Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Unease about collectivism pursued him through Italy. He worried about France’s resurgent patriotism, concerned that it would forget the lessons of the past and drape itself in the glorious mantle of pseudovictory only to repeat mistakes of the past, and thought the Italians’ spirit of self-criticism was uplifting. In general, Hirschman worried that nations would move on from the war “as something unpleasant whose boring effects must be circumscribed in order to forget and return to ‘normal’ life as quickly as possible. In my view, everything that can help engrave in our consciousnesses and of those generations to come of the all the horrors of this war, everything that would not allow people to forget or to deny or console themselves cowardly should be accepted and embraced.”49 But it was for Germany that he harbored the deepest concerns about collectivism. Reading about the bombing of Dresden a month before the German surrender, Hirschman worried that too much of the blame would be placed at Hitler’s feet. “This complete defeat of German totalitarianism that appears to be coming may be the most distasteful result of Hitler’s policies.” This should not be diminished. But there was more at stake: “The way in which Germany has conducted this war leaves it no other possibility for collective rehabilitation for a long period—maybe 1,000 years as once advertized by the 3rd Reich. All that is left is to fold back upon itself in an anti- or a-social individualism pushed to its extreme as a result of the disastrous experience with collectivism. Hitler, who wanted to make nonsense of History will have succeeded only in making nonsense of Germany’s history.… At bottom, it is the complete emptiness and all is possible that makes me pensive tonight,” he wrote to Sarah.50

  These ruminations about collective responsibilities about the past did not get in the way of some personal thoughts about the future. One of the buoys to his moods was learning that Sarah, despite the sad news at the National Gallery in Washington, was in fact pregnant. On March 10, 1944, he got news from Sarah informing him that she’d passed through the first trimester; “I am overwhelmed,” he exclaimed, “and have spent the entire day dreaming with my eyes open.” The news happened to coincide with “a decision I have made about my work …” He referred to “doubts which I still had,” but now “the justice of this decision has been dissipated by your telegram.”51 Exactly what these doubts were is not clear; he may be referring to his career or his sense of a future in the United States. It is unlikely he ever worried about being a good father. Quite the contrary: he had strong feelings about the baby’s name. It should be easy to pronounce in many languages and it should not be “fashionable” nor too foreign for Americans, “for we will always be Europeans in America and Americans among Europeans. It is important that the children [note the plural] not be too affected by this hybrid condition of the parents.” In the end they settled on Catherine (after St. Catherine, the Sienese scholastic philosopher, as a tribute to the city that welcomed Albert back to Italy), Katia for short. He also had thoughts about religion given the “hybrid” of Russian Orthodoxy, German Lutheranism, and Jewish origins: Albert urged that the children should enjoy the greatest freedom to choose, no baptism (unlike him) and a nonreligious circumcision if the baby was a boy.52

  The birth of baby Katia in October 1944, while he was in Siena, shook off, for the moment, self-doubting. Of course, the joys were slightly muted by the fact that he was not there for Sarah’s delivery, and he was concerned for the pain and suffering she might have endured without his company.53 But the combination of Katia’s arrival and his presence in Italy conspired to make him think more about the future. A week after learning that he had a daughter, the afterglow filled his letters and shifted his gaze to a new horizon. “My imagination runs wild,” he wrote in English, “happily [this time back to French] I am now overloaded with work and for the past two days I have been at the typewriter until late at night—and I am speeding up—look what a wonderful perspective for you after the war, for I will not have any more argument that for you it takes less time to write this letter or that manuscript.”54

  Of one other thing Hirschman was certain: he had no future in academe, and the prospects for working in “economic intelligence” were no brighter. Even as the war came to a close “I have more or less abandoned the idea of a famous ‘academic career.’ ” When Condliffe wrote him to tell him that National Power was about to be published, he quipped that “it will always be useful as a carte de visite.”55

  Instead, he began to think that Sarah should bring Katia to Rome and they should give up on the United States. “I find myself very happy in this country,” he said about Italy, “and I even have a great faith in her in spite of all the baseness and awful ruin. Perhaps it really would be best for you to learn Italian.”56 This was early in 1945. “I am more and more oriented,” he told Sarah after Japan surrendered, “toward Italy as a field of future activity without being very precise about what that might be concretely. I dream of 4 or 5 part-time jobs and in each one of them I depend on no one but myself. In any event, you should consider beginning to take Italian lessons, what do you think?” If OSS work was less than he’d hoped for, he still dreamed up projects. One “consists of creating an Institute for the Determination of National Revenue of Europe, nothing less than that, with its location in Rome and me as its president of course!” “It would consist of unifying the statistical methods used by different countries and to make them the bases for real European economic planning.” Ideas like these swirled around his head, though he very often circled back to the need to establish his credentials in the United States before establishing his footprint in Europe. “It will be important for me to spend some time in Washington to familiarize myself with American methods, and then get some funding from Rockefeller, etc, and that will be it! … I suppose that there are better ‘goals in life’ but that is for another moment.”57

  Germany’s surrender found Hirschman stationed in Udine, close to the Austrian frontier. It brought a transformation in his job. No longer was the army trying to get intelligence about the situation on the other side. It was dealing with captured German officers. Hirschman was sent to Rome, where several of the top captive commanders were under detention. By then, Hirschman was anxious to get to the Italian capital, for the death of Eugenio had become an obsession. Somehow, he got hold of some papers while in Florence, “but not all of them.” He poured over them like a Talmudic scholar: “There are brief or incomplete essays that illustrate clearly the turn in his spirit and are of a thought that is so refreshing and original, posing new problems in an unexpected way.”58 This only whetted his appetite to find the rest. “I hope I can go to the Capital to see friends and to occupy myself with E’s manuscripts.”59 What were Eugenio’s final words? At every stop, and with every Italian who might know anything, he would pause to try to find more details about what had happened. In May, he paid an especially bitter visit to Forte di Marmi, the Colornis’ summer home. For several months, the town had been the front of the war and had been pounded by the fighting. When Albert got there, he found the old villa had been shelled; all that was left was the ground floor and part of a staircase to the second floor. The maid, whose husband had been carted away by the Germans, had cleaned up and salvaged a few pieces of furniture. Albert gave her his spare change, 3,000 lira. That night, he sat down and wrote to Sarah of his despair “in seeing the house destroyed and the countryside ravaged where I passed some of the most beautiful weeks of my youth most full of hope and enthusiasm.”60

  It was not until he got to Rome, when he caught up with an old friend, Bruno Pincherle, an Actionist and another Jew from Trieste, whose brother was a doctor and very close friend of Eugenio’s, that the picture became any clearer—and more disturbing. According to Pincherle, his brother had tried to save Eugenio in the hospital, but to no avail. But he did learn one thing from the dying philosopher: Colorni had been carrying something secret in his bag and was trying to evade capture when he was gunned down. Pincherle introduced Hirschman to someone with whom Colorni had been hiding in c
landestinity: Luisa Usellini. She possessed the contents of his satchel he was carrying when he was shot. What Hirschman found were several scientific essays plus a series of literary-philosophical dialogues, one of which captivated Albert: “Fear of Dying,” written only a few days before the assassination. There was too much for him to read, so he paid a typist 2,000 lira to make copies and began to make inquiries about publishing the papers posthumously. In the meantime, he got a more complete story of Eugenio and Ursula’s separation: that Eugenio had escaped Melfi before Mussolini’s fall, that Ursula and Eugenio had definitively split before then, and that while in Rome Eugenio had learned of Ursula’s pregnancy with Altiero Spinelli. The estrangement had been complete. Learning this took some of the ire from Hirschman’s reunion with his sister.61

  Ursula, however, remained in Switzerland; their reunion was long delayed by the upheavals of the war, Ursula’s serial pregnancies, and the uncertainties of Italy’s future. As late as May 1945, while Albert was back in Siena, he asked her to come and meet him in Milan (if he could get a leave from the army) or Siena “as you seem to have great facility in movement.” “Let us swear to each other,” he urged, “not to reach the seventh anniversary of our separation.”62 Rome, however, united Albert with Altiero Spinelli. They shared many of the same outlooks. But Albert came away with the profile of an activist, not an intellect. He saw in the principles of European “federalism” some overlaps with his own thinking about the importance of curbing national sovereignty. But there was a tone of disappointment. “His thinking,” referring to Altiero, “resembles a bit a liberalism that he absorbed as an antidote to Marxism and he has very little awareness of all the thought that has developed in the United States and England about the co-existence of freedom with planning (Manheim, Lange, Lerner).”63 He could not help but find Altiero wanting, but only in Sarah’s confidences did he share his misgivings. Albert respected Altiero as a charismatic man of politics. But beneath the surface of mutual respect, Altiero never measured up to the fondness or intellectual affinity Albert reserved for Eugenio.

  No one did.

  By early October, the war had been over for months. A commander told him that it was likely he would be discharged within a few weeks, and he began to plan his departure. It was not to be—yet. Hirschman’s war would end with a figurative and literal bang.

  A lot of grizzly carnage was committed behind the lines. Colorni’s killing was only one of around 9,000 executions of Italian civilians, whose story has been dampened by efforts to portray the Wehrmacht as having fought a “clean war” in Italy—and thus mute the war crimes issue in order to consolidate a Western alliance during the Cold War.64 In March 1943, one SI operational group went out to infiltrate enemy territory around La Spezia to blow up a railway line and interdict traffic at the Stazione Framura; it was supposed to be an amphibious operation involving two officers and thirteen enlisted men. Before landing, a German PT boat sighted their craft. A flood of searchlights poured from the shore. The whole mission was captured and tortured. General Anton Dostler, the commanding officer of Germany’s Seventy-fifth Corps, ordered that the prisoners be shot in compliance with Hitler’s 1942 diktat that anyone caught sabotaging behind the lines should be summarily killed. His officers, knowing that this breached conventions of war, dithered. It took Dostler several rounds of instructions, but he finally got his underlings to obey. The fifteen prisoners were executed on March 26; the German officer who had resisted the order—Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten—was dismissed from the Wehrmacht for insubordination.

  The incident was the basis of a celebrated trial—celebrated not because it was exceptional, but because it was the first Allied war crimes trial, and a test for how jurists were going to handle captured commanders. For Hirschman, it was an important event because, as luck would have it, the army assigned him to be Dostler’s translator, an ordeal that would leave him distraught. “In principle, I hate the work of interpreting but in this case this might be interesting. I think,” he warned Sarah, “that you will read about it in the papers because it will be a big spectacle because it is the first trial of this sort against someone so high up.”65 Albert was right, but he never imagined that he might be part of the spectacle. Dostler was accused of violating the regulations attached to the Hague Convention of 1907 and long-established laws and customs of war. His case lasted from October 8 to 12, 1945, and his legal counselors did their best to test the mettle of Allied prosecutors. It was, indeed, a showcase trial and all sides knew it. The courtroom was packed every day with reporters and onlookers. Flashes went off as the defendant entered and left. “I am the most photographed man in Rome,” Albert quipped. If the academy and economic intelligence wouldn’t have him, “I may look good enough to pass through all this and be picked up by a studio’s talent scout.”66

  It turned out to be an “interesting, but exhausting” ordeal for the interpreter, who had to convey word by word each exchange of the defense and prosecution. Dostler’s defense “was incensed” and started by challenging the jurisdiction of the US Military Commission in Rome, a condition of the Geneva Prisoners of War Convention of 1929, which gave prisoners the basic right to be tried by a legally sanctioned court. The proper tribunal should have been a court martial. This challenge was eventually dismissed. Then they argued that Dostler was following Hitler’s orders. But prosecutors had detailed evidence and affidavits—thanks in part to the resistance of junior officers ordered to do the killing—chronicling Dostler’s command and instructions and pointed out that, unlike Dostler, who sat stoically in a chair before a panel of judges, enjoying defense lawyers and a translator, the American SI agents got no trial and no hearing. Wearing combat uniforms and possessing military identification, they could not be mistaken for anyone other than soldiers and were thus protected by the provisions of the Hague Convention. Even if Dostler were following Hitler’s commands, they did not apply to soldiers. The defense claimed that the uniforms could not be so easily identified and added that as the fifteen were all Italian speakers, these were Max Corvo’s men. Moreover, Dostler could not confirm that they were in fact US servicemen when he gave the execution order. In the see-saw, the SI uniforms were exhumed and eye-witnesses testified they knew they were American soldiers. The case for Dostler’s guilt appeared to be sealed. As the trial neared completion, Dostler elected to testify in his own defense. He climbed into the witness box to explain that in 1933 all officers of the German Army had had to take a special oath of obedience to the Führer and thus had to comply or face their own execution. The translator stood nearby, mediating words. The prosecution grilled him—did he know of any case in which an officer was executed for disobeying an order? He did not. There were some moments that shocked the translator, as when one of Dostler’s witnesses, a fellow German commander, testified that “I would like to add that the accused, in spite of his outward appearance, is a soldier with a heart.” Hirschman was aghast. But the “absolutely Kafkaesque conceptions on the part of the superiors,” did not sway the judges. The pronouncement: guilty of war crimes.67

  We do not know what passed through Hirschman’s mind as he sat through the five-day trial. He was, like many court officers, voiceless in a room that hinged on carefully poised words. His letters to Sarah, on account of the censorship, are silent. No doubt, he had to focus on getting the correct translations for the defendant to enjoy the benefits of fairness, so that in the course of the hearings his attention was tightly coiled with the exchanges between the lawyers, judges, and witnesses. While the transcripts leave Hirschman out of the proceedings, the visual images of the courtroom remind us that the two—General Dostler and Private Hirschman—sat side by side in stiff wooden chairs whispering into each others’ ears like colluders. It seems ironic that the person who did by far the most talking in the courtroom was Hirschman himself, though the words he uttered were never his own. Here was a man who had fought his entire adult life against everything the stern-faced German general stood for, compe
lled day in, day out to sit inches apart as the linguistic guardian of his rights. One can scarcely imagine what went on behind his subdued visage. Did he think of the Berlin he had lost? Did he think of the baby daughter he did not know? Did he think of Eugenio, gunned down by fascist thugs nearby?

  One record we have of Hirschman’s sentiments during the trial is his response to the sentence. Dostler and Hirschman were asked to stand before the judges. The latter wore his dark green uniform and khaki tie; the former wore the full scarlet-trimmed regalia of a Wehrmacht general, his hands slightly clenched as he awaited word. Major General Lawrence C. James read the verdict “with agonizing slowness,” observed the New York Times reporter at the scene, because “a GI interpreter standing beside him had to translate each phrase into German.” The interpreter “turned pale as he had to utter the death sentence” to the German general’s face. The courtroom, packed with spotlights, reporters, Allied soldiers, and several hundred Italian observers, watched in frozen silence as he trembled through James’ order that General Dostler was to be shot to death by musketry. In the hush, a visibly shaken Corporal Albert Hirschman of Berkeley, California, left the scene without a word.68

  The next day, The New York Times printed a front-page story of the sentencing and featured a photo of General Dostler conferring with his legal counsel, with his interpreter in the middle. Sarah, who knew nothing of her husband’s doings was shocked when she unfolded the paper in California to find the grainy black-and-white photo of Albert tête-a-tête with a Nazi general. Whatever international sensation the story was meant to cause was overwhelmed by her personal amazement. As she read how the interpreter went pale, she also breathed a sigh of relief that the war had not destroyed her husband’s sensitivity.