Julius Langbehn - The German National Romantic

Julius Langbehn (26 March 1851 – 30 April 1907) was a German national Romantic art historian and philosopher. He was born in Hadersleben, Schleswig (now Haderslev in Denmark), and died in Rosenheim. Langbehn, who called himself the "Rembrandtdeutsche" (the Rembrandt German) was convinced that he was uniquely called upon to initiate a revival of German culture. Langbehn's efforts at reform were a reaction to modernism; he particularly disliked materialism, democracy, and internationalism. He was stridently antisemitic and he favored aristocracy and individualism. He believed that Germany should abandon industrialization and urbanization in favor of an agrarian society ruled by a monarch. While Langbehn's vision did away with the bourgeois, proletarians, and the Junkers, he strongly opposed a classless society, stating that "equality is death." Langbehn advocated pan-Germanism, along with a view that Germany ought to take a place of primacy in world affairs, owing to national superiority. Later he converted to Catholicism and thoroughly condemned Nietzsche's books. He wrote at one point of Nietzsche: "Der Teufel muß dieser Seele immer sehr nahe gewesen sein" [The devil must have always been standing very close to this soul; Podach 196]. Langbehn died in 1907, apparently of cancer of the stomach, while living in the vicinity of Munich.

"The Lower German is a born aristocrat in character. No one is more recognizably aristocratic than the true peasant, and the Lower German is always a peasant. The peasant, like the farmer of North America, the English Lord, the old Mark nobility and the South African Boer, belong spiritually and physically to one and the same family."

Julius Langbehn