Here is a book that proves at Ph. D. thesis can be both relevant and palatable to readers who are not recluses of Widener's musty stacks. Peter Viereck, Graduate Fellow in history and assistant to Professor Brinton, has written an interesting and penetrating analysis of the origin of the Nazi Weltanschaugg. Writing under some difficulty because of his father's connection with the Nazis, Viereck is emphatic in his repudiation of the Hitlerian myth without being unfairly vindictive. Drawing his somewhat vague title from the letters of Richard Wagner, he points out clearly its appropriateness and the significance of its sourse. With a facile and sometimes flip pen, Viereck traces the origins of the feverish ideas of present-day Germany to the Romanticism of the last century and to even remoter sources of German character.

Viereck has a sensitive appreciation for the ideas of his former native land. The problem of the German, as he sees it, is the struggle between his "two souls." Viereck finds that Germans from the days when Rome walled them off from the civilized world have developed a self-consciousness. The ideas of the western world ever since have found a distinctively German world-view from which even intellectuals like Thomas Mann are not entirely free. But Viereck has added something new and solid to this rather debatable conception of German history. He has found in the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century both a detour from the main path of Western rationalism and the roots of Nazi philosophy. Romanticism, Viereck believes, is the expression of maladjustment. Whatever its various forms, whether Thoreau or Schlegel, Romanticism is the rebellion of those who can't solve their problems in the forms society prescribes. Ardent seekers after "the full life" may be a Faust or a white collar girl reading pulp magazines. "Freud after all had a word for it," Viereck comments shrewdly. Considering the ancient psychological distortion of the German mind, Viereck finds a violent expression of it inevitable.

But the books is not an emotional tirade against Nazi idealism. Instead it points out that these "nihilists" have a very definite set of values. The values of "metapolitics" are the "intertwining of four strands, Romanticism, the "science" of racism, a vague economic socialism, and Volk collectivity," Wagner is analyzed to show his peculiar position as forerunner of the Nazis. Their idealism is precisely the "soaring into metapolitics" Wagner wrote of. This theory of Wagner Viereck holds in common with Jacques Barzun and Reinhold Niebuhr, and is backed up by Hitler's own words. Nazi metapolitics, however, though a definite creed, runs across the grain of western life. It exalts irrationality and denounces reason and law.

This book belongs to the recent reaction against finding the origins of Nazism in the immediate past. But by revealing the sources of Nazi irrationality, it warns us of the Nazi lurking even in the most rational westerner. For even he is not always perfectly adjusted to society. Viereck gives us an insight that can be a potent weapon for combatting Nazism at its roots.