Dictatorship and Worldview: Monism in East Germany

In 1945, the birthplace of modern monism – understood narrowly as the worldview movement launched by the Jena zoologist Ernst Haeckel – fell into the Soviet sphere of influence. The regime established there was arguably a worldview dictatorship. This worldview is cursorily called “Marxist-Leninist” and often explained by historians as a consequence of "Sovietization". This presentation will question this analysis by examining instead the endogenous, non-Marxist roots of the ruling worldview. For it was precisely the German working-class culture that was influenced like no other in Europe by monistic popular scientific education. It is no coincidence that Walter Ulbricht, the first leader of East Germany, grew up in a freethinking milieu and devoured the works of Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel as a youth. Like Ulbricht, a whole generation of future communist leaders in Germany and in the Russia drew its early political inspiration not just from the works of Marx, Engels and Kautsky, but from the popular scientific penny brochures about the newest discoveries of natural science. The monist worldview contained in these writings was essentially nationalized with the founding of SED regime in 1949. The new state established a host of popular scientific institutions and journals. It adopted a secular version of the Christian confirmation – the Jugendweihe –that had been developed by monist freethinkers prior to the First World War. This presentation will first make connections between turn-of-the-century worldview movements and the East German state. It will then examine how monism and popular science served legitimatory functions, before turning to the problem of the compatibility of Haeckelian monism with Marxist dialectic. Finally it will bring in some examples from the USSR to argue that the monist project of natural scientific popularization requires us to rethink the content and role of worldview in the study of societies of the Soviet type.