• 1 James 1907.
• 2 James 1908.

4The relatively widespread reception of pragmatism during the Wilhelminian empire has surely its main cause in the fact that William James, as the best-known pragmatist, published in 1907 a popular synthesis of his philosophy under the title Pragmatism. A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking,1 which was translated a year later by Wilhelm Jerusalem into German.2 In this small book James not only propagated and defended the pragmatic maxim of the founding father of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, but also tried to apply the maxim to the problem of truth. According to his theory the truth of a belief consists in one formulation in its verification, in another one in the usefulness for the bearer of that belief.

• 3 Schlick 1910.

5At the Third International Congress of Philosophy 1908 in Heidelberg, Pragmatism made a first big appearance on the European continent. The theme “pragmatist theory of truth” was by far the most widely discussed at the whole congress. Only very few German philosophers present in Heidelberg missed the opportunity to give their opinion on James’s pragmatism. Many published a critical review afterwards (including Moritz Schlick,3 the founder of the Vienna Circle). But that reception was more or less superficial: most of James’s critics leaned only on the chapter on truth and not at all on the introduction and the last one, where James propagated his theory as a “happy harmonizer” between the fact-orientated “toughminded” and the “tenderminded,” who preferred a religious world-view. The toughminded were given “truth” as verification in James´s book, the tenderminded truth as usefulness, as a guide to life. As far as I know, no full-fledged monograph on pragmatism came forward in Germany at the time.

• 4 Jerusalem 1925.
• 5 Surprisingly in Habermas’s “Erkenntnis und Interesse” 40 years later such a peculiar three-part div (...)

6During the following period of the Weimar Republic, only a few articles on pragmatism were published in Austria by Wilhelm Jerusalem, the translator of James’s Pragmatism book.4 Max Scheler’s book, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, came a little later in Germany. There Scheler conceded a role for a pragmatistic interpretation of some of the sciences, namely the natural sciences, but refused to extend such an interpretation to the humanities and theology.5

• 6 Baumgarten 1936.
• 7 Baumgarten 1938.
• 8 Burkamp 1938.
• 9 Gehlen 1940/1993.

7During the Third Reich, well-informed monographs on pragmatism appeared for the first time in German in 1936 and 1938, namely the two volumes of Die geistigen Grundlagen des amerikanischen Gemeinwesens (the spiritual foundations of the American community) by Eduard Baumgarten.6 Part one dealt with Benjamin Franklin, a pragmatist “avant la lettre” in the eye of the author. Part two was called, Der Pragmatismus: R. W. Emerson, W. James, John Dewey.7 Later on a number of publications appeared which leaned on the second part, namely by Wilhelm Burkamp,8 Arnold Gehlen9 and Helmuth Schelsky. These publications are better informed about pragmatism than their forerunners in the two previous periods (with the possible exception of Scheler) and evaluate it throughout more positively.

• 10 Kempski 1952.

8Afterwards in the early Federal Republic of Germany (up to 1960), only a small but extremely well-informed book was published by Jürgen von Kempski on Peirce in 1952.10 In it Kempski filled the gap which was left open by Baumgarten’s strange omission of Peirce.

• 11 Baeumler 1931.

12That Baumgarten could prevail in the end, get a habilitation, publish his book and later on even got a philosophy chair in Königsberg, can only be explained by the circumstance that he built ties with the rising star in Nazi philosophy, who so to speak succeeded Heidegger as Führer of German philosophy, a certain Alfred Bauemler. Baeumler had built a career in philosophy at the university of Dresden prior to 1933. He was known as co-editor (together with Manfred Schröter) of the prestigious Handbuch der Philosophie (Handbook of Philosophy), which started in 1926 and, for our theme more importantly, also of an edition of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche from 1930 onwards. It was he who already in 1931 depicted Nietzsche as a propagandist of the authoritarian state in his book, Nietzsche als Philosoph und Politiker.11

• 12 See Baumgarten’s “vita,” 7th of February 1933, in: Phil. Pers. Baumgarten (in UAG)
• 13 Its title was “Staatswissenschaftliche Austauschstelle beim Institut für Sozial- und Staatswissensc (...)
• 14 Hausmann 2003.
• 15 Dewey 1925.

17In order to understand the following some facts about Eduard Baumgarten’s biography and his academic career must be stated. He (26.8.1898-15.08.1982) stemmed from a liberal academic family. His father, Fritz Baumgarten, had been director of a Gymnasium and later on university professor in Freiburg.12 The famous brothers Max and Alfred Weber were his uncles, as was Otto Baumgarten, a liberal theologian, who towards the end of the 1920s became chairman of the German league of Human Rights. Baumgarten immediately after his final exams at school volunteered as a soldier in the First World War. During that time he came into contact with Heidegger who at the time served as an agent in the office of postal censorship in Freiburg. After studies of philosophy and sociology in Heidelberg and Munich (there still with Max Weber before his premature death in the spring of 1920), Baumgarten submitted his dissertation with Alfred Weber in Heidelberg under the longish title, “Inner forms of human community. Material sociological investigations for the interpretation of the present cultural movement.” The thesis remained unpublished. After receiving his doctorate he – together with 12 other postgraduates – took a scholarship for the USA from an organization founded by Alfred Weber,13 which shortly later became the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst. Baumgarten visited as a post-doctoral student (not as a visiting professor),14 first in the winter semester of 1924/25 at Columbia university in New York, and in the summer semester of 1925 at Harvard. While in New York he came in contact with Dewey and some of his pupils, an encounter which led to his plan to translate Dewey’s “Experience and Nature.”15 When Baumgarten asked Dewey for his opinion on the introduction Baumgarten had written for the envisaged German edition, he received the following response:

• 17 Ratzke 1987/1998.
• 18 There Brock wrote a book about the current philosophical situation in Germany; after 1945 he went b (...)

20In place of Baumgarten, the assistant position in Freiburg went to Werner Brock, a pupil of the phenomenologist philosopher Moritz Geiger in Göttingen and son in law of Herman Nohl, a follower of Wilhelm Dilthey who, after a stint in Jena, became a professor of pedagogy in Göttingen.17 None of these connections, however, protected Brock, when shortly afterwards he was dismissed as a Jew in Freiburg by the Nazis. Heidegger gave him at least a letter of recommendation for an exile in England.18

• 20 Rickert (without adressee), 2nd February 1933, in: Phil. Pers. Baumgarten (p. 354 f.)

24There is another letter written by one of the elder statesmen in German philosophy in Baumgarten’s favor, namely by Heinrich Rickert, the head of the southwestern branch of Neukantianism, a letter which survives in the Baumgarten personal file at Göttingen university. Rickert writes that he had known Baumgarten even as a child. When he met him again later on, Baumgarten made an unfavorable, immature impression, giving Rickert no inclination to discuss philosophical issues with him. He then heard from Marianne Weber, Max Weber’s widow, that Baumgarten had experienced a hard fight for survival in the USA. When he came back from America, he “was changed completely.” He had considerably matured and was very sympathetic now. Rickert found his information on American universities and American youth interesting, and now this more mature Baumgarten made a very good impression on him.20

• 21 Hausmann 2003.
• 22 Ebel (1962, 120, Nr. 11).
• 23 The circle was not an invention of the young Nazi regime, as Hausmann (2003: 216) writes.

25Baumgarten’s ties to the Göttingen academic scene as well to some of the most prominent German philosophers helped him in the end to achieve a lecturer position for American studies (Amerikakunde) at the English Seminar at Göttingen in 1933. Amerikakunde was not introduced in Göttingen by the Nazis, as Hausmann has it.21 There was a long tradition in place in Göttingen, which dated back to the time when the university had been – before the annexion of the kingdom of Hannover by Prussia in 1866 – the university of the state of Hannover (Landesuniversität). Plans to found an entire institute for American studies before the First World War did not materialize. But at least the subject was covered from 1921 onwards by an honorary professor, the US-American Thomas Cuming Hall, until he reached emeritus status in 1931.22 He had been also in charge of the Englisch-Amerikanischer Kulturkreis (English-America Culture Circle),23 which cared for visiting student from Britain and the USA and organized public lectures given mostly by experts from outside Göttingen.

• 24 Hecht to Neumann (dean of the Phil. Faculty of the Uni. of Göttingen, 30th January 1933, in: Pers. (...)

26The aftermath of the economic crisis of 1929 ff. then led to the idea to pursue Amerikakunde with younger (and cheaper) lecturers instead. Baumgarten was invited to give a lecture on the 15th of November 1932 in the English-American Culture Circle of the University of Göttingen on “Benjamin Franklin and the psychology of American everyday life (Alltag).”24

• 25 Protokollbuch der Phil. Fak., 17th February 1933, p. 83 f.

28Hans Hecht, the director of the English seminary, then asked the faculty to decide the lectureship case in favor of Baumgarten – in a letter which was sent on the 30th of January 1933, the exact date of the Nazi “seizure of power.” The faculty had agreed on the 17th of January.25 While the decision-making about his lectureship in the faculty in Göttingen and the ministry in Berlin dragged on (possibly caused by the turnover in the administration after the Nazi “seizure of power”), Baumgarten prepared extensive programs for his lectures and seminars, as he reported to Hecht. The themes he proposed were centered on the philosophy of Peirce, James and Dewey, American psychology (James and Watson) and pedagogy (Dewey). What he then actually taught after 1933 is a bit different: Peirce is no longer mentioned, nor Watson.

• 26 See Hausmann (2003: 218, fn 18) for a full list of all of Baumgarten’s announcements during his tim (...)

29The relevant document for the lectureship was sent in April 1933 to the ministry, now under the Nazi – and former Göttingen student of classical philology – Bernhard Rust. Already in May Baumgarten should have started his courses, but it seems that the time between obtaining the lectureship and the publication of the personal- and lecture-program was too short to announce his course for the summer-semester 1933. For the winter-semester 1933/34, he announced in any case a lecture series “American man as seen in his philosophy (Emerson, James, Dewey).” That is almost identical with the main idea of his pragmatism book of 1938. Relevant for his publications were also the lectures from the winter-semester 1936/37 “Emerson” and the winter semester 1937/38, again “Emerson.”26

• 28 Hausmann (2003: 222).

31It seems that Lipps was also helpful to provide a publisher for the Franklin-book.28

• 29 Baumgarten 1936.

32When Baumgarten submitted in 1935 his habilitation thesis, “Die Grundlagen des Amerikanischen Gemeinwesens, Band I”29 (“Foundations of the American community, part one: Benjamin Franklin. The Teaching Master of the American Revolution”), his career came to an abrupt end as a result of the following expert opinion on him from Martin Heidegger, which seemingly had followed Baumgarten after his move from Freiburg to Göttingen. I need to quote the letter from the 16th of December 1933 in full:

• 31 Drexler told me this in an interview.

33There are other copies of slightly different versions of Heidegger’s opinion. The original did not survive. The files of the Göttingen chapter of the Dozentenschaft, to which it was seemingly addressed, were all burned by its last Führer, the classical philologist Hans Drexler, shortly before the end of the Second World War.31 After 1945 Heidegger tried to downplay the importance of his expert opinion in his denazification process. He wrote to a member of the denazification committee that he had been asked from Göttingen to give his judgment on Baumgarten’s scientific abilities and his National Socialist reliability. Regarding this aspect he had pointed to Baumgarten’s liberal descent (but he omits his reference to “the Jew Fränkel”). Heidegger also avoids identifying who “in Göttingen” asked him to give his opinion.

• 32 Cassirer (1981: 182).
• 33 See Heidegger 2014.

34Very telling in Heidegger’s Gutachten is the antisemitism, which was brought up first as a theme in Toni Cassirer’s book.32 It was then discussed anew, when a letter from the late 1920s (that is: before the Nazi “seizure of power”) was published, and later on resurfaced again after the publication of Heidegger’s black notebooks.33 In my view Heidegger was not an antisemite on principle, but used it here and there as a means to discredit enemies. Think of the “Jews” in his environment: his forerunner Edmund Husserl, his pupils Karl Löwith and Herbert Marcuse or his relation with Hannah Arendt. In the context of the Heidegger-Baumgarten affair, it is also noteworthy that he preferred the “Jew” Werner Brock to the “aryan” Eduard Baumgarten. Furthermore, Heidegger’s suspicion that Baumgarten had achieved his position in Göttingen through a connection with “the Jew Fränkel” is wrong, (as I showed above).

• 34 See Heidegger 1933a and Heidegger 2000 passim.

36Martin Heidegger in November/December 1933 surely was the most prominent German philosopher, because of his philosophical stature as the author of Sein und Zeit and the Davos dispute with Ernst Cassirer, but also because of his extraordinary engagement for National Socialism. It became public for the first time in his famous speech as Rector of Freiburg University, “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität” (The Self-affirmation of the German University), with its famous propagation of the trias of Arbeits-, Wehr- and Wissensdienst (labor, military and knowledge service) and many other speeches and activities.34 It remains to be explained how Baumgarten, depicted as liberal, associated with Jews and, furthermore, mostly unknown in academic circles won that struggle in the end.

• 35 Dozentenschaft (Blume) to dean of the phil. faculty (Wilde), 15th of January 1935, in: Phil. Pers. (...)

37At first Baumgarten’s case seemed hopeless. The Dozentenschaft not only denied the habilitation, but also demanded a time-limit for his lectureship. They argued that Baumgarten was not suited to present American studies in the National Socialist state, given his time in America, because, “There is the danger that many foreigners are not acquainted with National Socialism in the sense it needs to be under all circumstances.”35 The preferred limitation for Baumgarten’s lectureship was a half year.

• 36 This documentation survived in the Göttingen university archive as part of the new signature “Phil. (...)
• 37 Ebel (1962: 118, Nr. Ph. 1, 258).
• 38 (Ibid.: 117, Nr Ph 1, 245); for a description and discussion of the move from Hecht to Wilde see Sc (...)

39Baumgarten was able through “connections” in the office of the Dozentenschaft to look into Heidegger’s opinion. He then got an appointment with the leader of the Göttingen chapter of that organization, the medicine professor Werner Blume, and was allowed to describe the whole conflict with Heidegger from his perspective, backing it up with a lengthy documentation.36 As a first step toward regaining respectability for Baumgarten, the new professor of English studies, Hans-Oskar Wilde,37 intervened. At the age of only 28, he had replaced the “Jew” Hans Hecht.38 Now, in his capacity as the new dean of the Philosophical faculty at Göttingen, he asked the leader of the Dozentenschaft for a rejection of Heidegger’s expert opinion. He indeed got it. The leader of the Dozentenschaft wrote:

• 40 That camp took place from the15th of Feb. to the 7th of March 1937. Baumgarten asked the dean on th (...)

40From then onwards everything went as quick as lightning. The required colloquium lecture to be delivered by Baumgarten took place less than a week later. It was on Kant’s categorial imperative, exactly the theme over which Baumgarten and Heidegger’s ways had parted before 1933. In order to take the final step toward the status of Privatdozent, Baumgarten had to undergo a “Gemeinschaftslager” (community camp) – the name given to paramilitary drill and ideological indoctrination at Rittmarhausen near Göttingen.40

• 41 I thank Brigitte Parakenings (Archive of Scientific Philosophy, Konstanz university) for the inform (...)

41It seems that Baumgarten had in the meantime found a powerful ally, namely Alfred Baeumler (19th of November 1887-19th of March 1968). When exactly that happened I don’t know. Baumgarten wrote about this encounter on other occasions, but the original correspondence between the two men from the 1930s is not accessible.41

• 43 Baeumler 1926/1934.
• 44 See for example Nietzsche (1930); Baeumler regarded “The Will to Power” as Nietzsche’s main work.
• 45 Baeumler 1931.
• 46 See especially the chapter II, 3: „Rousseau. Gegen Demokratismus und Sozialismus,” (ibid., 113-9).

43Who was Baeumler? As I indicated in the introduction, he built his academic career before 1933 with the edition of the Handbook of Philosophy43 and an edition of Nietzsche’s works.44 But he also leaned politically early on towards fascism, especially in his small book, “Nietzsche as philosopher and politician,” of 1931.45 Its content does not need to be treated here at length. However, he reviewed there all of Nietzsche’s antidemocratic and antisocialist polemics.46 In his epilogue, Baeumler reminded readers of Nietzsche’s recommendation for a close coalition with Russia (at Nietzsche’s time the Czarist empire, at Baeumler’s the Soviet state) on the one hand and his admonition against an American-style future on the other. The last paragraph reads:

• 48 Leaman (1993: 100).
• 49 Tilitzki; this speech is not mentioned in Baeumlers defense in the denazification process: see M. B (...)

44Shortly after the publication of this book, Baeumler also went public politically when he joined the National Socialist “Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur,” founded by the Nazi party’s ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, when he signed on the 27th of July 1932 a call on university professors to vote for Hitler.48 These several activities earned Baeumler a newly founded chair for philosophy and political pedagogy in early 1933 in Berlin. The university and the philosophical faculty were not even asked to give an opinion on that move. Already on the occasion of the bookburnings in May 1933 Baeumler gave a speech to the Nazi students.49

• 50 See Tilitzki (2002, passim).

45Now three years later, when the Baumgarten case entered its decisive stage, Baeumler had been promoted in Rosenberg’s administrative body, comissioner of the Führer for the supervision of the whole ideological training and education of the NSDAP (“Beauftragter des Führers für die Überwachung der gesamten geistigen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP”) to the directorate of the Amt Wissenschaft (science office). This not only allowed him to mingle within the Nazi-party, but also gave him significant influence within science and education as a whole.50

• 51 It is interesting to note that Heidegger later on made at least an effort to deal with pragmatism. (...)
• 52 It was not only popular among right-wing academics, but also was shared by some on the left (like T (...)

46Heidegger had held American pragmatism in low esteem, having said for instance in Freiburg to Baumgarten that Dewey was not worthwhile to study because he lacked a philosophical niveau of his own.51 That opinion on pragmatism was endemic among German philosophers.52 So why did Baumgarten (and Baeumler) not share this wide-spread suspicion and resentment?

• 54 Baumgarten (1956: 94).
• 55 Baumgarten (1956: 94).
• 56 Baumgarten 1939.
• 57 Baumgarten 1956.
• 58 Compare its announcement as a chapter in the content list (ibid.: 93) and on page 152, where it was (...)

52Baumgarten described later on, how he formed the hypothesis that Nietzsche must have something to do with Emerson already during his first seminar-course in Göttingen in the summer-semester 1933, at a time when almost nobody, including the personel in the Nietzsche-archive in Weimar, would believe in the existence of such a relationship.54 But then in the Winter-Semester 1937/38, Baumgarten went to Weimar himself and indeed found convincing corroboration for his hypothesis.55 He was then given the opportunity to publish a piece about Emerson and Nietzsche in Baeumler’s “Internationaler Zeitschrift für Erziehung.”56 The full story about similarities and ties between Emerson and Nietzsche was developed later on after 1945, in a long article starting the first volume of the “Zeitschrift für Amerikakunde” in 1956.57 Baumgarten published in the documentary part of that article excerpts from Nietzsche’s hand from the works of Emerson and annotations Nietzsche made in his copy of Emerson’s works. Baumgarten as well described in more detail than before the various influences of Emerson on Nietzsche and also the differences between them. I cannot comment on these investigations here at length. To take just one example: Baumgarten presented the thesis that Nietzsche leaned on Emerson in his construct of the Übermensch (“the constructions of the Übermensch after models taken from Emerson”)58 in his Zarathustra. Thesis 4 of Baumgarten’s concluding statements reads as follows:

• 59 Habermas 1968, Apel 1973.

55A renewed interest in pragmatism in Germany in the 1960s neglected (or perhaps intentionally avoided) both Emerson and Baumgarten’s investigations and instead leaned mostly on the real founding father of pragmatism, Charles S. Peirce. In Jürgen Habermas’s Erkenntnis und Interesse as well as in Otto Apel’s Transformation der Philosophie, the most important books introducing this pragmatist turn, you will not find a single mention of either Emerson or Baumgarten.59

• 62 The single exception was Jürgen von Kempski, who wrote a short review in the Deutsches Adelsblatt i (...)

60Baumgarten at least had heard of Peirce (as the title of his planned lectures indicate). But the edition of Peirce’s “Collected Papers” started only in 1931, and the volume containing pragmatism and pragmaticism was published in 1934. It went almost completely unnoticed in the Third Reich.62

• 64 (Ibid.: 456).

65But Baumgarten also – in order to please Baeumler – wrote in a footnote about “Baeumler’s simple determination to awake from the remnants of Nietzsche’s life and thought a ‘pragmatism’ of a German kind.”64

• 65 Vogt (2002: 17).

66This passage is telling, because it can be interpreted as a confirmation of the thesis put forward by Peter Vogt, who writes that Baumgarten’s interpretation of pragmatism, which he regards as “widely superior to every other” of the ones he discusses in his book, did not preclude Baumgarten from an open sympathy for National Socialism.65 He offers as explanation for this peculiar fact the following:

• 67 Baumgarten 1934b.

67That can only be underlined, because the paragraphs in the Pragmatism-book were only a mild version of things Baumgarten had published elsewhere in a number of articles. The most noteworthy is the piece American Philosophy and German Faith (Amerikanische Philosophie und deutscher Glaube).67 There he not only tried to remove those “conceptual misunderstandings” concerning the term “democracy” in the introduction of his book on pragmatism, but had added a sentence of a (then) seeming actuality:

• 69 Leaman (1993: 100).

68Indeed: the cited paragraph from the 1934 article is an example of an early and strong nod in the direction to National Socialism. The phrase “support through referendum” makes this clear. In November 1933 Hitler introduced a plebiscite about the exit from the League of Nations. A big demonstration of the German academic and intellectual scene gave applause to this event at a meeting in Leipzig, among them in first line also Martin Heidegger. Not less than 961 intellectuals signed the accompanying document, among them 25 academic philosophers.69 Baumgarten was not among them. Perhaps this was simply due to the fact that he belonged not yet fully to academia, because he was still working on his habilitation. Perhaps the cited paragraph is an attempt to compensate for that missed opportunity. In any case: it could hardly have escaped Baumgarten’s attention that already in May 1933 all political parties had been forbidden and so democracy was overthrown; the different referenda that Hitler organized, served only the acclamation of his regime.

• 71 (Ibid.: 96).

70Baumgarten continues with a reinterpretation of Dewey’s well known statement against godlike leaders: “democracy is not concerned with freaks, or geniuses, or heroes, or divine leaders.” Against a “misunderstanding” that Dewey propagated a bad, leaderless and even leader-inimical (führerfeindiche) democracy, “from which we happily escaped,” Baumgarten stresses the eminent role that leadership played from the very beginning in British and US-American democracy. According to this reinterpretation, Dewey only rejected “community-foreign (gemeinschaftsfremde), irresponsable leadership, which wanted blind subjects, in contrast to a leadership which “to the last house of the nation” searches its “co-workers, wakens them and makes them step in.”71

• 72 Hausmann (2003: 223).

71What about the reception of Baumgarten’s work during the Third Reich in Germany and US-America? Hausmann cites only a very negative review about the Franklin book and adds that author and publisher were not able to enter into the Anglo-American sphere.72 That picture is at least one-sided and needs a correction.

• 77 Schneider 1947/1957.
• 78 Schneider 1928.
• 79 Schneider 1936.

78This positive evaluation perhaps might invite a question mark, because Schneider known after the Second World War mostly for his standard work on the history of American philosophy,77 had during the 1920s and 1930s developed a lively interest in Italian fascism (as a consequence of a visiting scholarship to Italy in the ‘20s). As an early résumé of his political investigations and experiences in Italy, he had published in 1928 the book The Making of the Fascist State.78 And only shortly before Baumgarten’s pragmatism book he added in 1936 another book on the theme.79

• 80 Vogt (2002: 41-60).
• 81 Vogt (2002: 52 ff.).

79Now Vogt in his book on pragmatism and fascism took the example of Schneider as one of two American pragmatists who had themselves fascist leanings.80 When reading only Schneider’s books, one is surprised by its mostly descriptive and “positivistic” approach in describing the Mussolini dictatorship. But, as Vogts makes it clear, unpublished papers show fascist inclinations.81

• 82 Schilpp to Baumgarten, 13th of Dec. 1938, in: Phil. Pers. Baumgarten in UAG.

80But Baumgarten was not only praised by Schneider: He was invited to contribute to the very first volume of the Library of Living Philosophers founded by Paul Arthur Schilpp, a series, which afterwards became a sort of counterpart to a (missing) Nobel-prize in philosophy. The volume was dedicated to John Dewey and appeared on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1939. In his letter of invitation Schilpp expressis verbis left it open to Baumgarten to proceed from his own standpoint or “the spiritual stance of his own people” and “to deal with the theme as critically as you like.”82

• 83 Schilpp 1938; see for he causes of the rejection Dahms (1987/1998: 302).
• 84 (Ibid.: 1 f.); It seems to me that – mutatis mutandis – similar worries could be named with today’s (...)
• 85 (Ibid.: 78).

81Baumgarten tried in vain to get a permit by the German authorities to contribute an article, because Schilpp had made critical remarks about National Socialism in his book, “The Quest for Religious Realism.”83 This book was prompted, as Schilpp wrote in the introduction, by the course of world events in the last quarter century. On the one hand, he began to name the First World War, the Russian revolution, the Versailles peace-treaty, and then ended in the immediate present with other events which had fallen “with increasing suddenness and tempo and with the staccato sound of a machine gun!”84 This included “the arrival of Hitler! The rearming of Germany […] The persecution of the Jews!” On the other hand, he went on to ask what religion could say to and do about such a world. In the chapter, “Can we both be Patriotic and Christian?” indeed he came forward with a straightforward rejection of fascism and National Socialism. In the second part of that chapter, with “illustrations from abroad, from sufficiently far away,”85 he summed up his investigations as follows:

• 88 (Ibid.: 81); Schilpp seems to have followed very closely the religious battle (Kirchenkampf) betwee (...)

83As he explained elsewhere, these dealings meant to be “put into concentration camps or murdered by the state.”88

• 89 See Leaman (1993: 244-7) for lists of organizers and participants as well as the programme of that (...)
• 90 (Tilitzki 2002: 958).

86He also was invited by Baeumler together with 29 handpicked young philosophers to the castle of Buderose (near Guben) to a conference for a week from 12th to 19th of March 1939,89 the only one of that type during the entire Nazi dictatorship. This gathering was meant to further the indoctrination with Nazi ideology and screen the participants for possible later careers. It came under the very general title “Weltanschaung und Philosophie” (wordview and philosophy). Nietzsche belonged there to the themes discussed after Baeumler’s lecture on Kant on the 14th of March (with Baeumler himself, Schlechta, Baumgarten and Springmeyer as discussants).90 Pragmatism had a place at most indirectly, in or after Alfred Zastrau´s talk on “Das Wort Wahrheit” (“the word truth”) the following day. Baumgarten, who intervened after all the other talks in the discussion, remained silent this time. Rosenberg himself invited the participants to a comrades’ evening on the 16th and gave a talk on “Sense and task of the science conference.”

• 91 Gehlen 1940/1993; see also Joas (1992 b: 130) and Karl-Siegbert Rehberg’s introduction to Gehlen 19 (...)
• 92 See for details Tilitzki (2002: 789 ff.).

87Baumgarten seems to have had a good showing in Buderose in the eyes of the relevant authorities. He was called in 1941 to a philosopy chair in Königsberg, in a way as a distant successor to Kant. He replaced directly Arnold Gehlen, who went to Vienna a year earlier, and who had shown in his main work from that time, Der Mensch, pragmatist tendencies and obvious knowledge of Baumgarten’s work.91 In Königsberg Baumgarten developed a program for a biological pragmatism based on evolution theory. He named some people who could possibly work on that program in cooperation, but he was only partially successful in his efforts. He at least achieved a move in the opposite direction as Gehlen’s voyage, that is, from Vienna to Königsberg. I have in mind Konrad Lorenz, later the very famous founder of animal ethology and a trained biologist, who received a psychology chair in Königsberg.92 They had met earlier in Göttingen, when the (also later on) famous biologist and animal physiologist Erich von Holst introduced Baumgarten to Lorenz. But the good cooperation between Baumgarten and Lorenz lasted only for a short while, before Königsberg was threatened by Soviet troops. Baumgarten gave a radio talk shortly before he and Lorenz escaped. It was a matter of fierce controversy after the end of World War II, whether this talk was meant as a hold out appeal against the “bolshevist danger” or not.

• 93 Baumgarten 1945.

88In the very last days of the war, Baumgarten turned up in Göttingen again. There he earned some fame as the leading spokesman of a small crew who drove out in an open military car with a white flag towards the allied troops in order to save the town from annihilation. Soon after the liberation he gave a triumphant speech to a gathering of students in which he denied German guilt in the atrocities of the National Socialist regime. That earned him a suspension from academic work for a while by the British education branch, and his denazification became ever more difficult. Especially his actions in Königsberg were held against him: did he give, for instance, a hold-out-talk via radio ln the 14th of March 194593 or not? I do not know whether any files (in what is now) Kaliningrad or elsewhere survive. It is difficult to give an opinion on denazification matters on the basis of the Göttingen files alone.

• 94 Baumgarten 1964.
• 95 See Albert 1971.

89It took a long time before Baumgarten was again admitted to a university, taught students or started publications. That came in Mannheim, where he started a new academic career. He abandoned his big theme, pragmatism, more or less completely. It is small wonder that his official position was no longer in American studies, nor was it in philosophy. Rather, he moved into sociology, with main themes during that period in organisation sociology and university reform. In the 1960s, he also turned to one of his relatives, Max Weber, who in Nazi-times had stood for a while in the way of his career. In 1964 he served as organizer of the big congress of the German sociological society in Heidelberg on the occasion of Weber’s 100th birthday, and he published in that year a collection of Weber’s more political works.94 So, for Baumgarten the Nazi-period, during which he wrote his major works on American society, on Franklin and on pragmatism, remained in the end a transitory one. Not a single author in the Festschrift dedicated to him on the occasion of his 70th birthday cared to write anything on pragmatism.95

• 96 Joas (1992 b: 133).

90In view of the evidence given above, one might ask, was Baumgarten a Nazi? Can it even be said that Baumgarten had a “perverted love for pragmatism,” as Hans Joas assessed it?96

• 97 See for other rather difficult examples in philosophy in Göttingen alone Dahms (1987/1998).

91First of all, one has to take into account that everyone who wanted to pursue an academic career in the Third Reich needed to find a difficult balance between his and her own beliefs and projects and the demands of the dictatorship. That applies to academics in every field, but especially in a highly ideologically-loaded subject as philosophy.97 Furthermore, unlike many others, Baumgarten had to struggle already before 1933 with the wrath of Heidegger, and later on especially with the “expert opinion” given in December 1933 and its devastating consequences. So, any judgments about what were merely opportunistic moves in order to save his career and what represented a willingness to embrace National Socialism needs to be studied very carefully, and in full knowledge of the relevant university files (which are completely neglected by Joas and Vogt).

• 98 See more titles in Hausmann (2003: 225, footnote 37).

92In Königsberg, Baumgarten was much more “explicit” (as Hausmann termed it) as an ideologue of National Socialism. One only needs to read some titles of articles and booklets he published, like Der Mensch als Soldat (Man as a soldier).98 But more material has to be studied in order to form a definitive judgment on his Königsberg period, his relationship to his colleague Konrad Lorenz, his lectures and seminars, his flatly propagandistic speeches and publications, his dealings with the university and government authorities. Special emphasis needs to be laid on the radio message mentioned above, which played a big role in his Göttingen denazification process. Given the limitations of space the interpretation and evaluation of this vast and complicated material can only be attempted in another article.