Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  American mathematicians watched the situation with dismay and alarm. At first they considered buying the title, but the Berlin company wouldn’t sell. Springer did, however, make a counter-suggestion, offering two editorial boards, which would have produced different versions of the journal, one for the United States, Britain, the Commonwealth, and the Soviet Union, the other for Germany and nearby countries. American mathematicians were so incensed by this insult that in May 1939 they voted to establish their own journal.6

  As early as April 1933 officials at the Rockefeller Foundation began to consider how they might help individual scholars. Funds were found for an emergency committee, which started work in May. This committee had to move carefully, for the depression was still hurting, and jobs were scarce. The first task was to assess the size of the problem. In October 1933, Edward R. Murrow, vice chairman of the emergency committee, calculated that upward of 2,000 scholars, out of a total of 27,000, had been dropped from 240 institutions. That was a lot of people, and wholesale immigration not only risked displacing American scholars but might trigger anti-Semitism. A form of words was needed that would confine the numbers who were encouraged to cross the Atlantic and in the end the emergency committee decided that its policy would be ‘to help scholarship, rather than relieve suffering.’ Thus they concentrated on older scholars, whose achievements were already acknowledged. The most well known beneficiary was Richard Courant from Göttingen.7

  The two mathematicians who did most to help their German-speaking colleagues were Oswald Veblen (1880–1960) and R. G. D. Richardson (1878–1949). The former, a nephew of Thorstein Veblen, the great social theorist, was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, while Richardson was chairman of the mathematics department at Brown University and secretary of the American Mathematical Society. With the aid of the society, which formally joined the emergency committee, fifty-one mathematicians were brought to America before the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939; and by the end of the war the total migration was just under 150. Every scholar, whatever his or her age, found work. Put alongside the six million Jews who perished in the gas ovens, 150 doesn’t sound much; yet there were more mathematicians helped than any other professional group. Today, out of the top eight world-class mathematics institutes, the United States has three. Germany has none.8

  In addition to the artists, musicians, and mathematicians who were brought to America, there were 113 senior biologists and 107 world-class physicists whose decisive influence on the outcome of the war we shall meet in chapter 22. Scholars were also helped by a special provision in the U.S. immigration law, created by the State Department in 1940, which allowed for ‘emergency visitor’ visas, available to imperilled refugees ‘whose intellectual or cultural achievements or political activities were of interest to the United States.’ Max Reinhardt, the theatre director, Stefan Zweig, the writer, and Roman Jakobson, the linguist, all entered the United States on emergency visas.9

  Of all the various schemes to help refugees whose work was deemed important in the intellectual sphere, none was so extraordinary, or so effective, as the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) organised by the American Friends of German Freedom. The Friends had been formed in America by the ousted German socialist leader Paul Hagen (also known as Karl Frank), to raise money for anti-Nazi work. In June 1940, three days after France signed the armistice with Germany, with its notorious ‘surrender on demand’ clause, the committee’s members held a lunch to consider what now needed to be done to help threatened individuals in the new, much more dangerous situation.10 The ERC was the result, and $3,000 was raised immediately. The aim, broached at the lunch, was to prepare a list of important intellectuals – scholars, writers, artists, musicians – who were at risk and would be eligible for special visa status. One of the committee’s members, Varian Fry, was chosen to go to France, to find as many threatened intellectuals as he could and help them to safety.

  Fry, a slight, bespectacled Harvard graduate, had been in Germany in 1935 and seen at first hand what the Nazi pogroms were like. He spoke German and French and was familiar with the work of their living writers and painters. At that time, with anti-Semitism running high in America, his first move was to visit Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House, soliciting her support. The first lady promised to help, but to judge by the behaviour of the State Department subsequently, her husband did not share her views. Fry arrived in Marseilles in August 1940 with $3,000 in his pocket and a list of two hundred names that he had memorised, judging it too dangerous to carry written lists. These names had been collected in an ad hoc way. Thomas Mann had provided the names of German writers at risk, Jacques Maritain a list of French writers, Jan Masaryk the Czechs. Alvin Johnson, president of the New School of Social Research, submitted names of academics, and Alfred Barr, director of MoMA, supplied the names of artists. To begin with, many of those Fry had been sent to help – especially the artists – didn’t want to leave. Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, and Jacques Lipchitz all refused to emigrate (Chagall asked if there were ‘any cows’ in America). Amedeo Modigliani wanted to leave but wouldn’t do anything illegal. Fry’s offer was also turned down by Pablo Casals, André Gide, and André Malraux.11

  Fry soon came to understand that not all the people on his list were in mortal danger. The Jews were, as well as the more outspoken, long-standing political opponents of Nazism. At the same time, it became clear that if many of the very famous, non-Jewish ‘degenerate’ artists were protected by their celebrity in Vichy France, there were far more lesser-known figures who were in real danger. Without referring back to New York, therefore, Fry changed the policy of the ERC and set about helping as many people as he could who fell within the ambit of the special visa law, whether they were on his list or not.12 He installed the Centre Américain de Secours, a ‘front’ organisation on the rue Grignan in Marseilles, which dispensed routine aid to refugees – small amounts of money, help with documentation or in communicating with the United States. Meanwhile he set up his own clandestine network, using several members of the French underground, which transported selected refugees out of France into Portugal, where, with a visa, they could sail for America. He found a ‘safe house,’ the Villa Air Bel, just north of Marseilles, and there he equipped his refugees with false documents and local guides who could lead them via obscure and arduous pathways across the Pyrenees to freedom. The best-known figures who escaped in this dramatic fashion included André Breton, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden (who had written a critical biography of Hitler), Heinrich Mann, Alma Mahler-Werfel, André Masson, Franz Werfel, and the Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam. In all, Fry helped around two thousand individuals, ten times the number he had been sent out to look for.13

  Until Pearl Harbor (by which time Fry was home), the American public was largely indifferent to the plight of European refugees, and positively hostile to Jewish ones. The State Department was itself staffed by many anti-Semites in senior positions, not excluding the assistant secretary of state himself, Breckinridge Long, who hated what Fry was doing. Fry was constantly harassed by the U.S. Consul in Marseilles as a matter of departmental policy; almost certainly, the consul had a hand in Fry’s arrest in September 1941, and his brief imprisonment by the Vichy authorities.14 Despite this, between 1933 and 1941 several thousand scientists, mathematicians, writers, painters, and musicians crossed the Adantic, many of them to remain in America permanently. Alvin Johnson, at the New School for Social Research in New York, took ninety scholars to create a University in Exile, where the faculty included Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, Otto Klemperer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Piscator, and Wilhelm Reich. Most of these scholars he had either met or corresponded with in editing the groundbreaking Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.15 Later, after the fall of France, he also created another exilic institute, the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy recreated a New Bauhaus in Chicago, and other former colleagues initiated something
similar in what became Black Mountain College. Located at 2,400 feet, in the wooded hills and streams of North Carolina, this was a place where architecture, design, and painting were taught alongside biology, music, and psychoanalysis. At one time or another its faculty included Joseph Albers, Willem de Kooning, Ossip Zadkine, Lyonel Feininger, and Amédée Ozenfant. Although the college was in the South, Negroes were represented among both faculty and students. After the war the college was home to a prominent school of poets and it remained in existence until the 1950s.16 The Frankfurt Institute at Colombia University and Erwin Panofsky’s Institute of Fine Arts at New York University were also started and staffed by exiles. Hitler’s gift turned out to be incalculable.

  The Artists in Exile exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1942, and others like it, introduced Americans to the work of important European artists. But it was only the beginning of a two-way process. Several painters who showed at Matisse never felt comfortable in America and returned to Europe as soon as they could; others adapted and stayed; none could fail to respond to the apocalyptic events they had been through.

  Beckmann, Kandinsky, Schwitters, Kokoschka, and the surrealists hit back directly at fascism and the departure from liberalism, reason, and modernity that it represented. Chagall and Lipchitz interpreted events more personally, exploring the changing essence of Jewishness. Fernand Léger and Piet Mondrian looked forward, and around them, at their new country. Léger himself admitted that though he was struck by the great skyscraper canyons of cities like New York, what impressed him most about America, and helped account for its great vitality and ‘electric intensity,’ was the clash and complementarity of a huge country, with ‘vast natural resources and immense mechanical forces.’17 The colour in his paintings became bolder and brighter, yet simpler, whereas his black lines became starker, less part of the three-dimensional effect. Léger’s American paintings are like intimate, mysterious billboards. Piet Mondrian’s late paintings (he died in 1944, aged seventy-two) are probably the most accessible abstract paintings of all time. Electric, vivid, flickering lattices, New York City; New York City 1, Victory Boogie-Woogie and Broadway Boogie-Woogie shimmer with movement and excitement, Manhattan grids seen from the air or the tops of skyscrapers, capturing the angular, anonymous beauty of this new world, abstract and expressionistic at the same time, emphasising how, in the New World, the old categories break down.18

  Other exhibitions were mounted during wartime, mainly in New York, showing the work of European artists living in America. War and the Artist was mounted in 1943, and Salon de la Libération in 1944. What counted here was less the way America affected the emigrés and more the way the emigrés affected a group of young American artists who were anxious to see everything the Europeans could produce. Their names were Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock.

  One of Hitler’s greatest gifts to the new world was Arnold Schoenberg. Once the Nazis took power, there was never much doubt that the composer would have to leave. Although he had converted from Judaism to Christianity early in life, that never made any impression with the authorities, and in 1933 he reverted to being a Jew. In the same year he was blacklisted as a ‘cultural Bolshevik’ and dismissed from his Berlin professorship. He moved first to Paris, where for a while he was penniless and stranded. Then, out of the blue, he received an invitation to teach at a small private conservatory in Boston, founded and directed by the cellist Joseph Malkin. Schoenberg accepted immediately, arriving in America in October.

  America, however, was not quite ready for Schoenberg, and he found the early months hard going. The winter was harsh, his English was poor, there weren’t many students, and his work was too difficult for conductors. As soon as he could, he transferred to Los Angeles, where at least the weather was better. He remained in Los Angeles until his death in 1951, his reputation steadily spreading. A year or so after he moved to Los Angeles, Schoenberg was appointed professor of music at the University of Southern California; in 1936 he accepted a similar position at UCLA. He never lost sight of what he was trying to do in music, and he successfully resisted the blandishments of Hollywood: when MGM inquired if he would like to write for films, he put them off by quoting so high a price ($50,000) that they melted away as quickly as they had appeared.19

  The first music he wrote in America was a light piece for a student orchestra, but then came the Violin Concerto (op. 36). Not only was this his American debut, it was also his first concerto. Rich and passionate, it was – for Schoenberg – fairly conventional in form, though it demanded phenomenally difficult finger work from the violinist. Schoenberg continued to think of himself as a conservative, in search of a new harmony, never quite (in his own mind) finding it.

  Twenty years younger than Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith was not Jewish – in fact, he was of ‘pure’ German stock. But he was also devoid of any nationalistic or ethnic feelings, and the string trio he helped to make famous contained a Jew, a tie he saw no reason to break. That was one black mark against him. Another was that as a teacher at the Berlin Hochschule from 1927 to 1934 he had become known as a high-profile German composer. He had a fervent following at the time, not least among music critics at certain influential newspapers and the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. But Goebbels was unimpressed, and Hindemith too was branded a ‘cultural Bolshevik.’ After a stint in Turkey, he went to America in 1937. Béla Bartók, Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky all followed to the United States. Many of the virtuoso performers, being frequent travellers as a matter of course, were already familiar with America, and America with them. Artur Rubinstein, Hans von Bülow, Fritz Kreisler, Efrem Zimbalist and Mischa Elman all settled in America in the late 1930s.20

  The only rival to New York as a base for exiles in wartime was, as Schoenberg found out, Los Angeles, where the roster of famous names living in close proximity (close in Los Angeles terms) was remarkable. Apart from Schoenberg, it included Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Lang, Artur Rubinstein, Franz and Alma Werfel, Bruno Walter, Peter Lorre, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Heinrich Mann, Igor Stravinsky, Man Ray, and Jean Renoir.21 The historian Lawrence Weschler has gone so far as to prepare an ‘alternative’ Hollywood map, displaying the addresses of intellectuals and scholars, as opposed to the more conventional map showing the homes of movie stars – worth doing, but in today’s world it could never have the same appeal.22 Arnold Schoenberg’s widow used to amuse her guests by taking them outside when the tour bus came round. It would stop outside the Schoenberg house, from where the voice of the tour guide could be clearly heard, over the loudspeaker. As the tourists peered across the garden and into the house, the guide would say: ‘And on the left you can see the house where Shirley Temple lived in the days when she was filming.’23

  When he was at Harvard, Varian Fry had edited an undergraduate literary magazine with a friend and classmate named Lincoln Kirstein. Like Fry, Kirstein later in life went to Europe and helped bring a piece of Old World culture to America. In Kirstein’s case, however, the emigration had nothing to do with the war, anti-Semitism, or Hitler. In addition to his literary interests, Kirstein was a balletomane: he thought America needed a boost in the realm of modern dance, and that only one man could fit the bill.

  Kirstein was very tall, very wealthy, and very precocious. Born into a Jewish family in Rochester, New York, he started collecting art when he was ten, saw his first ballet (Pavlova) when he was twelve published a play – set in Tibet – when he was barely fourteen, and in that same year summered in London, where he met the Bloomsbury set, encountering Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and the Sitwells. But it was ballet that was to make the difference in Kirstein’s life.24 He had been fascinated by the dance ever since he was nine, when his parents had refused to allow him to see Diaghilev’s company perform Scheherezade in Boston. Then, as a young man of twenty-two, visiting Venice, he had chanced on a funeral in an Orthodox church. An exot
ic barge of black and gold was moored to the church steps, waiting to take the body to Sant’ Erasmus, the Isle of the Dead on the lagoon. Inside the church, beyond the mourners, Kirstein saw a bier, ‘blanketed with heaped-up flowers, below a great iconostasis of burnished bronze.’25 Some of the faces that came out into the sunlight after the service was over he thought he recognised, though he couldn’t be sure. Three days later, according to Bernard Taper, his biographer, he chanced upon a copy of the London Times, and discovered that the church he had slipped into was San Giorgio dei Greci, and that the funeral was that of none other than Serge Diaghilev.