HITLER'S GENTILE

(At first sight, this entry does not belong in the Collective section, but in reality it does, and for a good reason. It is all-too-closely connected to the previous entry Man Of The Prinzip, and, in fact, serves as a postscript to it, as the reader is about to see presently. Incidentally, its title is a rather clever play on words. “Gentile” is of course the Italian philosopher of fascism Giovanni Gentile, used as a metaphor for any similar philosophical apologist of fascism in Germany, provided one can be found. The intellectual author of the Führerprinzip ought to be the counterpart to Gentile in Germany, in other words, Hitler’s Gentile. There is one problem with this neat parallel, however: Such a man does not seem to exist! All potential candidates fall by far too short of Giovanni Gentile’s stature.)

The Italian doctrine of fascismo owes its formulation to the political inspiration of Benito Mussolini and the remarkable philosophical genius (I naturally employ the word genius here without stamping it with a moral seal of approval) of Giovanni Gentile. Realizing that finding a parallel figure in Nazi Germany would be an intellectual boon, even though skeptical all along, I have spent some time poring through John Toland, William L. Shirer, and other honored-by-mold (I say this with a straight face: I would take a moldy history book over a freshly printed festival for the eyes anytime!) sources, particularly digging into the intellectual contribution to German Nazism of such characters as Dr. Karl Lüger, Mayor of Vienna and Alfred “the Russian” Rosenberg (he got his nickname as a native of Estonia which at the time of his birth in 1893 was a part of the Russian Empire), and a few other Third Reich intellectuals, but eventually gave up on them, as none could be compared to the Italian Gentile. Apparently, Nazi Germany took so much philosophical rationalization, and even implementation, from Italy that there was no pressing urgency for a German Gentile to emerge, and, guess what, he never did!

Ironically, German fascism proved itself much tougher than the Italian prototype, yet it had sprung from an admittedly foreign, not even technically German, soil (Austrian, Sudeten, etc.), and from some scandalously non-Aryan roots...