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. == Influence on Nazism==