Volkisch Religious NeopaganismZNeo-Germanic Paganism

Although neopaganism with reference to Germanic religious culture is rooted in 19th-century Romanticism, precursors of this development go back even further. During the early modern period, humanists used the rediscovered Germania of Tacitus to create a myth of origin which, in con­trast to Roman culture, made the Germanic peoples the origin of their own collective identity (Hirschi, 2006; Poliakov, 1993).

Among others who followed Herder’s lead, Grimm also interpreted Nordic mythology in his Deutsche Mythologie (1835) as a component of German folk culture (Trumpy, 1973, p. 3). This led to the Edda, two 13th-century col­lections of texts rediscovered in Iceland in 1643, being adopted as the main source of “Germanic mythology” (Heesch, 2014, p.

As racial theories were developed, above all by Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), relationships were increasingly forged between race, history, culture, and religion. At the end of the 19th century, orientalist and volkisch propagandist Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891) first expressed demands for a “German national religion” (Lagarde, 1875). The “inherent religiosity” set out here was an explosive conglomerate of nationalism, volkisch ideology, racism, anti­Semitism, hostility to Christianity, and criticism of civilization (Molders and Hoppadietz, 2007, p. 34; Wiedemann, 2010; Zernack, 1997, pp. 154-155;). Two particularly significant representatives of the Volkisch religious move­ment should be mentioned here: Guido Karl Anton List (1848-1919) and Adolph Joseph Lanz (1874-1954), both from Austria. They are still impor­tant points of reference for many “neo-Germanic pagans”—a collective term for representatives of a neopaganism referring back to alleged Nordic and Germanic traditions from a pre-Christian religion and way of life. The term “Germanic neopaganism” is synonymously used in current research to describe contemporary attempts to revive a pre-Christian indigenous local religion based on Germanic culture, mythology, and faith (see Grunder, 2008, pp.

List, alias Guido von List, is regarded as the founder of Ariosophy, an occult version of volkisch religion, which represents an openly racist, Germanized form of theosophy (Siewert, 2002, p. 141; von Schnurbein, 2006, p. 53). List’s main aim was to represent an esoteric Aryan cosmol­ogy and Germanic religion that he devised, the “Ario-Germanic religion.” List emphasized as its supreme principle the racial purity embodied by an Aryan elite, the Armanen, to whom the unconscious preservation and release of traditional but forgotten knowledge from the Germanic past was transmitted by means of “inherited memory” through the “voice of blood.” List himself allegedly also drew from this source, too, when he “found” the meaning of the runes during a spell of temporary blindness. In fact, List’s Armanen Futhark, in which runes were partly created from scratch while completely new meanings and sounds were assigned to existing ones, is pure invention. The List-Gesellschaft (List Society) established in 1908 promoted the distribution of its master’s writings (e.g., List, 1908a; 1908b; 1910a; 1910b; 1911a; 1911b). In 1911, List founded the Hohen-Armanen-Orden (High Arman Order) as a kind of inner circle of this society. He can be regarded as the central figure of the Germanic-religious wing of the Volkisch movement. His construction of “inherited memory,” in particular, became elementary for volkisch paganism and further paved the way for representatives of an “inherent religion” of the Germans (Puschner, 2006, p. 21).

List was in close touch with Lanz, who gave himself the title of Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels. Lanz also devoted himself to the development of Ariosophy and wrote numerous racist, eugenic, antisocialist, and anti-Semitic articles and monographs (e.g., Theozoologie, 1904). He also published the high- circulation magazine Ostara from 1905 to 1917.

There existed, of course, a number of further associations congregating adherents of a neo-Germanic faith, whose belief mainly revolved around a claim to be the chosen people and a willingness to act and make sacrifices for the “Germanic race” as a “blood and religious community.” After World War II, neopaganism with a Nordic or Germanic slant continued more or less without interruption: some organizations remained in existence, others were re-founded, and, in addition, a raft of new organizations were set up (for more detailed accounts, see Molders and Hoppadietz, 2007; Penke and Teichert, 2016; Siewert, 2002; von Schnurbein, 1992).

In connection with the New Age movement of the 1980s and a general rise in various forms of “nature-religious” or “pagan” movements, groups which—for a wide variety of reasons—dealt with and practiced neo­Germanic paganism mushroomed. As a result, the range of political opin­ions within the scene grew enormously, and in addition to openly racist and anti-Semitic groups, universalist groups also emerged which were critical of modern culture, adopted an ecological standpoint, and in some cases were decidedly left-wing (Penke and Teichert, 2016, p. 22). In the current field, therefore, three main strands can be distinguished (Grunder, 8). First, there are volkisch groups that tend to adhere to a racist understanding of religion, which restricts access to a Germanic paganism understood as a folk reli­gion to biological descendants of “Germanic” ethnic groups.

The convictions of List and Lanz-Liebenfels reached an extended sphere of reference via the volkisch-pagan religious communities of the post-war period, even going beyond Europe. The USA had a significant influence with regard to the pagan metal scene as well as the right-wing extremist scene, and particularly in a time of further differentiation of neo-Germanic paganism in Germany beginning in the 1980s, racist-pagan influences from the USA and Australia also had an impact (Goodrick- Clarke, 2009, pp. 503-535). For instance, the extremist neopagan group Wotansvolk, headed by US right-wing terrorist David Lane (1938-2007), proved to be highly influential, especially on the post-1990 ScandinavianIn Honor of the Forefathers 97 political neopagan scene (Gardell, 2000, pp. 167-169). It later had a con­siderable impact on Viking reenactment activities in central and eastern Europe as well (Banghard, 2009, pp. 31-32; Hoppadietz and Reichenbach, 2019, pp. 218-219). The ideology of Wotansvolk is modeled on gnostic, theosophical, numerological, and Ariosophic strands based on racist phi­losophy (Gardell, 2003, pp. 191-257). The origins of this ideology lie in the above-mentioned Austrian and German Volkisch movement, within which List had already tried to form a Wotan religion in the early 20th century. Like Lane, right-wing extremists worldwide increasingly turned to neopaganism from the 1990s onward. They believed it harbored their “natural and characteristic religion” and their supposedly “true,” “unal­ienated” culture.

At the same time, many protagonists of the pagan metal and reenactment scenes regarded themselves via a geographical reference as “true-blooded Germanics” and imagined themselves in a traditional line of descent. This view was used to form an identity and simultaneously served to cre­ate and update enemy stereotypes and antitheses mostly associated with Christianity and Judaism (Penke and Teichert, 2016, p. 32). As we have seen in the quotes above, the statements made by Menhir reflect the tradition of volkisch groups and oscillate between racist and tribalist understandings of religion. Together with the pictorial language of the volkisch-religious groups of the 19th and 20th centuries, the pointed use of the swastika by Menhir and Ulfhednar reveals a programmatic approach and illuminates how easily and intensively such convictions can find their way into reenact­ments. A central factor here is the frequently encountered self-perception as “pagan,” not to mention as “legitimate descendants” of the historical groups represented. This attitude and identification also feed the claim to be able to generate and present historical knowledge about these societies. Protagonists seek confirmation for their convictions above all in essays from the 19th and 20th centuries, even though their content differs significantly from modern academic findings. Heiko Gerull, for example, finds the most recommendable books on the subject in antiquarian bookshops, claim­ing that—in contrast to modern research findings—they contain “much unadulterated knowledge” (Fischer, 1999).