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BEYOND THE OTHER SHORE: GERMAN INTELLECTUALS IN THE UNITED STATES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2014

JOSHUA DERMAN
JOSHUA DERMAN*
Affiliation:
Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

For over half a century, the American transformation of German philosophy and social thought has been a major theme of modern intellectual history. The main protagonists of this “cultural migration,” as the story traditionally has been told, were German-speaking scholars and writers who, fleeing Hitler's Europe, brought their erudition and indigenous methodologies to American shores. But beyond this beachhead lies a vast and unfamiliar terrain for the historian. What became of German texts and concepts as they traveled further inland? Who transported them—and for what ends? In The Closing of the American Mind, the philosopher Allan Bloom marveled at the ways in which nonacademic Americans had become complicit in the dissemination of German thought: “What an extraordinary thing it is that high-class talk from what was the peak of Western intellectual life, in Germany, has become as natural as chewing gum on American streets.” It was an extraordinary thing, but not a good one, as far as Bloom was concerned:

We are like the millionaire in The Ghost (Geist) Goes West who brings a castle from brooding Scotland to sunny Florida and adds canals and gondolas for “local color.” We chose a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had as its starting point dislike of us and our goals. The United States was held to be a nonculture, a collection of castoffs from real cultures, seeking only comfortable self-preservation in a regime dedicated to superficial cosmopolitanism in thought and deed. Our desire for the German things was proof we could not understand them.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , April 2015 , pp. 235 - 252
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 See e.g. Neumann, Franz L., Peyre, Henri, Panofsky, Erwin, Köhler, Wolfgang, and Tillich, Paul, The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America (Philadelphia, 1953)Google Scholar; Fleming, Donald and Bailyn, Bernard, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960 (Cambridge, MA, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hughes, H. Stuart, The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Coser, Lewis A., Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (New Haven, 1984)Google Scholar; and Ash, Mitchell G. and Söllner, Alfons, eds., Forced Migration and Scientific Change: Emigré German-Speaking Scientists and Scholars after 1933 (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York, 1987), 147Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 153.

4 In addition to the books discussed here see also Offe, Claus, Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States, trans. Camiller, Patrick (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar; Jenemann, David, Adorno in America (Minneapolis, 2007)Google Scholar; and Wheatland, Thomas, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis, 2009)Google Scholar. For a recent study that asks similar questions about the American reception of French thought see Cusset, François, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort with Berganza, Josephine and Jones, Marlon (Minneapolis, 2008)Google Scholar.

5 A fascinating figure who appears on the margins of all three books is Eduard Baumgarten, Max Weber's nephew. Baumgarten taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before returning to Germany to write a Habilitationsschrift on John Dewey under Heidegger's supervision. In 1933 Heidegger denounced Baumgarten, who was being considered for a teaching position at the University of Göttingen, for having become “Americanized” and consorting with liberals and Jews. See Woessner, Heidegger in America, 20; and Farías, Victor, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. Margolis, Joseph and Rockmore, Tom (Philadelphia, 1989), 209–11Google Scholar. Baumgarten, a pioneering German scholar of American philosophy, was the first to study the close connections between Nietzsche and Emerson; he also noted Max Weber's deep interest in the work of William James. See Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche, 322 n. 19 and 324 n. 55; and Scaff, Max Weber in America, 152.

6 On transatlantic intellectual affinities and connections at the turn of the twentieth century see Kloppenberg, James T., Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; and Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar.

7 “Academic psychology, sociology, comparative literature and anthropology have been dominated by them [Nietzsche and Heidegger] for a long time,” Bloom observed. “But their passage from the academy to the marketplace is the real story.” Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 226.

8 Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche, 252–3. Subsequent citations of the reviewed books will be made parenthetically in the text.

9 Scaff, Lawrence A., Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley, 1989)Google Scholar.

10 Allan Bloom first encountered Weber's Protestant Ethic in his “first social-science course at the University of Chicago,” a “survey of social-science ‘classics.’” Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 208.

11 For a discussion of similar dynamics at work in the wider non-European reception of European social thought see Bayly, C. A., The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA, 2004), chap. 8Google Scholar.

12 See Parsons, Talcott, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (New York, 1968Google Scholar; first published 1937).

13 Quoted in Scaff, Max Weber in America, 243.

14 Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 148–9.

15 No sooner had Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills published their first Weber translation than Meyer Schapiro, the Columbia University art historian, accused them of uncritically presenting the works of a thinker who “came to speak in a way that anticipates the Nazis.” Schapiro, Meyer, “A Note on Max Weber's Politics,” politics, 2/2 (1945), 44–8Google Scholar, 44.

16 See e.g. Arendt, Hannah, “Approaches to the ‘German Problem’” (1945), in Arendt, Essays in Understanding (New York, 1994), 106–20Google Scholar. On this topic see also Rabinbach, Anson, “‘The Abyss That Opened Up Before Us’: Thinking about Auschwitz and Modernity,” in Postone, Moishe and Santner, Eric, eds., Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2003), 51–66Google Scholar.

17 Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 147.