Siegfried Kurt Baschwitz (2 February 1886, Offenburg – 6 January 1968 Amsterdam), was a journalist, a professor of press, propaganda and public opinion, scholar on newspapers, and crowd psychology.
Baschwitz, who, as was customary in German middle class, was known by his second name Kurt, was a German Jew and a friend of Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. Baschwitz was called upon as an expert to advise on the publication of the Diary of Anne Frank and later again authenticate it.. . .After World War II Kurt Baschwitz was reinstated as a private lecturer and then an ordinary lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.In 1948 he became associate professor in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences and four years later he was made full professor in press science, public opinion, and mass psychology.In July 1948 he founded and became the first director of the Dutch Institute for the Science of the Press which organized courses for the training of young journalists, as well as established ones. Baschwitz was considered to be a pioneer in communication science and mass psychology and contributed much to the international exchange of information and research among scholars in the field. First as a driving force behind the International Society for "Publicistics", and then as a key figure preparing the International Association of Mass Communication Research IAMCR.After 1945, one of his major efforts was to rediscover information on the field had been lost because of the war and on the previous underground press. Gazette, the international journal that he founded in 1955, acted as a liaison centre for research and researchers from different parts of the world. His later works all dealt with the mass psychology of witch hunts, but were also a reflection on the mechanisms of mass persecutions in general, and those of Jews in particular. His magnum opus, in his own opinion, Hexen und Hexenprozesse: Geschichte eines Massenwahns und seiner Bekaempfung which discussed methods of fighting attempts at mass delusion appeared in 1963 and was printed in several languages. Baschwitz also contributed to the founding of a ‘seminarium’ for mass psychology, public opinion and propaganda at the University of Amsterdam. In 1972 it was renamed the Baschwitz Institute for collective behavior studies, before merging with the public opinion section within the department for communication studies in 1985.
An excerpt from, "Kurt Baschwitz: A Pioneer of Communication Studies and Social Psychology" By Jaap van Ginneken, Amsterdam University Press, 2018, Introduction:
Kurt Baschwitz (1886-1968) had a lifelong fascination for ‘the riddle of the mass’ in both its visible and invisible forms. He was a major pioneer of communication and media studies on the European continent, an early student of the social, political, and mass psychology of crowds, publics, audiences, and public opinion, as well as a versatile social historian. Half a century after his death, however, he risks being forgotten and misunderstood, falling through the cracks of history.Baschwitz was one of the many founders of the social sciences who came from a Jewish background, and who were forced to flee the Hitler regime. Fate dictated that he made it no further than The Netherlands: then still neutral, later occupied anyway. He did not reach the Anglo-American world, which came to dominate the global linguistic, cultural, intellectual, and scientific spheres after the war.After Baschwitz’s death, one commemorative article noted: ‘Unlike colleagues like Karl Mannheim, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Paul Lazarsfeld and Kurt Lewin, he did not end up in [the United Kingdom or] the United States’. This contributed to his unique contributions being overlooked. In 1986, upon the centenary of his birth, his successors from both press history and mass psychology joined together to claim that ‘Baschwitz’ work deserves a good English translation, or at least a summary’.Upon a later jubilee, one of those successors repeated: ‘Had he fled to the U.S. [from Nazi Germany in 1933], he would have been world famous today’. So ‘His publications deserve to be reprinted and translated’. This present book is an attempt to fulfil part of that wish by providing an outline of Baschwitz’s life and times, as well as summaries and brief excerpts from his half-dozen books, for English-language and international readers.Throughout his life, Baschwitz was a defender of constitutional rule and law and order against authoritarianism, intimidation, and civil violence. This was especially true during the two World Wars and the Inter-War years, when those values were alternately assaulted by both the radical socialist or communist left, and by the radical nationalist or fascist right.Three of his major dictums illustrate his stance. One: Mass delusions are best stopped by preserving freedom of expression (meaning critical discussion) at all times. Two: The most important part of a newspaper is formed by the mass of its readers (meaning a group of citizens), not by the institution itself. Three: Practical politics needs to rediscover (i.e., put trust in) the large mass of decent people if they are to stand up to tyrants. He wrote this in the 1920s and 1930s, when Europe and the rest of the world began to slide toward another major conflagration.
