The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [131]
Education, which emphasised humanism and the classics, was a weakening influence. In a statement that laid the foundations of the rise of German industry at the end of the century, Haeckel advocated the introduction of science to replace the divisive effects of liberal thought which split the community into interest groups. The encouragement of free will was also destructive, since, as Darwin had shown, organisms did not triumph by reason and will, but by struggle and purity.
’The human will,’said Haeckel, ‘has no more freedom than that of the higher animals, from which it differs only in degree and not in kind… the greater the freedom, the stronger must be the order.’Freedom, for Haeckel, meant submission to the authority of the group, which would enhance the opportunities for survival. In this condition moral law was subject to biology. In Haeckel’s opinion, ‘Thousands, indeed millions of cells are sacrificed in order for a species to survive.’The life of the individual was unimportant. There could be no appeal to an absolute set of ethics higher than those relating to the interest of the community as a whole.
Haeckel’s use of Darwin’s theories was decisive in the intellectual history of his time. It united trends already developing in Germany of racism, imperialism, romanticism, nationalism, and anti-semitism. The unity with the group which Haeckel so strongly advocated found favour among the Volkists, a group who believed in the ‘blood and purity’of the German race above all others, as well as the indissoluble bond of nature and the individual.
By the end of the nineteenth century Germany had been transformed from a backward, agricultural community of petty states into an industrial giant in less than one generation.
In 1899 Haeckel issued his major philosophical statement in Weltsrätsel (The Riddle of the Universe). It was a bestseller, running to ten editions in the first decade and selling half a million copies by 1933. In it Haeckel evoked the pagan past, the fatherland, the inevitability of struggle and faith in the people. In 1906, at the age of seventy-two, he founded the Monist League in Jena. It united eugenicists, biologists, theologians, literary figures, politicians and sociologists. Its president in 1911 was William Ostwald, Nobel prize-winner in chemistry.
By 1911 the league had six thousand members in forty-two towns and cities throughout Germany and Austria. Its influence on the growing Volkist movement was considerable, especially among its principal intellectuals. Otto Ammon, a leading racial anthropologist, wrote that the laws of nature were the laws of society. ‘Bravery, cunning and competition are virtues… Darwin must become the new religion of Germany… the racial struggle is necessary for mankind.’
Alexander Ploetz advocated a national board to screen would-be parents for racial purity, in order to eliminate defective babies. In 1904 he set up a eugenics journal, Archiv, the first issue of which was dedicated to Haeckel. In it proposals were advanced for breeding communities such as the great elite-breeding city planned by Theodor Fritsch, to be called Mittgard.
After 1918 Fritsch was the ideological guide of a youth movement named, after the Aryan deity, Artamarzen. Charter members of the movement included Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess. Aloysius Unold, vice-president of the Monists, said: ‘Brutal reality had awakened us from the petty dreams of good, free, equal and happy people.’
A new national party would unite the community. It would function as a living example of the survival of the fittest, a hierarchy based on ability. Work would be compulsory. The state dynamic would be economic, not political. The confusion and anarchy of parliamentary procedures would disappear. The nation would become a biological elite. Struggle would be its prime reason for existence. Underpinned by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Nazism was born.
The Aryan ideal which inspired Germany in 1901. Racial purity would ensure