The Mind of the Nation

Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851-1955

Egbert Klautke

• Editorial: Berghahn Books
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782380207
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: German History

Völkerpsychologie played an important role in establishing the social sciences via the works of such scholars as Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, Ernest Renan, Franz Boas, and Werner Sombart. In Germany, the intellectual history of "folk psychology" was represented by Moritz Lazarus, Heymann Steinthal, Wilhelm Wundt and Willy Hellpach. This book follows the invention of the discipline in the nineteenth century, its rise around the turn of the century and its ultimate demise after the Second World War. In addition, it shows that despite the repudiation of "folk psychology" and its failed institutionalization, the discipline remains relevant as a precursor of contemporary studies of "national identity."

CHAPTER 1

Lazarus, Steinthal and the Invention of Folk Psychology

Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal are considered to be the founders of Völkerpsychologie. In 1851 Lazarus introduced the term into scholarly debates, and in 1859, together with Steinthal, he established the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (ZfVS), subsequently published in twenty volumes until 1890, which gave the new discipline a platform and its most important forum.¹ Lazarus and Steinthal’s folk psychology and the expectations and hopes they attached to this approach were closely linked to their position as emancipated, liberal Jews who identified strongly with Prussia and subsequently with the unified German empire. At the same time they kept their Jewish identity, refused to bow to the pressure to convert to Christianity, and became actively involved in the Jewish reform movement. They were typical products of the emancipation of the German Jews in the nineteenth century: strongly in favour of national unification under Prussian leadership and outspoken supporters of Jewish integration, they stopped short of full assimilation and proudly defended their Jewish heritage. To both Lazarus and Steinthal, their achievements as scholars and academics as well as their identity as educated citizens (Bildungsbürger) was the best proof of their integration into German society and made conversion to Christianity unnecessary, if not unhelpful.² Increasingly, their folk psychology reflected their socio-political position; while they started the journal as a decidedly scholarly venture, folk psychology turned more and more into a moral-political philosophy that comprised the ethics of reform-minded, liberal Jews in the German empire.³

As such, Völkerpsychologie became a life-long concern and project for both Lazarus and Steinthal; it summarized and contained their philosophical-scientific, political and religious-ethical convictions. The main purpose of the new discipline was to describe and understand the development of the folk spirit (Volksgeist), i.e., the progress of nations (or Völker), civilization and humanity, and by doing so to contribute to this very progress. Ultimately, folk psychology could not fulfil these high expectations. Indeed, several contemporary critics considered Lazarus and Steinthal’s plans exaggerated and arrogant, if not naïve. The high hopes of establishing folk psychology as a super-discipline that would integrate, and at the same time tower over the humanities and the sciences, were disappointed, but this does not make Lazarus and Steinthal’s folk psychology irrelevant. The approach was widely debated from the 1860s to the 1890s and found some followers. More importantly, it attracted a number of scholars who, by means of constructive criticism, appropriated main concepts of folk psychology, albeit in competing disciplines. Furthermore, Lazarus and Steinthal’s folk psychology left visible marks not only on the German intellectual landscape, but also in France, and, to a lesser degree, in the U.S.A. and in Russia.

Biographical Background

The biographical backgrounds of Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal are important for an understanding of their concept of folk psychology. They both grew up in the German provinces.⁴ Lazarus was born in the small town of Filehne (Wieleń) in the Prussian province of Posen in 1824. With hindsight he described his hometown as a typical Central European microcosm that was characterized by an ethnically and confessionally mixed population that invited reflections on the character of the different ethnic groups that lived side by side. Steinthal was born in the town of Gröbzig in Anhalt in 1823.⁵ Both came from respected lower-middle class Jewish families with strong ties to the local Jewish communities, and both used the opportunities that opened up in higher education for Jews to leave the traditional milieu of their parents’ generation behind. While attending the Gymnasium Lazarus experienced a short, but severe, crisis of identity when he broke with the orthodox Jewish faith of his family and became a secular, national-liberal Jewish German. According to Gershom Scholem, Lazarus was thus the epitome of the nineteenth-century assimilated German Jew, who completed the transition from purely Talmudic Judaism to a new German-Jewish identity in only five years.⁶ Despite their secularism and harsh criticism of Jewish orthodoxy, neither Lazarus nor Steinthal considered abandoning Judaism and converting to Christianity. Instead, both scholars became active and outspoken representatives of the Jewish reform movement in Imperial Germany and fought for the recognition of the Jews’ equal rights as German citizens.

At the University of Berlin, where they had met as students of the linguist Carl Heyse (1797–1855), both Lazarus and Steinthal abandoned plans to study theology and become rabbis, and immersed themselves instead in studying philosophy and the humanities.⁷ As was common at the time, Lazarus studied a broad range of subjects in the old philosophical faculty, including history, linguistics, literature and languages; his main topic, however, was philosophy.⁸ While attending the Gymnasium Martino-Katharineum in Braunschweig as a mature student between 1844 and 1846 – for lack of money, Lazarus had first taken up an apprenticeship – his teacher Friedrich Konrad Griepenkerl (1782–1849) introduced Lazarus to the works of the philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), the German philosopher who had succeeded Kant as the chair in philosophy at the University of Königsberg. Herbart was one of the first philosophers to define psychology as an empirical discipline that was to abandon all metaphysical speculation and cut its ties to theology. Instead, he proposed to study the mechanics of the human mind, taking the natural sciences and mathematics as role models.⁹ Herbart’s psychological philosophy made a lasting impression on Lazarus, who remained a follower of his psychology for all his life, and thus became a main representative of ‘Herbartianism’ in Germany.¹⁰ Lazarus in turn introduced Steinthal to Herbart’s works, and together they presented the critical assessment of his psychology as one of the reasons to embark on the project of Völkerpsychologie. Herbart, they claimed, had been close to ‘finding Völkerpsychologie’, but had stopped short of extending his psychological system to the study of groups and nations.¹¹

Against the dominating trend at the University of Berlin in the 1840s, Lazarus did not join the Hegelians, but followed the philosopher Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798–1854), who taught a mixture of critical empiricism and pragmatic philosophy that was similar to, but also competing with, Herbart’s approach.¹² Despite Lazarus’s critical, distanced view of Hegel, he was very familiar with his philosophical idealism. Indeed, he had already studied Hegel’s Aesthetics while still a student at the Gymnasium in Braunschweig. This reading left an impression with Lazarus: as a young student at the University of Berlin he told one of his former teachers that he dreamed of one day integrating and reconciling Hegel’s and Herbart’s philosophy. While his concept of Völkerpsychologie drew on concepts from both thinkers, Lazarus’s real role model was Herbart, whom he admired and referred to as the ‘Newton of psychology’ because of the precision and accuracy of his empirical analyses.¹³

After graduating with a doctorate in philosophy in 1849,¹⁴ Lazarus became an independent scholar and was able to establish a literary and scholarly salon at his flat in Berlin. His now comfortable lifestyle was made possible by the financial support of the family of his wife Sarah Lebenheim, whom he married in 1850. Without any creative ambitions of his own, he became increasingly interested in the arts and literature, searched out contacts with artists and poets and, amongst other activities, became a member of the Prussian capital’s most eminent literary club, the Tunnel under the Spree. This association, founded in 1827, dominated literary life in Berlin until the end of the nineteenth century and gave Lazarus the opportunity to mingle with personalities such as the writers Theodor Storm (1817–88) and Theodor Fontane (1819–98), and the painter Adolph Menzel (1815–1905).¹⁵ Not surprisingly, Lazarus’s closest friends, to whom he dedicated extended sections of his autobiography, were writers and novelists, not academics. Amongst them he counted Paul Heyse (1830–1914), Heinrich Rückert (1823–75), Berthold Auerbach (1812–82) and Gottfried Keller (1819–90), who had all contributed to developing Lazarus’s folk psychology without sharing his academic ambitions in this field.¹⁶ Lazarus’s interest in the arts and literature stood in contrast to the high expectations of an academic folk psychology, since one of the reasons to establish this discipline was to distinguish it clearly from the speculations for which travel writers and journalists were notorious. Lazarus seems to have been aware of this conflict, but ignored it.¹⁷ To him, academic folk psychology was meant to help develop the German folk spirit in the same way as national literature. Already in 1859, on the occasion of the centenary of Friedrich Schiller’s birthday, he had been instrumental in founding the German Schiller Association, a charitable organization devoted to fostering national literature und thus encouraging works that emanated from the folk soul and served the ‘general spirit of the nation’.¹⁸

Lazarus’s first independent publication was a political pamphlet composed shortly after the failed revolution of 1848–49 in which he argued in favour of Prussian leadership within Germany. This treatise introduced the main tenets of Völkerpsychologie, avant la lettre and in popular form, and showed Lazarus as a dedicated patriot who yearned for the national unification of Germany under Prussian auspices.¹⁹ In 1859 he became professor at the University of Berne on the basis of two volumes entitled The Life of the Soul, an eclectic collection of his philosophical-psychological writings. It covered a wide range of topics such as ‘Education and Science’, ‘Honour and Glory’ and ‘Humour’, but did not include any studies on folk psychology.²⁰ At Berne Lazarus held the first chair in psychology and Völkerpsychologie at a German-speaking university and became a respected teacher and administrator, serving both as dean of the faculty of philosophy and rector of the university. Despite the success and recognition he received for his academic work in Switzerland, however, Lazarus gave up his secure position at the University of Berne and returned to Berlin when his wife inherited a large sum of money in 1866.²¹

Upon his return to Germany Lazarus hoped to be appointed to a chair in philosophy at a German university, but several attempts to install him at the University of Kiel failed.²² From 1868 to 1872 he taught philosophy at the Prussian War Academy in Berlin, and in 1873, after his teaching contract at the War Academy was cancelled, he was made honorary chair (ordentlicher Honorarprofessor) in philosophy at the University of Berlin, a position that kept him at arm’s length from the tenured faculty, but recognized his former status as chair in philosophy.²³ Lazarus enjoyed continued success as a public speaker and teacher – his first lecture course on Völkerpsychologie at the University of Berlin in 1873–74 attracted more than 120 student...