Hermann Rauschning (4)

The suicide of the old order

The German conservatives do not come off well in Rauschning's book, where he writes that "it is mainly to the monarchist elements that Germany owes her present [1938] condition" (p. 111), referring principally to the deal of January 1933 which saw Hitler given the Chancellorship. Subsequently, the Army also failed to intervene to remove Hitler from power.

There were three basic reasons for this failure of the moderate right: the conservatives underestimated the Nazis' tactical abilities and ruthlessness; they were remarkably blind to the fact that the Nazi movement was inherently revolutionary, not conservative, in character; and finally, many of them tended to some extent to share basic Nazi views, despite the complete incompatibility of Nazism with genuine conservatism. Thus the conservatives succeeded not only in bringing to power a monstrous régime, but in discrediting traditional conservatism in Germany, perhaps for all time. Germany today has disowned its past—not just the Nazi period—probably more than any other Western country.

The most disturbing aspect of the conservatives' role is the convergence of Nazi and "conservative" thinking. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Rauschning says, German conservatism has been "decaying and degenerating" (p. 106). The conservatives have been losing their traditional values, which have been eaten away by the prevailing scepticism, and moving instead in the direction of nihilism. German monarchism fell into a "complete scepticism as to the relevance of spiritual and moral forces to practical politics" (p. 111). The Christian tradition of the former ruling classes was replaced by "ideas of power and interest" (p. 110). . . . CONTINUE

Rauschning cites conservative writers such as Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt as carrying some blame for this nihilist tendency. Within Nazi Germany, Jünger somehow managed to publish a thinly veiled denunciation of Hitler, and he remained a respected figure after the war. Yet Rauschning claims (without arguing the matter) that Jünger's philosophy of "dynamism" is essentially that of the Nazis. Carl Schmitt, a Conservative who later went over to Nazism, is treated at greater length.

Schmitt's view appears to be that what we call human society no longer exists in an era of control of the masses. There remains only an upper class of ruling officials at the head of the masses usefully organized down to the smallest detail. A revolution will thus amount simply to a change in the personnel of the ruling upper class; any accompanying disorders will be immaterial. In the first steps taken by the National Socialists after coming to power, the Nationalists and Conservatives saw only the establishment of the officials and the ruling class in power and an organization and control of the masses which was proceeding in an extremely chaotic way but was at least clearly destined to last. (p. 107.)

. . . long before 1933 . . . Carl Schmitt [went] beyond the retrogressive revision of the Constitution and the abolition of the franchise to the rejection of the whole "chimaera" of a State based on the laws. The revolutionary democratic legislator who builds up the State on the basis of an ideology gives place in his conception to the man of violence, who by the force of his own will gives the State the stamp of a dictatorship . . . . Here are plain links with National Socialism, the popular National Socialism of the first phase, with its nationalist doctrine. Along these lines the middle-class man and the pan-German of the old style come to approval of the methods of tyranny, of the character of the new dictator, tyrant, and usurper. In this conception his methods are only despotic on the surface, but in reality salutary and necessary. Terrorism included, they are necessary to constrain the nation to unity and higher insight and Germandom. (pp 108–109.)

Another source of the erosion of values in conservatism, Rauschning notes, was the military, which carried wartime ideas of expediency into peacetime political life through the personal connections between the officer corps and the Conservative leadership (p. 115).

In Rauschning's estimation there did exist Conservatives who would have been capable of successful national leadership under the conditions of the German crisis, but these were rejected by their own party as "ideologists and dreamers" (p. 114). An "entirely un-Conservative politician", Hugenberg, came to the head of the reactionary parties and inspired in them a "crude and unthinking materialism", the "belief in the ability of a suitable political machine to achieve any and every political task" (p. 116). Such "realism" is actually deeply unrealistic: "A policy of national renewal and reconstruction cannot grow to fruition in the absence of the only soil in which it can thrive, loyalty and justice and freedom." Nor, Rauschning suggests, is such unrealism limited to German conservatism.

In our day there is a sort of international understanding between reactionaries. All are proceeding along the same fatal course of self-destruction. By their abandonment of the principles on which their whole existence depends, they are destroying the basis of their existence more thoroughly and more rapidly than the extremest of their political opponents could have done . . . . The great financiers, in their support of political dynamism, overlook the fact that they can continue to live at the expense of that movement only so long as there still remain free democracies to be reduced to dictatorships, and that they are assisting the very authorities that are restricting the field of independent enterprise. And in the same way all the groups that profess Conservatism are training and nurturing the very element that intends to overthrow them. (p. 117.)