Notes on the Third Reich

In the same manner as he critiqued Italian Fascism in Fascism Viewed from the Right, in this volume Evola analyses the German National Socialist movement, making a distinction between National Socialism as an ideology and the contingent circumstances which led to its defeat in the Second World War. He traces the origins of the movement among the veterans who returned from the trenches at the end of the First World War and who found themselves dissatisfied with the bourgeois, liberal society that arose in Germany during the Weimar Republic, and which in turn led to the rise of the paramilitary Freikorps units as well as the Conservative Revolutionary movement in intellectual circles. For Evola, all that was best in National Socialism had been inherited from this spirit. Overall, however, Evola takes the Third Reich to task for always remaining populist, for not establishing a genuine political order based on European traditions rather than a cult of personality, and for its misunderstanding of the issues of race and the Jews. All of this Evola attributes to a lack of connection to the transcendent and the traditional. Nevertheless, Evola recognises some good qualities in the Reich, and credits it with inculcating a strong warrior spirit and sense of the sacred in the German people, and for making efforts toward establishing an elite Order based on higher principles as embodied by the SS. While viewing the Reich as inadequate, Evola praises aspects of it for having been superior to the Europe which arose from its ashes, particularly when it represented pan-European impulses, as well as a rejection of both Communism and democracy in an effort to forge a political 'third way.' Julius Evola (1898-1974) was Italy's foremost traditionalist philosopher, as well as a metaphysician, social thinker and activist. Evola was an authority on the world's esoteric traditions and one of the greatest critics of modernity. He wrote extensively on the ancient civilisations of both East and West and the world of Tradition, and was also a critic of the political and spiritual movements of his own time from a traditional perspective.

About the Author :
Julius Evola (1898-1974) has been one of the most misunderstood and controversial authors of the twentieth century. Born in Rome, Evola began his pursuit of truth as a Dadaist painter and an Idealist philosopher, but quickly lost his taste for modernism and moved on to metaphysics, religion, and the occult. Encountering the work of Rene Guenon, who became a lifelong friend, Evola embraced his concept of the Primordial Tradition and his critique of the modern world. Believing that Tradition was an idea which should encompass the social as well as the spiritual world, Evola saw some hope for a remedy to the ills of modernity in Fascism, although he never joined the Party, and his writings on the subject were frequently critical of its reality. After 1945, Evola remained aloof from politics, and attempted to define the most effective stance for an inhabitant of the modern age to adopt and still retain something of traditional wisdom. In recent years, Evola's ideas have given rise to a new breed of spiritual seekers and anti-modernists. Apart from the present volume, Arktos has published his books Metaphysics of War, which is a collection of his essays from the 1930s and '40s; The Path of Cinnabar, which is his intellectual autobiography; and Fascism Viewed from the Right, the companion volume to the present work, which presents his post-war assessment of Italian Fascism as an ideology.