Introduction: What Was the Conservative Revolution?
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Notes INTRODUCTION: WHAT WAS THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION? I. See Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932, third edn, 2 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 1, pp. 10-11; Karl Dietrich Bracher, The Gennan Dictatorship (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 183; Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlag, 1968), p. 120; Otto-Ernst Schiiddekopf, Linke Leute von rechts (Stuttgart: Koh1hammer, 1960), p. 248. 2. This is Walter Struve's assessment of their role in Elites against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Gennany, 1890-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 227. 3. Stefan Breuer rightly sees the majority of the Conservative Revolutionaries as belonging to the 'Generation of 1914' (Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993], p. 33). 4. Friedrich Georg Jiinger, Aufmarsch des Nationalismus (Leipzig: Aufmarsch, 1926), pp. 5-6. 5. See Mohler, pp. 9-10. 6. Bracher, p. 183. 7. Struve, p. 224. 8. Martin Broszat, Gennan National Socialism 1919-1945 (California: Clio, 1966), p. 40. 9. Bracher, p. 184. I 0. Walter Bussmann, 'Politische Ideologien zwischen Monarchie und Weimarer Republik'., Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 190, no. 1, 1960, p. 77. II. Sontheimer, pp. 13-14. 12. See Sontheimer, pp. 32-4; Joachim Petzold, Konservative Theoretiker des deutschen Faschismus (East Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1978), p. 12. An informative survey of how right-wing publishers sought to create an identifiable movement out of various strands of neo-conservative thought is provided by Gary Stark in his Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Gennany, 1890-1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). 13. See Wolfram Wette, 'Ideologien, Propaganda und Innenpolitik als Voraussetzungen der Kriegspolitik des Dritten Reiches', in W. Deist et al. (eds), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1979), pp. 94-9. 14. Estimates of the size of Stahlhelm, Jungdeutscher Orden and other combat leagues vary considerably. See James Diehl, Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 293-7. On Stahlhelm, see Volker Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm. Bund der Frontsoldaten (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1966). 135 136 Notes I 5. Sontheimer, p. 17. Sontheimer refers in particular to the new nationalism of the Conservative Revolution and links this with the combat leagues Wehrwolf (with an estimated membership of 40 000), Bund Oberland (10 000), Bund Wiking (6-10 000), and the youth leagues Freischar Schill, Eidgenossen, Deutsche Falkenschaft, Deutsche Jungmannschaft, Deutsches Jungvolk, die Geusen, die Artamanen, Adler und Falken (p. 27n.). Schtiddekopf estimates that the new nationalist journal Die Kommenden represented leagues with a total membership of 50 000 (Linke Leute von rechts, p. 240). 16. Helga Grebing, Der Nationalsozialismus. Ursprung und Wesen, eighteenth edition (Munich and Vienna: Olzog, 1964), p. 75. 17. See James Diehl, Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany, p. ix. Also Struve (Elites against Democracy), who has looked at the particular circum stances of key individuals in an attempt to clarify their motives. At another level, Joachim Petzold has examined the financing of Conservative Revolutionary activities in an attempt to shed light on motives, and toques tion the revolutionary character of the movement (Konservative Theoretiker des deutschen Faschismus). 18. Struve,p.13. 19. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, culture and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 22. 20. See the criticism of this approach in Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship (London: Edward Arnold, 1985), p. 7; John Hiden, John Farquharson, Explaining Hitler's Germany (London: Batsford, 1983), p. 34. 21. Herf' s Reactionary Modernism, which deals with the engineering profes- sion, is a recent example of this. 22. See, for example, Walter Struve, Elites against Democracy, p.l8. 23. Herf, p. 218. 24. J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 37. 25. Ibid., p. 38. 26. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 14. 27. Robert Darnton, 'Intellectual and Cultural History', in The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, edited by M. Kammen (Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 327-54. 28. See Detlev Peukert's perceptive characterisation of the radical right in Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der Klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 83-4. 1 THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR I. Martin Greiffenhagen, Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland (Munich: Piper, 1971), p. 277. Notes 137 2. See, for example, Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburg, 1968), p. 95. 3. Peukert, pp. 110-11. 4. Herf, pp. 72-5. 5. Wolfram Wette, 'ldeologien, Propaganda und Innenpolitik als Voraussetzungen der Kriegspolitik des Dritten Reiches', in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, edited by the Militiirgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, 10 vols (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979), I, p. 48. 6. Thus, when Modris Eksteins writes in general terms of the conservative view of the war as 'a necessity, tragic of course, but nonetheless unavoid able', he does not exploit the interpretative potential of what is, in the case of the Conservative Revolution, a development of the themes of necessity and inevitability (Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age [London, New York: Bantam, 1989], p. 287). 7. Ernst Jiinger, In Stahlgewittern (Hanover: published privately, 1920), p. I. 8. Franz Schauwecker, Der feurige Weg (Leipzig: Aufmarsch, 1926), pp. 21-2. 9. Ernst Jiinger, In Stahlgewittern, p. 6. For a historian's account of the horrors of trench warfare see Modris Eksteins, pp. 139-55. 10. Ibid., p. v. II. Ernst Jiinger, 'Der Pazifismus', Die Standarte, 11 (15 November 1925), 2. For a discussion of the theory of modernisation as applied to the Weimar Republic, see Peukert, pp. 87-190. George Mosse gives a convincing account of the First World War as a 'modern war' characterised by 'organ ized mass death' in his Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Here p. 3. 12. Kurt Hesse, Der Feldherr Psychologos: Ein Suchen nach dem Fuhrer der deutschen Zukunft (Berlin: Mittler, 1922), p. 30. 13. Franz Schauwecker, Der feurige Weg, p. 49. 14. See Martin Travers, German Novels on the First World War and their Ideological Implications, 1918-1933 (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, 1982). Travers demonstrates that military memoirs presented a paradigmatic view of war. This form survived through the First World War to emerge in the memoirs of Hermann von Stein, for example, who had command of the XIV Reserve Division in a Bavarian Regiment. His is above all an orderly view of war, in which all the events described have a beginning, a middle and an end. The typical memoir, argues Travers, does not recognise (does not have the categories to recognise) the less paradigmatic features of war the fortuitous, the random, the anomie, and the personal torments of hunger, fear and pain (p. 23). See also Hans-Harald Muller, Der Krieg und die Schriftsteller (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), on senior officers writing military memoirs in order to justify strategic decisions in the war (p. 22). 15. See Travers, pp. 23-4. 16. Werner Beumelburg, Douaumont (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1933), pp. 41-2. 17. See, for example, Erich Maria Remarque' s account of how the soldiers are made indifferent by the fact that they can do little to avoid being killed: it is chance which kills them or keeps them alive (lm Westen nichts Neues [Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1976], p. 76). 138 Notes 18. See Michael Gollbach, Die Wiederkehr des Weltkrieges in der Literatur (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1978), p. 116. Travers has pointed out that Ludwig Renn's Der Krieg stresses the formlessness of war and the soldier's struggle to survive in an environment governed by the random and fortuitous, by the failure of purpose and the subversion of order (p. 68). See also Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modem Memory (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) on the gap between expectations and reality which became such an important feature of British writing on the First World War, pp. 34-5. Fussell also reports on the elaborate rumours which circulated in the war about how the Germans gained information on the position of enemy artillery. These rumours reflected the need to make sense of events which would otherwise seem merely accidental or calamitous (p. 121). 19. Ernst Jiinger, In Stahlgewittem, pp. 63, 119. 20. Ibid., p. 133. 21. Ernst Jiinger, Sturm (Olten: Oltner Liebhaberdruck, 1963), pp. 56-7. 22. Ernst Jiinger, In Stahlgewittern, p. 67. 23. Ernst Jiinger, Feuer und Blut (Magdeburg: Stahlhelm, 1925), pp. 16f.; In Stahlgewittern, p. 93. 24. Ernst Jiinger, Sturm, p. 12. See also Miiller, pp. 232-5. 25. Franz Schauwecker, Deutsche allein (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1931), p. 9. 26. Rudolf Huch, '"Im Westen nichts Neues"', Deutsches Volkstum, 11, no. 8 (August 1929), 598-603. 27. Werner Beumelburg, Douaumont, pp. 7-8. 28.