Panofsky in Munich, 1967

A prize is supposed to honor the recipient. But often the recipient, just by accepting the prize, honors the prize-bestowing institution. Especially a damaged or disgraced institution, for example the German university in the twentieth century. Many German professors who had stayed at their posts right through the Nazi years and on into the 1950s and 60s craved personal reconciliation with the Jewish colleagues who had been expelled in 1933. Others sought a more abstract, shared exculpation. It occurred to some that prizes and honors might balm wounds and hasten atonement. Gert von der Osten, General Director of the Museums of the City of Cologne, wrote to the architect Rudolf Hillebrecht on June 20, 1966, about the possibility of electing the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky to the Order Pour le mérite. “The election,” he remarked presumptuously, “would have wide resonance among unreconciled refugees in all intellectual and artistic fields” (“Die Wahl hätte weite Resonanz bei unversöhnten Refugees auf allen geistigen und künstlerischen Gebieten”; Korrespondenz 5: no. 3304). The unforgiven, when speaking of the unreconciled, always manage to strike just the wrong note, as for example when von der Osten asserts in the same letter that Panofsky had not yet returned to Germany, “like so many of the sensitive emigrants, for fear of the shock” (“wie so viele der feinfühligen Emigranten, aus Furcht vor dem Schock”). As if the less sensitive emigrants would not think twice about paying a visit. And what “shock” was von der Osten imagining they would receive? Shock to realize all that they had lost? Von der Osten, born in 1910, had been employed in museums and universities continuously from the year of his doctoral degree, 1933, excepting only his military service.

Among the most prestigious of honors bestowed by the German state was and is the civilian or “peaceful” version of the Pour le mérite, the Prussian military order established by Frederick the Great in 1742. In 1842 Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia established the Friedensklasse Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste. The first cohort of inductees in 1842 included two Jews, the composers Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, as well as William Herschel, the German-English astronomer whose father was Jewish.¹ Later the musicians Joseph Joachim (1887) and Anton Rubinstein (1891) were admitted. In 1923 the Order elected two Jews, the painter Max Liebermann and the physicist Albert Einstein. The Order elected the chemist and Nobel laureate Richard Willstätter in 1924, the very year he resigned his professorship at Munich, at the age of 52, on account of the mounting anti-Semitism at the university. In 1933 Einstein sent his medal back to the Chancellor of the Order, Max Planck. After the war he was asked if he would rejoin the Order. He declined (Mitglieder 1: xxii).

The Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste was suspended by Adolf Hitler, who could not tolerate the Order’s privilege of electing its own members. In 1952 the first president of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland Theodor Heuss revived the Pour le mérite and it has been awarded ever since by the Ministery of the Interior of the BRD and now Germany. There are about forty German living recipients of the order, or “members,” and about forty foreign members, including for example the American historians James Sheehan, Lorraine Daston, Anthony Grafton, and Caroline Bynum, as well as the artist Richard Serra. After the relaunch of the Pour le mérite it proved difficult, apparently, to identify possible Jewish recipients. The physicist Lise Meitner, who had emigrated in 1938 to Sweden and later England, was elected in 1956. Many members of the Order were defensive. Thomas Mann had been elected in 1955, just before his death. In his eulogy of Mann before the Order in 1956, Reinhold Schneider praised the novelist but felt it necessary to concede that Mann’s denunciations of the homeland, which he did after all love, were to many ears possibly injurious or hurtful (verletzend; see Reden und Gedenkworte 34). At least to some members, at any rate...