Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYZoologically speaking, we should classify man under the category oftrutheater rather than carnivores.”The famous behavioral scientist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenzmade a very similar observation when he described human curiositywith these words: 62“There exist inborn behavioral systems that are equivalent tohuman rights whose suppression can lead to serious mental disturbances.”Lorenz’s disciple Eibl-Eibesfeld, who directed the Max Planck Institutefor Behavioral Research for many years, expressed the idea in asimilar fashion: 63“Through evolutionary adaptation [man is] pre-programmed tobe a cultural creature – in his curiosity, for example, an independenturge that causes him to seek out new situations in order to learnfrom them. For that reason we join A. Gehlen in calling him the ‘curiositycreature’.”A reviewer of my magazine Vierteljahresheft für freie Geschichtsforschung(quarterly for free historical research) 64 once wrote that thewill to the truth, which is to say curiosity, is the divine spark in man. 65The compulsion to learn the truth may not be of such high importancefor all individuals, but most certainly for the group I havequoted, namely the intellectuals in human history.I would now like to give you a brief overview of my life under theaspect of my own curiosity, from which it will become clear that Iwithout doubt belong to the group of “trutheaters” who have to witherwithout this nourishment.It was probably quite “normal” that I started bombarding my parentswith questions as a small boy, with which I was getting particularly onmy mother’s nerves. Probably due to my parents’ moderate educationcaused by wartime privations – both had only eight years of school education– their ability to satisfy my childlike curiosity was rather limited,which frustrated me quickly and caused me to doubt their competence.During my first three school years, my mother’s vain and despairingattempts to persuade me to read anything indicated that there was more6263646552Konrad Lorenz, Der Abbau des Menschlichen, Piper, Munich 1983, p. 1; The Waning of Humaneness,Little, Brown & Co., Boston 1987, p. 186.Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeld, Der vorprogrammierte Mensch, Fritz Molden, Wien 1973, p. 272;reference to Arno Gehlen, Moral und Hypermoral, Athenäum, Frankfurt on Main 1969.www.vho.org/VffG.D. V., “‘Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar,’” Mensch und Maß, 39(1) (1999), p. 44.