Series Liberating Thought in the Shadow of Auschwitz - Jewish Intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s for the Liberation of Man from Exploitation and Oppression - Murdered, Expelled or Forgotten by the Nazis
Primo Levi, a member of the Resistencia, was sent to Auschwitz as a young chemist and then to the chemical factory of I.G. Farbenindustrie. He survived and, through his testimony, was able to contribute to drawing a more accurate picture of German fascism in its sociomental structure shaped by big industry. Quotes are taken from his last work: "Die Untergegangenen und Geretteten".
In the course of his research work on the social history of industrial work in Germany and Austria from high industrialization to the present day, the labour and health scientist Wolfgang Hien dealt intensively with the "Zeit", the zeitgeist that prevailed at the beginning of the 20th century and led to the catastrophe of National Socialism. It revealed the continuity of a thoroughly brutal social Darwinism (which is being revived and continued in today's neoliberalism). The suffering of the working masses, the thematization of suffering and suffering in general, was and is frowned upon.
He searched for "opposing voices", for voices that looked at the other side of progress, and almost without exception found the voices of Jewish intellectuals. This seems to him to be one of the reasons for the steady rise in anti-Semitism from around 1870 onwards. In the eyes of the elite, humanity was the antithesis of the hardness and strength that was desired for "Germanness". The aim was to combat and eradicate the "humanity propaganda of the Jews" (see Hermann Glaser: Bildungsbürgertum und Nationalismus, Munich 1993).
In the course of the lecture series between March and November 2024, Hien introduces six Jewish intellectuals who he encountered as representatives of humanity, human dignity and "responsibility from others" (Levinas): Ludwig Teleky / Käthe Leichter / Simone Weil / Edith Stein / Primo Levi / Emmanuel Levinas.
