Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss

Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (born February 8, 1892 in Offenburg ; † January 13, 1974 in Huppert (Taunus) ) was a German psychologist and an influential racial theorist in the 1920s and during the Nazi era . He was a student of Edmund Husserl .

Life

Before 1945

Clauss grew up in Freiburg and attended grammar school there. His father was a district judge there . After graduation, he completed his military service in the Navy , where he was a midshipman Norway traveled. He volunteered for the Navy during World War I.

In Freiburg he studied philosophy, psychology and English and Scandinavian philology. From 1917 to 1921 Clauß worked for Edmund Husserl. In 1918 he married the daughter of a university professor in Freiburg, from whom he divorced after a year. In November 1919 he passed the state examination for the higher teaching post. In 1921 he received his doctorate with his work Die Totenklagen der Deutschen Minnesingers under Husserl.

In 1920 Clauß became a member of the Deutschbund and the anti-Semitic Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund . According to Breuer, he was possibly also a member of the völkisch youth federation of eagles and falcons , in whose magazines Clauss spoke extensively.

Clauss held his first lectures on the psychology of race at the Bismarck University in Dresden in 1921/22 . Husserl offered him a project on Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language for his habilitation. However, this project was soon canceled due to incompatible interests. Clauss later stated that the reason was that Husserl was Jewish. Clauss actually wanted to do his habilitation with Husserl with his work Die Nordische Seele (1923). The book with its attacks on Jewish degeneracy , however, aroused his displeasure. Husserl refused to accept “The Nordic Soul” as a habilitation thesis. Nevertheless, Clauß made a contribution to the commemorative publication on Husserl's 70th birthday, which appeared in 1929. For Clauss understood his lore of the race to be an extension of Husserl's phenomenology.

In 1923 he worked as a farm laborer in Norway, then as a boatman in Denmark and Sweden . In 1925 he traveled to the Balkans . His travels were supported by his sponsor Friedrich Wilhelm Prinz zur Lippe . With him and Margarete Landé , whom he had met while studying at Husserl, he set off on a long four-year excursion to the Middle East in January 1927. During this trip Clauss converted to Islam . After his trip, Clauss was busy for years with his studies on the “Near East” and “Desert Rassensoule”. Margarete Landé, who was of Jewish origin, helped him as a private employee with the evaluation. His faith then led him to participate in the SS Islamic Project in 1944 .

With effect from May 1, 1933, he became a member of the NSDAP , membership number 2,909,460. In July 1933, Clauss Hauer joined the German Faith Movement . In 1934, Clauß and Hans FK Günther founded the journal Rasse as the publication organ of the Nordic Ring . At times, Clauß was funded by the SS Foundation Research Foundation German Ahnenerbe .

In 1935 Clauß married for the second time, the daughter of an East Prussian officer from the old nobility. In 1936 he succeeded in doing his habilitation based on achievements, including his old book Race and Soul from 1926 and other writings. With the support of the Nazi student union , he was given a lectureship at the Berlin University and was made civil servant in 1941. At the height of his career in 1941, Clauss was scheduled for the chair for racial studies and racial politics at the University of Posen and was to become a member of a commission for the "research into the basic racial elements of the Italian people". Both were prevented by the intervention of the Rosenberg office . All this was triggered by a complaint from his second wife at the Racial Political Office , which was increased as a result of an internal rivalry between Clauss and Walter Groß , who initiated a party expulsion process. In 1943 he was finally expelled from the party and also dismissed from the civil service. Clauss was accused of having violated the Nuremberg race laws through a relationship with Margarete Landé . He hid his colleague until the end of the war and thus saved her from death.

After 1945

After the war, Clauss applied for redress , but it was rejected. The reason given was that Clauss was accused of his behavior towards Margarete Landé in his party exclusion proceedings, but not of his racial teachings. Clauss appealed. The proceedings dragged on for 11 years and ended in March 1962 with a settlement that Clauss accepted. Once again it was established that reparation was out of the question because Clauss "had promoted National Socialism", but "had also been damaged by his dismissal as a lecturer". He was awarded a small pension. With the support of the German Research Foundation , he undertook further research trips to non-European countries such as Turkey and Iran . For the rescue of Margarete Landé he was honored in 1979 after his death in ignorance of his role in National Socialism as Righteous Among the Nations . After his involvement became known, the honor was withdrawn in 1996.

Act

Clauß played a major role in developing the physiognomic-facial method . This is based on the assumption that both “pure” and “mixed races” each have their own and “type-forming” expression. In his race theory it was primarily about the typing of assumed phenomena and less about the research of "racial characteristics". In a contribution with the title "Are the Jews an inferior race?" Clauss came to the conclusion in 1933: "There are no inferior races for science."

After Hans FK Günther , Clauß was the most important reference author in racial pedagogical literature and the “real founder” of racial soul studies . For Reinhard Mehring, Clauß is one of the "fathers of Nazi racism".

Clauss also took part in the National Socialists' Islam project, which, under the wing of the RSHA, aimed at a long-term alliance between Nazis and Islamists under the Mufti . He was a war reporter with the SS-Standarte Kurt Eggers and Sturmmann of the Waffen-SS. In November 1944 he delivered a "final report" on his activities in the Handschar division and concluded that the Bosniaks found the SS too "restless". In February 1945 he wrote a document on the "preparation of an operation to win over Islamic peoples" for the Germanic control center at the SS main office , which was to be responsible for the ideology of those to be led. Reinhard Walz was supposed to operate the Koran interpretation in the sense of the Nazis. Among other things, a mullah school was founded in Dresden in November 1944 to look after Muslims from the Soviet Union in the Wehrmacht and the SS.

See also

• Islam fascism

Fonts (selection)

• Songs of the Edda. Old heroic song written in new German by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss . Lehmann and Schulze, 1921.
• Race and soul. An introduction to the present . JF Lehmann, Munich 1926. Later with the subtitle An Introduction to the Meaning of the Body .
• Of the soul and face of races and peoples. An introduction to comparative expression research . JF Lehmann, Munich 1929.
• The Nordic soul. An introduction to the science of the race . JF Lehmann, Munich 1932.
• As a Bedouin among Bedouins . Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1933
• Race and character - the living countenance . M. Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main 1936.
• Race is form . Rather, Munich 1937.
• Semites among themselves in the desert. Experiences of a race researcher . Gutenberg Book Guild, Berlin 1937.
• Racial soul and individual . JF Lehmann, Munich 1938.
• Arabs . Hatches & Hatches, 1943.
• Dealing with Arabs of the East . Hatches & Hatches, 1949.
• Thuraja . Novel. Kompass-Verlag, 1950.
• Veiled heads . Novel. C. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1955.
• The desert makes you free . Novel. C. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1956.
• The soul of the other. Paths to understanding in the West and East . B. Grimm, Publishing House for Art and Science, 1958.
• The world hour of Islam . New forum, 1963.

After the end of the war, Clauss's writings Rasse ist Gestalt ( Eher , Munich 1937), Rassenseele und Einzelmensch ( Lehmann , Munich 1938), The Nordic Soul (Lehmann, Munich 1940), Rasse und Character (Diesterweg, Frankfurt a. M. 1942) and Race and Soul (Lehmann, Munich 1943) placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone .

literature

• Peter Weingart : double life. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss: Between race research and resistance. Campus, Frankfurt, New York 1995, ISBN 3-593-35354-7 .
• Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt: Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich: Bio-bibliographical manual. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2006, pp. 144–150.
• Felix Wiedemann: Clauß, Ludwig Ferdinand , in: Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Volume 2/1, 2009, pp. 144f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss in the catalog of the German National Library
• Felix Wiedemann: The German Sheikh. Short biographical report on one day

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. 2nd edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 94.
2. ↑ Horst Junginger, Sigrid Hunke: Europe's New Religion and its Old Stereotypes , lecture manuscript held at the congress "Neo-Paganism, 'Voelkische Religion' and Antisemitism II: The Religious Roots of Stereotypes" in Tübingen October 1997. ( online )
3. ^ Stefan Breuer : The Völkische in Germany: Empire and Weimar Republic. WBG , Darmstadt 2008, pp. 115 and 216
4. ↑ Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt, Rassenhygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich: Bio-bibliographical manual. Academy, Berlin 2006, p. 144.
5. ↑ Otto Pöggeler, Steps to a Hermeneutic Philosophy , K. Alber Verlag 1994, p. 78
6. ↑ Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft , vol. 45, no. 8, August 1997, p. 757
7. ↑ Felix Wiedemann: The double Orient. On the folkish oriental romanticism of Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. Journal of Religious and Spiritual History , issue 1, 2009, p. 4.
8. ↑ Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt, Rassenhygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich: Bio-bibliographical manual. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2006, p. 148.
9. ↑ Helmut Heiber: University under the swastika. Part 1. The professor in the Third Reich. Saur, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-598-22629-2 , p. 485.
10. ^ Helmut Wilhelm Schaller: Die Reichsuniversität Posen 1941–1945 Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2010, p. 172
11. ↑ Kirstin Breitenfellner, Charlotte Kohn-Ley , How a Monster Arises , Philo Verlag 1998, p. 206.
12. ^ Benno Müller-Hill, Weingart, Peter. Double life. Ferdinand Ludwig Clauss between racial research and resistance , In: 1999, Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte, January 1997, issue 4, p. 120.
13. ↑ Volker Böhnigk: Cultural anthropology as race theory. Königshausen & Neumann 2002, p. 43.
14. ↑ Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Are the Jews an inferior race? , In Heinrich Mann ed .: Against the phrase from the Jewish pest , Amboss, Prague 1933, p. 245.
15. ^ Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt, Rassenhygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich. Academy, Berlin 2006, p. 144
16. ↑ Mehring in: Rüdiger vom Bruch , Christoph year, Rebecca Schaarschmidt: The Berlin University in the Nazi era. Steiner, Stuttgart 2005, p. 214
17. ↑ The main office in the person of Gottlob Berger was in charge of the school for the training of SS "Feldmullahs" in Dresden, other activists see Mufti and Bertold Spuler , as well as the following note.
18. ↑ Online . Regarding the planned interpretation of the Koran by Clauss / Walz in the sense of NS, Gerhard Höpp says : You don't know what became of it. online (PDF; 2.0 MB) The mullah course, on the other hand, came about with (only) one passage, which then ended with the bombing of Dresden in chaos, cf. Richard Hartmann (Orientalist) , there web links, van Koningsveld, 333ff, German 348 - 368
19. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-c.html