Intellectual Exile

One of the most important events in twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural life was the massive immigration of German-speaking intellectuals, artists, and scientists fleeing Nazism from the early 1930s to the early 1940s.

The refugees brought with them their erudition, training, and—in some cases—international reputations in the arts and sciences, all of which had an enormous influence on midtwentieth-century American academic and cultural institutions. Among the refugee intellectuals were prominent and diverse figures such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Hans Morgenthau, Karen Horney, Walter Gropius, Hannah Arendt, Franz Neumann, Ernst Cassirer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Eric Voeglin, Wilhelm Reich, Erik Erikson, Paul Tillich, and Fritz Lang. Even this impressive list of prominent emigres barely does justice to the astonishing array of displaced intellectuals who took refuge in the United States and profoundly shaped American thought and culture.

When the National Socialists rose to power, one of their immediate aims was to root out all intellectual and literary figures whose scholarship and artistic accomplishments they deemed insufficiently “Aryan.” On April 4, 1933, the Gesetz zur Wieder- herstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (Civil Service Law) led to the expulsion of more than a thousand scholars from academic positions. A month later, the Nazi-dominated Deutsche Studentenschaft (German Student Body) organized in Berlin and elsewhere an action called Wider den Un- deutschen Geist (Against the Un-German Spirit) that culminated in the spectacle of massive book burnings of the works of writers such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, and even Thomas Mann—Germany’s 1929 Nobel laureate in literature. Over the course of years to come, the Nazis systematically purged the German universities, literary academies, and artistic institutes of Jewish, liberal, and Socialist thinkers and writers.

It is estimated that of all the scholars who fled Nazi Germany, almost half took refuge in the United States (Krohn 1993, 16).

While the United States did accept more of such refugees than any other country in the 1930s and 1940s, there were no systematic governmental relief efforts to aid immigration. The few organized relief efforts that existed came from private and individual initiatives. The Rockefeller Foundation developed its own relief organization that became instrumental in orchestrating the transfer of prominent European scholars and securing them academic positions at American research universities. Motivated by humanitarian impulses and a desire to improve U.S. higher education, Alvin Johnson, director of the New School for Social Research, raised funds to found the “University in Exile” (which later became the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School) as a haven for European social scientists in 1933. Up through the end of the war, Johnson’s institute hosted over 170 exiled scholars and researchers and served as their springboard into prominent university positions elsewhere. During the war years, the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) would emerge as another significant relief agency. Later accused of cherry-picking those they perceived to be the best and brightest among the over 4 million refugees stranded in the south of France after French capitulation to Adolf Hitler in June 1940, the ERC sent a young emissary, Var- ian Fry, to Marseilles to coordinate the secret transfer of prominent intellectuals and artists. Among the 1,500 people Fry helped rescue were Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Siegfried Kracauer.

The bulk of the intellectuals arrived in America during the 1930s, a period marked by political isolationism, antiimmigrant nativism, and economic depression. During the 1920s, Congress had passed a series of stiff immigration quotas, many of which went unfilled in the 1930s largely due to antisemitic and antiradical anxieties of U.S.

government officials during the protracted economic crisis. However, the German intellectual refugees were largely exempt from the nativism and resentment that greeted other emigres during this period for a number of reasons. First, they arrived at a time when American academic institutions were still trying to establish themselves internationally. Academic administrators recognized that the expulsion of so much knowledge and talent from Europe to the United States could be a tremendous boon to American intellectual life. In the words of Walter W S. Cook, director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, “Hitler is my best friend. He shakes the tree and I collect the apples” (Fermi 1968, 78). Second, the new crop of highly trained social scientists was seen as a valuable resource for the development and administration of governmental social and economic programs in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. And third, and perhaps most importantly, the emigres’ firsthand experiences with Nazism led many to value them as vital contributors to the American understanding of the origins and consequences of European totalitarian regimes.

Refugee social scientists who landed research and teaching positions in the American academy had some of the greatest success adapting to their new environment. Political science, sociology, and psychology were still budding disciplines at American universities, and given the strong historical influences of German social and humanistic theories on the social sciences, the scholars and students in these fields were extremely receptive to their new emigre colleagues and professors. The most pressing concern shared by American and German psychologists, political scientists, and sociologists was the problem of totalitarianism. As future scholars of a regime they had fled, German refugee intellectuals understood profoundly the ramifications of living in a totalitarian state. Their interest in and analysis of the conditions in modern mass society that foster repression, however, were as complex and varied as their personal and intellectual histories.

The political scientist Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), one of the first efforts to examine the economic, political, and social structure of National Socialism based on German sources, provided a Marxist analysis of Nazism that argued for the primacy of economic motivations absent any consistent political and economic theories. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm examined the social and psychological origins of totalitarianism, arguing that Nazism represented a retreat from the psychic burden and alienation of individual freedom. Historian Erik Voeglin argued that European vitalism crystallized in Nazism’s totalizing ideology, while political scientist Leo Strauss contrasted the relativistic theory of values that he believed had come to dominate modern political theory on both sides of the Atlantic with the natural law he considered vital to constitutional democracy. Thinkers as diverse as Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and political philosopher Hannah Arendt employed existential ideas as they sought to understand the dislocation of individuals in modern, secular societies. Tillich struggled to formulate a new mode of religious experience (or “meaning beyond meaningless”) in a world after the “death of God,” while Arendt directed her attention to the origins of radical political evils as well as the existential nature of the human condition.

Much of the social and political theory in postwar America stems from the contributions of the refugee scholars. The emigres’ theories of mass society were widely read and popularized as Americans sought to comprehend the dynamics of cold war geopolitics abroad. In addition, their insights alerted Americans to the dangers of both atomistic possessive individualism and the mass tendencies at home. In the 1950s liberal sociologists and cultural critics, and in the 1960s the younger generation of the counterculture, discovered in the emigres’ works valuable theories for analyzing and critiquing the alienation and conformism caused by the dominance of bureaucracies, corporations, and suburbanization in postwar American life.

However, the contributions of German-speaking emigre intellectuals are not limited to midcentury political theory and social criticism. Their influence both direct and indirect can be seen in virtually every field of the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts, and thus their significance for the development of postwar American thought and culture can hardly be overstated.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

See also Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund; Bauhaus; Brecht, Bertolt; Einstein, Albert; Frankfurt School; Fromm, Erich; Gropius, Walter; Huebsch, Ben W et al, and the Viking Press Imprint; Jewish Refugee Scientists; Kracauer, Siegfried; Lang, Fritz; Mann, Thomas; Marcuse, Herbert; Morgenthau, Hans J.; Neumann, Franz L.; Schonberg, Arnold

References and Further Reading

Fermi, Laura. Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930— 1941. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968.

Fleming, Donald, and Bernard Bailyn, eds. The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930—1960. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1969.

Heilbut, Anthony. Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present. New York: Viking, 1983.

Jackman, Jarrell C., and Carla M. Borden, eds. The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation 1930—1945. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1983.

Krohn, Claus-Dieter. Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1993.

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Source: Adam Thomas. Germany and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History. ABC-CLIO, 2005. — 1365 p.. 2005

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