Hans Zehrer as a Neoconservative Elite Theorist

Abstract

SHORTLY before the collapse of the New York stock market in I929, a young German journalist published an article that would, he hoped, become the manifesto of the German intelligentsia. In a procedure unusual for a man who rejected Marxism, Hans Zehrer cited a passage from the Communist Manifesto to support his position. After quoting the assertion that all previous historical movements were movements of minorities or in the interests of minorities, he suggested a meaningful formulation of it: . . All movements began as intellectual [geistige] movements of intelligent, well-qualified minorities which, because of the discrepancy between that which is and that which should be, seized the initiative.1 Zehrer expected intellectuals to play the predominant role in creating and ruling a new Germany. During the final years of the Weimar Republic he and several of his friends used the pages of a monthly magazine, Die Tat, to stake out the future path of this minority. They participated prominently in the last, most turbulent phases of a widespread controversy about the type of leadership best suited to Germany since its defeat in World War I. Their efforts helped to make the Tat into one of the largest and most influential journals of German neoconservatism. Right Wingers who hesitated or refused to identify themselves with any political party and who dissociated themselves from the yearning of the more traditional Right to restore the Second Reich have come to be known as neoconservatives. Their ideas and activities have attracted much attention recently from students of the Weimar Republic,2 but their elite theories have not been studied systematically. Zehrer's ideas provide an especially revealing example of a neoconservative elite theory. Although he and the other members of the Tat circle were almost alone on the Right of the