Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

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Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (April 23, 1876May 30, 1925) was a German cultural historian and writer.

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (also Moeller-Bruck) was born in Solingen in 1876, the son of Ottomar Moeller, a government building official, and Elisabeth van den Bruck, the daughter of a building official. From 1898 to 1910 he studied at a gymnasium (a type of German secondary school) and afterwards continued his studies on his own in Berlin, Paris, and Italy. His eight-volume cultural history Die Deutschen, unsere Menschengeschichte ("The Germans, our people's history") appeared in 1905. In 1907 he returned to Germany and in 1914 enlisted in the army at the start of World War I. Soon thereafter he joined the press office of the Foreign Ministry and was attached to the foreign affairs section of the German Supreme Army Command. His essay "Der Preußische Stil" ("The Prussian Style"), in which he celebrated the essence of Prussia as "the will to the state", appeared in 1916, marking his embrace of nationalism. It showed him as an opponent of parliamentary democracy and liberalism, and exerted a strong influence on the Jungkonservativen ("young conservative movement"). After a nervous breakdown he committed suicide in Berlin on May 30, 1925.

Moeller van den Bruck was the joint founder of the "June Club", which sought to influence young conservatives in the fight against the Treaty of Versailles.

In his book Das Recht der jungen Völker ("The Right Of Young Nations"), in which he presents the interests of Germany, Russia, and the United States and develops an expressly anti-Western and anti-imperialist philosophy of the state (Staatstheorie), Moeller van den Bruck attempts primarily to bridge the gap between nationalism and concepts of social justice. He had a major influence on the Jungkonservativen in their opposition to the Treaty of Versailles. He may have also supplied the Nazis with some of the concepts underpinning their movement, though upon meeting Hitler in 1922 he rejected him for his "proletarian primitiveness". The Nazis nevertheless made use of his ideas where they could, including appropriating the title of his 1923 book Das Dritte Reich ("The Third Reich") as a political slogan.

  • Stan Lauryssens, The Man Who Invented the Third Reich: The Life and Times of Arthur Moeller Van Den Bruck. Sutton Publishing, NY, 2003. ISBN 0-7509-3054-3.
  • Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: a study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology, UCP, Berkeley, 1974. ISBN 0-520-02626-8.
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