Kurt Hildebrandt

Kurt Florentin Hildebrandt (12 December 1881 – 20 May 1966) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher. Initially a physician at the Wittenau sanatoriums and a member of the George Circle, he was appointed to a professorship of philosophy in 1934. In addition to philosophical works, he was also concerned with "racial psychology" and "racial hygiene".

Biography

Hildebrandt was born in Florence, the son of a preacher of the florentine German congregation. In Magdeburg, he attended the Cathedral Grammar School at the Monastery of Our Lady. Subsequently, motivated by Charles Darwin and modern biology, he studied medicine and natural sciences in Munich and Berlin under Emil Kraepelin and Ernst Rüdin, among others, with the state examination in 1905. The medical doctorate followed in 1906. His first position was at the Dalldorf mental hospital in the north of Berlin. Introduced by his school friend Friedrich Andreae, he joined the circle around Friedrich Wolters and Berthold Vallentin in Niederschönhausen near Berlin during this time. Initially primarily committed to the work and person of the universal historian Kurt Breysig, the circle, which moved to Lichterfelde in 1907 and organized lecture evenings there under the name "Academia urbana," finally turned its attention to the poet Stefan George in the second half of the 1900s. Soon, personal contact was also made possible, which not only for Hildebrandt, who belonged rather to the second squad of the George circle, became decisive in the following 20 years.

During the war he worked in a military hospital in Saarbrücken in the nerve department. Hildebrandt completed his studies of philosophy, which he pursued alongside his medical work, in Marburg, where he also received his doctorate in 1921 with a thesis on Nietzsche's Competition with Socrates and Plato under Paul Natorp. Hildebrandt worked at the Wittenau sanatoriums in the 1920s as a senior physician and psychiatrist in a suburb of Berlin. Despite the encouragement of the philosophers around Ernst Troeltsch, Max Dessoir and Eduard Spranger, who welcomed the inclusion of a representative from the George circle, Hildebrandt's attempt at a habilitation in Berlin in 1928 with the topic of Plato's World Negation and World Affirmation failed due to the objection of the philologists Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and his student Werner Jaeger, who denied Hildebrandt's professional knowledge. Jaeger spoke in his expert opinion of a "dilettante" without "scientific training".

Hildebrandt himself traced the opposition — probably not without reason — to an essay from 1910 in which he had attacked Wilamowitz's translation principles for ancient philosophical texts, in particular that the latter did not adhere to the linguistic and formal characteristics of the work of art: "But in these translations there is no Aeschylus, no Sophocles — only Wilamowitz". In the background was also the internal controversy about the methods of Geistesgeschichte, which were prominently used in the works of the George circle, and the question whether the study of Plato at the university should be reserved exclusively for the classical philologists there. With the help of the Prussian Minister of Culture, Carl Heinrich Becker, who promoted the George Circle on various occasions and was in personal contact with some of its members — including Hildebrandt — he nevertheless received a teaching assignment as honorary professor of philosophy in 1928. In 1932 he became medical director of the municipal insane asylum in Lichtenberg (Herzberge).

After the National Socialist seizure of power, Hildebrandt received a position as full professor of philosophy at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel in 1934 without a habilitation. He took over the chair of Julius Stenzel, who had been suspended by the National Socialists. The new, National Socialist rector Karl Lothar Wolf, himself a physicist, wanted a university teacher who could build a bridge between natural science and philosophy also in the sense of the new political orientation of the university. Moreover, Wolf, who was a friend of Carl Petersen, was close to the thinking of the George circle. Although the classical philologist Richard Harder tried hard to prevent the appointment of the psychiatrist, who had not qualified as a professor, in the Kiel commission, he was ultimately unable to prevail against Wolf, the rector. The appointment was also supported by Martin Heidegger, with whom Wolf was in close contact, while Alfred Baeumler expressed the assumption that Hildebrandt would probably follow the ideas of his master rather than the ideals of National Socialism even after George's death.

Hildebrandt subsequently served as co-editor of the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenschaft, a new journal founded by Wolf. He became a member of the NSDAP and the NSLB in April 1933, and later also of the NSV. As a psychiatrist, he was also a member of the Imperial Medical Association of Schleswig-Holstein.

Hildebrandt became emeritus professor in 1945, but continued his writing activities until shortly before his death.

Thought

Hildebrandt had early contacts with Stefan George and his circle. He collaborated on the three volumes of the Jahrbuch für die geistige Bewegung (1910–1912), in which the circle wanted to launch an attack on the intellectual currents of the time. To this end, Hildebrandt contributed a high-profile polemic in the first yearbook under the title "Hellas und Wilamowitz" against Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the most important classical philologist of the time and one of the best-known scholars of the Empire. Hildebrandt's criticism, supported by George and the other circle members, is not only directed against a translation practice of Greek works that strives to make antiquity "understandable" to contemporaries: "sacrilegious against Hellas [...] is to adapt these works to bourgeois comfort and proletarian taste." In addition, Wilamowitz is criticized for not sufficiently understanding and translating the ancient poems as art — and he and his guild as "teachers of the future teachers" are not least denied the competence to adequately educate the youth, which should rather be provided by art and its protagonists. His two-part critical examination of Romanticism ("Romantisch und Dionysisch") was unable to repeat this success in attracting attention.

After the yearbook period, Hildebrandt translated several Platonic texts and provided them with introductions that endured even after World War II (with Kröner and Reclam). In 1920, the writings Norm und Entartung des Menschen and Norm und Verfall des Staates were published. With these writings on "racial hygiene" and the doctrine of wholeness, he aroused fierce opposition even in the George circle, for example from Edgar Salin and Edith Landmann. On the other hand, he also found approval, for example with George himself, with Friedrich Gundolf and Friedrich Wolters. Hildebrandt wanted — in contrast to the "Nordists" among the race theorists — to create a cultural race by keeping unsuitable sexes or racial lines away from participation in the state through "strict isolation" or "strong culling."

The higher professions are open to the remaining groups for application through education, and the leading bearers of the state are selected from them according to their suitability, which is proven only later. The separation of the two groups must not be strict. Earlier mistakes, new blood mixture, changed aims of the state, degeneracy make shifting to the other side and to the other side necessary. But the separation must not be too loose either, because the rush for higher positions is so great anyway that it is not in the interest of the state to promote it.

Against the biological race theory of Hans F. K. Günther, Hildebrandt placed the category of the nation as a spiritual community. "The national idea is superior to racial community."

He emphasized that his theory of race was based on objective principles with regard to means and method and did not prescribed goals of breeding. "Without a standard, without a norm, the efforts of human breeding and racial hygiene have neither support nor meaning." Hildebrandt's racial thought was unusual for the time. He even considered an admixture of cultured Western European Jews to be advantageous for the development of a cultural nation, while he rejected a "marriage community" with Eastern Jews, Frenchmen, or negroes.

Hildebrandt's political theme was the rejection of liberal individualism and the search for a spiritual renewal in the community in the sense of a German "Greekism". Here he mainly represented the ideas of the George circle, for example when he advocated the original corporeality of the whole human being against all mechanization of life and wanted to overcome the opposition of nature and spirit. Besides George, Nietzsche and Plato were his points of reference, although he still preferred Plato to Nietzsche because he saw too much Dionysian hubris and self-idolatry in the latter. It is heroes who lead the struggle for a well-ordered state and thus make possible the overcoming of degeneracy. "The rejection of individualism is the opposite of the rejection of the great individual. The hero is the creator and nucleus of the state." Hildebrandt's writings are a combination of scientific insights with the thoughts of the George circle and have the goal of the "refutation of modern mechanism".

In his interpretation of Plato written in this spirit, Plato. The Struggle of the Spirit for Power (1933; based on the habilitation attempt) Hildebrandt emphasized — following the Plato image of the George circle, especially Heinrich Friedemann — the political dimension of Plato's work. Rainer Kolk sums up: "Plato's state belongs [according to Hildebrandt] to the elite, to tight leadership, to mythical legitimation, to creative forces; Hildebrandt pushes the thesis that Plato explicated the maxims for state action that are still valid today, and that he himself aspired to 'political leadership'." The book was favorably reviewed in 1935 by his Kiel colleague Hans-Georg Gadamer, who noted that "the most important impetus for a new understanding of Plato came from the circle of the poet Stefan George. [...] The Platonic work has never before been seen as directly political as in this account (completed in 1932). [...] The formation of philosophy in the Platonic dialogue is a 'mystery demanding ever new interpretation' through all distance, as close as everything that has taken shape in the flesh. Thus such an embodiment of Plato's political form, which for its part has something of the distant proximity of that which has become form, must challenge the primordial form of philosophy itself to a new response."

During the Kiel years, Hildebrandt wrote a revised version of his two writings from 1920 and published several articles in Rasse, the monthly journal of the Nordic Movement, from 1936 to 1939. He also devoted more time to the German literary classics Hölderlin and Goethe, as well as Leibniz. In addition, he contributed to the anthology Das Bild des Krieges im Deutschen Denken (The Image of War in German Thought), edited by August Faust as part of Aktion Ritterbusch in 1941.

After the end of the war, Hildebrandt's work The Idea of War in Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche (1941) was placed on the list of literature to be eliminated in the Soviet occupation zone. In the German Democratic Republic, this list was enlarged by Norm and Degeneration of Man (1920) and Norm, Degeneration, Decay, Related to the Individual, Race, State (1939).

Works

• Norm und Entartung des Menschen (1920)
• Norm und Verfall des Staates (1920)
• Nietzsches Wettkampf mit Sokrates und Plato (1922)
• Nietzsche als Richter unserer Zeit (1923; with Ernst Gundolf)
• Gedanken zur Rassenpsychologie (1924)
• Wagner und Nietzsche. Ihr Kampf gegen das 19. Jahrhundert (1924)
• Gesundheit und Krankheit in Nietzsches Leben und Werk (1926)
• Staat und Rasse. Drei Vorträge (1928)
• Ueber die Umformung gesehener Figuren durch wechselnden figuralen Zusammenhang (1933)
• Individualität und Gemeinschaft (1933)
• Platon. Der Kampf des Geistes um die Macht (1933)
• Norm, Entartung, Verfall bezogen auf den Einzelnen, die Rasse, den Staat (1934; 1939)
• Platons Vaterländische Reden. Apologie, Kriton, Menexenos (1936; introduced and transcribed by Kurt Hildebrandt)
• Hölderlin. Philosophie und Dichtung (1939; 1943)
• Goethe. Seine Weltweisheit im Gesamtwerk (1941; 1942)
• Kopernikus und Kepler in der deutschen Geistesgeschichte (1944)
• Goethes Naturerkenntnis (1947)
• Leibniz. Reich der Gnade (1953)
• Platon. Logos und Mythos (1959)
• Das Werk Stefan Georges (1960)
• Ein Weg zur Philosophie (1962)
• Erinnerungen an Stefan George und seinen Kreis (1965)
• Frühe Griechische Denker. Eine Einführung in die vorsokratische Philosophie (1968)

References

• Breuer, Stefan (2005). "Ästhetischer Fundamentalismus und Eugenik bei Kurt Hildebrandt". In: Bernhard Böschenstein, Jürgen Egyptien, Bertram Schefold & Wolfgang Graf Vitzthum, eds., Wissenschaftler im George-Kreis. Die Welt des Dichters und der Beruf der Wissenschaft. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 291–310.
• Raulff, Ulrich (2009). Kreis ohne Meister. Stefan Georges Nachleben. München: C. H. Beck.

External links

• Works by Kurt Hildebrandt at German National Library