Talking to Jeffrey Herf about Reactionary Modernism

In his speech to the House of Commons on the eve of the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill warned that if “we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” In exile 4 years later, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno wrote, “The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” And in 1945, Thomas Mann declared, “‘the really characteristic and dangerous aspect of National Socialism was its mixture of robust modernity and an affirmative stance toward progress combined with dreams of the past: a highly technological romanticism.”

In their very different ways, they were all intimating what would come to be called “reactionary modernism,” an enormously useful and illuminating term in the study of fascism, both past and present. For this episode of the Unpopular Front author series, I’m very lucky to be joined by the person who coined the term, Jeffrey Herf, professor Emeritus of history at the University of Maryland and author of Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Professor Herf's book investigates how the “conservative revolutionaries” of Weimar—figures like Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, and Ernst Jünger, along with a group of much lesser-known ordinary engineers—combined a paradoxical rejection of the Enlightenment with an embrace of high technology, which they thought would be “spiritualized” with the energy of the purified Volk. Taken together, they contributed to an aesthetic and ideological movement that Joseph Goebbels would later dub “steely romanticism.” This cult of the machine would include a desire to split the “creative” and productive side of capitalism from the abstract mercantile and financial side, forming a philosophical underpinning of Nazi antisemitism and, eventually, the Holocaust.

I talked to Jeffrey about all this and its relevance to contemporary debates about Trump, Silicon Valley, and much more!

Read more:

Jeffrey Herf, “Reactionary Modernism: Some Ideological Origins of the Primacy of Politics in the Third Reich” in Theory and Society, Nov. 1981

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