The Scientific Origins of National Socialism

Daniel Gasman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351474542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Many studies of the origins of National Socialism claim that the vo;lkisch and proto-Nazi movement arose largely as a reaction to the materialistic ideas of nineteenth-century science and especially to the naturalistic philosophy of Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League. Using hitherto unexplored material, Daniel Gasman calls this generalization into question. Arguing that the importance of science has been relatively neglected in accounts of the intellectual origins of Nazism, he attempts to show that Haeckel's "scientific" Darwinism, and his movement, the German Monist League, were proto-Nazi in character.

Contrary to popular belief, Haeckel's type of social Darwinism actually played a critical role in the formation of National Socialist ideology. In his new introduction, Gasman notes that recent research goes far to confirm Haeckel's role as an ideological progenitor of fascist ideology. This is true not only for Germany, but also for the birth of fascist thought in Italy and France. In general, Gasman claims, the history of science plainly reveals how Haeckel's social Darwinism nourished the roots of fascism no less than avant-garde modernism.

When The Scientific Origins of National Socialism initially appeared, the Times Literary Supplement called it a "very well-argued thesis... that is completely successful... and leaves the reader to extract his own moral lessons." Medical History, in its review of The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, said, "His book is essential for understanding modern Germany. It has a general message derived from the events in Germany, where scientific data were permitted to take on a mystical signficiance... with ghastly consequences." Bruce Chatwin, in the New York Review of Books, called the book "brilliant." Now available in paperback, with a new introduction by the author, this seminal work will be of interest to intellectual historians, as well as th

Chapter One

Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League

ERNST Haeckel grew to maturity in the decade and a half following the abortive German Revolution of 1848. The failure of the Revolution to achieve for Germany a united and modern state structure caused political passions to smolder from frustration and bewilderment, and the era left an indelible impression on the youthful mind and outlook of Haeckel. Because of the failure of the Revolution, the political, social, and intellectual problems which had plagued the fragmented states and provinces of Germany before 1848 not only persisted but became more intense in the years that were to follow. Prussia did not succeed in resolving its old enmity with Austria, nor did it very quickly succeed in reconciling the differences within the Confederation between itself and the lesser states. After the agreement of Olmütz with Austria (1850), Germany, and especially Prussia, ‘entered into several years of a deep sleep of repression.’¹

Throughout the decade of the 1850’s many kept alive the hope for a change in the political fortunes of Germany and nourished ideas of unification and national revival. It is true that there was a great confusion about the form the new Germany should take once change came about. There were those who argued for a Germany under the leadership of Prussia and separated from Austria, and there were others who looked towards an overthrow of the Hapsburgs in Austria, and the creation of a large Germanic Mitteleuropa. And there were still others who assumed positions in respect to unification which were variants of klein- and grossdeutsch solutions to Germany’s political dilemmas. But the general concern with the question of union is clear.

Towards the end of the decade two significant changes, one internal, the other external, offered the supporters of unification new hope. In 1858, William I took over the leadership of Prussia from his ailing brother, Friedrich William, and in 1861 he succeeded to the throne. Though a pious and somewhat conservative man, William I took an active and positive interest in the unification question and offered the possibility of hope to aspiring nationalists. Secondly, and very significantly, the nationalist movement in Germany was stimulated by events in Italy. In 1859, under the leadership of Cavour, Mazzini, and Garibaldi, Italy threw off the Austrian occupation in all her provinces save one, and largely succeeded in unifying herself. This success on the part of the Italian nationalists could not but suggest to the Germans that their political destiny was very similar. Both countries were involved in an intimate way with Austria and both were beset by the need for national self-realization.²

It was in this atmosphere of impending change, of national tension and awareness, that Haeckel completed his scientific and professional training, and began taking a passionate interest in the political condition and future of Germany. Even as a young student he had shown marked and strong nationalistic sentiments,³ and given a family tradition in which service to Germany and the state was venerated, this was not unusual. Reaching back more than a century into Prussian and Rhenish history, Haeckel’s family, on both sides, included prominent members of the upper governmental bureaucracy. His maternal grandfather served as a lawyer with the Prussian judicial administration and during the Napoleonic wars voiced noticeable German patriotic sentiments. The French considered him to be one of the more important government administrators in the Rhine district and for a time removed him to Paris as a hostage where he continued to verbally defy French authority.⁴ As we have already noted, Haeckel’s father was also a lawyer, and he ended his career as a friend of Gneisenau, and as state councilor for the Prussian government in Berlin.⁵ So now, in the heat of the struggle for unification, Haeckel became intensely involved, albeit only in a very personal way, in the political tempest which was brewing. In 1859, he was in Italy, preparing and gathering material for his doctoral dissertation in zoology. The letters which he sent home to his fiancée, Anna Sethe, and the letters to his friends, especially to the writer and poet, Hermann Allmers, who was then also in Italy, were full of the drama of Italian unification and revealed his intense German nationalism and the profound hope that Germany would follow in Italy’s footsteps. Haeckel recognized that it was in Italy that he had finally become aware of how deeply he felt about Germany. Writing from Messina on October 16, 1859, he explained how the time spent in Italy had ‘stirred up and cultivated’ more than anything else a ‘heightened inner love for our incomparable German fatherland.’ He wrote that wherever he went in Italy, no matter how magnificent the scenery and how beautiful the countryside, his love of Germany had to be expressed. ‘It had to be heard over all of Italy and Sicily, in the majestic environment of Naples, as well as on the glorious plains of Palermo, among the quarries of Syracuse, as well as on the peak of Aetna: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt! —Ich bin ein Deutscher, will ein Deutscher sein!’ And it was in Italy that he became acutely aware of the racial ties which bound all the German people together. In Sorrento he and his friend Allmers had come upon a Norwegian traveller. ‘The common bond,’ Haeckel wrote, ‘of our German racial nature quickly allowed us to become acquainted with him and we were overjoyed to hear so well expressed … the noble and great ideas of the free German spirit.’ He met other Germans and described them as ‘sons of the north’ and ‘relatives’ of the ‘same great national race.’ On New Year’s Day, 1860, Haeckel discovered a German ship in the harbor of Messina and boarded it. He drank to the new year with the crew and later wrote: ‘This experience strengthened anew in me my belief that there exists in our common German nation a healthy embryo which is capable of evolution and it is only because of this that one may hope for a healthy surge in our social relations.’⁶

By the spring of 1860, when Italy had already won her independence, Haeckel was back in Germany, and the letters which he continued to write revealed the depth of the impression which Italy had also left upon him in political matters. ‘I have no doubt,’ he wrote, ‘that this wonderful example of the union of a free people is also of the greatest significance for Germany.’ If the ‘degenerate’ Italians could unify, then so too could the Germans, who stood far above them in ‘moral development,’ in the ‘complexity of their deep spiritual life,’ and in their ‘highly developed sense of justice.’ The real impediment to unification was the particularism of the feudal aristocracy, the ‘thirty-six parasitic robber princes, who, together with their lackeys’ deny freedom to the rest of Germany. But the ‘noble disposition’ which ‘slumbers’ in the German people will ultimately allow them to realize their ‘fate.’⁷

Haeckel’s youthful vision of a united Germany was, even more than might be expected, strongly chauvinistic and expansionist. The Germans, he believed, were superior to all other people and had thus to be allowed to dominate all of central Europe. This attitude was clearly expressed in 1860, when shortly after his return from Italy he attended a Turnfest at Coburg and noted the profound impression which it had left upon him. He observed with joy the ‘fraternization of young and old from all classes and estates, from all the cities and provinces of Germany from the Eider to Lake Constance, and from the Vistula to the Rhine.’ He saw the athletically oriented Turnfest as symbolizing a ‘single people of brothers,’ who, by ‘developing their bodies’ contributed to the ‘defense and strengthening of the entire people.’⁸

In addition, Haeckel looked to the creation of a strong government which would be able to bind Germany solidly together. Upon his return to Germany in the spring of 1860 he recorded having passed through Paris on his way home and apart from the ‘unbelievable’ opulence of the Napoleonic capital he noted that France possessed a ‘centralisation for which one must have deep respect’ and thus found that the ‘military despotism’ of Napoleon III was quite ‘bearable.’⁹ It was clear that his brief experience with France had served to accentuate for him the pitifulness of German particularism and political fragmentation. He believed, of course, that the Germans could imitate the French because they were superior to them. He had written earlier from Paris: ‘We will not only reach the [level] of the French in other things but will also surpass them, since we still possess an inner essence which is lacking among the French: an earnest deep morality, a full inner soul, a happy pure family life, and a forceful striving for the essence and essentials of a thing.’¹⁰

Then in the 186o’s unification finally came to Germany, but the longed-for consolidation was instigated by Bismarck, rather than by the liberal middle class. By uniting Germany under Prussia’s leadership and by excluding Austria from the new state, Bismarck attempted to maintain the historical existence of the Junkers while fusing their interests with those of the middle class under a cloak of nationalism.¹¹ At first Haeckel opposed Bismarck and wrote to Rudolf Virchow in May, 1860, that Germany should not be united by a policy of ‘“Blood and Iron.”‘ However, six years later, once Bismarck’s¹² Austrian war was over, Haeckel and his friends, despite their underlying grossdeutsch point of view, enthusiastically welcomed the new Germany and seemed to express no further regrets that political unification was bought at the price of true political liberty and real parliamentary government. At the time of the outbreak of the Austrian War, Allmers wrote to Haeckel that he was excitedly ‘following Prussia with true and happy exaltation on its energetic path to victory,’¹³ and he noted that a ‘unified Germany with Prussia at its head would be able to defy half of Europe.’¹⁴ Within a few weeks, when this short war had already ended, Haeckel wrote back to Allmers that he hoped that the diplomats would not destroy the newly arisen state and would grant to Germany her just demands.¹⁵

Four years later Haeckel and his friends greeted the Bismarckian War with France even more ecstatically than they had greeted the events of 1866. In November, 1870, Allmers wrote to Haeckel: ‘What a time this is! What exaltation, what victory !’¹⁶ In the future, Germany would become so powerful that ‘every people around her from near and from far will bow to the majesty of the German people.’¹⁷ A short time later, Haeckel assured Allmers that he agreed with his appraisal of the events of the Franco-Prussian War. ‘Naturally,’ he wrote, ‘I have followed all the victories of the newly blossoming fatherland with enthusiasm and like yourself hope for a promising future.’¹⁸

While Germany was thus in political ferment and was embarking upon its modern path of unification, Haeckel was also busy launching his own scientific career. In 1861, he received his doctorate in zoology and during the same year was appointed Privatdozent at Jena, having been recommended for the position by his former instructor in comparative anatomy, Carl Gegenbaur.¹⁹ During these first years of teaching, Haeckel, along with the rest of the German scientific community, began making the acquaintance of Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species. It had been translated into Germa...