264 book reviews Julian Strube Vril: Eine okkulte Urkraft in Theosophie und esoterischen Neonazismus, München: Wilhelm Fink 2013. 222 pp. isbn: 978-3-7705-5515-4. Until quite recently “Nazi occultism” has mainly been a topic confined to spec- tacular crypto-or pseudo-history and popular fiction, while serious scholarly research has been, to say the least, scarce. Almost 30 years after Goodrick- Clarke’s seminal The Occult Roots of Nazism it seems that academia is slowly beginning to acknowledge this as a field worthy of exploration. This is not because of its historical qualities—as the concept per se is highly question- able—but with regard to the substantial impact it has had on post-war popular culture and right-wing political movements, thereby also on collective memo- ries of the Nazi era. In fact, many—if not most—popular narratives of “Nazi occultism” are founded on dubious revisionist concepts of history, not only by falsifying and/or distorting well-documented historical facts. Although not revisionist in the sense of Holocaust deniers, several of them are certainly triv- ializing the Nazi crimes and racist ideology in an ethically highly questionable way by “explaining” this as basically being the evil deeds of black magicians. Consequently, the victims are reduced to commodities, mere objects used in human sacrifice, thus once again dehumanized and bereft of their dignity. The lack of serious scholarly attention has certainly contributed to the success of this Nazi exploitation genre, as one of its main arguments is precisely that academia is neglecting the occult aspects of Nazi Germany. Not the least with this background in mind, Julian Strube’s meticulously researched Master’s thesis, published as Vril: Eine okkulte Urkraft in Theosophie und esoterischen Neonazismus, is very welcome. It provides an excellent contri- bution that well deserves its place next to The Occult Roots. Before going into some critical remarks I want to underline the qualities of the book: although it will probably not be popular among all those who like to believe in conspiracy theories about the Nazis making use of the mystical Vril force for their secret super weapons project, or Hitler and other top Nazis being occultists, Vril is indispensable reading for anyone interested in these kinds of things. It brings together basically all known primary and most secondary sources dealing with the topic and scrutinizes them from a both critical and balanced point of view, which in itself is an admirable achievement, as it would be all too easy to dis- card much of it as nonsense. That Strube’s material includes works published in both German, English and French brings extra strength to the study, as there are small, but still significant differences in different language representations of “Nazi occultism”—certain themes that are emphasized and certain tropes that are more commonly used in one language context than others, etc. This © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/15700593-01402009 book reviews 265 can be referred to the different audiences and their nationally shared frames of reference, including cultural memory. In the first part of his book Strube shows how the fictional concept of a mysterious, invisible Vril power introduced by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1871 novel almost immediately merges with ideas from Theosophy and other currents in Western fin-de-siècle esotericism and achieves a status similar to that of animal magnetism, aether, od, etc. The context of nineteenth century Western society is of course important, with a widespread fascination for all fantastic achievements brought forth by the rapid progress in natural science and new technologies, as well as an openness towards what might be possible. If there is electricity, x-rays, and wireless communication, why would there not be other invisible forces just waiting to be discovered? The influence of Theosophy on the reception of Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril concept is very important, as Mme Blavatsky’s interpretation of this as a fictional concept corresponding to aether, Akasa, Reichenbach’s od, Levi’s Astral light etc. not only rendered it a certain “esoteric legitimacy”, but also offered speculative post-war authors yet another “proof” of the supposed tight connections between Blavatsky, Nazi occultists and Nazi (pseudo-)science. There is another implication as well, to which I will return later. The main part of Strube’s book deals with the background and the evolu- tion of the Vril concept, with an emphasis on the contemporary esoteric dis- course especially in Britain and in a German language context, including Rudolf Steiner and other German occultists. Among these is the “Reichsarbeitsgemein- schaft”, the small Berlin-based alternative-science-organisation identified as the rather modest equivalent to the mythical, all-powerful and very Nazi “Vril society” of post-war fantastic and cryptohistorical lore. The RAG’s booklet pub- lications, “Vril, die kosmische Urkraft” and “Zeitschrift für Weltdynamismus”, are presented in detail and put into the context of contemporary German eso- tericism. Like in other Western countries at the time there was a widespread preoccupation with exploring the paranormal and a search for possible ways of making the world and us humans alike better, healthier, more peaceful, and so on, through the exploration of what is often called fringe, or pseudo, science. Bulwer-Lytton’s original Vril concept fits very well into such a utopian endeav- our, and it is not until well after 1945 that it begins to be connected to the Nazis, largely through the impact of Pauwels and Bergier’s Le Matin des Magiciens. Strube efficiently shows how the esoteric underground, with its faiblesse for fantastic speculation and bizarre conspiracy theories, provides inspiration for the second main strand in the discourse on Vril, esoteric neo-Nazism. The last part of the book widens the perspective to popular representations of so-called “Nazi occultism” more generally, including its close connections Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 14 (2014) 247–274.