Author: Dr Ernst Schertel, annotated by Adolf Hitler
Publisher: Cotum, 2009
Price: £14.50 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780578024578

Ernst Schertel (1884–1958) was an intriguing minor figure in the early 20th-century German occult revival whose interests ranged through ecstatic dance, nudism, sadomasochism and pornography, as well, of course, as magic. This book, described as “hauntingly erudite” by dance historian Karl Toepfer, was written in 1923 and  later sent to Adolf Hitler with an effusive dedication. You may think that anyone who does that is asking for trouble, but even the most unsympathetic critic would have to say that Schertel’s book doesn’t deserve what’s happened to it. Having learned that this copy, containing annot­ations presumed to be by Hitler (actually pencil-marked passages rather than notes), was preserved in the John Hay Library, JH Kelley obtained a photocopy of the book and proceeded to have it translated into a species of English. Unfort­unately, the species concerned is gibberish, as the following sentence shows: “Or a square or another kind of circle is drawn on the ground with a prick, a hack, etc. and this area is then seen as afflicted with mana.”

Despite the translators’ best attempts to turn the book into mad rubbish, it’s possible to see that Schertel’s original work could have been of some interest. His ‘history’ section is largely drawn from anthropological sources and quite sensitively discusses magic among tribal people, rather than the European magical tradition. ‘Theory’ covers such matters as the construct­ion of differing world-views, entropy and ectropy (mis-spelled throughout) and the supremacy of the imagination; while ‘Pract­ice’ is mainly concerned with achieving states of magical ecstasy. One would have to be a magician to conjure any meaning out of the farrago presented here. Such a work needs a translator fluent in German, English, and the language and history of occultism, who could provide explanatory notes and bio­graphical commentary on Schertel’s sources. Alas, Kelley seems more interested in the fact that Hitler annotated the work, and doesn’t even present Schert­el’s bibliography (though curiously this is available, in German, on the publisher’s website). These passages, 66 in all, are presented in bold type throughout the book, though farcically when the pencil-mark overlaps the final couple of words of the previous, un-annotated sentence, these are presented in bold as well.

So what do these passages tell us about Hitler’s thinking? For the most part they’re about paradigm-building and the necess­ity of destroying the old order to create the new, the use of the imagin­ation, and such like. These are the annotations of a man interested in propaganda and constructing a new (Nazi) mytho­logy. One or two, however, mention in passing, and probably with little understanding, Schertel’s symbolic mentions of demons and Satan, which has of course provided ammunition for the ‘Hitler was a Satanist’ brigade (and some right-wing occultists seem overjoyed at the discovery).

This does a great disservice to Schertel’s original work. The book is so ineptly produced that very few people will be inclined to get through it.