What is a "Jewish Dog"?

Konrad Lorenz and the Cult of Wildness
Boria Sax 1
White Plains, New York

This paper explores the Nazi view of nature as violent but orderly, contrasted with what the Nazis took to be the chaos and confusion of human society. In imposing strict authoritarian controls, the Nazis strove to emulate what they viewed as the natural discipline of instinct. They saw this as embodied in wild animals, especially large predators such as wolves, while the opposite were domesticated mongrels whose instincts, like those of overly civilized peoples, had been ruined through careless breeding. Those who anticipated this view included Nietzsche and Kipling. The author finds the Nazi perspective best articulated by Nobel-laureate Konrad Lorenz, a member of the Nazi party and its Office for Race Policy, who believed that traits indicating genetic decline crossed species lines. He advocated correcting the alleged damage done to animals and people by civilization through eugenic controls.

Hans Fantel was entering his teens when Hitler invaded Austria in 1938. Initially, he joined his companions in celebrating. A few weeks later, however, the Gestapo came to arrest a neighbor, the lawyer Mr. Eisler. The neighbor's dog attacked the intruders and was shot. Hans Fantel was not particularly concerned about the neighbor, but he had played with the dog. The housekeeper who looked after young Hans tried to comfort him, saying, "It doesn't matter....It's a Jewish dog." As Hans pondered this, he found it made little sense. Did dogs have creeds? For the first time, he began to doubt Hitler (Fantel, 1995).

What could the housekeeper have meant by "Jewish dog"? It was probably not simply that the dog was owned by a Jew, since the Nazis generally had no hesitation about using confiscated Jewish property. That is, at any rate, certainly not how Fantel understood the phrase. Furthermore, the notion of a Jewish dog was not new. The epithet "dog" traditionally suggests contempt. Heine, the popular German-Jewish poet, had written a narrative poem entitled "Princess Sabbath" about a Jew named Israel who had to assume the form of a dog on every day but Friday (1969, pp. 263-267). Furthermore, even if the housekeeper considered the dog polluted by association with a Jew, there remained the question of why. In what, exactly, was the pollution presumed to consist?

Fantel gives us another hint as to the meaning of the housekeeper's phrase: the dog was a mongrel. The rest is not hard to imagine. The dog would have conformed to the popular stereotypes of Jews. It may have been relatively small, with irregular features. It may also have been more intelligent than strong. It would certainly have been perceived as the opposite of the heroic images of canines and lupines that were popular at the time.

The housekeeper was a person of little education. We should not generalize too much from her remark about opinion among the educational or political elites. Nevertheless, ideas do filter both "up" and "down" social and educational scales. Scholarly people might have expressed the same thing in less obvious ways. The image used by the housekeeper may, as I will show, be found in much of the popular and scientific writing of the time. Some of the same categories that were used to praise or condemn human beings were applied to animals. Wolves and large thoroughbred dogs were considered emblematic of a warrior spirit, while mongrels were ignored or despised.

Domestic and Wild

Before I embark on a study of animal symbolism in the Nazi period, a few words of caution are in order. When we use the word Nazi , the emotions that it summons can obscure all nuances. Nazi Germany has been extensively studied, but it is generally studied in isolation from what came before and what came after, as if it were an aberration. On the contrary, however, the movement epitomizes a century of terror, delusion and brutality. If we are to learn anything from the Nazi period, we must put it in historical context.

This, in turn, means that we must be willing to draw analogies and point out influences connecting Nazis with people of other times and places. To do so requires a degree of balance and perspective that is difficult to maintain. We neither can nor should strip the word Nazi of its horror 2 , but we should remember that it embraces a wide range of people, not all of whom knew about the death camps or were in a position to protest against them. The association of an idea with the Nazi movement should not, therefore, be used automatically to discredit it.

Animal psychology as a discipline grew up under the patronage of the Nazi government. So, to some extent, did the related discipline of ethology. Hardly anyone doubts their legitimacy today. This development refutes the popular presumption that association with the Nazi government rendered genuine science impossible. Scientific projects require funding; the direction of scientific research is not determined solely by disinterested pursuit of knowledge. In some cases, it is precisely this which seems to distinguish the Nazi work from science today. When, for example, the Nazi researchers conducted elaborate discussions of such topics as the capacity of lobsters to feel pain in order to devise the most humane method of killing them (Giese & Kahler, 1944), the debates may, indeed, have been conducted according to high scientific standards. Yet the focus of their concern, in a regime characterized by enormous brutality, seems so strangely selective that it seems to call the scientific nature of the investigations into question.

Although the Nazis' rhetoric, and to a great extent their ideology, was a hodge-podge of barely coherent ideas, one element in their attitudes toward both people and animals comes through with remarkable consistency. This is their scorn for individuality. A consequence of this was a shift in favor, from domestic animals, particularly pets, to wild animals. When we make animals into pets we give them a human sort of identity. Usually, we love them for their vulnerability at least as much as for their strength.

It is true that the Nazis often did keep pets, yet this was generally as representatives of a breed rather than as individuals. The favored were standardized breeds, particularly of dogs and horses. Hitler, for example, kept a number of Alsatians. Even his beloved dog Blondie was as much a prize specimen as an individual. For the Nazis, the individual, insofar as he or she merited attention, was thoroughly subordinate to the race. The race, in turn, merged mystically into the biotic community of forests and hills.

According to the biologist and educator Ferdinand Roßner, the doctrine of races ( Rassenlehre ) was the third Copernican revolution. The first was the revelation that the sun is not the center of the universe. The second was the theory of evolution, which deposed human beings from the central position. The third was the doctrine of races, which dethroned "human personality" (Roßner, 1940).

It has been seen that the Nazis favored wild animals largely because they seemed untouched by human personality. Over history, the preference for wild versus domesticated animals has often shifted with cultural trends. The indigenous warrior societies of Europe generally chose fierce predators such as the wolf and bear as their symbols, largely in order to inspire fear. This practice was later taken up by the aristocratic houses of Europe. In the Enlightenment, men and women began to prefer domesticated animals, who were felt to share the blessings of civilization. A romantic reaction followed in the work of Georges Luis Compte de Buffon, who brought the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to biology in the 18th century. Animals, Buffon believed, degenerate culturally almost automatically with domestication or even casual contact with human beings (Sax, 1990). In spite of Buffon's influence, however the preference for tame creatures remained the dominant trend until about the end of the 19th century, as expressed in countless popularizations of natural history. Animals were widely considered admirable according to the degree to which they accepted human domination, and those perceived as rebels, such as the tiger or wolf, were often demonized (Ritvo, 1987). This sort of valuation, in turn led to a sort of moral crusade for the extermination of wolves and other large predators, especially in the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries, a goal often pursued with great persistence and cruelty (Worster, 1994).

The widespread keeping of pets was a middle-class institution, established only over much opposition in the late 18th and 19th centuries (Ritvo, 1987). Nazi revulsion against this was part of a massive revolt against bourgeois culture in the early 20th century, (a movement which also embraced Bolshevism and various artistic and cultural movements). Keeping animals simply as companions involved the cultivation of softer emotions, and required a degree of security and leisure. Historically, bourgeois pet-keeping went together with such developments as emphasis on individual autonomy; an attack on it was nearly inevitable with the rise of the Nazi movement.

But in order to side with "nature" against the dangers associated with "domestication," it was necessary to reconcieve both terms. As early as the Victorian era, nature had frequently been viewed as violent, lawless and chaotic, by contrast with the order and discipline of society. The Nazis agreed that nature was violent, but otherwise, the dichotomy was reversed. Nature became a realm of absolute order, opposed to the anarchy brought on by civilization. In imposing inflexible authoritarian controls, the Nazis believed they were restoring the natural order to society. By extending centralized control almost without limits, the Nazis would abolish nature as a realm apart from civilization. In so doing, the Nazis believed, they would restore wholeness, and thereby become nature, harsh and implacable yet always orderly.

Kipling and the Fear of Decadence

For the Victorians, the subjugation of large predators often symbolized the triumph of civilization over savagery. This might be illustrated, for example, in a circus, where a muscular man in a leopard skin would crack a whip and compel large cats to obey. However, the feelings of the Victorians about civilization were ambivalent. Another side to the great pride in the accomplishments of science and technology in the late Victorian period was the fear of slackness or "decadence." Though seldom clearly defined, the concept suggested a weakness of will, sentimentality, a lack of purpose and indulgence in idle pleasures. The cure for decadence, the Victorians also supposed, was military life, which was thought to foster courage, fierceness and harsh discipline. This idea was dramatized at the end of the 19th century in the enormously popular Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling (1895), who was often called the poet of the British Empire.

The most popular stories tell of a boy named Mowgli who is adopted and raised by wolves and initiated into the society of animals. The wolves have a leader but also meet in a sort of parliamentary assembly, rather like the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain. There are checks and balances, yet it is quite clear that the author's sympathy is with the monarch, an aging wolf named Akela. Akela's authority rests on his superior abilities. The adversaries who challenge him in the assembly speak for the rabble. Lacking the strength of Akela, they use stealth and cunning. They invoke the "law of the jungle," which details how and under what conditions the leader of the pack may be deposed.

As Blount puts it, "The Jungle is essentially a place of rules and order, and the The Jungle Books are about rules and order, and about an outsider who learns to conform and to pass on to a different (and, one feels, lesser) kind of society. It becomes even more obvious that the Mowgli stories are partially disguised school or soldier stories when one thinks of the way the scout movement took them over" (1974, p. 230). Fear of decadence made Europeans look toward the rule of instinct for firmness and reliability. Seen from this perspective, authority is a natural condition which the sentimentality of a democratic age undermines. The jungle is no place for bleeding hearts; the penalty for violation of the laws is usually death.

Mowgli's greatest pleasure, like that of a sort of Nazi superman, is to fit into, and even dominate, the society of the jungle, where he is admired and feared. This sense of belonging is won not only by obeying the rules but also by killing, a rite of passage which he must constantly repeat. The forces of decadence and anarchy threaten even in the jungle. The biggest danger comes from relatives of the wolves, the red dogs or "dholes." These canids invade the jungle in huge numbers, flouting precepts and traditions. Mowgli leads the enormous pack of dholes into a trap where, together with his friends the wolves, he slaughters every member. It is hard to know whether to credit chance or poetic intuition, but the scene seems an uncanny anticipation of Nazi Germany. Kipling shows us a genocide worked by one group of canids, ostensibly law-abiding and heroic, against others who are unable to conform.

It is hard to be sure to what extent The Jungle Books may have influenced popular perception of animals, but they quickly became a huge international best-seller and were translated into all major European languages. Konrad Lorenz, who, as we shall see, became a Nazi theorist, acknowledged The Jungle Books as an early influence (1952, p. xviii). As is so often the case, artistic imagination anticipated scientific theory. As we shall see, many subsequent thinkers in the humanities and the sciences looked to wolves as a model for a warrior society.

Nietzsche and the Wild Predator

By having Mowgli outgrow the society of wolves, Kipling implicitly cautions the reader against taking his portrayal of the jungle too seriously. The tale, after all, is in the tradition of many Victorian adventures for boys, with no sex and plenty of violence. The British, with their enormous empire, were able to take their fantasies to exotic corners of the world while remaining very civilized at home. In Germany, however, this was not so easy. The nostalgia for savagery was not so readily satisfied. Almost all features of the modern world, including democracy itself, were considered decadent. One consequence was that the cult of the wild beast became especially vehement.

The Darwinian phrase, "struggle for existence," was commonly translated into German with the more severe expression, Daseinskampf (a phrase eventually echoed by Hitler in Mein Kampf ), a word that gives an impression of life as a perpetual battlefield (Bäumer, 1991, p. 64). Victory, then, may be expected to go to the finest warriors. Haeckel, the leading advocate of evolution in Germany, wrote, "A 'moral ordering' and 'a purposive plan' of the world can only be visible if the prevalence of the immoral rule of the strongest...is entirely ignored" (1900, vol. 1, p. 112).

Despite German admiration for wild beasts, it was hard not to notice that large predators were everywhere dying out. Furthermore, the most powerful people very seldom looked or acted like mighty warriors. The world of everyday observation had little to do with the martial images evoked by popular Darwinism. For many people, in consequence, the supposed "right of the strong" took on a moral aspect. The warriors, the wild predators, had been meant to rule, but they had been cheated of their patrimony.

Nietzsche, who did much to articulate the cult of predators, had little but scorn for his own era. Writing at the end of the 19th century, he divided moral systems into those of slaves and masters. The slaves, he believed, advocated pity, compassion and altruism. The masters, by contrast, celebrated sensual enjoyment and exuberant egotism, while viewing weakness with contempt. The morality of slaves, in summary, he viewed as a creed of sickness, while that of masters was one of health. In Judaism and, even more, in Christianity, the weak had triumphed over the strong.

In the natural world, the creed of the masters corresponded to wild predators, while the morality of slaves was appropriate to the life of domesticated animals and prey, associations which constantly pervade his imagery. Nietzsche longed for what he viewed as the primeval vitality of predators and gloried in their perceived cruelty. In The Genealogy of Morals , originally published in 1886, he wrote of the early warrior societies:

...[W]e are the first to admit that anyone who knew these "good" ones only as enemies would find them evil enemies indeed. For these same men...who are so resourceful in consideration, tenderness, loyalty, pride and friendship...once they step outside their circle become little better than uncaged beasts of prey. Once abroad in the wilderness, they revel in the freedom from social constraint and compensate for their long confinement in the quietude of their community. They revert to the innocence of wild animals: we can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape, and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank -- convinced, moreover, that the poets for a long time to come will have something to sing about and to praise. Deep within these noble races there lurks the beasts of prey, intent on spoil and conquest. This hidden urge has to be satisfied from time to time, the beast let loose in the wilderness. This goes for the Roman, Arabian, German, Japanese nobility as for the Homeric heroes and the Scandinavian Vikings 3 . (Nietzsche, 1956, pp. 174-175) 

Nietsche believed that the "Teutonic blond beast" still inspired terror in Europeans, though he added that the racial connection to the ancient Germans had been lost.

"One might be justified," he continued, "in fearing the wild beast lurking within all noble races and in being on one's guard against it, but who would not a thousand times prefer fear when it is accompanied by admiration to security accompanied by the loathsome sight of perversion, dwarfishness, degeneracy? And is that not our predicament today?" (p. 176).

The frequent allusions to beasts of prey and wild animals are highly abstract, as might be expected from a person who had probably never seen a large predator outside a zoo. Nietzsche does not even find it necessary to specify which beast of prey he refers to, assuming an essential similarity among wolves, bears, lions, eagles and others. The imagery is only understandable within the context of Victorian thought, in which people and animals were generally in a continuum of savagery and civilization. Never questioning the appropriateness of these categories, Nietzsche simply reversed their most conventional valuation, celebrating savagery and scorning the decadence of civilization.

In his final book, The Will to Power , Nietzsche makes the identification between civilization of human beings and domestication of animals even more explicit. Like many of his contemporaries, he interpreted the theory of Darwin as one of inevitable evolutionary progress, an idea which he rejected as sentimental. Rather, in his view, evolution was purposeless and chaotic. The more complex or "higher" forms were actually more prone to decay than others, and to retain their superiority required an effort of will. Rather than an extension of biological progress, civilization, particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition, was an expression of decline:

The domestication [the "culture"] of man does not go deep -- where it does go deep it at once becomes degeneration [type: the Christian]. The "savage" [or, in moral terms, the evil man] is a return to nature -- and in a certain sense his recovery, his cure from "culture." (1968, fragment #684).

The strong, in Nietsche's view, derived their superiority from their closeness to the natural world, yet this conferred no evolutionary advantage. On the contrary, the richness of their gifts made them vulnerable, and they had to be defended against the guile and cunning of the weak.

Nietzschean rhetoric about "man as predator" and "the blond beast" became common during the Weimar Republic and the Nazi period (Glaser, 1964, pp. 123-130; Herf, 1993, pp. 65-66, 100). These epithets were remarkably vague, but the cult of predators was clearly very selective. Nobody ever thought of "man the predator" as a crocodile, a frog, a rat or a hyena. The only creatures that seemed to meet the image were large mammals which, ironically, had sometimes been partially domesticated.

Konrad Lorenz: The Theory of "Entropy"

While Nietzsche was often hailed as a prophet, it took later thinkers to give his ideas about domestication the authority of science. The identification between civilization of human beings and domestication of animals was probably first given the authority of science by Eugen Fischer, one of the fathers of Nazi "racial hygiene," who argued that the distinguishing characteristics of human races were the same as mutations in domesticated animals (1914, pp. 488-490; Lorenz, 1942, pp. 293-4, 400). This observation provided a foundation for subsequent generalizations embracing animals and human beings.

The study of animal psychology emerged as a distinct discipline when the German Society for Animal Psychology was founded in Berlin on January 10, 1936. This established an academic network and a journal, Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie , in which matters of animal behavior might be reviewed and discussed, all under the sponsorship of the Nazi government (Kalikova, 1980). The first issue, published in 1937, contained articles by Karl von Frisch, Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who would share a Nobel Prize in 1973 4 . Other authors represented in the issue would also go on to have distinguished careers, both during and after the Nazi period.

Like most Nazi publications intended partially for export, this journal was not filled with chauvinistic or anti-Semitic rhetoric. The articles were largely technical. Nevertheless, the political dimension of the journal came through clearly. It closed, for example, with a report of the February 1937 meeting of the German Society of Animal Psychology, with officials as well as scientists in attendance. "The chair concluded the series of lectures at the first annual meeting of the German Society of Animal Psychology," the report stated, "with the praise of our Führer, the warm-hearted patron of German science" (Effertz, 1937, p. 191).

Some contributors to the journal may have been apolitical scientists who wished to advance their research and were not very concerned about the source of their funding. This was not, however, the case with Lorenz, one of the editors of the journal. Putting his research in the service of the government ideology, he soon emerged from relative obscurity to become a leader of a new field 5 .

In 1938, immediately after the Nazis took over Austria, Lorenz joined the Nazi party. Shortly afterwards, he was given funding by Minister of Education Bernard Rust to start his own research institute at the Institute for Comparative Psychology at Albertus University in Königsberg (Kalikowa, 1980; Lorenz, 1942). Convinced that the human race faced possible extinction through genetic decline, he developed an elaborate theory which attempted to justify eugenic measures through analogies with domesticated animals.

An early comprehensive expression of this is a 1940 article entitled, "Durch Domestikation verursachte Störungen aerteignen Verhaltens" ( Disturbance of Characteristic Behaviors through Domestication ). Lorenz' starting point was the Nietzschean equation between civilization of human beings and domestication of animals. For Nietzsche, the comparison had been largely intuitive, but Lorenz attempted to put it on an empirical basis. He argued that the two processes, civilization and domestication, produce precisely the same patterns.

The period prior to civilization, in his view, was difficult but noble:

In prehistoric times when small clans in wide territories that were thinly populated by their own kind had, with great effort, to combat hunger, cold, predators and barbarians," he wrote, "all those qualities that we regard as beautiful, good, heroic and honorable possessed a high value in terms of natural selection. A tribe whose members were not always ready to stand up for one another, whose parenting was inadequate or which who showed a disturbance in other inborn social behaviors was consigned to extinction, as is the case today with all wild animals. (Lorenz, 1940a, p. 67)

But the comfort and security of civilization soon led to genetic decline.

When animals are domesticated, Lorenz argued, natural selection no longer works. While irregularities are generally eliminated through natural selection in the wild, they are prized for their novelty or their cuteness by human owners. The result is a proliferation of forms, which contrasts with the consistency of the features found in wild animals. Since external characteristics are linked with emotional reactions, such irregularity in appearance entails a comparable disturbance in instinctive behavior. Lorenz invariably found this to be the case in practice. Precisely the same pattern, he believed, could be observed among men and women in the big city, where one also observed a vast range of physical forms and behaviors.

This Lorenz called "entropy," the decay of a complex and highly differentiated form into increasingly random variations. It signaled genetic decline similar to that found among domesticated animals, and it should be regarded as an illness (Lorenz, 1940a, p. 69; Deichmann, 1996, p. 189). In the short run, entropy meant things like social breakdown and disease. People would lose the instincts that inhibited violent behavior and indiscriminate breeding, and they would not care properly for their young. Entropy would mean human extinction if not checked in time. Lorenz conceded that, in his capacity as a scientist, he was not authorized to make value judgements. He noted, however, that human beings have an instinctive revulsion against this entropy of higher and more complex forms. The instinct might also be lost eventually, as human beings were bred to prefer decadence and degeneration.

He also discussed several characteristics which he believed could be found among both human beings in civilization and animals in domestication. The physical characteristics found in both included, for example, rounded heads (Mopsköpfe), shortened extremities, and limp bellies. The mental characteristics included dulled reactions, lack of feeling, and heightened sexuality (Lorenz, 1940a). Lorenz supported his view with 35 illustrations, the great majority of which contrasted racial health and degeneration in various pairs of animals and of human beings. Though Lorenz did not make the connection explicit, the description of the "civilized" man corresponded very closely to contemporary caricatures of Jews, for example in the famous cartoons by Julius Streicher.

The Nazis did not simply consider the Jews an "inferior" race. They were, the regime maintained, not an authentic people at all (Aycoberry, 1981, p. 5). According to the Nazis, the Jews could not be a distinct race, since they were allegedly so mixed that they had lost any primordial identity (Kittle, 1939; Weinreich, 1946). Like gypsies, they did not have a single territory, and so they were not integrated into any sort of landscape (biotic community or organische Lebensgemeinschaft ). Their instincts, reportedly, had degenerated, and, lacking any sense of shame, they would indulge in indiscriminate promiscuity (Stengel, 1938. They represented, in other words, the entropy or degeneration which the Nazis believed was a result of urbanization and miscegenation.

Every degenerate animal was, as Hans Fantel's housekeeper put it, a sort of "Jewish dog." The following description by Lorenz is typical:

With phenotypic inferiority the refined modes of social behavior are disturbed far earlier and far more seriously than the outward appearance. One can predict with absolute certainty of a crooked-legged, pot-bellied, pale-beaked grey goose, such as is all too easily produced through careless breeding, that its social behavior will be other than normal. With the pure-blooded wild goose the view of the old Greeks that a handsome man can never be bad and an ugly man can never be good is fully valid. This, however, is unfortunately no longer the case even with the most racially homogeneous European peoples. I imagine that even by the time of the Classical Greeks it was no longer fully the case. But inborn patterns that are deeply imbedded in genetic inheritance are far, far older than all traditional cultures, so it required great, indeed geological spans of time to adjust to things like the separation of the original unity of those signals which indicate goodness and beauty. (Lorenz, 1940a, pp. 58-59)

Lorenz' letters to his mentor, Oscar Heinroth (who did not share Lorenz' Nazi sympathies) are full of anti-Semitic asides, and on one occasion in 1939 Lorenz refers to the "ugly Jewish nose" of the shoveler duck (Klopfer, 1994, pp. 204-5).

Lorenz believed it was imperative to institute aggressive measures before decline became fully irreversible. His solution was drawn from domestication. Just as degeneration could be prevented in animals by making them conform to a standardized breed (Lorenz 1940a), it could also be prevented in people through eugenic measures 6.

In another article from the same year Lorenz developed this idea further, and voiced eugenic ambitions far beyond those even of Hitler or Himmler. Not content with creating a master race, he spoke of creating a new species. Our instincts, he believed, lead us on to ever higher biological forms, provided we have the will to stop indiscriminate or careless breeding. Identifying the theory of evolution with National Socialism, he urged that the necessity for this selectivity be reinforced in young people through education. Lorenz even proposed a new morality in which the Golden Rule would be replaced by his maxim, "You shall love the future of your Volk above all else" (Lorenz, 1940b p. 32).

Parts of these articles by Lorenz, together with additional materials, were incorporated into a 1942 book-length work entitled Die angeborener Formen möglicher Erfahrung (The Innate Forms of Possible Experience), an essay so ambitious it might be called a "scientific theory of everything." A vast range of social and biological phenomena were reduced to instinctive reactions. A similar range of social and ethical recommendations revolved around the demand that only those with the appropriate instincts be allowed to reproduce. Lack of patriotic enthusiasm, for example, Lorenz viewed as a mark of an "instinctual cripple" (1942, p. 388). The struggle against entropy in human beings he saw as an aspect of a battle of harmonious form against chaos and decay throughout the universe. The creation of new forms through controlled evolution was like the work of an artist creating beauty (1942).

Wolf and Jackal

The Nazi regime, proclaimed to last a thousand years, survived barely more than a decade. This was not enough time for the cult of the wolf, implicit in much of the Nazi literature, to be fully articulated. The cult outlasted the regime, to reappear from time to time in the popular and even the scientific literature of Germany and other countries. This theme provides a striking illustration of the limits of scientific objectivity, as well as the enormous power of animal symbolism to guide, and sometimes overwhelm, observation.

In King Solomon's Ring (1952), Lorenz gives the cult of the wolf perhaps its most articulate formulation. Lorenz stated as fact a previously little-known theory of the dual origin of the modern dog (Mech, 1970), domesticated from the lineage of the Mesopotamian jackal, and the Northern Wolf, called by Lorenz "aureus dogs" and "lupus dogs" respectively. This corresponds to racialist theories of the Semitic and Aryan races. The parallelism goes much further. Lorenz' descriptions were filled with romantic rhetoric reminiscent of the Nazi period. "The wolf packs," he declared, "roam far and wide through the forests of the North and as a sworn and very exclusive band which sticks together through thick and thin and whose members will defend each other to the very death" (1952, p. 119). Anyone familiar with the Nazi period will recognize here a canine equivalent of the idealized descriptions of primeval Aryan tribes, whose putative qualities the Nazis and other nationalists endeavored to emulate. The jackals and their descendants were, Lorenz claimed, not so much oriented toward the pack as solitary animals. While capable of absolute obedience, they were lacking in the deeper traits of loyalty and affection. This corresponded to anti-Semitic propaganda which described Jews as superficially clever but lacking emotional refinement and creativity 7 . In accord with his earlier theory about the difference between the races -- human and animal -- of North and South, Lorenz attributed the "infantile" character of aureus dogs to "age-old domestication" (1952, pp. 120-121).

Nazi theoreticians tended to regard the individual as an extension of the biotic community. Much volkish thought derived the essence of a people from the landscape in which they lived. One scientist, for example, argued that there was a northern and a southern psychology which crossed species lines. To demonstrate this, he studied chickens in northern and southern Europe, observing such matters as the speed with which they picked up grain and the colors to which they responded, and compared their mental profiles with those of the people who lived alongside them. The conclusion was that the races of chickens paralleled those of human beings (Jaensch, 1939).

On similar grounds, Jews, as people of the desert, were considered spiritually barren, while Germans, as people of the forest, were considered profound, mysterious and oriented toward the light (Mosse, 1965; Herf, 1993). Lorenz suggested that the contrast between the populations, both human and animal, of the north and the south was the same as that between wildness and domestication. This prompted Jaensch, author of the article on chickens, to remark that Lorenz's idea "must absolutely be investigated and can further research into both animals and questions of race in human beings. The Northern Movement (National Socialism and related trends) is indeed without doubt also a protest against the damage done by domestication among people of culture" (Jaensch, 1939). It is possible that Lorenz was not conscious of this background when he wrote of lupus and aureus dogs, but his idea shows how a perceptual structure associated with the Nazi period survived the collapse of the regime.

A Fight among Wolves

The climax of King Solomon's Ring comes at the end, where Lorenz drops his folksy demeanor to present a description of a battle between wolves, taken from an earlier article (1942). When two dogs or wolves fight, the defeated one offers his neck to the other:

A dog or wolf that offers its neck to its adversary in this way will never be seriously bitten. The other growls and grumbles, snaps with his teeth in the empty air and even carries out, without delivering so much as a bite, the movement of shaking something to death in the empty air. However, this strange inhibition from biting persists only as long as the defeated dog or wolf maintains his attitude of humility" (Lorenz, 1952, p. 188).

The dramatic tension of the passage makes it stand out and, from a literary perspective, this is by far the book's most impressive section. Despite Lorenz's frequent use of illustrations, he did not provide a picture of this event. Furthermore, the two warring canids in contrast to most of the animals in his book, are never individualized, much less named. The lack of specificity gives the passage an almost mythic quality. Lorenz seems here to revert to his Nazi past. But his interpretation of events may be nothing more than an excellent piece of science fiction.

As in his previous discussion, Lorenz uses this as an example of how instinctive reactions, which he states can be lost through genetic decline, are necessary to prevent killing. He finds that among "higher" animals, the vanquished signify submission by offering the most vulnerable part of their bodies to the victor, thus releasing an inhibiting mechanism (Lorenz, 1952, p. 194). He later repeats the observation concerning fighting wolves in his well-known book On Aggression , adding that he has observed this phenomenon not once but many times (Lorenz, 1974).

One of the features that Lorenz shared with others in the Nazi movement was an extreme biological determinism. His theory of imprinting ( Prägung ) held that behavior was inherited, not only as a general tendency but in the form of precise and elaborate patterns (Deichmann, 1996). In his studies of wolves, Schenkel maintained that although such patterns were found in the behavior of birds and reptiles, the responses of mammals were too variable and subtle to be described in such a way (1947). Though he did not allude explicitly to Schenkel, Lorenz's observation about wolves was probably intended as a refutation, a demonstration that wolves did indeed inherit intricate social interactions.

Schenkel disputed Lorenz's observation. In an article published in 1967 in The American Zoologist , he stated that Lorenz had misinterpreted the wolves' behavior, perhaps confusing victor and vanquished. "It is always the inferior wolf," Schenkel wrote, "who has his jaws near the neck of his opponent" (p. 320). The apparent posture of submission was actually one of readiness to attack. More significantly, Schenkel challenged the basic concept of submission. Submission did not occur in a truly serious fight, he maintained, which would end in either death, mutilation, or flight. Rather, submission was found only in minor or ritualized fighting, where the conflict was mediated by affection.

To my knowledge, Lorenz did not reply, and subsequent research has generally confirmed Schenkel's view (Mech, 1970). Additional support for Schenkel comes from Lorenz's original description of the lupine confrontation, since he says that the wolf that has not bared his neck, supposedly victorious, is actually the one to leave the scene of the confrontation (1942). Common sense suggests that this is not a sign of victory but of retreat.

If, indeed, the criticism directed at Lorenz is correct, he has made a serious error in a matter on which he chose to place emphasis. How could such a mistake have been made by such a competent, if overrated, observer of animals? The desire to confirm his philosophical expectations must have led him astray. Wolves, with their relationships structured by unambiguous gestures of authority and submission, became, like the Nazis, strictly hierarchal within their society and potentially ruthless toward those outside.

Conclusion

Long rumored, Lorenz's Nazi involvement has been gradually documented over the past decade. Particularly significant are the recent revelations by Deichmann in Biologists under Hitler . Lorenz not only joined the Nazi party but was also a member of its Office for Race Policy. In 1942, he participated in a study of 877 offspring of mixed German-Polish marriages to determine their potential for assimilation into German culture. Those considered asocial or of inferior genetic value were sent to concentration camps, while others were sent away to be "Germanized" (1996, pp. 193-197, 323).

Lorenz never unequivocally repudiated or even acknowledged his Nazi past, though he did revise many of his ideas. Even his subsequent work, however, was built on the foundation of his writings under the Nazi government. His popularizations such as King Solomon's Ring (1952) consisted, as we have seen, primarily of ideas and observations that he first published in journals during the Third Reich. These popularizations enabled researchers to cite Lorenz without encountering the most sordid aspects of his past.

It is hard to see how Lorenz could have been awarded the Nobel prize if the committee had read his articles published during the late '30s and early '40s. This is not to deny that these articles contain valuable ideas and information. However, in addition to supporting Nazi policies, they use methods of argument which are dubious. Straying from scientific matters, Lorenz addressed a vast range of social and philosophical questions. Not only did he regularly falsify quotations (Deichmann, 1996), but he was not above calling people who disagreed with him "instinctual cripples," who were genetically unfit to reproduce (Lorenz, 1940b, p. 31; Lorenz, 1942, p. 338). Such an allegation would have been serious indeed in a regime which practiced involuntary sterilization and worse.

The continuity in Lorenz's career may be due to the concept of wildness which, at least in his Nazi period, was a foundation of his thinking. That quality become, for Lorenz, a condition that could only be reestablished by instituting stricter controls. The program he put forward was nothing less than to extend technocratic regulation to a point where the breeding and future evolution of the human species would be directed by experts. As the state appropriated the full power of the natural world, the effects of "domestication" would be overcome.

The notion sounds paradoxical, yet perhaps we ought not to be surprised. As scholars increasingly realize, the concept of "wildness," including that of predators, has always been largely a creation of human culture. The attempt to create wildness through elaborate eugenic controls was merely taking this concept to its ultimate conclusion. It might be compared with the artificial wildness of contemporary zoos and safari parks, where the demand for authenticity becomes the basis for increasingly complex manipulation.

Finally, the origins of the discipline of animal psychology (and, to an extent, of the related discipline of ethology) under the patronage of National Socialism merits further attention. Study will be needed to ascertain to what extent these origins may have influenced the central concepts of the disciplines. It seems likely that the projection of features of the Nazi state onto animals goes far beyond the work of Lorenz. The emphasis of researchers on such features as hierarchy and domination certainly suggests this.

Notes

1. Correspondence may be addressed to Boria Sax, 25 Franklin Avenue, 2F, White Plains, NY 10601. E- mail: VogelGreif@aol.com. I would like to thank James Serpell, Andrew Rowan and Peter Klopfer who read early versions of this manuscript and offered valuable suggestions and information. I have not always taken their advice, and responsibility for any errors is my own

2. Inevitably, however, as we get further from the period, the horror surrounding it will continue to fade. This process is accelerated by the use of it as a background in entertainments from melodramatic adventures to pornography.

3. It is hard to know whether it is accident or intuitive foresight, but the list of noble races contains the entire Axis.

4. In contrast to Lorenz, both Frisch and Tinbergen experienced serious harassment and repression during the Third Reich. After a protracted controversy, Frisch was deprived of his university position because of allegations that he was one quarter Jewish (Deichmann, 1996, pp. 40-48). Tinbergen was briefly incarcerated in connection with protests at the University of Leiden (Deichmann, 1996, pp. 200-205).

5. For further discussion of Lorenz's work as a member of the Nazi party, see Kalikova, 1980; Lerner, 1992, pp. 51-89; Bäumer, 1992, pp. 121-125, pp. 200-202; Deichmann, 1996, pp. 178-205; Friedlander, 1995, pp. 126-127.

6. Many specialists now believe the opposite is true. Standardized breeds of dogs, for example, are likely to suffer many physical problems as a result of generations of inbreeding. Furthermore, researchers emphasize the value of genetic variation rather than homogeneity in populations of both wild and domesticated animals.

7. Even Lorenz eventually abandoned the theory of the dual origin of the domestic dog (Mech, 1970, p. 38).

References

Aycoberry, P. (1981). The Nazi question: An essay on the interpretations of national socialism (1922-1975) . (R. Hurley, Trans.) New York: Pantheon.

Bäumler, Ä. (Ed.) (1990) NS-Biologie . Stuttgart: S. Hirzel.

Blount, M. (1974). Animal land: The creatures of children's fiction . New York: Avon.

Deichmann, U. (1996). Biologists under Hitler . (T. Dunlap, Trans.) Cambridge: Harvard University.

Effertz, J. (1937). Bericht über die jahrestagung. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 1 , 189-191.

Fantel, M. (1995) I once admired Hitler. The New York Times . April 30, E15.

Fischer, E. (1914). Die rassenmerkmale des menschen als domestikationerscheinungen. Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie, XVIII , 479-524.

Friedlander, H. (1995). The origins of Nazi genocide: From euthanasia to the final solution . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.

Giese & Kahler (1944). Das Deutsche Tierschutzrecht: Bestimmungen zum Schutz der Tiere . Berlin: Duncker and Humbolt.

Glaser, H. (1964). Spießer-Ideologie: Von der Zerstöung des Deutschen Geistes im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert . Freiburg: Rombach.

Haeckel, E. (1900). The evolution of man: A popular exposition of the principal points of human ontogeny and phylogeny (2 vols.) Arkron: Werner.

Heine, H. (1969). The poetry of Heinrich Heine (A. Kramer, Trans). New York: Citadel.

Herf, J. (1993). Reactionary modernism: Technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich . New York: Cambridge University.

Hesse, H. (1919). Der wolf. In Soffel, Karl & Klabund, Der Tierkreis: Das Tier in der Dichtung aller Völker und Zeiten (pp. 316-318). Berlin: Erich Reiss.

Jaensch, E. R. (1939). Der hühnerhof als forschungs- und aufklärungsmittel in menschlichen rassenfragen. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 2 , 223-258.

Kalikowa, T. J. (1980). Die ethologische theorie von Konrad Lorenz: erklärung und ideologie, 1938 bis 1943. In Mehrtens, Herbert & Steffen Richter (Eds). Naturwissenschaft Technik und NS Ideologie: Beiträge zur Wissenschaft des Dritten Reichs . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Kipling, R. (1895). The two jungle books . Garden City, NY: The Sun Dial Press.

Kittel, G. (1939). Die Historische Voraussetzung der Jüdischen Rassenmischung . Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt (Schriften des Reichsinstituts für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands).

Klopfer, P. (1994). "Konrad Lorenz and the national socialists: on the politics of ethology." International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 7 , 4, 202-208.

Lehrner, R. M. (1992). Final solutions: Biology, prejudice and genocide . College Park, PA: Pennsylvania State. {OK? I dont' know "university park" }

Lorenz, K. Z. (1995). Man meets dog (M. K. Wilson, Trans.).

Middlesex, Great Britain: Penguin Books.

Lorenz, K. Z. (1952). King Solomon's ring: New light on animal ways (M. K. Wilson, Trans.). New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

Lorenz, K. Z. (1943). Die angeborener Formen möglicher Erfahrung. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 5 , 2, 235-409.

Lorenz, K. Z. (1940a). Durch Domestikation verursachte Störungen arteigenen Verhaltens. Zeitschrif für angewandte Psychologie und Charakterkunde . [DATES?}

Lorenz, K. Z. (1940b). Nochmals: Systematik und Entwicklungsgedanke im Unterricht. Der Biologe, 1 , 2, 24-36.

Mech, D. L. (1970). The wolf: The ecology and behavior of an endangered species . Garden City, NY: American Museum of Natural History.

Mosse, G. L. (1964). The crisis of German ideology: Intellectual origins of the Third Reich . New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

Nietzsche, F. (1956). The birth of tragedy and the genealogy of morals (F. Golffing, Trans.). New York: Doubleday

Nietzsche, F. (1968). The will to power (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). New York: Vintage.

Ritvo, H. (1987). The animal estate: The English and other creatures in the Victorian age . Cambridge: Harvard University.

Roßner, F. (1940). Systematik und Entwicklungsgedanke im Unterricht. Der Biologe, 8 , 2, 366-377.

Schenkel, R. (1947). Ausdrucks-Studien an Wölfen: Gefangenschafts-Beobachtungen . Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Schenkel, R. (1967). Submission: its features and function in the wolf and dog. The American Zoologist, 7 , 319-329.

Stengel (1938). Sittliche Entartung und Geburtenschwund. Der Biologe, 7 , 5, 164-5.

Worster, D. (1995). Nature's economy: A history of ecological ideas . New York: Cambridge University.

Weinreich, M. (1946). Hitler's professors: The part of scholarship in Germany's crimes against the Jewish people . New York: Yiddish Scientific Institute.

For abstracts of all issues, including the most current, click Article Abstracts.

To order Society & Animals Journal, go to our secure online ordering page

You can Search the online issues of Society & Animals, as well as the entire Society & Animals Forum ( formally PSYETA) website,
for topics and keywords of your interest: