The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich was published by Grosset & Dunlap in 1964, and it transformed the study of Nazism by shifting attention from political and economic causes to cultural and intellectual ones. Mosse argued that the ideas that made Nazism possible were not the invention of Hitler or the Nazi Party but had been developing for more than a century in German völkisch thought — a tradition that glorified the Volk (the people as a racial-spiritual community), the German landscape, and the mystical bond between blood and soil.
Mosse traced this tradition through its institutional embodiments: the youth movements (Wandervögel), the educational system (particularly the gymnastics movement), the popular literature (novels, poetry, and folklore collections that idealized Germanic racial purity), and the religious movements (Germanic neo-paganism and “Aryan Christianity”) that together constituted a comprehensive alternative worldview to liberalism, socialism, and traditional Christianity.
The book’s most controversial argument was that völkisch ideology was not marginal but mainstream — that it pervaded German culture from the schools to the universities, from popular entertainment to serious philosophy. Nazism, in this reading, was not imposed on an unwilling population but emerged from beliefs that millions of Germans already held. The implications for German collective responsibility were uncomfortable, and the book was hotly debated in Germany when it appeared in translation.
Collecting The Crisis of German Ideology
First edition (Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1964): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $8–$20
- Later editions: $10–$25