Alfred Baeumler

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alfred Baeumler (November 19, 1887 in Neustadt an der Tafelfichte, Northern Bohemia - March 19, 1968 in Eningen unter Achalm, near Reutlingen), was a German philosopher and pedagogue. In 1924 he became Privatdozent, then in 1929 professor at the Technische Universität Dresden. Starting in 1933 he taught in Berlin.

One of the more influential philosophers in Nazi Germany, Baeumler was a leading interpreter of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy as legitimizing Nazism — an ideologically motivated misinterpretation repudiated by post-war scholarship (German-American scholar Walter Kaufmann characterizes Baeumler as "one of the worst Nazi hacks" (see Basic Writings of Nietzsche, New York: The Modern Library, 2000, p. 604, n. 2)). Thomas Mann is known to have read Baeumler's work on Nietzsche in the early 1930s, and to have characterized passages of it as "Hitler prophecy" (see Thomas Mann und Alfred Baeumler, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989, p. 185). The 1931 book Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker, for example, 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 ("Führer") 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 the 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).

Such assertions have no credible foundation in Nietzsche's writings. In his lectures on Nietzsche, published post-war, Martin Heidegger nonetheless maintained his praise of "Baeumler's judicious reading" of Nietzsche.

His books were translated in Italian in the late 1990s by the Edizioni di Ar, a far-right publishing house founded in 1963 by Franco Freda, a neo-fascist condemned to 15 years of imprisonment for "subversive association" and involvement in several bombings.

[edit] 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.