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The prominent historian Niall Ferguson recently tells a story for our time in his Pharos Lecture “The treason of the intellectuals: How the Nazis conquered German universities” (video below) and in his 2023 Free Press essay “The treason of the intellectuals.” The video includes Ferguson’s conversation with Noel Malcolm beginning at about 32:00.

On the subject of the conquest of German universities by the Nazis, I would add this footnote to Ferguson’s lecture. Saul Friedländer’s two-volume history Nazi Germany and the Jews presents a panoramic account of the larger story. Volume 1 has the subtitle The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. Volume 2, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, is titled The Years of Extermination. It has the subtitle Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. The two volumes are abridged in Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945.

Friedländer begins in chapter 1 of Volume 1 with the expulsion of Jews from the arts. “As peripheral as it may seem in hindsight,” Friedländer writes, “the cultural domain was the first from which Jews (and ‘leftists’) were massively expelled.” A few pages later, after discussing Thomas Mann, who was himself married to a Jew, Friedländer adds: “Apart from a few courageous individuals such as Ricarda Huch, there was no countervailing force in that domain — or, for that matter, in any other.”