institute dedicated to a radical dissection of bourgeois society. So the problem of Gerlach’s successor was satisfactorily resolved by the time the Institut was ready to begin operations. Grünberg, it might be noted in passing, was the first avowed Marxist to hold a chair at a German university.
The official creation of the Institut occurred on February 3, 1923, by a decree of the Education Ministry, following an agreement between it and the Gesellschaft für Sozialforschung. Accepting an invitation by Professor Drevermann of the Senckenberg Museum of Natural Science to use its halls as a temporary home, the Institut immediately began to function, as Weil remembers it, “among open moving boxes filled with books, on improvised desks made of boards, and under the skeletons of a giant whale, a diplodocus, and an ichthyosaurus.”22
In March, 1923, construction of a building to house its operations at Victoria-Allee 17, near the corner of Bockenheimer Landstrasse on the university campus, was begun. Franz Röckle, Weil’s choice as architect, designed a spare, cube-shaped, five-story structure in the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style then becoming fashionable in avant-garde Weimar circles. In later years the irony of the Institute being housed in a building whose architecture reflected the spirit of sober “objectivity” that Critical Theory so often mocked23 was not lost on its members. Nevertheless, its thirty-six-seat reading room, sixteen small workrooms, four seminar rooms with a hundred places, and library with space for seventy-five thousand volumes served the young Institut well.
On June 22, 1924, the Institut’s freshly completed building was officially opened. Grünberg gave the dedicating address.24 At the outset of his remarks, he stressed the need for a research-oriented academy in opposition to the then current trend in German higher education towards teaching at the expense of scholarship. Although the Institut was to offer some instruction, it would try to avoid becoming a training school for “mandarins”25 prepared only to function in the service of the status quo. In pointing to the tendency of German universities to become centers of specialized instruction—institutes for “mandarins”—Grünberg was putting his finger on a persistent problem in German history. More than a century before, Wilhelm von Humboldt had attempted to draw a line between “universities” devoted to practical training and “academies” fostering pure research.26 Over the years, however, the critical “academy” had been clearly shunted aside by the adjustment-oriented university as the model for German higher education. The Institut from its inception was dedicated to countering this trend.
Grünberg continued his remarks by outlining the differences in administration that would distinguish the Institut from other recently created research societies. Rather than collegial in leadership, as in the case of the newly founded Cologne Research Institute of Social Sciences, directed by Christian Eckert, Leopold von Wiese, Max Scheler, and Hugo Lindemann, the Frankfurt Institut was to have a single director with “dictatorial” control. Although the independence of its members was assured, true direction would be exercised in the distribution of the Institut’s resources and the focusing of its energies. In subsequent years the dominance of Max Horkheimer in the affairs of the Institut was unquestioned. Although in large measure attributable to the force of his personality and the range of his intellect, his power was also rooted in the structure of the Institut as it was originally conceived.
Grünberg concluded his opening address by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology. Just as liberalism, state socialism, and the historical school had institutional homes elsewhere, so Marxism would be the ruling principle at the Institut. Grünberg’s conception of materialist analysis was straightforward. It was, he argued, “eminently inductive; its results claimed no validity in time and space,” but had “only relative, historically conditioned meaning.”27 True Marxism, he continued, was not dogmatic; it did not seek eternal laws. With this latter assertion, Critical Theory as it was later developed was in agreement. Grünberg’s inductive epistemology, however, did not receive the approval of Horkheimer and the other younger members of the group. But in the first few years of the Institut’s history Grünberg’s approach prevailed. The Grünberg Archiv continued to stress the history of the labor movement while publishing an occasional theoretical work, such as Pollock’s study of Werner Sombart and Horkheimer’s article on Karl Mannheim.28
The tone of the Grünberg years, a tone very different from that set after Horkheimer replaced him as director, was captured in a letter sent by a student at the Institut, Oscar H. Swede, to the American Marxist Max Eastman in 1927. The relative orthodoxy of the Institut’s Marxism was frustrating to the young Swede, who complained of spending
hours of exasperating argument in a Marxist Institute with a younger generation settling down to an orthodox religion and the worship of an iconographical literature, not to mention blackboards full of mathematical juggling with blocks of 1000 k + 400 w of Marx’s divisions of capital’s functions, and the like. God! The hours I’ve spent listening to the debate of seminaries and student circles on the Hegelian dialektik, with not a single voice to point out that the problems can no longer be solved (if they ever were) by means of straw splitting “philosophical” conceptions. Even the leader [Grünberg], faced with an audience of enthusiastic youth convinced that Relativity is a further installment of bourgeois ideology substituting fluctuating ideas for Newton’s absolute materialism, that Freudism [sic] and Bergsonism are insidious attacks from the rear, and that the war can be waged with the sword in one hand and the “Geschichte der Historiko-materialismus” in the other . . . is constantly being brought up against the inherent contradictions in a Marxian M.I.H. [Materialist Interpretation of History] and being forced to devise defences against the logical conclusion that we may sit with our arms folded and wait for the millenium to blossom from the dung of the capitalist decay. The fact is that Ec[onomic] determinism cannot produce either fighting or creative forces, and there will be no communism if we have to rely for recruits on the sergeanty of cold, hunger, and low wages.29
Ultimately, Swede’s impatience with the unimaginative Marxism of the Grünberg years was to be shared by the Institut’s later leaders, who were to comprise the Frankfurt Schooi; but during the twenties, little theoretical innovation occurred at what the students were to call the “Café Marx.”
Symptomatic of its position were the close ties it maintained with the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow under the direction of David Ryazanov.30 It photostated copies of unpublished manuscripts by Marx and Engels brought over weekly by courier from the SPD’s Berlin headquarters and forwarded them to Moscow, where they were included in the collected works, the famous MEGA (Marx-Engels Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe).31
At the same time, the Institut began to assemble a group of young assistants with a variety of backgrounds and interests. The least important in terms of the Institut’s later development, but one of the most fascinating individuals to be associated with it at any time, was Richard “Ika” Sorge. The remarkable story of his espionage for the Russians in the Far East prior to and during the Second World War is too well known to require recapitulation here. Independent Socialist and then Communist after 1918, Sorge was also a doctoral student of Gerlach’s at Aachen. He combined his academic activities with such work for the Party as illegal organizing of Ruhr mine workers. In 1921 he married Gerlach’s divorced wife, Christiane, which surprisingly did not cost him the friendship of his professor. When Gerlach went to Frankfurt the next year, Sorge followed. After the sudden death of the Institut’s projected first director, Sorge remained with the group for a brief time, and was given the task of organizing the library. It was a job he did not relish, and when the Party told him to come to Moscow in 1924, his obedience was uncomplicated by a reluctance to leave Frankfurt. In any case, his connection with the Institut, according to Deakin and Storry, “must have been nominal and a cover”32 for his work for the Party. It was not until his public exposure as a spy in the 1940’s that the others learned of his remarkable undercover career.33
Other assistants at the Institut, however, were openly involved with leftist politics,
