Eduard Baumgarten

Eduard Baumgarten (26 August 1898 – 15 August 1982) was a German philosopher and sociologist. He worked on U.S. intellectual history and philosophy and wrote a book about his uncle Max Weber.

Biography

Early life

Eduard Baumgarten was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, the son of Fritz Baumgarten (1856-1913) and Else Georgii (1859-1924). His father was an older cousin of Max Weber, and his grandfather Hermann Baumgarten was one of Max Weber's teachers and paternal friends.

World War I and Weimar Republic

Baumgarten participated in World War I as a war volunteer. He then studied national economics, history and philosophy (with Edmund Husserl, among others) in Freiburg, Munich and Heidelberg. He received his doctorate in 1924 with Alfred Weber on Innere Formen menschlicher Vergemeinschaftung ("Inner Forms of Human Communion"). As an exchange student in the United States, he studied with John Dewey, among others. He was a fellow of the Abraham Lincoln Foundation, a German branch of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Baumgarten was a visiting lecturer at Columbia University, New York (1924), in Chicago (1926), and in Madison, Wisconsin (1926/27). He returned to Germany in 1929 and initially gave guest lectures at the Technical University of Stuttgart. Baumgarten planned to habilitate at Freiburg under Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had held out the prospect of an assistantship for him, and the two men initially became friends privately as well. However, apparently after a Kant lecture by Baumgarten in the Oberseminar, they fell out. For Heidegger, Baumgarten's pragmatist conception of philosophy was unacceptable. The Jewish philosopher Werner Gottfried Brock, who had already habilitated in Göttingen, received Heidegger's assistantship in 1931, and Baumgarten left Freiburg to transfer to the Georg-August University in Göttingen.

The National Socialist Era

In early 1933, Baumgarten received an (unsalaried) lectureship in American studies in Göttingen. In the following years, he taught American philosophy and intellectual history (Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, Benjamin Franklin), pragmatism and Puritanism (seminar on Jonathan Edwards and Nathaniel Hawthorne). Because of his successful teaching, he was to receive a lectureship with examination privileges in 1933 and was willing to conform politically. He applied for membership in the SA. Heidegger tried to prevent Baumgarten from receiving both SA membership and employment as a lecturer.

In a letter of December 16, 1933, to Hermann Vogel, Heidegger denounced Baumgarten as a little convinced National Socialist. The letter states: "Dr. Baumgarten comes from the liberal-democratic Heidelberg intellectual circle around M. Weber in terms of his family and his intellectual attitude. During his stay here he was anything but a National Socialist... After Baumgarten had failed with me, he was in very lively contact with the Jew Fränkel, who had formerly been active in Göttingen and had now been dismissed here. I suspect that Baumgarten had accommodated himself in Göttingen in this way... At present I consider his admission to the SA to be just as impossible as that to the lectureship... In the field of philosophy, at any rate, I consider him a dazzler." Vogel, the recipient of this letter, himself a private lecturer in agricultural veterinary medicine, judged the letter to be "hateful" and useless and filed it away. Baumgarten was able to continue his career with the help of the NSDAP, as Rüdiger Safranski writes.

Baumgarten was habilitated on April 20, 1936, and appointed lecturer on June 10, 1937. He had already joined the NSLB on April 1, 1934, followed by membership in the NSDB in 1937. On May 1, 1937, he became a member of the NSDAP and in the same year a Block Warden.

In November 1940, he was appointed full professor at the Albertus University in Königsberg, where he then served as deputy director of the Philosophy Seminar. He taught there until 1945 and, together with Otto Koehler, ensured that Konrad Lorenz was appointed to the Königsberg Chair of Human Psychology.

Postwar period, Federal Republic of Germany

After the end of the war, Baumgarten's publication Deutsche Führungsmodelle: Offizier, Gelehrter, Handwerker (1945) from the series "Writings of the Academy for Youth Leadership" was placed on the list of literature to be censores and discarded in the Soviet occupation zone.

Through letters of exoneration from Karl Jaspers, Marianne Weber, Leopold von Wiese, and Arnold Bergstrasser, Baumgarten remained in university service despite his National Socialist past and was initially a visiting professor at the University of Göttingen in 1945. Baumgarten had received a copy of Heidegger's 1933 letter through a sympathizing secretary. Only because of these circumstances does this piece of evidence still exist today. During the denazification hearings of Baumgarten in 1946, the denunciation by Heidegger came to light.

In 1948, Baumgarten moved to Freiburg im Breisgau and in 1953 became an honorary professor at the Technical University of Stuttgart. From 1957 until his retirement in 1963, he held the chair of sociology at the Mannheim School of Economics.

Works

• Nationalismus und Sozialdemokratie (1919)
• Innere Formen menschlicher Vergemeinschaftung. Material-soziologische Untersuchungen zur Deutung einer gegenwärtigen Kulturbewegung (Manuscript; Dissertation, 1924)
• "Ein Bericht aus Amerika". In: H. Goverts (ed.): Der Student im Auslande VII/VIII (1929), pp. 201–17.
• Von der Kunst des Kompromisses (1933)
• "Sinn der Auslandskunde". In: Neue Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung 10 (1934), pp. 41–48.
• "Das politische Fach der Amerikakunde an der Universität Göttingen". In: Niedersächsische Hochschul-Zeitung (1934), pp. 7–8.
• "Gemeinschaft und Gewissen in Shakespeares 'Coriolan'". In: Neuere Sprachen 43 (1935), pp. 363–84, 413–25.
• Die geistigen Grundlagen des amerikanischen Gemeinwesens.
  • I: Benjamin Franklin. Der Lehrmeister der amerikanischen Revolution (1936)
  • II: Der Pragmatismus: R.W. Emerson, W. James, J. Dewey (1938)
• "Kants Lehre vom Wert der Person". In: Blätter für Deutsche Philosophie 15 (1941/42), pp. 69–93.
• "Der Mensch als Soldat". In: Blätter für deutsche Philosophie 16 (1942), pp. 207–27.
• "Erfahrung und Denken". In: Beilage der Preussischen Zeitung vom 13 (1942)
• "Erfahrung und Wahrheit". In: Forschungen und Fortschritte (1942)
• "Erfolgsethik und Gesinnungsethik". In: Blätter für deutsche Philosophie 17 (1943), pp. 96–117.
• Deutsche Führungsmodelle: Offizier, Gelehrter, Handwerker'" (1943)
• Amerikakunde (1952)
• "Das Vorbild Emersons im Werk und Leben Nietzsches". In: Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 1 (1956)
• Max Weber. Werk und Person (1964)
• Gewissen und Macht. Abhandlungen und Vorlesungen 1933–1963 (selected and introduced by Michael Sukale, 1971)

References

• Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main (1999)

External links

• Works by Eduard Baumgarten German National Library