Nationalism and Culture (56 page)

And so the whole portrait-diagnosis of Woltmann and his successor. Otto Hauser, is utterly worthless. It is the most utterly unreliable means that could be produced for the establishment of definite characters. In the picture books of our race astrologers such "documents" look very fine and serve there their full purpose, but for the earnest student they offer hardly even a point of attack. The work of painters is not photography, which incorruptibly gives back what is before it. It must from the first be valued as the reproduction of what the inner eye of the artist perceives; and this inner picture which hovers before the artist, and without which no work of art can be produced, not seldom misrepresents the original from a factual standpoint. Also, the personal style of the artist and the school to which he belongs play an important part in the work. To what genuine investigator, for example, would it occur to try to establish the characteristics of a race from portraits by our present-day cubists or futurists? Besides which, the very same portraits which serve Woltmann as proofs of the Germanic origin of the French and Italian cultures supply to other advocates of the race theory a basis for quite different views. For example, AJbrecht Wirth, who also thinks that he recognizes in race the determinative factor in historical development, explains in his Rasse und Volk: "In this view is involved a strange error; that Woltmann and his adherents discovered in so many geniuses and men of talent in France and Italy Germanic features. To unprejudiced eyes the very pictures which Woltmann gives as illustrations show just the opposite: Bashkir, Mediterranean, and Negro types."

In fact, in the whole long portrait gallery which Woltmann displays

^ Ludwig Woltmann, Die Germanen und die Renaissance in Ita/ien; 1905. Die Germanen in Frankreich; 1907.

to the world in support of his thesis, there is hardly a type that could stand as genuinely representative of the Germanic race. In every one of them unmistakable characteristics of the hybrid are more or less clearly shown. If the researches of Woltmann and Hauser were to lead us to any "law of history" at all, it could be only to this: that racial inbreeding gradually undermines spiritual vigor and has as its consequence a slow decline, while racial interbreeding imparts to the capacity for culture ever new vigor and favors the production of personalities of genius. The same holds good also for the German bearers of culture, and Max von Gruber is not wrong when he says:

And when we apply racial standards to the bodily characteristics of our greatest men we find, indeed, in many of them Nordic characters, but in none of them only Nordic characters. The first glance reveals to the expert th?t neither Frederick the Great, nor Baron von Stein, nor Bismarck was pure Nordic; the same is true of Luther, Melanchthon, Leibnitz, Kant, and Schopenhauer, as also of Liebig and Julius Robert Mayer and Helmholtz, of Goethe', Schiller, and Grillparzer, of Durer, Menzel, and Feuerbach, and even of the greatest geniuses of that most German of all the arts, music, from Bach and Gluck and Haydn to Bruckner. They were all hybrids; the same is true of the great Italians. Michelangelo and Galileo were, if Nordic at all, still not pure Nordic. To the characteristics from the North apparently ingredients from other races must be added in order to produce the happiest combination of characters.^

However much Woltmann may insist that "Dante, Raphael, Lyther, and so on, were geniuses not because they were hybrids, but in spite of it," and that "the foundation of their genius is their heritage from the Germanic race," it remains but empty preaching so long as we are not in a position to establish indisputably and to confirm scientifically the influence of race on the intellectual characteristics of mankind. By just the same logic could we affirm that the spark of genius in Luther, Goethe, Kant or Beethoven was to be attributed to the presence of "Alpine" or "Oriental" blood in them. Nothing would be proved by thisj the world would merely be richer by one more assertion. In fact, during the War there were found on the other side of the Vosges men like Paul Souday and others who explained that all the great personalities that Germany had produced were of Celtic, and not German, descent. Why not?

The latest advocates of the so-called race doctrine take great pains to give a scientific appearance to their views and appeal especially to the laws of heredity, which play such an important part in modern natural science, and are still the subject of so much controversy. By heredity, biology means chiefly the fact, firmly established by common observation,

* "Volk und Rasse" in Siiddeutsche MonatshejtCy 1927.

that plants and animals resemble their parents and that this resemblance is apparently traceable to the fact that the descendants arise from bits of the same protoplasm and so develop from the same or similar hereditary primordia. From this it follows that in protoplasm there reside peculiar forces which by the separation of the tiniest portions can transmit the whole to the descendants. Thus men came to recognize that the real cause of inheritance must be sought in a particular condition of the living cell-stuff which we call protoplasm.

However valuable this recognition may be, it has hardly brought us nearer to the real solution of the problem. Instead it has proposed for science a whole set of new problems, whose solution is no less difficult. In the first place, it is necessary to establish the processes in protoplasm which control the development of particular characters, a task attended by almost insurmountable difficulties. And we are just as much in the dark as to the inner processes which precede inheritance. Science has, it is true, succeeded in establishing the existence of so-called chemical molecules and even the existence of certain fairly well-developed organs within the cell-structure, but the specific arrangement of the molecules and the inner causes of the differences between the protein groups in dead and in living substance are still unknown to us today. One can safely say that in this perplexing realm we rely almost entirely on assumptions, since none of the numerous theories of heredity has been able to lift the veil of the Magi that still hides the actual processes of inheritance. We have profited much by the observations on hybridization and their interpretationj but of course these deal less with the explanation of causes than with th^ establishmetit of facts.

Seventy years ago the Augustinian monk, Gr ggor Mendel, busied himself in his quiet cloister garden at Briinn with twenty-two varieties of pea-plants and achieved the following results: when he crossed a yellow with a green variety, the descendants bore all yellow seeds and the green appeared to be completely eliminated. But when he dusted the yellow hybrids with their own pollen, the vanished green appeared again in their descendants, and in a definite ratio. Of every four seeds in plants or the second generation, three were yellow and one was green. The characteristics of the green variety had, therefore, not disappeared j they were merely hidden by the characteristics of the yellow. Mendel speaks, therefore, of recessive or concealed, and dominant or concealing, characters. The recessive character—in this case green-seededness—in renewed fertilizations showed itself constant in heredity so long as self-fertilization was strictly controlled and no new crossing occurred. The dominants, however, segregated regularly in each new generation. A third of their progeny were pure dominants, which bred true in later generations; the other two-thirds "mendeled," that is, they segregated in reproduction

again in the same proportion of 3:1. In the same ratio the process continued indefinitely.

Countless experiments by well-known botanists and zoologists have since then confirmed Mendel's rules in the large. They also agree very well with the results of modern cytology, or cell-theory, as far as the growth and division of the cell can be observed. One can, therefore, agree that these rules have validity for all organic beings up to man and that in nature as a whole a unified plan of control of the processes of heredity obtains J but this recognition does not dispose of the countless difficulties which have thus far prevented our deeper insight into this mysterious occurrence. It is clear from the Mendelian laws of heredity that the characters of the parents are transmitted to the offspring in a definite ratio. On the other hand, cytological research has shown that the hereditary primordia of a living being are to be sought in those carefully separated nuclear parts in the germ cell which we call chromosomes. And all that science has more or less certainly established seems deducible from this: that the hereditary primordia enter into the germ cell in pairs, and that in each pair one element comes from the sperm cell of the father, the other from the egg cell of the mother.

But since one cannot believe that all the hereditary primordia of both parents are transmitted to each of their offspring, because in that case their number would become greater with each succeeding generation, one comes to the conclusion that only in the nucleus of the soma-or body-cells of a living being are all the hereditary primordia present j the germ cell always suppresses finally a part of the nuclear factors so that it receives only one-half of all the primordia, that is, only one member of each character-pair. One learns that in the general body cell of man there are 48 chromosomes, but the germ cell when ready for fertilization contains only 24. But this is not to say that man possesses only 24 character-pairs that function as bearers of heredity. In every chromosome several members of different character-pairs may be present, so that in the offspring the most varied combinations may appear. Since, however, every fertilization is really a crossing, even when it occurs between beings of the same race, because in nature no two individuals are exactly alike, it follows that from every instance of fertilization the most manifold results may ensue. From only two different hereditary factors there would arise in two generations four varietiesj from three pairs, eight varieties; from four, 16 J from ten, 1,024; and so on. From these clearly obvious possibilities of combination any comprehensive view of the results of the processes of heredity becomes not merely increasingly difficult, but actually impossible.

And we were still speaking only of purely physical characteristics. When we turn to mental or moral characters the processes become much

more involved, because here no segregation or fixation of separate qualities is possible. We are, then, not in a position to separate mental characteristics into their components and to differentiate one part from another. Intellectual and moral characters are given us as wholesj even if we agree that the Mendelian laws of heredity apply in this field, we still have no means of subjecting their operation to scientific observation.

And when it becomes clear that pure races are nowhere to be found, in fact, have in all probability never existed; that all European peoples are merely mixtures and present every possible racial make-up, which both without and within each nation are only to be distinguished by the proportion of the separate constituents 3 then only does one get an idea of the difiiculties which beset the earnest student at every step. If, further, one keeps in mind how uncertain the results of anthropologic research in regard to the different races still are today, how defective still is our knowledge of the inner processes of heredity, then one cannot avoid the conclusion that every attempt to erect on such uncertain premises a theory which allegedly reveals to us the deeper meaning of all historical events and enables its exponents infallibly to judge the worth of the moral, mental and cultural qualities of the different human groups must become either senseless play-acting or clownish mischief. That such theories could find such wide circulation, especially in Germany, is a serious sign of the mental degradation of a society that has lost all inner moral strength and is therefore concerned to replace outworn ethical values with ethnological concepts.

Of the present-day advocates of the race theory. Dr. Hans Gunther is the best known and the most disputed over. His numerous writings and especially his Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes have had an extraordinary circulation in Germany, and in wide circles have achieved an influence that one dares not underestimate. What distinguishes Gunther from his predecessors is not the content of his doctrine, but the pains he takes to surround it with a scientific mantle, in order to endow it with an outer dignity which does not belong to it. As a basis for his views Gunther has collected a great mass of material, but that is all. When it becomes necessary to establish scientifically conclusions of decisive significance, he fails completely and reverts to the methods of Gobineau and Chamberlain, who relied entirely on a wish-concept. For him the Aryan moves clear into the background; the Germanic man has also played out his part; Gunther's ideal is the "Nordic race," which he endows with precious native qualities as generously as Gobineau does the Aryans and Chamberlain the Germans. In addition he has enriched the classification of European races by one new component, and has equipped the already existing divisions with new names without, by this, adding anything to our knowledge.

The American scholar, Ripley, who first attempted to write an anthropological history of European peoples, contented himself with three principal types, which he designated as the Teutonic, the Celtic-Alpine and the Mediterranean races. Later there was added to these three a fourth, the Dinaric race, and it was thought that in these four fundamental types the chief components of Europe's racial make-up had been recognized. Besides these four principal races there are also in Europe Levantine, Semitic, Mongolian and Negro strains. Of course, one cannot represent these four types as pure races j we are merely concerned here with a working hypothesis for science, to enable it to undertake a classification of European peoples on more or less correct lines. The mass of European peoples is the result of crossings among these "races." These themselves, however, are merely the product of certain mixtures which in the course of time have taken on particular forms, as is the case in every instance of race formation. Gunther added, superfluously, a fifth to these four principal races, the so-called "East-Baltic race." Along with this new discovery he effected a rebaptism of the Alpine race which he called the "Eastern" {ostisch). There was no reason at all for this change, and his bitterest opponent in the racial camp. Dr. Merkenschlager, may have been right when he assumed that Gunther, in this renaming of the Alpine race, had the purpose merely of "representing it to the sentiment of his readers as 'contaminated' and to enable the unthinking masses to interpret it as Oriental-Jewish."