Post 3: Enough Already with the Race Science

Race science exemplifies the collision of science and politics in Nazi Germany. Nazis wanted to appear legitimate in their discrimination, so they strove to use science to validate their behavior. They sought to establish that there were biological differences between races that justify treating them differently. This is a page from a book called “Race and Soul” that shows the characteristics of Nordic people:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kleine_Rassenkunde_photos.png

Race science divides races using science; Aryan physics uses race to divide science. Philipp Lenard was the first scientist to publicly state that he thought German scientists ought to stay away from “Jewish physics” and create a more pure “Aryan physics.” He did this in 1922, when there was a lot of controversy surrounding Einstein’s theory of relativity (Walker 8-9). Stark was a power hungry anti-Semite attempting to gain influence over the direction of science in Germany in the 1920s. Together with Lenard, Stark founded the Deutsche Physik movement. One of the motivations behind this was simply that they were anti-Semitic, so they stood in opposition to Einstein, other Jewish scientists, and their work (Walker 13). Stark hoped to lead a “revolution in German science that would go far beyond the initial National Socialist purge of the civil service” (Walker 38).

Attempts to create divisions among people is a hard concept for me to understand. Perhaps it is just my naïveté, but I don’t understand why where people come from matters so much. So much of it is arbitrary. Like we said in class, people didn’t define “Aryanism” in terms of what it was, only what it wasn’t. During Apartheid in South Africa, there were many classifications of race. In many cases it had nothing to do with heritage, only what people looked like. One child in a family might have been considered colored and another, white. In other instances, heritage had everything to do with it. In “Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful,” Alan Paton describes a scenario where a man thought he was white, but it was uncovered that he was, because of some distant relative, colored. He lost his job, he was no longer allowed to live in the white area where he had his home, and his children were banned from white schools. A more contemporary example is Rwanda and Burundi, where it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between the Hutu and the Tutsi, and people were classified based on nose shape.

I think because I feel so little attachment to my own heritage, being a Western European mutt whose family has been in the United States for centuries, I cannot begin to comprehend why things like this could possibly matter. People are people.