Agrarian conservatism in Germany

Following the Aufklärung,[Note 1] German Conservatives rejected the newly-emergent habit of constantly questioning the status quo and never finding satisfaction in the present moment.

Their views are not conservative in the strict sense, as they seek to actively return the status quo to one of its prior states, rather than simply preserve certain traditional aspects of society.

[1] Agrarian elites united under this mantra of changing the status quo and formed the Bund der Landwirte (BdL), seeking to organize and represent what they felt was Germany's heritage and most important economic sector – farming.

Influential figures in German agrarian conservatism ranged from revolutionary conservatives such as Oswald Spengler to even Junkers like Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin.

Rather, romantic thinkers and ordinary landowners alike united, lusting for the destruction of the German Republic and wistfully hoping for the establishment of a pre-Enlightenment agrarian society.

His Diary of a Man in Despair catalogues the worldview of a "lost"[Note 2] generation of thinkers living under the Nazi ideology.

They fear the unknown – violent upheaval, tyranny, and death are often correlated with Enlightenment calls for liberty; the French Revolution of 1789 only further justified this claim.

In recalling Rousseau's "stand against rationalism on the basis of the 'reason of feeling',"[5] conservatives rejected the Enlightenments attempts to explain with the explicit intention of perceiving.

[6] This nostalgia allows the conservative to justify the past status quo as superior – as harbingers of Burke's organicism and intergenerationalism, these thinkers dutifully reject the destabilizing, anti-historicist views of the Enlightenment liberal.

Their ideal society – the present status quo – is seemingly displaying the throes of death, progressing aimlessly and with rapidity towards "civilizations end."

[1] Reform conservatism accepts the inevitable progressivism of society, seeking only to preserve and project visions of order and hegemony as espoused by all conservatives.

They exist as perennial moderates, seeking to adapt their visions of the past status quo to modern needs, so as to espouse their aforementioned edicts – hegemony and order.

All three of these men preached the core conservative tenets, – order and harmony through hegemony and tradition – and each attempted to subvert their status quo and replace it with the idealized agrarian one, albeit through differing methods.

[9] Unlike their Reactionary and Reformist brethren, agrarian revolutionaries seek not only the violent upheaval of the status quo to return to this pastoralism, but they reject nearly all sense of modernism.

A strong monarchy with a limited bureaucracy would represent the government and manage the state, whilst the people would exist in romanticized farming villages – their culture, livelihood, and civilization emerge from their profession and organic connection with the land itself.

[2] Under the rule of Otto von Bismarck – both as Chancellor of Germany and Foreign Minister of Prussia – German conservatives were not necessarily at the apex of their power.

[10] By 1864, Bismarck had effectively installed a wholly conservative government – Realpolitik, monarchical solidarity, and the support for a modernized yet traditional status quo weakened the liberal parties and strengthened a Bismarckian foothold on Prussia.

In the 1830s, Prussia was an industrious state, seeking to emulate the developmental patterns of England and avoid the vast problems they perceived within British society.

[3] Their problem was, in their words, "modern feudalism," – the Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt, a weekly publication, denounced the supposed resurrection of the old aristocracy under false pretenses.

As pastoral societies are by definition relatively self-centered, the agrarian conservatives rallied around protectionism and a sense of "biologically oriented völkisch nationalism.

Early associations between Nazism and conservatism were amicable – agricultural and military opposition to the German Revolution of 1918-1919 suggest sympathy for National Socialism.

[3] Though similarly "traditionalist" in their yearn to recapture a past German status quo, the Nazi Party and conservatives sought different futures.

The imperative obtainment of rural votes established Nazi predominance in German politics, yet reasons for the abandoning of traditional conservatism in favor of National Socialism are, at best, speculations.

[2] This notion of being the last vanguard between the destruction of the West and the rise of uncivilized, uncultured man permeates not only Reck's compositions and Spengler's writings, but also the life of Junker Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin.

[5][Note 4] As strict believers in the old status quo, and as revolutionaries who seek to re-establish a society from the past, the new, unproven, and alien Nazi Third Reich contradicted with their pastoralist views.

By the end of World War II and the fall of the Third Reich, agrarian conservatism would fade just as it began – a clinging reminder of a long-forgotten past.