Notes on the Third Reich

Fülszöveg

"Hitler's propaganda appealed to the workers. He tried to
attract the German working masses and draw them away
from international Marxism, by offering them a "national"
and "German" solution to their problems.5
In the same manner as he critiqued Italian Fascism in Fascism Viewed from the Right,
in this volume Evola analyses the German National Socialist movement, making a
distinction between National Socialism as an ideology and the contingent
circumstances which led to its defeat in the Second World War. He traces the origins
of the movement among the veterans who returned from the trenches at the end of the
First World War and who found themselves dissatisfied with the bourgeois, liberal
society that arose in Germany during the Weimar Republic, and which in turn led to the
rise of the paramilitary Freikorps units as well as the Conservative Revolutionary
movement in intellectual circles. For Evola, all that was best in National Socialism had
been inherited from this... Tovább

Fülszöveg

"Hitler's propaganda appealed to the workers. He tried to
attract the German working masses and draw them away
from international Marxism, by offering them a "national"
and "German" solution to their problems.5
In the same manner as he critiqued Italian Fascism in Fascism Viewed from the Right,
in this volume Evola analyses the German National Socialist movement, making a
distinction between National Socialism as an ideology and the contingent
circumstances which led to its defeat in the Second World War. He traces the origins
of the movement among the veterans who returned from the trenches at the end of the
First World War and who found themselves dissatisfied with the bourgeois, liberal
society that arose in Germany during the Weimar Republic, and which in turn led to the
rise of the paramilitary Freikorps units as well as the Conservative Revolutionary
movement in intellectual circles. For Evola, all that was best in National Socialism had
been inherited from this spirit. Overall, however, Evola takes the Third Reich to task
for always remaining populist, for not establishing a genuine political order based on
European traditions rather than a cult of personality, and for its misunderstanding of the
issues of race and the Jews. All of this Evola attributes to a lack of connection to the
transcendent and the traditional. Nevertheless, Evola recognises some good qualities in
the Reich, and credits it with inculcating a strong warrior spirit and sense of the sacred
in the German people, and for making efforts toward establishing an elite Order based
on higher principles as embodied by the SS. While viewing the Reich as inadequate,
Evola praises aspects of it for having been superior to the Europe which arose from its
ashes, particularly when it represented pan-European impulses, as well as a rejection of
both Communism and democracy in an effort to forge a political 'third way.'
Julius Evola (1898-1974) was Italy's foremost traditionalist philosopher, as well as a
metaphysician, social thinker and activist. Evola was an authority on the world's esoteric
traditions and one of the greatest critics of modernity. He wrote extensively on the ancient
civilisations of both East and West and the world of Tradition, and was also a critic of the
political and spiritual movements of his own time from a traditional perspective. Vissza