Conservative revolutionary movement
The Conservative Revolutionary movement was a German nationalist literary youth movement, prominent in the years following the First World War. None of the leading figures in this movement was a Nazi. 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 the rising tide of communism by advocating their own brand of "conservative socialism".
The Conservative Revolutionaries based their ideas on organic rather than materialistic thinking, on quality instead of quantity and on Volksgemeinschaft ("folk-community") 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 Germany’s most gifted youth, universities and 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 ("dagger-thrust legend") 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". Some were attracted to nihilist ideas. In their Froschperspektive writings, they sought to give their experience meaning.
Edgar Julius Jung, a prominent leader in the movement, was killed by the Nazis in the infamous Night of the Long Knives.
References
- The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic, pg 29.
Bibliography
- Travers, Martin (2001). Critics of Modernity: The Literature of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1890-1933. Peter Lang Publishing. ISBN 0-82044-927-X.
- Herf, Jeffrey (2002). Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (reprint edition ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-52133-833-6.
{{cite book}}:|edition=has extra text (help) - Stern, Fritz R. (1974). The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (New Ed edition ed.). University of California Press. ISBN 0-52002-626-8.
{{cite book}}:|edition=has extra text (help) - Woods, Roger (1996). The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic. St. Martin’s Press. ISBN 0-33365-014-X.