of Social Research), with Horkheimer and Pollock as its two “presidents”; Lowenthal, Fromm, and Sternheim were named their successors the following year.88 Not only was the “Frankfurt School” now Swiss, but also French and English, as offers of help from friends in Paris and London led to the founding of small branches in those cities in 1933. Celestin Bouglé, a former student of Durkheim and director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure’s Centre de Documentation since 1920, suggested to Horkheimer that some space might be found for the Institut in his offices on the Rue d’Ulm. Although a Proudhonist politically (he was an adherent of the Radical Socialist Party) and thus not sympathetic to the Marxist cast of the Institut’s work, Bouglé was willing to forget politics in considering the Institut’s plight. Maurice Halbwachs, another prominent Durkheimian then in Strassbourg, and Georges Scelle, who taught law in Paris when not in the Hague as French advocate at the International Court, joined Bouglé as cosponsors of the move. Further support came from Henri Bergson, who had been impressed with the Institut’s work. In London a similar proposal was made by Alexander Farquharson, the editor of the Sociological Review, who was able to provide a few rooms in Le Play House. Sidney Webb, R. H. Tawney, Morris Ginsberg, and Harold Laski all added their voices to Farquharson’s, and a small office was established that lasted until lack of funds forced its closing in 1936.
In the meantime, the Zeitschrift’s Leipzig publisher, C. L. Hirschfeld, informed Horkheimer that it could no longer risk continuing publication. Bouglé suggested as a replacement the Librairie Félix Alean in Paris. This proved acceptable, and a connection was begun that lasted until 1940, when the Nazis once again acquired the power to intimidate a publisher of the Zeitschrift.
With the first issue of the Zeitschrift to appear in Paris in September, 1933, the Institut’s initial German period was conclusively over. In the brief decade since its founding, it had gathered together a group of young intellectuals with diverse talents willing to coordinate them in the service of social research as the Institut conceived it. The first Frankfurt years were dominated by Grünberg’s views, as described earlier, but under his direction the Institut gained structural solidarity and a foothold in Weimar’s intellectual life. Although concentrating on research, it helped train students of the caliber of Paul Baran,89 who in 1930 worked on a projected second volume of Pollock’s study of the Soviet economy. Hans Gerth, Gladys Meyer, and Josef Dünner were other students during the pre-emigration years who later made an impact on American social science. (Dünner, it might be noted in passing, wrote a roman à clef in 1937, entitled If I Forget Thee . . . , in which Institut figures appear under pseudonyms.)90 In addition, all Institut members participated actively in the discussions about the future of socialism, which attracted such Frankfurt luminaries as Hendrik de Man and Paul Tillich. The independence provided by Hermann Weil’s generosity allowed the Institut to remain unencumbered by political or academic obligations, even after his death in 1927. It also guaranteed the continuation of its identity in exile, at a time when other German refugee scholars were put through the strain of reestablishing themselves in an alien world without financial backing. An additional $100,000 contributed by Felix Weil, after he rejoined the Institut in New York in 1935, helped keep it financially secure through the thirties.
The sense of a shared fate and common purpose that strikes the observer as one of the Institut’s chief characteristics—especially after Horkheimer became director—was transferable to the Institut’s new homes partly because of its financial good fortune. It had been the intent of the founding members to create a community of scholars whose solidarity would serve as a microcosmic foretaste of the brotherly society of the future. The Zeitschrift, as mentioned earlier, helped cement the sense of group identity; and the common experience of forced exile and regrouping abroad added considerably to this feeling. Within the Institut itself, a still smaller group had coalesced around Horkheimer, consisting of Pollock, Lowenthal, Adorno, Marcuse, and Fromm. It is really their work, rooted in the central tradition of European philosophy, open to contemporary empirical techniques, and addressed to current social questions, that formed the core of the Institut’s achievement.
If one seeks a common thread running through individual biographies of the inner circle, the one that immediately comes to mind is their birth into families of middle or upper-middle class Jews (in Adorno’s case, only one parent was Jewish). Although this is not the place to launch a full-scale discussion of the Jewish radical in the Weimar Republic, a few observations ought to be made. As noted earlier, one of the arguments employed by Felix Weil and Pollock to persuade the elder Weil to endow the Institut had been the need to study anti-Semitism in Germany. It was not, however, until the 1940’s that this task was actually begun. If one were to characterize the Institut’s general attitude towards the “Jewish question,” it would have to be seen as similar to that expressed by another radical Jew almost a century before, Karl Marx. In both cases the religious or ethnic issue was clearly subordinated to the social. In Dämmerung, Horkheimer attacked Jewish capitalists who were against anti-Semitism simply because it posed an economic threat. “The readiness to sacrifice life and property for belief,” he wrote, “is left behind with the material basis of the ghetto. With the bourgeois Jew, the hierarchy of goods is neither Jewish nor Christian, but bourgeois. . . . The Jewish revolutionary, like the ‘aryan,’ risks his own life for the freedom of mankind.”91 Further evidence of their de-emphasis of strictly Jewish as opposed to social oppression was their indifference to Zionism as a solution to the plight of the Jews.92
In fact, the members of the Institut were anxious to deny any significance at all to their ethnic roots, a position that has not been eroded with time in most of their cases. Weil, for example, in his extensive correspondence with this author, has heatedly rejected any suggestion that Jewishness—defined religiously, ethnically, or culturally—had any influence whatsoever on the selection of Institut members or the development of their ideas. He has also insisted that the assimilation of Jews in Weimar had gone so far that “discrimination against Jews had retreated completely to the ‘social club level,’ ”93 with the result that the Institut’s neglect of the “Jewish question” was justified by its practical disappearance. That the Institut was founded one year after the foreign minister of Germany, Walter Rathenau, was assassinated largely because of his ethnic roots seems to have had no personal impact on the “assimilated” Jews connected with the Institut. Wittfogel, one of its gentile members, has confirmed this general blindness, arguing that he was one of the few exceptions who recognized the precariousness of the Jews’ position, even of those who were most assimilated.94 What strikes the current observer is the intensity with which many of the Institut’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities. Assimilated German Jews, as has often been noted, were surprised by the ease with which German society accepted the anti-Semitic measures of the Nazis. Self-delusions on this score persisted in some cases as late as the war. Even so hardheaded a realist as Franz Neumann could write in Behemoth that “the German people are the least anti-Semitic of all.”95 His appraisal of the situation seems to have been supported by almost all of his Institut colleagues.
In the face of this vehement rejection of the meaningfulness of Jewishness in their backgrounds, one can only look for indirect ways in which it might have played a role. Certainly the overt impact of Judaism as a system of belief seems to have been negligible. The two possible exceptions to this were Leo Lowenthal and Erich Fromm, both of whom had been active in the group comprising the Frankfurt Lehrhaus. Lowenthal had been one of the contributors to the Festschrift dedicated to Rabbi Nobel in 1921, writing on the demonic in religion.96 He continued to find his way into the pages of such publications as the Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt as late as 1930, although by then he had left his truly religious period behind. Still, one would be hard pressed at any time to find echoes of Lowenthal’s interest in Judaism in the work he did for the Institut. Fromm, on the other hand, has often been characterized as retaining secular versions of Jewish themes in his work, even after he left Orthodoxy in the mid-twenties.97 Frequent comparisons have been made between his work and other members of the Lehrhaus group, particularly Martin Buber. What these similarities were will be made clearer in
