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Moeller van den Bruck: Inventor of the “Third Reich”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Gerhard Krebs
Gerhard Krebs
Affiliation:
Western Reserve University
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Extract

In December, 1922, a resident of Berlin finished the manuscript of a book which, although far from becoming a best-seller, was destined to make history, if only through its title. The book was Das Dritte Reich, and its author, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, was a German intellectual, then in his forties, who had a theory purporting to explain Germany's downfall as well as a vision of her recovery and return to a leading position in the world.

One may well be uncertain as to whether Moeller, had he lived, would have found himself altogether in agreement with the policies and methods of the régime for which he accidentally furnished so attractive a label, or whether he would have found himself among the dead on the morrow of June 30, 1934; but there can be little doubt that the author of Das Dritte Reich belongs among the contributors to the creed in the name of which Germany is ruled today.

Moeller van den Bruck was born in 1876 in the Rhineland, the son of a middle-class architect and Prussian official whose family went back to Lutheran pastor stock in Saxony. From his mother's side he inherited Dutch-Spanish blood and, from her Dutch maiden name, the more romantic-sounding portion of his pen name. His formal education was never completed after he was expelled from the Gymnasium at Düsseldorf as penalty for his indifference in class, resulting from his preoccupation with modern German literature (social lyrics) and philosophy (Nietzsche), which to the lad of sixteen seemed of vastly greater “social significance” than what his teachers had to offer.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 35 , Issue 6 , December 1941 , pp. 1085 - 1105
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1941

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References

1 Hamburg, 1923. A condensed translation by Lorimer, E. O. was published as Germany's Third Empire (London, 1934, and New York, 1941).Google Scholar The page references in the body of this article refer to the 1934 London edition.

2 Moeller hesitated between Das Dritte Reich and Die Dritte Partei as titles for his book.

3 About Moeller's earlier life and his admiration for the Nietzschean heroic, “dionysian” way of life we know through the reports of his first wife, quoted in part by Fechter, Paul, “Das Leben Moeller van den Brucks,” Deutsche Rundschau, April, 1934, pp. 14–20.Google Scholar Fechter also contributed a biography of Moeller, to Die Grossen Deutschen (5 vols., Berlin, 1935–1937), in Vol. 4, pp. 570–583Google Scholar, and wrote a brief book, Moeller van den Bruck; Ein politisches Schicksal (Berlin, 1934).

4 Fechter, , in Deutsche Rundschau, Apr., 1934.Google Scholar

5 On “old” and “young” nations, see below, note 15.

6 In collaboration with Merezhkovsky, Moeller had undertaken to translate Dostoevsky's writings into German.

7 The Herrenklub, it is remembered, took the limelight in 1932 when it was said that the cabinet of von Papen was born there.

8 “Schicksal ist stärker als Staatskunst,” Deutsche Rundschau, Nov., 1916, p. 161.

9 Besides, Moeller rejected parliamentary representation on the basis of democratic elections and equal suffrage as the rule of mediocrity, the cult of the average man, as Nietzsche had scornfully written. See Kolnai, Aurel, The War Against the West (New York, 1938), p. 116Google Scholar, for a critical analysis of this attitude.

10 Deutsche Rundschau, Nov., 1916, p. 162.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., p. 166. Nature, which expresses her will through nations, appears to be a composite of many elements, including geographic factors, economic spheres, and individual genius. Behind these “there may be still mightier forces: cosmic relationships, in which physical relations are linked with metaphysical necessities” (pp. 166–167). “It is for the thinker to recognize these relations, for the artist to reveal them, and for the statesman to put them into effect” (p. 167). In “Der Untergang des Abendlandes; Für und wider Spengler,” Deutsche Rundschau, July, 1920, pp. 141–170, Moeller points with emphatic approval to Spengler's rejection of causality in history and revival of historic destiny, and, in general, to the letter's interpretation of history from a “prime phenomenon” (Urphānomen).

13 Ibid., p. 162.

14 Ibid., p. 161.

15 “Das Recht der jungen Völker,” Deutsche Rundschau, Nov., 1918, p. 235. Moeller had first developed the concept of “old” and “young” nations—which must not be understood in terms of age in years—in 1906 in Die Zeitgenossen (“The Contemporaries”), a supplementary volume to Die Deutschen. At that time the “old” nations comprised the Latin, the “young” ones the Germanic, nations, excluding, however, England as a degenerate Germanic nation. In 1918, Moeller redefined the two types. “Age” of a nation now implied possession and saturation, also Bentham's concept of happiness, the ideas of 1789 dressed up as eternal ideals, and the confirmation of Malthus; while “youth” denoted claim, readiness and work, also Nietzsche and Darwin, and the refutation of Malthus. Bulgaria, Finland, and Japan were the “young” nations, and Prussia, their prototype.

16 The German “proletariat,” under this definition, might enjoy a higher standard of living than the non-”proletarian” working class of, say, France. Moeller would probably reply that the cultural problem has to be considered along with the population problem (cf. Germany's Third Empire, p. 64).

17 “The population problem … prevails amongst all nations who as the result of the War have lost the power to dispose freely of their human resources…. The population problem unites all conquered peoples in a common cause; and wherever it remains unsolved the nation is in effect a conquered people” (p. 67). Even Russia, with her vast Lebensraum, is included among the conquered, however strained the reasoning may appear. “The English working man can live because his country possesses the power to cater for its nationals; the French can live because they have more space than people. But the Russians cannot live, because they do not know what they can work with or what they can live on; and the German, Italian, and Central European peoples cannot live because they do not know either where they can work or how they can exist” (p. 68).

18 Kolnai, op. cit., p. 329.

19 The inadequacy of “empire” for the German term “Reich” is evident, for Reich does not imply an emperor but may indicate a republic, while on the other hand it denotes more than merely a territory and, to Moeller, has an almost mystical content.

20 Moeller credited the Revolution of 1918 with having rendered true leadership possible by sweeping away the monarchy.

21 Moeller, it appears, is more charitable in his judgment of conservatism than of liberalism. He does not reject the principle of conservatism when he censures those who passed as its representatives, as he does in the case of liberalism.

22 The similarity with Nietzsche-Zarathustra's advice that “no people could live without first valuing; if a people will maintain itself, however, it must not value as its neighbor valueth,” is evident.

23 Such nation-consciousness did appear in the 1920's in German political groups, especially on the Right and among the younger generation. It even reached, in a milder form, over to the Left, notably the “Young-Socialists” and the groups led by the late Professor Hermann Heller. The overwhelming majority of the Socialists and Communists, remembering what they had been taught about nations and internationalism and how they had been treated as outsiders before 1918, remained strictly class-conscious and aloof, however, and looked upon such demonstrations as showing the national colors or singing the national anthem as breaches of proletarian etiquette.

24 The Empire may not even be expected ever to be fulfilled, as “men set themselves only such tasks as they cannot fulfill” (p. 39). Its main function seems to be that of a myth.

25 Deutsche Rundschau, Nov., 1918, p. 233.

26 Ibid., Nov., 1916, pp. 165, 167. The end of the European leadership of France and England, and the prevalence of the ideas they represent, thus appears doubly certain.

27 E.g., Ferdinand Fried, Hans Zehrer, and others in the Tat-Kreis, a group of radicals of the Right speaking through the magazine Die Tat; or Freyer, Hans in his book Die Revolution von Rechts (Jena, 1931).Google Scholar Numerous other examples can be found in Kolnai, op. cit.

28 Deutsche Rundschau, Apr., 1934.

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