In 1927, the most successful attorney in Silesia published a book on conservatism that he knew would be immediately forgotten. Georg Quabbe informed his readers in the introduction that “conservative writings of some length” shared the fate of Johannes Brahms’s Wiegenlied. That lullaby was sung everywhere—except at cradles. Likewise, conservative books were read by some, “but not by conservatives or by those who might become conservatives.” He was right. Conservatives—specifically, members of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) at the time—did not read his book, and if they did, they did not understand it. Quabbe’s book, with its strange title Tar a Ri, is now as forgotten as its author. It is indeed a German peculiarity that books on conservatism, as Quabbe understood it, are rarely read—or even written.

This partly explains the current state of conservatism in Germany, which is marked not only by the intellectual poverty of public debate but also by the absence of a conservative party worthy of the name. American conservatives who believe that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has filled this void are mistaken, as they misjudge the party’s character by interpreting it merely as another variant of so-called right-wing populism. But the ideologues of that party look back to the antiliberal conservatism of the Weimar Republic, represented by the Völkisch movement, the so-called Conservative Revolution, and the national revolutionaries. They do not aim to reform liberalism as the foundation of German democracy; rather, they seek to abolish it entirely and dream of an illiberal democracy. The most prominent representatives of these tendencies are Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD parliamentary group in the Thuringian Landtag (state parliament), and Maximilian Krah, the party’s lead candidate for the 2024 European elections. When Krah told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica in May 2024 that the SS was not a comprehensive criminal organization, Marine Le Pen felt compelled to distance herself from Krah and the AfD. Krah was elected to the Bundestag in 2025. In addition, AfD members have close ties to the Kremlin.

On the other hand, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), abandoned conservatism long ago. If the CDU ever had a conservative core, it was ordoliberalism—the German variant of liberal conservatism, or conservative liberalism—similar in many ways to American fusionism, though more open to government intervention. After World War II, its advocates included intellectual giants such as Wilhelm Röpke and the first federal economics minister Ludwig Erhard, the architects of the country’s miraculous economic recovery. Today, though, ordoliberalism in Germany is in poor shape, largely due to Angela Merkel’s tenure, during which the party’s liberal conservatives often felt politically exiled. But the most serious blow came only recently. In March 2025, Friedrich Merz, who has led the CDU since 2022, accepted nearly all of the Social Democrats’ demands in order to secure his election as federal chancellor. He agreed to an investment package worth 500 billion euros, to be implemented through a so-called special fund—that is, by circumventing the constitutional debt limit. Merz wanted to pass a much-needed 500 billion euro package for defense investments, but the SPD only wanted to accept it in combination with the infrastructure package. So the CDU leader agreed. One could say that he had no other choice. But to pass both packages, the CDU/CSU and SPD needed a two-thirds majority, which they no longer had in the newly elected Bundestag. They therefore rushed the package through the outgoing Bundestag, with support from the Greens, before the new parliament convened—in other words, with a majority that, in effect, no longer existed.

This was a procedure that, while legal under the Basic Law, clearly violated the spirit of parliamentary government. Merz may have marked the beginning of the end of a long narrative that could rightly be called “The Strange Death of Conservative Germany”—a story that began a few years after the founding of the Empire by Otto von Bismarck in 1871, when conservatism was overtaken by ethnic nationalism and antisemitism. It reached its climax in January 1933, when the DNVP helped bring Hitler to the chancellorship. For this reason, after 1945, it became difficult for conservatives to openly identify as such. Christian Democrats who considered themselves conservatives avoided invoking German traditions and instead looked to the British Conservative Party as their model.

Today, that is no longer enough. Given the challenge posed by the AfD, which presents itself as a nationalist party, moderate conservatives must reconnect with their own past. Conservatism in Germany needs a fresh start—one that looks back to the period before 1933. The radicalization of most conservatives during the Empire and the Weimar Republic does not mean that there was no liberal conservative tradition in the country. On the contrary, it was vibrant throughout the nineteenth century and remained the position of a strong minority even after 1871.

This moderate conservative tradition was primarily Prussian, and the image of Prussia as a purely militaristic state is a gross oversimplification. The historian Heinrich von Sybel—who understood Edmund Burke better than any other German scholar of the nineteenth century and described himself as a “conservative Whig”—wrote in 1866 that during the first 150 years of its existence, from 1701 to 1851, the Prussian state had been at war for only 25 years. In contrast, France, Russia, and Austria had each already reached that number by 1789, counting from 1714. He also noted that, in 1866, Prussia had far more elements of self-government—he deliberately used the English word—than most observers realized.

Sybel was a National Liberal who placed his hopes in the founding of a German nation-state under Prussian leadership—one that would be constitutional and liberal. But even Prussian conservatives did not wholly reject the principles of liberalism; it was largely a matter of degree. Moreover, the common portrayal of Prussian conservatism as the anti-intellectual ideology of the Junker aristocracy is overly simplistic. As publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler wrote in 1960, nineteenth-century German conservatism—from Friedrich Gentz to Friedrich Julius Stahl—was “a product of urban cosmopolitanism.”

Friedrich Julius Stahl, who had been a professor of legal philosophy, constitutional law, and canon law at the University of Berlin since 1840, became the most important conservative thinker in Germany after the failed revolution of 1848, and the only one to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework for conservatism. He was elected to the Prussian Herrenhaus (House of Lords) in 1849 and was appointed by the king as a lifetime member in 1854. Stahl was an influential, though not a great, politician. As leader of the Conservative Party in the Herrenhaus, he defended the Prussian constitution, enacted by the king in 1850, while acting as a staunch opponent of liberalism and all forms of political change. In practice, he was more of a standpatter than a visionary conservative. His true significance lay in his role as a political thinker.

Stahl’s thought must be understood as a response to the ongoing conflict between reaction and revolution that had shaped the German states since 1830. He sought to develop a living conservatism that could transcend this antagonism through the establishment of a “real constitutional monarchy.” Born into a Jewish family in southern Germany in 1806, Stahl converted to Lutheranism in 1819. He offered a conservative conception of the Rechtsstaat (rule of law), defined by the tension between the “moral kingdom” of God and the secular world—a world in which the free individual must act autonomously. This secular world needs a framework, which Stahls calls the “state.” The state is the secular reflection of the “moral kingdom,” in which man must act independently but in accordance with the norms of the “moral kingdom,” i.e., with Christian values. For Stahl, history is shaped by human agency, but informed by divine law. By his action, man cannot progress towards the end of history, because this end would be the “moral kingdom,” which is God’s domain alone. Stahl believed that the Reformation’s great contribution was to affirm individual responsibility within history. For this reason, he opposed all forms of theocratic doctrine, including those found today in Catholic neo-integralism.

In practice, this doctrine led to a real constitutional monarchy as the embodiment of the Rechtsstaat: the monarch was the source and center of power, but he was also bound by the law like any other citizen and had to accept limitations on his authority by an elected parliament with budgetary control. This doctrine had greater practical impact than the ideas of most other conservative thinkers in Europe. Bismarck, perhaps unconsciously, followed Stahl’s model when drafting the constitution of the North German Confederation in 1867—a constitution that became the framework of the German Empire four years later.

Although Stahl’s doctrine cannot be directly applied to a liberal democracy, its central concept—the “moral kingdom,“ which grants freedom by anchoring it in a higher moral order—remains relevant for conservatives today. Stahl spoke of “freedom in obedience,“ but one could also call it “freedom in order,“ which requires the autonomous but responsible individual, without whom a constitutional government cannot work. Stahl’s “freedom in obedience” can be seen as the Prussian version of the “moral, manly, regulated liberty” praised by Burke. Above all, it is important to remember that Stahl was by no means an opponent of freedom or any kind of progress. In his view, the revolutionaries of his time were right to demand freedom’s advance, but they lacked a true understanding of what freedom meant. In this sense, Stahl’s political thought can still offer insight in an age marked by extreme liberalism.

Unfortunately, his teachings faded into obscurity during the German Empire. Two main factors contributed to this: first, the growing radicalization of conservatism, and second, Stahl’s Jewish origins. Though he had converted to Protestantism, the rapid rise of racial antisemitism during this period deeply affected German conservatism. That the greatest conservative thinker in Prussia had been born Jewish made him unacceptable to most conservatives of the time.

There were, of course, exceptions. Unlike the German Conservative Party, the smaller Free Conservative Party in Prussia—later known in the Empire as the Reichspartei—was never affected by antisemitism. Together with the National Liberal Party, it formed part of a liberal-conservative spectrum. It remained a minority current, but it did exist.

In 1912, the journalist Adolf Grabowsky joined the Free Conservative Party to promote his concept of Kulturkonservatismus (Cultural Conservatism) in the journal The New Germany. Like Stahl, Grabowsky was a Jew who had converted to Protestantism, and he sought to convince German conservatives that antisemitism was their original sin. “Judaism—or more precisely: German Jewry,” he wrote, “is an intimate part of German culture.” He accused the antisemites of driving Jews into radicalism—into the arms of left-liberalism and social democracy—through their “insane agitation.”

Grabowsky’s greatest achievement, however, was to argue that the idea of progress should not be ceded to the political left—whether to the left-liberal Fortschrittler (progressives) or the Social Democrats: “Conservatism is not—this cannot be emphasized loudly enough—identical with regression, not identical with the negation of progress. On the contrary: conservatism, because it is an aristocratic worldview that clears the way for the fittest, is identical with progress and the ever-increasing elevation of life.”

After Germany’s defeat in World War I, this form of liberal conservatism found little space in the Weimar Republic—if anywhere, it survived in the national-liberal German People’s Party (DVP). The more explicitly conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP), by contrast, became increasingly radical until it ultimately transformed into a fully-fledged Völkisch nationalist party. Intellectual conservatism during this period was largely the domain of the heterogeneous and radical currents associated with the Conservative Revolution. It is telling that one of its leading figures, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, declared in his infamous 1923 book The Third Reich that Stahl was not “the founder, but the destroyer of conservatism in Germany.” Moeller found “liberal traits” throughout Stahl’s thinking—and this was not meant as praise. He pointed, for example, to Stahl’s “predilection for English constitutionalism” and to “the notions of progress into which he involuntarily falls.”

There were few moderate conservatives at the time who recognized Stahl’s greatness. One of them was the Austrian Peter Drucker, who had studied law in Germany and was working for a newspaper in Frankfurt am Main during the final years of the Weimar Republic. The son of Jewish parents who had converted to Lutheranism, Drucker was already convinced by 1932 that he would not be able to remain in Germany if Hitler came to power. As he later recounted, in order to “make sure that I could not waver and stay,” he decided to write a book about Stahl—one that would make it impossible for him to have any association with National Socialism.

This pamphlet presented Stahl as the conservative thinker to read in order to overcome the crisis of the time. The mere fact that Stahl had been born Jewish made this argument provocative enough, but Drucker went further. He insisted that “the conservative theory of the state must affirm the state because and insofar as it represents an obligation,” but it must also “prevent the state from becoming the only obligation, from becoming the ‘total state.’” Every form of power, he argued, was “evil and demoralizing, destructive,” if it was “not bound to a divine, immutable order,” if it was not “bound to God’s plan for the world.”

After Hitler’s rise to power, Drucker emigrated—first to Britain and later to the United States, where he became an influential economist. His book on Stahl was among those burned publicly by the National Socialists on May 10, 1933.

Another thinker who took Stahl seriously was the aforementioned Georg Quabbe, arguably the only moderate intellectual conservative of the Weimar Republic. Born in 1887 to a tradesman’s family in Breslau, he studied law and became a successful attorney. Originally a member of the DNVP, he resigned from the party in 1930 in protest against its growing radicalization under Alfred Hugenberg. He then joined the People’s Conservative Association, a splinter group composed of relatively moderate—though not necessarily liberal—conservatives.

Following his first book, Tar a Ri, Quabbe published a second in early 1933 titled The Last Reich: Nature and Development of Utopia, which could be read as a veiled critique of National Socialism. Both works were later banned by the Nazis. When the Rotary Club of Breslau suggested in 1936 that its Jewish members resign, Quabbe, though Protestant, left in solidarity. During the war, he hid Jews in his home. After the war, in 1946, he became the first Attorney General of the State of Hesse and presided over the first legal proceedings against National Socialist criminals.

The title of Tar a Ri already hinted at his commitment to a liberal conservatism. Tar a Ri means “Come, O King” in Irish, and Quabbe claimed that this phrase was the origin of the word “Tory.” In fact, he presented himself as a great admirer of Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli (“the most ingenious conservative of all time”), and Sir Robert Peel (“one of the noblest representatives of our disposition”). He firmly rejected antisemitism, the Völkisch movement, and what he called “extreme conservatism.” He denied that conservatism was a strict ideology, instead defining it as a disposition always in tension with its opposite: the progressive disposition. Though he described himself as a “progressive conservative,” embraced parliamentary government, and accepted constitutional liberalism, he remained what Germans call a Vernunftrepublikaner—a republican by reason, rather than conviction.

His monarchism, however, was largely theoretical—more of an attitude than a political program. At the end of Tar a Ri, he concedes: “The call for the king is nothing more than a signal to gather a defeated army, and at the end of this book I find myself wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to shout ‘Come, O wise man,’ since kings are so easy to find and come so much faster.” Why was this “wise man”—a new Burke—needed? To resist the reality that “humanity as a whole has taken on the progressive sign today.” The “eternal pendulum law of world history,” Quabbe argues, requires a balance between the conservative and progressive tendencies of human nature.

Quabbe was a critical conservative friend of constitutional liberalism. He understood its flaws and its constant vulnerability to sliding into extreme progressivism. Thinkers like him, Grabowsky, and Stahl can serve as valuable guides in today’s Germany, where the twin dangers of “illiberal democracy” and “undemocratic liberalism” threaten the political balance as everywhere across the West. Tar a Ri, it seems, is a book for our time.