and influences as well, with Hungary’s powerful military leader Gyula Gömbös allying himself with Mussolini. In 1927, an anti-Semitic professor launched Romania’s notorious Legion of the Archangel Michael, which would grow through the sacralized political violence advocated by its magnetic young leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, and which expressed itself through bizarre self-mutilation and blood-drinking rituals as well as political assassinations and ethnic attacks. The English Labour Party politician Oswald Mosley soon moved to fascism, creating the British Union of Fascists in 1932, and the next year General Miguel’s son José Antonio Primo de Rivera formed the Falange Española. The most important group that adopted fascism after Mussolini’s March on Rome, however, was a small, radical-right populist party in the mostly Catholic, rural region of Bavaria. It was led by an assortment of cranks, conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, and occultists. Called the German Workers’ Party, or Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, it was later renamed as the German National Socialist Workers’ Party, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), nicknamed the “Nazi Party” by its detractors.
Unlike Italy, World War I ended in total loss for Germany. A naval mutiny turned into a revolutionary movement actuated by the proliferation of workers’ councils throughout the country, which overwhelmed the kaiser’s political order and forced him to abdicate. Rather than build horizontal systems of power sharing, the Social Democrats parlayed their influence in the council movement into a new republican government. The inchoate government remained weak, with revolutionary challenges from the newly formed Communist Party of Germany (KPD) led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who rejected a parliamentary government in league with bourgeois liberals. The Social Democrats brokered a deal with paramilitary veterans’ groups, the most important of which was the Freikorps, to stop the communists and secure governmental legitimacy.
In January 1919, the seasoned Freikorps, their helmets emblazoned with the swastika symbol, were deployed by the new government to put down an eleven-day strike and occupation, known as the Spartacist uprising and led by the KPD. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested, interrogated, and brutally murdered. In Bavaria, workers’ councils had solidified into a “Soviet Republic,” which in April 1919 began to expropriate food and apartments for homeless people and turn factories over to the workers. On May 3, though, the Social Democrats sent the German army and Freikorps into Bavaria to topple the leftist experiment, prompting an orgy of paramilitary street violence involving some seven hundred summary executions, including those of communist leader Eugen Leviné and anarchist Gustav Landauer.
For the German Freikorps, World War I had not ended. The struggle against communism and democracy was its logical continuation: first to purge Germany of those leftists and Jews who had “stabbed it in the back” by overthrowing the government at the decisive moment, and then to mount the assault against France once again, returning Germany to her former glory. Led by well-trained Prussian army officers from the landed classes, the Freikorps stashed their weapons after the war and maintained “labor communities” where they would work together according to rank and drive away Polish migrant labor.110 From their rural base, accentuating manly roots in blood and soil, the Freikorps attacked leftists, assassinated leftist leaders, fought the Polish army in border disputes, and maintained an aggressive war against liberal democracy even while supposedly under its command.
A national assembly was called in the wake of brutal counterrevolution, and in the newly created German republic (named after Weimar, where the constitution was framed and signed) the Social Democrats appeared to dominate the political scene, alongside the “crypto-authoritarian” Catholic Zentrumspartei (Center Party), the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (National People’s Party) close to General Paul von Hindenburg, and the Liberal Democrats.111 In the first decade of the twentieth century, the National Liberal Party, once allied with Bismarck, comprised 47 percent of the Pan-German League, which Nuremberg prosecutor Franz Neumann called “the direct result of Germany’s colonial policy and the direct ideological forerunner of the National Socialist party.”112 Without the empire and now divorced from the nationalists, the Liberals seemed purposeless and impotent. The Catholic Center Party, which held a traditional grudge against both the Nationals and the Liberals for religious repression, had little desire to aid their rivals. The German Social Democrats in a coalition government felt weakened in their charge to bring about socialism, and the Communist Party militated against them in elections and the streets. Meanwhile, right-wing nationalists saw the succession of the Social Democrats as an indication of the tacit success of the November Revolution and the Bolshevization of Germany.
The Conservative Revolution
A plethora of war veterans like Hermann Goering, Erich Ludendorff, and Hermann Ehrhardt emerged as national heroes, and a new, fighting sense of German ultranationalism grew around the writings of “conservative revolutionaries” (also called “neoconservatives”) like Ernst Jünger. With prose evocative of a modern men’s rights activist, Jünger merged his male gaze with both his weapon and the penetration of women: “I plunge my gaze into the eyes of passing women, fleeting and penetrating as a pistol shot, and rejoice when they are forced to smile.”113 In his writings, and the writings of numerous celebrated World War I heroes now participating in the Freikorps, women in general represent oblivion, forgetting, and abandonment. Proletarian women, in particular, are seen as bestial, communist, dirty, insensitive, and threatening to the men of the Freikorps who inspired the Nazi ethos. Worse still is the presentation of Jews as Salome, Jezebel, and Judith. In these narratives, the threat of rape is ever present for innocent women, although the protagonists torture or kill leftist women without sexual interest.114
Jünger’s accounts of the war, The Storms of Steel and The Adventurous Heart, waxed nostalgic about the heroism of the battlefield, the real arena of the “world spirit,” while identifying the decline of civilization and something on the horizon—an oblivion, joined with the feminization of Weimar, that had to be overcome. This Zivilisationskritik (critique of civilization) became Jünger’s trademark, along with a rejection of the Enlightenment in favor of something natural, which he called “deeper Enlightenment.” He sought a romanticized “total mobilization” that would capture the spirits and the will of the workers of the nation in a singular industrial effort to bring catastrophe to the modern world and unseat liberal democracy from global power.115
“In times of sickness, of defeat, poisons become medicines,” he wrote in The Adventurous Heart. “All men and things these days are thronging to a magic zero [magischen nullpunkt]. So it happens that the flame of new life comes to be; it happens that the flame delivers new life; it happens that you have a part of the flame of being.”116 The nihilist approach to the collapse of Weimar Germany is also a vision of a future resurgence of the real Germany, which Jünger’s personal secretary Armin Mohler ascribes to the conservative revolutionary: “[T]he essential core does not decay.… Our hope is placed…in what is left over.”117 This nihilism was echoed throughout the ideology of fascism and sought a total destruction of the present reality, a clearing out of the decadent and parasitic elements that corrupted everything, and a regenerative process that would finally produce something both historic and new—a kind of mythopoetic function of ancestral revival in the present moment.118 Such a utopian idea was attached to the order of the new day, produced by a new man, represented by Jünger in later novels by the character of the Anarch, a paragon of human excellence based on Stirner’s philosophy of the self.
The nihilist egoism popular among conservative revolutionaries spoke to a power vacuum that ostensibly existed within the unrepresented imperial ambitions of the Liberals, the disenfranchised traditionalism of the Catholics, the plebiscitary spirit of populism, and the nationalist return to blood and soil. Numerous reactionary political parties, broadly referred to as the “Patriotic Movement,” formed to attempt to fill this gap, often working with conservative revolutionary veterans’ groups and nationalist paramilitary outfits based in rural strongholds and carrying out campaigns against leftists and on the Polish border. Among these was the German Workers Party. In 1919, the army sent a failed artist and former army corporal named Adolf Hitler to keep tabs on the party. He would embrace the party as his own, taking a leadership role and changing the name to the German National Socialist Workers’ Party. Hitler proposed a totalitarian
