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Agrarian conservatism in Germany was a type of conservatism that began to wane in popularity prior to the rise of the Nazi Party.
Following the Aufklärung,[Note 1] German Conservatives rejected the newly-emergent habit of constantly questioning the status quo and never finding satisfaction in the present moment.[1] Instead, these conservatives ardently insisted that this new, "enlightened" mode of thought was dominated by perverse skepticism, immorality, and the undermining of authority.[1] By the late nineteenth century, the conservative ideology had fragmented as thinkers began to postulate their own understandings of the world. Some conservatives adopted Romantic views of the world and began to compose their dictums with strong, underlying senses of nostalgia. Nowhere was this sentiment stronger than in the words of German Agrarian Conservatives, who expressed both their bitterness for the present condition of the German state and their yearning for a return to a more organic, pastoral sense of life.[2]
With romanticism as its steadying hand, agrarian conservatism evolved from the earlier "Reactionary" line of conservatives. Their views are not conservative in the strict sense, as they seek to actively return the status quo to one of its prior states, rather than simply preserve certain traditional aspects of society.[1] Agrarian elites united under this mantra of changing the status quo and formed the Bund der Landwirte (BdL), seeking to organize and represent what they felt was Germany's heritage and most important economic sector – farming.
Influential figures in German agrarian conservatism ranged from revolutionary conservatives such as Oswald Spengler to even Junkers like Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin. In this sense, its connections to farming as an ideology did not necessitate farmers as its constituency. Rather, romantic thinkers and ordinary landowners alike united, lusting for the destruction of the German Republic and wistfully hoping for the establishment of a pre-Enlightenment agrarian society.[3] Hitler and the Third Reich outlawed all non-Nazi political entities, but ideologues like Friedrich Reck took up the mantle of agrarian conservatism. His Diary of a Man in Despair catalogues the worldview of a "lost"[Note 2] generation of thinkers living under the Nazi ideology.[4] Others, like the aforementioned von Kleit-Schmenzin, radicalized even more, going so far as to join the 20 July plot to kill Adolf Hitler.
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- ^ a b c Epstein, Klaus (1966). The Genesis of German Conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 6–66.
- ^ Dakin, Edwin (1940). Today and Destiny: Vital Excerpts from The Decline of the West of Oswald Spengler. New York: A. A. Knopf.
- ^ Jones, Larry Eugene; Retallack, James (1993-01-01). Between reform, reaction and resistance : studies in the history of German Conservation from 1789 to 1945. Berg. pp. 61–72, 81, 432, 465. ISBN 9780854967872. OCLC 919545072.
- ^ Reck-Malleczewen, Fritz Percy (2013). Diary of a man in despair. New York Review of Books. ISBN 9781590175866. OCLC 829760576.