Peter Viereck

The great critic Peter Viereck, in a volume that both reproduces an earlier effort and presents an entirely new work on the intersection of history and literature, offers a biting critique of the American desire for normalcy that leads to a culture of the surrender of personality. In contrast to this voluntary thought control process is the unadjusted person. Cast in the mold of great individualists from Thomas More to Friedrich Nietzsche, such a person responds to fundamental values of conscience rather than conformity built exclusively on ego gratification and icon worship.Viereck's book is a stinging critique of the liberal presumption of a monopoly in critical thought. He argues to the contrary, that most varieties of liberal expression offer little else than the common platitude dressed up as critique. In such a cultural environment, conservatism is the skeleton in the liberal closet. The virtue of conservatism is that in its very stress on liberty as dependent on tradition and law, it permits the human being an opportunity to test all transient things by the touchstone of all lasting ideas. Unadjusted Man cuts deep and in many directions: against left totalitarian regimes of Europe and right wannabes like McCarthyism in America. For Viereck, the art of conserving is not an embrace of utopias to come or empires that were, but retaining the sense of individuality over against the senselessness of the "massman." Civil liberties in this approach are a right to non-conspiratorial dissent informed by fundamental values.The new material is presented unabashedly--without an attempt to rewrite personal history, and with an admission that not every prediction made in the original edition has come to fruition. That said, the underlying themes of the original are not so much repeated as expanded upon. For those seeking a work in the classic mold of conservatism, rather than the strident reactionary views that have come to dominate much of the conservative dialogue, this will be a special book, a special entrance to the mind of a great figure in American culture wars of present as well as past.

More than half a century after the fall of the Third Reich, Nazism, its roots and its essential nature, remain a central and unresolved enigma of the twentieth century. During the period of Hitler's ascendancy, most attempts at explaining this unprecedented phenomenon were framed in "economic," often Marxist, sociological terms and concepts. Peter Viereck's Metapolitics, initially published in 1941, broke with this convention by indicting Hitler in terms of the Judaic-Christian ethical tradition and locating certain elements of the Nazi worldview in German romantic poetry, music, and social thought. Newly expanded, Metapolitics remains a key work in the cultural interpretation of Nazism and totalitarianism and in the psychological interpretation of Hitler as a Wagnerite and failed artist.The term "metapolitics," a coinage from Richard Wagner's nationalist circle, signifies an ideology resulting from five distinct strands: romanticism (embodied chiefly in the Wagnerian ethos), the pseudo-science of race, Fuehrer worship, vague economic socialism, and the alleged supernatural and unconscious force of the Volk collectivity. Together, those elements engendered an emphasis on irrationalism and hysteria and belief in a special German mission to direct the course of the world's history.Viereck analyzes nineteenth-century German thought's conflicting attitudes toward political procedures and social arrangements rooted in classical, rational, legalistic, and Christian traditions. This edition includes an appreciation by Thomas Mann and an exchange with Jacques Barzun debating Viereck's criticism of German romanticism. Viereck's essays on the case of Albert Speer, on Claus von Stauffenberg (the German officer who led the army conspiracy to assassinate Hitler), and on the poets Stefan George and Georg Heym appear here for the first time in book form.

Peter Viereck's career has been an ongoing experiment in the symbiosis of poetry and history. Tide and Continuities is the embodiment and culmination of that career. It includes many new poems, never before published, and work--some with stunning revisions--from books as recent as his 1987 epic, Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles, and as early as his 1948 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Terror and Decorum. Tide and Continuties is the revelation of a great American poet.

Viereck examines the ethics and political philosophy of the New Conservatism and explains why this movement has, in part deservedly, failed.