Theodor Reismann-Grone seems like an unlikely biographical subject for a study of radical nationalism and the German Right in Germany from the 1890s to the 1930s. Notoriously obstinate and incapable of compromise, even with his own ideological comrades, the right-wing newspaper editor and publisher found it difficult to integrate himself into any political movement or organization, including the Pan-German League, which he helped to found but left in 1915, and the Nazi Party, which he joined and dutifully served but always as an “outsider.” In this stimulating biography, however, Stefan Frech successfully places the unique political life and personal qualities of Reismann-Grone at the center of a wider analysis of radical or völkisch nationalism from Kaiserreich to Third Reich. Drawing on the work of Geoff Eley and Stefan Breuer, Frech argues that prewar Pan-Germans such as Reismann-Grone were the architects of a radical or völkisch-nationalist “New Right” with direct ideological connections to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, but were formed by generational perspectives and middle-class sensibilities that rendered them unable to adapt to the plebeian style and violence of Nazi radicalism during the 1920s and 1930s. In this way, Frech identifies both the ideological continuities and the sociopolitical discontinuities between the Wilhelmine radical nationalism and National Socialism.

He begins by exploring Reismann-Grone's socialization and psychic life as a member of the “Wilhelmine generation” of right-wing intellectuals and his role in the creation of a New Right before World War I. Born into a bourgeois Catholic family in Lower Saxony in 1863, Reismann-Grone endured a strict middle-class upbringing of emotional estrangement and rigid discipline, meted out by his “severe” mother and Catholic schoolteachers. As a result, he manifested numerous traits associated with an “authoritarian personality” (Adorno): “reserved and melancholic, unforgiving toward himself and others, self-satisfied . . . violent-tempered,” Reismann-Grone betrayed a Manichean tendency to view others with “extreme empathy” or extreme “antipathy,” a career-sustaining desire to overcome “feelings of inferiority,” and a penchant for directing his “repressed hatred for his uncaring mother” outward onto ethnic and religious minorities (pp. 75, 78). Such feelings and displacements, Frech suggests, appeared in Reismann-Grone's work as a leading exponent of radical nationalism—a post-conservative ideological formation focused on the creation of an expansionist and ethnically and racially homogeneous Greater Germany—and his efforts as a member of the Wilhelmine generation of right-wing activists who rejected the relative political complacency of the “founders' generation” and formed nationalist pressure groups to mobilize public opinion in favor of aggressive imperial expansion. As a publicist for Ruhr industry and then as a journalist and publisher of his own newspapers, especially the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung (RWZ), Reismann-Grone demanded recognition of Germany as a global power, the acquisition of new “Lebensraum,” the creation of a German-dominated central European customs union, the consolidation of the German “race” abroad and at home, and repression of ethnic minorities and political enemies, especially Poles and Social Democrats. As cofounder of the Pan-German League and one of its unyielding radicals, Reismann-Grone helped to build an authoritarian-populist, right-wing movement that evolved into a “national opposition” to the imperial government by means of a series of political initiatives that deployed new methods of mass mobilization, beginning with the Boer campaign from 1899 to 1902 and the Reichstag elections of 1903. Nevertheless, his volatile Manichaeism and rigid sense of his own unerring strategic vision later embroiled him in a feud with League Chairman Heinrich Class over the anti-Russian and pro-Habsburg thrust of Pan-German war aims, prompting Reismann-Grone to leave the League in 1915 and serve as informal government adviser and propagandist in efforts to support Flemish radical nationalists during the war.

The German military defeat and especially the revolution in November 1918, according to Frech, marked the fundamental discontinuity between prewar and postwar right-wing radicalism and rendered Reismann-Grone a sympathetic but distant participant in the Nazi movement and regime. Like other radical nationalists, the Essen-based publisher viewed the outcome of the war and the November Revolution as the work of internal enemies, namely socialists and Jews, and called for a national and racial “rebirth” of Germany. But bereft of organizational ties after the war, Reismann-Grone attacked the Left and Jews not in the streets but in his pamphlets and newspapers. In addition, he pursued his völkisch literary efforts to purify “German culture” by expanding his repertoire of poems, dramas, and novels, steeped in crudely racist and antisemitic characterizations and puerile recodings of Germanic and medieval tales—a cloying romanticism that Hitler ridiculed as hopelessly backward-looking. The distance between the bourgeois writer and journalist and the Nazis diminished, however, as Reismann-Grone embraced the Nazi party as the most promising expression of the völkisch movement, especially for its aggressive efforts to appeal to workers. In fall 1922, he attempted to set up a branch of the Nazi party in Essen, and his editorial line in the RWZ, which supported all parties of the Right before 1933, began to favor the Nazis after the Reichstag elections of September 1930. Indeed, Reismann-Grone's determined support for a Hitler chancellorship in 1932 brought him into conflict with key Ruhr industrialists, who had purchased the RWZ in 1929–31, prompting him to leave his former publishing house and dedicate himself fully to the Nazi movement. But even after Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933, Reismann-Grone never served as a party candidate or even speaker in an election meeting, despite his efforts as a “one hundred percent National Socialist agitator.” Moreover, his effective leadership of the regional section of the Nazi Combat League for German Culture, which orchestrated a purge of all “Jewish” and “Marxist” artists and professors, including Paul Klee, from all art institutions in Essen and Düsseldorf, failed to secure Reismann-Grone a high-ranking position as minister of culture. Finally, despite his appointment as mayor of Essen in April 1933, Reismann-Grone was never accepted into the ranks of the Nazi leadership and his mayoral role in the emergent Nazi order of antisemitic, racial, and political repression apparently never made the deployment of “wild” SA and SS violence easier for him to digest.

By entering into the complexity of relations between Reismann-Grone and the völkisch movement in this way, Frech has written the best study of the Pan-German League and radical nationalism since the 1980s. To be sure, there are potential drawbacks to this kind of biography: a tendency to attribute too much influence to the biographical subject; to treat radical nationalism as an entailed outcome of interior psychic states; to take too much at face value the analytical distinctions, including the dichotomy bourgeois/plebeian separating Pan-Germans from Nazis, posed by the historical actors themselves; or to explain inter-subjective ideological formations in terms of a single biographical subject and his life course. But to focus on these issues alone would be to miss the importance and novelty of Frech's study. Frech is the first historian to produce a full biography of a leading Pan-German. He is also the first to put Reismann-Grone's memoir-diary to such systematic use as a way of gaining access to the disturbingly self-enclosed, delusional, and Manichean psychic world of at least one German right-wing intellectual and his propensity to condone violent forms of political engagement. Moreover, through the story of Reismann-Grone, Frech is able to identify connections between the Pan-Germans and leading Wilhelmine newspapers, interest organizations, and government ministries in ways that reveal some of the actual influence of radical nationalists, especially on government policies, during this period. Accordingly, Frech's systematically researched and absorbing biography should encourage historians to rethink their estimation of figures such as Reismann-Grone as ineffectual “cranks.”