Politics of History as Metapolitics: Armin Mohler and the Historical Revisionism of the German New Right

This article examines Armin Mohler’s politics of history as a form of metapolitics in postwar West Germany. Through The Conservative Revolution in Germany 1918–1932, Mohler reconstructed the radical anti-democratic traditions of the Weimar Right as a distinct intellectual genealogy under the name of the “Conservative Revolution.” This project did not openly defend National Socialism, but it sought to make right-wing traditions overshadowed by Nazism usable again for the postwar German Right. In this sense, Mohler’s work constituted a politics of history that attempted to rehabilitate a right-wing intellectual heritage in a seemingly denazified form. From the mid-1960s onward, Mohler’s critique of Vergangenheitsbewältigung further radicalized this project. Rather than directly denying the Holocaust or Nazi crimes, he attacked the way their memory functioned as a moral boundary that constrained German national self-affirmation and political self-understanding. In Was die Deutschen fürchten and Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms with the past was reinterpreted not as the ethical foundation of democracy, but as a mechanism of power that reproduced German anxiety and restricted political self-assertion. The article also analyzes how Mohler institutionalized this politics of history through the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation. The lecture series Die Deutsche Neurose and Ernst Nolte’s 1980 lecture at the foundation translated Mohler’s critique of memory culture into the language of academic debate and bourgeois intellectual culture. Finally, the article traces the later transformation of Mohler’s historical politics through the German New Right, especially Götz Kubitschek and Karlheinz Weißmann, and into the memory politics of the radical wing of the Alternative für Deutschland. This should not be understood as a linear genealogy from Mohler to the AfD. Rather, it was a process of mediation and transformation from metapolitics to mass politics. Mohler’s politics of history was not a strategy for directly seizing power, but a long-term struggle over what could be remembered, what could be said, and what kind of Germanness could once again be asserted in postwar Germany.