The German Genius

Heinrich Mann, Alma Mahler-Werfel, André Masson, Franz Werfel, and Wilfredo Lam, the Cuban painter. Fry helped around 2,000 individuals, ten times the number he had been sent to look for.
    Alvin Johnson at the New School took ninety scholars to create a University in Exile, where the faculty included Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, Otto Klemperer, Claude Levi-Strauss, Erwin Piscator, and Wilhelm Reich. László Moholy-Nagy re-created a New Bauhaus in Chicago, and other former colleagues initiated something similar in what became Black Mountain College, in the wooded hills of North Carolina. At one time or another its faculty included Joseph Albers, Willem de Kooning, Ossip Zadkine, Lyonel Feininger, and Amédée Ozenfant. After the war the college was home to a prominent school of poets, and it remained in existence until the 1950s. The Frankfurt Institute at Columbia University and Erwin Panofsky’s Institute of Fine Arts at New York University were also started and staffed by exiles.
    Once the Nazis took power, there was never much doubt that Arnold Schoenberg would have to leave. He had converted from Judaism to Christianity early in life, but that never made any impression on the authorities, and in 1933 he reverted to being a Jew. In the same year he was blacklisted as a “cultural Bolshevik” and dismissed from his Berlin professorship. He moved to Paris, where he was penniless and stranded. Then, out of the blue, he received an invitation to teach at a small private conservatory in Boston, founded and directed by Joseph Malkin, a Russian exile who had been solo cellist with the Berlin Philharmonic. Schoenberg accepted, arriving in America in October 1933. The first music he wrote in Boston was a light piece for a student orchestra, but then came the Violin Concerto, op. 36. Not only was this his real American debut, it was also his first concerto. Rich and passionate, it was—for Schoenberg—fairly conventional in form, though it demanded phenomenally difficult finger-work from the violinist. 5
    Béla Bartók, Darius Milhaud, and Igor Stravinsky all followed to the United States in 1939–40. Many of the virtuoso performers, being frequent travelers as a matter of course, were already familiar with America, and America with them: Artur Rubinstein, Fritz Kreisler, Efrem Zimbalist, and Mischa Elman all settled in America in the late 1930s.
    The only American rival to New York as a base for exiles in wartime was Los Angeles, where the roster of famous names living in close proximity (close in Los Angeles terms) was remarkable. Apart from Schoenberg (who had moved there from Boston), that roster included Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Lang, Artur Rubinstein, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler-Werfel, Bruno Walter, Peter Lorre, and Heinrich Mann, not forgetting the non-Germans Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Man Ray, and Jean Renoir. 6
    “A N EW T YPE OF P LANNED O RDER”…WITH “THE W ORST ON T OP”
     
    It was perhaps only natural that a war in which very different regimes were pitched against one another should bring about a reassessment of the way people govern themselves. Alongside the scientists and generals and code breakers trying to outwit the enemy, others devoted their energies to the only marginally less urgent matter of the rival merits of fascism, communism, capitalism, liberalism, socialism, and democracy. This brought about one of the more unusual coincidences of the century, when a quartet of books was published during the war by exiles from the old dual monarchy, Austria and Hungary, looking forward to the type of society humanity should aim for after hostilities ceased. Whatever their other differences, these books had one thing in common to recommend them: thanks to paper rationing, they were mercifully short.
    Karl Mannheim’s Diagnosis of Our Time appeared in 1943. Mannheim was a member of the Sunday Circle who had gathered around George Lukács in Budapest during World War I, and included Arnold Hauser and Béla Bartók. Mannheim had left Hungary in 1919, grown up with the traditional German understanding of Bildung, studied at Heidelberg, and attended Martin Heidegger’s lectures at Marburg. 7 He was professor of sociology at Frankfurt from 1919 to 1933, a close colleague of Adorno, Horkheimer, and the others, but after Hitler took power he moved to London, teaching at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the