Edmond Vermeil - Stackelberg

French scholar of German literature, Edmond Vermeil, whose Doctrinaire de la révolution allemande was published in 1938 and reflected the animosities of the First World War. If Rauschning saw Nazism as a totally novel phenomenon without any precedents in German history, Vermeil was excessively fixated on alleged continuities in German history. For Vermeil Nazism was ultimately
rooted in the characteristically German tradition of what he called “organized
romanticism,” the schizoid German penchant for contradictory ideals, whether of
mysticism and technology, imperialism and subservience to authority, elitism
and populism, order and disorder. According to Vermeil, the tension between these
contradictory deep-historical strands could only be resolved through characteristically
German aggressiveness.2 Vermeil’s was probably the best and least
rigid of a number of works that sought to trace the roots of Nazism deep in the
German past and in the German national character. It became a model of sorts for
many subsequent works, most of them polemics written in the heat of the Second
World War, patterned on the “from Luther to Hitler” theme

Nothing special there. But I'm writing it on my blog because for some reason, I think I will really appreciate this info in the future.


This excerpt was retrieved from Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany by Stackelberg.