This week Bobby Derie notes Kthulhu Reich (2019) by Asamatsu Ken. It’s a translated Cthulhu Mythos novel from Japan, fixed up from seven short-stories….
Asamatsu Ken was a bit ahead of the curve when he first published these stories in Japan in 1994-1999. Some of the stories are eerily prescient as far as capturing the essential dynamic of the post-2000 Mythos WWII craze.
Which is something I’ve thankfully missed out on, and was only very marginally aware of. Give me a good Commando comic, any day, with my ginger beer. But I have of course noticed many other ‘Nazi occult’ instances over the last few decades, in more mainstream movies and graphic novels from Indiana Jones onward. In his article Derie also touches on how… “World War II has become fertile ground writers of weird and fantasy fiction” and gives a few examples. I’d imagine that McFarland’s vast Popular Culture book-list already has a couple of surveys of the relevant movies and games.
Derie’s comment on Lovecraft “approving as he did of Nazi Germany’s ultranationalism” could be be misunderstood, though. Firstly one has to know that “ultranationalism” has a specific political-historical meaning: ‘the arrogant belief in the complete superiority of one’s nation over others, and the placing of its interests above all other nations at all times’. In the cases of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia etc this was accompanied by variations on the ‘cult-of-the-Emperor’. Ultranationalism has also spawned an equally perverse leftist flipside, which despises any pride in the nation and seeks to constantly denigrate it at every opportunity.
One can then make the distinction between ultranationalism as expressed in foreign-policy and as expressed in the nation’s internal culture, and Lovecraft did so in regard to Germany in early 1934. He mildly approved of one, but derided the other. The evidence is in Lovecraft’s letters to Robert Bloch, which I’m currently reading. For about six pages and over several letters, Lovecraft tried to think through such distinctions. He coruscated the new Hitlerlism as it then stood, but as he understood it… i) the ailing Germany’s only choice was between fascism and communism, and… ii) the nation had some legitimate grievances about how harshly it had been subjugated after the First World War. Like many commentators of the time, he grasped these key wider imperatives of the new German ultranationalism: the Versailles treaty and communism. Lovecraft did however differ from many observers. He was painfully illiterate on even basic economics, as he himself admitted, and his grasp of fascist economics was simplistic — effectively nationalise key industries by constraining them with socialistic controls and price-fixing/profit-sharing regimes, and pay a small stipend to indigent writers such as himself. Probably he had not noticed that the programmes of job-creation for civilians had been quietly dropped from the ‘priority list’ of Germany’s key policies in December 1933.
Such Versailles→communism understandings of Germany were very common in early 1934, and Lovecraft’s epistolary “approval” of the new leader also followed the sentiment of the herd. In that he had an abstract and slightly grudging admiration of Hitler for ‘standing up’ to other nations, some two years before Germany actually marched into the Rhineland, while also stating that he was a “clown” given to buffoonish strutting. Lovecraft did not go on to express a concrete approval of an itemised tick-list of Nazi doctrines, so far as I’m aware. Beyond what he read in the English press (he had no German, having been put off it for life at school), the ambivalence of the “approval” of Germany’s new leader may have been underpinned by two factors: i) his ongoing correspondence with his friend Galpin, who sympathised with Mussolini’s nationalism in Italy and was thus highly critical of the German variety of fascism and its bizarre focus on anti-Semitism; and ii) by Lovecraft’s deep understanding of the Ancient Roman roots of the fascist worldview. In other words, Lovecraft knew something about how ersatz and crude Nazism was. It would be some years before his downstairs neighbour, a German teacher newly back from Germany, would also tearfully tell him of what Nazism was like on the streets and in the classrooms.
So, to return to the claim of “approving as he did of Nazi Germany’s ultranationalism”. In the Bloch letters of early 1934 Lovecraft appears to distinguish between: i) Germany’s outward-facing ultranationalist stance; and ii) the internal imposition of a new national socialist culture, which had then been underway for about a year following the infamous Reichstag fire (which allowed the Nazis to break with coalition government and take total power). Even before the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ purges (Hitler takes total control of the Party) in late June 1934, Lovecraft could see that national socialist culture was not going to be a sensible and timely adaptation of an old conservative culture to the new forces of modernity. Instead it was a rupture, a censorious book-burning flight into an ersatz and juvenile culture warped by ideology…
He has borrowed the Soviets’ [Russian communists] idea of a narrowly artificial culture or ‘ideology’ separate from Western Europe — & if this concept (with its foundation in definitely false science and rather infantile emotion) lasts long enough to colour a whole new generation, the ultimate result will be highly unfortunate.” — Lovecraft, Letters to Robert Bloch, page 98.
As de Camp wrote in the first substantial Lovecraft biography… “From the end of 1933 on, Lovecraft’s criticism of Hitler and fascism grew ever more severe.” (Lovecraft: A Biography). What is missing here is perhaps a “his”, as in “criticism of Hitler and his fascism”, i.e. Nazism. Lovecraft remained more ambivalent about the other forms of fascism.
