The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay
Marcuse was born in 1898 in Berlin, into a family of prosperous assimilated Jews, like most of the others. After completing his military service in the war, he briefly became involved in politics in a Soldiers’ Council in Berlin. In 1919 he quit the Social Democratic Party, which he had joined two years earlier, in protest against its betrayal of the proletariat. After the subsequent failure of the German revolution, he left politics altogether to study philosophy at Berlin and Freiburg, receiving his doctorate at the latter university in 1923 with a dissertation on the Künstlerroman (novels in which artists played key roles). For the next six years he tried his hand at book selling and publishing in Berlin. In 1929 he returned to Freiburg, where he studied with Husserl and Heidegger, both of whom had a considerable impact on his thought. During this period Marcuse broke into print with a number of articles in Maximilian Beck’s Philosophische Hefte and Rudolf Hilferding’s Die Gesellschaft. His first book, Hegel’s Ontology and the Foundation of a Theory of Historicity,84 appeared in 1932, bearing the marks of his mentor Heidegger, for whom it had been prepared as a Habilitationsschrift. Before Heidegger could accept Marcuse as an assistant, however, their relations became strained; the political differences between the Marxist-oriented student and the increasingly right-wing teacher were doubtless part of the cause. Without a prospect for a job at Freiburg, Marcuse left that city in 1932. The Kurator of the University of Frankfurt, Kurt Riezler, having been asked by Husserl to intercede for Marcuse, recommended him to Horkheimer.
In the second issue of the Zeitschrift Adorno reviewed Hegel’s Ontology and found its movement away from Heidegger promising. Marcuse, he wrote, was tending away from “ ‘The Meaning of Being’ to an openness to being-in-the-world (Seienden), from fundamental ontology to philosophy of history, from historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) to history.”85 Although Adorno felt that there was some ground still to be covered before Marcuse cast off Heidegger’s thrall entirely, the chance for a successful integration of his approach to philosophy with that of the Institut seemed favorable. Horkheimer concurred, and so in 1933 Marcuse was added to those in the Institut who were committed to a dialectical rather than a mechanical understanding of Marxism. He was immediately assigned to the Geneva office.
With the Nazi assumption of power on January 30, 1933, the future of an avowedly Marxist organization, staffed almost exclusively by men of Jewish descent—at least by Nazi standards—was obviously bleak. Horkheimer had spent most of 1932 in Geneva, where he was ill with diphtheria. Shortly before Hitler came to power he returned to Frankfurt, moving with his wife from their home in the suburb of Kronberg to a hotel near the Frankfurt railroad station. During February, the last month of the winter semester, he suspended his lectures on logic to speak on the question of freedom, which was indeed becoming more questionable with each passing day. In March he slipped across the border to Switzerland, just as the Institut was being closed down for “tendencies hostile to the state.” The greater part of the Institut library in the building on the Victoria-Allee, then numbering over sixty thousand volumes, was seized by the government; the transfer of the endowment two years earlier prevented a similar confiscation of the Institut’s financial resources. On April 13 Horkheimer had the honor of being among the first faculty members to be formally dismissed from Frankfurt, along with Paul Tillich, Karl Mannheim, and Hugo Sinzheimer.86
By then all of the Institut’s official staff had left Frankfurt. The one exception was Wittfogel, who returned to Germany from Switzerland and was thrown into a concentration camp in March because of his political activities. His second wife, Olga Lang (originally Olga Joffé), herself later to become an expert on Chinese affairs and an assistant at the Institut, worked to secure his release, as did such friends as R. H. Tawney in England and Karl Haushofer in Germany. Wittfogel’s freedom was finally granted in November, 1933, and he was permitted to emigrate to England. Shortly thereafter, he joined the others in America. Adorno, whose politics were not as controversial as Wittfogel’s, maintained a residence in Germany, although he spent most of the next four years in England, studying at Merton College, Oxford. Grossmann found refuge in Paris for three years and went to England for one more, rather unhappy, year in 1937, before finally coming to the United States. Lowenthal remained in Frankfurt only until March 2, when he followed Marcuse, Horkheimer, and other Institut figures to Geneva, the last to depart before the Institut was closed. Pollock was in effect already in exile when the Nazis came to power, although he was unaware that it was to last for almost two decades and extend to two continents.
In February of 1933 the Geneva branch was incorporated with a twenty-one member board87 as the administrative center of the Institut. In recognition of its European character it took the name of the Société Internationale de Recherches Sociales (International Society of Social Research), with Horkheimer and Pollock as its two “presidents”; Lowenthal, Fromm, and Sternheim were named their successors the following year.88 Not only was the “Frankfurt School” now Swiss, but also French and English, as offers of help from friends in Paris and London led to the founding of small branches in those cities in 1933. Celestin Bouglé, a former student of Durkheim and director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure’s Centre de Documentation since 1920, suggested to Horkheimer that some space might be found for the Institut in his offices on the Rue d’Ulm. Although a Proudhonist politically (he was an adherent of the Radical Socialist Party) and thus not sympathetic to the Marxist cast of the Institut’s work, Bouglé was willing to forget politics in considering the Institut’s plight. Maurice Halbwachs, another prominent Durkheimian then in Strassbourg, and Georges Scelle, who taught law in Paris when not in the Hague as French advocate at the International Court, joined Bouglé as cosponsors of the move. Further support came from Henri Bergson, who had been impressed with the Institut’s work. In London a similar proposal was made by Alexander Farquharson, the editor of the Sociological Review, who was able to provide a few rooms in Le Play House. Sidney Webb, R. H. Tawney, Morris Ginsberg, and Harold Laski all added their voices to Farquharson’s, and a small office was established that lasted until lack of funds forced its closing in 1936.
In the meantime, the Zeitschrift’s Leipzig publisher, C. L. Hirschfeld, informed Horkheimer that it could no longer risk continuing publication. Bouglé suggested as a replacement the Librairie Félix Alean in Paris. This proved acceptable, and a connection was begun that lasted until 1940, when the Nazis once again acquired the power to intimidate a publisher of the Zeitschrift.
With the first issue of the Zeitschrift to appear in Paris in September, 1933, the Institut’s initial German period was conclusively over. In the brief decade since its founding, it had gathered together a group of young intellectuals with diverse talents willing to coordinate them in the service of social research as the Institut conceived it. The first Frankfurt years were dominated by Grünberg’s views, as described earlier, but under his direction the Institut gained structural solidarity and a foothold in Weimar’s intellectual life. Although concentrating on research, it helped train students of the caliber of Paul Baran,89 who in 1930 worked on a projected second volume of Pollock’s study of the Soviet economy. Hans Gerth, Gladys Meyer, and Josef Dünner were other students during the pre-emigration years who later made an impact on American social science. (Dünner, it might be noted in passing, wrote a roman à clef in 1937, entitled If I Forget Thee . . . , in which Institut figures appear under pseudonyms.)90 In addition, all Institut members participated actively in the discussions about the future of socialism, which attracted such Frankfurt luminaries as Hendrik de Man and Paul Tillich. The independence provided by Hermann Weil’s generosity allowed the Institut to remain unencumbered by political or academic obligations, even after his death in 1927. It also guaranteed the continuation of its identity in exile, at a time when other German refugee scholars were put through the strain of reestablishing themselves in an alien world without financial backing. An additional $100,000 contributed by Felix Weil, after he rejoined the Institut in New York in 1935, helped keep it financially secure through the thirties.
The sense of a shared fate and common purpose that strikes the observer as one of the Institut’s chief characteristics—especially after Horkheimer became director—was transferable to the Institut’s new homes partly because of its financial good fortune. It had been the intent of the founding members to create a community of scholars whose solidarity would