The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

justifying genocide 103
1995:90–96). This ties in with party attitudes toward the Mediterranean cultures
of Greece and Rome, which were ambivalent to say the least. Alexander von Humboldt
exemplifies the pre-1933 hellenophilic perspective: “ ‘Knowledge of the
Greeks is not merely pleasant, useful, or necessary to us—no, in the Greeks alone we
find the ideal of that which we should like to be and produce’ ” (quoted in Morris
1994:18). The National Socialists rejected the Mediterranean world as a major influence
on Germanic culture. Instead, party ideologues proposed that Classical
Greek civilization was really the product of southeastward migration of peoples
from the northern Germanic heartland, where the Nordic stock remained pure
(Figure 4.2). Everything that was laudable, admirable, and positive about Greek or
Roman civilization was the result of Nordic influence; everything that was reprehensible,
degenerate, and negative was the result of native, non-Nordic dilution of
the original, superior racial stock. This preserved the old narrative structure but reversed
the direction of cultural influence (see Marchand 1996 for a more in-depth
discussion). Allied to the north-south migration concept was the total denial of outside
influence on German cultural evolution and an emphasis on autochthonous
development. This manifested itself institutionally in witch hunts against Römlinge,
archaeologists primarily concerned with the study of Greek or Roman civilization
(Arnold 1990; Bollmus 1970; Kater 1974).
THE MIRAGE OF THE “SUPERIOR NORTH”
Inevitably and ironically, in creating this myth of a northern origin for the civilizations
of the Mediterranean (Hermand 1992:196), National Socialist researchers had
to lean heavily on written sources from that region. A good example is the Roman
writer Tacitus. His account of the German people has been called “the birth certificate
of the German race” (Schama 1995:76), and National Socialist school textbooks
referred to it as the Old Testament of the German people (Ocklitz 1934). What
was it about Tacitus’s text that made it so important for the National Socialist metanarrative?
Among other things, it supported the idea of cultural and racial parthenogenesis,
so attractive to National Socialist ideologues. Tacitus described Tuisto, the
primal deity of the German people, as literally issuing from the soil, giving birth to
Mannus, the first man, who in turn had three sons. (The total absence of women,
even in their officially sanctioned role as “hero-makers,” is notable here.) Each of
these sons was the ancestral father of a German tribe. “Beyond all other people,
Tacitus seemed to be saying, the Germans were true indigenes, sprung from the
black earth of their native land” (Schama 1995:76).
Party archaeologists between 1933 and 1945 supported the idea that the Germans
not only “gave birth to themselves” but also succeeded in developing independently
all the major technological advances of civilization, which they shared
with all other, less fortunate European peoples through migration from their northern
homeland. Another trope that the National Socialist ideologues looted from
Tacitus (derived from Charles Darwin and filtered through Ernst Haeckel) was his