Peace, Friends!
I wrote my first book as a dissertation during the first reign of 45. Among other things, it was a study of hope summoned in hopeless times--and a search for hope that might hope in a liberating direction. This is a small excerpt from the book, An Unpromising Hope. As you may have noticed, I have mostly peaced out of social media, and have been focusing my energies on relationships, family, and community organizing.
That said, I am quite grateful for the time I got to spend digging into hope. If folks find this helpful, let me know, and I am happy to share more from the book.
Peace, all. And love. And hope. And liberation.
PS: If you are reading this on your phone, it may be easier to read if you flip your phone to a horizontal position.
[ image credit ]
Bloch's Hope
Ernst Bloch began his work on hope in the context of rising fascist ideologies in Germany—and therefore in the context of fascist hoping.* Fascist hopes were hybrid in nature. They were born of an idealized and glamorized German past, a past understood by fascist dreamers as having been both “pure” and “true.” Looking backward, toward a fantasy projected upon history, they simultaneously longed forward toward a future realization of the fantastic images that the glamorization of an idealized past evoked. That is, their desire was directed toward the fulfillment and/or completion of that which the image of the past simultaneously presented and promised.* The sciences of the day helped to ensure that these hopes were well founded in scientific facts. At the time, scientists had constructed and produced a number of racial distinctions and hierarchies, taxonomies that proved to be useful to the fascist cause, confirming at once fascist values and fascist aspirations toward their realization.*
These so-called truths and facts of Arian supremacy were further augmented by the newly accepted and quite in-vogue theory of Social Darwinism. In the service of fascism, science and religion were not necessarily conflicted. Fascist ideologies and hopes were enabled and even propagated by churches who held to the ancient understanding that “all authority is given by God,” and so taught that the Christian is to faithfully obey Hitler, to pray always for him without ceasing, never resisting the SS, and so on.*
In addition, propagandizing preyed upon the already dominant conviction among many in the church, that the Christian is the superior and true believer, and indeed the bearer of salvation. Today this attitude and belief is called “Christian supremacy.”*
Here was a vision of an Arian nation: The Third Reich, the final kingdom.* It was to be for these believers something of heaven on earth meant for the chosen, the few, the pure. “The eternal God created for our nation a law that is peculiar to its own kind,” claimed church leaders in a public fashion, “It took shape in the Leader Adolf Hitler, and in the National Socialist state created by him. This law speaks to us from the history of our people . . . One Nation! One God! One Reich! One Church!”* The Third Reich for these Christians was the fulfillment of the promise, spoken from history, the fruition of fascist, supremacist hopes and dreams.
Of course, such hope was not exclusively for the Christian. Resourceful as they were, fascist hopes played similarly on the messianic impulses within communist dreams and socialistic anticipations: desire for power to the people, to the workers, the proletariat, the farmers, those born of sweat and blood and soil.*
Hearing any claims to be of the people, we must always ask, with history, “Which people?” Fascist hopes simultaneously dehumanized and were willing to sacrifice, to kill, to incarcerate, to displace those deemed non-people or lesser people, according to their own scientific or theological classifications.* Such as these were not heirs to fascist hopes, they claimed. They were merely sacrifices toward hope’s fulfillment, here and now, on earth, as it is in the imagined fascist heaven. In Germany these became the Jews, the Roma, those who were gay, and so on. These were rounded up, detained, tortured, and killed in the name of the kingdom, the Reich, the imagined paradise conceived by idealistic minds. To these hopes, Bloch, a Jew and a refugee who was forced into flight, sought to write alternatives.
Thomas R. Gaulke, "Hope in the Key of Heimweh," An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021).
Footnotes:
*What Bloch means by fascist hope will be unpacked later in the chapter. (It will become important to our conversation later that these propagated hopes, dreamt by the Nazi party, where they resonated with many, were not born from within the hoper, but rather were received from an outside authority. This authority named both the pains and the responses to pain for the hoper, thereby robbing the hoper from genuine personal dreaming. In other words, hope was imposed, received, and not born from within.
*Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:235–36.
*For “scientific racism,” in Nazi Germany, see especially Günther’s notorious work on the “ethnology of the German people.” Günther was praised by Hitler, having been used largely as a basis for the Reich’s eugenics policies. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss was also a leading contributor to this conversation, claiming distinctions between Germans, Nordics, Arians, and so-called inferior groups. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes; Clauss, Race and Soul.
*For Bloch addressing this directly as “the europic principle,” see Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:98–102.
*As mentioned, although Protestantism remained diverse, there were concentrated attempts to erase the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew origins of Christianity by the state and by self-proclaimed German Christian movements. The Confessing Church formed in distinction to the German Christians (the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) and, later, the Reich Church, who colluded more directly with the Nazis. Beyond collusion by organizational structures, church members and party members overlapped. Bergen, Twisted Cross.
*Fletcher, The Sin of White Supremacy; Heschel, “Nazifying Christian Theology.”
*Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 2:509, 3:856.
*Remak, Nazi Years, 95–96.
*Of course, this movement was as much a heresy to Marxists as it was to the Confessing Christians—both schools claiming, at their best, fidelity to the crucified and the poor, to those the regime wished to exterminate.
*Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:235–36.
*For “scientific racism,” in Nazi Germany, see especially Günther’s notorious work on the “ethnology of the German people.” Günther was praised by Hitler, having been used largely as a basis for the Reich’s eugenics policies. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss was also a leading contributor to this conversation, claiming distinctions between Germans, Nordics, Arians, and so-called inferior groups. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes; Clauss, Race and Soul.
*For Bloch addressing this directly as “the europic principle,” see Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:98–102.
*As mentioned, although Protestantism remained diverse, there were concentrated attempts to erase the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew origins of Christianity by the state and by self-proclaimed German Christian movements. The Confessing Church formed in distinction to the German Christians (the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) and, later, the Reich Church, who colluded more directly with the Nazis. Beyond collusion by organizational structures, church members and party members overlapped. Bergen, Twisted Cross.
*Fletcher, The Sin of White Supremacy; Heschel, “Nazifying Christian Theology.”
*Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 2:509, 3:856.
*Remak, Nazi Years, 95–96.
*Of course, this movement was as much a heresy to Marxists as it was to the Confessing Christians—both schools claiming, at their best, fidelity to the crucified and the poor, to those the regime wished to exterminate.
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