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687-905 S-07-01 Signals of the New Time – 5 Book Set

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A five volume translation of the Third Reich original Signale der neuen Zeit. It consists of 25 speeches by Dr. Joseph Goebbels delivered between 1927 and 1934. All but the first five speeches date after the NSDAP’s rise to power on January 30, 1933. Each of the five softcover volumes has fifty or more pages.

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Softcover. Complete Set of All Five Volumes. 

Culture begins at the moment when the individual develops into folk. The individual human being is not capable of creating cultures. He only creates culture in the framework of a nationality. The wild man who inhabits the desert creates no culture. He creates for himself the most primitive foundation of his egotistic existence. But at the moment when he acts together with others, with people of the same sense, of the same faith, the same distress, where he sees and finds a common basis for existence with other living beings, where he builds his house, not with the intention of moving on tomorrow, rather where he surrounds it with protecting fences and bulwarks against the envious and enemies, where he does not do that alone, rather protects this bulwark with a community of people of the same fate and this community joins together for better or worse, there does folkish life begin, nation and culture.

Now you also see the fundamental error of our present-day folk. For us, the economy has become a purpose in itself, today it is a thing in itself and no longer has a living relationship to the folk. Today capital has become a purpose in itself. It no longer has a responsibility toward production. Both engage in economics for themselves, not even next to each other, rather against each other. Things that actually condition each other and are dependent on each other and would have to work next to each other in unity are today separated and hence cannot fulfill their duty toward the whole: so the folk perishes.

In a real and healthy state, moneys serves the economy and the economy the folk. Look at our present condition in this regard and you know where we stand. You will recognize that all slogans about sanction, about freedom, equality and brotherhood are simply just slogans, that one mocks and undermines the folk with them and that it cannot be foreseen when a basis will again be recognized at all for this folk upon which it is able to live.

When we today practice criticism, then not, say, out of whatever criminal pleasure to destroy the once taken path of German politics and to trip up the present cabinet; we practice criticism, because we are of the opinion that what one today calls politics in the parliaments is no longer politics, that it no longer serves to protect and defend the foundations of our existence, rather that this politics represents nothing else than the continuation of private business while laying claim to governmental means. We no longer have any politics today of which one could say that it is really the expression of our German life will. We see today how the parliament roaches swim around in the corridors and champion their own advantages as the overall interest of the nation. If, on the other hand, a movement sets itself into march and individual men stand up to rip the mask from this so-called politics, then that is not just the right of these men, rather their duty. If in the process one reproaches us: “Your criticism is only negative, after all”, then I wish to ask the cabinet what then is positive about their politics. For previously the politics of this government only consisted in selling dirt cheap and pawning everything that was present; they have not managed to build anything new. They have not given the Reich a new face, they have not inoculated the German folk with a different life feeling, rather all their politics consisted solely of using up and fragmenting the property that still existed in Germany for the maintenance of the system.

The National Socialist opposition is radical. That means, it gets at the root of the problem. It does not satisfy itself with eliminating just the excesses of this system, rather our opposition has recognized that excesses are always just the results of the bad causes and that one must eliminate these, if one wants to eliminate the excesses. If does not help at all, if I merely skim over the poison bubbles on the surface of a poisoned well. New bubbles will raise up again and again. I will only eliminate them, if I de-poison the well itself. It does not help at all, if I just eliminate the sinful and shameful effects of a system, but let the system itself exist. For if the system is internally poisoned, then it will and can always only produce poisonous results. Hence today it does not suffice to examine the events that play out in public visible to the eye of the layman, one must have the courage to get to the bottom of things, to think radically, and from this thought to also draw radical conclusions. It is not as if the terrible accompanying manifestations of this system, say, came by themselves. They have been caused by reasons, and to track down these reasons and causes is the first task of the opposition’s systematic criticism.

One wanted on November 9th to give the German folk, instead of an unworthy monarchist system, so one said, a more worthy, folk-oriented republican one. One acted as if the monarchy in itself were something contemptible and the republic in itself something praiseworthy. We have gradually to see that monarchy and republic in themselves mean nothing at all, they are only forms. It depends on the contents of the forms. A monarchy is great, if it has great monarchs, and a republic is petty, if it produces petty republicans. Monarchy is not identical with capitalism and republic is not identical with socialism. There were socialist monarchies and capitalist republics. A socialist monarchy was that state which a Fredrick the Great oversaw, for Fredrick was not a ruler, rather servant, and he demanded from each of his subjects the same feeling of duty such as he carried within himself. If Fredrick goes to war three times, if he spends the best years of his manhood out there at the bivouac fire, if he comes home only still the wreck of a human being and spends the last years of his existence to guarantee his folk an honorable life again, if in the evening of his life he still only has his greyhounds around him and writes down in his testament: “I bequeath nothing to my family, but everything to my folk”, then I must ask: “I cannot help myself, that is how I imagine a socialist.” If a man from the folk gradually rises, works his way up year by year, up to the height of life, and then by skill or coincidence is called upon to be guide for his folk, and the folk as well trustingly puts its fate in his hands and says: “Now master it”, if this man has nothing else to do than to conclude compromises with the previously so vehemently combated capitalism and lets himself be supported by it, then I must say: “I cannot help myself, that is how I imagine a capitalist.”

In a socialist economic system, money serves work and work serves the folk. Highest value measure is the folk and lowest value measure is money. The folk has invented the economy and the economy thought up money. Not so that economy and money become tyrants, rather the servants of the folk. If money serves production in a state and if production is nothing else than the servant of the folk, then the state is socialist. Socialism is a content, republic or monarchy is a form. I can fill a monarchist form socialist and I can fill a republican form capitalist. That always depends on the republicans and on the monarchists. Now you ask, what is this republic? Does money serve the economy here and is the economy the servant of the folk, or does not instead the folk serve production and is production not instead subordinate to finance? The ministers of this republic are just executing organs of international money. There can no longer be any talk of it that his republic represents the interests of the folk. Does not each of us have the tragic feeling that all of us are still only captives in our own fatherland, that we are actually still only tolerated and must say thank you that one still allows us here at all! That is the mood: the folk feels abandoned by all, by the associations and by the parties; a star of faith no longer stands over us. The great problems of our time have been ripped and shredded.

If we take a brief look back at the past years of German decline, then we will come to the terrible, almost crushing conclusion that the less German men were determined to prove themselves as men in public life, the more women fell to the temptation to fulfill the man’s task in his place. An effeminizing of the male always produces an emasculating of the female. A time that lets be forgotten the great ideals of virtue, of defiance, of hardness and determination, should not be surprises in the end that the male gradually loses to the female his towering position in the life of politics and of public state leadership.

A fundamental change must be made there. At the risk of being considered reactionary and outdated, I say it clear and straight-out: Woman has the first, best and for her most suitable place in the family, and the most wonderful task that she can fulfill is to give her land and folk children, children who continue the succession of generations and guarantee the nation’s immortality. Woman is the raiser of the youth and hence the bearer of the future’s support. And if the family represents the folk’s source of energy, then woman is its core and its moving center. In the service to the folk, woman can soonest become aware of her high mission in marriage, in the family and in motherhood. The women with a profession or childless are not in the least thereby excluded from the great work of motherhood for the German folk. They give the nation in another way their energy, their ability and their joy in responsibility. But we are of the conviction that a socially reformed folk must again see its first task in giving woman the possibility to again fulfill her actual task, the mission of the family and of the mother.

Public opinion does not shape itself solely from mood and sentiment. It is to a large degree the result of a willful influencing, which can work for the good as well as for the bad. Public opinion is made, and whoever participates in the shaping of public opinion, thereby assumes before the nation and before the whole folk a hugely great responsibility.

Only in the framework of this responsibility can one correctly understand the concept of freedom of the press. Insofar as one understands by it the permission to act at the cost of the folk’s well-being and national honor against the interests of the land, to transgress against it or to, say, perform mental acrobatic feats on the folk’s playground, this kind of freedom of the press, however, has no place in the regime that leads the government of the national revolution. Certainly, the press has a right to criticize, to provide suggestions, to warn against rushed decisions or to forecast wrong decisions in their ruinous consequences. Nobody will come up with the idea to somehow hinder this free practice of public criticism. However, it must be stressed in the process that this must always take place in the framework of a generally valid national discipline, and that this national discipline is all the more obligating, the more tumultuous and tense the time spans are in which it seems necessary.

That this must be stressed among us at all, is a sign how much in the last years we lacked the most primitive prerequisites for this required national discipline. In England and in France, it is self-evident that, despite all party-political differences, in big, nationally determined questions, public opinion is uniformly led and uniformly shaped. The more unified a folk’s national concentration of will is, the more effectively will this national discipline work out. The German folk is a folk of individualities. Stronger than in any other folk, the free tendency to one’s own mental opinion and to the forming of an independent, apparently uninfluenced view, becomes effective. As long as opinion and view do not threaten national life and do integrate themselves into the great fatefulness of the folk, for so long is this tendency given the free opportunity for development. But at the moment in which it has the effect of damaging, yes, of ruining public interest, the government is not only justified, rather obligated, to intervene here regulating.

The concept of the absolutely obligation-free freedom of the press stems from a liberal world of view, which we are just in the process of overcoming. It derives itself from that freedom of the individual that in reality degenerates into licentiousness and hence gradually overruns the whole folk’s common life and threatens to bring it down. This kind of freedom press has in the last years in Germany produced heights at whose memory we today blush with shame. Nowhere else in the world would it have been possible that symbols of national honor and freedom, the foundations of the nationality, the most elementary moral laws of family, state and church could be trodden and soiled under the cloak of an exaggerated mental freedom.

Here actually lies the core point of the decline of the liberal world, for its parties, after all, were nothing else than interest groups, and hence also had to view according to their interest based character all questions of national policy from the perspective of the interest placed upon them.

I am of the conviction that Europe, if it is structured nationally, will be able to guard peace much better than this Europe of liberal spirit. Nationalists always understand each other better than liberal democrats. Nationalists stand on the same worldview ground. They champion not only the honor of their own folk, they also respect the honor of another.

The third principle that Fascism championed was the struggle against anonymity. Liberal democracy never lends its name for a cause. It likes best to remain unrecognized, and its real regents, after all, also do not stand in the bright spotlight of public life, rather usually tend to stay behind the scenes.

This conditioned the struggle against that false kind of humanity with which we all became sufficiently acquainted in the liberal-democratic world of ideas. One is humane toward the weak, human toward every sick person and hence inhumane toward the strong and all health. One is humane toward the individual human being in order to become inhumane toward the nation.

One should not tell me that one cannot make unpopular things clear to the folk. One can indeed do that! One must just have the talent to talk with the folk. The folk is not as unreasonable as those who want to scold the folk as unreasonable. The folk knows what it wants, and it also knows what is possible and what is impossible. One must give the folk an inner share in things and then it will also summon up the courage to endure the unpopular, because it seems necessary to it. A folk can do anything in the end, if it wants to, and if it has leaders who give it this will, above all, a folk of rank such as the German one. In the past years we have made the gravest mistakes, because we, instead of tackling a crisis, always said: “But it is really the worst crisis! It has been the worst crisis in hundred years.” That does not give a folk courage for work and to tackle something. Much that a folk does, is in the end nonetheless a historical miracle.

It is quite self-evident that a government that must make such grave decisions as this one, that must bear such tremendous responsibility like ours, must stand in direct contact with the broad masses in order to do justice to its tasks in the long run. The folk will be ready to endure everything with the government, if it has the feeling that the government does not exclude itself from the general sacrifice. The folk is ready to work, if it knows that the government works; it is ready to limit its budget, if the government does the same thing. If a government really provides an example to the folk, then the folk is also always ready to take it as an example. It does not suffice that only the governing men themselves and their representatives act exemplary, important is that this high feeling of dignity of officials and honor of officials penetrates down to and is achieved by the last man in the ministry.

I ask you to so view this solemn hour as well and to accept these flags from my hand with the same pride and sacred zeal with which those young unknown SA men accepted them from my hand six or seven years ago. I told the lads back then: “With these flags may happen want will, the cloth can be torn down from the shaft, one can ban them, can proscribe us from displaying them in public; but one thing must never happen: that these flags cover themselves with our own disgrace and shame.” I believe they are also the best words of introduction with which I can send you off. If you affirm these flags, then you affirm the National Socialist ideals, and you also know then that National Socialism is not a private hobby that one pursues after work, that it is not enough to read National Socialist newspapers or occasionally attend one of our assemblies, rather that National Socialism must fill all of life, that each must make it clear to himself: in the morning, upon awakening, begins my National Socialist service and ends in the evening, when I go to bed.

Never in history has there been a revolution that played out as bloodless, disciplined and orderly as ours. If we attempted to regulate the Jewish question practically and hence legally tackled the racial problem in our state life, for the first time in all of Europe, then in this we only followed the train of the time.

In the process, the defense against the Jewish danger is only a part of our plan and of our goal; if in the world discussion it was elevated to the sole and chief topic, then this was not due to us, rather to Jewry itself. It has tried to mobilize the world against us, always in the hope to thereby be able to re-conquer the lost terrain.

This hope, however, is not merely deceptive, it contains for Jewry as well a series of grave and looming dangers, for it could not be avoided that in the broaching of this problem not only its contra, rather also its pro would be put to debate in the whole world, that hence the discussion assumed a dimension that in the closer and more distant future can drag behind it the most extremely unpleasant consequences for the whole Jewish race.

Richard Wagner once called the Jew “The flexible demon of decay” and Theodor Mommsen only said the same thing, when he saw in him “the enzyme of decomposition”. Confronting him is Aryan man as creative figure. A certain tragedy may lie at the bottom of the Jew’s essence; but it is not our fault that this race has a dissolving effect among the folks and hence represents a constant danger for their internal and external safety.

The diversity of essence of both races has led, above all, in the turbulent times of the November years, to ever repeating explosions. As long as Jewry saw its strength in anonymity, it hardly ran a risk. At the moment when he stepped forth from behind the scenes into the stinging and pitiless light of the spotlights, the problem of its race and its fate was acute and demanded a solution of whatever kind.

It is totally false that we make the Jew the sole main guilty party in the German catastrophe of spirit and of economy. We know all the other causes that led to the decline of our folk. But we also have the courage to recognize his role in the process and to call it by name.

Indeed, at certain times it was hard to make that understandable to the folk; for public opinion laid exclusively in his hands. He had assured himself rule over the great press organs in time and zealously watched out that his name, neither for good nor for bad, was named in the public discussion. No newspaper that had the character to withdraw itself form this anonymous influence, no party that summoned up the courage to assail it, no parliament in which an open word about it was tolerated.

The strength of the Jew lies in his anonymity; if he loses it, then he can only suffer harm.

Folk and government in Germany are one. The will of the folk is the will of the government and visa versa. The modern state structure in Germany is arefined kind of democracy, in which, on the strength of the folk’s mandate, governing is authoritarian, without the possibility existing through parliamentarian interventions to blur or even make unfruitful the will of the folk upward.

Public criticism may be good for the person who practices it will good will and purest conscience, it is a danger for folks, if it only destroys instead of building. It has a devastating effect, if it is make only for the sake of criticism and in the process already at the start sabotages and paralyzes a nation’s last possibility of rescue. It was not our task to provide the opportunity to a few talented pens to critically rip apart our rejuvenation work on the German nation. The German folk had assigned us, quite the opposite, to undertake the last rescue attempt for our land, and in the process to prevent any possibilities that could somehow threaten it.

It cannot be the meaning and purpose of democracy to only discuss, but not solve, problems.

But the principle of democracy is totally misunderstood, if one believes to have to conclude from it that the folks want to govern themselves. They cannot do that and they also do not want that. Their sole wish is that they are governed well, and they feel themselves fortunate, if they may have the consciousness that their governments work according to the best will and conscience for the blessing and for the well-being of the folks entrusted to them.

This kind of state formation is not as undemocratic as may appear at first glance. It has found a new form of cooperation between government and folk. In it, the government is indeed assigned by the folk, but not monitored by a conglomerate of parties in the execution of this assignment. This assignment is sovereign, and corresponding to the great extent of power that is tied with it is also the measure of responsibility that is thereby assumed. We do not govern against the folk and also not without the folk. We are only its executors. It was the tragic-comic fate of the traditional democratic parties of the German past that they indeed appealed to the folk, but that their appeal found no echo in the heart of the folk. They preferred to stray with the masses than do the right thing against the masses. We have the courage to tell the folk the truth, even if it is difficult, and in the process experience the good fortune that the folk understands us. If it is the meaning of a genuine democracy to lead folks and to show them the path to work and peace, then, I believe, this genuine democracy has been achieved in Germany, and indeed against the parties, which furnish only its caricature.

One has always held up to me: so there is no longer any freedom of opinion in Germany. Actually, however, freedom of opinion existed neither in Germany nor in another land in the world. Freedom of opinion was always the privilege of those who owned a newspaper, provided that their opinion did not stand in contradiction to the opinion of the government. Ownership of a newspaper alone did not yet give the right for free expression of opinion. For we felt that on own bodies to a sufficient degree in the years of our opposition. Furthermore, it is not the meaning of a so-called freedom of opinion, that every anarchist brain has the right to endanger the folk’s life interests. What stands higher there, the freedom of a folk or freedom of opinion? That is why we have introduced for the press the same laws that otherwise prevail everywhere in public life, namely, that everywhere each has to be responsible for what he does or does not do.

Revolutions have their own laws and their own dynamics. Once they have crossed a certain phase of their development, they remove themselves from the power of human beings and still only obey that law according to which they began. There are revolutions from above and revolutions from below. Revolutions from above usually have only very limited duration before history. For it is difficult, if not impossible, to impose a new causality upon a folk from above. Revolutions from below, however, usually survive the centuries, for they are not dictated, rather carried by the folk. The folk itself in its broad masses is their shaper and giver of form.

It was always clear to us that we had to possess total power in order to be able to do a thorough job. Revolutions that are satisfied with half successes would be better not made at all, for nothing is more contrary to their nature than compromises. Parliamentarianism lives from compromise. Revolution loves whole problems and whole solutions. Hence when we took power into our hands, we could tolerate no gods at our side. We did not do that out of hunger for power, rather we were of the conviction: only the total and ruthless use of power will put us in the position to also to a thorough job.

Revolutions have previously been necessary in the development of folks, and indeed when the normal development of the folk along the legal path is already so hampered, cartilaginous and encrusted that its opportunity of development hence appears taken from the folk. Then an act of force must simply set in, in order to put the normal capacity for development into function again.

Goal of the revolution is the total state, the takeover of all public life and the mobilization of all private and public connections. If revolutions are simple, then they are also understood by the folk. They will triumph the soonest and most successfully, if the ideas they champion are diametrically opposed to those they want to replace. We can prove that with a few historical examples. There was no idea more alien and hostile to the ancient world than the Christian one. The ancient world did not know the principle of charity at all. It has no organ at all to understand it. Because the Christian view of the world was so hostile to the ancient one and seemed so diametrically opposed to it, that is why a struggle for life and death ignited. And because the Christian view carried the advantage of youth and not being used up, that is why it gradually shook and replaced the ancient world.

There were no greater opposites at the end of the 18th century that the state and view views of the authoritarian and of the dawning liberal world. The concepts freedom, equality, fraternity were totally alien to the 18th century. But because they were so hostile opposed to it and because they as well again had the magic and invincibility of youth and of being not used not on their side, that is why they gradually toppled the aristocratic world and liberalized Europe.

The National Socialist movement also knew that the material assets a nation loses can be replaced, but that a folk’s honor, energy and confidence let themselves be replaced only very difficulty and with great sacrifices.

Revolutions are necessary in the life of folks; and indeed, they will always come, if a folk’s normal development capacity is so encrusted and deformed as a result of the petrifying of its organic life that a serious threat to healthy folk existence hence arises. Crises that can no longer be solved legally must either by solved by force or they lead to the fall of the folk afflicted by them. Revolutions hence also have their moral justification; they take place according to a higher morality than resides in legal processes. It hardly needs noting in the process that they are accompanied by occasional excesses; one cannot judge a child by its childhood ailments, and one should not blow out a light in order to eliminate the shadow.

The system that we knocked down found its most fitting characterization in liberalism. If liberalism proceeded from the individual and put the individual human being at the center of all things, then we have replaced the individual with folk and the individual human being with the community. Certainly, in the process the freedom of the individual was limited insofar as if collided with or stood on contradiction to the freedom of the nation. That is not a narrowing of the freedom concept in itself. Exaggerating it for the individual, means risking the folk’s freedom or at least seriously endangering it. The boundaries of the individualistic freedom concept hence lie at the boundaries of the folkish freedom concept. No individual human being, may he stand ever so high or so low, can possess the right to make use of his freedom at the cost of the national freedom concept. For only the security of the national freedom concept guarantees him in the long-term personal freedom. The more free a folk is, the more freely can its members move. But the more restricted the basis of its national existence, the more illusory a supposed freedom which its children enjoy.