Moler, Armin

Armin Moler was born in Basel in 1920. He entered the University of Basel and for some time supported the Communists . He was drafted into the Swiss army at the age of 20, but after reading the work of Oswald Spengler and the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was imbued with sympathy for Nazi Germany and in 1942 deserted from the army to join the Waffen-SS . However, he failed to gain sufficient trust and was not accepted for service. Despite this, he stayed in Berlin for another year before returning to Switzerland, where he was imprisoned for desertion .

After the end of World War II, Moler returned to study in Berlin and completed his doctoral dissertation on the topic “ Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918-1932” ( Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932 ) in 1949. Its supervisor was Karl Jaspers . The purpose of Moler’s dissertation was not strictly scientific, for he also tried to formulate a theoretical basis for the right movement in post-war Germany, which would be based on old traditions, and not on the ideology of Nazism . In the same year, Moler began working as a secretary for Ernst Junger , whom he considered his idol, although he came to the idea that after the end of the war he became more and more moderate in his views.

Moler worked as a correspondent in Paris for the publication of Die Zeit from 1953 to 1961. After that, he lived in Munich , where he headed the Karl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation. For a brief period, he worked as a speechwriter for Franz Josef Strauss ^[1] . In 1967, Armin Moler became the first winner of the Konrad Adenauer Prize, after which the media followed him with persecution.

In 1970, he became editor-in-chief of the German magazine Criticon , which belonged to writer Caspar von Schrenk-Notzing and was the most influential conservative publication in Germany for almost three decades.

He died in Munich in 2003 at the age of 83.

The main work of Moler is his “Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918-1932”, in which he gives a description and analysis of the right thought of the times of the Weimar Republic as a counterweight and alternative to National Socialism. Among the most important thinkers of the “ conservative revolution ”, he singled out Ernst Junger , Oswald Spengler , Karl Schmitt , Ernst Nikisch , Hans Blucher and Thomas Mann (before he turned to liberalism ).

Mohler was one of the first German publicists who drew attention to the ideas of the French New Right and, in particular, Alain de Benoit , whose friend Mohler himself was. Like Benoit, Moler was one of those rightists who opposed socialism and liberalism , with the main emphasis on anti-liberalism . According to Michael Minkenberg, the views of Moler were more on the same plane with the ideas of the representatives of the GRECE association, where de Benoit was a member, and were less similar to the ideas of the right-wing German publicists of the period of “ eastern politics ” like Robert Spemann and Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, who spoke for maintaining a strong German state ^[2] .

One of Moler's favorite subjects of criticism was the theme of the so-called “ overcoming the past, ” to which he devoted several books, where he argued that German society needed to “get out of Hitler’s shadow”. In this regard, Moler is sometimes called the predecessor of Ernst Nolte and other publicists who took part in the “ dispute of historians ” (Historikerstreit) ^[3] .

In the 1950s, Moler wrote for the Nation Europa and Die Tat magazines (not to be confused with the older magazine of the same name), as well as for such major publications as Die Zeit and (in the 1960s and 1970s) Die Welt . In later years, he wrote for the weekly German New Right newspaper Junge Freiheit . Under the pseudonym Michael Hintermwald also wrote two articles for Deutschen National-Zeitung , owned by Gerhard Fry , for which he was subsequently criticized by many.

Moler was originally a supporter of Franz Josef Strauss and his party, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria , but subsequently also worked with Franz Schönhuber, the founder of the Republican Party. He also actively collaborated with Alain de Benoit .

Some researchers consider the idea of ​​a conservative revolution in Moler’s presentation to be similar to the ideology of fascism : in particular, Roger Griffin adheres to this point of view ^[4] . In one of his interviews, Moler admitted that he really is a fascist, but only in the spirit of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera and at the same time inclined to believe that the origins of fascism are in the ultra-left political spectrum ^[5] .

• Conservative revolution in Germany 1918-1932 = Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932. Ein Handbuch. / Translation from German A. Vasilchenko. - M.: Tothenburg, 2017 .-- 312 p.

• (German) Works of Armin Moler and literature about him