Paul de Lagarde

Paul de Lagarde
Paul Anton de Lagarde
Born	Paul Bötticher (1827-11-02)2 November 1827 Berlin, Prussia
Died	22 December 1891(1891-12-22) (aged 64) Göttingen, Germany
Occupation(s)	Orientalist, Biblical scholar

Paul Anton de Lagarde (2 November 1827 – 22 December 1891) was a German biblical scholar and orientalist, sometimes regarded as one of the greatest orientalists of the 19th century. Lagarde's strong support of anti-Semitism, vocal opposition to Christianity, Social Darwinism and anti-Slavism are viewed as having been among the most influential in supporting the ideology of Nazism.

His great learning and gifts were mixed with dogmatism and distrust in the activities of others. In politics, he belonged to the Prussian Conservative party. He died in Göttingen on 22 December 1891.

Early life and education

De Lagarde was born in Berlin as Paul Bötticher. In early adulthood he legally adopted the family name of his maternal line out of respect for his great-aunt who raised him. At Humboldt University of Berlin (1844–1846) and University of Halle-Wittenberg (1846–1847) he studied theology, philosophy and Oriental languages.

In 1852 his studies took him to London and Paris.

Career

In 1854 he became a teacher at a Berlin public school, but this did not interrupt his biblical studies. In 1866 he received three years leave of absence to collect fresh materials, and in 1869 succeeded German orientalist and theologian Heinrich Ewald as professor of oriental languages at the University of Göttingen. Like Ewald, Lagarde was an active worker in a variety of subjects and languages. His chief aim was the elucidation of the Bible. Lagarde was easily the most renowned Septuagint scholar of the nineteenth century, and he devoted himself ardently to Oriental studies. He was well known as a copier and editor of Greek, Aramaic, and Arabic.

Political writing

In his mid-40s, Lagarde began to write cultural criticism and gave occasional speeches. He eventually collected his essays in Deutsche Schriften (German Literature, 1878–1881).

He postulated a national religion in his first political treatise Über das Verhältnis des deutschen Staates zu Theologie, Kirche und Religion. (On the Relationship of the German State to Theology, Church and Religion). He felt the state's most important task was to create a climate in which this national religion could flourish. Meanwhile, he obliged those who had faith in God to a radical morality wherein they distinguish solely between "duty or sin" in their every action. In addition, first a formal language must be developed for the religiosity of these newborn men.

He concludes his 1875 book, Über die gegenwärtige Lage des deutschen Reichs (On the Current Situation of the German Reich):

Germany is the totality of all German-feeling, German-thinking, German-willing Germans: In this sense, every one of us is a traitor if he does not consider himself personally acountable in every moment of his life for the existence, fortune and future of the fatherland, and each is a hero and liberator if he does.

Lagarde despised the bland version of Christianity that he knew and dreamed of a nationalistic religion. He was conversant with Adolf Stoecker, the founder of the anti-Semitic Berlin Movement. He also showed interest in folkish-anti-Semitic societies such as the Deutscher Volksverein of Bernhard Förster and Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg, as well as the Deutschsoziale Partei of Theodor Fritsch. To the latter, he established contact in 1886 by sending his treatise Die nächsten Pflichten deutscher Politik (The Coming Tasks of German Politics), at the core of which he considered to be a German policy of settlement in Eastern Europe.

He considered Jews to be the greatest barrier to German unification, whereas he simultaneously avowed the concept of a German colonization of southeastern Europe and proposed that the Jewish population settled there at the time be resettled to Palestine or Madagascar. The only alternatives for Lagarde were the total assimilation or emigration of the Jews. He also despised Slavs and wrote, "the sooner they perish the better it will be for us and them".

In his 1887 essay "Jews and Indo-Germanics", he wrote: “One would have to have a heart of steel to not feel sympathy for the poor Germans and, by the same token, to not hate the Jews, to not hate and despise those who – out of humanity! – advocate for the Jews or are too cowardly to crush these vermin. Trichinella and bacilli would not be negotiated with, trichinella and bacilli would also not be nurtured, they would be destroyed as quickly and as thoroughly as possible."

In addition to his influence on anti-Semitism and anti-slavism, Lagarde is also of importance to the formation of German imperialist thought. In this regard, he concentrated on German border colonization within Europe rather than the acquisition of overseas colonies. This bears a close resemblance to the later concept of German Lebensraum most notably espoused by Friedrich Ratzel. In 1875, Lagarde maintained that the primary objective of German politics was the "gradual Germanization of Poland." Since he was concerned about how many Germans emigrated in their search for land, he advocated a border colonizing land acquisition for the peasantry, which he considered the "true foundation of the state." This land acquisition aimed to create a Mitteleuropa under German leadership "that reaches from the Ems to the mouth of the Danube, from the Neman to Trieste, from Metz to about the Bug."

Works

Legarde edited the Didascalia apostolorum syriace (1854) and other Syriac texts collected in the British Museum and in Paris. He edited the Aramaic translation (known as the Targum) of the Prophets according to the Codex Reuchlinianus preserved at Karlsruhe, Prophetae chaldaice (1872), the Hagiographa chaldaice (1874), an Arabic translation of the Gospels, Die vier Evangelien, arabisch aus der Wiener Handschrift herausgegeben (1864), a Syriac translation of the Old Testament Apocrypha, Libri V. T. apocryphi syriace (1865), a Coptic translation of the Pentateuch, Der Pentateuch koptisch (1867), and a part of the Lucianic text of the Septuagint, which he was able to reconstruct from manuscripts for nearly half the Old Testament.

He was also a student of Persian, publishing Isaias persice (1883) and Persische Studien (1884). In 1880, de Lagarde attempted to reconstruct a Syriac version of Epiphanius' treatise, On Weights and Measures, which he entitled, Veteris Testamenti ab Origene recensiti fragmenta apud Syros servata quinque. Praemittitur Epiphanii de mensuris et ponderibus liber nunc primum integer et ipse syriacus (Gootingae 1880). He followed up his Coptic studies with Aegyptiaca (1883), and published many minor contributions to the study of oriental languages in Gesammelte Abhandlungen (1866), Symmicta (1. 1877, ii. 1880), Semitica (i. 1878, ii. 1879), Orientalia (1879–1880) and Mittheilungen (1884). Mention should also be made of the valuable Onomastica sacra (1870; 2nd ed., 1887).

• Zur Urgeschichte der Armenier: Ein philologischer Versuch. Austria, W. Hertz, 1854.
• Der Pentateuch Koptische. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1867.
• Armenische Studien. Göttingen: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1877.

As editor:

• Alcalá, Pedro de. Petri Hispani de Lingua Arabica libri duo. Göttingen: Arnoldi Hoyer, 1883.

In Deutsche Schriften (1878–81; 4th ed., Göttingen, 1903), he attempted to involve himself in politics. It deals with the position of the German state relative to theology, the church and religion.

Legacy

Deutsche Schriften was widely read by figures like Thomas Mann and Theodor Heuss. In his 1918 book, The New Europe, Tomáš Masaryk regards Lagarde as one of the leading philosophical and theological spokesmen of Pan-Germanism, and furthermore describes Heinrich von Treitschke as its historian, Wilhelm II as its politician and Friedrich Ratzel as its geopolitical geographer. In all of them he saw the representatives of the imperialistic "German Drang nach Osten" that threatened the Slavic countries.

Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg was heavily influenced by Lagarde's writings. Rosenberg's notion of positive Christianity directly descended from Lagarde.

Fritz Stern zeroed in on the aimless nature of Lagarde's writings:

"He wrote as a prophet; he neither reasoned nor exposited, but poured out his excoriations and laments, his intuitive truths and promises. There was nothing limpid or systematic in his work; within each essay he skipped from subject to subject, alternating abstract generalities and concrete proposals. Thee pervasive mood of the book was despair and the dominant tone a kind of whiny heroism."

His library now belongs to New York University.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Lagarde, Paul Anton de". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. This work in turn cites:
  • Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie
  • Anna de Lagarde, Paul de Lagarde (1894)

Further reading

• Heike Behlmer, Thomas L. Gertzen and Orell Witthuhn. Der Nachlass Paul de Lagarde. Orientalistische Netzwerke und antisemitische Verflechtungen. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020.

External links

• Paul de Lagarde at the Internet Archive.