In recent years, the history of the German-speaking anthropological tradition has come into its own. For much of the late twentieth century, the field was largely ignored by scholars, who concentrated on writing the history of Anglo-American anthropology, which held a dominant position in the discipline after World War II. The German tradition, meanwhile, had been discredited by its association with National Socialism during the 1930s and 1940s, and remained isolated from the wider anthropological community in the immediate postwar period. The first effort to write the history of German-speaking anthropology, in fact, was compromised by its author, Wilhelm Mühlmann, who was heavily implicated in Nazism himself.^[1] In the 1980s and 1990s, however, scholars began a concerted effort to engage the history of the discipline in German-speaking countries. An initial wave of works assessed the involvement of the German tradition in Nazism and colonialism.^[2] A number of American scholars, led by George Stocking, also found their way to German anthropology as they explored the intellectual influences on the American Anthropologist Franz Boas, who was educated in Berlin in the 1880s.^[3] By the late 1990s, scholars from a variety of national backgrounds and disciplinary perspectives had begun to explore the history of the German anthropological tradition in the late nineteenth century on its own terms, without continual reference to the Anglo-American tradition or an explicit focus on Nazism.^[4]
In the late nineteenth century, the German-speaking anthropological community functioned within a set of institutional and intellectual dynamics that distinguished it from other traditions. Chief among these was a particular constellation of sub-fields and terminologies specific to the German context. Anthropology encompassed three smaller but distinct disciplines: ethnology, physical anthropology, and pre-historic archeology. Of these three sub-fields, the first two were undoubtedly the largest and most important. In the German context, the term Anthropologie usually referred to physical anthropology, while the terms Ethnologie or Völkerkunde were used as general equivalents for cultural anthropology. Ethnology aimed at the comparative study of the culture and psychology of the world’s peoples. Physical anthropology was chiefly concerned with the classification of human physical forms and the systematic study of the origin of the human species. Following the German terminology, I use the term “anthropologist” in this essay to refer to physical anthropologists, and “ethnologist” to refer to cultural anthropologists.
Recent work on the history of German-speaking anthropology has also revealed a potentially surprising set of political influences on the discipline in the late nineteenth century. A central point of controversy in the emerging literature is whether or not there was a particular brand of “liberal anthropology” that dominated the German anthropological community during this period. Woodruff Smith was among the first to argue that German ethnology in the late nineteenth century was a “neo-liberal” cultural science.^[5] According to Smith, the leaders of the anthropological establishment in Germany, the pathologist Rudolf Virchow and the ethnologist Adolf Bastian, fashioned the discipline of ethnology around liberal assumptions about individuality, rationality, and universalism. In a similar vein, H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl have argued that the history of German anthropology was a “self-consciously liberal endeavor, guided by a broadly humanist agenda and centered on efforts to document the plurality and historical specificity of cultures.”^[6] Historians of the discipline have also linked liberalism to physical anthropology. In a groundbreaking article, Benoit Massin argued that the physical anthropology of Virchow and his colleagues represented a form of “liberal anti-racism” that faded only after the turn of the century.^[7] Other scholars, however, remain skeptical. Andrew Zimmerman, for example, sees the German anthropology of the late nineteenth century as “liberal” only in the democratic organization of its societies and institutions, not in the content of its science. By contrast, he maintains that the anthropology of imperial Germany emerged as a deliberate rebuke to humanist and historicist understandings of the world. In their place, anthropologists offered an empirical and non-narrative approach to humankind that, through its association with imperialism, forged an “anti-humanist worldview” in the study and representation of non-Europeans, and laid the foundations for the anthropology of the Nazi period.^[8]
A common problem in many of these analyses, however, is the uncritical use of the term “liberal,” which often remains undefined. What exactly was liberal about nineteenth-century German anthropology, if anything? Were there specific links between anthropology as a scientific discipline and liberalism as a political and economic doctrine? If there was indeed a “liberal” anthropology, did it constitute a scientific “paradigm,” as Thomas S. Kuhn has defined the term? The most thorough attempt to address these questions has been Woodruff Smith’s work, which convincingly establishes the links between liberalism and German ethnology. According to Smith, Bastian’s ethnology was liberal in that it assumed that individuals were at root fundamentally similar, capable of rationality and bound by a common set of mental processes. Bastian based his comparative ethnographic project on the search for the common “elementary ideas” in humankind, foundational concepts that underlay varying patterns of thought caused by cultural differences. For the discipline of physical anthropology, however, the picture remains unclear. Benoit Massin’s work was critical in identifying “racial liberalism” as a presence in German physical anthropology, but the specific connections to liberalism as an ideology often remain unexplored in his account.
The goal of this article is to explore the influence of liberalism on physical anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I argue that German physical anthropology, like ethnology, was dominated by a liberal paradigm during this period. The influence of liberalism in the discipline came in the form of wide-ranging assumptions about humanity, progress, and rationality, rather than through a specific set of political ideas. Drawing on liberal concepts of universalism, the leaders of the anthropological community consistently argued for a monogenist conception of the “unity of the human species,” maintaining that physical and cultural differences among peoples were merely variations on the common theme of humanity, and that dissimilarities were of minimal importance next to the elements that bound humanity together. As liberals, they firmly believed that all people were united on a fundamental level by their similarities and had the capacity for intellectual improvement. For this reason, they were reluctant to argue that one’s capacity for cultural or rational development was constrained by biology. This liberal perspective was encapsulated in a terminological distinction at the heart of the discipline: the insistence that the categories of race, nation, and Volk (translated roughly as “people” or ethnic group) were distinct and unrelated. Despite frequent contradictions and some equivocation, liberal anthropologists were unwilling to link physical typologies to faculty or ability, and thus maintained that no one race was superior to any other. This article is not designed to praise liberal anthropologists as heroes or excuse away their contradictions, but rather to show the influence of liberalism on their science. While there were multiple strands of thought in German anthropology in the late nineteenth century, the leaders of the discipline championed a liberal brand of physical anthropology that did not prefigure Nazi racism.

A LIBERAL LEADERSHIP

The influence of liberalism in German anthropology originated with the leading lights of the discipline. The dominant personality in the field throughout the late nineteenth century was Rudolf Virchow, professor of medicine at the University of Berlin and member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, who was internationally known as the founder of cellular pathology. Widely acknowledged as the founding father of anthropology in Germany, Virchow was the primary figure in the creation of the first anthropological societies and published over one thousand pieces related to anthropology before his death in 1902.^[9] The leading figures in the field, including Julius Kollmann, Johannes Ranke, Adolf Bastian, and Franz Boas in the United States, had all at one time been Virchow’s students and had absorbed the influence of the “old master.”^[10] But Virchow was more than simply a scientist: he was also a prominent figure in liberal politics. The famous pathologist was a founding member of the left-liberal Progressive Party in the early 1860s, serving as deputy in the Prussian parliament from 1862 to 1902, and holding a seat in the Reichstag from 1880 to 1893. Splits within the liberal camp in Prussia in 1866 consigned the Progressives to the status of opposition minority party, but they remained firmly opposed to the conservative policies of Otto von Bismarck, the Minister President of Prussia and the eventual architect of German unification. Throughout the 1860s, Virchow distinguished himself as an outspoken critic of the Prussian government. In 1865, Bismarck even challenged Virchow to a duel after the young parliamentarian questioned his truthfulness from the floor of the Prussian parliament.^[11] Virchow refused to take up the challenge, but the incident cemented his status as a prominent liberal parliamentarian.
A particular set of institutional circumstances in German anthropology allowed Virchow and his colleagues to influence the direction of the newly emerging discipline in the late nineteenth century. Anthropology did not enjoy a firmly established place in the German university system, and as a result the local anthropological society became the primary institution for the development of anthropology as a science. Organizations such as the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethhnology and Prehistory (Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte), founded by Virchow and Bastian in 1869, and the larger German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte) became the primary venues for conducting anthropological work. The societies held talks, published journals, and created networks with scientists at home and abroad.
Professional scientists like Virchow, many of whom were university professors in established fields outside anthropology, dominated these organizations, mainly because the vast majority of members were amateurs, pursuing the science as a hobby. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Virchow served as the president of the Berlin Society twenty-three times, often trading the post with Bastian. The two men also edited and controlled the Berlin society’s scholarly journal, the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, which soon achieved an international reputation. Virchow’s student Johannes Ranke, who occupied one of the few full professorships in German anthropology at the University of Munich, served as the General Secretary of the German Anthropological Society and the editor of its journal, the Archiv für Anthropologie. From his position as the head of the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde, Bastian functioned as the leading figure in the institutionalization of German ethnology. Kollmann, another student of Virchow’s and an anatomist and anthropologist at the University of Basel, was on the board of the journal that Ranke edited. Felix von Luschan, who became a full professor of anthropology and ethnology in Berlin in 1908, initially worked under Bastian at the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde. Together, Virchow and his colleagues held the major positions of power in the discipline, and in the field of physical anthropology, Virchow joined with Ranke and Kollman to form a powerful trio that championed liberal ideas through their intellectual and institutional influence.
The tight-knit nature of the anthropological community and its leadership makes the work of Thomas S. Kuhn on the nature of scientific change useful in analyzing the ideological and intellectual contours of late-nineteenth-century German anthropology. Arguing in terms of scientific communities rather than individuals, Kuhn supplied a sociological explanation for how scientific change occurs. He based his model on the elusive and powerful notion of shifting “paradigms,” bodies of standards and assumptions accepted by a community of scientists in a particular research tradition.^[12] The anthropology in the liberal tradition practiced by Virchow and his followers was clearly a paradigm in the Kuhnian use of the term: an unstated disciplinary “world view” that shaped the kind of science anthropologists practiced. An unfiltered application of Kuhn’s ideas to German anthropology, however, is problematic. It is unclear, for example, whether German anthropologists actually practiced “normal science” in the Kuhnian sense or whether their discipline was in fact “pre-paradigmatic,” without a recognizable paradigmatic structure. Borrowing from George W. Stocking, it is most useful to conceive of the paradigm as “a resonant metaphor, to be applied flexibly when it seemed to facilitate the understanding of particular historical episodes.”^[13] Without accepting Kuhn’s model of scientific change in its entirety, the paradigm notion can be employed to refer to a theoretical tradition in German anthropology.^[14] The liberal paradigm in German anthropology was, in short, a research tradition shaped by a liberal set of assumptions and adhered to by the leading members of the anthropological community.

LIBERALISM AND GERMAN ANTHROPOLOGY

Liberalism was a heterogenous ideology by the late nineteenth century – a loose “family of ideas and behavioral patterns”^[15] – but it continued to provide its proponents with elements of a common worldview. At the most basic level, liberals shared a belief in progress. From the Enlightenment, they drew an optimistic faith in reason and science as the twin engines of improvement. Sue Marchand and David Lindenfeld have pointed out that in the Germany at the fin-de-siècle, “The term liberal connoted a commitment to rationality in a broad sense, and the middle class took justifiable pride in the accomplishment of German science and scholarship.”^[16] In the realm of politics, liberals often shared a commitment to individual rights, and to widely varying degrees, representative institutions. Moreover, liberals argued for the equality of all people before the law, because they subscribed to the Enlightenment notion that all individuals were born free. Although they often clashed over exactly what role the population should have in government, proponents of liberal ideas generally agreed that sovereignty lay at least to some degree with the people, that constitutional limitations on the power of rulers were necessary, and that civil liberties, such as the freedoms of speech and assembly, should be guaranteed. In the realm of economics, liberals believed in the power of the free market, arguing for trade unfettered by government interference and regulation.
Beyond these political and economic positions, however, liberals also shared a common set of assumptions about humanity. Liberalism was based on the belief that, at root, human nature was the same everywhere and that everyone had the potential to become a rational, autonomous individual. All people, in other words, were united on a fundamental level by their similarities and had the capacity for intellectual improvement.^[17] As an ideology, liberalism was dependent on the notion that individuals shared more commonalities than differences. As Thomas Metcalf has pointed out, “At its heart, liberalism… can be seen as informed by a radical universalism.”^[18] While most liberals accepted a hierarchical view of politics and society by, for example, maintaining that certain groups such as women and colonial subjects were as yet incapable of self-rule, they also argued that liberal political and social values – such as freedom, progress, rationality – potentially applied to everyone, regardless of culture or background, because all humans were at base essentially the same. All individuals and societies could be transformed for the better through education, free trade, and the rule of law; fundamental commonalities among peoples meant that legal and educational reform could unleash the potential of even the most “backward” society. In the process, of course, liberals upheld European cultural values as the natural standard to which all peoples should aspire, and as believers in progress, they readily assumed that some cultures were more advanced than others.
Leading anthropologists drew on liberal concepts in their approach to science and humanity. In the broadest terms, anthropologists were firm believers in progress and rationality, seeing themselves as engaged in the accumulation of scientific knowledge by discovering natural laws. Virchow remarked that, “We too have a creed, a faith in the progress of our knowledge of the truth.”^[19] More specifically, liberal anthropologists were methodologically committed to inductive empiricism. Drawing on a scientific model stretching back to Sir Francis Bacon, the drive in the anthropological disciplines was to accumulate as much data as possible, to move very slowly from the specific to the general, rather than to propose unsupported theories. The loyalty to empirical induction meant that anthropologists were extremely hesitant to voice overarching conclusions or to construct finalized systems of classification. Colleagues described how Virchow would “push his glasses up on his forehead and investigate the [anthropological] object with raised eyebrows,” but that he remained “cool, even ironic, toward every rash conclusion. For him, it was primarily about the researching and securing of facts.”^[20] It was on the basis of empirical induction that leading members of the discipline, including Virchow, Bastian, and Ranke, rejected Darwinian evolution as unproven.^[21] Although the dismissal of Darwinism was not entirely uniform within the anthropological community – Hermann Schaffhausen in Bonn was a significant exception – Virchow was more or less able to keep the influence of evolutionary theory at bay in disciplinary circles throughout much of the late nineteenth century.
Even more important, however, were the ways in which anthropologists and ethnologists framed their study of human groups around a firm conviction in the basic similarity of humankind. This idea was most clearly reflected in the monogenistic concept of the “unity of the human species,” a key conceptual touchstone for the discipline that emerged in debates about the origins of humanity. At mid-century, a major point of disagreement for anthropologists throughout Europe was the question of human origins, and more specifically, human racial groups. Opinion was divided, and scientists fell into two general camps. Polygenism, the belief in the separate origins of races, influenced the anthropological traditions in France and Great Britain, but it had very few defenders in Germany.^[22] Polygenists generally held that races were descended from different species. The majority of German anthropologists, by contrast, firmly adhered to monogenism, the argument that all races had a common origin. This argument had long enjoyed many supporters among devout Christians because it ran parallel to the biblical story of creation and sustained the notion that humanity was descended from an original pair.^[23]In German-speaking anthropological circles, however, the trained philologist Theodore Waitz was primarily responsible for establishing monogenism as fundamental to the German anthropological tradition. In his influential six volume work, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, published between 1859 and 1872, Waitz argued that the polygenist position rested on faulty categorizations of humankind and was based on “abstract deductions lacking proper empirical basis.”^[24] Waitz’s monogenism paved the way for Virchow, Bastian, and members of the next generation to make the “unity of the human species” a central plank in their anthropological project.^[25]Despite several notable exceptions, there was a remarkable degree of unanimity on the question of monogenism within the German anthropological community by the late nineteenth century.^[26] In 1909, the Berlin anthropologist Felix von Luschan called the issue of monogenism “settled,” claiming that the “the great majority of all specialists adhere to the unified origin of the human species.”^[27]
For the leaders of the discipline, the importance of the “unity of human species” went beyond the debate on the origin of humankind to frame a general approach to the study of humanity that was indebted to liberal universalism. For Virchow and his colleagues, the “unity of humankind” meant that human beings shared more commonalities than differences, despite variations of culture or race. If the unity of humankind held true, then all humans were related to each other. Virchow maintained that, “I have a certain tendency, aside from all experience and analysis, to be enthusiastic for the idea of the unity of the human species. I admit that behind it lies a traditional, even sentimental idea, and that I cannot keep myself from thinking, when I look at the entire history of humankind, that we really are brothers and sisters.”^[28]Ranke, like Virchow, considered the differences separating mankind minimal compared to what bound them together. At meetings of the German Anthropological Society, Ranke emphasized the “equality of feelings and mental life of all humanity.”^[29] The idea that the peoples of the world shared fundamental characteristics underwrote a great deal of German anthropology in the era of Virchow. In ethnology, for example, Bastian’s search for the “elementary ideas” of humanity was based on his assumption that “human nature is uniform across the globe.”^[30] Ranke went so far as to remark that, “Bastian, more than any other, is the one who has recognized the mental [geistige] unity of the entire human species,” allowing members of the discipline to “know and feel as one with all of humanity.”^[31] Monogenist perspectives influenced physical anthropologists as well. Ranke noted that physical variations, while real and visible, were actually “bound together so completely with each other” so as to make “the totality of physical differences appear like a closed row in which we can make distinctions only through more or less arbitrary dividing lines.”^[32] Kollman, another monogenist among the leaders of the discipline, noted that while as an anthropologist he sought to classify the physical differences among human beings, “I do not have the slightest intention of letting the similarities in the appearance of the human species out of my sight.”^[33] For these men, liberal principles of universalism framed the anthropological project.

THE LIBERAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL TRADITION AND THE SEARCH FOR RACE

The liberal and empirical influences on physical anthropology came together in the discipline’s central pursuit: the investigation and classification of race. By the 1890s, the identification and classification of human variations had become a central focus of physical anthropology in Germany. From the outset, the goal of the discipline was the categorization of human forms in an effort to understand, as Wilhelm Waldeyer put it in 1890, the “differences and similarities which occur in the construction of humans across the globe.”^[34] Through measurement and quantification, late-nineteenth-century anthropologists sought to determine the underlying physical or morphological variations, usually constructed as “racial types,” thought to be caused by heredity and present in any given population.^[35]
To answer questions of classification and difference, anthropologists relied heavily on the techniques of anthropometry, the systematic measurement of human anatomical features across large populations. Using anthropometric instruments, they sought the measures of racial difference in the shape of the skull and bones. In particular, anthropologists employed craniometry, the practice of measuring the form and proportions of the human skull, to determine racial types. Using statistical methods on large sample of data, they believed that they could calculate the typical form or “pure type” for each group, which they could then compare with other groups to ascertain the relationships between them. Anthropologists recognized the calculation of the so-called “cephalic index,” the ratio of skull’s width to its length, as central to their project. The index was used to classify groups as either “long-skulled” (dolichocephalic) or “short-skulled” (brachycephalic). To this basic model, anthropologists added dozens of other measurements and classificatory schemes in their effort to catagorize humankind. Throughout this period, however, the contours of “race” as a concept remained vague and undefined. Despite their best efforts, anthropologists continued to lack any precise biological definition of race. The category remained abstract, usually constructed as a statistical mean. By casting race as an average of measurements and bodily characteristics, anthropologists throughout Europe had difficulty identifying individuals who actually matched the categories they were constructing.^[36] As a result, they often emphasized the more flexible and nebulous concept of “type.”
Central to the liberal paradigm, however, was the consistent assumption that “races” and “types” were simply categories of physical, rather than cultural or mental, variation. Virchow argued that physical anthropology had “nothing to do with culture” and called races “nothing more than hereditary variations.”^[37] Similarly, in his anthropological textbook of 1887, Johannes Ranke described the main goal of anthropology as the attempt to “divide humanity into sharply distinguished groups (races or varieties) by their physical characteristics,”^[38] features which had nothing to do with psychological or cultural attributes. Liberal anthropologists insisted that they were only engaged in investigating physical varieties, not in exploring classifications corresponding to political boundaries, cultural characteristics, or linguistic families. In their view, groups that shared a common tongue or set of customs did not necessarily share a common physical type; and therefore race, language, and culture were not congruent. These distinctions were accepted as veritable givens by many of the leading members within the German anthropological community in the 1880s and 1890s. After the death of his former teacher, Boas noted that “Virchow always maintained that limits of human types do not coincide with the dividing lines of cultures and languages.”^[39] In fact, the distinction between race, language, and culture in German anthropological circles in the late nineteenth century greatly influenced Boas. Echoing his German mentors, he maintained throughout his early career that that there was no correlation between racial, linguistic, and cultural classifications.^[40]
The refusal to link race with language or culture can best be seen in a set of distinctions that lay at the heart of the liberal brand of anthropology: the division between the concepts of race, nation, and Volk (or “people”). German anthropologists insisted on the incongruence of these terms because they wanted to distinguish race from language and culture. They argued that nations, which were determined by factors such as politics, customs, language, history and geography, were in no way related to categories of physical variation. At the annual conference of German anthropologists in 1899, Virchow stated that “Anthropology really cannot address the question of nationality that is continually raised.”^[41] He maintained that nationality was a “constructed phenomenon,”^[42] and pointed out that Russians, for example, were members of a political entity, not a cohesive somatic or ethnological group.^[43] Elsewhere, Virchow complained that the rise of “nativism” had led to a situation in which “every nation, even the smallest, wants to represent a particular race.” “Everyone knows,” he argued, “that that there is not a single ‘national’ race that did not win its modern forms through migration.”^[44]
Likewise, the term Volk possessed a wide variety of meanings in nineteenth-century Germany,^[45] but in anthropological circles it referred to a particular linguistic or ethnic group, a category that was unrelated to physical makeup. Because anthropologists claimed that race was incongruent with language and culture, they also argued that physical morphologies did not coincide with peoples or ethnicities, which usually contained many physical types. In describing the peoples of Europe, for example, Julius Kollmann explained that, “Peoples [Völker] are always constructed from many varieties. Nations may be large, united entities, joined by customs, language, by political structures and historical development, like Italians, French, and Germans, or may represent smaller… groups, like the Finns, Hungarians, Bavarians: they are created from many different races.”^[46] In fact, the very boundaries between the anthropological disciplines themselves depended on the distinction between race and Volk. The Austrian ethnologist Friedrich Müller argued that the morphological concept Rasse had no place in the cultural inquiries of ethnology, just as the culturally determined Volk had no place in the physical studies of physical anthropology.^[47]
Anthropological textbooks also emphasized the distinction between race, nation, and Volk as fundamental to the discipline. Rudolf Martin, a professor of anthropology in Zürich who would become Ranke’s successor in Munich in 1916, made this very point in the opening passages of his influential anthropological textbook:

“The ethnological word “Volk” is to be sharply distinguished from the zoological and anthropological term “variety” or “race.” Whole units of smaller or larger groupings (tribe, clan, Volk, nation) are racial aggregates or racial pluralities that have fused into ethnic unions. The deciding factor [in these cases] is not, as with race, morphological agreement, blood relationship, or common ancestry. Rather, what binds the members of a Volk (people) together is a common language and culture, a national feeling developed over time, a common government, political boundaries, etc. In anthropology, the term Volk has no place.”^[48]

In no uncertain terms, Martin admonished against investing categories like nation and Volk with racial meaning. Maintaining the liberal line, he argued that the investigation of peoples (Völker) was the job of ethnology, not physical anthropology, which focused only on physical morphologies.
Following these principles, a central characteristic of anthropology in the liberal tradition was the hesitation, or even refusal, to link the concept of race with human faculty. If race was nothing more than a category of human physical variation, then it could not be connected to mental ability or levels of cultural achievement. In Virchow’s view, race did not indicate superiority or inferiority.^[49] After Virchow’s death, Boas put particular emphasis on this aspect of his former teacher’s career and work, hailing the importance of Virchow’s argument that the “[theromorphic variations of the human body] cannot be considered as proof of a low organization of the races… There is no proof that such forms are connected with a low stage of culture of the people among whom they are found.”^[50] Virchow argued throughout his career that physical characteristics that were supposedly an indicator of the “lower” races could be found in all human groups: “The question whether characteristics could be found only in certain, namely lower, human races was already decided by earlier observers in the negative sense. My investigations also prove the claim that these characteristics can be found occasionally in all possible races.”^[51] Even in the years just before his death, Virchow continued to maintain that particular physical characteristics did not indicate superiority or inferiority. In 1901, for example, he argued that small skull size could not be considered a marker of lower, inferior races. “I want to especially emphasize this… that in my view no conclusion may be drawn about the lowness of the race from the smallness of the skull.”^[52]
Other leading voices in anthropology followed Virchow’s lead by avoiding judgments on racial groups as inferior or superior. In 1892, Julius Kollmann dismissed anthropologists who argued that either long-headed or short-headed types in Europe had achieved a higher cultural level: “I believe that on the basis of the knowledge of craniometry one must therefore counter every theory of the superiority of any one of the European races.”^[53] Kollmann, like other liberals, accepted the idea of lower and higher levels of cultural development, but assumed that this had nothing to do with race. After Kollmann’s death in 1919, a colleague noted his belief that, “Every ethnic group is… the product of mixing among many races, and even if [that group] stands at a lower cultural level, one may not speak of inferior races in the physical sense.”^[54] Similarly, Johannes Ranke argued that the supposed physical markers of inferiority were often present in every individual. In 1897, he contended that in the course of development every skull possessed elements of “prognathy,” a measure of the degree to which the jaw jutted out from the skull that was usually subscribed to the “lower races.” With age, Ranke maintained, every skull developed the very forms “which are typical for those often named representatives of the black and so-called lower races.”^[55] For Ranke, like Virchow, the “lower races” were indeed “so-called,” and he resisted the labeling of one race or another as lower or inferior. Felix von Luschan, who developed stronger nationalist tendencies and became a supporter of imperialism by the turn of the century, continued to maintain a liberal position on race until the end of his life, arguing that “There are no races that are inferior in and of themselves.”^[56]
Following this logic, anthropologists in the liberal vein generally avoided the construction of hierarchies based on race. Without the link between race and faculty, the construction of racial hierarchies was not possible, since no one group could be ranked qualitatively higher or lower than any other. On empirical grounds, Virchow rejected the notion that one could place peoples in hierarchical rankings based on race: “In the ethnological research of physical anthropology in the past… one has begun with the expectation almost without exception, that one will find a climbing row of lower to higher ethnic stocks (Volksstämme)… As undoubtedly tempting as this theory is, its factual underpinnings are also unsure.”^[57] In the same vein, Virchow’s lifelong opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution also involved the rejection of hierarchical schemes that placed Africans or other peoples at a lower station on an evolutionary scale, often as the “missing link” between apes and humans. He flatly rejected the notion that the pygmies of Central Africa were more closely related to apes, for example, instead emphasizing their commonalities with all humanity.^[58] Similarly, Ranke maintained that Africans did not represent a intermediary step between primates and humans.^[59]
Cultural hierarchy, however, was accepted as a given by liberal anthropologists. As believers in progress, they assumed that certain peoples were more advanced than others. This belief was embedded in the terminology of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on a distinction that originated in the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder in the late eighteenth century, German ethnologists and anthropologists commonly divided humanity into two groups, “cultured peoples” (Kulturvölker), literate peoples with a written history; and “natural peoples,” (Naturvölker) groups without a recorded past. Members of the discipline readily assumed that “natural peoples” were simpler and less culturally developed than “cultured peoples,” whose number included Europeans and Chinese. They argued that the Australian Aborigines, for example, had achieved only a low level of culture in comparison to Europeans.^[60] At times, such assumptions of cultural hierarchy crossed into physical and racial characterizations. Some anthropologists used terms like “Kulturrasse” or “cultured race” in their academic discourse. The Hamburg ethnologist Paul Hambruch, for example, referred to “Kulturrassen” in his courses.^[61] Virchow himself was not immune. He argued that the skulls of Australians, whom he considered at the “lowest level of culture,” exhibited features in the forehead that were generally absent from those of “the carriers of the highest cultures.”^[62] He went on to say, however, that he could see “no characteristic of progressive development” in such skull shapes, a statement which ultimately questioned any connection between physical type and cultural advancement. The general rule remained that physical anthropologists should rely on the disciplinary dictum that culture was a matter for ethnologists to explore and had no place in physical anthropology.
Another central characteristic of anthropology under Virchow was the rejection of “Aryan,” “Teutonic” and “Germanic” racial doctrines that were increasingly taking shape in the 1880s and 1890s. In one way or another, these theories all belonged under the rubric of völkisch thought, – a diffuse and unsystematic set of ideas loosely united by extreme nationalism, social Darwinism, anti-Semitism, and a Germanic brand of racism.^[63] Often motivated by what they saw as the ills of modernity and the fragmentation of modern German culture in an age of industrialization, Germanic ideologues drew on a disparate group of sources to create a radical nationalist ideology frequently based on notions of racial superiority and inferiority.^[64] One of these sources was the field of linguistics, where philologists had inferred the supposed existence of a prehistoric “Aryan” people from the common roots of Indo-European languages.^[65] Linguists and other writers subsequently imbued this concept with racial meaning. Chief among these was French theorist Arthur de Gobineau, whose Essay on the Inequality of Human Races popularized a glorified notion of a superior “Aryan” race and claimed that racial difference determined culture.^[66] Another influential racial theorist was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman who adopted Germany as his home and propagated an anti-Semitic and pro-German racial ideology. From the early 1890s onward, Chamberlain produced a spate of popular writings based on the notion that races differed in mental and moral faculty as well as physical makeup. In comparison with professional anthropologists, Chamberlain regularly conflated the categories of race, nation, and Volk in his writings.^[67]
Initially, anthropologists entertained theories about Aryan language roots, hoping to discover the prehistoric origins and relationships of European peoples through linguistics. While the Aryan idea was still generally new, members of the anthropological community guardedly accepted the notion of an Aryan language group and even referred to an “Aryan race” at points.^[68] Skepticism about Aryan linguistic theories soon set in, however, and the majority of anthropologists increasingly avoided any link between the Aryan concept and race. Virchow, for example, expressed doubt about the linguistic evidence upon which the notion of an Aryan language group was based. Reviewing the work of philologists on the subject, Virchow commented that the entire theory was like “an ingenious and artistic building, in which as soon one of the supports is taken away, the result is a strong rocking and shaking of the entire structure.”^[69] In his anthropological compendium of 1887, Ranke extensively quoted Virchow’s doubts about the congruence of the Aryan language group with a blond haired and blue-eyed physical type.^[70] The Berlin anthropologist Felix von Luschan also maintained that although the Aryan language group may have corresponded to race at some point in the distant past, this was no longer the case: “Certainly there is an indo-Germanic language family, but there is no more Aryan race; the peoples that speak indo-Germanic languages today belong to different races that have among them few physical characteristics in common. …whoever simply wants to look around immediately grasps that linguistic unity cannot fully correspond with the physical, as one usually assumed earlier.”^[71] Rudolf Martin made the same point in 1916, again basing his argument on the distinction between race, Volk, and nation and the inability to equate language with the form of skull. He wrote that “Germans, Celts, and Slavs are linguistic terms, and therefore it is as laughable to speak of a Germanic or Celtic race, as it would be to refer to a long-skulled language.”^[72] The dismissal of the Aryan race idea was widespread in the anthropological community by the late nineteenth century because anthropologists operated on the assumption that race, language, and culture were incongruent.
For the same reason, anthropologists also generally avoided references to a “Germanic” race. In the 1870s and 1880s, German anthropologists hoped to assemble an anthropological profile of a “Germanic type” and undertook a series of craniological studies to that end.^[73] In his famous study of the skin, hair, and eye color of German schoolchildren in the 1870s, Virchow made it clear that Germans were a mixture of several physical varieties.^[74] Anthropologists increasingly abandoned the attempt to construct a “Germanic type” as they became more sensitive about their use of the term in the face of rising Germanic racism. By the turn of the century, Virchow became very cautious about referring to a Germanic “type” or identifying bones and skulls as “Germanic.” Near the end of his life, for example, Virchow argued that he could not tell any difference between a Germanic and a Slavic skull, and also maintained that there were no clear physical boundaries between Celtic and Germanic peoples.^[75] In his view, there was “no positive characteristic of the Germanic skull,” which meant that a German skull was indistinguishable from those of other ethnic groups.^[76] In other words, national or ethnic categories did not correspond to a set of physical characteristics.^[77] In the same vein, Julius Kollmann attacked the notion of a “Germanic race” in 1900 by asserting that race and nation as categories did not influence each other.^[78]
Moreover, professional anthropologists openly attacked the theories of Chamberlain and Gobineau as unfounded. Johannes Ranke, for example, repudiated the works of the two men, saying that the public must be made aware of “how fully [they] contradict the real scientific facts.”^[79] After Ranke’s death in 1916, an obituary in the leading anthropological newsletter stated that Ranke had been a lifelong opponent of “modern racial theorists, at whose pinnacle stands the Frenchmen Gobineau and the Englishman Chamberlain.”^[80] In addition, the leading figures in the liberal tradition – Virchow, Ranke, and Kollmann – prevented völkisch theorists from publishing in anthropological journals or promoting their work in anthropological circles. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, for example, neither belonged to a German anthropological society nor published in anthropological journals. Moreover, anthropologists rarely mentioned him in print, treating his theories with a deafening silence. The same was generally true of Gobineau’s work, which received almost no mention at all in anthropological circles during the late nineteenth century. As Benoit Massin has pointed out, Chamberlain responded by condemning Virchow and Kollman for advocating “the dogma that ‘all men are equally gifted,’” and argued that as a result they had “wreaked a lot of havoc” on German political life.^[81] Several men who could be considered Germanic theorists, including Ludwig Wilser and Otto Ammon, were members of German anthropological societies, but in comparison to the leading members of the discipline like Virchow, Ranke, or Kollmann, their place was marginal at best.
German anthropologists in the liberal tradition were also generally opposed to anti-Semitism and were hesitant to construct Jews as a distinct race. This hesitation stemmed from liberal ideological grounds. As a liberal who supported equal rights before the law, Virchow was ideologically opposed to anti-Semitism throughout his public life. In 1880, for example, he defeated the notorious court preacher and leader of the anti-Semitic Christian Socialist Party, Adolf Stöcker, in an election for a seat in the German Parliament. In an era in which anti-Semitic political movements were on the rise,^[82] he spoke out publicly against anti-Semitism, particularly in the German university system, and identified himself as an opponent of anti-Jewish sentiment.^[83] Virchow’s anthropological view of Jews was often contradictory, but also demonstrated the influence of his opposition to anti-Semitism. Although he made references to a “Jewish race” at several points in his career, he became increasingly cautious about constructing Jews as a race by the 1890s. His study of German schoolchildren in the 1880s demonstrated, for example, that Jews in Germany did not possess a uniform physical type. Later, in 1896, he similarly claimed that no one had been able to prove that a specifically Jewish skull type existed.^[84] Virchow thus frequently upheld the notion that Jews, like other ethnic groups in Europe, exhibited many different physical types, rather than a uniform morphology that could be construed as a “race.” Similarly, Felix von Luschan directly challenged the popular conception that Jews were a racially distinct group by emphasizing the difference between race and language. He claimed that Jews, like other European peoples, represented a racial mixture. More importantly, Luschan maintained that it was a grave mistake to refer to Jews as inferior and lauded Jewish cultural accomplishments. Ancient Palestine, he argued, had supplied Western Civilization with writing, poetry, religion and architecture.^[85]
These views did not prevent anthropologists from subscribing to a variety of negative stereotypes about Jews, however, many of which were typical of the period. Both Luschan and Virchow made remarks at various points about the “Jewish nose” and consistently assumed that Jews were a distinct group apart from Germans.^[86] Later in his life, Luschan remarked privately on the “purely Jewish appearance” of several Austrian Jews that he had known in Vienna.^[87] And yet, despite these contradictions, German anthropologists set themselves apart from Germanic and völkisch racial theorists by generally opposing anti-Semitism, and avoided the construction of Jews as a distinct race. Moreover, as Benoit Massin has pointed out, German anthropologists remained relatively uninterested in Jews as subjects of anthropological inquiry during this period. Among the thousands of articles that appeared in the major German anthropological journals from 1890 to 1914, only six dealt specifically with Jews.^[88]

CONCLUSION

A combination of forces combined to weaken and finally extinguish the liberal paradigm by the 1920s. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the leading champions of the liberal brand of anthropology gradually died out: Virchow in 1902, Bastian in 1905, Ranke in 1916, Kollman in 1918, Luschan in 1924, and Martin in 1925. In addition, extended debates over the worth of craniometry and the value of Darwinism spurred many anthropologists to question induction as a methodology and liberal assumptions about humankind. In light of growing fossil evidence, more anthropologists converted to Darwinism by the turn of the century. This led to a series of increasingly illiberal positions on race, as members of the discipline came to accept the notion of inequality among peoples as an innate part of the natural world. The embrace of Darwinism also encouraged the assumption that physical characteristics were connected with mental and cultural faculty. Anthropologists such as Gustav Schwalbe, Otto Reche, and Eugen Fischer staked out such positions after 1900.^[89] Anthropologists also began to question the worth of craniometry, which had produced no firm conclusions after decades of data collection. In search of new methodologies, a younger cohort led by Eugen Fischer turned toward the emerging field of genetics, which held that mental traits, understood as hereditary, were another marker that distinguished races from one another. Finally, the First World War facilitated a conclusive break with the liberal tradition. In the atmosphere of total war, German anthropologists sought to make their science relevant to the nation and state by applying their disciplinary tools – including concepts of race – to the war effort. The result was a more politically instrumentalized and narrowly nationalistic anthropology that blended the categories of nation, race, and Volk.^[90] By the 1920s, the physical anthropology of Virchow’s day had been replaced by “racial science,” or Rassenkunde, which broke with previous practice by seeking the links between race, intellect and culture through genetics. Researchers in this vein often explicitly linked their scholarship to theories of a superior “Nordic” race and to eugenics.
Despite its demise, the liberal tradition in German anthropology remains significant in the wider history of the discipline. The influence of liberal ideological concepts on the physical anthropology of Virchow and his colleagues was substantial. Building on a monogenist approach to the “unity of the human species,” leading anthropologists in the late nineteenth century drew on liberal concepts of progress, rationality, and universalism to construct an anthropological paradigm that disconnected race from culture, avoided judgments of races as superior or inferior, and emphasized human commonalities even in a field where scientists were seeking to quantify physical difference. It was on this basis that the leaders of the discipline constructed a distinctly “anti-racist” approach to humankind. Anthropology in the liberal vein was not without contradiction, of course, and it drew on deep-seeded notions of cultural hierarchy; but in light of what was to come from the discipline during the 1920s and 1930s, it stands out as worthy of attention and explanation. The mere presence of the liberal tradition, not to mention its dominance, suggests that German anthropology did not proceed in a straight line from the late nineteenth century to the Nazi racial science of the 1930s. Teleological narratives of the development of racial thought in Germany clearly need to be revised to incorporate the trends that did not culminate in National Socialism, such as the liberal brand of anthropology that Virchow and his followers championed.