by Peter Watson
Fritz Perls studied dramatic direction in Berlin with Max Reinhardt, later becoming interested in Gestalt psychology, which, he thought, was “the next step after Freud.” It was Perls’s approach that produced the Esalen Institute in the 1960s and that, via “est,” evolved into the “human potential” movement in the late 1970s, the basic idea of which was to “unlock previously blocked psychic energies,” mainly by sexual and sensual liberation—hot tubs in the open air, nudity, drugs, the breaking of taboos. This may be seen as a form of post-Freudian Bildung. Games People Play, by Eric Berne, another émigré, was a best seller in 1964 and explored similar issues.
HEIDEGGER’S CHILDREN
After psychoanalysis, the area where German thought has had most influence in the United States is politics or, more accurately, political science—i.e., political theorizing rather than practical politics.24 The first figure here is Hannah Arendt, but Richard Wolin has reminded us in his book Heidegger’s Children (2001) how many of Heidegger’s students became influential after the war on both sides of the Atlantic: besides Arendt, we may include Herbert Marcuse, Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Paul Tillich, and Hans-Georg Gadamer.25
As outlined earlier, Arendt arrived in New York in 1941 via Paris. She moved in the milieu that surrounded such small magazines as Commentary and the Partisan Review, later for a time becoming a professor—at Princeton, the University of California, Chicago, and, perhaps inevitably, the New School for Social Research. The New School had been founded in 1919 by a group of scholars linked to the New Republic magazine, and early professors there had included John Dewey and Thorsten Veblen. In 1933, to help support refugee scholars, the school founded the University in Exile, which evolved into the Graduate Facility of the New School for Social Research.
From 1945 until 1949 Arendt worked on the first of several major books, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which appeared in 1951 and had an enormous impact on its American audience and made her famous. The book attempted to come to grips with the events that led up to World War II and examined in particular how a small group—the Jews—became the catalytic agent for the Nazi movement, the world war, and the death factories.26 She drew parallels between communism and fascism, arguing that although they were intended to lead mankind into a glorious future by eradicating class differences, they had instead produced only atomization, alienation, and homelessness. The point of mass society, she argued, was that instead of creating “a higher form of human community,” it produced isolation and loneliness which, she insisted, were the common ground of terror, and the cold and inflexible logicality of bureaucracy, leading to the executioners. There was no role for heroism, she said, and this absence helped to crush man’s soul. One of her main points in Origins was that there had been an alliance in Germany in the 1930s between the educated middle classes and the “mob,” and this was one of the main reasons why what happened happened.27
The Origins of Totalitarianism offered no solutions to the problems it described and diagnosed, though her next book, The Human Condition(1958), argued that the main aspects of political life were structure and action, and that in the modern world these two entities had all but disappeared in the highly administered politics of modern society—no one had the power to alter the structure of public life and to act on it. This turned out to be an important message, and Arendt’s books became influential texts in regard to the revolutionary student movements of the 1960s and helped to cohere the aims of the so-called alternative culture.
In some ways, however, Arendt—along with Brecht, whose art she admired as much as she loathed his politics—was the great nonsentimentalist, the writer who, even more than Thomas Mann, kept her individuality intact, uncontaminated by fame and by her status as a Jew. Even though she was a German victim of the Holocaust, she was never sentimental about it, and she distrusted inwardness—for her, public action in a public space was the only guarantee of honesty or authenticity in human affairs, and so the political, defined in that way, took priority. (Jewish émigrés, she liked to say, had “committed no act.”) Private life, she insisted, was the great aim but, increasingly in the modern world, it was a luxury.28 The real battle in the modern world, she felt, was not between classes but between the increasingly “totalitarian fictions” of all-powerful government and the “everyday world of factuality” in which we live.29
In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in 1962, the “mastermind” of Auschwitz, who had been captured by Israeli special forces in Argentina, where he was hiding, and smuggled to Israel, she was unflinchingly unsentimental about the man on trial and about the Holocaust and Jewish behavior in resisting persecution. The book created a furor but she held to her view, that evil was banal, that it is where nihilism ends.30
Herbert Marcuse became, for a brief time, the most famous of the Frankfurt school theoreticians, though he was by then already elderly. Born in 1898 into a middle-class Jewish family, he had not been much involved in politics until the revolutionary movements that emerged in Germany in the wake of World War I (he was part of a “worker’s council” in Berlin). But even then his involvement did not last long and he moved to Freiburg to study under Heidegger and Husserl. He broke with Heidegger as the latter’s flirtation with the Nazis began to show itself, and joined Horkheimer, Adorno, and Fromm at the Frankfurt Institute.31
He was in America from the late 1930s, where he obtained a position at the new Brandeis University near Boston. In the postwar era, he became one of the main critics of the world he saw around him, a world of increasing uniformity, consensus, and order, all subsumed under what was for him a tyrannical rubric of “progress.” This led to the first of two books by Marcuse that captured the public imagination. The first, Eros and Civilization, was published in 1955 and was intended as a liberating text in which Marcuse used Freud to modify Marx for the modern world. It became popular especially among the hippies of the counterculture.32 His argument was that modern men and women need to educate their desire, that Marx says nothing about this, that modern conformist society kills the aesthetic and sensual side to life, that this is a form of repression, and that society needed to be based as much on the pleasure principle as on economic principles.33
Marcuse made this more explicit in One-Dimensional Man (1964), with its famous concept of “repressive tolerance” where, he said, in modern society, even the language of tolerance and liberation is used to keep people from being liberated. The world, the American world in particular, was one-dimensional in that there was only one way of thinking that was now regarded as legitimate—technological rationality, which perpetuated itself in science, in the universities, in industry and commerce. His remedy was “the great refusal,” the “negation” of the reality that technological rationality has foisted on us. This stifling world, he said, needed to be replaced by imagination, art, and “negative thought.”
Compared to these, the influence of yet another student of Heidegger, Leo Strauss, was less diffuse, more immediate, and by no means to everyone’s taste. In 2004 Anne Norton wrote an impassioned attack on the charismatic Strauss and the many Straussians whose particular cult of militant conservatism she held responsible for taking over George W. Bush’s White House and oversimplifying the world of politics into a crass battle between righteous Americans and a series of “convenient enemies.”34
Born in Kirchhain in Germany in 1899, Strauss arrived in the United States in 1938, where he joined the University in Exile at the New School. His interests, to that point, were Spinoza, Maimonides, and Carl Schmitt, the National Socialist scholar, in particular his book The Concept of the Political (see Chapter 35).35 Strauss studied at the universities of Frankfurt, Marburg, Berlin, and Hamburg and his PhD dissertation was sponsored by Ernst Cassirer. After that he spent a year at Freiburg under Husserl and Heidegger. A formal and timid man, Strauss’s thought “was marked by his revulsion from the preponderant tendencies of the modern age…His conservatism rested on his conviction
that modern trends of thought, be they positivistic or historicist, were inimical to—nay, destructive of—what he cherished as being the perennial values.”36 He thought that these perennial values were the qualities that had distinguished the educated middle class in Nazi Germany and that modern “fads” had undermined the timeless qualities of the Greeks and “opened the floodgates to a nihilism of values of which the Nazi movement was the most extreme outcome.” Science, neo-Kantianism, and the modern behavioral sciences all contribute to a contemporary nihilism and this, Strauss was convinced, was the modern predicament, out of which a way must be found. He doubted the redemptive power of politics and never once wrote about American thought,37 becoming known for his doubts about technological supremacy and for his dogmatic stance on these issues.38 He lamented the decline of religion “as the only means of keeping the mob in check” and, according to Arendt (when they were both students of Heidegger), he “concurred with fascism in every respect except its anti-Semitism.”* His many students became very influential.39
Among political practitioners, as opposed to theoreticians, the most colorful is without question Arnold Schwarzenegger. Born in Thal bei Graz in Austria in 1947, he arrived in the United States in 1968, already famous for being voted the best-built man in Europe (and going AWOL during basic training in the Austrian army in order to enter competitions). In Los Angeles he trained to be an actor, at the same time continuing to work on bodybuilding, but his acting career blossomed after Conan the Barbarian was a hit, most notably with the three science-fiction Terminator films. He was elected governor of California in October 2003, though for the time being at least his political achievements have been overshadowed by those of Henry Kissinger, conceivably the most conventionally successful of all German émigrés to the United States.
Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in 1923, in Fürth, Bavaria, his Jewish family moved to New York in 1938. While still in college he served as a German interpreter in the Counter Intelligence Corps. After the war he forged an academic career at Harvard, specializing in foreign policy (and nuclear weapons in particular), becoming a consultant to various prestigious bodies and to Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of New York, who sought the Republican nomination for president in 1960, 1964, and 1968. After Richard Nixon became president in 1968 he made Kissinger national security adviser and then secretary of state, which office he continued to hold when Gerald Ford took over as president after Nixon resigned.
Kissinger was a very controversial secretary of state, a “power cynic” to some, pursuing Realpolitik and becoming the dominant force in American foreign policy between 1969 and 1977. His involvement in the Vietnam War, the carpet bombing of Cambodia, the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, and the botched CIA intervention in Chile, when the Marxist Salvador Allende was assassinated after being legitimately elected president, brought Kissinger robust criticism, and later in his life there were repeated attempts in several countries to have him arraigned on war crimes charges. At the same time, he helped negotiate the end to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam, and, with Nixon, pursued the policy of détente, a relaxation of relations with the Soviet Union and China, which helped him win the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.40
DAMAGED LIVES?
Theodor Adorno was possibly the most arrogant and at the same time the most angry émigré in the United States. Brecht thought Adorno was “pompous and elusive, austere and sensual” and Anthony Heilbut concluded that his disdain for American culture “bordered on the pathological.” He nevertheless remains a figure to be reckoned with.
The Frankfurt Institute had moved from Columbia to California in the early 1940s, in an attempt to fortify the declining health of Max Horkheimer, its director (though Horkheimer didn’t die until 1973, a decade after he and the institute returned to Germany). It was an ironic destination, Los Angeles being the capital of the entertainment industry that attracted the brunt of Adorno’s disdain.41 Yet although Adorno’s criticisms of American society and culture were clearly over the top at times, many of his points were well taken. His criticisms may be divided into those he advanced while he was in America, and those he made after his return to Germany. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which he coauthored with Horkheimer, the two men argued that Enlightenment led inexorably to totalitarianism, “everything can be illuminated in order to be administered.”42 Cultural life in capitalist society, in particular, they said, is as much a prison as a liberation, “style”—in fashion as in art—is a phony form of individualism, brought about by the need for commerce to maximize profits, trivializing experience.
This was followed by a more influential—but far more prosaic—work, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). The book was conceived as early as 1939, as a joint project with the Berkeley Public Opinion Study and the American Jewish Committee, to investigate anti-Semitism. It was the first time the institute had used a quantitative approach, and the results of their “F” (for fascist) scale “seemed to warrant alarm…Anti-Semitism turned out to be the visible edge of a dysfunctional personality revealed in the many ‘ethnocentric’ and ‘conventional’ attitudes of the general American population, as well as of a disquietingly submissive attitude towards authority of all kinds.” The book concluded with a warning that fascism rather than communism was the chief threat facing America in the post-war world, that fascism was finding “a new home” on the western side of the Atlantic, and that bourgeois America and its great cities were now “the dark heart of modern civilisation.” It was an arresting thesis, especially against the backdrop of the McCarthy shenanigans. But it was immediately attacked by fellow social scientists, who disassembled its findings. By then, however, the unsubstantiated phrase “the authoritarian personality” had caught on.
After he returned to Germany, Adorno wrote three more reflective works. In 1949, in Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life), he examined—again—how capitalism and marketing vulgarized experience, where the media attach almost equal weight to all events, the political being regarded as no more important than, say, the death of a soap-opera character.43 This he saw as a form of psychological damage, so too with television and film, where sentimental music often does the thinking for the audience, so that its responses are conditioned not by the objective situation but by the way a score is manipulated. Direction, presentation, staging, on this account, are a form of coercion, of bullying even, rather than a form of enlightenment or education.44
However, the main center of the social sciences, for the German refugees in the United States, was not the Frankfurt Institute but, as should already be clear, the New School for Social Research in New York, where the University in Exile had become the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. Alvin Johnson, one of the founders of the New School, had encountered—and been impressed by—many German scholars in the course of editing Columbia’s New International Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. He personally raised money for the exiles and, from his encyclopedia activities, knew who was likely to need help.
Exiles began arriving in 1933 and the graduate school soon acquired its own dean, Hans Staudinger, once a distinguished German civil servant and secretary of state in the Prussian Ministry of Commerce. Two journals were conceived, Social Research and Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft, the latter being published until the outbreak of World War II and indicating, says Lewis Coser, that the scholars were not too concerned to build strong bridges to their new location.45 In a variety of fields, such as phenomenology or econometrics, the New School offered pioneering courses. A number of members of the faculty—among them Hans Speier and Gerhard Colm, who had served in government institutions such as the Office of War Information during the war—helped to conceive the postwar German currency reform that was to prove such a success.
Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–76) stood out as the man most responsible for the introduction of sociological survey research into Amer
ica. Born in Vienna to a mother who was a psychoanalyst, he arrived in America in 1933 and, following developments in Austria and the outlawing of the socialist party, he extended his stay, then made it permanent. His first eye-catching study was a survey of the effects of radio on American society, and this brought him into contact with the Harvard social scientist Hadley Cantril, who offered Lazarsfeld a job as director of the Office of Radio Research at Princeton, an outfit that moved to Columbia in 1939 and evolved five years later into the now-famous Bureau of Applied Social Research.46 This bureau institutionalized a new approach to research, studying “aggregate behavior,” how people make up their minds when voting, why people don’t vote, why they buy some things and not others. Overall, as Coser has pointed out, Lazarsfeld revealed gradually the latent social structure of American life, new ways of understanding how people are grouped, beyond class structure, which was to have a significant effect on market research and political focus groups.47 Lazarsfeld’s influence was felt on a generation of famous American social scientists, including Seymour Martin Lipset, Alvin Gouldner, David Riesman, and Robert Merton.
A NEW STAGE IN INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION
