The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Of all those involved in shaping the universities, none was more interesting or controversial than the philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose relationship with, and treatment of, Hannah Arendt was notorious. As a young philosophy student of eighteen, Hannah Arendt (1906–75) arrived in Marburg in 1924 to study under Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), then arguably the most famous living philosopher in Europe, and in the final process of completing his most important work, Being and Time, which appeared three years later. When Arendt first met Heidegger, he was thirty-five and married, with two young children. Born a Catholic and intended for the priesthood, he developed instead into a charismatic philosophy lecturer.

  Arendt came from a very different background—an elegant, cosmopolitan, totally assimilated Jewish family in Königsberg. The love affair between Heidegger and Arendt is now well known. Each transformed the other but in 1933 their lives turned dramatically in different directions. He was made rector of the University of Freiburg, and rumors soon reached her that he was refusing to recommend Jews for positions and even turning his back on them. At Heidegger’s rectorial address, he made a very anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler speech, which was reported all over the world. Arendt, now in Berlin and married to a man who, as she later admitted, she did not love, moving among the likes of Adorno, Marcuse, and Fromm, was deeply upset and confused by Heidegger’s behavior. To make matters worse, Bertolt Brecht, persecuted as a Communist and forced to flee the country, left behind his address book, containing Arendt’s name and phone number. She was arrested and spent eight days in jail being interrogated. As soon as she was released, she left Germany and settled in Paris. She and Heidegger would not meet for seventeen years.

  Heidegger played a crucial role in Germany. As a philosopher, he gave his weight to the Third Reich, helping develop its thinking, which grounded Nazism in history and the German sense of self. In this he had the support of Goebbels and Hitler. As an academic figure he played a leading role in the reorganization of the universities, the chief “policy” under his regime being the removal of all Jews. Through Heidegger’s agency both Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and his own professor, Karl Jaspers, who had a Jewish wife, were forced out of their university posts. Arendt later wrote that “Martin murdered Edmund.”

  Ernst Krieck considered himself a more important National Socialist philosopher even than Heidegger, but the influence of the philosophers was limited in the Third Reich: Hitler, Goebbels, and the other leaders were more interested in practical matters than abstract theorizing—they regarded academics in general as an “elite group of opportunists.” The common theme that emerged from the speeches and publications by Krieck, Heidegger, and others, in 1933 and 1934, was that “research and teaching must serve the German ‘Volksgemeinschaft,’ and not some abstract notion of ‘objective truth’ or knowledge for its own sake.” At Göttingen, Paul Schmitthenner, the architect and arch-opponent of Walter Gropius, argued openly that universities must become “political universities,” research being supported only if it served “the state and the people.” Hans Frank, the Reichsminister and governor-general of occupied Poland, insisted that “The categorical imperative of action in the Third Reich is this: act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew of your action, would approve of it.” 7

  THE “GERMAN SPIRIT” IN SCHOLARSHIP

  In the summer of 1936 Heidelberg celebrated its 550th anniversary, an event that Hitler deemed to be of “national” significance.8 The Heidelberg celebrations offered an opportunity to set out what, exactly, was meant by the term “German scholarship” in the context of the Third Reich, what Reinhard Heydrich called “the spiritualisation of the struggle.”

  At Heidelberg, this had already begun the previous year when the physics institute had been renamed after Philipp Lenard, the prominent advocate of “Aryan physics.” What Lenard meant was that “German natural sciences” differed from “Jewish science,” the former consisting of “observation and experimentation and not excessive theorising and reliance on abstract mathematical constructions,” unlike, say, relativity theory. Speeches at the anniversary ceremony carried this further, with Ernst Krieck arguing that in the nineteenth century science had been “shattered into a ‘heap’ of disconnected specialities that ultimately did not serve the people.” 9

  The “Aryan” physicists tried to extend their influence, taking over various scientific journals and creating their own Deutsche Mathematik, devoted to Aryan mathematics. (Not everyone toed the line by any means, and Walter Bothe’s research into nuclear physics—ignoring what the “Aryans” had to say—led to the creation of Germany’s first cyclotron.) Their actions were attacked in the British (but also international) journal Nature to such an extent that, at the end of 1937, the Reich Education Ministry forbade subscriptions to Nature in Germany.10

  The Heidelberg celebrations featured—besides a congratulatory telegram from Hitler—several talks about the new intellectual climate. The Reichserziehungsminister (education minister), Bernhard Rust, argued that the national and racial background of individual scholars could not help but shape their scholarship, that there was no such thing as purely “objective science,” which was a “Jewish-Marxist” idea, and that this realization had “transformed the inner life of the German people,” helping them to forge an “organic unity” between Wissenschaft and the Volk. Krieck spoke in much the same vein but added that “it can be fully demonstrated…that…every worthwhile achievement in the sphere of the natural sciences, no less than in the sciences of culture, has been intimately bound up with the…racial characteristics of the people concerned.”11

  All this was underlined by a number of new institutes and seminars that were created at Heidelberg in the years before the outbreak of World War II, focusing on the military and political preparedness of Germany. Schmitthenner, who would become rector of Heidelberg in 1938, described himself as a “soldier, politician, and scholar” (i.e., in that order). He founded a seminar on the history of warfare, styling himself as a “frontier professor.” The Social and Economic Faculty focused on “spatial” research, Raumforschung, developing ideas of Werner Sombart that “economic life in Germany rested on two pillars, race and space.” The departments of classics, theology, languages, and literature were all affected—race was seen as a “determinant” of language, and people’s ability to absorb the Christian message was likewise regarded as a function of “blood, soil and race.” History teaching was reorganized around a new set of “key dates” or turning points, such as March 1912, when the last legal bans against Jews in Germany were removed.12

  Steven Remy sums up the “German Spirit” in scholarship as follows: it was fundamentally opposed to traditions of teaching and research throughout the Western world, in that (1) it rejected “objectivity,” (2) it denied that scholarship served intangible notions of truth for truth’s sake, insisting instead that German scholarship must serve the “Volk,” (3) it opposed “hyper-specialization,” and (4) race was a central concept, that representatives of “inferior” races, like the Jews, “were incapable of examining the natural world honestly and accurately.”13

  BIOLOGICAL DOGMATICS: “THE LANGUAGE OF OUR AGE”

  Just as Steven Remy has reconstructed the Nazification of one university, so James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld have explored the Nazification of a single discipline—folklore.14

  There was in Germany a strong interest in folklore going back to Herder and the Grimm brothers. In fact, in 1940, Thomas Mann identified what he viewed as the fundamental difference between German culture and that of the West. “Whereas British and French writers produced art rooted in social and political reality, the Germans had dedicated themselves to the ‘pure humanity of the mythical age,’ which was based in nature itself rather than the circumstances of any historical era.”15 This interest remained strong, and in the Weimar years a number of international conferences were held at the German Central Work Station for Folk and Cultural Landscape Research, while in 1926
the first issue of the journal Volk und Rasse appeared. What appealed to people about Volk culture was that it was organic, traditional, the exact opposite of the industrial worker. “He [the industrial worker] works with dead tools on dead material…His work pace is determined not by the sun, the season, the weather, but by a machine which goes at its own pace summer and winter, day and night. His work is measured exactly in millimetres and kilograms, measurements that have no relationship to life.”

  On this view, only Volk culture could give people a sense of fulfillment, all others would become “an un-German greenhouse plant.”16

  Although the National Socialists appropriated the general approach of the folklorists, folklore had a wider appeal than that. Kurt Huber argued for a “resurrection” of folk culture to counter “the national loss of instinct by Germans, completely miseducated by too much humanism…” Wolfgang Emmerich examined Gottfried Benn’s notion that “peasantry is an inner attitude, not a line of business.”17 The remains of German mythology, said another scholar, “were a force of secret resistance to bourgeois civilisation.” Herman Wirth, the founder of Ancestral Inheritance Inc., was filled with an unshakable belief in the “continuity of the early Stone Age religion and world view.” This was all a form of biological dogmatics. Max Hildebert Boehm reworked sociologist Wilhelm Riehl’s four S’s—Stamm, Siedlung, Sprache, Sitte (tribe, settlement, language, custom) “into the language of our age”—blood, soil, folk-nation, and folk order (Blut, Boden, Volkstum, Volksordnung). Above all there was the “ennobling” of the Social-Darwinistic mythos of “fateful struggle” for survival, an emphasis on the dark and tragic (the twilight of the gods) and the defamation of foreign influences. High culture, in this view, was “like a slut” that ran after every foreign influence that came its way. In 1928 William Stapel said that anyone who wanted to experience Germanness must have “lived in German forests, he must have courted German girls, and must have done German farming and German handiwork.”18

  Hermann Strobach noted that the League of German Societies for Folklore reacted immediately and “conspicuously” to the advent of the Nazis into power and at its conference in October 1933 there were lectures on “National Socialism and Folklore” and “The Sociopolitical Task of Folklore.” At its conference the following year, the folklorists sent a telegram to Hitler, vowing that they would work toward “strengthening and increasing the Germanness of our people.”19

  Christoph Daxelmüller says that Jewish Volkskunde had developed since 1898 thanks to the cooperation of both east and west European scholars, with organizational centers for the “Science of Jewishness” in Hamburg and Vienna, and that there was also in Berlin an Academy for the Science of Judaism, and a Teaching Institute for Judaic Studies, plus a Jewish-Theological Seminar in Breslau. There was also a Society for Jewish Folklore. All of these were closed down and their assets—such as their books—destroyed or scattered. These closures were countered by the opening of several institutes “For the Study of the Jewish Question.” The main one, in Berlin, was run by Wilhelm Ziegler, who became the “Jewish expert” for the Propaganda Ministry. Alfred Rosenberg’s Institute for Research on the Jewish Question, founded in Frankfurt am Main in 1941, annexed the Bibliothek Rothschild from Paris, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and the Librairie Lipschutz.20 This institute saw itself as the coordinating center for a “unified solution” to the Jewish question.*

  In the spring of 1934 a new journal appeared, Volkstum und Heimat (Folk-Nation and Homeland), which was the organ for the Der Reichsbund Volkstum und Heimat (Reich Union for Folk-Nation and Homeland). By the time the journal appeared, there were some 10,000 politically coordinated societies, about 4 million people, who were members of the Reich Union, though it was an “organization” with a difference. Specialisms were eschewed, instead “authentic, characteristic and valuable fellows,” whose enthusiasm for local culture would impress itself on followers, were sought to lead local groups by example. Festivals were planned where local groups would parade showing their local attributes—workers with spades on their shoulders, “maidens” pulling plows, farmers with sowing bags wrapped around them. The job of the union was to glorify peasant life and rural values.

  Anna Oesterle has examined the Office of Ancestral Inheritance, the Ahnenerbe, and its effect on folklore scholarship. It appears to have been a cesspit of rivalries and jealousies, involving itself in folksong research and religious folklore; it began as a private outfit, started with private money, called the Intellectual History Association.21 Many of those involved in the early days were academics schooled in the Indo-Germanic tradition, and their main interests, to begin with, were ancient intellectual history. Herman Wirth, for instance, had an interest in the “strengthening of genuine German spirituality,” hoping for “a rebirth of the Nordic race and the freeing of humanity from the curse of civilisation.”

  Himmler, who was the undisputed leader of the Ahnenerbe, though he often had to quibble with either Rosenberg or Göring, gradually took the SS further into academic life via the Ahnenerbe.22 One central concern of Himmler’s was German origins. In his mind there were two elements, a concern to trace the “Nordic” ancestry of the Germans and a profound interest in the so-called Aryan race in Central Asia, which he felt held the key to ancient religions and mythology and constituted the “founder” race of the Teutons. He enlisted the aid of more or less eminent—and more or less opportunist—anthropologists, ethnologists, orientalists, runologists, philologists, heraldry experts, and archaeologists, in a number of well-funded expeditions in Finland, Iceland, Mesopotamia, the Canary Islands (which Himmler thought formed the southern edge of the lost continent, Atlantis), the Andes (where Himmler thought the civilization had been founded by Aryans), and even Tibet. They studied Bronze Age rock carvings and Paleolithic caves, excavated ancient graves, collected different types of tents, coins, skulls, and needles, took endless photographs, recorded folk stories and dialects, and in Tibet worried they were being spied on.23 They all fell ill on Christmas Day24 before entering the “white- and wine-coloured walls” of Lhasa.25 They made plaster casts of things they couldn’t take away and studied ancient rites with a view to introducing them to Germany to replace traditional Christianity. They published a monthly magazine, Germanien, but, that apart, it is difficult to know what to make of these activities since few projects were properly completed or incorporated into Himmler’s overall view because, during the war, under the guise of “repatriating” goods that were of help in understanding the history and continuity of “Germanness,” the SS forces (and sometimes the Gestapo) carried out innumerable art and cultural robberies that were shameless in their extent. This process started in Lithuania and Estonia, then spread to Poland and even France. As part of the “cover” for this, Himmler declared himself to be Reichskommissar für Festigung deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissioner for Solidifying the German Folk-Nation).

  THE NAZI CONCEPTION OF SCIENCE

  In a survey conducted in 2007 by Stern magazine, one in four Germans believed that Nazi rule “had its good points.” One of those was “a high regard for the mother,” and another was the Autobahn (highway) system. Hitler is often credited with starting Germany’s impressive Autobahnen, but in fact the first such roads were conceived during the Weimar era. Similarly, Hitler was not quite the scientific enthusiast he is sometimes made out to be. Walter Dornberger, one of the physicists leading the army’s ballistic missile program at Kummersdorf West in Berlin (well ahead of everybody else’s), said later that the Führer never really grasped the significance of missile technology when it was explained to him. At his trial after the war, Albert Speer confirmed that Hitler had some pretty strange views in regard to technology. He was against the machine gun because “it made soldiers cowardly and made close combat impossible.”26 In 1944, when the Luftwaffe high command wanted to use the Me-262 jet as a fighter, Hitler insisted it should only be used as a bomber (he wanted to be able to bomb New York eventually), arguing
that aerial combat in jets had a dangerous effect on the brain. He was unable to grasp the revolutionary nature of nuclear physics and distrusted German attempts to build an atomic bomb because it was based, he said, “on Jewish pseudo-science.” (Before he had taken power, he promised he would reduce the amount of science pupils had to learn at school.) One of his enthusiasms was for Hanns Hörbiger’s theory of “glacial cosmogeny,” which claimed that the universe was formed from ice. Hitler believed that “progress” in science had led man to believe, mistakenly, that he could master nature. Instead, he said, he believed in an “intuitive acquaintance with the laws of nature.”27

  As with the artists, so the dismissal of scientists began almost immediately after Hitler became chancellor, in the spring of 1933. For the most part, one would think that science—especially the “hard” sciences of physics, chemistry, mathematics, and geology—would be unaffected by political regimes. It is, after all, generally agreed that research into the fundamental building blocks of nature is as free from political overtones as intellectual work can be. But in Nazi Germany nothing could be taken for granted. Some Jewish academics were exempt for a while, if they had been employed before World War I, or had fought in the war, or had fathers or sons who had done so. But such exemption had to be applied for and Hans Krebs, who was to win the Nobel Prize in 1952 for his discovery of the citric acid cycle, wrote a memoir in which he described how, all of a sudden, in the laboratories of the Freiburg hospital where he was then working, people who had shown only the mildest interest in Hitler, “were suddenly to be seen in the uniforms of Nazi organisations.”28 The situation was quickly polarized.