10. The Fall of the Nordic
Master Race
It was Carl Oscar Eugen Arbo who, with his anthropological surveys of Norwegian soldiers of the late 1880s, laid the foundation for physical anthropological research in Norway. Arbo also helped reinvigorate the notion of Norwegian nationhood centred upon the idea of a Nordic or Germanic master race and turned himself into a spokesperson for racist views on hisotry and society. Inspired by Otto Ammon, Arbo explained social and cultural differences in Norwegian society as the product of social selection resulting from the struggle for survival between inferior and superior races. These ideas remained highly controversial among scholars both in Norway and abroad, but they were still accepted within Norwegian academia as scientifically valid. The Norwegian government funded Arbo’s racial research, as well as Andreas M. Hansen’s work towards a grand synthesis of national history based on Ammon and Georges Vacher de Lapouge’s racial ideas. These ideas were also discussed at meetings of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and Arbo and Hansen’s works were published through recognised academic channels.
The concept of the superior Nordic race maintained its scientific legitimacy well into the interwar years, influencing discussions about national identity and becoming a key issue in the Norwegian debate over eugenics. Even though Halfdan Bryn may seem like an academic with extreme ideas, he was arguably nothing more than a very consistent advocate of theories that had circulated within Norwegian academia for decades. It was only in the aftermath of the conflict between Kristian Emil Schreiner and Bryn in the late 1920s that the notion of the superior Nordic race was seriously contested and finally downgraded to an unscientific idea. But how do we explain the demise of such an established scientific concept?
Racism in science has often been portrayed as the influence of commonly-held prejudices, prejudices that in the long run have been unmasked through growing scientific insights. The history of physical anthropology bears witness to a more complex relationship between prejudice and scientific knowledge. Scientists were not simply influenced by commonly-held racist attitudes. The reverse was also true; racism had an impact on society because it was legitimised by science. Such interdependence was to some extent implicit and subliminal. Scholars, like anyone else, were influenced by ubiquitous racial ideas, and the dominant scientific ‘truths’ helped shape ordinary notions of race. However, there was also a very explicit and direct interconnection between science and ideology: political ideologies, such as ‘the Nordic idea’, could be directly legitimised with the help of scientific knowledge.
In the anthropological study of race, ideological and scientific issues were often interwoven. Many of the scientists presented in this book offered scientific arguments to public debate and political life. Most of them did not merely use such arguments as rhetorical tools for achieving political goals; they also felt it was their duty to enlighten the public, and that natural science was to guide people's lives and society's structure. Central to their worldview was the idea of a naturally-progressing social, cultural and biological evolution. Everything that was in line with evolution was see as positive, and everything that deviated from evolution was considered negative. They thus had a double justification for claiming a privileged position for scientists in setting the agenda for the development of society. Scientist had privileged insights into the nature of human evolution and its driving forces, and at the same time positioned themselves at the top of the evolutionary hierarchyand at the forefront of human progress.
The idea of the superior Nordic race was one version of this worldview. It presupposed that Europeans could be ranked in a hierarchy of races, with the Nordics at its pinnacle. According to this worldview, Western civilisation was the product of the inheritable qualities of the Nordic race, and the future evolution of civilisation depended upon the expansion of this race. Throughout the period we have studied, some anthropologists embraced these ideas and claimed that they were based on science, while others dismissed them as unscientific. Both sides felt that it was their professional responsibility to enlighten the public as they believed that society should be organised on scientific knowledge about human nature. However, this was a two-way relationship: their scientific worldview influenced their ideals and outlook on society, while their engagement in cultural, societal and political struggles shaped their research.
In order to understand the relationship between racial science and society, this book has examined the shifting ways in which the boundary between science and non-science was constructed. Who had the authority to define scientific truths about ‘race’ and on what grounds? In order to speak about race with scientific authority, scientists would first had to be well-versed in the physical-anthropological research tradition; in order to gain scientific acceptance for specific racial ideas, a scientist had to ensure that these were based on empirical data obtained by acknowledged methods and interpreted in accordance with existing anthropological theories.
Physical anthropology was an arena for scientific debates on human biology, evolution and race, and these debates were often charged with political and ideological meaning. Despite their differing theoretical orientations and ideological stances, however, physical anthropologists still shared a frame of reference. They had a mutual scientific interest in the classification of human races and the mapping of the biological history of humankind, and they often used a common set of methods. Of particular importance for the discipline was the development of an increasing range of methods for measuring and quantifying characteristics, leading to an ever-expanding store of meticulously gathered empirical data. Anthropologists were involved in the mapping of human variation, and each new piece of research added fresh data to this collective undertaking.
By the time Halfdan Bryn and the two Schreiners began their racial studies of the Norwegian population, anthropologists had been piling up huge numbers of descriptions of human bodies for almost half a century. Bryn and Kristian Emil Schreiner saw it as part of their task to add to this stock of data, and their collaboration was based on the belief that these data were merely descriptive entities. Rudolf Martin’s textbook represented their starting point. According to Martin, anthropology’s main goal was to produce neutral descriptions of the variations in bodily characteristics between different human groups. The notion that anthropology was a descriptive science, however, was largely a delusion, since the very selection of the ‘traits’ listed in anthropologists' typologies was based on the fact that there existed techniques to describe them. These techniques had been created as part of changing and often incompatible theories on heritability, brain anatomy and evolution. They amassed over the years like archaeological layers in the discipline’s warehouse of methods. Progressively their original meaning was lost: a criterion for racial classification that had been established on the grounds of one set of biological theories might later acquire new meaning in the light of new scientific beliefs, or be regarded as an objective description of an existing trait.
The cephalic index provides the best example of this phenomenon. It was invented by Anders Retzius in the 1840s and remained in use until World War II. After the war, the dominant theories of heredity and evolution underwent a complete transformation and criticism of both the cephalic index and the racial typologies that were based on it was increasingly voiced within the scientific community. Despite all this, the cephalic index continued to be used within ever-changing theoretical frameworks. The long survival of the cephalic index can be, at least in part, explained by a reverence for the existing anthropological research tradition. Over the years, huge amounts of work, money and prestige were invested in amassing extensive data on variations in the cephalic index between populations. To abandon this criterion would be tantamount to dismissing much of the existing anthropological knowledge. Moreover, abandoning the cephalic index in favour of new measuring techniques would have made it impossible to compare new results with old data sets.
A similar logic seems to have characterised the field of physical anthropology in general: new criteria of classification were introduced, but often as a supplement to previously established methods, for rejecting those would have meant abandoning huge amounts of data and starting the mapping of human variation from scratch. Unsurprisingly this measure was resisted.
When Bryn and Schreiner began their cooperation on the large survey of Norwegian military recruits, they had to decide which traits they wanted to map and the method by which they would do so. They discussed this question based on the premises that anthropology was a descriptive science. They emphasised that the data they recorded should be comparable with data from previous studies and that the collection and statistical treatment of the data should be feasible. The ‘importance’ of traits was emphasised as well, but without clarifying the criteria by which the data on such physical features was to be assessed. Troubles began when Bryn and Schreiner started analysing their ‘descriptive’ data. Basic theoretical issues were now on the agenda, disagreements arose and the two scientists ended up interpreting the data in very different ways. Although they analysed the same set of empirical data with the same discipline’s stock of knowledge, the two scientists were unable to reach any agreement on the interpretation of their research results. This outcome was also due to the fact that anthropological knowledge was incoherent at the time, since theoretical and conceptual issues had been discussed within the discipline for decades but never settled.
Even granting that Halfdan Bryn was a sloppy scientist who was quick to jump to conclusions when confirming his own prejudices, his conflict with Schreiner cannot be understood solely as a story of false science being debunked by true science. By drawing on different anthropological research traditions, Bryn and Schreiner used the same set of data to construct conflicting scientific truths. Thus the results they produced helped confirm preconceived and conflicting perceptions of reality instead of leading to new insights. In that, the conflict between Bryn and Schreiner mirrored a tension within the anthropological research tradition itself, a discipline devoid of a coherent set of theories on how to interpret empirical data.
Initially their discussions about data interpretation was perceived as a debate between fellow-scientists. After they broke with Bryn, however, Alette and Kristian Emil Schreiner began to question the scientific credibility of Bryn and the ideas he represented. The Schreiners were thus instrumental in redefining Bryn’s status—from ‘scientist’ to ‘pseudo-scientist’—and in redrawing the boundary between science and non-science, which in turn helped to finally debunk the ‘Nordic idea’.
We have examined the links between this conflict and reorientation within the tiny community of Norwegian anthropologists and the increasingly polarised and politicised debates on race in the international arena. From the mid-1920s onwards, German anthropologists increasingly turned their backs on the liberal legacy of Rudolf Virchow and his generation, instead embracing racial determinism, the Nordic idea and a racist form of eugenics. In the English-speaking world, however, an increasing number of scientists began to question some of the basic assumptions upon which the notion of the superior Nordic race was based. The debates became even more polarised after the Nazi takeover in Germany, when the majority of German anthropologists pledged loyalty to the new regime and its racial policy, while a number of non-German scholars began to engage in anti-racist campaigns.
While Bryn’s increasingly strong advocacy of the Nordic idea accorded with the general trends in German anthropology, Alette and Kristian Emil Schreiner’s dismissal of this concept was more in line with the overall development of anthropology within the English-speaking world. It is important to note, however, that both Kristian Emil Schreiner and Bryn had particularly strong relations to German anthropology from the outset. They read German textbooks and journals, travelled to Germany, had close contact with German colleagues and published their works in German. To an extent Norwegian anthropology in the interwar years could be regarded as a subdivision of German anthropology. Seen from this perspective, it was the two Schreiners, and not Bryn, who distanced themselves from the prevailing trends within their field of research. Schreiner’s dismissal of the Nordic idea, nevertheless, did echo dominant attitudes among Norwegian academics around 1930, and this begs the question of why the concept of the Nordic master race followed such different trajectories in Norwegian and German academia. This question may have many answers, and the issue can be elucidated only partially with the help of the source material upon which this book is based. Nevertheless, it is possible to put forward some explanations.
Clearly the increasing scepticism towards the Nordic race idea in Norway was a direct response to the rise of Nazi Germany. During the 1930s, academic racism—in particular the notion of the Nordic master race—became increasingly tainted by its association with right-wing politics and Nazism. It thus became imperative that those who opposed right-wing ideologies renounced the Nordic idea. This is only a partial explanation, however, as it does not explain why right-wing racial ideas did not appeal to the vast majority of Norwegian academics who were engaged in studying the nation’s history and culture. It is also important to note that Bryn had already begun to feel isolated in Norwegian academia by the end of the 1920s, at a time when his career flourished in Germany—academia in the two countries began to take different paths even before the Nazi movement was perceived as a real threat. An additional explanation lies in the changed relationship between the Norwegian and German academic worlds. While at the turn of the century Norwegian academia was closely related to the German academic world, politically Norway's neutrality had far stronger ties to Great Britain. Norway's neutrality during World War I did not prevent Germany from waging a submarine war against Norwegian merchant ships, killing thousands of Norwegian sailors and instilling anti-German sentiments among the people. This event led many Norwegian academics to reconsider their traditionally strong attachment to Germany.
These feelings were strengthened by a general decline in Germany’s scientific prestige and the breakdown of international scientific cooperation caused by World War I. After the war many academic organisations boycotted Germany and Austria. German science thus lost its leading role and the international scientific world became more diverse, with German, French and English competing to be the dominant scientific language. Norwegian scholars kept many of their traditional ties with Germany while developing increasingly strong bonds with France, England and the U.S. This tendency was furthered by the Nazi takeover in Germany, although it must be emphasised that the interwar years never saw any definitive breakdown in academic relations between Norway and Germany.475
An even more important explanation for the varying success of the scientific concept of the Nordic master race in Germany and Norway lies in the different international roles and political situations the two countries faced during and after World War I. Andrew D. Evans has argued that the shift in German anthropology from ‘racial liberalism’ to racism occurred because members of the discipline accommodated their scientific goals and methods to the political and ideological context in which they worked. This process, Evans argues, started around the turn of the century when anthropologists increasingly began to adapt their science to the imperial aims of the German state. But the major shift occurred during World War I, when anthropologists put their discipline in the service of the war effort. Lacking access to the outside world, anthropologists began studying enemies in prison camps, portraying them as racial ‘others’. This opened the way for a racist style of research, which began to dominate during the 1920s when a new generation strongly influenced by their wartime experiences obtained positions.476 Robert Proctor has pointed more specifically at Germany’s situation in the aftermath of World War I when explaining the shift from liberal anthropology to Rassenkunde. After the defeat of Germany, the no less humiliating Treaty of Versailles and Germany’s loss of her colonies, German anthropology adopted a certain ‘therapeutic logic’ aimed at rescuing the German people and the Germanic race from the perceived threats of external and internal enemies (such as the Jews and the Gypsies).477
The research by Norwegian anthropologists and their colleagues in related disciplines may also have been affected by the political and ideological context in which they worked. This context was quite different from the one faced by their German counterparts. In 1918, the Scandinavian countries were not great powers humiliated by victors and devastated by war; they were small and vulnerable nations that had managed to remain neutral, albeit while surrounded by aggressive and militaristic great powers. In the aftermath of the war, all three Scandinavian countries instituted policies of neutrality, peace and reconciliation, and in all three countries research was turned into a tool for promoting peace. This had a strong impact on the development of both the sciences and the humanities and influenced both academic and political notions of national identity.478
The link between the Scandinavian peace policy and research policy arose as a response to the breakdown of scientific internationalism during and after the war. The French-British post-war attempt to isolate German academia took place at the time of Germany’s exclusion from the League of Nations, and was perceived by neutral countries as an unfair and politically dangerous containment policy. Numerous initiatives were taken to help reintegrate Germany into the international scientific world by the U.S. and others, including Scandinavia.479 Denmark, Sweden and Norway conducted foreign policies of neutrality, peace, internationalism and reconciliation with the aims of mitigating tensions between Scandinavia’s powerful neighbours, promoting international law and branding the Nordic nations as highly civilised, modern and pacifist. The hope was that this would reduce the risk of invasion from militaristic neighbours. As part of the strategy, support was given to initiatives that could help to restore academic internationalism and rebuild amicable relations between academic elites in former enemy countries. Research directives became strongly linked to security concerns and foreign policy, a link which created new opportunities for legitimising and funding academic research.480 It also led to the establishment of the Oslo Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture. This publicly-funded research institution was informally linked to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee and had an entwined scientific and political agenda: to facilitate both comparative cultural research and peaceful international relations by serving as an international meeting place for scholars.
Even though it never managed to live up to its massive ambitions, the relatively well-funded Institute played a significant role in Norwegian academia during the 1920s and early 1930s and contributed to a cultural, political and ideological environment that was inhospitable to racism. A recurring idea of the political campaign that led to the founding of the Institute was that the historical sciences by nurturing nationalist attitudes had contributed to the political climate that had led to war. Comparative cultural research was presented as a cure for national chauvinism since it aimed at producing universal insight into the evolution of human culture. Because all humans are endowed with the same basic mental potentials, it was claimed, all human cultures develop according to the same set of ‘laws’ which could be revealed through the help of comparative research. Such research was to be based on international cooperation and was expected to produce the kind of knowledge that would serve as a counterweight to aggressive nationalism.481
The Institute’s research programme was based on the notion that all humans were equally endowed and that cultural variation had to be explained not by racial differences and the struggle for survival, but by differences in the natural and social preconditions for cultural development. This research agenda and the ideas behind it had a significant impact on philological, ethnographic, historical and archaeological research in Norway and, as discussed in chapter 7, is likely to have had an effect on Kristian Emil Schreiner’s attitudes towards race and national origins. The intellectual environment fostered by the Institute, however, not only promoted ideas of universalism and human unity, it also promoted a certain approach to Norwegian culture and history that was at odds with the Nordic idea.
The campaign that led to the founding of the Institute was based on a paradoxical mix of universalist and nationalist arguments. The nationalist argument was related to the political goal of framing Norway as a highly civilised, democratic and peace-loving nation, while at the same time helping to build a coherent national identity and culture. Traditional Norwegian rural culture was singled out as a particularly good empirical case for the comparative study of the evolution of human culture, and it was claimed that by turning the cultural history of the Norwegians into an object of international comparative research, Norway’s international image as a highly cultured nation would be strengthened.482
In chapter 7 we saw that the study of ‘Arctic cultures’ was the first major undertaking of the Institute. From the late 1920s onwards, however, the Arctic programme was dwarfed by a new enterprise—the comparative study of the social and cultural history of peasant societies. This was probably the largest humanities research project ever undertaken in Norway. The research plans were developed in cooperation with the leading French and Austrian historians Marc Bloch and Alfons Dopsch, and, even if it ended up as a project of national scope, it was initially planned as an international comparative research in collaboration with European colleagues.483
However, in spite of being presented as a contribution to the universal history of humankind, the project was also the continuation of well-established national traditions in the writing of Norwegian history. We have seen how, due to the 'discontinuous' history of the Norwegian state, nineteenth-century historians had turned their attention to peasant society in order to establish a coherent account of Norwegia's past. By making the social and cultural structure of Norwegian rural societies the object of their study, the Institute continued to support, and elaborate upon, this tradition. In contrast to the proponents of the Nordic idea who saw the Norwegian peasant as the epitome of the Nordic race, the Institute’s research programme was based on the idea of a continuity in the social and material structure of peasant society. The latter was not considered to be determined by the racial qualities of the Nordic race, but by cultural, social and technological adaption to the specific natural environment of Norway.
The programme was launched and led by the leading socialist politician and historian, Edvard Bull, and it was partly based upon his Marxist-inspired materialist approach to history. Nonetheless, the programme included all the leading Norwegian historians, archaeologists, folklorists and experts on Germanic and Norse philology, representing a wide range of political and academic views. A key participant was the leader of the National Antiquities Collection, Anton Wilhelm Brøgger, who was the most influential archaeologist of his generation. He belonged to the urban and elitist wing of the Venstre movement and held that archaeology should foster the nation's unity by providing a coherent account of its history. In 1925, as part of an international conference at the Institute, he gave a series of lectures on ‘The Antiquity of the Norwegian People’ that attracted much public attention. In these lectures, he put forward a number of programmatic ideas that were typical of the Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture and that later became important elements in its comparative rural history programme.
Brøgger saw the Norwegians as the descendants of different groups of people who had migrated to Norway over a long timespan. What had bound them together and turned them into one nation was the fact that they had adapted to the living conditions of the territory that later became Norway. Through their efforts at making a livelihood in this specific environment through hunting, fishing, livestock farming and agriculture, they had developed a common way of life, and with the advent of settled farming in the Early Iron Age, they were transformed into one unified people.484 Brøgger’s account implied that the nation arose through the merging of diverse peoples. This view did not necessarily rule out the relevance of race to the question of nationality, and even Brøgger may have believed that there was a limit to the degree of racial difference that could be combined into a nation. However, he remained critical of the use of racial explanations. Brøgger claimed that it was wrong for archaeologists to explain differences in material culture with the help of racial theories and declared that debates about prehistoric racial migrations and settlements in Scandinavia had became a caricature of science. He maintained that cultural progress was not driven by competition between races but by the slow and steady evolution of the methods for cultivating the land and utilising natural resources. It was the peaceful agricultural conquest of the Norwegian landscape—not the inhabitants’ shared Nordic racial roots—that accounted for the ‘Norwegianness’ of the Norwegians.485
Brøgger’s theories were influenced by ideas that had circulated among Norwegian historians since the 1870s, and by the intellectual environment of the Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture. In its turn Brøgger had a significant impact on the Institute's plan to study peasant communities, and, most likely, on Kristian Emil Schreiner, the author of Crania norvegica. According to Schreiner, the term ‘Nordic race’ designated nothing more than a certain phenotype. This phenotype derived from the merging of different groups of people who had wandered into the territory during a long prehistoric timespan, before being moulded into a stable type.486
This conclusion, which implied that the Nordic race was not primordial but rather the product of racial mixing, was at odds with both the Nordic idea and with the racial ideology of the Nazis. However, it seemed to fit well with the vision of Norwegian prehistory advocated by Brøgger and with the Institute's notions of culture, ethnicity and race dominating the academic study of the country's past. Even if the concept of a Nordic race continued to be used into the post-war years as a tool for classifying ancient bones, it is clear that the idea of the master race had lost its scientific credibility, and that a notion of Norwegianness based on racial determinism and Nordic superiority was at odds with the leading scholarly trends established long before the outbreak of war.
475 Jon Røyne Kyllingstad, ‘Menneskeåndens universalitet’ Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning 1917-1940. Ideene, institusjonen og forskningen (Ph.D. thesis, University of Oslo, 2008), pp. 11-222. Fredrik Thue, In Quest of a Democratic Social Order. The Americanization of Norwegian Social Scholarship 1918-1970 (Ph.D. thesis, University of Oslo, 2005), pp. 33-75. Jorunn Sem Fure, Universitetet i kamp: 1940-1945, Vol. 4 (Oslo: Unipub, 2011), pp. 46-58.
476 Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
477 Robert Proctor, ‘From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde’, in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Bones, Bodies, Behavior (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 138-79.
478 Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen and Sven Widmalm (eds.), Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe: Intersections of Science, Culture, and Politics after the First World War (New York: Routledge 2012).
479 Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, ‘Challenge to Transnational Loyalties: International Scientific Organizations after the First World War’, Science Studies, Vol. 3, no. 2 (1973), pp. 93-118. Robert Marc Friedman, The Politics of Excellence. Behind the Nobel Prize in Science (New York: W. H. Freeman & Co Ltd, 2002), pp. 75-81.
480 Lettevall et al. (eds.), Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe.
481 Fredrik Stang, Verdensakademier, Norden som sentralsted for internationalt videnskapelig arbeide (Kristiania: Aschehoug, 1918); De norske akademiplaner. Foredrag holdt i Bergen 30. januar 1918 (Kristiania: [n. pub.], 1918) and ‘The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture: Its Origin and Aims’, in Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning, Four Introductory Lectures/Quatre conferénces d’inauguration/Vier Einleitungs- vorlesungen (Oslo: ISKF and Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1925), pp. 1-28.
482 Kyllingstad, ‘Menneskeåndens universalitet’, pp. 60-80.
483 Ibid., pp. 478-628.
484 A. W. Brøgger, ‘Viking’, Viking, 1 (1937), p. 6; ‘Nasjonen og fortiden’, Samtiden (1928), pp. 490, 493-95; Det norske folk i Oldtiden (Oslo: ISKF, 1925), pp. 13-27, 156-76, 192.
485 Ibid., pp. 15-16, 27, 30, 156-77, 190-92.
486 K. E. Schreiner, Crania norvegica II (Oslo: Aschehoug/ISKF, 1946), pp. 62-63.