Jerry Salyer, Martyrs and Modernity: Germany’s Heroes and the Left

It seems that some English policymakers feared catching blue-blood cooties from exposure to – in Oppen’s wry wording – “too many counts and barons.” Remember that Anglo-American leaders had no qualms about turning some hundred thousand men, women, and children into radioactive briquettes in order to “end the war”. (That is, to end it unconditionally, without need of peace negotiations.) And recall that in order to defeat the Führer, Allied leaders were quite willing to make an alliance with that famed international humanitarian Joseph Stalin.

But as for working with Hitler’s enemies within the German aristocracy… well, apparently that was asking a bit much. Whoa – come now, there are limits, after all.

One such aristocratic persona non grata was Oppen’s biographical subject – grand-nephew of the famed Prussian field-marshal of the same name – Helmuth James von Moltke. Though active in a variety of spheres, Moltke’s most productive work is circumscribed by the Kreisau Circle, so-called after the count’s country estate where Protestant theologians, Catholic priests, and lay intellectuals gathered to discuss Germany’s fate. Moltke and his companions intended that post-Hitler Germany would not repeat the mistakes of Weimar, and sought some viable, humane vision with which to fill in the vacuum left by Nazism’s inevitable self-destruction.

The Kreisau papers describe a decentralized society anchored by organic institutions, in which regional autonomy and an independent local leadership class would impede the ascendancy of any totalitarian demagogue. This decentralist ideal flowed from Kreisau’s Christian orientation, which translated practically into an emphasis upon localism and small communities. Such communities based upon “naturally occurring ties between individuals” – i.e., the organic ties which bind families together and neighbors to one another – were in Moltke’s view the key to a sustainably sane society.

Per Moltke, National Socialism was a logical consequence of the modern trend toward political and economic consolidation, a consolidation which snuffed out both human identity and the economic means by which individuals might resist tyranny. Rendered anonymous and faceless like ants in a hive, modern mass-man had no chance for either spiritual or political freedom. Quite early on Moltke attributed the philosophical roots of this totalitarian trend to his bête-noir G.W. Hegel, warning that “... in my view, we are on the road which leads through Hegel to the deification of the state.”

How Moltke’s decentralized society would have turned out is anybody’s guess. And whether Moltke was right in blaming Hegel is debatable; certainly better-qualified heads than mine have questioned how culpable Hegel really is vis-à-vis the modern totalitarian impulse. Yet right answers or wrong, at least Moltke was asking the appropriate questions. While he may have fingered the wrong suspect, at the very least he was aware of the essential nature of the problem – which is more than one can say of most intellectuals then or today. This is worth emphasizing. While Moltke particularly abhorred Nazism, his remarks about the general trend toward “the idolized state” also applied to the Bolsheviks… and to the increasingly centralized regimes of America and Britain as well.