Alfred Baeumler
1887–1968 · German philosopher and pedagogue, Nazi ideologue
Alfred Baeumler (1887-1968) was a German philosopher and educationalist, born in Austria according to some sources, and one of the most prominent intellectual voices of Nazism. He worked within the German philosophical tradition that followed Kant and Nietzsche, and his significance lies in being one of the regime's leading ideologues in academia and education.
He studied philosophy and art history in Berlin and Bonn and earned his doctorate in Munich in 1914 with a thesis on general validity in Kant's aesthetics. From 1924 he taught at the Technical University of Dresden, where he became full professor in 1929. In 1933 he was appointed to a newly created chair of philosophy and political pedagogy in Berlin, and that same year gave an inaugural lecture, "Against the Un-German Spirit", which became notorious for its call to fight foreign influence.
His 1931 book on Nietzsche presented the philosopher as a thinker of will and politics, a reading the regime used to justify its ideals. In education he stressed character and community over intellect, and in the essay "Hellas and Germania" he argued that Europe's renewal required recovering the values of ancient Greece. After 1945 he was interned for three years and never returned to a university chair. Today his influence survives mainly in critical studies of the relationship between philosophy and totalitarianism.
Key ideas
- Nietzsche in the service of Nazism: he read the philosopher as a thinker of will and politics, a reading that helped justify the regime.
- Political pedagogy: education should shape the soldierly citizen and the community rather than transmit purely intellectual knowledge.
- Anti-intellectualism in education: he rejected the idea of an unlimited malleability of human beings and held that character and race set limits to formation.
- Hellenism as model: he held that recovering the values of ancient Greece was necessary to renew Germany and the West.
Curiosities
A remark by Victor Klemperer
On learning of his appointment, the philologist Victor Klemperer remarked wryly on the Berlin faculty: "Poor Berlin faculty: Baeumler their philosopher, Neubert their Romanist."
A book burning
According to the Völkischer Beobachter, the symbolic book burning that followed his inaugural lecture was meant to purify the "German spirit" by destroying 20,000 volumes.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.