Das dritte Reich

In an excerpt translated by the German Historical Institute, Moeller presents the "third Reich" as an alternative to party government and parliamentarism: "Instead of government by party we offer the ideal of the third Reich". In the same text, he warns that the concept was, at first, only a philosophical idea, and that Germany could perish if it remained merely a dream rather than being translated into political reality. According to the German Historical Institute's introduction to the text, Moeller treated the Holy Roman Empire as the "first Reich" and the German Empire founded in 1871 as only a transitional "second Reich" because it excluded Austria. His projected "third Reich" was meant to be a greater-German polity that would fulfill German history and overcome social and political antagonisms. The book attacks Marxism, liberalism and party politics, while attempting to synthesize "German socialism" with revolutionary conservatism. Robbert-Jan Adriaansen writes that the larger argument of the book is less a detailed constitutional blueprint than an inquiry into the kind of historical consciousness and political movement that could bring about German national regeneration after World War I, the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the founding of the Weimar Republic. == Reception ==

Historians commonly treat Das dritte Reich as a key text of the Conservative Revolutionary right in the Weimar era. At the same time, reference works and historians have cautioned against treating Moeller as a simple or direct predecessor of National Socialism. Encyclopædia Britannica writes that, although the Nazis denied him as an intellectual precursor, his thought helped create an atmosphere receptive to National Socialist ideology. Gerhard Krebs similarly argued in 1941 that Moeller had "accidentally furnished so attractive a label" for the Nazi regime, while also noting the uncertainty of how far he himself would have agreed with its methods had he lived longer. == References ==