In case you haven’t noticed, American and British politics are in utter shambles. A climate science-denying President of the supposedly United States gets away with racial slurs and refusals to renounce sympathies with Neo-Nazis, and while I don’t think it’s fair to say that everybody who voted for Brexit is a racist, correlations between racial hatred and Leave votes are hard to deny. Equally concerning, Leave voters who have come to realize the magnitude of brazen lies fed to them by Brexiteering politicians and now demand a second referendum are attacked as ‘traitors’ by British tabloids and fellow countrymen.
With Britain’s impending exit from the EU next month, I still don’t know if or when I will receive a letter from the government telling me to go back to Germany, where things aren’t exactly looking bright either. If you had told me at the time of my relocation to England in 2005 that a new German rightwing party would beat the Liberals and Green party in the last elections, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. And a look at more remote places like Brazil also seems to confirm that we’re dealing with a global crisis: politicians and their journalistic henchmen catering to the worst fears and instincts in humans have brought about a new age of division. Perhaps the only ‘liberty’ these politicians defend is the freedom of their supporters to cultivate hatred for minorities, and to define what they mean by a ‘fact’.
Pardon the ramble. But these are scary times indeed, and I’m deeply frustrated and frankly disgusted at the bigotry and stupidity which has brought about the mess we are now forced to sort out somehow.
I can only suppose Eric Kurlander’s work on his book Hitler’s Monster’s. A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 2017) has been motivated by similar feelings of anxiety and helplessness. At least this might explain (though by no means excuse) this unhelpful historical scapegoating exercise. Because impartial, rigorously researched historical scholarship the book is not. Yale University Press advertises Hitler’s Monsters as the “definitive history of the supernatural in Nazi Germany”, but the most detailed review of the book, by a historian of religion and politics at Heidelberg University, begs to differ (Strube, 2017). I recommend reading this colleague’s review and concur with his main criticisms of the book: a remarkably sporadic and selective use of primary sources, undifferentiating portrayals of vastly heterogeneous spiritual traditions as an inherently fascist ‘occultism’, and reliance on straw man attacks on fellow historians, mainly targeting historical works following in the tracks of Corinna Treitel’s cultural history, A Science for the Soul (2004).
Coming from the history of science and medicine, and specializing in the historiography of science’s interrelations with magic, I’m afraid there is a lot more to be said about problems with Hitler’s Monsters.
Monstrous Monoliths: Humanistic “Mainstream Science” vs. Fascist “Scientific Occultism”?
Kurlander spells out a central concern of Hitler’s Monsters: The relationship of ‘mainstream science’ and ‘occultism’ during and beyond the Third Reich:
“German occultism was neither as universally progressive nor as closely interwoven with science as many revisionist scholars suggest. Many natural scientists, journalists, and liberal sceptics were a l r e a d y exasperated by – and devastating in their critiques of – occult and border scientific thinking during the first third of the twentieth century. To pretend that professional biologists, chemists, and physicists, both inside and outside Germany, were as prone to occult ideas as amateur ‘scientists of the soul’ is therefore unhelpful, especially in eliding long-running and heated contemporary debates over occult charlatanry between mainstream and ‘border scientists’” (pp. xiii-xiv, original emphasis).
We are not told which of the “many revisionist scholars” are criticised here, probably because Kurlander wouldn’t be able to name any serious historian who would make the absurd suggestion that ‘occultism’ was “universally progressive”.
The one thing that historians like Anne Harrington (1996), Corinna Treitel (2004) and Heather Wolffram (2009) did do for the German context was not to “pretend” but present concrete evidence that various occult beliefs have been far more widespread in progressive lay and scientific circles than previous historians have assumed.
Moreover, these findings have been confirmed by studies of various national contexts (e.g. Albanese, 2007; Allen, 2005; Bogdan & Djurdjevic, 2014; Mannherz, 2012; Owen, 2004). Hence, without downplaying let alone denying the plain fact that Nazi ideologies heavily correlated with certain variants of ‘occultism’, the common thrust of these studies have made it rather difficult to simply make this the basis for suggestions that there was something inherently fascist in any and all forms of belief in the ‘supernatural’.
Kurlander appears particularly worried because for these and other reasons “revisionist scholars respond quite critically to the idea that there is a clear line to be drawn between mainstream and ‘border’ sciences”, and he warns us: “But such lines, then and now, do exist” (p. xv).
I agree that there are criteria and basic rules that can help us separate the wheat from chaff in ongoing disputes over demarcations of science from charlatanry. But rather than spelling out what these are, Kurlander, after claiming knowledge of a universal demarcation criterion, lets himself off the hook by informing us that “The purpose of this book is not to answer the epistemological question of what constitutes science and what constitutes border science” (p. xv).
Moreover, Hitler’s Monsters never even tries to rigorously define the term ‘border science’, though it’s obvious the main culprits are those who have blurred the “lines between science and the supernatural” (p. 149). It would be unfair to single Kurlander out for failing to define ‘the supernatural’, but the consistent vagueness in which he uses his key terms is particularly problematic in this case because his narrative stands or falls with rigorously contextualized definitions of them. After attacking his fabled fellow historians for suggesting that occultism was universally progressive, by reliance on unchecked assumptions and fuzzy terms Kurlander comes darn close to making the opposite claim: ‘occultism’ was universally fascist. This he does by lumping together all sorts of unorthodox or alternative spiritual traditions under the label ‘occultism’, and contrasts this monster with its heroic conqueror ‘mainstream science’, which he portrays as inherently ‘naturalistic’ and simultaneously universally humanistic.
Hence, Hitler’s Monsters more than just insinuates that ‘mainstream science’ formed a closed front in a supposed simultaneous battle against ‘occultism’ and ‘scientific racism’: According to Kurlander, occupations with “‘racial hygiene’ and ‘racial-breeding’” may have been “popular among mainstream biologists” but were ultimately “border scientific fields” (p. 22). Also, it was only because it was supposedly nourished by occult ideas that “German racial science diverged from mainstream British or American biology and anthropology in applying totalizing, organicist, political-ideological arguments” (p. 242). There is a whole section on eugenics (pp. 241-6), but while Kurlander admits it was no invention of the Nazis, his tacit conflation of eugenics with experiments on humans inspires little hope that he’s aware of the actual scope of eugenicist ideas and practises.
Kurlander’s retroactive demarcation of eugenics from 1930s ‘mainstream science’ is so at odds with the state of the art of historical scholarship (e.g. Adams, 1990; Kevles, 1986; Wecker, Braunschweig, Imboden, Küchenhoff, & Ritter, 2009) that it boggles the mind. Historians of biomedical and hereditary sciences are typically as critical of eugenics as Kurlander is averse to ‘occultism’, though hopefully for better reasons. Still, rather than retroactively declaring eugenics a ‘border science’ because it was unethical, this scholarship has shown that it was perfectly ‘mainstream’ in and outside German science and medicine long before the rise of Hitler. But Kurlander simply ignores this literature, and instead of facing ugly facts, he tries to save the popular image of his ideal of ‘mainstream science’ as intrinsically humanistic by whitewashing its history.
Kurlander is obviously aware that the notion of ‘degeneration’ (“Entartung”) served a central function in Nazi ideology in first characterizing Jews, the mentally ill, and other ‘undesirables’ as sub-humans, before thereby justifying the atrocities of the Holocaust. But the consensus of the aforementioned scholarship on the history of hereditary sciences is again that degeneration as a pillar of ‘scientific racism’ had already become a ‘mainstream’ scientific preoccupation. Not least because colonial politics could instrumentalize it to ‘scientifically’ justify imperialist oppressions and atrocities against the ‘lower races’, again not only in German contexts, and long before the Third Reich. And rather than assuming degeneration theories were inherently occultist or even anti-Semitic, it’s worth remembering that the main proponent of Entartung in late nineteenth-century Germany, the physician and writer Max Nordau (1849-1923), was both Jewish and an outspoken enemy of all things ‘occult’.
Nordau was hardly the odd man out when he dismissed reports of alleged spiritualist phenomena out of hand, and thought it sufficient to declare witnesses as supposedly self-evident victims of morbid degenerative relapses into ‘savage’ stages of development. In fact, the pathologization of spiritualism and other occult beliefs as morbid degenerative regress was already a defining feature and central function of the fledgling ‘mainstream’ anthropology of Adolf Bastian in Germany, E. B. Tylor in England, and Nordau’s personal hero, Cesare Lombroso, in Italy. When Lombroso, a previous vocal ‘mainstream’ critic of occult beliefs, publicly announced his conversion to spiritualism in the early 1890s (Lombroso, 1909; Pick, 1989, pp. 149-152), it seems Nordau chose to simply ignore this rather inconvenient circumstance.
Scholars like Kurlander, who appear to deliberately pass over historical facts that don’t fit their simplistic narrative, do something very similar. Refusing to check the actual evidence for his most basic assumptions, Kurlander puts ‘mainstream science’ as a monstrously static monolith to work against equally unhelpful static conceptions of marginalized ideas and disciplines.
Once we start looking at the concrete means by which this marginalization was achieved, it again turns out that humanistic concerns of patient welfare, or even worries over undeniable instances of fraud, were not among the prime stimuli of the main response of the medical ‘mainstream’ to spiritualism and other occult beliefs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Brown, 1983; Shortt, 1984). And far from being an invention of the nineteenth century, ex cathedra pathologizations of various occult traditions that deviated from contemporary ‘mainstream’ sciences, religion and philosophies were already characteristic of discourses over magic during the Enlightenment, the supposed age of tolerance and humanism (e.g. Heyd, 1995; Porter, 1999).
Parapsychology: Anti-Semitic Pseudoscience or Pluralistic Puzzle-Solving?
Lombroso was by no means the only ‘mainstream’ scientist who believed to have found evidence for the occurrence of some occult phenomena. Others were, for example, the ‘father’ of American psychology, William James; Darwin’s co-originator of modern evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace in Britain; and the future Nobel Laureate in physiology, Charles Richet in France.
Kurlander casually mentions Richet and James, and states that both “experimented with the paranormal” (p. 23). The word ‘paranormal’ didn’t exist yet, but the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in London did. Founded in 1882 by elite representatives of the scientific and philosophical ‘mainstream’ in response to off-hand dismissals of reports of strange phenomena by most of their colleagues, the SPR would later count both James and Richet among its presidents. Further ‘mainstream’ science representatives of the SPR included A. R. Wallace, William Crookes, Oliver Lodge and others who became convinced that spiritualist mediums could indeed sometimes channel spirits of the dead. Again others in the SPR, such as Richet, James, and future physics Nobel Laureates J. J. Thomson, Lord Rayleigh and later Marie Curie, were much more critical of the ‘spirit hypothesis’, but believed that reports of occult phenomena should be rigorously investigated rather than scoffed at from a safe distance (Gauld, 1968; Noakes, 2004; Turner, 1974; Williams, 1984).
The pluralism of positions regarding spiritualism within the SPR as the international flagship for systematic research in the ‘supernatural’ (a word that was vehemently rejected by most of its members) was mirrored in heterogeneous positions regarding heredity and race.
Richet, for instance, was an atheist and strongly believed that the mind could be reduced to brain chemistry, and therefore rejected spiritualist explanations. But he was just one of many other positivist if not materialist psychical researchers who became convinced that telepathy and even more bizarre phenomena such as materializations were facts of nature, believing that science would sooner or later come up with physicalist frameworks to explain them (Brancaccio, 2014; Mauskopf & McVaugh, 1980, p. 4; Sommer, 2013a, chapter 2). Richet was also a glowing pacifist who often gave public lectures on the brotherhood of man. But his pacifism should not divert attention from the fact that at the same time he was a proponent of a rather disturbing ‘scientific racism’ (e.g., La Vergata, 2018).
Darwin’s co-originator of modern evolutionary theory A. R. Wallace, on the other hand, may have been a pretty gullible spiritualist. But while this in itself would not prove that all spiritualists were gullible, Wallace was also one of the relatively rare early critics of eugenics and a socialist who fought for the underprivileged classes (Fichman, 2006). We will come back to William James’ liberalism and rejection of ‘scientific racism’ in part 2, but the pluralism of psychical research is again illustrated in his misgivings over Wallace. James was much more open to spiritualist explanations than Richet, and kept his belief on the matter in suspense until the end. When he visited a séance together with Wallace, however, James had to realise that the great evolutionist wouldn’t shy away from saving his spiritualist faith by passing over strong indications of mediumistic fraud (James, 1887).
These examples already indicate that we cannot simply conflate psychical research (or as it was later called, parapsychology) with spiritualism. Neither can we regard spiritualism in itself as a fascist or even anti-progressive ideology. The examples of Richet, Wallace and James also show that we should not just blindly pin our faith on the authority of eminent scientific names to justify our own beliefs or disbeliefs. Any reconstruction of a scientist’s reasons for belief as well as disbelief in occult phenomena has to start with a close reading of primary sources, in the specific contexts of their own time. Kurlander, on the other hand, appears rather uninterested in concrete historical facts, contexts, nuances of detail, and other basic questions of methodology.
After having made a travesty of ‘mainstream’ science, Kurlander’s portrayal of the area where science and the occult have most directly intersected is likewise underwhelming. A useful initial definition of psychical research, or Parapsychologie, as it was often called in 1930s Germany, would be to say it was the name for a discipline concerned with systematic experimental tests and field studies of alleged telepathy, clairvoyance and the physical and mental phenomena of mediumship. Findings were published in specialist periodicals and books, typically by researchers that had gone through the mills of ‘mainstream’ scientific, medical or philosophical university training (cf. Bauer, 1993; Tischner, 1960; Wolffram, 2009).
This is perhaps why Kurlander states that ‘parapsychology’ was “probably the most ‘legitimate’ and all-encompassing ‘border science’” (p. 24), and elsewhere he even calls it “the border science par excellence” (p. 69, original italics). It’s not clear why he thinks parapsychology was “all-encompassing”, but probably means thereby what he falsely claims later, namely that “virtually all occult and border scientific thinkers embraced astrology” (p. 27). We are also told that parapsychology was comprised of an “uncritical” and “critical” wing. Proponents of the “uncritical” wing, Kurlander states, “sought to validate the claims of spiritualists, clairvoyants, and astrologers”, while the “goal of critical parapsychologists was not genuinely to ‘understand’ occultism” (p. 24). Leaving it at this classification without even wondering if “critical” is the right term to describe programmatic aloofness, Kurlander implies that those who occupied the important middle ground, i.e. researchers who actually wanted to understand and therefore did their best to impartially evaluate claims of occult phenomena, simply did not exist.
One representative of the ‘critical wing’ mentioned by Kurlander is the philosopher-psychologist Max Dessoir (1867-1947). This is the only time his name appears in the book, and readers don’t learn that Dessoir was the one who actually coined the term Parapsychologie.
The story of Dessoir’s coinage of Parapsychologie in the late 1880s is sufficiently strange to justify a separate post. In the meantime, let’s just state Dessoir invented the word in his response to an article written by a certain Ludwig Brunn, who represented the contemporary ‘mainstream’ view of Lombroso, Nordau, Bastian and others: ‘prophets’ (i.e. psychics and mediums) and believers in the ‘occult’, along with criminals and madmen, were degenerates. In his reply, Dessoir proposed Parapsychologie as a new name for the study of occult phenomena, and debated the scientific basis for Lombroso’s claim that a pathological framework was sufficient to deal with these things. It turns out that ‘Ludwig Brunn’ was none other than Dessoir himself, who would use this pen name on other occasions (Sommer, 2013b), and we will come back to Dessoir’s subsequent career as a ‘critical’ parapsychologist and debunker of spiritualism at a later occasion.
Dessoir’s terminological proposal of Parapsychologie was completely ignored at the time, and his neologism was only rediscovered and began to be more commonly adopted in the 1920s, when it still competed with wissenschaftlicher Okkultismus (‘scientific occultism’).
In terms of objects and methods of research, and competing theoretical interpretations of the alleged phenomena, however, both Parapsychologie and wissenschaftlicher Okkultismus were roughly identical with the English ‘psychical research’. The theoretical pluralism of this tradition we have already noticed earlier, when we took a brief look at the first German magazine dedicated to evaluations of ‘psychic phenomena’, Psychische Studien. Founded in 1874, the journal was renamed into Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie in 1926, by which time it sported a fairly impressive range of German and foreign university professors as board members, including vocal anti-spiritualists such as the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, the Italian medical anthropologist Enrico Morselli (both were ‘mainstream eugenicists’), and the Austrian physicist, Hans Thirring.
Thirring, a socialist and vocal critic of anti-Semitism, was a friend of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, some of the few ‘mainstream’ intellectuals whom Kurlander identifies as enemies of the occult. Kurlander quotes Freud’s concerns that certain occult beliefs – which Kurlander here simply labels ‘parapsychology’ – might be used to reinforce anti-Semitism (p. 25). Yet the claim that Freud “rejected parapsychology out of hand” (p. 68) is again simply wrong. Kurlander is either unaware of, or uninterested in the fact that Freud was yet another famous member of the SPR. More pertinently, while Freud was no doubt often ambivalent and cautious to express his views on parapsychology in public, his final conviction that telepathy was a fact is documented, for example, in his observations on “The occult significance of dreams” (Freud, 1943), as well in rather unambiguous statements in his correspondence (for a well-researched recent account of Freud’s growing acceptance of telepathy see Josephson-Storm, 2017, chapter 7).
To set the record straight is obviously not to make the foolish suggestion that telepathy must be real because Freud said so. It is simply to stress the point that as a historian, Kurlander does a profound disservice to his profession when he simply denies and suppresses primary sources along with findings by other scholars that directly contradict his claims.
Similarly, Kurlander states the truism that “many border scientific ideas” were “ardently rejected” by mainstream intellectuals, and enlists Albert Einstein among such sceptics (p. xv). Never mind that, as far as Einstein was concerned, telepathy was again not among these ideas. In 1930, Einstein offered to write the preface to a report of successful telepathic experiments by the American socialist Upton Sinclair, where he urged that it “deserves the most earnest consideration, not only of the laity, but also of the psychologists by profession” (Einstein, 1930/1962, p. xi).
But as in the case of Freud, Einstein, and dozens other iconic scientific name s, the prime historical question to come to grips with is not whether their beliefs or disbeliefs in telepathy were ultimately valid, but if ‘mainstream science’ really formed the supposedly united front against the ‘occult’ as Kurlander wants his readers to believe.
And here it has to be said that if there’s a consensus of ‘mainstream’ historians of science and medicine specifically working on the occult, it is that such a united front of ‘mainstream’ scientists contra ‘the occult’ – especially when it came to offering impartial and strictly methodological criticisms – never existed. Again, without having to make judgements about the reality of alleged occult phenomena, in the face of the quantity of the most sophisticated primary and secondary literature it’s futile to deny the fact that serious, systematic preoccupations of sometimes eminent representatives of science and philosophy with ostensible parapsychological phenomena have never actually stopped.
This is by no means to deny that modern Western academic ‘mainstream’ culture is indeed inherently biased against the ‘occult’. The plain fact that a strict adherence to ‘naturalism’ is an absolute precondition for any work in the sciences as well as in the humanities might also be enlisted as supposed proof that science has not only opposed but ultimately vanquished the ‘supernatural’. Yet, as we have already seen, it’s also a fact that despite its axiomatic function, ‘naturalism’ is an immensely tricky term to define. Moreover, elite psychical researchers like Richet, Wallace, James, and later their colleagues in German and international parapsychology, were usually rather explicit in their rejection of pre-interpretations of alleged occult phenomena as ‘supernatural’ miraculous violations of natural law.
Hence, it seems that even a sensible and important political function of ‘naturalism’ – the protection of secular academic freedom from theological inference – cannot simply be deployed as an argument for the intrinsic illegitimacy of parapsychological research. This is also illustrated in the categorical rejection of spiritual and religious interpretations of parapsychological phenomena by atheist believers in telepathy like Richet and Freud, a position that would in fact come to dominate post-war professionalized parapsychological research (Beloff, 1993; Collins & Pinch, 1982; Sommer, 2014).
Science historians like Frank Turner, Seymour Mauskopf, Roy Porter, Anne Harrington, Allison Winter and Richard Noakes have either tacitly demonstrated or explicitly argued that continuities of heterodox activities within scientific elites have been squarely written out of history. That such a statement would be no melodramatic exaggeration seems also confirmed by sociological studies, which have shown the predominantly polemical means by which parapsychology and other modern ‘border sciences’ have been marginalized throughout the twentieth century (Collins & Pinch, 1979, 1982; Hess, 1992, 1993; McClenon, 1984; Pinch & Collins, 1984). By employing the age-old rhetorical device of guilt by association, Kurlander’s book, on the other hand, actively contributes to a genre of literature that does not seek to understand, but to programmatically vilify marginalized ideas and those who ask unfashionable empirical questions.
Part 2 of this review will therefore take a look at Kurlander’s construction of ‘the occult’ as a pastime of anti-Semites and right-wing politicians by showing further problems with his selections and characterizations of historical actors. Apart from introducing Jewish parapsychologists who were part of ‘mainstream science’ in Germany and Austria in the 1920s and 30s, I will also discuss contemporary examples of how ‘occultism’ was embraced by German secular thinkers on the political left.
And since I opened this part of my review on a rather personal note, it might be fitting to conclude it in the same vein and give you an idea of the reasons why I personally think the study of science and magic is important. In fact, I strongly believe that the historiography of science and the occult points to rather serious problems far beyond questions of strictly academic specialism. To anticipate my main concern: both believers and nonbelievers in the occult should be united on one rather basic point, namely that if we want to battle hatred and division effectively, we first need to understand where it is coming from. Cultivations of programmatic hostility towards certain ideas, based on deliberate ignorance of who one’s opponents actually are, and what they actually do and think, can only serve to create further unnecessary division. This cannot be good for professional science or historical scholarship. Nor is it helpful in the realization of our urgent human duty to work together to prevent histories of the Third Reich and other fascist regimes from repeating themselves.
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