Karl Zimmermann (political scientist)
Karl Zimmermann (born September 29, 1889 in Zwickau) was a German political scientist and race theorist.
Biography
Zimmermann was the son of a railroad engineer. He attended a secondary school in Leipzig, studied natural sciences and philosophy in Leipzig and received his doctorate in 1912 on Jean Paul's aesthetics. In 1915, he volunteered for military service in World War I as an interpreter, but was recruited in 1916 to teach at the secondary school in Meissen. In 1926, he became a Studienrat at the Higher Israelite School in Zwickau, which he also headed as Oberstudiendirektor after 1933. From 1921, he was a lecturer, and from 1924 head of the Leipzig Fichte-Hochschule, a völkisch adult education center.
Zimmermann was considered an "old fighter". In 1921, he joined the German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation, in March 1929 the NSDAP, in 1930 the SA, the NS-Lehrerbund and the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, whose local groups he helped to establish. In 1929 he was elected to the Zwickau city council for the NSDAP, and in 1931 he took over the leadership of the local NSLB group and organized training sessions. In the run-up to the city council elections in 1929, Zimmermann welcomed the dismissal of Hildebrand Gurlitt, the city's museum director at the King Albert Museum, which had been decided on financial grounds, because his acquisitions had shown him to be a "friend of art Bolshevism." In a February 21, 1930 article in the Zwickauer Zeitung newspaper, Zimmermann continued his campaign against modern artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach, who were only from the "lower-race" section of the population. The art scandal made waves throughout the Reich.[1]
In 1934, he became Reich officer for racial affairs at the head office for teachers in Bayreuth. In addition, he had a teaching assignment for "social and cultural biology and racial education" at the TU Dresden. In 1937, he took over as principal of the Hans Schemm School in Radebeul, which is why he had to put his work in Bayreuth on hold. Together with Erich Meyer, he published the biology textbook for secondary schools Lebenskunde, which took up twin research propagandistically.
His most successful book was Deutsche Geschichte als Rassenschicksal (1933).
Works
Major publications
- Jean Pauls Ästhetik des Lächerlichen (1912; dissertation)
- Deutsche Geschichte als Rassenschicksal (1933)
- Die geistigen Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus (1933)
- Nationalsozialismus, Zoologie und neue Erziehung (1934)
Editor
- Zeitschrift Deutsche Monatshefte (1924–1930)
- Reihe Das Dritte Reich. Bausteine zum neuen Staat und Volk (1933–1934)
- Lebenskunde. Biologiebuch für Höhere Schulen (1934–1944; 4 volumes)
Notes
- ↑ Remy, Maurice Philip (2017). Der Fall Gurlitt: Die wahre Geschichte über Deutschlands größten Kunstskandal. Berlin: Europa.
References
- Carl Justi, "Der Zwickauer Skandal," Museum der Gegenwart, Vol. I, No. 2 (1930), pp. 48–60.
- Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt, Rassenhygiene als Erziehungsideologie des Dritten Reichs: Bio-bibliographisches Handbuch. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag (2006).
- Constantin Goschler, "Gleichheit als Naturexperiment". In: C. Goschler, Till Kössler, eds., Vererbung oder Umwelt?: Ungleichheit zwischen Biologie und Gesellschaft seit 1945. Göttingen: Wallstein (2016).
