The Myth of Myths: Scholarship and Teaching in Heidelberg

REVIEW ARTICLE

Michael H. Kater

The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University. By Steven P. Remy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2002. Pp. xi + 329. $39.95. ISBN 0-674-00933-9.

Much enlightening work has been done on the political changes in Germany after 1945, beginning with the volumes by Lutz Niethammer, James Tent, Clemens Vollnhals and, more recently, Norbert Frei.1 Some of these accounts include social change, insofar as it did occur, but there is a remarkable deficit of insight into culture, in the widest sense. Currently, this is being remedied with- in well-defined compartments, such as the screening of music and musicians in the American zone by U.S. cultural officers, as undertaken by David Monod.2 For the universities, the suggestive new study by Steven Remy is beginning to fill the gap, although I have reservations about what he chooses to call "the Heidelberg myth." But for the University of Heidelberg in the Third Reich alone Remy has done a better job than the ambitious multivolume work by

1. Lutz Niethammer, Entnazifizicrung in Bayem: Sauberung und Rehabilitienmg untcr amcrikanischcr Besatzung (Frankfurt am Main, 1972); James Tent, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification hi American-Occupied Germany (Chicago, 1982); Clemens Vollnhals, ed., lintnazij\zierung: Politische Sauberung und RehabiUtierung in den vier Besatzungszonen (Munich, 1991); Norbert Frei, \'er- gangenheitspolitik: Die Anjdnge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich, 1996). 2. David Monod, "Internationalism, Regionalism, and Musical Culture: Music Control m Bavaria, 1945-1948," Central European History 33 (2000): 339-68; Monod, "Verklarte Nacht: Denazifying Musicians under American Control," in Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933— 1945, ed. Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmuller (Laaber, 2(103), 292-314. Monod is currently completing a monograph on this topic.

Central European History, vol. 36, no. 4, 570-577

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Helmut Heiber, more than a decade ago, sought to accomplish for all the German universities.3 At the beginning of Tlie Heidelberg Myth, Remy briefly establishes the hall- marks of a liberal and democratic university during the Weimar Republic: a vibrant intellectual climate reigned in Heidelberg, held up by the internationally vaunted scholarship of such eminences as Max Weber in sociology, Karl Jaspers in psychiatry and later philosophy, and Gustav Radbruch in constitu- tional law. Heidelberg, being situated in Baden with its tradition of liberalism, attracted a large number of foreign students, including many Jewish ones. Its faculties were known to be innovative. Nonetheless, after January 1933, Heidelberg outdid itself in trying to be- come nazified. "Most professors expressed joy over the demise of the Weimar Republic," and there was a succession of ever more radical Nazi rectors (p. 23). The moderate theologian Martin Dibelius began ranting against Eastern Jews, and the Jewish legal scholar Walter Jellinek expressed pro-Nazi sympathies. The Nobel laureate physicist Philipp Lenard and the notorious Nazi philosopher Ernst Krieck came to symbolize Heidelberg's Nazi aspirations, which few opposed, apart from the theologian Gustav Hoelscher and Marianne Weber's intellectual salon. Between 1933 and 1938, many teachers were dismissed on political or racial grounds, including Radbruch and Jellinek. Academic subjects were increasingly ideologized and militarized; a "Western Research" branch was added with a view to the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine and Nazi hegemony in France. Ruthless younger Nazi faculty would include the legal experts Ernst Forsthoff and Herbert Kriiger, as well as Reinhard Hohn, who was closely tied to the SS. In the medical faculty, psychiatrist Viktor von Weizsacker wrote tracts that on careful reading lent themselves to the support of "euthana- sia," and Carl Schneider came from the Prostestant Bethel institution for the mentally challenged to commence killing children "unworthy of life" in the suburb of Wiesloch. By the terms of a new Civil Service Law of January 1937 faculty with non-"Aryan" wives like Jaspers and Otto Regenbogen were fired. About halfway through the book Remy turns to the post-1945 phase in Heidelberg's history — incremental reconstitution that he traces to the end of the 1950s, but that could actually be said to have lasted until 1968, the year of universal student unrest, which precipitated a measure of university reform. His main thesis here is that the university made only half-hearted moves to reverse its path and (re-)adopt democracy, shielding many of its former Nazi faculty — insofar as they had not permanently been dismissed — and hiring others from neighboring universities. The process of redemocratization was pushed and supported at first by American Military Government (OMGUS) control officers,

3. In Heiber's series Universitdt unterm Hakenkreuz (Munich, 1991—). See Remy, The Heidelberg Myth.: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).

until the victors felt it was safe to have them withdrawn, in lockstep with Germany repossessing sovereignty. On the whole, the Germans were ada- mantly opposed to the American officers. The new rector eventually was Karl Heinrich Bauer, a Heidelberg surgeon with a shady Nazi past. He kept resisting attempts by the Americans to weed out old Nazis and bar others from being newly employed, insisting that there was a dearth of expertise that overrode all political considerations. This was held to be especially true for the medical faculty, the reason the Americans had reopened the university in December 1945 in the first place. The only faculty members who could objectively be counted as active former supporters of the Weimar Republic were Radbruch, Uibelius, and Alfred Weber, Max's younger social-scientist brother. In the student body, former Hitler Youths continued to object to educational lectures, such as Jaspers s, on the collective guilt of the German people. But Remy charges that even Jaspers, by publicly insisting that the university was still operating with the same sense of integrity that had ruled it in the nineteenth century, was responsible for allowing back former Nazi faculty, and for the creation of an atmosphere "hostile to any reckoning with the professo- rate's support for National Socialism" (p. 170). According to Remy, Radbruch, too, sought to keep someone like Forsthoff on the law faculty, claiming, implau- sibly, that he had been a victim of the Nazis. In the end, not a single full professor at Heidelberg University was convicted in a denazification category more serious than that of fellow traveler (Mitldufer). The mantle of religion was often used by suspect candidates in their defense, where nonetheless it was seldom clear whether these had belonged to the oppositional Confessing Church led by Martin Niemoller or the German Christians, who had claimed Jesus to be an "Aryan." Hence when the university expanded in the 1950s, a process favoring the return of many former Nazis, Hans-Georg Kuhn was hired in theology, once a member of the SA and Nazi Party, who had served Walter Frank's Reichsinstitut fur Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands in an effort to dejudaize Christianity.4 From Miinster Werner Conze came to join the history department — he too had been an SA member and collaborator of Nazi Eastern specialists such as Theodor Oberlander. Remy also mentions Erich Maschke, a former NS- Dozentenbundfuhrer in Jena (p. 229),3 who — this Remy does not write — returned directly from Soviet captivity, bringing with him as assistants other former (Nazi?) POWs. Maschke had originally been an expert in the history of the medieval Teutonic Order (and as such had published much to the taste of

4. See Kuhn's anti-Semitic speech in Tubingen on anti-Jewish boycott day, 1 April 1933. and other anti-Semitic detritus reprinted in Rolf Seeliger, ed., Brautie I'tiitvrsitat: Deuttdw Hodischullrhrer gestern und heule (Munich, 1968), 6:46-52. 5. Remy falsely writes Leipzig.

the Nazis);6 for Heidelberg, he was given the chance of a perfunctory UmhabUitierung, newly qualifying himself in the larger area of German, including modern, economic history. A new faculty member whom Remy does not mention at all was Wilhelm Emil Miihlmann, a one-time student of Eugen Fischer ("Rasse-Fischer") in Berlin and then, in his chosen field of anthropol- ogy, a race scientist in the Nazi mold.7 While newly in Heidelberg from Mainz, the pointedly antifascist university founded by the French occupation authori- ties, Miihlmann served as an expert in sociology, specializing in Max Weber, as well as ethnology, with a large, institutionally funded research focus on the inhabitants of Sicily.8 At the core of his study Remy describes what throughout he calls the "Heidelberg Myth," by detailing these successive characteristics: To begin with, Heidelberg University was said to be "a bastion of democracy and tolerance." Then, in 1933, the Nazi regime smashed its self-governing autonomy and dis- posed of academic freedom, also ridding the university of the professors "who had been supporters of democracy." Wishing to make Heidelberg into a "model National Socialist university," the regime installed a few "ideological fanatics of dubious scholarly qualifications" to ensure the institution's nazification. Most professors, even if "nominal" party members, wishing to have nothing to do with the regime, became opponents of Nazism, maintaining time-honored stan- dards of objectivity in scholarship and teaching. For this they were persecuted by the party, jealous Nazi colleagues, and fanaticized students. Lastly, in 1945, the great traditions of a pre-1933 era were restored, thanks to the anti-Nazi professors and American assistance (p. 117). But these suppositions may themselves constitute a myth, or at least a partial one. Remy's representation of the Heidelberg Myth, or its collective submyths, is problematic on the following grounds. First, his conception of myths presup- poses that at least in the twentieth century Heidelberg thought of itself, or was thought of, as unique in the landscape of traditional German universities. Second, it assumes a large degree of ignorance, dissimulation, make-belief, and denial both on the part of the Heidelberg protagonists and its critical judges. Third, Remy may be imputing thoughts, feelings, and motivations to the main

6. Erich Maschke, Das Envachen des Xationalbewusstseins im deutsch-slavischen Qrenzraum (Leipzig, 1933); Maschke, Der Peterspjennig in Polen und dem deutschen Osten (Leipzig, 1933); Maschke, Der deutsche Orden (Jena, 1939)/ 7. Wilhelm Emil Miihlmann, Rassen- und Volkerkunde: Lebensprobleme der Rassen, Gesellschaften und Volker (Brunswick, 1936); Miihlmann, Krieg und Frieden, ein Leitfaden der politischen Ethnologie, nut Beriicksichtigung volkerkundHchen und geschichtlichen Stojfes (Heidelberg, 1940); Miihlmann, Assimilation, I 'mvolkung, Volkwerdung (Stuttgart, 1944); Niels C. Losch, Rasse als Konstrukf. Leben und Werk Eugen Fischers (Frankfurt am Mam, 1997), 26, 484-85, 533. 8. See Miihlmann's introduction to Martin Kehr, Der sizilianische Separatisms: Eine Studie zur Kultursoziologie Siziliens (Berlin, 1984).

characters in this larger play. That drama did not unfold in the way he thinks, and he may be missing pieces in the larger mosaic, or misjudge or neglect to mention people in the larger population. Fourth, even if myths existed, they might have applied only segmentally and to different phases in the development of Heidelberg as a university. It therefore behooves us at least to attempt, beginning with the nineteenth century, to separate fact from fiction. By way of preface, Heidelberg's "myth," then as always, derived more from its status as Germany's oldest university since 1386, the romantic castle ruins above the picturesque Neckar river that had already inspired Goethe, its clement climate, and modern American commer- cialization of the fraternity culture, as depicted in Sigmund Romberg's musical The Student Prince (1924). Moreover, even if that university was always stellar academically, there was no particular reason why Heidelberg should have been a pronouncedly democratic bastion of learning in the Weimar Republic. As regards its political liberalism in the republic, Heidelberg had to contend with more than its share of scandal because of its intolerant treatment of asso- ciate professor Emil Julius Gumbel, a brilliant statistician and a Jew, who had published a rendering of Weimar right-radical Feme murders, thus exposing the republic's inherent protofascist trends. Gumbel, who eventually ended up at Columbia University, was censored by the philosophical faculty as early as 1924 and hounded from the university by intolerant, undemocratic colleagues (and students) in the summer of 1932.9 Because it was not the only university at the end of the republic to treat especially Jewish scholars, no matter how prolific, in this prejudicial manner, Heidelberg showed itself to be unique neither in terms of academic excellence nor of open-mindedness. What united all German universities in the 1920s and early 1930s was a marked proclivity, especially among the full-time faculty, toward political conservatism and a corresponding absence of left-wing liberalism, let alone moderate socialism.10 At the same time, faculty refrained from radicalism on the right and notably on the left, not least because toward the end of the republic this could lead to dismissal from civil-service tenure.11 As for the continuation of the myth, after Hitler's assumption of power in January 1933, university faculties everywhere fell prey to Nazi Gleichschaltung and overnight conversion to the Nazi cause, notwithstanding the possible existence of any post-1945 myth regarding a throng of silent objectors. (I am not

9. Anselm Faust, Der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Studentenbitnd: Studenteti und \ationa\- sozialismus in der Weimarer Republik (Dusseldorf, 1973), 2:57-62. 10. Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: 77ie German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 200-52. 11. Michael H. Kater, "Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung an den deutschen Hochschulen: Zum politischen Verhalten akademischer Lehrer bis 1939," in Die Freiheit des Anderen: Festschrift fur Martin Hirsch, ed. Hans Jochen Vogel et al. (Baden-Baden, 1981), 49-63.

aware of such a myth either through oral transmission or as published and doc- umented in mainstream media.) The ostentatious move from being a right- wing bourgeois to becoming a member of the Nazi Party was facile, as was the move out of the supposedly neutral ivory tower, for such parties were easily absorbed by the Nazi mono-party system by the fall of 1933, and in 1920s Germany, nonparty alignment ivory-tower existence had typically signified an inner disposition to the right.12 Heidelberg was no different; it, like other universities, was easily subjected to the dictates of more or less stringent Nazi Fuhrer-Rektoren who were no longer democratically elected, but appointed by the central government's ministry of education.13 It is unclear to me who should have claimed, before (or after) 1945, that Heidelberg was to be molded into a Nazi "model university." Conceivably, this could have been based on the premise of such a model being advocated before 1933, but, as explicated above, in Germany's level academic field, Heidelberg had been a model among models, such as they were. Model universities in the more conventional sense, not for political instrumentalization but for their elite learning, however corrupted at the time, were Berlin and Munich, both at polar ends of a geographic and metropolitan axis and both aided by the heightened activities of the attached Kaiser-Wilhelm Institutes.14 Regarding the post-1945 myth that Heidelberg scholars allegedly con- structed by protesting their innocence and harking back to republican days, there is a certain truth to that. In the late 1940s, disagreements with supervising OMGUS experts such as Daniel F. Penham and Edward Y. Hartshorne detracted much from genuine reformatory progress that could have been made, and right into the 1960s tainted faculty either had themselves reinstated or joined the university from other places. Karl Georg Kuhn, for example, pointed to the fact that he had been formally denazified and therefore exculpated, adding that one could read about those technical details in official files. When asked to supply those, Kuhn demurred. And so did Herbert Kriiger, who did not even bother to react to any of the questions he was now confronted with.15 But in spite of such unreconstructable faculty, one would have to qualify Heidelberg's case by averring that its university was not much different from others in the land. A countermanding factor against Remy's assumed post-1945 myth is that as early as the 1950s there were genuine attempts, even among German

12. Michael H. Kater, "Professoren und Studenten im Dritten Reich," Archiv fiir Kulturgeschichte 67 (1985): 465-76. 13. Hellmut Seier, "Der Rektor als Fiihrer: Zur Hochschulpolitik des Reichserziehungsmin- lstenums, 1934-1945," Vieneljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 12 (1964): 105-46. 14. Berlin as the capital of the Third Reich, Munich as the capital of the Nazi movement. On KWG, see Kristie Macrakis, Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (New York, 1993); Doris Kaufmann, ed., Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Geselhchafi im NationahoziaHsmus: Bestandaufnahme und Perspektiven der Forschung, 2 vols. (Gottingen, 2000). 15. Seeliger, 41-45, 46-56.

compromised faculty members, to embrace a new democracy and steer their scholarship and teaching in a new, ideologically acceptable direction. Whether they did so out of opportunism or genuine new convictions is a tough question to answer. But it happened at all German universities. Three cases in point at Heidelberg are the aforementioned Erich Maschke, Wilhelm Emil Miihlmann, and Werner Conze. Maschke became very persuasive as a historian of economic and municipal history, with new, credible publications.16 Miihlmann, who was one of the first in Heidelberg whose Nazi past was called into question publicly, did not concede or deny anything; perhaps he should have resigned. But his teaching of Max Weber's social system was without fault, and his ethnolog- ical research in Italy was internationally acknowledged. As is now well known, the multilingual Conze, along with Theodor Schieder, his friend and former fellow in Rothfels's ultraconservative Eastern-Colonial Konigsberg circle, founded the new brand of German social history, which was not only influenced by racist-ethnic milieu theories of the Nazis but also, and this Remy does not mention, by the environmental-climate considerations developed by the French Annales School. To be sure, Conze could not deny his ties to an earlier political, farther-fetched conservatism, to put it charitably; he conducted graduate seminars on Carl Schmitt, was extremely critical of the barnstorming theories of Hamburg's Fritz Fischer (who ceded to Germany all the fault for World War I)17 and had his students carefully dissect William L. Shirer's sensa- tionally new and somewhat sloppy The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.'* Conze's senior students and assistants — the likes of Lutz Niethammer, Christian Streit, Bernd Weisbrod, Wolfgang Schieder, Hans Mommsen, and this reviewer — found it difficult to impute to this teacher a desire to obstruct and obfuscate; with all reservations, the consensus was that he was interested in helping to build a new and democratic university, apart from all those fascinating method- ological innovations in social history that were making him famous. Hence there was a forward-looking trend at Heidelberg University after 1945, as there was in all the others, which had the potential to supersede the unsalutary tradition of the Nazi years and even the impotence of the republic, even if it was characterized by slow momentum. This showed not only in efforts by men like Conze and others to be as constructive as possible, while also being as quiet as possible about their own recent past, but also in the appointment of

16. Erich Maschke, Stiidte und Menschen: Beitrdge zur Geschichle der Sladt, der H'irtschiift mid Gesellschafi, 1959-1977 (Wiesbaden, 1980); Maschke, Es entsteht em Konzcrn: Paul Rcusch und die GHH (Tubingen, 1969). 17. Fritz Fischer, Grijf nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deuhchland, 1914-18, 2nd ed. (DCisseldorf, 1962). 18. William L. Shirer, Tlie Rise and Fall of the Tliird Reich: A History of Xazi Germany (New York. 1960).

true pioneers of enlightened scholarship, who soon marked Heidelberg (as they would others) as a place of future promise. Unfortunately, these names are missing from Remy's enlightening book, names such as Alexander Mitscherlich, Dolf Sternberger,Jiirgen Habermas, Hans Georg Gadamer, Ernst Topitsch, and Carl Joachim Friednch. The philosopher Gadamer, for example, succeeded Karl Jaspers in 1949, until he became professor emeritus in 1968. Although he too had not been entirely free from accommodations with National Socialism while in Leipzig from 1939 to 1945, he became Leipzig's Rektor in 1946. Gadamer's significance lies in the influence he had in his field through the journal Philosophische Rundschau (with Helmut Kuhn), and his book Truth and Method (I960),19 through which he taught and networked with colleagues like Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Habermas and Mitscherlich were on Heidelberg's faculty in the 1950s and 1960s before assuming their influential chairs in Frankfurt.20 On balance, then, Remy's is a highly original and informative book that grants us valuable new insights into the hitherto neglected area of academia under Nazi rule. It also tells us much about the aftermath, from 1945 on, including haphazard attempts to excoriate the Nazi spirit. If one accepts a work about Heidelberg University as a case study indicative of its peer institutions, Remy's book is effective at that level. But the author has unnecessarily complicated his case by grafting his story onto a template of successive myths. In the absence of hard evidence, I would question the existence of such myths even after an attempt to prove them for the entire German university system (for instance in the sense that all were retrograde after 1945). However, to compound the com- plexity of his case, Remy applies the myth theory exclusively to Heidelberg and therefore lends to that university an aura, a cachet, a uniqeness that, in the respects he posits, it never possessed.

YORK UNIVERSITY

19. 2nd English-language edition: Truth and Method (New York, 1993). 20. William Outhwaithe, ed., The Habermas Reader (Cambridge, 1996), Peter Dews, ed., Habermas: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1999); Hans-Martin Lohmann, ed., Alexander Mitscherlich: Mit Selbstzeugnissen mid Bilddokumenten (Reinbek, 1987).