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Reunited Germany - The New Danger
GERMANY
Armin Mohler the influential fascist philosopher dies
Searchlight October 2003
By Jan Raabe
THE LIBERAL FRANKFURTER RUNDSCHAU reported the death, on 4 July, of the
veteran New Right theorist and fascist Armin Mohler under the heading
"conservatism". The description demonstrated the success of Mohler's
efforts over several decades to have extreme right-wing ideas accepted as
no more than conservative.
Mohler was important because he was one of the very few personalities of
the extreme right-wing whose voice was heard in the centre of the society
and among the German elite.
Mohler was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1920. After some initial
enthusiasm for the intellectual avant-garde and contact with left-wing
intellectuals and immigrants, he turned to right-wing philosophers such as
Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler and Ernst lunger, and moved to
Germany illegally in 1942. His decision, at the height of Hitler's war of
aggression, was prompted not only by his admiration of the ideology and
writings of these people but also by his fundamental sympathy with the
political aims and practice of National Socialism.
As he wrote in 1989: "I decided for something, to which more than just our
common language connected me: not for the 'good' Germany but for the
undivided German nation, for the German Reich fighting for its existence,
and that was not the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, but the Third
Reich." But his enthusiasm for the Third Reich was not reciprocated and,
despite his energetic efforts to enlist, both the SS and the Wehrmacht
rejected him. After studying for a term in Berlin, he decided at the end
of 1942 to return to Switzerland, where he was arrested.
By 1943, however, Mohler was able to take up the study of philosophy, with
history of art and German philology as subsidiary subjects, in Basel and
wrote his first articles. His interest in the extreme right since the turn
of the century had grown considerably. In 1949, he gained a doctorate for
a dissertation titled The Conservative Revolution in Germany 1918-1932.
Commenting on Mohler's thesis, his left liberal tutor, Karl Jaspers, said:
"This is what we philosophers are like. We breed snakes at our own
breast."
He was right in Mohler's case, because by inventing the term "conservative
revolution" Mohler was trying to detach the right-wing intellectual
precursors of volkisch and fascist politics from their conversion to, and
radicalisation in, fascism in order to make their rehabilitation possible.
Through his intellectual activities, Mohler caught the attention of Ernst
Jiinger, the doyen of literary German nationalism, and acted as his
private secretary from 1949 until 1953. Through this contact with the much
lauded author of the militaristic First World War novel Storm of Steel,
Mohler met Carl Schmitt, Friedrich George Jiinger, Gerhard Nebe and Ernst
Klett, the still living protagonists of the very conservative revolution
that he himself had created.
After these years of apprenticeship, Mohler left for Paris in 1953 to work
as a foreign correspondent for a number of papers including Die Zeit. He
was fascinated by Gaullism, which seemed to offer a course that that was
independent of both the USA and the Soviet Union. He became a connoisseur
of the extreme right in France, where he was later to become a mentor of the New Right and to hold the
likes of Alain de Benoist in high esteem.
After eight years in Paris, Mohler was lured back to Germany to work for
the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation. In 1964 he became the managing
director of this think-tank, which he systematically turned into a
political-cultural organisation of the New Right.
The following year he published a book, What the Germans fear, in which he
not only demanded an amnesty for Nazi criminals and a return to German
national sovereignty, but also proposed a German form of Gaullism, from
which he expected a strengthened Germany to emerge on the world political
stage. This book was a key text and set the tone for Ernst Nolte's later
attempts to relativise Nazism which eventually sparked off the so-called
"historians' quarrel" in 1986. Like Mohler before him, Nolte was seeking
the "release of the Germans from the mental grip of the Allies".
Mohler's role was more than simply academic because he was in a position
to influence policy, for example as an adviser and speechwriter for Franz
Josef Strauss, the ultra-right Prime Minister of Bavaria and West German
Defence Minister.
Just as it seemed he was being rewarded for his efforts, Mohler became
embroiled in a major political scandal when, in 1967, on the eve of being
awarded the prestigious Konrad Adenauer Prize, it was revealed that he had
been writing under an alias for the openly fascist Deutsche
Nationalzeitung.
No longer acceptable in the circles he had been moving in, Mohler was
frozen out politically and left with few outlets for his work other than
in Criticon, a virulently right-wing journal that he founded with Caspar
von Schrenk-Notzing in 1970.
Mohler saw his task at the time as being to extend the influence of the
French New Right to Germany. This was an important goal because the French
New Right was also trying to rehabilitate the German thinkers whom Mohler
idolised and who blazed the trail for Nazism. Accordingly, in 1983 he
started dabbling in practical politics again by joining an alliance of
far-rightist intellectuals known as the Council of Germany, which
functioned as a political pressure group.
Thanks to outbreaks of internal strife, the Council of Germany soon
flopped but this did not stop Mohler praising the SS memoirs of Franz
Schflnhuber a fellow Council member and the founder of the fascist
Republikaner party. Following the demise of the Council and his retirement
from the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation, Mohler resumed writing and
returned to his political roots.
In later years, he threw caution to the wind, openly writing articles for
organs of nazi theory such as Nation & Europa. Indeed, in an interview in
1995 with the Leipziger Volkszeitung, Mohler publicly confessed what
antifascists had known for a long time: that he was a fascist but, he
claimed, "in the sense of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera", the blood-soaked
Spanish fascist leader.
The confession was timely. Mohler's political work was all but done. Much
of what he had worked for so assiduously was by then either official
policy of the Christian Democrats or a matter of open public debate with
all previous taboos removed: German unity, sovereignty and identity, the
drawing of a line under Germany's recent past, questioning the uniqueness
of the Holocaust and the discussion of German war guilt.
 Mohler will not be lamented. What comes after him and for which he helped
lay the foundations might be infinitely worse.
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17-10-03 |
