Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

Moeller van den Bruck was born on 23 April 1876 in Solingen, Westphalia, as the only child of bourgeois parents. His father was Ottomar Victor Moeller, a German state architect, and his mother was Elise van den Bruck, the daughter of Dutch architect van den Broeck and (allegedly) a Spanish mother. Moeller van den Bruck's given name was "Arthur" in honour of Arthur Schopenhauer, but he would later drop that part from his name. He was expelled from a gymnasium, a German secondary school, for his indifference towards his studies. The young Moeller van den Bruck believed German literature and philosophy, particularly the works of Nietzsche, to be a more vital education. He later continued his studies on his own in Berlin, Paris and Italy. In 1897 he married Hedda Maase (later Eulenberg). She divorced him in 1904. Moeller van den Bruck's eight-volume cultural history Die Deutschen, unsere Menschengeschichte ("The Germans, Our People's History") appeared in 1905. In 1907, he returned to Germany, and in 1914, he enlisted in the army at the start of World War I. Soon, he joined the press office of the Foreign Ministry and was attached to the foreign affairs section of the German Supreme Army Command. His essay Der Preußische Stil ("The Prussian Style") in which he celebrated the essence of Prussia as "the will to the state" appeared in 1916 and marked his embrace of nationalism. It showed him as an opponent of parliamentary democracy and liberalism, and it exerted a strong influence on the Jungkonservativen ("young conservative movement"). After a nervous breakdown, he committed suicide in Berlin on 30 May 1925. Moeller van den Bruck was the joint founder of the "June Club" (Juniklub), which sought to influence young conservatives in the fight against the Treaty of Versailles. Later, it was renamed Deutscher Herrenklub ("German Gentlemen's Club"), became very powerful and helped Franz von Papen to become Reichskanzler in 1932.

Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich) formulated an "ideal" of national empowerment, which found many adherents in a Germany desperate to rebound from the Treaty of Versailles.

Die moderne Literatur in Gruppen und Einzeldarstellungen (1900) Das Variété: Eine Kulturdramaturgie (1900) Die Deutschen: Unsere Menschheitsgeschichte (1904) Zeitgenossen (1905) Die italienische Schönheit (1913) Der preußische Stil (1915) Das Recht der jungen Völker (1918) Das Dritte Reich (1923)