Kurt Hildebrandt

Kurt Florentin Hildebrandt (born December 12, 1881 in Florence , † May 20, 1966 in Kiel ) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher . Initially a doctor at the Wittenauer Heilstätten and member of the George Circle , he was appointed to a professorship for philosophy in 1934. In addition to philosophical works, he also dealt with "racial psychology" and "racial hygiene".

Life

Hildebrandt was born in Florence in 1881 as the son of the preacher of the German community. In Magdeburg he attended the monastery school Our Dear Women . He then studied, motivated by Charles Darwin and modern biology, medicine and natural sciences in Munich and Berlin among others Emil Kraepelin and Ernst Rudin Medical with the state examination 1905. Promotion followed in 1906. His first job was in the mental hospital Dalldorf in the north Of Berlin. Introduced by his school friend Friedrich Andreae , he joined the circle around Friedrich Wolters and Berthold Vallentin in Niederschönhausen near Berlin during this time . Initially committed to the work and person of the universal historian Kurt Breysig , the circle, which moved to Lichterfelde in 1907 and held lecture evenings there under the name “Academia urbana”, finally turned to the poet Stefan George in the second half of the 1900s . Personal contact was soon made possible, which was not only decisive for Hildebrandt, who was more of the second ranks of the George circle , in the following 20 years.

During the war he worked in the nerve department of a hospital in Saarbrücken . Hildebrandt completed his studies in philosophy , which was carried out in addition to his medical work, in Marburg , where he also received his doctorate under Paul Natorp with a thesis on Nietzsche's competition with Socrates and Plato in 1921. Hildebrandt worked as a senior physician and psychiatrist in a suburb of Berlin at the Wittenauer Heilstätten in the 1920s . The attempt at a habilitation in Berlin in 1928 on the subject of Plato's world negation and world affirmation failed despite the encouragement of the philosophers around Ernst Troeltsch , Max Dessoir and Eduard Spranger , who welcomed the admission of a representative from the George circle, because of the objection of the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and his pupil Werner Jaeger , who agreed with Hildebrandt about technical knowledge. In his report, Jaeger spoke of a "dilettante" without "scientific training". Hildebrandt himself attributed the resistance - probably not without good reason - to an essay from 1910 in which he attacked Wilamowitz's translation principles for ancient philosophical texts, in particular that he did not adhere to the linguistic and formal properties of the work of art: " In these translations there is not Aeschylus, not Sophocles - only Wilamowitz ”. In the background there was also the internal controversy about the methods of intellectual history , which were prominently used in the works of the George Circle, and the question of whether the study of Plato at the university should be reserved exclusively for the classical philologists there. With the help of the Prussian Minister of Education, Carl Heinrich Becker , who promoted the George Circle on various occasions and was in personal contact with some members - including Hildebrandt - he nevertheless received a teaching position as honorary professor of philosophy in 1928. In 1932 he became the medical director of the municipal insane asylum in Lichtenberg (Herzberge) .

After the National Socialist “ seizure of power ”, Hildebrandt received a position as professor of philosophy at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel in 1934 without habilitation . He took over the chair of Julius Stenzel, who was on leave from the National Socialists . The new National Socialist Rector Karl Lothar Wolf , himself a physicist, wanted a university professor who could build a bridge between science and philosophy, also in line with the university's new political orientation. In addition, Wolf, who was friends with Carl Petersen , was close to the thinking of the George Circle. The classical philologist Richard Harder tried with great commitment in the Kiel commission to prevent the psychiatrist who had not qualified as a professor from being appointed, but was ultimately unable to assert himself against Rector Wolf. The appointment was also supported by Martin Heidegger , with whom Wolf was in close contact, while Alfred Baeumler expressed the assumption that Hildebrandt would more likely follow the ideas of his “master” than the ideals of National Socialism even after George's death. Hildebrandt was subsequently co-editor of Wolf's newly founded journal for all natural sciences . In April 1933 he became a member of the NSDAP (No. 3,471,682) and the NSLB (No. 287,372) and later also the NSV . As a psychiatrist, he was also a member of the Schleswig-Holstein Chamber of Physicians .

Hildebrandt retired in 1945 , but continued his writing activity until shortly before his death.

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Hildebrandt had contacts with Stefan George and his circle from an early age. He worked on the three volumes of the yearbook for spiritual movement (1910–1912), in which the circle wanted to launch an attack on the spiritual currents of the time. Hildebrandt contributed a public polemic under the title Hellas und Wilamowitz against Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the most important classical philologist at the time and one of the most famous scientists of the empire. Hildebrandt's criticism, supported by George and the other members of the circle, is not only directed against a practice of translating Greek works which endeavors to make antiquity “understandable” to contemporaries: “It is outrageous against Hellas [...], these works of bourgeois convenience and to adapt to the proletarian taste ”. In addition, Wilamowitz is criticized because he does not understand and translate the ancient poems adequately as art - and he and his guild as "teacher of future teachers" are denied the competence for the appropriate education and upbringing of the youth, which is much more of art and their protagonists must be done. His two-part critical examination of Romanticism ( Romantic and Dionysian ) could not repeat this attention success.

After the yearbook period, Hildebrandt translated several Plato texts and provided them with introductions that continued after the Second World War (with Kröner and Reclam ). In 1920 the writings Norm and Degeneration of Man and Norm and Decay of the State came out. With these writings on " racial hygiene " and holistic theory , he also aroused fierce resistance in the George circle, for example from Edgar Salin and Edith Landmann . On the other hand, he also met with approval, for example with George himself, Friedrich Gundolf and Friedrich Wolters . Hildebrandt wanted - in contrast to the "northernists" among the race theorists - to create a cultural race by keeping unsuitable genders or racial lines away from participation in the state through "strict isolation" or "severe extermination".

“The higher professions are open to the other groups through their education and the leading institutions of the state are selected from among them according to their suitability, which is only later proven. The separation of the two groups cannot be strict. Earlier errors, a new mixture of blood, changed goals of the state, and degeneracy make it necessary to shift to one side and the other. But the divorce must not be too loose either, because the rush for higher positions is so great that it is not in the interest of the state to promote it. "

Hildebrandt put the category of the nation as a spiritual community against the biological race theory of Hans FK Günther . "The national idea is superior to racial togetherness."

He emphasized that his race theory is based on objective principles with regard to means and methods and does not specify any goals of breeding . “Without a yardstick, without a normative image, the endeavors of human breeding and racial hygiene have neither support nor sense.” Hildebrandt's racism is not expressly anti-Semitic . He even considered an “admixture” of cultured Western European Jews to be advantageous for the development of a cultural nation, while he rejected a “marriage association” with “ Eastern Jews ”, French or “ Negroes ”.

Hildebrandt's political theme was the rejection of liberal individualism and the search for a spiritual renewal in the community in the sense of a German “Greek culture”. He mainly represented the ideas of the George circle when he z. B. represented the original corporeality of the whole human being against all mechanization of life and wanted to overcome the opposition between nature and spirit . In addition to George, Nietzsche and Plato were his points of reference, although he preferred Plato to Nietzsche because he saw too great Dionysian hubris and self-deification in the latter. They are heroes who lead the fight for a well-ordered state and thus make it possible to overcome degeneration. “The rejection of individualism is the opposite of the rejection of the great individual. The hero is the creator and nucleus of the state. ”Hildebrandt's writings are a combination of scientific insights with the thoughts of the George circle and aim to“ refute the modern mechanism ”.

In his interpretation of Plato, written in this sense, Plato. The Struggle of the Spirit for Power (1933; based on the habilitation attempt) Hildebrandt emphasized - following the Plato picture of the George circle, especially Heinrich Friedemann - the political dimension of Plato's work. Rainer Kolk sums up: “Plato's state belongs [according to Hildebrandt] to the elite, the tight leadership, the mythical legitimation, the creative forces; Hildebrandt pushes the thesis that Plato had explicated the maxims for state action that are still valid today and that he himself strived for 'political leadership' ”. The book was positively reviewed in 1935 by his Kiel colleague Hans-Georg Gadamer , who stated that “the most important impulses for a new understanding of Plato came from the circle of the poet Stefan George. […] The Platonic work has never been seen so directly politically as in this presentation (completed in 1932). [...] The development of philosophy in the Platonic dialogue is a 'secret that always demands new interpretation' through all the distance, close like everything that has come into being. Such an embodiment of Plato's political figure, which for its part has something of the distant proximity of what has become, must demand a new answer from the original form of philosophy itself. "

In the Kiel years, Hildebrandt wrote a revised version of his two writings from 1920 and published several articles in Rasse , the monthly journal of the Nordic Movement , from 1936 to 1939 . He also devoted himself to the German literary classics Hölderlin and Goethe as well as Leibniz. To this end, he made a contribution to the anthology published by August Faust as part of the Ritterbusch campaign in 1941, The Image of War in German Thinking .

After the end of the war, Hildebrandt's work The Idea of ​​War was placed on the list of literature to be segregated by Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche ( Kohlhammer , Stuttgart & Berlin 1941) in the Soviet occupation zone . In the German Democratic Republic , this list was followed by norm and degeneration of the human being (Sibyllen-Verlag, Dresden 1920) and norm, degeneration, decay, related to the individual, the race, the state (Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1939).

Fonts

• Norm and degeneration of humans , Dresden 1920
• Norm and Decay of the State , Dresden 1920
• Nietzsche's competition with Socrates and Plato , Dresden 1922
• Nietzsche as judge of our time , Breslau 1923 (with Ernst Gundolf )
• Thoughts on race psychology , Stuttgart 1924
• Wagner and Nietzsche. Your fight against the 19th century , Breslau 1924
• Health and Illness in Nietzsche's Life and Work , Berlin 1926
• State and race. Three lectures , Breslau 1928
• About the reshaping of seen figures through changing figural context . Diss., Greifswald 1933
• Individuality and Community , Berlin 1933
• Plato. The fight of the spirit for power , Berlin 1933
• Norm, degeneration, decay related to the individual, the race, the state , Berlin 1934, 2nd edition 1939
• Plato's patriotic speeches. Apology, Crito, Menexenus . Introduced and transferred by Kurt Hildebrandt. Meiner, Leipzig 1936
• Holderlin. Philosophy and Poetry , Stuttgart 1939, 3rd edition 1943
• Goethe. His Weltweisheit in its entirety , Stuttgart 1941, 3rd edition 1942
• Copernicus and Kepler in German Intellectual History , Halle, 1944
• Goethe's knowledge of nature , Hamburg 1947
• Leibniz. Realm of Grace , The Hague 1953
• Plato. Logos and Myth , Berlin 1959
• The work of Stefan Georges , Hamburg 1960
• A Path to Philosophy , Bonn 1962
• Memories of Stefan George and his circle , Bonn 1965
• Early Greek thinkers. An introduction to pre-Socratic philosophy , Bonn 1968

literature

• Stefan Breuer : Aesthetic fundamentalism and eugenics with Kurt Hildebrandt. In: Bernhard Böschenstein , Jürgen Egyptien, Bertram Schefold , Wolfgang Graf Vitzthum (eds.): Scientists in the George Circle. The world of the poet and the profession of science. de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2005, ISBN 3-11-018304-8 , pp. 291-310.
• Ulrich Raulff : Circle without a master. Stefan George's afterlife. CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-59225-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Kurt Hildebrandt in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Christian Tilitzki : The German university philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich, Academy, Berlin 2002, p. 336. Review
2. ↑ Kurt Hildebrandt: Hellas and Wilamowitz. On the ethos of tragedy. In: Yearbook for Spiritual Movement 1, 1910, pp. 64–117. For discussion see: Josefine Kitzbichler, Katja Lubitz, Nina Mindt: Theory of the Translation of Ancient Literature in Germany since 1800, de Gruyter, Berlin 2009, pp. 209–220.
3. ↑ In addition Carola Groppe , Die Macht der Bildung. The German bourgeoisie and the George Circle 1890–1933, Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1997, pp. 557–559.
4. ↑ For funding by Becker Carola Groppe, Die Macht der Bildung. The German bourgeoisie and the George Circle 1890–1933, Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1997, p. 559.
5. ↑ On the background and Wolf's appointment policy Rainer Kolk: Literary group formation. Using the example of the George Circle. 1890-1945. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1998, pp. 521-532, on Hildebrandt's appointment pp. 527-529. Ibid. Some of the most important documents relating to the calling are printed on pp. 621–628.
6. ^ Christian Tilitzki: The University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in National Socialism, Academy, Berlin 2002, p. 624.
7. ↑ Kurt Hildebrandt: Hellas and Wilamowitz. On the ethos of tragedy. In: Yearbook for Spiritual Movement 1, 1910, pp. 64–117, here p. 70.
8. ^ Rainer Kolk: Literary group formation. Using the example of the George Circle. 1890-1945. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1998, pp. 365-368.
9. ↑ See Hildebrandt's memories of Stefan George and his circle . Then Stefan Breuer: Aesthetic Fundamentalism and Eugenics with Kurt Hildebrandt, in: Bernhard Böschenstein u. a. (Ed.): Scientists in the George circle: the world of the poet and the profession of science, de Gruyter, Berlin 2005, pp. 291–310, 292–293.
10. ↑ Kurt Hildebrandt: Norm und Verfall des Staates, Celle 1926, 140, quoted from Stefan Breuer: Aesthetic Fundamentalism and Eugenics with Kurt Hildebrandt, in: Bernhard Böschenstein u. a. (Ed.): Scientists in the George Circle: the world of the poet and the profession of science, de Gruyter, Berlin 2005, pp. 291-310, 300.
11. ↑ Kurt Hildebrandt: State and Race. Three lectures, Breslau 1928, pp. 12–13, quoted from: Christian Tilitzki: The German University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich, Akademie, Berlin 2002, p. 431.
12. ↑ Kurt Hildebrandt: State and Race. Three lectures, Breslau 1928, p. 32, quoted from: Christian Tilitzki: The University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in National Socialism, Academy, Berlin 2002, p. 428.
13. ↑ Kurt Hildebrandt: Thoughts on Rassenpsychologie, Stuttgart 1924, pp. 15-16, quoted from: Christian Tilitzki: The German University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich, Academy, Berlin 2002, p. 435.
14. ↑ Kurt Hildebrandt: Wagner and Nietzsche in the fight against the 19th century, Breslau 1924, from p. 495, after: Volker Gerhardt , Reinhard Mehring, Jana Rinder: Berliner Geist. A history of the Berlin university philosophy. With an outlook on the present of the Humboldt University, Berlin 1999, p. 251.
15. Jump up ↑ Kurt Hildebrandt: Individuality and Community, Berlin 1933, pp. 9-10, quoted from: Volker Gerhardt, Reinhard Mehring, Jana Rinder: Berliner Geist. A history of the Berlin university philosophy. With an outlook on the present of the Humboldt University, Berlin 1999, pp. 250–251.
16. ↑ Hildebrandt: Memories of Stefan George and his circle, Bonn 1965, p. 124.
17. ^ Rainer Kolk: Literary group formation. Using the example of the George Circle. 1890-1945. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1998, p. 528.
18. ↑ Hans-Georg Gadamer: Review of Plato. The fight of the spirit for power . In: Deutsche Literaturzeitung 56 (1935), pp. 331–336, quoted from: Hans-Georg Gadamer: Greek Philosophy Volume 1 = Collected Works Volume 5, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1985, pp. 331–338.
19. ↑ List of the year 1948 on polunbi.de.
20. ↑ List of 1953 on polunbi.de.