Egyptologists, Nazism and Racial “Science”

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Edmund S. Meltzer
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Important Research ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
Racial Science ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
John Wilson ◽  
Historical Thought

Abstract Only recently has Egyptology begun to examine ideology and its implications for our self-understanding and our understanding of ancient Egypt, of Egyptology as a discipline, and of the past as a whole. Part of this effort is Thomas Schneider’s important research on Egyptology and Egyptologists in the third Reich. In the present volume, P. Raulwing and T. Gertzen study and document the career and thought of F.W. Freiherr von Bissing; Schneider publishes Georg Steindorff’s letter to John Wilson about Egyptologists in the Third Reich, extensively documenting the scholars mentioned in it and many more besides; and L. Ambridge explores the racial dimension of James H. Breasted Sr.’s historical thought. The continuing influence and relevance of these people and events is shown inter alia by the recent controversy over Steindorff’s collection of Egyptian antiquities.

Unresolved Questions of German Medicine and Medical History in the Past and Present

1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Kater
Keyword(s):  
Significant Influence ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Sociology Of Medicine ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Victim Status ◽  
The Third Reich

While in recent years a great deal has been written to clarify Germany's medical past, the picture is not yet complete in several important respects. In the realm of the sociology of medicine, for example, we still do not know enough about physicianpatient relationships from, say, the founding of the Second Empire to the present. On the assumption, based on the meager evidence available, that this relationship had an authoritarian structure from the physician on downward, did it have anything to do with the shape of German medicine in the Weimar Republic and, later, the Third Reich? Another relative unknown is the role of Jews in the development of medicine as a profession in Germany. Surely volumes could be written on the significant influence Jews have exerted on medicine in its post-Wilhelmian stages, as well as the irreversible victim status Jewish doctors were forced to assume after Hitler's ascension to power

“The Chords of the German Soul are Tuned to Nature”: The Movement to Preserve the Natural Heimat from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich

1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Alexander Williams
Keyword(s):  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Conservation Law ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Natural Community ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
German People ◽  
State Protection

In the early 1930s, Dr. Konrad Guenther, a longtime advocate of nature conservation, was exhorting the German people to return to “the soil of the homeland.” In the past, according to Guenther, whenever the German people had been forced to respond vigorously to the pressure of hard times, they had returned to their “natural” roots. He called on the population to learn about the Heimat (homeland) and its natural environment, ‘not only through reason alone, but with the entire soul and personality; for the chords of the German soul are tuned to nature. Let us allow nature to speak, and let us be happy to be German!” The stakes were high, for if the German people failed in this way to unite into a strong, “natural” community, they would become “cultural fertilizer for other nations.” Following the fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Guenther became one of the most vocal exponents of the notion that conserving nature would aid in the cultural unification and “racial cleansing” of Germany. Indeed, Guenther and his fellow conservationists saw their longstanding dream of a nationwide conservation law at last fulfilled under the Third Reich. The 1935 Reich Conservation Law guaranteed state protection of “the nature of the Heimat in all its manifestations”—if necessary through police measures.

Memory and the Cityscape: The German Architectural Debate about Postmodernism

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
National Community ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Way ◽  
At Home

Few tools of Nazi propaganda were as potent or as permanent asarchitecture. At the instigation of Hitler, who had once aspired to bean architect, the Nazi regime placed unusual importance on thedesign of environments—whether cities, buildings, parade grounds, orhighways—that would glorify the Third Reich and express its dynamicrelationship to both the past and the future. Architecture and urbandesign were integral to the way the regime presented itself at homeand abroad. Newsreels supplemented direct personal experience ofmonumental buildings. Designed to last a thousand years, these edificesappeared to offer concrete testimony of the regime’s enduringcharacter. A more subtle integration of modern functions and vernacularforms, especially in suburban housing, suggested that technologicalprogress could coexist with an “organic” national communityrooted in a quasi-sacred understanding of the landscape.

Ägyptologen im Dritten Reich: Biographische Notizen anhand der sogenannten „Steindorff-Liste“

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 120-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Schneider
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Second World War ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
John Wilson ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Second World

Abstract The history of Egyptology in the Third Reich has never been the subject of academic analysis. This article gives a detailed overview of the biographies of Egyptologists in National Socialist Germany and their later careers after the Second World War. It scrutinizes their attitude towards the ideology of the Third Reich and their involvement in the political and intellectual Gleichschaltung of German Higher Education, as well as the impact National Socialism had on the discourse within the discipline. A letter written in 1946 by Georg Steindorff, one of the emigrated German Egyptologists, to John Wilson, Professor at the Oriental Institute Chicago, which incriminated former colleagues and exonerated others, is first published here and used as a framework for the debate.

The Public Secret

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Eaglestone
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Way

The knowledge of the murder of the European Jews was a public secret in the Third Reich. What is a ‘public secret’? How does it shape or reshape a society? The answers to these questions are key to understanding the Holocaust and other genocides. However, the public secret is elusive because of its nature: when it is at its most powerful, it cannot be explicitly discussed; when it no longer holds such power, people deny their knowledge of it and complicity in its concealment. Both the ‘subjective experience’ of the public secret and its wider meaning are beyond the limits of the discipline of history and are better elucidated obliquely through a work of fiction: in this case Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel which reflects on the past in the way historians cannot. Significantly, the public secret and the consequences of complicity are important concepts for understanding the post-Holocaust world.

German archaeology during the Third Reich, 1933–45: a case study based on archival evidence

Antiquity ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 76 (291) ◽  
pp. 209-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Maischberger
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Traditional Institutions ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Era ◽  
Locus Classicus

The history of the archaeological disciplines in Germany during the Nazi era can be considered as a locus classicus of nationalist interpretation and misuse of the past. For some time now, various efforts have been made to enhance our understanding of this period, including several aspects related to archaeology and cultural politics. Most studies have been carried on by modern historians, but also archaeologists have engaged in historiographical research on their own discipline. Some freqiiently cited works like Bollmus (1970) Kater (1974) and Losemann (1977) are still fundamental for our understanding of important aspects of Nazi cultural politics as well as the involvement of traditional institutions into the dictatorial system.

scholarly journals Formation and Development of the Policy of “Overcoming the Past” in the National Memory of the FRG

2018 ◽  
pp. 96-121
Author(s):  
A. Kudryachenko
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Past

The article analyzes the processes of postwar development of Germany from the point of view of implementing measures to denazify and disqualify persons who have tarnished themselves under theHitler regime, the specifics of the formation and stages of the formation of the policy of “overcoming the past” in the national memory of postwar Germany. The author, singling out four different stagesand depths of understanding, clarifies the problems of the formation and development of this policy from posing the “problem of guilt”, the differentiation of its types with respect to the common andexcellent policies of the two German states, the role of the international political context and the reconstruction of the historical truth regarding the Third Reich and conditions for the formation ofculture of memory in modern Germany. The strengths and weaknesses of West Germany’s ambivalent policy with regard to its identity are analyzed through clear disassociation from the Nazi past and, on the other hand, the broad integration of former Nazis into new public institutions as an option to win democracy in Germany despite the post-war moods of most of its citizens. The immediate significance of the succession of generations in the political arena, the public study of the Nazi past and the establishment of a new political culture in public discourse are underlined. Its main elements were the memory and responsibility of generations for the Holocaust and the strengthening of the national identity of the Germans through “constitutional patriotism”. In the united Germany, the comprehension of the totalitarian past, which took place quite intensively and resulted not only in public discussions, but also contributed to the memorialization and commemoration of historical memory, the reparation to victims of Nazism and forced workers of the Third Reich from different countries and the restoration of justice to all those affected by the so-called policy “Arization” and measures to return property and cultural values to their heirs, is fairly effective. The policy of “overcoming the past” contributed to the achievement of a public consensus of the national memory of the modern FRG regarding the recognition of the crimes of the Nazi period and the making of lessons from the past. As in any other Western society, in Germany the attitude towards the Holocaust is the cornerstone of the memory of the Second World War and the symbol of the crimes of Nazism, as well as the central historical event of the XX century.

Research under dictatorship: the German Archaeological Institute 1929–1945

Antiquity ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 72 (276) ◽  
pp. 282-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Junker
Keyword(s):  
Strong Influence ◽  
State Politics ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Leading Position ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Past State

All too often in the past, state politics has exerted a strong influence over the direction of academic archaeology. This was particularly true of the German Archaeological Institute under the Third Reich in the 1930s. Here, Klaus Junker offers an intriguing insight into the events and outcomes of this uncomfortable episode, and how the Institute managed to retain its leading position during and after the Nazi régime.

Toward the Present and the Future

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Garloff
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
German Jewish

This chapter shows that even Scholem's “Jews and Germans,” despite its explicit rejection of the past Jewish love for things German, relies on tropes of love to conjure the possibility of a future German-Jewish dialogue. Another famous German Jewish thinker, Hannah Arendt, is more outspoken in her valorization of love as a mode of sociopolitical intervention. In her biography of a Jewish salonnière of the Romantic era, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Arendt affirms the love of the pariah as a form of solidarity that is rooted in shared experiences of marginalization. Finally, the chapter turns to the decade after the 1990 unification of Germany, when the theme of interreligious or intercultural love enjoyed much popularity both in mainstream feature films and in contemporary German Jewish writers. Barbara Honigmann, for instance, dramatizes failing Jewish-Gentile love affairs to show how memories of the Third Reich continue to disrupt German-Jewish relations in the present. But this is not a negation of love as a trope of interreligious or intercultural mediation. Love remains an important trope in Honigmann, one that allows her to imagine a new kind of German Jewish diaspora.

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