Kurt Baschwitz

Kurt Baschwitz (1886-1968) had a lifelong fascination for ‘the riddle of the mass’ in both its visible and invisible forms. He was a major pioneer of communication and media studies on the European continent, an early student of the social, political, and mass psychology of crowds, publics, audiences, and public opinion, as well as a versatile social historian. Half a century after his death, however, he risks being forgotten and misunderstood, falling through the cracks of history.

Baschwitz was one of the many founders of the social sciences who came from a Jewish background, and who were forced to flee the Hitler regime. Fate dictated that he made it no further than The Netherlands: then still neutral, later occupied anyway. He did not reach the Anglo-American world, which came to dominate the global linguistic, cultural, intellectual, and scientific spheres after the war.

After Baschwitz’s death, one commemorative article noted: ‘Unlike colleagues like Karl Mannheim, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Paul Lazarsfeld and Kurt Lewin, he did not end up in [the United Kingdom or] the United States’. This contributed to his unique contributions being overlooked. In 1986, upon the centenary of his birth, his successors from both press history and mass psychology joined together to claim that ‘Baschwitz’ work deserves a good English translation, or at least a summary’. 

Upon a later jubilee, one of those successors repeated: ‘Had he fled to the U.S. [from Nazi Germany in 1933], he would have been world famous today’. So ‘His publications deserve to be reprinted and translated’. This present book is an attempt to fulfil part of that wish by providing an outline of Baschwitz’s life and times, as well as summaries and brief excerpts from his half-dozen books, for English-language and international readers.

Throughout his life, Baschwitz was a defender of constitutional rule and law and order against authoritarianism, intimidation, and civil violence. This was especially true during the two World Wars and the Inter-War years, when those values were alternately assaulted by both the radical socialist or communist left, and by the radical nationalist or fascist right.

Three of his major dictums illustrate his stance. One: Mass delusions are best stopped by preserving freedom of expression (meaning critical discussion) at all times. Two: The most important part of a newspaper is formed by the mass of its readers (meaning a group of citizens), not by the institution itself. Three: Practical politics needs to rediscover (i.e., put trust in) the large mass of decent people if they are to stand up to tyrants. He wrote this in the 1920s and 1930s, when Europe and the rest of the world began to slide toward another major conflagration.