Revolver (two).
These mostly right-wing visionaries were either unable or unwilling to view history as the outcome of numerous, intertwining factors that could be analyzed and interpreted from a rational perspective. Instead, historical events were perceived as part of a state of flux ultimately determined by the supernatural. Military defeat, political collapse, and economic crisis were thus transposed to a conceptual realm framed by notions of heaven-inspired retribution and miracles, of collective crucifixion and resurrection. People who were characterized by what Bärsch defines as a “subject-centered mentality or consciousness” reject notions of objectivity or causality: they do not accept a world in which causal links work themselves out independently of transcendent forces. They deny objective experience, disparage reason and intellect in favor of instinct and intuition, and unconsciously erase the boundary between fantasy and reality.
Unsuccessful in war and unable to adjust to a troubled peace, Weimar’s visionaries dismissed what was for them an overly complex, difficult, and demoralizing reality and indulged in elaborating fantasies of a vicious war of revenge that cast them in the role of conquerors. In their literature these angry men gave vent to primitive wishes for the annihilation of France, England, the United States, or whomever else they pictured as Germany’s enemy. But the war visions of the 1920s were not merely the self-serving fabrications of isolated malcontents. Instead of being left to dissipate in the realm of dreams, daydreams, and semireligious entrancement, the visions of revenge and renewal were converted into a literature of mass consumption. The published fantasy—often a quirky mixture of adventure story, fairy tale, millenarian vision, and political program—was intended to act as a catalyst inflaming the same type of emotions among the readers that originally elicited the fantasies in the minds of their creators. In this manner, what originated as compensation for the frustrated individual was transformed into a psychological tool, a propagandistic call for militant nationalism and engagement in antirepublican politics. Some of these writers, in fact, were also active as political speakers and agitators.
—Peter S. Fisher, Fantasy and Politics:
Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic
