The Conservative Revolutionary Movement

The Conservative Revolutionary movement was a German national conservative movement, prominent in the years following the First World War.... Like other conservative movements in the same period, they sought to put a stop to the rising tide of democracy and communism.

The Conservative Revolutionaries based their ideas on organic rather than materialistic thinking, on quality instead of quantity, and on Volksgemeinschaft ("folk-community") rather than class conflict and "mob rule". These writers produced a profusion of radical nationalistic literature that consisted of war diaries, combat fictional works, political journalism, manifestos, and philosophical treatises outlining their ideas for the transformation of German cultural and political life. Outraged by liberalism and egalitarianism, and rejecting the commercial culture of industrial and urban civilization, they advocated the destruction of the liberal order, by revolutionary means if necessary, in order to make way for the establishment of a new order, founded on conservative principles. The movement had a wide influence among many of Germany’s most gifted youth, universities, and middle classes.

The term "Conservative Revolution" predates the First World War, but the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the political theorist Edgar Julius Jung were instrumental in making this term an established concept of the Weimar period. Thomas Mann used the term to describe Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy greatly influenced many of the thinkers associated with the movement.

[link to en.wikipedia.org]