Abstract

Choosing 1914 as his point of departure, Domenico Losurdo, in this powerfully engaging book published first in Italian twelve years ago, focuses on what Thomas Mann coined Kriegsideologie. The central themes of Kriegsideologie— community, death, danger, destiny —not only pervaded Germany’s thinking in World War I but was inherited by the Nazi rise to power in 1933 and was present in and nurtured by the views of important twentieth-century philosophers. In Kriegsideologie, meditatio mortis becomes a central theme, genuine community configures itself as a warlike community, “unconditional loyalty” to one’s community and its historical destiny becomes the mark of commitment, and the willingness to die in conflict and war for one’s unique culture and its “historicity” becomes the mark and criterion of authenticity for the value and “truth” of one’s own being. For Max Weber, George Simmel, Husserl, Jü nger, Scheler, and others, “the battlefield becomes the privileged place to grasp the true meaning of life”. Alien to the mercantilism, superficiality, mechanization, and death-distancing of the West, this embrace of death is taken, in Kriegsideologie, as “the depth of the German soul”. For Losurdo, this transfiguration and glorification of war rages in many parts of Europe during and between the world wars, pervades a large part of German culture and philosophy, and exerts a devastating influence even after the military defeat of Germany in 1918.