The Liquidation of Exile: Studies in the Intellectual Emigration of the 1930s 9780857287939, 2011015826, 0857287931

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Half Title
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Main Matter
CHAPTER ONE The Study of Intellectual Exile: A Paradigm
The Concept of Exile
Symbolic Exile and Political Understanding
The Classical Model of (Political) Exile
Socrates’ Choice
Elements of Ciceronian Exile
A Paradigm for the Study of Political Exile
The Starting Point of Exile
Exile as Event
Locus of Exile
Project of Exile
The Mission and the End of Exile
Political and Metaphorical Exile Once More
CHAPTER TWO Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein’s Exile Studies
CHAPTER THREE A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider, and/or Exile
CHAPTER FOUR Exile as Process: The Case of Franz L. Neumann
The Zone of Displacement: Variety and Movement
An Overview of Franz L. Neumann
The “Political Scholar” in Exile
The Anti-Fascist Mission
Past and Future from the Perspective of Exile
Negotiating Exile: The Institute of Social Research
The Fluidity of Exile
CHAPTER FIVE The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State
Erich Kahler as Symbol of Humanism
Diasporic Kultur at Ohio State
History and Culture in Munich, Baltimore, and Columbus
Kahler and the Earnest “Young” Americans
Disenchantment: the crisis of “crisis”
Exile and Disorder
CHAPTER SIX First Letters: The Liquidation of Exile?
The “Things” That Happened “Over There”
Recognition and the Scope of Bargaining
Simple Cases
“Let Ball!” Hermann Kesten and Erich Kästner
Renegotiations: Ernst Fraenkel
Denial of Exile
Failed Negotiations: The Non-Return of Hans Gerth
The Captain from Vermont: Zuckmayer’s Return
From Exile to Diaspora: Oskar Maria Graf
The Documentary Meaning of First Letters: Conclusion and Review
CHAPTER SEVEN The Second Wave: An Autobiographical Exercise
A Belated Recruit to the Last Weimar Generation
The Vocation of Intellectuals
Politics: Science or Negotiation
“Exile and Return”: The Second Time
End Matter
NOTES
Preface
Chapter One. The Study of Intellectual Exile: A Paradigm
Chapter Two. Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein’s Exile Studies
Chapter Three. A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider, and/or Exile
Chapter Four. Exile as Process: The Case of Franz L. Neumann
Chapter Five. The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State
Chapter Six. First Letters: The Liquidation of Exile?
Chapter Seven. The Second Wave: An Autobiographical Exercise
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

The Liquidation of Exile

Advance Reviews “No one among our contemporaries has thought more deeply about exile than David Kettler. His new book illuminates its historical modes, its cultural impact and its personal cost. Humane without being mawkish, analytical without being cold, The Liquidation of Exile instructs and inspires the reader in equal measure. Those of us fortunate enough to have lived peaceful lives in quieter times can only gasp in amazement at what these refugee intellectuals endured – and achieved.” —Professor Peter Baehr, Lingnan University “Having successfully ‘liquidated’ his own exile, David Kettler (né Manfred Ketzlach), a ‘second-wave’ émigré (b. 1930, Leipzig) from Germany to the U.S., and a long-time contributor to the sociology of intellectuals, has written a critical review of the uses of ‘exile’ in contemporary scholarship. He shows how a coterie of German émigrés, most of Jewish origins, negotiated their relationship to their former Heimat in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Some returned to Germany, most did not: Ernst Fraenkel, Oskar Maria Graf, Erich Kahler, Hermann Kesten, Siegfried Kracauer, Hans Mayer, Franz Neumann, Nina Rubinstein and Carl Zuckmayer. A must-read is the collection of first postwar letters, which émigrés sent to German colleagues, renewing contact, beginning a tortuous rapprochement. The letters provide vivid evidence that, for most émigrés, the liquidation of exile was long and arduous.” —Professor Malachi Hacohen, Duke University “David Kettler has written a fascinating and thoughtfully accessible account of one of the most devastating and intriguing periods of modern intellectual history.” —Professor Gerhard Lauer, University of Göttingen “David Kettler has thought deeply about the meaning and impact of exile. His scholarship is beyond reproach. Thus, this book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of an important topic.” —Professor Jack Jacobs, City University of New York “In this meticulously researched, interdisciplinary study David Kettler expands on the conventional understanding of political exile by including the question of return. Building on new theories of exile, Kettler offers a carefully developed paradigm of ‘political exile’ that focuses on different modes of acculturation as well as the difficult negotiations for a return or at least a reconnection with the country of origin. Insightful case studies of individual exiles like Nina Rubinstein, Franz Neumann, Hans Mayer or Erich Kahler, which illustrate different variants within this paradigm, clearly demonstrate the viability of Kettler’s illuminating approach.” —Professor Helga Schreckenberger, University of Vermont

The Liquidation of Exile Studies in the Intellectual Emigration of the 1930s David Kettler

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2011 by ANTHEM PRESS 75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA Copyright © David Kettler 2011 The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Cover photograph entitled “Oedipus at Colonus, bronze sculpture by Leonard Baskin, Joslyn Sculpture Garden, Omaha” © Ali Eminov 2009 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kettler, David. The liquidation of exile : studies in the intellectual emigration of the 1930s / David Kettler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85728-793-9 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Germans–Foreign countries–History–20th century. 2. Exiles–Germany–History–20th century. 3. Intellectuals–Germany–History–20th century. 4. Political refugees–Germany–History–20th century. 5. Germany–Emigration and immigration–History–20th century. 6. Germany–Intellectual life–20th century. I. Title. DD68.K48 2011 304.80943’09043–dc22 2011015826 ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 793 9 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 0 85728 793 1 (Hbk) This title is also available as an eBook.

CONTENTS Preface 1. The Study of Intellectual Exile: A Paradigm

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2. Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein’s Exile Studies

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3. A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider, and/or Exile

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4. Exile as Process: The Case of Franz L. Neumann

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5. The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State

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6. First Letters: The Liquidation of Exile?

109

7. The Second Wave: An Autobiographical Exercise

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Notes

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Selected Bibliography

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Index

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PREFACE The studies brought together in this book are integral parts of a project developed over the past ten years. Many of them were published individually in various forms and forums, but the framework is the product of the accumulated work, and the pieces have been adapted to the comprehensive design. Since the overall “Contested Legacies” project has been a collaborative one, involving four workshops and a large conference, as documented in a number of collaborative publications,1 I am especially indebted to the many colleagues who made contributions to these events. None of the chapters of the present volume appear in these books. They do, however, variously draw on the following earlier publications: “Antifascism as Ideology: Review and Introduction,” in Habitus, Identität und die exilierten Dispositionen, ed. Anna Wessely, Karoly Kokai and Zoltan Peter, 139–159 (Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiado, 2008); “Erste Briefe. Zwischen Exil und Rückkehr,” Zeitschrift fürIdeengeschichte (May 2008): 79–107; “Le prime letteri dei refugees; una liquidazione dell’esperienza dell’esilio?” Memoria e Ricerca. Rivista di storia contemporanea 31 (Maggio/agosto 2009): 103–120; “Una ‘primera carta’ de Siegfried Kracauer,” in Siegfried Kracauer: un pensador más allá de las fronteras, ed. Carlos Eduardo J. Machado and Miguel Vedda, 171–178 (Buenos Aires: Gorla, 2010); “Negotiations: Learning from Three Frankfurt Schools,” in Fruits of Exile, ed. Richard Bodek and Simon Lewis (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), and in German: “Ein unvollendetes Lehrstück: Meine Verhandlungen mit drei Frankfurter Schulen,” in Soziologie in Frankfurt. Eine Zwischenbilanz, ed. Felicia Herrschaft and Klaus Lichtblau, 257–281 (Berlin: VS Verlag, 2010); Caroline Arni et al., Hrsg., “Negotiating Exile: Franz L. Neumann as Political Scientist,” Der Eigensinn des Materials. Erkundungen sozialer Wirklichkeit (Frankfurt am Main/Basel: Stroemfeld, 2007) 205–224; “Franz L. Neumann,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. William A. Darity Jr., , 9 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008); “A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider and/or Exile,” New German Critique (June 2006) 96: 171–181; “The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State University” in Exile and

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Otherness, ed. Alexander Stephan, 269–310 (Oxford, Bern: Peter Lang, 2005); “’Les émigrés sont les vainçus.’ Spiritual Diaspora and Political Exile,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Crossroads I, no. 3 (2004), reprinted as “Spiritual Diaspora and Political Exile” in Neuer Mensch und kollektive Identität in der Kommunikationsgesellschaft, ed. Gerhard Preyer (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008); “‘Weimar and Labor’ as Legacy: Ernst Fraenkel, Otto Kahn-Freund, and Franz L. Neumann,” in Die Alchemie des Exils. Exil als schöpferischer Impuls, ed. Helga Schreckenberger (Vienna: Edition Praesens, 2005); “Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein’s Studies in Exile,” in Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation, ed. Edward Timms and Jon Hughes, 195–206 (Wien/ New York: Springer, 2003). The project has been supported over the years by several institutions, whose help has been duly acknowledged in earlier publications, but I want to emphasize above all my lasting debt to Bard College and its remarkable president, Leon Botstein, and to Detlef Garz of Johannes Gutenberg University, who have been supportive when it most counted. The work is dedicated to my friend and daily correspondent, Jerry Zaslove of Simon Fraser University, who has provided intellectual tutelage, challenges, encouragement, and a lot of laughter for the past twenty years.

CHAPTER ONE The Study of Intellectual Exile: A Paradigm This is a book about exile. It is also a book about some figures within a cohort of individuals in a particular time and place to whom the term exile has been variously applied—persons active in one or another sphere of public space who were displaced by Nazi rule in Germany between 1933 and 1945—and whose historical experiences and achievements have been found sufficiently important to serve as a point of departure for an interdisciplinary field of studies. While there can be no prohibition against simply postulating a plausible definition of exile as a preliminary to biographical, historical, or critical studies of the individuals or groups subsequently classed under that dramatic label, as is often done in exile studies, such a proceeding entails costs. Exile has a rich and contested history as a concept in political, literary, and religious reflection—a history that enters as well into the recognition of self and others among those involved in the instances under study. The aim of the present study is to take some chapters in the historical inquiry into the 1930s exile as the locus for an investigation of the phenomena and issues at stake in the contested uses of exile in social inquiry.

The Concept of Exile What work does the term exile do in the contemporary language of cultural and political self-reflection, so that interpreters find it worthwhile to quarrel about its scope and application? Well, exiles in that context are always special. They are suspended between two places. In one place, they are denied, either by threat of violence or by some other insupportable condition; in the other place, they are only conditionally accepted: they find asylum, not a home. They are at a distance from both places. Moreover, in almost all uses of the term, even exiles who are literally banished retain the special status only so long as they continue to identify themselves—or to be identified—with this suspension between the two places, the refusal wholly to abandon the one or wholly to accept the other. The focus of their attention is on their unfinished business between them and the first place, not their limited business with the

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second. Exiles accordingly appear unlike ordinary people whose ordinary needs and ambitions regulate their lives. Exiles are not rarely a reproach to those who stay behind, even though exiles may also reproach themselves for their departures, whether willing or coerced. To be an exile is to have a project, to be a thoroughly untrivial person, however absurd your beliefs and conduct may appear to outsiders. To be an exile is to be interesting, in the way that a refugee or victim or traveler or immigrant cannot be supposed to be. Exile is a status that gives a right to a special kind of hospitality, a right to asylum, and that exempts the beneficiary from the ordinary rules of reciprocity. It is not a surprise, consequently, that the meaning of exile is a bone of contention among both social scientists and cultural commentators. It implies a lot about the person(s) to whom it is applied. The status makes claims and excuses, while it also implies separation from and uncertain loyalty to the place of residence and the company of others who are there. Exile, it might be said, is politics in extremis. It tests the capacities of political life when such life is deprived of most of its institutional supports. Like many similar terms, exile is used both to refer to a condition and to persons or groups who are identified with that condition by contemporary observers, commentators, or themselves. There is controversy about both aspects. In the case of the condition, there are disputes not only about its distinction from states characterized by terms like cosmopolitan, wanderer, stranger, emigrant or refugee but also about its relationship to the language of political life, where the concept poses especially hard questions. In the case of the exemplars, the questions are about the applicability of the term over time: when and how does one become an exile, how does one sustain the condition, and when does one stop being an exile in any important sense? Dictionary definitions are either too narrow—as when exiles are equated with those banished from their native lands—or they are too broad—as when all sorts of displacements from any state deemed native are included. Outright banishment is not altogether irrelevant to exiles in the era of the modern state, but it comprehends only a fraction of the cases where individuals see no acceptable alternative to departure from the scene on which they have been active. In a time in which identities are inwardly and outwardly contested, the concept of native land is also too restrictive to capture the bounded domains in which individuals operate and which they may be constrained to leave. When it comes to the question of return, moreover, no concept suffices that is not open to basic transformations in the place of departure. The many figurative and metaphorical conceptions of exile, on the other hand, are constantly at risk of rendering everyone an exile in some sense, and thus forfeiting the opportunity of specifying the complex that constitutes the condition of exile in the sense that has posed difficult questions in social, political, and ethical analysis.

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The condition of exile takes multiple forms and requires in any case a study that attends to its susceptibility to conflict and change. In recent years, in fact, the trope of exile has stood high. To judge by some recent writings in literary criticism and cultural studies, exile appears as a transcendent status, beyond the ambiguous supports of historical circumstance, and beyond even the painful sense of its loss. Exile appears as an enabler of the most profound thought, art, and literature—an empowerment. And yet if we look in the newspapers for exiles, we find stories of pain, criminality, maneuver, burden, and racking contradictions. Exile here looks like something historically overdetermined, constricting, distorting, closely bound to the threat, suffering, and infliction of violence. A preliminary approach to the wider scope of the concept is provided by a survey of the current use of the term in the New York Times, considered here as I collected them for a month in the recent past. There are eight items that involve exile. Two refer to leading figures in active external opposition to the clerical regime of Iran, with a noteworthy emphasis on the contrast between them and the opposition mobilized in the country against the outcome of the recent elections there. In the first instance, in an interview with the son of the last Shah, “the exile,” as he is called in the title of the selection, he in effect disparages the internal opposition insofar as it really thinks that the choice of one candidate rather than the other could matter, likening them to people who preferred one successor to another in the last days of the Soviet Union. Only the introduction of secular democracy can make a difference. In response, the interviewer probes skeptically whether the exile is not really an instrument of the American CIA, which he angrily denies. She pushes also whether the repressive practices of the present regime were not in fact modeled on those of his father, whereupon he says in his father’s defense only that he accepted exile rather than inflicting more bloodshed, a context in which the concept of exile stands for justly imposed punitive exclusion rather than principled opposition. Or perhaps, to stretch the point, we are implicitly asked to consider the possibility of the former kind of exile turning into the latter, if only in the second generation. The second article relating to Iran, which is also an opinion piece, does not sound quite as many changes on exile, but similarly signals ambivalence about the role of external exile groups in relation to internal protest in that it suggests that the latter may be damaged by the self-identification of any external exile groups with their principal symbols, especially in the light of some past political maneuvers by the exiles. What comes across, leaving aside the complication introduced by the concept of exile as (merited) punishment, is the contested status of exiles in relation to the internal politics of dissent and opposition, a contest that echoes in the very connotations of the term. From the standpoint of an internal resistance

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to an oppressive regime, exiles may appear as absconders and outsiders, while exiles may in turn distrust the scope of opposition represented by those who remain within the bounds. This ambiguity is less present in the third article, comprising a series of comments on the twentieth anniversary of the violent repression of the Tiananmen Square protests, where exile is initially used merely to mark the difference in location between present-day oppositionists within China and those without. As the article proceeds, however, it becomes clear that exile is thought of as a special kind of collective social entity with an inner life— “the” exile, as it were, so that it makes sense to speak of exile publications and exile culture, and to consider the potential value of its productions as well as its harmful disposition to internal conflict. Interesting in this context is also the notice of an “exile series” of publications in connection with one of the exile journals, where the work of Havel is translated, although he was never in fact an exile from the Czech Communist regime, so that exile in this sense appears to refer quite generally to a distinctive style of trans-national oppositional political thinking. In the fourth and fifth articles to be considered, exile figures in its quality as a punitive sanction, as in the references to the Shah in the first piece considered. “Political justice,” after all, is not always wrong. One of the articles is quite straightforward. It refers simply to the “exile” of Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos, which was imposed by his successors after a successful popular rising against a manipulated electoral result, as part of a process of political pacification. Both the Iranian and Philippine examples may be considered as a function of political justice, although both instances resulted as well from ad hoc political interventions by more powerful third parties, but the quasi-juridical character of the penalty is more marked in the case treated at length in the next article to be considered. It deals with the relations between an American journalist and a Palestinian militant charged with impermissible violence. In this case, exile is a restrictive regime formally established and enforced by agreement among members of the European Union in an attempt to break into the cycle of violence between Palestinians and Israelis by preempting the power to punish someone marked for death by the Israelis. A striking feature of this case is that the Israelis—and then the Americans, after evidence is uncovered of the man’s complicity in the killing of an American—refuse to concede the status of exile, so that the exile regime must not only constrain the Palestinian to prevent his return to the opposition at home but also protect him against assassination by Mossad and abduction by the CIA. This illustrates the contested character of the exile status, even when it is in some measure formalized by a recognized process of political justice, and its deep political core.

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The remaining three uses of the term involve extensions of exile beyond the realm of politics. One is an almost trivial metaphor for the isolation that the film director Werner Herzog seeks from his collaborators in film making, as he fully immerses himself in the location of the film. What makes it worth noting is that it focuses on the separation from associates that is not thematized in the political uses examined earlier, although the conditions so designated would more generally include this element. A similar shift in emphasis occurs in the use of exile as an attribute of an author who is the protagonist of a novel, where the case would appear to be one where the term in its most common minimal political sense would apply but the point of the concept in this case is to prepare for a characterization of the author as “misfit,” who comes to resemble Joseph Conrad by virtue of his outsider’s exquisite mastery of the alien English language. In both of these cases then, exile is associated with an opening to cultural achievements not available to those who remain inside of the context from which they are excluded—or exclude themselves. This association between exile and transfiguration is epitomized, then, in the final use of exile to be considered. A Greek journalist speaks rhapsodically of the supposed universalization of the highest values that is a concomitant of the “exile” of the Elgin marbles from their localized settings in Athens, the opening that the condition provides to cosmopolitan humanism.

Symbolic Exile and Political Understanding As we move from this preliminary survey of the rich complexity of contemporary uses of exile, we begin with this final class of unpolitical meanings because of its current vogue outside of the concrete settings of journalistic discourse. Two seminal texts exemplify the prime disjuncture in the contemporary cultural meaning of exile. The author of one has been a principal advocate of one of the most poignant and bitter exiles of our time and the author of the other is best known for his brilliant exposé of the captivity from which he fled. They speak with authority. Edward Said’s brief article, “Reflections on Exile,” immediately became a classic.1 A comparable essay “On Exile” is drawn from Czeslaw Milosz’s Nobel Prize address.2 What makes these two pieces especially interesting is, first, that both authors write with an acute sense of the “terrible” pain of exile, the deep and not rarely irreparable harms inflicted by defeat, dislocation, and disorientation. Second, their concepts are grounded in concrete experiences of people leaving their homelands because they must, making it clear that the borderline between exiles and refugees is fluid. These grave features of their thinking quite rightly put the burden of proof on those who have transformed it “so easily,” as Said says, “into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture.”

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The commonplace figurative identification of the modernist artist (or postmodernist or post-colonial intellectual) with “exile,” by virtue of their distance from—their elevation above—the ensnared multitude, risks the reduction of the claim to exile status to a self-dramatizing gesture, not unlike the Romantic poses familiar to the nineteenth century, as mere dramatizations of the heroic unseasonableness (Unzeitgemässheit) claimed for the poet by Schiller no less than by Nietzsche. Said and Milosz both recognize that risk but both nevertheless seek to explain—and conditionally to justify—an extended, symbolic sense of exile; in Said’s words, an understanding of the condition as an “alternative to the mass institutions that dominate social life,” an alternative that both Said and Milosz articulate in the language of Christianity. Said opens with a firm rejection of the idea that exile somehow serves humanism, as some sort of school for virtue—along the lines, perhaps, of the consolatory philosophizing conventionalized in the Roman literature of exile in the Imperial Age3: “Is it not true that the views of exile in literature and, moreover, in religion obscure what is truly horrendous: that exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings; and that, like death but without death’s ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography?” Said passes by with scant respect what he calls “the modest refuge provided by subjectivity” to the literary “exiles” of Paris and New York, and assimilates exile rather to the condition of the hopeless refugee in Cairo, Beirut, or Mexico City. A distinctive double bind of exile in the most recent era is nationalism, which is both bred by exile and conducive to generating new exiles. After developing numerous brilliant insights into the tortured condition of exile, however, Said returns to his initial question: “How is it that the literature of exile has taken its place as a topos of human experience alongside the literature of adventure, education, or discovery?” His answer, citing Simone Weil and Theodor W. Adorno on the atrocious costs of alternatives to exile, circles back to the exile as symbolic embodiment of subjectivity. Exile, it seems, is good for us after all, just as the humanists thought, because “exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.” At the crux of the essay is the vision of a twelfth-century associate of the monk, Abelard, who projects a mystic sequence, which culminates in the perfect state where all love of place is extinguished and the entire world is seen as a foreign land, quite in the spirit of Augustine’s City of God. Said backs off from this outcome and proposes instead a “contrapuntal” play of home against strangeness, a “life led outside habitual order.” “It is nomadic,” he concludes, “decentered, contrapuntal,” and constantly subject to new disruptions. Somewhere in all this invocation of phrases that sound sweet to modernist poetics the hopeless refugees have gotten lost again, as has the

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exile with the kind of political project that occupied Said himself in his other persona. It is the paradoxical depoliticization of exile that is troubling about this attractive and influential reflection, which ends up devaluing the sufferings of the defeated and excluded, whose pitiful state is initially mobilized against humanistic glorification of the exile. Milosz, for his part, having poignantly depicted the loss of orientation that follows the loss of the rhythms of life at home, moves towards a characterization of exile by recalling a Polish hymn, “Exiles of Eve, we beseech Thy help,” and its implication that we are all ultimately homeless. He next recalls the sense in which we are all in any case “exiled” from our childhood and earlier years, and appears to be moving towards a vision where all are exiles. Yet he abruptly brings the discussion back to the realities of the “condition of exile in the geographical sense,” as he has himself suffered it, and then fluctuates between a sober, questioning recital of some consolations that exiles offer themselves and an invocation of Nietzsche’s exaltation of “the freedom of height, of loneliness, of the desert.” The latter is introduced by an artistic possibility that Milosz illustrates by references to Mark Chagall, Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Joyce, and Igor Stravinsky but expounds by reference to Christian hermits in the desert, with “the only remedy against the loss of orientation” being “to create anew one’s own North, East, West and South and posit in that new space a Witebsk or a Dublin elevated to the second power. What has been lost is recuperated on a higher level of vividness and presence.” Yet this flight is followed immediately by a somber review of the many names by which “the exodus of people from their countries” has been familiarly known in our century, calling the roster from Russian émigrés to Vietnamese “Boat People.” The rest is anticlimax: “One thing is certain: people leave their homelands because life there is difficult to bear.” The next, concluding paragraph is full of awkward manifestations of pain. He asks whether we can hope for a world without exile, and admits that this goes against all the signs. Then he cautions people that there may be nothing better than the life that is “difficult to bear,” but admits that people will always hope. He ends with a lame joke about the refugee who asks the travel agent for an alternative to the lands on the globe. It is precisely the ever more weary scanning of possibilities that makes Milosz’s essay such an invaluable document of and about exile, a literary enactment of its dismaying portrayal of exile. I emphasize the Christian rather than anti-Christian allusions in both Said and Milosz because in this matter Nietzsche is at one with the Fathers. The exile that matters is a condition of diaspora where any sense of return other than the ultimate, unimaginable, transcendent one is a betrayal. The condition of exile in this sense is itself as close to transcendence as it is possible to come. The paradigm case is the early Christian universalizing of the theme that

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the Talmudic Jewish teachings give a more particular and concrete doctrinal form.4 Both authors, notwithstanding their starting points in concrete political events, end with an uneasy consolatory spiritualization of exile. As is true of both the Christian and anti-Christian thought of Nietzsche, their standpoint is ultimately disrespectful, if not simply hostile to the world of political action. This may be considered a paradoxical result, since both Said and Milosz are best known as authors of works with great political impact, Said’s Orientalism and Milosz’s Captive Mind. Yet even these works appear as a sort of denial of politics, inasmuch as they render impossible the modes of alliance and joint action that constitute political practice. Said attacks the world of cultural civility in which the exile with which he identifies finds its allies as well as its foes, and this in a manner and with regard to matters, moreover, that are effectively irrelevant to the inner politics of the Palestinian exile behind the walls, which can hardly be helped to orient itself by the consideration that Jane Austen may have been tacitly complicit in imperialism. Milosz in turn absolutizes the breach between the exile and those who have remained behind by choice or necessity, a dilemma for every exile, and a burden on those who are eventually vouchsafed the chance of return.

The Classical Model of (Political) Exile To help with an evaluation of the ultimately unpolitical construction of exile, it is useful to look at a contrasting model, derived from the example of Cicero, who is banished from Rome, de jure as well as de facto. Here, exile cannot be transcended. It originates in defeat, and it can only be a scene of struggle or an abandoned project—or, more commonly, a complex, unhappy negotiation between these two. This is the model recalled by the most common uses of the term in our earlier survey of current political commentary. The story of Cicero’s exile and return, 58–57 BCE, is hardly an inspiring one, notwithstanding Cicero’s rhetorical effort to make it appear so, and its subsequent incorporation as a minor moment in his Humanistic legend.5 It begins in the violent political world of the First Triumvirate. The veteran politician, Cicero, rejects Julius Caesar’s wooing and defies the triumvirs, whereupon they connive in the election of Cicero’s most bitter political enemy to the potent position of tribune. Clodius Pulcher uses the powers of the office to initiate legislation to outlaw persons who have inflicted the death penalty on citizens without legal process, as Cicero had done in his consulship, in his boasted triumph over Catiline under self-assumed emergency powers. “Let the wicked depart,” Cicero had proclaimed in one of his noted orations of self-justification, epitomizing the wall and death strip sometimes erected by republican virtue.

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Now he is himself targeted for outlawry. Cicero flees, and he is pursued by an edict of exile and expropriation. The time of exile is documented by his accusing letters to his friends and pleading, demanding letters to his wife, herself a proprietress and member of a powerful family. A year later, a political split between Pompey and Caesar creates an opening for a maneuver to restore Cicero, and he is welcomed as a potential savior, especially in the provinces, which he has always favored. On his return, Cicero addresses the diverse elite constituencies in Rome in their prime institutional settings, putting forward the claim that he was never in exile, since the processes which condemned him were mere acts of force. His seeming compliance with the act of exclusion he characterized as an act of statesmanship, a “magnanimous self-sacrifice, accepted to avoid bloodshed” among the loyal citizenry, and a maneuver to allow time for the civic mobilization that rendered his enemies powerless. In the event, it is far too late for a republican restoration and Cicero, as well as his political standing, are too damaged by his exile to play Brutus, not to speak of his hopes of repairing his political project by mentoring Octavian. His death at the hands of Marc Antony’s political thugs is politically without point. Yet his is the paradigm case of exile-and-return in the political sense that is the prime subject of this book and whose paradigmatic elements will be considered below.

Socrates’ Choice Political exile figures prominently in many core texts of the Western political theory canon, beginning with Plato’s account of the dramatic climax around which he orients all his political writings, the trial and subsequent execution of Socrates. In the Apology, Socrates dismisses the choice of exile as alternative to execution on the grounds that he would be ashamed to spend his old age expelled from one town after another, since strangers in other cities would never tolerate his speaking to young men, as he must do, especially if they know that his fellow citizens had fiercely rejected his conduct.6 The question is brought to a head in the Crito, where Socrates’ friend and well-wisher has arranged to bring him to safety among friends in another city. Many commentators are agreed that Socrates’ argument against this scheme of exile as amounting to a breach of a tacit contract between Socrates and the “laws” of Athens contains many weak, conclusionary, and inconsistent arguments, whose appearance in the text is commonly accounted for by the dramatic necessity of having Socrates respond kindly to a generous friend with a conventional cast of mind; but there are instructive disagreements about the ultimate validity of Socrates’ case against exile. The most interesting recent dispute, not accidentally resonating with issues that recur

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in the twentieth-century historical cases we will be examining, is between Steven Johnston and James Boyd White.7 In keeping with his general method, White treats the Crito as an account of performative transactions, in the course of which, according to White, the discursive exchanges between the principals about obligations and lawfulness are ultimately displaced by Socrates’ enactment of the binding emotional and ethical bond between himself and his fellow citizens, which provides justification for his actions and meaning to his life—and death. White titles his collection of essays “Acts of Hope” and likens Socrates’ refusal to abandon his visionary constitutional project for Athens to the eloquent refusal of Nelson Mandela, for the sake of the South Africa for which he hoped, to flee the prosecution that led to his many years of imprisonment.8 At issue, White maintains, is ultimately the creation of authority without which no humane order can take form. Exile is not an acceptable option. Johnston agrees that the discursive arguments within the dialogue cannot by themselves sustain Socrates’ conclusions, but he challenges White’s benign reading of the non-rational elements underlying the exchange. He argues that Socrates’ rejection of exile, notwithstanding the continued opportunities it would give him to investigate and to teach justice, is the product of his patriotism. And patriotism, in Johnston’s view, is a destructive and selfdestructive emotion that is epitomized—as Socrates’ own argument to the jury makes clear at key points—in the death-dealing of warfare. A democratic character, Johnston contends, requires precisely the qualities that would come into play in an exile devoted to resistance to the injustice that rules in Athens, a possibility that Crito had opened to Socrates. Johnston’s universalistic plea for the choice of exile is paradoxical inasmuch as it actually implies a rapid displacement of exile by a cosmopolitanism that renders the status otiose. Some recent writers find quite simple formulas for resolving the conflict between viewing exile as an evasion of responsibilities and an opening to effective resistance made manifest by this brief discussion of the Platonic text. Writing more than twenty years ago in an annual dedicated to exile studies of the 1930s emigration from Germany, Theo Stammen proposed a theoretical comprehension of the social-political phenomena that he thought generally intended by the term, whose special pervasiveness and significance since the beginning of the twentieth century he insisted upon, by means of a political theory with both explanatory and normative dimensions.9 He proposed a synthesis of Albert Hirschman’s analysis of organizations in “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” and Juergen Habermas’ examination of discourse and authority, and he concluded that the induced displacements central to exile are a function of the failure of a political structure to be open to dissent, however loyal the protesting voice, and that exile is thus a measure of both an incapacity for

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learning and a precursor of illegitimacy in the political system. The effective political exclusion of dissidents is thus the core of exile and inherently a measure of political pathology. The condition of exile, accordingly, is to be understood first of all as a kind of witness, which may in fact be mute, whose significance is not conditional upon the designs or achievements of the exiles. Stammen’s approach comprehends, at least implicitly, the inspirational aura then surrounding the paradigmatic twentieth-century exiles he has in view, especially in Germany, as well as the attempt to characterize the event in terms that would also apply to other political systems that generated a comparable outflow, notably the Communist regimes, but it cannot be said to help with many ordinary applications of the term in historical or contemporary studies today, or to explore the many other issues about political and cultural life exposed by reflection on the phenomenon. He presupposes as given the existence of settled political entities whose boundaries, structures of organization, memberships, and claims are not in dispute, as well as a body of persons whose shared and presumably fixed character as excluded dissidents establishes their common condition as exiles. This takes as settled most of the questions that exile studies are in fact required to address. The political meaning of exile cannot be comprehended by a straightforward analytical formula; the framework of analysis must be open to diverse and changing constellations of elements.

Elements of Ciceronian Exile To frame the more focused studies in the chapters to follow, I shall first draw on the Ciceronian model to identify three features common to political exiles as I understand them and then offer an outline overview of an inclusive schema for the study of exile, which will also help to identify the historically limited range of situations we are considering. The three features I want to emphasize I will sum up under the headings of “status activus,” “political justice,” and “political émigré.” First, then, whatever the impostures and anachronisms in Cicero’s rhetorical enactment of his position, there is no question that his expulsion drove him away not from a land passively enjoyed as sacred or familiar home, as in the evocations of exile’s starting point in both Said and Milosz, but from a scene of power and resistance in which he was an active participant, with allies and enemies, with projects and resources. The Rome from which he was expelled is not simply Cicero’s “native land” but above all the active political life of the republic. Even his frantic anxiety about his private interests during exile has to do above all with the prospects of his family, the basic unit of Roman politics. Cicero was beaten and stigmatized. The effective exclusion from the play of power

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and resistance deprived him of the locus of his strongest self-presentation and self-actualization. His counter-moves in exile were limited to attempts to press weak levers of influence through his wife’s family and his friends’ pity. His relations with those who remained behind were damaged irremediably, whether or not they supported his restoration. The magnanimity emblematic of Cicero’s political standing simply does not blend with the desperate struggles of exile and its aftermath. Even if the political disintegration had not been as far advanced as it was by the time of his return, it is highly doubtful that his rhetorical recasting of the story could have made him once again credible as the “statesman,” the role he had brilliantly invented to legitimize his virtuosity in internal security within a political setting that normally prized only generalship, and that had given him play for a while in the harsh contests of Roman constitutional politics. As is suggested by the case of Socrates, the Ciceronian model of the status activus must be considerably expanded to comprehend all the activities that may variously count as public in character. That case shows as well that the boundary lines are often contested—or as subtly drawn as they are by Socrates and his friends, who steadfastly deny that their discourses are political in the sense of the polis and its politics. Of special and increasing importance in the modern era beginning in the eighteenth century are the actions of intellectuals in the realm of the public. Where philosophical, literary, artistic, and sometimes even scientific productions are viewed from the perspective epitomized in the twentieth century by the concept of ideology—as interventions in the discourses of legitimacy and public policy, whatever their manifest designs—the public engagement of intellectuals is not limited to express political advocacy or performance. Still, the Ciceronian element of public performance remains as the defining point of departure. The concept of “political justice,” especially as developed by Otto Kirchheimer10 comprehends the special relationship between juristic and (other) political elements in Ciceronian exile. There is admittedly an element of self-contradiction in the expression, something like “military music,” but the complex cannot be written off as a bitter ironic jest. The juristic component, variable in its degree of relevance or authenticity, implies a mode of legitimation that may be as real in its effects as the other power resources that are brought into play in an act of banishment. The decision made by a decent political regime to expel rather than to execute a tyrant is as much an act of political justice as are the despot’s decrees disenfranchising and deporting his political enemies. In a larger sense, the formation and reformation of constitutional legality is itself a process of political justice, articulations of power and resistance in the by no means empty language of legality. In the constitution of exile, political justice may function not only in the manner of

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displacement but also in the process of asylum-seeking and exile existence, as well as in the conditions of homecoming. The point is not to posit legalism against political analysis, but to have sufficiently subtle political theory of the juridified relations and their dynamics. Even Hobbes, who cannot be suspected of power-blindness—especially Hobbes—pointed to the difference between violence mediated in the form of (legal) punishment and in the form of war and other un-normed expressions.11 Taken literally, exile is a legal status. Because the legal quality in this case belongs to the domain of political justice, attention to this dimension is an opening to realistic analysis, not a distraction from it. Exiles typically make claims, either upon their hosts or upon their erstwhile fellow-citizens (or fellow-subjects); the question of justice is almost always on the table, however limited or utilitarian the negotiations of exile become, and questions of justice in state formations are commonly construed as questions of law. This does not mean, of course, that the actual status of exile from our standpoint can be determined by legal decisions, whatever the character of the system. The point is simply to require attention to the play of political justice around any exile we choose to study. As is the case with all aspects of the political, this is a play of power and resistance. A critical focus in any study of exile, accordingly, is the changing balance between these elements during the duration of the condition. I take the concept of “political émigré” from Nina Rubinstein.12 Rubinstein wrote about the aristocratic émigrés of the French Revolution and, in asides, about their Russian counterparts after 1917, although her heart was with the Menshevik Russian exiles who formed her extended family, but whom she loyally excluded from the category of “political émigré” on reasoning similar to Cicero’s denial that he had in fact been in exile, conceding their claim to be still actively—if only virtually—present in the as yet unresolved revolutionary struggles at home. The condition of being a “political émigré” bears all the marks of deprivation that Said and Milosz also emphasize, but it has an additional debility, according to Rubinstein, which is the very opposite to the distance and insight, that intellectual and spiritual transcendence, that many other writers see as a unique possibility—if not inevitably concomitant—of exile. Rubinstein contends that the “political émigrés” become enclosed in a bubble of time that renders them unable to comprehend the historical changes underway, in their land of refuge as in their homelands. They may be brilliant and productive in many respects, but their efforts are constrained again and again to circle back on the reification of their problematic exile state.13 The demanding counter-effort to this individual and collective threat of self-enclosure, more pertinent to the case under study in this book than to the case of the French aristocratic émigrés

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that Rubinstein studied, consists of a sustained investment in negotiations with appropriate individuals and networks in their places of asylum, as well as in their places of origin, especially when the question of return comes on the agenda.14 Since the generation and utilization of diverse negotiating structures is critical to the contests about political justice as well as to this struggle against cognitive enclosure, this dimension of exile activity looms especially large in the studies comprising this book. Political exile as we propose to study it, in short, is not a static condition. One might speak rather of an exile process, while cautioning against the expectation raised by this term of a kind of automatic sequence caused by invariant forces. Perhaps it would be better to speak of the trajectories of exiles in recognition of the historicity and variability of the phenomenon. In the cases of the intellectual political exiles from Germany, which are our prime concern, the practical conduct that precipitates exile, the recognition of exile in relation to political justice, and the constraints shaping the exile’s projects obviously belong to a common historical setting, but they cannot be understood without close attention to the sources of diversity in their formation, shape, and outcome. That is the justification for the case-study approach pursued.

A Paradigm for the Study of Political Exile The next preliminary step is to situate the historical parameters of the exile we are studying in relation to the wider scope of the concept and to several related types of exile. We might speak of a paradigm for the comparative study of political exile. Methodologically, the aim is to show first the importance of historical, differentiated treatment of any complex exile situation, and to provide, second, some characteristic elements of exiles, which may assist in lending structure to a historically bounded configuration of exile. For these purposes, we begin with constituents of the most familiar definition to circumscribe the domain, while taking care to leave open all the constituent terms we know to be historically variable and analytically problematic. Political exile, then, is about the displacement and exclusion of individuals or groups from their familiar scenes of public action by purposive acts, their actions and circumstances elsewhere in consequence of this condition, and their relationships to the prospects of return.

The Starting Point of Exile At the starting point, this presupposes a power structure capable, as in the Greek polis, Roman republic or modern state, of bounding such a locale,

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and normally of determining inclusion and exclusion as well. The persons exiled, on this understanding, are supposed to begin by being attached to this bounded locale as to a public scene of action, although it may be that the public character of their spheres are imputed by others, as when poets are read through an ideological lens. This attachment may take the most obvious form of occupying political office or an elite status in a more or less formalized hierarchy, or it may simply be a matter of active citizenship within a polity. In many political formations, however, where a public sphere has emerged and where it is susceptible to some measure of control—whether the situation is one of bureaucratization, religious coordination, or totalitarian rule—recognized participation in a complex of intense commercial, social and cultural interaction situated within set political boundaries is a sufficient mode of attachment to render the person subject to exile in the present political sense, whether or not they were ever politically active in the conventional sense. Those who have the power to bring about exclusion also have the power to render the activities in this sphere political. It is not decisive whether the individuals and groups involved understand their attachment as a matter of home or simply a matter of their “world” of conversation, cooperation, and competition. The urban intellectuals who are at the center of the present study, for example, may speak nostalgically of home while in exile but they had almost uniformly already left their actual “homes”—whether in provincial towns or close-knit families, often Jewish—in order to engage themselves in the activities and transactions that made up the world from which they found themselves banned. The prominence of the trope of home in the rhetoric of exile over-dramatizes the situations of many exiles, it can stand as an obstacle to an understanding of the dynamics of the condition, and it facilitates the confusion between the political and metaphorical readings of exile. Two qualifications to the requirement of attachment are important enough in the comparative study of exiles to require brief notice. The first arises out of the circumstance that exiles may form themselves into formally or informally organized groups in their places of asylum, and that individuals who had not been attached to the public life of their places of origins—and even members of subsequent generations—, may nevertheless identify with the exile. Although it would be arbitrary to exclude them, it should nevertheless be noted that their relationship to return lacks many of the elements present in the cases of the primary group, especially in the matter of what we shall later call unfinished business with those who remained behind. An extension of this secondary exile concept is what we shall call constructed exile, where the connection with a real or legendary exile, often far in the past, is more a matter of ideology than experience. Yet such constructed exiles at times figure

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importantly in political life, and their claims both reflect and help to shape the discourse of exile, especially on the theme of return.

Exile as Event Given the most common starting point in active attachment to a political scene, the defining first stage in the dynamics of exile is exclusion from it. We have spoken quite impersonally of that moment since exile comprehends situations in which the decisive step is taken by an exiler in power, where exile appears quite simply as banishment, and those where the person exiled takes it, where it may appear as a choice, albeit often a forced one. It should be clear—if only from the classical examples cited earlier—that the empirical situations are often ambiguous. Only Socrates’ willingness to consider execution an option rendered exile a question of choice in his case, and Cicero sought to transmute a banishment into a choice as a step in his negotiations with the opprobrium attached to exile as juridical penalty—or to flight as a delinquency of responsibility. Yet the analytical distinction is important. The range of possibilities under the heading of punitive banishment is considerable. Banishment may be a punishment under due process of law, as was true not only in classical Greece or Rome but also under British law as late as the transportation of Thomas Muir to Australia in 1794. It should be noted, however, that when such exiles specify an internal or external places of sequestration they differ importantly, by virtue of the isolation they generally entail, from the type of exile characteristic of the modern world of nation states. The questions raised for the study of political exile by the phenomena of concentration camps deserve special attention, inasmuch as the internal political life these sometimes manifest may resemble the dynamics of life in exile, which are absent amid the hardships of prison colonies. In any case, such banishment usually exemplifies actions by police power rather than judicial process. It is worth distinguishing as well banishment as a result of conquest, a type that borders on the separate large question of enslavement, as in the classical world and in the modern imperialist epoch, although this rarely displayed the other hallmarks of political exile. Revolutionary struggle may also eventuate in a kind of banishment, although the initiative in those cases tends to shift from the exiler to those in exile. Marginal representative cases of exiles consequent on fundamental political changes, like those of Cicero, Dante, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau, are, of course, of special interest because of their influential and diverse literary examinations and documentations of the condition. A special type of banishment in the context of regime change is

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the modern day expulsion of dictatorial rulers as a result of express or implicit bargains designed to assist democratization and similar kinds of political transition. In these cases, issues of political justice often assume a unique importance, especially in the context of efforts to generate a global human rights regime and political crime jurisprudence, not to speak of domestic issues ranging from terroristic rule to kleptocracy. With this type, we are at the transition from banishment at the discretion of the banisher to the cases of exiles where the person(s) in exile can be said to take the initiative, although the boundaries are uncertain, first, because many individuals who choose to go into exile do so under immediate threat of violence or under conditions where their most valued activities and relations are proscribed, and, second, because the regimes in power normally forbid a return or at best require a total disavowal of who one was before exile. The French revolutionary governments expropriated the émigrés and the Nazi government deprived exiles of their citizenships. This does not, of course, mean that there are no cases of exile ended by undoing the exclusion, although the questions raised by the exchanges entailed in pardons and their acceptances can only be noted here and belong, in any case, to the conditions of exile rather than its onset. While exiles may be said to initiate their banishment where they flee from political justice at the hands of those who have power in order to deny them the legitimacy that would give them the jurisdiction, this is only an instance of a larger class of cases where exile is chosen as a form of political action, symbolic, tactical or strategic in character. The history of the 1930s exile is strongly marked by such considerations—and by the realization that such calculations may also be in serious error. In these cases, the exiles often count on power resources that they expect to become available only if they are in exile, as with the possibility of mobilizing allies and supporters. This political face of exile presupposes a positive conception of the exile not as the disgraced outcast, which is the starting point of most literary classical conceptions, however mitigated by recognitions of tragedy, but as the exemplary resister to injustice—the contrast implicit in the recent debates about Socrates cited earlier. Especially prevalent in eras of revolution and counter-revolution, the positive conception may also give rise to several anomalies, not excluding the claim to exile status of individuals fleeing from ordinary criminal justice. The phenomenon of governments-in-exile, traced by some commentators to the time of the French Revolution but first formally established in international law by the recognition given to state officials from nations occupied by Germany during the Second World War, adds a new complication to the institutionalization of the positive concept of exile. Politically even more interesting and occasionally related to such formations

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are the interlinked phenomena of constructed exile and claims based on inheritance, where entitlements to return, restitution, or even command are grounded in a banishment that may be generations old or simply legendary. A characteristic step in the construction of such exiles is the attempt to transmute the affected group from victims into agents congruent with the conditions of exile being propounded, as when Zionists disowned the diasporic Jews’ supposed alienation from the soil or Native Americans seek to reinvigorate warrior images. Underlying what I have called constructed exile in Western culture is not only the positive concept derived from modern revolutionary exiles but also— and doubtless at a deeper level—the most important sources of the figurative or metaphysical concept, the theological vision of the human condition as exile from the realms of the divine. Exile in this sense figures as a metaphor of an estrangement that is spiritually empowering and that transcends groundedness. That our study of exile is concerned with political exile and that our approach questions writers like Said who transmute the one mode of exile into the other does not mean that it is not important to be aware of precisely such undertones and trends in the discourse of political exile as well.

Locus of Exile If exile is a condition of exclusion from a place of attachment, the question arises where and how the displaced live. While the question obviously answers itself in the marginal case of banishment to a fixed place under the power of the exiling authority, it resolves itself into a question of safe haven or asylum in other classes of exile. Asylum takes the form of diverse regimes, which are shaped, like exile itself, by the conjunction of legal and political elements that we call political justice. Historically, the care of exiles sometimes came under religious regimes of sanctuary, but diverse state, interstate, and international asylum or refugee regimes are more relevant to modern political exiles. Despite repeated efforts to create a uniform (and hospitable) international code, the implementation of all such schemes depends on the inner legal-political actions of states, and their judgments will almost always be conditioned by questions of domestic or international politics. Some of the more stable asylum regimes exist paradoxically among political entities where instability of governments is the norm, as among ancient Greek city-states, Renaissance Italian cities, and Latin American states. In most modern states, however, where not only political but also social and economic personality depend on state legitimation, subject to detailed police regulation, the position of exiles is consequently precarious, subject to political criteria, and often subject to many conditions and restrictions, even where asylum is granted.

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Formal or informal restrictions on economic, professional, and cultural activities are not rarely a feature of asylum, and these require constant efforts to gain recognition as bargaining partners with those who control such resources, but the most common regulations concern political activities by exiles. This may mean either that the exiles must conform to the political objectives that led the state to grant the asylum or that they may not engage in any political activities at all. The latter qualification, if stringently applied, of course deprives the exile of a critical rationale, if not of its meaning. An integral part of the exile process, accordingly, is a progressive lessening of the distinction between exiles and refugees or immigrants, with significant effects on the orientation to return from exile, which is a paradigmatic component of the status. The elapsing of time, given a secure asylum, may well have such an effect in any case, and this effect is strengthened where, as in the United States, naturalization and the consequent acquisition of the indispensable personal identity papers commonly lost upon exile is widely—if not universally— available to the exiles over time. Under such comparatively advantageous conditions, exile becomes more nearly a project than a condition—and this in turn depends on the possibility of engaging in the political activity required to form and sustain such a project. Before looking more closely at the project of exile, we should note that asylum is by no means always available. This matters least in the exceptional cases of military exiles, where a formation is in a position to impose its presence on an alien territory by force. Much more common is the condition of exiles as illegals and wanderers, moving from one location to another under constant duress or collected in camps cut off from the inhabitants and institutions of the political societies on whose territory these may be located. The last class of cases stands in a distinctive kind of ambiguous relationship to exile. On the one hand, they submerge the political exiles, with their special reciprocal power-and-resistance relationships to the exiling force, in the wider population of the refugees, whom Hannah Arendt apostrophized as superfluous people; but, on the other, the condition may greatly simplify the otherwise uncertain undertaking of giving the exile political form and developing a constituency for it—albeit a powerless one.

Project of Exile The project of exile, whether in asylum or not, requires first of all the recognition of the chosen status among possible constituencies and more widely among those who control resources relevant to the exiles’ requirements. Much depends, accordingly, on the “trade goods” that they bring to the table in their negotiations with domestic forces in their place of asylum, as well

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as their resourcefulness in such interactions. Not only distrust or indifference has to be overcome but also—a more complex matter—the classification as helpless victims. Political exile, as I am presenting it here, may be a function of defeat, but it is also a mode of agency, at least in design. Political roles involve a part in the play of power and resistance, in prospect if not in actuality. The question of victimization is complex because the claim may also play a part in the attempt to gain asylum and then in efforts to overcome disabilities that may accompany asylum even if granted. When exiles let the balance shift towards victimization, they risk loss of credibility as actual or potential actors against those who exiled them. In this connection, it is important to note the difference between exiles as individual and collective entities. To speak of the Cuban exile in the United States, the Tibetan exile in India, or the erstwhile Hungarian exile in Vienna is to claim or to recognize a collective subject of some sort, whether formed in an organization or represented by a representative spokesperson. Alternatively, individuals may also be cast as exiles, although such a claim or recognition requires a measure of prominence and voice. As a practical matter, exile life is frequently marked by conflict among groups and individuals about questions of commonality and representativeness, not to speak of the forms and aims of their opposition to those who exile them, with shifting internal and external alignments and alliances, as in the effective breakup of the 1930s anti-fascist exile after the widespread discrediting of the Stalinist left. The shared fate of exile by no means guarantees that the exiles do not bring with them fiercely contested legacies. The Leftist organizations that speak for Iranian exiles excluded after their support of the Revolution have little in common with the subsequent waves of younger women and gays and others who could not remain in Khomeini’s Iran, not to speak of the nominal imperial government in exile under the successor to the crown.15 Such internal conflict is not even absent in the cases of exile more nearly resembling the classical case of the French royalist campaign against the regimes produced by the French Revolution, where the principal exile force did not want for international political support until it was defeated. Exiles are subject moreover not only to the international political-legal policies of the political entities that may grant them asylum but also to the conflicts of domestic politics, where they may be variously seen as instruments or symbolic targets. The constant demands on individual and collective energies of these multi-level political endeavors affect the quality and sustainability of exile projects. While it should be noted that the debilities of exile do not preclude the formation and sustenance of exile projects responsible for important achievements for those directly involved and others, the many literary laments

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about the pains of exile testify to the obstacles in the way of such achievements, the distorting factors that affect them, and their often inordinate costs. As noted earlier in connection with the status of victim, political exiles suffer under the stigma of defeat, which often impedes their efforts to gain support. Second, many suffer also from need and the attendant demands on their time and restrictions on their openness. Third, even exiles that do not have to overcome language barriers often suffer from communications deficits: their political images and topics and priorities are often simply not understood, at least on anything like their own terms, and the attempts to adapt their communications may undermine their own self-understandings and mutual accommodations. If nothing else, when they manage to gain some recognition as bargaining partners in internal politics, they stand out among political groupings by their single-mindedness and by their dispositions to interpret the constellations in their places of asylum in terms of the politics they know best.

The Mission and the End of Exile Exile as an ongoing project would seem to depend on the ability to shape and retain a sense of mission, whether as a matter of individual mental set or as institutionalized effective ideology. The balance between this aspect and the qualities required to deal with the obstacles to effectiveness noted above is differently struck by different exile formations. Too exclusive a sense of mission may lead to isolation; too open a mode of exchange with the context of asylum may lead to dissolution. The mission itself may be defined in quite general terms—an ending of the immediate condition that led to exile—or it may embody a specific and detailed program. There are also exiles where the mission is given the interim goal of witnessing to injustice or representing some distinctive cultural or intellectual enterprises thought to have been itself expelled with the exiles. However formulated, however, the mission normally entails an orientation to return. In time, however, and under many conditions, this orientation undergoes vicissitudes that may render it ever more uncertain. More broadly, the continued relevance of the question of return is a decisive indicator of the difference between the political and historical concept of exile and its metaphorical extrapolations. A recurrent phenomenon, however, is a gradual transition from one to the other, as the relevance of return declines, whether because of age, acculturation, political reorientation, or the immovability of the conditions that brought about the exile. Then too, the exiles may no longer recognize the place they left as a scene in which they belong. As Peter Fritsche has shown, the memoir literature of returned French émigrés in the early nineteenth century is full of assertions that there

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had been no homecoming because the places they knew—even the history they knew—no longer existed. If nothing else, there are always fundamental differences in memory, vision, relations, and practices between those who had not been in exile and those who seek to return, even after the principal exiling force is no longer in power. The exile’s hope of vindication and restoration is rarely fulfilled. Such obsolescence of the terms of reference of an exile can become manifest even before the opportunity for return presents itself, and it appears in many cases as a factor in the weakening of an integral exile.

Political and Metaphorical Exile Once More In sum, to the extent that exile is transmuted into a metaphor for a spiritually exalted, synchronic, emancipated, limitless, and creative state of estrangement from quotidian concerns, the concept of exile effectively ceases to pose several of the most persistent and difficult questions confronting exile as encountered in historical studies of actors banished from their native scenes of action. First are precisely the everyday concerns of asylum, livelihood, and isolation that engross all but the most privileged exiles. Second is the practical relation to the play of power and resistance that shaped their past and shapes their prospects. Third is the disrupted and unfinished business with those they are compelled to leave behind, friends or foes, as well as the effort to negotiate new enterprises with their fellows and their hosts. Fourth are the diverse and often alternating emotional stresses of rage, shame, confusion, and defiant missionary aspiration, under conditions of disorientation and uncertain recognition. Fifth, and often encompassing the others, is the consuming question of return, which is often understood as a necessary moment in the concept of exile, with the time of exile being charged with anticipation of return and the moment of return being correspondingly imbued with the remembrance of exile. On that reading, Exile and return are interdependent and even co-present.16 Yet against the contention that the metaphorical use impoverishes the terms of cultural or political discourse, it may be argued that the ascendancy of the metaphorical sense of exile is grounded in the ever greater elusiveness of return during the past century, as the binary opposition between exile and home has lost its meaning. The novel social regimes under which the displaced find themselves in politically generated exiles corresponding to the classical Ciceronian model, the rapid reclasssifications of social identities— which may appear as an opportunity in the case of reception in comparatively open cosmopolitan scientific or cultural elites, or as a sentencing in the case of relegation to the swarm of bureaucratically administered refugees—may rapidly drain myths of return of their emotional or political relevance. The sense of redemptive mission which has often represented the prospect of return

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in the history of exiles appears to lose coherence or point. Corresponding to these rapid changes in the conditions of political exile are the swift and fundamental structural changes that typically accompany the transformations that open the way to “return,” as the localized polities, societies, and cultures are incorporated in wider contexts of power and meaning and as the politics of memory are subjected to control by agencies and technologies unknown to earlier times. Under all of these conditions, it might be reasonably contended that the political-cultural formation of exile-and-return in the familiar historical sense had become an anachronism, and that the sense of exile generally characterized as metaphorical in fact refers to the historical reconfiguration of an increasingly obsolete design. Whether that new formation may properly be called exile would then appear as a rhetorical question, and not as an issue directly relevant to cultural or political understanding. Although the suggestion that the political sense of exile has become obsolete has gained special prominence in relation to dis/locations affecting non-Europeans in an era of post-colonialism, the problematic character of return is already evident in the case of the best-studied exile of the twentieth century, the removal of millions from the nations of National Socialist Europe. The overwhelming majority of Jewish emigrants and survivors from Germany rejected all thought of their native land as a place of return. They became emigrants and settlers, with no more than a nostalgic link. Among the exiled members of the cultural and intellectual elite, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, for whom the attractions of return might have been heightened by the German habitus of their mental capital, a substantial proportion found an alternative in the open structures of international science or cosmopolitan cultural institutions. Yet there were degrees of estrangement, and another portion of the exiles certainly sought to make good the meaning of their years of banishment by a partial or complete return. The vicissitudes of that cohort especially test the limits of the complex of exile-and-return. A key term in these stories is recognition, with a twofold application. First is whether the returnees recognize their geographical homecoming as a return from their exile, in terms meaningfully related to their understanding of the period of enforced absence, and with the claims and satisfactions that this implies. If political exile entails the disruption of some ongoing, arguably political business by acts of force, the question is whether that unfinished business is still recognizably present or possible. Second, and perhaps more fundamental, is whether they receive recognition as returned.17 Such acts of recognition–like their withholding–are eminently political actions, and failures of recognition may be thought cumulatively to undermine the political meaning of exile. This is the subject of the studies in this book.

CHAPTER TWO Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein’s Exile Studies1 In addressing the exile studies of one of Karl Mannheim’s students, our topic is the ambiguous conjunction of autobiography and sociological theory.2 In other words, we are interested in self-reflection on exile as a constituent of scientific clarification and innovation in its study. Reflexivity and selfdistantiation were central motifs of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, and, quite apart from his well-known call to self-knowledge among those he classified as intellectuals, he repeatedly applied the concept not only to the position of women,3 but also to the situation of the exile.4 Writing about himself in the early 1920s as an exile in Germany from Horthy’s authoritarian regime in his native Hungary and again in 1944 as a ‘refugee’ in England from Hitler’s Germany, he claimed that persons in that marginal situation could bring unique insight to their hosts but only if they first became fully aware of who and where they themselves had come to be. Understanding presupposes a measure of distance from oneself as well as from the external contextures to be understood. There is an attractive self-evidence in such a claim, familiar to sociologists from Georg Simmel’s seminal work on “the stranger,”5 but in this paper my aims are not only to secularize the concept of productive reflexivity, to ask what remains if we do not imagine (with Mannheim’s early mentor, Georg Lukács) that the insights to which it refers operate in the manner of a dialectical Aufhebung, but also to raise some questions about situational and psychological limits on such reflexivity. How much knowledge about ourselves can we use without undermining the selves that are presupposed, and how does such knowledge relate to our ability to contribute to knowledge of a more general kind? With trepidations, given the complexity of the theme and the faddish extravagances often associated with it, I might restate the topic as a problem in identity. Our present context for such inquiries is provided by a study of the political emigrant as a social type and the political emigration as a social formation by Nina Rubinstein, a student who first met Karl Mannheim in Heidelberg in 1929 and followed him to Frankfurt, where she last worked with him during his last

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semester, the winter of 1932–33. We will interpret Rubinstein’s dissertation,6 first, in the context of Mannheim’s political-educational project, his own approach to the linkage between biography and sociology, and, second, in the context of Rubinstein’s own life history as an emigrant in a political family. Nina Rubinstein’s studies in emigration (her Exilforschung) represent a cautionary tale in three respects. First, her contribution to the theory of political emigrations calls attention to an aspect of exile that militates against insight, a consequence that troubled her from her first engagement with the subject. If being a “stranger” in the sense of being encapsulated within a political emigration may inhibit insight, as Rubinstein suggests, then the realism of the political work of her “family” in the Russian Menshevik emigration is threatened, and the extent to which being an intellectual in Weimar may have entailed having a “political” character also gives us reason to look with care for the “Rubinstein effect” in studies of the Weimar generation in exile.7 Second, the theoretical insecurity in the restrictions she consequently puts on the scope of her own theory of the political emigrant—and the potential for personal pain in its unrestricted uses—call attention to limits of reflexivity. In the case of Nina Rubinstein, we see the inhibiting effects of love and loyalty. Critical distance is not always an uncontested good. Identity is not comprehended by social location alone. Third, and most important, however, neither of these cautions simply dismisses common claims about the epistemological and transformative consequences of reflexivity. Rather, they suggest that the insights we have in mind when we speak of reflexivity are always costly, qualified, conditional, and limited—an imperfectly negotiated settlement rather than a revolution. In this respect, the reflexivity of exiles is but an aspect of the overall process of acculturation and shares its messy incompleteness.8 Nina Rubinstein was born in 1908 to a young couple who had escaped arrest as political activists in Latvia, and she lived on domestic terms among political émigrés for many years. Rubinstein’s exile studies were thus in fact lifelong and experiential, but our interest is focused first on the dissertation completed in April 1933 under the active supervision of the sociologist Karl Mannheim.9 The dissertation, written between 1930 and April 1933, dealt almost exclusively with the aristocratic émigrés at the time of the French Revolution, although it bears some traces of Rubinstein’s abandoned original plan to compare that cohort with the White Russian émigrés after 1917. The earlier sketches are more revealing than the final text about the Russians and offer vital clues for understanding Rubinstein’s reasons for revising her scheme, quite apart from the undoubted objective difficulties in the way of a daughter of a socialist household and a Jew gaining the cooperation of this anti-socialist and anti-Semitic milieu. Her additional reasons for abandoning the plan to study Russians will concern us later.

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In every draft of her work, including her very first memo, Rubinstein states that her work is a contribution to the sociological theory of the stranger. Rubinstein’s point of departure is Simmel’s seminal excursus “On the Stranger,” which is summarized as follows by Claudia Honegger: Being a stranger “is an altogether positive relation, a distinctive form of interaction” because the stranger is an element in the group itself, an element whose inherent situation entails a position that is simultaneously external and engaged. This position of the stranger has an even more acute effect on consciousness when he remains settled in place rather than departing from the scene of his activities. And Simmel adds: “The classical example is provided by the history of European Jewry.”10

Rubinstein does not question the main outlines of this perception, but she poses the special problem of the émigrés, a population that becomes settled without becoming properly engaged with the group that is its host. Rubinstein’s thesis is that those she calls political emigrants in the full sense lack the distance, discernment, and social creativity credited to the stranger in society by the sociological tradition from Simmel and Sombart to Mannheim himself, whose missionary intelligentsia are after all strangers of a sort, epitomized by the Jews of his own generation in Budapest. Rubinstein concludes that these general expectations about the strategic advantages of the stranger do not apply to the situation of the political emigrant, as a type of stranger. Her argument is complicated, however, by a certain indecision about the extent to which intellectuals are ever political émigrés in the sense of her thesis. In the protocol of a seminar held on February 15, 1933, two weeks after Hitler came to power and two months before Mannheim’s dismissal, where she presented an abstract of her dissertation for final review, Rubinstein raises the problem of possible exceptions to the mass of typical emigrants, especially the progressive reformers among the French constitutionalists in exile and the Russian revolutionary exiles. At this point, she breaks out of the impersonal format of the protocol to insert a note to Mannheim, in parentheses: “This raises the new problem of the intelligentsia, about which I would very much like to speak to you!”11 This unresolved issue haunts the work. Rubinstein constructs an ideal-typical scenario for the political emigrant. After an initial period of disbelief, when the political émigrés imagine that their normal life has simply been suspended, as on a holiday, the emigration as a whole abruptly recognizes that there can be no return and, after a sharp break, its members enter an enclosed space where they can only reproduce old convictions and ways, even if they pragmatically interact with their host environment to earn a living. The social formation is sustained, above all, by

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practices of sociability set in scene by the women. If political émigrés survive to return, as many French aristocrats did, they are demanding, estranged and disappointed, unable to contribute to the new reality they did nothing to bring about, and ignored by those active in shaping the new times. It is a sad and dreary story, as she tells it, and remote in both manner and matter from the therapeutic designs of her greatly admired teacher, Karl Mannheim. Mannheim is best known for the sociology of knowledge put forward in Ideology and Utopia. The central claim of that composite work is, first, the pervasiveness of ideology in social thought, taken as total perspectives more accurately characterized by their ways of forming concepts, arguments, and ways of knowledge than by the characteristic doctrines familiarly present in competing political doctrines. Second is the contention that sociological interpretation can uncover the grounds of those ideologies in structured forms of social existence—notably in class location, as analyzed by his “Marxistic” sociology, but also in such other social formations as generational and gender units. The sociology of knowledge, third, is uniquely available to the intelligentsia, a social formation that is relatively detached from the other structures, although made up of individuals derived from them all. It is the common cultivation of the intelligentsia, as well as the way of life that this entails, that puts them comparatively at a distance from the unmediated way of holding ideologies, although that distance can in the end only be assured and made productive through the reflexive and critical practice of sociology of knowledge. Finally, the sociology of knowledge, through the awareness of ideological perspectives that it engenders and through the recognition of the social denominators common to all the social formations in competition— the historical time and situation and course of development they share— transforms the character of political debate and fosters the emergence of syntheses that overcome the unrealistic and highly selective viewpoints of the ideologies. The resulting knowledge is an open system, constantly subject to revision and subject to continuing conflict. Mannheim likened the outcome to the rare attributes that Max Weber credited to the politician oriented to the ethic of responsibility. Mannheim’s sociological project was simultaneously a project in political education.12 In the Weimar context, Ideology and Utopia was unmistakably about political education. Mannheim proposed sociology of knowledge as a method for opening practical life to the guidance of sociology. The intimate connections that interlink sociology of knowledge, sociological education, and the cultivation requisite for civic practice in Mannheim’s work have been obscured by the standardized debates over Mannheim’s book, especially after it was translated into English, reconfigured, and incorporated into the canon of American sociology, but the records of Mannheim’s disrupted term as

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professor in Frankfurt make the importance of his educational project clear. The recent recovery of the notes for Mannheim’s introductory sociology course during his inaugural year in Frankfurt makes possible a full appreciation of the extent to which Mannheim’s contributions to sociology are channeled through his hope of contributing decisively to the debate about sociology as education. The intellectuals that Mannheim seeks to bring to consciousness will express themselves not by becoming politicians, let alone revolutionaries, but by becoming teachers in the broadest sense, cultivators of the social mind and instructors of the democratic mass. Reflexive insight was the starting point. All memoirs of Mannheim’s practice as teacher agree that he pressed students to ground their research in questions that they had to confront in their lives. Speaking to his class in 1932, Mannheim insisted that no one is ready for sociology who has not experienced the disparities between their actual lives as women, youth, or intellectuals and the myths by which these forms of existence are regulated in society. The need to clarify such situations makes sociological work possible, and the endpoint of such clarification is self-clarification and a new self- possession. “Those who have not yet despaired of their situation,” Mannheim said, “cannot really find their way to sociology and should give it up.” Young people who have not realized their parents’ loss of authority and have thus missed the youth movement experience, he maintains, are not ripe for the sociological problem of generations. Women are addressed twice, and significantly each time anomalously associated with the supposedly anachronistic type of “the lady:” Any woman or girl who fails to face up to the fact that modern society [...] gives her enlightenment and culture, while denying her a field of action, falls prey to melancholy and the other psychic ailments that we will later encounter in the history of the lady. Only someone who has, as woman, confronted the experience of being alternately shunned as a “lady” (a throwback to the past) and shouldered aside as a competitor, can begin to see that a social situation is not a matter of anatomical destiny.13

In the case of the intellectual, his most important category, the key disparities are experienced in “the fact that he is esteemed above all others as cultivated person but counts for nothing in the world of bourgeois and proletarian, that he knows everything and can do nothing, that everyone needs him and that he is nevertheless rejected.”14 In sum, Mannheim says that his sociological method starts out from a crisis experienced in one’s own life situation and that the structural analyses that it generates are designed to culminate in self-knowledge and

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self-command. Sociological inquiry must begin and end with a recursive move to self and situation. From the standpoint of Mannheim’s project as sociologist and teacher, the question is whether Rubinstein has used the resources of structural sociology to gain sufficient clarity about herself and her own identification with the Menshevik emigration to transcend its ideological constraints and to be in a position to choose among the courses of action open in her time. Distance, understanding, openness to practical synthesis are the key terms in Mannheim’s design. It therefore seems reasonable to suppose that Mannheim’s quite remarkable mentoring of Rubinstein arose out of his hope that she would make an important statement about exile on the foundation of her own need to make sense of the experience. Yet Rubinstein detached her study from her experiences, at least in the final version of the dissertation, defining her subject matter so as to exclude the political emigration that encompassed her own life. In her introduction Rubinstein distinguishes political emigrants first from two sub-types of economic, as well as religious emigrants. These latter represent the more or less progressive types of “strangers” whose contributions to social change in their host environments have been over-generalized by Sombart and some others. But her ideal type of political émigré also excludes politically motivated emigrants who are not, as she puts it in uncharacteristically Marxist terms, representative of social strata defeated by successful revolution. Not included, thus, are people like her father, who must escape because they have taken part in a revolution that has failed, and, second, people like her Menshevik “family,” who are fleeing political persecution in their homelands. Because the political emigrants among whom she lives are not political emigrants in the sense of her study, they do not exhibit the telltale need for radical reorientation or reconstitution of their ways of life. Above all, there is no restrictive émigré consciousness or ideology. I submit that this move can best be understood by shifting our frame of reference from Nina Rubinstein as a student of Karl Mannheim to Nina Rubinstein as a loving daughter of the Menshevik extended family. She declined the offer to transmute herself into a political educator because she could have made the experiment only at the cost of a painful disruption in her self-defining attachments. More than that, the break would have been on terms deeply hurtful to the only people she cared for. Rubinstein’s drafts and memos record a variety of efforts to specify the distinction between “real” political émigrés subject to ideological ossification, on the one hand—what she called the “consciousness of the declassed” in her earliest notes and labeled “le transformation idéologique [...] des vaincus” in her proposal to the Sorbonne in 1934—and the exiles, on the other, who

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remain capable of renewal and insight. The closest she came to a principled solution depended on a distinction between reactionary and progressive strata, with the former “anchored in the past” and the latter dispensed from this fixation. Yet there are difficulties with all of these analytical attempts, even apart from the literary evidence of Rubinstein’s vivid intimate identification with portrayals of emigrant helplessness, especially among activist intellectuals. Rubinstein concedes that even the progressive political emigrants who share the revolution’s rejection of the past are ensnared in an antiquated picture of the future; they fail to grasp the foreclosure of possibilities by the revolutionary change they cannot accept. The issue becomes moot by the time she prepares her abstract for the Sorbonne, since she there speaks in despair of a successful “revolution” that is regressive and that produces a cohort of the “defeated” selected from the most “progressive” groups. In examining the literary evidence, I limit myself to a passage from one of Rubinstein’s preliminary studies to show how difficult she found it to sustain the hard line of separation between her Russian Jews and the aristocrats. She repeatedly segues from the aristocrats to the socialists, emphasizing that intellectuals and politicians are as “physically” tied to their country as landowners, even if they have a comparatively cosmopolitan capacity for earning their sparse livelihood abroad. According to Rubinstein, the intellectuals are among those who suffer most from emigration. “How dreadful it is for politicians, literati, and authors,” Rubinstein writes, “to sit around in cafes, impotent and fettered, debating the fate of their land, prophesying, year in and year out, the downfall of the ruling regime—at first, perhaps, out of genuine belief, and later, out of habit or fear, as one clings to a straw.” It is their helplessness that most moves Rubinstein. And something else: How painful and bitter for a socialist who fought against the old regime side by side with his present foe, who endured Czarist prisons, Czarist expulsion and emigration, and who is now once again imprisoned or compelled to flee abroad, who is once again a “traitor” to his land. The intellectual suffers in both spirit and intellect. He may be better able to accommodate himself to external circumstances because he is more likely to be cosmopolitan. He may be able to find a field of activity, even in strange lands, by means of which he can earn a living. But inwardly he languishes, he bleeds to death. He is cut off from the land from which he drew his spiritual forces, the land for whose well-being he had worked, struggled, and suffered.

Rubinstein’s emotional ties to her extended “family” were too great to permit the self-distantiation that Mannheim recommends as first step in his method;

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instead, she took distance by subdividing the topic and choosing the category furthest removed. Yet Rubinstein did not in fact believe, as her categorical separation requires, that the Menshevik emigrants remained part of Russian political reality after 1917, certainly not if her retrospective reflections as an old woman are to be believed. “I cannot imagine,” she admits, “that any of them really thought that they would ever go back.” In answer to questions about the point of Menshevik political activities put to her in interviews in 1987, she reveals the conflict between her personal feeling for this “family” and her inability to relate to their doings as something alive: They were politicians, and this was […] their life. There was [their newspaper], after all, and it appeared for fifty years, and may do so still […] It is all so long ago, and the people are all so long dead, and I was personally such very close friends with the leaders, with Abramovich and Dan. I do not believe that I ever had a political conversation with them […] They were my friends […] Being actually pretty much an apolitical person I never read the [party newspaper]. But to me [their political activity] was incontestable. It was their life content, and it had a purpose. I took that for granted. If they do it, they must be right. […] I knew them personally, and I knew how they considered themselves, and I couldn’t put them at the same level as the French nobles and their behavior, and how they became emigrants. It was different.15

My point is not to expose Rubinstein as somehow lacking in the intellectual seriousness to carry through the reflective exercise postulated by Mannheim. The difficulties identified in this case are integral to the larger ambitions of the Mannheimian project. The question is, ultimately, how the distanced, critical, typological view constitutive of the sociological perspective can orient and galvanize the passionate human being, profoundly tied in relations of love and loyalty. “What is the relationship between me and my dissertation?” she asked herself during the interviews. “It is that which is unclear to me.” The tension between the two contexts is the theme of a question posed by Mannheim near the end of his introductory sociology course in 1930: “Can we master the global tensions or shall we be shipwrecked on our own histories?” Formulated as a loaded question, the option against mastery has strong appeal to a woman like Rubinstein, given her own manifest feeling for her life, but the issue is somewhat in suspension even for Mannheim. Mannheim’s last lecture is devoted to the method that distinguishes sociology from other types of human study. He characterizes it by three aspects, and it is the third of these that is of special importance here. First, then, as is evident from the earlier account of sociology of knowledge, sociological method looks

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behind the immanent contents, whether assertion of fact or value. Interestingly, his example is one that Norbert Elias later elevated to importance in his civilizational process, the social conditions behind the use of a fork to eat fish. Second, “sociology dynamicizes social formations,” so that the question always arises about trends of development. “The pathos of sociology,” he said, “is the variability of man.” Finally, the distinctive sociological move is to reveal the particularity of established standpoints, their susceptibility to the illusion of the individual personality or individual social configuration that it is unique, self-sufficient, and complete. This illusion is epitomized in the approach that we find in internal life history, as it was implicit in the historicism of the old Bildungskultur. Learning is in fact a function of social experience and social relations, and attention to these relationships between knowing and society, including the concomitant self-distantiation, is what Mannheim terms the “functionalist” view constitutive of sociology. Self-knowledge reveals the knower as a function of historically variable social relations and orients to a practice of accommodation. Mannheim ended with a flourish: “Odd that the foundational truths of Christianity are here fulfilled: sociology shows that the other lives in everyone, that all men are brothers.” Nina Rubinstein reserved the metaphors of family for more intimate connections. In her life in America, she opted for language, literature, and sociability—professionally, as an interpreter at the United Nations, and most vitally in a small circle of Russian speakers, many of them émigré friends of her youth. I suggest that her choice of life-history above sociology is more than a private matter. Mannheim also accepted the notion that there was something beyond the self as apprehended functionally, but he saw it as a mysterious remainder, reachable only when the other course has been exhausted, and he characterized it in a religious language derived from the mystics. Another of his students, Kurt Wolff, cautioned Mannheim, in a naive seminar submission, that his own commitment to sociology was conditional on his being given free play as poet too. In a brief article written late in his life, Wolff concludes that they were, after all, poets together.16 Rubinstein drew the line differently than either, but evidently Mannheim let it be known to his students that the line was there to be negotiated. The capacity for choice opened to the intellectual by sociological reflection could yield a choice against the intellectual’s political mission. That seems obviously right to me, as long as the full implications of the choice are accepted, and we are spared aesthetic politics. In exile, Mannheim also had to operate further on his identity as intellectual in his attempt to become “The Sociologist” whose expert advice would be accepted as authoritative by gentlemanly English elites, only to find that, like other “successful” emigrants, that he had been domesticated as a kind of

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interesting character, who was welcomed for striking “ideas” but not taken altogether seriously by the world of learning. Rubinstein’s negotiated outcome is obviously different from that of such prominent social scientists,17 but it is not the point of my cautionary tale to impose a new universal formula on the emigration. My point is simply to invite closer examination of comparable trade-offs and adjustments, as well as the many lifelong costs. I suggest that the questions apply equally to all the others of that generation.There was no “happy end,” and no one “lived happily ever after.”

CHAPTER THREE A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider, and/or Exile In the historical study of political thought, it is a cliché that periods of practical innovation and theoretical fecundity are initiated “when words lose their meaning.”1 The confusions attending the Peloponnesian War, which are documented by Thucydides, are said, accordingly, to have enabled the work of Plato and Aristotle; the obsolescence of the pivotal distinction between king and tyrant, as well as the language of natural hierarchy, that came with the Religious Wars of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, opened the way to Bodin and Hobbes and competing discourses of the modern state. The decline of aristocracy and the rise of democracy, according to John Stuart Mill and other observers of the time, put the language of the party of order in crisis. All of these contentions have a certain plausibility. In the past few decades, correspondingly, it has been maintained that the languages of citizenship, legal orders, popular self-rule, and the like, all oriented to the geographically and culturally bounded nation-state, have been made irrelevant (or obscurantist) by conditions variously characterized as globalization, post-colonialism, or post-modernism. The concept of exile, understood as a distinctive political status associated with defeat, banishment, exclusion from a bounded location and similar attributes, appears as one of these terms of an obsolete political discourse.2 Exile reappears, however, as a key term in a counter-discourse, to refer precisely to the condition of dis/location, which is said to define the world beyond national identities and relations. Edward Said, for example, speaks of exile as emblematic of the “contrapuntal” play of home against strangeness, which constitutes the existence of individuals cast loose by the post-colonial era, dis/placing them for a “life led outside habitual order.” “It is nomadic,” he concludes, “decentered, contrapuntal,” and constantly subject to new disruptions. As such, it serves “as a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture” and becomes an “alternative to the mass institutions that dominate social life.”3

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The question is not whether Said’s recasting of the concept of exile captures anything interesting in contemporary culture, which is beyond doubt, but whether articulating these insights by abandoning the older, more obviously political concept in favor of what appears to be a modification of the spiritually elevated metaphorical use of the term common to the three most prominent monotheistic religions, is somehow mandated by an historical process which sits in judgment on the timeliness of language use. I reject this. It is my view, instead, first, that structural historical changes generate valuable ambiguities and contestations which can lead to differing ways of negotiating what is taking place, and that, second, the historicist language of obsolescence and timeliness may help to obscure what may be called the politics of contestation by deproblematizing the decisive issues.4 My exercise in retrieving the older, more political concept of exile is intended most of all to highlight the dialectical relations dismissed by too linear a conception of conceptual and historical change. The classical source of the undialectical commonplace of political thought noted at the outset is Saint-Simon’s theory of “critical” and “natural” phases in historical development, with crisis marked precisely by the obsolescence of established practices and ways of thinking, as marked by self-defeating actions and cacophony in thought and speech. In that version, of course, the theory depended on assumptions about a progressive propulsion of development from crisis to resolution at a higher plane.5 Today, it should be harder to give much credence to the automatic legitimacy of “the next step.” But “crisis”talk is not dependent on theories of progress. In the first third of the twentieth century, especially in Germany, the talk of “crisis” in meaning, cultivation, knowledge, orientation, and cultural being overall was often linked instead to a cult of decisive action by a resolute leader, whose will is his reason. Hans Freyer and Carl Schmitt, who have recently become fashionable once more, can serve as representatives of this view.6 In historical context, this German example cautions as well that words may lose their meaning not because they can no longer comprehend what may be postulated as new realities, but because the language has become discredited by ideologies grounded in malign or simply confused movements and aspirations. I recall German cases not in order to wave an old bloody shirt, but because the German experience shapes a distinctive debate about exile, which I am reviewing here in order to explore the analytical force and limits of the earlier, more political concept. I think that this will identify continuing problems that risk being lost from view by too categorical a capitulation to dis/location. The debate to which I make reference in this chapter can be dated to the early 1970s, when the German generational protest of the 1960s arrived in the field of German Studies and awoke new interest in the exile writings of

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the Hitler years, as an incident of a broader challenge to the then prevalent depoliticization of the Nazi epoch; but the participant in that debate whom I select for special attention is Hans Mayer, a literary commentator of the older generation (b. 1907), and himself the veteran of one, two, or three exiles—or none. Mayer—who had left Germany for France in 1933 on a mission for a dissident Communist group and who had become a researcher for Max Horkheimer in the early years of his subsequent Swiss residence in the 1930s, an editor for the American-sponsored radio station in Frankfurt immediately after the war, a professor of literature in Leipzig in the German Democratic Republic until September 1963, and a professor, critic, and cultural journalist in the German Federal Republic after his position in the East became impossible—briefly intervened in the debate and then went off to write two large books. One is called “Outsider(s)” [Aussenseiter] and the other “A German Subject to Recall” [Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf].7 Both titles signal important maneuvers in Mayer’s attempt to negotiate the question of exile(s) in his past. Writing in German for a German audience, he could not avoid the questions that remained uppermost in the debate of the 1970s and that are among those bypassed by too smooth a reconceptualization of exile, viz., the possibility of “return” from exile, and the relations between those who had returned and those who had remained. As is indicated by the title of an important collection of papers published in 1972, to which Mayer contributed, the latter question posed itself, first of all, in the German case as the relationship between the literatures of “Exile and Inner Emigration.”8 Common to both terms, in the views of the book’s editors, is their contestable quality as a political badge of honor within the political discourse about the National Socialist era and its aftermath. Both Jost Hermand, writing on “exile,” as well as Reinhold Grimm, writing on “inner emigration,” challenge most claims to one or the other designation. In the critical mode of the 1960s generation, they look back with skepticism at the conflict between those who legitimated themselves in the immediate postwar years as voices of the “Other Germany,” which they had ostensibly preserved and renewed in exile, and those who replied that this standing belongs rather to those who remained within Germany to withstand Nazi totalization, as best they could, while sharing the experiences of Germans. Their reconsideration of both concepts is best understood as an exercise in conceptual retrieval, designed above all to renew debates about labels that had become stereotyped and diminished, as questions about the political circumstances to which they referred, notably issues of political responsibility, had been localized in special constituencies and removed from the wider public forum. In the background is protest against the submergence of the Nazi past by the discourse of the Cold War, where the “exiles” most likely to be heard are the Germans displaced

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by the westward shift of the German borders.9 The intellectual protesters’ renewed attention to the issues, as they had been stated immediately after the war, was designed to force a re-analysis of suppressed questions in the politics of culture (and the culture of politics). Hermand amasses reasons for questioning whether the concept of exile can usefully be defined at all in general terms, citing not only the strongly subjective element in choosing and abandoning the status and the widely differing kinds of conditions to which it is variously applied, but also the disparity between the consistently high ethical expectations that the term arouses and the wide range of motives and characters that in fact mark the careers of many who might fit some generalized definition. Especially interesting, in view of the present-day discussion that initiates my own examination, is that Hermand feels obliged to dispose of a literary tendency, which he already finds prevalent at the time, to let the concept “pale to a mere metaphor of existence,” whether on the basis of aestheticist or existentialist reasonings, “through which nothing more is expressed than an impotent protest against a vulgar mass culture.”10 Hermand then postulates a historically contextualized definition for the purposes of his discussion, whereby exile applies only where there was a displacement due to an act of political expulsion or ideologically motivated self-expatriation. Many self-styled “exiles” thus drop out of consideration. In the case of “inner emigration,” Reinhard Grimm proceeds rather by challenging the political merit associated with the literary responses to Nazi rule that are alleged as instances of such withdrawal. Only in the rarest instances, expressly linked to resistance, do these literary documents or practices manifest anti-fascist political acts. Where they do not function as humorous safety-valves or distractions tolerated by the regime, Grimm maintains, they exhibit a pure aestheticism or esotericism that expresses and reinforces the characteristic German “form of life” of anti-political “inwardness,” which has compromised German culture for centuries, and which was a dubious feature as well of much writing in the “outer emigration,” and which neither Hermand nor Grimm fully recognize as “exile literature,” in their normative political sense of the concept (where resistance is integral). Grimm epitomizes his judgment of many of the key figures in the “inner emigration” in the words of Paul Rilla’s characterization of Ernst Jünger: that he was “a proven opponent of National Socialism” who was no less “a proven pace-setter of the Third Reich.”11 Hans Mayer’s contribution, while drawing energy from the renewal of debate, departs dramatically from the tone of the collection. In his title, opening, and ending, he speaks as someone who must not only interpret but also remember. He stresses the generational gap between himself and those who can only comment on things they have read, those whose inquiries do not

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put themselves in question. There is a surprising amount of anger against the exiles, and a corresponding amount of understanding of those who remained behind. Repeatedly hammering the term “incapacity,” [Unfähigkeit], he charges the emigrated writers with failing to comprehend either their own situation in exile or the situation in Germany, either during their absence or upon their return. His characterization of the exile condition is complex. While Mayer closes the article with the flat assertion that “the time of exile, which began on January 30, 1933, never came to an end,” he also states no less categorically that “the concept of ‘exile’ was itself nothing but a fiction.”12 The evident contradiction between these statements can be mitigated by an attentive reading. What was fictional was the idea of exile as a “fabric of experience” common to the emigrants, beyond their shared troubles with “passports and visas, emigration and immigration.” To an extraordinary extent, Mayer insists, inequalities in social standing, wealth, and ideological acceptability led to differing fates. Antithetical differences in motivation, moreover, make it even less possible to speak of the exile as a unified community. There were exiles, but there was no exile.13 On the other hand, and this is where Mayer’s idea of an unending time of exile comes in, there was no closure—no return—possible for those who had been exiled because the place from which they had been exiled had ceased to exist. Mayer does not mean this in the banal sense of the irreversible river of time. With his focus on literature, Mayer is concerned, rather, with the failure to reconstitute the “formal unity” of the field of action of the exiled writers, with the seeming impossibility of restoring the contested but common cultural forum in which their business was left unfinished by acts of force.14 The first dimension of this cleavage is precisely the gap between those within the country and those without. In the years of emigration, Mayer contends, the situation in Germany was oversimplified in one of two ways. Either the Germans were pictured as uniformly caught up in the regime, whether in guilty complicity or in helpless enchantment, or they were taken, in their vast majority, as cowed prisoners of a vicious minority. Neither misreading left room for the subtle analysis of the internal developments that generated various types of inner emigration. The question could not even arise. Mayer’s example, strikingly enough, is the failure to appreciate the changes that took place in Gottfried Benn. Benn’s vicious attack on the emigrés in 1934 sufficed to fix him, in their views, in alignment with the enemy, and it precluded any consideration of his subsequent writing and thinking, notwithstanding its denunciation by National Socialist organs. Mayer, in contrast, speaks quite comfortably of Benn’s work in “inner emigration”; he rejects the notion of 1933–1945 as a single fixed moment of frozen time. His own models among the emigrants reject such a categorical separation between those outside the

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country and those within. He praises Ernst Bloch’s success, for example, in continuing to write under an assumed name in the Frankfurter Zeitung for some time after Hitler’s seizure of power, and he holds up Walter Benjamin’s pseudonymous collection of letters by “German Men” published in Switzerland for distribution in Germany. Peter Weiss earns his praise, moreover, for his honest confession that “the emigration taught me nothing.” As for himself, Mayer took pride in his own adhesion to the Communist-led but coalitional “Free Germany” movement as the war came to an end. In his view, the point was “to end the condition of exile,” to return to the field of action. Exile, in short, was anything but a privileged location. It was an incident of a struggle that neither began nor ended with that dislocation. The decisive phase in the history of that struggle, according to Mayer, came with its massive displacement by the regime-centered conflict between East and West. Writing in 1972, Mayer highlights the moment in 1947 when Melvin Lasky, subsequently the founder of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, definitively re-divided the German authors who had been assembled in Berlin on Russian initiative, although as yet under four-power auspices, by attacking the absence of freedom in the East. The regimes on both sides endorsed and reinforced the consequent split, and the return from exile was in effect adjourned sine die. In his memoir, Mayer recalls, however, that he refused to accept the finality of this development at the time. The journalistic account of the event he wrote at the time bypassed the Lasky intervention and focused instead on signs of agreement with his own position, unchanged 34 years later: The author is impotent when he plays, as in past years, the role of a mere object subjected to forces from beyond his own sphere, the sphere of the word and the spirit. He is impotent if he does not recognize and know how to apply the force of “j’accuse,” the force of the word of denunciation.15

For Mayer, the 1947 event also marks his decision to pursue an appointment in the East, a professorship at the Karl Marx University of Leipzig. Notwithstanding the irresistible force of the regime’s distinction between emigrés who had gone East after 1933 (and who had survived the purges, not necessarily with clean hands) and those who had gone West, Mayer always rejected the idea that his move to the Soviet Zone of Occupation (SBZ) had been some sort of error that he had corrected by his subsequent 1964 removal to the German Federal Republic.16 Instead, he speaks of the latter as a “third emigration,” rather than a return home. There are two readings of the Mayer story, which was selected for the present occasion precisely because it can serve as a limiting case of the older,

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bounded, “located” political conceptualization of exile. First, Mayer could indeed be situated outside the limits, as a writer who breaks down the binary opposition of home and exile, and who locates himself in the condition of dis/ location. Mayer, on this possible reading, sees exile as becoming open-ended in a moment of great cultural disruption, where the home that was is no longer there. Certainly, Mayer’s late book on the women exemplified by Judith and Delilah, the homosexual domain of Sodom, and the Jewish realm of Shylock’s trades, where he treats all three categories as representative of “the outsider,” who cannot be comprehended even by the most advanced formulation of enlightened thought, points in such a “post-modern” direction. As he recalls, moreover, this work was the product of his American visits and associations, a removal from the site of the unfinishable exile-and-return. I nevertheless prefer a second reading of the Mayer story, which cautions against the premature breakthrough that I want to characterize as a deproblematization of the issues raised by exile. When Mayer picked up the task of remembering, which he had assigned to himself at the outset of his 1972 article, his question returned to “thinking in the night” about Germany (Heinrich Heine): what did it mean to be a “German subject to recall,” a combatant in a struggle he dared not abandon? In the last chapter of his memoir, Mayer picks his way through his inability to forget either that he had in fact been “recalled” at least three times from being a German or that he remained dedicated to a project of recalling the recall. To help him to convey his design, he calls on Ernst Bloch and Franz Kafka. From Bloch he takes the watchword “Traces” [Spuren] and from Kafka, the teaching that the greatest human evils are impatience and indifference [Ungeduld und Lässigkeit]. “If I am condemned,” he quotes Kafka, “so I am not only condemned to an end, but also to resist until the end.” Recollection, he contends, is resistance to impatience and indifference. The dimension of exile most fatefully excluded from attention by the metaphorical reconceptualization, which I exemplify by Said and which I am calling into question with the help of my brief re-examination of Hans Mayer’s struggles with the problem, is precisely the matter of exile’s end—the return or failure to return. Without this tension, the concept is an impoverished label for a condition for which there exist alternate terms and (re)problematicizing discourses. It is only in the context of return that the dialectical dynamics of exile become manifest, whether I am talking about the inner debates and complex negotiations during the period of exclusion, or the meaning of the experience and status afterwards. Mayer keeps these issues open, even if his position must also be understood to have been overdetermined by his professional interest in self-stylization, both in the East and the West. It is by no means necessary to accept his own rather

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eclectic and conventionally high-minded characterization of the politicalcultural space which would have to be regained in order to speak of an end of exile.17 His value to my conceptual inquiry is his refusal to consider the case as closed. My present analysis focuses on Mayer’s self-reflection and recollection because I am only concerned to show the resources of these terms of discourse, the attention they bring to dimensions of experience that might otherwise be neglected, and their capacity for comprehending even marginal or limiting cases. On the conceptual question, it is of first importance, in my view, to distinguish the cases where “words lose their meanings” because the language that gives them meaning has been displaced by discourse that constitutes a more comprehensive and sensitive structure of knowledge from the cases where that loss comes about through amnesia, suppression, or other sterile modes of deconstruction. I reject above all, as noted, the application of naturalistic metaphors, which transmute the acts of history into “processes” and “developments,” generating modes of passive adaptation or “crises” where the superior natural force prevails. This questionable kind of analysis is hardly a novel deviation, since Thucydides himself, whose account of the Corcyrean Revolution is the classical source of the idea that words can lose their meaning in a time of disorder, found his most compelling paradigm of disorder nevertheless in the natural violence of Athen’s great plague. He reads a human event through the lens of a physical one. If language is a function of intentional human action, however, decisions about terms require the full range of human initiative and responsibility, not least the capacity for re/location.

CHAPTER FOUR Exile as Process: The Case of Franz L. Neumann The Zone of Displacement: Variety and Movement The study of exile is burdened by conceptual disputes about the displaced persons who are to be classed as exiles rather than refugees or émigrés or emigrants or cosmopolitans or members of a diaspora. The disputes are an indicator, first, of the political weights variously attached to the term—ranging from the disgrace of the expelled kleptocrat to the celebration of the freedom fighter—and, second, of the historical place of the trope in metaphorical or symbolic senses in numerous religious, aesthetic, and other cultural contexts— ranging from the sacral privileged status of the Christian or Jew awaiting the ultimate restoration to the elevated distance supposedly occupied by the creative artist. The issues are further complicated by the circumstance that the contested concepts figure in many of the variations in the claims and counterclaims constitutive of the displaced condition, so that persons seeking asylum may claim refugee status and deny that they are exiles, lest they be excluded as likely disturbers of the political order or policies of the host state, while individuals seeking recognition as agents and allies in political ventures will assert their status as exiles and reject the passive victimization implied by the term “refugee.” In this chapter, I will not address the problem of relating the extended cultural trope of exile to the concrete political phenomena subject to characterization as exile, except insofar as I want to reiterate the position that I developed in the introduction, viz., that in these contexts it is misleading to treat exile as symbol rather than as metaphor, since the latter keeps open important questions that the former imperiously closes.1 My principal aim here is, further, to amend the terms of the dispute about the specification of exile by suggesting that these diverse modes of displacement are best recognized not as static classificatory boxes, but as overlapping regions on a multi-dimensional continuum, along which individuals and groups may move—by virtue of their own changing designs and actions, their variable and often contested recognition by others, and, above all, as a function of the bargaining between

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the displaced and others, including not only the hosts but also one another and those who remained behind in their places of departure. The German author Oskar Maria Graf illustrated the point succinctly when he entitled the first chapter of his partly autobiographical last novel “Exile or Diaspora,” and dedicated it to his character’s shift from one to the other.2 In my study of the first postwar letters to Germany written by several intellectuals and artists displaced by the Nazi regime, I signal a common pattern by the subtitle, “the liquidation of exile,” using the term in its commercial legal sense to indicate not only that the condition exacts costs that may be found excessive but also that there are legacies that may be retained, reinvested, or converted.3 Such recurrences suggest the need for an amendment to the “liquidation” concept, which can be met by a play on the term. In his study of some writers whose exile took them to Canada, Eugen Banauch proposes the term “fluid exile” in order to comprehend a certain ebb and flow, which he relates to a rich variety of factors, many peculiar to the odd circumstances that brought this cohort to Canada and to the special conditions prevailing there.4 But the image is evocative, even if the naturalistic conception also fails to capture the purposive actions that constitute the state and movements of liquidity. These will be a prime concern of the present study. My procedure in the chapter is to follow the career of one representative figure from among the political intellectuals displaced by Nazi rule: Franz L. Neumann. I begin with an overview of his career.5 Then I will touch briefly on Neumann’s own reflections on his place in the company of those who came to the United States as exiles. And finally, I will look at two critical and, I think, characteristic features of his movement through the exile process. To anticipate these last points, I want to call attention first to a limitation of the analytical acuity with which exiles like other strangers are often credited and for which Neumann was especially well known. The sociologist Nina Rubinstein has suggested that exiles often fail to create a new history for the place they left behind; they do not amend their views of the past in the light of the events that they missed. More to the point: they fail to imagine a new future.6 In Neumann’s case, as in the case of a number of his colleagues in the practice of labor law and policy during the Weimar years, this yields an exaggerated view of the importance of labor movements in the shaping of events, past and future. Second, and this is in part a legacy of that same career but critical for the shaping of all effective action and movement along the continuum in which exile is a major feature, Neumann was a brilliant and persistent negotiator, who had the ability to create and adjust the multi-directional bargaining relations and flexible settlements that are a necessity for the displaced, who find nothing ready-made. For the emigrants, whether in the humane and social sciences

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or in literature and the arts, acculturation was a very difficult and always incomplete negotiation, with generational memories and intellectual linkages frequently disrupting the settlements that were made.

An Overview of Franz L. Neumann The German-born political theorist Franz Leopold Neumann was prominent in the cohort of exile scholars who brought the contested legacy of German social theory to American social and political science after 1933, especially in the study of modern democratic and dictatorial states.7 Neumann was born to a Jewish family on May 23, 1900, in Kattowitz in Silesia (now Katowice, Poland). After completing his doctoral dissertation and his qualification for legal practice, he apprenticed with the leading Social Democratic labor lawyer, Hugo Sinzheimer (1875–1945), in Frankfurt. In the last years of the Weimar Republic, Neumann, in practice in Berlin, served as lead counsel for the building trade union, as well as for the Social Democratic Party. His name was reputedly high on the National Socialist arrest list, and he left for London in May 1933. There he studied at the London School of Economics with Harold Laski (1893–1950) and Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), and he earned a second doctorate with a political theory dissertation on “The Governance of the Rule of Law,” directed above all against the National Socialist jurist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), who had earlier intrigued him. In 1936 he came to Max Horkheimer’s (1895–1973) Institute of Social Research in New York, initially as a legal advisor and eventually as a collaborator in the research program. Between 1943 and 1947, impelled by a contraction of the Institute’s activities and the less-than-perfect fit between his political focus and the philosophical preoccupations of the Institute’s core, he was—somewhat uncomfortably—in US government service, engaged in intelligence analysis, as well as some policy planning towards a reformed social-democratic future for Germany. In 1949, after two years as a visitor, he became a professor in the Department of Public Law and Government at Columbia University in New York City. Neumann died in an automobile accident on September 2, 1954. Neumann’s publications may be divided into three periods, and key writings from all three phases have been variously retrieved by later generations of scholars in Germany, Italy, and the United States. During his years as a labor lawyer in Weimar Germany, following a methodological dissertation designed to permit a critique of German socialism’s failure to move beyond its pre-World War I tactical individualism in matters of criminal law, Neumann published several important articles, as well as a book, on the place of labor law in the scheme of the Weimar constitution, with labor law being taken, following Sinzheimer, as a body of socially initiated law that runs progressively against

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the liberal property law foundations of the civil code. The collective efforts of organized labor were an integral presupposition of this laborist approach, and the Weimar constitution was understood as a composite of democratic majoritarian parliamentary rule and a pluralistic social bargaining regime.8 In the first years of exile after 1933, in his well-known Behemoth (1942), as well as in his posthumously published second dissertation—both of which harshly criticized, in the light of events, his own earlier assumptions about organized labor—Neumann offered a diagnosis of National Socialism as a political malformation arising from the legal and political order of monopoly capitalism, which neither liberalism nor laborism can comprehend. His structural analysis led him to deny the view, not alien to some of his Institute associates, that the regime should be understood as a brutally overdeveloped state with an all-encompassing bureaucracy. The fascist slogans of “corporatism” and “totalitarian state” were mere ideological cover for a condition of incoherent conflict, according to Neumann. Nazi Germany was not to be likened to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) but to his Behemoth (1682), the account of civil war and “confusion.”9 Notwithstanding the Marxist sociological tools he applied to its structure, Neumann’s critique focused on the absence of a rational state in Nazi Germany and the dynamic destructive consequences of the unappeasable power struggles that constituted the system of rule. Expansionary and exploitative war without limit was the only way for such a regime, and such overreach cannot achieve a settled victory. The frame of Neumann’s argument recalls the reading of G. W. F. Hegel advanced at nearly the same time by his friend Herbert Marcuse in Reason and Revolution (1941), but Neumann lacked Marcuse’s philosophical interests, and he placed the weight of his work on the conjunction of his political theses with his detailed and authoritative analyses of current social, political, and economic information from German sources. It was the latter aspect that won him the greatest recognition from the dozen or more academics that reviewed Behemoth, but the more conjectural frame fascinated younger political writers, such as C. Wright Mills, who welcomed the work as an inspiration for a fresh, non-hackneyed start for leftist diagnosis of trends whose dangers were not limited to Germany. Mills’s influential Power Elite applies the analytical features that he most appreciated in Neumann’s study to the American conditions of the 1950s.10 Neumann’s mix of high humanistic ideals and tough-minded acceptance of stubborn facts recurrently intrigues a constituency on the independent Left, notably among the students of 1960s Radicals in Germany. Neumann’s writings after his years of wartime government service were constructive in aspiration, notwithstanding his occasional evocations of the critical theory formulas of the Institute of Social Research; but the work

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remained inconclusive. On balance, it represented an attempt to develop a theory of liberal democracy that would be responsive to the social and cultural concerns of the radical thinkers he took as his models, but that would, at the same time, support a secure constitutional order. The distinguishing consistent feature of his work from first to last is the conviction, first, that law is a mode of power and, second, that not all power in legal form is simply reducible to domination by force or fear. In its aspect as a pattern of guaranteed rights, as he developed the analysis in his last years, the rule of law has a minimum ethical function beyond its ideological and economic roles; in its character as rule by democratic enactment, it has the possibility of transforming society. Neumann’s central puzzle was how a political force, subject to the logic of power and confronted with the totalitarian threat immanent in all advanced societies, could serve the objectives implicit in the idea of a free and rational humanity.11

The “Political Scholar” in Exile In the course of a retrospective consideration of the role of social scientists exiled from Nazi Germany written not long before his premature death, Neumann proposes a characterization of his own vocation. Neumann speaks of “political scholars,” deliberately conjoining the senses of the scholar who studies politics and the scholar who is political. Using a more generic term, Neumann defines political scholars, first, as “those intellectuals dealing with problems of state and society—historians, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists—who were—or should have been—compelled to deal with the brute facts of politics”; and, second, as intellectuals who “being political… fought—or should have fought—actively for a better, more decent political system.”12 Neumann’s explication of this concept—at once normative and descriptive—is a prime motif in the periodization that marks his approach to the problem of intellectuals in exile, and which governs his account of his own cohort of emigrants. Neumann begins with a normative imperative addressed to all intellectuals. They are to be proponents of an expansion of freedom, which implies, first, that they must always stand in a critical relationship to their times, since freedom can never be fully attained in any political and social regime. And this vocation as advocate of freedom requires, second, that they must stand at a distance from the constraining institutions of the political and social order within whose boundaries they find themselves; they must be in some sense aliens or metics. In the context of the lecture we are following here, Neumann offers little more than two rhetorically effective but textually suspect references to some passages in Plato to support this postulated ideal.

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He quotes Socrates in the Republic on the notion of the philosopher as metic, without acknowledging, however, that Plato’s text moves on to the obligation of the philosopher nevertheless to accept a consuming civic responsibility. From the Crito, Neumann extracts another quotation that appears to underline the distance between the philosopher and his community, notwithstanding the overall thrust of Socrates’ argument in that text that he must bow to an unjust death sentence rather than to deny his city. It is impossible to say whether Neumann intentionally chose passages that highlighted some paradoxes in the normative guideline he proposes for intellectuals—and it must be said that this would not be his usual way with quotations—yet the difficulties might be said to be immanent in the very idea of the “political scholar,” as this figure is situated by Neumann in a sequence of historical contexts, and specifically as it is subjected to exile. To be political, after all, is to be engaged; the mark of the metic is his debarment from political status. Neumann’s comparatively lax use of classical quotations to embroider rather than to prove a point is characteristic of his manner, as is his turn next to a comparative treatment of historical differences. The force of his argument is in the synthetic constructions rather than in his authorities, notwithstanding a certain connoisseurship of unusual non-canonical sources and examples from the history of thought. He selects thinkers of the past as partners in a discussion of items prominent on his own agenda, in the manner of exceptionally talented students in relation to their most stimulating teachers. In this respect, as in so many others, he was a negotiator with aims of his own. According to Neumann, then, the situations of intellectuals in exile are constituted by their various roles in different ages, as well as by differences in their social settings. Because the historical appearances of some older types play a part in Neumann’s characterization of his own cohort, it is worth reviewing his scheme as a whole. In the classical era, he maintains, there is an identity of politics and culture, so that exile means death to an intellectual. Neumann’s eagerness to invoke a familiar limiting case, it appears, leads him to neglect both his thesis of the intellectual as metic—as he might have illustrated it, for instance, by Aristotle—and the political reality of the difference between the cultural and political boundaries of the Greek city-states of antiquity. By contrast, he asserts, culture and politics were separable in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, as is notably the case with the Epicurean philosophers, although exile was nevertheless “intellectually catastrophic.” His citation of Epicureanism and his harsh rejection of it are especially interesting because this posture also had its attractions for him, especially in his disillusioned last years. The construct of “political scholar,” as such, Neumann introduces in conjunction with his initial discussion of Christianity. Generally speaking, he

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maintains, the universal culture of Christianity, with its common language, allows intellectuals to move freely from a place where they are not wanted to another, where they may be welcome. In Christian Europe, barring excommunication, which Neumann does not discuss, one might say that transfers from place to place, even if involuntary, did not amount to exile, given the primacy of the intellectuals’ religious associations and their universal distribution. But the situation was different, Neumann asserts, for “political scholars” like Dante and Marsilius of Padua, who are seriously affected by displacement from their original civic locales. Yet, Neumann asserts, such figures were also both motivated and freed to reflect deeply on their dilemmas and thereby to make major contributions to political theory. The contrast to the Epicurean type of displaced intellectual, who moves in an abstract space that is indifferent to any qualities of place—and the optimistic foreshadowing of benefits to offset the costs in the event of exile—could not be starker. Since the concept of national cultures plays an important part later in Neumann’s analysis, it is important to note that with Dante and Marsilius he has introduced the idea of a “political scholar” in the context of a universal culture, albeit at the instance of two anomalous figures. Without forcing the evidence, it is interesting that the two figures, both originating within a civic polity, move in opposite directions in their political theories. While Marsilius offers a theory that anticipates later theories of the state, Dante develops a theory of a universal polity. This contrast hints at some questions about the alternatives of citizenship and cosmopolitanism that recur in the study of the limits of exile. In the further development of Christian types and contexts, however, Neumann conjures up two other typical situations. First, there is the circumstance arising when Christianity transmutes its constituent-bounded units into closed sacral religious communities, whose opponents are enemies who pollute the faith and deserve “extermination” not merely in the etymological sense of expulsion, but in the new sense of annihilation. This enforced reunification of culture and politics, Neumann asserts, is found, as well, where there is a “civil religion,” in the sense of Rousseau and the Reign of Terror, which he here conjoins, and indeed, according to Neumann, wherever society is united by faith rather than reason. While the conjunction of Rousseau and Robespierre is much in tune with academic opinion in the early Cold War years, Neumann’s extrapolation of the argument is eccentric in context and quite possibly, like his conception of the intellectual’s critical “mission,” a placeholder for some elements of Herbert Marcuse’s idiosyncratic version of Critical Theory. Over time, according to Neumann, Christian societies may, in any case, anticipate a more modern constellation. Under these circumstances, intellectuals are able to play church off against state in order to maneuver

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freely within flexible limits of heresy and political dissent, especially in view of their individual mobility and their collective protection by trans-political corporations of scholars. The counterparts in early modern states are the intellectuals with special skills who move freely from court to court in the early years of absolutism, as well as “uprooted intellectuals” like Bakunin and Marx, who find shelters in various locales as needed. These cosmopolitans, in fact, appear to epitomize the normative condition of the intellectual as outsider and critic, although neither of them was prepared to leave the mutually interdefining antithetical categories of citizen and metic intact. On further analysis, Neumann notes that the modern paradigm in either of these varieties presupposes the modern state, whose development—notably in the form of the nation state—creates a situation of striking ambiguity for the independent intellectual. While the modern state, as it emerges in the Sixteenth Century, increasingly limits itself in principle to providing security for cultural and social processes that achieve great gains by their autonomous dynamics, it also insists, according to Neumann, on its sole control over the question of what counts as “security” under different circumstances and what is required to maintain it. Modern states, thus, normally permit unprecedented liberty for intellectual exploration and dissent, but they may also produce abrupt and arbitrary incursions upon that liberty. With the mobilization of “nationality” increasingly comprehended by an ideology of nationalism as a frame of legitimacy, the tensions increase. As long as there is not the outright institution of a civil religion, however, the restrictions imposed by even such states are commonly limited to public interventions deemed to be disruptive. And this standard leaves room for a kind of “inner emancipation”—or even “inner emigration”—exemplified by figures like Spinoza, the Abbé Meslier, Kant, and Theodor Mommsen, according to Neumann, where intellectuals are outwardly compliant but maintain an inward rebellion and produce hidden dissident works, often of great value. Although Neumann does not use the expression “political scholar” to identify intellectuals of this kind, they clearly approximate, like the uprooted intellectuals, to this ideal—albeit within the constraints of their powerlessness. Yet in the course of development of the modern nation state, according to Neumann, even these ambiguous openings are made ever narrower, first of all, by the functionalization of intellectual roles and their transformation into intellectual professions. Neumann curiously cites Julien Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs as an authority for this observation, although Benda’s actual concern is with the “politicization of the intellectuals,” rather than the confrontation between political scholars and the bureaucratization of their function and thus of their thought. In view of the “political scholar’s”

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attention—as well as Neumann’s own—to the “brute facts of power,” which are often articulated in bureaucratic modes, however, it is increasingly difficult for the intellectual to be relevant to politics without becoming involved in the rationalized scheme, entering into a complex play of power and resistance rather than categorical autonomy. The terribly simple outcome of this line of development, according to Neumann, may be the state of affairs in totalitarian states, where the dominant powers exert irresistible pressure to “coordinate” all thought and culture, and where attempts to seek refuge in “inner emigration” are condemned to utter sterility. Intellectuals have only the choice between submission and exile. In making this flat assertion about the vacuity of “inner emigration” under totalitarian conditions, Neumann is registering a belated judgment on an issue bitterly debated in Germany during the six years since the end of the war and largely decided, at least in the Federal Republic, against the external emigrants. Interestingly enough, Neumann concedes enough force to the considerations most often cited against the exiles in these debates to list them among the prime constitutive difficulties confronting exiles more generally under the conditions of the nation state. Tradition, experience, and language are so closely integrated within the boundaries of the state that intellectuals who depart, whatever the reason, effectively break with the national culture and lose the right as well as the capacity to vindicate their exile on their return. Neumann rejects the constructive implication of this proposition, if it is put forward in support of “national” legitimacy claims for those who remained in Germany, whether as “inner emigrants” or as outright collaborators, but he seemingly accepts the negative point. This leaves Neumann’s judgment of those who returned to Germany from exile quite unresolved, which is especially noteworthy since this group includes several of his closest collaborators during the years of exile, notably Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno and Frederick Pollock, comprising the inner core of the so-called “Frankfurt School” to which he is often assigned. In any case, the exiles he is examining now must stay away and create, he maintains, “a new life” in a new national culture. Neumann’s essay now takes an expressly autobiographical turn, although the position he puts forward with such seeming certainty is by no means finally resolved in his own life. Such a new beginning is a profoundly difficult undertaking, not made easier by rage against those who disrupted the old life, since this emotion is inseparable for the exiled political intellectual from the recognition of failure and defeat. A “political scholar” is displaced, Neumann says, as human being, as scholar, and as political agent. Briefly sampling an earlier sociological inquiry by a fellow-exile and former Mannheim student,

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Hans Speier, Neumann then reviews the conditions that might ease these difficulties, which, according to Speier, were marked similarities in social environment and audience.13 In quite general and predictable terms, Neumann assesses the likelihood of Speier’s conditions being met under the various historical circumstances of his earlier overview; but he concludes that the case of intellectuals’ exile from German totalitarianism requires separate, historically more specific treatment. As his analysis proceeds, then, he abandons the straightforward micro-sociological situational variables cited by Speier and applicable to his own schematic historical survey, and he focuses instead on the experiences and states of mind of this particular cohort of exiles. He begins with a sketch of the skepticism and despair that he thinks marked German political intellectuals during most of the Weimar years. The war had ended with a competition between Wilsonian democracy and Bolshevism, in which both sides lost. Democracy was tied to defeat in the public mind, and its supposed supporters were too badly crippled to make it strong. Middle-class liberalism had been corrupted by Bismarck, and social democracy was steered bureaucratically to a course of “trading social freedom for higher wages.” Bolshevism, in turn, became a “terroristic machine” that misused Marx to serve the Soviet Union and “the ruling clique within the party.” It is worth noting that this characterization is not inconsistent with the views of the non-Communist leftist groups like Neu Beginnen that played a leading role in the early years of the emigration, especially in England, where Neumann’s first exile years were spent. The emphasis is in any case not on the shortcomings of Wilsonianism or Bolshevism, as such, but precisely on the disillusionment of intellectuals attracted to either one, in the articulations available in Weimar Germany. In the Weimar universities, he continued, the students with an intellectual bent, as he could testify from his own experience, were confronted by antidemocratic propaganda from the professorial lectern, as the universities became centers of nationalist restoration theories. Yet having offered this cold and bitter account of the political intellectual’s world, Neumann surprisingly introduces an “Indian Summer” that extended, in his view, through almost half of the life of the German Republic, notably in the universities. It was the Depression that took hold in 1930 that negated the apparent achievements of the Indian Summer. And then came National Socialist rule. Neumann distinguishes four grounds of emigration generated by that regime. There were, first, the exiles who were the targeted political enemies of the Nazi rulers, but who failed to constitute a unified exile, since there were many oppositional groups with nothing else in common. Second, there was the “racial” emigration driven by the persecution of Jews. Distinct from this group,

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whose actual religious commitments were immaterial to their classification as outcasts, was a “religious” exile, Neumann maintains, who reacted against the underlying anti-Christian animus in the regime’s ideological and cultural policies. And finally, Neumann identifies a “moral” exile, whose members were actuated by simple moral revulsion against the Nazis in power and their recognition that under totalitarian conditions there could not in fact be an “inner emigration.” There is an implication here about the judgments of those who remained, which points, when taken with Neumann’s assiduous postwar dealings with many such Germans, towards his view of the complex and conditional relations between politics and morals. Crime is a different matter, of course, and Neumann never questioned his service to the prosecution during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal.14 The difficulties in expounding this text are a function of Neumann’s attempt to find the correct balance between a dispassionate analysis of complex events and a public reflection on his own experience. Looking at the time elapsed in exile, then, Neumann generalizes a process of change exemplified by his own history. At some point, he maintains, Nazism was seen to have changed Germany so much that exiles found that their ties were cut and they were left to undertake a “conscious transplantation” of their “existence.” He had himself spent three years in England, he reports, remaining geographically close to Germany and active in exile politics, until he had concluded that there could be no internal overthrow and that England would support the Nazi regime rather than act against it. It is noteworthy that Neumann depicts the critical development as a political response to external events rather than as change in his own mental state through a process of spontaneous acculturation. On this telling, it was only when he had acknowledged these developments that he had set himself to undertake a “self-transformation,” a project for which, in his opinion, England was too restrictive a setting. It is impossible to know whether Neumann recognized the implicit judgment of those he left behind in London. Perhaps he was simply caught up at this point in his eagerness to pay tribute to his American hosts. To introduce the American alternative, then, Neumann continues in an autobiographical mode, although he points in the direction of generalization by citing the small number of academic returnees from America despite the superior conditions supposedly offered to professors in German universities after the war. Interestingly, he makes no reference here to a reconsideration of possible political reasons for return, as if the “self-transformation” had entailed either a complete abandonment of his character as a “political scholar” or a complete refocusing of that character on the new nation, and thus a definitive end of the relationship between exile and asylum. Such a projection would have to be substantially refined in the light of his actual career. At this stage

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of the exposition, he is concerned above all to explain the “success” of the transition to the United States. Neumann begins with an account of what he encountered when he arrived in 1936. First was the “Roosevelt experiment,” which had achieved what Weimar had failed to accomplish, in that it made Wilsonianism real by virtue of a “militant democracy.” Second came the openness of American society, its “comradeliness,” which made “the process of reintegration exceedingly simple, once one had really made a clean break with Europe, and particularly with Germany,” as Neumann overstated the case. Since this characterization can hardly be reconciled, if taken literally, with Neumann’s continued intense preoccupation with Germany—as scholar, as government official, and as academic entrepreneur—the crux must lie in his notion of a “clean break,” which evidently turns on the issue of political loyalty. As with his earlier discussion of national cultures, this raises interesting questions about his judgment of the conduct of his close associates in the Institute of Social Research. Clearly, his classification of responses leaves room for a class of exceptional cases, but just as clearly, he does not include himself in it, since he extrapolates the paradigm case from an idealization of his own perceptions and conduct. After these brief references to the wider environmental conditions facilitating the exiles’ entry into America, Neumann focuses on intellectual life and the universities, the dimensions most pertinent to his assigned topic. It is here that he most carefully differentiates his analysis from Speier’s generalized—and rather obvious—criteria of success, since the “similarities” that Speier postulates are not simply given, in Neumann’s view, but must first be discovered and cultivated, after the emigrants’ initial perceptions of incongruence. The German scholars, he points out, initially looked down on the miscellaneous mélange of colleges and universities in the United States, but recognized in time that American colleges had in fact resurrected the ideals of von Humboldt, which they treasured, while German universities, notwithstanding the ideology of Bildung, had become professional schools, with the professors specialized as researchers rather than serving as teachers. This conception of the universities as a theater for dedicated cultivation may help to explain both of Neumann’s extraordinary success as a teacher at Columbia, with oversubscribed classes, as well as the special reputation of so many of the émigrés in schools of all kinds. There was a widely shared sense of mission in the classroom. More complex was the problem posed by contrasts in the academic cultures, especially in the social sciences. Bred to history and theory, the German émigrés disparaged the empiricism and pragmatism of American scholarship, and they were confronted with a choice rather than a simple welcome. Some exiles attempted to make a total change, Neumann says, to

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become intellectually like the Americans, as they saw them. Others simply maintained their previous positions and sought converts—or accepted the status of recluse. From Neumann’s point of view, the optimal strategy was clearly one of attempted “integration” between the two cultures. To explain this possibility, as it applied in the social and political sciences, he essays a historical characterization of German practice in these fields. The starting points are, first, the traditions of scholarship and, second, the great systems achieved during the long nineteenth century, Kant, Hegel and Marx, as well as their counter-systems in the work of Nietzsche and Freud. In the universities, however, both Kant and Hegel were transmuted into conservative stereotypes, remote from actual conditions, while Marx and Freud were simply excluded. Nietzsche was turned into his own opposite, Neumann says. The great achievements of the universities were in history and law, which could be done by book learning and speculation, without reference to social and political reality. Social and political science were thus outside the university, except for Max Weber, whose actual empirical work, like his emphasis on the social responsibility of scholars, was neglected in favor of the much more uncertain preoccupations with methodology. It is only in the United States, Neumann asserts in an aside, that Max Weber comes into his own. There were some great social and political scientists in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century, whose work in fact inspired the first political scientists in America, but this Liberal current succumbed to Bismarck after unification, and Liberalism was reduced to the defense of private rights in the Rechstaat. Jurisprudence replaced the political and social science that had inquired as well into the sources of law in relations of power. In short, the émigré political scholars found in the American universities the focus on training social and political scientists concerned with the reform of society and politics, which was missing in the German universities after Bismarck. Implicit in this analysis is the thought that the exiles’ ever-clearer understanding of the limits of the German and the advantages of the American universities in these respects encouraged them to find ways of making an appropriate contribution. Because they are so diverse, the contributions cannot be easily assessed, Neumann says—and some European trends were already established, notably some orientation to Mosca and Pareto, as well as the Vienna School in economics—but he claims that persons like himself, trained in a tradition of theory and history, were able to achieve two things. First, they brought skepticism about the ability of social science to engineer change. In making this point, Neumann is not addressing the radical projections of Marx and similar European trends, which were hardly a factor in the United States, but to question engineering models of social transformation. Most important, he claims that the insistence by himself and his cohort on a theoretical framing of empirical research averts four capital dangers in the American pattern of

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social science. First, there is the overstressing of data at the expense of context and especially the historical frame. Second, according to Neumann, recalling his earlier cautions about the state of intellectual life in modern societies, there is the transformation of the scholar into a functionary, constrained by the techniques of data collection. And finally, citing a consideration that played an important part in his own early life as researcher in America, there is the dependence of the scholar on funding sources. It is not only an opportunity but also an obligation, Neumann says, for the émigré scholars to bring their backgrounds to bear on minimizing these threats. In return, American social and political science teaches them a “concern with and analysis of the brute facts of life.” Neumann clearly deems this to have been a mutually beneficial bargain, although he does not at this point use the language of negotiations that is elsewhere so pervasive in his discourse on these subjects. “Integration” is in effect a fair deal, we may conclude, and the success of the intellectual emigration is the result less of an immediately compatible environment than of a promising setting for negotiations. With that settlement presumed to be in place, Neumann returns to the question of the exile’s relations to Germany, using the somewhat evasive formulas of “the German scholar returning to Germany for a visit,” and “drawn into a debate” but also clearly alluding to his own extensive involvement there, notwithstanding his supposed “clean break.” The issue is the condition of the German universities, as seen by the returnee. Neumann draws up a list of comparative disadvantages, ranging from the unreformed spirit and institutional structure of the places, the gulf between students and teachers, the lack of “truly general humanistic education,” and the failure to establish evening universities due to the delicate condition of political and social science and its dependence on émigrés who have chosen to return after all, as well as on American visitors. Scholars like himself, who have a chance to be heard, find themselves pressing for empirical work in Germany, just as they are obliged to call for more theory in the United States. Unexpectedly, without further reference to the supposed centering on America, Neumann concludes that this “dual role” is the “true significance of the once exiled German scholar.” Without resolving this ambiguity, Neumann closes with a tribute to the attitude of American colleges and universities, which “succeeded in transforming a tragic problem into a happy solution.” When taken in the context of Neumann’s enterprises at the time of its composition, this unconditional compliment—courteous to his hosts at the University of Pennsylvania and valedictory in its unexpected finality—can be seen as charged with Neumann’s hopes and assigned a rhetorical function. He is engaged, first, in an extensive campaign on behalf of the Free University in Berlin, negotiating with his own university, agencies of the American

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government, and the principal foundations, by associating it with a menu of remedies for the supposed shortcomings of German universities listed above, as well as a capital anti-Communist political gain. Second, he has invested energy and hope in a Rockefeller Foundation project to strengthen political theory, which the sponsors see mainly as a means of strengthening the ideological front against Communist appeals, but which he sees also as an aid to making American universities more hospitable to the kind of enterprise he identifies with political intellectuals like himself. On the grounds of both projects, his presentation cannot dispense with a measure of diplomacy. Yet it is also suffused as a whole with Neumann’s own unfinished business with his exile experience.

The Anti-Fascist Mission An important insight into Neumann’s earlier negotiations with the anti-fascist political intellectual’s mission in exile, as well as a documentary basis for taking some distance from his post-war account, is provided by his extensive exchange on the subject with Paul Tillich two years after his arrival in the United States.15 On April 19, 1938, he sent a letter to Paul Tillich, the émigré theologian whose close ties in New York, as in Frankfurt, went far beyond Protestant circles. Neumann’s letter, in fact, submitted several pages of comments on Tillich’s draft of “theses on the political and spiritual (geistige) tasks of the German emigration,” which was also being reviewed, according to Tillich, by Gerhard Colm, Arthur Feiler, Eduard Heimann, Max Horkheimer, Adolf Loewe, Thomas Mann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Simon, Hans Staudinger, and Robert Uhlich—all but the prominent theologian, Niebuhr, being representative members of the intellectual émigré cohort, mostly in New York. In circulating a subsequent draft, Tillich maintained that he’d composed the text in response to requests from individual émigrés and “whole groups of my American friends.”16 The archives unfortunately do not contain the draft on which Neumann (and Marcuse) based their comments, but comparing the subsequent draft (circulated by Tillich on June 7, 1938) to the criticisms, which reference the theses by number, confirms Tillich’s remarks in his covering letter that all but the last section were revised only in detail. Since not a few of these detailed changes can be identified because of correspondences to suggestions made by Neumann, there is obvious value in using a comparison between the Neumann and Tillich texts to gain insight into some issues on the negotiating table among New York anti-fascists, as well as the quality of the debate among them. The value of the comparison is enhanced, moreover, because the evidence strongly suggests that Neumann was writing not only for himself

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but also for Horkheimer and the Institute group as a whole. First, Neumann’s position at the Institute always entailed responsibilities as negotiator (and advocate) for the group in its external relations. Second, the relevant folder in the Max Horkheimer Archives contains, first, Neumann’s long letter to Tillich, containing his criticisms and suggestions, second, a separate listing of his “theses for Tillich” as well as a shorter list of similar points by Herbert Marcuse, both formulated in programmatic rather than epistolary language, and, third, the letter and revision from Tillich, lacking an addressee. Since Neumann refers to earlier and prospective conversations about this matter with Tillich but is not included on Tillich’s list of (prominent) individuals consulted, it seems all the more likely that Neumann is understood to be speaking for Horkheimer, and that the programmatic lists of points, whose titles are handwritten, were prepared for an internal Institute discussion, of which there is regrettably no record, as there is for many. Despite the slight awkwardness imposed by the state of the record, I will first summarize Tillich’s principal theses, as revised in June, and then identify the main objections by Neumann (and Marcuse) to the unrevised version of April. The fourteen-page document consists of a three-point introduction and five parts, ranging from four to ten points each: (i) a political-social interpretation of the world situation (Weltlage); (ii) a religious-cultural interpretation of the world situation; (iii) an interpretation of the German situation; (iv) the situation of the German emigration; and (v) practical conclusions. The introduction postulates that the question of a common task applies only to those who accept special obligations arising from their situation as “anti-Fascist emigrants”—who emigrated out of an inner political or spiritual necessity—and not to those who emigrated simply under duress (i.e., most of the Jewish refugees) or those who have wholly immersed themselves in the problems of their new home.17 The programmatic correlation between anti-fascism and exile is very important, although, as will be seen, the idea is to present the vision as a contribution that the exiles are uniquely qualified to make, rather than as a limited perspective. The questions of the present standing of anti-fascism and the legacy of that exile cannot be separated. The principal point in Tillich’s discussion of the world situation is that fascism is a “universal tendency,” by no means limited to nations that suffered most in the war or lacked democratic tradition. Social and economic developments everywhere undermine the conditions—notably the exploitation of proletarians and colonies—that had upheld liberal democracy. “The collectivist-authoritarian systems”—which are everywhere tendentially displacing the liberal democratic phase—are classed as fascist “insofar as they uphold the capitalist principle, they are militarized in whole or in part, and have as their aim the suppression of the proletarian mass movement, which can no longer be held down by liberal-democratic means.” The universal

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thrust of this development is evident not only because the remaining liberal democratic states are undergoing similar trends, but because “Russia too has been propelled in this way along a line related to fascism, towards nationalistic militarization and bureaucratization—proof indeed of the irresistible force of the fascist tendency in the late capitalist era.” There are some tensions internal to fascism and it is not impossible that popular pressure in non-fascist lands will bring about a peaceful shift to socialist democracy, the only alternative, but the likelihood is that war and revolution will have to intervene. In the religious-cultural dimension, Tillich argues, the situation is marked above all by the destructive effects of the new technologies of communications, their near irresistibility when deployed by authoritarian propaganda, and their effects, as well, on cultural producers who succumb to their commercial appeals by the turn to unhistorical romance or uncommitted formalism. The isolated remaining voices true to the critical spirit are hunted down, either by starvation or by force, and they are ever more driven to esoteric and underground retreats. In the cultural sphere, the primary symptoms are the abandonment of humanism for nationalism, as well as the rise of anti-Semitism, which arises perforce because Judaism has nowhere lost all contact with the “propheticcritical” spirit. The churches are arenas of a losing struggle, as their inner weaknesses open them to cooptation and coordination, despite resistance to nationalism in its most egregious forms. While there are some signs of hope in occasional adhesions to principles of religious socialism (as in the Oxford Movement), in some places where the authoritarian trend is not yet fascistic, these are not reliable, as opposition mobilizes itself. Ultimately, hope for the spirit and culture resides only in the persistence of cultural traditions and in the resiliency of the spirit. The decisive point about the German situation, Tillich insists, is that “it must not be understood as an isolated, avoidable accident, but as the outstanding and most thoroughgoing example of the general trend of finance capitalism”—as witness above all to the success of German foreign policy, notwithstanding its aggressiveness. In a surprisingly strong restatement of a key Popular Front thesis, Tillich continues, “Hitler has been and is still accepted by the ruling classes of all nations...as the instrument for the structural transformation of late capitalist society. For that reason, they bow to him, even when they hate and despise him.” There is opposition, but it is scattered, esoteric, underground, and significant only for its role in salvaging the “socialist, humanistic, and prophetic” tradition for post-fascist Germany. There is also discontent, but it has no political significance, since it sways with the success and failure of the regime, which has good prospects in the present state of the world. The party officials in exile seem bent on restoring all the old divisions of Weimar politics, Tillich contends, while the critical intellectuals are severely strained by the practical demands of survival in their host countries.

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Tillich then returns to his central theme of the vocation of exiled intellectuals. The shared circumstance of emigration, he maintains, does lay the foundation for common struggle against fascism. The actual situation, he concedes, is admittedly marked by the division between “liberal-idealist” and “dialecticalmaterialist” views of history, yet this division can be overcome, if understood. The former views fascism as an avoidable, fortuitous interlude limited to the populations psychologically most damaged by the war, while the latter sees it as inherent in the situation of all late capitalist peoples, in view of the defeat of the working class movement. While the former sees the restoration of rights and liberties as the primary and immediate aim, the latter does not see this as being on the agenda until the conditions that led to fascism are eradicated: The first group is mainly interested in united and immediate political action of anti-Fascists, while the second is mainly interested in esoteric preparatory activities, which prepare for later action.

While the liberal-idealist intellectuals think that a moderate liberal, social, or socialist Rechtsstaat can follow directly upon fascist rule, the proponents of the dialectical-materialist approach believe that a post-fascist regime will have to be authoritarian and dictatorial. The former have high hopes for the transition of the remaining democratic states into reformed capitalist or socialist democracy; the latter see class struggle as the structure of contemporary democracy and see little chance of such a reformist transition; In the cultural sphere, the first group believes that there has been nothing more than a temporary interruption of general cultural progress through the Fascist barbarization of certain peoples, while the second group thinks it likely that spiritual life during the next historical period will have to be rescued by esoteric groups from destruction by liberal skepticism, anarchic disintegration, and authoritarian suppression.

Taking up one of his familiar themes, derived from Georg Simmel and other social thinkers of that generation, Tillich points a way beyond this seeming impasse: Nevertheless, the emigration does share an opportunity. Its location on the boundary permits it to see the overall situation of society more clearly and to have an effect on this overall situation from the boundary without feeling exclusively obligated to the special problems of Germany or their host countries. The emigrant can be the driving force of supranational groups and associations.

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The emigration must first of all gain realism about its very limited role in both Germany and in their host countries. The future of Germany will be determined by powers within the country. In cultural matters, as well, realism requires recognition that the emigrants have no succession beyond the present generation and that they cannot therefore mark the beginning of a new German culture. Yet, he reiterates, they nevertheless have both destructive and constructive functions in the struggle against fascism. Among the negative anti-fascist tasks are support of internal oppositional groups, exposés of conditions, and critiques of the factors responsible for the rise of Hitler, above all the unplanned liberal regime and the class domination disguised as democracy. Positively, the task is, first, to search for the forms of the now inevitable authoritarian-collectivist features that fit the requirements of the situation, but are limited by the principles of the humane principles on which prophetism and Christian humanism are agreed; and, second, to form a loose alliance among emigrants, which should nevertheless not aim at a common organization, for the sake of the diversity of perspectives and situations. The cultural mission of the emigration is to be fulfilled not only by continued work in their own language but also—and increasingly—by the translation that comes about as they pursue their work in new contexts and in a different language. In substance, the new cultural task, where the emigrants can make a vital contribution, is to join together the forces as well as the values of socialism, humanism, and prophecy, whose separation helped to make fascism possible. Once again, Tillich reverts to the defensive notion that none of this can be done in public: Groups of this sort will be inherently esoteric, not because of an artificial exclusion of the public, but because of the impossibility of achieving, under present world conditions, any public effectiveness. The attempt would not only render their own maturation impossible but also call forth destructive countermeasures.

There is a marked contrast between the moderate tone of Neumann’s letter to Tillich, which is conditioned by the rhetorical requirements of negotiations, and the substance of the objections, as is made especially clear by the strong language in the memoranda that I suppose to be intended for internal discussion. While internal evidence strongly suggests that Tillich did adjust his political analyses to come closer to the “dialectical materialist” points emphasized by both Neumann and Marcuse, there remain revealing differences. For one thing, Tillich sees the possibility, however slim, that the remaining liberal democratic states may evolve into socialist democratic ones, whose share of the inevitable “collectivist-authoritarian” elements mandated by the social developments of the age he describes in terms that bear a marked

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resemblance to Karl Mannheim’s design for central planning and coordinated education, as set forth in the German version of Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction published in 1935. This association is evidenced also by Tillich’s use of Mannheim’s term of art, Reconstruction (Umbau), and rendered plausible by the close association between Tillich and Mannheim during the last years in Frankfurt, as well as Mannheim’s involvement with members of the Oxford Movement in England, a connection also shared by Mannheim’s closest associate, Adolph Loewe, who resumed his close ties with Tillich when he came to New York after some years in Manchester. Although Neumann studied with Mannheim at the London School of Economics and used some of his key concepts in his dissertation, the unmistakable recollections of Mannheim in Tillich’s text would have been altogether unacceptable to Neumann in 1938, both because of developments in his own thinking and because his principals, insofar as he was acting as bargaining agent for the Institute group, were bitterly hostile to Mannheim. Neumann initially formulates his firm rejection of this “socialist democratic” alternative as an objection to introducing the sociological concept of a collectivist-authoritarian trend as something distinct from the tendency towards fascism, understood in political terms, pretending to treat it as a mere category mistake, while Marcuse bluntly says that such an “alternative” to fascism has already existed, presumably in Weimar, and that “fascism itself rests largely on this unquestionable existence.” The continuing debate about Weimar was another tension built into this design of anti-fascism. The question of relations to Communism is naturally of capital importance. In the internal memorandum, Neumann agrees with Tillich’s characterization of Russian developments as a “militarist-nationalist concentration,” but he rejects the idea of a connection to the “structural laws of late capitalist development,” arguing, in a manner reminiscent of Trotskyist and some left socialist groups, that Russian developments are strictly a function of internal developments alone, “namely the struggle against the Bolshevik revolution waged by the party and state bureaucracy.” In the letter, to evade the issue, he blandly suggests elimination of the whole thesis in which Russia is characterized, supposedly because militarization is mentioned earlier. Similarly, while in the letter to Tillich, Neumann simply urges a shortening of the section on cultural issues, he asserts in the internal memorandum that he has “lively misgivings about the claims made for the prophetic spirit of Judaism.” Throughout, both Neumann and Marcuse object to Tillich’s assigning equal weight to the fascist suppression of proletarian movements and the campaign against critical intellectuals. Tillich’s earlier language of the “spiritual leadership” and “creative emigrants” for such intellectuals is countered by Neumann’s ironic request that he find a term “that better

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applies to me.” The basic structure of Neumann’s own anti-fascism, in short, appears governed by revolutionary socialist expectations, epitomized in his objection that “the sentences about the proletariat [in Germany] are too pessimistic for me, despite everything. Under certain circumstances, a mass movement can emerge with the intensification as well as the weakening of terrorist pressure. Then it will also become evident that not the entire critical intelligentsia has been banished, but that forces will arise within the proletariat itself, which can lead it.” Without attempting to sort through the varieties of leftist émigré politics, it seems likely that Neumann’s own position at the time was close to the militant breakaway group from the German Social Democratic Party in Exile, called “New Beginning,” which was influential in English refugee circles during his time in London. From the standpoint of the New York scene, however, as well as the history of anti-fascism overall, it is more striking that Neumann was almost certainly speaking for Horkheimer and the Institute group, at least in the toned down epistolary statement. There is corroborating evidence in the Horkheimer correspondence that the group’s opposition to Stalinism was by no means identical to disillusionment with revolutionary socialism; Horkheimer speaks of Stalin as an “embezzler of the revolution’s legacy” [Erbschleicher]. Interesting, too, in this connection, as an indicator of the way in which the Horkheimer group is perceived within the emigration, is Tillich’s repeated reference to the “esoteric” retreats of the “dialectical materialist” reading of fascism (c. v. 6). Neumann evidently persuades Tillich to remove the term in one place, but fails in another, more critical location, where Neumann’s objection in any case is narrowly focused on the term. The reference is to the passage quoted above, where Tillich speaks of the contrasting liberal and dialectical conceptions of the challenges to “spiritual life,” the contrast that comes closest to the interests of the Institute. Neumann writes: Another problematic passage is where you impute immediate political action to the Liberals and esotericism to the Marxists. In substance, you are correct, because it is well known that certain Liberals understand by immediate political action the getting of offices, while Marxists are so much on the defensive (zurückgedrängt) that the theory exists in fact only among small groups. But I believe that we can find a more precise formulation for this.

Noteworthy is not only Neumann’s political translation of the alternative tendencies that Tillich identifies by philosophical labels, but also the reference to “the theory,” which is the way Neumann always refers to the shared assumptions of the Institute.

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Notwithstanding the substantial differences he hopes to adjust, Neumann assures Tillich that the exercise is worthwhile and that he “believes, as do the friends with whom he has discussed it, that the draft on the whole fulfills the purpose for which it was designed.” Without abandoning the hope that he might later negotiate a more Marxist understanding of the situation, Neumann is evidently at one with Tillich in the aim of devising an agreement to constitute an anti-fascist exile group. And the evidence suggests that Horkheimer and the Institute group agreed, despite their general unwillingness to play a part in exile politics. Although the 1938 project evidently came to nothing, the records of these negotiations nevertheless correct Neumann’s reconfigured recollection and emphasize the complexity of the exiles’ attempts to manage the status, as well as its liquidation.

Past and Future from the Perspective of Exile 18 In her pioneering study of political emigration as social formation, as reported earlier, Nina Rubinstein concludes that, contrary to Georg Simmel’s theses about the superior social insights of the stranger, political emigrants are likely to find themselves so absorbed in making sense of their own painful and constricted situations that they lose insight into historic structural changes both in their place of refuge and in their place of origin. They mutually reinforce one another within a sociable and ideological space that narrows the range of acculturation.19 While I treat her claim as a heuristic intuition rather than a testable proposition, I find that it illuminates some puzzling limitations in the thought of an émigré generation celebrated for its possession of just the structural vision that Simmel credits to the stranger. Deformations of thought are not limited to nostalgic or bitter fixation on the past; they can also take the form of rigidity about the range of variables relevant to a situation, overvaluing their presence or absence, or inflexibility about the key questions to ask. The old template disturbs the mapping provided by the new. The signs of this condition include astonishing omissions, stubborn paradoxes, and, at the end of the day, disappointment and regret. Yet even if these are indeed accidents common to exiles’ styles of thought, these obstacles to the flexible realism that Rubinstein used as a standard are not necessarily obstacles to understanding in all senses. Like caricatures—or utopias—these ways of seeing, especially as they are typically animated by deep convictions of ethical seriousness and profound affections of the heart, disrupt banality and complacency. Knowing matters desperately. Perhaps precisely these wounds help to explain the extraordinary success of the German intellectual and cultural emigrants of the Hitler era as inspiring teachers, a quality often noted but too rarely examined.

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The ambivalence of the post-1933 refugees about the Germany they had left behind is famous. There was the Weimar of culture, promise, and excitement; and there was the Weimar of helpless or complicit abandonment to evil political forces. One of the more specific paradoxes of exile opinion about Weimar was the inclination to condemn the Social Democrats and trade unions for their failure to muster the political will and organizational resources to fight the Nazis, combined with an almost equally prevalent inclination to praise the social policies of the Republic, notably in improving the abysmal conditions and servile status of the working population, as its highest achievement and most precious legacy. Yet these two aspects of Weimar were arguably connected, with the priority assigned by the main working-class organizations to the “social gains of the revolution” exacting a heavy cost in organizational energy, bureaucratization, and the demobilization of memberships. Some prominent exile writers insisted on the direct causal connection, of course, and avoided the paradox by disparaging the achievements. These included Communists and others on the Left and economic liberals and conservatives of the Center-Right hostile to the re-distributive interest-group politics of the epoch, as well as independent thinkers like Hannah Arendt, whose conception of the clash between the social and the political surely drew on perceptions of the Weimar anomaly. Our present interest, however, focuses on the more widely shared view and, specifically, on three prominent and professionally successful members of the emigration, viewing Franz L. Neumann in conjunction with two of his close Weimar associates and correspondents in exile, Ernst Fraenkel, and Otto Kahn-Freund, for whom this tension remained close to the center of their thoughts in exile—as it had already been, in varying degrees and in different forms, during the last Weimar years. Weimar Sozialpolitik (both policy and politics), as precipitated in Weimar labor-law practice, had been their vocation; and the question of the links between that policy and the political catastrophe of 1933 was a question that went to their own lives and responsibilities. During a remarkable seminar on the “methods of social inquiry represented by the institute” held among the associates of the Institute for Social Research in New York in January of 1941, Herbert Marcuse argued repeatedly that the naive questions of Americans about the grounds and proofs of their theory should be answered simply by reference to their “experience”—not the unmediated “Erlebnis” but the instructively structured “Erfahrung.”20 Marcuse does not carry the others with him, including his friend Neumann, but he is pointing to something important about emigrants’ convictions: where they have been, what they have done, and what has happened to them has taught them something that underlies everything else they know, something that others must somehow also learn from. For Fraenkel, Kahn-Freund, and Neumann that locus of experience was “Weimar and Labor.”21

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Reflecting on the course of their lives in exile, all three concluded, as Neumann says in the talk discussed above, that they had made a decisive breach with their pasts, that they had each undergone a decisive moment in which they had concluded that they now belonged to their hosts and no longer to Germany. At one level, the evidence bears this out, even in the case of Ernst Fraenkel, who spent the last twenty or more years of his life in Berlin. Interestingly, however, Rubinstein postulates such an “Umbruch” as, in fact, constitutive of political emigration rather than its overcoming; the moments reported by Fraenkel, Neumann, and Kahn-Freund are in fact ambiguous as between their own characterizations, in terms of transition to immigrant status, and hers. They had indeed left the Germany from which they were exiled, yet it is surely also accurate to say that they never wholly freed themselves from the special locale which is the locus of exile. In some current discourses, this is thought to be a highly privileged place, uniquely unconstrained and conducive to autonomous thought. That is not what I find in these stories. They are ghost stories, if also of a highly sophisticated kind. A disturbing coincidence is that Neumann, Fraenkel, and Kahn-Freund, after the utter defeat of their enemies and careers of striking achievements, were all three overtaken by disappointment and unease. I submit that this can be accounted for, at least in part, not simply by the effects of exile, but by the effects of exile on individuals engaged in the kind of project that was deeded to these figures by Hugo Sinzheimer and by their experiences of Weimar.22 Since Sinzheimer’s legacy was contested, even among our three writers, its characterization for present purposes must be quite general. It involved, first, a model of legal practice that brought together care for legal rights and institutions with integral advocacy of progressive social change. Sinzheimer’s example appeared to offer a “unity of theory and practice.” The American concept of “cause lawyering” comes close,23 although the German idea of labor law, especially after 1918, was oriented more to what it took to be the immanent logic of social development than to the aspirations of victimized and excluded groups. There could be no tension between serving the individual client in the specific case and serving the cause. Moreover, one’s knowledge was itself a factor in reshaping both law and society if enunciated on professional occasions in a professional way, if only because, in the continental context, the state of the law could be as much a function of prevailing opinion about the law (die herrschende Lehre) as of the largely implicit rationales of decisions. More broadly, especially in the context of Weimar Germany, Sinzheimer saw an integral link between law work and constitutional politics. Second, the concept of labor law was meant to point towards a transformation of the legal system as a whole. While the formal rationality of law and its positivist analysis remained as the point of departure, the sociological

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method showed, first, that the codified legal forms were undergoing a change in social function and, second, that new normative social patterns demanded legal ratification and ordering. At the very least, the subsequent rise of a legal domain in which the social reality of dependent labor is recognized and the social consequences of that dependency are counteracted—through direct measures of protection and support, but above all through the legitimization of collective self-assertion—was thought to provide a measure of parity in a legal order that was otherwise found to serve the multiple powers of private property. At most the labor law represented a field for cumulative development towards social democracy. That is why the labor law epitomized the social gains of the revolution, although its effects were seen to depend on the strength and efficacy of organized labor. Third, the conception of labor’s rise as embodied in recognition of a social law and constitution within a democratically governed state meant a reconciliation between the uncertain year-to-year political consequences of a system grounded in a sovereign, freely elected parliament on the one hand and, on the other, the steadfast guarding of labor’s self-activity and cumulative achievements in social relations.24 Let me summarize the main themes in the three ways pursued by Fraenkel, Neumann, and Kahn-Freund, respectively, in managing this legacy in exile and after. First, all three continued to think of their practice as the enactment of a theoretical design and to think of their theory as a rationale and context for their practice. Perhaps we can say in shorthand, if this is not understood as pejorative, that they had a more rhetorical or performative conception of theory than a philosophical one. The epistemological puzzling that is sometimes said to be typical of the Weimar conversation was alien to them25; theory was to be judged by its uses and purposes. This is easiest to show in the case of Kahn-Freund, who resumed work as a lawyer and delighted in the unphilosophical posture of the common law. Neumann and Fraenkel both ended up as professors of political science, but their respective conceptions of political theory retained the priority of purposiveness. “Theory,” as Neumann used the term, was an intervention in the power conflicts of political life effectively indistinguishable from ideology, given his distinction—offered already in his 1923 dissertation—between ideologies that are designed to obscure motives and ideologies that adequately express them; and given, as well, the ideal of theories with emancipatory effects. Even when commenting on theories he admired most, he dismissed their philosophical grounding as mere metaphysics.26 For Fraenkel, the transmutation of the legal construction of theory had more the sense of a cultural intervention, a pedagogical act, in the sense of Bildung. What is common to all three is, first, the indifference to philosophers’ preoccupations and, second, the notion of theoretical work as

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a part of (re)constitutive politics. The question about all three, but especially the two certified as political scientists, is whether their projects were ever taken at face value where they worked, as emigrant or returned emigrant—whether they were not destined to be seen as purveyors of stimulating “ideas,” which were really byproducts of projects which remained alien. In the debate about the roles of Neumann and Fraenkel in the formation of German political science, the issue is sometimes stated in terms of their roles in introducing American political science. What is neglected is that their relationship to American political science was in fact remote—ironic in the case of Neumann and romantic in the case of Fraenkel—and curiously non-professional. Their vocational advocates’ conceptions of disciplined inquiry and theory played a part in this distance. A common feature of their management of their new situation was that all three returned to school: Neumann and Kahn-Freund at the London School of Economics, and Fraenkel, some years later, at the University of Chicago. Thanks to support from refugee relief organizations (and thanks as well, doubtless, to their profiles among political groups opposed to Hitler in their host countries), Neumann earned a Ph.D. in Political Science under Harold Laski with a dissertation on the governance of the rule of law,27 and the other two took degrees in law. Without by any means guaranteeing them ordinary vocational careers, these formalized acculturation exercises placed them at some distance from the bulk of emigrants and gave them credentials that opened lines of informal communication closed to even the more celebrated of the older intellectual exiles. Yet, each in his own way, they remained tied as well to the formative experience of their generation, to the mission they had thought themselves called upon to fulfill in the Weimar years, and to their former associates. To think about such exile as a matter of displacement alone neglects the need to remain somehow present in the former place, whether by intervention from afar or simply by detailed knowledge and evaluation of events. Beyond that, they could never become indifferent to their common project, the social constitution of labor as integral to the democratic polity, or to the shared mentor, Hugo Sinzheimer, who had initiated them in that work. They were not among the helpless victims of the Nazis, in their own views, but defeated political advocates of the Weimar Republic, exiled after active defense of arrangements that they had actively helped to shape. The critical question, of course, is what happened in exile to the conception of labor law as paradigm of a disruptive and transitional structure, constituting an autonomous social sphere and serving to hem in at least some of the powers of property, as well as providing a strategic framework for cumulative measures to enhance the benefits and powers of labor. Fraenkel rewrote the history, to a

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considerable extent, to incorporate the labor story within the American design of pluralistic interest-group conflict, although he consistently exaggerated the extent to which the American system achieved objectives comparable to the Social Democratic project and angrily rejected tendencies in the 1960s to resurrect the more radical aspects of the old plan. Fraenkel’s contributions to German political science went far beyond his efforts to rectify the miscarriage of “Weimar and Labor,” but the motif keeps recurring. If his primary project came to be the “transposition” of the dominant American culturalpolitical theme, as understood by Tocqueville, into a melody that would move Germans—as Alfons Soellner, building on Hubertus Buchstein, has recently shown28—he assigned special importance, first, to the surely contestable claim that American political culture since the New Deal consensually comprehended the American polity as a “sozialer Rechtsstaat,” using the concept originally developed by Hermann Heller to comprehend one set of aspirations for Weimar and later appropriated by Carlo Schmid and others for the Bonn design; and, second, to the contention that German trade unions in their practice prefigured the twentieth-century American recognition of interestgroup pluralism as a prime element of democracy. His first and his last major publications after his return to Germany dramatize the continuities. In the fall of 1951, Fraenkel was invited to lecture in Cologne by Hans Carl Nipperdey, a professor of law who had represented the liberal pole among Weimar labor lawyers and whose academic standing had survived his accommodation with the Nazi regime. Fraenkel insisted on using labor law as the theme of his lecture on the American system of judicial review. Among the enthusiastic members of the audience was the Chief Judge of the newly created German Constitutional Court, who circulated copies to all of his justices and occasioned its publication. Nipperdey himself shortly became Chief Judge of the reformed highest Labor Appeals Court. Fraenkel’s thesis, developed through a remarkable survey of the constitutional history of regulatory issues relating to labor, was the success of judges following the lead of Holmes and Brandeis in transforming the effective American constitution from a charter of laissez-faire to the constitution of a “sozialer Rechtsstaat” (a concept for which, in a text sensitive to problems of untranslatability, he could of course find no American equivalent). The labor issue, he concluded, was the most illuminating theme for an understanding of American constitutional jurisdiction.29 In an opaque but not idle remark, Fraenkel wrote Nipperdey that during his law studies in the United States he had often fervently wished that he had known enough to speak about this history before 1933 at one of the many congresses on labor law that they had both attended—an indirect allusion perhaps, to the Weimar conflict about judicial review where Fraenkel and Neumann had opposed Nipperdey. While the knowledge derived from his

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exile experience was clearly being offered as a lesson to the Federal Republic, the America of that exile was read, in turn, through the experiences that had eventuated in exile. The United States, so understood, offered a solution to Weimar’s problems and thus to those of Bonn. In 1971, then, Fraenkel enlisted a reading of the Sinzheimer legacy in support of his categorical hostility to the movements of the New Left. At issue was the “council mythology,” grounded in the lost cause of the German Revolution of 1918–19, which he took to be the central theme of the new radicalism. Fraenkel portrayed Sinzheimer as the man who rescued the authentic reform movement of German labor from the wild and selfdefeating gestures of the council movement, imbued with delusions about the Russian soviets and misled by a “pariah” adventurer and preacher, Emil Däumrig. According to Fraenkel, the political changes of November 9, 1918, were essentially irrelevant to the cause of social reform practically identified with Social Democracy (as distinct from its confusing ideology). The decisive steps forward in political and social reform had been agreed upon before the end of the war; and they were ratified by the Stinnes-Legien agreement on a permanent joint working group on November 15th. The threat to that multi-dimensional settlement was not the political excitement of the last winter days of 1918–19, but the workers’ council movement bred up by disorientation and agitation, demanding a dictatorial regime of workers’ power. Sinzheimer was able to unite the trade unions and Social Democratic Party behind a conception that extracted a reasonable kernel out of the council excitement, transmuting the idea into an element within a “social” constitution consisting of trade-union responsibility, labor/ management parity, and a regime of negotiations alongside the ultimately sovereign democratic parliamentary order. This conception was then embodied in the Weimar Constitution (Article 165). Fraenkel went so far as to suggest that the eventual failure of the design was due not least to the fact that the Social Democrats and their trade unions withdrew from the settlement because of a resurgence of Marxist ideology.30 Writing to his closest friend, Otto Kahn-Freund, whom he knew to be simultaneously completing an extensive interpretation of Sinzheimer for a collection of his writings, Fraenkel admitted that he had exaggerated the black-and-white confrontation between Däumrig and Sinzheimer, but he urged Kahn-Freund nevertheless to follow his lead in contextualizing Sinzheimer’s articles quite narrowly in the confrontation with the Spartacists and recognizing him as the theorist of the Stinnes-Legien working group.31 It is fair to ask whether and how this interpretation, laid down twenty years after Fraenkel returned to Germany and clearly occasioned by his bitter hostility to the radical student youth, relates to Fraenkel’s exile. Rubinstein

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offers an interesting suggestion. Speaking of reformers in exile, she says that they are unlike the upholders of the pre-revolutionary order, whom exile leaves fixated on an obsolete past, but their thinking is nevertheless held captive by an image of the future that has itself become obsolete. I think that this applies to all three and that it accounts for the varying measures of disorientation and disappointment towards the ends of their working lives. For Kahn-Freund, during most of his years in England, the legacy appeared more securely realizable there than in Germany. The resourcefulness of common law in creating diverse negotiation relations and the passivity of the state opened the way to evolutionary legal processes without the dramatic anomalies and impasses that made the primary parties of German labor law so dependent on the state. Kahn-Freund, said one of his admiring commentators, “fell in love with British industrial relations.”32 Abruptly, however, he fell out of love, years later, when he served on a commission that heard endless testimony about the responsibility of industrial relations for Britain’s economic decline. Near the end of his life he clamored for state intervention to limit union power. I am struck by the commentator’s vivid language of falling in love and out again, and I think—for all of Kahn-Freund’s stupendous knowledge and brilliant judgment—that the pattern reflects the continuity of the “Weimar and Labor” construction. Neumann dealt differently with the Sinzheimer legacy on law. Since his second degree was in political theory, not law, he never worked again in labor law. The legal consulting he did for the Institute of Social Research related to quite different matters and was onerous to him, made bearable only by the affiliation it brought about. Labor law figured in his political analyses of Nazi rule and in his projection of post-war Germany, as well as, quite unclearly, his reading of America. To dispose of the last point first, Neumann proposed a study of “European Labor Law” in his first years at the Institute with the aim of using the comparison to elucidate and inform the American law. The proposal, however, is clearly designed to attract sponsorship for the research, so it is unclear how far this prospectus reflected his actual preoccupations. Still, it is interesting that he would have thought that this would be found attractive. Later in his relations with Max Horkheimer and the Institute, he was frequently subjected to criticism for his incessant attention to labor issues—and for his favorable judgment, despite everything, of the Weimar labor regime. Successive versions of a proposal to study labor in Germany show the effects of the criticisms. Three drafts recognize the achievements of the labor law, notwithstanding its dubious ideological underpinnings and uncertain social foundation, and the fourth abruptly recontextualizes the realm of reformist labor (and its law) among the factors conditioning the German masses for fascism.33

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Neumann’s more developed discussion of Weimar Labor Law was in the context of comparisons with Nazi regulations, and he was ambiguous about the Sinzheimer perspective. On one side, it seemed to be included in the “institutionalist” vision which the labor movement shared and which was easily appropriated by the proto-fascist and Nazi currents.34 At issue was the critique of individualist renderings of employment relations and the recognition of the needs of functional institutions as sources of law. Sociological jurisprudence was seen as implicitly institutionalist. On the other hand, however, Neumann recognized that Sinzheimer and his group in fact insisted on positivist individualist renderings of contractual relations as far as they could go, specifically in the matter of mutual obligations, leaving the sociological dimension to serve as wider context and completion. In exile this emphasis on the minimal ethical function of individualist law became a main theme, notwithstanding his wish to expose this law simultaneously as an ideology that obscures power relations. The whole argument is carried, I submit, by the “Weimar and Labor” configuration as its prime reference point. The projection for post-war Germany all but reinstated Weimar labor law, excluding only the provisions that tied labor to state administrative agencies for arbitration.35 For Neumann as for Sinzheimer, however, the legal order remained a prime dimension of the constitutional and political design with bases, however, in social relations. Neumann’s portrayal of the “Weimar and labor” complex was essentially consistent and effectively continuous with the Sinzheimer group’s diagnosis of the labor law crisis after 1930. The social constitution comprising collective bargaining, self-administered health and social insurance, works committees, labor courts, and the other achievements of Weimar was a function of a complex of bargains between conflicting social forces and operated as long as these forces were at least approximately in balance. There is no question that they enhanced the dignity of labor because they limited the powers pertaining to property in several important dimensions. With the progress of monopolization and rationalization in the economy, however, the conditions making for parity eroded, and the labor movement became ever more dependent on the support of governmental agencies with their own ideological and practical reasons for accommodating labor, with the result that they became organizationally adapted to these ties and estranged from their members. When the reactionary alliance took full control of the governmental agencies, the labor movement had lost the will and ability to put their full effort into the political struggle. When the call to action—general strike and civil war—was required, they thought only of saving their organization. They first pleaded in vain for a neutral state and then tried to win toleration from a dictatorial regime engaged

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to destroy them. The rage and intensity—and ultimate unfairness—of Neumann’s self-reproach in the last year of his life testifies to his inability to settle this business: How often have I asked myself since 1933 where my own responsibility for National Socialism lies. Because I do believe in collective guilt—and then I cannot exempt myself. All of us in the opposition to reaction were too cowardly. We all made compromises. How lying the SPD was in the months between July, 1932 and May, 1933 (and not only then), I could see with my own eyes—but I said nothing. How cowardly the union bosses were—and I continued to serve them. How lying the intellectuals were—and I remained silent. Naturally I can rationally justify this by the united front against National Socialism, but ultimately the fear of isolation played a part. And yet I had great models: Karl Kraus, Kurt Tucholsky. And in my theory I have always agreed with the Socratic standpoint that the genuine intellectual must always and in the face of every political system be a metic, an alien. So I also played a part in the sell-out of the ideas of the so-called German Left. No doubt, my contribution is small, and the politician will view my attitude with irony. But is it possible to view the fall of the SPD and the rise of the National Socialists as only a political problem? Were there no moral decisions to be made? I made those too late and still not radical enough.36

The self-conception of this life-long deal-maker as a classic outsider—more Diogenes than Socrates—is fantastical. No less striking is that he offers this exposé to a young German woman whom he had first gotten to know when he mentored her study of the “German academic emigration,” and with whom he had planned to spend the rest of his life, probably in Germany. Implicitly at least, this newly emphasized rupture with the past of “Weimar and Labor” also entailed a breach with his American years of conducting complex negotiations with institutions of the public and private establishment, a pattern he escaped least of all during his years with the Institute for Social Research, notwithstanding its institutionalization of the “Socratic standpoint” to which he makes reference.

Negotiating Exile: The Institute of Social Research37 A prime claim I want to make about Franz L. Neumann’s more creative response to exile, on the other hand, is that he was a negotiator of exceptional resourcefulness and persistence, both as bargaining agent for Max Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and as bargainer on behalf of his distinctive vocational, intellectual,

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and political interests. He was first brought to the Institute precisely in this capacity, and his relations within the Institute, for both better and worse, are importantly shaped by this activity. Neumann’s subsequent arrival as political scientist, to the extent that he succeeded in the abbreviated time granted to him, was similarly dependent on his vocation for negotiation, a term that he himself often used to characterize his activities when others might have spoken of conversations, consultations or meetings.38 If the university offered a solution to the “tragic dilemmas” of this intellectual, in any case, it was because of his ability to make himself its partner in deals, involving especially the great foundations who importantly shape American intellectual life by their science policies. This is not the place to expand on the need to move the concept of “negotiation” beyond its commonplace and vague metaphorical use, and on the possibilities offered by the newer literature on the ways bargaining structures emerge and change, and on the consequent variety of deals that different structures generate. An example of the dynamic changes among types, which is close to the substance of Neumann’s own “first love,” as he referred to labor law in the last of his letters archived at the Rockefeller Foundation, was the historic change from individual to collective bargaining in employment relations, and the concomitant experimenting with radically different kinds of agreements—from settlements intended to last forever to settlements subject to reopening by either party at any time. One striking realization yielded by a study of the labor example is that the bargaining structure is itself subject to constant renegotiation, often as the byproduct of the meta-bargaining that shadows substantive negotiation, even where the design is laid down by law. The first step, in the absence of the obligation to “bargain in good faith” where initiators meet certain criteria, which is the hallmark of American labor law, is for the party seeking negotiations to induce the other to agree that this is an appropriate relationship between them, a proposition that the more powerful will commonly resist. If and when an exchange then crystallizes into a negotiation, moreover, the persons involved are defined and redefined as parties, with sometimes complex consequences for their relations with others. And even in this class of bargaining relations, it is by no means universally the case that the bargaining is narrowly “strategic” in Habermas’ sense, with nothing at issue except the allocation of economic goods according to a calculus of interests. The centrality of “recognition” in the process precludes such neat classification, as does the richness of other rhetorical elements, as well as the range and variety of matters subject to “give and take.” Three things are especially important under the heading of Neumann as negotiator. First, Neumann’s negotiation practices involved losses as well as gains, especially since he was dealing simultaneously within very different

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structures, where the gains in one could count as losses in the other. As is notoriously true of trade union officials, a bargaining agent may find that winnings at one bargaining table are counterbalanced by complications at others, especially in dealings with the agent’s principal. Rank and file commonly despise the union bureaucrats on whom they nevertheless depend for their settlements. Similar ambivalences marked Neumann’s relations with his colleagues at the Institute for Social Research. Second, Neumann did not by any means succeed in all of the bargaining he attempted, with his attempt to gain recognition among political scientists as political theorist on his own terms as the most difficult, although by no means total or definitive, failure. Third, and perhaps most important from the standpoint of the products of Neumann’s “creative response,” Neumann’s writings of exile can be shown to document the negotiations of exile, although their meanings are by no means exhausted by this dimension.39 For present purposes, I first recall Neumann’s role in a failed attempt to constitute a common framework for anti-fascist designs among exiles in America and then examine, in the postwar period, the interplay between Neumann’s attempt to devise a comprehensive theoretical framework for his writings of the early 1950s and his relations with the Rockefeller Foundation. In the second class of projects, more remote from politics in the ordinary sense, Neumann was engaged in an effort to revise the parameters of political science, at least at Columbia, to make it a congenial setting for his own projects, while with the Ford Foundation he hoped mainly to establish and shape political science in Germany, notably in Berlin, in the pursuit of political as well as intellectual objectives.40 Played against the background of the resistances and counter-designs of his counterparts in these negotiations, the stories of these enterprises also reveal the activist element in acculturation, and its radical incompleteness. Neumann’s exceptional abilities as negotiator can be traced during his association with the Institute of Social Research between 1936 and 1948, first, as agent for the Institute in its dealings with its host institution, Columbia University, with potential funders, and with other academic actors; and, second, in maintaining and shaping his own relations to the Institute, notably through his dealings with the Director, Max Horkheimer. Although Neumann was thought by his Institute associates to be working throughout towards a university appointment, the available evidence shows rather that Neumann wanted above all to retain the Institute as the context for his work, at least until after his not altogether voluntary shift into American government service in the summer of 1942.41 His role in external negotiations, often on his own initiative, can be understood in large measure as instrumental to his efforts to maintain himself within the Institute, not only in the ordinary senses that he wanted to

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make a contribution to a common effort or to fund his own work, although both played a part, but also in the peculiar sense that he sought out deals that strengthened his hand against a consensus among the Institute insiders that he was dispensable from the standpoint of the Institute’s “mission,” a conclusion that was manifested in his being given a series of dismissal notices, beginning in September 1939. There is a paradox in Neumann’s aims in relation to the Institute. On the one hand, it seems clear that he wanted it as a supportive setting for his work, a sheltered location, a kind of enclosed household at a remove from the alien host country—an asylum from the asylum, where an assemblage of thinkers worked intensively, under an inspirational leader with militant lieutenants, on the “theory” that could make sense of their exile and somehow surmount the defeat. On the other hand, he could not count on remaining included without creating enough distance between himself and the others to be sustained by negotiated terms he could influence, rather than by the constitutive norms of the institution, which militated against him because of differences in training, temperament, and intellectual “fit”—and the external alliances and other deals he struck to strengthen his internal position were often enough seen as threats to the inner rationale. Yet the striking thing is that he was able to generate a bargaining relationship, to gain recognition as a party, which is the single most difficult step for the initiator of such a relationship, where a type of authority antithetical to negotiations is in place. It is not possible in a short presentation to display all the evidence behind these generalizations, but the case can be illustrated by a striking example of the bargaining mode in a letter where Horkheimer is concerned to counter Neumann’s claim that the inclusion of a section on labor in the anti-Semitism proposal close to acceptance by the American Jewish Committee makes it necessary for the Institute to retain him (instead of exiling him to fulltime employment in Washington). I will quote at length. Horkheimer writes: I realize very well that the section on labor, as it stands now, can only be carried through with your continuate [sic] and substantial participation. But even if, as you suggest, you don’t accept the full-time job in Washington, I doubt strongly whether, while leading your tripartite existence, you will be able to work out yourself a great deal of the labor section. Since you will probably have to devote some time to other and even more essential sections—particularly those dealing with the political aspects of Anti-Semitism—I am of the opinion that the section on labor should be kept short. On the one hand, it ought to be limited to Anti-Semitic key groups among the workers; on the other hand, it ought to be

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supplemented by a study of the Anti-Semitism of other significant social groups, e.g., the farmers. The labor study in its present set-up seems to me to be almost too large in proportion to the concrete new findings on Anti-Semitism it can possibly yield. After all, labor is not the hotbed of Anti-Semitism. In the printed project and in the introductory statement of 1941, on which Rosenblum [of the American Jewish Committee] based his original favorable judgment, no special section on labor was anticipated. I remember very well that in our discussion with Rosenblum, being a skilful negotiator who wanted to present as large as possible a collection of “samples,” you concocted to my amazement that story that we were already busy with a project on labor AntiSemitism. Your assumption that Rosenblum would go for your invention was certainly realistic, but we should not stick too much to such ad hoc imagery. If Rosenblum’s original interest in the matter is really strong, he should take a stand for the project even if the labor study is modified in the sense suggested above. However, should he actually change his mind because of this detail, we can hardly reckon with his genuinely being convinced of the basic idea of our project. Of course, I trust that you will do all in your power that your staying in Washington will not harm the project either with the Committee or with [Columbia sociologist and American scientific validator chosen by Neumann] Robert A. Lynd.”42

Three preliminary points of note. First, the question of how much the Institute should interest itself in labor issues of any kind is a continuing source of disagreement between Neumann and the others, as noted earlier with regard to Neumann’s susceptibility to the “Weimar and labor” Rubinstein effect. Second, it is clear that Horkheimer’s resistance is overdetermined. It is not only a question of lessening dependence on Neumann, but also, I think, an eagerness to stay away from questions that highlight the Institute’s markedly ambiguous position on this emblematic theme of conventional Marxism. Third, Horkheimer’s resorting to contemptuous peddler imagery where he speaks of Neumann’s “samples” and his “concocted” arguments is a sign of his hostility to the “skillful negotiator,” even while bargaining with him. At the end of the letter, he promises to see to it that Neumann’s move causes him no financial difficulties, offering him a financial settlement in lieu of the deal Neumann sought. But the availability of an alternative to Neumann in the form of a wartime Washington career of considerable distinction was itself a product of a most remarkable campaign of skilful negotiation, which he conducted at the same time.43 Neumann’s reliance on the bargaining mode is no less clear in his attempts ten years later to make his position as professor in the Department of Public Law and Government and his uncertain status as a member of the

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political science profession, better serve his aims as political theorist. The best-documented bargaining relationships in this pursuit are Neumann’s dealings with the Rockefeller Foundation, especially during the intertwined negotiations involving, on the one hand, Neumann’s search for funds to support a comprehensive work on “Political Systems and Political Theory,” and his participation in a conference and in consultations on ways for the Rockefeller Foundation to support political and legal theory. It would be an error to think that nothing more was at issue here for Neumann than some research funding and opportunities. As in his dealings with the Institute, his hope was to develop resources to render his occupational setting more hospitable to his intellectual and political projects. The purposes were institutional not personal.He was engaged in activities for which there are no English terms as accurate as the German Wissenschaftspolitik, Kulturpolitik, and Bildungspolitik. Here, too, an immediate focus was the meaning of theory, an issue to which the Rockefeller Foundation unexpectedly declared itself to be open in 1952. As was acknowledged by the Social Science Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, Joseph A. Willits, the foundation’s science policy since the 1920s was an important factor in marginalizing philosophical or ethical inquiries in the social sciences.44 Unlike sociology, political science still made room for research and teaching related to the older, pre-positivistic forms of theorizing about its subjects, but “political theory” was largely relegated to the study of canonical authors arrayed in one or another kind of Whig or pragmatic history, related to the primary work of political science mostly as a source of decorative “classical” comparisons and endorsements. In his important, if controversial, study of the emigrants’ impact on American conceptions of political theory, John G. Gunnell emphasizes important earlier shifts epitomized by George Sabine’s widely used textbook, which treated the principal theories as articulations of specific political configurations, not to be understood as making verifiable truth claims, and which equated insight into this relativistic reading with a liberal democratic aversion to absolutist claims.45 For Gunnell, the importance of the émigrés for political theory in America is not only their bitterly earned rejection of this casual and optimistic skepticism, but also their introduction of epistemological complexities derived from what he calls the “Weimar Conversation,” and what he sees—and deprecates—as a consequent depoliticization of political theory debate and inquiry. As noted earlier, Neumann does not fit this description. He had no interest in debating epistemology. Neumann’s aim in the consultations that eventually led to a short term Rockefeller program in Legal and Political Theory, as well as the core idea of the large-scale project that he asks the Rockefeller Foundation to fund, is succinctly stated in a letter that

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shows clearly how his interventions in the one operation are related to negotiations on the second: Yet our primary task to determine the truth of a political theory is to develop a true political theory for today. . . .My own view . . . is that the truth of political theory is determined by its ability to maximize the freedom of man in a specific historical situation. I reject both [skeptical and dogmatic] extremes and I base the determination of the truth on the empirical analysis of a concrete historical stage as well as on philosophical thought. The reason is this: political theory is not and cannot be pure philosophy. It does not deal with eternal categories (like time, space, being, essence, accidents). It deals with politics and thus with power, which is an historical category. The great attraction—and the great difficulty—of political theory is precisely the need for this dual approach: theory and its empirical validation.”46

In the project proposal, then, this idea is specified in the question whether a democratic political theory developed by and for an agrarian society can suffice as a theory for a society which has undergone such profound social changes, and which consequently requires more: This question can, however, be answered only through a genuinely comparative study of political systems. The comparative study must also be theoretical and historical; that is, they must be seen in the process of social and political change. Only then can we hazard a forecast whether our institutions will be capable of peaceful adjustment to a fundamentally changed environment… There is, in short, no longer a theory of political institutions.47

In his initial intervention at the Rockefeller Conference, he puts a provocative offer on the table: The question is, shouldn’t political theory be dangerous? Isn’t that the very function of political theory—to be dangerous? Don’t we face a situation that, in many cases, political theory and propaganda become indistinguishable? Isn’t it the function of political theory to be, so to speak, the critical conscience of political science? That is the primary role of political theory, as I see it. This, however, requires that political theory, apart from the study of its history, should not be taught in vacuo, but it should be taught in very close contact with the other segments of political science and other social sciences. To me, it is not understandable that a course in political institutions should be taught regardless of political theory; and that theory, political theory, is, so to speak, a segment where you learn certain things which have no bearing whatsoever on public

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administration, on comparative government, on American government, and so on. There is already a setting in of a fragmentation in which political theory appears merely as a segment in addition to other segments. This is, in my view, due to the fact that the critical role of political theory in the analysis of political phenomena and political structures is not properly recognized, and that the injection of political theory considerations into the teaching or the writing of political institutions leaves very much to be desired. Therefore this twofold orientation: to be critical but to cooperate very closely with the other segments of political science is, in my view, one of the principal and main problems that ought to be discussed.48

This is a negotiation for which he never managed to establish an effective bargaining structure. Both after the conference and in his evaluation of Neumann’s proposal to the foundation, Sabine—to take the American figure that Gunnell considers pivotal and whom Neumann also tries to win—sees Neumann’s proposed project as absurdly overambitous and remarks: “I suppose that this is in part a national (Teutonic) characteristic: like Christian Wolff ’s philosophy, their political theory deals with “alle Dinge überhaupt” in the most systematic fashion. To an American taste this seems pedantic and awakens prejudice.”49 Yet he admits he admires some of Neumann’s substantive writings and concludes his assessment with a characteristic misunderstanding: that it would nevertheless be good if Neumann could provide a political theory of contemporary democracy as Locke did for his time, “meaning an accepted rationalization of democratic institutions and practice.”50 The aim Neumann put forward somewhat ambiguously in the course of his dealings with Rockefeller, however, was not to use positive knowledge about institutions to illuminate theories, but to use theories to illuminate institutions, even if the resulting understanding lacked the authority of science, except insofar as the theory shows itself capable of comprehending the “empirical” data in a way that advances the human political project of freedom. In the context of his parallel negotiations at the Rockefeller Foundation— his project and his interventions in the Rockefeller Foundation planning for a program in legal and political theory—his main theme was the rejection of the “dangerous...dichotomy” between political theory and empirical studies, concluding with the contention central already to his LSE dissertation on the “Governance of the Rule of Law”: “The verification of a political theory in political reality is still, in my view, the most vital concern of political theory.” Instead of a philosophical explication of the charged term “verification,” however, as Gunnell would have expected, Neumann suggested historically legitimated models for the work he wanted to do and that he wanted political theory more generally to do for political science. His principal examples were

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Aristotle and Montesquieu.51 This claim was met with a shrug.When John Willits recommends that Neumann receive his grant, then, he expresses doubt about his ability to do what he promises, but adds, “he is a person of imagination, an effective teacher, and a man of ideas.” That judgment actually sums up the success of his reception rather well, except that it disregards—if it does not contribute to—Neumann’s disappointment during the year remaining to him, his drastic curtailment of his project, or his uncertainty about whether and when he would return to Columbia.52 A sign of the unhappy conflicts among his negotiation projects is a memorandum in the files of the Ford Foundation, according to which the Executive Officer of his Columbia Department urged the Foundation to deny Neumann’s application for funding to go to Berlin for negotiations about the political science curriculum at the Free University (and to receive an honorary degree), on the grounds that Neumann could not afford to neglect the research project for which he had received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Neumann’s hopes of building a new institutional framework to implement the “happy solution” to his tragic dilemma remain unfulfilled. In any case, all negotiations were abruptly adjourned sine die by a fatality no one could control.

The Fluidity of Exile The aim in presenting some vignettes from Franz Neumann’s rich but abruptly aborted career has been to illustrate the complex and fluctuating relationship to exile in the case of a displaced scholar who is generally considered to be a model instance of acculturation to American intellectual and professional life. Neumann himself pictured it as a more definitive transition. In the lecture cited earlier, he speaks of abandoning his status as a politically active exile in England after three years, having decided that Nazism had changed Germany so that no internal overthrow was possible and that political pressure on the English was useless, since they were rather inclined to strengthen the Nazis against the socialist alternative. What he needed, he had concluded, was a “conscious transplantation of [his] own existence” for which England was too restrictive. In America, he contended, especially in the epoch of the “Roosevelt experiment,” he found the requisite openness. “The process of reintegration,” he contended, was “exceedingly simple,” provided that “one had really made a clean break with Europe, and particularly with Germany.” Yet the rest of his talk, especially as he turned to the problems of German universities, as he had encountered them as a “German scholar returning to Germany as a visit,” makes it clear that he could not have made that “clean break.” He speaks rather of a “dual role,” both on matters of policy and intellectual designs, but his actual

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history shows that the “integration” he postulates is rather a conjunction of complementary but disjointed elements, whose changing juxtapositions correspond to the unresolved negotiations with his exile status. In practice, this took the form of complex mixtures of influence and misunderstandings in his relations with American colleagues. As a voluble participant in the initial planning sessions of the RAND Corporation in 1947, Neumann repeatedly poses quite loaded questions about American policies towards non-Communist collectivist and socialist developments in Central Europe that appear incomprehensible to all of the influential social scientists assembled there, except for the only other emigrant present, Hans Speier, who smoothes over Neumann’s implied advocacy of socialist alternatives.53 In a memorial delivered, as dictated by convention, by the Head of his Columbia department to the assembled council of the Faculty of Political Science soon after Neumann’s death, but written in quite an unconventional, almost confrontational manner by Neumann’s closest friend, Herbert Marcuse, it is said of him that he “was a scholar for whom political science was closely linked to political action,” and that “theory was for him not abstract speculation, not a digest of various opinions on state, government, etc., but a necessary guide and precondition for political action.” His lifelong cause, according to the friend who knew best how he would want to be remembered, even in this academic setting, was to reverse the Weimar failure of social democracy, and his most pressing concern was the condition of his time. Referring to the situation in both Germany and the United States in 1954, Marcuse claims, “He became ever more apprehensive of the intensified anti-democratic and neo-fascist trends the world over. He did not compromise; he did not recant.”54 In that sense, Neumann never ceased to be an exile from Nazi Germany.

CHAPTER FIVE The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State In a frequently quoted essay, to which we now return in a revised and diagnostic methodological context, Edward Said asks how it is that the fatal condition of exile has turned “so easily into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture.”1 Said quickly rejects the idea that exile somehow serves humanism, as some sort of school for virtue along the lines, perhaps, of the consolatory philosophizing conventionalized in the Roman literature of exile. “Is it not true,” he objects, “that the views of exile in literature and, moreover, in religion obscure what is truly horrendous: that exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings; and that, like death but without death’s ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography?” He shrugs past “the modest refuge provided by subjectivity” to the literary exiles of Paris and New York, and he assimilates exile rather to the condition of the hopeless refugee in Cairo, Beirut, or Mexico City. After developing numerous insights into the tortured condition of exile, however, Said returns to his initial question: “How is it that the literature of exile has taken its place as a topos of human experience alongside the literature of adventure, education, or discovery?” His answer, following Simone Weil and Theodore Adorno on the atrocious costs of alternatives to exile in their age, circles back to exile as an emblem of subjectivity. Exile, it seems, is good for us, after all, just as the humanists thought, because “exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.” Explicating this concept of the exile, Said celebrates the vision of a twelfth-century monk, who projected a mystic sequence culminating in the perfection of extinguishing all love of place and seeing the entire world as a foreign land. Exile becomes a symbol, precisely in the sense of the term generally ascribed to Goethe, as in the classic Theory of Literature by Wellek and Warren, where the symbol “is characterized…above all, by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal.”2 Said draws back a little

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from this surprising outcome of his inquiry and proposes a “contrapuntal” play of home against strangeness, a “life led outside habitual order.” Such a life “is nomadic,” he concludes, “decentered, contrapuntal,” and constantly subject to new disruptions. Somewhere in all this invocation of phrases that sound similarly sweet to modernist and post-modernist poetics, the hopeless refugees have gotten lost again, as has the exile with a desperate political project, like Said’s own Palestinians, whom Nina Rubinstein had in view when she concluded bleakly that “les émigrés sont les vaincus.”3 The vignette from an exile life I will now present provides a case for us to contemplate as we further explore the language of exile. While unjust and abusive, Erich Kahler’s forced removal from his comfortable life as a private scholar in Munich subjected him to none of the humiliations and deprivations called to mind by Said’s list of hopeless refugee resorts. He needed the help of friends to sustain his standard of living, but he lived well enough in Switzerland and America. He no longer had the resources to pursue his studies without paid employment, and his various visiting academic appointments were not of a nature to enhance his reputation or to let him build a following of advanced students. Yet he had support enough to write a good deal, and two of his books enjoyed a good reception among a segment of the educated American public.4 And the story that concerns us here shows him elevated to a position of importance by a group of able and well-regarded American academics. Kahler is clearly not an exile subjected to the worst sufferings. Nevertheless, I think that some reflection on the story of Kahler at Ohio State will help us to recognize a fundamental falsity in Said’s evocation of the exile as post-modern or post-colonial hero and to attend to the conjunctions between exile and phenomena of power and legitimacy.5 The point at issue, I suggest, is the overlap between the sense in which Said treats exile as symbol and the apotheosis of Kahler’s exiled condition—by himself as well as by his hosts—into a symbol of a humanism that moves through time and place to a point beyond both. In reflecting on this parallel, I will be guided by the critical distinction between metaphor and symbol drawn by Sigurd Burckhardt, an admired but skeptical participant in the Ohio State story, who wrote: A metaphor, demanding to be analyzed, implicitly acknowledges the separateness of being and meaning and so accepts the challenge of abstraction... Whereas a symbol by pretending to be the ineffable “thing in itself,” is likely to dismiss me, unguided and unballasted, into the intense inane of “experience”... The surest sign that metaphors are human...is that they remain intimately bound to the given language with all its accidents and limitations and seeks to transform them into opportunities.6

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Kahler, in contrast, dismisses simple metaphor as a mere device of our daily language. He writes: What poets do is exactly the reverse of the anonymous linguistic process: they transfer the intricate, intellectualized and spiritualized experiences of modern man into imagery...in our days, through immediate transmutation... A subtle interaction takes place between the flaring image and the experience that kindles it, whereby the image is capable of driving the experience farther, that is, of creating new experience. In such a process of intercreation, metaphor and symbol merge.7

The article on “the symbol” containing this paragraph was unsuccessfully proposed by Kahler as the centerpiece for his twenty-week-long interdisciplinary faculty seminar at Ohio State in 1959. Burckhardt was a member of that seminar. In siding with Burckhardt against Kahler in this matter, I mean to argue that when we deploy the trope of exile to capture aspects of estrangement not grounded in some actual banishment and exclusion, an ancient figure that obviously cannot be legislated out of existence, it is essential that we remain open to the need to negotiate between the metaphorical sense and its literal grounding—above all, when it is an exile whose condition of banishment is being transmuted into a figure of exalted exemption from mundane bonds. The “new experience” of which Kahler speaks may otherwise prove to be a hazy evasion of the respectful encounter with complexity that the analogy would elicit. Kahler’s exile may indeed be seen as a figure for the German sense of a cosmopolitan cultural calling in a time of crisis, but entering into it cannot be thought to achieve a breakthrough to higher transcendent experience—or, to speak Said’s more recent, cooler language, as a ticket to a uniquely apt career of nomadic, unbounded, decentered, contrapuntal cultural experience.

Erich Kahler as Symbol of Humanism Prof. Kahler, a native of Prague and a past member of the Institute of Advanced Study and teacher at the New School, Princeton, and Cornell, will come to Ohio State for a year on Feb. 1, 1959. While at the university he will preside at an interdisciplinary seminar for faculty in the historiography of culture. This will be a pioneering venture, drawing its members from departments in the humanities, the social sciences, and the pure and applied sciences... Thomas Mann said of Prof. Kahler, “of all the minds at work today his is one of the cleverest, finest, and richest.” Albert Einstein described him as “a man who has searched passionately for the reasons of the breakdown of values and ways of life which we are witnessing.” A product of German universities,

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Prof. Kahler was deprived of his German citizenship in 1933 and dispossessed of his German home. After a period of residence in England he came to the US in 1938. During the past few years he has lectured at various universities in Europe. His books in English are Man the Measure (4th edition, 1956) and The Tower and the Abyss (1957).8

As indicated by this official announcement of Kahler’s designation as one of the first two Mershon Professors at Ohio State (the historian, Theodor E. Mommsen, was the other), Kahler was uniquely qualified to represent the intellectual emigration to a broadly educated but non-metropolitan American public, even fourteen years after the fall of Hitler. Endorsements by both Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein, surely the most celebrated of the exiles, elevated him to a level beyond controversy. This general appeal was an essential condition for the success of the plans of the group that secured his appointment, for without it they could not have interested the rather provincial Board of Trustees, but it was not sufficient. The faculty sponsors indicated their hopes in their nominating letter addressed to a sympathetic Dean J. Osborn Fuller: We think of Professor Kahler as one of the major humanists of our time, and we recognize in him one of the few men in the world who [could] conduct a seminar in which there could be brought to focus some of the matters of sociocultural analysis and evaluation in which many of us at the University have such a deep interest. As you know, there already exists on a more-or-less informal basis a group of scholars who have discovered this shared interest and have done their best to communicate the results and implications of their researches and their study to one another. But at best it has been a hesitant and irregular feature of our intellectual lives. We feel a profound need to initiate more formal communications and exchanges, so as to make this University what it might well become: an important center of theoretical and applied interdisciplinary research in the nature and history of culture. We are sure that Professor Kahler is the kind of scholar who could help us begin to realize this image of ourselves and of our intellectual community.9

Kahler’s role is depicted as, first of all, an inspirational one, a master whose sheer authority and presence would give new form—but not necessarily new contents—to the activities of those to be assembled around him. He was to make them different by transforming their experience. He was to function, I submit, as a living symbol. To the extent that this was understood between hosts and visitor, it would not have been an altogether uncongenial conception to Kahler. Gerhard Lauer

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has shown how deeply and steadfastly Kahler was affected by the example of the George Circle, despite some reservations, and more generally how deeply Kahler was implicated in the discourse and practices of aspiring charismatic communities, so prevalent in the immediate pre-World War One period and the earliest Weimar years.10 For this reason—and because his advanced age helps also to explain his need for income from visiting appointments—it is important to keep in mind that Erich Kahler was almost fifty when he arrived in the USA in 1938 and that he was thus a member of the older cohort of intellectuals compelled to flee from Germany early in the Nazi reign. Born in 1885 as the son of a highly cultured and prosperous family of assimilated Jews in Prague, he spent his adolescence and student years in Vienna, and he chose Germany shortly before the First World War as the spiritual home uniquely consistent with his literary and philosophical aspirations. Exempted from military service because of poor eyesight, Kahler was in Munich during the months of revolution, personally but not politically close to the radical head of the first rebellious regime, Gustav Landauer; and he spent the years until 1933 in that city, as independent scholar and intimate of various cultural figures, including Thomas Mann and the principal figures in the Stefan George Circle. The publication that made him widely known and controversial in Weimar literary circles was The Vocation of Science (1920), offered as an aggressive and pre-emptive rejoinder to Max Weber’s seminal Science as Vocation. The main theme announced in that text characterized his work throughout his long intellectual career: the annunciation of an all-embracing, suprarational, organic “new science” that breaks through the present-day catastrophic “crisis of culture,” which is, in turn, defined first of all by the incapacity of historicized studies or “positivist” specialized sciences to perform the indispensable work of orientation and Bildung that constituted German culture and gives it its unique universal mission. Kahler’s conception entails a profound historization preparatory to a leap out of history, beyond history. As Lauer points out, however, Kahler always differed from many of the contemporaries who welcomed him as a prophet of the “heroic vitalism” that subsequently aligned them with fascism, in that he thought of the new science as a humanism, in effect a recovery of the great Greek experience of the true, the good, and the beautiful, as anticipated by Goethe and other German classics.11 Unlike others who were close to the Stefan George Circle—and like his friend and patron, Thomas Mann—he did not have to undertake a drastic reconsideration of his political position in exile.12 His Weimar hopes for a “new community” and “new man” had rested on “spiritual” rather than on political changes. If he occasionally displayed a weakness for Mussolini as a “genuine leader” profoundly grounded in a spiritually unified community,13

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this was usually in polemical contrast to Hitler; and in any case he never called the constitutional order into question during his American exile. Recognizable as an adherent—albeit an atypical one—of the “conservative revolution” in Germany, he later translated his main preoccupations fairly easily into the generically “leftist” political language of the literary emigration and of the academic circles that were interested in him. At the end as at the beginning, Kahler’s prime emphasis was on a many-sided, all-encompassing cultural “crisis” demanding an abrupt and total revaluation and reconstruction, with the all-too-probable alternative being a catastrophe for humanity. The profound moral importance that Kahler attaches to aesthetic categories of form and wholeness makes it tempting to associate him with the “beautiful soul” of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, if not Hegel’s Phenomenology, but Gerhard Lauer suggests that it would be more accurate to speak of soul that aspires to the exaltation of the sublime. Yet all such characterizations risk losing sight of Kahler’s capacities for affection, his generosity as teacher and critic, his curiosity, as well as other qualities that work against the forbidding pretensions of his prophetic mission. These are the qualities that enabled him to perform his symbolic tasks with such charm and courtesy, whatever his awareness of the discrepancy between his offer and the terms of its acceptance. In Kahler’s last submission to the Ohio State group, over a year after his longer visit, he outlined once more the many dimensions of “crisis” and implored the members of the seminar not to lose sight of the desperately urgent “human crisis” of the time: What seems to me particularly endangering a successful performance of the seminar is the indulgence in sidetracking, over-meticulous terminological disputes, and shifting of subjects, to the point of forgetting the general aim. It is essential that the ultimate common purpose always be kept in mind. I would therefore consider it inadvisable to deal with specific books or personalities, as such—a proceeding that is bound to lead to dissipation into a diversity of problems which are not, or only remotely, connected with our problem. The watchword is discipline.14

The legacy Kahler brought virtually unaltered into exile was his alignment on the side of Bildung against the new age of Wissenschaft whose ethical and cultural implications were spelled out by Weber at the birth of the Weimar era. What remains clear, in any case, is that Kahler’s advocacy of a “new science” to transcend a cultural crisis had in fact little to do with disciplinecentered scholarly debates on method, whether in the German universities of the Weimar years or in the American universities of the 1950s. Yet it was precisely in the cause of a coalition oriented to the Wissenschaftspolitik of the

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university and—beyond that—of a number of key disciplines that Kahler was repeatedly called to Columbus.

Diasporic Kultur at Ohio State Until the end of the Second World War, Ohio State had been a comfortable and entertaining place, where the local middle class saw its children schooled, where respectable business and professional careers were launched, and where the football team won. Such generalizations always overlook the exciting professor here, the research group there, that caught fire, and some pockets of diversity and innovation.15 The thrust toward modernization during the 50s and 60s was clear to all. Allied in this effort were academics and administrators more oriented to national professional audiences than to local dignitaries and alumni, as well as a small but growing number of political liberals and cultural modernists, especially in the law school, the social sciences, and the humanities. Entire departments were transformed. Strong chairmen were brought from more metropolitan centers to Philosophy, Political Science, German, and elsewhere, and they were cheered by liberal colleagues and progressive administrators as they prodded provincial older men into retirement or departure and brought people with “good” degrees and research ambitions, even if they were Jews or Easterners.16 Kahler’s visits belong in this context. A first invitation is dated 1955. The Germanist, Oscar Seidlin, invites Kahler, whom he has never met, to contribute to an interdisciplinary lecture series on the “role of scholarship in the intepretation and evaluation of paintings, music, and literature.” To judge by the list of proposed speakers, and the statement that the lecturers will show how “new scholarship is necessarily involved in interpreting their objects of criticism,” the aim was obviously to put the case for historical criticism against the formalist new criticism still predominant at the time, a step in developing a distinctive Ohio State “profile” in the study of art and literature.17 In the event, Kahler had to decline the invitation because he had a visiting fellowship in Manchester for the year. An interesting detail in Seidlin’s invitation is the transmittal of greetings from Arthur and Socha Salz, also present at the university, to which Kahler responds in his letter of declination with an expression of regret at losing the opportunity of a reunion with his “old friend,” Salz. Arthur and Socha had been on the periphery of the George Circle in 1920, but Kahler and Salz differed sharply about Weber’s “Science as a Vocation.” Salz wrote one of the most effective rejoinders to Kahler’s pamphlet, and he was not overly gentle in dismissing Kahler’s claims to be grounding a new science.18 Yet Kahler had evidently remained on good terms with Socha, and

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there is a friendly reply from her in 1946 to a letter in which Kahler conveyed news from one of their common friends, who had remained in Austria and whom they were now helping. The Salz connection is a preliminary element in Kahler’s relations with Ohio State. Unlike the group whose subsequent initiative is at the center of our study, the Columbus friends of Arthur and Socha are themselves émigrés, with the intimate circle consisting of Oscar Seidlin and his long-time friend, Dieter Cunz, as well as Kurt H. Wolff, a sociologist who had been a student of Karl Mannheim, and his wife, Karla. Exile and its liquidation is only rarely an individual affair. The management of old and new connections takes on a unique importance, where lives are so profoundly disrupted. The next project of this émigré friendship circle was to bring Kahler to the German Department as a visiting professor for the Spring Quarter of 1957. Without documentary evidence, it is impossible to be certain, but it seems clear that the aim was to enhance the legitimacy of their shared concept of Bildung, which they had been able to pursue in an enclave of the old disorganized university, but which was in danger of being harmed by the new modernist coordination of the institution. Their capacity to secure someone as well known as Kahler was to be an asset in their own collective bargaining. The letter inquiring as to his interest and availability was written by Socha Salz, but she remarks that Seidlin had simply been too “shy” to ask himself. Kahler indicates his interest, but requires a quick offer, since he expects a part-time opportunity at Cornell, which he could not otherwise turn down. The situation becomes complicated in a way that bears directly on the geneaology of the Mershon professorship that brought Kahler for his principal visit in 1959. While the appointment is approved in principle, it is also delayed because the president of the university must first waive a rule excluding visitors above the age of seventy; and the delay brings the decision into the Christmas holiday season, so that Seidlin, in order to meet Kahler’s deadlines, must bypass the acting chairman, who is on holiday, to get final approval from the Dean. For this he needs allies more influential than the small group of German émigrés. In a series of painful letters to Kahler, Seidlin implores him to cooperate with the “cabal” that is trying to work around the enraged acting chairman, in order to override the chairman’s retaliatory plan to use Kahler for a routine survey course and an advanced course that attracts very few students, and those generally the least talented. “Now, it seems to me that if we are lucky enough to get Kahler, then we must also employ Kahler in a ‘useful’ way,” Seidlin writes to Kahler, clearly eager to broaden Kahler’s constituency among students in other “humanistic” subjects—and their professors. “What I see shimmering in the distance,” he writes, “is a course that does

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not as yet exist, i.e., a course where we could be certain of the interest of neighboring disciplines (English, Philosophy, History). I have immediately gotten in touch with colleagues in English and Philosophy, and I have met with the most enthusiastic agreement.” He asks Kahler to request, as of his own volition, a course “that would illuminate a wider cultural-philosophical and cultural-critical perspective, beyond disciplinary boundaries.” Only in this way, Seidlin insists, could he be certain “to put Kahler in the place that is his due.” He apologizes for dragging him into the game of a “cabal,” but this is the “only way of being certain that your visit will be helpful and significant for wider circles.”19 Kahler is interestingly reluctant to address a “general cultural theme” before students, and Seidlin must write again to plead with Kahler to present the idea as his own and not to confirm the acting chaiman’s suspicion that secret plotting had taken place. It is all somewhat awkward, but Kahler is ultimately approved—after a clear signal from on high in the Arts & Sciences administration—to offer a course to be taught in English, and thus open to students from cognate departments. What is especially interesting here is that the small émigré “cabal” that meets periodically in Salz’s house first introduces Kahler to Ohio State, but will play very little part in the subsequent stage, where Kahler is taken up by the American Studies group in the English department. Salz’s own role in all this is uncertain. It is an interesting question, if only because Salz’s name never comes up in the discussions around the eventual 1959 seminar that is the focus of our study, not even when Roy Harvey Pearce has to explain apologetically to Kahler that they have been unable to find an economist to take part in the interdisciplinary group because Economics is located in the College of Commerce at Ohio State, with predictable consequences for the narrowness of the economists.20 Salz had been brought to Ohio State as an economist before the war, under a special grant from Fred J. R. Lazarus, the senior member of the Lazarus family, the Jewish proprietors of Lazarus Department Stores in Columbus and Cincinnati (later Federated Department Stores). He taught tiny groups of puzzled graduate students into the early 1950s, proffering main themes of political economy, evidently staying close to his modified liberal perspective of the late Weimar years. His non-participation in the Kahler Mershon seminar cannot have been due to a loss of intellectual capacity or lack of affinities, since the archives of his papers are full of articles and even book drafts dating from the years up to his death in 1964, virtually all of them preoccupied with the need to bring humanistic knowledge to bear on economic studies. There is hardly a text without its Goethe quotation.21 To some extent, the explanation may be simple: Socha Salz apologizes to Kahler in 1957 that they cannot house him during his visiting

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quarter in the German Department because they live in Worthington to the north of Columbus, without an automobile and dependent on poor bus service: “we live quite cut off from the university and even from other people—unaclimatized European idiots that we are!” It remains striking, nevertheless, that Salz’s name never occurs in the extensive correspondence with Ohio State figures other than Seidlin before and after Kahler’s second visit in 1959.

History and Culture in Munich, Baltimore, and Columbus The foundation for that more extensive and visible visit is laid, first, by a decision of the Ohio State University Board of Trustees. Acceding to a vehement campaign among the social science and humanities faculties, they allocated a portion of a $7,000,000 legacy for purposes other than the military matters on the mind of the donor, notably a short-term, nonteaching “Ralph D. Mershon Professorship” to enrich the graduate program by seminars and lectures.22 A few months later, in a “Dear Fred” letter to Vice-President Heimberger, a past Dean of Arts and Sciences sympathetic to the newer currents in the faculty, Roy Harvey Pearce mentions the possibility of securing one of these Mershon Professors to support the efforts of a group that have been meeting informally on the basis of their common interest in “theory of interpretation,” although the immediate point of the letter is to explore the possibility of some released time for this interdisciplinary group. Interestingly, the first list of seven is weighted towards social sciences and contains only three who will eventually take part in the Kahler Seminar.23 The formal proposal to re-invite Kahler was not submitted, as noted above, until the following year, and the terms of reference had shifted from “interpretation” to the historiography of culture. Although Kahler first learned about the all but certain Mershon Professorship from Oscar Seidlin in an urgent letter intended to forestall Kahler from accepting a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, the definitive news comes first in a telephone call from Pearce, a professor of English Literature and the leading proponent of the liberal arts at Ohio State.24 The seventy-threeyear-old German émigré, Erich Kahler, has become a project of a group of faculty centered in the English Department and dedicated to an ambitious plan for establishing Ohio State as a national center of humanistic inquiry, especially for the literary generation that was attempting to supercede the New Criticism.25 In a letter thanking Erich Kahler for having dedicated his Ohio State University Press brochure The True, the Good, and the Beautiful to him a year after Kahler’s second visit to Ohio State, Pearce offers the usual formulas of

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appreciation for what he oddly catalogues as one of several “great event[s] in my life as a scholar and teacher,” and he sketches a selective self-portrait through a telegraphic recital of these moments: The first: when A. O. Lovejoy, having been sent a term paper of mine, wrote me a 17-page letter and asked me to dinner. The second: when, on a Spring evening in Baltimore, Ludwig Edelstein made me understand that a humanist’s could be an authentic vocation. The third: when Josephine Mills wrote a poem about my Savages of America. Fourth: when Mr. Ransom accepted my “Historicism Once More” essay and told me why. The fifth: your dedication.26

The aged Lovejoy was, of course, the icon of many scholars in Pearce’s time at Johns Hopkins, and Pearce always placed his two principal books, The Savages of America (1953; 1965) and The Continuity of American Poetry (1961) in the line of Lovejoy’s “history of ideas.”27 Ludwig Edelstein was a classicist, best known for his work on the history of ancient medicine, especially the definitive edition and interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath (which may or may not have anything to do with the fact that he also was one of the University of California faculty members who refused to sign the Loyalty Oath in 1949), who was a German exile, like Erich Kahler. Pearce describes Edelstein and his wife as “the center of a group” to which he had belonged as a young scholar at Berkeley, and Pearce’s loyalty to him was so great that, as he wrote to Kahler in the last letter before Kahler began his tenure as Mershon Professor, he was planning to ask the Bollinger Foundation for “travel and maintenance money for Spring 1960 quarter, so that I can go to be tutored by Ludwig Edelstein in Baltimore.” Since he was not planning to be tutored in classical Greek scientific terminology, he is certainly correct when he says that “the request is unusual.” In this case, as briefly with Kahler, Pearce reveals a curious yearning for some sort of magical mentoring from a senior scholar, preferably from Germany, although he neither reads German nor knows the German methodological literature he is always resolving to read.28 The juxtaposition of Lovejoy’s historical contextualizing of thematic units and Edelstein’s modified classicism stands behind the “historicism” that Pearce seeks to reconceive in the essay whose acceptance by John Crowe Ransom for the Kenyon Review was another of his “great events.” It is striking that Pearce puts such great weight on his acceptance by Ransom, who had become identified with New Criticism, although to a lesser extent than René Wellek of PLMA and the editors of Contemporary Literature, who had earlier dismissed Pearce’s paper with harsh words. The poem by Josephine Miles, who had been, like Edelstein, a senior colleague of his at the University of California, is a different sort of pleasure, of course, and a different kind of validation.

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For an innovator and Americanist, Pearce was unusually eager, overall, to be designated and recognized as a legitimate transmitter and translator of the exile legacy, with its aura of European high culture. Pearce and Kahler clearly had little contact during Kahler’s ten weeks in the German Department during his first visit during the spring of 1957. They corresponded courteously in the autumn of 1957 about a reference from Pearce for Kahler’s application to the American Council of Learned Societies, but Pearce expresses regret that they had no chance for extensive conversation and he adds that he hopes “some day...to ask [Kahler] for some advice on some work of my own,” and Kahler chimes in with regrets for “the talks and discussions together which we missed in the happy turmoil of my all too short Columbus quarter.”29 A week later, Pearce mailed off the letter to Dean Fuller formally initiating the process that led to the professorship. Fuller recommended the appointment to the President on the grounds that Kahler appealed to “a large number of our most promising young men who will continue to be the leaders in the intellectual life of the community,” and that the appointment would help in continuing “the fine intellectual ferment that we have on campus.”30 Writing to the Dean some months later, after the appointment had been settled, Pearce restates the aims of the seminar: We think that the significance of the seminar is this: that, with all the pressure for interdisciplinary studies as has recently been generated by the situation of our culture, nonetheless, insufficient attention has been paid to the more general theoretical and methodological problems which such studies raise. The tendency has been to rush into empirical inter-disciplinary investigations, yet without a firm notion of just what making such investigations signifies for the relation of the investigator to both his materials and the readers on whose behalf he undertakes the investigation. How, that is to say, may the refined interpretive techniques of the humanities and the social sciences be employed together to give us a view of the history or culture, not broken up according to the disciplines of the investigators, but as a whole, as something lived in and through by those whose culture it was?31

Two things remain striking about these statements, in contrast to Kahler’s own conception of his intellectual and cultural “mission,” even after the constraints of such a letter of application are taken into account. First, they are focused on questions of scholarly method, with the aim of developing a technically sound structure of interdisciplinary study in the humanities. In terms of the German debates to which Kahler is heir, they are issues internal to Wissenschaft, not the questions of Bildung that were uppermost

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to Kahler.32 Second, as Pearce describes the preliminary discussions, the potential seminar members altogether lack the sense of “crisis” that informs Kahler’s own writings, and that he will urge them to use as a central motif a year after his departure. These differences between them are not evident, however, as their correspondence begins to anticipate closer relations between them. In the spring and summer of 1958, Pearce sends Kahler several chapters from his “Continuities of American Poetry” work in progress. Kahler is very positive, but reserves criticism on some points for future conversations. At the same time, he cautions Pearce: I am a little frightened by the array of so many wise men from so many departments over whom I am so supposed to preside in that seminar. I am afraid I am going to disappoint them, since I am definitely not such a polyhistor as they apparently take me to be, and I am far from being sufficiently versed in the theory and literature of all these fields. My knowledge is restricted to the peculiar trails on which my own work and research led me. So please tell them to tone down their expectations and keep the topics within a range which I may have a reasonable hope to cover, at least fairly satisfactorily.33

In that connection, then, Kahler proposes that they select a unified topic for the seminars. Significantly, Kahler suggests “the symbol” and cites his just published article on the topic. Pearce sidesteps the suggestion, in reply, and poses as alternative the more “generalized” question: “is there a unified theory of cultural historiography?”34 In the light of Kahler’s perplexed but encouraging reception of Pearce’s “Historicism,”35 and especially in view of Pearce’s gratified announcement that John Crow Ransom would publish the article in the Kenyon Review, it is clear that Pearce hopes that Kahler and the seminar will somehow invest in his project to carry on “the sort of study exemplified in the historicism essay: the general problem of the study of literature and culture and the particular problem of the critical philosophy of history, historical knowledge, and historical criticism.”36 Pearce’s scheme for a “critical” or “existential” historicism in literary criticism involved a two-stage process, which may be roughly summarized as asking, first, what does the work under scrutiny mean in its time and, second, what does this work in its time mean to us in our hard-won capacity as self-examined, humanist readers today, who recognize that although we are also historically definable, we cannot be only this, if we are to make sense of what we do as critics? Pearce postulates an underlying deep layer of humanitas, which becomes evident in the course of such encounters, and which is presupposed by them. It is in this context that, in the final,

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published version of the article, Pearce quotes Kahler, the only such citation I have found in his writings: When I try to delve into my innermost feeling, my initial feeling of self, I find at the bottom there is not just a feeling of sheer existence, or of sheer thinking, the Cartesian cogito. There is immediately and simultaneously, something more. There is implicit in my feeling of existence a feeling of organic existence, or organicity, of wholeness. Distorted, stunted as it may be by the wear and tear of modern life, the original form is still traceable as it was present in the bud of youth: a ball radiating strength and capacity; all-sidedness, all-potentiality; coherence, correspondence...37

Pearce’s footnote seems to take some distance from these formulations, however, when he cautions that Kahler’s words must be understood as “culminating expression” of an intellectual movement likely to be unfamiliar to literary scholars in American Studies, Pearce’s primary audience. While Pearce frames his inquiry in an adaptation of Georg Simmel’s distanced, neo-Kantian question, “how is literature possible?” the opening pages of the Kahler book that he quotes is full of agitated phrases like “the grave perils with which [our human condition is fraught]” and “the disruption or invalidation of the individual.” When Pearce and Kahler agree that the seminar will address “the historiography of culture,” the terms of their agreement are deeply ambiguous. The agreement is also asymmetrical in that Pearce will be satisfied if he can use Kahler’s presence and authority to forge together a group of colleagues whom he hopes to orient to a convergent, if not identical, agenda for the study of humanities at Ohio State, while Kahler is hoping to infect a younger and otherwise largely unreachable American academic audience with his sense of crisis and his opening to a new Weltanschauung, a new Bildung—or at least to be recognized by them as bearing witness to these aspirations. A striking statement of a third alternative is to be found in a Proposal for Support of a Mershon Institute for Humanistic Studies, which Pearce prepared (in collaboration with the anomalous logical positivist philosopher in the group, Virgil Hinshaw) for submission to the Mershon Committee for Defense Studies, in which he requests $150,000 per year for the first five years of such an institute, to be drawn from the “restricted”—or military—portion of the bequest, requiring an instrumentalization of Humanities for national security.38 Pearce invokes the American version of the German Bildung controversy, the presumed conflict between “the Humanities” and “the physical sciences.” He puts forward “a conception of humanistic study as the defense of man—or as a continuing offense on behalf of man,” and concludes “that it would be altogether fitting and proper that a substantial portion of an endowment

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for education and national security be devoted to humanistic studies.” The following is the crux of the case: The humanities are, then, a group of subjects devoted to the study of man as a being other than a biological product and different from a social or sociological entity. They make certain assumptions about human nature and about history. First, they assume that man lives in a dimension lying beyond science and the social sciences. Second, they assume that his profound sense of individuation is one of the most important things about him. Third, they assume that the better traits of humanity, or, if one likes, the enduring elements of human nature, find typical expression in philosophy, in literature, in language, and in the arts; and that history is both the way by which these expressions are preserved and one of the principal modes of interpreting the meaning of these expressions to and in contemporary life... Fourth, the purpose of the humanities is refining and maturing the individual who studies them sympathetically and intelligently, evidence of refinement and maturation being given by increased sympathy with and understanding of philosophy and the arts in past and present time and increased sympathy with and understanding of man not only as he is but as he has been. Human studies tend to concentrate upon individual development rather more than upon social judgment, and differ from science in this regard also, since science properly seeks to eliminate the personal equation. Incidental to these several aims, human learning also creates, as it were, methods and disciplines of its own, such as intellectual history.

Using Kahler’s key term of “crisis,” Pearce reinforces the disciplinecenteredness of his own interest, its wissenschaftspolitisch focus: For the crisis in humanistic studies today is not only in the weakening of their role in society, but in their being unable to develop rapidly enough the modes and methods whereby they maintain that role, should it again be granted them.39

The Mershon Center for Humanistic Studies initiative hopes to build on Kahler’s visit, but it proceeds on terms remote from Kahler’s own aspirations. Although he was not informed about it at the time, it seems clear from his later insistent warnings against specialized preoccupations in the seminar that he was painfully aware of the gap between himself and the “earnest ‘young’ men” of the seminar. From that standpoint, Kahler’s public lecture on The True, the Good, and the Beautiful documents the most strongly felt moment of his stay at Ohio State in 1959. Returning to the theme of “new science,” with the help of analogical readings of popularized Heisenberg, Einstein, and the rest, he

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envisions a total view of human evolution and the attendant convergence of value foundations among “mature” cultures. He reviews the three core concepts mentioned in his title and contends that they retain their essential meanings, as clarified especially by the Greeks, albeit in a “dynamic” form expounded best by Goethe. That the only documented response to the lecture in the archives should be in a letter from Oscar Seidlin is no accident. Of course, Seidlin would have the continental breeding that led to a letter rather than to a few words at a reception, in the American style, but he would also be least likely to assess the presentation as some sort of scientific contribution to scholarship, even as popularization. Instead, Seidlin writes (in his ingratiating, elegant German): What I always admire in your writings is the wide learning, but much more decisive is the wisdom and human rectitude, without which all knowledge is empty straw. And that, in a time of evasive relativization, you confess an ultimately irreplaceable creed is a great consolation and reassurance to me, for which I am grateful. So it is rewarding to be reminded by you that the history of the human spirit is bound together by lasting values (and that is after all what turns the mere course of events into history) and that this history, to the disadvantage of the values, can be undermined for us. Because this is so close to my heart, accept my thanks.40

This is not only beautiful and touching, but also totally noncommittal to Kahler’s philosophical arguments. It is a communication from one literary man—in the German sense of Schriftsteller—to another. Then, too, Seidlin evidently attended Kahler’s student seminar in 1957, when the topic was German literature, but he never attended the Kahler Seminar during the Mershon year.

Kahler and the Earnest “Young” Americans Neither the archival records nor the surviving participants’ memories are very revealing about the dynamics of the seminar itself, as it extended over the two quarters of Kahler’s residence as Mershon Professor. The planning correspondence between Pearce and Kahler, reinforced by Kahler’s own extensive lecture notes, indicates that Kahler actually conceived of the seminar, at least in the first quarter, as a kind of lecture course on approaches to the concept of culture and its history. Pearce’s first specific suggestions seem to point in a different direction, although they also give clear signs that Pearce is scaling back from his highest hopes. In a report on a preliminary meeting of the potential participants some months before Kahler’s scheduled arrival, he tells Kahler that the idea is to let Kahler use the first month to

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lay out how he sees problems and possible solutions in the historiography of culture, and to see what happens then. Perhaps there will be short reports on state of question in respective disciplines or expounding some key book. Papers will be written for fall quarter, but “we doubt it” that these will comprise a common project suitable for the unified book that Pearce had anticipated in his original submissions to the Dean. Most likely, the papers will be “just as the spirit of the seminar has moved the participant.” Pearce is acting as the broker between two parties, neither of which sees itself as he would like them to be. Kahler is not a charismatic leader, and Pearce’s colleagues are not a community. It is revealing and even touching, then, that he longingly closes his report as follows: You will have 15 or so earnest “young” men gathered about you. All are members of the senior staff here, however; all have some reputation in their own fields and have proved themselves worthy, we think; some are only tangentially concerned with the history of culture, but have joined the group either because they are not satisfied with their own tangentialness or because they are just curious. We have great hopes of establishing a richer sense of communitas here. So we need you badly.41

Kahler replies with a long reading list, beginning with major anthropologists and ending with Isaiah Berlin, Ernst Cassirer’s Essay on Man, and Amerigo Castro (at Pearce’s suggestion, as the correspondence shows). To judge from the generous helpings of Karl Mannheim (including both of his major books), the list must have been a collaborative project between Kahler in Princeton and the Columbus people, since this is more nearly an author that Kurt Wolff had been pressing on Pearce than a source that Kahler would have chosen to discuss. More characteristic are the historians of the Christian Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as the obvious array of Nietzsche, Jung, Marx, and Freud. Kahler projects the work as follows: Starting with the genesis of the term and concept [of culture] and following up with its evolution and ramifications, we shall be able to assemble all the pertinent problems in the order in which they developed. So I propose to give you in our first sessions an outline of this evolutionary process. Then having reached an overall picture, a topography as it were, of the various problems, we may enter into more detailed discussions.42

In his third presentation to the seminar, for example, to judge by his notes, Kahler looked back briefly to the two seminars in which surveyed the “development of the concept [of culture]” “from a casual, functional, attributive, subjective to a substantial, absolute, objective, and collective significance,”

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and then turns to the subsequent “distinctive tendencies or viewpoints or methods to deal with culture” in this sense, which first emerged late in the 19th century, history of culture, sociology of culture, and “morphology” of culture. He focuses on Jacob Burckhardt, Alfred Weber, and Leo Frobenius, as exemplars of the three distinct trends in what he calls “our modern, empirical, scholarly stage,” but his thesis is that all three converge towards the morphological approach, which he epitomizes as a “characterology” like his own studies of Germany in the 20s and 30s. In an overview of Frobenius, he emphasizes that the method in question rejects “mechanical” explanation in favor of an “intuitive” method, where the “searcher attempts to experience empathetically, to re-live (mit-erleben) the whole wealth of vital and psychic motions and emotions. He is able to distinguish the essential from the unessential, the significant from the unessential, the significant from the insignificant, the meaning of an expression from its means.” It is difficult to imagine how such a confidently asserted—and totally alien— conception of “empirical, scholarly” method could have been seriously discussed by a group of American academics in 1959.43 Kahler’s preview of successive sessions makes it no less clear that he saw the “seminar” as the opportunity for a kind of testamentary deposition of his legacy. He will next turn to Spengler and Toynbee, with some attention to Dilthey. Other twentieth-century authors like Simmel, Mannheim, and Freud, will be treated later, “when I propose to deal with the human situation in our age,” as will authors like Croce, Max Weber, and Lord Acton (!), in the context of special problems. “If we have time within this year,” he will move on to Scheler, Cassirer, and “even” Teilhard de Chardin, before closing with “my own views in this subject, critical and in a very sketchy way, substantive and structural.” The grandiosity of the project is manifest, and the sessions occasioned more skeptically-tinged spectatorial admiration than collegial participation. Kahler does refer at the outset to possible contributions by members of the seminar, but he puts it in the form of an assignment for someone to deal in greater depth with Simmel, Mannheim, and Freud, and this never happened. Pearce’s application for funding for the following year’s continuation of the seminar, without Kahler, suggests that there were virtually no papers presented. Writing to the responsible university administrator once again to request almost $10,000 for partial teaching relief for participants, Pearce lists the topics of the papers they respectively propose for the following year, and these correspond too closely to their major research interests, as known from other sources, to make it likely that they had already presented papers to the seminar, with the sole (significant) exception of the younger émigré, Sigurd Burckhardt, in whose case a presentation to the seminar in 1959 is expressly

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mentioned.44 Another non-American scholar, a Spanish exile, Carlos Blanco Aguinara, also spoke briefly on some Latin American historians of culture. Participation, in fact, was often non-committal. Pearce puts the case with a certainty based on hope: “We are in the process of establishing an interdisciplinary community,” he writes, “which, as it develops in the future, will make a positive contribution to the University’s research and teaching program.” He characterizes the funding as a “seed project”: “For, if we can carry on our work together successfully, we shall be in a position to make recommendations concerning a permanent institution for the historiography of culture.” The prime theme of his plea is the need to remedy his scholarly neglect of the “essential wholeness of the study of man.” Nevertheless, Pearce is careful to add—fending off possible skepticism about Kahler’s grand designs—that the group is not aspiring to “overarching syntheses,” but simply to mutual recognition of limits to specialisms. Events in the seminar group were soon to put Pearce’s sanguine projection into question.

Disenchantment: the crisis of “crisis” I hope that I didn’t sound too much in distress last night. But then: I hope that I sounded a little in distress. Anyhow: The Seminar in Humanistic Studies is in danger of drifting, foundering, etc. We need a sense of direction... Well, we had our initial meeting and just couldn’t get seriously started. All of us...want to keep the enterprise going. But in varying degrees all of us are uneasy: since we believe that somehow the enterprise has to be integral; and we find it hard to conceive of ourselves doing integratable papers over the next two years... Could you come—as early in February as possible? Let me suggest an ideal setup: You think about our problem; send us a list of things to read and think about...and come on yourself. Roy Harvey Pearce to Erich Kahler, January 12, 1961 I’ve been terribly depressed about the lack of any powerful kind of self-starting; and think maybe I could have managed things better; but I had assumed that with the group established and the opportunity, things would manage themselves. Roy Harvey Pearce to Erich Kahler, January 19, 1961

After a period of uncertainty, while awaiting the university’s decision about funding, Pearce reassessed the situation, in the light of a grant award insufficient to free anyone from teaching. The first aim, he thought, was to build a record that would permit the group to return to the Mershon Defense Studies Committee, and Pearce typically emphasized his professional, disciplinary

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themes: “My own notion is somehow to reconsider the substantial content (or fields) of the humanistic and social science disciplines and to inquire into the need for shifting in method and methodology as that content shifts.”45 But this evidently did not resonate with the strongest supporters of the project, notably with Richard A. Falk, a specialist in international law who also had deep religious interests at the time and who was without doubt the seminar member on the terms of greatest spiritual intimacy with Kahler, as witness some confessional correspondence of the time, as well as his two years’ stay in Kahler’s Princeton home, after his own move to that university. Accordingly, Falk urged the seminar to devote two years to the theme of “crisis,” Kahler’s own central motif. His framing of the theme is strikingly different, first, in that in his diagnosis he highlights elements from Buber, Tillich, and the personalist and existentialist theological writers that absorbed him at the time; and, second, in contrast to this background, in that he urges attention to plural “responses to crisis” in various social domains, as in his own field of study, where he proposes the work of his teacher, Myres McDougall, for study. McDougall’s pragmatist realism is about as far as it is possible to go from Kahler’s eschatological reading of crisis and its overcoming.46 Unlike the literary scholars in the group, Falk could take a seriously playful attitude towards this undertaking. His disciplinary identity was not at stake to anywhere near the same degree, in view of the faultless professional credentialing of his simultaneous legal research. This particular intersection between an interest in Kahler and the design of professional academic work is unique to Falk, but all of the participants in the Kahler seminar had a counterpart special location, which put lesser or greater constraints on their capacities for negotiating the differences (or, as in Falk’s case, essentially exempting them from the need to make the effort). These differences manifested themselves in the evident confusion at the seminar meeting designed to launch the new series, “Responses to Crisis; Historical and Contemporary.” Pleading with Kahler to return to Columbus to bring the group together in a common direction, Pearce speaks of the danger of “drifting, foundering, etc.” Kahler organizes a trip to Columbus within two weeks, visits with Falk and the other leaders of the effort, and addresses the Seminar group in mid-February. This meeting spawned three documents, which variously manifest the tensions within the undertaking. There is a memorandum composed by Kahler after his return to Princeton, a polemical exercise in conceptual specification by the political theorist, David Spitz, and “Notes towards a Structural Interpretation of a Crisis-Orientation: The Case of Karl Mannheim,” by another member of the Political Science Department, David Kettler. Oddly enough, these discordant contributions, none of them by members of the core Ohio State Humanities group, effectively mark the end of the Faculty Seminar in the Humanities originated by Pearce, except for a short series of guest speakers.

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Kahler’s appeal that members of the seminar overlook technical disciplinary issues in favor of the substance has been discussed earlier. His urgency is manifest in his language. “A crisis develops,” he writes, “whenever a situation gets out control.” More precisely, “a crisis is a final breaking point, the overpowering of the controlling form by the discontinuous multitude of life.” No earlier crisis, he maintains, has possessed “the present panicky simultaneity and therefore immediate universality and comprehensiveness of crisis” that prevails at present. He lists ten dimensions of the present crisis, from the explosive “predominance of masses” everywhere to alienation, and concludes that at a point of crisis “only a fundamentally broadening re-organization, reformation of the system, of its frame and means of control, may be able to cope with the anarchical situation and put an end to the crisis.”47 Like Kahler, Spitz also ends by worrying about “alienation,” but the conception of crisis that he preemptively wants to impose on the group by dismissing competitors as “erroneous or trifling, or both” is more anodyne than Kahler’s, inasmuch as he comes to rest with “the application of the word ‘crisis’ to the gap between human behavior and understanding, on the one hand, and what might be termed the requirements of ‘objective reality,’ on the other.” To speak of a “crisis,” then, is little more than to dramatize a serious problem. In marked contrast to Kahler’s most fundamental convictions—although not in explicit disagreement with him—Spitz derides proposals to apply the concept of crisis to disputations among practitioners in an academic discipline “as to its nature and proper direction” or “to failures of communication, in particular communication between teacher and student…which entails an inquiry into the meaning and purpose of education itself, and of a modern university.”48 Neither Wissenschaft nor Bildung are problematic in this sense for Spitz. Not surprisingly, his memorandum enrages Pearce. “If I weren’t so tired and worried about the seminar’s continuing I’d be angry,” he writes to Kahler, “especially at [Spitz’s] inability to understand what anyone says.” Kettler’s rather improvised Begriffsgeschichte attempts to mediate, with the help of a structural analysis in the manner of Karl Mannheim, between those for whom the category of crisis is an inevitable frame of reference for their inquiries and those for whom it appears to be an unnecessary imposition. Kettler’s history of the concept begins with OED entries on astronomy and medicine and ends with a configuration imputed to Marx: The notion that individual crises, while normal moments in social processes, cumulatively prefigure, entail, or symptomize crises in the developing social system as a whole; the idea that crisis threatens catastrophe but promises salvation; the indication that the fulfillment of that promise requires (in some sense) death and transfiguration; and, finally, the proposition the call of crisis must be met by vigorous action by forces capable of hearing it and somehow immune to (or freed from) its destructive effects.49

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After attempting to show that Kahler’s use is modeled on this pattern, notwithstanding fundamental differences in social and cultural analyses, Kettler argues that this state of the concept must be understood as a stylistic feature of the world-view common to “intellectuals” as a cultural formation, taking that term as referring to a specifiable cultural formation distinct from scientists and scholars as such. His hope is that even if this formation is generally in disrepute and decline, and if its orienting concepts appear strange to persons comfortably at home in scholarly disciplines, his exercise will nevertheless somehow facilitate “dialogue”—or negotiations—between those members of the seminar who do and those who do not orient to crisis as comprehensive category. In the event, Kettler’s presentation, which occupied the seminar at its first meeting after Kahler’s visit may have contributed as much as Spitz’s polemic to demoralizing the group, perhaps by inadvertently further demystifying Kahler’s “symbolic” authority. As far as can be seen from the documentation, the only other seminar meetings were centered on visits by two guest speakers. There were still echoes of the “crisis” motif, inasmuch as the speakers were variously identified with the dimensions of crisis in Kahler’s prospectus, but neither Anatol Rappaport nor Maurice Stein addressed themselves to Kahler or to a related set of issues. In Pearce’s last letter to Kahler on the subject, he nevertheless persists: I want the seminar to go whole hog and to ask for (a) a version of Hinshaw’s and my proposal for an Institute of Humanistic Studies...and (b) a continuation of the seminar on a permanent basis. Not much chance of a. but we’ve got to try. But frankly, and I dare say it only to you (I feel uncomfortable saying it even to myself) who will lead the group when I go?

Pearce, Falk, Kettler, and two others had leaves scheduled for the following year, and Pearce concludes his correspondence with the seminar members in despair: I should point out that as a group we are in a crisis, I have, despite my embarrassed pleas, received so far only one proposal for a paper for next year—and so am at a loss as to what I shall officially report to [the administration, who have made us a small grant]... The $1200 is waiting to be used—but how, by whom, according to what plan, clerked by whom... We can—I have to say, since I won’t be here, you can—give up, suspend the project, turn the money back. But I fear that then, having not put up, we will have to shut up—so to feel freer than ever to bitch about the University’s unwillingness to support, even on a small scale, projects like ours.”50

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The seminar on crisis, one might say, succumbed to its own crisis. Two years later, Pearce was preparing to leave Ohio State to become the first Chairman in the new Liberal Arts Program at the University of California at San Diego, accompanied by four members of the Kahler Seminar group, including Burckhardt, as well as several other Ohio State faculty. Reporting with eager enthusiasm on a visit by a UC Dean of Engineering keen for the Humanities, Pearce writes Robert Elliott, one of the seminar members who will join Pearce a year after his departure: [The Dean] said: “Since the founding of the University of Chicago, this is the first time when it has been possible to build from the top down. And we are going slow, so as to do it right.” Sig [Burckhardt] came up with the idea of four semesters 3 or more hour course for freshmen and sophomores, involving literature, philosophy and history departments... Idea is to get all assistants in these departments to do this teachings, read papers, have seminars themselves in the books studied, so as to identify themselves as humanists—and to give the kids a solid sense of things.

There was never an Institute of Humanistic Studies at UC San Diego, and Kahler was never invited to visit, but Burckhardt’s scheme was implemented, just as Pearce described it. Pearce maintained a thin correspondence with Kahler, reduced to a rate of one a year after 1965, in reply to Kahler’s New Year’s letters, and consisting of complimentary acknowledgements of publications, requests for help in recruiting certain academics, and apologies for his inability to visit Kahler during one of his many trips to New York City. The principal exception to these formulary letters is the one written in February of 1967, two months after Sigurd Burckhardt’s bewildering suicide, although the last letter in the Kahler file is also noteworthy in that it reports that Pearce is reviewing Kahler’s manuscript for Princeton, the book that was published as “The Orbit of Thomas Mann.”

Exile and Disorder What raises [Pearce’s] essay from the present flood of standard literary criticism, and what I consider its greatest merit...is its emphasis on the human motive behind the artistic one; it brings to light the human problems which informed the very forms of poetic expression. Erich Kahler, “Comment” on the book jacket of Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry

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What sets the great creators apart from ordinary men is not so much the capacity for inspiration, for vision...as the ability to sustain, often for a long time and without letup, the pain of disorder. Sigurd Burckhardt, “How Not to Murder Caesar,” Shakespearean Meanings

As with any story, there are many plausible ways of reading this account of Erich Kahler’s encounter with Ohio State between 1955 and 1961. I propose to take it as a representative tale of intellectual exile. And I find that it confirms, in its own way, what I have found to be tendentially true of such exiles, even when they are not “political” in the strict sense. Gerhard Lauer has shown that Kahler never ceased to regard himself as the true prophet of the “conservative revolution” that was to be the timeless antithesis to the critical disorder of the times. He lived in and for that mission, all the more if it was hopeless. In his curiosity, in his generosity, in his kindliness, he was able to befriend many people who nevertheless remained strangers to his designs. What he lacked, because of the fixation on German Bildung integral to the intellectual position to which he was committed, because of his age, and because of his enclosure within an outpost of exile at Princeton whose boundaries were reinforced by the symbolic significance ascribed to its prime inhabitants—notably Mann, Einstein, and Broch—was the capacity to negotiate intellectual reciprocity with American peers.51 That this failure, as exemplified by the incomprehension among many in the seminar when he returned to Columbus to preach the crisis, deeply disturbed him seems more than likely, notwithstanding the cordiality of his later exchanges with Pearce, in view of the fact that I was already moved to speak of his “shrilly urgent tone” when I characterized his presentation two weeks after he made it. The attempt I made at that time to broker a negotiation between the Ohio State group and Kahler was clearly insufficient, given my limited knowledge and skills and given my even more limited authority at the time, but the impulse was correct. It may be a leap to liken this conception of generating a bargaining platform in relations with exiles to Burckhardt’s conception of reading for metaphors rather than symbols, yet the two conceptions share the distrust of idealizing the otherness of the problematic communication or imagining that it is possible somehow to gain transcendent illumination by surrendering to it. Putting the matter much too crudely, Kahler was brought to Ohio State, after his first visit at the behest of the European “cabal,” to serve as a symbol of Humanism, immersed in culture, tried by exile, and exalted by (intimacy with) celebrity. Everybody concerned found that this was far less than enough. Whatever may be said of the exile experience in this example, it was not the emblem,

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as Said put it, of a “a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture.” The “human motive” at issue was precisely, in Burckhardt’s words, “the ability to sustain, often for a long time and without letup, the pain of disorder.” In such an encounter, Kahler proved to be a talented, decent, energetic “ordinary man,” precluded from many of the shifts that sustain the rest of us by the bitter destiny of exile.

CHAPTER SIX First Letters: The Liquidation of Exile? The “Things” That Happened “Over There” On October 13, 1947, the prominent Weimar cultural critic and Nazi-era émigré living in New York, Siegfried Kracauer, composed the following letter to Wolfgang Weyrauch in Germany, whom he’d encouraged years earlier, when Weyrauch was a beginning journalist and author in Frankfurt who had treated Kracauer as his chosen mentor:1 I have received your letters—including the last one—as well as the books. I am surprised that you now insist on a quick reply, after you never thought to keep up your connections with me throughout the Hitler years and even the years before. Since you overlook this circumstance, I am compelled to mention it. In the meantime things have happened that you know about—things that make it impossible for me simply to resume connections with people over there without being altogether certain of them. Such things are not forgettable. And if it is at all possible to restore trust, it is a far more difficult task than you seem to assume. You also seem to harbor illusions about our life: it has been and it is hard and difficult.2

Six days later, he rewrote the as yet unmailed letter. In the revision, Kracauer replaced the colloquial suggestion that contact might resume after a while with a more personal and concrete—but also less companionable—choice of language, telescoping two of his earlier thoughts, by turning directly to the “things” whose occurrence had made it “infinitely difficult to regain trust in people from over there from whom I have not heard in such a long time.” Finally, replacing his statement about the hardships of exile, he simply concluded with: “I do not want to say anything more. Too much stands in the way.”3 Kracauer’s letter to Weyrauch is an example of the genre I call “First Letters” and which I propose to examine for their witness about the dynamics and dilemmas of exile and return. Briefly characterized, they are letters written as soon as possible after the war by refugees from Nazi Germany to someone known to them earlier who had remained in Germany during the Hitler years,

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including letters in reply to initiatives from German correspondents. I will say more about this genre later and about my reasons for considering it worth study, especially in the context of exile and return, but I want to begin with this concrete case, since there is no general theory to be proposed, given the diversity of writers, occasions, and addressees—only a hermeneutic strategy, and its rationale. First, the fact that Kracauer postponed mailing the letter and then redrafted it signals its more than ordinary importance to him, although the addressee was not an intimate friend, political ally, or professional peer. Second, there is his remarkable unwillingness to speak more precisely of the “things” that happened, a euphemism for mass-murder that he used three times.4 The exclusive use of the émigré’s “over there” (drüben) for Germany is another striking linguistic choice for an exceptionally meticulous writer.5 The revision, then, further increases the distance between the writer and the recipient of the letter. In this case, the “first letter” is a reply to an initiative from Germany, or more precisely a rejection of two offers, contrasting in style, of renewed contact. Weyrauch wrote first in May of 1947, having secured Kracauer’s address from Alfred Kantorowicz, an exile whose own return was rendered comparatively unproblematic by his unshaken political commitments on the Left.6 That letter sought to recapture the strongly personal tone of the letters Weyrauch had written to Kracauer in 1929 and 1930. He tells about his life in Berlin, his editorship of the new satirical periodical, Ulenspiegel, and his several marriages. To anticipate the question of his years in Hitler’s Germany, he assumes an air of disarming frankness, as if to get the issue out of the way: I was in Germany throughout the Nazi years. I also published a few books. Apart from two sentences—one in the year 1941 and the other in April 1945, of which the first was written out of cowardice and the second out of confusion, and about both of which I am ashamed—I neither wrote nor did anything evil. Beginning in 1940, I was a soldier, but I never had to take aim at anyone.7

Kracauer did not answer this letter at all, although he eventually indicates that he did receive it. Four months later, Weyrauch writes a more nearly professional letter, in his capacity as editor of Ulenspiegel, to ask Kracauer for a copy of his recent American book, From Caligari to Hitler; and this time Kracauer sent off his carefully prepared response, so cuttingly devoid of any recognition of Weyrauch’s old or new standing. The meaning of this “first letter”—its deep significance in the context of the presumptive end of Kracauer’s exile—becomes even clearer four years later, when Kracauer suddenly takes the initiative to renew the correspondence.

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Kracauer tells Weyrauch that he has read a report in the American GermanJewish weekly, Aufbau, according to which Weyrauch had published a sort of manifesto calling on German writers to address the fate of German Jews and to lend support to surviving children and the aged.8 Kracauer recalls that he had rejected Weyrauch years earlier and he avows that this makes it all the more incumbent on him to express his pleasure with this action. He feels much better about this letter, he says, than he did about the earlier one.9 Kracauer’s seemingly unconditional rejection of Weyrauch in the “first letter” of 1947 proves to have been subject to revision, after all, except that the terms on which this could happen was not of a sort that could be stated. Weyrauch had to demonstrate without prompting that he was capable of giving recognition to Kracauer, as he had been changed and redefined by his exile, something that could not be done by mere verbal reassurances or by the marks of respect for the great Frankfurt intellectual of earlier years that introduced Weyrauch’s initial approach. In this complex sense, Kracauer’s “first letter” entailed a tacit demand and thus even a tacit offer, notwithstanding the harsh and seemingly categorical language. Kracauer’s surprising initiative after he accepts Weyrauch’s 1951 expostulation against neglect of the German-Jewish fate or its survivors as such a mark of recognition, is followed after a month by a longer letter in which Kracauer amusingly—and almost naively—resumes his much earlier patronizing but avuncular role towards Weyrauch, whom he now urges to leave Worpswede, where he is living while working as an editor in Hamburg, in favor of “a steady connection with a better newspaper or magazine.”10 This tone is all the more surprising inasmuch as Weyrauch’s reply to Kracauer’s conciliatory November letter had taken a serious turn unexpected in these exchanges. He despairs of the manifesto that reconciled Kracauer to him, and he warns against return: But such a manifesto is nothing but a gesture in this land of restoration, selfrighteousness, amnesia, and anti-humanism. No one reads it except those who agree; the others do not read it, or, if they do, they mark the man who wrote it—for later. I know that you do not even think of coming back here. But if you know someone who wants to do it, warn him, please.11

Before turning to the personal matters noted above, Kracauer declares himself impressed by Weyrauch’s report on the likely ineffectuality of his manifesto, noting that it strengthens impressions he’d gained from the newspapers, and he explains why he and his wife would not in any case consider a relocation to Germany, if only because “the life lived in the meantime is worth continuing.” Yet he also insists, strikingly, that this “is no disloyalty, but

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quite the opposite, as you can see from this letter.” The citation of the letter as proof against the charge of “disloyalty” [Untreue] is remarkable not only because it gives further weight to the idea that these letters count as a sort of re-entry into the bargaining relations that had constituted life before exile, often enough in lieu of return, but also because it concedes that a charge of disloyalty would require an answer, notwithstanding the “things,” a response unimaginable if Kracauer’s1947 letter were simply taken out of the context of the end-of-exile process.

Recognition and the Scope of Bargaining The “First Letters” project concerns letters by means of which German exiles of the Hitler years resume communications with former connections in Germany after 1945. It is shaped first of all by the observation that it is precisely the density of communicative grounding in the country of origin that qualifies an émigré as an exile. In earlier writings on the subject, I have spoken of the precondition of being disenfranchised from a status activus, in the sense of citizenship, as in the paradigmatic Roman cases, but with the rise of the “public” in the nineteenth century, ouster from an active role in that communicative space suffices, if it is then followed by coercion sufficient to induce emigration. With this comes a conviction of righteousness, a denunciation of the political justice that has led to displacement.12 An additional dimension of the concept of exile, as it applies to dynamic situations, is the telos of return, which also implies a view of the host country as nothing more than an asylum. If these questions have been irrelevant, there may have been no exile; if they are moot, so that they do not even require explanation, there is no more exile. The “first letters” project arises out of my recent work on the problematic linkage between “exile and return” in the paradigm of recent studies of exile, and my approach derives from my adaptations of the discourse of “negotiations” to the study of exile acculturation.13 First letters are a prime locus for specifying the final cause of the years of displacement; they initiate—and sometimes also close—the process of determining whether and how return matters. Apart from its definitional role in the concept of exile, return also figures in the calculation of what may be stated as the success or bankruptcy of the exile. The application of such terms implies a notion of exile as an enterprise rather than (simply) a destiny. Whatever the precipitating sequence, exile implies a commitment to witness, at minimum, and a hope for vindication, at best. Such a political project, however, is by no means incompatible with a mediated, negotiated outcome; and the “first letters”

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inquiry is methodologically biased in this direction, by the very nature of its exhibits. The great surprise of this study, in its initial stages at least, is the extent to which exile seems to have been brought near to liquidation in these letters. The metaphorical uses of terms like bankruptcy and liquidation have not kept track with current business practice, where they often refer to a comparatively untraumatic process whereby debts are repaid at a discount and assets are applied to new projects. If “success” refers to a return from exile in which the cause of the ousted is vindicated and their mission in some important sense fulfilled, “bankruptcy” covers a range of possibilities that nevertheless share the common quality of dispensing with key elements of the enterprise that defined the exile. The most familiar alternatives include redefinition as immigrant in the land of asylum, cosmopolitan, periodic sojourner in the old land, or member of a diaspora. Nevertheless, these adjustments may be volatile, as indicated in the chapter on Neumann above by the invocation of fluidity as an element of liquidation. The study of “first letters” is a refinement of the inquiry, precisely because it pinpoints the difficulty of conceptualizing “return,” especially in cases of cultural producers, since boundaries have become so fluid and irreversible cultural changes so rapid and deep. My point is not simply that the term has been rendered problematic by contamination with religious and other extended or metaphoric senses of exile, but also that the conditions of late modernity greatly complicate the circumstances even in cases where the political paradigm would prima facie apply, where we are talking, in short, about individuals who were forced to leave because causes in which they were actively engaged—and that were construed as political by their enemies, if not by themselves—who had suffered defeat, who were subject to “political justice” in its most egregious form, and who found themselves in the special situation of the political émigré, forced to negotiate for recognition and livelihood in a more or less welcoming place of asylum. Without in any sense denigrating the sincerity of the emotional expressiveness in many of these letters or assuming that the Romantic construct of the personal letter between intimates does not enter at all, especially when they are addressed to old friends, I think that these “first letters” should be understood as opening moves in a (re)negotiation of relationships, under conditions of uncertainty, stating the terms on which the writer offers and seeks “recognition,” as well as implying a model of some provisional bargaining rules. The point about such complex negotiations is that the bargaining about the issues “on the table” often includes as well a process of meta-bargaining about the issues deemed negotiable and non-negotiable, about the duration proposed for whatever “settlement” is reached, about the parties who are

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literally or virtually present at the table, about the constituencies spoken to or for, etc. The reason that the present project cannot be fully comprehended by the attractive and partially applicable metaphor of chess openings, then, is precisely that the rules themselves may be subject to revision in the course of the negotiating game—and there are no winners, in any simple sense. It is important to underline that the investigation of these “first letters” does not presuppose that the writers are uniformly seeking recognition of some sort of deep conception of their own identities at the end of their enforced absence and silence, justification of their exiles, or validation—although any or all of these objectives may be present. As we saw in Kracauer’s revision of his first draft, the writer may avoid exposing himself as much as possible, given that every letter is a risk (and that many probes from Germany were doubtless ignored). The exiled writers may well vary dramatically in the distance they will be seeking to establish, at least at the outset, in the roles they assume and the functions they propose for the contacts. Again, the study does not presuppose that these letters will necessarily be confessional in nature, since it is precisely a matter of great interest to distinguish how much or how little of themselves the authors are prepared to risk in these initial negotiations. We do not take “recognition” in the sense made familiar by the literature of identity and its underlying psychological theories. Instead, the present use of the term derives from international relations or, more precisely, from the history of collective bargaining in labor relations. Although “recognition” as a state in the former case or as collective bargaining agent in the latter tends to have a stabilized meaning underpinned by legal institutions, these institutions are themselves subject to endogenous as well as exogenous political changes. The recognition of China as a sovereign international actor, for example, may exclude, as is the case at present in relation to the United States, its claim to incorporate Taiwan and Tibet. Similarly, other states may or may not recognize the claims to a kind of hegemony over Latin America variously made by the United States since the time of the Monroe Doctrine. In the case of labor relations, the history of collective bargaining shows a surprising variety, ranging from the recognition of unions as total masters of the labor process to their mere recognition as advisers to employees with complaints. When the parties bargain, the process may impact the bargaining framework—and thus implicitly the terms of recognition—no less than it affects the issues expressly under negotiations. There is more fluidity in the deformalized negotiating structures at issue in the study of exile and return, where the exiled musical theorist earlier defined by his hostility to the enthusiasm and preferences of the conventional educated public, for example, may be required to settle for recognition as an initiate in classical music appreciation in his place of asylum; or where the

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exiled writer, at the moment when return from exile becomes possible, may be unwilling to ask for more than a return to the catalogue of published authors, or where he may seek and fail to receive recognition as someone entitled to speak about the recent events that he fled to oppose. Such fluidity is manifest in the correspondence between Kracauer and Weyrauch, although it naturally cannot become clear until we consider a number of exchanges. Kracauer begins by rejecting outright Weyrauch’s attempts, first to return to the mutual recognitions of 1932 and then to shift to a level of mutual professional regard. He asked to be recognized as someone too profoundly hurt and too securely reestablished to have any dealings with Weyrauch at all. Weyrauch’s initiative much later to meet the first demand, if only indirectly, unexpectedly achieved the mode of mutuality to which he had originally aspired. When we review these letters from the standpoint of our interest in exile and return as culturalpolitical phenomena, we take distance from the purely personal stories of these complex human relations to a dynamic view of the status, with the agency of the principal actors referred to their operations in a strategic domain.

Simple Cases There are, of course, “first letters” that fit easily in the political reading of “exile and return.” The leftist writer, Alfred Kantorowicz, for example, although well placed as Director of the CBS short-wave station in New York City, wrote to the German author, Ernst Kästner, in March of 1946: These have been stormy years for us and they can be summed up [by saying that] we are in the fourteenth year of our exile, which we view as exile, now as before, although we have done well in this—in contrast to France—truly hospitable country.14

Kantorowiz made his return a short while later to the Soviet zone of Germany, notwithstanding earlier quarrels with the Communist Party to which he belonged in the years of the great Popular Front movements, and he remained many years in the DDR. A different political writer whose time in exile, as in Germany before and after, was devoted to vehemently idiosyncratic and anti-popular-front politics—pacifist, anarchist, gay—Kurt Hiller, similarly indicated to Kästner in April of 1946, “I belong in Germany and will naturally return.” He was not at all shy about insisting on the correctness of his political views both before and after his exile, and prided himself not only on having been among the first hundred persons stripped of his citizenship by the Nazis but also on his defiance. He writes Kästner, whom he restores without question to the status of ally, in recollection of

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their time together in an oppositional formation within the pro-Communist writers’ group in the last year of the Weimar Republic: It is only an accident that I am still alive. On the 14th of July 1933, the SS whipped me three-quarters to death in the Berlin Columbia-House. And by the way, I published to the last detail everything that I experienced in the Nazi dungeons…15

For Hiller, no talk of “things” that happened “over there.” In the event, he did not actually go back to Germany until 1955—naturally to the Federal Republic—but his activities were all predicated on his return. The cases of Kantorowicz and Hiller should not lead to the conclusion that the difference between the straightforward “political” model of exile and the more complex and ambiguous one corresponds simply to the difference between the Left and others among the émigrés, leaving aside the cases of active Communists, whose enactment of classical exile and return was organizationally defined. Someone like Hans Mayer, however, who did move to the DDR after his first years of return to Germany, spent the rest of his long life as literary critic and publicist wondering about the relationships among the categories of exile, cosmopolitan, and outsider, all of which he considered appropriate to himself—provided only that the “exile” be recognized as of a kind that permitted no “return.”16 Even in the case of Communist Party members who return to assume a share of power in the Soviet Zone of Occupation immediately after the defeat of the National Socialist regime, the seemingly self-evident return may be cast in terms that are surprisingly remote from a simple conviction of validation. Johannes R. Becher, for example, who complied successfully with all the ugly requirements for survival during the years of Moscow exile and is brought back to Germany almost immediately by the leaders of his party, writes first letters to individuals badly compromised by their conduct under the Nazis as if their separation had been a sort of industrial accident that could now be passed over in the name of a common repair of German culture. There are scholarly disagreements about the extent to which his letters of solicitation to Gerhart Hauptmann and Hans Fallada, for example, should be understood as nothing more than more or less mechanical compliance with the terms of tactics decreed by his party and military government superiors, but the case for taking them rather as negotiating tenders by Becher on his own behalf is strengthened by other correspondence in the archives. Shortly after his arrival, he writes ecstatically to his wife: Everything is different—the old refrain. And Berlin is Berlin. Despite everything, one does not return to a strange land. Children sing in German. Mothers speak German—and the trees along the streets, and the green on the balconies—I am happy beyond measure.17

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Writing a month later to Anton Kippenberg, who had been his publisher during the years of avant garde experimentation, he legitimates himself by saying that he had become a genuinely “German poet” only during his years of absence but that he had throughout his time away viewed Insel Verlag, the professor to whom he is writing, and his wife “in the distance as a genuine symbol of German spiritual values.”18 There is nothing here of the political scenario of return from exile.

“Let Ball!” Hermann Kesten and Erich Kästner Hermann Kesten and Erich Kästner were well-known members of the generation that came of age in Weimar Germany, which is the generation of special interest here, if only because the question of return in their cases has the greatest saliency. They were old enough to have been active before Hitler and young enough to weigh their post-war options without distracting calculations about retirement. Kesten was born in 1900 and Kästner in 1899. In the later Weimar years, both were well-recognized literary figures, in the extended German sense that includes criticism, cultural essayism, editorial activities, cabaret and theater scriptwriting, and contributions to non-print media, as well as the authorship of novels, poems, and stories. Kesten was best known in the Weimar period as editor for a serious publisher, although he published a number of novels, and Kästner first became famous as author of several path-breaking children’s books, notably Emil und die Detektive, and then in 1931 published a novel Fabian, that was widely taken as a representative mordant summing up of the Weimar years. Neither was strikingly radical in literary style or strongly leftist in his politics,19 although both were among the cosmopolitan, republican authors who had at least some of their books burned by National Socialist students in the infamous ceremonies of 1933. Kästner was even present at one such burning. Kesten went into exile immediately after Hitler’s assumption of power, circulating among several Western European locations in Holland, Belgium, and France, until his flight to the United States in 1940 after some weeks in French detention; but Kästner, although excluded from the National Socialist guild of licensed authors, remained in Germany, despite general expectations among literary émigrés that he would join them, and despite several opportunities through authorized visits abroad in the immediate pre-war years. Kesten was Jewish, born in Galicia but detached from the community of Eastern Jews, and Kästner was born of a lower middle-class Christian family in Nürnberg. In their correspondence at the very beginning of the Hitler period and after its end, as in their letters to third parties, they speak of one another as friends, although Kesten joins his most constant correspondent in exile, the non-Jewish writer and editor, Franz Schoenberner, during the mid-thirties in disparaging

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the evident accommodations that made it possible for Kästner to sell his books in Germany (although having to be published elsewhere) and to work on newspapers and in film under transparent pseudonyms. Kesten does not even object when Schoenberner, writing in 1940, includes Kästner among a group of writers who “all have more or less become Nazis.”20 A curious feature of their correspondence at several critical moments is, first, a recurrent tone of ironic levity that amounts almost to facetiousness, and, second, a constant recurrence to the theme of tennis, which had obviously been a shared activity but which evidently also served Kästner, according to one of his biographers, as a part of his self-protective persona during the Hitler years. Both of the letters from Kästner to Kesten in the first months of Kesten’s exile invoke tennis, almost as a talisman. On April 4, 1933, writing from Italy en route to Zürich, Kästner expresses pleasure that Kesten feels well [wohl] in Paris—quite as if Kesten had gone there for a change of scenery—indicates that he may at some time “come by” to visit, but not on this business trip, which will take him back to Stuttgart, and concludes: “Tennis I play like a substitute member of the Davis Cup team.”21 Six weeks later, on May 26, after the Reichstag fire in Berlin and the flight of many more of their mutual friends—several of whom he’d met as they were arriving in and he was departing from Zürich—Kästner takes up the same curious tone: “I heard from [a mutual friend] that he has seen you and that he will soon see you again. That can make someone like me feel downright envious. Are you feeling quite well settled [wohl] in Paris?” That the correspondence is anything but normal, however, is evident from the next sentence: “L. told me that you asked—only by way of a joke, I hope—whether I would be pleased to hear news from you. How can you doubt it? Write to me very soon.” He immediately lowers the temperature with the question: “And tell me finally that you are playing tennis in Paris. Against whom? Have you managed to bring about a literary men’s singles pairing?” He concludes with a reference to his own lack of productivity and a lame joke to the effect that his laziness would be against the law if it did not so well accord with the wishes of the law’s enforcers.22 Neither the light nor the more stern passages acknowledge the reality that Kesten is in exile, in quite a different social-political space. Kesten, in contrast, knows it quite well. A week before he receives the first of the two letters from Kästner, he writes to Ernst Toller, who is sharing his fate: In Paris, I feel as if saved…. Dear friend, and on what shall we live? …. What a dream is exile. One takes a chance and crosses a border, and in an instant the terror is “foreign,” and immediately one begins to question this domestic horror, and has one really grasped it in full at home.23

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Kästner’s letter in May of 1933 is evidently the last correspondence between the two men until Kesten’s “first letter” on April 16, 1946, in which Kesten writes quite definitively, as if in answer to Kästner’s letter thirteen years earlier: “I stopped playing tennis long ago.” Here is the full text of this “first letter”: Dear Kästner, I do not know if my greetings reached you. How are you? Here and there, I read an essay or poem of yours. If this letter gets to you, let me hear from you right away. Then I too will tell you at length about my strolls through global catastrophes and in detail about my escapades, and how I wrote my way through thirteen grim years. I stopped playing tennis long ago. And I have also stopped writing in coffee houses; there are no proper coffee houses in New York. I live on the eleventh floor along the Hudson; the large ships anchor in front of my window before they travel to Europe. Allert de Lange has invited me to travel to Europe this summer, but I will perhaps put this off until the following year. Then I will come as an uncle from America, speak a German intermixed with English, and shed a tear like Hannibal at the sight of Carthage. My mother and my wife send you regards. How is your family? And did you get at least thirteen years older during these thirteen years, as I did? And how are you anyway? I published a selection of Heine in German in Amsterdam and in English in New York and London—that forbidden poet (do you still remember?) who lost sleep when he thought of Germany in the night; he clearly did not know what it could mean. I am very happy that you are still living and functioning, and in Munich in the American Zone. We must see each other again soon. With friendly greetings, Your old, Hermann Kesten.24

Kesten begins with a reference to a letter he had evidently mailed in January, and the continuing uncertainty about the mail doubtless helps to explain the surprising brevity of the present letter. The earlier text, still shorter, and evidently undelivered, exists. It combines fond formulas of pleasure at Kästner’s survival, good wishes, and hopes for a future reunion with a businesslike solicitation of manuscripts for the publisher for whom Kesten serves as editor. It could have been one of many such letters written in his capacity as acquisition editor. If we take it rather as a kind of “first letter,” the striking thing would be Kesten’s evident preference to let Kästner set the actual tone of any future correspondence, given Kesten’s clear indication that he would welcome it.25 Quite surprisingly, he seemed to think that it was Kästner’s serve, although he had the ball in his hands.

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In the second and somewhat more revealing “first letter” reproduced above, then, Kesten still puts a lot of emphasis on the urgency of a reply, and he makes an account of his exile conditional on first hearing Kästner’s report of his years in Germany. The surprising self-deprecation in Kesten’s linguistic evocation of the picaresque as he speaks about those years is compounded by his grotesque mix of the music hall cliché about the “Uncle from America” and his cabaret mockery of Bildungskultur to belittle his eventual visit to Germany. Kesten is too experienced a writer to miss the tensions, quite apart from his ironic manner, between the “uncle” who unquestionably continues to belong in America and the Carthaginian commander who comes home from military defeat to political triumph…and eventual exile. His parodic vamping on the two best-known Heine citations in the last paragraph also bespeaks Kesten’s evident unease in this letter, especially striking since these intervals of forced levity are interspersed with quite ordinary statements of concern for the wellbeing of Kästner. The parenthetical question whether Kästner still remembers Heine—or his having been prohibited—is a further sign of discomfort with the air of camaraderie that seems to be intended. A powerful conjunction near the middle of the letter is the reference to the American lack of cafés, which had been the principal sites of the social contacts between them, and the Europe-bound boats Kesten sees from his window. This could be read as an expression of longing, but also an enactment of great, unbridgeable distances in time and place. It may not be far-fetched to say, in the idiom of Kästner’s sport, that Kesten was now satisfied just to get the ball across the net and somehow into play. Because of this marked tentativeness, it seems especially prudent in this case to heed the suggestion that it may be the second letter, which serves as the “first letter” in the sense of putting forward some terms for the relationship. In this context, Kästner’s reply is important. He opens with a report on his family in Dresden, and notes his regret at his inability to see them, a theme of more than casual interest, since it was widely thought that Kästner’s refusal to go into exile was due to his special closeness to his mother. In a sentence, he summarizes the time he spent in the Tyrol and the move to Munich, his escape from Berlin in the last months of the war in the company of film makers who are able to take advantage of the propaganda claim that Germany will not be defeated to secure license and resources for a film to be made on location—a subject to which he devotes a book-length memoir some years later, where he presents himself as someone living in effect underground, a claim he never makes to Kesten. There follows a remarkable chain of associations. He begins by saying that he’d heard of Kesten’s Heine edition and that he’d actually read and owned one of the historical novels that he published in the mid-1930s (a work that

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has oppression and expulsion as its central theme). This occasions a quick aside that the book had burned in good company in Berlin in 1944, referring to the loss of his apartment in an air raid but also awakening a reminiscence of the earlier book burnings—“in good company”—where he and Kesten shared the same fate. There may even be the suggestion of a kind of symmetry between those responsible for the burnings in both cases. The paragraph ends, remarkably enough, with the return to the presumed bond of tennis: It has been a long time for me as well since I have had a chance to play tennis. But an acquaintance from Switzerland has recently brought back tennis shoes and some tennis balls, so that I will have no choice at the next fair weather but to make my way to a tennis court.

Then come three short paragraphs punctuated by the phrase “very soon” (recht bald). Kesten is to come to Europe very soon, he is to send a contribution to the cultural section of the American newspaper for the American zone edited by Kästner very soon, and he is to write again very soon. There is something here about countering the thirteen years that had elapsed by invoking a certain immediacy. But there is also a lowering of expectations. About the hopedfor visit, Kästner writes a sentence on the borderline between good-natured joshing and condescension: It would give me special pleasure to shake your hand once again and afterwards to be able to listen as you chat about the various banalities that are the foundation of the story-teller’s art.

About the solicited article, he says nothing more than, “all you would have to keep in mind would be the maximal length.” Kästner, in short, does not appear eager to hear Kesten tell about his “strolls through global catastrophes and in detail about my escapades.” The references to Dresden, which need no explication, and the bombing of Berlin, serve as a caution against Kesten’s making too much of the hardships of emigration.26 Except for two brief, almost incidental passages, one of them unexpectedly fierce, Kesten accepts the implicit terms of limitation in his reply. There is much in the letter that friendly fellow-authors might write to each other after a month or two: I see that you are busy; what have you been writing; can you tell me about some mutual friends. There is even an amusing literary setting of the scene in Provincetown, where Kesten is spending the summer, complete with a charming niece and “women painters standing on the beach in bathing suits, thirty at a time, painting the sea,” who scatter and leave the beach to the screaming gulls when the weather gets cool and harsh. He includes some news

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of writers both know, some of them present in Provincetown, others returned from Europe enthusiastic about Switzerland and Holland. In one place, he speaks of them as “German” writers and in another, as neo-Americans. Then there is Germany, but treated with distance. Reports from Germany given by friends “sound quite as depressing as may be expected after all that happened.” His response at the outset of the letter to Kästner’s mention of his parents having survived in Dresden contains a puzzling word, which may be related to that almost unconcerned tone. He congratulates Kästner on their having withstood what he oddly calls “all the famous horrors of Dresden,” using a term, “berühmt,” that can hardly withstand a somewhat slighting connotation. His later reference to Germany continues, “although I abandoned Germany more than thirteen years ago, I still write about Germany, the one I knew,” and he instances his recent “The Twins of Nürnberg” but specifies the Germany he knew by referring to the friends who appear in the book—people, not a place. The first exception to the ordinariness of the shared world conjured up by the letter comes in the midst of a longwinded request to help him find the addresses of some school friends “about whom I assume with some confidence that they were never Nazis.” He says that a letter sent to what he believed to be the address of one of them was returned with a notation that the house had been destroyed, but he adds that he cannot be sure he had the address right “since all of my letters and notes lay scattered somewhere in Europe, in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Nice, etc., and were everywhere confiscated or destroyed by the Gestapo, or stolen by others.” This is one of the two places, then, where Kesten alludes to the circumstances of his absence. The other occurs in an interesting, possibly ambiguous place, given the history of émigré controversy about Kästner’s writings during the Nazi era. He asks Käsner to write down the titles of all his books after 1938. The others, he says, can be found in the New York Public Library, where he has also been able to find books of his own that he was unable to bring along. Of course, there were also theatrical pieces and stories that were never published and must be presumed lost. Suddenly he introduces a different tone, although by a deceptively harmless route. “Perhaps I will find them again in Germany one of these days,” he writes, but then continues, “in contrast to the dozens and dozens of relatives and friends, who were also lost to me in Europe (mostly in German gas chambers) and whom I will never find again.” On the assumption governing this exercise that these writers know exactly what they are doing, and mean to do it, I suggest that this passage deliberately tests the extent to which the terms of reference can be expanded; it is a move in what I call the meta-bargaining about the negotiating structure that is never

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altogether absent. Of course, it follows after Kesten has blocked Kästner’s earlier initiative in the mentions of Dresden and Berlin. Kesten continues in the next paragraph with the theme of seeking the lost, but now the question returns almost to the level of professional news. He asks after two writers, whose names he has not seen in the German periodicals, one of them a younger author whose first book he’d edited and the other a writer in exile who was overtaken by the Germans in Holland. And that then provides the segue to “Who is your German publisher?” and the usual sort of shop talk about authors seeking the best possible publication arrangements. The letter closes with hopes for a quick reply.27 The contours of the constraints governing these letters to Kästner become evident, as in the case of the letters at the beginning of exile, when the letters are compared—in this case—with letters addressed to the two individuals Kesten especially asked Kästner to help him find: the best friend from school days and the younger writer. There is no space here to report on these letters at length, but they are full of details about the pains of exile and especially the list of the writers who are dead, not a few of them by suicide.28 Unlike the letters to Kästner, these are letters by someone who is still an anti-fascist exile. For present purposes, their principal importance is the contrast they provide to the letter to Kästner. In a wider context, they give occasion to think about the whole question of individuals varying their presentations of relations to the central themes of exile and return to different persons at home, and thus to the complex problems of resolving the next stages of their relations with others.

Renegotiations: Ernst Fraenkel A different dimension of complexity is exemplified by a 3000-word “first letter,” that the one-time Socialist labor lawyer, Ernst Fraenkel—having chosen to serve in Korea as civil legal advisor to the occupation forces, as he explains, rather than assuming some such function in Germany—addressed to both wife and husband in the family of the Social Democratic labor intellectual, Otto Suhr, intimate friends and comrades in arms in resistance to the Nazis until Fraenkel’s departure in 1937.29 Fraenkel describes his early isolation within the political emigration in New York, which appeared deluded to him in its expectations of internal revolution in Germany, and describes the unforced shift in allegiance to America that overtook both him and his wife, not least because of the deep impression on them of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt— although the latter is epitomized in the letter by an occasion when Eleanor Roosevelt appears at an emigrant meeting to show that “she knew how to distinguish between Nazis and Germans who see the struggle for democracy

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as their own.” Then the ambiguous story of a transition from exile is abruptly brought to a head: The decisive turning set in for me in 1943 [...]. It was at that time that we first heard about the gas chambers in Auschwitz [...]. As it became clear that these were not propaganda reports but facts, I deliberately and in full awareness of the significance of the step cut the cord between myself and Germany and determined never to return to Germany. It would be completely impossible for me to retrieve the impartiality necessary to live and to function in that land. In the relationship between Germans and Jews, now that 5,000,000 Jews have been murdered, I feel solidarity with the Jews—and only with them. I do not believe that it can be expected of any Jew that he will ever in future live in Germany [...]. I was in Germany long enough to know that a considerable proportion of the German population endorsed Hitler’s measures against the Jews. After this campaign has led to massacre, it is not permissible for me as a Jew ever again to make the cause of this people my own. That may sound bitter. I feel very bitter on this question. I believe that this wound can never be healed.30

Although not a few among the Jewish exiles may have shared some such feelings, as we can also read beneath the surface of Kracauer’s first letter, Fraenkel’s epistolary statement depends on the, doubtless, much rarer circumstance that he had such deep trust in Suhr himself and such a history of commitment to the German labor movement that he felt both obliged and enabled to speak out in this way. There is no talk of “things” (Dinge) or “over there” (Drüben) here. Yet even this initial categorical statement proved to be only an “opener.” The letter closes with pressing inquiries into the wellbeing of mutual friends and a loving recital of his German way stations, all the places where he had spoken during the Weimar years and where he had been recognized. He refers to a labor functionary whom he does not remember, but who had asked Suhr about him, and he remarks, “that he did not forget me led me to review once again all the questions discussed in this letter.” He reports, moreover, that he is asked daily by one or another of his American colleagues how “that” could have happened in Germany—meaning not the atrocities, he notes, but the rape [Vergewaltigung] of such a people as the Germans. Fraenkel concludes, then, in terms that hardly harmonize with his claims of a categorical break with the German years: And when I think of the thousands of [labor] functionaries that I came to know in the course of almost twenty years, this riddle seems no more soluble now than on the first day. The question will pursue us from Berlin, via Washington to Seoul. It is the black cloud in our life. Will your efforts succeed in extinguishing

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the memory of the time of shame by erecting a new Germany? I admire your courage and your confidence.

Five years later, we find Ernst Fraenkel teaching at the Hochschule für Politik in Berlin, with Otto Suhr as his Director, but the seeming self-contradiction—or what some might censoriously call a self-betrayal—was in fact the outcome of a series of negotiating moves, mostly mediated by Fraenkel’s lifelong friend, Franz Neumann, who used his influence with American authorities to secure Fraenkel a position, in effect, as an American representative in the new German discipline of Political Science. As can be tracked during his first semesters by Fraenkel’s dutiful reports to his American principals in the military government, somewhat embarrassing in their tone of eager deference, he set out to transmute the older socialist versions of self-governance into the American concept of pluralism and its modalities of bargaining within constraints of constitutional principle. Then too, the conjunction of American anti-Communism with the social-democratic resistance to pressures from the East, especially in Berlin, also helped to redefine the terms of discussion between Fraenkel and Suhr. Fraenkel’s initial resolution on an exclusively Jewish identity proved to be only one of several possibilities.31 The case is so deeply instructive because it shows that even the most profound and seemingly absolute issues may be subjected to negotiated settlements, without dishonor. When Fraenkel eventually sealed his “return” from exile by the assumption of German citizenship, it was a routine matter related to his pension, done after his retirement and after the student protests of the early 1960s, with their strong opposition to American practices and policies, had left Fraenkel bitterly convinced of the failure of his political-educational mission.32

Denial of Exile A “first letter” to the political writer, Dolf Sternberger, from the Germanist, Oskar Seidlin, written after his visit to Sternberger in the uniform of an American army officer, shows how eager some emigrants of Jewish extraction were to avoid permitting the events that had ravaged Fraenkel from creating an abyss between themselves and the German friends with whom they sought above all to be reunited. Fraenkel’s letter suggests, above all, that he had posed precisely the pivotal question about the end of exile, when he announced that he could no longer make the German cause his own. Seidlin, in contrast, writes at a critical moment in his first letter to Sternberger: That in these days I do not share the fate that should actually have been my own, that I must put pity in place of participation, is an absurd arbitrariness like

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others that have dogged my life’s career, which seems forever condemned to be at a tangent to inner reality.33

The passage is so striking because Seidlin’s doubtless sincere empathy with Sternberger and his wife—he speaks of the “shame” that binds his tongue— overlooks that the fate he had escaped would have been in fact quite different from that of the German journalist, who had after all been permitted to serve as editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung until 1943. Seidlin certainly knew, even in 1945, about the murder of his own Jewish parents in a death camp. The particular circumstances under which Seidlin’s letter was written doubtless contributed to his self-denying gesture of identification, since it was written after a first visit to Sternberger and his wife by Seidlin, where he arrived with all the attributes and privileges of an officer in the American army, while they were living in hardship quite early in the post-war occupation of Germany (1 August 1945). Yet there is more than the momentary embarrassment about the contrast between the well-fed victor and undernourished defeated in Seidlin’s exaggerated deference to the superior spiritual standing of his interlocutor, which amounts almost to abnegation. Seidlin continues: If you keep this in mind, you will perhaps understand why I was so happy to be with you, because the sidetracked direction of my life suddenly returned to its entelechy, because suddenly the pictures that had become so diffuse came into focus in their “proper” perspective—even if it is a perspective of great misery, which is in fact no longer quite so miserable as long as it is adequate to the inner oneness in essence.34

Seidlin’s pathetic reiteration of themes from the breviary of high Bildung does not make him forget to send a shaving kit to Sternberger, some shoes, and a variety of canned foods and juices. And it also does not preclude an element of bargaining in the correspondence. Although the language is guarded, it seems clear that Seidlin wants to be involved as broker in Sternberger’s effort to resume publication of the Frankfurter Zeitung, and that he does not see himself as being in any position to set terms for such a contribution. This may be an awkward—even slightly distrustful—way of characterizing Seidlin’s sincere effort to be of help, but it arises out of passages where Seidlin employs a rhetoric of persuasion, to win Sternberger’s tolerance of influential but quite possibly unpleasant contacts that Seidlin is attempting to connect for him. Seidlin is seeking acceptance as co-participant in a phase of German reconstruction, as an active collaborator and not merely as an onlooker, however sympathetic, and especially not as an external benefactor. If exile is defined as involuntary displacement from

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a practical civic role, as I suggested earlier, then return entails some kind of recognized resumption of such a role. The mode of return can even redefine the conditions of departure, as would be the case with Seidlin, who was only a beginning student when he fled in 1933 because of his exclusion from the university as a Jew, and who doubtless did not see his studious activities as bearing the character of an action in public. It is perhaps only in the light of the negotiations addressed to a kind of return that Seidlin’s years as refugee in America come into focus as an exile, although the exile itself, strangely enough, is made to appear almost without a cause, which Seidlin might have considered as having been vindicated. The situation is fraught with contradictions, and this may be among the grounds for the mannered style and melodrama in the letter, with repeated cries of “O Gott!” to confess his impotence to set things right. Seidlin returned to the United States after his military service and enjoyed a fairly prominent academic career in two midwestern universities. He was recognized as a cultivated literary specialist in Germany, too, but not as a public figure in any sense, and clearly as an American.

Failed Negotiations: The Non-Return of Hans Gerth While the sociologist Hans Gerth resembles Oscar Seidlin in addressing his first letter to Dolf Sternberger, a circumstance that calls attention to the standing of the latter as a kind of icon of the so-called “inner emigration,” and while he resembles Seidlin as well in effectively calling his own exile into question by deferring to the greater suffering undergone by his German correspondent, he differs from Seidlin in virtually every respect of background, intellectual interests, and style. Gerth had been the most loyal and trusted student of Karl Mannheim, a sociologist bitterly opposed by Karl Jaspers, who had been Sternberger’s mentor and who was co-founder with him of the post-war periodical whose first copy elicited Gerth’s letter. Gerth had followed Mannheim from Heidelberg to Frankfurt, when Mannheim became professor there in 1930, and he had written a dissertation on early liberalism that adhered more closely to Mannheim than the work of any of the other Mannheim students.35 Unaffected by the measures against those the Nazi regime classed as Jews, Gerth remained in Germany until 1937 working as a journalist and cultural commentator on one of the less fiercely coordinated metropolitan newspapers, but he left Germany when his leftist political past and some risky writing put him in danger. His first stop in exile was a visit in London with Mannheim, who recommended him to Louis Wirth at the University of Chicago, Mannheim’s American sponsor, and who also dispatched him as his spokesman to a conference of American sociologists at which Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia was subjected to intense critical scrutiny.

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Gerth eventually found employment at the University of Wisconsin, where he became well known through his publication, together with his former student C. Wright Mills, of a long-standard edition of excerpts from the works of Max Weber.36 It should also be noted that Gerth felt deeply aggrieved by several circumstances of his time of emigration. First, as will appear in the letters, he was treated with suspicion or worse by some of his earlier associates, who distrusted his journalistic employment in Nazi Germany until 1937. Second, he felt especially hard-pressed by the regulations restricting “enemy aliens,” perhaps because these may have been more harshly applied in the mid-West than in the metropolitan centers of the East. His dependence on his former student, Mills, for organizing and securing publication for his work, third, grated on him and resulted in conflicts that have been used in case studies of academic ethics and competition.37 In the first months of 1946, the year of his Weber book, Gerth undertook to re-establish contact with Sternberger, in order to thank him, first of all, for the recognition he thought had been signaled by his receipt of a copy of Sternberger’s new periodical and, second, to see whether he could consequently win a place for himself in this new enterprise. As was the case with Seidlin, the idea of mediating a return of sorts through first gaining a voice and testing his ability to cultivate a public was a central motif of his bid to this addressee. It is impossible to know from the available evidence how far Gerth’s first letters were written in awareness of the angry struggle set in motion by Thomas Mann’s public rejection of Walter von Molo’s plea to return in August of 1945, and consequently how far he means to align himself expressly with the “inner emigration” against the exiles, but the effect is clear.38 Because of the uncertain postal situation, Gerth actually wrote three “first” letters in his eagerness, one of them a continuation of the very first, as well as a literary “letter from America,” also cast as a “first letter” but submitted for possible publication in Sternberger’s “Transformation” [Die Wandlung]. The resemblance between the initial negotiating postures of Seidlin and Gerth— the determination to disarm any fear that they might conduct themselves as victors—is clearest in the following passage, which captures the spirit of the whole, although written in the limited context of Gerth’s cautious criticisms of some points in a translation by Sternberger of T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker”: May I point out, nevertheless, that there are a few lines that are not too successful or successfully achieved? You won’t be offended? (After so many years of estrangement, one no longer knows “how far” one may “go,” when one writes from so far away, to what extent one is accepted as being a part of things nonetheless. And I recognize that someone who has not been subjected to bombardment and who has not stood up to such things must conduct himself

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with due modesty.) Well then, I hope that you are able to smile indulgently if I take some liberties.39

This exaggerated exercise in ingratiation is hardly the language of someone who still believes that he was right to extricate himself from the need to compromise daily with the ever more unconscionable demands imposed on him by Nazi control of the newspaper where he was employed, especially since he was writing to someone who remained in such employment until late in the war—as editor of Siegfried Kracauer’s Frankfurter Zeitung, as it happens. Yet it is probably too strong to conclude that Gerth is declaring the exile a total failure. A more precise but no less paradoxical characterization of Gerth’s approach in these letters is that he is essaying a virtual return from exile, analogous to the inner emigration generally claimed for Sternberger. In his initial letter, Gerth indicates the terms on which he is prepared to align himself with Sternberger, using an expression that was already a term of art for the latter. Speaking of Hanna Arendt and her former husband, whom they had both known in Heidelberg, Gerth writes: She once wrote about you with a sneer—and I too was nothing more than a defector for her. These people believed that literally leaving the scene was the only method of struggle, and they lacked the patience and insight for “reading between the lines,” and the like. I saw [Hannah Arendt’s first husband] Gunther Stern for the first and only time when I arrived at Christmas 1937. The fool wanted to spit at my feet.40

Gerth’s long letter of February 1, 1946 can be characterized by noting that an attempt to outline its contents yielded at least fifty separate units, variously containing thoughts and information related to numerous distinct topics, including assorted suggestions for his proposed “Letters from America” contributions to Sternberger’s publication, possible contacts for Sternberger among American and émigré journalists and editors, information about current intellectual fashions in America, reports about his situation and his family concerns, comments on American immigration policy and recent developments regarding the occupation, news about mutual acquaintances among the émigrés and inquiries about friends in Germany, an outline of and apologia for his publication of Max Weber translations, bits of political analysis of prospects in Germany, as well as stray cultural news. This over-brimming communication, precisely because of its similarity to the conversational style remarked by Gerth’s American students, suggests an epistolary experiment in acting as if there were no distance between them, as if they could simply resume.

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There is some danger of over-interpreting Gerth’s curiously disconnected writing, since he was notorious among his American students for his monologues by free association, in and out of the lecture room.41 Yet a certain nervous haste and insistence is nevertheless noteworthy, especially in the insertion of incongruous matter, like the abrupt excursus on Catholicism in America in his very first paragraph. A comparison with the meticulously edited “First Letter” written by his early occasional journalistic mentor, Siegfried Kracauer, is striking, quite apart from the difference in tone and design. It is interesting, by the way, to compare Kracauer’s fastidious distance from the “things” that happened “over there” with Gerth’s formulaic and exculpatory euphemisms about “uproar and bellowing” and “intoxication and frenzy.” A first explanation for a fundamental difference in attitude, which is obvious but nevertheless has implications for our inquiry as a whole, is that Gerth has family in Germany, as Kracauer does not and effectively cannot have, since he is Jewish.42 The letters by Oscar Seidlin and by the political activists discussed earlier shows that this is not an automatic factor, but nevertheless a consequential one, with regard to which deviant case analysis is profitable. For Gerth in relation to Sternberger, in any case, the proposal comes down to a hope to be accepted by some Germans at least as a “German Abroad,” almost as if he were an agent, who might yet be recalled. Gerth’s other attempts to reopen contact with Sternberger exhibit greater awareness that he cannot simply plump down a bottle of wine and return to a seat at the kitchen table; if they are to sit down together it must be first at a bargaining table. The second letter in February 1946, as noted, opens with an apologetic formula whose application cannot be limited to the specific occasion. For the rest, the letter continues much in the vein of the earlier one, with reports of his attempts to gain a wider hearing for Sternberger’s journal and inquiries about mutual acquaintances. Abruptly, Gerth drops in a schoolmasterly report on a different set of prominent intellectual trends in America. A departure is a probe about politics. Gerth infers from some things in Sternberger’s column that he would “opt for the West,” and questions cautiously whether the blanket rejection of Communist unity proposals would not lead to a regionalizing and perhaps even depoliticizing of the Social Democrats, as they are led to play constructive and administrative roles in each of the Western occupation zones, so that only the Communists present a national program. Yet this political interest does not in any way bring Gerth close to the more nearly conventional exile voices of Kantorowicz and Hiller, whose first letters we discussed above. As he changes subjects, he wraps an unavoidable reference to the Hitler era in the archaic dialect expression as “das Schmirakel,” compounded of the word for an illegible schoolboy scrawl and a wonder. This pattern of evasive language, which we will note elsewhere,

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comes close to suggesting a proposal to forget those years, a kind of amnesia, which quite undoes exile.43 In Gerth’s final attempt at a “first letter” two months later, he devotes the bulk of his 2000 words to an engaging but eccentric rendering of the national and international political situation. After some relatively perfunctory reports on some other émigrés, he turns to a pessimistic report on the three main camps in the US Democratic Party and the possibilities, in view of developments in Poland, Germany, and Italy, that the Catholic Church will shift to Republicans in 1948 elections. There follow some two pages on the international prospects, returning to the rather hopeless spectator’s view of his earlier letter. His prognosis for western Europe foresees mass hunger and unemployment, while the United States pretends to imperial supremacy. “The Atlantic Charter then looks pretty strange,” he writes, “and the Sermon on the Mount of the God of love sounds like blasphemy.” In view of these prospects, he expects a mass rejection of the present politics in Western Germany, as people no longer believe “that everything is due to the dead Hitler,” and refuse to be placated by promises beyond the grave. He fears that the grinding political conflict between East and West will be won by those who do not have to satisfy an impatient and ignorant electorate. He concludes, “Masses can surely not be motivated by means of Humanism as a stand-in for cultivation. That is a diluted, unpolitical enthusiasm for ‘higher things,’ possible only for rentiers. But rentiers are no longer possible.”44 In contrast to the earlier “first letters,” the assertive political segment of this letter is actually somewhat provocative, especially in its skepticism about preaching the God of love and Humanism to the masses, which recalls but escalates some slightly teasing language about the piety of “Die Wandlung” in his February 1 letter. His remarks about political actors, not excluding the constituency of the journal, are harsh: Can that small heap of superannuated professors and old trade unionists—not to speak of the more sinister figures of the old bureaucracy, administration, etc., who make themselves available for “consultation” without appearing in public—this mix of Lutheran pastors whining about their guilt, heads of separatist churches and others, can they hold the cheesecake together, when they live on meager incomes that are pressed out of unwilling, hungry veteran proletarians?45

And he scorns the SPD’s resumption of the slogan, “The danger lies in the East,” when the party has nothing to offer to compete with the Communists. Gerth’s political pessimism is by no means unusual among the emigrants during the first years after the war, but it is nevertheless striking that he now puts it forward to Sternberger, notwithstanding his

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deference to him in earlier letters, as if he suspected that his earlier letters had in fact been read and their offer rejected. This focus opens up a vital consideration neglected until now in our examination of “first letters.” Since the pre-emigration mode of activity for all the writers (except Seidlin, who is therefore a problematic “exile”) had been their vocal intervention in contested public, cultural-political space—their presence in some sense as public intellectuals—the measure of any possible “return” is the resumption of such a role.46 From this standpoint, Gerth’s long list of contacts offered to Sternberger count as assets advanced to show good faith, with the sample “Letter from America” along with his catalogue of other topics, proffering the goods he has on offer. The crux of the matter remains Gerth’s eagerness to be accepted as a collaborator on Die Wandlung. That his literary-journalistic “letter” is meant to be anything but a letter from an American is made manifest by his posture in the sample, especially the search for legitimation through surprisingly conventional cultural garlands. The letter is functionally equivalent to Carl Zuckmayer’s Devils General, to be discussed below, in that it objectifies in a finished product rather than an epistolary probe his judgment about the terms on which he can reconnect at the end of exile. Gerth opens with a contrast between the years of “uproar and bellowings” and the subsequent abrupt and total silence, which has now been broken by Die Wandlung. He wonders about those who remained, asking who “bent to the storm…and avoided needlessly being broken” (Sternberger?) and who was “corrupted—wiped out,” once again using a euphemism to refer to the Hitler years as “intoxication and frenzy.” There follow some paragraphs on the University of Wisconsin, apostrophized as “this Heidelberg of America” and placed in its setting with the help of a misremembered citation from Goethe’s Faust.47 Although he contrasts the pride of provincial Americans at the sight of their republican capitol and university with German inclination to let the castle or military barracks dominate their landscape, a main theme is to show that there is no ultimate difference. He offers some generalizations about the limitations of humankind but then applies the commonplaces to a claim with extraordinary resonance in 1946: Your Wörterbuch des Unmenschen [Lexicon of the Inhuman Man] applies wherever hubris has its blinding effects; and not all wielders of power tread before the Wagnerian footlight with horned helmets and German spears, to disappear in the depths accompanied by the mocking laughter of the world. Less conspicuous, but often more mighty, without bluff, but with a fiery stroke and a cold long reach, they attend to the business of the weightiest hour—these men of affairs—and they do not invariably make the cause of humankind their business.48

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Gerth shifts from this negative but implicitly exculpatory equation to another route towards putting aside questions of German culpability by celebrating a rabbi with a concentration camp tattoo on his wrist who broke through a triumphalist Wisconsin celebration of the Allied victory by invoking the “New Testament truths” of “Faith, hope and charity,” an invocation Gerth mistakenly links to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburgh Address. He then abruptly speaks bitterly of his inability to contact his aged mother in the Soviet Zone or to send assistance to his sister and her son, who are in Leipzig, a circumstance he blames on American authorities and which is, in his view, compounded by the categorical unwillingness of Americans to permit any immigration. Before closing with some recollections of grand recent musical performances by some émigrés (and an apology for bringing to mind things of which his readers are deprived), he introduces a vignette of a courtyard musician he once heard in Germany, whose playing for pennies always ended with a grand production whose refrain was about the “Uncle from America,” whom he, Gerth, now appears to resemble. This image of the benevolent uncle from America evidently proved to be ill judged, and Gerth was evidently never asked to write for Sternberger’s journal. More generally, Gerth never played a role in post-war Germany. His 1935 dissertation on Liberalism and his co-authored American book on Character and Social Structure were finally translated in the early 1970s, shortly before he received the invitation to Frankfurt University that he had vainly solicited in 1947, and that, when it came, took on the unfortunate character of rather paltry reparations. At the end of a radio interview in 1977, not long before his death in Frankfurt, Gerth was asked whether he ever regretted his return. He answered: Yes, it is sad. I have no friends here. Well, yes, a few. They’ve been here once or twice. One let me know, just to make conversation, that Spengler had been quite right, that he was quite a fine fellow, and so on. There was nothing I could say to that; it made my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. Excuse me. Yes, when I see something like that, I am sorry. I prefer my American friends. Even in the sense of the German temperament. It is only Jews, however, who still remember and occasionally write. But it is horrible. Adorno called it the “damaged life.” My God, he had no idea just how damaged it can be.49

In his reflection on the conversation, the interviewer sought to trace this despair to Gerth’s disillusionment with German students, but it seems unmistakable that he was talking rather about the endlessly unfinished business of his exile.

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The Captain from Vermont: Zuckmayer’s Return For direct comparison with Gerth, I turn next to a mainly documentary approach to a complex case that underlines some features of our earlier comparisons but that could not be studied in depth without more attention than we have time or space available on this occasion. It points toward the rich variety of initiatives. Carl Zuckmayer succeeds where Gerth fails. He negotiated a term of exile that left him with resources to manage a return on terms that largely overcame the tensions between exile and return. He died, widely admired and much decorated, as a sojourner in Germany and a citizen of Switzerland. Perhaps a man of the theater is uniquely equipped to manage the role-playing that attends all negotiations. Zuckmayer was a well-regarded playwright, whose script for The Blue Angel and book for The Captain from Köpenick made it an easy matter for him to continue his career in Austria after leaving Germany in 1933. In 1939, however, he was forced to flee to the United States, where he first served a remunerative but unsatisfying brief term as screen writer before following classical Roman models of exile by removing himself to a rural retreat, where he farmed and stayed out of the way of exile politics or costly bargaining efforts to gain American recognition. At some point in the interim, however, he supplied the OSS—who chose him not least because of his aloofness from anti-fascist groupings bound up with the Communist-led Popular Front—with a secret report on the political trustworthiness of individuals in contemporary German film and theater.50 He was not a harsh judge. In the months before the war ended, he revised and completed a play called “The Devil’s General,” about a general torn between his love for his profession, his sworn duty, and his unspoiled humanity, a play Zuckmayer characterized as follows, in a letter to a reviewer for the New York Staatszeitung: It is the descent to hell of the undecided, and the tragedy of the few for whom justice and inner truth rise above everything, above their own people and even above their own lives. Such people existed in Germany, in small numbers but in all levels and classes, and for the sake of the few surviving ones it seems essential to me not to leave the old homeland in the lurch—especially when, as in my case, one feels a genuine sense of belonging here.51

Instead of a “Letter from America,” and an ironically proffered role as “Uncle from Amerika,” like Hans Gerth, Zuckmayer had this play in hand, offering a congenial saving formula for many of his erstwhile associates when he reopened his correspondence with them; and his restoration of personal

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contact was simplified by an assignment as authoritative advisor on theater policy, arriving in Vienna and Germany in an officer’s uniform, that his earlier contribution earned him from the American military occupation authorities. The critical contrast with Gerth, however, is that Zuckmayer was far from apologetic about his exemption from wartime horrors. Rather, he sees himself as free to bring something of value to those he now refuses “to leave in the lurch,” for the sake of the saving remnant. Zuckmayer wrote many “first letters,” since he sought to re-enlist as many as possible of his former theatrical associates for a renewal of his career in Germany, whether or not he returned to make his home there. I select some excerpts from letters addressed to Heinz Hilpert, whose unique ties to Zuckmayer are highlighted by a note under the date of the first uncertain mailing: “5th of March—Good heavens, that was the date of our Köpenick premiere fifteen years ago! It just occurs to me. Oh my saints!” Yes, you can well imagine how often we speak about you and how we have worried about you all these years, about your fate. As the end neared, we waited with constant, fearful apprehension for every bit of news—and much of it was even worse than our worst fears, and the whole misery could break one’s heart. Then came better and cheering news—as that my parents are still alive, with whom I now have fairly regular contact. And whatever else may have happened to you—that you are still alive and back at work, and that we will see one another again is among the very best. Please write as soon as you can to say where I can send you a longer epistle. This is just a signal. For years, I did not write—but for a year now some time I am back in the middle of it. Now I feel the time coming for the play that was not yet ripe back then: Melusine. With the “General” I have gotten something off my heart that had to be dislodged, but now it is necessary to draw once again from the well.52

As was the case with Kracauer and Gerth, this draft letter was followed a few days later by another “first letter,” in this case, as with Gerth, because of uncertainty about addresses and deliveries, which Zuckmayer apostrophizes in the following imagist language: Gradually, it becomes a torture to the nerves that one can never know what gets there, what actually reaches its goal, that one must always shoot into the blue (without being able to picture it as brilliantly blue. More nearly grey/blue. But then once more blue—that delicate and quite vivid ethereal blue of which there is a hint behind morning fogs and which is in a real sense over-earthly).

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Zuckmayer pursues this fantastic style, albeit with a dramatic change in images: Heinz—I often have the feeling that I became a whole generation younger during the past eight years, but at the same time grown out like a world in space with a crust millions of years old on which humus has accumulated and which brings into being plants and trees and all kinds of creatures, on which doves and bats drop their soft, fertile filth and in the depth of which, under infinite layers of loam, gravel and ancient minerals and sunken primeval forests, there is a core of fire that holds it all together and that, when seen at night and from a distance, even continues to glow. One senses the coordinates that join us to this whole brutally cold and uncannily glowing universe and that lead us to rotate around ourselves, slowly and unalterably. And just as it is supposed to be quite still and soundless in the middle of a hurricane, a typhoon, so there is in our center, in the middle of this wild world, a silence in which one can hear the newborn wrens peeping and the earthworms rasping. Just so, we will yet make our own song out of the clamor and stillness, and even if no more than a single stanza remains—how good that one was allowed to live.

Then the matter turns more concrete and practical: That you stage my play (as I have already told you, a play that I feel to be at once an end and a beginning—the easing of a burden from the heart and a whole new start)—that has always been my secret wish.53

A third letter complements the first two because it reveals what was pending earlier and doubtless underlay their confident tone. Zuckmayer is remarkably open and reflective about the mode of “return” he has chosen, and therefore exceptionally helpful for understanding the conflicting considerations that doubtless also tore at other exiles, far less well-placed than he was: In the meantime it has been definitely decided that I shall come over as an American “officer.” You can well imagine that this decision was not easy for me. I would have far rather come back as a private man, God knows, than in the service of an army of occupation. But there is no other possibility, not for years, because even if one wanted to return altogether, and to permit oneself to be repatriated, which I do not want to do, that would be refused for the time being. They do not want to have another mouth to feed, and that is understandable. On the other hand, the Americans offer me a leading and—insofar as that is possible—independent position, in which I have no political handicaps and will be occupied exclusively with artistic—and human—matters. As “supervising

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theater supervisor” of the American Zone, specifically assigned to plan and advise about the links with the other zones and the rebuilding of theatrical life in all of Germany, including cooperation with Austria. The word in the final proposal I received ten days ago is that I am free to open my office in Berlin or Munich and that I will have all means of transportation and support for “official travel to all zones” at my ready disposal. I will, in short, supervise the work and results of the other “theater officers,” and I will report directly to the Military Government.

Yet Zuckmayer knows that it is not quite so simple, and that he cannot be certain that his return in this provisional and empowered form “in the service of an army of occupation” will be accepted: I believe that anyone of good will in Germany and Austria will understand that I come on a mission of pure “good will,” only in order to help and to take part, and that I want nothing for myself out of this—nothing but the eye to eye, face to face confrontation with something that one cannot imagine from here—and that may well be decisive for all my future creative work. That—and the reunion with my parents and a few friends, of whom you are the closest to us. Jobs and I are alike in feeling that we simply need this—and that you need us just as much. That is why I agreed to do it. It will be July or August before we will be able to leave. Some people say that it is “too soon.” That it is impossible to build up a theater during a more or less acute hunger emergency. That people like us should wait until there is once again a unified government in Germany, which could commission or invite us, instead of coming in the service of the present occupation forces. I don’t believe any of that. I have the feeling that one must seize hold if one gets an opportunity to help now. And that it is more likely that it will be too late later than that it is too soon now. Ultimately I cannot judge all this but follow my feelings, which say, “Go over there.”

Zuckmayer closes with a fantasy, which so easily brushes away all possible contradictions, as well as time and difference, that it is clear how many questions remain unresolved: THE GREEN WAGON—my dear friend, before my first play was performed I wrote a kind of essay or manifesto of that name in the year 19xx, which set up the wandering theater as the theatrical ideal. I know very well how to get something out of the Americans. The official route is endless. American tempo existed only in Berlin. The personal route—man to man—can achieve in five minutes everything reasonable and attainable. Perhaps I will be able to charter a few dozen trucks and the needed tons of gasoline, with which we could then

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wander through the land from “zone” to “zone.” If you have such plans, I will take them to any American general. And I’ll tell him that this is what we must support. I would love to write pieces for such a theater. Shit on Broadway. That is only needed to provide us with wood for the oven from time to time. America needs its own arch-theater. That will also come along in the Green Wagon, just as it traveled in Mississippi steamboats at the beginnings of vaudeville. But when I come over, I may be able to pull together the forces to get your Green Wagon under way. 54,55

Zuckmayer ranges across a number of possibilities in a revealing way. He proposes a reciprocal arrangement in which he would keep his anchorage in America, while gaining recognition as an active sojourner in Germany and Austria. To make this work, he offers to use the one position for the benefit of the other, while recognizing that he must give assurances that this patronage does not imply domination. He must also reduce his own exile to an almost accidental necessity. In the world of “The Devil’s General,” which is the guest gift he brings to this reunion table, exile is not an option. So Zuckmayer’s “Happy End” is no less problematic than all the others we have considered.

From Exile to Diaspora: Oskar Maria Graf A distinctive range of positions is occupied by the Bavarian writer, Oskar Maria Graf, whose “first letters” to various correspondents over time monitor his changing views of his relationships to writers at home, beginning with a confident claim to the return from exile and ending with an acceptance of himself as member of a diaspora.56 In his personal style, an anomaly among the urbane literary exiles, his trajectory is nevertheless representative of many others. Graf is best known in the history of the literary emigration for the open letter, “Burn me!” (Verbrennt mich!), which he published in 1933, after he learned that only one of his books had been banned by the Nazis, and that his rural Bavarian tales had even been placed on an approved list.57 Bertold Brecht celebrated Graf ’s defiance in a poem, The Book Burning.58 While Graf ’s writings always had mixed reviews among literary intellectuals, he became a leading figure in the campaigns to constitute a unified anti-fascist exile, even if this meant accepting strong Communist influence. He was active in Vienna, Brno, and New York; and he attended the Soviet Writers’ Conference in 1934. After 1938, when he came to the United States, he was head of the German American Writers Association in New York, a Popular Front group shunned by anti-Communist exiles, and he campaigned actively in the German-Jewish Aufbau against divisions between Jewish and non-Jewish emigrants, rejecting

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all forms of nationalism (whether German or Jewish), and insisting on a common loyalty to the German Volk, in the pluralist sense he gave the term.59 He was unusual among the literary emigrants in the attention he paid to (nonJewish) German-Americans, speaking across the country against the pro-Nazi voices so prominent in those communities. Graf also published regularly in the Communist-edited “Neues Deutschland” in Mexico City. As the war wore on, however, he withdrew from organizational activities and spoke ever more sharply within his trusted circle of fellow-Bavarians against the “politicians.” In the end, although he never became fluent in English and never enjoyed any literary success in America, he never returned to Germany for more than short visits—and even these were not possible until after his long delayed naturalization in 1958.60 His case illustrates, among other things, the effects of the exiles’ grave loss of international legal status through the cancellation or expiration of their German passports as well as the corresponding attractions of the American naturalization process, notwithstanding the obstacles some of them faced—not least because of interferences by various American secret services—before they could gain the treasured American passport, which nevertheless precluded extensive residence abroad for the naturalized. My “first letters” search through the literary remains of Oskar Maria Graf in the Exiles collection at the State University of New York in Albany has left me with three letters, which appear to belong together, although one of them was not sent to Germany at all. On reflection, however, the need for a permissive reading of the “first letters” criteria cannot be surprising, if it is indeed the case that the investigation of these documents offers special insights into the relations between exile and return because of the underlying processes of tacit and express bargaining that they signal. The letters to be examined belong to an integral attempt by Graf to establish the grounds on which he sought recognition from his correspondents in Germany. It would be self-defeating to limit our ability to observe such developments by too rigorous a limitation to a single first letter: I suggest that we think of it as a genre with open boundaries. Oskar Maria Graf presents a case where the argument for flexibility applies with special force, first, because he changed his position on “return” so dramatically during the first post-war years, and second, because he was so exceptionally self-reflective about the process. In the first of the three letters to be examined here (written to a fellow émigré in the US), Graf writes: “Naturally, I also want to go home as soon as possible.”61 In the second letter, he reports that he resisted early letters from friends pressing him to return as soon as possible because he was convinced that he could do more good by remaining a while where he was, a position that they now agree with.62 In the third letter, he appears to accept that he was and would remain a German

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author “in alien lands” (in der Fremde),63 a situation that is given a name in the course of the following year, when he writes to fellow-emigrants: “After the defeat of fascism, exile finally turns into diaspora. What is meant by this is the end of the time of waiting and the beginning of uprooting and dispersion.”64 The first chapter of his self-exploratory 1959 novel Die Flucht ins Mittelmäßige [The Escape into Mediocrity] is accordingly called, “Exile or Diaspora.”65 A study of Graf ’s three letters offers a new perspective on the “liquidation of exile.” I begin with a few points in Graf ’s letter to the anti-Nazi nationalist aristocrat and fellow émigré, Hubertus Prinz zu Loewenstein. It lays down his program for the initial period of transition, which is centered on the formation of a small group—a change in function of his Stammtisch—to ship individual CARE packages to intellectuals in Munich of whom he has learned that they were imprisoned longest in concentration camps or otherwise conducted themselves with bravery. He defends himself against the charge (made by some) that he is engaging in separatist Bavarian politics: “I know these comrades well and know that not a single package goes to a Nazi.” News of such actions will spread quickly, he asserts, and this will do more good than endless newspaper articles, proclamations from Thomas Mann, or so-called manifestations of sympathy. “It speeds the building of the bridges that must unquestionably be built between the emigration and those who remained at home.” There is increasing talk of a wall between these two, which Nazis exploit. We cannot attempt to act politically, he insists, so long as the population is hungry and cold—and susceptible to any scheme. Emigrants can help to engineer a change from a “condition of the necessary to a condition of the free,” a curious echo of Marx. Graf then offers a cautious answer to Loewenstein’s astonishingly formulated dismay with the “Quislings” who allow themselves be used by the occupying powers. He has himself always spoken against being used as “democratic helper” by anyone, he tells him: “I have always stood for the position—not without its dangers, here and elsewhere—that one cannot go before the German people unless one is unconditionally committed to them and to no one else.”66 Nevertheless, he speaks up for two named individuals, former comrades in exile—both active in the Soviet zone—whom he trusts to be doing their best under desperate conditions. It is useless for us to protest the American or Russian occupation policy, he cautions, especially since the worst would be to heighten conflict between them. We have to regain the confidence of the people (Volk) inhabiting the geographical site where Germany once existed. And that cannot be done in the way that Communist and Social Democratic functionaries have proceeded, as if there had never been a Hitler. “In this and only in this, in my very modest opinion,” Graf writes,

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“lies the task for us intellectuals.” Thomas Mann should have seen it as his duty to say, “I stand by you, you Germans, I am coming.”67 His name alone could have averted some harm. Intellectuals have to make sacrifices. Graf wants to return home as soon as possible, he concludes, but he rejects the notion that there is something remiss in waiting until the worst is over, since every returnee is also another bread-eater. “Regrettably, one can accomplish more, for the time being, if one builds ‘non-material’ bridges by making every effort to gain help.”68 This letter to Loewenstein provides a helpful context for Graf ’s “first letter” to Hugo Hartung, seven months later, in answer to an approach from Hartung, a younger writer and sometime collaborator on Simplicissimus in the last pre-Hitler years. As was the case with Kracauer and Weyrauch, their acquaintance was slight and dated back to Hartung’s student years. Yet there is nothing resembling Kracauer’s reproach in Graf ’s letter. The contrast, in fact, could not be starker. Graf writes: “In comparison to everything that you had to bear in Hitler’s Hell, our exile naturally was something like a walk in the park [etwas gemütliches].” He admits that they had some deprivations, but notes that he was used to living under modest circumstances. And he insists that he was never homesick because “One remained so to speak in one’s own world, really and truly in Bavaria and ‘at home.’” He is delighted that Hartung has held on to his books and gets pleasure from them still. Graf follows with a paragraph dense with details about his activities since 1933, highlighting the talks he gave in Austria, under Social Democratic auspices, as well as his lectures to “freedom-minded German-Americans” in the United States. Graf ’s emphasis on his steadfast grounding in a localized German milieu—important, I think, in contrast to the counter-images of the exile he challenged in his Aufbau articles against anti-German tendencies, especially in Jewish emigrant circles (like the group organized by Hannah Arendt)—did not however mean that he did not draw the line against Nazism without euphemism or reserve. In a sentence reminiscent both of his offhand earlier remarks about hardship and of his well-known démarche at the beginning of exile, he writes, “Finally, I went so far as to republish the books that Hitler had burned, and even to peddle them myself, since I had so little luck with them in the USA.” He follows with a remarkably sanguine claim: “Overall, it was a great satisfaction to me that all of my friends, comrades, and even my native village remained antiNazi.” This blanket certificate of purity leads to a brief report on the many pleas for help he receives and the effort of his Austrian-German Stammtisch companions to find money for individual packages. His letter continues with news about émigrés, and some others, who had been variously involved with Simplicissimus and would presumably be known

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to Hartung. Before asking Hartung whether he would also like a package and cautioning him that this may take a while, he sums up his reading of the present situation in Bavaria—Hartung may still be elsewhere in Germany (his postwar book dealt with his participation in the Heimwehr defense of Breslau)—in order to explain his own stand: How things look politically in Bavaria will doubtless also be familiar to you. Despite all “de-nazification,” the Nazis are quite lively there. For the moment, I have no desire to go home. I also wish for no office from anyone and want to remain what I have always been, an independent writer. At first all my friends wrote urgently that I should come home right away, and they were very disappointed that I barely reacted to these pleas, and when I gave my reasons, they had no understanding for them. Now they all write that it would be better if I stayed here for a long time, since I could be of more use here than at home.69

That he concludes the letter with a paragraph of equal length about the prospects of sending a package recalls the bridge-building rationale and method he had described to Loewenstein. He offers and he asks recognition as a member of a literary contingent that is “at home” amid a “freedomminded” German people—in principle if not (yet) in fact—, that is engaged in mutual aid. The third letter to be considered, however briefly, is written more than three years after the letter to Loewenstein and is flecked with anger and estrangement, as well as some constructive literary advocacy, although it also—as with the letter to Hartung—treats the recipient as a sort of ally in a common struggle. He is writing to Hans Brandenburg, an essayist, whom he addresses as someone he’d seen now and then in the Munich years, and whose artist wife he also recalls fondly. He even identifies the social occasion when they had last met. This is not a reply to an approach from Germany, as in the case of Hartung, but an initiative by Graf, a letter to express appreciation for an article Brandenburg published in a literary journal.70 At the very outset, Graf distances himself from the stereotypical exile. He speaks of Brandenburg’s periodical as “praiseworthy” but immediately pleads, “please, do not take this as written in the school-teacherish emigrant manner!” Brandenburg’s article, called “Literary Self-Respect,” is primarily an attack on the younger literary generation that accepts a simple reversal of valences from the evaluations of the Nazi era, evidently acting, according to Brandenburg, out of submissiveness to the cultural policies of the occupying forces, as well as a lack of cultivation [Bildung], a group that is even prepared, Brandenburg charges, to chime in with denunciations of the habits of mind and spirit that animate the great German literary tradition, notably

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its “inwardness.” Graf elaborately congratulates Brandenburg for setting forth opinions on literature that he claims to have always shared. If the earlier letter to Hartung was a bridge-building exercise between those who emigrated and those who remained at home, taken as two collectivities, this letter is written much more as from a much edited version of his own literary persona—Graf speaks for himself alone—and altogether remote from any thought of representativeness or return. In the term used by Graf a year later, it is a letter from the diaspora. It is also not a letter to someone about whom Graf can claim to know that he was anti-Nazi; it is rather a letter to someone whose equivocal apologetics appear, for example, in a remark that it has never harmed Stendahl “that his novels march under the glorious eagle of the man who had brought about the greatest misery for his fatherland and the peoples of Europe.”71 Graf ignores the state of mind suggested by this equation of Hitler and Napoleon— or the implied justification of German writers far beyond the company of the generously configured “inner emigration,” and he takes Brandenburg’s anti-French animus, expressed at the outset of the article, in stride, while softening it a bit. Where Brandenburg had unpleasantly mocked what he portrayed as the French penchant for elevating their writers, even of the second or third rank, to transcendent glory as expressions of French national spirit, Graf refocuses the passage on the term “nation” and presses the point that Germans are driven to “dreadful things [Dinge!]” whenever they confuse their quality as Volk with nation—in proof of which he lists not only Hitler but also Bismarck and Wilhelm II, a parallel in the manner of Bavarian antiPrussianism and remote from his earlier anti-fascist convictions. Graf does draw the line at Brandenburg’s statement that “The [Nazi] dictatorship, within the limits of its volkisch doctrine, tolerant towards the literary life,” although he objects only, quite mildly, that he found Brandenburg’s remark “somewhat too mild.” What he really welcomes, however, is Brandenburg’s charge that the postwar occupying powers have adopted the distinctions between “desirable and undesirable,”72 just as in the “Hitlerei,” although he curiously overlooks Brandenburg’s pointed remark that it looked for a long while “as if the higher level of public valuation was due only to such authors as had been emigrants, converts, or racially persecuted—if only because of their wives.” In fact, Graf proceeds—whether disingenuously or not—to urge Brandenburg to recognize the surprisingly good work done by some writers in emigration, citing Hermann-Neisse, Anna Segher, Plevier, Speyer, and Schäffer, not to speak of Stefan Zweig, Carl Zuckmayer, and Thomas Mann. Where he seconds Brandenburg most forcefully, however, is on the “shameful and crushing theater of exhibitionist self-mutilation”—a passage he quotes approvingly from Brandenburg—that is evidenced by young

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Germans who somehow feel “liberated” and who dismiss their own honored ancestors. Graf then takes a shocking turn of his own: Germans and Jews seem to have the same inexplicable self-hatred, and doubtless this is the motive of their mutual enmity.73

He cites the “clever” [Jew], Weininger, writing in 1903 at the age of 23, in support of the thesis that people hate in others what they hate in themselves, which is a strange authority for advancing such a “balanced” view in 1949. This tactlessness may have its origins in Graf ’s disappointed struggles against the separation between Jewish and non-Jewish emigrants—and it is reinforced by a falsely good-humored reference in the next paragraph to the “thoroughly anti-Semitic but nevertheless lovable Raab[e]” as one of the older German writers without whom, as he writes, “it never would have been possible for me to live so unchanged and intact in all the lands of my exile.” In conclusion, then, he marvels at the lack of real literary criticism among the younger generation. “Nothing enrages me more than having someone write with condescending praise about me or my books, which are honestly wrought.” It is a tired letter, as it seems to me, with only very small aims, rising above a very routine performance only in the evidently shrewd selection of German writers that Graf exempts from his blanket condemnations, as in his small list of distinguished emigrants. The question of “return” is off the table. It is possible to read into the vehement denunciation of the occupying forces’ meddling in literary matters chagrin at the banning of his own youthful “revolutionary” book by the British authorities; and his remarks about ignorant but favorable reviews of his own books may have to be set against the review in the same journal only a few numbers earlier, of his Unruhe um einen Friedfertigen [Disturbances about a Peacable Man] by a conservative emigrant writer of his own generation, almost certainly Jewish, who praises Graf ’s Bavarian genre scenes but sneers at the political story Graf attempts to tell. “That Graf allows himself a bit of anti-clericalism need not be taken too seriously; that is just a sort of left-over from his old ‘revolutionist’ days,” is Max Fischer’s patronizing introduction to the dismissive judgment that the less political Graf is, the better it is for his authorship. The reviewer concludes: “where the love of his distant Bavarian home overwhelms the New York author, he deserves, despite the quite narrow limits of his abilities, the honorable name of poet.” It was doubtless better for Graf when his books were burned. Now he was nothing but one of those uprooted German-Americans, a New York author afflicted with nostalgia for “home.” We may read Graf ’s only novel with an exile theme, Die Flucht ins Mittelmäßige [The Flight into Mediocrity],

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which is a story of defeat that his contemporary critics harshly judged had also defeated the author, as a sequel to this last “first” letter.

The Documentary Meaning of First Letters: Conclusion and Review The survival of letters and the selection among them is not without arbitrariness. All the cases considered above are men, for example, not least because fewer women than men were able to go into exile and because those few were generally more damaged in their intellectual careers, so that their letters were simply less likely to be collected. Beyond that, there is the limitation to a few writers and social scientists. But the aim of the exercise is not a universal survey or a general theory. The aim is to illuminate the complex structure of exile by bringing it into focus with the help of documents derived from a critical moment at which the exiles themselves must address its meaning before a most difficult constituency. In recent years, much scholarship has transmuted exile into a metaphor for a spiritually exalted, synchronic, emancipated, limitless, and creative state of estrangement from quotidian concerns. Our sampling of first letters shows a number of the most persistent and difficult questions confronting exile as confronted by historical actors banished from their native scenes of action. First are precisely the everyday concerns of asylum, livelihood, and isolation that engross all but the most privileged exiles. Second is the practical relation to the play of power and resistance that shaped their past and shapes their prospects. Third is the disrupted and unfinished business with those they are compelled to leave behind, friends or foes, as well as the effort to negotiate new enterprises with their fellows and their hosts. Fourth are the diverse and often alternating emotional stresses of rage, shame, confusion, and defiant missionary aspiration, under conditions of disorientation and uncertain recognition. Fifth, and often encompassing the others, is the consuming question of return, which is often understood as a necessary moment in the concept of exile, with the time of exile being charged with anticipation of return and the moment of return being correspondingly imbued with the remembrance of exile. Exile and return are interdependent and even co-present. We have captured a number of exiles at a critical moment with regard to that conjunction. The selection is admittedly almost accidental, but our sample nevertheless permits us to identify not only the factors above that speak against a turning away from the older model, but also some considerations that help to explain the view that this classical formation may be obsolete, if only because of the ever greater elusiveness of return during the past century, as the binary opposition between exile and home loses some of its meanings.

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We have quite properly stressed the primary importance of people as the constituents of the places that exiles are compelled to leave behind and to which the question of return applies, and this is an important corrective to the hyperbolic elevation of native land, as articulated in scenery and architecture. Yet if one thinks of places not only in their character as physical locations but also as sites of meaning intimately conjoined with the human exchanges that define important actions, then their degeneration into the kinds of settings that E.V. Walter called “kakatopes” may decisively affect the relevance or even possibility of return in any important sense.74 Destruction may bear on this, rendering places unrecognizable, but other kinds of disfigurement may be more telling, as when a school is made into a barracks or prison. Such changes have their effects on exile. The rapid reclasssifications of social identities, moreover,—which may appear as an opportunity in the case of reception in comparatively open cosmopolitan scientific or cultural elites, or as a sentencing in the case of relegation to the swarm of bureaucratically administered refugees—may drain myths of return of their emotional or political relevance. The sense of redemptive mission which has often represented the prospect of return in the history of exiles appears to lose coherence or point. Corresponding to these rapid changes in the conditions of political exile are the swift and fundamental structural changes that typically accompany the transformations that open the way to “return,” as the localized polities, societies, and cultures are incorporated in wider contexts of power and meaning and as the politics of memory are subjected to control by agencies and technologies unknown to earlier times. The “first letters” capture the tension between these tendencies and foster a thick description of exile in the twentieth century, in place of an abstract choice of models. That is the aim of the undertaking.

CHAPTER SEVEN The Second Wave: An Autobiographical Exercise A recent study by Gerhard Sonnert and Gerald Holton examines the “second wave” of refugees from Nazi Germany, the individuals who were under 18 years of age when they arrived in the United States during the years between 1933 and the beginning of the Second World War.1 Sonnert and Holton’s point of departure is the finding that a disproportionate number of these émigrés achieved a measure of “success” in professional—and above all, in academic—pursuits. Among the examples they cite, to illuminate their statistics, are a number of very famous scientists and scholars, but inevitably the great majority of the individuals they classify as finding a place in the careers they single out have been journeymen in their various fields. This is where I can situate myself as a detail in their story, a refugee arrival in 1940 at age 9 and a reasonably productive faculty member of assorted colleges and universities since 1955. In a rather commonplace naïve response to good social science research, I was almost chagrined to learn how little originality there has been in my life. Even an ambivalent attitude I expressed to one of my daughters at the end of an autobiographical letter I wrote to her when she was ten proves to have been a commonplace in my cohort. I wrote at the time: America never captured my enthusiastic allegiance, in the gut sense of many grateful immigrants. It had been too long and too tortuous a wait at too impressionable an age, I guess, with too capricious an outcome. Oh yes. Our benefactors in Bayonne also changed our names, to make them less foreignsounding. I had been Manfred Ketzlach, called Fredi by all my family and friends. The Nazis required that Jews who did not have obviously Jewish first names had to add the middle name “Israel” or “Sarah.” But Manfred Israel Ketzlach wouldn’t do. I became David Kettler. That’s many decades ago, and I don’t know if I’ll ever manage the switch all the way. A strange business.

In a chapter called “Privatized Costs, Socialized Benefits,” Sonnert and Holton cite as a case they consider representative of one of four typical syndromes a

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mathematician who wrote: “I suspect I never quite became an American” (183). The authors offer some psychological explanations for this response, but that is not my field of competence or interest. Instead, I’d like to move to a more sociological level of analysis. Simply stated, Sonnert and Holton explain much of the “second wave” cohort’s success, given the remarkably favorable opportunity structure available to this generation, by “cultural capital” received as legacy from home, especially in relations with fathers. They stretch this explanation a little in the cases of children who came without their parents. In reflecting on my own experience as a case study, I open up the question of individuals who are effectively without more than a dim echo of cultural capital, but who nevertheless identify early with the intellectual exiles of the first wave and return constantly to their legacy. Such identification need not be an enlistment as disciple: the object of the identification may be perceived as an admired but damaged person, the transmitter of a dilemma. It may be, in short, identification with exile, and thus with a lifetime of negotiations that preclude the comforts supposed to be implied by discovering or deciding who one is. There is no “home,” either, to which one can hope to “return.” And there are no assurances that the exiles—or anyone else—will recognize these claimants as heirs. If liquidation is as much a feature of the lives of many intellectual exiles as has been suggested by the case studies in this book, the symbolic roles imputed to the exiles by individuals from the Second Wave may even be a burden to be rejected. All this gave members of the cohort to which I belong an idiom and a kind of orientation, albeit a contested one in its contents, as well as a lot to prove. The image offered here of a bankrupt’s son or daughter rather than the contented heir of paternal cultural capital should perhaps be distrusted as an aid to analysis since it happens also to correspond to the mere facts of my own life. My father’s father was bankrupt twice, first as a chandler near Odessa, whose business was destroyed in the anti-Semitic threats and boycotts of 1907, and then again after 1933, as a marginal furrier whose business depended on purchases outside Germany, which were no longer possible under new restrictions on travel and exchange. During the years of my earliest childhood, then, the Nazi years, my father, having assumed his father’s debts, worked at menial jobs in order to pay small installments in restitution. The theme of restitution adds another motif to the uncertain but galvanizing relationship at the core of the speculative model I am proposing here, which I do not in fact believe to be discredited by its curious personal application. Part I is a brief autobiographical narrative covering the years between 1930 and 1955. Its focal point is my unseasonable identification with the anti-fascist refugee generation. Although my place of birth was Leipzig, the city that recurs in my relations with the exiles is Frankfurt. This connection

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arises, first, from my most admired teachers, Franz Neumann and Herbert Marcuse, and refers, accordingly, to the “Frankfurt School” in the most familiar sense, as it took shape in New York during the 1930s. Part II centers on my theoretical and practical preoccupations between 1955 and 1970 with the “vocation of intellectuals” during my career from instructor to Professor in the Political Science Department of Ohio State University. Although this time period actually includes a year’s fellowship in the Institute for Social Research, the prime Frankfurt link in this phase is nevertheless the sociological work of Karl Mannheim, whose place of exile had been London. In Part III, I discuss my twenty years at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, from 1970 to 1990, a period during which I first attempted to negotiate the differences between the two Frankfurt schools, as I understood them, and then turned to the Frankfurt “school” of labor law, represented by Hugo Sinzheimer, to inquire more deeply into diverse practices of negotiations and the character of various kinds of settlements. Part IV covers my exceptionally satisfying years as Scholar in Residence and later Research Professor at Bard College, where a continued pursuit of the earlier themes eventuated in almost ten years of concentrated work on intellectual exiles, notably the German émigrés of the 1930s. The patron saint of this segment is once again Franz Neumann, whose track has been evident in all the earlier portions as well. The analysis draws on several social science disciplines, including political science, sociology, history, cultural studies, and a bit of philosophy. Yet in the end there is a lot of narration. This is quite a long story, which cannot convey anything without a certain amount of detail, so I will have to use some rather compressed formulations elsewhere and to make some leaps from time to time. It is never clear in a case study whether the patterns are not after all idiosyncratic, so I cannot be certain that what I am offering is more than a personal memoir. I trust that it may nevertheless be of some value to students of the 1930s waves of emigration.

A Belated Recruit to the Last Weimar Generation It all starts in Leipzig, where I was born on July 1, 1930. My father came to Germany from Kherson (on the Dnieper, near Odessa) in 1908, at age 3, and my mother from Brody (on the Austria-Hungarian side of the border with Russia) in 1914, at age 12. Posthumously they are both from Ukrainia. They were what was called “Eastern Jews,” in short, like 80% of the Jews in Leipzig, lacking more than primary education; but they were also acculturated to the world of standing room at the opera. My mother’s parents were enclosed by orthodoxy, but her five brothers were worldly and reasonably successful businessmen. She overcame family opposition to marry the slightly younger, impecunious son of

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a thoroughly secularized and Russified household. Until the “Aryan” takeover of her family’s business in 1938, my father worked as a backroom clerk in my uncles’ stores; but my parents sought to educate my older brother and me to middle-class German-Jewish standards. The shelves of Goethe, Schiller, and Heine accompanied us even in our move to a single room in a “Jew House” in 1939. I do not remember hearing Yiddish until my early years in America, although it must have been the normal language in the home of my maternal grandparents. Until it was forced shut on November 10, 1938, my brother and I attended the more select of the two Jewish schools in Leipzig, conducted by a husband and wife belonging to the famous rabbinical Carlebach family. Here would be the stuff of the “cultural capital” thesis of Sonnert and Holton, but it was all of such short duration. A pathetic final rehearsal of that motif came on our trip from Leipzig to our port of embarkation in Genoa in early spring of 1940. Faced with a six-hour layover in Nuremberg, my father chose instead to take us all to nearby Bayreuth, where, according to the recollection of my older brother, he hired a horse and carriage to take us past Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus, which he wanted to see at least once. According to my cousin Heinz, midway in age between my father and me and a survivor of seven years in concentration camps, my father was leftist in his politics and read avidly about the Soviet Union. I cannot say of my own knowledge, since he died on April 30, 1940, four weeks after our arrival in the United States, when he had just turned 35 and when I was approaching my 10th birthday. For the first four years in the United States, my mother worked in a factory and we were dependent on prosperous distant relations of an uncle by marriage for our occasional outings in middle class America. Although my mother was part of a small group of German-speaking refugees charitably given employment at minimum wages by the proprietor of the Maidenform Brassiere Company, we deliberately stopped speaking German at home almost immediately; there was a penny fine, I recall, for each German word. We lived in a small industrial city across the harbor from New York, and as a child I knew no German immigrants except two or three children of my mother’s co-workers, who did not in any case attend my school. Eventually, my mother married a widowed shopkeeper—an uneducated Jewish immigrant from prerevolutionary Russia without connections with Jewish religious practice—“for the sake of the children.” In thinking about the identification and terms of reference among my cohort of emigrants, an early question concerns the relationship to the Jewish community in America—or perhaps simply to immersion in Jewish beliefs and practices. Although my parents were in fact East-European Jews, as noted, they adopted not only the cultural aspirations but also the distanced religious attitudes of cultivated German Jews, an orientation probably reinforced by

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my father’s Socialist politics. My maternal grandparents were quite pious, however, and my mother was loyal to her family, so there were compromises made for family occasions and the “high holidays.” My father’s youngest brother, moreover, was an ardent Labor Zionist, who had originally brought my brother and me into the youth movement at an early age, an experience I remember mostly for the thrillingly “illegal” blue pants and green shirts we wore under raincoats. This uncle emigrated to a kibbutz in the mid-1930s and rescued his parents and his other brother, but the question of our joining them never arose, to my recollection (although my brother and I were registered for a “youth alliyah,” and my own name had in fact been selected for emigration to Palestine at around the time that the American visas arrived). Then, too, our schooling was under Jewish auspices—and we were reminded daily, as my father tried desperately to extricate us and we children fought back, as best we could, against hostility on the streets, that in some ineradicable sense we “were” after all Jews, although our religious affiliation was token and our Zionism, like our loyalty to our Jewish teachers, a childish admiration for those who defied the brutal authorities. Because my father died so soon after our arrival in the United States, my brother and I were put under conventional Jewish tutelage by the East European Jewish relations who were our patrons. This meant a year of daily attendance at a small local synagogue to offer the prescribed ritual prayers in remembrance of his death, as well as preparation for Jewish confirmation at thirteen. My own encounter with all this was in a mode of passive resistance; I did what was required, but found neither support nor inspiration in those activities. And I ended the affiliations as soon as I could. Not even the mounting reports of the mass murders, which took one-half of my mother’s family and devastated her for the rest of her life, deepened my sense of Jewish identification at the time. My brother and I sometimes even mocked my mother’s immersion in the “stomach ache newspaper” that brought reports of the slaughter. I would fight older and stronger boys who denigrated Jews, but I was not a member of a Jewish “community.” This is important, I believe, because I have lively recollections of one or two college classmates, for example, who had come from Germany but who lived, for example, in the orthodox Jewish enclave of Washington Heights, whose style of managing the shared fate was markedly different. Those I recall—notably Max Frankel, the noted long-time editor of the New York Times—certainly had careers of remarkable achievement in the sense of Sonnert and Holton, but they showed no sign of special interest, at least during our student days, in the intellectual exile that came to absorb my attention. My adolescence was a confused struggle, given structure above all by my many menial jobs, but I managed to leave high school without an education

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but with formal qualifications good enough to gain admission to Columbia College, as well as with sufficient savings from my summer employments to pay tuition for the first semester. I was remarkable at the end of high school only in having an exceptional vocabulary, I recall, as a result of reading popular lending library books at the rate of four a week. Although I had somewhere picked up the left-liberal political inclinations of the Roosevelt years, which offended some patriotic high school teachers, and had read some Freud with my only two friends in order to belittle other acquaintances by our unsolicited insights into their dreams and slips of the tongue, it is safe to say that everything I encountered in college was new. I was an eager, grateful student. Columbia College at the time did not even require students to select a major field, as long as we accumulated credits in advanced courses, so I balanced classes in philosophy, economics, political science, and history. My honors thesis, however, was on Marx’s German Ideology. I could not say much about it, since I wanted to believe it all, but had misgivings. By then, I was nevertheless one of six members of the moribund campus front organization, Young Progressives of America, where the other five, constituting the Communist Party cell, used to caucus beforehand, in order to work out the party line for the meeting, when I would join their number. We demonstrated against the Korean War, as I recall, as well as against the awarding of an honorary degree to a Rightist dictator from Chile. Our primary contribution was a legitimate lecture series on “Negro History,” which no one attended. It was my conviction at the time that my involvement with Communists was primarily a tactical maneuver, that I was using them to promote my own causes, and that this opportunistic affiliation did not oblige me to believe most of what they claimed, especially about the Soviet Union and its allies. Still, my cooperation with them also inclined me to discount or undervalue reports of abuses so harsh as to upset my tacit, fanciful compact. The political division between friends and foes characteristic of the first Cold War decade fostered my a-historical simplifications; I knew much more about the Spanish Civil War than about the Moscow Trials. Yet the “Daily Worker” and the talk of World Youth Festivals and the like embarrassed me. A romanticized version of the anti-fascist exile was my political home, and my newspaper was “PM.” My politics were an anachronistic throwback to the years of the Popular Front, although those I used as my models had almost all moved beyond them. As an undergraduate, my academic culture was quite passive. I was a “good student,” and my typical grade was an A-minus. After a course on the history of political thought, taught by a shy, young Canadian, who followed Franz Neumann’s syllabus, I knew that I would somehow pursue this study, but I had no idea how that might happen, since I had no conception of academic careers. Mostly, I studied diligently what I was assigned. It should be added

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that I had little time to be intellectually adventurous, since on weekdays I spent over eight hours at work, helping to administer (and eventually to teach in) a proprietary adult high school catering to veterans under the GI Bill. An obvious result of this routine was that I had surprising self-confidence but no familiarity or identification with undergraduate student culture. My transition into graduate school at Columbia happened as if by itself. My job in the evening high school was secure; there was never any doubt of my being admitted to graduate studies; and a fellowship was found to cover my tuition. It was just as natural that I would now become a student of Franz L. Neumann, although I had never seen him until I entered his large lecture course on “Democracy and Dictatorship” in my last undergraduate summer. Now I was more confident as some sort of Marxist, having been introduced to Georg Lukács in a class that had also examined Karl Mannheim and Karl Popper. Put somewhat paradoxically, I had come closer to a reference point in the intellectual rather than strictly political anti-fascist emigration, becoming in my habitus an “untimely” member of a generation whose actual members were fifteen to thirty years older. In addition to my classes and seminars with Neumann, as well as courses with Robert K. Merton and Seymour Martin Lipset, great names of the American sociology of the time, I heard Herbert Marcuse for a year in a course significantly called “The Theory of Social Change” (in contrast to a course in the same department called “Theories of Social Change”). My Master’s essay on “Plato and the Problem of Social Change,” a critique of Popper’s “Open Society,” originated as a paper for Neumann’s seminar but derived its problem formulation from Marcuse’s course. It was my second choice of a topic, selected after a noted veteran scholar in American political studies, anxious about my vulnerability to McCarthyist blacklisting and quite possibly puzzled by my attempt to look at American experience through “European” categories, persuaded me not to undertake a study of “political crime” as an implicit category of American law, which had been the subject of a seminar report in his class. Oddly, the advice to pay attention to Plato rather than to politically provocative themes was repeated in 1970, when a department chair sought to help me overcome a political blacklisting at his institution. But that is a different, not very interesting story, with a happy ending in Canada. In the event, both Neumann and Marcuse read and approved the Master’s essay on Plato. The thesis was that far from being afflicted with “historicism” in Karl Popper’s sense, Plato lacked any theory of social or political transformation. The confrontation with the widely read Popper was continued in my doctoral dissertation, which began in design as a grandiose critique of historical theories from Plato to Marx and ended as a narrow study of Adam Ferguson, who was to have been the subject of only a chapter. It is interesting

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that in choosing Popper as critical reference point, I was taking up one of the dramatic struggles internal to the intellectual emigration. After the Master’s essay, accordingly, I continued to look for ways of understanding the uses of history in the construction of social theory without succumbing to the logical errors whose diagnoses I conceded to Popper. Neither Neumann nor Marcuse, notwithstanding their posthumous consignment to the “Frankfurt School,” directed students’ attention to the philosophical writings of Horkheimer or Adorno. The political theories surveyed in the courses, even in doctoral level seminars, were indiscriminately labeled theories or ideologies, to be assessed for their respective contributions to the expansion of “human freedom,” whose elements were largely taken for granted. Our schooling was to a considerable extent a course in political education. My doctoral work on Ferguson consequently sought a strategy for bypassing philosophical issues in the technical sense and ended up—five years later and long after Neumann’s early death and Marcuse’s departure for Brandeis—in a conception of eighteenth-century “moral philosophy” as a tension-ridden paradigmatic mode of orientation for modern intellectuals, a study unexpectedly indebted more to Karl Mannheim—another exile and one of Popper’s prime targets—than to the “critical theory” of the HorkheimerAdorno “Frankfurt School.” Notwithstanding the work’s eccentric sociological approach and thesis, which were evidently little remarked-upon except by some skeptical but kind members of the doctoral committee, the book remains a standard work in the admittedly small field and it has been recently republished.2 It dealt with a writer in English, indeed, but Ferguson had been in fact more noticed in German scholarship than Anglo-American, which may well be how it happened that Neumann recommended the topic to me; and my study sought to identify the idiom and style of the intellectual in his work, a topic common to the exile writers and essentially alien to American studies of philosophical precursors of latter-day liberalism like Ferguson.

The Vocation of Intellectuals In 1960, when the dissertation was approved, I had been a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University for five years. I owed the appointment to a surprising upsurge of interest in political theory initiated by the Rockefeller Foundation in the early 1950s and to the openness to this initiative of a worldly political scientist, Harvey C. Mansfield, who had recently returned to the university from wartime service in Washington and was newly appointed not only as chairman of Ohio State’s ambitious program but also as editor of the profession’s principal journal. He indulged the overlong maturation of my dissertation project in part because he

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quickly employed me as his assistant in editing the American Political Science Review, a position that I held for five years and that required me to prepare a summary and preliminary assessment of nearly ten manuscripts a week, a sustained and thorough education in the discipline of political science, which I had largely neglected during my postgraduate studies. My qualifications as virtual outsider almost certainly added to my value in Mansfield’s eyes. He even brought me along one summer to work with him as an adviser to economists hoping to redirect and coordinate monetary policy, a topic about which I knew nothing. There is an echo here, I now believe, of the staff assignments given to exiles like Neumann and Marcuse in wartime Washington, drawing on their cultural qualifications while benefiting from their distance from channels of influence. Except for some book reviews, I published nothing during these apprenticeship years, preoccupied as well with learning the teaching trade, although one of the reviews, not accidentally called “Dilemmas of Radicalism,” was the first of my many attempts to come to grips with Neumann. It was a critique of the posthumous collection of his American essays in which I repeated some criticisms I had made to his face after he asked me to referee his newly prepared article on freedom in the spring of 1953, when I was an auditor in his doctoral seminar. The key question was how his requirement of a “rational” policy could be met without violating his standards of participatory and liberal freedoms, if the crisis of culture and society was as severe as his diagnosis suggested.3 He never liked the question, perhaps because he considered it to hide a Stalinist rationalization. In any case, I spent many years attempting to render my critical question less crude…and perhaps more answerable. Not quite coincidentally, 1960 was also the year I first met Max Horkheimer. Kurt H. Wolff, who had brought him on a visit to Ohio State, helped me to secure him as a guest lecturer in my class. The contact with Wolff, himself an exile and former student of Karl Mannheim, was part of an unsurprising pattern that manifested itself first in an assignment to translate a Georg Simmel essay for a commemorative volume and then in my privileged dealings with the guests of a newly formed faculty seminar—first Erich Kahler and later Arnold Hauser. I was recognized as a junior and associate member of the small cohort of exiles at Ohio State. After Horkheimer surprised me by speaking to my class with Schopenhauer and against Nietzsche, we talked about my coming to Frankfurt for a year, to follow up my Ferguson study with a fresh approach to the study of Marx, to which it had always been meant to be an introduction. Yet by the time I finished writing my applications for a post-doctoral grant to both the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright Commission— with success in both cases—I realized that I had first to work through the

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implications of my practical preference for Karl Mannheim’s approaches. As a result, however, my year of research in the Institute of Social Research in 1961–2 proved to be a largely fictitious affiliation. Neither Adorno nor Horkheimer were at all disposed to encourage my studies of Mannheim, for reasons I barely grasped at the time; and I was too arrogant to recast myself as merely their student. With my newfound partner, who became my wife in the course of the year, I lived in Königstein, which was not yet a suburb, and I came to Frankfurt only to acquire a new supply of library books once in a while. My notes of my sole interview with Adorno show that he’d referred me to an advanced student named Jürgen Habermas, but I was too discouraged by Adorno’s manifest disdain for my subject to follow any of his leads. Horkheimer reproached me when I sought him out at the end of my stay, because I had not requested permission to attend the Institute seminar. On balance, my failure to do so in the absence of an express invitation was probably a good thing; I would take my Frankfurt School in small, digestible doses—a metaphor that also comes to mind because my nervous system responded to my first return to Germany with no end of abdominal discomfort, one of my few topics in common with Horkheimer. Attraction and distance both marked my relations with the exile generation. Perhaps it would be better not to speak of identification, which could be misunderstood as discipleship, but to say rather that I recognized them as my primary bargaining partners, however defective my own bargaining power. The question is inescapable in the present context whether this year in Germany constituted a “return” in any sense relevant to the present analysis of exile. On one level, the answer is simple. If return entails a renegotiation with specific individuals with whom the exile has unfinished business in any literal sense, my age and inexperience ruled it out. Yet it certainly became clear in the course of the year that my dealings with the émigré generation would also have to extend to the scene that was their point of reference. Except for my minimal contact with the leaders of the Institute, I had virtually no contact with anyone who’d been in exile. I knew a few advanced students in Frankfurt; I had a landlord in Koenigstein who’d been a soldier and worked as a postal employee and who devoted his spare time to a sincere study of the Nazi regime, seeking out fellow-Catholics, like the author Eugen Kogon, in a nearby town to gain understanding of these crimes against his conscience in which he’d played some part. I had some difficult experiences while fulfilling my Fulbright assignments as lecturer and discussion leader in a few Amerika Haus functions, and I became acquainted with the couple who rented us a room during our three or four-day visit to Leipzig, where I visited at the time of the Trade Fair despite the boycott in place as a response to the construction of the Wall during that year. No one

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mistook me for anything but a sojourner, visiting from my enclave in America to some enclaves in Germany. Our landlady in Leipzig, some ten years my senior, came from a family in the same trade as my uncles, but we talked only about their attempts to shape acceptable lives in the DDR, where they had returned after a brief stay in a refugee camp in the West, determined to do what they needed to do in order to educate their children despite the onus of bourgeois origins. A taxi driver claimed to be wearing trousers he’d bought from my uncles, when I asked him about his memory of that family, and he wondered ingenuously what might have happened to them. A visit to the offices of the Jewish community, where I secured a map to help me find the grave of my mother’s mother, who’d died in 1936 and was spared the deportations, involved a grotesque sequence of reassurances that everything was fine, followed by a whispered plea for help in urgent Yiddish made by an old man out of hearing of the secretary. After a public lecture in Dortmund, a tall and strong elderly man deliberately pressed my hand painfully against his ring while pretending to shake hands, which led me and Janet to exit the social event through a French door into the garden and away. No. It was not a return, but it was not a tourist visit either. The terms of my attempt to define my work space in America were further complicated, and the connection to Germany, however peripheral, was never again broken off. Three years in the Netherlands later in my career—within easy reach of Germany for short, focused visits—probably epitomize the relationship, as do a number of collaborations with German colleagues, mostly on my own grounds. Despite the intense demands of my largely internalized confrontation with Germany during that year—I had an ulcer by Thanksgiving—I made headway in my independent studies of Mannheim. The two publications originating then had to await an additional summer of research, mostly in London. One attempted to show structural parallels between Ferguson and Mannheim as two ends of a continuum of intellectuals’ orientations, expressly linking my two worlds,4 while the other was a monograph reporting my findings, unpublished at the time even in Hungary, about Mannheim, Lukács, and the so-called Sunday Circle during the last years of the First World War. Georg Lukács, whom I briefly visited both in 1962 and 1963, had little patience himself with my historical questions, but he was kind and he sent me to Zoltán Horváth, who was just completing a well-informed if quite traditional historical survey. My own thesis was that Lukács’ “Sunday Circle” and its immediate aftermath demonstrated the insufficiency of what I called “revolutionary culturism” and highlighted the urgency of a search for a more adequate political concept, which I thought informed the participants’ divergent paths.5 In the course of that work, I confirmed that I had little stomach for the transcendent revolutionary option—either in its practical Communist Party form or in its esoteric virtual

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adaptation in Frankfurt. An indirect testimonial to this conclusion in quite a different idiom was a small article on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, a sequel to a well-known Neumann article on The Spirit of the Laws, in which I argued, with express critical reference to Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, that Montesquieu had correctly showed that love cannot be a political principle, that politics had to be a more limited project.6 My own decade of the 1960s, then, was divided between my largely localized experiments with reformist political activism on behalf of the usual good causes of those years, which made me think of myself as a “radical,” (and which made John Bricker, the Chairman of the Ohio State Board of Trustees, ask the FBI in vain for proof of my Communist allegiances, so that he could dismiss me), and a series of essay publications on the relations between such activism and democratic theory, a return to the issues raised in my Neumann review, but now deepened by my first round of studies of Mannheim. Further enriching my work during those years was a second year in Europe in 1966–67, the unexpected gift of a year as political science Fulbright lecturer at the University of Leiden, supplemented by a semester as instructor in the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. The respite from activism and the opportunity to observe a Left ranged from dissenting socialists to playful Amsterdam anarchists confirmed me in my habits of distinguishing between the distance required for reflections on “Radical” political theory and the immediacy of mobilizing ideologies associated with direct practice, a main theme of my writings on my return.7 As I have worked more closely in recent years on the vicissitudes of anti-fascism among the 1930s exiles, I have recognized ever more how deeply I was immersed in their questions, although at the time I thought that the issues were simply generated by the civil rights and student protest of those years. In the meantime I focused on Mannheim, obsessively compiling detailed notes on all of his writings and informing myself as well about the Weimar context of his best-known work. Yet I was not ready to publish anything. Back in the United States, I shifted the locus of my activism to the political science profession, about which I thought I knew a good deal from my days as assistant to the editor of the Review. My writings and minor political campaigning were focused on reintroducing (European) social theory themes into the discipline, rather than proclaiming a revolutionary revelation. I became chairman of something called the “Caucus for a New Political Science,” active in the profession, but I disappointed the more activist recruits to this cause by my insistence on academic standards and a scholarly tone.8 While this rather moderate tendency was clear enough to disgust my younger associates, it was little attended by my more senior professional colleagues, not least because the purely political lines of division in the discipline were reinforced by a

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cleavage between the strongly emplaced advocates of a scientific style and the scattered adherents of alternatives accumulated over the decades, as well as new converts to assorted philosophical radicalisms of the time. In 1970, then, I was abruptly removed from this disputed terrain, caught unaware in a transition from my full professorship at Ohio State, which had become unbearable because of the local state of the methodological wars, to a comparable position in a department with a strong political theory core, where I could expect to protect my students from prejudicial requirements. When Ohio State joined other campuses in an outburst of militant protest in the spring, I invented a kind of peacekeeping role for faculty unwilling to see the dissent simply stifled, but I was nevertheless cast in the role of faculty agitator that was required by the conservative scenarios of those events—and, having resigned earlier in anticipation of the move that was now foreclosed, I found myself without a job and virtually unemployable. The combination of insufficient hostility to rebellious students and disciplinary dissidence sufficed to bring about a kind of polite blacklisting, especially effective for a candidate for a senior appointment. It could be said that I found myself in need of asylum, although it would stretch the concept of exile to claim this status for myself.

Politics: Science or Negotiation After a year of safe haven (at an instructor’s salary) in a small, unorthodox college, whose president—Leon Botstein—was 23 at the time, I moved to a new, welcoming undergraduate university in Canada, where my alien status effectively disqualified me from active political engagements and freed me to return to my more strictly academic quandaries. It could be said, of course, that these shifts did entail analogies to the negotiations I have emphasized in my study of intellectual exiles.Despite the intellectual and geographic proximity between Peterborough, Ontario and upstate New York, it was a different political universe, and the recognition I had to gain and the deal I had to make in order to function productively in an institution that combined a distinctive anglophile university culture with a strong emphasis on Canadian distinctiveness was different from that I had received from my various minority constituencies in the United States. And one of the first things to be dissipated was any sense of mission or urgency of return. I became part of an American diaspora, it could be said. Still, it is best to draw these comparisons lightly. After writing an article on the Ohio State events, expressly drawing on Neumann for the first time in some years to help me think about the legal forms of those conflicts,9 as well as revising an English version of my earlier German-language Lukács and Mannheim monograph for an American

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theoretical-political journal, I accepted an assignment to write an article on Herbert Marcuse for a textbook edited by two conservative scholars, one a South African and the other an Englishman. It would give me a chance to balance my accounts with him, notwithstanding the curious venue and the near certainty that none of my peers would ever read it. In the end, as I rethought Marcuse’s achievement, I found surprisingly little substantive loss when I abandoned the supposed dynamics of the dialectic in favor of a threefold division into a “negation” of bourgeois society, a utopian projection, and a theory of political change. In defiance of Marcuse’s express strictures, then, I could extract value only after de-totalizing the design to reveal a vigorous and often quite brilliant version of the leftist civic humanism that was the lingua franca of the anti-fascist exile.10 I stopped thinking of the Frankfurt School as a vast mountain that I had yet to climb and went for walks instead in the lower-lying woods by incorporating both Adorno and Horkheimer in the cultural studies courses I was beginning to develop and by finding nothing anomalous about distinguishing in their texts between self-dramatizing exaggerations and deep questions. Juergen Habermas—a far greater figure than myself, who also had unfinished business with the exile generation—was a help in all this, although I knew right away that his was also not a school that would ever have me as a pupil. The combination of regard and reservation towards Habermas’ grand design initiated an assignment that led me to a new cycle through my earlier topics. In the spring before a full sabbatical for 1975–76, which I had arranged to spend at Balliol College, Oxford, and which I had expected to devote wholly to a book on Karl Mannheim, picking up where I had left off almost ten years earlier,11 I was asked to review a Habermasian treatment of the Scottish moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. The most important question that arose in the course of the review was precisely about my initial assumption when I first addressed Ferguson, whether his moral philosophy, insofar as it was also a social theory, actually rested on the scheme of historical stages that was doubtless present, but whose actual work in the design, I now decided, had to be discovered rather than imputed on the strength of later theorists he was thought to anticipate.12 I was able to gain a three-month residency at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Edinburgh and to work through Ferguson’s archival remains, notably his class lectures. The historical stages were important to his practical reading of situations appropriate to the actor, I concluded, but not to the spectator’s scientific explanation. The relationship between the intellectual and the scholar was thus one of complementarity, not displacement. In a major article published in 1976, then, and in a less formal sequel a year later, I concluded that I had been right in treating Ferguson’s theory as a composite structure, but that I had

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been wrong in relying on a standard paradigm of theory formation, and that I had consequently underestimated the element of constitutional bargaining and political openness in the essayistic theoretical design, as in the substance of the political theory itself.13 Despite renewed immersion in Mannheim during my stay at Oxford, some book reviews, and a premature book contract, my Mannheim project did not really gain momentum until a year or two after my return to Canada, when two German-Canadian sociologists already well known for contributions to Mannheim studies and sociology of knowledge persuaded me to begin a collaboration with them. Most important was Volker Meja, with whom I began a collaboration that has been productive for more than thirty years. Born in Germany at the beginning of the war, with a father in the army, and childhood experiences as a refugee from his grandmother’s home in Silesia, Meja studied sociology in Frankfurt until his departure for post-graduate study in North America, where he was a student of Kurt H. Wolff at Brandeis University. Some might wonder at this re-enactment of the famous GermanJewish symbiosis, but it has always seemed obvious to us. In terms of the analysis sketched in these reflections, Meja’s own inability to remain at home and his engagement with one after another of the German exiles represents an intriguing complement to my own enterprise. Almost immediately, Meja and I edited and in effect translated two book-length manuscripts by Mannheim, for which we also provided interpretive introductions,14 and we then jointly wrote a brief overall account of Mannheim’s intellectual project, giving due weight to my earlier treatments of his Hungarian beginnings, our new reading of the standard works in the light of the new discoveries, and a non-reductionist treatment of his time in English exile, which I had researched years earlier. Perhaps because the book was so short—and notwithstanding inattentive, somewhat patronizing reviews—there were translations in German, French, Spanish, and Japanese.15 Our reading of Mannheim emphasized the experimental character of Mannheim’s essays, even when misleadingly presented as integral chapters in his famous book, Ideology and Utopia, as well as the centrality of the theme of “politics as a science,” construed as a need to recognize but to render controllable what was historically called the “irrational” element in human social life. Fifteen years later, when Meja and I recast the analysis to incorporate the fistful of specialized Mannheim studies we had published in the interim, we characterized the project as the constitution of an open, multi-dimensional bargaining regime, designed to manage, without resolving, a classic constellation of difficulties confronting liberalism since its first articulation by John Stuart Mill.16 While the structural analysis of liberalism derived from R. D. Cumming’s marvelous (and marvelously eccentric)

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book—another return to one of my teachers—the account of bargaining regimes drew on quite a different return and over-determination. In the autumn of 1979, I became chairman of the Faculty Association at Trent—an office that normally went begging—but I set as a condition for accepting the chore that the established core group would help me to convert the association into a proper trade union, under Ontario labor law, with the capacity of negotiating a binding collective agreement, backed by a right to strike. In this eminently pragmatic and localized form, some of my old political responses revived. The unionization campaign succeeded, and for the next eighteen months, more or less, I spent twelve hours a week at the bargaining table, renegotiating all the rules and procedures governing faculty, up to the actual terms of compensation. Two things gave added weight to the things I learned from this experience in applied labor law. First, a publisher asked me to advise on the question of publishing Franz Neumann’s 1934 London School of Economics dissertation on the “Domination of the Rule of Law,” which I had never read. And, second, I was unexpectedly invited to spend 1981–2 as a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and Humanities. I actually advised against publishing the Neumann, unless it could be paired with a companion volume on the historical context and meaning of the work, and—of course—I decided to spend the NIAS year on researching Neumann’s legal theorizing, beginning with his Weimar years as labor lawyer. This brought me back to school in Frankfurt for the third time, since Neumann’s labor law thinking derived from his years with Hugo Sinzheimer, including his service as instructor in the Labor Academy, which was attached to the University. The “labor law” founded by Sinzheimer was essentially collective bargaining law, with the prime theoretical puzzle being the legal status of the collective agreement. The central political questions, in turn, had to do with the relationships between the regimes constituted by relations among state, worker, and employer collective actors and the democratic political constitution, especially insofar as the latter was seen as an agency of social change towards socialism. I concluded from my studies that not even the disastrous outcome of the Weimar experiment disproved the case for a complementarity between quasi-corporatist regimes and the sphere of political action. A defeat is not necessarily a refutation, although it is eminently understandable why the defeated—like Neumann and his associates—should have thought so, at least for a while. With a second year at NIAS, I was able to play a part in the belated Dutch reception of Sinzheimer’s contribution in exile to the formation of a labor law field in Holland, and to learn from the German discussions of the time about hyper-juridification (Verrechtlichung) and deformalization of law, which coincided with a revival of interest in Weimar socialist legal theory.17

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Then, too, there was the early work on reflexive law by Gunther Teubner, later in Frankfurt, which derived in turn from American labor law approaches reminiscent of Weimar labor law. The contrast between the mode of legality for which labor law was paradigmatic and the mode of legality grounded in property law led me then to attempt a critique of “new property” approaches to the welfare state and to a proposal for a theoretical approach based on the labor law experience.18 It could be said that I had moved, however cautiously, into a sphere of a German-American “symbiosis.” All the while, however, I wanted to get a clearer understanding of the differences among bargaining regimes and their various capacities for constituting relationships congruent with reasonable management of conflicts, as well as their capacities for changes in the parties to be recognized and the matters to be deemed proper for negotiation, with special emphasis, of course, on the role of reflexive law in framing these designs. My studies went in two directions. First, there was a case study of the role of labor lawyers in the early bargaining regime experiments of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, mostly in New York City and around the time of the First World War,19 a publication that had a sequel some years later in a study of the labor regime sources of the Japanese lifetime employment institution.20 The second direction was initiated by Seymour Martin Lipset’s challenge to show whether differences in the labor regime could contribute to explaining the divergences between American and Canadian trade union “density” in the years after 1960. This resulted in a series of three publications, done with different combinations of specialist collaborators.21 One was fittingly published in a collection of articles on reflexive labor law issued by the Hugo Sinzheimer Institute of the University of Amsterdam.22 Common to all these studies, which drew on European neo-corporatist experiences as well, was a rejection of the militant conflict models commonplace in North American labor history studies, in favor of recognizing the versatility and resiliency of bargaining models. At the same time, the work culminated in the recognition that the trade unions and labor regimes I had been examining, whatever their merits, were being irretrievably marginalized by the end of the 1980s.23 It was time to collect what I had learned from my empirical explorations and to move once more to more reflexive questions.

“Exile and Return”: The Second Time In 1990, I accepted a visiting appointment from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York followed by an invitation to be Scholar in Residence at nearby Bard College, whose President was the man who had given me shelter in 1970. I returned from Canada to the United States. The

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first order of business, then, was to complete the work on Mannheim that Meja and I had been accumulating, even as I was primarily focused on labor and the law. We published a series of articles, probing more deeply into Mannheim’s German research project, and into the complex and ultimately unsatisfying negotiations that constituted his reception in the years of his emigration to England. This phase of my many encounters with Mannheim was introduced by a mild but gratifying academic adventure, which also pointed towards a new level of reflection. Around 1985, my attention was called to Nina Rubinstein, who had studied with Mannheim and whose completed dissertation had been pushed aside by the Nazi dismissal of her teacher and by the forced immediate exile of her Menshevik family. A group of us, in America and Frankfurt—including, notably, Claudia Honegger, who soon after became Professor of Sociology in Bern— persuaded the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University to award Rubinstein the earned doctorate, after a memorable viva voce examination of Rubinstein, then aged 81. The dissertation was subsequently published on its merits, together with my laudation and some other documents.24 As someone at home in the Menshevik emigration in Berlin, Rubinstein undertook a study of exile through a comparison between the White Russian emigrants of the Soviet era and the French émigrés of 1789, although the work ultimately concentrated on the latter. My encounter with Rubinstein’s study suggested a new way of settling my unfinished business with both Mannheim and Neumann, since both cases had already raised questions about the consequences of their forced emigrations and complex subsequent dealings with representatives of their fields in their lands of asylum.25 This shift of emphasis was delayed, however, by an unexpected new find in 1997 of a major Mannheim text, a verbatim transcript of his introduction to sociology course in his first Frankfurt semester. Although his own quite detailed lecture notes for other courses had been available in the University of Keele collection, this text comprised a dramatic presentation of his distinctive idea about the forms and purposes of sociology.26 A conference on the new materials brought me together with Colin Loader, the author of a well-respected study of Mannheim, and we decided to publish an English translation of the text, with supporting materials, as well as a book on a theme given new urgency by these documents, Mannheim’s conception of sociology as the mode of Bildung [cultivation] appropriate to the democratic era.27 Questions of education, namely political education, had already played a part in our separate earlier interpretations, but the 1930 record showed the scope of Mannheim’s claims for sociology, in view of the historical place of Bildung as a major issue of political as well as cultural conflict in Germany. The lectures, moreover, offered new insights into Mannheim’s relations with writers he located in the

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fascist boundary domain, notably Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, as well as with those he considered orthodox Marxists. Despite the narrow focus on the years between 1930 and 1933, in short, the study with Loader struck me as profoundly instructive not only about Mannheim but also, in view of his character as a representative intellectual, about the state of the question of democracy and culture in those years, so bitterly regretted and so harshly judged by the intellectual exiles of 1933. Beginning in 2001, then, I turned to an intense—if always exploratory— study of intellectual exile, picking up the theme from Rubinstein and perhaps also from my own oblique biographical relations to it. Some of the issues had already been raised by my monographic work on Mannheim, Neumann, and Sinzheimer, of course, but now I decided to seek the cooperation of colleagues, notably younger scholars. There have been four stages in this project, centered respectively on a workshop, a large conference, a special issue of an interdisciplinary journal, and the collaborative exploration of a special focus through three workshops and an ongoing series of publications. The challenge to the twenty workshop participants at the first stage was epitomized in the title, “No Happy End,” inspired by the deep disappointment and self-blame evident in the late writings of Mannheim and Neumann, notwithstanding their reputed status as models of émigré success. Out of the workshop arose a large conference with a less one-sided problematique, namely “contested legacies,” which referred to three distinct sites of contestation: the Weimar scene, the diverse bargaining regimes among the exiles themselves and in their relations with their respective fields in the places of asylum, and in the successive waves of reception.28 The ancestry of this kind of contextualization in my confrontations with Mannheim’s approaches is evident, but my own actual contributions to the project had mostly to do with Neumann, although the momentum also led me to publish some narrowly focused studies of Nina Rubinstein, Hans Mayer, and Erich Kahler.29 The principal result of the effort was reported in an introduction to the main collective publication arising out of the project, written with the Germanist, Gerhard Lauer. Taking up the insight developed in the book on Mannheim and “political education,” we contrasted the way in which the dispute between cultivation and science was structured during the Weimar years with the contest in American higher education between proponents of “liberal arts” and “professionalism.” The aim was to interrogate the exiles’ various negotiations of the translation and transition, as documented in their work.30 And, of course, the aim at quite a different level was to dig more deeply into my own experience as student and teacher. The “Contested Legacies” project led me to three questions that I have only begun to address. The first of these, corresponding to the third “phase”

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mentioned above, is documented in a collection called “Limits of Exile,” which brings together studies of numerous intellectual emigrations, ranging from Iraqi Jewish novelists in Israel and Iranian students in the United States to Spanish Civil War exiles in Mexico and Russian philosophers in Weimar Germany.31 The unifying question had to do with the post-modern and postcolonial versions of the long-established metaphorical extension of the exile concept to comprehend states of estrangement that had no specific political source or character, a complex of issues commonly identified with the work of Edward Said. My proposal was to limit the concept of exile to its less metaphorical dimensions, lest we impoverish our abilities to examine the limits imposed by the condition—and even blur the inquiry into changes that may indeed render exile, in the politically charged sense, an anachronism.32 The contributors to the collection, including my co-editor, were not all agreed, and the project has remained open until the completion of the present book, notably its first chapter. The second new question deriving from my renewed attention to Neumann as a representative social science émigré had to do with the interplay between the emigrants and the academic disciplines in which some of them found a home. Specifically, I wrote two studies, drawing on archival records as well as my own recollections of my work on the American Political Science Review, focusing on the unexpected upsurge in the mid 1950s of “political theory” in modes inconsistent with accepted science models, at a time when quite simple positivist models of social science were so strongly in the ascendant.33 These were then presented to audiences of American political scientists, marking a return to this disciplinary setting after many decades, a belated renewal of my own negotiations with the field. In the spirit of such a reorientation, Volker Meja, Colin Loader, and I returned one last time to Mannheim, in order to focus on the less self-reflexive dimension of his project—the side he presented to disciplinary professionals inspired by Max Weber—especially through an examination of the projects Mannheim set his doctoral students, as well as the studies of Norbert Elias and others in his working group, during his lamentably brief but extraordinarily fruitful three years in Frankfurt, a time in which he managed nevertheless to fill the place of Oppenheimer’s “Frankfurt School,” in its competition with the “Cologne School” of von Wiese.34 This book is offered to the present generation of scholars who are looking at Mannheim anew, notably in Frankfurt, and brings together some past publications of ours on several of his women students, as well my recently published papers on Kaethe Truhel, who wrote on social workers and bureaucrats in the Weimar welfare state, and on Jacob Katz, who wrote on the ideology of Jewish assimilation.35 The last of these papers, written with Volker Meja during a joint month at Dan Diner’s Jewish

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Studies institute in Leipzig, resonates with a friendship earlier dramatized on a day in Poland, twenty years earlier, when we first visited the village where Volker, born in 1940, had spent some war years with his grandmother until they were forced on the road by the approach of Russian armies, and when we then drove on, just before dusk, to Auschwitz, where I lost beloved aunts and uncles and cousins of my age, and where I would have died myself, if it had not been for an unlikely combination of lucky accidents. The Leipzig paper on Mannheim was called “Mannheim’s Jewish Question,” and it attempted to answer, with the help of his dealings with Katz, why Mannheim never once addressed the inhuman happenings later comprehended as the “Holocaust,” although he never denied his Jewish parents, who both survived the years of the Budapest ghetto, in his personal life. Our thesis, uncertain and speculative, was that Mannheim’s “intellectual,” if he was Jewish, had strong reasons, unrelated to clichés about self-hatred, to impose a silence about Jewishness, in order to reproduce a setting free of Christianness upon which the constitution of the cultivated stratum depended—a counterpart, perhaps, of Adam Ferguson’s never explained decision to surrender his standing and title as a clergyman when he returned to the Edinburgh of David Hume and Adam Smith. That half-serious allusion underlines the obvious reflexive implications of the thesis of the Katz paper for my attempt to make sense of my own intellectual course. After all, questions about Jewishness and Holocaust are absent from my own record as well. Yet the argument about intellectuals is too vague. Much more to the point, I think, is the generational identification I introduced at the outset. Anti-fascism was a reading of the short twentieth century that precluded anything like the centering of anti-Semitism, not to speak of Holocaust. Until constrained to adapt by events at the bargaining table where the continued legitimacy as well as the financial viability of Horkheimer’s Institute in New York was at issue, Franz Neumann opposed the turn towards anti-Semitism in their studies, claiming that he had exposed National Socialism in his Behemoth virtually without a serious reference to the phenomenon. Manifestly, this turn in my work was not without its own bearing on my self-understanding. To clarify this position, I would have been glad to research more deeply the career of anti-fascism, its vicissitudes in the course of exile and return.36 My contribution to the earlier mentioned book of comparative studies, “Limits of Exile,” deals with the relationship between the general turn from antifascism in anti-Communist nations and the return of leftwing prisoners from concentration camp, which was also a mode of exile.37 The broader theme to which these studies were intended as introduction would have had special importance for me personally since the history of anti-fascism cannot

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be studied without a confrontation with the events—especially the Stalinist terror—that so bitterly disturbed and divided the actual members of the generation with whose idealized myth I was able to identify without much risk or strain. But it is regrettably too late for such a demanding project. I will not get to it. There can be no dramatic conclusion to this painful inquiry. I am not about to kick over the negotiating table. And perhaps, given the realities registered on tables of another sort—actuarial tables—it will not end at all, because it will simply have to stop. The bell will ring, and school will be out. In the meantime, I initiated an indirect and collaborative approach to some of these problems. On the principle of exploratory test boring in unusually promising terrain, we have been examining the initial postwar letters of exiles addressed to persons in Germany from whom they were separated by exile and war. Surprisingly, many of these letters document a disintegration of anti-fascism as well as the occasionally shame-faced disavowal of the exile itself, with interesting differences between Jews and non-Jews. These letters record very intricate and difficult negotiations, as these occasions pose the question of return, vindication and reconciliation so urgently that even the absence of these themes in the letters sometimes permits reasonable conclusions. After an initial programmatic article published in the journal of the German Literary Archive,38 about twenty colleagues have been involved thus far in workshops on this project, and a two-volume publication is in preparation.39 What is likely to be my final major undertaking takes me back to all of the themes recalled above. With a younger colleague who has been a participant in all of the earlier studies of exile, I have begun to assemble and integrate my accumulated studies of Franz Neumann into a work on Neumann as “political intellectual,” the category to which he assigned himself in reflecting back over his exile years and which focuses precisely on the legacy, which I have tried to appropriate and make useful. I think of it as a sort of retrospective protocol of a long negotiation. That would then be my final settling of accounts and return. In their treatment of cultural capital, Sonnert and Holton distinguish among embodied, objectified, and institutionalized states of that resource. The cultural objects and credentials intended by the last two types are largely irrelevant for young refugees, so the issue is about the first. Under embodied cultural capital, they “count the deportment, values, and expected behaviors that the young refugees imbibed in their early years from their families and the surrounding environment” (144). Inasmuch as the cultural aspirations in my own family could only be very thinly symbolized during my childhood years and ceased in any case to be a presence after my arrival at a young age, when neither my mother nor

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our most frequent family contacts were at all oriented to the GermanJewish habitus of cultivation, I am tempted to speak of being haunted by the specter of a dis-embodied cultural capital, a deep preoccupation with a rumor of irretrievable loss. Perhaps the search is, after all, nothing but a reenactment of Dickens’ famously bleak case of Jaundyce v. Jaundyce. A more optimistic rendering might speak of the quest for a legacy, depending very much on guides, and yielding at best the sort of reward that Georg Simmel associated with the heirs who enhanced the fertility of a field simply by digging for the treasure to which they were directed by their father’s will. Such a skeptical conclusion may be said to beg the question posed by an early reader of these pages. Referring to the issue raised in the study of Nina Rubenstein concerning the measure of consequential enlightenment that can be secured from exercises in analytically enhanced self-reflection, the reader asked in effect whether there is any gain for my understanding of the political world, which is my subject, from this recognition of my immersion in an unfinished process anchored in the past. Since I cannot believe in the transcendent breakthroughs popularized in self-help books, it seems clear that such reflections can serve at best to help others to enter into more productive negotiations with my work, to place it, to give it the recognition relevant to their own projects, and to continue on their own paths.

NOTES Preface 1 The workshops were: No Happy End (Bard College, February 2001), Erste Briefe, (Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach, 23–24 May 2008), First Letters/Erste Briefe International Workshop (Trinity University, 14–15 November 2008), and Workshop First Letters (Johannes Guttenberg University, Mainz, 13–16 January 2010). The large conference devoted to the project was Contested Legacies (Bard College, 13–15 August 2002). Here is the list of publications arising from these events: Contested Legacies: The German-Speaking Intellectual and Cultural Emigration to the US and UK, 1933–1945, ed. David Kettler (Berlin and Cambridge MA: Galda & Wilch, 2002); “Contested Legacies: Political Theory and the Hitler Regime,” ed. David Kettler and Thomas Wheatland, special issue, European Journal of Political Theory (June 2004); Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intellectuals, ed. David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer (New York and London: Palgrave, 2005); The Limits of Exile, ed. David Kettler and Zvi Ben Dor (Berlin/Glienecke: Galda & Wilch, 2010); and forthcoming: Erste Briefe aus dem Exil 1945–1950:(Un)Mögliche Gespräche Bd. 1, ed. Primus-Heinz Kucher, Johannes Evelein and Hekga Schreckenberger and Erste Briefe aus dem Exil 1945–1950: (Wie) endet das Exil? Bd. 2, ed. David Kettler and Detlef Garz (Munich: Text + Kritik, 2010).

Chapter One. The Study of Intellectual Exile: A Paradigm 1 Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. R. Fergusson, M. Gever, T. M. Trinth and C. West, 357–68 (New York, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 2 Czeslaw Milosz, “On Exile,” Exiles (New York: Aperture, 1988). Photographs by J. Koudelka. 3 J-M. Claassen, Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). 4 Apostolic Fathers, “The Martyrdom of Polycarp, The Epistle to Diognetus” in The Apostolic Fathers, trans. Francis X. Glimm, Joseph M.-F. Marique, and Gerald G. Walsh (New York: Cima Pub. Co., 1947); Jacob Neusner, Self-fulfilling Prophecy Exile and Return in the History of Judaism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). 5 Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero’s letters to his friends, trans. Shackleton Bailey, with foreword by J. E. G. Zetzel (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988); Marcus Tullius Cicero, Back from Exile: Six Speeches upon His Return, trans. with introductions and notes by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1991); Claasen, Displaced Persons. 6 Plato, “Defence of Socrates,” in Defence of Socrates, Euthyphro, Crito, trans. David Gallop, 37c–38b (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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7 Steven Johnston, The Truth about Patriotism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007) 64–114; James Boyd White, Acts of Hope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 3–44. 8 White, op. cit., 275–294. 9 Theo Stammen, “Exil und Emigration—Versuch einer Theoretisierung,” in Fluchtpunkte des Exils. Exilforschung. Ein Internationales Jahrbuch. Band 5. 1987, ed. Thomas Koebner et al., 11–27 (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1987). 10 Otto Kirchheimer, Political Justice, The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1961). 11 This consideration, as well as his indifference to the claims of citizenship, led Hobbes to deprecate exile as a form of punishment. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes writes, uncharacteristically citing Cicero as authority while scorning the quality of the status activus: Exile (banishment) is when a man is for a crime, condemned to depart out of the dominion of the Common-wealth, or out of a certain part thereof, and during a prefixed time, or for ever, not to return into it: and seemeth not in its own nature, without other circumstances, to be a Punishment; but rather an escape, or a public commandment to avoid punishment by flight. And Cicero says there was never any such punishment ordained in the city of Rome; but calls it a refuge of men in danger. For if a man banished be nevertheless permitted to enjoy his goods, and the revenue of his lands, the mere change of air is no punishment; nor does it tend to that benefit of the Commonwealth for which all punishments are ordained, that is to say, to the forming of men’s wills to the observation of the law; but many times to the damage of the Commonwealth. For a banished man is a lawful enemy of the Commonwealth that banished him, as being no more a member of the same. But if he be withal deprived of his lands, or goods, then the punishment lieth not in the exile, but is to be reckoned amongst punishments pecuniary. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 28:165, ed. Richard Tuck, 218–19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 12 Nina Rubinstein, Die französische Emigration nach 1789. Ein Beitrag zur oziologie der politischen Emigration (Graz: Nausner & Nausner, 2000); see also chapter 2 below. 13 This is in some respects a less subtle analysis than that presented by Peter Fritzsche, who emphasizes the sensitivity to historical disjunction cultivated in the émigré returnees, treating it as an important contribution to the historical consciousness of the nineteenth century. See Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 55–91. Rubinstein’s blunter account is written from the standpoint of capacity for political action in the event of return: the émigrés, she finds, share neither past nor future with those who remained behind. Rubinstein was a follower of Karl Mannheim, whose views on historical time are analyzed in David Kettler and Colin Loader, “Temporizing with Time Wars: Karl Mannheim and Problems of Historical Time,” Time and Society, 13 (2004) 2/3, 155–172. 14 Machiavelli, writing while he was himself in exile, dramatizes a caution that points to the obstacles in the way of the exile in the course of such efforts: And it does not appear to me to be foreign to this subject to discuss among other matters how dangerous a thing it is to believe those who have been driven out of their country, these being matters that are acted upon each day by those who

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govern States…. It ought to be considered, … how vain are the faith and promises of those who find themselves deprived of their country. For, as to their faith, it has to be borne in mind that anytime they can return to their country by other means than yours, they will leave you and look to the other, notwithstanding whatever promises they had made you. As to their vain hopes and promises, such is the extreme desire in them to return home, that they naturally believe many things that are false and add many others by art, so that between those they believe and those they say they believe, they fill you with hope, so that relying on them you will incur expenses in vain, or you undertake an enterprise in which you ruin yourself. …. A Prince, therefore, ought to go slowly in undertaking an enterprise upon the representations of an exile, for most of the times he will be left either with shame or very grave injury. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, second book, chapter 31, Liberty Library, http://www. constitution.org/mac/disclivy_.htm. 15 Peyman Vahabzadeh, “Reflections on a Diremptive Experience and Four Theses on Origins and Exile,” in The Limits of Exile, ed. David Kettler and Zvi Ben Dor, 169–188 (Glienicke/Berlin: Galda Verlag, 2010). 16 The conjunction is well developed for the paradigm Western case in Neusner, op. cit. On the difference between the Jewish and Christian versions of the figure, see Israel Yuval, “The myth of the Jewish exile from the land of Israel: a demonstration of irenic scholarship.” Common Knowledge 12, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 16–33. The spiritual hypostatization of the dis/location and the corresponding shift of “return” to a dimension beyond space and time is the historic distinguishing mark of the Christian rendition, notwithstanding the Jewish re-orientation to other aspects of the Christian transmutation of the exile paradigm. 17 “Exile and Return: Forever Winter,” Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads 3, no. 1 (April 2006): 181–200, reprinted in The Limits of Exile, ed. David Kettler and Zv Ben-Dor (Berlin/Glienecke: Galda & Wilch, 2010).

Chapter Two. Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein’s Exile Studies 1 Revision of a paper first presented to the Columbia University Seminar on Methods and Contents, September 13, 2000 and to a public seminar sponsored by several programs at the University of Minnesota, September 15, 2000. 2 David Kettler, “‘Can We Master the Global Tensions or Must We Suffer Shipwreck on our Own History?’” in Karl Mannheims Beitrag zur Analyse moderner Gesellschaften, ed. M. Endreß and I. Srubar, 293–309 (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1999). 3 David Kettler and Volker Meja, “‘Their Own Peculiar Way’: Karl Mannheim and the Rise of Women,” International Sociology 8, no. 1 (1993): 5–55. 4 Karl Mannheim, Sociology as Political Education, trans. and ed. David Kettler and Colin Loader (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001); Colin Loader and David Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education, ed. David Kettler and Colin Loader (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002). 5 Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt Wolff, 402–408 (New York: Free Press, 1950). 6 Nina Rubinstein, Die französische Emigration nach 1789: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der politischen Emigration, ed. D. Raith (1933; Graz: Nausner & Nausner, 2000).

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7 Karl Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie (Bonn: Cohen, 1929). 8 C. D. Krohn, P. v. z. Mühlen, G. Paul, and L. Winckler, Handbuch der deutsch-sprachigen Emigration. 1933–1945 (Darmstadt: Primus, 1998). 9 In our examination of this work, we can draw as well on a surprisingly complete record of preliminary sketches and drafts, fragmentary documentation of Rubinstein’s unsuccessful proposals for developing her thesis as submitted to the Sorbonne in the mid-thirties and to the Graduate Faculty of the New School in New York, in 1941, as well as a series of interviews conducted with Rubinstein in 1987 by the present author and the anthropologist Hanna Papanek, Rubinstein’s younger half-sister (Nachlaß Nina Rubinstein im Archiv für die Geschichte der Soziologie in Oesterreich Graz, 39/1, AHSA 39, no.1). Detailed marginal comments in Mannheim’s handwriting on Rubinstein’s drafts confirm her own recollection that he mentored the work in detail, rather than leaving the supervision largely to his assistant, Norbert Elias, as was evidently the case for many of his other students. Elias did make some contribution to Rubinstein’s efforts, however, as evidenced by a 1930 letter on the project. See Dirk Raith in Nina Rubinstein, Die französische Emigration nach 1789: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der politischen Emigration, ed. D. Raith (Graz: Nausner & Nausner, 2000). 10 Claudia Honegger, “Jüdinnen in der frühen deutschsprachigen Soziologie,” in Lektüren und Brüche. Jüdische Frauen in Kultur, Politik und Wissenschaft, ed. M. M. Jansen and I. Nordmann, 178–195 (Wiesbaden: Chmielorz, 1993); citing Georg Simmel, “The Stranger” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff, 402–408 (New York: Free Press, 1950), 181. 11 Archive for the History of Sociology in Austria (AHSA) 39, no.1. Nina Rubinstein, Die französische Emigration nach 1789 (dissertation, 1929–1933). 12 See Colin Loader and David Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2002). 13 Karl Mannheim, Sociology as Political Education, trans. and ed. David Kettler and Colin Loader, 166 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001). 14 Loc. Cit. 15 This is an edited compilation of statements made in reply to various probes. Interview Protocol, 17 December 1987. 16 Kurt H. Wolff, “The Two Secret Poets,” in What It Contains (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002). 17 “Forced Migration and Scientific Change,” Emigré German-Speaking Scientists and Scholars after 1933, ed. M. G. Ash and A. Söllner (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); G. Gemelli, The “Unacceptables,” American Foundations and Refugee Scholars between the Two Wars and After (Brussels and Berne: P. I. E. Peter Lang, 2000).

Chapter Three. A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider, and/or Exile 1 Cp. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character and Community (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984). White’s own subtle response to the problem signaled by the title does not correspond to the positivist historicism summarized here. 2 Martin Albrow, The Global Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformation

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5 6 7 8 9

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(London: Polity Press, 1999); Gunther Teubner, ed., Global Law without a State (Aldershott: Dartmouth, 1997); Ulrich Brand, et al., Global Governance: Alternative zur neoliberalen Globalisierung (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2000). Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. R. Fergusson, M. Gever, T. M. Trinth, and C. West, (New York and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 357–68. White, who is a lawyer and classicist, as well as literary critic, speaks of “constitutional” politics in this connection. See James Boyd White, Acts of Hope: Creating Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). See Robert D. Cumming, “Mill’s History of His Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25, no. 2 (April–June, 1964): 235–256. Colin Loader and David Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 109–143. Hans Mayer, Außenseiter (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981); Hans Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf (1982; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984). Rheinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand, Exil und Innere Emigration, Third Wisconsin Workshop (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972). The postwar displacement of anti-fascism as the ethical core of exile and return was by no means limited to Western Germany. For Holland, Belgium, and France, see Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); David Kettler, “Exile and Return,” in The Limits of Exile, ed. David Kettler and Zvi Ben-Dor (Berlin/Glienecke: Galda & Wilch, 2010). Recent scholarship has called into question some information contained in the latter article, and methodological difficulties attending the use of documentary films as primary documents pose issues too complex for the present collection of converging studies; however, the main outlines of the analysis remain valid. Jost Hermand, “Schreiben in der Fremde,” op. cit., 7–30, esp. 10. A striking feature of the effort to generate a study of exile literature in the United States is that it was largely led by young German academics, radicalized by the German student movement of the 1960s, who had gained positions in American universities. The differences among the successive waves of reception of exile writings are usually neglected in “exile studies.” This lack of self-reflection is manifest in a recent conscientious and generally useful study, which attempts belatedly to generate exile studies in Canada, where competing framings of the issues are nevertheless treated simply as incidents in the progress of theoretical knowledge. See Eugen Banauch, Fluid Exile: Jewish Exile Writers in Canada 1940–2006 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009). Rheinhold Grimm, “Innere Emigration als Lebensform,” op. cit., 31–87, esp. 65. Hans Mayer, “Innere und Äussere Emigration,” op. cit., 75–87, esp. 87 and 79. The question of interminable exile is not meant to be erased by the present insistence on the problem of return. It is a commonplace in studies of non-European exiles, but then usually in the context of relations between exile and diaspora. See, for example, Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). On the implicit criterion of a “genuine” exile, compare Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, “On the Specificity of the Spanish Exile of 1939,” in Kettler and Ben-Dor, op. cit. The conceptual issues are freshly addressed by Eduardo Subirats, “Boundless Exile,” loc. cit. Hans Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 1:395–6.

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16 Ibid., 2:263–64, 398–99. 17 Two lectures by Mayer at the time of his move to East Germany lay out his own diagnosis of the “crisis” to be overcome. He speaks of a “crisis of the human (Humanität)” in relation to authorship and of a “cultural crisis” in relation to music. In the former case, his antagonists are above all Sartre, Jünger, Camus, and Gide because of their hostility to “humanity” and their reduction of human freedom to “decisionism.” In the latter case, the enemies are musicians, exemplified by Stravinsky, whose play with forms disguises an abandonment of contents. In both cases, Mayer relies on late humanistic manifestos by Thomas Mann to project his home ground. Cp. Reinhard Mehring, “A Humanist Program in Exile: Thomas Mann in Philosophical Correspondence with His Contemporaries,” in Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Exile Intellectuals, ed. David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Mayer cites also Maxim Gorki: “Man—that has a proud ring” and Berthold Brecht’s “Galileo”: “I believe in reason, which means that I believe in man”; “Der Schriftsteller und die Krise der Humanität” [The author and the crisis of the human] and “Kulturkrise und neue Musik” [Cultural crisis and new music], in Hans Mayer, Literatur der Übergangszeit [Literature of the Time of Transition] (Berlin, Volk und Welt, 1949), 188–99 and 200–217. Both lectures were given in West Germany in mid-1948. In his later writings, Mayer sought some kind of synthesis between Mann and Brecht; see Hans Mayer, “Thomas Mann and Bertold Brecht: Anatomy of an Antagonism,” New German Critique, no. 6 (Autumn 1975): 101–15. Jack Zipes has written a subtle appreciation of Hans Mayer: “The Critical Embracement of Germany: Hans Mayer and Marcel Reich-Ranicki,” in Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000, ed. Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 183–202.

Chapter Four. Exile as Process: The Case of Franz L. Neumann 1 See above, as well as David Kettler, “‘Les émigrés sont les vainçus.’ Spiritual Diaspora and Political Exile,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Crossroads I, no. 3 (2004). Other dimensions of the concept are developed in the chapters below, especially chapters 6 and 7. 2 Oskar Maria Graf, Die Flucht ins Mittelmässige (1959; Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1976). 3 See below Chapter 4, as well as David Kettler, “Le prime letteri dei refugees; una liquidazione dell’esperienza dell’esilio?” Memoria e Ricerca: Rivista di storia contemporanea 31 (Maggio-Agosto 2009): 103–120. 4 Eugen Banauch, Fluid Exile: Jewish Exile Writers in Canada, 1940–2006 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009). 5 This section draws on my entry: “Franz L. Neumann,” in William A. Darity Jr., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., 9 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008). Materials in this chapter will be expanded and contextualized in the wider setting of Neumann’s career in David Kettler and Thomas Wheatland, Franz L. Neumann as Political Intellectual (forthcoming). 6 Nina Rubinstein, Die französische Emigration nach 1789: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der politischen Emigration, ed. Dirk Raith, with contributions by Hanna Papanek and David Kettler, (Vienna: Nausner and Nausner, 2000); see chapter 2. 7 Joachim Perels, ed., Recht, Demokratie und Kapitalismus: Aktualität und Probleme der Theorie Franz L. Neumanns (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1984); Peter Intelmann, Franz L. Neumann: Chancen und Dilemma des politischen Reformismus, (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996); Matthias Stoffregen,

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Kämpfen für ein demokratisches Deutschland (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2002): Alfons Söllner, Deutsche Politikwissenschaftler in der Emigration (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996); William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). Franz L. Neumann, “Betriebsrisiko,” Arbeitsrechts-praxis 1, Heft 10 (1928); Franz L. Neumann, “Richterliches Ermessen und Methodenstreit im Arbeitsrecht,” Arbeitsrecht 16 (1929): 320; Franz L. Neumann, “The Social Significance of the Basic Laws in the Weimar Constitution,” Economy and Society 10 (1930; 1981): 329; Franz L. Neumann, Koalitionsfreiheit und Reichsverfassung: Die Stellung der Gewerkschaften im Verfassungssystem (Berlin: Heymanns, 1932). See bibliographies in David Kettler, “Works Community and Workers’ Organizations: A Central Problem in Weimar Labour Law,” Economy and Society 13, no.3 (August 1984): 278–303; and “Hugo Sinzheimer: Advocacy, Law and Social Change,” in Mededelingen 6: Hugo Sinzheimer Instituut voor onderzoek van arbeid en recht, ed. A. J. Hoekema (Amsterdam: Hugo Sinzheimer Instituut, 1993). Franz L. Neumann, The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal System in Modern Society (1935; Leamington Spa, UK and Dover, NH: Berg, 1986); Franz L. Neumann, “Die Funktionswandel des Gesetzes im Recht der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1937): 542; Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford, 1944). C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People (New York, 1963), 174. Franz L. Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957). See David Kettler, “Political Science and Political Theory: The Heart of the Matter,” Making Political Science Matter: the Flyvbjerg Debate and Beyond, ed. Brian Caterino and Sanford Schram (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 234–51. Franz L. Neumann, “The Social Sciences,” in The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America, ed. William Rex Crawford (New York, 1961): 4–26, esp. 13. “Scholar” is almost certainly intended as a translation of “Wissenschaftler,” which is a more fluid concept, since it encompasses all studies. In some contexts, the German for “intellectual” applies to a population different from—or even antithetical to—“scholars,” if the latter are tied closely to specialized disciplines. See David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer, “The ‘Other Germany’ and the Question of Bildung,” in Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Émigré Intellectuals (New York and London: Palgrave, 2005). In the present context, however, Neumann treats the “political scholar” as a subset of the larger class of “intellectuals.” Hans Speier, “The Social Conditions of the Intellectual Exile” in Social Research 4, no. 1 (1937). Franz L. Neumann, “The War Crimes Trials,” World Politics 2, no. 1 (October 1949): 135–147; Michael Salter, “The Visibility of the Holocaust: Franz Neumann and the Nuremburg Trials,” in Social Theory after the Holocaust, ed. Robert Fine and Charles Turner (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 197–218; Michael Salter, Nazi War Crimes, US Intelligence, and Selective Prosecution at Nuremberg (Abingdon and New York: Routledge Cavendish, 2007). Paul Tillich Papers, bMS 649, box 201. Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The documents emanating from the Institute of Social Research, including the letter by Franz L. Neumann, are found in the Max Horkheimer Archiv in Frankfurt a. M. The precise location is not available at the time of writing. The Paul Tillich materials are in the Paul Tillich Archives at Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Series 201 (11). This conception is almost identical with a definition of political exile proposed by Karl Mannheim in 1921.

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18 This segment draws on David Kettler, “‘Weimar and Labor’ as Legacy: Ernst Fraenkel, Otto Kahn-Freund, and Franz L. Neumann,” Die Alchemie des Exils: Exil als schöpferischer Impuls, ed. Helga Schreckenberger (Vienna: Edition Praesens, 2005). 19 Nina Rubinstein, Die französische Emigration nach 1789: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der politischen Emigration, ed. Dirk Raith, with contributions by Hanna Papanek and David Kettler (Graz: Nasner & Nausner, 2000); Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 402–08; cp. David Kettler, “Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein’s Studies in Exile,” Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation, ed. Edward Timms and Jon Hughes (New York: Springer, 2003), 195–206. 20 Seminar Protocol: “Debatte über Methoden der Sozialwissenschaften, besonders die Auffassung der Methode der Sozialwissenschaften, welches das Institut vertritt,” 17 January 1941, Max-Horkheimer Archiv MHA IX.214. 21 For Ernst Fraenkel, see Hubertus Buchstein and Gerhard Göhler, Vom Sozialismus zum Pluralismus (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2000), and studies cited there. For Otto KahnFreund, see Roy Lewis and Jon Clark’s introduction to Otto Kahn-Freund, Labor Law and Politics in the Weimar Republic, ed. Roy Lewis and Jon Clark (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 3–69. For Neumann, see note 7 above. 22 For Sinzheimer, see David Kettler, “Works Community and Workers’ Organization: A Central Problem in Weimar Labor Law,” Economy and Society 13 (1984): 278; Otto Kahn-Freund, “Hugo Sinzheimer 1875–1945,” Labor Law and Politics (1976): 73–107; Ernst Fraenkel, “Hugo Sinzheimer” in Ernst Fraenkel, Recht und Politik in der Weimarer Republik, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Hubertus Buchstein (1958; Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999), 620–31; S. Knorre, Soziale Selbstbestimmung und Individuelle Verantwortung (1991); A. J. Hoekema, ed., Hugo Sinzheimer: Rechtsvormer, Arbeidsjurist en Rechssocioloog (1993). 23 Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold, eds., Cause Lawyering: Political Commitments and Professional Responsibilities (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 24 David Kettler, “Hugo Sinzheimer: Advocacy, Law and Social Change,” Mededelingen 6: Hugo Sinzheimer Instituut voor onderzoek van arbeid en recht, ed. A. J. Hoekema (Amsterdam: Hugo Sinzheimer Instituut, 1993); expanded, Bard Journal of Social Sciences 2, no. 7–8 (April–May 1994): 12–20. 25 John Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 26 David Kettler, “Introduction: For Franz L. Neumann,” Domestic Regimes, the Rule of Law, and Democratic Social Change, Mobility, and Norm Change, vol. 3 (Berlin: Galda & Wilch Glienecke, 2001). Neumann’s conception of political theory is clarified in the course of his interventions in a Rockefeller Foundation undertaking to expand its activities in legal and political theory. His position is set forth at length in two sets of materials to be found in the Rockefeller Foundation Archives, the Proceedings of the First Conference on Legal and Political Philosophy, Oct 31–Nov. 2, 1952, at Arden House (RF/RG3/910/9/81–2) and his correspondence with J. H. Willets, not only about this conference (Nov. 12, 1952: RG3/910/8/75), but also about Neumann’s last major research project, “Political Systems and Political Theory” (Nov. 5, 1952: RG 1.1/200/320/3805). 27 Franz L. Neumann, The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal System in Modern Society (1935; Heidelberg: Berg, 1986). This is a posthumous publication of the dissertation under an altered name. Neumann’s own efforts to gain financial support for a revision of the work during the late 1930s were unsuccessful. See Neuman’s 1939 Research Proposal on “Rule of Law,” MHA IX 59/2. Harold Laski urged publication in the

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30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37

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original form, but Neumann wanted changes. Cp. Neumann’s own reformulation of his main thesis, published in 1937 in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in New York: “Der Funktionswandel des Gesetzes im Recht der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft.” This work was the product of extended substantive negotiations with Max Horkheimer, and the English translation is a shortened version, as acknowledged in Herbert Marcuse, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957), 22, but not in William E. Scheuerman, The Rule of Law under Siege (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 101. Alfons Söllner, “Ernst Fraenkel und die Verwestlichung der politischen Kultur in der Bundesrepublik,” Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien, Pfalz-Akademie Lamprecht (2001). Ernst Fraenkel, “Das richterliche Prüfungsrecht in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika. Eine Untersuchung unter besondere Berücksichtigung des Arbeitsrechts,” Amerikastudien: Gesammelte Schriften vol. 4, ed. Hubertus Buchstein and Rainer Kühn (1953; Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2000), 49–141. Correspondence with Nipperdey is in Ernst Fraenkel Nachlass, Bundesarchiv Koblenz: N1274/5 (26.11.51 and 11.12.51). Nipperdey persuaded Fraenkel to expand the title of his talk from mention of labor law alone. Ernst Fraenkel, Reformismus und Pluralismus (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973). Ernst Fraenkel to Kahn-Freund, 16 March 1971 and 10 April 1971. BAK: N1274/56. Lord Wedderburn in Labour Law and Industrial Relations: Building on Kahn-Freund, ed. K. W. Wedderburn, Roy Lewis, and Jon Clark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). See Institute of Social Research report, “Research Project of Dr. Franz L. Neumann: The Theory and Practice of European Labor Law,” (February/March 1939), MHA IX 59/2. See also Carnegie Foundation Archives CCNY: Franz Neumann 261.7, for correspondence about project, February 1940–January 1941. In February 1941, then, Neumann prepared a series of drafts for a study of “Labor Movements,” culminating in a study with the thesis that the labor movement prepared the masses for National Socialism, MHA IX 170.13f, 13a, 10b. Neumann, “Change in Function” (1937; 1957): 590; Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford, 1944): 419–22, 440–58. [F. L. Neumann], Civil Affairs Handbook. Germany. Section 9: Labor Army Services Manual M356–9 (Civil Affairs), Headquarters, Army Service Forces (1944). Franz L. Neumann to Helge Pross, summer 1954, Jürgen Seifert, “Einführung,” Perels 9; author’s translation. Tucholsky committed suicide soon after his emigration, and Karl Kraus’ posthumous Walpurgisnacht fulminated against the Socialists and intellectuals with whom Neumann had identified himself. This segment draws on David Kettler, “Negotiating Exile: Franz L. Neumann as Political Scientist,” in Caroline Arni et al., Hrsg., Der Eigensinn des Materials: Erkundungen sozialer Wirklichkeit (Frankfurt a. M./Basel: Stroemfeld, 2007), 205–224. Opening a report to the US Department of State on a survey visit to the Free University early in 1951, for example, Neumann writes: “I stayed in Berlin from January 23 to January 31, 1951, and negotiated with officials of HICOG (Berlin Element and Headquarters), representatives of the Free University, of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, of the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft, with Lord Mayor Reuter, and a number of officials of the Magistrat Berlin.” As the report proceeds, it becomes clear that Neumann did indeed intervene as broker to foster negotiations in several of the situations he encountered, drawing on his past contacts with the Free University and presumably his standing as

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42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

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visitor under State Department auspices. “Report of Doctor Franz L Neumann,” 2 February 1951, FLN Report, FF Reel 489, Grant 51–41, Section 4. This proposition draws on Karl Mannheim’s sense of “documentary meaning.” See Karl Mannheim, “On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung,” in From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New Brunswick & London: Transaction, 1993), 136–87. Space limitations force me to put these materials aside for a later publication. See David Kettler and Thomas Wheatland, Franz L. Neumann as Political Intellectual (forthcoming). I retain the references here because it is striking to contrast Neumann’s last objectives in the American and German university settings. In the former, he ultimately sought a way out of “political science,” as institutionalized in the Columbia Public Law and Government Department: in his last year, he tried to gain foundation support for an extensive interdisciplinary program in European Studies, in which he thought his department would have little interest—an assumption confirmed by a dismissive letter to the relevant Rockefeller Foundation official by the Chairman, Schuyler Wallace. The history can be tracked in the archives of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, beginning in 1948, although Neumann’s more ambitious plans appear only in 1952; 7 March 1952, Carnegie Corporation of NY: Columbia, 112/16; S. Wallace to John Gardner, 24 February 1953, Carnegie Corporation of New York: Columbia, 112/16; FLN Memo RG2–1953/200/14/89; E. F. D’Armes to FLN, 13 March 1953 (RG2–1953/200/14/84). In the latter, all his efforts were devoted to integrating the Hochschule für Politik—an establishment distinguished since its founding in 1919 in the field of political education (Bildung) and where Neumann taught during the late Weimar years—into the Political Science Department of the Free University. The story can be traced in his correspondence with his friend, Ernst Fraenkel, for whom he had secured a place in both institutions, as well as his dealings with both the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. See, for example, FLN Report, 21 February 1952, Ford Foundation Reel 489, Grant 51–41, Section 3; FLN to Gladieux, September 1952, FF Reel 489, Grant 51–41, Section 219. See Leo Loewenthal to Max Horkheimer, 5 November 1942, MHA VI. 15, 277–8. Even with a firm offer from two Washington agencies, Neumann presses for an arrangement whereby he mixes some consultancies with a primary affiliation with the Institute. The issue is not resolved until January 15, 1943. MH to FLN, 8 November 1942, MHA VI.30, 315–16. See correspondence about Neumann’s Washington dealings culminating in his letter to Horkheimer on 29 September 1941, MHA VI, 30, 13–15. John H. Willits Memo, 15 February 1952, RG3/910/8/74. RF Correspondence. John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Franz L. Neumann to John H. Willits, 12 November, RG3/910/8/75. RF Correspondence. FLN to JHW, 25 November 1952, RG1.1, series 200, box 320, fol. 3805, Columbia University–Neumann, Franz L. (Political Science) 1952–1955. Proceedings. First Conference on Legal and Political Philosophy. 31 October to 1–2 November, 1952, 2 vols., Arden House, Harriman, NY, 1:52–54, RG3, series 910, box 9, fol. 81–2. Compare the reaction ten years earlier to a comprehensive plan for a comparative study of democracies proposed by Karl Mannheim to the Publications Committee of The Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House): “With all humility, I hope the Publications Committee will, before adopting the Mannheim scheme, consider very carefully whether [the empirical] native method of inquiry . . . is to be ousted by a

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53

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procedure which in every line betrays its continental inspiration, and is really a product of the political inexperience of the academic classes in Germany and Russia,” Kettler and Meja (1995): 281. George Sabine to John H. Willits, 24 January 1953, RG1.1/200S/320/3805. FLN to JHW, 25 November 1952, RG1.1, series 200, box 320, fol. 3805, Columbia University–Neumann, Franz L. (Political Science) 1952–1955. Ibid. DSS Staff Meeting Minutes. There is a non-trivial parallel between Willit’s language and the terms on which Karl Mannheim was accepted by A. D. Lindsay and T. S. Eliot, who were among the people who admired him most in his London exile. While they praised his stimulating “ideas” and “wisdom,” they were dismissive of his ambitious “theory.” Cp. David Kettler and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), 282–86. Project RAND, September 1947, Conference of Social Scientists (USAF Project MX-791), CNSS Files, rec. 118, box 7, The National Security Archive, New York City, 14–19. Minutes of Political Science Faculty, 15 April 1955, Columbiana Collection, Columbia University.

Chapter Five. The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State 1 Edward Said: “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever et al. (New York, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 357–68. 2 Wellek/Warren, Theory of Literature, p. 193, citing Curt Richard Müller; Die geschichtlichen Voraussetzungen des Symbolbegriffs in Goethes Kunstanschauung (Leipzig, 1937). In a personal communication, Gerhard Lauer has told the author that Kahler heavily underlined this passage in Wellek and Warren’s chapter on “Image, Symbol, Metaphor and Myth” and wrote “Goethe” in the margin. Cp. Erich Kahler, “The Nature of the Symbol,” in Symbolism in Religion and Literature, ed. Rollo May (New York: George Braziller, 1960), 50–74. 3 Nina Rubinstein Nachlass, Archiv für die Geschichte der Soziologie In Österreich. See Nina Rubinstein, Die französische Emigration nach 1789: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der politischen Emigration, ed. Dirk Raith (Graz-Wien: Nausner & Nausner, 2001). Cp. David Kettler, “‘Les Émigrés sont les vaincus,’ Spiritual Diaspora and Political Exile,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Corssroads I, no. 3 (Fall 2004) and David Kettler, “Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein’s Studies in Exile,” Edward Timms and Jon Hughes, eds., Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation (Wien/New York: Springer, 2003), 195–206. 4 Erich Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss: An Inquiry into the Transformation of the Individual (New York: G. Braziller, 1957); Erich Kahler, Man the Measure: A New Approach to History (New York: Pantheon Books Inc., 1943). 5 A curious feature of this literature is the frequent replication of Said’s reversal, beginning with a sensitive characterization of the distinctive fate of the involuntary exile and then somehow wiping away differences with rhetorical questions like, “is not every poet or ‘poetic’ novelist an exile of sorts?” Christian Brooke-Rose, “Exsul,” Poetics Today 17, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 289–303, esp. 301. On power and legitimacy as essential themes

182

6

7 8 9

10

11

12 13

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in social analysis, see Bent Flyvberg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Sigurd Burckhardt, “Of Order, Abstraction, and Language,” in Sigurd Burckhardt, The Drama of Language: Essays on Goethe and Kleist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1970), 1–15, esp. 3–4. Writing from a methodological perspective almost diametrically opposed to Burckhardt, Ella Shohat makes the point with regard to the concept of “post-colonial.” It “must be interrogated and contextualized historically, geopolitically, and culturally.” “Notes on the Post-Colonial,” Social Text, no. 31/32 (1992): 99–113, esp. 111. Kahler, loc cit., 73. “Report to the Campus: Major Actions by the Board of Trustees,” The Ohio State University I, no. 5 (1958). Roy Harvey Pearce and others to Dean J. Osborn Fuller, 17 October 1957, The Ohio State Archives, College of Arts and Sciences: Office of the Dean (Record Group 24/1/8), “Mershon Professorships: 1957–1966.” The letter is signed by seven members of the English Department, headed by Roy Harvey Pearce, who was without question the primary author. The archives also contain a typed list of additional signers, ranged by department: 12 additional members of the English Department, 16 from Sociology and Anthropology, 4 from Philosophy, 4 from Political Science (including the present author), 3 from the School of Fine and Applied Arts, 6 from German, 11 from Romance Languages, and 10 from History. For full disclosure, I should say that I became a junior member of the Kahler Seminar in 1959 and of its successors in the years following, up to and including the visit by Arnold Hauser in 1964. At the end, I even served as executive secretary for a quarter, but I was not party to the planning or direction of the operation in the years under discussion in this study. All of the Ohio State people mentioned in this paper, as well as Kahler himself, were well known to me, and one or two of them were my close friends. Gerhard Lauer, Die verspätete Revolution: Erich von Kahler. Wissenschaftsgeschichte zwischen konservativer Revolution und Exil (Berlin & New York: De Gruyter, 1995), 57–149. Lauer’s outstanding book is a major source of information and leading ideas throughout the present specialized case study, which can be said to have originated in my correction of a rare factual error in the book concerning Kahler’s visiting appointments at Ohio State. See 372–373. Cp. Gerhard Lauer, “Watermarks of the Kingdom: Erich Kahler in Exile,” in Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of the German Intellectual Emigrants, ed. David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005). Lauer (1995), 218–264, esp. 251–254. See excerpts from Erich Kahler, The Vocation of Science in Peter Lassman, Irving Velody, and Herminio Martins, Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’ (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Cp. Erich Kahler, Der deutsche Charakter in der Geschichte Europas (Zürich: Europa-Verlag, 1937), 27n. See also the text of Kahler’s principal public lecture during his 1959 visit at Ohio State: The True, the Good, and the Beautiful (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1960). On the sharply contrasting uses of the Greek theme in the Weimar period, see Irving Wohlfarth, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘Secret Germany,’” in Exile, Science and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Émigré Intellectuals, ed. David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Ernst Osterkamp, “The Legacy of the George Circle,” in Kettler and Lauer, op. cit. Kahler (1937) 137. Cp. Erich Kahler, “Why Socialism? Which Socialism?” (Columbus, Ohio: Dissent Forum and the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation, 1960). (Mimeograph)

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14 Memorandum, Erich Kahler to Ohio State Seminar, March 1961, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UCSD, MSS 127, box 14, fol. 1. In defining the “common purpose,” Kahler wrote: [A] crisis develops through the increasing friction between an elaborately established, less and less flexible and receptive order and the ever growing perpetually onrushing life material. A crisis is final breaking point the overpowering of the controlling form by the discontinuous multitude of life. At such a point only a fundamentally broadening re-organization, reformation of the system, of its frame and means of control, may be able to cope with the anarchical situation and put an end to the crisis. To be sure, we find crises occurring all along in human history. They are, in fact, the very instruments of change and advance the vehicles of human evolution. But all these former crises were locally or substantively restricted and temporally extended crises. They lacked the present panicky simultaneity and therefore immediate universality and comprehensiveness of crisis, which is mainly due to the technological unification of our world, the rapidity of world-wide communication, the crowding of events, and reactions to events. The incessant advances of our technology and science have, moreover, brought about an inner crisis of man, by promoting conformity and standardization, by alienating individuals from each other and from themselves by besetting human consciousness with continuous material changes by sweeping away traditions and memories and thus endangering personal and communal identity… [W]e want to gain a comprehensive picture of our present crisis which originated in a diversity of single critical developments and, through interaction of these developments, has broadened and deepened into a general human crisis… 15 One such group offers an important sidelight to the present story. In 1930, Professor W. W. Charters of the College of Education launched the Journal of Higher Education, the first periodical devoted to this subject. The October issue in 1931 is dedicated to articles on Abraham Flexner’s much-debated book, Universities—American, English, German, in which Flexner uses an idealization of German universities (untroubled by the actual German conflicts of the time) to criticize American universities for their neglect of both Wissenschaft and Bildung. While Charters reproaches Flexner for his failure to understand the practical tasks properly assigned to American universities by democratic legislatures, another Ohio State professor, W. H. Bode, finds “that Mr. Flexner…takes over the…German conception of culture, lock, stock, and barrel,” and that he consequently cannot appreciate the achievements in the progressive development of culture and social intelligence made by American institutions, especially the liberal arts colleges. B. H. Bode, “Currents and Cross-Currents in Higher Education,” The Journal of Higher Education 2 no. 7 (October 1931): 374–379. See David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer, “The ‘Other Germany’ and the Question of Bildung,” in Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of the German Intellectual Emigrants, ed. David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005). With the notion of Kahler as some sort of model for humanistic studies at Ohio State, there seemed to be a move towards just such an adoption of “German culture,” and it is likely that the Ohio State heirs of Charters and Bode were not pleased.

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16 This paragraph is adapted from “Law as a Political Weapon,” Politics and Society 1, no. 4 (1972), written about Ohio State by David Kettler and Harry R. Blaine after the events of the late 1960s and 1970 had split the modernizing coalition along several fault lines, and shortly after Kettler had belatedly joined all but two or three of the Kahler seminar members in moving from Ohio State. Compare David A. Hollinger on the University of Michigan: “Academic Culture at the University of Michigan, 1938–1988,” Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 121–54. 17 Oscar Seidlin to Erich Kahler, Erich Kahler Papers, 20 June 1955, SUNY Albany. Others invited included Earl Wasserman (Johns Hopkins, English), Meier Shapiro (Columbia, Art History), Paul Lang (Columbia, History of Music), and Stephen Gilman (Harvard, Romanistic). Wasserman and Gilman were especially close to Roy Harvey Pearce. With the addition of several other exile scholars, including Seidlin, by Bernhard Blume, who became Chairman in 1945, the German Department stood out by its early cosmopolitan character. For Seidlin’s negotiation of exile, see Chapter 3. Seidlin’s 1969 history is more celebratory chronology than inquiring historiography, so it is unclear how this development arose out of the provincial background. See Oscar Seidlin, “The History of the Department of German on the Occasion of the University’s Centenary,” OSU German Department Webpage. 18 Arthur Salz, Für die Wissenschaften gegen die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Munich, 1921). In a private communication, an expert on Salz’s economic writings, Johannes Fried (Frankfurt) has expressed the opinion that relations between Kahler and Salz were effectively at an end after the publication of this work. Lauer reports that Kahler’s copy of the Salz book are full of angry marginal remarks. Cp. Lauer (1993), 254–55. 19 Seidlin to Kahler, 4 January 1956 (sc. 1957), Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany. 20 Pearce to Kahler, 5 December 1958, Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany. 21 An undated draft article, which Salz had circulated to Frank Knight, Wesley Mitchell, and other leading economists, concludes: “It stands to reason that when economics, after having completed the full circle of economic materialism, determinism, and positivism, will have run into a blind alley, it will devolve upon the nondescript, the non-conformist economist to impregnate and fructify the dried-up field with the spirit of critical idealism which experience has proved to be the medium in which long-range problems can best be dealt with.” Arthur Salz Papers, Leo Baeck Institute, New York, AR 6288, 1/4, 14. Among other papers, there are manuscripts written in 1959–60, during Kahler’s visit, evidently intended for a book, “Signs of the Times,” where Salz appears to be working on the contrast between ancient and modern science precisely in the manner of Kahler, with Goethe as key authority. No less important to Salz during his last years, it should be added, was an attempt to extend the analysis of “empire” that was the subject of his most important German book to the new imperial mission of the United States. In this undertaking, he is following—too late, as witness the questionable quality of the work—a suggestion made to him early in the war years by the very influential Toni Stolper. In that earlier correspondence, Salz explains that he does not think that he understands the American “psychology” well enough to make the attempt. He agrees with Stolper that they had to reconsider the polemical conception of “Americanism” that had guided their Weimar writings, but concludes that despite obvious mistakes they were “instinctively” correct in recognizing the Americans’ total lack of a “state” concept or experience, as well as “the striking lack of a political destiny. I am referring to the absence of any sort of tragedy in the political sphere—of complicity, guilt, doom, and the rest.” Correspondence between Salz and Stolper, February 1940, AR 6288. It

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is, of course, impossible to impute Salz’s views to Kahler, but it is worth examining this evidence about the likely tone and contents of conversations in which Kahler doubtless engaged during his visits, as a reminder of the multi-level lives of exiles. 22 Official Proceedings of the Nine Hundred and Fifteenth Meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Ohio State University, 8 April 1957. Ralph D. Mershon was a prominent graduate of the university and the long-time commanding officer of the Ohio National Guard. His most noteworthy military assignment was as director of selective service during the First World War, and he was a strong advocate of civilian participation in military reserves and related activities. A literal reading of the terms of his will would appear to point to such activities as the intended beneficiary of his bequest. After the sequestering of a non-military portion of the annual income, the Trustees established a Defense Studies Committee to promote activity that “shall best promote, encourage, and carry on civilian-military education and training in the United States and its territories,” and authorized National Security Policy Seminar with an initial annual budget of $50,000 as a major focus of Mershon Fund activity. Official Proceedings of the Nine Hundred and Seventeenth Meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Ohio State University, 10 June 1957. In its first report, based on a body of consultants of whom only one was not a military officer, the committee listed its first awards, all related directly to ROTC or military programs, and recommended a scheme of development for the National Security Seminar that would bring its budget to $600,000 per year, beginning with continuation of initial experimental courses and advancing to fellowships for students in various disciplines, linked by participation in National Security Studies Seminar and career plans in government service (Dept of Defense, State, CIA, NSA, etc.). Official Proceedings of the Nine Hundred and Twenty-Fourth Meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Ohio State University, 7 February 1958. This information is of interest here because the promoters of the Humanities Institute will make several attempts in 1960 and 1961, to be discussed below, to secure support for that project from the Defense Studies Committee, under the “military” side of the Mershon bequest. 23 Roy Harvey Pearce to Frederic Heimberger, 5 June 1957, Ohio State University Archives, Academic Affairs, Office of Record Group 5/a/4/1, College of Arts and Sciences, 1956–57. The members of the group named by Pearce are Melvin Seeman and Kurt H. Wolff, Sociology; Frank Ludden, Art History; Morris Weitz, Philosophy; Harry V. Jaffa, Political Science; Carlos Blanco, Spanish; and Sigurd Burckhardt, German. The joint presence of Jaffa and Burckhardt in the group is noteworthy, since Burckhardt published a sharply critical article on Jaffa’s approach to interpretation (and with that of Jaffa’s close associate and fellow Leo Strauss follower, Alan Bloom). Harry V. Jaffa, “The Limits of Politics: An Interpretation of King Lear, Act I, Scene I,” American Political Science Review 51 (June 1957): 405–427; Alan Bloom, “Cosmopolitan Man and the Political Community,” American Political Science Review 54 (March 1960): 130–157; and Sigurd Burckhardt, “English Bards and APSR Reviewers,” ibid., 158–166. When I incited Burckhard to write the piece, in my capacity as assistant to the (indulgent) Editor of the American Political Science Review, I had no inkling of the earlier interpretation working group connection between them. Jaffa evidently took no further active part in the Humanities group, although he appears on the first list of seminar members in the following year, with a note to the effect that a scholarly project would keep him away. The lack of further involvement by the aesthetician, Morris Weitz, is also worth some note, since it says something about the implicit criteria for the Kahler seminar. Weitz was a close friend of the key members of the group, but his philosophical loyalties were with the analytical and nominalist currentswhich the others were united in opposing.

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24 Seidlin to Kahler, 22 January 1958, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany. Seidlin tells Kahler that he can well imagine the group of professors who nominated him and pleads with him to wait for the offer instead of accepting ACLS instead: “That would not only be delightful for us but also important. Around here, such juicy morsels are generally cast only before natural scientists and similar emitters of stinking gases. If we have a chance for once to gain this for a humanist, it would be bitter if we had to lose this opportunity.” See Pearce to Kahler and Kahler to Pearce (pencil draft), 23 January 1958, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany. 25 This summary statement of the Humanities Group’s aims picks up the Ohio State language of the time. The Defense Studies Committee’s report cited above concludes, “It is our ultimate hope that The Ohio State University may become the leading center in the world for teaching, research, and service in all areas related to the security and safety of free peoples.” 26 Pearce to Kahler, 6 July 1960, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany. A sign of the risks involved in research so close to the autobiographical bone is that my own name and New York City summer address for 1960 are written in my handwriting in a corner of this letter, although I have no recollection of having been invited to read it. Pearce was writing from California, so it was certainly Kahler who had me write on it there, evidently when I visited at the time, evidently in the company of another Ohio State colleague, John Sperling, whose name and summer address are in the opposite corner. 27 The extent to which Lovejoy provides Pearce’s point of departure is acknowledged most clearly in his essays. See “Historicism Once More,” Historicism Once More:Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 14–15; Gesta Humanorum: Studies in the Historicist Mode (Columbia, MO: Missouri University Press, 1987), 10–11, 19–20. 28 At Ohio State, it was Kurt H. Wolff who served as Pearce’s link to German cultural thought, although he was evidently too much a contemporary to serve Pearce’s larger symbolic purposes. Pearce opens his “Historicism” essay with a familiar reference to Simmel’s great Sociology, which he could have known only from the excerpts translated and published by Wolff. In 1957 and 1958, he was closely associated with Wolff ’s centenary volume on Simmel, published by the new Ohio State University Press. Pearce reworked the English texts of my own raw translations for that volume (“The Ruin” and “The Adventure”) and secured their publication in Hudson Review and Partisan Review. Wolff was perhaps more important than Seidlin as a link between the émigré “cabal” and Pearce. 29 Pearce to Kahler, 27 September 1957, and Kahler to Pearce, 11 October 1957, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany Archives. 30 Dean Osborn J. Fuller to President Novice G. Fawcett, 14 November 1957. The Ohio State University Archives, College of Arts and Sciences: Office of the Dean (Record Group 24/a/8), “Mershon Professorships: 1957–1966.” 31 Pearce to Fuller, 19 March 1958, ibid. 32 For this important distinction, see the introduction by Kettler and Lauer to Exile, Science and Bildung. 33 Kahler to Pearce, 28 May 1958, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany. 34 Pearce to Kahler, 28 July 1958, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany 35 Kahler wrote: As for the study of Historicism, I am happy to greet you as an ally in the fight against the New Critics. How wonderful that somebody takes an open stand against them. Your argument is very complex and complicated, and to discuss it

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in detail in a letter is hardly possible for me at this time. It calls for elaborate talks which I hope to have with you in Columbus. Meanwhile let me just tell you that your concept of Humanitas seems to me very felicitous and fruitful. Erich Kahler to Roy Harvey Pearce, 26 September 1958. 36 Pearce to Kalhler, 29 September 1958, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany. 37 Erich Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss (New York: George Braziller, 1957), 250. Quoted in Roy Harvey Pearce, “Historicism Once More,” in Historicism Once More: Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 30. In the original context, Kahler posits this almost biological version of Humboldtian or Goethian presuppositions as a mere correction to the existentialist total reduction, restoring by ipset dixit what over a hundred years appear to others—notably the existentialists—to have been lost. The “uplift” character of this writing becomes evident a few sentences later: “Such elemental feeling of organic existence shines forth in the beautiful, masterly, fully animated bodies of ‘primitive’ people in whom the face is not predominant yet, or better, in whom the whole body is face and has the playful, controlled expressivity of the face.” Kahler, 251. Unsurprisingly, Pearce does not quote this. 38 Reporting to Kahler on this scheme—clearly for the first time—when it was being revived in the year after his visit, Pearce wrote: “Somehow we must involve it in the idea of national defense—but the committee in charge has already proposed that national defense must be considered in the ‘broadest’ possible terms.” Pearce to Kahler, 12 June 1960, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany Archives. It should be noted that Pearce and his closest associates doubtless saw themselves as “doing well by doing good”—countering the distortion of university priorities as a result of the legacy, rather than subordinating the Humanities to “national defense” interests. Yet Kahler was not made privy to the idea when it was first acted on during his residence, perhaps in recognition of his known antipathy to American foreign policy. 39 The Ohio State University Archives, Mershon Center for Education in National Security (Record Group 23/f/1/24), Faculty Seminar Report, 1959. It is not hard to identify Pearce as author of these passages. There are also passages that emphasize the difference between facts and values and credit the humanities with being the realm for reflection on the latter, a line of argument typical of Hinshaw’s thought. 40 Seidlin to Kahler, “A Friday night,” [nd], SUNY Albany, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany. 41 Pearce to Kahler, 5 December 1958, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany Archives. 42 Kahler to Pearce, 23 February 1959, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany Archives; Bibliography in Ohio State University Archive, College of Arts and Sciences, Office of the Dean (Record Group 24/a/8), “Mershon Professorships: 1957–1966.” 43 All quotations from Kahler’s handwritten notes for the Ohio State Seminar on Culture in the Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany Archives. At the opening of the fourth lecture, Kahler notes that he will not be discussing the basic epistemological question of “how do we know?” but he magisterially proclaims in passing that “the Kantian portions” of epistemology “have become obsolete” due to “certain findings of the new physics.” “So let us do,” he counsels, “what empirical science has done, let us accept the phenomenal world as the reality that is given us.” There was a curious moment that roused fond snickers during these discussions one day when Kahler cited the case of certain insects that attack all mammals as empirical proof of the Realist case for universals. 44 The present writer was a member of the seminar. See below. Burckhardt’s title is “Language and the Social Order: An Essay on Shakespeare Interpretation.” Others

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were: Carlos Blanco, Romance Languages, “Notes for the Study of an Idea of History: On the Circumstantiality of Contemporary Spanish Thought.” (Ganivet, Unamuno, Ortega and Castro); Morton Bloomfield, English, “Problems of Historical Stylistics”; Robert Elliott, English, “Magic, Art and the Progress of Culture”; Richard Falk, Law, “Law and Culture”; Virgil Hinshaw, Philosophy, “The Logic of Historical Inquiry”; David Kettler, Political Science, “The Spirit of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws: Power and Culture” (an exception to the rule about the centrality of the topics, since this was a never-attempted spin-off from a dissertation project still in its final stages at the time); Albert Kuhn, English, “Myth, Religion and Science: A Problem in Historiography”; Franklin Ludden, Fine Arts, “The Problem of Representation and Its Relation to Style Development”; Anthony Nemetz, Philosophy, “Philosophies and Cultures”; Roy Harvey Pearce, English, “On the Interpretation of Popular Culture”; Alvin Scodel, Psychology, “Uses and Limitations of Studies of National Culture”; David Spitz, Political Science, “Freedom, Language, and Culture”; John Bennett, Anthropology, “Technology and Cultural History”; and Kurt H. Wolff, Sociology, “Loma: Culture, Change and History.” Bennett and Wolff had left Ohio State and were to be brought back for their presentations. Roy Harvey Pearce to Karl E. Krill, OSU Asst. to VP Instruction and Research, 17 December 1959, Robert Elliott Papers, UCSD 127/14/1. Roy Harvey Pearce to Erich Kahler, 12 June 1960, Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany Archives. “Ours has been widely identified as a time of high crisis for mankind. Many diagnoses have been made: the loss of the Medieval unity, the decline of religious faith, the rise of capitalism, the dominance of the new science, the growth of mass society, the threat of nuclear destruction, the growth of the modern state with its techniques of organizing mind and matter, the dehumanization of the arts, the accelerating rate of repression demanded by the processes of civilization, the rise to power of a middle class elite, the rejection of the principle of legitimacy, the claims of self-sufficiency made by humanisms of the left and of the right.” Memo: Preliminary Proposal for the Faculty Seminar in the Humanities, Pearce to Kahler, 12 January 1961. Erich Kahler to Ohio State Seminar, March 1961, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UCSD, MSS 127, box 14, fol. 1. Spitz to Kahler, 24 March 1962 (Enclosure). [David Kettler], “Toward a Structural Analysis of Crisis-Orientation: The Case of Karl Mannheim,” Erich Kahler Papers, SUNY Albany. Pearce to Kahler, 21 April 1962 (Enclosure). On the prospects of negotiations, compare Chapter 3 above.

Chapter Six. First Letters: The Liquidation of Exile? 1 See letters from Weyrauch to Kracauer, 27 May 1929, 31 May 1929, 21 June 1929, and nd [Summer, 1930] in the German Literary Archive, Marbach. The tone is informal, and the contents are a mixture of quite personal and professional matter. A documented account of their early relationship, as well as Weyrauch’s later recollection of it, can be found in the excellent Marburg doctoral dissertation of Ulrike Landzettel: Identifikationen Eines Eckenstehers: Der Schriftsteller Wolfgang Weyrauch (1904–1980) (2003), esp. 82–88, 119–129. 2 DLA Marbach: Nachlass Kracauer: 72.1905/1. Siegfried Kracauer and Wolfgang Weyrauch, 13 October 1947.

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3 DLA Marbach: Nachlass Kracauer: 72.1905/2. Siegfried Kracauer and Wolfgang Weyrauch, 19 October 1947. 4 Ulrike Landzettel (2003) suggests that Kracauer’s “things” refers to all the events of his emigration, but this would have been too diffuse a reference for the weight attached. Cp. 274n95. 5 That “drüben” was not merely a geographical expression, but a political reference to Nazi Germany is suggested by its use in a letter from Hermann Kesten to Franz Schoenberger, where Kesten says scornfully of a non-Jewish émigré writer that he had painstakingly kept his distance from the emigration and evidently flirted with “over there.” (Er hat sich bis 1936 peinlich von aller Emigration ferngehalten, und wohl liebgeaugelt mit drüben.) Franz Schoenberger and Hermann Kesten, Briefwechsel im Exil, 1933–1945, ed. Frank Berninger (Göttingen: Wallstein, nd), 138. 6 For Kantorowicz, see below, p. xx. 7 DLA Marbach: Nachlass Kracauer: 72/3135/5. Wolfgang Weyrauch to Siegfried Kracauer, 7 May 1947. The second letter is Weyrauch to Kracauer, 3 September 1947, 72/3135/6. 8 Ulrike Landzettel quotes a passage from the manifesto that expresses a vehement reproach and self-reproach, according to which “not a single German author who lived in Germany between 1933 and 1945, including myself, has publicly addressed himself to the fate of the German Jews” in the course of the six years since the end of the Second World War [loc. cit.]. If this was known to Kracauer, it would have served as a direct reply to his unspoken condition for further correspondence. Weyrauch’s “Manifest” nevertheless has some features that Kracauer might have liked less, notably a consistent objectification of the actions against Jews, so that they are spoken of as their “fate” or “lot,” or, most commonly, “what happened.” This distancing from questions of responsibility seems similar to Kracauer’s “things,” but has a different meaning in the present context. 9 DLA Marbach: Nachlass Kracauer: 72.1905/3. Kracauer to Weyrauch, 11 November 1951. 10 DLA Marbach: Nachlass Kracauer: 72.1905/4. Kracauer to Weyrauch, 16 December 1951. 11 DLA Marbach: Nachlass Kracauer: 72.3135–72.3136. Weyrauch to Kracauer, 1952. 12 David Kettler, “‘Les émigrés sont les vainçus.’ Spiritual Diaspora and Political Exile.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Crossroads I, no. 3 (2004): 269–282. 13 David Kettler and Zvi Ben-Dor, “Introduction: The Limits of Exile,” The Limits of Exile (Berlin/Glienecke: Galda & Wilch, 2010); the theme of “exile and return” is also a prime motif of other contributions to that volume. See especially Zvi Ben-Dor, “Invisible Exile: Iraqi Jews in Israel,” 135–162, and “Simon Lewis, Dennis Brutus, and the Stations of Exile,” 45–62. See also below, “Exile and Return: Forever Winter.” 14 DLA Marbach: Nachlass Kästner, Alfred Kantorowicz an Erich Kästner, 13 March 1946. 15 DLA Marbach: Nachlaß Kästner, Kurt Hiller an Erich Kästner, 2 April 1946. 16 See below. The availability of the East German political formation, with its anti-fascist founding myth, obviously opens alternative modes of “return” to individuals close to the Communist Party, but even there the “return” often played out in paradoxical ways, in view of the distrust attached to returnees who had not been subjected to the fine— and often deadly—sieve of Moscow under Stalin. See Karin Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt: Die Geschichte der jüdischen Kommunisten in der DDR (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2000).

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17 Johannes R. Becher, Briefwechsel (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1993), 259. 18 Op. cit., 262. For a controversial rendering of Becher’s return, exceptionally prepared to take Becher’s extra-political cultural affirmations at face value, see Jens-Fietje Dwars, Abgrund des Widerspruchs: Das Leben des Johannes R. Becher (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1998), 500–576 (XI. Heimkehr). Cp. “Mit leichter Dichterhand auf Doggenschädel. Die Seele verrenkt: Johannes R. Becher zählte sich gern zur Elite in Parteifesseln,” a sardonic review of Dwars’ book by Sabine Brandt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 November 1999. 19 Klaus Kordon, Die Zeit ist kaputt: die Lebensgeschichte des Erich Kästner (Weinheim: Beltz, 1995), 96. 20 Kesten to Schoenberner, 16 October 1934 and November 1935.; Schoenberner to Kesten, 23 February 1940 in Franz Schoenberner, Frank Berninger, Hermann Kesten, and Gerhard Schoenberner, Briefwechsel im Exil 1933–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 85–86, 102–103, 172–177. 21 Hermann Kesten, ed., Deutsche Literatur im Exil (Wien, München, Basel: Verlag Kurt Desch, 1964), 30. 22 Kästner an Kesten, 26Mai 1933, Deutsche Literatur, 34. 23 Kesten an Toller, 23 März 1933. Deutsche Literatur, 28–29. 24 Kesten an Kästner, 16 April 1946, Deutsche Literatur, 266–267. 25 Hermann Kesten an Erich Kästner, 4 January 1946, Münchner Stadtbibliothek/ Monacensia. 26 Kästner an Kesten, 13 Juni 1946. Deutsche Literatur, 270–271. 27 Kesten, Hermann an Kästner, Erich 22 July 1946, Münchner Stadtbibliothek/ Monacensia. 28 Kesten, Hermann an Hermann, Klaus 8 October 1946, Münchner Stadtbibliothek/ Monacensia; Kesten, Hermann an Beisler, Karl 25 July 1946, Münchner Stadtbibliothek/ Monacensia. 29 Simone Ladwig-Winters, Ernst Fraenkel: Ein politisches Leben (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2009), 125, 129. 30 “Brief vom 23 März 1946 an Familie Suhr,” in Ernst Fraenkel, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3, Neuaufbau der Demokratie in Deutschland und Amerika (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999), 389–395. 31 Cp. Fraenkel’s position on the “Jewish Question” ten years later: Gesammelte Schriften, 2, 583–594. 32 See Ernst Fraenkel, 318–320, as well as materials in BAK N1274/74, April 1967. 33 DLA Marbach: Nachlaß Sternberger. Oskar Seidlin an Dolf Sternberger, 1 August 1945. 34 Loc. cit. 35 David Kettler, Colin Loader, and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim and the Legacy of Max Weber (Aldershott: Ashgate, 2008), 85–100. 36 “‘Wie im Märchenbuch: ganz allein…’ Gespräch mit Hans Gerth,” Matthias Greffrath, Hrsg., Die Zerstörung einer Zukunft: Gespräche mit emigrierten Sozialwissenschaftlern (Hamburg: Rohwolt, 1979), 59–95; David Kettler and Volker Meja, “Settling with Mannheim,” State, Culture, and Society, 1 no. 3 (April 1985); see also Kettler, Loader, and Meja, op. cit. 37 Guy Oakes and Arthur J. Vidich, Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 38 See Reinhard Mehring, “‘In einem Brief nach Deutschland wollte allerlei untergebracht sein.’ Thomas Manns Antwort auf Walter von Molo,” forthcoming. Thomas Mann’s

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“Warum ich nicht nach Deutschland zurueckgehe” Aufbau 11, no. 39 (28 September 1945): 5. 39 DLA Marbach: Nachlaß Sternberger, letter dated only Sonntag, February 1946. It is not possible to capture the play on words and rhythmic games that mark Gerth’s precious style in this passage, as if auditioning for a part in a return to the cultural journalism of the late 1920s. In his “first letter” of February 1, 1946, Gerth writes that he would soon send another letter by a different route, assuring Sternberger that it would also be different, in case both should arrive. It seems likely, therefore, that the letter here cited was written on February 3. Gerth’s last “first letter” in this series is dated on April 2, 1946. Although some markings on the documents suggest the possibility that Sternberger received the original letters on March 4, the first letter from Gerth thanking Sternberger for a reply is dated June 23, and the references to Gerth’s earlier political analysis indicate that Sternberger in fact replied to the letter of April 2. 40 DLA Marbach: Nachlaß Sternberger, Hans Gerth to Dolf Sternberger, 1 February 1946. 41 Cp. Oakes and Vidich, 1–3. See Don Martindale, The Monologue: Hans Gerth, 1908–1978 (Ghaziabad, India: Intercontinental, 1982): The salon and coffee-house discussion became the norm of intellectual life to Gerth. In such contexts the standard, the conventional, the routine, and the stereotyped were unforgivable: the novel, the original, and the anticipatory, on the other, were prized. Gerth looked to such contexts for anticipations of the latest trends. And, from the beginning, he developed his particular skills in bringing them the fruits of wayward research. Furthermore, in Gerth’s own practice for the rest of his life, his classes, seminars, and office and meetings always turned into coffee-shop discussions and meetings in the Gerth home into salon-like affairs—though always dominated by Gerth.

42

43 44 45 46

47

Gerth’s students may have been impressionable about the qualities of Gerth’s monologues, since the “Brief aus Amerika” is rather conservative in its allusions. For the contrast between Jewish and non-Jewish readings of the wartime era in Germany, see Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003). DLA Marbach: Nachlaß Sternberger, letter dated only Sonntag, February 1946. DLA Marbach: Nachlaß Sternberger, Gerth to Sternberger, 2 April 1946. Loc. cit. The reasons why this reasoning applies to Hans Gerth as a university sociologist have to be sought in the character of that field under Gerth’s principal professor, Karl Mannheim, “Das Geheimnis des bemerkenswerten Aufstiegs Karl Mannheims,” p. 149–167 in Bálint Balla/Vera Spahrschuh, Anton Sterbling, ed. Karl Mannheim, Leben, Werk, Wirkung und Bedeutung für Osteuropaforschung (Hamburg: Krämer, 2007). For more extensive treatments of the issues, cp. David Kettler and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism: “The Secret of these New Times” (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995); and Colin Loader and David Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002). He locates it: “wo Hügel sanft zum Tal sich mildern”; cp.: “Die Hügel dann bequem hinabgebildet,/Mit sanftem Zug sie in das Tal gemildet”, Faust, 2.10101–2.

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48 DLA Marbach: Nachlaß Sternberger, manuscript included with Gerth to Sternberger, 1 February 1946. See Dolf Sternberger, Gerhard Storz, W. E. Süskind, Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen (Hamburg: Claassen, 1957). See also Dominic Boyer, Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2005). 49 Greffrath, loc. cit., 95. 50 Carl Zuckmayer, Geheimreport: Zuckmayer Schriften, ed. Gunther Nickel and Johana Schrön (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002). 51 DLA Marbach: Carl Zuckmayer and Julius Bab, 21 October 1946. 52 Carl Zuckmayer to Heinz Hilpert, 5 March 1946, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, HeinzHilpert-Archiv, no. 429. 53 All three quotations from Carl Zuckmayer to Heinz Hilpert, 12 March 1946, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Heinz-Hilpert-Archiv, no. 430. 54 Zuckmayer makes either a curious mistake or a clever pun. He uses the term “BetriebsStoff.” If he wanted to refer again to the fuel he had mentioned in an earlier sentence, he should have simply said Treibstoff (although Triebstoff is often used in Switzerland and Austria). If it was a pun he wanted, he compounds the latter term for fuel with the word for enterprise (Betrieb) and possibly even Trieb in addition, which means passion or drive. 55 Carl Zuckmayer to Heinz Hilpert, 7 April 1946, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, HeinzHilpert-Archiv, no. 431. 56 Georg Bollenbeck, “Restaurationsdiskurse und die Remigranten,” in Fremdes Heimatland, Remigration und literarisches Leben nach 1945, ed. Irmela von der Lühe and Claus Dieter Krohn (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 17–38. 57 For precise reference and sequel, see Gunter Hatzschel, “Oskar Maria Graf: Writer of the People?” German Studies Review 9, no. 1 (February 1986): 67–83. 58 Berthold Brecht, Die Bücherverbrennung, 59 See “Deutsche gegen Nazis. Unversöhnlicher Hass der Tyrannei Hitlers,” Aufbau 5, no. 17 (15 September 1939): 9; “Die Juden stehen nicht allein,” Aufbau6, no. 21 (24 May 1940): 14. Graf opposes the division between “Jews” and “Arians” in exile organizations, challenging the German-Jewish Club where he is lecturing. He reproaches those who charged him with anti-Semitism because he had earlier told the same group that people would forget about 200,000 victimized workers if Hitler were not anti-Semitic, citing the case of Mussolini. 60 Alexander Stephan, “Communazis,” FBI Surveillance of German Émigré Writers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 189–194. 61 SUNY Albany Exile Archives: Letter to Prinz Loewenstein, 9 February 1946. 62 SUNY Albany Exile Archives: Letter to Hugo Hartung, 3 September 1946. 63 SUNY Albany Exile Archives: Letter to Hans Brandenburg, 27 April 1949. 64 SUNY Albany Exile Archives: Letter to Gustav und Else Fischer, 21 November 1950. 65 Oskar Maria Graf, Die Flucht ins Mittelmäßige: Ein New Yorker Roman, Oskar Maria Graf Werkausgabe, band VIII (1957; München und Leipzig: List Verlag, 1994). 66 Compare Ernst Fraenkel’s letter to Otto Suhr, above. Graf ’s “Volk” is properly translated as “people,” since he consistently uses it to refer to a diverse population and eschews the strong collectivist sense of the term. 67 Graf is implicitly taking the side of almost all German writers against Thomas Mann’s “Warum ich nicht nach Deutschland zurueckgehe. Antwort auf einen Brief Walter von Molos in der deutschen Presse,” Aufbau 11. no. 39 (28 September 1945): 5. 68 SUNY Albany Exile Archives: Letter to Prinz Loewenstein, 9 February 1946. 69 SUNY Albany Exile Archives: Letter to Hugo Hartung, 3 September 1946.

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70 Hans Brandeburg, “Literarische Würde,” Welt und Wort 3, no. 3: 96–100. 71 During the Hitler years, Brandenburg had been the great publicist of the choreographer Laban, who was in turn long enmeshed in National Socialist cultural projects, although eventually criticized by some functionaries. 72 Brandenburg’s choice of the term “unerwünscht” echoes the language posted in German shops to exclude Jews, and may be taken as intended to invoke that supposed similarity. 73 SUNY Albany Exile Archives: Letter to Hans Brandenburg, 27 April 1949. 74 E. V. Walter, Placeways (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

Chapter Seven. The Second Wave: An Autobiographical Exercise 1 Gerhard Sonnert and Gerald Holton, What Happened to the Children Who Fled Nazi Persecution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 2 The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1965); republished with a new introduction and afterword as Adam Ferguson: His Social and Political Thought (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2005). 3 “Dilemmas of Radicalism: Review of Franz L. Neumann,” The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957); Dissent (Autumn 1957): 386–92. 4 “Sociology of Knowledge and Moral Philosophy: The Place of Traditional Problems in the Formation of Mannheim’s Thought,” Political Science Quarterly 82 (September 1967): 399–426. 5 Marxismus und Kultur: Mannheim und Lukács in den ungarischen Revolutionen, 1918/19 (Neuwied: Luchterhand Verlag, 1967); in Japanese, Studies on George Lukács 14 (Tokyo: Orion Press, 1970): 215–81; revised in English, Telos, no. 10 (Winter 1971): 35–92. 6 “Montesquieu on Love: Notes on the Persian Letters,” American Political Science Review 58 (September 1964): 658–61; reprint in Literary Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. James E. Person, Jr. (1988); also “The Cheerful Discourses of Michael Oakeshott,” World Politics 16 (April 1964): 883–89. 7 “Political Science and Political Rationality,” in Political Theory and Social Change, ed. David Spitz (New York: Atherton Press, 1967), 59–89; “The Politics of Social Change: The Relevance of Democratic Approaches,” in The Bias of Pluralism, ed. William E. Connolly (New York: Atherton Press, 1969), 213–49; “Beyond Republicanism: The Socialist Critique of Political Idealism,” in An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers, ed. Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 34–81. 8 “The Vocation of Radical Intellectuals,” Politics and Society 1 (Autumn 1970), and in The Politics and Society Reader, ed. Ira Katznelson et al. (New York: David McKay Company, 1974), 333–59; David Kettler and Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh, Intellectuellen tussen macht en wetenschap (Amsterdam: van Gennep, 1973). 9 David Kettler and Harry R. Blaine, “Law as a Political Weapon,” Politics and Society 1 (November 1971): 479–526. 10 “Herbert Marcuse. The Critique of Bourgeois Civilization and Its Transcendence,” in Contemporary Political Philosophers, ed. Anthony de Crespigny and Kenneth Minoque (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1975), and (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1976), 1–48. See also “The Aesthetic Dimension of Herbert Marcuse’s Social Theory,” Political Theory 10 (May 1982): 267–275.

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11 “Political Theory, Ideology, Sociology: The Question of Karl Mannheim,” Cultural Hermeneutics 3 (1975): 69–80. 12 “History and Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of Modern History 48 (March 1976): 95–100. 13 “History and Theory in Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society: A Reconsideration,” Political Theory 5 (November 1977): 437–60; “Ferguson’s Principles: Constitution in Permanence,” Studies in Burke and His Time 19 (1978): 208–22; see also a recent detailed treatment of the central distinction between Ferguson’s scientific and politicaleducational ambitions, “Political Education for Empire and Revolution,” in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, ed. Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 87–114. 14 Karl Mannheim, Strukturen des Denkens, ed. David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr (1980; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003); in English as Structures of Thinking (1982; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2001); in Hungarian as A gondolkodás struktúrái, Budapest: Atlantisz (Mesteriskola), 1995; Karl Mannheim, Konservatismus. Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie des Wissens, ed. David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr (1984; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003); in English as Conservatism (1986; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,2001); in Italian as Conservatorismo: Nascita e Sviluppo del Pensiore Conservatore, prefazione di Giuseppe Bedeschi (Rome: Biblioteca di Cultura Moderna Laterza, 1989); in Hungarian (1994). 15 David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr, Karl Mannheim (Chichester: Ellis Horwood Limited, and London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1984); in French, trans. Eddy Treves (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987); in German, Politisches Wissen: Studien über Karl Mannheim, trans. Reinhard Blomert (Frankfurt: Edition Suhrkamp, 1989); in Spanish, trans. Francisco Gonzáles Aramburo (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990); in Chinese (Taipei: Laureate Book Company, 1997); in Japanese (Tokyo: Ochianomizu, 1996). 16 David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr, “Politik als Wissenschaft: über Theorie und Praxis bei Karl Mannheim,” Angewandte Sozialforschung 11 (1983): 403–417; co-authored in English, “Is a Science of Politics Possible?” Transactions/Society 24 no. 3 (March/April 1987): 76–82; in Italian, “La Scienza Politica di Mannheim,” MondOperaio 12 (Dicembre 1987): 76–81; David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr, “Karl Mannheim and Conservatism: The Ancestry of Historical Thinking,” American Sociological Review 49 (February 1984): 71–85 [excerpts published in Times Higher Education Supplement as “Arguing for Democracy” and in French, “Karl Mannheim et ‘Le Conservatisme,’” Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie 83 (1987): 245–56; published in Italy, Storia della Storiografia (1984), 6, 44–69]; David Kettler and Volker Meja, “Settling with Mannheim,” State, Culture, and Society 1, no. 3 (April 1985); Mary Gluck, “The Romance of Modernism: Review-essay of George Lukács and His Generation,” Canadian Journal of Sociology (Winter 1986–7): 443–55; David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr, “The Reconstitution of Political Life: The Contemporary Relevance of Karl Mannheim’s Political Project,” Polity 20, no. 4 (Summer 1988): 623–47; David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr, “Rationalizing the Irrational: Karl Mannheim and the Besetting Sin of German Intellectuals,” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 6 (May 1990): 1441–73; in Italian, “Razionalizzare l’irrazionale: Karl Mannheim e il vizio inveterato degli intellectuali tedeschi,” Rassegna Italiana di Sociologica 29, no. 4 (Ottobre – Dicembre 1988): 487–512; David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr, “Karl Mannheim und die Entmutigung der Intelligenz” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 19,

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no. 2 (April 1990): 117–130; David Kettler and Volker Meja, “‘That typically German kind of sociology which verges towards philosophy’: The Dispute about Ideology and Utopia in the United States,” Sociological Theory 12, no. 3 (November 1994): 279–303; David Kettler and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism: “The Secret of these New Times,” (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995). “The Question of ‘Legal Conservatism’ in Canada: A Review of Essays in the History of Canadian Law I,” Journal of Canadian Studies 18 (Spring 1983): 136–142; “Works Community and Workers’ Organizations: A Central Problem in Weimar Labour Law,” Economy and Society 13, no. 3 (August 1984): 278–303; in Dutch, “‘Betriebsgemeinschaft’ en Arbeidersorganisatie: Een Kernprobleem in het Arbeidsrecht van de Weimar republiek,” Recht en Kritiek 10, no. 4 (December 1984):377–96; “Sociological Classics and the Contemporary State of the Law,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 9 (1984): 447–58; “A Review of Essays in the History of Canadian Law II,” Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (Winter 1984); David Kettler and Volker Meja, “‘Sancho Pansa als Statthalter’: Max Weber und das Problem der materiellen Gerechtigkeit,” in Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre: Interpretation und Kritik, ed. Heinz Zipprian and Gerhard Wagner (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 713–54; David Kettler and Volker Meja, “Legal Formalism and Disillusioned Realism in Max Weber,” Polity 28, no. 3 (Spring 1996), 307–331; “Hugo Sinzheimer: Advocacy, Law and Social Change,” in Mededelingen 6. Hugo Sinzheimer Instituut voor onderzoek van arbeid en recht, ed. A. J. Hoekema (Amsterdam: Hugo Sinzheimer Instituut, 1993), expanded: Bard Journal of Social Sciences 2, no. 7–8 (April/May 1994): 12–20. “Law and Constitution in the Welfare State: Impasse or Evolution,” pre-publication as Diskussionsbeitrag no. 23/84 and in M. David Gelfand et al., Law in the Welfare State: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, HIMON, Universität-Gesamthochschule Siegen; in German in Recht als Instrument der Politik, ed. Rüdiger Voigt (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), 88–114; in Dutch, “Recht en staatsbestel in de verzorgingsstaat: impasse of ontwikkeling?” Recht en Kritiek 11, no. 1 (1985): 55–75; “The Reconstitution of the Welfare State: A Latent Social-Democratic Legacy,” Law & Society Review 21, no. 1 (1987): 9–47. “Interest, Ideology, and Culture: From the Protocols of Peace to Schlesinger v. Quinto,” in Anarcho-Modernism. Toward a New Critical Theory, ed. Ian Angus (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001), 271–90. David Kettler and Charles T. Tackney, “Light from a Dead Sun: The Japanese Lifetime Employment System and Weimar Labor Law,” Comparative Labor Law and Policy 19, no. 101 (1997). David Kettler, Christopher Huxley, and James Struthers, “Is Canada’s Experience ‘Especially Instructive’?” Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century, ed. Martin Lipset (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1986), 113–132; reprinted as “Trade Unions in North America Since 1945: A Comparison,” in Coming of Age: Readings in Canadian History Since World War II, ed. Donald Avery and Roger Hall (Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 148–65; David Kettler, Christopher Huxley, and James Struthers, “Unionization and Labour Regimes in Canada and the United States: Considerations for Comparative Research” Labour/Le Travail 25 (Spring 1990): 161–187. David Kettler and Peter Warrian, “American and Canadian Labor Law Regimes and the Reflexive Law Approach,” in Reflexive Labour Law, ed Ralf Rogowski and Ton Wilthagen (Deventer and Cambridge: Kluwer, 1994). David Kettler and Volker Meja, “The end of western trade unionism?: social progress after the age of progressivism,” Rethinking Progress, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander and Pietr

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Sztompka (London and New York: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 123–158. The principal articles cited in notes 19–25 are collected in Domestic Regimes, the Rule of Law, and Democratic Social Change, Mobility and Norm Change 3 (Berlin and Cambridge, MA: Galda & Wilch Glienecke, 2001). “Wie kam es zu Nina Rubinsteins Promotion,” in Nina Rubinstein, Die französische Emigration nach 1789: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der politischen Emigration, Dirk Raith, Hg. (Graz: Nausner & Nausner, 2000). David Kettler and Volker Meja, “Schattenseiten einer erfolgreichen Emigration: Karl Mannheim im englischen Exil,” Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch 5 (Fluchtpunkte des Exils), (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1987), 170–195. “Can we master the global tensions or must we suffer shipwreck on our own history?” Karl Mannheims Beitrag zur Analyse moderner Gesellschaften, Martin Endreß and Ilja Srubar, Hg. (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1999), 293–308. Karl Mannheim, Sociology as Political Education, ed. and trans David Kettler and Colin Loader (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001); David Kettler and Colin Loader, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002); “Political Education for a Polity of Dissensus: Karl Mannheim and the Legacy of Max Weber,” European Journal of Political Theory 1, no. 1 (2002): 31–51; David Kettler and Colin Loader, “Temporizing with Time Wars: Karl Mannheim and Problems of Historical Time,” Time and Society 13, no. 2–3 (2004): 155–72; “The Secrets of Mannheim’s Success,” Soziologie, Politik und Kultur: Von Alfred Weber zur Frankfurter Schule, Eberhard Demm, Hrsg. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003), 141–53; translated, revised, and expanded: “Das Geheimnis des bemerkenswerten Aufstiegs Karl Mannheims,” in Karl Mannheim. Leben, Werk, Wirkung, und Bedeutung für die Osteuropaforschung, ed. Bálint Balla, Vera Sparschuh, and Anton Sterbling (Hamburg: Krämer, 2007), 149–68; David Kettler and Volker Meja, “Karl Mannheim in America: The Loyalty of Kurt H. Wolff,” in The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H Wolff ’s Existential Turn, ed. Gary Backhaus and George Psathas (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 2006). Contested Legacies: The German-Speaking Intellectual and Cultural Emigration to the US and UK, 1933–1945, ed. David Kettler (Berlin and Cambridge, MA: Galda & Wilch, 2002). “Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein’s Studies in Exile,” Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation, ed. Edward Timms and Jon Hughes (Wien/New York: Springer, 2003), 195–206; “The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State University,” in Exile and Otherness, ed. Alexander Stephan (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 269–310; “A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider and/or Exile,” New German Critique 96 (June 2006). David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer, “The ‘Other Germany’ and the Question of Bildung,” in Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intellectuals, ed. Kettler and Lauer (New York and London: Palgrave, 2005); Contested Legacies: Political Theory and the Hitler Regime: Special Issue of the European Journal of Political Theory, ed. David Kettler and Thomas Wheatland (June 2004); “Negotiating Exile: Franz L. Neumann as Political Scientist,” in Der Eigensinn des Materials: Erkundungen sozialer Wirklichkeit, Caroline Arni et al, Hrsg. (Frankfurt a. M./Basel: Stroemfeld, 2007), 205–24; “‘Weimar and Labor’ as Legacy: Ernst Fraenkel, Otto Kahn-Freund, and Franz L. Neumann,” Helga Schreckenberger, ed., Die Alchemie des Exils. Exil als schöpferischer Impuls (Vienna: Edition Praesens, 2005); “Review of Dominic Boyer, Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture,” Canadian Journal of Sociology (March– April 2007),http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/germanculture.html

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31 The Limits of Exile, ed. David Kettler and Zv Ben-Dor, special issue, Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads (April 2006). 32 “‘Les émigrés sont les vainçus.’ Spiritual Diaspora and Political Exile,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Crossroads 1, no. 3 (2004). 33 “Political Science and Political Theory: The Heart of the Matter,” in Making Political Science Matter: the Flyvbjerg Debate and Beyond, ed. Brian Caterino and Sanford Schram (New York: NYU Press, 2006); “The Political Theory Question in Political Science, 1956–1967,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (November 2006). 34 David Kettler, Colin Loader, and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim and the Legacy of Max Weber: Retrieving a Research Programme (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008). 35 David Kettler and Volker Meja, “Their own ‘peculiar way’: Karl Mannheim and the Rise of Women,” International Sociology 8, no. 1 (March 1993): 5–55; “Women and the State: Käthe Truhel and the Idea of a Social Bureaucracy,” History of the Human Sciences 20, no. 1 (2007): 19–44; David Kettler and Volker Meja, “Karl Mannheim’s Jewish Question: History, Sociology, and the Epistemics of Reflexivity,” in Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 3 (2004), 325–347. 36 “Antifascism as Ideology: Review and Introduction,” in Habitus, Identität und die exilierten Dispositionen, ed. Anna Wessely, Károly Kókai, and Zoltán Péter (Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, 2008), 139–60. 37 “Exile and Return: Forever Winter,” Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads 3, no. 1 (April 2006): 181–200. 38 “Erste Briefe: Zwischen Exil und Rückkehr,” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte (May 2008): 79–107. 39 Erste Briefe/First Letters aus dem Exil 1945–1950, Formen und Fallbeispiele eines (un)möglichen Gesprächs (Text und Kritik).

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INDEX acculturation 21, 26, 45, 53, 64, 68, 75, 81, 112, 149 Adorno, T. 6, 51, 83, 133, 154, 156, 160 alienation (estrangement) 18, 22–3, 28, 72, 85, 103, 128, 142, 145, 166, 183n14 American Jewish Committee (AJC) 76–7 American Political Science Review 155, 166, 185n23 anti-Communism 57, 125, 138, 167 anti-fascism 20, 38, 57–64, 75, 123, 134, 138, 143, 148, 152–3, 158, 160, 167–8, 175n9, 189n16 anti-Semitism 26, 59, 76–7, 144, 148, 167, 192n59 Arendt, H. 19, 65, 129, 141 Aristotle 35, 48, 81 asylum 1–2, 13–15, 18–22, 43, 53, 76, 112–4, 145, 159, 164–5 Aufbau 111, 138, 141 Auschwitz 124, 167 Banauch, E. 44 banishment 2, 12, 16–18, 23, 35, 85, 172n11 bankruptcy 112–3, 148 Bard College 149, 163 Bavaria 138–44 Becher, J. R. 116, 190n18 Benda, J. 50 Benjamin, W. 40 Benn, G. 39 Berlin, I. 99 Blanco, C. 101 Bloch, E. 40–1 Bodin, J. 35 Bolshevism: see Communism (Bolshevism)

Botstein, L. viii, 159 Brandeis, L. 69, 154, 161 Brandenburg, H. 142–3, 193n71, 193n72 Brecht, B. 138, 176n17 Bricker, J. 158 Broch, H. 106 Buber, M. 102 Buchstein, H. 69 Burckhardt, J. 100 Burckhardt, S. 84–5, 100, 105–7, 185n23, 182n6 bureaucracy (bureaucratization) 15, 22, 46, 50–2, 59, 62, 65, 131 capitalism 46, 58–60, 62, 188n46 Cassirer, E. 99–100 Castro, A. 99 Chagall, M. 7 Christianity 6–8, 33, 43, 53, 48–9, 61, 99, 117, 167, 173n16 church 49, 59, 131 Cicero, M. T. 8–9, 11–13, 16, 22, 172n11 citizenship 15, 17, 35, 49, 86, 112, 115, 125, 172n11 Cold War 37, 49, 152 collective bargaining 72, 74, 90, 114, 162 Colm, G. 57 Columbia University 45, 54, 75, 77, 81–2, 152–3, 180n40 Communism (Bolshevism) 4, 11, 37, 40, 52, 57, 62, 65, 82, 115–16, 130–1, 134, 138–40, 152, 157–8, 189n16; see also anti-Communism concentration camp 16, 133, 140, 150, 167 corporatism 46

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cosmopolitan 2, 5, 10, 22–3, 31, 35, 43, 49–50, 85, 113, 115, 117, 146, 184n17 crisis 29, 35–6, 72, 85, 87–8, 95–7, 101–6, 155, 176n17, 183n14, 188n46 critic 37, 50, 88, 95, 109, 116, 145, 186n35 cultivation (Bildung) 28, 36, 54, 67, 87–8, 90, 94, 96, 103, 106, 126, 131, 142, 164–5, 169, 180n40, 183n15 cultural capital 148, 150, 168–9 culture 4–5, 18, 23, 29, 35–6, 38, 48–9, 51, 54–5, 59, 61, 65, 69, 83, 85–7, 92, 94–6, 98–101, 106, 116, 146, 152–3, 155, 159, 165, 183n15 Cumming, R. D. 161 Cunz, D. 90 Dante Alighieri 16, 49, Däumrig, E. 70 definition 1–2, 14, 38, 112–3 democracy 3, 35, 47, 52, 54, 58–61, 67, 69–70, 80, 82, 123, 153, 165 diaspora 7, 43–4, 113, 138, 140, 143, 159, 175n13 Die Wandlung 128, 131–2 Dilthey, W. 100 Diner, D. 166 Diogenes 73 displacement 2, 10, 13–4, 38, 40, 43, 49, 68, 112, 126, 160, 175n9 Edelstein, L. 93 Einstein, A. 85–6, 97, 106 Elias, N. 33, 166, 174n9 Eliot, T. S. 128, 181n52 Elliott, R. 105 emigration 10, 25–7, 30–1, 34, 37–40, 50–3, 56–8, 60–1, 63–6, 73, 86, 88, 112, 121, 123, 127–9, 132, 138, 140, 143, 149, 151, 153–4, 164, 166, 189n5 Epicureanism 48 exclusion 3, 9, 11, 14–18, 35, 41, 61, 85, 127 Falk, R. A. 102, 104 Fallada, H. 116

fascism 46, 58–63, 71–2, 82, 87, 140, 165; see also anti-fascism Feiler, A. 57 Ferguson, A. 153–5, 157, 160, 167, 194n13 Fischer, M. 144 Ford Foundation 75, 81, 180n38, 180n40 Fraenkel, E. 65–70, 123–5, 179n29, 180n40, 192n66 Frankel, M. 151 Frankfurter Zeitung 40, 126, 129 freedom (liberty) 7, 40, 43, 47, 50, 52, 79–80, 141–2, 154–5, 176n17 Freud, S. 55, 99–100, 152 Freyer, H. 36 Fritsche, P. 21 Frobenius, L. 100 Fuller, J. O. 86, 94, 182n9 generation 3, 14–5, 18, 26–9, 34, 36–8, 45, 60–1, 64, 68, 92, 117, 136, 142, 144, 148–9, 153, 156, 160, 166–8 German Democratic Republic 37 German Federal Republic 37, 40 German American Writers Association 138 Gerth, H. 127–35, 191n39, 191n41, 191n46 globalization 35 Goethe, J. W. v. 83, 87–8, 91, 98, 132, 150, 164, 181n2, 182n6, 184n21 Graf, O. M. 44, 138–44, 192n59, 192n66–7 Grimm, R. 37–8 Gunnell, J. G. 78, 80 Habermas, J. 10, 74, 156, 160 Hartung, H. 141–3 Hauptmann, G. 116 Hauser, A. 155, 182n9 Hegel, G. W. F. 46, 55, 88 Heidegger, M. 165 Heimann, E. 57 Heimberger, F. 92, 185n23 Heine, H. 41, 119–20, 150 Heller, H. 69 Hermand, J. 37–8, 175n10 Hiller, K. 115–6, 130, 150

INDEX Hilpert, H. 135 Hinshaw, V. 96, 104, 187n39 Hirschman, A. 10 historicism 33, 93, 95, 153, 174n1, 186n27–8, 186n35, 187n37 Hitler, A. 25, 27, 37, 40, 59, 61, 64, 68, 86, 88, 109–10, 112, 117–8, 124, 130–2, 140–1, 143, 192n59, 193n71 Hobbes, T. 13, 16, 35, 46, 172n11 Holmes, O. W. Jr. 69 Holton, G. 147–8, 150–1, 168 home 1, 4–7, 11, 13, 15, 22–3, 30, 35, 40–1, 58, 84, 86–7, 102, 104, 118, 120, 123, 134–5, 138–45, 148, 150, 152, 161, 164, 166, 173n14, 176n17, 191n41 homosexuality 41 Honegger, C. 27, 164 Horkheimer, M. 37, 45, 51, 57–8, 63–4, 71, 73, 75–7, 154–6, 160, 167, 177n16, 180n41 Horvath, Z. 157 humanism 5–8, 46, 56, 59, 61, 83–7, 90–3, 95–7, 101–2, 104–6, 111, 131, 160, 176n17, 183n15, 186n24, 188n46 humanities 85, 89, 92, 94, 96–7, 102, 105, 160, 162, 185n22–3, 186n25, 187n38–9, 188n46 Humboldt, W. v. 54, 187n37 ideology 12, 15, 21, 28, 30, 36, 38–9, 46–7, 50, 53–4, 57, 64, 67, 70–2, 127, 152, 154, 158, 161, 166 immigrant 2, 19, 66, 113, 147, 150 injustice 10, 17, 21 inner emigration 37–9, 50–1, 53, 127–9, 143 Institute for Social Research 65, 73, 75, 149 intellectual 6, 12–15, 21, 23, 25–7, 29, 31–3, 38, 44–5, 47–52, 54–7, 59–60, 62, 64–6, 68, 73–6, 78, 81, 85–7, 91, 94, 96–7, 104, 106, 111, 123, 127, 129–30, 132, 138, 140–1, 145, 148–9, 151, 153–4, 157, 159–61, 165–8, 176n17, 177n12, 179n36, 180n40, 183n15, 191n41

207

interpretation 1, 21, 26, 28, 33, 38, 58, 70, 89, 92–4, 97, 102, 130, 161, 164, 185n23 Jaspers, K. 127 Jewish (Jews, Judaism) 8, 15, 18, 23, 26–7, 31, 41, 43, 45, 52, 58–9, 62, 76–7, 87, 89, 91, 111, 117, 124–7, 130, 133, 138–9, 141, 144, 147, 149–51, 157, 161, 166–9, 173n16, 189n5, 189n8, 191n41, 192n59, 193n72 Johnston, S. 10 Joyce, J. 7 Julius Caesar 8–9, 106 Jung, C. 99 Jünger, E. 38, 176n17 Kafka, F. 41 Kahler Seminar 92, 98, 102, 105, 182n9, 184n16, 185n23 Kahler, E. 84–107, 155, 165, 181n2, 182n9–10, 183n14–15, 184n17–18, 184n21, 186n24, 186n26, 186n35, 187n37–8, 187n43, 188n46 Kahn-Freund, O. 65–8, 70–1 Kant, I. 50, 55, 96, 187n43 Kantorowicz, A. 110, 115–6, 130 Kästner, E. 115, 117–23 Katz, J. 166–7 Kesten, H. 117–23, 189n5 Kettler, D. 102–4, 147, 172n13, 175n13, 176n17, 177n12, 178n26, 180n40, 181n49, 181n52, 182n10, 183n15, 184n16 Ketzlach, M. 147 Kippenberg, A. 117 Kirchheimer, O. 12 Kogon, E. 156 Kraus, K. 73, 179n36 labor law 44–5, 65–9, 71–2, 74, 123, 149, 162–3, 179n29 labor movement (trade unions) 44–5, 65, 69–70, 72, 75, 124, 131, 162–3, 179n33 Landauer, G. 87 Laski, H. 45, 68, 178n27 Lasky, Melvin 40,

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Lauer, G. 86–8, 106, 165, 176n17, 177n12, 181n2, 182n10, 183n15, 184n18 Lazarus, F. J. R. 91 legality 8, 12–3, 18, 20, 35, 44–7, 66–7, 71–2, 78, 80, 102, 114, 123, 139, 159, 162–3, 178n26–7 Leipzig 37, 40, 133, 148–50, 156–7, 167,181n2 letters 9, 40, 44, 57–8, 61–2, 74, 76–8, 86, 89–90, 92–4, 98, 104–5, 109–32, 134–6, 138–47, 158, 168, 174n9, 177n16, 180n40, 182n9, 186n26, 187n35, 188n1, 189n5, 191n39, 192n66 liberal arts 92, 105, 165, 183n15 liberalism 46, 52, 55, 127, 133, 154, 161, 181n52, 191n46 Lipset, S.M. 153, 163 liquidation 44, 64, 90, 113, 140, 148 Loader, C. 164–6, 172n13 Locke, J. 80 Loewe, A. 57, 62 Loewenstein, H. Prinz zu 140–2, 180n41 Lovejoy, A. O. 93, 186n27 Lukács, G. 25, 153, 157, 159 Lynd, R. A. 77 Machiavelli, N. 16, 172n14 Mandela, N. 10 Mann, T. 57, 85–7, 105–6, 128, 140–1, 143, 176n17, 192n67 Mannheim, K. 25–33, 45, 51, 62, 90, 99–100, 102–3, 127, 149, 153–61, 164–7, 172n13, 174n9, 177n17, 180n39, 180n49, 181n52, 191n46 Mansfield, H. C. 154–5 Marcuse, H. 46, 49, 57–8, 61–2, 65, 82, 149, 153–5, 158, 160, 179n27 Marsilius of Padua 49 Marx, K. (Marxism) 28, 30, 40, 46, 50, 52, 55, 63–4, 70, 77, 99, 103, 140, 152–3, 155, 165 mass culture 38 Mayer, H. 37–42, 116, 165, 176n17 McDougall, M. 102 Meja, V. 161, 164, 166, 181n49, 181n52 Menshevik 13, 26, 30, 32, 164

Mershon, R. D. 86, 90–3, 96–8, 101, 182n9, 185n22, 187n39 metaphorical exile 2, 15, 21–3, 36, 41, 43, 85, 166 metic 47–8, 50, 73 Mill, J. S. 35, 161 Mills, C. W. 46, 128 Mills, J. 93 Milosz, C. 5–8, 11, 13 mission 21–2, 27, 33, 37, 49, 54, 57, 61, 68, 76, 87–8, 94, 106, 113, 125, 137, 145–6, 159, 184n21 Molo, W. v. 128 Mommsen, T. 50 Mommsen, T. E. 86 Montesquieu 81, 158, 188n44 Mosca, G. 55 National Socialism (Nazi) 1, 17, 23, 37–9, 44–7, 52–3, 65, 68–9, 71–3, 81–2, 87, 96–7, 109–10, 115–18, 122–3, 127–9, 138–43, 147–8, 156, 164, 167, 189n5, 193n71 nationalism 6, 50, 52, 59, 62, 139–40 naturalization 19, 139 negotiations (bargaining) 8, 13–14, 16, 19, 22, 26, 33–4, 36–7, 41, 44–5, 48, 56–8, 61, 64, 70–1, 73–82, 85, 102, 104, 106, 112–17, 122, 125, 127–8, 134, 145, 148–9, 156, 159, 162–6, 168–9, 179n27, 179n38, 184n17 Neisse, H. 143 Neumann, F. L. 44–58, 61–9, 71–8, 80–2, 113, 125, 149, 152–5, 158–9, 162, 164–8, 177n12, 177n16, 178n26–7, 179n33, 179n36, 179n38, 180n40–1 New Criticism 89, 92–3 New York 6, 45, 57, 62–3, 65, 83, 105, 109, 115, 119, 122–3, 134, 138–9, 144, 149–50, 159, 163, 167, 174n9, 176n17, 177n12, 179n27, 180n40, 186n26 Niebuhr, R. 57 Nietzsche, F. 6–8, 55, 99, 155 Nipperdey, H. C. 69, 179n29 Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal 53

INDEX occupation 40, 116, 123, 126, 129–30, 135–7, 140, 175n9 Ohio State University 83–6, 88–92, 96–7, 102, 105–6, 149, 154–5, 158–9, 182n9–10, 183n14–15, 184n16, 185n22–3, 186n25–6, 186n28, 187n39, 187n43, 188n44 OSS 134 outsider 2, 4–5, 37, 41, 50, 73, 116, 155 Oxford Movement 59, 62 Palestine 4, 8, 84, 151 Pareto, V. 55 Paris 6, 83, 118, 122 patriotism 10, 152, 175n9 Pearce, R. H. 91–106, 182n9, 184n17, 185n23, 186n24, 186n26–8, 187n35, 187n37–9, 188n46 Plevier, T. 143 pluralism 46, 69, 102, 125, 139 politics 2–3, 5, 8, 18, 20–1, 33, 36, 59, 65, 68, 75, 79, 112–17, 130–1, 140, 150–2, 158–163; constitutional politics 12, 66, 175n4; politics and culture 38, 48–9; political émigré 11, 13, 26–8, 30, 113; exile politics 53, 63–4, 134, political justice 4, 11–14, 17–18, 112, 116; politics of memory 23, 146; Roman politics 11–12; political scholar 47–57; political science (political scientist) 45, 47, 55, 68, 74–5, 78–82, 89, 102, 125, 149, 152, 154–5, 158, 166; political theory 9–10, 13, 45, 49, 57, 67, 71, 78–80, 154, 158–9, 161, 166, 178n26 Pollock, F. 51 Popper, K. 153–4 Popular Front 59, 115, 134, 138, 152 positivism (positivist) 66, 72, 78, 87, 96, 166, 174n1, 184n21 post-modernism 35, 41, 84, 166 power 3–4, 7–9, 11–20, 22–3, 27, 40, 46–7, 50–1, 53, 55, 61, 67–8, 70–2, 74, 77, 79, 84, 101, 103, 116–17, 120, 132, 137, 140, 143, 145–6, 156, 181n5, 183n14, 188n46

209

propaganda 52, 59, 79, 120, 124 property 46, 67–8, 72, 163 punishment 3–4, 13, 16, 172n11 Raabe W. 144 RAND Corporation 82 Ransom, J. C. 93, 95 Rappaport, A. 104 Rechtsstaat 60, 69 recognition 1, 4, 6, 14–15, 17, 19–23, 27–8, 38, 40, 43, 46, 51, 53–4, 61, 67, 69–72, 74–6, 80, 84, 86, 88, 94–6, 101, 110–11, 112–17, 124, 127–8, 134, 138–9, 142–3, 145, 148, 155–6, 158–9, 161, 163, 169, 184n21, 187n38 refugee 2, 5–7, 18–19, 22, 25, 43, 58, 63, 65, 68, 83–4, 109, 127, 146–8, 150, 157, 161, 168 regime 3–4, 11–12, 16–18, 20, 22, 25, 31, 38–40, 44, 46–7, 52–3, 59–61, 69–72, 87, 116, 127, 156, 161–3, 165, 178n26 religion 1, 6, 15, 18, 30, 33, 35, 36, 43, 49–50, 53, 58–9, 83, 102, 113, 150–1, 188n46 resistance 3, 10–13, 17, 19–22, 38, 41, 51, 59, 74–5, 77, 123, 125, 139, 145, 151 return 2, 4, 6–9, 12, 14–19, 21–3, 27–8, 37, 39–41, 51, 53, 56, 60, 68–70, 81, 83, 97, 101–2, 106, 109–17, 121–39, 141, 143–6, 148, 154, 156–9, 161–3, 166–8, 172n11, 172n13, 173n14, 173n16, 175n9, 175n13, 189n13, 189n16, 190n18, 191n39 revolution 13, 16–18, 20, 26–7, 29–31, 42, 46, 59, 62–3, 65, 67, 70–1, 87–8, 106, 123, 144, 150, 157–8, 182n10 Rilla, P. 38 Rockefeller Foundation 57, 74–5, 78–81, 154, 178n26, 180n40 Roosevelt, F. D. 54, 81, 123, 152 Rosenblum, D. 77 Rousseau, J. J. 16, 49

210

THE LIQUIDATION OF EXILE

Rubinstein, N. 13–14, 25–7, 30–4, 44, 64, 66, 70, 77, 84, 164–5, 172n13, 174n9 Russia (Soviet Union) 3, 7, 13, 26–7, 31–3, 40, 52, 59, 62, 70, 140, 149–50, 152, 164, 166–7, 180n49 Sabine, G. 78, 80 Said, E. 5–8, 11, 13, 18, 35–6, 41, 83–5, 107, 166, 181n5 Saint-Simon, H. 36 Salz, A. 89, 92, 184n18, 184n21 Salz, S. 89–92 Schäffer, A. C. 143 Scheler, M. 100 Schiller, F. 6, 150 Schmitt, C. 36, 45, 165 Schoenberner, F. 117–8 scholarly method 94, 100 science (Wissenschaft) 23, 44–5, 54–6, 67–9, 74–5, 78–82, 85, 87–9, 91–2, 94, 96–7, 102–3, 125, 147, 149, 152, 154–5, 158, 161–2, 165–6, 177n12, 179n38, 180n40, 182n9, 183n14–15, 184n21, 187n43, 188n46 Segher, A. 143 Seidlin, O. 89–92, 98, 125–8, 130, 132, 184n17, 186n24, 186n28 settlement 26, 44–5, 56, 70, 74–5, 77, 113, 125, 149 Simmel, G. 25, 27, 60, 64, 96, 100, 155, 169, 186n28 Simon, H. 57 Simplicissimus 141 Singer, I. B. 7 Sinzheimer, H. 45, 66, 68, 70–2, 149, 162–3, 165 Social Democratic Party (SPD): see Socialist (Social Democratic Party) social policy (Sozialpolitik) 65 socialism 26, 31, 45, 59–63, 81–2, 125, 158, 162 Socialist (Social Democratic Party) 45, 63, 65, 69–70, 73, 123, 130–1, 140–1, 151, 179n36 sociological jurisprudence 72

sociology 25–6, 28–30, 32–3, 78, 100, 149, 153, 161, 164, 195n16 Socrates 9–10, 12, 16–17, 48, 73 Soellner, A. 69 Sonnert, G. 147–8, 150–1, 168 Soviet Union: see Russia Soviet Zone 40, 115–16, 133, 140 Speier, H. 52, 54, 82 Spengler, O. 100, 133 Speyer, W. 143 Spinoza, B. 50 Spitz, D. 102–4 Stalin, J. (Stalinism) 20, 63, 155, 168, 189n16 Stammen, T. 10–11 status activus 11–12, 112, 172n11 Staudinger, H. 57 Stefan George Circle 87 Stein, M. 104 Stern, G. 129 Sternberger, D. 125–33, 191n39 Stinnes-Legien Agreement 70 stranger 2, 9, 25–7, 30, 44, 64, 106 Stravinsky, I. 7, 176n17 Suhr, O. 123–5, 192n66 symbol 3, 6, 17, 20, 43, 83–6, 88, 95, 104, 106, 117, 148, 168, 186n28 Teilhard de Chardin, P. 100 terror 17, 49, 52, 63, 118, 168 theater 54, 117, 122, 134–5, 137–8, 143 Thucydides 35, 42 Tillich, P. 57–64, 102 totalitarian 15, 46–7, 51–3 Toynbee, A. J. 100 trade unions: see labor movement (trade unions) Trent University 149, 162 Truhel, K. 166 trust 4, 20, 77, 106, 109, 124, 126–8, 134, 139–40, 148–9, 189n16 Tucholsky, K 73, 179n36 Uhlich, R. 57 unfinished business 1, 15, 22–3, 57, 133, 145, 156, 160, 164

INDEX university 40, 45, 55–6, 68, 74–5, 81, 85–6, 89–90, 92–3, 100–5, 127–8, 132–3, 139, 149, 154, 158–9, 161–4, 179n38, 180n40, 185n22, 186n25, 187n38, 191n46 victim 2, 18, 20–1, 43, 66, 68, 192n59 violence 1, 3–4, 8, 13, 17, 42 Walter, E. V. 146 war 10, 13, 17, 35, 37–8, 40, 45–6, 49, 51–3, 58–60, 70, 72, 77, 87, 89, 91, 109, 120, 129, 131, 134–5, 139, 147, 152, 154–5, 157, 159, 161, 163, 166–8, 184n21, 185n22, 189n8 Weber, A. 100 Weber, M. 28, 55, 87–9, 100, 128–9, 166 Weil, S. 6, 83

211

Weimar Germany 45, 52, 66, 117, 166 Weininger, O. 144 Weiss, P. 40 Wellek, R. 83, 93 181n2 Weyrauch, W. 109–11, 115, 141, 188n1, 189n8 White, J. B. 10, 174n1, 175n4 Willits, J. A. 78, 81 Wilsonianism 52, 54 Wirth, L. 127 Wolff, C. 80 Wolff, K. H. 33, 90, 99, 155, 161, 185n23, 186n28, 188n44 women 20, 25, 28–9, 32, 41, 73, 121, 145, 166 Zuckmayer, C. 132, 134–8, 143, 192n54 Zweig, S. 143