Table Of ContentIntellectuals in Exile
Claus-Dieter Krohn
In tellectu als
Refugee Scholars and the
Translated by Rita and Robert Kimber
Foreword by A rthur J. Vidich
The University of Massachusetts Press Amherst
in Exile
New School for Social Research
Original title: Wissenschaft im Exil
© 1987 by Campus-Verlag
Foreword and translation,
© 1993 by The University of Massachusetts Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
LC 93-18625
ISBN 0-87023-864-7 (doth); 874-4 (pbk.)
Designed by Milenda Nan Ok Lee
Set in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Krohn, Claus-Dieter, 1941-
[Wissenschaft im Exil. English]
Intellectuals in exile : refugee scholars and the New School for Social Research /
Claus-Dieter Krohn ; translated by Rita and Robert Kimber ; foreword by Arthur ).
Vidich.
p. cm.
Indudes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-87023-864-7 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-87023-874-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. New School for Social Research (New York, N.Y.)—History.
2. New School for Social Research (New York, N.Y.)—Faculty.
3. Brain drain—Germany—History—20th century. 4. Social
scientists—Germany—History—20th century. 5. Economists—
Germany—History—20th century. 6. German Americans—History—
20th century. I. Title.
LD3837.K7613 1993
378.747*1—dc 20 93-18625
CIP
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.
Contents
Foreword vii
i / Introduction i
2/ The Expulsion of German Scholars n
3 / The United States and the German Intellectuals 21
1. Xenophobia at the Universities 21
2. Aid Committees for Exiled Scholars 24
3. The Rockefeller Foundation 29
4 / What the Exiled Social Scientists Brought to the United States:
Trends in Economic Thought around 1933 39
1. American Economics and the New Deal 39
2. Austrian Neoclassical Economics 45
3. The German Reform Economists 52
5 / The New School for Social Research 59
1. The Founding of the “University in Exile” 59
2. Center for Refugee Problems 73
77
3. te Rescue Action of 1940-1941 79
4. Resistance of the State Department 86
v
Contents
6 / Contributions of the Emigré Scholars at the New School 93
1. Growth Dynamic and the Theory of
“Technical Progress” 101
2. Economic Planning and the Keynesian Model 111
3. Fiscal Policy as Active Economic Policy 120
4. Writings on National Socialism 129
5. Peace Research and the Institute of World Affairs 139
6. Initiatives toward a Theoretical Synthesis 149
7 / The Influence of the New School Scholars in the United States 157
1. The Traditional View of the New School 157
2. Influence of the New School as an Institution 161
3. Impacts of Individual Faculty Members 168
8 / Problems of Integration 179
1. Individual Exile Experiences 179
2. The Graduate Faculty and the Horkheimer Circle of the Institute
of Social Research 189
9 / Epilogue: The New School Scholars and the New Germany
after 1945 199
Appendix: List of European Scholars and Artists Helped by the New
School for Social Research between 1933 and 1945 205
Abbreviations 211
Notes 213
Index 245
vi
Foreword
Claus-Dieter Krohn’s Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New
School for Social Research is the first in-depth intellectual history of a
remarkable group of social and political scientists. Recruited from Europe
by Alvin Johnson, then director of the New School, they were forged by
him into the “University in Exile,” later to be renamed the Graduate
Faculty of Political and Social Science. Unlike any other, this book pro
vides a comprehensive picture of that group’s intellectual significance and
of the impact of its seminal ideas on both European and American social
science.
Looking back on these thinkers, we can now fully realize how critical
their role was in preserving and enhancing what are now the key concep
tions of contemporary social science. They drew inspiration and intel
lectual sustenance from their predecessors, who included Marx, Böhm-
Bawerk, Weber, Simmel, Schmoller, Durkheim, Georg Jellinek, and other
turn-of-the-century social and political analysts. However, these brilliant
predecessors did not have to come to terms with the epoch-making events
of the twentieth century—the rise and fall of national socialism, the Second
World War, and the decolonization of the European seaborne empires.
Thus they offered to their successors few cues for understanding them.
Bom to a world that took such unexpected turns, this new generation of
thinkers also sought their own ways of analyzing the social, cultural,
political, and economic problems of the twentieth century. Always mindful
of the work of their predecessors, they charted new directions for the
vu
Foreword
disciplines of economics, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and political
science.
Escaping from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, they brought to the United
States a fully developed awareness of what would only later be recognized
as the central problems of twentieth-century civilization. Almost imme
diately, they initiated a unique dialogue between continental and American
thought. This dialogue remains unbroken as is substantiated by Krohn’s list
of the 184 emigré scholars who were originally affiliated with the New
School and whose scholarship continues to be a vital part of American
social science. This list includes Rudolf Arnheim, Paul Baran, Arnold
Brecht, Gerhard Colm, Eduard Heimann, Erich Hula, Felix Kaufmann,
Hans Kelsen, Alexandre Koyré, Emil Lederer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Adolph
Lowe, Bronislaw Malinowski, Jakob Marschak, Franco Modigliani, Kurt
Riezler, Gaetano Salvemini, Alfred Schütz, Hans Speier, Leo Strauss, and
Max Wertheimer. Their countries of origin included Germany, Poland,
Italy, France, Russia, Austria, Algeria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Belgium,
Spain, Switzerland, and Palestine. Without the single-minded and largely
single-handed efforts of Alvin Johnson to provide them with a place at the
New School, many of these intellectual figures would have lost their lives.
In spite of Johnson’s efforts, as Krohn observes, others did.
Readers of this book will learn that Alvin Johnson, more than any other
American, quickly realized the need for action to prevent Hitler’s destruc
tion of the German intellectual tradition. Johnson had become aware of
the immense importance of European scholarship while coediting the
Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences,* a monumental task he had undertaken
in the mid 1920s in collaboration with his former teacher at Columbia
University, Edwin R. A. Seligman. Designed as a comprehensive assessment
of social scientific thought, comparable to the German Handwörterbuch
der Staatswissenchaften, the Encyclopaedia was published in the midthirties.
Although its contributors were recruited from many countries, the largest
number from a single nation were German. Johnson’s work as a coeditor
brought him into dose contact with many of the 600 contributors and
consultants to the fifteen-volume Encyclopaedia. As a result, he became a
leading expert on who was who in the world of sodal sdence. Even before
the National Socialists took power in 1933, Johnson knew German scholars
such as Gerhard Colm, Emil Lederer, Jakob Marschak, Fritz Lehmann, and
Hans Speier, who would be invited to the New School that same year.
viii
Foreword
Johnson also understood the importance to scholars of being part of an
intellectual community in which ideas are discussed and debated. It was for
this reason, therefore, that when it was known that the Nazis would purge
the universities Johnson acted to recruit an entire intellectual community.
Krohn’s account of the creation by Johnson of this exiled community of
scholars touches on a number of embarrassingly sensitive points. Ameri
can universities and the State Department resisted and even opposed
Johnson’s efforts on the grounds that too many of the émigrés were Jews,
radicals, or socialists. President Roosevelt sympathized with Johnson’s
efforts but was unable to break the xenophobic resistance of immigration
authorities who doubted the Americanism of these foreigners or, worse,
supposed that they might be Nazi agents. In the midst of the American
depression and deep domestic problems, very few, other than Johnson,
thought in terms of the consequences for civilization that would ensue
should Europe’s most educated and creative thinkers be eliminated.
Before the onset of the war (but more especially after Germany invaded
France in 1940), an avalanche of refugees sought asylum in the United
States. “From 1935-36 on,” Krohn notes, “the New School was inundated
with about 5,000 requests ... annually [for support].” After the fall of
France, this institution became a central clearinghouse for the rescue of
intellectual and political refugees. In addition, refugee committees were
created to help absorb into the United States these bearers of European
culture. Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, contributed $250,000 to the
Graduate Faculty in order to supplement the support for faculty salaries
provided by the Rockefeller Foundation. By the end of the war, thousands
of European scholars had found their way to the United States and into its
cultural institutions, leaving a permanent legacy for the intellectual life of
the country.
For postwar Germany, the intellectual vacuum created by the expulsion
of its major scholars, intellectuals, creators, and disturbers would never be
filled. Krohn notes that the internal Nazi war against Weimar culture
resulted in the diminution of about 12,000 intellectuals from the social and
cultural life of Germany. Nothing like this had happened since the exodus
of the “Greek leading class after the Osmanian conquest of the Byzantine
Empire in the fifteenth century.... [T]he expulsion of German intellec
tuals after 1933 seemed like the transfer of an entire culture, primarily to the
United States.” The twelve-year gap in cultural continuity from 1933 to 1945
IX
Foreword
was sufficiently long to separate an entire generation from its own past.
This break in Germany’s intellectual and cultural life has been reconnected
only slowly and in part.2
Not until the 1960s did another generation of German social scientists
rediscover its roots in Weimar culture and in earlier German intellectual
traditions. In spite of this rediscovery, the thread of intellectual culture that
was broken in 1933 has not been fully repaired. The author of this book
does not make this point directly, but it is implicit in the text. Indeed, in
researching and writing this book, Professor Krohn has reconnected him
self to his own cultural legacy. This monograph is in fact part of a larger
German revival and rehabilitation of the works of that country's social
scientific ancestors.
Krohn's discussion of the ideas of the social scientists who were the
members of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science is found in
two chapters: “What the Exiled Social Scientists Brought to the United
States: Trends in Economic Thought around 1933" and “Contributions of
the Emigré Scholars at the New School." Krohn shows that the New School
economists, primarily Emil Lederer, Gerhard Colm, Adolph Lowe, and
Hans Neisser, while still in Germany had already addressed fundamental
questions concerning unemployment in relation to market forces and
technical change and had developed fiscal and monetary ideas about
economic and social planning that anticipated much of what later became
the foundation of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Although Keynes provided some
theoretical underpinnings for New Deal economic policies, these German
“reform” economists not only thought, like Keynes, in short-range prag
matic terms but also hoped to resolve the long-range problems that beset
Western capitalism. Their experience with the German economic crisis in
the 1920s gave their work both theoretical and practical advantages over the
ideas of Roosevelt's advisers.
Why do the innovative ideas of these economists receive so little atten
tion now? According to Krohn this “is not solely the fault of scholarship on
the exile but may be due even more to how the field of modem professional
economics defines itself and regards its own history." The work of these
politically and socially minded economists did not fit “the conventional
models the discipline worked with.” However, as Krohn shows, many of
their ideas subsequently found their way into whát is now conventional
economic thought. These reform political economists were unique among
twentieth-century economic thinkers because their conceptualization of
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