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ABSTRACT
This essay examines the philosophical and scientific approach of Fritz Lenz, Germany’s most eminent racial hygienist in the interwar years, toward the problem of race and soul. It focuses on Lenz’s attitude to the question of mental heredity, by examining his philosophical hypothesis concerning the mind-body problem and the antinomies and paralogisms it entails. Thus, it aims to go beyond the conventions and norms of “liberal science” and to trace Lenz’s biological reasoning by addressing the scientific and philosophical controversies of his time, highlighting the “crisis of science” and the emergence of holistic, vitalistic and biocentric language in 1920s Germany. The discussion illustrates the way in which Lenz sought to combine natural-scientific methods with metaphysical speculations, while rejecting scientific and materialistic monism in favor of an idealistic imperative of “faith in race”. Lenz’s racial anthropology serves here as a paradigmatic case study for re-examining the ideological and epistemological mechanisms, which enabled the apotheosis of race in interwar Germany and its becoming a supreme value.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my grateful thanks to Shulamit Volkov and Shalom Ratzabi from the Tel Aviv University for their invaluable and tireless mentorship; to Galili Shahar and Snait Gissis from the Tel Aviv University, Nitzan Lebovic from the Lehigh University, Steven Aschheim and Ofer Ashkenazi from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Anat Leibler from the Bar-Ilan University, for their generous support and ongoing encouragement; and finally to the journal‘s anonymous referees for their highly useful comments.
Notes on contributor
Amit Varshizky has completed his PhD studies at the Tel Aviv University in 2017 and he is currently a research fellow at the Minerva Institute for German History at the Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on the intersection between ideological, epistemological and socio-psychological factors that contributed to the emergence of a new racial paradigm in interwar Germany. He is especially interested in the encounter between religious patterns and scientific concepts that underlined the Nazi biological language, and the way they contributed to the emergence of new structures of meaning.
Notes
1. The literature dedicated to this subject is vast and diverse. See for example: Müller-Hill, Tödliche Wissenschaf; Proctor, Racial Hygiene; Frei, Medizin und Gesundheitspolitik; Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State; Caplan, When Medicine Went Mad; Weindling, Health, Race and German; Lifton, The Nazi Doctors; Klee, Deutsche Medizin im Dritten; Kater, Ärzte als Hitlers Helfer; Nicosia and Huener, Medicine and Medical Ethics; Segal, Die Hohenpriester der Vernichtung; Süß, Der Volkskörper im Krieg; Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler; Spitz, Doctors from Hell; Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis; Cocks, The State of Health.
2. Bärsch, “Alfred Rosenberg’s Mythus,” 205.
3. See Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 31, 129–32; Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 7; Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis, 220; Kühl , The Nazi Connection, 6; Jackson and Weidman, Race, Racism, and Science, 123; Lerner, Final Solutions, 21–3; Foth, Caring and Killing, 23; Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof, xi; Foth, Kuhla, and Benedict, “Nursing during National Socialism,” 38.
4. Krieck, Die Wirklichkeit, 5. (All the included citations were translated from German by the author.)
5. Ibid., 7.
6. Günther, Rassenkunde des Deutschen Volkes, 414.
7. Groß, Rasse, Weltanschauung, Wissenschaft, 22.
8. George Mosse has already pointed out historians’ tendency to underestimate the importance of religious and irrational elements in volkish thought. He argued that this derives first and foremost from their habit of projecting their own standards and values on their research subjects, applying rational judgment to a philosophy that is originally intended as anti-rationalistic. See Mosse, The Crisis of German, 1–2. Emilio Gentile, in his study of Italian Fascism, also emphasized the importance of assuming an unbiased approach, pointing out the problematic nature of a historiography that “seeks to restore rationality to a phenomenon that, though not without its own historical rationality, was sited deliberately and ostentatiously in the camp of the irrational”. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, xi.
9. Rosenberg, “Weltanschauung und Wissenschaft,” 5.
10. Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, 117.
11. The following is a partial list of the main scholarship in this field: Voegelin, “The Political Religion”; Mosse, The Nationalization; Billington, Fire in the Minds; Gamm, Der Braune Kult; Vondung, Magie und Manipulation; Rhodes, The Hitler Movement; Pois, National Socialism; Bärsch, Die Politische Religion; Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots; Ley and Schoeps, Der Nationalsozialismus als Politische; Maier and Schäfer, Totalitarismus und Politische Religionen; Burleigh, The Third Reich; Tal, Religion, Politics and Ideology; Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich; Poewe, New Religions; See also in the seminal journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (currently Politics, Religion & Ideology), established by Michael Burleigh in 2000.
12. See Hardtwig, “Political Religion in Modern”; Evans, “Nazism, Christianity, and Political”; Stowers, “The Concepts of ‘Religion’.”
13. See Cattaruzza, “Introduction”; Payne, “On the Heuristic Value.”
14. Burleigh, The Third Reich, 14.
15. This problem has led Mark Roseman, Devin Pendas and Richard Wetzell, to organize a conference entitled “Beyond the Racial State. Rethinking Nazi Germany” at the Indiana University in October 2009. A forthcoming collection, edited by the three, will be published next year by Cambridge University Press.
16. Ehrenreich, “Otmar von Verschuer,” 56.
17. Hutton, Race and the Third.
18. See Rissom, Fritz Lenz, 46–63; Becker, Zur Geschichte der Rassenhygiene, 137–217; Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 46–63; Weiss, “Race and Class,” 5–25; Kröner, Von der Rassenhygiene; Weingart, Kroll, and Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene, 102–3, 151–4; Breuer, Ordnungen der Ungleichheit, 47–76; Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen, 196–202.
19. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 63.
20. Weiss, “Race and Class,” 7.
21. Daston and Galisman, Objectivity, 379.
22. For further reading see Proctor, “From ‘Anthropologie’ to ‘Rassenkunde’”; Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer”; Schmuhl, “Rasse, Rassenforschung, Rassenpolitik”; Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism; Evans, Anthropology at War.
23. Troeltsch, “Die Revolution,” 1001–30.
24. Husserl, The Crisis of European, 5.
25. See, for example, the statement made by Wilhelm Stern in Ringer, The Decline, 254. For a comprehensive discussion on the “value-neutrality” debate and the prevalent call for the exclusion of politics and morals from scientific thought in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Germany, see Proctor, Value-Free Science?; Anderton, The Limits of Science; Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 3–30.
26. This postulate, for example, stands at the core of Edmund Husserl’s critique of naturalism in his Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology from 1936. On this subject, see also Siegfried Kracauer’s critique in Proctor, Value-Free Science?, 157.
27. Scheidt, Die Träger der Kultur, 81.
28. Sombart, Weltanschauung Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft, 16.
29. Fischer, Rasse und Rasse-Entstehung, 11.
30. On the relevance of Lebensphilosophie for the rise of Nazi thought, see Lebovic, The Philosophy of Life; Leo, Der Will zum Wesen; Gray, About Face. Other historians have already emphasized the influence of Idealism on German biology and pointed to the relevance of romantic concepts of morphology and organism to the renewal of bio-philosophical thought during the fin-de-siècle and in the first decades of the twentieth century. See Lenoir, The Strategy of Life; Kelly, The Descent of Darwin; Harrington, Reenchanted Science; Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life; Richards, The Tragic Sense; Holt, “Ernst Haeckel’s Monistic Religion,” 266–7.
31. Vierkandt in Forman, “Weimar Culture, Causality,” 16–17.
32. Ibid., 16–17. See also Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German; Bohleber, “Psychoanalyse, romantische Naturphilosophie,” 506–21.
33. Lebovic, The Philosophy of Life, 18.
34. Gay, Weimar Culture, 70–102. Georg Lukács identified Lebensphilosophie as “the dominant ideology of the entire imperialistic period in Germany … .” See Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, 318.
35. On the political manifestations of the intellectual polarization between the organic and the mechanical see the classical work of Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken.
36. Hans Günther, for example, drew a direct line between German nineteenth-century Romanticism and Idealism, Lebensphilosophie and the Nazi Rassenkunde: “At any rate, what has been called ‘Lebensphilosophie’ more or less bypasses the school of German Idealism, moves from Goethe and some of the impulses derived from Romanticism’s so-called philosophy of nature, via Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and, as many people believe, ultimately to Ludwig Klages. We recognize in all of these thinkers a certain Darwinism, an emphasis on what is innate and genetically transmitted, as well as an inkling of, or even a firm belief in, the very body-soul unity that was prevalent in the thought of the ancient Indogermanic peoples, a unity that is also confirmed by present-day biology.”
Günther in Gray, About Face, 271–2. In a similar fashion, the psychologist Carl Haeberlin, portrayed the shift from “logocentric science” to “biocentric characterology” as a triumph of “German psychotherapy”, which marks the vital unity of body and soul (Leib-seelische Einheit), as it is reflected in Western philosophy from Heraclitus to Goethe and Nietzsche. Haeberlin, “Die Bedeutung von Ludwig,” 39.
37. Holle, Allgemeine Biologie als Grundlage, 17.
38. See note 18 above.
39. Weindling, Nazi Medicine, 242. Despite this, in his 1989 monograph Weindling describes Lenz as an untypical Nazi eugenicist, while emphasizing his objection to Hitler’s racial anti-Semitism and his dislike of the party’s political authoritarianism. See Weindling, Health, Race and German, 476–7.
40. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 48.
41. Rissom, Fritz Lenz, 87–97; Weiss, “Race and Class,” 11–12, 16–22; Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 61–2; Weindling, Health, Race and German, 476–7.
42. Weiss, “Race and Class,” 9.
43. Lenz participated as a member in the Ministry of Interior’s Expert Committee for Population and Racial Policy, and was involved in formulating a racial policy that would support a healthy German population at the expense of the so-called racially weak elements of society. For further reading: Kaupen-Haas, “Die Bevölkerungsplaner im Sachverständigenbeirat,”103–20.
44. Weindling, Nazi Medicine, 242–3.
45. Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 661, 713.
46. Ibid., 713–14.
47. Ibid., 707.
48. Ibid., 759.
49. Ibid., 702–3.
50. Ibid., 701,760–1.
51. Ibid., 760.
52. Lenz employs a long list of genealogical researches, including classic works by Galton, American intelligence tests from the First World War, as well as psychological typologies, such as those conducted by Kretschmer, Pearson, and Krueger, that allegedly validate the correlation between the physical and the psychological. He also praises Günther’s ethnological and historiosophical approach, which provides a “spiritual portrait” (geistige Bild) of the “creator of Hindu-Germanic cultures”. Ibid., 714–15.
53. See Ibid., 716–55. A detailed description of Lenz’s racial typology can also be found in Rissom, Fritz Lenz, 34–6; Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 50–9; Weiss, “Race and Class,” 11–13.
54. See Lenz, Die Rasse als Wertprinzip, 6.
55. Ibid.
56. Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 704.
57. Ibid., 704–5.
58. Schmidt, Rassen und Völker in Vorgeschichte und Geschichte des Abendlandes, 163.
59. Ibid., 164.
60. Ibid.
61. See, for example, Haeckel’s differentiation between his monistic view and materialism of any kind. According to him, “monistic philosophy” rejects any antithesis between the material and the spiritual, and does not acknowledge the existence of a “material without force” or a “force without material”. Haeckel, The Evolution of Man, 356; Haeckel, Die Welträtsel, 21.
62. For this reason, and unlike Lenz, many racial scientists often preferred not to deal directly with such philosophical antinomies, and focused instead mainly on practical and empirical biology. By doing so, they actually proclaimed the rigid limits of science and its inefficiency in regard to one of the most fundamental problems of human existence. Thus, for example, Johannes Schottky, a senior scientist in Walther Darré’s staff, proclaimed that the natural sciences are incapable of resolving the mind-body problem; therefore they must stick to the mechanistic methods of biology. Similarly, the physician Hans Burkhardt mentioned the efficiency of psychological studies such as those conducted by Hoffmann, Kretschmer and Rüdin, due to their practical agenda and the fact that they do not depend on theoretical speculations concerning the mind-body problem. Kurt Gottschaldt, the head of the department for racial psychology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, also stressed the difficulties raised by the problem of psychophysical unity (Ganzheitsproblem) to the study of mental heredity, which is basically based on principles of functional-causality. According to him, the fundamental issue that sets the limits of empirical science is the “will function” (Willensakt) and the “will position” (Willenshaltung). See Schottky, “Einführung,” 4; Burkhardt, “Psychiatrische Beiträge zur Rassenseelenkunde,” 85; Gottschaldt, “Die Methodik der Persönlichkeitsforschung,” 130–1, 157.
63. Thus, for example, wrote the famous pathologist Martin Staemmler: “There is no free will in the sense that I can change my character and reshape it anew. My character, my nature, is irreversible and was given to me by destiny: I am not the one who controls my character, but my character controls me. It dictates whether I will be a scoundrel, a prince of spirit, a poet, or a philistine.” Staemmler, Rassenpflege im völkischen Staat, 10. Karl Ludwig Schemann, the race theoretician and the profound distributor of Gobineau’s writings in Germany, celebrated the elimination of free will by biological determinism: “The very same deterministic and unconditioned causality, which was proven by Spinoza, Kant, Friedrich the great, Goethe and Schopenhauer, must be fully implemented on peoples and races (the absence of free will instead of the illusion of free will). In practice, this fact has already been proved by heredity.” Schemann, Die Rasse in den Geisteswissenschaften, 58.
64. Levine, “Transnational Themes in the History of Eugenics,” 55.
65. Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 706.
66. Lenz, Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene, 554.
67. Ibid., 556.
68. Ibid., 9.
69. Ibid., 556.
70. Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Human Heredity, 1931, 698; cf. Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 768.
71. Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Human Heredity, 698.
72. Ibid., 699.
73. Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 769.
74. Lenz, Die Rasse als Wertprinzip, 7.
75. Ibid., 15.
76. Ibid., 16.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid., 17.
79. Ibid., 29–30.
80. Ibid., 27–9.
81. Ibid., 39.
82. Ibid., 42.
83. Ibid., 42–3.
84. See, for example, Lenz’s rejection of Paulinian dualism and its identification with modern materialistic biology. Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 714.
85. Lenz, Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene, 566.
86. James, The Varieties of Religious, 31.
87. Ibid., 33.
88. See Voegelin, “The New Science”; Todorov, “Totalitarianism.”