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.
