THE
HISTORY OF

RACE

THEORY

AND
THE DISCOVERY OF

THE UNITY OF
THE RACES

BY RUDOLF ROCKER
EDITOR’S NOTE:

Rudolf Rocker was a German Anarchist. His books include
Principles of Syndicalism (1920), The Bankruptcy of Russian State
Communism (1921), The Daily Fight For Bread (1925), The Truth
About Spain (1936), The Tragedy of Spain (1937), and
Anarchosyndicalism (1938).

Prior to World War II Germany had a strong Anarchosyndicalist
Iabor movement. Anarchists participated in the 1920 General
Strike which defeated the Kapp Putch, an attempted coup d” etat by
right wing Freikorp paramilitary gangs and were part of the Army
of the Rihr which briefly established an autonomous workers
republic in the Saarland run by workers councils during the time
of the Weimar Republic. When Hitler came to power, the German
Free Workers Union was forced underground and many
Anarchists were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. In 1936
German Anarchists fought with the Anarchist militias of the CNT
(National Workers Confederation) in the Spanish Civil War. After
the Spanish Civil War Anarchist militias helped form the Maquis,
a resistance movement in Nazi-occupied France. During World
War 11, Anarchists organized resistance groups inside Nazi
Germany.

The History of Race Theory and the Discovery of the Unity of the
Races is a chapter from Rudolf Rocker's seminal book against

Nationalism, Fascism and Racism: Nationalism and Culture. 1t

describes how the European Aristoeracy invented race theory and

race science, how the modern sciences of biology, genetics,

anthropology, sociology and psychology refute the existence of

biologically distinct races and the theories of racial determinism, .
and how race theories contradict each other.
NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 339

Thus we should happily attain the cultural level of the Papuans. Such
lines of thought lead to total depravity and inflic on all human fecling
decper wounds than onc suspects. The race theory is the leitmotif of 3
new barbarism which endangers all the intellectual and spiritual values
in culture, threatening to smother the voice of the spirit with its “voice
of the blood.” And so belief in race_becomes the most brutal violence
to the personality of man, a base denial of all social justie. Like every
other fatalism, 50 also race-fatalism is 2 rejection of the spiri, a degrading
of man to a mere blood-vessel for the race. The doctrine of race when
applied o the concept of the nation proves that this is not a community
of descent, as has been 50 often dsserted; and as it dissects the nation into
its separate components it destroys the foundations of its existence. When
in spite of this its adherents today so noisily proclaim themselves the
representatives of the national interests, one can but recall the saying of
Grillparzer: “The course of the new education runs from humanity
through nationality to bestiality.”

. SAUIUNALISM AND CULTURE

revolution with grim bitterness and remained to the last the bellwether of
political and social reaction in Germany. In this respect the represedtatives
of the modern race theory differ in not the slightest degree from their
predecessors cxcept that they are more soulless, outspoken and brutal, and
therefore morc dangerous at a time when the spiritual in people is crippled
and their emotions have grown callous and dull because of the wat. and
its horrible after-effects. People of the brand of Ammon, Giinther, Hauser
and Rosenberg, are in all their undertakings ruthless and hidebound
reactionaries, What that leads to, the Third Reich of Hiler, Goering
and Goebbels shows us realisticall ly. When Giinther, in his Rassenkunde
des deutschen Volkes speaks of a “gradation in rank of the Germans
according o their blood” his concept s thoroughly that of a slave-people
Who arc arranged in a definite order of ranks that reminds us of the cactes
of the Indians and the Egyptians. One comprehends how this doctrine
found such ready acceptance in the ranks of the great industrialists, The
Deutsche Arbeitgeberacitung wrote thus about Giinther’s book: “What be.
comes o the dream of human equality after one takes even a single glance
at this work? Not only do we regard the study of such % work a5 this 25 3
source of the highest interest and instruction; we believe, too, that no
politcian can form correct judgment without investigation of the prob
lems here dealt with.”

Of course! No better moral justification could be produced for the in-
dustral bondage which our holders of industrial power keep before them
as a picture of the future.

‘The race theory first appeared as an interpretation of history. But with
has acquired a political significance, and it has crystallized today in
Germany into a new ideology of reaction in which lurk future dangers
that cannot be overlooked. He who thinks that he sees in all politeal
and social antagonisms merely blooddetermined manifestations of race,
denies all concilatory influence of ideas, all community of cthial fecling,
and must at every criss take refuge in brute force. In fact, the race theory
is only the cult of power. Race becomes destiny, against whih it s useleos
to struggle; thercfore any appeal to the basic principles of humanity 1
just idle tall which cannot restrain the operation of the laws of mature,
This delusion is not only a permanent danger to the peaceful relations
of peoples with one another, it kills all sympathy within a people and
flows logically into a state of the most brutal barbarism. Whither this
leads is shown in Ernst Manns Moral der Kraft, where we read: “Who
because of his bravery in battle for the general welfare has acquired 3
serious wound or disease, even he has no right to become a burden to his
fellow men as cripple or invalid. IF he was brave enough to risk his life
in battle, he should possess also the final courage to end his life himself.
Suicide is the one heroic deed available to invalids and weaklings”

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 337

condotieri is merely the thoughtless adoption of an assertion of Taine’s.
The fact is that in the whole tribe of the Bonapartes there was not 3
single condottiere—neither in the line from Treviso nor in that from
Florence—though probably there is Saint Bonaventura, Wherefore
Mereshkowski quite properly inquires: “Why should the blood of these
supposititious robbers (condottieri) have run stronger in the veins of
Napoleon than that of the actually provable saint?”

But cnough of this unpleasant game, which one could keep up. in-
definitely without becoming any the wiser. It is neither the conclusions .
of science nor the voice of the blood which is responsible for the ideas
of the founders of the race theory, but their strongly asocial sentiment,
which makes them walk rough-shod over every feeling of human dignity.
To no one s well s to them does the old saying of Gocthe apply: “We
are able to understand correctly how anyone will think about any par-
ticular matter only when we know what is his sentiment toward it” It was
not their doctrine that shaped their sentiment; it was the sentiment that
gave form and content to the doctrine. But this sentiment is rooted in the
very foundations of al spiritual, political and social reaction: in the attitude
of masters towards their slaves, Every class that has thus far auained to
power has felt the need of stamping their rulership with the mark of the
unalterable and predestined, till at last this becomes an inner certainty
for the ruling castes themselves. They regard themselves as the chosen
ones and think that they recognize in themselves externally the marks of
men of privilege. Thus arose in Spain the belicf in the sangre azul, the
“blue blood” of the nobility, which is first mentioned in the medieval
chronicles of Castile. Today they appeal to the blood of the “noble race”
which allegedly has been called to rule over all the peoples of the world.
It is the old idea of power, this time disguised s race. Thus one of the
best known defenders of the modern race idea declares with noble self.
assurance: “All Nordic culture is power culture; all Nordic talent s talent
for matters of power, for matters of enterprise and world-making, whether
in the material or in the spiritual realm, in the state, in art, in research.” %

All advocates of the race doctrine have been and are the associates and
defenders of every political and social reaction, advocates of the power
principle in its most brutal form. Gobineau stood squarely in the camp
of the counter-revolution and made no bones about his purpose of attack-
ing by his teaching “democracy and its weapon, the revolution.” The
slave-owners of Brazil and of the southern states of North America ap-
pealed also to his work to justify Negro slavery. Chamberlain’s Grund-
Iagen was an open declaration of war against all the achicvements of the
last hundred years in the direction of personal freedom and the social
equalization of men. He hated cverything which had sprung from the

L. F. Claus, Rause und Secle, p. $1.

336 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

“national socalism?” that probably presents the most gruesome enlivening
of aapitalstic platitudes with wornout socialistic slogans that was ever
thought of. Under this banner, and with the lovely motto, “Germany,
awake! Judah, perish!” they made their way into the Dritte Reich.

But crazier still was the picture when the advocates of the race theory
set themselves to subject to the Nordic bloodtest the great personlities
of history. What they got out of it could be written on no single parch-
ment, though it were made from the skin of the famous Cloudow
Audumla of the Norse saga. First, there is Gocthe, whose character
portrait in the race-books is suspiciously shaky. The appearance of this
“most German of all Germans” is certainly very litcle like the representa.
tion of 2 Germanic man. To begin with, he lacked the “sparkling sky-blue
eye” the blond hair and several other features which alone make the
100 percent Nordic. Regardless of this, Chamberlain rates him s the
most perfect genius of the Germanic race and recognizes in Faust the
ripest product of the German mind. Albrecht Wirth s of the opinion, in
which anthropologists seem to be fairly well agrecd, that Goethe was 3
non-Nordic; and most anthropologists see in him a product of the Alpine
race. Lenz recognizes in Goethe a Levantine.Germanic hybrid. Duhring
questions the Aryan descent of Goethe and believes that he recognizes
in him Semiti trats. Hans Hermann goes farthest of all, In his Sanatorium
of Free Love he presents this picture of the greatest of German poets:
“One looks now at Gocthe; these protruding brown eyes, this nose slightly
hooked at the i, this long body with its short legs, with even slightly
‘melancholy” expression; and we have before us the very prototype of &
descendant of Abraham.”

Lessing, whose creative work was of such decisive and profound
signifiance for the intellectual development of Germany, s honored by
Dricsmans as the living embodiment of the German spirit. Diihring, on
the contrary, sought to adduce proofs that the author of Nathan had Jewish
blood in his veins. Even the noses of Schiller and Richard ‘Wagner
aroused the scorn of the race sniflers, and Schiller was 25 good as done
for when Adolf Bartels, the literary pope in the present Hitlerite state,
traced the “unGermanic” in Schiller’s works to Celtic admixtures in his
blood.

For Chamberlain Napoleon I was the living embodiment of all Non-
Germandom. But Woltmann discovered in him a blond-haired German,
and Havser opincs: “If one sees in him ‘Corsican’ one assigns him to 2
group in which he is an exception; in the North Ttalian nobility, however,
to which he belongs, one finds all the splendid condottieri of the Renais.
sance and perccives at once that he is to be counted with these.” * As to
this, we may note that the notion that Napolcon sprang from 2 line of

Rane und Kultur, p. 14

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 335

same Germanic spirit and in support of this view tried to prove that most
of the leading minds of the revolution were of German origin. While
for Gobineau the slogan of the revolution, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,”
was merely the utterance of a completely unleashed racial misture, Hauser
tells us: “The demand for liberty, equality and fraternity is genuinely
Protestant, but it holds good only for the selection which Protestantism
makes, only for groups like that.” In another place in the same work
he says: “The revolution begins as the work of Germans and Germanoids
and on the basis of 2 Germanic idea; it finds an echo in all those of higher
race; but it ends in the witches’ sabbath of the unshackled impulse of the
baseborn mass, which hts made use of the Germanic ‘heavenly light' only
%0 be beastlier than any beast.’ * Now does this mean that the Germanic
desceat of the French nobility of which Gobineau tells us was just an idle
boast, or are we here dealing with an annihilating war of Germans against
Germans, a sort of race-suicide?

That Marx and Lassalle were Jews by descent i, for men of the stamp
of Philipp Stauff and Theodor Fritsch and their kind, the best proof that
the sociaist doctrine is based on the Jewish mentality and is alien to the
racial fecling of Nordic man. That the enormous majority of the founders
of socialism were non-Jews and that the socialist movement found quite 25
easy entrance into Germanic countries as into Romanic and Slavie has for
these gentlemen just as litle significance as the fact that Mare and
Lassalle were influenced most deeply and permanently in their mental
development, not by the ideology of Judaism, but by the philosophy of
Hegel. As for the idea of socialism itself, Woltmann explains, that it has
its most convinced adherents in the German sections of The proletarian
population on account of their blood, because in the Germanic clements
the urge to freedom finds strongest expression. Gobineau, on the contrary,
recognizes in socialism a typical sign of Mongolism and the covetousness
of the born slave, hence his outspoken contempt for the workers, to whom
he denies any sustained cultural ambition. Driesmans designates the
scialsts a3 “Celto-Mongolians.” Chamberlain scents in the socialistic move.
ment everywhere the influence of Jewish ideology, which in this move-
ment pursues its aim of utterly destroying the Germanic spirit in Germans.
Dihring, however, declared categorieally: “The Jewish social democracy
is a reactionary gang whose state enforced actvities tend, not toward free-
dom and good husbandry, but toward the universality of bondage and
exploitation through enforced service to the state i the interest of leading
Jews and associations of Jews.” * And so that nothing might be lacking
o this crazy pot-pourri, the “rough riders” of the race theory in Germany
declared a holy war against Judaized Marsism and proclaimed 1 so<alled

2 Die Germanen in Europe, pp. 149-150.
Sache, Leben, und Feinds, p. 107.

334 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

French Revolution. It is mere matter of course that one finds among the
exponents of the race theory no trace of understanding of the economic,
political and social causes of that great European upheaval. Just as gypsies
read the fate of a man in the lines in his hand, so the soothsayers of the
race theory read from the portraits of the lcading spirits of that storm.
lashed time the whole story of the Revolution and its “blood-determined”
causes. “We know that 2 man must of necessity behave as his appearance
indicates, and that this law can manifest itself as well in the most primitive
a8 well as in the most complicated and confused fullness of expression,
that it must remain always and everywhere the timeless and unchanging
Iaw of the inheritance of life.” 22

This masterly exposition, which disposes of the most diffcult question
with which science has dealt for many decades as if it were the most
matter of course affair in the world, is quite astounding. “We know!”
Who knows? How do we know? Who cstablished this “law” of which
our author speaks? No one! No science! We are dealing here merely with
an empty assertion that is not worth a bad penny. In fact, the author tried
from the portraits of Louis XVI, Mirabeay, Madame Roland, Robespierre,
Danton, Marat, to establish the inner law of their behavior and to infer
it from the degree of their racial mixture. Unfortunately this deduction
rests on no Jaw but merely on imagination, which is neither “Gmelcss”
nor “unchanging.” There may be men whose character is written on their
forchead, but there arc not many of them; for types like Karl and Franz
Moor live only in works of fiction; in actual life one seldom mects them.
No one is able to recognize the mental and moral characters of a man
from his external features; the most expert physiognomists could hardly
read the importance of any of the great personages of history from their
faces. This ability is usually revealed only when one knows with whom
he is dealing; and it would not have been so casy for the author of our
selected work to pass judgment on persons like Mirabeau, Robespierre,
Marat or Danton if these men had their historic roles stll to play.

‘Gobineau saw in the great revolution only the revolt of “Celto-Romanic
mongreldom” against the Germanic ruling class of the French nobility
and damned the whole tremendous movement with the virulent hatred
of the royalist, who on principle condemned every attempt to destroy
the divinely ordained order. The revolution was for him the slave-revolt
of men of baser race, whom he already despised because. they were the
exponents of those modern revolutionary and democratic ideas in Europe
which had struck a deathblow at the ancient master caste, Chamberlain
judged the revolution from a like point of view, since he, like Gobineau,
saw in demtocracy and liberalism the deadly foc of the Germanic spirit.
In contrast, Woltmann saw in the revolution 2 demonstration of that

. 86.

A, Hartar, Ravie Menschen con Gertern und Morgen. Leipris,

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 338

popes toward the Papacy and Christianity. So, while the Papacy was
represented for a while by an almost uninterrupted line of Germans, it
was nevertheless an un-German, un-Nordic idea”

‘How are we to find our way n all this? What sort of strange thing is
this “Nordic racial soul”? It glimmers with all the colors of 2 chameleon.
It is popish and antipopish, Catholic and Protestant. The Voice of the
Blood in it is opposcd to the rulership of a privileged priestly caste and
rejects the thought of a world hicrarchy, but at the same time its repre-
sentatives exert every effort to bring the world under the yoke of the
Papacy, whose forms are derived from “the Oriental despotism of the
Semites”; and the matter becomes still more interesting when we learn ©
that Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, was a blond-haired
descendant of Germans—as Woltmann and Hauser assert. Here, as in
the case of Beethoven, it scems that a dirty trick was played on nature.
Think of it: Loyols, a blond-haired, blue-cyed German, the warlike herald
and acknowledged preacher of the counter-Reformation; and Martin
Luther, the “soul of the German Reformation,” a dark-haired man, of
stocky figure, with brown cyes, who exhibits so plainly the outward
characteristics of the “Eastern” that even Gunther, Hauser and Wolt-
‘mann cannot deny this! That Gobineau in his work on race and elsewhere
makes laudatory mention of the controlling hand of the Catholic church,
and in his Ottar Jorl damas heartily every heresy against Holy Mother
Church, does not tend to simplify the matter. And, as if all this were not
enough, Hauser assures us that the Reformation was a “movement of
the blood” and indicates the “displacing of the mixed-race spirit by the
Nordic” 1 And he says this just after he has, a few pages farther back,
drawn for us this picture of the men of the Reformation: “What was lefc
of Germany had reached the lowest point of its cultural and racal ebb
about 1500. The Germans were at that time usually so ugly that Direr
and his forerunners and contemporarics in their realistic paintings are
almost never able to present a beautiful, clear<ut, noble countenance,
only features of a quite beastly repulsiveness; and even in their representa-
tions of the divine personages and saints from sacred history they were
very seldom able to depict a halfway beautiful being because they had
not even models to follow.” But these men of the “racial ebb,” after all,
made the Reformation. How explain that this “movement of the blood"
which displaced the “mixed-race spirit” occurred just at the time when,
according to Hauser’s own statement, Germany had reached the “lowest
point of its cultural and racial ebb”?

Let one take any period whatever of human history and one stumbles
always on these same contradictions. There is, for example, the great

Die Germanen in Europo, p. 113.
4 Raue und Kulr, p. 331
3% NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

and declarcs that they had no understanding of the sentiment of honor—
as we see, the purest “Oriental.”

profundity and divorces itself most definitely from every Semitic
concept. For Judaism is the complete antithesis of the Christian religion;
any philosophic synthesis of the Jewish and the Germanic mind, even in
religion, is quite unthinkable. On the other hand, Albrecht Wirth sees in
Christanity a product of the Jewish-Hellenic mind, which undertook, as
the “despised Jew fled from the misery of the outer world, to erect about
it a higher inner world.” " While Eugen Dithring condemns Christianity
utterly because by its influence the Judaizing of the Aryan mind was
accomplished.** Ludwig Neuner accuses the Frankish kings of having
stolen from our ancestors and utterly destroyed “the ancient, indigenous
faith that sprang from a childlike view of nature” and forcing on them
instead “a harsh system of religion of outspokenly international charac-
ter”1* Then Erich Mahlmeister assures us, in his cssay, Fir deutsche
Geistesfreiheit: “Cl ity is of an unmanly, slavish nature, directly
opposed to the German nature.” On the person of Christ he passes judg-
ment thus: “The outast traitor to his country of a hatred race is the God
before whom the German is expected to bend his knee.

Ginther, Hauser, Clauss, sce in Protestantism 2 spiritual movement
of the Nordic race, and Lapouge, as well, sces in it “the attempt to adapt
Chrisianity to_the specific type of the Aryan race.” Chamberlsin, too,
is a decided opponent of the Catholic church and refers in his Grundlagen
to the Semitic origin of the Papacy. He sees in the latter the exact antithesis
of the Germanic spirit, which recognizes no priestly caste and is emotionally
opposed to 2 world hierarchy. For him, thercfore, the Reformation s the
revolt of Nordic man against the Semitic Cacsarism of Rome and one of
the greatest deeds of Germanism in general. Against this, Woltmann
exalts the Papacy as the glorification of Germanism and takes great pains
to demonstrate the Germanic descent of most of the popes. He was
especially impressed by that “child of the Goths,” Hildebrandt, who sat
on the papal throne 25 Gregory VII and was the real founder of the
temporal power of the Papacy. Otto Hauser, however, explins this patent
confusion of the Germanic spirit as follows: “It is characteristic of the
power hunger of Nordic man that he is able to employ all his force in
every undertaking and unhesitatingly makes use of every means to an
end. We know how extremely frivolous was the attitude of many of the

11 Das Auf und Ab der Valker, Leipsi, 1920, . 84.

1 Die Judenfrage dl Frege der Rawensehidlichket i Exitens, Sitte und Keliar
der Vlker. See also, Sache, Leben und Feinde.

Deutrche Gott-Natur-Kunde,

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 33

mankind which surrounds him and which he sees at an infinite distance
beneath him.” 16
We do not maintain that only the German is capable of such deluded
notions. Every belief in a chosen religion, nation or race leads to similar
monstrosites, But we must recognize that among no other people has
the race theory found such wide acceptance or inspired a literature of
such general circulation as among the Germans. It seems almost as
the Germany of 1871 had wished to make up for what its greatest spi
before the foundation of the empire, because of their broadly humanistic
attitude, had fortunately omited.
‘The exponents of race doctrine find themsclves in the enviable position
that they can venture the most extravagant assertions with no need to
trouble themselves about intelligible proofs. Since they themselves know
that most of these assertions cannot be maintained on the basis of their
scientific value, they appeal to the infallibility of the race instinct, which
allegedly gives clearer insight than is vouchsafed to the painstaking cx-
perience of scientific research. IF this famous instinct of race weré real
and demonstrable to everybody it would get along very nicely with
ence, since the “Gnner voice” or “race in one’s own bosom” would bring
certainty to men on every diffcult question, even when science failed.
But in that event we should expect at least the most distinguished advo-
cates of the race theory to be in complete agreement and to voice a certain
unanimity in their conclusions. But here is just the trouble. There is hardly
a single question of fundamental importance about which those in the
camp of the race ideologists are even halfway agreed. Often their views
are so far apart that no bridging of the difference is conceivable. Just
few instances of this from the thousands:
In his work, Rasse und Kultur, Otto Hauser informs us that the
Greeks “were a strictly blond people who, quite of themselves, attained
to 2 height of culture that will always arouse admiration, will always
serve as a model as long as the related Nordic blood flows in any people,
in any human being.” Woltmann, Giinther, and others have said the
same thing in other words—basing their opinion, doubtless, on the same
“Nordi instinet” which permeates the related blood through the millennia.
But Gobineau, the real founder of the race theory, found nothing good
to say of the Greeks; rather he constantly disparaged them in every way,
because of his ingrained hatred of democracy. In his 1,200-page Histoire
des Perses he praises the culture of the Persians in exaggerated terms and
pictures Greece 25 2 halfbarbaric country with no culture of its own worth
mentioning. Gobincau even denies to the Hellenes every moral quality

Werner Sombart, Hindler und Helden, Patriotiche Besinmungen, Munich,
1915, p. 143
330 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

the fate of Germany the conviction of the inevitability of the “German
war,” of which they talked so much in Chamberlain’s circle. In a widely
circulated work in which war is hailed as “midwife of all culture” Othmar
‘Spann declares: “We must desire this war just to prove that all its burden
will rest on us, that we alone must fight it out with all the power that the
lordly Germanic race has manifested throughout the millennia.” 14

‘This spirit was cherished through the decades and gradually reared
© that fatalistc delusion which views all history under the aspect of race.
Spann was not the only one who played with the race war of the future.
At the conference of the All.deutscher Verband (“All-German Union”)
of November 30, 1913, the question of the coming war held the most
prominent place. There was talk of the “decisive struggle between the
collective Slavic peoples and Germankind” by Baron von Stéssel and
others; and Dr. Reuter-Hamburg declared that it “is our chief task to
inform the people about the real grounds of the war which is probably

ing,” which is to be regarded only as a “battle of united Slavism
against Germanism.” When the German administration brought in its
new safety proposals in April, 1913, Bethmann-Holweg based the new
provisions on the necessity of preparing for the threatened clash between
Slavs and Germans. Although the groupings of the powers at the begin-
ning of war must prove to every person of insight that there could be
no talk here of a “war of the races” there were sill not lacking those
who saw in the frightful catastrophe only the incvitable impact of races.
Even so widely known a historiographer 2s Karl Lamprecht published
in the Berliner Tageblatt of August 23, 1914, an cssay in which he
spoke of a “war of Germandom and Latin [Catholic] Slavdom against
the invading Oriental barbarism.”

Lamprecht discovered then that Scandinavia, Holland, Swiczerland, and
America had been led by racial fecling to favor the German cause, and he
announced. jubilantly “Blood will telll” The illusion of having America
a8 an ally even led him to proclaim the living future of 2 “Teutonic-Ger-
manic racel” And since very finally England did not fit into this scheme,
the great historian emphasizes: “Just observe that the central land of the
Britsh world-empire & no longer dominated by 2 pure Germanic spiri
but rather by the Celtic.” 13

1If the race theory can produce such incurable delusion in the brain of
a scholar of worldwide renown, need we wonder at the crazy presumption
of an economist like Sombart, who at that day of the world could announce:
“Just as the German bird, the Eagle, soars high above all other animals
on earth, just so shall the German feel himself exalted above all that

" Zur Soziologie und Philorophie det Krieges, 1913.
F. Herw: Rone und Kultar,

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 329

those inconvenicnt geniuses whom he, the devoid of genius, cannot beat in
fair fight1*

In another place in his works Hauser tells his readers:

The Eastern is vulgar in his sexulity. One cannot be with him half
an hour before he begins telling not merely indecent storics, but his own sex
experiences and passibly even those of his wifc; and the women entertain the
listeners with accounts of their menstrual difficultics. His brats bedaub the
walls with vulvas and phalluses and make dates for sexual intercourse at
public comfort-stations. .

One can hardly trust one’s eyes when one reads such stuff. The first
impression is that one is dealing with a discased mind, for this joyous
wallowing in the imagined sexulity of another surely springs from a
pervested disposition and 2 morbid imagination incapable of healthy per-
ceptions. Let us be clear about the monstrousness of these accusations
which are published thus to the whole world. They throw this filth at 3
whole body of human beings, numbering millions in their own countries,
and ascribe to them alleged “character traits” which really spring only
from their own discased and unclean imagination. This sort of “demonstra-
tion is characteristic of the methods of the presentday race ideologists;
it also i typical of the mental degradation of the men who do not hesitate
even to draw on the sccrcts of the comfort.tation in order to hang some-
thing on the “racial cnemy” and so to satisfy their own dirty instincts.
And this poison has been poured into the country for years by countless
books, pamphlets and newspaper articles. Let no one be surprised if this
sowing of dragon’s teeth shall some day germinate. For the absurdity of
the presentday nationalistic movement in Germany s just this: that it
rests on the race theory and that its advocates in their blindness fail to
see that they ar destroying with their own hands the strongest bulwark
of the nation, the inbred feeling of national cohesion.

1f one is not sufficiently deluded to be able thus to insult the members
of his own nation, he can casily see how this race fatalism must operate
against other peoples. Out of the shortsighted belief in the divinely
ordained superiority of the noble race follows logically the belief in its
“historical mission.” Race becomes a question of-destiny, a dream of the
renewal of the world by the conscious will of Germankind. And since
one cannot admit that all peoples will view the approaching destiny from
just the same angle of vision, war becomes the only solution. Expericnce
has shown us where that leads. The belief that “In Germankind the world
once more its weal will find” (Am dewsschen W esen einmal noch die Wels
genesen) vouses in just those classes which had the greatest influence on

% Rase und Kultar, Brsunschweig, p. 69.
128 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

isic sprit” if the ideas of man are only the outcome of hereditary factors
inherent in his blood? Must we not conclude from this cither that the
Jew is much more closely akin to s by blood than our race ideologists are
willing to admit or that the blood-determined hereditary characteristis
are too weak to withstand foreign ideas?

But the attacks of modern race doctrine are not directed solely against
the Jews; in evén greater force they are massed against a section of thei
own people, against the offspring of the socalled “Alpine race” which
Giinther rebaptized “Eastern.” When Ginther, Hauser, Clauss and thei
associates speak of the Eastern peoples they become downright malicious,
That the Eastern race settled in the very heart of Europe is, according
to Gunther, a great misfortunc, for with its “impure blood” it constantly
threatens the exalted Nordic, whose mixture with this “talentless” “un.
creative” race leads only to ruin. The Eastern is the exact opposite of the
Nordic man. If in the latter the “spirit of the commander” finds its most
distinguished expression, in the former lives only the “sullen soul” of
the pikeman capable of no great campaign. The Eastern is the “born
pacifit,” the “mass man”; hence his preference for democracy, which grows
out of his need to pull down everything superior to himself, He has no
heroic traits and no feeling at all for the greatness of the fatherland
and the nation. The Easterns are the “men of Jean Paul, already plentiful
enough, in fact, far too plentiful, in Germany.” They make good sub-
jects, but they can never be leaders; only the Nordic man is 1 predestined
leader (sce Hitler and Gocbbels). But that is not all.

“Sexual intercourse among near relatives, also between brothers and
sisters and parents and children, is, I am assured by country doctors, ssid
not to be unusual in those districts settled by Easterns, The Eastern mind,
perhaps because of its origin, is not acquainted with the idea of incest.” 1+

Otto Hauser has the worst things to say about Eastern man, of whom
he presents the following charming picturc:

He will do anything for money. He would unhesitatingly sell his honor
it he had any. He is the born democrat and capitalist. - » . The Eastern
man is more lascivious than. the pure races or than the other mixed races.
He makes men and women dance naked on the stage or wrestle with one
another. He loves to read about perversions and practices them when he can
afford it. He enslaves woman and is enslaved by her. He advocates indi-
vidualism in the sense that everyone i to do what he pleases, vilate girls and
young boys, employ any means in social, mental, or policcal contests. And
though it is contrary to all rules of sportsmanship to grasp an opponent by
the genital, he, who advocates in general the frecing of all desire, likes
to make use of the practice when he wants to drag down to is own level

L. F. Claus, Ra

und Secle, p. 118.
NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 327

same natural and social environment have certain outer and inner charac-
ters in common. These resemblances are more. manifest between members
of the same family than in a tribe or a people; and yet what immeasorable
contrasts of character on finds when one goes decper into the mental
and spiritual make-up of the individual members of famly. In gencral
the so called “collective character” of 1 people, a nation or a ace expresses
merely the personal views of individuals which are taken up by sthers
and thoughtlessly repeated.

What, for instance, are we to think when Ginther in his Rassenkunde
des jidischen Volkes has this to say about the socalled “Oriental racet
“This race came out of the desert and their mental attitude inclines them
o allow formerly cultivated Jands to become desert again This s empty
tile based on nothing at all. In the first place, we lack any historial
evidence that this race in fact came out of the descrt; and in the next
place, who is to produce proof that in the members of this race there
really resides the instinct to “let cultivated lands become desert agai
But Giinther needed this construction of history to convince his roaders
of the utter worthlessness of the Jews. Yet, in Palestine, the Jews were
an agricultural people; their whole legislation was built around this fact,
The Arabs changed Spain into 2 garden of which great portions became
desert again after the expulsion of the Moors,

Fear of the Jews has developed among the advocates of the race theory
into a genuine race pani. It is aditted, of course, even in those circles,
that actually no such thing as a Jewish race exists, and that the Jews,
like all other peoples, are a mixture of cvery possible racil clement.
Modern race theoreticians go so far as to asert that along with Levantine,
Oriental, Hamitic and Mongolian blood, cven a drop or two of Nordic
blood flows in the veins of Jews! Nevertheless, it seems that of all races
the Jewish has the worst inheritance. There is hardly any evil quality
that hostile imagi il
inventor of socialism, and at the same time he let ca
World. He has infected all countries with his liberal ideas and losened
2l bonds of authority; sill, his religion is a creed of strictest suthority,
& cult of the utmost despotism. He caused the War and invoked the
revolution. He scems to have just the one sccret purpose of hatching out
subtle conspiracics against the noble Nordic man. We are assured that
mixture of blood destroys the original characteristics of race anid diverts
the course of its mental and spiritual tendencics. How comes i, then, that
50 highly mixed a race as the Jews have for two thousand years been able
12 preserve their religious system in spite of the horrible persecutions they
have endured because of it? Must one not infer from thes that there ars
in history other factors than hereditary racial characterites? And o
comes it that the Jews could poison the whole world with their “modern.

sau NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

human culture has proceeded, how came it that in its Nordic homeland
it was unable to bring forth any culture worth mentioning? Why did its
“inborn culture.making capacity” unfold only in distant zones and far
from its native Why must we go to Greece and Rome to find 2
Sophocles, a Praxitcles, a Pericles, a Demosthenes, an_ Alexander, an
Augustus, a_hundred others, who are honored by the Giinthers, Wolt-
manns and Hausers as representatives of the Nordic race? The fact is,
alas, that the Nordic man revealed his celebrated culturebuilding powers
only in anather environment and in association with forcign peoples. For
the “proud Viking voyages” with which the books on race are all ablaze
could hardly be described s cultural activities. On the contrary, they all
too frequently threatened culture and laid waste valuable elements of it,
as the robber-aids of Goths, Vandals, Normans and other Germanic tribes
show clearly enough.

All modern race theorists are, however, agreed that the capacity for
state-making was the most important characteristic of Nordic man, which
destined him alone to be the leader and guide of peoples and nations.
I this is true, how is it that Nordic man in those very Nordic lands never
set up a great kingdom, lke, for example, that of Alexander, the Roman
Caesars, or Genghis Khan, but always stayed shut up in little communities?
It really seems rather odd that this crowd which has so much to sty about
the state-building genius of the blond Nordi, in the same breath bewails
the eternal disunion of the Germanic tribes as one of the most lamentable.
‘manifestations of their character and warns the present-day Germans of
the fatal consequences of this bad habit of their forcbears, Such 2 state
of affairs is surely hard to reconcile with the capacity to weld together
great kingdoms and nations; a fact—we may remark in passing—that is
1o great misfortunc. The impulse of the Germanic tribes to split up, which
is quite proverbial, goes very poorly, in fact, with their alleged capacity
for state-building. The blond Nordic acquired this only in foreign parts
when the powerconcepts of the Roman Empire came to him as 2 new
revelation—and a catastrophe.

We do not mean to deny to “Nordic man” cultural capacity or other
valuable characters. Nothing is farther from our intent than to fall into
the opposite crror from that of the race ideologists. But we guard our.
selves with all modesty against the immeasurable arrogance of those
persons who dare to deny to other races not only all deep fecling for
culture bu every idea of honor and fidelity. In the end, all the talk about
the “race soul” is nothing but an idle playing with imaginary ideas. The
method which brings all human groups mentally and spiritually under
single norm is a monstrosity which can but lead to the most perniciously
erroneous conclusions. 1t is not to be disputed that men who have repro-
duced for centuries in the same territory and under the influence of the

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 325

compact unity, but each separate character by itself or in separate con-
stellations. Therefore, not only may both pure and mixed characters occur
in the offspring; there exists for each of them the possi ility of every
conceivable combination of the parental hereditary primordia.

There are no longer any pure races, least of all in Europe. The
so<alled “fundamental races” of Eurape are today so thoroughly jumbled
together that racially pure peoples are simply not to be found. This holds
true especially for Germany, which because of its geographical situation i
the heart of the continent seems to have been made for 3
tribes and peoples. At the time of the
left the old homeland in troops and moved towards the south, where
the Nordic blood gradually fused with that of the indigenous “racealien.”
Slavie tribes, which invaded the land from the east, took possession of the
halfemptied territories and spread in the north as far as the Elbe and
in the south as far as the Regnitz. Up to the middle of the eleventh
century the Thuringian Forest was called the Slavenwald, and one can
recognize in the appearance of the population there the strong influence
of Slavie blood even today. The ancient population of Germany was com-
pletely recast by these continued intermixtures of blood. The Germans
have long ceased to correspond to the description that Tacitus once wrote
of the Germanic people. Not only have the physical characterisics altered,
the mental and spiitual characters, too, have undergone a profound
change. Among the sixty millions which today inhabit Germany there
is probably hardly one person whom one could describe s a pure Nordi,
Itis, therefore, one of the strangest delusions that men have ever harbored
that out of this variegated mixture there can be redistilled one of the old
“basic races.” One must, i fact, be a race-theoretician to be able to think
such things. The whole nordification Utopia is as Brunhold Springer
dlverly remarks—not an undertaking, but an Old German community
playn e

It is the extremes which mutually attract one another, especially in
the love of the sexes. The blond will always be more drawn to the brunctte
than to one of his own type. It is the strange that charmes and allures and
scts the blood astir, The very fact that there are no pure races and tht
all peoples are mixtures proves that the voice of nature is stronger than
that of race or of blood. Even the strictest castes of India were not able
to preserve their racial purity. The “Nordic man” of Gunther and his
followers s a purcly imaginary picture. The belief in a race which unites
in itself every feature of physical beauty along with the most exalted
qualiies of mind and spirit is a wonder-faith, dream notion, which cor.
responds to nothing in the past o the future.

1fthe Nordic race were in fat the miraculous entity from which every

* Brunhold Springer, Die Blutmischung als Grundgesesz des Lebans, Berlin,

324 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

Boden (“A New Nobility from the Blood and the Soil”), for the breed-
ing of & new nobility on special Hegehsfen (“breeding farms”). Herr
Darré wishes to bring the propagation of the nation under constant super-
vision by establishing “breed-wardens.” For this purpose special “herd-
books” and “farily records” are to be prepared for all women. ALl virgins
arc to be divided into four classes to whom on the basis of special “breed-
ing laws” marriage is to be permitted or denied according to their racial
characteristics and fitness for childbearing. On March 12, 1930, the Na-
ional Socialists introduced in the Reichstag the following addition to
Asticle 218 of the Criminal Code:

Whoever undertakes artificilly to restrict the natural ferdlity of the
German people to the injury of the nation, or by word, writing, print,
tre, or in any other way to assst such attempts, or whoever by mat
with members of the Jewih blood-community or of the colored races con-
tributes or threatens i contribute to the corruption and disintegration of
the German peole shall be punished by imprionment for racial tresson.

On December 31, 1931, the national administration of Hitlers Storm
Troopers issued a decree that after January 1, 1932, a marriage license
should be issued to every Storm Trooper by a socalled “Racc-office.”
This curious document, which pleads for the “preservation by hygienic
heredity of a distinct German-Nordic species,” and makes reference to a
“book of kinship of the S. S.,” gave us the first forctaste of the glories
of the Third Reich. It is characteristic that the same crowd which peddles
its “German idealism” so insistently and with such profound moral
enthusiasm combats the “materialistic debasement” of Germany, values
sexual relations purely from the viewpoint of the breeder and would
reduce the lovelife of men to the level of the breeding stall and the
stud-farm. After the “rationalization of industry,” the rationalization of
sexual intercourse—what a future!

But all the talk about nordification s entirely worthless because all the
conditions for such process are lacking. Even if the race were not a mere
idea, but an actual living unity whose characteristics were transmitted to
their progeny in their entirety, stll such 2 project could not be under.
taken. A farmer may be in 2 position to breed his oxen, cows or swine
for the production of meat, milk or fat, but to breed human beings for
definite moral and intellectual characterisics is quite another matter. All
experiments which have so far been made on plants and animals have
shown that a race never enters a mixture as a whole. So long as human
beings with like or with very similar racial characteristics kecp to them-
selves and propagate only their own circle their peculiar characters
reappear more or less conjoined and in like relations. When, however,
mixture with other racial clements occur, then race is not inherited a5 2

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 323

of the Vikings” which is supposed to have been the outstanding charac-
teristic of Nordic race is, in these same Scandinavian lands, as good a5
extinguished. The phrase “born pacifists,” which was invented by Ganther
and his satellites especially to bring the so<alled “Oriental man” into
moral disreputc, fits no one better than the present-day Scandinavians.
They merely show that the latest destiny-faith of race is the shallowest
faalism that has ever been devised; it is the most pitiful and degrading
surrender of the spirit to the cannibalistic delusion of the “voice of the
blood.”
In order to prevent the submersion of the “Noble Race” they have
, in Germany, on the grand idea of “nordification,” which has led
cunning minds to the most daring proposals. The nordification theory has
during the past ten years called forth a whole flood of literary productions
than which anything more grotesque would be hard to find. No other
country can approach Germany in this. Most of those strange saints who
obtrude themselves in Germany today as reformers of scxual relations
wish to put procreation under the controlling hand of the state. Others
stand openly for the legal introduction of polygamy in order to put the
Nordic race the quicker on its somewhat weakened legs. And, 5o that the
lord of the family may come into his rights “in the midst of this effeminate
old world”—as Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s spiritual adviser, 5o pic-
tresquely expresses it—Herr Richard Rudolf in_his essay, Geichlechis.
moral, defends polygamy, not only because it provides a means for raising
the fecundity of the Nordic race to its highest capacity, but also because
is institution better corresponds to the polygamous instincts of the male.
Inspired adherents of nordification 2 few years ago called to life 2
special movement for the advocacy of the so<alled “Midgard marriage”
‘whose sponsars proposed the founding and financing of special settlements
where Nordic men and women sclected for this purpose should, in
loving collaboration, devote themselves to the exalted task of preventing
the decline of the noble race. There were to be ten women for every man.
‘The marriage was to be regarded 2s sort of bond of pregnancy which
was to last only till the birth of the child, unless both the mates cxpressed
a wish to prolong the union. In his book, Weltanschauung und Men-
schenziichtung, Health Coms er F. Dupré advocated a socalled
“emporary marriage” which was to serve merely for breeding purposes.
A stateappointed “Counil of Elders” was to supervise these matters.
“The couple must be brought together purely for the purpose of propaga-
tion,” declares this curious elaboration. “When this has been accomplished
they are to separate. . . . The expenses of this breeding are to be borne
by the state.” Very much like Hentschel, the inventor of the “Midgard
marciage,” Herr Walther Darré, later Germany's National Socialistic
Minister of Nutrition, sets to work, in his book, NewAdel aus Blus nd

322 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

remarkable race is this which allegedly fecls itself drawn toward foreign

ideas and forcign customs s iron is drawn to the magnet? This unnatural
phenomenon might easily make us think that we have here a morbid
degenerate form of the “Nordic race-soul”—which otherwise is shown
clearly cnough by the whole “race” rubbish of our time. It is still more
remarkable that the cnraptured worshipers of the Nordic wonderrace
constantly strive to eliminate these moral blemishes of their idol and in
the same breath announce that race is destiny. If this is true, what is the
use of all the indoctrination? OF what use that Giinther and. his “Nordic
Ring"—a sort of Blue-Blond International—try by all means to prevent
a war between the Nordic peoples in the future; or that Otto Hauser
proclaims to an astonished world that the principal strategists of the World
War on both sides were blond Nordics and honors the French General
Joffre as 2 “blond Goth”? All the worse if this is o. It then merely proves
that blond Nordics on opposite sides have killed one another for 2 cause
which according to their blood was alien to them; above all it proves that
the inborn “voice of the blood” could not prevail against the economic and
politcal interests about which the war was fought.

‘The French race ideologist, Vacher de Lapouge, once announced that
in the twentieth century “we shall kill one another by.the millions because
of one or two degrees more or less in the cephalic index,” and that “by this
sign, which will replace the biblical shibboleth and kinship of language,
related races will recognize one another, and the last sentimentalist will
live to see a mighty extermination of peoples.” Even the bald and terrible
reality of the war was less fantastic than the bloodthirsty imagination of
this race f . In the World War we did not smash skulls because they
were a little longer o shorter, but because the opposing interests within
the capitalistic world had grown to such a degree that the war scemed
to the ruling classes the only available way by which they could hope to
escape from the blind alley into which they had gotten themselves. In
the late World War the most various races fought shoulder to shoulder
on both sides. We even drew black men and yellow into the catastrophe
ith us, without any hindrance from the “voice of the blood,” to let them-
selves be slaughtered for interests which were certainly not their own.

‘Peoples have not infrequently undergone a fundamental change in
their morals and customs which could in no way be traced to racial cross-
ing. According to the unanimous testimony of all recognized race theorists,
men of the Nordic race are today most numerous in the Scandinavian
countrics, especially in Sweden. But these very Swedes, Norwegians and
Dancs have in the course of their history expericnced a profound change
in their ancient ways of living. Those very countries which were once
hated and feared as the home of the most warlike tribes in Europe now
harbor the most peaceful population on the continent. The famous “spirit

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 321

The child confronts these things quite without comprehension untl it
gradually learns to adjust itself to them.

And love? With how many prohibitions, duties and grotesque customs
has man hedged in this most elemental of his impulses. Even among
primitive peoples there exist a great mass of morals and customs which
are sanctified by sage and respected by public opinion. Human imag
tion invented the cult of Astarte in Babylon and that of Mylitta in Assyria,
the sexual religions of India and the asceticism of the Christian saints. 1t
ereated all the institutions of sexual behavior: polygamy, polyandry,
‘monogamy, and all of the forms of promiscuity from the “sacred prostitu.
tion” of the Semitic_ peoples to the sequestration by the state of the
‘women of the street. It brought the whole gamut of sexual passion under
strict rule and developed definite views which today are deeply rooted in
the minds of men. And yet here are at work also merely acquired
concepts, customs, institutions, which have found emotional e i
definite trained:in characteristcs. And i is just these characteristcs which

rect the love life of man into definite courses and constantly impel the
individual to quite distressing suppression of his inborn impulses. Even
the most cunning sophistry cannot avoid these facts.

Every phase of human history shows us the powerful influence of
religious, political and moral ideas on the social development of men,
the strong influence of the social conditions under which they live and
which in their turn react on the form of their ideas and opinions. This
eternal reciprocal influence constitutes the whole-content of history. Hun-
dreds of thousands of men have gone to their death for particular ideas,
very often with the most frightful accompaniments, and have by their
conduct defied the strongest inborn impulse that every living
being. And this has happened under the overpowering influence of ac-
quired ideas. Religions like Islam and Christianity have drawn peoples
of all races into their bonds. The same may be said of all the great popular
movements of history. We need but think of the Christian movement in
the decaying Roman Empire, of the great movements of the time of the
Reformation, of international floods of ideas like liberalism, democracy
or socialism, which have been able to exert their proselyting power upon
men and women of every social class and enlist them under their banners.
‘The peoples of the “Nordic race” have been no exception to this rule.

Our race alchemists have tried to save their faces by maintaining that
the peoples of the Nordic race have all too often been misled by ideas
that are racially alien to them and for which they had no real inner inclina-
tion. They all this incomprehensible invasion by “foreign custom” and
“forcign spirit” one of the most lamentable aspects of Germanism and of
the Nordic race in general. Such outbursts, which are quite common with
Ginther, Hauser, Neuner, and others, seem rather odd. What sort of

520 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

I it is indisputable that men like Socrates, Horace, Michelangelo,
Dante, Luther, Galileo, Rembrandt, Goya, Roussea, Pestalozzi, Herder,
Goethe, Beethoven, Byron, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, Balzac, Dumas,
Poe, Strindberg, Ibsen, Zola, and hundreds of others were of mixed race,
this is surely a proof that external racemarks have nothing to do with
the intellectual and moral qualities in man, It is really amusing to observe
with what excuses our modern race fetishists try to overcome these diff-
culties. Thus, Dr. Clauss accounted for Beethoven's inconvenient race
affinities quite simply by declaring: “Beethoven was, so far as his musical
ability is concerned, a Nordic man. The style of his work proves t
clearly cnough; and this is not altered at all by the fact that his body—
anthropologically considered, that i, just the mass and weight of his body
—perhaps was fairly pure Oriental.

As we see, the purest metempsychosis. What mysterious forces were
at work when the “Nordic race-soul” of Beethoven was stuck into 2 vile
Oriental body? Or did, perhaps, the Jews or the Freemasons have a hand

itl
There remains the last question, whether the qualities which man
acquires during the course of his life or which are imparted to him by the
culture in which he lives have actually no influence on his inherited factors.
I this could be proved, then indeed should we be compelled to speak of
a “Kismet of the blood” which no one could withstand. But how docs
the matter stand in reality? The power of the acquired characters reveals
itself every day in our lives and constantly conceals the inherited factors
with which we began our lfe journey. As examples we may take the two
strongest impulses—which in all living beings and in men of every race
and clime reveal themselves as equally powerful—hunger and love. Man
‘has surrounded these two instincts in which the whole vital energy of the
individual and the race exhausts itself, with such a network of age-old
customs and usages, which in the course of time have been erected into
defiite ethical principles, that the inborn urge in most cases no longer
asserts itself against this web of imparted and acquired concepts. Do we
not see every day how in our great cities thousands of miscrable, starving.
human beings silently sneak past the rich display in the show-windows
of our food stores? They devour these splendors with greedy cyes, but
very seldom does one of them dare to yield to the inborn impulse and
take what would serve for the satisfaction of his most urgent needs, Fear
of the law, dread of public opinion, inculcated respect for the rights of
property of others prove stronger than the drive of the inborn impulse.
And yet we are dealing here with acquired characters which are no more
transmissible by heredity than are the calloused hands of the blacksmith.

1 Rae und Seele. Munich, 1925, p. 60.

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 319

congenital factors and that acquired or imparted characters have no
essential influence on his destiny.

As t0 the first question, we have already shown that science knows a
whole series of firmly cstablished facts which prove irrefutably that action
of the environment on the hereditary factors does occur and produce
changes in them. The fact that numerous investigators have succeeded in
effecting a modification of hereditary factors by radiation, changes of
temperature, and so on, testifics to this. Besides, we have the effects of
domestication, the importance of which has been brought out with special
strength by Eduard Hahn and Eugen Fischer. Indeed, Fischer was led
to declare: “Man s a product of domestication, and it is domestication that
has caused his great variabi i g

Concerning the second point, no sophistry will help. Not a shadow of
proof can be adduced to show that external racial characters like the shape
of the skull, the color of the hair, slimmer or sturdier build, have any
relation to mental, spiritual or moral factors in mankind; so that, for
example, a tall, blond, blue-eyed Nordic because of his external physical
characters should possess moral and mental qualities which one would
not find in descendants of some other race. Our race ideologists claim
this, it is true, but their doctrine is completely untenable, and based on
assertions for the correctness of which they have not the slightest proof.

We have already emphasized that in the long line of persons of genius
who deserve credit for the intellectual culture of Germany there is hardly
one whose appearance corresponds even halfway to the ideal concept of
the “Nordic man.” And it is preciscly the greatest of them who are phys-
ically farthest from the fanciful picture of the Giinthers, Hausers and
Clausses. We need but think of Luther, Goethe, Beethoven, who lacked
almost completely the external marks of the “Nordic race,” and whom
even the most outstanding exponents of the race theory characterize 25
hybrids with Oriental, Levantine and Negro-Malayan strains in them.
It would look even worse if one should go so far s to apply the blood.
test to the champions in the arena of the race struggle like Hitler, Alfred
Rosenberg, Goebbels, Streicher, for example, and give these worthy repre-
sentatives of the Nordic race and the national interest the opportunity
to confirm their rulership of the Third Reich by virtue of their blood.

* The well-known race hygienit of Munich, Msx von Gruber, President of the
Bararian Academy of Science #nd 1 leading mind in the rice movement in Germany,
ertanly an unprejudiced witnes, has drawn the following picture of Hider: “Todsy
1 saw Hitler close-ap for the it time. Fice snd hesd of a bad race, 3 misture
Low, retresing forehead, ugly nose, wide cheek-bones, Tl cycs dark hair, A tiny
ooth-brush, mustache, only s wide 3 his nose, gives his face 2 defant wpect. Hir
cxpresion s not thai of 4 self-controlled commander, but of 3 crazy emetionslit.
Repaated witchings of the facial muscle. Final expresion (hat of happy sl
faction* (Euner Volksoscht of November 9, 1939.)

313 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

The American scholar, Ripley, who first auempied to write an
anthropological history of European peoples, contented himself with
three principal types, which he designated as the Teutonic, the Celtic
Alpine and the Mediterranean races. Later there was added to these
three a fourth, the Dinaric race, and it was thought that in these four
fundamental types the chief components of Europe’s racial make-up had
been recognized. Besides these four principal races there are also in
Europe Levantinc, Semitc, Mongolian and Negro. strains. OF course,
one cannot represent these four types as pure races; we are merely con.
cerned here with a working hypothesis for science, to enable it to under.
take a classification of European peoples on more or less correct lines,
The mass of European peoples is the result of crossings among these
“races” These themselves, however, are merely the product of certain
mixtures which in the course of time have taken on particular forms, 15
is the case in every instance of race formation. Ginther added, super.
Auously, a ffth to these four principal races, the so<alled “East-Baltic
race.” Along with this new discovery he effected a rebaptism of the Alpine
race which he called the “Eastern” (ostisch). There was no reason at all
for this change, and his bitterest opponent in the racial camp, Dr. Merk
schlager, may have been right when he assumed that Gnther, in this
fenaming of the Alpine race, had the purpose merely of “represcnting
it to the sentiment of his. readers as ‘contaminated” and to enable the
unthinking masses to interpret it as Oriental-Jewish.”

Like nearly all of the presentday race theorists Giinther in his dis-
cussions starts from the modern theories of heredity. He uses as his
foundation especially the hypothetical assumptions of neo-Mendelism. Ac.
cording to these conceptions the hereditary primordia are not subject to
any external influence, 50 that a change in the hereditary factors can occur
only through crossing. From this it follows that man and-all other living
beings are to be regarded mercly as the prodts of particular hereditary
primordia which they received before their birth and which can be turned
from their predestined course neither by the influence of the natural or
social environment, nor by any other forces.

‘Here les the essential error of every race theory, the reason for their
inevitably false conclusions. Glinther, and with him all the other advocates
of race theories, proceed from assumptions which can in no way be proved
and whose untenability can always be shown by examples from daily life
and from history. One could take these assertions seriously only if their
proponents were in a position to adduce conclusive proofs of these three
points: first, that hereditary primordia are in fact unchangeable and are
not affected by the influences of the environment; second, that physical
characters must be taken s unmistakable signs of particular intellectual
and moral qualities; third, that the life of man is determined entircly by

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 317

more involved, because here no segregation or fxation of scparate qualities
is possible. We are, then, not in a position to separate mental characteristics
into their components and to differentiate one part from another. Intel-
lectual and moral characters are given us as wholes; even if we agree that
the Mendelian laws of heredity apply in this field, we stil have no means
of subjecting their operation to scientific observation.

And when it becomes clear that pure races are nowhere to be found,
in fact, have in all probability never existed; that all European peoples
are merely mixtures and present every possble racal make.up, which
both without and within each nation are only to be distinguished by the
proportion of the separate constituents; then only does one get an idea
of the difficulties which beset the carnest student at cvery step. If, further,
one keeps in mind how uncertain the results of anthropologic research in
regard to the different races still are todsy, how defective stillis our knowl-
edge of the inner processes of heredity, then one cannot avoid the con-
clusion that every attempt to erect on such uncertain premises 2 theory
which allegedly reveals to s the decper meaning of all historical events
and enables its exponents infallibly to judge the worth of the moral,
mental and cultural qualities of the different human groups must become
cither senseless play-acting or clownish mischief. That such theories could
find such wide circulation, especially in Germany, is serious sign of the
mental degradation of a soicty that has lost all inner moral strength and
is therefore concerned to replace outworn ethical values with ethnological
concepts.

OF the present day advocates of the race theory, Dr. Hans Ginther is
the best known and the most disputed over. His numerous writings and
especially his Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes have had an extraor-
dinary circulation in Germany, and in wide circles have achieved an in-
fluence that one dares not underestimate. What distinguishes Gnther
from his predecessors s ot the content of his doctrine, but the pains he
takes to surround it with a scientific mantl, in order to endow it with
an outer dignity which does not belong to it. As basis for his views
Giinther has collected 2 great mass of material, but that is all. When it
becomes necessary to establish scientifically conclusions of decisive signifi-
cance, he fails completely and reverts to the methods of Gobincau and
Chamberlain, who relied entirely on wish-concept. For him the Aryan
moves clear into the background; the Germanic man has also played out
his part; Glnthers ideal is the “Nordic race,” which he endows with
precious native qualities as generously as Gobineau does the Aryans and
Chamberlain the Germans. In addition he has enriched the classifcation of
European races by one new component, and has equipped the already
existing divisions with new names withou, by this, adding anything to our
knowledge.

316 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

again in the same proportion of 3:1. In the same ratio the process con-
tinued indefinitely.

Countless experiments by well known botanists and zoologists have
since then confirmed Mendel's rules in the large. They also agree very
well with the results of modern cytology, or ceil-heory, as far as the
growth and division of the cell can be observed. One can, therefore, agree
that these rules have validity for all organic beings up to man and that in
nature as 2 whole 2 unified plan of control of the processes of heredity
obiains; but this recognition does not dispose of the countless diffculties
which have thus far prevented our decper insight into this mysterious
occurrence. It is clear from the Mendelian laws of heredity that the
characters of the parents are transmitted to the offpring in 2 definite ratio,
On the other hand, cytological research has shown that the hereditary
primordia of a living being are to be sought in those carefully separated
nuclear parts in the germ cell which we call chromosomes, And all that
science has more or less certainly established scems deducible from this:
that the hereditary primordia enter into the germ cell in pairs, and that
in each pair one element comes from the sperm cell of the father, the
other from the egg cell of the mother.

But since one cannot believe that all the hereditary primordia of both
parents are transmitted to each of their offspring, because in that case
their number would become greater with cach succeeding generation, one
comes to the conclusion that only in the nucleus of the soma- or body-cells
of a living being are all the hereditary primordia present; the germ cell
always suppresses finally a part of the nuclear factors so that it receives
only one-half of all the primordia, that is, only one member of each
character-pair. One learns that in the general body cell of man there are
48 chromosomes, but the germ cell when ready for fertilization contains
only 24. But this is not to say that man possesses only 24 character-pairs
that function as bearers of heredity. In every chromosome several mem-
bers of different character-pairs may be present, so that in the offspring
the most varied combinations may appear. Since, however, every fertiliza.
tion s really a crossing, even when it occurs between beings of the same
race, because in nature no two individuals are exactly alike, it follows
that from every instance of fertilization the most manifold results may
ensue. From only two different hereditary factors there would arise in
two_generations four varieties; from three pairs, cight varieties; from
four, 16; from ten, 1,024; and so on. From these clearly obvious pos-
sibilities of combination any comprehensive view of the results of the
processes of heredity becomes not merely increasingly diffcult, but actually
impossible.

And we were still speaking only of purely physical characteristics.
When we turn to mental or moral characters the processes bécome much

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 315

that plants and animals resemble their parents and that this resemblance
is apparently traceable to the fact that the descendants arise from bits of
the same protoplasm and so develop from the same or similar hereditary
primordia. From this it follows that in protoplasm there reside peculiar
forces which by the separation of the tiniest portions can transmit the whole
to the descendants. Thus men came to recognize that the real cause of
inheritance must be sought in a particular condition of the living cell stuff
which we call protoplasm.

However valuable this recognition may be, it has hardly brought us
nearer to the real solution of the problem. Instead it has proposed for
science a whole set of new problems, whose solution is no less difficult.
1n the first place, it is necessary to establish the processes in protoplasm
which control the development of particular characters, a task attended by
almost insurmountable diffculties. And we are just as much in the dark
a5 to the inner processes which precede inheritance. Science has, it is true,
Succeeded in establishing the existence of so<alled chemical molecules and
even the existence of certain fairly well-developed organs within the cell-
Structure, but the specific arrangement of the molecules and the inner
causes of the differences between the protein groups in dead and in living
substance are still unknown to us today. One can safely say that in this
perplexing realm we rely almost entirely on assumptions, since none
of the numerous theoris of heredity has been able to lft the veil of the
Magi that sill hides the actual processes of inheritance. We have profited
much by the observations on hybridization and their interpretation; but
of course these deal less with the explanation of causes than with the
establishment of facts.

Seventy years ago the Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel, busied him-
self in his quiet cloister garden at Brinn with twenty-two varieties of
pea-plants and achieved the following results: when he crossed a yellow
With a green variety, the descendants bore all yellow sceds and the green
appeared. to be completely climinated. But when he dusted the yellow
hybrids with their own pollen, the vanished green appeared again in their
descendants, and in a definite ratio. OF every four seeds in plants of the
second generation, three were yellow and one was green. The charac-
teristics of the green variety had, therefore, not disappeared; they were
merely hidden by the characteristics of the yellow. Mendel speaks, there-
fore, of recessive or concealed, and dominant or concealing, characters.
The recessive character—in this case green-scededness—in renewed fer-
tilizations showed itself constant in heredity so long as sclf-fertilization
was strictly controlled and no new crossing occurred. The dominants,
however, segregated regularly in each new generation. A third of their
progeny were pure dominants, which bred true in later generations; the
other two-thirds “mendeled,” that is, they segregated in reproduction

314 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

to the world in support of his thesis, there is hardly a type that could
stand as genuinely representative of the Germanic race. In every one of
them unmistakable characteristics of the hybrid are more or less clearly
shown. If the researches of Woltmann and Hauser were to lead us to any
“law of history” at all, it could be only to this: that racial inbreeding
gradually undermines spiritual vigor and has as its consequence a slow
decline, while racial interbreeding imparts to the capacity for culture ever
new vigor and favors the production of personalities of genius. The same
holds good also for the German bearers of culture, and Max von Gruber is
not wrong when he says:

And when we apply racial standards to the bodily characterstics of our
greatest men we find, indeed, in many of them Nordic characters, but in
none of them only Nordic characters. The first glance reveals to the expert
that neither Frederick the Great, nor Baron von Stein, nor Bimarck was
pure Nordic; the same is true of Luther, Melanchthon, Leibnitz, Kant, and
Schopenhauer, 25 also of Libig and Julius Robert Mayer and Helmholtz,
of Goethe, Schiller, and Grillparzer, of Direr, Menzel, and Feucrbach, and
even of the greatcst geniuses of that most German of all the arts, mus
from Bach and Gluck and Haydn to Bruckner. They were all hybrids; the
same is true of the great Ttalians. Michelangelo and Galileo were, if Nordic
at all, sull not pure Nordic. To the characteristcs from the North apparently
ingredients from other races must be added in order to produce the happiest
combination of characters.®

However much Woltmann may insist that “Dante, Raphacl, Luther,
and s0 on, were geniuses not because they were hybrids, but in spite of i
and that “the foundation of their genius is their heritage from the Ger-
manic race,” it remains but empty preaching so long 25 we are not in
pasition to establish indisputably and to confirm scientifcally the influence
of race on the intellectual characteristics of mankind. By just the same
logic could we affiem that the spark of genius in Luther, Goethe, Kant or
Beethoven was to be attributed to the presence of “Alpine” or “Oriental”
blood in them. Nothing would be proved by this; the world would merely
be richer by one more assertion. In fact, during the War there were found
on the other side of the Vosges men like Paul Souday and others who
explained that all the great personalities that Germany had produced were
of Celtic, and not German, descent. Why not?

The latest advocates of the socalled race doctrine take great pains
to give a scientific appearance to their views and appeal especially to the
laws of heredity, which play such an important part in modern natural
scence, and are stll the subject of so much controversy. By heredity,

i ly the fact, irmly established by common observation,

in Saddeatiche Monsishefie, 1937.

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 313

t0 an astonished world that most of them had blond hair and blue eyes.
Woltmann was completely obsessed by his bluc.cyed-blond theory and
went into raptures every time he thought he had discovered a new
blondling.”

One utterly fails to see what such assestions are meant to prove. That
there arc Germanic clements in the population of France and Italy,
1o one has ever questioned. Both peoples are racilly just as mixed as
are the Germans, as are all the peoples of Europe. France and Italy were
repeatedly overrun by Germanic tribes, just as the numerous human floods
of Slavic, Celtic and Mongolian tribes poured over Germany. But to
what extent the culture of 2 people s determined by race is @ question
to which science has as yet found no answer, nor is likely to find one. We
are here depending merely on conjectures which can never serve as sub
stitutes for actual facts. We do not yet know one thing definitely about
the causes behind even purely external characteristics like color of hair
and eyes.

And 5o the whole portraitdiagnosis of Woltmann and his successor,
Otto Hauser, is utterly worthless. It is the most utterly unreliable means
that could be produced for the establishment of defnite characters. In the
picture books of our race astrologers such “documents” look very fine and
serve there their full purpose, but for the earnest student they offer hardly
even a point of attack. The work of painters is not photography, which
incorruptibly gives back what is before it. It must from the first be valued
as the reproduction of what the inner eye of the artist perceives; and this
inner picture which hovers before the artist, and without which no work
of art can be produced, not seldom misrepresents the original from &
factual standpoint. Also, the personal style of the artist and the school
to which he belongs play an important part in the work. To what gentine
investigator, for cxample, would it occur to try to establish the character-
istics of a race from portraits by our present-day cubists or futurists? Be-
sides which, the very same portraits which serve Woltmann as proofs of
the Germanic origin of the French and Italian cultures supply to other
advocates of the race theory basis for quite different views. For example,
Albrecht Wirth, who also thinks that he recognizes in race the determina-
tive factor in historical development, explains in his Rasse und Volk: “In
this view is involved a strange error; that Woltmann and his adherents
discovered in so many geniuses and men of talent in France and Italy
Germanic featares. To unprejudiced eyes the very pictures which Wolt-
mann gives as illustrations show just the opposite: Bashkir, Mediterrancan,
and Negro types”

In fact, in the whole long portrait gallery which Woltmann displays

" Ludwig Woltmana, Die Germanen und die Rensinance in Italien; 1905. Die
Gérmanen in Fronkreich; 1907.
312 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

of revolution was hateful because it carried on its face the mark of its
revolutionary origin. That which is today called democracy can be over-
come only by forces which look not to the past, but to the futurc. The
remedy lies not in what has been, but in the continual ealargement of the
concept of freedom and its social applications. Evgn democracy did not
overcome the will to power, because it was shackled to the state and
dared not shake the privileges of the possessing classes. But Chamberlain
did not find his base in the future; his gaze was fixed unchangingly on the
past. Thereore he condemned even the constitutional monarchy s essen-
tially alien to the Germanic spirit and advanced the idea of an absolute
monarchy over a “free people”—whatever he meant by that. He was one
of those unswerving ones who opposed to the very last every limitation
of the royal power in Prussia and, like all his predecessors and successors
in the race theory, stood squarely in the camp of undisguised political and
social reaction.

One would think that a work like the Grundlagen, which offers no
opening for earnest understanding, which has regard neither for social
relationships nor for the slow process of spiritual endeavor, and in which
actually only the violent whim of the author i revealed, would be wrecked
on its own mad contradictions. But it worked quite otherwise. It became
for the ruling castes in Germaay a destiny. So profound was the infatua.
tion which this work induced that the former Kaiser could write in his
memoirs: “Germanism in all ts glory was first revealed and preached to
the astounded German people by Chamberlain in his Grandlagen des 19,
Jahrhunderss. But, as the collapse o the German people showed, without
effect”

‘That the dethroned champion of divine right even today holds the
German people responsible for the collapse is quite as delightful 2 revela.
tion of the “lordly German spirit” as is the sorry role of those who with
slavish exaltation revered the hopeless fool as “German Emperor” only
0 turn upon him after his downfall and kick him like maddened asses—
even to brand him as an “offspring of the Jews.”

What Chamberlain had begun so_gloriously was continued in the
same spirit by men like Woltmann, Havser, Ginther, Clauss, Madison
Grant, Rosenberg, and many others. Woltmann, the former Marxist and
Social Democrat, who one fine day threw over the class struggle and took
up the race struggle instead, tried to supply historical prosf for what
Gobineau and Chamberlain had asserted about the origin and character of
foreign cultures. He assembled an enormous mass of material which
supposedly went to prove that all distinguished persons in the cultural
history of France and Ttaly had been of German descent, To reach this
conclusion he had examined the portraits of several hundred prominent
personalities of the Renaissance period and was in a posi

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 3

the freedom of Chamberlain is of a quite peculiar kind, It is the “freedom
which the state is able to protect only on the condition that it shall limit
it.” “Man does not become free by being granted political rights; rather,
the state can grant him political rights only when he has atiin
freedom; otherwise these alleged rights are always misused by others”
“This utterance proves that Chamberlain had never understood the
nature of either freedom or the state. But how could he? Fatalism is the
exact opposite of the concept of freedom, and no fatalism bears so plainly
the Cain's brand of hostility to freedom as the Kismet of race. Cham-
berlain's concept of freedom is that of the well fed and satisied, to whom
order is the first duty of the citizen, and who accepts such rights as the
state hands out to him. Before such freedom no despot has ever trembled;
but any trivial right that man wins by struggle against the tyranny of
tradition brings the sweat of anxiety to the despot’s brow. Chamberlain's
“inner freedom?” is just an empty word; only where the inner sentiment
of freedom is transformed into liberating deed has the spiri of freedom
genuine homestead. “He who is occupied with nature and with “force and
matter’ must if he is honest, let freedom go,” opines Chamberlain. We
think, however, that he who does not constantly strive to convert freedom
into “force and matter” must always remain a slave, An abstract concep-
tion of freedom that cannot inspire its possessor to strive o the
the attaining of his rights is like 2 woman to whom ature has deni
gift of fertility. Chamberlain's concept of freedom is the illusion of
potence, 3 cunning inversion of the inner fecling of serfdom which is

incapable of any action. Ibsen had a very different view of freedom when
he wrote:

You can never get me to regard freedom a5 synonymous with policical
liberty. What you cal freedom, T call freedoms; and what I call the struggle
for freedom s nothing but the constant, living assimilation of the ides of
freedom. Who possesss freedom otherwise than as something to be striven
for posseses it only as a thing without lfe or spiit, for the idea of freedom
has always this qualiy, that it constantly expands as one assimilates i, %
that if during the struggle one pauses to say: Now I have i he merely shows
that he has lost it. But to have just this dead kind—a certain statc view of
freedom—is characteristc of state organizations; and i s just this that T
have called worthless.$

Chamberlain never stood still on the road to freedom, because he never
found himself on that road. His eriticism of democracy has is basis in the
past; he is the man who looks backward, the man to whom every prodct

* Demolvaie und Freiheis, Mon

* Letter to George Brandes of Fe
in dewticher Sproc

917.
7, 187,
. Zehnter Band, Berlin, 1905,

310 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

achievement of Germanic culture. The German is the specially chosen
minister of the Protestant mission, through which Christendom is frst
made aware of its true content. That the Christian had thoughtlessly
chosen the Jew, Jesus, for his savior was surely a bitter pill; it was toy
late to undo that. But was it not written in the Gospel that Christ first
saw the light in Galilec? And immediately the “instinct of the race” came
to Chamberlain’s aid and informed him that in just this part of Palestine
extensive crossing of races had occurred and, above all, that in Galilee
Germanic stocks had settled. Must one not, then, admit that Christ had
been 2 German? It was, in fact, unthinkable that out of “materialism-
drunken Jewry” 2 doctrine could come to whose spiritual content the
Jewish mind is completely opposcd.

Chamberlsin revealed an uterly morbid hatred of everything Jewish.
He even ventured to assure his credulovs readers that 2 Germanie child,
the keenness of whose senses had not yet been ruined or blunted by the
prejudices of adults, could tell instinctively when 2 Jew was near him,
Yet he found it possible to speak highly of the Spanish Jews, the so<alled
Sephardim,” while he could never severely enough disparage the
““Ashkenazim,” the Jews of the northern countrics, To be sure, he based
his preference for the Sephardim on the assumption that they were in
reality Goths who had been converted to Judsism in large mumbers—s
recogaition which came to the great master of unproved asertion rather
tardily, as it fist appears in the third edition of his book. How the Goths,
those genine branches of the noble tre of Germandom, n spite of thelr
Jmystc inclination” and their inborn sense of “rcligious profundity,
which according to Chamberlain are the heritage of thei race, could
throw themselves into the arms of “materialistic Judaism® with its “dead
ritalism,” its “slavish obedience,” and its “despotic God” remains an
unsolved mystery. In this case the “race in their own bosoms” must have
led outright; otherwise the wonder is not to be explained. Chamber-
ain’s work on race swarms with similar assertions. There is hardly another
work which reveals such unexampled unreliabilty in the material used
and such reckless juggling with bare assumptions of the most daring
1ype. As to this, not only the opponents, but also many outspoken believers
in the race theory, like Albrecht Wicth, Eugen Kretzer and others, are
fully agreed. Even so selfsaisfed an advocate of the race theory 25 Otto
Hauser speaks of Chamberlain’s work as “the Foundations of the Nine-
teenth Century which 50 frequently lacks factual basis”

Like Gobincau, Chamberlain is 2 fanatical opponent of all liberal and
democratic ideas and sces in them a danger to Germanism, For b , free-
dom and cquality are antage concepts; who desires equality must
sacrfice o it his personality, which alone can be the basis of freedom. But

* Die Germanen in Europs. Dresden, 1916, p. 5.

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 309

race stands at the beginning of all human history. It has its definite
physical and mental characteristics which are transmitted by heredity and
can be changed only by crossing with other races. And since he was con-
vinced that in the course of thousands of years the blood of the noble race.
had been constantly debased and its precious qualities lost by mixture
with yellow and black races, he looked toward the future with gloomy
eyes. Chamberlain, on whom Darwin's theory had not been quite without
effect, saw in race not a starting point, but a product of evolution. Accord
ing to_his view the race arises through natural selection in the struggle
for existence, which eliminates the incapable and preserves only the able
individual for the propagation of the species. Consequently, the race is
the end-product of 2 continuous process of splitting-off from 3 related
genus.

But if the race is 2 product of cvolution and not its starting point,
then the production of noble races for the future also is guaranteed, pro-
vided that the ruling upper stratum of 2 nation takes to heart the teaching
of history and wards off the threatening “race chaos” by suitsble race
hygiene. For the strengthening of his position Chamberlain appeals to the
experience of breeders and shows us how a noble race of horses, dogs o
swine comes into being. It is truc, he forgets the essential point, namely,
that the crossings of the human races in the course of millennia have been
carried on under very different circumstances from those followed in the
socalled “ennobling experiments” in the stables of breeders. For Gobineau
we should rightly read: In the beginning was the Race. Thercfore the
nation meant nothing to him, and the idea of the fatherland was just 2
cunning invention of the Semitic mind. Chamberlain, however, who
believed in the breeding of 2 noble race, wished to train the nation to
racial purity. And since the German nation scemed to him best fitted
for this purpose, because in its veins, according to his opinion, Germanic
blood flowed purest, he saw the Teuton as the Bearer of the Future.

After Chamberlain had fitted out the noble Germans with every con-
ceivable mental and spiritual trait in a really big way, there remained
nothing for the peoples of any other descent except to surrender uncon-
ditionally to the proud master race and in the shadow of its overtowering
greatness to drag out 2 humble existence. Since these others are merely
the culture-dungers of history, it is o much the worse for them if they
cannot see it.

According to Chamberlain the opposition between Romanic peoples
and Germans constitutes the whole content of modern history. And since
the Romanic world, which had risen out of the great “chaos of peoples,”
had bound itself for good or ill to the “materialistc aims” of the Catholic
church; had of necessity so to bind itself, since the voice of the blood
left it no other choice, thercfore Protestantism became for him the great

308 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

person and so became benefactor to many 2 German private or state
library and to all the schools of the Reich. According to von Bulow's
malicious statement, William used to read whole sections of the book to
the ladics of his court, until they fell aslecp.

As 2 rule Chamberlain is regarded merely as the perfecter of
Gobineaw's race theory; emphasis, however, is always laid on his mental
superiority. It is impossible to oppose such a view too strongly. Cham-
berlain was merely the beneficiary of Gobineau, without whom his Grund-
lagen would be unthinkable, No one who has carefully compared the two
works can avoid this conclusion. Chamberlain first became acquainted with
Gobineaw’s racial philosophy of history in the home of his father-in-law,
Richard Wagner, and appropriated its essential features for his own work.

From Chamberkin, no more than from Gobineay, do we discover
‘what, exactly, “race” is. He is the finished mystic of the race idea, which
in him condenses into 2 devoutly believed race mythology. External
characteristies, like the shape of the skull, texture and color of the hair,
the skin, the ¢yes, have for him only 2 qualified meaning; even language
is not determinative. Only the instinctive fecling of cohesiveness which
reveals itself through the “voice of the blood” is determinative. This
“feeling of race in one’s own bosom,” which is subject to no control and
cannot be scientifically apprehended, is all that Chamberlain has to tell us
about race.

Like Gobineau, Chamberlain sces in every great culture period the
undeniable product of the German intellect and with cool assurance
appropriates for his Noble Race the cultural wealth of all peoples and of
al the great minds that mankind has ever produced. The Germans arc
the salt of the earth; they have been endowed by Nature herself with all
the mental and spiritual qualities which it them to be “masters of the
world” This alleged historical destiny of the Germans follows so clearly
for the author of the Grundlagen from all previous history that any doubt
about it is stricken dumb. It is Germans who as leading caste have played
an important role even among non-Germanic folk-groups, such as the
French, the ltalians, the Spaniards, the Russians; it is due only to their
influcnce that a culture was able to develop in these lands at all. Even the
great cultures of the Orient arose in this way. Under the influence of
German blood they rose to undreamed-of greatness, and then went down
23 mental elasticity relaxed and the will to power was quenched in the
deteriorating master caste by blood mixture with inferior races. Even
Chamberlain did not deny that racecrossing can be advantageous to
cultural development so long s it involves only the mixture of related
races; for 2 noble race builds itsclf up only gradually by intermixture
with other races of more or less the same worth. It is at this point that
Chamberlain's concept parts company with Gobineaw's. For Gobineau

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 307

The admirers of Gobineau have tried to account for the master's
attitude on this point by explaining that he cherished in his mind an ideal
fatherland corresponding to nermost fecling and that he did not fail
to take into account that patriotic need which is said to dwell in every
man. But such an explanation is without value. 1€ man can arbitrarily set
up for himself the fiction of an ideal fatherland, that merely proves that
the notions of the fatherland and the nation are fictitious concepts which
«can be drilled into the lividual and can at any time be driven out by
other fictions. Gobineau was a fanatical opponent of the equality of human
rights; therefore the Revolution appeared to him as a desccration of
divinely established order. His whole race ideology was merely the
product of a profound wish: to implant in men a belief in the unalter-
ability of social inequality. As Malthus had explained to the “superfluous”
that lifes table did not have places for all, so Gobineau wished to prove
0 the world that the enslavement of the masses is ordained by fate and
is 2 Jaw of nature. Only when the instincts of the inferior mixed race begin
to work in the blood of the master caste does the belif in the cquality of
everything in human form arise. For Gobineau this belicf was an illusion
which must lead irrevocably to the destruction of all social order.

Although lttle recognition was accorded Gobineau in his native France,
even his purely literary work receiving less appreciation than it deserved,
he exercised upon the development of race opinions elsewhere, especially
in Germany, an influence that is not to be underestimated. Through his
acquaintance with Richard Wagner, in whose home he first made the
acquaintance of Schemann, the German biographer and translator of
Gobinea, there was later formed the socalled “Gobineau Society” which
looked after the dissemination of his work on race and further advanced
the notions of the imaginative Frenchman to whom, in spite of all his
scientific shortcomings, there cannot be denied a certain greatness which
is entirely lacking. ater followers.

A much stronger influence on the development of the race doctrine
in Germany, and also outside it, was exercised by the Englishman, Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, whose work, Die Grundlgen des 19. Jahrhunderts
(“Foundations of the Nineteenth Century”) (1899), was rather widely
circulated. Chamberlain enjoyed the special favor of William 11, whom
he knew how to approach from his most vulnerable side. He compared
William's reign to 2 “rising morning” and testified that he was “really the
first emperor.” For such bald fattery the present Lord of the Castle of
Doorn had a very receptive ear, so it could ot fail that Chamberlain by
high command advanced into the ranks of the great contemporary minds.
The Grundlagen found a rapid sale among the members of the ruling
caste in Germany. In order to assure for his work the widest possible circu.
lation, 2 special fund was established; the Kaiser endorsed the work in

306 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

of inner decay; they foretold the victory of “mongreldom” over the Aryan
Noble Race. According to Gobineau only 2 monarchy can accomplish any-
thing lasting, since it contains in itself the basic law of its being, while
a democracy is always dependent on external powers and so can do nothing
important. Only the degenerate blood of the mixed race demands democ-
racy and revolution. On this point Gobincau is close to the views of Joseph
de Maistre, the standard bearer of reaction, with whom he has much clse
in common, including actally hair-raising distortion of historical facts
and almost inconceivable naiveté of ideal interpretations. Although de
Maistre found the oot of all evil in Protestantism, it came to the same
thing in the end, for democracy was for de Maistre a politial variety of
Protestantism.

On one point Gobineau s sharply at issue with all later advocates of
the race theory: he has no sympathy with nationalistic ambitions and
regards the notion of the “fatherland” with outspoken antagonism. Be.
cause of his aversion to everything that savored of democracy no other
position was possible. Then, too, it was from the French Revolution that
the idea of the fatherland and the nation received the special imprint
they bear today. This was enough to make Gobincau despise it a5
“Canaanitish sbomination” which the Aryan race had, against its will,
taken over from the Semitic. As long as Hellenism had remained Aryan,
the idea of the fatherland had been entirely alien to the Greeks. But a3
the intermixture with the Semites progressed farther and farther,
‘monarchy had to give place to the republic. The Semitic clement impelled
toward absolutism, as Gobineau put it; still the Aryan blood which was
still active in the mixed race of the later Greeks was opposed to personal
despotism such as was common in Asia and arrived logically at the
despotism of an idea—the idea of the fatherland.

On this point Gobineau is thoroughly consistent: his hostility to the
idea of the fatherland is the immediate and deliberately derived product
of his race theory. If the nation were in fact a community of descent, 2
race-unity, then the race instinct must be its strongest cementing material.
16, however, it is made up of the most varied race consttuents—a fact
which no race theorist dares to dispute—then the notion of race must act
on the concept of the nation like dynamite and blow to bits its very
foundation. More talented and imaginative than any of his successors,
Gobineau recognized clearly the opposition between race and naticn; and
between the pure race ruling stratum of the nation and the “mongreldom”
of the great masses he had drawn a sharp line which our nationalstically
inclined race theorists have tried in vain to bridge over. The notion that
the great masses of the nation are merely Helots who must without choice
submit to the rule of a privileged caste determined by blood is in fact the
greatest danger to national cohesion.

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 305

white, the yellow and the black. Each, according to Gobineau, represented
a separate experiment of God in the creation of man; God had begun with
the Negro, coming round at last to the creation of the White Man in
own image. Among these three great racial groups there existed no inner
relationship, since they were descended from different stems. Everything
outside of these three tasic races was racial mixture—for Gobineau, mon-
greldom—which had come into being by interbrecding of white, yellow
and black.

It s clear that in Gobineau’s opinion the white race is far superior to
the other two. Itisin the best sense a “noble race,” for besides its physical
beauty it possesses also the most distinguished mental and spiritual qual
ties—above all, mental breadth of view, superior capacity for organization,
and in particular that inner urge of the conqueror which is entircly lacking
in the yellow and black races and which gives to the Aryans alone in
history the power to found great states and civilizations.

eau distinguishes ten great culture periods in history, which
include all the significant epochs in human civilization, and attributes them
exclusively to the activity of the Aryan race. The origin, development
and decay of these great epochs consitute, according to his understanding,
the entire content of human history; for civilization and degeneration
are the two poles about which all events turn. Gobineau, to whom the
idea of organic evolution was entirely unknown, tried to explain the rise
and decay of the great civlizations by the degeneration of races, or rather,
of the ruling race, since for him the mass of less important beings which
constitutes the great majority in every state exists only for the purpose
of being governed by the racially pure conquerors. Changes in socil rels.
tionships and institutions are to be attributed solely to changes of race.
The decay of a dominion and its culture occurs when a great deal of other
blood is mixed with that of the conquerors’ caste. From this enses not
only an alteration in external race characteristics, but also a change in the
spiritual and mental impulses of the master race which leads to gradual
of rapid decay. In this inner decay of the noble race is found the final
and authentic explanation of the decline of all great culturcs.

‘The stronger the component from the white race in the blood of 3
people, the more prominent will be its cultural activity, the greater its
power of building a state; while too strong an infusion of Negro or
Mongolian blood undermines the creative cultural characteristics of the
old race and gradually brings about its inier dissolution. In contrast with
Chamberlain and most of the exponents of modern race theorics, Gobineau
was thoroughly pessimistic about the future. He could not escape the
conclusion that the Germanic race, this “last bud upon the Aryan stem,”
a8 he called it, was doomed to inevitable destruction, The wide dissemina.
tion of republican and democatic ideas scemed to him an unfaling sign

304 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

magnum opus, Esii sur Pinégalité des races humaines (“Treatise on the
Incquality of the Races of Men”), which first appeared in 1855. Accord-
ing to his own statement, the Parisian Revolution of February, 1843, gave
Gobincau the first impulse toward the formulation of his ideas. He saw
in the revolutionary occurrences of that time only the inevitable conse-
quences of the great upheaval of 1789-94, amid whose violent convulsions
the feudsl world fell in ruins. Concerning the causes of this collapse he
had formed his own judgment. For him the French Revolution was noth-
ing clse than the revolt of the Celto-Romanic race mixture that for years
and years had lived in intellectual and economic dependence on the Franco-
Norman master caste. This caste was made up, according to Gobineau,
of the descendants of those Nordic conquerors who had t one time in.
vaded the country and subjected the Celto-Romanic population to their
rule. It was this race with its blue eyes, its blond hair and its tall figure
that held for Gobineau the sum-total of all mental and physical perfection,
whose superior intelligence and strength of will in themselves guaranteed
t0it the role which it was, in his opinion, destined to play in history.

‘This idea was by no means entirely new. Long before the time of the
French Revolution it had bobbed up in the minds of the aristocracy. Henri
de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722), author of an historical work which was
not published until after his death, maintained that the French nobles of

aaste were descended from the Germanic conquerors, while
the great mass of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry was to be regarded as
the progeny of the conquered Celts and Romans. Boulainvilliers tried on
the basis of this thesis to justify all the privileges of the nobles, in oppo-
ition to both the people and the king, and demanded for his class the

si
right to keep the government of the country always in their hands.
Gobineau adopted this theory, extending it considerably to apply to the
whole of human history. But since he—as he himself once said—“believed
only that which scemed to him worth believing,” it happened inevitably
that he pushed on to the most daring conclusions.

Just 35 Joseph de Maistre once declared that he had never met a
human being, but only Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, and so on, s0 2lso
Gobineau maintained that the abstract human being existed only in the
minds of philosophers. In reality the human being is only the expression
of the race to which he belongs; the Voice of Blood is the Voice of Fate,
from which no people can escape. Neither the climatic environment nor
the social conditions of life have any influence worth ‘mentioning on the
constructive. power of peoples. The driving force in all culture is race,
above all the Aryan race, which even under the most unfavorable condi-
tions is capable of the greatest achicvements so long as it avoids mixture.
with less worthy racal elements. Following the classificatin of the Freach
naturalist, Cuvier, Gobineau distinguished three great facial groups, the

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 303

remarkable because they deal with a change in bodily characterstics which
can only be explained by the action of external influences on the so<alled
“hereditary purity of the race.” OF quite especial, and in its results as yet
quite incalculable, significance are the results achieved in late years by the
action of Roentgen and cathode rays. Experiments made at the University
of Texts by Professor J. H. Miller yielded results which lead us to
anticipate 3 complete revolution in theories of heredity. They not only
prove that artificial intcrference with the lfe of the germ.mass leading
to 3 controlled change in the race characteristics is possible, but also that
by such experiments the creation of new races can be effected.

From all this it appears that bodily characteristics are by no means
unchangeable and tht a change can be effected even without racial cross.
breeding. It is even morc monstrous to infer mental and spiritual charac.
teristics solely on the basis of bodily ones and deduce from them judg.
ment about moral worth. It is true that Linnacus, in his attempts at a facial
clasification of humanity, took moral factors into consideration when he
sid:

The American is reddish, choleric, erect; the European, whie, sanguine,
fleshy; the Asiatic, yellow, melancholy, tough; the Affican, black, phlegmatic,
slack. The American is obstinate, contented, free; the European, moble,
keen, inventive; the Asatic cruel, splendor-loving, miserly; the Afican, sly,
ay, indifferent. The American s covered with tattooing, and rules by habit;
the European is covered with close-fiting garments and rules by law; the
Asiatic is enclosed in flowing garments and rules by opinion; the African is
anointed with grease and rules by whim.

But Linnacus was not in his scheme conforming to any political
theories. The very naiveté of mentioning tattooing, clothing and greasing
of the body along with forms of government proves the innocence of his
effort. But, however odd the notions of the Swedish naturalist may scem
to us today, we still have no right to laugh at them in view of the
shameful flood of so-alled race literature that has rolled over us during
the Jast two decades, with nothing better to offer than Linnacus could say
two hundred years ago. For when the Swedish scholar brought tattooing,
clothes and greasy biack bodies into combination with forms of govern.
ment, he did far less harm than when today men try to deduce the capacity
for culture, the character and the moral and spiritual disposition of the
separate races from the color of their skins, the curve of their noses or the
shape of their skulls.

The first attempt to explain the rise and fall of peoples in history as
a play of race antagonisms was made by the Frenchman, Count Arthur
Gobineau, who during his diplomatic career had seen many distant lands.
He was 2 fairly prolific writer, but we are intercsted here only in his
302 NATIONALISM AND'CULTURE

whether they can really be changed only by crossing of races, or whether
natural or social environment cannot also effect a change of purely physio.
logical race charactristics, i for science a chapter far from closed.

How the special characteristics of the various races originally appeared
we can today only guess, but in all probability they were in one way or
another acquired by a change in the natural environment—a view held
today by the most prominent anthropologists. There exist already quite
a number of established facts from which it appears that physical race
characteristics may be changed by external life conditions and the change
inherited by the descendans. In his excellent work, Race ond Culrur,
Friedrich Hertz records the experiments with mollusks and insects by the
two researchers, Schrdder and Pictet, who by changes in environment
succeeded in altering the nutritional instincts, mode of ovulation and of
pupation, and the procreative instinct so thoroughly that the changes were
transmitted by inheritance, even though the modified conditions were later
removed. The experiments which the American scholar, Tower, made with
the Colorado beetle are well known, Tower exposed the insects to colder
temperatures and by these and other influences succeeded in effecting 3
change in certain characteristics which also were inherited by the progeny.

E. Vatter records the experiences of the Russian anthropologist Ivan-
owsky during the three-year famine period in Russia after the war,
Ivanowsky had made measurements of 2,114 men and women from the
most varied parts of the country at halfyearly intervals, 5o that every
individual was examined six times. Thereby it was discovered that the
cross section of the body was reduced an average of four to five centimeters,
and the circumference of the head as well as its length and breadth was
reduced and the cephalic index changed. This was true among the Great
Russians, as also among the White and Little Russians, Syrians, Bashkirs,
Kalmucks, and Kirgizes. (Among the Armenians, Grusians, and Cri
‘Tartars it was raised.) Likewise, the percentage of shortheads had in.
creased, and the nasal index had become smaller. According to Ivanowsky,
“The unchangeableness of anthropological types is a fable.” *

Change of food, of climate, influence of higher temperatures, greater
humidity, and so on, unquestionably result in alterations of certain body
characteristcs. Thus the well known American anthropologist, F. Boas,
was able to prove that the- skull formation of the descendants of immi.
grants showed a marked change in America, so that, for instance, the
descendants of short-headed Oriental Jews became longer-headed, and
the long-headed Sicilians became shorter-headed; the skull, that is, tends
to assume a certain form of crosssection These results are the more

* Ernst Vatter, Die Rasten und Vilker der Erde. Leiptig, 1937, p. 37.
*F. Boas in Dis Zeinchrift far Ethnologie, Band 45. Compare sk the
same suthor’s Kultur und Rane, Zwcite Aufage, Berlin, 1922,

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 301

and the Aurignac man, a5 some investigators have assumed, Entirely
mistaken is the attempt to derive the present European races from these
three “original” races, since we cannot know whether in these varieties
we are really dealing with original racia types or not. Most probably not.

Not only in Europe are pure races wanting; we also fail to find them
among the so<called savage peoples, even when these have made. their
homes in the most distant parts of the earth, as, for example, the Eskimos
or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. Whether there were once “original
races” can hardly be affirmed today; at least our present sate of knowledge.
docs not justify us in making definite assertions which lack all convincing.
proof. From this it appears that the concept of race does not describe some-
thing fixed and unchangeable, but something in perpetual state of flux,
something continually being made over. Most of all we must beware of
confusing race with species or genus, as is unfortunately so often done by
modern race theorists. Race is only an artificial classification concept of
biological science used as a technical device for keeping track of particular
observations. Only mankind as a whole constitutes a biological unit, 2
species. This is proved primarily by the unlimited capacity for cross-
breeding within the genus man. Every sexual union between offspring of
the most widely different races is fruitful; also unions of its progeny.
This phenomenon is one of the strongest arguments for the common
of human kind.

‘With the discovery of the soalled blood groups it was at first believed
that the problem of race had been solved; but here, too, the disillusion-
ment followed swiftly. When Karl Landsteiner had succeeded in proving
that men can be distinguished according to three different blood groups,
to which Jansky and Moss added a fourth, it was believed that this differ-
ence in the blood, a fact of great importance especially for medical science,
would establish the existence of four primary races. But it was soon
discovered that these four blood groups can be found among all races,
though blood group three is rare among American Indians and Eskimos.
Above all, it was shown that 2 long-skulled blond with all the marks of
the Nordic race may belong to the same blood group as a dark-skinned
Negro or an almond-cyed Chinese. Doubtless a very sad fact for those race
theorists who have so much to say about the “voice of the blood.”

The majority of race theoreticians maintain that so<alled “race charac-

istics” are heritage created by nature itself unaffected by external life

s and are transferred unchanged to the progeny, providing that
the parents are racially related. Hence, the race destiny s a blood-fate
which none can escape. By race characteristcs we mean primarily the
shape of the skull, the color of the skin, the special kind and color of
the hair and eyes, the shape of the nose, and the size of the body. Whether
these characterstis are indeed so “inalienable” as race theorists maintain,

teri

300 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

‘The Gothic word, reizza, really had only the meaning of rift or line.t
In this sense it found admission into most European languages where it
gradually was called upon for the designation of other things and still is,
Thus in English we understand by “race” not only a specific animal o
human group with definite hereditary physical characterisics, but the word.
is also used for contests in speed, as for instance, horse-race. Also we speak
of the race of lic, and a millrace. In France, the word acquired, among
other meanings, also a political meaning, 2s applicd to the succession of
the various dynastis. Thus the Merovingians, the Carolingians and the
Capets were spoken of as the first, the second and the third race. In
Spanish and Ttalian also, the word has 2 similar variety of meanings.
Later, it was used mainly by breeders of animals—until gradually &t
became the fashionable slogan for particular political parties. Thus we have
become used to connect the word race with a concept which is tself unclear,
As eminent an anthropologist as . von Luschan dared to say: %, . . yes,
the word race itself has more and more lost its meaning and had best be
abandoned if it could be replaced by a less ambiguous wort

Since the discovery of the famous human skeletal remains in Neander-
thal (1856) scintific research has made about a hundred similar discoveries
in various parts of the earth, all of which are traceable to the Glacial Age.
We must, however, not overestimate the knowledge gained from them,
for nearly all are single specimens with which no certain comparisons can
be made. Besides, bone remnants alone give us no idea whatsoever con-
cerning the skin color, hair and superficial facial structure of these pre-
historic men. From the skull structure of these human specimens only one.
thing can be stated with a certain degree of definiteness, namely, that in
these discoveries we are dealing with at least three different varicties,
which have been named after the places where they were discovered. Sa
we now speak of a Neanderthal race, an Aurignac race and a Cro-Magnon
race. OF these, the Neanderthal man scems to have been the most primi-
tive, whereas the Cro-Magnon man, both from his skull structure and the
tools discovered, seems to have been the most developed scion of the
European population at that time.

In what relationship these three races—assuming that we are really
dealing with races—stood to cach other and where they came from, no
one knows. Whether the Neanderthalers really originated in Africa and
emigrated to Europe, or whether they had inhabited great sections of our
continent for thousands of years until about 40,000 years ago they were
driven out by the immigrating Aurignac race, as Klaatsch and Heilborn
assumed, is of course only hypothesis. It is cqually questionable whether
the Cro-Magnon man is in fact the result of a mixture of the Neanderthal

+Some English philologists trace the verb “to write” to reizza, 3¢ it originally
mesnt to mark romeving.

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE 299

Scientific authorities are not agreed in their opinions as to the age of
the human race. It was some time before they were willing to place the
first appearance of man on earth as far back as the Glacial Epoch. How-
ever, the opinion is Jately gaining ground that man’s past can be traced
back to the Tertiary Period, We are also completely in the dark concerning
man's original home. Decided differences of opinion among the most
noted representatives of biologieal science have again been brought sharply
to the front during recent years by the results of the Cameron-Cable
expeditions in South Africa and the Roy Chapman Andrews American
expedition in Outer Mongolia. The question also remains unanswered
whether the appearance of mankind was confined to a definite region o
occurred in various parts of the earth approximately at the same time.
In other words, whether the genus Man sprang from a singlc stem and
the differences of race were subsequently caused by migrations or changes
in the external conditions of life, or whether difference of race was duc
to descent from different stems from the very beginning. Most rescarchers
today still maintain the standpoint of monogenesis and are of the opinion
that mankind goes back to a single original source and that race distinc
tions appeared only later through change of environment. Darwin main-
tained this point of view when he said: “All human races are so immensely
closer to one another than to any ape that I am inclined to view them as
descending from 2 single form.” What has caused prominent men of
science to adhere to the unity of the human specis is principally the
structure of the human skeleton, which determines the whole bodily forma-
tion, and which among all races shows an astonishing similarity of
structure.

To all these diffculties must be added the fact that we are not at all
clear about the concept of “race,” as is seen from the arbitrary way men
have played about with the cl of existing races. For a long time.
we were content with the four races of Linnacus; then Blumenbach pro-
duced a fifth and Buffon a sixth; Peschel followed at once with 2 seventh
and Agassiz with an cighth. Till at length Haeckel was talking of twelve,
Morton of twenty-two, and Crawford of sixty races— number which was
to be doubled a litte fater. So that s respectable a researcher as Luschan
could with justice assert that it is just as impossble to determine the
number of the existing races of men as of the existing languages, since
one can no more easily distinguish between a race and a variety than
between a language and a so<alled dialect. If a white North European is
set beside 2 Negro and 2 typical Mongolian the difference is clear to any
Iayman. But i one examines thoroughly the countless gradations of these
three races one reaches a point at last where one cannot say with certainty
where one race leaves off and the other begins.

BESIDES the concepts already discussed concerning the character of the
‘nation there is another which today is very clamorous and has gained many
adherents, especially in Germany. We are here speaking of “community
of blood” and of the alleged influence of race on the structure of the
nation and on its spiritual and cultural creative endowment. From the
Very beginning we must make here a clear distinction between purely
wientific investigations concerning the origin of races and their special
characteristics, and the socalled “race theories” whose advocates have
Ventured to judge the mental, moral and cultural qualities of particular
human groups from the real or imaginary physical characteritics of a race.
The latter undertaking is extremely risky, inasmuch as we are quite
uncertain not only of the origin of races, but of the origin of men in
general, and have to rely solely upon hypotheses, not knowing how far
they correspond to reality, or fail to do so.

208
THE
HISTORY OF

RACE

THEORY

AND
THE DISCOVERY OF
THE UNITY OF
THE RACES

BY RUDOLF ROCKER
South Chicago ABC

Zine Distro
@ P.O. Box 721
Homewood, IL 60430