Reddit reviews The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (California Library Reprint Series)

The Prussian German Empire was an interesting country, but I'm with the others on this thread who're siding with the Habsburgs/Hapsburgs. There were three key events that led to the Prussians being paramount in Germany: the War of the Austrian Succession, the Prussians' extremely capable resistance in the Napoleonic Wars (including the invention of military reserves and the General Staff), and the Wars of German Unification, including another war with Austria. (Specifically, the Seven Weeks' War. You know that rule of thumb that the side with the fancier uniforms loses? Austria inspired it.) If it hadn't been for the War of the Austrian Succession, Bavaria would probably have been Austria's main rival, and 1871-1945 would have been a much less exciting time.

The current heir to the German Empire is Georg Friedrich Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia (Wikipedia's full list of pretenders to the world's abolished crowns is fascinating reading); I'm pretty sure that if you made him the absolute monarch of Germany, his first and last act as an absolute monarch would be to limit his own powers and re-establish the Imperial Diet. Most of the European royals (definitely including the Hohenzollerns of Prussia/Germany) fought against the Nazis, and have a low opinion of anything too similar to the people who tried to kill their parents and grandparents. (The late Archduke Otto von Habsburg, for example, spent much of his political career as a Member of the European Parliament.)

Still, if you're interested in Imperial Germany, so much the better! I'd recomend reading Fritz Stern's Gold and Iron and Five Germanys I Have Known to get the lay of the land; Five Germanys is mostly about making sense of the Holocaust, but its first chapters are one of the best accounts of the Kaiserreich I've ever read.

And to answer your main question: I think a restored German Empire using its historical pattern of organization (an Emperor and Imperial Council with defined powers, a Parliament/Diet, an independent judiciary, and a good bit of regional autonomy) would function very well, as a normal, developed Western country...

Unless the Serbs killed an allied archduke again, that is. "The Summer Before the War" is famous for a reason; Europe was at its high water mark, and had nothing but hope to look forward to in the future, before the First World War dealt the continent a wound that it's still reeling from, and that might prove mortal. (Fritz Stern's other book, about exactly the people you'd expect it to be about, is The Politics of Cultural Despair. Also worth reading on the beginning of that cultural despair -- although not directly dealing with its worst manifestation -- is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory.)

On the likes of Moeller van den Broeck and Ernst Jünger, and the cultural-political movement they belonged to (the Conservative Revolution), there are three classic works. There is The Politics of Cultural Despair by Fritz Stern, Germany's New Conservatism by Klemens von Klemperer, and The Crisis of German Ideology by George L. Mosse.

On the French Nouvelle Droite (De Benoist and Faye), there are really only two books in English which touch on the subject. These are Tamir Bar-On's Where have all the fascists gone? and Rethinking the French New Right. Both books by Bar-On do not really discuss the intellectual heritage of the Nouvelle Droite, so there isn't much about Nietzsche and the conservative revolutionaries (which is a weakness of these books), but they're still useful if you want to know what the deal is with the Nouvelle Droite. If you can read French, I'd suggest reading Pierre-André Taguieff's Sur la Nouvelle Droite.

To my knowledge there isn't really a large body of literature in English on Julius Evola. There is however one important book by Mark Sedgwick, called Against the Modern World, which is about Traditionalism. While the book isn't specifically about Evola, considering his traditionalist background he is still an important actor in the book.

Edit: Oh yeah, last month there appeared a book by Ronald Beiner, called Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right, which is about the way authors like Nietzsche and Heidegger are read by the radical right. While the book doesn't deny the greatness of both philosophers, it does claim that the attraction these authors present for the radical right, isn't completely unjustified: it has been the left who had to do most of the intellectual gymnastics in order to appropriate these authors for themselves, rather than the right.

>But I was wondering, how did Hitler and the Nazi party win over majority of the citizens of Germany?

The majority were never won over, at least not based on the available evidence. Many more began to support the Nazis after Hitler's foreign victories and initial victories in the Second World War, but since there were no more elections its hard to qualify how many more and if they ever made up a 'majority'.

> Surely the people must have thought, this guys views on Jews, gypsies, gays etc is wrong? How could someone with that sort of mindset get that much support?

Hitler relied on rhetoric, which all politicians do. His ideas on Jews and the current state of Europe were rather widespread. While his views might have alienated some or even many in terms of the extremes he used from time to time, others were in agreement with much of what he campaigned on. See The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology for a description of some of the more mundane ideas that were around at the turn of the century. Hitler was unoriginal in almost all of his ideas. Additionally, his views on Jews, for instance, were kept in the background when campaigning, he told his audience(s) what they wanted to hear: revenge for WWI, an end to reparations and the guilt clause, etc.

Try "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology", this will show you where some of Hitler's and by proxy the Nazi Party's ideas originated. Hitler was a very banal thinker, what he did was bring together so many things that were floating around Europe at the turn of the century, which relied on anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Communism, etc., and added in a fear factor (based on social Darwinism) about an inevitable showdown between Aryans and others (Jews).