When Germany's Weimar Republic was shaken by political turbulence in the early 1930s, the young and ambitious journalist Hans Zehrer was among the most zealous advocates of a radical demolition of the parliamentary system. As a “neoconservative elite theorist”, he was repelled by Hitler's “plebeian” and populist demagogy, but he shared the strident antiliberal and antidemocratic sentiments of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) nonetheless.Footnote 1 Like so many other right-wing intellectuals of the period, he had little interest in pluralism, compromises, or a pragmatic approach to politics, denouncing such ideas as relics of the nineteenth century. Intractable and outdated, liberal democracy had, in Zehrer's opinion, no choice but to give way to an authoritarian and nationalist order adequate to modern conditions in twentieth-century Germany.
Considering his deep-rooted antidemocratic stance, how did Zehrer—a prominent figurehead of radical conservatism during the Weimar years—perceive the process of reestablishing democracy in Germany after 1948–9? Was he willing to reconsider his rejection of liberal democracy after the devastating experiences of the Third Reich? Did he even reflect on his active participation in undermining the political culture of Germany's first republic? What lessons did he learn from its collapse and from the rise of a dictatorship unparalleled in history? Recent research on the democratization and liberalization of West Germany after 1945 has only just begun to tackle such questions for a broader range of actors and institutions, but there is already a substantial literature on the history of conservative intellectuals in the post-war years. In general, most scholars point to the defiantly self-righteous and arrogant attitude of the majority of right-wing intellectuals, on the one hand, and to their politically discredited status, on the other.Footnote 2 Beginning as grumbling and disillusioned postwar outsiders, these conservatives underwent a long process of “deradicalization” that contributed to the stabilization of West German democracy not through any “learning process” on their parts but, more indirectly, by their actual political insignificance.Footnote 3
While persuasive arguments have been made for this account, I approach the intricate question of why such former radicals did not more fervently resist the establishment of a liberal democracy from a different perspective. My main focus lies on the internal transformation of conservative thought and action after 1945. I do not intend thereby to add to the growing literature on right-wing intellectuals’ efforts to rationalize, and to trivialize, their role in the formation of the Nazi dictatorship after the fact. Although Zehrer would be a good case for such a study, my argument aims instead at the connections (and the disconnects) between Weimar-era neoconservatism and the specific conservative consensus formed under the Federal Republic of Germany's first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In particular, I will concentrate on Hans Zehrer's interpretation of the West German political system as a post-liberal order, rationalizing the Kanzlerdemokratie (“chancellor democracy”) as a partial fulfillment of his own expectations for an “end of politics”. In doing so, I offer a fresh look at the “modernization under conservative guardianship” of West Germany in the 1950s.Footnote 4 Hans Zehrer provides particularly good evidence for this interpretation, as he not only transformed his radical right-wing positions of the Weimar years into a moderate conservatism during the Adenauer era but also argued for a specific pacification (or “modernization”) of German society that was unconnected to the ideals of liberal democracy.Footnote 5
In a first section, I examine Zehrer's intellectual and biographical background, on which follows a section examining his professional passage from the influential political journal Die Tat to the newspaper Die Welt, an important exemplar of the journalism of opinion that dominated the postwar press. A third section deals with intellectual continuities from the late Weimar Republic to the early Federal Republic, looking at Zehrer as an exemplary figure for the refashioning of the ideas of former “conservative revolutionaries” in a new sociopolitical context. Throughout, I am concerned not only with the evolution or transformation of ideas but also with their dissemination and reception among specific intellectual actors. Following recent historiographic trends in the intellectual history of the Federal Republic, the highbrow journalism of Hans Zehrer and its impact will be embedded in the wider context of West Germany's media, communication, and political structures after 1945.Footnote 6
I. “THE WAY INTO CHAOS”: HANS ZEHRER UNTIL 1945
Hans Zehrer was born in Berlin in 1899, the son of a post office manager. Like many young men of his cohort, he voluntarily enlisted as a soldier in 1917 and served on the Western front during the First World War's last phase.Footnote 7 Minimally wounded several times, he received the Iron Cross after a severe injury in Lorraine in August 1918. Although sources on him in this period are sparse, we can assume that young Hans Zehrer had a hard time finding his way back into civilian life. Like other veterans who felt betrayed by the home front's alleged “stab in the back”, he sympathized with militaristic and nationalist circles and was eventually involved in the ultranationalist Kapp putsch attempt of 1920.Footnote 8 During the years of hyperinflation, he began his studies at Berlin University, attending a random selection of lectures in medicine, psychology, theology, history, and political economy. Forced to earn a living, however, he quit without completing a formal degree and became a journalist at the Ullstein publishers’ renowned Vossische Zeitung from 1923 to 1929. Unswayed by that newspaper's democratic and republican bent, Zehrer retained his authoritarian and nationalist outlook and came increasingly under the influence of neoconservative theorists like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck or Oswald Spengler. But then again, this was nothing special among younger, educated middle-class men during the interwar years. Many young academics, intellectuals, and students opted for a radical or even revolutionary conservatism.Footnote 9
But Zehrer displayed a remarkable talent for journalism and was soon known as a rising star in the highly competitive newspaper business of late 1920s Berlin. He appeared regularly on the city's colorful scene of salons, clubs, small circles, and other social events, where he made dozens of intellectual contacts that would prove useful later on.Footnote 10 In 1929, publisher Eugen Diederichs put him in charge of the monthly Die Tat, a journal founded in 1909 that had an eclectic programmatic outlook, blending “social–religious” and völkisch ideas.Footnote 11 Although Zehrer's editorship remained unofficial until October 1931, when he formally left the Vossische Zeitung, he gave the journal a completely new direction right from the start, making it first and foremost a forum for neoconservative ideas. This instantly hit the mark of the younger generation's sentiment, and Die Tat soon became a leading organ of the conservative revolution. Circulation numbers soared from a thousand copies in 1929 to more than thirty thousand in 1932, even though the journal was still produced by only a handful of editors. The inner circle never included more than four or five gifted young men, who either followed Zehrer from the Ullstein Verlag—like Friedrich Wilhelm von Oertzen (1897–1944) and Friedrich Zimmermann (1898–1967, aka Ferdinand Fried)—or had just completed their university degrees, like Heidelberg students Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann (1904–87) and Giselher Wirsing (1907–75).Footnote 12
Understanding Die Tat's dramatic success is no straightforward matter. Looking just at its ideological contents, the journal offered little more than another nuance within the broad antiliberal, nationalist, conservative-revolutionary press. Its lengthy articles called for an authoritarian alternative to the parliamentary system, abhorred the alleged shapelessness of “mass democracy”, and demanded economic autarky from the capitalist markets of the West. But as several scholars have pointed out, the success of Die Tat (and of Hans Zehrer as its executive editor) had to do not only with its contents but also with the suggestive mode of their presentation, which combined decisionist pathos with academic grandiosity. The editors employed a specific rhetoric of crisis that perfectly fit the prevailing pessimism among many educated youth, who were hard hit by the economic crisis of the late 1920s and despised the democratic order for its alleged shortcomings.Footnote 13
The experience of a real crisis soon extended into the anticipation of an all-encompassing political and social crisis that played a major role in delegitimizing democracy in the last years of the Weimar Republic.Footnote 14 But a closer look reveals that the destructive, negative elements of this crisis discourse are only half of the story. As recent research suggests, the imagination of widespread disorder was deeply ambivalent and always included connotations of change and hope for a better tomorrow. Based not in nostalgic evocations of the “World of Yesterday” (Stefan Zweig), the rhetoric of crisis was often future-oriented and sometimes openly modernist, propelled by the vision of a ground-shaking upheaval leading to a new world.Footnote 15 Or, as Hans Zehrer once put it in an article with the telling title “The Way into Chaos”, the present crisis was just the necessary prelude to Germany's “internal self-cleansing process”.Footnote 16
The path into—and through—chaos that Zehrer advocated would allow the true, courageous leaders of Germany to emerge.Footnote 17 Moreover, society as a whole would reunite as a Volksgemeinschaft (“people's community”), a popular concept in the German public sphere of the time that was explicitly modeled by Zehrer and others after the image of the Frontgemeinschaft (“front community”) said to have emerged from the trenches of the First World War. A newfound sense of völkisch community, deeply shared solidarity, and common destiny would overcome present disintegration, ending all disunity, conflict, and the quarreling of parties and politicians. Superficial political fronts of left and right would give way to a social order built on cohesion, consensus, and an emphatic political unity of the people.Footnote 18 Although hierarchical and authoritarian, this utopian order could even be described—as it was, most notably, by Carl Schmitt—in terms of “real democracy”, because it built on the identity and homogeneity of the rulers and the ruled.Footnote 19 In fact, it has been argued that Die Tat made a “substantial concession to the ideals of democracy” in the notion that the future elites should be recruited among the best from every segment of society.Footnote 20
In the end, however, it was no intellectual or journalist but Hitler who claimed to have created such a Volksgemeinschaft by the “revolutionary act” of January 1933.Footnote 21 And Hitler had at first little, and then even less, use for far-right intellectual stooges or even for his conservative former allies. Some of the most significant protagonists on the right, like General Kurt von Schleicher or the adviser to Franz von Papen, conservative revolutionary Edgar Julius Jung, were murdered in the National Socialists’ infamous purge of June 1934. Hans Zehrer, who had relinquished the editorship of Die Tat only weeks after the Nazi “seizure of power”, withdrew to the North Sea island of Sylt for an extended period. It is debatable whether this represented a retreat into “inner emigration”, since he returned to Berlin in 1938 and became a employee (and board member in 1942) of the Stalling Verlag, a moderately right-wing publishing house. But Zehrer clearly felt that he had good reasons to keep a low public profile; in turn, he was more or less ignored by the Nazis, who were now absolute rulers of German intellectual life.
II. CONSERVATIVE JOURNALISM FROM DIE TAT TO DIE WELT
After 1945, Hans Zehrer was widely considered a typical exponent of the radical conservatism that helped pave the way for National Socialism. Even though he long had severe reservations about the NSDAP and Hitler, he and the entire Die Tat circle were often held responsible for the destruction of the republic in the early 1930s. Surprisingly enough, however, Zehrer's return to journalism was supported from a most unlikely side. When he came back from Sylt, where he also spent the last phase of the war, British press control officers appointed him editor in chief of Die Welt in January 1946. This forthcoming Hamburg daily was planned as a “model newspaper” for the British occupation zone, similar to the Neue Zeitung in the US zone, which would demonstrate the standards of a free and critical press to German readers and journalists alike.Footnote 22
Obviously, Zehrer was hired for his indisputable journalistic experience, and it is not quite clear whether the British were aware that they had placed a man with a staunchly antidemocratic past at the helm of a newspaper they intended to be firmly democratic. But critical voices in Hamburg—mainly from local Social Democrats—soon started to attack this personnel decision, pointing to Zehrer's political past as an antiliberal standard-bearer and notorious enemy of the Weimar Republic. Zehrer was dismissed by the British authorities before Die Welt's first issue could be published.Footnote 23 This may have increased his contempt for political parties and occupying powers alike, but in any case he was fortunate to be able to resume his career at the small Christian-conservative Sonntagsblatt, a weekly published by the Protestant bishop of Hanover.Footnote 24
But the antifascist sentiment of the months immediately following Germany's defeat soon began to diminish. German society saw itself more as a victim of the war than as a perpetrator, and while a handful of top Nazi leaders were held responsible for all atrocities and destruction, the vast majority of Germans denied any share of the blame. Faced with the enormous task of rebuilding the nation, past political orientations seemed to be of secondary importance, especially after the beginning of the Cold War and the foundation of the Federal Republic.Footnote 25 In the wake of this atmospheric shift, Zehrer was soon able to return to a more prominent journalistic platform. In 1953, Hamburg publisher Axel Springer bought Die Welt from the British and asked Zehrer, whom he had known since the early 1940s and whose professional skills he held in high esteem, to be the new editor in chief.Footnote 26 Zehrer agreed, making Die Welt, already an acclaimed, high-quality newspaper, into the flagship periodical of the Springer press. Circulation figures ran to impressive heights throughout the 1950s, usually between 200,000 and 250,000 copies, making the paper the most influential national daily in the first years of the Federal Republic. Zehrer's articles and front-page commentaries—sometimes published under the pseudonym Hans Thomas—reached a public of millions, and he was one of the best-known commentators and opinion makers of his time.Footnote 27
As recent scholarship has shown, the editorial staff of Die Welt as originally selected by the British—but largely unchanged by Zehrer—was among the youngest in Germany.Footnote 28 It included ambitious junior editors like Conrad Ahlers or Gert von Paczensky, who would soon become advocates of a more critical, liberal press in the Federal Republic. Zehrer tried to harmonize this rising generation with his older network of right-wing intellectuals and journalists, whose careers had encountered few hurdles from the Nazi regime into the postwar years.Footnote 29 For instance, he hired Ferdinand Fried, an old crony from Die Tat, who had joined the SS in 1934 and worked as an economic expert at the nerve center of Nazi racial and security policy, the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt. At Die Welt, he became the editor responsible for the business section. Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann, member of the NSDAP and professor of sociology at Berlin University prior to 1945, wrote literary articles for Die Welt before pursuing a career as professor of philosophy in Münster.Footnote 30 Zehrer also maintained close contact with Giselher Wirsing, who together with Klaus Mehnert—another sympathizer of Die Tat in the early 1930s—had joined the national-conservative Christ und Welt, a Stuttgart weekly known to US occupation forces as a refuge for ex-Nazi journalists.Footnote 31 Nonetheless, Zehrer repeatedly and openly referred to Fried and Wirsing as part of the “old team” that he would like to reunite under the auspices of Die Welt.Footnote 32
Zehrer made great efforts to integrate journalists and staff members with different backgrounds and opposing world views. He tried to mediate conflicts between generations as well as between returning emigrants like Willy Haas, who headed Die Welt's culture section, and former National Socialists like the above-mentioned Ferdinand Fried.Footnote 33 When he tried to win over the legendary cultural correspondent Friedrich Sieburg to the Feuilleton in 1956, he wrote, “We are gathered here from rather different camps and very contrasting pasts. Nevertheless, all goes well and the team has always proved stronger than the substantive differences. And personal differences are always dispelled by me.”Footnote 34
III. A POST-LIBERAL ORDER? CONSERVATIVE CONSENSUS BUILDING IN THE 1950S
In this recurring idea of a small group of elite journalists bound together across all differences, points of connection to Die Tat and its attitude of “public exclusivity” are hard to ignore. Apparently, there was no need for Zehrer or like-minded conservative publicists to rethink their own roles for the postwar period. Seeing himself as a bright and witty intellectual with superior insight into patterns of society, modes of politics, and convolutions of history, Zehrer continued to dwell in the self-conception of an elitist–authoritarian and conservative brotherhood of writers.Footnote 35 Like most rightist intellectuals, he was concerned to give Germany's reading public the political orientation they allegedly needed, and he even tried to address the “masses” by writing a regular column in Springer's Bild. This tabloid was launched in 1952 and soon became that publishing house's biggest success, the best-selling newspaper in the Federal Republic.Footnote 36
The ambition to explain the world while insisting on an exclusive and superior point of view hints at another important continuity from the late Weimar Republic to the postwar years. On the one hand, it reflects general trends among German journalists, who rarely understood the press as a “fourth estate” and were used to submissively propagating government authorities’ official positions.Footnote 37 But it also registers the special fascination that closed intellectual circles had long held for conservatives, who asserted their independence from “mass opinion” and denied any responsibilities toward a more democratic public.Footnote 38 Zehrer himself had been concerned largely with esoteric, metaphysical questions from the late 1930s onward, thinking and writing extensively about the spiritual fate of mankind in modernity. In 1948, after twelve years of work, he published his lengthy tome Der Mensch in dieser Welt (Man in This World), an almost unreadable and incomprehensible treatise on the condition of (Christian) humanity in the modern world. Despite the severe reservations of most critics, as well as of his publisher, Ernst Rowohlt, Zehrer intended to write a second, even more extensive, volume.Footnote 39 After this plan failed, Zehrer's subsequent journalism picked up the metaphysical themes and esoteric tone of his philosophical work; some of these articles were republished in the 1949 collection Stille vor dem Sturm.Footnote 40
The title, “calm before the storm”, reflects yet another continuity linking the late 1920s and early 1930s with the early 1950s. On closer comparison of his writings from Die Tat to Die Welt, Zehrer's continuing concern with—and refashioning of—an ever-mounting crisis is unmistakable. As observed above, this idea—or motif—had its origins in the turbulent years of 1918–19 and was frequently employed in the late 1920s and early 1930s to denounce the democratic foundations of the Weimar Republic. In the postwar years, this notion could easily be reactivated. However, it was invoked less to come to grips with the depressing reality of destruction, ruins, and millionfold death and more to obscure German responsibility for National Socialism. By extending their motif of crisis to engulf all of modern humanity, German conservative intellectuals concentrated on misfortunes and tribulations of society since the French Revolution that were only epitomized by but far from unique to National Socialism.Footnote 41 “We should not overestimate ourselves, or the Third Reich, or German history”, Zehrer could write in 1959 while reflecting on the nuclear age and the aggressive competition between superpowers.Footnote 42 And just like Friedrich Meinecke in his famous book on The German Catastrophe (1946) or Ernst Niekisch in his Germany's Existential Transgression (1946), Zehrer continued to frame this crisis as a consequence of the European (or “occidental”) failure to create a new order beyond communism and capitalism, beyond the socialist totalitarianism of the USSR and the permissive liberalism of the USA.Footnote 43
More importantly, however, the claim of an ongoing crisis after the Second World War would also involve a silent revision of radical conservatism's past expectations. While most right-wing intellectuals had cultivated a future-oriented, aggressive decisionism during the Weimar years, it was now barely possible to embrace the idea of crisis, chaos, and rebirth in any affirmative way. Crisis was no longer seen as a dynamic process but as the permanent status of modernity, one that did not necessarily result in sudden change, revolutionary breakdown, or the opening of new horizons in the near future. In consequence, neither their past political activism nor their past nationalist pathos could be revived. With the experiences of National Socialism and world war still fresh in their memories, a strong sense of politics’ inherent destructiveness took root among most conservative intellectuals. Rather than elaborating and enforcing a certain set of political ideas, they envisioned a broad withdrawal from everyday politics and programmatic ideologies of all kinds.Footnote 44 Zehrer saw the “end of the political” drawing ever nearer in the immediate postwar years and asserted repeatedly that the fundamental crisis of modern mankind was a spiritual and metaphysical one that could not be overcome by politics.Footnote 45
This politics of the end of all politics mirrored, of course, the 1950s ideology of the end of all ideologies.Footnote 46 Like the latter, it had profound consequences for the acceptance of the Federal Republic by German conservatives. The notion of a dawning meta-political era could easily belittle the foundation of West German democracy as irrelevant or ephemeral amid the dwindling significance of politics in general. Seen from this perspective, Zehrer's diagnoses from the late 1940s and early 1950s fit seamlessly into his intellectual development from 1932–3 onward, again underscoring continuities in his thought. Despite the vibrant political activism of Die Tat in the final stages of Weimar, Zehrer often emphasized the need for a general depoliticization and respiritualization of self and society. For instance, his support of a military dictatorship under the short-lived Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher in the fall of 1932 had been centered on the idea of a meta-political alliance, or Querfront, that would overcome competing ideologies and unify the fragmented parts of German society through a non-parliamentary, authoritarian regime.Footnote 47 In 1933, when Zehrer's difficulties with the National Socialist regime began, he yearned for a kind of spiritual monastery remote from political life.Footnote 48 He even asserted the “end of progress” in all conventional human efforts, anticipating a phase of religious and contemplative timelessness, in his very last piece in Die Tat, from August 1933.Footnote 49
In the years after 1945, however, this notion of an end to all politics and ostensible retreat to an apolitical world view became the dominant political strategy of conservatism. It is true that some right-wing intellectuals and scholars who were not discredited by Nazism—such as early supporters of the conservative resistance like Gerhard Ritter or former émigrés like Arnold Bergstraesser and Hans Rothfels—remained influential in West German politics. But the vast majority of conservatives considered a meta-political consensus essential for stabilizing the young Federal Republic. This notion was not exclusive to rightist thinkers, however. As conflictual politics met with general disapproval and ideas of a harmonious and paternalistic society flourished, the concept of a Volksgemeinschaft was subcutaneously carried forward in large parts of West German society well into the 1950s. Also, a widespread attitude known as ohne mich (“count me out”) emerged most clearly in response to efforts to reintroduce military service in the Federal Republic, but it was by no means limited to this context. Instead, it always also signaled a general rejection of politics. Uninterested in such concerns, a solid majority of German society was indifferent or even hostile toward democracy and politics in general.Footnote 50
These popular trends were nothing to worry about in the eyes of conservative commentators. In their opinion, the end of politics would indicate the people's healthy reaction in the face of—as they saw it—an overpowering politicization of life by the Nazis, by Allied reeducation efforts, and by Germany's own “engaged democrats”.Footnote 51 Rejection of politics was thus seen as an important first step toward achieving a new balance in society. As Zehrer noted in 1957, Germany had become much more homogeneous after the Second World War. With traditional social stratifications and political frictions buried under the rubble of both dictatorship and war, the dialectics of history had created a new kind of egalitarianism and integration. After the boundless unleashing of politics in the 1930s, the rebuilding of order had to be based on a wide-ranging pacification of political life and containment of pluralism. This interpretation paralleled Helmut Schelsky's conservative theory of the nivellierte Mittelstandsgesellschaft (“leveled middle-class society”) in some respects, specifically its focus on the remarkable reduction of social tensions in 1950s West German society, at least when compared to the Weimar Republic.Footnote 52 But when making this comparison, Zehrer actually justified his former radical neoconservatism as an early, unsuccessful attempt to overcome social conflicts in a consensus similar to that of the Adenauer years. Still posing his old question whether to turn to the political “right” or “left”, he continued to opt for an integrative, meta-political path beyond the traditional milieus of the workers’ movement and the bourgeoisie, beyond left or right.Footnote 53
In their own eyes, Hans Zehrer and like-minded conservatives might have failed in the early 1930s, but the situation in the young Federal Republic seemed to be different and much more amenable to their ideas. Despite his alleged withdrawal from everyday politics and the strong skepticism he harbored toward him personally, Zehrer had especially high regard for Konrad Adenauer's masterful ability to pick up on and play to pronounced apolitical resentments in society. Considering the huge gains for the CDU in the 1953 federal elections, for instance, Zehrer strongly endorsed Adenauer's authoritarian and patriarchal style, calling it a miracle how “a nation [Volk] merges with the person of its chancellor”.Footnote 54
From this point of view, one can understand why Zehrer would employ the rhetoric of a general crisis of modernity while at the same time interpreting the Federal Republic as a phase of stabilization in what he used to call Germany's “internal self-cleaning process”. Under the semi-democratic rule of Adenauer and the “apolitical politics” he appeared to represent, society seemed to be on its way out of the chaos, slowly losing the taints of political conflict and inner turmoil. And just like Zehrer, several other Weimar right-wingers wanted to see the Adenauer regime in this vein, as a fulfillment of their own expectations for a post-liberal order. As former Die Tat-author Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann insisted in a 1959 controversy with Kurt Sontheimer, the conservative revolutionaries and specifically the circle around Die Tat had not erred in the past, but rather had anticipated “some of the ideas and procedures, albeit in a confused and incomprehensible form, that were realized in West Germany after 1945”.Footnote 55
The crucial point to be made here about this perception was not its strongly autosuggestive and—at least in retrospect—almost grotesque distortion of reality but rather its profound historical implications. Because a clearly evident “conservative reintegration”Footnote 56 under Adenauer could be interpreted as a sort of authoritarian system based on an apolitical consensus in society, there was little to complain about—especially considering the lavish integration policy pursued toward former Nazis and their conservative sympathizers. When Hans Zehrer and other right-wing intellectuals looked at the Adenauer republic, they often saw in it a specific antiliberal and harmonious spirit and desperately wanted to regard it as a fulfillment of their own earlier expectations. In consequence, they would not actively fight or agitate against the new West German state, given that it too seemed to devalue the political principles of liberal democracy as secondary to social integration and to the firm rule of a strong political authority. When Zehrer demanded a “return to democracy” in 1956, he intended not a general democratization or even liberalization but the development of a class of representative leaders who “care for things in a responsible way and get the acclamation of the masses”.Footnote 57 One can clearly see in this anti-pluralistic and authoritarian–conservative interpretation of democracy the lingering legacy of Carl Schmitt (and other right-wing thinkers), who starkly distinguished liberalism from democracy.Footnote 58 The Weimar Republic's former right-wing elite thus made their peace not with liberal parliamentarianism but with a Kanzlerdemokratie system that, in their eyes, realized at least some elements of their past conservative-revolutionary agenda.Footnote 59
Only one major point of opposition remained that stirred long-lasting dissatisfaction and frustration among conservative intellectuals in the 1950s, and that was the unresolved problem of German unity. Especially after the Stalin Notes of March 1952 and the ensuing debate over a “missed opportunity” for the reunification of West and East Germany, they were among the severest critics of Adenauer and his uncompromising policy of Westbindung (integration into the West).Footnote 60 Zehrer and Springer were particularly unhappy with this and eventually traveled to Moscow in 1958, hoping to negotiate for German unity with Soviet premier Khrushchev on their own initiative. However, as is well known, this trip proved a disaster. Khrushchev had no intention of conferring with a capitalist publisher and his dubious intellectual adviser about Soviet foreign policy; subsequently, Zehrer's personal relations with Axel Springer as the publisher's confidant dramatically cooled down.Footnote 61
But when assessing the situation in general, the partition of Germany was a price quietly accepted by many conservative intellectuals for their own reintegration into postwar intellectual life. And as their stridently nationalistic stance from the days of the Weimar Republic was lost in the catastrophic mayhem of Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War, their attention turned from the German nation to forms of supranational cooperation, be that the Christian “occident” or the idea of a common Western civilization embodied in NATO. As Zehrer argued, “The future no longer belongs to the nation state, whose time has run out; it now belongs to federations”.Footnote 62
IV. CONCLUSION
Hans Zehrer's intellectual passage from the late Weimar to the early Federal Republic displays a rather intricate blend of continuity and change. On the one hand, Zehrer's journalistic style and self-conception emerged untouched by any political changes, remaining based on the model of a small circle of elite writers who claimed superior insight. On the other hand, he carefully adjusted his political positions after the foundation of the Federal Republic. Instead of persisting in his frontal attacks on liberal democracy, he embedded the new West German order in a larger picture of universal crisis and long-term political change that was clearly continuous with certain currents in his own ideological past. Asserting a broad, apolitical consensus in society or welcoming the Kanzlerdemokratie's effective pacification of the political, however, did not only mirror ideas of the conservative revolution by remodeling them under the auspices of an ostensible “end of politics”. Paradoxically, it was also crucial for the establishment and the early strengthening of West German democracy, since it made radical conservative protest more or less pointless, especially when the Federal Republic could be interpreted as an essentially authoritarian state at the same time.
Of course, the meta-politics Zehrer proclaimed had become anachronistic already before the end of the decade. While the Federal Republic gradually stabilized, the successful integration of former radical conservatives became less important. In turn, the rhetoric of crisis and political restraint deployed by Hans Zehrer and other aging right-wing intellectuals lost its resonance in society at large. Instead of becoming even more conservative, paternalistic, and authoritarian, Adenauer and the Bonn government soon began to lose their legitimacy, which crumbled in the face of the massive social and cultural changes wrought by West Germany's “economic miracle”. While older concerns about consumerism, materialism, and Americanization, which had long circulated among conservatives, came to define a political left increasingly under the Frankfurt school's influence, traditional conservative politics were either absorbed by the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, or relegated to the far right margins. This left an intellectual vacuum in the center right of the spectrum, since it took several decades for a genuinely liberal-democratic conservatism to emerge from within small circles over the 1960s and establish itself.Footnote 63 But it also sparked a fresh look at politics. Younger intellectuals and journalists of a new generation soon began to target Adenauer and West German elites for their apolitical conservatism. Nor did they spare Hans Zehrer, who was mocked for his sweeping historical prophecies and his political mysticism.Footnote 64
In the years after 1960, a new kind of polarization and politicization took place in German society, often connected to spectacular conflicts like the Spiegel affair of 1962. But the real turning point was when media enterprises noticed that conflictual politics started to sell. The market for newspapers and magazines became increasingly competitive, quickly overturning the consensus-oriented style that had dominated the press in the early Federal Republic. A new and dynamic relationship among media, public, and politics could be discerned, and by the mid-1960s it had become clear that West Germany would witness not the end of politics but rather a vibrant and thoroughgoing politicization.Footnote 65 Hans Zehrer still hoped to overtake these developments again, harboring plans to launch a conservative offensive through Die Welt that would counter the supposed leftist domination of mainstream media in the Federal Republic. But this turn to the right was never fully realized during his lifetime.Footnote 66 Already isolated within the editorial staff of Die Welt from the late 1950s onward, Zehrer was in poor health and too exhausted to take up a more radical and decisive political stance again. He died in 1966, at the age of 67, just one short year before the political and intellectual turbulences of 1967 and 1968 began. But one might wonder if these turbulences would have ever had the chance to erupt if a strong and politically determined camp of conservatives had battled the Federal Republic just as they had battled its Weimar predecessor.
