Nazi Germany and Southern Europe, 1933-45

Science, Culture and Politics

Fernando Clara, Cláudia Ninhos, Fernando Clara, Cláudia Ninhos, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137551528
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Nazi Germany and Southern Europe, 1933-45 is about transnational fascist discourse. It addresses the cultural and scientific links between Nazi Germany and Southern Europe focusing on a hybrid international environment and an intricate set of objects that include individual, social, cultural or scientific networks and events.

1

‘The “invisible” export of thought’: German Science and Southern Europe, 1933–45

Fernando Clara

A report on the commemorations of the ‘Quatercentenary of the University of Coimbra’, written by the Irish chemist Frederick George Donnan and published in the pages of the British scientific journal Nature (Donnan, 1938), offers a helpful and insightful first approach to understand many of the questions that the chapters in this book deal with.

Donnan’s report gives a detailed depiction of the celebrations held at Coimbra between 6 and 9 December 1937. It is a sympathetic and diplomatic text focusing mainly on institutional and social events, in which the author does not spare laudatory comments about the Portuguese authorities, most especially about the former ‘distinguished Professor of that University’ and ‘great Prime Minister’ of Portugal, ‘Dr. Salazar’. Towards the end of the text, however, the style changes somewhat; it becomes less formal and its author more expansive. Donnan seems to feel obliged to give his readers some professional and more personal notes on two visits he made during his stay at Coimbra that were apparently not included in his official programme. The first one, described as a ‘remarkable experience’, was to the Chemical Laboratory (‘a building in the neo-classical style erected in the last quarter of the eighteenth century’), the second to the English Institute at the University of Coimbra. This last ‘very interesting visit’ was paid to an institute ‘due to the energy and initiative of Dr. [Sidney George] West’ and ‘worthy of the strongest support’. Donnan is ‘astonished to find [there] a library containing some English scientific journals and a goodly number of the most modern English books on chemistry and physics’, and this leads him to a series of interesting personal reflections about the ‘modern world’ that end up in a significant concluding observation (Donnan, 1938: 65):

In the modern world the ‘invisible’ export of thought is an element of deep significance and importance. Britons in the past have been too apt to think that foreign nations are bound to assimilate the products of their thought and research by reasons of some sort of inevitable predestination. This curious diffidence – or sublime trust in Providence – is not much good in the rough catch-as-catch-can of the thrusting modern world.

It is important to emphasize that Donnan knows exactly what he is talking about. War in Europe was just around the corner; the British scientific journal in which his report was published had been banned in Germany in November 1937 (Anon., 1938a); and Donnan knew only too well what war meant, both for science and for the state. Besides the two articles published on the subject (Donnan, 1915, 1916), he had been ‘in the thick of the scientific and technological battle’ (Freeth, 1957: 26) during the Great War as an active member of several British warfare scientific committees.

Furthermore, Donnan is perfectly aware of the deep ‘significance and importance’ of this ‘export of thought’ because he is, himself, a product of it. In fact, like several other scientists of his generation, he spent a great part of the last decade of the nineteenth century in Germany, where he studied chemistry under Ostwald and van’t Hoff. He obtained his PhD from the University of Leipzig in 1896, and several of his scientific papers were written in German and published in German scientific journals. Like many other scientists and scholars of this period, Donnan is, therefore, a product of German science. His personal and professional connections to German laboratories and universities were interrupted but not broken off by the Great War. In 1933, after the death of Wilhelm Ostwald, he delivered the Ostwald Memorial Lecture at the Royal Society (Donnan, 1933). During the Nazi period, he helped German Jewish scientists fleeing the country (Herman Arthur Jahn, Edward Teller, and Herbert Freundlich, among others), and in 1939, just a few months before the Second World War broke out, he left in the Notes & Records of the Royal Society a curiously sympathetic brief report on a visit to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Berlin (Clark and Donnan, 1939; further biographical details on Donnan in Oesper, 1941 and Freeth, 1957).

Finally, it should be worth noting that Donnan received honorary degrees from several universities (among them Athens and Coimbra) and that he was a member of various international scientific societies, as, indeed, would be expected from a firm believer in the internationalization of science who, as early as 1910, had translated a book on International Language and Science in which the following epic paragraph can be found (Pfaundler et al., 1910: [VII] from the ‘Translator’s Preface’):

Internationalisation of thought is the motto of the twentieth century, the device on the banner of progress. Science, the Super-Nation of the world, must lead the way in this as in all other things.

The chapters in this book tackle the rather complex mixture of social, political, and cultural events, international scientific meetings, and personal networks that Donnan’s report on his visit to Coimbra partly unveils. This book is, therefore, about the ‘internationalisation of thought’ or, to be more specific, about the ‘export’, circulation, and appropriation of German scientific ‘thought’ in Southern European countries during the Nazi period.

The last two decades have seen a growing flood of publications concerned with science in National Socialist Germany. In an article that appeared 15 years after his important book Scientists under Hitler was published (Beyerchen, 1977), Alan Beyerchen distinguishes two basic streams of publications dealing with the subject (Beyerchen, 1992: 615–616):

One stream is that of collected essays surveying the role of the university (or a specific university) under National Socialism; in contrast to most such volumes published before the 1970s, careful attention is paid to the relationship of the scientific institutes with the regime. […] The other stream is that of examinations of specific disciplines and their practitioners or of specialized institutions.

Beyerchen’s review of literature still seems generally germane today, in spite of the many other books and essays that have appeared since 1992 and in spite of important commissioned research projects focusing on German science during the Nazi era that have been launched since then. The research programme promoted by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in 1999 on the History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the National Socialist Era deserves special mention in this context, as do several other projects initiated by German universities (Berlin, Munich, Heidelberg, and Göttingen, among others) that sought to understand their own entangled (hi)stories in the Nazi period. All of these projects have undoubtedly contributed with a very significant number of works to a much clearer understanding of how the National Socialist regime controlled some of its most important scientific institutions, and its results are generally in line with Beyerchen’s perspective (see Becker et al., 1998; Kaufmann, 2000; Bruch et al., 2005; Eckart et al., 2006; Kraus, 2006; Schmuhl, 2008; Heim et al., 2009; Hoffmann et al., 2014).

However, the chapters in this volume would have some difficulties completely fitting into the two streams of publications envisioned by Beyerchen. They certainly examine the role of universities, research laboratories, and other scientific actors and institutions under National Socialism, but they do it in a considerably different setting. First, their main focus is on the circulation and appropriation of knowledge in an international – bilateral, and sometimes also multilateral – environment. Second and furthermore, this environment is not exclusively scientific but also strongly determined by the political and cultural foreign policies of the states involved (in this respect, see for example Hård and Jamison, 1998). In other words: what this double shift of perspective means is that these essays deal with a hybrid international environment and an intricate set of objects that include social, cultural, or scientific events and personal networks along with scientific theories, disciplines, technologies, or methodologies.

Considering, therefore, the variety of this set of materials, and the fact that the internationalization of ‘German scientific thought’ during the period operates at a complex level where the scientific, the cultural, and the political are often closely intertwined, the term ‘science’ can only be understood here in the broadest sense of the German Wissenschaft, thus including both the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften. Odd, or at least unusual, as it may sound in a post-‘Two Cultures’ world, it should nevertheless be pointed out that this meaning of ‘science’ corresponds more accurately not only to the general use of the word in Germany, but also to the perception of the concept of Wissenschaft that the particular period and the Nazi regime appeared to favour. It is true that the cleavage between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften was already clearly perceivable, including in Germany, by the late nineteenth century, as the controversy between Dilthey and Du Bois-Reymond, which led the former to publish his Introduction to the Human Sciences, clearly shows. But the fact is that between 1933 and 1945 the growing relevance and conspicuousness of the political and ideological spheres somehow managed to set aside the differences between the ‘Two Cultures’. One only needs to recall the pivotal role played by the humanities in some of the more relevant scientific research institutions of that epoch, like the above-mentioned Kaiser Wilhelm Society, whose first president, and one of its founders, was the theologian Adolf von Harnack. And, as to the specific role and functions of the Geisteswissenschaften in the building of international scientific networks, the concluding observations of a speech given by the physicist Heinrich Konen in November 1929 at the general meeting of the Emergency Association of German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft) leave no doubt about their significance: ‘oriental studies, archaeology, research expeditions and philosophy are indispensable to support our decisive future foreign policy and as close to real life as bacteriology or mechanical engineering’ (Konen, 1930: 64).¹

The change of focus that such a perspective entails admittedly calls for a reassessment of the literature on Nazi science somewhat different from the one drawn by Beyerchen in 1992, though not necessarily contradictory to it.

Apart from some scattered and very differently motivated publications that appeared during the first decade immediately after the Second World War and whose authors, in one way or another, were all involved in the conflict – among them Max Weinreich’s Hitler’s Professors (1999, 1st edition 1946), Leslie A. Simon’s German Research in World War II (1947), and George Schreiber’s Deutsche Wissenschaftspolitik von Bismarck bis zum Atomwissenschaftler Otto Hahn (1954) – it is above all from the mid-1960s that Germany begins to reconsider the role of science and technology as well as the role of universities during the Nazi period. Most of the essays published in that decade (Abendroth, 1966; Kuhn et al., 1966; Erdmann, 1967) come from lecture series held in 1965 and 1966 at the universities of Tübingen, Berlin, Munich, and Kiel. But by 1969, the publication of Fritz K. Ringer’s The Decline of the German Mandarins already anticipated much of the work and research lines of the next decade. In fact, the 1970s go far beyond the panorama of occasional memorial lectures, important as they were, by bringing a significant shift to discourse in this area with the first academic dissertations on the subject (for example, Beyerchen, 1977) and a growing number of articles on similar topics published in international scientific journals (Düwell, 1971; Forman, 1971; Schroeder-Gudehus, 1972, among others). Of course, it is important to stress that works like the ones mentioned earlier were largely outnumbered by an already remarkable number of publications dealing with the Nazi regime from a historical– political point of view. The 200-page bibliography on National Socialism compiled by Peter Hüttenberger in 1980 might well be considered an emblematic milestone of the research interests until then: while most of the works listed there deal with historical–political topics (fascist theories, ideology, history of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), and so on), only three meagre pages itemizing 40 publications are devoted to the section ‘Sciences/University’ (Hüttenberger, 1980: 100–104).

Nevertheless, the shift of historiographical discourse to an international academic arena, announced in the 1970s, was to produce significant results in the following decades. Among these are several congress proceedings, edited volumes, and academic dissertations that basically fall into the two streams identified by Beyerchen in his aforementioned review essay (Macrakis, 1993; Walker, 1993, 1995; Brocke and Laitko, 1994; Hentschel and Hentschel, 1996; Hutton, 1999; Hausmann, 2000, 2001, 2002; Schmuhl, 2000; Heim, 2001; Szöllösi-Janze, 2001; Proctor, 2002; Bruch et al., 2005; Bialas and Rabinbach, 2006; Hoffmann and Walker, 2007; Maas and Hooijmaijers, 2009; Weiss, 2010; Jütte et al., 2011, to name only a few published after Beyerchen’s review).

Now, what is interesting about the vast majority of these publications is that they all share one common feature: they are mainly entangled in the inner landscapes and networks of German science and are, thus, primarily concerned with demystifying its internal organization, structures, and functions. That is to say: they tend to operate at local national levels, hence reproducing, to a certain extent, the typical parochiality attributed to the political and cultural systems they seek to analyse. The ‘“invisible” export of thought’ remained, therefore, still ‘invisible’.

The European fascist period was certainly a period of exclusions and disruptions, but it was also a time of intense international network building and scientific and cultural exchange: the exhibitions, public lectures, and academic or even touristic exchange that Germany organized between 1933 and 1945 in Southern European countries (from Portugal to Romania and Bulgaria, not forgetting Spain, Italy, or Greece) reflect a hybrid (that is, political, cultural, and scientific) obsession to ‘persuade’ and to ‘seduce’, ‘to make a friend out of an enemy or to make a friend out of an indifferent’ (Schwabe, 1940: 10).

The fact that international hybrid networks like these have attracted only incidental attention from researchers should not be surprising. On the one hand, the analysis of such complex networking systems implies an often intricate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. ‘The “invisible” export of thought’: German Science and Southern Europe, 1933–45
• 2. Beyond Germanness? Music’s History as ‘Entangled History’ in German Musicology from the End of the Nineteenth Century to the Second World War
• 3. Tourism as Networking for a Pan-fascist Mobilization before the Second World War
• 4. Student and Scholar Mobility between Nazi Germany and Southern/Southeastern Europe
• 5. International Contacts in the First Years of the Spanish CSIC, 1940–45
• 6. The Role of Culture in German–Spanish Relations during National Socialism
• 7. The Longing for a ‘Conservative Revolution’: German Influences over the Greek Inter-war Politicization of Technology and Science
• 8. Portugal at the ‘Third Front’
• 9. The Library of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Rom and Postwar Perceptions of German Scholarship
• 10. Tracing Eugenics: German Influences on a Greek Background, c. 1930–45
• 11. The Mild Eugenics Temptation in Portugal
• 12. A ‘Fascist’ Colonialism? German National Socialist and Italian Fascist Colonial Cooperation, 1936–43
• 13. Breaking Points of the ‘Axis’: Austrian Scholars, Politics, and Nazi Expansion to the South
• 14. Planning a ‘Modern Colonization on European Soil’? German Scientific Travels and Expeditions to Greece during National Socialism
• 15. Citizens of the Third Reich in the Tropics: German Scientific Expeditions to Brazil under the Vargas Regime, 1933–40
• Index