The Strange Afterlife of Theodor Lessing

Theodor Lessing, a German-Jewish philosopher who was murdered by Nazi assassins in 1933, has enjoyed an extraordinary revival in recent years. While most contemporaries considered Lessing a "fierce antisemite," a new generation of scholars has hailed him as a far-sighted defender of the Weimar Republic. But this view understates the extent to which his work was influenced by völkisch, racialist, eugenicist, and antisemitic ideas. Despite the noble goal of "making amends for the past," as one influential scholar put it, the sanitized view of Lessing that now dominates the secondary literature significantly deforms our understanding of the intellectual history of the Weimar Republic.