Hermann Muckermann

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Hermann Muckermann SJ (born August 30, 1877 in Bückeburg , † October 27, 1962 in Berlin ) was a German biologist , racial hygienist and Jesuit .

Life

Hermann Muckermann came from a Roman Catholic family and was the first of 12 children of Anna and Hermann Johann Muckermann, a shoemaker in Bückeburg. Nine of the gifted siblings, five girls and four boys, reached adulthood. After graduating from high school, the sisters became teachers. The youngest brother Ludwig Muckermann became a diplomat, his next older brother Richard Muckermann became a politician, and Friedrich Muckermann a priest, writer and journalist.

Hermann Muckermann attended high school in Paderborn . In 1896 he joined the Jesuits and studied theology , biology and philosophy until 1906 , including in the United States at the College of the Sacred Heart, Wisconsin.

After the First World War , which Muckermann experienced as secretary of the delegate of the Order of Malta in France and in the East, he concentrated on his journalistic activities. In 1926 he left the Jesuit order after disputes, but remained a Catholic clergyman all his life.

Muckermann was a member of the " German Society for Racial Hygiene " founded by Alfred Ploetz and propagated eugenics as a "family-friendly science". In his opinion, “hereditary healthy” should be promoted by the state through marriage counseling, whereas “hereditary sick” should be “asylated” (isolated) in institutions. In 1930 he was the co-founder of the journal Eugenik . At Muckermann's instigation, several local groups of the “German Society for Racial Hygiene” were renamed “Society for Eugenics”.

From 1927 to 1933 he was in Berlin head of the Racial Hygiene Department (Department eugenics) at the Dahlem Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology , however, was for the " seizure " of the Nazis dismissed 1,933th His successor was Fritz Lenz .

July 2, 1932 was one of the political highlights of Muckermann's career. On this date, Muckermann presented his draft for a law on eugenics at the meeting of the Prussian State Health Council on the subject of "Eugenics in the service of the people's welfare". This session marked the end of the Weimar eugenics debate and set a legislative process in motion, which was concluded on July 14, 1933 in the “ Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Offspring ”. Muckermann's draft was consensus-building for those involved in the meeting. In addition to the racial hygienists and eugenicists Erwin Baur , Agnes Bluhm , Eugen Fischer and Muckermann, the social hygienists Benno Chajes , Hans Harmsen and Scheumann, the population scientist and director of the Reich Statistical Office, Friedrich Burgdörfer , the Catholic moral theologian Joseph Mayer , and the psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer , Hübner, Lange, Kurt Pohlisch (a later "euthanasia" reviewer), Emil Sioli , Otmar von Verschuer and the lawyers Ebermayer, Heimberger and Eduard Kohlrausch . Representatives of the associations, the central authorities and the state parliament were also involved. The NSDAP member of the state parliament and later Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti also took part in this meeting.

After his release from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in 1933, Muckermann was head of the episcopal research center for the design of marriage and family until 1945 . In this position, too, he represented the racist positions of the Nazi regime; For example, in 1934 in his Grundriß der Rassenkunde he warned against marriages with “foreign races ”: “One should not refer to the baptism that turns a Jew into a Christian. Baptism ... never changes its inheritance ”.

In 1936 he was banned from speaking by the National Socialists , but published with ecclesiastical imprimatur until 1938.

After the Second World War , Muckermann, who "had now returned with honor [to the university]," took over building the new Berlin Institute for Anthropology in 1947 , which he headed until his death. From 1949 to 1954 he was full professor for anthropology and social ethics at the Technical University and was a scientific member of the Max Planck Society. In 1952 he received the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Since 1953 he was an honorary member of the Catholic student union K.St.V. Askania-Burgundia Berlin in KV . In 1957 he became an honorary senator of the TU Berlin.

After Hermann Muckermann's death in 1962, numerous personalities, including the Federal President, the Chancellor and the Pope, paid tribute to the life's work of a man whose fate had been shaped in a special way by the upheavals of the past century.

criticism

"The champion for pure popular feeling Dr. Muckermann ". Author dedication in: Ludwig Finckh : Der Ahnengarten , Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1923.

Hermann Muckermann was initially held up against "half measures" by his specialist colleagues. Political-Catholic circles criticized his advertising for eugenics, as well as that of the theologian Joseph Mayer , as "human discipline frenzy".

On the basis of quotations from his work “The Family”, published in 1946, Ernst Klee accuses Muckermann of having continued to write after the war as he left off in the 1930s. It was not until 1954 that he revised some of his positions.

Fonts (selection)

  • Attitude of Catholics towards Darwinism and Evolution. St. Louis / Freiburg: Herder 1906.
  • Child and people. The biological value of fidelity to the laws of life in building the family. Freiburg: Herder 1922.
  • Race research and the people of the future , Berlin 1928
  • Essence of eugenics and tasks of the present , in: The coming gender 5, 1929, pp. 1-48
  • with Otmar von Verschuer : Eugenic marriage counseling , Berlin 1931
  • Rassenhygiene , in: Staatslexikon, 5th edition, Freiburg i. Br. 1931, 4th vol., Col. 524-529
  • Eugenics and criminal law , in: Eugenik 2, 1932, pp. 104-109
  • Race Research and the People of the Future. A contribution to the introduction to the question of the biological development of humanity , Berlin 1932
  • Volkstum, state, nation, eugenically seen , Essen 1933
  • Eugenics and Catholicism. Dümmler, Berlin / Bonn 1934. (At the same time the title of his lecture given in Berlin-Dahlem in the winter semester 1931/1932 as part of a lecture cycle on eugenics and worldview organized by Günther Just )
  • Turning point . Germania publishing house, Berlin 1937
  • From the return of the world redeemer , Pustet, Regensburg 1937
  • Inheritance and Development , Verlag Ferd. Dümmlers, Berlin 1937 (2nd edition 1947)
  • Small heredity. Dümmler, Berlin 1938
  • The meaning of marriage. Publishing house of the Bonner Buchgemeinde, Bonn 1938
  • Eternal law . Bachem, Cologne 1946
  • The family. Explanations for the people on the question of reconstruction in the light of the laws of life . Dümmler, Bonn 1946
  • The true face of racial research , Deutsche Rundschau, Volume 69, Issue 3, June 1946, pp. 205–210
  • The true face of eugenics , Deutsche Rundschau, vol. 69, issue 4, July 1946, pp. 32–36
  • From the return of the world redeemer. Religious exposition on the ultimate things of man . Wibbelt, Essen 1947
  • Holidays and after work. A religious house book following the church year. Herder, Freiburg 1951
  • Of the being and ought of man. Based on lectures on natural science and humanities anthropology at the Technical University of Berlin-Charlottenburg and at the Free University of Berlin-Dahlem . Heenemann, Berlin 1954

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Barbara Nichtweiß in: BBKL 1993, Sp. 222–225.
  2. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 417.
  3. ↑ Ute Felbor: Racial Biology and Hereditary Science in the Medical Faculty of the University of Würzburg 1937–1945. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1995, ISBN 3-88479-932-0 (= Würzburg medical-historical research. Supplement 3.) - At the same time: Dissertation Würzburg 1995), p. 156.
  4. ↑ Ute Felbor: Racial Biology and Hereditary Science in the Medical Faculty of the University of Würzburg 1937–1945. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1995, ISBN 3-88479-932-0 (= Würzburg medical-historical research. Supplement 3.) - At the same time: Dissertation Würzburg 1995), pp. 77 and 155.
  5. ^ Quote from Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , pp. 417–418.
  6. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , p. 418.
  7. ^ Benno Müller-Hill : Deadly Science. The singling out of Jews, Gypsies and the mentally ill 1933–1945. Reinbek near Hamburg 1984 (= rororo aktuell. Volume 5349), pp. 84-86.
  8. ^ Hermann Muckermann: The family. Explanations for the people on the question of reconstruction in the light of the laws of life. Bonn 1946
  9. ↑ Ernst Klee: What they did - What they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews. FiTb Frankfurt / M. 1986, ISBN 3-596-24364-5 , pp. 147f
  10. ↑ Ute Felbor: Racial Biology and Hereditary Science in the Medical Faculty of the University of Würzburg 1937–1945. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1995, ISBN 3-88479-932-0 (= Würzburg medical-historical research. Supplement 3.) - At the same time: Dissertation Würzburg 1995), p. 154 f.
personal data
SURNAME Muckermann, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German biologist and Jesuit
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Buckeburg
DATE OF DEATH October 27, 1962
Place of death Berlin