German Nihilism, American-Style

German Nihilism, American-Style
AP Photo/Thibault Camus

“What I am now going to relate is the history of the next two centuries. I shall describe what will happen, what must necessarily happen: the triumph of nihilism.”

--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

In 1941, Leo Strauss delivered a fascinating, semi-autobiographical lecture on “German Nihilism” at the New School for Social Research. Strauss’s talk attempted to explain the nature and sources of German nihilism and the role it played in the rise of Nazism during the decade-and-a-half after the end of the Great War. The “young nihilists” described by Strauss were those young men who, like himself, had been influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and/or Martin Heidegger, and who then went on to become “Conservative Revolutionaries” during the 1920s, men such as Oswald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Carl Schmitt, Hermann Rauschning, Ernst Jünger, and Ernst von Salomon.

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