Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory:, Explanation and ... Lorenz... · Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory:, Explanation and Ideology, 1938-1943 THEODORA J. KALIKOW Department of

Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory:, Explanation and Ideology, 1938-1943

THEODORA J. KALIKOW

Department of PhiIosophy Southeastern Massachusetts University North Dartmouth, MA 02747

In this paper 1 we shall look at the role of ideology in the writings of Konrad Lorenz, major pre-World War II theorist of ethology. This role will be examined by focusing on the place in Lorenz’s theory where it had the most obvious effect: in his pronouncements on degeneration in human’ beings and in animals. What follows is by no means intended to be a complete history of Lorenz’s achievements as chief prewar theore- tician of ethology, although it does represent an extension of my own earlier essays2 and one by Robert J. Richards.3

Ideology played a triple role in Lorenz’s speeches and writings during the years from 1938 to 1943. (1) He saw changes in the instinctive behavior patterns of domesticated animals as symptoms of decline. (2) He assumed a homology between domesticated animals and civilized human beings, that is, he assumed there must be similar causes for effects assumed to be similar, and he further believed that civilization was in a process of “decline and fall.” Finally, (3) he connected the preceding concerns to racial policies and other features of the Nazi program.

An examination of Lorenz’s writings from before and after World War II shows that (1) and (2) have remained as features of his work, while (3) has disappeared, at least in its overt manifestations4 This

1. An earlier version of this article was published as “Die ethologische Theorie von Konrad Lorenz: Erkltiung und Ideologie, 1938 bis 1943,” in Naturwissen- schaft, Technik urtd NS-Ideologie, ed. S. Richter and H. Mehrtens, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), pp. 189-214. A still earlier version was delivered at the fifteenth International Congress of the History of Science, Edinburgh, August 1977.

2. Theodora J. Kahkow, “History of Konrad Lore&s Ethologicrd Theory, 1927-1939: The Role of Meta-Theory, Theory, Anomaly and New Discoveries in a Scientific ‘Evolution,‘” Stud. Hist. and Phil. Sci., 6 (1975), 331-341;and “Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory, 1939-1943: ‘Explanations’ of Human Thinking, Feeling and Behaviour,” Phil. Sot. Sci., 6 (1976), 15-34.

3. Robert J. Richards, “The Innate and the Learned: The Evolution of Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinct,” Phil. Sot. Sci., 4 (1974), 111-133.

4. But see Sheldon Richmond, “Man = The Rational Hunter: Some Com- ments on the Book by Tiger and Fox, ‘The Imperial Animal,“’ Phil. Sot. Sci., 4

Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 1983), pp. 39-73. 0022~5010/83/0161/0039 $03.50. Copyright 0 1983 by D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, lLS.A

THEODORA J. KALIKOW

suggests that Lorenz’s pronouncements on degeneration in human beings and animals may best be explained by a combination of two factors: (a) a “social Darwinistic” view of biology and society, a view that was present in National Socialist ideology, that had been widely preached by Ernst Haeckel and the Monist League, and that Lorenz also shared. Lorenz’s particularly strong “obsession” with the issues of eugenics and degeneration is an important part of this factor. (b) A certain amount of adaptation to the political circumstances of the time, involving Lorenz’s belief that the National Socialists needed or wanted scientific discussion, justification, or correction of their ideas. Lorenz’s situation as an Austrian living in that country’s Clerico-Fascist regime before the Anschluss also contributed to his acceptance of elements of the Nazi view.

In the first portion of this article I shall discuss each of these factors. In the second I shall describe some of the ideological themes in Lorenz’s writings from 1938 to 1943.

Lorenz’s deep concern with the “struggle for existence” within human society, and with the degeneration of a civilization, must not be taken as the mark of an isolated fanatic but as an indication that he belonged to a long and respectable tradition of European thought. That tradition had its beginning even before the Origin of Species. Darwin provided a scientific framework and an acceptable terminology for its discussion. His basic meta-theoretical assumption was that mechanistic and material processes could be found to explain biological phenomena. His successful account of “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life” was extended, post-Origin, to human beings and society. Darwin himself in Descent of Man, Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel - all of whom were probably already concerned about social change in general and the rise of the lower classes in particular - described the “danger” to the evolutionary progress of civilization, a danger caused by the mechanism of differential reproductive success of the so-called lower classes. Darwin asserted: “The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members.“5 This was not a novel observation: but it was now legitimized and explained within the framework that Darwin had provided. The social

(1974), 279-291; and Thomas Molnar, “Ethology and Environmentalism: Man as Animal and Mechanism,” Zntercd. Rev., 13 (1977), 2543. Both writers recognize the continuing authoritarian political implications in Loreru’s work.

5. Darwin, Descent of&fan (New York: D. Appleton &Co., 1888), p. 138.

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Lorenz’s Ethological Theory

concerns of the time came to be discussed, explained, and prescribed for by an ever-increasing flood of Darwinistic texts.

In the German-speaking world the most influential author of those texts was Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) who grafted his own concerns onto the Darwinian stock and who, even more than his English counter- parts, used science to justify already-existing Volkisch beliefs.

It may be said that in no other country of Europe . . . did the ideas of Darwinism develop as seriously as a total explanation of the world as in Germany. But Darwinism in Germany was a system of thought that was often transformed almost beyond recognition. Dmwinismus was far from the biological ideas or underlying moral and philosophical views of Darwin himself. Professing a mystical belief in the forces of nature, insisting on the literal transfer of the laws of biology to the social realm, and calling for a religious reformation in German life, Haeckel and his immediate followers held to ideas which were re- mote from the familiar naturalism of Spencer, Darwin and Huxley.6

Some major themes of Haeckel’s belief system will be indicated below. But an important one needs to be discussed here: eugenics.

As we have said, degeneration of society was a concern of scientists and writers from the mid-1860s and even earlier, and eugenics programs to avoid “decline and fall” had been advocated as early as 1868, when Haeckel (in Natiirliche Schtipfingsgeschichte) had praised the Spartans for being the first nation to institute such a program. Haeckelians maintained that “nations and civilizations have declined in the past solely because they did not know how to avoid biological decay,“’ but the underlying mechanism of decay was not discussed fruitfully until the new Mendelian genetic theory of the 1900s and its synthesis with classic Darwinian ideas. This synthesis provided the necessary “explanation” of the already accepted idea of the degeneration of a population. It justified the importance of differential reproductive success, still of course within the Darwinian meta-theoretical framework.

Germ-plasm theory gave heuristic clarity . . . to the notion that each individual is a genetic custodian with the responsibility of preserving

6. Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (London: MacDonald, 1971), pp. xiii-xiv.

7. Ibid., pp. 90-91, paraphrasing W. Schallmeyer, Vererbung und Auslese, 2nd ed. (Jena: G. Fischer, 1910), p. ix.

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THEODORA .I. KALIKOW

his or her own genetic “package” for the future. If those with the “best” genetic heritages handed them on less frequently than others, the overall result for a population would be genetic degeneration8

Thus were born the connections among the new science of genetics, Social Darwinism, and the eugenics movement. Eugenics was cham- pioned in Germany by scientifically respectable geneticists (such as Bauer-Fischer-Lenz) right up to the Nazi era, and the Haeckelians too continued their active emphasis on eugenics until 1933. (They were considered the progressive element in the scientific community, as Engelbert Broda, my correspondent at the University of Vienna, has insisted.)

Thus Lorenz’s concern with degeneration and its alleged cure, eugenics, was not at all unusual. It would have been rare indeed for a German-speaking scientist of his generation (Lorenz was born in 1903) trained in medicine and zoology, to have escaped the commonly accepted linkages between genetics 9 and evolution theory, and their applications to society in the form of eugenics, Social Darwinism, Haeckelian Monism, and so on.

Lorenz’s distinctive concern with the problems of degeneration and eugenics went beyond the level of routine interest. He has said of himself, “I am by inheritance obsessed with eugenics.“‘o Lorenz’s father, the famous orthopedic surgeon Adolf Lorenz, was probably one of the sources of his interest in eugenics. We can glean hints of the senior Lorenz’s attitude from his autobiography, My Life and Work1 In a passage discussing the future of orthopedic surgery he wrote: “It yet remains to be seen, however, whether congenital deformities, especially congenital club-feet, can be prevented by eugenics.” l2

8. Loren Graham, “Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920’s,” Amer. Hist. Rev., 82 (1977), 113364; quotation on p. 1135.

9. Lorenz spent a semester at Columbia College of Columbia University (fall 1922) and saw his first chromosome in T. H. Morgan’s laboratory. See Alec Nisbett, Konrud Lorenz: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), pp. 26-27.

10. Vie Cox, “A Prize for the Goose Father,” Hum. Behavior (Mar. 1974), 20. 11. New York: Scribner’s, 1936. 12. Adolf Lorenz, My Life and Work, p. 335. Konrad Lorenz quotes his father

as follows: “Viewed race-biologically, the whole art of medicine is a misfortune for humanity.” (“Die angeborenen Formen mijglicher Erfahrung,” Z. Tierpsy- chologie, 5 (1943) 235409; quotation on p. 380.) All translations of Lore&s writings are my own, unless otherwise noted.

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In the same context, on the social burden of “spastic cripples,” he wrote:

These patients very often become half-wits, a burden to their parents, to themselves, and to the community, especially when they reach maturity. To at least diminish their number, some drastic means, such as sterilization, is strongly indicated. Look at Germany! l3

Konrad Lorenz’s own training as a physician also must have caused him to consider eugenics as a worthy preventive measure against needless suffering.

In addition to his concern with eugenics, Lorenz was preoccupied with the issue of degeneration, a common enough concern of the time, but perhaps made more immediate because of his work with wild and domestic animals. This assessment is backed up by a report (private correspondence) from Lorenz’s colleague at KGnigsberg, Eduard Baum- garten: “The special theme of ‘degeneration’ was a constant interest, from his earliest to his latest investigations.“14 Baumgarten mentions also the special intensity with which Lorenz approached the issue.

Lorenz’s own special interests in eugenics and degeneration were congruent with two important themes of social thought, themes that were important elements in Haeckelianism and that were also taken over into the Nazi world-view. However, we have no definite evidence for any explicit connection between Lorenz and Haeckel’s Monist League. If we wish to explain Lorenz’s ideas as being in part the result of Haeckelianism, we have to rely, first, on Haeckel’s generally pervasive influence throughout German biology, indeed throughout German intellectual life. Daniel Gasman reports on the extent of that influence:

Of all [Haeckel’s] . . . works the most famous was, of course, the Welt&se1 _ . . When it was first published in 1899 it immediately became, like Haeckel’s earlier popular works, the Natirliche Schfipfingsgeschichte [ 18681 and the Anthropogenie [ 18741, one of the most widely read and known -books in Germany. It quickly

13. Adolf Lorenz, My Life and Work, pp. 335-336. Perhaps such remarks, although there are only two or three scattered through a book of some 350 pages, are what prompted Otto Antonius, a referee for Konrad, to say that he had heard this book described as a “true Nazi book.” (Konrad Lorenz file, Deutschefor- schungsgemeinschaft, Bundesarchiv Koblenz.)

14. Letter of 3 Sept. 1980, p. 2. My translation.

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THEODORA J. KALIKOW

became Germany’s most popular philosophical work and during the first year after its appearance it sold more than a hundred thousand copies. It went through ten editions by 1919, was translated into above twenty-five languages, and by 1933 almost half a million copies had been bought in Germany alone.15

With popular success of this magnitude, with scientific prestige such as that which Haeckel enjoyed, and with the numbers of scientists who were trained at Jena and who in turn trained others, it is plausible (but not conclusive) to suppose that Lorenz’s outlook on biology, evolution, and social questions was much influenced by Haeckel’s particular evolutionary, Volkisch, and Social Darwinistic views.

We also have slight evidence of a direct Haeckelian influence on Lorenz. Alec Nisbett, in his biography of Lorenz, records it as follows.

When he was nearly ten [about 1912-19131, he fell under the influence of the concept that has consciously dominated his whole life.

Konrad had picked up and read a book called Die Schiipfungstage . . . by Wilhelm BGlsche, a popular writer who had already introduced a whole German-speaking generation to the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. To the boy, this revelation illuminated the whole of living nature, lending system and order to its otherwise bewilder- ing diversity. Konrad devoured Bijlsche; then to satisfy his craving for more knowledge and understanding he searched out every scrap of further information that he could glean from any source.16

Nisbett is somewhat misleading in saying that Bijlsche was writing about Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Of course, that theory was originated by Darwin, but BBlsche’s work is a Haeckelian tract. Bdlsche, a “longstanding follower of Haeckel,“17 cofounder with him and others of the Monist League in Jena in 1906, and a leading Volkist intellectual,18 produced in Die Schtipjkngstage (The Days of Creation) a book that shared with Haeckel’s Die Weltr&sel (The Riddle of the Universe) the quite un-Darwinian view that evolution and religion are in the same

15. C&man, Scientific Origins, p. 14. 16. Nisbett, Konrad Lorenz, p. 21. 11. Gasman, Scientific Origins, p. 21. 18. Ibid., p. 154.

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domain, where evolution is “a cosmic force, a manifestation of the creative energy of nature.” l9 Further, Bblsche pictured nature as a romantic, mystical, upward-spiraling life process, in true Haeckelian fashion, and even the illustrations in Die Sch@-/iingstage are reminiscent of the exotic and bizarre plates in Haeckel’s works.

This is only a tantalizing glimpse into a childhood “conversion experience,” and although Lorenz himself has repeatedly referred to Bijlsche’s book and credited it with interesting him in evolutionary biology,*’ we cannot give the incident credit for making Lorenz into a mature Haeckelian!

One might try to rescue a connection with Haeckelian Monism from another known influence on Lorenz, H. E. Ziegler, professor of biology at Jena and another leading Monist. But Ziegler’s major influence on Lorenz seems to have been his Der Begri.ff des Instinktes einst und jetzt,*l a straightforward and elegant explanation of the chain-reflex theory. This work may be taken as a tacit illustration of Monistic meta- theoretical and theoretical presuppositions, but it certainly does not preach them. Other than that, I have no evidence that any of Lorenz’s teachers (for example, Ferdinand Hochstetter or Oskar Heinroth) had any connection with the Monist League. I also do not know if there were any strong Haeckelian tendencies among Lorenz’s teachers at the Vienna Medical School in the 192Os, although I would guess this to have been the case.

We do have one other piece of evidence to indicate that Lorenz accepted an important element of the Monistic-Haeckelian world-view: his vigorous defense of an appropriate materialistic theory of instinctive processes, in opposition to the claims of the vitalists. Jacques Loeb’s mechanistic thesis, originally expressed in a speech in 1911 to the First International Congress of Monists, was that all aspects of living phenomena could be reductively explained by the laws of physics and chemistry. “Loeb’s views . . . reached an astonishing vogue among biologists and nonbiologists alike by the 1920~,“~~ and workers in the mechanist tradition included I. Pavlov, C. S. Sherrington, H. E. Ziegler, and others who influenced Lorenz’s work in the theoretical explanation

19. Ibid., p. 11. 20. Richard I. Evans, Konrad Lorenz: The Man and His Ideas (New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 56; Les Prix Nobel en 1973, (Stockholm: Irnprimerie Royale P. A. Norstedt, 1974), p. 177.

21. Jena, 1910. 22. Garland Allen, Life Science in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1978), p. 73.

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THEODORA J. KALIKOW

of animal behavior. The vitalists, however, criticized this general program, maintaining that there are forces operating in living beings that cannot be reduced to, or explained by, the laws governing the inorganic realm.

The battle between the mechanists and the vitalists was still very much alive in the 1930s and early 194Os, and Lorenz joined the anti- vitalists, attacking statements such as J. A. Bierens de Haan’s “we can recognize instinct, but we do not explain it” as antiscientific, obfusca- tory, dangerous nonsense,23 and defending the Monist creed that every phenomenon in the universe (including animal instinctive behavior) is in principle explainable by the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, without recourse to unanalyzed wholes, a soul, an entelechy, or any concept that could not be caught in some part of the material-mechanistic web.

Indeed, Lorenz was even more severe on the issue of mechanistic purity than some Haeckelians, who were apt to become mired in the swamps of Lamarckism. Without any demonstrated mechanism with which to explain the supposed phenomenon of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Lorenz would have nothing to do with it.24 Although we have no definite proof that Lorenz ever formally allied himself with the full Haeckelian-Monist program, his beliefs about eugenics and degeneration were consistent with it, and he accepted the same underlying material-mechanistic hypothesis about causation and explanation of organic processes.

Besides the basic metaphysical (material-mechanistic) presuppositions that Lorenz shared with Haeckelian Monism, there were other common beliefs about the place of the human being in nature. The importance of these shared beliefs is that they also found their way into National Socialist (NS) ideology, according to Daniel Gasman, and thus facilitated Lorenz’s discussion of degeneration, eugenics, and other similar topics within the Nazi milieu. The beliefs shared by Haeckelianism, Lorenz, and NS ideology are as follows:

23. See, for example, “Inductive and Teleological Psychology” (1942), in K. Z. Lorenz, Studies in Animl~and Huron Behaviour, vol. I, trans. Robert Martin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 351-370. This volume wiII be referred to hereafter as Martin I.

24. See, for example, “Comparative Studies of the Motor Patterns of Ana- tinae” (1941), in K. Z. Lorenz, Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour, vol. II, trans. Robert Martin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 14- 113, esp. pp. 25-26. This volume will be referred to hereafter as Martin II. See also “A Consideration of Methods of Identification of Species-Specific Instinctive Behavior Patterns in Birds” (1932) in Martin I, 57-100, esp. p. 60.

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(1) The biologistic view that the laws of nature are the laws of society. Human culture is acceptable only where it can be shown to have arisen out of biology. Any societal transgression against the “natural” will lead to the decline and fall of the erring civilization, nation, or state. The national or civilizational unit (the German Volk, for instance) must be protected by a eugenics program against the decay caused by conditions of civilization.

Emphasis on the biological nature and destiny of the human organ- ism had as a corollary the belief in the “natural” inequalities of the various human “races,” and of the individuals within a given race. A further corollary was distrust of any political movement toward democracy; rather there was a trend toward Social Darwinism, the rule by the sur- vivors in the struggle for existence, of “The Best.”

(2) The view that phylogeny “has followed a steady course until now when it is suddenly surrounded by a number of perils: over-population, softened attitudes, weakened pulsions.“25 This infusion of romantic “cultural despair” into the Haeckelian type of evolutionary theory is one of the more interesting developments of late nineteenth- century thought. The underlying reason why a materialist, mechanistic biologist like Haeckel - or, for that matter, like Lorenz - would have accepted this Volkisch belief in the present danger to the race, or decline and fall, is probably the hidden determinism of such beliefs, as Fritz Stern has described them, for instance, in the ideas of Julius Langbehn.% Langbehn’s romantic view of art, for example, was that it depended not on the free creation of the individual but on forces emanting from the Volk, an organic community rooted in the natural landscape. The artist was a product of these forces, and with the decline of the Volk had come the decline of art, political community, and so on.27

But what are the forces? Why had the Volk declined in the first place? Volkism itself provided suggestions that all amounted to com- pliants about various social developments, but biology could provide a definite answer that fit the “hidden determinism,” not to mention the basic presuppositions, of Volkism: genetic decay.

(3) Two other features common to Haeckelianism, National Socialist ideology, and Lorenz are, first, that human external form mirrors

25. Molnar, “Ethology and Environmentalism,” p. 39. 26. See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1961), p. 138. 27. Ibid., pp. 138-139.

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THEODORA J. KALIKOW

internal moral condition, and second, that the ancient Greeks were forebears of the Aryan race. We must note that these views are not unique: the first theme must be close to universal, while the second became a commonplace of nineteenth-century German thought. It seems that, among other things, an aesthetic criterion must support both views: the human being who is perceived as aesthetically pleasing (for the population we are studying, that meant the Germanic “racial type” or the classic Greek statue) is therefore also credited with intelligence, racial purity, moral uprightness, and other virtues. We mention these ideas because Lorenz tried to explain them ethologically and gave them a function in the battle against degeneration.

(4) Finally, a belief common to Haeckel and Lorenz, but not shared by National Socialist ideology, was that evolution is a creative world- force, replacing traditional concepts of God. While the Nazis shared Haeckel’s and Lorenz’s hostility to organized religion, they of course did not accept the idea that human beings could have evolved from “lower” organisms, since this would have contradicted their belief in the eternal superiority of the Aryan race. The theory of evolution, while not totally banned, was not encouraged by the Third Reich and was occasionally attacked. According to Gasman, Nazi hostility toward evolution prevented Haeckel from attaining the status of a “major prophet of National Socialism” like Houston Stewart Cham- berlain. This failure did not hinder Haeckel’s continuing fame during the Third Reich.29 Lorenz’s belief in Haeckelian-style “evolutionary theology” is quite evident in his “Systematik und Entwicklungsgedanke im Unterricht” (1940) to be discussed below.

We have mentioned several of the themes to be found in Lorenz’s works, themes that parallel some dominant features of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social and biological thought, and that are found also in Haeckelian Monism and in Nazi ideology. Can we venture any hypothesis about why Lorenz (beginning in 1938) wrote a number of papers that included and sometimes emphasized the topic of animal and human degeneration and other contemporary ideological themes? Granted, Lorenz felt strongly about eugenics and degeneration; but there is scarcely any hint of these concerns in his first sixteen papers written between 1927 and 1938, while in the twelve written between 1938 and 1943 they are mentioned rather prominently in five.

28. Gasman, Scientific Origins, pp. 173-174. 29. For an account of Nazi honors for Haeckel, see ibid., pp. 170-173.

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If we take Gasman’s thesis about the “scientific origins of National Socialism” as our guide, we may hypothesize that the absorption of Haeckel’s major biologistic social doctrines into National Socialist ideology must have been reciprocally legitimating for Lorenz, who already shared these beliefs. This is true even though the Monist League itself dissolved in 1933 rather than face “coordination” (Gleichschal- tung) by the Nazis. 3o Haeckel had wide intellectual acceptance before the Machtergreifing. But the panoply of state power, propaganda, the “coordinated” universities and learned societies, must have in turn reinforced the Haeckelian-type beliefs that Lorenz already had and made him more confident about expressing them.

I think Lorenz’s abiding concern - long after the demise of the Third Reich - with animal and human degeneration and civilizational decay does not owe its origin to National Socialist ideology. In his infrequent statements about his “brown past,” Lorenz has indicated that he regrets having put his discussion of degeneration in ideological terms, since this prevents people from listening to his message of doom and makes them concentrate instead on the unfortunate language in which he phrased his warnings. 31 Other writers have noted parallels between Haeckel’s Die Welt&se1 and Lorenz’s Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins (1 973).32 In this work, in On Aggression (1963), and elsewhere in his post-World War II writings, Lorenz has not retracted his beliefs but has continued in the Haeckelian prophetic tradition of calling attention to the biological transgressions of society before it is “too late.” 33

Further, the hypothesis of the prior existence of Lorenz’s concerns with degeneration and so on explains why, when his experiments with ducks and geese were underway for the 1935 paper, “Companions as Factors in the Bird’s Environment,“34 Lorenz would have interpreted changes involving hybridization, illness, and domestication as symptoms of decline.

This is not to say that the National Socialist era had nothing more to

30. See Niles R. Holt, “Monists and Nazis: A Question of Scientific Respon- slbility,” Hastings Center Report, 5 (1975), 37-43;quotation on p. 37.

3 1. See Nisbett , Konrad Lorenz, p. 90. 32. Bruce Chatwin, “The Education of Konrad Lorenz,” Sunday Times

(London), Dec. 1,1974;reprinted inAtlas (June 1975), 21-24. 33. With philosophical failings analogous to Haeckel’s. See Theo J. Kalikow,

review of Konrad Lorenz, civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, Phil. Sot. Sci., 8 (1978), 99-101.

34. Martin I, 101-258.

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THEODORA J. KALIKOW

do with this aspect of Lorenz’s thought than contributing a distinctive set of linguistic terms for its expression. In fact, I believe we must first examine Lore&s particular situation us an Austrian looking at the Nazi Reich “from the outside” to explain further his ideas during this time. Lorenz studied medicine and zoology at the University of Vienna in the middle and late 1920s and early 1930s. He taught in Ferdinand Hochstetter’s Anatomical Institute and was a Privatdozent from 1937 to 1940. Thus his early career, all at the University of Vienna, spanned the last years of the First Austrian Republic, the Christian corporate (Clerico-Fascist) state of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, and the post- Anschluss Nazi regime. At the beginning of his career Lorenz had experienced the comparative academic freedom of the university under the First Republic, not to mention the progressive Social Democratic educational policies of the City of Vienna (under the administration of his father’s friend, Karl Seitz). Then came the unsettled months of late 1933 and early 1934, including serious disturbances at the university and its temporary closing, the fall of the First Republic, and its replace- ment by the Clerico-Fascist regime. This regime consolidated its hold on all elements of the state. The educational reforms of the Social Democrats were partially dismantled, and even the traditionally autono- mous university was affected.

Engelbert Broda gives the following overview of the Clerico-Fascist state:

In spite of the dissolution of the Nazi party in 1933, the atmosphere in Austria, also in the Universities, remained oppressive. Aided and abetted by Mussolini’s Italy, the Austrian Chancellors Dollfuss and, later, Schuschnigg abolished democracy, the freedom of the press, the working class parties and the trade unions. Instead, they estab- lished a corporate state, which in fact was largely a police state. The number of political prisoners was enormous, and economic conditions miserable.

The Universities were heavily affected. Whoever refused an oath to the Government was purged. Very many professors were retired on grounds of “economy.” Antisemitic measures were applied silently. Young people had no chance to be employed unless they proved their reliability through active membership in right-wing organizations.35

35. “Refugee Scientists from Austria during the Occupation of Their Country, 1938-1945,” delivered at Colloque Iutemational “Les Universitbs et les autres

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Lorenz himself reported the following example of state interference with educational policy:

The teaching of biology in secondary schools was cut down to a laughable minimum, phylogeny could not be mentioned, biology was stricken from the medical school curriculum and an obligatory course on the study of ideology, taught by a Jesuit priest, was introduced.36

Biology, of course, was in an awkward spot, and comparative anatomists and evolutionists of any stripe must have had a difficult time. The problem was compounded if one happened to be a member of a political group opposed to the Clerico-Fascist state. Lorenz’s acquaintance, Otto Antonius, director of the Schonbrunn Zoo, was relieved of his post in 1934, probably because he was a member of the National Socialist Party, which he had joined in 1932.37

Lorenz’s opposition to political interference with biology and biologists was more than theoretical: he also suffered professionally under the Austrian regime, as can be shown by material from his file in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz. This file is from the Deutsche Forschungs- gemeinschaft (DFG). 38 Lorenz evidently had some personal contact with Walter Greite of the DFG (a biologist) and in January 1937 began pursuing with him the possibility of grant support. This was necessary, as at that time Lorenz did not have a paying job, and costs for his animals were high. There was little likelihood that any Austrian agency would fund his work. However, Greite left the DFG around May 1937 and Lorenz’s application was rejected shortly thereafter, apparently because of unfounded rumors that he was politically unreliable and had Jewish ancestry.39

However, Fritz von Wettstein, head of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fur Biologie in Dahlem, was persuaded to take an interest in Lorenz’s case. In the summer and fall of 1937 he wrote to several people in Vienna, both academic specialists and those who could testify to

centres scientifiques dans la zone d’influence des pays de l’axe, 1938-1939” (Cracovie: Pologne, 1979), pp. 56.

36. “Systematik und Entwicklungsgedanke im Unterricht,” Der Biologe, 9 (1940), 24-36; quotation on p. 30.

37. Berlin Document Center. 38. Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 39. This can be inferred from the DFG material, especially the von Wettstein

letter of December 14,1937, discussed below.

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THEODORA J. KALIKOW

Lorenz’s political and hereditary correctness. Their replies and von Wettstein’s summary letter to the DFG are the evidence for Lorenz’s attitude to the contemporary Austrian regime - and, not incidentally, to National Socialism.

This evidence will be presented in the form of paraphrased excerpts from letters to von Wettstein40

From E. Pernkopf, September 13, 1937: He is in every respect unprejudiced toward the new problems of the time, but he is not in the least interested in politics, because he is totally absorbed in his scientific work.

From F. Hochstetter, July 5, 1937: Has utmost confidence in Lorenz’s character and national loyalty [nationale Gesinnung] . . . He and Lorenz both agree in the sharpest rejection of Clericalism and all that goes with it . . . They agree that the fate of Germans in Austria is bound most closely with that of Germans in the Reich . . . Lorenz still visits him even though Hochstetter [who retired in about 19321 has no influence in the circles that control the fate of Austrian higher education today.

From 0. Antonius, July 5, 1937: Mentions his three years’ dismissal as a result of the Clerical regime and says Lorenz was a true friend. A. has never asked Lorenz’s opinion about contemporary problems, but Lorenz has never made a secret of his admiration for the new circumstances in Germany . _ , and doubtless is absolutely positive about them.

From A. Pichler, August 4, 1937: Lorenz does not like the current circumstances in Austria. Has told P. of his growing interest in National Socialism. As far as P. knows Lorenz’s biological studies, they fit in with the direction of the prevailing world-view of the German Reich.

From F. Knoll, October 17,1937: Has checked Lorenz’s Aryan ancestry, and his wife’s. It is perfectly acceptable, in the sense in which this is understood in the German Reich. K. is hopeful that the DFG can support Lorenz, because such support is highly unlikely in Austria. Because of the ideology of the

40. My translations.

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ruling circle, biology is rather unwelcome than welcome, and most especially in the direction in which Lorenz works so excellently.

Von Wettstein summarized the results of his correspondence in a long letter to the DFG (December 14, 1937). His institute could not give money to an Austrian directly, but he urged the DFG to help. In fact the Osterreichische-Deutsche Wissenschaftshilfe (affiliated with the DFG) did give Lorenz a monthly stipend beginning in February 1938, and after the Anschluss this support was continued by the DFG through at least 1942.

The evidence presented above indicates that Lorenz, like so many other Austrians “on the outside looking in” at the German Reich before 1938, may have become pro-Nazi because of his dissatisfaction with the Austrian regime. In this he would have been rather typical. P. G. J. Pulzer has summarized the attraction of Nazism to Austrians thus:

It was only after the establishment of the clerical-corporate regime that they [the Nazis] made spectacular headway. The failure of the 1934 Social Democrat rising discredited the Jewish leaders of that party; the undoubted unpopularity of the regime and the apparent economic dynamism of the Third Reich, with its rapidly declining unemployment, did the rest. Austrian Nazism was oppositional, anti-clerical, pro-annexation, and called itself a “workers’ ” party. This enabled it to penetrate deep into all classes of society.41

This “oppositional” attraction to Nazism in Austria was actually sur- veyed by the Gestapo soon after the Anschluss, in a report dated June 20, 1938. The results (for the Tyrol) show that about 30 percent of the population fell into this category.

This survey divides its subjects in four “political strata,” arranged in descending order of their enthusiasm for the cause.

The first section of “faithful fighters and absolutely reliable National Socialists from idealistic motives” is estimated as forming “at the most probably 15 percent”; . . . The second group are the nominal Nazis, the supporters out of opportunism or spite rather than convic.tion. These ‘less valuable” members, who joined because of

41. P. G. J. Pulzer, The Rise .of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York: John Wiley, 1964), pp. 326-321.

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THEODORA J. KALIKOW

“‘economic and personal motives or antagonism to the hated clerical regime” are put at about 30 percent. A further lo-20 percent of the total is classed in a vague category of “occasional supporters” - Austrians who felt drawn at times to some aspects of the Nazi programme . . . The remaining 30-40 percent are admitted to be “open or hidden opponents of the movement, whether Marxian or clerical.“42

Lorenz’s experiences under the Austrian regime may have put him in the second group of “nominal Nazis.” It is noteworthy that this group certainly did not look back to the First Austrian Republic as a model of a better way to govern, but believed that if Austria were to be made part of the Reich its grievances would be redressed. I would guess that in Lorenz’s case the persecution or nonsupport of biologists and the attempt to interfere with the teaching of evolution would have ranked high on his list of grievances. His dismay at the discovery (in late 1939 or early 1940) that biology was still being censored by the Nazi state was probably the motive behind his “Systematik und Entwicklungsgedanke im Unterricht” (1940), a spirited defense of evolution theory as contributor to the framework and foundation of Nazi ideology. And indeed, on this point Lorenz was quite correct insofar as the Haeckelian world-view was concerned.

Anti-clericalism is another significant element of Lorenz’s particularly Austrian viewpoint. It was widespread during the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime, and it is at least congruent with Haeckelian Monism. Anti- clericalism was also encouraged by the Nazis; in fact, they had much more success with their “Kulturkampf” (campaign against organized religion) in the newly annexed Austria than they had had in the Old Reich?3

Thus, Lorenz’s particular situation as an Austrian may have played an important role in inclining him to accept Nazi ideology, which in any case shared many presuppositions with Lorenz’s biologistic views. Further, the social, political, and academic climate after the Anschluss of March 1938 may have made it possible for Lorenz to elaborate on his animal observations and to draw parallels with human civilization, parallels that went far beyond his observational results. We cannot say what direction Lorenz’s work would have taken if the Nazi era had not

42. Reported by Gordon Shepherd, The Austricm Odyssey (London: Mac- millan, 1957), p. 135. Emphasis added.

43. Karl R. Stadler, Austria (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 195.

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occurred. In my opinion the socially sanctioned emphasis on Volkisch ideas of racial degeneration and the like must have played some role in turning Lorenz to writing about animal-human comparisons of the sort that follow if one accepts the basic supposition that the laws of biology equal the laws of society.

Another factor that may have led to Lorenz’s writings on degeneration is this: he may have been encouraged by the increased respectability of racial biology under the Nazis to believe that an emphasis on those aspects of ethology that could be related to Nazi policies might be a useful strategy for the furthering of his science - that is, for getting it accepted as a legitimate branch of biology. Lorenz eventually obtained a chair in psychology (not animal psychology) at the University of Konigsberg in 1940, but there is no evidence that his ideologically oriented papers or other activities played a role in this appointment.44 Earlier, I put great stress on this possible motive,45 an emphasis that I now think was overdone. What evidence we have& suggests that the Establishment biologists such as von Wettstein were aware of Lorenz’s talents and would have found a suitable post for him much earlier if the war had not intervened. Lorenz knew this, and probably would not have felt it necessary to write about degeneration if his only motive had been to “get ahead.” Perhaps, though, Lorenz’s writings and speeches on degeneration were the products of a somewhat more subtle opportunism. Taking into account his faith in the broad explanatory power of evolutionary biology, his disdain for religion and pseudo-

44. Eduard Baumgarten has provided me with an extensive account of how Lorenz came to be called to Kiinigsberg. I am convinced that the circumstances of this appointment were so unusual that Lorenz’s political leanings were rela- tively unimportant. Besides, by this time scholarly worth had replaced mere political affiliation as the major criterion for university appointments. See Richard Zneimer, “The Nazis and the Professors: Social Origin, Professional Mobility and Political Involvement of the Frankfurt University Faculty, 1933-1939,“J. Social Hist., 12 (1978), 147-158. However, Nisbett’s report (Conrad Lorenz, pp. 90-91) that Lore&s involvement with Nazism never resulted in anything concrete, indeed that it hurt his chances for success, is not borne out by any documentation I have seen. On the personnel forms of the Reich education ministry, Lorenz listed his party affiliation as well as his connection with the Race-Political Depart- ment of the NSDAP “mit Redeerlaubnis.” In 1940, before his call to Kiinigsberg, he had been promoted, via good scientific and political reports, to “Dozent neuer Ordnung” (with salary) at the University of Vienna. (Berlin Document Center, REM File, Konrad Lorenz.)

45. See “Die ethologische Theorie von Konrad Lorenz.” 46. Nisbett, Konrud Lorenz; DFG File; Baumgarten, private correspondence.

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science (the parallels with Haeckel are strong), we may hypothesize that Lorenz’s discussions of degeneration during the Nazi era not only reflected his own longstanding concerns, but also were intended to teach those in power the scientifically correct way to conceive of it and deal with it. Lorenz may have come to his strong convictions on racial degeneration through a more “scientifically sanctioned” route (than perhaps the Nazis), but the common intellectual background was the same. Lorenz, a strong missionary of science (again like Haeckel), wrote “to instruct Party doctrine and where necessary to correct it scientifically.“47 A reading of, for instance, “Systematik und Entwick- lungsgedanke” will at once confirm this view. The opportunism that occurs here consists in accepting the politically sanctioned assumptions (1) that individual and social degeneration exist, (2) that the state should institute a program to prevent them, and (3) that attempts should be made to justify these assumptions scientifically. It may have been mere contamination by the Zeitgeist, mere happenstance, that Lorenz agreed with the Nazi line on this point. But it was not happenstance that Lorenz explicitly appealed to the wider goals of National Socialism when arguing for a biological-ethological explanation of degeneration or for a vigorous program to combat this danger to the Volk.

The Berlin Document Center records show that Lorenz applied for membership in the Nationalsozialistische Demokratische Arbeiter Partei (NSDAP) on May 1, 1938, soon after the Anschluss. His application was accepted June 28, 1938; his membership number was 6,170,554.

Our hypothesis is, then, that Lorenz’s beliefs coincided in many respects with elements of NS ideology. The beliefs may have come from his childhood reading, his education, his family situation; they may have been given added impetus by their association with Haeckelian Monism. Lorenz’s struggles to make his career in Austria during the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime may have further inclined him to accept Nazism, particularly since the Nazis voiced concerns or seemed to stand for principles that were already a part of Lorenz’s world-view. The process of reciprocal legitimation, whereby the Nazis lent political power and prestige to already accepted ideas, may help explain Lorenz’s increasing emphasis on animal and human degeneration after 1938; and Lorenz’s “scientific evangelism” may have moved him to try to explain and justify Nazi racial policies ethologically.

47. Eduard Baumgarten, letter of September 3,1980, p. 1. My translation.

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Lore&s Ethological Theory

With our hypothesis in mind, then, let us turn to a discussion of certain aspects of Lorenz’s pre-1943 publications and other activities. The connection of ethology t6 Nazi ideology (and eventually to its racial policies) came, for Lorenz, through the behavioral and physical changes that he observed in animals under domestication. In his 193.5 paper, “Companions as Factors in the Bird’s Environment,” Lorenz had reported results of his extensive comparative studies of bird behavior, and it was there that problems of hybridization, illness, and above all domestication were first mentioned. Lorenz wanted to make a method- ological point: it was best to use wild animals to study instinctive behavior patterns, because domestic animals exhibited disrupted and fragmented innate behavior. Thus, if domestic animals were used in a study, it would be more difficult to determine what the behavior of the wild form would be; Lorenz recommended against using any domestic animals in ethological studies.48

We also find in the “Companion” paper the first explicit statement of Lorenz’s belief that instinctive behavior patterns play a large role in human behavior.49 Combining this thesis with Lorenz’s repeated observation that sickness in a wild animal often leads to fragmentation or disappearance of its instinctive behavior patterns (analogously to what happens in domestication),50 we have the major internal factors in Lorenz’s work that lent themselves to interpretation on an ideological basis.

Lorenz took these factors and combined them to answer Spengler’s question, what causes the fall of civilizations? To presume that this is a proper question is to take for granted many of the ideas on which the Nazis capitalized, and to answer it in the way that Lorenz did is to place oneself in the Haeckelian and Volkisch tradition. Lorenz proposed his views on domestication and degeneration of the human being to answer the decline-and-fall question in a “properly scientific” way: the conditions of civilized life lead to the domestication and degeneration of human beings, so that eventually diseased specimens with defective instinctive behavior.patterns overrun the body politic like a cancer and destroy it. The domestication of civilized human beings, not Spengler’s “logic of time,” might prevent the Thousand-Year-Reich.

48. Martin I, 253. 49. Ibid., p. 257. 50. See, for instance, “A consideration of methods of identification of

species-specific instinctive behaviour patterns in birds” (1932), in Martin I, 84-85 ; “Companion” (1935), in Martin I, 175.

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The first time Lorenz spelled out his views on human degeneration through domestication was in a paper delivered in July 1938 at the sixteenth congress of the German Psychological Association. This congress, held in Bayreuth, exemplified the “coordination” (Gleich- schaltung) of a learned society. Sponsored by the NS Teachers’ League and “under the protection” of Gauleiter Fritz Wachtler, with official representatives from the Reich Education Ministry, the Wehrmacht, the Reich University Teachers’ League, the Race-Political Department of the NSDAP, and so forth, and presided over by the notorious Nazi academic Erich Jaensch,sl it must have been an extremely congenial place for Konrad Lorenz, brand-new party member, to make his first remarks on animal and human degeneration through domestication.

His paper, “Uber Ausfallserscheinungen im Instinktverhalten von Haustieren und ihre sozialpsychologische Bedeutung” (Deficiency phenomena in the instinctive behavior of domestic animals and their social-psychological meaning),52 sounds almost all of the ideologically influenced themes on the subject in Lorenz’s writings. It begins with a slap at Pavlov’s chain-reflex theory of behavior 53 because of its possible ideological bias toward human equality, which Lorenz wished to deny, since in the Nazi climate of thought this result would tend to invalidate inferences from animals to human beings. Lorenz attacks Pavlov in order to defend the legitimacy of some inferences from animals to human beings, such as the ones he wants to make in the “new German animal psychology.” 54 This is a hint of Lorenz’s efforts to apply his science to the aims of the Third Reich; given the spectacle of the “new German psychology” as presented at Bayreuth and reported in Charakter und Erziehung, one should perhaps not be surprised.

I think the best way to demonstrate the effect of ideology on Lorenz’s descriptions of the phenomena and his explanations of them is to cite some passages from his lecture and, in a running commentary, identify some of the relevant points. Near the beginning Lorenz said,

What ought to be compared, in these inferences from animals to human beings, are the hereditary changes in the system of innate species-specific behavior patterns, changes that arise in animals in

5 1. Character und Erziehung: 16. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft f?ir Psychologie in Bayreuth, ed. Otto Klemm (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1939), p. 1.

52. Ibid., pp. 139-147. 53. This is one year before the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. Until about

1936 Lorenz too had believed in the chain-reflex theory. 54. Charakter und Erziehung, p. 139.

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the course of domestication and in human beings in the course of the civilization process. These two processes, seen from the standpoint of the biologist, have much in common.‘*

Here we have the first intrusion of ideology into the “standpoint of the biologist.” The parallel between domestication and civilized life may well stem from Lorenz’s possible uncritical or even unconscious acceptance of the Volkisch idea that the only true life of the human being is the peasant existence, close to the soil. Lorenz’s later use of “the metropolitan or big-city man” as the epitome of the degenerate type 56 seems to indicate his acceptance of the myth of the noble, racially pure peasant.

Lorenz continued:

The precipitate alterations of the conditions of natural living space [Lebensraum] have led in both cases to the following: first, that the very conservative instinctive innate behavior patterns are no longer suited to the new conditions, in fact, can even be harmful; and second, to the fact that the original limits of individual variation that are normal for a species undergo a tremendous increase.57

The two sources of danger for a people thus are that persons with intact innate behavior patterns will find themselves unsuited to modern life, while those with more varied patterns (the “degenerates”) will be suited to the metropolis. In the standard Darwinian scenario they may then enjoy more reproductive success and come to outnumber the intact persons, as Lorenz mentions later.58

He went on:

The similarity of the biological foundations makes it quite believ- able that these parallels, which extend to the smallest details of human and animal behavior, are not just superficial analogies, but are founded on underlying causes, Thus, through a closer investigation of the behavior of domestic animals, we may hope to further our understanding of the biological causes of many menacing decay phenomena in the behavior of civilized human beings.59

55. Ibid., p. 140. 56. Ibid.,p. 146. 57. Ibid., 140. p. 58. Ibid., 145-146. pp. 59. Ibid., 140. p.

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The implication is that the civilized human being and the domestic animal are homologous. This in turn results from the analogy Lorenz made between domestication and civilized life, an analogy infested with ideological presuppositions. I do not find any mention here (or elsewhere) of any other “biological causes” that Lorenz might have had in mind. Thus the very premise of Lorenz’s work on domestication and civilization is colored by his extrascientific beliefs, beliefs shared with Haeckelianism and with Volkism. These beliefs also led to his very interesting but quite un-Darwinian search for mutagenic factors in civilized life that might cause the deplorable hereditary changes in external form and in innate behavior patterns.60

There is one more element of this paper that needs to be mentioned - Lorenz’s idea that we have an innate emotional reaction to those of our conspecifics who exhibit behavioral decay phenomena. The postulation of this reaction was compatible with prevailing ideas, found also in Haeckel and the Volkisch tradition, of instinctive soul recognition of valuable human specimens and of true art as well.‘jl Here is Lorenz’s first statement on this valuational reaction:

In closing, just a few words about our own evaluation of social reactions in our conspecifics and in animals. Even the observer striving for complete objectivity cannot stop himself from evaluating the decay of social behavior patterns negatively, even in animals. This is even more the case with respect to our conspecifics. For humans we mean by “good” and “bad” really nothing other than “complete with respect to innate social behavior patterns” and the opposite of this. If a person in fact detachedly exhibits a thoroughly social behavior, but does this not according to feeling, or instinctively, but calculatingly, and we see through this, we never feel this person to be “good.” Our instinctive evaluation thus really relates

60. See the discussion below of “Durch Domestikation verursachte Stijrungen arteigenen Verhaltens” (1940).

61. Daniel Gasman says the following about the congruence of Hitler’s and Haeckel’s beliefs on art: “For Hitler, as for Haeckel, art was a highly serious matter and was a vehicle whereby the people could capture the reality of the homeland. Hitler was, therefore, like Haeckel, opposed to modern art, which he felt distorted reality” (Gasman, Scientific Or&-&, pp. 180-181n121). See also Hitler’s speech at the culture session of the 1933 party rally, in Nationalsozial- istische Monatshefte, 4 (1933), 434-442; Hitler’s speech at the opening of the House of German Art, July 18, 1937, reported in N. H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, (New York: Howard Fertig, 1969), I, 584-592.

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to the presence of -absolutely specific hereditav properties in our conspecifics.

The implication here seems to be that we inherit and instinctively evaluate not only the behavior but also the motivating feeling and emotion of a person. This fits in with Lorenz’s espousal of a mind-body identity theory, which I have mentioned elsewhere63 as a feature of his theory as it developed, but this aspect of it looks quite sinister. Echoing an age-old prejudice, Lorenz seems to imply the ability of nondegenerate human beings to evaluate the “souls,” emotions, and motivations of others. An inference from mere bodily appearance (not even overt behavior) to the condition of the “soul” is not far behind, and Lorenz actually made it in later works.64

Lorenz finished his lecture by briefly mentioning a way in which civilized nations may fall to their Spenglerian fate: the degenerate types, by virtue of their increased breeding success in metropolitan conditions, penetrate the body of the Volk “like the cells of a malignant tumor.“65 Nondegenerate people must use their innate valuational responses to eliminate these threatening types, in order to ensure “racial health and power.“66 Lorenz’s concluding sentence, an appeal to “the care of our holiest racial, Volkisch and human hereditary values,“67 is a final small but perhaps symptomatic example of commonality of his approach with that of Haeckelianism, Volkism, and of course NS ideology.

I must mention a lecture of Lorenz’s that did not actually take place, but that is nonetheless of interest. The third annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Tierpsychologie was scheduled to be held in Leipzig on September 21-23, 1939. It was canceled when war broke out, but the projected program was printed in the Zeitschrift fiir Tierpsychologie, 3 (September 1939) p. 248. Scheduled for the even- ing of September 21st was “Offentlicher Vortrag in Verbindung mit dem NS-Deutschen Volksbildungswerk Leipzig: Doz. Dr. K. Lorenz, Altenberg bei Wien: ‘Aufsteig und Verfall bei Mensch und Tier,’ mit Lichtbildern.” (“Ascent and Decline in Man and Animal,” with slides.) The NS-Deutsches Volksbildungswerk was the “coordinated” successor

62. Charakter und Erziehung, p. 146. 63. “Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory, 1939-1943.” 64. “Durch Domestikation verursachte Stijrungen arteigenen Verhaltens”

(1940) and “Die angeborenen Formen miiglicher Erfahrung” (1943). 65. Charakter und Erziehung, p. 146. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid.

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organization to the Volkschochschulen, which in the Weimar Republic had served as adult education centers. This lecture was probably organized by the regional office of the Volksbildungswerk, but since the records of this region have not survived,68 we cannot discover how Lorenz came to be scheduled to give this lecture. We can conjecture that it would have followed the pattern of Lorenz’s other writings on this subject.

The paper that is perhaps the best example of Lorenz’s Haeckelian view of evolution, his scientific evangelism, and his use of ethology to explain and justify policies of the Third Reich, is his “Systematik und Entwicklungsgedanke im Unterricht” (Systematics and Evolutionary Theory in Teaching).69 We must first mention the journal in which this article appears. Der Biologe was founded in 193 1-1932 by, among others, Ernst Iehmann, a Nazi supporter. In February 1935 its mast- head proclaimed that it was now also the “Organ . . . des Sachgebietes Biologie des NSLB” (Organ of the Biology Section of the NS Teachers’ League), and Hans F. K. Gunther (“der Rassengtinther”) was added to the editorial board. By 1940, when Lorenz’s article appeared, the editorial board included representatives of Das Ahnenerbe, the NS University Teachers’ League, the SS, the Race-Political Department of the NSDAP, and other similar organizations.

Lorenz’s article defends the teaching of evolutionary theory (which, he had just learned, was still not fully accepted in the Third Reich) as a proper tool to inspire the “healthy [that is, nondegenerate] young German man” ‘O with the highest ideals of the predominant world-view. Lorenz’s strategy in the article is to justify the teaching of evolution by arguing that it is compatible with the true race-politics, as it should be taught by those in control of the curriculum:

What, however, does this demanding, this never-rewarding God [evolution] , who always requires still further exertions, give us for our efforts? He gives us unlimited freedom to develop! Our knowledge of the historical growth of organic creation gives us the certain knowledge that this process has absolutely never been terminated, indeed that in all probability it absolutely never will be terminated.”

68. Many thanks to Dietrich Orlow, who provided me with the information in this paragraph.

69. Der Biologe, 9 (1940), 24-36. By the time this article appeared, Lorenz had probably been called to KGnigsberg. He had, however, written it beforehand.

70. Ibid., p. 35. 71. Ibid., p. 28.

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This certainly sounds the Haeckelian theme of evolution onward and upward. Lorenz’s view can be seen quite clearly by his contrast with the nonevolutionary view of the world, and in his remark, “Thus we see, in the fiction of the unchangeability of race, a serious danger: it must lead to race-political fatalism.“72 The desired view in Lore&s opinion was of course race-political optimism, which he enunciated in terms that Haeckel, the Volkisch prophet, would probably have approved:

Whether we share the fate of the dinosaurs or whether we raise ourselves to a higher level of development, scarcely imaginable by the current organization of our brains, is exclusively a question of biological survival power and the life-will of our Volk. Today especially the great difference depends very much on the question whether or not we can learn to combat the decay phenomena in Volk and in humanity which arise from the lack of natural selection. In this very contest for survival or extinction, we Germans are far ahead of all other culture-Volks.73

Given what we have already said, it is not as surprising to me as it once was74 that Lorenz contradicted the antievolutionary Nazi line - if Nazi educational policies were ever organized sufficiently to be referred to as an official line. It appears to me today that Lorenz wrote this paper from his idealized perception of what Nazism was supposed to be and do - and his surprise and disappointment when he found that the reality was quite different.

As a reader of Der Biologe I have already discovered and learned much that is new from this journal. Nothing, however, has been as truly surprising to me as a fact which I first found out because of the article by Prof. Dr. F. Rossner in the eleventh issue of the current year: namely, that evolutionary theory and heredity theory as such are actually still not accepted within the educational program of National Socialist, Greater German men. This seems to me so important, not only for the teaching of biology but also for ideology [Weltanschauung] in general, that I may, I hope, be permitted to discuss these questions once again.75

72. Ibid., p. 30. Emphasis omitted. 73. Ibid., p. 29. 74. Theo J. Kalikow, “Konrad Lore&s ‘Brown Past’: A Reply to Alec

Nisbett,” J. Hist. Behav. Sci., 14 (1978), 173-179. 75. “SystemaUk und Entwicklungsgedanke,” p. 24.

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Thus, Lorenz’s scientific evangelism led him to use his interpretation of the results of ethology to argue for refinements to the main tenets of Nazi ideology, to indicate ways in which he thought his science could serve what he perceived as the true interests of the state.

Another Lorenz paper of 1940, “Durch Domestikation verursachte Storungen arteigenen Verhaltens” (Domestication-caused Disturbances in Species-Specific Behavior),“j represents the observational and further theoretical basis for the remarks in Lorenz’s first lecture of 1938 (according to a footnote in the latter). “Durch Domestikation” seems also to have been written around the time of the Anschluss,” although it was not published until later. As Alec Nisbett mentions, this treatise is full of Nazi terminology. The ideological themes we have already discussed are present, along with two new ones.

In the 1938 lecture there was no mention of a mechanism for the appearance of domestication phenomena. However, the Darwinian explanation citing the removal of natural selection factors characteristic of “the wild” was implied most strongly.78 But in “Durch Domestika- tion” Lorenz introduced the hypothesis that something in the actual conditions of civilized domestic life causes the appearance of mutations. It seems to me that the ideological viewpoint of the metropolis as a decadent place (in contrast to the pure German countryside) must play some role here. In fact, in the 1943 paper “Die angeborenen Formen rnoglicher Erfahrung” Lorenz cites Eugen Fischer and others as pro- ponents of the view that the metropolis causes decline phenomena.

Lorenz first wrote on this subject in “Durch Domestikation” as follows.

There is another assumption which perhaps has a certain heuristic value in spite of its being completely unproved. The alteration of the conditions of original life-space [Lebensraum] has already approached right up to the limits of the physiologically bearable, in human beings as in domestic animals. Just as the struggle ,for space between conspecifics in Man created extreme conditions, so in domestic animals the limiting conditions were light, space and

76. Z. angewandte Psychologie und Charakterkunde, 59 (1940), l-81. 77. See Cox, “A Prize for the Goose Father,” p. 19. 78. The entire Darwinian explanation of domestication would be the removal

of “natural” selection factors and the substitution of others such as human choice, different environment, and the like. The influence of ideology on Lorenz’s ideas is seen in the fact that he does not give this entire explanation but assumes that “civilized” life is mutagenic, and so on.

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nourishment. Now, a series of cases is known in genetics, where such an unphysiological extreme has led to an increase in mutations in experimental animals and plants. Roentgen-rays and radium radiation certainly cause this in Drosophila, by a direct effect on the hereditary arrangements . . One could now suppose that perhaps likewise, under the many abnormal and extreme influences of the altered life- spaces of domestic animal and civilized human being, the appearance of mutations would somehow occur due to favorable conditions.7g

In addition to developing this new hypothesis, Lorenz made the leap from assuming that we have innate valuational responses to human social behavior, to assuming we also respond to human physical appearance. The postulation of an aesthetic releasing mechanism as well as an ethical one for judging behavior coincided with the Nazi and Volkisch glorification of supposed Nordic racial characteristics. Lorenz assumed that these releasing mechanisms “went off”’ at the usual Nordic characteristics. In “Durch Domestikation” his approach to the problem included adding to the text some pictures of classical Greek statues and contrasting them with caricatures from the same period showing “domestication phenomena.” (0 ne of the caricatures was a bust of Socrates.) We have already mentioned the tendency of Haeckelian, Volkisch, and Nazi writers to equate the ancient Greeks with the forebears of the Nordic race.

Here is Lorenz’s first mention of an aesthetic valuational response to physical characteristics.

With the exception of a very few breeds of dogs, horses and pigeons, bred by man deliberately for the ability to run or fly, there is scarcely a domestic animal which does not show the disposition to proportional shortening of the extremities, to shortening of the axial skeleton and the cranial foundation (pinch-headedness), to weaken- ing of the whole musculature but especially that of the rump (pot- belly), and to superfluous fat. These phenomena all are extraordi- narily frequent in metropolitan man, and arise in just the same way as in the domestic animal. In the latter they are certainly desired, and are spread further through selection, while in human beings, certain aesthetic valuations select in the opposite direction, as we shall later discuss in detailse

79. “Durch Domestikation,” p. 7. 80. Ibid., p. 53.

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Lorenz discussed the aesthetic reaction further,81 stating that physical and behavioral characteristics should remain unified in one person (the Socrates problem), otherwise mistakes would be made by our releasing mechanisms, leading to the spread of decay phenomena. (Lorenz is not concerned here with the fate of those like Socrates, ugly but good, but with the escape of those who are handsome but bad.) This physical and behavioral unity, Lorenz claimed, is “a strong argument for the high biological worth of racial uniformity.” 82

In the final section, on “Practical Applications,” Lorenz urged an investigation into the possible mutagenic factors in modern life. If they are found to exist, then race-hygiene can eliminate them: if they do not exist, then constant surveillance is needed against the continuing appearance of the “ethically inferior,” so that their elimination (Ausmerzung) can be carried out by race-hygiene, which would have to replace the selection factors of the natural environment.s3

Here we have yet another example of Lorenz’s use of his interpretation of ethological theory to instruct the Nazis in their race-hygiene program, in rather the same way that he argued for use of evolutionary theory to improve racial ideology and its teaching. He recommended stringent measures against those afflicted with decline phenomena, analogous to the proper medical treatment of malignant cells. The innate aesthetic response to “domesticated” human beings is a good clue to the presence of decay: “A good man, by his intuitive responses [dunkeln Drange], marks very well if another is a villain or not.“84 The innate aesthetic responses of “our Best” should be followed to preserve the state. Lorenz ends with an explicit linking of the Nordic movement to his ideas:

The Nordic Movement has been emotionally guided, from time im- memorial, against the “domestication” of human beings. All its ideas are such, that even if all the biological consequences of civilization and domestication mentioned here were to be destroyed, it would struggle for a direction of development that would be directly opposed to that in which today’s civilized metropolitan man is moving. For a biological sensibility, no doubt can exist as to which of the two ways is the way of true evolution, the way “onward and upward!“85

81. Ibid., pp. 59-60. 82. Ibid., p. 60. 83. Ibid., p. 66. 84. Ibid., p. 70. 85. Ibid., pp. 71-72.

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The debt to Haeckel, the original German evolutionary evangelist, is clear.

In Lorenz’s commemorative article, “Oskar Heinroth 70 Jahre!“% we find one more indication of his willingness to link the supposed findings of ethology to the aims of the regime:

We confidently venture the prediction that shortly in psychology the laws of innate behavior, which are decisive for the deepest strata of human personality, will be investigated in animals with the self-same obviousness that exists today for the corresponding investigations in genetics. We even venture the prediction that these investigations will be fruitful not only for theoretical but also for practical race- political concerns.87

The conclusion of this short article, moreover, notes that Lorenz’s Institute for Comparative Psychology had been founded at KBnigsberg by Reich Minister for Education Bernhard Rust at approximately the date of Heinroth’s seventieth birthday (March 1, 1941). Lorenz took this as a good omen for the successful investigation of the laws of human and animal psychology,88 which he hoped to carry out at his new institute. An explanatory note is perhaps in order here. Although Lorenz arrived at KGnigsberg for the fall term in 1940, he was not con- firmed in his rank of professor until February 25, 1941 .s9 German custom was that all professors were given an institute to direct. This is presumably what Lorenz referred to.

It is perhaps in Lorenz’s 1943 paper, “Die angeborenen Formen miiglicher Erfahrung” (The innate forms of possible experience),m received by the journal on July 31, 1942, and written while Lorenz was on duty as a physician in a military hospital in occupied Poland (he was called up for military service in October 1941), that we meet some of the most interesting examples of the congruence of his the- ories with the ideology of the times. This 174-page treatise is not a short topical statement such as Lorenz’s 1938 lecture on domestication. It is a huge summary of all of Lorenz’s work in ethology,91

86. Der Biologe, 10 (1941), 45-47. 81. Ibid., pp. 4641. 88. Ibid., p. 47. 89. BDC, REM file, Konrad Lorenz. 90. Z. Tierpsychologie, 5 (1943), 235409. 91. It is also a significant precursor of Lore&s postwar works, including King

Solomon’s Ring (fust published in 1949) and On Aggression (first published in 1963).

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including what he had done in comparative psychology at Konigsberg, the work of his student Alfred Seitz, and a review of the latest work of others. In this large context, in appropriate sections of the paper, all of the themes we have mentioned recur: the eternal unity of true art; the idealization of the Nordic type; the equivalence of this with the Greek ideal; the employment of ethical/aesthetic responses in an instinctive, antirational way; and the use of these feelings as a defense against domestication phenomena.

Lorenz’s discussion of aesthetic characteristics of degenerate types and our negative reactions to them is exemplified by the following:

If one systematically goes through the - on close observation - astonishingly short list of the characteristics which clearly produce the ugly in human beings and animals, one comes to the result that they are all relational characteristics which in human beings indicate domestication- or civilization-caused decay phenomena. If the ugly is to be represented in art, the artist accordingly resorts, not to any old arbitrary distortions of the human ideal Gestalt, but with great regularity to the few typical characteristics of domestication. Classic Greek sculpture represented Silenus as the opposite of the god-and- hero-type, always pinch-headed, with pot-belly and too-short limbs . . . and in just the same way the traditionally ugly Socrates is always pictured as a chondrodystrophic.W

And here is an example of Lorenz’s explanation of positive aesthetic reactions:

The close relationships of the aesthetic value judgment to very definite decay phenomena that threaten humankind may be indicated also from the opposite direction. That is, our positive perception of beauty responds just as selectively to the physical characteristics endangered by typical domestication phenomena, as the negative ones do to those phenomena themselves _ . . It is perhaps characteristic of the function of these innate relational schemata that they are much less sensitive to exaggeratioris . . . in an opposite direction to the domestication phenomenon . . . Thus, as the male pictured in Fig. 11 [see below] shows the width of the shoulders and the narrowness of the hips in a very exaggerated way without damaging our perception of beauty, so other aesthetic relational

92. “Die angeborenen Formen,” p. 306.

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characteristics, especially endangered by domestication, can be greatly enhanced.93

Lorenz’s use of art as a vehicle for representation of the “normal ideal” shows a remarkable parallel to Haeckel and Hitler and is an indication of their common ideological basis. There is another connection. The statue pictured in the “Fig. 1 1”94 referred to above, which Lorenz cites as a work of art exaggerating the bodily proportions endangered by domestication in an aesthetically pleasing way, is a statue of Dionysos, not by a classical Greek artist, but by Arno Breker, the sculptor who did the two monumental statues, “The Party” and “The Wehrmacht,” that flanked the entrance to the Reich chancellery. Breker created many other works inspired by National Socialist ideas on art and was said to be Hitler’s favorite sculptor. The Dionysos looks just like the statues at the Reich chancellery, but in a different pose.

The last wartime paper I want to mention is the 1943 “Psychologie und Stammesgeschichte” (Psychology and Phylogeny).95 Edited by G. Heberer (a Haeckelian), the volume in which the essay appeared seems to be a mixture of respectable contributions and those tainted by Nazi pseudoscience; and Lorenz’s article is a microcosm of the whole, reporting his interpretation of issues in comparative psychology, his experimental results on the investigation of instinctive behavior patterns, special phylogenetics of signal behavior, and the investigation of domestic animals and the problems of civilization. Once again Lorenz argued that the appearance of “domestication phenomena” in human beings is homologous with domestic animals.

If one were to examine modern man for these typical domestication characteristics one would find so many, in such typical forms, that no unprejudiced person could doubt the identity of causes for the phenomena in both human being and domestic animal.%

Lorenz repeated his idea about the fall of civilizations through being overrun by degenerates, and the cancer analogy. The postulation of this sort. of biological cause for the decline and fall. of civilization is really

93. Ibid., pp. 306-307. 94. Ibid., p. 289. 95. In G. Heberer, ed., Die Evolution der Organismen (Jena: G. Fischer,

19431, pp. 105-127. 96. Ibid., 119. p.

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very seductive, due to the congruence of Lorenz’s biologistic view of society with that of Volkism and Haeckelianism, and I am not surprised that Lorenz has retained his concerns with the “present danger to the race” long after the fall of National Socialism.

Of the beliefs that were enunciated from 1938 through 1943, Lorenz has dropped only the idea that civilized life is mutagenic. This he did in the 1954 version of “Psychology and Phylogeny,“97 whose last section was extensively revised - from “The Investigation of Domestic Anhnals and the Problems of Civilization” in 1943 to “The Precondi- tions for Human Evolution” in 1954. The removal of the “natural” selection factors is given as the sole cause of “domestication.“98

One might possibly be inclined to think that similar environmental conditions (e.g., limitation.of freedom of movement; scarcity of air and light; imbalanced, vitamin-impoverished and yet copious food; etc.) have favored homologous mutations. However, this would definitely seem to be a false assumption; instead the blame for the appearance of these characters seems to be exclusively due to the removal of natural selection.99

As one can see from the title change mentioned above, the 1954 version of “Psychology and Phylogeny” also elaborates on a theme discussed in the 1943 version: that “domestication,” that is, the fragmentation of innate behavior patterns, may be the door through which intelligence may enter in the course of phylogenetic development. In 1943 Lorenz was concerned primarily with the dangers of human domestication, but by 1954 he had changed his emphasis to the possibility of advance as the benefit for which we must trade the cost of domestication phenomena and danger to civilization.

Domestication-induced alterations of instinctive behavior are, by nature, processes bordering closely on pathological events, and the deficiencies to which man owes his specific freedom are closely allied to those which drive him to destruction.ree

91. In G. Hebem, ed., Die Evolution der Organismen, 2nd ed. (Jena: G. Fischer, 1954), pp. 131-177. This is the version that was translated for the English edition of Lorenz’s collected works (ii Martin II).

98. The substitution of other selection factors is also important. 99. Martin II, 232. 100. Martin II, 236.

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But Lorenz still believed in 1954 that an excess of domestication phenomena in certain individuals will allow them to infiltrate like a cancer and destroy the state.‘Or

Lorenz’s preoccupation with domestication and civilizational decline has persisted from 1938 until his most recent works. Having accepted the ideologically influenced assumption that racial decay causes this decline, he has continued to discuss it ever since. Abandoning the hypothesis that metropolitan life is mutagenic, Lorenz has maintained the standard Darwinian notion of the degenerate human types swamp- ing society like a cancer. In the chapter on “Genetic Decay” in Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins102 this notion is still present. In the 1977 Behind the Mirror,‘03 Lorenz has changed to a partially sociological explanation:

The transmission of acquired characteristics brings about that ac- celeration of development, found in all spheres of human life, which may well be one of the causes of the decline of individual human civilizations after a certain period of time.ro4

And in the Berlin newspaper Kurier of December 30,1979, Lorenz said that domestication-caused genetic degeneration is not so much of a danger any more because it is unlikely that humanity will live long enough to experience it (because of the possibility of atomic warfare). Nonetheless, it was enough of a concern for him to mention it.

What can we conclude from our discussion of ideology in Lorenz’s pre- 1943 works?

First of all, I believe that only the most blatant emphasis on National Socialist concerns in Lorenz’s work can be explained by his scientific evangelism, his urge to give correct ethological explanations of state policy. Also, the disappearance of Nazi jargon after World War II should not mislead us into thinking that what is left is “pure science,” or that the Nazi era had no effect on Lorenz’s scientific work. Although Lorenz’s views on evolution and human society were acquired before

101. Martin II, 237. 102. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. First published in German

in 1971. 103. New York: Ha.rcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. First published in German

in 1973. 104. Ibid., 173. p.

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1933, the fact of the Nazi acceptance of biologistic and Haeckelian-type beliefs, which Lorenz also shared, must be given appropriate weight as a factor in Lorenz’s persistent view of human genetic degeneration through domestication.

Lorenz’s year in Konigsberg (academic year 1940-1941) that hotbed of neo-Kantianism, his collaboration with Eduard Baumgarten, and his resulting preoccupation with human and animal perception, must also be counted as factors in his concern with comparative questions. But studies of the comparative psychology of perception are quite different from assumptions that human beings have innate emotional aesthetic and ethical releasing mechanisms to fight racial decay caused by civilized life. Besides, Lorenz’s animal-human comparisons started two years before he was called to Konigsberg, and from the outset they were couched in the most explicit ideological terms. I think this is significant because it indicates the earlier provenance of his ideas on this subject and their permanence in his conceptual scheme.

For instance, although Lorenz repudiated the idea that civilization is mutagenic, he has apparently never wholly abandoned the philosophi- cally confused belief that civilization in human beings can be compared to domestication in animals, as if there were some “noble savage” or “peasant” who represents the true human type, as the rock dove represents the true type that we see faintly mirrored in the pouter pigeon. Volkist ideology, shared also by Haeckel and National Socialism, with its praise of the peasant who lives close to the soil in an unspoiled country village, and its condemnation of the “unnatural” big city with its depraved inhabitants, probably gave Lorenz - and others before him - the key idea that domestication in animals and urbanization or even civilization in human beings are homologous.

On a more fundamental level, ideology functioned to provide the idea that there is societal decline and that it is caused by genetic decay. Lorenz thus came to the conclusion that domestication in animals caused genetic decay, and he then extrapolated the civilization-domestication homology to explain that genetic decay in civilized human beings could be expected - and would finally produce the social decline that ideology postulated! Thus, although at first the postulation of animal or human genetic decay looks purely scientific, at every step of the way we find influence by ideological presuppositions. And although Lorenz’s language no longer contains the easily identifiable jargon of 1930s and early 194Os, the basic ideological factors I have outlined are still present in his comparative animal-human work, and in his attempts to explain human society. Thus those ethologists,

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sociologists, and popularizers who have adopted Lorenz’s traditional biologistic view of society have also accepted, wittingly or unwittingly, its presuppositions, its implications, and its history of use in justifying race-political ways of thought and action.

Acknowledgments

This article is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant no. SOC 78-11404. I wish to acknowledge support also from Southeastern Massachusetts University, Harvard University, and Boston University, and courteous and efficient aid by the staffs of the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Berlin Document Center, YIVO Institute, and National Archives of the United States. Special thanks go to Eduard Baumgarten (189%1982), Engelbert Broda, Reece Kelly, Alec Nisbett, and many other correspondents who have helped me with information on archival sources, ethology, and German and Austrian history.

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