ABSTRACT
Christoph Meiners was a German professor of philosophy at the hanoverian University of Gttingen, then under British rule, and known for its mission to innovate. German anthropology in the years between 1933 and 1945 reincarnated his ghost. W. E. Mhlmanns interest in Meiners thinking is patent, both in his post-war History of Anthropology and in his 1938 Methodology. Indeed, for Meiners, non-European nations could be characterized by their irritability, agility, and fragility, which were apparent in their propensity toward despair and anger, in their convulsions and epileptic fits, in their tendency toward suicide. Egon von Eickstedt, another faithful servant of national-socialist anthropology, also vaunted Meiners qualities. Several books of Meiners, dealing with corruption and decline in ancient Greece and Rome, were translated and found a positive echo in France where the idea of decline by way of degeneration became associated to the experience of Revolution and Terror.
