Wolfgang Bialas

Aurel Kolnai’s The War against the West remains one of the most insightful analyses of Nazi thought ever written. First published in 1938 it was a revelation for many readers. Quite different in tone and approach from most other analyses of Nazism available in English, it was remarkable for the thoroughness with which it discussed the writings of Nazi thinkers and for the seriousness with which it took their views. In this edited collection published eighty years after the original book, a team of distinguished scholars reassess this classic text and also consider its continued relevance to contemporary politics. They address issues such as the comparison of Nazism and communism, anti-Semitism, British and American perceptions of the Reich before the war and the Nazi legal theory of Carl Schmitt. This book is a vital source for historians of Nazism and Fascism.

Aurel Kolnai’s The War against the West remains one of the most insightful analyses of Nazi thought ever written. First published in 1938 it was a revelation for many readers. Quite different in tone and approach from most other analyses of Nazism available in English, it was remarkable for the thoroughness with which it discussed the writings of Nazi thinkers and for the seriousness with which it took their views. In this edited collection published eighty years after the original book, a team of distinguished scholars reassess this classic text and also consider its continued relevance to contemporary politics. They address issues such as the comparison of Nazism and communism, anti-Semitism, British and American perceptions of the Reich before the war and the Nazi legal theory of Carl Schmitt. This book is a vital source for historians of Nazism and Fascism.

In 1933, Jews and, to a lesser extent, political opponents of the Nazis, suffered an unprecedented loss of positions and livelihood at Germany’s universities. With few exceptions, the academic elite welcomed and justified the acts of the Nazi regime, uttered no word of protest when their Jewish and liberal colleagues were dismissed, and did not stir when Jewish students were barred admission. The subject of how German scholars responded to the Nazi regime continues to be a fascinating area of scholarship. In this collection, Rabinbach and Bialas bring some of the best scholarly contributions together in one cohesive volume, to deliver a shocking conclusion: whatever diverse motives German intellectuals may have had in 1933, the image of Nazism as an alien power imposed on German universities from without was a convenient fiction.

English summary: This book discusses the rationale of Nazi ethics and the moral conditioning of Nazi perpetrators aimed at developing a kind of "ethnic conscience" which restricted moral obligations to members of their own race community. It reconstructs how the universal ethics of humanism got turned upside down and replaced with the particularistic selective racial ethics and the pragmatics of eugenics and racial exterminatory politics. It shows how ordinary Germans became willing executioners of criminal and immoral deeds. Neither did they act without any moral orientation nor in the awareness that what they were doing was morally reprehensible. As perpetrators with a clear conscience they were convinced that the humiliation, persecution, deportation and, finally, killing of the Jews was the right thing to do. German description: Das Buch analysiert die Versuche der Nationalsozialisten eine eigene moralische Ordnung in philosophischen, medizinethischen und ideologischen Texten zu begrunden. Dabei zeigt Wolfgang Bialas, wie klassische moralische Denkfiguren durch die nationalsozialistische Rassenethik eines artgerechten Humanismus ideologisch umfunktioniert wurden. Gegenuber den Juden gab es keinerlei moralische Verpflichtungen. Einen eigenen Abschnitt widmet das Buch den Bemuhungen der Tater, sich nach der Zerschlagung des Nationalsozialismus mit dem Verweis auf ihre ideologische Indoktrinierung fur moralisch unzurechnungsfahig zu erklaren.

Nachgezeichnet wird der durch Jurgen Habermas eingeleitete Paradigmenwechsel kritischer Theorie von der Produktion zur Kommunikation. Dabei geht es u.a. um folgende Fragen: Wie konnen sozialphilosophische Ansatze, die die Verhaltnisse nicht auf ihrer Seite haben, normativ begrundet werden? Wie kann die Komplexitat kommunikativer Situationen zur Durchschaubarkeit wechselseitiger Verstandigung reduziert werden, ohne damit aus den Ambivalenzen der Moderne auszusteigen? Wie ist die Beforderung sozialer Demokratie durch Aufklarung und die Verallgemeinerung lebensweltlicher Kompetenzen moglich? Diskutiert wird der Status von Geschichtsphilosophie und mit ihm die Gefahr einer Neutralisierung historischer Subjekte zu Statisten geschichtlicher Konfigurationen der Vernunft. Habermas' Kommunikationstheorie wird als sozialphilosophisches Pendant zu Gorbatschows 'Philosophie des neuen Denkens' gelesen, beide als West-Ost-Konvergenz sich wechselseitig verstarkender Bemuhungen zu einer Umstellung strategischer Beziehungen auf solche kommunikativer Verstandigung."