The Man Who Invented the Third Reich

A prolific writer, historian, critic, translator and publisher, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was the quintessential Bohemian fin-de-siecle artist. In the turbulent years which followed the end of World War I, he became politically active and was soon considered to be the leader of the young conservative revolutionaries in Weimar Germany. Van den Bruck expressed his ideas for a German authoritarian state in his major work "Das Dritte Reich" (The Third Reich), first published in 1923. Adolf Hitler, the charismatic leader of the then litle-known National Socialist German Workers' Party, whom van den Bruck had met the same year, was profoundly influenced by these ideas and regarded himself as the activist who could implement them. When Hitler and the Nazis swept to power in 1933, van den Bruck realized Hitler had become the personification of the violent dynamism recommended in "Das Dritte Reich" and he foresaw the horrors to come. Van den Bruck saw no way out other than suicide. In this biography, the author offers an insight into the life of van den Bruck and of the political and artistic whirlpools of Weimar Germany in which he lived.