[Odyssey] Lessons from the Failure of Germany’s “Conservative Revolution”

“What we call revolutionary today will be conservative tomorrow. We are seeking not the revolution itself, but the idea of revolution. We will combine this idea of revolution with the idea of conservatism. We will pursue this revolutionary idea in a revolutionary yet conservative way, until we reach a state in which we can restore our lives.”

— Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, from The Third Reich

Germany, defeated in World War I, was bleak. The peace settlement was harsh on Germany. It had to bear the blame for the war, and thousands suffered from poverty and hunger. Many died from the influenza pandemic. In 1926, when Germany became unable to pay war reparations, France and Belgium took German resources in lieu of payment. When that proved insufficient, they occupied the Ruhr, Germany’s wealthiest industrial region. German industry fell into ruin. The economy collapsed, and hyperinflation began. The anger and frustration of the German people reached an extreme.

In the midst of this, prominent right-wing German intellectuals began putting forward arguments that the German people would welcome. Their claim was that “Germany’s defeat was not the fault of its soldiers, but a defeat caused by the collusion of political schemers in the rear who pursued their own interests during the war.” Among those making such arguments was Spengler, well known to us for his famous work The Decline of the West. In fact, in the middle of World War I, Germany experienced the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm. Social democrats and communists, under the banners of “freedom” and “liberation,” moved to overthrow the empire. Germany called them “liberals.” Rosa Luxemburg, the leading figure of the German communist movement, was also highly influential. She opposed the conscription of the young working class during the war.

In November 1919, after the fall of the German Kaiserreich, the Social Democratic Party took control of parliament and the Weimar Republic was established. Amid a proliferation of political parties, Germany’s right-wing intellectuals advanced arguments that flatly rejected parliamentary democracy. According to them, parliamentary democracy was not a system capable of reflecting German traditions. Germany, then an economically backward country, had not followed the same historical path as Britain or France—a path of “revolution from below.” These German right-wing intellectuals argued that the German political system should be centered on the Volk, a people sharing the common memory of German history and culture, and that it should be led by wise and moral elites whom the people would willingly follow. They called their political reform movement the “Conservative Revolution” (Konservative Revolution).

The advocates of this Conservative Revolution, above all, criticized German capitalism. They argued that capitalism, in which everything was bought and sold, had destroyed German traditions, while parliament had become a playground for swindlers representing these interests. They denounced such parliaments as foreign institutions, belonging to countries like Britain and France whose historical experiences differed from Germany’s, and condemned those countries’ parliamentary forces as hypocritical and corrupt political groups that preached freedom and equality at home while practicing intimidation and exploitation toward Germany. Therefore, they argued, Germany needed “German-style politics,” and parliament was no longer necessary. Alongside the aforementioned Spengler, major German intellectuals of the age such as Carl Schmitt were among the proponents of this Conservative Revolutionary theory. Yet the German Conservative Revolutionaries were not advocating a return to the old monarchy. They called such advocates “reactionaries” and argued that Germany had no exemplary political tradition to which it could return, and thus had to move toward a republican future. That is why the two seemingly conflicting concepts of “conservative” and “revolution” were joined together.

The German masses strongly sympathized with the Conservative Revolution. The German people had already been deeply unsettled by capitalist industrialization grounded in individualism. To them, liberalism was as ominous as socialism. Accordingly, the Conservative Revolution, which offered a sense of belonging through the “nation,” appeared more familiar and attractive than either communism or liberalism. But its fruits went to Hitler’s Nazi Party. Conservative Revolutionaries who resisted this were arrested or exiled. In effect, the Conservative Revolution unintentionally opened the way for the rise of the Nazis.

Ordoliberalism: The Force Behind Germany’s Revival

After World War II ended once again in Germany’s defeat, reflection on Nazism spread in Germany, and the liberal political forces so bitterly condemned by the Conservative Revolutionaries came to power. Among them was Walter Eucken, who laid the political-economic philosophical foundation for Germany’s economic revival, the so-called “miracle on the Rhine.” Eucken’s liberalism was both similar to and different from the Anglo-American liberalism of Mises and Hayek. This is called ordoliberalism.

Eucken understood the market and society as two competing orders. On that basis, he justified the principle that the state should intervene as the maker of fair rules and as a coordinator of both market and society, but must not dominate by sacrificing one to the other. Eucken argued that the state had a duty not only to check monopolies in the market that seek rents, but also to prevent monopolization of political power by forces that suppress freedom in politics. Then what did Eucken, as a liberal, do during the Nazi regime?

Eucken did not abandon his country and go into exile, nor did he hide in cowardice. On the contrary, he personally engaged actively in opposing the totalitarian and dictatorial regime for the sake of freedom, human rights, and democracy. Along with Bonhoeffer, Eucken was one of the key figures in the anti-Nazi Freiburg resistance movement. He was a member of the Confessing Church and one of the strong opponents of Freiburg University rector Heidegger, who had aligned himself with the Nazis’ policy of Gleichschaltung and the Führerprinzip. Even under the Nazi government, Eucken made his ordoliberal position unmistakably clear. As a result, although he was not Jewish, he was classified under the Nazi racial laws as belonging to a racially discriminated group because he was considered sympathetic to Jews.

Eucken received repeated death threats from the Nazis, and the second edition of his book Where Is the National Economy Heading? was banned from publication. After the failure of the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, Eucken was interrogated under threat of torture and was also detained. Eucken’s ordoliberalism began to come into its own in 1948, when he participated as a member of Economic Minister Ludwig Erhard’s economic advisory council. At the time, the German government was wavering between the market economy and socialism over the direction of the postwar economy, and Eucken’s ordoliberalism offered a timely path forward. In 1975, the then Minister of Economics, H. Fridrich, described it this way in a speech before the Bundestag:

“Through Eucken, we all learned what it means to think in terms of order policy. In particular, we learned from him that our national economy must be run decentrally through markets and free prices, and that it is our duty to establish competition. What we Germans have achieved today is precisely the influence and accomplishment of Eucken and ordoliberalism.”

After Germany’s defeat in World War I, the right-wing Conservative Revolution—combining German nationalism and statism while condemning liberalism alongside socialism—captivated the German masses, but the result was the monstrosity of Nazism. The ideas that revived Germany after its defeat in World War II were not Anglo-American liberalism, but German ordoliberalism. In that, one might say, there remained at least one positive legacy from the intellectually sophisticated advocates of the German Conservative Revolution, despite their political failure. That legacy was none other than the belief that “Germany needs German-style politics,” along with the moral reflection that “when God created man, He also gave him an order suited to him.”

The message this sends to today’s Korean conservatives and liberals is by no means a light one.

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Original title: [오디세이] 독일 ‘보수혁명’의 실패가 주는 교훈

Author: Jeong-seok Han

Date: 2021-03-10

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=5&idx=23555