convictions,”75 even though other authors continued to contribute occasional articles. Editorial decisions were ultimately Horkheimer’s, although Lowenthal, drawing on his years of relevant experience, served as managing editor and was fully responsible for the extensive review section. One of Lowenthal’s first tasks was a trip by plane to Leopold von Wiese, the doyen of German sociologists, to assure him that the Zeitschrift would not compete with his own Kölner Viertelsjahrshefte für Soziologie (Cologne Quarterly of Sociology).
As Horkheimer explained in the foreword to the first issue,76 Sozialforschung was not the same as the sociology practiced by von Wiese and other more traditional German academicians. Following Gerlach and Grünberg, Horkheimer stressed the synoptic, interdisciplinary nature of the Institut’s work. He particularly stressed the role of social psychology in bridging the gap between individual and society. In the first article, which followed, “Observations on Science and Crisis,”77 he developed the connection between the current splintering of knowledge and the social conditions that helped produce it. A global economic structure both monopolistic and anarchic, he argued, had promoted a confused state of knowledge. Only by overcoming the fetishistic grounding of scientific knowledge in pure consciousness, and by recognizing the concrete historical circumstances that conditioned all thought, could the present crisis be surmounted. Science must not ignore its own social role, for only by becoming conscious of its function in the present critical situation could it contribute to the forces that would bring about the necessary changes.
The contributions to the Zeitschrift’s first issue reflected the diversity of Sozialforschung. Grossmann wrote once again on Marx and the problem of the collapse of capitalism.78 Pollock discussed the Depression and the possibilities for a planned economy within a capitalist framework.79 Lowenthal outlined the tasks of a sociology of literature, and Adorno did the same, in the first of two articles, for music.80 The remaining two essays dealt with the psychological dimension of social research: one by Horkheimer himself on “History and Psychology,”81 the second by a new member of the Institut, Erich Fromm.82 (A full treatment of the Institut’s integration of psychoanalysis and its Hegelianized Marxism appears in Chapter 3.) Lowenthal, who had been a friend of Fromm’s since 1918, introduced him as one of three psychoanalysts brought into the Institut’s circle in the early thirties. The others were Karl Landauer, the director of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute, which was associated with the Institut, and Heinrich Meng. Landauer’s contributions to the Zeitschrift were restricted to the review section. (In the first issue he was in very good company: among the other reviewers were Alexandre Koyré, Kurt Lewin, Karl Korsch, and Wilhelm Reich.) Meng, although more interested in mental hygiene than social psychology, helped organize seminars and contributed reviews on topics related to the Institut’s interests.
With the introduction of psychoanalysis to the Institut, the Grünberg era was clearly over. In 1932 the publication of a Festschrift,83 collected on the occasion of Grünberg’s seventieth birthday the previous year, gave further evidence of the transition. Pollock, Horkheimer, Wittfogel, and Grossmann all contributed articles, but most of the pieces were by older friends from Grünberg’s Viennese days, such as Max Beer and Max Adler. The change this symbolized was given further impetus by the acceptance of a new member in late 1932, Herbert Marcuse, who was to become one of the principal architects of Critical Theory.
Marcuse was born in 1898 in Berlin, into a family of prosperous assimilated Jews, like most of the others. After completing his military service in the war, he briefly became involved in politics in a Soldiers’ Council in Berlin. In 1919 he quit the Social Democratic Party, which he had joined two years earlier, in protest against its betrayal of the proletariat. After the subsequent failure of the German revolution, he left politics altogether to study philosophy at Berlin and Freiburg, receiving his doctorate at the latter university in 1923 with a dissertation on the Künstlerroman (novels in which artists played key roles). For the next six years he tried his hand at book selling and publishing in Berlin. In 1929 he returned to Freiburg, where he studied with Husserl and Heidegger, both of whom had a considerable impact on his thought. During this period Marcuse broke into print with a number of articles in Maximilian Beck’s Philosophische Hefte and Rudolf Hilferding’s Die Gesellschaft. His first book, Hegel’s Ontology and the Foundation of a Theory of Historicity,84 appeared in 1932, bearing the marks of his mentor Heidegger, for whom it had been prepared as a Habilitationsschrift. Before Heidegger could accept Marcuse as an assistant, however, their relations became strained; the political differences between the Marxist-oriented student and the increasingly right-wing teacher were doubtless part of the cause. Without a prospect for a job at Freiburg, Marcuse left that city in 1932. The Kurator of the University of Frankfurt, Kurt Riezler, having been asked by Husserl to intercede for Marcuse, recommended him to Horkheimer.
In the second issue of the Zeitschrift Adorno reviewed Hegel’s Ontology and found its movement away from Heidegger promising. Marcuse, he wrote, was tending away from “ ‘The Meaning of Being’ to an openness to being-in-the-world (Seienden), from fundamental ontology to philosophy of history, from historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) to history.”85 Although Adorno felt that there was some ground still to be covered before Marcuse cast off Heidegger’s thrall entirely, the chance for a successful integration of his approach to philosophy with that of the Institut seemed favorable. Horkheimer concurred, and so in 1933 Marcuse was added to those in the Institut who were committed to a dialectical rather than a mechanical understanding of Marxism. He was immediately assigned to the Geneva office.
With the Nazi assumption of power on January 30, 1933, the future of an avowedly Marxist organization, staffed almost exclusively by men of Jewish descent—at least by Nazi standards—was obviously bleak. Horkheimer had spent most of 1932 in Geneva, where he was ill with diphtheria. Shortly before Hitler came to power he returned to Frankfurt, moving with his wife from their home in the suburb of Kronberg to a hotel near the Frankfurt railroad station. During February, the last month of the winter semester, he suspended his lectures on logic to speak on the question of freedom, which was indeed becoming more questionable with each passing day. In March he slipped across the border to Switzerland, just as the Institut was being closed down for “tendencies hostile to the state.” The greater part of the Institut library in the building on the Victoria-Allee, then numbering over sixty thousand volumes, was seized by the government; the transfer of the endowment two years earlier prevented a similar confiscation of the Institut’s financial resources. On April 13 Horkheimer had the honor of being among the first faculty members to be formally dismissed from Frankfurt, along with Paul Tillich, Karl Mannheim, and Hugo Sinzheimer.86
By then all of the Institut’s official staff had left Frankfurt. The one exception was Wittfogel, who returned to Germany from Switzerland and was thrown into a concentration camp in March because of his political activities. His second wife, Olga Lang (originally Olga Joffé), herself later to become an expert on Chinese affairs and an assistant at the Institut, worked to secure his release, as did such friends as R. H. Tawney in England and Karl Haushofer in Germany. Wittfogel’s freedom was finally granted in November, 1933, and he was permitted to emigrate to England. Shortly thereafter, he joined the others in America. Adorno, whose politics were not as controversial as Wittfogel’s, maintained a residence in Germany, although he spent most of the next four years in England, studying at Merton College, Oxford. Grossmann found refuge in Paris for three years and went to England for one more, rather unhappy, year in 1937, before finally coming to the United States. Lowenthal remained in Frankfurt only until March 2, when he followed Marcuse, Horkheimer, and other Institut figures to Geneva, the last to depart before the Institut was closed. Pollock was in effect already in exile when the Nazis came to power, although he was unaware that it was to last for almost two decades and extend to two continents.
In February of 1933 the Geneva branch was incorporated with a twenty-one member board87 as the administrative center of the Institut. In recognition of its European
