The Magic Cancellation of Crisis and the “Physiognomic Method” of Ernst Jünger – Robert Steuckers – Vouloir n°123/125 – 1995.

02 Thursday Nov 2017

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1995, Ernst Jünger, Robert Steuckers, The Magic Cancellation of Crisis and “Physiognomic Method” of Ernst Jünger, Vouloir

Jünger saw in the figure of the Arbeiter the central category around which the modern world, subjected to the planetary domination of technology, was called to organize itself, in “total mobilization” though and in labor. More precisely, a response adapted to the rise of nihilism in the modern era could be deployed through the technological mobilization of the world. With it, he salutes the advent of a new figure of man, modeled on the Nietzschean superman.

Among the adepts of Marxist ideology, very few have analyzed the thought of those they call “pre-fascist”, or outright “fascist”, including Ernst Jünger, who would evidently be one of the figureheads. Armin Steil is one of the rare Marxist ideologues who has analyzed the paths of Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger with pertinence, depth, and especially clarity in his work Die imaginäre Revolte : Untersuchungen zur faschistischen Ideologie und ihrer theoretischen Vorbereitung bei Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt und Ernst Jünger (The Imaginary Revolt: Inquiries on Fascist Ideology and its Preparation with Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger).

Focusing on Der Arbeiter, Steil notes that Jünger’s logic, starting from his “fascism” or more precisely his “revolutionary conservatism,” is not a theoretical logic, a constructed logic, based on the observation of causes and effects, but a metaphorical, poetic, imagistic logic and language. Facing a chaotic socio-economic and political reality, facing the crisis of German society and culture, Jünger wanted to master its perverse effects, its dysfunctions through aesthetics: so his “fascism,” his “revolutionary conservatism,” would essentially be aesthetic in nature, contrary to Marxism, which molds itself on material realities and resolves crises by operating on socio-economic matters themselves, without idealist recourse, without recourse to transcendence or to an aesthetic. Steil very justly concludes: “The book [Der Arbeiter] wants to teach [men] to have a sovereign attitude in the face of social attitudes.” Cold, dispassionate, microscopic observation thus forms the “magic key” that would permit an elite to master the crises, to put an end to chaos and the corrosive disparities that hinder the proper functioning of societies that are subject to them.

To be Hyper-Perceptive Eyes

The willing spirits that thus desire “to take the bull by the horns,” to act on the political terrain, to fight against crises and their effects, should not bind themselves to building a mechanical system of ready made ideas that perfectly match and fit together, but should be hyper-perceptive “eyes,” capable of describing the phenomena of everyday life: what Jünger calls the “physiognomic method.” It allows one to see the essence of a thing in its simple appearance, grasping the unity of essence and appearance, which is the “form” (Gestalt), invisible to all inattentive, distracted observers, not used to wielding the “physiognomic method” with the desired dexterity. All valuable, fruitful phenomena thus bear in themselves a “form,” more or less hidden, a potential force that it captures and puts in the service of a political or historic project. On the other hand, every phenomenon that only appears as “normal” is consequently a phenomenon without further “form”, without “force.” Such a phenomenon would be an early warning sign of decadence, a sign indicating a reshuffling of the cards, forms die, thus obeying a hidden logic, which prepares the advent of new forms, of unbroken forces.

The observation of the phenomena of everyday life, of the details of our daily settings, gives a glimpse of where the fall and death of forms manifest themselves: neon, garish lights, loud and artificial modern cities, are a patent indication of this fading of forces, masked by colors and intensities without real life. Modern traffic in the big cities burdens the pedestrian, the only physical being in this universe of concrete, asphalt, and metal, on the barely tolerated margins are the sidewalks, tracks reserved for the “least speedy.”

The “Arbeiter” uses the “Physiognomic Method”

So the “Arbeiter” is the figure that makes use of the “physiognomic method,” observes, deciphers, plunges into this universe of artifice to seek buried forces, in order to mobilize them for a purely imagined project, “Utopian” in the Marxian and Engelsian sense of the term, Steil explains. This recourse to the imaginary, as the Marxist Steil explains, proceeds from a logic of doubt, which aims to give meaning to that which does not have it, at any cost. It aims to convince us that behind the phenomena of decline, of de-vitalization, an “Order” and laws emerge, which are avatars of the one God refused by the advocates of historical materialism. This “Order”, this Gestalt, this “form”, integrates the infinite diversity of observations posed by people, but it is not, like in the case of historical materialism, a reflection of social relations, but rather a total vision, intuitive, going directly to the essence, that is to say the original form. It is not the objective and positive enumeration of causes and effects that allows one to decide and act, but, on the contrary, a piercing look what allows one to see and grasp the world as the theater where forms confront or cooperate with each other.

The “Arbeiter” is precisely the one who possesses such a “piercing look”, and who replaces the bourgeois, who reasons strictly in simple cause and effect. Steil notes the gap between this vision of the “Arbeiter” and the Marxist and empirical vision of the “Proletarian”: the figure forged by Jünger places himself high above socio-economic contingencies; while the proletarian conscious of his dereliction operates at the heart of these contingencies, without taking any distance, without detachment. The “high flight” of the Arbeiter, his aquiline perspective, gives him a mask: metallic or cosmetic, the gas mask of the combatant, the drivers helmet with the men, makeup with the women. Individual traits disappear behind these masks, as should individual human, all too human, imperfections disappear. The figures of the Arbeiter are certainly imaginary figures, excessively idealized, de-individualized and examined: they act like Prussian soldiers in the Frederician era of practice. Following their leaders, these lesser (but nevertheless necessary) avatars of the Arbeiter and the Prussian soldiers from the “war in lace” [Translator’s note: referring to the ornate uniforms worn by soldiers of the 17^th and 18^th century] certainly lose the imperfections of their individuality, but also abandon their doubts and disorientation: rules and Order are safety anchors offered by the new elite community of “Arbeiters,” virtuosi of the “physiognomic method.”

The Apparent Independence of the Proletarian

Steil protests that Order, as an imaginary projection, and the “physiognomic method” are instruments against the empirical and Marxist notion of “class struggle,” before clearly giving Jünger’s version: to leave the laborer, the worker, in the grasp of socio-economic contingencies is to leave him in a world entirely determined by the bourgeoisie, arising from the bourgeoisie and ultimately controlled by the bourgeoisie. By occupying a designated place in the bourgeois order, the worker only enjoys an apparent independence, he has no autonomy. Every attack launched against the bourgeois order from this apparent position is also only apparent, destined to be recollected and reinforce the establishment. “Theoretically, every move takes place in the context of an outdated social and human utopia; practically, each brings to dominion, time and again, the figure of the clever business man, whose art consists in bargaining and mediating,” writes Jünger. For Steil, this definition radicalizes the Sorelian vision of socialism, which desires to transform politics into pure means, without a limiting objective, inscribed in contingencies.

To Restore “Auratic” Work

A Marxist will see, in this idealism and in this purification of politics as pure means, an eliminations of politics, a will to put an end to the destructive violence of politics, which is only, in the Marxist view, “class struggle.” But technology operates to sweep away the dead forms in order to establish new forms following a planetary confrontation of extant forms, still endowed with more or less intact forces. So technology destroys residual or obsolete forms, it makes the permanent war of forms planetary and gigantic, but the “Arbeiter,” by coldly instrumentalizing the “physiognomic method,” gives a final form to technology (a desire that is never realized!). This final form will be artistic and the beauty emerging from it will have a magic and “sacral” function, like in so-called “primitive” societies. The restoration of these forms, writes Steil, will be achieved through the restoration of “auratic” work, eclipsed by technological standardization. The Aura, the impalpable expression of form, of the essence of represented phenomenon, restores the sacred dimension, proclaims the return of the cult of beauty, by qualitative replacement of the dead religiosity from the bourgeois era.

“Heroic realism,” the foundation of the new socio-political Order, will be carried by a dominant caste simultaneously exercising three functions: that of retainer of knowledge, that of new warrior forged during the battles of material in the Great War, and that of producer of a new aesthetic, a medium integrating social differences.

Armin Steil, in his Marxist critique of the “pre-fascism” of Sorel, Jünger and Schmitt, clearly lays out the essence of a work as capital as Der Arbeiter, where the mania for fabricating systems is refused in favor of great idealist affirmations, disengaged from the overly heavy contingencies of bourgeois society and proletarian misery. The Jüngerian path, in this view, appears as a disengagement from the yoke of the concrete, as a haughty retreat ultimately leading to a total but external domination of this concreteness. But in the piercing look, demanded by the physiognomic method, is there not, on the contrary, an instrument to penetrate concreteness, much more subtle than simple surface considerations of phenomena?

Reference: : Armin STEIL, Die imaginäre Revolte. Untersuchungen zur faschistischen Ideologie und ihrer theoretischen Vorbereitung bei Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt und Ernst Jünger, Verlag Arbeiterbewegung und Gesellschaftswissenschaft, Marburg, 1984

Neo-Nationalism and the “Neue Rechte” in West Germany from 1946 to 1988 – Robert Steuckers – Vouloir n°45/46, 1988.

27 Thursday Jul 2017

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1988, Neo-Nationalism and the “Neue Rechte” in West Germany from 1946 to 1988, Robert Steuckers, Vouloir, West Germany

◘ A critical reading of : Margret FEIT, Die “Neue Rechte” in der Bundesrepublik : Organisation – Ideologie – Strategie, Campus, Frankfurt a.M., 1987, 242 p.

To place the German “New Right” under the magnifying glass is not an easy thing; firstly because term was neither used nor claimed by the men and groups that journalists arbitrarily pigeonholed under this label. Actually, the term “Neue Rechte” is a creation of journalists, a lazy verbal convenience that designates attempts at ideological and practical innovation which occurred in the “nationalist” camp in West Germany. Recently, Margret Feit tried to investigate this rarefied world and released a book, a dense 244 pages abounding with useful information, but, alas, also incongruous commentary and erroneous simplifications.

The reason for these derailments is simple: M. Feit is a professional anti-fascist militant, one of these Don Quixotes who, forty years after the spectacular collapse of Hitler’s Reich, spends their time harassing increasingly antiquated phantoms. But the variant of her Don Quixotism diverges a bit from that of her Francophone colleagues in the vein of Article 31 (Paris) or Celsius (Brussels); who get completely befuddled, fabricating incredible plots where we see, for example, the Belgian Justice Minister Jean Gol, liberal and Israeli, plan the emergence of a gigantic paramilitary network with the former leader of the movement Jeune Europe, Jean Thiriart, and a representative of Zaire’s president, Mobutu Sese Seko in the backroom of a Brussels restaurant! M. Feit doesn’t take the joke that far.

Why Read This Book

If the “who’s who” of Article 31, Celsius, their Flemish buddy who rages in Morgen and the no less unerring Maurice Sarfatti, alias Serge Dumont, scribbler at Vif / L’Express, whose colleagues privately scoff at him, politely saying, “he’s still a big adolescent…”, all sink into charming fantasy, the incurable childishness from son to father of the Golden Sixties, M. Feit accomplishes a more serious task; she’s from the masochist variant, which (poorly) stalks its own phantoms but also collects authentic documents in order to denounce, what she believes to be, a veritable network, infested with wickedness and ready leap upon poor democracy like the wolf does to the tender little lamb in the fables. But Dame Feit is an archivist, she cites her sources and that’s why her book is noteworthy, even if it doesn’t contain an index and the outline of its chapters, which intends to be an analysis of the intellectual content of the “Neue Rechte”, is purely and simply taken from the useful and well written book published in 1975 from the pen of Günter Bartsch (1).

It’s worth more than a note if we rid ourselves of her fantasies, which return to every paragraph at a full gallop, in order to be constantly repelled by the terrible energy displayed by M. Feit’s quasi-neurotic desire to acquire a shred of scientific respectability. Let us therefore consider that this book has a certain value, which remains hidden behind an undergrowth of fantasies, and one must know how to read it with the dexterity of a professional pathfinder.

The Nationalist Camp Before the Advent of the “Neue Rechte”

In 1946, the DReP (Deutsche Rechts-Partei ; German Right Party) appeared, a fusion of the DKoP (Deutsche Konservative Partei) and the DAP (Deutsche Aufbau-Partei ; German Reconstruction Party), two groups formed in 1945. The DReP, lead by Fritz Dorls and Fritz Rößler, was too heterogeneous to endure; the conservative wing separated from the socialist wing which, with two party leaders, formed the SRP (Sozialistische Reichs-Partei) in 1949. In October 1952, the government banned this party, under the pressure of the allies, who were disturbed because it demonstrated a certain dynamism (1951: 11% of the vote in Basse-Saxe and 16 seats). The party was opposed to the pro-Western policy of Adenauer, fighting for a unified neutral Germany and seriously competing with the “left” thanks to its audacious social program. M. Feit doesn’t utter a word about this resolutely non-right-wing engagement … The ban forced its militants to change their symbols and modify their style of propaganda. The DRP (Deutsche Reichs-Partei) would take over from it, again registering a certain success in Basse-Saxe (8.1%, more than the liberals from the FDP). However economic recovery played in favor of the confessional parties and the SPD.

From Statist Nationalism to Plebiscitary Nationalism and “Basisdemokratisch”

Following the failure and ban of the SRP and the stagnation of the DRP, nationalist milieus turned upon themselves. The most audacious rejected all forms of pro-Occidentalism and chose neutralism or a German form of Gaullism. But the criticisms essentially focused on the relics of Bismarckian statism passed on by the “old nationalist” leaders of the SRP and DRP. The organizational nucleus of this hostile revision to centralizing statism was the DG (Deutsche Gemeinschaft ; German Community) of August Haußleiter, who came from the Bavarian CSU. This DG was nationalist, neutralist and anti-liberal, in the sense intended by the principal protagonists of the Weimar era “konservative Revolution.” This group aspired to legitimize the state on the basis of popular will, the generator of popular harmony and conviviality, not on the power of the party that won the elections. From the start, with such a program declared for the 2 German republics and Austria, the militants of the DG took the side of colonized peoples fighting to acquire independence (Nasserist Egypt, the Algerian FLN, etc) as these fights were aligned with the German will to gain self-determination.

In May 1965, while the remnants of the DRP reassembled with a new formation, the NPD (National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands), founded in November 1964, the DG, with the DFP (Deutsche Freiheits-Partei ; German Freedom Party) and the VDNV (Vereinigung Deutsche National-Versammlung ; Association for A German-National Rally), evolved into the AUD (Aktionsgemeinschaft Unabhängiger Deutsche ; Action Community of German Independents). A divide arose immediately: the old, statist nationalists found themselves in the NPD, while the left wing of the nationalists, with its principal intellectuals, found themselves in the AUS.

From the AUD to the Opening to Left Wing Movements and Ecologism

We note that the VDNV counted Wolf Schenke, founder of a “third way” concept and a partisan of neutrality, and the historian Wolfgang Venohr (cf. Orientations n°3), in its ranks. The AUD, faithful to its populist and organic will and its refusal of the old statist and quasi-fascist formulas, opened itself to the leftist APO (Außerparlamentarische Opposition ; Extra-parliamentary Opposition) and made a number of pacifist and neo-democratic (whose objective is the erection of a democracy beyond parties and traditional ideological family) arguments. The negotiations with the APO would fail (although many leaders of the APO and the SDS, its student organization, would find themselves in the neo-nationalist camp in the 1980s) and the militants of the AUD would establish ecological circles, in the name of an organic ideology, a very romantic and Germanic tradition: the protection of Life (Lebensschutz). Many of its militants would create, with the most left wing elements, the famous “Green Party” that we know today.

The Strasserists: “Third Way,” European Solidarism

The Strasserists, grouped around Otto Strasser, constituted a supplementary component of neo-nationalism after 1945. After the collapse of the Third Reich, Otto Strasser, then in Canadian exile, sent Rundbriefe für Deutschlands Erneuerung (Circulars for German Renewal) to his sympathizers in mass quantities. These circulars mentioned German unification on the basis of a “European third way,” centered around a solidarism that dismissed both Western liberal capitalism and Soviet style socialism. This solidarism would abolish class distinction, by forming a new leading elite. German unity, as seen by Strasser, implied armed neutralism, the future military nucleus of an independent Europe that should become an equal, if not superior, political power to the USA and USSR. This Europe would ally with the Third World, as Third World countries would furnish raw materials to the “European Federation” during its gestation.

In order to support and spread this program, the West German Strasserists founded the DSU (Deutsche Soziale Union) in 1954. Many national-revolutionary militants made their first commitments there, notably Henning Eichberg between 1956 and 1959. In 1961, he passed to the VDNV of Venohr and Schenke (cf. supra). This passage implied an abandonment of the neo-Strasserists’ statism and centralism and an adherence to populist democracy, which the AUD championed.

Worker’s Self Management and the Nationalism of Liberation

In this same movement, the “Vötokalisten” grouped around E. Kliese appeared. This political circle elaborated an new theory of worker’s self-management, derived from the principles of “German socialism” (cf. Orientations n°7 and Trasgressioni n°4), the only true revision of Marxism in this century. This theory of worker’s self-management formed the nucleus of the social doctrine of the UAP (Unabhängige Arbeiter Partei), another group created at the start of the 1960s which desired to be “the combat group for a libertarian and democratic socialism of the German nation.” Vötokalisten and the militants of UAP laid claim to Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of German social democracy and admirer of Bismarck’s work. Here the French reader will note how close social democracy is to the different variants of German neo-nationalism.

This German socialism, with Lassallian connotations, opposed the NPD, judged to be excessively right wing, as much as the communists and the SPD, judged to be traitors to the socialist ideal. An important personality appeared in this movement: Wolfgang Strauss, former militant from the East German Liberal Party (LDPD) and former convict in Vorkuta. Strauss was the advocate of a popular socialism and a nationalism of liberation, whose model was derived from the Ukrainian resistance, Russian solidarism, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, among others. In this view, nationalism is conceived as the emotional yeast that gives rise to a socialism close to the people, resolutely anti-imperialist, hostile to large scale entities, ethno-pluralist.

The Decline of the NPD

Despite a few initial successes in the Länder elections, the NPD never surpassed the score of 4.3% (in 1969) for the federal vote. The party was divided between idealists and opportunists, while the movement for democratic, neo-socialist and proto-ecological nationalism attracted more intellectuals and students. This sociological stratification effectively lead to the principal ideological innovations of German neo-nationalism on the eve of the agitations of 68. If one is interested in this constant germination rather than fixed structures, an analysis of the student organizations that were created on the margins of the NPD (and often in direct opposition to it) will be very useful.

Many initiatives happened in quick succession in the academic world. Among them, the BNS (Bund Nationaler Studenten ; National Student’s League) in 1956, on the impetus of Peter Dehoust, currently the director of the magazine Nation Europa (Coburg). Dehoust and his companions wanted to base the political combat of the nationalists on an engagement in the domain of culture from every angle, which, in the German political language, calls for the start of a new Kulturkampf. The disciplines favored by this “Kulturkampf” were of course history and biopolitics. The BNS assuredly constituted a well conceived organizational model, but its ideological message was, in many aspects, more conservative than the program and the intentions of the DG, which later became the AUD.

The organizations that took over in the 1960s, between the development of the NPD and the agitation of 67-68, were more faithful to revolutionary populism and quite hostile to the last strains of statism. In October 1964, Sven Thomas Frank, Bodo Blum and Fred Mohlau founded the IDJ (Initiative der Jugend ; Youth Initiative) in Berlin, which in 1968, would merge with a few other militant organizations to form the APM (Außerparlamentarische Mitarbeit ; Extra-Parliamentary Cooperation); this new initiative was clearly modeled on the leftist APO (Außerparlamentarische Opposition). The APM aimed to bring together, with the nationalists, those who didn’t renounce the idea of German reunification, and who hadn’t stopped considering Berlin to be the sole capital of all Germany.

Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl Slide Towards A Form of Nationalism

Günther Bartsch relevantly underlines, contrary to M. Feit, that, despite the initial divide caused by the national question, all the student groups, leftists as well as nationalists, slid towards a new, militant nationalism of protest. Bartsch recalls that the 2 leftist leaders in Berlin in 68, Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl, didn’t raise the stale equation: “nationalism = fascism” at all. On the contrary, quite early on, Rabehl insisted that nationalist motivations had played a first rank role in the French, Russian, Yugoslav, and Chinese Revolutions in many theoretical texts.

According to Rabehl, nationalism dialectically receives a progressive utility; it catalyzes the process of history and provokes the acceleration of class conflicts, from which socialist revolutions unfold. National ideology can give a unifying discourse to the different components of the working class. Rabehl continues, on the global scale, a German neo-nationalism, carried by the working class, can undermine the American-Soviet condominium, the embodiment of reaction and stagnation in the 20^th century, just like the “Metternich system,” arising from the Congress of Vienna, was at the start of the 19^th.

Dutschke, with all his charisma, supported this slide initiated by his comrade Rabehl. He even went further: he wrote that in the 20^th century Germany had experienced 3 forms of revolutionary worker’s socialism: the socialist SPD, the communist KPD, and … Hitler’s NSDAP (which he nevertheless criticized for certain compromises and diplomatic orientations). This (very) partial rehabilitation of the historic role of the NSDAP shows that Manichean anti-fascism, which rages today, no longer dominated the discourse among the serious leftist theorists of the 1960s. Margret Feit evidently doesn’t utter a word about this slide towards nationalism and dogmatically avoids looking into the theoretical value of this common argument of the “New Left” and the “New Right.” Bartsch notes that the militants of the left and the young nationalists had a good number of shared ideas, notably:

The refusal of the establishment
Criticism of consumer society
Hostility to media manipulations
The refusal of hyper-specialization
An anti-technocratic attitude with ecological connotations
Anti-capitalism and the will to form a new socialism
The myth of the revivifying youth
An anti-bourgeois attitude where Marxism and Nietzscheanism closely mingle
The will to question absolutely everything

Why didn’t nationalists and leftists march together against the system, if their positions were so close? Bartsch thinks it’s because nationalists still conveyed the images and references of the past in an overly stereotypical manner, while the left wielded “critical theory” with a remarkable dexterity and benefited from the resounding impact of Marcuse’s book, The One-Dimensional Man, [cf. The critical analysis of M. Haar, L’Homme unidimensionnel, Hatier/Profil d’une œuvre, 1975]. The gap between their “styles” was still insurmountable.

“Junges Forum” and “Junge Kritik” : a laboratory of ideas in Hamburg

The magazine Junges Forum, founded in 1964 in Hamburg, envisioned “laying the theoretical bases of a new thought” from the outset. The will that guided this intention, was motivated by the desire leave the strictly political ghetto, where it saw total stagnation regarding the recruitment of new militants, and suggest a new message to depoliticized citizens, capable of gaining their interest and rousing them from their torpor. Those who were named by M. Feit as the “head thinkers” of the “ Neue Rechte” published articles and manifestos in the columns of Junges Forum. Among them: Wolfgang Strauss, Lothar Penz, Hans Amhoff, Henning Eichberg and Fritz Joß. The themes addressed concerned: intellectual renewal, the search for a more satisfactory form of democracy, the elaboration of an organic socialism, German reunification, European unity, outlining an international order based on organic principles, ecology, regionalism, solidarism, etc.

In 1972, the editorial committee of the magazine published a 36 point manifesto, whose stated objective was to propose the basis for a popular and organic socialism, capable of constituting a coherent alternative to the dominant liberal and Marxist ideologies (the text, without notes, is reproduced in full in the appendix to Bartsch’s book). This manifesto exercised a relatively modest influence among us, notable in certain circles close to the Volksunie, among Flemish solidarists, regionalists, some neo-socialists and solidarists in Brussels, notably in the youth magazine Vecteurs (1981) which only published a single issue, where an adapted translation of the program of Junges Forum was reproduced, by Christian Lepetit, militant of the quasi-Maoist AIB (Anti-Imperialistische Bond ; Anti-Imperialist League). Robert Steuckers spread this message into the orbit of the magazine Pour une renaissance européenne, the organ of GRECE-Bruxelles, directed by Georges Hupin.

European Nationalism, The New Economic Order, Philosophy and Policy

In parallel with the magazine, a collection of paperback books appeared, under the title Junge Kritik. More than notebooks of Junges Forum, the treatises bound into the 3 volumes of Junge Kritik constituted the essential basis for a total revolution of nationalist thought at the dawn of the 1970s (the publication of the first 3 booklets extended from 1970 to 1973). Margret Feit, evidently not interested in the evolution of the ideas, prefers to fabricate a puzzle from real or imaginary connections to underpin her latest conspiracy theory.

Objectivity obliges us to directly refer to the texts. In Volume 1 (Nationalismus Heute; Nationalism Today), the young leaders Hartwig Singer (pseudonym of Henning Eichberg), Gert Waldmann and Michael Meinrad argued for a Europeanization of nationalism, and, consequently, for a liberation of our entire continent from American and Soviet tutelage. The revised nationalism would be progressive thenceforth because it would imply the liberation of our peoples from economic and political oppression, operating at two speeds (Western and Soviet), as the “dutschkistes” in Berlin had envisioned, not the conservation of dead structures (as the old liberal/ Marxist historiography suggests).

In the second volume of Junge Kritik, entitled Leistungsgemeinschaft (community of service), Meinrad, Joß and Bronner developed the economic program of neo-nationalism: solidarity of the working classes of all nations, ownership of means of production by all who worked, drastic limitation of capitalist concentrations of wealth. Hartwig Singer, for his part, published a Manifest Neue Rationalität (Manifesto for a new rationality), where the parallel with the efforts of Alain de Benoist at the same time is glaringly obvious. Singer and Benoist, in effect, wanted to launch an offensive against the essentialism of the dominant ideologies of the era, through the interpretation of Anglo-Saxon empiricism given by Français Louis Rougier. However, Singer also added the lessons of Marx, for whom all ideology conceals interests, and Max Weber, theorist of the process of rationalization in the West, to this empiricist and Rougierian message. Singer, writing in a German context totally more revolutionary than the Franco-Parisian context, struck by an overly literary anti-Marxism, dared to mobilize Marx, the hard realist, against the abstract and false Marx of the neo-moralists. Which allowed him to correct Rougier’s apolitical stance that lead to a socially respectable conservatism incapable of smashing the practical incoherence of the ambient liberalism of the West.

Neo-Nationalism is “Progressive”

In the third volume, which was entitled Europäischer Nationalismus ist Fortschritt (European Nationalism is Progress!), Meinrad, Waldmann, and Joß reiterated and completed their theses, while Singer, in his contribution (“Logischer Empirismus”), accentuated the conceptual modernism of Junge Kritik; the proximity of its approach to Alain de Benoist’s in Nouvelle École from 1972-1973 appeared even more evident in the text Manifest Neue Rationalität. Singer not only cited Nouvelle École abundantly but encouraged his comrades to read Monod, Russell, Rougier, and Heisenberg, 4 authors studied by Nouvelle École. Singer added that, from this four way reading, it is possible to deduce a new type of socialism (Monod and Russell), neo-nationalism (Heisenberg), and a new “European consciousness” (Rougier). In effect, Rougier had demonstrated that the European spirit was the only spirit open to progress, capable of innovation and adaptation. European rationality, according to Rougier, Benoist, and Singer, largely transcended contemplative oriental ideas that the hippy vogue had injected into public opinion, in the wake of 68 and the protest against the American war in Vietnam. Neo-nationalism henceforth appeared progressive, open to modern sciences, just like it appeared progressive in the eyes of Dutschke and Rabehl because its energy could break the oppression represented by a macro-political alienation: the alienation established at Yalta.

This German-French philosophical pairing didn’t endure: a few years later, Éléments, the organ of GRECE and Alain de Benoist, attacked the ecological movement, which the Germans felt directly committed to. In the scheme of national defense, the French supported a national nuclear arms program, an approach that the Germans didn’t care about. It was only in 1982, when A. de Benoist decided completely in favor of German neutralism, that the respective positions of the Germans and the French joined together once again.

The Flemish Contribution

In Flanders, where Junges Forum had its most subscribers outside of Germany, the solidarism and regionalism of the Hamburg magazine had roused much interest, so much that a good number of Flemish (meta)political writers contributed to the effort of Junges Forum. We cite, in no particular order: Jos Vinks (Le nationalisme flamand, 1977 ; Le pacifisme du mouvement flamand, 1981; La langue afrikaans, 1987), Roeland Raes (Le régionalisme en Europe, 1979), Willy Cobbaut (L’alternative solidariste, 1981), Frans de Hoon (Approche positive de l’anarchisme, 1982), Piet Tommissen (Le concept de “métapolitique” chez Alain de Benoist, 1984), Robert Steuckers (Henri De Man, 1986). On the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of Belgian independence, in 1980, Jos Vinks, Edwin Truyens, Johan van Herreweghe and Pieter Moerman explained the historical roots and situation of the linguistic quarrel in Belgium, from the Flemish point of view. The French contribution was limited to a text by Alain de Benoist defining the “Nouvelle Droite” and an essay by Jacques Marlaud on the Gramscian theory of meta-politics and its practical application by the “Nouvelle Droite” in 1984.

One imagines what would have been a fusion of “dutschkisme”, neo-Europeanism, and Gramscian praxis in Europe – that’s what a few Francophone high school students in Brussels, grouped around Christian Lepetit and Éric Delaan, hoped for, before academic scattering and military service separated them … The furtive misadventure of Lepetit and Delaan deserves attention as it shows that neo-socialist and regionalist neo-nationalism, prefigured by the Germans, had the ability to seduce boys who militated in the Maoist anti-imperialist movement, then in full collapse, beyond Germany’s borders.

The National-Revolutionary “Basis Groups”

In parallel with the Junges Forum enterprise, which continues today and will celebrate 24 years in 1988, the German neo-nationalist movement constituted “basis groups” (Basisgruppen). The term came from the vocabulary of leftist protest. The student organizations of the left spilled over from the universities and invaded the high schools and factories. The emergence of the “basis groups” signified that, henceforth, there existed a national-revolutionary presence in all layers of society. This diversification implied a decentralization and relative autonomy of local groups who should be ready to intervene very quickly at any moment in their city, their high school, their factory, without needing to refer to a central body.

Agitation in Bochum

The strategy of the “basis group” demonstrated itself in the most spectacular fashion at the University of the Ruhr in Bochum. A group of neo-nationalist activists militated effectively there and founded a journal, the Ruhr-Studenten-Anzeiger. Around this militant newspaper, a Republikanischer Studentenbund (RSB ; League of Republican Students) organized in 1968, which aimed to become a counterweight to the leftist SDS. Conflict would soon follow: the militants of the RSB criticized the SDS for organizing pointless strikes in order to consolidate their power over the student masses. In the course of a blockade organized by the leftists, the RSB took the university of Bochum by storm and proclaimed, in a populist-Marxist language, their hostility to the “exploiters” and “bonzes” of the SDS, having become stakeholders in the new establishment, where leftists had henceforth been accorded a place. The proclamations of the RSB, drafted by Singer, were stuffed with citations from Lenin, Marx, and Mao. Singer also referred to the rhetoric of the German workers in Berlin against Ulbricht’s communist functionaries, during the June 1953 uprising. The revolting RSB students insulted the East German functionaries of the SED, calling them marionettes of the Soviets, “monkeys in glasses,” “fat cats,” and “paper-pushing reactionaries.” This appropriation of the Marxist vocabulary and style of Berlin Uprising of 1953 irritated the leftists as, ipso facto, they had lost the monopoly on militant shock-language and foresaw a possible intrusion of national-revolutionaries into their own milieus, with the evident risk of poaching and counter-attraction.

The scuffles of 1968 and the nationalists’ adoption of a language drawn from Marxist ideology, though surprising the SDS, hardly had an echo beyond the Ruhr and it was confronted with a conspiracy of silence. The RSB and the Ruhr-Studenten-Anzeiger disappeared, which didn’t necessarily entail the total disappearance of left-wing nationalist agitation in Bochum. Thus, at the start of the 1970s, the nationalists participated in left wing demonstrations against property speculation and rent increases and they appropriated the slogan of Trotskyite groups: “The division of Germany is the division of the German proletariat!” In itself, the adventure of the RBS is significant for the further evolution of German neo-nationalism (which M. Feit erroneously calls “Neue Rechte”), it marked its definitive transition to the left, its exit from the quasi-rightist microcosm in which it was encrusted, due to the existence of the NPD. The historical weakness and sterility of “rightism” were proclaimed there and the emphasis was resolutely placed on socialism, critical reasoning, militant atheism, and futurism.

Munich and Bielefeld

After Bochum, other “basis groups” were established and each developed its own originality. Thus in Munich, Wolfgang Strauss formed a committee of young workers, high school students, and students, whose objective was to give them militant culture based on literature and political science. Strauss named his group Club Symonenko, from the name of a Ukrainian poet, Wasyl Symonenko, who died in 1963, after enduring Soviet repression. This committee demanded the liberation of the Ukrainian historian Valentin Moro, organized soirees with the exiled Polish writer Zygmunt Jablonski and held rallies on June 17^th, in memory of the Berlin Workers’ Uprising of 1953, distributed bilingual tracts in favor the IRA and founded a James Connolly “labor circle”, in honor of the militant union leader and Irish nationalist, who drew his arguments from Celtic mythology. Its German references were the poet Georg Büchner, founder of the Society for the Rights of Man in the 19^th century, and the Romantic poet Theodor Körner, who fought with the Lützow Free Corps (referenced in the music of Weber) in order to drive the Bonapartist oppressor and his pillaging troops out of Germany. Strauss succeeded in laying the basis for an original political culture on the eve of the 1970s, drawing from the corpus of popular and libertarian Slavic and Celtic nationalist thought, and reawakening the enthusiasm of young Germans for their nationalist, libertarian, anarchist, and radically anti-bourgeois poets at the start of the 19^th century. This corpus would be upheld as such in the columns of the magazine Wir Selbst, at the start of the 80s.

If in Sarre and North Rhine-Westphalia, the “basis groups” ended up choosing subservience to the NPD – which never stopped being problematic and causing grave ideological conflicts – in Bielefeld, the NJ-Stadtverband group (Urban Group of Nationalist Youth), close to the Berliners of the APM, managed to organize a modern agitation, with records of protest songs composed by Singer, and printed 4,500 copies of a paper, Wendepunkt! Never before seen! The editorial strategy was to gather a maximum of texts and dispatches, coming directly from the militants, and align them in the columns of the paper; other “basis groups” followed the same strategy, which allowed them to form a solid cadre, thanks to a good division of labor and a concentrated mass of militant dispatches. Militancy thus become lively and profitable.

Five Types of Action

Meinrad thought coordination between groups should extend to the national scale, and eliminate the right wing and outmoded NPD. Groups should number from 15 to 20 local activists self-financed from relatively high contributions, and regularly conduct 5 types of action, as Bartsch explains:

1 – Commemorations, notably of June 17^th 1953 and August 13^th 1961, the date the Berlin Wall was erected.

2 – Ecological actions: The group Junges Forum in Hamburg excelled there. It organized Bürgerinitiativen (Citizen’s Initiatives) against the construction of a highway in the middle of the city. In this perspective, nationalism meant protecting the natural integrity of the popular biotope.

3 – Social actions: They were essentially directed against property speculation, rent increases, and increases in the price of public transport. These actions also aimed to expose the irrationality of the functioning of the machinery of the state, which pretended to be a perfect democracy.

4 – Solidarity actions: they aimed to support Eastern European nationalist protests, as during the 1970s the West German neo-nationalist activists thought that German unity could only be realized through a major upheaval in Eastern Europe.

5 – Resistance actions: especially rowdy protests against the visit of East German personalities to the West in the framework of Wily Brandt’s Ostpolitik.

Towards Unity: The NRAO (Nationalrevolutionäre Aufbauorganisation)

The ensemble of “basis groups” didn’t form a party, structured in a rigid manner, but a dynamic movement that ceaselessly integrated new information and facts. Its non-rigidity and diversity set a contemporary tone and prevented all stagnation, any collapse into itself or into a fixed corpus of thought. Politics doesn’t only come into play during elections, or in furtive moments, but it constantly extends into and pervades daily life. Better: it is ingrained into the consciousness due to constant agitation, which means that each militant takes to heart the task of personally disciplining himself every day though reading newspapers and books, especially those written by his adversaries, which challenge his essential and untaught cultural references, in order to better understand the ideological divides that are articulated in the country.

In order to amplify the actions of these “basis groups” implanted in German cities and universities, many of figureheads of this neo-nationalist (or national-revolutionary) movement decided to create a “coordination organization” in March 1974, which took the name NRAO or Nationalrevolutionäre Aufbauorganisation (Organization for National-Revolutionary Development). Many meetings would be necessary to establish a common strategy. During the first, which took place on March 2^nd and 3^rd 1974 at Würzburg, three orators laid the bases for renewal: Alexander Epstein (alias Sven Thomas Frank), Lothar Penz and Hans Amhoff.

Epstein’s Speech

Epstein’s speech revealed, among other things, a willingness to fight “the enemies on the inside,” refusing ersatz Western European patriotism (integration into the European Community sold as a panacea by Adenauer’s friends), and to play the Chinese card against the two superpowers in international politics. In this manner, Epstein integrated the Maoist theory of “three worlds” into the national-revolutionary doctrinal corpus. Moreover, he proposed that the national-revolutionary movement was the only authentically national movement, because the East German SED and the West German DKP had sold out to the USSR, while the bourgeois parties, the SPD, FDP, and the CDU/ CSU were the guarantors of the American presence, despite the left wing of the SPD, favorable to a conciliatory Ostpolitik. In this scheme, the NPD placed itself to the right of the Bavarian CSU through its incurable rightism. Only the little Berlin Maoist microcosm, publisher of the prestigious magazine Befreiung, found favor with Epstein, who thus became the advocate of tacit and courteous cooperation between the Maoists and the national-revolutionaries.

Epstein, like Penz and Amhoff, thought that the strategy to follow couldn’t be clandestine or illegal in any way; as the national-revolutionaries were the only ones to claim the reunification of the country in a coherent fashion, their program conformed to the watchword inscribed in the preamble to the democratic constitution of West Germany, the watchword that asked the citizens to mobilize all their efforts to restore freedom and unity to Germany. Consequently, during this meeting in Würzburg, Penz articulated his “biohumanist” social vision and Amhoff explained his revised definition of modern national liberation, essentially anti-imperialist.

The Creation of “Sache des Volkes”

The geographic dispersion of groups, the different styles of work that each one had, and some ideological divergences ensured that no centralism could coordinate the diversity proper to the national-revolutionary movement. On August 31^st 1974, Epstein (S.T. Frank), Waldmann and Amhoff gathered a thousand national-revolutionary militants for new projects: to engage in ecological protest because the massacre of the countryside is the work of a rootless capitalism without a fatherland; outline a solidarist, rooted, popular socialism, in the style of the socialism adopted by the oppressed peoples of the third world; construct workers’ self-management in the Yugoslav style, etc. The movement Sache des Volkes (SdV; Cause of the People), which emerged from this meeting, intended to be a part of a diffuse global moment which fought against capitalism and Soviet state socialism everywhere in the world.

Hartwig would flesh out this double refusal, to which the French national-revolutionary militants also adhered (notably those in Lutte du Peuple and the Provençal militants of the CDPU), as well as the Italian and Belgians of Jeune Europe and its various incarnations. In the speech he sent to the congress of Sache de Volkes, which would be read to them, he reminded them it was elementary to refuse Moscow like Washington, but he also explained that it was necessary to take new facts into account: the principal enemy was no longer local, nationally based, capitalism but multinational capitalism which made US and Red Army its police throughout the world. Singer then designated a more precise, unique enemy: multinational capital, of which the classical imperialisms established at Yalta were only instruments. In this view, the policy of detente only aimed open markets in the East for Western multinational capitalism.

SdV expressed itself from 1978 to 1988 in the magazine Neue Zeit, which continues to be published in Berlin, while a series of pamphlets punctuated the militant life of the movement like Laser(Düsseldorf), Ideologie und Strategie, Rebell et Der Nationalrevolutionär in Vienna; the latter is still published under the direction of Helmut Müller.

Solidaristische Volksbewegung (SVB)

While the youngest element of the national-revolutionary movement modeled their offensive strategy on the left’s, the Hamburg militants, gathered around the magazine Junges Forum and the figure of Lothar Penz, opted for a “solidarism” more positive than the critical, offensive, and revolutionary discourse of SdV. From this practical disagreement, a parallel movement was born, the Solidaristische Volksbewegung (Solidarist Folk Movement), whose press organ would be SOL. In 1980, the SVB became the BDS (Bund Deutscher Solidaristen ; League of German Solidarists), after having directed the ecological GLU (Grüne Liste Umweltschutz ; Green List for the Protection of the Environment). In January 1981, SOL merged with Neue Zeit, which became ipso facto the collective organ of SdV and BDS.

“Wir Selbst” and the NRKA

At the start of the 80s the two groups lost their monopoly on the national-revolutionary press, due to the appearance of two new factors: the creation of the prestigious magazine Wir Selbst (Colbenz) by Siegfried Bublies, and the emergence of a new coordinating network, the NKRA (National-revolutionärer Koordinationsausschuß ; National Revolutionary Coordination Committee), supported by the magazine Aufbruch. Created in Düsseldorf in the wake of the magazine Laser, previously controlled by SdV, from the start, the NKRA wanted to break with Neue Zeit in order to address social questions in a more “progressive” perspective and further accentuate the national-revolutionary movement’s anti-capitalist critique.

This evolution arose from the fact that the new members of the Düsseldorf cell no longer came exclusively from the classical post-war neo-nationalist network, but often from Marxist-Leninism. These new elements intended to remain faithful to the “quintuple revolution” advocated by SdV in the manifesto in 1974. The quintuple revolution should operate on national, social, ecological, democratic, and cultural levels. The critique launched by the militants of the NKRA was the creation of the “second generation” of national-revolutionaries, whose recent militancy prevented them from falling back into the “errors” of right wing paleo-nationalism.

New phrases and concepts appeared, notably those of an autogestionary “democracy of councils” (Rätedemokratie) and a “disconnection” in the style of Albania and North Korea. There were also new figures who directed the circles and magazines of this “second generation”: H.J. Ackermann, S. Fadinger, P. Bahn, Armin Krebs (not to be confused with the Frenchman Pierre Krebs, who founded the magazine Elemente, the twin sister of GRECE’s magazine, Éléments).

At the end of 1979, the young nationalist activist Siegfried Bublies founded the magazine Wir Selbst (We Ourselves; the German translation of the Irish Gaelic Sinn Fein) where, very soon, the influence of Henning Eichberg (Hartwig Singer) would make itself felt. He would take up the pen again to demand, from the viewpoint of revolutionary restoration shared by the Greens, “basis democracy” (Basisdemokratie), cultural revolution, the establishment of a decentralized economic order, socialism with a human face (based on the theses of the Czech economist of “Prague Spring”, Ota Sik), an approach to life in accordance with ecology, and ethno-pluralism, the cornerstone of the anthropological vision of German neo-nationalism. Moreover, Bublies found a formulation that succinctly explained the meaning of its fight: Für nationale Identität und internationale Solidarität, that is to say for national identity and international solidarity. Thus Bublies sought to preserve the identities of all peoples and unite all those who fought for the preservation of their essence across the world, beyond ideological, racial, or religious divides.

“Wir Selbst” : A Forum Noted For German Political Debates

But political-philosophical essays remained in the minority in the magazine, which rapidly became a forum for all who sought to address the German question, never resolved, in a new manner. Wir Selbst thus opened its columns to personalities who never belonged to the nationalist movement in the strict sense: the urbanist and ecologist Konrad Buchwald, the historian Helmut Diwald, the former high ranking East German official Wolfgang Seiffert, the television producer Wolfgang Venohr (formerly of the VDNV), the journalist Sebastian Haffner (an anti-Hitler emigre to New York during the war who returned to nationalism in the 1980s), the artist-provocateur Joseph Beuys (formerly of the AUD), professor Schweißfurth (influential member of the SPD), etc. More recently, the generals Löser and Kießling (cf. Vouloir n°30) addressed the problems of territorial defense and the reorganization of the armed forces in a democratic and populist perspective in the columns of Wir Selbst.

Bublies’ magazine, whose style and presentation were generally high quality, thus succeeded in positioning itself as a forum where men from various perspectives could freely debate. The year 1987 saw a slackening in the pace of publication, due to the fact that the magazine sought to give itself a definitive tone, which would be neither the activist militancy of SdV or a pale copy of Marxist militancy. As for the NRKA, it first evolved in to the NRKB ( NR-Koordinationsbüro; National-Revolutionary Coordination Bureau), before calling itself more simply, Politische Offensive. It is certain that the militants of the “second generation” of national-revolutionaries were torn between, on one hand a fidelity to the heritage of SdV, and on the other, a will to burn all bridges with the anti-Marxist “rightism” of national-revolutionaries in 1968. It seems that the “national-Marxists,” behind Stefan Fadinger, wanted to separate the “second generation” from traditional national-revolutionaries, grouped behind Markus Bauer, editor of Aufbruch. Other figures like Peter Bahn, Karlheinz Pröhuber and Werner Olles, preferred to remain neutral in this internal debate and expressed themselves in Wir Selbst.

The NR Movement Between Surfers and Militants

Twenty years after 68, militancy experienced a low tide across Europe, Guy Hocquenghem said that “Mao suits” were being recycled in Paris; Lévy and Glücksmann quickly denied their former commitments, etc. In Germany, the Marxist left experienced a real crisis, just like the national-revolutionaries. All the hyper-politicized movements had to face increasing de-politicization and the hemorrhaging of militants. Protest, the will to construct alternatives gave way to sunbathing and surfing, barricades gave way to the seductions of “sea, sex, and sun,” at least until the day where the stock market crash could no longer be avoided or stopped.

The national-revolutionaries and the Sixty-Eighter Marxists exploited a universe of values that, whether we want it to or no, remains immortal, even if that seems like a disturbing assumption today. That’s why global perspectives, which restore the guiding principles of a movement, are useful: they prepare the way for the next offensive which will inevitably happen.

Some Conclusions

The books of Günter Bartsch and M. Feit allow us to grasp the evolution of German neo-nationalism since 1945. They also allow us to identify the broad philosophical options of this political movement; which we’ll cite, in no particular order: a theory of scientific and Eurocentric knowledge (at least in the initial phase which valued European rationality and science, supplemented by logical empiricism and the works of Rougier, Monod and Heisenberg; the French and Germans shared the same concerns at this moment), biohumanism oscillating between organic / vitalist anthropology and biological materialism, ethno-pluralism, national and rooted socialism (the Irish model of James Connolly and Slavic populism), national liberation, and the idea of a European space.

A Heterogeneity that Margret Feit Doesn’t Want To Notice

The label “Neue Rechte” gives the impression that the German movements qualified as such by M. Feit are the twin brothers of the French “Nouvelle Droite.” Yet the serious researcher willnotice the heterogeneity of these two worlds very quickly, despite evident overlaps, overlaps one could also notice between Dutschke and Eichberg (alias Singer) or GRECE and the socialist CERES of Chevènement. The German pseudo-“Neue Rechte” appeared in a more militant situation, less metapolitical, and drew from different intellectual domains than those Benoist and his friends in France utilized. If we must find a direct and clear influence from GRECE in Germany, it’s found with Pierre Krebs, director of Elemente, with Armin Mohler who revealed the existence of the French “Nouvelle Droite” to the readership of Criticon, or in the scattered translations of French neo-rightist texts.

In the doctrinal scheme, the Germans were not very insistent about egalitarianism, the warhorse of the French “Nouvelle Droite”; only Lothar Penz, the theorist of national-revolutionary biohumanist solidarism, included a few thoughts on biological hierarchies in his vision of man and the city. Consequently, the impact of aesthetic, Hellenic, even Celtic paganism was quite reduced in Germany, thought many of the national-revolutionary activists were adherents of the “unitarism” of Sigrid Hunke, whose book The True Religion of Europe, was translated in France by éditions Le Labyrinthe in 1985, under Alain de Benoist’s auspices.

If Bartsch had objectively limited his investigation of the national-revolutionary movement and demonstrated his desire to avoid any obfuscation, M. Feit mixes types and includes organizations or magazine belonging to the classical nationalist right, like Mut, Bernhard Wintzek’s magazine, or the monthly Nation Europa of Peter Dehoust, in her analysis of the “Neue Rechte” (an improper term for the least). She presses this obfuscation even further by including the conservative Bavarian magazine Criticon of Caspar von Schrenk-Notzing, close to the Bavarian CSU in certain respects, in what she believes to be a conspiracy. Reading these various magazines reveals that the selected themes and philosophical choices made by each were different, despite intersections quite evidently due to literary, philosophical, or political current events. Every magazine possesses its originality and doesn’t want to lose it.

The Brief Venture of the ANR

The confusion between the national-revolutionary movement and the classical nationalist right maintained by M. Feit arises the partial observation of a phenomenon from 1972. In January of that year, dissidence arose within the Bavarian NPD, inspired by a certain Dr. Pöhlmann. He asked for a few meetings with Singer, while not endorsing his anti-Americanism at all. From this dissidence an activist grouping, the ANR (Aktion Neue Rechte ; Action for a New Right) emerged, which rallied youth discontent with the NPD, criticizing their party for being too politically and socially conservative. The venture would last until November 1973 when the ANR split into many groups:

1 – The national conservatives, who would form the AJR (Aktion Junge Rechte ; Action for a Young Right)

2 – The “Hitlermaniacs” (who came, in part, from wacky fans in brown and black uniforms, with leather and studs, who were sometimes heard chanting slogans, especially in Dixmunde and the shady restaurants of big cities, and who, in certain cases, proclaimed a ridiculous homosexuality where “Aryan” and juvenile bodies were erected as objects of veneration)

3 – Those who returned to the cradle, the NPD

4 – Those who evolved towards national-revolutionary ideology

The presence of a few compromising idiots in the ANR, perpetually drunk and quickly expelled, allowed the drawing room moralists to infer “Nazism” from a school of thought that ultimately conveyed an ideology of synthesis, exercising a real seduction on the free spirits of the militant left. The phrase “Neue Rechte” is thus erroneously applied to the national-revolutionary sphere. M. Feit’s tactic is crude: the part is taken for the whole. The fringe of the ANR that evolved towards revolutionary nationalism ended up giving its name to all contemporaneous nationalist movements, even left-wing ones. The objective of this obfuscation is evident: associate the brawlers in boots (who can attract media attention) with the modernist intellectuals, so they cannot influence the broad and free minds of the dutschkiste and para-dutschkiste left, or bind together the analyses of GRECE and CERES into a useful ideological bloc in France.

One evidently notices, in light of these facts, the tactical error committed by certain leaders of GRECE in accepting and claiming the “Nouvelle Droite” label that the provocateur journalists of the Parisian left bourgeoisie accorded them. The M. Feit’s diversion operation found itself reinforced: the pseudo-“Neue Rechte” is crudely obfuscated with the “Nouvelle Droite” although they are quite different movements.

Impacts in Flanders and Wallonie

In Flanders, Pol Van Caeneghem and Christian Dutoit’s attempt at synthesis, notably with the group Arbeid and the magazines Meervoud and De Wesp, unfortunately turned into sterile leftism, just like the brilliant syntheses of Mark Cels-Decorte and Freddy Seghers (close to Wir Selbst for a time) within the Volksunie and the VUJOs (Cf. volumes of propaganda entitled Integraal Federalisme — 1976 — and Integraal Federalisme 2 — 1980). While in Wallonie, Jeune Europe – whose leader Jean Thiriart had outlined an excellent project of alliances with the non-aligned states of the Third World, with China and Black American militants – remained the prisoner of rigid Latin political thought unsuited to inspire revivifying dynamism, its embryonic and dissident union USCE (Union des Syndicats Communautaires Européens), under the leadership of Jean Van den Broeck, Claude Lenoir and Pierre Verhas, opted for a regionalist organization of our continent and officially distanced itself from “everything right-wing.”

USCE firstly published Syndicats Européens and then L’Europe Combat, which would be published until 1978. This experience was the only serious national-revolutionary attempt in Wallonie after the failure of Jeune Europe, when Thiriart failed to spread his anti-Americanism to his right wing audience, which hastened to betray him. Today, a sympathetic synthesis is emerging on the left, close to the ecologist ideology, in the columns of the magazine Wallons-nous.

From “Jeune Europe” to Nothingness

An incarnation of Jeune Europe which evolved towards a useless philo-Sovietism, the PCN of the Charleroi native Luc Michel, unfortunately emerged from the most bizarre extreme-right and neo-nazi groupuscules, it didn’t manage to take off politically (and for good reason!) and its editorial enterprise, very instructive for specialists and historians (Cf. Vouloir n°32/34), stagnated because it didn’t address problems that directly interest a militant audience. The magazine Conscience Européenne, which recently devoted several issues to the economic war between the USA and Europe and the illusion of detente, suffered from dissension in 1984, which lead to the establishment of Volonté Européenne and Cercle Copernic, directed by Roland Pirard, a somewhat bizarre individual who frequently changes pseudonyms (Bertrand Thomé, Roland Van Hertendaele, Roland Brabant, etc.) and naively dreams of founding a neo-Teutonic “order of chivalry!” If Luc Michel performs useful documentary work and furnishes very interesting analyses, despite his cliched language, the dissident Pirard sinks into complete caricature, reinforced by appallingly neglected editorial standards and confoundingly mediocre analyses, where Hitermaniac outbreaks occasionally re-surge, crossbred with a neo-Stalinism and pro-Khomeinism so ponderous that Soviet cliches seem hyper-lyrical in comparison. So there’s no hope for the rebirth of the dynamism of Jeune Europe and its French heir, the CIPRE of Yannick Sauveur and Henri Castelferrus, in Brussels or Wallonie.

In Conclusion

In conclusion we can say that the German national-revolutionary movement constituted a synthesis that situated itself at the crux of leftism and nationalism and that it still harbors much potential for sincere militants, those who truly care about social life. Moreover, when one observes the synthesis realized by Cels-Decorte and Seghers within the Volksunieentre from 1975 et 1981, we see that a comparable synthesis is still possible in our countries, apart from any marginal position. We have to reflect on it.

Article published under the pseudonym “René Lauwers”, in: Vouloir n°45/46, 1988.

◘ Supplementary Bibliography:

Günter Bartsch, Revolution von rechts ? Ideologie und Organisation der Neuen Rechten, Herder-bücherei, Freiburg i.B., 1975.
Karl-Heinz Pröhuber, Die nationalirevolutionäre Bewegung in Westdeutschland, Verlag deutsch-europäischer Studien, Hamburg, 1980.

Source: http://robertsteuckers.blogspot.com/2014/12/neo-nationalisme-et-neue-rechte-en-rfa.html

Friedrich-Georg Jünger’s “The Perfection of Technology” – Robert Steuckers – March 30th, 2017

15 Saturday Jul 2017

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2017, Friedrich-Georg Jünger, Friedrich-Georg Jünger's “The Perfection of Technology”, Robert Steuckers, Technology

A denunciation of the mechanized titanism of Western thought, this work is the quarry from which all contemporary ecological thought draws in order to refine its critiques. Divided into two parts and one excursus, themselves divided into a multitude of small concise chapters, the work begins with an observation: Utopian literature no longer takes politics as its subject matter, but technology, which causes a disenchantment with the Utopian line of thought. Technology resolves none of man’s existential problems. It doesn’t increase leisure time; it doesn’t reduce work: it only replaces manual labor with “organized” labor. Moreover, it doesn’t create new wealth, on the contrary it condemns the condition of the worker to pauperism.

The deployment of technology was due to a general lack that reason sought to fill. But this lack didn’t disappear with the encroachment of technology: it only camouflaged it. The machine is a devourer, annihilating substance: its rationality is henceforth illusory. The economist believes, at first, that technology is the generator of wealth, then he realizes that its quantitative rationality is only an illusion, technology, in its infinite will to perfect itself, only follows its own logic, which is not economic. The modern world is henceforth characterized by a tacit conflict between the economist and the technician: the latter seeks to determine the processes of production despite profitability, a factor judged to be too subjective. Technicality, when it attains its highest degree, leads to a dysfunctional economy.

This opposition between technology and the economy will astonish more than one critic of contemporary uni-dimensionality, accustomed to putting economic and technological hypertrophies on the same level. But Friedrich-Georg Jünger saw economy as its etymology implicitly defined it, setting the standards of oikos, the housekeeping of man, well circumscribed in time and space. The establishment of oikos doesn’t proceed from an excessive mobilization of resources, similar to the economy of pillage and la razzia [Translator’s note: referring to slave raids conducted by the Barbary Pirates] (Raubbau), but a parsimonious enrichment of the place one occupies on earth.

The central idea of Friedrich-Georg Jünger regarding technology, states that it is an automatism dominated by its own logic. Once that logic starts forward, it escapes its creators. It multiplies itself in an exponential manner: machines demand the creation of other machines, until achieving complete automation, both mechanical and dynamic, at an extremely regimented pace, thus in a fatal pace. This fatal pace penetrates into the organic tissue of the human being and submits man to its deadly logic. Henceforth man no longer possesses his own pace, internal and biological, but feverishly seeks to adapt to the inorganic / fatal pace of the machine. Life inexorably comes to be submitted to the grand automation that technology produces, which ultimately regulates life entirely.

This generalized automatism is the “perfection of technology,” to which Friedrich-Georg Jünger, an organicist thinker, contrasts maturation (die Reife), which only natural beings can attain, without violence or coercion. The major characteristic of gigantic technological organization, dominant in the contemporary era, is the exclusive domination exercised by technology’s own determinations and causal deductions. The state, as a political body, can acquire, by means of technology, more power. But that is, for him, a sort of pact with the devil as the principles of technology then imply the extirpation of organic substance and its replacement by technological automation.

Whoever says total automation means total organization, in the sense of management. Labor, in the era of the exponential multiplication of automation, is organized to the point that it detaches itself from the ergonomic immediacy provided by hand and tool. This detachment leads to excessive specialization, normalization, standardization. To this Friedrich-Georg Jünger adds the concept of Stückelung (splitting, cutting, “division into pieces”) where “fragments” are no longer parts (pars, partes, Teile) of a whole but pieces (Stücke) reduced to serving a function in a device.

Friedrich-Georg Jünger joins Marx to denounce the alienation of these processes but distinguishes himself from Marx when he considers the process to be fatal so long as one remains chained/ connected (gekettet /angeschloßen) to the technological-industrial apparatus. The worker (Arbeiter) is a worker precisely because he is connected volens nolens [Translator’s note: Latin, willingly or unwillingly] to this apparatus. The condition of the worker doesn’t depend on the modesty of his wages but on this connection, independent of the amount of salary. The depersonalized connection causes the loss of the personal quality. The worker is he who has lost the internal bond that ties him to his work, the relation that makes interchangeability impossible, between him and another worker or between his purpose and another purpose. So alienation is not primarily economic, as Marx thought, but technical.

The general progression of automation devalues all labor directly derived from the interior character of the worker and triggers the process of natural destruction, the process of “devouring” (Verzehr) substance (the resources offered by Mother Nature, the generous donor). Because of this alienation by the technical order, the worker is hurled into a world of exploitation without the least protection. In order to benefit from a semblance of protection, he must create organizations, notably unions, but those remain connected to the technological-industrial apparatus.

The protective organization doesn’t emancipate, it enchains. The worker defends himself against alienation and “division into pieces” but paradoxically accepts the system of total automation. Marx, Engels, and the first socialists only saw political and economic alienation, and not technological alienation. Among them, no one took machines seriously. The dialectic of Marx, from this fact, became a sterile mechanicism, in the service of mechanized socialism. Socialism retained the same logic as total automation under the capitalist aegis. Even worse, its triumph would not put an end to automated alienation but would cause this movement to accelerate, by simplifying it and increasing it.

The creation of organizations generalizes total mobilization, which makes all things mobile and all places like workshops or laboratories buzz with incessant agitation. Any social sphere that tries to escape this total mobilization counteracts the movement and consequently endures repression: thus concentration camps open, mass deportations and collective massacres begin. It’s the rule of the unrestricted manager, a sinister figure appearing under a thousand masks.

Technology doesn’t produce harmony, the machine is not a goddess that dispenses blessings. On the contrary, it sterilizes the giving natural substrates, it organizes pillage to the ends of the Wilderness. The machine is a devourer, it must be unceasingly fed and, because it consumes more than it gives, it exhausts the riches of the Earth. Enormous elementary natural forces are hijacked by the gigantic technological machinery and its imprisoned retinues, which often leads to explosive catastrophes and demands constant surveillance, another facet of total mobilization.

The masses embroil themselves, voluntarily, in this total automation, annihilating isolated resistances, individual consciences, in the same stroke. The masses allow themselves to be carried by the hectic movement of automation, so that in the case of failure or a momentary halt in the linear movement towards automation, they experience a feeling of emptiness that seems insufferable to them.

Henceforth war is also totally mechanized. The destructive potential are amplified to extremes. But the shine of uniforms, the mobilizing worth of symbols, the glory, fades. We expect nothing but endurance and tenacious courage from soldiers.

The absolute mobility initiated by total automation turns against everything that retains endurance and stability, notably property (Eigentum). Friedrich-Georg Jünger, by posing this assertion, defines property in an original manner: the existence of machines rests on an exclusively temporal conception; the existence of property rests on a conception of space. Property implies limits, demarcation, hedges, walls and fences, enclosures. Technological collectivism wants to make these limits disappear.

Property creates a limited, circumscribed field of action, enclosed in a determined, precise, space. In order to progress vectorially, automation must break down the locks of property, the obstacle to the establishment of its omnipresent communication and connection networks. A humanity deprived of any form of property cannot escape total connection.

Socialism, by denying property, by refusing what remains in the world of “enclosed” zones, exactly facilitates absolute connection. Thus the possessor of machines is not an owner; the mechanized capitalist undermines the order of property, characterized by endurance and stability, to the benefit of an all-dissolving dynamism. Personal independence is only possible if there is no connection between events and the technical apparatus’ way of thinking and organization.

Between his critical and acerbic reflections on automation and the excessive technicality of modern times. Friedrich-Georg Jünger challenges the great philosophers of the European tradition. Descartes initiated a dualism that established an insurmountable separation between the body and the mind and eliminates the systema influxus physici that both relied on, in order replace it with punctual divine intervention that made God a watchmaker. The res extensa [Translator’s note: corporeal substance] is a dead thing: it its explained as an arrangement of mechanisms in which man, the instrument of the watchmaker God, can intervene at any moment with impunity. The res cogitans [Translator’s note: the mental substance] is then established as the absolute master of the mechanical processes ruling the universe. Man can become like God: a watchmaker who can manipulate everything to his will, without fear or respect. Cartesianism gave the signal for the exorbitant technical exploitation of the planet.

Source: http://www.in-limine.eu/2017/03/la-perfection-de-la-technique-de-friedrich-georg-junger-par-robert-steuckers.html

The Itinerary of a German Geopolitician: Karl Haushofer – Robert Steuckers – June 2012

21 Friday Apr 2017

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2012, Geopolitics, Karl Haushofer, Robert Steuckers, The Itinerary of a German Geopolitician: Karl Haushofer

Preface: The following text is a brief excerpt from the first of two thick volumes that Prof. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen devoted to Karl Haushofer. The labor to accomplish this in order to re-explore the works of Karl Haushofer from every angle, including his correspondence, is still immense. May this modest contribution serve as the basis for the student who wants to embark upon a reading of Haushofer’s works, in a neo-Eurasianist perspective, and especially to analyze all his articles published in his “Zeitschrift für Geopolitik”.

Haushofer was born in 1869 into a well established family in Bavarian territory. The archives remind us that the name has appeared since 1352, designating a peasant family originating in the locality of Haushofen. The maternal ancestors came from Frisian country in the North of Germany. Orphaned by his mother very early in his life, the young Haushofer would be raised by his maternal grandparents in the Chiemsee region of Bavaria. Grandfather Fraas was a professor of veterinary medicine in Munich. Mentioning his happy childhood much later, Haushofer took care to remember that class differences were non-existent in Bavaria: children from every background played together, so class arrogance was non-existent: his liveliness and proverbial gentility were the fruits of this baroque conviviality: his initiatives would bear the mark of this character trait. Haushofer was destined for a military career very early on, which he embarked upon in 1887 in the 1^st Field Artillery Regiment of the Bavarian Royal Army.

On a mission to Japan

On August 8^th 1896, he married Martha Mayer-Doss, a very cultivated young lady of Sephardic origin on her father’s side and native Bavarian aristocracy on her mother’s side. Her logical spirit would be the necessary counterweight to the fantasy of her husband, to the bubbling effervescence of his spirit and especially his writing. She would give him two sons: Albrecht (1903-1945), would would become involved in the anti-Nazi resistance, and Heinz (1906-?), who would become an agronomist. The great turning point in Karl Haushofer’s life, the true start of his career as a geopolitician, began with his trip to East Asia, more specifically Japan (from the end of 1908 to the summer of 1910), where he would serve as a military attache and then instructor of the Imperial Japanese Army. The voyage of the Haushofer couple to the Empire of the Rising Sun started in Genoa and passed through Port Said, Ceylon, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In the course of this maritime trek, he entered India, saw the Himalaya mountain range from afar, and met Lord Kitchener, whose “defensive creativity” in matters of military policy he admired. During a diner, at the start of 1909, Lord Kitchener declared “that any confrontation between Germany and Great Britain would cost both powers their positions in the Pacific Ocean to the benefit of Japan and the United States.” Haushofer would never cease to reflect upon these words of Lord Kitchener. In fact, before the First World War, Germany had inherited the domination of Micronesia from Spain, which it had already needed to defend against American schemes, even though the United States were the masters of the principal strategic islands in this immense oceanic space: the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, and Guam. From his trip to Japan, Haushofer became, before all, a geopolitician of the Pacific space: he unabashedly accepted the translatio imperii in Micronesia, when Germany had to cede these isles to Japan at Versailles; for Haushofer it was logical: Germany is “a power external to the Pacific space” while Japan, for him, was a regional power, which gave it a right to dominate the islands south of its metropolitan archipelago. But any sovereign presence in the Pacific space gives it mastery of the world: so Haushofer was not an exclusively Eurasian or continental geopolitical thinker, or an erudite exponent of German nationalist geopolitics, he was equally the one who would elaborate, in the course of years in the columns of his magazine “Zeitschrift für Geopolitik”, a thalassocracy centered on the Pacific Ocean. His most attentive readers would not be his German compatriots or other Europeans but Soviets from the “Pressgeo” agency of Alexander Rados, who would collaborate with a certain Arthur Koestler and who would proceed the famous Soviet spy Richard Sorge, who was equally an attentive reader of “Zeitschrift für Geopolitik” (ZfG). In his journal, Haushofer recalls the relations that he had with Soviet personalities like Chicherin and Radek-Sobelsohn. The intermediary between Haushofer and Radek was Ritter von Niedermayer, who had launched expeditions in Persia and Afghanistan. One day Niedermayer reported to Haushofer that Radek read his book “Geopolitik der Pazifischen Ozeans”, which he wanted to translate. The wily Radek couldn’t simply translate the work of a Bavarian general and had a “better” idea in the Soviet context of the era: fabricate a matching plagiary with Marxist phraseology entitled “Tychookeanskaja Probljema”. All the theses of Haushofer were reiterated there, clothed in Marxist trimming. Another intermediary between Radek and Haushofer: Mylius Dostoevsky, grandson of the author of “The Brothers Karamazov,” who brought the German geopolitician issues of the Soviet magazine on international politics “Nowy Vostok”, Soviet information on China and Japan, and the writings of the Indonesian Revolutionary Tan Malaka on the self-determination movement in the archipelago, under Dutch domination at the time.

The journey to the Far East also made him discover the importance of Manchuria for Japan, which sought to conquer it in order to give itself arable land on the Asian coastline facing the Japanese archipelago (the purchase of arable lands, notably in Africa, by powers like China or South Korea is still a problem today). The Sino-Japanese wars, since 1895, aimed to control land for the expansion of the Japanese people, cornered on their mountainous archipelago with insufficient agricultural space. In the 30s, they would aim for the majority of the Chinese coastline in order to protect the maritime routes conveying oil to Japanese refineries, a vital commodity for the rapidly developing Japanese industry.

The beginning of a university career

Karl and Martha Haushofer’s return to Germany was made via the Trans-Siberian railway, a journey that would make Haushofer understand the continental dimension in the era of the railroad, which had reduced the separation between Europe and the Pacific Ocean. From Kyoto to Munich, the voyage would take exactly one month. The result of this voyage was his first book, “ Dai Nihon – Grossjapan” (“Japan and the Japanese”). The success of the book was immediate. Martha Haushofer then contacted Professor August von Drygalski (University of Munich) so that her husband could take courses in geography and finish a doctoral thesis on Japan. From this moment on, Haushofer was both an artillery officer and professor at the University. In 1913, thanks to his wife Martha’s formidable work ethic, who assisted all his projects with an impressive effectiveness, his thesis was ready. The specialized press picked up his work on the Empire of the Rising Sun. His notoriety was established. But critical voices weren’t lacking: his feverishness and enthusiasm, his tendency to accept any dispatch coming from Japan with meticulous verification of the content, his explicit rejection of “plutocratic powers” (England, the United States) lead to a few unexpected results and would harm his reputation until our day, where it is still not rare to read that he was a “magician” and an “irrational geographer.”

The outbreak of the First World War put a (provisional) end to his studies on Japan. Haushofer’s interests focused on “defensive geography” (“Wehrgeographie”) and “Wehrkunde” (“the science of defense”). That was also the time where Haushofer discovered the work of the Swedish geographer and conservative Germanophile Rudolf Kjellen, author of a capital pioneering work in political sciences: “The State as Living Form” (“Der Staat als Lebensform”). Kjellen forged the concept of “geopolitics” in this work. Haushofer reprised it in turn and thus became a geopolitician in the proper sense of the term starting from 1916. He also supplemented his knowledge by reading the works of the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (to whom he owed his anthropological learning); it was also at this time where he read the works of the English historians Gibbon (“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”) and Macaulay, exponent of the “Whig” (non-conservative) vision of English history, who had come from Quaker and Presbyterian families. The events of the First World War caused Haushofer to note that the German people had not received – despite the excellence of its university system, its 19^th century scholars, and the wealth of works produced in the line of organic German thought – a true geopolitical and “wehrgeographisch” education, unlike the British, whose colleges and universities had even given the elites “the sense of Empire.”

Reflections during the First World War

It was only at the end of the conflict that the fortunes of war would pass to the camp of the Entente. At the start of 1918, despite the declaration of war on the German Reich by Woodrow Wilson’s United States, Haushofer was still more or less optimistic and briefly sketched what would be an ideal peace for him: “Courland, Riga, and Lithuania should retain strong links with Germany, Poland should hold equivalent ones with Austria; then, we must consolidate and enlarge Bulgaria; in the west, in my opinion, we must keep the status quo while protecting the Flemish, but without German compensation for Belgium, and pure and simple evacuation of our colonies and Turkey. In such a context, peace will bring security on our eastern flank and the minimum to which we are entitled; we must absolutely not speak of Alsace-Lorraine”. American intervention would make him write in his journal: “Rather die as European than rot as American.”

Haushofer wanted to free the “three great peoples of the future,” namely the Germans, the Russians, and the Japanese, from the strangulation that the Anglo-Saxon powers had prepared for them. The energies of the “Russian bear” should be channeled towards the South, towards India, without spilling over into the German space in the West or the Japanese space in the East. The “imperialism of the dollar” was, for Haushofer, the “principal external enemy” since the day after Versailles. Faced with the new order that the Bolshevik power had constituted in Moscow, Haushofer was ambivalent: he rejected the Bolshevik style and practices but he conceded that they had liberated Russia (and intended to liberate all peoples in the future) from the “slavery of banks and capital.”

In 1919, during the trouble that rocked Munich and lead to the emergence of a Soviet Republic in Bavaria, Haushofer was part of the “Einwohnerwehrverbände” (defense units constituted by the inhabitants of the city), local militias destined to maintain order against the imitators of the “Councilist” troika and against the looters that benefited from the disorder. They grouped up to 30,000 armed men in the Bavarian capital (and up to 360,000 men in Bavaria as a whole). These units were ultimately dissolved in 1922.

The results of the Treaty of Versailles

The end of the war and the troubles in Bavaria brought Haushofer back to the University, with a new thesis on the geographic expansion of Japan between 1854 and 1919. A professor’s chair was allocated to him in 1919/1920 where the following courses were given to eleven students: East Asia, India, the comparative geography of Germany and Japan, “Wehrgeographie”, geopolitics, borders, anthropogeography, Germans from abroad, urbanism, international politics, the relations between geography, geopolitics, and military sciences. The objective of these efforts was certainly to form a new political and diplomatic elite capable of enacting a revision of the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. For Wilson, “nationality” was the principle that should rule the future Europe after the hostilities. No border of the states arising from the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire corresponded to this principle dreamed up by the president of the United States. In each of these states, as Haushofer and other exponents of German geopolitics would note, various minorities lived in addition to Germanic minorities (10 million people in total!), to whom they refused to allow any contact with Germany, as they did with the Austrian enclaves, deprived of Czech industry, Hungarian and Croatian meat and agricultural produce, and any maritime outlet to connect them to the Weimar Republic, which was the wish of the socialists of the era especially (they were to first, notably under the encouragement of their leader Viktor Adler, to ask for Anschluss). Germany had lost its Alsatian glassworks and its province of Posen, rich in wheat, thereby more or less giving Poland autarky in the alimentary scheme, as it did not possess good soils for grains. The Rhineland was demilitarized and no border of the Reich was “intact”, to use the terminology forged in the 17^th century by Richelieu and Vauban with Haushofer. In such conditions, Germany could no longer be a “subject of history.”

To become a “subject of history” again

In order to become “a subject of history” again, Germany needed to regain the sympathies lost in the course of the First World War. Haushofer managed to export this concept of “geopolitics”, of Kjellénian origin, not only to Italy and Spain, where institutes of geopolitics were created (for Italy, Haushofer cites the following names in his journal: Ricciardi, Gentile, Tucci, Gabetti, Roletto and Massi) but also to China, Japan, and India. Geopolitics, in the style of Haushofer and Kjellen, equally expanded through the dissemination and translation of a quantity of magazines across the entire world. The second initiative that would he take, in 1925, would be the creation of a “Deutsche Akademie” whose goal was firstly to address the Germanophone elites of Europe (Austria, Switzerland, the German minorities, Flanders, Scandinavia, according to Haushofer’s journal). This Academy would number 100 members. The idea came from the Bavarian legate to Paris, Baron von Ritter, who had, already in 1923, recommended the creation of a German institution similar to the Institut de France or even to the Académie française, in order to bring about good and fruitful contacts abroad in a perspective of constructive appeasement. Although established and financed by private organs, the “Deutsche Akademie” would not know the success that its seductive program deserved. The “Goethe-Institute”, which represent Germany on the cultural level today, would be its indirect heirs, since their foundation in 1932.

The objective of the institutes of geopolitics, the Deutsche Akademie and “Goethe-Institute” was thus to generate a sort of permanent “self-education” within the German people regarding geographic facts and the problems of international politics. This “self-education” or “Selbsterziehung” rests upon an imperative of openness to the world, exactly like Karl and Martha Haushofer were open to Indian, Asian, Pacific, and Siberian realities between 1908 and 1910, during their military mission to Japan. Haushofer explained this approach in a memorandum composed in his villa of Hartschimmelhof in August 1945. The First World War, he wrote, had erupted because the 70 nations involved did not possess the intellectual tools to understand the actions and maneuvers of the others; then, the dominant ideologies before 1914 didn’t perceive the “sacrality of the Earth” (“das Sakrale der Erde”). Factual geographic and historical knowledge, coupled to this telluric intuition – somewhat romantic and mystic in the manner of the “telluric thinker and painter” Carl Gustav Carus, in the 19^th century, and his heir Ludwig Klages, who drew attention to the mysteries of the Earth in his speech to the youth movements during their rally in 1913 – could have contributed to a general understanding between peoples: intuition of Gaia’s resources, reinforced by an adequate political “tekhnê,” would have generated a general wisdom, shared among all the peoples of the Earth. Geopolitics, in Haushofer’s perspective, a few weeks after the capitulation of Germany, could have constituted the means to avoid any additional bloodshed and useless conflagration (cf. Jacobsen, tome I, pp. 258-259).

A revolutionary geopolitics in the 1920s

Despite this memorandum from August 1945, which laments the disappearance of all German geopolitics as Haushofer and his team had imagined it, and underlines the “pacifist” dimension, not in the usual meaning of the term but according to the Latin adage “Si vis pacem, para bellum” and the traditional injunction that makes knowing the enemy a sacred duty (“fas”), Haushofer was also and above all – what we remember him for today – the rebel student of Sir Halford John Mackinder, the student who reversed the intentions of the master by retaining the content of his lessons; for Mackinder, from his famous speech of 1904 on the day after the inauguration of the last segment of the Trans-Siberian railway, the dynamic of history rests upon an atavistic and recurrent opposition between continental powers and maritime powers (thalassocracies). The littoral powers of the great Eurasian and African continent were sometimes allied with one or the other. In the 1920s, where his geopolitics was shaped and influenced by the revolutionary milieus (those circles frequented by Ernst and Friedrich-Georg Jünger as well as the original figure Friedrich Hielscher, not forgetting the communists who gravitated around Radek and Rados), Haushofer enumerated the active continental powers, who articulated an original and independent diplomacy against the French or Anglo-Saxon western world: the Soviet Union, Turkey (after the accords signed between Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the new Soviet power in Moscow), Persia (after Reza Khan’s seizure of power), Afghanistan, the Indian subcontinent (whose independence the Germans believed was imminent at the time), and China. He didn’t include Germany (neutralized and removed from the club of “the subjects of history”) or Japan, a thalassocratic power which had just vanquished the Russian fleet at Tsushima and was entitled to maintain the third largest fleet in the world (double that of France!) in the waters of the Pacific after the accords with Washington in 1922. In order to contain the powers of the Earth, Haushofer noted by close reading of Mackinder, the Anglo-Saxon maritime powers had created a “ring” of bases and support points like Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Suez, the British bases in the Persian Gulf, India, Singapore, Hong Kong as well as New Zealand and Australia, a cordon of more isolated islands and islets (Tokelau, Suvarov, Cook, Pitcairn, Henderson, …) that extended as far as the coastlines of the southern cone of South America. French Indochina, Dutch East Indies, and various Portuguese support points and posts were included, for better or worse, in this “ring” plan, commanded from London. The Philippines, occupied by the United States since the Spanish-American War and the Filipino-American War from 1898 to 1911, were its Northern frontier. Japan refused to be a part of this plan which allowed for the control of oil supply routes leading to the Japanese archipelago. The Empire of the Rising Sun sought to be a double power: 1) continental with Manchuria and much later with its conquests in China and its tacit satellization of Inner Mongolia and 2) maritime by controlling Formosa, the Korean peninsula, and Micronesia, formerly Spanish and then German. Japanese history, after Tsushima, was marked by the will to affirm this double hegemony, continental and maritime, the ground army and the navy argued over budgets and priorities.

A continental defensive bloc

Haushofer desired, at this time, the “continental bloc”, Soviet-Turk-Persian-Afghan-Chinese, from which he desired strategic unity, continually pressing on the “ring” in order to break it. This strategic unity is a “pressure / defense alliance”, a “Druck-Abwehr-Verband”, a de facto alliance that defends itself (“Abwehr”) against the pressure (“Druck”) exerted on it by the bases and support points of the thalassocracies, against all deployment attempts by the continental powers. From this perspective, Haushofer denounced colonialism and racism, as these “isms” blocked the way of the peoples towards emancipation and self-determination. In the collective work “Welt in Gärung” (“The World in Turmoil”), Haushofer spoke of “rigid guardians of the status quo” (“starre Hüter des gewesenen Standes”) who are obstacles (“Hemmungen”) to any true peace; they provoke upheavals and destabilizing collapses, “Umstürze”, instead of favoring radical and fruitful changes, “Umbrüche”. This idea links him with Carl Schmitt, when the latter keenly and vehemently criticized the treaties imposed by Washington across the entire world, in the wake of Wilsonian ideology, and the new dispositions, apparently subservient and pacifist, imposed at Versailles and then at Geneva in the framework of the League of Nations. Carl Schmitt criticized, among others, and very severely, the American actions aiming for the ultimate destruction of the classical law of nations, the “ius publicum europaeum” (which disappeared between 1890 and 1918), by aiming to remove the right to make (limited) war from states, according to the juridical theories of Frank B. Kellogg at the end of the 1920s. There is much work to do on the parallelism between Carl Schmitt and the geopolitical schools of his time.

Despite the great amount of sympathy that Japan had enjoyed with Haushofer since his journey to Kyoto, his geopolitics, in the 1920s, was totally in favor of China, whose fate, he said, was similar to that of Germany. It had to cede territories to its neighbors and its maritime front was neutralized by the permanent pressure exerted by all components of the “ring” composed of foreign support points (especially the American in the Philippines). Haushofer, in his reflections on the destiny of China, noted the physical heterogeneity of the former Chinese imperial space: the Gobi desert separates the vast zone populated by the “Han” from the zones inhabited by Turcophone peoples, under Soviet influence at the time. The mountains of Tibet were under British influence coming from India, this influence constituted the deepest advance of thalassocratic imperialism into the interior of Eurasian territories, permitting the expansion of control over the Tibetan “water tower” where the principal rivers of Asia originate (in the West, the Indus and Ganges, in the East, the Brahmaputra / Tsangpo, the Salween, the Irrawaddy, and the Mekong). Manchuria, disputed between Russia and Japan, was once mostly populated by Chinese and thus became Chinese sooner or later.

Sympathy for China but support for Japan

Haushofer, despite his sympathies for China, would support Japan after the start of the Sino-Japanese war (which began with the Mukden incident in September 1931). This new option doubtlessly came from the fact that China had voted for many motions against Germany in the League of Nations, while noting that China was incapable of ending its own miseries through its own forces. Japan henceforth appeared as a more reliable imperial power, capable of bringing a new order to the region, unstable since the opium wars and the Taiping rebellion. Haushofer had followed the “organic growth” of Japan but had not framed that in his theories, in light of its hybrid nature, both continental since its conquest of Manchuria and thalassocratic from its naval superiority in the region. Very connected to Mackinder’s idea of the “maritime ring,” Haushofer held that Japan remained a fluid element on the international chessboard. He looked at “racial” explanations, appealing to “anthropogeographic” criteria (Ratzel) in order to try to explain the imprecise geopolitical and geostrategic status of Japan: according to him, the Japanese people originated from the Pacific islands (notably from the Philippines and doubtlessly, beforehand, from the East Indies and Malaysia) and felt more at ease in warm and humid climates than on the dry soil of continental Manchuria, despite the necessity of having this continental zone available as “breathing space” for the Japanese, acquiring in the long term what Haushofer called an “Atemraum”, a breathing space for its demographic overflow.

East Asia was shaped, he added, by the dynamic of two “Pan-Ideen”, the Pan-Asiatic idea and the Pan-Pacific idea. The Pan-Asiatic idea concerned all the peoples of Asia, from Persia to Japan: it aimed for the strategic unity of all the Asian states solidly arrayed against the Western stranglehold. On the other hand, the Pan-Pacific idea aimed for the unity of all the states bordering the Pacific Ocean (China, Japan, Indochina, the Philippines, on one side; the United States, Mexico, Peru, and Chile on the other). We find a trace of this idea in recent or extant relations between the Asian states (especially Japan) and Latin-American states (commercial relations between Mexico and Japan, Fujimori in the Peruvian presidency, the geopolitical and thalassocratic Pan-Pacific theories of the Chilean General Pinochet, etc.). For Haushofer, the presence of these two idea-forces generated a precarious space (rich in potential turbulence, as we see today) on the intersecting plane where these ideas collided. Namely coastal China and the Japanese possessions facing the Chinese coast. Sooner or later, thought Haushofer, the United States would use the Pan-Pacific idea to contain any Soviet advance in the direction of the Pacific oceanic zone or contain a China that had adopted a continental and Pan-Asiatic policy. Haushofer demonstrated his sympathies regarding Pan-Asianism. For him, Pan-Asianism was “revolutionary,” bringing real, radical, and definite change to the situation, while Pan-Pacificism was “evolutionary,” and only brought minor changes, which were always capable of being revised. Japan, by controlling the Chinese coastline and a large fringe in the hinterland, then opposed any Western interference in the region, opting for the Pan-Asiatic route, which explains Haushofer’s support for its actions in Manchuria. It would then be a constituent element of the alliance that he recommended between Mitteleuropa, Eurasia (Soviet), and Japan / Manchuria orienting its energies towards the South.

All these thoughts indicate that Haushofer was principally a geopolitician specializing in the Asian and Pacific world. The reading of his works on these continental and maritime spaces remains highly interesting today, in light of the current frictions in the region and the American interference which, overall, relies upon an updated Pan-Pacificism in order to maintain its hegemony and contain a China becoming fully Pan-Asiatic in the measure where it has become part of the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization” (SCO), while orienting its maritime ambitions towards the South, striking against a Vietnam that has henceforth aligned itself with the United States, despite the atrocious war, raging for decades, that it waged there. Do not forget that Kissinger, in 1970-1972, had once gambled on a continental Maoist China (without large maritime ambitions) to contain the USSR. China then had a “Pan-Pacific” dimension rather than a “Pan-Asiatic” one (as the Italian general and geopolitician Guido Giannettini underlined). The strategies remain and can be used in multiple fashions, depending on circumstances and the current alliances.

Reflections on India

We have yet to consider, in the very limited framework of this article, Haushofer’s reflections on India. If India had become independent, it would automatically cease to be an essential element of the “ring” and become a master piece of the continental / Pan-Asiatic plan. So the Indian subcontinent was marked by a certain ambivalence: it was the keystone of British maritime power, resting on its total mastery of the Indian Ocean; rather than the vanguard of the continental powers on the meridional “rimland” of Eurasia and the “Middle Sea” which is the Indian Ocean precisely. This ambivalence is found today at the highest level: India is a stakeholder in the challenge launched by the “Shanghai Group” and in the UN (where it doesn’t vote for interventions demanded by the American hegemon) but it is wooed by this same hegemon to participate in the “containment” of China, in the name of its old conflict with Beijing for the Himalayan heights of Aksai Chin on the border of Kashmir and Jammu and for the question of dams on the Brahmaputra and control of Sikkim. Haushofer had already stated, far before the partition of India in 1947 following the departure of the British, that political opposition between the Muslims and Hindus would hinder India’s accession to independence and/or undermine its territorial unity and social coherence. Afterwards, India like Germany or the Europe of the “Kleinstaaterei”, was and still is a politically divided space. The unitary Indian independence movement was, he underlined, a model for Germany and Europe, in the measure where it justly wanted to overcome divisive differences in order to become a bloc fully capable of being a “subject of history” again.

So these are a few essential ideas conveyed by Haushofer’s “Zeitschrift für Geopolitik.” There are many others, sometimes fluctuating and contradictory, that must be exhumed, analyzed and commented upon to re-situate them in their context. The task will be long and heavy but inspiring. Haushofer’s German geopolitics is most interesting to analyze in the 1920s, where it makes its full development, before the advent of National-Socialism, just like the National-Revolutionary movement, more or less Russophile, which ceased its activities after 1933 or somehow pursued them clandestinely or in exile. The relations between Haushofer and Rudolf Hess also remain to be examined, which doesn’t cease to stir passions. Albrecht Haushofer, secretary of the “Deutsche Akademie” and faithful disciple of his parents, summarized the strategic errors of Germany in a few points:

(a) Overestimation of the impact of the Japanese strike to weaken the resistance of the thalassocracies in Asia.
(b) Overestimation of the crisis in France before the war.
(c) Underestimation of the time-frame in which a problem can be eliminated militarily.
(d) Overestimation of German military reserves.
(e) Ignorance of English psychology, that of the masses as well as the leaders.
(f) Disinterest in America.

Albrecht Haushofer, as we know, would be executed with a bullet in the back of the neck by the Gestapo in the Berlin-Moabit prison in 1945. His parents, arrested by the Americans, would be found hanging from a tree in back of the garden of their villa of Hartschimmelhof, on March 10^th 1946. Karl Haushofer was sick, depressed, and aged at 75 years.

So official Germany was never inspired by Haushofer, neither under the Weimar Republic, nor under the National-Socialist regime, nor under the Bundesrepublik. Nevertheless a good number of Haushofer’s collaborators pursued their geopolitical works after 1945. Their itineraries and the fluctuations should be capable of constituting an object of study in itself. From 1951 to 1956, the ZfG reappeared, exactly under the same form as in Haushofer’s time. It then changed its title to become the “Zeitschrift für deutsches Auslandswissen” (“German Magazine for Foreign Knowledge”), published under the auspices of an “Institut für Geosoziologie und Politik”. It appeared under the guidance of a disciple of Haushofer, Dr. Hugo Hassinger. In 1960, the geographer Adolf Grabowsky, who also took his first steps besides Haushofer, published a remarkable work, not shirking the term “geopolitics”, “Raum, Staat und Geschichte – Grundlegung der Geopolitik” (“Space, State, and History – The Foundation of Geopolitics”). He would alternatively prefer to speak of “Raumkraft” (“spatial force”). The works that desired to restart German geopolitics in a new European context are those by 1) Baron Heinrich Jordis von Lohausen, whose book ““Denken in Kontinenten” unfortunately remained confined to conservative, nationalist, or national-conservative circles, necessitated by “political correctness,” although Lohausen didn’t develop any provocative or incendiary discourse, and 2) by the political scientist Heinz Brill, “Geopolitik heute”, where the author, a professor at the military academy of the Bundeswehr, dared to depart from an official position within the German state for the first time, enunciating a geopolitical program inspired by the traditions bequeathed by Haushofer’s heirs, especially those who pursued a quest for geopolitical order after the tragic death of their professor and his spouse, like Fochler-Hauke or Pahl. Henceforth, everyone should labor to utilize every aspect of these works, which span nearly a century.

Robert Steuckers,
Forest-Flotzenberg, June 2012.

Bibliography

Hans EBELING, Geopolitik – Karl Haushofer und seine Raumwissenschaft 1919-1945, Akademie Verlag, 1994.
Karl HAUSHOFER, Grenzen in ihrer geographischen und politischen Bedeutung, Kurt Vowinckel Verlag, Berlin-Grunewald, 1927.
Karl HAUSHOFER u. andere, Raumüberwindende Mächte, B.G. Teubner, Leipzig/Berlin, 1934.
Karl HAUSHOFER, Weltpolitik von heute, Verlag Zeitgeschichte, Berlin, 1934.
Karl HAUSHOFER & Gustav FOCHLER-HAUKE, Welt in Gärung – Zeitberichte deutscher Geopolitiker, Verlag von Breitkopf u. Härtel, Leipzig, 1937.
Karl HAUSHOFER, Weltmeere und Weltmächte, Zeitgeschichte-Verlag, Berlin, 1937.
Karl HAUSHOFER, Le Japon et les Japonais, Payot, Paris, 1937 (préface et traduction de Georges Montandon).
Karl HAUSHOFER, De la géopolitique, FAYARD, Paris, 1986 (préface du Prof. Jean Klein; introduction du Prof. H.-A. Jacobsen).
Hans-Adolf JACOBSEN, Karl Haushofer, Leben und Werk, Band 1 & 2, Harald Boldt Verlag, Boppard am Rhein, 1979.
Rudolf KJELLEN, Die Grossmächte vor und nach dem Weltkriege, B. G. Teubner, Leipzig/Berlin, 1930.
Günter MASCHKE, “Frank B. Kellogg siegt am Golf – Völkerrechtgeschichtliche Rückblicke anlässlich des ersten Krieges des Pazifismus”, in Etappe, Nr. 7, Bonn, Oktober 1991.
Emil MAURER, Weltpolitik im Pazifik, Goldmann, Leipzig, 1942.
Armin MOHLER, “Karl Haushofer”, in Criticon, Nr. 56, Nov.-Dez. 1979.
Perry PIERIK, Karl Haushofer en het nationaal-socialisme – Tijd, werk en invloed, Aspekt, Soesterberg, 2006.
Robert STEUCKERS, “Les thèmes de la géopolitique et de l’espace russe dans la vie culturelle berlinoise de 1918 à 1945 – Karl Haushofer, Oskar von Niedermayer & Otto Hoetzsch”, in Nouvelles de Synergies européennes, n°57-58, Forest, août-octobre 2002 [recension de: Karl SCHLÖGEL, Berlin Ostbahnhof Europas – Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert, Siedler, Berlin, 1998].

Source: https://fr.novopress.info/115822/litineraire-dun-geopolitologue-allemand-karl-haushofer-par-robert-steuckers/

Institute for National Revolutionary Studies

Tag Archives: Robert Steuckers

The Magic Cancellation of Crisis and the “Physiognomic Method” of Ernst Jünger – Robert Steuckers – Vouloir n°123/125 – 1995.

Neo-Nationalism and the “Neue Rechte” in West Germany from 1946 to 1988 – Robert Steuckers – Vouloir n°45/46, 1988.

Friedrich-Georg Jünger’s “The Perfection of Technology” – Robert Steuckers – March 30th, 2017

The Itinerary of a German Geopolitician: Karl Haushofer – Robert Steuckers – June 2012

On a mission to Japan

The beginning of a university career

Reflections during the First World War

The results of the Treaty of Versailles

To become a “subject of history” again

A revolutionary geopolitics in the 1920s

A continental defensive bloc

Sympathy for China but support for Japan

Reflections on India

Bibliography