Episode 16 The Story of Arnim
Peter began the interview of the old Bavarian officer.
The border you crossed as a child.
– Arnim, we have many questions to ask you. If you were with us at the Nancy conference, then you know what our movement is about. We want to break the prohibitions on our personal spiritual source of Knowledge to use it again to conduct our human activity based on the use of our second rational scientific intellectual source of Knowledge. The passage between our two sources of knowledge is mainly the mystical way, one of the 4 ways of our personal initiatory development.
Our movement opposes religious dogmas and systems of power. We want to develop a flourishing new civilization based on the complementarity between our two sources of knowledge without autocratic systems of power and without theocracies. In the second part of our conference in Nancy, I presented my initiatory journey from my first meditations in Nature and on the mountains above my village to the Knowledge transmitted by Egyptian civilization in the temple of Dendérah and later saved and preserved at Mont Cassin by the Benedictine movement.
You too, this night, you must make an effort and take a step back with all the events that in your existence must not have been easy to cross. But maybe we’ll find the same weft, the same thread that can bind to ours.
As you know, it is during childhood that we are called to cross the most borders in our lives. For a mountaineer, the border is most often up there, at the top of the ridges, in the middle of the pass.
What did you try to cross as a child?
The altitude of the mountains was the first frontier I crossed
– I am seventy-three years old and was born when my father returned from the Great War in 1920. My family lived in a mountain hamlet in Bavaria near Ramsau and next to Berchtesgaden. I had a joyful childhood in the middle of nature before discovering the pleasures of the mountains and skiing, traditional sports for the boys of the village. We had a large lake in the vicinity, the Königsee.
Later, I wanted to discover the Alps and their peaks above the four thousand meters of altitude. The altitude was one of the first borders I crossed. Then in the army and during the war, I was in other mountains, in Scandinavia, in the Caucasus, the Carpathians. After the war, with our group from the Alpine Club of Munich, we went to the Andes and the Himalayas, Tibet and Nepal.
The frontier of ideas
It wasn’t just the mountains in my education. My father, a teacher, had chosen the quality of life of this mountain village without ever cutting himself off from the student life of his youth in Munich and Vienna. Regularly he commissioned the latest books published and frequently during the holidays, went alone a few days to meet thinkers, lecturers and he attended concerts, political meetings.
I discovered naturally the ideas my father had adhered to before I went to war in 1939: the ideas of the Naturmenschen, the activities of the Wandervögel, the study of the Nordic runes and the Aryan civilization, the colony of Monte Verita where my father went several times. He told me about Hermann Hesse, Gusto Gräeser, Mary Wigmann…
– Why did you have these interests in your family?
– Germany remained for a long time an assembly of regions, duchies, counties and local life was very rich and prosperous. To use the words of your conference, the network organization of knights and monastic orders did not disappear suddenly in Germany as it did in France. On the contrary, this networked organization flourished especially around the Baltic through the Hanseatic.
This local organization in networks has been called into question through the development of cities caused by the industrialization of Europe. Alongside the fact that industrialization established an economic system that needed a political system capable of directing the widest possible spaces, the development of cities and their working-class neighborhoods marked a cultural rupture.
The city, seen from the countryside, was the landmark of misery, debauchery and alcohol, the law of money, the landmark of the rich who profit from the work of others. It was also the concentration of factories, pollution by coal fumes, the smells of chemicals, tanneries.
– yes, it is like in Baudelaire ” an obscure atmosphere envelops the city, some carrying peace, others the worry, while mortals, the multitude city, under the whip of pleasure, will gather remorse in the servile feast…”
The boundary between industrial pollution and nature
– This is it: the place of servile celebration that dumbfounded people. In my Bavaria and our mountains in the Alps, there was none of that. On the contrary, nature remained magnificent and my father had understood that the choice was to preserve this nature, that our family should not degrade itself in the city like so many others who left for the city for a life they believed easier. This is the initial choice and I made this choice again to remain faithful to nature and to the values that carry life without misery throughout my life. In fact, more and more people from cities came to our mountains to treat tuberculosis and lung diseases caused by urban pollution and coal smoke.
– Let’s stay on these values of life, how did you translate them into a sharing around you capable of giving birth to a group culture?
The Wandervögel and the reform of life
-Following my father, I followed the ideas of the Wandervögel movement[1].
Encouraged by a childhood spent in an enchanting nature among these mountains of Bavaria, I quickly understood the evils of pollution of industries and without difficulty, I subscribed to this idea of developing the autonomy of human beings so that they can live again in the middle of nature in harmony with it, after having abandoned the fallacious promises of the industrial era.
It was a concrete way of living the spiritual teachings I had received
When I was very young, I was in favor of a reform of life.
Fighting capitalism meant then seeking an alternative among the ancient civilization of the Nordic peoples and the Aryan civilization stretching from the legendary Thule to beyond the Himalayas in India. Rama was the guide of this Aryan migration to the East.
The staviska, swastika and other symbols from these Nordic peoples were highly prized among the Wandervögels. I had learned from my father and his friends that Scandinavia after the fall of the Roman Empire was inhabited by a people from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea who themselves came from a people from India five thousand years before our era. This staviska came from India. It was the Vikings descended from Odin who influenced European countries at the end of Celtic civilization.
We originally wanted to build on that civilizing history. But we did not know the history of the Atlantean and then Egyptian civilization, the last great cataclysm and the survivors of the engulfed continent.
To realize this ambition to reform life, one had to learn to purify oneself: bathe naked among the torrents or mountain lakes, do his naked gymnastics in the sun on large rocks. I spontaneously did it from the age of eleven and twelve had a comrade and the sister of this comrade. This girl, before the age of twenty, became my wife.
This is how we learned to free ourselves and to access the pleasure that all three of us gave each other without any shame. And we weren’t the only ones. Around us, there were many small groups that in the woods, by the lakes, did as we did and often a wood fire brought us together in larger groups. It was enough to be discreet.
Engaging further with my comrades in the Wandervögel movement was a very natural step. I enjoyed participating in camps among the clearings, torchlight retreats, big bonfires around which rhythmic dances gave me a feeling of ecstasy.
I knew that communist youth did the same thing but they were very politicized when we wanted to follow a more spiritual and natural approach. Later, in Asia and Japan, I discovered the animism, the shintoism (or shintō) of Japan. The major concept of Shinto is the sanctity of nature. The deep respect that comes from it defines the place of man in the universe: to be an element of the Great Whole.This is what I was looking for during my adolescence with my comrades.
The challenge of industrial society.
I learned to dance. It wasn’t just any dances! My father, during his studies, was trained once in Munich in dance by Rudolf von Laban, one of the greatest choreographers of the twentieth century, and in the group there was also Mary Wigmann. He always told me about it and encouraged me to practice dance as a spiritual exercise.
Through this contact, I became more interested in this whole protest movement of industrial society.
I studied in my father’s books the theory of bodies and movements according to the method of Jacques Dalcroze. We reasoned about economic problems by analyzing the ideas of the Naturmenschen movement that were hostile to the circulation of money.
I was interested in Otto Gross, prophet of the sexual revolution in the movement and he had accepted the principle that we are governed by our impulses, that bad impulses come from social constraints, that the purification and suppression of bad impulses imply the suppression of social constraints mainly from those born with the industrial era.
The band listened to Arnim without interrupting him. Frantz noted the names of the evoked characters, the places traveled, the ideas cited.
Arnim had nurtured his relationship with his wife through this purification of impulses, much like in Tantrism. In periods of sexual frenzy lived in groups in which both filled their wills to the point of crossing new frontiers in enjoyment, pleasure and sharing powerful emotions with others, followed more spiritual periods nourished by retreats in favorable places such as ancient castles in ruins of medieval knights or in abbeys.
The communities through which he lived with his wife and friends advocated the restoration of ties with Nature and with what lives within us. Arnim insisted on demonstrating to his interlocutors that the special evenings that Frantz and Anke have known were only pale copies of those nights spent hugged under the stars during his life as high school students and then students.
– goes for this group culture, but how have you done to transform this group culture into a social culture? Have you thought about it?
The failure of the transition to humanist culture
– Oh, at the time nobody was talking about the network organization and the three levels of human activity, the participatory local direct democracy that you talk about so much. We also did not have control of the past as we do now. Egypt, Tibet and the Andes were not known as they are today, and the ideas that some people brought back from India were not properly understood and were used more for racist ideologies and the desire to create a new race of pure human beings who would have the responsibility of leading the world than for humanist movements respectful of the dignity of life on Earth.
As you know, Buddhism has refused to challenge and change the social organization of India into castes that are well separated from each other, especially the Untouchable caste.
Today, I know that there has been a failure on this point. Our wonderful community life has not been translated on the social level into an exemplary humanist culture and a more just and fraternal society.
The most stupid people who did not deprive themselves of proclaiming their erroneous ideas took the lead as often and others more sensible continued their work in the silence of their retirement. Alongside them, the majority of people who opposed this capitalist and industrial system of power tried to define another system of power that was more socialist or communist.
I read carefully the writings of Muhsam, the poet, against the developing Nazism and like the other movements of the reform of life, I was a fervent admirer of the opera Tannhaüser.
Arnim goes to Monte Verità
After having ingested all these ideas, read all these writings, I took advantage of a stay in the Engadine to go to Italy in Ticino, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, near Ascona, to Monte Verità, a flagship colony of this movement for the reform of life and a laboratory to go back in time and return to the lost paradise.
My father had been there before 1914. Despite my father’s warnings, I was disappointed by this visit because the animators of this center left well in 1920 for Brazil and probably then for the Andes and there is little memory there.
The meeting of Montagnola.
My meeting not far from there, in Montagnola near Lugano with Hermann Hesse saved this stay.
On the writer’s advice, I returned to Germany to seek information about the disappearance of Muhsam in 1933, this poet resolutely hostile to National Socialism, and I went in search of Gräeser then itinerant prophet who announced that a savior would come to carry out the great purification to rid society of the evils of the industrial age.
I found this barefoot prophet who had been hiding for a few years because already, among the many prophets who traveled through Germany to speak to the youth, there was one who, since the end of the Great War, had stood out for his more radical and fiery political remarks and he had just conquered power in an absolute way.
Hitler’s youth took over and imposed most of the values and symbols of the Wandervögels, and even though I learned of Muhsam’s assassination[2], I followed Laban and the others behind Hitler, who had been installed in power in early January 1933 by the political and economic class, who thought they would muzzle him better following his electoral success in July 1932. Appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, this dictator ended on December 1, 1933 by proclaiming unity between the Nazi party and the German state, thus realizing the Nazi dictatorship.
– so you were part of the hitler youth?
– No, but I prepared myself to enter the army and become an officer.
– why?
– it’s a bit of a complicated story. You have to look back at that time and present the reasons for this choice may take time.
– It doesn’t matter, we have all night. ( Laurie intervened firmly )
Arnim enlists in the army.
– there are several reasons. The first is that to oppose industrial society, the power of machines and money, we must use a stronger power: that of weapons.
– and the power of the spirit that always overcomes the power of the sword?
– my father and his ideas could fit under what you call the power of the spirit. These forces of the mind did not triumph in 1918 nor between 1910 and 1914. They were not the ones who brought the First World War to an end.
Arnim’s military motivations,
Sooner or later, the cannons would start thundering again. This time, my country was to emerge victorious from this ordeal. Not to restore a Germanic empire but to impose a new political order capable of serving the interests of the people.
That’s my second reason:
participate in the development of a new world political order.
The old officer thought for a long time to clarify his point. He became more knowledgeable to complete his historical vision of what he had experienced.
He began by explaining his motivations for becoming a soldier and turned to Dan. He spoke sometimes in English, sometimes in French so that Pierre could understand what he had to say. He took on the tone of the experienced officer he had become and who had understood how to win battles without making gross mistakes.
He returned to the defeat of 1918. The German army was not defeated by arms but by the inadequacy of its industrial production in the face of the massive arrival of American armaments and soldiers.
From a strategic point of view, the German army was the only one that knew how to correctly combine on the battlefield the use of heavy artillery and then light artillery with infantry. Heavy artillery crushed the first enemy lines and then only the infantry attacked. The problem was to move this heavy artillery quickly enough as the infantry progressed.
With each breakthrough of the front, without the protection of the latter, the allied armies in a classic war of movement were able to fight again on equal terms and repel the German armies. The French army under Joffre’s command only conceived its strategy through an offensive war which did not need heavy artillery but only good light artillery with the 75 cannon.
However, the first fighting in 1914 showed that the only line-up of French troops ended in a massacre far from the front under the shells of German heavy artillery. The French could not even put themselves in position to launch an offensive. Entire columns of infantrymen or horsemen were massacred without even being able to put themselves in a combat position or in a position of protection against shells.
From then on, the logic was that the French strategy would turn into a defensive war: the first line was only weakly defended and had to retreat on a second line that was heavily armed and protected by solid fortifications. The German infantry that had then advanced beyond the reach of its heavy artillery could now be fought more effectively with significantly less loss and with the advantage of having its own field artillery, well installed and protected.
This defensive strategy was supported mainly by Colonel and then General Pétain. After May 15, 1917, Pétain became chief general in his own right.
This strategy of defensive warfare was pursued until the armistice of November 11, 1918, and the French General Staff persisted in this attitude, in this culture, preferring to engulf billions in the Maginot line rather than creating an army made for movement and offensive.
Then there was the shock in 1919 at the Versailles Conference, our German leaders understood why and how the United States went to war against us. It is the case of the Balfour Declaration and the agreement between England and the Zionists that after the victory brought by the USA, the Zionists finally have a sovereign state in Palestine. Oh I learned this much later and not so long ago! When we were younger, we ignored all these secret negotiations and the conduct of the world by the Anglo-Saxon oligarchy led by the Zionist movement and by the Puritans, those vigorous Protestants who had initially formed groups of Jews to make them believe in a new Zionist Jerusalem in Palestine.
After Hitler came to power, the German army rebuilt an offensive army, this time combining the two new technological weapons of the battlefield: the air force and the armored divisions. As early as 1939, this superiority on the battlefield came from the perfect combination between the aircraft and the tank in the war of movement. The blitzkrieg made it possible to travel all over Europe and northern Africa.
New technologies useful for our armies, radio networks, engines with special oils, the first mechanical machines that use punched cards to sort, count and calculate information for companies and administrations until the 1960s, came from American patents and American factories built in Germany. The German economic miracle led by Schacht between 1933 and 1937 had given us unshakable confidence. We knew we were going to win the war and take revenge.
The defensive warmongers after the surprise were defeated in a few weeks. By joining the German army, Arnim repeated that he had had faith in this offensive strategy. His life would not be wasted on faulty orders and outdated military doctrine. His struggle would be followed by the most judicious use of the most modern weapons in a spirit of total conquest.
Victory could only be at the end of the road.
Dan confirmed Arnim’s words. He pointed out that in 1940, the French army had a power hardly different from the German army, the number of armored vehicles and planes was roughly equal but it is in the use of these means on the battlefield that there was a gap and this is indeed the cause of the brutal defeat of the French army in 1940. The French General Staff had not changed its culture inherited from 1917, it had consolidated itself in a deadlock and a guilty conservatism.
Command and elites are responsible for the defeat. The causes are primarily cultural. After the enormous human losses of this first world war and the horror of fighting in the trenches under the fire of artillery, all wanted it to be the last war and the slogan was « never again! » French politicians have made it their dogma to reassure citizens and their voters. The movement of pacifism was essentially French.
After that, in the 1930s, those responsible for the May-June 1940 defeat were in power: Daladier and Chief of Staff Gamelin. They made common cause to maintain this defensive strategy and they followed the political game of the English who also wanted to avoid a new war even if it meant getting along with Hitler and the Nazis.
As far as military strategy is concerned, Colonel de Gaulle’s attempts to create armored divisions to wage a war of movement with the air force have been rejected while Guderian and Rommel have used them in Germany. In 1936, Blum also rejected the armored divisions as a military tool to crush the socialist and communist labor movements.
Dan, as an American officer, didn’t stop there. Briefly, he explained the role of high finance and the Anglo-Saxon oligarchy which, as early as 1919, organized the Second World War so that Germany could conquer the wealth of the Soviet Union for the benefit of the families who owned the Federal Reserve and who wanted to establish a world government.
But the French campaign from May to June 1940 did not go as hoped by the Nazi leaders. Despite the blatant and culpable incompetence of the French political and military command, the French and English soldiers with their artillery and air force, during these six weeks of fierce fighting, destroyed 30% of the tanks and 50% of the German army’s air force. Better yet, by resisting for four weeks around Dunkirk, they allowed the professional English army to return home to continue the war. Hitler failed to defeat the English by dispersing his armored divisions in northern France instead of focusing them on capturing the English army. Then his aviation was too weak to prepare for a landing in England.
All members of their small group warmly welcomed Dan’s intervention and this lesson in political and military strategy. There was no question of overwhelming Arnim as a former officer of the German army in the service of Nazism. Between them, that night, they had no account to settle but all wanted to prepare the development of their spiritual and humanist movement in a new civilization without the systems of power… and without wars led by the tyrants!
Arnim’s political and economic motivations
Arnim moved to a more economic and political level. He stated that he was speaking on the basis of his current knowledge and not on the basis of what he had at the time. While the chances of military victory were high, the economic and political situation was not necessarily the same.
He could put his words together over two major periods.
The first, in the aftermath of 1918, saw the German people find the first motives for revolt through the policy that the allies imposed on them.
The US government, and Wilson more precisely, did not understand that this typically European conflict marked the end of an Austro-Hungarian empire supported by a German and Prussian power that was also always in search of an empire.
The times were changing: France had a hard time remaining a republican and it experienced a restoration of the monarchy and then a Second Empire; Germany could not break free from its monarchist organization until after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918.
Arnim explained this failure not to modernize his political structure, by the inherently federal nature of his country, survival of the counties and thousands of free cities of the former Roman empire that no centralism or royal absolutism could erase. The dispersion of powers had allowed for a time the maintenance of the knights of the Teutonic order, an order affiliated with the Temple whose memory had not been forbidden in Germany as was the case in France.
This dispersion of powers had also allowed the flourishing development of free Rhineland and Hanseatic cities, but it had not made it possible to actualize the sclerotic notion of monarchist empire that topped this state organization. It was Napoleon in 1803 who abolished most of the free cities in Germany in order to better govern this country.
The role of the allies in 1918 was to let the German people carry out this mature mutation and still do so in the old and natural federal structures. US President Wilson’s imposition of a centralized republic was a monumental mistake. This diktat, added to the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles, could only push the German people into an extreme solution: an abnormal concentration of power within the framework of a new empire that is not monarchist but is led by a popular expression concentrated in a tyrant.
Hope had been thrown into the basket of history and the victors had behaved like all victors for millennia, that is to say according to Arnim, just as stupidly.
Pierre intervened in the monolog to declare that in French, the anagram of stupid is disputed and that the two therefore go well together! Laurie waved to him to be silent.
Arnim took the American officer by the shoulder. Did he not agree as a soldier that it was they who won the wars and that immediately afterwards, the others: politicians, economists, traders, religious or workers, by their ideological dissensions, lost them for twenty years later having to bring the soldiers back to the front?
The second period between 1925 and 1935 was marked by economic confrontations.
Arnim took a step back to show that this type of conflict was not new at the time and that the historical knowledge of his adolescence allowed him to analyze it properly.
His father had taught him to be wary of the industrial age and capitalism. His study of the money and financial markets left him perplexed. While other countries clung to a strong currency convertible into gold, he lived painfully through the financial crisis of 1922 and the hyper inflation that devalued the German currency. The excessive war compensation to be paid was one of the causes but in Bavaria, what he experienced more personally was the ruin of the peasants defeated by the imports of agricultural products and meat from the new producing countries as the countries of South America.
In his province of Bavaria, peasants and the rural world quickly regrouped in movement to challenge this global opening of agricultural markets and to advocate for a more nationalistic organization of economic exchanges. The internationalization of the economy benefited irresponsible traders who rejected their former German suppliers in order to get rich.
Arnim referred to the fact that among these traders there were a number of Jewish businessmen.
During the Wall Street stock market crisis of October 1929, US and Western leaders made two mistakes that turned the stock market crisis into a global economic crisis. First, they continued their conservative doctrines of defending their currencies and refused to support economic activity by running a fiscal deficit. Without any public intervention, the bankruptcy of private companies caused misery among the population.
The second mistake was to resort to protectionism to defend one’s economy against the crisis in its neighbors. This protectionism, first introduced by the United States, quickly spread the crisis around the world.
Keynes was already sharply critical of the United Kingdom’s rash defense of money, which in the 1920s had condemned more than 20% of the working population to unemployment and misery. As early as 1930, this economist advocated the intervention of the state to revive the economy through the widening of public deficits, deficits repaid once the economy exited the crisis and growth regained. In 1931, US policy abandoned ruinous monetary dogmatism and embraced Keynes’s ideas through the establishment of a New Deal.
Arnim did not want to go too far and come to the obstacles that, as early as 1935, hampered this return to growth: the overproduction of hard-to-sell material goods since most people had not seen their incomes grow in the same way, the inability of other countries still in crisis to buy the surplus of American production.
It was the Second World War that would unfortunately put an end to the problem of adjusting production to distributed income.
Arnim returned to his subject. The first country in Europe to embrace Keynes’s ideas for exiting the global crisis was Germany, where the new Chancellor, Hitler, brought in Germany’s leading economic expert and appointed Schacht as its economy minister. France only partially adopted Keynes’ ideas in 1936 through the Popular Front governments. The recovery of the German economy was rapid and spectacular. The state lifted the German economy out of the global impasse through this radical cultural upheaval and the abandonment of old monetary dogmatism. The use of a full currency with the works voucher system and commercial effects gave spectacular results at the industrial level with the reduction of unemployment and the construction of transport infrastructure and social housing.
Arnim confessed that he believed in Keynes’s ideas, and was pleased with Hitler’s economic policies from 1933 to 1937. In fact, he understood what had happened during this period by studying the financial policy pursued by Hjalmar Schacht. The use of a full, debt-free currency, with the circulation of bills of exchange changed into work orders, has made it possible to eliminate unemployment in four years and to achieve not only a sharp increase in industrial production but also the construction of highways and social housing. After the war, Schacht tried to remake this strategy of economic development with a full currency in the developing countries. Did he understand that his method is contrary to the interests of the Anglo-Saxon financial oligarchy that organized the two world conflicts to impose its world government on the neo-liberal capitalist system?
Gérard intervened to give his agreement to the remarks made by Arnim. He pointed out that this leading role of the state against the conservative interests of economic leaders was still found in France in 1960 when General de Gaulle summoned the blacksmith to meet to find among themselves the financial means to finally invest in the acquisition of cold rolling mills.
Germany, thanks to the Marshall Plan and American aid, had been able to install such cold rolling mills as early as 1948. It is obvious that without such efficient and productive tools, the French blacksmith could not fight against German competition and it was out of the question that the French state would somehow support the French steel industry even through a lobby of several hundred politicians. The presidential formal notice remained in vain, De Gaulle immediately nationalized the entire steel industry to entrust its fate to the state engineering corps so that a steel activity would remain in France in the long term.
Gérard could not keep his calm and his voice became more and more virulent. He regretted that despite successive nationalizations, the spirit of enterprise broken in the eighteenth century, still did not find a common adherence necessary for the creation and especially the sharing of economic wealth through employment.
Gérard made the observation that Arnim brought a vision of history that corresponded to theirs.
Their movement, admittedly, began by developing the use of spirituality, but this time with the aim that it would lead human activity into a new civilization, without wars and financial, economic and even less religious conflicts! Dan approved of Gerard’s intervention. He explained that warriors only fight with a peace plan in their head and especially with an ideology. This peace plan is based primarily on the incapacitation of tyrants, warlords, financiers who organize wars to obtain miraculous profits impossible in peacetime.
The group was satisfied with the quality of the exchanges. Arnim was not a special case with a Nazi fanatic background. He understood what he was going through year after year and his acquaintances joined those of their group. They too were carrying out a reform of life and inevitably they were going to have to face political, economic and social issues to set up new institutions in their networks of Life.
Arnim took over and went on to get to the crucial point.
Arnim explained that his choice had been considered.
He did not believe that German society was ready for communism.
The law of the strongest demonstrated at the end of the First World War was successful in this race and the nationalists, in Europe, succeeded in rejecting the communists in opposition.
At the level of these politically evolved European peoples, the principle of security has played a full part in motivating citizens to the detriment of a communist adventure deemed too utopian.
On the other hand, the communist movement was reduced to a simplistic doctrine in relation to the approach of a movement like the one of the reform of life.
Pierre, as a jurist, intervened to emphasize that communism chooses collective property and prohibits common property managed by the social group and private property. The Communist Party is the only one to manage collective property and this really corresponds to the dictatorship of the Party. This good idea at first can only sink into the most ferocious and criminal tyranny. The solution developed in their movement is the complementarity between the three forms of property: private, common, collective managed by citizens’ representatives.
The communist utopia was inconsistent with Arnim’s aspirations.
He could not abandon and deny his spiritual journey during his youth among the mountains, lakes and torrents of his Bavaria. He believed in spiritual renewal and scientific rationalism socialist then communist was for him only a monstrous mistake. Arnim had only sided with the choice of his time to preserve a religious culture certainly not at the level of his spiritual aspirations.
Had he not come back to discuss again the alternative of social organization in networks
direct local participatory democracies with their national, continental, global confederations?
Arnim’s gaze was that of the poet.
The old officer also saw the forces of the current proponents of capitalist financial power crush in blood the minority of their movement in an attempt to save his paradigm of free market and unlimited enrichment of the owners of capital.
As long as capitalism lives, it will nourish its fiercely nationalist opposition and all socialist and humanist discourses will not be able to do anything about it! Moreover, most often the communist system of power to stay in place has been nourished abundantly by nationalism, fascism and tyranny!
But like the poet, Arnim also saw this blood nourishing the people to free their human destinies from the tyranny of the rulers of the power systems, capitalist, communist, theocratic, military and police. Arnim now wanted to live free without autocratic systems of power and without Theocracies with their criminal religious dogmas.
Arnim brought a rich experience of spiritual, military, political and social experiences. He had just expressed his ideas, his values, his reasons for living. All this corresponded to the values that their group defended to develop their humanist movement.
But as a soldier and officer during the Second World War, how did Arnim reconcile his ideas with his actions? What had he experienced during the battles in which he had participated?
Laurie asked him to recount his experience as a warrior and his wounds from wars.
She reminded him that at the Nancy Conference, she had talked about her work with American war veterans. As a German war veteran, Arnim, how did he cope with all those memories of fighting? What lessons could he bring to their movement?
The sequel in the next episode
[1] Wandervögel or migratory birds
[2] Muhsam was deported and tortured at the Orianenburg concentration camp where he was assassinated on July 10, 1934. Her murder will be made up as suicide.