Heinrich Claß published the first volume of his memoirs late in 1932, on the eve of the National Socialist Machtergreifung. Here he wrote of the “creators and early pioneers” of the movement that was about to seize power. “Because I believe that I am one of these,” he observed, “I am permitted to establish my part in the emergence and growth of this movement” (p. 34). Claß had every right to make this claim. He was the pivotal figure in the history of radical nationalism in modern German history. As the leading figure in the Pan-German League after the turn of the twentieth century, he turned this organization into the uncompromising proponent of German expansion in Europe and overseas, racist antisemitism, ethnic cleansing, and dictatorship by a charismatic leader. During World War I he led the forces that called for far-flung German annexations as the reward for a victorious war. Germany's defeat he blamed loudly on Jews, pacifists, and Marxists. Then, in his efforts to bring down the Weimar Republic, he conspired with leaders of paramilitary groups, terrorists, businessmen, nationalist publishers, and right-wing political figures, including Hitler, whose early successes were due in part to hefty subsidies from the Pan-German League. Hitler's ideological debt to Claß and his friends was greater still.

Because he has figured centrally in the many histories now available of the Pan-German League, Claß's exploits in preparing the way for National Socialism are well documented. The great virtue of Johnannes Leicht's excellent dissertation, which he wrote in Berlin under the direction of Werner Bergmann and Uwe Puschner, is to provide the first systematic biography of the man. It joins Stefan Frech's recent biographical study of Claß's contemporary and fellow Pan-German, Theodor Reismann-Grone.

Like Frech, Leicht emphasizes the importance of cohort in the history of radical nationalism in Imperial Germany. Claß was one of the Wilhelmine “transitional men” of whom Martin Doerry has written—men who were too young to have fought in the wars of unification but were determined to bring Bismarck's work to its conclusion in a state that would encompass all Germans. Claß's views gestated under the influence of Treitschke and took on features that Leicht, like Peter Walkenhorst in a recent study of radical nationalism, analyzes under the rubric of a “political religion.” Its doctrinal foundations were a commitment to expansion abroad and ethnic homogeneity at home. When the German government failed to pursue policies that were, in his eyes, mandated by these beliefs, Claß turned the Pan-German League into the leader of a “national opposition”—a posture that the organization kept until 1933. Claß also became a leading popularizer (or as Leicht calls the role, a “multiplier”) of antisemitism, anti-Marxism, biopolitics, and German conquest in Europe. Little in National Socialism was not prefigured in his famous “Kaiser Book” of 1912. Claß and the Pan-Germans did, however, differ with the National Socialists over who was to lead Germany's national renewal. Claß believed throughout his political career that leadership in this great effort should devolve onto (Protestant) men of property, academic education, culture, and character, who had demonstrated their national expertise in elite organizations such as the Pan-German League itself. Although they had represented a radical vanguard before the war, these men were uncomfortable with the mass politics that emerged afterward. Hitler and his confederates they regarded with suspicion for this reason and because he repudiated their pretensions to leadership of the nationalist right.

The biographical approach to this problem is effective in highlighting the generational clash that marked German radical nationalism in the Weimar era. In another respect, though, the same approach raises a number of questions. The difficulty lies in a biographical hero who is difficult to situate as an individual actor. The sources are in part to blame. Unlike Reismann-Grone, Claß left no diaries, so the biographer must rely on the hero's own memoirs for most of the personal details. Categorizing him as an Übergangsmensch carries the biographical analysis only so far. The vast majority of this cohort did not join the Pan-German League; and even within this organization, many were unhappy with Claß's pugnacious disdain for others and his ideological arrogance, which became radicalized to the point of megalomania as his projects were repeatedly frustrated. Leicht's study mentions but does not analyze in much detail the opposition to Claß within the League, although it does seem clear that Claß had by the Weimar era surrounded himself with pliant supporters. To this extent, the separation between biography and organizational history then dissolves; the history of Heinrich Claß becomes the history of the Pan-German League.

Both the organization and its leader were overtaken by forces beyond their control. Claß never got along with Hitler, who was two decades younger. The difficulty lay in part in the socialistic features of the Nazis' economic program and in part in rivalry over leadership of the radical right; both reflected an insurmountable clash of personalities and temperaments. Without an ounce of irony, Claß complained of Hitler's “tendency to overrate himself [Selbstüberschätzung]” (p. 368). Under Claß's leadership, the Pan-German League failed in any case to broaden its appeal, and by 1933 it had become tired and irrelevant. The new regime tolerated it, but the Sicherheitsdienst shadowed its activities until 1939, when the organization was dissolved. Claß retreated after 1933 into disillusion. Some contemporary observers tried to portray him in these circumstances as a tragic figure, the heroic pioneer whose role had gone unappreciated by those who took up his legacy. Claß himself by now understood his role in the same light. Leicht's study makes it abundantly clear, however, that such a biographical reading is unsustainable. Claß's failure was no tragedy, although it did not lack elements of pathos. His central motive was his ferocious contempt for other peoples, opposing views, and criticism of any sort; and he draped his many hatreds in sentimental appeals to his own patriotic idealism. The Third Reich elevated his contempt, hatreds, and his ideological vision into doctrines of state. It failed only to flatter his boundless vanity.