Dissertation Information for Nitzan Lebovic NAME: - Nitzan Lebovic
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2005)
ADVISORS: - Saul P. Friedlander - David N. Myers
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Andrew Hewitt - Samuel M. Weber
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: The politicization of Lebensphilosophie: From Ludwig Klages to national socialism (1870--1933)
Abstract: The present dissertation explores the philosophy of life that was taken up by the radical German Right in the late 1920s and early 1930s. By approaching this movement from its historical origins, rather than its catastrophic end, this study offers a critique of previous histories whose Whiggish methodology has tended to minimize the radical and avant-garde aspects of Lebensphilosophie . At the same time, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which the movement initially criticized and later joined the widening current of anti-Semitism and radical nationalism.
At the center of this study stands Ludwig Klages, an early adherent of the poet Stefan George, later far closer to Friedrich Nietzsche's and Johann Jakob Bachofen's aestheticizing studies of pre-Socratic and pre-Christian rituals. Klages, like Bachofen and Nietzsche before him, viewed literary and scientific methods as determined by a certain, basic view of life. During the early 1900s Klages became famous thanks to his highly popular studies of graphology and characterology, which he worked out by establishing the late Romantic type as an ideal. In the late 1910s and early 1920s Klages, a determined anti-Semite, developed a racist formulation of his theory of bodily signs: this was the project that made him, in the eyes of Thomas Mann and Georg Lukács, "the father of German fascism."
This dissertation traces the philosophical and intellectual origins of Lebensphilosophie as an aesthetic discourse, and tries to demonstrate the way in which it was transformed over the first decades of the twentieth century into the foundation of a bold call to action, a summons to a radical and innovative vita activa . In contrast to the current leading interpretation of fascism, the case of Ludwig Klages has far less to do with the aestheticization of politics than with the politicization of an aesthetic discourse. Beginning with aesthetic concepts during the early 1900s, Klages's Lebensphilosophie ended by politicizing them during the late 1920s.
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calculated 2008-09-06 17:43:27
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