The “Other Germany” and the Question of Bildung: Weimar to Bonn

David Kettler (Bard College, US) and Gerhard Lauer (Göttingen, Germany)

The recognition of a difference between the scientific dimension of institutionalized knowledge in society and therhetorical, didactic one , as well as the potential for conflict between them, is by no means unique to modern German culture. For centuries, English universities put theformation of clergymen and gentlemen ahead of the advancement of knowledge, and American colleges vied with each other in adapting both instruction and inquiry to the building of piety or moral character or civic virtue, not tospeak of the utilitarian didactic achievements of inculcating commercial initiative or housewifely guile. Francis Bacon and Adam Smith denounced Oxford and Cambridge early in the modern era, and their spiritual heirs later created the London School of Economics, while the protests of Charles Beard and Thorstein Veblen against the higher education in America helped to bring into being the New School that was eventually to harbor an important contingentof the German émigrés of 1933.

Yet neither in England nor the United States did questions arising out of the contrasting aims of organized knowledge penetrate so deeply into competing designs of suchknowledge, lay claim to such comprehensive ethical significance, resonate so profoundly in public discourses remote from debates about education in the narrower sense, or have such ambitions on the allocation of authority and power in society. Some of these themes doubtless arose among essayists elsewhere, as with Matthew Arnold or T.S. Eliot in Britain, or Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau in the United States, but the comprehensiveness, centrality,and pervasiveness of the problem constellation was distinctively German, as was its extension to spheres of discourse remote from the essayistic.? The conception of

Germany as uniquely a “Kulturnation”and of cultural policy consequently as the subject matter of prime political decisions was admittedly undermined by the defeat in the First World War, which had been marked by this ideological motif, but in the world of the literary intelligentsia the conception revived in diverse forms in the Weimar years.? Inthe various discourses centered in the university faculties of philosophy, especially within the humanities and social studies, intellectual work in Germany was commonly searched,by reviewers addressing the surprisingly broad and active non-university audience for academic work, for its stand on the issues between Bildung (broad cultivation) and Wissenschaft (specialized research science), even if its substance was remote from pedagogical questions. The interrogation was a “philosophical” one, whether the writers sought to contribute to “orientation,” to counter the loss of meaning widely associated with the explosion of modernity, or whether they were engaged in “specialist” science “for its own sake.” For the intellectuals forced into emigration by the Hitler regime, this dimension of their past intellectualactivity, as well as the souvenirs of their prominent participation in controversies about the supposed “crisis” of Bildung in the decades before 1933 of many of them, remained a persistent presence.? With their faces towards Germany, moreover, many of the émigrés grounded their claimsto represent the “other,” better Germany precisely on the charge that the Nazis had betrayed the Bildung ideal and practice that the emigration was safeguarding in exile. In their relations with English and American intellectual life,however, in the processes of acculturation that proceeded inresponse to necessity as well as to attractions, the older, “philosophical” context frequently appeared exaggerated and professionally unsound.

To add to the complexity of the situation, many of the elements of the core German Bildung tradition, the canonized names and poses, as well as the reputation of uncompromisingGerman Wissenschaft enjoyed high status in the significantly different setting of American campaigns against shallow

moralism, commercialism or hyper-specialization in higher education, notwithstanding the propagandistic extravagances of the First World War years. The high standing of German universities among American professors, especially of the older generation, was both evidenced and reinforced by the considerable number of them who had done a Wanderjahr of advanced study there, as a matter of course. Since late in the nineteenth century, moreover, the debate about American higher education was strongly influenced by conflicting citations of German models, a pattern of argument emphatically renewed by Abraham Flexner in his widely discussed Universities – American, English, German, published in 1930, on the eve of the post-1933 emigrations.? The exchange between Flexner and his critics offers a perspective on the patterns of expectations–accepting or disparaging–that confronted émigré scholars, scientists, andintellectuals when they came, inescapably as Germans, to theAmerican academic world.?

Flexner argued that neither American nor English institutions of higher education were more than secondary schools, in the last analysis, while Germany alone, buildingon the historic initiatives of Wilhelm von Humboldt, knew genuine universities. Above all, Flexner attacked the incorporation of vocational and “professional” training devoid of scientific problems or methods into the university. Law may be included and medicine belongs, sincethese entail both rigorous scientific disciplines and humanitarian ideals. German students were brought to maturity, he contended, by their experience in the academic secondary schools (Gymnasia), whose high standards were safeguarded by the nation-wide Matura examination;and the universities were free to serve disciplined scholarship and science alone, without regard to the paternalistic or ad hocutilitarian concerns of schools in the United States.?

Flexner was an influential commentator at the time, an educationist whose power was by no means limited to the force of his public arguments. Although his retirement from

his position as Secretary of the General Education Board--the Rockefellers’ first educational philanthropy-- was not altogether voluntary, he remained well connected with major donors in the field of education, respectful of his remarkable record. His proposals for massive reform in medical education, first in 1910 for the Carnegie Foundationfor the Advancement of Teaching and later for the General Education Board, had been backed up by conditional foundation grants, whose terms he materially shaped, as was his scheme for a progressive secondary school, implemented in the Lincoln School at Teachers College, Columbia. To judge by the accounts in his autobiography, Flexner must have generated and programmed the expenditure of more than $60,000,000 on higher education during his years with Carnegie and Rockefeller. Within a year of the publication of his 1930 critique of American universities, moreover, he had been given the endowment funds to establish the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.? Even at 70, in short, he was a force that could not be simply ignored, quite apart from the welcome reception that his frequently sarcastic assault on American universities received among graduates and professors of those institutions who wrote andread the literary periodicals of the time. He was in a unique position to return to public attention the arguments based on idealized German school and university models that had been pushed aside by the ideological mobilization against Germany in the First World War, the fear of Socialist influences from Germany in the postwar period, thedistrust among social scientists and publicists of the “philosophical” and anti-scientific motifs in German books like Spengler’s Decline of the West, and the celebration of new American models. After April 1933, then, he was also among the first to act on his admiration of the German academic tradition by assisting in the placement of distinguished émigrés.

Yet it would be a mistake, first, to confuse Flexner’s thesis with an importation of the German debate about Bildungas it had developed during the Weimar years, with its

presumed bearing on the philosophical aims and designs of knowledge, especially since he shows no awareness, except for the chronological division between school and university, of the division between Bildung and Wissenschaft featured in the debate about the supposed “crisis of Bildung”in Germany. The actual Weimar debate compounded themes initiated in the nineteenth century by Nietzsche’s assertions of the claims of “life” against the “dead knowledge” of the Bildung tradition with ideas arising in thecontext of newly assertive social movements, to challenge the Wissenschaften at home in the universities, in a state of the question remote from the conjunction of the two conceptsin the earlier idealistic ideology put forward in the name of Humboldt. This involved also a generational conflict. Siegfried Kracauer, a rising cultural journalist of the early Weimar period and later exile, wrote:

The crisis of the sciences--which is by now a topic of commonplace discussion--is most visible in the empirical sciences such as history and sociology, which are dedicated to the investigation of intellectual/spiritual contexts and to the explanation of meaningful human action.. . . The consequences of this dilemma have becomequite palpable: senseless amassing of material on the one hand and unavoidable relativism on the other. These alone suffice to explain the "hatredof science" rampant among the best of today's academic youth. (Kracauer 1995: 213-214)

Like Kracauer, a number of the exiled intellectuals had beenamong those who sought for some mediation of the conflict, following the line laid down by Georg Simmel, whose authority outlived his death at the beginning of the epoch:

Anyone who has been active for decades in the academic sphere and who enjoys the trust of the youth knows how often it is precisely the inwardlymost alive and idealistic young men who turn away

in disappointment, after a few semesters, from what the university offers them in the way of general cultivation, the satisfaction of their innermost needs. For what they want, quite apart from the most outstanding instruction of a specialized and exact kind, is something more general or, if you like, something more personal. This can be made available in the treatment of history, art, or philology, to be sure, but it canbe offered most purely and completely by philosophy, despite its scientific shortcomings. Call this, if you like, a mere by-product of science--or philosophy as science, but, if it is no longer offered to young people, the best among them will turn to other sources that promise to satisfy these deepest needs: to mysticism or to what they call “life,” to social democracy or to literature in general, to a misunderstood Nietzsche or to a materialism tinged with scepticism. Let us not deceive ourselves. The German universities have largely surrendered the inner leadership of the youth to forces of this kind. (Quoted in Lichtblau 1996: 408)?

Flexner knew nothing about this distinctive German theme of inner, subjective development, or about the conception of the “youth” as impatient, assertive actor in the struggle for Bildung, striking exemplified by the studentgroup that brought Max Weber to Munich to speak about “Science as a Vocation.? The emigrants brought these additional questions and expectations, as well as, for many of the Jews among them, the contradictory experience of the transmutation of Bildung from entryway to exclusionary formula, as Bildung had become a motto of anti-Enlightenment,Gemeinschaft-centered opinion in the course of the struggle with Wissenschaft.? Flexner’s attempted revival of earlier American idealization of German university culture itself stands for a pattern of demands on the exiles that many of

them will find puzzling and some will experience as demeaning, while others will use them as a route of access.

Second, it would be an error to suppose that Flexner’s undoubted capacity to gain attention for his theses about the superiority of the German universities meant that he could also redefine the field. The Journal of Higher Education, founded at the Ohio State University in the year that Flexner’s book appeared, devoted its entire October, 1931 issue, to reviews of Flexner’s Universities; and these provide a valuable guide to American academic understandings of and responses to challenges in the name of an idealized German contrast model to American higher education, as well as a preview of the context within which the German émigrés wouldhave to find their way and their place a few years later.

The editor of the journal, W.W. Charters, may be excused the irritation in his conclusion that Flexner uses ridicule because he “has wholly missed the point” of university people trying to meet state-imposed obligations for professional training in vital social domains. Two of Charter’s own studies are the object of almost three pages of such ridicule.? Charters grants Flexner that he has justly depicted the “Valhalla” of the research professor, taking a side-swipe at Flexner’s German ideal without further reference, but he denies that this addresses any of the real problems posed by the need to unite practice with knowledge, as a result of the “profound social forces which swept through the university to produce the professional schools.” Another Ohio State professor, the philosopher, B.H. Bode, is more sympathetic to Flexner’s critique of muchAmerican practice, but he finds a contradiction between, on the one hand, Flexner’s abrupt disjuncture between secondaryschool cultivation and university research and, on the other, his insistence that university work too must be charged with “cultural values” and dedication to social intelligence. The failure to define either of those key concepts, as well as the contradiction itself, is, accordingto Bode, “apparently due to the fact that Mr. Flexner ...

takes over the ... German conception of culture, lock, stock, and barrel.” Once it is recognized that the endlesssearch for cultural values cannot be packaged in an authoritarian transmission of traditional ideas, as the Germans do, there is no further reason to draw Flexner’s sharp line between school and university, and the liberal arts college comes back into its own. Bode closes with the ironic compliment that the book “may be expected to assist modern education in sloughing off a tradition from which theauthor himself has been unable to escape.”?

Perhaps the most pointed critique of Flexner’s idealization of German models is made by the associate editor of the journal, W. H. Cowley, soon to be president ofHamilton College. In part, he is simply angry at Flexner’s disdain of empirical research as a route to reform of highereducation, but, more interestingly, he opposes Flexner as the main protagonist of “the German scholarly ideal,” prevalent among graduate-studies centered universities whosedemands (and graduates) have ever more overshadowed “the traditional American ideal of the broad, symmetrical education of the individual.” He speaks of mounting protestat the Association of American Colleges and increasing callsto action against the subordination of higher education to the purely intellectual interests of a tiny minority, at thesacrifice of the democratic requirement of an “enlightened citizenry.” ? A criticism similarly discomfited by what it takes to be Flexner’s unreflective preference for a “feudal-aristocratic place of intelligence” rather than a democratic, practical one is especially noteworthy because it comes from William H. Kilpatrick, second only to Dewey inhis importance for Progressive Education and a major figure in the development of the Lincoln School at Columbia Teachers College, which Flexner himself had originally brought into being. Unlike most of the other commentators, Kilpatrick takes note of Flexner’s progressive strand, unparalleled in most German arguments, the suggestion that the autonomous research university is essential precisely because no other agency will provide the critical analysis

of a “society that is driven it knows not whither by forces of unprecedented violence.” Yet he objects that this is negated by Flexner’s formalism, his “classical” penchant forneatly dividing school from university, cultivation from science, the learned from the rest. “Each idea and class must stand apart,” Kilpatrick writes, “nicely bounded, not–as in democracy and modern logic–each one merging into its neighbor. Crude America must be withstood.”1?

Kilpatrick’s criticisms gain added weight, from the standpoint of our present interest, when taken together witha review of Flexner by the leader of Kilpatrick’s school, John Dewey, published in the Spring of 1932. Sympathetic with Flexner’s assaults against follies and distortions in higher education, he nevertheless protests that Flexner makes no attempt “to indicate the direction in which the American university might and should move.” This can only be done, according to Dewey, if it is recognized that universities are a manifestation of the ethos of the national communities they serve.

We– the American people– are blindly trying to do something new in the history of educational effort. We are trying to develop universal education; in the process we are forced by facts to identify a universal education with an education in which the vocational quality is pervasive. Mr. Flexner’s criticisms would have been as truthful and as drastic if his criterion had been a recognition of what underlies both the excellencies and the defects of our society and our education instead of one which looks, however unconsciously, to the dualism of the past and of other societies.1?

Dewey’s judgment means that the American tendency that comesclosest to the German insistence on the deep ethical and political ramifications of pedagogical arrangements is firmly committed to a uniquely American situation and mission in education. Dewey and his associates, as

democrats and humanitarians, will be among the leaders in welcoming the German émigrés, but they will also expect themto shift rapidly from the old to the new context of problems.

In sum, the intellectual and cultural émigrés from Germany entered an academic landscape where there were both avid friends and harsh critics of the specialist, research-centered, performance-oriented, autonomous German universitysystem, but where neither the one nor the other actually grasped the state of the question of Bildung, as it was contested in the discourse of Weimar intellectuals, in the university and out.

The present volume brings together a group of studiesthat variously explore the writings of several well-known members of the post-1933 German-speaking intellectual and cultural emigration against the background of the vicissitudes of Bildung in exile. Some twenty figures are included, ranging from Thomas Mann and László Moholy-Nagy toFranz L. Neumann and Paul Lazarsfeld, with special emphasis on the so-called neo-Humanist tendency variously oriented toErnst Cassirer or Thomas Mann, as well as the indispensable cultural commentators, including Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Kracauer. That only three of the individuals on this list were themselves university faculty does not mean that any of them were removed from the Bildung controversy: the pervasiveness of the issue across the intellectual landscape is precisely the premise of the analysis. The aim is not, in any case, to rescue forgotten names but to explore an approach beyond the scope of past exile studies, to offer new help with the interpretation of texts and materials whose intrinsic value is not seriously in question. The idea is to read through the texts to the vicissitudes of Bildung, and then to reconsider the resultingtransparent palimpsest. There are a number of insufficiently explored questions to be addressed by this means, ranging from the puzzling success of so many émigrés as university teachers to the no less puzzling sense of

disappointment that haunted many of the émigrés who were most successful in making notable careers. At a more complex level of analysis, there are new insights to be gained, on the one hand, about the inner structure of the bargaining processes generally discussed as acculturation: the unfinished Bildung problem complex is usually neglected at the bargaining table. And, conversely, many obscurities or false notes in the writings of exile can be understood asdocuments of this practical aporia. Clearly, this issue is less likely to be present in cases where the condition of exile is effectively subsumed under patterns of international scientific migration, which were under way between Germany and the United States before Hitler came to power, supported in certain disciplines by the Rockefeller Foundation and other agencies dedicated to a global domain of Wissenschaft. These cases, especially in the natural sciences, have recently been made the subject of important studies, but they should not be overgeneralized.1?

The individuals chosen for study here are members, withone or two exceptions, of what may be called the “Weimar generation,” whose formative experiences came after the First World War1?; most are Jewish, at least by Nürnberg-lawcriteria, although at most one or two oriented themselves toany measurable extent to the internal Jewish debates about Jewish identity and culture; and almost all can be referred not only to one or another academic discipline but also to the more diverse congeries of cultural networks that was characterized in Germany as die Intelligenz. Not altogether by coincidence, only one is a woman.1? In the contests about Bildung that marked the Weimar period, none simply aligned themselves with a conservative defense of the nineteenth-century canon and ideal, according to the conventionalized forms of which they were all themselves schooled, but there were sharp differences among them as to the extent to which and the ways through which the ethical and political demandsof the old Bildung, should be reconstructed. Issues in contestation included above all the relations between Bildungand Enlightenment, on the one hand, and between Bildung and

(artistic) modernism, on the other. Because “Enlightenment”served as code for all that opponents hated about the “system,” and “modernism” was taken as a radical assault against the centers of legitimacy, the former division entailed questions about democracy and the legitimacy of theWeimar state, and the latter, questions about anti-bourgeoisrevolution. Peter Nettl has characterized intellectuals as

?5.5 Cp. Karl Mannheim, “Science and Youth,” in Karl Mannheim, Sociology as Political Education.

? 0 See Wolfgang Schluchter, Rationalismus der Weltbeherrschung. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. 1980; Michael Buckmiller, "Praxis als soziale Pflicht. Korsch und die freistudentische Bewegung." In Karl Korsch, Gesamtausgabe. Recht, Geist und Kultur, pp. 13-47. Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Velagsanstalt, 1980.

?6.6 For an excellent analytical overview, see Aleida Assmann, Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis. Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee. Frankfurt/New York, 1993, 72-77, 85-91.

?7.7 W.W.C. “Editorial Comments,”, The Journal of Higher Education, 2:7 (Oct. 1931) 104ff.

?8.8 B.H. Bode, “Currents and Cross-Currents in Higher Education,” The Journal of Higher Education, 2:7 (Oct. 1931) 374-379. David Snedden similarlychides Flexner for fixing on an obsolete pattern. Writing in an evolutionist mode, Snedden suggests that the changes that Flexner decries may well be experimental steps towards a realization of Flexner’s high ideals in a manner appropriate to emerging social conditions. “Functions of the University,” Journal of Higher Education 2: 7 (Oct. 1931) 384-389. In 1939, Fritz Karsen included Progressive Education at the Crossroads (1938) among the books in an unusually long collective review published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (VIII. 1-2, 209-219). Like all of the books under review, Karsten concludes, Bode is concernedwith the strengthening of democracy, but the standard he proposes is ultimately relativistic and incapable of orienting Bildung.

?9.9 W. H. Cowley, “The University and the Individual. The Student as an Individual in Contrast to Mr. Flexner’s Interest in his Intellect Only,” The Journal of Higher Education 2:7 (Oct. 1931) 390-396. Cowley returnedto the argument, with equal emphasis on the contrast between German and American models, in his inaugural address as President of Hamilton

constituting “structures of dissent,” in relation to the primary institutions of disciplinary knowledge, and this is adequate to our cases, as long as it is clearly understood that dissent is not limited to any given political direction, and that it may not take the form of political discourse at all.1? In exile, arguably, nothing of this weighed as heavily as their common experiences and investments in a culture where the things they had learned,

College in 1938. See “Intelligence is not Enough,” Journal of Higher Education 9:9 (Dec. 1938) 469-477. He coins the unfortunate term “holoism” to setagainst “intellectualism” and he sees a promising enactment of the contrast with the return to collegial principle after Lowell’s succession to Eliot at Harvard in 1909. By 1938, of course, it is Hutchins rather than Flexner who stands as emblem of intellectualism. Adefense of the undergraduate college with a special emphasis is offered by Henry N. Maccracken of Vassar College, writing on “Flexner and the Woman’s College.” (The Journal of Higher Education 2:7 (Oct. 1931), 367-373.)

?0.10 William H. Kilpatrick, “Universities: American, English, and German,” The Journal of Higher Education 2:7 (Oct. 1931) 357-363. For Flexner’s quite radical proposals to eliminate Latin and Greek and many conventional subjects from the “modern school,” see Abraham Flexner, “A Modern School,” American Review of Reviews 53 (1916) 465-474. In that piece, he asks why the Germans “appear to succeed where [Americans] fail” and answers by citing, first, the radical selection process and, second, theextraordinary pressure from every social source. Even then, he maintains, the rise of interest in alternatives to the classical Gymnasium shows that this approach cannot be sustained. In his autobiography, Flexner attempts to reconcile his progressive education enthusiasms with his comparatively rigid formulas for university reform by reference once again to the preparatory function of the former. In the early 1930s, Kilpatrick and his associates were concerned above all with the conjunction between progressive education and radical social change, and the German connection tended to take the form of collaboration with German critics of the existing Bildung regime. See Herman Röhrs, “Progressive Education in the United States and its Influence on Related Educational Developments in Germany,” 45-68 in Jürgen Heideking, Marc Depaepe, Jurgen Herbst, eds. Mutual Influences on Education: Germany and the United States in the Twentieth Century. Paedagogica Historica 33:1 (1997).

?1.11 John Dewey, “[Book Review of] Universities: American, English, German. By Abraham Flexner,” International Journal of Ethics. 42: 3 (Apr. 1932) 331-2. Bonner reports on a subsequent exchange of letters between Dewey and Flexner, which ends with expressions of mutual good will but no basic

the things they studied, and the things they taught were widely believed to bear on the basic qualities of both individual and collective life. If nothing else, they had to explain a rejection of this “culturist” assumption. Yet a number during the time of emigration hoped to influence events in Germany, perhaps to return, and several did so, ina few cases to positions of some prominence. The past and future of exile both figure in these studies of intellectuals in exile.

The present-day literature on the concept and history of Bildung is large and accessible, and there is no need to retell here the story from Wilhelm von Humboldt to Eduard Spranger.1? The aim is simply to map the controversy during the last Weimar years, with some attention to its concentrated form in pedagogical and curricular discussions.By way of introduction, however, it may be useful, first, toquote at some length a statement of the Bildung idea first published in 2002, and, second, to reproduce a fundamental challenge, a few years older, to the very idea that the expulsion of the “other Germany” had deprived Germany of viable answers to its puzzles about Bildung, whether in the narrow pedagogical or wider cultural-political sense, or that the narrow limits on the influence of the returned émigré intellectuals had cost Germany the results of important lessons from exile.

In commemoration of Leibniz’s vision of an academy of sciences, the widely recognized cultural philosopher, JürgenMittelstraß, proposes the following guidelines to present-day thinkers:

Culture is the world itself transmuted into the world of individual human beings, who can recognize themselves only in things that they havemade themselves–not only in things upon which they

agreement on the question of relating cultural and vocational aims, not to speak of Dewey’s insistence on a standard specific to the American social context. Bonner, op. cit. 232-3.

have bestowed objectivity (as in Wissenschaft), but also in things that breathe their subjectivity. Human beings move in this world –discovering, interpreting, and creating – and in this they individually create their world. Bildung in turn is simply the other face of culture, culture made into a form of life, and precisely into an individual form of life. Bildung, implicated in the culture that comprises the essence of the modern world, is itself an active, reflexive, and interactive life. In the main, then, Bildung is neither something theoretical nor a mere acquaintance with the contents of Bildung, but a competence and form of life. That is why the concept of Bildung is bound to the concept of orientation. Structurally, Bildung and orientationbelong together as the form of a competence that (speaking with Humboldt) draws a world into itselfand that endows a world with orientative expression. (Mittelstrass 2002, 146-147. Elisionsnot marked.)1?

Read in the original German, there is nothing in this statement that would have appeared strange to intellectuals in 1925, except for the astonishingly self-assured abstention from any talk of crisis. Translated into English, however, even after an utmost effort at colloquial expression and the omission of passages whose elaborations would yield even more puzzling associations and connotations, the text is mysterious indeed, except perhaps for specialists who have trained themselves in linguistic equivalences introduced by the émigré generation and those who follow them. The encounter with Mittelstraß serves as a

?2.12 Mitchell G. Ash and Alfons Söllner, Eds. Forced Migration and Scientific Change. Emigré German-Speaking Scientists and Scholars after 1933. Washington: German Historical Institute (Cambridge University Press) 1996; Giuliana Gemelli, ed. The “Unacceptables.” American Foundations and Refugee Scholars between theTwo Wars and after. Brussels, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt/M, Oxford, New York, Vienna: PIE-Peter Lang (Euroclio No. 18), 2000.

first illustrative marker of the problem complex addressed by our studies.

A second is provided by quite a different statement by a contemporary German author. Heinz-Elmer Tenorth, who writes as a well-regarded, methodologically sophisticated historian of educational thought rather than as a philosopher, although he does not shy away from judgments.1? He poses the provocative questionwhether the victory of the National Socialist must not be explained, at least in important part, by the absence of an alternative capable of satisfying the wants and needs of thepeople. In reply, he maintains that “the ideological political offerings produced by democratic Germany before 1933 lacked elements essential to the foundation of a collective identity able to convince the masses and to save the republic.” But it is not simply a matter of such deficits, in his view. What the “other Germany” had to offer could not provide identity and practical orientation “outside of intellectual circles.” “The conceptions of the ‘other Germany’ were bound to remain the conceptions of minorities because the models of identity that they propagated were systematically ungeneralizable.” Indicatingthe continuing contemporary bearing of these old contests just as much as Mittelstrass’ fervent invocation of the old Bildungs ideals, Tenorth adds parenthetically that the practical irrelevance of these conceptions remains: they were not generally applicable in the past, he avers, and they still are not. In support of his judgment, he cites a peculiarity of “alternative” social programs “which is especially often met with among the intellectuals of Weimar,” viz., “a preference for paradox and for the unorthodox linking of mutually exclusive models of social orientation,” as illustrated by Paul Tillich’s conjunction of religion and socialism or Kurt Tucholsky’s combination ofpacifism and revolution. Such complex formulas, he concedes, may even be said to reflect “objectively” valuablereadings of the possibilities remaining after critical dissolution of orthodox dogmas, but they could not meet the

practical expectations of masses or the realities of warlikesocial encampments. From these standpoints, according to Tenorth, “these diagnoses and offerings of identity remain marginal and bound to fail.”

Mobilizing a polemical vocabulary that would have been all too familiar to the Weimar intellectuals of the “other Germany,” Tenorth concludes:

?3.13.Karl Mannheim distinguishes between “actual generations” and “generational units.” The former are constituted by a shared syllabus of questions arising out of a common defining experience, such as war, revolution, or hyperinflation (Mannheim even speaks of an “entelechy,” adapting a term from the art historian, Wilhelm Pinder), while the latter are further integrated by common responses. The “Weimar Generation” comprised several distinct and often conflicting generational units, yet the question of a crisis in culture and Bildung was common to all. From Mannheim’s point of view, actual generations will not be redefined or reassorted by new experiences, however disruptive, but new units will naturally arise, and alternative social sources of orientation–class alignment, the status of stranger, gender, etc.--will orient new patterns of response. Mannheim, K. "The Problem of Generations," in Mannheim, K. (1952) Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. and trans. P. Kecskemeti. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.276-322. Cp. David Kettler and Colin Loader, “Temporizing with Time Wars: Karl Mannheim and Problems of Historical Time,” Time and Society.

?4.14.Christian Fleck and his associates report no more that 7% women in their survey of German-speaking sociologists, overall, at the time ofthe forced emigrations in Germany and Austria. Christian Fleck & WernerReichmann, “Collective Biography (Prosopography) of German Speaking Sociologists” This is an overestimate, if anything, of our potential population because the uncertain category of “sociology” includes students of social work and other fields fairly remote from the world ofintellectuals that is our focus. Fleck’s work is especially important because it highlights the important segment of émigré intellectuals fromAustria among those recognized as sociologists, disproportionately largeand influential in the United States. The centrality of the question ofBildung cannot be simply exported to Vienna. In the present volume, onlyone author comes from Austria, the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, and his distinctive background and presuppositions will figure in the analysis. See also Christian Fleck, “Opportunity Structures for Migrating Scholars, in David Kettler, ed., Contested Legacies: The German-Speaking Intellectual and Cultural Emigration to the United States and United Kingdom, 1933-45 (Galda

In public, they appear rather as a symptom of the fractionalized intelligentisia, a symbol of its preference for nonconformity, of the merely theoretical syntheses of the practically unreconcilable, of its avidity for controversy, and, finally, as expressions of an eccentric culture of intellectuals rather than as prospects for a generalizable collective identity.

Our present concern is not with Tenorth’s post hoc instrumental criteria of generalizability, but his challengeis nevertheless pertinent, insofar as reflections on rhetorical dimensions can never ignore relations to the public being addressed.1? Tenorth is no more sanguine about the lessons of the Hitler era, as transmitted by émigré thought and by the activities of those who returned. Citingthe findings of exile studies, which he rightly criticizes as being limited by their insufficient exploration of emigration and exile as forms of life, he concludes that they nevertheless provide reliable evidence that the returnees from emigration and exile failed to bring new,

+Wilch, 2002).

?5.15 Peter Nettl, “Ideas, Intellectuals, and Structures of Dissent,” 57-134 in Philip Reif, ed., On Intellectuals. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969.

?

6.16.Aleida Assmann, Arbeit am Nationalen Gedächtnis; Georg Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur. Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters. Frankfurt a.M./Leipzig,1994. Bruford, W.H. 1975. The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: "Bildung" from Humboldt to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Krieger, Leonard. 1957. The German Idea of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.; Ringer, Fritz K. 1969. The Decline of the German Mandarins; the German Academic Community, 1890-1933. Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press.;Scholtz, Gunter. 1991. Zwischen Wissenschaftsanspruch und Orientierungsbedürfnis: Zur Grundlage und Wandel der Geisteswissenschaften. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.Heinz-Elmar Tenorth, Zur deutschen Bildungsgeschichte. Köln Wien: Böhlau, 1985.Hans Weil, Die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsbegriffs. Bonn 1930, 1967.

distanced analyses adequate to the situation after 1945. Instead, their readings of the latest German experiences were overlaid by unresolved and ambiguous compounds of theirold preferences and the new, situationally specific conditions of their former host countries. Even if they hadbrought coherent models, Tenorth adds, they could have madeno difference, since the orientations of groups are determined by mechanisms of adaptation related to traditionsand interests. Self-criticism, he concludes, is always demanded only of the other side. Quite clearly, the legacy of the emigration has not ceased to be contested.

Tenorth’s mordant assessment of the Bildungs-projects ofthe “other Germany” introduces the important question of failure into our discussion, a possibility that is often achingly present among émigrés but just as often absent fromthe compensatory writings of those who recall their efforts in solemn commemoration. While it is not the aim of the present work to sit in judgment on those it studies--with almost all contributors, in fact, selecting work they consider important to their own thinking--, this is not intended as a celebration of the exile intellectuals. If ageneralization is warranted, then it may be useful to begin with Tenorth’s contention that the attempt to make the experience of the Hitler years work for Bildung met with no more than ambivalent success, if only because changes in institutionalized knowledge were under way that the exiles’ fixation on their generational problem constellation may have obscured. The efforts made by Ernst Fraenkel and FranzL. Neumann at the Hochschule für Politik and Free Universityin Berlin may be taken as an example of such an outcome. Itis an affront to exiles simply to transmute their condition into a metaphor for intellectual advantage. Above all, and this is astonishingly neglected by Tenorth, these émigrés had to confront the question of complicity in the mass-murder of Jews among members of their generation and intellectual networks in Germany.2? Since silences in this matter also speak, all generalizations about responses to this harrowing disruption of the discourse of Bildung, as

they apply to our group of intellectuals, are certain to be wrong. Ambivalence is at most a place marker. The efforts to replace it with specific replies are varied and complex, and it is one of the prime objectives of several of the studies collected in this volume to explore these depths.

To complete our introduction, however, we first offer aschematic diagram of the intellectual landscape at the pointof departure, a characterization of the major alignments in Weimar Germany on the question of relations between Bildung and Wissenschaft. The outer perimeter is defined by Max Weber, whose heroic abandonment of Bildung as a goal of higher education for the sake of Wissenschaft, most vividly inhis address on science shortly before his death in 1920, is the limiting case by reference to which much of the Weimar

?7.17.The original text, in a somewhat longer excerpt, reads:

Kultur ist ... die Welt selbst...verwandelt in die Welt des Menschen, der sich nur in Dingen wiederzuerkennen vermag, die er selbst gemacht hat–nicht nur in Dingen, den er (wie in der Wissenschaft) Objektivität verleiht, sondern auch in Dingen, die seine Subjektivität atmen. In dieser Welt bewegt sich der Mensch entdeckend, deutend und gestaltend, und indem er dies tut, schaffter seine Welt....Bildung ist wiederum nur die andere Seite der Kultur, Kultur zur Lebensform, gerade auch zur individuellen Lebensform gemacht....Bildung, mit jener Kultur verbunden, die dasWesen der modernen Welt ausmacht, ist selbst ein tätiges, reflexives und interagierendes Leben. ... Bildung ist daher in erster Linie auch nichts Theoretisches, sondern ein Können und eine Lebensform, kein bloßes Sich-Auskennen in Bildungsbeständen....Daher verbindet sich der Begriff der Bildung...mit dem Begriff der Orientierung. Orientierung...ist selbst etwas Konkretes, nicht Abstraktes wie Theorien oder die Artund Weise, wie wir Theorien weitergeben. Der Ort der Orientierungist die Lebenswelt, nicht die begriffliche, die theoretische Welt.Nicht der Theoretiker und nicht der Experte sind diejenigen, die Orientierungsfragen beantworten, sondern derjenige, der lebensformbezogen die geheimnisvolle Grenze zwischen Wissen und Können, Theorie und Praxis schon überschritten hat. Eben das giltauch von Bildung. Bildung und Orientierung gehören strukturell zusammen...als Lebensform bzw. In Form eines Könnens, das (mit Humboldt) Welt in s ich zieht und Welt durch sich selbst ausdrückt, orientierenden Ausdruckk, verleiht.”

debate proceeded.2? Beyond that boundary are scientific discourses whose self-reflection was confined to methodological issues and whose work served the Bildung debate largely as object lessons. Common to all of the authors enclosed by these bounds is a preoccupation with history, variously understood as both a prime constituent ofand prime threat to Bildung. Yet the differences in treatment of that theme, generally subsumed under the heading of Historismus, do not lend themselves to easy classification, and they will be left for treatment in the separate studies.

Within the diagram, then, it is useful to plot four locations by matching two variables familiar from intellectual history, and then to attach a distinct plane defined by variable readings on a continuum of a different kind. On the four-fold table, then, one axis is labeled civilization and the other, politics. We distinguish thinkers whose concepts of Bildung are somehow reconciled with “civilization,” a term often identified in the German discourse of the time with the French Enlightenment and poised as antithesis against “Kultur,” from thinkers who aremore true to the historical legacy of Bildung as an alternative to the supposed unhistorical “intellectualism” of civilization and the Enlightenment, and within each of these types, we distinguish, on the other axis, those whose conception of Bildung is expressly political from those who disdain conflictual politics. Representative of the upper left quadrant on our hypothetical table is the sociologist, Karl Mannheim; for the upper right, we take Hans Freyer, whois both sociologist and philosopher of culture; on the lowerleft, we locate authors like Ernst Cassirer and Ernst RobertCurtius; and the crowded lower right quadrant is representedby the various voices of the George Circle and “Secret Germany,” as well as more pedantic voices of conservative opposition. It is perhaps emblematic of the discordant juxtapositions that are the subject of the present studies to force this complex assortment of intellectuals into the hostile confinements of so banal–and uncultivated--an

analytical device. It is just as well, then, to disrupt thesimplicity of the model with the addition of another dimension that is not susceptible to binary compartmentalization, the orientation to what may be called “revolutionary culturism,” and that ranges from the unorthodox communist theorizing of the younger Georg Lukács,often revived by others during the Weimar years, with its reconceptualization of Bildung as class consciousness and itscelebration of a revolutionary “new culture,” at one end of the (dis)continuum, to various antinomian or anarchist articulations of avant garde artistic rationales, no less scornful of Lukács’ curious aesthetic conservatism than of the coordinated movements of his political associates. For present purposes, it will suffice to illustrate the four main alternatives on the principal dimensions, with emphasison the quadrants that play a lesser part in the studies to follow but that remain an important part of the context.

Our first striking marker, exemplifying a clear accommodation of both Enlightenment civilization and conflictual politics, is provided by a text arising in a

?8.18.Heinz-Elmar Tenorth, “Das andere Deutschland,” Pp. 137-154 in Zur deutschen Bildungsgeschichte. Köln Wien: Böhlau, 1985. In an article more narrowly focused on pedagogical debates around 1933, Tenorth argues thatstructures of argumentation about the relations between Bildung and instruction (Erziehung) differed little as among the Social Democrat, Hans Weil, the national conservative, Wilhelm Flintner, and the foremostNazi pedagogical planner, at least in the first years of the subsequent regime, so that an approach from their divergent educational aims fails to recognize critical commonalities. As with Tenorth’s treatment of the“other Germany,” the piece raises important questions as well as exhibiting some fairly transparent programmatic biases (as with the decision to base the interpretation of Weil exclusively on a peripheral publication on subjects he had barely begun to study, as distinct from his widely admired–and plagiarized–pioneering sociological study of the rise of the German principle of Bildung. See Heinz-Elmar Tenorth, “Einfügung und Formierung, Bildung und Erziehung. Positionelle Differenzen in pädagogischen Argumentationen um 1933,” pp. 259-279 in Ulrich Herrmann and Jürgen Oelkers, Eds., Pädagogik und Nationalsozialismus (Zeitschrift für Pädagogik. 22. Beiheft. 1988)

specialist conference in 1932 devoted precisely to reinforcing the claims of sociology, a new and widely distrusted university discipline, to be accepted as a Wissenschaft in the desperate distribution struggles of the depression years. The speaker is one of the most polarizing–but also one of the most representative--figures of the age, Karl Mannheim. Probably drawing on the research of Hans Weil, whose book on the emergence of the concept of Bildung he selected for his own series, to appear immediately after Ideologie und Utopie,2? and implicitly answering critics like Ernst Robert Curtius and Eduard Spranger, who charged him with betrayal of the German Bildungideal, Mannheim offers a conciliatory account of the state of the question in 1932, just months before his own forced emigration:

By specialized knowledge (Spezialwissen) we shall understand all the forms and contents of knowledgenecessary for the solution of a scientific-technical or organizational task. A knowledge whose advantage consists in its pure applicabilityand in its capacity of being separated from the purely personal is in essence always addressed to distinctively differentiated tasks in the social process, in a manner that is both particularistic and specialist. By cultivational knowledge (Bildungswissen), in contrast, we shall understand the tendency towards a coherent life-orientation, with a bearing upon the overall personality as

?9.19.A characterization of the émigrés’ claims to represent Bildung or “another Germany” far more fierce that Tenorth’s but unimaginably far from his manner of speaking, thinking, and judging is in Karl Kraus, Walpurgisnacht, written in 1933 but not published until long after his death. Kraus denounced the intellectuals as the ultimate authors of theforces that had turned on them, precisely by virtue of their decades-long corupt betrayal of the language that was constitutive of the culture they claimed to be saving. This book was unknown to the émigré generation, and Kraus continued to be cited by many of them as enemy of their enemy and authoritative icon of the encounter with the crisis in Bildung and Kultur.

well as upon the totality of the objective life-situation insofar as it can be surveyed at the time.2?

Mannheim argued that sociology could not function as specialized Wissenschaft alone, and he maintained, audaciously–or, many thought, absurdly--, that it was up to sociology in the present day to provide the “distinctive self-expansion of personality, together with the deepening of experiential dimensions, that was in large measure the meaning of the experience of Bildung for earlier generations.” If humanistic knowledge and the correspondingartistic culture were appropriate to the conditions of life of the defunctionalized aristocracy of the early nineteenth century and, in a different manner, of the passive and prosperous bourgeoisie later in the century, as Weil’s studyargued, then sociological self-understanding and practical orientation could meet the needs of democratized mass populations, especially through the cultivation of new meritocratic elites capable of stemming the slide to emotional mass democracy.

Mannheim is especially worth citing in this connection,first, because his example shows that the concern for Bildungwas by no means limited to anti-modern and politically conservative writers, as witness also the domestic political

?

0.20 See, most recently, Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung und Erinnerung. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003.

?1.21.A companion to the present volume is a special edition of The European Journal of Political Theory, “Contested Legacies: Political Theory and the Hitler Era,” edited by David Kettler and Thomas Wheatland, devoted to conflicts over Max Weber’s legacy in exile, as well as to several studies of Hanna Arendt. Both publications are based on papers presented to a conference held at Bard College in August, 2002, “Contested Legacies: The German-Speaking Intellectual and Cultural Emigration to the US and UK, 1933-1945.”

rationale for the Hochschule für Politik, which was the scene of operation for younger Jewish intellectuals, several among whom emerged as “political scientists” in emigration,2? second, because he indicates that there was a common point to the concept, Bildung, despite conflict and fluidity about its contents during the Weimar years, and third, because he proposes, in effect, a peacable division of labor between the two modes of knowledge, although he had no doubt as to which of the two complementary dimensions had the authority to draw the boundary lines. Common to all three elements ishis determination to broker a deal between Bildung and Enlightenment, notwithstanding the emnity between them in most Bildung discourse after 1900, an undertaking that was atone with his consistent support of the compromises constituting the Weimar constitution.2?

The second “political” compartment must be treated withsubtlety, since it includes important thinkers who surprisingly paired the concepts of Enlightenment and Bildung, as Hegel had done in the Phenomenology, in order to see both as superceded. This is a motif, above all, in thinkers drawn to Martin Heidegger.2? Yet this gesture cannot be taken as face value precisely because of the extent to which the thought is defined by the characteristicvision of a total Aufbruch and Umbruch precisely in the domain that is more widely conceptualized as Bildung. The supposed rejection of Bildung was an opening to a reintroduction of its key elements. In the political form of such “existentialism,” Hans Freyer is a leading example.

?2.22 Hans Weil, Die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsbegriffs. Bonn [1930] 1967.

?3.23. Karl Mannheim, “The Contemporary Tasks of Sociology: Cultivationand the Curriculum” in Sociology as Political Education, David Kettler and ColinLoader, eds. New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2001. [A translatedextract from Karl Mannheim, Gegenwärtsaufgaben der Soziologie, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1932]. For background and commentary, see Colin Loader and David Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education. New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2002.

Like Heidegger himself and Carl Schmitt, he deserves some careful attention in this introduction, precisely because the complex dialogic relationship between him and leading émigré thinkers is overshadowed by the deep lines of separation drawn by exile. Tactically allied with Mannheim against the proponents of a purely scientific sociology in 1932 but diametrically opposed to him on the bargain with the Enlightenment and Republic, Freyer pronounced his views on Bildung in a famous joint appearance with Carl Schmitt at a philosophers’ congress in Davos in 1931. Bildung was obsolete, he proclaimed, while promulgating a radically new regime of Bildung, bearing above all the hallmark that Tenorth imputes to the whole discourse of crisis in Bildung, the diagnosis of a failure to provide the communal conjunction (Bindung) that knowledge as rhetoric should

?4.24.Tutors included Hans Morgenthau, Franz L. Neumann and Ernst Fraenkel, but the most important voice was Albert Salomon. See Albert Salomon,"Innenpolitische Bildung." Pp. 94-110 in Ernst Jäckh, ed. Politik als Wissenschaft. Zehn Jahre Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. Berlin: Hermann Reckendorf, 1934; See Ulf Matthiesen, "'Im Schatten einer endlosen großen Zeit.' Etappen der intellektuellen Biographie Albert Salomons," Pp. 299-350 in Ilja Srubar, ed. Exil. Wissenschaft. Identität. Die Emigration deutscher Wissenschaftler, 1933-1945,. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp

?5.25.Mannheim chose the language of “synthesis” rather than negotiations, but his actual exposition of synthesis justifies the analytical terminology chosen, especially because of its congruence withprecisely the most despised feature of the Weimar project, its desperately unlucky but thoroughly admirable option for pluralism. See David Kettler and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism, New Brunswick and London: Transactions, 1995. In the literature of the Bildung debates of the time, a major influence on Mannheim was Ernst Troeltsch, especially Der Historismus und seine Überwindung. Fünf Vorträge von Ernst Troeltsch, eingeleitet von Friedrich von Hügel, Berlin 1924. For a less political reading of this connection and a definitive analysis ofMannheim in the context of the philosophical problem constellation of his time, see now Reinhard Laube, Karl Mannheims wissenssoziologische Perspective als Antwort auf die >Krise des Historismus< , especially the final chapter, “Bildungals Perspektivierung.”

provide. Like Schmitt and Heidegger, who similarly attempted loyally–and failed--to inspire the Nazis with their related views of Bildung, Freyer was not by any means segregated from the intellectuals who subsequently became exiles, and his analysis, at least in part, is not without present-day admirers. Georg Bollenbeck has recently celebrated his diagnosis of the obsolescence of Bildung, whiledeprecating his totalitarian “therapy,” without quite noticing that this represented very much a continuation of the Bildung discourse, vis á vis Wissenschaft. (Bollenbeck 1994:289) The aim is to outbid established “bourgeois” Bildung with a form that is revolutionary and all-encompassing, proclaimed under the name of “life.” Freyer is the second prime locational marker on our map.2?

Speaking to a gathering on the topic of the “present-day crisis of Bildung” in 1931, set by the hosts, Freyer began with a rejection of the premise underlying the conventional formula he accepted for his title. There is nocrisis of “cultivation” in the conventional sense, he maintained, because the concern with his kind of cultivationno longer troubled actual life. The sense of crisis in this respect derives rather from the demise of the humanistic ideal and the lack of insight into a new one. In its beliefthat the individual develops through a self-enclosed organicprocess from a germinal inner tendency (Anlage) the cultivational ideal no longer matches the existing reality. Freyer noted that Humboldt believed that cultivation was nothing but the blossoming of the individual soul, out of which and within which the world could be configured. The totalities of personality and spirit (Geist) existed in the relationship of microcosm/macrocosm, so that the unities of culture and cultivation formed the norm for one another and the individual could grasp the larger whole from his own ?6.26.The theme is well developed in Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933. [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986.] 27-42.

?7.27.With special thanks to Colin Loader, the exposition of Freyer’s concept of Bildung draws heavily on Loader and Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education (2001).

individuality (1931c: 597-598; 601-604). Most important, this self-development was understood as the highest good in itself. Although talk of cultivation flourishes, none of this really makes any sense today, not even as an ideology. While Friedrich Schlegel meant it literally when he wrote “The greatest good and the sole utility is cultivation,” we think that we are reading “an aphorism in the spirit of romantic irony, where concepts are necessarily somewhat in the air” (1931c: 598). We can understand these ideas as historical productions, he contends, urging the readers to conduct the “thought experiment” for themselves, but they have no currency for us. Freyer speaks of them lacking “validity” (Gültigkeit), but he only means that they are experienced as obsolete.

Closely following Hans Weil’s account (without acknowledgment), Freyer offered a historical-sociological analysis to account for this absence of experiential “validity.” The cultivation ideal entails a focus on individuality whose plausibility was a function of unique historical circumstance affecting persons occupying a distinct social location. In this atmosphere, the ideal of cultivation served as a substitute for political will. In the nineteenth century, this social reality gave way to a new one as industrial capitalism established itself and society divided, first into the classes whose relations are correctly depicted by Marxism and later, in the twentieth century, into the economic interest groups of the new, pluralist world (1931b). Under these changed historical conditions, practical ideals of cultivation multiplied and the unified humanistic ideal served simply as the illusion (Schein) of a specific social segment, the cultivated bourgeoisie, with no real unifying power. Eventually, it simply became one among many options and manifestly an anachronism in its universal claims. In the interim, notably at the end of the nineteenth century, when cultivation became paired with possessions as the marks of entitlement, it served as “a typical bit of bourgeois ideology. . .one of those lies that are by no means only

lies, but also a strength” (1931c: 611). Under conditions of class struggle, this bourgeois ideal was briefly opposed by a proletarian one; but the confrontation soon gave way tothe present-day proliferation of incoherent alternatives. The crisis is not constituted by the obsolescence of the oldideal but by the obscuration of the new one.

A solution for the crisis, however, could not be found merely by identifying new, timely contents and appropriate forms for cultivation. Freyer’s next analytical step depended on the central place that he assigned to the well-established sociological distinction between “critical” and “positive” ages, first introduced by Henri Saint-Simon a hundred years earlier. A critical age lacks the consensus on the interpretation and evaluation of the world which defines a positive one. Unlike Mannheim who more nearly resembles John Stuart Mill in treating the critical present as a novel opportunity for instituting a constitutionalized openness (Mill 1963; Mannheim 1930a: XXX), Freyer sees no hope without a new positivity. This yearning for closure isone of the most decisive differences between him and Mannheim.

Both the function and the social location of the humanistic ideal of cultivation were designed for positive epochs and could not function in a critical one. In an attempt to replicate the life-enhancing effects of humanistic cultivation for a population that has been separated into diverse social locations, Freyer observes, educators (like Mannheim) draw on the efforts of sociographyand contemporary issues studies to identify the dimensions of meaningfulness appropriate to the various social locations, to build on experiences and attitudes as the older cultivation built on the realities of individualism. But there are no such dimensions in the social locations constituted by industrial society. The critical age is thoroughgoing in its impoverishment of social existence; it denies Erfahrung.2?

Freyer next reviews an argument that recalls Max Weber’s heroic concept of value-freedom (1931c: 619). Let cultivation recognize the profoundly “realistic” character of the modern age, the argument goes, and let it provide deep and detailed insight into those social realities, and notably, as in Marxism, into the objective tendencies of development, endowing men with the capacity for orientation.Freyer summarizes:

And the person who is cultivated under these circumstances would not be the person at home in the world of ideas, the person who has created a universe out of his individuality, but the one whostands in his age with a spiritual overview, the one who really has an overview of the real forces and factors of his age, without illusion (1931c: 621).

Freyer rejects this conception as insufficiently geared to the disruptive force of the crisis. It is insufficiently responsive to the reality that we are all “mass” torn along by a torrent of change and that we clash as we move. There is no representative standpoint. An ideal of cultivation fora critical epoch had to be directed not toward a spiritual whole to be represented but rather toward a political whole to be enacted (vollzogen):

?8.28. In emigration, Freyer’s analysis is echoed, for example, in a highly revealing debate among the members of the Institute of Social Research about ways of communicating something of their distinctive theoretical standpoint to American audiences without frightening them byMarxist and other unorthodox convictions. Herbert Marcuse repeatedly urges that they must elucidate their views by reference to their Erfahrungen until Horkheimer sweeps the argument aside with the contention that “bourgeois society may almost be defined by the fact that its members have only the most pitiful impressions in common,” but no experiences in Marcuse’s sense of Erfahrung. Seminar Protocol: “Debatteüber Methoden der Sozial wissenschaften, besonders die Auffassung der Methode der Sozialwissenschaften, welches das Institut vertritt.” 17 January 1941. MHA IX.214

The person assembles his spiritual forces where his will also stands, by virtue of his decision. .. . He expands his willed position into a consciously spiritual position, and thereby makes it free. A spiritual existence, then, that is notconstructed like a figure of mediation but rather one that operates like a searchlight. . . . The sovereignty of spirit bestowed by cultivation is not the sovereignty of someone who has incorporated much or everything, but rather the sovereignty of the will that has equipped itself with historical consciousness of the situation. (1931c: 624).

Playing on the two senses of the word Bildung, he writes, “Cultivation of the Volk (Volksbildung), one can say, ultimately means formation of the Volk (Volkbildung).” (625). Cultivation is thus at one with active political consciousness, although it cannot do the work of carrying itinto effect. “That can only be achieved by struggle (durchgekämpft),” Freyer concludes. The term Bildung is localized so as to have it refer to a bourgeois ideal, but the concept is retained, merely heightened by the honorific populist qualifier.

Freyer denies that his conception of Bildung grounded ondecision and will left Wissenschaft free, in the liberal manner, to pursue its autonomous way. Science is distinguished only by its more rigorous method. Its grounding must be the same as Bildung. Ultimately, Freyer asserted, science had to educate students for practical activity. This meant a schooling of the will by spirituallydeepening the force of decision. The old humanistic, bourgeois idea of cultivation (and the free-floating intelligentsia) had to be replaced by a political cultivation in which the person became rooted in the nation and was responsibly bound to the decision of the state. Theold forms of education that focused on the totality of personality had to be replaced by those that disciplined the

will for the tasks at hand. Students had to attain a sense of concrete duty, to be prepared to sacrifice, to dedicate their total person to nation and state. (Freyer 1933: 8, 16-18, 37, 39). The state in question, needless to say, could not be the pluralistic, enlightenment-oriented constitutional regime of Weimar.

Although the Weimar dispute about Bildung extended deep into the discourses of history, philosophy, and philology, the challenges of sociology posed by both Mannheim and Freyer provided a central theme, above all because sociologyfigured so large in the cultural policies of the most influential universities minister of the Weimar era, Carl H.Becker.2? Sociology, he thought, could provide the common civil understanding that would enable individuals to recognize themselves through their dealings with others as peers and partners, without the discredited elitism and romanticism of the older conception. A sociological culture, moreover, would foster respect for diversity, as itencouraged individuals to take distance from themselves without fear of losing themselves. The individual subject of cultivation would reappear as a social being capable of being molded into a citizen; the universalistic assets of culture would be recognized as elements of social cooperation; and the activism integral to cultivation would reveal itself as civic virtue. Leading roles in the public struggle against Becker’s design were played by Georg von Below, a historian, Eduard Spranger, the philosopher best-known as an authority on Humboldt, and the noted Heidelberg ?9.29.See Loader and Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education. The account of Eduard Spranger and Ernst Robert Curtius below draws extensively on this book. It should perhaps be noted that Flexner listsBecker among the participants in a cultural ministry lunchtime discussion circle, which he had been invited to attend during his last visits to Berlin, before publication of his 1930 book; but there is no sign that Flexner knew anything about Becker’s university reform projects in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of Bildungspolitik. Flexner’ entree was evidently provided by friends from his medical school enterprises; and he tells the story in the context ofbalancing a grim time of exclusion for him in America. Flexner, I Remember, 353.

critic of French literature, Ernst Robert Curtius. The last-named is of special interest here, both because his devotion to French culture sharply separated him from the continuators of the anti-Enlightenment slogans of the “Spirit of 1914,” and marked him as well, in the cultural politics of Weimar, as an unpolitical but comparatively moderate critic of the Republic, and because of the wider publicity of his views among non-university intellectuals.3?

Although the quadrant also includes neo-Kantian philosophersand classicists attentive to republican currents in ancient (and Renaissance) literatures, Curtius will serve as marker for the class, with the exposition supported by incidental comparisons with both Spranger and Mannheim.

Both men brought the discussion of the problematic relationship of Bildung to science and the socio-political sphere directly back to the source, since both Spranger and Curtius first of all tried to assess the status of Humboldt's ideal in the late Republic. Both endorsed Humboldt's emphasis on the need for organic harmony between individual freedom and supra-individual connections. While Spranger, in accordance with historicist assumptions, wrote that the national culture was an individuality with a unified objective spirit, Curtius drew on the traditional humanism of the Rhineland instead of German historicism. Both believed the purpose of Bildung was the development of the individual as a cultural-ethical personality, who had todevelop in the soil of objective value contents (Spranger 1928: 2-3, 63; Curtius 1932: 14, 20, 44, 50). Curtius

?

0.30.Curtius occasioned Karl Mannheim’s only published defense of Ideologie und Utopie against his critics, and it focused exactly on his charge that “sociologism” betrayed the German ideal of Bildung. Notably,the exchange took place in Neue Schweizer Rundschau, a periodical aimed at a broad public of cultural intellectuals. Mannheim laid claim to the legacy of the recently dead great German teachers, Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and Max Scheler. Ernst Robert Curtius, “Soziologie – und ihre Grenzen,” in Neue Schweizer Rundschau 22 (1929), pp. 727-736, and KarlMannheim, “Zur Problematik der Soziologie in Deutschland,” in Neue Schweizer Rundschau 36/37 (1929), pp. 820-829.

wrote: "We must return to the original foundation and beginning of our tradition and again learn the elements of culture" (Curtius 1932: 63). With that specification as to the cultural source, he agreed with Spranger's contention that education was "the cultural activity that strives to bring about an unfolding of subjective culture in developingindividuals, by means of an evaluatively guided contact witha given objective culture and the activation of a genuine, ethically requisite cultural ideal " (Spranger 1928: 3). Thelarger “organic” totality relied on the Bildung of the individual for its realization. Spranger described this reciprocal relationship as the "infusion of the [objective] spirit with the [individual] soul and the infusion of the soul with the spirit. Where this succeeds in a productive sense, there is Bildung ” (Spranger 1928: 65).

Spranger and Curtius sought to restore the nineteenth-century character of the university in the face of the new Weimar reform movement (Oelkers 1998: 88). While they criticized the parliamentary democracy of the Republic to differing degrees, they were united in the belief that democratic forces had to be kept out of the university and that this meant putting the relatively new discipline of sociology--which the Prussian ministry of higher education promoted as central to education for democracy--in its proper place as a clear subordinate to traditional disciplines such as philosophy and history. Curtius argued that with the existing parties, none of whom had a cultural-political program, there was no room for independent spirituality and that no one seemed to want to serve the national spiritual estate [geistiger Stand](Curtius 1932: 20, 34-35). Spranger directed a similar critique especially towards the "proletarian parties." What he characterized astheir narrow dogmatism elevated the proletariat to an absolute but left workers without a flexible ideal for life or fully formed ethos and led to their divorce from the deeper culture as a whole. Such party dogmatism, he contended, went hand in hand with the shallow mechanistic “culture” of the times (25, 49-50). Curtius seemed

comparatively more afraid of the parties of the radical right in which modern irrationalism had reached its peak in the form of primitive antisemitism and the racial myth (Curtius 1932: 27, 44; Hoeges 1994: 181-190).

Similarly, neither writer considered sociology as a kind of science that could be a fit partner for a coalition to restore Bildung. For Spranger, the rejection extended to all modern sciences. He wrote that science had come to meana more positivistic and utilitarian specialization oriented toward the adaptation of practical abilities to the materialhere and now. He saw sociology as the epitome of this orientation. In addition to its mechanistic methodology, itlimited ethical questions to those of social forms. When this concern for the practical removed a will to values (Wertwille), he asserted, the result was relativism (Spranger 1928: 14-15, 54, 11). Curtius was less inclined to blame developments within the specialized disciplines as a whole. He focused on the new, as yet insufficiently focused discipline of sociology, identifying it with outside forces that encroached upon the university. By claiming to be the central discipline of the university, it usurped what had been and should once again become the proper place of philosophy and introduced a political and relativizing tendency into learning. He did not fail to notice that the newer philosophy did not in fact play the part he wished forit; and he was not averse to sociology as a scientific studyof civil society. German sociology should follow the example of French sociology and recognize that it can only be a specialized discipline. It must first abandon the pretense of mastery over culture. In short, Curtius believed that the destructive approach of sociology in its most prominent guise would weaken the ability of traditionalhumanism to resist the growing irrationalism in Germany. The end result would be nihilism (Curtius 1932: 80-81, 99, 101-103; 1990: 113-114). Sociology in this sense, he maintained, is profoundly subversive of the university as agent of Bildung.

Hostile to Becker’s proteges and projects, Curtius and Spranger looked beyond the politicized Weimar state for a solution to the cultural crisis of Weimar. Spranger called for a renewal of culture carried by new forces, notably the youth movement, which he apostrophized in wholistic terms, without regard to the political character of the “renewal” movements he had in mind or of the deep cleavages within theyouth cohort. The new culture would be based on a larger ideal tied to both the achievements of the past as well as to the meaning provided by religion.3? Curtius in contrast shared Mannheim’s conviction that the primary responsibilityrested with the intellectuals, but he believed that their proper contribution was precisely the restoration of faith in the canonical Western cultural legacy that Mannheim considered obsolete. The food for this Bildung was to be humanism reinspired by the Renaissance, a humanism that camefrom the creative intensity of life and was connected with religious belief. Warning that Germany should not make an abrupt break with the past, Curtius also looked to the academic tradition. The more democracy brought the masses to the fore, the greater the need for a restored humanistic elite and its secure field of operation in the university would become (Curtius 1932: 20, 42, 46, 56, 73-78, 120-121).He believed that the university, which formed a living community of teachers and students, should be the synthesizing agent for the cultural totality by cultivating an elite, unified as well by something resembling the “Spirit of 1914,” a unity of Germans, without parties.

In this connection, then, Curtius gave voice to his hostility to Jews who do not choose either the route of fullassimilation to the host culture or whole-hearted traditionalism. This segment, epitomized by Mannheim, is dedicated to skepticism and deconstruction. Having fallen

?1.31.For an invaluable record of the bitter impression that Spranger and his ideas made on an émigré intellectual when he presented them in Japan, as cultural promoter of the axis alliance, see Lowith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933, pp. 112-115. The document gains special piquancy from the fact that Löwith’s eventual position, after his final,painful break with a Heideggerean Nietzsche, resembles that of Spranger in Weimar.

away from their own traditions, “they are unwilling to open themselves to Christianity, Humanism, or Deutschtum. All thatis left to them is negation in its two forms, deconstructionand cynicism. We must defend ourselves against this, since the dangers of deconstruction are tenfold in a country as fractured as Germany.” (Curtius [1932] 1933: 85). Curtius expressly attacked Mannheim’s credentials as educator. As an expression of a world view, he says, Mannheim’s brilliantexposition has its rights, but “once it is taught and demands to be heard at German universities as the latest findings of the most recent ‘key science,’” the design becomes profoundly objectionable. What is at issue is precisely corruption of the youth. “We hope that youth--German youth--will resist all attempts by scientific authorities,” Curtius continues, “to dissuade them from an appreciation of greatness and idealism” (Curtius [1929] 1990: 117). It is not necessary to question the sincerity of Curtius’ rejection of racialist anti-semitism or his abhorrence for the National Socialists, to emphasize the intimate conections between even this moderate and comparatively modernist evocation of the older Bildung tradition with undisguised anti-Socialist and anti-Jewish themes, a consideration doubtless of moment to many of the emigrants who had been otherwisesympathetic to Curtius’ urbane literary approaches.3?

Youth served as an even more militant slogan in the anti-political and anti-Enlightenment Bildungspolitik of the fourth quadrant of our diagram, at least among the most representative figures, but it was a youth configured according to the leader-follower design pervasive in the

?2.32 The comments on Curtius’ anti-Jewish motifs are indebted to a personal communication from Martin Vialon, Istanbul, a specialist on literary critics of that era, notably the emigrants like Leo Spitzer andErich Auerbach, his predecessors in his present university. Vialon alsocalls attention to a bitter conflict between Curtius and Auerbach after the war, when Curtius turned furiously against Auerbach’s reading of a right of resistance in Pascal, charging him with “politicizing” the texts, in a manner reminiscent, according to Vialon, of his attacks on Mannheim.

pre-war German youth movement and crystallized in the remarkably attractive George Circle and its extensive penumbra. Karl Mannheim wrote a compelling account of Heidelberg as a cultural center divided between the realms of Max Weber’s sociology and the George Circle; and Erich Kahler, on the periphery of the Circle, effectively launchedhis public career with an attack on Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf, a publication which also played a key part in the disputes already surveyed.3? Yet arguments about Bildung in the university hardly penetrated into the inner poetic circle.

The issues were translated to a distinctive sphere, ostensibly remote from the realms of politics or civilizational currents. The struggle was indeed about the Bildung of the youth, but the question of Wissenschaft was simply pushed aside. While Max Weber may be seen to have asserted the heroism of an irresistible modernity devoid of “meaning” as the term figured in the “crisis” debate, a condition where science is a vocation without being a “calling” in some transcendent sense, George and his circle promised a calling to a secret and ultimate Bildung, outbidding all other invocations of the term. George’s pronouncement, “From me, no road leads to Wissenschaft,” citesthe contrast central to the wider debate,3? but he offers nomore explanation of what he means by Wissenschaft than he doesof Bildung. The only thing certain was that it would transform humanity. The inflated metaphors of “life,” “youth,” and the “organic” suggested to the chosen that theywere already living in the pre-dawn of that future. An “icon [Bildnis] of the master” seemed to suffice for their Bildung. Bildung required neither universities or other institutions nor any specified contents. Bildung was rather to resemble a religious epiphany, as was manifest in the

?3.33 Karl Mannheim, “Letters from Heidelberg: Soul and Culture in Germany,” in Karl Mannheim, Sociology as Political Education; Erich Kahler, Der Beruf der Wissenschaft. Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1920.

?4.34Cit. in Edgar Salin, Um Stefan George. Godesberg 1948, 256.

discussions within the circle about correct iconic practices, as well as in the belief that the exclusivity of poetics could take the place of all Wissenschaft testify to this.3? The Bildung of the few was modeled on the “circle” of Jesus’ disciples, the reading of a poem was a neo-religious liturgy, and the abstinence from politics was a matter of principle.3? It was precisely in this respect that they considered themselves superior to the “old” sciences, and their claims to a capacity for Bildung.

There were parallels to the George Circle, as with the poetic pretensions and the vast ambitions of Rudolf

?0. A major voice for putting Kulturpolitik at the center of discussion in the Weimar era was Carl H. Becker, a university professor turned state official at the highest level. To rebuild the case, after the defeat, interestingly enough, he contended that the defeat of Germany was due toits failure to pursue Kulturpolitik as consistently as the victors had done. Carl H. Becker, Kulturpolitische Aufgaben des Reiches. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1919. See Colin Loader and David Kettler, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education. New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2001. pp.?0. This generalization would probably have to be qualified in a systematic survey extending to other nations of central and Eastern Europe, but that cannot be our present purpose, especially because any such study would have to sort out the effects of the widespread German cultural influence in these areas. The English-language essayists citedcan also be shown in most cases to have responded to German initiatives,and thus to belong to an earlier phase of the complex reception history that is our present concern. On another point, it is important to recognize that the theme of Bildung had special saliency for the Jewish intellectuals and academics who made up the bulk of the eventual emigrants because of the historical importance of Bildung as qualification for recognition and (limited) advancement for this otherwise excluded segment of imperial society. The earliest sociological analysis of this widely acknowledged phenomenon is in a contribution by Paul Honigsheim to Max Scheler, ed. Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens. Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1924, 428-429. The talented Honigsheim never established himself in exile.

?

0. A counterpart to Carl H. Becker’s influential intervention from the Prussian Ministry of Culture at the end of the First World War was Max

Borschard, which are not easy to distinguish from it at thisdistance in time. They all present themselves as unpolitical, but nevertheless seek to exercise a direct influence on the political through their elite “few.” Of course, the political does not refer here to anything as mundane as social legislation or anti-inflationary policy. The political has Bildung as its aim, and it is supposed to draw in ever wider circles, beginning from “above” by means

Weber’s celebrated and much-disputed “Science as a Vocation.” The most widely recognized controversialists in the younger generation were ErichKahler and Arthur Salz. They had a poignant reunion in 1957 at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where Salz was a professor of economics without students in the College of Commerce, maintained by thecharity of a Jewish department store owner, and where Kahler initially served as one-quarter visitor, as a result of efforts by another emigrant to help him patch together a livelihood, in the absence of a pension. ?

2.2 Abraham Flexner, Universities–American. English. German. New York, London,Toronto, 1930. For the composition and reception of the book, see Thomas Neville Bonner, Iconoclast. Abraham Flexner and a Life of Learning. Baltimoreand London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2002, 213-233. For a historical overview of the “importation of . . .German ideals of university education,” see Jurgen Herbst, “Liberal Education and the Graduate Schools: An Historical View of College Reform,” History of Education Quarterly 2:4 (Dec. 1962), 244-258.

?3.3A factor that cannot be properly considered here is the contrast between the encounters with anti-semitism in the past histories of the émigrés, notably the many who were defined as Jews, and the diverse consequences of this imputed Jewish identity in American exile, ranging from outright rejection due to widespread, more or less “genteel” anti-semitism in the academic class to generous support through the mobilization of Jewish philanthropists and agencies. The documentation of these complexities in the intellectual and cultural productions will figure in several of the articles, but will not be a theme of this introduction, except in the indirect sense that the Bildung and Wissenschaftthemes had special saliency for Jews in Germany, as a prime element in their legitimation and resistance to anti-Semitic exclusion. The issue of anti-Semitism figures in the controversies that led to Flexner’s stepping down as Director of the Institute of Advanced Study. Under somewhat obscure circumstances, members of the Institute charged Flexnerwith temporizing with the widely-recognized anti-semitism at Princeton because of his eagerness to cultivate the institution. See Bonner, op.

of the few. It is hard to avoid noticing the exaggerated self-importance of this project, but it is no less importantto remark its extraordinary appeal to outstanding intellectuals at the time. Since it was impossible to speakof Bildung without simultaneously alluding to the educated middle class for whom the concept was iconic, it was necessary to widen the distance. They spoke of “unconditional renewal” and they were not economical with

cit. 264-283. The story is pertinent for the light it may shed on the complexity of the unceasing negotiations for acceptance, even under the optimal conditions of the Institute, with its extraordinarily prominent members. It was Albert Einstein’s anti-Nazi activism, in fact, that exacerbated Flexner’s problems with the host institution and his conservative [Jewish] donors.

?0 The relationship between the Bildung debate as it affected secondary schools and universities in the Weimar years (and before) is complex. In the present context, the latter aspect is of prime interest, precisely because of the focus on tensions between science and cultivation within intellectual life. Theoretical treatments of the Bildung theme, which do not distinguish between the two institutional settings, may nevertheless get some attention.

?4.4 Abraham Flexner, I remember. The Autobiography of Abraham Flexner. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940. Flexner was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1866, a son of Jewish immigrants. After study at Johns Hopkins and a short stint as high school teacher, he developed a small, expensive, independent school devoted to preparing the sons of wealthy local families for admission to prominent universities. His success caught the attention of Charles W. Eliot at Harvard, and he secured enough encouragement to publish some articles and then to break away from Louisville for post- graduate study at 40. He interrupted an unsatisfying year at Harvard to move on to Berlin, where he gratefully attended lectures by Karl Stumpf, Friedrich Paulsen, and Georg Simmel. His career with the Carnegie Foundation began with the first of his surveys of medical education. Flexner clearly had a genius for winning the patronage of men of high status, but this was not because he simply confirmed their opinions. Instead, he found dramatic things for them todo, in areas where they lacked guidance but wanted to have an effect, building on his additional capacity to gain the confidence of individuals with extraordinary professional credentials, notably in medicine. This was no less the case with John D. Rockefeller Jr. than with Louis Bamberger or Julius Rosenwald. Cp. Bonner, op. cit. Flexner’s

expressions of totality and the direct apprehension of essences. The specialization characteristic of modern orders of knowledge seemed to be suspended, and the “essential,” to come into view.

With all this diffuse intensity, it is no wonder that the ways of the George followers could as easily terminate in the “new” state as in “inner emigration” or exile. The fault lines among the individual members could not be compellingly predicted, and it was not clear to the participants themselves. That the members of the circle returned to the Master’s ideas after 1945 is further evidence of the striking persistence of the all-too German controversy about Bildung, from which this fourth quadrant onthe intellectual landscape cannot be excluded.

This is a book about Bildung and Exile. The critical examination of the relations between these contested concepts in the experience and thought of representative figures of the 1930s forced emigration from Germany bears directly on current topics. Education is the watch-word in the policy debates and politics of most wealthy countries, with the emphasis on performance, specialized knowledge, andthe advancement of science. This thrust encounters a more or less coherent resistance, a fear that something is being lost. Variously cast as a concern for the arts, the cultivation of excellence, or even education for democracy, the protests circle around themes of the orienting, individual- and group-forming purposes of schooling. The Germans have a word for what may be lost in a single-minded focus on an inherently unstable scientific knowledge--Bildung,--and they have a history of contestation about this concept that is profoundly instructive about the powers and failures of such a focus on a sacralized dimension of

career offers an important template of the architectonics of power in the Progressive Era. In the more paranoid writings of social critics, whose caricatures are often nevertheless instructive, Flexner figures asan important agent in the Anglo-American elite coalitions identified with such entities as the Council of Foreign Relations and the Royal Instute of World Affairs.

encounters with knowledge, especially when this focus is viewed through a prism of “crisis” and as an occasion for totalized decision. Exile, in turn, is a prime topos in postmodern theory, taken variously as a figure for an enhanced spiritual status of the reflective and distanced intellectual and cultural creator, in a time when displacement is alleged to be the only condition adequate tothe disintegration of orders. A re-examination of representative exile experiences, where exile means defeat, expulsion, breach, abandoned tasks and obligations, and a difficult reorientation under the burden of unfinished business—moral, political and intellectual—is a salutary counter to the etherealization of the concept. The exile ofthese authors and artists disrupted their contested but common discourse about Bildung, science, and education, and confronted them with both opportunity and compelling need toreanimate their legacy in a cultural space where the issues seemed tantalizingly similar but where the terms of agreement and difference were in fact dramatically different. “No happy end” and “contested legacies” are the guiding mottos of the multi-authored and open-textured argument developed in the book, shadowed throughout by a keen awareness of the wonders of renewal that nevertheless emerged, and that ultimately account for the collaborators’ engagement with their respective texts and subjects.

_____________________________________________No group active during the last imperial years in Germany and the fourteen years of Weimar was more intimately identified with the slogan of Bildung, expressly treated as remote from specialized sciences of the university and as core of an intimate association of individuals, than the so-called Circle around the poet, Stefan George. The members forced into exile after 1933 could not avoid decisions aboutthis motif so demandingly present in their earlier lives, and they exemplify a significant range of alternative ways of managing this unshakable legacy, encapsulated in an elitist conception of ‘secret Germany’ that also resonated with many intellectuals drawn to National Socialism. In a

brief essay grounded in his extensive scholarly investigations of George and his Circle, Ernst Osterkamp evokes and analyses this extreme exile experience.

Irving Wohlfarth, in turn, closely marks Walter Benjamin’s dialectical conversion of ‘secret Germany’ into a location defined by “political repression and the denial of a public voice.” While Benjamin’s exile ended in death before he could join most of the individuals studied in this volume inone of the secure English-speaking nations, his years in Germany had been a constant preparation for exile, and the production of his brief years in French exile became a vitalimpulse in the self-confrontation of such disparate prominent exile figures as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno.Yet, as Wohlfarth shows, Benjamin to an important extent kept his own secret, leaving it to be differently unriddled in different times. This Bildung has to be painfully extracted from of the given materials; and it bestows no status. With all the hermeticism and rebelliousness of Benjamin’s position, as Wohlfarth shows, he profoundly affects the debate about enlightenment, politics, Jews—and Germany.

According to Laurent Jeanpierre, the question of acknowledging the inescapable inner connection between Bildung and myth without a romantic transcendence of practical enactment, in the realm of concrete social possibilities, also links the exiled Surrealists and the aesthetician of the Institute of Social Research, despite the failure of both, under their differing conditions of exile, to recognize the hidden parallels.

Reinhard Mehring presents Thomas Mann as a writer who bringsthese issues more into the light, challenging the thought that myth and humanism are contradictory, first of all through the humanistic prototypes that people his novels butsecondly also in philosophical essays, whose arguments are explicated by several exile philosophers and in the course of Mann’s correspondence with Karl Kerény and Theodor

Adorno. With the end of exile, as such, Mann’s humanistic Bildungs project was largely abandoned by those who had expounded it earlier, and his extraordinary authority abruptly withered, especially within the new German literaryscholarship.

A former secretary and close friend of Thomas Mann stood out, according to Gerhard Lauer, as a lifelong witness to a distinctive idealization of a “revolutionary” refounding of German Bildung, having chosen Germany above his native Austria, which he deemed polluted by Habsburgh. In principle, Kahler made no concessions to the intellectual currents of his place of asylum, except insofar as his self-popularizations served a taste for cultural uplift. Here was an exile in the vestibule.

The case of Kahler is especially interesting in the present context because, as Reinhard Laube shows, he was the most celebrated antagonist of Max Weber’s Science as Vocation, the work which elicited the sharpest statements of the Weimar phase of the conflict between Bildung and science. His counterpart on the other side of the contest was Helmuth Plessner, who accepted Max Weber’s answer but reasserted thesaliency of the distinctively German question about Bildung. Strikingly, neither of these writers adapted their positionsto the exile environment, where the state of the question was strikingly different.

Quite different, Gregory Moynahan points out, is the case ofthe philosopher, Ernst Casssirer, whose own contestation of the Bildung issues variously posited in the debate after Weber took place at the most stringent philosophical level, famously in his debate with Martin Heidegger in Davos in 1927. Cassirer’s further elaboration of his argument—and its application to large political themes-- shows clear andinfluential marks of his engaged encounter with the philosophical setting in his places of exile, Sweden and theUnited States. Cassirer’s service as mediator in the

transition to the new frame of reference is especially clearin the work and reception of Erwin Panofsky.

An unexpected affinity can be observed, according to Kay Schiller, between Cassirer and the renaissance scholar, PaulKristeller, whose rigorous historical method precluded in principle the more symbolic rendering of Humanist ideas thatCassirer occasionally ventured in his writings in exile. Atissue in the “humanistic turn” was the transfer to the United States of the debate about a “Third Humanism” that had talen authoritarian and elitist form in Germany. Cassirer and Kristeller came together in insisting on the philosophical seriousness of the Renaissance figures they studied and in rejecting their invocation in aid of stereotyped positions in the old Bildungs debate.

In his extended and extensively researched essay on Siegfried Kracauer, Jerry Zaslove brings forward the profound soberness with which this essayist, a convenor and participant of the Weimar Bildung debate, explores the experience of exile—and Holocaust--notably in displacing thedestructive and wordy yearning for community with the distanced but infinitely attentive view of the photographer.Interestingly, Kracauer’s work was completed, not by TheodorAdorno, with whom he had been in extended conversation, but by Paul Kristeller, who evidently found him a kindred spiritprecisely in this prophetic ataraxia.

While Kracauer made his defiantly uncertain peace with exilewithout any recovery of professional standing, the artist, Lázló Moholy-Nagy enjoyed the success of a cosmopolitan figure. Anna Wessely shows how he was moved to leave Germany, where he had earlier come as exile from Hungary andhow the terms of his welcome in America nevertheless compelled him to give the Bildung project of the Bauhaus, theaim that was of special value to him.

In anything but a trivial sense, there is a parallel betweenMoholy-Nagy’s trajectory in exile and that of his Hungarian-

Jewish compatriot, Karl Mannheim, which Colin Loader characterizes as a movement from Bildung to Planning. Mannheim’s response to the Weimar Bildung debate was a conception of political Bildung centered on a process of sociological reflection and implemented through experientiallearning expressly linked by him to the Bauhaus experiments. In British exile, he depoliticized this conception and sought without notable success to transmute the sense of crisis into a dedication to planning.

Theodore W. Adorno , like his closest collaborator, Max Horkheimer, rejected all aspects of Mannheim’s approach. The conjunction of politics and culture, both in the diagnosis of the crisis and in the projection of its negation, was central to Adorno, Alfons Söllner shows, both in theory and in the Bildungs practice in Germany, to which Adorno returned after the years of exile.. Adorno’s strategy of “political culturism” is a sign of the breach produced by exile and of the subtlety required to work effectively across the gap.

Jack Jacobs contends that the stark recognition of anti-Semitism as focal point of attention by the Horkheimer-Adorno group, during the years of exile, mediated the displacement of the theoretical focal point from Marxist social theory to a distinctive dialectical cultural-political configuration. Not only their reflections on the German spectacle, seen from a distance, but also the exigencies of their client search and service contributed tothis reorientation. The conditions of life in exile manifested itself on more than one level.

The complexity of the exile situation of this exemplary group is made evident by an account of their anti-Semitism research project from Thomas Wheatland’s competing

?5.35Gerd Mattenklott, Bilderdienst. Ästhetische Opposition bei Beardsley und George. Frankfurt/M. 1985.

?6.36Ludwig Thormaehlen, Erinnerungen an Stefan George. Hamburg 1962, 57

perspective, where the emphasis is rather on the effort to meet the methodological expectations of American social science clients. The emphasis here is on the contested importance of the empirical methodologist—and fellow-exile--Paul Lazarsfeld for their work, an issue of particular interest because it highlights the question of the extent towhich participants in exile revised their memories in the changed contexts of later times.

David Kettler considers the importance of negotiation as a mode of relationship that played a special part in shaping exile existence, taking the case of Franz L. Neumann, who served as negotiator for the Horkheimer-Adorno group, but also transformed his own relationship with the group leadership into a bargaining form. In his subsequent relations with foundations, he exemplifies contrasting strategies for negotiating a way to the institutionalizing of a mode of political Bildung which he derived from his Weimar experiences, a space where concerns of science and a mode of Bildung would be in productive complementary apposition. The case study invites consideration of the diverse types of bargaining—or the failures to achieve such a relationship—that pervade all of the examples studied in this book. Then too, successfully to construct a negotiating frame work is not necessarily to achieve a favorable or sustainable settlement. Yet attention to such processes opens the way to balanced encounter with these varied and rich sources of current thought.