ABSTRACT
A democratic constitution guaranteeing the inalienable rights of the citizen, ministerial responsibility to Parliament and the division of power was supposed to aid the realization of this idea. However, German liberalism with its constitutional-monarchist and later national-liberal wings soon diluted the democratic-parliamentary concept in favour of an estate-oriented conservatism. Ernst Junger serves to illustrate the military component of anti-democratism: he considered democracy vapid, devoid of toughness and without healthy brutality, it lacked a warlike metaphysic and a soldier mythology. The spirit of the German history book in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was – in the mainstream – correspondingly anti-democratic and anti-liberal. The heroic had for a long time occupied the top position in the German philistine’s pyramid of values, and the most varied symbolic figures were brought into play in the representation of the heroic.
