page_title: Conservative Revolution
section_title: New nationalism and morality
hierarchical_section_title: Conservative Revolution / Ideology / New nationalism and morality
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. ADN-ZB Spengler, Oswald Geschichtsphilosoph geb. 29.5.1880 Blankenburg/Harz gest. 8.5.1936 München
context_page_description: The Conservative Revolution, also known as the German neo-conservative movement or new nationalism, was a German national-conservative movement prominent during the Weimar Republic in the years between World War I and Nazi Germany.
  Conservative Revolutionaries were involved in a cultural counter-revolution and showed a wide range of diverging positions concerning the nature of the institutions Germany had to instate, labelled by historian Roger Woods the "conservative dilemma". Nonetheless, they were generally opposed to traditional Wilhelmine Christian conservatism, egalitarianism, liberalism and parliamentarian democracy as well as the cultural spirit of the bourgeoisie and modernity.
context_section_description: Conservative Revolutionaries argued that their nationalism was fundamentally different from the precedent forms of German nationalism or conservatism, contemning the reactionary outlook of traditional Wilhelmine conservatives and their failure to fully understand the emerging concepts of the modern world, such as technology, the city and the proletariat.
  Moeller van den Bruck defined the Conservative Revolution as the will to conserve a set of values seen as inseparable from a Volk ("people, ethnic group"). If these eternal values can hold on through the fluctuations of the ages, they are also able to survive in the world due to the same movements and changes in their history. Distant from the reactionary who, in Moeller van den Bruck's eyes, does not create (and from the pure revolutionary who does not nothing but destroying everything), the Conservative Revolutionary sought to give a form to phenomena in an eternal space, a shape that could guarantee their survival among the few things that cannot be lost:
  Conserving is not receiving to hand down, but rather innovating the forms, institutional or ideal, which agree to remain rooted in a solid world of values in the face of continuous historical setbacks. In the face of modernity as an era of insecurity, opposing the securities of the past is no longer enough; instead it is necessary to redesign new safety by adopting and taking on the same risky conditions with which it is defined.
  — Arthur Moeller van den Bruck
  Edgar Jung indeed dismissed the idea that true conservatives wanted to "stop the wheel of history". The chivalric way of life they were seeking to achieve was, according to Oswald Spengler, not governed by any moral code, but rather by "a noble, self-evident morality, based on that natural sense of tact which comes from good breeding". This morality was not the product of a conscious reflection, but rather "something innate which one senses and which has its own organic logic." If the values of morality were deemed to be instinctive and eternal, they were logically seen as embodied in rural life. The latter became challenged, Spengler believed, by the rise of the artificial world of the city, where theories and observations were needed to understand life itself, either coming from liberal democrats or scientific socialists. What Conservative Revolutionaries were aiming to achieve was the restoration, within the modern world, of what they saw as natural laws and values:
  We call Conservative Revolution the restoration of all those elementary laws and values, without which man loses his connection with Nature and with God and cannot establish a true order.
  — Edgar Jung, 1932
  Influenced by Nietzsche, most of them were opposed to the Christian ethics of solidarity and equality. Although many Conservative Revolutionaries described themselves as Protestant or Catholics, they saw Christian ethical premise as structurally indenturing the strong into mandatory, rather than optional, service to the weak. On a geopolitical scale, theorists of the movement adopted a vision of the world (Weltanschauung) where nations would abandon moral standards in their relationship to each others, only guided by their natural self-interest.
  Let thousands, nay millions, die; what meaning have these rivers of blood in comparison with a state, into which flow all the disquiet and longing of the German being!
  — Friedrich Georg Jünger, 1926
  Völkischen were involved in a racialist and occultist movement dating back to the middle of the 19th century and had an influence on the Conservative Revolution. Their priority was the fight against Christianity and the return to a (reconstructed) Germanic pagan faith, or the "Germanization" of Christianity to purge it from foreign (Semitic) influence.
caption: Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, embodied the Kulturpessimismus that partly characterised the Conservative Revolution
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