THE DEVELOPMENT OF literary nonconformism in the Third Reich needs to be understood particularly in the context of its intellectual roots in the Weimar Republic and of National Socialism's literary policies and organizational structures, which impinged on writers’ freedom in different ways. This chapter will consider both these areas before discussing the origins of the term “inner emigration,” reviewing the history of its critical reception and evaluating its status as a literary-historical category.

The Intellectual Background

The Conservative Revolution

The intellectual origins of inner emigrant writing are complex, owing not least to the diversity of the writers involved and their varied social, political, and religious backgrounds. This section and the following highlight two key common influences.

The sense of disorientation experienced by many Germans after the First World War gave rise to an intellectual and political movement known as the Conservative Revolution. Although the paradoxical use of the term “conservative” in connection with “revolutionary” can be traced back to the immediate post–World War I period, it became an umbrella term—for, variously, patriotic, nationalist, young conservative, völkisch (racist nationalist), and national revolutionary strands of thought—only in the second half of the 1920s. It was made famous by the cultural historian Arthur Moeller van den Bruck's book Das dritte Reich (The third empire, 1923) and the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal's lecture on “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation” (Literature as the spiritual space of the nation, 1927). The other principal figures associated with the movement were the lawyer, politician, and later adviser to Franz von Papen, Edgar Jung, who was subsequently murdered in the so-called Röhm putsch; Hermann Rauschning, a former army officer who was briefly to become an NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) member but later emigrated to the United States; and the historian and philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, who was initially seen as a potential intellectual collaborator by the Nazis but who had little time for their racial policy. The Conservative Revolution was strongly opposed to all socialist and liberal forms of government and was deeply suspicious of democracy in general. The movement also distanced itself from the internationalist spirit of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the embryonic League of Nations, advocating instead an authoritarian nationalism with pronounced militarist tones.