Precursors of Nazism
HERZ, JOHN H.
Precursors of Nazism THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL DESPAIR By Fritz Stern California. 367 pp. $8.00. Reviewed by JOHN H. HERZ Professor of Political Science, City College of New York By...
...They saw the times in which they lived as corrupted by "liberalism" and "materialism," and rejected them as violently as they rejected all "modern" Western ideas and values...
...Not satisfied with merely bemoaning the demise of a glorified pre-modern German past, they opposed a still largely authoritarian present...
...Unreason and fancy," Stern points out, had greater impact on the German mind than any system of ideas, because they strongly "affected the sentiments, the Lebensgefühle, of respectable Germans for two generations before Hitler...
...On the surface, the three men with whom The Politics of Cultural Despair concerns itself seem different in many ways...
...Reviewed by JOHN H. HERZ Professor of Political Science, City College of New York By describing the ideas of three German ideologists—Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Arthur Moeller van den Brack—Fritz Stern has made an important contribution to the understanding of one of the mysteries of our time: why the Germans, especially the educated Germans, fell for Hitler...
...What these three men—whose strange lives and stranger ideas Stern relates in fascinating detail— had in common was the mood they articulated...
...The earliest...
...Toward the end of his life, he converted to Roman Catholicism...
...In a heightened way they felt the mood of cultural despair common among sensitive persons sick over the effects of unification on Germany, effects the author neatly sums up in the term "modernity...
...He lived the life of a typical 19th century German academician...
...Many of their soft ideas appealed to progressives and moderates, and actually influenced much that proved valuable: the new esthetic standards and artistic sensibility of the Werkbund, for example, or the idealism of the German Youth Movement...
...What mattered was their common transition from "excessive sentimentality to unrestrained agressiveness...
...The great merit of Fritz Stern's book is that it has assigned these almost forgotten men their place in history...
...All three men had what Stern refers to as "hard" and "soft" ideological aspects...
...He was a solitary bohemian and a recluse who published his major work anonymously...
...This led them, in what Stern describes as a "leap from despair to Utopia across all existing reality," to dream of a future "Third Reich...
...The nationalism and cloudy idealism of men like Lagarde, Langbehn and Moeller van den Bruck served as a bridge "between the rabble-rousing nationalists and anti-Semites and the highly respectable, culturally discontented, politically disinterested groups in German life...
...But it was their harsh extremism which eventually triumphed...
...The last of the trio, Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1924), never completed his formal studies...
...Shortly thereafter, he committed suicide...
...Langbehn (1851-1907), on the other hand, studied art, but took up neither a career nor a profession in the traditional sense...
...Germanic ideals were to be realized in a spiritually united community of German people...
...He worked as a writer, was a member of nearly all the bohemias of 20th century Europe, and finally emerged as the key intellectual figure of the German Rightist romanticism of the 1920s...
...Lagarde (1827-91), was a wellknown Biblical scholar and orientalist...
...Whether this was to be brought about, as in Lagarde's dreams, through a new Germanic religion, or whether, as in Langbehn's "rhapsody of irrationalism," through renewed artistic feelings, mattered little...
...He has reminded us that "A thousand teachers who in their youth had read and worshipped Lagarde or Langbehn were just as important to the triumph of National Socialism as all the putative millions of marks that Hitler collected from German tycoons...
...Thus, when Hitler finally presented himself in the role of the longed-for "heroic leader" and appealed to the Rightist cultural elite in the name of Germanic idealism, few were prepared to deny him...
Vol. 45 • June 1962 • No. 13
