Golo Mann’s discussion of the Conservative Revolution in The History of Germany since 1789 (Penguin, 1985) begins with Oswald Spengler, whose positions (anti-Hohenzollern, socialist, anti-progressive, militarist…), mark the beginning of a novel movement, “overthrowing conventional ways of thinking in politics.” For Mann, the C.R. is “confused,” a “strange combination of words,” and yet somehow, perfectly simple: Conservative Revolutionists “rejected not certain aspects of the Republic but the whole of it, and the whole present; they […] wanted to ask completely new questions and offer completely new ideas” (p. 620).
Their temperament was
unsuited to parliamentarism or the new international order, though suited to
poetry and the formation of groupuscules (pp. 620–1). Mann provides a perfect,
lapidary, aphoristic précis of “the
conservative-revolutionary attitude” (Mohler): “They wanted a new Reich without party squabbles, a Reich of the young and of masculine virtues,
a great, proud gathering around a
camp-fire instead of the capital Berlin. They expected much more from the
modern state than it can give them at
the best of times” (p. 621). Here we have their anti-parliamentarism, the
spirit of the Freikorps (“the Ideas of 1914”), the bündisch spirit. And of course “the best of times,” measured by
“quality of life,” which strikes them as the coming of the Last Man: see Leo
Strauss on “German Nihilism”
Interpretation, 26.3 (spring, 1999), specifically p. 360.
I believe that a thorough investigation, from the perspective either of the histoire des sensibilités or des mentalités, or of the history of ideas, can reveal, and indeed all but has revealed, a conservative-revolutionary essence that is anything but “confused”; but Mann specifies the nature of this “confusion,” at the level of sensibilité, through the case of Ernst Jünger: “We cannot know, and he probably did not know himself, what he wanted, what he feared with compassionate sensitivity and what he only pretended to want. The doubts which tortured his fine mind he hid behind the mask of the inflexible writer-officer who gives his readers orders” (p. 621).
Mann’s is a peculiar
though understandable position: Klemens von Klemperer misrepresents him as
sceptical of C.R.’s validity as
historical category (Klemperer, Central European History, 30.3 [1997], p. 458); but it
is rather that, for Mann, the sensibilités
and mentalités of a clearly definable
current strike him as confused: “one’s head reels in dealing with it” (p. 622).
Mann does not quite succeed in making a case for confusion, so to speak. He
asserts “an unusual confusion of aims”; the reader is to understand that their
“hyper-modern view” and classical “absence of emotion,” “hardness and
brittleness” are at odds with their romantic, neo-mediaevalist idealisation of
the Hohenstaufen, etc. (ibid.). I
repeat my formula in return: conservative revolution is an abstraction and radicalisation of conservative principles
necessitated by the completion of (“early”) modernity with industrialisation
and democratisation, and the arrival of (“proto-”) postmodernity. (See my
previous notes on Stefan
Breuer and Panagiotis
Kondylis.)
Mann says that for the
Conservative Revolutionists, “ideas, of
which there was an abundance in Germany, were less important than
character, activity and life” (ibid.).
Two elements. First, as Kondylis
describes, with the intensification of modernity, ideas, ideology, discourse,
reason, etc., in the contemporary understanding of these terms, become the more
and more the medium of politics. This is perhaps a characteristic of “the best
of times”: a shift away from force and towards at least the appearance of
reason. Second, in revolting against
these “best” of times, Conservative Revolutionists at least make an appearance
of disdaining ideas, ideology, discourse, reason, etc.; but again, as Kondylis
describes, this was a “purely polemical abhorrence”; “only theoretically could
the idealised description of a ‘healthy’ and ‘organic’ society be made which is
not created by abstract theories, nor does it need them.”
Finally, Mann describes
succinctly and helpfully how party politicians like von Papen tried to “woo”
these troublesome young anti-parliamentarians, and how, with economic crisis
and the failure of the party system, alliance between Conservative
Revolutionists and the “average Conservative” was “much talked about”; but how
ultimately “[i]t was absorbed and ruined by the real, anything but
‘conservative,’ revolution which now began in earnest” (p. 623)—National
Socialism, that is. Mann does not elaborate on this “absorption”; but two camps
emerge in the literature. For the professed Conservative Revolutionists
Rauschning and Mohler, C.R. and N.S. are quite distinct, even if there were
moments of collaboration, and ultimately defection. For Leo Strauss, whose own
relationship to the movement is ambiguous, both C.R. and N.S. are expressions
of an underlying current of “German nihilism.”
Postscript. On Nietzsche: “Balanced essays were replaced by
aphorisms, thrown out like orders” (p. 397). Compare this to his
characterisation of Jünger (“orders”). Mann does not deal with Nietzsche as proto-Conservative
Revolutionary. He dispenses with C.R. as Nietzscheanism with a disparaging
tacit allusion to Baeumler (p. 402). But his choice of the same word in these
instances implies the continuity. Part of that continuity is Nietzsche’s and
the latter right-Nietzscheans’ rejection of discourse: a meta-discourse about,
and sceptical of the use of, discourse.
(My thanks to Robert Steuckers, who has republished this post at Euro-Synergies with some nice pictures.)
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