Sociologist-in-Exile? Kurt H. Wolff in America1

David Kettler (Bard College, USA)

Volker Meja (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada)

In an earlier reflection on Kurt H. Wolff’s work after his

arrival in 1939 in the United States (Kettler and Meja 2007, 93-114),

we emphasized Wolff’s effort to remain true to Mannheim’s most

ambitious aims for his cultural sociology, the hope of arriving at a

transcendent relationship to social knowledge through the

cultivational experience of the sociology of knowledge. Now we look

more closely at the obstacles in the way of such an undertaking, when

attempted by an exile in the English-speaking world in the middle

decades of the twentieth century, a shift of attention made all the

more urgent and demanding by the circumstance that Mannheim himself

arguably backed away from that larger project or, in any case,

1 This paper was first presented as a talk at the symposium “Kurt H. Wolff and Existential Truths”, at Villa Vigoni, Lago di Como, October 28-31, 2013.

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rendered it less searching by putting new weight on a religiosity in

which he did not himself believe (Kettler and Meja 1995, 251-268;

Mannheim, 2001, 175-194) .

The aim of the present paper is to examine Wolff’s work as it

developed between his arrival in the United States in 1939 and his

departure from Ohio State University for Brandeis University twenty

years later, in the context of his negotiations with the more

influential agencies in the field, with a view above all to examining

his various attempts to move beyond the earlier tactful maneuvering

between established sociology and the philosophical project that he

had brought with him. We will look at his dealings with Louis Wirth,

the influential Chicago sociologist who had been instrumental in

facilitating the publication of Karl Mannheim’s “Ideology and Utopia”

(1936) in English. We will also look at Wolff’s attempt to regularize

his standing as a faculty member at Ohio State, with illustrative

consideration of his year-long seminar on “sociology of knowledge,” of

which there is a transcript, and finally we will briefly look at the

reorientation of Wolff’s treatment of Georg Simmel from his original

respectful treatment of the sociology to his much more adventurous

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investigations of Simmel’s philosophical aims, which were close to the

most ambitious side of Mannheim’s project and which Wolff eventually

embodied in his existentialist writings and in his teaching, while

grounded in the exceptionally open environment of Brandeis University.

Our examination of Kurt Wolff’s rich working life presupposes,

first, a revision of the terms of the dispute about the specification

of exile through the suggestion that the diverse modes of displacement

are best recognized not as static classificatory boxes but as

overlapping regions on a multi-dimensional continuum along which

individuals and groups may move—by virtue of their own changing

designs and actions, their variable and often contested recognition by

others, and, above all, as a function of the bargaining between the

displaced and others, including not only the hosts but also one

another and those who remained behind in their places of departure.

At the end, then, we will propose a new way of characterizing

Wolff’s final mode of operations. We will suggest that he can best be

understood, after his relocation from Ohio State to Brandeis in 1959,

after his arrival in the place where he wrote most of the studies

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involving his concepts of surrender and catch (Wolff 1976; Wolff

1989), as a representative of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, at least in

aspiration. We take the concept, which suggests a movement beyond the

status of exile, from current discussions of quite a different sort.

It originates in a discussion of contemporary cultural forms like film

and pop-rock music, but it is of interest to us because it highlights

attempts to validate the cultural productions of individual social or

national sectors in relation to a cosmopolitan aesthetic composite.

In the literature, the phenomenon is linked to claims by social

sectors within national contexts for status and recognition in their

own contemporary cultural uniqueness (Regev, 2013). The suggestion

that his “surrender and catch” in any way resembled “hip hop” as a

cultural expression would surely have astonished Kurt Wolff, but he

would have been pleased by the point of the exercise. He aspired to

move beyond the toleration of a curious import or even acceptance of

an exile contribution to the recognition of his distinctive cultural

idiom as an expression beyond boundaries.

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This undertaking is behind Wolff’s striking formula, “one world

and cultural relativism,” which he quoted often many years after its

original statement in 1949:

Such help to reason may be help to us at this time when one of the most palpable meanings of one world is the feeling of global claustrophobia. On the one hand, our science and technology have made our destruction feasibleand thus a possibility. On the other, our social science in particular (especially cultural anthropology) has so overwhelmed us with a range of cultures that are strange,yet human -- and, being human, ours-- that we are terrified and confused. We may feel relief when we can transcend our terror and confusion by transforming them into questions such as these: What can we do with our ownways of life? How can we reinterpret our traditions so that we can all live together not to compromise but by being truer to ourselves?  In the light or mood of such questions the idea of one world and cultural relativism may impress us as a democratized version of the idea of the brotherhood of man and the immortality of the soul. If developments under the sway of subjective reason have disenchanted us to the point of being haunted by our own disappearance, we may revive by insisting that these developments, despite world wars, death camps, atom bombs, genocide, and the administered life, are a phase of secularization and rationalization whose enchantment we have yet to discover. We may revive if we realize thatthis phase challenges us to reinvent ourselves so that wemay learn how to LIVE in our world. WE must get hold of our TRANScultural selves after we have been so fascinatedby cultural relativism, by our cultural unselves. (Wolff 1974, pp. 561-2)

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We think that “surrender and catch” takes up themes put aside or

kept hidden during the years of exile, which were, however,

critical years for Wolff’s formation.

The study of exile is burdened by conceptual disputes about the

displaced persons who are to be classed as exiles rather than refugees

or émigrés or emigrants or cosmopolitans or members of a diaspora.

The disputes are an indicator, first, of the political weights

variously attached to the term—ranging from the disgrace of the

expelled kleptocrat to the celebration of the freedom fighter—and,

second, to the historical place of the trope in metaphorical or

symbolic senses in numerous religious, aesthetic, and other cultural

contexts—ranging from the sacral privileged status of the Christian or

Jew awaiting the ultimate restoration, on the one hand, and, on the

other, to the elevated distance supposedly occupied by the creative

artist.

Exiles are always special. They are suspended between two places.

In one place, they are denied, either by threat of violence or by some

other insupportable condition; in the other place, they are only

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conditionally accepted: they find asylum, not a home. They are at a

distance from both places. Moreover, in almost all uses of the term,

even exiles who are literally banished retain the special status only

so long as they continue to identify themselves--or to be identified--

with this suspension between the two places, the refusal wholly to

abandon the one or wholly to accept the other. The focus of their

attention is on their unfinished business between them and the first

place, not their limited business with the second. Exiles accordingly

appear unlike ordinary people whose ordinary needs and ambitions

regulate their lives. Exiles may be a reproach to those who stay

behind, even though exiles may also reproach themselves for their

departures, whether willing or coerced. To be an exile is to have a

project, to be a thoroughly un-trivial person, however strange your

beliefs and conduct may appear to outsiders. To be an exile is to be

interesting, in the way that a refugee or victim or traveler or

immigrant cannot be supposed to be. Exile is a status that gives a

right to a special kind of hospitality, a right to asylum, and that

exempts the beneficiary from the ordinary rules of reciprocity. It is

not a surprise, consequently, that the meaning of exile is a bone of

contention among both social scientists and cultural commentators. It

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implies a lot about the person(s) to whom it is applied. The status

makes claims and excuses, while it also implies separation from and

uncertain loyalty to the place of residence and the company of others

who are there.

Recent studies of the intellectual exiles of the 1930s have moved

away from the categories of influence or assimilation that are common

in earlier intellectual histories in order to focus instead on the

complex negotiations required as the newcomers sought to achieve and

to find understanding for an “integration” or “synthesis” between the

philosophical legacy that they treasured and integrated into their

constructs of theory, on the one hand, and the empirical methods and

problem-centered inquiry of American social science above all. The

negotiations to be examined have an aspect where the term is meant

metaphorically, as individuals try to identify the novel materials

from which they may be able to learn and to make apt use of what they

already know, but in the case of individuals who seek to be heard in

some appropriate public space, the negotiations are also quite literal

and concrete, as they seek to gain from those who possess some share

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of the scarce resources whose expenditure is required for

participation.

Before such negotiations can even begin, the exile must first

gain the recognition required to have a place at the bargaining table,

a requirement that is met more or less automatically by the native

generation, by virtue of their legitimation through their professors

and established curricula of studies, although obviously individual

bargaining power will vary. In the cases of exiles, however, the

legitimation may be seriously lacking, where language, traditions, and

reputations are alien or obscure. Even after they have been accepted

as parties in some negotiations, the terms may be very limited and

starkly conditional. In certain fields, they must prove themselves

many times, and the experience may affect their activities even after

they have achieved a measure of recognition and a share of the

requirements for public intellectual work.

These complications for exiles may be missing or much mitigated

where individual achievements are already known, where the fields and

subjects are cosmopolitan in character or where the originating

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academic cultures enjoy wide recognition. Then too, fields differ in

their internal diversity and openness, up to a limit where the

exoticism of the stranger may itself ease access to and enhance

strength at the bargaining table.

Kurt H. Wolff had few if any advantages in these respects when he

arrived in the United States. Like most other exiles, he initially

had a poor command of the language and the intellectual traditions of

the United States. He could not even gain the advantage of the

decades-old intellectual authority of German universities in certain

fields, since his degree was earned in Italy. In the United States,

the field of sociology was in the midst of a self-conscious

consolidation into a more or less standardized discipline, although

dissident groups could be found and boundaries remained contested.

Sociology, moreover, was a field only recently and tenuously

established in the universities where Wolff had been a student,

although his early studies with Karl Mannheim in Frankfurt meant that

he had some contacts at least who would respond to legitimation from

Mannheim himself or the associated scholars who had arrived earlier in

the United States and had made headway in their own negotiations.

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In a recent study of political exile, one of us proposed a five-

step paradigm for framing such stories (Kettler, 2011). First comes

the starting point, which characterizes the moment before the process

of displacement begins. In Wolff’s case, this would be the place

where he is thriving as a precocious second-year university student at

the University of Frankfurt, admitted to the active group of Karl

Mannheim’s older students, where the design involves a political

education in a kind of democratic cultural leadership as well as

preparation for the new enterprise of sociology as a vocation. And

where he distinguishes himself in relation to his influential teacher

by insisting that he would never abandon the lability that belongs to

him as a poet, not even for the valued instruction he is seeking.

Second is the event of displacement, including its grounds. In

thinking about Wolff’s departure from Frankfurt in 1933, the two

principal elements of exile are somewhat problematic. It is by no

means clear, first of all, that the activities that were disrupted by

his departure can be understood as taking place in the public sphere,

as with the political activities that are a part of the most direct

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sense of exile. Yet it is one of the special characteristics of this

sphere that its dimensions and qualities are not to be defined by some

general sociological criteria or by the subjective perceptions of the

participants—with regard to which Wolff was always clear in speaking

of this time: he saw himself as apolitical. The boundaries of the

political are defined by those in power, and in the case of the

emerging Nazi regime few things were more “political” than the

activities of the kind of intellectual that Wolff had begun to become.

They were determined to disrupt the sphere in which he worked—and this

was only contingently connected with the anti-Semitic campaign. If we

agree that this meets the first objection, we are confronted with a

second one, since it is by no means certain that Wolff’s original

departure was understood by him as an expulsion. As he reflected back

on those days, he would leave open the possibility that he had really

only gone for a month’s visit to a friend in Italy, which was then

extended because of some opportunities rather than because of a

perceived threat against his return—until at some point it became

manifest that he could not return without harm and greater risk. “ I

found life interesting and exciting, I didn’t know what I should do,

but I wanted to get away, I didn’t like it any more, and there was the

12

wide world” he explained to Nico Stehr in an interview (Stehr, 2007).

And in speaking of those days, at least in recorded conversations, he

was curiously silent on the struggles against the brown shirts in the

university that his teachers and the minority of students had fought

since 1930 at least, the dismissals of his most important teachers,

the flight of especially vulnerable fellow-students. All these

considerations introduce an element of uncertainty as to the point

when the condition of expulsion actually crystalized in his awareness,

and he became an exile.

The third aspect of political exile is its locus, which points to

the special possibilities and limitations of the place(s) of asylum.

In Kurt Wolff’s case, if we leave aside for now the fluctuating and

uncertain extent to which the nature of his displacement is best

understood as exile, the two sites are dramatically different. Six

years are spent in Italy. This is not a very long time, but it is

almost one-quarter of the life-time of the young man who leaves for

England and then the United States in 1939. This is Fascist Italy, of

course, where there can be no realistic question of the anti-Fascist

projects that occupied so many of his contemporaries cast out from

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Germany. There is no total cultural-intellectual mobilization as in

Germany, but there are forbidden areas. Wolff said of this time that

“ it was a very nice period … I was totally apolitical and primarily

happy in spite of Fascism.” It seems clear nevertheless that he is

viewed and that he comes to view himself without ambiguity as someone

forcibly displaced from Germany. He associates with fellow-exiles,

including a stint as a teacher in a school for refugee children

conducted by a senior associate in Mannheim’s circle, which surely

clarified his self- definition, and in university he was exempted from

the Fascist participation required of his Italian fellow-students and

lived as member of a small but recognizable contingent notwithstanding

his close friends who were Italian, especially Aurelio Pace, the later

historian of Africa, whose son, Joseph Pace, credits conversations

with Wolff, in Rome in 1990, on Wolff’s epistemological surrender and

catch concepts with inspiring a radical redirection in his art, away

from figurative painting toward informalisto filtranista or

filtranismo. [Then too, he is on record as cautioning the young woman

he had met in 1934 against returning to Berlin, although the motives

may well have been mixed, since they married soon after.] His thesis

at the university was devoted to the central subject of his German

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university studies, sociology of knowledge, which was effectively

unknown in Italy, and his supervisors are volunteers from a faculty

that did not teach sociology—and they include a Jewish professor, who

is soon ousted. In 1938, then, the Italian government decrees the

ouster of alien Jewish sojourners like himself. After some months in

London, sponsored by his former teacher, Mannheim, Wolff proceeds to

the United States, following a well-traveled refugee trail,

facilitated by established relatives in the United States. Once

there, however, we can say that he is socialized to the status of

intellectual exile, included in the cohort by the special but limited

opportunities of his kind and obliged to take part in the same kinds

of complex multiple negotiations as the others, with special emphasis

on finding ways of gaining recognition for the ways of thinking at

home in the newer forms of cultivation in Germany which shaped his

intellectual experience, while working on a process of concessions to

and communications with American scholars in his nominal field.

Wolff’s fourteen years at Ohio State University are vivid with such

activities, carried on with extraordinary energy and with a surprising

measure of risk-taking, as he had already done in the use of his SSRC

fellowship for the audacious Loma study that he carried as a very

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important and importantly unfinished talisman through all those years,

even while meeting professional requirements for frequent publication

and unexceptionable teaching in a field that was ever more

constituting itself as a bounded discipline.

Fourth, then, we may speak of the project of the exile, what is

to be made as one prepares to be confronted with the question of

return. Wolff is hardly indifferent to the questions central to much

thinking about political life, but he cannot be said to have had a

political project—as did those who sought to build a resistance or a

counter-government or even just a scheme of political re-education.

In fact, it may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Wolff

sought guidance from one of his favorite essays by one of his favorite

authors: Georg Simmel’s “Adventure.” There is an important sense in

which he worked to be able to live in a space of freedom,

experimentation and risk. As we know, not all projects are executed

in full, and it is certainly in order to distinguish carefully between

successes and failures in this venture, which can be almost understood

as a series of efforts to move from the historical and political sense

of exile to the cultural one, notwithstanding the constant reminders

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of the practical impediments that adhere to exile in its least

romantic aspects. We will leave the story at the fifth and final

stage, a characterization of the exile’s mission, as seen in

retrospect, satisfying ourselves with the hypothesis of “aesthetic

cosmopolitanism,” that we offered earlier to comprehend the fluid

movement beyond the bounds of exile in the course of the years at

Brandeis.

In the final part of this paper, we return to the five aspects of

the paradigm to provide an example or two of the story to which we

refer mostly in quite general terms in this preliminary overview. In

Wolff’s recollections of his time as a student in Frankfurt, as in the

records of class notes that he kept by him throughout his life, and

the points of departure for successive phases of his subsequent

intellectual life, Karl Mannheim was the professor who mattered. What

is missing, as noted, is the key place occupied by political concerns

in Mannheim’s studies of ideologies and, later, the problem of elites

in democratized societies. The special interdisciplinary seminar

initiated by Mannheim was about Liberalism, after all, and sought to

identify the inner strains that had ended, as Mannheim and his

17

students thought, the liberal world possibilities seen by Alexander

von Humboldt and his successors. With few exceptions, the advanced

students he sought to join had projects with a markedly political

coloration, not only because they were being steered in the direction

of some of Max Weber’s key questions but also because they could not

avoid bitter politics every day at the university. Mannheim’s

appointment in 1930 had been bitterly opposed by all of the people who

became his colleagues; and the instruction in other classes, putting

aside the question of rightists and proto-Fascists must have retained

echoes of these conflicts. To be apolitical in such a setting

required a strong filter.

It should be explained that there was no automatic or mass

dismissal of Jewish students in 1933. The teaching staff and

administrators were the immediate target of the law for the

purification of the civil service, and students were affected only by

the imposition of a harsh numerus clausus for future enrollments and the

loss of the Jewish teachers who had not served at the front in the

First War. So Wolff’s departure from university was voluntary, and

not altogether different from the pattern of usual student practice

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when they could afford it—punctuating their stay in university with

visits elsewhere, either to study or to wander. Yet the events taking

place after the end of January 1933 were so striking and in part

brutal that it is impossible to conclude from Wolff’s later statements

that he was in fact insouciantly unaware at the time but only that he

had radically relativized all that in his reconstruction of his own

history and that of the world. That is why the evidence must always

remain uncertain.

In comments about his university time in Florence, Wolff told an

interviewer that his decision to seek an advanced degree came about

casually, through the recommendation of a young woman, who told him

that a degree is always a good thing. He had seen himself rather as

an “adventurer,” he records. Among the surprisingly favorable

conditions of exile in Italy was a unique provision for transferring

funds from Germany—a generosity unavailable in any other place of

refuge except Palestine—and Wolff had a small inheritance that he

tapped in monthly allotments, so that the usual exile’s harsh needs

for livelihood were covered for much of his Italian sojourn. We note

the atypicality of his early years of exclusion from Germany—and we

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emphasize at the same time just how young Wolff was at the time.

There might even be a case for including him in the cohort that has

been studied as “the second wave,” the class to which one of us

belongs, but that cannot be applied to his status in America.

In a retrospective view of the work of German exile intellectuals

in the United States, the political theorist, Franz Neumann,

emphasized their need to find a way of “integrating” the historical

and philosophical legacy they brought from their earlier lives with

the American methods of comprehending what he called the “brutal facts

of life.” In fact, as his own accomplishments in Max Horkheimer’s

Institute for Social Research revealed, such integration refers in

fact to complex processes of negotiations and the conclusion of always

provisional and changeable deals between the parties, with the balance

of bargaining power almost always in the hands of the Americans who

set the terms of effective asylum. The first twenty years of Kurt H.

Wolff’s American career are full of such dealings, even if—as noted

earlier—he was quite ingenious in finding new things to strengthen his

hand at the bargaining table, notably his diligent practice of

publication and—exceptionally—his success in becoming the proprietor,

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so to speak, of certain “classics” of German sociology, notably Georg

Simmel, who also had American reputations dating back to the earlier

generation that invariably prepared in German universities, if only

for a year. The risk, of course, is that he would be recognized only

as the translator of Simmel, which gave him insufficient leverage.

Wolff’s resourcefulness is perhaps epitomized by his three-term

seminar on “Sociology of Knowledge” that he taught—evidently only once

—soon after his arrival as Assistant Professor at Ohio State

University (Wolff, 1945). He designed it so as to have the students

respond to all the books on the subject available in English, with

emphasis on questions of method; and he arranged for stenographic

notes on all the discussions, which he submitted, as the course

proceeded, to all the living English-speaking authors that were

covered, in the hope that their replies could also be incorporated.

The syllabus importantly included several philosophers critical of

claims of the supposed epistemological bearing of sociology of

knowledge, so that the exercise overall was meant to serve also as a

site of negotiation between Wolff and these characteristic Americans.

The exercise yielded some interesting responses, quite apart from

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introducing Wolff as an open-minded student to several important

Americans, notably a letter from Mannheim himself in which he drew

back from epistemological arguments, counseling patience.

Yet the project failed in one important respect. An important

interlocutor in the early phases of Wolff’s efforts was the very

influential Louis Wirth, who had first been the intermediary for Karl

Mannheim. As the sociological discipline consolidated, however,

during the critical late 1930s, Wirth shifted the balance of his own

activities and eventually dismissed Wolff at a critical point, when he

refused to support funding for an opportunity for Wolff to publish on

Sociology of Knowledge at Mannheim’s request and in Mannheim’s

influential International Library of Sociology and Social

Reconstruction. The project would obviously have been grounded on the

seminar notes. We select these moments in a complex story mainly to

indicate how difficult it was for even the most talented scholars,

especially in a field like sociology, to gain and retain recognition

as other than an esoteric decoration to the real work of the field. We

select these moments in a complex story mainly to indicate how

difficult it was for even the most talented scholars, especially in a

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field like sociology, to gain and retain recognition as other than an

esoteric decoration to the real work of the field.

Wolff’s adventurousness takes several forms. There is his

persistence in pursuing the unorthodox Loma project, a study of a

Mexican village strongly shaped by his resistance to the abstract

classifications and terms of reference of established American social

science, and a project to which he kept returning over several

decades, as he felt himself gain in strength to bypass objections.

Despite caution and continuous contact with the American reception of

the sociology of knowledge, he ventured persistently into the border

area between sociology and philosophy of culture, a zone that Mannheim

himself had largely abandoned—or segregated—in respect to more

orthodox social science, already in Frankfurt. A feature of adventure

is the experimentalism and persistent thrust. There was no simple

“integration,” but rather a willingness to mark out new ways around

the collisions between discordant ways of thinking. Implicit is a

steady distantiation from projects characteristic of exile, where

there is much more emphasis on building a strong foundation for

prospective action in connection with the occasion and aims of exile.

23

This is the process of development, which, in our judgment, brought

Wolff to the place where his distinctive search and idiom merits

recognition as a cultural achievement that has its own place in the

“one world” of his seeking.

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Backhaus and George Psathas, eds., The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H Wolff's Existential Turn. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, pp. 93-114

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2007 “How I Came to Sociology and Who I Am: A Conversation with Kurt H. Wolff”, Gary

Backhaus and George Psathas, eds., The Sociology of Radical Commitment. Kurt H. Wolff’s Existential Turn. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, Pp. 37-61. [This interview was originally published in German in Sonderheft 23/1981 in the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie ,pp. 324-346.

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