As archival scholarship on National Socialism moved under way during the later 1960s, study of the Right's broader intellectual history relied on a small number of then canonical works—by Klemens von Klemperer (1957), Otto E. Schüddekopf (1960), Fritz Stern (1961), Hans-Joachim Schwierskott (1962), and Kurt Sontheimer (1962), shadowed by Armin Mohler's Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Grundriβ ihrer Weltanschauungen (1950)—soon to be joined by George Mosse (1964), Herman Lebovics (1969), and Walter Struve (1973). At this stage, with the exception of Fritz K. Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins (1967) and Reinhard Bollmus's study of Alfred Rosenberg's office and its opponents (1970), there was virtually nothing taking a broader social or institutional approach to the contexts of Nazi ideology and the sociology of knowledge under the Third Reich. Gerhard Kratzsch's Kunstwart und Dürerbund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (1969) stood very much alone as a nuanced, archivally researched case study alive to the complex ambivalences of cultural nationalism in the Wilhelmine years.

Four decades later, in contrast, that landscape has entirely changed. Perhaps the single most decisive intervention has been Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann's The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 (1991), now almost a quarter of a century old, which marked out an evolving research agenda in paradigmatically persuasive ways. Intersecting concentrations of new scholarship have been the result—on the professions, particularly in medicine, public health, and law; on the expanding eugenicist and biopolitical complex of ideas organizing the social policy realm; on research and policy in the natural sciences; on the consequences of Gleichschaltung for the production and application of academic knowledge across all of the humanities and social sciences; on the systematized promotion of racialist theory and research, especially with respect to the intended New Order in the East; and on all aspects of the “Jewish question” as the Nazis understood it, including everything associated with the genocide. Four bodies of scholarship in particular deserve to be singled out: 1) analyses of the ideological outlook of the Schutzstaffel (SS), most notably in Ulrich Herbert's Best (1996), Michael Thad Allen's The Business of Genocide (2002), and Michael Wildt's Generation des Unbedingten (2003); 2) individual and collective biographies of academic intellectuals, including critical literatures on Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, and other major figures; 3) growing attentiveness to the arts, cultural life, and aesthetics; and, most recently, 4) an emergent literature focused specifically on the meanings of the Volksgemeinschaft. Virtually none of this was available before the late 1980s.

Another genre of publication has always been with us, of course, that of the potboiling and often sensationalizing “popular” screeds of the “Nietzsche to Hitler” variety, usually by journalists and other nonacademic independent writers. All that separates Yvonne Sherratt's Hitler's Philosophers from such literature is its formal academic credentials. How the author of Adorno's Positive Dialectic (2002) and Continental Philosophy of Social Science: Hermeneutics, Genealogy, and Critical Theory from Ancient Greece to the Twenty-First Century (2006) came to write this superficial and tendentious book is no less a mystery than the decision of Yale University Press to publish it. Sherratt sets out to explore how academic philosophers—“lost in abstract ideas, apparently living in an ivory tower” (xvii)—came to give their support to the Third Reich. She treats, in turn, Adolf Hitler's own relation to ideas, the deeper pre-1914 contexts of philosophy in the German-speaking world, and academic philosophers' record of collaboration in the life of the Nazi regime (using Alfred Rosenberg, Alfred Bäumler, Ernst Krieck, and several others as illustrations), before devoting a chapter each to Schmitt and Heidegger. Then, oddly, she turns in the second half of the book to a list of “Hitler's Opponents”: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Huber (an academic musicologist executed for his relation to the White Rose movement). The book closes with a meandering discussion of the postwar (“The Nuremberg Trials and Beyond”).

None of these treatments has anything original to say; none has any relationship to the wealth of scholarly historiography mentioned above; none dwells even remotely on the history of ideas themselves, as opposed to the merest of biographical details assembled in a chatty and usually speculative style. The discussion of Arendt in particular is a travesty. Benjamin and Adorno fare little better. Why each appears in the first place is not very clear. The gap between the importance and promise of the topic and what the book actually delivers is immense. The relationship between aspects of earlier philosophical traditions to the National Socialist outlook, the regime's drive to appropriate and redeploy the intellectual legacies bequeathed by earlier thinkers, the responsibility borne by academic intellectuals such as Heidegger and Schmitt for legitimizing the Third Reich by their affiliation, the nature of the reciprocities and disjunctions between particular bodies of philosophical thought and the grounds and entailments of the political life—all of these remain matters of the highest complexity and importance, whether historiographically, politically, ethically, or epistemologically. None of that difficulty enters this account.

With Volker Weiβ's imposing treatment of the ideas and influence of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, we return to the world of serious scholarship, entering the latter at the highest level of intelligence, groundedness, and measured originality. Best known for his coinage of Das Dritte Reich in his 1923 tract of that name, Moeller was given a salient place among the Nazis' intellectual precursors in the early works mentioned above—especially by Fritz Stern's Politics of Cultural Despair, which counted him as one of a triumvirate of emblematic thinkers, along with Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn, whose “cultural pessimism” supposedly disabled the civic-mindedness and liberal capacities of Wilhelmine Bildungsbürger and opened them to right-wing irrational appeals. Moeller has also been seen more generally as a primary voice among the so-called Conservative Revolution, a sloganeering category devised by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1927, two years after Moeller had taken his own life.

That term described a definite, vociferous, but loosely affiliated body of avowedly right-wing opinion that loudly marked its differences from the conservatism of pre-1918 cast. Fired by the Versailles Treaty, the 1918 Revolution, and the Left's advance, inspired by the soldierly ethos of the proliferating combat leagues, yet unconvinced by available party-political options, its exponents scorned both the new constitutionalism of the Republic and the Empire's discredited legacy. A different kind of state—the opposite of the West's liberalism and expressive of German traditions—was expected to marshal the nation's inner energies into a commanding solidarity, a new Volksgemeinschaft, where the alienated and misled masses could return, bound by what Jünger called a “national socialism” or a “socialism of the blood.” Strong central authority and corporatist rather than democratic representation; restoration of the lands stolen by Versailles; a new ethics of the nation forged from the soldier's warrior virtues, including courage, discipline, heroism, and “fighting as inner experience” (in Jünger's phrase)—these convictions rose fiercely out of the postwar's counterrevolutionary disorder. During the 1920s, they acquired increasingly programmatic form. To realize them, argued one of Moeller van den Bruck's collaborators (Wilhelm Stapel, an ex-liberal), “heroic” leadership would be needed, a “modern man of power” standing “above parties and divisions,” a “savior” for the “machine era” who was “at one and the same time ruler, warrior, and priest.”Footnote ¹

The Conservative Revolution crystallized in magazines and newspapers, seminars, clubs, and informal networks. One key vehicle was a new national weekly called Gewissen, launched by a group around Moeller in April 1919, and linked to a discussion forum called the Juni-Klub and a Political Seminar founded in November 1920 under the Catholic corporatist Martin Spahn (it was renamed the Institute for National Politics in 1922). After Moeller killed himself in May 1925 amid personal crisis and psychic collapse, his associates regrouped into the more elite-based Herrenklub and the elaborately ramified Ring network of self-styled Young Conservatives, for whom the magazine Tat, founded in 1909 and owned since 1912 by Eugen Diederichs, became the mouthpiece. With access to mass-circulation newspapers and generous funding from business and other private interests, these efforts coalesced by the end of the 1920s into a generalized critique of parliamentary democracy that was increasingly widely diffused among the Right. Along with Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (1922), which went through forty-seven German editions in four years, selling over 100,000 copies by 1926, Moeller's Das Dritte Reich became a main vector of this politics, decisively repudiating monarchism and older forms of conservative thought, subsuming all politics into the cultural ideal of the nation, and advancing dictatorship over the pluralism of party. A certain rhetoric of “socialism” became a marker for precisely what separated this conservatism from the past: its call for a society based on disciplined solidarity, collective sacrifice, and creative labor, uniting all interests into a new communal order on the style of “the ideas of 1914.” The grammar of youth also worked to discredit the past. “For us the war means the collapse of the old generation and its world and the breakthrough [Aufbruch] for the young,” Max Hildebert Boehm, another of Moeller's close Juni-Klub associates, declared in 1919.Footnote ²

Weiβ embeds this history, with great learning and breadth of insight, in a series of overlapping analytical contexts, arranged into a cascading sequence of twelve thematically conceived, chronologically ordered chapters. Having framed his purposes in a conceptual and biographical introduction, he maps out the landscape of Moeller's thinking in five interconnected treatments. In “Wilhelminismus: Kaisertum, technische Moderne und gesellschaftliche Gliederung,” he derives Moeller's fundamental conviction about the necessity of antidemocratic, elite-based political forms from a pre-1914 critique of Wilhelm II's inadequacy to the challenges of technological modernity, a critique based in large degree on an argument about generational change (as social history and normative discourse) accompanying the transition from Otto von Bismarck at the turn of the 1890s. A wide-ranging discussion of transformations in conservatism during the Wilhelmine and early Weimar eras follows (“Der konservative Angriff”), taking off from Moeller's own later reflections to establish a sharply drawn contrast with the traditionalist outlook of the landed aristocracy descending from the earlier nineteenth century, while detailing the move toward “National Opposition” in the final years of the Kaiserreich.

In the next two chapters, “Die Metaphysik des Provokateurs” and “Monument und Moderne,” Weiβ provides detailed explications of Moeller's cultural criticism, making clear its affirmative relation to “modernity” as such, as opposed to any backward-looking cultural pessimism. He locates Moeller's aesthetics in a fin-de-siècle Berlin milieu of Lebensreform-tinged bohemianism, while exploring at length the centering on architecture as emblematic among the arts. Moeller's embrace of new technologies, valuing of the monumental and heroic, and ascription of essential national characteristics to the built environment, based in a racial conception of people and place (Der Preuβische Stil, 1916), made architecture into the main bridge from cultural criticism into politics. Weiβ then reinforces this argument with a crucial chapter on Moeller's views of the East (“Das Reich im Osten”), both establishing the significance of his intellectual relationship to the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky and clarifying his views of Russia. While nominally the editor of the German edition of Dostoevsky's complete works (1906–1919), Moeller provided mainly a series of abstruse prefaratory commentaries for translations actually provided by Elisabeth (Less) Kaerrick, the younger sister of his second wife, Lucie. At the same time, Weiβ carefully teases out the place of “Russia” in Moeller's thinking. Though certainly disparaging of “the West,” Moeller was far from being a straightforward Slavophile (contrary to much past commentary). Rather, he thought fully inside the German expansionist imaginary of the East. These five chapters, roughly half the book, do a fine job of contextualizing Moeller convincingly in his Wilhelmine time—which he outlived, after all, by only seven years.

Certain opportunities are nevertheless missed in Moderne Antimoderne. By making Lagarde and Langbehn into the main negative measure of Moeller's affirming modernism, for example, Weiβ takes their wider intellectual-cultural importance on trust. But the latter is far more an artifact of The Politics of Cultural Despair than any actual resonance of the kind and scale that Stern had sought to suggest. Likewise, Moeller's architectural thinking might have been linked more extensively to the surrounding cultural criticism and its ambiguities, whether in the field of architecture per se, design and the applied arts more generally, or the elaborate circuits of experimental living associated with Lebensreform: from Paul Schultze-Naumburg through Hermann Muthesius to Bruno Taut, or from Heimatschutz to Werkbund. But overall, this is a remarkably accomplished treatment of the major interrelated questions of Germany's complex modernity in the early twentieth century—carefully argued, densely researched, theoretically supple. The recurring pattern of chapter-by-chapter discussion moves from a succinct exegesis of Moeller's mature thought in the early 1920s, back through his evolving ideas in the relevant contexts of the Wilhelmine period, to a finely judged summary at the end, sometimes looping back to the wider ideological setting of Weimar. In this way, Weiβ makes the case very compellingly for recognizing the overarching temporal coherence of the years between the 1890s and 1930s.

Weiβ bridges to the second part of his book with a brief discussion of Moeller's wartime propagandist writings. Having developed such strong and intricate arguments about Moeller's ideas earlier on, the explicit character and active agency of those ideas now somewhat recede, as Weiβ shifts focus to the wider coalescence of the Conservative Revolution, first via the Juni-Klub and its evolving network, then among the Young Conservatives after Moeller's death. Two chapters are then devoted to Moeller's relations with Hitler and the National Socialists, both directly in his personal stance toward them before 1925 and via the legacy of his thought after his death. Common misconceptions notwithstanding, neither Moeller himself nor his close associates marked significant distance from either the NSDAP or the Third Reich, whether before or after 1933, whereas the regime itself gave considerable support to the institutionalizing of its indebtedness via the creation of the Moeller van den Bruck Archive in Berlin. If the latter lost its distinct existence in 1939, when it was folded into the Prussian Staatsbibliothek, there was no diminishing of the acknowledged affinities: Moeller's nuanced positioning on matters of race might often be marked, but he was consistently accepted as a “spiritual pioneer” of the movement, as many prominent instances (e.g., Erich Koch and Werner Best) and the more generalized intellectual climate of the 1930s could attest. Weiβ's patient demonstration of Moeller's efficacy as a particular kind of popularizer, or “multiplier” (Multiplikator), as he calls him—not least in diffusing familiarity with the very category of the “Third Reich” as it migrated during the 1920s from its earlier Christian-eschatological, literary, and philosophical provenance into the centerground of right-wing political discourse—is one of the great strengths of this book. These matters are laid out in two careful and substantial chapters. The book ends with two broader reflections on Moeller's relation to fascism: “Avantgarde und Faschismus” and “Der faschistische Stil.”

In contrast with much other pertinent work—e.g., André Schlüter's impressive but resolutely exegetical Moeller van den Bruck. Leben und Werk (2011)—Moderne Antimoderne shows how a particular congeries of apparently dispersed and politically disconnected thought could actually come into its own, how its elements were able to cohere, and how they could enter into effective circulation as politics. Along with Claudia Kemper's equally outstanding companion study (Das “Gewissen” 1919–1925: Kommunikation und Vernetzung der Jungkonservativen, 2011)—each began as a Hamburg dissertation with Axel Schildt—Weiβ's book finally grounds treatment of the ideas of the Conservative Revolution in a broader material context of ideological practice and political action, using collective biography, networked influence, institutional resources, and pointedly orchestrated public exchange. It bridges brilliantly across the divide of the war, both showing the necessary Wilhelmine crucible for the formation of Moeller's distinctive ideas (the post-conservative departures and critique at the core of prewar “National Opposition”) and grasping how 1918–1919 broke irreversibly with the past, transforming the boundaries of the possible while ratcheting earlier potentials forward. Weiβ's particular thematic approach, allowing movement back and forth across 1914–1918 within a dynamic temporality, clarifies not only the differences between Young Conservatives and prewar conservatism but also the former's convergence with the Fascists in Italy.

Finally, Weiβ offers exceptional insight into the complex relation of aesthetics and politics under the impact of early twentieth-century Germany's breakneck modernity. Mixing among an ‘outsiderly’ avant-garde of the fin de siècle, Moeller cultivated a stance of aesthetic opposition to the philistinism of the time, which, during the first decade of the 1900s, kept an amorphous connection to politics as such, in a manner more akin to the self-styling of a Stefan George. Yet, as Weiβ makes clear, the entire thrust of Moeller's grandiose literary ambitions—from the twelve volumes of Die moderne Literatur (1899–1902) through the eight-volume Die Deutschen (1904–1910) to Der Preuβische Stil (1916) and the postwar Das Recht der jungen Völker (1919)—was toward a unitary and essentialist conception of the artistic life (Kultur) of a people (Volk), through whose self-confident realization Germany, a youthful nation like the United States, could ascend “to the peak of the peoples” (186). “The source of culture for Moeller was not society and its institutions,” Weiβ argues, “but always a metaphysical triad of race, space, and people, which were bundled in the nation” (122–23). The politics inscribed in this cultural criticism were already visible in certain prewar writings—e.g., Die Zeitgenossen. Die Geister—die Menschen (1906), Rasse und Nation (not published until 2001–2002, but written in 1908–1909), and Erziehung zur Nation (1911)—and the sharp demarcation against an Anglo-French image of the dandy qua aesthetic decadence was clear, making Moeller into the “anti-dandy” of Weiβ's astute coinage. The effort at shaping a “national mythology” (122) was certainly Moeller's driving aspiration. But the forging of this into a political program, inspired by virulent hatred against liberalism, democracy, parties, and parliaments, required the patent exhaustion of older-style conservatism in the defeat and revolution of 1918. In the resulting synthesis, Das Dritte Reich (1923) deployed all the aesthetic nationalism of the prewar years.

In Moderne Antimoderne, Volker Weiβ has given us one of the most important and illuminating studies of the pre-Nazi German right to have been published in recent years. He shows just how valuable a biographical approach to intellectual history can be once it comes with the breadth of archival learning, density of historiographical knowledge, astuteness of theoretical awareness, and contextualizing surefootedness demonstrated here. At a more modest level of ambition, but from a fascinating angle of vision and in carefully researched detail, Sarah Danielsson adds another useful building block to the increasingly elaborate historiography of the relationship of the academic disciplines to Nazism. More exactly, The Explorer's Roadmap to National-Socialism illustrates the degree to which the institutionalizing of knowledge inside the universities, beginning in the later nineteenth century, had still left some indeterminate spaces where amateurs and mavericks could practice an earlier pre-academic form of the pursuit of knowledge. In the wake of Gleichschaltung under the Third Reich, as the racial state began acquiring its elaborate machinery of research, scholarship, and pseudoscientific legitimation, precisely such types could come into their own—not just the academic careerists and place makers, but precisely the partially qualified charlatans and academics manqués who had lived in the gray zone of independent scholarship and public repute earlier on.

Sven Hedin (1865–1952) was a well-born, German-educated, Swedish expeditioner to Central Asia; his exploits in the 1890s and 1900s brought great public renown, certainly in Sweden itself, but also in Germany and across Europe and North America. After early travels in Baku (1885–1886), Persia (1886, 1890), and along the Silk Road (1890–1891), interspersed with university studies in Sweden and Berlin (with geographer and China specialist Ferdinand von Richthofen), he undertook three major expeditions (1893–1897, 1899–1902, 1905–1908) into the desert and mountain regions of Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang), Tibet, northern India, and Persia, territories that remained still largely uncharted by Europeans (the so-called white spots or blank spaces of global cartography). On the basis of these travels—their cartographic outcomes and scientific findings, the knowledge and artifacts they accumulated, their ethnographic renditions of the wild and exotic, their intricate articulations with the region's competing imperial projects (British, Russian, German), their representational heroics, their further inscription of the romance of exploration—Hedin secured his place in a characteristic later nineteenth-century pantheon, “permanently referred to as the last great explorer in a long tradition of classical explorers” (20). Honored ceremonially by the pre-1914 rulers of Sweden, Persia, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Britain, Germany, India, China, the Vatican, and the United States, he carried his reputation through World War I into the 1920s, leading a fourth major expedition in 1927–1935 through Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and Xinjiang. By this time, his love for Germany—arising from an early affinity with the German Empire, expressed as a racially understood Pan-Germanism whose terms intensified via involvement in the German cause during World War I—had long solidified into publicly avowed identification with Hitler and the Third Reich. On returning from China, he embarked on a German lecture tour involving 111 talks in ninety-one cities between October 1935 and April 1936, launched by meetings with Hermann Goering (in a friendship going back to 1920) and Hitler himself. The strength of this support for Nazi Germany was actively sustained during the later 1930s into the war years, even outlasting the demise of the regime. A culmination occurred in January 1943, with the inauguration of the Sven Hedin Institute for Inner Asian Research in Schloβ Mittersill near Salzburg, effectively a research center for racial biology, ethnography, and geography. On Hitler's suicide, Hedin penned a eulogy “praising the German leader in glowing terms” (238). He died in Stockholm, unrepentant, in 1952.

Danielsson lays all of this out with great economy and a clear narrative style. Reaping the advantages of the Sven Hedin papers in the Swedish National Archives, she builds a strong picture of Hedin's personal career, while placing beyond any doubt the character of his political beliefs and affiliations. The book is organized straightforwardly around the chronology of the life, with little attention to the times. It consists of eight chapters of similar length, with three-quarters of the book falling after 1914. This is a pity, because the author misses a chance to provide a pre-1914 treatment of geography's formation as an academic discipline in universities—as opposed to a civic practice of geographical societies or a field of eclectic information and ideas produced by amateurs, adventurers, and freebooters, and circulating in less respectable and more popular ways. In fact, even when supplying fascinating detail (e.g., using the respective expedition travelogues), Danielsson has little to say about the shifting institutional and epistemological bases of geography during the period she covers. Hedin was a typical pre-academic geographer of the high nineteenth century, after all. As the book shows, having studied with Richthofen for barely half a year, he demurred from an academic career, throwing himself with great energy and application into acquiring immense practical expertise instead, including numerous local languages as well as philological literacy, while relying more intrepidly on his own resources than on the small armies of helpers European exploration usually presupposed.

More elaborate comparative reflection on the emergence of this later nineteenth-century mystique of the explorer and its varying trajectories would have contextualized Hedin more satisfyingly, not least because a repertoire of impressive studies doing exactly this have now become available: from Johannes Fabian's Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (2000) and Felix Driver's Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (2001), to Edward Berenson's Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa (2011) and Dane Kennedy's The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (2013). Given what Danielsson describes of Hedin's Pan-Germanism, the careers of Karl Peters and other German adventurers of the time would have been another obvious foil. The migration of both exploration and its aura from the heart of Africa to Central Asia—which seems to have occurred around Hedin's time—and the similar spectacle of travel to the Poles, would also repay attention (e.g., David Thomas Murphy, German Exploration of the Polar World: A History, 1870–1940 [2002]).

Geopolitics—as a distinctive field of knowledge invented again exactly in this period, with a similar German-Swedish axis—is another missed chance. The Swedish geographer Rudolf Kjellén makes a fleeting appearance in The Explorer's Roadmap, as does his German predecessor Friedrich Ratzel, but there is no further elaboration. Indeed, the subsequent enlistment of academic geography as a discipline in the Nazi planning machinery remains one of the very few such histories still to be excavated, and we badly need some counterpart to David Murphy's The Heroic Earth (1997), which thoroughly mapped out the history of geopolitical thought under Weimar. In addition, the wider context of Sweden's right-wing, antisocialist politics in the early twentieth-century should have been more fully treated, given Danielsson's emphasis on the Pan-German character of Hedin's beliefs, which, she argues, trumped any specifically Swedish nationalism. Any reader of contemporary Scandinavian noir fiction will be familiar with the virulence of Sweden's persisting Nazi legacies, which makes the thinness of Danielsson's gestures in this direction disappointing. Chapter 2, “The Ideological Conviction of a Germanic Nationalist: Hedin the Agitator (1904–1913),” presents the outlines of an important story focused on Hedin's reaction against the 1905 break with Norway and his mass-distributed, anti-Russian (and antisocialist) pamphlet of 1912, A Word of Warning. But that discussion seldom moves away from Hedin himself, and, in the rest of the book, it recedes almost entirely. Danielsson nevertheless offers her strongest material later in the treatment of Hedin's support for the Third Reich, which he greeted in 1935 as “the German miracle” (129). He emerges not only from the public record but still more from his unpublished diaries as an utterly repellant antisemite and pro-Nazi loyalist, actively proposing schemes for Jewish mass deportations in the aftermath of Reichskristallnacht during the earliest floating of the so-called Madagascar Plan, for example—mainly to Mesopotamia, where he observed the earlier Armenian deportations in 1916, but even, bizarrely, to Baja California as well.

As against these varieties of intellectual history, Larry Eugene Jones's edited volume, The German Right in the Weimar Republic, pleads for a return to an older-style political history of the Weimar years. As Jones observes, after the late 1980s in the English-speaking world, such work experienced a definite eclipse, supplanted by “the more popular sub-genres of social and cultural history” (4). Yet, while he sees this as a loss—of scholarly substance and archival learning—this changing fashion has involved less any receding of interest than a broadening of what politics can now be taken to mean.Footnote ³ Scholarship that analyzes politics markedly away from a more narrowly constructed history of the parties can be no less intensively grounded in the archives than new monographs on Pan-Germans and Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP). Examples include Anna von der Goltz's Hindenburg (2009), Timothy S. Brown's Weimar Radicals (2009), and Benjamin Ziemann's Contested Commemorations (2013). In another genre of social and cultural history, namely those longitudinal studies that chart changing social bases of politics across the twentieth century as a whole, the archival grounding seems no less richly impressive, e.g., Annette F. Timm's The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin (2010), Monica Black's Death in Berlin (2010), and Moritz Föllmer's Individuality and Modernity in Berlin (2013). The same is true if we reach further back to some now classic social histories: e.g., Atina Grossmann's Reforming Sex (1995), Young-Sun Hong's Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State (1998), and David Crew's Germans on Welfare (1998), as well as Cornelie Usborne's The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany (1992) and Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany (2007).

In what sense, then, have these scholars “all but abandoned the writing of the political history of the Weimar Republic to their German colleagues” (4)? Anthony McElligott's Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916–1936 (2014) develops its challenging arguments not by ignoring the parties but rather by situating them differently. In studying the Republic's history “far beyond the realms of parliaments and political parties,” the editors and authors of Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects (2010) were not exchanging the archives for theory; they were bringing them both together.Footnote ⁴ In other words, Jones constructs a misleading and unnecessary dichotomy, and, in pairing his volume with Weiß's Moderne Antimoderne, we have the chance to explore precisely this point. In a nutshell: What does “the political and organizational history of rightist groups,” as practiced by Jones and his fellow contributors, still bring to our understanding of Weimar's fragilities and eventual collapse?

The ten equally weighted chapters in The German Right in the Weimar Republic may be variously grouped. Four take a mainly biographical approach—Wolfram Pyta's useful résumé of his authoritative work on Paul von Hindenburg, Daniela Gasteiger's informative report from her dissertation in progress on Kuno von Westarp, Edward Snyder's commentary on “Eugenics and Protestant Social Thought” in the practice of Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, and a highly tendentious treatment of “Carl Schmitt and the German Right” by Joseph W. Bendersky—while a fifth, Björn Hofmeister's overview of the Pan-German League, centers largely on the role of another leading individual, Heinrich Claß. Gasteiger's essay, Ulrike Ehret's treatment of the Catholic Right, and the editor's own discussion of “Conservative Antisemitism” make valuable cuts into the history of the DNVP during the 1920s. Three chapters deal with the Pan-Germans: Rainer Hering offers a capsule summary of the League's character from his own extensive writings; Hofmeister previews his forthcoming book on the League's post-1914 history; Barry Jackisch reprises the account of Pan-German relations with Nazism from his recently published book. While antisemitism figures, too, in each of the Pan-German essays, it provides the formal thematics of three chapters: Jones's characteristically careful dissection of the outlook of the DNVP; Brian E. Crim's account of “situational antisemitism” in the Stahlhelm and the Young Germany Order; and Ehret's “Antisemitism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in the Political Worldview of the Catholic Right.”

Overall, these essays adhere straightforwardly to their discretely assigned briefs, so that general arguments about the Right as a whole do not easily emerge. There is little sense of the interconnected discussion circles, intellectual networks, and circuits of political sociability explored so productively in Weiß's Moderne Antimoderne and Kemper's Das “Gewissen.” The character of the extraordinarily ramified völkisch sector of the Right's political activity is treated only obliquely and allusively rather than addressed systematically as a whole. Neither the rural and agrarian arenas of the Right's organized political presence nor those of the small business interest and the Mittelstand are very visible; the same holds for the white-collar interests and, for that matter, industry and big business. With the exception of Jackisch's piece, the complicated fields of equivalence, interarticulation, and convergence between this non-Nazi Right and the Nazis themselves, whether during the earlier 1920s or in the crucial transitional time of 1926–1930, remain strikingly indistinct. When the contributors occasionally bridge to the wider ideological landscape of right-wing political aspiration, as in the Snyder and Bendersky chapters, they do so very boundedly, without any bold or challenging claims about the bigger picture. In these ways, the collection largely reenacts the confusing heterogeneity and fragmentation that characterized the Right's own organized activities and ideological presence during the pre-Nazi years.

What can we take away from The German Right in the Weimar Republic? Even if tracked into the highly particularized directions itemized in the preceding paragraph, the individual contributions offer a great deal of empirical information and detailed insights, opening a series of windows onto research presently in progress—reports from the coalface, so to speak. Moreover, if not drawing very directly or elaborately on the vast wealth of the recent, rapidly expanding German-language scholarship on the parties and Verbände invoked by Jones in his introduction, the essays at least chart out the shape and extent of this historiography across the footnotes and in the very helpful selected bibliography. Beyond merely strengthening our knowledge or filling the gaps, the volume suggests, in fact, a number of strong conclusions. One set of these shows not only the fundamentally fractured profile and antidemocratic commitments of the DNVP but also the utter pervasiveness among its supporters of a virulently antisemitic outlook. If these arguments add appreciably to our earlier understanding, then another—proposing the exceptional degree of splintering in the Right as a whole—largely confirms an existing set of perceptions, as Jones himself readily concedes.Footnote ⁵ But here the volume simultaneously reveals its limitations, for we get only so far by stressing “fragmentation” as such. If we stay focused only on the Right's manifold and immobilizing divisions, as opposed to the terms of latent and eventual coalescence, the bases of the Nazis' decisive success will not easily emerge.

The DNVP's anti-Republican obduracy (to take the first of these points) is no longer remotely in doubt. That emerges especially clearly from the essays by Gasteiger and Jones himself. The party's out-and-out offensive against the Republic is commonly associated with the period of Alfred Hugenberg's leadership after October 1928, when its electoral strength also collapsed. Yet, on both counts, the rot had already long been apparent. If 1930 brought the defection of two million voters, then the same number were already lost by 1928; in only eight years (December 1924 to July 1932) the party plummeted from a peak of 20.5 percent to merely 5.9 percent of the popular vote. In capturing control of the DNVP, the Hugenberg faction (based in a Pan-German-Conservative accord) willingly sacrificed the party's earlier but still fragile endorsements among Christian labor, radical agrarians, and the right-wing white-collar lobby to the higher purpose of an intransigent anti-Republicanism. But even during its two brief spells in government (1925, 1927–1928), the DNVP was riven by increasingly venomous disagreements over first the Dawes Plan and then the Treaty of Locarno, which irrevocably fractured its unity, narrowed its strategy, and buried the always slim hope of turning it into a functioning parliamentary conservative party. Even Westarp, the principal voice of pragmatism, justified joining the government strategically, actually quite cynically, in the name of short-term advantage, guided by ulterior antidemocratic intentions. If the ferociously polarized intensities over Locarno and Dawes in the six months between the Hindenburg election and the DNVP's abandonment of the government (April to October 1925) were decisive for the Republic's parliamentary and governmental instability, as now seems clear from a variety of older and more recent studies, then the DNVP bore the primary responsibility.Footnote ⁶ As Hugenberg's maneuvering for the leadership unfolded from December 1925, orchestrated via Pan-German and Conservative influence in the regional committees, the space for even the most limited and temporary of accommodations with the Republic had effectively gone.

While the essays in the Jones volume contain much evidence for the preceding argument, this and other aspects of the bigger picture remain frustratingly latent or understated. That applies in particular to the Right's organizational landscape—whether for the DNVP or for the wider universe of parties, associations, pressure groups, interest lobbies, combat leagues, circles, and clubs in their national, regional, or local incarnations, to which the book gives no access at all. In fact, the DNVP was the opposite of a stable formation. It existed, on the contrary, in a shifting and amorphous relationship to the complex ecology of organized socioeconomic and cultural affiliations, civic activism, and broader passive support that sustained it in elections. It was founded in November 1918 amid hectic confusion, drawing on Free Conservatives, Conservatives, Christian-Socials, and Antisemites, along with assorted National Liberals, Pan-Germans, and previously unattached nationalists. In 1919–1920, its relations with anything resembling a local base remained entirely unclear. Not only had Westarp painstakingly preserved the autonomy of the old Conservative organization, but as Gasteiger shows, its outlook veered from truculent ambivalence to outright hostility. By 1920, in the aftermath of the Kapp Putsch, key Free Conservatives had already left; in the fall of 1922, so, too, did the völkisch elements, regrouping into the German Völkisch Freedom Party.

As the launch of the Wirtschaftspartei in September 1920 confirmed, the DNVP had failed to gather in the economic Mittelstand, who found a variety of rival homes. Local völkisch, radical-nationalist, and paramilitary groups continued proliferating, each in their particular configuration with the local DNVP. In other words, even before the fracturing of 1925–1928 (which itself preceded the electoral collapse of 1928–1930), the party had barely been able to find its feet. By the two elections of 1924, it was already suffering a long-term drift of Mittelstand support toward right-wing alternatives; at the same time, the multiplicity of locally bounded völkisch groups undermined its base with a labyrinth of crosscutting attachments.Footnote ⁷ In grasping these dynamics, Jones and his contributors unfortunately offer very little explicit guidance. But, as Peter Fritzsche showed many years ago, on the evidence of the local associational mosaic, vital constituencies were deserting the “parties of the middle” well before the Nazis gave them a refuge. In 1924–1928, the DNVP lost 30 percent of its vote; national membership of the German Democratic Party (DDP) sank from 800,000 in 1919 to 135,000 in 1924 and 113,000 in 1927; from its 300 Braunschweig local branches in 1920, the German People's Party (DVP) shriveled to 100 in 1925 and, in 1929, to a mere 33.Footnote ⁸

The volume's strengths and weaknesses are most apparent on the subject of antisemitism, where the detail is compelling. Centering her discussion on the DNVP's Reich Catholic Committee (RKA), along with Young Conservatives such as Eduard Stadtler and Martin Spahn, Ulrike Ehret considers those right-wing Catholics explicitly opposed to the Center, whose pro-Republican orientation had forfeited their allegiance. Rather than the older forms of Christian antisemitism, this new Catholic Right began from the overriding primacy of nation, the corrosive moral consequences of the “Jewish spirit,” and the “fundamental struggle between Christian and Jewish forces in the modern world” (226, 236). In one characteristic discussion, a 1923 meeting of the Catholic Westphalian aristocracy, the “inner truth” of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was affirmed, “the assimilation of Jewry and Germandom” was held “to be impossible,” and the Jews were denounced from Catholic principle as “the rejected people, God's scourge, the main representatives of materialism, decomposition, [and] anti-Christendom” (226). In his treatment of antisemitism inside the DNVP, Jones likewise finds it pervasive. Even as Westarp opposed the exclusive prioritizing of antisemitism in the DNVP's program in 1922, for example, he still railed against “the political, economic, and social dominance of Jewry within the entirety of its political and racial labors” (85). Such convolution reflected both the need to appease the DNVP's völkisch presence—after the 1922 secession, the party created its own Völkisch National Committee in February 1923 to keep that presence warm—and the party's default outlook. “If we are not one day to appear decayed and rotten to the core,” one parliamentary candidate declared, “we must save the German oak from being choked by these usurious weeds” (81).Footnote ⁹

On the matter of antisemitism's importance, Jones and Crim each ultimately equivocate. In attributing “situational antisemitism” to “opportunism, pragmatism, and vicious competition in a crowded German Right” (195)—which, in both the Stahlhelm and Young Germany Order, left antisemitism's importance merely “ephemeral”—Crim misconceives and undervalues the nature of the ideological effect. The foregrounding or explicit attention to antisemitic demands may certainly have shifted in each of these movements as needs and exigencies changed (e.g., “demographics, fluctuating political fortunes, and bitter feuds with rival groups”), but in light of the evidence marshaled by Ehret and Jones, it is hard to see antisemitic belief as merely incidental, opportunistic, or “situational,” just the “the function of a fluid and complex political environment” (214). In practice, Crim oscillates between recognizing the pervasiveness of the antisemitic outlook, conceptualized via Shulamit Volkov's thesis of the “cultural code” (196–97), and treating specific expressions as reductively instrumental. But the relationship of particular political actions or purposes to the wider and deeper discursive reservoir of conscious and unconscious assumptions, underlying values, emotional allegiances, cultural citations, and skeins of partially formulated ideas that go toward shaping a political imaginary is surely more complicated than that.

Recent studies of everyday practices of discrimination and exclusion under the Third Reich suggest the need for a far more sophisticated and searching examination of the preceding ground of pre-1933 belief, however carefully we map the diversity of anti-Jewish attitudes and their diffusion.Footnote ¹⁰ The April 1924 DNVP Congress resolution banning Jews from joining the party, the Leitsätze proposed by the Völkisch National Committee around the same time (adopted in modified form), or the resolution proposed to the Prussian Landtag in February 1924 for the expulsion of foreign Jews—all these bespeak an active propensity very easily stirred into motion, however “abstract” (Gasteiger, 55-56) the sentiments might sometimes appear.Footnote ¹¹ Whether or not the DNVP under Hugenberg played down specifically antisemitic language in favor of the anti-Marxist threat, the meanings of espousing “racist belief and racist strength (völkischer Glauben und völkische Kraft)” (92) were clear enough. Weighing the particular efficacy of antisemitic ideas and commitments remains a complicated task, as Jones's characteristically dense archival citations amply attest. But seeing the German Right as “steeped in antisemitism” is the opposite of “a simplistic interpretation” (Crim, 214).

There is a larger difficulty here. In his mapping of the Right's landscape, Jones is drawn recurringly to its disunity and fragmentation. He locates this partly in a mess of ideological heterogeneity (“all sorts of different strands that can only be disentangled from each other with great difficulty and subtlety”), partly in changing situational dynamics (“Just as there was no consensus on the Jewish question between the various factions . . ., so did the party's embrace of antisemitism rise and ebb with the vicissitudes of the German economy and the stability of the Weimar Republic”) (79). Making sense of the DNVP, he insists, “requires a fine sense of nuance and an ability to distinguish between the various strands of racism and antisemitism that came together” in its formation (96). In light of new research, we can see

Looking forward to 1933, this “disunity of the Right” was just as key “a prerequisite for the establishment of the Third Reich as the schism of the socialist Left or the fragmentation of the political middle” (2). Yet, Jones leaves us with little explanatory space between the dividedness of the Right in the 1920s and the later unification under the NSDAP. If we view the Right only through this principal lens, finding an ever-proliferating mosaic of difference and demarcation, we blur the equally decisive tendencies toward convergence.

The years of Weimar's so-called relative stability after 1923–1924 were, on the one hand, actually a time of enduring fracture. The DNVP's viciously internecine factionalism made it clear that large parts of the anti-Republican electorate had become unwilling to relent from postures of irreconcilable enmity. Widening swathes of rural and small-town opinion (farmers, artisans, professionals and civil servants, small traders and property-owners of all kinds) were evacuating the ground of a positive citizenship capable of acknowledging, or acquiescing in, what had changed as a result of 1918–1919. In these terms, Jones is right to demand “nuance” and “subtlety” in the analysis. But in fracturing away from the existing “parties of order,” the right-wing electorate was, on the other hand, cleaving to a deeply desired ground of patriotic fantasy where the nation's wounded integrity could once again become whole. As Peter Fritzsche showed long ago, these frustrations became galvanized around the presidential campaign of Hindenburg in April 1925: hungry for validation, angry with its leaders, and aggressively reoccupying public space, a rallying of right-wing allegiances was notably driven forward by the organized muscle of the Stahlhelm. This proved the occasion for an uncommonly unified extra-parliamentary coalescence across the Right as a whole under the sign of the permanence of supraparty patriotic loyalism, thereby initiating a new narrative of right-wing electoral concentration—one whose relentless beneficiary between 1928 and 1932 came to be the NSDAP.Footnote ¹² If, in these years, antisocialist politics was fragmenting around interest-based claims, while disbelief in existing party forms was becoming radicalized, then the Hindenburg election made the extra-parliamentary ideal of the Right's ecumenical civic mobilization into a compelling actuality. Accessed via the elaborate breadth of this anti-Republican momentum and reconfigured into the Volksgemeinschaft, this motive ideal of an imagined State-Nation remained primary for large parts of the DNVP's always unstable constituencies of support. It increasingly trumped any contingencies of shorter-term party membership and identification.

The potential coalescence of a potently mobilized front against the Republic was thus already inscribed in the politics of the years 1925–1928—before the onset of the Depression, the escalating of nationalist campaigning against the Young Plan, or the huge surge in the Nazi vote in the 1930 elections. It is regrettable that none of the contributors to The German Right in the Weimar Republic engages this other theme, for which recent intellectual historians, such as Volker Weiß, Claudia Kemper, and other writers on the Conservative Revolution, have provided such excellent illumination.Footnote ¹³ Meanwhile, on the cumulative basis of an invaluable series of essays (sixteen are listed in the bibliography), Larry Jones himself continues assembling the building blocks of his long-awaited magnum opus on the Weimar Right, whose centrality for our knowledge will certainly match his earlier study of the liberal parties.Footnote ¹⁴ In many respects, as the current volume suggests, that account will surely become authoritative. Yet, without attentiveness to the Right's connective allegiances, its core understandings, and the enabling beliefs that transcended the otherwise persisting divisions—the ideological cement accessible for use by the Nazis—the sum will remain far less than the parts.