This is a very belated book review. I
was in England when Dietrich von Hildebrand's edited memoirs “My
Battle Against Hitler” were first released, and I could not get
a review copy until I came back to the States. Even then, it was a
challenge for me to read the book, first of all because the only
format I could obtain limited me to reading it on an iPad (no treat
for tired eyes), but more importantly because the book itself is so
dense. We are talking, after all, about a philosopher's
memoirs of a philosophical and political battle against
an all-encompassing ideology. At times it was a struggle for
me to get through. I do not have a strong background in 20th
century thinkers, and von Hildebrand seemed to have been friends or
at least colleagues with all of them. I didn't know anything about
the Austrian experience of the Anschluss outside of some scenes in
The Sound of Music, but now I know enough to even use the word
appropriately (pronunciation is an altogether different question).
Suffice it to say, this was not a quick
read, but now that I am (getting around to) writing about it, I am
realizing how much I got from the book—and how unnervingly timely
it is. Von Hildebrand, who was born at his family's villa in Italy
but educated in Germany, perceived very early on just what kind of a
menace Nazism was, thanks to his youthful philosophy studies under
Edmund Husserl (the same Husserl alongside whom St Edith Stein would
soon enough be working) and his friendship with Max Scheler (whom St
John Paul would credit as providing one of the two “great
philosophical revelations” in his life).
From Scheler, it would seem, both von
Hildebrand and the future pope learned to approach qustions and
issues from the standpoint of human dignity. It was “the
depersonalising tendency of National Socialism” that provoked von
Hildebrand's laser-like attention. In writing his memoirs some thirty
years after so many experiences, it is this very point that the
author keeps returning to. Scheler is also credited, at least in the
book's introduction, with the conversion to Catholicism of von
Hildebrand and his wife Gretchen. (The “other” Dr. von
Hildebrand, Alice, was Dietrich's second wife; it was for her that he
wrote the encyclopedic memoirs that are present only in part in the
published book.) The motivation? “The Catholic Church is the true
Church,” according to Scheler, “because she produces saints.”
Right from the beginning of his
teaching career, von Hildebrand faced the challenge of putting his
students on guard against the philosophical underpinnings of National
Socialism (something his contemporary, Martin Heidegger, would soon
be busily propagandizing). Sadly, von Hildebrand was in a minority.
Many Catholic thinkers and leaders thought that Nazism was simply “a
sign of the times” and had to be taken into consideration, or that
it was best to placate the movement as much as possible, in order to
protect the Church and its institutions from retaliatory damage or
marginalization. This accommodating tendency continued even as
Hitler's forces invaded country after country. I was saddened to read
that the nationalist fervor was not absent even among the most
distinguished religious communities. Von Hildebrand continued to
insist that every dimension of Nazism, “its nationalism,
militarism, collectivism, materialism, and anti-Semitism were
unbridgeably antithetical to Christianity.”
When Hitler came to power, von
Hildebrand was effectively exiled. He first moved to Italy, to his
family's holdings, and then to Austria where he hoped to be part of
an intellectual and political stronghold against Nazism. The
annexations, first of Austria and then of France, by the Nazis kept
von Hildebrand on the run. He knew he was on their hit list for
starting an anti-Nazi journal, and narrowly escaped assassination
(unlike the Austrian President with whom he had been working so
hard). He fled from nation to nation, finally finding refuge in the
US in 1940. The world hadn't even seen what Nazism would still do.
His experience of Austria had been that
it was always, in its own way, what we today call “multiethnic”:
“it had a supranatural character, not only because it always
embraced non-German nations such as the Bohemians, Hungarians, and
southern Slavs, but also because it was interiorly united and formed
by an ideal that was religious, multi-national, cultural and dynastic
in character.” What the Nazis brought was “the great heresy of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: nationalism.” “This
terrible error... [starts] with the identification of nation and
state and reaching all the way to committing idolatry towards a
nation, that is, making the nation the highest criterion for the
whole of life and making it the ultimate goal and highest good.”
It is hard not to read those words of
von Hildebrand's in our current political setting and not feel
unsettled. We need von Hildebrand's critique now as much as the
complacent people of Germany and Austria needed it almost a century
ago. What I want to take from this book is his centering (as St John
Paul did, and as Pope Francis is modeling for us now) on the
person. Any time we find ourselves expected to sacrifice a person
to an ideal, every red flag ever flown should go up.
“Genuine patriotism and nationalism
are as different from each other as the true, divinely ordained love
of self is from egoistic self-love. ...The first characteristic of
nationalism is thus a collective egoism that disavows respect and
concern for foreign nations and evaluates the rights of one's own
nation according to criteria different from those applied to other
nations.” “Nationalism is also present wherever the nation is
ranked above communities of even higher value, such as larger
communities of peoples or mankind as a whole.” It doesn't take
laser vision to see this sort of thing spreading like a virus through
contemporary social media.
So. A tough read, but a worthwhile
(maybe even necessary) one.
More books by/about von Hildebrand, who was also a kind of proto-Theology of the Body writer:
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More books by/about von Hildebrand, who was also a kind of proto-Theology of the Body writer:
 
 
 
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