Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

Arthur Wilhelm Ernst Victor Moeller van den Bruck (23 April 1876 – 30 May 1925) was a German cultural historian, philosopher and writer best known for his controversial 1923 book Das Dritte Reich ("The Third Reich"), which promoted German nationalism and strongly influenced the Conservative Revolutionary movement and then the Nazi Party, despite his open opposition and numerous criticisms of Adolf Hitler. From 1906 to 1922, he also published Elisabeth Kaerrick's first full German translation of Dostoyevsky's written works. 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. At birth Moeller van den Broek was assigned the given name "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").