1/27/23

Not for the faint of heart, but essential for those who want a stronger historical mind and spirit. My caveat is simply based on the inevitable density and complexity of intellectial history, though it should be added that Mosse at best could write with a vigor and clarity recalling the best of the Enlightenment. The sub-title of the book is self-explanatory -- and yet wasn't assumed to be that when he was writing this book. The preponderant opinion then, both on the street and in the academy, was that Nazism had no intellectural pedigree, that its practitioners were all either sub-intellectual sadists, or pitiful mis-understanders of high-culture figures like Wagner. Up to this time, the only English-language compettiton Mosse had faced was Peter Viereck's METAPOLITICS: energetic, righteous, entertaining -- and often wildly misleading. Shortly afterward, left-wing hippies were t'rilled and delighted by the appearance of the English-language edition of THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS, which suggested, with little scholarshiop and less subtelty, that the Nazis had been right-wing hippies, avant le lettre. Anyway, Mosse's work was pioneering at the time, and has stood the test of time extremely well. After all, his thesis is fairly simple: elitist (and ultimately racist) and authoritarian value were the common intellectual property of many too many people who formed the minds of Germasn youth, in the schools and in the enormous youth-movement.
A few words about the main title, which is far less self-explanatory than the sub-title. Mosse explains it himself in the course of its argument, but it it may be helpful to understand it a little earlier. The crisis was not simply the crumbling of earlier belief-sets but the flooding-in of newly-ascendant irrational systems to replace the old certainties of Christianity, conventional patriotism, the new science, bourgeois accumulation, Marxism, aestheticism and the rest. In this story, the stars are not people like Nietzsche, but obscurities like Langbehn, Lagarde, and Liebenfels. ( )