“Race” (Antje Sommer & Werner Conze, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Bd. 5)
Race, a Conceptual History
This is a machine-assisted translation of “Rasse” in: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, hsg. v. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984, 1992.
Race
I. Introduction. II. Origin and development of the concept of race. 1. Pre-scientific concept (16th-18th centuries). 2. 'Species', 'race', 'variety': the systematization of human manifestations in the 18th century. a) 'Race ou espèce': travel descriptions and theological discussion. b) The incorporation of the species 'homo' into the 'regnum animale'. c) 'Race' as 'variété constante': Buffon, Naturgeschichte des Menschen. d) Kant's definition. e) From 'Race' to 'Rasse': Blumenbach's effect on the theory of race. 3. 'Race' in history. a) Basic concept for the "history of mankind" : Christoph Meiners. b) The German classical period without the concept of race. c) Penetration of the concept into German natural philosophy. d) 'Race' and world history (first half of the 19th century). 4. 'Race' and 'people' in ethnic continuity. a) France. b) Germany. 5. 'Language', 'people', 'race': the impact of linguistics. 6. 'Race' as a key concept in world history: Gobineau. 7. Darwin, Darwinism, Social Darwinism. 8. Effect and limits of a fuzzy concept of race between the founding of the Reich and World War I. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche: 'Herren'-responsibility. 10. Ludwig Gumplowicz. 11. Houston Stewart Chamberlain. 12. Anti-Semitism. 13. Hitler: 'Final Solution'. III. Outlook.
I. Introduction
Today, the word 'race' - with whatever precision - is understood biologically and refers to the grouping of living beings that differ from others of the same species by their common genetic makeup. In its relatively recent history it has alternately penetrated the semantic fields of order and classification terms such as 'genus', 'species', 'varietas', 'species', 'genus', 'variety', of political-social group designations such as 'natio', 'Volk', 'Nation' or language group designations such as 'Teutons', 'Slavs'. Insofar as the word served to classify types of people according to somatic characteristics, 'race' became and remained a descriptive term, first in natural history, then in natural science and anthropology. But since the term had a political value inherent in it from the outset through the associated criterion of descent community, the word and term 'race' penetrated into the political-social language and underwent a conceptual history that led to 'racism'.
The term, which from its basic meaning can be used in a scientifically value-free way, has been degraded by the extreme consequence of the "racial struggle", the planned genocide of the forties, to such an extent that its use seems to be burdened and only possible with reservations. EGON VON EICKSTEDT suggested already in 1937, because of the political-ideological coloration of the term, to do without the word in biologically oriented anthropology and to reintroduce the old word 'varietas' instead. However, this suggestion remained without effect, since 'race' had been generally accepted internationally for a long time.
There is a history of the concept treated here before its covering by the new word. That the original phenomenon of (noble) blood, which has been made conscious again and again since the advanced civilizations, in connection with the questions of its origin, descent, succession and claim to dominion or elevation, has been linguistically expressed and thus conceptually grasped, shall only be referred to here, but not dealt with. It will be shown that the word 'race' occupied this field of meaning and was then available since the end of the 17th century to serve the natural scientific need to understand the natural system of the differentiated species of the plant and animal world as well as of man in an ordering way . With the application to humans, the political-social meaning of the word was given from the outset.
There are several major treatises and works on the history of the concept of race, some of which are ideologically tinged, but most of which contain extensive references that make them useful . The special importance of the concept of race in our century is reflected in the general representations of race that appeared after the war.
WERNER CONZE
I. Emergence and development of the concept of race
1. Pre-scientific Concept (16th-18th century)
The etymological origin of the word 'race' is the subject of widely differing explanations. It is certain, however, that it has been used sporadically in the Romance languages as 'razza' (Ital.), 'raza' (Span.), 'raça' (Port.) and 'race' (French) since the 13th century, but that it was only increasingly used - also in English as 'race' - in the 16th century. The word refers first and foremost to membership in and descent from a family, a house, in the sense of "noble lineage" and even as a synonym for "ruling house".
Thus stirpis nobilitas (1512) with noblesse de sang (1533) is finally transposed as ceulx qui sont yssus de tresnoble et ancienne rasse (1540). This meaning, which stands for domus, familia, gentilitas, genus, propago, sanguis, soboles, stirps, progenies, is rendered in 1660 as de bonne race with gutes geschlechts, herkommens, generoso sanguine cretus and still lexically in first place until the 19th century: he comes from a noble race.
Deviating from the modern, scientific concept of a group characterized by common somatic features, the idea of a long ancestral line, in which outstanding quality - not necessarily tied to physical characteristics - is recognizably inherited, was the basis here: Race, in history, refers to a long line of kings of the same line, and nobility is a virtue of lineage or race. The term refers both to royal descent, "stirps regia", som were Dukes, and came of regal race, and to dynasties : The first race of Kings of France were the Merovingians. The second is the Carlovingians, and the third the Capetians, and finally, as a collective singular, can include the whole nobility. This meaning can occasionally be read in German as well: Your Razza ... does not die out (1581), but does not naturalize.
Besides the vertical notion of generational sequences, de race en race, where ' race' practically means "generation" - a knight must prove his nobility in four ways - , the term also denotes horizontally all representatives of a generation: have I ... forborne the getting of a lawfull race, and how strongly 'nobility' and 'quality' are combined in this term is shown by the phrase there's no race to be done.
Parallel to the application to humans, 'race' was used for common characteristics or preferences in domestic animals - breed (race), also said of domestic animals, such as dogs, horses, horned beasts, etc. -, more rarely in cultivated plants. Corresponding to the great importance of horse breeding, the term 'race' has a special meaning here. On the one hand, it unites the idea of quality with destination as a breeding animal, as in cavalla da razza, on the other hand, it describes not only the breeding process but also the membership of the herd. In Italian alone, even the institution "stud farm" is included in the meaning: to set up a complete stud farm is translated in 1672 as per farvi la razza, while French includes only the action, not the place: to breed (race) them at his stud.
A meaningful connection of this concept of race in humans and animals is presented by JOACHIM DU BELLAY:
Et ne permettra point que d'un sang moins hardy. Le sang plus genereux devienne abastardy. Car si des bons chevaux et des bons chiens de chasse. Nous sommes si soigneu.x de conserver la race, Combien plus doit un Roy soigneusement pourvoir. A la race, qui est son principal pouvoir ? (And will not allow a less hardy blood. The more generous blood becomes bastardy. For if good horses and good hounds. We are so careful to preserve the breed, How much more must a King carefully provide To the breed, which is his main power?)
Two historical events in particular had a decisive influence on the early concept of race: the Spanish Reconquista and the discussion of nobility in France. With the Spanish forced conversion edict of 1492, the Jews entered European consciousness as a 'race', and their special position was additionally sealed by the demand for "purity of blood", limpieza de sangre, which was to exclude them as a powerful group from Spanish society beyond conversion. The prevented danger of marriage connections is described by a French chronicler in 1587: Over time, the noble families of Spain, allied by marriage with this race, have become entirely contaminated and polluted with blood and debt.
In France, since the middle of the 16th century, the old aristocracy of birth, the "noblesse d'épé," had tried to prevent the penetration of the rising official nobility, "noblesse de robe," into their own privileged status by invoking their descent (race). "Purity of blood" as proof of validity through descent was set against a verifiable principle of achievement, and 'race' was thus elevated to a key political concept - albeit initially on the side of the losers.
In a social order in which birth largely determined social status, there was no contradiction in the fact that this concept of race, which expressed a "social qualities, ... constituting an Order within society," was applied to unrelated groups of the same social status: une race roturière. At the same time, in such a usage the extension to the indifferent group concept (toutes races et sortes d 'hommes) was given. The concept of race could be used for common ideal characteristics both in a positive sense, the race of the righteous is blessed, the race of good men are decai'd, and as a swear word, race maudite, ... meschante race, use. The number of people included in the term also expanded, for "Christendom," race of Christ, and even more so "devil's spawn," race of Satan, could already include all people. The explicit confirmation of this synonymous use of 'race ' for 'human race' is contained in the dictionary of the French Academy in 1694: The mortal race, in other words, the human race.
A compelling chronological sequence of these pre-scientific meanings of 'race' could not be determined; also the application to humans and animals occurred simultaneously. In terms of the history of the term, it is striking that although there was an extensive travel literature of two centuries, there is no reference to the use of 'race' in the field of ethnological meaning in any of the lexicons until the end of the 18th century. In the accounts of discovery and travel in Romance languages as well as in English, the term 'race' appeared more and more frequently alongside the equivalents of ' tribe', 'people', and 'nation' to cover, together with 'genre', 'espèce', 'classe' or 'kind' and 'sort', unknown human populations of foreign lands: Different race, that is: a people of peculiar character and unknown ancestry.
2. 'Species', 'Race', 'Variety': the Systematization of Human Forms of Appearance in the 18th Century
a) 'Race ou espèce': travel descriptions and theological discussion. Among the attempts to organize the constantly growing observational material on the people of foreign continents, the proposal of the French physician and explorer François Bernier in the "Journal des Sçavans" 1684 stands out first. He referred to the recently developed universal geography, especially in Leiden, and explicitly went anthropologically beyond it. Geographers have only divided the Earth by the different Countries or Regions that are found on it. What I have noticed in men during all my long and frequent travels has given me the idea of dividing it differently. For although in the external form of the body and especially of the face, men are almost all different from one another, according to the various Cantons of the Earth they inhabit, so that those who have travelled a great deal can often distinguish each nation in particular without being mistaken: I have nevertheless noticed that there are especially four or a g Species or Races of men whose difference is so notable that it can serve as a just basis for a new division of the Earth.
New was not only the proposal to divide the entire earth's population into only four to five major groups and to assign the e with the terms 'espèce' or - in two parts - 'race', new was above all that this division was mainly based on somatic criteria. Bernier emphasized the shape and texture of the body, face, lips, teeth, and hair, while most of his contemporaries considered skin color to be the decisive factor. He does not propose a separate name for these "espèces ou races", but only delimits them geographically: the first includes Europe, North Africa and Asia up to and including India, the second Africa south of the Sahara and the third Central, East and North Asia up to the borders of Moscow. In their essential characteristics Bernier grasps with it already the three large races from today's view - Europide, Negride and Mongolide. With the inhabitants of America he hesitates to see an espèce particulière and rather assigns them to Europe, while according to a persistent contemporary prejudice the Lapps as vilains animaux with "bear faces" form the fourth espèce.
Certainly, Bernier's classification can be seen as the "birth certificate of racial research", as long as it remains clear that the term "race" is not yet used as a natural-historical concept of order. Species' as the basis of such a system was established two years later (1686) by JOHN RAY in the "Historia plantarum" as a reproductive community with fertile offspring. Nevertheless, also in natural history 'espèces ou races' - like several kinds of, ... sorts of (men) - remained in use as an indefinite group designation until after 1750.
How exciting Bernier's view of the world, which was far from tradition, was perceived, is shown by the fact that it was immediately taken up by GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ. Although he adopted 'race' as one of the terms for the division of the recognizable human forms (five species vel generationes or certains tribus, races ou classes), he saw mankind divided according to the classical model into extremos et medios, extremi sunt Lappones et Nigritae, quorum ultimi Cafres: Lappones ursorum, Nigritae simiarum naturam habent. For a new division of the earth regions, however, Leibniz wanted to give priority to the criterion of language. In the foreground of the contemporary discussion is not the problem of subdivision, but the unity of the human species, for which even 'race' is still used synonymously. Against all obvious differences Leibniz summarizes: This does not prevent all men, who inhabit this globe, from being of the same race, which has been altered by the different climates, as we see, that beasts and plants change their nature, and become better, or degenerate.
This question addressed the authority of the Bible, the compatibility between biblical tradition and modern empiricism. Here, the "physical theology" (1713) named after WILLIAM DERHAM's work represented the last attempt in the 18th century to combine knowledge of nature and Christian revelation in a common science52. For the discussion around humans two conceptions derived from the creation history were important: the constancy of the kinds (species), which, once created, did not change any longer essentially, to which above all no new kinds added, and on the other hand the graduated ladder of nature. From the minerals over the plants to the animals, from the simple to the higher, the divine providence had created the "chain of the living beings" in well-ordered gradation, each species exactly equipped for its certain environment. In German usage, the argument about whether the human race (genus humanum) formed a unity or differed fundamentally (specie) was still conducted predominantly in Latin. A good example of evidence and pre-systematic terminology is the "Disser tatio critica de hominibus orbis nostri incolis, specie et ortu avito inter se non differentibus" (1721) by VINCENTIUS RUMPF. Following up on the Prae-Adamite controversy, the common ancestor was saved by juxtaposing quotations from classics for blacks and whites: Deum ex uno Adami sanguine totum derivasse humanum genus, generationes innurnerabiles ac gentes longe dissitas et lingua ac moribus multmn inter se differentes.
Undoubtedly, the Enlightenment has decisively contributed to the fact that the Christian idea of unity - biologically correct, but against the knowledge of contemporary natural history - could prevail. Because in view of the problems to be clarified, for the latter a polygenistic emergence of several, from each other independent human species was much closer: a Negro will always be a Negro, carry him to Greenland, give him chalk, feed and manage him never so many ways; hence the conclusion: the black and white race have ab origine sprung from different colored first parents.
From the conception of a uniform human species an important natural-historical conclusion resulted: all observed differences with humans had to be attributed ultimately to changeable external influences, since the term 'species' as subdivision permitted only the not constant variation in the individual, the variatio or play kind. With the demarcation followed however at the same time also the question about the superordinate term (genus), the question about the position of humans to the animal kingdom.
a) The integration of the species 'homo' into the 'regnum animale'. In his "Systema naturae" Carl von Linné was the first to classify humans in a table-like overview in the regnum animale in 1735. Within the class of quadrupeds, man forms the species 'homo' in the genus of the same name and stands at the top of the first order, the anthropomorphs (Anthropomorpha), before the apes and the sloth. The only concession to a special position is the request, nosce te ipsum instead of the required classification characteristics (characteres generum). The species 'homo' is divided into Europaeus albescens, Americanus rubescens, Asiaticus fuscus, Africanus niger. Although this division is named only in the second edition of 1740 with homo variat clearly60, Linnés "system" leaves no doubt that he assigns these human forms to a species. Thus it is to be evaluated as uncertainty in the appropriate German terminology, if the translation of the first edition calls four separate kinds within the sex 'man'.
Linné adheres to this little differentiated classification, which is strictly based on the zoological criteria of occurrence and skin color, and thus lends it the weight of his work. Still clearly outside the "system", the 6th edition (1748) attempts to cover the human sphere of being theologie, moraliter, physiologice, diaetice, pathologice - and later also politice. Only in the 10th edition (1758) the somatic criteria are increased and spiritually cultural characteristics are added with equal importance. In the order now called primates, homo sapiens is characterized by varians cultura, loco. The Schil derung of its varieties refers now both to skin color, hair, eyes, nose like posture, character, temperament and spirit and to the criteria tegitur and regitur, clothes and custom. At the same time, this gives it a clear evaluation, whether it is the bilious, choleric temperament of the American, the European skilled in invention, ... governed by law, the melancholy, ... ...the melancholy Asiatic who loves splendor, arrogance and money, or the African with a mischievous, lazy and easy-going disposition who is ruled by arbitrariness.
Beside homo sapiens diurnus, the sensible day man, the troglodyte is classified as a second species, homo nocturnus, in the human race. Linné's reflections on this mixture of classical mythical creature and misinformation about chimpanzees and orang utang (forest man) as a transitional form to the animal kingdom underline the delimitation problems of the school system with increasing of individual knowledge.
ANTJE SUMMER
b) Race' as 'variete constante': Buffon, Naturgeschichte des Menschen. Similar to Linné, GEORGE LOUIS LECLERC, COMTE DE BUFFON, was also concerned with the classification of the genre humain to the animal kingdom under the basic idea of a gradation from the simplest living being to man in imperceptibly sliding transitions. The "Histoire naturelle de l'homme" appears as a prominent part of the "Histoire générale des animaux". As with the animal species, he also sees the species of man, regardless of all differences of their 'varietes' ('races'), descended from a single original family. He thus holds to the unity of the human race and sees the varieties forming in the course of a very long time in many generations through natural influences of climate, food and way of life. Buffon thus conceptually distinguished 'genre humain' as distinct from animals, consisting of only one species (espece), whose individual races (varietes, races) are distinct but intermixable.
With the assumption of a family of mankind on the one hand, the empirical determination of different 'varieties' or 'races' on the earth on the other hand, followed, without this being reflected theoretically, for Buffon the "natural-historical" fact that the 'human varieties' - this term is still more frequently used than 'race' - would have formed in time, in long duration, far before the historical time describable in world chronicles, by reproduction, multiplication and differentiation of the human tribe. The climate stood for him at the top of the natural factors which would have brought about the variety types. The different races were associated with climatic zones. It is not within the scope of this article to discuss this in detail, all the more so as the changes and inconsistencies in the course of Buffon's lifetime would have to be taken into account. As fundamental is quoted: When, after centuries, continents crossed, and generations already degenerated by the influence of different lands, he (man) wanted to get used to extreme climates, and populate the sands of the South and the ice of the North; the changes have become so great and so perceptible, that there would be reason to believe that the Negro, the Lappon and the White form different species, if on the one hand we were assured that there was only one Man created, and on the other that this White, this Lappon and this Negro, so dissimilar to each other, could nevertheless unite together and propagate in common the great and unique family of our human race: Thus their stains are not original; their dissimilarities being only external, these alterations of nature are only superficial; and it is certain that they are all the same man.
It is remarkable that Buffon emphasized the "white", European race as the most beautiful and best before the races of black, red and yellow people in Africa, America and Asia. South of the polar zone, in Europe, we'll find ... the most beautiful, whitest and best-made men in the whole world.
c) Kant's definition. Kant took up Buffon's racial doctrine, tried to understand it philosophically with German terms and to raise it to a scientifically usable concept. In his descriptions, however, he remained speculative and "abstruse. 69 Thus, the impact of the writings, which were small in scope, was small.
Kant had given lectures on "Physical Geography" in Königsberg since 1757, which were increasingly enriched anthropologically until his essay "Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen" was published in 1775 in connection with the announcement of lectures for the summer semester. Here the word 'race' is used first. Kant followed Buffon when he translated the term 'espece' as "natural species". The decisive characteristic of this term was for him, in contrast to a division according to similarity classes, the descent - tribes, which divides the animals according to relations in respect of production. Thus, as with Buffon, all humans are members of one and the same natural genus, because they consistently produce fertile children with each other. Thus, all human beings belong to one tribe, regardless of all their differences, although Kant admits that polygenistic tribe formation is also possible and conceivable. For the differences ('varietes' in Buffon) of the natural genus man, which would have developed in the course of a long time, Kant introduces the concept of 'varieties' or 'races'. In this way, Negroes and Whites are not different species of man (for they presumably belong to one tribe), but they are two different races. While miscegenation produces semi-sacred children or dazzlers (mulattoes), differences (blond, brown) within a race are called varieties. Kant sees the varieties or races of the people in continued movement between the extremes of strict endogamy of distinguished families (family beat) and continued mixtures. For this purpose he coins the terms anarten, ... einarten and ausarten. However, degenerations can never lead out of the natural kind, because organic bodies are "preformed" in their possibilities by germs or natural dispositions and are capable of considerable physical adaptations to different living conditions, especially of the climate. Kant distinguishes four varieties or races: the White, the Negro, the Hunnic (Mungalian or Kalmuckian), and the Hindu or Hindistani race. From these four races Kant thinks to be able to derive all other hereditary characters of peoples. The Americans see erz. B. sees the Americans as a not yet completely united Hunnic race. The hypotheses or speculations need not be reproduced in detail. Essential are only the Kantian terminology and the leading principles of racial natural history: constancy of predisposition, germinal development, hereditary stability and infinity of variability of types and individuals.
The superiority of the people of the temperate earth was emphasized by Kant even more concretely than by Buffon. So these peoples would have taught the others at all times and would have conquered them by the weapons, it is said in his lecture (1764 ?), but not more in the essay of 1775.
In 1785 Kant confirmed his definition of the term and, more than before, made it more precise beyond Buffon. More clearly than in 1775, the human species is classified under the characteristic of skin color, resulting in four classes (white, yellow, black, copper-red). They can be called 'races' only insofar as the necessarily hereditary characteristics - primarily skin color - are taken into account. That the four classes as races have essentially preserved themselves, notwithstanding the: The reason for the fact that the four classes as races have preserved themselves essentially pure, regardless of the mixed types observed by Kant, is that each one has lived rather isolated with respect to its residence and therefore the law of the necessary semi-sophisticated procreation has had such an effect. The determining factor for the concept of a special human race is therefore that which is inevitably ... inherited. In the concept of race, firstly the concept of a common tribe, secondly necessary hereditary characters of the classical difference of the descendants of the same from each other are contained. Or: The concept of a race is thus: the class difference of the animals of one and the same tribe, as far as it is inevitably hereditary.
Kant distinguished from what is "inevitably hereditary" and thus common to all human beings of one of the four racial classes, the infinite variety of human phenomena, hereditary qualities which do not belong to the character of the species and are to be considered individually as well as familially or nationally. He introduced the term variety for this in 1788, thus dissolving the Buffonian synonymity of 'variety' and 'race' in favor of a conceptually helpful distinction. A variety is the hereditary peculiarity which is not classificatory because it does not inevitably reproduce.
e) From 'Race' to 'Rasse': Blumenbach's Effect on the Theory of Race. In 1785, Kant introduced his treatise on the concept of race with the observation that there was much talk of the various races of men and that much confusion was already being created. In fact, the word, still unfamiliar in 1775, quickly came into use. The interest was great, and the doctrine of the 'Menschenracen' penetrated into the literature of scientific anthropology as well as into the historical-political journalism. An indication of this was that the French foreign word began to be Germanized in its spelling. Thus GEORG FORSTER wrote in 1786 of human races and shortly thereafter of main races. However, 'race' remained next to or even above the Germanization even beyond the middle of the 19th century.
In the following, the literary history of the new branch of knowledge will be followed only insofar as it has been of importance for the political and historical-theoretical development of concepts. But it is not possible to separate strictly between scientific-anthropological and political-historical literature, even and especially with a sharp selection from the immense material.
Among the racial classifiers following Buffon, JOHANN FRIEDRICH BLUMENBACH, professor of medicine in Göttingen, stands out, however, less in terms of conceptual history than in terms of impact, whereby it must be emphasized that he introduced craniology as a classificatory measuring method into racial anthropology. An observational empiricist himself, he explicitly referred to Kant in his not consistently unambiguous conceptualization. The descriptive efforts for the main races did not lead in principle beyond Blumenbach in the 19th century. His classification of the five established main varieties in the human race was: with the name A) the Caucasian, B) the Mongolian, C) the Ethiopian, D) the American and E) the Malayan. In the case of the now finally called 'Caucasian variety' ('race') - Blumenbach thus does not follow in terminology Kant, who is otherwise praised by him - tradition (Buffon) and effect cross in his commentary for the 19th century: This race received its name from the mountain Caucasus, because the countries adjacent to it, and especially the line to the south, are inhabited by the most beautiful human tribe, the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons come together in the fact that the fatherland of the first humans could not be sought anywhere else than here. For first of all, this tribe, as we have seen, has the most beautiful skull form, from which, as it were from its original middle form, the rest, up to the two outermost extremes (the Mongolian on one side and the Ethiopian on the other) have sprung by quite simple gradual deviations. Then this trunk is of white color, which we can also consider as the original, genuine color of the human race, since from it, as we have shown above, a variety into black is easy, but far more difficult from black into white (namely when the secretion and precipitation of this carbon pigment has taken root through the length of time).
3. 'Race' in history
a) Basic term for the "history of mankind": Christoph Meiners. For more than a century, from Bernier to Blumenbach, 'variety' or 'race' of man have been classificatory terms of classification, which characteristically have been applied to man by the botanist Linné and the zoologist Buffon. The relation to the "natural history" has been given from the beginning. The concept of descent, which has already been constitutive for the pre-scientific concept of race, was contained in all works about ' Race'. It was at the center of Kant's theory. It necessarily contained the time factor in itself. The biblical chronology was in principle, if not yet de facto, blown up. The way from the original ancestral family to the "development" of the distinguishable human races was incomprehensibly long. About its length no estimates were made. But repeatedly of it in careful hints the speech was. It was natural scientists or naturalists (in the sense of historia naturalis) who, on the basis of the material of travel reports, undertook their attempts at classification with reference to the whole earth. The relationship to history (→ Geschichte) in the traditional or modern understanding had not been established - except hintingly, when 'race' was somehow related, i.e. hardly specified, to 'nation' or 'people'. But this relation has been only weak even in Kant's 'anthropology'.
The importance of the Göttingen cultural historian CHRISTOPH MEINERS (1747-1810) lay in the fact that he was the first to make this connection explicitly. Race' became the key concept of what he understood by the "history of mankind" (→ Menschheit). He made the claim that this was the actually worthwhile 'history', the concept of which he grasped traditionally and simply in the most general meaning of the word as a faithful narration of what objects are or were, what they worked or suffered. Not only man, ... its most important object, but the nature surrounding him were the reproach of history. Meiners rejected political history, even in its extension to universal history, and instead elevated the history of mankind to a program. It does not teach us both what man did or suffered in different ages, but what he was, or still is. It does not deal with the outstanding people and nations, but with all people of the whole earth (especially the savages and barbarians of all continents), whereby there need not be any chronological order. Meiners was thus concerned with cultural-anthropological phenomena, in the consideration of which natural-historical thinking merged with cultural-historical and ethnographic empiricism. Natural and human history were necessarily seen in time, but not yet explicitly in "movement" and "progress," although Meiners stood culturally optimistic against Rousseau's cultural pessimism.
This followed from his anthropological "Historie", in which he was not only concerned with the "spirit" and the "mores", as was also usual, but, as was not usual, first with the "body". Here, in the consideration of the natural man, the new racial doctrine came into play. Meiners took it up, cut it for his world view and used it for the explanation of the superiority of the Europeans of "Caucasian race" over all other "other-racial people" of the earth lying before all eyes. The fact was, as we saw, since Buffon again and again determined, but nevertheless more only registered than evaluatively made to the basis of the result of the history of mankind. But now Meiners formulated, by dismissing the monogenetic basic assumption, ... that the present human race consists of two main tribes, the Tatar or Caucasian tribe, and the Mongolian tribe: that the latter is not only much weaker in body and spirit, but also much more evil and virtuous than the Caucasian tribe: that finally the Caucasian tribe again falls into two races, the Celtic and the Slavic, among which again the former is the richest in spiritual gifts and virtues.
Meiners then spread his praise of the Caucasian tribe and therein again of the Celtic (including the Teutons and the Romans) 'race' as well as the disparagement of the Mongolian tribe. That he fell behind his predecessors in precision in his concepts, so also in 'Race', shall only be noted, but not reproduced in detail. It is sufficient to emphasize that he saw in 'tribe' as well as in 'race' and 'variety' a type-unity of 'body' and 'mind' as well as 'character' and 'manners' and claimed the tribal-historically developed large groups according to their degree-wise different hereditary dispositions for greater or lesser achievements in the attainment of "cultural levels". It is remarkable that Meiners used terms of linguistics like 'Celts' and 'Slavs' for the designation of 'races'. Also the languages were for him outflow of the nature-conditioned 'degeneration'.
The inequality of the two tribes, their races and varieties, thus also of the nations belonging to each was for Meiners the result of "natural history". From this followed for him a strong feeling of superiority and security as Europeans . Europe's nations were for him of the noble stock. The leading role of these nations was decided on the basis of their 'race'. Meiners' "History of Mankind" should make clear why a single continent and certain peoples were almost always the ruling ones, and all the others, however, the serving ones: why from time immemorial the goddess of freedom dwelt only within such narrow borders, and the most terrible despotism, on the other hand, set up its unshakable throne among most of the peoples of the earth: why, finally, the European nations, even in a state of savagery and barbarism, would have been advantageously distinguished from all the rest - especially by their receptivity to enlightenment, freedom, enlightenment, efficiency and achievement could, for Meiners, only be developed if natural and - consequently - political-social inequality were respected, racial differences and social gradation belonging together 'Race' became the fundamental explanatory factor for the affirmed "gradation" of society.
b) German classicism without race. Meiners' "History of Mankind", according to his traditional notion of 'history' as "description", has basically been little more than a natural and ethnological tableau of the earth opened up by travelogues from a Europe-centric point of view.
HERDER, on the other hand, did not, like Meiners, separate description of mankind and universal history, but connected natural and human history as a development visible in epochs and peoples towards 'humanity', which he saw laid out in the original 'organization' of man. Herder had heard "physical geography" with Kant in Königsberg. Since then he held the thought of the embedding of human culture and history in the foundations and conditions of "natural history" until the writing of his "Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind". Natural condition of man through environment and hereditary disposition - genetic power as the mother of all formations on earth - was fundamental for Herder and was demonstrated in its concrete variety. Decisive for Herder's concept of humanity, however, was not the difference, but the unity of the one human tribe and thus the common humanity. The word and concept 'race' were repugnant to him. They were beneath the dignity of humanity for him. He regarded the ignoble word as superfluous. Race referred to a diversity of descent, which either does not take place here at all or in each of these parts of the world under each of these colors the most diverse races are understood. Herder followed this with the sentence: For every people is a people: it has its national formation as well as its language. For his main interest, the knowledge of peoples and their characters, Herder did not need the concept of race. He eliminated it from the headings of the chapters on "Organization of Peoples" in the regions of the earth, to which since Buffon certain races were assigned.
c) Penetration of the concept into the German natural philosophy. In the context of his doctrine of the essence of the organic and terminologically in the succession of Kant, SCHELLING adopted in 1799 the concept of the genus as well as of different varieties or races of the same stem: ... The other representatives of romantic natural philosophy who followed Schelling, mostly professors of natural science and medicine, also incorporated the race theory into their speculations following Blumenbach.
Among them, the Dresden physician CARL GUSTAV CARUS stood out, who reduced the Blumenbach human races from five to four (Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, American), in order to be able to relate man as an "epitelluric" entity with the four planetary states of day and night, dawn and dusk. Thus the day side of mankind was represented by the Caucasian-European peoples; on the night side lived the blacks, in between the two other main races. This was a figurative-symbolic repetition of the inequality and inequivalence of the racial development, which had been established again and again, and from which the leading role of the whites was derived. The general "organic principle" stood behind the visible phenomena: that the greatest possible diversity, i.e. inequality of the parts, with the most perfect unity possible of the whole, appears everywhere as evidence and as a standard of higher perfection of any organism. Carus described in detail the sequence of stages ... of the ability for the highest spiritual development from the peoples of the dark to the light tribes or races, connected the older development with the historically provable one, emphasized the historical importance of the Hindu, the Egyptians and the Hebrews, in which the tribe of the day peoples got its spiritual light, showed himself impressed by the newest linguistic research, by placing the peoples of the Indo-Europeans at the top of the development leading to the present and concluded historically: all the merits of the day peoples would give them the right to consider themselves as the real flower of mankind. The most favored peoples of the European tribe seemed to him to be Germans, Englishmen and Frenchmen- The national pride, based on tribal history, was with Carus still - representative for his time and his generation - fully embedded in the consciousness of European commonality and human destiny.
d) 'Race' and world history (first half of the 19th century). Carus is a particularly impressive example of the fact that the theory of race, which had gone its way from natural history classification to the permanent reflection on the natural history of the 'tribe' or the 'tribes' of mankind, had necessarily to lead into problems of history. All those who had tried to do this in their own way had been - with few exceptions - natural scientists and physicians. To write history had not been their actual intention. The historians, however, stood in a different tradition: the art of presenting political histories. For this purpose, they had at their disposal basic geographic and ethnological knowledge of the ancient European world and a handed-down empirical knowledge of human characters and behavior. Everything that was connected with the new racial classification, both the expansion of space and the new, vaguely presented time horizon of prehistoric human development, was far from them. The anthropological-natural-historical basis of the "stories", however, had fundamentally changed, deepened and expanded. The modern leap from "stories" to "history" (→ Geschichte) was presumably related to this. This became clear in the historical-philosophical drafts of the time, for example in Herder and in Hegel.
It is remarkable that historiography was hardly affected by this. The tradition of 'stories' had an effect on the new critical, professionalizing science of history, and this was subject to its law, according to which it had started: to make no statements without a source basis. The sources of the prehistoric natural or tribal history of mankind, however, about which one began increasingly to take care, were worked on by natural scientists, especially geologists, anatomists and physiologists. Thus it happened that the historians continued to work with their well-tried vocabulary and terminology (for instance, "people", "nation", tribe', 'family', 'society') and could do without the new word 'race' which was suspect to many.
From this point of view CARL VON ROTTEOK's nine-volume "World History" (since 1812) is informative. In the introductory chapters about 'concept' and 'material of world history' he sees the history of the earth and mankind as a connected whole and touches the problem of unity and diversity of the peoples and human races. But the processes of the human spreading, the oldest descent and relationship of the earth peoples cover an impenetrable darkness, he leaves therefore from these questions. This then led to the fact that he let the history begin with the historical knowledge", as it is called in the title. History" was thus in fact replaced by the tribal problem of racial evolution. Rotteck at least still saw and hinted at this loss of reality as a result of the separation of subjects.
But if the attempt was made to introduce the racial diversity of mankind into history, then it was a question of authors who were not "professional" historians. GUSTAV KLEMM, for example, as a librarian and ethnological collector in Dresden, wrote an extensive "Culturgeschichte der Menschheit" (1843), in which the development of mankind was explained by the polarity of two principles, which he let appear as "races", the "active" (male) and the "passive" (female). Since with the 'active race' the European family of peoples was meant, it amounted also with this idiosyncratic, from the usual deviating attempt to justify the world-historical leading role of the Europeans.
GEORG FRIEDRICH KOLE's article in the Staats-Lexicon shows how strongly the newly recognized racial problem imposed itself on historical thinking and the formation of historical concepts, all the more so as it was highly topical due to the slavery question in America. He referred Blumenbach as well as the state of the research and opinion formation, in order to connect to it his historical interpretation and world-historical future expectation. For him, the superiority of the Caucasian race did not lead to the confirmation of European rule and affirmed political inequality on earth, as it did for Meiners, but to the earth-spanning civilization process, also breaking through the Chinese-Japanese barrier, for the benefit of the other-racial peoples of the earth. The racial characteristics of the "Caucasians" make possible their supremacy on the whole earth - however not for the oppression, but for the cultural development of the others, who after liberation from their "stability being", i.e. their hostility to progress, may and should strive to progress in self-ascending development - with all nations, brought about by. Confidently Kolb pointed to the goal: Cultur und Humanitát - Menschenveredlung und Beglückung (the world-historical will of the most advanced race for the backward races. These, however, were capable of germinal learning and development. Racial inequality became the vehicle of progress, the ideal of future racial equality in universal world peace. Race' became the historical key concept of a great utopia.
Kolb thus joined the current of a widespread democratic optimism for harmony in view of the coming world peace and used, of all things, the concept of race, which at the same time began to be subordinated to the struggles of nations and nationalities with contradictory valuations. In the eyes of democratic peace thinkers, however, the elevation of the nationality conflicts to a "race struggle" was an atavism that had to be abolished in the dawning period of law and freedom. Against the fanatics of the race principle, JULIUS FEL, in 1848, set the confidence that the great impulse of history is not the separation, but the fusion of the races. Salvation was to be brought about, less utopian than in Kolb's prognosis, by the system of federal democracy on the North American and Swiss model, Thus the political-historical elements contained from the outset in the concept of race were updated under the impression of the political tensions of the forties.
4. 'Race' as 'People' in Ethnic Continuity
a) France. The confusion of "race" and "people" or nationality found in Froebel corresponded to a frequently common mixture of terms that always occurred when "race" as a comprehensive type of form was not clearly distinguished from its national or folk concretions and the criterion of ethnic unity through genealogical succession was taken as a basis. For this purpose, the words 'people' or 'nation' had been available before the new word 'race' was included. This happened in France more uninhibitedly than in Germany, although the interest in investigating the origins, migrations and overlapping of peoples and (historical) tribes had been no less strongly developed in Germany since humanism.
In France, after 1820, "people's history" was written as "race history", especially by the brothers AUGUSTIN and AMADEE THIERRY. Their problem was the struggle between the resident and the conquering peoples in Britain - e.g. the juxtaposition of les Irlandais de race et les Anglo-Normands d'Irlande and in France. Here, the Thierry brothers, with their pre-conception of an antipathie des races, were still under the influence of the controversy about the "Germanic" (Frankish-aristocratic) or the "Celtic" (Gallic-plebeian) France, which had been rekindled again and again since BOULAINVILLIERS (1727), especially during the Revolution. Boulainvilliers had already distinguished: conquering and patrician race and conquered and plebeian race. The separate consciousness of descent divided the nation into two "peoples" or "races". Evidence of this interchangeability of 'peuple' and 'race' as well as of the interchangeability of 'nobility' with 'Germanic', 'third estate' with 'Celtic race' can be found in abundance in Chateaubriand, Guizot, Michelet and others. TOQUEVILLE also spoke of the anciennes races of France.
In 1829, the English natural scientist EDWARDS, who lived in Paris, tried to overcome the confusion of terms suggested by the aquivocation of "race" by holding on to the five great human races determined by natural history, following Blumenbach, but describing them as of little use for historical research. He confirmed Amadée Thierry that historians could only work with concretely comprehensible ethnic units in history. If one wanted to emphasize their hereditary and descent character by the word 'race,' then he preferred the distinguishing term races historiques, which were to be understood quite independently of the races of histoire naturelle. Edwards showed in detail how the problems of constancy, mixture and disappearance of the original species, rule formations and superpositions could be demonstrated at the .,historical races. He demanded the closest possible connection of natural and historical science. Ce qui vous intéresse, he wrote to Thierry, is to know whether the groups that make up the human race have recognisable physical characteristics, and to what extent the distinctions that history establishes among peoples can be reconciled with those of nature. Edward's bridge-building had consequences insofar as at the foundation of the "Société Ethnologique" in Paris in 1839 as elements of racial research were indicated: physical organisation, intellectual and moral character, languages and historical traditions.
b) Germany. In historiography and journalism, however, it remained with the expansion of the term by equivocation. The mediating term 'Volksrasse' (RUDOLPH WAGNER 1840) after the English 'race of peoples' (PRICHARD 1813/36)12, which was not used consistently there, received a certain spread in Germany, so that it was included in the "Staats-Wörterbuch" of BLUNTSCHLI and BRATER in 1864. BLUNTSCHLI himself wrote the article 133, in which he distinguished: 1) the different races of man,... natural varieties of mankind... a product of macrocosmic nature.... and accordingly... a necessity, 2) the formation of the national and the people races... - a work of human history. To this he added, according to the criterion of "descent and coinage": the race of the individual tribes within the nations..., as within the peoples that of the estates and popular classes, as well as the narrowest racial circle.... the sex and the family ('family race'). The individual forms the animated instrument of all races: of the family, of the estate, of the people, of humanity. When Bluntschli, expressly following Carus, placed among the human races... the white race, the so-called "day peoples" and among these the Aryans at the top, then he partly reproduced a well-known opinion, which corresponded to the European self-understanding, but partly he pointed to a new tendency, which - apart from the term 'Aryan' - by the pointed designation of the human existence as race-determined pointed to a new current. His sentence: The peculiarity of nations is their race contained the possibility, not yet emphasized by Bluntschli, to interpret history as a people-race struggle.
5. 'Language', 'People', 'Race': the Impact of Linguistics
As is well known, the modern national movements have been considerably stimulated by the upswing of philology with its newly emerging individual subjects. Historical nations such as the French, Germans, and Poles have been strengthened in their self-confidence by language, national literature, and linguistic research; smaller nations such as the Slovenes or Lithuanians have been set on the path to the modern "nation" by philologists and historians. Also and especially the supranational large groups defined by linguistic affinity, such as the Germanic, Romanic, and Slavic peoples, who could already look back on a medieval tradition, were given a new linguistic foundation by the philological disciplines of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic studies and strengthened in their politicization up to pan-movements. The tendency noted above to understand 'people' or 'nation' - descent and blood community as 'race', is also and apparently even more noticeable in the labeling of the linguistically connected major groups. To the movement of Germanism corresponded the 'Germanic race', to Romanism (before other word combinations) the 'race latine' and to the '(Pan-)Slavism' the 'Slavic race'. This use of language, it seems, after cautious beginnings at the beginning, had evolved by the end of the 19th century. In the history of concepts, it was more significant that through comparative linguistics far more comprehensive interconnections of related languages were discovered, which were related to ethnic substrates, so that 'language families' became groups of peoples, whose tribal origin ('Urvölk') was searched for and whose migration history led to the problem of continuity of descent, but thus to the 'race'.
Among these large-scale connections of peoples linked by linguistic affinities, the Indo-Germanic and the Semite stand out for our context. For both of them, after first attempts, Indo-Germanic and Semitic studies developed from the end of the 18th to the middle of the 19th century, but their scientific-historical progress was purely philological without social and political implications - THEODOR BENEEY reported in 1869 is His scientific abstinence has not been kept up even by many linguists, let alone by those who pursued popularization.
The leap from language to race (with the naturalized ranking) can be explained mainly by two causes. 1) The newly acquired knowledge of Sanskrit and its literature had led from the beginning, already with the Schlegel brothers, to admiration, reverence and rapture for the ancient Indian culture. The India myth was reinforced when the master race of the Aryans (arya edel) was made the pars pro toto not only of India but of all peoples of the Indo-Germanic language family, and the name 'Aryan was put for Indo-Germanic." "Aryan" quickly became an irritant word in the philosophy of history to denote the bearers of progress and the proving of the highest ethical values. Thought processes of Hegel's philosophy of history flowed into the researches of Orientalists like "CHRISTIAN LASSEN". 2) It was inevitable that the newly acquired conception of the Aryan was reinforced by the concept of race and associated with the concept of the "Caucasian" or "white race", This race, which from Meiners to Carus had always been designated as the highest-ranking above all other human races, however, included both newly named language families, the Indo-Europeans or Aryans as well as the Semites. If the sentence pronounced in 1865, about tribal kinship of peoples decides first of all the language, can be accepted as a contemporary conviction, then it is understandable that the separation of the Caucasians' into two different language families alias tribal or ethnic groups had to lead to difficulties and thus to further speculative constructs. The dichotomy became dominant in consciousness, and the tendency to consider the 'Aryans' more "valuable" than the "Semites" became widely accepted, as did the convergence of language family concepts with the concept of race. As early as 1846, LOEBELL, as editor of the seventh edition of Becker's widely read "Weltgeschichte", wrote that the spirit of the Indo-Germans was leading in its ordering power, where the Semites were hindered by their restless mobility. Also in religious respect the Indo-Europeans had surpassed their teachers and had united all higher things of mankind in themselves in such a way that they had completely overtaken them.
In 1857, JOHANN CASPAR BLUSTSCHLI gave a detailed account in an article of his Lexikonst how far the dichotomy 'Aryans' 'Semites' had already increased and established itself by the middle of the century. The Caucasian race was no longer mentioned; the concept of race was, however, used, e.g. when speaking of the of the contrast of the two races, the Indians and the Chinese, was spoken of; to Aryans and Semites, however, only the terms 'family of nations' or 'peoples' were applied; the "Aryans" had replaced the "Caucasians" in the leadership of the world; God had given the rule of the earth into the hands of the Aryans and not of the Semites; the Semites were indeed spoken of as the inferior peoples, i.e. behind the Aryans; but Bluntschli, under the impression of the biblical-Christian relationship, placed them very close to the Aryans. They were the only family of peoples which could bear comparison to some extent with the Aryan, in contrast to the inferior races of the earth, to which the concept of race could be applied without hesitation because of their low descent. Bluntschli thus avoided degrading the Semites, and the Jews were not even particularly mentioned as part of the Semitic family of peoples.
Bluntschli has summarized the state of research and consciousness of the middle of the century in a view usual for that time. He has already used the just published work of Count Gobineau, showed himself impressed by it, but has by no means taken over only the theses of Gobineau, which were not entirely original in the basic concepts.
6. 'Race' as a key concept in world history: Gobineau
The four-volume work of Count GOBINEAU on the human races in world history stood in a long French tradition, reproduced above. Immediately after its publication (1853/55) and decades later in the context of the increased interest in the race problem before and after the turn of the century, it had an extraordinarily strong effect. This was due to its claim to interpret the course of history by a simple principle, to give a diagnosis of the present Europe, and thus to answer the question to the future. The work was written in an easily comprehensible manner and exerted a strong power of suggestion on contemporaries who were inclined to be skeptical of progress after the failed revolution of 1848. The witty, well-read aristocrat, who despised the modern ideology of equality, appeared with the claim of superior scientificity and, without offering any attempt at therapy, represented his bleak diagnosis with emphasized dignity and resignation in the face of supposedly inevitable decay. He is particularly emphasized here because he was significant in terms of impact history, regardless of his limited originality.
Gobineau adopted the old idea of the cyclical type of progression of the rise and fall of empires and cultures ("civilizations"). He applied it to Europe, which had reached the peak of its power and prosperity and was approaching its decline. He justified his conviction both providentially and naturalistically and endeavored to prove it as a law of history in detailed historical exposition. For this purpose, he used the theory of race following Blumenbach, modified it for his train of thought by, among other things, reducing the major race types to three, the white, yellow and black race, and developed a series of terms of movement of racially determined history suitable for his "organic" cyclicity.
Gobineau did not define 'race' explicitly, but used the term so consistently that it can be circumscribed: as "a group with originally pure blood, uniform in its physical and mental characteristics", which passes on its inheritance in the process of generation, whereby l'élément ethnique primordial can either be preserved pure or mixed, or else be overgrown by other racial elements to such an extent that the dégénération is complete and its death occurs. The ideal type of "pure race" or "pure blood" is no longer to be found in historical reality, since from time immemorial le mélange du sang has always taken place. This had often been culture-promoting and performance-encouraging in the initial stage of tribal or ethnic connections or overlapping, but led, if the commandment of the (relative) purity of the blood (at least of leading families) was disregarded and the blood mixture was driven on without restraint, to the dégénération of the race and consequently to peoples and civilizations 149. World history is thus traced back solely to the God-willed and unalterable, constant change of the racial stocks of nations or tribes, the interest is directed solely to the formation, preservation and exhaustion of racial power. Not historical coincidences like conquests or defeats were as such decisive for the fate of a people as long as the blood of this people and its institutions still retain, to a sufficient extent, the imprint of the initiating race, this people exists.... On the other hand, if this people, like the Greeks and Romans of the Late Empire, has completely exhausted its ethnic principle, the moment of its defeat will be the moment of its death: it has used up the tempa that heaven had granted it in advance, because it has completely changed its race, and therefore its nature, and is therefore degenerate.
For Gobineau, it was conceptually constitutive that races were unequal and stable in themselves, as long as they did not lose their basic characteristics through crossbreeding. Their inequality was considered by the aristocrat, as already emphasized in the title of the book, as the most essential conceptual feature of 'race' insofar as only through it the course of history was effected. History took place in tribal and national struggles, in which the more capable prevailed, established dominance and overlaid peoples of inferior racial power. Gobineau recognized the (divinely predetermined) ability to do this only to the white race, which alone is historically significant. History only exists in white nations, Gobineau summarizes the considerations about it: It has been established, then, that the question of race is a major factor in assessing the degree of the vital principle in great foundations; that history has been created, developed and sustained only where several white branches have come into contact. The white peoples are the only historical ones, und the memory of their deeds matters only to humanity.
Thus, Gobineau emphasizes the historical leading role of the white race as a whole, without, like Bluntschli, decisively putting the 'Aryans' before the 'Semites', regardless of specific characteristics, although he preferred those, the 'Iranians', in their historical performance to the Semites as more realistic, more masculine. In general, it was true for him that history since the 7th century BC had concentrated on the spaces of the white peoples. He called them together originally noble peoples: Arians, Semites (...), Celts, Slavs. The Jews do not play a role in Gobineau as a race. When they were mentioned in certain contexts, they were treated with respect because of their important achievements. Gobineau made 'race' the key concept in world history. This was a one-sided reduction, comparable to the roughly simultaneous interpretation of history by 'class' and 'class struggle, The term 'racial struggle is not yet found in Gobineau, although the importance of struggle or war between peoples or nations, whose strength or weakness was based on their racial quality, was emphasized for the formation of domination and civilization. But the constant change of the racial stock in the historically acting peoples appears with Gobineau rather as a necessarily proceeding natural process, in which also the great works and deeds of men within certain nations and civilizations, which are called "historical," are predetermined and cannot be answered for by the acting men. The consequence of the historical-dynamic race principle was deterministic and depersonalizing. Since the existence of a society is, in the first instance, an effect that does not depend on man to produce or prevent, it does not entail for him any result for which he is responsible. A society is, in itself, neither virtuous nor vicious; it is neither wise nor foolish; it is. The voluntaristic 'racial struggle did not correspond to the character of the observer who proclaimed not so much the death of European civilization as the continued existence of mediocrity, of the degenerate, as the real sad forecast (prévision attristante).
7. Darwin, Darwinism, Social Darwinism
Not as a historian like Gobinean, but as a geologist and biologist CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882) tried to get closer to the origin, assertion and development of races in the plant and animal kingdom (1859), later also with humans (1871). He confirmed the idea of the evolution of all living beings developed before him by Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), among others, by extensive material and formed a theory for it, which became authoritative for modern biology and genetics. The concept of 'species' or 'race' adopted by him gained a new quality through this theory, since it lost its static more convincingly than before and was seen as variable in the long-lasting process. Darwin saw the variability of the species caused by the natural law of the selection", in the continued struggle for life", which was inevitable in the tension between food clearance and overpopulation (so taken over from MALTHUS) and the moving cause of the" development" of the species. The survival of the most efficient, i.e. the fittest, and the failure of the unsuitable lead in natural selection to the change of the genetic material and consequently to variations of the species. If "development" takes place continuously due to selection and mutation, then it concerns changes of very long duration in the course of the earth history. The human being was included by Darwin in the evolution; since the few millennia old history did not fit into the time measure of the (at that time) immeasurably long evolution, Darwin left it out of consideration.
The striving of some predecessors like Edwards to understand natural and human history in a context of meaning, however, necessarily presented itself. The question arose whether and how 'history' could be interpreted through the genetically dynamized natural history of evolution - all the more so because even without Darwin's books of 1859 and 1871, as Gobineau's and Bluntschli's remarks showed, the tendency to understand 'history' as 'racial history' was contemporary. If this tendency became widely accepted from the sixties on, it is not only due to Darwin and the adoption of Darwinian concepts of natural movements; the so-called 'Darwinism' and a little later 'Social Darwinism' can only be equated with Darwin himself to a limited extent. Thus, when in the following examples of the ideas leading to civilization optimism on the one hand, to imperialism on the other hand, to understand 'history' as a "struggle for existence", a one-sided reference back to Darwin or Darwinism is forbidden. National movements or ideologies in the European nations have been in play with their own (exaggerated) traditions, and the impact of Gobineau has to be taken into account.
How inevitable it was that the Darwinian theory of evolution was applied to man, his history and society, was shown by the public disputes immediately after the appearance of the "Origin of Species". They had both a defensive and an aggressive tendency. The defense was initiated in 1860 at the meeting of the "British Association for the Advancement of Science" in Oxford. The final break with tradition in the doctrines of creation, descent, and evolution acted as a scandal. The defense against the materialistic, unchristian "natural law" of racial selection remained strong in the following period, even if Darwin's theory of descent became more and more scientifically accepted.
On the other side was the controversial (social) Darwinism. At the meeting of German natural scientists and physicians in Stettin in 1863, ERNST HAECKEL (1834-1919) gave a lecture "On the Theory of Evolution of Darwin", in which his teachings were related with emphasis, even with pathos, to the history and future of human culture. Haeckel foresaw that from the law of the continuous change of species also in history a constant gradual change of the whole living world, a progressive metamorphosis, a progressive transformation and refinement of all organisms, would follow with necessity. As in nature, in human society there is a relentless and incessant war of all against all. But this did not mean wars of nations, as they corresponded to backward aspirations of priests and despots, but the principle of competition in culture, economy and politics, which led to progress and gradually to higher culture. Progress of mankind, that was secured by natural law through the struggle for existence and natural breeding, i.e. through race ennoblement. With this Darwinian conviction of progress, Haeckel was in agreement with Englishmen of the same school of thought, such as Herbert Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace, and even with Darwin himself.
The Darwinian optimism for progress was not abandoned at the meetings of the German natural scientists, even when ALFRED KIRCHHOFF, speaking in Magdeburg in 1884 on Darwinism in the development of peoples, characterized and summarized the "peculiarities of peoples" as the "result" of telluric selection: In the international struggle for existence always the physically and morally more capable people wins. But the cultural nations have grown together in the spirit of humanity in such a way that this commonality can only be lost again through deep moral decay. From this, however, the constant competition of nations protects, which eliminates degenerated peoples, secures the supremacy of the most capable, and guarantees the constant progress of mankind. Seen in this way, history was a continuous process of selection on the way to civilizational perfection according to the natural law of the survival of the "capable" and the elimination of the "degenerate peoples", i.e. peoples of bad race due to inadequate "sexual selection".
While in this view national policy and the goal of humanity were still in the context of the world history determined by the principle of race for progress, a völkisch reduced Darwinism soon emerged. The human ultimate goal was abandoned and the nation remained as the only reference point for the "struggle for existence" in history. Representative of this national Darwinism was the lecture of FELIX VON LUSCHANS (1854-1924), the Vienna-born director of the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, at the 1909 meeting of German naturalists and physicians in Salzburg. He spoke in the Department of Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory on "The Present Tasks of Anthropology," the usefulness of which he saw in its application to the nation. In this context, in view of the world political situation in the struggle for existence, he placed the concept of military strength at the top of the list. For the potential of the military personnel was decisive for the victory of the (own) nation in terms of number and quality. He saw their efficiency endangered, since the inferior ones were protected and promoted in their reproduction at the expense of ... the strong, the healthy and the clean. It is true that Luschan did not suggest to eliminate them, as it happened with the primitives. Such is no longer possible with the culture peoples fatally (!). Instead, on the basis of further, for the time being still insufficient research, the way of preventive and promoting legislation must be aimed at.
With this, Luschan had alluded to the efforts which were raised to a concept by FRANCIS GALTON in England as 'eugenics', by ALFRED PLOETZ and WILHELM SCHALLMAYER in Germany as 'racial hygiene' and realized in several states of the USA from 1905 on in laws on birth prevention and sterilization. The doctrine directed to practical measures for the promotion of desired and prevention of undesired 'heredity' is best characterized by Schallmayer's term Rassedienst (already in the title of his book). 'Race' had become the epitome of the preservation of the people against the (biologically based) tendency of degeneration and the "imminent" "death of the people" through their own failure. In contrast to Gobineau's resignation and Darwin's amorality, race as a power of the people became the target concept of will and politics.
With this expansion and voluntarization of the concept of race, the need arose to redefine it and to create the vocabulary for the conception of history and society designated as 'racial', the terms of which permeated the racial literature that proliferated between 1900 and 1930 and gradually also the colloquial language. As strongly as "racial science" gained broad impact and was popularized, as extensive and intensive were the scientific disputes. It is to be emphasized here around the meaning of "race" in all touched disciplines. on the border of science and popularization - LUDWIG WOLTMANN, who tried to explain the martial and mental achievements of the states from the physiological peculiarity and inequality of the races composing them and unsuccessfully to influence the workers' movement social Darwinistically.
It was significant that in 1904 the "Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschafts-Biologie einschließlich Rassen- und Gesellschaftshygiene" (Archive for Racial and Social Biology including Racial and Social Hygiene) began to appear bimonthly in Berlin, which expressly did not want to commit itself to a certain direction and, as a scientific journal, defended itself against the recently numerous works of laymen - of pseudoscientific character. Its main editor, the ethnologist and physician ALFRED PLOETZ, despite the serious efforts of his "Archive" to introduce a new discipline between the disciplines, met with reluctance of the listeners when he gave a lecture on "Race and Society" at the German Sociologists' Congress in Frankfurt am Main in 1910, which was particularly well received by Max Weber, in which he gave a definition of the state of the understanding of the term at that time. He recalled the old classification meaning of what he called system race or variety, which merely denoted a narrow morphological group of forms within a systematic species. He contrasted this with the now predominant and for him relevant concept of race in the biological sense or vital race. As a community of descent it is the unit of preservation and development of life: it is absolutely the unit of permanent life. This is how Darwin understood the concept. Racial hygiene must serve the maximum preservation and optimum development of this permanent life to which we belong. Society should be integrated into the comprehensive racial concept of the unity of life, as it were as an auxiliary organization for the race of the people. The more effectively the social context is formed, the more favorable are the conditions for the strengthening of the race. Society as a structure for the exchange of help is a weapon of the individuals in the inner and of the race in the outer struggle for existence. The help of the society for the strength of the race must consist in legal measures for the eradication by breeding influence, by birth prevention and germ cell destruction. The fighting power of the (biological) race of a people thus rose or fell with the manipulable ups and downs of the healthy blood more or less relieved of unfit people. In place of the no longer functioning natural breeding selection - after the model of the artificial breeding of domestic animals emphasized by Darwin - the socio-politically controlled sexual selection should step.
For Max WEBER, who devalued Ploetz's lecture with critical, partly ironic remarks and interjections For Max Weber, who devalued Ploetz's lecture with critical, partly ironic remarks and interjections, the occupation with the current "racial science" was not scientifically justifiable, although he had still based his topic on distinctly Social Darwinist concepts in his inaugural address in Freiburg in 1895: racial differences between nationalities in the economic struggle for existence, selection process, (victory through) greater adaptability to the given living conditions, racial qualities, in the course of generation-long breeding processes. In "Economy and Society" he saw the problem of race, placed in quotation marks, in the systematic context of ethnic communities, emphasizing especially the phenomenon of ethnic community belief, which is everywhere awakened primarily by the political community. "Thus, exemplifying universal history, Weber was far from the unprovable notion of 'race' as prima causa of the course of history.
8. Effect and Limits of a Fuzzy Concept of Race between the Founding of the German Reich and the First World War
The example of Max Weber may be taken as an occasion to characterize in general terms the reception of the concept of race in the German educated classes before and after 1900. The restraint towards the unspiritual word, as it had been widespread around 1800, has obviously been increasingly abandoned. CARL SCHIRREN's sharp antithesis of culture, law, freedom of conscience and human dignity to the instinct of the masses and the rule of race 178 (1869) at the historical moment of the assertion struggle of the Kur, Liv and Estonians against Russification, with its idealistic rejection of a racial naturalism judged as "chaotic", corresponded less and less to the political thinking of the educated middle classes in the new Reich. The word 'race' had penetrated deeply into the vocabulary and imagination. The term was admittedly vague. But it can be approximately circumscribed, since in it certain, much-mentioned valuable terms melted together: 'Volk', also 'Nation' and 'Nationalität', 'Deutschtum', 'Germanentam', 'Weiße', 'Arier' and, only around the turn of the century, as a Germanic reduction and exaggeration of the 'Aryan', the 'Nordic race'. This term indicates that around 1900 the concept of race was increasingly propagated and politicized in "Rassenkunde". However, since for critical minds the racial doctrine had the stigma of being methodically mono-causal and largely uncontrollable, of being, as it were, faith-based, it mostly remained below the level of seriousness and thus demanding recognition. For all subjects of the humanities and social sciences, it was questionable to what extent the concept coming from natural science was usable in a strict sense and where it really proved to be recently desired or indispensable. All in all, one is confronted with the paradox that the word and the concept of race became fashionable, as it were, while gaining only a marginal significance in the language of science and education.
Informative for the restraint with which the concept of race was received in the humanities, especially in history, is TREITSCHKES "Politik", whose text reflects the state of this often repeated lecture of 1891/93. There, in the second book (The Social Foundations of the State, 193 pages), in § 8 (Races, Tribes, Nations, 30 pages), only three pages have been allotted to the race question. They are inserted in the essential theme of nation and nationality for Treitschke. They seem more like a digression on the main races (white, black, red, yellow) with the usual primacy of the white - which breaks down into two classes, the Aryan peoples and the Semites - than that the race problem after Darwin was referred to or linked to the nationality question. Thus, Treitschke, like historians in general, got along without the concept of race in his historiography.
OTTO HINTZE went a step further ten years later. He was inspired not only to discuss Schemann's German translation of Gobineau's "Inequality of the Races" and Chamberlain's "Fundamentals of the Nineteenth Century" (see below), but to take them as the occasion for his own reflections 180. As skeptical as he was about Gobineau and as dismissive as he was about Chamberlain, he expressed himself in a peculiar mixture of historical-empirical analysis and national evaluation about the justification and the limits of the application of the concept to history. For Hintze, the great collective subjects of history were only the nations. History does not talk about races, but about nations. Whose substratum he saw as the result of miscegenation. The nations were for him in their character no natural growths at all, but products of history. But as sharply as Hintze rejected any monocausal explanation of history by the principle of race, he nevertheless emphasized, in a moderately Darwinian way, the importance of healthy "race" - substance for the nation as a historical phenomenon which was both race-determined and race-forming. He spoke of a German race formation with regard to the German race of the future - analogous to the Anglo-Saxon race as an English self-designation or the Latin race in the French self-understanding, 'race' moved here conceptually into the vicinity of 'folk character', insofar as it was - not alone! - by descent sequence. The mixture of linguistic, national and biogenetic characteristics of the concept of race, which got out of hand in this way, was not even challenged by Hintze. Further examples of this mixture of terms in the popular word could be brought numerous.
More important for the widespread effect of the spreading, blurred use of the word was RICHARD WAGNER, who had been impressed by Gobineau, but who, in contrast to him, did not want to stop at 'degeneration', but considered a 'regeneration' possible. For him, the meaning of 'race' in history was combined with distinctively anti-liberal democratic thinking and abhorrence of any ideology of progress. Race-based and progress-based views of history were seen less and less in an effective context toward the end of the 19th century. They became opposites in Germany.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche: 'Gentlemen's' Responsibility
In connection with this tendency, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE also had an unintentional great effect. Although the concept of race did not take a key position in his philosophy of history, he used it in the sense of "breeding form" in decisive places of his interpretation of history. He processed Gobineau as well as Lamarck and Darwin, but did not adopt them. From Gobineau he was separated by his achristian "nihilistic" approach and his principle of the "will to power", from Darwin by the rejection of naturalistic legalism. Nietzsche did not subject his concept of race to a mere natural law of preservation of the species, but related it to his basic category of self-conquest and thus to the self-exaltation of man or, intergenerationally and group-specifically thought, to the higher breeding of an ancestral, not finished, but still perfectable species ("race"). It was not the "purity of the somatic form that mattered to him. Rather, he emphasized the culture-promoting effect of racial mixtures. Breeding' was therefore not meant in analogy to animal breeding, but in the sense of passing on acquired and hereditary mental and physical characteristics. Nietzsche concretized the concept of race in two ways: in the 'noble' or 'ruling' race and in the 'European race'. Both are characteristic of Nietzsche's thinking and set him apart from both the common, mendacious racial self-admiration ... which is displayed in Germany today as a sign of German sentiment, and from anti-Semitism. He abhorred in history, but especially in his counterpart, the "herd animal," the "mediocrity," the "rabble," which were favored by the "slave morality" of Christianity and democracy - equality of rights and compassion for all who suffer. Against this Nietzsche set the necessity of the rule of noble races, demanded a morality with the intention to breed a ruling caste - the future masters of the earth. A reversal of values had to be prepared for a certain strong kind of people of highest spirituality and willpower ... - for the special rights of higher people against the herd animal. Several times Nietzsche spoke of a future 'European race' that would transcend the nations and that would be elitistly bred up also and especially as a 'mixed race', most clearly in the "Nachlaß der achttziger Jahre", where the process of the coming formation of Europe was revealingly brought into connection with his race theory: the increasing reduction of the human beings (in the sense of the "herd animal") challenged the breeding of a stronger race. This would have to have a surplus of what the reduced species lacks: will, responsibility, self-confidence, the ability to set goals. The process of equalization of the European people will lead to the tearing open of gaps, distance, hierarchy and thus to selection. Not only a master race whose task was exhausted by ruling: but a race with its own sphere of life, with a surplus of power for beauty, bravery, culture, manner up to the most spiritual; an affirmative race beyond good and evil; a hothouse for strange and selected plants. This breeding and elite utopia was in sharpest contrast to the democratic and Christian mediocrity. The 'European race' of the future had nothing to do with 'Aryan or 'Germanic' precedence. Jews were also to enter into this high breeding. Race' was thus completely detached from physical characteristics and the idea of pure heredity. It was the highest possible breeding form of 'masters' who should be ready and able to counteract the "chaos".
Nietzsche stood out lonely from the swelling race literature. The history of the impact of his "master race" was full of misunderstandings until National Socialism.
Closer to common ideas of race of the time were: LUDWIG GUMPLOWIC Lawn Fight (1883) and HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN's Fundamentals of the 19th Century (1899).
10. Ludwig Gumplowicz
The Polish-Austrian sociologist LUDWIG GUMPLOWICZ (1838-1909), who came from a Jewish family, elevated the word 'racial struggle' to a well-founded concept. He understood the conflict of nationalities, familiar to him as a Polish patriot, as caused by racial origin and explained the emergence of the state in general - in the course of world history each time with the necessity of a natural law - from the conflict of ethnic groups (races), which had to lead early on through conquest and overlapping to political rule organization and to racial mixtures. Without racial antagonism there is no state and no state development, and without racial amalgamation there is no culture and no civilization. Gumplowicz thus linked the ethno-political "struggle for existence" with the idea of progressive change, but without being able to predict a happy end state. For him, the conflicts rather increased in the growing together earth. He summarized skeptically: There is no end in sight to the racial struggle, the social process of nature lies in its infinity before us as well as behind us.
11. Houston Stewart Chamberlain
CHAMBERLAIN (1855-1927), the Englishman turned German, was far from Gumplowiez's experience-saturated hardness. He adopted thinking and concepts, as far as they were according to him, both from Gobineau (emphasis on inequality) and from Darwin (sexual selection, model of animal race breeding), both of which, however, he rejected in their fundamentals. On the other hand, he identified with Richard Wagner, whose conviction he shared that (racial) decay was not inevitable and that 'regeneration' was possible. He put aside phylo- and ethno-genetic controversies, e.g. about a common Indo-European primal race, and warned against taking linguistic kinship as a compelling proof of community of blood. By professing a creative dilettantism coming from "life", he used an intentionally undefined concept of race, which came close to the pre-scientific (see above section II. 1.) concept ("noble descent") reflected in historical theory.
Following the analogy of plant and animal breeding, he emphasized: A noble race does not fall from heaven, but it gradually becomes noble, just like the obat trees, and this process of becoming can begin anew at any moment, as soon as a geographical-historical coincidence or a fixed plan (as with the Jews) creates the conditions. Preservation and development of 'race' were for Chamberlain decisive for history. Only conditionally was purity of race meant by this. Rather, five factors were considered decisive for the historical effectiveness of a race: the quality of the ("human") material, inbreeding (i.e. endogamy within the members of a family, a tribe, a nation), breeding selection, the necessity of (innovating) blood mixtures, the necessity that these blood mixtures be strictly limited in choice and in time. For Chamberlain, the conditions for a noble race to come into being and to be preserved necessarily included the formation and preservation of a nation living in good condition. His concept of race served him to explain the continued coming and going of nations in world history. The greatest example, closest to Europe, long and repeatedly invoked before Chamberlain, was seen in the decay (chaos of nations) of late antiquity and the entry of the Germanic peoples into world history as the precondition for the history of Europe. This world-historical event context, to which Chamberlain's whole sympathy belonged in ideological succession to Germanism, he contrasted with the entry of the Jews into Western history as the fateful intrusion of the "foreigner" and as the precondition for the "Jewish question" of the 19th century. This, he argued, arose from the latest intrusion of Jews seeking world domination into all spheres of life. All this was only possible through 'race' in his sense. One can see with what mastery they use the law of blood to spread their rule. Although, or perhaps just because, Chamberlain tried to substantiate his view in all too broad historical terms and distinguished himself from the passionate assertions of the anti-Semites, his teachings about the relationship of ancient Jewish history to the present had a strong effect, even on Hitler.
12. Anti-Semitism
Elsewhere (→ anti-Semitism; emancipation), it has been shown that the Jews, through their emancipation as 'Israelites,' were confined to a denomination and lost their character as a 'nation,' but that nevertheless, in the pros and cons of the disputes over their bourgeois amalgamation, their indelible character as a people or as a 'race' or 'Rasse' has been increasingly emphasized since the Vormärz. In the process, opinion about 'Judaism' detached itself from the religious and shifted to a secular characterology of Jewish 'Semitism,' adopting stereotypes of the old Christian hostility to Jews but tailoring and supplementing them in a modern way.
The difference of 'Aryans' and 'Semites', originating from linguistics, could be dealt with in itself, following Oriental and Indo-Germanic studies out of universal-historical comparative interest, unencumbered by anti-Jewish prejudices. A testimony of this is RUDOLPH VON JHERINGS work about the prehistory of the Indo-Europeans. Here, in the time of the spreading anti-Semitism (1894), the origin problem of the peoples of Europe was investigated, the cultural priority of the (Semitic) Babylonians was justified and the cultural achievement of the superior "Aryan people" or of the European peoples over the Semitic master was emphasized. If (only) once the difference of the Semitic and Aryan race is mentioned, then this has the sense of a historically developed kind of people, not of fixed race characteristics.
This example is inserted here in order to point out the danger of perspective distortion, if in the following one shall speak of the influx of anti-Semitism into the racial doctrine. Both were in the majority of their manifestations around 1900 pseudo-scientifically founded, scientifically and predominantly also - despite Bayreuth! - culturally unrecognized ideologies; nevertheless, they had a broad impact on politics and the world of education. These were perversions that had already been germinated in the beginnings of race-historical thinking since the beginning of the century.
How far such germs were developed around the middle of the century and applied to Judaism by "educated people" is shown by two representative examples from the sixties: 1) HERMANN WAGENER's extensive article "Das Judentum in der Fremde" (1862). It stands at the threshold of the traditional hatred of Jews to current political judgments and the (not yet so called) 'anti-Semitism' in a sharply "Christian-Germanic" evaluation. Characteristic was the constantly used singular "The Jew", to whom the lowest character traits and dangerous political goals (revolutionary, world domination) were attributed. Although the baptism of Jews was not yet rejected as senseless, the Jewish inferiority was justified "by blood": A Christian and a German can become Jewish, but never a Jew (Christian or German) - his flesh and blood and the rest of his mind protect him from it, and the exclusiveness and uniqueness of the Jewish race prevents him from it. ... The folk of God has long since sunk low, a parasitic plant on the tribes of other nations.
2) A little later than Wagener, Ronert von Moni wrote, in an article against the Jewish emancipation, ... the difference between the nationality of other European peoples and the German one was not as great as that between the Jewish and Germanic race, In this, so to speak, a character indelebilis was seen. The foreignness of the Jews designated as a 'race' was to be seen in deeper layers than national antagonisms of European peoples.
The consequence was explicitly drawn (1881) by EUGEN DOBRING (1833-1921): he used the term 'Jew' in its natural sense, i.e. for descent and race. Religion was immaterial. Baptism of Jews could therefore not be a solution to the Jewish question. As a goal he demanded containment of the Jew, ... Shrinkage of the Jewry.
The catchword 'anti-Semitism', in contrast to 'Semitism', is not of scientific origin, but was coined as a catchword in 1879/80 without an explicit programmatic definition and quickly spread. At first it was not sharply distinguished from 'anti-Jewish', but as a new term it in fact offered the possibility of distinguishing a 'modern, i.e. no longer Christian-based disparagement of the Jews from the old, religiously determined opposition. It must be remembered, however, that the Christian or nationally based 'anti-Jewish' attitude without or against the new catchword was still in vogue. The most outstanding representative of this tendency was TREITSCHKE. He castigated the corrosive power of a peoplehood that assumes the mask of different nationalities. But he affirmed the baptism of Jews: whoever is baptized as a Christian cannot be considered a Jew. Jewish filth, especially in theater and tingling, should be rejected, but impure anti-Semitism should not be recognized. Before and after Chamberlain's book of 1899, publications accumulated in which the historical intensification of the racial problem with different concepts on the "Jewish question" was already expressed in the title, e.g. HERMANN AHLWARDT (1890), I. M. JUDT (1903), IGNAZ ZOLLSCHAU (1910). Zionism, too, made the connection between the doctrine of race and Jewry from its point of view. Not only from the Jewish side the fiction of a 'Jewish race' was decisively rejected on anthropological grounds in view of the diversity of descent of the Jewish 'people'. In fact, the 'racial' view of the counter-concepts 'Aryan' and 'Semite' could no longer surpass the distance of the concept of race from its anthropological origin.
RICHARD WAGNER already in 1881 set the German race (if we should still assume such a race) against the Jewish one.
13. Hitler: "Final Solution"
Hitler's youth fell in the years around the turn of the century, in which social Darwinist, popular race literature culminated and absorbed anti-Semitism. Hitler was imbued with it first in Linz and then in Vienna. In addition to his idols Richard Wagner, Schönerer and Lueger, it was obscure trivial products that conveyed anti-Semitism to him in connection with social Darwinism, historical occultism and racial mysticism - for example in the issues of the magazine "Ostara, Briefbücherei der Blonden und Mannesrecht" (since 1905) by the former monk and self-nobled sectarian Josef Lanz von Liebenfels, in which history was sharpened to the struggle of the "blond-blue" high race against the "low races".
This view returns with HITLER (1924) in the conception of the world-historical (final) struggle between the light Aryans/Germanic tribes and the devilish, parasitic Judaism (Juda), which strives for world domination and advances on this path until another force confronts it and in a mighty struggle throws back the heavenly striker. For Hitler, the success of the struggle, which had to be waged by the Aryans (Germanic peoples) who alone were creative in culture, depended on keeping the blood pure. What is not good race in this world is chaff. All world-historical events, however, are only the expression of the self-preservation instinct of the race in the good or bad sense.
All of Hitler's ideas and terms are taken from the anti-Semitic or social-Darwinian-racial literature of his youth. What is remarkable in terms of conceptual history is only that 'anti-Semitism' and 'racial doctrine' were inextricably linked and that the diction is determined by the impatient will to act. The racial policy and legislation of the German Reich after 1933, in consistent adherence to this original program of Hitler, has never been free from the connection to 'anti-Semitism' even where radical eugenics was involved. Race' and 'racial struggle' were for Hitler - this too not original - fundamental to the comprehension of world history with the ultimate goal of secular salvation after annihilation of the pest race, the negative, culture-destroying principle.
The history of the term 'race' has come to its end by Hitler, if it is (erroneously) assumed that the way from Meiners' ranking of human races via ideology of progress by "Veredlung (Refinement)", later by "Kampf (Struggle)" and "Züchtung (Breeding)", up to Social Darwinism and National Socialism would have been compelling. This opinion is not provable, just as it is absurd to illuminate the history of the term 'race' by Hitler's Final Solution alone. But that 'genocide' and 'extermination' were derived from the ideological reduction formula, history is 'racial struggle', is undeniable Already in the relation of human history to the principle of racial supremacy (end of the 18th century) the doom was contained as a possible consequence.
III. Outlook
In 1915, the Viennese cultural sociologist FRIEDRICH HERTZ prefaced his book "Race and Culture" with the sentence: "For science, the race theories in the sense of Gobineau and Chamberlain are finished today." However, he was well aware of the great effect of the "race theories". They had founded the belief in race and had dressed up racial instinct and racial hatred, which were ancient, with scientific tinsel, i.e. they had made anthropologically given resistance to foreigners "modern" and ideologized them.
In this tension between racial science as the basis for a 'racial' - the adjective that became increasingly common - 'Weltanschauung' and politically abstinent anthropology, the concept of race continued to stand. However, the ideological penetration of anthropology did not diminish after World War I, but rather increased, while at the same time 'racial thinking' spread. The result of these scientific and popularizing efforts was summarized by LUDWIG SCHEMANN at the end of a three-volume work 17 1931 in the identification of three different... races: 1) the "vital race" (Ploets), which in the science of racial hygiene is mainly carried out in a humanitarian direction, 2) the anthropological system race in scientific use, 3) the race as a content of consciousness of the peoples, as a folk race. Only in the Volkstum is race today still powerful in real history. In Volkstum, larger groups of individuals would be united in spirit under the sign of racial thought, i.e. in the feeling and consciousness of what they have inherited racially and carry within themselves. Zionism and All-Germanism are especially mentioned as examples of folk-racial consciousness.
The third application of the concept of race became decisive for National Socialist doctrine and practice, in an emphatically static sense, i.e., as a defense against assimilation. Before and by Hitler propagated ideas of "racially" justified "selection" and "extermination" were realized alone this was new - consequence. The Nazi racial policy, which was intensified to the point of the "final solution", has undoubtedly been the greatest example of the fact, which can be ascertained in many ways, that in the modern apostasy from political concepts to suggestive formulas and slogans, conclusions of principle were and still are drawn, which stand apart from all political ethics and also cannot be derived from a political reason or political interest. They were legitimized by the claim to "higher knowledge" of "called ones", in our case the "leader", who demanded unconditional allegiance from the believers.
The mass murders of peoples by the National Socialists and the collapse of Hitler's rule had the consequence that the "race theories" and 'Volkstumsrasse' (Schemann) related to "history" were reduced to absurdity and became completely meaningless after 1945, especially among the German people. The previously little used term 'racism' ('racisme', 'racism') prevailed in the English and French, then also in the German language area. It was provoked by National Socialism and denotes in a disparaging sense the abuse of the concept of race by its unjustified transfer to history and politics up to the (experienced) consequences that have resulted and still result from racial conceit and racial discrimination. The term, initially applied to National Socialism, has since 1945 also been applied to other offensive cases, such as South Africa (apartheid). It also lends itself to the past, where it has been unknown.
Thus the questionable conceptual history of 'race' as a basic concept of political-social language has essentially come to its end. The word 'racial hygiene' has also disappeared, but without abandoning the theoretical and practical efforts contained in the term 'eugenics'. They have continued, except in Germany, and have been further developed not only in the United States of America,
The word and concept 'race', moreover, naturally continue to belong to the conceptual language of natural science, not only of anthropology.
WERNER CONZE