Wilhelm Stapel


Otto Friedrich Wilhelm Stapel, was a German Protestant and nationalist essayist. He had been the editor of the influential antisemitic monthly magazine Deutsches Volkstum from 1919 until its shutdown by the Nazis in 1938.
While holding cultural anti-semitic thesis that diverged from the racialist Nazi doctrines, and advocating for less harmful measures to be taken against Jews, Stapel nonetheless collaborated with many Nazi institutions and official figures. He spoke vehemently against the anti-Nazi Confessing Church of Martin Niemöller and Karl Barth, and defended the policy of Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller. At the same time Stapel was committed to the policy of Reichsminister of Church Affairs Hanns Kerrl, to whom he served as an advisor.
After 1945, Stapel despised the new German Federal Republic and, in 1949, called for a boycott of the Bundestag elections. He died in Hamburg in 1954 at the age of 71, largely unnoticed from the public.

Early life

Born in 1882 in Kalbe, the son of a Prussian watchmaker, Stapel soon became a journalist under the influence of Friedrich Naumann in 1903. In 1905 he graduated from high school, before joining Ferdinand Avenarius' magazine Der Kunstwart in November 1911. The same year, he earned a PhD in art history at the University of Göttingen, after a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Edmund Husserl titled Der Meister des Salzwedeler Hochaltars. Nebst einem Überblick über die gotischen Schnitzaltäre der Altmark.
From 1903 to 1914, Stapel was a left-wing liberal but also an aggressive nationalist. He abominated in his articles what he called "Wilhelmian histrionics" and bourgeois materialism. The patriotic experience of WWI turned Stapel into a right-winger and a supporter of Ludendorff's annexations programme in Poland. Adopting the Volksgedanke as the essence for his political theories, he became, from 1919 until its shutdown by the Nazis in 1938, editor in chief of Deutsches Volkstum, a nationalist and antisemitic monthly journal from Hamburg owned by the trade-union of German salesclerks.

Collaboration under Nazi rule

After the great electoral success of the Nazi Party in September 1930, Stapel published a few months later a small brochure titled Sechs Kapitel über Christendum und Nationalsozialismus, and welcomed the Nazis as an elementary and instinct-led movement.'
He joined the Deutschen Christen in July 1933, to which he remained loyal even after the mass withdrawals of November 1933. He spoke vehemently against the anti-Nazi Confessing Church of Martin Niemöller and Karl Barth, this polemical dispute shaping numerous articles that appeared in the following years in Deutsches Volkstum.'
Stapel defended the policy of Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller and advocated for the introduction of the Aryan paragraph in the Church, claiming that the Jewish Christians should organise themselves in their own church. At the same time he was committed to the policy of Reichsminister of Church Affairs Hanns Kerrl, to whom he served as an advisor. However, under pressure from the Nazi leadership in 1938, Stapel had to stop the publication of his monthly magazine Deutsches Volkstum.

Later life

After 1945, Stapel despised the new German Federal Republic and, in 1949, called for a boycott of the Bundestag elections. As late as 1953, he claimed the Bundestag was only an "aid institution for the relief of the occupying powers".' The same critics can be found in various articles Stapel published in the right-wing magazine "Nation Europa" in the early 1950s.'
In 1951, Stapel published the book Über das Christentum. An die Denkenden unter seinen Verächtern, dedicated to the newly elected President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Theodor Heuss, his former friend from the Der Kunstwart period.'
Stapel died in Hamburg on 1 June 1954 at the age of 71, largely unnoticed from the public.'

Nationalist and antisemitic theories

considered Wilhelm Stapel to be one of the most influential thinkers of the Conservative Revolution.

National-Protestantism

After the experience of WWI, Stapel began to develop ideas of strong leadership against the Weimar Republic's parliamentary democracy, when he argued that this regime was unsuited to turbulent times and that "free, spontaneous, dominant personalities" were needed to make quick and responsible decisions. In his essay, published in 1932 and respected at that time among German right-wing circles, Der christliche Staatsmann: Eine Theologie des Nationalismus, he tried to legitimise the chiliastic Imperium Teutonicum he had long been advocated for.' In this sense, he stood entirely in the tradition that historian Clemens Vollnhals has called Nationalprotestantismus. Stapel had already published a specific theology of war in another essay, Ideen von 1914, where he wrote about his faith in a special divine mission for the German people.'
According to historian Roger Woods, Stapel's apparently grounded theories against the Weimar system should not obscure the fact that they were theorised as a response to the political dilemma of the Conservative Revolution and their lack of programmatic detail. Stapel was above all a supporter of an "instinctive form of election" where he focused on the personalities of the candidates and "dismissed political programmes as largely produced for propaganda purposes".

Cultural antisemitism

Writing about Volk and Volkstum when he defined Germans and Jews in broad generalisations, he however refused to use Nazi concepts on race. According to Stapel, the Volk was an "irrational, non-reflective, God-given entity" that one was not able to fully understand with concepts but could only experience.
Using Oswald Spengler's thesis on the cultural confrontation between Jews as whom Spengler described as a Magian people versus Europeans as a Faustian people, Stapel described Jews as a landless nomadic people in pursuit of an international culture whereby they can integrate into Western civilisation. As such, he claims that Jews have been attracted to "international" versions of socialism, pacifism or capitalism because as a landless people the Jews have transgressed various national cultural boundaries.
Indeed, Stapel saw the Jews as the typical expression of materialism and intellectualism who were draining Germans dry from imagination and instinctive feelings. Although he dismissed German Christians that rejected the Old Testament or the Jewishness of Christ, Stapel participated in spreading the idea that Christian philosophy had nothing to say about racial discrimination and encouraged the Nazis in their creation of a "Positive Christianity".
Nonetheless, Stapel never advocated physical maltreatment of the Jews or a full denial of their civil rights. He believed however that borders had to be drawn regarding the Jewish influence in Germany, as they should not be involved in politics, except on a case by base basis. In 1932, he listed what measures he expected to be taken by the Nazis regarding the Jewish question: "ousting unpatriotic Jewish journalists, barring Jews from the armed forces, and creating a separate educational institutions and courts for the Jews".

Works