party affiliation. Karl August Wittfogel, Franz Borkenau, and Julian Gumperz were all members of the Communist Party. Political activism as such was thus not in itself a reason for rejection by the group. It could, however, prove a hindrance, as in the case of Karl Korsch, who had been justice minister in the Thuringian SPD-KPD Coalition government in 1923, and continued as a prominent left opposition figure in the KPD until 1926. Wittfogel remembers Korsch’s role in the Institut as central during its first years, but the other surviving members have all disagreed with his version of the facts. Korsch did participate in some of the Institut’s seminars and wrote occasional reviews for its publications before and after the emigration, but was never offered a full membership.34 The reasons were no doubt complex, but Korsch’s stress on praxis, which was to lead him increasingly away from philosophical speculation in later years, certainly played a role. So too did the instability that the others saw in his character.35
From time to time the question of Horkheimer’s possible membership in the KPD has been raised. But hard evidence to support this view seems unavailable, and there is much in his writings and actions that makes his current denial of membership entirely plausible. During their student days together in Munich in 1919, Horkheimer and Pollock were nonparticipatory witnesses of the short-lived revolutionary activities of the Bavarian literati. Although helping to hide left-wing victims of the white terror that followed, they did not themselves join in the revolution, which they considered premature and inevitably doomed by the lack of objective conditions favoring true social change.36 Horkheimer’s earliest political sympathies were with Rosa Luxemburg, especially because of her critique of Bolshevik centralism.37 After her murder in 1919, he never found another socialist leader to follow.
In one of the very few concrete political analyses Horkheimer wrote during the pre-emigration period, “The Impotence of the German Working Class,” published in 1934 in the collection of aphorisms and short essays known as Dämmerung38 (the German word means both dawn and twilight), he expressed his reasons for skepticism concerning the various workers’ parties. The existence of a split between an employed, integrated working-class elite and the masses of outraged, frustrated unemployed produced by capitalism in its current form, he argued, had led to a corresponding dichotomy between a Social Democratic Party lacking in motivation and a Communist Party crippled by theoretical obtuseness. The SPD had too many “reasons”; the Communists, who often relied on coercion, too few. The prospects for reconciling the two positions, he concluded pessimistically, were contingent “in the last analysis on the course of economic processes. . . . In both parties, there exists a part of the strength on which the future of mankind depends.”39 At no time, therefore, whether under Grünberg or under Horkheimer, was the Institut to ally itself with a specific party or faction on the left. In 1931, one of its members characterized its relationship to the working-class movement in these terms:
It is a neutral institution at the university, which is accessible to everyone. Its significance lies in the fact that for the first time everything concerning the workers’ movement in the most important countries of the world is gathered. Above all, sources (congress minutes, party programs, statutes, newspapers, and periodicals) . . . Whoever in Western Europe wishes to write on the currents of the workers movement must come to us, for we are the only gathering point for it.40
When the Institut did accept members who were politically committed, it was solely because of their nonpolitical work. The most important of the activists in its ranks was Karl August Wittfogel.41 The son of a Lutheran schoolteacher, Wittfogel was born in the small Hanoverian town of Woltersdorf in 1896. Active in the German youth movement before the war, he became increasingly involved in radical politics by its end. In November, 1918, he joined the Independent Socialist party and two years later, its Communist successor. Throughout the Weimar period he directed much of his considerable energy into party work, although he was frequently in hot water in Moscow for the heterodoxy of his positions.
At the same time as his participation in Communist politics deepened, Wittfogel managed to pursue a vigorous academic career. He studied at Leipzig, where he was influenced by Karl Lamprecht, at Berlin, and finally at Frankfurt, where Carl Grünberg agreed to direct his dissertation. He published studies of both bourgeois science and bourgeois society before turning to what was to become his major concern in later years, Asiatic society.42 As early as 1922 Wittfogel had been asked by Gerlach and Weil to join the Institut they were planning to open. It was not until three years later, however, that he accepted the offer, his wife, Rose Schlesinger, having already become one of the Institut’s librarians.
Although his new colleagues respected Wittfogel’s contributions to the understanding of what Marx had called the Asiatic mode of production, there seems to have been little real integration of his work with their own. On theoretical issues he was considered naive by Horkheimer and the other younger members of the Institut who were challenging the traditional interpretation of Marxist theory. Wittfogel’s approach was unapologetically positivistic, and the disdain was clearly mutual. Symbolic of this was the fact that he had to review one of his own books in 1932 under the pseudonym Carl Peterson, because no one else was interested in taking the assignment.
In 1931, to be sure, his study Economy and Society in China was published under the Institut’s auspices, but by then he had moved his permanent base of operations to Berlin. Here, among his many other pursuits, he contributed a series of articles on aesthetic theory to Die Linkskurve, which have been characterized as “the first effort in Germany to present the foundations and principles of a Marxist aesthetic.”43 Wittfogel, who in the twenties had written a number of plays performed by Piscator and others, developed a sophisticated, Hegelian aesthetic, which anticipated many of Lukács’s later positions. It is a further mark of his isolation from his Institut colleagues that it seems to have had no impact whatsoever on Lowenthal, Adorno, or Benjamin, the major aestheticians of the Frankfurt School. To Horkheimer and his colleagues, Wittfogel appeared as a student of Chinese society whose analyses of what he later called “hydraulic society” or “Oriental despotism” they encouraged, but as little else. His activism they found somewhat of an embarrassment; he was no less scornful of their political neutrality.
If Wittfogel cannot be characterized as a member of the Institut’s inner circle, either before or after the emigration, the same can be said even more emphatically of Franz Borkenau. Born in 1900 in Vienna, Borkenau was active in the Communist Party and the Comintern from 1921 until his disillusionment in 1929. How he became part of the Institut’s milieu has proved difficult to ascertain, although it is probable that he was one of Grünberg’s protégés. His political involvement seems to have been as intense as Wittfogel’s and his scholarly activity somewhat constrained. Most of his time at the Institut was spent probing the ideological changes that accompanied the rise of capitalism. The result was a volume in the Institut’s series of publications released after some delay in 1934 as The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois World View.44 Although now almost completely forgotten, it has invited favorable comparison with Lucien Goldmann’s more recent The Hidden God.45 Borkenau’s major argument was that the emergence of an abstract, mechanical philosophy, best exemplified in the work of Descartes, was intimately connected to the rise of abstract labor in the capitalist system of manufacturing. The connection was not to be understood as causal in one direction, but rather as a mutual reinforcement. Soon after, an article appeared in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung critical of Borkenau’s central thesis, the only public acknowledgment of his isolation from the others.46
The author of the piece, Henryk Grossmann, although a figure in Institut affairs from 1926 until the 1940’s, can himself be scarcely described as a major force in its intellectual development. Closer in age and intellectual inclinations to Grünberg than to some of the younger members, Grossmann was born in 1881 in Cracow, then part of Austrian Galicia, of a well-to-do family of Jewish mine owners. Before the war he studied economics at Cracow and Vienna, at the latter with Böhm-Bawerk, and wrote among other things a historical study of Austria’s trade policies in the eighteenth century.47
