Section 4
But at this very time, in January 1930, a government had been formed in Thuringia, made up of several parties, including the NSDAP, a government whose Minister of the Interior and Education was Dr. Wilhelm Frick. My Munich publisher wrote to me soon afterwards that the hereditary researcher (eugenicist) Alfred Ploetz, who had published a paper on social anthropology years before, had visited him and advised him to contact Frick, who could now seize the opportunity to create a chair for social anthropology in Jena and appoint me to it. This is how I was appointed to the University of Jena, which the majority of the Senate opposed. Provoked by this opposition, Frick decided, as he had every right to do, to appoint me not as an extraordinary professor, but as a full professor.
As happened to me in Jena, so later in Berlin and in Freiburg im Breisgau: many, and later some professors, feared that a party-political zealot, perhaps even an anti-Semite, would now be sent to their faculty. But I did not belong to any party at the time and during my academic career I never mixed science with politics. So in Jena, as later in Berlin and Freiburg, the moods of my colleagues quickly calmed down, and I can say that I soon found friendly accommodation among my colleagues. But the opposing press did not calm down for a long time. It can be traced back to this and other agitation that in 1932 a communist sent from abroad fired several shots at me on his way at night. One of these, aimed at the heart, hit me in the left upper arm, while others flew past my head to the left and right. When I jumped at him, the young perpetrator fled into the darkness and threw his pistol away as he ran.
My inaugural lecture was scheduled for the beginning of the winter semester of 1930, which again attracted a great deal of press attention. Before the lecture, I was waiting in the rector's room for it to begin when - unexpectedly - Adolf Hitler was led into the room. After the inaugural speech, I learned that Hitler had been invited by Minister Frick to attend the lecture. The encounter surprised me greatly on the inside, but I didn't let it show on the outside.
Hitler came up to me, gave me his hand and said, looking at me attentively, in what I remember as a rough voice: "I am so pleased that you have been called here." I bowed in thanks. Then a few more sentences followed, which I no longer remember. All I remember is that while Hitler was speaking short sentences, I was thinking about how best to respond. But these thoughts were interrupted because Hitler was taken to the auditorium by a university official. I was left to myself for a while, to myself and my "first impression."
The first thing that struck me about Hitler was the look of an outstanding intelligence in his big blue eyes, but also the harsh roughness of his voice. The second feeling that immediately arose was, however, undeniable: a bridge of understanding will never be built between this man and me. For me it was the feeling of a person who, because of his nature, could not look upon the other person in any other way than as fundamentally alienated, and I would like to confess straight away that I never got over this alienation - I say alienation, not antipathy. I do not know whether Hitler felt the same alienation towards me at the time, but I suspect from later impressions that people like me could not be more to him than at most pieces on his chessboard. But who would blame him for that?
Hitler was probably just as disappointed by my inaugural speech as the large numbers of opposing press that attended, which contributed to the overcrowding of the auditorium, while Hitler had been given a place among the professors on the amphitheatrically arranged rows of benches to my sides and behind me. My inaugural speech explained the tasks of social anthropology - that was what my subject had been called in Jena following Ploetzen's suggestion. Any "propaganda", which I was averse to, would have been a slip-up in such a speech. But the anti-Semitism that the opposing press hoped for was not to be expected from me either. So the press reports were short and flat. The "Berliner Tageblatt" wrote a few irrelevant lines, but added: "One thing must be said: his tailcoat fit perfectly." I sent this advertisement to my tailor, to his great delight.
Immediately after his inaugural speech, Hitler left to the sound of cheers from the people. Göring unexpectedly appeared for a small meal at the Hotel zum Bären. He sat opposite me at the table in a uniform, looking very self-satisfied, and spoke to me - I can't remember what - with the cheerful benevolence of a high-ranking patron, but was then asked by the hotel owner to speak to a small group of Jena citizens gathered outside the hotel who had asked to see him. Flattered, Göring immediately interrupted his meal and went through a stairwell window onto the hotel's canopy, greeted by cheers. When he returned to the table, he beamed with the awareness of his popularity. But enough of him, who had escaped death by hanging in a way that was honorable to him!
Around 1942, a colleague of mine in Freiburg who studied history at a north German university had to undergo an operation in Freiburg for the after-effects of an injury from the First World War. When this colleague had been moved to a hotel to continue his recovery because the hospitals were overcrowded, I visited him, who was lying in his hotel bed. During the conversation, my colleague asked me what impression I had of Hitler. I told him about the meeting in Jena, which had been 10 years ago, and stressed my feeling that mutual understanding between me and Hitler was impossible. My colleague thought about it and then said: "That is very strange, because that is what the sculptor Klimsch told me, even though he is a completely different person to you." My colleague obviously wanted to express that the possible line of people from Klimsch to me would feel the same way about Hitler.
I met the sculptor in about 1952, but my friend Schultze-Naumburg had always mentioned him to me with full recognition. Klimsch lived in the southern Black Forest, bombed out, a very
amiable old man with a Franconian accent and, in fact, completely different from me. We understood each other immediately. We did not talk about Hitler, but rather about the decline of the fine arts into something undignified. The arts of the present, succumbing to a declining age, have completely turned away from human dignity. A phrase from Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's "Aphorisms" can be applied to them: "Art is in decline when it turns from the representation of passion to that of vice."
Klimsch only spoke of Goebbels, whom he probably rejected as a politician, but who must have shown his best side to Klimsch when he visited Klimsch in Salzburg to see Klimsch's plaster designs for a Mozart monument that Hitler had commissioned the sculptor to create. It is to Hitler's credit that he held Klimsch's art in such high regard, an art that still testified to human dignity. The Salzburg plaster figures were used as targets by North American soldiers in 1945. Klimsch died a few years after our conversation. I will never forget this important artist and intelligent, kind person.
Hitler's voice occupied me for years as an expression of his character, until I found the word that described my impression. The opportunity to do this arose in 1936 or 1937 in Berlin at the May Day celebrations. Hitler, as I had been accustomed to since Jena, used to rant against the educated in his May Day speeches, to the delight of the less gifted and uneducated, against those whom they call the "bigwigs" in Bavaria, and against the "reactionaries."
Even in my time in Jena, naive students had adopted such accusations and called professors they disliked "brain beasts"; children in the Hitler Youth called old people they disliked "graveyard vegetables". Children and young people quickly understand what political slogans can be used for. - The way in which today's "demonstrating" students speak is therefore nothing new. The politicization of the immature, a premature putting on of blinkers, today carried out overzealously and with flattering phrases, began in Germany with National Socialism.
During my academic years, it was precisely the cleverer students who were surprised, no matter how much caustic "criticism" they made of people and situations among their peers, that they had become "mature" by the time they reached the age of 21, because at this age only the stupider and those who are unable to mature are mentally and spiritually "finished". For the cleverer students, every answer to the pressing questions of life immediately gives rise to another set of questions. That is why the cleverer members of the Swabian tribe speak of a "Swabian age", which people only enter at the age of 40. A well-advised state would only recognize the toga virilis at the age of 30.
In the May speech, for which members of the University of Berlin and other organizations, associations, smaller and larger aligned groups were lined up under loudspeakers along the broad streets of Berlin, Hitler again railed against educated people and reactionaries, but this time he spoke contemptuously of the fact that these people could no longer endanger his state because - and now came the sentence, uttered in a hard, rough voice - "We will take their children away from them!" I was greatly shocked, but controlled myself and said calmly to a colleague standing next to me: "Then these circles will simply have no more children." I thought
I could read anxiety and sadness on the colleague's impassive face. Hitler had not thought of kidnapping children - no one would have thought of that - but he had thought of having the children "trained" by the Hitler Youth so that they would evade their reactionary parents.
The next day I bought the "Völkischer Beobachter". (I myself also subscribed to the "Steglitzer Anzeiger" because of its handy format; my colleague Werner Sombart, whom I highly respect, subscribed to "Das Echo vom Grunewald".) The sentence that had frightened me was missing from the print of the May speech, evidently omitted by a level-headed, thoughtful editor. But I
have remembered the sentence and above all the voice in which it was spoken again and again since then, and now I have also found the word for Hitler's voice: it sounded merciless, or at least could sound merciless on certain occasions.
Only about half a year ago I had confirmation: I had heard that sentence correctly. A lady who lived in Berlin at the time and had heard the May speech told me in a calm conversation about Hitler that she too had been horrified and outraged by those harsh words.
I know very well that other people felt differently about Hitler's harsh voice, but I stick to this: the possibility of such ruthlessness - at least in public speeches - is part of the image of Adolf Hitler as a man.
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