ABSTRACT
In the introduction to the new (1981) edition of The Crisis of German Ideologies, George Mosse noted that while his book appeared to have left the impression among some readers that völkisch thought must inevitably lead to Nazism, this was not his intention. Not only were ‘moderate’, mainstream conservatives in pre-1933 Germany deeply infected with völkisch thoughts, but there also existed the non-authoritarian völkische socialism of Gustav Landauer which drew on the ideal of the Volk as a democratic community of equals (Mosse 1981). Eugene Lunn has suggested that Landauer’s völkische socialism could provide an antidote to the tendency among historians to teleologically link völkische romanticism with the triumph of Hitler’s version of völkische ideology (Lunn 1973).1
