Anonymous postcard to Karlsruhe Polytechnic, undated, received on October 19, 1936. Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe 235/2478.
In early 1935, the Law on the Dismissal and Transfer of University Teachers, Enacted as Part of the Reorganization of the German University System, authorized the National Socialist regime to reassign or abolish professorships. The structure and staffing of academic institutions were thus subject to the orders of the Reich Ministry of Science, Education, and National Culture. Against his will, the historian Franz Schnabel (1887–1966) was relieved of his duties at Karlsruhe Polytechnic in June 1936. His publications had revealed him as an opponent of National Socialism. Officially, this action was justified as intending to strengthen military content in the Polytechnic’s curriculum. Protest against Schnabel’s dismissal took the form of a typewritten postcard, signed as by “Many,” which was received by the Polytechnic’s administration on October 10, 1936. Rector Rudolf Weigel (1899–1955) forwarded the postcard, posted from Ludwigshafen am Rhein, to the Ministry of Culture “for possible further action by the Gestapo.” This move demonstrated Weigel’s effort to be recognized as a vigilant supporter of the regime. After his removal from academic service, Schnabel lived on a pension and continued to work on the fifth volume of his German history in the nineteenth century, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. The Nazi regime blocked the publication of this work. A building on KIT’s South Campus has been named in Schnabel’s memory since 1992. kn
The terse protest note regarding the dismissal of Karlsruhe historian Franz Schnabel, received on October 19, 1936, raises numerous questions about the nuanced relationship between conformity and non-conformity in the Nazi academic system and the interplay of domination, self-regulation, and partial autonomy within universities under the Nazi regime. In recent decades, historians have explored this complexity and ambivalence, focusing less on exemplary entanglement or exemplary resistance, and more on the scope of action within the given context. The five-line protest, presented in a single sentence, reflects a characteristically bourgeois academic style. This style claims the authority of scholarly competence and interpretive sovereignty. It was precisely this German nationalist professorial pathos — viewing the German “Volk” as ultimate legitimation, and presuming to speak in Germany’s name — that facilitated and encouraged the early establishment of National Socialism among the Karlsruhe student body and faculty. The protest was not directed against the unjust state as such or the violation of law affecting Franz Schnabel personally, but rather against an infringement on the professional rights of the academic elite, an injury to their self-image. This is expressed in the tone of offended complacency in which this is interpreted as “a sign of Germany’s decadence in academia.” Schnabel is perceived not as a disenfranchised colleague or fellow human being, but as “a prominent scholarly force,” a reduced member of their rank. In contrast, the rector’s response is far more political and modern — in the sense of the “Führer state” model. Weigel’s suggested “possible further persecution by the Gestapo” is an example of preemption, what was called “working toward the Führer” during the Nazi era. Thus room was made for maneuver. Rolf-Ulrich Kunze