Germany’s Third Empire

Description

This is the English edition published by George Allen And Unwin, London, 1934; reprinted by Howard Fertig, New York, 1971.Original work was written in 1923, when Germany was in the throes of revolutionary demands from both the Left and the Right, Moeller van den Bruck envisioned a Germany that was radical, traditional and nationalistic. Angered by the harsh conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles which ended the First World War, and frustrated by the types of reforms being called for in the Weimar Republic, he examines all of the major political doctrines of his day and finds them wanting. Instead, he calls for a return to empire – not the empire of the Kaiser or the Holy Roman Empire, but an empire of all German-speaking peoples, with a social hierarchy based upon strong communal values and German traditions which nurture, rather than belittle, strong individuals. Although van den Bruck was not a supporter of the National Socialists, they ended up adopting his term Das dritte Reich for the state they intended to build. “The greatness of a man is: to be something more than his mere self. The greatness of a nation is: to be something greater than itself, to be able to communicate something of itself; to possess something that it can communicate.” Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1925) was primarily a man of letters who translated all of Dostoevsky’s works into German for the first time, as well as an advocate of German nationalism, authoring an eight-volume history of great figures from German history. He served as a soldier in the First World War, and later as a press officer in the Foreign Ministry. After the war, he became involved in nationalist politics, becoming a co-founder of the Juniklub (June Club), one of the centers of the so-called Conservative Revolution. Following a serious illness, he committed suicide.