Introduction

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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).

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.

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.

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, moral relativism, anti-democracy—and “gentle Nietzscheans,” who transform him into a humanist, see Crane Briton, Nietzsche (Harper: New York, 1941).

10 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobigraphy, Transference, Translation (Lincoln: Nebraska, 1988), 31. 11 Quoted in “Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology,” in Constellations Volume 2, (Blackwell Publishers, 1995).

5 multiplicity of historical sources in a period a univocal narrative from them. What the cultural critic Ernst Bloch called “non-synchronicity,” acknowledges the multiple strands of history that may cohere in a historical period.12 What I wish to bring to mind in listing this concept is that in

Germany, the “classical land of non-simultaneity,” the legacy of Nietzsche will be one in which heterogeneous adaptions of his name exist together, as is the case with the conservative revolutionary and National Socialist adaptation of Nietzsche.

The Context of the Conservative Revolution

The study here of Weimar right-wing intellectuals is also a study of the history of their contentious ideas. All displayed an anti-enlightenment motif in their writings that Nietzsche exemplified. Nietzsche was not seriously adopted by the right until during World War I, and at that time, by the radical revolutionary right. The legacy of Nietzscheism shifted to the right during the war. Reactionary modernism was a tradition of the political right.

The Weimar republic itself has been called a laboratory for competing visions of modernity, and the conservative revolutionaries exemplify this statement in that they offered yet another vision and critique of that turbulent period of the century.13 If the phenomenon of romanticism can be understood as a revolt, perhaps the Conservative Revolutionary Movement and the “political romanticism” inherent in it should be seen as an extension of this revolt: a revolt against liberalism, democracy, materialism, and mass society they so often spoke out against.

12 Edward Dimendberg, Anton Kaes, and Martin Jay, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (California: Berkeley, 1994), xvii. 13 Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic (Hill and Wang: New York, 1989), 177.

The truth of the matter is, that like Nietzsche and the avant-garde image which he manifested, these thinkers did not affect the mass political system as they perhaps wanted to but only affected the climate of the Republic. But the conservative revolutionaries were much more than just a poetic revolt. What makes this group such an important historical subject is that their collective critique helped undermine the republic. The fact that the movement did not crystallize into one political organization should not detract from its significance. In the years following the war it became major factor in shaping public opinion by means of its frequent publications, its clubs and circles, and its network of personal relations cutting across party lines in Germany. A study of the movement raises for us another seminal problem: how and why the Weimar

Republic came to be an “orphaned” republic.14 Although by 1933 the conservative revolutionaries lost their political viability, their critique had made a place in the political culture of Weimar Germany.

The framework of this study is historic, but the issues examined in the writings of these thinkers are current. Recent postmodern discourse which has found some inspiration in Oswald

Spengler’s relativism, Junger’s “phenomenology without a subject,” Schmitt’s “primary of the political,” and of course Heidegger’s entire philosophical project, should be understood in relation to these early critiques of modernism: the conservative revolutionaries were postmodern avant la lettre.15 For too long have scholars understood the writings of this group as displaying a

“Pseudo-Nietzschean style.” The power and seriousness of the group was often overshadowed by

14 Woods, The Conservative Revolution, 20. 15 Elliot Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Junger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism (Berkeley: California, 1999), 8. Also see Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 277 for the argument that the conservative revolutionaries prefigured some postmodern critiques.

7 their similarities to the Nazis: The line between Kulturkritik and Kultur Pessimismus was often overlooked.16

Historian Steven Aschheim understands Nietzscheanism to be always “tied to larger frameworks.”17 One such larger framework that Nietzscheanism certainly became tied to in the period was the politically activist anti-modernism that has been labeled as “reactionary modernism.” The “reactionary modernists” formed a coherent group in that they used the same set of metaphors, familiar words, and emotionally laden expressions that had the effect of converting technology from a component of alien, Western Zivilization into a part of “organic”

German Kultur.18 The mixture of "great enthusiasm for modern technology with a rejection of the Enlightenment and the values and institutions of liberal democracy" was characteristic of the

German Conservative Revolutionary movement. Thomas Mann, for example, called it a display of “technological romanticism.”19 They combined reactionary politics with technological enthusiasm in order to inform a new German nationalism. Junger, Schmitt, Spengler, and to a degree, Heidegger, were the thinkers who embraced technology in this regard. Moeller van den

Bruck stood somewhat apart from these thinkers. Technology and culture were symbiotic in the framework of these thinkers. The reactionary modernists pointed to a new German future against the formless chaos of capitalism. They called for a revolution from the right calling for the

“primacy of the political.”

If it true that the Weimar republic demonstrated “the crisis of classical modernity” than the cultural-political revolution that the postwar conservative revolutionaries sought must be

16 Although both critique modernity, these two German traditions are quite different. Detlev Peukert argues that Nietzsche, Weber and Mann demonstrate the former while National Socialism demonstrates the latter, The Weimar Republic, 188. 17 Aschheim, 14. 18 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge 1984), 1. 19 Reactionary Modernism, 25.

8 seen as part of this crisis.20 Historian Jeffrey Herf links the conservative revolutionaries with

Hitler in that they both seeking to restore instinct and to reject the “degeneration” of the times.

He links Junger as part of the “modernist vanguard.” From Nietzsche to Junger the modernist credo, Herf contends, was the triumph of the creative spirit over reason.

The lead figures in the conservative revolution were born between 1885 and 1895. Their formative years took place during the Great War. The war taught them contempt for bourgeois society, accustomed them to violence and gave them a sense of community which they were to search for long after the war ended.21 The out outlet of the writings took place in universities, political clubs, and magazines. The German Right comprised over 550 political clubs and 530 journals in the Weimar Republic.22 While many of these journals had a short life, Die Tat and

Die Standarte lasted the entire of the Republic. The conservative journal Die Tat, which was the major outlet for the writings for several of the group, such as Moeller van den Bruck, Spengler and Junger, began publication in 1912 and became overwhelmingly popular in the late 1920s with a readership over 100,000. Hans Zehrer would become chief editor of Die Tat in September and would make it into an influential promoter of the circle around it—the Tatkreis, and the

Conservative Revolutionary movement. In a short time the circulation of the magazine would rise to 30,000, attracting mostly a middle-class populace, and becoming a front-runner of the

Nazi propaganda machine with the magazine's stress on autarky, nationalism, and anti- capitalistic tendencies. It also provided a front for the last chancellor before Hitler’s takeover,

Kurt von Schleicher, when it took control of the Berlin paper Tägliche Rundschau in 1932.

20 Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic (Hill and Wang: New York, 1989) 21 Reactionary Modernism, 23. 22 Armin Mohler, Die konsevrative revolution, 539. Quoted in Reactionary Modernism, 25.

The Tatkreis, or "Action Circle," was a Völkisch movement which became an influential forum dedicated to a redefinition of conservative thought. It saw a blending of the conservative spirit and ideas taken from socialism and socialist movements. Since many in the conservative revolution sought a political movement with a “distinctively German nature,” 23 it consciously opposed itself against western Zivilization. Historical traditions, contended Spengler for example, were what made Germany superior to the other nations. The sociological dichotomy of

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft surmised their thinking, two terms that belonged to the “general stock of concepts” Weimar intellectuals were quite familiar with, though the concepts were quite often misunderstood.

George Mosse has described the search for a unique “third way” between western liberal parliamentary politics and Russian socialism that was essential to understand the period.

Implemented by the Nazis, the “messianic message” of a German Revolutionary sentiment that was purportedly beyond traditional politics found expression in many groups and voices in the period.24 The spiritual message, the search for a common Geist, had roots in the Youth

Movement, Lebensphilosophie, and further back to German romanticism. The search for a special kind of community beyond practical political gestures, occupied many of these radicals.

An “inner revolution” was sought after, which would restore the genuineness to the German

Volk as had been before.

That search—and those who sought to come up with an answer by any means—are what have made the conservative revolutionaries a distinctive historical topic which attracts attention.

These all-too-modern thinkers who challenged the political confines of modernism with radical

23 Reactionary Modernism, 35. 24 George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (Schoken: New York, 1964), 272.

10 force ought to be understood individually in order to say something about the nature of the group as a whole. The earlier careers of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Oswald Spengler will be dealt with concurrently, followed by Junger and Schmitt, before moving on the topic of Heidegger.

Chapter 1 The Early Conservative Revolutionaries: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Oswald Spengler

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was born in 1876 in Solingen in the Rhineland. Like

Nietzsche, Moeller’s father descended from protestant preachers. Although he trained to be a cultural historian, he was probably best known early on for the first full German translation of

Dostoyevsky. He was expelled from secondary school for his indifference towards his studies.

He came of age in the 1890s and by 1899, had written an appreciation of Nietzsche that contained all the elements of the conservative revolutionary interpretation. Nietzsche, van den

Bruck argues, was the first in Wilhelmine society to call out for the creation of a new culture.

Nietzsche’s critique of liberalism and the present were echoed in Moeller van den Bruck other writings. Man needed transcendence, van den Bruck argued, from his limited historical framework and Nietzsche understood this. Soon after publishing his eight-volume cultural history of Germany, he enlisted for the war in 1914. During the war, he wrote the essay, “The

Prussian Style,” a celebration of nationalism and what he deemed, in Nietzschean language, “the will to the state.”

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was initially the dominant figure of the conservative revolutionary movement in the Weimar Republic. He was most famous as the author of The

Third Reich, a text that went through several editions and fermented an outlook among many

German conservative literati. He also made the concept of the “Third Reich” his central slogan, a symbol of national eschatology. What is also unique in his philosophical position was his reversal of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is “politics by other means.” Instead, he implied that politics is a continuation of war by other means. Moeller van den Bruck was a major character in

12 the politically conservative June Club in Berlin.25. Like Oswald Spengler, he matured before the war, although the war was the experience which cemented his political understandings of

Germany. Like all the conservative revolutionaries, the war was the great experience which all political knowledge must be drawn from. His works in the 1920s represent the culmination of a prewar cultural criticism that first manifested itself in the writings of the radical writers Paul de

Lagarde and Julius Langbehn.26

The emphasis on a “third way” in politics, between the West and the East political programs, was sought after by many groups in the Weimar period; a third way between Marxism and capitalism. Moller van den Bruck has been called “the prophet of the third way.27 He based his idea of a third way upon the supposed cultural peculiarities of the German people. “Every people have its own socialism,” he stated.28 Die Tat took up the cause of the “third way” in the

1920s. The revolution would be democratic but not parliamentary. One may ask in respect to van den Bruck’s ideas, is it a contradiction to believe in both revolutionary yet conservative change? much like the Nazis, this group of thinkers were comfortable embracing seemingly contradictory ideas.

Moeller van den Bruck considered Germany to be a “new” nation in contrast to the “old” nations of the West. It was a country of the future with a mission to be discovered, created. He provided Germany a chiliastic ideal in which faith in the leader to come was restored. The idea of the German past needed to be restored and then pressed upon the new generations in order to fuel the greatness to come. Moeller van den Bruck’s goal was a type of medieval messianism.

Only this German messianic quest could triumph over the corrupting powers of materialism and

25 Ibid, 103. 26 Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (California: Berkeley, 1961), 183. 27 The Crisis, 281. 28 The Crisis, 282.

13 liberalism. Liberalism and parliamentarianism were the main targets of Moeller van den Bruck’s scorn. He attributed “the whole political misery of Germany” to political parties.29 He condemned the “brass-band sentimentality” of Wilhelmine Germany in 1919.30 His belief that

“ever since 1871 we have been moving backward, not forward” contains within it a still quite innate notion of progress common to the conservative revolutionaries. It’s important to expand upon it here. The conservative revolutionary movement, as demonstrated by Moeller van den

Bruck, was a utopian vision.

The idea of Germany as the “world proletariats” occupied a central place in the thought of conservative revolutionaries such as Moeller van den Bruck, Junger, Spengler, and others around the journal Die Tat.31 This seemingly contradictory self-description was the product of the drastic thinking that took place in the conservative revolutionary circles. Forced to abandon the old conservatism that had steered them wrongly, the movement adapted new understandings of society in order to co-opt other political movements such as communism, which had a lasting effect over the conservative revolutionaries as a whole—Spengler and Junger especially.

Like Nietzsche, Moeller became part of the “cultural opposition” to the Second Reich, emphasizing Germany’s unpolitical past while seeking to politicize her. From 1918 to 1925,

Moeller’s output of political writings skyrocketed.32 Importantly, Moeller emerged from the war with two rationalizations about defeat. The first, that “A people is never lost, if it understands the meaning of its defeat.” The second speaks to the “stab-in-the-back-legend” that pervaded

Weimar at this time. He states that “the home front failed…it did not understand the issues of

29 Quoted in The Crisis, 283. 30 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat (Picador: New York, 2004), 241. 31 Culture of Defeat, 237. 32 The more publicized titles were: Das Recht der jungen Volker (Munich, 1919) and Das dritte Reich (Berlin, 1923). Many articles included in the journals Gewissen, Deutsche Rundshau, Der tag quoted in Germany’s New Conservatism, 157.

14 this war.”33 Moeller reversed Clausewitz dictum that war is politics by other means, by implying that politics is a continuation of war by other means. Moeller made the concept of the “Third

Reich” his central slogan, a symbol of national eschatology.

Moeller’s political beliefs, like Nietzsche’s, invited misunderstandings.34 He must have been aware of this when he took his life in late 1925. He has been accused of being an intellectual trailblazer for fascism. The Nazis made use of his ideas where they could, including appropriating the title of his 1923 book Das Dritte Reich (meaning "The Third Reich") as a political slogan. Unlike the Nazis, Moeller van den Bruck was not an anti-semite, as he stated

“Racism must not lead to a new German problem by excluding men who belong spiritually to the race.”35 Das Dritte Reich ("The Third Empire") is his 1923 book, the ideology of which heavily informed the Nazi party. The book formulated an "ideal" of national empowerment, which resounded throughout a Germany desperate to rebound from the Treaty of Versailles: Das Dritte

Reich was Germany's Third Rome. For Moeller van den Bruck, Germany's great misfortune lies in the political system created by the Weimar Republic, one of competitive parties and liberal ideologies. The weak Weimar Republic, he argues, will have to be replaced by a new revolution, a revolution from the right. He looks also for a new political movement that will embrace both socialism and nationalism, a unique form of German Fascism. He takes all of his philosophical cues from the work of Nietzsche "who stands at the opposite pole of thought from Marx."36

When assessing the relation between the conservative revolutionaries and the Nazis, the meeting between Hitler and Moeller van den Bruck was is telling.37 Upon meeting him in 1922,

33 Germany’s New Conservatism, 160 34 For a detailed analysis see Germany’s New Conservatism, 169. 35 The Crisis ,282. 36 Cultural despair, 185. 37 Germany’s New Conservatism, 192.

Moeller van den Bruck rejected him for his "proletarian primitiveness.”38 The conservative revolutionaries starting with Moeller van den Bruck were rooted in the conservative cultural opposition to the Second Reich, as was Nietzsche. As any have argued that the conservative revolutionaries successfully undermined the republic, the extent to Nietzsche’s influence must be traced in this realm of German history.39

As he wrote in the preface to The Third Reich, his writings were meant to serve “all our political problems, from extreme Left to extreme right.”40 He is writing from the “perspective of the third party, which has not formed yet.” One is curious as to what that party may have looked like. It would be one that could:

Reach that lofty spiritual plane of political philosophy that the parties have forsaken, but which for the nation’s sake must be maintained, which the conservative must preserve and which the revolutionary must take by storm.

The lofty spiritual plane he sought became difficult to distinguish from the Nazi vision that became enacted less than ten years after his suicide in 1925.

Oswald Spengler

Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler was born in Blankenburg, 1880. Like

Nietzsche, he had imperfect health, and suffered throughout his life from migraine headaches and from an anxiety complex. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1905, he lived the life of a quiet high school teacher, writing his books in solitude in the city of Munch where lived until his death in

1936. He was most famous in his time for the controversial and popular The Decline of the West.

Completed in 1914, the book was a spell-binging work of cultural pessimism and renewed the

38 Cultural despair, 185. New Conservatism, 232. 40 Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, The Third Reich in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook ed. Martin Jay (California: Berkeley, 1995), 332.

16 idea of cyclical history, ideas it could be argued, Nietzsche shared. The book was widely discussed, even by the many who had not read it.

In it, Spengler described the state of Western man and his relation to technology; what he deemed “Faustian technology,” one that displays a “will to power over nature.”41 The

Nietzschean influences over this concept are clear. One of the most distinguishing features of the conservative revolution is the perception of the political life through aesthetic categories, which displayed in all five thinkers. The emphasis was on revolutionary change. A spiritual, metaphysical revolution was predicted to happen by many thinkers in the 1920s. Spengler offered a selective use of the Nietzschean legacy. He concocted the idea of a “beast of prey” from Nietzsche’s writings in order to justify an individual not to be stopped by bourgeois morality and customs. For Spengler, Nietzsche also provided a masculine vocabulary. He uses

Nietzsche in two ways: to qualify his “new socialism” and his anti-intellectual stance on technology.42 He saw socialism as a “Faustian ethics.” One major formula Spengler derived from

Nietzsche’s writings was the will to power. “Socialism,” Spengler wrote, “means power, power and more power.”43 His philosophy of power was very influenced by Nietzsche. Spengler’s use of the word Gesalt (shape) in understanding political and political phenomena such as war is a typical use of the aesthetic to understand the political.

He also played with the meaning of the “Third Reich.” For him it meant the “Germanic ideal.” He wrote the political essay “Prussianism or Socialism,” published 1920, which addressed the connection of the Prussian character with a “socialism of sentiment,” and from which his writings on National Socialism take flight. Spengler argued that socialism must be

41 The Decline of the West in Weimar Sourcebook, 358. 42 Reactionary Modernism, 57. 43 Quoted in Reactionary Modernism, 51.

17 made compatible the anti-liberal, authoritarian traditions of German nationalism.44 In 1920

Oswald Spengler was invited to the June Club in Berlin to debate Moeller van den Bruck. Both thinkers borrowed much from socialism in order to create a new idea of a German socialism. It was not a productive meeting. The two, true to their idealistic natures, could not see eye to eye on the issues. They left probably unaware of affinities in their thinking. Spengler like many in his generation sought connections between Germany’s collapse and the fragilities of western civilization.

Out of the neo-conservatives who stood most firmly against National Socialism, Spengler and Ernst Junger stand out. Spengler’s protest took the form of a book. The Hour of Decision was published in 1933. It was a bestseller, but the Nazis later banned it for its critiques of the party. Spengler's criticisms of liberalism were welcomed by the Nazis, but Spengler disagreed with their biological ideology and anti-Semitism. While mysticism played a key role in his own worldview, Spengler had always been a critic of the racial theories professed by the Nazis and many others in his time, and did not change his views upon Hitler's rise to power. Although himself a German nationalist, Spengler viewed the Nazis as too “narrowly German.”

Spengler, like many in the movement, held radical views of the experience of the Great

War. As related to his stark historical determinism, war and revolution came to be accepted in themselves.45 With the benefit of hindsight, the conservative revolutionaries saw the war as a

“German revolution,” a victory of the “German soul,” and paraded the “ideas of 1914” over the

“ideas of 1789.”46 It was the search for the meaning of the war that led many wartime intellectuals to construct a conservatism based on war experience. Burgfrieden—literally

44 Prussianism and Socialism, 15. 45 New Conservatism, 47. 46 New Conservatism , 49.

"fortress peace," but more accurately "party truce"—is a German term used for the political truce the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the other political parties agreed to during World

War I. The atmosphere that took place around this truce came to be described at the “Spirit of

1914.” The Spirit of 1914 refers to the commonly alleged jubilation in Germany at the outbreak of World War I. An estimated one million war poems were sent to German newspapers in

August 1914 alone. The conservative revolutionary movement was intent to focus this spirit, to harness its appeal and point it towards a perturbed postwar populace who had found the Treaty of

Versailles shameful. During the Weimar Republic the popular perception that Germany had been

“stabbed in the back” rendered the public vulnerable to the Nazis, who embraced the language of the Spirit of 1914 in their aim of seizing power throughout Germany. The presence of the stab- in-the-back-legend became almost unquestioned in the Weimar period by all-too-many. It was tapped into by the conservative revolutionary writers both intentionally and unconsciously. It shaped political opinion.47

Johann Plenge was one such writer. He wrote the book 1789 and 1914, in which the

“Ideas of 1789” (liberty) and the “Ideas of 1914” (organization) were contrasted. Plenge argued:

Under the necessity of war socialist ideas have been driven into German economic life, its organization has grown together into a new spirit, and so the assertion of our nation for mankind has given birth to the idea of 1914, the idea of German organization, the national unity of state socialism.”48 Thomas Mann was a leading proponent of the “Ideas of 1914” early in his career. He and many other intellectuals saw in the vicious carnage of World War I much more than just territorial rights and political disputes. For Plenge, whose view was representative of many; it

47 Weimar Sourcebook, 355. 48 New Conservatism, 50

19 was a war against “the destructive liberalism of the eighteenth century.”49 Mann agreed, stating that “the German mind has always been conservative,” and resistant to the ideas of the West.50

The depiction of the common ends and means of war had changed. A new vocabulary was used to describe the point of it all, to make sense of it morally. Max Scheler saw “liberation” as being replaced by war as an “inner experience.” Junger sought it as an escape from a displaced

“bourgeois Germany.”51 The war took an even deeper meaning as the fundamental characteristics of the German people were described against the others. For Thomas Mann, it was

German Kultur versus Anglo-Franco Civilization. German Kultur, which was an “inner conservatism,” was described as being deeper more significant set values than any national culture.

Following the war, the self-depictions and dichotomies intensified and became mixed with the new self-understanding many brought back from the war. Kultur was now mixed with the “community of the trenches” that existed on the front lines. An account of the technological and military developments also affected the identity of these thinkers. The uprootedness of

World War I caused a psychological vacuum after the war and caused many to re-think the categories that defined their lives pre-1914. Walter Rathenau among many saw the mass mechanization as a problem for the idea of freedom in post-war Germany. How could a man the adventurer and creator of values stand a chance against the overtly rational society that was taking over in the wake of the French, American and British victory? Yet, the war experience rejuvenated German conservatism and brought about an understanding of conservatism that was independent of the party-line. The war also gave it a distinctive anti-western note.

49 Plenge, Der Kriege und die Volkswirtschaft, 171 quoted in Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 51. 50 Thomas Mann Reflections of a Nonpolitical man (Frederick Ungar: 1985), 45. 51 Ibid, 51

The victory of National Socialism has obscured the fact that there were a number independent groups and individuals who were in their own ways concerned with establishing new allegiances.52 These revolutionaries conservatism was forward-looking to an extent, instead of backward: “Nietzschean rather than Bismarckian,” as it has been put. They can be seen as

“officers without an army,” and have been criticized because they “wore themselves out … with problems which led them far from the political issues of the day into a maze of esoteric ideologies and doctrines.”53 They were a right-wing group that, fascist or proto-fascistic, played an enormously influential, subversive role in the waning years of the Weimar Republic. Ernst

Junger, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, and the members of the

“Tat” circle, prepared a “spiritual preparation” for German National Socialism. This accounts for the situation of a German political culture in the aftermath of World War I that “facilitated the triumph of a proto-fascistic, conservative revolutionary reading of Nietzsche - a reading that was vigorously endorsed and purveyed by virtually all of the “young conservatives,” from Spengler to Carl Schmitt.”54

After World War II, the political writer Armin Mohler completed his doctoral thesis Die

Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932 (The Conservative Revolution in Germany,

1918-1932) under Karl Jaspers in 1949. The very term "conservative revolution," as it is commonly used today, was coined by Mohler. The aim of his thesis was not merely scholarly, but to provide old traditions for new pathways for a non-national-socialist Right in post-war

Germany. In the same year, he worked as a secretary for Ernst Junger, but increasingly felt he had become too moderate for his taste after the end of the war. Amongst the most crucial

52 New Conservatism, 74. 53 New Conservatism, 75. 54 “Left fascism”, 400.

21 thinkers of the Conservative Revolution he counted Ernst Junger, Oswald Spengler, Carl

Schmitt, and Thomas Mann (before his turn to liberalism). Mohler's notion of Conservative

Revolution has been described as fascism, with Roger Griffin arguing this point.55

The pessimism of the conservative revolution has affinities with the highly influential

German Youth movement. Founded in 1896, it was pivotal in the reshaping of middle class—the class of the conservative revolutionaries—values in Germany. Nietzsche was one of the organization’s heroes.56 The group was able to draw inspiration form the writings of Nietzsche such as when he wrote of the rising of the “first generation of fighters and dragon slayers.” They sought conservatism through rebellion and radicalism. The Youth thought of themselves as new nobility. In October 1913 the Youth movement formulated its declaration, stating that:

Free German Youth … under their own responsibility … are determined independently to shape their own lives. For the sake of this inner freedom … they will take action.57 The emphasis here was on “inner freedom,” the idea that the freedom. Nietzsche was seen to provide a “will of tradition” as the foundation of a new conservatism. The poet Stefan George was a hero of the Youth movement.58 He was often quoted and plagiarized.

These early cultural critics, Moeller van den Bruck and Spengler, in search for a new way in politics in the wake of the First World War, outlined and developed what they predicted would be the destiny of political life in Germany. There critiques were supplemented by Ernst Junger and Carl Schmitt—the two thinkers we turn to now.

55 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1995). 56New Conservatism, 44. 57 New Conservatism, 46. 58 New Conservatism, 45.

Chapter 2

The Later Conservative Revolutionaries: Ernst Junger and Carl Schmitt

“One must learn to march without flags”

Ernst Junger

“The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything.”

Carl Schmitt

While Spengler and Moller van den Bruck matured intellectually before the war, Junger and Schmitt were even more influenced by the war experience itself. Pivotal in the late twenties, the major characteristics of this these thinkers were similar to their predecessors in that conservatism, anti-liberalism, and conflict were emphasized. Like Nietzsche, their writings are inherently ambiguous. The “right-wing revolutionary politics and literary modernism” of Junger best displayed the Nietzschean concept of a “transformation of all values.” Junger’s writings of the 1920’s have been described as a seismograph of the destroyed the Weimar republic.59 Junger became a fascinating interpreter of militarism for a generation by way of his Nietzschean

“language of prophecy.”60 He and other Weimar intellectuals had shown war and militarism to be the forging ground toward a new post-decadent, anti-bourgeois man. Nietzsche provided these thinkers with the language of heroic struggle. He was as well known in his time as he was controversial. “I hate him,” said Sartre.61

59 Thomas Nevin, Ernst Junger and Germany: Into the Abyss 1914-1945 (Duke: Durham, 1996), 2. 60 Fuhrer and the People, 65. 61 Into the Abyss, 3.

Ernst Junger was born in Heidelberg in 1885. In his youth he was active in the

Wandervogel youth movement. In 1913, he ran away from home to join the French foreign legion for a period of time before his father retrieved him. On the outset of war in 1914, he enlisted in a Hanoverian regiment and left for the Western front. Keeping diaries until the end of the war, he was wounded ten times and received the Pour le Merite, Germany’s highest military decoration and made Lieutenant in 1919.62

The early Ernst Junger was a true existentialist; a standalone individual part of a restless generation that thought restlessness was a good thing. It’s clear from the early essay The Battle as Inner Struggle that Junger furnished a romantic gloss upon his war-time experience. Writing from the perspective of a “bold adventurer,” he examines the “will to battle” as a route to comradeship and experience. One can observe the political undertone inherent in the Junger’s view on human will:

“But in the moment of experience, all denial is futile; then every unknown is possessed of a higher and more convincing reality than all the familiar phenomena of a midday sun—a human is incapable of anything greater than mastering oneself in death.”

After World War I, Junger and Schmitt sought to distinguish themselves from nineteenth-century romanticism but their enthusiasm for the “Fronterlebnis” was a romantic vision nonetheless.63

The conservative revolutionaries used symbolism, metaphor and analogy to transform their sentiments into a political vision. They were seen as the intellectual advance of the “rightest revolution.” Junger’s belief that “essential is not what we are fighting for, but how we fight,” has a strict affinity with Nietzsche’s remark in The Gay Science that “I say unto you: it is the good

62 Into the Abyss, 41. 63 Reactionary Modernism, 15.

24 war that hallows any cause.”64 Junger soon inverted Spengler’s pessimism in his writings by heralding the coming German workers state which he believed would be shaped by the “heroic realism” which he displayed in the Great War.65 Schmitt, Junger and the other conservative revolutionaries redefined the vocabulary of Romanticism. They used the word romantic to refer to the language of “will and decision” as opposed to traditional anti-industrial imagery.66 He wrote sentimentally of the “impressions of blood, roses, and splendid tears.” Junger’s work and approach have been seen as a manifestation of the literary mode deemed “heroic realism.”67 In

Stahlgewittern, Junger’s war diaries translated as Storm of Steel, were his first major work.

Junger’s war book launched the swarm that was published in the late twenties.

Like all the conservative revolutionaries, Junger was a “tough Nietzschean.” In Junger’s theoretical essay Der Arbeiter, 1932, the concept of the “worker” succeeds that of the warrior as an ideal type man in the new society. What’s clear in this new formulation is the influence of the

Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati in Junger’s writings. The “worker” emerged as a historical necessity in the age of technology He also put forth the concept of “total mobilization” in this publication, perhaps his most influential and original concept. Total mobilization is the remedy for the loss of individual freedom in contemporary society. Beginning with a Hegelian identity between freedom and obedience, Junger stated that through total participation in society, the individual would gain total immersion in society.

64 Freidrich Nietzsche, Gay Science, 145. 65 Elliot Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Junger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism (Berkeley: California, 1999), 4. 66 Reactionary Modernism, 30. 67 Ernst Junger, “Der heroisch Realismus,” Literarische Welt, vi, No. 13 (1930), 3. in Germany’s New Conservatism, 183.

Karl Heinz Bohrer’s study of Ernst Junger, Die Asthetik des Schreckens, placed Ernst

Junger in postmodernist discourse.68 He took the anti-enlightenment motifs in Junger’s books and essays, represented in notions like “shock” from the war diaries, to be emblematic of his oeuvre. Later scholars showed how his early works and later works could be divided into categories of “war literature” “metaphysical redemption” respectively.69

For Junger, Nazism failed to overcome the nihilism at the heart of contemporary man. He deemed National Socialism the “wrong a-metaphysical solution.”70 But did he make fascism intellectually acceptable by spiritualizing the war experience? Perhaps Junger provided the

“intellectual superstructure” for the NSDAP.71 A political reform was certainly not enough for our present crisis in the eyes of Ernst Junger. In a sense, he discarded the possibility of conservatism as hopeless. What was important was his quest for heroism which lasted the entirety of his literary career. At the outset of World War II, Junger reportedly had said “I have chosen for myself an elevated position where I can observe how these creatures devour each other”72 In 1914 he joined the army to seek danger; in 1939 he joined to seek refuge.

Membership in the army meant no party interference. What Moeller, Spengler, and Junger had in common was an antipathy toward sterile bourgeois values and its social order. They were extreme reactions to an equally extreme historical circumstance. According to Edgar Jung,

German revolution has two roots, one nationalistic and one conservative and Junger sought to explore both.73

68 Dubious Past, 9. 69 See Martin Konitzer, Ernst Junger (New York: Campus, 1993). 70 J.P. Stern, The Fuhrer and the People (California: Berkeley, 1975), 81. 71 JP Stern, Ernst Junger (Yale, 1953), 29. 72 Quoted in New Conservatism, 216. 73 New Conservatism, 201

Ernst Junger wrote about ten books and a hundred essays on the themes of nationalism, heroism and sacrifice. The war experience was the “lost treasure” of the Right, something that he was intent of recapturing:

In the course of thousands of years the wildness, brutality, and bright colors of desire have been smoothed and dampened by a civilization that erects a fence around man’s sheer lust. It is true that refinement has ennobled man and enlightened man, but an animal still lies in the substrate of his being.74 The case has been made that Junger’s prose draws heavily from Nietzsche, with its eruptive and antirational aspects. In the 1920’s Junger read Georges Sorel and sympathized with the hatred of bourgeois society displayed in the Marxist’s writings.75 Junger’s political nihilism is best displayed in his work “On Danger.” he compares the bourgeois “concept of security” with his own ideal of heroic self-sacrifice. He writes:

The peculiarity of the bourgeois relation to danger lies in his perception of it as an irresolvable contradiction to order that is, as senseless . . . bourgeois values possess little validity for the believing person . . . through misfortune and danger, fate draws the mortal into the sphere of the highest order.76 Here one senses that Junger’s language of sacrifice has the quality of disguising itself as a description of a natural event. In the 1920s Junger published articles in several right-wing nationalist journals and more novels. As in Storm of Steel, in the book Feuer und Blut (1925,

"Fire and Blood"), Junger glorified war as an internal and natural event. He described war in meteorological terms. As in the title of his war diaries, war was an inevitable and natural storm that man must learn to accept. A helpful key to the understanding of the aesthetic dimensions and understanding of Junger’s politics was published in Junger’s lifetime. Walter Benjamin’s critique of fascism, put forth in a review of a book edited by Junger himself, describes the mindset of the disposition of the conservative revolutionaries.

74 From “Battle as Inner Struggle,” quoted in Dubious Past, 27. 75 Dubious Past, 29. 76 “On Danger” in Weimar Sourcebook, 370.

The Aestheticization of Politics

Nietzsche's willingness to aestheticize politics has for some time suggested distinct affinities with fascism. Walter Benjamin’s views on fascist aesthetics were published in 1930 in a review of Ernst Junger’s edited essay collection, Krieg and Krieger (War and Warriors). The collection was a tribute to the “front-line” experience that so many in the Weimar period sought to make sense of. Benjamin argued that the right-wing was attracted to fascism because the movement seemed to be able to solve the cultural crisis in bourgeois society.77 Creativity, beauty and aesthetic form would take the place of materialism and chaotic liberalism.

Benjamin’s main thrust in the essay, that the aesthetic dictum “art for art’s sake” was converted to “war for wars sake,” embodies Benjamin’s belief that fascism is the aestheticization of violence and politics:

“The most rabidly decadent origins of this new theory of war are emblazoned on their foreheads: it is nothing other than an uninhibited translation of the principles of l’art pour l’art to war itself.”78

Benjamin believed that the postwar right’s “new theory of war” was to transform the defeat that was experienced in the war into a victory of form and beauty over chaos.79 War was now seen to be an exhilarating aesthetic experience, one that promised to offer the chance for a new and better society. But by making the war the subject of aesthetic contemplation, the social and political interests that brought the war about have been obscured by the conservative revolutionaries. Junger’s descriptions of the war landscape, according to Benjamin, were a perversion of the traditional use of German romantic imagery:

With as much bitterness as possible, it must be said that the German feeling of nature has had an undreamt-of upsurge in the face of this “landscape of total mobilization

77 Reactionary Modernism, 31. 78 Weimar Sourcebook, 163. 79 Reactionary Modernism, 33.

. . . ” Technology wants to recreate German Idealism’s heroic features with ribbons of fire and approach trenches. It went astray. For what it took to be the heroic features were those of Hippocrates, the features of death. The dialectic of progress Benjamin espouses here takes place through he repression of individuals. Benjamin was the first to realize that the right was not a backward looking pastoralism, but a revolt against rationalism while looking towards the future: a “cult of technics.”80 The language of expression was used upon historical events. The power and violence of warfare was seen as an “external expression” towards life. And the distinction between history and nature became blurred as in Junger’s description of the frontlines in Storm of Steel, as

Benjamin sought to demonstrate.

Junger compared the experiences of war to fire—feuerwalze, a “waltz of fire.”81 He took the experience of war to be a transcendental and stated prophetically that the future of political commitment would be changed entirely from the fire of war: “Now our actions must be guided by quite different forces, very dark forces of the blood, but one senses that the blood possesses a profound logic.”82 In addition to these sentiments Junger developed a more authoritarian political outlook in the theoretical essay Der Arbeiter, 1932, with the concept of the “worker” succeeding that of the warrior as an ideal type of man. His idea of a totally mobilized society has direct affinities with his contemporary Carl Schmitt, who he exchanged many of these early ideas with.83

80 Reactionary Modernism, 33. 81 Culture of Defeat, 233. 82 Conservative Revolution, 20. 83 Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt: Letters 1930-1983. Edited, annotated by Helmuth Kiesel. (Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1999.)

Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt, the son of Roman Catholic parents from Plettenberg, Westphalia, was born

1888. He passed his law school exams in 1915 and then volunteered for the army in 1916.

Afterword, he taught at universities afterward. As a young man, Schmitt was a devoted Catholic until he lost his faith after World War I. Schmitt joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933 and defended the night of Long Knives as the “highest form of administrative justice” in infamous legal brief.84 But before all this occurred, Schmitt became one of the most respected German political scientists of his day with the publication of numerous political essays and books which have been seen to undermine the legal credibility and authority of the Weimar republic. Schmitt is probably to most well-known of the conservative revolutionaries today, due to the lasting interest in his criticisms of liberalism, parliamentary democracy, and liberal cosmopolitanism.85

Out of the thinkers examined here, Schmitt was certainly the most affirming of the national

Socialists.

Stating that “Everything romantic stands in the service of other, unromantic energies,” sought to classify the nature of the “settled bourgeois order” that was inherently of the true political action that he deemed was necessary at the time.86 He was an advocate of the infamous theory of Decisionism (Dezisionismus)—the idea that a political and jurisprudential doctrine which states that legal precepts are the product of decisions made by political or legal bodies.

Schmitt based his theory of Decisionism upon the Italian example of Mussolini’s’ government.

The two major elements of the model were a common bond and the leader principle.

84 Reactionary modernism, 116. 85 “Carl Schmitt” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, First published Sat Aug 7, 2010. 86 Reactionary modernism, 117.

Schmitt and Spengler both saw the bourgeois parliamentary system as a limited class institution and called for a “new political forum.” Political Corporatism was developed in

Schmitt’s further writings.

When he became the President of the Union of National Socialist Jurists, the Nazis sought to use his theories as justifications for their use of power. His most influential text is perhaps of The Concept of the Political, an attack on “liberal-neutralist” political ideas, arguing conflict was embedded in existence itself and that the State itself presupposes the notion of politics and politics is governed by the conflict between friend and foe. Published 1927, it argued that any situation creates its own legality and obviates the normative law. Schmitt’s view was nihilistic: it justified war but not the victors of war, much like Junger’s theoretical tracts.

Schmitt wrote that “Bolshevism and fascism are like all dictatorships anti-liberal, but not necessarily anti-democratic” and sought to put a wedge between liberalism and democracy.87

The anti-utopian political ontology is inherent in only some of the conservative revolutionary’s writings. Carl Schmitt believed the breakdown of liberal parliamentary to be inevitable as the instability of Weimar Germany was unfolding before his eyes. With less emphasis on the “inner freedom” that the other conservative revolutionaries made a focus,

Schmitt contributed heavily to the political culture of Weimar Germany with these highly aggressive and dismissive political tracts.

In 1923, written in “On the Contradiction between Parliamentarianism and Democracy,”

Schmitt attempted to undercut the idea that rational discourse and legal formalism wee enough to create political legitimacy:

87 Quoted in Reactionary modernism, 25.

The situation of parliamentarianism is critical today because the development of modern mass democracy has made public discussion an empty formalism. . . The norms of parliamentary law . . . like a superfluous decoration, useless and even embarrassing. . .88

The belief brought out in the essay further along is that actual democracy is a sham if it is to be premised on the idea of equality. Worse off, it demands the “erasure of heterogeneity. Certainly,

Schmitt’s many essays with containing ideas such as these contributed heavily to the “revolution form the right.” The Nietzschean character—of being hostile to all “bloodless” ideas—is evident although Schmitt is certainly the least conscious of Nietzsche conservative inheritors.

88 “On the Contradiction between Parliamentarianism and Democracy,” in Weimar Sourcebook, 337.

Chapter 3

The Ambivalent Voice Martin Heidegger

The case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger has been covered to an almost excessive extent. But it is important to mention here the role he played within the movement, even if it a distance. Martin Heidegger was born in Messkirch, Germany, on September 26, 1889. Messkirch was then a quiet, conservative, religious rural town, and as such was a formative influence on

Heidegger and his philosophical thought. Upon publication in 1927 of his monumental Being of

Time, he became bit of a celebrity. His philosophy is controversial to this day due to his complicity with National Socialism, becoming a member of the party in 1933.

Though Heidegger has been understood to be only peripheral to the movement, his chapter in its history is nonetheless pivotal. He held long correspondence with Junger and

Schmitt, and developed much of his attitude on the “question concerning technology” with them.89 His views on the subject certainly effected his initial reception of the Nazi party.

Heidegger believed that the Germans had a “special mission” in the world. Although his affair with National Socialism did not last long, his “antimodernist” protest surely had affinities with it.

From 133 to 1934, he was the appointed rector of University of Freiburg. In the speeches he delivered at that time, he was an exponent of the Nazi political practice and program. But like the conservative revolutionaries, he did not understand the Nazi movement to be an effective remedy of the ills of society. yet, he repeated the antimodernist message of the party until he lost favor with the party. Heidegger viewed Western history and philosophy as a long process of

89 Reactionary Modernism, 109.

33 decay set in motion form the Greek activist stance to dominate nature.90 He believed that the total “forgetting of Being” was the disaster awaiting man if they gave into the forces of western

Nihilism—the concept Nietzsche developed the most. Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche in a series of seminar courses in the 1930s have been understood as Heidegger’s coming to grips with the misgiven project of the Nazis: in book form they span a thousand pages.

Although the cultural pessimism and philosophical outlook of Heidegger has affinities with the conservative revolutionaries, he did not in his writings condone any radical political maneuvers. It has been argued that Heidegger’s corpus lacks any ethics or politics entirely.91

Whatever the case may be, it certainly separates him from both the conservative revolutionaries and the National Socialists that he saw a serious dichotomy between technologies vs. the

“German Soul.”92 They were irreconcilable.

Two important and recurring themes of Heidegger's writings that have been influential in the period are poetry and technology.93 Heidegger sees poetry and technology as two contrasting ways of "revealing." Poetry reveals Being in the way in which, if it is genuine, it “commences” something new. Technology, on the other hand, when it gets going, inaugurates the world of the dichotomous subject and object, which modern philosophy commencing with Descartes also reveals. But with modern technology a new stage of revealing is reached, in which the subject- object distinction is overcome even in the "material" world of technology. The essence of modern technology is the conversion of the whole universe of beings into an undifferentiated

"standing reserve" of energy available for any use to which humans choose to put it. Heidegger

90 Reactionary Modernism, 115. 91 George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago, 1991). 92 Reactionary Modernism, 114. 93 “Martin Heidegger” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published Wed Oct 12, 2011.

34 described the essence of modern technology as "enframing." These ways of understanding the world show a philosopher that had, much like the rest of the conservative revolutionaries, too nuanced of an outlook to be seen as entirely similar.

Conclusion

Thomas Mann remarked at the end of World War I that the 20th century was a century that has faith and that the 19th century was a century without faith.94 That was what made them different. However this quote is to be understood, it’s clear that the period in which Mann was writing in was certainly an era that had acted brashly. Like many who defined the period, the conservative revolutionaries broke with the elders of their generation—Mann, Meinecke, Weber and others, and away from the opportunity to be seen as a republican conservative movement.

Junger, Moeller, and Spengler and Schmitt to a degree, were unaware of the contradiction between the logic of conservatism and the approach they began to take; that they lost track of what their actual political commitment was.95 The nomenclature between left and Right no longer contained meaning.96 The “revolution from the Right” became a “homeless Right.”

They combined reactionary politics with technological enthusiasm in order to inform a new German nationalism. Junger, Schmitt, Spengler, and to a degree, Heidegger, were the thinkers who embraced technology in this regard. Moeller van den Bruck stood somewhat apart from these thinkers. Technology and culture were symbiotic in the framework of these thinkers.

The reactionary modernists pointed to a new German future against the formless chaos of capitalism. They called for a revolution from the right calling for the “primacy of the political.”

Why was this case? As Roger Woods has argued, the arguments put forward by the conservative revolutionaries showed blindness to towards the true nature of the Nazis.97 Yet, the political thinking and arguments of the group also show continuity with the Nazis: a commitment

94 New Conservatism, 48. 95 Reactionary Modernism, 117. 96 New Conservatism, 119. 97 Conservative revolution, 134.

36 to activism, infatuation with conflict, and a disregard to the traditional programs of politics.

Regardless of the criticisms on the Nazis that the conservative revolutionaries all launched forth, there was no fundamental objection to the National Socialist assumption of power. Moreover, the dilemma and failure of working out a “conservative revolutionary” program has been studied and should be understood in comparing the group to the Nazis.

In recent years the German topic of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the "Struggle to come to terms with the past"—has led one back to the conservative revolutionaries and the nature of their critique. Their intellectual genealogy has led many to question their role in the abandonment of the Weimar republic that was responsible for so much. Thomas Mann in 1946 recalled that Hofmansthal was well aware of the inspiration that his addresses gave to the emerging Nazi movement and many others in the republic.98 The romantic ideas of the “Young

Conservatives” never appealed to the masses. Instead their ideas were taken over and distorted, much like Nietzsche’s, by the National Socialism movement.

But perhaps if romanticism can be understood as a revolt, perhaps the conservative revolutionary movement and the “political romanticism” affiliated with it should be seen as an extension of this revolt. Nietzsche has been called “the culture hero of modernism, a cultural revolution comparable to the Reformation or the Enlightenment.” The “crisis of the German mind,” that is, the felt separation in German society between the intellectual and political sphere led many to lament the lost contact with “life,” and to speak of the “legion of seekers” who sought a new faith and tradition in the Weimar period. Spengler’s relativism, Junger’s

“phenomenology without a subject,” Schmitt’s “primary of the political,” and of course

Heidegger’s entire philosophical project, should be understood in relation to these early critiques

98 New Conservatism, 11.

37 of modernism. The writings of this group displayed much more than just a “Pseudo-Nietzschean style.” All displayed an anti-enlightenment motif in their writings that Nietzsche exemplified.

Nietzsche was not seriously adopted by the right until during World War I, and at that time, by the radical revolutionary right. The legacy of Nietzscheism shifted to the right during the war.

Reactionary modernism was a tradition of the political right.

If it true that the Weimar republic demonstrated “the crisis of classical modernity” than the cultural-political revolution that the postwar conservative revolutionaries sought must be seen as part of this crisis.

Bibliography

Primary Sources Ernst Junger. Storm of Steel, Translated by Michael Hofmann (Penguin: London, 2004) Friedrich Nietzsche. Basic Works. Translated and Edited by Walter Kaufman ---. The Portable Nietzsche. Translated and Edited by Walter Kaufman ---. The Will to Power. Translated and Edited by Walter Kaufman Critics of Modernity: The Literature of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1890-1933. Edited by Martin Travers. New York. Peter Lang Publishing, 2001 The Weimar Republic Sourcebook Edited by Anton Kaes and Martin Jay.

Secondary Sources Aschheim, Steven. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890 – 1990, University of California Press (1994) Bergmann, Peter. Nietzsche, "The Last Antipolitical German"

Derrida, Jacques The Ear of the Other: Otobigraphy, Transference, Translation (Lincoln: Nebraska, 1988) Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, Norton (2001) Golomb, Jacob. Editor. Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton: 2002). Herf, Jeffrey. (2002). Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press. Hinton, Thomas. Nietzsche in German Politics and Society, 1890-1918 (1986) Kaufman, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) Modris Eksteins. Rites of Spring. The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age Stern, Fritz. (1974). The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology Stern, J.P. The Fuhrer and the People (California: Berkeley, 1975). Thomas Nevin. Ernst Junger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914–1945

Wolin, Richard. “Left fascism: George Bataille and the German Ideology.” Constellations Volume 2, No 3, 1996. ---“Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror.” Political Theory Vol. 20 No. 3 (August 1992), 424-427. Woods, Roger. The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (1996)