ABSTRACT
The first initiative came from a small group of members of the extreme right-wing Bunde, who ventured for the first time into the noman's land believed to lie at the far end of the political scale. Though the leading conceptions of National Bolshevism had been arrived at outside the youth movement, its protagonists in the Bunde did not slavishly follow the instructions issued by Ernst Niekisch and others. National Bolshevism was not an exclusively German phenomenon; there were similar developments in other European countries about the same time with, of course, local variations. There were many other small groups and magazines propagating national revolutionary and National Bolshevist ideas; some were even more radical than Niekisch, whose pro-Soviet standpoint was then based mainly on considerations of foreign policy. While Niekisch's influence was restricted to the right-wing Bunde, the Tat circle appealed far more widely both to right and left—the Freischar Schill included.
