Buried Alternative
Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century
By Klemens Von Klemperer
Princeton University Press. 250 pp. $5.00.
There might well be established a special category of historical writing devoted to the efforts of individuals and groups who have tried to modulate between two solutions of a great political problem that have eventually proved irreconcilable. This is not the same thing as history as it might have been. The latter deals in the alternative not taken, the aspirations and disappointments of the defeated party in a clear-cut fight. Hence its perennial appeal: the history of lost causes has an equal and complementary popularity to the history of the victorious solution, with its underlying implication of God’s delight in big battalions. But the people in between frequently get forgotten: their history has neither the nostalgic savor of defeat nobly borne nor the reassurance that comes from cheerful cooperation with the “inevitable.”
Klemens von Klemperer’s study of German conservatism in the 20th century falls in this twilight category. It deals with a theme that is almost unknown to the general public. As conventionally considered, the history of Germany in the crucial interwar years consists of a choice between democracy and authoritarianism—with these two alternatives in turn neatly bisected into Social Democracy and middle-class republicanism on the one hand, Fascism and Communism on the other. The second alternative won in the 1930’s—the first rather surprisingly seems to have established itself in the 1950’s. There have apparently been only these two—or better, four-possibilities: the others have not found their way to the forefront of political and historical debate.
It is the great virtue of Mr. von Klemperer’s book that he has dredged up from the shoals of the recent past, where it threatened to lie buried forever, the story of the movement he calls neo-Conservatism. And he has done it in a fashion that gives his book a wider significance than the rather specialized nature of the subject would suggest. Most obviously, his study is a contribution to the growing literature of conservative rehabilitation—and for once, a contribution that is intellectually on a par with the work of political liberals. Beyond that, it is a noteworthy manifestation of the recent effort to understand the subtleties and shadings in German history and society: in the situation of the 1950’s the crude interpretations in terms of “good” and “bad” Germans that seemed reasonably satisfactory during the Nazi period have proved patently inadequate. In order to reach some proper understanding of the present Germany of Adenauer, prosperity, and cultural smugness, it has been found necessary to reach back into the nation’s past and to search out all the elements of ambiguity and doubt that the hastier historians of a decade or two ago tended to overlook or disparage. Mr. von Klemperer has done this with scholarship, sympathetic understanding, and intellectual poise.
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His theme “is a peculiar story of trial and error. It is a chapter in the history of an idea . . . whose workings have not merely developed away from the original ‘basic intention’ but have come in conflict with it. This, then, is the story of an extreme dilemma between the logic of conservatism and the politics of conservatism, or, in other words, of conservatism against itself.” It is the story of the effort in the first three decades of this century to make German conservatism something truly popular and in harmony with the demands of an advanced industrial society, and the failure of that attempt to hold its own against the onslaught of National Socialism.
The story begins with the Youth Movement and similar strivings in the pre-First World War period to break loose both from Marxism and from middle-class respectability, and in particular from the parvenu vulgarity of Wilhelminian society; with Nietzsche as their spiritual mentor, the young people who were later to be the “front generation” of the war were seeking—haltingly and incoherently, it is true—the way to a reconciliation of classes through the acceptance of an authority that would be inwardly recognized rather than merely imposed from the outside. The next phase of the analysis covers the war period itself—the best days of neo-conservatism, when individuals of the most divergent political creeds found themselves aligned together in a common effort to create a national unity, and when conservatism came its closest “to representing the ideals of a Tory democracy.” There follows the postwar era—neo-conservatism’s great opportunity, with its advocates, however, tragically divided between pragmatic supporters of the Republic like Thomas Mann and Max Weber and such mystically-minded prophets of a corporative authoritarianism as Oswald Spengler and Moeller van den Bruck. Finally, there are the late 20’s and early 30’s, in which the neo-conservatives, disillusioned and “in a more or less apocalyptic mood,” either collapsed before the Nazi attack, or in some fashion or other made their peace with it.
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This meagre outline is, I trust, sufficient to suggest where the intellectual difficulty in Mr. von Klemperer’s account lies. To my mind, he lumps together as a single “movement” people and ideas that were in fact extremely divergent. It was no accident, I believe, that the neo-conservatives split apart in the early 1920’s. Men like Weber and Mann had always been of a radically different type from men like Spengler and Moeller van den Bruck. During and just after the First World War, they had found a temporary unity because they had a common enemy—the regime of William II and the shams it stood for. But they hated it for different reasons: those who were later to accept the Weimar Republic condemned the Empire as insufficiently democratic; those who subsequently preached authoritarianism found Wilhelminiain rule lacking in true national grandeur. On a number of secondary criticisms the two groups were in agreement. But basically their whole approach was different. Men like Weber and Mann were rational, decent human beings; the logic of the unfolding situation would eventually lead them to democracy. A man like Spengler was full of hatred and scorn: it was only a special and not very admirable form of fastidiousness that kept him and his like from becoming racists and Nazis.
I am aware that the foregoing observations expose me to the charge of succumbing once again to the stereotype of “good” and “bad” Germans. What I am trying to suggest, however, is that any historian writing within the framework of Western humanitarian values cannot fail to make certain moral judgments, explicit or implied, and that within the terms of this value system, some of Mr. von Klemperer’s protagonists fall clearly on one side of a great ethical dividing line, and some others fall just as clearly on the opposite side. From time to time, Mr. von Klemperer recognizes this. He amply documents all that was irrational and “demonic” in the majority of the neo-conservatives, and he condemns them forthrightly as “irresponsibles all,” who “were confused and spread confusion.” But to my thinking he does not do this with sufficient consistency. He is fair-minded to a fault.
Aside from this basic criticism of ideological approach, I find nearly everything else in Mr. von Klemperer’s book quite admirable—the wide range of knowledge and appreciation it reveals, the sense of direct historical experience it conveys, and its refined feeling for ambiguity in human history. Helping to bring about the very opposite of what one has set out to achieve is one of the perennial tragedies of historical action, and Mr. von Klemperer has done us a service by Calling to our attention an example of it that has too long been neglected.
Quite properly he does not try to answer the final question of why the moderate conservatism that failed in Germany in the 1920’s has succeeded today. Yet his readers can scarcely fail to wonder about it. Let me suggest one hypothesis Which grows quite naturally out of Mr. von Klemperer’s account. This insistent question can be turned around and put in the following fashion: why did Germany take so long to arrive at the regime of electoral democracy, tempered by bureaucratic authority, that has come to seem natural and “conservative” to other advanced industrial peoples in the Western tradition? I suggest that three peculiarities of German society largely account for it: the strength and prestige of the Army officers’ corps, the “feudal” power of the great landholders east of the Elbe, and the popular virulence of anti-Semitism.
The Second World War and its aftermath effectively ended these three special conditions: the Army was shattered, its prestige was destroyed, and militarism was discredited in a fashion that was not even remotely approached after the first war; the Soviet occupation of Eastern Germany resulted in the break-up of the great estates and the separation of the Western industrialists from the aristocratic allies in the East with whom they had earlier shared power; the annihilation of the German Jews eliminated every pretext for anti-Semitism as a political force. Freed of the encumbrances and prejudices inherited from the past—freed from the fatal lures of the “demonic”—Western Germans of property and conservative leanings are today at last at liberty to follow the normal processes of calculated choice and businesslike accommodation in their political and social life.
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