Category: [RIP]

Erich von Däniken finally abandoned this planet the other day at the fairly good age of 90. Don’t know if I was aware that he’d still been with us up to now, but if I was it was pretty dimly… apparently he remained fairly popular in Europe long after Anglophone readers started losing interest in him during the 80s, and his frankly dubious influence will no doubt linger longer than it should. How dubious? Well…

“The evolutionists say that man descends from monkeys. Yet who has ever seen a white monkey? Or a dark ape with curly hair such as the black race has?”
“Were the extraterrestrials able to opt between different races from the beginning? Did they endow different human groups with different abilities to survive in different climatic and geographical conditions?”
”Today it is assumed that primitive men had dark skins.”
“Was the black race a failure and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or a yellow race?”
“Nearly all negroes are musical: they have rhythm in their blood.”
“I quite understand that I am playing with dynamite if I ask whether the extraterrestrials ‘allotted’ specific tasks to the basic races from the very beginning, i.e. programmed them with special abilities.”
“I am not a racialist… Yet my thirst for knowledge enables me to ignore the taboo on asking racial questions simply because it is untimely and dangerous… why are we like we are?
“Once this basic question is accepted, we cannot and should not avoid the explosive sequel: is there a chosen race?”
“A black family emigrates from its home in the tropical zone of the earth and settles in a cooler region. Pigments change down the generations, dark skins become light, perhaps so light, the negroids become white. Dark skin, say the racial specialists, no longer being necessary as a protection against the sun. OK, but in his new environment the black man would also have to lose his curly hair, his prominent dark eyes and protruding lips, otherwise he could never become a white man. But it’s all quite simple, someone will tell me. The black breeds with a white and there you are…”

That’s a series of quotes from von D.’s 1979 book Signs of the Gods collected by his “nemesis” Jason Colavito; I’ve often seen it said that the whole ancient astronauts thing and its later Graham Hancock-type lost civilisations variant relies on frankly racist assumptions and, well, Erich was clearly not above expressing some of those outright. I have my own issues with Jason Colavito (particularly his assertion that the ancient astronauts scene von D. popularised really stemmed from H.P. Lovecraft by way of Pauwels & Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians; whatever their own assertions about their fondness for HPL, they actually barely mention him in that book and spend a lot more time on Charles Fort), but he is right to call this bullshit out. In his own words:

Von Däniken asserts that the “extraterrestrials did choose a specific race.” He won’t say what that race is, but he leans heavily on Jewish claims to be the chosen people, which we have just seen him connect to the white (European) race. There can only be one conclusion, even if unstated. He then advocates eugenics, suggesting that modern genetic research will advise which combinations of races “are beneficial and which should be eliminated.” He seriously asks whether the aliens want “strict segregation” of the races, and he advocates human cloning to perpetuate the very best superior specimens in the event of disaster.
We know from documents I obtained from the National Archives that in these years von Däniken secretly tried to influence the U.S. Republican Party to use his alien theories to energize voters to support conservative politics, particularly in opposing creeping socialism. We also know from his recent books that he remains uncomfortable with changing gender norms, writing as he did in 2009’s Twilight of the Gods that if Islamic prophecy were correct the world would have already ended because “women act like men and the men act like women.”
Also in that 2009 book, Erich von Däniken decried efforts to link him to racism: “And suddenly Erich von Däniken is associated with idiotic racists, as if the ‘heavenly seed’ were my idea and I had made up the ‘chosen ones’ myself.” Well, I think that the racism claim has a bit more to it than that.

Parenthetically I was very interested to discover last night that when Chariots of the Gods? was finally published in 1968, it had actually been heavily rewritten by von D.’s editor, one Wilhelm Roggersdorf, a movie screenwriter who was also known as Wilhelm Utermann, under which name he had worked a few decades earlier at the Völkischer Beobachter… also known as the official newspaper of the Nazi Party in Germany from 1919 to 1945. For whatever it may be worth…