Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß

Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß (8 February 1892 – 13 January 1974) was a German psychologist and influential race theorist in the early 20th-century. He was a student of Edmund Husserl.

Biography

Clauß was born in Offenburg. He grew up in Freiburg and attended the local Gymnasium. His father was a district court judge. After graduation, he completed his military service in the Navy, where he toured Norway as a naval cadet. He volunteered for the Navy during the World War I.

In Freiburg he studied philosophy, psychology and both English and Scandinavian philology. From 1917 to 1921, Clauß was a collaborator of Edmund Husserl. In 1918, he married the daughter of a university professor in Freiburg, from whom he divorced after one year. In November 1919, he passed the state examination for the higher teaching profession. In 1921, he received his doctorate with his thesis Die Totenklagen der deutschen Minnesänger under Husserl.

In 1920 Clauß became a member of the German League and the German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation. According to Breuer, he may also have been a member of the völkisch organization Eagle and Falcon, in whose journals Clauß spoke extensively.

In 1921/22, Clauß gave his first lectures on the psychology of race in Dresden. Husserl offered him a project on Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language for habilitation. However, this project was soon abandoned because of incompatible interests. Clauß later gave as a reason that Husserl was a Jew. Actually Clauß wanted to habilitate with Husserl with his work The Nordic Soul (1923). However, the book with its attacks on Jewish degeneracy aroused his displeasure. Husserl refused to accept The Nordic Soul as a habilitation thesis. Nevertheless, Clauß contributed to the Festschrift for Husserl's 70th birthday, which appeared in 1929. For Clauß understood his race psychology as an extension of Husserl's phenomenology.

In 1923, he worked as an agricultural laborer in Norway, then as a boatman in Denmark and Sweden. In 1925, he traveled through the Balkans. His travels were supported by his patron Friedrich Wilhelm Prinz zur Lippe. With him and Margarete Landé, whom he had met while studying with Husserl, he set out in January 1927 on a lengthy excursion to the Middle East that lasted four years. During this trip, Clauß converted to Islam.

Clauß was occupied with his studies of the "Near Eastern" and the "desert racial soul" for years after his trip. Margarete Landé, who was of Jewish origin, helped him with the evaluation as a private collaborator. His faith then also led him to participate in the SS Islam Project in 1944, aimed at a long-term alliance between the Reich and Islamists under the Mufti Amin al-Husseini. He was a war correspondent with the SS-Standarte Kurt Eggers and a Sturmmann in the Waffen-SS. In November 1944, he delivered a "final report" on his activities with the Handschar Division, summing up that the Bosniaks found the SS too "restless." As late as February 1945, he wrote a document on the "preparation of an operation to win over Islamic peoples" for the Germanic Guidance Office at the SS Main Office, which was to be responsible for the ideology of those to be led. Reinhard Walz was to carry out Koran interpretation in the NS sense. Among other things, this led to the founding of a Mullah School in Dresden as late as November 1944, to the troop mentoring of Muslims from the Soviet Union in the Wehrmacht and the SS.

In May 1, 1933, he became a member of the NSDAP. In July 1933, Clauß joined Hauer's German Faith Movement. In 1934, Clauß founded the journal Rasse alongside Hans F. K. Günther as the publication organ of the Nordic Ring. At times Clauß was sponsored by the Ahnenerbe.

In 1935 Clauß married for the second time, the daughter of an East Prussian officer of old nobility. In 1936 he succeeded in obtaining a habilitation on the basis of achievements that included his old book Rasse und Seele ("Race and Soul") of 1926 and other writings. Supported by the NSDStB, he received a lectureship at Berlin University and was tenured in 1941. At the height of his career in 1941, Clauß was slated for the chair of racial studies and racial politics at the German National University of Poznan and was to become a member of a commission for "research into the basic racial elements of the Italian people." Both were prevented by the intervention of the Rosenberg Office. This had all been triggered by a complaint filed by his second wife with the Office of Racial Policy, which was subsequently exacerbated by an internal rivalry between Clauß and Walter Groß, who instigated party expulsion proceedings. In 1943, he was finally expelled from the party and also dismissed from his civil service position. Clauß was accused of having violated the Nuremberg Laws through a relationship with Margarete Landé. He hid his co-worker until the end of the war and thus likely saved her life.

After the war, Clauß applied for reparations, but this request was rejected. The reason given was that Clauß had been accused of his behavior toward Margarete Landé during his party expulsion proceedings, but not of his racial teachings. Clauß appealed. The proceedings dragged on for 11 years, ending in March 1962 with a settlement that Clauß accepted. Once again it was determined that reparations were out of the question because Clauß had "promoted National Socialism" but had "also been harmed by it through his dismissal as a lecturer." He was awarded a small pension. He undertook further research trips to non-European countries such as Turkey and Iran, supported by the German Research Foundation. For saving Margarete Landé, he was honored as Righteous Among the Nations in 1979. After his involvement with National Socialism became known, the honor was withdrawn in 1996.

Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß died in Huppert, Taunus.

Research

Clauß decisively developed the physiognomic-mimic method. This is based on the assumption that both "pure" and "mixed races" each have their own and "type-forming" expression. His theory of race was primarily concerned with the typification of assumed phenomena rather than with the study of "racial characteristics." In a 1933 paper entitled "Are the Jews an Inferior Race?" Clauß concluded "For science there are no inferior races." According to Hans F. K. Günther, Clauß was the most important reference author in racial pedagogical literature and the "actual founder" of racial psychology.

After the end of the war, Clauß's writings Von Seele und Antlitz der Rassen und Völker (1929), Rasse ist Gestalt (1937), Rassenseele und Einzelmensch (1938), Die nordische Seele (1940), Rasse und Charakter (1942), and Rasse und Seele (1943) were placed on the list of literature to be eliminated in the Soviet Occupation Zone.

Works

• Lieder der Edda. Altheldischer Sang in neues Deutsch gefasst von Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (1921)
• Rasse und Seele. Eine Einführung in die Gegenwart (1926)
• Von Seele und Antlitz der Rassen und Völker. Eine Einführung in die vergleichende Ausdrucksforschung (1929)
• Die nordische Seele. Eine Einführung in die Rassenseelenkunde (1932)
• Als Beduine unter Beduinen (1933)
• Rasse und Charakter – das lebendige Antlitz (1936)
• Rasse ist Gestalt (1937)
• Semiten in der Wüste unter sich. Miterlebnisse eines Rassenforschers (1937)
• Rassenseele und Einzelmensch (1938)
• Araber (1943)
• Umgang mit Arabern des Ostens (1949)
• Thuraja (1950; novel)
• Verhüllte Häupter (1955; novel)
• Die Wüste macht frei (1956; novel)
• Die Seele des Andern. Wege zum Verstehen im Abend- und Morgenlande (1958)
• Die Weltstunde des Islam (1963)

References

• Harten, Hans-Christian; Uwe Neirich & Matthias Schwerendt (2006). Rassenhygiene als Erziehungsideologie des Dritten Reichs: Bio-bibliographisches Handbuch. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, pp. 144–50.
• Varshizky, Amit (2021). "Non-Mechanistic Explanatory Styles in the German Racial Science: A Comparison of Hans F. K. Günther and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß." In: Medicine and the Holocaust: New Studies on Victims, Perpetrators and Legacies for the 21st Century. New York: Berghahn Books.
• Weingart, Peter (1995). Doppel-Leben. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss: Zwischen Rassenforschung und Widerstand. Frankfurt, New York: Campus.

External links

• Works by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß at German National Library