The German Genius

forbidden from exhibiting in museums and from receiving commissions. Goebbels further stipulated that there were to be no public exhibitions of art without official approval. In a speech to the party’s annual meeting in September 1934, Hitler emphasized “two cultural dangers” that threatened National Socialism. On the one hand were the modernists, the “spoilers of art”—identified specifically as “the cubists, futurists and Dadaists.” 2 What he and the German people wanted, Hitler said, was a German art that was “clear,” “without contortion,” and “without ambiguity.” Art was not “auxiliary to politics,” he insisted. It must become a “functioning part” of the Nazi political program. From May 1936 all artists registered with the Reichskammer had to prove their Aryan ancestry. In October that year the National Gallery in Berlin was ordered to close its modern art galleries, and in November Goebbels outlawed all “unofficial art criticism.” From then on only the reporting of art events was allowed.
    Some artists protested—Ernst Kirchner that he was “neither a Jew nor a Social Democrat,” Max Pechstein that he had fought for Germany on the Western Front in World War I, that his son was a member of the SA, Emil Nolde that he had been a member of the Party since 1920—but it was all in vain. Some protested in their art—Otto Dix portraying Hitler as “Envy” in his 1933 painting The Seven Deadly Sins , and Max Beckmann caricaturing the chancellor as a Verführer , or “seducer.” Many artists realized they had little choice but to emigrate, Kurt Schwitters to Norway, Paul Klee to Switzerland, Lyonel Feininger to the United States, Beckmann to the Netherlands, and Ludwig Meidner to Britain. 3
    As has been seen, the closure of the Warburg Institute in Hamburg actually preceded that of the Bauhaus, with the Frankfurt school the next to go. Most members of the school were not only Jewish but also openly Marxist. According to Martin Jay in his history of the school, its endowment was moved out of Germany in 1931, to the Netherlands, thanks to the foresight of the director, Max Horkheimer. Foreign branches had already been set up in Geneva, Paris, and London (the latter at the London School of Economics). Shortly after Hitler assumed power in March 1933, Horkheimer quietly crossed the border into Switzerland, only days before the school was closed down for “tendencies hostile to the state.” The building on Victoria-Allee was confiscated, as was the library of 60,000 volumes. Only days after he escaped, Horkheimer was formally dismissed, together with Paul Tillich and Karl Mannheim. Horkheimer and his deputy, Friedrich Pollock, went to Geneva, and so did Erich Fromm. Offers of employment were received from France, initiated by Henri Bergson and Raymond Aaron. Theodor Adorno meanwhile went to Merton College, Oxford, where he remained from 1934 to 1937. Pollock and Horkheimer made visits to London and New York to sound out the possibilities of transferring there. They received a much more optimistic reception at Columbia University and so, by the middle of 1934, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was reconstituted at 429 West 117th Street. It remained there until 1950.
    The migration of the Vienna Circle was perhaps less traumatic than that of other scholars. Thanks to the pragmatic tradition in America, not a few philosophers there were sympathetic to what the logical positivists were saying, and several of the Circle crossed the Atlantic in the late 1920s or early 1930s to lecture and meet like-minded colleagues. They were helped by a group known as Unity in Science, philosophers and scientists searching for the constancies from one discipline to another. This international group held meetings all over Europe and North America. Then, in 1936, A. J. Ayer, the British philosopher, published Language, Truth and Logic , a brilliantly lucid account of logical positivism that popularized its ideas still more in America, making members of the circle especially welcome there. Herbert Feigl was the first to go, to Iowa in 1931; Rudolf Carnap went to Chicago in 1936, taking Carl Hempel and Olaf Helmer with him. Hans Reichenbach followed in 1938, establishing himself at UCLA. A little later, Kurt Gödel accepted a research position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and so joined Einstein and Erwin Panofsky.
    On May 2, 1938, Hitler signed his will. In it he ordered