What is a National Revolutionary?

Jürgen Schwab

Jürgen Schwab talks about the necessity of clarifying a frequently misinterpreted term and the importance of the nation-state.

A dazzling term that is rarely questioned in nationalist journalism is “national revolution.” Revolutionary nationalists, National Socialists, National Bolsheviks, national communists — these groups and more can be (mis)interpreted as “national revolutionary.”

Armin Mohler defined the “national revolutionaries” — alongside the “young conservatives,” the Völkische (ethno-nationalists), the Bündische (alliance movements), and the Landvolk movement (rural people’s movement) — as one of the five main groups of the “Conservative Revolution,” which, however, did not exist under this collective term during the author’s period of study, namely the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, the term “New Nationalism” was commonly used, but it was no longer considered appropriate after the war, leading Mohler to replace it in his dissertation with “Conservative Revolution.” The national revolutionaries of the interwar period would likely have strongly opposed being redefined as “conservative revolutionaries.”