6. Science and National Socialism

Editor's Introduction

Two NOBEL LAUREATES were instrumental in building a bridge between science and the Nazi world view. Philipp Lenard (1862.1947), who received the Nobel Prize in 1905 for his work on cathode rays, occupied the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Heidelberg. Together with his fellow Nobel laureate Johannes Stark, he declared himself a follower of Hitler as early as 1924. Lenard's Deutsche Physik (German Physics) (1936) was praised by the official party bibliography for making science relevant to the political struggle, [1] and indeed this was the aim of the work. Lenard divided all knowledge into the natural and spiritual sciences. In this scheme all animate matter is brought into the world of the spirit, which, in turn, is determined by the racial origins of the organism itself. But inanimate matter is also included in the "mysteries of nature" by emphasizing the interconnection between all natural phenomena, animate or inanimate.

Stress upon the "organic" and the fundamental unity of all of nature according to a divine plan is basic to National Socialist science, indeed to its view of nature (see also page 81). This theme appears throughout the chapter. With this hypothesis Lenard is able to avoid "materialism" and can, instead, subordinate scientific investigation to the "greatest mystery," which is one of the spirit. Of itself, matter is merely a mechanism which does not comprehend the spiritual dimension all-important to scientific investigation. We have already seen how the spiritual dimension was linked with race. Lenard thus lays the foundation for the absorption of science into the world view.

Johannes Stark (1874-1951) further elaborates these ideas. After receiving a Nobel Prize for his work on electromagnetism, he had to retire from his chair at the University of Wurzburg because of his polemics against Albert Einstein and the Theory of Relativity in 1922. He devoted the rest of his life as a scientist to the cultivation of fruit trees and to forestry. Under the Nazis he became the president of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the state organization concerned with supporting scientific research. Stark makes a direct and simple equation between science and Volk. What remains of science is the emphasis upon exact and disinterested observation of natural phenomena, but this is immediately tied, Once again, to the Nordic race. With its emphasis upon race the Nazi world view envelops all scientific activity. Stark stands the truth upon its head: German science, as he defines it, is objective and factual, while Jews are advocates of opinion -- and the proof for this is seen in the quite unobjective science of race. Scientific respectability depends on the racial soul.

Lenard mentions Newton as one of the true scientists; indeed National Socialist scientists regarded themselves as descended from scientists of the seventeenth century. For these men did, as a matter of fact, believe in the organic nature of the universe; they were interested in religion as much as in science and their theories sought to encompass the whole universe. Science had changed in the nineteenth century: the "new physics" had denied the organic nature of the Newtonian universe and the Theory of Relativity sounded its death knell.

That is why Bruno Thuring's attack on Einstein is important. Thuring (b. 1905) was a young astronomer and mathematician, active in the Heidelberg Association of Students of Science, a branch of the National Socialist student organization. It was before this body that he gave the talk (September 4, 1936) that was reprinted in the official mathematical journal, Deutsche Mathematik, from which our excerpt is taken. The year after his speech, Bruno Thuring became a lecturer at the University of Munich, working at the university's observatory. Thuring, like the others, emphasizes the so-called spiritual factors in science, but he also presents a good exposition of the National Socialist history of science. His opposition to the course of modern science is obvious, and modernity is, in typical Nazi fashion, linked to the Jew. The materialism of Einstein's space-time concept and the supposed absence of "energy" from his system are contrasted with the Nordic's instinctual understanding of the meaning of energy. The influence of Nietzsche is not to be denied in this passage.

If a certain view of human nature is implicit in Thuring's approach to science, as it is in that of Lenard and Stark, what then of psychoanalysis? Kurt Gauger gives us the official Nazi version of this science. Though he had taken a medical degree, he was not active in that field. He was associated with the government office in charge of educational films and edited its series of pamphlets. Moreover, as a side line he wrote novels about seafaring men. Gauger was a propagandist, and as such helped to lay down the line for a German psychotherapy: the world view must be primary. Small wonder that he appeared at the International Medical Congress for Psychotherapy in 1934 as a political leader rather than as a practicing psychoanalyst. For to that title he could lay no claim -- certainly not before an international audience.

Gauger's attacks against Freud are very similar to those of Thuring against Einstein. The materialism of the Freudians is contrasted with the positive values which National Socialism has brought to science. When he comes to discuss the actual nature of mental illness, he moves toward the theories of Carl Gustav Jung, not just by contrasting Jung and Freud but in a more fundamental sense. The emphasis upon the "collective unconscious," which expresses itself in the community linked together by a shared archetype (or soul) derives from Jung, as does the denial that the ego and the id (defined as soul and mind) are opposed to each other. At one point Gauger takes Freud's famous metaphor -- that the relation of the ego to the id is like that of a rider to a horse -- and changes Freud's wild horse into an animal in complete harmony with its rider. Once again the organic is stressed, the genuine unity of all nature. Jung, it must be remembered, had taken over the presidency of the German Society for Psychotherapy in June 1933. He began to refine his concept of the "collective unconscious" in the pages of the journal of the association -- writing about the differences between the Aryan and the Jewish archetype while advocating the necessity of understanding the German soul. Thus another distinguished scientist came to the aid of the Nazi cultural drive.

The physician in the new Reich must be a "biological soldier." Hanns Lohr (b. 1891), the medical director of the University Hospital at the University of Kiel, defines the place of the medical sciences in the National Socialist state. He calls for a basic revision in medical studies toward building character and personality rather than merely transmitting knowledge. This approach to medical education has its parallel in the general educational theories of the Third Reich (see Chapter 8). Empirical knowledge is integrated into the total biological picture and here the basic spiritual fact of Volkish belonging is primary. If Volk and race are the chief reality, then a medical science which is divorced from these is merely mechanical. On the other hand, an emphasis on race is not anti-intellectualism, but rather leads to intuitive insights. Lohr's book Aberglaube und Medizin (Superstition and Medicine) (1940) stresses the immanent laws of nature which only the Nordic, with his talent for observation, can under stand -- a point made by Lenard. Superstition is the belief that healing derives not from nature but from supernatural causes, such as those advanced by Christianity.

In these documents the Nazi world view is equated with organic nature: Volk and race are part of an interconnected totality of which nature is one facet -- all held together by spiritual principles which were expressed in Nazi culture. The "biological soldier" must be aware of this totality so that he can serve the truth and through it his Volk. For Lohr this also meant encouraging the propagation of the race through healthy child-bearing as well as approval of the sterilization law (see page 90).

Science was absorbed by Nazi culture, and in turn helped to give this culture an air of intellectual respectability. The importance of empirical facts was never denied; instead they were integrated into the world view. There can be little doubt that Nazi science, in departing from the famous tradition of German scientific accomplishment, contributed to the final failure of the Third Reich in the war effort. It was no accident that the Allies, not Germany, developed the atomic bomb, the "miracle weapon" for which Hitler waited in vain.

G.L.M.

_______________

Notes:

1. Nationalsozialistische Bibliographie, Jahrg. I, Heft II, (March 1936), p. 4. No. 25a.

The Limits of Science, by PHILIPP LENARD

Natural Science and the Spiritual Sciences [1]

Originally, physics meant -- and essentially continues to mean even today, especially in our conception -- natural science in general. This is one part of human knowledge; the other part consists of the spiritual sciences.

Natural science -- physical -- deals with the totality of nature, or the world, as far as it is perceptible to us. Its subject is everything that exists that is observable. And this is a great deal, for it reaches to the farthest celestial bodies. Obviously, however, it is not everything, not the entire world. There is, as our innermost being teaches us, a portion of the world that is inaccessible to our senses.

We call the portion of the world that is accessible to our senses the material or substantial world; the other part, of which our inner being gives us information but whose existence is also apprehended by our senses when we observe organisms, we call the spiritual world.

Our subject, therefore, is the material world and everything that happens in it; the spiritual sciences, on the other hand, deal with matters of the spirit. Among these spiritual sciences are history, theology, so- called philosophy, jurisprudence.

The work of the investigator of nature who furthers the natural sciences is very different from that of the man who deals with the spiritual sciences. The investigator of nature relies entirely on his senses; he uses them to gather daily ever more extensive and new information about the material world. Thus he generally focuses his observations on the inanimate part of the material world, since that part has most easily confirmed and still confirms for him the simple uniformities of the processes of the entire material world. The animate part is strikingly different from the inanimate; it is marked by processes of a highly intricate character, and it is this difference, accessible to sensory perception, which indicates to the senses the existence of an extra-material world. Obviously it is the same "spiritual world" of whose operations we are informed by our own inner being. The animate part of the material world is influenced by the "spiritual world," which is not noticeably the case with the inanimate part. Animate organisms exhibit phenomena in which the spiritual world and the material world work together. Life consists precisely in this cooperation; we designate matter which has spirit (soul) as "living."

In the case of the spiritual sciences, the basic data do not come to the investigator from the outside, through the portal of his senses, but from within, from his own spirit. The representative of the spiritual sciences is mainly concerned with animate, inspirited nature, and he uses his senses essentially only for commerce with other matter-bound spirits, mostly with other human beings.

The endeavor of the spiritual sciences should produce a new cognition wrested from the spiritual world. Nevertheless, in reality such new knowledge reaches us only seldom, and it does not come from the professional representatives of the spiritual sciences. The great founders of religions, of whom barely one appears every thousand years on earth, are the bearers of such knowledge. Also true artists, thinkers, poets in words and music, and true statesmen, of whom perhaps one may be given to us every hundred years. The spiritual scientists at the universities should, at least, administer this knowledge, but not in such a manner that the knowledge at hand or that which can be reclaimed from the past is eruditely tossed back and forth, with the result that the best of this knowledge remains mostly unnoticed. Rather it should be exchanged in a manner that feeds and nourishes the spirit of the people and thus truly educates the people. This obviously has been entirely lacking during long periods of history, in consequence of the profound decline of the German spirit. One did not understand how to provide the German spirit with a nourishment suitable to it because not even spiritual scientists were sufficiently conscious of the most fundamental differentiations in the spiritual world -- namely, that every organism has its own special spirit (that portion of the total spirit world which its body is able to hold on to) and that the greatest differences among spirits are based on groups varying in physical structure according to their inherited physical constitution. They did not grasp clearly enough that, just as fleas and elephants have different spiritual constitutions, so the spirits of different human races and ethnic groups are totally different from each other. Down the centuries attempts have been made to nourish the spirit of the German people with "the spirit of humanity," as though spirits could be patched together at will, as though fleas could be educated profitably by elephants, or vice versa. Thus the spiritual sciences were incapable of increasing the spirit of the German people, or even of preserving the sterling quality which it had already achieved in the lap of nature, without these sciences....

The Truth-Value of the Investigation of Nature

The conceptions and laws derived from the observation of natural processes, which are adapted to them and constantly tested against them and which are the main results of the investigation of nature, are cognitions of realities, of things and structures which exist independently of us and of our thinking and existed long before us. These findings have a truth-value. The true is that which, in our own spirit, corresponds to the reality which is independent of the arbitrariness of our spirit. The true is not that which is "verified" here or there, but that which must always verify itself because it is derived from a wholly interconnecting reality.

The perception of a total interconnectedness in nature is one of the most distinguished achievements of the investigation of nature. The progress of natural science has shown with increasing clarity and comprehensiveness that all processes of the observable world are closely tied to other processes in that world; every discovered natural law is seen to be linked to a number of other laws in such a way that they mutually support each other and none could be valid without the others....

Hence it can be asserted that the understanding of things that are as yet unintelligible also depends on discovering and on making evident in detail their interconnection with what is already known to us and with everything else in nature. It was precisely the yearning of Nordic man to investigate a hypothetical interconnectedness in nature which was the origin of natural science. His guess was correct, but after following it down paths strewn with unexpected difficulties, reality was in most cases constituted very differently from the way it was first imagined. The marvels of reality were not to be found in our own spirit; they had first to be discovered in the external world before our spirit, surprised at first, could assimilate them, and thereby grow truer and richer in conscious harmony with the totality of nature.

The intuition that all of nature is interconnected -- which spurred on the great researches -- was also correct when it included our own spirit within this interconnectedness. The simplicity of the results seemed to point in this direction, for what is suitable to our spirit, what is arranged for its comprehension, seems simple to us ....

The Limits of Understanding

Some of the laws which transmit to us the understanding of nature have been shown to be valid only within definite limits. This means that their applicability is dependent on the fulfillment of certain conditions. The progress of knowledge, therefore, has frequently shown what is valid outside of these limits and has thereby discovered even more general laws which encompass the narrower concepts. In this way we can also expect further progress.

The complete comprehension of any given natural process must be regarded as impossible. Because of the interconnectedness of nature, such comprehension would involve understanding the totality of the infinite world -- from which we, in the true sense of the word, must remain forever infinitely removed, if for no other reason than because of the finiteness of our body to which our cognitive spirit is bound. We know from experience that we are not capable of understanding everything at once, and even the successive comprehension of an infinite number of things of limited extent would take an infinitely long time. This accounts for the fact that beyond every uncovered mystery of nature we find an even greater mystery.

But progress in the investigation of nature has also shown that even in the material world -- hence apart from the spiritual world -- there exist things more difficult to understand than others. If we consider matter alone, we are dealing with mechanisms of which the spirit can form pictures, or models, which behave according to the laws of mechanics and with which it is relatively easy to work. But even the phenomena of heat pose difficult cases of matter in motion. More difficulties arise when we observe the ether, because of its component light and energy. To be sure, concepts have been formulated which give solid support to our notions of the ether, but we have sought in vain for mechanisms in the ether; every experimental presumption in this direction fails to tally with reality. The ether seems more difficult to grasp than matter; it seems already to indicate the borderline of comprehensibility. It is obvious that these borders have been definitely crossed in the attempt to understand the spiritual world; for no human mind can even comprehend its own spirit. ...

Materialism: A Delusion

The peculiar tendency to recognize only matter and not spirit must be mentioned here since it is an outgrowth of natural science. The great achievements of natural science in understanding hitherto insufficiently known portions of the totality of the world have led to an arrogant dismissal of what is incomprehensible. The greatest investigators never shared this attitude; they were always aware of the limits of understanding; even if they crossed old borders, they immediately saw new borders ahead before which they had to come to a halt. But the lesser spirits, for whom the great ones had already blazed a trail and made their work easy, adopted an insolent omniscient attitude. Such was the case after Newton and again after Darwin.

In recent times, the successes of technology have produced a special form of arrogant delusion with respect to matter. The actualization of practical possibilities opened up by a greater comprehension of nature gave rise to the notion of the "mastery" of nature. "Man has slowly become the master of nature." Such utterances on the part of spiritually impoverished "grand technicians" acquired a great influence because of the impressive display their new techniques and inventions made possible. And that influence has been even strengthened by the all-corrupting foreign spirit [2] permeating physics and mathematics. In the face of this development, the spiritual sciences -- increasingly estranged from the comprehension of nature and not cultivated in a truly German manner -- have utterly failed.

From Philipp Lenard, Deutsche Physik. Vol. I: Einleitung und Mechanik (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1936), pp. 1-2, 11-13.

_______________

Notes:

1. Geisteswissenschaften -- that is, the social sciences or the "humanities."

2 The Jews are meant here.

Respect for Facts and Aptitude for Exact Observation Reside in the Nordic Race, by JOHANNES STARK

The slogan has been coined, and has been spread particularly by the Jews, that science is international. It refers not so much to science as such as to scientific researchers and demands a special position in the nation for them. They ought not to be considered from a national point of view, but are to be evaluated strictly on the merits of their scientific activity without regard to their ethnic origin. According to this concept, Jewish scientists ought to be inviolable even in the National Socialist state and should be allowed to continue to exert a standard-setting influence. From the National Socialist side, in opposition to this view, it must be insisted upon with all possible emphasis that in the National Socialist state, even for the scientist, the duty to the nation stands above any and all other obligations. The scientist, too, must consider himself a member and a servant of the nation. He does not exist only for himself or even for his science. Rather, in his work he must serve the nation first and foremost. For these reasons, the leading scientific positions in the National Socialist state are to be occupied not by elements alien to the Volk but only by nationally-conscious German men.

But aside from this fundamental National Socialist demand, the slogan of the international character of science is based on an untruth, insofar as it asserts that the type and the success of scientific activity are independent of membership in a national group. Nobody can seriously assert that art is international. It is similar with science. Insofar as scientific work is not merely imitation but actual creation, like any other creative activity it is conditioned by the spiritual and characterological endowments of its practitioners. Since the individual members of a people have a common endowment, the creative activity of the scientists of a nation, as much as that of its artists and poets, thus assumes the stamp of a distinctive Volkish type. No, science is not international; it is just as national as art. This can be shown by the example of Germans and Jews in the natural sciences.

Science is the knowledge of the uniform interconnection of facts;  the purpose of natural science in particular is the investigation of bodies and processes outside of the human mind, through observation  and, insofar as possible, through the setting up of planned experiments. The spirit of the German enables him to observe things outside himself exactly as they are, without the interpolation of his own ideas and wishes, and his body does not shrink from the effort which the investigation of nature demands of him. The German's love of nature and his aptitude for natural science are based on this endowment. Thus it is understandable that natural science is overwhelmingly a creation of the Nordic- ermanic blood component of the Aryan peoples. Anyone who, in Lenard's classic work Grosse Naturforscher (Great Investigators of Nature), compares the faces of the outstanding natural scientists will find this common Nordic-Germanic feature in almost all of them. The ability to observe and respect facts, in complete disregard of the "I," is the most characteristic feature of the scientific activity of Germanic types. In addition, there is the joy and satisfaction the German derives from the acquisition of scientific knowledge, since it is principally this with which he is concerned. It is only under pressure that he decides to make his findings public, and the propaganda for them and their commercial exploitation appear to him as degradations of his scientific work.

The Jewish spirit is wholly different in its orientation: above everything else it is focused upon its own ego, its own conception, and its self-interest -- and behind its egocentric conception stands its strong will to win recognition for itself and its interests. In accordance with this natural orientation the Jewish spirit strives to heed facts only to the extent that they do not hamper its opinions and purposes, and to bring them in such a connection with each other as is expedient for effecting its opinions and purposes. The Jew, therefore, is the born advocate who, unencumbered by regard for truth, mixes facts and imputations topsy-turvy in the endeavor to secure the court decision he desires. On the other hand, because of these characteristics, the Jewish spirit has little aptitude for creative activity in the sciences because it takes the individual's thinking and will as the measure of things, whereas science demands observation and respect for the facts.

It is true, however, that the Jewish spirit, thanks to the flexibility of its intellect, is capable, through imitation of Germanic examples, of producing noteworthy accomplishments, but it is not able to rise to authentic creative work, to great discoveries in the natural sciences. In recent times the Jews have frequently invoked the name of Heinrich Hertz as a counter-argument to this thesis. True, Heinrich Hertz made the great discovery of electromagnetic waves, but he was not a full-blooded Jew. He had a German mother, from whose side his spiritual endowment may well have been conditioned. When the Jew in natural science abandons the Germanic example and engages in scientific work according to his own spiritual particularity, he turns to theory. His main object is not the observation of facts and their true-to-reality presentation, but the view which he forms about them and the formal exposition to which he subjects them. In the interest of his theory he will suppress facts that are not in keeping with it and likewise, still in the interest of his theory, he will engage in propaganda on its behalf. Only his theory is valid for him, and in the face of doubts he demands a faith in his theory as if it were a dogma. The dogmatic zeal and propagandistic drive of the Jewish scientist leads him to report on his achievements not only in scientific journals but also in the daily press and on lecture tours. The phenomenon, for example, of Jews pushing themselves prominently to the foreground at scientific congresses, such as the gatherings of German natural scientists and physicians, can be explained in the same way.

From Johannes Stark, Nationalsozialismus und Wissen schaft (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1934), pp. 10-12.

Nature Presupposes a Spiritual Disposition, by BRUNO THURING

Einstein's work can be understood only as counterpart and antithesis to the intellectual tendency of a Kepler or a Newton. Whereas, still intoxicated with the tremendous successes of Kepler and Newton, their successors and spiritual heirs already became partly conscious, but increasingly less so, of the fact that the creative power of these two great men did not rest so much on their logical intellect as on their world-embracing outlook on life, with its simultaneous and equal concern for the realm of the material and the realm of the spiritual and non-material -- that is, on qualities of soul and disposition. Others of their followers turned deliberately toward what was essentially a purely materialistic conception of spiritual and material nature, in the hope of being able eventually to grasp the whole of nature in one mathematical formula. However, Kepler and Newton made their own anti-materialistic mode of thinking perfectly clear. The instinctive knowledge that nature and creation were not to be divorced from their creator and that the world of our paltry five senses, the world of matter, simply could not be the whole world, was so valuable and essential to their investigations that they expressed this knowledge not only in numerous private letters but also in their justly famous treatises. Their scientific aspirations, their drive to understand, and their inquiry into nature were in the first instance born of a deep religious feeling -- the word being used here in its true meaning -- and whenever they raised the question of the meaning and purpose of scientific inquiry, they never furnished any answer except their desire to comprehend and explain the existence and operation of God in the investigation of His plan of the world and His works. The ancient magnanimity of soul of the Germanic man, directed away from the world and all external appearance, posed the first world-encompassing question about nature and thus became the mother of natural science. If the generation from which Kepler and Newton sprang had been exclusively devoted to materialism -- if indeed it had been incapable of an inner view extending far beyond mere sensory perceptions -- Kepler's search for the divine harmony of nature would have been impossible and therefore unsuccessful. At the same time, his success did not come to him easily. Not only for years but for decades, he exerted all his genius for mathematics and creative combinations, which he knew how to subordinate to the primacy of exact. observation. No failure, no disappointment could ever shake his rocklike conviction that the world had to be in harmony, for its progenitors were perfection and beauty. "With God's help I shall certainly conclude this undertaking -- and indeed in a military manner, by issuing my orders boldly, daringly, and triumphantly today, and worrying about my funeral tomorrow," he wrote in a letter. And in another letter: "My whole being strives to penetrate form and existence, God Himself, the architect of creation -- and here is where the greatest joy beckons me." And again: "Here I throw the dice, and write a book either for my contemporaries or for posterity. Maybe it will have to wait centuries for its readers, but then God Himself waited thousands of years for someone to describe His works." Kepler wrote all this in the glowing flame of supra-terrestrial exultation over having finally succeeded in finishing his work. The drive to comprehend what can be perceived by the senses, born of a conviction and faith in what cannot be grasped by our senses, and a modest yet persevering devotion to the exact observation of nature, determined the scientific attitude which made Kepler the prototype and example of the German natural scientist. Therefore, his scientific achievements were, and remain, de spite their international reputation, the products of a thoroughly German and nationally conditioned conception of nature. The fairy tale of an international and absolute natural science that is independent of Volk, history, and race is smashed to pieces on Kepler. Conversely, a liberal theory of science could have come into being only in a period which, under the influence of persons of alien blood, increasingly fell victim to materialism and which was no longer able to see Kepler and Newton as anything more than great intellectualists and mathematicians.

But how can such a conception do justice to a man like Newton, who found it necessary in his main work, Principia Mathematica, to delve extensively into the problem of divinity and who, on the basis of his world-encompassing view of nature, could demand that divinity be evaluated as a problem of natural science? "Thoroughly similar only to itself," he describes divinity, "entirely ear, eye, brain, arm, feeling, insight, activity, and all in a manner not human, even less corporeal, but in an entirely unknown manner. We see only the structure and color of a body; we hear its sounds, we feel its exterior surface, we smell and taste it. But as regards the inner substances of matter, we can comprehend them neither through our senses nor through our intelligence. Even less do we have a conception of the substance of God." And he concluded this part of his contemplations as follows: "This I had to say about God, whose works it is the task of natural science to investigate." Is not such thinking and such knowledge of the threads that bind the realm of matter to the realm of the spirit, is not this awareness of the fact that with our limited number of senses we are able to grasp only a restricted part of the whole world, worlds apart from materialism, worlds apart from that relativistic conception according to which every description of nature may deal only with relations of matter to matter and according to which even space and time are only attributes of matter because there is, allegedly, nothing but matter? The formulation of general relativity as a principle of nature, as is done in Einstein's theory, can be nothing more than the expression of a thoroughly materialistic attitude of mind and soul. The feeling for nature and the racially determined concept of nature possessed by Nordic man, who strives to comprehend nature not only with his intellect but also with his heart and soul and with his imagination, are here opposed by a concept of nature which aims to set up the intellect alone as the cognitive principle in the investigation of nature and which consequently disregards the possibility of conceptions geared to our spirit in favor of a purely symbolical, mathematical, formalistic, and non-concrete representation of nature....

By starting out from facts alone, even though based on observation and experiment, we cannot arrive at a "decision" with respect to the "correctness" of either [the Nordic or the Einsteinian conception of nature]. Rather, the complex of facts is identical in both cases. The difference between the two concepts goes deeper; it lies on another level, namely, where natural science as an activity takes its point of departure. For that reason, the assertion of books popularizing the theory of relativity that it is a conception of nature based on experience is utterly untrue. For the substratum and essence of natural science are not to be found in this or that measurement, in this or that experiment, or in the exact reading of an instrument. All these are merely its exterior forms of expression, its results. and as such something which is objective, a datum provided by nature. But what is essential in connection with what concerns us today is to determine what lies at the base of inquiry, what it springs from, what use the investigator makes of it and what it can be utilized for. It is not the What which is the decisive factor, but the How, Whence, and Why. If that were not so, there would be no explanation for the fact that the natural sciences came into existence and blossomed among the valuable peoples and races of Europe, and among these overwhelmingly in the Germanic segments thereof. This fact cannot be ignored; it attests to the communality of an identical basic attitude of mind and spirit which coincides with the communality of racial and Volkish characteristics. Not only Kepler and Newton, but also Galileo, Guericke, Faraday, Gauss, Maxwell, Robert Mayer, and many others attest to this fact.

But a word about the space-time problem. The conceptions of space and time are thought frameworks given to us by nature, into which we order and arrange all physical and chemical phenomena, but also all manifestations of life, mind, and soul. They are forms of thinking of our innermost being, so to speak, Our "weapons" for confronting the outside world. Newton, as a true Germanic natural scientist, was fully conscious of that and he regarded space and time not as purely logical concepts, but as concepts strongly anchored in intuition. It is altogether different with the Jew Einstein. The attempt to view space and time as attributes of matter exclusively and the desire to understand them solely as matter, so that on the basis of this mental attitude it had to be claimed that the motion of matter is meaningful only in relation to other matter, are fully in keeping with the thoroughly and onesidedly materialistically oriented spirit of the theory of relativity. For the relativist, this is a self-evident concept and in return he acquiesces in all the violence done to intuition. Intuition and feeling are sacrificed to the worship of matter and pure logic....

Still another closely connected difference between the relativistic, Jewish and the Nordic-Germanic conception and representation of nature lies in their attitude toward the concept of energy. Power, strength, energy, is something immediately clear and understandable to the Nordic man; not only does he possess it himself, but it has confronted him from the primordial beginnings of his history and from the beginning of his personal life in his work as a craftsman, in the effort of physical activity. He knows from experience that through energy one can set bodies in motion or bring moving bodies to a stop. For Kepler and Newton, as Germanic men, it was immediately obvious, whenever they encountered such changes in motion, to speak of the effects of energy. Kepler was the first to give voice to the idea that the sun was the source of an energy which determines the trajectory of the planets. Newton founded his general mechanics on an exact and measurable definition of energy.

It is no coincidence that the half-Jew Heinrich Hertz [1] and the full-Jew Einstein attempted to create a structure of mechanics from which the concept of energy has wholly vanished. The Jewish philosopher Spinoza likewise was ignorant of the concept of energy. It seems to be entirely alien to the world-feeling of the Jew, and he is therefore at pains to exclude this alien phenomenon from his consideration of nature. Hertz clothed this aspiration in his demand that all anthropomorphisms, such as energy, be excluded from natural science. But in doing so he overlooked the fact that every construction of a scientific concept arises in principle from human experience, that is, from a cognitive process in which the specific nature of the cognizing subject is as essentially involved as the specific nature of the cognized object. Finally, even Hertz's attempt is anthropomorphic if in place of energy he postulates the coupling of mechanical systems, whose motions thereupon lose all freedom.

Einstein's theory of relativity, however, sets aside the concept of energy through the most radical upheaval of all space-time concepts. He postulates, in a purely mathematical, formalistic way, a curvature of space in the environment of all matter and necessarily connected with it. In this curved space the planets follow trajectories analogous to the so-called geodetic lines, that is, to the shortest possible lines between two points in curved planes. Thus, through the elimination of the concept of energy, dynamics become, with Hertz as well as with Einstein, a kind of cinematics.

We can see by this example what is involved here: Not new cognitions of natural events, not new findings of scientific research, but something relating to human inwardness, something concerning the soul, world-feeling, attitudes, and racial dispositions.

There have been repeated attempts in lectures and books to present the theory of relativity as the grand capstone of centuries of progressive scientific development, which began with Copernicus and Galileo and led, via Kepler and Newton, to Einstein. No! Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton are not Einstein's predecessors and pathfinders, but his antipodes. Einstein is not the pupil of these men, but their determined opponent; his theory is not the keystone of a development, but a declaration of total war, waged with the purpose of destroying what lies at the basis of this development, namely, the world view of German man. Therefore, it could be so joyfully saluted and enthusiastically celebrated only by a generation that had grown up on purely materialistic modes of thought. This theory could have blossomed and flourished nowhere else but in the soil of Marxism, whose scientific expression it is, in a manner analogous to that of cubism in the plastic arts and the unmelodious and unharmonic atonality in the music of the last several years. Thus, in its consequences. the theory of relativity appears to be less a scientific than a political problem.

The flooding of the book market shortly after the war with popular and semi-popular expositions of the theory of relativity naturally could not aim to acquaint the large public interested in natural sciences with the highly difficult logical and mathematical thought-content of the theory. Such a goal cannot be attained in this way. Rather, the effect of these books was to be found mainly on the level of the inner soul and a world view. Some even ventured -- and they were not altogether wrong in this assumption -- to look upon the theory of relativity as a typical expression of our time. Colin Ross, [2] in his book Die Welt auf der Waage (The World in the Scales), declared that Einstein's theory could have been discovered only in our time, that the principle of relativity gave our time its keynote and left nothing untouched, no moral law, not even Kant's categorical imperative.

In this manner, assisted by advertising in the newspapers and lectures from the professorial chairs, this purely scientific theory, whose main ingredient was the postulate of relativity, grew into a physical world view. And since it is always impossible for several world views -- say, a physical, a philosophical, an astronomical, or a religious world view -- to exist simultaneously without affecting and influencing each other, the theory of relativity threatened to become the dominant world view altogether and in every direction. This development be. came possible only because of the general recognition accorded natural science as a scientific discipline, characterized by the highest objectivity since it supposedly deals exclusively with established facts, whose existence is in no way subject to being conditioned or determined by the cognizing subject. It was deliberately overlooked that all interest in nature in itself presupposes a certain spiritual disposition, and that the perceiving subject has his own manner and content of conception and his Own method of inquiry, all of which must depend On himself and his particular endowments. The few who were of different opinions were disregarded. Nevertheless, it remains forever true that the natural scientist in his work remains a son of the people and a representative of their feelings and yearnings, as is also true in the case of the artist and the statesman. This obvious fact could be misunderstood only because nobody took the trouble to delve deeply enough into the wellsprings of natural-scientific inquiry; everyone remained suspended at the point where facts were observed, experiments made, results recorded. To prove the dependence of natural science on racial stock requires less study of results in textbooks and more study of the original works of the great discoverers and their personalities as scientists. Kepler and Newton as Nordic men on one side, Einstein as a typical Jew on the other, are the most illuminating examples -- the former because they did not shrink from allowing the reader an insight into their own spiritual life, the latter as a contrast to them.

May the young generation of natural scientists and philosophers recognize, therefore, what is meant by the concept of German natural science! If, however, someone asks: How can we arrive at a German natural science? our answer must be: A new National Socialist science cannot create, as if by sorcery, arbitrary and amateurish world systems and conceptions -- only infinite damage could come of this. Rather, it must reverentially immerse itself in nature itself, and in the great Nordic discoverers and interpreters of nature, to find there the essence of German being in glorious abundance. As for the rest, let us keep as far away as possible anything that comes from the hands of the Jew, and let us be Germans and National Socialists in all our work and thought! Then everything will be all right. I shall close with a variation of a quotation from R. Eichenauer: "Natural science is not a root, but a blossom. Let us take care of the roots. The blossom will appear by itself." [3]

From Deutsche Mathematik, edited by Theodor Vahlen (Leipzig: Kommissionsverlag von S. Hirzel, 1936), pp. 706-711.

_______________

Notes:

1. Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894), physicist, discoverer of the electrical frequencies. Johannes Stark praises him because his Aryan half may have broken through (see page 207). The Nazis had it both ways.

2. A writer, chiefly famous for his Unser Amerika: Der deutsche Anteil an den Vereinigten Staaten (Our America: The Part Played by the Germans in the United States) (1936), which claimed that the German racial stock in America was superior to the other races in this country.

3. Richard Eichenauer, racial theorist, became director of the peasant adult education school (Bauernhochschule) in Goslar. Author of works such as Die Rasse als Lebensgesetz fur Geschichte und Gesittung (1938) (Race as an Attitude toward Life in History and Morals).

Psychotherapy and Political World View, by KURT GAUGER

I have chosen as the subject of my address "Psychotherapy and Political World View."

It is clearly indicated that the sense of my talk will be political, since I am standing before you in the uniform of a political soldier, of an SA man.

The connection between psychotherapy and politics may appear strange to many of you, especially those who have come from abroad to participate in this congress, and you may probably look upon the relationship between psychotherapy and politics as a purely tactical matter.

Hence you might, perhaps, be of the opinion that a political address at an international scientific congress, as far as the participants from abroad are concerned, could have only the purpose of winning sympathy for our new state. And our German participants may be of the opinion that such a political report, for them, signifies a directive to the action which we know adequately enough as coordination. [1]

To be sure, it would give me great joy if, through my talk, I were to succeed in giving those of you from abroad a better understanding of what is happening today in Germany. But my utterances, in this sense, are not exclusively directed to our foreign participants. My remarks are made ad hoc. I do not want to persuade....

Even the one-sided exponents of the scientific research tendencies in medicine have not dared to assert that such an entity as a human soul does not exist.

They have avoided, however, taking a position on this phenomenon -- either by declaring that it was of no interest to them, that it did not fit in with their alembics, levers and screws, or by saying that the psychic life, by its nature, is only apparently different from the physical processes. They meant to say that just as there are definite chemical transformations which can be perceived subjectively as color changes, likewise are there highly complicated chemical physical proc esses which can be observed with relative convenience as psychic life. It is only because of the temporary inadequacy of our chemico-physical research methods that we cannot yet express a feeling directly as a chemical formula.

For us, on the other hand, it is evident -- that is, something not requiring further proof -- that this conception of psychic life is not presuppositionless, not extra-scientific, bit rather the expression of a philosophical decision along the lines of materialism.

For us it is certain that even perfect chemico-physical research methods, applied to living brains, will always register only chemico-physical processes, and will never show even a trace of a thought or a feeling.

In the same way we reject the twin brother of materialism, namely that "idealism" which, conversely, holds the non-corporeal alone to be essential, but which can just as little find a trace of a corporeal substratum in the most thoroughgoing analysis of thoughts and feelings.

Freud did not look for chemical processes in mental illnesses. In the investigation of mental illnesses he limited himself strictly to psychological methods, but only because he considered that the path of chemistry was not yet traversible. In one passage he expressly states that he regarded all psychological findings so far as provisional, which eventually would be replaced by chemical formulae.

Thus he took an unequivocal position in favor of the materialistic world view and deprived the sphere of the soul of the value peculiarly its own. According to this opinion, even though we have not yet reached the point, one day we shall be able to spare ourselves all spiritual battles and upheavals through the simple medium of a well-mixed intravenous injection.

The philosophical premises of scientific materialism, of which Freud himself obviously was unaware, made it possible for psychotherapy at first to conduct itself exclusively like an exact science. Freudian psychoanalysis is the attempt to apply chemico-physical methods to the investigation of the human psychic life.

We do not dispute the value of physics and chemistry. Nor do we assert that in the future things will depend entirely and only on ideology....

I do not at all oppose the fact that there is and should be a special pathology and therapy in the treatment of neuroses. We do not dispute the value of physics and chemistry. Hence we do not dispute the value of certain theses of Freudian psychoanalysis which were formulated on the basis of such quasi-scientific observation of human psychic life.

Philosophical enmity develops only with the interpretation of the results of such research! To express it differently: We do not fight astronomy, but we will obstruct any astronomer who would want to use astronomical science as a weapon for Communist anti-religious organizations.

Or, let us take a medical example: A genius and a moron could easily at the same time come down with a severe cold. Despite the fact that they have a sickness in common, we would not be apt to mistake the one for the other. Thus we use yardsticks which have nothing directly to do with the common cold. To express it differently: What we miss in Freudian psychoanalysis is a system of values.

To return to the example of the common cold: casuistically, everything relative to the cold which psychoanalysis has etiologically collected may be correct. What is still missing, however, is the sure criterion for the evaluation of the man who has the cold....

The scientific materialism of Freudian psychoanalysis is closely related to the economic materialism of the Marxists.

The specific National Socialist concept of feeling and disposition is alien to both of them, as is the specific National Socialist concept of community.

In turn, materialism is closely connected with individualism.

The political expression of individualism is egoism. Materialism is the world view of egoism. True, even materialism does not teach unbridled egoism. It always calls attention to the fact that other individuals also exist in addition to the single individual. It teaches, rather, a "well-considered egoism," that is, an egoism moderated by a regard for the egoism of others.

The illegitimate political child of Freudian psychoanalysis, namely, Adler's individual psychology, moves in this direction. Adler's individual psychology provided the former German Social Democratic state with a ready-made surrogate for religion, though it must be added that even before 1933 German individual psychology exhibited certain resistances to its establishment on a Marxist basis.

Fidelity, honor, love, comradeship -- heroism, Volkdom, homeland -- as words with philosophical weight and hence as political factors, have no place in the world view of materialism.

For materialists, for egoistical individualists, a man ready to sacrifice himself for an idea is necessarily a fool, a pathological individual.

If we consider whether the convinced egoist can achieve his philosophical goal, his subjective well- being, the gratification of his egoism, the pitiful fiasco is at once evident. It needs no sharp-sighted speculations, in the manner of Schopenhauer, to know that everything can be satisfied in this world, except egoistic strivings.

Freud speaks of overcoming the pleasure principle. But he cannot name the value system which can be experienced only outside of every egoistic evaluation. Such a system of values is possible only as an expression of a world view that does not have the individual and his wellbeing as its exclusive goal.

Hitherto, psychotherapy was largely individualistically oriented, and precisely at the point where one spoke of the relationship of the individual to the community. To us, the concept of the individual is at the outset false; it is the expression of an attitude which we call liberalistic.

For us it is not at all the concept of personality but rather the concept of the individual as ens existens per se that from the outset constitutes the negation and falsification of a biological datum, namely, that of a reality that is not merely "metaphysical" but indeed biological, the German people.

As inheritors of the individualistic epoch, we know much about individual conditions of mental illnesses. What we did not hear so much about, however, before Adolf Hitler, are the general conditions of the health of the soul.

If you ask me about the connection between psychotherapy and National Socialism, I must answer that the problem of the health of Our people's soul is the basic question with which National Socialism is concerned. Adolf Hitler did not start out from purely economic considerations.

He did not promise his first followers and later the whole German people "more earnings and less work," as had been done earlier by Marxist demagogues. He promised us nothing. He achieved something psychologically unprecedented, in that he made demands rather than promises.

He demanded of every individual the utmost in terms of participation and a disposition prepared for action. And precisely by so doing, he reopened the wellsprings of the healthy soul of our people which had begun to run dry. Since the advent of Adolf Hitler, Volkdom and homeland, discipline, fidelity, and honor, are again words of biological value in Germany! ...

The term "mental illness" requires, empirically speaking, a more exact explanation. Most people know or think they know what is meant when we speak of mental illness. A mentally ill person is someone who continuously makes senseless and illogical assertions and commits correspondingly irrational and illogical actions, or someone who no doubt thinks and acts logically as it were, but on the basis of emotional and logical presuppositions which nobody but himself considers valid. The layman also usually includes among the mentally ill people who act and think logically but on the level of small children, while in terms of bodily development and age they are adult human beings. It may be questionable whether the traditional designation "mental illness" is actually meaningful in connection with these cases. But under no circumstances can the sick people with whom psychotherapy is concerned be summarily designated as "mentally ill" or as "mentally ill to a lesser degree." The Intelligence Quotient of these patients, if measured against that of healthy people within the same walk of life, is in fact frequently higher than the average.

Soul is a designation that encompasses the whole area of individual human existence, so far as it is not of a corporeal nature. Sickness of soul, therefore, always designates the whole area. The line of demarcation between psychoses (insanity) and psycho-neuroses (soul sickness) becomes perceptible only through a consideration of the total man.

"Health of soul," "sickness of soul," and "insanity" are, therefore, terms indicating the "gradations of the capacity to relate to others."

Hence the concept of illness espoused by German psychotherapy is oriented toward the basic premise that man is a community-building being. At the same time, community building must here be understood in the specific National Socialist or German sense of an essentially psychic process. An association of stockbrokers is in no sense a community according to us.

Hence the German psychotherapeutic concept of illness is "politically" determined, and this means politically in the sense of a definite decision about a world view.

The term "relationship" implies a connection with something extrapersonal and supra-personal.

Like every other illness, mental illness can be immediately perceived in the impairment of the vital capacities. As with every other sickness, there are those who come by sickness of soul through heredity and those who come by it through accident, and in both forms there exist degrees of intensity, as in the case of every purely physical sickness. The feeble-minded, the hereditarily insane, and the constitutional psychopath are to be mentioned among those' afflicted with hereditary soul sickness.

Heretofore, when dealing with these patients, it was not customary to regard their capacity for forming psychic relationships as a yardstick to measure the degree of their illness. Yet everything depends on just that.

It is entirely analogous with ethnological research: blond or dark-haired, slender or stout, brachycephalic or dolichocephalic, is of "scientific" interest only if these racial features are not evaluated as expression. Only when racial difference also signifies a psychic difference is it of vital importance to us.

And where does the danger of certain racial mixtures lie if not in psychic depravity? Physically, the union of Negroes and whites is entirely possible. Physically, bastards are healthy if their procreators were healthy. Wherein should the incompatibility of such a union lie if not in the realm of the soul?

The situation is similar in the case of those suffering from congenital psychic sickness. For instance, feeble-minded persons frequently -- and unfortunately -- enjoy the best of physical health. Their health is not animal, but animal-like. The great physical strength of many feeble-minded professional criminals is well known. Equally well known is the animal procreative faculty of feeble-minded persons that is so dangerous in the Volk-biological sense. [2]

But is the term "sickness of soul" -- that is, the lack of psychic relationship -- at all applicable to these near human beings? The answer is that it is, but only in consideration of their psychic possibilities; only in reference to their "world view" can they be viewed as dangerously sick in a Volk-biological sense. This means that they are not dangerous because they are unable to count and write, but because psychically they cannot relate.

The world view of the feeble-minded embraces his own person, and other persons only to the extent they can serve the gratification of the most primitive instincts. Good-natured feeble-minded persons attach themselves to those who give them food and drink and a bed. Their relationship to other people is therefore essentially of an egoistic nature, hence not a relation in the true sense.

This psychic inability to relate is even more explicit when viewed as a decisive symptom of severe illness in schizophrenics. There are lesser degrees of congenital feeble-mindedness which can be so designated, not because the patient can count up to 20 instead of up to 5, but because some beginnings of true psychic relationship are still at hand, that is, because the patient is still capable of being educated instead of merely drilled. The schizophrenic, on the other hand, is characterized by a total absence of a psychic capacity to relate. The world which he views and perceives is exclusively a dream world. Other persons may enter this dream world in speaking and acting roles, as they may in the normal dream of a healthy individual. But this does not yet constitute a true psychic relationship to real human beings. The schizophrenic, for instance, does not talk to someone who visits him-he talks to an apparition of unknown origin that may perhaps have been stimulated by the visit or that may have been created in his mind purely by accident and entirely independent of the visit. The schizophrenic only seems to talk to his visitor, if he speaks at all. And he may also simultaneously converse with others who are not present, such as someone long dead, or with fabulous beings which he sees.

The diseased state of the constitutional psychopath is of the same kind, if not of the same degree. In contrast to schizophrenics and feeble-minded persons, the psychopath is often entirely capable of truly perceiving the actual world -- persons and situations. The psychopath is frequently not lacking in intelligence. Nor is his physical condition decisive. There are both physically strong and physically weak psychopaths.

Again the absence of psychic relationship to others is the decisive and sociologically important symptom of the sickness. The psychopath is the born egoist. Measured by the degree of his sickness, the psychopath, despite his intellectual endowment, is more closely related to the schizophrenic than is the good-natured half-wit. Only to a very inadequate extent is the psychopath capable of a true love relationship of real passion, of true dedication. The talented psychopath, from a Volk-biological point of view, is infinitely more dangerous than the obvious severely mentally ill person, or the feeble- inded person, or the psychotic. The psychopath is incapable of a true bond with a symbol, with a vital happening. But his talents may enable him to simulate such a bond.

An untalented psychopath, a liar who believes his own lies, may also believe that he has a relationship with others but only as long as he is not called upon to serve such a bond, as long as he can follow his own egoism, his ambition and desire for power.

This does not mean that ambition and desire for power should fundamentally be designated as psychopathic. They can be thoroughly manly virtues. It is a question of emphasis; the key word is "only." "Only" ambition, "only" desire for power, are the distinguishing marks of the psychopath.

For a normal human being, this distinction, once he has grasped its importance, is not difficult to make, since it is not an abstract scientific matter, but an emotional, spontaneous expression of his ethical capacity. At the same time, for the healthy and non-sentimental human being, there can be no doubt that the successes of the pathological egoism which marks the psychopath (just as sit venia verbo the successes of psychopathological nations) are only apparent. There is no injustice in the world. The final accounting always balances if one never loses sight of the realm of the soul. In the life of the individual as in the life of whole peoples, the final fate is the immediate expression of the attitude of psychic engagement, even if, from a materialistic point of view, the final accounting should not balance. Here again, men differ along philosophical and political lines, namely, between those who can experience the defeat of a hero as a victory and those who are not capable of doing so. Or expressed in another way: There is a fulfillment of life, but never a gratification of egoism. Happiness is necessarily unattainable on the level of egoistic gratification, since it is possible to satisfy everything but egoism itself.

Of necessity, therefore -- and as the expression of an implacable inner-worldly justice -- the liberalistic-materialistic world view, with its goal of "the greatest happiness for the greatest possible number," ended in the deepest dissatisfaction, in the inferno of the deepest sickness of our people's soul.

The Third Reich has not inscribed happiness on its banners, but virtue....

Since it is my purpose to discuss, to the best of my ability, some aspects of the fundamentals of German psychotherapy, it is necessary also to say something about the healing process, about the methodology of treating patients with psychic disorders.

In order to treat any sickness and to investigate the path to a cure, it is necessary to know the etiology, the cause of the illness. To a large degree this is identical with a thorough knowledge of the genesis of the development of the illness.

No doubt it is possible to heal many illnesses without an accurate knowledge of the etiology. Pains in the upper stomach frequently disappear if the patient is sent to bed and a special diet and warm bandages are ordered. Such treatment is beneficial under all circumstances, regardless whether the organs of the upper stomach are suffering from a slight inflammation or more serious disorders. But with sicknesses of more severe character it will always be necessary to diagnose not only the affected organ but also the kind of illness.

The same is true with psychic illnesses. A great number of so-called psychic disorders will disappear as the result of suggestive persuasion on the part of the doctor. Frequently the psychotherapist needs only to mention things which the patient has already told himself often enough, but the fact that a qualified physician says them encourages him.

It depends upon the process of perception, which is a necessary ingredient in the healing power.

Perception is a total process and only distantly related to knowledge; just as it defies comparison if a young midwife directs hundreds of births and then should become a mother herself.

Methodologically the road of retrospection is the road of Freud. At the risk of being considered a "Freudian," on this road one must deal with events that have given a name to a whole segment of life in every human being, the age of puberty. Methodologically and taken by themselves, many of Freud's findings are correct, but the interpretation of their meaning and their assigned place in the totality of human affairs appears unbearably wrong to us.

The road of Jung looks forward. Freud asks: Whence? Jung asks: Whither? Freud is the scientist, only the scientist; Jung is an ethician. One could also call him a seer, in the deepest and most reverent sense of the word. Jung is the poet among psychologists. His subconscious is full of living forms with whom one speaks and consorts like human beings, who can give counsel and warning, with whom one tries to be on a good footing because otherwise they may become "angry." Jung's psychology is a demonology. The essence of a demon is contained in its name. Primordial wisdom has it that one can disarm a demon, even make servant of him, if one knows his name.

This is nothing but the process of perception, which heals like any other form of cognition.

While the true magician knows that his forms are always his forms, even if occasionally they overwhelm him, it can still happen to the sorcerer's apprentice that he seriously believes he can lead German youth to TAO, [3] while we are satisfied with the choral music from the carillon of the Potsdam Garrison Church: "Always practice fidelity and honesty!"

Freudian psychology incorporates all the advantages and dangers of the Jewish spirit, Jungian psychology all those of the Germanic soul.

Freud is atheistic; Jung, not in terms of doctrine but in terms of attitude, is marked by a Catholic piety....

Perception is courageous, active, clear-eyed self-responsibility -- an attitude which accepts personal responsibility even for those matters for which the individual human being himself is not responsible. This in the face of the Biblical saying "Man is wicked from youth," or in the face of personal, undeserved calamity.

In such circumstances, the "ego" and the unconscious are not two different entities; they are one, as horse and rider are one when the rider truly knows and understands his horse, can tell him what he wants him to do, and when the horse has understood that it has a good rider.

It is, therefore, not necessary to try to explain that mind and soul do not have to be enemies, or that the destiny of man is his intellectuality, a progressive cerebration. The man who is condemned to die is mistaken if he assumes that the world is coming to an end.

We have described personality as a configuration of actualized possibilities. We can add here that ... there may be individuals who not only have lived a full, well-rounded life, but also have been gifted with perception: they are the men whom we call the true leaders of the people, the thinkers, poets, and politicians....

A ground plan is an essential part of every architectural design, even if it does not indicate exactly how the rest of the building is to be constructed. The following closing remarks concerning the profession of the psychotherapist should be regarded as a ground plan.

Psychotherapy is closely related to pedagogy. Psychotherapy points up the importance of a correct education by showing that, as a rule, a wrong education, even in the case of healthy material, not only leaves the individual badly educated but frequently leads to the sickness of his soul. (To prevent misunderstanding, let us add here that, from a psychotherapeutic point of view, an especially "good" education frequently turns out to be a particularly "bad" one.)

Psychotherapeutically speaking, the development of specific ethnic virtues must be mentioned as the goal of a healthy education. Our educational ideal is not the education of the personality, but to bring up German boys and girls; young Germans. Personality is the fruit, the organic result, of the ripening of the given ethnic propensities.

At the same time, it must not be forgotten that the term "virtue" does not have an ascetic connotation in Germany. Indeed, the binding National Socialist demand is: "Common interest before self-interest," a demand which, like all the other demands of National Socialism, derives from the biological sphere. Biologically, self-assertion is a necessity of life, and only that self-interest is reprehensible and destructive which harms the common interest. This differentiation is purely psychic and is therefore, for One whose soul is healthy, no more difficult to understand than the equally important distinctions between breeding and training, hardihood and brutality, compassion and weakness, passion and fanaticism, steadfastness and dogmatism, enthusiasm and elation, love and sexual gratification, deep emotion and sentimentality.

Psychotherapy, therefore, can serve as a critic of pedagogy, but it can also have a direct, practical relationship with pedagogy since in many cases the treatment of neuroses is tantamount to overcoming educational mistakes. But in the case of adults, the physician should never be or try to become an educator. Rather, he must undertake only the function of introducing the process of self-education, which is more in keeping with the biological situation of an adult, in contrast to the situation of a child.

Psychotherapy is also related to pastoral work, but only in subject matter. The essential difference between the two is frequently misunderstood. It can best be made clear by the equally customary and equally wrong comparison between the psychotherapeutic session and the Catholic confession. For one thing the confession is based on a fixed moral system and a clear understanding of that system, secondly the concept of sin as a violation of this moral system, and finally a confessor with the power of absolution.

A psychotherapeutic session contains none of this. One may, perhaps, see a certain similarity between a neurotic's feeling of guilt and the religious feeling of transgression. But it would be blasphemy to equate the two. If a sick person with a compulsion to wash his hands, for instance, is in utter despair because on one occasion he shook someone's hand without having had a chance to wash his hands first, it is obvious that the moral system of the compulsion to wash is not of a religious nature, but of a highly private nature. It is also obvious that in such a situation the physician has only an apparent relationship to the confessor. In the beginning the patient may, perhaps, perceive it as such, but great progress in psychotherapeutic treatment will have been achieved when the patient relinquishes the desire for absolution because he begins to understand that it is perception which will set him free. One can perhaps say that basically a deep religious conflict is hidden in each neurosis. But that does not make every neurosis also a religious conflict. The essentially religious conflict can be fought only when, for instance, the patient is no longer concerned with the cleanliness of his hands, but when, with the courage of responsibility, he begins to think about the purity of his heart.

Psychotherapeutical activity can therefore be called pastoral work only in a special sense.

Psychotherapy, as we have described it, has two different tasks -- one general, the other particular.

Psychotherapy is first and foremost the philosophical-political foundation of all medical practice and should therefore occupy an essential place in all medical studies.

It is well known that up to now hardly any beginnings have been made in this direction. Lectures on psychology in general and medical psychology in particular that have been introduced here and there are certainly useful, but scientifically they are still based on the concepts of the nineteenth century. A relationship to the problems that have been discussed here is hardly noticeable.

The task of psychotherapy in the narrower sense is to educate physicians with special qualifications for treating soul sickness. In practice, this means that these physicians will have to undergo another course of study in addition to their general medical studies. They must know and should have absorbed the history of thought, especially that of their Own people; they must have arrived at a certain judgment with respect to philosophical and metaphysical problems; they must be fully conversant with the social sciences, and especially racial science, to mention only a few "non-medical" disciplines.

The question can also be raised as to whether the opposite way would not be equally possible, namely, to start from the humanistic sciences and then add the necessary medical and biological knowledge. It is known that the leaders of psychotherapeutic schools who are physicians themselves are aware of this possibility and have used it in practice by admitting non-medical students.

From a lecture given at the Medical Congress for Psychotherapy, Bad Nauheim, 1934, published in Politische Medizin: Grundriss einer deutschen Psychotherapie (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1934), pp. 7, 12-14, 16-17, 23-27, 49, 52-54, 61-63.

_______________

Notes:

1. Gleichschaltung: a term used to describe the absorption or control of organizations by the Third Reich.

2. See "The Hereditary Health Law," page 90.

3.  TAO, for Jung, is the unity-giving symbol of Chinese philosophy, an irrational unity of contraries. See Psychologische Typen (Zurich, 1930), pp. 303 ff.

The Physician Must Come to Terms with the Irrational, by HANNS LOHR

We National Socialists are of the opinion that the physician, leaving his "ivory tower" work at a university clinic far behind, must first of all, in close contact with the Volk community, come to terms with the "irrational" which forms the bridge between the physician and man if the patient is not to be only a "case" or "material" for study.

Hence the National Socialist state is not interested in stuffing a medical student with a great mass of individual, disconnected facts and imparting anemic bits of knowledge which he usually learns ad hoc -- that is, only for his examination -- and entirely forgets four weeks later. Rather, it wishes to lead him, through a knowledge of the great biological interconnections to a deep reverence for life....

By no means are we against science. Indeed, we demand from the future physician a great measure of scientific knowledge. However, this can be achieved only by reinvigorating the course of instruction with considerably more emphasis on its relationship to human biology than it has received heretofore through the transmittal of purely abstract and dead subject matter. It is precisely here that a truly rational reform of studies must be inaugurated.

Johannes Stein correctly points out that the medical student comes into contact with the living human being -- that is, the patient -- much too late. If he has no experience with a sick person until after he has passed his first examination, frequently a profusion of regulations and preconceived notions stands between him and his patient. Let no one misunderstand us. We have no intention of imitating the medical schools of France or even their specific method of instruction, which from the very beginning puts the student in contact with patients, concentrating almost exclusively on medical techniques and methodology and, for the average student, putting no great emphasis on theoretical knowledge.

We believe, however, that it would certainly be useful to require service as a nurse and orderly as a precondition for medical studies. While performing this selfless service for his fellow men, the young student will soon find out whether or not he has chosen the right profession.

On the other hand, this practical nursing service, involving, as it does, sacrifice and self-denial, also presents us with an opportunity for a strict selectivity. A principle of selection which leaves the decision, at the end of the course of instruction, entirely up to the teachers on the basis of purely intellectual abilities must be rejected as altogether wrong. How many highly important men were told by their high-school teachers that they had no ability at all! Nor is the process of selection completed even after the pupil meets all qualifications for medical studies. A year of labor service and an additional half year as a practical nurse allow a much more certain judgment of a young man's character endowments. But even during his academic studies -- which will soon undergo a fundamental change, whereby the emphasis will be shifted from the "spectacle" of illnesses in the lecture hall to the sickbed itself -- in fact at the end of each semester, instead of receiving the usual probationer's certificate the medical student should be repeatedly subjected to evaluation. In the case of the large institutions this may appear to be a practical impossibility. It is, however, a most important task for every lecturer and every department head in clinics and hospitals, and their qualifications as teachers ultimately on how well they perform it.

[Wilhelm Frick [2] has said]: "Only he who is his whole being is fully committed to the Volk and seeks nothing for himself and for his own advantage belongs in the university. Whoever is called to study or to teach will not be recognized for his grand words but for his deeds and accomplishments in the service of the Volk community. The National Socialist concept of knowledge and the newly defined task of university studies have by no means lowered the intellectual standards of the university. Rather, it has raised them so that they can be satisfied only by stricter spiritual discipline. If the German student can draw his energies from the deepest dedication to National Socialism, he will do his duty in the way the Volk expects him to do it."

In former years standards of selection sank progressively lower as the number of medical students increased, and more particularly as the medical schools received individuals who neither racially, ethically, nor philosophically were suitable for the medical profession. Consequently, the personal relationship between teacher and student was lost, and with it, naturally, the living model of leadership. The greater the influx of the multitude, the lower the individual accomplishment. In addition, Jewish lecturers occupied the chairs of medicine and despiritualized the art of healing. [According to Reich Physician Leader Gerhard Wagner]: "They have imbued generation after generation of young physicians with their mechanically oriented spirit."

A culture ideal prevailed in the liberalistic period, now definitely overcome, that entirely disregarded the character education of the individual.

Hence the building of character and personality, through our teachers, must again be placed in the foreground; next to scientific training, this is the main task of our teachers. Only thus can we return to the ethics and high moral status of an earlier generation of physicians (one has only to read the Hippocratic Oath), which stood on solid philosophical ground and has no peers in terms of its professional knowledge....

Enemies of National Socialism have for years spread the lie that National Socialism by nature stands for an anti-intellectual attitude and has no understanding of the uniqueness of genuine scientific inquiry. Thus the National Socialist. movement is considered anti- intellectual and alien to the spirit of learning. Allegedly National Socialism would rob science of its inheritance and would restrict all scientific thought in such a way that, in the words of Heinrich Hasse, [3] "the proud mountain ranges of former German culture are leveled into swampy lowlands, fit only to serve as a refuge for intellectual castrates."

Literary emigres especially tried to make it appear that in Germany today all culture and civilization are endangered -- as if a horde of un leashed savages threatened the ideals of all mankind....

The concept of an "unbiased and objective" science, aiming at "absolute truth" based on pure reason, which arose in the liberalist period, has today entirely lost its reason and justification for existing, since we have now come to understand that a realistic science is al ways based upon a personal contemporary-historical premise. Science can project itself into reality only out of the mainstream of the specific present. Volk community and science are not opposed to each other. The concept of Volk community, heretofore regarded only as a political concept, has now also become a basic scientific principle....

Since the ultimate process of life can never be fully explained through causal-mechanical analyses, the question arises whether the physician, aside from his diagnosis based on the methodology of natural science, may not also have at his disposal some other means of knowledge. At once such concepts as empirical knowledge, consideration of the whole, and intuition spring to mind.

Unquestionably the physician cannot dispense with empirical knowledge, yet, as Hippocrates said, experience is deceptive. Many items of knowledge based solely on experience, no matter for how long they have been considered valid, may one day be discovered to be fundamental errors.

Another question is whether intuition is really a new kind of knowledge, whether or not there is a difference between purely emotional comprehension and the ordinary thought processes. Without a scientific foundation, without a thorough knowledge of biology, there would certainly be no room for intuition in medical science. But what differentiates the truly brilliant, intuitive researcher from his average colleague is that he suddenly receives great, trail-blazing insights which would never occur to the other. According to Bumke, [4] intuition is an exceedingly great concentration; it is the eye for the "essential which puts not only a great number of single observations and numerous recollections into focus, but at the same time is able to gather the great interconnections into a single thought."

It is self-evident that we cannot train all our students to become geniuses; rather, now as ever, a basic and thorough education in the total biological interconnections is what is required. Anyone who believes he can dispense with scientific knowledge and medical training and depend entirely on intuition in the diagnosis of sickness would soon meet disaster in his diagnostic and therapeutic methods.

We readily admit that from time immemorial there have been "faith healers," people endowed with great medical insight, that is, with intuition. But even these lay practitioners do not always make instantaneous diagnoses; they, too, in the final analysis, make use of a store of experience and empirical knowledge. For, involuntarily, every man, either by inclination or from passion, occupies himself with the field in which he is especially gifted. For example, I have frequently found among the simplest and wholly uneducated strata men with unmatched empirical knowledge of breeding birds, dogs, butterflies, etc., who have never actually studied these subjects. Naturally, these are their favorite hobbies or pursuits. But one will have to admit that here, too, the role of intuition can be seen.

A further cause for the distortion of the concept of the physician in recent times has unquestionably been the progressive Judaicization of our profession. Jewish colleagues soon managed to become the leaders of our professional associations and medical groups. According to Gerhard Wagner: "They debased the concept of professional honor and undermined the ethics and morals intrinsic to our racial stock." Anyone who follows the collection of statistics which show how our profession, especially in the big cities, is dominated by Jews -- and they were gathered according to religious and not ethnic or racial principles -- will be able to appreciate fully the National Socialist counter-reaction. Reich Physician Leader Gerhard Wagner, in his sweeping report at the Reich Party Convention in 1934 dealing with race and national health, called attention to the fact that in February 1934 -- that is, a full year after the National Socialist revolution -- in Berlin alone 46.8 per cent of the physicians participating in the State Sick Benefit Fund were Jews. In other big cities the situation is essentially the same. In the light of these facts one can no longer speak of brutal persecution and annihilation of Jews in the medical profession.

But the great influx of Jewish physicians also brought with it a parallel intrusion of Marxist-liberalist thought, which in turn distorted the concept of the physician ever further. The physician became a businessman; moreover, as a servant of the social security and insurance systems, he frequently did shoddy work if he did not want to suffer economically. The art of healing was solely valued in figures and fees!

Simultaneously, the medical practitioner was deprived of what remained of his professional pride by Marxist-oriented insurance administrators and fiduciary physicians. [5] They ordained -- and he had to submit-what medicines he could prescribe for his patients.

What was the consequence of all this? The prestige of the medic cal profession sank lower and lower  in the eyes of the people. Because of its dogmatic rejection of all lay medical thought, medical science became alienated from the Volk -- simply because it ignored reality. To regain the confidence of the people, it would have been much more correct to submit the ideas and suggestions of Volk medicine to objective study and examination rather than to reject them out of hand....

The social upheaval of the present time will help us to turn from an undue concentration on individual symptoms and organs to the consideration of the "whole" human being, and thus will lead to truly medical-biological thinking. This change in viewpoint has already been reflected of late in numerous contributions to medical publications by leading physicians in all specialized areas of medicine....

The physician has an almost unique opportunity to offer the people real "pastoral care." For the decrease in the birth rate not only is influenced by economic factors but is decisively determined by the inner attitude of the people.

Asking the people to assume moral responsibility is meaningless if at the same time they are not given economic incentives for childbearing. The National Socialist state, however, through its tax legislation [6] and other promulgations, offers economic incentives to those desirous of founding a family and raising children. On the other hand, the appeal to purely economic advantages is completely meaningless if the inner attitude of the individual is not renewed. And here the purposeful work of the physician must begin. It must not be concerned only with the present generation, but should strive to transcend it and direct its efforts toward the health of the eternal Volk.

In this respect the sterilization law is likewise a pillar of the National Socialist state. [7] If the congenitally healthy person intentionally restricts the number of his children, and the congenitally ill person unrestrictedly and rapidly reproduces himself, after a hundred years, according to the famous calculations of Lenz, [8] the descendants of the healthy people will constitute only 11 per cent of the population whereas the hereditarily defective will represent 88.9 per cent (on the basis of a generation lasting thirty-three years and a uniform rate of reproduction). Thus the quality of the Volk sinks ever lower. Of what use is any attempt to change the spiritual attitude of a people if it consists overwhelmingly of inferior types? We will make no mention here of the enormous costs imposed on our society by congenital defectives, which Dr. Wagner has calculated to be 1.2 billion marks yearly.

The National Socialist physician has the holy obligation to the state not merely to induce patients with congenital diseases to undergo voluntary sterilization but also to report such cases to the authorities. Many a physician may perhaps ask: "But what becomes of the confidence between physician and patient? I for one have no intention of ruining my practice." But the fact is that under the law for the unification of the public health system of July 3, 1934, this crucial problem of medical practice has already been transferred to the public health agencies soon to be established in city and rural districts.

But this does not free the physician from his most important obligation, namely, to do his duty as an alert biological soldier. It is his foremost task to defend the state and his people and their future against asocial elements. I need not emphasize here that the National Socialist physician occupies a basically different position from that taken by the physician of the Marxist-liberalistic period with respect to the problem of artificial interruption of pregnancy. We know of no social need for the destruction of the fruit of the womb.

What tremendous tasks are open to the physician and medical science in the National Socialist state! Our responsibilities and our obligations are greater than ever before. As a Volk physician in the truest sense of the word, the medical practitioner will be able to regain a great deal of his importance as well as the confidence of the people....

Adolf Hitler and his associates have shown the way to the German medical profession.

We university teachers, however, are obliged to teach the student that the health of the Volk stands above the health of the individual as the ultimate aim of the art of medicine, hence to be a doctor to the people is mare important than science itself!

We must transmit to the medical student living knowledge taken from the immediate everyday struggles and disputes. We must do this not only by refashioning the curriculum to include such new disciplines as demographic policy and racial eugenics. We are responsible for much more than the growth and advance of science. Rather, those working in Volkish occupations -- physicians, judges, and teachers -- on whom in the last analysis depends the reconstruction of the Reich, must all be gathered together under the great idea of the National Socialist biological state structure. Hence we also demand for university institutions Volkish teachers, Volkish students, and Volkish physicians. With his biological concept of science and state, the Volkish academician, whether teacher or student, will never run the danger of losing himself in abstract formulations or arid paragraphs.

For him, all work has only one great meaning: the Volk. Here the doctor is restored to the priesthood and the holiness of his calling, which for centuries he possessed in the life of all great nations.

I would like to end my discussion with words from the last important speech by Gerhard Wagner at the Reich Party Congress in 1934:

"Loyal to the will and the instructions of the Fuhrer, we shall fulfill our tasks in the future: to form the new German man, the new German people, which will assert its place in the world in strength, in honor, and in freedom."

From Hanns Lohr, Uber die Stellung und Bedeutung der Heilkunde im nationalsozialistischen Staate (Berlin: Nornen-Verlag, 1935). pp. 19-23, 26-29, 32-35.

_______________

Notes:

1. Johannes Stein was professor of internal medicine (from 1934) and Director of the University Hospital at the University of Heidelberg (from 1936).

2. Minister of the Interior.

3. Author of Schopenhauers Religions Philosophie (1932) and of works attempting to define the tasks of learning in the Third Reich.

4. Oswald Bumke was the author of Das Unterbewusstein (The Subconscious) (1926).

5. Those physicians who administered the state medical insurance system.

6. See page 357.

7. See page 90.

8. Fritz Lenz was a writer concerned with racial eugenics. Hans F. K. Gunther (see page 61) based much of his theory on Lenz's calculations.

Go to Next Page