Racial Science on Trial

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative-Historical Roundtable 3

Abstract

This article examines the Nazi party expulsion trial of racial psychologist Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (1892-1974). While ostensibly concerned with a bureaucratic violation of the Nuremberg Race Laws—Clauss collaborated with a Jewish researcher throughout the dictatorship without declaring her religious heritage—the trial stages an internal dispute over scientific authority within Nazi racial science. Clauss’s defense, that his Jewish-classified assistant’s “partial” racial status uniquely qualified her to study “Semites,” reveals a paradox at the core of the regime’s knowledge project: At least some Nazi racial science depended on the epistemic capacities it officially denied. Reading the trial files obliquely, the article reconstructs this unresolved tension. A comparative analogy with W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness highlights how structurally similar ideas about positional knowledge can be mobilized toward radically divergent political ends. More generally, the article explores the epistemology and internal contradictions of racial pseudo-science.

Author

• Anna K.M. Skarpelis, CUNY-Queens College