Radical forces want to enforce a new censorship at universities. In Germany in particular, such political policing is part of a non-spiritual tradition – yet it is still being played down.
The statue of the historian and Nobel Prize winner Theodor Mommsen after a demonstration at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Eric Gujer, Editor-in-Chief of the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”.
You are reading an excerpt from the newsletter “The Other View” by NZZ Editor-in-Chief Eric Gujer especially for readers in Germany. Subscribe to the newsletter for free. Not resident in Germany? Benefit here.
When a hare-footed university management gives in to the student mob and cancels a lecture, as happened at the Humboldt University in Berlin, the reassuring message inevitably sounds: The cancellation culture is not as bad in this country as it is in the USA or possibly Great Britain .
That’s correct. It’s not as bad in Germany as it is in the USA, where many professors are now silent for fear of brash anti-racists and gender police officers. Nor has any female professor been expelled from the university for insisting on bisexual gender, like Kathleen Stock in England.
Nevertheless, there are reasons not to treat Marie-Luise Vollbrecht’s temporary ban on performing at Humboldt University and other similar incidents as isolated cases. Perhaps the best argument is German history. In the 1930s, Germany was a pioneer of cancel culture – and that was before Hitler came to power.
The young savages win against the timid old ones
Golo Mann reports in his “Memoirs and Thoughts” from Heidelberg, where Thomas Mann’s son spent a few semesters, how things were at the universities back then. In the fall of 1930, the mathematician Emil Julius Gumbel received a professorship there. He was a red rag for the Nazis, who held the majority in the student committee, the Asta. Gumbel was a Jew, a pacifist and had made a name for himself as the author of a book on the right-eye blind judiciary of the Weimar Republic.
A storm of indignation broke out against the appointment, which soon bore the name “Gumbel riots”. The Asta staged a boycott to force the dismissal. Initially, the professors stood by their colleague, not without the sour reference to his “unpleasant personality and attitude”.
But the following year Gumbel lost his license to teach. He emigrated to France and later to the USA. After the end of the war he was refused the hoped-for re-employment in Heidelberg. Universities are bureaucracies; they tend to be lazy and cowardly. Nothing has changed to this day.
Gumbel was not an isolated case in Heidelberg. Something similar happened to the theologian Günther Dehn, a self-confessed socialist and pacifist. He could not take up the promised professorship because the faculty feared protests. Golo Mann commented on the affair in 1931 with words that sound like a contemporary reckoning with the behavior of the Humboldt University. It’s shameful that “the faculty didn’t even back down from the current terror, but from the possibility of future terror.”
In Berlin, as in Heidelberg a century earlier, they capitulated prematurely in the face of potential riots. It seems to be the same every time student radicalism meets professorial need for quiet. The young savages triumph over the old timid ones.
The cancellation culture of the Weimar Republic ended on January 30, 1933. The riot of a minority turned into state terrorism. It was no longer extremists who fought against the constitutional order, the state itself was the first and foremost extremist.
The universities become places of censorship
Does history repeat itself? Germany is a young but strong democracy, just as the USA is an old but still vital democracy. These democracies will not perish from the cancel culture, any more than from critics of the measures and those who understand Putin. But it’s worth staying alert to what’s brewing at universities, because they are early warning systems for undesirable developments in society.
The historical example shows where driving boilers against people and ideas can lead. On the square in front of the Humboldt University, a work of art commemorates the book burnings by the Nazis, to which Gumbel’s book also fell victim. So people in Germany pride themselves on understanding the past as a reminder for the present.
Respect for history should lead to calling cancel culture what it is: a new form of extremism. The term, imported from English, is a euphemism, the deliberate euphemism of academic witch-hunts. That should be forbidden in Germany.
“Fend off the beginnings” is not a bad motto. It has proven itself in dealing with neo-Nazis. It is also the right slogan when minorities try to occupy German universities again in order to eradicate unpopular views.
When the unleashed zeitgeist strikes, as in the smear campaign against British feminist Kathleen Stock, reputation and livelihood are at stake. Even in Germany, where nobody has lost their professorship, something always sticks: at least the dumbest adjective in the German language. Those who escaped are now considered “controversial” – the Berlin professors Herfried Münkler and Jörg Baberowski, both completely undisputed luminaries in their field, can sing a song about it.
After each incident, the astonished question is asked why this is happening at universities, the places of free thinking. The counter-question should be: where else if not at universities? Wherever new ideas arise, the will to silence those who doubt and oppose pure doctrine also grows.
Free thought and its opposite, censorship and dogmatism, often coexist. This is the negative dialectic of academic progress. This was not only the case in Golo Mann’s time, but also during the student riots of 1968.
The phenomenon runs in waves, only the content changes. Today it is identity politics, militant anti-racism and a gender ideology that declares everything sexual to be a purely social construct. In the 1960s it was a doctrinaire neo-Marxism that disrupted lectures and occupied institutes. Some Asta, now painted red instead of brown, organized boycott campaigns like three decades earlier.
The cancel culture is still being glossed over
Feminists and lesbians who argue in a traditional way, such as Kathleen Stock, are particularly caught in the crosshairs of gender ideologues. In the 1960s, Marxists’ anger was directed at other Marxists. The Communist League of West Germany (KBW) was the worst enemy of the Communist League (KB). Extremism always works according to the same rules.
At the same time, extremism only thrives with the help of appeasers in rectorates and editorial offices. They mitigate where zero tolerance would be required. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also seems to have defected to this camp. She scoffs at “campaign media of the anti-cancel culture”, although the topic is of intense concern to bourgeois academic circles. Otherwise, hardly any researchers would have come together in the “Academic Freedom Network” to, as they say themselves, “defend the principles of the Enlightenment”.
Anyone who fights against a social misdevelopment is not leading a campaign. A campaign can only be recognized by those who do not see the undesirable development or who deliberately downplay it.
The argument of the euphemists is always that «cancel culture» does not actually exist; these are exaggerated individual cases. Using the same logic, one could claim that there is no right-wing extremism, but rather a plethora of individual cases.
Anyone who explains extremism as a question of numbers also misjudges the evil spirit behind it, i.e. the operating principle. Human rights such as freedom of speech and research are indivisible and are not only endangered when they are violated on a massive scale. Then it is usually too late to fight back anyway.
It is part of the nature of extremism that it spreads if you do not oppose it – but not “by all means” of the judiciary and the protection of the constitution, as it was called in view of the protests by opponents of vaccination, but with a sense of proportion and civil courage.
Excessiveness is part of the tools used by extremists, and their opponents shouldn’t take this as an example. Good arguments are more lasting in the political struggle than the threat of fines and surveillance by the secret service. The political confrontation with extremists is therefore the opposite of a campaign, it is a passionate commitment to freedom and democracy.