It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before.
A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tübingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than to physics. More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 percent went to Americans. Albert Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1933, when he moved to Princeton, but from 1914 to 1917, when he was appointed professor at the University of Berlin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany.
Yet the German professoriat had a fatal weakness. For reasons that may be traced back to the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich or perhaps even further into Prussian history, academically educated Germans were unusually ready to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader, in the belief that only such a leader could preserve the purity of the German nationalist project.
Today’s progressives engage in racism in the name of diversity. The nationalist academics of interwar Germany were at least overt about their desire for homogeneity and exclusion.
Marianne Weber recalled how, in the wake of the 1918 Revolution, her husband Max had explained his theory of democracy to the former supreme military commander, General Erich Ludendorff:
Weber: Do you think that I regard the Schweinerei that we now have as democracy?
Ludendorff: What is your idea of a democracy, then?
Weber: In a democracy, the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, “Now shut your mouths and obey me.” The people and the parties are no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business.
Ludendorff: I should like such a “democracy.”
Weber: Later, the people can sit in judgment. If the leader has made mistakes—to the gallows with him!
Rudy Koshar’s study of the university town of Marburg in Hesse illustrates the way this culture led German academia toward the Nazis. The mainly Protestant student fraternities already excluded Jews from membership before World War I. In March 1920, in the turbulent aftermath of the revolution that had overthrown the imperial regime and established the Weimar Republic, a student paramilitary group was involved in a murderous attack on Communist workers. In the national elections held four years later, the Völkisch-Sozialer Bloc—of which the early Nazi Party (the NSDAP) was a key part—won 17.7 percent of the Marburg vote.
Lawyers and doctors, all credentialed with university degrees, were substantially overrepresented within the NSDAP, as were university students (then a far narrower section of society than today). To middle-aged lawyers, Hitler was the heir to Bismarck. For their sons, he was the Wagnerian hero Rienzi, the demagogue who unites the people of Rome.
Even a man who considered himself a liberal, as Max Weber surely did, was susceptible to the allure of charismatic leadership when the fledgling democracy seemed so weak. Three years after Weber’s death in 1920, Germany was plunged into disastrous hyperinflation. For many German academics, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933 was a moment of national salvation.
