idea —its spiritual longings, psychological needs, and ethical ideals inhered in its biological reality. Culture had a racial basis. In one of My Struggle’s rhetorical climaxes, Hitler explains what the ‘Aryan idea’ is: “a stronger instinct for self-preservation [which] manifests itself in a way which is peculiar to themselves… The readiness to sacrifice one’s personal work and, if necessary, even one’s life, for others shows its most highly developed form in the Aryan race.” The willingness to toil and die for fruit that one will never experience personally but that can only benefit one’s descendants, cousins, or people allowed Aryans to accumulate knowledge, culture, and technology far beyond other races, Hitler wrote.
Aryan self-sacrifice for the good of the race, as Hitler conceived it in My Struggle, is a virtue specifically grounded in Schopenhauerian metaphysics and almost certainly informed by Hitler’s experience in the Great War. The natural slaughter that Schopenhauer framed as the Will’s disregard for individual bodies in its care for the species was adapted by Hitler into a national ethos—of all the races of mankind, nature’s ultimate design is most closely realized by the conscious intellect and inborn personality of the Aryan. The vitalistic conception of a racial Will that animates the breast of every individual German, driving them to fight and die for their species, is characteristically Schopenhauerian and rooted in Hitler’s wartime experience. For me, this is the kernel, the deepest core of Hitler’s vision: a Will, existing outside of time and space, coming into being as a species and pushing itself over a planetary surface through the individual bodies of men who are perfected to the point of consciously participating in nature’s timeless design. The total health, strength, and beauty of that species is the most fundamental reality accessible to individual humans and in the end what matters.
In My Struggle there are many Schopenhauerian ideas and concepts, phrases, and even a few direct quotations. Yet contemporary academics cannot allow themselves to take seriously the idea that Hitler’s worldview was rooted not merely in petty ethnic grievance or in the demagogic fantasia of global conspiracies but in a deeply meaningful personal experience and philosophically serious confrontation with fundamental reality. To do so would open a portal into a realm where the pieties of human rights, international law, individual dignity, and universal egalitarianism are ridiculed and blasphemed. Today, a veil has been pulled over Schopenhauer’s challenging, disturbing metaphysics—his vision of a world of continuous strife: “the will must live on itself, since nothing exists besides it, and it is a hungry will.” Men bury their heads in amnesia and still their pangs of anxiety with beloved nursery rhymes, and what nature intended mankind to be slips further away from our world on a path now growing dim.
“Every grade of the will’s objectification fights for the matter, the space, and the time of another.” – Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, book II
“He who would live must fight.” – Hitler, My Struggle
In the pre-dawn darkness on the morning of October 29, 1914, the soldiers of the newlyformed 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment marched toward the burning villages surrounding Ypres. The reservists, all young volunteers, had departed Munich on trains a week before in high spirits, full of nationalist fervor, some of them even expecting to participate in an amphibious assault on England. But now they were hungry, tired, and paranoid. The regimental field kitchen had gotten lost the night before, so the men missed supper. A nearby battery firing two shells every fifteen minutes through the night deprived them of rest. On the journey to the front, half-burnt Lille was a depressing sight, and rumors of civilian spies and saboteurs in the hinterland had the regiment on edge. A messenger on horseback had been shot by a Belgian civilian insurgent, and soldiers from the 16th, named the “List Regiment” after its commanding officer, arrested the villagers and wanted to hang them, but nothing had come of it.
The situation in Belgium was developing into a dangerous stalemate for the Imperial German Army. Invading neutral Belgium had been a calculated risk: although the violation of the rules of war and the subsequent collateral damage inflamed international opinion against Germany, the prospect of driving straight to the ocean, capturing ports, and outflanking the French and British defensive lines was too good to pass up. But multiple attempts by German cavalry to outflank the British on the ten mile-wide strip of flat, sandy soil by the sea had already been rebuffed in the late summer and fall of 1914.
On October 27, the Belgians opened the floodgates at Nieuwpoort at high tide and inundated the low-lying lands near the water, cutting off the northern route around Ypres and focusing the struggle on the town itself. After the Fourth Army’s advance bogged down, the decision was made to concentrate a new force and attempt a breakthrough in the British lines. Army Supreme Command issued an order on October 28, the day before the List Regiment’s assault, to assemble Army Group Fabeck out of elements of the XV Corps and II Bavarian Corps, along with the 26th Infantry Division and the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division (the List Regiment’s division)—this force would be thrown at Ypres along the southeast-northwest road running from Menin to the center of Ypres. On the largest scale, the situation was bafflingly complex, with army commanders balancing their inventory of artillery shells, the exhaustion and capabilities of their troops, and the capacity of their supply lines for replenishment against inclement weather, incomplete intelligence, and a strategic situation that was rapidly devolving into positional warfare. But on the individual scale, things were simpler.
The List Regiment arrived at its assembly point just below the crest of a hill behind the front. Private Adolf Hitler fixed his bayonet to his Gewehr 98, a bolt-action rifle with a five round magazine, surrounded by freshly dug graves of German soldiers, each topped with a steel helmet. The task was to assault in a northwesterly direction up the road toward the town of Geluvelt, where an 18th century chateau and windmill commanded the nearby fields and hedges. Units from the British Expeditionary Force’s York Regiment, the 1st Coldstream Guards, 1st Black Watch, 1st Grenadier Guards, and 2nd Gordon Highlanders awaited the Bavarians in the village, the chateau and its outbuildings, and snipers hid in a nearby tobacco field. The British troops had already been fighting for weeks and were low on ammunition, but an intercepted message warned them of the impending attack.
The List Regiment came under artillery fire well before it reached the British positions, but pressed forward amidst a German counter-barrage. The inexperienced reservists crossed British trenches before they had been cleared and were shot from the sides and from behind; some platoons were ordered to hold back and fire, while others were told to advance without stopping. One man in the List Regiment reported being so frightened at seeing his comrades cut down by rifle and artillery fire that he kept running forward without looking back; others were completely overwhelmed and deserted on the spot, returning to the unit several days later. British machine gun fire from the windmill and snipers in the tobacco field chewed through the regiment; the survivors found themselves fighting for their lives in British trenches with their bayonets. The regiment suffered 349 fatalities on October 29, a grim harvest on its first day in action.
Hitler and the List Regiment spent the night in trenches at the bottom of the hill below the village. The next morning brought a cold rain, and Hitler’s battalion fought its way up most of the hill, although its manpower had been cut in half. Captain Rubenhauer pled against another assault on the village and its chateau, but he was overridden. On the 31st, elements of the List Regiment took Geluvelt and cleared the chateau, but paid dearly for it. Colonel Julius List was shot and killed as he entered the park of the chateau, and his adjutant was wounded. The chateau’s ruined grounds—shattered greenhouses, blasted formal gardens, splintered tree stumps—were partially recaptured by troops from the 2nd Worcesters later that day. Hitler spent the night of the 31st in a formerly British trench with the rest of the 1st Battalion. Hitler had been in combat continuously for 72 hours and his regiment was decimated: the enlisted men had been reduced from approximately 3,000 to 725 men, and there were only 4 officers left from the original 25. What remained of the List Regiment was withdrawn to rest in Wervicq on the evening of November 1. In the next week and a half, the front would barely advance another few kilometers toward Ypres, and would remain roughly static through the first half of 1917; the British had withstood the assault in a bloody defensive contest they would later call the ‘Three Great Days.’
The battle for Geluvelt, itself part of a larger German failed breakthrough attempt, was a unique experience for Hitler during the war. The List Regiment’s entry into combat occurred prior to Hitler’s promotion to Gefreiter and before he had been assigned to the regimental staff as a dispatch runner: at the beginning of Ypres, he fought as a regular infantrymen. By the winter of 1914, Hitler already seemed harder, and somewhat distant from the other enlisted men of the regiment—he strongly disapproved of the ‘Christmas truce’ members of the List Regiment held when they crossed lines, exchanged gifts, and sang carols with troops from the British 5th Division. Heinrich Lugauer, a fellow regimental messenger, reported that Corporal Hitler was enraged by the behavior of the German men and said “Something like this should not even be up for discussion during wartime.”
Incidents like Hitler’s reaction to the Christmas truce, and scattered letters he wrote to his former landlord, have been mined by historians looking for the origin of Hitler’s radical nationalism and anti-Semitism. The tendency of contemporary Hitler biographers is to try to push the date of Hitler’s radicalization as far forward as possible and to attribute it to propaganda encountered in Munich after the war ended. Ian Kershaw went so far as to claim that Hitler back-dated his conversion to radical politics as part of a self-reinvention during the 1920s as someone who had “struggled from the first,” asking in Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (1998) “Why might Hitler fabricate the claim that he had become an ideological antisemite in Vienna?”
Thus Brigitte Hamann in Hitler’s Vienna (1999), while noting the grievances that ethnic Germans in Austria had with the tottering, cobbled-together multinational Habsburg Empire, works hard to present the young Hitler as a shiftless bohemian uninterested in politics. Hamann’s Hitler was happy to use Jewish art dealers such as Jakob Altenberg to move his postcard-paintings and, while surrounded by volksich and anti-Semitic pamphlets and newspapers, never joined a pan-German organization and was therefore merely a “right-wing chauvinist” and not yet a radical. She devotes a whole chapter to Hitler’s “Political Role Models,” especially anti-Semitic and pan-German nationalist parliamentarian Georg Schönerer, whose followers greeted each other with “Heil!” and called him “Führer,” only to commit herself to the absurd argument that Hitler modeled himself on Schönerer after the First World War, after he left Vienna. In Vienna, Hitler was supposed to be pedantic, inflexible, afraid of women, choleric. Hamann insists that in Vienna, Hitler was not in any way charismatic and even attributes the “compelling force of Hitler’s blue eyes” to later practice and actors’ training. Hamann concludes near the end of her study: “In any case, Hitler’s career cannot be derived, let alone understood, from his situation in Vienna.”
Similarly, Thomas Weber’s Hitler’s First War (2010) deconstructs and downplays Hitler’s wartime letter of February 5, 1915 to his acquaintance Ernst Hepp, where he hopes that he will “return to the fatherland [to] find it a purer place”, and that the sacrifice of blood his comrades made will smash Germany’s outside foes but also its “inner internationalism.” Weber likewise dismisses the explicit völkisch-ness of some of the List Regiment’s soldiers. Weber narrates each battle of the List Regiment in order, in each case finding that the fighting’s effects on the men’s political and social attitudes were indeterminate. Of the Battle in Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, Weber writes: “It was still unclear what impact the battle had had on the attitudes and political mentalities of Private Hitler and the men of his regiment” (this was after the ‘sacrifice of blood’ letter to Hepp). He needs to find that Hitler was not ‘made’ by the First World War, that the experience of the war didn’t radicalize him; to make that argument, of course, Weber must ignore the broader context of the Freikorps and the many men who manifestly were radicalized by the war. But to locate the origin of Hitler’s ‘evil’ in real ethnic dispossession as in Germanspeaking Austria or in his wartime experience, is to legitimate and ground it in the minds of contemporary historians. So instead, they imbue the anti-Semitic mind virus spread by Munich rabble-rousers with ultimate responsibility, in order to make Hitler’s radicalism contingent and opportunistic rather than inevitable, and a matter of personal vice rather than a structural necessity.
But there is another potential source for the kernel of Hitler’s weltanschauung: his study of Schopenhauer during the Great War. August Kubizek, Hitler’s close boyhood friend in Linz and then roommate in Vienna, reported that Hitler read Schopenhauer closely even before the war. Hans Frank said that Hitler told him he read Schopenhauer during the Great War, and Nietzsche during his imprisonment at Landsberg in 1924. According to his Table Talk, on May 19, 1944, Hitler said that he had carried Schopenhauer’s works with him in his rucksack, presumably instead of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which was issued to Imperial German troops in a special military edition. His secretary, Christa Schroeder, wrote that she recognized one of Hitler’s seemingly impromptu speeches as “a rendition of a page of Schopenhauer”, an anecdote cited by Hitler biographies as evidence of the derivative nature of his thought, but one which supports the notion that he had a deep familiarity with Schopenhauer’s work.
By directing our attention to Hitler’s reading of Schopenhauer during the Great War— potentially even at Ypres, as his regiment fought in Flanders for years, through Passchendaele in late 1917—we decenter the anti-Semitism and German nationalism as the ‘core’ of Hitler’s worldview. In our analysis, those ideologies look more like consequents of a metaphysics rather than its core postulates. We consider a dangerous question in intellectual history: what if the Third Reich and its war was not merely motivated by cheap demagoguery, but by a profound philosophy with unsettling implications for the society and people we care about? And we gain a glimpse into a more fundamental, alien landscape: a world where an aimless, blind Will writhes without ceasing, and pieces of it that we objectify as individual beings engage in desperate combat with each other over living space, energy, and time.
Underneath the grievances of Viennese-German nationalism and the postwar beerhall conspiracy theories lies a vision strange and cold: species of animals and types of human emerge from raw matter as expressions of an eternal Idea and kill and take from each other to perpetuate themselves in space and time. As Schopenhauer writes in the second book of The World as Will and Representation: “Persistent matter must constantly change the form, since, under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear, snatch the matter from one another, for each wishes to reveal its own Idea.” A decade after Ypres, Hitler would write in My Struggle “that is why the struggle between the various species does not arise from a feeling of mutual antipathy, but rather from hunger and love. In both cases Nature looks on calmly and is even pleased with what happens.”
Even those scholars who acknowledge that Hitler studied Schopenhauer typically understand his reading of the pessimist in the context of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics in the third book of his great work. Schopenhauer placed a great importance on art—by engaging the intellect and disarming the will’s gnawing hungers, art allowed for the contemplation of the Ideas that stand behind the objectified beings we perceive and the momentary dissolution of the pains of being human. Art is one of the things that makes human life bearable, Schopenhauer thought; Hitler was artist; ergo, if Hitler read Schopenhauer as an artist, it was for his aesthetics. Yet Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in the second book of World as Will and Representation appear to be even more important to Hitler, especially to his subsequent thought. Toward the end of that book, Schopenhauer pauses to consider the progress of his argument in words that could have been in My Struggle: “We have considered the great multiplicity and diversity of the phenomena in which the will objectifies itself; indeed, we have seen their endless and implacable struggles with one another.”
The endless struggle between species and races depicted in My Struggle is commonly thought to be ‘Darwinian’ or ‘social Darwinist’, but this isn’t accurate. Hitler does not emphasize evolution and speciation; while the Aryans emerged into being at a specific point in history, he does not call for their transformation into a higher, different form. Instead, struggle improves the race in the sense that it becomes more itself; the races are discrete entities placed upon the earth by nature and tasked to guard the purity of their blood and perpetuate themselves. Hitler writes in the “Nation and Race” chapter of My Struggle:
Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law— one may call it an iron law of Nature—which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind.
This passage doesn’t simply refer to the reproductive isolation inherent in the definition of a ‘species’—Hitler considers hybridization unnatural and deleterious to the “higher development of organic life”, a phrase more redolent of Schopenhauer’s progressive stages of the objectification of the will than the random variation in Origin of Species. Hitler views the races— Aryans, but also Jews—more like defined, metaphysically distinct types that are called forth to specific destinies rather than temporary, accidental varietals of a unified human species. And that view is in keeping with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the animal kingdom, which treats each species as the Will’s expression of an Idea that exists outside of space and time; there is no room for random evolution in Schopenhauer’s natural world, only a species becoming more perfectly itself, more fully expressing the Idea inherent to it.
If Hitler read Schopenhauer at Ypres, he would have encountered a powerful synergy between the pessimist’s thinking of space and territoriality and the practice of static, positional warfare. Fighting in, over, and through the disintegrated and churned up Flanders silt, rendered into a featureless mud by innumerable artillery shells—enough that the soil around Ypres is ‘enriched’ with copper and lead to this day—would have transformed Schopenhauer’s abstract vision of the primordial war over matter into a vivid reality. But there is evidence that Schopenhauer’s metaphysics could have made sense of the slaughter at Ypres in a way even more significant to Hitler, judging by his later writings.
The horrifying attrition the List Regiment bore in the three days around Geluvelt would have found a kind of metaphysical grounding in the way that Schopenhauer thought about the relationship between the individual being and its species. Nature is heedless of the individual, Schopenhauer thought: witness the waste of plant seeds, the carelessness with which it disposes of the eggs and young of insects, fishes; tabulate the ruthless elimination of the majority of every litter of rodents that must occur, else the earth be overwhelmed and utterly consumed by rats. Schopenhauer writes:
The individual, on the contrary, neither has nor can have any value for Nature, for her kingdom is infinite time and infinite space, and in these infinite multiplicity of possible individuals. Therefore she is always ready to let the individual fall, and hence it is not only exposed to destruction in a thousand ways by the most insignificant accident, but originally destined for it, and conducted towards it by Nature herself from the moment it has served its end of maintaining the species.
The apparent waste of individual lives in the fruitless combat around Ypres was, perhaps, a microcosm of nature itself, which is prepared to expend without limit individual bodies to preserve the Idea of the species. That the Bavarians, Prussians, and Saxons falling in Flanders were clad in uniform clothes and coated in a monochromatic mud underscored their ultimate interchangeability and expendability, especially in a war for the preservation of a national ‘species.’ The destruction and replacement of infantry units on the front “is everywhere nothing but a constant change of matter under a fixed permanence of form; and this is precisely the transitoriness of the individuals with respect to the imperishableness of the species,” in Schopenhauer’s words. In some passages in My Struggle, Hitler recasts the biological phenomenon of the strife between human races in cosmic terms that Schopenhauer himself might have used:
Man must realize that a fundamental law of necessity reigns throughout the whole realm of Nature and that his existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife. He will then feel that there cannot be a separate law for mankind in a universe in which planets and suns follow their orbits, where moons and planets trace their destined paths, where the strong are always the masters of the weak and where the latter must obey or be destroyed.
Here, racial warfare is not just an ecological Darwinian competition over territory, food, and mates, but is a consequence of the structure of the universe. The mastery of the strong over the weak is shown to be fundamentally the same “eternal struggle” as gravity, the force by which a larger or “stronger” mass attracts and captures smaller or “weaker” masses. The hierarchies and enmities between peoples do not arise from mere xenophobia or strategic contests—they are cut sharply etched patterns in deep congruence not only with the rest of the living world but with inorganic and even astronomical forces. The butchery of modern warfare is no different than the movement and transformation of other forms of matter, whether it is the violent uplifting of a sublime chain of mountain peaks and its gradual erosion by the forces of ice and wind back into boulders, gravel, and sand, or the compaction of space dust into planets set into motion by the immensely strong will of a star.
If the plurality of individual entities was merely a phenomenal illusion, an effect of human perception that objectifies the eternal Will into discrete things, likewise are the various events of history. Schopenhauer rejected both of the prevailing styles of historical research in 19th century German universities: the antiquarian accumulation of facts and dates into an overwhelming mass of material and the Hegelian philosophy of history that purported to trace the gradual unfolding of the World Spirit in time. For Schopenhauer, “external events are mere configurations of the phenomenal world… the attempt to explain and expound them is like the attempt to see groups of persons and animals in the forms of clouds. What history relates is in fact only the long, heavy, and confused dream of mankind.” Perhaps the interminable repetition of trench warfare and its miniscule advances and retreats over the same obliterated earth illustrated Schopenhauer’s vision, which always everywhere tries to gaze through the insubstantial clothing of phenomena and see the indifferent, monstrous, thing-in-itself. Whether or not Hitler saw Schopenhauer’s thoughts on history mirrored in his wartime experience, he grew to share those thoughts, and in My Struggle criticized the teaching of history in Germany. Schopenhauer saw in the events of history the repetitive striving and suffering of an unchanging, essential mankind in different guises; Hitler denigrated the study of dates and details and called for the “völkisch state to arrange for the writing of a world history in which the racial problem will occupy a dominant position.” History, in other words, is not the story of a progressive development of culture and technology or some other social process, but the expression in time of a permanent human essence.
Hitler was inspired by the self-sacrifice of his comrades for greater Germany, which was both an aspirational people and territory because he was able to see beyond what Schopenhauer called the principium individuationis to the racial Idea behind it. In My Struggle, he insists again and again on the stakes for which the game of nations is played: if the Aryan race were to disappear, humanity would sink into a cultureless abyss for millennia, inventing, discovering, or thinking nothing for eons as it dissolved into the putrefaction of an animalistic existence. “Human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert,” Hitler wrote. For Hitler, not only were the races of man expressions of nature’s Ideas, but each race bore its own culture-idea —its spiritual longings, psychological needs, and ethical ideals inhered in its biological reality. Culture had a racial basis. In one of My Struggle’s rhetorical climaxes, Hitler explains what the ‘Aryan idea’ is: “a stronger instinct for self-preservation [which] manifests itself in a way which is peculiar to themselves… The readiness to sacrifice one’s personal work and, if necessary, even one’s life, for others shows its most highly developed form in the Aryan race.” The willingness to toil and die for fruit that one will never experience personally but that can only benefit one’s descendants, cousins, or people allowed Aryans to accumulate knowledge, culture, and technology far beyond other races, Hitler wrote.
Aryan self-sacrifice for the good of the race, as Hitler conceived it in My Struggle, is a virtue specifically grounded in Schopenhauerian metaphysics and almost certainly informed by Hitler’s experience in the Great War. The natural slaughter that Schopenhauer framed as the Will’s disregard for individual bodies in its care for the species was adapted by Hitler into a national ethos—of all the races of mankind, nature’s ultimate design is most closely realized by the conscious intellect and inborn personality of the Aryan. The vitalistic conception of a racial Will that animates the breast of every individual German, driving them to fight and die for their species, is characteristically Schopenhauerian and rooted in Hitler’s wartime experience. For me, this is the kernel, the deepest core of Hitler’s vision: a Will, existing outside of time and space, coming into being as a species and pushing itself over a planetary surface through the individual bodies of men who are perfected to the point of consciously participating in nature’s timeless design. The total health, strength, and beauty of that species is the most fundamental reality accessible to individual humans and in the end what matters.
In My Struggle there are many Schopenhauerian ideas and concepts, phrases, and even a few direct quotations. Yet contemporary academics cannot allow themselves to take seriously the idea that Hitler’s worldview was rooted not merely in petty ethnic grievance or in the demagogic fantasia of global conspiracies but in a deeply meaningful personal experience and philosophically serious confrontation with fundamental reality. To do so would open a portal into a realm where the pieties of human rights, international law, individual dignity, and universal egalitarianism are ridiculed and blasphemed. Today, a veil has been pulled over Schopenhauer’s challenging, disturbing metaphysics—his vision of a world of continuous strife: “the will must live on itself, since nothing exists besides it, and it is a hungry will.” Men bury their heads in amnesia and still their pangs of anxiety with beloved nursery rhymes, and what nature intended mankind to be slips further away from our world on a path now growing dim.
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