The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid., p. 87.

  20. Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court; London: Cambridge University Press, 1963), especially pp. 183f., 385ff., and 545f. See also A. W. Carus, Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 91–108 and 185–207.

  21. I have used Rudiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (Munich: Hanser, 1994), pp. 145ff.

  22. Michael Grossheim, Von Georg Simmel zu Martin Heidegger: Philosophie zwischen Leben und Existenz (Bonn and Berlin: Bouvier, 1991), pp. 14–18.

  23. Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

  24. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath, intro. by W. Stark (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), pp. 96–102.

  25. Ibid.

  26. To situate Cassirer, see Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), pp. 1–10 and 129–144.

  27. That year he took part in a famous debate with Martin Heidegger at Davos in Switzerland, where they locked horns over Kant, a year or so after Heidegger had published Being and Time. Safranski, Meister aus Deutschland, pp. 183–188.

  28. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Text und Anmerkungen bearbeitet von Claus Ronsenkarnz (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2001), pp. 43ff. and 193.

  29. Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 122ff.

  30. Percy Ernst Schramm, Hitler, the Man and the Military Leader, trans., ed., and with an intro. by Donald S. Detwiler (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1972), p. 9.

  31. Alain Boureau, Kantorowicz: Stories of a Historian, trans. Stephen G. Nichols and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, foreword by Martin Jay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 2.

  32. Norbert Elias, The Germans.

  33. There has been an explosion of Elias scholarship recently. See Richard Kilminster, Norbert Elias: Post-Philosophical Sociology (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), which has a section on Elias and Weimar culture (pp. 10–14), a chapter on Elias and Mannheim, and one devoted to The Civilising Process. See also Stephen Menell, Norbert Elias: Civilisation and the Human Self-Image (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), with chapters on “Sports and Violence,” “Civilisation and De-civilisation,” “Involvement and Detachment.”

  34. Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith, Gershom Scholem: Zwischen den Disziplinen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995).

  35. Susan A. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 109ff.

  CHAPTER 33: WEIMAR: “A PROBLEM IN NEED OF A SOLUTION”

  1. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Times (London: MAX, 2006), p. 546.

  2. Watson, Modern Mind/Terrible Beauty, p. 273.

  3. Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche, trans. Richard L. Collier Jr. (London: Athlone Press, 2000), pp. 70–82 and 137–156.

  4. Renos K. Papadopoulos, et al., Jung in Modern Perspective (Hounslow, Middlesex: Wildwood, 1984), p. 203.

  5. Bernard J. Paris, Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-understanding (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 92ff.

  6. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: H. Fertig, 1998).

  7. For Nietzsche and Darwin, see John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 78ff., 81f., 95f., and 146f. Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 115ff., for Nietzsche and “the nervous age.”

  8. For Hitler and Nietzsche, see Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, eds., Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 90–106.

  9. See Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, for a chapter on “The Physiology of Power.”

  10. See Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 12ff. for the myths of the homeland, and 112ff. for Heidegger’s concept of Mitteleuropa.

  11. Frank-Lothar Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie: Geschichtsdenken und politisches Handeln im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998), pp. 72–77.

  12. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).

  13. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1961/1974), p. 184.

  14. Ibid., p. 189.

  15. Ibid., pp. 191–192.

  16. Ibid., pp. 194–196.

  17. Ibid., p. 220.

  18. Ibid., pp. 257–259.

  19. Anthony Phelan, ed., The Weimar Dilemma: Intellectuals in the Weimar Republic (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1985), especially Keith Bullivant, “The Conservative Revolution,” pp. 47–70. See also Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 109. Elias, The Germans, p. 212.

  20. Watson, Modern Mind/Terrible Beauty, p. 300.

  21. Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in West Germany (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2001), p. 140.

  22. Ernst Reinhard Piper, Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe (Munich: Karl Blessing, 2005), pp. 179ff. for the Mythus.

  23. Ibid., pp. 212–231. See also Cecil Robert, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (London: Batsford, 1972).

  24. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Learned, trans. Richard Aldington (Boston: Beacon, 1955), p. xxi.

  25. Ibid., pp. 13–14.

  26. Ibid., p. 18.

  27. Ibid., pp. 30–32.

  28. Ibid., p. 41.

  29. Ibid., p. 42.

  30. Ibid., pp. 55–59.

  31. Ibid., p. 86.

  32. Ibid., p. 104.

  33. Ibid., p. 116.

  34. Ibid., pp. 117–120.

  35. Ibid., p. 141,

  36. Ibid., pp. 145–147.

  37. For contemporary reactions, see Robert J. Niess, Julien Benda (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), pp. 168ff.

  CHAPTER 34: NAZI AESTHETICS: THE “BROWN SHIFT”

  1. Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson, 2002), pp. 11–15.

  2. Ibid., pp. 152 and 156.

  3. For Ernst Barlach’s prolonged fight, see Peter Paret, An Artist against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 77–108 and 110ff.

  4. For his ideas about transforming Linz by art and architecture, see Hanns Christian Löhr, Das braune Haus der Kunst: Hitler und der “Sonderauftrag Linz” Visionen, Verbrechen, Verluste (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2005), pp. 1–18.

  5. Peter Adam, The Arts of the Third Reich (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992), pp. 129ff., “The Visualisation of National Socialist Ideology.” See also Berthold Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, trans. by Robert and Rita Kimber (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).

  6. Paret, An Artist against the Third Reich, pp. 109–138, specifically discusses “un-German art.”

  7. After it closed in Munich, the degenerate art show traveled to Berlin and a number of other German cities. That exhibition was a one-off but the House of German Art show became an annual affair—until 1945. Rudolf Herz, Hoffmann & Hitler: Fotographie als Medium des Führers-Mythos (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1994), pp. 170ff. and 260ff. An excellent study of how the Führer was presented visually.

  8. Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (New York: Continuum, 2000/2006
), p. 63.

  9. Ibid., p. 72.

  10. In architecture, the Greek ideal still ruled. See Alex Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press for the College Art Association, 1990), pp. 1ff. for Hitler and classical antiquity, 93ff. for Speer’s theory of “ruin value.”

  11. Jay Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1992), p. 161.

  12. Oron J. Hale, The Captive Press in the Third Reich (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 67ff. and 76–93 for control of the press.

  13. Baird, To Die for Germany, p. 132.

  14. Ibid., p. 133.

  15. Ibid., p. 137.

  16. See also Jay W. Baird, Hitler’s War Poets: Literature and Politics in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  17. Baird, To Die for Germany, p. 154.

  18. Ibid., p. 157.

  19. Ibid., p. 167.

  20. Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005), pp. 118ff. and 160ff. In regard to radio, in the winter of 1936 the German broadcasting authority announced that the main feature of future programming was to “create joy and solidify the community.” Part of this plan included broadcasts on German peasantry “along with agricultural news,” under the general title “Peasantry and Landscape.”

  21. Antje Ascheid, Hitler’s Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), chapters 2, 3, and 4.

  22. Baird, To Die for Germany, p. 200.

  23. Ibid., pp. 186–192.

  24. Karl-Heinz Schoeps, Literature and Film in the Third Reich (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2004). Very useful references.

  25. Baird, To Die for Germany, p. 197.

  26. For Nazi influence on film outside Germany, see Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, eds., Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), which traces Nazi influence as far afield as Brazil, Croatia, Greece, Norway, and the United States, pp. 306ff. For more discussion of German-American film relations in the 1933–1940 period, see Sabina Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 128–148.

  27. Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 71.

  28. Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 14–21.

  29. Levi, Music in the Third Reich, p. 40.

  30. There were in addition several works of “scholarship” aiming to show that German music had a racial element, that it was Nordic in origin, the Nordic races alone being capable of the heroic virtues as represented, for instance, in the music of Beethoven. One monograph, published by Karl Blessinger in 1939, claimed that German music had declined in three stages—via Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Mahler. No prizes for guessing what they had in common. Levi, Music in the Third Reich, pp. 53–56.

  31. Levi, Music in the Third Reich, p. 70.

  32. Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 197–198.

  33. For Hindemith, see chapter 2 of Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era. See p. 111 for Carl Orff and p. 144 for Hans Pfitzner.

  34. Kater, The Twisted Muse, pp. 22–39. Levi, Music in the Third Reich, p. 118.

  35. Levi, Music in the Third Reich, p. 179.

  36. Ibid., p. 181.

  37. Kater, The Twisted Muse, pp. 41–42.

  38. Brigitte Hamann, Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth, trans. Alan Bance (London: Granta, 2005).

  39. Kater, The Twisted Muse, pp. 188ff. And for Furtwängler’s fight, see Fred K. Prieberg, Trial of Strength: Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Third Reich, trans. Christopher Dolan (London: Quartet, 1991), chapters 2 and 3.

  40. Levi, Music in the Third Reich, p. 203. See also Misha Aster, Das “Reichsorchester”: Die Berliner Philharmoniker und der Nationalsocialismus (Munich: Siedler, 2007).

  41. Glen W. Gadberry, ed., Theatre in the Third Reich: The Pre-war Years (New York: Greenwood, 1995), p. 2.

  42. Ibid., pp. 6–9.

  43. Ibid., p. 124.

  44. Ibid., p. 103.

  45. Ibid., p. 115.

  46. Ibid., p. 81.

  47. The Nazis also had something to say about women’s fashion. See Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2004), esp. chap. 5 on “purifying” the German clothes industry.

  48. Armin Strohmeyr, Verlorene Generation: Dreissig vergessene Dichterinnen und Dichter des “anderen Deutschland” (Zurich: Atrium, 2008), for the “lost generation” of satirists, songwriters, socialists, and historians.

  CHAPTER 35: SCHOLARSHIP IN THE THIRD REICH: “NO SUCH THING AS OBJECTIVITY”

  1. Steven P. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and De-Nazification of a German University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 16.

  2. Ibid., p. 22.

  3. Ibid., p. 24.

  4. Ibid., p. 43.

  5. Ibid., p. 26.

  6. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 196.

  7. Remy, Heidelberg Myth, p. 33. Elias, The Germans, p. 383.

  8. Remy, Heidelberg Myth, p. 50.

  9. Philipp Lenard, “The Limits of Science,” in George L. Mosse, ed., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich, trans. by Salvator Attanasia, et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), pp. 201–205.

  10. Remy, Heidelberg Myth, p. 56.

  11. Ibid., p. 60.

  12. Koonz, Nazi Conscience, p. 205.

  13. Remy, Heidelberg Myth, p. 84.

  14. James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld, eds., The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

  15. George S. Williams, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religious and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 1.

  16. Dow and Lixfeld, eds., Nazification, p. 21.

  17. Fritz Joachim Raddatz, Gottfried Benn, Leben, niederer Wahn: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Propyläen, 2001), pp. 48ff.

  18. Dow and Lixfeld, eds., Nazification, pp. 42–46.

  19. Ibid., pp. 57–59.

  20. Ibid., p. 80.

  21. Ibid., pp. 189ff and 198.

  22. Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 166ff.

  23. Christopher Hale, Himmler’s Crusade: The True Story of the 1938 Nazi Expedition into Tibet (London: Bantam Press, 2003), pp. 207ff.

  24. Ibid., p. 211.

  25. Ibid., p. 233.

  26. Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists, p. 25.

  27. Ibid., pp. 30–32.

  28. Ibid., pp. 130–131.

  29. Albert Einstein, The Born-Einstein Letters: Friendship, Politics, and Physics in Uncertain Times; Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Born from 1916 to 1955 with Commentaries by Max Born, trans. Irene Born (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), pp. 113ff.

  30. Roger Highfield and Paul Carter, The Private Lives of Albert Einstein (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), pp. 240–241, for lesser-known details of Einstein’s more personal difficulties.

  31. Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists, p. 130. For an unusual view of Einstein, see Dennis P. Ryan, ed., Einstein and the Humanities (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1987), with chapters on the moral implications of relativity, poetic responses to relativity, and relativity and psychology.

  32. Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists, p. 140.

  33. Michael H. Kater, Doctors under Hitler (Chapel Hill: Universty of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 19ff. and 63ff.

  34. Ibid., pp. 177ff. Se
e also Charles McClelland, “Modern German Doctors: A Failure of Professionalisation?” in Berg and Cocks, eds., Medicine and Modernity, pp. 81–97.

  35. Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 53–60. See also Laurence A. Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

  36. Cocks, Psychotherapy, p. 87.

  37. Jarrell C. Jackman and Carla M. Borden, The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, 1930–1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), pp. 205ff.

  38. Ibid., p. 25.

  39. Ibid.

  40. David Simms, “The Führer Factor in German Equations,” review of Sanford L. Segal, Mathematicians under the Nazis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), Times Higher Education Supplement, September 17, 2004, p. 28.

  41. Sanford L. Segal reports in Mathematicians under the Nazis that no mathematician played a part in the Resistance, that the National Socialists in fact had little interest in mathematics, that Otto Blumenthal remained as editor of Mathematische Annalen up to 1939 but died in Theresienstadt in 1944. Heinrich Behnke, who had a Jewish son to protect, managed to found a “school of several complex variables,” which was to become “the spur for a postwar revival of German mathematics under Friedrich Hirzenbruch.” See also Jackman and Borden, eds., Muses Flee Hitler, pp. 221ff.

  42. Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists, p. 168.

  43. Ibid., p. 170.

  44. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, trans. Arnold J. Pomeranz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 166.

  45. Otto Hahn, A Scientific Autobiography, trans. and ed. Willy Ley (London: McGibbon & Kee, 1967), p. 85.

  46. Otto Hahn, My Life, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (London: Macdonald, 1970), p. 149.

  47. Otto Frisch, What Little I Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 120ff.

  48. Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists, pp. 208–210.

  49. Watson, Modern Mind/Terrible Beauty, pp. 392–393.

  50. Ibid.

  51. Rudolf Peierls, Atomic Histories (Woodbury, N.Y.: American Institute of Physics, 1997), pp. 187–194.

  52. Koonz, Nazi Conscience, p. 58.