The “racial face” in Germany

Deeply rooted in the German intellectual tradition, physiognomy engaged many creative representatives of German thought, such as Lavater, Lichtenberg, Herder, Goethe, Gall, Hegel, Carus, Schopenhauer, Klages, Kassner, and Kretschmer (Gray, 2004; see also Section 2.4.3.). Having flourished in the 19th and early 20th _{centuries, physiognomy developed powerfully and most}

perniciously from “the racial-genetic turn German biology and anthropology underwent in the early decades of the twentieth century, leading up to the catastrophe of the Nazi racial state. The convergence of these diverse intellectual forces occurred during the years of the Weimar Republic, leading to an explosion of physiognomically-oriented theories in diverse academic and intellectual disciplines in the years from 1918 to 1935 and beyond” (Gray, 2004: xx). In this period of time, the face was turned into a socially and politically powerful tool used against other races.

The years of the Weimar Republic are often described as the time of “the physiognomic boom” and the emergence of the German “physiognomic worldview.” In 1919, one of the most significant German physiognomists, Rudolf Kassner (1873—1959), published his first physiognomist work, “Zahl und Gesicht” [Number and face], in which he breaks with an essential principle of the physiognomic tradition, “the identification of the external and the internal,” the conviction that the body is the mirror of the soul (Gray, 2004: 167), and postulates “the great paradox of every physiognomics” which says that “the human being only is the way he looks, because he does not look the way he is” (1919: 3, 192; in Gray, 2004: 167). Unlike traditional, “scientific” physiognomists, Kassner glorifies subjectivism; he claims that the subjective interpretation of the face is the form of empathy through imagination. The

power of imagination legitimizes every possible interpretation of other people (Gray, 2004). In “Physignomik” Kassner defines what he calls Ständegesicht (the socially determined face):

the socially determined face means that the physician, the scholar, the schoolteacher, the tailor, the interior decorator, the painter, the Count, the Baron, the accountant, that each of these figures also has the peculiar face befitting his social class, the socially apt face (1932: 5, 29; in Gray, 2004: 204).

Among the representatives of the “physiognomic boom” was Ludwig Klages (1872—1956), a psychologist, who created a physiognomically based theory of expression, and Ernst Kretschmer (1888—1964), a physician, who tried to relate physiognomic body types to predispositions for certain mental illnesses (Gray, 2004). But the most representative figure of the physiognomic worldview, and the most infamous of them all, was a proto-fascist thinker, Hans F.K. Günther (1891—1968). Called “Rassen-Günther,” or “Race-Günther,” he applied physiognomic theories to racial anthropology and was one of the strongest advocates of the Nordic Movement in Germany. He practised a type of materialist physiognomy which sought to establish the relationship between intellectual, spiritual, and cultural traits and such physical features as blue eyes, blonde hair, a particular skull form, and the shape of the nose (Gray, 2004). Using various tools to measure the head and face, Günther analysed the proportions of the skull and used them as the primary characteristic of the European races he identified (Gray, 2004). According to Günther, the members of the “Nordic” race, identified with a cross section of modern Germans, had the long and narrow (dolichocephalic) skull, and the “Eastern” race — the Slavic peoples — had the short and broad (brachycephalic) skull (Gray, 2004). The main source of the information about hair and eye colour that Günther used in his studies was Germania, in which Tacitus describes the Germanic peoples (Gray, 2004). All the physiognomic attributions he analysed in his studies are mediated by criteria of race. People’s negative attitude towards another person who has dark hair or a pointed nose, for example, according to Günther, is due to the “blood,” which intuitively separates “us” from others (Gray, 2004: 233). Thus, his racial physiognomy was mainly based on Germanic tradition, intuition and pseudo-scientific research.

Interpreting the anatomical features of human beings as indicative of both racial type and certain psychological and characterological traits specific for those particular racial types, Günther expressed the common prejudices of middle-class Germans about their representatives (Gray, 2004). The typology he formulated was extremely Eurocentric: he believed that all races which are extra-European are lower than the low. This also applied to the Jews, who, 118 The face as a part of the body

according to racial physiognomists of Weimar Germany and Nazi Germany, were the primary vehicles of degenerate Otherness (Günther, 1929; in Gray, 2004). He did not treat Jews as a religious or cultural community; Jewishness, for him, from the very beginning, was an innate racial characteristic associated with certain attributes. Thus the only way to eradicate these attributes was to eradicate the Jews themselves (Günther, 1929). The conclusions formulated by Günther were well suited to the epoch he lived in and were soon used as a scientific basis of Nazi policy.

The biased results of these and other studies by racial physiognomists coincided clearly with the anti-Semitic prejudices of the Nordic Movement, and created favourable ground for the Final Solution (Gray, 2004). In the Third Reich, racial physiognomy was put into practice. The main racial-physiognomic theories formulated in Germany at this time were popularized among the general public, the young generation included. Obligatory classes were organized on racial ethnology in schools. The popularizers of racial physiognomy claimed the absolute infallibility of the methods of the “science,” which in practice consisted in cranial measurements and comparison of eye and hair colour with a range of colours listed in special charts. The idea that “race is in the face” (McNeill, 1998: 96) in Nazi Germany became a dangerous truth. Having the “wrong” face very often meant a death sentence. The saying that the face can

betray its owner got a new literal meaning.