Journey · 10 stops
Philosophy under National Socialism
How philosophers in Germany and occupied Europe took part in, adapted to, fled from or were murdered under National Socialism – with fascist Italy as a comparison and the first attempts in exile to understand what had happened.
Stops
Stop 1 of 10: Giovanni Gentile
Can a philosophy serve a dictatorship – and what becomes of philosophy when it does? In Italy the question arose a decade before it did in Germany. Giovanni Gentile, who had turned Hegel’s idealism into an “actual idealism”, became minister of education in Mussolini’s first government (1922–24) and in 1925 drafted the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals; Benedetto Croce answered with a counter-manifesto. Gentile also wrote the philosophical part of the article that circulated under Mussolini’s name as “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932). He stood by the regime up to the Republic of Salò and was shot by communist partisans in Florence on 15 April 1944.
Stop 2 of 10: Martin Heidegger
In Germany the question arose in 1933. In April Martin Heidegger was elected rector of Freiburg University, and on 1 May he joined the NSDAP. His rectoral address, “The Self-Assertion of the German University”, named labour service, military service and “knowledge service” as the students’ three equal duties and declared that the much-praised “academic freedom” would be expelled from the German university. He resigned the rectorate in April 1934 but remained a party member until 1945; how far this commitment reaches into his philosophy is still debated.
Stop 3 of 10: Edmund Husserl
Heidegger had succeeded his teacher Edmund Husserl in the Freiburg chair in 1928. Under its antisemitic laws and decrees the Nazi regime placed Husserl, by then emeritus, on leave in April 1933 and barred him from all official academic activity; the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935 stripped him, like all Jews, of his rights as a Reich citizen, and in 1936 the regime withdrew his licence to teach. In Germany he could hardly publish any more: the first two parts of The Crisis of European Sciences, based on his 1935 lectures in Vienna and Prague, appeared in 1936 in a Belgrade journal. Husserl died in Freiburg on 27 April 1938; soon afterwards the Franciscan Herman Leo Van Breda smuggled his manuscripts to safety in Belgium. The 1941 edition of Being and Time appeared without its dedication to him – removed, by Heidegger’s account, at the publisher’s request; the note of thanks in §7 remained.
Stop 4 of 10: Ernst Cassirer
Husserl stayed in Freiburg; Ernst Cassirer, who had debated with Heidegger at Davos in 1929 and had been rector of Hamburg University in 1929–30, left Germany in 1933. He taught at Oxford, in Gothenburg, at Yale and at Columbia, and died in New York on 13 April 1945. The Myth of the State, published in 1946, applies his philosophy of symbolic forms to National Socialism: modern mass communication, he argued, had been used to exploit mythical thinking for politics. In it he criticised Heidegger’s idea of “thrownness” as a picture of the human condition that leaves philosophy unable to do its duty.
Stop 5 of 10: Alfred Baeumler
While Cassirer left, the new government created a chair for one of its supporters. Alfred Baeumler, who in 1931 had presented Nietzsche as a “philosopher and politician” of the coming Reich, took the new Berlin chair of political pedagogy in 1933. On 10 May 1933, the day of the book burning on the square opposite the university, he spoke to students before the burning; later he headed the science office in the Amt Rosenberg. His Kröner edition of Nietzsche, including The Will to Power, shaped the popular reading of Nietzsche until the critical edition appeared.
Stop 6 of 10: Carl Schmitt
In legal and political theory, Carl Schmitt, one of the leading constitutional theorists of the Weimar Republic, joined the NSDAP on the same day as Heidegger, 1 May 1933; he became a Prussian State Councillor and led the university teachers’ section of the National Socialist jurists’ league. In “Der Führer schützt das Recht” (“The Führer Protects the Law”, 1934) he justified the killings of 30 June–2 July 1934 as the highest form of law. In October 1936 he organised a conference on “Judaism in Jurisprudence”; after attacks in the SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps, which called his antisemitism a sham, he had to give up his offices in the jurists’ league and the editorship of the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung in December 1936, but kept his Berlin chair and the title of State Councillor.
Stop 7 of 10: Edith Stein
Schmitt kept his chair; others the regime had already driven from their posts in 1933. Edith Stein, Husserl’s former assistant, who had developed a phenomenology of empathy and joined it with the thought of Thomas Aquinas, was dismissed from the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster on 19 April 1933 because of her Jewish descent. In October 1933 she entered the Carmelite convent in Cologne; in 1938 she was moved for safety to the Carmel at Echt in the Netherlands. After the Dutch Catholic bishops had publicly protested against the deportations, the Gestapo arrested her there on 2 August 1942 together with her sister Rosa; both were murdered in Auschwitz on 9 August.
Stop 8 of 10: Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum
The persecution also reached philosophers far beyond the German universities. Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, a philosopher of the Lwów–Warsaw School, worked on induction and probability; in 1940, writing from Vilnius, she published a probabilistic answer to the paradox of confirmation in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. In September 1939 she and her husband, the logician Adolf Lindenbaum, had left Warsaw for Vilnius; in the summer of 1941 he was arrested and shot near Vilnius by German forces or Lithuanian auxiliaries (accounts of the place differ). Under the German occupation she was held in Lukiškės prison from autumn 1941; in spring 1942, possibly on 29 March, she was handed over to the German Security Police and probably shot; the place is not known.
Stop 9 of 10: Dialectic of Enlightenment
Those who had escaped tried to understand what was happening. In 1933 the regime had closed the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, directed by Max Horkheimer, and the Gestapo had seized its building; the Institute continued in Geneva and, from 1934, at Columbia University in New York. In California Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, circulated as a typescript in 1944 and printed in Amsterdam in 1947. Its preface asks “why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism”; the book seeks the answer in enlightened reason itself, turned into an instrument of domination, and one chapter analyses the “elements of antisemitism”.
Stop 10 of 10: Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, who had studied with Heidegger and Jaspers, was briefly arrested in 1933 and fled via Prague and Geneva to Paris. Interned by the French authorities at Gurs in 1940, she escaped; in Marseille Walter Benjamin, who took his own life at the Spanish border in September 1940, entrusted her with his theses “On the Concept of History”, which she gave to Adorno in New York in 1941. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) examines antisemitism, imperialism and the new form of rule of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. What can be thought after these crimes, and what responsibility university philosophy bears, are taken up by the journey “Thinking after Auschwitz” and the debate “University Philosophy and National Socialism”.
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