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Title: Beachhead or Refugium? Author: Eliah Bures Language: en Source: Journal for the Study of Radicalism Volume 14, Number 2, Fall 2020 Michigan State University Press
Today’s intellectual far right loves rebellion. In calculated acts of
public provocation, right-wing writers and thinkers present themselves
as outsiders and nonconformists, bravely breaking the taboos of a
“politically correct” mainstream culture. This is particularly the case
for the far right’s most important intellectual movement, the loose
assortment of writers and publications known as the European New Right.
It is not for nothing that one of the New Right’s premier publications
in Germany is called Sezession (Secession) and carries as its motto the
Latin inscription etiam si omnes—ego non (“even if everyone, not I”).1
Louder and less refined are the so-called “Identitarians,” a
youth-oriented offshoot of the New Right that began as the Identitarian
Bloc in France in 2003 and is today an energetic (and growing)
international movement of right-wing activists. With branches in at
least ten European countries, the Identitarians style themselves an
“extra-parliamentary avant-garde” of activists opposed to immigration.
“Resistance—Networking—Counterculture,” proclaimed the billing for the
German Identitarians’ “Europa Nostra” protest in Dresden in August
2018.2 Such right-wing cultural revolt is not restricted to Europe. In
the United States, white nationalist websites with intellectual [End
Page 29] pretensions and dreams of importing New Right ideology to
American shores adopt names like Counter Currents and seek hip
rebranding as the alternative right, or Alt Right.3 Writing in February
2017 on Breitbart, Milo Yiannopoulos captured this renegade mood when he
claimed that “being right-wing is the new counterculture, the new punk,
an act of rebellion in an era of political correctness, safe spaces,
multiculturalism and globalism.”4
The New Right’s embrace of the “counterculture” label is no accident. It
represents an effort to wrest the mantle of transgression and bold
emancipation away from the leftist counterculture of the 1960s. The
student movements and youth revolts of the 1960s’ New Left
counterculture were marked by an international solidarity that stemmed
not primarily from sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but from commitment to
a handful of morally urgent causes célèbres: university reform, free
speech and civil rights, hostility to capitalism and authoritarianism,
and an impassioned anticolonialism, expressed in denunciations of the
Vietnam War and the veneration of Mao Zedong and Che Guevara as patron
saints of Third World liberation.5 The international cohesion of today’s
New Right counterculture (including its Identitarian update) is likewise
driven by zeal for what it holds to be the defining causes of our time.
Chief among these is opposition to the supposed “Great Replacement” of
white natives and their indigenous European cultures by a relentless
tide of immigrants. Joined to this fear is suspicion of “liberal
elites,” who engineer globalization and demolish national sovereignty in
distant places like Davos and Brussels. Such concerns have grown
increasingly mainstream since 2000, propelled not only by
events—Islamist terrorism and the 2015 migrant crisis, above all—but by
bestselling books with Spenglerian titles like Éric Zemmour’s Le suicide
français (The French Suicide, 2014) and Thilo Sarrazin’s Deutschland
schafft sich ab (German Abolishes Itself, 2010).6
In the eyes of the New Right, the radicals who took to the streets of
West Berlin or Paris in the spring of 1968, and then undertook their
“long march through the institutions” in the decades that followed,
paved the way not for freedom, but chaos. The 68ers’ demands for
authenticity and autonomy, New Righters argue, led to the plummeting
birthrates and hedonistic individualism of today’s moribund West, where
citizens robbed of their roots no longer defend their cultural
identities. “Islamization” and “white genocide,” so the charge goes, are
the inevitable telos of dogmas such as multiculturalism, preached by
“cultural Marxists” whose creeds stretch back to the revolutionary [End
Page 30] social movements of the 1960s, and to the theories of New Left
thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Guy Debord. Typical of this contempt
is the character of Clément Dio, the mixed-race editor of a lefty
newspaper in Jean Raspail’s anti-immigrant novel The Camp of the Saints
(1973). Raspail presents Dio as a quintessential New Left figure, a
“citizen of the world” with bottomless “scorn for Western Man,” who
champions “freedom of instinct and social destruction,” leaving France
too paralyzed with “shame and remorse” to resist an invading horde of
Third World migrants.7 The New Left is also the villain in Pat
Buchanan’s Death of the West (2001). The “paleoconservative” Buchanan
points an accusing finger at “radical youth, feminists, black militants,
homosexuals, the alienated, the asocial, Third World revolutionaries,
all the angry voices of the persecuted ‘victims’ of the West,” who sow a
“cultural pessimism” that brands one’s own country as “evil.” “[W]hat
was denounced as the counterculture,” Buchanan laments, “has become the
dominant culture, and what was the dominant culture has become . . . a
‘dissident culture.’”8 For many, the left’s cultural dominance has grown
tyrannical. “Antiracist progressivism,” proclaimed Zemmour, is “the
successor of communism, with the same totalitarian methods developed by
the Comintern in the 1930s.”9 Although not avowedly part of the New
Right, fellow travelers like Raspail, Buchanan, and Zemmour help
normalize the movement’s nativism and glamorize its rejection of liberal
“decadence.”
This article makes three arguments about the New Right’s
self-understanding as a “dissident” counterculture, challenging the
dominance of dogmatic leftism as the New Left once challenged the
“repressive” society of its day. The first argument is that the rise of
New Right counterculture is part of a more general transformation. As
many have noted, the New Right has evolved since the 1960s, not just in
opposition to the 68ers, but by appropriating left-wing positions and
postures. I contend that the right-wing embrace of counterculture is
another aspect of this process—the fruit of a dialectical motion in
which the New Right seeks to transcend, by selectively absorbing
elements from, the 1960s’ New Left it wishes to negate. Indeed, much
connects today’s right-wing radicals to their leftist predecessors,
including a belief in the rottenness of their times and an overweening
conviction in the importance of their own activism.10 In the first
section, I look briefly at the New Right’s institutional and ideological
development since 1968, in particular in Germany, in order to provide a
context for understanding this countercultural turn. [End Page 31]
My second claim is that New Right counterculture represents more than
just theft of the left’s radical chic. In its Identitarian form, the New
Right also returns more fully to the stridency, unruliness, and
confrontational temper that fueled the rise of fascism a century ago.
Originally a sedate movement of ideas, the New Right, in other words, is
now recapturing elements of fascism’s countercultural style. This should
not surprise us: countercultural rebellion, after all, has never been
the sole property of the left.11 “Everywhere in Europe,” Zeev Sternhell
observed of the rise of fascism, “the cultural revolt preceded the
political.” Fascism began before 1914 as an intellectual innovation that
“was nonconformist, avant-garde, and revolutionary in character,” mixing
hatred of bourgeois society with a revised Marxism, indebted to Georges
Sorel, that substituted myth for reason, voluntarism for materialism,
and the people for the proletariat.”12 Of course, that fascism morphed
from cultural and intellectual revolt before 1914 into political
movements in the chaotic post-World War I years does not presage a
similar return of fascist dictatorship today.13 My point is that New
Right counterculture has an authentic right-wing pedigree as well; if it
reaches with one hand to snatch that label away from the left, it
reaches with the other to resurrect the dynamism evident in fascism’s
earlier cult of youth and action. In the second section, I point to this
deeper history by considering one of the New Right’s intellectual
heroes, the German writer Ernst Jünger (1895–1998). I argue that the
countercultural spirit was a major aspect of Jünger’s writings as part
of Weimar Germany’s “Conservative Revolution.” Jünger’s later works also
show how that impulse was refashioned under the different conditions of
post-1945 Western Europe.
My third argument is that there is a structural difference between New
Right counterculture and its fascist and New Left predecessors. The
“integral nationalism” that arose in France in the 1890s was driven by
Social Darwinist fears of degeneration and demanded counterrevolutionary
change in the present. The same impatience marked contemporary aesthetic
currents like futurism, which praised the beauty of speed and violence
and sought to harness the spirit of modern technology to purge the soul
of the musty past. What joined these currents and helped fuse them into
fascism was “their hatred of the dominant culture and their desire to
replace it with a total alternative.”14 The New Left of the 1960s was no
less restless. As Elliot Neaman put it, they “wanted to create at all
levels a ‘counterculture’ that would actually change the culture rather
than provide an alternative within [End Page 32] one that already
existed.”15 Today’s right-wing intelligentsia, by contrast, is riven in
a way these previous countercultural movements were not. Although many
New Righters are indeed insurgents eager to conquer the mainstream,
others fear that the liberal-globalist order is unlikely to vanish any
time soon. For this latter camp—betraying a dose of the “realism” often
associated with rightist thinking16—the New Right’s chief goal should be
simply to hang on, keeping the faith alive in the meantime by
communicating it to sympathetic ears. The dilemma can be translated into
a question of dueling metaphors: Is New Right counterculture akin to
what an ecologist would call a “refugium”—a survival niche in an
otherwise hostile climate—and thus better imagined as a pocket of
conservative sanity in a world gone mad? Or is right-wing counterculture
more militant? Is it rather a beachhead in a war of reconquest, led by
an advance guard of iconoclasts and visionaries? In the third section, I
explore this division within some of the German New Right’s major texts.
“The French New Right was born in 1968.” Thus begins Manifesto for a
European Renaissance (2000), by Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier.
The claim is half true: As a “think tank and school of thought,” the
Nouvelle Droite indeed began with the creation of GRECE (Groupement de
recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne [Research and
Study Group for European Civilization]) in January 1968.17 Founded by de
Benoist, already as a teenager an ultranationalist activist opposed to
Algerian independence, along with some forty like-minded intellectuals
and professionals, GRECE took as its model New Left think tanks like the
French Club Jean Moulin and research centers like the celebrated CNRS
(Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique [National Center for
Scientific Research]). Armed with a new journal of ideas, Eléments,
GRECE aimed to bring greater intellectual sophistication to the French
far right, to reorient its ideology away from militarism and biological
racism, and to pioneer a cultural strategy based on recognition that the
left had a firm grip on the zeitgeist. “The events of May 1968,” Tamir
Bar-On noted, “imbued many GRECE members with a strange cocktail of
shock and envy for the leftist student radicals. They were especially
impressed by the sophistication of the Marxist cultural theories [End
Page 33] and the idealistic fervor of the students battling in the
barricades.” That the insurgent energy gripped ordinary men and women as
well—approximately 11 million workers seized control of factories or
went on strike—further “convinced Benoist and company that the
liberal-left held the key to power in France, since it now supposedly
controlled the schools, universities, media and the thinking of the key
state elites.” From the start, GRECE envisioned “culture war” as a
response. “What is metapolitics?” asked the title of the group’s
inaugural seminar in November 1968, thereby introducing the name for
what would become the New Right’s strategy to reconquer the cultural and
intellectual terrain occupied by the left.18
Let us return to metapolitics—the mainspring of New Right
counterculture—in a moment. We need to first ask about the “newness” of
the New Right’s core ideas; here, the claim to a 1968 birthyear is more
dubious. Although the New Right aspires to intellectual innovation and
is often sincere in its claims to transcend the tired left–right divide,
a strong argument can be made that its heart remains on the right. The
New Right looks with skepticism at left-wing concerns for legal
egalitarianism and universalist doctrines such as human rights. In the
words of one partisan, the movement is “against equality and democracy.”
The New Right’s distance from leftist values is also plain from its
admiration of hierarchy-obsessed “traditionalists” like Julius Evola,
enemies of the French Revolution like Joseph de Maistre, and members of
the interwar Conservative Revolution—German writers and thinkers such as
Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Oswald Spengler, who
rejected the Weimar Republic’s liberal ethos and parliamentary politics
and lent credibility to the revolutionary nationalism that came to power
with the Nazis in 1933.19
For Roger Griffin, the New Right is better viewed a vehicle “for the
same ideological energies which fed interwar fascism,” above all the
belief “that through the intervention of a heroic elite the whole
national community is capable of resurrecting itself Phoenix-like from
the ashes of the decadent old order.”20 To be fair, figures like de
Benoist denounce as a slur any attempt to link their movement to
fascism, whose militancy the New Right roundly rejects.21 Griffin,
however, is unmoved by the New Right’s claim that they are the “heirs of
a ‘healthy’ Conservative Revolution—its ‘Trotskyite’ wing—leagues apart
from its catastrophic ‘Stalinist’ travesty perpetrated by Nazism.” In
Griffin’s definition, the genealogy connecting the New Right to fascism
is based not on actions or organizational forms, but on continuity at
the level of ideas, emotions, and a [End Page 34] reading of the present
as a decadent catastrophe that demands total renewal. In this sense, the
New Right represents merely a new “face,” one appropriate to antifascist
times, for earlier fascist and radical conservative creeds.22
If the French New Right owes a debt to the German Conservative
Revolution, it paid that debt forward in the inspiration it provided for
the German Neue Rechte a few years later. It is not a surprise that the
founding of the German New Right reflected a similar effort to shunt the
1960s’ radical energy into ideological channels well-grooved by interwar
fascism. Influenced by the appearance of the Nouvelle Droite (and by the
emergence of other national variants, such as the Italian Nuova Destra,
around the same time), the German New Right crystalized in the 1970s
through the labor of several disaffected groups eager to harness the
spirit of cultural revolt for the right. These included right-wing
publicists such as Armin Mohler (a one-time private secretary to Ernst
Jünger who introduced de Benoist to Conservative Revolutionary
writings), Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, and Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing,
founder, in 1970, of the influential journal Criticón. Another important
influence was the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) and its youth
wing, the “Young National Democrats,” who argued that the party’s poor
showing in the 1969 federal elections revealed a need to first win
hearts and minds as a precursor to electoral success. In a generational
rebellion that mirrored de Benoist’s rejection of the French right’s old
guard, the NPD’s younger members turned against the “Old Right” of
unrepentant Nazis and called for direct action against American
imperialism and the establishment’s “pseudo” democracy in a manner
similar to the German student movement’s “Extra-Parliamentary
Opposition” (APO).23 It is important to note that the Neue Rechte also
attracted crossovers from the most uncompromising elements of the New
Left itself, figures such as Günter Maschke and Bernd Rabehl, who
gradually found a new home on the radical right.24
In institutional terms, the German New Right first took shape in the NPD
spin-off Aktion Neue Rechte (ANR), which lasted from 1972 to 1974. Among
ANR’s leaders was the sociologist Henning Eichberg, who became one of
the German New Right’s leading theorists in the 1970s and 1980s. With
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the New Right gained prominence.
Helped along by the rightward drift of West German politics in the
1980s, and by the possibilities opened up by Germany’s reunification in
1990, a crop of right-wing intellectuals took to the airwaves and
editorial pages, worrying publicly about multiculturalism, a lack [End
Page 35] of national pride, and Germany’s westernization under American
influence. In response, they argued for a “self-confident” German
identity, taking up a New Right ideology that was indebted to figures
like de Benoist, Mohler, and Eichberg.25 The “mothership” of this New
Right assault was the newspaper Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom). Founded
by Dieter Stein in 1986, it emerged in the 1990s as a major voice for a
revitalized national conservatism eager to challenge mainstream
Christian Democracy from the right. As Sezession publisher Götz
Kubitschek, a former editor at Junge Freiheit, put it in 2006, the aim
was to “drive out the ‘ideas of 68’ with the ‘ideas of 89.’”26 The line
has a familiar ring. As Kubitschek doubtless knows, it echoes the call
by interwar Conservative Revolutionaries to replace the worn-out “ideas
of 1789” (liberté, egalité, fraternité) with the “ideas of 1914” (heroic
struggle for the fatherland). But the line points to an important shift,
as well. If the student-led revolt of the 1960s brought democratic
change and cultural liberalization to Germany, it was the “birth hour”
of another development as well, opening space on the right for a
radical, dynamic, antisystem, yet determinedly non-Nazi New Right
movement that now offers itself as the “new 68ers.”27
This appropriation of leftist language and postures is part of a more
general refashioning of the far right since 1945. A good example is the
embrace of “democracy” and “republicanism” in the names of right-wing
parties like the NPD and the Republikaner (founded in 1983), language
anathema to interwar fascists. A more recent case of this leftist
whitewash is adoption of Wir sind das Volk (“We are the people”)—famed
mantra of the liberal-democratic opposition to the East German regime—by
the radical-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). The slogan now
carries a xenophobic inflection not present in 1989, and is wielded
against a liberal federal state hardly comparable to a communist
dictatorship.28 José Pedro Zúquete, one of the few scholars to have
analyzed Identitarianism’s countercultural stance, notes that the
movement gathers strength not just from a “spiritual rejection of the
modern world” traceable to the Conservative Revolution, but from “ideas
and tactics traditionally associated with left-wing groups or
movements.” These include sampling from antiglobalist thinkers and
cultivating an “ethos of rebellion.” The result is a “New Cool” aimed,
not at Third World liberation, but at “defending the homeland”—a
commercially savvy style less likely to reference Homer than blockbuster
films of patriotic resistance like Braveheart, Avatar, and 300.29 [End
Page 36]
Such tactics were pioneered by the Identitarian organization CasaPound
Italia (CPI), whose origins are traceable to 2002, when young right-wing
activists squatted in a government-owned building in Rome (a tactic
generally favored by radical leftist groups). Named after the modernist
poet and fascist sympathizer Ezra Pound, CasaPound’s activities are not
literary but pop-cultural, creating a “fascistically aestheticized
counterculture” by combining elements of mainstream youth culture (e.g.,
music, movies, and sports) with political activism. A hybrid social and
political movement, with roots in the nonconformist music scene of the
1990s, CPI has gained popularity through an Identitarian band,
ZetaZeroAlfa, whose “emotional lyrics . . . promote the vital need for
rebellion.” The movement also established a “Student Bloc” to agitate in
high schools and universities and showcase its “new, diverse, way of
being.” The group’s motto—Riprendersi Tutto (“Retake
Everything”)—proclaims its ambition for total cultural conquest.
Criticized as “fascists of the third millennium” in the press, CasaPound
embraced the label. Indeed, their deliberate mimesis of the Left is part
of an à la carte ideology fully consistent with interwar fascism, which
commandeered aspects of syndicalism, nationalism, socialism, and
modernist aesthetics.30 To the Identitarian New Right, the New Left of
the 1960s provides a menu of radical gestures adaptable to current
times. This includes the use of spectacle—such as unfurling an
anti-immigration banner from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in 2016—that is
designed to make the news and circulate endlessly on YouTube and
Facebook, projecting a rebel aura and broadcasting their declaration of
war against the mainstream. Kubitschek, an early adopter of the
Identitarian label in Germany, dubs such propaganda of the deed
“conservative-subversive action”—a knock-off of the 68ers’ “subversive
actions,” which were supposed to awaken the slumbering masses to the
repression around them.31
But the New Right’s involvement with the New Left goes beyond just
mimicry. It is important to see that, in some ways, the New Right also
has authentic roots in the leftist politics that came out of the 1960s.
Of course, revolutionaries have been making ideological journeys from
left to right since the nineteenth century—a path traced in our day by
right-wing populists like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Originally an
anti-communist dissident, Orbán helped found Fidesz as a radical liberal
alternative youth movement in the late 1980s.32 The trajectory joining
1968 to 1989 to today’s far right is not one of simple oppositions. The
New Right’s intertwinement with the far left [End Page 37] can be seen
in the case of Henning Eichberg, who was close to the German Greens in
the 1980s and, after 1982, a member of the left-wing Danish Socialist
People’s Party.33 The marriage of leftist themes to “national identity”
was a principal goal of Eichberg’s magazine Wir Selbst, whose title (We
Ourselves) was a translation of Sinn Féin, Ireland’s party of
anti-imperialist nationalism. The magazine’s inaugural issue, in
December 1979, carried a photo of 1960s German student leader Rudi
Dutschke on its cover and proclaimed itself the voice of the “young
alternative movement, which sees its own identity lost and wants to
recover it.” The magazine also announced a salad of goals: an
“ecological form of life,” “humane socialism,” “decentralized economy,”
“cultural renewal,” “grassroots democracy,” and “ethnopluralism.”34 The
latter term, however, was a signal that the leftist elements in this
medley were intended to serve the characteristically right-wing cause of
ethnonational renewal. The connection is not entirely surprising. Bernd
Rabehl, the former 68er who migrated to the New Right, has highlighted
the nationalist dimension of the German student movement—evident in its
rejection of the two models, Western capitalism and authoritarian
socialism, dividing Cold War Germany—and argued that Dutschke himself,
had he not died prematurely, would have joined the
“national-revolutionary” cause.35
Today, the foremost champion of “ethnopluralism” is de Benoist, who
calls for the protection of indigenous European cultures against
globalization. He characterizes his position as “the attitude that
considers the diversity of the world, and as a consequence the related
inequalities necessarily produced by it, to be a good, and the gradual
homogenization of the world, advocated and realized by the
2,000-year-old discourse of egalitarian ideology, to be an evil.” The
real racism, in this view, comes from “universalist anti-racism” and its
“ideology of the same,” which wages war against “races” by denying
people the right to preserve their ethnic communities.36 “Decadence is
worse than dictatorship,” de Benoist proclaimed in Cultural Revolution
from the Right (1985). Although dictatorship is “contemptuous,” it can
“only destroy us as individuals. Decadence, however, destroys our
survival chances as a people.”37 De Benoist’s ethnopluralism builds on
the work of Eichberg, who pioneered the concept in a 1978 treatise.
“Whoever doesn’t want to speak of peoples (Völkern),” Eichberg wrote,
“should remain silent about man.”38 De Benoist has since fleshed out the
concept, through borrowings from French anticolonialist thought and the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, to include a “right to
difference.”39 But [End Page 38] despite masquerading as a celebration
of cultural difference, ethnopluralism is better seen a sophisticated
rebranding of European nativism, translating “xenophobia and intolerance
into liberal-democratic universalist language.”40 Here the New Right’s
mimesis slips from a sincere interest in appropriating radical leftist
postures and ideas to a more cynical and strategic adoption of
terminology.41 In doing so, it reproduces a strategy identified by Ernst
Jünger in a 1930 essay, an approach he described as “taking up a
position against liberalism” by fighting it with liberalism’s “own means
and vocabulary.” Every liberal dirge “from idealistic indignation to the
alarmed cries of an endangered culture,” Jünger wrote, is uttered by
those “long schooled in resentment.”42 The tactic perfectly describes
New Right figures like de Benoist, whose schooling in antiliberal
resentment under the conditions of post-1945 Western Europe forced them
to take up liberalism’s means and vocabulary.
Jünger’s observation brings us back to “metapolitics.” The term names a
program for change based on shifting the boundaries of acceptable
discourse within a society. Metapolitics—alongside ethnopluralism,
apocalypticism, and hatred of liberal “elites”—is a thread running
across today’s intellectual far right.43 It is a buzzword that signals
their choice for cultural and intellectual work as a form of activism in
a center-left political culture where other paths to power—violent
uprising and party politics—are deemed hopeless. It is also a prime
example of the New Right’s cross-fertilization from the left. The
concept draws from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who believed the
proletariat must first conquer cultural hegemony as a prelude to
political power, and from the cultural theories of other New Left
Marxist thinkers, such as Louis Althusser. Though de Benoist declares
that metapolitics is neither “politics by other means” nor “a ‘strategy’
to impose intellectual hegemony,” the statement is hard to square with
his root-and-branch rejection of liberal modernity and faith in the
power of ideas. As he wrote in 1979: “Without a precise theory, there is
no effective action. . . . All the revolutions of history have only
transposed into facts an evolution that had already occurred in the
spirit. One can’t have a Lenin before having had Marx.”44 Metapolitics
in this sense is not unpolitical or antipolitical, but prepolitical.
“What, then, can a think tank do?” De Benoist asked in a 1993 interview.
“It can contribute to the development of ideas and wait for their
impact.”45 This “right-wing Gramscianism” has long since found a home on
the German New Right. Karlheinz Weißmann, author of a book on the
consequences of the 68ers’ [End Page 39] “cultural break,” argued in
1988 that long-term political power depended on “occupation of fields in
the prepolitical space.” In a 1995 piece for Junge Freiheit, Stein
similarly declared that “occupying concepts and shaping their meaning is
. . . a central prerequisite for winning political-cultural hegemony.”46
The New Right’s embrace of “counterculture”—especially by its
Identitarian partisans—should be seen within this double context: New
Righters’ post-1968 envy of New Left intellectuals and the student
movements and the cultural revolution they forged, and their
metapolitical turn as a program for taking the culture back. But a
crucial shift has happened as well. Although the metapolitics practiced
by the likes of de Benoist and Stein is countercultural in a formal
sense—it damns mainstream culture and seeks to shift it rightward—it is
a staid affair of professors and publicists. Its metapolitical turf is
editorial offices and think tanks, and its practice contains little that
is redolent of the romance, hip self-display, and generational rebellion
of 1960s counterculture. This is not the case for Identitarian (and
Alt-Right) counterculture. As Milo put it, the aim is to make being
right-wing “the new punk.” In this respect, it contributes to
Identitarianism’s larger project to free the New Right’s ideas from the
straightjacket of journals and institutes and link them with “mediagenic
street politics.”47 Although this countercultural turn is obviously
significant as a way to boost the New Right’s appeal, it also represents
the left’s own counterculture coming home to roost, as right-wing
metapolitics absorbs more fully the dynamism of the 1960s. Like its
predecessor, Identitarian counterculture is idealistic, rebellious,
uncompromising, and self-consciously “cool.” It is “metapolitics with a
punch.”48 For this reason, it is more than just the right harkening
“back to the slogans and forms of action that, since the days of the
68er student revolt, one associates above all with the Left,” as Thomas
Wagner suggested.49 By injecting adrenaline and restlessness into the
New Right, Identitarian counterculture also returns the movement more
closely to the cult of youth and action that defined fascism’s
countercultural style.
Whereas many New Right writers envy the New Left’s intellectuals,
Identitarians envy the New Left’s revolutionary energy, which issued in
protests and demonstrations that spurred thousands to concrete action.
For both camps, [End Page 40] Ernst Jünger is an inspiration. This has
much to do with his long life (he died in February 1998 at the age of
102) and trajectory as a writer, which shifted from a fiery “Old
Testament” of ultranationalist writings in the 1920s to a mature “New
Testament” of detached meditations on nature and history. To be sure,
Jünger remains best known for the former—as a celebrant of the World War
I “front community” and a foe of Weimar democracy, whom Thomas Mann once
damned as an “ice-cold playboy of barbarism.”50 His early essays and war
memoirs endeavored to locate a new elite forged in the trenches and
other heroic zones of modern life, whose vitality and iron will would
revolutionize the decaying bourgeois world. Though Jünger was never a
Nazi (and still less a thug), he was doubtless a fascist on spiritual
and aesthetic grounds, an avant-garde intellectual who fused longings
for collective renewal with paeans to danger, violence, instinct, and
youth. “Our hope rests in those young people,” Jünger proclaimed in
1929, “who suffer fevers because the fresh sore of disgust eats away
within them.” This line, Zúquete notes, “is found in many Identitarian
circles across Europe,” a sign that they are eager to turn their disgust
at the times into the practical business of revolt.51
The urgency of total cultural rebirth is plain from Jünger’s essay “On
Danger” (1930). The piece praised the intrusion of danger into modern
life through technologies like automobile travel, which disrupt the
bourgeois dream of a unified, good, rational, and secure humanity.
One of the best objections that has been raised against this valuation
is that under such circumstances life would be intolerably boring. This
objection has never been of a purely theoretical nature but was applied
practically by those young persons who, in the foggy dark of night, left
their parental home to pursue danger in America, on the sea, or in the
French Foreign Legion. It is a sign of the domination of bourgeois
values that danger slips into the distance. . . . For these values to
disappear entirely, however, will never be possible, not just because
they are always present but above all because the human heart is in need
not only of security but of danger too. Yet this desire is capable of
revealing itself in bourgeois society only as protest.
In 1930, Jünger believed a tipping point was nigh, when the hegemonic
liberal order would yield to a new realm in which “not security but
danger will determine the order of life.” A “new style of language,” he
wrote, was [End Page 41] emerging, a sign that a “wholly different
society” was waiting to be born.52 The appeal of this insurgent spirit
(and “disgust” at bourgeois life) has never fully faded. It was with
such writings in mind that Armin Mohler penned another essay in 1973
called “The Fascist Style,” which endeavored to define fascism in a way
that would free it from association with Nazism and give it new life in
the present. According to Mohler, the hallmark of fascism was not a
political system; rather, it was a “bearing” or “style” that was
expressed in the attraction to decisive action, self-sacrifice, and
heroic struggle. These were postures Mohler found epitomized in Jünger’s
early writings, as well as in non-Germans like the Italian futurist
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. In a 1995 interview, Mohler admitted he was a
“fascist” in this qualified sense.53
Jünger’s post-1933 works, however, turned away from political activism.
He resisted involvement in the Nazi regime and became one of the most
important writers in the so-called “inner emigration.” His writings
under the Third Reich—especially the roman à clef On the Marble Cliffs
(1938), which was widely interpreted as anti-Nazi—chronicled the
brutality around him and held out a metaphysical vision that could lead
readers away from the nihilism and plebian culture of modern life—the
deep conditions, he believed, underlying not just the Nazi regime, but
the American and Soviet nightmares as well.54 For Jünger, humanity was
entering a time of “titans,” an epoch defined by capitalist
globalization, technological rationality, cultural impoverishment, and
growing uniformity and control, as modern man’s insatiable lust for
power spreads “the system” around the globe. Though Jünger believed this
cognitive horizon would one day yield to a new age of “gods”—defined by
reverence for the arts and the sacred and a nonalienated relationship to
the earth—he projected such a “form change” off into the distant future.
The present was a posthistorical era, in which thinkers could merely
“contemplate the stranded objects of history washed up on the shore.”55
Jünger’s posthistoire vision was shared by other far-right intellectuals
after 1945 who ceased to believe that revolutionary change was just
around the corner. For Armin Mohler, the West had entered an unhappy
“interregnum.” For Julius Evola, it was “Kali Yuga”—a Hindu term for a
dark age of strife preceding a cyclical rebirth—in which aristocrats of
the soul could only “ride the tiger” of secular modernity.56
It would be hard to overstate Jünger’s importance for the New Right,
especially in Germany, Austria, and France, where activists like Armin
[End Page 42] Mohler and Alain de Benoist not only praised and defended
Jünger’s works, but enjoyed close access to him as well. A recent
assessment of New Right ideology classed Jünger among the movement’s
“intellectual forefathers” and traced this “great fascination” to
Jünger’s “oppositional stance toward the National Socialist regime and
the resulting ability to annex his thought world politically.”57
Jünger’s influence on New Right counterculture is no less profound,
though less widely acknowledged in the scholarly literature. The chords
of Jüngerian cultural despair were unmistakable in a 1995 Junge Freiheit
article by Roland Bubik, which damned the “emptiness” of Germany’s
consumer society and called for a “counterculture” that would “create on
the basis of [the Right’s] own standards something new atop the
postmodern ruins.”58 This call, Horst Seferens observed, fits
comfortably within the discursive boundaries of Jünger’s later works,
which pioneered the “turn to culture” that became typical of the
Conservative Revolution’s metapolitical reinvention.59
Given the New Right’s perpetual reading of the present as a time of
crisis, it is unsurprising that they remain activists in some form. As
Rüdiger Graf pointed out, the feeling of crisis is rooted in a “dramatic
plot” that views the present as a “moment of decision” poised between
disaster and salvation, in which one must “act in order to prevent the
undesirable and realize the desirable option.”60 The decision faced by
figures like Jünger or Bubik is not between political activism and
political quietism, but between the actions appropriate for either
short-term insurrection (the optimistic beachhead stance) or long-term
survival (the pessimistic refugium position). Jünger’s sprawling oeuvre
supplies ideas and canonical texts serviceable to each. In both modes,
Jünger articulated what the historian Barbara Rosenwein would call the
“emotional community” of New Right counterculture, defined by
“fundamental assumptions, values, goals, feeling rules and accepted
modes of expression.” Such an emotional community can extend beyond
direct social interaction to include a “textual community” of readers
and writers as well.61
The New Right’s crisis mentality and emotional community can be seen in
one of Jünger’s signature notions—the “lost post” (der verlorene
Posten). Despite its military connotations, Jünger first described the
“lost post,” not in his Weimar-era accounts of trench warfare, but in a
1938 book called The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios. There
Jünger described the “lost post” as the fate that befalls small groups
or whole communities when they [End Page 43] find themselves fighting a
losing battle against the course of history. Though he named many
examples—Moorish Grenada, Old Regime aristocrats in revolutionary Paris,
the holdouts in besieged cities like Carthage or Saguntum—Jünger clearly
intended the “lost post” to resonate with readers opposed to the Nazis
and stranded, as he was, in the inner emigration. Those holding a “lost
post,” Jünger argued, experience a special kind of solidarity and moral
clarity: reliance on one another fosters a “feeling of spiritual
brotherhood,” in which each knows they must bear witness to the values
and way of life that are under threat. Holding a lost position sometimes
means standing one’s ground to the “last man.” “The representative power
of the individual can be tremendous,” Jünger assured his readers.
“[H]istory provides us with examples of how a single honest witness
turned a verdict around, though the millions remained silent.”62
After 1945, Jünger saw himself still occupying a “lost post”—a spokesman
for a supposedly wholesome Conservative Revolutionary philosophy that
had been betrayed by Nazism and was now officially spurned in the new
German Federal Republic. Jünger’s post-1945 works intended to foster a
counterpublic in which this philosophy could be circulated during what
he assumed would be long years in the wilderness. What is striking,
however, is Jünger’s pessimism about the ability of this alternative
cultural space to effect any immediate political change. This is
illustrated by his decision, in spring 1949, to withdraw from plans to
establish a new journal. The publication would have included editorial
work by Martin Heidegger, the political theorist Carl Schmitt, and
several others sympathetic to the Conservative Revolution. The plan came
to naught, however, because of Heidegger and Jünger’s unwillingness to
appear as political actors and risk the attacks they feared such a
journal would draw. Although Heidegger and Jünger “saw themselves as
members of an intellectual opposition” to the new liberal-democratic
West German republic, they were reluctant to become “active dissidents.”
For Heidegger and Jünger, the West German public sphere was just a
left-liberal version of the stifling intolerance that had marked the
Nazi public sphere. In their view, both regimes ruthlessly attacked
political enemies and free thinkers who broke with political
orthodoxy.63 In Heidegger’s view, a new “awakening” could no longer be
actively brought about but could only be awaited with philosophical and
artistic “readiness.” “Only a God can save us,” Heidegger famously
declared in a 1966 interview.64 [End Page 44]
Jünger’s position, by contrast, remained more counterculturally active—
devoted to network building and the creation of private and semi-public
channels of communication—despite his pessimism about the chances for a
fundamental transformation. Jünger, like Heidegger, styled himself a
victim and wallowed in his imagined marginality. But Jünger, unlike
Heidegger, did much more to strike the seemingly authentic pose of taboo
breaker and to portray, in his published writings, postures of heroic
nonconformity and countercultural camaraderie. Resistance is central to
Jünger’s 1951 book Der Waldgang (The Forest Passage)—a work sometimes
translated, appropriately if less literally, as The Treatise of the
Rebel. Here Jünger described what he called the Waldgänger (“forest
rebel”), the inwardly sovereign individual able to resist not just
totalitarianism, but also the softer tyranny of materialistic mass
democracy. For Jünger, such aristocrats of the soul are relatively few;
they are an elite—often artists, philosophers, or saints—who bear
witness to true freedom and virtue. Though in the world, these forest
rebels stand outside society’s grasp. They are called to walk a higher
spiritual path and to illuminate the way for others. In Jünger’s view,
such a small yet tenacious resistance can ultimately turn the tide. “[A]
tiny group of resolved individuals can be dangerous,” he wrote, because
their will “can outweigh that of ten, twenty, or a thousand men.”65
The forest rebel exemplifies Jünger’s adaptation of the “lost position”
to postwar conditions. Jünger did not call for active dissent or
protests in the street; still less did he call for violent uprising.
Instead, he exhibited an attitude of spiritual opposition to the modern
technocratic state, which regulates and monitors every aspect of its
subjects’ lives. What defines the forest rebel is not explicit ideology
but a fearless “determination to resist . . . The forest rebel thus
possesses a primal relationship to freedom, which, in the perspective of
our times, is expressed in his intention to oppose the automatism and
not to draw its ethical conclusion, which is fatalism. . . . Everyone
finds themselves trapped in a predicament today, and the attempts we see
to hold this coercion at bay represent bold experiments upon which a far
more significant destiny depends.” Jünger expected a small minority of
readers would find the book and be inspired to a similar practice. The
reference to “automatism”—Jünger-speak for the individual’s loss of
power to technology and social planning, which he associated above all
with the United States—points, however, to a subtle political message.66
The Forest Passage voiced the postwar grievance of [End Page 45] many
West Germans who felt their land occupied, culturally and politically,
by vapid, cookie-cutter America. The text’s appeal for today’s
“ethnopluralists” springs not just from Jünger’s rebel posture but from
a similar sense of loss. In a 2017 memoir, the Austrian Identitarian
leader Martin Sellner described his right-wing milieu while a student at
the University of Vienna as a band of “forest rebels.” “The idea of a
‘cultural revolution from the right’ was our grand vision,” Sellner
recalled. “At the university, dominated by leftists, we felt ourselves
freedom fighters of the spirit.”67 In the words of one commentator, The
Forest Passage remains, now as then, a “plea for the establishment of an
autonomous, subversive counterculture.”68
The solidarity of this countercultural elite is a major theme in
Jünger’s 1977 novel, Eumeswil. Here the forest rebel is transformed into
the similar figure of the “anarch.” “The difference,” Jünger wrote, “is
that the forest rebel has been expelled from society, while the anarch
has expelled society from himself. He is and remains his own master in
all circumstances.”69 The novel describes a small group of such people
in a postapocalyptic future. They are a tiny band of seekers and true
thinkers occupying a lost post in a world given over to vulgarity and
hedonism. Surrounded by cynics and philistines, these unfashionable
“anarchs” hold symposia and meet in a garden where they cultivate a lost
world of myth and spirituality. Jünger provocatively labels this circle
“people of the day after tomorrow and the day before yesterday.”70 Born
into the wrong century, they are stewards for past values whose time
will come again. Of course, despite its futuristic setting, the novel
was in fact a thinly veiled portrait of what Jünger believed was his own
nihilistic present. The model of countercultural community he provided
was intended for the veterans and heirs of Weimar’s Conservative
Revolution—a lesson in how to hunker down and play the long game.
On today’s New Right, there are some who have taken this lesson to
heart. Alain de Benoist initially fell in love with the revolutionary
Ernst Jünger of the 1920s and 1930s. But “[w]ith time, and thus with
age,” he remarked in 2008, “I undoubtedly became more appreciative of
the ‘second’ Jünger—of the Anarch and even more of the Rebel, of the
‘timeless’ thinker who, having risen [End Page 46] higher, also sees
further.”71 Another good example is the German playwright Botho Strauß.
In a controversial 1993 essay for Der Spiegel, Germany’s premier
newsweekly, Strauß rehearsed a litany of New Right complaints,
denouncing his country’s media obsessions, shallow economic values, cult
of “tolerance,” and unwillingness to defend its native culture. Titled
“Impending Tragedy,” the essay also called for spiritual resistance. “So
many wonderful writers still to be read—so much substance and
exemplariness for a young person to become a maverick. You simply have
to be able to choose; the only thing you need is the courage to secede
(Mut zur Sezession), to turn away from the mainstream.” A measure of the
essay’s impact on the New Right scene is that this phrase was adopted a
decade later, in 2003, as the title of the New Right magazine Sezession.
The essay’s aim, Richard Evans wrote, was “to break the intellectual
tyranny of the post-1968 generation” and make it acceptable “for Germans
to dare to call themselves right-wing once more.” Yet Strauß’s call was
not for collective revolt, but for personal withdrawal so as to save
one’s soul from the moral decay of modern life. Amidst the madness,
Strauß urged retreat into a “garden” of likeminded nonconformists, a
countercultural space “only accessible to the few and out of which
nothing of value to the masses escapes.”72 “The real thrust of the
essay,” one observer noted, “involves an appeal to an elite group to
preserve true living and thinking for a future age. Strauß leaves no
doubt that only a select few deserve admission to this exclusive
circle.”73
More even than his explicit ideas, Strauß’s outsider stance and mood of
cantankerous elitism are indebted to Ernst Jünger. Like Jünger, Strauß
exhibits key features of the “emotional community” of New Right
counterculture: both share feelings of despair and disgust at the
present state of society, a sense of cultural loss, and a belief that
they belong to an embattled minority in a lost post, bravely witnessing
to higher values and truths. In a 1995 essay, Strauß wrote that Jünger’s
resistance to the pedestrian concerns of the “horrid, buzzing majority”
had made him a “prototype” of the “subversive-radical” artist able to
escape the fetters of his age.74 In the expanded version of “Impending
Tragedy” that appeared in the 1994 New Right anthology The
Self-Confident Nation, Strauß elaborated in language that could have
been lifted straight out of Jünger’s Eumeswil. “The minority,” Strauß
proclaimed, “is by far too many! There is only the tiny cluster of
scattered individuals . . . [and] only in the narrowest
literary-ecological enclaves, in thought-and feeling-reservations, [End
Page 47] is survival still possible.”75 It is hard to imagine a clearer
statement of New Right counterculture in its despondent refugium mode.
In more recent works, Strauß has continued this language of the “lost
post,” calling on an aristocracy of the spirit to simply opt out of
mainstream culture. “At the start of the 21st century,” Strauß wrote in
2013, “the outsider type has all but vanished. . . . The loner . . .
seems to have no more prestige, but appears to most as a cranky figure.
The conformities [and] proprieties . . . that govern the juste milieu of
the critical public are only strengthened by the new media. The
mainstream can only get wider, more powerful, and more amusing. . . .
When everyone thinks that, even in the middle of nowhere, the point is
to find adequate society online, then a new role falls to the person who
is not attached.”76 In another essay two years later, Strauß proclaimed
German language and literature under threat from mass immigration, and
called for a new “secret Germany” to carry on the allegedly threatened
intellectual heritage of Böhme, Klopstock, Nietzsche, Jünger, and Celan.
The phrase invokes the elitist “circle” assembled around the early
twentieth-century poet Stefan George, whose charismatic leadership and
disdain for bourgeois culture have often been seen as a precursor to
Hitler’s political style.77To pine for a new “secret Germany” is to
translate this antidemocratic temper to today’s political climate.
Indeed, the piece, titled “The Last German,” suggests that most of
Strauß’s compatriots are as unmoored from German high culture as the
latest refugee, and thus unable to feel the “cultural pain” that comes
from knowing one’s tradition is vanishing.78 Like the monks who kept
classical learning alive at the end of the Roman Empire, Strauß’s
countercultural “secret Germany” is tasked with nothing less than saving
German Kultur during our own dark age.
The willingness of Strauß or Jünger to await justification in the eyes
of a redeemed future is harder to find on today’s New Right. For the
younger generation, New Right counterculture is more often not a space
of refuge in a long metapolitical struggle; rather, it is a demand for
cultural revolution now, an announcement that the “day after tomorrow”
has finally arrived. This is particularly the case for the
Identitarians, who function as a tech-and media-savvy youth wing of the
New Right, mobilizing people in their teens and twenties to protect
European societies from the supposed ravages of multiculturalism.
Identitarianism’s rise since the early 2000s is part of a broader
evolution of the New Right. Although the movement experienced a
flowering in the 1990s, fueled by high-profile publications like
Strauß’s [End Page 48] “Impending Tragedy,” by the late 1990s the New
Right was again on the margins. What followed was a generational and
organizational shift. Crucial to this transformation was the
establishment of new institutions, magazines, and publishing houses, and
a newly aggressive conception of metapolitics.79 Often, this means
metapolitical work in direct coordination with political movements or
parties. As Karlheinz Weißmann argued in 2013, “Metapolitics is not
everything. Metapolitical strategies are only meaningful as part of
political strategies.” Old-timers like de Benoist kept right-wing
politicians at arm’s length and focused on intellectual production.
Up-and-coming leaders of today’s New Right, such as Erik Lehnert, head
of a New Right think tank called the Institute for State Policy
(established in 2000), are less cautious. In June 2018, Lehnert gave a
talk on Jünger’s political philosophy in the AfD’s Bundestag office in
Berlin.80
A prime example of this more aggressive metapolitics is the publisher
Arktos. Created in 2009 and currently based in Budapest, Arktos bills
itself the foremost publisher of the European New Right in English and
is today almost certainly “the largest retailer of radical right
literature in the world.”81 Arktos’s activism is exclusively
metapolitical, though its culture warriors harbor dreams of a political
revolution they hope fully to see. “Liberalism and its various offshoots
are now in their death throes,” declared Tomislav Sunic, an Arktos
author, in 2011, “and it is only a matter of how many years remain
before we see it crash.”82 The sentiment was echoed by Arktos’s Swedish
founder, Daniel Friberg, in 2015. “After more than half a century of
retreat, marginalization, and constant concessions to an ever-more
aggressive and demanding Left,” Friberg wrote, “the true European Right
is returning with a vengeance. . . . We traditionalists and Rightists,
who are the defenders of Europe. . . . now step up to the front and
centre. We are the forefront of the future of Europe, and we represent
the eternal ideas and values that are now returning across a broad
front, building something new out of the solid stones we have found
amongst the ruins.”83 Friberg illustrates an insurgent countercultural
spirit that is no longer content to hold on in Strauß’s
“literary-ecological enclaves.” The aim of metapolitics, after all, is
not cultural activity for its own sake but creation of the conditions
for wholesale political change. After experimenting as a teenager in the
1990s with skinheadism, Friberg encountered the French New Right in
2004, which offered both “intellectual cachet” and a “politically
formidable alternative to white-power jingoism.” The entrepreneurial
Friberg [End Page 49] subsequently founded a series of music,
publishing, and internet ventures “with the goal of cultivating a new
generation of rightists with tools to challenge the Left at the level of
ideas.” It is a media empire that represents metapolitics as a
multidimensional assault on a public sphere in which far-right ideas can
now circulate with impunity. Although Evola’s call to “ride the tiger”
used to be “a healthy and necessary strategy,” Friberg wrote in 2015,
“it isn’t any more. Europe is bleeding, but the tiger—liberal
modernity—is dying as well. It is time to climb off and strangle it
while a European civilization still exists.”84
The same countercultural energy is at work in the Austrian Identitarian
Markus Willinger’s Generation Identity. The book—first published by
Arktos in 2013 and now available in eleven languages—carries the
grandiose subtitle “A Declaration of War against the ‘68ers.” As the
foreword by the French Identitarian activist Philippe Vardon puts it,
this is not a work for those who “complacently mope about in their
self-appointed role as the ‘last men standing.’” For Vardon and
Willinger, the lost post is also the “front line” in a battle to reclaim
Europe from the generation of the 1960s. The Identitarians, the foreword
proclaims, “are the first pangs of a new birth.”85 “[T]his
counter-culture must be embodied and must authenticate itself in life,
in action,” Vardon professed in Elements for an Identitarian
Counter-Culture (2011), a work which tied this project to the
“nonconformist” French fascist sympathizer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.86
Such cries for a countercultural uprising are a recurring Identitarian
theme. The movement’s branch in the German city of Halle calls itself
Kontrakultur Halle and aims to “establish a counterculture against the
leftist Zeitgeist.” In 2017, the group’s leader, Mario Müller, penned a
book, Kontrakultur, which is half philosophical primer and half
lifestyle guide for those ready to join the revolt.87
Willinger’s own book has a raw, undergraduate quality—it is littered
with vague ideas and seeming contradictions—but it makes up for these
shortcomings in its impassioned, almost lyrical language. Willinger
saddles the 68ers with all manner of evils—from destroying faith and
family, to increasing alienation through their embrace of globalization.
The text exudes moral urgency, addressing the reader as a fellow lonely
suffer in search of meaning and connection. Willinger writes:
Come to us, brothers and sisters! In this life there are still battles
to fight and struggles to win. We need your desire for action and your
passion in order to defeat our parents. [End Page 50]
Let’s end their reign of terror together. Let’s join each other in
entering into a new era. Let’s build a new world together. . . . A world
in which there will be genuine values and true friendship. A world of
community and solidarity. . . . Join us in the struggle against the
’68ers. Defend yourself with all your strength. Join us to reclaim our
inheritance, our country, and our identity.
For Willinger, the 68ers are not just the enemy—they are also a model of
successful countercultural revolt, a movement that “succeeded in shaping
the Zeitgeist of an entire generation” through its books, art, and
music. “We will write our own essays and books,” Willinger declares,
“sing our own songs, make videos, design graphics, create art, and daily
weaken your grip on power. . . . There will come a day on which it is
entirely natural for a student to be an identitarian, just as it was to
be a Leftist in ’68 and a Rightist in ’33.”88 The line makes plain that
Identitarian counterculture is absorbing more than just the dynamism of
the Sixties.
It is important to recognize that the dilemma in New Right
counterculture between the choice of insurgency and refuge is by no
means resolved; in fact, the division runs right through the middle of
the German New Right’s most intellectually sophisticated group. With
headquarters in the tiny east German village of Schnellroda, and
counting writers like Götz Kubitschek, Ellen Kositza, Martin Lichtmesz,
and Erik Lehnert among its voices, the group runs the Institute for
State Policy, the magazine Sezession, and a high-brow press (Antaios).
Most welcome the New Right’s Identitarian rebranding—the Austrian
Identitarian Martin Sellner is a frequent Sezession contributor—and few
have shied from political activism. Fully committed to the brainy
meta-politics of New Right pioneers like de Benoist, the group also has
practical ties with the AfD. Kubitschek, an early advocate of
“conservative-subversive actions,” has been a featured speaker at
anti-immigrant Pegida rallies.89 As Volker Weiß noted, they embody
Jünger’s hope in the revolutionary power of “disgust.”90 In a 2003
obituary for Armin Mohler, Kubitschek praised Mohler’s “The Fascist
Style,” which he first encountered as a student in 1990. The essay
“aimed at mobilization,” Kubitschek recalled, “and ‘mobilization’ is
what we students experienced to the core: nothing was the same again.”
Of course, as Mohler made plain, “The Fascist Style,” which so stirred
Kubitschek, merely distilled the heroic postures from Jünger and his
fellow fascist aesthetes that had seized Mohler in his own formative
years.91 If Jünger decisively demobilized after 1945, figures like
Mohler and Kubitschek retained more radical zeal. [End Page 51]
In 2015, the group published transcripts of conversations held over the
course of four evenings. Called Tristesse Droite, the volume’s stated
aim was to correct misunderstandings about the New Right within the
mainstream media. The book captures the countercultural solidarity of
the New Right perfectly: its atmosphere is cozy and familiar, the
discussants all see themselves as “outsiders,” and disagreements take
place with trust that one’s views will still be heard with sympathy and
good will. The book is also marked by a confessional quality that makes
it highly insightful. In particular, many of the participants harbor
ambivalence about their own activism—a kind of inner conflict between
the carpe diem spirit of a Willinger, and the dark suspicion of a Jünger
or Strauß that the New Right’s breakthrough moment is still far over the
horizon. As Kositza explains in a brief foreword, they are “active
pessimists,” a condition which the title—Tristesse Droite, or
“right-wing melancholy”—intends to capture.92
Older, better read, and certainly more sober than hotheads like
Willinger, members of the group feel their own weakness acutely. Though
there is no consensus about the term, all agree that they are something
like a Traditionskompanie—a rebel company of independent spirits holding
on to the best elements of the past and able, like Jünger’s “anarch,” to
expel modern society from their souls. Most support AfD, but with little
hope that it will prove truly transformative. (As several members
observe, they have been erroneously predicting a right-wing Tendenzwende
for decades, yet the system always stabilizes itself.) Even if AfD won
power, it would still operate within Max Weber’s “iron cage” of modern
life and most of the work of metapolitics—transforming mind and
spirit—would still remain.93 The iron cage, Kositza points out, is also
furnished with “hammocks” and “rubber walls,” lulling people into
consumerist complacency. Erik Lehnert speaks for many in arguing that
the group’s real task is preservation—making sure that the “destruction
of tradition . . . does not happen so fast, that one so to speak still
has refuges, that one even still remembers that there is a German soul:
for that there must be a place.” In the words of another participant,
Nils Wegner, the “refuges” of the New Right scene are “almost necessary
for survival,” a place to channel “one’s disgust at reality” and no
longer feel like one “marooned in their own land.”94
In the end, Tristesse Droite conveys a strong sense of resignation to
the necessity of New Right counterculture playing a long game, despite
ardent [End Page 52] wishes for a speedier cultural conquest and a clear
willingness to do what they can to realize that right-wing awakening in
our day. The “lost post,” Kubitschek muses, “is simultaneously a heroic
and hopeless concept. . . . One holds out despite the lack of hope.” As
Martin Lichtmesz reminds them, Jünger himself once remarked that the
“historical gulfstream” has been blowing powerfully leftward since 1789,
and thus the person of the right “is forever fighting a rear-guard
action.” If this is true, then the New Right can take some comfort in
imagining itself to be the real counterculture—or perhaps, the most
countercultural counterculture. Even the radical left can offer “no real
opposition” to the mainstream, Martin Lichtmesz argues, because it
“represents the same values which are already metapolitically the total
consensus.” It is the far right, he maintained, which is truly reviled
because it goes “against the grain,” refusing to echo the “great
‘emancipatory’ and liberal pathos” and its familiar calls for “more
democracy.”95 For a counterculture, being the movement most hated by the
mainstream is at least some consolation.
“Historians,” Dieter Langewiesche warned, “are competent only for
retrospection. As experts they are fundamentally incapable of
predicting.”96 Sage advice—and I will not risk my own credentials by
hazarding a prediction here about the future of the New Right. More
visible from the historian’s perch is the journey of the New Right’s
countercultural impulse: from the overheated intellectual and cultural
fascism of the early twentieth century; to the patient metapolitical
project that arose in reaction to 1960s counterculture, content to
cultivate oppositional spaces and lob “fundamental criticism” into the
public sphere; to the emergence, around 2000, of a younger, more
restless contingent eager to take those ideas into new media and onto
the street in an aggressive campaign to “strangle” an already ailing
liberal-democratic West. With this most recent stage, the New Right’s
countercultural impulse returns to its fascist origins—albeit with
significant differences, such as the renunciation of violence, picked up
along the way. My argument is not just that fascism has an important
place in the New Right’s genealogy (hardly a new claim in itself); it is
that Identitarianism’s effort to harness the rebelliousness of the 1960s
reunites New Right thinking with the dynamism of [End Page 53] interwar
fascism. Identitarianism turns “the fascist style,” which for Armin
Mohler was mostly a writer’s posture, lived out on the printed page,
into a vibrant protest movement once again. Although Ernst Jünger is by
no means the sole intellectual inspiration for New Right counterculture,
he is perhaps the most useful. A gifted writer and thinker, Jünger not
only lends credibility to the New Right by articulating its ideas at a
high level. He also offers a powerful personal model of far-right
countercultural revolt in both its beachhead and refugium postures.
But perhaps two historically minded reflections are in order regarding
how to think about the future of this division. The first is that
possession of dual countercultural styles should be counted as a
strength, an element of strategic flexibility for the New Right in its
long-term goal of bringing the Conservative Revolution to full life.
Should activists like Daniel Friberg or Götz Kubitschek fail in their
bid for cultural hegemony, the countercultural refugium awaits, from
which new crusades may be launched in more propitious times. After all,
the history of fascism as a movement, Roger Griffin argued, exhibits two
main features: “(i) the systematic failure of fascism to seize power,
whether in non-liberal or liberal states, except in inter-war Italy and
Germany; (ii) the protean quality of palingenetic ultra-nationalism as a
mythic core which has enabled fascism to surface in an unbroken stream
of new ideological permutations and organizational forms right up to the
present day.”97 If Griffin is correct, then defeat and reshuffling are
more norm than exception, the process by which fascism strives for total
societal rebirth (palingenesis) via a series of countercultural turns.
In this sense, fascism shares in the far right’s dream of a New Order to
replace the authority and hierarchy that were laid to rest with the
Ancien Régime—a dream they have pursued across diverse and shifting
historical realities since 1789.
The second point may also bring some comfort to those who look with
foreboding at the New Right’s resurgence. As Fritz Stern recognized, the
political temptations of cultural despair are not ideologically stable.
What the 1960s revealed, Stern wrote, was that the revolt against
modernity and longing for “a new communal existence” had merely shifted
from fascism’s “mystical nationalism” to a vague “utopian socialism.”
But the sentiments fueling that attack remained remarkably consistent:
rebellion “against the emptiness of a materialist age, against the
hypocrisy of bourgeois life and the estrangement from nature, against
spiritual impoverishment amidst plenty, [End Page 54] against the whole
‘liberal-capitalist system.’”98 It is an arresting observation. If the
energy of cultural grievance is today predominantly on the right, there
is no reason to suppose it will remain there. Should those hungering for
a new New Left get their wish and the political winds shift, then the
New Right may be “riding the tiger” once again.
For helpful feedback and stimulating discussions, the author thanks Tim
Anderson, Martin Jay, Lawrence Rosenthal, Matthew Specter, two anonymous
JSR readers, and audiences at the 2018 German Studies Association annual
conference, IE University (Madrid), and the Institute for European
Studies, of the University of California, Berkeley.
1. The motto features prominently on the magazine’s website,
www.sezession.de. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
2. https://www.identitaere-bewegung.de/blog/europa-nostra-am-25-08-2018/
(accessed 10 September 2018).
3. See www.counter-currents.com and www.alternativeright.com. Richard
Spencer, who claims to have coined the term “alternative right” in 2008
to distinguish himself from mainstream conservatism, is a good example
of a self-described American Identitarian whose writings look to the
European New Right. See Tamir Bar-On, “Richard B. Spencer and the Alt
Right,” in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, ed. Mark Sedgwick (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 226–27; and Daniel
Steinmetz-Jenkins, “The European Intellectual Origins of the Alt-Right,”
İstanbul Üniversitesi Sosyoloji Dergisi/Journal of Sociology 38, no. 2
(2018): 255–66.
4. Milo Yiannopoulos, “Joy Villa is Just the First Wave of the New
Conservative Counterculture,” Breibart, 15 February 2017,
http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2017/02/15/joy-villa-trump-join-counter-culture/
(accessed 28 January 2018). Cas Mudde terms the Alt Right a (mostly
online) far-right subculture, defined as a group “within the larger
national culture that share[s] an identity, values, practices, and
cultural objects.” By contrast, he describes the New Right as “a very
loosely structured movement of individuals and magazines that spans the
globe.” Neither characterization, however, captures the qualities of
collective defiance and dissent which give to each a countercultural
flavor. See Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today (Cambridge: Polity, 2019),
53–55, 59–62.
5. See Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and
Workers in 1968 (New York: Berghahn, 2004); and Elliot Neaman, Free
Radicals: Agitators, Hippies, Urban Guerillas, and Germany’s Youth
Revolt of the 1960s and 1970s (Candor, NY: Telos, 2016). Of course,
1960s counterculture was not homogenous. One divide was between the
“dropout” ethos and New Age mysticism of the (mainly American) hippies,
and the protests and revolts of the New Left and the student movements,
which “carried a sharper political edge.” See Doug Rossinow, “‘The
Revolution is About Our Lives’: The New Left’s Counterculture,” in
Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960’s and 70’s, ed.
Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002),
100.
6. Mudde, The Far Right Today, 30–41. The “Great Replacement” theory was
popularized by Renaud Camus, Le Grand Remplacement (Neuilly-sur-Seine,
France: David Reinharc, 2011).
7. Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints, trans. Norman Shapiro
(Petoskey, MI: Social Contract Press, 2018), 68–69.
8. Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West (New York: St. Martin’s
Griffin, 2002), 80–89. Buchanan is especially appalled by the Frankfurt
School—led by Marcuse and Theodor Adorno—which he calls “a prime suspect
and principal accomplice” in the West’s collapse (88). On the problems
with the charge, see Martin Jay, “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment:
The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe,” Salmagundi
168/169 (2010/2011): 30–40. Buchanan’s proximity to Identitarianism is
discussed in Edward Ashbee, “Patrick J. Buchanan and the Death of the
West,” in Sedgwick, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, 121–36.
9. Éric Zemmour, “Immigration: le réel interdit,” Le Monde, 12 October
2007,
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2007/10/11/immigration-le-reel-interdit-par-eric-zemmour_965798_3232.html
(accessed 13 January 2020).
10. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York:
Penguin, 2005), 390.
11. On the diverse forms taken by the countercultural impulse throughout
history, see Ken Goffman and Dan Joy, Counterculture through the Ages:
From Abraham to Acid House (New York: Villard, 2004).
12. Zeev Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of
Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution,
trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994),
3–5.
13. On this point, see Federico Finchelstein, From Populism to Fascism
in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 26–30.
14. Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 30.
15. Neaman, Free Radicals, 14.
16. As Corey Robin notes, “Conservatives usually style themselves as
chastened skeptics. . . . But, in reality, conservatives have been
temperamentally antagonistic, politically insurgent, and utterly opposed
to established moral convention.” The split within New Right
counterculture explored here can be attributed to a radicalized
conservatism expressing this combative impulse in either a
pessimistic-realist or optimistic-utopian manner. See Robin’s The
Reactionary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 113.
17. Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, Manifesto for a European
Renaissance (London: Arktos, 2012), 9.
18. Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2007), 33–35; and Tamir Bar-On, “Transnationalism and the
French Nouvelle Droite,” Patterns of Prejudice 45, no. 3 (2011): 203–4.
On the French New Right in general, see Michael Torigian’s “The
Philosophical Foundations of the French New Right,” Telos 117 (1999):
6–42; and the pioneering work by Pierre-André Taguieff, especially Sur
la Nouvelle Droite. Jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes &
Cie, 1994).
19. Tomislav Sunic, Against Equality and Democracy: The European New
Right (London: Arktos, 2011). For an attempt to place de Benoist and the
Nouvelle Droite on the right, despite their interest in the left’s
anticapitalist, antiglobalist, and anti-imperialist positions, see Tamir
Bar-On, “The French New Right: Neither Right, nor Left?” Journal for the
Study of Radicalism 8, no. 1 (2014): 1–44. Bar-On notes that de Benoist
has repeatedly proclaimed “that egalitarianism is the major ill of the
modern world,” and denounced the “abstract equality” of liberal
societies (27–28). In placing the New Right on the right, Bar-On draws
on Norberto Bobbio’s argument that the key difference between left and
right is in their attitudes to inequality. Whereas the left seeks to
redress inequality as an evil artificially produced by culture and
society, the right views inequality more positively, as a natural
outcome to be defended. See Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The
Significance of a Political Distinction, trans. Allan Cameron (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997).
20. Bar-On, Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, 23–32; Roger Griffin,
“Interregnum or Endgame? The Radical Right in the ‘Post-Fascist’ Era,”
in The Populist Radical Right: A Reader, ed. Cas Mudde (New York:
Routledge, 2017), 16. See also Roger Griffin, “Plus ça change! The
Fascist Pedigree of the Nouvelle Droite,” in The Development of the
Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le Pen, ed. Edward J. Arnold
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 217–52.
21. See Alain de Benoist, “Alain de Benoist Answers Tamir Bar-on,”
Journal for the Study of Radicalism 8, no. 1 (2014): 141–68; and Tamir
Bar-On, “A Response to Alain de Benoist,” Journal for the Study of
Radicalism 8, no. 2 (2014): 123–68.
22. Roger Griffin, “Foreword: Another Face? Another Mazeway? Reflections
on the Newness and Rightness of the European New Right,” in Bar-On,
Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, x. In a 2008 essay describing
Jünger’s importance for the New Right, de Benoist wrote of Jünger and
his fellow Conservative Revolutionaries that he “by no means saw [in
them] a current of thought that was merely a Wegbereiter [pathbreaker]
for National Socialism . . . but an alternative course whose development
and better structuring could have saved the world from Hitler’s
disaster.” Alain de Benoist, “Ernst Jünger et la Nouvelle Droite,”
http://alawata-alaindebenoist.blogspot.com/2014/02/ernst-junger-et-la-nouvelle-droite.html
(accessed 11 February 2020).
23. Diethelm Prowe, “‘Classic’ Fascism and the New Radical Right in
Western Europe: Comparisons and Contrasts,” Contemporary European
History 3, no. 3 (1994): 299–301; and Roger Woods, Germany’s New Right
as Culture and Politics (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),
10–11. Neaman observes that these “structural similarities” are
outweighed by ideological differences, including the NPD’s World War II
revisionism and desire to recover lost German territories in the East,
concerns not shared by the left. See Neaman, Free Radicals, 36–37.
24. Good overviews of the German New Right, from which I’ve drawn here
and below, are Samuel Salzborn, “Renaissance of the New Right in
Germany? A Discussion of New Right Elements in German Right-Wing
Extremism Today,” German Politics and Society 34, no. 2 (2016): 36–63;
Sebastian Maass, Die Geschichte der Neuen Rechten in der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland (Kiel, Germany: Regin, 2013); Volker Weiß, Die autoritäre
Revolte. Die Neue Rechte und der Untergang des Abendlandes (Stuttgart,
Germany: Klett-Cotta, 2017); Thomas Wagner, Die Angstmacher. 1968 und
die Neuen Rechten (Berlin: Aufbau, 2017); and Woods, Germany’s New Right
as Culture and Politics.
25. See Heimo Schwilk and Ulrich Schacht, eds., Die selbstbewusste
Nation (Berlin: Ullstein, 1994); and Heimo Schwilk and Ulrich Schacht,
Für eine Berliner Republik (Munich, Germany: Langen Müller, 1997).
Representative of anxieties from the time over the New Right’s rise in
the 1990s are Jacob Heilbrunn’s article “Germany’s New Right,” Foreign
Affairs 75, no. 6 (1996): 80–98; and Richard Herzinger’s “Werden wir
alle Jünger?” Kursbuch 122 (1995): 93–117. An insightful analysis of the
conditions for the resurgence is Göran Dahl, “Will ‘The Other God’ Fail
Again? On the Possible Return of the Conservative Revolution,” Theory,
Culture and Society 13, no. 1 (1996): 25–50.
26. Wagner, Die Angstmacher, 113; Andreas Speit, Bürgerliche
Scharfmacher. Deutschlands neue rechte Mitte—von AfD bis Pegida (Zurich:
Orell Füssli, 2016), 156–62.
27. Maass, Die Geschichte der Neuen Rechten, 28–29. Weiß, Die autoritäre
Revolte, 11.
28. See Michael Wildt, Volk, Volksgemeinschaft, AfD (Hamburg, Germany:
Hamburger Edition, 2017). The slogan was transformed into the
ethnonationalist Wir sind ein Volk (“We are one people”) when German
unification became possible after the fall of the Berlin Wall in
November 1989. The relationship between the two slogans allows AfD to
shift seamlessly from a populist-democratic to Volkish-nationalist
register. See, for example, AfD party head Alice Weidel’s statement on
the thirty-year anniversary of the fall of the Wall:
https://www.afdbundestag.de/30-jahre-mauerfall-wir-sind-ein-volk-alice-weidelafd-fraktion-bundestag/
(accessed 28 February 2020).
29. José Pedro Zúquete, The Identitarians: The Movement Against
Globalism and Islam in Europe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2018), 5, 8, 39–42, 52–53, 78–81.
30. Ibid., 32–37; Stephanie Heide, “Im Kampf gegen den Zeitgeist. Das
Identitäre Zentrum in Halle,” in Das Netzwerk der Identitären. Ideologie
und Aktionen der Neuen Rechten, ed. Andreas Speit (Berlin: Christoph
Links, 2018), 84–85. Zúquete points out that the organization was
originally named Casa-Montag, after Guy Montag, the character in Ray
Bradbury’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451, who seeks refuge from his
authoritarian surroundings in a nonconformist resistance group (32). For
other examples of right-wing energies poured into cultural forms more
often associated with the left, such as musical subcultures and forms of
self-display (e.g., “fashy” haircuts and clothing labels), see Benjamin
Teitelbaum, Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical
Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Cynthia
Miller-Idriss, The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and
Far-Right Youth Culture in Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2018).
31. Weiß, Die autoritäre Revolte, 92–134; Wagner, Die Angstmacher,
128–53.
32. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe,
trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017),
8–10; Paul Lendvai, Orbán: Hungary’s Strongman (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2017), 21–22.
33. Camus and Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe, 131.
34. Wir Selbst. Zeitschrift für nationale Identität, December 1979, 1,
23.
35. See Bernd Rabehl, Rudi Dutschke. Revolutionär im geteilten
Deutschland (Dresden, Germany: Antaios, 2002). On the nationalist
dimension of the German 68ers, and Rabehl’s self-serving reading of
Dutschke, see Neaman, Free Radicals, esp. 224–26. As Götz Aly noted, a
1967 poll revealed that 81 percent of German students agreed that
“German politics should free itself from Western guardianship,” a view
openly championed by radical-right parties at the time. Götz Aly, Unser
Kampf. 1968, Ein irritierter Blick zurück (Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany:
Fischer, 2012), 144. But as Neaman points out, the statistic need not
only indicate chauvinistic anti-Americanism, but could also reflect hope
for a neutral West Germany. Free Radicals, 57–58.
36. De Benoist and Champetier, Manifesto for a European Renaissance,
32–34; Camus and Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe, 43, 124.
37. Alain de Benoist, Kulturrevolution von Rechts (Dresden, Germany:
Jungeuropa Verlag, 2017), 202–3.
38. Henning Eichberg, Nationale Identität: Entfremdung und nationale
Frage in der Industriegesellschaft (Munich, Germany: Langen-Müller,
1978), 13. The phrase twists Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer’s
well-known adage about the relationship between fascism and capitalism.
39. See Pierre-André Taguieff, “From Race to Culture: The New Right’s
View of European Identity,” Telos 98/99 (1993/1994): 99–125; and Alberto
Spektorowski, “The French New Right: Differentialism and the Idea of
Ethnophilian Exclusionism,” Polity 33, no. 2 (2000): 283–303.
40. Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 103.
41. On de Benoist’s interest in New Left theory and role in helping
transform the critical theory journal Telos from left-to right-wing, see
his “Our American Friend Paul Piccone was a Free Spirit and a Loud
Talker,” Telos 131 (2005): 46–49.
42. Ernst Jünger, “Über Nationalismus und Judenfrage,” Süddeutsche
Monatshefte, September 1930, in Politische Publizistik. 1919 bis 1933,
ed. Sven Olaf Berggötz (Stuttgart, Germany: Klett-Cotta, 2001), 588.
Jünger associated this mimicry of liberalism not with his own
conservative revolutionary writings, but with Jews and traditional
conservatives.
43. Sedgwick, “Introduction,” Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, xxiii.
This use of “metapolitics” is distinct from both the spiritualized
political vision expressed in aesthetic production, which Peter Viereck
explores in Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (New York: Knopf,
1941), and from the politicization of philosophical practice which Alain
Badiou argues for in Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso,
2012).
44. De Benoist and Champetier, Manifesto for a European Renaissance, 9;
Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite (Paris: Copernic, 1979), 19. Benoist
quoted in Bar-On, “The French New Right: Neither Right, nor Left?,” 33.
See also Bar-On, Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, ch. 5.
45. Alain de Benoist, “Three Interviews with Alain de Benoist,” Telos
98/99 (1993/1994): 182–3.
46. Karlheinz Weißmann, “Junge Freiheit,” Criticón 105 (1988): 58;
Dieter Stein, “Konservative und ‘Neue Rechte’ brauchen langen Atem—Die
stille Revolution,” Junge Freiheit, 19 May 1995. Both cited in Patrick
Keßler, Die ‘Neue Rechte’ in der Grauzone zwischen Rechtsextremismus und
Konservatismus (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2018), 179. Weißmann’s book is
Kulturbruch ‘68. Die linke Revolte und ihre Folgen (Berlin: Junge
Freiheit Verlag, 2017). See also the essay by Thor von Waldstein,
Metapolitik. Theorie-Lage-Aktion (Schnellroda, Germany: Antaios, 2015).
47. Mudde, The Far Right Today, 54.
48. Zúquete, The Identitarians, 37.
49. Wagner, Die Angstmacher, 11.
50. Quoted in Eliah Bures and Elliot Neaman, “Introduction,” in The
Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios by Ernst Jünger, trans. Thomas
Friese (Candor, NY: Telos, 2012), xxv–xxvi.
51. Zúquete, The Identitarians, 27. I have altered the translation. The
passage is from Jünger’s Das abenteuerliche Herz. Aufzeichnungen bei Tag
und Nacht (1929). On Jünger’s proximity to Latin fascism in Sternhell’s
sense, see Elliot Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics
of Literature after Nazism (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999), 30–31. Jünger as an avant-garde writer is discussed in Helmuth
Kiesel, “Gab es einen ‘rechten’ Avantgardismus? Eine Anmerkung zu Klaus
von Beymes ‘Zeitalter der Avantgarden,’” in Die Politik in der Kunst und
die Kunst in der Politik, ed. Ariane Hellinger, Barbara Waldkirch,
Elisabeth Buchner, and Helge Batt (Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer, 2013),
109–24.
52. Ernst Jünger, “On Danger,” trans. Donald Reneau, New German Critique
59 (1993): 27–32. The fullest statement of Jünger’s perspective is his
1932 book The Worker: Dominion and Form, trans. Bogdan Costea and
Laurence Paul Hemming (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2017).
53. Armin Mohler, “Der faschistische Stil,” in Konservatismus
International, ed. Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner (Stuttgart, Germany:
Seewald, 1973), 172–98; Wagner, Die Angstmacher, 104–5.
54. See Bures and Neaman, “Introduction,” The Adventurous Heart,
xiii–lii.
55. Neaman, A Dubious Past, 157–60; Jünger, “Gestaltwandel. Eine
Prognose auf das 21. Jahrhundert,” Die Zeit, 16 July 1993,
https://www.zeit.de/1993/29/gestaltenwandel (accessed 9 February 2020);
and Antonio Gnoli and Franco Volpi, Die Kommenden Titanen. Gespräche,
trans. Peter Weiß (Vienna: Karolinger, 2002), 102–3, 112–14.
56. Roger Griffin, “Between Metapolitics and Apoliteia: The Nouvelle
Droite’s Strategy for Conserving the Fascist Vision in the
‘Interregnum,’” Modern and Contemporary France 8, no. 1 (2000): 35–53;
Griffin, “Interregnum or Endgame?” 15–27.
57. Klaus-Peter Hufer, Neue Rechte, altes Denken. Ideologie,
Kernbegriffe und Vordenker (Weinheim, Germany: Beltz Juventa, 2018), 93.
See also Elliot Neaman’s appraisal, “Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel,”
in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, 22–35; and Niels Penke, Jünger und
die Folgen (Stuttgart, Germany: J. B Metzler, 2018), 103–10. De Benoist
discusses his own writings on Jünger in “Ernst Jünger et la Nouvelle
Droite.” Mohler’s time as Jünger’s private secretary is described in his
Ravensburger Tagebuch. Meine Jahre mit Ernst Jünger (Vienna: Karolinger,
1999).
58. Roland Bubik, “Die 89er fordern heraus,” Junge Freiheit, 22
September 1995.
59. Horst Seferens, “Leute von übermorgen und von vorgestern.” Ernst
Jünger’s Ikonographie der Gegenaufklärung und die deutsche Rechte nach
1945 (Bodenheim, Germany: Philo, 1998), ch. 10, esp. 247–48.
60. Rüdiger Graf, “Either-Or: The Narrative of ‘Crisis’ in Weimar
Germany and in Historiography,” Central European History 43 (2010): 600,
609.
61. Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 24–25.
62. Jünger, The Adventurous Heart, 69–71.
63. Daniel Morat, “No Inner Remigration: Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger,
and the Early Federal Republic of Germany,” Modern Intellectual History
9, no. 3 (2012): 662. On Jünger’s post-World War II position, including
debates surrounding his works and the temporary Allied-imposed ban on
publishing, see Helmuth Kiesel, Ernst Jünger. Die Biographie (Munich,
Germany: Siedler, 2007), 534–57.
64. See “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin
Heidegger (1966),” trans. Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo, in The
Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993), 91–116.
65. Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage, trans. Thomas Friese (Candor, NY:
Telos, 2013), 72.
66. Ibid., 25.
67. Andreas Speit, “Avantgarde rückwärts. Die geistigen Grundlagen der
Identitären Bewegung,” in Das Netzwerk der Identitären, 56, 64–66;
Martin Sellner, Identitär! Geschichte eines Aufbruchs (Schnellroda,
Germany: Antaios, 2017), 9. The appeal of Jünger’s “forest rebel” is
also clear in Richard Millet, Verlorene Posten.
Schriftsteller-Waldgänger-Partisan (Schnellroda, Germany: Antaios,
2018).
68. Seferens, “Leute von übermorgen und von vorgestern,” 100.
69. Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York:
Marsilio, 1993), 147. Translation slightly altered.
70. Ibid., 277.
71. De Benoist, “Ernst Jünger et la Nouvelle Droite.”
72. Botho Strauß, “Anschwellender Bocksgesang,” Der Spiegel, 8 February
1993, 203, 206; Richard Evans, Rereading German History: From
Unification to Reunification, 1800–1996 (London: Routledge, 1997), 228.
73. Jay Julian Rosellini, Literary Skinheads? Writing from the Right in
Reunified Germany (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2000),
94. See also Rosellini’s more recent treatment of Strauß in The German
New Right: AfD, Pegida, and the Re-imagining of National Identity
(London: Hurst, 2019), 71–87. Rosellini states that Strauß’s “turn to
the right, rather unusual for someone who experienced the student
movement of the 1960s and was quite familiar with (neo)Marxist cultural
theories, continues to puzzle many in Berlin and beyond” (71). As my
argument here suggests, Strauß’s trajectory may be atypical of former
68ers, but it is not atypical of the New Right, and thus not especially
puzzling.
74. Botho Strauß, “Refrain einer tieferen Aufklärung,” in Magie der
Heiterkeit. Ernst Jünger zum Hundertsten, ed. Günter Figal and Heimo
Schwilk (Stuttgart, Germany: Klett-Cotta, 1995), 323–24.
75. Strauß, “Anschwellender Bocksgesang,” in Die selbstbewusste Nation,
33.
76. Botho Strauß, “Der Plurimi-Faktor,” Der Spiegel, 29 July 2013, 108.
77. See Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
78. Botho Strauß, “Der letzte Deutsche,” Der Spiegel, 2 October 2015,
123–24.
79. See Salzborn, “Renaissance of the New Right in Germany?,” 42–58. On
the German New Right’s low fortunes circa 2000, see Jan-Werner Müller’s
premature obituary of the movement, “From National Identity to National
Interest: The Rise (and Fall) of Germany’s New Right,” in German
Ideologies since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of
the Bonn Republic, ed. Jan-Werner Müller (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2003), 185–205.
80. Karlheinz Weißmann, “Politik und Metapolitik,” Sezession 57 (2013):
41. Lehnert’s talk was titled “Mobilmachung—Waldgang—Weltstaat. Ernst
Jüngers Politische Philosophie.” See Gerd Wiegel, “Jünger der Torheit,”
Junge Welt, 14 August 2018, 12.
81. Benjamin Teitelbaum, “Daniel Friberg and Metapolitics in Action,” in
Sedgwick, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, 269.
82. Sunic, Against Equality and Democracy, 12–14.
83. Daniel Friberg, The Real Right Returns: A Handbook for the True
Opposition (London: Arktos, 2015), 1, 16.
84. Teitelbaum, “Daniel Friberg and Metapolitics in Action,” 259, 265,
271.
85. Philippe Vardon, “Foreword,” in Generation Identity: A Declaration
of War Against the ‘68ers by Markus Willinger, trans. David Schreiber
(London: Arktos, 2013), n.p.
86. Quoted in Zúquete, The Identitarians, 38.
87. Mario Müller, Kontrakultur (Schnellroda, Germany: Antaios, 2017).
See also Heide, “Im Kampf gegen den Zeitgeist. Das Identitäre Zentrum in
Halle,” in Speit, Das Netzwerk der Identitären, 86.
88. Willinger, Generation Identity, chs. 30, 31. Willinger belongs to
the “Jahrgang 1992,” and was thus around twenty when the book was
written and published.
89. On the group’s mix of intellectual labor and political activism, see
Volker Weiß, Die autoritäre Revolte, esp. chs. 3–6. A shorter account is
Armin Pfahl-Traughber’s, Der Extremismus der Neuen Rechten. Eine Analyse
zu Diskursthemen und Positionen (Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer, 2019).
90. Volker Weiß, “Ab wann ist konservativ zu rechts?” Die Zeit, 19
February 2016,
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2016-02/rechts-konservativ-nassehi-kubitschek/komplettansicht
(accessed 12 February 2020).
91. Götz Kubitschek, “Fünf Lehren—Nachruf auf Armin Mohler,” Sezession,
1 July 2003,
https://sezession.de/8033/fuenf-lehren-nachruf-auf-armin-mohler
(accessed 1 May 2017).
92. Ellen Kositza, “Foreword,” in Tristesse Droite, ed. Ellen Kositza
and Götz Kubitschek (Schnellroda, Germany: Antaios, 2015), 8–9.
93. Tristesse Droite, 19, 25, 44.
94. Ibid., 26, 44, 46.
95. Ibid., 24, 35, 38.
96. Quoted in James Sheehan, “The Future of the European State: Some
Historical Reflections on the German Case,” German Historical Institute
Bulletin 42 (Spring 2008): 9.
97. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1991),
116.
98. Fritz Stern, “Preface to the Paperback Edition,” in The Politics of
Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1974), ix.