Critics of Modernity: The Literature of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1890-1933

Critics of Modernity provides the fullest account in English of the work of a series of writers who were of crucial importance to the formation and dissemination of a trenchant ethos of national revivalism in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In cultural terms that ethos was every bit as powerful as the prevailing discourse of Modernism, bringing within its sway figures as diverse as Hermann Lons, Hans Grimm, Ernst Junger, Stefan George, Arnolt Bronnen, Ernst von Salomon, and Gottfried Benn. Disparate as they were in their aesthetic aims and priorities, these writers shared a thorough rejection of the values and institutions of the modern world, whose perceived evils they sought to remove through that most paradoxical of all political acts: a conservative revolution. This study examines in detail both the literature of these authors and the varied intellectual contexts that gave their writing its ideological momentum.