by Peter Watson
LENIN OVERBOARD
Music and musical theater had crossed the Atlantic—both ways—long before 1933. American jazz had sailed east and Wagner in particular went west, to be reinterpreted all over again in the New World.79 Of the three great theatrical figures of prewar Germany—Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator, and Bertolt Brecht—Reinhardt fared worst in America, his Broadway productions failing and his one film, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, proving a commercial flop, though as Anthony Heilbut says he drew brilliant performances from James Cagney (Bottom) and Mickey Rooney (Puck). In Los Angeles Reinhardt was forced to open his own school, where William Wyler and William Dieterle taught directing and Erich Korngold taught composing.
Erwin Piscator was much more successful, though it was hard at first. When he first arrived in America, he directed the Dramatic Workshop at the New School, which eventually closed, as did two of the other ventures he was involved with, the President Theatre and the Rooftop Theatre. Despite this, the list of writers and actors who studied under Piscator is second to none—Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Ben Gazzara, Walter Matthau, Arthur Miller, Rod Steiger, Tennessee Williams, and Shelley Winters. In the so-called New Drama, Piscator introduced to the American stage Sartre, Kafka’s The Trial, and the music of Hanns Eisler.80 Though he liked America, he was appalled by the activities of McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and, after being subpoenaed to appear in 1951, returned to Germany, where he directed Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), his assault on the Vatican, followed by Heinar Kipphardt’s In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer (The Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer), a vivid modern American tragedy.
Bertolt Brecht was in America for six years after exile in Prague, Vienna, Zurich, Russia, and Denmark. Ironically, although he had been much interested in, and influenced by, American culture, especially popular culture (such as jazz), in the 1920s and early 1930s, Brecht’s time in the United States was not especially happy, though he did produce one masterpiece, Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle; 1948).81 His swagger had less meaning in the land of swagger, his interest in popular culture was less controversial, indeed it was the orthodoxy, and his hatred of the cult of popularity, his loathing for sentimentality—equal to Hannah Arendt’s—meant that although he didn’t care how he went down, his was hardly an attitude guaranteed to produce success. He thought America was the most “vital spot” on earth but also the site of the “ultimate horrors of capitalism.”82
Brecht was as much an anarchist as a Marxist at heart, but he wasn’t without his realism either. He threw his copy of Lenin overboard during the crossing to America, knowing it might interfere with his acceptance. And he journeyed to California because Feuchtwanger assured him it was easier to make a living there. He made one Hollywood picture, Hangmen Also Die, not a success at the box office and he never really attempted to assimilate, not believing it possible.83 He liked the “grace and generosity” of ordinary Americans but not their lack of dignity. As soon as he could, he went back to Germany, to the East.
When Thomas Mann arrived in America in 1938, he was acclaimed as the world’s greatest living novelist, invited to dine at the White House and, along with Einstein, awarded an honorary degree from Harvard. He quickly became a public figure, and it was Mann who, in November 1941, was given the distinction of broadcasting, over the BBC (from the USA), the first news about the Holocaust.84
To begin with he adored America, in particular the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt, although Mann’s family gave cause for despair. He had arrived with his wife, Katja, and their six children, plus his brother Heinrich and his wife. Thomas’s son Klaus, Heinrich’s wife, and two sisters all committed suicide during or soon after the war.
Yet Thomas managed to produce a body of work while he was in America. In 1948 he published Doctor Faustus, arguably his masterpiece, about the life of a German composer, modeled on Schoenberg, who wasn’t entirely happy with Mann’s treatment. Leverkühn, the composer, is nihilistic, a man who concludes a Faustian bargain, contracts syphilis after a visit to a brothel, and destroys his lovers. There is more than a touch of Nietzsche in Leverkühn and there are several allusions to a figure who might or might not be Hitler; high art itself comes under cynical scrutiny, as do the Frankfurt school and the twelve-tone system itself. There is a more than passing reference to a true community of artists—the redemptive community that has so obsessed Germans of all stripes.
Mann always remained a serious writer, continually upset by the glibness and what he saw as the unreflective nature of American culture and public life, in particular the American tendency to oversimplify—a dangerous stance, he felt, both fostering and deepening the Cold War that emerged after 1945. He was proud of having become a citizen of Roosevelt’s America but became appalled by the “barbarous infantilism” of American life and by the country’s decision, as he put it, “not to lead the world but to buy it.” In June 1952, he emigrated again, back to Europe, to Switzerland, a German-speaking country that wasn’t Germany. “America was as glad to see him go as it had been pleased to receive him years before.”
In one way and another, because the language barrier proved too difficult, because the social-political-intellectual climate was so different in the New World, because they rarely had the popular successes of the filmmakers, most of the émigré writers returned to Europe when they could: Brecht, Bloch, Frank, Mehring, Döblin, Mann as we have seen, Remarque, and Zuckmayer. Several of them got only as far as Switzerland, a German-speaking country but not the country they had left. It could be said that Hitler had all but broken the spirit of an entire generation of writers, or at the least had deformed them out of recognition. In that sense, the monster had won. Anthony Heilbut quotes a letter Mann wrote to a friend shortly before he left America: “We poor Germans! We are fundamentally lonely, even when we are ‘famous’! No one really likes us.”85
The same could not be said of the scientists. Among the émigrés there were nineteen Nobel Prize winners, which shows their caliber and underlines Hitler’s extraordinary decision to let them—even encourage them—to go. And to an extent reinforces the sentiment of Sir Ian Jacobs, Churchill's wartime military secretary, that “the Allies won the [Second World] War because our German scientists were better than their German scientists.”
The role of Leo Szilard in conceiving the notion of a self-sustaining chain reaction, which would make an atomic explosion possible, has already been introduced. After he emigrated to America, he joined with two others, Albert Einstein and Hans Bethe, in trying to convince the country’s military and political authorities not to pursue the atomic (and then the nuclear) bomb to its logical conclusion. Another émigré physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, refused point blank to have anything whatsoever to do with an atomic bomb project, while a fifth, the Hungarian (but German-speaking), Edward Teller, took a diametrically opposing view, and became a celebrated “hawk.”
Bethe and Teller were close friends when they arrived in America, going mountain climbing together with their wives and jointly renting a home.86 But the bomb came between them, as it divided émigré physicists in general: John (“Jancsi”) von Neumann, whose ideas had been crucial to the speed with which the atomic bomb had been produced at Los Alamos, took Teller’s side, and Victor Weisskopf took Bethe’s.87 The crunch came in 1953 over the Oppenheimer affair when J. Robert Oppenheimer, once the director of America’s atomic research program, was charged with dis-loyalty, as shown by his opposition to A-bomb research (a charge that was dismissed), and with attempting to shield a left-wing friend.88 Teller gave evidence against Oppenheimer. In response, Bethe wrote a paper—not declassified until 1982—which argued that the delays in the Los Alamos H-bomb project resulted more from miscalculations by Teller than from Oppenheimer’s political doubts.
Bethe was taken on to the President’s Science Advisory Committee and well into the sixties had a voice in tempering Teller’s more belligerent approach (Peter
Goodchild subtitled his 2004 biography of Teller The Real Dr. Strangelove).89 In America the arguments for and against the atomic and nuclear bombs have been unusually closely associated with émigré physicists.
“DAS REICH DER ZWEI”
Fortunately, that is not all the émigré scientists have been noted for. In the postwar years a friendship formed between Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, both of whom were fellows at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.90 Einstein was, of course, by far the better known of the two men, but it was Gödel who, at that stage, was doing the more significant work. (Einstein used to tell visitors to the IAS that he went into the institute simply to “have the privilege of walking home” with Gödel.) The younger man had never enjoyed good health and he would, soon enough, suffer a breakdown. But for a while their walks together endured and they laughingly described their time at Princeton as “Das Reich der Zwei,” the Reich of two. 91
Gödel’s new thinking about relativity imagined a breaking out of our notions of time, as if certain limits we accept in common sense are no longer true. Einstein had introduced the concept of space-time, that it was all one entity, and that it could be curved or twisted. Gödel now imagined (or rather, worked out mathematically) that if the universe were rotating, as he calculated it was (this is now called a “Gödel universe”), then space-time could become so greatly warped or curved by the distribution of matter that were a spaceship to travel through it at a certain minimum speed (which he calculated), time travel would be possible.92
The idea of time travel naturally catches the eye. But Gödel was not a frivolous man—far from it—and his aim was deeply philosophical, an attempt to understand time in a post-Einstein world, his fundamental point being that the world was/is a space, not a time.93 This is clearly not an easy concept to grapple with, and for many years Gödel and his new theory were ignored. But there were signs of increasing interest at the turn of the twenty-first century (he died in 1978) as his ideas show some overlaps with string theory.
THE RETURN—AND AMERICANIZATION—OF Bildung
Looking back to the beginning of this chapter, Allan Bloom’s comments about the German influence in American cultural life sounded more than a little reminiscent of a plea for a return to Bildung, a rounded, humanistic education, harking back to the Greek and Latin classics, as the best (and first) that have been thought, written, painted…and so on. This is not so surprising, since Bloom was himself taught by the German exile Leo Strauss. Bloom argued that Americans were now looking for fulfillment by Freudian means rather than the more traditional educational route, and this was a cause of his pessimism, for he didn’t see how it could succeed.
His views, and the book based on them, created a great furor, especially in the universities, where opinion was sharply divided as to whether he had a point: that, as he said, the big issues facing mankind have not changed and that many of the “new” ideas “discovered” by the social sciences were in fact introduced a long time ago, in ancient Greece (“the best model”), and subsequently by mainly German thinkers—Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber, Husserl, and Heidegger; or, as his critics alleged, that he was out of date and that culture should now be regarded, as one critic put it, as “a kind of ethnic carnival.”
The furor has rumbled on since then, never really going away, and one eventual result was a conference held at Bard College in New York in August 2002, titled “Exile, Science, and Bildung,” attended by scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Hungary. The thrust of the conference was that the debate over Bildung had entered America in 1930 with the publication of Abraham Flexner’s book, Universities—American, English, German, and they wanted to see how it had fared. Flexner, secretary of the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Foundation’s first educational philanthropy, argued that neither American nor English institutes of higher education were really any more than secondary schools, while “Germany alone, building on the historic initiatives of Wilhelm von Humboldt, knew genuine universities.”94 Bildung was the chief purpose of a university.
The aim of the Bard conference was to examine the careers, publications and friendships of a raft of German émigré scholars in America, to see to what extent they brought with them the German idea of Bildung. The figures examined in the conference included Thomas Mann, Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, Erwin Panofsky, Paul Lazarsfeld, Ernst Cassirer, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim, and Paul Oskar Kristeller—many of the names considered in this and previous chapters.
The conference found that, once in America, many of the émigré scholars lost their obsession with Bildung. Whether the experience of exile was just too much, whether America was just too different, no one could say. At the same time, aspects of the Bildung culture were incorporated into American life but Americanized in the process, in three areas in particular. First, the idea of a critical sociology, rather than number-crunching, seems to have gathered pace as a result of the Frankfurt Institute’s work in America. This has not hindered number-crunching sociologists, but postwar critical sociology in the United States did flourish as a result of what Adorno, Horkheimer, and others brought to the table.
Second, was the German challenge to the empirical tradition. Their philosophers understood that there were “impersonal forces beyond their control that governed their fate.” This was not just people like Hegel and Nietzsche, but Heidegger too, whose attitude that we should “submit” to the world as it is, that we should “care” for it rather than try to control it, was an ethical stance not exactly congenial to American materialist thought, but was an attitude that flowed from the Bildung approach and would grow in importance as the postwar decades passed.
But the Bildung concept with the greatest resonance in America, and the concept that was most Americanized, was the notion of “self-realization.” At the same time that Bildung self-realization entered the American vocabulary, so did Freudianism and its concept of individual self-realization. Psychoanalysis, the psychological approach, was, as might be expected, deeply personal and individualistic. Its moral content was confined implicitly to the doctrine that a (mentally) healthy citizen is a better citizen than an unhealthy one. It did not explore, as traditional Bildung, traditional self-realization did, what it meant to be a good citizen in a moral or political sense or what it meant to be “a cultural-ethical personality.” So, yes, Bildung had arrived in America, but it was in an impoverished form.
We shall return to these matters in the Conclusion. For now we may say that the relatively small number of German émigrés who lived in exile in the United States had an influence out of proportion to their size, but that they were themselves much influenced (and in some cases defeated) by the exile experience.
It was somewhat different in Great Britain.
40.
“His Majesty’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens”
While 130,000 German émigrés settled in the United States, the equivalent figure for Britain was roughly 50,000.1 Proportionately, this was a bigger figure, since America had four times the population of Britain and ten times the landmass. Other than that, however, it is not easy to compare the experiences of the émigrés in the two countries. Daniel Snowman, who interviewed many of the more prominent German émigrés who settled in Britain, found that they were characterized by two qualities: they had been raised in homes that were “steeped in music,” learned from their mothers, and in which Bildung, emanating from their fathers, was taken very seriously.*2
The country they arrived in was not especially interested in German culture. Most educated Britons directed their attentions to France and, to an extent, Italy. Christopher Isherwood, who spent time in Berlin and Hamburg in the 1930s, said he was attacked by his friends who deplored his interest in Germany “and wished that I went more often to France…the France of Proust and the French Impressionists.” German art and culture had been anathema since the First World War, though before it the likes of the composers Edward
Elgar (1857–1934) and Donald Tovey (1875–1940), had felt the need to receive recognition in Germany before Britain.
As with those émigrés who arrived in America early, so there were some who arrived in Britain in the early 1930s. Carl Ebert and Rudolf Bing were among the first, the former the Intendant at the theater in Darmstadt (who resigned after an ignominious meeting with Göring), the latter the manager of the Charlottenburg Opera in Berlin. They would collaborate in helping the Glyndebourne Opera get off the ground and, in 1947, Bing went on to found the Edinburgh Festival, though he “hardly knew where Scotland was.”3 Walter Gropius was another early arrival; he had visited Britain in 1934 for an exhibition of his work at the Royal Institute of British Architects and was invited back later in the year when he began a number of collaborations, notably Impington College north of Cambridge. Rudolf Laban’s Labanschule in Stuttgart transferred first to Paris, in 1937, and then on to Dartington in Devon, where the arts community of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst was making waves, and where Laban’s former pupil, the choreographer Kurt Jooss (see below), was already ensconced.4 Alexander Korda, Hungarian by birth but German-speaking and Berlin-trained, had left the German capital in 1926, destined for Hollywood, where he failed to thrive, and so had turned up in London where his fortunes were transformed, and he became one of the most successful film producers of all time. Another Germanophile Hungarian émigré, Emeric Pressburger, who had worked alongside—if not actually with—Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Carl Meyer (creator of Caligari), was forced to leave in the spring of 1933. In England, Korda introduced him to an aspirant director Michael Powell, and an enduring partnership was born. Ernst Gombrich, the future art historian, left Vienna for Britain in 1935, joining painters such as Oskar Kokoschka and Kurt Schwitters.
