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 First edition | |
| Author | Arthur Moeller van den Bruck |
|---|---|
| Original title | Das dritte Reich |
| Language | German |
| Publisher | Ring Verlag |
Publication date | 1923 |
| Media type | Print book |
Germany's Third Empire (German:Das dritte Reich,lit. 'The Third Kingdom') is a 1923 book by the German authorArthur Moeller van den Bruck. The book formulated an ideal of national empowerment, which found many adherents in a Germany desperate to rebound from theTreaty of Versailles. For Moeller, Germany's great misfortune lay in the political system created by theWeimar Republic, which had competitive parties andliberal ideologies. Moeller was influenced byFriedrich Nietzsche and called for a strong leader. The book is associated with theConservative Revolution.
In the preface,Arthur Moeller van den Bruck distanced himself from possible future implications of the concept: "The Third Reich is but a philosophical idea and not for this world, but for the hereafter. Germany could well perish dreaming the Third Reich dream". To pursue the philosophical idea, he believed that Germany would need anÜbermensch of the type described byFriedrich Nietzsche but that this individual was notAdolf Hitler or anyone else living.
Moeller'sreich is not a state in the usual sense of the word but the ideal condition and the only way in which the scatteredGerman people can achieve a common purpose and destiny. However, this should not be a limited state, and he saw theGerman Empire established byOtto von Bismarck as an imperfect reich, as it did not include Austria, which survived on from "ourFirst Reich", side by side with "our Second Reich". According to Moeller, "Our Second Reich was aLittle-German Reich which we must consider only as a stepping stone on our path to aGreater German Reich".
Moeller called for theWeimar Republic to be replaced through a newrevolution from the right. He takes all of his philosophical cues from the work of Nietzsche, "who stands at the opposite pole of thought fromMarx".
Kindlers Neues Literatur Lexikon ties the book to theConservative Revolution, for which it can be regarded as a manifesto. It describes it as the most important record of antidemocratic thinking in Weimar Germany and of the reactions toWorld War I, theNovember Revolution and theTreaty of Versailles. It writes it is a mistake to view Moeller as a direct predecessor to National Socialism; rather, he was a representative of the "dangerous world of political ideas" of which National Socialism was another outgrowth.[1]
