The German Genius

matters worse, Bertolt Brecht, persecuted as a Communist and forced to flee the country, left behind his address book, containing Arendt’s name and phone number. She was arrested and spent eight days in jail being interrogated. As soon as she was released, she left Germany and settled in Paris. She and Heidegger would not meet for seventeen years.
    Heidegger played a crucial role in Germany. As a philosopher, he gave his weight to the Third Reich, helping develop its thinking, which grounded Nazism in history and the German sense of self. In this he had the support of Goebbels and Hitler. As an academic figure he played a leading role in the reorganization of the universities, the chief “policy” under his regime being the removal of all Jews. Through Heidegger’s agency both Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and his own professor, Karl Jaspers, who had a Jewish wife, were forced out of their university posts. Arendt later wrote that “Martin murdered Edmund.”
    Ernst Krieck considered himself a more important National Socialist philosopher even than Heidegger, but the influence of the philosophers was limited in the Third Reich: Hitler, Goebbels, and the other leaders were more interested in practical matters than abstract theorizing—they regarded academics in general as an “elite group of opportunists.” The common theme that emerged from the speeches and publications by Krieck, Heidegger, and others, in 1933 and 1934, was that “research and teaching must serve the German ‘ Volksgemeinschaft ,’ and not some abstract notion of ‘objective truth’ or knowledge for its own sake.” At Göttingen, Paul Schmitthenner, the architect and arch-opponent of Walter Gropius, argued openly that universities must become “political universities,” research being supported only if it served “the state and the people.” Hans Frank, the Reichsminister and governor-general of occupied Poland, insisted that “The categorical imperative of action in the Third Reich is this: act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew of your action, would approve of it.” 7
    T HE “G ERMAN S PIRIT” IN S CHOLARSHIP
     
    In the summer of 1936 Heidelberg celebrated its 550th anniversary, an event that Hitler deemed to be of “national” significance. 8 The Heidelberg celebrations offered an opportunity to set out what, exactly, was meant by the term “German scholarship” in the context of the Third Reich, what Reinhard Heydrich called “the spiritualisation of the struggle.”
    At Heidelberg, this had already begun the previous year when the physics institute had been renamed after Philipp Lenard, the prominent advocate of “Aryan physics.” What Lenard meant was that “German natural sciences” differed from “Jewish science,” the former consisting of “observation and experimentation and not excessive theorising and reliance on abstract mathematical constructions,” unlike, say, relativity theory. Speeches at the anniversary ceremony carried this further, with Ernst Krieck arguing that in the nineteenth century science had been “shattered into a ‘heap’ of disconnected specialities that ultimately did not serve the people.” 9
    The “Aryan” physicists tried to extend their influence, taking over various scientific journals and creating their own Deutsche Mathematik, devoted to Aryan mathematics. (Not everyone toed the line by any means, and Walter Bothe’s research into nuclear physics—ignoring what the “Aryans” had to say—led to the creation of Germany’s first cyclotron.) Their actions were attacked in the British (but also international) journal Nature to such an extent that, at the end of 1937, the Reich Education Ministry forbade subscriptions to Nature in Germany. 10
    The Heidelberg celebrations featured—besides a congratulatory telegram from Hitler—several talks about the new intellectual climate. The Reichserziehungsminister (education minister), Bernhard Rust, argued that the national and racial background of individual scholars could not help but shape their scholarship, that there was no such thing as purely “objective science,” which was a “Jewish-Marxist” idea, and that this realization had “transformed the inner life of the German people,” helping them to forge an “organic unity” between Wissenschaft and the Volk. Krieck spoke in much the same vein but added that “it can be fully demonstrated…that…every worthwhile achievement in the