Once again, Erich Przywara and the Jews: A response to John Betz with a brief look into the Nazi correspondences on Przywara and Stimmen der Zeit

Author(s):  
Paul Silas Peterson

AbstractIn this article, I respond to John Betz (University of Notre Dame, USA) who has recently rejected claims that I have made about Erich Przywara’s anti- Semitism and his relationship to Nazi era ideology. Although I admire much of Przywara’s theology and have great sympathy for the teaching about the analogy of being, in this article I address some of the problems of Przywara’s work. I address literature from Przywara on the Jews where he talks about the essence of “the Jew” as “restless” and “revolutionary,” and where he brings up the “wandering Jew” theme or claims Judaism is an “insolent disturber” of the (German) “folkdom.” Przywara’s rejection of “Jewish messianism” and his claims about the “basic tension of the Jew” are also addressed. I analyze his conception of the essence of “the Jew” as, among other things, a “rising will of destruction” and his claim that “Christianity” ultimately becomes the “enemy” of Judaism. Beyond these things, Przywara’s desire to “overcome” Judaism with the right “weapons” is addressed. I also draw attention to his rejection of “Jewish capitalism” and his justification of “the hatred towards the Jews in world history.” In addition to this, his use of ideologically charged Nazi terminology, such as “host-peoples,” and his support of Catholic integralism in Nazi Germany are addressed. Furthermore, Przywara’s remarks (to a leading Nazi representative and ideologue, Hanns Johst) on “the positive sense” of the German “movements” (i. e. National Socialism) in the 1930s are presented. I also show that Przywara”s work was praised by a leading representative and ideologue of National Socialism (Otto Dietrich). With this, I address the internal Nazi correspondences on the very influential German Catholic Jesuit journal titled Stimmen der Zeit

Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Zeidman

The Austrian neuroscience consolidation came swiftly and terribly on “non-Aryans.” Austrian anti-Semitism was arguably even more virulent than in Germany. And laws had already escalated in Nazi Germany to the point that Jewish physicians at most could only treat other Jews as derogatorily called “sick treaters”; these laws were instantly applicable in “annexed” Austria, with no stepwise progressive disfranchisement. Even “Aryan” neurologists who were thought to be unsympathetic to the Nazi movement were dismissed shortly after the “annexation.” The Vienna university neurology clinic was taken over primarily by SS neurologists who had been “illegal” Nazis before the annexation and were extremely dedicated to the Nazi cause. At least one, Walther Birkmayer, spoke of expanding the sterilization law to other hereditary conditions not stipulated already by the law. At least nine racial or political neuroscientist replacements, including directors of institutes, led to racial hygiene consequences, including execution of sterilization and euthanasia programs.


2015 ◽  
Vol 63 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Fritsche

AbstractAccording to Trawny, Heidegger’s Black Notebooks show that his thinking could be “contaminated” by National Socialism and anti-Semitism only between 1931 and 1944/1945. However, in this paper it is argued that already in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger had made a case for National Socialism, which he discovered in 1938 − the ‘true’ National Socialism -, and that Trawny’s main criterion is false. Heidegger’s case is compared with Max Scheler, who, because of Hitler, turned from the right to the centre. In addition, alternatives to Trawny’s detailed interpretations of three of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic remarks are offered, and the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger’s history of Being are presented.


2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 232-261
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk

The present article examines the place of the Jewish question in the ideology of the monarchist (right-wing, “black hundred”) parties. In spite of certain ideological differences in the right-wing camp (moderate Rights, Rights and extreme Right-Wing), anti-Semitism was characteristic of all monarchist parties to a certain extent, in any case before the First World War. That fact was reflected in the party documents, resolutions of the monarchist congresses, publications and speeches of the Right-Wing leaders. The suggestions of the monarchists in solving the Jewish questions added up to the preservation and strengthening of the existing restrictions with respect to the Jewish population in the Russian Empire. If in the beginning the restrictions were main in the economic, cultural and everyday life spheres, after the convocation of the State Duma the Rights strived after limiting also the political rights of the Jewish population of the Empire, seeing it as one of the primary guarantees for autocracy preservation in Russia, that was the main political goal of the conservatives.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-137
Author(s):  
MARTI LYBECK

After a drought of more than a decade, a substantial group of recent works has begun revisiting Weimar gender history. The fields of Weimar and Nazi gender history have been closely linked since the field was defined thirty years ago by the appearance of the anthologyWhen Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Following a flurry of pioneering work in the 1980s and early 1990s, few new monographs were dedicated to investigating the questions posed in that formative moment of gender history. Kathleen Canning, the current main commentator on Weimar gender historiography, in an essay first published shortly before the works under review, found that up to that point the ‘gender scholarship on the high-stakes histories of Weimar and Nazi Germany has not fundamentally challenged categories or temporalities’. Weimar gender, meanwhile, has been intensively analysed in the fields of cultural, film, and literary studies. The six books discussed in this essay reverse these trends, picking up on the central question of how gender contributed to the end of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of National Socialism. In addition, four of the books concentrate solely on reconstructing the dynamics of gender relations during the Weimar period itself in their discussions of prostitution, abortion and representations of femininity and masculinity. Is emerging gender scholarship now shaping larger questions of German early twentieth-century history? How are new scholars revising our view of the role of gender in this tumultuous time?


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-522
Author(s):  
Christopher Dillon

In their 1991 monograph on Nazi Germany,The Racial State, Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann asked why it was “acceptable to use anthropological categories in the case of youth or women, and apparently unacceptable to employ them in the case of men?” The expansive historiography of Nazism, they complained, offered nothing “beyond an isolated venture into the realm of male fantasies, or a few studies of homosexuals.” The answer, in fact, had a lot more to do with scholarly motivation than acceptability. Put starkly, there was no intellectualfrissonin recovering the history of “men” as a social category in Nazi Germany. Influential asThe Racial Stateproved to be in driving the research agenda for historians of National Socialism, the authors’ ensuing chapter, “Men in the Third Reich,” merely confirmed as much. It presented a dry, empirical overview of Nazi racial and economic policies, excised of those specifically directed at women and children. The termsgender,masculine, ormasculinitydo not appear once in thirty-six dense pages of text. To be sure, this reflected the wider state of knowledge in the academy. Now, almost three decades later, historians can draw on a sociology of gender relations that was still in its infancy when Burleigh and Wippermann were writing. They study “men” to decode historical configurations of power. They no longer conceive of women, children, and men as discrete actor groups, but as protagonists in systems of gender relations. A sophisticated interdisciplinary literature has rendered men legible as gendered subjects, rather than as an unmarked norm. This scholarship stresses the plurality of masculine identities. It advises that a racial state, like all known states, will be a patriarchal institution, and that the gendering of oppressed ethnic minorities plays a key role in the construction of majority femininities and masculinities. By pondering the relationship between racial and social identities in Nazi Germany, Burleigh and Wippermann nevertheless raised questions with which historians continue to grapple. Each of the contributors to this special issue ofCentral European Historyfocuses productively on the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and power in the “racial state.”


2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori G. Beaman

Moreover, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to identify in the constant central core of Christian faith, despite the inquisition, despite anti-Semitism and despite the crusades, the principles of human dignity, tolerance and freedom, including religious freedom, and therefore, in the last analysis, the foundations of the secular State.A European court should not be called upon to bankrupt centuries of European tradition. No court, certainly not this Court, should rob the Italians of part of their cultural personality.In March, 2011, after five years of working its way through various levels of national and European courts, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights decided that a crucifix hanging at the front of a classroom did not violate the right to religious freedom under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Specifically, Ms. Soile Lautsi had complained that the presence of the crucifix violated her and her children's right to religious freedom and that its presence amounted to an enforced religious regime. The Grand Chamber, reversing the lower Chamber's decision, held that while admittedly a religious symbol, the crucifix also represented the cultural heritage of Italians.


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