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Reviewed by:
  • German Scholars in Exile ed. by Axel Fair-Schulz and Mario Kessler
  • Steven P. Remy
German Scholars in Exile. Edited by Axel Fair-Schulz and Mario Kessler. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2011. Pp. 243. Cloth $70.00. ISBN 978-0739150238.

This collection of essays profiles ten exiled German and Austrian intellectuals who, the editors claim, are “less well-known but not less important figures” (ix) than contemporaries such as Hannah Arendt or Max Horkheimer. The book complements and expands upon the analyses in David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer’s edited volume Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Émigré Intellectuals (New York, 2005). In German Scholars in Exile, a cross-generational group of German and American scholars profiles the classicist Werner Jaeger, the philosopher Robert Ulrich, and the political theorists and historians Karl Loewenstein, Franz Borkenau, Franz Neumann, Ossip Flechthim, Hans Rothfels, Helene Wieruszowski, Jürgen Kuczynski, and Henry Pachter. The collection concludes with Georg Iggers’s reflections on the attitudes of refugee historians toward democracy. The essays vary in length and depth, ranging from brief sketches to lengthier analyses.

The scholars profiled here represent, very roughly, a generational cohort. The [End Page 210] oldest (Jaeger) was born in 1888, the youngest (Flechtheim) in 1909. Each shared the experiences of socialization, education, and the establishment of professional careers in the late Kaiserreich and/or the Weimar Republic. All were victimized, to varying degrees, by the Nazis before fleeing Germany, and all struggled with the practical pressures and uncertainties of the unwilling exile’s life. Most returned to the postwar German states, if in some cases only briefly. Jaeger, Loewenstein, Borkenau, Neumann, Kuczynski, Pachter, and Flechtheim all crossed—by necessity or by choice—from the academic realm to that of journalism, politics, wartime service, and even early organized human-rights activism.

The similarities dissipate upon closer examination of their lives and careers. One of the most challenging aspects of writing about exiles sharing the same national or cultural background is identifying general themes and problems, and narrating the whole without oversimplifying the diversity of individual experience. The extent to which each of these scholars identified with his or her Jewish heritage varied widely. Politically, their engagements ranged from an embrace of National Socialism (Rothfels) to communism, democratic socialism, anticommunism (most notably Borkenau in the last category), and various points in between—including no discernible political orientation, or at least none that influenced the trajectory of the scholar’s intellectual endeavors (e.g., Wieruszowski).

The editors’ claim that this collection deals with figures “less well-known but not less important” than Arendt or Adorno is not entirely accurate. Hans Rothfels’s career has been the subject of close scrutiny and considerable controversy for nearly a decade. Franz Neumann’s work is also well known among historians and political scientists. The claim that their careers are “not less important” than those of Arendt and Adorno is especially problematic. Such attempts at comparison serve no analytical purpose. Indeed, they only perpetuate the idea of a pantheon of intellectual luminaries, at the gates of which stands a long line of frustrated applicants kept in obscurity by some particularly selective gatekeeper.

Rather than viewing the Frankfurt School’s status as a kind of yardstick by which all Nazi-era German exile intellectuals must be measured, historians would do better to examine closely the complex dynamics of engagement, reception, institutional marginality, and intellectual cross-fermentation across multiple cultural and political contexts. Fortunately, the volume’s strongest contributions do just this. To cite a few examples: Catherine Epstein’s brief but illuminating essay on the medievalist Helene Wieruszowki’s career shows how exposure to American currents of intellectual history—namely, an appreciation for social context and even the cold realities of diplomacy—altered and enriched her work. Markus Lang argues that the trajectory of Karl Loewenstein’s conceptualization of Staatswissenschaften was not the result of influences encountered in a new intellectual and institutional context. Loewenstein’s approach was outside his discipline’s mainstream while he was still in Germany, and [End Page 211] it remained so after he arrived in the United States. His methodological marginality in both places represents, for Lang, an example...

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