Wotan

In 1936 Jung was trying to frame his understating of what was happening only about 30km away from his home in Zürich, over the border in Germany. A profound shift had happened in just three years and it was being reflected in what he was hearing from his patients during analysis, especially from his German speaking patients. Their dreams and dream symbols were worryingly disturbed. He wrote Wotan to explore his thoughts about what he was observing.

We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our opinion on economic, political, and psychological factors. But if we may forget for a moment that we are living in the year of Our Lord 1936, and, laying aside our well-meaning, all-too human reasonableness, may burden God or the gods with the responsibility for contemporary events instead of man, we would find Wotan quite suitable as a causal hypothesis. In fact, I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together. There is no doubt that each of these factors explains an important aspect of what is going on in Germany, but Wotan explains yet more. He is particularly enlightening in regard to a general phenomenon, which is so strange to anybody not a German that it remains incomprehensible, even after the deepest reflection.

Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit – a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler – which has indeed actually happened – he is really the only explanation. It is true that Wotan shares this quality with his cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to have exercised his influence mainly on women. The maenads were a species of female storm-troopers, and, according to mythical reports, were dangerous enough. Wotan confined himself to the berserkers, who found their vocation as the Blackshirts of mythical kings.

Jung received his university education during the 1890s, a period when the second wave of Darwinians were trying to work out how evolution applied to the human species. Both ethnography and anthropology were thriving because of the opportunities for studying human diversity offered by the global extent of European empires. Was human kind a single species, or were there distinct races, each competing with the other in the battle of survival? Were some races more evolved than others, more adapted and fitter to survive and thrive? It was far from clear. Many people were happy to have 'scientific' underpinning to their racialist views. It suited countries with empires. It suited some in communities with ethnic minorities amongst them as a means of justifying discrimination. It suited those who felt 'good breeding' was something organic and conferred superiority: they had good genes which is why they were at the top. It justified eugenics. Social-Darwinism was to be very much part of the zeitgeist of the first half of the twentieth century.

Jung was not utterly immune. He was a man of his age. He did not embrace such theories, but it seems he did toy with them, allowing them to colour his thinking to greater or lesser extents during  periods of his long career.  He had developed his theories of archetypes and of the collective unconscious. He did wonder how far the archetypes were inherited, and how they might differ between peoples. He thought he could identify differences between the deep minds of German and Jewish peoples. His recommendation that Westerners do not adopt Eastern religious practices were based on his belief that the deep structures of European minds would attach themselves incorrectly to the symbols and practices of Eastern religions. Those had been evolved to suit different minds. It would be like trying to use an imperial toolkit to service an engine built using metric nuts and bolts.

There are eminent Jungian scholars, such as Andrew Samuels, who claim that Jung was antisemitic because of such thinking. Jung was a man of his age and there are certainly traces in his work, however, he did not behave in an antisemitic way: he had Jewish colleagues, Jewish patients, used Jewish businesses, corresponded with Jewish people as equals, and even had a Jewish mistress.

Jung felt he could detect the footprint of an earlier paganism in the German mind – in the collective unconscious of German peoples – as perhaps an organic part of their racial heritage? One that had been masked over by the Christian centuries, but one that lurked there waiting to be reawakened. He called that archetype Wotan after the Norse/Teutonic god. He was much concerned by what he saw as the mass-psychosis that had infected the German people; or, as he called it the phenomena of Ergriffenheit. It is possible to veiw his essay Wotan as an apologia for the intoxication of Nazism, excusing Germans because they could not help themselves from being carried away: being swept along by the symbolic power of the Third Reich was unavoidable because it awakened deep racial responses. The Gothic-romantic symbolism of the Nazi Party reached into the emotive brain, into the unconscious, into the non-rational. It connected with and activated the Wotan archetype – the dark potential of cataclysmic fury: the want to destroy all who oppose: the want to seek the glory of death in battle.

Questions are asked as to why Jung continued in contact with so many people in Germany, even within the regime, right up to 1940, suggesting that he sympathised with the regime to some extent. It can be countered by remembering that he was a doctor of the mind, and not only many Germans, but Germany itself he saw as his patient: if someone is sick you do not abandon them. As a native speaker of German he was exposed to, and engaged with, what was in effect his own wider native culture. It seems he hoped to help Germans, and maybe even Germany itself, escape their Ergriffenheit. 

To help Germany escape its intoxication – and to help explain it to the wider world – Jung felt that it was necessary to identify the component of the unconscious mind that was the source of the problem. The shift of the God-archytype from being expressed through the Christian-Judaic "God" to the older and more primitive and furry filled Wotan, and its projection over the person of Hitler would, Jung felt, account for much that he was witnessing. As he states, "But since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces" – and, in his view, such psychic forces were largely at play in our lives unconsciously – those possessed by the intoxication of Wotan would not realise they were so afflicted. It would impel them from deep within. The pagan iconography of the Nazi regime, the appeal to Teutonic myths – tangibly as re-interpreted by Wagner in his Ring-Cycle of operas – the wide cultivation of a pagan völkisch-Norse aesthetic and the belief in Aryan superiority, all fed into revitalising Wotan as a living force in the deep, collective mind of the German peoples, and were outwards expressions of its vigour. Realisation of the fact of possession, Jung hoped, would help liberate from the affects.  

A mind that is still childish thinks of the gods as metaphysical entities existing in their own right, or else regards them as playful or superstitious inventions. From either point of view the parallel between Wotan redivivus and the social, political, and psychic storm that is shaking Germany might have at least the value of parable. But since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. Not that ‘psychic forces’ have anything to do with the conscious mind, fond as we are of playing with the idea that consciousness and psyche are identical. This is only another piece of intellectual presumption. ‘Psychic forces’ have far more to do with the realm of the unconscious. Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.

Jung then suggests Hitler as the agent of infection which will inevitably lead Germany towards the destruction that it did indeed suffer, but only after having engulfed most of Europe in a blaze of its fury. He was certainly showing foresight in 1936 about what would take most of the next decade to unfold.

For the sake of better understanding and to avoid prejudice, we could of course dispense with the name ‘Wotan’ and speak instead of the furor Teutonicus. But we should only be saying the same thing and not as well, for the furor in this case is a mere psychologizing of Wotan and tells us no more than that the Germans are in a state of ‘fury’. We thus lose sight of the most peculiar feature of this whole phenomenon, namely, the dramatic aspect of the Ergreifer and the Ergriffener. The impressive thing about the German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously ‘possessed’, has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition.    

Irene Pickard and the other of the Quaker-Jungian group in the Geneva Meeting felt that Jung held the keys to explaining much that was happening around them with the rise of fascist movements across Europe, especially of the Nazis in Germany. In addition to how his ideas illuminated their understanding of their own personal struggles and conflicts, it was one of the main motivating factors for their intense study of his ideas during the period between 1934 and 1936. They hoped that understanding Jung might provide them with tools to strengthen their peace-work in order to combat the rise of militarism and the lurch towards war.

All the quotes are from C G Jung's ‘Wotan’, in Essays on Contemporary Events (London: Kegan Paul, 1947; a translation of the 1936 original).