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Recovering Natural Right in the Weimar Republic

Leo Strauss's intellectual formation took place during the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Republic (1919-33) is the name given to the republic formed following the collapse of the German Reich after the First World War. Under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck in the nineteenth century, the Reich had unified Germany and defeated both the Austro-Hungarian Empire and France. In contrast to Bismarck's Reich, however, as Leo Strauss noted, "The Weimar Republic was weak. It had a single moment of strength, if not of greatness: its strong reaction to the murder of the Jewish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Walther Rathenau, in 1922. On the whole it presented the sorry spectacle of justice without a sword or of justice unable to use the sword" (JPCM 137). It is evident from Strauss's early writings and correspondence that he shared with many of his contemporaries a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic. The world of the Weimar Republic was remarkable: vibrant, but also strife-ridden, haunted by a lingering sense of illegitimacy and decadence. It has been the subject of innumerable historical studies, novels, plays, and films, and was the seedbed of many of the most significant intellectual and cultural movements of the twentieth century. Experimental art and culture emerged during the Weimar years in a plethora of forms that sought "the new" in radical extremes. The Weimar Republic was Germany's first liberal democracy, but it was not born out of victory, accomplishment, or liberation. Instead it came into being as if it were an imposition foisted upon a defeated Germany by the triumphant liberal democracies of Britain, France, and the United States, which themselves deeply compromised the potential of this new democratic regime by the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The very name "Weimar Republic" paid testimony to modern liberal developments within German culture, as Strauss noted: "By linking itself to Weimar the German liberal democracy proclaimed its moderate, non-radical character: its resolve to keep a balance between the dedication to the principles of 1789 and the dedication to the highest German tradition" (JPCM 137). However, over the course of just a few years, it became clear that the Weimar Republic was incapable of mediating and moderating the radical tendencies that came to life within it. In opposition to it and its connection with both the Enlightenment and the longer history of modern European thought and culture, there was everywhere a desire for radicality and new beginnings. Politically this took the form of a weakening of the liberal "center," and the turn to destabilizing or revolutionary extremes on both the left and right. On one side, philosophically, the Weimar Republic saw the emergence of a revival and reconstruction of Marxism in groups such as the Frankfurt School. On the other side, "conservative" or right-wing forms emerged that had an existentialist character that called for religious, cultural, or philosophical recovery of the pre-modern, often mixed with an authoritarian ultra-modern or postmodern political vision. Names such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and above all Martin Heidegger can be connected to the latter tendency. The overarching philosophical and literary presence informing the Weimar Republic, however, was undoubtedly Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche and the Weimar Republic

In 1941, in a public lecture entitled "German Nihilism," Strauss told his American audience: "Of all German philosophers, and indeed of all philosophers, none exercised a greater influence on post-war Germany, none was more responsible for the emergence of German nihilism, than was Nietzsche" (GN 372). For many in Strauss's New York audience, National Socialism was the obvious embodiment of "German nihilism." Strauss acknowledged that this was true, but argued that the roots of German nihilism were deeper still, and that they preceded the existence of the Nazi Party. In that lecture, Strauss defined nihilism as "the rejection of the principles of civilization as such" (GN 364). For him, civilization is "the conscious culture of reason" (GN 366), above all the cultivation of science (or more generally philosophy) and morals "and both united" (GN 365). For Strauss and many of his contemporaries, there was a powerful impetus toward nihilism in their experience of the inadequacy of modern forms, especially as these were realized in the Weimar Republic.

Strauss makes this point powerfully in a section of this lecture that is worth considering at some length. He writes: "No one could be satisfied with the post-war world. German liberal democracy of all descriptions seemed to many people to be absolutely unable to cope with the difficulties with which Germany was confronted. This created a profound prejudice, or confirmed a profound prejudice already in existence, against liberal democracy as such" (GN 359). Strauss does not see nihilism as arising simply from the weakness of the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic; rather, it emerges from the reaction of the new generation of young Germans to the Marxist or socialist solution to this situation:

The older ones in our midst still remember the time when certain people asserted that the conflicts inherent in the present situation would necessarily lead to a revolution, accompanying or following another World War - a rising of the proletariat and of the proletarianized strata of society which would usher in the withering away of the State, the classless society, the abolition of all exploitation and injustice, the era of final peace. It was this prospect at least as much as the desperate present, which led to nihilism. (GN 359-60)

Strauss describes a reaction in this younger generation in a way that is clearly inspired by Nietzsche's account of modern egalitarianism leading to the era of the "last man":

The prospect of a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled, of a planetary society devoted to production and consumption only, to the production and consumption of spiritual as well as material merchandise, was positively horrifying to quite a few very intelligent and very decent, if very young, Germans. They did not object to that prospect because they were worrying about their own economic and social position; for certainly in that respect they had no longer anything to lose. Nor did they object to it for religious reasons; for, as one of their spokesmen (E. Jünger) said, they knew that they were the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of godless men. What they hated, was the very prospect of a world in which everyone would be happy and satisfied, in which everyone would have his little pleasure by day and his little pleasure by night, a world in which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe, a world without real, unmetaphoric, sacrifice, i.e. a world without blood, sweat, and tears. What to the communists appeared to be the fulfilment of the dream of mankind, appeared to those young Germans as the greatest debasement of humanity, as the coming of the end of humanity, as the arrival of the latest man. (GN 360)

But, as Strauss brings out here, this negation of a secular, egalitarian, consumerist humanism was accompanied for these young Germans by no alternative positive vision:

They did not really know, and thus they were unable to express in a tolerably clear language, what they desired to put in the place of the present world and its allegedly necessary future or sequel: the only thing of which they were absolutely certain was that the present world and all the potentialities of the present world as such, must be destroyed in order to prevent the otherwise necessary coming of the communist final order: literally anything, the nothing, the chaos, the jungle, the Wild West, the Hobbian state of nature, seemed to them infinitely better than the communist-anarchist-pacifist future. Their Yes was inarticulate - they were unable to say more than: No! This No proved however sufficient as the preface to action, to the action of destruction. This is the phenomenon which occurs to me first whenever I hear the expression German nihilism. (GN 360)

A curious feature of this lecture, given in New York City in the middle of the Second World War, is that Strauss shows sympathy for the "very young Germans" who were drawn not into National Socialism, but into this deeper, earlier form of German nihilism. Though Strauss does not specifically say it, it is reasonable to assume that he himself felt the attraction of this German nihilism. This is evident particularly in his relation to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, a relationship that has been the source of great scholarly controversy.

In a letter written in June of 1935 to his friend Karl Löwith, Strauss confessed: "I can only say that Nietzsche so dominated and bewitched me between my 22nd and 30th years that I literally believed everything that I understood of him" (LC 183). Nietzsche's declarations that "God is dead" and that the West had entered an age of nihilism were not widely taken up during his own lifetime - but at the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially in the wake of the First World War, Nietzsche's account appeared inescapable, not only for the young Leo Strauss, but for his...