German University Name Pays Homage to Inspiration for Nazis
On March 17, the governing academic senate of the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University in Greifswald formally rejected the proposal of a student initiative that had pleaded for the name of the university to be changed. The university thus chose to continue to bear the name of the 19th century German nationalist firebrand whom Léon Poliakov in his monumental History of Anti-Semitism describes as one of “the two great apostles of Germano-Christian racism” and of the two, the one who “the Nazis saw as their great ideological precursor.” (The other “apostle” is the German chauvinist gymnastics instructor Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a.k.a. “Father Jahn.”)
Arndt is an emblematic figure of so-called “völkisch” German nationalism. The term derives from the German word Volk, which is commonly translated as either “nation” or “people.” But unlike these English words, it typically carries a strong ethnic or indeed “racial” connotation. As numerous passages attest, Arndt’s writings combine Germanomania and an obsession with racial purity in about equal measure. As Poliakov notes, Arndt regarded the “wild” and “powerful” Germans to have provided “the right stock into which the divine seed could be implanted to produce the most noble fruits” — as manifest, among other things, by the Germans ruling over the “surrounding peoples of alien kind.”
The student initiative Uni ohne Arndt [University without Arndt] cites the following passage from Arndt:
The Germans have not been bastardized by alien peoples [Völker]. They have not become half-breeds [Mischlinge]. More than many other peoples they have preserved their innate purity and they have been able to develop themselves slowly and surely … out of this purity of their kind and nature. The lucky Germans are an original people [Volk]. … Every people can only become the best and most noble … inasmuch as it selects the most powerful and the most beautiful [specimens] of its stock and has them breed with one another.
Anti-Semitism and xenophobia — and in Arndt’s case, a particularly virulent hatred of the French — are correlates of such racially obsessive Germanomania. In Arndt’s favor, it has sometimes been argued that he defended the acceptance of baptized Jews as members of the German nationalist fraternities known as “Burschenschaften.”
But in his classic study of the language of the Third Reich LTI, the philologist Victor Klemperer cites the following passage from Arndt’s 1848 volume Reden und Glossen:
Jews…, whether baptized or unbaptized, work tirelessly … towards the corruption and dissolution of that which we Germans have hitherto seen as the embodiment of what is both most human and most holy for us, toward the dissolution and destruction of love for the fatherland and the fear of God. … Just listen and look around you a little, [and you will notice] where this poisonous Jewish humanity [Judenhumanität] would take us if we did not have anything properly German to oppose to it.
That was 1814.
At that time there was no germany. Just a collection of little kingdoms in the middle of europe.
The very idea of nationalism came from the french and napoleon. Of course the leaders (and writers/poets) of these kingdoms kind of envied the french. They had a national identity, germans had none.
All that lead to the “drang und sturm” times before the german “revolution” of 1848. Not that bloody as the french one and not that successful.
Germany was then founded 1871 when in fact prussia conquered nearly all german kingdoms.
There is lot of poetry and literature during this process that you simply can’t correctly understand from 2010 point of view.
For example if you say like “deutschland über alles” (germany above all), nowadays after WWII and holocaust it has a differnet meaning in 1820. If you said it in bavaria you got jailed for critizing the local king (as happened to the “king of franken”).
At that time it was more like pushing a national idea forward.
I bet if you just read what your founding fathers wrote about other races you’ld be quite surprised
those students of the “initiative …” are the german “in the face Obamatons”. And your take on Arndt is, let me be polite, a bit premature.
I agree with t.g. What was written in the 19th century must be understood in the context of the time even though it is unaccaptable by todays moral standards (and, let me add, rightfully so!). Arndt strongly condemned tyranny and the practice of serfdom. He promoted individual freedom and a constitutional monarchy. I am pretty sure he would not have condoned the Nazi totalitarian tyranny.
Should the Lutheran Church change its name because Martin Luther was a jew-hater (much more radical than Arndt)?
Should the Jefferson Memorial be torn down because Jefferson was a slaveowner?
Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.
How are people supposed to remember their history if we keep changing the names of things? Especially the Germans.
Rather than trying to hide Arndt and his racial ideas the university should keep the name and require students to know the full story.
When they know the name, the man, the work and the result then they are less likely to be wooed by the same swinish thoughts of racial superiority because they have been schooled on where that path leads.
That is education in action.
Now, how do we get American universities to teach where progressivism, socialism, communism and jihad lead?
I despise anti-Semitism as much as I despise slavery and the crimes committed against the native-Americans, but…
If it were left to people who don’t like historical symbols to determine what is and isn’t appropriate, than America would have to rid itself of the symbols of most, if not all of the founding fathers- for being slave owners. It would also have to rid itself of all traces of the Confederate flag, as being a symbol of the antebellum South, as well as Mount Rushmore, for bearing the faces of several Presidents who the native Americans feel desecrated their lands and had one of their mountains blown up to have their faces plastered upon it.
How far do you want to take this? Times were different then. We can learn a lot about what went wrong in the past and use it as a basis to improve our culture today, but if we eliminate all traces of the past- what basis do we have to build upon?
I think the university should keep its name. This man may have held repellent ideas, but there is something instinct with Stalinism about the notion that we ought to erase people on these grounds.
The surprising thing to me is that even the small percentage of the student body who bothered to vote elected to keep the name. I can’t imagine that happening in any of the politically correct colleges here in the USA.
I get it that Arndt was an anti-Semite. I don’t get why an article about a German university not changing its name to fit PC is posted here. It just doesn’t seem to be very relevant to this site.
Am I supposed to be all mad and up in arms about what Germans do in Germany?
Shouldn’t I be more concerned with what Obama and his stooge cronies are doing HERE?
And if we’re gonna the change names of everything we don’t like we’re gonna spend a lot more time and energy changing the labels when we should be spending the time and energy to change the causes.
The first comment is without merit. The Germans are a people and the legality of a sovereign nation state does not constitute their existence.
They existed and all spoke the same langiuage and shared the same culture.
It os not much different than states deciding to unite. That is exactly what happened. The Kurds don’t have a sovereign nation called Kurdistan. Do they not exist?
The Germanic people and tribes of what is now Germany, Austria, and Poland existed long before the countries we know today.
A number of those posting here are missing critical points in this debate.
First, this university’s name only dates from 1933, making claims that, “they knew no better back in the nineteenth century” irrelevant. This was a Nazi-inspired renaming, not one born almost two centuries ago when a divided and weak German-speaking people were conquered and occupied by Napoleon. The issue isn’t that Ardnt was an anti-Semitic thug, although he was. It’s that this ‘honoring’ of his legacy was done by Nazism. That’s not something that should be allowed to stand. By the late 1800s, it was common knowledge in Europe that German had a problem that threatened the peace of Europe. This was forty years after that. The renaming was obviously foul in 1933. It remains foul today.
Second, the fact that Germans went from one extreme (divided and easily conquered) in the early 19th century to the other (aggressive and militaristic) in the early 20th century is no excuse for either. And yes, the Northern Germans, once described as Prussians, do seem to have a problem achieving balance, but it doesn’t do them any good when we excuse their excesses.
Third, it is possible to achieve a healthy balance. G. K. Chesterton was a strong English patriot, but he loathed the British empire, once remarking that he “had no use for an empire with no sunsets.” He championed nationhood the same way he championed marriage, by urging every man to both love his wife and respect the love other men have for their wives. I know, I ‘wrote the book’ on Chesterton’s views on war and peace, aptly entitled Chesterton on War and Peace. In the throes of WWI he was writing cogently on the very issues we still debate today.
Finally, we shouldn’t be apologists for the follies of any era and perhaps more important, we should always be balanced. Living in an age when the intelligentsia routinely attack patriotism, we shouldn’t let ourselves get duped into defending chauvinism. As Chesterton put it, someone who says, “my country right or wrong,” is as depraved as someone who says, “my mother, drunk or sober.”
I am sorry but i cant share Your views about 19th century Germany concerning peace in Europe. As far as i know there has never been a crucial interest in Britain that a central european power may arise between Russia and France. That was the policy until 1989 when historic development was not in the direction as Thatcher and Mitterand wanted(G.Bush was not member of this political party).
Germany has the inherent problem of a central power with a dozen countries bordering with different intetrests on German development. France and Britain used to fight over their issues abroad, which battlegrounts werent only the Amricas but also german soil. In view of this expereince it was obvious for german thinkers although mad about french language(the king of Prussia F II spoke only french) to address France as main enemy but not because of racial cause or something similar. The racist or virulent antisemtism of the NAZI was brainchild of the obvious combination of Darwinism and Socialism- a 20th century phenomenon. It is misleading to quote 18th or19th centuries thinkers under the context of 20th century ideology.
It was not only Arndt but also other “prussian” thinkers who gave after the debilitating napoleonic wars the full rehabilitation to jews in Prussia as equal citzens(Stein). As a matter of fact al lot of jews headed for service in military and administration.
I am afraid the author missed the point by avoiding to mention that the anti-Arndt wing in the university authorties is 100 % socialistic and proto-communist, with strong ties to the former state party SED.The left is playing a double game because by viewing the recent history the communist states are inherent antisemetic although proclaimg the opposit.
The story around Arndt has in common with stalinistic methods of thought control that does not need brute force anymore as Aldous Huxley predicted. PC,Selfcontrol and social exclusion are spreading in Germany as theres is no distinction between the antisemitism of historic persons and the fatal antisemitism of Hamas now or the NSDAP 3 generations ago.
The Germans, especially in the 20′s and 30′s, chased after the myth of the Aryan superman. They sought it in occultism and in faux athropology to the point where even Hitler became embarrased by it; everything they “discovered” made the Germans and their tribal antecedents appear crude and barbaric.
One thing to remember about German volkish bullshit. They never performed anywhere near their own unrealistic expectations, ESPECIALLY against the French. They beat the French three times; the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and temporarily in WWII. Until 1814, the French kicked their ass every time they met on the field. The French, with British and American help, bled the Kaiser’s Reich white in WWI, and, again with British, American and Russians leading the way, saw Hitler’s Germany ground to dust in 1945. And, let’s face it, the French are candy asses. The much vaunted German war machine went 0 and 2 in the two big wars of the 20th century against the French!
Anti-semitism, by the way, is a NAZI construct to give jew hating a civilized sounding lable. It seems they also understood that you must control the language to control the narrative.
@B Dubya:
The French of the 17 th and 18 th century were not candy asses (to use your words), but rather the superpower of Europe, please don’t forget. Furthermore, Germany had been severely weakened by the Thirty Years War, in which we lost 35% of our population and 75% of our national assets.
Sure, and when we had the entire world against us in the world wars, the outcome was clear.
@Thomas Fix and blauaugen63: Thank you. You are very right.
By the way, if you want to see real racism on a scale that would impress a Kluxer, ask somebody like B Dubya or Victor Davis Hanson about us Germans
It is reassuring for me that this time, we have G_d on our side, at least…
By the way, what is B Dubya’s Freeper name?
Ah, and another thing: Mr. Rosenthal is a fanatical Germanophobe, as any casual reader of his writings could easily attest.
He even went so far as to quote the socialist pseudo-scholars of Bielefeld University once on a fabricated study on antisemitism in Germany. Okay, but is he aware that it was written by people who are situated politically to the left of Lenin?
We dont have to speak here about the german history, for this group of “Uni without Arndt” only counts their socialist view. I spoke with some of them and with the initiator of this group:
They have a high “save-the-world-socialst” motivation. They dont want to really change something cause its fascist name…..they want to be in the middle of the intrest.
Btw: The name was also existing in the socialst country of “German Democratic Republic” (so the socialist SED let the name stand and dont change it!)!!!!!