The chapter presents a survey of the life and works of Richard Strauss's foremost librettist, the Austrian poet, playwright, and essayist Hugo von Hofmannsthal whose fame as a poetic genius began in his teenage years. His early poetry and poetic dramas established his reputation as the poet of aestheticism – an image he tried to shed all his life. A person of extraordinary sensitivity and erudition, he was drawn to Greek dramas, mythology, as well as folk and fairy tales which he tried to recreate for a modern audience. They offered him a framework for expressing social and ethical questions in a subtle, seemingly un-didactic fashion. In literary history, he is primarily noticed for his language skepticism (above all, his Letter of Lord Chandos); for the general public, his collaboration with Strauss is certainly the highpoint of his career (the operas Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra leading the list).

Chapter 9 analyzes Germany’s conservative intelligentsia as it has developed by the middle of the 1920s and the various institutions it has established in pursuit of a young conservative political agenda. Most of the individuals discussed in this chapter – Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Oswald Spengler, Heinz Brauweiler, Heinrich von Gleichen, and Wilhelm Stapel among others – define themselves as “conservative revolutionaries” who do not to wish to return to the way things were before World War I but who espouse an apocalyptic view of the political and envision a revolutionary transformation of the world in which they live through direct political action. Some like Martin Spahn and Eduard Stadtler are connected to the DNVP, but for the most part they are politically unaffiliated and in most cases opposed to the German party system as it has developed since the founding of the Second Empire. But they are united in a pedagogic mission to educate the younger generation and to instill in it the values and virtues they believe necessary for Germany’s national rebirth.