Lebovic South Central Libre

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Published in: South Central Review 23:1: a special issue about philosophy and theory of
Fascism (Spring 2006), pp. 23-39.
______________________________________________________________________
The Beauty and Terror of Lebensphilosophie:
Ludwig Klages, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Baeumler

Nitzan Lebovic

During the past two decades interest in Walter Benjamin and fascist aesthetics has
extended well beyond the limits of any social and political focus. Strangely, a little
investigation shows that this vogue has been fueled by the historical roots of Benjamins
theory as much as by the discourse he employed-- downplayed by current historians-- a
mixture of aesthetic critical theory, ideas about temporality drawn from the philosophy of
life, and an alternative philosophy of history. Directly relevant to these connections is a
document unnoticed until now that registers the interest a high ranking Nazi took in
Walter Benjamin, or more concretely, an interest a Nazi Lebensphilosopher took in
Benjamins own fascination with Lebensphilosophie, the tool the latter believed might
help him develop a total critique. The focus of this discussion, where radical politics met
a radical critique, belongs to a third party, a relatively hidden site in the history of modern
thought: the Lebensphilosophie of Ludwig Klages, the conservative and anti-Semitic
popular philosopher, and his dedication to the work of another founder of this neo-
Romantic discourse, Johann Jacob Bachofen. Tracing the lineage of Lebensphilosophie
leads us to dark corners and antecedents of todays biopolitics, teaching us a great deal
about where and when Benjamins total critique collided with the totalitarian struggle for
life. Moreover, it teaches us that in so many ways, current political philosophy is still led
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by the consequences of this collision and its horizon of expectations, the wagon of
catastrophes as Benjamin calls it in an article dedicated to toys as psycho-cultural
archetypes.
1

1. We know only we are no more
In August 1923 Ludwig Klages sent a letter to Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, the Baseler
philologist and exponent of Nietzsche, proposing that his correspondent compare
psychoanalysis to late Romantic psychology.
2
This was part of a project, heavily
influenced by Johann Jakob Bachofens Romantic theory of symbols, designed to destroy
Sigmund Freuds theories.
3
Many of these concepts psychological, metaphysical,
aesthetic turned up again and again in the formal fascist discourse and the radical
aesthetic critique of the 1920s-1930s alike. Klages, a philosophical luminary, the pope

1
Walter Benjamin, Spielzeug und Spielen, Randbemerkungen zu einem Monumentalwerk, in
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972),
pp. 129. Benjamin explored in this article a clear opposition between the Freudian therapeutic model and
the Klagesian-Bachofenic-Nietzschean typology of living temporality. He rejected the first in favor of the
second. The psychological dimension of the article supports an analogy between folklorist art and toys as a
direct path to collective images [kollektive Gebilde].
2
Carl Albrecht Bernoulli was the principal disciple of Friedrich Nietzsches close friend Franz Overbeck
(1837-1905). Of the interpretation of Nietzsche Bernoulli wrote at Overbecks behest Lionel Gossman
wrote: Overbeck strove for the rest of his life and beyond it, through the work of his student Carl Albrecht
Bernoulli, to preserve a different picture of Nietzsche from that propagated, unfortunately with
considerable success, by die Dame Frster, as he insisted on calling [Elisabeth Fster Nietzsche]. Lionel
Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000), p. 418.
3
Herbert Schndelbach sees Klages as the heir to Nietzsches Lebensphilosophie. See Herbert
Schndelbach, Philosophy in Germany 18311933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), p. 145. Klagess own followers and admirers often identified him as the days
leading thinker in the Lebensphilosophie tradition: Within Germanys borders, as well as without, Ludwig
Klages is known as the most important Lebensphilosopher. Ernst Hoferichter, Ein Frischer und Knder
des Lebens, in Herbert Hnel, ed., Ludwig Klages, Erforcher und Knder des Lebens: Festschrift zum 75.
Geburtstage des Philosophen am 10. Dezember 1947(Salzburg: sterreichscher Verlag fr Bellestristik
und Wissenschaft, 1947), p. 11.
3
of German graphology,
4
an outspoken anti-Semite, and a principle Lebensphilosopher
whom Georg Lukcs recognized also as a pre-Fascist irrationalist,
5
urged Bernoulli to
radicalize the contrast to the Freudian humanistic Geist (spirit, intellect) to make it more
polemical.
6
If Bernoulli turned to the late Romantic philosophy of Bachofen, said
Klages, he would find the antidote to all mechanistic depictions of the soul.

Klagess
beginning point was rather that there is no body without a shape [Gestalt]. Every
appearance has a shape.
7
One wonders what image our age would have had of the body
and its soul if Klagess cause had triumphed in World War II. As Ulfried Geuter showed
in The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany, Klagess Charakterologie
was counted among the leading influences on Nazi psychology.
8
Benjamin himself
pointed out, in a review of Ernst Jngers collection War and Warriors (1930), about
those habitus of the chthonic forces of terror, who carry their volumes of [Ludwig]
Klages in their packs.
9
Letters found in the Klages archive in Marbach prove that plans
were afoot to create a whole Nazi leadership school based on Klagess
Lebensphilosophie, graphology and characterology. Hence, the danger was imminent.
10
A

4
Eva Horn, Der Mensch im Spiegel der Schrift. Graphologie zwischen popular Selbsterforschung und
moderner Humanwissenschaft, in Literatur und Anthropologie, ed. A. Assmann, U. Gaier, and G.
Trommsdorf (Tbingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003).
5
Georg Lukcs, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin, 1980), p. 191.
6
Ludwig Klages to Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, 14 August 1923, Deutsche Literaturarchiv am Marbach
(henceforth DLM), Nachlass Ludwig Klages, Sig. 61.4141, letter no. 33.
7
Ibid., p. 956.
8
Ulfried Geuter, The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany, tr. Richard J. Holems (N.Y:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 94.
9
Walter Benjamin, Theories of German Fascism, in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes,
Martin Jay, Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Clifornia Press, 1994), 159-
164. Here, p. 164. Originally published as Theorien des deutschen Faschismus. Zu der Sammelschrift
Krieg und Krieger, Die Gesselschaft 7:2 (1930), pp. 32-41.
10
The correspondence between Ludwig Klages and the economist Kurt Seesemann proves such plans in the
process of realization, during the late 1930s. However, the plan was blocked once the old institution of the
party, Rust and Schacht, lost its power during 1936-1937, and finally when Alfred Rosenberg and Alfred
Baeumler turned against the Klages Circle publicly, in 1938. Rosenbergs attack on Klages in the
Martin-Luther University and above the major newspapers of the time--first and foremost the Vlkischer
Beobachter--was undoubtedly the result of a competition between the two principal forces of
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thinker of a different sort, Walter Benjamin participated in the Bachofen debate of the
mid 1920s, crossing paths with the radical aesthetic ur-models of Bachofen and Klages,
investigating closely the same anti-Freudian graphology and Characterology that Klages
promoted. Benjamins texts, after this debate, are filled with hidden and explicit
references to this debate, a fact largely unrecognized in the fertile Benjaminian scene.
Klagess attack on psychoanalysis and the mastering of types and characters,
would not have interested current research as much, if not the impact it had on key
progressive theoreticians, or the radical reactionaries on the right wing. Reconsidering the
power of Lebensphilosophie, so it seems, forces one also to reassess the power of a
discourse that refused to commit to a clear political and ethical position, but engaged with
different--often opposite--radical forms, instead. Revived at present from the perspective
of biopolitics, one wonders whether these political ambivalences and inherent radicalism
are incorporated into the theoretical system and to what extent the theory is aware of its
own historical burden.
Klages, one of the principle inspirations for typological psychology,
11
was calling
for a new understanding of reality, which he located on the threshold between life and
death, existence and nothingness, the individual and the collective: The great urgency
felt today is a result of the mechanization process itself. It is the tragic destiny of
authentic knowledge . . . . We know only that we are no more. Somnium narrare

Lebensphilosophie in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. See Alfred Rosenberg: Gestalt und Leben (Halle/
Saale: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1938): A Lecture given on 27April 1938 at the Martin-Luther-Universitt in
Halle- Wittenberg. Klages and Seesemanns correspondence refers explicitly to this confrontation with
Rosenberg and Baeumler. For the correspondence, see Kurt Seesemann to Ludwig Klages, 11 February
1935, Deutsche Literaturarchiv am Marbach (henceforth, DLM), Nachlass Ludwig Klages, sig.: 61.12413.
11
Mitchell G. Ash, Gestlat Psychology in German culture, 1890- 1967 (N.Y: Cambridge University Press,
1995), pp. 12, 300.
5
vigilantis est (Seneca).
12
Klagess words bespoke an awareness of an existential threat
not to be confused with existential philosophy, which prizes individual choice above
all else and could hardly be further from Klagess ideas. Life, according to Klages, arose
out of a fundamental division of body and soul, a rupture and a lost unity of cosmological
principles, an erotic nearness (Nhe) to nothingness that cannot be surpassed.
13
Freuds
attempt to recall an individual state of harmony und cognitive unity was destined to fail,
according to Klages, who saw the Freudian enterprise as another sign of the modern
obsession with narratives of progression and automatization, part of the Jewish faith and
inclusive worldview.
14

2. Lebensphilosophie
The Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie defines Lebensphilosophie as a
cluster of concepts of uniquely German provenance, unknown to Anglophone or
Francophone cultures.
15
Its principal advocates, according to the editors of the dictionary,
make up the school of life-hermeneutics that sprang from Wilhelm Dilthey during the late
nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The movement, they argue, developed in
a few directions, united by an emphasis on resistance. As an alternative to normative

12
Ludwig Klages, Smmtliche Schriften (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1964), 4: 409.
13
Eros als Schpfer der Weltblieb trotz seiner kosmischen Beschafenheit ein Eros der Nhe. Ludwig
Klages, Vom kosmogenischen Eros (Jena: Eugen Diedrichs Verlag, 1930 [1922])., p. 131. Emphasis in the
Original.
14
In 1929 Klages argued that the fundamental basis of the Jewish faith or its myth of creation is the
determinist and necessary progress towards an aim. Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele,
in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II (Bonn: H. Bouvier Verlag, 1969), p. 537. For the vampire will to power
[dass vampytische Wille zur Macht ] of the Jewish god see the second volume, p. 1266.
15
Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie, eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Grnder (Hrsg.) (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), s.v. Lebensbezug, Lebenserfahrung, Lebensreformen,
Lebensgefhl, Lebenskategorien, Lebenskraft, Lebenskries, Lebensphilosophie.
6
empiricist culture, the movement mostly focused on the relationship between biology (or
psychology) and philosophy.
Lebensphilosophie should be considered as the result of early anti-Kantianism.
Johann van der Zande has said of these writers that they were bad Kantians but not
necessarily bad popular philosophers.
16
According to van der Zande, the founder of this
amorphous movement, Johann August Ernesti, demanded in 1754 the return of life-
philosophy to the universities and specifically the philosophy faculties. Johann Georg
Heinrich Feder (17401821) established an even closer connection between the
philosophy of life and a philosophy of action in 1782. Founded as a protest in the
name of life against modern science and universalism, this philosophy of life assigned
to the science of man the ability to explain the other empirical sciences.
17

The first journal dedicated to Lebensphilosophie was established during the
1790s, and by the 1830s a few books attested to the presence of the new approach.
18

During the 1820s those affiliated with the Jena Romantics did much to further the
aesthetization of Lebensphilosophie, and the most notable work that emerged from this
milieu was Friedrich Schlegels Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie des Lebens (Lectures
about the philosophy of life, 1827). Schlegel attacked the systematic philosophy of the
day and advocated einheit der Gesinnung, or unity of conviction. Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi, Novalis (the pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg), Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler

16
Johan van der Zande, In the Image of Cicero: German Philosophy between Wolff and Kant, Journal of
the History of Ideas 56, no.3 (July 1995): p. 420.
17
Ibid., p. 430.
18
The most comprehensive historical study of Lebensphilosophie was written by Gudrun Khne-Bertram.
According to her periodization, it emerged in the period between 1770 and 1830 and was closely related to
ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. This is why, she argues, Dilthey often mentions the rmische
Lebensphilosophie. Khne-Bertram, Aus dem Leben- zum Leben: Entstehung, Wesen und Bedeutung
populr Lebensphilosophien in der Geistesgeschichte des 10. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Lang
Verlag, 1987), p. 72.
7
and Lorenz Oken can all be considered contributors to a philosophy devoted to critical
self-cultivation, often contrasted with the ordained perception of Bildung . After the
Romantics it was the contributions of Bachofen, Nietzsche and Dilthey that placed the
meta-concept of Ganzheit [wholeness] above all, identifying an organic process in time
with an aesthetic vocabulary and a descriptive psychology. Hans-Georg Gadamer,
looking back at the process that led from the nineteenth centurys organic and empirical
language to Diltheys hermeneutics of life, concluded that from then on life and history
became the letters of the world.
19

Post-Nietzscheanism and the revival of Bachofen made Lebensphilosophie into a
hugely popular philosophy during the 1920s; in the words of the neo-Kantian Heinrich
Rickert (18631936), Lebensphilosophers formulated a comprehensive aesthetic
discourse of naked life (blossen Leben) during the early and mid 1920s, turning it into
the fashionable philosophical trend of our time.
20

The Lebensphilosophie of the early Weimar Republic slowly gained popularity
among the educated. Identified from the early 1910s with protests against the elitist
Prussian bureaucracy launched by both the green movement and the youth movement, it
inspired the Lebensreformbewegung (life reform movement), which advocated nudism
and natural therapy as a means to liberating the soul and casting away all formal
conventions and false pretensions.
21
During the late 1910s and the early 1920s

19
Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, ed. Bernhard Groethuysen (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1992), p. 291.
20
Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen
Modestrmung unserer Zeit (Tbingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag, 1920).
21
See, for example, August Messer, Die freideutsche Jugendbewegung (Ihr Verlauf von 1913 bis 1922)
(Langensalza: Beyer & Shne, 1922), p. 17. For a detailed history of the Lebensreformbewegung see
Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, A Social History 1890- 1930 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Raymond H. Dominick III, The Environmental Movement in
Germany, Prophets & Pioneers, 1871-1971 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
8
Lebensphilosophie confronted a severe political and ideological crisis: military defeat had
prompted a series of mutinies and gross political disaffection. Philosophers called for a
poetic return to the total aestheticism of the nineteenth century and pledged their support
for a sweeping counterattack against the conventions of scientific and historical thinking,
against industrialization and positivism. At a lecture he gave in 1918, Klages set forth his
new calculus: Images and not objects are the source of inspiration for the soul this is
the key for the whole teaching of life.
22
The new philosophy of life permitted all kinds
of resistance to institutionalized discourses. Avant-garde thinkers and artists like Klages,
the Romantic guru and poet Stefan George and his circle, Alfred Kubin, a founding
member of the Expressionist group Blaue Reiter, shared the dream of reviving, in
Foucaults words, a great circle of nature based on the divine All-in-One.
23

Georg Lukcs paid tribute to Klages as the one responsible for the fascization of
Lebensphilosophie, who actually transformed vitalism into an open combat against
reason and culture.
24
Klagess whole philosophy, Lukcs argued, is only a variation
on this one primitive idea. His significance lies in the fact that never before had reason
been challenged so openly and radically.
25
Together with Bergson and Heidegger,
Lukcs named Klages a founder of modern vitalism. But in contrast to the two and their

22
Nicht Dinge, sondern Bilder sind beseelt: das ist der Schlssel zur ganzen Lebenslehre. DLM,
Nachlass Ludwig Klages, Manuskripte, Prosa: Zur Lebenslehre. Aus einer Vorlesung (summer semester,
1918), Sig.: 61. 3798.
23
See Michel Foucaults essay about Hlderlin and the George circle, in Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and
Epistemology, ed. James D. Fabion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 13. On
Stefan Georges close relationship with the cosmic principle and Klages and Schulers Cosmic Circle,
see Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2002), pp. 292310. For Klagess close correspondence with the expressionist Alfred Kubin, see Paul
Bishop, Mir war der Geist immer mehr eine Explodierte Elephatiasis, Der Briefwechsel zwischen
Alfred Kubin und Ludwig Klages, in: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft XLIII (1999), pp.49-
95.
24
Georg Lukcs, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: The Merlin Press, 1980), p. 523.
25
Ibid., p. 524.
9
vitalist time theory, Klagess polemics were directed against the future,
26
which Lukcs
identifies with time itself.
Klages himself, following the legacy of late Romanticism, identified the Jewish
perception of the divine as arriving from out-of-time [Ausserzeitlich] and opposing the
organic wholeness [Ganzheit] of form [Gestalt]. If Klages is indeed a faithful
representative of Lebensphilosophie, he stands at an alternative crossroad between the
disciplines and different discourses that occupied the minds of so many thinkers in the
German 1920s. The biological metaphor ruled above all.

3. An acute sense of subversion
Born in Hannover in 1878, Ludwig Klages lived most of his youth with a younger sister,
an authoritative father, and a sentimental aunt.
27
His mother died giving birth to his sister.
Pressured by his father, Klages obtained a doctoral degree in industrial chemistry, but
soon after meeting the poet Stefan George in Munich, turned to philosophy and the arts.
In Munich Klages established the Cosmic Circle with George, Karl Wolfskehl, Albert
Verwey, and Alfred Schuler. The circle was dissolved in 1905, after Wolfskehl began to
play a part in Zionist initiatives. Turning a deaf ear to Klages and Schulers anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories, George took Wolfskehls side. Things got so bad that Wolfskehl
decided to buy a gun to protect himself against his old friends and mistakenly shot his
own leg.

26
Ibid., p. 525.
27
Hans Eggert Schrder, Ludwig Klages; die Geschichte seines Lebens (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1972). For
the following sketch of Klages childhood I have relied heavily on the information in Hans Eggert
Schrder, Ludwig Klages, Vol I: Das Jgend, pp.3- 47.
10
During the first decade of the twentieth century, Klages started to study and teach
graphology, physiognomy, and neo-Romantic philosophy of life. Ironically, it was none
other than Wolfskehl who introduced Klages to Bachofens philosophy and ideas, later so
influential on his thinking about life and his reactionary politics.
After gaining fame in Germany as the founder of German graphology and
characterology, Klages shifted to more philosophical works. During World War I he
constructed a new philosophy of dreams that fused Goethes primal image, or Urbild,
with modern phenomenology. When the war ended, he produced Vom kosmogenischen
Eros (On the cosmogonic Eros, 1922). His resolutely apolitical hermeneutics of organic
images found support in widely varying ideological camps. Beginning in the 1910s the
editors of the reactionary journal Die Tat had snatched up every article Klages offered
them. Soon their moderate rivals, the editors of Mnchner neuesten Nachrichten and
Vssischen Zeitung, followed suit. In June 1922 Siegfried Kracauer published sections of
Vom kosmogenischen Eros in the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung feuilleton, adding a short
introduction in which he focused on Klagess innovative notion of Urbilder, or primal
images.
28
In October 1924 Kracauer introduced and published a talk Klages had given on
the Frankfurter Zeitung radio hour.
29

Walter Benjamin was among the first to claim that Klages had endowed
the soul with mythical powers, which had led him to speak of the souls
collective unconscious and image-fantasy (kollektiven Unbewusstsen and
Bildphantasie).
30
Benjamins admiration of Klages, which has never been

28
Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 June 1922, feuilleton section, pp. 12.
29
Frankfurter Zeitung, 25 October 1924, feuilleton section, p. 2.
30
Walter Benjamin to Max Horkheimer, 28 March 1937, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph
Gdde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996), 5:490.
11
properly explored in intellectual history, lasted for over two decades, and is far
better documented than his relationship with Carl Schmitt, which the philosopher
Giorgio Agamben stresses.
31

Though the correspondence between Benjamin and Klages, which has not been
fully published, is scanty it gives a clear picture of the contradictory interest the former
took in the latter. The many references to Klages begin in the early 1920s and continue to
his Arcades Project, proving that for Benjamin Klagess Lebensphilosophie was utterly
essential. When he was twenty-two, Benjamin had traveled to Munich in order to invite
Klages to give a lecture to his fellow Free German Students, the liberal branch of
Wandervogel.
32
After that first meeting in 1914, a short exchange followed in 1920, when
Benjamin praised Klages for his theory of dreams and asked for further references.
Klagess response, still unpublished, mentioned other pieces he had written and included
an invitation to meet in Berlin the following spring.
33
Furthermore, the two men were
next drawn together by the publication of Kosmogenischen Eros, which opened with a
dedication to the theory and history of myths revived by Bachofen. Benjamin read the
book with great excitement and wrote to Klages in February 1923 to communicate his
enthusiasm.
34

31
There are only few studies that emphasize the relationship between Klages and Benjamin. The earliest is
a short and partial article by Werner Fuld, Walter Benjamin Beiehung zu Ludwig Klages, Akzente,
Zeitschrift fr Lieteratur 28 (1981): 27485. A few others have discussed the importance of the
relationship, notably John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, N. Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1993). Most recently appeared a fascinating theorization by Irving Wohlfarth,
Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros, A Tentative Reading of Zum Planetarium, in
Benjamin Studien 1, no. 1 (May 2002).
32
Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers
(London: Verso, 1996), p. 64.
33
Ludwig Klages to Walter Benjamin, 20 December 1920, Nachlass Lduwig Klages, Deutsche
Literaturarchiv in Marbach [DLM], sig.: 61.4074.
34
Walter Benjamin to Ludwig Klages, 28 February 1923, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe , 2:319
12
Benjamin dedicated two essays and a few reviews to Bachofen and his Klagesian
epigones. In 1926 he reviewed Klages and Bernoullis interpretation for the widely read
Literarische Welt. Eight years later he published a far more ambitious essay in Nouvelle
revue franaise, setting Bachofens contribution and Klagess reaction in a more general
perspective by elaborating the context for both thinkers and their reception. At the center
of Bachofens project was the cult of the magical death, the rites of the earth . . .
explored by the primitive mentality. Yet, Benjamin added, his foregrounding of
irrational forces in terms of their metaphysical and civic signification, would one day
pique the interest of fascist theorists though it would interest Marxist theorists nearly
as much thanks to its evocation of a communist society at the dawn of history.
35
This
more critical spirit also affected Benjamins treatment of Klages in the essay: while most
of his comments were strikingly laudatory, he linked his sometime correspondent to
Alfred Baeumler, whom he called one of Germanys official professors of fascism.
36

As Yoseph Mali pointed out in an article dedicated to Benjamins theorization of
Bachofen, during Benjamins career the allusions to Bachofen are very consistent. From
1922 to 1934, references to Bachofen always contain the concept of myth, and its
contribution to a theory of history, language, and time, mostly seen from the perspective

35
Ce tableau [de la prhistoire], mettant au premire plan les forces irrationnelles dans leur signification
mtaphysique et civique, devait un jour presenter un intrt suprieur pour les thoriciens fascists; mais il
devait solliciter presque autant les penseurs marxistes par lvocation dune socit communiste laube de
lhistoire. Walter Benjamin, Johann Jacob Bachofen, in Gesammelte Schriften, book 2, 1:220.

36
The article was originally written for the Nouvelle revue franaise. In a commentary they affixed to the
piece, the editors of Benjamins Gesammelte Schriften argued that his ideas on Bachofen were recycled by
Benjamin in his writings about Kafka. See Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, book 2, 3:962.
13
of an absence, or a destructive character, characterizing Bachofen in terms akin to
those which he usually applied to himself.
37

A silent homage Benjamin consistently paid his master was his scrupulous
avoidance of anything resembling Freuds psychoanalytical narratives. Even when
Benjamin identified the connections between Klagess mythical images and Fascist
aesthetics, he still insisted on the great potential of Klagesian thought.
38
In 1934
Benjamin wrote his acclaimed essay Franz Kafka and made his preferences very clear:
There are two ways to miss the point of Kafkas works, one is to interpret them
naturally; the other is to interpret them from a supernatural perspective. Both the
psychoanalytical and the theological interpretations miss the essential point.
39
The
alternative he proposed was an investigation of the historical consciousness of
creatures based on the culturally suppressed in contrast to individual psychological
suppression and which he related to Bachofen, the Bachofen he knew through Klages:
In his [i.e., Kafkas] works, the creature appears at the stage which Bachofen has termed
the hetaeric stage. The fact that this stage is now forgotten does not mean that it does not
extend into the present. On the contrary: it is present by virtue of its oblivion.
40
Only
through this approach could one appreciate the dure that extends from prehistory to
everything excluded since then. Laws and definite norms remain unwritten in the

37
Joseph Mali, The Reconciliation of Myth: Benjamins Homage to Bachofen, in: Journal of the History
of Ideas 60:1 (1999), pp. 165-187. Here, p. 178.
38
Walter Benjamin, Theories of German Fascism, in Weimar Sourcebook, p. 164. Diese einsichten sind
nicht nur durch grssere Materialstudien sondern auch durch neue methodische berlegungen bedingt.
39
Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, in Selected Writings, trans. Harry Zohn, eds. Michael Jennings,
Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2:806.
40
Ibid., pp. 8089.
14
prehistoric world, Benjamin explained, noting that Kafka was able to save and represent
that forgotten world in his stories through a series of ur-images [Urbilder].
41

In June 1930 Benjamin wrote to his friend Gershom Scholem about Klagess Der
Geist als Widersacher der Seele (The spirit as the adversary of the soul, 192932): It is
without a doubt a great philosophical work, regardless of the context in which the author
may be and remain suspect. . . . I would never have imagined that . . . clumsy
metaphysical dualism . . . could ever be conjoined with really new and wide-ranging
conceptions.
42

During the early 1930s Benjamin considered writing a book about the theory of
collective unconscious, relying on the insights of Klages and Carl Jung.
43
He was
particularly impressed by Klagess theory of Eros and he liked to point out that Klages
had endowed Eros with the ability to form connections between time and space that had a
political and social relevance as well as loftier metaphysical implications. Benjamins
whole notion of Rausch [ecstasy] is taken, in fact, from the work Klages did on the
concept beginning in the mid-1910s.
44
So fond of seeing the world through Klagesian
spectacles did Benjamin become that in June 1932, replying to a letter in which Gershom

41
Ibid., p. 797.
42
Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W.
Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 36667. Es ist nun,
in welchen Zusammenhngen zuch immer der Verfasser [Klages] einem Suspekt sein und bleiben mag,
ohne Zweifel ein grosses Philosophisches Werk. Es wre vllig mssig, wenn ich Dir etwa hier andeuten
wollte, worum es sich handelt. Ich have auch noch keine eigne Stellung zu dem, was darin steht, bezogen.
In keinem Fale htte ich mir vorstellen knnen, dass ein si hanebchner metaphysischer Dualismus, wie er
bei Klages zugrunde liegt, je sich mit wirklichen neuen und weittragenden Konzeptionen verbinden
knne. Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem, 15 March 1930, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. 4, p.
537.
43
Walter Benjamin to Max Horkheimer, 28 March 1937, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 5:490.
44
The term was popularized by the George circle and the Cosmic circle. It has appeared already in Klagess
1914 and 1919 two parts Traumbewusstsein, which Benjamin read carefully. But it is most notably
developed in Klagess Eros work from 1922. In his 3 volumes Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele Klages
still used the notion of Rausch or ecstasy but preferred the concept of Entzuckung instead. Benjamin
continued to use the concept of Rausch during the 1930s, in spite of its Nazification.
15
Scholem described his experience in Palestine as Nietzschean, Benjamin suggested that
his friend reconsider his experience in Jerusalem by the light of Klagess book about
Nietzsches psychological achievement.
45

As described by Benjamin, Lebensphilosophie in general and Klages in
particular suggest a much more radical both collective and individual
theoretical prospect than any other theory, including psychoanalysis and political
authoritarianism. One might say that the secret power of Lebensphilosophie lay in
its ability to use and abuse history for the sake of life. Benjamins fascination with
the ideas of figures whose political fortunes deviated from those of his
companions tainted his interpretations: Gershom Scholem reflected somewhat
uncomfortably, Benjamin had an acute sense of subversion . . . [connected to]
the worldview of reactionary writers.
46

4. Radical Life
Ludwig Klages and Alfred Baeumler were the two principal Bachofenians of the early
Weimar republic. Both wrote about Bachofen and edited selections from his writings.
Yet, while Benjamin failed in his attempts at an academic career and Klages chose the
existence of a bohemian outsider, writing dense, almost hermetic books, Baeumler was
an established academic.
Alfred Baeumler is known to historians as the father of the Nazified
Nietzsche and the Nazi image of heroism. Herbert Schndelbach wrote, It is certainly
undeniable that the heroic realism of [Alfred] Baeumler, [Ernst] Krieck and [Alfred]

45
Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem, 1 June 1932, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 4: 100.
46
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, in Neue Rundschau 76, no. 1 (1965), p. 19.
16
Rosenberg, which was once considered to be the official philosophy of National
Socialism, was inspired by the traditions of life-philosophy.
47
But Baeumler was much
more then just another simple-minded Nazi who reinvigorated heroic realism, like the
two other companions Rosenberg and Krieck.
Alfred Baeumler was born in 1887 in Neustadt, then part of the Austro-Hungarian
Sudeten. He studied in Berlin and Munich and received his doctorate in Kantian
philosophy in 1914, under the direction of Max Dessoir, a well known neo-Kantian of the
time and an expert in philosophy of aesthetics. Baeumlers dissertation was dedicated to
the problem of generality [Allgemeingtigkeit] in Kants Aesthetics, and opened with a
declaration about the need to overcome the flawed psychology of rationalism, before
any further discussion of aesthetics.
48
Similarly to Klages, Baeumler agreed that the rift
between feeling (soul) and consciousness or the intellect (Geist) is a decisive one in
modern times. However, in contrast to Klages, Baeumler envisioned a radical political act
that would open up new possibilities in both philosophy and the world.
While working on his dissertation he was also on the staff of the feuilleton of the
daily Frankfurter Zeitung, the same liberal supplement that Siegfried Kracauer would
edit during the 1920s. Baeumler was drafted into the German army, where he served from
1915 to 1918 as an infantryman and later fought in the east with the Freikorps, refusing to
put down his weapon even after the formal announcement on the German defeat.
Between 1920 and 1922 he worked for the elitist Kantian journal Kant-Studien, directed
at the time by the leading neo-Kantian and chairman of the Kant Society, Arthur Liebert.

47
Herbert Schndelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831- 1933 (Cambridge University Press, 1984., p. 140.
48
Die unvolkommene Psychologie des Rationalismus musste berwunden sein, bevore das sthetische
seine Stelle fand. Alfred Baeumler, Das Problem der Allgemeingltigkeit in Kants sthetik, Inaugural-
17
In 1926 Baeumler edited with Manfred Schrter a collection of Bachofens texts,
published as Der Mythus von Orient und Occident: Eine Metaphysik der alten Welt (The
myth of Orient and Occident: a metaphysics of the ancient world). Baeumlers lengthy
introduction to the book made him a celebrated public intellectual in Germany. In 1929
Baeumler was appointed a professor of philosophy and pedagogy at Dresden University,
where he would meet, among others, Victor Klemperer. In 1931 he began assisting
Alfred Rosenberg in shaping the new ideology of the Nazi party. Baeumler formally
became a member of the Nazi party in 1933. In 1934 he was appointed director of the
office of science in Rosenbergs office of culture and pedagogy. His analyses of
Bachofen, from the mid 1920s, mark a turn of his career, changing from the neo-
Kantianism to Lebensphilosophie. It was accompanied by a growing interest in politics,
and potential political uses of both history (myth) and philosophy.
Klagess popular study of Eros, turned out to be the first in a series of publications
that stirred up a broad discussion of Bachofens ideas. Two years later, Klages helped
Bernoulli publish Johann Jakob Bachofen als Religionsforscher (Johann Jakob Bachofen
as a student of religion), a compilation of the writings by Bachofen they considered
essential to the revival of interest in his theory of mythical time. In addition to editing the
passages, the two men added rich and pointed comments to every page. In 1925 Bernoulli
and Klages edited a new edition of Bachofens Versuch ber die Grbersymbolik der
Alten (Interpretation of ancient mortuary symbols) and in 1926 they published a
collection of Bachofens writings under the title Johann Jakob Bachofen: Urreligion und
antike symbole (Johann Jakob Bachofen: primal religion and ancient symbols).

Dissertation submitted to the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universitt in Munich, defended 9 June 1914 (Munich:
Delphin-Verlag, 1915), p.1.
18
By 1925 Klages and Bernoulli found themselves competing with the more
professional adherents of Bachofen. In one of his last letters to Bernoulli, Klages
mentioned a new collection of Bachofen texts, a work of resentment, administered by
the firm of Baeumler and Schrter, who deserve to be rapped on the hand.
49
Klages
planned a large-scale critique of this work, a plan that was never realized.
In many ways, Baeumlers interpretation of Bachofen, or of the cults of death
and life, led to more radical political implications than did Klages and Bernoullis
readings but relied on a more conventional methodology. Baeumlers growing interest in
Bachofen occurred the same year he established his journal, the Handbuch der
Philosophie. His carefully contextualized and highly analytical close readings used
Bachofen to polarize Western civilization between Orient and Occident: for him,
Bachofen had described a clash of civilizations that influenced religion, race and
cultures. Baeumlers careful and scholastic interpretation often failed to strike the sparks
that fly from the pages Klages and Bernoulli devoted to Bachofen but it was much more
coherent and organized. His chronology advanced and analyzed Bachofens
anthropological research of the death cult, as a metaphysical system of presence and
preservation that consecrated myths as the power of the mood of death [Macht der
Todesstimmung].
50
Bachofen, he wrote, did not historicize the myth. Quite the
contrary: he mythicized history.
51
True depiction of history, according to this view,
could not erase the dead as distanced by either space or time. German Romanticism
returned to Greece and Rome, Baeumler argues, in order to save the dead from

49
Ludwig Klages to Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, 9 February 1925, DLM, Nachlass Ludwig Klages, Sig.
61.4141, letter no. 46
50
Alfred Baeumler, Introduction to J.J. Bachofen, Der Mythus von Orient und Occident, eine Metaphysik
der Alten Welt, ed. Manfred Schrter (Munich: C.H. Becksche Verlag, 1956), p. CC.
19
oblivion.
52
Any opposite attempt, would abide to a cold scientific culture. Therefore,
Bachofens myth was reflecting the law- of- life [spiegelt ein Lebensgesetz] and its
constant exchange with the cult of the dead.
53
This unity, in turn, illustrates the
experiences of the people [Volkserlebnisse] in light of its religious belief.
54
Provoked by
Klagess strong anti- Christian reading of both Bachofen and Nietzsche, Baeumlers
project can be read, to a large extent, as an anti- Klagesian project. Baeumler expresses
his resistance to Klages in different forms, mocking all erotic cosmologies as overtly
aestheticized euphemism for religious contents.
Three years after publishing his popular essays about Bachofen, Baeumler was
simultaneously appointed head of the science office at the Center of Nazi Pedagogy and
chairman of the department of education at Berlin University, which effectively made
him responsible for the Nazification of the German academic world. Hans Sluga
reported: On the night of May 10, 1933 . . . there were many students that attended
Alfred Baeumlers inaugural speech. . . . Baeumler was in no doubt about the public and
symbolic function he was meant to serve, and it was surely for this reason that had
arranged for his inaugural lecture to coincide with the day of the book burning.
55
As
Alfred Rosenbergs right hand his influence on the educational programs and the
propaganda system of the Nazi state were profound. He was imprisoned by the Allies
after the end of the war but continued to publish and debate politics from the pages of the

51
Ibid., p. CXC.
52
Frher hatte man die Toten begraben und an ihre unmittelbare Gegenwart geglaubt. Ibid., p. XXXVII.
53
Ibid., p . CXCII.
54
Ibid., p. CXCIII.
55
Hans Sluga, Heideggers Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1993), p. 125.
20
right-wing journals that now turned all their anger against the Stalinist-Bolshevic
conspiracy, evoking nary a whimper from the American occupying forces.
All along Baeumler had viewed Bachofen as a possible tool for reviving the long
forgotten mythical power of the German soul. Like Bachofen and Nietzsche before him,
Baeumler used Theodor Mommsen as the representative figure of scientific
historicization: he protested that Mommsen sees it all as the present, a prosaic nearness,
a [negative] critique. In Ranke and Mommsens critical science the state was evaluated
hastily: this was the course taken by their historical writing.
56
Baeumlers antihistoricist
approach won considerable praise. Among those impressed by the essay were Thomas
Mann and Martin Heidegger.
57
That same year, Baeumler published several articles about
Bachofen; one was republished in his intellectual history of Germanness.
58

Of particular interest to Baeumler was Bachofens discussion of the mythic
ontology of time, which he would put to use in his attacks on the Jewish science of
psychoanalysis. Myth, he claimed, was essentially an absent chronology, an exclusive
collective history without chronology or facts. As a heuristic device, Baeumler
contrasted the thinking of Bachofen, whom he identified quite simply as the prophet,
with that of the psychologist clearly Freud. [Bachofen] gazed into the depths of
pre-time [Vorzeit]. The psychologist, fearful, greedy, alert, surveys his own time and the
surrounding time of previous centuries. . . . Whoever is willing to risk his life, whoever

56
Bei Mommsen ist alles Gegenwart, prosaische Nhe, Kritik. Man berschtzt zu leicht den Umstand,
dass Ranke und Mommsen der wissenschaflich- kritischen Richtung innerhalf der neueren
Geschichtsschreibung angehren. Alfred Baeumler, Der Mythos von Orient und Occident: Eine
Metaphysik der alten Welt (Munich: Becksche Verlagshandlung, 1956 [1926]), p. clvii.
57
Marianne Baeumler, Hubert Brintraeger, Hermann Kurzke, eds., Thomas Mann und Alfred Baeumler:
Ein Dokumentation (Wrzburg: Knigsberf und Neumann Verlag, 1989). See also Frank Edler, Alfred
Bumler on Hlderlin and the Greeks: Reflections on the Heidegger-Bumler Relationship, at
http://www.janushead.org/JHspg99/edler.cfm and http://www.janushead.org/2-2/fedler.cfm .
21
plans great acts, must forget all about psychology.
59
For Baeumler the revival of myths
and of their peculiar chronology inspired a vita activa that transcended linear time and
epistemology. No more words to aestheticize a totality of life, but an action to enforce its
vitalism on the false cultivated and socialized self.
In 1929 Baeumler published Korrekturen: Bachofen und Nietzsche, a
comparative study of Bachofen and Nietzsche concluding that Bachofens symbolism
suited Fascist goals less well than did Nietzsches will to power.
60
In 1931 Baeumler
joined the cultural organization Alfred Rosenberg was forming under Nazi auspices and
became his right hand.
Baeumler rejected Klages and Bernoullis interpretation of Bachofen twice: in a
review he wrote in 1924 and in his elaborated introduction to Bachofen, Der Mythus von
Orient und Occident, eine Metaphysik der Alten Welt (The myth of the Orient and the
Occident, a metaphysics of the ancient world), published in 1926. In many ways, the
political implications of Baeumlers interpretation were more radical than Klagess, but
Baeumler relied on a more conventional academic methodology. His carefully
contextualized and highly analytical close readings used Bachofen to reveal the
incommensurable Oriental and Occidental influences on Western religion, race and
culture, revealing a world map divided in two: the lands of the enemies of the Teutonic
races and those of their friends. If Baeumlers interpretation often failed to strike the

58
Alfred Baeumler, Von Winckelmann zu Bachofen, 1926, in Studien zur Deutschen Geisteschichte
(Berlin: Junkerund Dnnhaupt Verlag, 1937), pp. 100170.
59
Wer in Gefahr des Lebens schwebt, wem eine grosse Tat aufregelt ist, wer muss, der vergisst alle
Psichologie. Alfred Baeumler, Korrekturen: Bachofen und Nietzsche, in Das Mutterrecht, ed. Heinrichs,
p. 147.
60
Hans Sluga argues that Baeumler transformed to German Fascism only in 1929, next to joining
Rosenbergs organization. But Baeumlers Lebensphilosophie proves this shift taking place as soon as the
early 1920s, a conclusion of his disappointment with his pervious neo- Kantian conviction. See Hans Sluga,
22
sparks that fly from the pages Klages and Bernoulli devoted to Bachofen, it was more
historical and committed to action than Klagess radical aestheticism. In Baeumlers view
Bachofen and Klages offered a Romantic theory of history but could not realize it:
Still, in 1926 an olive branch was offered, to which Klages and Bernoulli refused.
In a letter Baeumler sent to Bernoulli in 1926, he insisted that a shared foe implied a
convergence:
The contrast between your perception of Bachofen and ours goes
beyond Bachofens oppositions. The number of Philistines is so large,
and that of the anti-Philistines so small, that it is truly unfortunate that
few determined foes of civic prejudice have entered this polemical
conflict. . . . The enemy confronts us both [Der Gegner steht uns wohl
beiden gegenber].
61

Along with his letter, Baeumler included a copy of the essay on Klages and Bachofen that
Walter Benjamin had published in Literarische Welt, marked with a large angry X.

To conclude, in the history of Lebensphilosophie the difference between Klages and
Baeumler is a telling one, a gap large enough to envelop every twentieth-century theory
of totalitarianism and fascism, but it has been neglected because of the general contempt
in which postwar historians and philosophers held right-wing theories. I have tried to
show that this approach has also shaped how progressive thinkers were and are being
read. In Benjamins case, his views were framed too quickly within other progressive

Heideggers Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1993), p. 128.
61
Alfred Baeumler to Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, 8 May 1926, Institut fr Zeitgeschichte in Munich,
Nachlass Alfred Baeumler, Mappe 23: Korrespondenz Manfred Schrter.
23
contexts as the psychoanalystical school. The difference between the two reactionary
interpreters of Bachofen reflected a new belief that an aesthetic view had to be politicized
in order to be realized. It was more a difference of degree than kind that led Baeumler to
turn his influence against Klages in 1934 and culminated in 1938 with an informal taboo
against the Klages circle. Interestingly, the more radical in political terms was the more
moderate in aesthetic terms; conversely, Klages produced a wacky aesthetic which
Baeumler and Nazi ideology with him rejected in favor of action, Tat. Fascinated
by the first and frightened by the second, Benjamin plunged into the vocabulary of life as
the burning issue of his time. Relating it to the state of intoxication, or Rausch, and
animalistic drives which he found even in children playing with toys he turned
back to Senecas writings about drunkenness and their full perception of earthly life.
62

62
Walter Benjamin to Albert Salomon, 10 October 1932, in Gesammelte Briefe, vol. 4: 1931-1934
(Frankfurt a.Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), p.137.

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