Section 2
I probably heard the name Hitler for the first time in 1921 or 1922 in Breslau, where I was working on "Rassenkunde Europas" (first edition, 1925). In this city I occasionally met the Jewish editor of a large social democratic newspaper, a very clever man with a superior wit. I have him to thank for my knowledge of many biting Eastern Jewish jokes. We made no secret of our different, even opposing, views, but, with a mutual penchant for satire, enjoyed our conversations in which the editor did not spare some of his less gifted social democratic comrades. The editor, who had probably long since ceased to be of the Mosaic faith - if he had even been brought up in one - and I met each other in a certain free-thinking spirit, he - to use terms from the history of modern philosophy - from an agnostic or positivist point of view, I from a neo-Kantian one (Windelband, Rickert). He admired his academic teacher Professor Max Weber from the University of Heidelberg; his favorite writer was the Irish socialist Bernhard Shaw. Our conversations mostly moved on a surface that allowed for jokes, since we both knew that we were fundamentally different. My preoccupation with questions of racial studies (anthropology) - at that time Theodor Mollison held the chair of anthropology in Breslau - was probably viewed by the editor with benevolence as a harmless game. I later learned from a lady we both knew that he had explained to her, when the conversation touched on the human races of the earth, that everything on the whole earth had to be mixed together.
I reported to the editor and asked him whether such popular assemblies, to which each profession sends its elected representatives, were not preferable because the vast majority of voters voted for the party from which they expected the most benefit for their income. The editor immediately replied in all seriousness: "Where are the demagogues then?"
Another time I explained to him that I could not understand that socialism was only possible as an international group and that it should appear in the spirit of the words: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" Ferdinand Lassalle and Friedrich Naumann had called for a national socialism, both even a monarchist one. A man in Munich called Hitler seemed to want something similar. The editor immediately and very seriously replied: "Don't listen to him! He's a fool." I asked myself why the editor had lost his mocking superiority in both cases. Perhaps I should listen to the fool and form my own opinion.
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