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The Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851–1955 by Egbert Klautke (review)

The Mind of the Nation: Volkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851-1955, by Egbert Klautke. New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2073. vii, 788. $72.00 US (cloth). This concise and lucid book makes the case that scholars have consistently mischaracterized and unappreciated Volkerpsychologie, a now obscure but once robust set of approaches to understanding national or collective psychology. The idea that there is a German character, an "Austrian Mind," or a French soul seems naive if not downright childish today, but these notions are merely a cartoonish version of more nuanced ideas, which, as Egbert Klautke argues, trace back to mid-nineteenth-century attempts to establish a science of national or collective psychology involving the rigorous study of people as members of national groups. Klautke's project is to explicate these ideas, place them in their intellectual and political historical contexts, and argue for their ongoing relevance. He fulfills these tasks admirably and for the most part persuasively. The first issue to sort out in a discussion of Volkerpsychologie is how to define and translate this unwieldy term. If Klautke's protagonists had had their way and succeeded in establishing it as a discipline, indeed as the queen of the nascent social sciences, these questions would be moot today. However, this is a story of failure, and there are no departments of Volkerpsychologie in Germany or anywhere else, nor are there professional journals, endowed chairs, scientific societies, or annual meetings. So what was Volkerpsychologie? On its most literal level, as Klautke shows, it would be translated as "psychology of peoples," but that term finds little resonance among English speakers. Folk psychology, the translation Klautke falls back on, sounds better but renders the plural Volker into the singular folk and thus has slightly different connotations. Ethnic psychology, social psychology, and ethnic anthropology are all close but likewise flawed. Another variant, race psychology, obscures more than it clarifies because of the shifting meanings of race from the nineteenth century through the Nazi period and indeed because of Volkerpsychologie's eventual accommodation with the Nazi regime. Finally, there is the problem that the authors and practitioners of this course of study regularly changed their minds about its core mission, and it meant something slightly different in the three contexts that form the core of this book. Klautke's first chapter concerns the creation of academic Volkerpsychologie by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal. In 1859 the two scholars launched the Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal of Folk Psychology and Linguistics), and the journal's twenty-year lifespan corresponded with the height of optimism about Jewish emancipation and social acceptance in Germany. Volkerpsychologie reflected this optimism, seeing the nation not as a fixed racial or ethnic entity, but as voluntaristic, open-ended, and evolving. Volkerpsychologie aimed to be an objective, scientific approach to understanding the spirit or essence of nations through the tools of linguistics, history, and anthropology, yet could never free itself of teleological thinking whereby Europe, and Germany in particular, was both the template for national development and the standard of cultural achievement. Interestingly, as German nationalism became more exclusive and xenophobic amid the anti-Semitic wave of the 1880s, Lazarus reoriented his method from valorizing the German people to extolling the Jews, whose synthesis of German Bildung with Jewish ethics, he believed, represented the height of human achievement. …