Christian Strub, Research Associate project
This project was based on the conviction that it was wrong to regard the relationship between the members of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft and their regime solely as a relationship of power and coercion, without considering that the moral justification of what the perpetrators did or allowed to happen played an important role. It was often argued that people were seduced by their Führer and that acts of violence did not result from their own free will. Other frequently cited stereotypes were that of the Mitläufer (fellow traveller) who was forced to join in and that of the amoral person who committed violence out of political conviction and did not lay claim to any moral justification.
This study pursued the argument from a new angle, namely that the members of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft were acting on a concept of morality and that they therefore had an interest in their principles being universally applicable. This Nazi morality appeared to be made up of three elements: (1) traditional, partly universal concepts of morality; (2) specific, highly flexible, extremely shallow concepts such as ‹race›, ‹blood›, ‹Volksgemeinschaft›, ‹Volksempfinden› etc.; (3) the transformation of the traditional concepts of morality by these specific, shallow concepts - a process which covered up the deficiencies resulting from this transformation.
As the project was based on the assumption that one of the essential elements of the relationship between the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft and its regime was a specific morality, it seemed reasonable to examine the professional discourse on morality between 1933 and 1945. The first main task of the project was therefore the analysis of philosophical publications - books, specialist journals and university papers - dealing with issues of morality.
The reception of Kant's concept of morality under National Socialism played a special role, as Kant was no doubt the one author who most effectively put into words a moral claim to universal validity with concepts such as ‹duty›, ‹conscience› and the ‹categorical imperative›. Another main area of investigation was a historical analysis of the usage of the concept of morality and related concepts such as ‹honour›, ‹loyalty›, ‹duty› and ‹morals› in different contexts between 1933 and 1945.
This study was closely connected with a project on National Socialism and morality which Raphael Gross and Werner Konitzer were working on. It also complemented Christian Strub's work Sanktionen des Selbst (Hildesheim 2000), focusing on the concept of moral self-obligation which was, in Strub's opinion, essential to explaining what it meant to be part of a social group. The abstract thoughts presented in Sanktionen des Selbst were applied to a concrete case in this project.
