Amit Varshizky, "The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview" (Taylor & Francis, 2024)

Sep 19, 2025

Amit Varshizky, an expert on the intellectual and cultural history of Nazism, dives deep into his book, exploring the metaphysical dimensions of Nazi racial thought. He discusses how Nazi ideology provided a coherent philosophical framework amidst tensions in science and spirituality. Varshizky highlights the cultural pessimism of interwar Germany and the dangerous merging of genetics with political ethics. The conversation also draws connections to contemporary ethnic nationalisms, revealing alarming parallels to today's world.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Personal Origins In Holocaust Memory

Varshizky recounts growing up in Israel with Holocaust memory and his grandmother's survival stories.
Those childhood encounters with trauma motivated his attempt to understand perpetrators' justifications.

INSIGHT

Biology As A Source Of Meaning

Varshizky shows Nazi thinkers rejected mechanistic biology and favored holistic, vitalist biology to ground values in nature.
This allowed them to collapse the fact/value divide and claim biology as a source of ethics and meaning.

ADVICE

Study Anti‑Positivist Currents

Take cultural critiques of positivist science seriously as part of modern intellectual history.
Investigate holistic biology and phenomenology to understand how value claims migrate into science.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

The Metaphysics of Race seeks to reframe debates on the conflicting scientific and spiritual traditions that underpinned the Nazi worldview, showing how despite the multitude of tensions and rivals among its adherents, it provided a coherent conceptual grid and possessed its own philosophical consistency. Drawing on a large variety of works, the volume offers insights into the intellectual climate that allowed the radical ideology of National Socialism to take hold. It examines the emergence of nuanced conceptions of race in interwar Germany and the pursuit of a new ethical and existential fulcrum in biology. Accordingly, the volume calls for a re-examination of the place of genetics in Nazi racial thought, drawing attention to the multi-register voices within the framework of interwar racial theory. Varshizky explores the ways in which these ideas provided new justifications for the Nazi revolutionary enterprise and blurred the distinction between fact and value, knowledge and faith, the secular and the sacred, and how they allowed Nazi thinkers to bounce across these epistemological divisions. This volume will be of interest to scholars of Nazi Germany and World War II, intellectual and cultural history, the history of science, and the philosophy of religion.

Amit Varshizky is an Israeli-born, Berlin-based historian, novelist, and essayist. He holds a PhD from the School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University and has lectured at academic institutions in both Israel and Germany. His research focuses on the history of racism and antisemitism in modern Europe, the intellectual and cultural history of Nazism, German Romanticism, the philosophy of science, and theories of religion, myth, and secularism. His articles and reviews on these subjects have appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals. His book The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview (Open University of Israel and Yad Vashem, 2021) was awarded the Goldberg Prize of the Open University of Israel for Best Research Book (2019) and the Bartal Am VeOlam Prize of the Israel Historical Society for Outstanding Book of the Year (2022). An English version of the book was published by Routledge in 2024.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network