section_path: National variants/Europe/Germany
section_name: Germany
paragraph_text: Germany
  
  Germany was the heart of the reactionary Romantic movement that swept Europe in the aftermath of the progressive Age of Enlightenment and its culmination in the anti-conservative French Revolution. German Romanticism was deeply organicist and medievalist, finding expression philosophically among the Old Hegelians and judicially in the German historical school. Prominent conservative exponents were Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, and Adam Müller.
  
  During the second half of the 19th century, German conservatism developed alongside nationalism, culminating in Germany's victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War, the creation of the unified German Empire in 1871, and the simultaneous rise of ”Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck on the European political stage. Bismarck's balance of power model maintained peace in Europe for decades at the end of the 19th century. His "revolutionary conservatism" was a conservative state-building strategy, based on class collaboration and designed to make ordinary Germans—not just the Junker aristocracy—more loyal to state and Emperor. He created the modern welfare state in Germany in the 1880s. According to scholars, his strategy was:
  
  granting social rights to enhance the integration of a hierarchical society, to forge a bond between workers and the state so as to strengthen the latter, to maintain traditional relations of authority between social and status groups, and to provide a countervailing power against the modernist forces of liberalism and socialism.
  
  Bismarck also enacted universal manhood suffrage in the new German Empire in 1871. He became a great hero to German conservatives, who erected many monuments to his memory after he left office in 1890.
  
  During the interwar period —after Germany's defeat in World War I, the abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II, and the introduction of parliamentary democracy—German conservatives experienced a cultural crisis and felt uprooted by a progressively modernist world. This angst was expressed philosophically in the Conservative Revolution movement with prominent exponents such as historian Oswald Spengler, jurist Carl Schmitt, and author Ernst Jünger. The major conservative party of this era was the reactionary German National People's Party, who advocated a restored monarchy.
  
  With the rise of Nazism in 1933, traditional agrarian movements faded and were supplanted by a more command-based economy and forced social integration. Adolf Hitler succeeded in garnering the support of many German industrialists; but prominent traditionalists, including military officers Claus von Stauffenberg and Henning von Tresckow, pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, and monarchist Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, openly and secretly opposed his policies of euthanasia, genocide, and attacks on organised religion. The former German Emperor Wilhelm II was highly critical of Hitler, writing in 1938:
  
  There's a man alone, without family, without children, without God... He builds legions, but he doesn't build a nation. A nation is created by families, a religion, traditions: it is made up out of the hearts of mothers, the wisdom of fathers, the joy and the exuberance of children... This man could bring home victories to our people each year, without bringing them either glory or danger. But of our Germany, which was a nation of poets and musicians, of artists and soldiers, he has made a nation of hysterics and hermits, engulfed in a mob and led by a thousand liars or fanatics.
  
  Post- World War II Germany developed a special form of conservatism called ordoliberalism, which is centred around the concept of ordered liberty. Neither socialist nor capitalist, it promotes a compromise between state and market, and argues that the national culture of a country must be taken into account when implementing economic policies. Alexander Rüstow and Wilhelm Röpke were two prominent exponents of this economic theory, and its implementation is largely credited as a reason behind the German miracle —the rapid reconstruction and development of the war-wrecked economies of West Germany and Austria after World War II.
  
  More recently, the work of conservative Christian Democratic Union leader and Chancellor Helmut Kohl helped bring about German reunification, along with the closer European integration in the form of the Maastricht Treaty. Today, German conservatism is often associated with politicians such as Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose tenure was marked by attempts to save the common European currency (Euro) from demise. The German conservatives were divided under Merkel due to the refugee crisis in Germany, and many conservatives in the CDU/CSU opposed the immigration policies developed under Merkel. The 2020s also saw the rise of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany.