Paper Short Abstract:

Paul Leser and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, forced to emigrate from Nazi Germany, are hardly acknowledged in the history of anthropology today. Their writings are examples of statements in the first half of the 20th century against the inclusion of racial theories and colonialism within anthropology.

Paper Abstract:

With Paul Leser and Otto Maenchen-Helfen I would like to introduce two ethnologists who emigrated to the USA during the Nazi regime. They did not return to Europe and have hardly been considered in the historiography of anthropology. Leser, born in Frankfurt, saw himself as the only student of Fritz Graebner. Throughout his life, he endeavoured to understand Graebner's cultural-historical approach as an unprejudiced and in-progress method. It is virtually unknown that Leser submitted a thesis in 1927, at a time when others were developing Graebner's approach in a racist manner, in which Leser decidedly demonstrated why racial theories could not be used as a reliable source for (cultural-historical) studies. Submitted as a habilitation thesis, it was rejected as "non-ethnological".

Otto Maenchen-Helfen, born in Vienna/Austria, is today primarily recognised as an expert of Asia and art historian, although he qualified as a professor of ethnology in Berlin in 1933. As a Socialist and husband of a Jewish woman, he emigrated from Germany, first to Vienna and then to the USA. Maenchen-Helfen was one of the very few (rare even in early socialist circles) who explicitly opposed colonialism and supported cultural self-determination worldwide.

This paper calls for recognizing Paul Leser and Otto Maenchen-Helfen and to end the marginalisation they experienced during their lifetimes. Their writings show us that there were other scholars in our discipline besides Franz Boas who explicitly opposed the inclusion of racial theories and colonialism in the first half of the 20th century.