Catastrophe and Continuity: In German Academic Philosophy Under National Socialism
Gregor Große-Bölting will in his presentation report on the creation of a Linked Open Data collection of philosophy professors who worked at German universities between 1933 and 1945.
German philosophy during the Weimar Republic may have produced some of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century: philosophical schools of thought such as logical empiricism, the Warburg-Cassirer circle, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Freiburg phenomenology and, in a broader sense, Gestalt psychology have shaped the thinking and work of the humanities in the last century and continue to exert a significant influence.
This period of productivity ended abruptly with the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums, BBG) forced even leading international authorities out of their positions if they were in the Nazis' racist perception considered “non-Aryans” or were politically inconvenient. Many subsequently left Germany, and few returned after the war to take up professorships in the newly founded Federal Republic. Three – Paul Ludwig Landsberg, Johannes Maria Verweyen, and Kurt Huber – fell victim to the Nazis' extermination politics. Those who remained in Germany and in their positions had to conform their activities to the restrictions imposed by a totalitarian regime.
These changes left their mark on academic philosophy, with repercussions that may still be felt today: careers were ended, philosophers in exile fell into oblivion. At the same time, post-war philosophy was taken up by people who had already held positions of power and influence under National Socialism, some as followers, others as active supporters of the system.
In my presentation I will report on the creation of a Linked Open Data collection of philosophy professors who worked at German universities between 1933 and 1945. It is based on existing research by George Leaman (1993), Christian Tilitzki (2002), and Michael Grüttner (2021, 2023, 2024) and contains, in addition to basic information, references to other linked data repositories, event data, and information on memberships in Nazi organizations and the effects of the application of the BBG.
The resulting dataset of 215 philosophers is FAIRly published and openly available via a website, which can be filtered and freely searched using a SPARQL interface. Furthermore, the data was analyzed exploratively using a variety of digital methods: In addition to a prosopographic analysis to identify similarities and differences within the collection – primarily based on memberships and categories of discrimination – links to the German National Library's GND Explore service were used to analyze 1,280 titles of works written by the philosophers. The per-professor-event data and the contained links to DBpedia provide GIS information for geoanalysis, which can be used to trace the routes of philosophers who fled Germany. The analysis was conducted against the backdrop of Siegfried Kracauer's (2009) philosophy of history and Pierre Bourdieu's (2020) social history of philosophy, as well as an elaborate understanding of exile, developed on the basis of the writings of Hannah Arendt (2023, 2024), Judith N. Shklar (2019), Giorgio Agamben (2012, 2020), and others.
Bio
Gregor Große-Bölting is a researcher in computer science education and works as a software developer on the project “Runic writing in the Germanic languages (RuneS)” (runesdb.de). He has a background in computer science and philosophy and enjoys interdisciplinary work.