The latest issue of Aries, the prime academic journal for the study of Western esotericism, includes a comprehensive assessment of Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters by Eva Kingsepp at Karlstad University, Sweden. Whereas the first part of my own review here on Forbidden Histories was concerned with Kurlander’s evidence-free depiction of ‘mainstream’ science’s relationship with parapsychology and ‘race science’ during the Third Reich, Kingsepp’s 16-pages fact-check specifically deals with his use of properly esoteric literature and ideas, and their claimed influence on Nazi ideology.
Systematically comparing Kurlander’s claims with the evidence he cites to support them, Kingsepp arrives at a sobering conclusion: Hitler’s Monsters is riddled with serious misrepresentations of primary and secondary literature, and Prof. Kurlander sometimes claims the actual opposite of what his sources say. Wondering if the book was “a practical joke to test the US academic publishing system” (Kingsepp, 2019, p. 274), she also takes Yale University Press to task for employing an alarmingly lax review process.
As Kingsepp observes, however, mere sloppiness fails to account for the very nature of these problems, and there is method in Kurlander’s abuse of sources and creation of what she calls “fake references” (ibid., p. 279) to construct a monolithic monster of ‘occultism’ as a necessary condition for Nazism. These are serious allegations, but Kingsepp thankfully made her review available for readers who wish to counter-check her findings.
Parapsychology on the left
Interestingly, Kurlander himself states that “Given occultism’s broad impact on Weimar culture, including a number of left-wing and Jewish artists, it would be inaccurate to suggest that occultism was inherently racist or fascist” (Kurlander, 2017, p. 76). Yet, as we have already seen, his book as a whole tells a rather different story: It lumps together all sorts of sometimes competing ‘esoteric’ ideas and Eastern philosophies in his shorthand of ‘occultism’ as a pastime of anti-Semites and other villains, only to contrast it with an equally absurd depiction of ‘mainstream science’ as an aggregate of self-evident anti-fascism.
Let’s take a closer look at his insistence that while Nazis were all ‘occultists’, “[t]here was no such relationship between politics and occultism on the left” (Kurlander, 2017, p. 88).
You may recall the first part of this article included a link to a review by scholar of religions Julian Strube, which should be read together with Kingsepp’s in-depth assessment of Hitler’s Monsters. Strube – whose own research has revealed striking links of esoteric ideas with socialism – quotes Kurlander’s denial of clearly existing relationships between left-wing politics and the occult, and states his assertion was “factually wrong” (Strube, 2017, p. 135).
In line with Strube’s critique, I’d like to add a few concrete examples of German representatives of parapsychology (the experimental study of alleged telepathy and mediumistic phenomena) or ‘scientific occultism’ as it was also called, which likewise fly in the face of Kurlander’s one-dimensional constructions.
Johannes Maria Verweyen (1883-1945)
Let’s begin with Johannes M. Verweyen, a professor of philosophy at Bonn. While experimental parapsychology was not his most central interest, he supported it by writing at least one book concerned with parapsychological research (e.g. Verweyen, 1928) and by lending his name to the editorial board of the leading German periodical in the field, the Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie (ZfP), where he also published a number of mostly theoretical texts.
Perhaps the most eclectic elite advocate of German parapsychological research, Verweyen more than dabbled in various occult traditions ranging from classical Christian and Eastern mysticism to ‘Indian Theosophy’ and the teachings of Krishnamurti. Moreover, he was an especially passionate proponent of psychotherapeutic applications of occult beliefs with an emphasis on self-acceptance, personal growth and other principles not far removed from the post-war humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow and others.
Verweyen was also an outspoken anti-fascist and open critic of the Nazi regime, and as historian Corinna Treitel has shown, both his political and occult-therapeutical utterances were closely watched by Nazi officials, who forced his retirement from his chair at Bonn university in 1934. After years of surveillance and harassment, Verweyen was eventually arrested in 1941, and in 1945 he died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (Treitel, 2004, pp. 234-236).
Kurlander fleetingly mentions the case, but hastens to stress: “When Verweyen was arrested, it was due as much to his ‘pacifism, internationalism, and anti-fascism’ as it was to his occultism” (Kurlander, 2017, p. 120). At first sight, this may look like an unproblematic statement and in line with Treitel’s findings, who is cited to support his argument (it’s unclear which purpose the inverted commas in the quote are supposed to serve, by the way). However, while Kurlander implies that Verweyen’s political activism should be viewed as separate from his occult philosophy and fails to mention humanistic psychotherapeutic ideas as another practical upshot of his heretical convictions, Treitel, on the contrary, makes the rather better supported case that both were “inextricable” from his “occult predilections” (Treitel, 2004, p. 235).
A similar assessment is provided by Heather Wolffram, another historian whose work turns up in Kurlander’s bibliography, never mind that it is also quite at odds with his narrative. Verweyen’s arrest and ultimate death, Wolffram argues in line with Treitel, was a consequence of “the ideological implications” of his occult humanism, “which in its emphasis on pacifism and anti-fascism competed with the ideological claims made by the Nazi State” (Wolffram, 2009, p. 222).
Hans Driesch (1867-1941)
If Kurlander merely downplays the role of Verweyen’s occult ideology as a motivating factor behind his humanistic political activism, he bends the case of the biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch beyond recognition to make it fit his biased account.
One of the most prominent German academics of his time, Driesch’s name appeared on the editorial board of the ZfP, and he published several articles on parapsychology and incorporated it in some of his books. Driesch also wrote a methodological textbook of parapsychology (Driesch, 1932), and served as the first German president of the Society for Psychical Research in England, which we already mentioned in part 1 of this article.
Driesch was also one of the first non-Jewish German professors to be forcibly retired after Hitler rose to power in 1933. This was because of Driesch’s pacifist, cosmopolitan and anti-racist political activism, and not least because he refused orders to denounce a Jewish colleague. After failing to tone down his radical democratic prose, in 1935 he was prohibited to speak in public and to travel (see also Harrington, 1996, pp. 188-193; Wolffram, 2009, pp. 206-208).
Historian of science Anne Harrington has shown that some of Driesch’s ideas were appropriated by certain Nazis for their own purposes, while others rejected them. Far from concluding his ideas were inherently conducive to fascism let alone genocide, Harrington states that Driesch’s Nazi appropriators “failed to understand his bottom line”, and she suggests that his “heightened efforts during the Nazi years to validate the claims of parapsychology actually functioned for him, among other things, as a form of oppositional politics – a means by which the metaphysical groundwork for cosmopolitanism and pacifism could be laid, even in the midst of a regime that deplored such ideals” (Harrington, 1996, p. 192).
What does Kurlander make of Driesch’s case and the research of Harrington and Wolffram, both of whom he cites?
Not mentioning Driesch’s political stance and resistance, let alone his oppression by the Nazis with a word, he merely notes that “many völkisch-esotericists and Nazis consumed his occult-inspired, holistic views with great interest” (Kurlander, 2017, p. 143). Elsewhere, Kurlander makes a statement whose syntax is sufficiently ambivalent to allow a reading of the absurd claim that Driesch even “worked for the Third Reich” (p. 106). That’s essentially as far as Kurlander’s rather incomplete and one-sided portrayal of Driesch goes, never mind that no less than six of Driesch’s works appear in the bibliography.
Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich (1880-1949)
Verweyen and Driesch have received a fair deal of attention by historians. A comparatively understudied case is that of the Tübingen professor of philosophy and psychologist of religion, T. K. Oesterreich, whose name is absent from Hitler’s Monsters altogether.
A member of the small German network of elite academics trying to advance parapsychology against polemical attacks leveled both by orthodox religious and anti-religious intellectuals and journalists, Oesterreich shared the cosmopolitan, democratic and pacifist fervor of Verweyen, Driesch and other colleagues. Married to the Jewish philosopher Maria Raich, Oesterreich was also among several other representatives of parapsychology who explicitly linked their unorthodox work with political views that were in stark contrast with Nazi ideologies.
For example, in the introduction of one of his books on parapsychology, written not long after the end of the Great War and about a decade before the rise of Hitler, Oesterreich spelled out a warning concerning the rise of political barbarism. As a way to stem it, he proposed to follow recent developments in physics and psychology (notably relativity theory and Gestalt psychology), and place the sciences methodologically on a less reductionist-mechanistic and politically on a more pacifist humanist footing (Oesterreich, 1921).
Like Driesch and the Giessen philosopher and supporter of parapsychology August Messer (see below), Oesterreich was forcibly retired from his chair in 1933, and he and his family suffered years of harassment. The fact that his wife was Jewish was certainly a factor, but the official justification for his dismissal from his Tübingen chair was Oesterreich’s pacifism, cosmopolitanism and advocacy of democracy (Bauer, 1999; Wolffram, 2009, p. 221). According to local historian of Tübingen Manfred Hantke, shortly before the end of the war, Oesterreich and his family were ordered to be killed by an SS firing squad but managed to evade execution (Hantke, 2010).
Jewish parapsychologists: Arthur Kronfeld (1886-1941) and Carl Bruck (1879-1944)
Kurlander virtually writes German parapsychologists and ‘occultists’ on the political left out of history. It’s therefore hardly surprising that Jewish mystics and parapsychologists in Germany receive a less than superficial treatment in Hitler’s Monsters as well.
In part 1 of this review I pointed out how Kurlander cast Jewish elite intellectuals Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in the role of antagonists of parapsychology whereas in fact they were not: Einstein wrote a preface advocating research on telepathy in his preface to a parapsychological study, and Freud was not only a member of the Society for Psychical Research but came to be convinced that telepathy was real.
To be sure, Kurlander dedicates a whole section to the Jewish celebrity clairvoyant ‘Erik Hanussen’ (Hermann Steinschneider), whose ‘predictions’ were instrumentalized by the PR-savvy Nazis before he was eventually killed. Kurlander also casually mentions the Kabbalah as a Jewish tradition of occultism and drops a reference to “the Jewish occultist and ‘life reformer’, Friedrich Eckstein” (p. 18).
However, readers are left in the dark concerning the fact that the inventor of the very term Parapsychologie – the philosopher-psychologist Max Dessoir – was half-Jewish (for his memoirs, see Dessoir, 1947). Another inconvenient detail passed over by Kurlander concerns two further ‘mainstream’ academics who happened to be parapsychological researchers: the Jewish physician, psychotherapist, and philosopher of science Arthur Kronfeld, and the prominent dermatologist, syphilis researcher and professor of medicine, Carl Bruck.
To be fair, there has been little historical work on either Kronfeld’s or Bruck’s parapsychology, even though they were by no means marginal figures when they were alive. I hope to be able to continue research on both; in the meantime, here are some initial findings:
Arthur Kronfed, a prominent and widely respected psychiatrist and philosopher (see, e.g., Abu Ghazal, 2016), obtained his doctorate in philosophy from another openly anti-fascist advocate of parapsychology, the Giessen philosopher August Messer. Like Driesch and Oesterreich, Messer was forcibly retired from his chair in 1933, for the same political reasons (there has been scant historical interest in Messer, but see Kanitscheider, 1994). In February 1930, Kronfeld conducted parapsychological experiments with Albert Einstein in Berlin (Schmidt, 1930, pp. 604-610), and from January 1928 to June 1929 he was a co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie, where he also published several articles (e.g. Kronfeld, 1929).
Kronfeld also participated in and wrote a substantial preface to an experimental study of telepathy by Carl Bruck (Bruck, 1925), which was practically ignored by most other ‘mainstream’ scientists. One of the few reviews of Bruck’s study appeared in the psychoanalytical journal Imago, where the Jewish analyst Fanja Lowtzky stated that “the experimenter succeeded in obtaining positive results under rigorous control” (Lowtzky, 1928, p. 536).
Almost certainly to avoid impending arrest by the Nazis, both Kronfeld and Bruck committed suicide in 1941 and 1944 (both were tragically joined in the act by their wives). Yet, certain overt similarities notwithstanding, it seems Bruck and Kronfeld didn’t completely see eye to eye in regard to humanistic values.
Kronfeld was a devout and widely admired proponent of humanism in medicine and socialism in politics. Bruck, on the other hand (though information on his political views are hard to come by today), directly contributed to biomedical research now referred to as ‘scientific racism’.
In 1907, Bruck published a study in a leading medical journal, in which he attempted to use blood serum as a means to racially differentiate Caucasians, Negroes, Malayans, Chinese, and Arabs (Bruck, 1907). In retrospect, this may seem a rather unthinkable research interest for a Jewish scientist who would later be prosecuted by the Nazis. And yet, unlike his later telepathy experiments, Bruck’s serum study was part of Kurlander’s cherished ‘mainstream science’, which was far from unblemished long before the rise of Hitler.
Incidentally, and adding to my point (in part 1) concerning Kurlander’s ignorance of directly relevant studies in the history of science and medicine, he refers to an edited volume (Rupnow, Lipphardt, Thiel, & Wessely, 2008, cited, for example, on pp. 304n35, 307n15, 314n236, and 372n207) containing three chapters by historians of German biomedicine, which specifically address the problematic whitewashing of ‘mainstream’ science from its past racist and Nazi entanglements. (Even more incredibly, Kurlander cites two of these chapters directly, on pp. 366n9 and 371n193.)
Julius Goldstein (1873-1929)
While Bruck appears to have contributed to early twentieth-century ‘race science’, another Jewish intellectual with occult leanings in Germany, Julius Goldstein, was a vocal early critic. If Kronfeld and especially Bruck are hardly remembered today, Goldstein, who witnessed the rise of Hitler but didn’t have to live to see the Nazis seizing power, is now practically invisible (for a short biography see this online guide to the papers of Julius and Margarete Goldstein at the Center for Jewish History, New York).
Goldstein, a professor of philosophy at Darmstadt university and active member of the Democratic party, was an early vocal critic of ‘scientific racism’ as well as an open advocate of open-minded yet rigorous research into telepathy, spiritualism and other reported ‘occult’ phenomena. A friend and the closest German philosophical ally of the pragmatist philosopher and ‘founding father’ of American psychology William James, Goldstein was also a member of the Society for Psychical Research, whose president James was long before the same office was held by Hans Driesch from 1926 to 1927.
A few months before James’s death in August 1910, Goldstein sent him one of his critiques of ‘race science’ (Goldstein, 1910). James, whose own liberal, anti-imperialist and cosmopolitan views are well known, responded by noting “What mockery is carried on to-day under the name of Science!” (Skrupskelis & Berkeley, 2004, p. 554).
Earlier, Goldstein had tried to make up for deliberate omissions of original passages related to parapsychological research from German translations of James’s Will to Believe and Varieties of Religious Experience by publishing articles summarizing the omitted contents, and by providing an overview of empirical results of ‘scientific occultism’ (Goldstein, 1906, 1909).
Yet, just like Goldstein himself, his corrections of omissions in German editions of James’s works have sunk into oblivion. Until around the 1990s, the heretical scientific interests of James were mostly written out of history even in the US (for a literature review see Ford, 1998). Evidently, most James scholars (who are usually philosophers or psychologists with a keen interest in keeping their disciplines ‘modern’) have been haunted by similar concerns as Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones. In 1926, Jones warned his master that his parapsychological convictions were damaging to the public image of psychoanalysis. Freud replied:
“When anyone adduces my fall into sin, just answer him calmly that conversion to telepathy is my private affair like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking and many other things, and that the theme of telepathy is in essence alien to psychoanalysis” (Jones, 1957, pp. 395-396).
Professional suicide: Undermining historical scholarship’s right to exist
As mentioned in part 1 of this review, as far as questions of the reality of, say, telepathy interest us, we shouldn’t simply base our own verdict on Einstein’s belief that it might be, or Freud’s conviction that it was. Nor do I want to claim that occult or mystical beliefs in the metaphysical unity of mankind beyond temporary categories of race, nation and gender can only be enacted to motivate sympathy with the oppressed and courage to speak truth to power, as apparently in the cases of Verweyen, Driesch, Oesterreich, Messer, Kronfeld, James and Goldstein.
By pointing out severe distortions, falsifications and omissions of basic historical facts and concrete contexts in Hitler’s Monsters, I am mainly expressing my concern that Professor Kurlander, a representative of the historical profession, actively connives at the destruction of his own discipline.
Let me explain by going back to Eva Kingsepp’s review, which concludes by raising a significant point: Observing that Hitler’s Monsters arrived at a time when ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ have become part of official White House policy and communications, she also noted the Trump administration reinforced and drew upon “a widespread popular skepticism towards elite groups, including academia. Sadly, in this case such skepticism is extraordinarily well founded” (Kingsepp, 2019, p. 279).
Expertise is under fire not only in the US, and the threat concerns scientific as well as historical specialism. Hitler’s Monsters is in effect cheerleading Steven Pinker-style propaganda, which portrays current scientific orthodoxy as necessarily ‘humanistic’ and marginalized ideas as inherently dangerous. Neither Pinker et al. nor Kurlander have engaged with concrete evidence that renders such notions problematic to the say the very least. Yet, Kurlander tacitly buys into, and dangerously reaffirms, prophets of scientism like Pinker, Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who have all publicly declared the historical and philosophical study of the sciences a waste of time and money.
Funding for the humanities, and for historical research particularly on marginalized ideas and traditions, is rapidly dwindling on a global level. To play in the hands of pop intellectuals who abuse their considerable influence by attempting to make a hair-raisingly naive scientism an obligatory ideology if not metaphysics for all, is to accelerate the annihilation of critical historical scholarship as a much needed counterbalance.
As far as I can tell, with the already noted exceptions Hitler’s Monsters has received overwhelmingly positive reviews – not only by lay readers, but also by professional historians, who however lack relevant expertise in either the history of occult ideas or the histories of science and medicine. If the overall public reception of the book is any indication, it seems Kurlander has proven one thing: committed disbelief can be just as biased and disregarding of facts as the most naive faith in occult principles.
References
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