a diary in which he records meticulously the details of his ... The diary is, therefore, an eyewitness ac- .... Like Marburg theologian Rudolf Otto (1869-1947),.
834
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST •
VOL. 103, No. 3
•
SEPTEMBER 2001
Politically Compromised Scholars, or What German Scholars Working under Missions, National Socialism, and the Marxist-Leninist German Democratic Republic Can Teach Us KARLA POEWE University of Calgary
Mein Freund Maleboch. Christoph Sonntag; Ulrich van der Heyden, ed. Berlin: Edition Ost, 1999. 256 pp. Von der philologischen zur volkischen Religionswissenschaft. Horst Junginger. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999.399 pp. Die Afrikaw issenschaften in der DDR. Ulrich van der Heyden. Miinster. LIT Verlag, 1999. 640 pp. Ever since CIA involvement in the affairs of Latin American countries and scholars, U.S. anthropologists have been aware of the dangers of politically compromised research and writing. Yet we have relatively few publications that discuss the serious consequences for scholarship and society when scholars themselves shape political ideologies or are bound to conform to ideologies that accept or justify persecution, war, and massacre or that immunize people's consciences from braking social brutalization. Of the above listed books, the mildest example in terms of consequences of an observer's ideological conformity is that of the Berlin missionary Christoph Sonntag (18621919). I include Sonntag in the category of scholar because, as Ulrich van der Heyden explains in his introduction (p. 21), it was Berlin mission policy that the missionary be fluent in seven languages, including importantly the indigenous one. Only after he gave his first sermon in the indigenous language was he ordained andfreeto marry. Berlin missionaries were bound to follow especially paragraphs 19 and 59 of the mission constitution. Paragraph 19 states that it is the task of a missionary to learn the language and to establish close ties with the people, to earn their trust, learn their customs, and be like a tribesman to them. Paragraph 59 obligates the Berlin missionary to keep a diary in which he records meticulously the details of his work as missionary, its progress and hindrances, and the condition of his environment (pp. 15, 16). Finally, Berlin missionaries were obligated to observe neutrality vis-a-vis the Afrikaner (then called Boer), the British, and the indigenous peoples. The tension between maintaining, in this instance, the trust of the Bahananoa, on one hand, and observing the neutrality principle, on the other, put Sonntag into a state of chronic tension that was expressed in his diary. Van der Heyden edited Sonntag's journal to highlight especially the description of the 1894 Maleboch War (p. 13).
After the English returned Transvaal to the Boers in 1881, the chief of the Bahananoa, Maleboch (18607-1939), steadfastly refused to pay taxes to Paul Kriiger's Transvaal Republic (p. 13). The diary is, therefore, an eyewitness account of a historical episode for which the only other account is that of English Pastor Colin Rae, who, however, experienced the campaign from the perspective of the Boer (p. 15). Sonntag was devastated by the escalating conflict between the Boer military leader, Barend Vorster, and Maleboch. The conflict threatened Sonntag's carefully cultivated friendship with Maleboch. Because the latter resisted subjugation, the Afrikaner encouraged enemy tribes like the Matlala and Matabele not only to raid Bahananoa cattle but to hunt these people down even when they were not armed (p. 70). Like Scheper-Hughes (1995:417), Sonntag writes, "I ask myself continuously whether the moment has now arrived when I must leave the role of passive spectator" (p. 65). Sonntag knew that asking converts to pay taxes would put him into the category of being "a friend of the Boer" (p. 66), many of whom he did not like (p. 79). On the other hand, liking the Bahananoa could not save them either Even if we feel deeply and have great empathy for a pagan people that think themselves to be free, and even if we share their patriotic feelings and are enthusiastic about their independence, in moments of sober reflection, we know that their old self-determination, their being a chiefdom, is a thing of the past. [p. 65]
They would inevitably be subordinated and missionized (P- 65). Boer unfairness and lying were carefully recorded. Boers were unfair about forcing Bahananoa to relocate within seven days when that was impossible (p. 82). They accused Sonntag of having told Vorster's wife that the Bahananoa were ready to pay taxes, when he had not (p. 84). Boers lied to the press about Maleboch in order to discredit him (p. 95). In all of this and more, Sonntag saw a mean strategy to bring the Bahananoa to their knees. Whenever Sonntag was asked to deliver letters to Maleboch he copied them into his diary. They make visible the extent to which Boers, using Matabele Kommandos, were willing to violate human and grouprights(Volkerrechte) (p. 137). An example is the letter of Afrikaner General Piet
BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS
Joubert to Maleboch in which Joubert threatens to use dynamite to blow up Maleboch's capital and "bury the people alive" (pp. 137-138). As it turned out, the dynamite was ineffective because the rocks were too hard and the exact location of the capital was unknown. But the intent was there, and Joubert went so far as to call in an engineer from Pretoria to guide the specialized work of placing the dynamite (pp. 150,158). Sonntag also describes Bahananoa intelligence, strategies, and discipline (p. 204), as when they let more than 300 Matabele and Boers rush up the mountain where the Bahananoa isolated and attacked them (pp. 125-127). But Sonntag never forgot the inevitable end of Bahananoa bravery. With great pathos he describes his heartbreaking encounters with Maleboch, who could not bring himself, or be brought by Sonntag, to surrender (pp. 176, 178). Could Sonntag have left his role of passive observer? Could he have done more than deliver messages to and from Maleboch? Perhaps, but only if he had violated the neutrality principle and supplied Maleboch with enough arms and ammunition to remain invincible for six years until 1900, when England occupied Pretoria and set the jailed Maleboch free. Maleboch accepted the British Pretoria regime and died in 1939, 20 years after Sonntag (p. 193). If the neutrality principle helped maintain a distance between the scholar-missionary and his complex environment, this distance is shown to have disappeared in Horst Junginger's analysis of the shift from a philological to a volkische (folkish) science of religion. It reminds me of Clifford's introduction in which he argues that an old "ideology" had "crumbled" and a new one was born (Clifford and Marcus 1986:2). Clifford was referring to an ideology that he thought informed the practice of anthropology. This new ideology, he argues, sits on six assumptions, of which one, namely, that poetics and politics are inseparable, is important in a review of Junginger's book. The significance of the title is immediately clear to those who know that volkische ideas were the groundswell that swept National Socialists (Nazis) into power. Clear, too, is the fact that if the science of religion came to sit on National Socialist ideas, politics and poetics would indeed be inseparable, not because of an inevitable affinity as postmodernists have us believe but, rather, by design. Behind this union of poetics and politics were determined scholars, among them Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881-1962). As I am also working on a book about Hauer, I know that Junginger's work is top scholarship. It is based on unpublished primary resources of the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, the University of Tubingen, and the Bundesarchiv Berlin, among others. From 1907 to 1911 Hauer was a Basler missionary in the South Indian District of Malabar, where he acted as school principal (p. 54). Given British policy in India that missionary teachers were to be university educated, Hauer was sent to Oxford in 1911. Just before the
835
outbreak of World War I in 1914, Hauer finished his B.A. at Oxford and was promptly interned. With the promise that he would not take up arms, he was released and sent to Germany in 1915. In Tubingen he received his Ph.D. in 1918 and his Habilitation, a second doctorate required to achieve an academic post, in 1920, both under the history of religions professor Richard Garbe (1857-1927). It is the latter's chair that Hauer would fill first as an Indologist and then as a science of religions professor (Religionsmssenschaftler). Against the background of the transition from the volkische to the National Socialist movements, Junginger describes Hauer's transition from missionary, to Indologist, to Religionswissenschaftler (p. 73). Hauer's inaugural lecture, April 28, 1921, was entitled "The Idea of Development in the History of Religion" (p. 55). He traced the development of the discipline through Lessing, Herder, Schleiermacher, and the philosophers of German Idealism. This lecture is an important signpost. It is the first hint of Hauer's effort to trace that lineage of thought, going back to medieval mystics like Eckhart, that would later come to be known as Deutscher Glaube (German Faith). Thus, in 1940 he argued that "Jewish-Christianity" had to make room for the truly German faith, which consisted of a line of "Indo-Germanic FiihrergestalterT [leaders] and specific (arteigene) Indo-Germanic views that originated in the Aryan world and flowed unerringly into National Socialism (p. 148). The significance of founding his new religion on a line of thought that was expressed over the centuries by "Germanic" Fiihrergestalten is that it enabled him to link the race principle to the ancestor principle (Ahnenprinzip) and to a specific (namely, Germanic) culture. Like Marburg theologian Rudolf Otto (1869-1947), with whom Hauer was friends, Hauer saw the living essence of religion to be religious experiences and a feeling of the holy (das Numen). To grasp it, the method of intuition was used (p. 57). Intuition is not original to Hauer. It was used by the well-known anthropologist Leo Frobenius (1873-1938), who converted from the "mechanical" culture circle approach to the idea of cultures as living organisms, with individual souls, the essence of which had to be intuited. Instead of philological analyses of texts, Hauer put into the foreground the ecstatic sides of religious experience (p. 57) and worked with these in terms of the volkische discourse. It is over the issue of Hauer's affiliation with National Socialism that I differ somewhat with Junginger. Hauer functioned in two contexts, as professor in academia and as guru in the world of new religions. Junginger's primary context is the discipline of Religionswissenschaft in Tubingen. Consequently, Junginger looks at the correspondence between Hauer, his colleagues, and university administrators. By contrast, I am interested in Hauer as one of several scholars who founded new religions, primarily, deutsche (German), Germanic, or Nordic ones, that helped
836
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
•
VOL. 103, No. 3
•
SEPTEMBER 2001
usher in National Socialism. While I, too, researched the correspondence between Hauer and academics, I also researched numerous letters between Hauer and his followers. According to Junginger, Hauer joined Rosenberg's Kampfbund fur deutsche Kultur in May 1933 and the Hitlerjugend in December 1933 (p. 128). In 1934 he was persuaded by Himmler (1900-45) and Heydrich (190442) to join the Schutzstaffel (SS) and Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and in 1937 he joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (NSDAP). This is accurate as far as it goes. But there is more. Even if Hauer had not been committed to National Socialism since the 1920s, as I think he was, his correspondence up to 1937 sat on a lie. He always wrote his followers that he was not a member of the Party, implying, and sometimes stating outright, that he was not a National Socialist. Publicly, he sold himself as being open to all religious and political persuasions (p. 182). Behind the scenes he worked against Jewish-Christianity with deadly seriousness. With the exception of fellow SS officers, none of the people with whom Hauer corresponded was told that he was a member of the SS and SD and that he could, and would, spy on them. The most famous example is Martin Buber, who, probably not knowing that Hauer had spied on him (p. 137), wrote him a generous letter of reference (a Persilscheiri) that helped Hauer get off easily during his denazification hearing. The consequences of this inseparable union between poetics and politics were horrendous. Hauer's research ceased to sit on empirical evidence. He used his SS friends to discriminate against any scholar who had less than a clear National Socialist worldview. To Jews he spoke with a forked tongue. On the one hand, he claimed that he and they shared a common bond in the sphere of religion. On the other, he wished that they be excluded from German public life (p. 185). At his moment of greatest triumph in 1933, when he headed the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Glaubensbewegung, a short-lived umbrella organization of dozens of new and free religions, he accepted without hesitation the Arierparagraphen (Aryan paragraph), thus excluding Jews automatically. One of Hauer's students, Paul Zapp, when he faced his trial for serious war crimes (pp. 137,139, 214), claimed that he had committed them in accordance with Hauer's philosophy. Ulrich van der Heyden*s description of the fate of African studies in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), the former German Democratic Republic, belongs, like Junginger's book, to the genre of the assessment (Aufarbeitung) of one's discipline. Van der Heyden's work, too, is outstanding scholarship. He is a wizard when it comes to knowing the nooks and crannies of Berlin and Leipzig archives. Consequently, his book also sits on unpublished archival material but is enriched by eyewitness interviews, roundtable discussions (p. 6), and unpublished memoirs, as well as his personal experiences as a historian of Africa in the Institute for General History (Institut fur
Allgemeine Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR), which was part of the Academy of the Sciences oftheDDR(p.28). If the core constraint on Sonntag was the neutrality principle and that on Hauer was the race principle, then that on former DDR scholars was the solidarity principle. The solidarity principle was imposed from without by the (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) Socialist Unity Party of Germany, but apparently it was also internalized (p. 76). The principle guided the formation of new university courses and programs. For example, in the 1950s classical Orientalism was replaced by EntwicklungsIdnderwissenschaften (sciences of developing countries) and in the 1960s by Regionalwissenschaften (regional studies). The emphasis moved away from a concentration on languages to interdisciplinary foci on diverse freedom movements (pp. 29,76). The call toward solidarity with the people that East German scholars researched had both positive and negative aspects. The positive result was that for the first time in the history of German African studies, an unambiguous position for the colonial and oppressed peoples was taken (p. 76). The negative result was that, for reasons of solidarity, one did not criticize the goals and methods of freedom movements. One simply feared that criticism would somehow hurt the Solidaritatsobjekte (objects of solidarity). Provided the parties, organizations, and movements had socialistic goals, one took the views of their representatives at face value. This discredited East German work in the eyes of the West, creating a peculiar retaliation whereby Easterners saw Western scholars as lackeys of West German imperialism and neocolonialism and as their main ideological opponent (p. 77). The official solidarity of the DDR with Africans began with help for the Algerian freedom fight against French domination (p. 78). In the late 1950s wounded Algerian soldiers were nursed back to health in the DDR and were taught various skills or were otherwise educated. Solidarity was not only a basic assumption for scholars, it was also an SED-enforced precondition for becoming practicing social scientists. Thus, social scientists, writing for the popular press, were not above publishing pompous loyalty statements about "how we citizens of the DDR—and with us the total socialistic world system and the international workers movement and national freedom movementspractice solidarity with the peoples of Angola, Mozambique, and so on" (p. 78). The founding of African studies in the DDR was shaped by two individuals, Walter Markow and Ernst Dammann. Of these, van der Heyden chose to focus on the competent language scholar, Ernst Dammann. The latter succeeded Diedrich Westermann (1875-1956), who held the chair of African Languages and Cultures at the University of Berlin (later Humboldt University) but was also codirector of the Institute of African Languages and Cultures in London
BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS
from 1925 to 1939. Like Westermann, Dammann represented the traditional philological and cultural studies approach to Africa. But, as was clearly stated in his acceptance letter, Dammann had been a Nazi. According to van der Heyden, Dammann's conservative approach to African studies, and his being hired by a Communist regime that knew of his past political affiliation, gives insights into the structures of the ruling and power mechanisms of the former East German republic (p. 219). From the beginning of his tenure at the Humboldt University in 1956, his colleagues regarded him as the enemy, and in 1961, the year of the Wall, he left East Germany. Dammann, who is in his nineties, started his academic career by studying theology, orientalism, and African languages. In 1930 he was ordained, but he soon became an academic helper at the Institute for African and South Seas Languages at the University of Hamburg. In 1933 he became a missionary to East Africa and a minister of a German congregation in Tanga. He also, however, became an Ortsgruppenleiter (political leader of a town) (indeed, a Landesgruppenleiter [political leader of a governmental district]) of the NSDAP for the then Tanganyika Territory. In this capacity he discredited himself with the Bethel Mission and was pulled out of the field (p. 222). He returned to the University of Hamburg in 1937, and in 1939 he received his Habitation (p. 222). If high-ranking SED officials hired Dammann, lower ones denounced him. At the institute at Humboldt University one assistant spied on him and denounced him on a regular basis to the leader of the SED university party. The latter (not named) accused Dammann of understanding his "African language studies as a part of imperialistic colonial politics . . . as glorifying the colonial politics of the imperialists . . . and of German fascism" (p. 229). Along with the
837
denunciation, the denouncer sent a plea to the Central Committee of the SED "to start immediately with the ideological and political exposure of this Fascist" (p. 230). This was of course impossible because Dammann's former Nazi affiliation was public knowledge, and he was hired in spite of it. With the intervention of Walter Ulbricht, Dammann was given permission to leave East Germany for the University of Marburg, where he founded African studies and influenced the field into the 1980s. Van der Heyden concludes his detailed study by differentiating two approaches. First, there are colleagues who tried to order other people's original research into theoretical revolutionary models that they saw as a continuation of a Marxist-Leninist approach to African studies. Second, there are other colleagues, like historians, linguists, geographers, and so on, who could have published their empirical research results, while heeding the boundaries of Marxism-Leninism, in Western journals. The first, argues van der Heyden, the guardians of a political ideology that they treated like a corset into which were squeezed any findings, even if they did not fit, are best forgotten without shedding a tear. The loss of the second, with their multidisciplinary approach and structural innovations, is mourned (pp. 444-445). Nevertheless, 83 percent of them were abgewickelt (let go), among them the book's author. References Cited Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986 Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 1995 The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology. Current Anthropology 36(3):409-438.
