Abstract

This article demonstrates the existence of a national socialism in Germany long before the founding of the Nazi movement, and not just in the dark recesses of racial antisemitism but at the very heart of German bourgeois society. The article focuses on two major cases of pre-Nazi national socialism: left-leaning bourgeois reformist Friedrich Naumann; and the ideology supporting Germany's war effort from 1914 to 1918, a phenomenon also known as the 'ideas of 1914'. National socialism in both these cases rested at its core on a national existentialism: a conviction that Germany is facing a struggle for its very existence as a nation, and that all domestic socioeconomic forces must be systematically regimented andmobilized in the service of the nation's purportedly 'existential' struggles. National socialism emerges from this article