Review by Eric J. Engstrom in German History

German History Advance Access published March 3, 2015 German History Book Review The Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851–1955. By Egbert Klautke. New York: Berghan Books. 2013. 194 pp. £45.00 (hardback). Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany. By Gabriel Finkelstein. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2013. 384 pp. £26.95 (hardback). © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at Auraria Library on March 8, 2015 These books represent important contributions to the English-language historiography on psychology and physiology in Germany. Egbert Klautke draws on the writings of Moritz Lazarus, Heymann Steinthal, Wilhelm Wundt and Willy Hellpach to examine the development of folk psychology (Völkerpsychologie). Gabriel Finkelstein’s biography of Emil du Bois-Reymond tracks the life and influence of arguably Germany’s most renowned nineteenth-century physiologist. Although all these figures were quite well known in their day, historians have paid remarkably little attention to them. Both Klautke and Finkelstein strive to open greater space for them in our historical understanding. In this vein, Klautke provides readers both with useful biographical summaries and with cogent accounts of his protagonists’ specific interpretations of Völkerpsychologie. But he also expands his narrative horizon beyond mere intellectual biography. Laudably, he pays special attention to the broader reception of their writings in an attempt to correct the misperception that Völkerpsychologie was merely ‘political propaganda dressed up as a social science’ (p. 2). Although often the object of ridicule for its untenable assumptions and sweeping generalizations, Klautke insists that the influence of Völkerpsychologie in Europe and the United States was far greater than intellectual historians have generally acknowledged. In particular, he notes that the central problem of Völkerpsychologie has remained an important trope within the humanities and social sciences despite the field’s ‘failure’ as an academic discipline. Klautke shows convincingly how the development of diferent variants of Völkerpsychologie reflected shifting political exigencies. He argues that Völkerpsychologie proved to be useful in the service of various political agendas, not least because it never resolved the tension between its particularist frame of the nation and its universalist aspirations. For example, Klautke embeds the development of Lazarus’s and Steinthal’s Völkerpsychologie in debates about antisemitism around 1880, showing how it articulated the specific experiences of emancipated and deeply nationalistic liberal Prussian Jews. Indeed, Lazarus came to see Völkerpsychologie as evolving out of long-standing Jewish ethical principles so that it was itself a contribution to the progressive evolution of the national spirit (Volksgeist). But this ‘repackaging’ (p. 45) of their earlier understanding of Völkerpsychologie left Lazarus and Steinthal on the horns of a dilemma, at once denying that Jews constituted a separate nation, while simultaneously countenancing the importance of a Jewish Volksgeist. In the case of Wilhelm Wundt’s extensive writings on Völkerpsychologie, an initial idealistic universalism and disinterest in national characteristic gave way during World War One to a ‘“diferential” folk psychology’ (p. 82) that interpreted German Kultur as the pinnacle of human development and juxtaposed it with Benthamic utilitarianism, individualism and materialism. In this derivative, Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie was debased and reduced to the Page 2 of 3 Book Review Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at Auraria Library on March 8, 2015 ‘speculative stereotyping’ (p. 85) that he had previously striven to avoid. Yet while some of his followers attempted to appropriate Wundt for right-wing and anti-Western agendas, his Völkerpsychologie had little in common with völkisch or antisemitic ideology. The ‘forgetting of Wundt’ (p. 88) after World War One became a task not just of experimental psychologists, who ignored Völkerpsychologie, but also of students inspired by race psychologists such as Hans F.K. Günther and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß. As one of Germany’s most prolific social psychologists, Willy Hellpach had been largely dismissive of Wundtian Völkerpsychologie prior to the 1930s. But with the publication of his Einführung in die Völkerpsychologie in 1938, Hellpach sought to reestablish his academic standing during the Nazi regime. Making shrewd use of terms such as ‘blood and soil’ (Blut und Boden) and Lebensraum, Hellpach embarked on a ‘conscious attempt to make folk psychology compatible with Nazi ideology’ (p. 128). In this interpretation, Klautke explicitly and convincingly contradicts Horst Gundlach’s contention that Hellpach’s folk psychology can be read as an attempt to critique National Socialist ideology using ‘coded language’. Nevertheless, Klautke insists that Völkerpsychologie was not a ‘forerunner of scientific racism’, but rather a ‘welcome alternative’ for authors who were opposed to racist theories of the nation (p. 148). In his final reflections, Klautke turns to the post-1945 era when Völkerpsychologie became ‘shorthand for reductionist and simplistic racial theories about national characters’ and directly associated with NS-ideology. But its steady decline in the 1950s and 1960s in no way put an end to the ‘search for the German mind’ (p. 154). Klautke shows how Völkerpsychologie was not so much forgotten as transformed into the study of national characteristics, citing as evidence Ralf Dahrendorf ’s Society and Democracy in Germany and the Sonderweg hypothesis, the study of mentalities by the Annales school and the concept of ‘national identity’ as advanced in Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society. Gabriel Finkelstein’s biography of Emil du Bois-Reymond underscores just how fraught such notions of national identity have always been. A descendant of French Huguenots and married to a Spanish woman who had been raised in Chile and England, du BoisReymond became an unlikely and enigmatic figurehead of Germany’s scientific community. Finkelstein’s account takes us back into a mid-nineteenth-century world populated by the likes of Johannes Müller and an entire generation of young physiologists (Hermann Helmholtz, Carl Ludwig and Ernst Brücke) who, all born around 1820, became icons of their field. Finkelstein’s account admirably evokes the intellectual richness of this era, defying any simple explanation of the emergence of du Bois-Reymond’s electrophysiology from its roots in the Naturphilosophie of the 1830s. He reminds us on every page of a vast horizon of mid-nineteenth century experience that historians of science have too often either ignored or simply forgotten. It is, however, not just this world in transition from romanticism to scientism that has gone missing, but also its poster child, Emil du Bois-Reymond. The central question of Finkelstein’s biography is therefore how someone so famous could end up so forgotten; and his answer is that du Bois-Reymond has simply been hiding in plain sight: we have all become du Bois-Reymondians (p. xviii). Regardless of whether du Bois-Reymond’s ideas have become the intellectual aether through which we move, in his own day and age he was certainly no neutral medium. He was a scientist and trenchant advocate of science, and his physiological writings and wideranging pronouncements on contemporary politics and culture were hotly debated from the august halls of the French Academy of Sciences to the Prussian House of Representatives. Finkelstein’s forte is to take his readers through these debates, carefully presenting the thrust of du Bois-Reymond’s arguments and then recording their many echoes in public and Book Review Page 3 of 3 private responses. The result is often a blow-by-blow account of the reputational jousting of mid-nineteenth-century academic elites. But by any measure, this study illustrates the rich benefits that accrue from investing the time and efort to plough through the large troves of du Bois-Reymond’s published and unpublished correspondence. One common theme running throughout is that of intellectual limitations. Finkelstein takes du Bois-Reymond’s famous dictum ignoramus et ignorabimus and construes it as emblematic of his life, finding it prefigured in his earlier life and writings. Another less prominent theme is the ‘issue of expression’. According to Finkelstein, du Bois-Reymond’s experience didn’t become real until he wrote it down. This is what connected his marriage to his work. Science sought to make the experiences of the natural world explicit, oratory sought to make the experiences of the social world explicit, and correspondence sought to make the experiences of the private world explicit (p. 170). doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghv013 Eric J. Engstrom Humboldt University, Berlin Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at Auraria Library on March 8, 2015 Such overarching associations help organize the book and enhance its narrative coherence. But they leave this sceptical reviewer questioning whether the ‘issue of expression’ isn’t also an artifact of historical research that relies heavily on written documents. Finkelstein’s study is nothing if not aphoristic. Every chapter—indeed every sub-section of every chapter—is prefaced by aphorisms, often drawn from far afield (Heine, Rousseau, Kipling, Goethe, Auerbach, Buckle, Bacon, Brontë, Wordsworth, Bismarck, Macaulay, Schopenhauer) and deposited as portals to the ensuing narrative fray. Their aim is not to launch an argument, but rather to evoke a certain cognitive mood (Stimmung). Wisely, Finkelstein doesn’t adorn chapter headings with his own didactic platitudes, although his do punctuate the text with surprising regularity: ‘Men plan their careers; they seldom plan their relations’ (p. 170); ‘Sometimes wishes get deferred so long that they cease to matter’ (p. 191); ‘The secure can aford to admit doubt; the insecure prefer certainty’ (p. 208); ‘There is nothing quite as unsettling as success’ (p. 284). These aphoristic outcroppings stand out precisely because of the otherwise dense and largely uncultivated thicket of names and ideas that Finkelstein’s biography serves up to its readers. Finkelstein seems especially irked by the widely held views about du Bois-Reymond’s arrogance. Those who have perceived him as arrogant are in ‘error’ and their logic is ‘twisted’ (pp. 285, 356). Furthermore, Finkelstein criticizes historians—and explicitly chastises Ernst Cassirer—for failing to recognize the subtlety of du Bois-Reymond’s Laplacian worldview. No doubt, a biographer must sometimes stand by his man. But Finkelstein’s rendering of du Bois-Reymond rings more apologetic than need be. The result is a rather heroic rendition of du Bois-Reymond (Finkelstein profers a passage from Virgil’s tribute to Lucretius as an epitaph). The overall impression is one of a master struggling to come to terms with the limits of human knowledge and surrounded—and at times besieged—by the raucous clamour of enemies and naysayers. Both books are especially commendable for not leaving out the politics of these scientists’ lives. The role of German scientists as public intellectuals has too often been discounted or misrepresented. These books help us to gauge their influence more judiciously.