The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Walter Benjamin’s road into the open turned into disaster. In 1933 he fled Germany for Paris where he worked for the Frankfurt Institute and published some of his most influential work, notably “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), an argument brilliantly deconstructed by Clive James.19 In this Benjamin argued that art from antiquity to the present has its origin in religion and that even secular work keeps to itself an “aura,” the possibility that it is a glimpse of the divine. As Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and José Ortega y Gasset had argued before him, this implied a crucial difference between the artist and the nonartist. In the era of mechanical reproduction, however, this tradition, and the distance between artist and nonartist breaks down. Benjamin thought this was a good thing, and his view was to prove persuasive among postmodernists—that mass-produced entertainment can address the psychological problems of society at large. But he did not live to see what became of his idea. As the Nazis advanced on Paris, he headed south, planning to take advantage of the passage over the Pyrenees put in place by Varian Fry and others. By 1943, Benjamin thought that he had the necessary paperwork—he had a U.S. emergency visa and a Spanish transit visa. But then he found he also needed a French exit visa and, already exhausted as the result of a heart condition, the whole enterprise proved too much; he took his own life.

  What are we to make of Ernst Jünger’s road after 1933? In 1930 he had published Über Nationalismus und die Judenfrage (On Nationalism and the Jewish Question), in which he had condemned the Jews as a threat to the unity of Germany, followed in 1932 by Der Arbeiter (The Worker), which called for a totally mobilized society run by “warriors-workers-scholars.” But Jünger began to have his doubts about Hitler’s Reich, publishing Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs) in 1939, which expressed some of these doubts, albeit metaphorically, and he still served in World War II as an army captain. In Russia in 1942, however, his reputation was such that the generals there admitted to him the terrible atrocities taking place. For a time, Jünger comforted himself that all sides in the war were equally barbaric but eventually he came to see that the Germans were far worse. He was then fortunate to be stationed in Paris where he mixed with—and to an extent was able to protect—the likes of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. If that redeemed him somewhat, so too did the inspiration he seems to have offered to anti-Nazi conservatives in the German army who mounted an unsuccessful attempt (one of several) on Hitler’s life in 1944. Nevertheless, after the war Jünger was banned from publishing for several years for not sufficiently resisting the Nazis.

  Gottfried Benn fared little better. In the years before 1933 he had not been as bellicose as Jünger, enjoying a good reputation as a distinguished poet and an accomplished doctor. Born in Manfeld, he studied theology at Marburg before taking a medical degree in Berlin. In World War I he served as a military doctor in Belgium, though by then he had already published his first collection of Expressionist poems, Morgue, concerned with the decay of the body. After World War I, Benn came to loathe Weimar, in particular its liberal culture, and he railed against what he saw as the nihilism of the republic and the role of intellectuals in that process. After 1933, he agreed with the Nazis’ attempt to “re-awaken” Germany and broadcast over the radio his apparently new view that “intellectual freedom was an anti-heroic ideology,” mocking those authors in exile—in particular Thomas Mann and his son Klaus—who, he said, “had missed the chance to experience the concept, so alien to them, of Volk, rather than think about it in the abstract.”20

  However, Benn’s enthusiasm for the Nazis did not outlast the Nacht der langen Messer (Night of the Long Knives; June 1934), and he broke with the regime, retreating into what he called “aristocratic inner emigration.” He was attacked in the press, forced to resign from the Reich Chamber of Writers and forbidden from publishing. After the war he resumed both writing and his medical practice. To begin with his works were banned by the Allies but in 1951 he won the Büchner Prize. In his autobiography, Doppelleben (Double Life; 1950), he included a letter Klaus Mann had sent to him from France, which showed, he admitted, that Mann had judged the prewar situation better than he had. By then it was too late. Klaus Mann committed suicide in May 1949.21

  PART VI

  BEYOND HITLER: CONTINUITY OF THE GERMAN TRADITION UNDER ADVERSE CONDITIONS

  39.

  The “Fourth Reich”: The Effect of German Thought on America

  When the American philosopher Allan Bloom first went to college, at the University of Chicago in the mid-1940s, just after World War II had ended, one of the things he soon noticed was that “American university life was being revolutionised by German thought.” At that time, in Chicago anyway, Marx was revered, he said, but the two thinkers who generated the most enthusiasm were the sociologist Max Weber and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who in turn, as Bloom put it, had both been profoundly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche. Between them (plus Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Tönnies later on), Bloom argued, “Freud and Weber are the immediate source of most of the language with which we are so familiar…part of that great pre-Hitler German classical tradition…Equality and the welfare state were now part of the order of things, and what remained was to complete the democratic project. Psychotherapy would make individuals happy, as sociology would improve societies.”1

  What we were witnessing, Bloom insisted, was an Americanization of German pathos that the Americans were not aware of. Americans, he said, were now straining in a search for inwardness, but the main effect of German thought on America (and perhaps, by extension, on the rest of the West) was its historicism, its rejection of universality and cosmopolitanism in favor of a culture rooted in a nation’s history and achievements. “Our intellectual skyline has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than has our physical skyline by German architects.”2

  Henri Peyre agreed. Peyre (1901–88), professor of French at Yale, was one of five people who contributed to a series of lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952 on the topic of “the cultural migration.” The others were Franz Neumann on the social sciences, Erwin Panofsky on the history of art, Wolfgang Köhler on psychology, and Paul Tillich on theology. Peyre, in speaking of the effect of immigrants on literature in the United States, said it was already clear that they constituted “one of the most vigorous elements in present-day American intellectual life, around periodicals like the Partisan Review and Commentary.” Particularly in their capacity for work and their concern for intellectual values, he said, they had transformed many university departments, with American pragmatism and fondness for factual empiricism being strengthened by “German patience” and the Germans’ habits of collection of data, adding “those exiles from Germanic lands have enabled American speculation in many fields to leap forward with unheard-of boldness.” He concluded: “Philosophy has invaded many academic curricula; psychological or sociological generalisations fascinate college youth. Tocqueville…wisely remarked that ‘the Americans are much more addicted to the use of general ideas than the English.’ In several respects, American intellectual life is today closer to the German than to the British.” In fact, he said, the British contribution to American intellectual life was “surprisingly far behind” the German contribution.3

  THE DE-PROVINCIALIZATION OF THE AMERICAN MIND

  The pithiest way to show how German refugees affected American life is to give a list of those whose intellectual contribution was such as to render their names, if not household words, then at least eminent among their peers: Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Rudolf Arnheim, Erich Auerbach, Paul Baran, Hans Bethe, Bruno Bettelheim, Arnold Brecht, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Breuer, Hermann Broch, Charlotte and Karl Bühler, Rudolf Carnap, Lewis Coser, Karl Deutsch, Marlene Dietrich, Alfred Döblin, Peter Drucker, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Hanns Eisler, Erik Erikson, Otto Fenichel, Ernst Fraenkel, Erich Fromm, Hans Gerth, Felix Gilbert, Kurt Gödel, Gottfried von Haberler, Eduard Heimann,
Ernst Herzfeld, Julius Hirsch, Albert Hirschman, Hajo Holborn, Max Horkheimer, Karen Horney, Werner Jaeger, Marie Jahoda, George Katona, Walter Kaufmann, Otto Kirchheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka, Erich Korngold, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Krenek, Ernst Kris, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Fritz Lang, Paul Lazarsfeld, Kurt Lewin, Peter Lorre, Leo Lowenthal, Ernst Lubitsch, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Mayr, Ludwig von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern, Hans Morgenthau, Otto Nathan, Franz Neumann, Erwin Panofsky, Wolfgang Panofsky, Erwin Piscator, Karl Polanyi, Friedrich Pollock, Otto Preminger, Fritz Redlich, Max Reinhardt, Erich Maria Remarque, Hans Rosenberg, Arnold Schoenberg, Joseph Schumpeter, Alfred Schutz, Hans Simons, Leo Spitzer, Hans Staudinger, Leo Strauss, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Paul Tillich, Eric Voegelin, Kurt Weill, René Wellek, Max Wertheimer, Billy Wilder, Karl Wittfogel, Hans Zeisel, Heinrich Zimmer, Fred Zinnemann. This list is, of course, nowhere near exhaustive.4

  Brecht described their experiences this way:

  Hounded out by seven nations,

  Saw old idiocies performed,

  Those I praise whose transmutations

  Leave their persons undeformed.

  But who could remain undeformed, even when there were so many Germans in Washington Heights in New York that it became known as the “Fourth Reich”? Most of the refugees arrived during the 1930s, in the Great Depression, when unemployment was high and the general mood was not especially favorable to newcomers, however distressing their circumstances. Even so, they made their world. The Deauville restaurant on East Seventy-third Street in New York, the Éclair on West Seventy-second, the Café Royale on the Lower East Side, or the Blue Danube in Hollywood, operated by Joe May, a Berlin director down on his luck, became homes-from-home, as close to the old life as they could find.*5

  Most who were to become famous (and “de-provincialize” the American mind, in Anthony Heilbut’s phrase) were under forty. They were flexible, but even so it wasn’t always easy. One historian found American students disappointing—“They’re so unequipped. I’ve never had one student from whom I learned a thing.”6 More than one remarked that “Americans were the kindest of people and the dullest.”7 Paul Lazarsfeld found German more precise than the “commercial discourse” of America. Theodor Adorno and his colleagues found American popular culture to be uncritical, a latent form of propaganda for commercial society.8

  THE GOLDEN AGE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

  Probably the greatest single influence that the refugee Germans had in America, certainly in the more immediate aftermath of war, was in the realm of psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular. Social psychologists like Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) and Gestalt psychologists like Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967), Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), and Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), all exerted some influence, in the case of Lewin on such people as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and in the case of the Gestaltists on such behaviorists as Edward C. Tolman and the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow.9

  Freud had formed a rather warped view of the United States after his visit there early in the century (he thought America was “a mistake”) but despite this, psychoanalysis had become popular in the United States even without fresh German input. Between the wars it had been incorporated into the medical establishment, in contrast to Europe where “lay analysts” were far more common, and this may have had something to do with its high prestige. Between 1940 and 1960 the membership of the American Psychoanalytic Association grew fivefold, making this, says Lewis Coser, “surely the golden age of psychoanalysis in America.”10 Coser puts this down partly to “America’s more optimistic temper,” but whatever the reason, the insights of several of the refugee psychoanalysts passed into the language.

  Born in Frankfurt in 1902, Erik Erikson was abandoned by his Danish father and brought up by his Jewish stepfather. Taunted at school as a “Jew” yet treated suspiciously at his local synagogue because of his blond Danish looks, he was uncertain of his identity from an early age, and this may have shaped his work. He taught art at a school in Vienna and was drawn into a circle that included Anna Freud, who analyzed him. He moved to America after Hitler invaded Austria, his way smoothed by the analyst Hanns Sachs, who helped him secure a position at the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital as a child analyst. There he encountered Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, and Kurt Lewin.11 His anthropologist friends suggested that some of the generalizations he was prone to make about childhood did not apply across all cultures and so, acting on these criticisms, he visited a Sioux reservation in South Dakota, where he observed child-rearing practices. These inquiries led to his groundbreaking book Childhood and Society, written after he had moved to California (via Yale) and in which introduced his concepts of “ego identity” and “identity crisis.”12 He compared Americans with Germans, placing the appeal of Nazism in the cradle of the German family, where the son was set against the father, unlike in America, where fathers and sons “are friends,” united against the wife-mother who “incarnates” social authority. This was why one’s occupation was so important to Americans, he said—it was the American way of overcoming the dominance of the mother.13

  Bruno Bettelheim arrived in 1939 after a traumatic year in Dachau and Buchenwald. He had studied philosophy and psychology in Vienna under Karl Bühler, though he too was influenced by Anna Freud. He found work at the University of Chicago and soon became the director of the university’s school for disturbed children. His best-known books are The Informed Heart (1960), The Empty Fortress (1967), and The Uses of Enchantment (1976). In these works he drew on his treatments of disturbed children, but also on his experience of concentration camps and, as a Jew, of being a victim of anti-Semitism.14 The books were thus an amalgam of clinical detail, contemporary history, and social criticism, his main argument being that modern mass society fails to take account of the unconscious and nonrational aspects of our make-up and that this leads people into either the extremes of crime, cruelty, and brutality, or else into ill health—mental and physical—suicide, or other forms of self-harm. He even thought the mentally ill had no place in American society—a chill echo of Nazi Germany.15 The autistic child, for example, cannot “reach” adulthood, but is “held back by its own prison guards,” Bettelheim going so far as to identify the autistic child's parents with Nazi guards.16 In The Uses of Enchantment he examined children’s classic fairy tales, concluding that they introduce children to the sometimes harsh world of adult reality, that they too have an unconscious aspect, the symbols of which help us understand the problems of children growing up.17

  Erich Fromm probably enjoyed the largest readership among the lay (non–psychoanalytically trained) public. Born in 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, he was brought up in a strict Orthodox Jewish tradition and studied with, among others, Gershom Scholem. Fromm himself planned to become a rabbi but, while studying philosophy, sociology, and psychology at Frankfurt, and then at Heidelberg, he was drawn to what Scholem called the “torapeutic” sanatorium, a clinic where the psychoanalyst Frieda Reichmann combined teachings of the Torah with Freudian therapy.18 Fromm did more than study with Reichmann—he married her, before associating, as we saw in an earlier chapter, with Adorno and Horkheimer at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. He moved to America in 1938 along with most of the other members of the institute.

  His most famous book, Escape from Freedom, appeared in 1941 and it too may be seen as an attempt to marry Marx with Freud. Accepting the theory of the “oral,” “anal,” and “genital” stages of human development, and combining that with the concept of “social character” built up by Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel—Marxist psychoanalysts he had met in Berlin—Fromm argued that, contrary to what Freud said, character was partly determined by class structure and socioeconomic conditions.19 He distinguished, for instance, between the “hoarding orientation” of nineteenth-century merchants with their predisposition to punctuality, a saving mentality, and orderliness, and the “marketing or
ientation” of the twentieth century. It was Fromm who identified what he called the sadomasochistic or “authoritarian” personality, which he had observed first in Weimar Germany.20 Such people respect the strong and loathe the weak, and Fromm thought this might help explain fascism. His Frankfurt colleagues took up the theme of the authoritarian personality in a more sociological context (see below).

  Fromm’s later books Man for Himself (1947) and especially The Sane Society (1955) became works of social criticism—applying a mix of clinical detail and contemporary observation, as Bettelheim was doing and as would become a familiar form of literature in the West from the 1960s on—which castigated modern culture, especially its greed, competitiveness, lack of moral backbone, and loss of community.21 This was, in its way, a return to German cultural pessimism. Together with Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Fromm was adopted as a guiding light by the students of the 1960s (again, see below).

  Wilhelm Reich and Fritz Perls may be considered together as they are often regarded as joint initiators of the “sexual revolution” that began in the 1960s and gathered pace through the 1970s and into the 1980s.22 This is hardly true of Reich and is based chiefly on his “invention” of the “orgone” box, a telephone booth–shaped instrument, wooden on the outside, with a metal lining which he claimed—fraudulently—had therapeutic properties. Reich began as a serious Freudian (he analyzed Perls) and, like so many others, attempted a marriage of Freud and Marx in the interwar years in Germany. His 1933 book, Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (The Mass Psychology of Fascism) was timely, so much so that with his background and interests he could not stay in Germany.23 He reached America via Denmark, settling in the Forest Hills suburb of New York, where he underwent a profound reversal of feeling—from pro-Communism to virulent anti-Communism, and a growing paranoia (it was a paranoiac time). This gradually got the better of him (to the point where he included flying saucers among his enemies), and he was eventually convicted of fraud after the Food and Drug Administration took out an injunction against a shipment of “orgone accumulators,” which he claimed attracted “orgone energy” (basic to life) and focused it on the body inside the box. In March 1957 he was sent to prison.