During his time in Munich, von Hildebrand also met the German philosopher Max Scheler, who would become a tremendous source of intellectual inspiration. Though Dietrich never formally studied under Scheler, they were for many years close friends and would spend innumerable hours in discussion. Scheler is the main source of von Hildebrand’s personalist approach to philosophy. Actually, von Hildebrand never refers to himself as a “personalist,” but his thought has all the hallmarks of a philosophy that seeks to answer the crucial questions of human existence by looking first to the nature and dignity of the human person. From Scheler he learned a deep reverence for the mystery and inviolability of each person. This made him especially alert to the depersonalizing tendencies of National Socialism, as shown in its idea that the individual exists only as a part (dispensable at that) of the nation.
While in Göttingen, von Hildebrand met a young woman named Margarete Denck with whom he soon fell in love. By 1910, he wanted to marry “Gretchen,” as she was called, but his parents refused to give their consent, without which he could not legally marry. While they found Gretchen attractive, they relished neither her north German background nor her relatively undistinguished family pedigree. They also felt that her age (she was over four years older than Dietrich) would push him toward marriage at a moment when he was still unready. At the time, not yet being a Catholic, Dietrich and Gretchen entered a relation of sexual intimacy which both of them understood as a lifelong commitment. In early 1911, Gretchen discovered she was pregnant. Dietrich’s parents still would not grant him permission to marry but offered to support them financially while he finished his dissertation. The young couple moved to Vienna in the spring of 1911, where they lived until the birth of their son Franz in February 1912. Only after the arrival of their grandson did Adolf and Irene finally consent to their son’s marriage, though they did not attend the Protestant ceremony which took place in May 1912. While in Vienna, von Hildebrand completed his dissertation under the direction of Husserl, who gave it a distinction of opus eximium (highest honors).
A decisive role in preparing the ground for von Hildebrand’s conversion to the Catholic Church was played by Scheler, who made the surprising and arresting claim, “The Catholic Church is the true Church because she produces saints.” Scheler spoke to von Hildebrand about St. Francis of Assisi and helped him to understand that the splendor emanating from this saint was not like any natural virtue but pointed to a new and higher source. It was the unearthly beauty shining in the saints that, more than anything else, drew von Hildebrand to Christianity and to Catholicism, to which he and Gretchen converted in 1914.
But if the beauty of Christ and the saints drew von Hildebrand to Christianity, it was his philosophical commitment, honed in his studies with Husserl and Reinach and enriched by his friendship with Scheler, that allowed his faith to mature. “It was not faith that determined my fundamental philosophical orientation,” he later wrote; “rather it was my philosophical orientation that leveled the path for my reception into the Catholic Church.”2 Fideism, in which faith is understood without any dependence on reason, was always foreign to von Hildebrand.
Part of the fascination we experience with Dietrich von Hildebrand’s life comes from the degree to which he remained immune to the siren song of the great ideologies of his time. Just as he showed a striking independence from the milieu of his upbringing, so he showed an unusual independence from the currents of the age.
The First World War broke out on July 28, 1914. As a married man with a son, von Hildebrand was not called to fight and was able to fulfill his military obligation for most of the war by serving as assistant to a surgeon in a Munich hospital. Only in 1918, when Germany was losing the war, was he called up for active duty. He narrowly escaped deployment in the final days of the war when he was diagnosed with chronic appendicitis.
It is difficult for most of us today to imagine a world in which Germany’s hatred for its neighbors, notably for France, could stir up frenzied popular support for the war. Von Hildebrand hated this sort of militaristic nationalism, which he thought emanated from the Prussian military culture embodied by the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. While he initially sympathized with Austria, which had been attacked in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he came increasingly to hate the war. He even secretly began to hope, as he says in his memoirs, that the Allies would win.
Dietrich’s characteristic independence also manifested itself in another way: his absolute freedom from anti-Semitism. Like countless others, he was appalled by the violent racism of the Third Reich. But what really sets him apart from many of his contemporaries was his total freedom from the comparatively moderate anti-Semitism widespread during the 1920s and 1930s. Thriving on stereotypes—the liberal, wealthy, exploitative, amoral, and, invariably, socialist Jew—this more moderate anti-Semitism was pervasive. And it had enough currency that even Catholics who spoke out against Nazism—and personally protected Jews—could simultaneously harbor antipathy for the supposed liberalism and moral degeneracy of Jews.
In his memoirs, von Hildebrand describes one of his earliest encounters with anti-Semitism. The year 1920 saw the premiere of the orchestral Fantastic Apparitions on a Theme by Berlioz by his brother-in-law Walter Braunfels, by then one of Germany’s leading composers. During the final applause, a man stood up in the concert hall and shouted, “I object to this Jewish music.” (Though a convert to Catholicism, Braunfels was half Jewish through his father.) Approaching the man on the stairway outside the hall, von Hildebrand challenged him, “What is the meaning of this nonsense?” The man repeated his charge. When von Hildebrand pointed out, “Braunfels is not even Jewish but Catholic,” the man shot back, “By race he is Jewish.” All this took place in the presence of the departing concertgoers who stood silently as they waited in line at the cloakroom. “I cannot describe how much the man’s outburst upset and outraged me,” writes von Hildebrand. “This was the first time I experienced this rubbish which became so widespread: the notion of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian art’ in Bolshevism, and the notion of ‘Aryan’ and ‘Jewish art and mathematics’ in Nazism.”
In 1919, von Hildebrand became adjunct professor for philosophy of religion at the University of Munich. Throughout his career in Munich he became increasingly outspoken in his critique of National Socialism, using the classroom and his frequent public lectures to speak against its ideological foundations. Many of von Hildebrand’s students have commented on his intuitive power. Balduin Schwarz, his leading student in Munich, captures this well: “He had a great talent for detecting what was ‘in the air,’ almost as if he had a kind of barometer for whatever was ominously brewing in the atmosphere.”3 While his comments could be blunt—“I tell you the Nazis are the most vicious animals,”4 he said in 1924—he was also enormously persuasive. “He immunized and protected us from the philosophical waves that swept across Germany in those days,” remembers his student Paul Stöcklein. “Heidegger’s melodies no longer had the power to seduce us, for our ears had become more discerning. Whoever understood von Hildebrand was saved. Despite the many factors at work, I think one can rightly say that history might have been quite different had there been more professors like him.”5
One German professor who helped history turn out as it did was Martin Heidegger. Even though Heidegger is probably the best-known German philosopher of the twentieth century, he was notoriously a zealous Nazi, and in fact in later years he never recanted his Nazi allegiance. It is true that von Hildebrand and Heidegger had the same teacher in philosophy, namely Edmund Husserl, but on the question of Nazism, they were as opposed as two thinkers can possibly be. To the scandal of Heidegger’s Nazism we oppose the heroic witness of von Hildebrand.
In keeping with his own public stance, von Hildebrand also challenged his students to take action. But this action was distinctly philosophical in nature. Rather than urging direct political involvement, let alone violent agitation, “he sent them to attend gath
erings of National Socialists where through pointed questions they could expose the inhumanity and intellectual incoherence of Nazism.” 6
In 1930, von Hildebrand published The Metaphysics of Community,7 his major work in social philosophy. The book can be seen as the culmination of his reflections on the nature of community, a subject that he thought was badly misunderstood, even by fellow Catholic thinkers. But this book, while a work of fundamental philosophy, was full of implications for the crisis of the day, especially the collectivism of National Socialism. It had prepared him in a unique way to think clearly and outside of the conventional political paradigms and the usual false alternatives, especially the widely held view that one had to choose between collectivism or individualism.
Indeed, he understood why collectivism appealed so strongly to ordinary Germans. He saw that people experienced the bankruptcy of what he called “liberal individualism,” which made them feel isolated from one another. National Socialism seemed to offer relief; as a dynamic movement it exploited this deep craving for community and offered a powerful feeling of togetherness. Mingled with the nationalism to which Germany was ever vulnerable, collectivism had something irresistibly appealing about it. But von Hildebrand saw that the intoxication of mass rallies and marches created only a pseudocommunity. It played on a need, but did not offer the real thing. Nazism could produce elation and a sense of national purpose, but it also paved the way for a state in which an individual who opposed its ends was simply eliminated.
We can see other key ideas in von Hildebrand’s philosophy at work in his critique of Nazism. Striking is the degree to which he opposed Nazism aside from any harm it might do to him or to his family or to the Catholic Church. Here he was prepared philosophically by the seminal concept of “value,” which he had developed in his dissertation and which would form the golden thread throughout his entire body of thought. To see “value” in something in von Hildebrand’s sense is to recognize its goodness “in itself” and not only to recognize it as something beneficial for me or others close to me. The same logic carries over to “disvalue,” which is badness, not in virtue of any harm it might bring to me, but simply bad in itself.
If abstract in theory, “value” and “disvalue” become concrete in von Hildebrand’s anti-Nazism. Take an episode from early 1933. Speaking to a friend who was vice president of the Catholic Academic Association, von Hildebrand expressed his surprise that the Association would hold a previously planned symposium on the grounds that the true work of the Association was surely impossible under the Hitler regime. His friend responded by jubilantly producing a cordial telegram he had received from Franz von Papen, then-vice chancellor of Germany. Von Hildebrand was dismayed:
How could a vice president of the Catholic Academic Association, founded to imbue everything with the spirit of Catholicism, base his judgment of a regime on whether it was courteous toward the Association, rather than looking to the regime’s spirit and its first principles?”
Here von Hildebrand speaks out of his value philosophy. While his friend still appraised Nazism in terms of how Hitler would treat the Association, von Hildebrand was looking only at who Hitler really was.
The turbulent years in German public life that coincided with von Hildebrand’s tenure at the University in Munich gave him great reason for concern; nevertheless they were exceptionally fruitful for him in terms of new philosophical insights. In 1922, he gave a series of lectures on the virtue of purity at the Catholic Academic Association, of which he was a leading member. These lectures, published in German in 1927 and in English a few years later as In Defense of Purity (1931),8 created a stir in Catholic circles, which received them in the awareness that they marked a sea change in the Christian approach to sexuality. Not a few people who read his work on purity in the 1930s and 1940s describe a sudden awakening to a sense of the depth and beauty of conjugal love that was totally unlike what had been presented to them in their religious education. He would expand his reflections in his pathbreaking book Die Ehe, published in 1929 (and in English as Marriage in 1942). One cannot understand the seismic shift in von Hildebrand’s thought on love and sexuality without grasping that for nearly two thousand years Christian teaching had defined the conjugal act almost exclusively in terms of its power to bring about new life. According to historian John Noonan, von Hildebrand was the first Catholic thinker to argue thematically that sexual union was oriented not just to procreation but also to expressing the love between spouses.9
The ideas on marriage that von Hildebrand was pioneering during the 1920s would find expression in the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the dual meaning of the conjugal act, namely to generate new life and also to enact the love between spouses.10
The depth and reverence with which he approached married love empowered him to think with clarity about the attacks on marriage embodied in the Nazi race laws prohibiting intermarriage between Germans and Jews. He saw with particular keenness not just the overreaching of the state but the invasion of this most intimate and sacred of human spheres.
The Nazi crisis led von Hildebrand to address questions that might otherwise not have caught his attention. One of these was the rise of anti-Semitism. He opposed, as already noted, not just the anti-Semitism that aimed at extermination but also the more moderate anti-Semitism found in pervasive stereotypes and antipathies. But anti-Semitism also led him to think deeply on the meaning of the Jewish people. In his writing the “Jewish question” took on an entirely different meaning than it generally did in German and Austrian political and intellectual life at the time.
The German race laws and even many Catholic thinkers approached the question from a purely racial and ethnic basis. By contrast, von Hildebrand wrote that the Jews are the “only people whose inner point of unity lay not at a racial or cultural level but on the religious level. True belief in the one God,” he says, “and the awaiting of the Messiah constituted the ‘form’ of Israel’s unity.”11 The historian John Connelly, in his book From Enemy to Brother, marvels how von Hildebrand could emerge so completely unaffected by the anti-Semitism under which so many other Catholics labored.12
The relentlessness of von Hildebrand’s anti-Nazi critique might suggest a stern, even severe, disposition. Nothing could be further from the truth. All who knew him say he radiated a contagious joy and mirth. “He was happy and grateful for all great things that call for reverence,” remembers his student Paul Stöcklein. “His inner happiness made itself felt in the way he spoke. This happiness struck me as free of any self-deception. I had never realized it was possible for someone to be so happy.”13 His philosophical genius and extraordinary culture did not make him inaccessible; rather, his “inner wealth” was integrated into a lively concern for the well-being of his friends, his family, and especially his students.
He was spontaneous and effusive, but not in a way that was reducible to natural disposition. It was an expression of how deeply he lived by his own “value philosophy,” with its emphasis on the “due response” to values and disvalues. It was also, for anyone who knew him, an expression of joy that flowed from the deep faith in which he lived moment to moment.
Von Hildebrand’s rich contact with “the world of values” challenges us to think of his political witness not just in terms of resistance and opposition. He was not merely opposed to Nazism. Or rather, his opposition was rooted in his devotion to the West, which to him above all meant the Judeo-Christian West with its commitment to truth, its respect for the dignity of the individual person, and its great cultural inheritance.
It is now high time that we open the pages of von Hildebrand’s memoirs. The stage has been set. We join him, in Paris, as a youthful professor of thirty-one.
The year is just 1921, yet already battle with Hitler looms on the horizon.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Most of the texts presented in this volume are drawn from a German edition of von Hildebrand’s anti-Nazi papers edited by Austrian historian Ernst Wen
isch and published under the title Memoiren und Aufsätze gegen den Nationalsozialismus (Memoirs and Essays Against National Socialism).1 Not only did Wenisch have privileged access to the manuscript of the memoirs, from which he made selections for this volume, he also produced a first-rate set of scholarly notes, which form the basis of many of the notes in this volume. Wenisch’s volume also includes about a third of von Hildebrand’s essays from Der christliche Ständestaat, of which we have selected twelve (in many cases just excerpts). Wenisch features two important remembrances of von Hildebrand by Balduin Schwarz and Paul Stöcklein, students of von Hildebrand at the University of Munich. We cite their personal testimonies in “Who Was This Man Who Fought Hitler?”
My Battle Against Hitler Page 2
