In 1933, Jews, and to a lesser extent, political opponents of the Nazis, suffered an unprecedented loss of positions and livelihood at Germany’s universities. Of the 1,700 faculty members who lost their jobs, eighty percent were removed on racial grounds. With few exceptions, the academic elite welcomed and justified the acts of the Nazi regime, uttered no word of protest when their Jewish and liberal colleagues were dismissed, and did not stir when Jewish students were barred admission. Why did the ‘Nazification’ of German universities encounter so little resistance?

The subject of how German scholars responded to the Nazi regime has seen a resurgence of scholarship in recent years. In this collection, Rabinbach and Bialas bring some of the most important and original scholarly contributions together in one cohesive volume, to deliver a surprising conclusion: whatever diverse motives German intellectuals may have had in 1933, the image of Nazism as an alien power imposed on German universities from without was a convenient fiction.

Dr. Anson Rabinbach is a specialist in modern European history with an emphasis on intellectual and cultural history. He has published extensively on Nazi Germany, Austria, and European thought in the nineteenth and twentieth century. He is currently director of European Cultural Studies at Princeton University.

Dr. Wolfgang Bialas is a specialist in 19th and 20th century German culture, German literature, intellectual history and film. He is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Al Ain University, United Arab Emirates University.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Humanities in Nazi Germany
Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach

Chapter I: Georg Bollenbeck
The Humanities in Germany after 1933: Semantic Transformations and
the Nazification of the Disciplines

Chapter II Steven P. Remy
"We are no longer the university of the liberal age:" The Humanities and
National Socialism at Heidelberg

Chapter III Erhard Bahr
The Goethe-Gesellschaft in Weimar as Showcase of Germanistik during
the Weimar Republic and the Nazi Regime

Chapter IV Dieter Thomä
Difficulty of Democracy Rethinking the Political in the Philosophy of the Thirties (Gehlen, Schmitt, Heidegger)

Chapter V Richard Wolin
Fascism and Hermeneutics: Gadamer and the Ambiguities of "Inner
Emigration"

Chapter VI Martin Schwab
Nietzsche's Nazi Affinities

Chapter VII Karl-Siegbert Rehberg
Arnold Gehlen: "Images of mankind" and the idea of order in Philosophical Anthropology

Chapter VIII Willi Oberkrome
German Historical Scholarship under National Socialism

Chapter IX Jane O. Newman
Baroque Studies: The Legacy of Walter Benjamin in the Third Reich

Chapter X Susanne Marchand
Nazism, 'Orientalism' and Humanism

Chapter XI Frank-Rutger Hausmann, English and American Studies
In Nazi Germany

Chapter XII Volker Losemann
Classics in the Second World War

Chapter XIII Susannah Heschel
The Theological Faculty at the University of Jena as "a Stronghold of
National Socialism"

Chapter XIV Alan E. Steinweis
Nazi Historical Scholarship on the "Jewish Question"