Racism and National Socialism: a Brief History Christian Geulen
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Racism and National Socialism: A Brief History Christian Geulen The Nazi concentration camp system in the the racist mentality is evident not least of all “Third Reich” obeyed a racist logic. Yet however in the implicit or explicit summons to act, to do indisputable this observation is, it cannot claim something about the supposed threat to the to serve as a sufficient explanation. On the wellbeing of the insiders posed by the outsiders, contrary, it immediately poses two questions: to eliminate the supposedly “unnatural” hotch- what exactly is a racist logic, and what exactly is potch of people and cultures and ultimately to racism? And how does the racist logic of National improve the world by combatting the others. This Socialism relate to the long and comprehensive is what distinguishes racism from the prejudices history of racism before 1933 and after 1945? A and assumptions of inequality that presumably plausible account of how Nazism continued the occur in every particular community from neigh- history of racism while also adding something bourhoods to nations and, in principle, recognize new to it can contribute to an understanding of difference precisely in its accentuation. The sim- what was unique about the annihilation policies ple assertion of this difference – “we’re different of the Nazi state. At the same time, it can help us from the others” – can hardly be conceived of as recognize the historical origin of its justifications, racism. Yet where this difference is perceived as which by no means fell into oblivion after 1945. 1 a danger to be eliminated, where it is considered unnatural or a threat to ‘the own’, prejudices and The above-outlined thought is already an initial assumptions about ‘the other’ can quickly turn important prerequisite for the following deliber- into the demand and the summons to get rid of it ations: modern racism is understood here as a to the benefit of all. practice that does not differ from other forms of violent ostracism and hostility in the magnitude This distinction is also important with a view or special form of its violence, but in how it is to the history of racism before 1933. That is justified. It is in precisely this sense that rac- because it marks the historical transforma- ism is an ideology based on hypothetical rules tion from pre-modern forms of racist-justified and laws of nature, history and existence that ostracism and oppression into modern racism are intended to serve as orientation for human as a praxis-oriented ideology of the reinforce- action. On the other hand, racism is never mere ment and rescue of ‘the own’ through hostility ideology. In contrast to the classical function of towards ‘the foreign’ in the manner typical modern ideologies to legitimize and consolidate of the period immediately preceding National the status quo, modern racism links its justi- Socialism. Certainly, the early modern forms of fication with a reality still to be created, with oppression, enslavement and long-term anni- a world that has strayed from the right path, hilation, especially of non-European peoples, from the original ideal, and has to be healed, were manifestations of modern European racism improved, or redesigned. This is precisely what and accordingly justified by pseudo-scientific links racist ideology with praxis: rather than theories of the superiority and inferiority of the justifying supposedly natural states, it points to different ethnic groups. Nevertheless, the idea supposedly natural states to justify its practical that those foreign peoples could pose a threat creation and thus its racist actions. In a nutshell: to “white” European superiority was just as racism “always starts with an appeal to com- foreign to the perpetrators and protagonists of plete the task”. 2 those times as the notion that their existence was something unnatural and to be eliminated This can still be recognized in present-day as a result. On the contrary, particularly eight- forms of racism. To be sure, since the historical eenth-century scholars outdid one another in experience of National Socialist extermination the Eurocentric distribution of superiority and politics hardly anyone has dared to propagate inferiority as a given and inalterable world order the “eradication” of a people openly. Even so, to be acknowledged by all. 220 | 221 This claim endured in the many anthropologi- for the theory of evolution and what historicism cal and ethnographic characterizations of the had already long done for the concept of histo- world’s peoples and the “world races” until ry: it overcame the speculative assumptions of well into the nineteenth century. Yet with the a natural-historical development mechanism emergence of the industrial-capitalist economic with which the Enlightenment had ushered in system and the gradual shift from modern colo- the modern age but then forcibly committed it nialism to modern imperialism – but also against to “progress”. These assumptions were now the background of the Universalist notion of one replaced by the insight that development, the fu- humanity and the modern conception of history ture, and the possibility of progress were decid- as an ongoing process of historical transfor- ed daily – in other words that they would neither mation – the self-evidence, and ultimately the happen automatically nor were they logically plausibility, of the idea of a fixed “universal ra- deducible from the past, but that they depended cial order” dwindled. Both spatially and tempo- on present action. 4 rally, ‘the own’ and ‘the foreign’ began to merge, transcultural forms of life evolved increasingly, In the context of development and progress, the and there was even a growing awareness of central law of Darwinism – the occurrence of natural orders. natural selection on a daily basis – was equat- ed with “survival”, pure and simple. And in the One of the first racial theories to react to this late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, state of affairs was The Inequality of Human many regarded this law as a natural-scientific Races written by the French diplomat and hobby foundation of Gobineau’s popular theories of the anthropologist Arthur Gobineau in 1853. 3 He antagonism between and intermingling of the regarded world history as being determined not races and the preservation of their purity. There by eternal differences between races, but rather was a huge drawback, however, to this linking of by their eternal intermingling with and eternal the two theories: precisely because of the fact struggle against one another. In this dynam- that they saw a causal relationship between the ic of struggle and intermingling, the only race development of the species and races on the that would survive in the long run was the one one hand and daily behaviour on the other, both that defended itself against intermingling with Darwin and – to a certain extent – Gobineau other races, and its way of life against foreign had emphasized above all the coincidental and domination, with every means at its disposal. In incalculable aspect of this development. At the four thick volumes, Gobineau thus established end of the nineteenth century, when the tech- a notion of race no longer as a concept of order, nical successes of the natural sciences had but as an abstract principle of development and ousted historicism as the guiding principle of a law of the preservation of cultural purity. the bourgeoisie, supplanting it with claims to rationalization, and brought the idea of nature’s It was above all this break with the older tradi- technical dominance back to the fore, people no tion of racial systematics that accounted for the longer contented themselves with such contin- astonishing success of his book in the decades gencies in racial theory. 5 that followed, despite the extreme confusion and contradiction that characterized it from begin- These contingencies were thus rapidly enhanced ning to end. This was because Gobineau did for with mechanisms and laws that served to endow racism what Charles Darwin did soon thereafter the random nature of the daily struggle for re- 1 For general comparison, see Georg M. Fredrickson, Rassismus. Ein historischer Abriss (Hamburg, 2004); Christian Geulen, Geschichte des Rassismus , 2nd ed. (Munich, 2014). 2 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer used this phrase to describe the workings of modern racist anti-Semitism, but it can easily be applied to modern racism in general. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment [1947], trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, 2002), here p. 140. 3 Joseph A. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races [1853–55], trans. Adrian Collins, reprint of the 1915 edition (New York, 1967). 4 For a general discussion of this subject, see Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Verzeitlichung und Enthistorisierung in den Wissenschaften vom Leben im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1976); see Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London, 1859). The responsibility ethic in Darwinism was already pointed out early on by the American philosopher John Dewey, “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy” [1909], idem, The Collected Works , Part II: The Middle Works 1899–1924, vol. 4: 1907–1909, ed. by J. A. Boydston (London, 1977), pp. 3–14. 5 For a more detailed discussion of this subject, see Christian Geulen, Wahlverwandte. Rassendiskurs und Nationalismus im späten 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 2004). E S SAYS production with determinable direction and Be that as it may, from the end of the nineteenth form after all. The themes of racial intermingling century onward ever closer links were drawn and the struggle between the races were now between Lamarckist conceptions of the pass- joined by the idea of creating race by essentially ing on of acquired traits, Gobineauesque ideas technical means, in other words by deliberately about the consequences of racial intermingling, exploiting the laws of development known until Darwinist notions of selection and the strug- that time.