By Keith Preston, August 18, 2020

Friedrich Nietzsche has clearly been one of the most influential thinkers of the past century. His thought has exercised a profound impact on the intellectual disciplines of philosophy, psychology, history, theology, political theory, linguistics, aesthetics, cultural criticism, and others. A wide range of ideological and philosophical currents have attempted to claim the legacy of Nietzsche as part of their own trajectory, including existentialism, postmodernism, liberal Christianity, post-structuralism, and political tendencies as diverse as anarchism, fascism, and neoliberalism. Francis Fukuyama went so far as to proclaim the post-Cold War global hegemony of “democratic capitalism” to be the coming of Nietzsche’s “last man.” Clearly, Nietzsche’s ideas have been appropriated by an enormous range of usurpers, often in wildly inappropriate ways.

One of the most profound desecrations of Nietzsche’s legacy has been the common but ill-considered tendency of many to associate him with the Third Reich and the ideology of National Socialism. The roots of this misconception perhaps lie within Nietzsche’s own family. His sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, herself a committed anti-Semite who later embraced Nazism decades after her brother’s death, did indeed attempt to misappropriate his work in service of the Nazi cause. When Elizabeth died in 1935, Adolf Hitler, having already risen to power as the dictator of Germany, attended her funeral. However, even a cursory review of the life and thought of Friedrich Nietzsche reveals him to have been the antithesis of Nazism. He detested both German nationalism and anti-Semitism, having broken with his former friend, the composer Richard Wagner, and later with Elizabeth herself, over such questions.

Serious scholars of Nietzsche famously disagree on how to best interpret his work as well. However, given the lingering association of Nietzsche with Hitlerism, two important questions emerge. The first involves the matter of what Nietzsche’s political outlook actually was, to the degree that his thought is “political.” The second question relates to Nietzsche’s influence on the German radical right during the interwar period. While the appropriation of Nietzsche by the National Socialists was clearly opportunistic and profoundly wrong from an intellectual perspective, the question of Nietzsche’s influence on the German Conservative Revolution is somewhat more difficult and ambiguous. The Conservative Revolution was not a unitary or singular movement, and included a range of figures with widely divergent ideas. Other figures, such as Carl Schmitt, have been identified by subsequent intellectual historians as having been associated with the Conservative Revolution in ways that are largely inaccurate or exaggerated.

However, it is true many luminaries of the Conservative Revolution embraced the work of Nietzsche in a way that was much more serious and far less corrupted, debased, and opportunistic than the National Socialists. Despite their differences, certain core ideas emanate from the general body of thought that was produced by the thinkers of the Conservative Revolution. Among these was a rejection of traditional conservatism of the “throne and alter” variety, which put them at odds with the reactionary monarchists who wished to restore the Wilhelmine order or the Hapsburg or Hohenzollern dynasties. The Conservative Revolution rejected the liberal parliamentarian and bourgeois democratic regime of the Weimar Republic, along with the Marxist class determinism and economism of the Social Democrats and Communists. The ethos of traditional Christianity and the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which tended toward scientism, met with opposition from the Conservative Revolution.

It is clear that these ideas overlap with the thought of Nietzsche to a considerable degree. Nietzsche disdained the Enlightenment as an Apollonian manifestation and preferred what he regarded as the Dionysian traits displayed by the Renaissance. The Conservative Revolution’s embrace of German Romanticism demonstrated similar motivations and characteristics. Nietzsche’s criticisms of liberalism, democracy, egalitarianism, and socialism were an extension and derivative of his famous critique of Christian ethics as the theological embodiment of “slave morality.” His disdain for the aristocrats and monarchists of his own era as representations of decadence and cultural decline foreshadowed the Conservative Revolution’s rejection of traditional German conservatism. Bourgeois commercial culture was in its infancy in Germany during Nietzsche’s era. It is a certainty that Nietzsche would have been repulsed by the Americanization of Germany during the Weimar period, as were the thinkers of the Conservative Revolution.

However, the connection between Nietzsche’s thought and other aspects of the Conservative Revolution are less clear. The affinity of the Conservative Revolution for the Prussian military tradition is difficult to reconcile with Nietzsche’s actual views on war, militarism, nationalism, and the state, all of which are widely misunderstood. For example, Nietzsche’s well-known concept of the “will to power,” properly interpreted, appears to be a metaphor for aspirations to greatness, rather than a literal call to arms in a militaristic fashion. Nietzsche’s writings on “war” are best understood as a metaphorical reference to the spirit of conquest that he felt had been eradicated by the rise of modernity with its emphasis on rationality, scientism, materialism, and “progress.” The great evil of modernity in Nietzsche’s view was its perceived incompatibility of the cultivation and preservation of high culture in associated with aristocratic tradition.

The thinkers of the Conservative Revolution, influenced by their recent experience in The Great War, tended to give a more literal interpretation to Nietzsche’s writings on war. One of the most popular books associated with the Conservative Revolution was Ernst Junger’s “Storm of Steel,” which contains a young stormtrooper’s diaries, written during his time as a surviving frontline combatant in the Imperial Army. The liberal-bourgeois commercial and democratic ethos of Weimar provided something of a culture shock to war veterans accustomed to a military lifestyle, and for whom danger and the threat of imminent death had been constant companions. Junger’s essay “On Danger” is reflective of such sentiments.

Nietzsche frequently expressed anti-German sentiments in his writings in ways that clearly indicated contempt for the rising German nationalism of the Bismarckian era in which Nietzsche lived. Nietzsche’s political outlook, to the degree that it can be fully deciphered, appears to reflect the tradition of European aristocratic radicalism of the 19^th century. Aristocratic radicalism tended to regard the nationalism of the era as bourgeois, liberal, and middle-class, if not outright plebian or proletarian. Nationalism was considered to be rooted in the egalitarian sentiments and mass societies that emerged from the French Revolution. Certainly, Nietzsche’s reference to the state as the “coldest of monsters” is not compatible with the authoritarianism of the Conservative Revolution, much less the totalitarianism of the National Socialists.

The Conservative Revolution likewise expressed an affinity for the Volkisch movement, which emphasized German ethno-cultural identity. Contrary to another common misconception, the Volkisch movement was not a type of proto-Nazism or vulgar “Aryan” racial determinism. Adherents of the movement had included such figures as the Jewish anarcho-communist Gustav Landauer, who had been murdered by the Freikorps paramilitary forces during the brief workers’ revolution of 1919. The core objectives of the Conservative Revolution, to the degree that the movement had a consistently identifiable political outlook, were the replacement of the Weimar liberal-capitalist parliamentary democracy with a more hierarchical and stratified order. However, the “new state” concept that emerged from the movement did not involve restoring the former royal or aristocratic dynasties, or the creation of a personality cult of the kind that characterized the Hitler regime.

Anti-capitalism was a critical element of Conservative Revolutionary thought. The anti-capitalism of the Conservative Revolution was not rooted in the Marxist emphasis on leveling differences between classes. Rather, it was a rejection of the bourgeois commercial ethos of capitalism which was perceived to be culturally degenerate as manifested by the embryonic consumer culture. During the Weimar period, features of modern capitalist societies such as department stores and the pervasiveness of billboards and other forms of commercial advertising became prevalent for the first time. Such features were regarded as vulgar, philistine, and as manifestations of aesthetic deterioration. The economic depression and mass unemployment experienced by the Weimar regime likewise cemented the conviction of the Conservative Revolutionaries that capitalism would have to be replaced by some kind of socialism. However, the Conservative Revolution called for a socialism that lacked the vulgar materialism of Marxism and reflected the supposed organic features of the German volkisch tradition.

The relationship between the Conservative Revolution and National Socialism is one that has long been debated. Critics of the Conservative Revolution have expressed a range of viewpoints concerning the movement. The most critical perspectives have suggested that the Conservative Revolution was merely a variation of National Socialism with the differences being only peripheral or incidental. Others have argued that the differences involved matters of style and application rather than differences of a more substantive or qualitative nature. For example, some critics have likened the differences between National Socialism and the Conservative Revolution to the differences between Stalinism and Trotskyism. The Conservative Revolution has been likened to the interwar fascist movements that emerged in other nations and, in the case of Mussolini’s Italy, actually took power. A less critical comparison has been to cite the differences between Social Democrats and Communists as an analogy, or the differences between totalitarian regimes and conventionally authoritarian but not totalitarian regimes.

It is impossible to determine what kind of state and society the Conservative Revolution would have produced given its internal intellectual differences and its failure to achieve actual state power. However, an overview of the ideas of the Conservative Revolution indicates that the movement reflected only a very limited similarity to the ideas of Hitler’s National Socialism. First, the Conservative Revolution lacked the crude racism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis, traits which were the definitive characteristics of Hitlerism. The cult of personality that centered on Hitler was polar opposite of the Conservative Revolution, a movement in which no universally recognized leader or defining figure emerged. The Conservative Revolution was instead a collection of writers, philosophers, political theorists, and ex-soldiers. National Socialism was unique in its extremism and represented a bizarre syncretism of its own.

The Conservative Revolution and National Socialism shared an affinity for militarism and German nationalism. Both movements opposed liberalism, democracy, and Marxist variations of socialism. However, the Conservative Revolution possessed a much more serious intellectualism as opposed to the lowbrow, street-level, thuggish antics of the Nazis. The highbrow writers of the Conservative Revolution regarded Nazism as a theatrical and improvisational appeal to plebian sentiment, and considered Hitler’s hardcore followers to be mere gangsters and lumpen degenerates. National Socialism attempted to co-opt elements of the Conservative Revolution and wished to bring at least some of its leading figures, particularly popular and well-known writers such as Junger, into it ranks. However, overtures of these kinds were consistently rejected by most figures associated with the Conservative Revolution.

An examination of the primary influences on National Socialism reveals characteristics that are difficult to reconcile with the Conservative Revolution. National Socialism was obviously influenced by Italian fascism as well as the paramilitary formations that formed in Weimar in the aftermath of World War One. However, the crude and bizarrely exotic racialism of the National Socialists was largely absent from both of these influences and was instead borrowed from 19^th century thinkers expressing similar ideas such as the English writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain and from the American eugenics movement. The fanatical cult of the party and the leader that was a hallmark of National Socialism bears a closer resemblance to Bolshevism and its development into Stalinism than to any tendency among the European far right during the same period.

Likewise, the totalitarian dystopia that was established by the Third Reich more closely resembled the Marxist-Leninist regimes that would continue to emerge throughout the 20^th century. The conventionally right-wing authoritarian or revolutionary nationalist regimes of the interwar period, World War Two, or the post-World War Two era failed to cultivate the total state with the same degree of extremity or intensity. It was only in the Third Reich and Communist regimes that every aspect of social, cultural, and economic life was effective steered toward total subservience to the state. Twentieth-century totalitarianism was essentially a resurrection of the god-emperor tyrannies of antiquity synthesized with modern technology and technocracy. Political organization of this kind bears little similarity to the traditional Prussian authoritarianism that was largely recycled by the Conservative Revolution. And while the movement’s borrowings from Nietzsche may have been imprecise, the limitations of the Conservative Revolution in this regard paled in comparison to the desecration of Nietzsche’s legacy promulgated by the National Socialists.