Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Financial strains, palpable to the adolescent OA, coincided with the tightening of quarters in the flat. When the children were young, it was easier to have them bunk together. Ursula, the eldest, had her own room; but young OA and little Eva shared the same quarters. At some point (probably around his fifteenth birthday), Otto Albert had to get a space of his own, and he was moved to the waiting room of Carl’s home office. Its sofa was converted to a night bed; OA, never above turning a virtue out of necessity, was happy to sacrifice privacy in order to sleep surrounded by bookshelves. Then, as the financial woes shook the fortunes of the extended family, Hedda’s mother moved in. Ottilie’s own wealth, along with the extended family’s, some of which had been invested in some rather dubious ventures, had evaporated. Two of her sons were gone, and there was only Franz, a complete dependent. Carl had until then been the custodian of Öhmchen’s health. Now he was saddled with her lodging needs. By the end of 1932, the apartment on Hohenzollernstrasse was getting overcrowded for a family that once aspired to an haute bourgeois lifestyle; but two things they did not skimp on was support for the children’s expensive schooling and the recreational travel that punctuated it.48

  The tension that hung over the family finally erupted in 1931, revealing not just the limits of assimilationist ideals and their outward cruelties, but also the family’s vulnerability to inner cleavages. Until then, only subtle signs of trouble had appeared: the abandoned search for a house, the need to keep working through vacations. But otherwise Carl and Hedda could keep up the appearances they both wanted. Behind the scenes, there was evidence of marital strain. Carl worked harder than ever, and his recessive propensities at home seem to have grown. In the summer of 1930, while Hedwig had taken Ursula and Eva to Arosa, Carl clearly yearned to join them. At one point, he called her to say that he was going to leave Berlin for the mountains. The phone conversation did not go well, indicating that the two had grown apart and knew it. The next day, he quickly tried to make amends: “You know, this time I’ll come to you like in old times, fresh in spirit and not bad in body. Hold on, I still wanted to say, if it’s any trouble finding a single room for me, or if it’s much dearer or—and that’s the main thing—if it’s more pleasant, more agreeable to you—if we both sleep together … then arrange it that way. I must confess, it was a bit of a relapse, when I told you on the phone that I wanted a room for myself.”49

  Then the strains on Carl took a turn for the worse. He applied for a position as head of neurosurgery in a major Berlin hospital. The stakes were high, for not only was it an important step for Carl’s career, especially now that he was into his early fifties, but it was also a condition for his being able to teach medicine at a university—a crowning achievement in the medical hierarchy. Instead, he was passed over in favor of a younger candidate with impeccable Christian credentials. To compound matters, he then applied to fill a vacancy for the surgical chief at the Jewish hospital, only to be turned down, evidently because his children had been baptized. Carl was feeling the squeeze of having committed to the assimilation ideal when anti-Semitism and Jewish self-defense were on the rise.50

  Carl’s failure to be promoted was devastating. Not only did it mean there would be no boost in income at a time when resources were getting tight at home, it was also a blow to the family status. Much later, Eva was to recall that, while she was too young to know exactly where the malaise was coming from, Mutti “was very upset” about the news: “according to her, he was not ambitious enough or didn’t do enough.” Things got worse as her relatives began to whisper. The tension was always latent: Carl was, after all, an eastern Jew. Now he was an unsuccessful one, which only confirmed his deficiencies. His credentials as a surgeon were now cause for suspicion. Why did he minister to ordinary patients? Why not the elite? Maybe he botched a procedure?51 For Ursula, who was by now more aware of the drama unfolding around her, what was as striking as the growing bigotry was “my father’s incapacity to defend himself, his vulnerability to the big blows in life.”52

  Maternal preening and bourgeois self-consciousness, combined with paternal pity, eventually did not go down well with Ursula, the eldest, powerful, vocal, and often combative child. In her teenage years, she started to scorn her parents’—and especially her mother’s—efforts to emulate, if not catch up with, the likes of the Katzenellenbogens. The ostentatious behavior, the parties, the organization of fêtes for children in which the rich cousins danced with other rich cousins and quietly but deliberately left those like the Hirschmanns to stand on the side—all fueled Ursula’s confrontations with her mother and the rising tension in the household. Carl went more silent, Ursula and her mother grew more combative, Eva, the youngest, was the bystander; the son, meanwhile, created a carapace of invulnerability out of his immersion in books, schooling, and eventually, politics.53

  The history of the Hirschmann family is one of ascent, of social mobility and outward display of the successes of the bourgeois, assimilated Jewish world it thrived on. It had its ambiguities—there were family scars that refused to heal, a marital union subject to more than the normal pressures, and the scourge of anti-Semitism that could not be completely shut out of the cosmopolitan milieu of the Tiergarten. By the early 1930s, the clouds that passed occasionally over the Hirschmann family began to thicken and darken—and the temptation to liken the Hirschmann family fortunes to that of the republic they all believed in is almost too hard to resist. An example of the Enlightenment-assimilationist ideal, Otto Albert’s upbringing was shaped by the optimism of the republic, a well-mannered home life, and a heritage that exuded an assurance that, with hard work and proper dedication, better times lay ahead. That the cause for such confidence was more fragile than realized was certainly easier to see in retrospect. But as Hirschmann entered the fourth decade of the century and he passed through his adolescence, few could have anticipated how truly dark were the days that awaited him.

  CHAPTER 2

  Berlin Is Burning

  The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  A photo of Otto Albert at nine years old cuts a profile of a thin, delicate figure with soft, sensitive, brown eyes, a full, but not wide, mouth, dressed the part of the child of Berlin’s professional elite. To these features would be added, as he matured, an unruly shock of hair and an impish, playful, grin; his eyes would evolve into knowing, ever-attuned instruments; what his father’s hands were for the surgeon, OA’s eyes were for the observer of the world. He was by no means a formed being, but some basic traits were there. The son of an upper-middle-class family of assimilated Jews from a city that was a symbol of tolerance, he was self-assured, he could boast—but didn’t—achievement, and he possessed an uncanny ability to charm those around him. With the charm came a remarkable skill in deflecting personal difficulties and avoiding trouble. The combination earned him the confidence of his parents, teachers, and mentors. Multiligual as he already was, to his good looks must also be added his sheer intelligence, ingredients that would have foretold a brilliant career, a model son.

  But it would not be so. The republic that had buoyed the world in which the Hirschmanns prospered came apart, and came apart dramatically, shattering the comforts and status of the household on Hohenzollernstrasse.

  None of this was foretold in the mid-1920s. On the contrary: for the Hirschmanns as for Berlin, there was prosperity and promise. For devoted parents like Carl and Hedwig, their children were spared no expense: holidays, music lessons, weekend outings, birthdays, and fine educations. When it came to Otto Albert’s schooling, there were choices; the parents of bright young Berliners tracked their sons either into classical or practical schools. OA’s parents perceived—and thus promoted—a scholarly orientation. They were also intent on making him a worldly creature. Otto Albert was sent to the Französisches Gymnasium (or Collège Français), where he would spend nine years and from which he would gradu
ate in the spring of 1932. Established after the Edict of Potsdam (1685), it threw open the gates for fleeing French Huguenots. As an emblem of Prussian tolerance and a definition of accommodation, the school promoted a cosmopolitan spirit among its students and alumni. By the second half of the nineteenth century, it began to take in larger and larger numbers of Jews: between 1834 and 1933, over one-third of the school’s one thousand graduates were Jewish. To sneering anti-Semites, it was known as the Franco-Jewish Gymnasium. It undoubtedly appealed to the sons of educated parents, or to those who were keen to have their sons enjoy a more academically inclined education. This was a school that prided itself on intellectual rigor: its classes were small (Otto Albert’s graduating cohort was eighteen fellow students), its professors demanding. Otto Albert rewarded his parents by winning book prizes and special mentions, to Ursula’s chagrin. While French was the language of instruction, the curriculum was resolutely classical, rigorous in languages (Otto Albert was proficient in Greek and Latin and would read to his younger sister from The Iliad) but less inclined to scientific or technical subjects. This is not to say that science was completely ignored; Professor Otto Nix, a mathematician, introduced his students to Einstein’s theory of relativity. But for the most part, languages, the humanities, and mathematics absorbed most of the students’ time.

  Otto Albert, 9 years old.

  In a day and age in which well-educated young men, especially those inclined to writing, treated traditional rote learning as something on which one had to cut some teeth, Otto Albert was spared some of the wider social rigidities. The school, like the republic, was adept at allowing teachers and pupils to mold what might have been an oppressive classicism to a more modern form. For while there was no shortage of rigor at the Collège, there was also room for unorthodoxy. Otto Albert’s most memorable teachers were Professor Lindenborn, who taught religion and ethics and introduced the young Hirschmann to Tolstoy as a way to teach Christianity, and Professor Levinstein, who embellished his classes on Goethe by sitting down before his piano and singing Wagner. Evidently, his singing took up too much time to get through all of Faust, so Otto Albert and his classmates had to convene in Professor Levinstein’s home at nights to catch up on what got missed in class. Many years later, Hirschmann would recite pages of Goethe’s Faust to his new wife and would read it to his young daughters at night, a reminder that the memory of a German culture did not have to remain imprisoned by the ghosts of fascism.

  Otto Albert’s class at the French Gymnasium, 1926. Otto Albert is on the top row, far left.

  When Otto Albert stood for his Abitur (his final exam and thesis), on January 29, 1932, his assigned topic was an analysis of a quote from Spinoza: “One should neither laugh nor cry at the world, but understand it.” It was, in the scheme of things, a remarkably appropriate line for what would characterize a leitmotif of his own, much later, compositions. Written under exam conditions of a half day, the young man’s commentary summarized much of what Otto Albert had learned of Hegel, the tradition of German idealism, and Greek literature to treat the quote as a moral injunction for the present. As befitted the school’s aims of creating thoughtful young men for a cosmopolitan republic, the examiners cared less about his command of Spinoza’s own writings (which the young Hirschmann had read but did not imbibe with quite the same determination reserved for Hegel) than the soon-to-be-graduate’s values he would carry forth into the world. The sixteen-year-old’s exam script ended with a plea for an open mind: “Finally, the maxim calls upon us not to mock or fight something at first sight, but to consider, to understand, to penetrate. It is thus directed against the increase of catchphrases. Against this state of affairs, in which—as Goethe put it—a conceptual lacuna is soon filled by a word, Spinoza’s maxim deserves to be defended as an ideal.”1

  More important to Otto Albert’s educational experience than what transpired in the classroom was what the school offered on the side. It was in the quasi-formal reading groups, or tutorials (Arbeitsgemeinschaften), on topics ranging from art history to classical philology and led by faculty, alumni, and upperclassmen that Otto Albert thrived. The idea was to have the students create a parallel curriculum of their own design, one that would reflect their interests beyond the core of languages, humanities, math, and natural science. Otto Albert and his classmates reached out to a Collège Français alumnus, Bernd Knoop, who took Otto Albert under his wing for intensive reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit once a week over the course of one school year, 1931–32, culminating in the next summer’s writing assignment on one of the introductory paragraphs of Hegel’s monumental work, which focused on reason and consciousness. Otto Albert parked himself at a great desk in the Staatsbibliothek for weeks, poring over the text and writing his very first independent essay, a dense, twenty-eight-page exegesis. At the time, Hegel was the departure point for any serious student of contemporary German philosophy and social theory, and Phenomenology was the ur-text that any ambitious student had to master (or think he was mastering). In the dialectical escalation from spirit to consciousness to self-consciousness so much could be explained—and yet it was not easy; OA’s friend, Helmut Mühsam—the nephew of a famous anarchist—quipped: “I understand every word, but not their connection!”2

  Still, Hirschmann was determined to show his mettle and fathom the ties between Reason and History—and their surprising turns. He did so by tackling a passage of Phenomenology dealing with Hegel’s concept of ethics and consciousness and how the two are grounded in the nation and in the family—and from which an “ethical order” for human reason emerges. As happens so often in analyses of Hegel’s work, the young Hirschmann’s prose is as dense as that he tried to decipher; indeed, it does not differ very much from the subject. One might suspect that he grappled with Hegel’s opacity by being opaque himself, an inclination that would change dramatically and yield to his trademark clairvoyance. But for a seventeen-year-old making his first steps into philosophy, not to mention Hegel, distance might be too much to ask. This exercise was already something of a tall order. But Hirschmann does offer some sense that he not only understood but also sought to lend an original reading to the great text when he dealt with Hegel’s understanding of the family. What was the “ethical” bedrock of the family? Not the husband and wife relationship, “which is clearly natural.” Nor was it the tie between parents and children, because “it does not display that identity between subject and object requisite for an ethical relationship.” The condition of an ethical relationship rested upon the exercise of free will, which required an exchange of “free individuality unto each other.” Accordingly, the ties that most conform to a “truly ethical relationship” are those between brothers and sisters, bound by blood but divided by sex. Hirschmann went on to explain how Hegel viewed brothers (for whom “spirit becomes individualized” as they move through the world, passing from subjects of divine law to human law) and sisters (who become wives and preservers of the home, and thus the preservers of the realm of divine law). It was the braided relationship between siblings that caught his eye and called for reflection. Sticking close to the Hegel text, he surmised that “in this way both sexes overcome their merely natural being, and become ethically significant, as diverse forms dividing between them the different aspects which the ethical substance assumes.” How much Hirschmann truly absorbed of this is hard to say. “At the time,” he recalled, “everything seemed very opaque to me.” Yet, one has a sense that his reference was not just Phenomenology, but also his dialectic with Ursula, with whom he was reconstituting a close bond (now as young adults) forged in the heat of the Weimar Republic’s decomposition.3

  He was enormously proud—of both the exercise in writing and of having tackled Hegel! That he had “something worthwhile” to say added to the sense of achievement. While it is tempting to identify in this writing on Hegel the seeds of something that would later grow—a sense that humans carried with them larger, logical, and ethical purposes inscribed in Rea
son and its manifestation in History—this impulse should be resisted. It is true that at the time he imagined himself as the heir of a German idealist tradition, but there is no sense that philosophy was capturing his imagination. Beyond this essay, Hirschmann would steer clear of Hegel until the 1970s, when he would stumble back to Philosophy of Right to wonder whether Marx had really revealed the cunning of capitalism’s history. In that subtle dig at the certainties of the social sciences, he used Hegel to turn excessively abstract theorizing on its head. Hegel, in fact, was a touchstone in his lifelong reservations about “the characteristic tardiness of theoretical understanding of reality.” These are Hirschmann’s words. And they are followed by Hegel’s hallowed metaphor about the Owl of Minerva who “spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”4

  For the moment, however, the commitment to study Hegel reflected a young man’s search for basic intellectual moorings for other interests and the belief that Hegel was a necessary departure point. It was more his developing interest in Marxism that cued his curiosity about dialectics; for any self-respecting dialectical thinker, one had to start with the source himself: the author of Phenomenology. This was, after all, Berlin, and Hegel was the city’s philosophical icon; any effort to acquire a Weltanschauung had to start here. At the time, there was not yet any recognition on Hirschmann’s part that there were various ways into the mysteries of la raison universelle, and it would take decades to circle back to Hegel to find in German idealism some foundations for his assault on “mindless theorizing.”