While there's no disputing that Nazism's success was deeply connected to the privations of the great German Depression, that should not lead one to think that Nazism itself was a product of poverty. Even before World War I, Germany was undergoing a revolution of youth. The war merely accelerated these trends, heightening both idealism and alienation. Klaus Mann, the secular Jew and homosexual novelist, spoke for much of his generation when he wrote in 1927, "We are a generation that is united, so to speak, only by perplexity. As yet, we have not found the goal that might be able to dedicate us to common effort, although we all share the search for such a goal."3 Mann understated the case. While young Germans were divided about what should replace the old order, they were united by more than mere perplexity. A sort of youthful identity politics had swept through Germany, fired by the notion that the new generation was different and better because it had been liberated from the politics of corrupt and cowardly old men and was determined to create an "authentic" new order.
German youth culture in the 1920s and early 1930s was ripe with rebelliousness, environmental mysticism, idealism, and no small amount of paganism, expressing attitudes that should be familiar to anyone who lived through the 1960s. "They regarded family life as repressive and insincere," writes one historian. They believed sexuality, in and out of marriage, was "shot through with hypocrisy," writes another. They, too, believed you couldn't trust anyone over thirty and despised the old materialistic order in all its manifestations. To them, "parental religion was largely a sham, politics boastful and trivial, economics unscrupulous and deceitful, education stereotyped and lifeless, art trashy and sentimental, literature spurious and commercialized, drama tawdry and mechanical." Born of the middle class, the youth movement rejected, even loathed, middle-class liberalism. "Their goal," writes John Toland, "was to establish a youth culture for fighting the bourgeois trinity of school, home and church."4
In cafes they howled at the decadence of German society in cadences reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg. In the woods they'd commune with nature, awaiting "messages from the forest." A fuhrer — or popularly acclaimed "leader" — might read passages from Nietzsche or the poet Stefan George, who wrote: "The people and supreme wisdom yearn for the Man! — The Deed!...Perhaps someone who sat for years among your murderers and slept in your prisons will stand up and do the deed!" "These young people," Toland writes, "thriving on mysticism and impelled by idealism, yearned for action — any kind of action."5
Even before the Nazis seized power, student radicals were eager to challenge the stodgy conservatism of German higher education, which cherished classically liberal academic freedom and the authority of scholars and teachers. A wave of Nietzschean pragmatism (Julien Benda's phrase) had swept across Europe, bringing with it a wind that blew away the stale dogmas of their parents' generation, revealing a new world to be seen with fresh eyes. The Nazis told young people that their enthusiasm shouldn't be restrained through academic study — rather, it should be indulged through political action. The tradition of study for its own sake was thrown aside in the name of "relevance." Let us read no more of Jewish science and foreign abstractions, they cried. Let us learn of Germans and war and what we can do for the nation! Intuition — which young people have in abundance — was more important than knowledge and experience, insisted the radicals. The youth loved how Hitler denounced the theorists — "ink knights," he spat. What was required, according to Hitler, was a "revolt against reason" itself, for "[i]ntellect has poisoned our people!"6 Hitler rejoiced that he stole the hearts and minds of youth, transforming universities into incubators of activism for the Fatherland.
The Nazis succeeded with stunning speed. In 1927, during a time of general prosperity, 77 percent of Prussian students insisted that the "Aryan paragraph" — barring Jews from employment — be incorporated into the charters of German universities. As a halfway measure, they fought for racial quotas that would limit the number of racially inappropriate students. In 1931, 60 percent of all German undergraduates supported the Nazi Student Organization. Regional studies of Nazi participation found that students generally outpaced any other group in their support for National Socialism.7
A key selling point for German youth was the Nazi emphasis on the need for increased student participation in university governance. Nazis believed that the voice of the students needed to be heard and the importance of "activism" recognized as an essential part of higher education. Foreshadowing a refrain common to American student radicals of the 1960s, like Columbia's Mark Rudd, who declared that the only legitimate job of the university was "the creation and expansion of a revolutionary movement," the Nazis believed that the university should be an empowering incubator of revolutionaries first and peddlers of abstraction a very, very distant second.8
The Nazis' tolerance for dissident views sharply declined, of course, once they attained and solidified power. But the themes remained fairly constant. Indeed, the Nazis fulfilled their promise to increase student participation in university governance as part of a broader redefinition of the university itself. Walter Schultze, the director of the National Socialist Association of University Lecturers, laid out the new official doctrine in an address to the first gathering of the organization, wherein he explained that "academic freedom" must be redefined so that students and professors alike could work together toward the larger cause. "Never has the German idea of freedom been conceived with greater life and vigor than in our day...Ultimately freedom is nothing else but responsible service on behalf of the basic values of our being as a Volk."9
Professors who deviated from the new orthodoxy faced all of the familiar tactics of the campus left in the 1960s. Their classrooms were barricaded or occupied, threats were put in their mail, denunciations were posted on campus bulletin boards and published in student newspapers, lecturers were heckled. When administrators tried to block or punish these antics, the students mounted massive protests, and the students naturally won, often forcing the resignation of the administrator.
What cannot be overstated is that German students were first and foremost rebelling against the conservatism of both German higher education and the older generation's "bourgeois materialism." The churches, too, were suspect because they had become so closely associated with the old, corrupt World War I regime. The students wanted to run the universities, which to traditional academics was akin to inmates running the asylum. Meanwhile, most of the progressive professors, at least those who weren't Jews or Bolsheviks, gamely went along. Indeed, many such academics — like Hans-Georg Gadamer — who in later years would exploit their victim status under the Nazis, were quite happy to take a better office vacated by a Jewish colleague. Martin Heidegger, the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, took to the Nazi revolution instantly.