Conservative Revolutionary movement
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The Conservative Revolutionary movement was a German nationalist literary youth movement, prominent in the years following The First World War. Later, the Nazis claimed the Conservative Revolutionary heritage as their own, although in reality they have had very little to do with it. None of the leading figures in this movement were Nazis. The Conservative Revolutionary school of thought advocated a "new" conservatism and nationalism that was specifically German, or Prussian in particular. Like other conservative movements in the same period, they sought to put a stop to what they saw as a rising tide of socialism, by advocating their own brand of "conservative socialism", which stood in opposition to the actual socialist movement. The Conservative Revolutionaries based their ideas on organic rather than materialistic thinking, on quality instead of quantity and on Volksgemeinschaft ("people-comradeship") rather than class conflict and ochlocracy. These writers produced a profusion of radical nationalistic literature that consisted of war diaries, combat fictional works, political journalism, manifestos, and philosophical treatises outlining their ideas for the transformation of German cultural and political life. The movement had a wide influence among many of Gemany’s most gifted youth, universities and semi-educated middle classes.
The term "Conservative Revolution" predates the First World War, but the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the political theorist Edgar Julius Jung were instrumental in making this term an established concept of the Weimar period.
The Conservative Revolutionaries, many of whom were born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, were all basically formed by their experiences of the First World War. The war and the German Revolution was for them a clean break from the past, which left them greatly disillusioned. First, the experience of the horrors of trench warfare, the filth, the hunger, the negation of heroism to a man’s effort to stay alive on the battlefield and the random death led to many recognizing that there was no meaning to this war, or to life itself. They also had to contend with the Dolchstoßlegende of the end of the war. Second, in this Kriegserlebnis, they sought to re-establish the Frontgemeinschaft (the frontline camaraderie) that defined their existence on the warfront. They felt that they were "like a puppet which has to dance for the demonic entertainment of evil spirits". They were attracted to nihilist ideas. In their Froschperspektive writings, they sought to give their experience meaning.
For the Conservative Revolutionaries, Friedrich Nietzsche was their chief philosophical mentor. A major interpreter of Nietzsche in the Weimar and Nazi periods, Alfred Baeumler, wrote that when one said "Heil Hitler!" to the Nazi youth, one was also greeting Fredrich Nietzsche. (1) Like Nietzsche, Ernst Jünger sees war as inevitable and invigorating. War, for the conservative revolutionaries, was capable of providing new energy for a different spiritual and cultural development of Europe, divorcing it from a moribund and effeminizing Christian morality and culture.
References
- The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic, pg 29.
Bibliography
- The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic, Roger Woods, St. Martin’s Press, Inc., NY, 1996de:Konservative Revolution