Teaching in Vain

Author(s):  
John P. McCormick

This chapter traces Carl Schmitt’s attempt, in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political, to quell the near civil war circumstances of the late Weimar Republic and to reinvigorate the sovereignty of the German state through a reappropriation of Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy. The chapter then examines Schmitt’s reconsideration of the Hobbesian state, and his own recent reformulation of it, in light of the rise of the “Third Reich,” with particular reference to Schmitt’s 1938 book The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes.

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Brothers

The rise of neo-Nazism in the capital of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was not inspired by a desire to recreate Hitler's Reich, but by youthful rebellion against the political and social culture of the GDR's Communist regime. This is detailed in Fuehrer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Naxi by Ingo Hasselbach with Tom Reiss (Random House, New York, 1996). This movement, however, eventually worked towards returning Germany to its former 'glory' under the Third Reich under the guidance of 'professional' Nazis.


Author(s):  
Michael I. Shevell

Abstract: It is commonly thought that the horrific medical abuses occurring during the era of the Third Reich were limited to fringe physicians acting in extreme locales such as the concentration camps. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there was a widespread perversion of medical practice and science that extended to mainstream academic physicians. Scientific thought, specifically the theories of racial hygiene, and the political conditions of a totalitarian dictatorship, acted symbiotically to devalue the intrinsic worth to society of those individuals with mental and physical disabilities. This devaluation served to foster the medical abuses which occurred. Neurosciences in the Third Reich serves as a backdrop to highlight what was the slippery slope of medical practice during that era. Points on this slippery slope included the “dejudification” of medicine, unethical experimentation in university clinics, systematic attempts to sterilize and euthanasize targeted populations, the academic use of specimens obtained through such programs and the experimental atrocities within the camps.


1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Kater

While in recent years a great deal has been written to clarify Germany's medical past, the picture is not yet complete in several important respects. In the realm of the sociology of medicine, for example, we still do not know enough about physicianpatient relationships from, say, the founding of the Second Empire to the present. On the assumption, based on the meager evidence available, that this relationship had an authoritarian structure from the physician on downward, did it have anything to do with the shape of German medicine in the Weimar Republic and, later, the Third Reich? Another relative unknown is the role of Jews in the development of medicine as a profession in Germany. Surely volumes could be written on the significant influence Jews have exerted on medicine in its post-Wilhelmian stages, as well as the irreversible victim status Jewish doctors were forced to assume after Hitler's ascension to power


1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Alexander Williams

In the early 1930s, Dr. Konrad Guenther, a longtime advocate of nature conservation, was exhorting the German people to return to “the soil of the homeland.” In the past, according to Guenther, whenever the German people had been forced to respond vigorously to the pressure of hard times, they had returned to their “natural” roots. He called on the population to learn about the Heimat (homeland) and its natural environment, ‘not only through reason alone, but with the entire soul and personality; for the chords of the German soul are tuned to nature. Let us allow nature to speak, and let us be happy to be German!” The stakes were high, for if the German people failed in this way to unite into a strong, “natural” community, they would become “cultural fertilizer for other nations.” Following the fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Guenther became one of the most vocal exponents of the notion that conserving nature would aid in the cultural unification and “racial cleansing” of Germany. Indeed, Guenther and his fellow conservationists saw their longstanding dream of a nationwide conservation law at last fulfilled under the Third Reich. The 1935 Reich Conservation Law guaranteed state protection of “the nature of the Heimat in all its manifestations”—if necessary through police measures.


Author(s):  
Elliot Neaman

This chapter discusses the life and work of Ernst Jünger, who was part of a strain in modern German conservatism that tested the limits of modernity and Enlightenment rationality. He catapulted to fame as a young man on the basis of his World War I memoirs, In Storms of Steel, which made him part of the antidemocratic forces of the Weimar Republic, but he retreated into the inner emigration during the Third Reich. After 1950 he lived a reclusive life but published a stream of essays and books and an impressive diary that chronicled almost four decades of life with sharp observations on a wide range of topics. He was a cultural pessimist who thought that the rise of a unifying planetary technology and the loss of local culture meant that we were entering into a posthistorical world of fragmentation, and new forms of cultural and political tyranny.


2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 533-539
Author(s):  
Craig Smith

Article 1 is the Basic Law's crown. The concept of human dignity is this crown's jewel: an interest so precious that the state must affirmatively protect and foster its inviolability. This uniquely important status is evident from human dignity's prominence in the constitution, the early Federal Republic's pressing need to repudiate the Third Reich, the many judicial and scholarly exegeses of Article 1, and human dignity's unique claim to absolute protection. The success of the German legal construct of human dignity also is apparent from its influence on the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights. That document likewise begins with a provision nearly identical to the Basic Law's Article 1.


2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Jan Konst

This article discusses five historical novels by Louis Ferron: Gekkenschemer (1974), Het stierenoffer (1975), De keisnijder van Fichtenwald (1976) De gallische ziekte (1979) and Plicht! (1981). They deal with German history, particularly that of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This article shows that the characters in these novels can be viewed in the light of Theodor Adorno's theory on the Authoritarian Personality.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Vera

Interwar Germany represents a highly interesting period from the perspective of police history. This book focuses on the German police force as an instrument of state authority and analyses its role, function and importance in interwar Germany based on the articles published between 1918 and 1939 in the journal ‘Die Polizei’. It reveals that the failure of the Weimar police as an instrument of state authority contributed significantly to the rise of National Socialism and the destruction of the Weimar Republic. After the Nazi takeover, the German police rapidly became a loyal and highly effective instrument of rule for the regime. Hence, the German police in the Third Reich blatantly failed in moral terms, but not as an instrument of state authority.


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