Otto Strasser and National Socialism
PAUL G O T T F R I E D
ON MAY 30, 1930, a burly Bavarian, who
since 1926 had been spreading National Socialism
in Prussia, met in Berlin with the
South-German leader of his movement. The
topic which they discussed was the place
of revolutionary socialism in the Nazi party.
After a long and acerbic quarrel, the
two men parted. The Bavarian condemned
his fellow Nazi, for “selling out to the bourgeoisie”;
and the recipient of his reproach
attacked his accuser for insubordination?
The refractory Nazi, Otto Strasser, went
further, however, in asserting his independence
from the most powerful personality in
his group, Adolph Hitler. On July 4, 1930,
he organized his own wing of the National
Socialist party: Die Kampfgemeinschaft revolutwnaerer
Natwnalsozialisten. A hodgepodge
of displaced veterans, former
stormtroopers, and even noblemen, this
camarilla, which Strasser also called the
“Black Front,” proclaimed itself “a school
of officers and non-commissioned officers
of the German revolution.”2
Both Strasser and his movement, however,
soon discovered the brutality of their
opponent on the Right. Hitler, aided by his
bourgeois contacts, industrialists, and financiers,
had completed his rise to power by
1934; and on June 30, he purged the Nazi
party of all potential threats to his power.3
The Brown Shirts were one victim of this
bloodletting; former members of the Black
Front provided another. Otto Strasser, who
had fled from Germany in 1933, watched
from Prague this slaughter which claimed
his own brother. Soon after he wrote a
book, The German Saint Bartholomew’s
Night, which combined praise for the fallen
National Socialists with seething invectives
against Hitler. Strasser ended his narrative
by expressing the hope that the example of
his slain comrades might yet inspire a real
German revolution.4
This prayer never came to fruition. Hitler
remained in power until foreign nations
had battered his country; and his National
Socialist antagonist, Otto Strasser, suffered
the plight of another idealogue, Leon Trotsky.
Like the enemy of Stalin, he too lived
142 Spring 1969
out his days in protest against a triumphant
competitor who he firmly believed had
betrayed revolutionary ideals.6
Otto Strasser was born in Windsheim,
Bavaria, the son of a minor civil official,
on September 10, 1897.6 His two older
brothers, Gregor and Paul, both attended
a university; and Otto too was heading for
a professional vocation in law when the
first world war broke out. The young Bavarian
spent four years on the Western
Front; he was wounded several times and
finally received the rank of lieutenant. Like
many others of his generation Strasser was
deeply affected by the experience of the
war. Between 1914 and 1918 the German
nation had seemed more united than during
any period in its more recent past. Patriots
of all regions, classes, and faiths had
marched together to the front where they
had fought for the fatherland against its
enemies.’ Their valor notwithstanding,
Germany had lost the war; and Strasser
returned to Bavaria, still on crutches, in
the fall of 1918.
He returned to arms almost at once. On
November 8, 1918, a republican revolution
unseated the last king of Bavaria, Louis I11
of Wittelsbach; a few days later Kurt Eisner,
a young Jewish socialist, seized control
of the government in Munich. Strasser
joined a corps of volunteers headed by General
von Epp in crushing the radical regime.
And yet, in 1920, Strasser, after moving
to Berlin, vocally supported the socialist
government there when a rightist politician,
Wolfgang Kapp, tried with his followers
to topple it. These actions, according to
one biographer, show no inconsistency in
his conduct. Though a social democrat in
Bavaria, Strasser held no brief for the revoolutionary
rule of Eisner. In Prussia, where
the Left took over by orderly elective
means, he opposed any attempt by the military
to intervene?
This explanation of Strasser’s apparent
vacillation is only partially true. In spite
of his socialist posture, he had never accepted
the Marxist notion of class conflict.
There was no unbridgeable gulf that lay between
the bourgeoisie and the proletariat;
for both, in his view, belonged to the same
cultural and spiritual entity, the German
nation. Further, Strasser, unlike the Communists,
disdained a dictatorship of the
workers as much as a capitalist monopoly.
Both expressed the egotism of classes which
had ceased to concern themselves with the
common well-being. Neither Communists
nor capitalists understood what 1914 should
have made obvious to all: that, henceforth,
Germans had to put away their individual
ambitions and social resentments and serve
their people as a whole. The Marxist revolutionaries
in Munich could not satisfy the
yearning for national solidarity which lay
behind this vision. Nor did the social democratic
functionaries in Prussia bring any
lasting satisfaction to its author.
Thus Strasser soon became alienated
from both. In the early 1920s, the young
nationalist, while a law student in Berlin,
attended meetings of the “June Club”:
coterie of German patriots who were critical
of both parliamentarianism and Marxism.
g Strasser also contributed to the club‘s
magazine, Gewissen, along with such outstanding
spokesmen as Moeller van den
Bruck, Eduard Staedtler, and Heinrich von
G1eichen.l’ It was then that Otto and his
brother Gregor became deeply involved in
the Nazi movement; and in October 1925,
they presented a conference of party officials
with their controversial “Bamberg
Program.” Designed to introduce “real
German socialism,” this plan called for the
nationalization of industries and for a more
equitable distribution of farm lands.‘l Essentially
it reaffirmed the socialist elements
of the “Twenty-Five Points,” framed by
Hitler and two early Nazis, Gottfried Feder
and Anton Drexler, in the fall of 1919.l2
Modern Age 143
Like Point Seventeen of this document, the
Bamberg Program demanded the confiscation
of all land belonging to the nobility
without compensation. For Hitler who was
bent on conciliating the Junker class and
who had voted against a similar proposal
in the Reichstag of 1925, the Twenty-Five
Points had become a source of embarrassment.
But the Fuehrer wished desperately
to retain the radicals in his movement, so
he grudgingly gave the Strassers their way.
For Hitler the Bamberg Program was a
distasteful concession, but for the Strasser
brothers this plan meant the beginning of
German socialism. The Kampfverlag, the
press which the two men ran for the party
in Berlin, announced in its pamphlets the
advent of a new social order. Naturally
there was no place here for either capitalists
or Bolsheviks; the Germany conjured
out of this dream of unity would integrate
all patriots into the life of the nation. In
December 1925, the Strassers offered the
following observation concerning Marxism
:
The communist class struggle is merely
the process whereby a deprived group
succeeds to the wealth of its oppressor
and becomes itself a privileged order.
No reconciliation takes place here; what
occurs is the substitution of one form of
mastery by another.ls
A similar separation of interests, notes
Gregor (on July 25, 1925), prevails in most
parliamentary states, for there parties serve
only as fronts for the social and economic
powers which control them.l” In such a
system one finds neither national unity nor
a sense of sacrifice that enables men to act
“out of like interest and like purpose.’’
There was an alternative, however, to
Marxism and Western parliamentarianism :
a socialism that was “identical with true nationalism
and equally opposed to a privileged
bourgeoisie and a privileged proletariat.”
15 Though the publications of the
Kampfverlag never defined this entity at
any length, in 1931 Otto Strasser completed
a work which did: The Structure of German
Socialism.
This study began with an elaborate and
fanciful anthropology. Nations like individuals,
observed Strasser echoing a view
posed by thinkers from Aristotle to Spengler,
were living bodies. Each one passed
through a cycle of youth, maturity, and
senescence, and each possessed its own
physical and cultural peculiarities.16 A
“people,” properly so called, was an “amalgam
of races” whose members shared both
biological kinship and the same historical
and geographical conditioning. At present,
Europe comprised about four or five such
groups who were held together by an overarching
spiritual and racial unity.” A people
was also a nation if, like the Germans
under the impact of the first world war,
they had achieved a consciousness of their
own identity. Neither nations nor peoples,
however, operated as entirely free and
spontaneous units; for both were subject
to what Strasser styled the “law of triune
polarity.”
According to this theory European history
oscillated between two poles: a liberal
and a conservative. Whereas the former
was inextricably enmeshed with the “ego
impulse,” the latter brought forth a sense
of cornmunity.ls Both egotism and communalism
became manifest in the same three
sets of relationships: in the material sphere,
in man’s connection with objects; in the social
realm, in one’s interaction with other
beings; and in metaphysical pursuits, in
one’s treatment of concepts. During a liberal
epoch (the present one beginning about
1500 with the extreme individualism of the
Renaissance) , economic life became divested
of moral restraints; society assumed
a chaotic and precarious character as institutions
which once brought a unity started
144 Spring 1969
to dissolve. Meanwhile, the human mind
constructed a materialistic world-view
which explained the religious skepticism
characteristic of European culture since the
seventeenth century.”
The ages in which the “we” or conservative
principle dominated favored “socialism,
nationalism, and popular idealism.”
For Germany the transition started in August
1914, when tthe convulsion of war
welded together its people as never before.
Strasser viewed the rise of Marxism in Europe
as an historical anomaly. For although
emphasizing socialism, which was
peculiar to conservative times, the Communists
rejected nationalism and embraced a
philosophy which was basically materialistic.*
O On the other hand, Strasser, though
suspicious of Marxist errors, had no call to
defend capitalism. Like the Communists he
believed that the capitalist economy was
historically pass6 and tottering beneath the
wages of its own sins. The mastery of Western
techniques would soon enable such formerly
unindustrialized countries as India,
China, and Brazil to compete against European
trade. Both Japan and Russia already
possessed sufficient technology for largescale
industrialization. Meanwhile American
trade made inroads all over the world.
And the boycott of Western commodities
by nationalists in India and elsewhere
ruined European markets even more.” Unfortunately
this change of events had not
elicited a growing concern among countries
for social alternatives, though never was
the necessity for creative economics greater
than at present. In Germany, industrialists
like the Thyssens and Krupps, argued
Strasser, were carving out a financial empire
despite the growth of poverty and unemployment
in most sectors of their socie-
The Structure of German Socialism
abounds with suggestions on how to adapt
the German economy to the nation’s needs.
ty.=
These range from the imposition of huge
tariffs to curtail the import of foreign cornmodities
to the investment of property in
the community and its assignment to
worthy individuals as fief^.^'^^ None of
these proposals, we might note, originated
with Strasser. They were modelled on a
previously constructed economic system,
autarky, which organized wealth and the
means of production around the principle
of national self-sufficiency. The German
philosopher, J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), in
his tract Der geschlosserze Handelstaat
(1799), first advocated the gradual withdrawal
of Germany from her commercial
relations with her neighbors as a means of
achieving economic independence and of
regenerating the national spirit. Certainly
by the time that Strasser aired such
thoughts, they had become common coin
among German rightistsz4
There was another proposal which Strasser
made long popular on the German
Right: the abolition of parliamentary government.
Political parties which appeared
to him as self-seeking cabals, had no future
in the new Germany. This would be ruled
by vocational councils without the interference
of party officials.25 Education and law
would likewise be cleansed of their liberal
taint in the order which Strasser conceived.
Schools would aim no longer at the
“mere transmission of facts.” This “depersonalized”
approach to learning would be
replaced by one which “cultivated cornradeship”
and “incorporated the young into
the fabric of the nation.”26 Further, the
resurrected fatherland would no longer
abide a single legal code like the one to
which all Germans were presently subject.
During the Middle Ages there was a superabundance
of laws which enveloped the
German Empire: each city and region had
its own code as did every class and occupation.
But during the late fifteenth century
the Holy Roman Emperors introduced
Modern Age 145
Roman imperial law as a means of bringing
their German subjects more completely under
their sway.27 The trend toward written
codification continued in modern times.
This Strasser attributed largely to liberal
jurists who mistakenly identified rigid and
uniform laws with legal equality. National
socialism, understanding the perils of this
pedantry, would revive Medieval concepts
of justice and transfer all legal suits to people’s
courts.28
Despite the centrality of these ideas in
Strasser’s thought, his confrontation with
Hitler greatly affected his attitudes. The
book, Germany Tomorrow, written in 194<0,
indicates a basic shift in his philosophical
outlook. This work must be seen in the context
of the German resistance to Hitler in
which Strasser played an active role even
in exile. Indeed the underlying assumption
of Germany Tomorrow is the reality of a
successful revolt against Nazism with the
Black Front at its head.2o Indulging his
passion for wishful thinking, Strasser also
imposed a second conceit upon his readers:
a new Germany led by his followers. The
Black Front, after giving the Nazis their
desserts, would make peace with all of Germany’s
neighbors. It would compensate the
Poles and Czechs for the loss of their German-
speaking regions by yielding them territories
conquered from Communist Russia.
5O The Black Front would also work for
a reestablished League of Nations which
would be given an army to ensure the
maintenance of international peace. Strasser,
in Germany Tomorrow, abandons the
principles of autarky. Instead of exalting
the self-sufficiency of peoples, he calls for
the removal of all European custom barriers
and the unfettered pursuit of free
trade.S1
Notwithstanding the differences between
Germany Tomorrow and The Structure of
German Socialism, there are lines of continuity
that lead from one to the other. The
war against the Junkers, a matter of grave
concern to the young Strasser, becomes in
his later tracts a full-scale crusade against
greed and injustice. It was the Prussian
mentality that he saw triumphant in the
“hysterical militarism” of the Hitlerian
epoch. In 1941, in the Prussian Eagle over
Germany, he advised the dismemberment
of the Prussian state and the political degradation
of its Junker masters.32 In Germany
Tomorrow Strasser also advocated
the restoration of German medieval areas
of government, Landschuften (Brandenberg,
Hesse, Saxony, Hanover, etc.), and
the return of political power to these territorial
units. The old demand for the expropriation
of landed estates likewise reappears
in Strasser’s later works; and almost
as a ritualistic carryover from the past, he
resumes his denunciation of the industrial
magnates.s3 One also catches a rasping
echo in Germuny Tomorrow of the anti-
Semitism which permeated the publications
of the Kampfverlag. Gone, however, are the
imputations of these earlier polemics that
the Jews had betrayed the fatherland to the
capitalists or Bolsheviks. Strasser did challenge
the right of Jews to equal citizenship,
but only on the grounds that they were not
yet thoroughly German or Christian. Unlike
the Nazis, however, he was willing to
give them the opportunity to assimilatethat
is, to convert to Chri~tianity.~~
Since the second world war the perils
of Statism have haunted Strasser’s thought
as completely as anti-Bolshevism and anti-
Prussianism before. In 1965, he produced
a study, Fascism, which unmasks. the adversary
on every page. The essence of Fascism,
we learn, is neither aberrant nationalism
nor a counter-revolutionary imitatioll
of Bolshevism. Both patriotism and counterrevolution
provide merely the veil of rhet.
oric behind which the state conspires to extend
its power. Strasser was obviously
grinding an axe here; but the extent of his
1% Spring 1969
prejudice becomes apparent only at the end
of his treatise. Then one discovers:
Whoever praises and wishes to strengthen
the state, he is a fascist; whoever
wants to give the state new tools and to
make its bureaucracy mightier, he is a
fascistFS
One is hardly astounded by this definition
in view of the argumentative tone of
the work from which it comes. Nor can one
resist a smile when Strasser proposes his
theory of “solidarism” as an alternative to
the modern state. Several times before we
have read his presentation of this idea.
Again we are offered a decentralized government
which is controlled by vocational
councils and which stresses social integration
rather than equality. This time, however?
allowances are made for free speech and
the unrestricted pursuit of culture.36 These
programs have confronted us so often before
that by now one might wonder about
the cast of mind behind them.
Armin Mohler, the secretary of Ernst
Juenger, in his study The Conservative
Revolution in Germany (1918-1932), distinguishes
two types of anti-liberals on the
modern political Right: the conservative
who performs a holding action against
change ; and the “neo-conservative” nationalist
who, like Strasser, assumes a vitalistic,
though pessimistic view of the world.”
The conservative, faced by the breakdown
of cultural and social cohesion, tries to
guard traditional life against an uncertain
future. For the neo-conservative both the
challenge and response are different. The
crust of custom has already been broken,
and men have despaired of the values and
symbols of
Ernst Juenger, in his novel Upon the
Marble Clitfs, describes the malaise of people
in ages of transition. Tossed between
exhausted truths and unborn redemption,
they grasp desperately at one of two hopes:
“refined nihilism” or “wild anarchy.” The
outcome of one is “desolation,” the promise
of the other a return to the “primeval for-
Civilization, for the neo-conservative,
has lost its staying power. Sickened
from within by mass culture and philistine
pretension, it must resist from without the
disintegrating current of Marxist revolution.
Juenger, Erich Remarque, and other
German writers of the twenties have traced
the emergence of these views among the intellectuals
of their era. Growing up in the
gilded age of William 11, young men underwent
the agonies of war only to return to
a society still divided between a smug
bourgeoisie and a sullen, but potentially
vicious, working class. In the face of such
misery, many Germans sought to transform
their country, to renew it spiritually while
avoiding the “refined nihilism” of the old
ruling stratum and the “wild anarchy” of
the radical Left. Mere preservation was,
however, insufficient for this purpose. The
neo-conservative, steeped in the prophecies
of Friedrich Nietzsche and of that eloquent
and pessimistic historian, Jacob Burckhardt,
considered civilization in extremis.“’
There was no turning back in an age
of democratic revolution. The masses would
never surrender the rights they had wrested
from the aristocracy in government or from
the educated classes as arbiters of culture.
The cheapening of spiritual and artistic
life which the neo-conservative saw all
around them and which like Nietzsche and
Burkhardt they identified with liberal and
democratic values, could not be halted by
a retreat into the past. History itself worked
against such an option. Not only did the
present structure of society bar the way
back, but the cataclysm of the War upset
whatever certainties either the conservatives
or liberals had cherished before.’*
But the war seemed a visitation upon a decadent
culture which also brought regener.
ation. It reeducated an atomized people to
Modern Age 147
communal values and served as a bridge
to what, for Strasser and others, were
sources of collective redemption : nationalism
and socialism.
The emphasis of the neo-conservative
upon community and integration did not,
however, leave him uncritical of the state.
To be sure, some administrative apparatus
would be required to implement social reforms,
but the neo-conservative wished to
distinguish between means and end. The
state was an institution which would assist
in the salvation of Germans, but only if it
conformed to two conditions. The government
had to reflect the values and impulses
of the nation. And it would be bound by
the needs of the German people who,
through their various councils would control
its functioning. The neo-conservative
despised a state which seemed manipulated
by bureaucrats or which divided its sovereignty
among political factions. Such governments
ceased to represent the collective
spirit ; they functioned as divisive forces
and reasserted the egotism of the few
against the unity of the folk.“
This excursus into the political philosophy
of neo-conservatism should illuminate
the seeming vagaries which run through
the writing of Strasser. His ideas pass
through a multitude of phases; and, no
doubt, a cynic, knowing that he is dealing
with a political personality, would ascribe
these alterations to crass opportunism. But
I decline to make such a judgment. Strasser’s
dogged resistance to Hitler indicates
that he is more than a devious politician.
No, the cause of his mutability as a thinker
lies elsewhere. At the risk of appearing paradoxical,
let me state that socialism and nationalism,
liberty and internationalism are
all of a piece in Strasser’s world-view. The
apparent changes in his thought involve
shifts of emphasis rather than anything
more concrete.
The point of departure for most of his
theoretical work is a crisis in European history
which totally reshaped the social life
of man. In The Structure of German Soc;alism,
this upheaval is associated with the
breakdown of the nation as a culturally integrated
whole; in the study Fascism, the
crucial event becomes the rise of the modem
state and its conversion into an instrument
of spiritual oppr e s~ion.I~n~ b oth accounts,
however, a similar development is
postulated. An ordered and unified society
gives way to a confused one; this process
is abetted by a government which breaks
up communal ties in order to enslave individuals.
Individualism is an illusion which
the modern state fosters in order to render
men helpless before it. And liberal slogans
also mask the chicanery of businessmen
and profiteers who are the most fervent advocates
of “free trade.” The rise of capitalism
is intimately bound up with the emergence
of the modern state; one drew upon
the other in overthrowing the political and
economic restraints which held Medieval
society together?’
But the rule of the capitalist and bureaucrat
would soon be ended; for a revolt
against both was already in course. We
have discussed the convergence of forces
which Strasser viewed as a threat to modern
liberal society. Of all the powers which
challenged this order, national socialism
seemed the one most fit to succeed it. The
radical Left, more specifically the Marxists,
provided, according to the neo-conservative,
only a spurious alternative to Western
capitalism; for implicit in the ideology
were liberal values writ large. Equality was
the principle with which the modem state
set man loose from his ordered, communal
relations; and it rcceived its reductio ad
absurdum under Marxism. This demanded
a government, explains Strasser, which, in
the name of revolutionary ideals, would reduce
all to the same condition of life. Even
the cultural differences among people
148 Spring 1969
would be effaced as communism would
abolish all national distinctions.
Strasser rejected communism, however,
not only as programmatically unsound, but
as historically untrue. Like liberalism it
rested on the assumption of human progress
in time. Every social and moral development
through which men passed, the Marxists
taught, constituted an advance over
whatever had preceded it. The neo-conservative
challenged this conviction and held
instead to a cyclical view of historyY5 SOciety
wavered inexorably between periods
of unity and those of dissolution. The liberal
capitalist phase through which the
West had just moved, exemplified the second
type of epoch; but the erosion of communal
solidarity which it had brought, was
bound to pass. Strasser foresaw a return to
the medieval way of life, or at least to principles
which he had abstracted from his examination
of the Middle Ages. Hierarchy,
religion, and an agrarian society, these are
the institutions which shaped the contours
of neo-conservative nationalism;16 But such
forces also harked back to a prenationalist
age. Indeed, nationalism, as Strasser defined
it throughout his writings, stood in
dialectical relationship to a whole range of
political and economic phenomena identified
with modern Europe, from the industrial
revolution to the secularization of society.
It was the nation which supplied a r ~
integral culture that allowed men to resist
the effect of these changes.
Nevertheless, nationalism, though an antidote
to cultural dissolution, was not an
end in itself. Thus Strasser, in Europe Tomorrow,
a biography of Thomas Masaryk,
father of the Czech republic, praised his
subject for reconciling two significant, but
often conflicting forces : nationalism and
humanitarianism.” He also rhapsodized
about a grand synthesis of the universal
and particular and foresaw an age in which
countries would come together to erect a
federation dedicated to “national liberty,
social justice, and European cooperation.”
People would learn the “futility of COercion,”
and the principles of national SOcialism
would regulate the intercourse of
states and the relationships within all countries.’*
The burden of our study has been to explore
an aspect of Nazi ideology abandoned
by its leaders even before Hitler’s accession
to power. This was neo-conservatism whose
outlook stressed both revolution and restoration.
Otto Strasser is one of this cause’s
most active exponents, and his writings reflect
its social vision. They also enable US
to challenge an assumption with which
scores of scholars have approached the German
Right. This is the belief that a nationalism,
both violent and bigoted, lay behind
the formation of modem German conservatism.‘
O The thought of Strasser, as it developed
both before and after the second
world war, suggests a more overriding
concern than the German state. It is a
general crisis in European culture to which
he directs the attention of his reader.
Whether one agrees with either his diagnosis
or cure is, for our purpose, beside the
point. Strasser and his like are significant
even if their views do not always seem
plausible. Because of them it is difficult to
explain anti-liberal attitudes in Germany
with reference to chauvinism and anti-
Westernism alone. At the core of this rejection
of liberalism lay occasionally more
positive elements: an anxiety about the individual’s
estrangement from society and
the desire to reabsorb him into a community.
The essential weakness of Strasser
concerns more his work as a politician than
as a thinker. The evocation of prejudice
and xenophobia, though not basic to his
philosophy, did become the weapons whereby
he fought his enemies in the twenties.
And the glorification of political violence
in his early tracts seem ludicrous as well as
Modern Age I 49
crude. However, the civilizational concerns
which underlay his career cast a better
light upon the whole. They also indicate the
need for a reappraisal of the appeal which
rightist movements have had in Germany
and elsewhere during our century.
‘For Strasser’s account of this confrontation
which, unhappily, is the only one available, sae
his Hitler and I, trans. G. D.Mossbach (Boston,
1940).
“lbid., pp. 120-26. Black, the color of the flag
carried by the Swabian peasants during their uprising
of 1525, became identified in the works of
the nationalist, Moeller van den Bruck (1876-
19251, with the awakening of the German people.
See especially Das dritte Reich (Hamburg, 1931).
‘Karl Paetel, a friend of Strasser’s and a rightist
revolutionary during the twenties and thirties
ascribes the defeat of the socialist and anti-Hiderian
elements among the Nazis to their ideological
hairsplitting. National Socialist critics of Hitler.
like the aristocratic publicist, Count Reventlow,
and Strasser’s own brother Gregor, refused to
leave the party with the organizer of the Black
Front; for whatever their differences with the
Fuehrer, they believed that they could achieve
more of their socialist program under his leadership
than by entrusting their cause to fragmented
sectarians. Cf. K. 0. Paetel, Versuchung oder
Chonce? (Goettingen, 1965), pp. 29-32,208-217.
‘Cf. Strasser’s Die deutsche Bartholomauesnacht
(Zurich, 1935), especially pp. 234-38; and his
pamphlet Sozialische Revolution oder faschistischer
Krieg? (Prague, 1935).
This analogy, which is not my own, comes from
the titIe of an article by Alfred Werner, “The
Trotsky of the Nazi Party” (Journal of Central
European Aflairs, No. XL, Jan.-Apr., 1951). Despite
its piquant title, however, Werner’s essay is
too violently biased against Strasser to be of
scholarly benefit.
There are only two substantial biographies of
the early Strasser, and both have come from the
pen of his British apologist, Douglas Reed; see
Nemesis (London, 1952) and Th.e Prisoner of
Ottawa (London, 1953).
‘The front as a school for militant nationalists
and “heroic nihilists,” is a subject lyrically treated
in the novels of Ernst Juenger (1895- ), the
guiding light of the “Front Generation.” This was
the name taken by veterans of the first world war
who, unhappy with the social inertia of Weimer democracy,
called for a “new German reality” in
politics and culture. For an excellent discussion
of this mood of revolt, one should see Klemens von
Klemperer. Germany’s New Conservatism (Princeton,
1957).
‘See Reed’s Nemesis, pp. 10-15.
“Cf. K. von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism,
pp. 133-37.
‘Olbid., also Fritz Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair
(Berkeley, 1961), pp. 185-245.
nFor a discussion of this program, see 0. E.
Schueddekopfs Linke Leute von Rechts (Stuttgart,
=For a’ copy of these points, see either Schueddekopfs
work or D. Reed’s Nemesis, p. 242.
=See the compilation of editorials from the
Kampfverlag in the book Kampf urn Deutschland
(Munich, 1931), pp. 164-66.
1960), pp. 193-97.
“Ibid., p. 62
ulbid., p. 63.
T h e section from The Structure of German Socialism
employed above appear in a translation by
Eden and Cedar Paul of Strasser’s chief works:
see Germany Tomorrow (London, 1940), p. 119.
”lbid,, pp. 120-22.
=lbid., p. 124
‘‘lbid., p. 125.
Ybid., p. 129.
nlbid., pp. 132-35; see also Paetel’s Versuchung
oder Chance? pp. 206-22, for the anti-colonial
and anti-capitalistic aspects of Strasser’s thought.
=lbid.; see also the introduction to Schueddekopfs
work.
“Germany Tomorrow, pp. 142-44.
Two excellent dissertations have appeared on
the significance of autarky for German economics.
See Nelson Edmondson, The Fichte Society (Harvard,
1964) and Herman Lebovics Social Conservatism
in Germany (Yale, 1964).
Gs Germany Tomorrow, pp, 183-208.
Ybid., pp. 211-12.
For an examination of an intricate subject in
the history of law which Strasser treats, alas too
one-sidedly, see Paul Vinogradoffs Essays in Legal
History (London, 1913).
11
“Germany Tomorrow, pp. 213-15.
I b i d . , pp. 234.
“Ibid., pp. 79-98.
’ “Ibid., pp. 106-110.
=Ibid., p. 57; see also L’Aigle prussien sur
l‘AZlemagne (New York, 1941), especially the introduction.
”Germany Tomorrow, pp. 58-70.
=lbid., pp. 110-115.
?Strasser, Der Faschismus (Munich, 1965), p. 106.
s61bid., pp. 69-72.
150 Spring 1969
"Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in
Deutschland (1918-1932) (Basel, 19491, pp. 147-
151.
"Ibid., pp. 203-07.
3s Ernst Juenger, Auf den Marmorklippen (Zurich,
19371, p. 103.
"'For an evaluation of the effects of Nietvche
and Burckhardt upon German nationalists and neoconservatives,
see the introductions to the books
by Klemperer and Stem and the conclusion to the
study by Mohler.
"The first world war, as Mohler points out,
was only the last of a series of tidal waves which
the neo-conservative saw overwhelming the West.
The Reformation and the French Revolution were
usually regarded as equally destructive events by
conservative revolutionaries.
YFor a study of this corporatist and anti-parliamentarian
strain in modern German thought see
R. H. Bowen, German Theories of the Corporative
State (New York, 1947).
"Der Faschismus, pp, 50-55.
''1bid; also Germany Tomorrow, pp. 125-130.
=Mohler rightly observes that the neo-conservative,
in denying any goal to the historical process,
condemns Christianty as well as liberalism; for
both philosophies ascribe a design to human events.
See Die konservative Revolution, p. 149.
"'Der Faschismus, pp. 72-74.
"0. Strasser, Europa von Morgen (Zurich, 1939).
*Ibid., p. 281.
"For a popularization of this idea, see Mans
p. 239.
Kohn's Mind of Germnny (New York, 1960).
Modern Age 151