Wilhelm Röpke: a rare liberal confronting fascism

In his courageous 1933 lecture, Wilhelm Röpke, a Professor at University of Jenna, at the young age of 24, valiantly spoke up, at great personal risk, for liberalism in the face of despotic fascism - a message still mundane today.

Hitler never made any secret of his intention to strike against those he saw as his enemies. It was thus at considerable personal risk that a young German economics professor delivered a public lecture in Frankfurt am Main, just eight days after Hitler took office, in which he made clear his opposition to the new regime.

Had Röpke been willing to compromise, he could have gone far under the new regime. His 1933 lecture, however, indicated that he was not going to bend. From then on, he had no future in the Third Reich.

When the autocratic Nazis acceded to power in 1933 there were those who believed that the new order was amenable to democracy. Even the most important German Jewish group, the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, maintained that, despite the Nazis' ferocious anti-Semitism, "nobody would dare to touch [their] constitutional rights."

In his February 8 lecture, Röpke demonstrated that he had no such illusions. Entitled 'End of an Era', Röpke's lecture spelled out precisely why Hitler's ascendance represented something entirely different from a normal change of government. National Socialism's triumph constituted, Röpke stated, a defeat for reason and freedom. The new movement, he told his audience, with its naked appeal to "moods and emotions" and constant invocation of "myth", "blood" and the "primordial soul" left no room for liberalism. The threats to destroy entire groups (Jews) were not, Röpke argued, mere rhetoric designed to whip up populist resentment that would be forgotten once the Nazis took power. It was integral, Röpke knew, to the entire National Socialist project (Resonance of Trump's anti- immigrant stance).

As a distinguished free market economist, Röpke was well aware of the role played by the hyperinflation that had economically undermined and politically radicalised parts of the German middle class in the early 1920s, as well as the Great Depression in propelling the Nazi Party to power. The economic downturn that began in 1929 had driven Germany to the political abyss by shattering the relative stability that the Weimar regime had attained.

The deeper cause for many Germans' embrace of the Nazis, in Röpke's view, was not the turning of "the masses" but also a fair number of academia against liberalism in the name of "Germany's awakening" and "the purification of the German soul".

The focus of Röpke's lecture was 'human individuality'. Liberalism, he said, involved a belief in "every individual's human dignity" and the rejection of treating humans as "objects". That is why liberalism rejected the oppression of people for their race or religion. "Tolerance" was impossible without an affirmation of every individual's inherent dignity: it ruled out treating one's political opponents as "enemies" who belonged to a different group, and who would ultimately have to be reduced to the status of non-citizens.

It was no coincidence, Röpke argued, that the National Socialists submerged everything into the Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community" or "racial community"). For the Nazis, what mattered was the group: in their case, the racial collective.

Reason, combined with respect for freedom and each individual's dignity, was indispensable for the liberal constitutionalism and rule of law that inhibited the type of arbitrary power that the Nazis would take to new levels.

For Röpke, defence of the individual was tied to two ideas. One was the priority of liberty not only "from something" but "for something".

Liberty in this sense thus went together with a belief in "reason". Ultimately, reason concerned "the absolute pursuit of truth". If societies wanted to be free, he added, they had "to accept reason as the common denominator". For reason, combined with respect for freedom and each individual's dignity, was indispensable for the liberal constitutionalism and rule of law. To violate the rule of law, Röpke underscored, was to behave in an inherently unreasonable manner, not least because it invariably involved choosing to treat individuals as things and to crush their liberty. Therein lay the path to "servilism" and the "total state".

Röpke ultimately urged his audience to look, first, to "the Greek and Roman Stoa" (Stoic philosophers), then "Christianity", the subsequent development of "natural law", and finally "enlightenment" - all of which, taken together, rejected "the principle of violence in favor of the principle of reason".

Röpke's immediate concern was the new government's determination to move against those still willing to express open opposition to Nazism.

The university authorities were not slow to act. Over 50 per cent of the city of Marburg had voted for the Nazis, exceeding the national average by 16.1 per cent. Most students at Röpke's university fervently supported the Nazi party. On April 7, 1933, the University of Marburg's Rector invited members of the university senate known to support the Weimar Republic to resign. That was clearly a message to Röpke. This was followed up by a Nazi member of the Prussian Assembly writing to the education minister, denouncing Röpke for his "anti-national attitude" and as a "danger to young German academics". He called for a boycott of his classes and his immediate dismissal. He could no longer be considered "a German professor".

Initially, Röpke was suspended from teaching. Then, despite efforts by friends in high places to protect him, Röpke was forcibly retired on September 28, 1933. Röpke had departed into exile several months before.

Fifteen years later, the rare liberal found himself among those uniquely positioned to reorientate the German economy away from the hard corporatism and widespread interventionism into which the Nazi regime had led it. But alongside his insistence on the necessity of embracing a market economy, he invested just as much time explaining why his country and the West (more generally) had to embrace the civilisational-grounded liberalism that he had defended in his February 1933 lecture. That, Röpke plainly believed, was essential if the era which prevailed in Germany between 1933 and 1945 was never again to see the light of day.

In our own age of creeping servilism, rampant fakeism, friend-enemy Manichaeism, and, in some cases, outright nihilism across the political spectrum, it's surely a message worth remembering today.