The Hugo Valentin Lecture 2008: Professor Claudia Koonz

How Racism Became Respectable: Explorations of Nazi Public Culture

Professor Claudia Koonz

Duke University, N.C.

The sixth Hugo Valentin Memorial Lecture is given by Professor of History Claudia Koonz, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. She has published several award-winning studies of social life and public culture in National Socialist Germany. The evening's lecture deals with German intellectuals and their role in the moral transformation process that took place in the country during Nazi rule. In just a few years, German society changed from having been a comparatively tolerant state to one in which Jews and other branded groups were deprived of rights and property, persecuted and finally murdered on a massive scale. Koonz has charted how scientists, artists, and other authorities and professionals, by working in accordance with and giving prominence to the new political ideals, actively contributed to the gradual and ultimately fatal dehumanization. It was largely due to the actions of these key figures that chauvinistically based racial beliefs were able to be heard and appear as socially beneficial for a majority of the German population and thus lay the basis for the implementation of the Nazi policy of mass murder.

Koonz became internationally known for the acclaimed survey Mothers in the Fatherland. Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York 1987), which i.a. examined the response to Nazism among women in Germany. Much attention was also paid to the groundbreaking study of the racist Nazi self-understanding, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass. 2003). Koonz is also the author of a thesis on the German industrialist and politician Walther Rathenau, who was assassinated in his post as foreign minister by anti-Semitic right-wing radicals in 1922. In research in recent years, Koonz has studied the forms of ethnic fear that surround the use of the headscarf among Muslim women when it is touched upon in the media and public in countries in Western Europe.