The death of God, the resurgence of archetypal powers, and the psychological conditions that contributed to the rise of National Socialism
The rise of National Socialism was not merely a political or economic phenomenon. It also reflected powerful unconscious forces that had been developing within German culture for generations. Beneath the surface of modern European civilisation, ancient archetypal energies remained active, even as the religious and cultural structures that had traditionally contained them gradually lost their authority.
Understanding this development requires distinguishing between two historical layers: the ancient archetypal foundations of Germanic culture and the more recent formation of collective national insecurity.
The archetypal layer reaches into the pre-Christian past, when Germanic tribes expressed powerful psychic forces through mythological figures such as Wotan. Christianity did not eliminate these forces but introduced a different symbolic framework through which psychic life could be organised. The old gods did not disappear psychologically simply because their worship declined.
The German national inferiority complex, however, had more recent historical roots. Germany achieved political unification only in 1871, considerably later than Britain and France had consolidated their national institutions. German-speaking lands possessed a distinguished intellectual, artistic, religious, and philosophical tradition, but political fragmentation, rivalry with established European powers, and the desire for national recognition contributed to tensions around collective identity and status.
In his 1938 interview Diagnosing the Dictators, Jung described Germany's historical position through the psychological image of the younger brother, arriving late to a world in which the older European powers had already established their political and colonial influence. This image conveyed a sense of historical disadvantage, competition, and resentment that could persist despite considerable national achievements.
The newly unified German Empire became a formidable industrial and military power, yet its growing strength was accompanied by the desire to demonstrate its importance on the international stage. Collective insecurity could thus become organised around national identity, creating a tension between genuine cultural achievement and compensatory fantasies of superiority.
This does not imply that every German experienced personal inferiority or that Germany possessed a uniquely pathological national character. Rather, it describes a possible collective psychological pattern in which the need for recognition becomes emotionally charged and increasingly dependent upon external demonstrations of power.
The Enlightenment, scientific rationalism, industrialisation, and the gradual decline of Christianity's cultural authority profoundly transformed European consciousness. Traditional religious symbols, which had previously provided collective containers for archetypal experiences, were losing their psychological effectiveness.
Archetypal energies do not disappear when their religious expressions are abandoned. Instead, they may find alternative forms of manifestation. When the gods are no longer recognised as symbolic representations of transpersonal psychic forces, these energies may be unconsciously projected onto human beings, political leaders, nations, or ideological movements.
Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration in The Gay Science (1882) announced a profound transformation in Western consciousness. Through the figure of the madman, Nietzsche confronts humanity with the consequences of destroying its highest source of meaning:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
The madman then asks how humanity can find consolation after destroying what it once regarded as sacred. His questions concern the possibility of moral purification, the invention of new rituals, and ultimately whether humanity must assume divine significance to bear responsibility for its own deed (Nietzsche, 1882, §125).
Nietzsche's proclamation was far more radical than a simple rejection of religious belief. Humanity had removed the symbolic centre around which its moral universe revolved. The problem was no longer merely whether God existed, but what would become of human consciousness when the organising centre of its values disappeared.
The resulting vacuum opened the possibility of nihilism, but also the temptation to seek substitute absolutes. From the perspective of analytical psychology, the disappearance of God from conscious belief does not eliminate the psychic energies once expressed through religious symbolism. The divine image may lose its traditional form while continuing to influence human behaviour through unconscious identification and projection.
Nietzsche's response to the crisis of nihilism was the possibility of creating new values through self-overcoming, expressed symbolically in his concept of the Übermensch.
From the perspective of analytical psychology, however, this development presents a particular danger. When the divine loses its symbolic existence beyond the ego, human consciousness may attempt to appropriate powers that properly belong to the transpersonal psyche.
The ego risks identifying with the Self, producing psychic inflation: a condition in which the individual mistakes archetypal power for personal greatness.
Nietzsche possessed extraordinary psychological insight and anticipated the spiritual crisis of modern Europe. Yet his relationship with the figure of Zarathustra also raises questions about the distinction between individual consciousness and archetypal forces.
Contact with archetypal material can overwhelm the ego when the individual becomes identified with the symbolic figure rather than maintaining a conscious relationship to it. Nietzsche's psychological collapse was interpreted by Jung partly through this framework, although such an interpretation cannot establish its clinical cause.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche did not advocate the simple deification of the human ego. His philosophy sought to confront nihilism, challenge inherited moral assumptions, and develop a creative relationship to existence. The Übermensch cannot be equated with narcissistic omnipotence or political authoritarianism.
His concept of self-overcoming involved discipline, transformation, and the creation of values rather than merely domination over others. A Jungian interpretation illuminates the dangers of inflation but may underestimate Nietzsche's effort to distinguish genuine self-overcoming from fantasies of power.
His writings were later appropriated and distorted by nationalist and Nazi interpreters, but this should not be confused with his philosophical intentions.
Richard Wagner represented another expression of the cultural transformation taking place in nineteenth-century Germany.
Through his operas, particularly Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner revived Germanic mythology and brought ancient gods, heroes, and mythological conflicts into the emotional life of modern European audiences.
The Ring presents a world shaped by power, desire, betrayal, sacrifice, fate, and the struggle between different forms of authority. Wagner's music and drama did not merely retell ancient stories; they reactivated their emotional and symbolic power.
Nietzsche and Wagner, despite their philosophical differences and eventual estrangement, represented two contrasting responses to the same cultural crisis. Nietzsche articulated the collapse of the Christian symbolic order and the necessity of confronting nihilism, while Wagner gave renewed artistic expression to the mythological imagination.
Neither caused National Socialism. Both, however, reflected developments already taking place within European, and particularly German, culture.
Wagner's nationalism and antisemitism made aspects of his legacy available for later political appropriation. The Nazis selectively used his music and mythology to reinforce their image of German destiny, illustrating how symbolic material can be redirected towards political identification, exclusion, and violence.
Germany's defeat in 1918, the collapse of the imperial order, the Treaty of Versailles, and subsequent economic and political instability intensified feelings of collective vulnerability.
These events did not create Germany's psychological tensions from nothing. They amplified patterns that had been developing throughout the nineteenth century.
The movement from inferiority to compensatory superiority is a familiar psychological mechanism. What cannot be consciously tolerated as weakness may be replaced by exaggerated images of strength, exceptional destiny, and omnipotence.
Political instability and economic crises created conditions in which nationalist movements could mobilise these emotions. Hitler presented himself as the figure capable of restoring Germany's dignity, strength, and historical importance.
In Diagnosing the Dictators, Jung interpreted Hitler as a figure reflecting unconscious aspects of German collective psychology. The leader's appeal was therefore not understood solely through his personal characteristics, but also through his capacity to embody collective frustrations, resentments, expectations, and fantasies of redemption (Jung, 1938/1977).
The leader became more than a political representative. He served as the carrier of projected psychic contents that individuals experienced as belonging to a greater national destiny.
Within this psychological atmosphere, the ancient Germanic god Wotan became a compelling symbol of the forces emerging in German collective life.
In Wotan (1936), Jung described the deity as a restless wanderer who brought conflict and unrest wherever he travelled. Christianity had transformed this figure into a demonic presence, yet traces of him survived in European folklore as a supernatural hunter travelling through the stormy night with a ghostly retinue.
This transformation is psychologically significant. A deity once consciously worshipped had become a marginal figure of superstition and folklore, yet the underlying psychic pattern had not disappeared.
Wotan was associated with the unleashing of passions, the excitement of battle, magical power, and the dissolution of ordinary restraints. These qualities made him a compelling symbol for the emotional atmosphere of Germany during the rise of National Socialism.
Jung described the reappearance of this ancient pattern as the awakening of a storm god within a modern society that believed it had outgrown such mythological forces. He understood Wotan as an autonomous psychic factor capable of influencing collective life and revealing its nature through the emotional and behavioural patterns it activated (Jung, 1936/1970).
This expresses the central psychological proposition: archetypal forces are not merely cultural memories or decorative mythological images. They possess a relative autonomy within the psyche and may become active under particular historical conditions.
The resurgence of Wotan was therefore not understood as a literal return to pagan religion, but as the reactivation of an ancient psychological pattern through modern mass movements.
The emotional qualities associated with the god—frenzy, possession, ecstatic power, wandering, and storm-like upheaval—could be recognised in the collective excitement surrounding National Socialism.
Hitler became the focus of projections of national redemption, while Nazi rallies, uniforms, rituals, symbols, and speeches helped transform political participation into a quasi-religious experience.
The individual was invited to find personal meaning through identification with the collective, surrendering independent judgement to an apparently greater historical mission.
The archetypal energy itself was not inherently National Socialist. The danger arose when mythic imagery became fused with racial ideology, antisemitism, militarism, authoritarianism, and the destruction of democratic and moral restraints.
The psychological interpretation of National Socialism must remain connected to its historical and political realities.
Archetypal explanations alone cannot account for the rise of Nazism. Antisemitism, authoritarian institutions, propaganda, political decisions, economic interests, and social conflict all played decisive roles.
Archetypes do not write laws, organise political parties, build concentration camps, or make decisions about war and genocide. Human beings and institutions do those things.
Psychological analysis can illuminate why political messages acquire extraordinary emotional power, but it cannot replace historical explanation or moral responsibility.
The idea of a distinctive German collective inferiority complex should also be understood as an interpretative hypothesis rather than an established historical fact. Germany was not the only European society affected by nationalism, secularisation, war, or humiliation.
The connection between nineteenth-century German national development and collective inferiority is grounded in Jung's historical observations, but its explanatory significance remains open to critical examination.
A society does not overcome its unconscious forces simply by becoming more rational, secular, or technologically advanced.
When archetypal energies are denied meaningful symbolic expression, they may return through collective projections, ideological absolutism, and the glorification of human power.
The death of God, in this psychological sense, does not necessarily mean the disappearance of the divine image. It may mean its unconscious transfer onto human beings and political institutions.
A leader can become a substitute for God, a nation can become an object of worship, and political obedience can acquire the emotional intensity once associated with religious devotion.
Whenever collective humiliation combines with spiritual disorientation and fantasies of exceptional destiny, societies become vulnerable to psychological inflation and collective possession.
The task of consciousness is not to eradicate archetypal forces, which is impossible, but to recognise their reality, understand their symbolic meaning, and develop a conscious relationship to them.
This is where individuation becomes particularly relevant. The ego must learn to relate to powers greater than itself without either repressing them or identifying with them.
Individuation does not mean withdrawing from history or becoming purely individualistic. It means developing sufficient consciousness to recognise when one is being carried by a collective force and to take responsibility for one's participation in it.
The psychological lesson is not that Germany was uniquely irrational or that mythology inevitably produces fascism. Rather, unresolved collective tensions can become dangerous when they combine with political manipulation, social crisis, and the loss of meaningful symbolic forms.
Nietzsche recognised the spiritual crisis. Wagner gave artistic expression to the mythological imagination. Wotan symbolised the possibility that ancient archetypal forces could return through modern political life.
The historical catastrophe emerged through the interaction of cultural, psychological, social, and political forces—not through any single thinker, myth, or symbol.
Ultimately, the central question remains profoundly relevant: What happens to the gods when human beings no longer recognise them as gods?
They do not necessarily disappear. They may return through our convictions, collective identities, political passions, and unconscious fantasies of power.
The challenge of individuation is to become conscious of these forces before they begin to determine our actions and our history.
Vlado Šolc
