Embattled Farmer

THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION--Hermann Rauschnmg--Putnam--($2.75).

Public assassinations of statesmen and kings (probably with the connivance of the police); weird disappearances; bloody purges; sudden emergence of strange characters from underground struggles in Europe's political depths; treason in the highest places; deserters running from all sides to all camps -- in the ten years before World War II these curiosa were not merely foretastes of war and the collapse of nations. They were evidence to one East Prussian farmer that "an age has come to its end," because the moral sanctions by which until then men had lived had lost all meaning.

The farmer was Hermann Rauschning (The Revolution of Nihilism}. Not a Junker, but "a distant connection of most of the Junker families of East Prussia," Rauschning ran "a medium-sized farm of not quite 250 acres" near Danzig, stepped up its sugar-beet and flax yield by intensive cultivation. Believing that "the breeder is a co-creator and an ennobler of nature," he raised purebred horses and heifers. Believing in "the full quiver," he sired eight children, lost three.

A devout Lutheran, he nevertheless felt in the presence of "the mystery of the fertility of the arable land," the stirrings of an ancient paganism. An authority on sacred music, he wrote voluminously about it. He also wrote, never published, a monumental history of the end of the Prussian order (since confiscated by the Gestapo), dabbled in local agrarian politics, became president of the Danzig Senate, pondered upon that passage in the writings of the late great Austrian poet, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which describes the growing revolt against Europe's arid intellectualism: "The process of which I am speaking is nothing less than a Conservative Revolution, on such a scale as the history of Europe has never known."

In his latest book, from exile in Britain, Rauschning told how these words had inspired him: "End of the Revolution, Conservative Revolution, perhaps Revolution of Reconstruction--call it what you will! . . . Every revolution sets out to burst oppressive limitations. But the current of destruction introduced by the great secular movement of human emancipation is going far beyond the natural rhythm of destruction and rebuilding. Here it is no longer a question of relative destruction and losses, but of absolute and irrevocable sacrifices of the very nature of man, of the human qualities formed by the untold thousands of years of man's social existence. The saving of these human qualities, now endangered and already almost destroyed, seemed to us the true task of our time. . . ."

So Farmer Rauschning and his conservative neighbors, to save it, joined the Nazi Party.

In The Conservative Revolution, ex-Nazi Rauschning this week told why. The book, his second in six months, was a Prussian Apologia Pro Vita Sua, describing in a series of autobiographical letters (to an anonymous British friend) why "even men of good will [were driven] into Naziism" -- and why they later left it. Like Cardinal Newman, who was a leader in the religious revival ("Oxford Movement") in 19th-Century England and eventually changed from the Anglican to the Catholic faith, Rauschning could write his apologia only in terms of the great issues of which he has become a spokesman. His book is therefore both history and personal history: the most authentic record to date of the totalitarian attraction, its cause and cure.

Like Newman, Rauschning seems to have been wounded into writing by one of those tactless remarks, to which people who have changed sides are vulnerable and rawly sensitive ("Your question is meant kindly. But may I reply that it has hurt me more than unjust and malevolent judgments from opponents. . . .")-And like Newman's, Rauschning's apologia is no apology at all, but a careful and courageous examination of his course, revealing great probity, political acumen, intellectual equilibrium.

At times ex-Senator Rauschning's book has a querulousness that suggests not Newman but the Roman ex-Consul Boethius (circa 480-524), who in The Consolation of Philosophy complained of his enemies while awaiting execution after his Rauschningesque failure to cooperate with the Barbarian Ostrogoths. He also has some of Boethius' wordiness, and indulges a nostalgic yearning for his farm and blooded heifers, which he lost when the Nazis raised a sign: Rauschning, traitor to the people, lives here.

Only once does Rauschning comfort himself bitterly with what Prussian Baron Stein said wittily: "One must be able to lose one's luggage several times in life." But Rauschning's crisis is the crisis of conservatives everywhere; he states fearlessly and frankly their difficulties, mistakes, defeats and failures in battle with revolutionary Bolshevism and Naziism. The Conservative Revolution helps to restore to the conservative position the basic sense in which it is acceptable to all men --the sense of conserving human civilization.

Three years ago Nazi Rauschning would scarcely have written these passages:

On the Jews--"There . . . can be no other 'settlement' for the future than that the Jewish German is and always will be a German, just as the Bavarian German, or the Rhineland or the Pomeranian German is."

On Anti-Semitism--"The part played by the bourgeois in popular Marxism is played in popular Naziism by the Jew . . . the principle of these inventions must be sought ... in Marx and Sorel."

On Turncoats--"It is not those who have changed, in these years of change, that should be suspect, but those who have not changed."

On the emigres--"A large section of the German emigres [have] failed to realize the deep and irrevocable changes that have come over the German people in the course of the last ten years. . . . We have become the 'alien corn.' "

On Socialism--"Socialism has to come. I hope you will not misunderstand my rejection of doctrinaire Marxism and of the parties that have represented it politically. In a democratic order in Germany a socialistic labor party will be indispensable."

More familiar is his remark about liberalism: "It was the liberal guards at the palace gates of democracy who allowed their palace to be burned down and reveled in the flames."

Though The Conservative Revolution makes an excellent book title, as a political slogan it leads Author Rauschning into all kinds of verbal quibblings. By it Rauschning means that against the Marxist revolutionary forces which are rending Europe (Naziism, he says, is Marxism rampant no less than Bolshevism), men like himself must fight to the death. But a struggle against revolution cannot be revolution: it is counterrevolution. Counterrevolution is what Rauschning wanted when he joined the Nazis, but they turned out to be part of the revolution. Conservative counterrevolution, preferably nonviolent, is what he still wants. It is bound to prevail, he believes, because in the end conservatism appeals even to revolutions that have gained power. He says:

"We have entered the period of self-liquidation of Utopias and doctrines. Not until this process is complete shall we be ripe for a truly conservative order resulting from the synthesis of all our traditional and historic elements. We are in the midst of the liquidation of the doctrines of nationalism, socialism, rationalism, and liberalism and of the demarcation of the boundaries within which they are serviceable and constructive influences."

That is the ultimate meaning of the war against Naziism: "There can be no peace of compromise with Naziism. . . . There can be no compromise with revolution. Every revolution lives by its claim to exclusive authority. . . . What we wanted and what we failed to achieve, and what will be the aim of the peace to come, is the end of the revolution"

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