Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (62 page)

After she had finished her Ph.D., Hannah moved to Berlin and married a man whom, although he was Jewish, she did not love. For her, it was a survival device. He too was a philosopher, but not as dedicated as she, and he became a journalist. They moved in a left-wing circle, and among their close friends was the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the philosopher—social scientists from the Frankfurt School – Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm. Hannah still corresponded with Heidegger. Then, in 1933, after the Nazis took power, Hannah and Heidegger’s lives turned dramatically in different directions. He was made rector of Freiburg University, and rumours soon reached her that he was refusing to recommend Jews for positions and even turning his back on them. She wrote to him, and he replied immediately, ‘furiously’ denying the charge.
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She put it out of her head. Her left-wing husband decided he should leave Germany for Paris. Soon after, at Heidegger’s rectorial address, he made
a very anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler speech, which was reported all over the world.
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Hannah was deeply upset and very confused by Martin’s behavior. To make matters worse, Bertolt Brecht was being persecuted as a Communist and forced to flee the country. He left behind most of his personal possessions, including his address book, which contained Hannah’s name and phone number. She was arrested, and spent eight days in jail being interrogated. Her husband was already in Paris; Martin could have helped her; he didn’t.
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As soon as Hannah was released from jail, she left Germany and settled in Paris. From then on her world and Heidegger’s were about as different as could be. As a Jew in exile, homeless, careerless, cut off from her family and all that she had known, for Arendt the late 1930s and early 1940s were a desperately tragic time. She joined a Jewish organisation, Youth Aliyah, which trained students who wanted to move to the Holy Land. She visited Palestine but didn’t like it and wasn’t a Zionist. Yet she needed a job and wished to help her people.
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Heidegger’s life was very different. He played a crucial role in Germany. As a philosopher, he gave his weight to the Third Reich, helping develop its thinking, which grounded Nazism in history and the German sense of self. In this he had the support of Goebbels and Himmler.
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As an academic figure he played a leading role in the reorganisation of the universities, the chief ‘policy’ under this scheme being the removal of all Jews. Through Heidegger’s agency both Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology and his own professor, and Karl Jaspers, who had a Jewish wife, were forced out of their university posts. Hannah later wrote that ‘Martin murdered Edmund.’ When
Being and Time
was republished in 1937, the dedication to Husserl had been removed.
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Heidegger allowed both himself and his philosophy to become part of the Nazi state ideological apparatus. He changed his thinking to extol war (this happened when his rectorial address was republished in 1937). He argued that the Nazis were not Nietzschean enough, not enough concerned with great men and struggle. He played a part in linking biology to history by drawing parallels between modern Germany and ancient Greece, in its obsession with sport and physical purity.

The encounter between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger was revealing not just in itself but also for the way it showed that intellectuals were not only victims of Hitler’s inquisition; they helped perpetrate it too.

This is an area of prewar and wartime activity that has only become crystal clear since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which made many more archives available to scholars. Among the scientists who are now known to have conducted unethical research (to put it no stronger) are Konrad Lorenz, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1973, Hans Nachtsheim, a member of the notorious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics in Berlin, and Heinz Brucher at the Ahnenerbe Institute for Plant Genetics at Lannach.

Lorenz’s most well known work before the war was in helping to found ethology, the comparative study of animal and human behaviour, where he
discovered an activity he named ‘imprinting.’ In his most famous experiment he found that young goslings fixated on whatever image they first encountered at a certain stage of their development. With many of the birds it was Lorenz himself, and the photographs of the professor walking on campus, followed by a line of young birds, proved very popular in the media. Imprinting was theoretically important for showing a link between Gestalt and instinct. Lorenz had read Oswald Spengler’s
Decline of the West
and was not unsympathetic to the Nazis.
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In that climate, he began to conceive of imprinting as a disorder of the domestication of animals, and drew a parallel between that and civilisation in humans: in both cases, he thought, there was degeneration. In September 1940, at the instigation of the Party and over the objections of the faculty, he became professor and director of the Institute for Comparative Psychology at the University of Königsberg, a government-sponsored position, and from then until 1943 Lorenz’s studies were all designed to reinforce Nazi ideology.
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He claimed, for instance, that people could be classified into those of ‘full value’ (
vollwertig)
and those of ‘inferior value’ (
minderwertig
). Inferior people included the ‘defective type’
(Ausfalltypus),
created by the evolutionary conditions of big cities, where breeding conditions paralleled the ‘domesticated animal that can be bred in the dirtiest stable and with any sexual partner.’ For Lorenz, any policy that reduced ‘the ethically inferior,’ or ‘elements afflicted with defects,’ was legitimate.
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The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics (KWI) was founded in 1927 at Berlin-Dahlem, on the occasion of the Fifth International Congress for Genetics, held in the German capital. The institute, and the congress, were both designed to gain international recognition for the study of human inheritance in Germany because, like other scientists, its biologists had been boycotted by scholars from other countries after World War I.
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The first director of the institute was Eugen Fischer, the leading German anthropologist, and he grouped around him a number of scientists who became infamous. They included Kurt Gottschaldt, who ran hereditary pathology; Wolfgang Abel, racial science; Fritz Lenz, racial hygiene; and Hans Nachtsheim, in charge of the department of experimental hereditary pathology. Nearly all the scientists at the KWI supported the racial-political goals of the Nazis and were involved in their practical implementation – for example, by drawing up expert opinions on ‘racial membership’ in connection with the Nuremberg laws. There were also extensive links between the institute’s doctors and Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. The institute itself was dissolved by the Allies after the war.
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Nachtsheim studied epilepsy, which he suspected was caused by lack of oxygen to the brain. Since the very young react more overtly to oxygen deficiency than adults, it became ‘necessary’ to experiment on children aged five to six. In order to determine which of these children (if any) suffered from epilepsy, they were all forced to inhale an oxygen mixture that corresponded to a high altitude – say, 4,000 metres (roughly 13,000 feet). This was enough to kill some children, but if epilepsy did result, the children could be lawfully sterilised. These were not
völkisch
brutes carrying out such experiments, but educated men.
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*

Using newly opened archives in Berlin and Potsdam, Ute Deichmann has shown the full extent to which Heinrich Himmler (1900–45) largely shaped the goals of the science policy of the SS as well as the practical content of the scientific and medical research it initiated. He grew up in a strict Catholic home and, even as a child, took an interest in warfare and agriculture, notably animal and plant breeding. He also developed an early interest in alternative forms of medicine, in particular homeopathy. A superstitious man, he shared with Hitler a firm belief in the superior racial value of the Germanic people. It was Himmlers Institute for Practical Research in Military Science, within the framework of another SS branch, Das Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage), which set about clarifying the ‘Jewish question’ anthropologically and biologically. Himmler played a decisive role in the establishment of Das Ahnenerbe in 1935 and was the first curator. A detailed analysis of SS research authorised by Das Ahnenerbe shows that Himmler’s central concern was the study of the history of, threat to, and preservation of the Nordic race, ‘the race he regarded as the bearer of the highest civilisation and culture.’
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At the Institute for Practical Research in Military Science, experiments were carried out on cooling, using inmates from Dachau. The ostensible reason for this research was to study the effects of recovery of humans who suffered frostbite, and to examine how well humans adapted to the cold. Some 8,300 inmates died during the course of these experiments. Second, were the experiments on yellow cross, otherwise known as mustard gas. So many people were killed in this experiment that after a while no more ‘volunteers’ could be found with the promise of being released afterward. August Hirt, who carried out these ‘investigations’, was allowed to murder 115 Jewish inmates of Auschwitz at his own discretion to establish ‘a typology of jewish skeletons.’ (He committed suicide in 1945.)
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No less brutal was the Ahnenerbe’s Institute for Plant Generics at Lannach, near Graz, and in particular the work of Heinz Brücher. Brücher had the distinction of having an entire commando unit at his disposal. During the German invasion of Russia, this unit stole Nikolai Vavilov’s collection of seeds (see below, page 319). The aim here was to find hardy strains of wheat so as to be able to provide enough food for the German people in the ever-expanding Reich. Brücher and his unit also went on expeditions to areas like Tibet, carrying out ethnological as well as plant studies, which show that they were thinking far ahead, identifying remote areas where ‘inferior’ peoples would be forced to produce these foods, or else to make way for others who would.
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On 2 May 1938, Hitler signed his will. In it he ordered that, upon his death, his body was to be taken to Munich – to lie in state in the Feldherrnhalle and then to be buried nearby. More than any other place, even more than Linz, Munich was home to him. In
Mein Kampf,
Hitler had described the city as ‘this metropolis of German art,’ adding that ‘one does not know German art if one has not seen Munich.’ It was here that the climax of his quarrel with the artists took place in
I937.
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On 18 July that year, Hitler opened the House of German Art in Munich,
nearly 900 paintings and pieces of sculpture by such Nazi favourites as Arno Breker, Josef Thorak and Adolf Ziegler. There were portraits of Hitler as well as Hermann Hoyer’s
In the Beginning Was the Word,
a nostalgic view of the Führer consulting his ‘colleagues’ during the early days of the Nazi Party.
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One critic, mindful that speculative criticism was now outlawed, and only reporting allowed, disguised his criticism in reportage: ‘Every single painting on display projected either soulful elevation or challenging heroism … the impression of an intact life from which the stresses and problems of modern existence were entirely absent – and there was one glaringly obvious omission – not a single canvas depicted urban and industrial life.’
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On the day that the exhibition opened, Hitler delivered a ninety-minute speech, a measure of the importance he attached to the occasion. During the course of his remarks he reassured Germany that ‘cultural collapse’ had been arrested and the vigorous classical-Teutonic tradition revived. He repeated many of his by now well known views on modern art, which he depicted this time as ‘slime and ordure’ heaped on Germany. But he had more to offer than usual. Art was very different from fashion, he insisted: ‘Every year something new. One day Impressionism, then Futurism, Cubism, and maybe even Dadaism.’ No, he insisted, art ‘is not founded on time, but only on peoples. It is therefore imperative that the artist erect a monument not to a time but to his people.’
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Race – the blood – was all, Hitler said, and art must respect that. Germany, he insisted, ‘demands … an art that reflects our growing racial unification and, thus, the portrayal of a well-rounded, total character.’ What did it mean to be German? It meant, he said, ‘to be clear.’ Other races might have other aesthetic longings, but ‘this deep, inner yearning for a German art that expresses this law of clarity has always been alive in our people.’ Art is for the people, and the artists must present what the people see – ‘not blue meallows, green skies, sulphur-yellow clouds, and so on.’ There can be no place for ‘pitiful unfortunates, who obviously suffer from some eye disease.’
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Warming to his theme, he promised to wage ‘an unrelenting war of purification against the last elements of putrefaction in our culture,’ so that ‘all these cliques of chatterers, dilettantes and art forgers will be eliminated.’
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Of course, art criticism was not the only form of criticism outlawed in Germany; speeches by the Führer were apt to get an easy ride, too. This time, however, there
was
criticism of a sort, albeit in a heavily disguised way. For the very next day, 19 July, in the Municipal Archaeological Institute, across town in Munich, the exhibition
Entartete Kunst
(Degenerate Art) opened.
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This was a quite different show, almost an antishow. It displayed works by 112 German and non-German artists. There were twenty-seven Noldes, eight Dixes, thirteen Heckels, sixty-one Schmidt-Rottluffs, seventeen Klees, and thirty-two Kirchners, plus works by Gauguin, Picasso, and others. The paintings and sculptures had been plundered from museums all over Germany.
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This exhibition surely ranks as the most infamous ever held. It not only broke new ground in its theme – freely vilifying some of the greatest painters of the century – but it also set new standards in the display of art. Even the Führer himself was taken aback by the way in which some of the exhibits were presented. Paintings and
sculptures were juxtaposed at random making them appear bizarre and strange. Sarcastic labels, which ran around, over, and under the pictures, were designed to provoke ridicule. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s
Peasants at Midday,
for example, was labelled, ‘German Peasants as Seen by the Yids.’ Max Ernst’s
The Creation of Eve; or, The Fair Gardener
was labelled, ‘An Insult to German Womanhood.’ Ernst Barlach’s statue
The Reunion,
which showed the recognition of Christ by Saint Thomas, was labelled, ‘Two Monkeys in Nightshirts.’
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