Druso or: The Stolen Human World. A völkisch Utopia

This chapter analyzes a völkisch utopia from the period of the Weimar Republic. The research deals with Friedrich Freksa’s novel Druso oder: die Gestohlene Menschenwelt (Druso or: the stolen human world, 1931), which contains various elements of the chauvinistic völkisch ideology that was strongly diffused before the rise of National Socialism. The aim is to show how important a political utopia can be for contemporary readers to understand the historical and political facts of the time. It emphasizes how mythology, philosophy, ideology, and technology interact to build this kind of utopia. The author’s background is that of a conservative political opponent against the Weimar Republic who imagines a utopia in which the Aryans will save the Earth from an alien invasion. A spiritual leader leads the characters to the promised land of Atlantis. Spirituality constitutes the irrational part of this utopia, which needs the rationality of philosophy and technology for its legitimation, while the Atlantis myth functions as a geno-text. This utopia shows the author’s vision of reality, which does not carry a clear political message, as Dina Brandt affirms, and differs from Nazi literature and propagandistic texts. For further research, it would be interesting to find out if it is possible to define ‘National Socialist science fiction’ and to analyze this kind of texts in the academic field, not forgetting how certain ideals emerged.