oa Van humanisme tot nazisme

From Humanism to Nazism. The case of Frederik Jzn. Muller (1883-1944)

Frederik Jzn. Muller (1883—1944) was professor of Latin at Leiden University from 1921 to 1944 and one of the few prominent Dutch classicists who collaborated with the German occupiers during the Second World War. The driving force behind Muller’s collaboration was not political opportunism or anti-Semitic ideology, but the conviction that only in a ‘Third Reich’ under German leadership could a new era of European culture dawn. With his belief in the close connection between cultural flourishing and state-building, Muller was a rare Dutch exponent of the intellectual movement known as the ‘third’ humanism, of which the German classicist Werner Jaeger (1888-1961) is commonly seen as the most typical representative. However, Frederik Muller’s views, much more so than Jaeger’s, expose the utterly paradoxical relationship between the ‘third’ humanism and the history of National Socialism.