The following interview is with a retired eastern German professor whose career constitutes a case history in the comparative politics of “academic unfreedom”. Professor Erhard Naake was the only Ph.D. student in the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to write his dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work was considered “anti-socialist” throughout the history of the GDR regime. Because Herr Naake had the temerity to select Nietzsche as his thesis topic – a philosopher whose work was banned from GDR bookstores and never taught in GDR schools or even universities – he never received an appointment as a professor in a GDR university. Ironically, however, even after the collapse of the GDR in 1989–1990, Herr Naake was penalized by the new powers-that-be in reunited Germany. He once again suffered a violation of his academic freedom when the university evaluation boards, which were composed of western German scholars, refused to let him keep his recently acquired position as a professor and instead summarily fired him, thus leading to his enforced retirement. As we shall see, the dramatic life story of Herr Naake reflects not only complicated issues of academic freedom and communist versus capitalist political values, but also the rich and complex history of eastern Germany both under the Nazis and GDR Communists and within reunited Germany since 1990.
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Notes
Naake’s scholarly publications on Nietzsche during the mid-1980s included one article and his long-delayed Ph.D. thesis. See Erhard Naake, “Zur Rolle Peter Gasts im Leben und Schaffen Friedrich Nietzsches.” In: Schriftenreihe der Hochschule für Musik “Franz Liszt” Weimar, 2,2 (1983), 30–51. See also his Ph.D. dissertation: Friedrich Nietzsches Verhältnis zu wichtigen politischen und sozialen Bewegungen, Jena 1986.
Naake’s study appeared in mid-2000 for the centennial of the philosopher’s death that August. The title must, however, be understood as referring less to Nietzsche than to “Nietzsche”, that is, to the towering, mythic image of the philosopher that arose posthumously and assumed the form of an intellectual-spiritual cult. Nietzsche und Weimar is not, however, a short biography of Nietzsche’s last 3 years during his residence at Weimar, but rather a study of the famous Villa Silberblick, otherwise known as the Nietzsche Archive, as it influenced what became the Nietzsche cult after the philosopher’s death. As a result, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth receives more space in Naake’s study than does Nietzsche himself, because she is primarily responsible for steering the archive in support of Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s Nazism during the 1920s and 1930s. And it was on her authority that the fascists and the Nazis could both claim Nietzsche as their own.
Naake never edited this volume, nor did he publish any full-length work (except his dissertation) until the appearance of Nietzsche und Weimar in 2000.
The heart of Naake’s book consists of four chapters dealing with the Nietzsche Archive and Nietzsche’s reception history: the posthumous years through the First World War, the brief period of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, and Nietzsche’s postwar fate in the GDR. Naake is especially interested in the philological scandal perpetrated by the Archive under Elisabeth. Naake fundamentally disagrees with all attempts to vilify Nietzsche as a “trailblazer for national socialism” and considers such an image completely the work of Elisabeth and other family members (such as Alfred Oehler, her nephew and successor as director of the Nietzsche Archive), along with clever exploiters among Nazi scholars (such as Alfred Rosenberg). Naake rejects the idea that Nazi claims to Nietzsche had any basis in his own work, pointing out that the quotations came from abridged or bowdlerized editions of Nietzsche’s writings edited by Elisabeth personally or under her supervision.
Instead Naake sees Nietzsche as the “Good European”, an anti-socialist and an opponent of anti-Semitism. Essentially his image of Nietzsche is a throwback to the period of Nietzsche’s early posthumous fame before the First World War, when virtually all of Europe’s intellectual élite revered Nietzsche as the greatest modern European philosopher, indeed almost a second Socrates or Plato. It was only during and after World War I, and especially with the rise of Italian fascism and German Nazism in the mid-1920s, that a nationalistic, Teutonic Nietzsche emerged as a prominent public image of the philosopher and displaced this pan-European image, as both imperialists and ideologues sought to exploit Nietzsche’s slogans and catch-phrases for their aggressive, anti-humanist ends.
Naake published nothing in GDR journals that became receptive to Nietzsche during 1986–1989. In addition to his book, his publications on Nietzsche since the collapse of the GDR include: “Nietzsche in Weimar.” In: Zwischen Konvention und Avantgarde. Doppelstadt Jena - Weimar. Ed. Jürgen John und Volker Wahl. Weimar/Köln/Wien 1995. 21–31; “Die Beziehungen zwischen Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche und dem thüringischen Innen- und Volksbildungsminister Wilhelm Frick.” In: Weimar 1930. Politik und Kultur im Vorfeld der NS-Diktatur. Ed. Lothar Ehrlich und Jürgen John. Weimar/Köln/Wien 1998. 275–292.
At present, Naake is writing a history of the Friedrich Schiller Gymnasium, where he taught from the late 1950s until the late 1980s, before gaining a university appointment in Weimar. During those years in the GDR, the school was known as the Schiller EOS (advanced high school).
In a private communication written in September 2005, Herr Naake updated me on his activities during the GDR era and subsequently. He noted that he had regularly taught the summer seminars for foreign Germanistik scholars and German language teachers, which was co-sponsored by the University of Jena and the Research Institute for Classical German Literature in Weimar. During these seminars he occasionally gave a lecture on the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Nietzsche, where he would often encounter visiting Nietzsche scholars. He remained in contact with them after the fall of the Berlin Wall and occasionally published short reviews in a few Germanistik journals abroad such as Germanic Notes.
During the 1980s he submitted a substantial essay to the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie on the necessity of a full-scale revision of the GDR’s Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Nietzsche. Unfortunately, after the Politburo of the SED officially entered the debate on Nietzsche–including official statements in Sinn und Form from the Minister of Culture, Kurt Hager, and from other leading GDR cultural functionaries–Naake was informed in 1988 that his essay could not appear. The stated reason was that “political grounds” did not permit its publication. After 1990, when he defended his Habilitationsschrift on Nietzsche’s relationship to the poltical and social movements of nineteenth-century Germany, he was invited to participate in several conferences that dealt with Nietzsche’s “unperson” status during the GDR era.
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Rodden, J. Dictatorship of the Professoriat?. Hum Rights Rev 8, 369–388 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-007-0019-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-007-0019-1