Gottlob Frege - 1924 Diary

1924 Diary

Frege's published philosophical writings were of a very technical nature and divorced from practical issues, so much so that Frege scholar Dummett expresses his "shock to discover, while reading Frege's diary, that his hero was an outspoken anti-Semite (1973)." He was always a conservative, but after World War I he became more of a radical. His late political "diary shows Frege to have been a man of extreme right-wing political opinions, bitterly opposed to the parliamentary system, democrats, liberals, Catholics, the French and, above all, Jews, who he thought ought to be deprived of political rights and, preferably, expelled from Germany". Frege confided "that he had once thought of himself as a liberal and was an admirer of Bismarck, but his heroes now were General Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler. This was after the two had tried to topple the elected democratic government in a coup in November 1923. In his diary Frege also used all his analytic skills to devise plans for expelling the Jews from Germany and for suppressing the Social Democrats." Frege disliked universal suffrage and was against any form of socialism, which he simply called Marxism. His antisemitism still allowed for exceptions, and he had friendly relations with Jews in real life: among his students was Gershom Scholem who much valued his teacher; and he encouraged Ludwig Wittgenstein to leave for England. The 1924 diary has been published.