Nationalistic and familial sentiments are intimately interlaced with religious feelings, which are vague and mystical to a lesser or greater extent. There is no end to the literature on this subject. A detailed academic critique of this field is out of the question - for the time being at least. We want to pick up the thread of our main problem. If fascism relies so successfully on the mystical thinking and sentiments of the masses, then a fight against it can be effective only if mysticism is comprehended and if the mystical contagion of the masses is tackled through education and hygiene. It is not enough that the scientific view of the world gains ground, for it moves much too slowly to keep pace with the rapid spread of mystical contagion. The reason for this can lie only in our incomplete comprehension of mysticism itself. Scientific enlightenment of the masses was mainly concerned with the exposing of the corrupt practices of church dignitaries and church officials. The overwhelming majority of the masses was left in the dark. Scientific elucidation appealed only to the intellect of the masses - not to their feelings. If, however, a man has mystical feelings, he is impervious to the unmasking of a church dignitary, no matter how artfully done. He is no more impressed by the detailed exposure of how the state uses the workers’ pennies to support the church than he is by Marx’s and En-gels’ historical analysis of religion.
To be sure, atheist movements also tried to employ emotional means in their efforts to enlighten the masses. For example, the youth initiation festivals of the German free thinkers were dedicated to this kind of work. Despite all this the Christian youth organizations had approximately thirty times as many members as the Communist and Social Democrat parties taken together. In the years 1930-32, Christian youth
organizations had approximately one and a half million members as opposed to the fifty thousand members of the Communist party and the sixty thousand members of the Socialist party. According to its own statistics. National Socialism had some forty thousand youth in its organization in 1931. We extract detailed figures from the Proktariscbe Freidenherstimme of April 1932. According to this newspaper the distribution ran as follows:
Thus, four fifths of the members were at the age of puberty or post-puberty!
While the Communists, in their efforts to win over these young people, gave prominence to the question of class, as opposed to the question of creed, the Catholic organization took up its position precisely on the cultural and philosophic front. The Communist wrote:
If our work is clear and consistent, the question of class membership will prove to be stronger than the impeding questions of creed, among the young Catholics also . . . We must not give prominence to the question of creed, but to the question of class membership, to the misery which binds us and is our common lot.
The leadership of the Catholic youth, on the other hand, wrote in Jungarbeiter no. 17, 1931:
The greatest and most likely the gravest danger of the Communist Party is the fact that it gets its hands on the young workers and the children of workers at a very early age. We are very pleased that the government... is strongly opposed to the subversive Communist Party. Above all, however, we expect the German government to deal sharply with the fight of the communists against church and religion.
Representatives of eight Catholic organizations held positions on the Berlin examining board for the ‘Protection of Youth against Filth and Obscenity’. In 1932 a proclamation of the Centre Youth stated:
We demand that the state use every available means to protect our Christian heritage against the poisonous influence of a filthy press, obscene literature, and erotic films - all of which degrade and falsify national sentiments . . .
Thus, the church defended its mystical function, not where it was attacked by the communist movement, but at an entirely different place.
‘It is the task of the non-orthodox proletarian youth,’ the aforementioned Freidenkerstimme states, to show ‘the young working Christians the role of the church and of their organizations in the implementation of fascist measures and their advocation of crisis bills and economic measures’. Why, as it turned out, did the masses of the young Christian workers offer resistance to this attack on the church? The Communists expected the Christian youth to see for themselves that the church was serving a capitalist function. Why did they fail to see this? Evidently, it was because this function had been concealed from them and because their authoritarian upbringing had made them credulous and incapable of criticism. Nor could it escape one’s notice that the representatives of the church in the youth organizations spoke out against capitalism, so that the antithesis between the social positions assumed by the Communists and the priests was not readily perceptible to the youth. At first it appeared as if a clear-cut demarcation existed only in the sphere of sexuality. It seemed as if the Communists, as opposed to the church, had taken a positive attitude towards adolescent sexuality. However, it soon turned out that
the Communist organizations not only allowed this decisive area to lie fallow, but even felt themselves to be in accord with the church in their condemnation and inhibition of adolescent sexuality. The measures adopted by the Communists against the German Sexpol, which never hesitated to raise the question of adolescent sexuality and to attempt to solve it, were no less severe than those of some clerical representatives. The fact that the Communist pastor Salkind, who was also a psychoanalyst, was an authority in the field of sexual negation in Soviet Russia, speaks for itself. It was not enough to point out that the authoritarian state was in control of and could exploit the parental home, the church and the school as a means of binding the youth to its system and its world of ideas. The state used its entire power apparatus to keep these institutions intact. Hence, nothing short of a social revolution would have been capable of abolishing them. And yet, an undermining of their reactionary influence was one of the most essential preconditions of the social revolution and therefore the presupposition of their abolition. Many Communists considered this the main task of the ‘Red cultural front’. To accomplish this task, it was of decisive importance to comprehend the ways and means with the help of which the authoritarian parental home, the school and the church could exercise so much influence, and to discover the process that took hold of the youth as a result of these influences. Generalizations such as ‘enslavement’ or ‘brutalization’ did not offer an adequate explanation. ‘Brutalization’ and ‘enslavement’ were the results. What we wanted to know were the processes that enable dictatorial interests to gain a foothold in the structure of the masses.
Der sexuelle Kampfder jugend was an attempt to show the role played by the suppression of adolescent sexuality in this process. In the present work we want to investigate the basic elements of political reaction’s cultural aims, and to ascertain the emotional factors on which revolutionary work has to be based. Here, too, we have to adhere to the principle of paying strict attention to everything to which cultural reaction gives prominence; for that to which it gives prominence is not incidental, nor is it a means of ‘distracting’ one’s attention. It is the central arena in which the fight between revolutionary and reactionary world philosophy and politics is to take place.
We are forced to avert an encounter in the philosophic and cultural sphere, the centre of which is the sexual question, as long as we do not possess the necessary knowledge and the required training to engage in such a clash successfully. However, if we can succeed in gaining a firm foothold in the cultural question, we have everything necessary to pave the way for work-democracy. For let it be stated once again: Sexual inhibition prevents the average adolescent from thinking and feeling in a rational way. We must see to it that mysticism is countered with appropriate means. To this end knowledge of its mechanism is urgently necessary.
Let us quote from one of the many typical works on this subject: Der Bolichewismus als Todfeindund Wegbereiter der Revolution, 1931, written by the pastor Braumann. We could emote from any other work just as well. The essential points of their arguments are the same, and minor differences in detail are of no importance here.
Every religion is liberation from the world and its powers through unification with Godhood. Therefore, Bolshevism will never be able to enchain man completely as long as there is still something of religion in him.
[Braumann, p. 12]
Here, to be sure, mysticism’s function is clearly articulated: to divert attention from daily misery, ‘to liberate from the world’, the purpose of which is to prevent a revolt against the real causes of one’s misery. But scientific findings on the sociological function of mysticism will not take us very far. First and foremost, it is the rich experience gained from discussions between scientifically and mystically oriented youth that has a practical value for our work against mysticism. Such discussions give us a clue to an understanding of mysticism, and hence to the mystical feelings of the individuals in the masses.
A workers’ youth organization invited a Protestant pastor to a discussion on the economic crisis. He came, followed and sheltered by some twenty Christian youths between eighteen and twenty-five years of age. In his talk he made the following points, although it was his shifting from partially correct statements to mystical points of view that was most striking: The causes of the existing misery, he explained, were the war and the Young plan. The world war was an expression of man’s depravity and of his meanness, an injustice and a sin. Capitalistic exploitation was also a grave sin. (By assuming an anti-capitalist attitude and thus anticipating the anti-capitalist feelings of the Christian youth, he made it difficult to undo his influence.) Capitalism and socialism, he went on to say, were essentially the same. The socialism of the Soviet Union was also a form of capitalism. Socialism entailed disadvantages for some classes just as capitalism entailed disadvantages for other classes. Every form of capitalism should ‘be given a good kick in the pants’. Bolshevism’s fight against religion was a criminal act; religion was not responsible for misery. It was capitalism’s abuse of religion that was at fault. (This was a decidedly progressive pastor.) What were the conclusions to be drawn from this presentation? Since man was vile and wicked, the wretchedness of his situation was not at all to be done away with; it had to be endured, coped with. The capitalist was not happy either. Man’s inner anguish, which lay at the root of all anguish, would not disappear even after the fulfilment of the third five-year plan of the Soviet Union.
A number of revolutionary youths tried to represent their point of view. They pointed out that it was not a question of individual capitalists, but a question of ‘the system’. It was a question of whether the majority or a dwindling minority was suppressed. To say that wretchedness had to be endured did not help matters at all and only benefited political reaction. And so on and so forth. In the end it was agreed that a reconciliation of the opposing views was not possible, that no one went away with a conviction different from the one with which he had come. The young attendants of the pastor hung on the words of their leader. Their material situation appeared to be just as indigent as that of the Communists, and yet each one of them acquiesced in the opinion that there was no escape from misery and that one had to make the best of it and ‘have faith in God’.
Following the discussion, I asked a number of communist youths why they had not entered into the main issue, namely the church’s insistence on sexual abstinence. They replied that this subject would have been too ticklish and too difficult, that it would have had the effect of a bomb, and finally, that it was not customary to speak about such matters at political discussions.
Some time prior to this a mass rally had been held in one of Berlin’s western districts, at which representatives of the church and representatives of the Communist party explained their respective viewpoints. A good half of the 1,800 people attending the rally
were Christians and lower middle-class people. As the principal speaker, I summarized the sex-economic position in several questions:
The church contends that the use of contraceptives is contrary to nature, as is any interference with natural procreation. If nature is so strict and so wise, why did it produce a sexual apparatus that does not impel one to engage in coitus only as often as one wants to procreate children, but on the average of two to three thousand times in a lifetime ?
Would the representatives of the church who were present state openly if they engaged in sexual intercourse only when they wanted to procreate children? (They were Protestant pastors.)
Why had God produced two kinds of glands in one’s sexual apparatus: one for sexual excitation and one for procreation?
How did they explain the fact that even small children developed sexuality, long before the procreation function begins?
The clerical representatives’ embarrassed answers evoked peals -of laughter. When I began to explain the role played within the framework of authoritarian society by the church’s and reactionary science’s denial of the pleasure function, that the suppression of sexual gratification was intended to produce humility and general resignation in economic areas also, I had the entire audience on my side. The mystics had been beaten.
Extensive experience at mass rallies shows that the political reactionary role of mysticism in connection with the suppression of sexuality is readily comprehended when the right to sexual gratification is medically and socially explained in a clear and direct fashion. This fact requires thorough elucidation.
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