Johann von Leers: Are We at the End? [Der Weg 1950-12]
An original translation of "Sind wir am Ende? Prüfung des Gewissens"
Title: Are We at the End? [de: Sind wir am Ende? Prüfung des Gewissens]
Author(s): Johann Jakob von Leers (J.v.L.)
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 4, Issue 12 (December 1950)
Page(s): 1072-1074
Dan Rouse’s Note(s):
Der Weg - El Sendero is a German and Spanish language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos-Aires, Argentina by Germans with connections to the defeated Third Reich.
Der Weg ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.
Selectively quoting Wikipedia:
Johann Jakob von Leers was an Alter Kämpfer and an honorary Sturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS in Nazi Germany, where he was also a professor known for his anti-Jewish polemics. He was one of the most important ideologues of the Third Reich, serving as a high-ranking propaganda ministry official. He later served in the Egyptian Information Department, as well as an advisor to Gamal Abdel Nasser. He published for Goebbels, in Peron's Argentina, and for Nasser's Egypt.
This appears to be the first article written by Johann Jakob von Leers, later Omar Amin, in Der Weg. He is also known to have written under the pen name “Felix Schwarzenborn” and “Gordon Fitzstuart”. This article is signed “v. L.” and attributed to “J. v. L.” in the Table of Contents. I have not been able to source the poems quoted in the work, so if you know it, let me know in the comments.
Source Document(s):
[LINK] Scans of 1950 Der Weg Issues (archive.org)
Are We at the End?
Examination of Conscience
by Johann Jakob von Leers
„Was führt ihr noch voll eitlen Dranges Ein leeres Wortgefecht ums Recht? Ich sag, ein kurz Schwert und ein langes, Ich sag, ein stark Herz und ein banges, Die schaffen Unrecht — ach, und Recht.“"Why do you still engage in vain disputes with empty words about what's right? I say, a short sword and a long one, a strong heart and a fearful one—these create injustice, alas, and justice too."
„Auf, folget doch den neuen Lichtern, Und überlasset seinen Richtern, Den, der in Treuen lebt und stirbt.“"Arise, follow the new lights, and leave to his judges the one who lives and dies faithfully."
Theodor Fontane’s Jacobite ballads, poetic glorifications of the Scots’ great uprisings for the rightful House of Stuart, echo through these deeply resigned verses. For the last time, the loyalty and honor of the Highlands rallied around the blue thistle banner of the Stuarts; for the final time in 1745, the vibrant Highland clans, with their fluttering tartans and broadswords, hurled themselves against English battalions—until, on the field of Culloden, Prince Charlie Stuart and the Highlands’ faithful fell, and the song of the “Young Cavalier” faded beneath the terror of British rule.
„Sieben Söhne gab ich dem Kavalier, sieben grüne Hügel, die blieben mir. Ihrer Mutter Herz ist gebrochen vor Weh. König Jakob, daß ich Dich wiederseh ...“I gave seven sons to the cavalier; seven green hills are all that remain. Their mother's heart is broken with sorrow. King James, I long to see you again...
There remained a population in Scotland thereafter, but the Highlands grew desolate, the old tongue died, the costumes decayed, and tradition retreated into books and museums. It was finished…
Every people meets its end someday, often even while their language still lingers, while some remnant of statehood endures—molded by foreign will, serving alien ends…
Three times the Kingdom of Macedonia rose to battle Rome; in the end, it was carved into four meaningless republics—yet as long as it drew breath, the people of Alexander the Great refused to yield.
In three wars, the Carthaginians wrestled for their great-power status—only then were they undone. So it was with the Aztecs, with the Incas too. And though their languages persist from their empires’ fall to this day, their time was over.
And the German Reich? Did it too perish with the German Reich in 1945?
This is the central question we all must answer honestly. It probes our conscience and our certainty of what lies ahead. Was 1945 the end—yes or no?
We must dig deeper here. No one disputes that in 1805, when Emperor Francis laid down the crown of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, that empire itself was dead. But was its idea dead?
No one disputes that in 1918, in that accursed November, the Reich forged by Otto von Bismarck met its end. Nor does anyone doubt that in 1945, the Greater German Reich, as shaped by Adolf Hitler, ceased to be.
Yet hasn’t the entire history of the 19th and 20th centuries been one ceaseless struggle to unify the Western cultural world—an inheritance the German kings of the Middle Ages took up from the Roman emperors? Is today’s desperate call to unite Europe against the barbarians of East and West anything other than the tradition of that “Holy Empire,” founded by Augustus as a realm of peace, offering shelter to all peoples?
But has Bismarck’s fight—to win for the German people an equality in Europe, so often denied them, through a strong state of their own—become irrelevant today, when the wretched First Partition of Germany at Versailles was followed by the forsaken Second Partition at Potsdam, pressing the people at Europe’s heart into a helot’s despair beyond imagining? Is not that struggle, so long as this endures, as urgent as ever? And isn’t the core idea of the Greater German Reich—one it could only begin to live—the overcoming of the dire rift between capital and labor in a higher unity, a state of creative community, far more vital today, when the East has birthed a state of savage class hatred and the West a world of states worshipping the almighty dollar? Did not this very Greater German Reich, through the volunteer units of its SS, already embody that true European unity prefigured in the First Reich—a unity unachievable now by democratic paths?
In spirit, the dream of a separate Scottish kingdom was dead before the last poor loyalty of Gaelic Highland warriors bled for it; in spirit, the late Macedonian empire of Alexander’s successors was mere tradition when its people’s stirring bravery and steadfast royal devotion still sought to shield it from the Roman Republic, destined to unite the classical cultural world; in spirit, the Carthaginians were dead, petrified in selfishness, while the blood-soaked Aztec realm and rigid Peru of the Incas had run their course.
They were spiritually dead too.
But the German Reich grows spiritually more alive the longer it seems dead. We would be dead as a people only if Heuss and Pieck, Adenauer and Ulbricht, and their intellectual heirs defined our future. Were what arose after 1945 under foreign—even inwardly un-European—commands our destiny, only creeping dissolution and final collapse would await us: earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, with no resurrection!
If “democracy” or “people’s democracy”—servitude to un-European powers—were our future, nothing would remain to be done. It would be as countless German emigrants, washed up on this South American shore, lament: “We simply have no fatherland left. Germany is gone. We’re left with two prison camps—one in the West, one in the East. All is dead behind us, however busily it teems.”
Then Europe too would be finished. For if the Germans surrender, if they can no longer find meaning in their historical being, they will cease to fight—or fight feebly—no matter how swiftly they’re rearmed. And none believe Europe could then hold against the East. Worse still:
Our people’s history is a long weaving of Germanic tribes into the Roman-Greek cultural tapestry. True, these tribes shared with Hellenes and Romans a common linguistic and racial root, but until they forged the foundations of later Europe—taking the imperial ideal from Rome, the classical culture from Greece—no cultural unity of Europe existed. It is our people’s historic feat—from Arminius, who expelled the Romans from Germany yet embraced their statecraft over tribal chaos, through Charlemagne and Otto the Great, to all our rulers down to Adolf Hitler—that we not only lent youthful vigor to the ancient world but also faithfully bore the Romans’ mighty legacy north of the Alps: the Imperium, the Reich—ever vigilant against barbarism, not to crush it, but to draw it in, to win it, to shape it into that humanity born of Indo-European tradition, classical antiquity, Christianity, and modernity fused together.
The Germanic tribes could have chosen otherwise! Let’s not wholly forget with what wild fervor all—truly all—save the Visigoths, Burgundians, and half the Franks joined Attila, the Hun lord, and fought for him with zeal. Attila was no crude Mongol but a great Eastern Turkish Khan, a Turk by type, strength, and the ruling genius of his race, as his name and his kin’s reveal. His too was an empire—a horseman’s realm of boundless reach, with its own allure, the spell of a warrior horde-state, its own tradition of youthful, mighty, victorious barbarism, unburdened by culture.
Our people’s essential historic calling must now be seen as this: they chose Plato and Seneca, Imperium and Church, Augustus and Augustine, over barbarism—over the horde with its bone-and-squirrel-pelted shamans, over Attila, Ellac, and Dengizich—choosing the Reich over the steppe.
But if the Reich is razed and a prison camp, “Cage West,” erected in its stead—if a line is slashed through our tradition, turning an ancient imperial people into a late-bourgeois everyman’s republic—then perhaps it’s not grasped that this risks unraveling over a millennium of integration. Who’d deny that “The Red Sun of Young Humanity,” the “Old Eagle of the Mountains,” that Caucasus brigand and warrior Josef Stalin, is a towering figure? If no Reich remains, no vital idea of their own, the Germans will flock to him. From the ecstatic roar of FDJ marches in the Soviet zone, from these young German lads striding over their parents’ woe and their fatherland’s rubble, the East’s blissful lure already beckons. Those vast Germanic hosts who stormed Europe’s last defenders at Attila’s side on the Catalaunian Fields, fighting on even as the Huns withdrew to their wagon-fort, likely felt no different. The peril is the same.
Not because we cling, homesick, to the past, but because we’re bound to the future—that’s why we’ve not abandoned the fight.
We see that others cannot forge a Europe where all its peoples find place and home. We’ve learned too from the missteps made in this quest thus far. And we know we hold the only tradition ripe for growth to build such unity. Thus, we dare not yield, lest we betray Europe’s spirit.
We see that others falter with labor and capital—a riddle we’d largely solved. So we’ve every right to defend our ideals, for they are, in every way, better and more healing than what stands today.
We see our people not only plundered beyond measure and driven to ruin by the theft of whole provinces, but their historic purpose shattered—with the Reich, their mission and very being stripped away. This must someday tear the whole fabric apart: silent despair for some, the earnest and accountable, and gleeful drift to barbarism for the utterly uprooted masses.
Whoever holds the youth truly holds the future! Don’t they see the stirrings in the central zone? We see them, and so we raise once more the old, tattered, glory-wreathed flag of the Reich. It is not yet over!
And we know we have mighty allies: the millions of our history’s dead—fallen on battlefields, strangled at enemy gallows, starved in prison camps, lost to despair, or perished on the roads of forced expulsion. With whom do the dead’s prayers rest? With Mr. Pieck, with Bonn, or with those who stay true to them and their ideals? We trust in those who are:
„im Geist in unseren Reihen mitmarschieren“
"Marching in spirit within our ranks."
— deep meaning lies in that sung line.
For what cause in all the world have so many martyrs died as for ours? Not just in Germany—in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Hungary, Croatia, Russia—through countless sacrifices of all Europe’s peoples, the first great bid for a comradely Europe was sealed with sacred martyrdom. The blood of martyrs has ever been faith’s seed! In utter stillness, they come to us too, urging courage—their form suddenly at the door,
„und sagte drängend und doch ohne Ton: Wo steht die Front und wo mein Bataillon?“
“saying, urgent yet voiceless: Where is the front, and where is my battalion?”
The dead are with us, the many thousands of martyrs, the meaning of our history, and Europe’s necessity.
Yes, the world’s necessity too!
Ever more peoples and souls refuse to let traditional values drown in the leveling ruin of communism or democracy, seeing in barbarism and Yankee ways the menace of the termite-man. From Portugal, from Spain, above all from South America—what a gift to the world is the steadfast tradition and wondrous cultural fidelity of Spanish-tongued humanity!—and from the Islamic world, voices of a “third force” rise, understanding, uplifting, consoling, and spurring us on. Thus, even among the living, we’re neither isolated, nor forlorn, nor scorned.
It is the winter solstice. Over in the old homeland, snow lies thick over the sharp gables of ancient villages and towns, over ruins and countless graves. The light has sunk into the mountain, awaiting resurrection. The Reich rests deep in the Kyffhäuser with Emperor Frederick—yet it merely sleeps, slumbering, biding its hour.
It is Christmastide—the bells, the old songs, the fir tree herald death’s defeat…
It is the season when they’re wholly with us: the loyal dead and the children, our family’s people who endure after years of bombing nights, then persecution and disenfranchisement. It’s when a quiet bond of love, belonging, and unyielding loyalty entwines them all—the dead, the companions of our lives, family and comrades, and the children—and we know it is not finished.
The lone soul may perish, but loyalty knows no tomb.
And to the many faithful of the Reich—the homeless, the stripped of rights, the captives, the widows, all who couldn’t sell themselves nor betray their ancestors’ legacy—to them all goes our remembrance.
They’re all near to our hearts. They must not despair; they must be brave. The power of darkness won’t endure forever. The old light will blaze again, despite all! Our struggle presses on!
„... grüß dich, Deutschland aus Herzensgrund“
"... greetings to you, Germany, from the bottom of my heart."
I can't thank you enough for making these incredible articles available.
I expected a National Socialist intellectual to be more desperate and depressed five years after the collapse of the Reich. It seems he was more hopeful then than many of us are now.