Those who can't read French may like to know that they are not
missing anything. The important pieces of information which can be
found in that excerpt have been brought to the reader's attention at
http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id2.html.
The author of the marathon preface to 'La Nobiltà della Stirpe (1932-
1938) - La Difesa della Raza (1939-1942)', an anthology of the
articles published by Evola on race in those two papers, states
that "it would be too long to mention the assonances (...) between
Spann and Evola. They work on the sociological matrix of Spann's
philosophy, which is assumed, in traditional thought, as a necessary
corrective to the theoretical excess. To Spann, besides, "society
constitutes a spiritual world", in which spirit "does not affect any
of the things which depend upon the laws of organic matter, but acts
freely toward that matter which it finds". Hence the gulf between his
conception and any type of sectarian, scientific and
biological 'racism' ("the concept of a pure race, derived from no
other race and alien to any mixing, is an inconsistent concept"), the
need to overturn the Rosenbergian and National Socialist reasoning
("The formation and the mutation of race is a fundamental spiritual
fact, and not a vicissitude of the laws peculiar to organic
heredity"), and thus to consider the racial element as a social
expression ("an historical upheaval of species"), which can never be
reduced to an object of scientific application or of political
intervention".
Those "assonances", those who have read 'The Elements of Racial
Education' can hear distinctly, as distinctly as they can hear also
the striking dissonances. To the author of the marathon preface, in
Spann's 'Geschichtsphilosophie' (Iena, 1932), "a substantial anti-
racism is advocated".
A subsection is called 'L'anti-Rosenberg : tra Spann e Stapel'. It is
the shortest : hardly a page and a half and two footnotes. Very few
biographical data are available on the relations between Spann and
Evola. What is known is that, in the years 1930, Spann became known
in Italy mainly thanks to Julius Evola, who invited him to
collaborate to 'Diorama Filosofico', the cultural page of which he
was in charge in the daily run by Farinacci, 'Regime Fascista', as
well as to the paper 'Lo Stato', edited by the jurist Carlo
Costamagna. According to Alberto Lombardo ('La collaborazione
evoliana a La Stampa' -
http://www.juliusevola.it/documenti/template.asp?cod=15 ), there are
grounds for thinking that he housed Evola during his stay in Vienna.
After the Anschluss in March 1938, Spann, his son Raphael - with
whom, according to Renato del Ponte, it seems that Evola and others
formed a mysterious organisation called Chronidenbund or 'Bond of the
Chronides' (
http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id5.html ), together
with Walter Heinrich, were arrested and imprisoned in the
concentration camp of Dachau, where they remained for several
months : the National Socialists didn't forgive him for having
indulged himself in very soft forms of anti-Semitic racism, more or
less of the traditional Catholic flavour. Evola said of the Viennese
sociologist : "the Austrians do not forgive him for his German
sympathies, while the Germans do not forgive him for the criticisms
he has launched against materialist racism".
One can reasonably assume that the links between him and Evola played
a part in the ostracism the latter himself faced from the German
authorities.
--- In
evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com, "wotanfolk" <wotanfolk@...>
wrote:
>
>
> Does anyone knoes precisely the relations Evola had with Othmar
Spann?
>