The Betrayal of the Humanities

The University during the Third Reich

Bernard M. Levinson, Robert P. Ericksen, Bernard M. Levinson, Robert P. Ericksen

• Verlag: Indiana University Press
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253060808
• Thema: Historia
• Thema: Historia judía

How did the academy react to the rise, dominance, and ultimate fall of Germany's Third Reich? Did German professors of the humanities have to tell themselves lies about their regime's activities or its victims to sleep at night? Did they endorse the regime? Or did they look the other way, whether out of deliberate denial or out of fear for their own personal safety? The Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich is a collection of groundbreaking essays that shed light on this previously overlooked piece of history.

The Betrayal of the Humanities accepts the regrettable news that academics and intellectuals in Nazi Germany betrayed the humanities, and explores what went wrong, what occurred at the universities, and what happened to the major disciplines of the humanities under National Socialism.

The Betrayal of the Humanities details not only how individual scholars, particular departments, and even entire universities collaborated with the Nazi regime but also examines the legacy of this era on higher education in Germany. In particular, it looks at the peculiar position of many German scholars in the post-war world having to defend their own work, or the work of their mentors, while simultaneously not appearing to accept Nazism.

PART I

NAZI GERMANY AND THE HISTORICAL HUMANITIES

ONE

THE HISTORY OF THE HUMANITIES IN THE THIRD REICH

ALAN E. STEINWEIS

WHEN DISCUSSING THE IMPACT OF Nazi rule on the humanities in Germany, it is important to avoid retrojecting onto the past our own sense of what the humanities are or ought to be. As Suzanne L. Marchand has emphasized, the humanistic disciplines in Germany before 1933 were characterized, by and large, by a devotion to a particular set of methodologies, not by the kinds of “non-elitist, inclusionary” values that typify the humanities in today’s academy.¹ This is not a moral judgment about old-fashioned scholarship but simply a fact that must be kept in mind when assessing the degree to which the history of the humanities during the Nazi period should be regarded as a “betrayal.” While there is no question that the Nazi regime brought unprecedented political and ideological pressures to bear on German academic life, German universities had not served as beacons of tolerance, democracy, and antiestablishment thinking before 1933. The acquiescence of German scholarship in Nazi rule resulted from a variety of factors, but certainly among the most important of these was the fundamental compatibility between Nazism and the intellectual and political values of a significant segment of the conservative-nationalistic German professoriate—or, at the very least, the absence of a fundamental incompatibility. The humanistic values that were betrayed between 1933 and 1945 were not so much those of the German professoriate of the time as those of today’s scholars working in liberal-democratic intellectual environments.

With this caveat in mind, we can trace the post-1945 development of scholarship about the conduct of Nazi-era German humanists. The historiography has unfolded against the background of generational change and the process of “coming to terms with the past” in postwar German-speaking Europe. Consideration of the subject began very slowly and haltingly, with only a tiny number of studies appearing between 1945 and 1990. These were produced mainly in West Germany. For its part, East Germany produced no significant research on this subject,² although it did publish information about West German scholars with Nazi pasts as an element in its strategy to discredit the Federal Republic.³ In Austria, where work on the Nazi period was generally neglected until the late 1980s, systematic research about Nazi-era academics has been slow to develop, although a recent excellent volume about the University of Vienna, to be discussed in this chapter, provides a solid foundation for further consideration of the subject.

Research in this area picked up in pace considerably in the 1990s, after German unification, and has undergone a dramatic efflorescence since around 2000. This development has paralleled that of the historiography of the Third Reich more generally and for many of the same reasons. In postwar West Germany, the academic establishment long remained reluctant to address the pre-1945 unpleasantness. This mirrored a broader West German tendency to strive for normalcy by repressing certain aspects of the Nazi past but also served the personal and professional self-interests of a professoriate that had itself been implicated in Nazism. For many years after 1945, West German academic life was dominated by scholars who had started their careers or received their degrees in the Nazi period. Moreover, as members of that generation retired, they were replaced by their students, whose personal loyalty to their mentors often took precedence over an honest confrontation with the past. This is not to suggest that West German scholars with unacknowledged Nazi-era records necessarily espoused ideas that were sympathetic to, or apologetic for, right-wing causes. Many were solidly on the left, the most notable case perhaps being that of the historian Fritz Fischer, who had trained at a Nazi-sponsored institute in the 1930s but whose work during the 1960s, which posited a continuity between the expansionistic aims of the German Empire and those of the Third Reich, was embraced by the German New Left.⁴ Although a generation of historians and other scholars who came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s did much to stimulate public and scholarly discussion of the Third Reich, they rarely addressed the involvement of their own disciplines and doctoral supervisors in Nazism.⁵

We should not let the tacit conspiracy of silence in the German academic world obscure other factors accounting for the slow development of scholarship on the humanities during the Nazi period. Postwar German scholars who did address the Nazi era regarded other issues as more urgent: the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s accession to power, the diplomacy of the 1930s and the origins of the Second World War, and resistance to Hitler.⁶ These were also the themes that tended to dominate American and British scholarship about Nazi Germany. One can argue that German scholars failed in their unique obligation to confront the Nazi-era records of their own disciplines, but they were hardly the only ones who neglected such subjects.

The intellectual life of Nazi Germany, like its cultural and artistic life, was widely and erroneously regarded—both within Germany and without—as having been characterized by a fundamental bifurcation. On one side stood the majority of German scholars, artists, and intellectuals, who kept the Nazis at arm’s length, preserved their integrity, and provided a basis for the perpetuation of non-Nazi values into the post-Nazi period. On the other side stood the mediocre opportunists, the party hacks, and the ideological zealots, who attempted to infuse Nazism into the mainstream of cultural and intellectual life but were easy enough to identify and purge in 1945. The first group seemed too mundane a subject for historical inquiry; the second group seemed unworthy of the attention of serious scholars. There appeared to be no compelling reason to place the German humanities on the agenda of postwar scholarship.

This context helps explain why the first book on the subject made little impact and quickly fell into oblivion. This was Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Hitler’s Crimes against the Jewish People, published in 1946 by Max Weinreich.⁷ One of the twentieth century’s most distinguished Yiddishists, Weinreich was long associated with the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), first in Vilna and later in New York. Weinreich’s indictment of German scholars for their role in legitimizing and facilitating the persecution and murder of the Jews was marked by an angry and uncompromising tone—understandable in view of how close the events in question had been and in view of the German-trained Weinreich’s personal sense of betrayal by people he believed should have known better. Given the speed with which Weinreich prepared his book, and the fact that organized research on this subject was extremely difficult so soon after the war, Hitler’s Professors was an impressive achievement. In an otherwise critical review of the book in the Jewish journal Commentary, Hannah Arendt praised Weinreich for having laid a foundation for future research on the subject. But Weinreich’s book found no resonance in a postwar German academic establishment that was itself implicated in Nazism. Moreover, the German scholars described by Weinreich tended to fit into the category of insurgent ideological zealots and could be easily dismissed as irrelevant for understanding the mainstream of German academic life under the Nazis. Only decades later, upon its republication, did Weinreich’s work receive widespread recognition for its pioneering contribution. The rediscovery of Weinreich⁸ was the result of new interest in the subject of Nazi Judenforschung [Jewish research], which has been addressed in several recent books that are further discussed here.

Between the publication of Weinreich’s book in 1946 and the 1990s, only a handful of book-length works addressed the subject of Nazi-era scholarship in the humanities. But despite the relatively small volume of material, these early works, like Weinreich’s, set much of the agenda for research on the subject. Questions that were central to the early scholarship remain crucial today. What was the degree of continuity or discontinuity within university faculties from the Weimar period into the Nazi years? To what extent did German scholars “self-coordinate,” that is, accommodate themselves to the ideological and political priorities of the Nazi regime? How much intellectual and professional room for maneuver did they have? What strategies did the regime use to steer scholarship in the desired ideological and political direction? What was the relationship between the established universities and the many external institutes set up by the regime? What role did scholars play, as consultants or as experts in the employ of the government and the party, in the formulation and implementation of policy?

Several of these questions were addressed in Helmut Heiber’s study of the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany. Published in 1966, the book contained a wealth of new, archive-based disclosures about the historical profession during the Nazi era.⁹ Led by the right-wing historian Walter Frank, the Reich Institute was established by the Nazi regime to promote historical scholarship sympathetic to a Nazi perspective. The history of the Institute conveys the complexity of the relationship between established German academics and the Nazi regime. The Institute was found...