MOELLER VAN DEN BRUCK, ARTHUR

(1876-1925)

publicist; an ide-ological precursor of National Socialism. He was born to a prosperous home in Solingen; his father (Moeller) was a royal architectural advisor, while his mother (van den Bruck) was Spanish and Dutch by descent. Expelled from Gymnasium and thus barred from university, he was disowned by his family (yet he inherited a small fortune). He was thereafter a determined student of history and art and a cultural opponent of the Kaiserreich. Unpolitical, but passionate about German culture, he led a bohemian existence in the years before 1914, traveling widely and devoting considerable time to editing and translating modern literature. Dur-ing 1904-1910 he wrote an eight-volume history,Die Deutschen; however, his focus was a twenty-two-volume edition of Dostoyevsky s collected writings, translated between 1905 and 1914. The Russian s attack on Western rationalism appealed to Moeller.

World War I politicized Moeller. Aged thirty-eight when war erupted, he volunteered for the army in 1916 and served briefly on the Eastern Front (in 1902 he had eluded the army by moving to Paris, deserting a pregnant wife in the process). Assigned to the army s propaganda department, he was given free rein to write, albeit with a twist. His 1916Der preussische Stil(The Prussian style), while theoretically treating architecture, was a tract in praise of Prussian austerity and obedience.

From 1916 Moeller wrote incessantly on political theory. Two pivotal works, the article "Das Recht der jungen Volker" (The right of young peoples) in November 1918 andDas dritte Reich(The Third Reich) in 1923, underscored his rejection of Western liberalism and his espousal of a mixture of Prussian conservatism and an ill-defined socialism—a relationship advanced also by Os-wald Spengler.* What Germany needed was "a third way" between Western liberalism and the Bolshevism of Russia. Although he argued that Germany commanded a key position in central Europe, its orientation should be toward the East (his thought was crucial to the curious movement called National Bolshevism*). Vague on how his vision might be achieved, he was not averse to suggesting that there was power in contradiction.

With Spengler, Moeller is deemed the key force behind Germany s neocon-servative movement. After the war he publishedGewissen(Conscience), a Ber-lin* journal in which he eloquently critiqued the Weimar system. When Germany signed the Versailles Treaty,* he helped found a neoconservative group, theJuni-Klub(see Herrenklub). His prolific writings championed a "con-servative revolution that blended nationalism, anti-Marxism, antiliberalism, and corporative socialism. Late in 1924 he suffered a severe breakdown; a few months later he committed suicide. Although his ideas found an echo in Hitler s* movement, the Nazis later distanced themselves from an ideology not grounded in racist principle.