Alfred Baeumler
Alfred Baeumler (November 19, 1887 in Neustadt an der Tafelfichte (Nové Město pod Smrkem), Bohemia – March 19, 1968 in Eningen unter Achalm, near Reutlingen), was a German philosopher and pedagogue. From 1924 he taught at the Technische Universität Dresden, at first as an unsalaried lecturer Privatdozent. Bäumler was made associate professor (Extraordinarius) in 1928 and full professor (Ordinarius) a year later. From 1933 he taught philosophy and political education in Berlin as the director of the Institute for Political Pedagogy.
Biography
One of the few influential philosophers in Nazi Germany, Baeumler used Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy to legitimize Nazism — an ideologically motivated misinterpretation critiqued by post-war scholarship. German-American scholar Walter Kaufmann called Baeumler "one of the worst Nazi hacks" [1] Thomas Mann read Baeumler's work on Nietzsche in the early 1930s, and characterized passages of it as "Hitler prophecy" [2]. Baeumler's 1931 book Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker states:
A theory of the state is not to be found in Nietzsche's work – but this work has opened all paths towards a new theory of the state. … His attack on the "Empire" arises from the feeling of a world-historical task that awaits us. He wanted to hear nothing of the state as a moral organism in Hegel's sense, he also wanted to hear nothing of Bismarck's Christian Lesser Germany ("Kleindeutschland"). Before his eyes stood the task of our race: the task of being leader of Europe. … What would Europe be without the Germanic North? What would Europe be without Germany? A Roman colony. … Germany can only exist world-historically in the form of greatness. It has the choice to exist as the anti-Roman power of Europe, or not to exist. … The German state of the future will not be a continuation of Bismarck's creation, but will be created out of the spirit of Nietzsche and the spirit of the Great War (from pp. 180–183. Italics in the original).
His books were published in Italy in the late 1990s by the Edizioni di Ar, a far-right publishing house.[3]
Works
- Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1937.
- Politik und Erziehung. Reden und Aufsätze. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1937. (Collected speeches and essays).
- Männerbund und Wissenschaft. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1934.
- Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker. Leipzig: Reclam, 1931.
- Nietzsches Philosophie in Selbstzegunissen. Ausgewählt und herausgegeben von Alfred Baeumler. Leipzig: Reclam, 1931.
- Die Unschuld des Werdens. Der Nachlass, ausgewählt und geordnet von Alfred Baeumler. Leipzig: Kröner, 1931. (Collection of unpublished writings by Nietzsche).
- Bachofen und Nietzsche. Zurich: Verlag der Neuen Schweizer Rundschau, 1929.
- Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft, ihre Geschichte und Systematik. 2 vols. Halle (Saale): Niemeyer, 1923.
Notes
- ^ Basic Writings of Nietzsche, New York: The Modern Library, 2000, p. 604, n. 2.
- ^ Thomas Mann und Alfred Baeumler, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989, p. 185
- ^ founded in 1963 by Franco Freda, a neo-fascist condemned to 15 years of imprisonment for "subversive association" and involvement in several bombings