Thesis (M.A. (German)) - Rhodes University, 2009

This thesis discusses three intellectuals, each from a distinct academic background, and their relationship with National Socialism. Persons covered are Carl Gustav Jung, Martin Heidegger, and Eugen Fischer. This thesis aims at discovering something common and fundamental about the intellectuals' relationship to politics as such. The relationship each had with National Socialism is evaluated with an eye to their distinct academic backgrounds. The conclusion of this thesis is that intellectuals succumb all too easily to political and cultural extremism; none of these three scholars saw themselves as National Socialists, yet each through his anti-Semitism and willingness to cooperate assisted the regime.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1956 W57 / Master of Science

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This thesis analyzes the text, stage design, and historical context of Lothar Müthel's production of Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy in 1936, which was sponsored by the National Socialist government during a broader publicity campaign during the Summer Olympics of 1936. The third play, Eumenides (Die Versöhnung in German) has democratic undertones, and therefore seems incompatible with Nazi ideology at first glance. There are three ways in which the Nazis made Müthel's adaptation of Die Versöhnung compatible. First, in the context of the Olympics, the Nazis attempted to draw a connection or relationship between modern German and ancient Greek culture, implying themselves to be successors to ancient Greece. Second, through Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's interpretations of the Greek word δίκη (justice), a central concept in the Oresteia, the Nazis were able to emphasize the progression of a state from a savage, chaotic period to a new, better civilization, an idea that particularly appeals to Nazi narrative owing to their own recent history with the Weimar Republic. Third, the Nazis shifted focus from the institution of the Areopagus to the role of Athena and interpreted her to be a Germanic goddess. Müthel's adaptation is a good case study in how, through appropriation, a political movement can interpret a text to fit their ideology.

My dissertation explains how the scientific study of sexuality became laden with emotions and the unforeseen results of this process. It begins with a scholarly tradition, forged during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which privileged sentimental articulations of feelings. This tradition helped inspire the late nineteenth-century foundation of sexology, or sexual science. Sexologists, as their discipline developed alongside the modern rational bureaucratic nation-state, maintained attention to emotive expressions. Sexologists also helped shape the interpretation and enforcement of laws against same-sex acts. While they built authority, however, sexologists lacked consensus. During the first third of the twentieth century, sexologists helped compile defendants' detailed sexual histories, replete with affective articulations of sexual desires, which led to calamitous consequences under National Socialism. Nazi technocrats utilized these same sexual histories, offered by same-sex attracted persons describing their feelings and actions before 1933, to prosecute them after a 1935 legal revision, which expanded the law's reach from specific acts to general expressions of feelings. My dissertation provides a genealogy of sexual research and the unexpected uses of its findings. It also revises the biography of sexology as an interdisciplinary field, braided with a history of emotions, tracing its previously underappreciated origins, tumultuous apex, and contested legacy.

The history of World War II has led many Americans to vie~ Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany as European variants of a single Fascist ideology. Ho~ever, in the early years of the Mussolini and Hitler regimes, the conceptual category of international Fascism was by not so well-established, particularly ~here the Nazis were concerned. American and British diplomats stationed in Germany in the early 1930s only occasionally interpreted the rising Nazi party as an offshoot of Fascism, but frequently referred to it as a possible form of or precursor of Bolshevism in Germany. Published and unpublished American foreign policy documents, published British diplomatic documents, and a wide array of secondary sources have contributed information showing how perceptions of Nazism and Bolshevism were influenced by matters that clouded the issues. The similarity of American and British views on the subjects of Bolshevism, Fascism, and Nazism can be attributed to the new understanding among the policy elites of the two nations as they became the leading status quo powers after World War I. The United States in particular had gone through tremendous organizational changes during and after the war, and was entering into a new era of professional and bureaucratized foreign policy that differed from its ad hoc diplomacy of the past. American foreign policy of the interwar period combined a strong interest in business expansion with a relative lack of desire for international political entanglements. American political commitments of the 1920s, particularly in Germany, were backed primarily by loans and investment, and through reparations revision plans designed by unofficial diplomats recruited from the private sector. As American financial commitments to Germany became more dependent on German repayment, and as the Depression tightened its grip, the rise of the Nazis became an ever greater source of alarm. This concern was related not only to their unclear and ill-defined political ideas, but to the threat they seemingly posed to financial stability -- a threat that increased their resemblance to the Bolsheviks in the minds of many diplomatic observers. Various other factors were important in developing the Anglo-American view of Nazism as related to Bolshevism. These included the almost obsessive intensity of anti-Bolshevism in the United States and Great Britain throughout the interwar period; the close association of Bolshevism with economic chaos in the minds of Anglo-American leaders, with a concomitant tendency to see Bolshevism developing wherever economic chaos occurred in Europe; and the strong admiration for Mussolini's Italy in both Britain and the United States, which precluded possibilities of seeing much in common between Italian Fascism and Nazism during this period. Some important sources of conceptual confusion were inherent in the policies of Germany's post-World War I Weimar Republic. Leading German diplomats and politicians of the republic, such as Gustav Stresemann, used Anglo-American fears of Bolshevism as a cornerstone of their policy to gain revisions and modifications of the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty. In the early 1930s, the "Bolshevism bogey" was used by Ambassador Frederic Sackett, a political appointee of Herbert Hoover, to get Hoover's attention so that he would modify reparations policy in favor of Sackett's friend, the embattled Chancellor Heinrich Bruning. The internal factions of the rising Nazi party, including the left-leaning wing led by Gregor Strasser, appeared to give some credence to the idea that the Nazis could harbor communistic elements. After Hitler's rise to the chancellorship in 1933, American and British observers began to note more resemblances between the Hitler and Mussolini regimes. However, many of their earlier observations about the similarities of Nazism and Bolshevism have validity in terms of the more totalitarian nature of these regimes as compared to Italian Fascism and its other less extreme variants.

Wer bildete das Herrschaftszentrum im Deutschland der Jahre 1933 bis 1945? Welche Gruppen stabilisierten das System bis zur Niederlage im Zweiten Weltkrieg? Ernst Fraenkels "Der Doppelstaat" und Franz Neumanns "Behemoth" gelten als wegweisende analytische Zugänge zum Verständnis der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftspraxis. Beide Bücher sind bereits Anfang der 1940er Jahre erschienen. Es sind Klassiker: also Bücher, mit denen noch heute etwas anzufangen ist. Der kompakte Lehrtext ist insbesondere für den studentischen Haus- und Seminargebrauch verfasst worden. Er ist eine Handreichung für Einsteiger und Studierende aller Semester, die sich erstmals mit den schwierigen Texten beschäftigen