In one sense the Institut’s period of exile can be said to have begun before its actual expulsion by the Nazis. After the failure of the German revolution, its members, at least those around Horkheimer, were alienated from all political factions on the left. The SPD was treated with the scorn its craven capitulation before the status quo deserved—in fact, one might argue that the SPD’s betrayal of the working class colored the Frankfurt School’s subsequent distrust of all “moderate” solutions. The KPD was equally anathema, for its transparent dependence on Moscow and its theoretical bankruptcy. And the pathetic attempts of such left-wing intellectuals as Kurt Hiller and Carl von Ossietzky to transcend the differences between the two parties, or to offer a viable alternative, were rejected for the pipe dreams they quickly proved to be. The result was that the Frankfurt School chose the purity of its theory over the affiliation that a concrete attempt to realize it would have required. That this entailed disadvantages as well as advantages shall be seen in subsequent chapters.
The prudent transfer of the Institut’s endowment to Holland in 1931 allowed the continuation of its work without much interruption. The first year in Geneva was a period of readjustment, but not stagnation. The project on the attitudes of workers and employees was not curtailed seriously. Andries Sternheim, a Dutch socialist who had ties to the labor movement, was recommended by someone in Albert Thomas’s office to Horkheimer as a prospective member. In Geneva he was admitted as an assistant, and after Pollock’s departure for the United States, he became the branch’s director. Although of great help in collecting materials for the project, he contributed little to the theoretical work of the Institut, aside from a few contributions to the study of leisure in modern society.108
Hampered occasionally by the problems of adjustment to a new publisher, the Zeitschrift continued to appear regularly. New names were added to the roster of previous contributors. George Rusche wrote on the relationship between the labor market and criminal punishment,109 anticipating a book he later published with Otto Kirchheimer’s help under the auspices of the Institut. Kurt Mandelbaum (often under the names Kurt or Erich Baumann) and Gerhard Meyer added articles on economics to those written by Pollock and Grossmann.110 Periodic contributions came from the Paris branch, which attracted such able assistants as Raymond Aron and Georges Friedmann. Paul Ludwig Landsberg, a philosopher for whom the Institut had high hopes that were later dashed by his murder by the Nazis, wrote on race ideology and pseudo-science.111 American issues were dealt with by Julian Gumperz in a series of articles.112 The “International” in the Institut’s new title was thus clearly evident in the pages of the Zeitschrift.
It soon came to mean much more as the Institut began to look elsewhere for a new home. While appreciating its usefulness, Horkheimer and the others never considered the Geneva branch a permanent center of the Institut’s affairs. In May, 1933, Grossmann had expressed an anxiety they all shared, when he wrote to Paul Mattick in America that “fascism also makes great progress in Switzerland and new dangers threaten our Institut there as well.”113 Pollock made a trip to London in February, 1934, to appraise the possibility of establishing the Institut in England; but intensive negotiations with Sir William Beveridge, director of the London School of Economics, and Farquharson and his colleagues at the Institute of Sociology convinced him of its unlikelihood. The limited opportunities in England for the refugee scholars who began to stream out of Germany in 1933 have been frequently noted.114 Of those associated with the Institut, only Borkenau elected to make London his permanent home in exile. He was able to obtain a position teaching international politics in the adult education section of the University of London. A few years later he took time out to visit Spain during the Civil War, which confirmed his already strong dislike for communism and produced one of the classic studies of the war, The Spanish Cockpit.115 By then, his connections with the Institut, except for one last essay in the Studien über Autorität und Familie (Studies on Authority and Family) in 1936,116 had been severed.
In Paris, where the academic establishment was even more impenetrable than in England, the prospects seemed equally limited. Paul Honigsheim, who fled from Cologne and became head of the Institut’s Paris branch, has described the cold reception that normally greeted emigrés to France:
The typical French intellectual, who wanted security and a predictable future for himself and his family, found his way of life threatened by those damn German intellectuals, who did not spend their time drinking apéritifs with their friends but worked twice as hard as the Frenchman. They worked for the sake of God or, if they were not religious believers, for work’s sake, which for a true German scholar is almost the same. Accordingly, in contrast to the sympathetic attitude in the United States, the French did not welcome the appointment of German scholars in their midst. Thus it took courage to work openly on behalf of German refugees.117
Bouglé, Halbwachs, and their colleagues, Honigsheim stresses, had that courage, but they were in a small minority; as a result, France was ruled out as a possible new home for the Institut’s headquarters.
Despite the Institut’s Marxist image, at no time was the thought of going eastward to Stalin’s Russia seriously entertained, even by Grossmann, who made a short and unsuccessful journey to Moscow in the mid-thirties, or by Wittfogel. The only serious possibility left was America. Julian Gumperz was sent there in 1933 to explore the situation. Gumperz had been a student of Pollock’s since 1929 and at one time a Communist Party member, although he later gave it all up, became a stockbroker, and wrote an anti-communist book in the forties;118 he was born in America and thus was fluent in English. He returned from his trip with a favorable report, assuring Horkheimer and the others that the Institut’s endowment, which still brought in about $30,000 a year, would be sufficient to guarantee survival in a country still mired in economic depression.
Over the years, the Institut had made several contacts with prominent figures in the American academic world, such as Charles Beard, Robert Maclver, Wesley Mitchell, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Robert Lynd, all of whom were at Columbia University. Thus when Horkheimer made his first trip to the United States in May, 1934, he was able to gain access to Columbia’s patriarchal president, Nicholas Murray Butler. Much to his surprise, Butler offered the Institut affiliation with the university and a home in one of its buildings, at 429 West 117th Street. Horkheimer, fearing he had misunderstood Butler because of his limited command of English, wrote a four-page letter asking him to confirm and clarify his offer. Butler’s response was a laconic “You have understood me perfectly!”119 And so the International Institute for Social Research, as revolutionary and Marxist as it had appeared in Frankfurt in the twenties, came to settle in the center of the capitalist world, New York City. Marcuse came in July, Lowenthal in August, Pollock in September, and Wittfogel soon after. Fromm had been in the United States since 1932, when he came in response to an invitation to lecture by the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis. These men were among the first to arrive of that wave of Central European refugee intellectuals who so enriched American cultural life in the decades that followed.120
The transition was by no means without its difficulties. Still, in comparison with the members of Alvin Johnson’s “university in exile” at the New School for Social Research, who had few or no financial resources to make their resettlement easy, the Institut’s members were fortunate. In fact, the tensions that developed between the two refugee groups, although due in part to ideological differences,121 were also clearly exacerbated by their contrasting financial situations. It should be added, however, that in later years the Institut maintained a strong sense of responsibility to less well-off refugees. When problems did exist for Institut members, they were those of language and cultural adjustment, which plague any immigrant, but not of finances. The most difficult intellectual adjustment, as we shall see later, involved coordinating the philosophically grounded social research practiced by the Institut with the rigorous antispeculative bias of American social science. The use of American empirical techniques that its members learned in exile was an important lesson brought back to Germany after the war, but these skills had not been acquired without considerable hesitancy.
In
