D.H. Lawrence, Fascism and the Logic of Contamination

[...]the völkisch thinkers cleaved to racist beliefs, such as the alleged biological inferiority of Jews, and social Darwinism, proclaiming that the Aryan race was the fittest to survive and linking the putative physical characteristics of Aryans (blond hair, blue eyes, and so on) with moral qualities, such as courage and honesty (Goodrick-Clarke 4-5). If, indeed, Lawrence was a chest-thumping Teutonic supremacist, it seems strange that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Gerald Crich in Women in Love (1920) should die at the end of novel, largely as a result of his inorganic mechanism; if Lawrence was so influenced by völkisch thinkers, surely the industrial magnate in the novel would have been Jewish, while Birkin, who achieves a more Lawrentian balance between mind and body and establishes an organic connection between himself and Ursula, would have taken the role of the Teutonic Übermensch. Given the demonstrable distinction between the law and love and the law and grace, it is frankly incredible to imagine that Lawrence was influenced by Chamberlain in this respect. [...]as Delavenay himself admits, for Chamberlain the "Jewish spirit was the masculine principle, the generative element, the will" (qtd. in Delavenay 311), whereas Lawrence associates Jews with the feminine principle and Christians with the male. The Jew "kept his body always like the body of a bride ready to serve the bridegroom"; he "had become the servant of his God, the female, passive" whose "conscious element was a resistance to the male or active principle" (STH 62).