The German Genius

beauty, on the one hand, and German Weltanschauung , American will, and Russian soil on the other. It was at this time that he changed his name from Moeller-Bruck to Moeller van den Bruck. 15
    In Die Zeitgenossen , Moeller van den Bruck lamented the absence of great spiritual and artistic interpreters of modernity (except for Walt Whitman, “the hero of the modern world”), and he decried in particular the decline of German culture since unification, arguing that Germany had “too much civilization, not enough culture.” 16 His own contribution was to edit the twenty-three-volume German edition of the works of Dostoevsky. He was also involved in the Juni-Klub, an active force in German intellectual politics whose members, even in those days, were called neo-Conservatives, and with a journal, Gewissen (Conscience)¸ which had much the same aim. As Lagarde had said, liberalism was the enemy—more than ever in Weimar—in particular the enemy of Innerlichkeit , Bildung, and idealism. 17 No form of social harmony was possible with liberalism.
    This was the (very rough) background to Moeller van den Bruck’s celebrated work Das dritte Reich ( The Third Reich ; 1922), which, again as Fritz Stern has described it, “accidentally provided the National Socialist state with its historic name.” The book was a passionate polemic, an attack on liberalism and social democracy in Germany, an attack on ideal types that existed nowhere other than in Moeller van den Bruck’s imagination, in which “he reduced socialism to Marxism, Marxism to Marx, and Marx to Judaism.” This was a new theme for Moeller van den Bruck, who had not been anti-Semitic to that point. But he now criticized the Jews as an uprooted, homeless people “who had no fatherland.” His main argument was that “liberalism is the expression of a society that is no longer a community…” the pre-1914 Germans were “the freest in the world,” liberalism was synonymous with reason, which was inferior to understanding. 18 Many Nazis (not least Hitler) did not embrace Moeller van den Bruck, but Goebbels did and after his suicide in 1925 the writer became a hero in right-wing circles.
    And he was far from alone. In the Weimar Republic people with Moeller van den Bruck’s way of looking at the world went by several names—cultural pessimists, conservative revolutionaries, reactionary modernists—all overlapping: figures such as Ernst Jünger, Edgar Jung, the post-Nietzschean, pre-existential philosopher Ludwig Klages, Stefan George, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Toller, Thomas Mann, who shared a view that what Germany needed was a spiritual revolution, that democracy was culturally unacceptable, that Weimar was a problem in need of a solution, and that a return to a “ völkisch ” community the ideal.
    Thomas Mann and Oswald Spengler have already been introduced. Among the others, Ernst Jünger stands out. A man who would live to be 102 (born in 1895, he died six weeks before his 103rd birthday in 1998), his long life enabled him (as Hans Baumann, another long-lived writer, was to say later) to correct many of his mistakes. Jünger ran away from home to join the French Foreign Legion, then fought bravely on the Western Front, being injured fourteen times and winning the Iron Cross and Pour le Mérite (the “Blue Max”) at twenty-three, one of the youngest-ever recipients. After the war he trained as an entomologist and, in 1922, published In Stahlgewittern ( Storm of Steel ), an unrestrained war memoir that does not shy away from the casualties of war but is at its most lyrical and enthusiastic when describing the fighting. It is now often contrasted with All Quiet on the Western Front , treating war as a near-mystical, elevating, “internal event.” Like many—like the Freikorps, the private armies that sprang up in Germany after World War I to combat revolutionary tendencies—Jünger, at least then, wanted Germany reinstated to a position of supremacy. For him, the Weimar Republic was a pale alternative to the “real” Germany, democracy and liberalism the twin enemies of all that is noble in life. His career would go through several twists before World War II had come and gone; he was never a Nazi but in Weimar, as Keith Bullivant has observed, he was a vivid presence among the Conservative Revolutionaries. 19
    The stance of the Conservative Revolutionaries was as much aesthetic and cultural as political. It set them against such figures as Kurt