Implications
The temptation is to see this difficult little book as an advocate for what was to come, but this gap between the ideal vision and the historical truth is virtually unbridgeable. On the eve of publication Moeller van den Bruck inserted a preface, in which he wrote that "The Third Reich is a philosophical idea not for this but for the next world. Germany might perish because of the Third Reich dream." He believes Germany needs an Übermensch (Superman) in the fashion described by Nietzsche, but that Superman is not Adolf Hitler.
Soon after the collapse of the Munich Putsch he wrote: "There are many things that can be said against Hitler, and I have sometimes said them. But one thing you have to give him credit for: he is a fanatic for Germany. But he is wrecked by his proletarian primitive ways. He does not know how to give an intellectual basis to his Nazi party. Hitler is all passion but lacks sense or proportion. A heroic tenor, not a hero." Hitler, in other words, was not Mussolini. These were the last words he ever wrote before his suicide in 1925.
Read more about this topic: Das Dritte Reich
Famous quotes containing the word implications:
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)
“When it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)