IIn June 1933, the Leipzig student leader Eduard Klemt was in high spirits: “We look around in the lecture hall today with exactly the same impudence that we once had as SA men on the street and decide whether a professor can stay or not. The criterion will be: That man can no longer be a professor because he no longer understands us… We boys have the university in our hands and can make of it what we want.” The fact that the students had the universities in their hands in 1933 That was saying a little too much. But their influence was very great, far greater than ever before.
In Kiel, SA men broke into the apartment of the astronomer Hans Rosenberg and told him that he should be considered “suspended from office”. The events of unpleasant professors were blown up, the “Reichsführer” of the students called for information to be collected about Jewish, left-wing, liberal professors. In Berlin, the rector Eduard Kohlrausch stood up to the students, but he did not stand for re-election: he did not have the trust of the student body; It was similar in Halle. The Kiel rector August Skalweit, who didn't let the National Socialist students say anything to him, had to experience the windows of his office being smashed, stink bombs being planted, and fire hydrants being opened. He resigned from office at the beginning of March.
Towers can be built from the literature on individual universities, faculties, disciplines and scholars in the Nazi state. What was missing, however, was an overview of the universities in these years. Michael Grüttner has now closed this gap with his book “Talar and Swastika”. It wasn't an original idea, but it was a fruitful one: a renewed look at the National Socialist dynamic of seductive and destructive power.
What was required was not tolerance of the new conditions, but activism
Immediately after January 30, 1933, the young people, the students, assistants, private lecturers, seized power. The full professors, the majority of whom are German nationalists, are reserved, averse to “restless elements” such as “radiant anti-Semitism” (the Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius speaks of the “revolution of the masses”, the philosopher Erich Rothacker of a “strong shot of class hatred”), the politicization of science goes against everything they stood for. Now the boys are asserting themselves, and their enjoyment of their new power, their joy in belittling and even torturing others, makes a disgusting impression.
However, there are reasons for this dynamic. Universities in the 1920s were in a precarious position. The number of students had doubled compared to the pre-war period, but the number of teaching positions was barely able to keep up due to financial constraints. The prospects for young scientists were pitiful, which made the idea of being able to inherit the dismissed Jewish university professors so tempting. But science itself had also lost credit; the growing specialization contradicted the new desire for “holistic” knowledge; Anyone who knows Gottfried Benn's “Ithaka” has an impression of the atmosphere. And the autonomy of the universities consisted not least in the almost absolutist prerogatives of the full professors. If the “spirit of the national community” was invoked, which no longer made a difference “between the oldest full professor and the youngest private lecturer,” how could that not be a promise for everyone who had not yet made it?
“Fighting position against everything established, a beautiful privilege of the youth!” enthused a “Speech to the Members of a Lecturer’s Body” in 1934. The historian Siegfried Kaehler, himself only 48 years old, wrote from the perspective of the elderly, “as if we gave the class of people who have now broken into the state with elementary violence the impression of costumed figures who have made their way from a museum into the world “We got lost in broad daylight.”
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