‘L’activité diplomatique d’Evola à Vienne, Prague, Bucarest et Berlin,’ Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes, 24 (1996). Italian original, Pagine Libere (March 1996). PDF of this version here; original here.
Some time in 1938, at a date unknown to us, the Ahnenerbe brought to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler a secret report on the activities of the Baron Evola that ended with the following injunction: ‘Keep him from exercising any influence in the future on leaders and functionaries of the Party and the State; survey his propagandistic activities in neighbouring countries’ (see the document published by B. Zoratto in L’Italia settimanale [9 February 1994] titled ‘Fermate Evola, firmate SS’) [See also H. T. Hansen, introduction to Julius Evola, Revolt against the Modern World (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995), p. xviii.]. Moreover, we can concur with Piero Di Vona, who shows, in his Evola, Guénon, De Giorgio (Barzano, 1993), that the relationship between Evola and the Third Reich was ‘very complicated and obscure.’ Nevertheless, from the fact that Evola was suspected of being able to ‘influence’ ‘structures as difficult to penetrate as the Party and State of National-Socialist Germany,’ Prof. Giorgio Galli quite rightly deduces, in his preface to Marco Fraquelli’s Il filosofo proibito (Milan, 1994), that Evola ‘did in fact pursue political projects of an elitist type, not lacking in operative potentialities.’
Evola in Austria: Contacts with Othmar Spann and the Prince von Rohan
In this article, it will be possible to uncover these ‘operative potentialities’ by discussing an episode in Evola’s relations with the Third Reich. But what were the ‘neighbouring countries’ in which, according to the Ahnenerbe, the Baron Evola went about his activities? Certainly, and most importantly, Austria, which would turn from a ‘neighbouring country’ into a territory of the Reich on the 13 March 1938, the same year the Evola report reached Himmler’s desk. In his autobiography, The Path of Cinnabar, Evola writes:
I […] found a favourable milieu in Vienna, where I often came to spend the winter. In Vienna, I got in touch with the representatives of the Right and of the genuine Austrian aristocracy, as well as with the group headed by Othmar Spann (who followed a line similar to my own). I also worked with Prince K. A. [von] Rohan, who had a vast network of personal contacts [The Path of Cinnabar, trans. Serio Knipe (Integral Tradition, 2009), p. 155. See Il cammino del Cinnabro (Milan: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1972), p. 139.].
Evola’s relations with Spann were duly noted by agents of the Ahnenerbe, who wrote in their report that ‘His concrete relations with Spann have, meanwhile, become clearer. We think we would not be wrong in saying that Evola sees an ally in Spann and has taken the opportunity to approach him and tried to give Spann a political future.’ Spann, who had held the chair in economics and sociology at Vienna, was interned in a concentration camp immediately upon the Anchluss. He died at Neustift in the Burgenland in 1950.
Evola in Bucharest: Meeting with Legionaries and Intellectuals
In the month the Anschluss took place, Evola was in Bucharest, where, as is well-known, he met Corneliu Codreanu, along with other personalities of the political and cultural worlds: the leader of the Legionary Workers’ Corps [Corpul Muncitoresc Legionar], Gheorghe Clime, the former minister Constantin Argetoianu, the corporatist ideologist Mihail Manoilescu, the economist Petre Țuțea, the philosopher Nae Ionescu, the mathematician Octav Onicescu, the Traditionalist intellectuals Vasile Lovinescu and Marcel Avramescu, the historian of religions Mircea Eliade and many others. (On the milieux that came into contact with Evola in Bucharest, see Evola, La tragedia della Guardia di Ferro [Rome, 1996].) It must have been on this trip, when he visited or revisited Romania, that Evola appeared publicly in Budapest in Hungary, where he gave a lecture at the Zichy Castle to an audience of aristocrats. However, we can say little more, given the present state of the research, on Evola’s Hungarian contacts [see endnote].
Still in 1938, the Baron Evola travelled to Prague, where he pursued a political project of large scope, which cannot be understood unless we recall that Evola had already visited Czechoslovakia in the last months of 1937, which we learn in a note to the article ‘Panorama della Mostra antiebraica di Monaco’ (‘View of the Anti-Jewish Exposition at Munich’) published in La Vita Italiana in January 1938 and reproduced in Il genio d’Israele (Catania, 1992). This note states:
The material that represents the basis of the present article, as well as the catalogues of the Munich exposition and the Anti-Bolshevik Exposition at Berlin, and scientific works related to the Jewish issue in countries other than Czechoslovakia, were confiscated from the author of the present article at the German–Czechoslovak border at Podmokly under the pretext that they were proscribed publications within the territory of the Czechoslovak Republic.
Evola returned to Prague, therefore, during the summer of 1938, as witnessed by two articles that he published the same year: the first appeared in Lo Stato in October 1938; the second, longer and more detailed, in the Bibliografia Fascista in September 1938. These two texts are still available today, republished in anthologies of Evola’s articles (Lo Stato: 1934–1943 [Rome, 1995], pp. 262–64; Esplorazioni e disamine, vol. 1 [Parma, 1994], pp. 237–48).
Evola writes that in the Czechoslovak capital, ‘a little before the acute phase of the crisis’—therefore, before the rebellion and general strike in the Sudetenland, which took place on 13 September—he had frequented the circles of ‘important Czech personalities in charge of the government,’ among them the Minister of Foreign Affairs:
Kamil Krofta, then Minister of Foreign Affairs at Prague, during a conversation we had with him, told us that he did not exclude the idea of an autonomous collective policy pursued in concert by the various minor powers of Central Europe and the Balkans, including Czechoslovakia, either a policy that did not refer unilaterally to Paris or London, or which sought to disrupt the international policy of the Axis. Thus, he believed that the great powers might have a sensation of security in Prague, and he gave us the impression that there was no reason to remain on the alert and to seek every means to guarantee the liberty and integrity of the Czech state. But the irreversible has occurred.
‘The irreversible’ was the annexation of the Sudetenland by the Reich on 1 October 1938, immediately after the Munich Agreement. Czechoslovakia, thus stripped the richest of its territories in basic resources and industries, as well as its first line of defence in Central Europe, was reduced to a territory of 100,000 square kilometres with 10,000,000 inhabitants. On 21 November, the new constitution established a federal state comprising three largely autonomous regions: Bohemia–Moravia, Slovakia and Ruthenia.
A ‘Helvetic Solution’ for Czechoslovakia?
The project of affording the Sudetenland a similar autonomy had been countenanced before that territory was simply annexed by the Reich. Indeed, Evola reveals that he had ‘personally organized an inquest at Berlin and Prague’ to propose that an autonomy of the ‘Helvetic type’ be granted to the Sudeten within Czechoslovakia, or, ‘in extreme cases, to organize a plebiscite.’ We might think today that the solution of an autonomous status would be more in conformity to Evola’s political ideas: for he shows himself favourable to a composite system of autonomies within a supranational state. Nevertheless, Evola himself recognized that Czechoslovakia did not have available a secular tradition like Switzerland, nor a universal principle like ancient Austria, a tradition and a principle that ‘would be able to guarantee the solidarity and stability of a system involving both unity and plurality and allowing the limitation, within it, of the inevitable centrifugal tendency of particular ethnic groups.’
Whatever the case may be, ‘an annexation sic et simpliciter’ had never before been mentioned, ‘neither among the Sudeten nor in Wilhelmstrasse.’ ‘On the other hand, autonomy within the Czech state was constantly talked about.’ The ‘inquest’ Evola made in Berlin and Prague seems simply to have fallen within the framework of an project on the fringes and within the Reich Foreign Ministry in which certain political milieux, in which Evola was involved at that time, had a hand. In any case, these ins and outs of Evola’s biography reveal a ‘diplomatic’ dimension to the activities of the Italian Traditionalist thinker that have till now passed unnoticed.
Endnote
For more on this, see Mutti, ‘L’influence de Julius Evola en Hongrie,’ Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes, 28 (1997). The following extract is relevant here:
In Hungary there circulates a sort of ‘Evolian legend.’ In the thirties, Julius Evola actually went to Budapest, where he gave a lecture in Óbuda, in the Zichy Castle. Indeed, Evola himself, in the text of his ‘Autodifesa,’ given in 1951 before the Assizes at Rome, states that he had ‘been an invited speaker at foreign societies that are open only to the principal exponents of traditional and aristocratic European thought.’ In this context, he expressly mentions the ‘Cultural Association’ of the Countess Zichy.
See ‘Evola’s Autodifesa,’ Men among the Ruins (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002), p. 291.
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