This volume is a genealogy of the major practitioners of Völkerpsychologie from the middle of the nineteenth century until the postwar era: Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903), Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899), Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), and Willy Hellpach (1877–1955). Lazarus and Steinthal, the founders of the field and the editors of the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (1859–1890), drew on a venerable intellectual heritage. Johann Gottfried Herder, puzzling over the diversity and unity he saw within cultures and nations, embraced the notion of Volksgeist; he, along with Wilhelm von Humboldt and many of their contemporaries, eagerly sought to identify the connections among cultural characteristics, language, and people. Egbert Klautke reminds us that many Germans through the twentieth century continued that search, often drawing on the basic tenets of Völkerpsychologie, even when they sought to distance themselves from it. Indeed, “while the reputation of Völkerpsychologie declined steadily in the 1950s and 1960s,” it is clear that “the search for the German mind continued” apace (154). Indeed, despite his “damning critique of Willy Hellpach's folk psychology,” Ralf Dahrendorf's efforts were only the most poignant postwar example of that persistent pursuit (Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, 1959; The Modern Social Conflict, 1988).
The Mind of the Nation is divided into three main chapters. Each offers an intellectual biography—first of Lazarus and Steinthal, then of Wundt, and finally of Hellpach. The biographies are also intertwined with a description of Völkerpsychologie as it took shape and was practiced by these leading individuals and across the shifting institutional and political landscapes of four political regimes.
If the main questions of Völkerpsychologie—“the development and formation of nations, the relationship between the individual and the community, and the questions of national differences and a national ‘mind’” (156)—persisted across the modern era, the humanities and social sciences changed greatly. When Lazarus and Steinthal founded their journal, they did so during an era in which the humanities had not yet divided into strict disciplines, the social sciences had not emerged, and quests for total knowledge were still popular. As German Jewish intellectuals, they championed Jewish integration as well as national unification under Prussia, and although their public activities began with scholarly pursuits, they increasingly focused on the moral and political debates that consumed many reform-minded liberal Jews in the German empire. Thus, while both taught at German universities, neither gained a position as a full professor, and the field itself was never clearly defined.
Indeed, even the work by Lazarus and Steinthal contained contradictions. While both argued, for example, that the diversity and plurality of nations needed to be “welcomed and encouraged, since it allowed for the advancement of human culture” (20), they also mixed their voluntaristic definitions of “the Volk” with normative and often essentialist ideas of “the German Volk” and “its spirit.” Their main assumption—that the psychological study of the Volk was possible and necessary— nevertheless convinced Wundt to continue their quest in a more comprehensive manner, and their writings influenced scholars as diverse as Mikhail Bakhtin, Adolf Bastian, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Georg Simmel. In that sense, Klautke rightly contends, Lazarus and Steinthal made significant contributions to the emergence of the social sciences, and they promoted a set of questions that remain pertinent today.
Wundt arguably continued that contribution as he pursued his own career, took up a chair in philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and consistently championed the label Völkerpsychologie against other labels, such as social psychology. He also defended his pursuits against practitioners in other fields, among them Max Weber, who criticized the lack of empirical science in Wundt's “creative synthesis” and derided his efforts to locate natural laws behind the development of national characters. His criticisms were indeed often harsh, despite the fact that, as Klautke astutely points out, Weber's own efforts to describe the spirit of Western capitalism and a specific “Western” mentality had much in common with Wundt's own efforts and goals.
As Europe moved into World War I, academics and others on both sides of the battle lines eagerly took up ideas about, and engaged in untoward characterizations of, national mentalities and characters. Wundt's contributions to those efforts, which were rife with bald essentialism, undermined his scholarship. People such as the ethnologist Richard Thurnwald (Die menschliche Gesellschaft in ihren ethno-soziologischen Grundlagen, 1931–1935) nevertheless continued to recognize the importance of the kinds of studies Wundt had pursued, arguing that the field needed to be professionalized, not discarded.
That professionalization never came about, however, Still, the central questions that begot the field of Völkerpsychologie continued to have influence, and Wundt's mantel was taken up by his student Willy Hellpach, whose 1938 Einführung in die Völkerpsychologie was an effort to both resurrect the field and provide a way for him to integrate himself into the German academic community during the Third Reich. Hellpach succeeded by making several clear concessions to Nazi ideology as he recast his undisciplined field. That required subtle yet fundamental shifts. Even during Wundt's participation in the production of national caricatures during World War I, Völkerpsychologie had little in common with völkisch ideology. Its practitioners never endorsed antisemitism or race theories, and Hellpach contended that nationhood or Volkstum and race were never identical. Indeed, citing the German American anthropologist Franz Boas, Hellpach underscored that even the physiognomy of a nation changed much more quickly than physical anthropologists had assumed. The real enigma of the German Volkstum, he argued, was not race, but the different German tribes and their interactions over time.
Despite such clear positions, the radical right posthumously harnessed Wundt to support their causes, and once the Nazis were firmly in power, Hellpach distanced himself from Boas's critiques of simplistic racial theories and presented Volkstum, rather than a progressive humanity, as the culmination of human history. He also introduced the Führerprinzip into Völkerpsychologie as the answer to the perplexing question of the relationship between individuals and the community. In his later writings, the “man of action” became the decisive force in any community—at least until World War II ended. After the war, Hellpach joined many of his colleagues in denouncing the Nazi regime as barbaric; he returned to teaching at the University of Heidelberg, and his Einführung in die Völkerpsychologie, which was approved by the American occupation forces, continued to be widely read.
Klautke's book is a competent genealogy, well worth reading. Its virtue, however, is not in teaching the obvious point that different political regimes can channel and shape the character of an intellectual field and discredit its terminology. Rather, it reminds us that the fundamental questions pursued by many German intellectuals across the nineteenth century remain worthy of our attention today, despite their later association with National Socialism and the resulting taboos assigned to their key words.
