Racial studies and general education. The concept of "race."

  Racial studies and general education.

The concept of "race."

By:Hans F. K. Guenther

One cannot assume that the averagely educated German today has knowledge of the racial composition of the German people; as experience shows, one cannot assume such knowledge even where one would expect it: in historical books about the German people, in books about individual German regions and tribes, in books about the ancient Germanic tribes, etc. Here and there, one finds essays about racial observations on the German population: they mostly remain unknown beyond the narrowest circles. Or one finds essays that consider how the German people today are still the pure-blooded people from the time of Tacitus, the first to describe Germania. With such false notions, general education may be reassured. During the World War, one could encounter non-German and enemy publications that sought to demonstrate that contemporary Germans hardly had a drop of "Germanic" blood left. One could come across German essays that, conversely, denied any "Germanic" blood in the contemporary French and identified only very little "Germanic" blood in England. Thus, both sides held the notion that the value of a people was greater the more "Germanic" blood circulated within it; but both sides had the most vague ideas about the actual racial relations of the individual peoples.

Contemporary man lacks any prior education to judge the racial characteristics of his own body and the racial origins of his own people. But not only is all knowledge lacking; what is even more serious is the lack of vision, the discerning eye; there is a general lack of attention to the many things that a person's stature and features unmistakably reveal. A certain inability to observe and a weakness of perception are striking in the people of our time. It is precisely the simple, the very things that initially only allow one to see and not yet think, calculate, or take a position on—it is precisely these that are least likely to stick in the perception of modern man.

This seems to me to be connected to a characteristic that is particularly noticeable in Germany: the gaze of modern man is unimaginative. Perhaps it is precisely natural science that has contributed to the spread of a certain lack of imagery in vision and imagination. The goal of natural science is—and must be—to convey all phenomena through a numerical expression of knowledge. Galileo already said that the phenomena of the world are written in mathematical language. The danger, however, is that with our scientific approach, the form, the structure, the tangible, physical essence of the phenomenon, gets lost. One could perhaps say: the very last thing called upon in modern man is the sculptor. Whoever does not, as it were, recreate within themselves the narrowness or the width of a head when seeing; whoever is not tempted to absorb this curvature of the eye, this curve of the nose, this curvature of the lips, this peculiarity of the chin, etc., through a structure of lines and surfaces for imaginative reproduction; Anyone who does not always create at the same time as they see is missing a part, an essential part, of all phenomena. The German, in particular, does not easily attain a pictorial vision; they do not surrender themselves so easily and so intellectually unencumbered to phenomena. Perhaps their gaze is already tinged with too much contemplation for a passion for grasping the pure form to arise within them. And yet, in a scientific age, nothing seems more necessary than this complement to cognition: pure pictorial vision.

The gaze can be trained, or at least: the power of physical seeing and perceiving can be developed. I have always been struck by how poorly witness statements convey physical characteristics, how inadequately official arrest warrants describe facial features and physique, while in other matters the court and witnesses make the most subtle distinctions. I remember a court hearing in which the degree of intoxication of the accused at the time of his crime was to be determined: after careful consideration of all the witnesses, the police officer's statement that the accused had a "sting" was finally chosen from among the dozen expressions. But when it comes to determining the shape of a nose, hair color, or skin color, the most contradictory statements emerge from the witnesses. Here, the training to differentiate, demarcate, classify—the training to perceive in general—is completely lacking. A racially trained eye will not rest until every detail of a face and a body has become interpretable. It will strive to advance beyond the observation of the physical to a grasp of the racially determined essence of a person, that essence to which the physical and spiritual aspects of the person under consideration point in mutual conditioning and correspondence. The racially trained eye will be most trained, or at least most eager, to recognize what this or that person truly is; it will be least misled by the many contradictions or seemingly contradictory things a person does.

Anyone who hears of European races for the first time and is reminded that fundamental differences exist between them; anyone who learns for the first time that all European peoples consist of mixtures, that in every people, in addition to pure representatives of the various races, there is an exceedingly large number of mixed-race people; anyone who thus learns for the first time that racial contrasts are clearly demonstrable in their own environment will initially approach a science with suspicion, whose claims have so far presented so little or nothing at all that is obvious. And yet, what is obvious, indeed striking, is enough. Only, there is a lack of any guidance for seeing; only, in our daily activities, we are all trained only to notice what this person or that person does in this or that matter, what they do against us or for us, what they promote, what they hinder, whether they do something favorable or unfavorable; and even if we don't actually think and observe for ourselves, we Europeans consider everything in a person, unless they are truly a foreigner, a Japanese, or a Negro, or perhaps look particularly Jewish, rather than their racial affiliation. We always consider them first as a representative of their people, their class, their tribe, their gender, even their club and neighborhood, and last of all we notice is whether they are blond or black, tall or short, broad-faced or narrow-faced. What Ripley (The Council of Europe, 1910) says is true: "From the moment a person comes into the world, he finds himself exposed to a series of encircling influences that seek to act upon him with overwhelming power. Family ties are the closest thing to him, then the ties and prejudices of class, then comes the circle of party life and church beliefs. Around all this lies the circle of language. The vital air of nationality, which lies even further outside these things, is as much the result of historical and social causes as any of the other encircling things, excepting family ties alone. A person's race may very well intersect almost all these circles at right angles. It lies beneath everything else. It is, so to speak, the raw material from which all these strata of life are formed. It may be a driving force that determines their significance and effectiveness, just as the peculiarity of a fiber determines the material in which it is woven." is woven into it. Race can operate in complete independence from all other things, since it alone is detached from the confusing influences of human will and human caprice. Race indicates

what a person is; all other individual forces of social life indicate what a person does.

If race is not what one person first notices about another, then the environmental theories (milieu theories) of the 19th century also contributed to diverting attention away from the consideration of racial phenomena. If, after all, it was possible, in the way of thinking so characteristic of the 19th century, to explain the skull shape of a tribe by the altitude of its settlement area or by its way of life, this indicates that research, until not so long ago, had made understanding racial phenomena more difficult for itself through its own direction. But if I am not mistaken, we are living today in a turning point in history, which, in contrast to the passing historical, indeed history-making (historicist) time, in contrast to the time of environmental theories, to the time that saw development, conditioning, dependence, and becoming everywhere, is turning, in contrast to all these declining views, to the essence itself, to the historyless being of things. Expressionism in the arts can be seen as the cry for this turning point, and its seriousness can most likely be sought in the philosophy of our time. If I am not mistaken, we are living in a time in which peoples strive to grasp in history less the unique than the characteristic, the timeless, in order to raise the forces to which they owe their greatness from the unconscious into the conscious. The will to achieve one's own, one's living, self-own, through clear knowledge, seems to me almost a hallmark of our present, perhaps even more so a sign and portent of the future. Connected with this is a shift from doing to being; connected with this is a shift toward unprovable, inborn beliefs given as a conviction of the blood; connected with this is a shift toward the particular racial identity of each people. "One wants to make the unconscious development of the national psyche conscious; one wants to condense, as it were, the specific characteristics of a bloodline and utilize them creatively; one wants to make the people's instincts more productive by proclaiming their nature. Goethe's dream of a world literature takes on new forms: only when each people speaks from its essence does it increase the common treasure."

So writes the Zionist Martin Buber in his essays "The Jewish Movement" (1916), which can be taken as a sign of this turning point and are written with astonishing clarity and insight into the requirements of racial life and racial rebirth. One no longer asks rationally about the meaning or purpose or even the value of one's own nationality or race; one has recognized that the powers of blood are hardly accessible to the analysis of reason, that blood, race, nationality, and innate nature themselves are the Intellectual achievement and scientific knowledge are often interdependent. One recognizes that a person's inherited blood is their most personal, their most destined possession; thus, one comes to regard blood heritage as the most certain thing, which gives authenticity to all faith and all works; one comes to sense in a person's blood heritage their essence and being, which characterizes them more authentically than their actions. And thus, finally, the true home for love and faith is found. "All that matters to me is the beauty and happiness of my bloodline" (Buber). The same blood alone will create unity and stability; mixture will always create confusion, misinterpretation, selfishness of all against all—in short, immorality and disintegration.

Thus, the thoughts on the racial blood heritage of people and nations, once evoked, ultimately extend even into morality, into decisions of daily life. This book is intended to provide a basic understanding of all these things and, most importantly and first of all, to characterize the physical characteristics of the four races that primarily comprise the population of Germany. The Jewish people living among the German people, who have already become aware of the necessity of racial rebirth on many occasions and are, in some cases, working exemplary ways on their racial identity—the Jews in Germany—will be treated separately in the appendix as a people of foreign origin.

An important discussion must be addressed right at the beginning: namely, the nature of race itself. What does the term "race" mean? How is this concept to be defined?

A discussion and definition of the term "race" is all the more necessary for a book like this, as the word "race" is frequently used in the many books that deal with racial matters, or believe they do, without first clearly stating what is meant by "race." The many meanings attributed to this word make it understandable that confusion upon confusion must ultimately result, and finally make it understandable that a philosophical observer who occasionally turns to the field of racial research does not want to recognize anything like "race" in the sense of a (Platonic) idea, but rather wants to see "race" as nothing more than a superficial, makeshift term for mnemonic school classifications, such as "race" in the original German. For example, Stein recently wrote in an essay entitled "Culture and Race" (Archive for Systematic Philosophy 1921, Vol. 26, Issues 1/2). If every book attempting to discuss racial matters had previously clearly defined what it meant by "race," even a philosophical observer would have been spared such failures as the one mentioned above.

Whenever the term "race" is used in conversation in relation to European or even German conditions, it evokes only very vague ideas, not only among the less educated, but also among the more educated and highly educated. It becomes clear: knowledge of the racial characteristics of European populations is not a component of so-called general education. The most immediate issue, the body and its racially determined structure and expression, is something most people have not yet considered. The striking differences in body structure, in hair, skin, and eye color, are accepted as a kind of natural phenomenon, as accidental variations between individuals. The word "race" somehow brings to mind "savages," yellows, blacks, "redskins," and thus, above all, the conspicuous inhabitants of non-European continents. Applying the word race in reference to Europe evokes in many people the memory of the "Caucasian race," which is still cited in older natural history and history books as the true European race or "white race," to which almost all European people are supposed to belong. The memory of the "Caucasian race" then brings to mind the image of a decent and mild-looking, fully bearded man with a long, round, not too narrow, not too broad face, with a healthy complexion and medium-light hair: this is how these older books depict the representative of the "Caucasian race," and the average perception of the racial affiliation and structure of Europe is rarely clearer. At most, the word "race" evokes a vague notion of the racial alienation of the Jews living among the European peoples, or some vague images of the tall stature, blue eyes, and blond hair of the ancient Germanic tribes, from whom all modern-day Germans are supposed to descend. At most, one speaks of the contrast between the Germanic tribes and the Romanic tribes, or between the Germanic tribes and the Slavs; at most, one creates vague notions of Anglo-Saxon "cousins" or "Celtic pre-populations" – the word "race" hardly has any more precise meaning, and one can say: almost all of these notions are fundamentally wrong, are as widespread in their vagueness as they are worthless, or they are ridiculous, like the claim spread by the French in occupied territory for advertising purposes that the French and the Rhinelanders descended from the same "Celtic race."

One occasionally hears the word "rassig" (racial). But in common usage, this word only corresponds to the idea of ​​a person's particularly prominent sexuality or historical attraction. It is striking that most of these people called "rassig" are mixed-race people from all interbreeding races, such as those commonly found in large cities. A special attention to racial matters, a traditional knowledge of at least one's own racial distinctiveness, is actually only found among the Jews. Even their opponents, the anti-Semites, who are so attentive to the special racial characteristics of the Jews, in most cases have the most unclear ideas about where the Jews actually belong. The very word "anti-Semitism" contains a certain ambiguity, since the opposition to Judaism can be just as strong among Semitic-speaking peoples, for example, among the Arabs, and is often even more so than among Western peoples.

Whatever notions of so-called general education in racial matters one may pay attention to, the actual knowledge is lacking. Blood and creed are confused—a Jew who has become Catholic, Protestant, or "free religious" is said to be no longer a Jew: as if Judaism were in the creed and not in the blood. The English statesman Disraeli, a Jew, was racially proud like few others, yet he belonged to the English High Church. But he never forgot his Judaism, his blood, a day of his life and loved it passionately.

Race and language are confused – people speak of Germanic, Romanic, and Slavic races and then cannot explain it when they see a resident of Normandy, i.e., a Frenchman, a "Roman," who looks like a German: tall, blond, blue-eyed; they cannot explain it when they see an equally tall, blond, and blue-eyed Russian or even a Finn, since the Russians supposedly belong to a Slavic race, and the Finns supposedly to a Mongolian race. Or conversely: the average German understands a representative of the Slavic race as a medium-sized person with a broad face and prominent cheekbones. However, the embarrassment becomes great when, upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that such people with "Slavic" traits are not at all rare in Germany, and not only in the eastern part of Germany, where German and Slavic languages ​​border each other. "Romans" are, in the general imagination, dark-haired, dark-eyed, "passionate" people: but they can also be found among the Germans. One could also group together Italians, Spaniards, French, Romanians—all "Romans" who look like the "old Germans": tall, blond, blue-eyed. But even among the Finns, who speak a Ural-Altaic language, a Mongolian language, there are enough people who look "Germanic." Finally, one could find blond and blue-eyed people among the Berbers, especially the Kabyles, in North Africa, who speak Hamitic languages ​​like certain dark-skinned East Africans. The confusion of linguistic affiliation with racial affiliation is thus misleading. There are Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, but no Germanic, Romance, or Slavic race. Language and race have mutual, not-so-easily-detected relationships, but language boundaries are never racial boundaries, and racial boundaries are never language boundaries. Race and ethnicity do not coincide. The same applies to the even more superficial confusion of race and nationality. There is no Italian, Spanish, Greek, or English race. All these things: language, nationality, religious beliefs, popular customs and conditions have nothing to do with race, or rather:

not directly. To put it briefly: nationality is a legal concept, ethnicity a historical and moral concept, race is a concept of natural science, applied to humans: a concept of the descriptive study of humankind. Racial research is primarily concerned with the physical makeup of humans or individual groups of people. Ethnicity usually encompasses people of the same language and culture, the state people of the same demarcated territory, and race people with the same physical and mental genetic makeup. To this day, racial studies—as "physical anthropology"—are mostly limited to physical genetic makeup and rarely attempt to describe psychological genetic makeup. An attempt to describe the psychological characteristics of individual European races can be found below.

Right from the start, a warning should be given against somehow overlooking the limitations of the concepts under consideration. Most errors and misunderstandings in racial theory arise from the confusions mentioned above. Let us repeat the warning issued by the French racial researcher Topinard in 1889 to a gathering of anthropologists from all over the world: "Let me remind you of one of the most certain facts of general anthropology, which cannot be repeated often enough. This is that the concept of race has not the slightest connection with that of ethnicity; that all the peoples of Europe are composed of approximately the same racial components, only in different proportions." (Quoted from Wilser, Die Germanen, 1918). 

The importance and accuracy of this observation cannot be overemphasized: that race, even though it often influences the lives of nations, beliefs, languages, and customs, initially belongs only in the context of a purely physical descriptive consideration. The term "race" is a scientific term, like other classification concepts, such as family (familia), genus (genus), species (species), and subspecies (varietas). Just as natural science first describes the physical characteristics that together constitute a specific generic or species profile, so does racial science: the purely measurable, weighable, numerically expressible physical characteristics constitute the unambiguous and certain component of its knowledge. After measuring and counting, after recording weight and volume, after describing color, growth, signs of aging, sexual differences, etc. of the body structure—after these purely factual determinations, investigations may follow into the psychological behavior that is characteristic of each individual race.

This is how this book will proceed. It will not, however, be strictly scientific in its approach, but will generally describe only the physical characteristics of individual races that can be recognized in everyday life, in the appearance of the clothed person in our European part of the world; at most, it will mention important characteristics that are only accessible by touch. The purpose of this book is not to join the ranks of actual specialized works. Rather, its aim is to sharpen the view, or better: to awaken a view, an understanding, an awareness of the racial conditioning of the environment and history. Deeply imbued with the worthlessness of all "popularization," which is always simultaneously a trivialization, this book would prefer to address those capable of a creative perspective and capable of allowing the inspiration that comes from racial research to serve their environment. The study of European races would be better off if more insight into the characteristics and nature of races could be found in professions that inevitably involve comparisons, especially doctors, judges, teachers, statesmen, and heads of larger companies. It has been shown that even people without professional training—if they carefully consider the limits of their specialized knowledge—can contribute valuable observations about racial relationships. But the slightest insight into racial studies is very often lacking, even within professions that could actually conduct racial observations at every turn. One meets doctors who are astonished when they are made aware of the racial differences within European peoples. Lack of education in these matters is so widespread that even the most educated person has not progressed beyond the vague ideas mentioned above.

If race and language, race and ethnicity, race and state, race and creed cannot be related to one another, or at least not directly, if it is therefore urgently necessary, above all, to first and foremost distinguish all these pairs of concepts as sharply as possible, how then does a race appear? How is the concept of "race" to be defined?

First, the question: how does race appear? How does research come to establish separate racial images? If one thinks of the Yellows and Blacks or the "Redskins," the classification seems clear. But how does research in Europe come to establish four separate racial images?

A racial researcher coming to Germany from outside would certainly be completely confused by the confusion at first. He might first think of counting all blondes as one race, since the light hair would probably be the first thing he noticed. However, the difficulty of distinguishing between blonde and brown would arise. Even if transitions were not present at all, another confusion would arise: there are tall and short blondes, short-haired and long-haired blondes, blondes with blue eyes and—albeit less frequently—blondes with brown eyes; there are blondes with soft hair and blondes with hard hair. Should the racial researcher then establish new races for each of these? He would arrive at a myriad of races, since he would have to classify the dark-haired as well. But even if he had recorded a whole series of individual races, he would have to observe over time that, for example, For example, a marriage between two dark, short-headed people could produce blond children with long heads, or perhaps a blond, long-headed child and a dark, short-headed child, or children who exhibit all transitions and combinations of foot patterns. As a race, however, it should only group together those groups of people who repeatedly produce their own kind. This would result in confusion.

Now, if chance led this researcher to European regions where the population is uniform, or at least almost uniform, if chance or the most thorough research led him precisely to the European regions of relatively greatest racial purity, a classification would emerge more quickly. He would find, for example, in Sweden or Schleswig-Holstein, tall, blond, blue-eyed people with narrow, long heads, with light skin, soft hair, and a number of other characteristics. He would find, for example, in the Alps, where shorter, brown- or black-haired people live, with short, round heads and flat noses, with yellowish-brown skin, tighter hair, and certain other characteristics. He would find tall, black-haired people with short heads and prominent noses in the mountains of Albania, Bosnia, Serbia, and, in smaller numbers, in the Austrian Alps. He would finally find small, dark-haired people with long, narrow heads in southern Italy. This would enable racial researchers to more quickly arrive at a classification that corresponds to the true racial picture of Europe.

However, when researching the populations living between the aforementioned regions, he would find vast stretches of land where the above-described confusion of characteristics prevails; and if people were counted according to physical characteristics, the blond short-heads, for example, would perhaps be much more numerous than the blond long-heads, raising the question of whether two different blond races should not be assumed, or whether perhaps the blond long-heads themselves could be explained by racial mixture.

If one crosses Central Europe in a north-south direction, roughly from Schleswig-Holstein across the Alps to southern Italy, the following picture emerges: the small northwest German region of tall, blond, light-eyed, long-headed people with light skin is not entirely uniformly populated; shorter, darker people are found in a minority; it may also happen, albeit rarely, that blond, long-headed parents have a dark, long-headed child or a short-headed child. However, the presence of darker people increases the further south one goes and becomes more noticeable south of the Harz Mountains. Even in central Germany, a diverse picture emerges. Blond, long-headed people live next to blond, short-headed people, dark, short-headed people next to dark, long-headed people, alongside a large number of medium-headed people with medium-dark hair, short blonds next to tall blonds, blue-eyed blonds next to blue-eyed browns. Within a family, the various characteristics are often distributed differently among all children. This is the picture in southern Germany, except that the proportion of tall, blond, and long-headed people gradually decreases, while the proportion of short, dark, and short-headed people increases. Finally, in certain areas of the Alps, a relatively uniform picture emerges again: the dark, short, short-headed people. But already in the Po Valley in northern Italy, a bewildering diversity emerges again; blonds, including short-headed blonds, appear more frequently, alongside short, dark, short-headed people and, occasionally, short, dark, long-headed people. The blonds disappear when leaving Umbria, and now dark, medium-headed people live alongside dark, short-headed people and dark, long-headed people. Parents may often have short-headed children, and vice versa. Finally, medium-headed and short-headed people disappear, and now short, dark, long-headed people create the image of an almost uniform population. Similar transitions would occur in the Bavarian Alps and Tyrol, if we were to branch off southeastward into the Eastern Alps and the South Slavic and Albanian mountains, where a uniform picture would again emerge: the tall, short-headed people with protruding noses, which would again become mixed towards Greece.

Where are the pure races located? Are they really only represented

by those minorities in the four designated regions? Perhaps the many medium-sized, blond, round-headed people also represent a race? Perhaps the many tall, dark, long-headed people also represent a race? Or perhaps there are no races at all, and it's all a senseless game of nature? Dark-skinned parents can have blond children; tall parents can have short children. — The reality is confusing, and if the four regions of relatively homogeneous populations did not allow any conclusions, and if there were no prehistoric and historical graves to bear witness, it is conceivable that the study of European racial relations would not have progressed beyond its beginnings. As late as 1898/1899, Deniker (Races de l'Europe) did not reach a clear distinction between pure races and mixed populations. He still assumes six main races (races principales) and four secondary races (races secondaires) in Europe. Ripley (The Race of Europe, first published in 1899) proposes three European races. However, the research results, which Ripley could have identified earlier, clearly point to four races.

However, even if pure-bred people did not exist or no longer existed, even if the areas of relatively pure race had disappeared through crossbreeding or had never existed at all, even if a confused jumble were to distribute all characteristics indiscriminately—even then the view of the existence of pure racial patterns could not be abandoned, even then the validity of pure racial patterns could still be demonstrated and even proved through hereditary phenomena. When research into individual countries categorizes the prevalence of tall and short stature, blond and dark hair, long and short skulls, and all the other characteristics into numerical overviews, when all conscripts in a country are measured according to height, skull shape, skin, hair, and eye color, then this research, by establishing an overall average across an entire people, proceeds as if the entire people were a single mixed region, and such numerical overviews alone could prove the validity of certain racial stereotypes.

In compilations of this kind, which in the larger states—unfortunately with the exception of Germany—have often been carried out very meticulously by the authorities, it has now been shown, in Italy as well as in France, in Scandinavia as well as in England, that, on average, consistent relationships exist between the individual characteristics: the larger a population, the more blond hair appears, with the notable exception of the aforementioned Adriatic region and certain Alpine regions, and the more light eyes; the blonder a population, the rarer brown eyes, and the more common long skulls. The darker a population in Germany—with the exception of certain Alpine regions—the smaller, shorter-headed, and snub-nosed it is, and the rarer light eyes are in it. Thus, regular relationships between the various characteristics emerge, ultimately producing pure racial patterns.

If one examines the maps of England showing the distribution of body size, color, and skull shape, one can clearly see, on the whole, the correspondence between the areas of tallest stature and those of the lightest colors and those of the longest skulls. The same result is evident when examining the racial maps of France, except that here, from the Mediterranean coast, in the area of ​​short stature and dark colors, a pronounced long-skulled race is once again evident: it shows that, in addition to the tall, light-colored, long-skulled race in the north of France, a small, dark, long-skulled race can be distinguished in the south, while large areas between these two long-skulled races, according to the maps, belong to a small, dark, short-skulled race. In the Adriatic region mentioned above and in certain Alpine regions, it is also evident that two human types must be distinguished within the area of ​​dark colors: tall, strong-nosed, short-headed people and short, blunt-nosed, short-headed people. Such connections can also be clearly seen on the Italian maps and are also evident from the racial maps of German regions. The relationships between the individual characteristics, even when examining the maps, and especially when examining them, reveal the existence of four specific European racial patterns, to which the individual features of the maps are clearly combined in each case: In the racial surveys of larger groups of people, with the exception of the Adriatic region, blond always indicates tallness and a long head, light eyes, and light skin; in Germany, short indicates dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair, and a short, round skull with a blunt, flat nose. In Austria, two types are evident within the dark-haired, dark-eyed, short-headed populations: tall, short-headed, with a steeply posterior head and strongly curved noses, on the one hand, and short, round-headed, short heads with blunt, flat noses, on the other. Thus, at the point where such indicative lines (short, tall, long-haired, short-haired, blond, dark-haired, etc.) intersect, there stands, as it were, the pure image of the respective race: the racial "type" (as an idea in the Platonic sense).

Race is therefore a law, an figurative standard by which comparative human science (anthropology, physical anthropology) measures the physical appearance of a person.

Even a population composed entirely of mixed-race people is subject to the idea of ​​race and must manifest it clearly in its hereditary phenomena. Therefore, it should be noted at this point that a thorough understanding of racial phenomena and a reliable assessment of the controversial issues of racial research are only possible for those who are familiar with the laws of inheritance. The most disparaging evaluators of racial research results are usually characterized by their ignorance of the laws of inheritance. This, along with the recurring confusion of race and ethnicity among otherwise astute opposing evaluators, is the most deplorable.

If, after this discussion (due to the misinterpretation from the philosophical side mentioned on page 5) one already touches on the philosophical realm, one looks for a definition of the concept of race that remains within the realm of experience, the result is:

A race is represented by a group of people consisting of the same species, who repeatedly produce only their own kind.

A group of people consisting of the same species should here mean: a group of people who are distinguished from any other group of people by their own combination of physical characteristics.

That such a group of people actually lives as a cohesive unit, that they actually live clearly and cleanly enclosed by a belief, a language, and a peoplehood, is a very rare case. Racially pure peoples are perhaps only the Eskimos and the now-extinct Tasmanians. Again, the insight arises: peoplehood and race belong to separate conceptual realms. Race proves, first of all, to be only a unity and equality of physical hereditary traits. A race cannot, or can only very rarely, be demarcated on a map like a people or a language. It will usually have one or more areas of greatest purity, and around these areas, areas in which it occurs more or less admixed. However, things are not the same everywhere as in Europe, and this may be why the most remote regions of the earth are now better researched racially than Europe.

In this disputed continent, migrations and shifts of races and peoples have apparently taken place more than in other continents since prehistoric times. Since ancient times, crossbreeding has created a bewildering diversity of the picture and has certainly contributed to the fact that no European race has developed anything like a racial consciousness, let alone a racial conscience and racial unity. Something that one might call "awareness of kind" (Giddings), a consciousness of one's own blood, is found in Europe only among the Jews. Otherwise, a separate blood consciousness has never developed. Therefore, when irreconcilable racial antagonisms arise between individuals in Europe or between European peoples, when necessary disputes and misinterpretations, a necessary mutual misunderstanding, we seek the reason for this in everything else rather than in matters of blood; indeed, we hardly ever come up with such a conjecture or method of investigation.

This deficiency in our observation—a deficiency it is—can also be explained by the fact that the very existence of scientific anthropology is hardly known beyond the circle of specialized scholars. "General education" knows about research trips to "savages"; that science has also measured and described a large number of Europeans, it does not know, or does not yet know, and probably simply because the authoritative research in Europe is too recent, too contemporary, for its results to have penetrated a more general consciousness today. Scientific findings must have reached a certain age, must lie a certain period of time ago, before "general education" learns of them. However, the penetration of European racial studies may be made even more difficult by the fact that racial facts are most likely to clash with general prejudices and resistance. The results of racial studies are all too easily passed on in a distorted form in everyday life, applied to the most isolated cases, and often applied just as indiscriminately as rejected. Indeed, racial studies presents itself to the general consciousness quite differently than any other science: it deals with what is very close to every human being and to which every human being is particularly sensitive: the human body. Above all, racial studies are in the awkward position of having to declare the vast majority of European people to be mixed-race people, bastards. This makes it an embarrassing, disturbing science and gives it something uncomfortable, similar to the injunction "Know thyself."

Thus, many reasons can be given as to why, even in a time which has been called the "scientific age," in which scientific knowledge has been widely disseminated, such ignorance prevails in matters of comparative human science.