Friedrich Hielscher - Conservative Revolutionary Movement

Conservative Revolutionary Movement

Hielscher's first publication was a 1926 essay in Ernst Jünger's nationalist journal Standarte-Arminius. His dissertation in law was about the term Selbstherrlichkeit in German legal tradition, accepted in 1928. Impressed by The Decline of the West, he contacted Oswald Spengler but was rejected. Beginning in 1928, Hielscher gathered a circle of followers around his person. He took over the editorship of Der Vormarsch from Jünger in 1928, a post he abandoned in the summer of 1929 in order to launch a journal of his own, titled Das Reich, which appeared from 1930 until 1933.

Hielscher's concept of Reich was inspired by Stefan George's belief in a "Secret Germany" (Geheimes Deutschland), a mystical and ethnic essentialist argument for a spiritual and cultural potential held by the German people and a German nation which existed in potentia but which had been prevented from realization in the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

Hielscher published his vision of an ethnic German Reich in a monograph in 1931. Here he argues against a racial or biologist definition of the German nation, emphasizing the cultural and spiritual character of his vision in contrast to the Blut und Boden ideology in völkisch nationalism.