Alfred Baeumler

Alfred Baeumler
Bookplate of Alfred Baeumler. Woodcut by Otto Wirsching, 1914
Born	19 November 1887 Neustadt an der Tafelfichte, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary
Died	19 March 1968 (aged 80) Eningen unter Achalm, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany
Nationality	German
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Nietzscheanism
Influences Friedrich Nietzsche

Alfred Baeumler (sometimes Bäumler; German: [ˈbɔʏmlɐ]; 19 November 1887 – 19 March 1968), was an Austrian-born German philosopher, and pedagogue. He played a leading role in shaping education under National Socialism.

Biography

After studying philosophy and art history in Berlin and Bonn, Baeumler received his doctorate in Munich in 1914 with a thesis on the problem of general validity in Kant's aesthetics. From 1924, he taught at the Dresden University of Technology, habilitated there, and became an associate professor (Extraordinarius) in 1928 and full professor (Ordinarius) a year later. In 1933, he was appointed by the Minister of Culture, Bernhard Rust, to a newly established chair of philosophy and political pedagogy at the University of Berlin, without the faculty's participation, and at the same time to the position of director of the newly founded Instituts für Politische Pädagogik ("Institute for Political Pedagogy"). Alongside Ernst Niekisch, with whom he was a close friend, he had contributed to the first volumes of the journal Widerstand. Zeitschrift für nationalrevolutionäre Politik (contributions under the pseudonyms "Leopold Martin" and "Wolf Ecker").

Baeumler was originally close to the Jungkonservative, but then turned to National Socialism. In 1930, he was a co-founder of the Militant League for German Culture. From the beginning of the 1930s, he had personal contact with Hitler and the Alfred Rosenberg. At the Reichstag elections of 1932, Baeumler openly declared his allegiance to the NSDAP along with other philosophers, but it was not until after the party came to power that he applied for membership.

On May 10, 1933, Baeumler gave his inaugural lecture, Wider den undeutschen Geist ("Against the Un-German Spirit"), as part of his college Wissenschaft, Hochschule, Staat ("Science, University, State") in the crowded Lecture Hall 38 of the Berlin University. Most of the students had turned up in SA uniforms. At the beginning of the lecture, a student flag delegation marched in carrying the swastika banner. The little-noticed key quote from this lecture was as follows: "Politics can only be made by those who are responsible for it. There may be a philosophy and science of politics, but there is no scientific politics and just as little a political science. Thought must answer to thought." Baeumler went on to explain, "In a word, it can be said here what National Socialism means spiritually: the replacement of the educated by the type of the soldier." The "epoch of freedom of conscience, of individualism" was over, he said. "They are now going out to burn books in which a spirit foreign to us has made use of the German word to fight us. [...] What we dismiss from ourselves today are poisons that have accumulated in the time of a false toleration." Later, the procession of torchbearers - but without Baeumler at the head - formed up to the Opernplatz. There, according to the Völkischer Beobachter, the "German spirit" was to be symbolically purified by burning 20,000 books.

In 1934, Baeumler called for the "political soldier" as a student ideal, the establishment of "men's houses" and the exclusion of the "feminine-democratic." Martin Heidegger criticized both Baeumler and Ernst Krieck for lacking depth in their ideas and for wanting to realize the national pedagogical model of the "political soldier" through external training programs and military training. Since July 1934, Baeumler had been a member of the NSDAP's Higher Education Commission. In 1934, Reichsleiter Rosenberg also appointed him "Amtleiter des Amtes Wissenschaft des Beauftragten des Führers für die Überwachung der geistigen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP," and in 1941 he was promoted to Dienstleiter; Baeumler worked there primarily as Rosenberg's liaison to the universities. In this sense, Baeumler also worked as editor of the Internationalen Zeitschrift für Erziehung ("International Journal of Education") and, from 1936, of the journal Weltanschauung und Schule, whose editor was Hans Karl Leistritz. His task in the Rosenberg Office, Science Department, was in particular "to work on the evaluation of humanities scholars to be appointed to universities and to deal with the fundamental questions of pedagogy."

For Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday in 1939, Baeumler wrote a contribution in the Festschrift Deutsche Wissenschaft. At that time Ernst Krieck and Baeumler were considered "the two leading philosophers of National Socialism". From April 1942, Baeumler was head of the "Aufbauamt der Hohen Schule," a planned party university called Advanced School of the NSDAP.

After 1945, Baeumler was interned for three years in camps in Hammelburg and Ludwigsburg. He was one of the few National Socialist professors who did not return to a university post.

In the Soviet Occupation Zone, several of his works were placed on the list of literature to be censured and discarded.

Pedagogical-philosophical views

"Race as a Basic Concept of Educational Science"

In this 1942 paper, Baeumler shows how, in the National Socialist regime, the concepts of race and heredity have preeminent significance. Furthermore, he asserted that the concept of the Bildsamkeit des Menschen ("Image sensitivity of man") had been misconceived until then. This proof, he says, is to be provided by racial thinking. He sees a problem in intellectualism. In his view, intellectualism assumes:

1. that man comes into the world as a pure, i.e. indeterminate plant (tabula rasa);
2. that the environment has the power to write on this tablet what it wants;
3. that the organ by which man relates to the world is the intellect;
4. that man's actions are guided by the intellect and therefore can be decisively influenced by influencing the intellect.

From this intellectualistic assumption the concept of "unrestricted likeness" would be derived. The science of education does not start from the real human being; the goal of education is the human being as such, as he has never existed and will never exist. The success of education results from the correct application of means. All theories of education would have no foundation if they were not based on sound scientific knowledge of man. The opponents of the science of life and race would still work with a historically outdated science of man. It would depend on the right relation of intelligence and character. From this would grow a realistic theory of education.

Therefore it is of the greatest importance to form character and intelligence. In racial thinking, not a principle of unlimited likeness would be opposed by the principle of limited likeness, but only through this would the true principle of likeness be discovered. The unity of the character does not exist in its static-resting nature, but in its dynamically moved moments. It is the unity of direction. Education follows this unity; this unity can never be produced through intellect and environment.

The task of education arises from the relatively undetermined direction of unity. Only through the formative effect of the others does the soul come to itself, does it become what it is. At the end of education stands the clearly determined form, the form of the "type". And it reaches this only by being educated through the community. With the insight into the impossible concept of "unrestricted education", the concept of any "restriction" by educational measures also falls:

"Limitation is not an invention of racial educational science, but an essential characteristic of man."

"The German School and its Teacher"

In this writing from 1942, Baeumler explains what he understands by political pedagogy. In doing so, he states that the "Dictionary of Compassionate Love" would not be available to the National Socialists. He interprets the word "new", claiming content that never existed in this simple explanation. Pestalozzi and Herbart are for him classical patterns, which were only surpassed by the "new time". The role of the teacher should be "set in motion" from the political. Pedagogy could not take over this role. For him, historical epochs of the harvest are only suitable for an intellectual content to reach "that degree of its formation in which it becomes teachable.

"The National Socialist age, too, will bring forth the school which is spirit of its spirit, but we must be aware that we are at the beginning of the new education." Only after the new world view had undergone its "shaping through" by artists and thinkers would it be handed over to the school as teaching material. However, the school is excluded from the achievement of the world view itself. Thus, Baeumler sees the school as an object and mediator of yesterday's formed worldview. On the other hand, he sees the school as a place that receives meaning and content from the struggling Volksgemeinschaft, with which it also necessarily participates in the historical ups and downs of things. Thus it is no longer independent of life, but a piece of national and historical life itself, and it can no longer escape its laws.

"The New Teacher Education"

In this writing from 1942, Baeumler deals with the new regulation of teacher education. In doing so, he takes as his starting point the teacher training institution, which at that time had assumed its final form after Adolf Hitler's decision. He explains this measure with "necessities of national existence" and "circumstances of the matter". Thus, without presenting it, he indirectly expresses that pedagogy had become only the product of National Socialism.

For him, the concept of the "camp", where a "pedagogical atmosphere" prevailed, was at the top of the list in the training of teachers.

Baeumler and Nietzsche

In the late 1920s, Baeumler began to present Friedrich Nietzsche as a philosopher of National Socialism. He wrote a book Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker ("Nietzsche, the Philosopher and Politician"), which appeared in Reclams Universal-Bibliothek in 1931 and was widely read; he compiled an extensive volume Nietzsche in seinen Briefen und Berichten der Zeitgenossen ("Nietzsche in his Letters and Reports of Contemporaries"; and prepared a 12-volume edition of Nietzsche's writings, which was also published by Alfred Kröner beginning in 1930 and is still available today (2009) in new editions. Baeumler wrote introductions or epilogues to the individual volumes, which continued to be printed in new editions after 1945.

Martin Heidegger praised Baeumler's edition of The Will to Power as a "faithful reprint of volumes XV and XVI of the Complete Edition, with an intelligible afterword and a concise and good outline of Nietzsche's life story." Later, Baeumler's texts were successively replaced by texts by Walter Gebhard. Only the two volumes compiled by Baeumler under the title Die Unschuld des Werdens ("The Innocence of Becoming") with materials from Nietzsche's estate are still in the original version of 1931 in the program of the Kröner publishing house.

Works

• Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft. Ihre Geschichte und Systematik (1923)
• Bachofen der Mythologe der Romantik (1926; reprinted as Das mythische Weltalter. Bachofens romantische Deutung des Altertums, 1965)
• Hegels Philosophie des Geistes und Rechtsphilosophie (1927)
• Handbuch der Lehrerbildung (1930–1933 (editor, with Richard Seyfert and Oskar Vogelhuber)
• Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker (1931)
• Ästhetik, Handbuch der Philosophie (1934)
• Männerbund und Wissenschaft (1934)
• Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (1937)
• Politik und Erziehung. Reden und Aufsätze (1937; collected speeches and essays)
• "Die deutsche Schule und ihr Lehrer." In: Bildung und Gemeinschaft, 1942, pp. 98–108.
• "Die neue Lehrerbildung." In: Bildung und Gemeinschaft, 1942, pp. 74–80.
• Weltdemokratie und Nationalsozialismus (1943)
• Alfred Rosenberg und der Mythus des 20 (1943)

Translated into English

• "Nietzsche and National Socialism." In: George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (1968)

References

• Ulrich Fröschle, Thomas Kuzias, Alfred Baeumler und Ernst Jünger. Thelem: Dresden (2008).
• Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Ein Handbuch. Ares-Verlag, Graz (2002).
• George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich. New York: Grosset & Dunlap (1968).
• Max Whyte, "The Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in the Third Reich: Alfred Baeumler's 'Heroic Realism'," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. XLIII, No. 2 (2008), pp. 171–94.

External links

• Newspaper clippings about Alfred Baeumler in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW