Kurt Florentin Hildebrandt

Kurt Hildebrandt
Prof. Dr. med. et Dr. phil. Hildebrandt
Born	Kurt Florentin Hildebrandt 12 December 1881 Florence , Kingdom of Italy
Died	20 May 1966 (aged 84) Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, West Germany
Education	University of Munich University of Berlin (Dr. med.) University of Marburg (Dr. phil.)
Influenced by	Plato, Darwin, Nietzsche, Western philosophy
Influenced	Racial psychology, racial hygiene
Political party	NSDAP (1933-1945)
Spouse(s)	Hildebrandt was married and father of four children

Kurt Florentin Hildebrandt (12 December 1881 – 20 May 1966 in Kiel) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher. Initially a doctor at the Wittenau sanatoriums and a member of the George-Kreis (academic circle around the poet Stefan George), he was appointed to a professorship in philosophy in 1934. He saw "German culture as the fulfillment of the Aryan essence", in order to confront a “Western mechanism”.

Life

Hildebrandt was born in Florence in 1881, the son of Maximilian Hildebrandt and his wife Elisabeth, née Lippert. His father was the Protestant preacher of the large German community in Florence, which had belonged to the Empire of Austria until 1861. In Magdeburg, he visited the Gymnasium "Klosterschule Unsere Lieben Frauen" and received his Abitur at Easter 1900. Motivated by Charles Darwin and modern biology, medicine and natural sciences, he then studied in Munich and Berlin under Emil Kraepelin and Ernst Rüdin, among others, graduating with the state examination in 1905. His medical doctorate (Dr. med.) followed on 16 May 1906.

His first job was in the Dalldorf mental hospital in the north of Berlin. Introduced by his school friend Friedrich Andreae, he joined the circle around Friedrich Wolters and Berthold Vallentin in Niederschönhausen near Berlin. Initially committed primarily to the work and person of the universal historian Kurt Breysig, the circle, which moved to Lichterfelde in 1907 and organized lecture evenings there under the name “Academia urbana”, finally turned to the poet Stefan George in the second half of the 1900s. Personal contact was soon made possible, which became decisive for the following 20 years, and not just for Hildebrandt, who belonged to the second echelon of the George circle.

During WWI, he served with the Landsturm (V Berlin) in the mental department at a military hospital in Saarbrücken (Reserve-Lazarett I), where on 18 August 1918 he was promoted to Kriegs-Assistenzarzt auf Widerruf (War Assistant Doctor upon revocation) of the Imperial German Army, which was equivalent to a commission as 2nd Lieutenant. Hildebrandt completed his studies in philosophy (1918 to 1921), which he pursued alongside his medical work, in Marburg, where he also received his doctorate under Paul Natorp in 1921 with a dissertation on Nietzsche's competition with Socrates and Plato.

Hildebrandt worked as a senior physician (Oberarzt) and psychiatrist at the Wittenau sanatoriums in a suburb of Berlin in the 1920s. The attempt to complete a habilitation in Berlin in 1928 on the subject of Plato's world negation and world affirmation failed due to objections from the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, despite the encouragement of the philosophers around Ernst Troeltsch, Max Dessoir and Eduard Spranger, who welcomed the inclusion of a representative from the George circle, and his student Werner Jaeger, who denied Hildebrandt's technical knowledge. Hildebrandt himself attributed the resistance – probably rightly – to an essay from 1910 in which he attacked Wilamowitz's principles of translation for ancient philosophical texts, in particular that he did not adhere to the linguistic and formal properties of the work of art. With the help of the Prussian Minister of Education Carl Heinrich Becker, who supported the George-Kreis on various occasions and was in personal contact with some members – including Hildebrandt – he nevertheless received a teaching position as an honorary professor of philosophy in 1928. In 1932, he became medical director of the municipal mental asylum in Lichtenberg (Herzberge).

During the Kiel years, Hildebrandt wrote a revised version of his two writings from 1920 and published some articles in Rasse, the monthly magazine of the Nordic Movement, from 1936 to 1939. He also devoted more time to the German literary classics Hölderlin and Goethe as well as Leibniz. He also contributed to the anthology Das Bild des Krieges im Deutschen Denken (The Image of War in German Thought), published by August Faust as part of the Ritterbusch campaign (Aktion Ritterbusch) in 1941.

Hildebrandt opposed the biological race theory of Hans F. K. Günther with the category of the nation as a spiritual community: “The national idea is superior to racial unity.” Nor was Hildebrandt's racial consciousness anti-Semitic, as is sometimes claimed. He even considered an "admixture" of cultivated Western European Jews to be beneficial for the development of a cultural nation, while he rejected a "marriage union" with "Eastern Jews", Frenchmen or "Negroes". Hildebrandt's political theme was the rejection of liberal individualism and the search for intellectual renewal in the community. They are heroes who lead the fight for a well-ordered state and thus make it possible to overcome degeneration:

“The rejection of individualism is the opposite of the rejection of the great individual. The hero is the creator and nucleus of the state.”

Chronology

• 1928 to 1934 Honorary Professor of Philosophy in Berlin
• 1932 to 1934 Director of the Lichtenberg Municipal Lunatic Asylum in Berlin
• 1934 to 1945 Full Professor of Philosophy at the Philosophical Seminar, Faculty of Philosophy, Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel
  • 1934 to 1935 Chancellor of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel
  • 1935 - 1935 Senate member of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel
    • He took over the chair from Julius Stenzel, who was on leave. The new rector Karl Lothar Wolf, himself a physicist, wanted a university professor who could build a bridge between natural science and philosophy in the spirit of the university's new political orientation. In addition, Wolf, who was friends with Carl Petersen, was close to the thinking of the George Circle. The appointment was also supported by Martin Heidegger.

Memberships

• 1 May 1933 Member of the NSDAP (No. 3,471,082)
• 1933 Member of the National Socialist Teachers' Association (NSLB-No. 287,372)
• Member of the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV)
• Member of the Reich Medical Association Schleswig-Holstein (Reichsärztekammer)
• Member of the Reich Chamber of Literature (Reichsschrifttumskammer)

Quotes

• Nietzsche is sensitive, he has to hold his nose at this stench of hypocrisy. But those are the weak ones who act expediently for themselves. But what would he say if this crusade sermon did not come from the weak, but from the propagandists of a nation that is fighting for its world domination, which no one blames it for, but that is fighting for the merciless exploitation of the peoples, not for a new nobility that would People create, for plutocrats who let the worker starve for the sake of their lazy desires, when these men preach in an extremely clever way the ideals of the masses, which they exploit, for the religion of compassion, humanity, the equality of races and people fight against German bestiality? Nietzsche also answered this. The danger to the earth is not the strong, nor is the fear of them; the danger is rather that the great pity for people gives rise to the great disgust for people. This is the danger of nihilism. Nietzsche is not an opponent of morality, because he wants to create a new ethics, but is the most terrible opponent of the English Kant." – Last words of the essay Nietzsche und die Kriegspropaganda (1940) ends with these words

Awards and decoraions

• Merit Cross for War Aid (Verdienstkreuz für Kriegshilfe)
• Honour Cross of the World War 1914/1918 without Swords

Works (excerpt)

• Zur Kenntnis der gliomatösen Neubildungen des Gehirns mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der ependymären Gliome, Berlin 1906 (dissertation)
• Norm und Entartung des Menschen, Dresden 1920 (forbidden in the GDR)
• Norm und Verfall des Staates, Dresden 1920
• Nietzsches Wettkampf mit Sokrates und Plato, Dresden 1921 (dissertation; published 1922)
• Nietzsche als Richter unserer Zeit, Breslau 1923 (with Ernst Gundolf)
• Gedanken zur Rassenpsychologie, Stuttgart 1924
• Wagner und Nietzsche. Ihr Kampf gegen das 19. Jahrhundert, Breslau 1924
• Gesundheit und Krankheit in Nietzsches Leben und Werk, Berlin 1926
• Staat und Rasse. Drei Vorträge, Breslau 1928
• Ueber die Umformung gesehener Figuren durch wechselnden figuralen Zusammenhang. Diss., Greifswald 1933
• Individualität und Gemeinschaft, Berlin 1933
• Platon. Der Kampf des Geistes um die Macht, Berlin 1933
• Norm, Entartung, Verfall bezogen auf den Einzelnen, die Rasse, den Staat, Berlin 1934, 2. Edition 1939 (forbidden in the GDR)
• Platons Vaterländische Reden. Apologie, Kriton, Menexenos. Eingeleitet und übertragen von Kurt Hildebrandt. Meiner, Leipzig 1936
• Die Bedeutung der Abstammungslehre für die Weltanschauung, in: "Zeitschrift für die gesammte Naturwissenschaft", No. 3, 1937/38
  • Hildebrandt called it an “illusion” on Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Ernst Haeckel’s (de) part that he believed in the “mechanistic solution” of the world's riddles through Darwin's theory of descent.
• Hölderlin. Philosophie und Dichtung, Stuttgart 1939, 3. Edition 1943
• Nietzsche und die Kriegspropaganda, in: "Kieler Blätter" No. 3/4 (Gemeinschaft Kieler Professoren), 1940
• Die Idee des Krieges bei Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart & Berlin 1941 (forbidden in the Soviet occupation zone in Germany)
• Goethe. Seine Weltweisheit im Gesamtwerk, Stuttgart 1941, 3. Edition 1942
• Kopernikus und Kepler in der deutschen Geistesgeschichte, Halle, 1944
• Goethes Naturerkenntnis, Hamburg 1947
• Leibniz und das Reich der Gnade, Den Haag 1953
• Platon. Logos und Mythos, Berlin 1959
• Das Werk Stefan Georges, Hamburg 1960
• Ein Weg zur Philosophie, Bonn 1962
• Erinnerungen an Stefan George und seinen Kreis, Bonn 1965
• Frühe Griechische Denker. Eine Einführung in die vorsokratische Philosophie, Bonn 1968

Further reading

• Otto Apelt: Plato(n). Sämtliche Dialoge in Verbindung mit Kurt Hildebrandt, Constantin Ritter und Gustav Schneider, Leipzig 1916