No concept in the intellectual, cultural, and political history of the Weimar Republic has provoked more interest or produced more ambiguity than the so-called conservative revolution. A term originally coined by the Austrian poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannstahl in a much celebrated speech at the University of Munich in January 1927, the conservative revolution was a stratagem for overcoming the fragmentation of German social and political life through the healing power of German culture. Directed against the individualistic and materialistic trappings of modern mass democracy, the conservative revolution defined itself in essentially moral and spiritual terms, as it sought a return to those cultural values that were supposed to be indelibly inscribed upon the soul of the German nation.

Much of this was fueled by Friedrich Nietzsche's ruthless dissection of European cultural decadence and his apocalyptic vision of a new race of Herrenmenschen that would smash the existing moral order—Nietzsche called it “philosophizing with a hammer”—and through the exercise of its “will to power” would transform the world. True to his own epitaph that “some are born posthumously,” Nietzsche's influence was greater after his death in 1900 than it had been when he was alive. The problem, however, is that Nietzsche's legacy was not so much an organic and unified worldview as an inchoate bundle of contradictions and thought experiments designed to tantalize, challenge, and unsettle those who took them seriously. Nietzsche was the antithesis of the systematic philosopher and believed that the search for absolute truth was itself an illusion, which had haunted the Western world for more than two thousand years. Nowhere was the disjointed impact of Nietzsche's legacy more apparent than in the case of the young conservatives who turned to him in their despair over the calamities that had befallen the German nation since the turn of century.

In this collection of essays on Nietzsche and the conservative revolution, Sebastian Kaufmann and Andreas Urs Sommer explore the various ways in which Weimar's young conservatives received the Nietzschean legacy and deployed it in their assault on the legitimacy of Germany's republican order after 1918. To be sure, few of those whom Kaufmann and Sommer have included in their anthology would have considered themselves Nietzscheans. Their embrace of Nietzsche's ideas was selective and conspicuously excluded those aspects of Nietzsche's thought they found offensive. At the same time, Kaufmann and Sommer's survey of Weimar's young conservative intelligentsia conspicuously omits those like Edgar Julius Jung, Eduard Stadtler, and Martin Spahn who equated Germany's national rebirth with a reaffirmation of the Christian values they believed to be at the heart of German national culture.

The precise manner in which Nietzsche's ideas were refracted in the thought and behavior of individual young conservatives is a challenging topic that fully warrants the careful consideration it receives at the hands of Kaufmann and Sommer. All told, their anthology encompasses twenty-five individual chapters on writers as diverse as Julius Langbehn, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Ernst Jünger, and how they responded to Nietzsche's philosophical legacy and incorporated it into their often idiosyncratic notions of the conservative revolution. Of particular interest to the historian is Christoph Schweer's essay on Nietzsche and the “heroic realism of the conservative revolution” (67) as a response to the devastating effect that Germany's defeat in World War I had upon the national psyche. Armin Thomas Müller's essay on Moeller van den Bruck, on the other hand, offers an insightful analysis of how arguably the most celebrated of Weimar's young conservatives incorporated elements of Nietzsche's thought into his distinctive worldview and what would come to be known as revolutionary conservatism. Equally impressive is the way in which Felix Schönherr argues how Nietzsche's “pessimism of strength” allowed Spengler to overcome the fatalistic implications of his magnum opus The Decline of the West and, in so doing, established what Schönherr calls “a meta-narrative for the Conservative Revolution” (219).

Some of the most intriguing chapters in the anthology are those on Thomas Mann and Ernst Jünger. As Rolf Zimmermann argues in his essay on Mann as a voice and a critic of the conservative revolution, Mann's fascination with Nietzsche dated back to the period before World War I and continued until the end of his life in 1955. That Mann harbored sympathies for revolutionary conservatism is clearly revealed in his discussion of the Kridwiss circle in his masterpiece Dr. Faustus. But unlike virtually all of the other subjects of this anthology, Mann publicly supported the Weimar Republic as early as 1922 and remained loyal to its founding principles for the rest of his life. Despite the fascination that Nietzsche held for Mann, Nietzsche and the doctrine of the conservative revolution were for him inextricably intertwined with Nazism and Germany's descent into madness, a fate which mirrored that of Nietzsche himself. Jünger, on the other hand, merits two essays, one by Michael Storch, in which he analyzes Nietzsche's influence on Jünger's writings from the Weimar period, and the second by Joana van de Löcht on Jünger's tortured retreat from Nietzsche in the late 1930s and 1940s, as he began to realize for himself the abyss to which the doctrine of the conservative revolution had led his beloved Germany. That Nietzsche and the conservative revolution continue to exercise a spell of their own over the political culture of today's Germany is the cautionary tale that Sebastian Kaufmann offers in his concluding essay on Nietzsche and the new German Right.

In terms of its breadth and the quality of its scholarship, this is an impressive collection of essays for which its two editors are to be commended. Only the inclusion of two essays on Carl Schmitt, who was neither a disciple of Nietzsche's nor an advocate of the conservative revolution, seems out of place. Likewise, although Alfred Baeumler was certainly a Nietzschean, his relationship to the conservative revolution was tenuous at best. That being said, this volume represents a major contribution to the historical understanding of the political impact of Nietzsche's ideas and just how they percolated throughout the cultural and political life of Weimar Germany.