Daniel Gasman - The Scientific Origins of National Socialism

ERNST HAECKEL AT EIGHTY: THE VOLKISH PROPHET.

Reproduced from the journal of the Monist League, Das monistische Jahrhundert.

Appearing between pages 8 and 9

THE passage of time and the dramatic events of the twentieth century offer a retrospect on the life and career of Ernst Haeckel that could hardly have been imagined a century ago. The somber events of World War II, the rise and fall of fascism and communism, the rapid growth of modern science, and the spectacular flowering of contemporary culture all seem strikingly remote from the nineteenth-century world that Haeckel dominated.

After his death in February 1919, relatively little attention was paid to HaeckePs memory, except for some very passionate, but ultimately guarded praise in Nazi Germany, and then, paradoxically enough, equally intense yet, in the end, decidedly wary praise in communist East Germany. Even at the present time, Haeckel, for many individuals, remains a rather elusive intellectual and scientific figure: the popular German scientist who coined phrases like ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny or the word ecology, but whose political and intellectual significance is indefinite or loosely associated with the materialistically and progressively inclined positivists of the late nineteenth century.

When this book was first published in 1971 I proposed that insights gained from the history of science could explain more successfully than any other theoretical framework the origin and nature of Nazi ideology. Nazism, 1 argued, closely paralleled the teachings of Haeckel, and reflected as well many of the demands articulated in the public programs of the German Monist League, an internationally influential organization that Haeckel launched in 1906, in the years prior to World War I. Other sources of Nazism were, I pointed out, also important to bear in mind, but its ideological nature was most clearly apparent in the way that Haeckel had formulated his idiosyncratic Weltanschauung.

Thus, I suggested, the determining ideological characteristic of the National Socialist State was the fact that it flaunted political and social doctrines that were allegedly derived from the established findings of modern evolutionary science. No state or society has ever been initiated in an even remotely similar way, and it was this theoretical designation of the social realm based ostensibly on biological and scientific truth that marked German National Socialism as an unprecedented episode in human history.

Since 1971, discussion of the meaning of the obsessive scientific consciousness and Social Darwinist activity of the Nazi State, Many more examples of the worldwide influence of The Scientific Origins can be readily demonstrated.

However, popular interpretations of National Socialism frequently ignore the conclusions reached in The Scientific Origins, and in a general sense, it is the failure to grasp fully the significance of the Haeckelian scientific origins of Nazism, and related fascisms in other countries like Italy and France, that continues to account for many of the inadequacies of recent studies of the Nazi and fascist phenomena. for example, Ian Kershaw carefully summarized, in all their historical complexity, the main contemporary theories that seek to explain the origin and meaning of National Socialism. Yet, assigning no role to the influence of science, and little to the importance of ideas, Kershaw listed hypotheses about fascism that, for all their flair, are never completely satisfying and, over the course of time, seem to fall by the wayside in the light of evolving research: such explanations for Nazism as the uniqueness of German history; the impact of the rise of totalitarianism; the Marxist hypothesis of an assumed crisis of capitalism; the role played by German industry in supporting Hitler; fascism as an historically determined manifestation of the unavoidable forces of modernization, dragging Germany kicking and screaming into the twentieth century; and Nazism as a consequence of the age-old irrational and destructive pattern of German anti-Semitism.

Kershaw does not seem to choose among these hypotheses and does not succeed in developing a coherent theoretical framework of his own that would account for the fascist phenomenon. Above all, he fails to single out the fundamental essence of National Socialism, its basic pseudo-scientific biological-eugenicist underpinnings, as one historian has recently expressed it, echoing, at least partially, the theoretical perspective I have urged since the early 1970s.