Community
by Kurt Eggers
translated by the Wewelsburg Archives
Translator’s Note: The terms ‘law’ (Gesetz) and ‘order’ (Ordnung) lose a lot in translation. ‘Law’ here does not mean the formal law found in the books in a lawyer’s office, rather something akin to the ‘laws of Nature’, or more accurately, a ‘law’ arising from the self-knowledge of an ethical person strongly bound to his folk community and his duty toward it. ‘Order’ means neither ‘law and order’ in the American sense nor a ‘command’ in the military sense, rather something akin to the ‘order’ found in Nature, or more precisely, the ‘order’ of the folk community. (Sometimes, of course,‘order’ can refer to an actual organization, say, the Order of the Teutonic Knights.)
* * *
NO TERM is more misunderstood, no term is so controversial, no term has caused so much confusion as the term community.
The defenders of the reservations like to make use of this term in order to protect the groups of the community they view to dominate from slipping away or breaking out.
It should hence first be stated that community and democracy have nothing to do with each other.
Community is not equal rights of all toward all. Community is not a herd with the same right to pasture, space and drink. Community, however, is also not a coincidental condition or random location.
Community is the union of those who are of one will.
* * *
That means: Community is indeed also the union of those who are of one blood. Blood is the casual prerequisite, without which an order is not possible. But blood without will is dead.
Community is indeed also the union of those who are of one language.
Language is a result of blood.
Without blood-bound will, however, language is only a loose band that can be cast off at any time and at any place.
Indeed, community is also the union of those who are of one faith.
But when faith lives outside the bonds of blood, language and will, the community slides into the unreal and becomes phrase and toy of foreign powers.
* * *
Community exists where people who are of one blood, one language proclaim a will that through attitude and bearing pushes to deed. Only there do people have in common that which leads to community: a binding and obligatory life content, which is simultaneously life activity.
The community hence grows not from the mass, rather from the personality.
* * *
Personality, however, also only exists where responsibility rules.
Responsibility consists of the consciousness of being bound through duty to law and order. Responsibility consists of the accountability toward the demands of law and order and in honesty in the answering of the questions about the value of life activity. Responsibility means having constant vigilant dialogue with the questions of the heart and trying to bring them into harmony with the demands of the will.
* * *
A person is indeed born into the mass, but he is only accepted into the community.
Acceptance into the community only happens when the person recognises his causality and puts his will into the order.
That is his decisive deed, by which his value and his fertility are determined.
* * *
The community is bearer and executor of the law. It only exists where every reservation is overcome, where the will is directed toward the goal of the healthy, original folk and of the strong state.
Folk is law.
State is order.
Community, however, is will.
* * *
The mass stands outside of bonds. It has decided for neither good nor evil.
Within it rest good and evil.
Mass must be awakened, shaken up, led.
A portion of the mass will remain obstinate and resist any bond. This portion of the mass is harmless and will, in good natured sleep, walk in the direction in which the community consciously marches.
A portion of the mass will hear the triad of law, order and will and yearn for harmony with it. The bearers of the community will again and again arise from this portion.
A final portion of the mass, however, is malicious. Because it is blind, it claims
there is no light. It has no understanding for the triad and claims it is deception and swindle. That portion stands in constant attack against the community. It rebels with poison-filled destruction rage against law and order.
Its law is arbitrariness.
Its order is chaos.
Its will is rage.
This portion of the mass, which has its homeland in the underworld, tries to drag the upper world down to it and to impress upon its spirit the stamp of its negative spirit. The unleashing of the mass leads to the destruction of the community and replaces the rule of the valuable with the dictatorship of the valueless.
The community is the union of the chosen. To practice selection is the life activity of the trinity of law, order and will. The duty for selection is simultaneously the highest reason.
* * *
The selection takes place in the socialist-aristocratic sense.
Socialist, because the performance for the community is the decisive thing.
Aristocratic, because the selection, if it is to bear fruit at all, must be elevated out of the mass.
Membership cannot be inherited, rather it must be acquired each time. Hence it is socialist.
But it can indeed be lost.
Membership among the chosen does not rest upon a one-time performance. It cannot be acquired through a deed, rather it is a life condition.
* * *
The life condition of the chosen is elevated from the coincidence of outer events into the causality of the deed.
Whoever stands in the community, stands firm. He is unshakeable, because he knows that nothing happens outside the law and because each demanded deed takes place within the framework of the causality.
* * *
Only whoever stands outside the community is uprooted enough to seriously request a miracle that puts him outside the scope of the law.
Whoever stands in the community seeks fulfilment, not salvation.
* * *
The community alone is called upon for rule. It elevates from its midst the freest, noblest, bravest and gives them the office of leadership.
The leader is accountable to the community.
It alone. For only it is of the same blood, same faith and same will.
Only it knows the leader’s will and knows about his intention.
It alone, however, can also pass judgement over weakness, failure and disloyalty.
Community and leader determine each other reciprocally. They draw strength from each other.
The community is judged by its leader, and the leader by the community.
* * *
The nation in its totality consists of three strata: the mass, which itself arises from three strata, the community, the leader.
It presents the picture of a pyramid.
The strata are not created, rather they grow.
* * *
The community rules in the leader.
Rule is the fulfilment of the law. The leader is the supreme executor of the law and first announcer of order.
Knowledge of law and order is the spiritual sign of the community.
Insofar as the willing mass does not have knowledge, it binds itself through trust.
This certainty is the representation of knowledge.
The three strata are bound among themselves by loyalty.
The loyalty is anchored in the feeling of belonging together and of being bound together in fate.
* * *
The nation does not deal with the strata according to bourgeois occupations or acquired educational values, rather exclusively according to the degree of the presence of knowledge and trust and according to the capacity for loyalty.
* * *
Fate is not a power equivalent to God that chains the will of man, rather the effect of the law that binds people in space and time and demands the fulfilment of the duties of the life condition.
* * *
Within the community there are male federations.
The male federations arise from the yearning for fulfilment of the law. They are comrade federations of the path, not of the goal.
Hence male federations are not an end in themselves.
If they were an end in themselves, they would destroy the community.
The essence of male federations consists of struggle against any indifference.
Their most sublime signs are poverty and sacrifice.
Poverty is not the ascetic negation of property, rather incorruptibility towards the temptations of property.
Poverty attitude is readiness to bear any burden and any deprivation that the fulfilment of duty toward the law brings with it.
Sacrifice is not a sacral act, rather renunciation of exploitation of personal advantage that the strong could acquire for himself at the expense of the weaker.
* * *
The order elevates itself invisible over the community.
It is the spiritual crowning of the whole nation.
The great people of the folk belong to it.
It is simply the bearer of the idea.
It is the witness to the eternity of the folk.
It is the homeland and heaven of the great people of the nation.
It is the sole, the genuine and sacred temple in which a folk can elevate its soul from present distress.
It is the place of self-contemplation, the fountain of eternally present energies.
* * *
Veneration of the great people of the folk is the appropriate cult of the community.
* * *
About the author: Kurt Eggers (10 November 1905, Berlin – 12 August 1943, near Belgorod) was a German writer, poet, songwriter, playwright, and soldier on the Eastern Front, with close links to the NSDAP.
* * *
Source: a selection from Live Bravely and Die Courageously; Wewelsburg Archives via Anthony Collins