Before the outbreak of the First World War völkisch literature was securely rooted in mainstream literary life in Germany. The völkisch-nationalist ideology, articulated in völkisch literature, provided Germans with an his-torically rooted identity in the face of modern insecurity. In the years before 1914, the reality of the Kaiserreich nonetheless seemed increasingly far from the völkisch ideal of a unified Germany. Between 1871 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, völkisch-nationalists increasingly empha-sised the importance of war as they grew impatient with the cultural and political stagnation they identified in contemporary society. Suffering was considered a prerequisite of creativity and the virtues of the struggle a way of cleansing the German Volk of its decadence. War offered men the chance to become heroes, freeing them from the routine and passive complacency of everyday life and making the Volk vital once more. Military service educated men to this end.191 War was viewed as a natural part of human
189 Kolbenheyer, Sebastian Karst, vol. III, pp. 107–109.
190 Ibid. pp. 145–146.
191 ‘Völkische Hochziele – Das deutsche Heer’, Deutsches Handelsblatt (Hamburg, 16.
Jahrgang, Nr. 15: 1.08.1909), FfZ: 5221.
existence, necessary for weeding out the weak and degenerate elements in the Volk, ensuring its biological and spiritual health. Völkisch-nationalists therefore greeted the outbreak of the First World War with enthusiasm, in the belief that the war would create the necessary conditions for the renewal of German society. The Kaiser’s words in August 1914, ‘I no longer know parties, I know only Germans’192 were received as a declaration of the dawning Volksgemeinschaft, or national community of the German people.193 For the first time in the history of Germany as a unified state its population was apparently united by a common purpose, which inspired a feeling of spiritual unity that, according to völkisch commentators, had been missing since 1871. It also gave further impetus to the anti-western position of many völkisch-nationalists, who conceived their ideal of the German Volksgemeinschaft in opposition to the materialist capitalism of the Anglo-Saxon world.
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck has been recognised as a leading figure of the ‘conservative revolution’ in the Weimar Republic, alongside the brothers Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger and Oswald Spengler.194 Yet Fritz Stern identifies him instead as ‘the last and in some ways the most admirable of the Germanic critics,’ emerging in the decade before the out-break of the First World War. Stern asserts that: ‘… in him [Moeller van den Bruck] we can understand that the conservative revolution was not a spontaneous or reactionary opposition to Versailles or to the Weimar Republic, but was the reformulation under more favorable conditions of a nineteenth century ideology.’195 This is evident in Moeller van den Bruck’s pre-war work, which provided the ideological foundations for his most
192 Quoted in Hermand, Der alte Traum vom neuen Reich, p. 94.
193 On the various responses to the ‘August Days’ in Germany, see Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 3–9;
13–31; Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen (Munich: Beck, 2002), vol. I, pp. 333–336; Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘Germany and the Coming of War’ in R.J.W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (eds), The Coming of the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 101–102.
194 See Breuer, Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution, p. 3.
195 Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, p. 231.
famous work, Das Dritte Reich (1922). In Die moderne Literatur, published in 1902, Moeller already argued for the social and spiritual cleansing that war would provide: ‘Fighting is magnificent and more worthy of man than self-indulgence in smug comfort. Battle gives us, especially when it is of spirits and passions, our greatest kings and best heroes. … Eternal peace would be unsupportable – it would be a boredom, a yawning that would give us merely the philistine.’196 In short, he argued, the virtues of the struggle could ennoble the Volk.
The extent to which völkisch ideas informed Moeller’s work is revealed most clearly, however, in Die Deutschen, an eight-volume history of the Germans published between 1904 and 1910, in which he sought to glorify his Volk through biographical essays on its great figures.197 In the years lead-ing up to the First World War, Moeller also published an examination of contemporary culture and its leading figures,198 and managed to sell the idea of a six-volume series to the Munich publisher Reinhard Piper, three volumes on the old Völker – in Moeller’s view Britain, France and Italy – and three on the new – Germany, America and Russia. The only work of the series ever published was that on Italy.199 His plans for the works nonetheless demonstrate ‘his celebrated distinction among old, young, and embryonic peoples.’200 Young peoples, he believed, could claim privileges in the course of realising a great future. Of those listed above, Germany was the only truly young Volk, being bold, energetic and capable of expansion.
Germany therefore had a right to imperial power.201
196 Arthur Moeller van Bruck, Die moderne Literatur (Berlin and Leipzig: Schuster &
Loeffler, 1902), p. 608. Quoted in Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, p. 237.
197 Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Die Deutschen (Minden: Bruns, 1904–1910).
198 Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Die Zeitgenossen: Die Geister – die Menschen (Minden:
Bruns, 1906).
199 Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Die italienische Schönheit (Munich: Piper, 1913).
200 Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, p. 251.
201 Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das Recht der jüngen Völker (edition consulted:
Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932); see Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, p. 251. On Moeller van den Bruck’s relationship with völkisch thought, see also André Schlüter, Moeller van den Bruck: Leben und Werk (Cologne: Böhlau, 2010), pp. vi, 98, 113.
Moeller van den Bruck’s political views were based not on pragmatic assessments of actual situations, but on an aesthetic idealism that opposed the banality of the Kaiserreich and spoke directly to the concerns of völkisch-nationalists. Like them, Moeller van den Bruck was revolutionary before the First World War. He already called for the complete reorganisation of German society based on a vision of a community of the people and led by a leader who would emerge from the masses. Thus the Führerprinzip would be applied.
Germany should also expand territorially, providing the German people with the space to realise their great fate.202 As it became apparent that the war was not going to yield an easy victory the metaphors of heroism and sacrifice that had characterised propaganda both in the trenches and on the home front gave way to an emphasis on the stoic endurance of the soldiers serving their Fatherland.203 This was also reflected in völkisch-nationalists’ responses to the conflict. In the end, however, their common experience was manifested not in the sunshine of victory but in the shadow of defeat. The lost war focused völkisch-nationalist attention on outward circumstances – the Versailles Treaty, the republican state – to a degree that had hitherto been impossible. In the post-war years idealism gave way to pragmatic, even extreme, action.
Throughout the Weimar period, the First World War was the single most important influence on the development of völkisch literature. Its significance was both political and symbolic, giving writers the chance to tackle themes of völkisch-nationalist thought in a context that touched the lives of the entire population. In their works, images of German heroes survived in accounts of individual battles and campaigns. Countless books attempted to restore Germany’s lost pride by analysing significant battles to show German courage and military success.204 The memoirs of veterans
202 Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 244; 264–265.
203 Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 97; Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich:
A New History (London: Pan, 2000), p. 30; Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus, pp. 72–73. Ketelsen, Völkisch-nationalistische und nationalsozialistische Literatur, pp. 54–55; Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken, pp. 121–122.
204 For example: Juan Winkelhagen, Das Rätsel vom Skagerrak (Leipzig: Weicher, 1925), reviewed in the Völkische Bücherschau, No. 2, May 1925. Other völkisch-nationalist
were also popular in the post-war years, and the camaraderie of the trenches was glorified in novels and accounts of the front. The appearance in 1929 of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel Im Westen nichts Neues205 unleashed a new wave of nationalist publications that countered his negative view of the War with glorified accounts of their authors’ own experiences based on pre-1914 nationalist ideas of war as the ultimate test of manhood and hero-ism. The writers’ direct involvement in the events they described lent credibility to their emphasis on the importance of deeds over words and gave their books added authority.206
Continuing the wartime struggle, the Freikorps campaigns in German border regions and the vigilante operations and political murders of extreme right-wing groups, like the Organisation Consul, provided further subject matter for writers determined to chronicle the ongoing völkisch strug-gle.207 These hastily formed bands of volunteers were initially formed to help protect Germany’s eastern borders, to defend German interests in the Baltic region and resist left-wing subversion within Germany. The Freikorps consisted largely of First World War veterans. The army had provided them with their raison d’être and it seemed natural to seek refuge from defeat in
works on the war reviewed in the same publication included: Unvergessenes Heldentum:
Das Kolonisationswerk der deutschen Schutztruppe und Marine (Berlin: Kolonialwarte, 1925) and Admiral Michelsen, Der U-Bootkrieg 1914/1918 (Leipzig: Koehler, 1925).
See Völkische Bücherschau, Nr.2, May 1925, FfZ: 36213, Verlagswesen.
205 Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1929).
206 For example, Franz Schauwecker, Aufbruch der Nation (Berlin: Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft, 1929); Paul C. Ettighoffer: Gespenster am toten Mann (Cologne:
Gilde-Verlag, 1931); Feldgrau schafft Dividende (Cologne: Gilde-Verlag, 1932); Von der Teufelsinsel zum Leben (Cologne: Gilde-Verlag, 1932). For further discussion of First World War literature see: David Midgley, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 6; Sontheimer, Anti-Demokratisches Denken, pp. 96; 118–119; Ketelsen, Völkisch-nationale und nationalsozialistische Literatur, pp. 69–71; Hans-Harald Müller, Der Krieg und die Schrisftsteller: Der Kriegsroman der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1986), pp. 298–299.
207 For example, Hans Zöberlein, Der Glaube an Deutschland: Ein Kriegserleben von Verdun bis zum Umsturz (Munich: Eher, 1931), p. 890.
the comradeship that had developed in the trenches. Ernst von Salomon summed up their position at the beginning of Die Geächteten:
These, these weren’t workers, farmers, students, no these weren’t artisans, clerks, businessmen, officials, these were soldiers. Not men dressed up, following orders, not deployed; these were men who had obeyed the call, the secret call of blood, of spirit, volunteers, men who, one way or another, experienced a hard common cause and the things behind the things – and who found a homeland in the war. Homeland, Fatherland, Volk, Nation!208
In 1918, von Salomon asserted, they no longer knew what Germany meant.209 They were particularly susceptible to völkisch propaganda, and anti- Semitism, which provided them with an explanation for their prob-lems and an enemy against which they could continue the struggle they had waged at the front.210 Völkisch ideology thus informed the further development of their nationalism in the Weimar Republic.211
Following the passage of a new army law in March 1921 the Freikorps were officially disbanded. Many groups, however, went underground.212 Anti-republican and völkisch writers on the right elevated the perpetrators of political crimes carried out in the name of Germany to heroes of the German Volk. Their participation in the war had won them the right to determine Germany’s future.213 Right-wing writers also propagated the
208 Ernst von Salomon, Die Geächteten (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1930), p. 34.
209 Salomon, Die Geächteten, pp. 81–82. See also Ernst von Salomon (pseudonym:
Ernst Friedrich), ‘Stahlhelm und Rotfront’ in Deutsche Front, 3rd June edition, 1928, DLA – A: Ernst von Salomon, Box 1.
210 See, for example, Arnold Bronnen’s biography of General Roßbach, leader of the Freikorps unit bearing his name: Roßbach (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1930), p. 70.
211 Salomon, Die Geächteten, pp. 112–114. See also Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus, p. 216.
212 Howard Stern, ‘The Organisation Consul’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 35, No. 1 (March 1963), pp. 20–32. Here p. 23. See also: Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, pp. 75–76; Emil Julius Gumbel, a mathematician, counted almost 400 murders and several thousand assaults as Feme crimes after 1918. Emil J. Gumbel, Vom Fememord zur Reichskanzlei (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneiderer, 1962).
213 Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken, p. 121.
Dolchstoßlegende, which contested the outcome of the war by suggesting that Germany had not been defeated militarily, and campaigned for the return of Germany’s lost territories and the reinstatement of her status as a great power, the latter in full recognition that this was likely to happen by force.
Alongside the glorification of German heroism in the First World War, the consequences of Germany’s defeat also provided inspiration for völkisch literature in the Weimar Republic. Opposition to the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the German revolution of 1918/19, and the French occupation of the industrial Ruhr region in 1923 were all subjects of dis-cussion.214 In 1922 Wilhelm Schäfer, a 54 year-old writer and editor of Die Rheinlande, a significant journal of the Heimatkunstbewegung, located Germany at the centre of a ring of enemies: the country had been betrayed on all sides. Wilson, with his fourteen points, had declared that the war was with the Kaiser, not with Germany. Yet the Kaiser’s abdication, itself a betrayal of his Volk, had done nothing to soften the peace settlement with
214 For example, the discussion concerning the Denkschrift über die Ausschreitungen der Besatzungstruppen im besetzten Gebiet (Berlin: Heymann, 1925) in the Völkische Bücherschau, No. 2, May 1925, FfZ: 36213, Verlagswesen. Also Friedrich Grimm,
‘Frankreich und wir’, excerpt from his book Frankreich am Rhein (Hamburg: HAVA, 1931) in Hava-Bücherbrief. Politik-Geschichte-Kultur, No. 3, Hamburg, February 1932;
Prof. Dr. Grimm, ‘Der Kampf gegen die Separatisten’, Hava-Bücherbrief. Politik-Geschichte-Kultur, No. 2, Hamburg, December 1931, pp. 2–3. This article, which is also an excerpt from the aforementioned book, deals with the German strug-gle against separatists in the Palatinate, who were, according to Grimm, supported by the French. Further völkisch-nationalist works on the subject included: Hans Blüher, Die Erhebung Israels gegen die christlichen Güter (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlaganstalt, 1931). See also Hans Blüher, ‘Der deutsch-französische Friede’, Hava-Bücherbiref. Politik-Geschichte-Kultur, No. 3, Hamburg, February 1932, pp. 4–5;
Fritz Klein, ‘1923 als Paradigma’ from Auf die Barrikaden, Hava-Bücherbrief, No. 3, February, 1932, pp. 5–6. With particular reference to Albert Leo Schlageter, famous as a resistance fighter against the French occupation of the Rhineland in 1923, see Hans Sadowsky, Lebenslänglich Zwangsarbeit (Berlin: Fridericus Verlag). ‘Bücherumschau zur Femefrage’, Korrespondenz: Nachrichtenblatt aus den deutschen Grenzgebieten im bedrohten Osten, 22 September 1930; Friedrich Glombowski, ‘In Memorium Schlageter’, Korrespondenz, 1. Jahrgang, Oppeln, 22 October 1930, Folge 4. FfZ:
412–419, Nationale und Völkische Verbände; also: Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933, p. 195.
Germany; the fourteen points had achieved little; the League of Nations was trapped in its own bureaucracy; German troops had been betrayed by Communists and Jews; and the economy had collapsed. In short, Schäfer argued, ‘all that was corrupt and sly, mean, double-tongued and self-serving had been consecrated; all that was true and straightforward, noble, just and altruistic, had been abandoned.’215
Schäfer’s Dreizehn Bücher der deutschen Seele, he recalled in 1937, was writ-ten out of Germany’s hopelessness after the war, and called for a new start.216 In Schäfer’s post-war works, he linked the social and the national by viewing Germany’s defeat as the starting point for addressing social and cultural prob-lems from a völkisch perspective. Schäfer demanded that Germany admit her war-guilt. He was not, however, referring, as the victorious Allies did, to her role in causing the war. Instead, he suggested that Germany, like all the bel-ligerent nations, needed to acknowledge her guilt in prioritising the national economy and material gain over the nurture and promotion of the Volk. Seen from the German perspective in 1918, this guilt, shared equally between the nations in question, had caused the implosion of European civilisation. As a result, Schäfer, like Moeller van den Bruck in Das Dritte Reich, called for a new beginning that would redress the balance. The Weimar Republic, the prod-uct of Social Democracy and capitalist modernity, was the wrong answer.217 Schäfer’s attitude towards the Jews was ambiguous. In 1923, he outlined his views in a speech entitled Die deutsche Judenfrage.218 Here he praised the contribution made by German Jews to German culture. At the same time he highlighted a deep chasm between the German and the Jewish spirit. In this way, he was able to accept Jews as German citizens but not as members of the German Volk. Assimilation was not only impossible, but dangerous, leading to an adulteration of German culture. An even greater
215 Wilhelm Schäfer, Die dreizehn Bücher der deutschen Seele (Munich: Langen-Müller, 1922), p. 403.
216 Wilhelm Schäfer, Mein Lebenswerk: Dankrede bei der Verleihung des Rheinischen Literaturpreises in Köln am 13. November 1937 (Munich: Langen-Müller, 1937), pp. 4–5.
217 Würmann, ‘Vom Volksschullehrer zum “vaterländischen Erzieher”’, p. 154.
218 Wilhelm Schäfer, ‘Die deutsche Judenfrage’ in Der deutsche Gott (Munich: LMV, 1923), pp. 211–266.
danger, however, were those Jews who espoused modernist culture, which sought to eradicate the differences between Völker altogether. Logically, therefore, he supported the efforts of the Zionists, who understood the differences between the Germans and the Jews. Schäfer’s concern was the maintenance of the cultural and racial purity of the individual Völker.219
Sontheimer observes that the Kriegserlebnis that had such a stark impact on the political culture of the Weimar Republic was far more homogeneous than the experiences that formed German collective memory of the Second World War.220 The First World War demonstrated the nature of industrial warfare for the first time and its impersonal and amoral quality provided all those involved with a common experience. On the German right, at least, this single, widely shared experience proved to be a unifying force for the previ-ously disparate adherents to völkisch-nationalism. It provided them with a new context in which to understand their ideals of camaraderie and community, just as the consequences of the lost war left them with a new context in which to apply their ideology. Nonetheless, the fundamental characteristics of this ideology remained those made familiar by völkisch-nationalists during the Kaiserreich: a racial worldview based on the Volk defined by blood; a social-political ideology formed around the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft led by a Führer and consisting of all European Germans; a belief in Germany’s rightful position in the world as a great power. These were also the terms adopted by Hitler and the newly formed Nazi Party in the 1920s.