Conservative Revolution

The Conservative Revolution, also known as the German neoconservative movement, or new nationalism, was a German national-conservative and ultraconservative movement prominent in Germany and Austria between 1918 and 1933.
Conservative revolutionaries were involved in a cultural counter-revolution and showed a wide range of diverging positions concerning the nature of the institutions Germany had to instate, labelled by historian Roger Woods the "conservative dilemma". Nonetheless, they were generally opposed to traditional Wilhelmine Christian conservatism, egalitarianism, liberalism and parliamentarian democracy as well as the cultural spirit of the bourgeoisie and modernity. Plunged into what historian Fritz Stern has named a deep "cultural despair", uprooted as they felt within the rationalism and scientism of the modern world, theorists of the Conservative Revolution drew inspiration from various elements of the 19th century, including Friedrich Nietzsche's contempt for Christian ethics, democracy and egalitarianism; the anti-modern and anti-rationalist tendencies of German Romanticism; the vision of an organic and naturally-organized folk community cultivated by the Völkisch movement; the Prussian tradition of militaristic and authoritarian nationalism; and their own experience of comradeship and irrational violence on the front lines of World War I.
The Conservative Revolution held an ambiguous relationship with Nazism from the 1920s to the early 1930s, which has led scholars to describe it as a form of "German pre-fascism" or "non-Nazi fascism". Although they share common roots in 19th-century anti-Enlightenment ideologies, the disparate movement cannot be easily confused with Nazism. Conservative Revolutionaries were not necessarily racialist as the movement cannot be reduced to its Völkisch component. Although they participated in preparing the German society to the rule of the Nazi Party with their antidemocratic and organicist theories, and did not really oppose their rise to power, Conservative Revolutionary writings did not have a decisive influence on Nazism, and the movement was brought to heel like the rest of the society when Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933, culminating in the assassination of prominent thinker Edgar Jung by the Nazis during the Night of the Long Knives in the following year. Many of them eventually rejected the antisemitic or the totalitarian nature of the Nazi regime, with the notable exception of Carl Schmitt and some others.
From the 1960–1970s onwards, the Conservative Revolution has largely influenced the European New Right, in particular the French Nouvelle Droite and the German Neue Rechte, and through them the contemporary European Identitarian movement.

Name and definition

Although conservative essayists of the Weimar Republic like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Edgar Jung had already described their political project as a Konservative Revolution, the name saw a revival after the 1949 doctoral thesis of Neue Rechte philosopher Armin Mohler on the movement. Molher's post-war ideological reconstruction of the "Conservative Revolution" has been widely criticized by scholars, but the validity of a redefined concept of "neo-conservative" or "new nationalist" movement active during the Weimar period, whose lifetime is sometimes extended to the years 1890s–1910s, and which differed in particular from the "old nationalism" of the 19th century, is now generally accepted in scholarship.
The name "Conservative Revolution" has appeared as a paradox, sometimes as a "semantic absurdity", for many modern historians, and some of them have suggested "neo-conservative" as a more easily justifiable label for the movement. Sociologist Stefan Breuer wrote that he would have preferred the substitute "new nationalism" to name a charismatic and holistic cultural movement that differed from the "old nationalism" of the previous century, whose essential role was limited to the preservation of the German institutions and their influence in the world. Despite the apparent contradiction, however, the association of the terms "Conservative" and "Revolution" is justified in Moeller van den Bruck's writings by his definition of the movement as a will to preserve eternal values while favouring at the same time the redesign of ideal and institutional forms in response to the "insecurities of the modern world".
Historian Louis Dupeux, a specialist of the Conservative Revolution, saw the movement as an intellectual project with its own consistent logic, namely the striving for an Intellektueller Macht, if necessary via the use of modern technique and concepts, which would allow them to promote and gain wider support to conservative and revolutionary ideas directed against liberalism, egalitarianism, and traditional conservatism. This change of attitude, compared to 19th-century conservatism, is described as a Bejahung by Dupeux: Conservative Revolutionaries said "yes" to their time as long as they could find ways to facilitate the resurgence of anti-liberal and what they saw as "eternal values" within modern societies. Dupeux conceded at the same time that the Conservative Revolution was rather a counter-cultural movement than an actual philosophical proposition, relying more on non-rationalistic "feeling, images and myths" than on scientific analysis and concepts. He also admitted the necessity to distinguish several leanings, sometimes with contradictory views, within its diverse ideological spectrum.
Political scientist Tamir Bar-On has defined the Conservative Revolution as a combination of "German ultra-nationalism, defence of the organic folk community, technological modernity, and socialist revisionism, which perceived the worker and soldier as models for a reborn authoritarian state superseding the egalitarian "decadence" of liberalism, socialism, and traditional conservatism."

Origin and development

The Conservative Revolution is encompassed in a larger and older counter-movement to the French Revolution of 1789, influenced by the anti-modernity and anti-rationalism of early 19th-century romanticism, in the context of a German, especially Prussian, "tradition of militaristic, authoritarian nationalism which rejected liberalism, socialism, democracy and internationalism." Historian Fritz Stern described the movement as disoriented intellectuals plunged into a profound "cultural despair": they felt alienated and uprooted within a world dominated by what they saw as "bourgeois rationalism and science". Their hatred of modernity, Stern follows, led them to the naive confidence that all these modern evils could be fought and resolved by a "Conservative Revolution".
Although terms such as Konservative Kraft and schöpferische Restauration began to spread across German-speaking Europe from the 1900s to the 1920s, the Konservative Revolution became an established concept in the Weimar Republic through the writings of essayists like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Rauschning, Edgar Jung and Oswald Spengler.
The creation of the Alldeutscher Verband by Alfred Hugenberg in 1891 and the Jugendbewegung in 1896 are cited as conducive to the emergence of the Conservative Revolution in the following decades. Moeller van den Bruck was the dominant figure of the movement until his suicide on 30 May 1925. His ideas were initially spread through the Juniklub he had founded on 28 June 1919, on the day of the signing of Treaty of Versailles.
Conservative Revolutionaries frequently referred to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche as their mentor and as the main intellectual influence on their movement. Despite Nietzsche's philosophy being often misinterpreted, or wrongly appropriated by thinkers of the Conservative Revolution, they retained his contempt for Christian ethics, democracy, modernity and egalitarianism as the cornerstone of their ideology. Historian Roger Woods writes that Conservative Revolutionaries "constructed", in response to the war and the unstable Weimar period, a Nietzsche "who advocated a self-justifying activism, unbridled self-assertion, war over peace, and the elevation of instinct over reason."
Many of the intellectuals involved in the movement were born in the last decades of the nineteenth century and experienced WWI as a formative event for the foundation of their political beliefs. The life on the front line, with its violence and irrationality, caused most of them to search a posteriori for a meaning to what they had to endure during the conflict. Ernst Jünger is the major figure of that branch of the Conservative Revolution which wanted to uphold military structures and values in peacetime society, and saw in the community of front line comradeship the true nature of German socialism.

Main thinkers

According to Armin Mohler and other sources, prominent members of the Conservative Revolution included:

Ideology

Despite a broad range of political positions that historian Roger Woods has labelled the "conservative dilemma", the German Conservative Revolution can be defined by its disapproval of:

the traditional conservative values of the German Empire, including the egalitarian ethics of Christianity; and a rejection of the project of a restoration of the defunct Wilhelmine empire within its historical political and cultural structures,
the political regime and commercialist culture of the Weimar Republic; and the parliamentary system and democracy in general, because the national community shall "transcend the conventional divisions of left and right",
the class analysis of socialism; with the defence of an anti-Marxist "socialist revisionism"; labelled by Oswald Spengler the "socialism of the blood", it drew inspiration from the front line comradeship of World War I.