Search results for "Nazi Germany"

“Not in Possession of Any Weltanschauung”: Otto Neugebauer’s Flight from Nazi Germany and His Search for Objectivity in Mathematics, in Reviewing, an…

2016

Two major factors have to be considered to account for Neugebauer’s “Weltanschauung”, in particular his apparent or real rejection of philosophical or political judgments. On the one hand, Neugebauer, as a mathematician and a historian, had to cope, with the double character of mathematics as a science in its continuity and universality, independent of time, and of mathematics as a characteristic and fundamental product of each individual culture. On the other hand emphasis has to be put on Neugebauer being torn between organizational work (institution building, reviewing, editing) and historical research. One has to consider the vicissitudes of Neugebauer’s long and eventful life, which wa…

Spanish Fascist Women’s Transnational Relations during the Second World War: Between Ideology and Realpolitik

2018

Spanish fascist women played a very active role in the Falange’s cross-border relations with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. From the very beginning, fascist women took a preeminent place in these contacts and exchanges in order to see with their own eyes how both fascist models were at a practical level. These relationships between fascist women’s organizations were born out of deep ideological affinity and were especially fluid, firstly on a bilateral level and after 1940 on the ‘New Order’ Europe-wide multilateral, transnational collaboration. However, they lacked neither of political calculation nor could abstract from the wider fra…

Anti-Speciesist Rhetoric

2017

The various laws protecting animals that were established in Nazi Germany (but for the most part were never put into effect) had, among others, the aim of marking the taxonomic and ontological distance between pure animals and impure sub-humans (Jews, homosexuals, the Roma). The attention to and respect for the alpha predator and noble animals was a vertiginous ignoratio elenchi of the concentration camps. With analogous fallacy, today’s anti-human and anti-speciesist eco-fascism, which regularly makes use of the reductio ad Hitlerum (“meat-eaters = Nazis”), avails itself in an irrational and populist way of the rudimentary argumentum ad personam typical of xenophobic and racist propaganda.…

The birth and youth of Compositio Mathematica: ‘Ce périodique foncièrement international’

2006

The journal Compositio Mathematica was founded by Luitzen E. J. Brouwer to counter his dismissal from the Mathematische Annalen in 1928. In spite of the economic crisis, Brouwer succeeded in finding a publisher (Noordhoff), an editorial board and subscribers. The founding took place at the time of the rise of the Third Reich, which caused problems of a political nature. The German editors followed Ludwig Bieberbach in 1934 when he left the board because Brouwer refused to dismiss the Jewish editors. After a period of flourishing, the publication was suspended at the beginning of the occupation of Holland in 1940. The post-war restart of the journal led to a painful conflict between Brouwer …

Hilbert’s Early Career

2018

David Hilbert’s remarkable career falls into two clearly distinct periods: the quiet Konigsberg phase, which spanned the period from his birth on 23 January 1862 to that of his full maturity as one of Germany’s leading mathematicians, followed by the tumultuous Gottingen years. The latter began with his appointment in Gottingen in 1895 and ended with his death on 14 February 1943 when Nazi Germany had already entered its death throes. It would be difficult to exaggerate the contrast between these two phases, just as it remains difficult to picture life in Germany before the onset of the two world wars that so decisively shaped the course of twentieth century history.

‘A Hellish Nightmare’: The Swedish Press and the Construction of Early Holocaust Narratives, 1945–1950

2020

This study examines how the Swedish press responded to and portrayed the Holocaust immediately after the war. The liberation of the camps, the role and guilt of ordinary Germans, the Nuremberg trials and the ongoing problem of Jewish DPs in Europe were the most important issues on the basis of which the Swedish press had shaped the early post-war view of the Holocaust. Moreover, the fate of the Jews under Nazi Germany formed an important element of such reporting. The author argues that, contrary to the dominant Anglo-American historiography, which holds that the first post-war decades were marked by silence surrounding the German genocide, the Swedish press wrote about the Holocaust often …

Hermann Beck / Larry Eugene Jones (Eds.), From Weimar to Hitler. Studies in the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the Establishment of the Third…

2020

Mortal threat: Latvian Jews at the dawn of Nazi occupation

2018

In late June 1941, Nazi Germany stormed the borders of the Soviet Union, occupying the three Baltic republics within weeks. By the end of 1941, a significant proportion of the Jewish population had been murdered by German forces and local collaborators. In the days before full Nazi occupation of the territory, Latvia's Jews confronted the question of whether to flee into the Russian interior or stay in their communities. History shows that this would be a critical choice. Testimonies and memoirs of Jewish survivors illuminate the competing motivations to leave or to remain. This article highlights the key factors that figured into these calculations and the interaction between individual ag…

Israel State, Genocide and Thana-Capitalism

2019

The term “genocide” was originally coined by Lemkin just after the horrendous crimes committed against innocent civilians in Nazi Germany. At that moment, the SS officials disposed of a systemic rationalized system of death which was oriented to domesticate and eradicate the “inferior” or the undesired “Other”. The concentration camps were space of torture, violence, death and mourning that marked the state of Israel forever. Today things have changed a lot, and the state of Israel is accused of violating the human rights in Palestine. While we review the discussion of senior lecturers such as Slavoj Žižek, Richard Bernstein, Norman Finkelstein and Yakov Rabkin, we reconstruct the philosoph…

Evolutionary biology and beliefs : how ideology can draw different social stances from science

2016

Agreeing that there are often strong connections between fields of science and the ideological convictions of those producing the science, this essay shows that the connections are often complex and rarely straightforward. Taking the example of evolutionary biology, by looking at three key figures ? Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace ? it is shown how very different social beliefs can lead to very different social conclusions being drawn from one?s science. It is argued that this message should be kept firmly in mind by those who today would draw social conclusions from science, for instance suggesting that Darwinian evolutionary biology leads straight to the social p…