Academics Debate An Antisemite

Ernst Haeckel

Sir, – Peter D. Smith, in his adulatory review of Robert J. Richards’s The Tragic Sense of Life (July 25), appears to have been taken in by an overly ambitious author anxious to “rehabilitate” the reputation of Ernst Haeckel and especially to deny his links with National Socialism. While written rather elegantly, Richards’s book is frequently an elaborate distortion of the ideas and influence of Haeckel. Smith suggests that Richards has successfully severed the alleged connections between Haeckel and Nazism and has definitively “misplaced” my hypothesis of such a relationship. But Smith’s naivety and Richards’s claims in this regard carry no weight because they rest on untenable historical assumptions and imagined source material.

For example, Richards alleges that there are fundamental factual misrepresentations in my scholarship on Haeckel and that in this way I have hoodwinked scores of writers regarding Haeckel’s predilection for Nazi-like ideas. This is seen, he writes, in the well-known interview, conducted with Haeckel in 1894 on the subject of anti-Semitism by the literary critic Hermann Bahr. Richards suggests that the encounter with Bahr indicates that Haeckel was not anti-Semitic; that in fact the opposite is true and that he was an outstanding friend of German Jewry.

Richards can manufacture such claims of revisionist feats because he excludes from his analysis more than 90 per cent of the actual discussion – and the summary of the remaining content can only be described as fantastical. Richards introduces an idiosyncratic alchemy that transforms Haeckel’s hostile remarks about Jews into affirmations of philo-Semitism and makes a case that the dialogue shows that Haeckel did not define the Jews in racial terms. The trouble is, none of this is true or even remotely indicative of Haeckel’s point of view.

In the interview, Haeckel praised anti-Semitism, stated explicitly that the Jewish question was a racial problem, and lent his support not to the historian Theodor Mommsen who defended the Jews in the famous Antisemitismusstreit (1879–81), but to the noted anti-Semitic writer Heinrich von Treitschke. Not surprisingly, Haeckel’s remarks were castigated as anti-Semitic in the German-Jewish press at the time. Many other discrepancies between what is claimed and what the sources reveal appear throughout Robert Richards’s book.

DANIEL GASMAN
City University of New York,
535 East 80th Street, New York 10021

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