Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (review)

In the face of industrialization in the late nineteenth century, Germany struggled mightily against the disenchantment of the world. In Max Weber’s sense of the word, disenchantment described the separation of cultural spheres of value from one totalizing domain in religious consciousness to the differentiated realms of expertise in law, aesthetics, and science—a historical phenonomenon at the base of modern alienation and existential crises. Walter Gebhard illustrated nineteenth-century responses to a fragmenting world by analyzing how German science and philosophy merged in new holistic concepts of the world, with luminaries of a revitalized Naturphilosophie—such as Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Boelsche, Eduard von Hartmann, and Gustav Fechner—reconceiving biology, psychology, philosophy, and aesthetics as holistic systems. The work of these nineteenth-century thinkers not only influenced the course of German intellectual history, but had a great impact on German society and politics. The aura around holistic Naturphilosophie dimmed in the aftermath of World War I: so reads the standard formulation. Haeckel’s monist religion still had adherents in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), one still heard Hartmann evoked with his denunciation of the eudaemonistic society that was rupturing the natural order of the state, and so forth—yet the shock of war’s mass death and the paradigm shift of modernity had supposedly cast enchanted science out of legitimate academic discourse and research, and left only popular philosophy and pseudo-science to fill a longing for totality and the interrelation of all things in the world.

Germany certainly had its share of successful pseudo-scientific theories and cults in the 1920s, with examples such as Hanns Hörbiger’s Glacial Cosmogony and Friedrich Bilz’s Future State springing immediately to mind. However, hare-brained romantics and mountebanks are not the subject of Anne Harrington’s brilliant contribution to the cultural history of Germany’s Weimar Republic. Although Ganzheit (holism) and vitalism may appear suspect as a pantheistic nature-worship, the scientists in this investigation practiced true academic science, and are not to be confused with popular mysticism. Moreover, these biologists, neurologists, and psychologists proved instrumental in inspiring ideas in philosophy, culture, and politics, influencing the broad sweep of German intellectual culture, including the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the social theories of Max Horkheimer. Reenchanted Science succeeds marvelously in demonstrating the complexity with which science is embedded in its own historical and cultural moment, and the ways in which scientific theories influence the thinking of contemporaries and future generations across the intellectual spectrum. Whereas Paul Weindling examined the influence of biology on the German state, with the medicalization of politics and its emerging “therapeutocracy” (as Jürgen Habermas called it), Harrington carefully elaborates how the scientific debates addressed a wide lay audience. She analyzes the ability of biology and psychology to participate in popular social controversies, while the scientists at the same time attended to the specialized idiom intended for a smaller coterie of experts. Harrington’s guiding insight is that these intellectuals were thoroughly a product of Weimar culture, and engaged dialogically with that culture: “German holistic science ‘worked’ as a multilevel discourse in part because its scientists found ways to craft their most certain truths out of words and images rich with cultural resonances, thus enabling those truths to function in culturally meaningful ways” (p. 208).

The importance of this book lies not so much in that it recovers forgotten, marginal figures of anecdotal interest, but in that it brings to the fore the foundational work of some of the greatest researchers of our century, who despite their prominence have not yet been placed in their proper historical context. With great sense of nuance and a deftly constructed narrative, Harrington gives us, not a mere compendium of biographical portraits, but rather a story of how these men of science and their ideas evolved and revolved within a constellation of cultural artifacts and icons that are quintessentially Weimar. Although the following is necessarily fragmented...