Critics of Modernity: The Literature of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1890-1933 (review)

In his title, Martin Travers sets up a dramatic opposition between modernity and its critics, but in the book itself he does too little to explore the precise qualities of modernity. He fails to explore the ways in which anguish about the contemporary moment might itself be wholly modern, or the pertinence of conservative criticism to our own age. To its credit, the book raises these questions, and Travers argues for the "pressing" and "unique sense of emotional immediacy and relevance" of conservative revolutionaries (8). He presents an expert introduction to Ernst Jünger, Arnolt Bronnen, and Gottfried Benn, but does not answer the question of why we continue to be so attracted to and fascinated by the angry refusal and "militant judgements" (55) of these German thinkers who created romance out of their own postwar era three-quarters of a century ago. A broader discussion of modernity itself and the degree to which modernity is not simply self-reflective but also self-exculpatory would have moved the argument further along than the caricature of modernity as "that grim locus of urbanization, industrialization, mechanization" (xii). Indeed, as Travers shows, the post-World-War I generation of critics, led by figures such as Jünger and Ernst von Salomon, had a much more dynamic conception of history, were far less indebted to passive or obedient social and political relationships, and thought in much more mythic terms than allegedly "anti-modernist" Heimat writers Friedrich Lienhard and Hermann Löns did a generation earlier. Travers's close attention to style and tense in the written texts makes this impressively clear. The idea of the worker, the discipline of technology, and the site of the city were much more central to the worldview of Weimar conservatives; Travers says as much (106-07). Jünger himself noted that technology was not simply something subjects use; they had to become technological, the objects as much as the subjects of the process. The whole argument about modernity and antimodernity looks a little stale in that light. Moreover, the examination of modernity is incomplete without a discussion of the premises of radical thought. As Travers's own evidence shows, canonical modernists embraced apocalyptic change and insisted on mythic transformations (9). A much more engaged discussion of theory, of "crisis historiography" (195), and particularly of the self-reflective aspect of thinking about the present age would have been extremely welcome. While Travers applies Ernst Bloch's description of the "contemporaneity of the incontemporaneous"(8-9), the notion and its implications are not explored. To have done so would have invited readers to make more of Travers's claim that Jünger, Salomon, and Benn retain pertinence to this day. In any case, an account of our fascination with these fascists, who continue to appear in the pages of this journal, still needs to be written.

Travers is persuasive in his endeavor to reinsert the Conservative Revolutionaries into the context of fascist mobilization in the 1920s and 1930s. Jünger, Salomon, and the rest were sympathetic to the "national socialist" revolution, although Travers quite rightly does not find it necessary to cast his thinkers as Nazi dogmatists. It is also true that they distanced themselves from the Nazi regime after the fact. But he does not explain why intellectuals or indeed the general public were attracted to fascism in the postwar years. Moreover, Travers does not discuss how these writers conceptualized the act of writing or the mobilization of readers, as Ulrike Hass-Zumkehr did in her excellent analysis of the Heimatroman and Kriegsroman in the same period, 1890-1933. ¹ Unlike Hass-Zumkehr, Travers provides little in the way of historiographical discussion at all. Despite abbreviating some of his themes, however, Travers organizes the book well and analyzes his subject insightfully. He creates highly effective portraits of the writers...