MONARCHISM

Monarchism: translation

Writing in 1928 about the November Revolution,* August Winnig* stated that "when the Republic took the place of the Monarchy, nobody opposed the Republic in order to die for the Monarchy (Von Klemperer). Despite a mythology regarding the strength of monarchism during the Republic, there were few occasions, outside Bavaria,* when officials needed to fear an attempted restoration. This weakness is surprising given the widespread attach-ment to the Hohenzollerns—even within the SPD—that preceded the end of the war. But defeat, revolution, and inflation* conspired to undermine monarchism and other traditional institutions (e.g., organized religion, family, and aristoc-racy). Before the war the key date in Germany s social calendar had been 27 January, the Kaiser's birthday, but the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations in com-memoration of Sedan in September 1920 and the founding of the Second Reich in January 1921 precluded reference to the Hohenzollerns.Bismarck s birthday attracted more attention than Wilhelm s.

Aside from splinter groups, only the DNVP was closely identified with mon-archism. Yet plots aimed at restoration, often hatched beyond Germany's bor-ders, confronted insoluble dilemmas within the DNVP. What form of monarchy should be restored? Should all of Germany s more than twenty royal houses be restored? Tactical and ideological disunity invariably undermined the plots. As the 1920s wore on, it became clear that the DNVP gave only lip service to the cause; its fanfare consistently embraced nationalist tradition above an overdrawn sentimentality for the Kaiser. Siegfried von Kardorff,* among the Party s more moderate figures, claimed in a letter to Kuno von Westarp* that the Kaiser's loss of legitimacy was due to his family s "unusually ignominious collapse. Yet even in Bavaria, where monarchists generally delighted in the ruin of the Protestant* Hohenzollerns, those who favored restoration of the Wittelsbachs collapsed in disarray during the crisis year of 1923. From 1924 hard-core mon-archists, more attached to nationalism than legitimism, drifted toward fascism, while moderate monarchists accommodated themselves to the Republic. Ulti-mately, nothing undermined monarchism more than Hindenburg s* election as President.

Peter Fritzsche has argued that the "deficiencies of monarchism did not com-promise the past"; instead, the past was reworked to fit postwar conservatism. Monarchism s eclipse in Germany s tradition-bound society left a void and gen-erated a new conservatism whose philosophic proponents included Oswald Spengler,* Arthur Moeller* van den Bruck, Edgar Jung,* and Ernst Jünger.* Disenchanted with hereditary monarchy, such neoconservatives championed a revolution from the Right that repudiated parliamentary democracy while em-bracing a non-Marxist "national socialism" founded on a new aristocracy of talent and charisma. Leading the new Germany would be an ersatz monarch, a necessary great man who served asFuhrer.