Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  For scientists only slightly less famous than Einstein, the attitude of the Nazis could pose serious problems, offering fewer chances of a safe haven abroad. Karl von Frisch was the first zoologist to discover ‘the language of the bees,’ by means of which bees informed other bees about food sources, through dances on the honeycomb. ‘A round dance indicated a source of nectar, while a tail-wagging dance indicated pollen.’ Von Frisch’s experiments caught the imagination of the public, and his popular books were best-sellers. This cut little ice with the Nazis, who under the Civil Service Law of April 1933 still required Von Frisch to provide proof of his Aryan descent. The sticking point was his maternal grandmother, and it was possible, he admitted, that she was ‘non-Aryan.’ A virulent campaign was therefore conducted against von Frisch in the student newspaper at Munich University, and he survived only because there was in Germany an outbreak of nosema, a bee disease, killing several hundred thousand bee colonies in 1941. This seriously damaged fruit growing and dislocated agricultural ecology. At that stage Germany had to grow its own food, and the Reich government concluded that von Frisch was the best man to rescue the situation.26

  According to recent research about 13 percent of biologists were dismissed between 1933 and the outbreak of war, four-fifths of them for ‘racial’ reasons. About three-quarters of those who lost their jobs emigrated, the expelled biologists on average proving considerably more successful than their colleagues who remained in Germany. The subject suffered most in two areas: the molecular genetics of bacteria, and phages (viruses that prey on bacteria). This had less to do with the quality of scientists who remained than with the fact that the scientific advances in these areas were chiefly made in the United States, and the normal dialogue between colleagues simply did not take place, neither in the late 1930s, nor throughout the war, nor for a considerable period afterward.27

  In 1925 Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy had moved the Bauhaus from Thuringia when the right-wing authorities there cut its budget, and transferred to Dessau. In the Saxony-Anhalt state elections of May 1932, however, the Nazis gained a majority, and their election manifesto included a demand for ‘the cancellation of all expenditures for the Bauhaus’ and ranted against ‘Jewish Bauhaus culture.’28 The new administration made good its promise, and in September the Bauhaus was closed. Bravely, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe moved on to the Steglitz suburb of Berlin, running the Bauhaus as a private school without state or municipal support. But money wasn’t the real problem, and on 11 April 1933 the Bauhaus was surrounded by police and storm troopers. Students were detained, files seized, and the building sealed. Police guards prevented entry for months. When the Bauhaus had closed in Dessau, there had at least been protests in the press. Now, in Berlin, there was a press campaign against the Bauhaus, which was dismissed as a ‘germ cell of Bolshevik subversion,’ sponsored by the ‘patrons and popes of the Arty German Empire of the Jewish nation.’29 Attempts were made to reopen the school; the Nazis actually had a policy for this, called Gleichschaltung – assimilation into the status quo.30 In the case of the Bauhaus, Mies was told that this would require the dismissal of, among others, Wassily Kandinsky. In the end, the differences between Mies and the Nazi authorities could not be reconciled, and the Bauhaus closed for good in Germany. It was more than just anti-Semitism. In trying to marry classical tradition to modern ideas, the Bauhaus stood for everything the Nazis loathed.

  Those who went into exile included some of the most prominent Bauhaus teachers. Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, all members of the inner circle, left Germany in either 1933–4 or 1937–8. Most went because their careers were stalled rather than because their lives were threatened, though the weaver Otti Berger was murdered at Auschwitz.31 Gropius moved to Britain in 1934, but only after he had received official permission. In Britain he avoided any contact with the politically active German artists who were also there at the time (known as the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund). When he was made professor at Harvard in 1937, the news received favourable coverage in the German papers.32 In America Gropius soon became a highly respected authority on modernism, but he still eschewed politics. Art historians have been unable to trace any public statement of his about events in Nazi Germany – not even the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition (see below), held in the very year of his appointment, and in which practically all of his Bauhaus artist colleagues and friends were vilely defamed.

  The closure of the Warburg Institute in Hamburg actually preceded that of the Bauhaus. Aby Warburg died in 1929, but in 1931, fearing that a Jewish-founded institute would become a target for the Nazis if they came to power, his friends took the precaution of moving the books and the institute itself to the safety of Britain, to become the Graduate Art History Department of the University of London. Later in the 1930s, one of the Warburg’s most illustrious disciples, Erwin Panofsky, who had written his famous study of perspective at the institute in Hamburg, also left Germany. He was dismissed in 1933, and he too was hired by Abraham Flexner at Princeton.

  Most members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research were not only Jewish but openly Marxist. According to Martin Jay, in his history of the Institute, its endowment was moved out of Germany in 1931, to Holland, thanks to the foresight of the director, Max Horkheimer. Foreign branches of the school had already been set up, in Geneva, Paris, and London (the latter at the London School of Economics). Shortly after Hitler assumed power, Horkheimer left his house in the Kronberg suburb of Frankfurt and installed himself and his wife in a hotel near the main railway station. During February 1933 he gave up his classes on logic and turned instead to politics, especially the meaning of freedom. A month later, he quietly crossed the border into Switzerland, only days before the institute was closed down for ‘tendencies hostile to the state.’33 The building on Victoria-Allee was confiscated, as was the library of 60,000 volumes. A few days after he had escaped, Horkheimer was formally dismissed, together with Paul Tillich and Karl Mannheim. By then almost all the senior staff had fled. Horkheimer and his deputy, Friedrich Pollock, went to Geneva, and so did Erich Fromm. Offers of employment were received from France, initiated by Henri Bergson and Raymond Aron. Theodor Adorno meanwhile went to Merton College, Oxford, where he remained from 1934 to 1937. Sidney Webb, R. H. Tawney, Morris Ginsberg and Harold Laski all helped preserve the London branch until 1936. Geneva, however, gradually became less hospitable. According to Pollock, ‘fascism also makes great progress in Switzerland.’ He and Horkheimer made visits to London and New York to sound out the possibility of transferring there. They received a much more optimistic reception at Columbia University than from William Beveridge at the LSE, and so, by the middle of 1934, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was reconstituted in its new home at 429 West 117th Street. It remained there until 1950, during which time much of its more influential work was carried out. The combination of German analysis and U.S. empirical methods helped give sociology its postwar flavour.34

  The migration of the philosophers of the Vienna Circle was perhaps less traumatic than with other academics. Thanks to the pragmatic tradition in America, not a few scholars there were very sympathetic to what the logical positivists were saying, and several of the circle crossed the Atlantic in the late 1920s or early 1930s to lecture and meet similar-minded colleagues. They were aided by a group known as Unity in Science, which consisted of philosophers and scientists searching for the constancies from one discipline to another. This international group held meetings all over Europe and North America. Then, in 1936, A.J. Ayer, the British philosopher, published Language, Truth and Logic, a brilliantly lucid account of logical positivism that popularised its ideas still more in America, making the members of the circle especially welcome on the other side of the ocean. Herbert Feigl was the first to go, to Iowa in 1931; Rudolf Carnap went to Chicago in 1936, taking Carl Hempel and Olaf Helmer with him. Hans Reichenbach followed, in 1938, establishing himself at UCLA.
A little later, Kurt Godei accepted a research position at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and so joined Einstein and Erwin Panofsky.35

  The Nazis had always viewed psychoanalysis as a ‘Jewish science.’ Even so, it was a rude shock when, in October 1933, the discipline was banned from the Congress of Psychology in Leipzig. Psychoanalysts in Germany were forced to look elsewhere for work. For some Freud’s hometown, Vienna, provided a refuge for a few years, but most went to the United States. American psychologists were not especially favourable to Freudian theory – William James and pragmatism were still influential. But the American Psychological Association did set up a Committee on Displaced Foreign Psychologists and by 1940 was in touch with 269 leading professionals (not all psychoanalysts), 134 of whom had already arrived in America: Karen Horney, Bruno Bettelheim, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and David Rapaport among them.36

  Freud was eighty-two and far from well when, in March 1938, Austria was declared part of the Reich. Several sets of friends feared for him, in particular Ernest Jones in London. Even President Roosevelt asked to be kept informed. William Bullitt, U.S. ambassador to Paris, was instructed to keep an eye on ‘the Freud situation,’ and he ensured that staff from the consul general in Vienna showed ‘a friendly interest’ in the Freuds.37 Ernest Jones hurried to Vienna, having taken soundings in Britain about the possibility of Freud settling in London, but when he arrived Jones found Freud unwilling to move. He was only persuaded by the fact that his children would have more of a future abroad.38

  Before Freud could leave, his ‘case’ was referred as high as Himmler, and it seems it was only the close interest of President Roosevelt that guaranteed his ultimate safety, but not before Freud’s daughter Anna was arrested and removed for a day’s interrogation. The Nazis took care that Freud settled all his debts before leaving and sent through the exit visas one at a time, with Freud’s own arriving last. Until that moment he worried that the family might be split up.39 When his papers did at last arrive, the Gestapo also brought with them a document, which he was forced to sign, which affirmed that he had been properly treated. He signed, but added, ‘I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.’ He left, via the Orient Express, for Paris, before going on to London. A member of the American legation was instructed to go with him, to ensure Freud’s safety.40 In London, Freud stayed first at 39 Elsworthy Road in Hampstead. He was visited by Stefan Zweig, Salvador Dalí, Bronislaw Malinowski, Chaim Weizmann, and the secretaries of the Royal Society, who brought the society’s Charter Book for him to sign, an honour previously bestowed only on the king.

  Within a month of his arrival Freud began work on Moses and Monotheism, which he first conceived as an historical novel. In this book Freud claimed that the biblical Moses was an amalgam of two historical personages, an Egyptian and a Jew, and that the Egyptian, autocratic Moses had been murdered, a crime that lay at the root of Jewish guilt, which had been handed down. He thought the early Jews a barbarous people who worshipped a god of ‘volcanoes and wildernesses,’ and who, in their practice of circumcision, inspired in gentiles a fear of castration, the root cause of anti-Semitism.41 It is difficult not to see the book as a reply to Hitler, almost a turning of the other cheek. The real significance of the book was its timing; Freud turned his back on Judaism (intellectually, if not emotionally) at Judaism’s darkest hour. He was hinting that the Jews’ separateness was psychologically profound, and partly their own fault. Freud didn’t agree with the Führer that the Jews were evil, but he did admit they were flawed.42 Many Jewish scholars implored him not to publish the book, on the grounds that it was historically inaccurate as much as because it would offend politico/religious sensibilities. But he went ahead.

  It was not a fitting epitaph. At the end of 1938, and early 1939, new lumps appeared in Freud’s mouth and throat. His Viennese doctor had obtained special permission to treat Freud without British qualifications, but there was little to be done. Freud died in September 1939, three weeks after war was declared.

  As a young philosophy student of eighteen, Hannah Arendt arrived in Marburg in 1924 to study under Martin Heidegger, then arguably the most famous living philosopher in Europe and in the final process of completing his most important work, Being and Time, which appeared three years later. When Arendt first met Heidegger, he was thirty-five and married, with two young children. Born a Catholic and intended for the priesthood, he developed into an extremely charismatic lecturer – his classes were complicated and dazzling intellectual displays. Students found his approach bewitching, but those who couldn’t cope with the intellectual fireworks often despaired. At least one committed suicide.

  Arendt came from a very different background – an elegant, cosmopolitan, totally assimilated Jewish family in Königsberg. Both her father and grandfather had died when she was young, and her mother travelled a great deal, so the young Hannah constantly worried that she would not return. Then her mother remarried, to a man Hannah never warmed to; nor did she take to the two stepsisters she acquired as a result of this union. When she arrived in Marburg, she was therefore intense but emotionally insecure, very much in need of love, protection and guidance.43 Marburg was then a small university town, staid, respectable, quiet. For a professor to risk his position in such an environment with one of his young students says a lot about the passions that Hannah’s arrival had aroused in him. Two months after she started attending his classes, he invited her to his study to discuss his work. Within another two weeks they had become lovers. Heidegger was transformed by Hannah. She was totally different from the ‘Teutonic Brunhildas’ he was used to, and one of the brightest students he had ever known.44 Instead of being a rather morose, even sullen man, he became much more outgoing, writing Hannah passionate poetry. For months they indulged in clandestine meetings with an elaborate code of lights in Heidegger’s house to indicate when it was safe to meet, and where. Working on Being and Time was an intense emotional experience for both of them, and Hannah adored being part of such an important philosophical project. After the initial passion, both realised it would be better if Hannah left Marburg, and she transferred to Heidelberg, where she studied under Karl Jaspers, a friend of Heidegger. But Hannah and Heidegger continued to correspond, and to meet, sharing their love for Beethoven and Bach, Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann, with an abandon that neither had known before. They met in a series of small German or Swiss towns where Heidegger had devised excuses to visit.45

  After she had finished her Ph.D., Hannah moved to Berlin and married a man whom, although he was Jewish, she did not love. For her, it was a survival device. He too was a philosopher, but not as dedicated as she, and he became a journalist. They moved in a left-wing circle, and among their close friends was the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the philosopher—social scientists from the Frankfurt School – Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm. Hannah still corresponded with Heidegger. Then, in 1933, after the Nazis took power, Hannah and Heidegger’s lives turned dramatically in different directions. He was made rector of Freiburg University, and rumours soon reached her that he was refusing to recommend Jews for positions and even turning his back on them. She wrote to him, and he replied immediately, ‘furiously’ denying the charge.46 She put it out of her head. Her left-wing husband decided he should leave Germany for Paris. Soon after, at Heidegger’s rectorial address, he made a very anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler speech, which was reported all over the world.47 Hannah was deeply upset and very confused by Martin’s behavior. To make matters worse, Bertolt Brecht was being persecuted as a Communist and forced to flee the country. He left behind most of his personal possessions, including his address book, which contained Hannah’s name and phone number. She was arrested, and spent eight days in jail being interrogated. Her husband was already in Paris; Martin could have helped her; he didn’t.48

  As soon as Hannah was released from jail, she left Germany and settled in Paris. From then on her world and Heidegger’s were about as different as could be. As a
Jew in exile, homeless, careerless, cut off from her family and all that she had known, for Arendt the late 1930s and early 1940s were a desperately tragic time. She joined a Jewish organisation, Youth Aliyah, which trained students who wanted to move to the Holy Land. She visited Palestine but didn’t like it and wasn’t a Zionist. Yet she needed a job and wished to help her people.49

  Heidegger’s life was very different. He played a crucial role in Germany. As a philosopher, he gave his weight to the Third Reich, helping develop its thinking, which grounded Nazism in history and the German sense of self. In this he had the support of Goebbels and Himmler.50 As an academic figure he played a leading role in the reorganisation of the universities, the chief ‘policy’ under this scheme being the removal of all Jews. Through Heidegger’s agency both Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology and his own professor, and Karl Jaspers, who had a Jewish wife, were forced out of their university posts. Hannah later wrote that ‘Martin murdered Edmund.’ When Being and Time was republished in 1937, the dedication to Husserl had been removed.51 Heidegger allowed both himself and his philosophy to become part of the Nazi state ideological apparatus. He changed his thinking to extol war (this happened when his rectorial address was republished in 1937). He argued that the Nazis were not Nietzschean enough, not enough concerned with great men and struggle. He played a part in linking biology to history by drawing parallels between modern Germany and ancient Greece, in its obsession with sport and physical purity.