Les Humanités allemandes en guerre : le Rome et Carthage des antiquisants allemands (1943)

Abstract

When in 1936 the 4-Year plan was launched to prepare Germany for the war to come, humanities were widely forgotten. In 1940, eager to prove their strategic usefulness in a time of war, professors in various fields of the humanities launched a programm called “the mobilization of the humanities for the war”. Their endeavour was to publish articles and books that would justify the war aims of the Third Reich. Historians, philosophers, and classicists published two books on Greece and Rome. One of them was Rom und Karthago, a study on the Punic wars between two worlds that were, according to the book, racially opposed. Rom und Karthago was to be nothing less than the justification of the national-socialist Rassenkrieg (racial warfare).

Keywords

• Rom und Karthago
• Altertumswissenschaft
• science at war
• race struggle
• nazi rewriting of history