The Conservative Revolution During the Weimar Republic and its Impact on the Young German Generation in the Years 1919–1933

Abstract

In the historical and political literature we will not encounter such a diverse and, in its impact,
individually ambiguous term as the “conservative revolution”. Although it is possible to place it
within one of its creators, in the application of its practices we will come across many substantive
discrepancies. This is certainly due to the creative idea of the people and the language that the
revolutionaries used. In the basis of this historical-political dialogue, although the dissertation is
concerned only with the period of the Weimar Republic, we can see the changes already taking
place in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus to this day Friedrich Nietzsche is
regarded as the spiritual father of the “conservative revolution”. The cult of the “superman”
(Übermensch) he created (Übermensch) broke the ties with the hitherto values of Christianity in
favour of crossing out God's universe in the world. For many intellectuals, it represented a theoretical-
cognitive pluralism in the recording of moral tables for modern humanity. Nietzschean nihilism,
as a construct of the “superman”, uprooted youth from bourgeois structures, and thus
from their duty of service to their elders, guiding them towards the heroic realm. In its dimension,
it overcame the statu quo of the time in favour of renewal and liberation towards the inner evolution
of the “superman”. It resulted from the constant struggle and persistence of a reality which
the “superman” then created himself.
The significance of the Nietzschean construct for the fundamental ideas of the “conservative
revolution” was best summed up by Thomas Mann. In his original reflections on the apolitical
man, he shattered the previous norms of political structure in favour of the heroism awakening in
youth. Subsequent intellectuals who were unquestionably counted among the founders of the
revolutionary idea of the Weimar period agreed with this thought: Ernst Jünger, Ernst Julius Jung,
Carl Schmidt, Wilhelm Stapel. The acolyte of the young revolutionaries' thought became the First
World War. It broke the link with the pre-industrial mentality in favour of militant-apologists, from
whom a new state elite was to crystallise. It was to create a hierarchy of cadres based on society.
Thus, among the soldiers on the battlefield, the idea of defence of the homeland and sacrifice on the altar of war was born. Internally, it created an anthropology and philosophy of war to which
the German youth was called. This sense of struggle was to evolve from defeat into a new different
Germany: “we had to lose the war in order to win Germany”. The National Socialists, after coming
to power in 1933, were keen to use the educational concept of the „conservative revolution” and
the youth organisations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nazi pedagogy drew on these
reservoirs as a model for creating the Third Reich's ideal of the “new man”.