Otto Westphal (historian)

Otto Heinrich Westphal (18 February 1891 – 15 February 1950) was a German historian and professor of Medieval and Modern History at the Historical Seminar of Hamburg University from 1933 to 1936. Westphal was a pioneer of an orientation of science and university structure in the sense of National Socialism.

Biography

Otto Westphal was born in Hamburg into a wealthy patrician family. His father Eduard Wilhelm Westphal was a lawyer. In 1910, Westphal began studying history at the University of Freiburg. Further stations were Berlin and Munich, where Friedrich Meinecke, Max Lenz and the later editor of the Historische Zeitschrift and active Karl Alexander von Müller were among his academic teachers. In 1917, Westphal earned his doctorate in Munich under Erich Marcks with a dissertation on the history of German liberalism. Westphal habilitated in Hamburg in 1923 and taught there as a Privatdozent until he was rehabilitated at the Georg August University of Göttingen in the winter semester of 1931/32. There, after mediation by Karl Brandi, he participated in a project on the bicentennial of the university.

In the early days of his teaching career, Westphal was a member of the Academic Senate. As a national conservative, he rejected the parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic and instead cherished hopes for a "revolutionary conservatism" that would be fulfilled in the renewal of Prussian Protestant traditions. As late as 1932, Westphal had published an appeal in favor of the Papen government in the Göttingen Tageblatt.

When Friedrich Keutgen, holder of the Chair of Medieval and Modern History II at the University of Hamburg, was appointed professor emeritus in September 1933, Otto Westphal received a call to this position. In a laudation by the faculty, the decision in favor of Westphal was justified by his political stance. Westphal had joined the NSDAP in April 1933. On November 11, 1933, he signed the Vow of allegiance to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State.

As early as 1932, when Westphal was teaching in Göttingen, Gustav Adolf Rein, later director of the university, had developed the "idea of the political university" in Hamburg. Westphal put this concept into practice with him from the winter semester of 1933. Together they created the "Political Subject Community," which was enshrined in the "Law for the Reorganization of the University of Hamburg" of January 19, 1934. This Professional Society was to become the "motor" of the university's political-scientific development, uniting National Socialist ideology with scientific traditions, as Westphal explained in his article "The Political College" in the Universitätszeitung.

Initially an "inner-scientific movement" of the faculty, it had the "National Socialist university" with the political orientation of the entire lecture system as its distant goal. Westphal himself became dean of the "political subject community" in January 1934. The supporters of the initiative were never able to achieve the goals they had set for themselves: Although ideologically oriented lectures were offered in various subjects for a few semesters, a complete transformation of the lecture system did not succeed. Within this framework, Westphal held classes on "Prussianism and Socialism" and 'Jünger's Worker' as part of a course on "German Socialism."

Meanwhile, a conflict flared up at the History Department between the "political" and the "non-political" scholars, especially between Otto Westphal and Justus Hashagen, who resolutely rejected National Socialism and "political science." The dispute was fought out primarily over questions of doctoral degrees and teaching materials.

Westphal taught as a full professor in Hamburg from the winter semester of 1933 until 1936, when he took over the professorship of Hans Rothfels in Königsberg, who had been expelled on account of his Jewish origins. On October 6, 1936, he was arrested for violating § 175 of the German Penal Code (homosexual acts). This had been preceded by a raid on Hamburg's Reeperbahn, as a result of which Westphal was accused of "contacts" with male prostitutes. Although Westphal was acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence, the state teaching authority nevertheless sought his dismissal in disciplinary proceedings. Probably to avoid this procedure, Westphal renounced his "title, salary and pension" with his dismissal on September 30, 1937. From then on he published as a freelance writer.

Westphal died in Hamburg on February 15, 1950.

Research

Early career, 1917–1932

In his 1917 dissertation, Westphal examined the history of the Preußische Jahrbücher, which he considered the central organ of the liberal movement before the founding of the Kaiserreich. By evaluating the yearbooks, he aimed to arrive at a "picture of liberal German man in his inner contexts." The dissertation is not a pure reckoning with liberalism, but it also does not spare criticism that arises from Westphal's worldview. Thus, the doctoral candidate Westphal emphasizes the influence of liberalism on the nation-building of Germany, but criticizes the lack of binding power of the national-liberal conception of the state. The latter, he argues, never held sway over the masses — which, in Westphal's thinking — only Bismarck was able to unite.

In several publications, Westphal dealt with the development of the German nation in the context of a general philosophy of state. This was followed by works on the German National Assembly, the development of a general theory of the state, the co-author of the Constitution of St. Paul's Church of 1848, Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, and the concept of the state by the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, to whom he had already devoted a chapter in his dissertation.

His work always intended to have a function of orientation for the present and the future. The scientific study of "political mankind" should at the same time be a guide for practice in the concrete political situation of Germany — a motto that Westphal followed extremely energetically after 1933 through his university-political actions. He emphasized that the Germans were a "people of science" and that only in the interaction of state and science could the crises of the present be overcome.

Westphal was a supporter of Bismarck and the Prussian traditions; for him, the founding of the Reich in 1871 was the consummation of Lutheran Protestantism, as he detailed in his work Enemies of Bismarck. In it, the national-conservative historian examined the cultural opposition not only to Bismarck, but also to the "ideas of 1871" that have been handed down to the present day, starting with a critique of the author Emil Ludwig's biography of Bismarck. By contrasting the "ideas of 1871" he praised with the "ideas of 1919" as a culture of political decay that was not oriented toward the state as a central moral idea, Westphal simultaneously attacked the basis of the history of ideas of the Weimar Republic.

Another topic that was to occupy Westphal until the end of his scientific activity was universal history. As early as his Philosophy of Politics of 1921, he attempted to trace the course of world history up to the present. For Westphal, world history culminated in the German Empire, which, encircled by the alliance of the other powers, had been at the center since the outbreak of World War I: "With their will to destroy us, they elevated us."

National Socialism, 1933–1945

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power, he published an essay entitled "Bismarck and Hitler," in which he declared Hitler to be the finisher of Bismarck's work, who with the "Ideas of 1933" took up the conjured the "Ideas of 1871". Thus it says: "In the front position against the golden, the black and the red International, against the 'black-red-golden' thought, the founder of the Reich and the leader of the Third Reich meet. Democracy inwardly and the International outwardly are the ideals in the cultivation of which both the one and the other recognized the incompatibility with a peculiar and sovereign German existence.

Westphal expressed solidarity with the National Socialist idea: "This was overthrow and reorganization at the same time, revolutionary transformation and yet the deepest historical bond: a unity of Germanism and Prussianism, which our enemies would like to decry as barbarism because they suspect that the idea of a German century is taking root in it."

When, for Westphal, the Prussian state and the Germanic people converged in terms of the history of ideas, he also seems to have succeeded in reconciling his previous research with the National Socialist conceptions of German history. In the same year, he wrote an article for the Hamburger Universitätszeitung under the title "Political Science," in which he stated that in 1933 "Volk and Staat" had become identical. Science should no longer follow "Art for art's sake" and should not tolerate professors who, out of a striving for objectivity, ignored the requirements of the people's state in their work. The article takes on a programmatic character when Westphal, in that period, takes the scholar to task for the state — and thus explicitly for the National Socialist state.

In 1941, he published Das Reich, the work that Peter Borowsky called "probably the most important manifesto of National Socialist historical ideology". In it, Westphal sketched the path of the Germanic-Germanic people through history until they became an empire and attempted an interpretive, metaphysically evaluative historiography. The history of the empire was at the same time the history of religion, religion and state were inseparably connected. The history of the empire was at the same time the history of religion.

This interpretive historiography was equally influenced by völkisch ideology, which made it possible to grasp German history as a unity and as purposeful, as in the days of Borussianism, which had been programmed for the Proclamation of the German Empire under Prussian leadership. He describes Adolf Hitler's work in his introduction, which is reminiscent of an account of the Last Judgment, as follows: "A tremendous transformation is breaking out, like a geological event, in the history of the present."

In terms of content, subject matter, and politics, Westphal had clearly decided to write history in the spirit of the National Socialists. Geopolitics, race theory, and the "Nordic spirit" became fixed components of his work. He described the racial struggle in Darwinian jargon as a natural "planetary aggregate."

Post-war period

Begegnung der Götter (Encounter of the Gods) was the title of a work that Otto Westphal left in fragmentary form when he died in 1950. Gustav Adolf Rein, his former companion, later published it as Weltgeschichte der Neuzeit 1750-1950. Here Westphal had returned to the theme of universal history, in the context of which he was also led "to a new interpretation of the German path of destiny."

In the introduction, the author presents himself as a reformed "ex-fascist" whose task now is to research National Socialism in order to prevent a new, "reactionary edition" of the "Third Reich." Hitler is now portrayed by him as a pan-European catastrophe, a purgatory. As his former counterpart at the History Department in Hamburg, Justus Hashagen, writes in a review, Westphal's treatment of National Socialism or the Jewish question is extremely incomplete, although he attests that he has largely been able to avoid "apologetic character." At this point, Westphal is far from coming to terms with his personal role in National Socialism. The "incompleteness", as Hashagen writes, would probably be better described as "concealment".

Westphal's last work, an application of Goethe's theory of colors to the philosophy of history, appeared in 1957. Westphal's oeuvre no longer plays a role in historiography today. Nicolaus Sombart explains this as follows: "In contrast to his prominent generation comrades, Schmitt, Jünger, Heidegger, he did not remain silent after 1945, but made a courageous attempt to explain his 'error' to himself and the world. The guild did not forgive him for this; he was hushed up."

Works

• Die Preußischen Jahrbücher von 1858–1863 (1917; 1918)
• Welt- und Staatsauffassung des deutschen Liberalismus. Eine Untersuchung über die Preußischen Jahrbücher und den konstitutionellen Liberalismus in Deutschland von 1858–1863 (1919)
• Deutsche Nationalversammlung. Der Neue Geist
• Philosophie der Politik. Einheiten und Mächte der Universalgeschichte (1921)
• "Bemerkungen über die Entwicklung einer allgemeinen Staatslehre in Deutschland." In: Von staatlichem Werden und Wesen. Festschrift für Erich Marcks zum 60. Geburtstag (1921; edited by Ludwig Bergsträsser)
• "Der Staatsbegriff Heinrich von Treitschkes." In: Deutscher Staat und deutsche Parteien. Festschrift für Friedrich Meinecke zum 60. Geburtstag (1922; edited by Paul Wentzcke), pp. 155–200.
• "Zur historischen Entwicklung der deutschen Staatsidee." In: Österreichische Rundschau 18 (1922), pp. 551–64.
• "Metternich und sein Staat." In: Österreichische Rundschau 19 (1923), pp. 901–15.
• "Einleitung." In: Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann: Die Politik (1924; editor)
• "Zur Beurteilung Hegels und Dahlmanns." In: HZ 129 (1924), pp. 252–80.
• "Deutscher Liberalismus im Zeitalter Bismarcks." In: HZ 138 (1928), pp. 58–71.
• Feinde Bismarcks (1930)
• "Über die Ideen von 1871." In: Bismarck und Göttingen (1932; edited by Arnold Oskar Meyer)
• Gustav Adolf und die Grundlagen der schwedischen Macht (1932)
• "Zum Hingange von Max Lenz." In: Hanseatische Geschichtsblätter 57 (1932), pp. 27–37.
• Theologie der deutschen Geschichte? (1933)
• "Bismarck und Hitler." In: Vergangenheit und Gegenwart 23 (1933), pp. 469–81.
• Das Reich. Aufgang und Vollendung (1941)
• Asien oder Amerika? Europa zwischen Ost und West (1950)
• Weltgeschichte der Neuzeit 1750–1950 (1953; edited by Gustav Adolf Rein)
• Die Weltgeschichte im Spiegel von Goethes Farbenlehre (1957)

References

• Borowsky, Peter (1991). "Geschichtswissenschaft an der Hamburger Universität 1933 bis 1945". In: Hochschulalltag im „Dritten Reich“. Die Hamburger Universität 1933–1945. Berlin/Hamburg: Dietrich Reimer, pp. 537–88.
• Goetz, Hans-Werner (2011). "Geschichtswissenschaft in Hamburg im „Dritten Reich“." In: Rainer Nicolaysen and Axel Schildt, eds., 100 Jahre Geschichtswissenschaft in Hamburg. Berlin/Hamburg: Dietrich Reimer, pp. 103–60.
• Holborn, Hajo (1931). "Protestantismus und Politische Ideengeschichte. Kritische Bemerkungen aus Anlass des Buches von Otto Westphal: „Feinde Bismarcks“." In: Historische Zeitschrift 144, pp. 15–30.
• Hying, Klemens (1964). Das Geschichtsdenken Otto Westphals und Christoph Stedings. Ein Beitrag zur Analyse der nationalsozialistischen Geschichtsschreibung. Dissertation: Freie Universität Berlin.

External links

• Works by Otto Westphal at German National Library