sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 9

Jasmin Welte: Helmut Berve und die Alte Geschichte

Jasmin Welte's biographical study of ancient history professor Helmut Berve purports to present 'A German Biography', reading Berve's life as a lens onto wider social, political, and disciplinary developments across the course of Germany's long twentieth century. In a strange mirroring of her subject's own research foci - which commenced with Berve's prosopographical study of leading figures of the Alexanderreich, and remained fixated on the life and times of 'great men' throughout his long and chequered career, Welte (despite her initial disavowals) effectively presents the reader with yet another 'great man' history - not in the guise of an Alexander or Pericles, but of Berve himself. Unfortunately, the author's evident admiration for her subject's scholarly qualities leads her to present what can often feel like an apologia for Berve's undeniable and unrepentant complicity with the Third Reich and its Wissenschaftspolitik.

In what follows, I will briefly sketch the monograph's content, before discussing in more depth the ways in which it neither lives up to its holistic promise, nor reckons adequately with Berve's imbrication with the Nazi regime. Key problems include the author's hagiographic leanings, tendentious use of sources from the immediate postwar period, and obfuscation of Berve's implication in Nazi racism and antisemitism, as well as his general support for the dictatorship - tendencies which seem at times to border on outright rehabilitation.

Following a methodological excursus siting her analysis within recent trends in biographical studies and Bourdieu's 'field theory', and a brief discussion of relevant scholarship and sources, Welte begins by presenting Berve's youth in Jakobsdorf/Jakusowa and Breslau/Wrocław. Prevented by ill-health from serving in World War I, Berve discovered his passion for pedagogy during a stint at Breslau's Friedrich-Gymnasium in 1917-18, where his constant penchant for surrounding himself with a coterie of admiring students revealed itself even at this early juncture in his teaching career. Disillusioned and pessimistic about the new postwar order, Berve dedicated himself first to creative writing, and then to his academic studies.

Having completed both his Doctorate and Habilitation in quick succession, Berve's scholarly networks and growing academic reputation enabled him to land a professorship at Leipzig extremely early in his career, where he burnished his National Socialist credentials (he joined the NSDAP in May 1933) and amassed increasing bureaucratic power during the 1930s as he took on the roles of Dean, Pro-Rector, and finally Rector of the university. Berve was thereby able to maintain good relations with high-ranking functionaries in the Nazi regime, including Reich Education Minister Bernhard Rust. This ultimately led to his being selected to direct the ancient-historical division of the so-called 'War Effort of the Humanities' (Kriegseinsatz der Geisteswissenschaften) during World War II, as well as being sent as a mixture of ambassador and low-level spy to lecture in occupied territories throughout Europe, as part of the regime's programme of scholarly Germanisierungspolitik.

During his time in office, Berve was party to antisemitic and politically motivated sackings, deliberately broke off contact with one of his circles of academic acquaintances (Professorenkränzchen) because it still included a Jewish colleague, and explicitly incorporated Nazified racial thinking into his academic and popular writing. Even after his wartime move to a professorship at München, Berve presented propagandistic lectures to numerous groups of schoolchildren, army and police officers, and National Socialist leadership cadres, spreading the gospel of a Nazified antiquity peopled above all by ancient Greek and Roman 'Führer-personalities' and the Spartan 'master-race'.

Postwar, Berve's stint as Rector at Leipzig led to his immediate designation by the Allied occupiers as 'hauptschuldig' (most culpable). Yet, through adroit manipulation of the denazification process, he was ultimately able to commute this sentence to 'entlastet' - that is, he was formally exonerated of any complicity with the Nazi regime and its crimes. Nevertheless, many former colleagues still considered him to be irredeemably tainted - though Berve himself appeared to have no such qualms, even expecting that his erstwhile professorial position at München would be held open for him. It was only due to the strength of his professional networks that he was eventually re-appointed as a professor at Erlangen university, where his perpetual penchant for presentist histories led him to focus his research on Greek tyranny as a reflection of contemporary Cold War anxieties.

Ultimately, Berve never disavowed his work during the Third Reich, allowing many of his monographs and essays from the 1930s and 1940s to be republished postwar with only the most superficial changes, and cleaving to a racialised view of antiquity even towards the very end of his life.

The first question in evaluating the book's overall contribution must be whether it lives up to its stated aim of presenting a holistic picture of German twentieth-century social, political, and scholarly history through the medium of biography. Unfortunately, this ambition is stymied by Welte's deliberate decision not to include any discussion of Berve's private life, as well as her surprising lack of engagement with recent developments in German social and political history (for example, no mainstream historiography on the Third Reich from the last fifteen years or so is included in the bibliography - as opposed to works focusing specifically on university history and Wissenschaftsgeschichte).

What is more, despite the book's ostensible interest in Berve's connections with power-brokers in Saxony and Berlin, many relevant historiographical contributions in this sphere also go uncited, including Anne Nagel's monographs on the Reich Education Ministry and the life of Johannes Popitz respectively, and fundamental considerations of Nazi rule in Saxony by Andreas Wagner, Clemens Vollnhals, and Claus-Chrstian Szejnmann. [1] Even works of extreme relevance to Welte's subject, such as Steven Remy's The Heidelberg Myth, or Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach's volume on Nazi Germany and the Humanities, go unmentioned. [2]

The same can also be said of recent literature on denazification, which could have provided crucial background for Welte's discussion of Berve's negotiation of the process - including key works by Hanne Leßau, Konrad Jarausch, and Mikkel Dack. [3] In addition, the chapter on Berve's youth fails fully to elucidate the broader social, political, and historiographical context of his presumably broadly bildungsbürgerlich milieu, instead quoting (at times inordinately long) excerpts from his tortured culturally-pessimistic poetic oeuvre.

However, the lack of adequate engagement with more wide-ranging historiographical advances and historical understandings is arguably at its most marked in the chapters on the Third Reich, where necessary context, if delineated at all, tends to appear as a brief pendant to the main analysis. The focus on Berve's perspective - or on glowing appraisals of his work and career prospects, which are quoted at such length that at times the book feels like a work of hagiography rather than biography - makes for an unbalanced narrative which privileges its subject's 'achievements' and perceived sufferings over the broader historical context pertaining to his actions and his willingness to serve the Nazi dictatorship, as well as his undeniable contribution to the marginalisation and 'social death' of his persecuted colleagues.

This lack of contextualisation is also glaringly evident in the sections relating to (highly selective) portions of Berve's writing. For example, on pages 66-67, Welte moves from a discussion of Berve's earlier work to a post-Machtergreifung essay which was reprinted in a National Socialist teachers' journal, without even mentioning the article's context beyond a footnote, nor alerting readers to the fact that the period of analysis has shifted from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich.

Worse still, the author often seems to be attempting to defend Berve from accusations of Nazism, internalising the sorts of specious arguments often used in denazification affidavits - known as 'Persilscheine' for their ability to wash the recipient's record whiter than white. At times, Welte even uses these spurious documents as 'evidence' for Berve's actual behaviour and attitudes during the Third Reich, despite their utter lack of integrity as historical sources in this context (and despite the fact that she is clearly aware of their tendentious nature, as is evident from her nuanced and informative discussion of the denazification process in chapter V.2.3).

For example, despite no concrete pre-war evidence existing to this effect, the author uses denazification documents to suggest that Berve might have sought to protect Jewish colleagues or students from wrongful dismissal (rather than hastening their departure), or that he might have been instrumental in 'saving' the Theology Faculty at Leipzig from closure. These conjectures are then presented as fact in the monograph's conclusion. In similar vein, Welte suggests that Berve's 'Fragebogen' (denazification questionnaire) can provide genuine 'insight into his political past', given these documents' 'veridical and thorough' nature (213) - a specious proposition, especially in light of the author's subsequent discussion of her subject's consummate manipulation of his own denazification process.

Moreover, instead of fully siting her analysis within current understandings of the National Socialist regime as a chaotic polycracy, marked above all by constent Konkurrenzkämpfe and battles for advantage, in which accusations of ideological nonconformity were constantly being weaponised in pursuit of personal grudges, Welte repeatedly deploys the highly flawed logic found in de-Nazification documents more generally to suggest that if Berve were persona non grata with any Nazi organisation or individual with clear Nazi sympathies (such as the NS-Dozentenschaft or Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann), he cannot therefore have been a true Nazi himself - despite his excellent relationships with regime grandees such as Rust and Ritterbusch.

At one point, the author even goes so far as to claim explicitly that Berve was neither a '"party loyalist" nor an opponent of the Nazis' (212), whilst also implying that as far as the regime was concerned he 'fell between two stools', in contrast with those whom she considers to be genuinely 'Nazi-aligned' academics (204) - despite Berve's joining the NSDAP shortly after the Machtergreifung, and having consistently conformed with and profited from the regime thenceforward. Welte also takes issue with the very idea that Berve might have internalised party-political aims and yardsticks and used them to his advantage in his roles as scholar, Dean, Rector or Doktorvater (142, n. 351).

Similar tactics are apparent in Welte's discussions of Berve's oeuvre, which are characterised by attempts to suggest that the focus on 'race' in his work was much less consequential than that of other 'Nazi' ancient history professors such as Hans Bogner, Hans Oppermann, and Fritz Schachermeyr. Work that does not explicitly contain the term 'Rasse' is frequently portrayed as ideologically negligible (despite the suffusion of Berve's writing with racialised modes of thought more generally), and his work is excused because it allegedly only propagates 'psychological' rather than 'anthropological' ideas of race in antiquity. At times, the overtly Nazified - or at least regime-friendly - nature of his output also goes undiscussed, even when exemplified by quotations cited explicitly in the text.

Meanwhile, Berve's work on the edited volume Das Neue Bild der Antike is explained away as not really Nazified because some scholars claimed that it did not go far enough ideologically, and because the volume's contributors did not just include fanatical Nazi ancient historians such as Bogner and Oppermann. Yet this was a volume commissioned as a key output of the regime's Kriegseinsatz der Geisteswissenschaften, with ministerial and SS-Ahnenerbe representatives attending the associated conference. By only taking a handful of Berve's writings as 'representative', rather than digging more deeply into the content of his spectrum of outputs, including his controversial lectures and propagandistic writing (such as his contribution to an Adolf-Hitler-School textbook) [4], Welte is able to obfuscate and evade discussion of the true extent of Berve's entanglements with the National Socialist worldview.

Ultimately, Berve's contributions are repeatedly hailed as 'significant achievement[s]' (e.g. 213); chapter headings style him a 'Magnificency' or a 'Nestor', and Welte concludes her depiction of his life with Burkert's assessment of Berve as a 'princeps der griechischen Geschichte'. (329) To frame Berve in this way does a disservice to history, and to those whose suffering he caused or abetted (directly or indirectly). Postwar, even Berve's erstwhile colleagues considered him to be damaged goods; a spectre at the ancient-historical feast.

Welte's conclusion suggests that scholars' focus on Berve's 'compromising behaviour in the Third Reich' should cease (331). If anything, we should do the opposite. For to lose sight of Berve's manifold complicities and accommodations and outright abettings of the National Socialist regime would also mean losing sight of how easily such compromises and politicised career-moves might repeat themselves, under far more proximate forms of authoritarianism. That Berve, with his unrepentant racism, antisemitism, and clear sympathy with a dictatorship which in turn raised him to one of the highest positions in academe, should be portrayed in a way that at times attempts to cleanse his career of guilt (in similar fashion to his own Persilscheine) is unconscionable, especially at a time when the ghosts of fascism past are rearing their heads more menacingly than ever before.

Notes:

[1] A. C. Nagel: Hitlers Bildungsreformer. Das Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung, 1934-1945, Frankfurt 2012; A. C. Nagel: Johannes Popitz (1884-1945). Görings Finanzminister und Verschwörer gegen Hitler. Eine Biographie, Köln 2015; C.-C. W. Szejnmann: Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in "Red" Saxony, New York 1999; C. Vollnhals (ed.): Sachsen in der NS-Zeit, Leipzig 2002; A. Wagner: Mutschmann gegen von Killinger. Konfliktlinien zwischen Gauleiter und SA-Führer während des Aufstiegs der NSDAP und der "Machtergreifung" im Freistaat Sachsen, Beucha 2001; A. Wagner: "Machtergreifung" in Sachsen. NSDAP und staatliche Verwaltung 1930-1935, Köln 2004.

[2] S. P. Remy: The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University, London 2002; W. Bialas / A. Rabinbach (eds.): Nazi Germany and the Humanities, Oxford 2007.

[3] H. Leßau: Entnazifizierungsgeschichten. Die Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen NS-Vergangenheit in der frühen Nachkriegszeit, Göttingen 2020; K. Jarausch: After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995, Oxford 2006. Although the monograph based on Mikkel Dack's dissertation only appeared in 2023, the dissertation itself was completed in 2018, with relevant articles appearing in print beforehand - e.g. M. Dack: Retreating into Trauma: The Fragebogen, Denazification, and Victimhood in Postwar Germany, in: P. Leese / J. Crouthamel (eds.): Traumatic Memories of the Second World War and After, Basingstoke 2016, 143-70.

[4] Cf. H Roche: Spartanische Pimpfe: The Importance of Sparta in the Educational Ideology of the Adolf Hitler Schools, in: S. Hodkinson / I. Macgregor Morris (eds.): Sparta in Modern Thought: Politics, History and Culture, Swansea 2012, 315-42.