This is just an addendum to yesterday's blog. I mentioned that in the aftermath of World War One the upper reaches of academia at least could be included (along with army officers, state bureaucracy, judges, and so on) in the reactionary 'permanent state' unhappy with democracy and its new freedoms for the upstart labour movement. This might seem a bit odd, when it has been argued that the academy is the very bedrock of democratic process and the open society. But it's well known, of course, that universities in inter-war Europe were bastions of conservatism or (amongst students at any rate) the radical-right.
Here is Franz Neumann writing mournfully in the Summer of 1919:
When I came in the spring of 1918 to the university of Breslau, its celebrated economist – in his very first lecture – denounced the Peace Resolution of 1917 (peace without annexations and indemnities) … When I came to Leipzig in the fall of 1918 … the [professorial] historian proved conclusively that democracy was an essentially non-German form of political organisation, suitable for the materialistic Anglo-Saxons, but incompatible with the ideals of the Germanic race. When I transferred to Rostock in the summer of 1919, I had to organise students to combat anti-Semitism openly preached by the university professors. When I finally landed in Frankfurt, the very first task with which I was faced was to help protect a newly appointed socialist university professor from attack – political as well as physical – by students secretly supported by a considerable number of professors.
[Quoted in Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as
Insider (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968), pp. 45-6.]
