The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Among a whole raft of economists who were influential after their arrival in the United States (Fritz Machlup, Gottfried von Haberler, Alexander Gerschenkron, Paul Baran, Karl Polanyi, Fritz Redlich), there were a handful whose names became very familiar. Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was known for his work in his native Austria when he arrived in 1940 and became a guest of the National Bureau of Economic Research, eventually becoming a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Business Administration at New York University. He had begun by being interested in business cycles, which stimulated in him a belief in strict laissez-faire. While Keynesian economics held the day after World War II, Mises’s approach was not popular but in the 1970s, as he was joined in his views by Hayek and Milton Friedman, he was listened to more and more.

  Oskar Morgenstern, born in Görlitz, in 1902, and Albert Hirschman, born in Berlin in 1915, both became important figures soon after leaving Hitler’s Germany. Morgenstern was a consultant to the Rand Corporation, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the White House, and Hirschman was at first the principal assistant to Varian Fry, helping refugee intellectuals and artists escape over the Pyrenees; he later served on the Federal Reserve Board.48 Hirschman was the author of several books, including Private and Public Happiness (1982), an original work on how these two are—and are not—related. But his most influential work is probably his first book, Strategy of Economic Development, in which he pointed out that many other economic theorists had selected one or another overriding factor as the main determinant of economic performance—be it natural resources, capital, entrepreneurship, or creative minorities. Usually, as one determinant was adopted, the others were jettisoned, and Hirschman thought it time to acknowledge that such an approach was inadequate, that monocausal explanations explained nothing. Instead, we should acknowledge that economic development depends on discovering resources and abilities that “are hidden, scattered or badly utilised.”49 He has now become among the most cited of social scientists.

  Peter Drucker (1909–2005) was the best known of three German-speaking refugees who were interested above all in consumer behavior (the others were George Katona and Fritz Redlich). He taught at Bennington College before becoming professor of management at New York University and much enjoyed making management a speciality and consumer behavior the focus of rational research. His books reflect that interest: The End of Economic Man (1939), The Future of Industrial Man(1941), The Concept of the Corporation (1946), and Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1974). Drucker’s main aim was to help people adjust to the modern world by emphasizing the difference—too often not appreciated—between nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism and modern, postindustrial, managerial capitalism. Lewis Coser called him “a Max Weber for managers,” except that whereas Weber was gloomy about “instrumental reason,” Drucker thought it was the main means to salvation in the modern world. 50 He also thought that business promotes tolerance—because blacks and women are customers too. In 1980, The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America surged into the best-seller lists as yet another good-news message that the American way combined capitalism and socialism almost without knowing it. Drucker and Lazarsfeld were two German Dr. Panglosses among the many other cultural pessimists.

  Among German philosophers in America, the greatest success story is that of Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970). As already noted, the members of the Vienna Circle were among the first refugees to arrive in the United States and were well received because their attempt to put an end to metaphysics found resonance with American pragmatists such as John Dewey and Willard van Quine.51

  Born in Barmen in northwestern Germany, Carnap came from a family of deeply religious Protestant weavers.52 After his father died when he was still quite young, Carnap was taught by his mother before studying mathematics, philosophy, and physics at Freiburg and at Jena, where he studied under Gottlob Frege.53 He was drafted in 1917 and stationed in Berlin where revolution broke out the following year, a development Carnap welcomed. He retained his socialist beliefs all his life and for him, and others like him, the Weimar years were exciting. His main aim, like that of the others who made up the Vienna Circle, was “the final overthrow of all metaphysical speculation, all references to transcendent entities, and their replacement by resolutely this-world empiricism, informed by the symbolic logic of Frege and Russell.”54 He was also opposed to the specifically German idea that there is a fundamental divide between the natural sciences and the Geisteswissenschaften, the social sciences and the humanities. Instead, he held that there are only two types of knowledge—the purely formal and the empirical. This approach led to Carnap’s best-known work, Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Structure of the World; 1928), which effectively sums up the aims of the Vienna Circle. He was offered a position at the University of Vienna in 1926 by Moritz Schlick, and together they set about forming the circle.55

  They enjoyed rapid success but, as we have seen, since many of them were Jewish, the advent of the Nazis forced them abroad. Charles Morris, at Chicago, who had spent several years at the German university at Prague, and Willard van Quine, at Harvard, sponsored Carnap. He obtained a position at Chicago, where he taught until 1952.

  In America, Carnap produced Logical Foundation of Probability (1950), which had a big influence on Nelson Goodman and Hilary Putnam. In 1953 Carnap accepted the chair at UCLA that his friend and Berlin colleague Hans Reichenbach had held.56 Between them, Carnap and Reichenbach did much to establish logic and linguistics as integral to American philosophy. In 1971 van Quine described Carnap as “the dominant figure in philosophy from the 1930s onward.”57

  Paul Tillich’s journey from Heidegger’s Germany to Union Theological Seminary in New York has already been outlined. Once in America, although it took him a while to learn English properly and to disengage himself from Germany, and though he always retained a strong German accent, he became a prolific author, achieving fame well beyond theological and philosophical circles, most of all with The Courage to Be (1948).58 Many former Marxists were becoming disillusioned, especially as Marxism manifested itself in East European and Chinese Communism, and the secular world that became especially visible after World War II seemed to many devoid of meaning, even as prosperity blossomed. Tillich proposed a “spiritual cure” for “uneasy souls.”59 He personally found the non-authoritarian, even anti-authoritarian ethos of America very attractive, and the theology he offered in The Courage to Be was a form of religious existentialism that arose from this absence of authoritarianism—people could find God wherever they looked, it was the looking that counted. After he retired from the Union Theological Seminary in 1955, he became a professor at Harvard and then moved on in 1962 to Chicago where, for the last three years of his life, he was professor of theology and, as Lewis Coser says, “an American institution.”60

  The successes of Tillich did not go unnoticed by Peter Berger, who was born in Vienna in 1929 and immigrated to the United States after World War II. Berger was one of the first to notice that religion was not declining as the secular social scientists had predicted, and he cannily argued that in an increasingly globalized world the experience of faith was changing: it was no longer taken for granted when people were growing up; and more and more individuals searched for a personal religious preference. This was an early sighting of what became known as “expressive individualism.”

  THE BIAS IN HISTORY

  German history was not well established at American universities before World War II.61 This provided opportunities for the roughly three dozen historians who found refuge in America, among them Hajo Holborn, Hans Rosenberg, Felix Gilbert, Paul Kristeller, Hans Baron, and Ernst Kantorowicz.62 The most important (and the most “imposing,” according to Coser) was Hajo Holborn (1902–69), who taught for many years at Yale, becoming the only refugee historian to be elected president of the American Historical Association.63

  Historians were in a special position in Germany, as already not
ed. Germans were responsible for the very concept of historicism which, among other things, meant that historians were taken seriously. By the time of the Nazi takeover, almost all the professors there had been trained either by or in the tradition of Sybel, Treitschke, or Droysen (see Chapter 21), and so all were in the Prussian mold who looked back more or less fondly to Bismarck and the Wilhelmine Reich “when the professoriat had been considered an essential pillar of the Prussian and German political establishment.”64 On the other hand, the refugees were usually younger, mainly in their thirties when they emigrated, and in many cases were students of the intellectual historian Friedrich Meinecke at the University of Berlin. Meinecke was unusual in that, while he had his traditionalist side (and had signed the Manifesto of the 93 in 1914), he made an accommodation with the Weimar Republic (he famously described himself as a monarchist at heart but a republican by virtue of reason) and this set him implacably against the Nazis.

  Hajo Holborn was a Berliner whose father was a well-known physicist, highly political and deeply liberal. This rubbed off on the son, an influence reinforced when he studied under Meinecke, who stimulated in Holborn a lifelong interest in the history of ideas. His first book was a study of Ulrich von Hutten, Luther’s close friend, in which Holborn argued that the Reformation and the history of humanism were parallel—but separate—intellectual movements, and that the conservative strand of German thought, culminating in Bismarck, was not as directly related to Luther as it suited the conservatives to say. His subtext was that German historiography had a right-wing bias that had caused German history to be misunderstood. From Berlin, Holborn moved to Heidelberg, where he unsuccessfully attempted to resist the Nazis’ interference in history teaching and historical understanding.

  He was barely thirty when he arrived at Yale.65 There he worked on two major books, The Political Collapse of Europe (1951), which had an impact on American foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s, and his three-volume A History of Modern Germany (1959–69), for many years the standard work. Here he showed how the founding idealism of German thought had become obsolete in the contemporary world. During the war he worked in the Office of Strategic Services as chief of the research and analysis branch, responsible for scrutinizing Nazi policies and drawing up plans for postwar Germany.66 In 1946 he became an adviser to the U.S. Department of State and wrote a book on the American military government in Germany that had a major impact on postwar political organization. Later he became an unofficial mediator between the United States and the Federal Republic. His students included Leonard Krieger and Charles McClelland.67

  In some ways the most successful—and successfully adjusted—émigré historian was Fritz Stern. He wasn born in 1926 in Breslau, where his father was a doctor and an enthusiastic member of the Bildungsbürgertum, who numbered Fritz Haber among his friends and who became Fritz Stern’s godfather. The family emigrated in 1938, relatively late, when Fritz was already twelve. He avoided the admonition from his father to become a scientist, choosing history instead. Stern’s life, as a professor at Columbia, and his father’s, touched many of the well-known German émigrés—the Mann brothers, the Werfels, Einstein, Marcuse, Max Wertheimer at the New School, Felix Gilbert, Hans Jonas—and he formed friendships with many artists and scholars, among them Allen Ginsberg, Lionel Trilling, Kurt Hahn, Ralf Dahrendorf, Hajo Holborn, Tim Garton-Ash, and David Landes. His students included Peter Novick (see Introduction) and Jay Winter, whose Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, is a brilliant and moving exploration of war memorials.68

  In his work, Stern concentrated on two themes, German history in the run-up to World War II, and American historiography, especially in regard to Europe and Germany. He researched a variety of figures, including Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck, as well as scientific figures such as Haber, Einstein, and Planck. He also devoted fourteen years to a detailed study of the relationship between Bismarck and Bleichröder. This took him back to Germany (including East Germany) in search of correspondence, and made him well known in the German corridors of power. Many of his conclusions have been incorporated into this book.

  Besides the books he produced, Stern served on several American-German committees and academic and diplomatic bodies, making him a trusted expert on German-American relations, psychological as well as policy-oriented. He took part in a number of celebrated confrontations, including the Historikerstreit, the Fritz Fischer controversy, Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and the role of culture in the German self-image. When Richard Holbrooke was appointed ambassador to Germany by President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, Holbrooke took Stern with him as an adviser. A friend and/or colleague of Henry Kissinger and Chancellors Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, and Willy Brandt, Stern attended the notorious meeting at Chequers to advise Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on what a reunified Germany would mean. Stern has had fingers in many pies on both sides of the Atlantic, and was asked by Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister, to take part in the historical commission to investigate the ex-Nazis in the postwar German foreign service.69 He also helped Arthur Schlesinger in the Kennedy White House.

  Stern agreed with Hajo Holborn that German Idealism was a crucial factor underlying everything, and that partly because of it, “The split between Germany and the West will of necessity always be an important theme for historians.”70

  Stern successfully managed to be both German and American, never completely comfortable with what he called the “European arrogance” of Hannah Arendt. In his work (which I have leaned on heavily) he did a lot to explain how the “mood” that helped create National Socialism came about, especially in regard to German elites, but he concluded that, ultimately, the horror would never be explained fully.

  The “native tongue” of art history, according to one American scholar, “was German.”71 Although there is a measure of truth in this, and although the most influential art historians of the postwar world were, arguably, Erwin Panofsky in the United States, and Ernst Gombrich in Great Britain, it is not true to say that there was no art history in either country until the refugees arrived. The first chair in art history in Germany, in Göttingen in 1813, did long predate any such position in America or Britain, yet the discipline had been organized since at least the 1920s, and Panofksy himself called that period a golden age in art historical scholarship.

  The Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (IFA), and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) had all opened their doors not too long before the refugees arrived, and all were well endowed. Among the art historians, the biggest impact, without question, was in New York where, at the Institute of Fine Arts, director Walter Cook invited several renowned academics to take up positions—Erwin Panofsky, Walter Friedländer, Max Friedlander, Richard Krautheimer, Rudolf Wittkower, Richard Ettinghausen, Karl Lehmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolf Arnheim. As Cook liked to say, “Hitler is my best friend; he shakes the tree and I collect the apples.”72

  Panofsky was no stranger to America—he had been teaching on and off at the Institute of Fine Arts since 1931 and held joint appointments there and in Hamburg, alternating terms between Germany and the United States. When the Nazis came to power, he simply stayed in America, eventually joining the IAS at Princeton while continuing to teach at the IFA.73 Between eighty and one hundred refugee art historians arrived in America as a result of National Socialism, and through them many colleges began to offer art history courses.74

  THE ORIGINS OF POP ART

  As for the artists themselves, Joseph Albers, Hans Hofmann, and George Grosz became teachers as well as painters and the first two, in particular, exerted a major influence in that way. Albers taught at Black Mountain College where Robert Rauschenberg was among his students. Hans Hofmann, who had a Jewish wife and was on a visit to America when Hitler came to power, simply extended his stay, teaching for a time at the Art Students League in New York before opening his own school. There he became what one historian desc
ribed as the most influential art teacher of his generation, teaching—among others—Helen Frankenthaler, Alan Kaprow, Louise Nevelson, and Larry Rivers.75 He himself became a leading member of the school of Abstract Expressionists and may well have invented “action painting,” splashing pigment on canvases as early as 1938, several years before Jackson Pollock. George Grosz, arguably the most famous of the three when he arrived in America, had the unhappiest—and least successful—time. He too taught at the Art Students League before opening his own school but he seemed overly keen to adopt the American way. He became an illustrator for popular magazines and did a stint at Esquire.76

  Unlike these three, Richard Lindner, Hans Richter, and Max Ernst never intended to stay in America, an attitude that limited their engagement with their temporary home. Lindner, however, is generally credited with being the founder, or at least one of the founders, of Pop Art. He described himself as “a tourist” in America, but a friendly tourist, whose visitor status meant that he saw New York “better than anyone who was born there,” which is why the everyday paraphernalia of modern American life fascinated him so much.77

  Among the German émigré photographers, illustrators, and cartoonists there were Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt (the famous “Kiss,” showing a sailor embracing a total stranger on V-E day), Philippe Halsman, Lotte Jacobi, and Andreas Feininger. Otto Bettmann founded the Bettmann Archive, a celebrated library of historical photographs. They formed an exiles’ community with art dealers and publishers, people such as Karl Nierendorf, who specialized in the Expressionists but gave Louise Nevelson her first exhibition, Samuel Kootz (Hofmann and Picasso), Curt Valentin (Lipschitz, Beckmann, Henry Moore), and Hugo Perls (Chagall, Calder). Kurt and Helen Wolff published Kafka and Kraus in Munich before the war and Heinrich Mann, Erwin Panofsky, Robert Musil, and Franz Werfel afterward in New York under the Pantheon imprint. They collaborated with the Mellons, Paul and Mary, who had both been patients of Carl Jung. Their Bollingen Press was designed to introduce Jung’s ideas to America, though Jung’s interest in the East and in mysticism and Oriental religion meant that other titles, such as the I Ching, also appeared under this imprint. Schocken Books and the New American Library were also started by German émigrés, as was Aurora Press, which originally published books only in German, to be read by prisoners of war. The name was devised by Brecht, to symbolize a new dawn but also the boat that fired a shot over the tsar’s palace.78