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Weimar in America
| Article
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11239 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
5,284 Words |
| Author
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Wilfred M. McClay
Wilfred M. McClay is an assistant professor of history at
Tulane University in New Orleans. |
REFUGEE SCHOLARS IN AMERICA
Their Impact and Their Experiences
Lewis A. Coser
Yale University Press, 1984
$25
Few events in this century have altered the landscape of American intellectual life so much as the massive immigration during the 1930s of German speaking refugee intellectuals. In a strictly demographic sense, of curse, the arrival of a few thousand exiles seems a tiny trickle when measured against the immense waves of European immigration that washed over the United States in the decades before the immigration-restriction statues of the 1920s. But what this particular group lacked in size it made up in potency, for the infusion of a few powerful minds can change the chemistry of culture. To be sure, American civilization has always been deeply indebted to exiles and immigrants for their intellectual contributions. Such influences, however, have generally manifested themselves in piecemeal fashion. To find a concentrated transfer of advanced learning comparable to that effected by the Hitler-era refugee scholars, one would have to search back through three hundred years of American history, to the great migration of English Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
One need only consider the Puritans' intellectual legacy, its effects still very much in evidence today, to realize how consequential such a transfer can be. Of course, too close a comparison of these two intellectual migrations would be misleading, not to mention anachronistic, for the motives involved were entirely different. John Winthrop and his band of Old Testament-minded zealots conceived themselves to be embarked upon a divinely ordained mission, a European errand into the American wilderness. The German refugee intellectuals, however, most of them secular Jews and many with radical-leftist political sympathies, had a more mundane mission: sheer survival. Where the Puritans had responded to the pull of a new beginning, an Edenic regeneration, the German intellectuals felt only the diabolical push of Nazi terror, and many came to archapitalist America with the profoundest reluctance.
Even as reluctant emigrants, however, they were to have a telling effect, for their sensibilities had been shaped by an extraordinarily sophisticated intellectual culture, in a country whose high literacy rate and advanced educational institutions were the world's envy. They therefore brought to the United States a dauntingly high standard for intellectual
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