Radical Conservative Thought in the Intellectual Constellation of the Early Federal Republic

In recent years, the history of West Germany after 1945 generally has been told as a success story. Even ardent destroyers of historical master narratives like Konrad Jarausch have chosen book titles like Die Umkehr—meaning “the change” or “reversal”—to describe this period of German history. Such authors have tended to describe the ongoing rise of a liberal civil society in West Germany out of the ashes of the Third Reich. Such optimistic accounts are found not only among historians but also among groups pursuing more directly political objectives in their use of history. In the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the case of West Germany was repeatedly cited as a model for how to overcome a ruthless dictatorship through a combination of military defeat, economic reconstruction, and political re-education (Herf, “Condi Rice”). One even heard calls for an Iraqi Adenauer—while the Iraqi Hitler had long since been identified. As we all know, nothing comparable to the current civil war in Iraq took place in Germany after 1945. The German guerrilla campaign that the SS launched in 1944 under the mythological name “Werewolf” remained a myth. To be sure, top-ranking Nazis took pains to stage their defeat as a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung, and young soldiers who had grown up in the Third Reich continued fighting fanatically for an imaginary final victory (Endsieg)¹—among them the later German Nobel Prize winner and author of The Tin Drum, Günther Grass, who recently confessed to having been a seventeen-year-old member of the Waffen SS. For the majority of Germans, however, survival, not suicide, had become the main priority—and the German population adapted quickly to the new situation. Nonetheless, it is worth asking exactly how the mental transformations that followed the German military defeat occurred and what these transformations meant in the long run for the intellectual life of the Federal Republic.

In order to understand Germany’s post-1945 transformation, it is necessary to examine the role played by radical conservative intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger. This is especially true with respect to shifts in our historical perspective that have occurred during the past few decades. For many years, mutually incompatible accounts of a “new beginning after 1945” on the one hand and of a “restoration after 1945” on the other hand tended to clash unproductively. More recently, historians have started to look at the 1950s as a more ambiguous period. This fresh perspective has led to interpretations of the 1950s as an age of “modernization under conservative auspices” (Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, Die doppelte Staats-gründung). Apparently, radical conservative intellectuals played an important role in the emergence of what might be called “the German way to modernity” after 1945, figuring both as subjects and as objects of this process (Schildt, Zwischen Abendland, Konservatismus, Moderne Zeiten, “Ende der Ideologien”; Laak, “Trotz und Nachurteil,” “Nach dem Sturm,” Gespräche; Lenk, Deutscher Konservativismus).

When one examines debates about Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jünger’s role in the Federal Republic after 1945, it becomes obvious that writing about these thinkers has rarely been a purely scholarly endeavor. On the contrary, political interests have always played a large role. The main motivating factor has been fear about the possibility of reactionary political developments in West Germany. Justifiably or not, some authors have worried about the nefarious influence notorious right-wing thinkers like Schmitt, Jünger, and Heidegger might exert on West German intellectual life (Grebing, Konservatismus). Such an approach is based on the assumptions that these thinkers’ radical conservative ideas could once again become dangerous and that the West German liberal and democratic order is fundamentally unstable. Other authors have sought to discredit German postwar conservatism as a whole by pointing to the allegedly intimate connections between mainstream conservatives and the lunatic fringe represented by Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jünger (Leggewie, Der Geist).

Our interest in Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jünger should not, however, be based on a desire to uncover the dirty little secrets of contemporary German conservatism (Hacke, Philosophie). Instead, we...