How did the academy react to the rise, dominance, and ultimate fall of Germany's Third Reich? Did German professors of the humanities have to tell themselves lies about their regime's activities or its victims to sleep at night? Did they endorse the regime? Or did they look the other way, whether out of deliberate denial or out of fear for their own personal safety? The Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich is a collection of groundbreaking essays that shed light on this previously overlooked piece of history.

The Betrayal of the Humanities accepts the regrettable news that academics and intellectuals in Nazi Germany betrayed the humanities, and explores what went wrong, what occurred at the universities, and what happened to the major disciplines of the humanities under National Socialism.

The Betrayal of the Humanities details not only how individual scholars, particular departments, and even entire universities collaborated with the Nazi regime but also examines the legacy of this era on higher education in Germany. In particular, it looks at the peculiar position of many German scholars in the post-war world having to defend their own work, or the work of their mentors, while simultaneously not appearing to accept Nazism.

About the Author

Bernard M. Levinson serves as Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies and of Law at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the Berman Family Chair in Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible. He is the author of four books, including Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation and Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel, and six edited volumes.

Robert P. Ericksen is the Kurt Mayer Chair of Holocaust Studies Emeritus at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He has written or edited six books, including Theologians under Hitler, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany, and (edited with Susannah Heschel) Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust.

Reviews

"This collection of valuable studies shows how the German universities-already home to many conservative-nationalist and anti-democratic faculty as well as nazified students before 1933-welcomed the onset of the Nazi dictatorship and pursued a course of "self-coordination" in purging Jews and political opponents. Within the humanities, a core of Nazi activists in major disciplines such as theology, law, archeology, and history certainly exercised an inordinate influence over hiring, funding, and curriculum, but numerous opportunists and fellow travelers even in smaller departments adopted Nazi racial rhetoric and sought to demonstrate their "relevance" and "usefulness" to the Nazi cause. In the post-war period a few of the most egregious academic Nazis served as useful scapegoats, but the vast majority of faculty viewed themselves as the double victims of Hitler's dictatorship and war on the one hand and the Allies' unfair denazification on the other. But at least, in a second act of self-coordination, they sanitized their vitas, forgot their past complicities, and began to act like the non-Nazi, apolitical scholars they now claimed to have been all along."-Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"This is a sobering study of how quickly and completely German universities and the humanities were corrupted by Nazi ideology and policies during the National Socialist era. Led by some of the most prominent scholars in their fields, entire scholarly disciplines conformed to Nazi rule, leading to the broader perversion of humanistic values, standards and ethics throughout Germany. Thoughtful and profound, the essays in this volume explore this history as a warning for our own times."-Victoria J. Barnett, Director (retired), Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

"As I read this rich collection, I found myself learning at nearly every turn, even from many of the footnotes. These are serious, well-researched and well-written studies; their authors draw upon both primary sources (not infrequently unpublished archival items) and secondary sources in the original languages to construct their arguments. Taken together, this is a compelling collection of serious essays from which readers, whether specialists or non-specialists, will learn much. The essays complement each other and even build on each other."-Saul M. Olyan, Samuel Ungerleider Jr. Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University

"With Jewish students under assault on campuses across the United States, The Betrayal of the Humanities demonstrates the role academicians can play in "validating" antisemitism and producing research to underpin genocidal worldviews."-The Times of Israel

"The Betrayal of the Humanities is a testimony to what can go wrong if humanistic education is separated from ethics, from moral imperatives, and from the face of one's neighbor. We would do well to heed its warning."-Kathleen Gallagher Elkins, Review of Biblical Literature

Book Information
ISBN 9780253060792
Author Bernard M. Levinson
Format Paperback
Page Count 624
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 903g