Charisma, authority and Heil:

Walter Baetke and the chasm of 1945

Bernard Mees
Coming to grips with the National Socialist pasts of many of the key German and
Austrian contributors to Old Germanic studies has often proved a difficult
experience for former students and colleagues of professors who lived through the
dictatorship. Many assessments of such figures can take on personalising and
moralising overtones, however, ones which set such questions above and apart
from those typical of intellectual history more generally. Responses and
assessments of academic responses to Nazism can encompass a broad spectrum,
ranging from apologies and rebuttals to insinuation and slanderfrom the
circituitous and forgetful to outright parrhesia. Where reservations regarding the
dirtying of disciplinary nests and the threat of legal redress have tended to give
way, particularly since the 1990s, to more considered and honest reappraisals, not
all Germanists whose careers bridged the period from the 1930s into the post-war
era are simply to be categorised as tainted, fellow-travellers or even
conscientious objectors. A particular case in point is represented by the career of
the University of Leipzig Professor of Religious History and later of Old Norse,
Walter Baetke (18841978).1
Baetke is also remarkable in that he lived in both German dictatorshipsthat
of the National Socialists and also of the post-war Socialist Unity Party (SED).
Carrying a considerable amount of ideological baggage, Baetke was one of the few
politically engaged Germanists of the 1930s to hold on to a position in the German
Democratic Republic (DDR). Never going as far as, say, Hans Kuhn (whose Nazi
Party membership card from 1937 has him literally living in Wodanstrae), Baetke
was, nonetheless, scarcely a political cleanskin in 1945. While Kuhn fled his chair
1

Cf. Kurt Rudolph, Geschichte und Probleme der Religionswissenschaft (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1992), pp. 36880; Fritz Heinrich, Empirische Religionsforschung und
religionswissenschaftliche Reflexion: Walter Baetke als religionswissenschaftlicher Lehrer
Kurt Rudolphs, in Rainer Flache, Fritz Heinrich and Carsten Koch, eds.,
Religionswissenschaft in Konsequenz: Beitrge im Anschluss an Impulse von Kurt Rudolph
(Mnster: LIT, 2000), pp. 14962; Kurt Rudolph and Fritz Heinrich, Walter Baetke
(18841978), Zeitschrift fr Religionswissenschaft 9 (2001), pp. 16984; Kurt Rudolph,
Baetke, Walter Hugo Hermann, in Christoph Knig, ed., Internationales
Germanistenlexikon: 18001950 (3 vols, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), I, pp. 7577.

at Berlin after the war (taking up instead a position at Kiel), Baetke was able to
succeed Kuhn to the professorial post which the latter had given up at Leipzig in
1941 in order to assume his position in Berlin. Kuhns predecessor at the
University of Berlin had been Gustav Neckel, an outspoken conservative who had
been forced into retirement in light of the machinations of Bernhard Kummer, a
member of the SA who had written his laudatory dissertation on Old Norse
religiosity at Leipzig in the 1920s.2
Yet Baetke already held a chair at Leipzig before the departure of Kuhn, one
he had assumed in 1936. That was the year before Kuhn himself had come to
Leipzig to succeed Konstantin Reichardt, a Russian-born Nordicist who had fled
Nazi Germany in protest at the political pressure he had been subjected to since
1933 to serve the regime. Reichardt was treated by many of his colleagues as a
prima donna after the fact, but he had come under pressure from his next-door
neighbour, the Germanist (and Nazi freemasonry expert) Andr Jolles to become
involved in pro-regime activities (such as appearing at public events and on the
radio).3 Baetkes arrival at Leipzig had been an equally political affair, albeit of a
different kind than that which saw Kuhn succeed Reichardt and in turn Neckel at
Berlin.
Much as Kuhns career had benefited greatly from the academic intrigues
typical of 1930s Germany, Baetke had himself arrived at Leipzig after a political
struggle. Baetke had been one of the many doctoral graduates who had been unable
to secure a tenured teaching position in the 1910s and 20s, but with the rise of the
National Socialists had managed to obtain an association and later lectureship with
the University of Greifswald. In 1935 the Faculty of Theology at Leipzig began a
search for a successor to the late Hans Haas, a long-serving professor of history of
religions, orientalist and faculty dean, however, and Baetkes name soon emerged
as a preferred candidate. His main competitor was Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, the
2

Bernhard Kummer, Midgards Untergang: Germanischer Kult und Glaube in den letzten
heidnischen Jahrhunderten (Leipzig: E. Pfeiffer, 1927); Klaus von See and Julia Zernack,
Germanistik und Politik in der Zeit des Nationalosozialismus; Zweifallstudien: Hermann
Schneider und Gustav Neckel (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2004), pp. 113208; Bernard Mees,
The Science of the Swastika (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), pp.
120ff.; Fritz Heinrich, Bernhard Kummer (18971962): the study of religions between
religious devotion for the ancient Germans, political agitation, and academic habitus, in
Horst Junginger, ed., The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
2008), pp. 22962.
Walter Thys, Inleiding, in idem, ed., Andr Jolles (18741946): gebildeter Vagant;
brieven en documenten (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), pp. 16; Mees,
Science of the Swastika, pp. 17374.

University of Tbingen Indologist and controversial head of the neo-pagan

German Faith Movement. Much as members of the conservative German
archaeological establishment had managed to exclude the Erich von Daniken-like
figure of Herman Wirth from being considered as a replacement for the late
prehistorian Max Eberts chair in Berlin, Baetke, who had no formal qualification
in the history of religions, was promoted as a more suitable candidate at Leipzig
than the radical religionist (and clearly better qualified) Hauer.4
To many scholars at the time, Hauer represented the academic equivalent of a
Guido (von) Lista nationalist neo-pagan romanticand hence could not be
considered a suitable candidate for a chair in religious history. The Viennese
mystic List had established a tradition in radical nationalist circles (variously called
Ariosophic or Armanist) of Odin worshippers and other kinds of new
religionists who enthused about pagan Germanic antiquity and held up its spirit
as a model for national renewal.5 List had had his counterparts in German literary
circles, in local historical societies and even academiaand this fringe had
become more influential when more and more patriotically minded German
professors had begun in the 1920s to see that their work could be viewed as a very
active contribution to a national re-awakening. Although such figures often
bemoaned the amateurism, mysticism and speculative excesses of the Lists (and
later the Hauers too), they formed the vanguard of a new movement within the
Germanist community that had already begun to marginalise dissident voices (such
as the Jewish Germanist Sigmund Feist) in the late 1920s.6 Although only
relatively newly established in the discipline of history of religion, Baetke was
clearly a member of the antiquity-enthusing academic right, but he was equally

5
6

Kurt Rudolph, Leipzig und die Religionswissenschaft, Numen 9 (1962), pp. 6467; Ingo
Wiwjorra, Herman Wirth Ein gescheiterter Ideologe zwischen Ahnenerbe und
Atlantis, in Barbara Danckwott, Thorsten Querg and Claudia Schningh, eds., Historische
Rassismusforschung: Ideologen, Tater, Opfer (Hamburg: Argument, 1995), pp. 91112;
Horst Junginger, Von der philologischen zur vlkischen Religionswissenschaft: das Fach
Religionswissenschaft an der Universitt Tbingen von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhundert bis
zum Ende des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1999), pp. 17980; Fritz Heinrich, Die
deutsche Religionswissenschaft und der Nationalsozialismus: Eine ideologiekritische und
wissenschaftliche Untersuchung (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2002), pp. 27475; Mees,
Science of the Swastika, p. 155.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and
Germany 18901935 (Wellingborough: Aquarian, 1985); Mees, Science of the Swastika, pp.
60ff.
Ruth Rmer, Sigmund Feist: Deutscher Germanist Jude, Muttersprache 91 (1981), pp.
249308; Mees, Science of the Swastika, pp. 17577.

also an outspoken critic of the more extreme (and less properly academic)
expressions of the movement for a Germanic renewal in 1930s Germany.7
Baetke was somewhat older, however, than most members of the lost
generation of German university graduates of the 1920s. His first post, as a
secondary-school teacher in Stettin, had taken in the years before the Great War,
and from 1913-35 he had served as the director of studies of a technical college in
Rgen. His doctorate from the University of Halle was taken in early modern
English literature, his teaching position at Greifswald in the history of religions a
reflection of an interest he had gained since the 1920s in Old Germanic
mythology.8 Eugen Mogk, the Professor of Old Norse at Leipzig from 18931925,
had been one of the leading German interpreters of early Germanic religion and
mythology.9 Yet having a specialist in Old Germanic studies taking a chair in a
theology faculty seemed a very strange undertaking. Baetkes hiring was obviously
afforded by the political situation, his (largely self-taught) speciality in Old
Germanic studies clearly marking him out as a key contributor to the academic
Germanentum or Germanicness movement of the day.
After all, Baetke had been politically active before his appointment as a
member of the German National Peoples Party (DNVP) from 192632 and it was
clear that he held an intellectual debt to the National Socialist spring. Indeed his
hiring had come not long after the dismissal of the Jewish sociologist of religion
Joachim Wach from the Leipzig philosophical faculty (whose advocation of
empiricism in his professional thesis from 1924 Baetke is often claimed to have
been influenced by).10 Yet Baetke is perhaps most interesting among the many
academic conservatives of the day for the manner in which his political affiliations
can be seen reflected in his scholarship. Unlike Nazi academic showponies like the
7

Bernard Mees, Hitler and Germanentum, Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004), pp.
25570; idem, Germanische Sturmflut: From the Old Norse twilight to the fascist new
dawn, Studia Neophilologica 78 (2006), pp. 18498.
8 Walter Baetke, Kindergestalten bei den zeitgenossen und nachfolgern Shakespeare (Halle
a.S.: A. Kaemmerer, 1908).
9 Eugen Mogk, Germanische Mythologie (Leipzig: G.J. Gschen, 1906); idem, Germanische
Religionsgeschichte und Mythologie (2nd ed., Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1921); Mees,
Science of the Swastika, p. 86.
10 Joachim Wach, Religionswissenschaft: Prolegomena zu ihrer wissenschaftstheoretischen
G r u n d l e g u n g (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1924); Rudolph, Leipzig und die
Religionswissenschaft, pp. 6263; Steven M. Wasserstrom, The master-interpreter: Notes
on the German career of Joachim Wach (19221935), in Christian K. Wedemeyer and
Wendy Doniger, eds., Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The contested
legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp.
2151.

SSs Otto Hfler (a prominent member of the Vienna school of folklore studies),
however, it is much harder to tease out the political in Baetkes work. Moreover,
his engagement with conservative ideological discourses is particularly notable
given that he joined the SED in 1946 as a social democrat (the same year he was
also granted an honorary Leipzig doctorate in theology), his post-war academic
work taking on a quite different political character, if not always tone.
Baetkes best-known book today is undoubtedly his Dictionary of Old Norse
Literary Prose (which is currently in its eighth edition), the result of a project he
undertook after his retirement in the 1960s in the DDR.11 Yet in the 1930s Beaetke
was far better known for his work with Eugen Diederichss Thule translations of
Old Norse literature and Baetkes similar publications with the equally neoconservative Hanseatic Publishing House.12 Baetke had developed a career as a
populariser of Old Icelandic literature in the 1920s, a contributor to the Germanic
resurgence represented in the academic Germanentum movement of the day.13 His
particular interest in Old Germanic religion first came to prominence, however,
with his criticisms of neo-paganism; an active and proud Lutheran, Baetke began
to publish on Old Germanic religion and its relationship to Christianity only in the
early 1930s.
Hence Baetke began his 1930s academic career as a patriotic, Germanist critic
of the more colourful and romantic arm of the Germanentum movement
represented by Kummer, Wirth and Hauer. His short 1933 study of Characteristics
of Germanic Religion and Christianity was published in De Gruyters Way of the
Church series and was followed the next year by a longer work on the Nature and
Belief of the Germanic Peoples for the Hanseatic Publishing House which criticises

11 Walter Baetke, Wrterbuch zur altnordischen Prosaliteratur (2 vols, Berlin: Akademie,

196568; 8th ed., 2008) = Sitzungsberichte der Schsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
zu Leipzig, Philologisch-Historische Klasse 111, nn. 12.
12 Gary D. Starck, Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative publishers in Germany,
18901933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Siegfried Lokatis,
Hanseatisches Verlagsanstalt: Politisches Buchmarketing im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt
a.M.: Buchhndler-Vereinigung, 1992); Irmgard Heidler, Der Verleger Eugen Diederichs
und seine Welt (18961930) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998).
13 Walter Baetke, Glum, der Totschlger (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1923); idem,
Die Schwurbrder (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1924); idem, Die Geschichten
von den Orkaden, Dnemark und der Jomsburg (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1924); idem, Havards
Rache (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1925); idem, Thords Pflegesohn (Hamburg:
Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1927); idem, Islands Besiedlung und lteste Geschichte (Jena:
E. Diederichs, 1928); idem, Geschichten vom Sturlungengeschlecht (Jena: E. Diederichs,
1930).

the contributions of Kummer and Wirth.14 His Christianity and Religion, a 1934
pamphlet published by the Christian Periodicals Associations Kranz Press, was
more surely aimed at Hauer and his German Faith Movement, the Tbingen
Indologist being regarded as one of the most dangerous outsiders of the day by
many in the Germanist establishment (even including many of its more outspoken
National Socialist members).15 It is this background, perhaps most cogently
expressed in his 1944 collection of essays From the Spirit and Inheritance of Thule
that made Baetke appear so suitable for the position at Leipzig.16 He was a
conservative, a nationalist and a noted contributor to the neo-romantic literary
scene which saw in the rise of German fascism. But he was not a member of the
antiquity-enthusing nationalist fringe criticised by Hitler in Mein Kampf, a radical
pseudo-academic Grub Street which was, moreover, kept at arms length by most
members of the Germanist establishment even at proudly National Socialist
institutions such as the University of Leipzig.17
Unlike many of the other Leipzig faculty, Baetke was not a signatory to
1933s Vow of Allegiance of German academics to Hitler (which had culminated in
a public acclamation at the Alberthalle in Leipzig in November of that year)but
then in 1933 he was still yet to find his first university position.18 Scholars such as
Kuhn (in 1933 still an untenured lecturer at Marburg) had happily signed up, while
many other conservative Germanists (such as Reichardt who had also been
involved with Diederichss Thule series) demurred. Yet Baetkes most important
contribution to the history of religions was not his excoriating of figures such as
Kummer, Wirth and Hauer or even his 1937 study The Religion of the Germanic
Peoples according to the Original Sources (published by Moritz Diesterwegs in
Frankfurt, a publishing house associated with the Listian Armanist movement), it is
14 Walter Baetke, Arteigene germanische Religion und Christentum (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1933); idem, Art und Glaube der Germanen (Hamburg: Hanseatische
Verlagsanstalt, 1934).
15 Walter Baetke, Christentum und germanische Religion (Berlin: Kranz, 1934); Karla Poewe
and Irving Hexham, Jakob Wilhelm Hauers new religion and National Socialism,
Journal of Contemporary Religion 20 (2005), pp. 195215; Karla Poewe, New Religions
and the Nazis (New York: Routledge, 2006).
16 Walter Baetke, Vom Geist und Erbe Thules: Aufstze zur nordischen und deutschen Geistesund Glaubensgeschichte (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1944).
17 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), pp.
32627; Mees, Hitler and Germanentum, pp. 25761.
18 Arthur Gpfert et al., Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Universitten und
Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat (Dresden: W. Limpert,
1933), pp. 129ff.

his 1942 study of Holiness in Germanic that made Baetkes reputation as an

original and important contributor to Old Germanic religious studies.19
Baetkes 1942 book (with its preface dated to February of that year) is
remarkable, however, for the timing of its appearance. Published by J.C.B. Mohr
(Paul Siebeck) in Tbingen, it was Baetkes first major academic study with a
recognised scholarly publishing house. Yet appearing the year after the German
invasion of the Soviet Union, it was to be Mohrs last offering in Old Germanic
studies until after the warindeed Mohrs was better known at the time for its law
and philosophy catalogue, Baetkes book being only one of six monographs issued
by J.C.B. Mohr in 1942 to have found their way into the catalogue of the German
National Library today. Mohr had published Hauers Religion and Race in 1941
(as an extract from the Annual of the Scientific Academy of the Nazi Lecturers
League) and seems to have considered the publication of Baetkes work a matter of
comparable importance.20
Yet Baetkes study is not expressed as if it were a work influenced by
political ideology. Its first section is instead an insightful review of the concept and
theorising of holiness in early-twentieth-century studies of religion. Baetkes
first footnote cites Emile Durkheim and his Elementary Forms of Religious Life,
hardly a National Socialist favourite, and although he then moves on to
considerations of holiness by contemporary academic proponents of Nazism such
as Hermann Gntert and the Dutch Nordicist Jan de Vries, Baetkes treatment of
previous scholarship seems even-handed rather than ideological.21 He grounds his
conceptual understanding principally in Durkheims sociology of religion and a
critique of Rudolf Ottos famous 1917 work on the numinous.22 Baetkes main
concern in the first section of his book is to consider Old Germanic notions of
holiness in terms of the major empirical studies of classical and other forms of
19 Walter Baetke, Die Religion der Germanen in Quellenzeugnissen (Frankfurt a.M.: Moritz
Diesterweg, 1937); idem, Das Heilige im Germanischen (Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1942).
20 Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, Religion und Rasse (Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1941) = Jahresbnde
der Wissenschaftlichen Akademie der NSD-Dozentenbundes 1 (193739), pp. 177225.
21 Emile Durkheim, Les formes lmentaires de la vie religieuse: le systeme totemique en
Australie (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1912); Baetke, Heilige, pp. 12.
22 Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige: ber das Irrationale in der Idee des Gttlichen und sein
Verhltnis zum Rationalen (Breslau: Trewendt & Granier, 1917); Baetke, Heilige, pp. 8ff.;
and cf. Gregory D. Alles, Introduction, in Rudolf Otto, Autobiographical and social
essays, ed. Gregory D. Alles (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), pp. 3436; Todd A. Gooch,
The Numinous and Modernity: An interpretation of Rudolf Ottos philosophy of religion
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 34; and Dirk Johannsen, Das Numinose als
kulturwissenschaftliche Kategorie: Norwegische Sagenwelt in religionswissenschaftlicher
Deutung (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2008), pp. 4652.

religion of his day, even taking the time to pillory Hauer for his (apparent)
misunderstanding of key issues in the task.23 Yet as Baetke admits at the end of the
first part of his study, his main contribution in Holiness in Germanic will be to
undertake a Wrter und Sachen study of the employment of terms for holiness in
the Old Germanic linguistic tradition.
The first Wrter und Sachen studies were produced by the brothers Grimm,
but a new call had gone out in 1909 to German and Austrian linguists and
philologists to re-engage with the relationship of language to culture. The Wrter
und Sachen approach to historical semantics was championed especially by the
pioneering Austrian psychological linguist and Indo-Europeanist Rudolf Meringer
(who had founded a journal that year with the same name), but which by the 1930s
had taken on clearly National Socialist overtones.24 Most of the key figures in the
Wrter und Sachen movement by the 1930s had become outspoken Nazis who
clearly saw their work as a service to the nation. As such, it comes as little surprise
to find that the second part of Baetkes key 1942 study begins with a reference to
Hflers basely politicised University of Vienna professional thesis which
Diesterwegs had published in 1934 as Secret Cultic Leagues of the Germanic
Peoples.25
Holiness in Germanic is largely a very technical study of the way in which
holiness is referenced and described in the Old Germanic languages, Baetkes
material ranging from assessments of Wulfilas bible translation into Gothic, to
Old High German monastic sources, runic inscriptions and Old Icelandic literary
23 Baetke, Heilige, p. 29, n. 1.
24 Rudolf Meringer, Wrter und Sachen, Indogermanische Forschungen 16 (1904), pp.
10196; Wrter und Sachen: Kulturhistorische Zeitschrift fr Sprach- und
Sachforschung/Zeitschrift fr indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft, Volksforschung und
Kulturgeschichte 135 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 190944); Dorothee Heller, Wrter und
Sachen: Grundlagen einer Historiographie der Fachsprachenforschung (Tbingen: Gunter
Narr, 1998); Christopher M. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue
fascism, race and the science of language (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 3739; Mees,
Science of the Swastika, p. 95.
25 Otto Hfler, Kultische Geheimbnde der Germanen I (Frankfurt a.M.: Moritz Diesterweg,
1934); Klaus von See, Politische Mnnerbunde-Ideologie von der wilhelmischen Zeit bis
zum Nationalsozialismus, in Gisela Vlger and Karin von Welck, eds., Mnnerbnde,
Mnnerbande: Zur Rolle des Mannes im Kulturvergleich (2 vols, Cologne: City of Cologne,
1990), I, pp. 93102 [= a revised version in idem, Barbar, Germane, Arier: Die Suche nach
der Identitt der Deutschen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1994), pp. 31942]; Stefanie von
Schnurbein, Geheime kultische Mnnerbnde bei den Germanen, in Vlger and Von
Welck, eds., II, pp. 97102; Mees, Germanische Sturmflut, pp. 188ff.; idem, Science of
the Swastika, pp. 90ff.

evidence. Baetke focuses particularly on two terms which have typically come to
indicate holiness in the Germanic languages, one represented by the Gothic term
weihs (thus German Weihnachten Christmas, literally the holy nights), the other
by Gothic hailags (hence English holy). Baetke argues that the two terms originally
represented two different (and complementary) kinds of Germanic holiness: the
first the holiness associated with ritual (cf. the Latin cognate victima sacrificial
victim), the other with the grace or good luck that the Old Germanic gods could
offer (in turn) to the fortunate (cf. English hale, health, German Heil).26 Three
quarters of the book comprises a close philological analysis of the use of these two
terms and their cognates in the various medieval Germanic languages, Baetkes
linguistically predicated slow reading of his sources representing a classic
example of 1940s Wrter und Sachen scholarship.
Baetke argues that the linguistic tradition in which this dualism is most clearly
(and originally) preserved, however, is that of medieval Germany.27 According to
him, early German monastic sources preserve more reliable indications of the
original state of Germanic pagan holiness than do the Old Norse linguistic
employments he describes, not even those of (the chronologically much earlier)
runic inscriptions from Scandinavia. Baetke does not engage in the same manner
with the relevant early English material, his comparative (principally) GermanNorse analysis, complemented by Wulfilian Gothic, representing a form of
Germanising of the Old Norse tradition that was common in continental
scholarship at the time. Nonetheless the book not only represents a triumph of
historical semantic studies, it also represents a vindication of the mainstream
claims of the Germanentum movementnot only was the need for Germanic
resurgence most strongly felt at the time on German (rather than Scandinavian)
soil, it was in a linguistic analysis of early German (rather than Nordic) sources in
which Baetkes semantic dualism could be seen represented most clearly. Rather
than more culturally archaic and more pagan as the older Norse sources are usually
assumed to be, it was in the writings of German Christians, writing about early
Christian things, in which Baetkes presumedly original conceptualisation of Old
Germanic holiness was most faithfully preserved. In the Old Scandinavian North, a
considerable bowdlerising (particularly) of the notion of weihs had apparently
occurred under the influence of Christianityand the often pre-Christian runic
evidence, so Baetke proclaimed, was simply too unclear to be assessed with any

26 Baetke, Heilige, pp. 5568.

27 Ibid., pp. 16596.

10

confidence.28 Baetkes work represented not just a triumph of philological patience

and will, it was also a supremely nationalist undertaking.
Yet unexpectedly enough, Baetkes dualistic understanding of Old Germanic
holiness has subsequently turned out to be a very well received one. With Claude
Lvi-Strausss introduction of structural binarism to anthropology in the 1950s,
later specialists have tended to agree with Baetke.29 Emile Beneveniste in his
magisterial 1969 Wrter und Sachen survey of Indo-European language and
society even developed further on Baetkes fundamental scheme, the leading
French linguist (whose brother Henri had perished at Auschwitz) expanding the
dualism seen by Baetke from a German and Germanic to an Indo-European level,
arguing that an essential binary distinction of the consecrated or ritually marked off
to the fructifying and healing power of divinity represents an inheritance not only
of early Germanic culture but also of Indic, Iranian, Greek and Roman religious
tradition as well.30 More recent work in Old Norse studies, particularly from the
perspective of the runic testaments from pre-Christian Scandinavia seen as so
unreliable by Baetke, has tended to support his basic argument (albeit shorn of his
nationalistic claim).31 Baetkes 1942 work has remained a Wrter und Sachen
classic even despite the evident political aspect which supported its original
production.
Baetke seems to have represented a milder version of a scholar such as
Gntert. With Gntert, his nationalism and support of National Socialism clearly
enlivened his philological work, even if he was to have to face his own battles in
the late 1930s as the SS, in the figure of the Ahnenerbes Walter Wst,
cannibalised the journal founded by Meringer and eventually sidelined Gntert

28 Ibid., pp. 2024.

29 Claude Lvi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958).
30 Emile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropennes (2 vols, Paris: Minuit,
1969), II, pp. 179207 and cf. Thomas L. Markey, Germanic terms for temple and cult, in
Evelyn Sherabon Firchow et al., eds., Studies for Einar Haugen, presented by friends and
colleagues (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), p. 375; Julien Ries, Lapport de Rgis Boyer
ltude du sacr dans la religion des anciens Germains et Scandinaves, in Claude
Lecouteux, ed., Hugur: Mlanges dhistoire, de littrature et de mythologie offerts Rgis
Boyer pour son 65e anniversaire (Paris: Presses de lUniversit de Paris-Sorbonne, 1997),
pp. 23336 and Dennis H. Green, Language and History in the Early Germanic World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 36061.
31 Bernard Mees, Alu and hale, Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association 5
(2009), pp. 10731.

11

(Meringers successor) as its editor.32 But unlike Gntert (who died in 1948),
Baetkes career blossomed after the war as he forsake his former intellectual
allegiance to the mainstream of German reaction, and instead joined the victorious
socialist cause.
Serving as dean of his faculty from 194850 and awarded the DDRs Order of
Patriot Merit in 1959 after his retirement, Baetke became a leading member of the
new East German academic establishment after the war. His devoted former
student Kurt Rudolph records that Baetke did not basely politicise his lectures,
however, not filling them and his scholarship with Marxist rhetoric or other
socialistic flourishes as became common in the works of other DDR scholars at the
time.33 Indeed Baetke now became in word and deed a critic not only of basely
ideologised right-wing scholarship, but even of the many excesses that had
characterised the more mainstream reflections of the Germanentum movement of
which he had formerly been such a solid part. Most of Baetkes post-war works
even eschew the description Germanic as he became more surely focused on the
Nordic world and retreated from studying the philology of medieval Germany.
Perhaps Baetkes most telling work of post-war scholarship is represented by
his 1958 return to the matter of Germanic holinessor at least in terms of a key
aspect of Old Germanic Heil that he had not properly studied in his 1942 book. In
1958 and 1962 he gave two addresses to the Saxon Academy of Sciences on the
theme of sacral kingshipi.e. the tradition of ascribing the power of Heil to Old
Germanic kings. Baetkes resultant book, published in 1964 as Yngvi and the
Ynglings, starts (again) with a reference to Hfler, but also to the Scandinavian
scholars Vilhelm Grnbech and Otto von Friesen.34 In 1934 Von Friesen had
published a seminal study of the ascription of divine or fatalistic standing to
Swedish kings in the medieval Norse Ynglinga Saga and Grnbechs similarly
groundbreaking study of Old Norse religion from 1909 had been translated into
German at the behest of Hfler in 1937 as a seminal contribution to understandings
of Old Germanic Heil.35 This theory of an Old Germanic tradition of attributing the
32 Mees, Science of the Swastika, p. 196. On Gntert, see also Bruce Lincoln, Hermann
Gntert in the 1930s: Heidelberg, politics, and the study of Germanic/Indogermanic
religion, in Junginger, ed., Study of Religions, pp. 179204.
33 Rudolf and Heinrich, Walter Baetke, p. 182.
34 Walter Baetke, Yngvi und die Ynglinger: Eine quellenkritische Untersuchung ber das
nordische Sakralknigtum (Berlin: Akademie, 1964) = Sitzungsberichte der Schsischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse 109, n. 3.
35 Otto von Friesen, Har det nordiska kungadmet sakralt ursprung?, Saga och Sed
(193234) pp. 1534; Wilhelm Grnbech, Kultur und Religion der Germanen, trans. Ellen
Hoffmeyer (2 vols, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 193739).

12

power of Heil to kings (as well as gods) had come into especial prominence in the
1950s, particularly in terms of a long study by Hfler (who had passed through
West German de-Nazification, like Kuhn, mostly unscathed) of what he saw as
evidence for sacral kingship in the difficult poetic sequence which is preserved on
the early medieval Swedish Rk rune-stone.36 Enthusiasts of the notion of royal
Heil like Hfler had praised the concept in contrastive terms to democratic
authority and clearly understood its medieval effect as being comparable to that
produced by the leadership cult which surrounded Hitler. Professor of Swedish at
the University of Uppsala, Von Friesen had long been influential in the
Germanentum movement, Hfler having taught at Uppsala in the late 1920s along
with several other scholars with similar political leanings.37 Grnbech and Von
Friesen had developed upon the Pacific islander notion of mana first brought to the
attention of scholars of religion in the late nineteenth century and introduced it to
Old Germanic studies, whence the more politicised of the Germanist fraternity had
come to see its relevance so excitably to understanding the imagined historical
roots of the key political discourses of their own day.
In 1955 at the Eighth International Congress for the History of Religions in
Rome, however, the Swedish historian ke V. Strm had delivered a paper which
seemed to indicate to Baetke that the notion of an Old Germanic sacral kingship
was threatening to become an academic dogma.38 Hfler and Kummer (the latter of
whom had been unable to regain a position after being dismissed from his post at
Jena at the end of the war) had presented at the conference on sacral kingship in
Rome too, but as an expert in all things holy in Germanic, Baetke disagreed,
dismissing the concept as it was promoted by his West German counterparts as a
Christianised construct.39 In 1956 Baetke had published a key analysis of Old
Norse literary production which portrayed it as essentially Christian, the
representations of paganism found in such sources stylised and fictional, the
36 Otto Hfler, Germanisches Sakralknigtum I: Der Runenstein von Rk und die germanische
Individualweihe (Tbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1952).
37 Bruce D. Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, ideology, and scholarship (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 126; Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols, trans. Sonia
Wichmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 209ff.
38 ke V. Strm, The king god and his connection with sacrifice in Old Norse religion, in
The Sacral Kingship: Contributions to the central theme of the VIIIth International
Congress for the History of Religion, Rome, April, 1955 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1959), pp.
70215.
39 Otto Hfler, Der Sakralcharakter des germanischen Knigtums, in The Sacral Kingship,
pp. 664701 and Berhard Kummer, Ein Lebensbeispiel zur Frage nach Ursprung und
Fortwicklung demokratischen und sakralen Knigtums in Skandinavien, in The Sacral
Kingship, pp. 71634.

13

products of clerical imaginations.40 His addresses on the Heil of Old Germanic

kings to the Saxon Academy of Sciences in 1958 and 60 developed this theme
further, the 1964 monographic publication of his lectures presenting a searing
critique of the notion. Baetkes book traces the twentieth-century development of
the concept of Old Germanic sacral kingship and assesses the philological evidence
for it in early Nordic sources (which he dismisses as fantastic and unreliable). He
subsequently disparages the contemporary efforts of continuators of the sacralkingship tradition such as Hfler and the University of Mnsters Karl Hauck. The
main author that Baetke invokes in his swingeing attack on Hfler and his
colleagues is Marc Bloch and his study of the medieval Rois thaumaturges from
1924.41 Rather than citing Marx or Lenin as his main methodological inspiration,
instead Baetke preferred to promote the analysis of sacral kingship advanced by
the Marxist cofounder of the French Annales School of medieval studies.
Bloch, who as a member of the French resistance had been killed by the
Gestapo in 1944, saw the ascription of healing powers to medieval French and
English kings as essentially a Christian development. Baetke in turn explains the
emergence of a tradition of sacral kingship in medieval Norse sources as a sign of
Christian thematic influence in these works, not indications of the existence of a
genuine inherited Old Germanic tradition. Baetke assesses evidence such as early
runic inscriptions and (characteristically) dismisses it as too poorly understood to
be employed as reliable in a direct repudiation of Von Friesen and his many
Scandinavian successors.42 Baetkes critique is so searching and so dismissive of
Scandinavian scholarship, Olof Sundqvist in his recent review of the whole
Germanic sacral kingship genre, decries Baetkes approach as (too) radical.43
Although Sundqvist provides no real response to Baetkes arguments (which for
the runic evidence at least are not accepted by most experts) and seems to accept
that there is something wrong with the received sacral-kingship tradition (to which

40 Walter Baetke, ber die Entstehung der Islndersagas (Berlin: Akademie, 1956) =
Sitzungsberichte der Schsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologischhistorishce Klasse 102, n. 5.
41 Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges: tude sur le caractre surnaturel attribu la
puissance royale particulirement en France et en Angleterre (Strasbourg: Istra, 1924);
Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A life in history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
42 Baetke, Yngvi, pp. 2638.
43 Olaf Sundqvist, Freyrs Offspring: Rulers and religion in ancient Svea society (Uppsala:
Uppsala University, 2002), p. 31.

14

he nevertheless still accords), here Baetkes work has succeeded in finding only a
quite limited acceptance among Nordicists today.44
That is not to say that the notion of an Old Germanic sacral kingship has not
continued to prove quite controversial. Sundqvists book represents mostly a
descriptive rather than analytical work and there remain many critics of the sacralkingship thesis in Old Germanic studies today. The matter still proved the occasion
of public exchanges between Hfler and several of his critics as late as the 1970s,
and many more recent scholars have voiced similar concerns, particularly given the
decidedly 1930s associations that the notion that Old Germanic kings may have
been thought to have had supernatural powers necessarily brings to a consideration
of German scholarship from the time.45
After all, the whole notion that Nazism represents a political religion
immediately brings to mind the pomp and hysteria of the Nuremberg rallies and
other often less public aspects of the leadership cult which surrounded Hitler.46
Max Weber used the example of Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of Mormonism, as
the epitome of his notion of charismatic authority in his Economy and Society, but
Hitler is often considered a better example of such a figure by many scholars
today.47 Charisma was an essential and very obvious part of the political culture of
44 Olaf Sundqvist, Runology and history of religions: some critical implications of the debate
on the Stentoften inscription, Blandade runstudier 2 (Uppsala: Institutionen fr nordiska
sprk, 1997), pp. 13574; Bernard Mees, The Stentoften dedication and sacral kingship,
Zeitschrift fr deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, forthcoming 2011.
45 Klaus von See, Kontinuittstheorie und Sakraltheorie in der Germanenforschung: Antwort
an Otto Hfler (Frankfurt a.M.: Athenum, 1972); Rory McTurk, Sacral kingship in
ancient Scandinavia, Saga-book 19 (197576), pp. 13969; idem, Scandinavian sacral
kingship revisited, Saga-book 24 (1994), pp. 1932; Walther Kienast, Germanische Treue
und Knigsheil, Historische Zeitschrift 227 (1978), pp. 265324; Daniel G. Russo,
Sacral kingship in Early Medieval Europe: The Germanic tradition (Dissertation,
University of New Hampshire, 1978); Eva Picard, Germanisches Sakralknigtum?
Quellenkritische Studien zur Germania des Tacitus und zur altnordischen berlieferung
(Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1991); Franz-Reiner Erkens, Sakralknigtum und sakrales
Knigtum: Anmerkungen und Hinweise, in idem, ed., Das frhmittelalterliche Knigtum
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 24.
46 Eric Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1939); Richard
Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich: Nazi conceptions of Christianity, 19191945 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); idem, Nazism and the revival of political religion
theory, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5 (2004), pp. 37696; Milan Babk,
Nazism as a secular religion, History and Theory 45 (2006), pp. 37596.
47 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An outline of interpretative sociology, ed. Guenther
Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1978), p. 242; Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth: Image and reality in the Third Reich

15

the 1930sand the studies of the cults of charismatic kings (and their associated
Heil) by scholars such as Hfler in the 1950s reflected a form of ideological
Germanic thought which clearly represented a continuation of pre-war
Germanentum theorising. Hflers legacy was one of the less palatable aspects of
Old Germanic philology after 1945 (at least for a repentant Germanist). Baetkes
attempt to combat the romanticism he clearly saw at work in such scholarship in a
study which invokes so centrally the contribution of the most important Marxist
medievalist of the pre-war period obviously makes Yngvi and the Ynglings an
ideological tract, even if the book does not cite a single political theorist or make
any direct reference to Nazism.
Baetkes 1964 study represents a wholesale repudiation of a genre of
politicised discourse in Old Germanic studies that first emerged in the early 1900s
but which had since developed into its own ideological formation, an ideology (and
discursive formation) of Old Germanic charisma and kingship.48 H e i l had
constituted both a term of address (cf. English hail!) and a reference to divine
favour (hale, holy) already in Old Germanic times, but the word had become even
more pregnant with ideological meaning under the National Socialists. Webers
notion of charismatic authority has clearly religious roots and with the
development of Weberian charisma into the transformational leadership theory of
James MacGregor Burns (which still represents a canonical theory in leadership
studies today), the political discourses of Heil within Old Germanic studies might
be seen to be particularly linked with the anti-democratic thought encapsulated in
the Nazi leadership principle.49 After all, Hfler and Kummer made it
particularly clear that the Heil of early medieval kings represented ideological
competition to the idea of Old Germanic agrarian democracy. There was obviously
something very politically unrepentant about the sacral-kingship debates which
raged within Old Germanic studies during the 1960s and 70s.
Indeed German Old Germanic studies in the 1950s and 60s was riven between
two schools: the progressive and the obstinate. Hfler represented a continuator of
the unreformed extremes of 1930s scholarship to some, but also the very promise
such scholarship might still offer to others. Younger figures like Hauck who
followed in the Hflerite tradition were typically scholars who had come of age
academically during the dictatorship (Hauck at the wartime Reich University of
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); Michel Dobry, Hitler, charisma and structure: Reflections on
historical methodology, Politics, Religion & Ideology 7 (2006), pp. 15771.
48 Cf. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London:
Tavistock, 1972), pp. 3139.
49 James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Martin Riesebrodt,
Charisma in Max Webers sociology of religion, Religion 29 (1999), pp. 114.

16

Strasbourg), but were unwilling to pursue a reformation of their discipline along

the lines championed by Baetke in the 50s. As the scholarship of figures such as
Bloch came to represent the canon of medieval studies in the 1960s and beyond, as
universities increasingly became bastions of academic socialism, a work such as
Baetkes Yngvi and the Ynglings no longer seemed quite so radical. But taken in
light of his earlier study of Holiness in Germanic (which is only cited once in the
whole of Baetkes 1964 work), the change seems quite abrupt and intellectually
uncharacteristic of a man who had previously prided himself so obviously on his
own contribution to the pre-war Germanic resurgence.
Baetke was one of the first German Nordicists to reject the romantic
pretensions of scholars such as Otto, Kummer, Wirth and Hauer. He was a
quintessential empiricist who had no time for what he considered to represent
unwarranted speculation. Yet it remains a strange kind of intellectual history that
heroises someone who proved so academically successful under both German
dictatorships, first as a critic of Germanist excess that was publicly skewered at the
time even by many card-carrying Nazis and then later as a bitter opponent of postwar academic romanticism. The radical source critic of Sundqvists rather
diffident assessment of Old Norse sacral kingship evidently thought himself a stern
critic of basely politicised academic distortion. But his own scholarship, often
oppositional and overwrought as it sometimes no doubt is, was clearly also enabled
by political circumstancelike Kuhn, Baetke had lived in his own version of a
metaphorical Wodanstrae in the 1920s and 30s. That Baetke specialised in a field
that was so suggestively amenable to ideologised fancy meant that a certain
amount of pointed boundary setting would seem to have been essential. Yet unlike
a Reichardt or a Feist, Baetke was never forced into emigrationeven to an
inner one; his matter and method drank only too deeply of the accepted
conservative consensus of the day.50 Drawn to his studies of the Old Germanic past
initially in terms of an illiberal sense of patriotism, instead Baetke used the
opportunities he was afforded quite successfully, hailed later in his life as an
academic hero (the subject of two East German Festschriftenone posthumous)
rather than the conservative-turned-socialist ideological changeling that he might
rather more empirically be admitted to have been.51
50 Cf. Reinhold Grimm, In the thicket of inner emigration, in Neil H. Donahue and Doris
Kirchner, eds., Flight of Fantasy: New perspectives on inner emigration in German
literature, 19331945 (New York: Berghahn, 2003), pp. 2745.
51 Kurt Rudolph, Rolf Heller and Ernst Walter, eds., Festschrift Walter Baetke, dargebracht zu
seinem 80, Geburtstag am 28. Mrz 1964 (Weimar: Bhlau, 1964); Ernst Walter and
Hartmut Mittelstdt, eds., Altnordistik: Vielfalt und Einheit. Erinnerungsband fr Walter
Baetke (18841978) (Weimar: Bhlau, 1989); and cf. also Walter Baetke, Kleine Schriften:

17

Any scholar who lived through those times had to tread a difficult path, but it
is surely overstating Baetkes role in the 1930s to paint him as an implacable
opponent of Nazism. As Richard Steigmann-Gall has demonstrated so clearly,
Nazi Germany was an ideologically protestant, not neo-pagan state, figures such as
Hauer and Wirth representing a political extreme, not the fascist mainstream. If
Nazism can validly be seen as a secularised, political religion, then being an
outspoken defender of Lutheranism and the German empirical tradition was far
from incompatible with National Socialism. Baetkes actions speak louder than his
later words, his dalliance with right-wing publishers and the associated movement
for Germanic resurgence already in the 1920s a truer testimony of his original
intellectual standing than are his altercations with radical religionists in his search
to establish a supremely empirical scholarship of Old Germanic religious studies.
His later publications presented under another kind of dictatorship often seem to
have become so sceptical and socialist he has developed something of a reputation
as a methodological extremist among latter-day experts in the Old Germanic field.
Rather than a cranky hypercritic as he has sometimes been portrayed, however,
Baetke was clearly reacting against what he saw as an unrepentantly ideologised
form of German antiquarian studies which had survived the war, his conversion to
the politics of Durkheim and Bloch only serving to sharpen his critical apparatus.
Rather than remain trapped in the dreamy world of the literary neo-romanticism he
had long ago begun his journey towards attaining academic respectability
enmeshed in, Baetke increasingly came to have no time for those who had proven
unable to leave the Germanentum enthusing of the pre-war period behind and for
this became a reforming hero for more than just historians of religion working in
the DDR.

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