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Eckart, Dietrich (1868–1923) Bavarian Catholic poet who was Hitler's first mentor and the ‘spiritual’ godfather of National Socialism, Dietrich Eckart was born on 23 March 1868 in Neumarkt, Upper Palatinate. A journalist by training, a mediocre poet and dramatist, Eckart's lack of success in pre-war Wilhelminian Germany fuelled his hatred of Jews and Marxists whom he blamed for his own failures and later for Germany's defeat in World War I. After a long period of bohemian vagrancy in Berlin, Eckart returned to Munich in 1915 and entered politics after the abortive November revolution of 1918. He invented the Nazi battle-cry ‘Deutschland Erwache!’ (Germany Awake!), the title of one of his poems, and, as the first poet of the movement, became the forerunner of National Socialist lyric art. In 1919 he began publication of the nationalist weekly Auf Gut Deutsch, which attacked the Versailles Treaty, Jewish war profiteers, Bolshevism and Social Democracy. Among its earliest contributors were Gottfried Feder (q.v.) and the young Baltic emigre, Alfred Rosenberg (q.v.). Eckart helped obtain the funds which enabled Hitler to buy up the Völkische Beobachter, which became the official organ of the NSDAP on 17 December 1920. Eckart was its first editor and publisher until he was eventually succeeded by Rosenberg.