The German Genius

publications in support of the National Socialists, most of them decrying Weimar as “weak,” “foreign,” and “un-German” and welcoming what many liked to call the “national revolution…that embodied a mixture of continuity with Germany’s past and the radical, youth-oriented element of the National Socialist ‘movement.’” The sociologist Arnold Bergstraesser blamed democracy for failing to produce “that social and political unity which is necessary in order to overcome a crisis like the world crisis of 1929,” arguing that one of the aims of National Socialism was to establish “a real unity between State and society.” The main idea now, he said, was “not to allow the existence of any sphere apart from the State.” When he attended conferences across the Channel, the theologian Martin Dibelius made it his business to spread before the British, “the wonder of German unity” and “the cleansing of moral life” taking place under the Nazis. 3
    Jurists did what they could to offer legal justification for the new Nazi laws. In general their view was to advocate the importance of “German common law” and to reject the concept of “individual rights protected by law.” 4 Walter Jellinek (himself Jewish) praised the new Nazi laws for overcoming class, regional, and religious differences. “The individual…owes all his dignity of being human only to his subordination to the state.” In 1934 Jellinek argued that the political power concentrated in Hitler’s hands was no bad thing: “It must not be forgotten that a voluntary restriction of supreme power resides in the German word Führer, the ideological content of which can hardly be translated into a foreign language.” 5
    That so many established scholars were dismissed created boom conditions for younger, more compliant colleagues. Many of them, on the radical right, saw such advance as little more than their entitlement. The sociologist Carl Brinkmann, for example, now began opening his lectures with the words “finally, we can speak freely.” There also emerged a group of more senior figures who began to work on the shape of the universities under National Socialism. These included Ernst Krieck, Alfred Bäumler, Adolf Rein, Hans Freyer, and Martin Heidegger. Krieck, a professor of pedagogy and in 1933 rector of the University of Frankfurt, called for an overhaul of the university, a “levelling of its hierarchical structure” and the “total focus of its research and teaching on the ideological goals of the state.” Walter Gross, chief of the Office of Racial Politics, charged with “heightening ethnic consciousness,” worried that many scholars who claimed to endorse National Socialism actually withheld “inner support” by taking “refuge” in “apolitical” research projects. 6 He also realized that biologists had failed to identify Jewish blood by physiological traits, which meant that a switch to cultural stereotypes was needed.
    Of all those involved in shaping the universities, none was more interesting or controversial than the philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose relationship with, and treatment of, Hannah Arendt was notorious. As a young philosophy student of eighteen, Hannah Arendt (1906–75) arrived in Marburg in 1924 to study under Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), then arguably the most famous living philosopher in Europe, and in the final process of completing his most important work, Being and Time , which appeared three years later. When Arendt first met Heidegger, he was thirty-five and married, with two young children. Born a Catholic and intended for the priesthood, he developed instead into a charismatic philosophy lecturer.
    Arendt came from a very different background—an elegant, cosmopolitan, totally assimilated Jewish family in Königsberg. The love affair between Heidegger and Arendt is now well known. Each transformed the other but in 1933 their lives turned dramatically in different directions. He was made rector of the University of Freiburg, and rumors soon reached her that he was refusing to recommend Jews for positions and even turning his back on them. At Heidegger’s rectorial address, he made a very anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler speech, which was reported all over the world. Arendt, now in Berlin and married to a man who, as she later admitted, she did not love, moving among the likes of Adorno, Marcuse, and Fromm, was deeply upset and confused by Heidegger’s behavior. To make