Classics and the Third Reich

No German could, of course, claim to be a ‘‘citizen of Rome’’ (or indeed of Greece), and Germany had no such smooth relationship with the classical past.4 The uneasy relationship between Germany and Rome following the Reformation confirmed the eternal city as a contentious exemplar for German intellectuals and statesmen; Greece, therefore, was made to provide an alternative locus ofauthority. Given the association of Germany with philhellenism, it is worth reiterating that this turn to Greece was, for want of a better expression, a state of mind. Nevertheless, while the ‘‘tyranny’’ (Butler 1935) of Greece over eighteenth - and nineteenth-century German thought may well have been exaggerated, it seems beyond doubt that the Greeks played a formative role in the formation of modern German intellectual consciousness (Cambiano 1988; Schmidt 2001; Christ 1986; Gildenhard and Ruehl 2003; Marchand 1996; Rawson 1969).

Hitler’s pronouncements on ancient Greece, by contrast, were not prompted by real or imaginary philosophical, intellectual, or even artistic affinities, but by what he thought of as racial contiguity. Famous remarks, such as his assessment of Sparta, ‘‘the clearest race-state in history’’ (Schmuhl 1992: 152),5 and his assertion of German lineage, ‘‘[w]hen someone asks us about our ancestors, we should always point to the Greeks’’ (Picker 1976: 85), confirm this racialized ‘‘use’’ of antiquity. The doctrine of racial and national purity, of Aryanism, and its association with the ancient Hellenes were not, however, his own invention:6 de Gobineau, H. S. Chamberlain, and their successful twentieth-century heir, H. F. K. Gunther (nicknamed Rasse-Giinther [race-Gunther], advocate of Aufnordung [renordification], Eugenik [eugenics], and Rassenhygiene [racial hygiene]), had long proposed such racial doctrine (Gunther 1925, 1928, 1929). Gunther’s 1922 volume, an ‘‘ethnography’’ ( Rassenkunde) of the German people, sold over a quarter of a million copies (Griffin 1995: 124). Alfred Rosenberg, leading ideologue of Nazism and author of the wildly successful Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The myth of the twentieth century [1930]), also expounded the superiority of the Nordic race, whose ancestors are to be found in the ancient world. His book, outsold in Germany only by Mein Kampf (My struggle) (Bollmus 1970: 25ff.), argues that world history is marked by the key racial struggle between the Aryan race and corrupting Semitic influence (Nova 1986). R. W. Darre, Nazi minister for food and agriculture, coined the Nazi slogan Blut und Boden (Blood and soil), and in a series of books argued both for the Nordic ‘‘creation’’ of European culture and the necessity of establishing a new racial aristocracy (Neuadel) (Darre 1934, 1935). Greece, then, was seen to offer an exemplary racial model and point of contact; in this respect, Hitler’s remarks are consistent with much popular racist discourse of his day.

Contrary, however, to the Winckelmannian tradition in Germany, which privileged and imitated Greek art and architecture, Hitler was, it would seem, more preoccupied with the impressive scale of ancient Roman monuments. He famously envisaged the urban renewal of Berlin - to be renamed ‘‘Germania’’ - along Roman lines. With an Ozymandian eye to posterity, he developed with Albert Speer the concept of the ‘‘ruin-value’’ of major buildings, anticipating the awe with which future generations would behold even the vast remains of the Third Reich. This desire to replicate, or rather to exceed, the imposing structures of imperial power made Rome the more prominent ancient archetype (Losemann 1999; Scobie 1990; Quinn 2000).7 While Speer characterized Hitler’s interest in the visual impact of the Roman model as megalomania, Alex Scobie, in his 1990 study Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity, has suggested that Hitler’s desire to replicate Roman architecture was a part of a much more coherent programmatic design, and that the new buildings of the Reich were to play an important part in the psychological and communal development and sustenance of the Nazi empire. Certainly Hitler’s appropriation of Roman monumentality and his admiration for the vast conquests of the empire coincide exactly with his understanding of the power of Versamm-lungsarchitektur (assembly architecture, architecture in which large numbers of people can be gathered) and his longstanding obsession with the acquisition of Lebensraum (living space) for the German nation. Aphoristic though his remarks on Rome, Greece, and Sparta may have been, Adolf Hitler’s opinions of antiquity can therefore arguably be aligned with his wider worldview. Antiquity provided a decorative canvas for both his violent anti-Semitism (and more general racism, particularly with regard to Eastern Europe and Russia) and his imperialist vision.

Hitler’s relatively infrequent and often esoteric remarks about the ancient world, however, do little to explain why many scholars (whether classical or otherwise) should have followed the racist propaganda of the National Socialist government so enthusiastically. Of course - and this must be stated immediately - the institutional pressures placed on scholars by Nazism were frequently immense, and as the regime became more murderous throughout the 1930s, it would have taken remarkable courage to resist (Losemann 1977; Noakes 1993). That many scholars, however, did not pay mere lip service to the regime is also undeniable. While some of this may be attributed to personal prejudice, flourishing under a climate of hatred and fear, the relationship between race, classics, and the Third Reich can be better understood against a number of intellectual precedents in German philhellenism and classical scholarship. This may provide some way of explaining how classical scholars could have managed to reconcile their work with the ideology of Nazism.

It has long been observed that German philhellenism was often consistent or concomitant with trends of thought that would have alarming twentieth-century consequences (Rawson 1969; Marchand 1996). For instance, the fourth of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s ‘‘addresses’’ (Reden an die deutsche Nation [Addresses to the German nation] [1808]), texts central to the philosophy and development of German organic nationalism, makes a case for the peculiar spiritual affinity between Germany and Greece. It is possible, too, as Athena Leoussi’s work has shown, to draw a convincing genealogical line between the nineteenth-century philological study of Indo-European languages and the development of Aryan chauvinism and racism in the twentieth century (not least through such figures as de Gobineau and H. S. Chamberlain) (Leoussi 1998). Of particular importance, as Elizabeth Rawson has shown, was the connection of Sparta with the ‘‘nordic’’ Dorians, supposed to be the ‘‘true’’ Greeks (Rawson 1969). More specifically, it has also been proposed that certain expressions of philhellenism (and by extension, classical scholarship) have some inherent connections with anti-Semitism (Glucksmann 1980; Cancik and Cancik-Lindemaier 1991). All too often, the Greeks, or Dorians, were placed in polar opposition, as original and ‘‘pure’’ Europeans, to Semitic languages and people (Hall 1997). Conflated with the idea of the Urvolk (the original people, a fantasy of Romanticism), this could become a powerful formula. Matters of race or, more pertinently, racial superiority can therefore be seen to be intrinsic to certain trends in German classical scholarship. Recently Luciano Canfora and Egon Flaig have argued that Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was disposed to such lines of thought, although their theses have been vigorously opposed by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Canfora 1985; Flaig 2003; Lloyd-Jones 2004).

In the wake of World War I, a number of anxieties about the state of German society and concerns over national identity focused the attention ofmany on issues of education. Much of this debate revolved around the perceived decline of the classical Gymnasium (secondary school) in Germany after 1918 and the sense that ‘‘traditional’’ values were slipping away (Solmsen 1989). Classicists were necessarily involved in this debate. It should be noted at this point that the traditionalist and decidedly antidemocratic position adopted by several classical scholars during the 1920s and 1930s makes it difficult to distinguish between work that is the product of conservative postwar disenchantment and that which coheres more consciously to the catholic doctrines of National Socialism (which could range from left to right). That classical scholars were unable to disassociate their conservative position from the

Party’s chauvinistic doctrines is evident from the inadequate response made (or, rather, not made) by many to the new political situation. As Marchand suggests, ‘‘[i]f these men bear a measure of responsibility for the failure of the Weimar Republic it lies in their resistance to progressive reform’’ and in their employment of ‘‘the arguments of the new Right to defend the status quo’’(Marchand 1996: 304; Lloyd-Jones 1999).

A further complication lies in the fact that many scholars - such as W. F. Otto, author of Dionysus (1933) - adopted, on the contrary, a Nietzschean language that was itself appropriated by Nazism (von Blumenthal 1939; Cancik 1995). A conflict of scholarly models became epitomized in the opposition between the Wissenschaft (the traditional scholarship) of Wilamowitz and the Zukunfts-philologie (the philology of the future) of F. W. Nietzsche. This clash between the historicism associated with Wilamowitz and a more aesthetic appreciation of Greek culture advocated by Nietzsche defined classical scholarship in 1920s and 1930s Germany. Scholars endeavored to return ‘‘meaning’’ to the study of ancient literature in the face of the cultural dislocation provoked by World War I (Solmsen 1989; Caldar, Flashar, and Lindken 1985; Flashar 1995).

Of this matter Werner Jaeger, inventor of and spokesman for the so-called ‘‘Third Humanism,’’ is symbolic (Calder 1983; Calder 1992; White 1992).8 Jaeger is probably best known now amongst nonspecialists for his three-volume work Paideia (the first volume was published in 1934). Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, he put forward the educational, political, and cultural value of ancient Greece as the solution to the perceived crises of the Weimar Republic (Jaeger 1960). While this can be seen as a product of the fusion of the profound sense of postwar anxiety, Wilhelmine antidemocratic sentiment, and inherent academic conservatism and elitism, equally important was Jaeger’s desire to find a ‘‘third way’’ between Wilamowitz and Nietzsche. Thus, long before the success of Paideia, Jaeger mapped out a new vision of humanism (which shook itself free from the ‘‘purely aesthetic’’ humanism of Goethe and Humboldt), hoping to reinstate the model whereby the cultural and political coincided, a model he saw depicted in ancient Greece.

Jaeger’s early lectures single out Plato as the supreme theorist of paideia/Bildung (Jaeger 1960: passim). But for all their obvious sincerity his appeals appear, in retrospect, rather generic and vague. Just how the literature of ancient Greece and the particular example of Plato were supposed to educate and form German citizens for a truly organic and ‘‘whole’’ political life remains unclear (Kahn 1992). Such was the criticism leveled at Jaeger's work by Bruno Snell in his famous review of Paideia (Snell 1966). Snell rightly pointed out that Jaeger’s programmatic search for paideia throughout Greek literature and his dismissal of German neohumanism left an unappealing political vacuum too easily appropriated by politics of any sort. Indeed, Paul Friedlander, in the marginalia to his copy of Paideia, did not hesitate to make these politics clear: schlecht (bad), die Nahe Hitlers! (the closeness to Hitler!), and Nazi are a few of his remarks (Calder and Braun 1996). Rudolf Pfeiffer, too, in a long and fair analysis of the work, made clear his uneasiness with the careless anachronisms of Paideia, which made him critical of Jaeger's organic and overtheorizing approach. While recognizing the need for debate on the subject of humanism, he suggested that Jaeger, by reading a modern spirit too invasively into the past, made Greek literature less strange and more ‘‘classic’’ than it is (Pfeiffer 1935).

The relevance of Greece and its relationship to contemporary politics was a central feature of Jaeger’s outlook. In 1930, lamenting that the international values of Renaissance humanism had been lost in the pure, narrow scholarship of the nineteenth century, he advocated once again a new - German - humanism:

The most important supranational task which is placed before humanism in Germany at present is to keep alive internally our bond with old Europe and to forearm ourselves against outright spiritual surrender before eastern powers; if it should succeed in this to insert and to draw up in each soul the common inheritance of antiquity with ever-new employment of its whole strength, then this educational act is at the same time the greatest service which German humanism is able to perform indirectly for the cohesion of the European culture-community. (Jaeger 1960: 185)

Jaeger, therefore, like many others, collapsed the concepts of Bildung (education) and Kultur (culture) into Greek paideia - the source and location of true humanism (Jaeger 1960: 108-9, 202). As such, Jaeger’s humanism coincided with more nationalistic appropriations of antiquity. Certainly, Jaeger offered his paideia as a means of generating and sustaining the spiritual Gemeinschaft (community) of Germany (Naf 1992). The unity of classical culture, Jaeger argued, could be used to unify (or face down) the plurality of cultures in Weimar Germany (Jaeger 1960: 126). While Jaegar’s total commitment to paideia, or Bildung, provides a distinct alternative to the Volk (nation) of nationalist and Nazi ideology, nevertheless Paideia I exhibits a vocabulary of race that corresponds with the racial lexicon of Nazism.9 Problematic, too, was Jaeger’s willing participation in the Gleichschaltung (the bringing into line) of universities that took place following the Nazi seizure of power, when he contributed a short piece, ‘‘Die Erziehung des politischen Menschen und die Antike’’ (The education of political men and antiquity), to Ernst Krieck’s nationalist and racist pedagogical journal, Volk im Werden (A people in becoming) (Jaeger 1933; cf. White 1992 and Orozco 1995). Although this would seem to have been an exercise in (mere) academic opportunism, an attempt to convince the new powers of the compatibility of his ‘‘Third Humanism’’ (which would offer the perfect educational mold for forming the political community of National Socialism) with Party aims, it also shows how easily ‘‘Third Humanism,’’ like so much else in 1930s Germany, could be aligned with Nazism.

In general, it was around Plato, education, and Bildung that much of the discussion on humanism centered, but the terms of this debate became critical with the emphasis placed on the formation of‘‘new men’’ under National Socialism (Demetriou 2002). The year 1933 saw the publication of Humanistische Bildung im nationalsozialis-tischen Staate (Humanism in the National Socialist state), to which a number of leading classical scholars, including Hans Oppermann and Fritz Schachermeyr, contributed (Oppermann 1933; Schachermeyr 1933; Losemann 1977; Christ 1982; Malitz 1998). The tone of the book was decisively against Jaeger’s ‘‘Third Humanism’’ (although, naturally, not for the reasons given by Snell or Pfeiffer). Amongst the articles was ‘‘Plato als Erzieher zum deutschen Menschen’’ (Plato as educator for German men), by Adolf Rusch. Although it reflects contemporary interest in Plato, this article does not quite concur with the praise, given by H. F. K. Gunther in his (1928) work Platon als Hiiter des Lebens (Plato as guardian of life), for the ancient author as the founder of the doctrine of racial superiority (despite reading like a shopping-list of ideal characteristics in German youth). It is to the ideology of volkische Gemeinschaft (the national community) that Rusch pleads, illustrating Plato’s suitability as a reading text for school students, who would learn of the sacrifice of leading intellects to the greater good of the spiritual community.

Also in this volume Gustav Klingenstein, in an article revealingly entitled ‘‘Huma-nistische Bildung als deutsche Waffe’’ (Humanist education as German weapon), lauds the ability of a classical education to teach heroism and competitive spirit. Importantly, he draws a contrast between Erasmus, the leading light of sixteenth-century cosmopolitan humanism, detractor of religious warfare and, by the end of his life, firm opponent of Martin Luther, and Ulrich von Hutten, the German humanist, patriot, and knight who fought with von Sickingen for Martin Luther against the ecclesiastical princes of southwest Germany.

Two figures are prominent at the beginning of German humanism, Erasmus and Hutten.

At all times, both have had followers in Germany; the first must now stand back, the others are today men of the hour, whose noble ancestor Hutten made his life a struggle for the German way and his humanism a sword. (Klingenstein 1933: 29)

This tension between the international and the fiercely national faces of German classical scholarship and humanism, and the challenge offered to them by the chameleonic politics of National Socialism, are themes encountered again and again in this debate. The rivalry between German humanism and its foreign (particularly Italian) counterparts is striking, and reminds the reader of the deep tension felt in the German academy over the perceived importance of such ‘‘alien’’ intellectual trends (Schafer 1943; Fuhrmann 1984; Visser 2001). Indeed, the Nazi party continued to propose (alongside the enthusiastic embracing of the ‘‘Doric’’ Greeks) a more Bismarckian rejection of Greek cultural models in favor of Germanic ones (Michalski 1998; Niven 2000).

Connected to this was the charge of intellectualism raised against Jaeger’s project. Pfister, in an article entitled ‘‘Der politische Humanismus’’ (Political humanism) (thus indicating the direction that discussion on humanism will take), argues that this ‘‘so-called’’ humanism is unable to accomplish the education of Germans as political men. ‘‘True’’ political humanism would draw direct examples - of race, of Gemeinschaft, of will and Weltanschauung (worldview) - from the ancients (Pfister 1934). Bengl, in 1941, also associates the substance of‘‘Third Humanism’’ with the benign and (crucially) cosmopolitan humanisms of the past. Genuine, vOlkisch-political humanism turns to antiquity for exemplary confirmation: for instance, the heroic militarism of the Iliad, or the racial laws of Solon and Pericles (Bengl 1941). Likewise, in 1942, Vorwahl contrasts explicitly ‘‘contemporary’’ humanism with ‘‘political’’ humanism. His reference to Gunther as the most outstanding authority of political humanism lays bare its racialized structure (Vorwahl 1942: 112-13).

Jaeger’s ‘‘Third Humanism’’ was, it would seem, rejected almost uniformly by the academic community, both Nazi and non-Nazi (Losemann 1977: 97-108; Naf 1992). Helmut Berve (who in Jaeger's absence would become a [self-appointed] spokesman for political classical scholarship) in a 1934 article, which programmatically encourages the politicization of the study of ancient history, dismisses the new humanism for its lack of vitality (Berve 1993). Yet even his ‘‘politicized’’ scholarship produced uneven results: a 1942 volume, Das neue Bild der Antike: Hellas (The new picture of antiquity: Greece), edited by Berve contains a number of articles that conform to the new model, but also several that do not (Berve 1942; Englert 1942; Gadamer 1942; Losemann 1977; Naf 1986; Nippel 1993).

But humanism in general also came under attack from National Socialist educational theorists and philosophers who rejected humanistic Bildung in favor of a new volkische Erziehung (national education) (Kneller 1942). Although they eschewed traditional elite education, they nonetheless still embraced the exemplary potential of the ancient Greeks. In particular, two ideological pedagogues, Ernst Krieck and Alfred Baeumler, whose educational philosophies were dominant and popular throughout the National Socialist period, embraced both the heroic-soldierly values of ancient Greece and the potential of the totalitarian state in Plato (Baeumler 1939, 1943; Krieck 1933, 1934a, 1934b, 1934c, 1935). In his rectorial address of 1933, Baeumler cast aside the ‘‘idealistic-humanist philosophy of Bildung'' (Baeumler 1943: 136), whose aspirations were too individualistic and purely aesthetic for the purposes of the new state, in favor of the political pedagogy of Plato, whose tripartite division of society would provide both an educational and military ideal, and also mold the development of a Party-elite (Baeumler 1939). National Socialist education must be total, committed to the political and communal development of the Volk (nation). Simultaneously, it would also be the organic expression of the volkisch will.

Krieck, despite early collaboration with Jaeger (hence Jaeger’s publication in Volk im Werden), soon disassociated himself from what he saw as academic frivolity. Critically, Jaeger’s ‘‘humanism,’’ as we have already seen, was not volkisch enough, a feature of education Krieck had long called for:

Provided that we see the collective responsibility placed before the German people to be the production of national-political life-unity (der volkisch-politischen Lebensganzheit), by which we mean the appropriate world-view (Weltanschauung) and direction of will (Willensrichtung), then in the future the national-political (volkisch-politische) university must take the place of the obsolete humanistic university. (Krieck 1934a: 81)

Krieck, too, with Plato as a model, described education in symbiosis with the state, as an organ of the will of the people that both produces and sustains itself (Krieck 1935: 96).

National Socialism, then, both crystallized and encouraged a number of longstanding debates. The cultural arguments of the neohumanists and Idealists were transferred from cosmopolitanism to a new framework of cultural vision - the Volk. The subsequent vision of humanism and society, abstracted from practice, was embedded in reactionary tradition and was an ‘‘anti-modernist, anti-democratic endeavour’’ (White 1992: 275) and a remote search after organischer Zusammenhang (organic connection) and das Ganze (unity) (Sontheimer 1968). It was all too easy for already-disenchanted cultural critics to slip into more radicalized and extremist positions. In the end, this language of crisis was one appropriated by the extreme nationalists (Stern 1965; Glaser 1978). Yet ironically, the regime that attracted so many academics was itself trenchantly anti-intellectual (Fuhrmann 1984).