Loyalty and Allegiance in Baltic German Political Thought after the First World War

Abstract This article sheds light on the political thought of prominent authors belonging to Baltic German aristocratic families, examining their responses to the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of the Third Reich. Focusing on the writings of authors such as the international lawyer Mikhail von Taube and the philosopher Hermann Keyserling, it examines the peculiar combination of uprootedness and cosmopolitanism which characterized the political thought of these unmoored elites. Lacking a definite attachment to specific post-imperial successor states, these authors demonstrate a recursive loyalty to their own family history. An elite group among the diverse sets of people and nationalities fleeing the Russian empire as it descended into revolution and civil war between 1917 and 1922, including Jews, people from the Caucasus, Poles, and many other nationalities, the Baltic German nobility stood out as representatives of an ethnic and religious minority whose ancestors had settled on the Baltic littoral long before the Russian empire or other states in the region had emerged. The article contributes to a new approach to the intellectual history of refugees from a global perspective, which emphasizes the importance of language, faith, nationality, and social class as factors shaping ideas about political attachment among displaced intellectuals.