Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  There is a question of how he supported himself while he was a student. In the first few months, he was clearly dependent on remittances from Mutti. His letters to her in that first year acknowledge the receipt of transfers. What happened thereafter, especially as the Nazis plundered Mutti’s resources, is less clear. But among the few clues is a document in Hirschman’s personal papers from the Comité français de l’Entraide universitaire internationale that gave scholarships to students from around the world to attend French universities. This typed letter of glowing reference from R. Arasse, secretary of the Comité français, noted how O. A. Hirschmann “immediately called attention to us, for the titles that he possesses and the notes élogieuses that he has received in his examinations.” Clearly, the performance at the Collège in Berlin, a credential that would have called attention on its own, paid off. The letter, however, continued. It noted the baccalauréat, the fact that Monsieur Hirschmann was the “author” of a work on Hegel’s philosophy, with some sense that the Comité had received some kind of endorsement from one of his tutors, his maître (possibly Bernd Knoop), as well as his preliminary course work in political economy at the Institute of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Berlin. The letter refers to his two reports on classical political economy. The result: “We have therefore decided to help M. Hirschmann for the duration of his studies in France. He has not disappointed us. After having successfully passed a certificate at the Institute for Statistics, he was accepted at” HEC. This letter is undated but appears to have been written prior to his having completed his studies at HEC, for it notes that Hirschman was currently ranked fifth in his class of 220 students, with reference to grades from two previous years of studies and preliminary results for his Easter examinations. There is an indication that he also made some money “by giving numerous lessons” and that he earned “each time, des cerificats élogieux.” Was this a letter recommending him for further scholarship—for instance to go to London? The timing might suggest so. But what it does imply is that the scholarship and part-time teaching covered his living.12

  Between the care packages with shirts and cookies from Mutti, some family money at the outset, tutoring German, and winning a scholarship, Hirschmann scraped by. But these were tough years. The staple of his diet was a baguette with butter. He would later jokingly claim that having eaten so many he deserved some fame for having discovered this unique culinary combination which he baptized “un sandwich au pain.” It is revealing that privilege did not make of him an inert man once it was gone. Indeed, the new circumstances brought out an inner reserve of resourcefulness and a stock of hope that would motivate him to seize opportunities when they appeared—or to make them if they didn’t.

  As the news from home went from bad to worse, he worried about his mother and sister in Berlin. “Wonderful for you these days,” he wrote to Mutti, “means above all peaceful, without the external agitations that have been so many in the last years and especially in the last year.” He exhorted her to enjoy her new work: wonderful “does not mean dull; to the contrary, I hope that you find a position to fill that makes you still useful to society and that you also let yourself to feel this.” With Carl’s income gone and the family finances in ruins, Hedwig Hirschmann had to leave the apartment on Hohenzollernstrasse. This must have been a difficult choice, and it no doubt inspired a wailing letter from Mutti, which explains Otto Albert’s chirpy tone. With the large furnishings and extensive dishes and cutlery, Mutti, who was apparently not without some skill in eking out opportunities on her own, set up a boardinghouse. At her new quarters she began taking in lodgers, filling rooms with Jews whose stores and occupations were being shut down in the anti-Semitic rampaging. With the help of donations from an American Jewish ladies’ charitable organization, Mutti hired a cook and several maids and was soon able to feed not only the boarders but other needy guests as well. She managed to put sweets, rice puddings, and other plates on the table, providing a decent fare for persecuted neighbors.13

  If Hirschmann was trying to move forward with his life, troubled memories of that final year in Berlin were an undertow. The letters that have survived to his mother are replete with efforts to come to terms with the family’s past. “I wish for you,” he noted, “that you should not and cannot resent me—that you learn somewhat better to understand the life and efforts of your children and don’t call them a ‘disappointment’ when they sometimes don’t take the exact path that you thought out as the ideal path for them.” Hedda’s disapproval of Otto Albert’s militancy, his choice for something as apparently déclassé as economics, and his more general reluctance to live up to her expectations of success had been so fraught. Her son was also trying to come to terms with his own choices—and here possibly revealing some of his own misgivings about his decisions. Either way, he was insisting that she hear him now: “The most important thing for mutual love is that we understand and appreciate each other. The bible says: God made man in his own image. Maybe. But man definitely can’t do the same.” Nor did distance appear to heal old wounds. Two years after his departure from Berlin, the question of “return” was still plagued by memories of unresolved, and unresolvable, conflicts. April was always a difficult month, entwining his and his mother’s birthday with the anniversary of his father’s death and his sudden flight; he was subject to yearnings, “blissful at the idea immediately to return.” In 1935, the occasion triggered memories of his Hegel paper and his thinking about parent-child dialectics from Phenomenology. Not even the meeting with “a very nice pretty Norwegian girl” could dispel his mood. “Such cruelty,” he wrote to his mother in Hegelese, “which for parents certainly will be felt as painfully as a disappointment, which the children could not spare them and should not in my opinion, which they can only make in form as inoffensive as possible, such a cruelty comes about each time that the parents (which is exceptionally natural and understandable), out of their wishes, out of their development, out of their imagination, demand something of their child, which is justified neither in the wishes, nor the development, nor the world of thoughts of the child.” He tried to clarify himself to Mutti: “I only want to say that parents with reasonably independent-minded children, especially in the years of their decisive Bildung, must simply be disappointed because they, for example, demand togetherness precisely when another use of time will appear as much more valuable to the child.” The passage from Phenomenology about the dialectics of the master-serf relationship (in which the former depends on the latter’s recognition as a condition of his full consciousness, while the latter possesses only the power to deny this) had of course been the subject of endless scrutiny in Berlin. But now Hirschmann was finding in it an explanation for his current malaise and a way to expiate some of his guilt about leaving his family behind. “You will wonder why I write you all this so suddenly? These thoughts have been living with me for a long time and I had barely started writing a page (of the description of my departure), and they (the words) all came out without me knowing or wanting it. I fail to see why you should not know it.”14

  One decision that Hirschmann was making did bear on his HEC studies: he concluded that they were, for the most part, useless. If they were meant to prepare him for the business world, this was not a world he cared to join. This choice, he feared, might compound his mother’s disappointment: “I don’t have the norm of the gross-bourgeois in me, I see it in others, am uncertain and unoriginal.… What are the practical ramifications of this? This is not yet clear to me, I see only a few things that I won’t go after: some kind of apprenticeship position in a bank or a business, where it would be assured, I could not work my way up.”15 At the time, one of his options was to go overseas with a French bank. There were few jobs to be had in Paris, and even fewer in Berlin. But some opportunities were opening in South America, where the industrialization of Brazil and Argentina was luring European bankers. The Banco Italo-Frances was considering Hirschmann for a position.

  Paris
also meant solitude. Unable to make friendships at HEC and queasy about émigré affairs, he spent more and more time on his own. He took solo trips. The seclusion also affected his relationships with women. Early on, he rekindled his relationship with Lia Rein, whose family had similarly fled to Paris. But the relationship did not endure; Lia was determined to pursue a career in medicine, while Otto Albert wanted a companion in his restlessness, someone who could adapt to what was becoming a more and more peripatetic life. Once the affective ties with Lia were broken, no one filled this gap. As if to cover the subject that he knew was on his mother’s mind in order to dispense with it, he informed her pithily: “I haven’t been able to manage a lasting girlfriend yet.” He did, however, find refuge in Paris’s chess cafés, which had been—like the Café de la Régence—important salons in which the world’s champions had gathered from the eighteenth century. There was one near the Palais Royale where Otto Albert enjoyed playing and watching games.16

  Meanwhile, Paris was filling up with refugees. At first there were the Russians. Then the Italians. After 1933, thousands of Germans began to flood Paris, looking for cheap hotel rooms and work of any kind. For most, the grip of statelessness tightened over their despairing quest. Without proper papers, they could not get decent work, and without work, it was harder to cover the expenses of getting the right papers. Nativism hung heavy in the air. In late 1933, a scandal erupted involving a shady businessman of Russian-Hungarian-Romanian origins, Serge Alexandre Stavisky, whose money-dealings contaminated ruling party circles all the way to the top—and led to a general outcry about the pernicious influence of foreigners on the French state. Social unrest compounded the hysteria. In February of the next year, mass rioting and police brutality tore Paris apart; on February 6, fascistoid Croix de Feu militants marched down the Champs-Élysée toward the National Assembly, where the Communists were staging their own rally. They converged, with nervous police huddled in formation, at the Place de la Concorde—until the gendarmes opened fire, killing fifteen and leaving hundreds wounded. The new prime minister, Daladier, had to resign in disgrace. The Third Republic had never been a model of stability; from 1924 to 1931, fifteen cabinets came and went. The Depression only accelerated the revolving doors along the Quai D’Orsay. There was a general sense that foreigners made things worse. To an observer like Hirschmann, this must have been déjà vu, but he managed to avoid much of the tension because, unlike many of the émigrés who flocked to Paris, he was so young. At seventeen, he could simply restart his studies; armed with a student visa he avoided the vicious cycle that drove other, especially older, émigrés to distraction.17

  Statelessness affected Hirschmann’s intellectual development in more ways than one. Statelessness can make people more political. It did for Hannah Arendt and others, for whom the displacement occasioned by German bigotry and intolerance directed them toward new Jewish identities, especially Zionism. But these were Jews whose upbringing provided anchorage in Jewish culture and ties to a community upon which to build a new political faith and commitment. “The question of a ‘return’ to Judaism never came up for me [ne s’est jamais posée pour moi],” he explained many years later to his grandson Grégoire on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah. “First of all, it was never instilled in my upbringing … and above all I would have sensed that an embrace of Judaism as a reaction, as something history imposed on me which I then had to live (persecution), and for me the question was how not to submit to this miserable history created by Historic Laws (because there are none).”18

  There was, of course, an alternative appeal, to Communism—whose internationalism gave its militants satellites in most of the world’s major cities. This secular faith was even less enticing. Hirschmann groped for his own way without a guiding ism. He did not feel particularly burdened by this lack; indeed, in many respects he did not even consider himself an exile, but rather a “foreign student.” Therein lay another important difference between Hirschmann and many of the other familiar names we associate with the émigrés in Paris who wore their intellectual heritage like a badge of honor, hanging on to it, possibly because there was so little else to hang on to. For elders such as Hannah Arendt or Walter Benjamin, Paris was a new setting for working out older problems. They had come to Paris already formed, with intellectual projects and concerns to which exile gave new poignancy. In contrast to a younger Hirschmann, unformed by the German university system, already multilingual, and never quite as smitten by German philosophy, they were decidedly more connected to their pasts, and in a sense therefore more despairing. When pressed by a German interviewer about the “disappearance of hope” that afflicted many Germans in France, Hirschmann resisted: “It never really was the disappearance of hope for me.”19

  But did these efforts mean that he was not an exile? Not quite. Exile was more of a stage than a condition. At the outset, return was the expectation. “Everybody had, as, I think Brecht put it in one of his poems,” Hirschman later recalled, “a suitcase always packed. It was the idea that the day may come very soon in which we might go back.” When Nazi infighting erupted in 1934 around the Ernst Röhm affair, many, Hirschmann included, thought the time for return had come. Instead, the botched overthrow gave Hitler free rein to slaughter rivals within his party. “It turned out to be a consolidation of the regime,” not “the beginning of the end,” thought Hirschmann retrospectively. It reminded him that History had a way of betraying those who stored too much confidence in it, and its pseudo-laws. It was not just Hirschmann who watched Hitler consolidate his grip by wiping out rivals; Stalin, too, admired the Nazi purges and SS murders of hundreds of SA storm troopers. A few months later, a gunman shot Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party boss, ushering in a wave of Bolshevik cleansing and inaugurating a duet between Hitler and Stalin that culminated in the pact to divide Poland six years later.20

  Having started as a refugee, a citizen of another country stripped of his basic rights, Hirschmann was on his way to some other, still undetermined, status. One sign of this shift was his effort to cover the tracks of his own origins: his accent. Keen to erase where he could the outward markers of his foreignness, to pass as his forefathers had from Jew to German without a public trace, he was determined to make his French indistinguishable from a Parisian’s. When he rode the Metro, he ground off German inflections from his French by reading the station names or advertisements posted on the sides of the carriages out loud, practicing rolling his r’s, softening his consonants, exercising the nuanced range of u, eu, ou. The efforts paid off: his French was soon impeccable and accent-free. There would be no passing for French so long as he spoke like all the teeming émigrés, many of whom were beginning to encounter the increasingly hostile face of the French state. Indeed, Hirschmann took pride in his ability to walk up to a policeman and speak with him as a test of his “passing” skills.21

  Aside from some remarkable linguistic skills, credit for this transition must also go to the ways in which statelessness gave him new intellectual coordinates, coordinates he was prepared to orient to. One formative source of new coordinates was in fact an old contact from Berlin. Ursula had found a place in the servant’s quarters of the Rein family’s apartment in the fourteenth arrondissement, near the Porte d’Orléans. The Reins had fled the German capital a few months earlier, in February. Lia, OA’s old flame from the SAJ, had enrolled in the Collège Sévigné, to complete her studies before moving on to the medical school of the Sorbonne. In the meantime, Ursula and Mark (who had completed his education as an engineer) had also become romantically involved—a much more intense and volatile affair than Lia and Otto Albert’s fleeting romance. The foursome, redoubled by the travails of making their way as refugees in Paris, composed a tight unit of displacement, friendship, and love, which brought Otto Albert into close contact with Lia’s formidable father, Rafael Rein.

  More publicly known as Rafael Abramovitch, Rein was only too glad to welcome the magnetic Ursula and pensive Otto Albert into the family. He
was less a paternal surrogate for Otto Albert than a presence in a moment in which the Marxistoid ether in which Hirschmann had been educated in the last years in Berlin was thinning out. Rein kept up his activism. If anything, he was considered more and more as a pariah to those in power in Moscow. As a leader of the Russian Workers Social Democratic Party in exile, a prominent person in the Labor and Socialist International, and a journalist for several papers, including the American Jewish Daily Forward, he lent his voice to the campaign against the Menshevik Trial in 1931—for which he would earn a privileged place on Stalin’s hit list and eventually pay a truly awful price.

  Hirschmann, who had his own mounting concerns about Communism, tuned in to Rafael’s frequency. Leavened by Russian cordiality, the Rein apartment was a “gregarious kind of place,” full of visitors and an air thick with discussion and debate. While his wife, Rosa, kept the teapots hot and full and toiled in kitchen to feed the constant turnover of visitors, there was always someone with whom the sometimes lonely Otto Albert could talk. The Rein apartment was a refuge from the anti-intellectual and right-wing milieu of HEC, and for all that the family had witnessed, it abounded with generosity and affection. Otto Albert would come to respect Rafael’s political judgment and see him, increasingly, as a sage; for Rafael’s part, the convulsions of the Russian Revolution and Hitler’s rise had taught him a few things, and he was protectively skeptical of his children and their friends’ political naïveté. After the Röhm incident, which sent German exiles pouring over the news in search of evidence for Hitler’s imminent downfall, Rafael warned them prophetically that this was Hitler’s consolidation; the Bolsheviks had done the same. Mark tried to temper his father’s condemnation of Communism. With the wall of his room in Paris covered with photos of Viennese workers killed in the struggle for socialism, Mark still nurtured hopes for a common front and yearned to return to Berlin to rejoin the struggle, a prospect that no doubt petrified the father. As the divide opened in the Rein apartment, Otto Albert sensed that he leaned more toward Rafael’s realism than to Mark’s idealism—which did not always make it easy to accept: “Sometimes one is angry at people who are always right,” he said, looking back.22