In 1922 Horkheimer received his doctorate summa cum laude under Cornelius’s direction with a thesis on Kant.7 He was “habilitated” * three years later with another critical discussion of Kant’s work and gave his first lecture as Privatdozent in May, 1925, on Kant and Hegel.8
Horkheimer’s relationship to Pollock was one of the cornerstones of the Institut, and it merits some comment here. An insight into it can be gleaned from a passage in Ludwig Marcuse’s autobiography. Marcuse, no relation to Herbert, was the drama critic for a Frankfurt newspaper in the mid-twenties when Cornelius brought his two young protégés to his office. They were “an attractive man, Max Horkheimer, overflowing with warmth, and his reserved, externally austere friend, Fritz Pollock; but one also saw in him a little of what was being guarded behind the reserve.”9 Among the qualities in Pollock to which Marcuse might have alluded was a self-effacing, unquestioning loyalty to Horkheimer, which marked their friendship for the sixty or so years of its duration until Pollock’s death in the winter of 1970. With only brief interruptions, the two remained in close proximity for all of their adult lives. Pollock took the role of the pragmatic, prudent realist, often arranging the mundane details of their lives to allow Horkheimer the maximum time for his scholarly pursuits. As a child Horkheimer was highly protected, and during his mature years Pollock often served as buffer between him and a harsh world. Horkheimer, so one observer recalled,10 was often moody and temperamental. Pollock, in contrast, was steady, even obsessive. The complementarity of their personalities was one of the sources of the Institut’s success. That Pollock’s own scholarly career suffered to some extent was a price he seemed willing to pay. In the twenties, to be sure, this was a result that was difficult to foresee.
In fact, both men, and probably Weil as well, might have expected successful careers in their respective fields. However, entrance into the highly rigid German university system would have necessitated confining their broad interests to one discipline. In addition, the type of radical scholarship they hoped to pursue found little favor with the established academic hierarchy. Even the non-Marxist but unconventional Cornelius was very much of an outcast among his colleagues. Accordingly, Weil’s idea of an independently endowed institute for social research seemed an excellent way to bypass the normal channels of university life. Such topics as the history of the labor movement and the origins of anti-Semitism, which were neglected in the standard curriculum of German higher education, could be studied with a thoroughness never attempted before.11 Hermann Weil, Felix’s father, was approached with the plan and agreed to an initial endowment providing a yearly income of 120,000 Marks (the equivalent of $30,000 after the inflation had ended). The value of this income has been estimated by Pollock as four times what it would be in 1970. It took approximately 200 Marks (or $50.00) a month to support an unmarried assistant at the Institut. In time the initial grant was supplemented by additional capital gifts from Weil and other sources. To my knowledge, however, there is no evidence to indicate any political contributors, although allegations to this effect were sometimes made by the Institut’s detractors in later years. In any event, Hermann Weil’s gifts, though not enormous, did permit the creation and maintenance of an institution whose financial independence proved a great advantage throughout its subsequent history.
Although independence, both financial and intellectual, was the goal of the founders, they thought it prudent to seek some affiliation with the University of Frankfurt, itself only recently established in 1914. The original idea of calling it the Institut für Marxismus (Institute for Marxism) was abandoned as too provocative, and a more Aesopian alternative was sought (not for the last time in the Frankfurt School’s history). The suggestion of the Education Ministry to call it the Felix Weil Institute of Social Research was declined by Weil, who “wanted the Institut to become known, and perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism as a scientific discipline, not due to the founder’s money.”12 It was decided to call it simply the Institut für Sozialforschung. Weil also refused to “habilitate” himself and become a Privatdozent, or to consider the possibility of further academic advancement leading to the directorship of the Institut, because “countless people would have been convinced that I ‘bought’ myself the ‘venia legendi’ or, later, the chair.”13 Holding a chair as a governmentally salaried full professor at the university was, in fact, a stipulation for the directorship of the Institut as spelled out in the agreement reached with the Ministry of Education. Weil proposed as candidate an economist from the Technische Hochschule in Aachen, Kurt Albert Gerlach. Weil himself retained control of the Gesellschaft für Sozialforschung (Society of Social Research), the Institut’s financial and administrative body.
Gerlach shared with the Institut’s founders an aesthetic and political distaste for bourgeois society. He had cultivated the former through connections with the Stefan George circle and the latter through an acquaintanceship with the Fabians gained during several years of study in England. His political inclinations were firmly to the left. Many years later, Pollock would remember him as a nonparty socialist,14 while the British historians F. W. Deakin and G. R. Storry in their study of Richard Sorge wrote: “It is probable that, like Sorge, he was at this time a member of the Communist Party.”15 Whatever the precise nature of Gerlach’s politics, when proposed by Weil, he was accepted by the economics and social science department as professor and by the Education Ministry as first head of the Institut. In early 1922, Gerlach wrote a “Memorandum on the Foundation of an Institute of Social Research”16 in which he stressed the synoptic goals of the Institut. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that he would deliver a series of inaugural lectures on anarchism, socialism, and Marxism. But the lectures were never given, for in October, 1922, Gerlach suddenly died of an attack of diabetes, at the age of thirty-six. (He left his library of eight thousand volumes to Weil, who passed it on to the Institut.)
The search for a successor focused on an older man who would serve as interim director until one of the younger founding members was old enough to acquire a chair at the university. The first possibility was Gustav Mayer, the noted historian of socialism and the biographer of Engels. But the negotiations foundered, as Mayer remembers it, on the demands made by Weil—whom he later dismissed as an Edelkommunist (an aristocratic communist)—for total control over the Institut’s intellectual life.17 If this was true, Weil’s insistence was certainly short-lived, for the next candidate, who actually got the position, asserted his own domination very quickly. Weil’s influence on intellectual questions appears, in fact, never to have been very great.
The final choice for Gerlach’s replacement was Carl Grünberg, who was persuaded to leave his post as professor of law and political science at the University of Vienna to come to Frankfurt.18 Grünberg had been born in Focsani, Rumania, in 1861 of Jewish parents (he later converted to Catholicism to assume his chair in Vienna). He studied jurisprudence from 1881 to 1885 Austrian capital, where he subsequently combined a legal and an academic career. In 1909 he became professor at Vienna and in the subsequent year began editing the Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers’ Movement), popularly known as Grünbergs Archiv.
Politically, Grünberg was an avowed Marxist, who has been called “the father of Austro-Marxism” by one observer.19 This characterization, however, has been disputed by the historian of that movement, who has written that it was true only “insofar as the representatives of Austro-Marxism were his students at the University of Vienna, but not in the sense that Grünberg himself can be counted among the Austro-Marxists, since his work had a primarily historical character and was not devoted to achieving a unity of theory and practice.”20 Grünberg’s relative indifference to theoretical questions seems to have persisted after his coming to Frankfurt. Although his journal did contain an occasional theoretical article, such as Karl Korsch’s important “Marxism and Philosophy” in 1923 and Georg Lukács’s critique of Moses Hess three years later,21 it was primarily devoted to historical and empirical studies usually grounded in a rather undialectical, mechanistic Marxism in the Engels-Kautsky tradition. Weil’s own theoretical
