G21

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND

NEOROMANTICISM IN THE WEIMAR
REPUBLIC
Grigoris Panoutsopoulos
 Science, Technology and Neoromanticism in the
Weimar Republic

Grigoris Panoutsopoulos (gpanouts@phs.uoa.gr)

Thesis Supervisor: Kostas Gavroglu (kgavro@phs.uoa.gr)

First University/Second university:
Graduate Program in the History and Philosophy of Science and
Technology, NTUA/NKUA, Athens, Greece
Specialization:
Philosophy and History of Science and Technology
Year: 2014
Word Count: 25.235

Title page illustration: Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly
Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919), Hannah Höch

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 Abstract

This study will attempt to investigate the bidirectional relationship between the wider
ideological and social context of the Weimar Republic with the particular characteristics
that science and technology received during this period. Of catalytic importance in this
osmotic relationship will be a set of ideas, metaphors, terms and emotionally charged
references to German tradition, which became widely accepted from both the engineer
and scientific communities, as well as social currents, intellectuals and political carriers of
the period. In order to describe this particular ideological tradition, within the context of
this thesis, we will introduce the term neoromanticism. Neoromanticism, therefore, was the
result of a blending of two ideological traditions, of classical romanticism and of modernism,
which were however given a unique meaning by various ideological, philosophical and
social currents that had already been established in Germany since the end of the 19 th
century. However, even though Weimar Republic’s neoromanticism shares many theoretical
origins with classical romanticism, such as the lebensphilosophie, a holistic view of nature or
the competition against analytical rationalism, it displays at the same time substantial
differentiations. It did not reject neither scientific modernity nor technological progress,
industrialized production and the symbolism of the machine. Neoromanticism was formed
under a national imperative: any anti-technological views would express a national
weakness. Thus, neoromanticism was of catalytic importance in the social role and meaning
that was given to both science and technology in the Weimar Republic, since, despite the
idealism and mysticism that dominated the ideological field, the formation of a context
of legitimization of Germany’s new main goals, rearmament and industrial
rationalization, was achieved; these goals would be accomplished only through the radical
development of technology and science. This particular study will be based upon various
facets of the ideological context of the period: in German intelligentsia (E. Jünger, Ο.
Spengler, H., C. Schmitt, W. Benjamin, G. Lukács etc.), in philosophical and artistic
currents (Circle of Vienna, Bauhaus, Werkbund etc.) and obviously in the scientific and
engineer communities.

Keywords: Technology, Science, Neoromanticism, Weimar Republic, STS, Kultur,

German intelligentsia, Circle of Vienna, Bauhaus

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 Table of Contents

1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................1
1.1.Science and technology in the Weimar Republic through a STS perspective ............2
1.2. Research approach: Bibliographical references ..............................................................5
1.3. Structure of the thesis ........................................................................................................6
2. The wider ideological context of the Weimar Republic .......................................................9
2.1. The German Μittelstand as a carrier of new ideas ........................................................9
2.2. The birth of neoromanticism ......................................................................................... 10
3. Movements, ideological currents and their views on science and technology ............... 14
3.1. The discourses of the right and the conservative revolution .................................... 14
3.2. Ernst Jünger: the heart of the neoromance current ................................................... 15
3.3. Οswald Spengler, the “religiousness” of science and technology and their
connection to neoromantic ideas.......................................................................................... 19
3.4. Carl Schmitt and the Geist he lent to technology...................................................... 23
3.5. The technocratic vision of the Left .............................................................................. 24
3.6. The heretic thought of W. Benjamin, G. Lukács ........................................................ 25
3.7. The Circle of Vienna, science as a basis for philosophy and the battle against
Metaphysics.............................................................................................................................. 27
3.8. Bauhaus and its close relationship to technology and science .................................. 30
4. The contribution of scientists to the particular neoromantic ideological context of the
Weimar Republic ......................................................................................................................... 36
4.1. The formation of a new circumstance.......................................................................... 36
4.2. The creation of new scientific institutions ................................................................... 37
4.3. The close relationship of science with technology, industry and rearmament ....... 38
4.4. The “dual perspective” ................................................................................................... 39
4.5. Pascual Jordan: military technology and neoromanticism ......................................... 40
4.6. Τhe Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and the eugenics centers .................................. 42
4.7. Crisis and revolution: expecting the birth of new science ......................................... 43
4.8. The collapse of causality ................................................................................................. 45
4.9. Attempts at popularizing science .................................................................................. 48
4.10. The pursuit for the establishment of a new social role for science........................ 49

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5. The engineers’ branch as a modulator of the ideological context of the Weimar
Republic ........................................................................................................................................ 51
5.1. The roots behind the ideas of German engineers ...................................................... 51
5.2. The “legitimization” of technology in German consciousness ................................ 53
5.3. The engineers in the printed word ................................................................................ 54
5.4. Manfred Schroter and Germany’s particular mission in conjoining technology and
spirit .......................................................................................................................................... 57
5.5. The relationship between engineers and sciences: The case of Friedrich Dessauer
................................................................................................................................................... 58
5.6. Eberhard Zschimmer: the reconciliation of technology with German idealism .... 59
5.7. The relationship of the national socialist ideology with the ideas of the engineers 60
5.8. The engineers’ movements that resisted the dominant current of the period ....... 62
6. Conclusions and points for further research ...................................................................... 65
7. Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 70

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 1. Introduction

It is a fact that a large number of completely extensive historical approaches of the

political, social and ideological currents of the period of the Weimar Republic have been
written. The majority of these, however, while representing in depth the conflicts that
arose in the fields of politics, art and philosophy, presents the massive changes that
science and technology underwent in a rather detached way, untouched by what had
been going on in the political and ideological fields.

In one of the more interesting recounting of the era in Weimar: a cultural history 1918-1933
for example, renowned historian Walter Laqueur states: “There was no Expressionism or New
Objectivity, there was no social protest or revanchism in scientific research, there was only good science and
bad science”. However: “There existed German literature, German theater, German art schools, even
history and philosophy schools. But only a fool or a fanatic would talk of German mathematics or
German physics” (Laqueur, 1974, pp.217,219). The present paper however, attempts to
examine whether the analogy between the environment of the Weimar Republic with
literature, the theater and the arts can be found in the field of mathematics, of physics
and of other sciences. Indeed, while terms such as German mathematics or German
physics might at first appear to be paradoxical, the fact that these specific fields were
developed toward a particular direction and were invested with a particular ideology in
Interwar Germany, gives us the opportunity to examine the cultural roots of science and
technology behind the veil of objectivity and neutrality that often times obscures them
through a modernist viewpoint.

The Weimar Republic is a polarized historical context of which each expression is

characterized by ideological crises and political conflict. It is a period when men learn to
perceive and see the world differently, a fact that becomes apparent in the developments
in art (cubism, expressionism, dada, modernism), in philosophy (a challenging of the Kantian
example, phenomenology etc.) and in politics (communist revolutions, the rise of Nazism
etc.). Therefore, perhaps the question that should be examined should be that of the
extent that science and technology, or, to better put it in human perspective, that
scientists and engineers, are capable of producing a perfectly objective science and
neutral technology, without being affected in their endeavors by the intricacies of their
environment.

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What could such a study offer the present day, however? The study of science and
technology, as well as their relationship to the wider ideological, social and political
environment of the Weimar Republic is of particular importance in the modern historical
context as well, since it faces us against some of the greatest concerns of Modernity:
How did western societies confront, not always in unison, the challenges of the industrial
revolutions and the determination of everyday life by science and technology? What part
did the ideas of the Enlightenment, rationalism, the symbolism of the machine and the
phenomenon of mass production play in this confrontation? What is the role of science
and technology in periods of crisis and radical changes? How are the various political and
ideological crises incorporated into scientific theories and technological orientations and
how do the new scientific and technological worldviews contribute, in turn, to these
crises? How and why did one part of these views on science and technology of the
period connect organically with the vision of the Nazis while another was against it? Can
nuclei of thought be found within modern science and technology that, given the right
environment, could lead towards one path or another? If so, how can we be
championing a neutral “character” of science and technology? What were the roles of
institutes, universities, ministries, publishers, periodicals, engineer unions and scientific
societies? Could all of the above constitute a serious challenge for the cumulative model
for the development of knowledge? How can we reinterpret Interwar history through the
considerations and the interpretative tools of modern movements such as STS?

1.1.Science and technology in the Weimar Republic through a STS perspective

For the methodological context of the thesis we will use the STS studies. Through the
STS literature's interpretative tools and a wide range of branches such as philosophy,
history, anthropology, sociology, cultural theory, art history and political theory, the
relationship between science/technology/society becomes a major issue, offering us a
new way of viewing social, historical and political narratives. We will therefore attempt to
re-read the history of the Weimar Republic, by rejecting essentialist and instrumentalist
views on technology and science and by asserting that the black box of technoscience
should not remain closed.

More specifically, the study of science and technology through the use of interpretative
tools of the field of STS, during the Weimar Republic constitutes a particularly lucrative

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territory for understanding the way in which social, political and cultural values affect
scientific research and the direction of technological innovation. Also of particular
interest is an attempt of interpreting the society of Interwar Germany through
technology and science, by looking at the artifacts and the mathematical and physical
equations of the period as crystallizations of social relations and ideologies that take place
within the Weimar Republic.

At this point it should be underlined that, despite the great interest that was displayed by
ideological and social currents regarding the role of science and technology in interwar
German society, we should be particularly careful in our study of the way in which these
currents affected the developments in science and technology, by avoiding the regulatory,
simplified, deterministic models of interpretations. There were indeed important factors
outside the regions of science and technology that helped, affected, perhaps even guided
both science and technology towards certain paths, but these influences did not
deterministically affect their course.

It is also important to study the inverse course of the ideological influences, meaning that
which began from the scientist and engineer communities and was targeted towards their
wider social environment. Thus, the present paper, respecting the considerations that
have been developed in STS literature, will attempt to examine not only the ways in
which the social context influences the formation of science and technology in the
Weimar Republic but also how they, in turn, affect the ideas, politics and culture of the
period.

An interpretative scheme that could, therefore, describe the bidirectional and dynamic
relationship between science and technology and their wider environment, is that of two
concentric circles that are separated by a permeable surface. The inner circle is composed
by those directly involved with science and technology (we could use the term experts),
meaning the scientific community and the engineer community. The outer circle is
comprised of the wider environment of the aforementioned communities, the relevant
actors (users, German intelligentsia, political parties, clubs and organizations, publishers,
art and philosophical currents). Anything that occurs within each circle, because of the
permeable surface, affects but does not determine what happens in the other circle. A
graphical interpretation of this scheme follows:

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The study, however, of the particular role that the scientific and technological endeavor
played in the formation of the cultural and ideological current of the Weimar Republic
urges us not to confront simply the relationship between the “internal” and “external”
historical narratives of science/technology as a conjunction between an ‘internal’ motor
and an ‘external’ demand. Such a conjunction would maintain the “internal” component
“undiluted” by the social, political and ideological current surrounding it and would,
therefore, make it independent from the “external” one. In this way the “external”
component would appear to simply surround the “internal” one, by ensuring only the
material and social conditions of its operation. However, by examining the birth of
quantum mechanics, the aversion towards the concept of causality by the overwhelming
majority of the scientific community, the mystical myths that flow from technological
applications and the messianic role of technology in the rebirth of the German nation,
we may observe that the very core of the discourse and the ideas of scientists and
engineers is transformed under the weight of the changes in the social field during the
Weimar Republic.

In other words, the scientific and technological endeavor, by choosing to survive in the
new order of things, accepted not only a reconsideration of its processes of persuasion,
its institutions and its research methods, but of its entire worldview. The necessity of
survival of the scientific and engineer communities, as experts, in a period of crisis and

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radical change, their attempt to take up more central roles in an era of intense
reclassification, their relationship to other social groups and their new boundary
demarcation from their environment, all play a catalytic role in the formation of a new
ideological core. Because the ideology of the scientific and technological endeavor does
not only include the general ideas regarding nature, the world and the goals of the
technological and scientific activity, nor only the conviction and the astuteness of the
scientist and of the engineer, but also their view on the status of their fields, their hopes,
their beliefs, their fears and expectations regarding the wider social affairs.

1.2. Research approach: Bibliographical references

The research described here will be based both on both primary and secondary sources.
The primary sources include:

 Books by scientists and engineers that refer to popular scientific subjects but also
to the wider ideological context of the period, such as the book by physicist
Erwin Schrödinger (1961), Science, Theory and Man .
 Periodicals that were followed science and technology closely, such as Technik und
Kultur (Technology and Culture), Die Tat (The Deed) and Deutsche Technik (German
Technology)
 Books by German intellectuals that influenced the views on science and
technology, such as The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes) by O.
Spengler (1926) or Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) by E. Junger (2004).

The secondary sources include material collected through important studies that
investigate the relationship between science and technology in Weimar specifically as well
as others dealing with the relationship between Modernity and modern science and
technology. Indicatively, these include:

 The relationship between the ideological environment and the scientists of the
Weimar Republic is thoroughly examined in articles such as P. Forman’s (1971),
Weimar Culture, Causality and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927: Adaptation by German
physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment, as well as the M.

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 Norton Wise’s (1994), Pasqual Jordan: Quantum Mechanics, Psychology, National
Socialism.
 In J. Herf’s (2003) book, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in
Weimar and the Third Reich we find a particularly concise study regarding the
relationship between technology and the German intelligentsia and the role of the
engineer community in interwar Germany. J.Norr’s (1974) essay German Social
Theory and the Hidden Face of Technology deals with the Nazi passion for technology
and the Right’s worship of the machine while M. Hard’s (1998) article, German
Regulation: The Integration of Modern Technology into National Culture, deals with the
integration of technology into the particular German cultural context of the
interwar period.
 Regarding the deeper relationship between science and technology and modern
societies we can draw material from the classic book Dialectic of Enlightenment by
M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno (2002). In addition, D. Bell’s (1976) book The
Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, includes a wealth of material on the economic
and political ramifications of technological development as well as the tension
between modern culture and technical rationality.
 Within the STS umbrella, my thesis focuses on the HSS/HST (History, Science,
Society/ History, Science, Technology) approach. I have also used material from
the following STS-related books and articles: Does Technology Drives History (M.
Roe Smith, L. Marx, 1994), The Machine in the Garden (L. Marx, 1964), Do Artifacts
have Politics (L. Winner, 1986), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (ed. E.
Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, J. Wajcman, 2008), The Intellectual
Appropriation of Technology: Discourses of Modernity, 1900-1939 (ed. M. Hard, A.
Jamison, 1998)

1.3. Structure of the thesis

The main part of the thesis is comprised of 5 chapters. Following the prologue is the 2 nd
chapter of the thesis titled The wider ideological context of the Weimar Republic, where we
attempt a short description of the dominant ideological current of the period,
neoromanticism, which is of key important in understanding the particular
conceptualization that science and technology underwent during the Weimar Republic.

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The aforementioned current, whose basic carrier of ideas was the german Mittelstand, was
a result of the mixing of two ideological traditions, of classical romanticism and modernism,
which were however given a unique meaning by the cultural and historical context of the
period.

In the 3rd chapter titled Movements, ideological currents and their views on science and technology, we
attempt to document the views on technology and science of the wider environment of
the scientific and engineer communities. We will thus attempt a review of the ideas and
dynamic relations of relevant social groups with science and technology in the Weimar
Republic, such as right wing intellectuals (E. Junger, O. Spengler, H. Freyer, C. Schmitt),
or left wing intelligentsia (German Communist Party, W. Benjamin, G. Lukacs) and
philosophical and art currents (Circle of Vienna, Bauhaus).

In the 4th chapter titled The scientists’ contribution to the particular neoromantic ideological current of
Weimar, we describe the bidirectional relationship between the scientific community with
the ideologically dominant neoromantic spirit. Through the scientists’ own discourse,
who during the Weimar Republic acted as the main modulators of the ideological
context, we attempt to describe the shifts of ideas during the German interwar period,
the turn towards mysticism, the ideological crises, the collapse of causality and the close
relationship between science and both industry and rearmament.

In the 5th chapter titled The engineer sector and its relationship to the neoromantic spirit we
investigate the engineer community’s views on technology as well as its attempts at
‘legitimization’ within the particular German Geist (Spirit). However, the inclusion of
technology into the German Geist necessitated the severance of its cultural roots in the
western Zivilization1 and its domestication on the basis of the principles of the German
Kultur2. The issue of the relationship between Kultur and Zivilization constitutes an
illuminating interpretative context regarding the ideological identity of German
engineers. Finally, this chapter examines the relationship between a large percentage of
engineers who developed close relations with the invading nazi ideology and those who
resisted it.

In the next chapter titled Conclusions and subjects for future research, we attempt a synopsis of
all the major points of this thesis while we also list a series of subjects for future research,

1 A term used in German that refers to intellectual culture

2 A term used in German that refers to technical culture

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which could use as a starting point the considerations and questions that this thesis has
posited. At the end there is an extensive Bibliography that includes all the sources that
were used in the writing of this thesis.

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 2. The wider ideological context of the Weimar Republic

The views on science and technology that are expressed during the Weimar Republic
which constitute, largely, a common component regarding these issues, cannot be viewed
as detached from the economic, political, cultural and ideological history of the period.
The period under discussion ranges from the humiliating, for Germany, end of the First
World War (1919) up to the assumption of power by Hitler (1933), which led to the
atrocity of Nazism.

The interwar years in Germany were a period of incessant social and ideological crises.
The attempt at rebuilding a new society in a financially and ethically damaged state
following the defeat of the First World War, the thickening of political time and, finally,
the concurrent existence and struggle of the three main political expressions of
modernity (communism, social democracy, Nazism) constitute a complex and interesting
image.

At the same time, development in branches such as science, technology, philosophy,

literature, cinema, architecture and the fine arts was impressive. Berlin, much like
German-speaking Vienna, were the foremost cultural centers during the ‘20s since the air
of freedom that was blowing, as well as the intensive socio-political fermentations, both
amplified the emergence and interventions of the period’s intellect. It is however worth
examining in more detail the ideological context of the period through which the
particular conceptualizations of science and technology were developed.

2.1. The German Μittelstand as a carrier of new ideas

The social basis of the conservative revolution was the middle class, broadly defined. The
German Mittelstand encompassed small- and middle-sized farmers, artisans and
shopkeepers, white-collar workers in big industry and civil service, and the professional
middle class- lawyers, doctors, professors, higher civil servants, and engineers (Mayer,
1971, p.66). These diverse groups were bound together by common reactions to the
rapid development of industrial capitalism in Germany. Anxious and afraid of large
capital, on the one hand, and the organized working class on the other, they viewed the
nation as a redemptive unity (Lebovics, 1969, pp 4-11).

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The German Mittelstand was an intermediate class in a temporal as well as social sense.
The German middle class’ imaginary was built on the shuffle of modern, capitalist and
industrial experiences with the traditional, pre-capitalist and pre-industrial life. The
Mittelstand lived in the cities and worked in modern industry, but the memories of small-
town life and less rationalized forms of production were still vivid in the Germany of the
1920s. Based on these facts, it was Ε. Bloch who was the first to argue that the appeal of
Nazism lay less in traditional anti-modernism than in the promise of cultural and
emotional redemption through embracing aspects of the modern world in accordance
with German national traditions (Bloch, 1992).

2.2. The birth of neoromanticism

Thus, during the Weimar Republic, it is developing a coherent and meaningful set of
ideas, metaphors, terms and emotionally charged references to German tradition, which
became widely accepted from both the engineer and scientific communities, as well as
social currents, intellectuals and political carriers of the period. It was an ideological
tradition that rose through the need for a total reform of the degenerate Zivilisation so that
it could become aligned with the characteristics of German Kultur.

In order to describe this particular ideological tradition, within the context of this thesis,
we will introduce the term neoromanticism. It is worth noting that this term was never used
during the Weimar Republic. Yet it constitutes an ideal typical construct which will assist
us in connecting a series of characteristics of the ideological context of the era, that
played a catalytic role in the particular meanings that science and technology received in
that period.

The WWI was of catalytic importance in constituting the neoromantic ideas as dominant
in the ideological field of the Weimar Republic. The war instilled in the generation that
played an active part in it, a contempt towards the bourgeoisie, a familiarization with
violence and finally, it also gave them a sense of community, which they would later long
for. It was after the war that the conservative revolutionaries associated irrationalism,
protest against the Enlightenment, and a romantic cult of violence with a cult of technics
and scientific applications. When the generation of the interwar period idealized the lost

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communities of the past, they looked back to the modern battlefield and the trenches,
not the preindustrial landscape. The Kriegserlebnis (war experience) presented postwar
reaction with a fully up-to-date masculine alternative to bourgeois society, one preferable
to the effeminate and escapist fantasies of previous generations (Herf, 2003, p. 29).

The neoromantic current was mostly the result of the blending of two ideological
traditions, of classical romanticism and of modernism, which were however given
meaning in a unique way by the cultural and historical context of the particular period.
Modernism in interwar Germany was on one hand connected to radical movements such
as Dadaism, Expressionism and the Bauhaus. At the same time, however, the other side of
interwar modernism displayed an excellent dynamic; the side that flirted with far-right
ideas, obviously influenced by Filippo Marinetti the Futurists in Italy, by Wyndham Lewis
and Ezra Pound in England and the US, by Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras in
France. In other words, influenced by an important part of Western intellect that
connected technology to a new anti-bourgeois vitalism, with masculine violence, with the
will for power, with a new aesthetic, with productivity instead of trade parasitism. Finally,
it also connected it with a life that was full, lived to the limits of emotions, a life that was
in total contrast with the bourgeois decadence and boredom.

German modernism however preserved inside itself its own unique legends. From Ernst
Jünger to Joseph Goebbels, the modernist credo was the triumph of spirit and will over
Reason and the subsequent fusion of this will to an aesthetic mode: If aesthetic
experience alone justifies life, morality is suspended and desire has no limits. When the
reactionary modernists discussed trains as embodiments of the will to power or saw the
racial soul expressed in the Autobahnen, they were popularizing what had been the
preserve of a cultural vanguard (Herf, 2003, pp. 12-13).

On the other hand, classical romanticism was, for the Western World, a reaction to the
radical life changes that took place through the Industrial Revolutions which lead, as the
exponents of the movement underlined, to the estrangement of nature, to the
industrialization of society and the mechanization of life. In order to explain the
historical line, however, that connects classical romanticism with the Weimar Republic’s
neoromanticism, it should be noted that the german-speaking public was one the foremost
cores of development of classical romanticism and that the romantic ideas were perfectly
aligned with the idealistic German tradition, which was widely accepted in interwar

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Germany. Romanticism also shaped the nature of German science, as was the case with
cartesianism in France and baconism in England, having its own unique symbols such as
Goethe, whose scientific aspect was often praised during the Weimar Republic.
References to him during the interwar period was a symbol of unity for Kultur and
science, through the prism of a particular cultural nationalism.

Despite the fact that the Weimar Republic’s neoromanticism shares many theoretical origins
with classical romanticism, such as the ideological tradition of the Lebensphilosophie,¸the
holistic view of nature or the competition against analytic rationalism, it presents, at the
same time, substantial differentiations. Neoromanticism did not reject scientific modernity,
much less technological progress and industrialized production. It elaborately integrated
modern technology into the cultural system of modern German nationalism. Thomas
Mann had perhaps conceived of the essence of neoromantic ideas when he wrote that
“the really characteristic and dangerous aspect of National Socialism was its mixture of robust modernity
and an affirmative stance toward progress combined with dreams of the past: a highly technological
romanticism” (as cited in Herf, 2003, p. 2).

Thus, the ideological current of neoromanticism expressed an increasing hostility towards

many aspects that were up to that point defined as typically romantic, such as the critique
of the estrangement of human nature by the machine. The new conception of romanticism
that dominated, also implied some subtle but important shifts in the meanings given to
romantic concepts and symbols. For example, when German interwar intellectuals such
as Schmitt, Spengler, Jünger, Sombart referred to romanticism, they mostly referred to the
idea of will and not the anti-industrial vision. Its proponents believed that the new
romanticism was the product of the war, rather than of pastoral poetry. Although the
reactionary modernists used terms such as Gemeinschaft (community) or Innerlichkeit
(inwardness), they redefined these legacies of romanticism in ways that elude the dichotomies
of tradition or modernity, and progress or reaction (Herf, 2003, p. 30). Their enthusiasm
regarding Fronterlebnis (experience of the trenches), as well as their belief that the war brought
to the foreground a new man, was an orld romantic vision placed within a modern
context.

As Joseph Goebbels would note in his speech given at the Heidelberg city hall in 1933:

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“Every time has its romanticism, its poetic presentation of life […] Ours does as well. It is harder and
cruder than a previous romanticism, but it remains romantic. The steely romanticism of our time
manifests itself in actions and deeds in service of a great national goal, in a feeling of duty raised to the
level of an unbreachable principle. We are all more or less romantics of a new German mood. The Reich
of droning motors, grandiose industrial creations, an almost unlimited and unenclosed space which we
must populate to preserve the best qualities of our Volk - is the Reich of our romanticis” (as cited in
Herf, 2003, p. 196)

Neoromanticism was thus formed under a national imperative: anti-technological views

would be expressions of national weakness. The distinction of technology or Κultur was
largely replaced by the indivisible unity of technology and Κultur. The German nation
could not be simultaneously powerful and technologically backwards. Germany not only
could but should be simultaneously technologically advanced and true to its soul. As
Joseph Goebbels noted repeatedly, this century would be the century of steel romanticism.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that despite the intense idealism and mysticism
that dominated the ideological field, the main goals were rearmament and industrial
rationalization, both of which could be achieved through the radical development of
technology and science.

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 3. Movements, ideological currents and their views on science and
technology

The confrontation between technology and culture did not begin in Weimar, however, it
certainly came to a head in those years. It even had a name of its own, Die Streit um die
Technik, (The Debate about Technology). Hundreds of books, lectures, and essays emerged
from both the technical universities and nontechnical intellectuals from all points along
the political spectrum dealing with the relation between Germany's soul and modern
technology. The confrontation between technological advance and the traditions of
German nationalism was sharper in Weimar than at any time before or since in modern
German history, as well as in any other place in Europe after WWI. The battle over
Technik und Kultur took place against a background of military defeat, failed revolutions,
successful counterrevolution, a divided Left and a resentful Right (Herf 2003, pp. 18-19).

3.1. The discourses of the right and the conservative revolution

The conservative revolution took place in and around universities, political clubs and
right-wing magazines. These institutions formed its public sphere. It was within such an
atmosphere, brimming with right wing sectarianism, that the charisma of Kriegserlebnis was
based on a developing politico-cultural opposition to democracy. From 1919 to 1933, the
German Right comprised over 550 political clubs and 530 journals. Some lasted weeks or
months; others, such as Die Tat, (The Deed), with a readership of 30,000 or Die Standarte,
the journal of war veterans, with a circulation of 110,000, continued throughout the
entire life of the republic. By the time books by Jünger or Spengler came to the attention
of a broader reading public, they had been discussed and refined within this narrower but
by no means small right-wing public sphere. It served as a linguistic and political
incubator of ideology, offering authors financial support and sympathetic readers (Herf,
2003, p. 25).

It is of course worth noting that the discourse of the right would not accept the
‘intellectual’ characterization, what with its leftist, cosmopolitan and Jewish connotations.
They were seen however, by themselves as well, as a cultural elite with a special
responsibility and capability for processing traditions, ideas, symbols and meanings, in an
attempt to make their era comprehensible.

14
The ideological core which they used was mainly coming from German tradisions:
romanticism, volkisch3 ideology, the existentialist language of the self and authenticity, a
widespread acceptance of social Darwinism, Lebensphilosophie and a general antipathy to
Enlightenment thought and morality. Although it is true that elements of all of these
traditions could be found throughout Europe in the first third of the century, nowhere
else did they constitute such an important part of national identity as in Germany. At the
same time though, the conservative revolution attempted to show that this particularity
of German traditions could be used in praising, not condemning, mechanization, war and
labor (Herf, 2003, p. 29).

Therefore, by exalting the idea of beauty over normative standards and by interpreting
technology as an incarnation of will and beauty, the right wing discourse of Weimar
contributed towards an irrational and nihilist embrace of technology. Ernst Jünger, for
example, celebrated the will over lifeless rationality by pointing to its presence in a
hardness evident in the battle against nature waged with technological devices. In his
own words: “Nietzsche had no room for the machine in his Renaissance landscape. But he taught us
that life is not only a struggle for daily existence but a struggle for higher and deeper goals. Our task is to
apply this doctrine to the machine” (Jünger, 2004, p.15).

3.2. Ernst Jünger: the heart of the neoromance current

Jünger was one of the foremost personalities of the conservative revolution that took
part in the Republic of Weimar. A highly decorated soldier of WWI, he published during
the Weimar years around ten books and over one hundred essays on the subjects of war,
death, heroism, nationalism, sacrifice and technology. Among them were two books that
defined the political dialogue of interwar Germany, In Stahlgewittern (The Steel Storm) and
Der Arbeiter (The Worker). Also important were the books Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (The
Battle as an inner Experience) and Feuer und Blut (Fire and Blood) that make apparent his vital
passion for war and technology. Even though he never became a member of the Nazi
party and, following 1933, he withdrew from politics, his work hitherto helped create a
favorable climate for national socialism and the acceptance of the machine and
technology as an integral part of the German soul.

3 is the German interpretation of the populist movement, with a romantic focus on folklore and the
"organic"

15
War was for him the defining event that allowed his generation to perceive the dynamic
and importance of technology through a mystical prism:

“Today we are writing poetry out of steel and struggle for power in battles in which events mesh together
with the precision of machines. In these battles on land, on water, and in the air there lay a beauty that
we are able to anticipate. There the hot will of the blood restrains and then expresses itself through the
dominance of technical wonder works of power” (Jünger, as cited in Herf, 2003, p.77).

Jünger magical realism thus found its purest expression in the descriptions of war. Here
appeared to be an endless composition of fire and blood, of precision and passion, of
rationalism and magic, of external form and hidden will. The following description of a
sinking battleship, for example, aptly shows Jünger’s mystical passion for technology:

“But haven't we, who of course are not materialists, but instead label ourselves realists, already felt the
experience of mathematical precision and magical background during the war. Didn't phenomena such as
the modern battleship arouse the same impression in us. This embodiment of an icy will, all coal and
steel, oil, explosives and electricity, manned by specialized positions from admiral to boiler heater, the
image of the latest precision mechanics, served by workers and directors, functional in the highest degree,
composed of millions of objects -this whole apparatus is sacrificed in seconds for the sake of things which
one does not know but rather in which one can only take on faith.” (Jünger, as cited in Herf, 2003,
p.83)

When viewed through the spectacles of Jünger magical realism, the battleship emerges as
the objectification of tremendous energy and technical potential. Human beings enter as
part of the functioning machinery that is utterly reified; that is, it appears to have its own
autonomous laws separate from human consciousness and organization, but it is not
soulless or inhuman. Precision, exactitude, subordination of the individual to his
specialized task, as well as unthinking sacrifice, represent both technology's icy will and
the lost treasure of the conservative revolution's notion of community. Literally and
figuratively, the battleship represents an iron necessity that Jünger welcomes (Herf, 2003,
p. 84).

Technology, as an essential component of the Jüngerian mythic construct of the worker-

soldier Gestalt (figure/form), is the centerpiece of a Utopian vision of a postbourgeois,

16
advanced industrial dictatorship (Herf, 2003, p. 105). Bourgeois politics and
parliamentary discussion are chaotic and formless, especially when compared, according
to Jünger, to the “greater cleanliness and definition of technical will toward form”. Politics must
turn away from compromise and obscurity and model itself on the clarity evident in
technology. A new “landscape at once more dangerous, colder and more glowing”, is evident and
politics must follow suit. But in order to pursue this new politics, the cultural baggage of
the Enlightenment must be thrown out because it cannot grasp this “martial side of
technology's Janus face” (Jünger, as cited in Herf, 2003, p.105). Total mobilization of
technology demands abolition of this obstacle. Jünger’s symbolism of the worker-soldier
presents an image of modernity that is neither liberal nor Marxist but mystery
technological.

Jünger was a technological determinist in the extreme and believed that use of
technology brings with it “a very particular style of life, which extends to the great and little things of
life”. Far from being a neutral force, technology was inherently in conflict with
democracy. Authoritarian technology required an authoritarian state. And the political
elite of this state ought to be the worker-soldiers who first understood that “the motor is
not the master but the symbol of our time, the image of a power for which explosiveness and precision do
not constitute a contradiction” (Jünger, as cited in Herf, 2003, p.105).

Thus we could claim that Jünger is a characteristic example of the neoromantic current, a
current that connects technology with the primal forces of will and thus saves the
machine from the attacks of the anti-technological currents of German idealism. Instead
of apologizing for this, or denying the reality of the submission of war and labor to bio-
mechanical rationalization, Jünger, as a “heroic realist”, to use the term with which he
described himself, welcomed such a process that promised liberation from those
attributes of bourgeois society that he himself despised the most: rationality and feminine
sentimentalism.

Jünger continued to develop this symbiosis of irrationalism and technics in essays of the
mid-1920s. The generation of the trenches was one that “builds machines and for whom
machines are not dead iron but rather an organ of power, which it dominates with cold reason and blood.
It gives the world a new face”. It had borne with dignity the “storm of material” and looked
forward to seeing its will find “expression” in material objects. Unlike the antibourgeois

17
youth of prewar Germany, “the front generation begins to reconcile itself with the machine and to see
in it not only the useful but the beautiful as well. This reconciliation is an important first step out of a
grey, frightful world of utilitarianism, out of the Manchester landscape in which coal dust covers over all
values” (Jünger, as cited in Herf, 2003, p.79)

It is a reconciliation of machine and the body that is exemplified in the relation between
the soldier and the technology of war:

“We have to transfer what lies inside us onto the machine. That includes the distance and ice-cold mind
that transforms the moving lightning stroke of blood into a conscious and logical performance. What
would these iron weapons that were directed against the universe be if our nerves had not been intertwined
with them and if our blood didn't flow around every axle” (Jünger, as cited in Herf, 2003, p.79).

Transferring “what lies inside us” onto technology not only creates a man—machine
symbiosis. It is also an improvement on the body because, unlike the body, the machine
is capable of attaining the Utopian stage of flawless functioning. But if, as Jünger insists,
our nerves are in fact intertwined with technology, the conservative suspicion of and
hostility toward this aspect of modernity must be set aside:

“Yes, the machine is beautiful. It must be beautiful for him who loves life in all life's fullness and power.
Nietzsche insisted that life is not only a merciless struggle for survival but also possesses a will to higher
and deeper goals. The machine cannot only be a means of production, serving to satisfy our paltry
material necessities. Rather, it ought to bestow on us higher and deeper satisfactions […] The artistic
individual, who suddenly sees in technics the totality instead of a functional assembly of iron parts”
(Jünger, as cited in Herf, 2003, p.79).
The effect of the contribution of Jünger’s theories on the embrace of technology by the
Nazis is evident. A year after Hitler came to power, Wolf Dieter Mueller, a Nazi
commentator, pointed:

“German youth owe a debt above all to Ernst Jünger for the fact that technology is no longer a problem
for them. They have made his beautiful confessions to technics born from fire and blood their own. They
live in harmony with it. They require no more ideologies in order to overcome technology. Rather they
grasp it as the arm of the idea. This was something new for us, this incorporation of matter into the

18
meaning of events. Jünger has liberated us from a nightmare” (Mueller, as cited in Herf, 2003,
p.80)

3.3. Οswald Spengler, the “religiousness” of science and technology and their
connection to neoromantic ideas

Like Jünger, Οswald Spengler was a genuine child of right wing political clubs and
magazines. Even though he is usually considered as the principal representative of
Weimar’s political pessimism, Spengler made a special contribution to the movement of
neoromanticism and the reconciliation of German Kultur with science and technology.
Many scholars have, since then, interpreted his most important work, Der Untergang des
Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1918-1922) that until 1926 had been reprinted 30 times
over and had distributed more than 100,000 copies, as anti-technological. However many
facets of his work attempt to connect technology and science with beauty, will, and
productivity, thus placing them within the sphere of German Kultur and not with the
Western Zivilisation. At this point it is worth studying more thoroughly some of these
facets. The influence of the book on the scientific community was catalytic. As P.
Forman notes, there are clear references to Spengler’s work by scientists such as Max
Born, Albert Einstein, Franz Exner, Philipp Frank, Pascual Jordan, et. al. (1971, p. 65)

The book is impressive not only in size but also in the density of the concepts it tackles:
cultural crisis, scientific revolution, Lebensphilosophie –all these condensed and declared
within a sweeping theory on world history, in which physics and mathematics are
considered, next to art, music and religion, completely defined culturally. Ernst
Troeltsch, a famous philosopher of the period, saw the first volume of the The Decline of
the West as the paradigm of the revolution in science: “It is the first decisive public revelation of
the new science, and thereupon rests a great part of its captivating effect” (Troeltsch, as cited in
Forman, 1971).

At this point we should examine certain interesting passages from The Decline of the West,
in which Spengler constructs his particular vision regarding science:

“There simply are no conceptions other than anthropomorphic conceptions […] so is it certainly with
every physical theory, no matter how well founded it is supposed to be. Every such is itself a myth, and in

19
all its features anthropomorphically preformed. There is no pure natural science, there is not even a
natural science which could be designated as common to all men” (as cited in Forman, 1971, p. 32).

Spengler, after formulating his position on the non objectivity of positive science,
proceeds to interpret physics, its content and future since the Renaissance. The content
of Western physics and mathematics is, of course, but an expression of the soul of
Western culture -of the Faustian culture, as Spengler calls it. And the essential,
determinative characteristic of Faustian science is, the Kausalitätprinzip (causality principle) -
the logical form of the Faustian world-feeling: “We see then that the causality principle, in the
form in which it is selfevidently necessary for us -the agreed basis of truth for our mathematics, physics
and philosophy- is a Western and, more strictly speaking, Baroque phenomenon” (Spengler, 1926, p.
392). Causality, argues an influenced by Lebensphilosophie (Philosophy of Life) Spengler, reigns
in modern positive sciences as an artificial construct that had been raised as a
fortification against the most fundamental irrational concept of destiny, Schicksal. His line
of thought begins thus:

“For the principle of causality is late, unusual, and only for the energetic intellect of higher cultures a
secure, somewhat artificial possession. Out of it speaks fear of the world. Into it the intellect banishes the
demonical in the form of a continually valid necessity, which rigid and soul-destroying is spread over the
physical world-picture. […] The abstract savant, the natural scientist, the thinker in systems, whose
entire mental existence is founded upon the principle of causality, is a late manifestation of the hatred of
the powers of destiny, of the incomprehensible. […] The words time and destiny, for anyone who uses
them instinctively, touch life itself in its deepest depths -life as a whole, which is not to be separated from
lived experience. On the other hand, physics, reason, must separate them. The livingly-experienced in
itself, detached from the living act of the observer and become an object, dead, inorganic, rigid -that is now
Nature as mechanism, i.e., as something to be exhausted mathematically” (Spengler, 1926, pp. 118-
120, 388-389).

He not only attacks science and technology in general, but also shows his admiration for
them in multiple points of his work, attempting to re-define them through the values and
visions of the neoromantic movement: “The depths and refinement of mathematical and physical
theories are a joy, who would sooner have the splendidly clear, highly intellectual forms of a fast steamer,
of a steel structure, of a precision lathe, the subtlety and elegance of certain chemical and optical processes,
than all the pickings and stealings of present day applied art, architecture and painting included”

20
(Spengler, 1926, pp.43-44). While for modern physics, he adds that it is: “our ripest and
strictest science”.

However, physics in his generation is not merely plodding forward in a beaten track,
tying up loose ends, it is also, according to Spengler, disintegrating and metamorphosing,
undergoing a transformation of the goals and principles of scientific explanation
paralleling the Zeitgeist (spirit of the age), the “second religiousness”, thus implying that scientific
theory that grasps the invisible processes of the natural world possesses the same
ritualistic and mythic aspects as religion. Hence, the fate and the salvation of physics will
be a reunification of thought and feeling, a self-discovery of physics as a fundamentally
religious-anthropomorphic expression:

“The goal reached, the vast and ever more meaningless and threadbare fabric woven by natural science
falls apart. It was, after all, nothing but the inner structure of the mind. […] But what appears under
the fabric is once again the earliest and deepest, the myth, immediate becoming, life itself. […] Out of the
religious soulfulness of the gothic there grew up the urban intellect, the alter ego of irreligious natural
science, overshadowing the original world feeling. But today, in the sunset of the scientific epoch, in the
stage of victorious skepsis, the clouds dissolve and the quiet landscape of the morning reappears in all
distinctness […] weary after its striving, the Western science returns to its spiritual home” (Spengler,
1926, pp.427-428).

Beyond science, Spengler dedicates a large portion of his work on technology and the
role it should play in the rebirth of the German nation. His close personal ties with
German industrialists and the conservative rebels of the Club of June, the core of the
conservative revolution in interwar Germany, helped him realize the ambiguous
composition of technology and irrationalism, which later gave mechanics a central part
within the new elite that undertook the mission of saving Germany from the liberalism
of the Weimar Republic. Thus, both in Der Untergang Abendlandes as well as in other
works of his, like Der Mensch und die Technik (Man and technology), a book that he wrote in
order to improve his pro-technology credentials, Spengler creates a fragile truce between
right wing conservatism and modern technology using a language and a symbolism that
are adaptable to mass nationalist policy. Behind the lean, glossy surface of modern
technological constructs, Spengler could discern the work of those dark, mysterious
forces at the epicenter of the former romanticism in Germany. The keywords are

21
creating, myth, form, soul and formative power. They offer a way of talking about the
rationalization of German industry, of retrofitting and technological applications, as if
they were the processes of renewal of myth and remystification.

The Spenglerian version of the Faust legend was an important aspect of his reconciliation
of irrationalist and romantic traditions with the products of the first and second
industrial revolutions in Germany. His argument was as follows: Faustian technology
signifies a turning point in the relationship between human beings and nature. Man shifts
from passive observation and perception to active transformation and direction of the
material world. The Faustian person's will exudes a “primordial violence” that is channeled
into the “steel energy of his practical consideration”. Western man's soul is that of the discoverer
who uncovers and unleashes nature's hidden powers. The origin of technical innovation
is ultimately religious, that is, the urge to reveal the mysteries of God's universe. For
Spengler, the technological world appears not at all as a disenchanted or demystified one.
The tyranny of technical Geist (spirit) by no means signifies the “dethronement of God” or the
emergence of human omniscience. Divine causality has not been handed over to human
beings because the machine has now taken on a life of its own. Technology becomes
“ascetic, mystical, esoteric, […] even more spiritual” (Herf, 2003, pp. 60-61).

Spengler continues his undeniably impressive reasoning by arguing that the Western
man, driven to dominate nature by the Faustian soul which permits no return to
primitivism or pastoral reconciliation with nature, cannot escape the frenzied and
seemingly ineluctable will of an apparently autonomous technology. This tyrannical
technology, however, possesses a “magic soul”. Therefore any attempts to overcome the
current cultural crisis must include groups with affinities to this magic. The peasantry and
merchants are ruled out. So are the Jews, whose talents as entrepreneurs do not cultivate
the technical Geist, and the Russians, “who look with fear and hatred at this tyranny of wheels,
cables and rails” and dream of a “wholly new world, in which nothing of this devil's technique
remains”. The entrepreneur and industrial proletarian are products of and slaves to
technology. Thus it is up to the engineer, “the erudite priest of the machine”, to provide
guidance and leadership in the midst of Weimar's cultural and political crisis. Spengler's
defense of technology rests on pointing not to its rational properties but to its essentially
irrational and romantic “metaphysics and mysticism”. Although the engineers are able to
grasp these neoromantic dimensions of technology, those tainted with the commercial

22
spirit cannot (Herf, 2003, p. 61-62). If the Faustian spirit is dead, then according to
Spengler the technology of the machine would also be forgotten, a victim of intellectual
decadence as well as corrosion from within and political attacks from the outside.

In conclusion, we could argue that Spengler by, linking technology to the romantic and
irrationalist traditions, to will, struggle, Gestalt, soul, destiny, and blood, helped to shift
the technology from the realm of Zivilisation to that of Kultur. His depiction of the
Faustian man created a vivid image suggesting instinctual bonds between embattled
patriarchy and masculine will on the one hand, and technology, on the other.

3.4. Carl Schmitt and the Geist he lent to technology

Carl Schmitt was one of the most widely read and respected political scientist of his day.
In 1932, as Germany moved into the protracted constitutional crisis that resulted in
Hitler's accession, Schmitt argued in his famous, book-length essay, Der Begriff des
Politischen (The Concept of the Political), that the actual situation creates its own legality, that
emergencies obviate normative law, and that he is sovereign who makes the decision
regulating the emergency situation. In the spring of 1933, he joined the Nazi party in the
belief that Hitler and National Socialism were the realization of this theory of decisionism4.
His contributions to neoromantic ideas may be mainly found in two works: Der Begriff des
Politischen (The Concept of the Political), and Politische Romantik (Political Romanticism). A
student of Max Weber, Schmitt believed that the authoritarian state, when combined
with advanced technology could restore political dynamism in a bureaucratized society.
Along with Ernst Jünger, he argued that neoromanticism demanded a break from what he
viewed as the passivity and escapism of nineteenth-century German romanticism.

In Schmitt’s view, the belief that technical progress went hand in hand with moral
progress was a relic of the Enlightment, one especially indefensible in the period
following the Great War. Beginning with Saint-Simon, he complained, theorists of
industrial society had imputed their own liberal teleology to technology, while refusing to
see that technology was not a force for neutralization of conflicts. Rather, it was an
indispensable aspect of war and political domination.

4 a doctrine which states that a political action was a value in itself regardless of the normative justifications
attached to it

23
Technology's Geist was not identical with the positivism or romanticism. But this spirit did
harmonize with an ethic of will, battle, and struggle. The language of the will and of
struggle, evident in Schmitt’s work, was incompatible with classic romanticism. It was
instead, as Jünger would have put it, fully modern and up-to-date, and no longer mired in
the obsolete sentimentalism of the bourgeois nineteenth century. This language did not
reject technology but sought the liberation of its suffocating Geist from the fetters of the
political and social relations of the Weimar Republic. For Schmitt, the Geist of
technology, once separated from liberal and Marxist notions of progress and rationality,
possessed an elective affinity to authoritarian politics (Herf, 2003, pp.120-121).

3.5. The technocratic vision of the Left

During a period when technocratic visions resonated with the centrist political space for
increasing productivity and appeasing social conflicts, in an era when the Right praised
the technology that would arm the German nation, it becomes perhaps difficult to
understand the adoration that a large part of the Left felt for technology. We should
although see this position of the Left in relation to the particular historical context of the
Interwar period as well as the productivist, technocratic visions that were dominant
within the Soviet Union at the time.

Hence, The German Communist Party exuded Leninist enthusiasm for technology.
“Forward through the trusts and beyond to socialism” was the view of Jacob Walcher, a famous
left-wing leading theorist, who also went so far as to call Henry Ford a revolutionary “no less
revolutionary than capitalism itself” (as cited in Herf, 2003, p. 41). An important reason, as J.
Herf (2003, p. 41) notes, for which communists and social democrats embraced
technology and the industrial vision, was the strong belief in marxist teleology of the
progressive unfolding of the productive forces that would eliminate feudal residues,
enlarge the proletariat, and lead to socialism or communism. Therefore, the fact that the
famous left-wing cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer described the American chorus line5 of
industrial production as a welcome sign of the disenchantment of society that could only
help to dissolve German volkisch mysticism, could not be classified as random.

5
A term originating in American musicals that describes female troupes that perform synchronized musical
numbers

24
The stance described above, of the Left’s majority towards technology in interwar
Germany led Ernst Bloch to characterize it as “the doctor at capitalism's deathbed”, whose
served the rehabilitation of capital after the postwar years of revolution and
counterrevolution. Bloch argued that German Marxism was so committed to
development that it left the field of cultural revolution and appeals to myth and emotion
to the Right (as cited in Herf, 2003, p. 41).

3.6. The heretic thought of W. Benjamin, G. Lukács

Beyond the majority trend within the Left that deified science and technology, there were
within the left wing though camp some critical voices, like those of Walter Benjamin and
the Hungarian György Lukács, who during the ‘20s lived and was active in Vienna.

Acccording to Lukács, one of the characteristics of modern industrialized society is the

process of gradual rational organization, meaning the widening of areas of life where
people are no longer guided by social values, but only by personal interests. Lukács
described this process as reification, emphasizing that the modern man sees himself and
others increasingly as “things” with which he creates logical relationships. The start of
this process lies, for Lukács, with the expansion of the institution of wage labor, where
the laborer believes that his own labor is something detached from himself and that he
ought to sell it. Therefore, workers, in contrast to other social classes, have the
opportunity to realize the fact that the capitalist system is the reason behind their
reification. Lukács theory of reification, as it is developed in History and Class Consciousness,
had been the cornerstone of his critique against the dominant stance of the Left
regarding the neutrality and objectivity of technology. According to the Hungarian
thinker, reification, which professed that technology possessed “a phantom objectivity”,
an automony so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its
fundamental nature: the relation between people, should be fought in every way possible
(Lukács 1975, p. 150).

Benjamin, based on the concept of reification, exercised a thorough critique to the

dominant vies regarding aesthetics and technology in interwar Germany. The
conservative intelligentsia of the period mostly saw in the machine various categories
taken from aesthetics and philosophy, but almost none originating from society or social

25
relationships. Benjamin, like Lukacs, rejected the attempts of Soviet Marxists, to separate
technology from social relations and view it as an autonomous force. It is noteworthy
that in their attempt they came in conflict with Marxist theorists like Bukharin (Lukacs,
1972, pp. 134-42).

Another significant contribution by Benjamin lay in his understanding that for

Germany's right-wing intellectuals, the liberation of technology from Weimar's social and
political restrictions was synonymous with recovery of the German soul. Whatever this
program may have meant for German industry, for the right-wing intellectuals it meant
resolution of a cultural crisis. The idea that economic advance could overcome a cultural
crisis was new, at least for Germany's nontechnical intellectuals. Benjamin also noted that
the less important the individual on the industrialized battlefield became, the more the
right-wing enthusiasts of technology stressed his presence. Benjamin thought Jünger and
his colleagues turned war into a cultic object, an eternal power that transforms the soul,
and that in so doing they were engaging in “nothing other than an uninhibited translation of the
principles of art for art's sake to war itself” (Benjamin, 1979, p.125). In the language of battle,
the Right abandoned its enmity to technology. As he himself notes:

“Technology wanted to recreate German Idealism's heroic features with ribbons of fire and approach
trenches. It went astray. […] To elevate war into a metaphysical abstraction as the new nationalism
does, is nothing other than an effort to use technology to solve the mystery of nature as German Idealism
understood it in a mystical way instead of illuminating and using nature's secrets via the rational
organization of society […] In the parallelogram of forces formed by nature and the nation, war is the
diagonal” (Benjamin, 1979, p.127).

According to Benjamin for Weimar's right-wing nationalists, the violence of the

battlefields, the efficiency and power of tanks and ships, and the explosions of grenades
were the external expression of inner impulses toward "life." Rather than offer political,
economic, or social analyses of events, they could be explained away as being merely the
expression of some deep, mysterious, eternal, and irresistible force, some Ding an sich (the
thing in itself) immune to rational description (Herf, 2003, p. 34).

Even though Benjamin’s and Lukács’s ideas on technology were not particularly resonant
with the Weimar Republic, they formed the basis for a large part of later theories

26
regarding science, technology and Western civilization in general, like those of Marcuse
and Horkheimmer.

3.7. The Circle of Vienna, science as a basis for philosophy and the battle against
Metaphysics

The Circle of Vienna was the ideological current in German speaking Europe of the
Interwar period which relied most on the principles and methods of science. The
movement’s main goal was to revise the tradition of empiricism through the
developments in the natural sciences of the period. It is no coincidence that the
overwhelming majority of the participants in the Circle of Vienna had a scientific
education, mostly in the fields of Physics and Mathematics, which heavily affected the
ideas of the movement. It should also be noted that the members of the Circle were
extremely active within the political field, most of which with a leftist orientation. The
study of both the current itself as well as its relationships with its mostly hostile
ideological environment, is revelatory for the ideas on science and technology that
prevailed during the Weimar Republic.

In 1929, Hahn, Neurath and Carnap, publish the declaration of the Circle of Vienna, titled
Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung (The Scientific Conception of the World). It is, in effect, an
extensive article that presents the influences of the Circle, its historical origin, its positions
and its goals. Starting from an anti-metaphysical, empiricist stance and having as a
principle the spirit of scientific perception of the world, the article’s writers reference
Russell’s and Whitehead’s research on the logical foundation of mathematics. Sometime
later, in 1930, Carnap and Reichenbach publish the magazine Erkenntnis, which becomes
the official instrument of the current; the latter coming quickly to terms with the
particularity and role it has to play within a hostile philosophical environment.

Logical positivists looked forward to what they called unified science. They sought a
neutral system of symbols and formulas which would be free of the “deposited rust”, as
they called it, of historical languages as well as a holistic system of concepts. It is a
program reminiscent of Leibniz’s lingua universalis, a universal typical language of universal
characters, which, in cases of disputes, would ensure that one could “calculate” who is
right, exactly as it happens in mathematics, by expelling all traces of subjectivity from his

27
judgment. With this schema, philosophers could express their theories, which in turn
could be verified through equivalence rules and experience, far away from the “dark and
unexplored depths of language”. (Tsiampaos, 2011) Especially important for the movement is
also the concept of progress, since everything appears to contribute towards it. Scientific
progress thus becomes a continuous, cumulative process. The theories are expanded to
cover wider spectrums or are integrated in more comprehensive theories, that unify
hitherto distinct scientific sectors. The older successes of theories are not discarded, but
preserved and expanded.

We can argue that Logical Positivism had two main goals, both based on the Circle’s
admiration of science:
1)The logical analysis of valid knowledge: Since, as within the positivist traditions, valid
knowledge is identified with science, its first goal becomes: the analysis of the logic of
science.
2) The empirical foundation of science, a claim leading to the demarcation between
science and metaphysics.

Very often the rough and mostly inflexible positions of the Circle of Vienna are presented
in an unhistorical way. If, however, we were to place these positions within the historical
context from which they sprung, we could perceive them as angry responses to a usually
reactionary, metaphysical, mystical and idealistic neoromantic context that had swept the
Weimar Republic. In Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung, “their tone”, as F. Ringer (1969, p.308)
rightly points out, “was that of exasperated outsiders”. Indeed the opening lines tell us: “Many
assert that metaphysical and theologizing thinking, not only in everyday life, but also in science and
scholarship, are today again increasing […] The assertion itself is easily confirmed by a glance at the
themes of lectures at the universities and at the titles of philosophical publications”. Sketching the
history of the Vienna Circle, Victor Kraft (1968, p. 8) described the great resonance the
movement found in Western Europe and America, adding ruefully, “It was only in Germany
that the Vienna Circle's approach was not taken up at all”. Characteristic of the hostile stance of
the ideological environment towards the current of Logical Positivism is the fact that the
members of the Circle were forced into exile from Austria and Germany following the
domination of the Nazis, while one of the leaders of the movement, Moritz Schlick, is
murdered by a Nazi-supporting student of his in 1936.

28
Let’s take a look, however, at some of the reactions of the members of the Circle of
Vienna towards this particular neoromantic context that is gradually constructed during
the Weimar Republic. Otto Neurath, a supporter of socialism and of scientific
interpretation, vehemently attacked the intentions of the neoromantic spirit: “The
metaphysical mystifications were aimed not at furthering the positivist cause of clarification but at
connecting good new physics with obsolete scholastic metaphysics through vague analogies and conjectures”
(as cited in Ν. Wise, 1994, p.246).

Phillip Frank understood the stakes even more clearly. Bemoaning the fact that one
could hardly open a book or journal without reading: “bankruptcy of mechanistic physics”,
“the end of animosity towards Spirit in natural science” or “reconciliation between religion and natural
science”, he rejected out of hand the notion that the spiritualistic turn had been forced by
the revolution in physics: “in a series of countries, especially in Italy and the German Reich, a
completely antithetical conception of the world asserted itself”. Frank recognized that the arguments
had to be cast in political terms. But in this courageously open condemnation of
Nazism and Fascism, Frank cast his net too widely, catching not only everyone who
pursued holistic explanations, but all those mathematical idealists like Jeans and
Eddington who believed that the world had been built according to the theorems of
pure mathematics. On the other hand, Schlick attempted to undermine the conjuring
force of neoromantic holistic view, even while supporting Gestalt psychology, by attacking
its vagueness and by dogmatically asserting that a holistic description could always in
principle be reduced to a sum of elementary processes (Ν. Wise, 1994, pp.246-247).

Yet the climax of the conflict between the Circle of Vienna and the neoromantic
environment is crystallized in the delimitation of science with respect to Metaphysics on
the basis of the criterion of verification: a sentence has meaning only if it can be verified
through immediate observation. The programmatic opposition against Metaphysics and the
demand for a scientific philosophy is the unifying element of the Circle of Vienna against a
mostly hostile ideological environment. Thus, valid knowledge is based on data from
experience, whereby it becomes the exclusive product of particular sciences and is
confined to investigating physical laws without seeking the hidden causes behind things.

In this way, the rejection of Metaphysics becomes a principle for the Circle of Vienna, not as
convoluted or useless, but as politically reactionary. Neurath for example, with his keen

29
socio-political interests, heavily insisted on organizing the Circle in the manner of a
political party, with its main principle being the destruction of traditional Metaphysics,
which he considered an instrument of social and political reaction. As H. Hahn, O.
Neurath and R. Carnap characteristically stated in their manifesto:

“The increase in metaphysical and theological trends within many modern unions and groups, in books,
in discussions and university speeches seems to emanate from the intense social and economical struggles of
the time: one side of the combatants, staying faithful to traditional social forms of organization, cultivates
the traditional forms of behavior of metaphysics and theology, the content of which has been sidelined for
some time; while the other side, mostly in Central Europe, rejects these views and stands by empirical
science.” (Hahn, Neurath & Carnap, 2008, p. 67)

3.8. Bauhaus and its close relationship to technology and science

The Bauhaus movement is one of the characteristic examples of the heavy influence that
technology and science exerted during the Weimar Republic. The movement crystallized
the fascination of the era with industrial production and especially the machine which
was considered the symbol of progress. Given the economic destruction of post-WWI
defeated Germany, industry was seen as a field of development and therefore as a field of
recovery. We therefore come to understand how industrial production, within the
context of modernism, could present a visionary perspective for the artistic vanguard.

Bauhaus is instituted as an applied arts school in Weimar, Germany in 1919 and has three
distinct periods that relate to the three consecutive directors of the school and its transfer
and development in three different cities. The first period, dating from 1919 up to 1925,
found the school based in Weimar and with Walter Gropius as its director; the second
period lasted from 1925 to 1932 with the school based in Dessau where W. Gropius was
succeeded by Hannes Meyer, while the final period lasted from 1930 up until 1933,
during which the school’s director was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In the same period,
the school is forced to relocate from Dassau to Berlin for one year (1932-1933) when it is
finally shut down following pressure from the Nazis.

Gropius was primarily interested in incorporating the artist within the social corpus,
supporting the shift of the school towards industrial design, according to the dogma “Art
and technology, a new unity”. The artists that Gropius refers to in his theoretical texts is not

30
the commonly accepted painter or sculptor, but a descendant of them, as, with the
assistance of the machine, the established arts (painting, sculpting and graphic design)
were transformed into something new. In Gropius’ own words:

“The machine is an instrument that is destined to relieve man from oppressive bodily labor and enforce
his hand, thereby giving him the ability to form his creative harmonization […] The work of the new
man will become an organic part of the unified industrial production […] because creative freedom is not
found in the inexperience of expressive mediums, but in free movement through its strict legal contexts”
(as cited in Gay, 2010, p. 87).

According to the dominant perceptions of Bauhaus, mechanization should be put in the

service of man. The movement’s role was to “prevent the enslavement of humanity by the
machine, giving its products a content of reality and meaning, and therefore saving the house from
mechanical anarchy [...] Our objective goal is to eradicate any disadvantage of the machine without
sacrificing even its slightest advantage. Truly, the modern man has been shattered, but it would not only
be impossible but also undesirable to abandon the division of labor. The tragedy of fragmentation did not
come from the machine, nor by the detailed subdivision of duties, but from the dominant materialistic
mentality of our ear and the defective and otherworldly connection of the individual to the community”
(Gropius, 1965).

The focus on the symbolism of the machine, however, also becomes evident in the
theater workshop of the school, one of the most interesting and pioneering enterprises
that took place in Bauhaus. Responsible for this workshop from 1923 onwards is Oskar
Schlemmer who was initially the director the sculpting workshop. Schlemmer perceives
space “not through the visual sense but with his entire body and is interested in reducing human
movement into abstract geometric shapes and mechanisms” (Schlemmer, Nagy & Molnar 1971, p.
8). Gropius himself will claim that his workshop presented a unique experience: that of
the magical transformation of actors and dancers into “moving architecture”. Deduction,
mechanization and the possibilities of new technology become tools of expression and
basic principles of composition and production not only for the theater workshop but
also for the entirety of Bauhaus through an attempt to investigate the individual and for
collective solutions to be sought.

31
In February of 1928 Gropius submitted his resignation and recommended Hannes Meyer
as his successor. Following this change in directorship, the school itself was also
substantially changed. Its main goal was now the mass production of products. The
individual expression through art repelled Meyer, since for himself it expressed the
individual and not the whole, which the school should address. “Art is just order” he used
to say, subtracting its intellectual layer. Pure functionalism was the new motto. In the
programmatic declaration that he wrote in 1928, we read: “the entirety of life is a function and
therefore anti-artstic”.

Another aspect that shows the close relationship of the Bauhaus movement with the
scientific discourse concerns the contacts that the former developed with the
ideologically congenital current of the Circle of Vienna. Bauhaus, mostly after 1922, sought
through analysis, organization and standardization a single method of design and
production which could present solutions with a rational and straightforward way to the
problems of architecture and city planning. This method borrowed heavily from the
methods that certain branches of the positive sciences followed as well as the
philosophical ideas of the Circle of Vienna.

Within the work of the positivist philosophers of the Circle of Vienna the teachers of the
Bauhaus sought scientific principles which would assist them in talking about colors and
geometric shapes in an objective way that would marginalize any sense of unnecessary
decoration and subjective aesthetic. It is no coincidence that even in the Bauhaus
vocabulary, words emphasized this philosophy. Thus the word Kunst (art) was replaced
by the word Gestaltung (design), while the word Architektur was replaced by the word
Bauen (building).

The tight relationship between the Circle of Vienna and Bauhaus is also attested by the
multitude of lectures which members of the Circle would give at the school. For some
characteristic examples, we could point out the speech Feigl gave during the inauguration
ceremony of the emblematic Bauhaus building in Dessau, as well as the lectures given at
the school by Neurath, Carnap, Reichenbach and Frank. Carnap, in his lecture titled
Wissenschaft und Leben (Science and Life), addressing the Bauhaus faculty and students notes:
“I work in science and you with visual forms. Both are nothing but two sides of a single
life”. Finally, we should also note Neurath’s famous article in the magazine Der Aufbau

32
titled Das Neue Bauhaus in Dessau (The new Βauhaus in Dessau), where he references the
attempts at improving quality of life through science and technology. P. Galison (1996,
p.38) wrote characteristically, regarding the way that the Circle of Vienna members
perceived the production of Bauhaus, that “where the Bauhaus architect saw in the lamps and the
chairs that he designed a pure function, [the Circle of Vienna members] saw an ideologically charged
aesthetic”. Moreover, the close relationship between Bauhaus and this particular philosophy
became evident later, after 1945, when the new Bauhaus in Chicago set Logical Positivism as
its education program’s basic tool (Galison, 1990, p. 711).

The demand for an improvement of living conditions through a process of

rationalization and scientification of their endeavors was therefore common in both
ventures. The scientification of architecture and urban planning practice, that Bauhaus
intensively attempted, meant for its initiators the activation of all sciences that could
contribute to the enriching of design and the development of a cross-scientific
methodology that would aim towards the study of a truly social architecture. These
scientific connections would lead to a new empirical-technocratic language that would be
open and not based on the authority of a single person but through pluralism and
versatility would exclude absolute and hierarchical schemes.

Bauhaus’ insistence on the importance of new technology, scientific logic and the
rejection of all manner of decorative logic did not solely concern the development of an
architectural or wider design style but mostly expressed the desire to free architecture
from elements that it believed offered absolutely nothing to the community and the
betterment of human life (Potochnik & Y. Audrey, 2006, p. 469-488).

It is worth noting that, in contrast to Bauhaus’ general direction of thought on the matters
of science and technology that we described above, there were, until 1923 at least, serious
conflicts within the movement regarding this very matter. These conflicts are extremely
interesting from a study perspective because they make apparent the various different
views regarding science and technology in interwar Germany.

One of the foremost conflicts within the movement was that between Gropius and Itten.
Johannes Itten heavily criticized the dominant perception of Bauhaus regarding
technology, scientific method and pass production. Itten’s mystical, spiritual, pure art was

33
seen by Gropious as outdated by the reality of social democracy, of industrial
development and of modern art. For him, what was necessary was not the self-realization
of the artist through his work, but the production of an object with an emphasis on its
usability. He wrote regarding this matter:“Bauhaus would become a refuge for eccentrics, if it lost
touch with labor and the working methods of the outside world.” Oskar Schlemmer describes this
particular conflict thus: “These two alternative possibilities appear to me typical of the current trends
in Germany […] On one hand, eastern culture and the return to nature [Itten] and on the other the
American spirit, progress, the wonders of technology and inventions, the environment of the cities.
[Gropius]” (as cited in Forgacs, 1995, p.87).

However beyond Itten’s and his followers’ case, the Bauhaus movement was, in some
cases, wary of new technology and science. For example, when Gropius, started
reorienting the school towards industrial design, he faced strong opposition from within.
“I wholly reject with the utmost certainty the motto ‘Art and Technology – A New unity’, wrote the
school’s professor Lyonel Feininger in a letter written in August of 1923, adding:
“however, this misconception of art is a symptom of our times. And the demand of connecting it to
technology is absurd in all aspects.” An antagonism toward science cum technology was even
more explicit in the manifesto which Schlemmer drafted for the publicity pamphlet of
the first Bauhaus exhibition in the summer of 1923: “Reason and science, man's greatest powers,
are the regents, and the engineer is the sedate executor of unlimited possibilities. Mathematics, structure,
and mechanization are the elements, and power and money are the dictators of these modern phenomena
of steel, concrete, glass, and electricity […] calculation seizes the transcendant world: art becomes a
logarithm”.(as cited in Forman, 1971, p.23)

Even Gropius (1965, pp. 52, 89) himself, moreover, was thoroughly ambivalent on this
question. “My primary aim” in planning the curriculum of the Bauhaus was “training the
individual's natural capacities to grasp life as a whole, a single cosmic entity […] Our guiding principle
was that artistic design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the
stuff of life. Reason and passion should cooperate here. It is true that a work of art remains a technical
product, yet it has an intellectual purpose to fulfill, something which only passion and imagination can
accomplish”. These quotes by Gropius are of particular importance, because in conjunction
with the positions of professors such as Itten, Feininger and Schlemmer, they make
apparent the particular views regarding science and technology that were dominant in the
Weimar Republic. Therefore, the observation that even the initiator of a movement like

34
Bauhaus has clear references to a holistic view of things that refers to the Philosophy of Life
(for example, the phrase “life as a whole, a unique cosmic unity”, is characteristic of this) while
his vision is closely connected, as we have seen, to new technologies and the scientific
method, is quite striking. We could therefore claim that the neoromantic ideas of the
period exist even in movements that initially appear to be keeping their distance from
them.

Gropius’ words could be read concurrently with the views of other architects that were
on the immediate periphery of Bauhaus and the modernist movement in architecture,
such as Erich Mendelshon. Even though Mendelshon’s primary sources of inspiration
were science and technology, he often attempted to give then an idealistic content that
referenced the neoromantic ideas that dominated interwar Germany: “Between these two
poles, the rational and irrational, my nature, my life and my work all move”. Of course, he wrote
his wife, “the foremost element is function, but function without sensory impurities remains just a
construction. More than ever I support my program for reconciliation in which beauty and usability
become one” (as cited in Gay, 2010, p. 85). Mendelshon’s balancing act between the rational
and the irrational, between science and mysticism, between technology and idealism, was
not, as we have seen, something unprecedented for interwar Germany. The above are
crystallized in one of Mendelshon’s most famous works, symbolically titled Einstein Tower
and built in 1920 as an observatory and astrophysics laboratory. In his own words, he
designed it, being driven by “something unknown, letting it leap out of the “mystical content of
Einstein’s universe” When Α. Einstein visited the building, he used a single word to
characterize it: “organic” (Gay, 2010, p. 85).

35
 4. The contribution of scientists to the particular neoromantic
ideological context of the Weimar Republic

4.1. The formation of a new circumstance

In the fall of 1920, mathematician Artur Schoenflies made the following statement
during his inaugural Rector speech in Frankfurt: “In increasing measure in recent years there has
developed a conscious hostility to the natural-scientific mode of thought […] The fact is that the new mode
of thought with force and bluster has fought its way through to success in all fields -in science and art,
literature and politics, in writing and speaking”(as cited in Forman, 1971, p.12).

Along the same axis, renowned physicist Max Planck states that: “It is astonishing how many
people, particularly from educated circles […] fall under the sway of these new religions, iridescing with
every hue from the most confused mysticism on out to the crassest superstition” (as cited in Forman,
1971, p.13).

In turn, Arnold Sommerfeld, also a physicist, on an article for a widespread periodical

emphasizes that:

“The belief in a rational world order was shaken by the way the war ended and the peace dictated;
consequently one seeks salvation in an irrational world order. We are thus evidently confronted once again
with a wave of irrationality and romanticism like that which a hundred years ago spread over Europe as
a reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century and its tendency to make the solution of the
riddle of the universe a little too easy” (1968, p. 582).

The adaptation, however, of physical laws to the predominant ideological context was by
then apparent even in their public statements. In November 1925 Wilhelm Wien
described the great scientific discoveries of the early modern period, especially Newton's
derivation of the motion of the planets from the laws of mechanics, as “the first convincing
demonstration of the causality of natural processes which revealed to man for the first time the possibility
of comprehending nature by the logical force of his intellect”. But he then immediately conceded
that this program, which the natural scientist finds so grand, has its limitations, and he
proceeded to quote Schiller: “With out feeling even for its creator's honor/ Like the dead stroke of
the pendulum clock/ Nature devoid of God follows knavishly the law of gravity”. The attempt at
mingling scientific rhetoric with romantic poetry and the classical literary expressions of
German idealism becomes even more apparent in the Hans Rosenberg’s academic

36
address on January 18th, 1930: “Your subject is, to be sure, the most sublime in space/ But, friend,
the sublime does not reside in space, I hear Schiller-Goethe call out to us” (as cited in Forman, 1971,
p.10).

4.2. The creation of new scientific institutions

The various scientific communities however did not remain passive against the new
ideological currents but by adjusting their strategy, their ideas and their institutions, they
managed to make the scientific discourse once again dominant. A central role in this
process was played by the scientific company Kaiser-Wilhem, which included among its
ranks personalities such as W. Bothe, Α. Einstein, F. Haber, O. Hahn and W.
Heisenberg. The company was funded through domestic as well as international
resources such as the German industry and government but also through the American
Rockefeller institute. Kaiser-Wilhem actively participated in research relating to the subjects
of military rearmament industrial production. Central role had the science union
Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science) too, which
is funded in 1920 on the initiative of F. Haber and M. Planck in conjunction with two of
the foremost personalities of the politics of the era, Ε. von Harnack and the minister of
culture F. Schmidt-Ott. Its basic goal was advocating German science and finding
sponsors in the industry and the government. From 1920 onwards, German
mathematicians formed a union for the advocacy of their interests, the Reich Mathematical
Union, a task of which was safeguarding the subject of mathematics in schools. Also of
note is the nationalist science movement of Deutsche Physik which was spearheaded by
two prominent physicists, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark (the latter, during the Nazi
regime, held the title of Führer of Physics for himself). The main goal of the movement was
the establishment of a “pure, Aryan German physics”. In order to achieve this goal they
attempted to translate the entire international scientific terminology into German (i.e. X-
rays into Röntgen rays), to withdraw all Hebrew scientists from strategic posts at various
institutes, universities and academies and to combat to the end any physical theory that
originated from Jews, labeling it as Jewish Physics, asking for its reinterpretation (the
movements tenacity involved even Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity).

37
4.3. The close relationship of science with technology, industry and rearmament
Thus the fortification of the role of the scientific community was a constant challenge of
the era, having already started since the establishment of the Weimar Republic. One of
the foremost arguments of the scientists, in their attempt to establish their science as a
basic and necessary pillar for social progress in Germany, was the presentation of the
tight-knit relationship between science and technology and therefore between the
industry and rearmament.

The mathematician Felix Klein, for example, observed in June 1918 before an audience
including leaders of German industry and the Prussian government, “the more our thoughts
are dominated by the question what, after peace is successfully won, ought then to come”. Klein's
demands ranged from a mathematical institute for himself and his university, through a
general reorientation of academic research in the exact sciences to achieve harmony with
the requirements of industry and the military, to a corresponding reorientation of
German education at all levels. And at least the first of these demands seemed assured as
the Prussian Minister of Education, Friedrich Schmidt, came forward to announce a
grant of 300,000 Marks (Forman, 1971, p.9).

Wilhelm Wien, reviewing as rector of the University of Würzburg the development of

the German universities in the preceding century, had given only one measure of
achievement for the fields of physics and chemistry, which encapsulated in the phrase
“universities have created the solid foundations upon which the pillars of our industry are erected” (as
cited in Forman, 1971, p.48). Sometime later, in May of 1918, Wien gives a lecture titled
Physics and Technology, whose basic, endlessly exemplified theme was the “support and
stimulation” which these two fields have received from one another and should continue
to receive in the future. Moreover, in the years that followed, Wien played a major part in
the formation and operation of the Helmholtz-Gesellschaft scientific union, through which,
for the first time, a significant financial assistance was funneled by the German industry
to the physics institutes of German universities.

Furthermore, nobelist physicist Johannes Stark, who was closely related to the Nazi
movement, in his book Nationalsozialismus und Wissenschaft argued that the scientist’s
priority should be the service of the nation. Therefore, a research field was considered
important insofar as it could assist the German arms production and industry.

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4.4. The “dual perspective”
Also of particular interest, however, is the scientists’ attempts at reconciling the demand
for technological progress with the dominant characteristics of the neoromantic context,
of the Philosophy of Life and the idealist rhetoric of intellectuals of the era, such as Oswald
Spengler and E. Jünger. Let us examine once more a characteristic example of this dual
perspective in Wilhelm Wien’s lecture at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, on February
of 1920, titled The significance of physical research. This issue, according to Wien, can be
judged from two very different points of view. The first sees physical research as aiming
at “human domination over the recalcitrant forces of nature”. A basic extension of this perspective
was the need for technological development. The second perspective, on the other hand,
proposed a research that was “free of all striving toward a goal: Physical research is, in truth,
nothing but the expression of the pure human instinct for inquiry· it arises solely from an inner need of
the human spirit” (as cited in Forman, 1971, p.44). To this line of two different
perspectives on physical research, Wien held fast in all further academic addresses.

However, Wein’s dual perspective is also shared by the majority of renowned scientists
of the era. Another important example is that of applied physics professor Friedrich
Krüger, dean at the University of Greifswald. In his address to the university’s students,
he mentions that “the common driving force of all the research in the university is the innate human
urge for ever new knowledge”. At the same time though, by referencing the artificial fission of
the atom, he emphasizes the application of scientific knowledge as the key towards
solving the imperative energy problem. More specifically, he argues that: “extracting the
energy of the atom as one of the greatest technical problems worthy of the most strenuous efforts […]
consequently we see at present a mighty contest in the laboratories of the civilized nations […] to find the
methods for extracting this energy” (as cited in Forman, 1971, p.45).

Along the same axis, Max Dehn, a professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics, in his
address to the official assembly of his University in Frankfurt, in January of 1928 states:
“Many of us to be somewhat skeptical in more general questions as well. The fundamental conviction of
every philosopher that the world can be comprehended consistently by the human reason is, for the
mathematician, no longer certain […] Out of this skepsis there develops a certain resignation, a kind of
mistrust for the power of the human mind in general”. However, being faithful to the concept of
the dual perspective detailed above, he continues: “But contemporary mathematics is by no means
dead […] For through mathematics the constructive power of the human being first unfolded, and thus
brought forth the age of technology” (as cited in Forman, 1971, pp. 54-55).

39
We therefore note that the role of science in the social process, as described by the
scientists themselves, is an oxymoron. It is a description that crystallized the
contradictory pattern of the dominant neoromantic context. On one hand, science is
called to perform its functionary role through its technological applications in a society
that is both undergoing industrialization and also preparing for war. Both mathematical
and physical research are therefore presented as the foundations of a technology that is
defending and expanding the German nation. Concurrently however, science swears
allegiance to the German soul, to Kultur and the Philosophy of Life, which proposes that the
value of science lies in –and also derives from – the fact that it is an expression of a non
analyzable and irreducible human impulse.

4.5. Pascual Jordan: military technology and neoromanticism

If there is someone who encapsulates, through his discourse and his work, the
integration of modern technology within the particular neoromantic cultural system, then
that individual is non other than Pascual Jordan, one of the foremost physicists of the
period, who co-wrote with Heisenberg and Born the Work of Three (Drei-manner Arbeit),
which standardized Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics in 1925-6.

Throughout the 1930s Jordan sought in popular articles and books to show that this
transformation of the western tradition to german Kultur should be understood as the
necessary result of twentieth-century physics and philosophy, especially quantum
mechanics. Quantum mechanics would point the way toward an “organic conception”, a
rigorous conceptual foundation for previously fuzzy ideas like “finality” and “wholeness”. It
would ground in physics itself, in its strictest mathematical form, a holistic, ideological
viewpoint on all aspects of nature (Wise, 1994, pp. 227, 229).

Physicists, according to Jordan, exhibit two prominent characteristics: love of beauty and
will to power. For them, the beauty of things is captured in their theoretical
representations, which resemble the artistic expressions of architecture and music; while
their will to power is “one of the most sublime, most refined forms of the will to power, and yet filled
with an almost brutal vitality”. This juxtaposition of beauty with brutality was of course
common in romantic ideology. In such characteristics of physicists Jordan saw “a deep
affinity with the spirit and desire of our epoch”, which ever more clearly took the imprint of “the

40
resolute will to power”. Politically, the significance of the physicists' will to power lay in
weapons technology. (Wise, 1994, p. 234)

In 1935 Jordan published a little propaganda piece designed to legitimate the theoretical
physics of the twentieth century by identifying it with National Socialist ideology in the
'new epoch'. His cleverly titled Physikalisches Denken in der neuen Zeit (The Physics Thought in the
Modern Period) appeared under the imprint of the Hanseatiscbe Verlagsanstalt in Hamburg,
which specialized in the publication filled with Nazi’s vision (Wise, 1994, p. 224).

Jordan’s view on modern physics ties harmonically with view of German intellectuals
such as Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger who often praise the triptych of technology,
war and dominanation. According to Jordan the technical application to airplanes, radio
technology and weapons of all kinds provided “the strongest and sharpest means of exercising
power for the mighty battles of our century”. Moreover, the recent upheaval in theoretical
physics and its explosive tempo of development presented “a mirror image of the
revolutionary transformation of the world” (as cited in Wise, 1994, p. 224).

Under “revolutionary” Jordan understood - to judge from frequency of usage – “radical”,

“brutal” and the “liquidation” of enemies. Modern physics contributed not simply an
analogue to the new world order but weapons for eliminating enemies, both material and
intellectual. Intellectual enemy number one was the Enlightenment, with what Jordan
saw as its mechanist-materialist reduction of the physical world, its elimination of life as a
special category for organisms, its anti-religious stance, and of course the individualist
social-political doctrines that it projected as natural law. Revolutionary quantum
mechanics, coupled with revolutionary positivism, attacked this set of dogmas at the base
of their legitimation, the mechanist- materialist physics of Newton-Laplace and the
supposed capacity of scientific method to reveal the objective truth of nature itself.
Emphasizing that not only cultural critics like Oswald Spengler, but physicists and
positivist philosophers themselves had vitiated the idea of absolute objectivity, even in
mathematics, Jordan warned against overestimating cultural relativity (Wise, 1994, p.
225). According to him, we should define the boundaries of objectivity but we should at
the same time refrain from completely negating it. Jordan, in his attempt at defining a
minimum criterion for these boundaries suitable for the period, formulates a phrase that,
we could argue, summarizes a few major characteristics of the era’s view of science: “The
differences of German and French mathematics are not more essential than the differences of German and
French machine guns” (as cited in Wise, 1994, p. 226).

41
Along the same train of thought, in his letter to Heisenberg, he underlines that:

“Not the intellectual-theoretical merits of our science, therefore, are to be propagated with some
expectation of positive appreciation, but the practical consequences, above all with respect to war technology
[…] And the fact that today only a nation which also marches at the head of nuclear physics can be in a
position in the long run to make use of the armament possibilities available to it in a manner equivalent
to that of the scientifically 'higher-armed' states may be the single decisive argument if one wants to obtain
attentive treatment and a positive evaluation of physics” (as cited in Wise, 1994, p. 251).

Jordan becomes even more specific with regards to his beliefs in his work Die Physik und
das Geheimnis des organischen Lebens (Physics and the Mystery of organic Life) which is written, on
account of him being a volunteer at the Wehrmacht, in an unnamed air force bace
adding the aura of real machine guns to the setting: “Democratic liberalism was dead, along
with its deceptive insistence that the true value of science lay in the world of ideas, not material technology.
We are not willing to see any abuse in the coupling of science to military might after military might has
proven its compelling aufbauende (constructive) force in the creation of a new Europe” (as cited in
Wise, 1994, p. 250).

4.6. Τhe Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and the eugenics centers

At this point, it is devoting a separate section to the physician Μagnus Hirschfeld and the
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the first institute in the world oriented towards the science of
sexology. The institute is founded in 1919 and ceases operations in 1933 after a Nazi
intervention during which the institute, as well as its library and records, are set on fire.
The case of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft displays not only the great effect that scientific
discourse had on life during the Weimar Republic, but also the attempt at using this
discourse not only for the creation of weapons of mass destruction but also for the
advocacy of minorities. By taking advantage of the example of the institute we may note
that, even though the science of the era was characterized by certain general guidelines,
such as the holistic view of the world, it was often used towards other directions and
with different motives, within the context of the political multiperspectivity in interwar
Germany. More specifically, Hirschfeld believed that homosexuality and gay rights could
be fortified through science as per the institute’s main motto, “justice through science”.
In order to better understand the central part that the institute played in Weimar, we

42
should note that it was visited yearly by over 20,000 people. The institute also had a great
effect in the movements that appeared during the period regarding female emancipation,
contraception, sexual liberation and gay rights. Finally, it is worth pointing out that the
first sex change in the world take places at the institute in 1930, while the term
transsexualismus was concocted by Hirschfeld himself, who was often called the «Einstein
of Sex».

On the other hand, we should also note that, simultaneously, the dynamic of the
scientific rhetoric was also used by eugenics geneticists who paved the way for the Nazi
atrocities. A characteristic example is the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (German
Company of Racial Hygenics), where, under the guidance of renowned at the time geneticists
Alfred Ploetz, a candidate for the Nobel prize, Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer, it sought
racial hygiene policies for Volksgemeinschaft and the prevention of the biological and
psychological tumbling of the German nation. (Porter, 1999, p. 648) The foundation of
the KWI-A (Anthropology, Heredity and Eugenics Institute Emperor Wilhelm) in 1927, and of the
German Psychological Hygiene Company in 1928 both cemented these first steps. Indeed, the
ΚWI-A was a part of the Kaizer-Wilhem Society, the foremost scientific company of the era,
whose main financier was the Rockefeller Foundation.

4.7. Crisis and revolution: expecting the birth of new science

The crisis in science6 developed concurrently with several important political and
ideological crises which supply but are also by supplied by it. Therefore, the science crisis
was not only the result of an external imperative of the particular neoromantic context,
but that of an interactive scheme where the “internal core” of science was influenced by
its environment while at the same time it influenced said environment to a great degree.
Thus, we should always keep in mind the duality of this relationship, by wondering not
only if the crises in science were affected by wider social crises but also to what degree
did the scientific crises affect the political and ideological crises that took place during the
Weimar Republic.

6 As P. Forman (1971) notes, from the first years of the Weimar Republic, we have a wealth of examples
regarding an attitude towards considering the state of physics as critical. Taking only those cases in which
the crisis is proclaimed in the title itself, there is Richard von Mises's lecture On the Present Crisis in Mechanics
of September 1921, Johannes Stark's pamphlet on The Present Crisis in German Physics of June 1922, Joseph
Petzoldt's remarks Concerning the Crisis of the Causality Concept of July 1922, and Albert Einstein's popular
article On the Present Crisis in Theoretical Physics, dated August 1922.

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In his text, Paul Forman, attempting to maintain this delicate balance between the internal
engine of science and the external demand of the environment, argues:

“It is undoubtedly true that the internal developments in atomic physics were important in precipitating
this widespread sense of crisis among German speaking Central European physicists, and that these
internal developments were necessary to give the crisis a sharp focus, nonetheless it now seems evident to me
that these internal developments were not in themselves sufficient conditions. The possibility of the crisis of
the old quantum theory was, I think, dependent upon the physicists' own craving for crises, arising from
participation in, and adaptation to, the Weimar intellectual milieu […] It is worthwhile to emphasize
how ready the mathematicians and physicists were to serve themselves with the crisis rhetoric when
addressing a general academic audience. For as the notion of crisis became a cliché, it also became an
entree, a ploy to achieve instant relevance, to establish rapport between the scientist and his auditors. By
applying the word crisis to his own discipline the scientist has not only made contact with his audience,
but has ipso facto shown that his field -and he himself- is "with it," sharing the spirit of the times. […]
In fact, in this period, both mathematics and physics -but above all German mathematicians and
physicists- went through deep and far-reaching crises, whose very definitions showed the most intimate
relation with the principal currents of the Weimar intellectual milieu” (1971, pp. 58-59).

Let’s take a look, however, at the scientists’ view regarding the science crisis through the
eyes of Hugo Dingler, a prolific and well-read scientists and philosopher of science:
“Science is at a state where nothing is any longer really certain, everything is possible and at the same
time every possible position is also maintained, where there is no longer any basis and any guidelines,
nothing, nothing which may be considered certain -in a word, chaos, collapse. In that state we stand; right
in the middle of it” (as cited in Forman, 1971, p.29).

The collapse of conviction towards the ‘old’ science was often cited in public speeches
and text by mathematicians and physicists of the period, both in order to renounce the
burdens of determinism, rationalism and positivist thought, as well as emphasizing the
substantial changes that the new revolution promised for their fields. Let us examine
how this rhetoric dominates the inaugural lecture of mathematician Gustav Doetsch,
given at the seat of applied mathematics at the University of Halle on January 27th, 1922:
“Such rationalistic dogmatism is the characteristic expression of that intellectual epoch which is at this
moment perishing. It is the spirit, one could say, of the age of natural science, which, essentially, coincided

44
with the 19th century, and which in our days is sinking with violent convulsions into its grave in order to
make room for a new spirit, a new life-feeling […] this epoch, at whose beginning we unquestionably find
ourselves today, is fed up with this rationalistic attitude” (as cited in Forman, 1971, p.53).

However, scientific education and literacy were also considered parts of the
aforementioned crisis; they should, therefore, undergo fundamental changes. As the
philosopher Ernst Troelts argues: “The crisis of causal monism, of positivistic methods in science,
the crisis of learning must be followed by a revolution which liquidates this barren and intolerable
mechanism in favor of a New Science of values, intuition, feeling, of the living, the organic” (as cited in
Forman, 1971, p. 28)

The fact that the revolution in science and its method was closely related to mysticism
becomes apparent in Richard von Mises speech, given as a professor of Mechanics at the
Dresden Polytechnic on February 1920: “It is not a question of new facts of any sort, nor of new
theoretical propositions, nor even of new methods of research, but, if I may say it -taking this word in its
philosophical sense- of new intuitions of the world. Atomic physics has taken up again the question of the
old alchemists; numerical harmonies, even numerical mysteries play a role, reminding one no less of the
ideas of the pythagoreans than of some of the cabbalists”. Indeed, towards the end of his speech,
accepting Spengler's doctrine that cultures, as living organisms, are fundamentally
incommensurable, von Mises declared: “it is entirely out of the question that the culture which
succeeds ours will continue the exact sciences in our sense” (as cited in Forman, 1971, p. 49).

4.8. The collapse of causality

In this way, we gradually arrive at the core of the crisis and the revolution in science that
could be summarized under the title “the collapse of causality”. But what was the
conceptualization – the content – of the term causality within the particular context of the
period? In broad terms, we could claim that the concept of causality was interpreted
through a spectrum that ranged from its designation as the assumption of the
subjugation of natural processes into laws all the way up to strict determinism. As P.
Forman aptly notes one might object that there is room for several distinct positions
between these two conceptions. The possibility of satisfying a (weaker) postulate of
lawfulness without demanding that every detail of every natural process be
unambiguously determined did not entirely escape physicists in the years before the

45
discovery of a quantum mechanics having this general character. Nonetheless, the
essential point is that during Weimar Republic, every such suggestion of a relaxation of
complete determinism was advanced as, and regarded as, a failure or abandonment of
causality (1971, p.68).

At this point however, let us examine some of the more characteristic attacks that the
concept of causality suffered during this particular period. It was only 1919 when the
physicist Franz Exner claimed that, more or less, not a single one of the laws of nature is
precise. He also claims that causality does not obtain, that if examined sufficiently closely
during sufficiently short time intervals the motion of a falling body would be found to be
perfectly random, directed up as often as down. The apparent lawfulness which we
discover at the macroscopic level is then explained by Exner's second thesis that all
macroscopic natural laws are essentially statistical in character, the regularity arising in
some unspecified way out of the collaboration of the random motions. In this way he
adopts a radically nominalist-empiricist stance:

“the absolutely rigorous laws are a creation of man and not a piece of nature. Nor have we the right to
postulate even the existence of an absolute causality, least of all on the grounds that it is necessary in order
for us to understand nature. Nature does not inquire at all whether men understand her or not, and we
are not to construct a nature adequate to our understanding, but our task is simply to come to terms with
that which is given as best we can” (as cited in Forman, 1971, p. 75).

Weyl, in turn, in his first manifesto against causality titled The Relation of the Causal to the
Statistical Approach in Physics, published on August of 1920, wonders, “Are statistics merely a
shortcut to certain consequences of causal laws, or do they imply that no rigorous causal interconnection
governs the world and that, instead, chance is to be recognized alongside law as an independent power
restricting the validity of the law?” (as cited in Forman, 1971, p. 77)

Following 1921 the phenomenon of the rejection of causality by a large percentage of

scientists of the period turns into an avalanche. These scientists, both in theoretical as
well as popularizing texts and public addresses, declare that they are ready to rid the
interpretation of the world from the shackles of causality through the revolutionary
process taking place in the science of the period. The catalyst used by the scientists for
this process is the concept of the statistical phenomenon.

Richard von Mises, for example, claims that: “Every electrical, every thermal, every optical process
is a statistical phenomenon and as such fundamentally incompatible with the concept of causality. So long

46
as we base ourselves upon that concept, the quantum theory and everything connected therewith must
appear as an insoluble riddle. Whoever traces back the history of physical cognition cannot help but
recognize that here an essential alteration of our mode of thinking, of the entire scheme of physical
explanation, is inexorably demanded and is gradually being prepared” (as cited in Forman, 1971, p.
81).

Even more determined to bury once and for all the concept of causality was the physicist
and chemist Walther Nernst, citing the dominant holistic philosophical ideas of the era.
For him, science is now called to play the part the liberator of both philosophy as well as
human consciousness and thought:

“But, now, can philosophy and natural science really assert with certainty that, for example, every human
action is the unambiguous result of the circumstances prevailing at the moment? If absolutely rigorous
laws of nature controlled the course of all events, one would in fact scarcely be able to escape from this
conclusion. But philosophy has adopted this position only because it has been tyrannized by the exact
natural sciences, whose conception of the principle of causality as an absolutely rigorous law of nature
laced the mind [Geist] in Spanish boots, and it is therefore at present the obligation of research in natural
science to loosen these fetters sufficiently so that the free stride of philosophical thought is no longer
hindered” (as cited in Forman, 1971, pp. 84-85).

But even Erwin Schrödinger himself, a pillar of German theoretical physics, with an
impressively thorough address, attacks the concept of causality:

“The principle of causality is the postulate that every natural process or event is absolutely and
quantitatively determined at least through the totality of circumstances or physical conditions that
accompany its appearance. But in the past four or five decades physical research has demonstrated
perfectly clearly that for at least the overwhelming majority of phenomena, the regularity and invariability
of whose courses has led to the postulation of general causality, the common root of the observed rigorous
lawfulness is –chance” (1961, p.135).

Despite the strong opposition of a small number of scientists such as Planck, Petzoldt
and Einstein, already since 1923 the road has been paved for physics without the
necessity for a principle of causality. The atomic physicists were becoming convinced of
the fundamental inadequacy of the extant quantum theory of the atom -which supposed
classical mechanics to be valid for motions within the stationary states- and were
beginning to doubt the reality of the visualizable atomic models to which that theory had
been applied. As P. Forman argues, the antimechanical and anticausal movements coalesced,

47
reinforcing one another. The confluence and synergy of these movements appears all the
more intelligible if one recalls the persistent tendency to confuse and confound the
validity of the laws of classical mechanics and the validity of the law of causality
(1971,p.98)

Through the introduction of Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics during the fall of 1925, and
Schrödinger’s wave mechanics in spring of 1926, physicists quickly realized that the belief
that causality is not valid on an atomic scale gradually became rooted deeper and deeper.
Thus, the largely abstract condemnation of causality that took place in scientific discourse
until the mid-‘20s, quickly moved to the core of the scientific endeavor and became
crystallized in new physical laws and mathematical expressions. Of catalytic importance
in this process was the statistical interpretation of the waveform by Max Born, who in
this way cemented the rejection of causality on the foundations of quantum mechanics.
“The true state of affairs”, Heisenberg declared in the spring of 1927, “can be characterized thus:
Because all experiments are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, […] quantum mechanics
establishes definitively the fact that the law of causality is not valid” (as cited in Forman, 1971,
p.105).

4.9. Attempts at popularizing science

In this way, the new science would finally manage to not only disconnect itself from the
characteristics of Western science but also align itself with the dominant ideological
context of the Weimar Republic, as well as break new ground in the neoromantic
thought of the period. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the overwhelming majority of
scientists not only embraced the new developments with open arms but also attempted
to communicate them to a wider audience through popular articles and speeches.

Heisenberg published a popular article where he presented the conclusions of matrix

mechanics even before his technical article had been published. In another article of his,
a few months later, he states that: “it appears that, through the new development in atomic physics,
that the nullity or, in any case the lack of objectivity of the principle of causality, is finally ascertained”(as
cited in Forman, 1971, p.83). On his part, Max Born, in an article for the popular Berlin
newspaper Vossiche Zeitung in spring of 1928, mentions the old physics that was based on
the concept of causality by arguing that: “Such a conception of nature is deterministic and
mechanistic. There is no place in it for freedom of any sort, whether of the will or of a higher power. But

48
happily physics has now discovered new laws which give it an entirely different character” (as cited in
Forman, 1971, p.107). The mathematician Emanuel Lasker is even more blunt and
devastating in his description of the new relativistic reality in physics:

“The old axiom from nothing comes nothing is refuted by the new discovery that the principle of causality
is not valid. The new result runs: in physics and chemistry the principle of causality holds only probably.
The old idea of the necessity, unambiguity, and regularity of the laws of nature is ridiculous. The pattern
for a law of nature is the lottery. Until further notice. It depends upon what we decide. We believe in
principle in the power of experiment. Our council decides the meaning of the experiment -by majority
decision” (as cited in Forman, 1971, p.107).

As P. Forman (1971, p.112) comments, the manifestoes by physicists against causality

were issued not in spite of, but much rather because of, the general belief that an
abandonment of determinism would signify a renunciation of the comprehensibility of
nature. Far from engaging in any critical analysis of the concept of causality, directed
toward the relaxation of determinism without renouncing a priori the comprehensibility
of nature, these physicists actually reveled in that consequence, stressed the failure of
analytical rationality, implicitly repudiated the cognitive enterprise in which physics had
theretofore been engaged.

4.10. The pursuit for the establishment of a new social role for science
Science, thus, may have lost the privilege of the main interpreter of the essence and truth of
the world, but it never stopped being an important component of the social
transformation that took place in interwar Germany. A pillar upon the central role that
the new science would play, as we saw above, was that of its technological applications in
the industry and the rearmament race. However, this aspect was not enough to
completely legitimize science within the consciences of the period. The scientific
endeavor was still lacking certain new characteristics in order to fit better with the
dominant neoromantic context.

Let us examine some of these characteristics as they are described by Georg Hamel,
president of the Reich’s Mathematical Union, in his address as dean on the 30th of June,
1928, at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin: “Mathematics customarily appears as the rational
science per se; to the layman the mathematician is a calculator. In opposition thereto I maintain the thesis
that mathematics is an art, and that, in the last analysis, it is conditioned not logically but

49
transcendentally […] The mathematician is a poet. Like the dramatist he creates a form […] The
problem of the irrational numbers leads mathematics into metaphysics” (as cited in Forman, 1971,
p.50).

The mathematician Emanuel Lasker attempts to establish a new social status for the
scientist, that of the physicist-philosopher, a status which is consistent with the
ideological premises of the period and which will give him a central, universal role to play
in the new developments:

“The physicist who is content to measure remains an artisan. He becomes an artist only when he is also a
philosopher. The philosopher in turn is negligible if he isn't stamped as an experimental physicist. The
physicist-philosopher alone is permitted to interpret and evaluate experiments […] The true instrument of
the physicist-philosopher is illumination […] We are prepared to debate with anyone who is both
physicist and philosopher and accepts our methods. To debate with other people would be a waste of time,
and we have quite enough work to do turning science into new pathways. Just at this moment we have our
hands full replacing the principle of causality by another which we will postulate, and which we will then
impose upon the philosophers” (as cited in Forman, 1971, p.107).

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 5. The engineers’ branch as a modulator of the ideological context of
the Weimar Republic

Interwar Germany, in a very short time span, undergoes a massive industrialization and
attempts to find a balance between electrical systems, massive factories and orchestrated
production lines. Mass production, new materials and machines were adopted as the
authentic symbols of the new machine-dominated period, while their propagation and
application was deemed as a constitutive part of progress and social change. The
discipline of the new principles of order, normality, sameness and of the system, lead to
the vision of coordinated modernity.

5.1. The roots behind the ideas of German engineers

During the latter part of the 19th century as well as the beginning of the 20th, new
industries (chemical, optical, electrical, refrigeration) were developed, the so called
science based industries, those that formed the essence of the phenomenon called the
Second Industrial Revolution. Germany, at the turn of the century, was characterized by its
leading position not only with regards to scientific development, but also with regards to
the latter’s applications. The industrial laboratory, which marked the close relationship
between modern technology and the natural sciences, was considered the emblem of the
new industries, being largely a German cause with regards to the chemical and electrical
industry.

On one hand the German engineers were characterized by their faith in a higher
impersonal order, the order of Geist, in other words, something beyond technology and
their profession. This belief brought to light the fact that the engineers were deeply
imbued in the values of pre-industrial Germany. On the other hand, however, a basic
characteristic of the engineering community was the constant devotion of the
organization to a technocratic ideal, which anticipated the peaceful coexistence and unity
of interests between state, capital and technical labor, a unity which made class struggle
unnecessary. Engineers introduced themselves as the de facto guarantors and handlers of
this contract.

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Fear at the possibility of foreign, materialistic culture ran through the engineers’
discourse and thought. These reservations, however did not diminish in the least the
allurement and fascination of the tangible technological aspects and especially their
admiration towards Henry Ford and the Ford production line. In this case, it wasn’t only
Ford’s anti-Semitism that induced this selective accord, but also his dedication to the
spirit of practicality and application.

The WWI was a major nodal historical event for the formation of the engineer
community. The mobilization for technological war underlined the co-dependence of
technical knowledge and politics in a modern nation-state. By comprehending, during the
war, the nodal importance of their social role, the engineers intensified, during the post-
war period, their pressures regarding the ineffectiveness of their cooperation with the
state. Despite the fact that the war ended in absolute defeat, the engineers proudly
displayed the war period’s achievements and were encouraged in rejecting the various
anti-technological attitudes of pacifist, humanitarian intellectuals. The cooperation
between the state, corporations, labor and technical knowledge in the years of complete
mobilization created a model which the engineers strived to institute on a permanent basis.

One could easily wonder how it became possible, despite the absolute disaster of the
First World War in which both science and technology played a vital part, that the
engineer community does not appear weakened, but also uses the War as an important
example of its dynamic. In order to answer this question, we should consider the
discussion that ensued regarding the consequences of the War. On one hand the greater
part of the Left, trapped in the myth of neutrality of technology and fascinated with
industrial progress, systematically avoids to critique technology. On the other hand, a
large part of the conservative Right had transformed the War into an object of worship,
into an eternal force that formulates the soul of the nation. For Weimar's right-wing
nationalists, the violence of the battlefields, the efficiency and power of tanks and ships,
and the explosions of grenades were the external expression of inner impulses toward
life. For them, technology was untouchable. J. Goebbels words are characteristic of this:
“The Germans must learn the primary lesson of WWI: Germany was defeated by deficiencies of the
spirit rather than by material deficiencies. We did not lose the war because our cannons failed, but rather
because our spiritual weapons didn't fire” (as cited in Herf, 2003, p195). In this way, technology
after the WWI is surrounded by an exceptionally powerful myth that connects the
protest against Enlightenment, the romantic passion for violence and the worship of
technology. This particular myth was heavily taken advantage of by the engineer
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community. As J. Herf aptly notes, whereas Jünger and the other protagonists of the
conservative revolution had seen the masculine community of the trenches as a prefiguration
of the future, many engineers saw wartime mobilization as a prefiguration of the illiberal,
corporatist visions that attracted them during the Weimar Republic (2003, p.160).

5.2. The “legitimization” of technology in German consciousness

The dominant ideological elements that constituted the identity of the German engineer
were connected in a multitude of ways with the political situation of the period. In
Germany, the legitimization of the technocratic spirit passed through its subjugation to
the Geist of German culture: earth, blood, race and the nation. (Hard, 1998, pp. 36-46).
For this particular legitimization, however, required a number of symbols, keywords and
emotionally charged metaphors in order to bridge the professional conscience of the
engineers and the wider current of German nationalism.

The cultural politics of German engineers drew on three main sources. The first was a
tradition internal to the engineering profession presented in the journals of the national
engineering associations and by professors of engineering at Germany's famous technical
universities. These professors shared with their humanistic counterparts the cultural
rejection of the Enlightenment and were particularly sensitive to the need to make
technology consonant with the idealist culture of the German universities. The second
source was essays and books written by engineers and independent polemicists who
sought to forge links between the conservative revolution and the German anticapitalism
of the engineers. Third, the Nazi party directed propaganda at engineers from the mid-
1920s onward, which was based on presenting their movement as the only force capable
of liberating engineers from the distortions of exchange relations in the name of a
glorious nationalist future unsullied by crass commercialism (Ringer, 1969, pp. 128-130,
213-227).

What the engineers attempted, therefore, was to integrate technology into a national
culture from which the liberal traditions were absent and which cultivated intense
romantic and anti-industrial sentiments. Like the neoromantic intellectuals, the engineers
wanted to prove that technological progress was compatible with the rise of German
nationalism against positivism. The subjugation of technology into the German Kultur would

53
fulfill the engineers’ expectations for a greater political recognition, for prestige and social
status equal to those of other professions for greater assistance by the state, as well as,
during the latter years of Weimar, for employment positions and the termination of
restrictions that had been imposed on technical progress and rearmament.

The German historian K. Ludwig (1974, p.155) attempting to summarize the main
characteristics of the rhetoric used by the engineers during the Weimar Republic in order
to achieve the legitimization of technology in the German consciousness, divided them
into four categories:
1) technology emanated from the deepest impulses of German Kultur and not from
the disenchanted materialism of Western Zivilisation
2) the cultural, political, and economic crises of modern German society were not
due to the machine but to its misuse by private capitalist interests
3) the welfare of the national community could be protected only by a strong state,
which ought to predominate over private economic interests
4) engineers had a central role to play in providing the expertise necessary for
Germany in an age of technological warfare

5.3. The engineers in the printed word

The most important medium of expression for the engineers was the monthly periodical
Technik und Kultur. Its initial name was Zeitung des Verbandes Deutscher Diplom-Ingenieure
(Journal of the Union of Graduate Engineers). It was first published in 1909 and renamed to
Technik und Kultur in 1922. During the period of 1934-1937 the magazine continued to be
published, but it had now been subjugated to the results of the national-socialist
Gleichschaltung, the alignment of political and institutional life with the requirements of the
new regime. Its publication ended in 1937, when the official Nazi publications rendered
it unnecessary.

During the Weimar Republic the magazine was the focal point for those engineers who
attempted to delineate a cultural mission for technology by focusing attention on works
dealing with a philosophy of technology. A typical issue would include an essay on
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Spengler as well as a comment on the cultural contributions
made by a recent technical accomplishment - a new train station, airplane, ship, and so
on. The technical universities that trained the contributors to Technik und Kultur were

54
distinct from the humanistic universities, but the contents of the engineers' essays make
it abundantly clear that they felt compelled to legitimate their professional work in terms
defined by the German Kultur (Herf, 2003, p.157).

What often began as an article in Technik und Kultur ended up becoming an entire book.
The magazine also published excerpts of books on politics, technology and culture, as
well as reviews of current and earlier writing literary output. In this way the magazine
helped in the consolidation of an internal tradition of the engineering branch and its
educational institutions.

One of the most prolific and interesting of all the engineers to write on technology and
culture was Heinrich Hardensett. From 1925, when his first essay appeared in Technik und
Kultur, to 1934, when he contributed an essay to a collection published by the Nazis,
Hardensett produced a truly remarkable series of essays that combined social theory,
right-wing politics, and defense of technology. He expressed reactionary modernist
themes with remarkable clarity and style. On the Relationship of Industrial Technology to the
Visual Arts, his first essay in Technik und Kultur, compared the work of engineers to that
of artists. As he himself pointed out, this work fulfilled the “great longing of our time for
community and form”. The engineer's aesthetic sensibility was manifested in the beautiful
and clear forms of bridges, roads, and factories. Now engineers were beginning to
understand that their labors were not means to something else, but were themselves
filled with cultural value and aesthetic form. Hardensett insisted that pathos existed in
modern functionalism and matter-of-factness (Sachlichkeit), as well as in religion and humanistic
cultivation of the individual. Sachlichkeit did not demand materialism but metaphysical,
religious, and aesthetic virtues. It was the “opposite of specialization” and must be
differentiated from the “positivistic domination of nature” because “only in technology does the
chaos of our artistic striving find an end point” (as cited in Herf, 2003, p.181). One of the things
that made Hardensett's work stand out was his knowledge of German sociology, in
particular Max Weber and Sombart. For example, in a 1926 essay in Technik und Kultur,
Magische Technik (Magical Technology), he argued that technological advance did not lead to
a disenchantment of the world but to a revived understanding of the relation between
reason and magic. Technology, according to Hardensett, had a deep religious impulse
that persisted despite numerous efforts, beginning with Galileo, to eliminate animism and

55
magic from technics. An irreducible unmagical magic remained, evidence of the
inseparability of religion and technology (Herf, 2003, p.182).

In 1934 the Nazis introduced their own cultural and political review, the Deutsche Technik
(German Technology), but the thematic continuity with Technik und Kultur underlined the fact
that this publication was the institutional and intellectual center of reactionary modernist
tradition with the branch of German engineers, especially during the Weimar Republic.
While there was a large number of engineers who remained indifferent to the philosophy
of technology, we could claim that German engineers, unlike their English, French and
American colleagues, spent a lot of time and activity in cultural politics. This particularity
of German engineers may be a result of the fact that while social sciences in France,
England and the US strived for legitimization on the basis laid out by positive sciences,
in Germany the cultural Engineers strained form legitimacy with the language of Kultur.
Militant advocacy of progress through positivism and enlightenment would have been
tantamount to identifying with the materialist menace from England, France, or America.

Another publication however, played a central role in expanding the ideas of engineers
and propagating them to a wider audience. Die Tat, the major journal of rightwing
radicalism of the middle classes in Weimar, was the institutional bridge between the
conservative revolution and the engineers. This particular periodical was the vessel
through which the engineer community managed to decisively affect with its ideas the
particular neoromantic ideological context of the period. The magazine’s editors intended
to face the danger, on the occasion of the reaction towards the uncritical integration of
Amerikanismus7 during the ‘20s, of the Germans, and especially the German youth,
becoming hostile towards the same technological means necessary for rebuilding the
power of the German army. Following the seizure of power by the Nazis, the majority of
Die Tat’s editors, which in turn is renamed into Das XX Jahrhundert (The 20th Century),
leave their doubts regarding Nazism behind, pressuring their engineer colleagues into
incorporating their own constructive efforts into the national revolution.

7
an expression often used in interwar Germany to refer to the negative aspects of American culture

56
5.4. Manfred Schroter and Germany’s particular mission in conjoining technology
and spirit

During the postwar years, numerous defenses of technology appeared, of which

Schroter's Die Kulturmoglichkeit der Technik als Formproblem der produktiven Arbeit (The Cultural
Possibility of Technology as the Form Problem of Productive Labor) was one of the most famous.
Schroter pointed out that from a nationalist perspective, German reconstruction after the
Great War would be impossible if technology were mistakenly identified with the
victorious countries. He insisted that indigenous, German cultural traditions were
conducive to technical advance. Hence anti-Western or anti-American cultural protest
ought not be conflated with hostility to technology (Herf, 2003, p. 164).

The clever twist in Schroter's appeals to the virtues of creative labor lies in his
summoning of the language of inwardness and the German soul in order to stop rather
than encourage what he described as a modern “flight from technology”. He called for a
Vergeistung (infusion with spirit) or Beseelung (infusion with soul) of technology. There was no
contradiction in the idea that the nation of poets and thinkers should also produce great
engineers and technicians, because no other nation blended “idealism and exact
thinking” as thoroughly as did Germany. Schroter was one of the first that set what
became a central theme among the engineers' cultural politicians in the Weimar Republic,
that is, that Germany was the Kulturnation, (the nation of culture). Like Martin Heidegger,
Schroter connected the idea of the Kulturnation to Germany's geographical position
between East and West. Schroter wrote that Germany's relation to technology must be
distinguished from both the “technocratic mechanization” of American liberal democracy and
the “forced technical advance” of the Soviet Union's “purely materialist and collectivist system”,
because in both of those societies, work had been emptied of meaning and cultural
significance. For Schroter, Germany, the country in the middle between East and West,
rejected the materialism of the Americans and Russians. It was the only modern nation
able to create a proper relationship between technology and culture. He interpreted the
Nazi seizure of power in this context. National Socialism could elevate idealism and the
realm of the spirit over that of materialism and recreate the basis for synthesis of “idealism
and exact thinking, of technology and spirit”. The unification of German Geist and
German technology finally would occur, dispensing with the depraved and soulless
materialist age. Germany's special mission among nations was to create an advanced

57
industrial society in which there was still room for “our life will to search uninterruptedly for
redemption” (Herf, 2003, pp. 166-168).

Schroter’s argument can be summarized as follows: a requirement for technological

progress was the unification of German idealistic philosophy with the scientific and
technological research and innovation. The development of capitalism and the
consequent commodity culture threatened the pre-capitalist, non-utilitarian traditions of
German Kultur and philosophy, thus threatening the foundations for further
technological progress. Schroter suggested that societies without a feudal past, such as
the United States, were incapable of merging technology and culture, the way Germany
could. Thus, the anti-liberal traditions of Germany were not a handicap but would assist
technological progress.

5.5. The relationship between engineers and sciences: The case of Friedrich
Dessauer

As we saw on the previous chapter, during the Weimar Republic there was a tight knit
relationship between scientists and technology. In their attempt to legitimize science
through its technological applications, they developed a rhetoric which had an immediate
effect on the one used by the engineers. A characteristic such case was that of the
physicist and philosopher of science, Friedrich Dessauer.

Friedrich Dessauer, a professor at the University of Frankfurt, was one of the foremost
exponents of the attempt at recognizing the various technological and scientific
achievements as a part of German Kultur. From 1907 to 1933 he published over fifteen
essays and books regarding technological progress and its incorporation into German
society. It is also important to note that almost all of those essays were published in
engineering periodicals. He was also instrumental as an intermediary between scientists,
engineers and politics, by being a member of the Christian-Democrat Party and a
member of German congress from 1924 to 1933.

A basic characteristic of Dessauer’s rhetoric is that it blamed the excessive influence of

the economy for Germany's cultural crisis. In 1921, he urged that a National Ministry of
Technology be created whose purpose would be to correct the misuse of technology at
the hands of private commercial interests. The central task of technical thinking, he

58
wrote, was “service to the Volk and to humanity”, rather than the accumulation of profit
envisaged by the “world of finance”. He urged his fellow scientists and engineers to end
their traditional disinterest in politics. A “breakthrough of technical spirit into public opinion”
would bring about a “rebirth of spiritual forces” associated with technical creation as a sphere
of activity outside the cash nexus. Dessauer complained that the public had burdened
technology with the sins of the economy. Certainly the two were related, but their essence
was different. Like Spengler, he distinguished between the entrepreneur, the capitalist,
and the engineer. The first is a heroic creator of new industries. The second only
searches for profit, is uninterested in the common good, and creates large, impersonal,
bureaucratized firms. The engineer suffers as a result of the predominance of the
capitalist over the entrepreneur (Herf, 2003, p. 170).

Technology, in turn, also suffers according to Dessauer. However, according to him,

technology had an essence, a life of its own that demonstrated “the fulfillment of natural laws”.
Building on this idea, he wrote that “an automobile is not a heap of iron and wood, but rather,
like all machines, it is mathematics that has become form and movement” (as cited in Herf, 2003, p.
170). This particular argument is of pivotal importance for the German physicist’s
rhetoric not only because it separates the deeper nature of technology from its bad
application, but also because it legitimizes the very functionality and application of
science.

5.6. Eberhard Zschimmer: the reconciliation of technology with German idealism

Another pivotal aspect of the engineers’ rhetoric was the reconciliation of technology
with German idealism, which seemed to dominate the entire social spectrum of the
period. In order to achieve this reconciliation, however, a new “philosophy of technology” was
necessary. One of the engineers that worked consistently and passionately towards this
direction was Eberhard Zschimmer of the Munich Polytechnic.

Zschimmer, in his work Technik und Idealismus (Technology and Idealism) in 1920, added his
voice to those bemoaning a modern cultural crisis, the roots of which lay in the
historically unprecedented domination of the economy over cultural life - not in
technology. The core of technological activity was invention, and that, he claimed, was
completely unrelated to profit seeking. On the contrary, its roots were philosophical,
namely, the “freedom to create and form”. “Technical creation is unconditionally and completely

59
spiritual creation. Far from threatening the tradition of German idealism, technology confirmed one of its
basic maxims: “Spirit is stronger than matter”. The engineer's task was to create permanent
and lasting forms that would stand in sharp contrast to the ephemeral and changing
forms thrown up by the market. Zschimmer insisted that such a task was a
consummation, rather than a denial, of German idealism (Herf, 2003, p. 178).

We could see Zschimmer’s words in conjunction with the words of a neoromantic

idealist philosopher of the period, Edgard Dacque. It is worth noting that in the
following excerpt from the latter’s book, titled Natur und Erlosung (Nature and Redemption),
that the worldview of a philosopher is consistent with that of an engineer:

“When we stand in awe and perhaps also in terror of a functioning machine what is it we are seeing other
than a true homage to the ideational meaning of iron, that, so to speak, receives life from our spirit and
shows us its inner countenance in symbols. It is art in the highest and noblest sense that we see before us.
We admire the spirit and powerful manliness that inventors and builders have here represented from
within their beings” (as cited in Herf, 2003, p. 176)

5.7. The relationship of the national socialist ideology with the ideas of the
engineers

The formation of a particular national socialist view on technology began long before the
seizure of power by the Nazis. In the years immediately following WWI, Gottfried Feder,
himself an engineer, dominated discussion on the subject in the Nazi party. In his 1923
pamphlet, Der deutsche Staat auf nationaler und sozialer Grundlage (The German State on National
and Social Foundations), Feder insisted that “the Jew” had remained remote from productive
labor and was the bearer of a parasitic spirit. But at the same time he claimed that
“German big industry - Krupp, Mannesmann, Thyssen - and its property were not at all in conflict with
the interest of the totality. The fundamental recognition of private property is deeply anchored in the clear
awareness of the Aryan spiritual structure”. Feder summarized his theoretical contribution to
National Socialism in the formula creative versus parasitic capital. Creative capital was a
source of utility, employment, and technological advance, whereas parasitic capital
drained national resources for the benefit of a smaller number of international financiers.
Feder's conspiratorial outlook served to shift the conflict between capital and labor into a
nationalist idiom. Moreover, the associations in Feder's slogan between beauty and

60
productivity with the German racial character and ugliness and parasitism with the Jews
were standard fare in German anti-Semitism (Herf, 2003, p. 190).

In 1926, Hitler selected Feder as the final arbiter of disputes arising from formulation of
the party's Twenty-five-point program. Feder used this position to publish a series of
pamphlets, the National Socialist Library, which set forth a Nazi theory on economic
organization and technology. In July 1933, Technik und Kultur published a speech by Feder
in which he claimed that National Socialism was compatible with the internal tradition of
the engineers and with their desires to elevate service to the nation above individual
profit. In his view, National Socialism would fulfill the engineers' demands for greater
social recognition and more state intervention to unleash technology. In practical terms,
this meant job programs, highway construction, and production of synthetic fuels to
reduce German dependence on imported oil (Herf, 2003, pp. 191-192).

National Socialist Library was also the vehicle for the first official Nazi statement on
modern technology, which appeared in 1930. Nationalsozialismus und Technik: Die
Geistigkeit der Nationalsozialistischen Bewegung (National Socialism and Technology: The Spirituality
of the National Socialist Movement) was written by Peter Schwerber, a philosophically adept
engineer. Nationalsozialismus und Technik was the earliest effort to synthesize Nazi ideology
with the indigenous traditions of German engineers. Schwerber made reference to
Dessauer, Zschimmer, and Spengler as well as to Feder and Hitler. His pamphlet rested
on one obsessively repeated idea, namely, that racism was the logical end point of
Germany's reconciliation with modern technology. Far from being antitechnological,
National Socialism was dedicated to liberating technology from the “domination of money”
and the “fetters of Jewish materialism”. Schwerber wrote that technology was more than a
material foundation of Nazism. It was an “independent factor” of a new, postliberal,
postmaterialist culture. It was the generation that survived the Fronterlebnis (Experience of
the trenches) that really grasped the idea of freedom inherent in technology (Herf, 2003, p.
192).

Schwerber also made regular references to Henry Ford, whose Biography was also
published by the National-socialist Library. The Nazis praised Ford for his anti-Semitic
views and for being what they saw as an ideal-typical technical man who excluded all
merchant activity or dependence on finance capital by creating a self-financing industrial

61
corporation. Schwerber attributed to both technology and National Socialism a “primal
life instinct”. He saw technology as a natural force, at once demonic and passionate, which
sought a victory of “spirit over matter”. Hence, National Socialism was dedicated to
emancipating technology from capitalist exchange, a goal that bore striking similarities -at
least on a rhetorical level- to the engineers' own anticapitalist language during Weimar
Republic. Practically, this coalition of the Nazi party with a large part of the engineer
community advocated a program that would mean the disbanding of unions and the
undoing of restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles regarding Germany’s
rearmament.

The connection between national-socialist ideology and the domestic engineering

tradition was evident in an essay collection published in 1934 by the Verein Deutscher
Ingenieure (Association of German Engineers) called Die Sendung des Ingenieure im neuen Staat (The
Mission of the Engineers in the New State). The essays present a belief that the Nazis had
abandoned the anti-industrial themes of völkisch thought. The “new state” had the technical
idealism that German engineers sought after the years before. As the editor of the
collection, Rudolf Heiss, put it, Hitler's goals of rearmament and full employment
required that “technics be placed in the service of the totality of our Volk”. National Socialism
would also make engineers the “officer corps” in the battle to place technics in the service
of the whole nation and thereby give them the positions of responsibility and power they
had yearned for since the beginning of German industrialization (Herf, 2003, pp. 186-
187).

In this way, the coming of the Nazi regime not only was a danger for a large part of
engineers, but, instead proved to be the carrier of their liberation after many years of
political weakness and low social status, compared to other middle-class professions.
Thus it should come as no surprise that a large part of German engineers joined
enthusiastically the rearmament and public works programs of Hitler.

5.8. The engineers’ movements that resisted the dominant current of the period
There were German engineers that strongly resisted the ideas described above, such as
the pioneer of industrial rationalization Walter Rathenau, the visionary city planner Ernst
May, the architect Peter Behrens, organizer of the German Werkbund and the artists and

62
architects of Bauhaus, who believed a special synthesis of national traditions and
international developments was both possible and necessary. These particular engineers
attempted to incorporate the dipole of Kultur and technology into a liberal or socialist
context, fighting the technological visions of the Nazi party.

Rathenau was a symbol of the attempt to restructure Germany in the first years of the
Weimar Republic. He studied physics and chemistry, was trained as an engineer and took
up administrative positions in various corporations. Being responsible for national
replenishment during the WWI and Minister of National Reconstruction in the period
following the Versailles Treaty, he wrote and acted in defense of the reconstruction of
Germany through the application of a central state plan. He never stopped preaching the
necessity for the adaptation of the idea of mass production to the requirements of the
national economic and social structures as well as cultural values of Germany. He was
also a writer of books and articles on the subject of defending the reconstruction within
the context of a rational central planning and the adaptation of the technological
challenge to the requirements of national economic and social structures of Germany.
His texts combined a technocratic vision of productivity with intellectual views on
technology. The Rathenau “line of through” was defeated during the end of the ‘20s. The
conjuncture favored much more radical solutions. His assassination in 1922 by a right-
wing extremist could also be seen as an omen of this ending.

The Werkbund movement is founded in 1907 in Munich and played an important role
during the Weimar Republic in the fields of industrial design, architecture and the ideas
regarding industrialization, modernism and technology, affecting other movements,
foremost of which was Bauhaus. It is founded following a meeting of a select group of
German industrialists, politicians, artists and engineers with the goal of “rescuing the
quality” of German industrial production. The basis of this endeavor was the unification
of scientific and business forces intending to bring about effect an aesthetic and financial
modernization of German industrial products, in order to increase domestic
consumption and to stand as equals next to foreign industrial markets. Another goal
however was also the protection of the cultural values that appeared to be threatened by
the rapid industrialization and catalytic modernization of Germany. Werkbund was
developed as a cultural phenomenon that spread as an organization to other countries in
Europe. The Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart in 1926 was, in essence, the definitive act

63
of unification and international propagation of modern architecture as a uniform and
recognizable movement. The movement was highly active up until the beginning of the
‘30s and was interrupted temporarily in 1934 with the domination of Nazism.

64
 6. Conclusions and points for further research

Having taken into account what has been presented in this paper, we could, in closing,
synopsize the following major points:

The ideological context of the Weimar Republic was characterized by the birth of the
neoromantic movement. Said movement was the result of a mingling of two ideological
traditions, of classical romanticism and of modernism, which were however given
understood through various ideological, philosophical and social currents that had
already been formed in Germany since the end of the 19th century. Neoromanticism did not
reject scientific modernity, much less technological progress, industrialized production
and the symbolism of the machine. It managed to incorporate a new perception for
modern technology through the cultural system of interwar Germany. Thus, the
prevalence of neoromanticism was of catalytic importance for the social role and the
meanings that were given to science and technology in the Weimar Republic, since,
despite the idealism and the mysticism that dominated the ideological field, the formation
of a context for the legitimization of the new main goals of Germany, i.e. rearmament
and industrial rationalization, was made possible; these goals could only be achieved
through the radical development of technology and science.

The majority of the German intelligentsia that was adjacent to the Right during the
Weimar Republic was positively disposed towards technology and science. Their rhetoric
was based in identifying Kultur with over-historic primary values drawn from the German
ideological tradition, such as life, blood, race, will, sacrifice, all of the concepts that defied
rational justification. Their rhetoric amplified the neoromantic ideological context and
contributed to the delineation of science and technology’s particular role. Their
achievement was based on the reconciling of a set of cultural symbols in which science
and technology were transformed into an expression of the German soul and therefore
of Kultur. The Left intellectuals proved ineffective in developing a worthy
counterargument despite its attempts at appropriating in its own way both science and
technology, through movements such as Bauhaus, the Circle of Vienna, the theories of
Benjamin and Lukács. It is, however, worth noting that in the Weimar Republic history
was still “open”. Movements and ideological currents fought hard, prefixing different
political and ideological views, different directions and contents for science and

65
technology. One of the foremost of these currents, although minor, was the
philosophical current of the Circle of Vienna, whose program understood science as a
model, and had as its goal the construction of a typical reducing system of concepts
starting from simple elements, a demand for a unified empirical, positivist science and
the rejection of Metaphysics as a reaction to the idealistic aspects of the neoromantic
context. This is program that was based on the belief in the possibilities of science, a
program that drew its origin through the Enlightenment ideas of truth and progress.
Another movement that also had its basis on science and technology was Bauhaus, whose
ideas were characterized by a central contradiction that was often encountered in the
Weimar Republic, that of the struggle between the romantic and the rational/empirical
tradition. On one hand, Bauhaus crystallized the fascination of the ear for industrial
production and especially for the machine, which was the de facto symbol of progress.
On the other hand, important personalities of the aforementioned movement, such as
Gropius and Itten, expressed obvious references to a holistic view of things, which
referred to Lebensphilosophie, while their vision was closely related to the new technologies
and scientific progress. We could, therefore, argue that the neoromantic ideas of the
period were to be found even in movements which initially appeared to be distanced
from them.

For a series of historical reasons, national socialism prevails in 1933, taking full advantage
of the ground prepared by the conservative revolution of the Interwar period. The
massive support it achieved is based in part on the fact that it managed to conduct a
cultural revolution, stopping the route towards demystification of the world which
liberalism and Marxism advocated, without, however, leading Germany to a state of pre-
industrial weakness. National-socialism, like the majority of the Right intelligentsia in
Weimar, showed contempt towards volkisch bucolism, advocating what Goebbels called a
“steel romanticism”. Thus the Nazis were those that applied the ideas of the conservative
revolution’s neoromanticism. It was them that constructed national highways and started
the war that would merge technology with the German Seele.

The views of a lot of scientists of the era were so closely related to an unbridled idealism
and mysticism, that today, they could hardly be recognized as “scientific”. And yet,
during the Weimar Republic, such views were part of the core of the scientific endeavor
and were in no way considered “fringe”. These new scientific ideas were not only

66
incorporated in the particular neoromantic context of the ear but they also provided it
with feedback, making it more concrete. At the same time however, science was
considered necessary for its technological applications in a society that is undergoing a
radical modernization while also preparing for war. Science never lost its main social role,
a fact that becomes apparent through the noteworthy development in fields such as
quantum mechanics, aerodynamics and mathematics, through the multitude of Nobel
prizes that are awarded to German scientists of the era, through wealthy sponsorships
towards scientific institutes, laboratories, universities and academies, through the
involvement of a large part of the German intelligentsia with scientific issues as well as
through the public discourse that is often given to scientists of the period in magazines,
newspapers and public lectures. Science did not lose its main social role even when it was
forced to balance between two grounds that appeared to be diverging: on one hand it
should remain an organic part of the German Seele and Kultur, with obvious idealistic and
holistic aspects, and on the other hand, it should also be an essential cog for a
technologically advanced nation that would replace the fractured, rational knowledge of
Ζivilisation.

The role of the engineer community was also of a critical importance. They, too, were
called upon to walk the move forward between the idealism and technocentricism of the
neoromantic context. In order to fortify their social role in the aforementioned context,
it was necessary for them to legitimize the basis of their expertise, technology, in the
German consciousness. Thus, the engineers attempted to balance between two poles.
The first pole was composed of the traditional cultural values, which had, throughout the
centuries, contributed to the establishment of a national identity, while the second pole
was essentially a set of the new values of science and technology which arose from the
demand for industrial rationalization and rearmament. These new values asserted their
encapsulation in the body of traditional values of the nation leading to the legitimization
of the prospect of modernization. The subjugation of technology to German Kultur will
in this way create a particular technocracy which will, largely, characterize the
neoromantic ideological context. The engineer’s rhetoric, adapting to this context, was
built on a set of ideas and images. This set was politically effective, because it drew its
contents largely from important subjects of German cultural traditions. The engineers
repeated insistently that technology was German, spiritual, cosmic, whole, complete,
eternal, and as such it had something pre- or non-capitalist. It had escaped the confines
of the exchange society and the sterile Western civilization, and was a viable alternative

67
to them. The osmotic relationship between neoromanticism, technology and national-
socialism would be of defining importance for the historical development of the Weimar
Republic, despite the important resistance on the part of a number of engineers that
proposed an alternative view on technology. These resistances, despite not managing to
avert the totalitarianism of the Nazi period, proved to be a wealthy legacy for the postwar
technical civilization and enriched the critique regarding the modernization of western
societies.

This research presents an opportunity for the formulation of a series of questions and
speculation that were not possible to answer within the confines of this thesis,
presenting, however, an incentive for future research. Let us look at a few of them more
closely: it would be particularly interesting to conduct a comparative research of the
ideas, public image, social role, popularization and social representations of technology
and science in the Weimar Republic in contrast to other countries of the Interwar period,
such as France, the U.S., England as well as the Soviet Union. This research should
attempt at approaching these interwar societies in a non-anachronistic fashion, i.e. not as
they were constructed during and after the Second World War, but through primary
sources of the period.

Similarly interesting would be a research that focuses on how totalitarian forces today
(Golden Dawn in Greece, NPD in Germany, Forza Nuova in Italy etc.) adopt parts of
the ideas on technology and science that were developed in the neoromantic context.
Where do these ideas focus today? What are the similarities and dissimilarities between
the neoromantic views on science and technology and their views? Which particular
scientific applications and technological directions do they adopt for the 21st century?

A deliberate, more in-depth study of the relationship of the concept of rationality, with
the science and technology of Interwar Germany through the cultural tradition of
thinkers such as Benjamin, Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno. How representative is the
characterization of science and technology as “irrational”, a characterization widely used
in the literature pertaining to the Weimar Republic? Are rationalism and myth more
closely related than we think in every aspect of modernity, as Horkheimer and Adorno
argue in the “Dialectics of Enlightenment”? Was the neoromanticism of Interwar Germany
the confirmation and not the exception to the rule?

68
Another field ripe for research is the study of curriculums of university departments such
as Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Biology as well as Polytechnic and Technical
universities. For example, how enriched were those programs with philosophy and
history classes? Could there lie the reason for the thorough involvement of scientists and
engineers with cultural politics? What are the conclusions we can draw from a
comparative study of these programs with those of university departments in England,
France, the U.S. as well as the Soviet Union? This research could be further widened to
include the first and second degree education programs.

Especially revealing would also be the study of scientific theories that even though were
formulated during the period, but never became accepted, as well as technological
applications that, despite being carefully designed, never materialized. Researching the
causes behind the marginalization of scientific theories and artifacts would not only bring
to light the reasons behind the success of the theories and technologies that prevailed,
but would also present us with more information on the social forces and ideas that
made them “successful”.

69
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