Philosemitism on the German Right:
The Case of the Novelist Walter Bloem
by Roddler F. Morris

In 1922 Walter Bloem, one of Germany's best-known nationalist writers, stunned his contemporaries with a political novel strongly opposed to racism, antisemitism, and extremism. Publication of this novel, Brotherhood (Die Briiderlichkeit), was a singular event in the Weimar Republic, for not one other best-selling philosemitic novel by a prominent nationalist author appeared in the years 1918-1932.1 Bloem was probably the best-selling author in Germany between 1912 and 1922, and Brotherhood started as a success with 90,000 copies in print by the end of 1922. But the novel also became the focus of a passionate political controversy. 2 On the right, Bloem's nationalist readers rejected his philosernitism. and henceforth viewed him as a renegade; therefore, his popularity slipped precipitously. On the left, liberals and socialists hailed his stand against antisemitism, but they in turn rejected his conservatism and nationalism. Bloem found himself politically isolated and, in part driven by this isolation, became a Nazi fellow traveler by 1933 and joined the Nazi party in 1938.

Bloem's career illustrates the perhaps insurmountable difficulties facing a conservative nationalist, who was also a philosernite, in Germany during the Weimar Republic; it also shows how impossible it was for a "loner" without party backing, however popular he or she might be as an author, to have any lasting influence in such polarized times. But while Bloem stood politically alone after publishing Brotherhood, deserted by his former allies on the right, he did represent his readers, the provincial reading public that also provided the mass following of the right-wing parties.3 Like his readers, he eventually surrendered to the extremists and accepted the Nazis.

Bloem's eventual acceptance of the Nazi revolution proves the limitations of his philosemitism. Unlike the left, Bloem's conservative philosernitism did not stem from any egalitarian belief in the equality of human beings. Further, although he had Jewish friends and admired some Jewish traditional qualities, Bloem's philosernitism did not stem from an admiration of Jewish contributions to society; he accepted common antisernitic stereotypes and rejected all those Jews who did not accept the German nationalistic traditions. Bloem's philosemitism was thus due to his rejection of volkisch racial antisemitism: to his opposition to the vulgarity, illegality, and stupidity of this type of Jew-hatred.4 And because Bloem's philosernitism was thus not based on either ethical or ideological conviction, he could and did join the Nazis when their cause appeared to represent his national beliefs.

Walter Bloem was born at Elberfeld in the Rhineland in June 1868 and raised in the adjacent, drab industrial city of Wuppertal. His parents came from the middle class-his father was an attorney and his mother was the child of manufacturers; Walter would always share, more or less, their bourgeois values and politics. After an undistinguished university career, during which he spent most of his time on student corps (i.e., dueling fraternity activities), Bloem started a floundering law practice.5 A second career as a nationalist playwright also proved unsuccessful.6 Finally, Bloem achieved fame and fortune during 1911-1914 with a fictional trilogy about the achievement of German unity during the Franco-Prussian War.7 This trilogy transformed him into the best-selling author of 1911-1922, the favorite of the broad provincial middle class and the ruling elite (including Kaiser Wilhelm II himself).8

During the First World War, Bloem was a much decorated infantry officer.9 He spent the first half of 1915 as the press officer of the Belgium occupation regime; consequently he stood "suddenly in the focal point of a political life inflamed by war."10 During 1916-1918, Bloem was head of the Field Press Office which was assigned the mission of guiding opinion within the army and at home into channels desired by the Supreme Command.11 Well into the summer of 1917, Bloem served as an ardent, influential spokesman for the regime's policies, countering (for example) enemy propaganda about German atrocities in Belgium and annexationist war goals.12 He savagely attacked the Reichstag deputies for their Peace Resolution of July 1917 in an article ordered by Ludendorff to be distributed en masse in the army. 13 However, personal contact with Wilhelm 11 and the Supreme Command combined with revulsion at the unprecedented bloodletting at Verdun to erode Bloem's confidence in the Second Reich.14 The war also gave Bloem a new respect for the common man.15 In 1917, he proclaimed that the lasting legacy of the war would be "a deepened feeling of brotherhood" permeating all Germans.16 Finally in an official speech delivered 4 November 1918 in Berlin, Bloem (who had long disapproved of the systematic deception of Kaiser and homefront as to the true state of the war effort) horrified his superiors and much of his traditional audience by admitting that the war was lost and that the Kaiser might have to abdicate.17 When the monarchy was toppled shortly thereafter, Bloem. advised against counterrevolution and signed a declaration of support for the new regime drawn up by the "Berlin Artists and Writers." Despite intense despair over the death of the old order, Bloem the most read novelistic apologist for the Second Reich, had become a reluctant republican. 18

Bloem entered the Weimar era as the representative author of the German entertainment literature industry. Entertainment fiction had an immense circulation in Germany where it had been the major item on the book market since the eighteenth century, had constituted a significant portion of German newspapers, and had become the staple of the lending libraries with their mass of lower-middle class and proletarian customers.19 Throughout his writing career, Bloem saw himself as educator as well as entertainer of the nation, as the medium by which the Volk achieved self-consciousness and unity.20 Now, although he refused to join a party or become a mere propagandist, Bloem became avowedly political. He turned to thesis novels designed to deliver a socio-political message.21

As a political educator, however, Bloem was quite flawed. He was devoid of religious faith (his Calvinist upbringing notwithstanding); neither his neohumanist nor legal education had convinced him of the worth of the tradition of moral philosophy.22 Thus Bloem easily succumbed to a general tendency among Germans during his lifetime (mirrored and reinforced by historicism, positivism, literary and political realism, and existentialism) to forego transhistorical standards for human action derived from canonical revelation or nature.23 Without such standards he could neither see social reality clearly nor steer a permanently moral course. Rather, he confronted his world through sense experience apprehended as pictures.24 Refraction through the prism of national conservative ideology unified yet distorted these pictures in his mind's eye.25 The result was a vision of his times sufficiently askew to merit the term "second reality."26 His self-comprehension was also deluded. He defined himself in reference to the collective identities of nation and social elite while imagining for himself an absurd great personality as belletristic voice of the Volk.27 That Bloem's political vision was nonetheless more healthy than that of most of the German Right derived from his natural decency, from his readiness to learn from experience, and from the residues in his thought of the principled Judaeo-Christian, liberal and conservative traditions. Yet, while Bloem preferred humane means to sustain the nation and its corollary idol of the traditional social elites, he had no principled foundation for convincing others, or even himself, that vile means were impermissible.

That Bloem decided to defend the Republic and assault antisemitism. in a novel in 1922 stemmed from his liberal and Christian upbringing as well. as his actual experiences. His father, clearly a liberal of the old school whose first wife had been Jewish, "considered antisernitism to be barbaric nonsense." The religious tradition of Wuppertal, where Bloem had been raised, viewed the Jews not only as those who killed Christ, but also as the people of the Bible. In the Berlin theater world, Bloem became a close friend of German nationalist Jews like Ludwig Fulda and Georg Engel. During the war Bloem was impressed by the bravery of Jewish soldiers. He was appalled when a young platoon sergeant in his former battalion, the son of Felix Hollander (a prominent writer and Max Reinhardt's leading producer), was denied promotion to the officer corps despite extraordinary heroism simply because he was a Jew. Young Hollander subsequently was killed in combat.28

The immediate impulse behind Brotherhood was the decision of one of the largest associations of university student fraternities, the Kosener Senioren Conventsverband (KSC), to exclude Jews.29 In general, the corporations of university students saw themselves as the crucibles of the nation's future ruling elite. The student corps or dueling fraternities, united in the KSC, were infused with an intense nationalism and a monarchist tradition. They viewed themselves as the cream of the academics, a sort of an elite within an elite. Although the corps had traditionally been the most liberal, though apolitical, of the student corporations, they became after World War I both anti- republican and antisemitic. 30

In 1920, the Kosener Congress passed an amendment to the KSC constitution obliging members "to serve the fatherland through cultivation of national usage and stock, through keeping away everything immoral and un- German." The Congress agreed unanimously to interpret this clause as precluding further admission of Jews. The racial fanatics in the corps were, however, dissatisfied with this imprecise formulation. They pushed for a statute explicitly prohibiting acceptance of Jews defined by race.31 Apparently, there was even a movement afoot to revoke the memberships of Jewish Old Boys (Alte Herren) and of those old members married to a woman of full or partial Jewish heritage.32

Bloem, an Old Boy of two member corps of the KSC, Teutonia in Marburg and Lusatia in Leipzig, was incensed by these racial demands. As a jurist he was particularly angered by the demands to expel Old Boys who had earlier married Jews and to block membership to the sons of such marriages. This "meant something judicially and humanely unheard of: a provision for punishment with retroactive force..."33 Significantly, Bloem's sense that the proposed statute was unjust derived from a procedural rather than a substantive view of the rule of law. The horror for him lay not in the impending violation of the principle of equality before the law but in the ex-post-facto quality of the projected measure.

A personal, emotionally charged experience crystallized Bloem's political stance. His corps brother, the well-known surgeon Wilhelm Schultheiss, had married an American Jew. They had three sons. Schultheiss was deeply involved in the affairs of the corps Teutonia in Marburg and had educated his boys "only in the thought that they would some day wear the blue-red-gold ribbon." His oldest son, ready to enter the university, would be barred from Teutonia. if the KSC adopted the anti-Jewish membership clause.34

Bloem tried to thwart the move for a clear-cut "Aryan paragraph" in the KSC by direct action. He spoke on the Jewish question in Berlin before the collective board of the Association of Old Corps Students.35 He lectured against antisernitism at several universities.36 Finally in 1921, he stood up alone at the KSC Congress against the plan to exclude Jews, evoking bitter opposition.37 But his efforts were in vain-the KSC Congress changed the statutes expressly to forbid admission of Jews by race to the corps. According to a further regulation, each freshman on demand had to produce proof that he "had no ancestor of Jewish heritage up to and including the line of his grandparents.38

The KSC adoption of an Aryan paragraph was the last straw for Bloem. Sharing the belief in the corps as training grounds for Germany's elite, he now decided to bring his case to the nation.39

The action of the KSC Congress was finally decisive for me. Out of the whole structure of the old Reich, only the academic associations remained in existence after 1918 as protectors of the fatherland. And now these wanted to take a step, which let itself be answered before no court of honor and justice! I then, if ever, felt myself now called to a knight's deed of the spirit.40

One last experience contributed to "the original material and punctum saliens of Brotherhood"-a meeting with Carl Sormenschein, the Catholic theologian and founder of the Catholic-Social Student Movement.42 Before the Weimar era, religion little concerned Bloem. who, despite his Calvinist upbringing, was not attached during his adult life to any church. After the collapse of the Empire, however, personal contacts in the strictly Catholic north Bavaria (where his castle Rieneck was located) turned him into an admirer of the Catholic Church, which affected the themes and messages of his fiction.43 His pro-Catholic stance, however, stemmed from social-minded conservatism rather than from inner conversion.

Thus, Sormenschein appealed to Bloem because the former aimed at harmony between the industrial workers and the rest of the nation. Sormenschein saw the emergence of a social conscience among the academics as a prerequisite for this harmony. Bloem incorporated some of Sonnschein's central ideas in his image of a German "brotherhood" encompassing those elements, namely the workers and the Jews, who hitherto had been considered to be beyond the pale.44 Sonnenschein himself, transparently fictionalized as the Catholic spiritual advisor Dr. Hohmann, plays a pivotal role in the plot of Brotherhood.

The novel, written in 1921, tells the story of two World War I heroes, the Aryan pilot, Hans Joachim Eichholz, who had won the famous "Blue Max," the highest possible decoration for an officer of his rank, and Ludwig Lowenstein, a Protestant of Jewish origin.45 When Hans Joachim comes home from an English prisoner-of-war camp, he is afire to return to the university in Schafflingen where he intends to learn "what it means to be German" and to enjoy the comradeship of his old dueling fraternity, Franconia (which belongs to the KSC).46

He soon finds much awry in the corps, however. Franconia, indeed the student corporations generally, are bastions of privilege where tradition and trivial fraternity activities crowd out education about Germandom. Most disheartening is the anti-Jewish resistance to Ludwig.47 Ludwig does have some flaws that Bloem clearly portrayed as typically Jewish. Sometimes boastful, Ludwig is inherently skeptical, innovative, and completely lacking in awe before secular tradition. These traits supposedly made the Jews agents of change. For Bloem, a moderate conservative, some change, both within the corps and within Germany as a whole, was necessary to meet the demands of the present. "Jewish" traits, when constrained within the framework of a nationalist conservatism, were therefore an actual boon to society (although equating Jews with change approaches the antisernitic notion of Jews as the "ferment of decomposition").48 Ludwig certainly has the right values: a man of great courage, he is the fraternity's best duelist; steeped in corps traditions, he reorganizes Franconia's finances and helps in all aspects of its administration.49 In key respects, moreover, the Lowenstein family is the antithesis of antisernitic stereotypes. Ludwig and his sister, Ruth, with whom Hans Joachim falls in love, are physically beautiful and completely committed to Germandom.50 Their father, a Justizrat, is a patriotic paragon of fiscal integrity who, much like the real-life Schultheiss, had longed for the day when his son would become a corps student.51

While Ludwig is the target of the traditional antisemitism of the fraternity's reactionaries, his deadliest antagonist is Hermann Strobel, who represents the Volkisch or racist movement of which the Nazis, then unknown to Bloem, would become the prime party-political representative. An insecure and unsavory bully, Strobel, compensates for his lack of a war record (the other Franconians are all veterans) by dueling unskilled freshmen.52 Strobel's hatred of Jews stems from racial theories, a sense of inferiority, and envy of Ludwig.

Hans Joachim (as Bloem's mouthpiece) agitates to reform the corps and through them the academic corporations and educated middle class generally. The corps, whatever their faults, are potential nuclei for German rejuvenation because they alone carry on the spirit of associative life, of community.53 To fulfill their potential, they must cease to be citadels of "old interests and privileges" and temper respect for tradition with willingness to change.54 Uncategorical opposition ' to the Weimar Republic must be dropped; however untimely and wrong in removing the Kaiser, the November Revolution swept away much that was outworn and was a natural explosion against "monstrosities" like 'militarism, feudalism, antisemitism, mammonism.. . . "55

At any rate, Hans Joachim tells his peers, state form is second to national unity. The Republic must be at least formally accepted as a bulwark against chaos and as the will of the working masses. These must be reconciled if the Bildungsburgertum (the educated middle class) is to regain leadership and if all Germans are to become nationalists. Academic youth must take the lead in winning over workers by renouncing privilege and by responsible preparation for and execution of later public office.56

Reform of the corps must be coupled with a campaign against antisemitism. While conceding dangerous features to contemporary Jews, many of whom admittedly failed to do their part in the war, Hans Joachim argues that these are the product of the shameful repression of a race that had done nothing more than fail to understand a prophet of its own blood. Hatred of the Jews, which has been most pronounced in the corps and in the universities, has alienated them from the national movement.57

There are only two possible solutions to the Jewish question: pogrom until total expulsion or the removal of all barriers. Pogrom is out of the question for a multitude of reasons-it would be barbaric, un-Christian, and utopian, and it would isolate Germany among the civilized nations. There is only one true Jewish policy: whatever harmful qualities the Jews may have must be educated out of them. The corps must take the lead in the job of schooling Jews of good win to Germandom; "only then do we have the right and duty to fight against the malacious with all means."58 To reject Jews who come to a corps ready to accept its life style is more than just un-Christian, inhuman, and anti-social; it is stupid and politically harmful. Antisemitism is ridiculous in cases like that of Ludwig Lowenstein a defender of the fatherland and a model corps student. Jews must be judged as individuals. Hans Joachim announces, therefore, that he will oppose any plans to ban Jews from the KSC "as medieval narrow-mindedness, worse than the burning of witches and the inquisition."59

Notes

I am grateful to the Earhart Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service for funding my research. I am thankful to Dr. Gerhard Weinberg who supervised my original work on Bloem and to the guidance of Drs. Ruth Angress, Henry Friedlander, and Sybil Milton in making revisions. Professor Robert Heywood provided a helpful commentary on the preliminary version of this article delivered as a paper at the 12th Great Lakes History Conference, Grand Rapids, Michigan (1986). Special appreciation is owed to Marsha Boehmke for her accomplished typing.

1. Other nationalist authors occasionally also opposed antisernitism in their fiction: for example, Ernst Wiechert and Ernst Puschel, but they had few readers and little impact. Ernst Wiechert, "Die Gebarde," in Samtliche Werke, 10 vols. (Vienna, Munich, and Basel, 1943) 7: 608; Ernst Puschel, Die Juden von Kronburg: Ein Buch von deutschem Volks- und Menschentum. Roman (Neudietendorff, 1924). See also: Sumner Kirschner, "'Even If They Were Guilty': An Unpublished Letter by Ernst Wiechert about the Jews," German Life and Letters: A Quarterly Review 23 (1970): 142-43; Ernst Puschel, "Die wahre Volkische Gesinnung," CVZeitung 3 (4 Dec. 1924): 769.

2. Judgments about comparative sales statistics must take into account the flawed but useful German Studies in America, vol. 2: Donald Ray Richards, The German Bestseller in the 20th Century: A Complete Bibliography and Analysis, 1915-1940 (Berne, 1968). See also: Ernst L6wy, Literatur unterm Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich und seine Dichtung. Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt, 1966), p. 307; Stadt Biicherei Wuppertal, Nachlass Walter Bloem, [hereafter cited as Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal)], file 22: Erich Leyens to Bloem, 3 Mar. 1923.

3. Peter de Mendelssohn, S. Fischer und sein Verlag (Frankfurt, 1970), p. 886.

4. The word vd1kisch is an adjective derived from the noun Volk. This noun can be translated as people, nation, or folk, although no such translation captures its full meaning in nineteenth- and twentieth-century political usage. Volk connoted a people organized along national lines and somehow organically fused together. Many political thinkers considered the Volk to be the ultimate political reality, a not unnatural development in a people that had to define nationhood in other than statist terms before 1871. Those who posited the Volk as the center of sociopolitical life-and who thus tended to call themselves vd1kisch-differed as to what was the cement of the Volk. Some saw the medium of fusion as blood (the racialists), some as religion, some as culture, and some as shared ideals. Around 1912, a movement was bom that called itself the vd1kisch, or German movement. This movement propounded a racialist ideology and ultimately issued into Nazism. Indeed, it can quite properly be termed proto-Nazism. Since many others who did not adhere to this movement called themselves vd1kisch, I prefer (following Uwe Lohalm) to term it and its heir, Nazism, vd1kisch radicalism. Those who adhered to revolutionary conservatism, which posited the Volk as the ultimate sociopolitical reality but which rejected the primacy of race, might be termed vd1kisch conservatives. Bloern's Reform Conservatism of 1918-1928 is vd1kisch conservative. See Uwe Lohalm, VdIkischer Radikalismus: Die Geschichte des Deutschvdlkischen Schutz- und Trutz-Bundes 1919-1933 (Hamburg, 1970); George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964); Klaus Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, Vol. 1: Vorgeschichte und Zeit der Illusionen 1918-1934 (Frankfurt, Berlin, and Vienna, 1977), pp. 93-109.

5. Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal), file 6/29: [Walter Bloem], untitled Auto- biographical Sketch for the Celebration of Bloern's Fiftieth Birthday [hereafter cited as Autobiographical Sketch], n.d. [1918], pp. 1-5; Freiburg, Bundesarchiv-Militdrchiv, Nachlass Bloem, [hereafter cited as Nachlass Bloem (Freiburg)], Record Group N31, file 10: Bloem to Georg Engel, 15 Apr. 1915; ibid.: Dr. Schmalz, "Findbuch N31, Dr. Walter Bloem [Guide to Bloem Nachlass with biographical data]," 19 July 1966; Hermann A. L. Degener, Wer ist's? (Berlin, 1928), p. 142; Terrell Carver, Engels (New York, 1981), pp. 3-5; Walter Bloem and others, "Warum werden lhre Biicher viel gelesen? Das Ratsel des Publikumserfolges," Die literarische Welt 4, no. 19 (1928): 3.

6. Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal), file 6/29: Autobiographical Sketch, pp. 5-11; ibid.: [Bloeml to the Verlag Rheinische Heimat (Dr. Heinrich Ohlers), 10 May 1928; Walter Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch erstes bis achtes Kapitel, Seite 180-298" [fragment of Bloern's unpub- lished autobiography, written shortly after World War 111, p. 271; ibid., file 8: Walter Bloem, "Eine Freiburger Theatererrinerung: Dazu allerlei Grundsatzhches," p. 1; Bloem, "Warum werden Ihre Bilcher viel gelesen?," p. 3.

7. Bloern's first novel dealt with the student corps. Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal), file 6/29: [Bloeml, Autobiographical Sketch, pp. 9-11; Walter Bloem, Der krasse Fuchs: Roman (Leipzig and Zurich, 1906 [19321); Werner Hegemann, "Walter Bloem contra Heinrich Mann," Das Tage- buch 13 (1932): 1590-91. For a sales history of the war trilogy, see: Bloem, "Wartun werden Ihre Bdcher viel gelesen?," p. 3; Nachlass Bloem (Freiburg), RG N31, file 1: Walter Bloem, "Lebenslauf," (copy of a letter from Generalstab des Feldheeres im Auftrage des Herm Hauptsmarms Bloem to Schriftleitung von Dennerts Konversationslexikon, Prof. Dr. Dennert), 19 Apr. 1916; ibid.: Dr. Schmalz, "Findbuch N31"; Bibliogra- phische Abteilung des Bbrsenvereins der deutschen Buchhandler zu Leipzig, comp., Deutsches Biicherverzeichnis: Eine Zusammenstellung der im deutschen Buchhandel erschienenen Bacher, Zeitschriften und Landkarten mit einem Stich- und Schlagwort-register, 40 vols. published by 1970 (Leipzig, 1916-1970) 23:490. After his breakthrough to popularity, Bloern's earlier works also became bestsellers: Der krasse Fuchs had gone into a respect- able but unspectacular 12,000 copies in the period 1906 to 1910. The total in print shot up to at least 50,000 by 1913, 112,000 by 1922, 176,000 by the fall of 1932. Heinrich Conrad, comp., Christian Gottlob Kaysers vollstdn- diges Biicher-Lexikon: Ein Verzeichnis der seit dem Jahre 1750 im deutschen Buchhandel erschienenen Biicher und Landkarten, vol. 53 (Leipzig, 1911): 292-93; Deutsches Biicherverzeichnis 1: 342; 7: 390.

8. The following Bloem books (almost all novels) came out in first editions of fifty thousand copies each: Volk wider Volk (1912); Die Schmiede der Zukunft (1913); Das verlorene Vaterland (1914); Vormarsch (?); Gottesferne (1920); Herrin (1921); Briiderlichkeit (1922). See Deutsches Biicherverzeichnis 1: 342; 6: 312; 7: 390. For Bloern's popularity, see Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal), file 6/29: [Bloem], Autobiographical Sketch, p. 112; Bloem, "Warum werden lhre Buecher viel gelesen?," p. 3; Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 240-45. Bloem described himself as the best-selling author on the German book market: ibid., file 22: Bloem to Hermann Hestermann, 26 Apr. 1949. According to Friedrich Albrecht, the belletristic field in the years before the outbreak of World War I was ruled by "apologists for the Empire" like Bloem. Deutsche Schriftsteller in der Entscheidung: Wege zur Arbeiterklasse 1918-1933 (Berlin and Weimar, 1970), p. 22. Kaiser Wilhelm II, on numerous occasions, summoned Bloem. to talk over the latter's books. Herbert Eulenberg, "Walter Bloem zurn 60. Geburtstag (20. Juni 1928)," CV-Zeitung 17 (22 June 1928): 356. The inside back flaps of later editions of the Franco-Prussian War trilogy contain ecstatic reviews of the novels from the major liberal dailies: Walter Bloem, Das eiserne Jahr: Roman (Leipzig, 1912); Walter Bloem, Die Schmiede der Zukunft (Leipzig, 1913), pp. 513-14; Walter Bloem, Volk wider Volk: Roman (Leipzig, 1912).

9. The decisiveness of the war for Bloern's polifical development as well as his career in the army reserves, his reaction to the August days, his combat record, and his exemplary heroism are documented in: Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal), file 65: [Bloeml to Dr. Harald Oldag, 2 Apr. 1925; file 22: Moritz Schauenburg to Herr Dreecken, 30 Jan. 1946; ibid.: Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 182-83; Nachlass Bloem (Freiburg), RG N31: Dr. Schmalz, "Findbuch N31"; RG N31, file 26: "Stammliste"; RG N31, file 4: Walter Bloem, "Keine Verbitterung! [typescript of war article for unidentified journal]," [1916]; RG N31, file 25: Ludwig Osius to Bloem [for his seventieth birthday], 24 June 1938.

10. Nachlass Bloem (Freiburg), RG N31: Dr. Schmalz, "Findbuch N31"; Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal): Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," PP. 184-89 (quote on p. 184); Gerhard Ritter, The Tragedy of Statesman- ship: Bethmann Hollweg as War Chancellor (1914-1917), vol. 3 of The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany, trans. Heinz Norden (Coral Gables, Florida, 1972), pp. 358-72.

11. Nachlass Bloem (Freiburg), RG N31: Dr. Schmalz, "Findbuch N31"; file 1, "Lebenslauf'; file 26, "Stammliste"; file 8, Walter Bloem, "Notizen fiber die TAtigkeit der Feldpressestelle des Generalstabes des Feld- heeres, Charlesville, 1916-1918," [n.d.]. The Field Press Office never achieved anything close to the central role in the German press originally assigned to it. It did create an effective agency for army papers. Bloern founded a system of war reporters made up o army officers that was retained by the German army in World War 11. Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939-1945 (New York, Evanston, and London, 1968), p. 69, note 4. See also, Nachlass Bloern (Wuppertal): Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 195-99.

12. Nachlass, Bloern (Freiburg), RG N31, file 3: Walter Bloem, "Greuelhetze," Kdlnische Zeitung (10 Feb. 1915) and [Walter Bloem], draft for a lecture, ultimately published in Die Woche 17 (1 May 1915): 613-19; RG N31, file 22: article by a Herr Kuhn in the Bayrische Landeszeitung (25 Aug. 1919), attached to and the subject of Bloern to Herr Kuhn, 28 Aug. 1919.

13. Nachlass Bloern (Wuppertal): Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 197-202. Bloern's attack on the Peace Resolution was entitled "From a Front Officer" and appeared in Die Woche. This was undoubtedly part of the Supreme Command's campaign against the Peace Resolution. For this see Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1650-1945 (London, Oxford, and New York, 1955), pp. 330-31.

14. Nachlass Bloern (Wuppertal), file 65: Bloern to [Dr. Harald 01dag], 2 Apr. 1925; Dr. Harald 01dag, Bergisch-Mfirkische Zeitung, Abt. Aus- senpolitik, to [Bloeml, 23 Mar. 1925; ibid.: Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 195-202. For the horror of Verdun and its impact on German chances for victory, see Alistair Home, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1962), esp. pp. 42-45, 330.

15. Nachlass Bloern (Freiburg), RG N31, file 4: Bloem, "Keine Verbitter- ung!"

16. Ibid., file 6: Walter Bloem, Wandlungen der Seele im Kriege: Vortrag, gehalten am 20. Januar 1917 im Sieglehaus zu Stuttgart auf Einladung der Vereinigung ffir Vortrdge wdhrend des Krieges (Wdrttemberg, n.d. [1917; forward by Bloern dated 27 Jan. 1917]).

17. Nachlass Bloern (Wuppertal): Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 205-14, 234. See the following in Nachlass Bloern (Freiburg), RG N31, file 8, Bloem, "Notizen"; file 1, Barmer Zeitung (2 Mar. 1918); Dr. Schmalz, "Findbuch N31"; file 26, "Stammliste"; file 1, Generalstab des Feldheeres, Abteilung IIIb, -Nr. 19543111, geheim," 7 Nov. 1918; file 7, [Walter Bloem], "Maschinenschriftliche Obertragung der stenographischen Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen des Schriftstellers Walter Bloern dber die Ereignisse vorn 19. Oktober bis zurn 21. November 1918, Kriegspresseamt und Revolution, aus Aktenstiick 7 des Bestandes 54 des Bundes- archivs, S. 1-44, dictandoilbertragen von Oberregierungsrat a.D. Ludwig Krieger, Bonn [transcription of Bloern's diary from stenographic original]," Oct.-Nov. 1918, pp. 9-10; file 11, "Ein eigenartiger Vortrag in der Kolonialgesellschaft," Der Reichsbote (6 Nov. 1918); "Walter Bloems politische Wandlungen," Deutsche Zeitung (5 Nov. 1918). Not all those present for the lecture were hostile; the future Reich Chancellor of Germany, Heinrich Briining, was overjoyed by Bloern's stand against the Pan-Germans. Ibid., file 51: Heinrich Briining to Bloem, 6 Nov. 1918.

18. Nachlass Bloem (Freiburg), RG N31, file 7: [Bloeml, "Maschinenschriftliche Ubertragung," Oct.-Nov. 1918, pp. 4-20; Nachlass Bloern (Wuppertal): Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 215-21; Albrecht, Deutsche Schriftsteller, pp. 81 and 649, note 7.

19. See Roddler F. Morris, "German Nationalist Fiction and the Jewish Question, 1918-1933," Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1979, pp. 8-195.

20. Nachlass Bloern (Freiburg), file 1: Bloem, "Lebenslauf'; Bloem, "Warurn werden Ihre Bficher viel gelesen?," p. 3. Bloern wrote in 1925: "1 have dedicated my life and creative activity to the German Volk in its entirety, and will never tire of admonishing it to unity, to reconciliation." Nachlass Bloern (Wuppertal), file 22: Walter Bloern, "Ein Wort zu 'Briiderhchkeit'," Hamburger Familienblatt (1 Dec. 1925). See also ibid., file 22: Walter Bloem, "Offene Antwort zu Rocholl," 16 May 1923.

21. The politicization of Bloern's writing began in the war, when he wrote for the purposes of an imperial war machine in which he nonetheless gradually lost faith. He even undertook to write a novel on enemy espionage activities for the War Press Bureau. Nachlass Bloern (Frei- burg), file 1: Kriegspresseamt to Bloem, 7 Nov. 1918. See also: Nachlass Bloern (Wuppertal), file 19: [Walter Bloeml, "GesprAch mit [Oswald] Spengler," [in Hamburg], Apr. 1924, pp. 1-4; ibid.: [Walter Bloem], "Zweites Buch: Der neue Dreissigjahre Krieg," ["Werk und Tat," vol. 3], n.d. (post-1945), pp. 513-22; file 22: Bloem, "Ein Wort," Hamburger Familienblatt; ibid.: Bloern, "Offene Antwort zu. Rocholl"; Bloern, "Warurn werden lhre Bficher viel gelesen?," p. 3.

22. For the relationship between the decline of neohumanist and legal education and the susceptibility of educated burghers (particularly of the lawyers who nearly monopolized state offices) to illiberal national- ism, see: Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (Garden City, NY, 1967); Konrad H. Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany: The Rise of Academic Illiberalism (Princeton, 1982).

23. For the breakdown of transhistorical standards in law and morality as the background to twentieth century barbarism, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago and London, 1950); John H. Hallowell, Main Currents in Modem Political Thought (New York, 1950); Eric Voegehn, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago and London, 1952); idem, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago, 1968).

24. Nachlass Bloem (Freiburg), file 11: Bloem to Princess Sch6nburg, 22 July 1918.

25. Bloem appears to be what Isaiah Berlin called an intellectual "hedge- hog," i.e., a writer who relates "everything to a single central vision." Bloern's "single, universal, organizing principle" was the nation. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (Harmonds- worth, Middlesex, 1978), p. 22.

26. Quote from Eric Voegelin, "The German University and the Order of German Society: A Reconsideration of the Nazi Era," The Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion 20, no. 3 (1985): 15-16, 25.

27. For an analysis of the roots and political consequences of deluded self-images, see James M. Rhodes, The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution (Stanford, 1980), pp. 148-64, esp. 150-53.

28. Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal): Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 234-36 (quote on p. 234) and Walter Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Exemplar 1, Band 1, 1 bis 243. Alte Fassung," n.d. [after 1945], pp. 29, 129, 165-66. See also ibid., file 22: Moritz Schauenburg to Herr Dreecken, 30 Jan. 1946.

29. Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal): Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 237-39; Hans Peter Bleuel and Ernst Klinnert, Deutsche Studenten auf dem Weg ins Dritte Reich: Ideologien-Programme-Aktionen 1918-1935 (GOt- ersloh, 1967), p. 261.

30. Bleuel and Klinnert, Deutsche Studenten, pp. 18-19, 28, 57-58, 84, 144-49; Nachlass Bloem. (Wuppertal): Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 237ff.

31. Bleuel and Klinnert, Deutsche Studenten, pp. 148-49.

32. Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal): Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," p. 237.

33. Quote from Ibid., p. 237 [underlined in original]. See also Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal), file 22: Moritz Schauenberg to Herr Dreecken, 30 Jan. 1946.

34. Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal): Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," p. 238.

35. This lecture was not well received. The Deutsche Corpszeitung refused to print a stenogram of the lecture. Ibid., file 22: Bloem, "Offene Antwort zu Rocholl," paragraph 2.

36. Bloem lectured the students at several universities-the university at Gottingen, the Technische Hochschule in Hannover, the Tierartzliche Hochschule in Dresden. He won agreement from the rectors, only cool respect from the students. Ibid., file 22: Bloem, "Offene Antwort zu Rocholl," paragraph 2.

37. [bid.; also ibid.: Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," p. 238.

38. Bleuel and Klinnert, Deutsche Studenten, p. 149.

39. Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal), file 22: Bloem, "Offene Antwort zu Rocholl," paragraph 3.

40. Ibid.: Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 238-39.

41. Ibid., file 22: Bloem, "Offene Antwort zu Rocholl," paragraph 3.

42. Quote from ibid.: Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," pp. 239-40.

43. Ibid., pp. 223-24: Walter Bloem, Gottesferne: Roman, 2 vols. (Leipzig and Zurich, 1920).

44. Jfirgen Schwarz, Studenten in der Weimarer Republik: Die deutsche Studen- tenschaft in der Zeit von 1918 bis 1923 und ihre Stellung zur Politik (Berlin, 1971), pp. 136, 331, 387; Bleuel and Klinnert, Deutsche Studenten, pp. 64-65; Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal): Bloem, "Werk und Tat: Zweites Buch," p. 239.

45. Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal), file 22: Moritz Schauenburg to Herr Dreecken, 30 Jan. 1946; Walter Bloem, Briiderlichkeit: Roman (Leipzig and Zurich, 1922), pp. 5-7, 12-13.

46. Bloem, Brfiderlichkeit, pp.7-8 (quote on p. 15). This is a fictionalized corps; Bloem denied modeling it on his own corps, Teutonia-Marburg. In fact, Bloem claimed that his fictional corps was the "type of the dueling fraternity overall." Nachlass Bloem (Wuppertal), file 22: Bloem, "Offene Antwort zu Rocholl," section 1.

47. Briiderlichkeit, pp. 67-69, 107-08, 141, 144.

48. Ibid., pp. 59-60, 100-102; George L. Mosse, "Die deutsche Rechte," in Entscheidungsjahr 1932: Zur Judenfrage in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik. Ein Sammelband, ed. Werner E. Mosse and Arnold Paucker, 2d rev. ed. (Tiibingen, 1966), p. 234.

49. Bloem, Briiderlichkeit, pp. 133-34.

50. Ibid., pp. 21-22, 27, 52.

51. Ibid., pp. 11-19.

52. Ibid., pp. 63, 100-102, 189.

53. Ibid., pp. 64, 69-70, 128-33.

54. [bid., pp. 108, 125.

55. [bid., pp. 107-08, 124 (quote on pp. 107-8).

56. [bid., pp. 124, 145, 159-60.

57. Ibid., pp. 245-49.

58. Ibid., pp. 249-50.

59. Ibid., pp. 246-47 (quote on p. 246).