CONSERVATIVE

Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing:
Conservative Founding Father
Harald Bergbauer
Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing (1927-2009)
was a leading German conservative in the period
after World War II. Between the 1960s and 1990s,
he founded the widely-read conservative magazine
Criticón, set up the Foundation for Conservative
Education and Research, and published a number
of thought-provoking books. And in 2006, he was
a decisive voice supporting the establishment of the
conservative European association, the Vanenburg
Society.
His most prominent book is Charakterwäsche
(Character-Washing), which appeared in 1965. It
contained an excellent analysis of the ways Germans
had been ‘re-educated’ after World War II. In it he
explained that Allied forces saw three possibilities to
deal with Germany after the war:
“The first possibility referred to the so-called
‘Morgenthau plan’ which saw Germany as the great
and perpetual source of disturbances in world history,
and recommended the permanent isolation of the
country from its neighbours, as well as the systematic
weakening of its economic and political power.
[Germany] should be re-modelled as an agrarian
state.”
“The second option distinguished between
two kinds of Germany. On the one side, there was
the (bad) Germany of the Prussian squires, the rich
industrialists, the influential generals, the Romantic
philosophers, and the legal positivists; but on the
other (good) side, there were the passionate pacifists,
the trade unionists, the idealistic socialists, and the
enlightened philosophers. The obvious solution …
was to foster the good party at the expense of the bad
one.
“The third option was provided by ‘character
reformers’. They rejected the Morgenthau plan and
dismissed the thesis of the two different Germanys.
Instead, they maintained that certain qualities—such
as, for instance, aggressiveness or racism—are in no
way hereditary but simply the outcome of a certain
‘misdirected’ culture.”
According to Schrenck-Notzing, the solution
offered by the “character reformers” was to “alter the
general culture in Germany by introducing a new style
of leadership”, which they expected would eventually
lead to a new way of life in Germany. In the end, the
Allied Powers adopted this approach.
But in order to change the German character,
democracy first had to be established. Setting up
a democracy not only meant creating political
institutions on the basis of regular elections and offices
with term limits; it also required a deep transformation
of the whole political culture. Democracy had to be
FKBF
The late Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing (1927-2009) in the
prime of his life.
publicly praised and it had to be practiced so that it
would eventually become the natural inclination of all
Germans.
In order to realize this goal, various things had
to happen: The German school system had to be
changed, faculties of political science at universities
needed to be founded, the content of television
programmes had to be adjusted, and the old party
system had to be completely re-modelled. Schrenck-
Notzing offered a fundamental critique of this
“character-washing”. He argued that the influence
of the Allied Powers on Germany went far beyond
the political and military realm, and that they ended
up imposing an ideology—using methods not unlike
those used by prior political regimes.
In this respect, Schrenck-Notzing observed
that none of the institutions like schools, universities,
the press, etc. were ever ‘free’ in the sense that a
true democracy is supposed to be free. Rather, such
institutions were first studied systematically and then
afterwards supervised closely. Schrenck-Notzing
called this kind of a democracy an “educational
democracy”—one that does not give power to
people but, on the contrary, only to a select group of
individuals who direct, control, and manipulate public
opinion.
In his Foreword to Charakterwäsche, Schrenck-
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