The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Fry soon grasped that not all the people on his list were in mortal danger. The Jews were, as well as the more outspoken, long-standing political opponents of Nazism. At the same time, it became clear that if many of the very famous, non-Jewish “degenerate” artists were protected by their celebrity in Vichy France, there were far more lesser-known figures who were in real danger.3 Without referring back to New York, therefore, Fry changed the policy of the ERC and set about helping as many people as he could who fell within the ambit of the special visa law, whether they were on his list or not. He set up his own clandestine network using the French underground, which transported selected refugees out of France into Portugal, where, with a visa, they could sail for America. He found a “safe house,” the Villa Air Bel, north of Marseille, and there he equipped his refugees with false documents and local guides who could lead them via obscure and arduous pathways across the Pyrenees to freedom.4 The best-known figures who escaped in this dramatic fashion included André Breton, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden (who had written a critical biography of Hitler), Heinrich Mann, Alma Mahler-Werfel, André Masson, Franz Werfel, and Wilfredo Lam, the Cuban painter. Fry helped around 2,000 individuals, ten times the number he had been sent to look for.

  Alvin Johnson at the New School took ninety scholars to create a University in Exile, where the faculty included Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, Otto Klemperer, Claude Levi-Strauss, Erwin Piscator, and Wilhelm Reich. László Moholy-Nagy re-created a New Bauhaus in Chicago, and other former colleagues initiated something similar in what became Black Mountain College, in the wooded hills of North Carolina. At one time or another its faculty included Joseph Albers, Willem de Kooning, Ossip Zadkine, Lyonel Feininger, and Amédée Ozenfant. After the war the college was home to a prominent school of poets, and it remained in existence until the 1950s. The Frankfurt Institute at Columbia University and Erwin Panofsky’s Institute of Fine Arts at New York University were also started and staffed by exiles.

  Once the Nazis took power, there was never much doubt that Arnold Schoenberg would have to leave. He had converted from Judaism to Christianity early in life, but that never made any impression on the authorities, and in 1933 he reverted to being a Jew. In the same year he was blacklisted as a “cultural Bolshevik” and dismissed from his Berlin professorship. He moved to Paris, where he was penniless and stranded. Then, out of the blue, he received an invitation to teach at a small private conservatory in Boston, founded and directed by Joseph Malkin, a Russian exile who had been solo cellist with the Berlin Philharmonic. Schoenberg accepted, arriving in America in October 1933. The first music he wrote in Boston was a light piece for a student orchestra, but then came the Violin Concerto, op. 36. Not only was this his real American debut, it was also his first concerto. Rich and passionate, it was—for Schoenberg—fairly conventional in form, though it demanded phenomenally difficult finger-work from the violinist.5

  Béla Bartók, Darius Milhaud, and Igor Stravinsky all followed to the United States in 1939–40. Many of the virtuoso performers, being frequent travelers as a matter of course, were already familiar with America, and America with them: Artur Rubinstein, Fritz Kreisler, Efrem Zimbalist, and Mischa Elman all settled in America in the late 1930s.

  The only American rival to New York as a base for exiles in wartime was Los Angeles, where the roster of famous names living in close proximity (close in Los Angeles terms) was remarkable. Apart from Schoenberg (who had moved there from Boston), that roster included Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Lang, Artur Rubinstein, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler-Werfel, Bruno Walter, Peter Lorre, and Heinrich Mann, not forgetting the non-Germans Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Man Ray, and Jean Renoir.6

  “A NEW TYPE OF PLANNED ORDER”…WITH “THE WORST ON TOP”

  It was perhaps only natural that a war in which very different regimes were pitched against one another should bring about a reassessment of the way people govern themselves. Alongside the scientists and generals and code breakers trying to outwit the enemy, others devoted their energies to the only marginally less urgent matter of the rival merits of fascism, communism, capitalism, liberalism, socialism, and democracy. This brought about one of the more unusual coincidences of the century, when a quartet of books was published during the war by exiles from the old dual monarchy, Austria and Hungary, looking forward to the type of society humanity should aim for after hostilities ceased. Whatever their other differences, these books had one thing in common to recommend them: thanks to paper rationing, they were mercifully short.

  Karl Mannheim’s Diagnosis of Our Time appeared in 1943. Mannheim was a member of the Sunday Circle who had gathered around George Lukács in Budapest during World War I, and included Arnold Hauser and Béla Bartók. Mannheim had left Hungary in 1919, grown up with the traditional German understanding of Bildung, studied at Heidelberg, and attended Martin Heidegger’s lectures at Marburg.7 He was professor of sociology at Frankfurt from 1919 to 1933, a close colleague of Adorno, Horkheimer, and the others, but after Hitler took power he moved to London, teaching at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Institute of Education.

  Mannheim took a “planned society” completely for granted.8 For him the old capitalism, which had produced the stock market crash and the Depression, was dead. “All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire order of society, that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution by preparing the road to a new type of planned order.” He was equally disillusioned with Stalinism and fascism. Instead, according to him, the new society after the war, what he called the Great Society, could be achieved only by a form of planning that did not destroy freedom, as had happened in the totalitarian countries, but that took account of the latest developments in psychology and sociology, in particular psychoanalysis. Mannheim believed that society was ill—hence “Diagnosis” in his title. For him the Great Society was one where individual freedoms were maintained, but informed by an awareness of how societies operated and how modern, complex, technological societies differed from agricultural peasant communities. He therefore concentrated on two aspects of contemporary society: youth and education on the one hand, and religion on the other. Whereas the Hitler Youth had become a force of conservatism, Mannheim believed youth was naturally progressive if educated properly. He thought pupils should grow up with an awareness of the sociological variations in society, and the causes of them, and should also be made aware of psychology, the genesis of neurosis, and what role psychology might play in the alleviation of social problems. He concentrated the last half of his book on religion because he saw that at bottom the crisis facing the Western democracies was a crisis of values, that the old class order was breaking down but had yet to be replaced by anything else systematic or productive. While he saw the church as part of the problem, he believed that religion was still, with education, the best way to instill values, but that organized religion had to be modernized—again, with theology being reinforced by sociology and psychology. Mannheim thought that postwar society would be much more informed about itself than prewar society. He acknowledged that socialism had a tendency to centralize power and degenerate into mere control mechanisms, but he was a great Anglophile who thought that Britain’s “unphilosophical and practically-minded citizens” would see off would-be dictators.

  Joseph Schumpeter had little time for sociology or psychology. Insofar as they existed at all, for him they were subordinate to economics. In his wartime book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter declared himself firmly opposed to John Maynard Keynes, to Marx, and to Weber up to a point. It is not hard to see why.9 Educated at the Theresianum, an exclusive school in Vienna reserved for the aristocracy, Schumpeter was there by virtue of the fact that his mother had married a general after his father, an undistinguished man, had died. As a result of his “elevation,” Schumpeter was always rather self-consciously aristo
cratic; he would appear at university meetings in riding habit and inform anyone who was listening that he had three ambitions in life—to be a great lover, a great horseman, and a great economist. After a number of adventures in Egypt and Austria, Schumpeter eventually made his way to Harvard, “where his manner and his cloak quickly made him into a campus figure.” All his life he believed in “an aristocracy of talent.”

  Schumpeter’s main thesis was that the capitalist system is essentially static. For employers and employees as well as for customers, the system settles down with no profit in it, and there is no wealth for investment.10 Workers receive just enough for their labor, based on the cost of producing and selling goods. Profit, by implication, can only come from innovation, which for a limited time cuts the cost of production, until competitors catch up, and allows a surplus to be used for further investment. Two things followed from this. First, capitalists themselves are not the motivating force of capitalism; the impetus comes instead from entrepreneurs who invent new techniques or machinery by means of which goods are produced more cheaply. Schumpeter did not think that entrepreneurship could be taught or inherited; it was, he believed, an essentially “bourgeois” activity, and bourgeois people acted not out of any theory or philosophy but from pragmatic self-interest. This flatly contradicted Marx’s analysis.11 The second element of Schumpeter’s outlook was that profit, as generated by entrepreneurs, was temporary. Whatever innovation was introduced would be followed up by others in that sector of industry or commerce, and a new stability eventually achieved. This meant that capitalism was inevitably characterized by cycles of boom and stagnation. As a result, Schumpeter’s view of the 1930s was diametrically opposite to Keynes’s (that economies could spend their way out of recession). Schumpeter thought the Depression was to an extent inevitable, a cold shower of reality. By the time the war began, he had developed doubts that capitalism could survive. He thought that, as a basically bourgeois activity, it would lead to increasing bureaucratization, a world for “men in lounge suits” rather than buccaneers. In other words, it contained the seeds of its own ultimate failure, an economic success but not a sociological one.

  If Mannheim took planning for granted in the postwar world, and if Schumpeter was lukewarm about it, the third Austro-Hungarian, Friedrich von Hayek, was downright hostile. Born in 1899, Hayek came from a family of scientists, distantly related to the Wittgensteins. He took two doctorates at the University of Vienna, became a professor of economics at the LSE in 1931, and acquired British citizenship in 1938. He loathed Stalinism and fascism equally, but he was much less convinced than the others that the same centralizing and totalitarian tendencies that existed in Russia and Germany couldn’t extend eventually to Britain and even America. In The Road to Serfdom (1944), he set out his opposition to planning and linked freedom firmly to the market, which, he thought, helped produce a “spontaneous social order.” He was critical of Mannheim, regarded Keynesian economics as “an experiment” that in 1944 had yet to be proved, and reminded his readers that democracy was not an end in itself but “essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom.” He acknowledged that the market was less than perfect, but he reminded his readers that the rule of law had grown up at the same time as the market, in part as a response to its shortcomings: the two were intertwined achievements of the Enlightenment.12 His reply to Mannheim’s point about the importance of having greater sociological knowledge was that markets are “blind,” producing effects that no one can predict, and that that is part of their point, part of their contribution to freedom, the “invisible hand” as it has been called. For him, therefore, planning was not only wrong in principle but impractical.13 Hayek then went on to produce three reasons why, under planning, “the worst get on top.” The first was that the more highly educated people are always those who can see through arguments and don’t join the group or agree to any hierarchy of values. Second, the centralizer finds it easier to appeal to the gullible and docile; and third, it is always easier for a group of people to agree on a negative program—on the hatred of foreigners or a different class, for example—than on a positive one. He conceded that the tendency to monopoly needed watching and should be guarded against, but he saw a greater threat from the monopolies of the labor unions under socialism.

  As the war was ending, a fourth Austro-Hungarian, Karl Popper, released The Open Society and Its Enemies. Born in Vienna in 1902, Popper flirted with socialism, but Freud and Adler were deeper influences, and he attended Einstein’s lectures in Vienna. He completed his PhD in philosophy in 1928, then worked as a social worker with children who had been abandoned after World War I, and as a teacher. He came into contact with the Vienna Circle, and was encouraged to write.14 His first books, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge) and Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery), attracted enough attention for him to be invited to Britain in the mid-1930s for two long lecture tours.15 But when Moritz Schlick was assassinated in 1936 by a Nazi student, Popper, who had Jewish blood, accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. It was in the Southern Hemisphere that he produced his next two books, The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies, many of the arguments of the former title being included in The Open Society.16

  The immediate spur to that book was the news of the Anschluss. The longer-term inspiration arose from the “pleasant sensation” Popper felt on arriving for the first time in England, “a country with old liberal traditions,” as compared with a country threatened with National Socialism, which for him was much more like the original closed society, the primitive tribe or feudal arrangement, where power and ideas are concentrated in the hands and minds of a few, or even one, the king or leader. Popper, like the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, was profoundly affected by the scientific method, which he extended to politics. For him, this meant that political solutions were like scientific ones—they “can never be more than provisional and are always open to improvement.” This is what he meant by the poverty of historicism, the search for deep lessons from a study of history, which would provide the “iron laws” by which society should be governed. Popper thought there was no such thing as history, only historical interpretation.

  This led Popper to the most famous passage in his book, the attack on Plato, Hegel, and Marx. (The book was originally called False Prophets: Plato, Hegel, Marx.) Popper thought that Plato might well have been the greatest philosopher who ever lived but that he put the interests of the state above everything, including the interpretation of justice. Popper was attacked for his dismissal of Plato, but he clearly saw him as an opportunist and as the precursor of Hegel, whose dogmatic dialectical arguments had led, he felt, to an identification of the good with what prevails, and the conclusion that “might is right.” Popper thought this was simply a mischaracterization of dialectic. In reality, he said, it was merely a version of trial and error, as in the scientific method, and Hegel’s idea that thesis generates antithesis was wrong: thesis, he said, generates modifications as much as it generates the opposite to itself.17 By the same token, Marx was a false prophet because he insisted on holistic change in society, which Popper thought had to be wrong simply because it was unscientific—it couldn’t be tested. He himself preferred piecemeal change, so that each new element introduced could be tested to see whether it was an improvement on the earlier arrangement. Popper was not against the aims of Marxism, pointing out, for example, that much of the program outlined in the Communist Manifesto had actually been achieved by Western societies. But that was his point: this had been achieved piecemeal, without violence.

  Popper shared with Hayek a belief that the state should be kept to a minimum, its basic raison d’être being to ensure justice, to ensure that the strong did not bully the weak. He disagreed with Mannheim, believing that planning would lead to more closure in society, simply becaus
e planning involved a historicist and holistic approach, which went against the scientific method of trial and error. This led Popper to consider democracy as the only viable possibility because it was the only form of government that embodied the scientific, trial-and-error method and allowed society to modify its politics in the light of experience, and to change government without bloodshed.

  The coincidence of these four books by Austro-Hungarian émigrés was remarkable but, on reflection, perhaps not so surprising. There was a war on that was being fought for ideas and ideals as much as for territory. These émigrés had each seen totalitarianism and dictatorship at close hand and realized that even when the war with Germany and Japan ended, the conflict with Stalinism would continue.

  Erwin Schrödinger, the physicist who conceived the idea that the electron orbited the nucleus as a wave (see Chapter 32) and had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933, found a different way into the open. He left Germany in the year he won the Nobel, dismayed by the Nazis. He had been made a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and taught there before moving on to Ireland where, in 1943, he gave a series of well-received lectures, “What Is Life?” in which he considered how a physicist might define life. In these lectures he looked at the chromosome from the point of view of physics and showed that the gene must be “an aperiodic crystal…a regular array of repeating units in which the individual units are not all the same.” He explained that the behavior of individual atoms could be known only statistically and therefore for genes to act with the very great precision with which they did act, they must be of a certain minimum size—which he calculated—with a minimum number of atoms. He concluded that the gene must consist of a long, highly stable molecule that contains a code. In 1943, most biologists were ignorant of the latest physics but among those who read Schrödinger’s book based on his lectures and were excited by its arguments were Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins.18