Based on a talk given in July, 1932 Sidney Hook analyses why the campus is a hothouse of Fascism.

‘Why the German Student is a Fascist’ by Sidney Hook from Student Outlook (S.L.I.D.). Vol. 1 No. 5. May, 1933.

Based on an extemporaneous address delivered in New York City, July 15, 1932.

THE German student in the eyes of the educated world presents a cultural paradox. He is proud of a cultural tradition whose sources, he claims, go back to Luther, Goethe, Kant, and Hegel; yet with the possible exception of the emigré Black-Hundreds, no group possesses an ideology more reactionary than his. In affairs of the spirit, he is mystical, nationalistic, obscurantist, and anti-semitic. He boasts of his hardheaded scientific and realistic approach to practical problems but he embraces an illusionary solution of the social problem which promises all things to all men. He protests he is pledging all for Volk and Vaterland; in reality he is fighting the battle of the West German industrialists and East Prussian agrarians against socialism and communism.

In order properly to explain the German student, one would have to explain modern Germany. Short of that, we can make his present allegiance intelligible by examining his class origins, his recent history and the contemporary economic and social situation in Germany as it affects his vocational prospects.

The origins of the German student are predominantly middle-class. Little more than 2% of the students in higher schools are of proletarian origin. Only slightly more are of the former nobility and of the present-day financial and industrial oligarchy. The overwhelming bulk comes from the lesser bourgeoisie and land-owners, the professional classes and government officials. In the “good old days” of the Empire, the German student was called to fill positions quite congenial to the role which his class played in production. In an expanding economy, it provided the engineers for industry, teachers for the schools, officials for all the state services, officers for the army and fleet, colonial administrators, and at the very worst, the scientific and enlightened entrepreneur. Due to the feudal political forms with which the German national economy was invested, the state services enjoyed a higher social prestige than business. To be an official carried with it security, power, and a glory reflected from the shining eminence of his Imperial Highness himself. Even the business-man aspired for official esteem as well as wealth. (See the keen portrayal of the social-political milieu of pre-war Germany in Heinrich Mann’s powerful, but neglected, novel, Der Untertan.) The anticipation of the material rewards of a successful career combined with a sense of the social significance of their callings banked the fires of radicalism among the German Youth. Their very revolt was conventional. It was channeled off in activities indulgently tolerated as the privilege of youth—a little play, a little dalliance and a great deal of beer. One need but recall the opening lines of the German student songs to get the quality of his life in the days of the Empire. They could be sung only by young men made sentimentally complacent by the assurance that a career was awaiting them.

The ordinary processes of capitalism and the extraordinary effects of war and inflation changed all this. The fortunes, if not the memories, of the middle-class were wiped out. The present generation of German students grew up under the incredible hardships of the slow war with hunger on the home front. Where there was not enough to feed even the soldiers, there was naturally still less for the civilians. I have been told by German students that their greatest boyhood wish was a full meal. Some of them to this day cannot bear the sight of the Steckruben which for long periods was their only stable fare. Arter the war inflation brought additional impoverishment to the middle classes. The character of the student’s social and academic life reflected this change. His home allowance, always meagre, dwindled away until he could hardly pay for his bare necessities. Even in the comparatively stable years which followed the Dawes Plan his standard of living sunk to the general level of permanently unemployed among the working class. This sharpened his interest in politics. He looked around for a convenient scapegoat—and a credo which would glorify the violence by which he hoped to escape from his despair.

After 1918 the state had become republican and nominally socialist. Organized in his fencing fraternities with their imperial traditions, the German student found himself hostile to it. This hostility was sometimes the cause and sometimes the effect of his rapidly diminishing vocational opportunities. The extension and “rationalization” of the social services by government, federal states, and municipalities cut down the field for independent professional activity—medicine, law, engineering, etc. The official posts were few and were more readily accessible to those who had republican sympathies. In the course of time, under the pressure of the Allied Reparations Commission and the large industrialists the government began to curtail its social service program. It carried through a drastic economy in all fields especially education. Jobs became fewer and fewer. German youths naturally now: became intensely Versailles conscious. At first, an ethical issue became the ideological rallying cry. Organizations sprang into existence dedicated to combating what was called the ‘‘warguilt lie.” Germany was really paying reparations because she lost the war. The Allies insisted in black and white that she was paying because she began the war. The official hypocrisy of the war-guilt clause made it easier for the German student to forget that if the peace had been dictated in Berlin and not in Paris it would have been the Allies who would be paying and protesting their Reparations. The Marxist analysis of the causes of war was dismissed as “materialistic.” And as for the causes of Germany’s defeat they would quote General Hoffman to the effect that the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik propaganda had undermined the morale of the German worker. Some of them even believed the fantastic statement of General Ludendorf that it was the “social-democratic stab in the back” which had caused the collapse of the Hindenberg line. By 1929 there was no student body in the world which was more validly nationalistic than the German Studentenverbindungen.

Then the crisis-broke. The tendencies described above became intensified. Concentration of industry and rationalization of the manufacturing process had eliminated more and more of the managing personnel but this was as nothing compared to the results of the shutdown of large industries with their experimental laboratories, engineering works, etc. The drain upon the government treasury by the increasing number of unemployed lead to both a decrease of the already inadequate dole and the severest retrenchment which Germany has ever suffered in its schools, hospitals, and health stations. For the last three years graduating students have had nowhere to go but home or the streets. But more important still, as the possibilities of employment decreased, the number of students increased. This is a phenomenon not uncommon to other countries. With rising unemployment, registration in all schools generally goes up. For the youth there was nothing else to do; and they still desired to prepare themselves even for the remote contingency of securing a position when an upturn came. Naturally, this meant larger classes, greater burdens, and deeper dissatisfaction for the teachers who retained their posts.

The resultant hopelessness of the economic situation of the German student may be made more graphic by a few figures. In the winter semester of 1931-32 students in the higher schools and universities numbered 130,072. At the same time waiting for appointment to academic positions alone there were 137,000. One out of every seven teachers who previously had had posts was unemployed. One out of every three students still studying received public aid, which consisted of one meal a day. Each year the situation grows worse. The number of available jobs is continuously being reduced; the number of those entering the higher schools keeps on rising. What matters will be like by 1935 when all of those now studying will have completed their studies, no one knows. Although it is part of the general social problem, the problem of the German student is especially grave. Small wonder that he is prepared for desperate measures.

All those who are eaten by despair in Germany today find one haven—die Partei der Verzweifelten, the party of Hitler and Fascism. The National-Socialist Party was already on the scene when the depression began. The German student at that time was nationalist but not yet fascist. His steadily worsening plight soon drove him into the fascist camp. Hitler was as rabid in his anti-Versailles nationalism as they could possible desire, he had a program and an ideology compounded of scraps from Hegel, Stahl, Chamberlain, and other patron saints of German conservatism. Space does not permit a detailed analysis of Hitler’s program and the national-socialist movement. I can only indicate why the German student finds Hitler’s program congenial to his present need and past tradition.

The German student understands quite well that Fascism is not a return to the feudal state although its propaganda sports the slogan of the old Standesstaat. Fascism is an advance from the state form of early industrial capitalism. Politically it means the destruction of the ideals of liberalism and democracy which were the battle cries of early industrial capitalism struggling to cut free from the vestigial legal forms of feudalism; and the substitution of a new political ideal more in harmony with the integrated economic structure of monopoly capitalism. In their propaganda, therefore, the German Fascists make effective use of the Social-Democratic critique of competitive capitalism; but it is directed. not against the system of capitalism and international monopolist competition, but against the outmoded bourgeois, democratic political forms which are now a drag upon further capitalist expansion. That is why the German Fascists call themselves socialists, radicals, and sometimes revolutionists. Psychologically, the German student is quite sincere in his revolutionary self-consciousness. He is revolting against the political shadows of a system which has deprived him of a career and driven him beneath the margin of a decent subsistence.

In cold fact, however, the Fascist state does not imply an economic revolution, but the development of an instrument, more efficient than any hitherto evolved, by which the full political and economic force of the bourgeoisie may be mobilized against the working-class. Under the old democratic forms of industrial capitalism—and even then with difficulty—the proletariat was able to win a certain measure of organized strength. That organized strength acts like a continual brake upon the straining efforts of monopoly capitalism to rationalize industry by speeding up production and cutting wages. Consequently the victory of Fascism means first and foremost the ruthless destruction of all working-class organizations. State and industry become welded into one organic whole. There is no longer any working at cross-purposes between business and government. Those who rule one, rule the other. Here is where the strong German tradition of the supremacy of the state comes in to reinforce the needs of monopoly capitalism. And it must be remembered that there is no group among whom the tradition of state worship is so strong as among the students. The assertion of the naked state power of the bourgeoisie in industry and the whole of the cultural life which it conditions, can only be achieved through “the circulation of the élites” (a phrase of Pareto’s which stands the Italian and German Fascists in good stead) who must occupy the key-posts in the completely articulated structure of modern society. The German students are naturally quite sure that they constitute the élites. If not they, who else? they ask.

We can now see more clearly what Fascism means to the German student and why it has such a hold upon him. It offers him an opportunity for action which he can get, under existing conditions and his own class prejudices, nowhere else. In becoming one of the lieutenants of a monopoly capitalism, in smashing the trade-unions and building new industrial cadres, he is fulfilling his life-long ambition to become a servant of the state. In supporting a state-controlled economy which must come into conflict with other national economies, he is gratifying his nationalistic illusions and indulging in high hopes of a renewed imperialist expansion which will create further opportunities for rising in the state service. In accepting Hitler’s racial chauvinism, he gets rid of his Jewish rivals in all the professions and with that, their “unendurable superiority.” (The explanation of the intense character of student anti-semitism is a chapter in itself. It will be treated on a subsequent occasion.)

This is what the German student hopes to gain by the victory of Fascism. Meanwhile he is helping it—as it stands on the threshold of power—in many concrete ways both in the field of theory and practice. He is organizing industrial engineering corps to perform all the technical functions necessary to keep the public services running in case of a general strike. The Fascists have learned the lesson of the Kapp putsch when their attempt to overthrow the republic was foiled by a general strike called by the socialist trade unions. As soon as Hitler comes to power the socialist and communist trade unions in self defense will probably be compelled to launch this weapon once more. This time the Fascists are preparing in advance for the eventuality: and it is the Fascist students, especially of the technical and engineering schools, who will step into the gas, water, and electric works until the old unions have been liquidated and the new state industrial unions—forms of peonage sugar-coated with patriotic myths —will have been organized. In addition the German student is supplying Hitler with the leaders and heroes of his Sturmabteilungen—shock troops, who carry out a murderous physical terrorism, especially during election campaigns, against socialists, communists and jews. On their home-ground, the universities, the German students harass liberal, radical, and Jewish elements among both the student body and the faculty. They break up the lectures of “unpatriotic” professors, attack individuals with their metal-tipped canes, beating them sometimes to the point of death, and often cause the not altogether unsympathetic authorities to close down the universities for short periods. In some universities with the aid of their cultural allies in the faculty and administration, they have introduced the hateful numerus clausus for Jewish students.

The main activity, however, of the German Fascist student has so far been on the theoretical front. Here he has been busy developing for consumption among the masses the Fascist ideology of das dritter Reich, the third empire, in which there are no classes in theory, but where in practice everyone is to serve the interests of monopoly capitalism. This is the German variant of economic planning. Interestingly enough, when the Socialists were in power they prepared the way for this new doctrine by regarding the German republic as an Arbeits-Rechts und Kultur-gemeinschaft of capital and labor. The leading intellectual lights of the Fascist movement are drawn not from the German students themselves but from their teachers. Men like Othmar Spann in Vienna; Max Wundt in Jena; Carl Schmitt in Berlin; and Hans Freyer in Leipsig have baptized the Nazi movement with the holy waters of German philosophical idealism and with a few sprinkles attained an easy fame denied them by their scientific colleagues. Not only do these men and their like preach the philosophy of Fascism but some of them are even helping to revise and renew the myth of the purity of the Teutonic race, thus feeding the flames of anti-semitism. Despite Hitler’s professional anti-semitism, he did not hesitate to accept the financial assistance of Jakob Goldschmidt, a Jewish banker afraid some years back of a red Germany, and to adopt the antiquated political philosophy of Julius Stahl, the apostate Jewish court advisor of the ‘”40’s”. International finance capital against which the Fascists inveigh so bitterly is heavily involved in the plants of Thyssen, Siemens, and other who are now acting as Hitler’s paymasters.

The Fascist student body and faculty are at present engaged in a great crusade, revamping and reinterpreting the whole of German’s cultural inheritance for their own political purposes. The official celebrations of Goethe and Hegal made them out to be the forerunners of the movement. The entire history of German philosophy, art, and literature, has been laid under tribute to plead for all those virtues which are necessary for the efficient functioning of monopoly capitalism: discipline and obedience; belief in the hallowed traditions of the past and the future national destiny; worship of the hero and contempt of the masses. More serious still, the sacred character of German culture which is regarded, in typical prewar fashion, as the crown of Western civilization, is being opposed to the “degraded, materialistic, anti-spiritual” culture of communism. Russia is spoken of as the anti-Christ among nations. With France and even with Poland, a compromise can be reached. But only a war with Russia can save the West. Just as the German students regard themselves as the shocktroops of Teutonic-Christian culture against the Bolshevik within, so they expect to be the shock troops of the last great crusade of Christian imperialism against the Bolshevik without.

So far the handful of radical students have been too weak to serve even as a slight counterpoise to the hordes of academic Fascists. Part of the reason is to be found in the costly failure of the Social-Democrats when in power to throw the universities open to working-class elements and in their toleration of high-handed student persecution of liberal and social professors. Today they are reaping the fruits of their policy, adopted in the days of Scheidemann and Noske, of saving the German republic from communism—a policy which lead them to approve of the building of armored battle-cruisers, to conclude a Concordat with the Catholic Church, and to ban the May-day demonstrations of 1929. Although in the universities socialist and communist students reflected the struggle of their political organizations, and for years were little better than study sects often compelled to meet secretly, the rise of Fascism is rapidly bringing them together in a united front. In many universities they are fighting shoulder to shoulder for survival against the furious attacks of the reactionaries. But the signs seem to show that this last-hour union, carried out in the teeth of the official policies of the Socialist and Communist parties, is too late.

If ever Hitler comes to power, the tactical errors of the socialists and communist parties especially from 1929 to 1932, will not be among the least important of the contributory factor.

Going through a series of names in the 1930s starting with Revolt, then Student Outlook, then New Frontiers, and finally Industrial Democracy these were the publications of the Socialist Party-allied National Student League for Industrial Democracy. The journal’s changes in part reflected the shifting organizations of the larger student movement.

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