Nazis blocking Jews from entering the University of Vienna, 1938 |
That National Socialism is an attack upon the Western heritage is now a generally accepted truism, nowhere more applicable than in the field of education. Before considering this basic antagonism the underlying premises of Nazi educational theory may be noted. To the Nazis the individual is a myth, having no separate existence apart from the "total collective- personality" of which he is a member. This larger, all-comprehending corporate personality is the Volk, a spiritual-historical being, the ideal form, mold, or type for all its members. It is immutable and eternal, the reality which endures and transcends ephemeral circumstance, always embodying the ideality and objectives of personal, group, and national life. Thus educational objectives cannot be devised or formulated for preconceived ends-they are predestined by the nature of the Volk and must be discovered. Personality is a derivative of race and cannot be fashioned arbitrarily, nor can it evolve autonomously in accordance with its own laws. ...There is no place for free, that is arbitrary and unmotivated, cultivation of the mind; "abstract life-strange theories" are to be avoided. ... An ethno-cultural determinism must rule all educational procedures.
[To Nazis,] Race is the natural form which differentiates life, a primal unity of living substance expressing itself in body, spirit, and soul, the basic reality which gives meaning to all knowledge. Humanity is a myth-there are only racial types. Education, then, cannot develop man but can only elicit responses characteristic of a racial group. Blood has symbolic significance it is the source of the spirit of a race and transmits the ancestral heritage.
The German word Volk is untranslatable as "folk" or "people. " It implies the organic union of a racially determined community in a collective personality embracing generations past, present, and to come. Hence it is eternal, immutable-as fixed as a Platonic type or form.
The Volk is a communion as well as a community, a fellowship of faith and feeling. The lone thinker easily becomes divorced from his community and no longer shares its intuitive grasp upon vital truths.
The Relativity of Truth. Nazi theory denies the existence of a positivist system resting on truths of universal validity.
National Socialist reforms in the field of higher learning can be understood only in the light of the Nazi attitude toward science and research-an attitude which springs inevitably from the ethnocentric nature of the premises underlying all National Socialist thinking. It attacks first the detachment of the scientist. "Scientific objectivity", asserts a German educational journal, "is only one of the many errors of liberalism. The liberal man is only an artificial construction. He does not exist in reality ; there are only men who belong to a nation and to a specific race. "
Under the Civil Service Law of April 7, 1933 , members of the teaching staffs of the universities and other collegiate institutions might be summarily removed for "non-Aryan" origin, unsatisfactory political records or views, membership in "subversive" organizations, or on grounds of administrative necessity. By May 4, according to reports in the German press, about 200 teachers had been dismissed, mostly because of their Jewish origin or liberal views. This number included former ministers of state, world- famous scientists, historians, jurists, and two Nobel prize-winners. ...
The position of the college or university teacher in Germany has become one of complete subordination to the regime. Incessant pressure is put upon him to participate in party functions ( which, incidentally, monopolize much of the time and energy of his students) , to subscribe for the official journals, to lecture at Land-Year camps and SA gatherings, to favor students who miss work because of party activity, and to refrain from making complaints except through official channels. He may be disciplined in innumerable and vexatious ways. His lectures may be canceled if they conflict with party functions. He may not travel abroad without official permission. His favorite seminar may be abolished. He may be transferred as a disciplinary measure.
The curriculum in German colleges and universities has been modified mainly in two directions-greater stress on Rassenkunde (race science)...New chairs have been established in such fields as peasant lore, race science, defense physics, and folk problems. ....Extreme political orientation tends to undermine speculative science. ....The social studies and the humanities are completely dominated by race science, in which subject the University of Berlin alone offers 30 seminars. Nazi mathematicians have founded a new journal, Deutsche Mathematik, to deal with their subject along racial lines. The party has financed at Frankfurt an Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question , designed as the first division of a Nazi high academy as a center of scientific study from the point of view of race.
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