Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

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Moeller van den Bruck grave in the Parkfriedhof Lichterfelde in Berlin.

Arthur Ernst Wilhelm Victor Moeller van den Bruck (also: Moeller-Bruck , eigtl. Moeller ; * April 23, 1876 in Solingen ; † May 30, 1925 in Berlin ) was a German cultural historian , state theorist and völkisch - nationalist publicist. He was one of the outstanding representatives of the " Conservative Revolution " in the 1920s. His main work, published in 1923, is entitled The Third Reich . Moeller thus contributed to the spread of the term “ Third Reich ” coined by Dietrich Eckart .

Life

Arthur Moeller was the son of the building supervisor Ottomar Moeller and the daughter of the building supervisor Elisabeth Moeller, b. van den Bruck. He left high school without a degree. Stays in Berlin, Paris and Italy followed . He added his mother's maiden name to the common family name Moeller. From 1897 to 1904 he was married to Hedda Maase .

In 1905, as an autodidact , he published an eight-volume work, The Germans, Our Human History . In 1907 he returned to Germany. In 1908 he married Lucy Kaerrick (1877–1965). In 1914 he volunteered as a volunteer in the First World War . Soon afterwards he became an employee in the foreign department of the Supreme Army Command and worked in this function in the press office of the Foreign Office .

When the treatise The Prussian Style appeared in 1916 , in which Moeller van den Bruck referred to Prussia as the “will to the state” and socialism as the link between Germany and Russia , this marked his turn to nationalism . He now described himself as an opponent of parliamentarism and liberalism and thus exercised a strong influence on the young conservative movement .

On May 30, 1925, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck committed suicide in Berlin after a nervous breakdown .

Thought leaders of the young conservatives

In his 1919 publication The Law of Young Peoples , he emphasized the interests of Germany and Russia as "young" peoples. He presented an anti-western and anti-imperialist theory of the state in which he linked nationalism and socialism with one another. As a co-founder of the June Club in 1919 and its spiritual center, he had a decisive influence on the Conservative Revolution in the fight against the Versailles Treaty .

Main political work: The Third Reich

In 1923 his book The Third Reich came out, which was originally supposed to have the title The Third Party . The book contains a radical criticism of party rule to which all misery can be traced. Only a third party, formed from the conservatives of the new spirit, wanted the Third Reich .

There is no mention in the book of the medieval herald of a Third Reich, Joachim von Fiore . Under the First Reich he comprised the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation , as the Second Reich he designated the German Empire , which, however, is referred to as an intermediate empire . The future Third Reich was to be the realm of greater German unification and the realm of internal pacification, the realm of the fulfillment of German values. On the one hand, it was the Reich that German nationalism would establish in the near future, but on the other hand, it was also the promise for the German people, the final Reich, which could never be fully redeemed . The title of the book became the slogan of National Socialism , which was ultimately completely detached from the actual content of the work.

Political goals

Moeller's ideas of a “German socialism”, with power being concentrated on a small elite , were directed against liberalism , communism and democracy . Still, he called himself a Democrat. Parties were not included in his model of society. Non-German and German Jews were tolerated, but should not have any social influence. The relationships within society and between peoples should be fought on the basis of the "struggle for survival" according to social Darwinist principles.

In addition to his political and social ideas, Moeller wanted above all to orient Germany towards the East, towards the Soviet Union . The liberal West, especially the US , is by no means a partner. Among other Otto Strasser , then author of the forward (to 1920), the Germania and of Conscience , sympathized den Bruck with the ideas Moeller van. His approach was also well received in the “ Tat-Kreis ” and even more so with the so-called national Bolsheviks like Ernst Niekisch .

Although he preached nationalism and socialism, Moeller separated some aspects from the Nazism of the NSDAP . In 1922 Moeller met Adolf Hitler , who advertised his participation in the Nazi movement:

“You have everything that I am missing. You will develop the intellectual tools for a renewal of Germany. I am nothing but a drummer and a collector. Let's work together! "

Moeller, however, behaved reservedly towards Hitler, since he regarded him as unspiritual and primitive, and thus contrary to his own elitist ideas. After the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch , he said:

“Hitler failed because of his proletarian primitiveness. He did not understand how to mentally support his National Socialism. He was embodied passion, but without any distance or sense of proportion. "

From the National Socialist point of view, Moeller van den Bruck u. a. Received in a dissertation by Hans Rödel from 1939, in which he was accused of an “unworldly ideology” due to the misunderstanding of the racial factor - Moeller van den Bruck was not a seer of the Third Reich, but the “last conservative”.

History of impact after 1945

  • Armin Mohler , himself a representative of the Conservative Revolution and pioneer of the New Right , again referred to the almost forgotten Moeller in his work The Conservative Revolution in Germany 1918 to 1932 , which is still published in a revised version today.
  • In conservative circles and media of the New Right, attempts are still being made to establish young conservative ideas and conceptions in social debates. As in his lifetime, Moeller's sympathy with Russia regularly proves to be a heavy burden that speaks against success in the bourgeois or right-wing camp.
  • The Ostpreußenblatt recognized Moeller in 2000 in two basic articles.

Heinrich von Gleichen , Edgar Julius Jung , Max Hildebert Boehm and Eduard Stadtler were closely connected to Moeller's ideas .

Editor and translator of literary works

Volumes 1–2 (in one volume) of an early German edition of Edgar Allan Poe's works , published in 1904 by JCC Bruns' Verlag in Minden. The editor was the couple Hedda and Arthur Moeller-Bruck. The translations are by Hedda Moeller-Bruck and Hedwig Lachmann .

From 1906 to 1922 Dostoyevsky's works were published in 22 volumes by Piper Verlag , translated by Less Kaerrick under the pseudonym E. K. Rahsin, edited by Moeller. This collection contains a number of German first editions and was the first to make Dostoyevsky's work popular in Germany outside of Guilt and Atonement . Although scientifically more exact editions have appeared in the meantime, the red linen-bound (“red edition”) is still very much appreciated today, not least because of its elegant, bibliophile design. Together with his wife Hedda , Moeller published a widespread translation of Edgar Allan Poe's works in Germany in 1904 .

See also

Works (selection)

A bibliography of Moeller van den Bruck's publications contains: Hans-Joachim Schwierskott: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and revolutionary nationalism in the Weimar Republic . Göttingen 1962, pp. 181-189. The published works (including Moeller's introductions) by Dostoyevsky have been omitted below.

literature

  • Paul Fechter : Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. In: The great Germans. Volume 4. Propylaea, Berlin 1936, pp. 570-583
  • Woldemar Fink: Ostideologie and Ostpolitik. The Ostideologie, a dangerous moment in German foreign policy. Götz & Bengisch, Berlin 1936 (dissertation)
  • Klemens von Klemperer :  Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , pp. 650-652 ( digitized version ).
  • Berthold Petzinna: Education for the German lifestyle. Origin and development of the young, conservative “Ring” circle 1918–1933. Academy, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-05-003191-3
  • Hans-Joachim Schwierskott: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and revolutionary nationalism in the Weimar Republic . Goettingen 1962
  • Fritz Stern : Cultural pessimism as a political danger. An analysis of national ideology in Germany. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-608-94136-3 , first in English 1961 (Deutschlandradio Kultur The intellectual precursors of National Socialism . Deutschlandradio Kultur - The political book; review of the new edition)
  • Volker Weiß : Dostoyevsky's demons. Thomas Mann , Dmitri Mereschkowski and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in the fight against “the West”. In: Heiko Kauffmann, Helmut Kellershohn, Jobst Paul (eds.): Völkische Bande. Decadence and Rebirth - Analyzes of Right Ideology. Unrast, Münster 2005, ISBN 3-89771-737-9
  • Christoph Garstka: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and the first German complete edition of Dostoyevsky's works in Piper-Verlag 1906-1919: an inventory of all preliminary remarks and introductions by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Dmitrij S. Mereschkowskij using unpublished letters from EK Rahsin. (Heidelberg publications on Slavic Studies, 9) Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1998, ISBN 3-631-33757-4
  • Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann: Liberalism - Democracy - Conservatism. Moeller van den Bruck, the conceptual system of a conservative at the beginning of the Weimar Republic. In: Dieter Cherubim, Karlheinz Jakob, Angelika Linke (eds.): New German language history. Mental, cultural and socio-historical connections. (Studia Linguistica Germanica, 64.) de Gruyter, Berlin 2002, pp. 183-206
  • André Schlüter: Moeller van den Bruck: life and work . Böhlau, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20530-0
  • Volker Weiß: Modern anti-modern. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and the change in conservatism. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-77146-9
  • Michael Lausberg : Moeller van den Bruck: An intellectual trailblazer for National Socialism. A critical review of the 85th anniversary of his death . In: Tabula rasa , ed. 6, Jena 2010.

Web links

Wikiquote: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Weindling : Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 . Cambridge University Press 1989, p. 497.
  2. ^ Matthias Sträßner : Flute and Pistol. Notes on the relationship between Nietzsche and Ibsen . Würzburg 2003, p. 76, ISBN 3-8260-2539-3 (Sources: Ernst Bloch: Zur Originalgeschichte des Third Reichs . In: ders .: Inheritance of this time . Complete edition Volume 4, Frankfurt a. M. 1977, p. 126 –160. Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch: The political religion of National Socialism . Munich 1998, p. 50).
  3. ^ Kurt Sontheimer : Anti-democratic thinking in the Weimar Republic. The political ideas of German nationalism between 1918 and 1933 . 4th edition, dtv, Munich 1994, p. 239.
  4. ^ Kurt Sontheimer: Anti-democratic thinking in the Weimar Republic. The political ideas of German nationalism between 1918 and 1933 . 4th edition, dtv, Munich 1994, p. 238 f.
  5. ^ Kurt Sontheimer: Anti-democratic thinking in the Weimar Republic. The political ideas of German nationalism between 1918 and 1933 . 4th edition, dtv, Munich 1994, p. 239 f.
  6. ↑ Weekly magazine of the " Juniklub "
  7. ↑ Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: Critique of the press . In: Conscience , 5th year, No. 45.
  8. ↑ Helmut Rödel: Race, Space and Empire in Moeller van den Bruck. Attempt to differentiate itself from National Socialism. Dissertation University of Leipzig 1939. Another edition appeared under the title Moeller van den Bruck, location and valuation. Berlin 1939. See also: Ulrich Prehn: Max Hildebert Boehm. Radical orderly thinking from the First World War to the Federal Republic. Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1304-0 . P. 531, and Volker Weiß: Moderne Antimoderne. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and the change in conservatism. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 3-506-77146-9 , passim, in particular p. 301.
  9. ^ Edgar Allan Poe: Works . Edited by Hedda and Arthur Moeller-Bruck. 10 vols. JCC Brun's Verlag, Minden [1901-04].
  10. ^ Excerpt from the October 1935 edition of the Weisse Blätter .
  11. ↑ on this Joachim Petzold : Schw., Who actually constructed a profound contrast between MvdB and fascism. In: Conservative theorists of German fascism. Young conservative ideologues in the Weimar Republic as intellectual pioneers of the fascist dictatorship. 2nd ext. Edition VEB Dt. Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1982, p. 121 (parallel West German edition under a similar title in Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Cologne 1983 ISBN 3-7609-0781-4 )
personal data
SURNAME Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Moeller, Arthur Ernst Wilhelm Victor (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German cultural historian and writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Solingen
DATE OF DEATH May 30, 1925
Place of death Berlin