Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (born April 26, 1876, Solingen, Ger.—died May 30, 1925, Berlin) was a German cultural critic whose book Das Dritte Reich (1923; “The Third Empire,” or “Reich”) provided Nazi Germany with its dramatic name.

Moeller left Germany after the turn of the century (to avoid military service) and lived in France, Italy, and Scandinavia. While abroad he wrote an eight-volume history of the German people, Die Deutschen (1904–10), in which he classified his countrymen according to psychological types (drifting, dreaming, decisive, etc.). He returned to Germany when World War I began and in the same year (1914) completed the editing of the first German edition of the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

In the postwar period Moeller began to seek in politics the solution to what he saw as Germany’s cultural poverty. He regarded western Europe’s “civilization” (by which he meant enlightened rationalism and its political manifestations, liberalism and socialism) as destructive of “true culture.” He called for a new Germanic faith to save the country from what he viewed as the disintegration and vulgarity of modern industrial society.

Moeller suffered from an emotional disturbance and, apparently in despair over the course of German history, took his own life. Though the Nazis denied him as an intellectual precursor, his thought helped create an atmosphere that was receptive to the National Socialist ideology.