Armin Mohler

He demanded the revolution from the right

Hardly had the Second World War been over, Armin Mohler revived the nationalist nationalism of
the twenties. Today the New Right honors him as a founding father.

By Volker White

Germany is in crisis, the author is seeking a way out. After his diagnosis, the Left and the Liberals
transformed the country into a "governess democracy". "An arrogant minority" manipulates a
"patient majority" with its "monopolistic position in the opinion-making apparatus". It uses a deeply
rooted "national masochism" to prevent the real sovereignty of the country as an extended arm of
the victors of 1945. The only real alternative for Germany comes from the right. However, the
farewell to established conservatism, a radical new determination of the right-wing camp, was
necessary. "A Liberal Conservative in the Federal Republic" is for him a man who "has already
capitulated".

These are familiar tones, but they are neither from a Dresden Pegida tribune nor from the AfD party
convention. Armin Mohler, in the late sixties and early seventies, presented the enemy regulations
during the Social Democratic coalition in a series of prominent articles. For Mohler the usual speech
of "left progress" and "right preservation" has never been valid. In the CSU's own Bavarian curator,
he rejoices that "today the conservatives are the dissatisfied, shifting political layer". They were the
"real revolutionaries", while the left only defended the status quo.

On the criticism from his own ranks, too extreme for a conservative, he replies: "The definition of
what is 'conservative' is already a political act." One had to open the field to the right and in 1945 to
recapture lost terrain.

Born in Switzerland in 1920, Armin Mohler was a journalist and writer, a key figure in the
reorganization of the extreme right in the Federal Republic. Mohler's pupils such as Gtz Kubitschek,
the now well known television publisher and publicist, are giving speeches before Pegida meetings
and influence the AfD. Their dream of a revolution from the right is a long, subterranean history of
political theory.

Mohler plays a key role in this. Having grown up in liberal Basel, he calls Ernst Jnger's work a
formative event of his youth. The essay sketched a modern-heroic counter-model to the alleged
"citizens" who were supposed to be safe and personal gain.

To experience the war in quiet Switzerland, Mohler is not manly enough, he feels "monumentally
malnourished" there. This drives him illegally into the German Reich in 1942, where he wants to join
the Waffen-SS. He later wrote that the German bureaucracy had deterred him. Instead of going to
the eastern front, he would rather go to Berlin for a few months and then drive home. There, as a
member of the Swiss army, he was given a prison sentence for his German adventure.

After 1945 Mohler works as a journalist. Ernst Jnger drew attention to him and engaged him in 1949
as a private secretary.

Mohler is well acquainted with the spiritual world of disciple. He has just presented his dissertation
The Conservative Revolution in Germany 1918-1932. With the paradoxical concept, he confounds
hundreds of different authors of German nationalism into a political current and tries to relieve them
of national socialism. This artifice, with some daring constructions, omissions and legends, is
intended to create a right new beginning. Mohler's inclination is clearly the result of Italian fascism-
oriented authors such as Oswald Spengler and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

Mohler is proud that his book shocked the democratized post-war conservatives because it reminded
him that "German conservatism used to have ideologies." Above all, the author's assertion, which
adheres to a nationalistic neo-paganism, that Christianity and conservatism are mutually exclusive,
because a Christian must necessarily become a left, finds resistance.

Overall, however, the influence of the work remains restricted to the academic debate, especially
since the last living luminaries of the current, like Martin Heidegger, are afraid to make themselves
politically exposed. Mohler's master, Ernst Jnger, too, would prefer to be remembered as a literary
man, not as the militant republican and nationalist propagandist of the twenties and thirties. This
self-interpretation of Jnger leads to a break between the two. Mohler goes to Paris in 1953 as a
correspondent, where he is closely observing the development of the Fifth Republic for Swiss and
German papers, including ZEIT, and becoming the admirer of President Charles de Gaulle.

In 1961, Mohler moved to Munich to the newly founded Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, which
has committed itself to the promotion of science. He soon rose to the position of managing director,
he understood how to use the Foundation's resources for his political network. Franz Riedweg, a
Swiss who lived in Germany, recommended him to recruit European volunteers for the war effort
during the war in the rank of an SS Obersturmburfhrer. In this work Mohler had met him.

Mohler is wise enough to distinguish between his passion for fascism and real politics under federal
conditions. He has excellent press contacts, works for the Axel-Springer-Verlag and the important
week-time of the evangelical church Christ und Welt, directed by the Nazi writer Giselher Wirsing.
Above all, however, the Bavarian Kurier is available to him as a journalistic platform. For his editor,
Franz Josef Strauss, he writes speeches. In 1965 he gave Strauss his Marcel Hepp as a personal
speaker. As in the textbook, he thereby strengthens his access to power.

Hepp is one of the remarkable figures in Mohler's environment. Together with his brother Robert, he
founded the "Conservative Front" at the end of the 1950s. The group disrupts lectures by liberal and
left professors and provokes mocking calls, such as the founding of a "German-Israeli student group",
which is supposed to follow the "history of the Geissler movement in the 20th century". When they
mob at the University of Erlangen against African students as "black brethren", Hepp gets house ban.
In terms of content, the "Conservative Front" is strictly right, but in the style anticipates the
interventionist actions of the eighties and sixties.

The influence of the Mohler circle on the great politics is proved by Hepp's book Der
Atomsperrvertrag. The supermarkets distribute the world, which he published 1968 before the
signing of the agreement. He argues that the treaty marks the end of the German nuclear industry
and takes the country's ability to atomic armament. He can count on Mohler's approval, but this has
already been discussed with Ernst Jnger on the "atom bomb as a necessary decimation tool". There
are also unmistakable positions of Strauss in the book, which the atomic question has always
regarded as an armament question. In the fifties he was the initiator of the German nuclear program,
but as a minister of defense he could not realize his plans for nuclear rearmament.

Hepp takes up the thread again. According to the Mohler student, his own bombshell strengthens
sovereignty and is the best insurance against a "German Vietnam", a conventional proxy war of the
supermarkets on German territory. The political model chosen by Hepp in the book comes from
Mohlers taste: General de Gaulle, who was armed by France, was taken out of NATO in 1966, and did
not sign the treaty. Thus, France had asserted itself against the Americans.

In fact, de Gaulle shows little tendency to make the German neighbors too strong. After his re-
election in 1959, he ended an Italian-German-French nuclear project, and set up his Force de Frappe
on his own. In the formation of Franco-German relations, de Gaulle is concerned with the inclusion of
"German Gaullism" by expanding the national spheres of action.

The enthusiasm for the French general is above all the enthusiasm for an authoritarian presidential
system. The handwriting of another Altnazis, which Mohler studied very well, is clearly marked here:
Carl Schmitt. After his break with Ernst Jnger, the lawyer became a new master for him. As a
theorist of fascist state law, Schmitt had, after 1933, placed himself entirely at the service of the new
masters - until he himself fell into disgrace. After the war he lives in Sauerland. Mohler is in close
contact with Schmitt and always gives him new readers and admirers.

While Mohler is successfully gaining the long tradition of German law, his real-policy action is less
successful. Franz Josef Strauss must use too many interests to fit into the role of a German de Gaulle.
As Mohler, with the book What the Germans fear. Fear of politics, fear of history, fear of power in
the meantime best-seller author, in 1967 for his journalistic work the Adenauer-Prize of the national-
conservative Germany-Foundation gets, criticize the application of the Swiss to the SS Early cancer
death of his protege Marcel Hepp. He is also denied the long-awaited professorship.

He still has a schooling effect. Above all, he is present in the journal Criticn, a founding of his pupil
Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, but he also has no contact with the neo-Nazi German national
newspaper. At any rate, Mohler is double-faced at the time of his life: on the one hand, he can,
without any degree, draw himself against the political opponent, and, on the other hand, make
artless judgments. He despises the processing of the national socialist crimes, but at the same time is
friendly with the poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan.

From the mid-eighties onwards, his followers gathered together in the right-wing youthpost for
which he wrote the notes from the Interregnum. The title is intended to illustrate that an epoch in
which Germany does not have a form of the Reich can only be an illegitimate "intermediate time". In
1994 the cooperation ended in the dispute over its thesis, a punishment for Holocaust deniers
denying the Germans the sovereignty over their history. In his old age, he frankly flirts with his
admiration for the "fascist style". At Mohler's funeral in 2003, several generations of pupils and
companions gathered in Munich, including Robert Hepp and Schrenck-Notzing. Gtz Kubitschek,
Mohlers last publisher, emphasizes the unbroken "spiritual presence" of the author in his grave.

Mohler's legend of a "Conservative Revolution" had far-reaching consequences. In France and

Germany, she inspired the founding of a "new right" in the sixties, which wanted to distinguish itself
from both explicit national socialism and classical conservatism. After the reunification, in the course
of the debates about the "Berlin Republic", a "self-confident nation" and the right to asylum, the
movement got new impetus. She is currently setting her third, so far most successful, start.

The latest economy is not unprepared for the "New Right". As early as the turn of the millennium,
Kubitschek, the historian and student councilor Karlheinz Weimann, the biographer Armin Mohlers,
founded the Institute for Political Science in the area of the freedom of the young, in order to
cultivate Mohler's political bestiary. With a "Conservative-Subversive Action" Kubitschek tried for a
while to make public provocations in the style of the brothers Hepp and disturbed, for example, a
reading by Gnter Grass. Today, right-wingers influenced by him act as "identities" according to a
similar pattern. They recently stormed the performance of a play by Elfriede Jelinek in Vienna.

Mohler's enemy was never left alone. In the tradition of the twenties he always took Marxism and
liberalism to the extreme. Thus his thinking could also survive the decline of real socialism. While
established conservatism still felt a Bolshevik threat in every long-haired student, Mohler saw the
"American decadence" as the cause of the feared decline of Germany.

Today, this form of antiliberalism exists in the circles of the Afd and is the main reason for the
somewhat enigmatic attraction of Russian President Vladimir Putin at first glance. The withdrawal
movement of the right against the transatlantic alliance has once again attracted followers. The Neue
Zrcher Zeitung, for which Mohler wrote for a long time, exclaimed Jrgen Elssser, Pegida activist
and editor of the right-wing pop-magazine Compact, to the new "German Gaullist".

Mohler was an epigone of the twenties who himself produced a series of epigones. In his succession,
there are ample reminiscences, but no new Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt or Ernst Jnger.
Kubitschek is now publishing the confused pamphlets of the German-Turkish author Akif Pirinci. At
the end of Mohler's project of a revolutionization of the German right now stands Pegida and AfD.
Thus the history of these "new rights" is revealed as decay.