The Man Who Invented the Third Reich

by StanLauryssens (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $4.33

  A prolific writer, historian, critic, translator and publisher, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was the quintessential Bohemian fin-de-siecle artist. In the turbulent years which followed the end of World War I, he became politically active and was soon considered to be the leader of the young conservative revolutionaries in Weimar Germany. Van den Bruck expressed his ideas for a German authoritarian state in his major work Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich), first published in 1923. Adolf Hitler, the charismatic leader of the then litle-known National Socialist German Workers' Party, whom van den Bruck had met the same year, was profoundly influenced by these ideas and regarded himself as the activist who could implement them. When Hitler and the Nazis swept to power in 1933, van den Bruck realized Hitler had become the personification of the violent dynamism recommended in Das Dritte Reich and he foresaw the horrors to come. Van den Bruck saw no way out other than suicide. In this biography, the author offers an insight into the life of van den Bruck and of the political and artistic whirlpools of Weimar Germany in which he lived.

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.25

  Lauryssen's remarkable biography of the key figure in the formation of the political ideals behind the Third Reich, charts the progress of a political activist as his theories became reality, and the repercussions that led to his suicide. Arthur Moeller van der Bruck's seminal work Das Dritte Reich, (The Third Reich) was Hitler's main inspiration, and it was the authoritarian state hypothesised by Moeller which Hitler implemented, taking his recommendations of violent dynamism to achieve increasingly his own aims. Moeller was able to predict the atrocities to come and racked with guilt this recognition of the monster he had created led to his suicide. Lauryssen explores the political and artistic whirlpools of Weimar Germany in Moeller's time and using personal interviews with contempories such as Kafka, Munch and Dietrich gives exceptional insight into both Moeller's life and this fascinating period of political change.