I think that Freud was also anxious to enlist Akhenaten onto the side of culture, reason and intellectualism because he guessed how easy it would be to build a Nazi Akhenaten from the same basic materials he had used - a Nazi Akhenaten who would justify the furor Teutonicus that would soon engulf Europe. And Freud was right. At the same time as he was writing Moses and Monotheism, Fascist sympathisers were reading Breasted and Weigall and finding confirmation there of a very different set of beliefs.
Fascist Akhenatens
Among the Amarna objects on display in the Berlin Museum in the 1920s and 1930s were reliefs showing Akhenaten and his family, virtually naked and out in the open, being touched by sun rays terminating in the hieroglyph for life. These reliefs were originally placed in outdoor shrines where people would request favours from the Aten through the agency of the royal couple. Visitors to the Museum would also have been able to see pieces of faience, sculpture and other objccts suggesting Akhenaten's apparent love of the natural world. In the 1920s and 1930s, these objects had particular meanings to certain viewers. These were the adherents of the various Utopian movements, popular in German-speaking central Europe from the 1890s onwards, which rejected Judaeo-Christianity in favour of a revived nco-pagan nature-worship which they believed to be older and more genuine. In these movements, nature-worship often revolved around sun-worship and nudism, and antiquity played an important part in its discourse and imagery. The ancient world, untainted by an imposed Judaeo-Christianity, was thought to be more in tune with nature; it offered a pure, Eden-like space uncorrupted by the evils of modernity. The illustrations in some of these groups' magazines give such ideas visual shape. They contrast the natural, naked forms of classical statues with the bodies of modern women deformed by corsctry or constricting clothes. In nco-pagan nudist periodicals such as Die Sch5nhe.it ('Beauty'), the graphics featured naked people with arms extended as they prayed to the sun, whose rays rcach out to 'kiss' them and bestow its pure blessings. Some of these graphics include Amarna motifs, especially the sun-disc with hands. The same images also appear in Theosophical publications (see Figure 4.2). Such an appropriation is quite predictable bccausc of Akhenaten's associations with nude sun-worship and nature, the importance of antiquity to nco-pagans, and public knowledge of the Amarna reliefs in Berlin.
One of Die Schonheifs distributors was Richard Ungewitter, a nudist and so- called 'racial hygienist' (Rassenhygieniker) who regarded Jews as an infestation on the pure Aryan body politic, which needed to be cleansed of these parasites. Other nudist sun-worshippers like Ungewitter sympathised with anti-Semitic racial politics, and Akhenaten was soon co-opted into these as well. This process was assisted by ideas derived from popular histories about Akhenaten's racial origins. He was believed to be not fully Egyptian but partly Aryan - the most aristocratic race of humanity and the inverse of Semitic, according to racial theories of the time. Elaborate pseudo-genealogies were concocted to make Akhenaten Aryan. Weigall, for instance, reflected current orthodoxy by discussing Akhenaten's non-Egyptian ethnicity at some length; Breasted did not agree, saying rightly that this was speculation. According to these alternative family trees, Akhenaten's mother Tiye was a foreigner from Naharin, a place on the north-eastern fringes of the Egyptian world and ruled by an aristocracy of Aryan origin who worshipped Aryan divinities (see caption to Plate 3.5). There was further speculation about the origins of Akhenaten's paternal grandmother, Mutemwiya, who was also supposed to be non-Egyptian and possibly Aryan. Such an ancestry meant, in effect, that Akhenaten was only one-quarter Egyptian (through his paternal grandfather), and he could therefore be distanced from the Semitic race to which the ancient Egyptians were supposed to belong.3' Akhenaten's advocacy of sun-worship was seen as further proof of his Aryan blood, because theorists of Aryanism argued that sun-worship was the basis of mythological systems among Aryan peoples."' These historical contortions to de-Semiticisc Akhenaten develop predictably from the European veneer Breasted and Weigall overlaid on him — at any rate, those who wanted to make Akhenaten an Aryan found plenty of evidence in their books. These versions of him have nothing to do with monotheism; rather, Akhenaten represents something much older uncorrupted by any contact with Judaeo-Christianity.
Writers with Nazi sympathies during and after the Second World War developed this pagan, Aryan Akhenaten in the interests of propaganda. One example is the historical novelist, theatre critic and journalist Josef Magnus Weh- ner (1891-1973). Wehner came from a devout family and later became interested in alternative religions. He was the editor of two newspapers, the Miinchener /ji- tung and the Miinchener Meuesten Machrichten. He became a Nazi supporter and made propaganda broadcasts on the radio during the Second World War. His most
UAhra.ne5.
Theojophisdie*
CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD
fThegfophie 3
MonAtssdwift 3ur Pflege und Verbr^itun^ einer hoheren Welt-u. EebentmsdMumQ
Aug? mo - HugoVollrAtfw&iffifl
Figure 4.2 'FIDUS'. Hugo Hoppener (1868-1948), illustrator, alternative religionist and later Nazi sympathiser, often mingled Egyptian elements with nudism in his graphics, such as this one for a German Theosophical journal, 1910.
successful pre-war work was Sieben vor Verdun, a tale of soldiers' comradeship in the First World War. Sieben vor Verdun mixes racism and sentimentality with a vague, somewhat Theosophical religiosity in a way that also appears in his Akhenaten novel, Eehnaton and Nofretete: Eine Erzahlung aus den alten Agypten, published in Leipzig in 1944. Eehnaton and Nofretete seems to be indebted to Mcrezhko- vsky's Der Messias, perhaps another instance of its anti-Scmitic attraction which Freud noticed. Wehner added an autobiographical epilogue to the novel, explaining why the story was a topical one to recount in 1944. But the most prolific and extreme of Akhenaten's Nazi interpreters was the woman who called herself Savitri Devi.