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Introduction Introduction Nietzschean impulses: 1918-1933 “It is only beginning with me that the earth knows great politics.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Why I am A Destiny,” Ecce Homo "The pinnacle of great politics is the moment in which the enemy comes into view in concrete clarity as the enemy." Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political “Conservative Revolution--what have stupidity, rebelliousness and malevolence, what has well-read brutality made of this term which was once spoken be intellectuals and artists!” Thomas Mann, “Man and Wert: Vorwort zum ersten Jahrgang” The twentieth century has seen countless appropriations of the ideas of the philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche for cultural and political ends, yet nowhere have these attempts been more frequent or important than in Germany. Continuing into this day, the group most popularly associated with Freidrich Nietzsche is the Nazi party, and although the German fascist regime was eager to lay claim to Nietzsche's ideas, the debate of the affinity and connection between Nietzsche and National Socialism has never yielded any simple answers as to the role the philosopher played in that movement.1 As early as 1935, the debate concerning Freidrich Nietzsche’s complicity in the formation of National Socialism in Germany was well underway. An early Swiss commentator wrote that: 1 The issue was recently debated in the pages of Jacob Golomb Ed. Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton: 2002). 1 Friedrich Nietzsche is held to be the pioneer, the ideological founder of the Third Reich. With no other thinker does National Socialist ideology feel so closely related, so internally linked as with Nietzsche. The leading spirits of the Third Reich call on him incessantly. Striking also is the fact that the grimmest opponent of National Socialism also rests…with Freidrich Nietzsche. How is that possible?2 As the debate has grown more intense in recent decades, new questions have arisen in regard to the proper relation between the two. One line of thought tracks the history of the two movements and argues that the Nazis perverted and distorted Nietzsche’s ideas—they did not adhere to the “essence” of his thought. Yet, if Nazism is to be regarded as a “debased Nietzscheanism,” then one should come to terms with more than just the aspects of the thought that happen to be similar and different in the two—questions of the similitude of their style and the order of their concerns with the problems they faced also should be acknowledged. For example, both espoused an “aesthetic of the body" which can be seen as a transcendental component of their thought.3 The debate over Nietzsche’s influence has a precedent in the role he played in World War I, during which an Englishman deemed it the "Euro-Nietzschean War.” By this time, Nietzsche was internationally believed to be a causal factor in the prelude to the war.4 Those who opposed this vilification were ignored. There was substance to the claim that Nietzsche was influential in the German incentive for war: 150,000 copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra were distributed to the German troops in a special wartime cover.5 It was also the most popular German book brought into battle alongside Goethe’s Faust. 2 D. Gawronsky, quoted in Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy In Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley: 1994), 272. 3 Godfather of Fascism, 13. 4 Aschheim, 128. 5 Aschheim, 135. 2 Complicating this topic evermore has been the discussion concerning Nietzsche’s complicity in the emerging cultural modes of modernism and irrationalism in Germany. He was to significantly influence diverse movements such as German socialism, the international avant- garde, the Stefan George circle, the Youth movement, expressionism, volkish groups, and many others in addition to National Socialism. It is time for a reexamination of the role and influence of Freidrich Nietzsche’s philosophy in the wave of thinkers who shaped the political climate of Weimar Germany before the rise of National Socialism. One must confront the nuanced political import involved in the philosophy of Nietzsche in order to understand the nature of the influence that Nietzsche exerted over this time period. The focus of this paper will be on one such group, a set of right-wing intellectuals who have come to be labeled the “Conservative Revolutionaries.” In 1927, the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in a now famous address to the students of the University of Munich, brought attention to a new conservatism that he deemed a “conservative revolution.”6 He spoke of a “crisis of the German mind” alluding to the separation in German society between the intellectual and political sphere. Society had lost its contact with “life” and spoke of the “legion of seekers” who sought a new faith and tradition. Hofmansthal was one of the first influential writers to spawn the intertwined political, philosophic and religious prose that is characteristic of the conservative revolutionary movement. The conservative revolutionaries sought to deal with the feeling of being uprooted after world war one. He was also the first to describe the broad set of critiques launched by this loosely affiliated group of postwar German writers who were 6 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Taum der Nation” (Munich, 1927), quoted in Klemens Von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 9. 3 searching for a new conservatism that took account of the experience of the First World War.7 They were vehement opponents of the Weimar Republic and understood Nietzsche to be a mentor of sorts. Hermann Rauschning’s book, The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West, published 1939, was one of many works inspired by Hofmansthal’s address, which addressed the nature of the conservative revolution. The right-wing intelligentsia in Weimar Germany was a “post-conservative,” revolutionary group that re-evaluated Nietzsche’s philosophy as they responded to what a recent historians have deemed the “conservative dilemma” in Germany.8 They advocated a "new" conservatism and nationalism that was to be understood as specifically German in the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic. By analyzing the Conservative Revolutionary Movement, this project seeks to compare and contrast the influence of Nietzsche in order to understand the difference between this group of Nietzscheans and the National Socialists who also claimed Nietzsche. Historiographical concerns frame this inquiry into Nietzscheanism and the ideas of the movement. Among the many writers who have been classified as part of the conservative revolution, a few key thinkers stand out both because of their influence in the period and because of the influence they have yielded over many since. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt and to an extent, Martin Heidegger, may be classified as the vanguard of the movement. Each saw Nietzsche as posing the challenge for their time and sought to confront the political issues of their time under his influence. The doctrines of these writers of a “new conservatism," reveal much about the diverse political culture of Weimar Germany. 7 Cited in Cultural Despair, 27. 8 Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (Stuttgart: 1996), 13. Also, Klemens Von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 9. 4 These “tough Nietzscheans” focused on the insufficiencies of bourgeois values and in repose created a revolutionary conservatism.9 Recently, the movement has garnered the interested in the nature of their protest and political commitment. The historian Richard Wolin in the article, “Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror,” argues that Nietzsche’s vitalism fueled the conservative revolutionary movement, and he singles out Spengler, Van den Bruck, and Junger as pivotal in the formation of the movement’s habitus. The group has also been the major subject of several philosophers’ interest. In coming to terms with the controversial reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Jacques Derrida notes that: There is nothing absolutely contingent about the fact that the only political regime to have effectively brandished his [Nietzsche’s] name as a major and official banner was Nazi. The future of the Nietzsche text is not closed . but if the only politics calling itself Nietzschean will have been a Nazi one, then this is necessarily significant and must be questioned.”10 Alongside this articulation, stands the critical assessment of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas’, analysis of these thinkers that states: The young conservatives embrace the fundamental experience of aesthetic modernity - the disclosure of a decentered subjectivity freed from all constraints of rational cognition and purposiveness, from all imperatives of labor and utility - and in this way break out of the modern world. They thereby ground an intransigent antimodernism through a modernist attitude…In France this trend leads from Georges Bataille to Foucault and Derrida. The spirit of Nietzsche that was reawakened in the 1970s of course hovers over them all.11 These analyses are samples of the enduring importance to the conservative revolutionaries and the philosopher they inherited. Rarely is it possible to garner from the 9 For the distinction between “tough Nietzscheans,” who emphasize Nietzsche’s controversial political beliefs—anti- liberalism,
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