Heinrich Schmidt

Background

Schmidt was born in Heubach in the German State of Thuringia.

Education

From 1890 to 1894 he attended a teacher training school in Hildburghausen and then worked as an elementary school teacher. He studied there under the financial support of Ernst Haeckel and in 1900 became his private secretary.

Career

In 1897 he moved on to scientific training in Jena. Since Schmidt lacked formal college training, Haeckel sent him the University of Zurich to study under his former pupil, Arnold Language. There Schmidt earned his Doctorate in 1904.

By 1912 he was an archivist in the Phyletic Institute and in 1916 he became head of the Haeckel Archive.

Schmidt was awarded the title of full Professor in 1919. After Haeckel"s death in 1920, Schmidt became his executor and director of the Ernst Haeckel House at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena.

In 1920 he became its chairman and remained so until his death in 1935. Schmidt was a staunch representative of "haeckelism" and its theories of evolutionary development.

He was also editor of the journal Monistischen Monatshefte.

After this publication was abolished in 1933 for political reasons, Schmidt founded the journal Nature and Spirit. The management and archiving of Haeckel"s vast legacy in the years following his death formed the bulk of Heinrich Schmidt"s work. By 1933, however, ideological and political issues increasingly became a priority.

In its later editions, Schmidt"s journal "Nature and Spirit" took a detour from its monistic tradition and published works on eugenics and racial hygiene by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz.

Politics

Schmidt"s predominantly social democratic thinking gave way to a radical nationalism then being espoused by the Nazis. However, their attempts to reinterpret the legacy of Ernst Haeckel into a National Socialist meaning ultimately failed.

Membership

Schmidt, as Haeckel before him, was also a member of the Deutsche Monistenbund, a society of Monists.

Connections

colleague:

Ludwig Plate