Guido von List

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Guido von List 1913; Recording: Conrad H. Schiffer

Guido Karl Anton (von) List (born October 5, 1848 in Vienna ; † May 17, 1919 in Berlin ) was an Austrian writer and esotericist . He was a popular representative of the ethnic movement and is considered the founder of the racist - occult ariosophy .

life and work

Guido List was the eldest son of the Viennese leather merchant Karl Anton List. His mother Maria List, b. Killian, also came from a Viennese merchant family. He was brought up as a Conservative Catholic. He was enthusiastic about nature from an early age and began to paint landscapes and castles, encouraged by his father. Other interests were mountaineering and rowing. According to later self-portrayals, he also developed an inclination for the spiritual and a strong interest in Germanic mythology at a young age , combined with a rejection of the Catholicism prevailing in Austria .

Although he actually wanted to be an artist and a scholar, List trained as a businessman at the instigation of his father. In his free time, however, he roamed the area around Vienna, painting and recording his impressions in prose and poetry. As he later described, his love for nature was an expression of a resolute rejection of modernity and urban life. In addition, from 1868 to 1870 he was in charge of the small private theater "Walhalla". In 1871 he became secretary of the Austrian Alpine Club, which was then emphatically nationally oriented towards Germany . The ethnic milieu had a strong influence on his views.

Ruin of the Heidentor in Carnuntum

On January 25, 1874, Guido List was accepted as a Freemason in the “Humanitas” lodge in Neudörfl ad Leitha (a so-called “Grenzloge” for the Viennese members). After his father's death in 1877, Guido List left the company and in the following years made his way as a journalist with his first wife, Helene Förster-Peters (married 1878, † 1891), under poor circumstances. He published articles in various nationally oriented magazines in which he combined idyllic descriptions of landscapes with pagan- oriented speculations. He had his first success as an author in 1888 with the novel Carnuntum , in which he drew a conflict between the Germanic indigenous population of the Vienna Basin and the Roman colonial rulers or the Roman Catholic Church from pagan antiquity to the present , and glorified a fictitious attack Germanic tribes depicted on the Roman provincial capital Carnuntum . This was very well received in the Volkish camp.

In the 1890s, the idea of ​​a Wotan cult as the national religion of the " Teutons " developed into the central idea of ​​List's mythology, which he presented in the book The Invincible (1898). In addition, there were increasingly anti-Semitic motives. His novels Jung Diethers Heimkehr (1894) and Pipara (1895) were enthusiastically received in popular circles. In 1899 List married the actress Anna von Wittek, who had played the leading role in his play The Wala Awakening , which premiered in 1894 . In the following years he wrote other plays.

In 1902 List went blind for eleven months as a result of an eye operation (removal of a cataract ). During this time he turned increasingly to esoteric ideas. He conceived an " Aryan original language" and interpretations of the runes and other symbols in ancient inscriptions. In 1903 he submitted a manuscript of these new “findings” to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna, which, however, returned it without comment. Another document of List's inner transformation is an essay on The Esoteric Meaning of Religious Symbols that appeared in the theosophical journal The Gnosis in 1903 and dealt with the creation of the universe.

The rejection of the manuscript by the Academy of Sciences was the subject of a request to the Reichsrat in 1904 , in which the Minister for Culture and Education was asked to comment. The signing of this inquiry by 15 Viennese dignitaries proves the support that List had with his views in Viennese society. In 1907 List had the nobility predicate “von” entered in the Vienna address book, which he justified in an investigation that was initiated by the fact that he came from the old nobility, but that his grandfather had given up the title. In 1908, friends and followers of List founded the Guido von List Society to promote his "research" and publications, to which many well-known German nationalists and esotericists from Austria-Hungary and the German Empire belonged. The publications sponsored by this society included The Secret of the Runes (1908), in which List attributed magical powers to the runes, and The Armanenschaft der Ario-Germanen (1908), a representation of the Wotan priesthood.

Central cemetery Vienna, Neue Arkaden, ground floor - grave of Guido List

List himself founded the High Armanen Order (HAO) in 1911 as the inner circle of the List Society, which, however, only had a few members and disintegrated after a few years. In the First World War Lists works circulated among the soldiers at the front, and he received from this readership many letters. He saw the catastrophe in which the war ended as a further stage of suffering before the final salvation of the Ario-Europeans. After the end of the war he and his wife went on a relaxing trip to visit friends in Brandenburg . On the way there, pneumonia was diagnosed, which made it impossible to travel on. His condition deteriorated rapidly and he died in a Berlin pension. The body was cremated and the urn was buried in his hometown of Vienna in the central cemetery in the "Neue Arkaden".

Teaching, classification and effect

List named his religious teaching ("Wuotanism") after Wotan or Odin, the highest god of the Teutons. As a tradition of the old Germanic mythology, he regarded the Nordic Edda , the author of which he regarded as Germanic refugees from Christian persecution. One aspect particularly emphasized by List is the magical power of runes , which is already mentioned in the Edda song Hávamál . List's original achievement, which, according to Goodrick-Clarke , made him the “pioneer of folk runic occultism”, consisted in assigning a rune of the runic “alphabet” ( Futhark ) to each of the 18 stanzas of the Hávamál and assigning each of them a specific occult meaning.

Another important theme in List's depictions was the mystical unity of man with the universe. This gave rise to the central demand to live in unity with nature, which also included seeing oneself as part of a people and a race. This was List's response to the modernity that he rejected , typical of 19th century German romanticism in its “urge to belong to something bigger, that was bigger than you” ( George L. Mosse ).

From 1903 List began to integrate elements of modern theosophy in his views, which led to a "synthesis of theosophy and Germanic mythology" (Goodrick-Clarke). In doing so, he apparently followed up on some of the books by Max Ferdinand Sebaldt von Werth (1859–1916) from the years 1897 to 1903, in which the latter had combined the idea of racial hygiene with Germanic mythology and theosophical cosmology and postulated a superiority of the "Aryan race", as long as this remains “pure”. In his Gnosis essay from 1903, List adopted the concept of an ancient Aryan sexual religion and various details from Sebaldt's work, including for the first time the esoteric notions of the immortality of the soul, reincarnation and karma . In this context, racial purity became the "paramount idea" (Goodrick-Clarke) in List's religious teaching.

In the following years List gradually received further elements of theosophy, which, however, he mostly covered with terms from Germanic mythology; In this context, Goodrick-Clarke speaks of a “Germanization of theosophy”. The theosophist Franz Hartmann compared List's book Die Bilderschrift der Ario-Germanen with Isis unveiled , the first work of the founder of Anglo-Indian theosophy, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky , and was enthusiastic about the correspondences between "Germanic" ( de facto : Listscher) presented by List. and "Hindu" ( de facto : Blavatsky) mythology.

List tied directly to Blavatsky's race theory and Aryan theory by propagating that the fourth root race of the Atlanteans preceded the Aryans. Non-Aryans, on the other hand, are survivors of the fourth race and Aryans are therefore more valuable. In order to develop the Aryan race in its full strength, "strict laws against mixed marriages and hybridization" (sic!) Are necessary.

In addition, List was friends with the Austrian "Ariosoph" Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels , who, alongside him, is the second prominent originator of the idea of ​​an "Aryan religion" as the spiritual basis and legitimation for the cultivation of an elitist, pure-bred society and who is decisive for List's conceptions was influenced with.

List's vision of the ancient priesthood of the Armanes was based on Masonic and Rosicrucian models. The name Armanen was a Germanized form of the legendary tribal name Hermionen or Herminonen . List claimed that the three Teutonic tribes mentioned by Tacitus and other ancient historians were in fact social classes , and that the Armanes were the priest-kings class. List further claimed that the Armanen had survived persecution by Christianity and continued to exist under the Templars , Kabbalists and Rosicrucians to the present day. The old Germanic wisdom they supposedly preserved was described by List using terms from Freemasonry, Kabbalah and alchemy . It was passed down in a secret language that he, List, reconstructed. In addition, a lot of ancient wisdom is hidden in legends and fairy tales, in place names and in coats of arms , as he tried to show with numerous examples. In doing so, he partly referred to the clairvoyant ability, for example, to be able to perceive earlier events in a place of historical importance.

List's visions were not limited to a romantic glorification of the past, but rather resulted in practical demands for the restoration of the armies. In The Armanenschaft der Ario-Germanen (1908) he drafted a detailed plan for a new Pan-German Empire. In this the purity and the primacy of the "Aryan race" should be the supreme principle. All non-Aryans should be subjected unconditionally. Only the Aryans should enjoy civil liberties, and at the same time they should be exempt from wage labor. Society should be structured in a strictly feudal- hierarchical manner - with List being based on the ten-level tree of life of the Kabbalah - and the family should also be organized in a patriarchal and authoritarian manner.

List foresaw the salvation of the Ario-Germanic peoples from the status quo , which was felt to be unworthy , for the near future, whereby his predictions were based on a partly paradoxical combination of cosmic cycles and apocalyptic end-time expectation . He described a conspiracy as the cause of the current “dark” age, which began with the Christianization of the Teutons and which continued to have an effect in the Catholic and Protestant churches, Judaism, capitalism and liberalism. The longed-for new age would be reached by a great war, and List also foresaw the appearance of a heroic leader of the Teutons, based on a verse from the Edda song Völuspá .

List's influence on posterity was complex; Goodrick-Clarke distinguishes three "main channels": The most important by far goes through some German members of the List Society such as Bernhard Koerner , Philipp Stauff and Eberhard von Brockhusen, who were also involved in the founding of the Teutonic Order, of which the Thule Society a connection to the NSDAP was established. There were also cunning followers who cultivated his Armanism, his runic occultism and his Edda interpretations in esoteric circles and who did not pursue any political endeavors, but who gained influence on Heinrich Himmler in the 1930s and on this path to symbolism and the SS rituals contributed - above all Karl Maria Wiligut .

List's teachings were revived in the neo-pagan Armanen Order founded in Germany in 1976 .

Works

  • The castle of the Margraves of Ostmark , Vienna 1877
  • Carnuntum . Historical novel. Grote, Berlin 1888
  • German mythological landscape pictures . Berlin 1891; 2. greatly increased A. Wien 1912; Reprint: Cologne undated
  • From the German Wuotan priesthood . Berlin / Zurich / Leipzig 1893. - Full text online (transcription, 2004).
  • Jung Diether's homecoming . Roman, 1894
  • The Wala awakening . Drama, 1894
  • Valkyries consecration . Epic poem, 1895
  • Pipara. The German woman in Caesar's purple . Historical novel. Schulze, Leipzig 1895; 2. A. Vienna 1913
  • The invincible. A basic feature of the Germanic worldview , 1898. (New edition: Graz 2008, ISBN 978-3-902677-04-4 ). - Full text online
  • King Vannius. A German royal drama in 1899
  • Mandrakes . Österreichische Verlagsanstalt, Linz undated (around 1900); Graz 2008, ISBN 978-3-902640-48-2 .
  • Summer solstice fire magic . Drama, 1900. - Full text online
  • The reconstruction of Carnuntum . Vienna 1900. - Full text online
  • The gold piece . Austria, Vienna and Leipzig 1903 ( digitized from HAAB Weimar ).
  • The secret of the runes. With a rune tablet . Guido List Library, Series 1, Volume 1, ZDB -ID 1225024-7 . Zillmann, Groß-Lichterfelde 1908, OBV . (New edition: The secret of the runes . Edition Secret Knowledge, Graz 2007, ISBN 978-3-902640-50-5 ). - archive.org , (5th edition, 1938).
  • The armies of the Ario-Germanic peoples . Publishing house of the Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft, Vienna 1908. - Full text online
  • The Rita of the Ario-Teutons . Self-published, Vienna 1908. - Full text online (PDF; 111 MB).
  • The names of the Germanic tribes and their interpretation . Self-published, Vienna 1909. - Full text online (3rd edition, 1922).
  • The religion of the Ario-Europeans in its esoteric and exoteric . Self-published, Vienna 1909; Graz 2008, ISBN 978-3-902640-49-9 .
  • The Ario-Germanic pictorial writing (Ario-Germanic Hieroglyphics) . Self-published, Vienna 1910. - Full text online
  • The transition from Wuotanism to Christianity . Bürdeke, Leipzig 1911; 2nd ext. A. Berlin 1926; Reprint: Cologne undated
  • The original language of the Ario-Germanic peoples and their mystery language . Self-published, Vienna 1914; Reprint: 2005

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ For List's biography and work, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke : Die occult roots of National Socialism , Wiesbaden 2004, pp. 36–48.
  2. ↑ Volker Lechler in collaboration with Wolfgang Kistemann: Heinrich Tränker as theosophist, Rosicrucian and Pansoph (taking into account his position in the OTO and his occult environment). Self-published by Volker Lechler, Stuttgart 2013, p. 145.
  3. ↑ On List's teaching, see Goodrick-Clarke, pp. 49–74.
  4. ↑ George L. Mosse: The Crisis of German Ideology . New York 1964, quoted in Goodrick-Clarke, p. 50.
  5. ↑ see Goodrick-Clarke, p. 50f and Max Ferdinand Sebaldt von Werth: Wanidis (1897), DIS - die Arische Sexual-Religion (1897) and Genesis (5 volumes, 1898-1903)
  6. ↑ Sabine Doering-Manteuffel : The occult. A success story in the shadow of the Enlightenment - From Gutenberg to the World Wide Web . Siedler, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-88680-888-5 , pp. 201-202.
  7. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke, pp. 45 f.
personal data
SURNAME List, Guido von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES List, Guido; List, Guido Karl Anton (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer and founder of ariosophy
DATE OF BIRTH October 5, 1848
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH May 17, 1919
Place of death Berlin