Conservative Revolution (Weimar Germany)
보수 혁명 (바이마르 독일)
The name for the current of anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian nationalist intellectuals active in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) after Germany's defeat in the First World War. Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt are counted among them; instead of the restoration sought by the old conservatism they proclaimed a revolution that would "create what is worth preserving". They revered Nietzsche as their master, and historians treat the current as having paved the way for Nazism. The name spread through Armin Mohler's book of 1949, and the concept itself is disputed.
In depth
How did "conservative" and "revolution" become one phrase?
To conserve is to preserve and revolution is to overturn, so "conservative revolution" sounds like a contradiction. Yet that contradiction was precisely the self-understanding of the right-wing intellectuals of Weimar Germany. They were not old conservatives trying to bring back the monarchy that fell with the defeat and the November Revolution of 1918. What they hated was the liberalism, parliamentary democracy and equality that had come since the French Revolution of 1789, and the Weimar Republic built on them; their revolution was to overturn all this and establish a new order based on "eternal values".
The phrase was used by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal at the end of his 1927 lecture at the University of Munich, "Literature as the Spiritual Space of the Nation". Speaking of a great countermovement against the Renaissance and Reformation of the sixteenth century, he concluded: "The process I am speaking of is nothing other than a conservative revolution on a scale unknown to European history." Hofmannsthal himself did not mean it politically, but the nationalist camp eagerly took it up.
Der Prozeß, von dem ich rede, ist nichts anderes als eine konservative Revolution von einem Umfange, wie die europäische Geschichte ihn nicht kennt.
It became the name for the whole current, as it is today, only after the Second World War. The Swiss-born Armin Mohler, once Ernst Jünger's secretary, spread it with his 1949 dissertation published as The Conservative Revolution in Germany 1918–1932. Mohler sorted some 350 people into five groups: national revolutionaries, young conservatives, völkisch nationalists, the Bündische (youth leagues), and the rural people's movement.
Who argued what?
The current had no single organisation and no unified doctrine; it was a loose web of journals, circles and books. Oswald Spengler, who in The Decline of the West (1918–1922) diagnosed Western civilisation as having entered its decline, put forward in Prussianism and Socialism (1919) a "Prussian socialism" opposed to English liberalism. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, in The Third Reich (1923), portrayed liberalism as a disease dissolving the nation and dreamed of a "third empire" beyond left and right; he defined conservatism as creating what is worth preserving. Ernst Jünger, who glorified the experience of the First World War trenches, was the leading national revolutionary, and in The Worker (1932) he sketched a warrior-worker state suited to the age of technology and total mobilisation. The jurist Carl Schmitt attacked parliamentarism and saw the distinction between friend and enemy as the essence of politics.
Their "socialism" had nothing to do with Marxism. As the German Wikipedia puts it, concepts and analyses such as who should control the means of production, how national income should be distributed or how to view class struggle are sought here in vain. Socialism meant a vague order in which individuals gave up their selfishness to serve the national community under the authority of the state; it rejected internationalism and accepted a "natural hierarchy". Some national revolutionaries drew close to National Bolshevism, which sympathised with the Soviet Union.
What place did Nietzsche hold in this current?
Conservative revolutionaries frequently invoked Nietzsche as their master and main intellectual influence. They took from him contempt for Christian ethics, democracy, modernity and equality, and read the "revaluation of all values" and the "Übermensch" as a call to smash the old bourgeois world and build an order led by a new elite. That Nietzsche despised German nationalism and antisemitism was mostly left out of this reading.
The institution that underpinned this appropriation was the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar. From 1923 Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche courted Spengler, made him a board member of the foundation and had him speak at its major occasions. Alfred Baeumler, who read Nietzsche as a political philosopher, published Nietzsche, the Philosopher and Politician in 1931 and later became a leading Nazi philosopher. In the history of Nietzsche's reception the Conservative Revolution was the most important channel through which Nietzsche was pulled to the right.
What was its relation to Nazism?
The German Wikipedia records that historians treat the Conservative Revolution as having paved the way for Nazi rule. Conservative revolutionaries were mostly not Nazi party members and sometimes despised the vulgarity of the mass party, but neither did they reject Nazi ideas in principle. In his diary on 26 September 1933 Thomas Mann called Nazism "the political reality of that conservative revolution". Reactions after 1933 varied: some, like Schmitt, collaborated actively; others, like Spengler and Jünger, kept their distance; and some, like Ernst Niekisch, resisted the Nazis and were imprisoned.
The Marxist analysis is represented above all by Lukács's The Destruction of Reason (1954). Lukács traced a genealogy of German irrationalism from Schelling through Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and the philosophy of life to fascism, and held in particular that Spengler's The Decline of the West, by "reconstructing [German vitalism] as a philosophy of militant reaction" after the First World War, became a direct prelude to fascist philosophy. The crisis of the German bourgeoisie in the age of imperialism, in his view, took the form of an assault on reason.
Why is the concept itself disputed?
Mohler's scheme carried an intention to construct a "clean" tradition of the German right distinct from Nazism. The sociologist Stefan Breuer criticised "Conservative Revolution" as "one of the most successful creations of recent intellectual historiography" but an untenable concept. The historian Volker Weiß wrote that Mohler left out the Nazi entanglements of figures like Carl Schmitt while including outright antisemites such as Chamberlain, and that "with the invention of the 'Conservative Revolution' Mohler created a refuge for the intellectual world of fascism immediately after its defeat".
The debate is not only about the past. As the opening of the German Wikipedia article notes, today's German New Right and the French Nouvelle Droite draw directly on the ideological patterns of the Conservative Revolution. This entry is therefore both a current of the Weimar era and a name the far right of today reaches for when it builds its own genealogy.