The Devil's Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha by Mark Cornwall (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 915 Cornwall, Mark. The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2012. 352 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. $39.95: £25.00: €36.00. Heinz Rutha was born in 1897, on Adolf Hitler’s eighth birthday. More important, he first saw the light of day within two weeks of the ‘Badeni decrees’, which required civil servants in the imperial Austrian crownlands of Bohemia and Moravia to know both German and Czech, and provoked German protests so vehement as to mark perhaps the beginning of the end for the multinational Habsburg Monarchy. After 1918, in the new Czechoslovak state, Rutha, a young veteran and repressed homosexual, dedicated himself to forging a new leadership for its German minority from young men united in erotic friendship. Drawing inspiration much less from Nazism than from the radically anti-liberal Austrian philosopher Othmar Spann, he founded the Kameradschaftsbund, or Comrades’ Union, which developed into a powerful cohort within the völkisch, ‘Sudeten’ subset of German politics outside Germany. In 1926, Rutha served as best man to another German from Northern Bohemia, Konrad Henlein. And between 1935 and 1937, as tensions between Czechoslovakia and Henlein’s Sudeten German movement escalated, Rutha served as his emissary abroad. Arrested in October 1937 for the crime of homosexuality, however, he escaped the confines of a Czechoslovak cell a month later by committing suicide. Mark Cornwall concludes his remarkably researched biography of Rutha by declaring that he died ‘on the twin altars of Sudeten German patriotism and homosexuality’ (p. 267). The Devil’s Wall rescues Rutha from an undeserved obscurity born of a now bygone taboo. Cornwall promises, and delivers, fresh perspectives on the internaldynamicsoftheSudetenGermanmovement,aswellasoninternational dimensions to the Czech-German conflict after 1933. Confirming the nuance of Ronald Smelser’s pathbreaking study, The Sudeten Problem (Middletown, CT, 1975), Cornwall demonstrates disunity among völkisch leaders in Czechoslovakia, with Rutha perhaps the least extreme and Henlein somewhere in the middle, but lurching toward the Sudeten Nazis. Pushing against a tradition of reading Sudeten German appeals to West European public opinion as nothing but a fig leaf atop a treacherous irredentism, Cornwall argues that Rutha was ‘sincere over the righteousness of the Sudeten cause’ (p. 233). In 1935 and even somewhat later, Rutha and others in Henlein’s inner circle assessed the international framework in ‘conservative, pragmatic terms’, hoping at best for a ‘domestic revolution within Czechoslovakia’ (p. 184). Diplomats, of course, often equate sincerity with naivety. And using ‘conservative’ to describe revolutionaries begs a question: conservative compared to what? Perhaps the most riveting chapters stretch from the Great War to about 1933. Drawing on a long-lost diary that Rutha kept for half of 1918, Cornwall SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 916 captures the anxieties of a lower-middle-class Catholic at the age of twenty-one as he experienced not only combat and political catastrophe but attraction to fellow men. Over the following several years, Rutha discovered his life mission: leading male adolescents in a militantly nationalist pedagogic crusade to which he could sublimate his sexual insecurities and desires. In the late 1920s came a personal crisis, despair over having found no ‘son and friend for life’ (Rutha’s own words, p. 146) to nurture as his successor. ‘For me,’ Rutha declared in a never sent letter, the Sudeten state idea ‘comes alive and grows only where a young man loves me’ (p. 142). In 1932, it seems, he began to initiate ‘mutual gratification’ (p. 148) with disciples, including one who was only fifteen years old. As the Depression and the Nazi seizure of power in Germany broke open locked doors for Sudeten Germans, Rutha sowed the seeds of his own destruction. Cornwall sees ‘interesting parallels’ (p. 241) between the persecution of homosexuals in the Czechoslovak Republic and in the Third Reich. Yet one and the same discriminatory intent should not obscure the difference made by liberal safeguards in Czechoslovakia such as due process and independence of the judiciary. And to state that Rutha’s ‘sexual and nationalist “deviances” increasingly left him exposed to enemies who wanted to assert “normality”’ (p. 9) seems to miss fundamental...