Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, RIP

PAUL GOTTFRIED is the Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

The death of Caspar von Schrenck-
Notzing on January 25, 2009, brought
an end to the career of one of the most
insightful German political thinkers of his
generation. Although perhaps not as well
known as other figures associated with
the postwar intellectual Right, Schrenck-
Notzing displayed a critical honesty, combined
with an elegant prose style, which
made him stand out among his contemporaries.
A descendant of Bavarian Protestant
nobility who had been knights of the Holy
Roman Empire, Freiherr von Schrenck-
Notzing was preceded by an illustrious
grandfather, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing,
who had been a close friend of the
author Thomas Mann. While that grandfather
became famous as an exponent of
parapsychology, and the other grandfather,
Ludwig Ganghofer, as a novelist, Caspar
turned his inherited flair for language
toward political analysis.

Perhaps he will best be remembered as
the editor of the journal Criticón, which
he founded in 1970, and which was destined
to become the most widely read and
respected theoretical organ of the German
Right in the 1970s and 1980s. In the pages
of Criticón an entire generation of non-leftist
German intellectuals found an outlet
for their ideas; and such academic figures
as Robert Spämann, Günter Rohrmöser,
and Odo Marquard became public voices
beyond the closed world of philosophical
theory. In his signature editorials, Criticón‘s
editor raked over the coals the center-conservative
coalition of the Christian Democratic
(CDU) and the Christian Social
(CSU) parties, which for long periods
formed the postwar governments of West
Germany.

Despite the CDU/CSU promise of a
“turn toward the traditional Right,” the
hoped-for “Wende nach rechts” never seemed
to occur, and Helmut Kohl’s ascent to
power in the 1980s convinced Schrenck-
Notzing that not much good could come
from the party governments of the Federal
Republic for those with his own political
leanings. In 1998 the aging theorist
gave up the editorship of Criticón, and he
handed over the helm of the publication to
advocates of a market economy. Although
Schrenck-Notzing did not entirely oppose
this new direction, as a German traditionalist
he was certainly less hostile to the
state as an institution than were Criticón‘s
new editors.

But clearly, during the last ten years of
his life, Schrenck-Notzing had lost a sense
of urgency about the need for a magazine
stressing current events. He decided
to devote his remaining energy to a more
theoretical task—that of understanding
the defective nature of postwar German
conservatism. The title of an anthology to
which he contributed his own study and
also edited, Die kupierte Alternative (The
Truncated Alternative), indicated where
Schrenck-Notzing saw the deficiencies of
the postwar German Right. As a younger
German conservative historian, Karl-
Heinz Weissmann, echoing Schrenck-
Notzing, has observed, one cannot create
a sustainable and authentic Right on the
basis of “democratic values.” One needs a
living past to do so. An encyclopedia of
conservatism edited by Schrenck-Notzing
that appeared in 1996 provides portraits of
German statesmen and thinkers whom the
editor clearly admired. Needless to say, not
even one of those subjects was alive at the
time of the encyclopedia’s publication.

What allows a significant force against
the Left to become effective, according
to Schrenck-Notzing, is the continuity of
nations and inherited social authorities. In
the German case, devotion to a Basic Law
promulgated in 1947 and really imposed
on a defeated and demoralized country by
its conquerors could not replace historical
structures and national cohesion. Although
Schrenck-Notzing published opinions
in his journal that were more enthusiastic
than his own about the reconstructed
Germany of the postwar years, he never
shared such “constitutional patriotism.”
He never deviated from his understanding
of why the post-war German Right had
become an increasingly empty opposition
to the German Left: it had arisen in
a confused and humiliated society, and it
drew its strength from the values that its
occupiers had given it and from its prolonged
submission to American political
interests. Schrenck-Notzing continually
called attention to the need for respect for
one’s own nation as the necessary basis for
a viable traditionalism. Long before it was
evident to most, he predicted that the worship
of the postwar German Basic Law and
its “democratic” values would not only fail
to produce a “conservative” philosophy in
Germany; he also fully grasped that this
orientation would be a mere transition to
an anti-national, leftist political culture.
What happened to Germany after 1968
was for him already implicit in the “constitutional
patriotism” that treated German
history as an unrelieved horror up until the
moment of the Allied occupation.

For many years Schrenck-Notzing had
published books highlighting the special
problems of post-war German society
and its inability to configure a Right that
could contain these problems. In 2000 he
added to his already daunting publishing
tasks the creation and maintenance of an
institute, the Förderstiftung Konservative
Bildung und Forschung, which was established
to examine theoretical conservative
themes. With his able assistant Dr. Harald
Bergbauer and the promotional work
of the chairman of the institute’s board,
Dieter Stein, who also edits the German
weekly, Junge Freiheit, Schrenck-Notzing
applied himself to studies that neither
here nor in Germany have elicited much
support. As Schrenck-Notzing pointed
out, the study of the opposite of whatever
the Left mutates into is never particularly
profitable, because those whom he called
“the future-makers” are invariably in seats
of power. And nowhere was this truer
than in Germany, whose postwar government
was imposed precisely to dismantle
the traditional Right, understood as the
“source” of Nazism and “Prussianism.”
The Allies not only demonized the Third
Reich, according to Schrenck-Notzing,
but went out of their way, until the onset
of the Cold War, to marginalize anything
in German history and culture that was
not associated with the Left, if not with
outright communism.

This was the theme of Schrenck-Notzing’s
most famous book, Charakterwäsche:
Die Politik der amerikanischen Umerziehung
in Deutschland, a study of the intent and
effects of American re-education policies
during the occupation of Germany. This
provocative book appeared in three separate
editions. While the first edition, in
1965, was widely reviewed and critically
acclaimed, by the time the third edition
was released by Leopold Stocker Verlag
in 2004, its author seemed to be tilting
at windmills. Everything he castigated in
his book had come to pass in the current
German society—and in such a repressive,
anti-German form that it is doubtful that
the author thirty years earlier would have
been able to conceive of his worst nightmares
coming to life to such a degree. In
his book, Schrenck-Notzing documents
the mixture of spiteful vengeance and leftist
utopianism that had shaped the Allies’
forced re-education of the Germans, and
he makes it clear that the only things that
slowed down this experiment were the
victories of the anticommunist Republicans
in U.S. elections and the necessities of
the Cold War. Neither development had
been foreseen when the plan was put into
operation immediately after the war.

Charakterwäsche documents the degree
to which social psychologists and “antifascist”
social engineers were given a free
hand in reconstructing postwar German
“political culture.” Although the first edition
was published before the anti-national
and anti-anticommunist German Left
had taken full power, the book shows the
likelihood that such elements would soon
rise to political power, seeing that they
had already ensconced themselves in the
media and the university. For anyone but a
hardened German-hater, it is hard to finish
this book without snorting in disgust at
any attempt to portray Germany’s re-education
as a “necessary precondition” for a
free society.

What might have happened without
such a drastic, punitive intervention? It is
highly doubtful that the postwar Germans
would have placed rabid Nazis back in
power. The country had had a parliamentary
tradition and a large, prosperous bourgeoisie
since the early nineteenth century,
and the leaders of the Christian Democrats
and the Social Democrats, who took
over after the occupation, all had ties to
the pre-Nazi German state. To the extent
that postwar Germany did not look like its
present leftist version, it was only because
it took about a generation before the work
of the re-educators could bear its full fruit.
In due course, their efforts did accomplish
what Schrenck-Notzing claimed
they would—turning the Germans into a
masochistic, self-hating people who would
lose any capacity for collective self-respect.
Germany’s present pampering of Muslim
terrorists, its utter lack of what we in the
U.S. until recently would have recognized
as academic freedom, the compulsion felt
by German leaders to denigrate all of German
history before 1945, and the freedom
with which “antifascist” mobs close down
insufficiently leftist or anti-national lectures
and discussions are all directly related
to the process of German re-education
under Allied control.

Exposure to Schrenck-Notzing’s magnum
opus was, for me, a defining moment
in understanding the present age. By the
time I wrote The Strange Death of Marxism
in 2005, his image of postwar Germany
had become my image of the post-Marxist
Left. The brain-snatchers we had set
loose on a hated former enemy had come
back to subdue the entire Western world.
The battle waged by American re-educators
against “the surreptitious traces” of
fascist ideology among the German Christian
bourgeoisie had become the opening
shots in the crusade for political correctness.
Except for the detention camps and
the beating of prisoners that were part of
the occupation scene, the attempt to create
a “prejudice-free” society by laundering
brains has continued down to the present.
Schrenck-Notzing revealed the model that
therapeutic liberators would apply at home,
once they had fi nished with Central Europeans.
Significantly, their achievement in
Germany was so great that it continues to
gain momentum in Western Europe (and
not only in Germany) with each passing
generation.

The publication Unsere Agenda, which
Schrenck-Notzing’s institute published
(on a shoestring) between 2004 and 2008,
devoted considerable space to the American
Old Right and especially to the paleoconservatives.
One drew the sense from reading
it that Schrenck-Notzing and his colleague
Bergbauer felt an affinity for American
critics of late modernity, an admiration
that vastly exceeded the political and media
significance of the groups they examined.
At our meetings he spoke favorably about
the young thinkers from ISI whom he had
met in Europe and at a particular gathering
of the Philadelphia Society. These were the
Americans with whom he resonated and
with whom he was hoping to establish a
long-term relationship. It is therefore fitting
that his accomplishments be noted in
the pages of Modern Age. Unfortunately, it
is by no means clear that the critical analysis
he provided will have any effect in today’s
German society. The reasons are the ones
that Schrenck-Notzing gave in his monumental
work on German re-education.
The postwar re-educators did their work
too well to allow the Germans to become a
normal nation again.