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Karla Poewe's New Religions and the Nazis casts a penetrating light on the 1920s and 30s in Germany. Using original documents, letters and unpublished papers, most notably, the SS personnel files in Berlin's Bundesarchiv, Poewe explores how Germany came under the sway of National Socialism. To this end, the author, an anthropologist and specialist on new religious movements, focuses on the Indologist, Jakob Wilhelm
Hauer, and the German Faith Movement he helped create. She persuasively reassesses Hauer's and the German Faith Movement's importance to the rise of Nazi Germany. Poewe examines how he and other leading cultural figures promoted a type of religious romanticism whose belief systems underpinned Nazi ideology and extremism. She demonstrates that the study of, and enthusiasm for, Aryan and folk religions, while serving to restore dignity to a humiliated nation, was also employed to validate the political agenda of National Socialism.
New Religions and the Nazis opens withan examination of the economic and political causes for Germany's economic distress and shameful humiliation between the two wars. Poewe describes the rise of the German Faith Movement as part of the attempt to reinvigorate the German sense of self through a heroic reclamation (or invention) of a volkisch religion. This movement both glorified and promoted a virile Germany free of what its followers considered the weakening and polluting contamination of Jewish, womanish, and non-Aryan influences. Instead, the new faith rested on supposed past pagan glories, while Hauer, himself, drew inspiration from Indian Hindu and Buddhist texts, often bending them to his political agenda. Most notable in this respect was his interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita as justifying ruthless male violence and hierarchical noblesse oblige.
Throughout her book, Poewe reveals much important new information about Hauer. Chapter two recounts his early life; chapter three details Hauer's increasing politicization; chap