The Fatherland

The Fatherland was a World War I era, New York weekly periodical in which several articles by Aleister Crowley appeared. It was a  published by poet, writer, and noted propagandist George Sylvester Viereck and advocated "Fair Play for Germany and Austria-Hungary". Having been born in Munich, Germany, and moved to New York City in 1896, Viereck graduated from the College of the City of New York and directly entered the world of publishing.

Viereck outspokenly supported the German cause at the outset of World War I, and his poetry reflected his pro-German zeal. Drawing on experience gained while working on his father's German-language monthly, Der deutsche Vorkämpfer (The German Pioneer), later called Rundschau Zweier Welten (Review of Two Worlds), the younger Viereck now channeled his German sympathies into his own publication. He founded The Fatherland in August 1914, a weekly publication in English that reached a circulation of 75,000, by some estimates, and 100,000 by others, to promote American neutrality in the war and give voice to German support. The Fatherland.

One of the contributors of German propaganda to The Fatherland was Aleister Crowley. In Crowley's own words from his Confessions, he explained:

     “I decided on a course of action, which seemed to me the only one possible in a situation which I regarded as immensely serious. I would write for The Fatherland. By doing so, I should cut myself off temporarily from all my friends, from all sources of income, I should apparently dishonour a name which I considered it my destiny to make immortal, and I should have to associate on terms of friendship with people whose very physical appearance came near to reproducing in me the possibly beneficial results of crossing the Channel with a choppy sea.”

“But the German propaganda was being done as well as the British propaganda ill. With a little more ascendancy over Viereck, I could spoil his game completely by doing as much mischief to Germany as the Patriot Bottomley [Horatio Bottomley] and the other hoarse-throated fishwives of Fleet Street were doing to England. I met with more success than I had hoped.”

 

“. . . “I must explain here that I had more than one string to my bow. It was really a minor part of my programme to wreck the German propaganda on the proof of reductio ad absurdum. I had hoped to gain the full confidence of the conspirators whom I had identified and deal with them as somebody whose name I forget dealt with Cataline; and Lord Mount Eagle or whoever it was, with Guy Faux. But nobody in British Intelligence had sufficient of that quality to notice me.”

 

“I have always been unduly optimistic about England. I know such a lot of people who are far from being fools. But war seems to deaden perception. Men who are in ordinary times quite acute become ready to assume that anyone who is waving a Union Jack and singing ‘Britannia Rules the Waves’ must be an Admiral of the Fleet. Everybody assumed that the irritating balderdash I wrote for The Fatherland must be the stark treason that the Germans were stupid enough to think it was.”

Crowley's contributions to The Fatherland consisted of: