From Alain de Benoist’s Preface
“There are two questions to which the Germans of 1945 would respond to in all likelihood with a distraught mimicry or a shrug of the shoulders. The first would be: who was the last great Prussian? The other: who was the real adversary of Hitler in Germany? One can hesitate a long time and propose, to see, various names that one will reject all the same. But to finish, one will find the only good response to these two questions.”
“Ernst Niekisch”
“Who was Ernst Niekisch? Out of a hundred Germans, it is not likely to find more than one who would say it. Born in Silesia in 1889, Ernst Niekisch died in Berlin in 1967; his enterprises having failed, he died in obscurity. But he was one of the great Germans of the 20th century, and his failure is perhaps a part of and a reflection of the Germany’s failure, the obscurity of his name a symptom of the loss, among the Germans, of a historical consciousness and of self awareness.”
These lines of Sebastian Haffner, will, without a doubt, surprise more than one reader. Niekisch is a mystery, maintained also in part by himself, and the work that he devoted himself to has not been entirely elucidated to date. Within the Conservative Revolution, Niekisch was without a doubt the most remarkable of those who are frequently called “the left men of the right.” He was also the major exponent of “National Bolshevism,” a problematic expression in many respects. How can we clarify this mystery of Niekisch, except by bringing his works to public knowledge and retracing the major stages of his biography? (...)
At the same time, Niekisch also met Ernst Jünger, whose influence was also equally large on the Bündisch milieu. In 1930, Ernst Jünger would become the co-editor with Werner Lass of the “überbündisch” weekly, Die Kommenden, founded in 1925 and very quickly diffused through most Bündisch groups. It was in the autumn of 1927 that Niekisch and Jünger met for the first time. The contact was decisive, and the close links that were established between the two men were to quickly manifest themselves by active collaboration. Jünger would publish 18 articles in Widerstand between April 4th, 1927 and the 8th of September 1933. At the same time Niekisch became close to the brother of Ernst Jünger, Friedrich Georg, and with his circle: Richard Schapke, who was the future leader of Die Kommenden, the anti-Christian ideologue Friedrich Hielscher, and through contact with Jünger by the intermediary of Winnig, Franz Schauwecker, etc. Contrary to what is sometimes written, Jünger would never be a National Bolshevik, but he provided the National Bolsheviks with some of the essential elements of their conceptual cadre. And it was under the influence of Jünger, “the man of vision”, Niekisch said, that the editors of Widerstand would radicalize their ideas on the nation and extol a “new aristocracy” inspired by a Jüngerian “heroic realism.”
(...)
Revelatory in this respect was the polemic that, in 1931, opposed Niekisch by Wilhelm Stapel, co-editor of the new conservative magazine Deutsches Volkstum. This magazine, however, was not fundamentally hostile to him. It sometimes even published texts by him and his other co-editor, Albrecht Eric Günther, in which one could read the articles in Widerstand, which followed closely in 1919-1920 the experience of “Hamburg National Communism.” In 1931, listing Entscheidung, the book published by Niekisch in the proceeding year, Stapel was nonetheless very worried about the emergence of a “German National Communism.” The book, he affirmed, belonged to the category of “either-or books,” that is to say, it merely, in Manichean fashion, addresses two brutal alternatives, as if there did not exist a third solution: “All of the German social universe, for example, is divided for Niekisch into “peasants” or “bourgeoisie.” The peasant is all that is pleasing to him (and pleasing to me), the bourgeois all that is displeasing to him (and displeasing to me). But this dichotomy is purely arbitrary. Reality is not like that.” Accused of multiplying the oppositions between “phantoms,” Niekisch also saw himself accused of “Romantic” Prussianism and opposition to the idea of Empire
(Reichsgedanke). To conclude, Stapel declared that if the ideas of Niekisch were to be realized politically, it would simply be “the end of the German people.” Niekisch would respond to him in Widerstand in July 1931.
With the National Socialists, the clash was more brutal. It would also be more determinant. Niekisch was, in effect, without contest, the one man in the Conservative Revolution who denounced, from very early on and with the most vigor, the Hitlerist movement. Around 1927, he accused Nazism of engaging itself in an dead end and only being motivated by “resentment” against the Jews and the November Revolution. Two years later, he systematized his critique in a new article dedicated to Hitlerism.
This would culminate in the celebrated booklet published in 1932: Hitler – ein Deutsches Verhängis.
The opposition between Hitler and Niekisch evidently first holds from the rigorously opposed judgments that they both had on the Soviet Revolution and the nature of Bolshevism. Not only did the NSDAP profess a fanatical anticommunism, but it inherited the Russophobia of Paul Lagarde, and in a very general fashion, the racial anti-Slavism then common in the Völkisch milieu – it only envisioned Ostorientierung in the expansionist and imperialist sense. For the National-Socialists, was neither “national,” and even less “Prussian,” since it was essentially internationalist and “Jewish.” Niekisch drew the conclusion that the “socialism” which Hitler claimed was a pure facade and that his irreducible anticommunism betrayed, despite all that he could say, his affinities with the Western, liberal, bourgeois universe. From 1929, this critique reinforced the theme of German protest against the “Roman” world. While in 1926, Niekisch then attributed Italian Fascism the merit of sharing “The intellectual structure of Bolshevism: autocracy, hatred of liberalism, use of force,” three years later, far from opposing the “modernist” ideology of Fascism to the “archaic” National-Socialism, as certain authors of the Conservative Revolution did, it is, on the contrary, primarily because the fascist movement was “Roman” and “Occidental” that he pronounced a condemnation of Hitler without appeal. In the same epoch, Ernst Jünger also affirmed: “Indubitably, Fascism is nothing other than the late form of liberalism … a brutal shorthand of the liberal regime.” Niekisch therefore takes as his rival, not the name of liberal democracy, but on the contrary, the detested liberal and bourgeois universe. From there the arguments successively cascade. Niekisch recognized that at its beginning Hitlerism could have embodied the German protest against the Diktat of Versailles, but around 1923, he added that Hitler betrayed his mission and succumbed to the Roman and Catholic solicitations to which his Austrian origins predestined him: “He who is Nazi will soon be Catholic!” Hitler’s ideology, which made “race” the universal explicative factor and the “Jew” the scapegoat par excellence, was not German, but Bavarian, “Southern,” and reactionary. Like a Roman potentate, Hitler maintained around his personality an “oriental” cult, and, to do this, appealed to the masses, whom he basely flattered. He was the opposite of the Prussian homo politicus, inspired by Protestantism and Frederick the Great. His “Third Reich,” then, was less a political project than a “religious hope.” Not only was Hitler not a true revolutionary anti-capitalist, his “socialism” only being a lure to use radicalized petit-bourgeois, but in searching for the good grace of Italy, England, and France – that Niekisch denounced under the name of “BritoGermania,” the Anglophilia of the “Hitler-Hess line” – it placed him “on the terrain of Versailles,” which showed that he had taken the role of “the gendarme of the West” by launching a “crusade” against Bolshevism. And Niekisch risked this prophecy: If Germany misguidedly gives itself to Hitler, it will surely go towards disaster. “It will remain an exhausted people … without hope, and the order of Versailles will only be stronger than ever.”
Beginning in 1932, Niekisch made a new appeal to “the protesting Germans against fascism.” “The cohorts of Hitler,” he wrote, “find themselves on German soil as Southern European occupying troops!” To Goebbels, who he wanted to convince, he retorted one day, “You pretend to be National-Socialists, but is there anything national in your movement? Your salute is Roman, your flag equally so, the color of the uniforms of your troops makes one think of a Balkan occupation arm, your military parades of Catholic high masses! No, the German nation is another thing, it was not born in the fever of Bavarian beer halls! It was born in the protest against Rome, with the clear breeze of Protestantism and of the Prussian spirit.” Shortly after, Niekisch presented his proofs in his pamphlet, Hitler – ein Deutsches Verhängis, to Ernst Jünger, who had returned to visit Berlin in the company of Carl Schmitt and Arnolt Bronnen. The text completes his premonition of a final catastrophe in the East. Jünger would say: “Niekisch gave me the effect of a man in the middle of making a leap; I could not dissuade him from publishing the book.” Illustrated with the striking drawings of A. Paul Weber, the pamphlet attained a circulation of 40,000 readers in that year. The NSDAP struck back by launching a press campaign against Niekisch. At that date, Widerstand was already regularly cited in the monthly press review (Pressebericht) of the Reichsführer SS as one of the “principal adversarial organs” (Hauptorgane der Gegner).
Around 1930, explained Sebastian Haffner, “Hitler and Niekisch were antipodal to each other, the two being the most irreconcilable you could find in Germany. The only thing they had in common, was their declared hate for the Weimar Republic, their firm will to make it fall such that it would fall in every manner and to be the heir of the deceased. For the rest, their programs were opposed to each other, point by point: Hitler would want vengeance on the “criminals of November;” Niekisch would want the triumph of the November Revolution; Hitler would want a Fascist counter-revolution, Niekisch would want a socialist revolution; Hitler, the anti-bolshevik crusade and the colonization of Russia with the tacit complicity of the West, Niekisch, the alliance with Bolshevik Russia against the West. Hitler throught in the terms of “race” and “space,” Niekisch in terms of “class” and “state.” Hitler would want to win the crowds so he could lead them to capitalist and imperialist politics, Niekisch would want to win the crowds so he could lead them to Prussian socialism and ascetic politics.” Jünger would declare on his part: “Niekisch was then in a bit of a situation where we find the Greens today. He was quite on the right path, and if I could express myself thus, he would have been capable of influencing the evolution towards the left: and that would have gained him a stronger consensus, particularly in the East. Compared to him, Hitler did cheap work, and that bought him this monstrous popularity.”
In the Spring of 1932, on the occasion of the presidential elections, Niekisch tried to submit his candidacy, with the double title of the National-Revolutionary movement and of the Landvolkbewegung, whose leader, Claus Heim, of the Peasant revolt in Schleswig-Holstein, found himself imprisoned then. But, the other National-Bolshevik groups had already taken a position in favor of Thaelmann (the communist candidate), Claus Heim, who had already given his accord, reversed his support and the project failed. Some months later, Niekisch participated, beside twenty academics and researchers, in a voyage to the Soviet Union organized, from August 23rd to September 14th, by the Working Group for the Study of the Soviet Russian Planned Economy (Arplan). This group created on the margins of the activities of Vörkampfer by the economist Friedrich Lenz, for the First Secretary Arvid Harnack, who served in the same Freikorps as Friedrich Hielscher and who was to later become famous within the celebrated “Red Orchestra” espionage network. The Arplan delegation was received in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov. Niekisch, whose sojourn would be cut sort by illness, encountered Karl Radek on this occasion. On his return, he published in Widerstand a resounding article, in which he gave tribute to the Soviet plan, as a means to surmount and instrumentalize modernity, affirming that the Russian people had adopted an attitude “heroism singular in the world,” forming a veritable “army of labor” and that “nothing would be easier than to transform it into a revolutionary army.” The Russians, added Niekisch, had even managed to dominate technology. It was not inevitable that it would “devour man” and that confronted Niekisch with an idea, which he had advanced a year earlier, that “collectivization is the form of social existence that the organic will must don if it wants to affirm itself in the face of the murderous effects of technology.” In this positive revaluation of technology, one notes the new influence of Jünger, who published Der Arbeiter in the course of the same year.
Like many of his compatriots, Niekisch was completely overtaken by the National-Socialist rise to power. In the first issue of Widerstand in January 1933, Hitler was then described as “the man without talent” (Talentlose) par excellence. In February, Niekisch published in his journal an article entitled: “The Epoch of Class Struggle.” There he declared: “Never has there been in Germany a cabinet so reactionary as that which we have now … Does the event of January 30th represent a national revolution or not? … Hitler is chancellor: that is for him without a doubt a personal success. He is the chancellor of a bourgeois reactionary cabinet: that is certainly not a success for nationalism.”
But the hour of repression was already at hand. The first organization forbidden by the new regime, on February 4th 1933, was the Black Front of Otto Strasser. On the night of 8th to 9th March, Niekisch was arrested with his wife by a group of SA, then released a few days later. His apartment was searched. Moreover, in March, the weekly Entscheidung was banned, after publishing 23 issues. Widerstand, in contrast, continued its publication for some time. In January 1934, the magazine adopted a new symbol on the first page, drawn by A. Paul Weber: on a black colored background, an eagle, in its claws a sword and a sickle, its chest bearing a hammer. At the end of July 1933, it published articles by the philosopher Hugo Fischer. Yet, in August 1933, it was still a question among official milieus regarding a ban on Widerstand, which was finally pronounced on the 20th of December 1934. Niekisch would then accuse one of this former collaborators, the philosopher Alfred Baeumler, of having played a role in this ban.
Sebastian Haffner said that Niekisch “would spend four years in the Third Reich during which he was the last known and openly declared enemy of Hitler.” Pressured by his friends to leave Germany – Jünger, notably, advised him to seek refuge in Switzerland – Niekisch chose to make an “interior emigration.” Between 1933 and 1937, he would continue to write and tentatively constitute in secret his “Resistance Movement”, which henceforth merited this name more than ever. Though under constant surveillance by the police, he also made a number of trips abroad, thanks to the support of some patrons like Alfred Töpfer. Previously, he had almost never left Germany, now he traveled widely to Switzerland, Holland, France, Belgium, England, Scandinavia. In the summer of 1935 he even sojourned to Italy, where he met emigres … and Mussolini.
In 1933, Niekisch worked on a project for a book which was titled, Deutsche Mobilmachung, echoing Jünger’s essay on “total mobilization.” There he repeated his critiques of National-Socialism and described Lenin as the all time heir of Luther, of Frederick II, of Fichte, of Hegel, of Nietzsche, and of Marx! The manuscript, sent to Joseph Drexel, would be seized by the Gestapo. But it was mainly in his two essays of 1934, Die Dritte imperiale Figur and Im Dickicht der Pakte, published in the following year, that begins a new turn, a turn then stillborn by the political conjuncture and the following events.
Distributed as Privatdruck, in a confidential fashion, Die Dritte imperiale Figur, a mythic work and virtually untraceable, is perhaps the most important of Niekisch’s books, at the same time the draft of an unfulfilled vision. Niekisch no longer reasoned in terms of immediate politics. Like Jünger, and without a doubt under his influence, he reformulated his ideas in an idealist language which gave the notion of Figur, Figure, (Gestalt in Jünger’s terms), a fundamental role. The history of Europe, according to him, is before all the history of confrontation between grand Figures, each having a ratio, that is to say a spirit involved in a particular metapolitical project. The two great Figures of the past are the “Eternal Roman,” supporting the Western political project, at the same time Catholicism and Fascism, and the “Eternal Jew,” whose ratio was strictly economic and embodied in global liberalism. Faced with these two enemy Figures, both issuing from the Mediterranean and Roman space, Niekisch no longer believed in the “provincial” Figures of the Soldier, Peasant, the Germane, which he had previously praised and who risked being manipulated by the dominant Western ratio. He wish to greet the advent of another emblematic Figure, the Third Imperial Figure, that of the Worker, master of the “technical space,” who must establish on a global scale a new order, at the same time organic and technical, socialist, and proletarian. The technical ratio was then called to supplant the economic and metaphysical ratio. The Worker, “the New Barbarian,” engendered by the “new force” of the “Russo-Asiatic element” would liquidate the West, and its reign would permit the establishment of an Empire extending upon a world totally rid of bourgeois values, and at the same time it would correspond, Niekisch remaining in the Hegelian tradition, to the reign of the Spirit.
The kinship of the Third Imperial Figure and of Jünger’s Worker was obvious. They were not totally dependent on each other. For Niekisch, the old socialist, the collective worker is closer than the individual worker, in the strict sense, it is a less abstract Figure, resulting in the metamorphosis of the proletariat itself, redefined in an idealist manner. The Worker was also the embodiment of the “Bolshevik.” In 1935, Niekisch would then say he placed Jünger “between Spengler and Marx.” But the most important consequence of this new vision was the abandoning of the all reference to nationalism. Jünger, who, at that time, had already begun to distance himself from politics (in 1932-1933 he only published three articles in Widerstand), lead the way in this domain. Around 1929, Jünger would write: “The word nationalism is a flag, very useful to clearly fix the original combat position of a generation during the chaotic years of transition; it is by no means, as is believed by many of our friends and also our enemies, the expression of a superior value; it designates a condition, but it is not our goal.” For Niekisch, the reference to the nation would become problematic since he would call for the formation of a Germano-Slavic “great space” – from Flessingue to Vladivostok! – and would multiply his acerbic criticism against Southern Germany and the “Bavarian miasma.” Contrary to other National-Bolshevik groups, who continued to see the nation as the absolute and final value for them, Niekisch, in the the Die Dritte imperiale Figur then perceived the nationstate as a bourgeois creation from the epoch of the French Revolution. “When the bourgeoisie celebrate the cult of the nation,” he wrote, “they secretly sacrifice to the their true idol, the god Mammon.” The nation was then no longer an unsurpassable reference. The state itself was no longer an absolute, but a simple means for the accession of the Figure. Niekisch rallied to the idea of imperial idea that he had condemned some years earlier, but he gave to it a somewhat planetary resonance. The unification of the “Russo-German great space” was only a prelude to the “ultimate empire” (Endimperium) that would extend across the entire earth. “If the nation is overtaken in the long term,” observed Louis Dupeux, “it is for reasons that hold neither for the economy, nor for any universalism, but to accomplish the accession of the Figure to the imperial rank.”
Niekisch also used the notion of empire to criticize anew Hitlerian racism: “No empire is a community of blood: it’s a community of faith and more generally a community of spirit.” He defended himself from falling into antisemitism. The Figure of the “Eternal Jew,” he said, belonged to the past. “To engage in antisemitism, it’s to revolve around the Jew.” Dignity required he challenge Nazi antisemitism, which was a “bourgeois German” antisemitism. Niekisch also gets to the Völkische and the “romantics,” who wanted to return to the past (“that is not the way back to the roots”) and he would propose that they “flee to countryside.” He finally renewed his attacks on National-Socialism, which he continued to consider as a bourgeois movement, even exclusively bourgeois, which he compared with insistence to Bonapartism: “Caesarist Democracy of the masses should become a major coup for the capitalist bourgeoisie.”
Im Dickicht der Pakte develops this critique with the angle of foreign policy. Niekisch contested that the world was divided into three camps: the communist camp, the capitalist camp, and the fascist camp. There were only two camp, he said, from the fact of “Hitlerian betrayal.” Germany found itself once again attached to the Western camp. It was the reason for which, he added, the game of the democracies consisted of dragging Hitler into a “thicket of pacts.” Niekisch then reproached the Third Reich for legitimizing the bourgeois order by making a defense of private property, and for the first time, “not wanting to go beyond the national state” and rejecting “imperial ambition.” But this book, for the first time also, put equally into doubt the revolutionary capability of Russia. Russia’s admission to the League of Nations in effect scandalized Niekisch, who spoke of a “voyage to Canossa” and demanded if the USSR, “by renouncing its savage mission of global revolution,” wouldn’t become one a day “a Western European power with State capitalism.”
On the 22ndof March 1937, at seven in the morning, then preparing for a journey to Czechoslovakia, Niekisch was arrested by the Gestapo and then incarcerated. Simultaneously, a dragnet permitted the questioning of 70 other members of the Widerstand Circles, including Joseph Drexel and Karl Tröger. The archives of the movement and the correspondence of the publishing house, concealed by Drexel in a seat of an insurance company in Nuremberg, were also seized. No organ of the press would not be seized.
The proceedings only opened two years later. On January 3rd1939, Ernst Niekisch, Joseph Drexel, and Karl Tröger appeared in secret before the Volksgerichthof, presided over by Dr. Thierack. The clandestine activities of the Widerstand Circles, together with most of the texts published by Niekisch since 1933, were retained as evidence and figured in the accusation file. After a week of debate, on the 10thJanuary, Niekisch was condemned for “preparations for high treason” and violation of the law banning political parties to life in prison, the confiscation of his property, and the forfeiture of all his civil rights. His companions were also condemned to prison time: three years and six months for Drexel, one year and nine months for Tröger. The integral text of the judgment, discovered after the war at the American Documentation Center in BerlinDahlem, would only be published in 1978. In Switzerland, the trial was discussed at length by Adolf Grabowsky in the Nationalzeitungof Bâle. Fourteen authors were charged, including Niekisch’s wife, who would be judged starting on the 17thof February and condemned to various penalties. Ernst Jünger, who saw Niekisch for the last time at the start of 1937 in Goslar, would write in his notebooks on the date of September 1st1945: “Ernst Niekisch is among these exceptional beings who, in the Civil War, had courage. I could not have imagined, before the events, that this courage would be astonishingly rare … I saw how one man such as Niekisch stood in his refusal to capitulate. Dead silence all around.” In prison, where he was incarcerated in particularly painful conditions, Niekisch developed a system of self discipline, that Sebastian Haffner described as “the last product, the supreme product, inspired by all of the Prussian spirit known to history.” He held conferences before an imaginary public and imposed upon himself a rigorous use of his time. “I would invent a system of physical and intellectual hygiene that I would rigorously observe,” he recounted in his memoirs, “I would stretch myself to use my time well. The first hour, I would work on philosophy, the second hour sociology, then I would reflect on a book I projected to write. After a meal, I would continue my intellectual exercise. History of literature, economic sciences, sometimes mathematics, aesthetic problems, those were the subjects on which I concentrated myself at present …” His friends, they were trying to survive. Certain ones among them, during the war, found themselves in the service of counterespionage. Joseph Drexel, imprisoned in Amberg, then freed after having his sentence expunged, would be arrested again after the attempt of July 20thand sent to the camp in Mauthausen with the reference “R.U.” (“Rückkehr unerwünscht”, “no hope of return”). However, he would be liberated in January 1945. Karl Tröger, who enrolled in the Wehrmacht after his sentence, the penalty of prison having been converted to preventative detention, would die of a cerebral congestion due to overwork, on the 25thof March 1945 in Schmerze, in the environs of the town of Brandenburg an der Oder where his friend Niekisch was then detained.
The 30thof September 1945, Jünger wrote in his notebooks: “Gerd also taught me that Niekisch had escaped alive from prison when they began to massacre the detainees. He had become blind and near paralyzed, and would try to reconstruct his publishing house in Berlin.” Ernst Niekisch was liberated by the Red Army on the 27thof April. He left the prison of Brandenburg-Görden near blind and incapable of walking. He had since returned home on the 5thof May.
***
The political career of Niekisch did not end in 1945. But the man that the Russians had taken from his cell was evidently not the same man that, ten years earlier, announced the advent of the “Third Imperial Figure.” He affirmed democracy and “progressivism.” He stayed faithful to a number of his intuitions, and maybe the Soviet occupation of the Eastern part of Germany had also convinced him that the “Prussian-Bolshevik” synthesis which he had dreamed of, in part or less, had come to pass. Around August 1945, he joined the German Communist Party (KPD), and simultaneously took charge of the Volkshochschule Wilmersdorf, which found itself in the British sector where he continued to live. In Autumn he found himself in the director’s bureau of the Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany (Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands) and the Society of German-Soviet Friendship. We would become a member of the SED starting in April 1946. At the start of January 1946, Jünger wrote maliciously “It seems that Niekisch is completely oriented to the East right now.” The interested party responded to him not to simplify things… in 1947, thanks to the support of the historian Alfred Meusel, Niekisch became the professor charged with contemporary political and social problems at the Humboldt University of East Berlin. He would be tenured the following year. In 1949, member of the presidium of the national council of the National Front, director of the Research Institute on Imperialism, he also sat in the People’s Chamber (Volkskammer) and he found himself closely associated with the creation of the GDR. But his independent spirit would rapidly earn him hostility, and near the end of 1949, he seemed to have encountered some difficulties expressing himself. In 1951, his Research Institute on Imperialism was brutally closed. The following year, the publication of his book entitled Europäische Bilanz, which he composed most of mentally in the course of his imprisonment and which he wrote immediately after his liberation (“I noted in four short months that which had slowly matured in eight years”), attracted violent attacks on him on the part of Wilhelm Girnus, one of the party ideologues, who accused him of utilizing Marxist terminology to spread “nonscientific” ideas marked by idealism, irrationalism, and pessimism, and who designated his book as having everything of an “American edition of Spengler!” At the start of 1953, Niekisch publicly declared that the leadership of the GDR had lost all contact with the population. After an uprising on the 17th of June, he worked with the Soviets against Walter Ulbricht, resigned from the SED and definitively returned to the West. In his memoirs, he would say, “Liberty, which was opened to myself again, revealed an impenetrable thicket of new stifling subjugation.”
This same year of 1953, Niekisch published Das Reich der niederen Dämonen. There he underlined the bankruptcy of the middle classes and their lack of moral resistance in the face of Nazism: “The bourgeoisie had the government they deserved.” Put on sale in the GDR in 1958, the book would be withdrawn from libraries there after a few weeks. Yet, Niekisch had not converted to the West! In his articles, he denounced the young Federal Republic as a “plutocracy,” taking a position in favor of neutrality and considered Adenauer to have continued the “Western” ideas of Hitler. In 1956, his text on the Figure of the “Clerk” (der Clerk), which he described as a “modern fellah” – a term apparently borrowed from Spengler – in the service of the techno-bureaucracy, raised a certain disturbance. In parallel, in his works, since Deutsche Daseinsverfehlung (1946) until the first volume of his memoirs, Niekisch rewrote his personal history and assured that it was only for tactical reasons that he frequented nationalist milieus before the war. Finally, he began, against the authorities of the Federal Republic who, under the pretext of his sympathies with the East, obstinately refused to pay the pension as a victim of Nazism as what his right, a judicial battle that would last no less than 13 years. In the judiciary proceedings, which would be obscured for some years after, Niekisch would be supported by jurists like Fabian von Schlabrendorff, and mainly by his friend Joseph Drexel, who managed after 1945 to become head of a veritable press empire in Franconia (he was notably the founder of Nürnberger Nachrichten). It was only in 1966, a few months before his death, and after the intervention of the European Commission on Human Rights, that Niekisch would finally obtain 30,000 marks of reparations and the promise of a monthly payment of 1,500 marks!
Ernst Niekisch died in Berlin, alone, the day of his 78 birthday, May 23rd 1967. His remains were cremated in the presence of Drexel, A. Paul Weber, Schlabrendorff, and Jünger, who would later say: “I assisted at his funeral. One saw the old militants there, who seemed to have all come right from the Joseph Conrad novel, The Secret Agent, some basket cases, and some old friends. It was a dismal funeral.”
Niekisch died apparently forgotten. The years following 1968, there appeared the first deep studies dedicated to him, a certain number of groups on the right and left would rediscover his thought and reclaim for themselves certain positions of his. Small journals like Neue Zeit, Rebell, Ideologie und Strategie, Der Aufbruch, Wir selbst, organizations like “Sache des Volkes” and the “Solidaristiche Volksbewegung”, militants and young theoreticians like Alexander Epstein, Klaus Herrmann, Armin Krebs, Henning Eichberg, Siegfried Bublies, Wolfgang Strauss, Marcus Bauer, etc, who affirmed themselves under various titles as the representatives of a new “national-revolutionary” current. Certainly, times had changed. The national-revolutionaries of the “second generation” affirmed democracy and did not retain the apology for Bolshevism nor the project of an alliance with Soviet Russia from
Niekisch. But they did willingly support his advocacy of refusing the Western bloc, ethnopluralism, the defense of collective identities, the antiimperialist struggle, and the cause of peoples. They reclaimed German reunification in the name of decolonization and the right of the people to guide themselves, and combated the liberal West on the basis of “national liberation” (Befreiungsnationalismus). One of their watchwords was “National identity and international solidarity.” In October 1976, young national-revolutionaries from the organization “Sache des Volkes” affixed to the house of Niekisch a commemorative plaque struck with this inscription: “We will be a revolutionary people, or we will no longer be a free people.” In 1977, Rebell and Neue Zeit gave Niekisch as an example to show that “nationalism consequently leads the antifascist struggle,” while Wolfgang Venohr declared in the magazine Wir selbst, “National liberation and anti-fascism cannot and should not be opposed.” The influence of Niekisch was equally felt in certain tendencies of the “national left” (Bernt Engelmann, Peter Brandt, Herbert Ammon) who opposed themselves to Hans Matthias Kepplinger or Arno Klönne, and those who strove to unite nationalism, neutrality, ecology, and pacifism, and affirmed that the division of Germany was the principal factor of insecurity in Europe. The drawings of A. Paul Weber, who pursued, after the war, his career as a graphic designer in left wing milieus, were particularly popular among the Greens. And while many of the Niekisch’s books were reissued by the anarchist press ADHE, Helios publishing, of Mayence, lead by Karl-Heinz Pröhuber and Peter Bahn, published, starting in 1985, reprints of the great “classics” of NationalBolshevism. “Ernst Niekisch prepared his resurrection,” wrote Sebastian Haffner. “The historical and political works that he left had no equal in the Germany of the 20th century. For this moment, it’s something like a hidden treasure, jealously guarded by a handful of old comrades in struggle and grateful disciples. But when one opens his books … one sees sparks flow as if they were electrified.”
“If on January 28th 1933,” wrote Walter Lacquer, “the president of the Reich Hindenburg had entrusted in Ernst Niekisch the responsibility to form a new cabinet, and if this cabinet was comprised of Friedrich Hielscher (Minister of Foreign Relations), Otto Strasser (Interior), Ernst Jünger (Culture Minister), Karl O. Paetel, Werner Lass, Hartmut Plaas, and some others, the task of the historian who writes the history of German National-Bolshevism today, would have been simpler than it is in reality.” But the task of the historian is never simple, and on the subject of Niekisch the most opposed opinions abound today. For Sebastian Haffner, he was “first and foremost a revolutionary socialist”; for Armin Mohler, “the most radical nationalist of all times.” Hans Matthias Kepplinger treated him as a Linkfaschist. Louis Dupeux, who did not hold him in esteem, considered him a “sonorous cretin,” and the liberal authors rested on his case to enunciate the “horseshoe theory”: the extremes touch. However, many saw in him as a premier author and thought, like Jünger, that he could have played “an important role in German history.”
These contrary opinions fed symmetric legends. The first of which was the “Niekisch-Orthodoxy” (Mohler). Maintained after 1945 in his self interest, with the support of Joseph Drexel, it formed the basis of the biography he dedicated to Friedrich Kalbermann. Niekisch was always a man of the left, who had only made tactical concessions with the terminology of nationalism to regroup the misguided youth. It was in this spirit that Schüdderkopf could write that Niekisch was “during all of his life a man of the left, who would think as a National-Communist, but never as a Nationalist.” The inverse thesis was supported by Louis Dupeux, among others: a man “of the right and even of the extreme right,” at least from 1926, Niekisch would be employed in shuffling the cards in giving into revolutionary pathos and his massive usage of the rhetoric of the extreme left was only a “reclamation.” The two theses actually appear to be unconvincing, one way or the other. Armin Mohler and Uwe Sauermann did not do justice to the first: it suffices, to refute it, by referring to his texts. About the second, one can oppose to it the itinerary of Niekisch – like the other National-Bolsheviks – after 1933: at the hour of decision, no longer intellectual but living, existential, the least we can say is that they did not pass to the side of “reaction.”
These two theses, equally suspicious, both rest on the theory of a “mask”: the mask of nationalism in the first, the mask of revolutionary Bolshevism in the second. The common presupposition is that he couldn’t have a socialism of the right or a nationalism of the left, and that one cannot be right and left at the same time. Such presupposition, which gives the leftright dichotomy a quasi-ontological bearing, has yet to be demonstrated. The history of ideas, in truth, rather seems to deny it. From one epoch to another, the “ideas of the right” and the “ideas of the left” are rarely the same. Is it truly impossible to use one as another to make, in the proper sense, their opposition insignificant? Niekisch appears to us, to have been a man of the right and of the left at the same time.
What no one disputes, however, is the extreme radicalism of his positions. While, if the evolution of Niekisch appears today so “aberrant” according to current political ideological categories, maybe it is because it obeys a logic which, for the most part, has become incomprehensible. “Those who don’t want to think it through could never begin to do it,” said Friedrich Lenz, while Louis Dupeux wrote: “Only the National-Bolsheviks went through with the discussion and they boldly dreamed of a truly “total” revolution for strictly national reasons.” Niekisch strove to think “through”, and it is in this by which his path exemplifies in the extreme, the greatest cross pollination of contemporary ideas. Also, with that, his thought, while bearing the imprint of many well known influences, stayed perfectly original. Niekisch, who had the nature of Cassandra, would want “realism” in a country where politics was frequently enmeshed with morality, and yet he was also unrealistic, maybe, precisely by an excess of logic and realism. He would want to give the right the ideas of the left, and the left the ideas of the right. Throughout his life, he navigated between the fronts; throughout his life, he scaled the heights. The result was a long series of setbacks, ruptures, failures, maybe even disillusionment. Niekisch was imprisoned under Weimar, imprisoned under Hitler, rejected by the authorities of the GDR, detested by those of the Federal Republic. That did not prevent him, with the social democrats, as with the councils, the “old socialists,” with the nationalists and the communists, from always affirming himself as a revolutionary that nothing could ever break. Moreover, he was in revolt, a rebel, a resistant. The word Widerstand, chosen as the title of his journal and his publishing house, has strong paradigmatic value: Niekisch was able to resist. What remains today of the ideas of Niekisch? Maybe more than one believes, and not because here and there small groups occasionally reclaim them. Since it is significant that the majority of Communist Parties in the West have rallied today to an implicitly Lassallian conception, where the proletariat that was defined by Marx has been replaced by “the immense majority of the people.” The reinterpretation of the class struggle in national terms, which lead the National-Bolsheviks to qualify Germany as an oppressed nation compared to a “bourgeoisie” constituted globally by the Western countries, also knew new fortune with the diffusion of the term “proletarian nations.” Uwe Sauermann wrote that Niekisch could well have been the prophet of all the nationalism which expressed itself in this century under the red flag, indeed those who express themselves today under the green flag of Islam. Sebastian Haffner also saw him as a precursor of decolonization. “The fundamental political idea of Niekisch”, he wrote, “is that national liberation and socialist revolution are one in the same thing, that they are two sides of the same coin. This idea, is it another thing than the common maxim of the actions of Mao and of Ho Chi Minh, of Fidel Castro, of Che Guevara, and of Khomeini? The anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, anti-Western revolutionary parties of the Third World all bear the same name: National Liberation Front. The socialist revolution everywhere bears the nationalist flag. As implausible that this could appear, that true theoretician of universal revolution that is on the march today is not Marx, nor even Lenin. It’s Niekisch.”
Niekisch had without doubt many illusions about the nature of Russian communism, and his apology for “Bolshevism” could scandalize us today. Then it is necessarily to place it in context, to remember the immense hope which would sustain the Revolution of 1917 in the worker’s movement – and do not forget any more the Soviet delirium which seized, in the following decades, a large part of the global intelligentsia. The paradox is that Niekisch would admire the USSR for the same reasons that its adversaries would detest it and for the opposite reasons of those who would admire it as its partisans! Yet, if we disregard value judgments, Niekisch in his analysis, is it so wrong? In seeing the Soviet Union as an authoritarian regime of “Prussian” inspiration, alternatively Spartan, in the fashion of Niekisch, or in imagining it as the draft of “society without classes” and as the “workers’ paradise”, in the fashion of so many intellectuals of the epoch, who was more in error? And the affirmation according to which Lenin and Stalin had practically “liquidated the old Marx,” the affirmation according to which Soviet Communism had always been, in part or less, a properly Russian phenomenon, hadn’t, in a certain measure, been confirmed? Many disappointed Marxists would probably be ready today to agree that Stalinist Russia was never anything other than “National Bolshevik.” The difference according to Niekisch, it is that they would derive from this finding, the opposite conclusions. They would also willingly distinguish “Russian” Bolshevism from “Occidental” Marxism, but they would then value the second to the detriment of the first. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it was in the ranks of the Conservative Revolution, and singularly in the National-Bolshevik milieus, that this distinction, received as banal today, was made for the first time.
As to the great book of the Germano-Russian alliance, who can say today, that he was not called, in the future, to add a few more chapters?
Hitler: A German Fate
Ernst Nieksich
Translated by: Eugene Montsalvat from the French volume of Ernst Niekisch’s “Hitler – une fatalité allemande” et autres écrits nationauxbolcheviks
At:
https://niekischtranslationproject.wordpress.com/
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