Horst Junginger, Tübingen

Sigrid Hunke:
Europe's New Religion and its Old Stereotypes *

1. Introduction

Sigrid Hunke is a well-known literary figure in Germany. She has written several books dealing with the subject of European identity and especially her publications about the relation between Europe and the Arab World have achieved great success. In addition to her activities as an author, Hunke played, and still plays, an important role in the religious movement of the German Unitarians. Not to be confused with the British or North American Unitarians, the German Unitarianism of Hunke criticizes Christianity as totally alien to the European mind. The "Judaeo-Christian 1" world view is accused of having brought into the world an unnatural segregation of the Holy and the profane, leading to materialism and the debasement of all spiritual values. The only possibility for Europe to overcome this profanation is to return to its Pagan tradition and to strip off the foreign rule which is seen as the result of Christianization.

2. Voelkish Grounding

Born in 1913 in Kiel, the daughter of the publisher Heinrich Hunke, Sigrid Hunke studied psychology, philosophy and journalism at the universities of Kiel, Freiburg and Berlin from 1934 on. She was a leading member of the National Socialist German Student Union (NSDStB) and worked for its public relations office, first on a local level and then, until 1938, within the Berlin "Gaustudentenführung". Here she acquired contact with the press and the public, developing a quite eloquent fluency in her style of expression. These capabilities promoted her literary success after the war too. On May 1, 1937 Hunke joined the NSDAP. 2
Hunke's main scholarly teachers had been Hermann Mandel (1882-1946)3 and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (1892-1974). Besides Hans F. K. Günther, Clauss was the most influential race theorist in Nazi Germany. He wrote numerous books on racial topics, with a huge number of copies sold. Clauss, lecturing from 1936 on at the Berlin university, was a good-looking, wealthy and traveled young scholar who frequently impressed his female students. The historian Heiber mentions that Sigrid Hunke attempted in December 1937 to meet Adolf Hitler personally because she wanted to call the "Führer's" attention to her inspiring teacher and, according to Heiber, she was hindered only by Hitler's adjutant Brückner in doing so.4
Using the title of a "Rassenseelenkunde", Clauss developed his mimetic method to be the genuine National Socialist race-theory, since it was - conversely to the natural sciences - even able to reach the depth of the human soul. Therefore, he lived as a Bedouin under Bedouins, and for this reason he kept a Jewish assistant in order to study her racial characteristics as a living object, so to speak.5 Despite his post-war interpretation, Clauss did not intend any kind of racial (or other) equality between Aryans and Jews. He claimed to be the founder of the NS race-psychology and in a letter to the dean of the Berlin philosophy department he moreover stated, that his books are rightly esteemed as antisemitic.6 It is naive to concede to Clauss - as Weingart does - the status of an oppositionel figure. His "Rassenseelenkunde" was an important variety of National Socialist racism and not a counterpart. Clauss never argued or acted against National Socialism. He held his introductory lecture at the Berlin university in the "brown shirt" and during the war he became a collaborator of the secret service of the SS. 7
In October 1936, Sigrid Hunke wrote an article in which she tried to elucidate her teachers psychological race-science as the organic counterpart of the anthropological "Rassenkörperkunde".8 Echoing the thoughts of Clauss, Hunke followed him in the attempt to apply Husserl's phenomenology to the field of racial studies. Only the Nordic race seemed her to be capable of comprehending the true essence ("das Wesen") of every racial expression because of a specific ability to exclude the researchers point of view and by reason of a genuine Nordic unity between science and metaphysics. Even to learn and to live in a foreign language, Hunke reserved to the geniuses of Nordic style.9 At the end of the thirties, Hunke continued this approach in her doctoral dissertation about the 'Origin and Influence of Foreign Models on the German People 10 ', where she dealt with the effectiveness of models in conformity with one's race. Beginning with a eulogy on Adolf Hitler and the moral obligations that this great model represents to the German people, she investigated the relation between alien ("artfremd") and intrinsic ("arteigen") models and how they function. Hunke came to the conclusion that the racial liability always remain the same, although time and space may lead to some modifications.11 What happens is that the inner patterns of perception could be overrun by alien models, ergo races. Together with the Christian missionaries the spirit of the dessert came to Europe, which, in the vocabulary of Clauss, is: the prophetic style ("Offenbarungsstil") invaded the Germanic territories. In fact, this foreign infiltration could only temporarily occupy the German soul; in its center, it remained untouched. Therefore, Hunke concluded a voelkish cleansing as the urgent duty of the day, not sparing any corner and zone of life.12
Here in her doctoral dissertation, the critique of Christianity predominates. But Hunke had expressed her positive religious conception some years before in a script written for the racial schooling within the German Faith Movement.13 Hunke illustrated in this "Schulungsbrief" how race and religion, from the viewpoint of Clauss, hang together. However, she just asserted a different experience of the religious reality depending on one's racial lineage without giving any kind of proof. In accordance with the arbitrariness of any race theory, Hunke collected a phenomenological choice of examples simply declaring that each people has its own racial shaping. Race unifies a people and outside the race no truth is possible: "Alle Wahrheitserkenntnis ist rassegebunden", she stated.14 Especially in the sphere of religion it is impossible to act independently of one's racial determination because the religious identity forms the core of the "Volk". For this reason, one must study the different ways to the Holy to understand what is alien and what is one's own. The "Rassenseelenkunde" of Clauss would enable doing so and moreover would support the emergence of a Nordic religion.
Yet Hunke did not become prominent in the voelkish religious movement. She was too young and the German Faith Movement came to an early end in 1936. Nonetheless it was little wonder that she later sought the company of another organization which promoted a Nordic religion, the "Ahnenerbe" of the SS. Like her sister Waltraud Hunke, she contributed to its journal Germanien and she too received a "Ahnenerbe"-scholarship in the forties for further research on the racial influence on models. Under the aegis of the SS, Himmler's semi-official brain trust "Das Ahnenerbe" endeavored to search for Germany's ancestral heritage and turned close attention to trace back the religious and cultural roots of the 'Indogermanic' race. Hunke and her sister were affiliated with the Germanic studies of the "Ahnenerbe", that is, with the so called "Germanistischer Wissenschaftseinsatz" of the SS, an operation for the Germanization of the Nordic countries. In stark contrast to the alleged spirituality of its goals, the political and military strengthening of Germany's rule over the European countries stood here in the fore. There can be no doubt that such a spiritual fascism, as it was sponsored by the SS, had been a fertile ground from which even Nazi crimes could emerge with ease.

3. Spiritual Renewal

Due to the fact that Hunke was only a small figure in the "Ahnenerbe" and that she was less involved in its policy, she had no great problems establishing herself in the post-war era. From the midfifties on, Hunke began to publish books calling for a spiritual renewal of Germany after its military defeat. Avoiding any mention of the National Socialist period, she took up the program of the former German Faith Movement for a religious revival of Germany's Pagan tradition outside and against the Christian churches. To keep distance from the taboos of a Germanic ergo Nazi heathendom, Hunke called her Pagan approach Europe's new or Europe's own religion. However, a lot of items of the old voelkish program arise once more in new clothing. For example, the attitude of anti-dogmatism, a direct approach to the Holy without mediator, a polytheistic tolerance instead of the Jewish-Christian monotheism, the preference for mysticism, the adoption of monistic elements, the veneration of nature with a forced reclaiming of sacred sites and holy festivals, the protection of the environment against unbridled technology on the basis of a Pagan argumentation, a female principle of the Divine, pantheistic equation, and an organic ("organizistisch") world view with a religious focus found a new setting. Hunke's life-long search for a lineage of heretics which should build the backbone of Europe's new Pagan religion exactly followed the ancient genealogy of the German Faith Movement. It was primarily its "Führer" Hauer who had undertaken great efforts to list such a genealogy of forefathers of non-Christian belief. Even the selection of Hunke's examples coincide with a choice that Hauer partly published in 1940.
As a matter of course, the former attempts for a fusion of fascism and religion had to change its appearance after the war. That mainly meant giving up the vocabulary of National Socialist race ideology and cutting the eminent link between blood and spirit. Hunke succeeded quite well in doing so, however some residues remained in her thinking. You can see this very well at the starting point of her conception of history. The evil, that is, the splitting of the religious union between God and mankind, came into the world by the "Churri" or the "Hurrites" ("Hurriten"). This people about which we do not know very much settled two or three thousand years ago in the Middle East, originally coming from Armenia. Whereas the "Churri" did not belong to the Semites, Hunke amalgamated them with Israel and "Jewishness". Irrespective of historical facts, she quotes passages from the Jewish Bible (the Old Testament) at will to describe the pretended "Churri" spirit. So the "Churri" had to display the bad inception of Judaism and then to represent the negative Jewish influence on Christianity, seeming - and that is the clue - to be without a racial connotation. In spite of this camouflage, the scale of Hunke's negative stereotypes obviously stem from the former antisemitic polemic. Though Hunke pays attention to her vocabulary and tries to avoid a direct usage of terms such as "Judaeo-Christian" to express anti-Jewishness, this is to be found with reference to Hunke and with a strong antisemitic sense in the so-called New Right.
Hunke could emerge as an intellectual leader of the New Right because she does not only express a negative criticism, but has a positive religious program. Not totally without reason, some people view her as a "positive Spengler". She stands for a common right-wing critique of culture, collecting the usual arguments of moral and social decay including the disintegration of family values, an increasing irreverence against the authorities as well as drug abuse and the long hair of the youth. Hunke is a restless preacher against - or rather: for - the decline of Western civilization, because only the Christian West will and has to end. A Pagan rebirth will come into existence and supersede the predominance of mediocrity in a frail Occident, leading Europe to a new and powerful future. It is the task of a spiritual elite to fight against the tyranny of the American way of life and to rejuvenate a decrepit Europe. We see here an old ideology concealing its imperial aspirations once more behind a European frame. The spiritual mode of its expression is the old ancestral heritage of Nazi Germany that is returning once more on a European level. Its racial focus has shifted to concepts of ethnic-religious identity (Turkey for the Turks) which are directed against the democratic cosmopolitanism and the ideology of human rights. Conversely, a right for regionalism and vernacular diversity is declared that, together with a romantic love for nature, can lead to a close connection with leftist grass root movements. Blots of brown color in the green movement certainly are not astonishing since the brown movement had a 'green' preference for a natural environment and healthy behavior from the beginning on.
Besides Hunke's Paganism, her contribution to the ideology of the New Right is related to two other important issues. First, a women's movement which originates in the old voelkish 'feminism' of the German Faith Movement. The second, and for our context more interesting, concerns her activity for a rightist Arab nationalism. Hunke represents the philo-Arabic wing of the New Right, such as Alain de Benoist and François Genoud. She wrote highly influential books about the Arabic culture and its relations with Europe. Without mentioning her former teacher, Hunke continued the racial studies on the Semites of Clauss and took up the research program that she had already begun in her dissertation. The topics and examples given there return in many variations in her books written after the war. Yet Hunke's interest is not purely directed to the Arabic peoples themselves. She wants to show the Arabic influence on Europe as a step in Western history on its way to gain independence from Christianity. Hunke glorifies the policy of Frederic II in the 13th century who had enlarged the German Reich to a European size, reaching from Burgundy to Sicily. This strong Europe under German dominance was based, to some extent, on the relationship with Arabic culture and goods and Hunke is interested in a resurgence of this 'philo-Arabic' tradition. Utilizing nationalist Arabism together with the old strategy of the Third Reich to form an alliance with the Arabs against Western (British) imperialism, it becomes clear that Hunke's intellectual grounding and her love for the Arab culture is embedded in the ideology and political scenery of National Socialism.
Due to the enormous success of her books about Arabic themes in the sixties, Hunke was esteemed as an expert on oriental affairs. Although lacking any scholarly accomplishment or even the necessary knowledge of the Arabic language, the German government sent her on a good will tour through several Arabic countries after the war of 1967. Hunke held lectures at the universities of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Aleppo, and became Honorary Member of the Supreme Court for Islamic Affairs in Cairo. The Arabs were glad that somebody from Europe showed a real interest in their great Islamic culture not only intending to exploit their oil fields. The fact that Hunke's friendship originates in National Socialism did not irritate them. Even the leaders of an Arabic Socialism agreed with this background and the mistake of giving faith to such kind of German anti-imperialism was repeated once again.
The 'philo-Semitism' of Nazi-Germany and later of right wing intellectuals has, without any doubt, an antisemitic context. In the stupid logic of intermingling language and race it becomes possible to be anti-Jewish without being an antisemite because of a friendship with the Semitic Arabs. This rightist Western 'philo-Semitism' seems to me not only a simple jugglery, but moreover a psychological phenomenon and an attempt to recall negative projections on Jews. As we discussed it last year in Jerusalem, a voelkish point of view could take the Jewish people for a good example of a successful voelkish self-determination. Maintaining strong anti-miscegenation laws the Jews preserved their ethnic (racial) identity throughout the ages. In this voelkish sense, Germany reversely must repulse the Jewish threat with a higher degree of racial purity and punish offenses against the prohibition of intermarriages ("Rassenschande") as hard as possible. We have to remember here that Hunke concluded her dissertation with a voelkish demand for racial cleansing and declared, with relation to models, the prevention of racial alienation as the main task of the day. In the case of Arabism, the negative model of Jewish identity changes into a positive mode of perception. Since any wholesome voelkish development depends on a deep and uncorrupted relation to religion, the Islam is expected to take over the task of focusing national-Arabic identity as Orthodox Judaism and the Torah did it for the Jews. This would explain why such a predilection for Islam and its values is found on the right wing, conversely to the usually ardent and anti-Muslim xenophobia there. On the other hand, i.e. from the side of an Arabic identity and anti-Islamic stereotypes - which are not the subject of our workshop - would it be rather unfair to disregard the Arabic right for political independence as a matter of course and to overlook the relation between Western aggressions negating this right and a religious fundamentalism directed against the West in general.
Summarizing the correlation of Hunke's Pagan religion and her concept of Arabism, one has to pay attention to the idea of a voelkish national Socialism associated with forms of religious revitalization and with attempts to retrieve the golden age of ethnic nativeness. Whereas Hunke renounced to publish her lectures held at North African and Middle Eastern universities, she strengthened in all probability not only the congenial but also the antisemitic aspects of her appeal for a friendship between the Arabs and Germans.

4. Pagan Unitarianism

To promote her own religious goals, Hunke joined the German Unitarians, a religious association that had been founded directly after the war. This movement collected former Pagan groups of the Nazi era as well as members of the former "German Christians" and people affiliated with the freethinking movement which partly was persecuted during the Third Reich. Being to some extent the follower of the German Faith Movement, the same heterogeneity and similar conflicts characterized the German Unitarianism by its attempt to gain political acknowledgment. Together with other prominent followers of Nazi-ideology, Sigrid Hunke belongs to the right wing of the German Unitarians, i.e. the "Deutsche Unitarier. Religionsgemeinschaft" (DUR). Between 1971 and 1983 she became vice-president and in 1985 honorary president of the DUR. A Sigrid-Hunke society was established in 1973 to enlarge her influence in and outside the German Unitarians.
Hunke's books do not meet scholarly requirements. Nevertheless they pretend to serve the purpose of formulating a systematical (scientific) conception for a Pagan theology. For this reason she is seen as one of the main theologians of the DUR. Hunke indeed has a good ability to generalize her religious goals in terms of common sense and to impart the heathenish sectarianism of the German Faith Movement with a modern appearance. Yet her literary success depends to no small degree on simplification and on a fervent manner to refrain from any complexity in the realm of philosophy and religion. Hunke calls her program "Dialektischer Unitarismus" which simply means the unification of all contrarieties she is discovering at large-scale in history. Just repeating the tripartite idiom of Hegelian dialectics (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), Hunke reclaims having synthesized the "dualistic principle" of the world on the higher level of Unitarian religion. Moreover, her "Dialectical Unitarianism" alleges to be the overcoming of Hegel himself, a synthesis of Hegelian Marxism and Freudian psychology all in one.
The key-word of Hunke's philosophical and religious system is unification. Without asking for the reasons of the previous split in the world, Paganism is declared to have the capability of unifying any kind of disunion. Because the so called "dualistic principle" has the quality of a religious datum, Hunke does not need to care for historical conditions and circumstances. Thus she just recognizes a total disruption of the world, a religious crisis that prevails allover the society and every political, social or economical antagonism is producing proof of her dualistic doctrine, i.e. a Pagan doctrine of two reigns ("Zweireichlehre"). Since Christianity is not only regarded incompetent to solve the religious dilemma but to be the main cause of it, solely Paganism is embodying an adequate way out of the crisis. Perhaps due to the anti-Christian attitude of her approach, the Pagan unification of good and evil seems to be something new for Hunke, newly discovered by intellectuals such as Hauer, Mandel, Clauss and herself. Nonetheless Hunke is dealing with the old Christian conception of sin and covenant between God and mankind which enables men to live on, albeit their sinful behavior (simul iustus et peccator). In Christian theology the union between God and mankind is realized by the Kingdom of God in the form of the Christian State. Advocating the Second German Reich, the Kreuzzeitung, which was the main journal of Protestant orthodoxy, wrote on May 8, 1878:
"A deep and unfortunate split characterizes our time, so that what is united in an inseparable unity in the Kingdom of God (religious life and natural life) is torn asunder in violation of nature. [...] Hence, there is no higher solution for the great contradictions and struggles of our time than the renewed teaching of the Kingdom of God".
This unionist program was able to support any kind of Christian theocracy. Some decades later Hunke's books repeat this statement a good many times employing it almost verbally as corner-stone in her Pagan theology. Having no regard to its Christian origin, Hunke adds a Pagan supplement to the old call for a new treaty with God. Thus, her Pagan struggle against Christian supremacy apparently uses structural parts taken from Christian theology where they served to consolidate Christian precedence and not at least to overthrow heathendom. This is a quite good example for religious amalgamation even in the case of ardent religious enmity and in the second for our thesis that the rise of Paganism must not necessarily repudiate a far-reaching adoption of Christian elements at the same time.
The enormous increase of those grave "contradictions and struggles" which the Second Reich produced up to its end paved the way for a spiritual renewal of the old Christian unification of religious and political power within a voelkish framework. But as we know from history, the Pagan attempt to establish a non-Christian ('Nordic', 'Indo-Germanic') religion failed. And also the main opponent of the German Faith Movement, the German Christians, had no great success to revive the Christian State as an immediate expression of the Third Reich. National Socialism obviously left little margin for such a religious recovery under voelkish principles, neither in nor outside Christianity. Its 'revolution' turned out to conventionalize political sovereignty by strengthening the old elites in the middle of the thirties when Hunke begun to engage with a Pagan belief system. Finally, the war set a definitive limit to the voelkish break-up of the 19th century.
One cannot say that the pre-war misfortune of the German Faith Movement to found a "third confession" in order to compete with the Christian churches changed after 1945. Far away from being a menace to Christianity, Hunke's Pagan unionism even failed within the little group of the German Unitarians when she ruptured the fragile unity of its five or six thousand adherents in the eighties. Together with about 200 followers Hunke seceded the DUR in 1988 and formed a religious group called "Bund Deutscher Unitarier. Religionsgemeinschaft europäischen Geistes".

5. Conclusion

Although some people try to do so it is really impossible to derive from this tiny religious minority a peril for the German society. Yet stressing religious freedom as a basic law does not mean to undervalue the political implications of Hunke's European Paganism which became an important factor of the ideology of the New Right. Hunke herself is seen as one of its main ideologists. Her literary success yields possibilities for a linkage of the extreme Right with people not interested in policy but representing to some degree the political establishment. With its cultural criticism ("Kulturpessimismus") in the tradition of the Conservative Revolution Hunke's Pagan approach is participating rightist attacks on Western democracy in an exceptional manner. It is fitting very well as a religious substructure for a strategy called metapolicy or Gramscism of the Right, which means the attempt to attain political power by occupying (pre/metapolitical) clusters of cultural ideas prevailing in the dominant groups of the society. Hunke's books therefore are very important not only to the religious movement of German Unitarianism but to the whole scenery of the European right. Besides Julius Evola (1898-1974) and his Pagan Imperialism Hunke probably is the most important figure contributing to a new form of Paganism on European level.

Selected Bibliography of Sigrid Hunke

"Schulungsbrief 'Rassenseelenkunde'" (Manuscript, 1935, 7 pages)
"Verstehen", in: Rasse, 1936, pp. 86-91
Review of: Die Wissenschaft im Lebenskampf des deutschen Volkes. Festschrift zum fünfzehnjährigen Bestehen der Deutschen Akademie am 5. Mai 1940, hg. von G. Focheler-Hauke, München 1940, in: Germanien, 1940, pp. 318-319
Review of: Jahrweiser "Deutsches Ahnenerbe" 1941, Berlin 1941, in: Germanien, 1941, p. 120
"Vom Königssprung der Germanen", in: Germanien, 1941, pp. 198-199
Herkunft und Wirkung fremder Vorbilder auf den deutschen Menschen, diss. Berlin 1941
Am Anfang war Mann und Frau. Eine Psychologie der Geschlechterbeziehung, 11950 (enlarged edition in 1980)
Allahs Sonne über dem Abendland. Unser arabisches Erbe, Stuttgart 11960 (as paperback-edition, Frankfurt/M, 1990ff.)
Das Reich ist tot - es lebe Europa. Eine europäische Ethik, Hannover 1965; new edition as: Das Reich und das werdende Europa. Eine europäische Ethik, Kreuzau-Stockheim [1973]
"Das dualistische Vorbild Europas", in: Philosophisches Wörterbuch, G. Schischkoff, ed., Stuttgart 171965, pp. 27-57
Europas andere Religion. Die Überwindung der religiösen Krise, Düsseldorf 1969
"Wiederfinden der algerischen Persönlichkeit", in: Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch, no. 2, 1970, pp. 130-132
Das Ende des Zwiespalts. Diagnose und Therapie einer kranken Gesellschaft, Bergisch Gladbach 1971
Europas andere Religion im Bild, "Sigrid Hunke Gesellschaft", ed., Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1973
Das nach-kommunistische Manifest. Der dialektische Unitarismus als Alternative, Stuttgart 1974
Kamele auf dem Kaisermantel. Deutsch-arabische Begegnungen seit Karl dem Großen, Stuttgart 1976, paperback edition as: Die Orientierung. Sternstunden deutsch-arabischer Begegnung, Stuttgart 31993
Glauben und Wissen. Die Einheit europäischer Religion und Naturwissenschaft, Düsseldorf 1979 (21986)
"Tief verwurzelt", in: Schleswig-Holsteiner unter sich - über sich, Werner Schmidt, ed., Frankfurt/M. 1979, pp. 102-106
"Doch der Mensch ist nicht ein Ding unter anderen Dingen", in: Die Welt, October 22, 1980
Europas eigene Religion. Der Glaube der Ketzer, Bergisch Gladbach 1981 (31983)
"Der dialektische Unitarismus", in: Jahrbuch 1 der Philosophinnen, Internationale Assoziation von Philosophinnen e.V., Mainz 1982, pp. 10-20
"Europas Aufbruch ins Heilige Land. Zweihundert Jahre Kreuzzüge", in: Deutschland. Portrait einer Nation, vol. 1: Geschichte, Gütersloh 1985, pp. 75-80
"Morgenland und Abendland. Einflüsse aus dem Orient", in: ibd., pp. 81-84
Tod - was ist dein Sinn?, Pfullingen 1986
"Was trägt den Untergang des Zeitalters?", in: Elemente zur Metapolitik, 1986, p. 40ff.
"Die Zukunft unseres unvergänglichen Erbes in Mann und Frau", in: Elemente zur Metapolik, 1987, pp. 27-34
"Überwindung des Dualismus. Zur Wiedergewinnung ganzheitlichen Denkens in der Gegenwart", in: Handbuch Deutscher Nation, vol. 3: Moderne Wissenschaft und Zukunftsperspektive, Bernard Wilms, ed., Tübingen 1988, pp. 11-42
"Kampf um Europas religiöse Identität", in: Mut zur Identität. Alternativen zum Prinzip der Gleichheit, Pierre Krebs, ed., Struckum 1988, pp. 75-104
Vom Untergang des Abendlandes zum Aufgang Europas. Bewußtseinswandel und Zukunftsperspektiven, Rosenheim 1989
Allah ist ganz anders. Enthüllung von 1001 Vorurteilen über die Araber, Bad König 1990 (2-31991)

letzte Änderung: 26.01.2001

Page & HTML Design:
S. v. Szalghary