Hitler's Philosophers
Yvonne Sherratt
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN: 0300151934
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Hitler had a dream to rule the world, not only with the gun but also with his mind. He saw himself as a "philosopher-leader" and astonishingly gained the support of many intellectuals of his time. In this compelling book, Yvonne Sherratt explores Hitler's relationship with philosophers and uncovers cruelty, ambition, violence, and betrayal where least expected—at the heart of Germany's ivory tower.
Sherratt investigates international archives, discovering evidence back to the 1920s of Hitler's vulgarization of noble thinkers of the past, including Kant, Nietzsche, and Darwin. She reveals how philosophers of the 1930s eagerly collaborated to lend the Nazi regime a cloak of respectability: Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and a host of others. And while these eminent men sanctioned slaughter, Semitic thinkers like Walter Benjamin and opponents like Kurt Huber were hunted down or murdered. Many others, such as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, were forced to flee as refugees. The book portrays their fates, to be dispersed across the world as the historic edifice of Jewish-German culture was destroyed by Hitler.
Sherratt not only confronts the past; she also tracks down chilling evidence of continuing Nazi sympathy in Western Universities today.
Hitler's enforcers.The Gestapo and the SS security service in the Nazi revolution
The Third Reich Sourcebook (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)
Several encounters with war throughout his life, and because he had experienced at first hand its atrocities one might have expected his enthusiasm to have been dampened. In spite of its horrors, however, in 1884 he wrote ‘one must learn from war (1) to associate death with the interests for which one fights – that makes us venerable; (2) one must learn to sacrifice many and to take one’s cause seriously enough not to spare human lives’.53 Brave words, given that after his own short encounters.
Quiet, unpretentious home in the large streets behind Tiergarten in Berlin, reaching the age of ninety-two, but never losing her freshness of mind and memory.’ She recalled Haeckel from her parlour where: the small old furniture and the ancient, ever ticking clock . . . made one forget oneself and lose oneself in the past. . . . In the dreamy twilight hours . . . smiling with quiet pride, she recounted . . . how her nephew [Ernst] visited her when he came to Berlin; how with unassuming ways.
Rosenberg’s project of reconstructing the university curricula also paid great heed to the younger generation. Professors were encouraged not only to teach and undertake research in line with the new ideology but also to influence their students directly. ‘Hitler spoke of how his party had infiltrated the student organisations.’67 Bäumler and Krieck were promoted by the Nazis principally because they were considered to be essential educators. As an expert in pedagogy, Krieck demonstrated.
Opportunities for womanly existence open to you are completely different from what the “student” in you believes, and much more positive than she suspects. May empty criticism fall away from you, and arrogant negativity recede.’30 Heidegger’s erotic drive was at times barely suppressible. He exclaimed on one occasion, ‘dear Hannah, the demonic struck me . . . nothing like it has ever happened to me’.31 And on another occasion he wrote: ‘But my longing for you is becoming less and less.
Germany. . . . No economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power. Today we have no longer any sword in our fist – how can we have a successful economy?36 Surveying the vista of the German landscape outside, he reimagined the scene. He replaced trees with men, and pictured himself once more before an enormous audience. From the bird’s-eye view of his second- floor cell window, he saw in his mind’s eye a mass of men saluting with their arms outstretched.