This Movement Is For All Western Nations

“The German Faith Movement is as old as German history. What today is styled the German Faith Movement is only a phase of the conflict between native faith and a Christianity which has come down to us from an alien source. And the range of this conflict extends beyond the boundaries of Germany. For the whole conflict of the German spirit with Christianity, since the latter’s invasion of the Teutonic area, is in turn merely a phase of the conflict of the Indo-Germanic spirit with the spirit of the Near-Eastern Semitic world, which in the form of the Christianity of the first centuries and of the middle ages allied itself with Rome. The struggle of these two worlds with one another extends over thousands of years, and all the West Indo-Germanic countries have been in a special sense drawn into it. In every single one of these countries the revolt of the Indo-Germanic spirit against Christianity, which is Near Eastern and Semitic, has made itself felt. The “Secularist” movement in France falls undoubtedly in this category.

The German Faith Movement, which was founded in Eisenach in July 1933, did not receive its name because we thought that there was a German God in contradistinction to the God of other nations; the name was intended to express the fact that we felt the constraining power of a faith movement springing out of the specific German nature, and the urge to set it over against Christianity, whose founded and standard documents have reached us from a different racial and cultural area. The word “German” was not intended to mark off this movement from the other West Indo-Germanic nations. The distinguishing feature of this Faith Movement was, rather, to be the normative function assigned to moral forces which spring immediately from the nature of the German soul. We could have just as easily called it the “Nordic-Teutonic” Faith Movement. As I am convinced that the same fundamental forces in religion and morals are operative in the other West Indo-Germanic nations as well, I chose at first the title “Indo-Germanic”. But this sounded too academic, and did not fit the spiritual situation; so it was changed to “German”. For this word evoked a far more immediate response from the hearts of those who had been gripped by the National Socialist revolution.

The French or English translation of the name should, therefore, never be “Mouvement allemand de foi”, or “German Faith Movement”. The adjectives which come nearest to what is meant are “germanique”, and “Germanic”, so long as it is borne in mind that what is in view is a particular expression of the Indo-Germanic spirit, with its storm-center in Germany. Thus the German Faith Movement can never be a hindrance to international understanding – quite the reverse. It represents, among other things, a thoroughgoing attempt to bring out more and more clearly, and to render effective, the close connection that exists between all the West Indo-Germanic nations in their innermost nature.”