Jewish Studies in the Third Reich: a Brief Glance at Viktor Christian and Kurt Schubert

JEWISH STUDIES IN THE THIRD REICH: A BRIEF GLANCE AT VIKTOR CHRISTIAN AND KURT SCHUBERT Susannah Heschel Dartmouth College What use did Hitler have for the humanities?1 More pointedly, what room was there in Nazi Germany for the study of Jews and Judaism? Scholars in fields such as science, medicine, technology, even law were certainly important and made significant contributions to the Reich, to the war, and even to the atrocities carried out in the killing fields of Eastern Europe and in the concentration camps. But what could the humanities contribute? And why did the study of Jews and Judaism flourish in a Reich with antisemitic policies? The Nazis did not come to power in 1933 with a clear course of action in relation to the universities, but taking control of education was high on Hitler’s agenda. In response to the electoral success in Thuringia in December, 1929, Hitler composed a rare letter to Wilhelm Frick, setting forth directives for establishing the government of Thuringia as a model for the rest of Germany.2 Frick, regarded by Hitler as a “durchgekochter Nationalsozialist,” a man of “ausse- rordentlich grossem Können und fanatischer Nationalsozialist,” had participated in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and had served in the Reichstag as a Nazi party member. On January 23, 1930, he became the Thuringian Minister of the Interior and of Education, the first ministerial appointment of a National Socialist.3 In his letter, dated February 2, 1930, Hitler instructed Frick to gain control of the state 1 I would like to thank several colleagues for helpful discussions of Kurt Schubert’s career, as well as that of Viktor Christian and the situation of the University of Vienna during and after the Third Reich: Dirk Rupnow, Guenter Stemberger, Armin Lange, Mitchell Ash, Irene Maria Leitner, Anson Rabinbach, Michael Ermarth, Peter Black, Patricia Heberer, Alan Avery-Peck, and Francis Nicosia. 2 Fritz Dickmann, “Die Regierungsbildung in Thüringen als Modell der Machtergreifung: Ein Brief Hitlers aus dem Jahre 1930,” in Vierteljahshefte für Zeitgeschichte 14 (1966), pp. 454–464. 3 On Frick, see Günter Neliba, Der Legalist des Unrechtsstaates Wilhelm Frick: Eine politische Biographie (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1992). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 Review of Rabbinic Judaism 13.2 Also available online – brill.nl/rrj DOI: 10.1163/157007010X536302 jewish studies in the third reich 237 ministries of the interior, education, and propaganda. In coming to power, he should purge the civil service and police and take charge of everything related to education—schools, university, and theatrical productions. Hitler’s letter also called for the appointment of Hans F.K. Günther, the noted racial ideologue, to a professorship at the University of Jena, in Thuringia. Hitler’s appointment of Günther to a professorship in social anthro- pology did not sit well with the Jena professoriate and aroused protest from the faculty and from anthropologists throughout Germany, not because of Günther’s racism but because the proper procedures for a professorial appointment had not been followed and also because of Günther’s perceived lack of scholarly qualifications for a professorship. For the students at Jena, however, Günther’s appointment was more positively received—as early as 1926, the University of Jena had the largest percentage of members of the Nazi student organization. The students demonstrated their support with a torchlight parade the night that Hitler attended Günther’s inaugural lecture at Jena, on November 15, 1930, the first and last time Hitler attended a university lecture.4 Within a short time, other faculty appointments were made, at Jena and elsewhere, that compromised academic qualifications in favor of political—National Socialist—reliability. Within the university as an institution, Jewish scholars fared badly once Hitler came to power. While occupying 12.5% of the profes- sorships in 1933, Jews were 80% of those dismissed under the Nazi racial laws. Their positions had been distributed widely throughout most of the university disciplines, including law, medicine, science, as well as the humanities. Given that no faculties of Jewish Studies had been established at German universities, knowledge concerning Jews and Judaism was generally confined to the margins of departments of Protestant Theology and Oriental Studies. Protestant theologians, for example, created the historical study of the Old Testament, and Jewish texts of antiquity played an important role in their studies of the New Testament and their reconstruction of the history of Christian origins. While the professoriate in theology was limited to Protestants and hence experienced no purge under the Aryan Paragraph, the field of Oriental Studies in Germany had a significantly high presence of Jewish scholars and a concomitant high rate of purge. Ludmilla Hanisch estimates that 4 Susanne Zimmermann, Die medizinische Fakultät der Universität Jena während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000), p. 71..

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