The Nazi Origins of Horseshoe Theory (2024)

The idea of “Horseshoe Theory” has been floating around in the English language since at least the 1980s, if not earlier, with ebbs and flows in popularity. As the Wikipedia page (at least the English one) is relatively sparse on the historical origins and background of this idea, perhaps its worth a brief overview of the historical timeline.

Following his expulsion from the NSDAP in July 1930, Otto Strasser, the younger brother of Nazi party stalwart, Gregor, formed the Kampfgemeinschaft Revolutionärer Nationalsozialisten (KGRNS) Revolutionary National Socialist Combat Comradeship) as an anti-parliamentary “external opposition” fringe Nazi combat group. Later, in the hopes of merging with some other fringe sects, the Tat-Kreis (circle around the magazine Die Tat) and the Wehrwolf (right-wing nationalist Freikorps group), the KGRNS changed its name to the Schwarze Front (Black Front). In reality the Black Front never really amounted to more than a heterogenous collection of cranks and oddballs. The Wehrwolf group, already in numerical decline did not join the proposed merger and ultimately disappeared into the SA.

Otto Strasser’s political differences with Hitler were on the economic side — Strasser wanted a more explicitly anti-capitalist national socialism (although actual specifics beyond rhetoric were vague at best) — and in the international relations or geopolitical sphere, looked toward a rapprochement with the USSR to form an anti-Western “Eurasian” alliance (following the ideas of Moeller van den Bruck). In 1933 two academic members of the Black Front, Adolf Ehrt and Julius Schweikert (pen name of White Russian exile Ivan Ilyin) published a document “Entfesselung der Unterwelt. Ein Querschnitt durch die Bolschewisierung Deutschlands” laying out the self-professed ideological orientation of the Front in the following terms:

„Stellt man sich die deutschen Parteien und Strömungen in Gestalt eines Hufeisens vor, an dessen Biegung das Zentrum und an dessen Endpunkten jeweils die KPD und die NSDAP lagern, so liegt der Raum der ,Schwarzen Front‘ zwischen den beiden Polen des Kommunismus und des Nationalsozialismus. Die Gegensätze von ,Links‘ und ,Rechts‘ heben sich auf, indem sie eine Art Synthese eingehen unter einmütiger Ausscheidung des ,Bürgerlichen‘. Die Lage zwischen beiden Polen gibt den Spannungscharakter der Schwarzen Front am besten wieder“

“If you imagine the German parties and currents in the shape of a horseshoe, with the centre at the bend and the KPD and the NSDAP at the ends, then the area of the ‘Black Front’ lies between the two poles of Communism and National Socialism . The opposites of ‘left’ and ‘right’ cancel each other out by entering into a kind of synthesis with the unanimous elimination of the ‘bourgeois’. The situation between the two poles best reflects the tense character of the Black Front.”

The Black Front was banned by the Nazi authorities in February 1933 after their seizure of power. Otto fled the country shortly thereafter, first to Prague, then Switzerland and eventually Portugal and Canada. From there, both the Black Front and it’s Hufeisenschema (Horseshoe-schema) should have disappeared into the footnotes of academic histories, were it not for the post-war publication of a Swiss Waffen-SS reject’s Phd thesis.

Armin Mohler was born in German-speaking Switzerland and after a brief flirtation with communism at university, became a convinced Nazi after Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union. Mohler deserted the Swiss army and travelled to Berlin to volunteer for the Waffen SS. However, the Waffen SS decided he was too much of a creep for them (even genocidal maniacs have standards, apparently) and knocked him back. Returning to Switzerland, he was imprisoned for desertion. But after the end of the war and release from prison, he returned to Berlin to pursue a post-graduate doctorate culminating in his thesis “Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932” (The Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918–1932) in 1949, later published as a book of the same name.

This book became very successful and was the retrospective source of many of the ideas that continue to circulate in the historiography of the interwar rise of the German volkisch movement, terms like “Conservative Revolution” itself, “National Bolshevism” and even “Strasserism”. However Mohler was no neutral scholar, his thesis and book were as much a political project for the refounding of a radical neo-nazi project (Mohler remained an unrepentant Nazi until his death in 2003). Mohler became one of the founding theorists of the post war “New Right” and both influenced and was influenced by his French Kamarad, Alain de Benoist, theoretician of “la Nouvelle Droite”. Mohler’s rescuing of the Schwarze Front from the dustbin of historical trivia, also retrieved the Hufeisenschema, which became the basis of de Benoist’s “nether left nor right” concept of “metapolitics” of the radical periphery against the conservative centre.

Another important post-war figure in the promotion of the ideas behind horseshoe theory (if not the name itself) was the German-British psychologist Hans Eysenck. Eysenck’s nazi sympathies are better known through his work on the “scientific” racist themes of race and IQ, in which he was a forerunner of Charles Murray (like Murray, Eysenck was supported and funded by the nazi Pioneer Fund and Mankind Quarterly journal). However, in the early 50s Eysenck’s research was focussed on political attitudes amongst the British population. He proposed that the traditional left-right binary was insufficient to model the range of opinions amongst the public. Like many people (of varying political views) who’d lived through the Nazi-Soviet pact, Eysenck believed that the Nazis and Communists had more in common with each other than people more in the middle of the left-right spectrum. He proposed as an alternative a two-dimensional model combining an R-factor (radicality) and a T-factor (tender-mindedness). This allowed him to say that the Nazis and Communists were both at the radical end of the R-factor and the ruthless end of the T-factor, and so “the two extremes resembled each other more than those in the middle” as the horseshoe theory is often summarised. These ideas entered general circulation in England in the 1950s and early 60s along with similar ideas from the likes Karl Popper, whose book “The Open Society and Its Enemies” made similar claims, as in America, did Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

Although the contributions of Eysenck, Popper, Arendt and others with first-hand experience of both the Nazis and the German Communist Party (KPD) did not use the term, their work clearly prefigures the content of horseshoe theory.

The term itself, however, enters into French in a 1964 paper by Jean-Pierre Faye in the Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, entitled “Langages totalitaires”, later expanded to a book of the same title in 1972. The diagram at the top of this piece is taken from this paper. You will notice that the diagram is not only specific to the various groups around the German political scene at the time of the Black Front, but is also in German. Faye’s paper, unusually by today’s academic journal standards, has no references or footnotes. But the obvious suspicion has to be that the diagram is simply lifted directly from Armin Mohler’s book. Introducing the diagram, Faye tells us:

De ce grand cercle de la Révolution conservatrice (ou nationale), le diamètre horizontal a pour pôles les deux tendances déjà rencontrées: Jeunes-Conservateurs et Nationaux-Révolutionnaires. Noter les deux expressions, c’est déjà voir que ce segment est orienté par une polarité plus large, opposant Conservation à Révolution ou, dans la terminologie spatiale héritée des Constituants français, la Droite à la Gauche. Eux-mêmes,les Jeunes Conservateur se réclament sans modestie de la Droite; quant aux Nationaux-Révolutionnaires, un spirituel journaliste berlinois les désignait un an avant l’avènement d’Hitler comme « les gens de gauche de la droite». Au cours d’une soirée organisée la même année par la « Société pour une Littérature allemande», dans le local même des Jeunes-Conservateurs, les Nationaux-Révolutionnaires amis de Jünger précisaient que la distribution des positions politiques à cette date devait prendre la forme, non pas d’une ligne, mais d’un fer à cheval: ses deux extrémités seraient représentées parle parti hitlérien et par la Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands. Entre ces deux points,dans l’espace vide du fer à cheval, habiteraient les Nationaux-Révolutionnaires précisément,et le Front Noir d’Otto Strasser en particulier, qui entre 1930 et 1933 en est la force de frappe

From this great circle of the conservative (or national) Revolution, the horizontal diameter has as poles the two tendencies already encountered: Young-Conservatives and National-Revolutionaries. To note the two expressions is already to see that this segment is oriented by a broader polarity, opposing Conservation to Revolution or, in the spatial terminology inherited from the French Constituents, the Right to the Left. Themselves, the Young Conservatives claim to be without modesty from the Right; as for the National-Revolutionaries, a witty Berlin journalist referred to them a year before Hitler’s accession as “the people of the left of the right.” During an evening organized the same year by the “Society for a German Literature”, in the very premises of the Young Conservatives, the National-Revolutionaries friends of Jünger specified that the distribution of political positions on this date should take the form , not of a line, but of a horseshoe: its two extremities would be represented by the Hitler party and by the Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands. Between these two points, in the empty space of the horseshoe, would live the National-Revolutionaries precisely, and Otto Strasser’s Black Front in particular, which between 1930 and 1933 was the strike force.

Knowing the context, it becomes clear that Faye is less introducing the Hufeisen/Horseshoe schema as a new concept, so much as reporting the language that the Schwarze Front themselves used to describe their view of the political landscape. In this sense, it seems almost a little unfair, or at least misleading to attribute the origin of the concept to Faye, who is mentioning it in passing, in a paper that is focused on the origins and uses of the term “totalitarian” in Italian Fascist and German National Socialist discourse of the era.

I hope this brief review of the origins of the term and concept behind “Horseshoe Theory” has been instructive. More could be said (particularly about the historically distorting effects of uncritical absorption of Mohler’s theses, for e.g. the fallacious notion of “Strasserism” as a political tendency incorporating both Otto and Gregor Strasser — a fallacy debunked in Peter D Strachura’s book “Gregor Strasser and the Rise of Nazism”), but concision is good. One final caveat must be made though. Just because the idea of the “political horseshoe” has Nazi origins, does not make it a “Nazi concept” per se. There is no essentialism of language that means a term always has to carry the taint of its origins as some form of conceptual original sin. And certainly it’s not the case that liberals invoking horseshoe theory are trying to inveigle far right themes into political debate. But the origins of ideas are always useful to know and the evolution in their use and significance over time is also a matter of interest and educational.