For White Rose scholars – a must-have reference
Tilitzki’s work is not merely about philosophy professors in Munich. He includes all German universities and Technische Hochschulen from 1918-1945. Even as I write this, I’m astounded anew.
Christian Tilitzki. Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie in der Weimarer Republik und im dritten Reich. Two volumes. Berlin: Akademie Verlag GmbH, 2002.
If every scholar undertook such rigorous research, our world would be a better place. Christian Tilitzki ignores legends, ignores postwar reinvented selves, ignores simplistic definitions of good and evil.
Tilitzki writes about philosophy professors who inhabited the halls of academia from 1918-1945. He notes who influenced whom, who believed what, and what each man — because his pages are filled primarily with men — taught their students. Resources like this are rare, and invaluable.
I’ll be honest. I have not read all 1168 pages of footnoted text. I have not even fully explored his appendices (more on that in a moment). Instead my focus has been on White Rose professors, those mentioned by students and other professors alike.
Note that Tilitzki’s work is not merely about philosophy professors in Munich. He includes all German universities and Technische Hochschulen of those two eras. Even as I write this, I’m astounded anew at the depth of his work.
This was Christian Tilitzki’s doctoral dissertation, submitted in 1999. Apparently his research took more than twelve years. Considering the depth of his digging, I’m surprised he finished it so quickly. If you sit on a doctoral committee anywhere in the world, point your PhD students to Tilitzki’s work as example of how it’s done.
Tilitzki had at least two options for presentation of his material. He could have written it as a catalog of professors, that is, alphabetically. Or, as he chose to do, chronologically.
Therefore if you’re looking for e.g., Kurt Huber or Gerhard Ritter as I did, references to them span several sections. The longer their tenure, the more spread out the information about them. Tilitzki’s indices are good, so that’s not a problem.
[Note: Because of the focus on philosophy professors, Heinrich Wieland and his natural sciences colleagues are not listed.]
The introduction to these two volumes sets the tone. Tilitzki declares up front that he’s looking at the relationship between philosophy and politics. He closely follows this golden thread throughout. A professor’s philosophical viewpoint generally is not considered apart from his political position.
Initially, Tilitzki’s section headings threw me off. If I had been captioning the evolution of philosophy lectures taught in German universities between 1918 and 1945, I likely would have gone with something like Beginnings of the post-monarchy era, Philosophy during economic turmoil, and so on. Especially since it’s clear that it’s the intersection of philosophy and politics that interests Tilitzki, my headlines would have reflected the metamorphosis of political movements in Germany as the country broke free from monarchy, experimented with democracy, and then welcomed authoritarianism.
Tilitzki was smart. He looked instead at the better-documented topic of hiring policies. There’s far less speculation involved when we simply look at criteria applied to fill philosophy teaching positions. Tilitzki’s work includes not only professors who were hired by German universities and Hochschulen, but also those philosophy professors rejected by universities, and reasons for the rejection.
Better yet, Tilitzki found the doctoral dissertations of philosophy professors, both those who were rejected as well as the ones who were hired! For example, thanks to Tilitzki, we know that Kurt Huber’s 1917 dissertation was written on the works of the sixteenth century Franco-Flemish composer, Ivo de Vento.
Tilitzki’s text is dense, but readable. Although his audience is clearly academic (which means it’s not easily translatable), at least I did not run across any five-page-long sentences. It’s scholarly, but not unapproachable. His vocabulary reflects that. An undergraduate German major in the USA or UK would likely have a difficult time with his word choice, but it’s standard academia, not ‘invented’ compound nouns that take up two lines.
Now to the appendices.
I found these almost as useful as the text itself. Each appendix has a unique purpose and provides information summarized in a different context.
First appendix, pages 1173-1272: Verzeichnis der politisch-weltanschaulichen Lehrveranstaltungen WS 1918/1919 bis SS 1945. Eine Aufstellung anhand der Vorlesungsverzeichnisse zwischen 1918/19-1945. [Index of political-ideological courses from winter semester 1918/1919 to summer semester 1945. A list based on course catalogs between 1918/19-1945.]
To address the elephant in the room: Kurt Huber is not listed in any of the courses offered in either Berlin or Munich. None. Despite having no doctorate, Hans Alfred Grunsky was hired in 1937 to teach philosophy. Huber’s star was in decline. Grunsky himself quickly learned about leopards eating faces. He soon managed to anger Chancellor Wüst and party officials, despite having been an early member of the NSDAP. Philosophy was a tough subject to teach in Nazi-era Munich. Grunsky was suspended and then reinstated in 1943, when he taught two classes: One on Jakob Böhme, and the second on “The Concept of Reality as Primary Philosophical Problem.”
Tilitzki organized this appendix as follows:
Semester — university or Hochschule — professor — name of the course. This form of organization makes it difficult to track what Grunsky taught, or Gerhard Ritter, or Martin Heidegger. But it makes it singularly simple to follow the progression (or better said, regression) of philosophical thought in German academia over those twenty-seven years.
Instead of courses taught during the Weimar Republic which included Kant and ethics, or Fichte and Die Bestimmung des Menschen [The Destiny of Man], in 1945 we find multiple Geschichtsphilosophie [philosophy of history] with subtopics like “cultural accomplishments of the primary civilizations of Europe from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.” Nothing Nazi about that. [\sarcasm]
The second appendix is entitled Sources and Literature, essentially a comprehensive bibliography.
Section A: Archives. Tilitzki provided location details for the places he searched: Federal, state, municipal, university, personal, and library archives. If he had researched White Rose instead of professors, my work would have been blown out of the water. I envy his uncensored access to documents! [That’s my clear dig at blocked archives related to White Rose.]
Section B: Literature. Subsections are the expected primary and secondary sources. His primary sources include all publications by the professors he writes about. His primary source section likely includes the most thorough inventory of philosophy publications from 1918-1945 ever assembled. If you want to write about a philosophy professor from these two eras, Tilitzki’s second appendix, section B, part 1 is your best starting point. Just be sure to cite him! It’s plagiarism if you use his list without proper attribution!
His list of Huber’s publications underscores what I wrote in my White Rose histories. For some reason, Kurt Huber had fallen out of academic favor in 1937. He went from being a prolific author, to nothing after 1937, until his former students published his work-in-progress in 1960. Tilitzki does not explain Huber’s fall from grace. There’s a great PhD in that story. If you’re willing to tell the truth. Why was he demoted to adjunct in 1937, as I learned in my research? He was more Nazi than several of his colleagues.
Finally, Tilitzki closed out his two-volume work with a comprehensive index of persons mentioned. Fortunately, the index includes names in both appendices, so if you’re searching only for Huber or only for Heidegger, you can easily find sections referring to them.
That said, I would not recommend reading only pages “154-157, 585f., 629, 689, 753” for Kurt Huber, or “16, 18f., 24-28, 30, 34-36, 72, 121, 126, 137-142, 145, 185, 244-248, 250, 256-260, 261ff., 268, 280f., 292f., 297ff., 301f.” — and about 200 more pages — about Martin Heidegger.
Instead, read the full context surrounding their mention. For example, one sentence about Kurt Huber is very, very brief. As Tilitzki introduces Hans Alfred Grunsky, he briefly alludes to Huber’s allies in the anti-Grunsky camp. If you stick solely to the allusion to Huber, you miss the bigger picture about the dog-eat-dog fight in Munich’s philosophy department.
Note that other scholars who reviewed Tilitzki’s two volumes complained that Tilitzki did not mention antisemitism enough in his book. Which left me scratching my head.
Not only did Tilitzki write about professors or PhD students who were rejected because of their Jewishness or because of their connection to Jewish thinkers. He also spent pages 1041-1074 elaborating on the specific topic of Die Kommentierung der NS-Rassenideologie und Rassenpolitik [Commentary on Nazi Racial Ideology and Racial Policy]. It’s an even-handed, factual analysis that takes into account degrees of awfulness.
Those thirty-three pages include, for example, fifteen pages dealing with National Socialist attempts to cope with Spinoza. White Rose literature often makes it sound like Kurt Huber’s occasional mention of Spinoza in his Leibniz classes was courageous and admirable (that Leibniz course is now in question after Tilitzki’s publication). Likely fiction. Because Huber’s nemesis Grunsky taught Spinoza. Grunsky was not alone. Nazis wanted to embrace Spinoza on the one hand because he had left Judaism, but on the other hand, there was that blasted race card to consider.
Of course Spinoza was by and large ridiculed and marginalized. But not ignored. And not always taught with a wave of the racial ideology hand.
Perhaps Tilitzki’s “failure” to talk about antisemitism — which was indeed prevalent from 1933-1945! — on every page of his book is a strength and not a weakness. For one thing, he assumes that anyone reading Universitätsphilosophie would already know that antisemitism was an undercurrent of German life during the Weimar Republic, bursting unmasked onto the scene once Hitler took power.
Tilitzki’s index mentions Spinoza thirty-four times. Wilhelm Burkamp lectured on the topic The Ethics of Spinoza in Rostock, 1935. Hans Meyer, who published articles in Carl Muth’s Hochland, edited a four-volume biography of Spinoza, released in 1937.
In other words, Tilitzki allowed the complexities of university life between 1933-1945 to exist without apology, without trying to explain anything away. If anything, he condemns the entirety of German academic life during the Nazi era when he notes that not only did philosophy departments embrace the NSDAP’s racial ideology, but so did medical schools. So much for our White Rose students choosing medicine as a way to avoid Nazism!
Indeed, when I finish our 2025/2026 updates to White Rose histories, volumes 1 and 2, Tilitzki’s work will undergird my words about what the students faced as they studied in Munich, Bonn, Tübingen, Göttingen, and Freiburg, as well as the professors whose courses they took. The lives of those students become far less black and white. They too reflect the complexity of Tilitzki’s words.
I highly recommend Christian Tilitzki’s valuable opus. Our understanding of the Weimar Republic and National Socialism is significantly enhanced because of his diligence.
© 2025 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote.
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