Between 1918 and 1933, German cultural and political life was shaped by a powerful spiritual movement which declared itself determined “to clear away the ruins of the nineteenth century and to establish a new order of life.” This movement took form, with more or less vigour, across almost all of Europe; but it was in Germany that it marked every domain of life and society most profoundly. It has been named the Konservative Revolution, the ‘conservative revolution.’ This ‘metapolitical’ phenomenon has been examined many times (and all too often by its enemies and on the basis of preconceived notions); but all in all, despite its fundamental historical importance, we still understand it quite poorly. In 1950, Dr. Armin Mohler aimed to fill in this lacuna by publishing his doctoral thesis, which he had defended the previous year at the University of Basle under the supervision of Professors Karl Jaspers and Herman Schmalenbach. This successful publication would be reedited into a veritable handbook and augmented by an imposing bibliography of nearly four hundred pages, which suffices to demonstrate the importance and richness of the writers of the Konservative Revolution.
A Thousand Directions
The task Armin Mohler took on was extremely arduous. Between 1918 and 1933, the Konservative Revolution never presented one unified aspect, one sole visage. Groping after a path of is own, it proliferated in a thousand apparently divergent directions, investing as much in art as in philosophy, in literature as in politics. Therefore, the Konservative Revolution formed a universe of its own whose depth and breadth may amaze those who come to it for the first time. Men as diverse as the ‘first’ Thomas Mann (exiled in 1933), Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg, Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West) Ernst von Salomon (The Outlaws), Alfred Baeumler (who became some sort of official academic philosopher of National Socialism), Stefan George and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the jurist Carl Schmitt, the biologist Jacob von Uexküll, the anthropologist Hans F. K. Günther, the economist Werner Sombart, the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer and Hans Grimm, Hans Blüher and Gottfried Benn, Ernst Wiechert and Rainer Maria Rilke, Max Scheler and Ludwig Klages, to just a few of the most famous: all were men of the Konservative Revolution. The works of these men instigated and animated, in ever-renewed impulses, a host of schools of thought and ‘circles of friends,’ secret and semi-secret organizations of an esoteric sort, literary cenacles, political parties and ‘groupuscules,’ associations aligned with the Freikorps, with the ‘underground’121 (already!), and of the most diverse orientations and around the most diversely articulated concerns and intentions.
These currents’ kinship is apparent; though their shared mentality can be apprehended only with difficulty as long as one adopts a perspective exterior to the movement. On the other hand, the sense they all had of this ideological kinship did not keep them from nurturing enmities and fierce hatreds among themselves (more against those condemned as ‘traitors’ than against enemies). So it was that Walther Rathenau, whose works belong to the margins of the Konservative Revolution, was assassinated by terrorists who were no less “conservative-revolutionary.” This affair is well-known from Salomon’s account of it in Die Geächteten (The Outlaws).
Finally, as the author affirms in the preface, its ‘spiritual proximity’ to National Socialism wrongfully compromises the Konservative Revolution and risks skewing any analysis by casting a shadow over the facts of the matter. While recognising that this problem is all but insurmountable, Dr. Mohler tried to avoid the difficulties attendant on this uncomfortable proximity by bracketing the whole National Socialist phenomenon, whose historical destiny represents a distinct question, a ‘lack of distance’ from which still precludes an analysis today. He does remark, though, that the National Socialists, once they had come to power, made a priority of attacking certain representatives of the Konservative Revolution who refused to join. The ‘Night of the Long Knives,’ to cite only one event, settles scores not only between wings of the National Socialist movement but also between the Nazis and conservative-revolutionary ‘Trotskyists.’
‘Trotskyists’
‘From a formal point of view,’ writes Dr. Mohler,
participants in the Konservative Revolution might be understood as the Trotskyists of National Socialism. Here, as in any great revolutionary movement, including communism, we find a large mass-party of uniform weight, on the one hand, and a myriad of little circles, on the other, distinguished by an intense intellectual life, exerting only a weak influence on the masses and, in terms of party-formation, managing at most to provoke marginal splits in the larger party, indulging in the organization of explosive sects and little elitist, barely coherent groups. When the larger party goes bankrupt, then comes the hour of the Trotskyist heresies.
We should note, in this connection, that, in fact, the Konservative Revolution underwent the inverse process, and that it was the serial bankruptcy of the little ‘Trotskyist’ sects that cleared National Socialism’s path to power. But from Armin Mohler’s perspective, this is of secondary importance, since his purpose is not to analyse a revolutionary machine but to sketch, as he states, a typology of the Konservative Revolution.
‘Guiding Images’ Having noted that the origins of the Konservative Revolution date around the midpoint of the nineteenth century, Armin Mohler then tries to recover and describe what he calls the Leitbilder, the ‘guiding ideas’ (or, better, ‘images’) shared by all the writers of the Konservative Revolution.
He situates the origin of the ‘world-image’ (Weltbild) of the Konservative Revolution in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche: the Nietzsche of Zarathustra above all, but also the Nietzsche of The Will to Power and the Genealogy of Morals. Indeed, every Leitbild he adduces springs from Nietzsche’s vision. One of these ‘leading ideas’ is without a doubt fundamental. This is the ‘spherical’ conception of history, as opposed to the linear conception shared, among others, by Marxism and Christianity. For the participants in the Konservative Revolution, history is not an infinite and indefinite progression. It is an eternal return. Mohler rightly emphasizes that this eternal return is best expressed not by the circle but by the sphere (Kugel), which ‘means, to the conservative-revolutionary eye, that everything is contained in every moment; that present, past and future coincide.’ He cites Nietzsche:
Everything goeth, everything returneth; eternally rolleth the wheel of existence. Everything dieth, everything blossometh forth again; eternally runneth on the year of existence. Everything breaketh, everything is integrated anew; eternally buildeth itself the same house of existence. All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remaineth the ring of existence. Every moment beginneth existence; around every ‘Here’ rolleth the ball ‘There.’ The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.122
Nihilism and Regeneration A second Leitbild, arising immediately from the first, is the Interregnum: ‘We live in an Interregnum: the old order has crumbled; and the new order is not yet visible.’ We are on the eve of a ‘historical turning’ (Zeitwende). To the eyes of the men of the Konservative Revolution, Nietzsche is the prophet of this ‘turning.’ Better, he marks this turning in Time when ‘something is dead and nothing else is yet born.’ One of the most characteristic representatives of the Konservative Revolution, the writer Ernst Jünger, also states: ‘We are at the turning between two ages, a turning whose meaning is comparable to that of the passage from the Stone Age to the Ages of Metal’ (cited by Wulf-Dieter Müller).
In its day-to-day struggle, following the itinerary outlines by Nietzsche, the Konservative Revolution adopted the Leitbild of nihilism: a positive nihilism whose goal is not nothingness for the sake of nothingness (the end of history, we might say) but the pulverization of the ruins of the old order, the condition sine qua non of the new order’s advent, of regeneration (Wiedergeburt). This positive, ‘German’ or ‘Prussian’ nihilism advocated by the Konservative Revolution is not an end in itself but a means: the means to reach the ‘magic point beyond which no man may advance but he who arms himself with new and invisible sources of power’ (Ernst Jünger). This ‘magic point’ is a Leitbild in itself: the ‘reversal’ (Umschlag), that is, the moment and the location at which destruction morphs into creation, at which the end reveals itself to be a new beginning. It is the moment at which ‘each recovers his own origin,’ Zarathustra’s ‘Great Noontide’ when historical time is suddenly regenerated.
Eternal Returns
All these Leitbilder display the preference of the Konservative Revolution for formulae that unite antagonistic terms: Konservative Revolution, Prussian nihilism, socio-aristocracy, National Bolshevism, etc. True revolution is quite literally ‘re-volution, an about-turn, the reproduction of a moment that has already been.’ ‘In the beginning was the word,’ writes Hans V. Fleig.
And now present circumstances compel us to pay close attention to the original meaning of the word ‘revolution.’ During an age of revolution which lasted a hundred and fifty years, Europe has frittered away and left behind the heritage of many centuries. This heritage is the Western community as it was in the spirit of Christianity. Nowadays, foul weather has rusted the Cross and, every way one turns, the Western community disintegrates with startling rapidity. Old gods, whom we thought long murdered by evangelism, go in search of their buried temples. The Western ‘superstructure,’ this community of Germanic, Latin and Slavic peoples, which traces its roots, in the last analysis, to the Christian oecumene, is melting like snow in the sun. in the incandescent fire of a Saturnine star proclaiming the dawn of a new Antiquity, Western thought disintegrates into dust.
Friedrich Hielscher, a disciple of Jünger’s, declares: ‘Homo revolvens plays his part on the great world-stage; he will have no peace until the museums have been restocked. The stone altars of sacrifice will stand once more in the clearings; and the crucifixes will be shut up in the museum’s cabinets…’
Here, ideology demands an immediate move into political action. But this is always sustained by a metapolitical vision. Even Ernst Jünger, a writer inclined to literary botany, cannot suppress this political impulse: his famous Arbeiter (The Worker) intends to be the manifesto of a ‘new politics.’ Armin Mohler, sensitive above all to the literary and poetic aspects of the conservative-revolutionary Weltanschauung, somewhat neglects those Leitbilder more directly bound to political action. Sensing the historico-temporal dimensions of the universe he studies with precision and clarity, he is less concerned to discover its socio-spatial dimensions.
If Marxism is a theory which must necessarily be prolonged in practice, we might call the Weltbild of the Konservative Revolution a metapolitics that entrusts its ultimate designs on man to politics. It therefore seems that, in the eyes of the participants in the Konservative Revolution, the ‘temporal’ Leitbild of regeneration has its ‘spatial’ counterpart in the Leitbild of the ‘German people’ (Volk). This is considered the only ‘true people,’ since it is the only people to have preserved the ‘conscience of its origins’ and, as such, is invested with a ‘redemptive’ mission from which all mankind will benefit. The Leitbild of the “German mission,” from Fichte and his famous Discourse to Wagner, which Armin Mohler emphasizes somewhat less, is one of the major sources of the Konservative Revolution. Similarly, the ‘temporal’ Leitbild of the eternal return and the spherical conception of history corresponds to the ‘spatial’ Leitbild of aristocratic superhumanism and the hierarchical conception of society, notions which are also foregrounded in Nietzsche’s thinking; and, inversely, the linear conception of history corresponds to the egalitarian conception of society.
In the last analysis, the ‘conservatives’ of the Konservative Revolution want to destroy everything that surrounds them: for everything is already a corpse. What they want to conserve, we now see clearly, is man’s historicity — that is, the possibility of new eternal returns — as opposed to the ‘end of history’ offered, explicitly or implicitly, by their adversaries. They work towards the return of the past. But this past is not the past of memory: it is the past of an imagination that plunges its roots into Sehnsucht, into a nostalgic and passionate urge towards a regenerated future following the crumbling of civilization.
A Religious Revival
The tendencies that formed within the Konservative Revolution might be characterized according to the different emphases they placed on different Leitbilder belonging to the movement as a whole: images only vaguely discerned by one group played predominant roles in others.
Armin Mohler proposes the classification of these tendencies into five groups: the Völkischen, the Jungkonservativen (‘young’ or ‘neo-conservatives’), the Nationalrevolutionäre (‘national revolutionaries’), the Bündischen (‘leaguists’), and the Landvolkbewegung (‘peasant movement’). Strictly speaking, these groups were of different natures. The first three, Dr. Mohler specifies, are ‘ideological movements’ seeing to realize their ideas. The other two were ‘concrete historical outbursts, from which it was subsequently attempted to draw an ideology.’ Nevertheless, it was the former that exercised the greater influence over the political domain.
All three foreground the Leitbild of the Volk; but each casts a different light on it. For the Völkischen, it was a matter of opposing the ‘process of disintegration’ that endangered the people and of inciting a greater self-consciousness in the people. The Völkischen emphasized ‘race,’ understood as fundamental to the Volk’s specificity. But their conceptions, even their definitions of race were strikingly variable. Some saw it from a purely biological perspective’ others saw it as the exemplary unity of ‘bodily’ and ‘spiritual.’ While, for Spengler, race is ‘that which takes form’ (its own form), Jünger speaks of ‘blood’ (Blut), but a blood that appears in the ‘dazzle’ of German Mediaeval mysticism, and still more in the Wagnerian Grail. In fact, there was a profound völkisch religiosity which generally sought to express itself in anti-Christian religious revival: either the proclamation of a ‘German Christianity’ or ‘German faith’ (Deutschglaube) or the attempt to resuscitate the cult of ancient deities in a modern context, as with the movement around Ludendorff and his wife Mathilde. The völkisch movement also evinced a tendency towards esotericism whose abstruse manifestations sometimes help to discredit the movement. This esotericism permeated, among other the notorious Thule-Gesellschaft to which the poet and dramaturge Dietrich Eckart belonged.
Young Conservatives
On the other hand, the Jungkonservativen were primarily concerned to realize the ‘mission of the Volk,’ which was, in their eyes, the construction of a new Empire (Reich). Their intellectual leaders, Edgar J. Jung (a future victim of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’), Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Henrich von Gleichen, etc., saw the Reich as ‘the organization of peoples into a supra-statal whole, dominated by a higher principle, under the supreme responsibility of a single people.’ This is not a matter of nationalism, however. The Jungkonservativen condemned nationalism, considering it to ‘transplant the egotistic doctrines of the individual to the level of the nation-state.’ In their vision, the German people is not a people like the rest. It is, as Fichte proclaimed, the only people that has remained ‘conscious of its origins’ and, consequently, a lone ‘true people’ in a sea of mass-peoples. From this it follows, said Novalis, that ‘there are Germans everywhere.’ In 1917, a few days before perishing on the Front, the poet Walter Flex, one of the most typical bündisch writers, author of the famous song ‘Wild Geese’ (‘Wildgänse rauschen durch die Nacht’), wrote:
If I have spoken of the eternity of the German people and the redemptive mission of Germanness, it had nothing to do with national egotism. Rather, it was an ethical conviction, perhaps one that realizes itself in defeat or, as Ernst Wurche has written, in the heroic death of a whole people. Nevertheless, I have always imposed a clear limit on this conception. I believe human evolution attaints its most perfect form in the people and that universalist humanism implies a dissolution inasmuch as it liberates and strips naked the individual egotism till then trammelled by love of one’s people…
Meanwhile, Edgar J. Jung declared:
Peoples are only equal in a metaphysical sense, just as men are only equal before God. He who would transplant this metaphysical equality to the earthly realm sins against nature and against reality. Demographic power, race, intellectual aptitude, historical development, geographical situation: all this necessitates an earthly hierarchy of peoples, which is not established by chance or by caprice.
In fact, the Jungkonservativen, who did not care all that much about philosophy, often thought it possible to reconcile Christian metaphysics with an essentially anti-Christian conception of history. Armin Mohler does not fail to note that this quirk allowed the ‘Neo-Conservatives,’ alone among the currents of the Konservative Revolution, to be admitted as the worthy interlocutor of the Weimar ‘system’ (and remarks upon the obvious logical contradiction in this peculiarity).
National Bolshevism
Almost to a man, the national revolutionaries were moulded by the experience of the storms of steel and ‘comradism’ of the trenches. For them, the ‘nation’ is just the Volk rallied and ‘set in motion’ by war. The national revolutionaries embraced technological progress not because they succumbed to the ‘dangerous temptation to admire it’ but because they wanted to ‘dominate it — nothing more.’ For them, it was a matter, as one of their leaders, Franz Schauwecker, said, of ‘doing away with linear time.’ Living in the Interregnum, they think the time ripe for positive nihilism. Their revolutionary urgency and Prussian discipline combine to sustain their will to destroy the ‘bourgeois order’; their ‘nationalism of soldiers’ unites with the ‘socialism of comrades.’ An acutely tragic sense of history and life becomes the backdrop, at once sombre and luminous, of their revolutionary adventure. The deeds of the Freikorps (‘free corps’), the putsch by the Wikingbund led by Captain Erhardt, the exalted terrorists of the ‘outlaws’ dramatized by Salomon, the literary attitudes of the ‘socio-aristocrat’ Jünger, the ‘Prussian Socialism’ of Oswald Spengler, the Black Front of Otto Strasser, the (old Prussian) dream of an ideological alliance between Bolshevism and the Konservative Revolution to bring about a (Germano-Soviet) ‘Reich from Vlissingen to Vladivostok’: all this potent but chaotic agitation, thrown together upon the tragedy of a Germany bruised and humiliated by defeat, lent the emergence of the Weimar Republic its most vivid colours.
Migratory Birds
Contrarily, the Bund movement arose before the First World War, growing out of the enormous youth movement (Jugendbewegund) in the first years of the century, itself linked to the Wandervogel (migratory birds) — a sudden explosion of a particular cast of mind, without definite political persuasion, sweeping across the whole of Germany. With the Bund, the youth of the Interregnum vaguely discern that the future is at their charge and that the immense task of bringing about the ‘return of historical time’ falls to them. Above all, the Bündische Jugend expresses an attitude to life ruled by a sort of collective unconscious. ‘Movement and mobility with no goal,’ writes Mohler, ‘with no programme, with no ideal but the explosion of the young bourgeois mind into a new adolescence, a new, secret, instinctual energy.’ At once a ‘youth movement’ and a ‘society of men,’ the Bund intended to form an elite, bound to disperse, upon coming of age, in all sort of directions, but which was to spread the conservative-revolutionary cast of mind far and wide. In every political camp, left, right and centre, one saw a flourishing of youth-groups (and of paramilitary formations) all nurturing the concerns and preoccupations of the Konservative Revolution, sometimes unconsciously and despite declared political persuasions — which explains the surprising developments during the political Gleichschaltung (coordination) under the Third Reich.
Armin Mohler saw the Landvolkbewegung or ‘peasant-movement’ as the fifth tendency within the Konservative Revolution. In fact, this movement was just a modern jacquerie, a spasm of corporative life amidst a teetering and tattered social system. It is nonetheless true that the corporative demands of the Landvolk, compelled by circumstance to express themselves politically, fell almost inevitably within the orbit of the Konservative Revolution, whose participants heaped it with sincere and vigorous support. It was then undetectably absorbed by National Socialism under the pressure of historical evolution and thanks to the personal efforts of Walther Darré, theoretician of the Bauernadel (‘peasant aristocracy’).
The sentences which end the book have a certain prophetic resonance. ‘In the Konservative Revolution and its five tendencies,’ writes Mohler, ‘the ideas of 1789 are confronted with the absolute negation of their values. The struggle which this unleashed is not yet over.’ In particular, Armin Mohler believes that today, despite the ideology with which it is linked, this ‘confrontation’ still carries some germs of the Konservative Revolution. Though unaware of it, rendering its agitation vain and sometimes ridiculous, ‘the ideas and mythemes of the Konservative Revolution are nearly always examined with prejudice, on account of its embarrassing proximity to National Socialism.’ ‘The situation this creates,’ he concludes, ‘is nothing new: genuine confrontation of these problems remains the preserve of circles of an esoteric type … while vulgar sects gain strength, whose clumsy and distorting interpretations risk winning over the fanatical masses at any moment.’
Despite its brevity, this final text deserves close attention: for here Locchi not only alludes to the confusion with which his work America, or, in the Italian and Spanish translations, The American Disease, written collaboratively with Alain de Benoist, was received by some, but also newly advances, in a very condensed form, the idea of a ‘projectual’ Europe still to be achieved, drawing on Heidegger, which still has the historico-spiritual strength to regenerate its presence in the world and not to die of ‘occidentalist alienation.’ This text is Giorgio Locchi’s response to a question by the journal Intervento (no. 69, published under the title ‘Europe Is Not an Inheritance: It Is a Future Mission’) and later republished in Margini, no. 43, a publication of the Edizioni di Ar, July 2003. Its inevitable anachronism (it dates to the time when Europe was still bound by the Treaty of Yalta) removes none of its relevance.
Giorgio Locchi
Defintions: The Texts That Revolutionised Noncomformised Culture
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