Der Kreisauer Kreis

I am afraid this is going to be one of those tedious ‘on this day in history’ posts, largely because this one is way, way too good to pass up. On 20 July, 68 years ago, there was an attempt to put an end to one of the greatest malignancies ever to afflict Europe, the rule of Adolf Hitler, by planting a bomb in Hitler’s Eastern Front headquarters. The Abwehr plots to assassinate Hitler are most famous amongst American mainline Christians for having involved Dietrich Bonhöffer. Sadly, this attempt was unsuccessful, and the resulting purges led to the deaths of thousands of resistance members and other anti-Nazi dissidents. The plot was organised through the German military, though they worked through and had contact with civilian resistance groups, notable among them the group around Helmuth James Graf von Moltke and Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, the Kreisauer Kreis.

The Graf von Moltke’s courage and conscientiousness are not to be understated. He never joined the Nazi party. He himself opposed the 20 July plot not out of pacifism, but on the grounds that if it succeeded it would turn Hitler into a martyr and make Germany’s transition to a more peaceable and just society that much harder to achieve in the aftermath, and if it failed it would provide the Nazis with a pretext to crack down violently on dissent and consolidate their control (in the latter case, it turned out that he was correct). But prior to that, he used his position in the Abwehr to smuggle information about the war effort and about the concentration camps to the Resistance and (through them) to the Allies. At the Graf von Moltke’s manor in what is now southwestern Poland, met a small and motley group of intellectuals: Jesuits, Lutheran pastors, conservatives, radicals, socialists, noblemen, monarchists and ex-trade unionists.

The fascinating thing about the Kreisauer Kreis was that its membership, though loose, was notably both leftist in its economic thinking (courtesy of union organisers like Hermann Maaß and persecuted democratic socialists such as Adolf Reichwein, Julius Leber, Gustaf Dahrendorf and Theodor Haubach) and conservative in its social thought (many of its members, including its founders von Moltke and the von Wartenburgs, being noblemen and -women, and having involved devout Catholics such as Alfred Delp and Gereon Goldmann). As such, the Kreisauer Kreis was spurned by the Allies for being too conservative and ‘blue-blooded’, and had a very uneasy relationship with anti-Nazi German liberals like Carl Gördeler for being too socialist. The vision von Moltke had for a free Germany is tantalising for its similarities to distributism and syndicalism:

The Kreisau papers describe a decentralized society anchored by organic institutions, in which regional autonomy and an independent local leadership class would impede the ascendancy of any totalitarian demagogue. This decentralist ideal flowed from Kreisau’s Christian orientation, which translated practically into an emphasis upon localism and small communities. Such communities based upon “naturally occurring ties between individuals” – i.e., the organic ties which bind families together and neighbors to one another – were in Moltke’s view the key to a sustainably sane society.

It has become sadly fashionable in the studiously idiotarian lines of American right-wing discourse (Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, Jonah Goldberg, as well as all too many vulgar libertarians) to equate anything smelling of economic egalitarianism with fascism; just as it became fashionable in the idiotarian New Left circles of the 1960’s to tar traditionalist conservatism with that brush. These caricatures deserve to be dismantled at every conceivable opportunity. The social Darwinist, racial-nationalist and anti-union elements of the fascist ideology make it irrevocably incompatible with socialism. Likewise, the militarist, techno-fetishist and make-the-world-anew elements of the fascist ideology make it incompatible with traditionalist conservatism.

The Kreisauer Kreis serves as an historical lesson, both that committed socialists and committed conservatives not only can oppose fascism, and that they are often the most reliable anti-fascists, on the socialist side because of their commitment to egalitarianism and justice in a society, and on the conservative side because of their suspicions of military expansionism, technology worship and grand plans to bring the whole world under a single unified rule.

(As a side, it is worth remembering that the most odious elements of the Nazi ideology can be traced directly back to the secret student fraternities, the Burschenschaften, which promoted both radical racial-nationalist and classical liberal ideologies. As noted Israeli political scientist and Hegel scholar Shlomo Avineri put it, ‘The forces unleashed by the student fraternities and their academic mentors were those same forces that ultimately culminated in the victory of Nazism in Germany more than a century later.’)

EDIT: I am also pro-thrash.