1. Roger Woods characterized the conservative revolution in the following terms: “[C]onservative revolutionaries assumed the role of ‘intellectual vanguard of the right.’…[M]any of them were born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and this generational bond was strengthened through the First World War which many of them experienced directly in their formative years. Although the term Conservative Revolution predates the First World War it only became an established concept in the Weimar period, passing into the cultural and political vocabulary of the day via the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the political theorist Edgar Jung…[C]onservative revolutionaries sought to break with that tradition of conservatism which had its roots in Wilhelmine Germany, and they dismissed all thoughts of a political restoration…[T]hey rejected the whole business of parliamentary politics in Weimar…Conservative revolutionaries sought to come to terms with socialism, not by embracing it in its existing form, but rather by reworking it into a ‘German socialism,’ a ‘socialism of the blood.’…This national community (volksgemeinschaft), it was argued, would transcend the conventional divisions of left and right, and enable Germany to attain a position of strength in a world where nations had effectively discarded moral standards in their dealings with each other and were guided only by ‘natural’ self-interest.” Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), pp. 1–2.
2. Schmitt’s understanding of the political crisis, during the 1920s, opened the route to a series of anti-Semitic and anti-Western conceptualizations during the 1930s. Interestingly, after 1945 Schmitt revised his texts from the 1930s in order to rid them of explicit anti-Semitism. For a detailed history and analysis of Schmitt’s anti-Semitism see Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish Question,” the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory, trans. Joel Golb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).
3. Both Schmitt and Heidegger rejected Lebensphilosophie explicitly yet used and supported much of its vocabulary and the stress on living experience as a form of rootedness. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), p. 96;
4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 43–45.
5. “Like Klages, [Spengler] formulated [Lebensphilosophie] in the form of impressive antitheses…Nature is the object of objectifying, history is the reality of mental becoming.” Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 152. A closer look at Spengler’s reactions to Klages exposes a pretty critical commentary on Spengler’s side. For example, after the publication of Klages’s Eros book in 1922, Spengler joined a public debate about it, which drew colorful responses by Klages in his letters. Ludwig Klages to C. A. Bernoulli, April 27, 1923, DLA, Nachlass Ludwig Klages, Sig. 61.4141, letter no. 31. See also the exchange between Spengler and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, March 14, 1927, in Briefe 1913–1936, ed. Anton M. Koktanek (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1963), p. 516.