Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (19 page)

attempted in part through the introduction of ‘Racial Psychology’ and ‘Racial

Typology’,
31
and in psychotherapy by the foundation of a New German Psychotherapy (Neue Deutsche Seelenheilkunde).
32
In both cases what was at stake was not only a theoretical dissociation from psychoanalysis, but a matter of working

out the fundamentally different mental make-ups of ‘Aryans’ and ‘Jews’.

The transformation of the discipline of Anthropology (Volkskunde) into ‘Ger-

man Anthropology’ (Deutsche Volkskunde), and its academic establishment on a

larger scale, which occurred only during the Nazi period, was linked primarily

with the idea of demonstrating the homogeneity and uniqueness of a German

national culture beyond all regional differences and European similarities.
33
But the precondition for this, as one of the leading anthropologists stressed, was to

make clear, ‘how the Jewish spirit deliberately turns against essential foundations

78

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

of German Anthropology. Jews above all are the first to turn away from the “Volk

as nation”. It is Jews who most strongly emphasize the differences between

individual classes and groups within the German Volk . . . The corroding effects

of the Jewish spirit in the German Anthropology of the past can only fully be

understood if one takes into account the Jewish influence coming from abroad.’
34

This quotation already makes it clear how the accusation of ‘Verjudung’ (Juda-

ization) could be utilized in intradisciplinary disputes.

The advocates of a transformation of sociology into a ‘German theory of

society’ (deutsche Gesellschaftslehre) in turn assumed the task of fundamentally

renewing the ‘völkisches Selbstbewusstsein’—the ‘völkisch self-awareness’ of the

Germans. To this end they turned against a ‘Western’ sociology, meaning one that

concentrated on bourgeois, industrial society, and countered it with that of a

German Volkstum rooted in peasant society; this expressly German-völkisch new

science was supposed to connect with a traditional lineage represented by names

such as Jakob Herder, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and Wilhelm Riehl. Accordingly,

refoundation of the subject was concerned with fending off ‘volksfeindliche incur-

sions of Western thought’; particular importance was assigned to the battle against

‘Jewish thought, which has sought to talk the German people out of its völkisch

needs’.
35
‘German sociology’ did manage to institutionalize itself in the universities in the mid-1930s, but without developing an ‘encompassing theoretical construct’.
36
The place of theory was occupied by practical social research, primarily concerned with ‘weeding out’ those who were ‘inferior’ and ‘of foreign race’ from

German society—a task that was to assume growing importance with the con-

quest of Eastern European territories.

In the discipline of history during the National Socialist era it is possible to

identify a powerful shift towards a Germanocentric folk history: along with the

Volkskunde researchers and social scientists mentioned above, and in cooperation

with geographers, archaeologists, and others, an attempt was made to create a new

interdisciplinary field of research: Volkstumsforschung or ethnicity research.
37

Volksgeschichte (ethnic history) and Volkstumsforschung primarily attempted

to record the history and culture of the German people through its differentiation

from foreign peoples; the actual roots of the German people could, the Volk-

stumsforscher were convinced, be revealed only when it was successfully freed

from being overgrown by alien cultures.

Here—despite the establishment of thematically relevant research insti
tutes38—

anti-Semitism played a subordinate role. The chief intention was to re-establish

German borders in disputes with the country’s neighbours. Central to this was the

claim to demonstrate the superiority of the character of ethnic Germans in border

areas and abroad as against the national character (Volkstum) of foreigners, and

thus to establish the German claim to hegemony. The fact that Volkstums-

forschung sought to prove this claim to superiority primarily in a negative way,

through the demarcation/separation from ‘inferior’ peoples, was summed up by

Interim Conclusions

79

one of its leading representatives at the 1934 German Historians’ Congress, in a

formula that can hardly be beaten for concision: ‘Volksgeschichte is at its most

elementary level the history of border conflicts.’
39

Ethnic research was by no means purely based on racial biology: the term

völkisch, which became its central concept, expressed the fusion of racist concepts

with cultural, historical, and spatial ones.

Ethnicity research (Volkstumsforschung) represented the striking attempt, by

overcoming the boundary between scholarship and politics, through close collab-

oration with political offices and through new institutional structures, to open up

career paths to a generation of academics close to the Party via the redefinition of

scholarly parameters.

Volkstumsforschung was to achieve practical significance during the war when,

as a result of policy advice, cartographic material, statistics, and ‘arguments’ were

made available to justify the displacement of Germany’s Eastern borders; within

this context it also achieved ‘scholarly’ preliminary work for the deportation of the

Eastern European Jews. Thus Volkstumsforschung, unable to demonstrate the

supposed superiority of the German people in a positive way, to a large extent

ended up providing anciliary work for genocide. In this way it provided a

particularly vivid example of the destructive momentum that lay within National

Socialist racial politics in almost all spheres of life.

A further example from the humanities might be mentioned here: the path

towards ‘völkisch legal renewal’ in jurisprudence led towards a consistent counter-

ing and denial of pre- and supra-state normative contexts.
40
The new version of the law was to be solely an expression of the ‘national community’, and that

national community was, as one of the leading National Socialist jurists put it,

defined by two factors: by ‘racial homogeneity’ (Artgleichheit) and by the ‘com-

mon differentiation of friend from enemy’.
41
In fact the new völkisch law—

adapted to the ‘essence’ of the German Volk—was to be reduced to an instrument

in the hands of the National Socialist leadership; in this world of ideas there was

no room for an autonomous sphere of law. Clearly this ‘essential core’ of völkisch

law was not definable and—if the political leadership was not to be hampered in

its actions—was not supposed to be defined more closely. On the other hand it is

not difficult to discern, from the given definition, which ‘enemy’ the ‘racially

homogeneous’ national community united by the new law was supposed to turn

against: significantly, the ‘völkisch legal renewal’ concentrated in its theoretical

discussions upon the ‘unmasking’ of Western and particularly of ‘Jewish’

jurisprudence.
42

In legislative practice, significantly, attempts to codify völkisch legal renewal

in a comprehensive legal reform did not go beyond the drafting stage, while at

the same time an extensive ‘special law’ for ‘ethnic aliens’ (Fremdvölkische) was

created, one which was to be extraordinarily efficient in the practice of

persecution.
43

80

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

In the natural sciences, attempts to establish a ‘German physics’, a ‘German

chemistry’, or a ‘German mathematics’ were limited to relatively small groups of

researchers, and proved finally to be without consequences. Only the devotees of

‘German physics’ managed temporarily to secure a series of important posts for

themselves. Exactly what the specifically ‘German’ aspect of the individual sub-

jects was supposed to be remained nebulous. While the representatives of ‘Ger-

man’ physics turned against the supposed supremacy of a ‘Jewish physics’,

meaning the theory of relativity in particular, and the devotees of ‘German

mathematics’ also sought to distinguish themselves from a ‘Jewish mathematics’,

German chemistry, as a unified ‘theory of matter’, resisted a supposedly ‘Western’

foreign domination of the subject.

The definitive breakthrough of ideas of racial hygiene in medicine and their

contribution to a ‘weeding-out’ population policy (closely bound up with psych-

iatry, social sciences, educational theory, and jurisprudence) illustrates, on the

other hand, the immediate relevance of racist paradigms based on exclusion

within academic disciplines for social-political practice.

This survey has made it clear that the ‘de-Judaization’ (Entjudung) of the

sciences was not accomplished simply by sacking a few Jewish scientists or

removing them from the educational canon. In fact it was a matter of giving the

individual subjects an authentically ‘German’ character via a comprehensive

distancing ‘from the Jewish spirit’ and other ‘foreign influences’. The survey has

also made it clear that, without permanent reference to the rejected Jewish or

foreign ‘Other’, the paradigm shift to a Germanocentric scholarship could not be

achieved, indeed that the planned theoretical reorientation was largely exhausted

in that distancing. The Entjudung and völkisch-racial cleansing of the discipline in

question was thus—for want of ‘positive rationales’—effectively constitutive; it

was not a single action, but a permanent and continuous distancing process which

served to conceal the lack of any substantial content in the ‘German’ renewal.

The intended internal reorientation of the individual subjects succeeded, as we

have seen, to various degrees; where its success was modest, it was often limited to

rhetorical gestures and remained without significant consequences for practical

academic work. However, through the intended Germanocentric conversion of

disciplines or partial disciplines—even if this was purely declamatory in

character—the theoretical discussions within the individual subjects and thus

their identity were also influenced, new structures and career opportunities were

created; here lay the starting point for National Socialist academics not only to

establish themselves in the individual disciplines, but substantially to change the

character of the individual subjects. The keyword Entjudung was the starting

point for this process of change.

Beyond these theoretical discussions—and the survey has also made that

clear—the Entjudung and Germanocentric transformation of individual discip-

lines also had considerable practical consequences: academics who allowed their

Interim Conclusions

81

work to be governed by racist paradigms substantially opened up new areas of

work for themselves: the definition and exclusion of those of foreign race.

The Entjudung of Cultural Life as the

Precondition for a ‘German Culture’

The National Socialist project of creating an authentically ‘German’ culture is

inseparably bound up with efforts to achieve a consistent Entjudung of cultural life

as a whole; indeed, to a considerable extent such negative measures constituted the

whole of National Socialist cultural policy.

According to the National Socialist vision, ‘culture was the highest expression

of the creative powers of a people’:
44
every artwork of any distinction could accordingly be interpreted as the expression of primal racial-völkisch powers.

Every ‘clearly distinctive race’, as Hitler said in a speech to the Reich Chamber

of Culture in 1934, had ‘its own signature in the book of art’—citing as an

exception ‘Jewry’, which is ‘utterly without its own artistic productive capability’.
45

According to this idea, the liberation of authentically ‘German’ culture from the

Jewish—that is, unproductive, parasitic, alien, corrosive, and finally destructive—

influence formed a leitmotif of cultural-political discourse in the National Socialist

regime.

However, attempts to define the ‘essence’ of art rooted in the German or Aryan

‘racial soul’ remained diffuse:
46
all efforts to free ‘German’ music or ‘German’

painting from the context of the European tradition were inevitably destined to

fail, while ambitious contemporary attempts to produce ‘native’ (arteigene)

artworks appropriate to National Socialism were not as a rule convincingly able

to fulfil this claim. The artistic production of the era generally suffered from a lack

of originality and ended up predominantly in the production of kitsch.

Consequently, as in many other policy areas, the National Socialist cultural

policy makers had no option but to execute the intended homogenization nega-

tively, to produce ‘pure’ German culture above all by means of the permanent

cleansing of ‘alien’ art. This tendency to define National Socialist art in negative

terms became more intense the greater the discrepancy between the bombastic

proclamations of a new, National Socialist aesthetic and the actually mediocre

products of National Socialist art production grew: the ‘cleansing principle’ now

became an ‘absolutely exclusive compulsion to purification’.
47

In this cleansing policy, the removal of the supposedly dominant Jewish

influence in German cultural life was very much in the foreground. This was

not only a matter of the exclusion of Jewish artists and the prohibition or

destruction of their artworks; the Entjudung of German culture also concerned

the exclusion of Jews active in the purveyance of culture, since as ‘cultural

82

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

administrators’, agents, critics, dealers, and so on, they were made primarily

responsible for the distribution and promotion of undesirable modern, ‘degener-

ate’ (entartet) or simply merely ‘foreign’ art.
48
The Jews, as ‘primarily a business-minded people’, according to Hans Severus Ziegler, General Manager of the

National Theatre in Weimar and a leading Nazi cultural policy maker, at the

opening of the ‘Degenerate Music’ exhibition in 1938, had turned ‘cultural and

artistic objects, like the objects of politics, into business commodities’; they had

succeeded ‘in cutting off the Volk from its creative forces, from its gifts and its

genius, and thus removing it from the most vivid examples of race and Volkstum’;

the result was the ‘terrible alienation from its better self, from its own essence,

from all historic values, from its creative personality’.
49
Hence the ‘removal of Jews from cultural life’ could not exempt ‘art-dealers, cinema owners, publishers and

booksellers’.

With the tightening of the conditions of admission into the Reich Chamber of

Culture in the spring of 1934, the ground was laid for the definitive Entjudung

of cultural life as a whole:
50
the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Chamber of Letters) began the process in 1935 with the exclusion of its Jewish members, and

other chambers followed this model over the coming months and in the course of

1936
.51
For economic reasons above all, however, a series of exceptional regulations for Jewish artists were put into force. Moreover, Goebbels did not at first manage

to exclude Jews completely from the professions of the ‘culture business’; the

ministerial bureaucracy slowed down this process, so that prohibitions on Jewish

cinema-owners, art and antique dealers, and other professions from working

came into effect only from 1937
.52
The existing exceptions repeatedly offered National Socialist cultural policy makers, with Propaganda Minister Goebbels at