Hitler's Monsters, which will be published on July 18 by Yale University Press, is the story of a romantic movement-the populist völkisch movement-gone terribly awry, as paramilitary groups coopted magic and religion and effectively banished reality, instead embracing "fantasies of racial faith" like Hanns Hörbiger's World Ice Theory, which postulated that huge blocks of celestial ice were at the root of all natural science and explained human history. Kurlander quotes pro-Nazi writer Gottfried Benn, who observed, "There tended to be a regression in intellectual advances while those grasping for power… reached backwards in search of mythical continuity." In Nazi Germany, this meant werewolves, a preference for magic over science, and the influential Thule Society, which traced the Aryan race back to a lost continent, or what Kurlander collectively refers to as "the supernatural imaginary."
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