Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Among socialists, these anxieties spilled into a vibrant internal debate and growing calls for change of tactics and new visions. Weekend excursions by militants were devoted to discussions of important tracts, workshops in political tactics, and plans for future meetings. On Sundays, OA and sometimes Ursula, who would later affiliate with the Communist Party, donned their blue shirts and red kerchiefs and took the train to assemblies in the countryside. Youth hostels became the meeting grounds for leftist students and young workers from around Berlin. Erich Schmidt, the charismatic head of the SAJ chapter in Berlin, steered the group further to the left within the Social Democrats and argued for the creation of a coalition of Social Democrats and Communists. In this, he was taking on the SPD establishment, incarnate in the Reichstag faction of the Brüning (of the Center Party) government, which was desperately trying to cope with a growing crisis and focusing on the older party line. Figures like Erich Ollenhauer and Rudolf Hilferding “tolerated” the bourgeois parties and put their trust in Brüning until he dropped the remaining Socialists from his coalition and brought in Nazis as part of his botched electoral gambit. In the meantime, the SPD leadership stuck with a government that had swung to such deflationary, antilabor, pro-military, pro-clerical, and even increasingly anti-Semitic standpoints that it made a mockery of whatever the republic’s reformists and moderate socialists had envisioned. Rudolf Hilferding wrote to the elder SPD leader and intellectual, Karl Kautsky, on December 1 that “the situation is certainly unpleasant. The fascist danger still threatens and the increase [in support] for the Communists disturbs our people even more. Indeed, a further advance in this direction would certainly bring the greatest danger that the attraction of the Communists would increase powerfully as soon as they surpassed our numbers. It is not a pretty scene, but adventurous stupidities would only make matters worse.” As if to mock the SPD leader’s cautionary diagnosis, two months later Hindenburg named Hitler Chancellor of Germany.15

  This kind of blindness to imminent dangers drove younger militants to distraction. For Schmidt, the 1930 elections revealed that old rivalries on the left had to be set aside to confront the common enemy. At stake was parliament itself. Something different had to be done to rescue it, and it was clear to those of the SAJ that the extremes of the Left and especially the Right had no interest and the Center had no ability. Along with Walter Löwenheim (aka Kurt, who had been evicted from the KPD for “right-wing deviationism”), Schmidt called this movement the Circle, and later ORG; sometimes it was known as LO, or just O, for Gruppe Leninistische Organisation. It would become the incubator for the Neu Beginnen movement in 1933, a self-described Leninist vanguard within the Socialist camp devoted to a full-throated analysis of the economic crisis and the practical necessity of a left-wing alliance. Only socialism could rescue the republic. But for the time being, Schmidt’s crusade focused on mobilizing the movement to treat the Nazi threat as not just a momentary political blip (which is how the overconfident SPD leadership tended, condescendingly, to dismiss it), but rather the expression of a structural shift in German capitalism with decisive political realignments. Hirschmann later recalled Schmidt’s powerful speeches and presence before audiences of politically awakening youth, drawing inspiration from Lenin for organizational discipline to push the party onto a new track. Enchanted by Schmidt’s ability to formulate in words what he was beginning to divine in observation, Hirschmann met with Schmidt several times during SAJ activities and fell under the spell of his learned activism. “He was one of those men who thought while he spoke,” remembered Hirschman. It was in the spring of 1932 that Schmidt and the ORG leaders sponsored a months-long series of intensive workshops on revising Marxist theory, the history of the German labor movement, discussions of tactics, and exegesis of Lenin’s pamphlet What Is to Be Done? Lenin was truly “captivating.” While other Marxists focused on the stages of historical transformation and were understandably obsessed with what was seen as the inevitable crises of capitalism, Lenin presented an altogether different kind of reading. His prerevolutionary writings actually defended the creative cunning of capitalism. Anything that accented the mysterious role of History’s hiding forces drew the young militant’s attention. But it was especially Lenin’s political writings that gripped Otto Albert. He devoured the April Theses, Letters on Tactics, and the notes that would appear in The State and Revolution. Lenin’s analysis of the creative possibilities for new forms of action put the accent on what Hirschmann immediately appreciated as “a great subtlety for tactics.” The “fascination” with how change is effected—not presuming it was so automatic or predestined—started here; not until the young Hirschmann read Machiavelli would he encounter a similar political theorist of the practice of change and the politics of the possible. One of his favorite Lenin tracts was the injunction to the Second Congress of the Communist International from 1920, in which the Bolshevik fixed his sights on the “infantile disease” (Lenin’s words) of the rebel’s “mindless theorizing” (Hirschman’s), with no attention to the subtle cunning of events. Lenin decried dogmatists’ affection for blind spots about History’s infinitely forking paths in order stick to their line. The traditional Communist faith that a crisis would resolve itself only one way—with a revolutionary triumph—was at best naïve. There was always more than one way to get out of a jam. “Revolutionaries sometimes try to prove,” wrote Lenin, “that there is absolutely no way out of a crisis [for the ruling classes]. This is a mistake. There is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation.” Hirschmann savored these words; one can hear them echo through his prose a half century later.16

  Nocturnal and weekend activism involved exegeses of Lenin and debates about Socialist tactics and eventually became overlaid with a patina of romance. The circle of Otto Albert’s friends moved him beyond the confines of his school or his sister’s classmates. It was within the SAJ that OA came to know the family of Rafael Rein, a prominent ex-Menshevik and leader of the Bund, the Jewish Workers’ Union under the Russian Empire. Rein had gone to Petrograd in 1917 in the second sealed train from Zurich and played a leading role in the fall of the tsar, then went on to lead the parliamentary faction of the Mensheviks in the Duma. He fled to Berlin and from there became a marked man as a writer for the Russian underground paper Vestnik, which circulated into the Soviet Union via Poland. Two of his children, Mark and Lia, were also SAJ activists of roughly the same age as Ursula and OA, and the acquaintances quickly gave way to attractions, OA for Lia, and Ursula for Mark. Lia’s gymnasium seethed with violence, for teenagers were semiobliged to sport their partisan colors under their uniforms, only to peel off the top layer when school was dismissed. For the pugilists, this kind of color-coding helped separate allies from targets. Lia thought herself as mobilized as the boys. It would have been hard for any “pure” romance to flourish in an environment so saturated with politics; instead of going dancing together, Lia and OA marched together, which, in Hirschman’s memory, did have the advantage of making the sometimes tedious and repetitive exercises more pleasant. If there was any kissing, it had to be done while walking home—already exhausted—from a long meeting or rally.17

  For all the inspiration and romance that accompanied Hirschmann’s political turn, his increasing engagements coincided with, and to some extent were stoked by, an increasingly rancorous debate within the party. The SPD began to tear itself apart. The Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei split off in opposition to the party’s unrelenting support for Chancellor Brüning. Other radical factions opted to stay. Hirschmann was decidedly in the “stay” camp and saw no point in fracturing the movement any further; it was more important, he felt, to meet the challenge than to content oneself with an intellectually pure or politically “sound” position; his pragmatic streak was already showing through the fabric of his radicalism. In this, he was joined by another young militant, Willy Brandt, who was a member of the same group and the same age; both insisted that the cause would be better served by disagreeing from
within the structure than defecting from it.18

  The big question was, how far should one collaborate with the Communists? After Moscow, Berlin was the world’s biggest Communist polis, with a quarter million members and twenty-five newspapers. Since the Comintern’s leftward lurch in 1928, Communists had followed an intransigent line. For many, the loathing of the republic began early—with the killing of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the KPD’s founders, at the hands of cavalry guards doing paramilitary duty. The doctrine of social fascism, invoked to defame the already vulnerable ruling SPD, argued that there was little to distinguish the Nazis and the government when it came to upholding the basic structures of capitalism. If anything, the Nazis were easier to contend with because they did not bother to mystify the oppressive content of boss rule with the allure of bourgeois, gentlemanly electoralism. In the shared disdain for procedural, parliamentary norms—Hirschmann observed—the Communists and Nazis mirrored each other, in their conviction at having gotten to some basic “truth” about the world and sneering at anyone who urged caution, advocated complexity, or preferred reformist civility. Otto Albert did not have to go very far to reach this conclusion, for the Communist sloganeering for “Red Unity” and “Antifascist Struggle” was steeped in the same militaristic style as the fascists: martial parading, belligerent rhetoric, aktion over deliberation. Since the pluralist and reformist values of the republic were such anathema to extremists, they could agree to treat them as doomed. Hirschmann recognized a conveniently circular way of agreeing to destroy all hope of reform. During the transportation strike of November 1932, Goebbels, who envied the Communists’ organizational machinery, and Walter Ulbricht, the scheming tool of the Comintern, joined up at the same demonstration. The strikers were so appalled at the spectacle of a Nazi-Communist march that they dissolved the stoppage. Then, that night, Communists and Nazis tore at each other to create a growing list of rival martyrs: knives slashed faces, beer mugs cracked skulls, and bullets pierced the night from the tops of buildings. In the morning, the trails of blood could be seen from where comrades dragged away the dead or injured.19

  These were scenes that Hirschmann witnessed but conspicuously preferred not to discuss for the rest of his life. But they left their indelible marks on everything he wrote; one cannot help but detect in his defense of moderation and open-mindedness in The Rhetoric of Reaction his alarm at Communist and Nazi tirades and certainties. But for the moment, while the KPD clearly loathed the republic, both its principles and its politicians, there were many in the socialist ranks who shared Otto Albert’s sense that they were necessary allies; the only hope for socialism, and thus the republic, was a new alliance, for it appeared that the Center and Right were prepared to cave into the Nazis. The hope was that some flexibility and accommodation might yield to a progressive ruling coalition to lift the republic from its troubles.

  In the end, these were pipedreams. There was no Left coalition; indeed, KPD militants took to the streets as much to beat up Socialists as they did Nazis. While the electoral scene became more intense, some youth and neighborhood movements vented their rivalry with fisticuffs; indeed, the collapse of the Reichstag’s power fueled the militarization of the streets. In 1931, the Social Democrats formed a self-defense front called the Iron Front. Otto Albert did not follow those activists who went from campaigning and doctrinal debates to their paramilitary outfits, the Schutzbund, which argued that “force had to be met with force.” These tended to operate more out of union halls and working-class sports clubs. But because the SPD was loath to confront the government with mass strikes or armed resistance, most of the violent activity was restricted to political gang warfare, which escalated dramatically and blurred the line between civic and violent action. The establishment fervently tried to defend civility. Still, some meetings got rough. Those who left the meeting halls could not ignore the prowling gangs of angry Communists and Nazis. For this reason, it was important to escort women to their homes after assemblies, and Hirschmann’s bicycling skills came in handy when he was alone. One evening, while Lia, Mark, Otto Albert, and Ursula were at a meeting trying to convince Communists to bury their grudges and doctrinal purity, the argument degenerated into a fist fight. Mark, who was more and more to Otto Albert the archetype of the engagé idealist, emerged beaten and bruised. The others escaped unscathed. They all withdrew to the safety of home—to ready themselves for another round the next day.20

  The plunge into politics created a rift with the parents. At first, the suspicions were more about the suitability of some readings and whether the children were hanging around the appropriate crowds. Both parents took a dislike to Ehrmann and his influence. Writing to Hedwig in mid-1930, Carl exclaimed, “How hard it is to build up childrens’ souls! Hereto, to this question, it is necessary that Ehrmann get out of her [Ursula] and the boy’s [OA] lives. I’d prefer a jiu-jitsu champion.” When the nanny discovered that Ehrmann had given Ursula a German copy of Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of the Earth (Eine Frau allein), Carl was livid: “I find this intolerable and grounds for taking firmer action with him.”21 Smedley, the American writer and radical, was known for her promotion of birth control and her affinity with Chinese Communists, not to mention her service as a Soviet spy. Daughter of the Earth was a semi-autobiographical novel about a heroic, self-made, independent woman—who became radical. It is hard to know exactly which of Smedley’s causes was more of an affront to Ursula’s protective parents. The poems of Erich Kästner and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera were also proscribed, though Kästner’s essays figured prominently in the family newspaper, the Vossische Zeitung. The entire New Objectivity movement was altogether too dark and sobering for either Carl or Hedwig, who preferred not to have their children ruminate on the hypocrisy of the establishment.

  The weight of the clash between parents and children landed on one parent’s shoulders in particular, Hedda’s, and one child’s, Ursula’s. Relations with Mutti had never been completely harmonious, and frictions with Ursula simply worsened, as did the tension with OA, who had been immune to her fussing until then. They were faced with a stark choice: conform to Mutti’s pride or defect to street politics. Ursula had no skill in avoiding filial conflict; OA did, in spades. The result was that while OA had always been adept at carving out some autonomy from Mutti’s overbearing embrace, he now raised his skill to a higher form, defusing the conflict by avoiding its source. In the year leading up to January 1933, he would be gone for days on end and most nights, largely unnoticed now that his bedroom was positioned with direct access to the apartment’s front door and he had his studies to hold up as a fig leaf.

  If Mutti projected her anxieties, even at the price of alienating her two eldest children, Carl turned his inward and became more withdrawn and taciturn than ever. With his career stalled, the family fortunes in decline, and the republic unraveling, mounting tension over OA’s and Ursula’s militancy enhanced his recessive proclivities. Ursula’s memoirs may overstate her father’s prescient sense that their world was ending, but the point is: the republican dream was dying along with his personal aspirations, and the two were indissoluble. Resigned and melancholy, he spent his time reading poems by the introverted nihilist, Gottfried Benn (from a little anthology, aptly called Morgue, published in 1912), and rereading his Kafka, perhaps searching for solace in tales of unfathomable bureaucratic agonies, which he no doubt recognized as his own. Retrospectively, Ursula also knew that the image of death hanging over his desk at home was casting a shadow over the republic and the family.22

  In 1932, Otto Albert Hirschmann graduated from the Collège. His gymnasium degree was a major accomplishment and an index of status, especially coming from one of Germany’s best schools. With his grades, Otto Albert had a ticket to pursue further studies. The question was, where and what? Medicine was ruled out; Carl may have wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, but he could see in his preference for courses at the gymnasium that Otto Albert’s passions lay elsewhere. It is lik
ely that Ehrmann helped shape his choices, if only by example. He had studied law and economics. What Hirschmann could not count on, for the first time in his life, was parental approval. The decision to study economics was not greeted with much enthusiasm. They explained that it was “a breadless art”—to which their son replied, with his tongue already in cheek, that it was precisely the power to explain shortages and abundances of bread that made it such an important discipline. For the time being, the conflict could be muted, for economics was taught within the law faculty of the University of Berlin, and Carl and Hedwig could hope that their son would emerge a talented and successful lawyer.23

  Moreover, the Depression was on Hirschmann’s mind; it was hard to avoid, and Otto Albert was, if nothing else, already a fine observer. Not only did the jobless rate hit one-third when he graduated, but his family’s own finances, while not ruined, were crippled. The buoyancy of the 1920s, admittedly floating on an influx of American dollars and bank lending, gave way to a profound slump and thus destroyed the legitimacy of the republic. To Hirschmann, economics had the appeal of explaining the crisis around him while offering a more analytical distance from politics; he preferred to keep his politics contained to his, admittedly demanding, involvements with the SAJ. If economics was his inclination, where to pursue this interest was beyond doubt: the University of Berlin. Eventually renamed the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1949, partly to give it a new lease after years of complicity with the Third Reich, it had been the paragon of Enlightenment pursuit from Hegel and Schiller to Einstein and Max Planck. Its large buildings with classical façades, open squares, and stacked libraries captivated the young Hirschmann, and its peerless status removed some of his parents’ reservations. That students could wander past the windows from which Hegel once gazed only added to the institution’s aura.