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THE INTELLECTUAL MIGRATION AND THE “OTHER WEIMAR”
Review products
Emily J.Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014)
UdiGreenberg, The Weimar Century: German Emigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2015
Extract
These two books bring fresh eyes and much-needed energy to the study of the intellectual migration from Weimar Germany to the United States. Research on the scholars, writers, and artists forced to flee Europe because of their Jewish heritage or left-wing politics was once a cottage industry, but interest in this topic has waned in recent years. During the height of fascination with the émigrés, bookstores brimmed with panoramic works such as H. Stuart Hughes's The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (1975), Lewis Coser's Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (1984), and Martin Jay's Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (1985). Now, while historians still write monographs about émigré intellectuals, their focus is often narrowed to biographies of individual thinkers. Refreshingly, with Emily Levine's and Udi Greenberg's new publications we are asked to step back and recapture a broader view of their legacy. The displacement of a significant part of Germany's renowned intelligentsia to the US in the mid-twentieth century remains one of the major events in the intellectual history of both countries.
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References
1 Gay, Peter, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968), 31 Google Scholar.
2 Cited in Chernow, Ron, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York, 1993), 142Google Scholar.
3 Suri, Jeremy, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 7 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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5 Gurian argued passionately in the final years of the Republic against the dissolution of political parties, but his vision for the future role of parliament was so weak and fuzzy (and his openness to dictatorial measures so strong) as to throw into question whether most Americans or Britons at the time would have regarded his call for autoritäre Demokratie in Um des Reiches Zukunft (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1932) as “democratic.” A young Morgenthau noted in his diary that democracy was “nothing more than a specific technique of selection” and was of “no use” if it could not “create a new aristocracy” of leadership in the state. Quoted in Frei, Christoph, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge, 2001), 157 Google Scholar.