Between science and metaphysics: Fritz Lenz and racial anthropology in interwar Germany

This essay examines the philosophical and scientific approach of Fritz Lenz, Germany’s most eminent racial hygienist in the interwar years, toward the problem of race and soul. It focuses on Lenz’s attitude to the question of mental heredity, by examining his philosophical hypothesis concerning the mind-body problem and the antinomies and paralogisms it entails. Thus, it aims to go beyond the conventions and norms of “liberal science” and to trace Lenz’s biological reasoning by addressing the scientific and philosophical controversies of his time, highlighting the “crisis of science” and the emergence of holistic, vitalistic and biocentric language in 1920s Germany. The discussion illustrates the way in which Lenz sought to combine natural-scientific methods with metaphysical speculations, while rejecting scientific and materialistic monism in favor of an idealistic imperative of “faith in race”. Lenz’s racial anthropology serves here as a paradigmatic case study for re-examining the ideological and epistemological mechanisms, which enabled the apotheosis of race in interwar Germany and its becoming a supreme value.