The German Genius

sphere of the natural sciences, no less than in the sciences of culture, has been intimately bound up with the…racial characteristics of the people concerned.” 11
    All this was underlined by a number of new institutes and seminars that were created at Heidelberg in the years before the outbreak of World War II, focusing on the military and political preparedness of Germany. Schmitthenner, who would become rector of Heidelberg in 1938, described himself as a “soldier, politician, and scholar” (i.e., in that order). He founded a seminar on the history of warfare, styling himself as a “frontier professor.” The Social and Economic Faculty focused on “spatial” research, Raumforschung , developing ideas of Werner Sombart that “economic life in Germany rested on two pillars, race and space.” The departments of classics, theology, languages, and literature were all affected—race was seen as a “determinant” of language, and people’s ability to absorb the Christian message was likewise regarded as a function of “blood, soil and race.” History teaching was reorganized around a new set of “key dates” or turning points, such as March 1912, when the last legal bans against Jews in Germany were removed. 12
    Steven Remy sums up the “German Spirit” in scholarship as follows: it was fundamentally opposed to traditions of teaching and research throughout the Western world, in that (1) it rejected “objectivity,” (2) it denied that scholarship served intangible notions of truth for truth’s sake, insisting instead that German scholarship must serve the “Volk,” (3) it opposed “hyper-specialization,” and (4) race was a central concept, that representatives of “inferior” races, like the Jews, “were incapable of examining the natural world honestly and accurately.” 13
    B IOLOGICAL D OGMATICS : “T HE L ANGUAGE OF O UR A GE”
     
    Just as Steven Remy has reconstructed the Nazification of one university, so James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld have explored the Nazification of a single discipline—folklore. 14
    There was in Germany a strong interest in folklore going back to Herder and the Grimm brothers. In fact, in 1940, Thomas Mann identified what he viewed as the fundamental difference between German culture and that of the West. “Whereas British and French writers produced art rooted in social and political reality, the Germans had dedicated themselves to the ‘pure humanity of the mythical age,’ which was based in nature itself rather than the circumstances of any historical era.” 15 This interest remained strong, and in the Weimar years a number of international conferences were held at the German Central Work Station for Folk and Cultural Landscape Research, while in 1926 the first issue of the journal Volk und Rasse appeared. What appealed to people about Volk culture was that it was organic, traditional, the exact opposite of the industrial worker. “He [the industrial worker] works with dead tools on dead material…His work pace is determined not by the sun, the season, the weather, but by a machine which goes at its own pace summer and winter, day and night. His work is measured exactly in millimetres and kilograms, measurements that have no relationship to life.”
    On this view, only Volk culture could give people a sense of fulfillment, all others would become “an un-German greenhouse plant.” 16
    Although the National Socialists appropriated the general approach of the folklorists, folklore had a wider appeal than that. Kurt Huber argued for a “resurrection” of folk culture to counter “the national loss of instinct by Germans, completely miseducated by too much humanism…” Wolfgang Emmerich examined Gottfried Benn’s notion that “peasantry is an inner attitude, not a line of business.” 17 The remains of German mythology, said another scholar, “were a force of secret resistance to bourgeois civilisation.” Herman Wirth, the founder of Ancestral Inheritance Inc., was filled with an unshakable belief in the “continuity of the early Stone Age religion and world view.” This was all a form of biological dogmatics . Max Hildebert Boehm reworked sociologist Wilhelm Riehl’s four S’s— Stamm , Siedlung , Sprache , Sitte (tribe, settlement, language, custom) “into the language of our age”—blood, soil, folk-nation, and folk order ( Blut , Boden , Volkstum , Volksordnung ). Above all there was the “ennobling” of the