The German Genius

Mann and his son Klaus—who, he said, “had missed the chance to experience the concept, so alien to them, of Volk , rather than think about it in the abstract.” 20
    However, Benn’s enthusiasm for the Nazis did not outlast the Nacht der langen Messer (Night of the Long Knives; June 1934), and he broke with the regime, retreating into what he called “aristocratic inner emigration.” He was attacked in the press, forced to resign from the Reich Chamber of Writers and forbidden from publishing. After the war he resumed both writing and his medical practice. To begin with his works were banned by the Allies but in 1951 he won the Büchner Prize. In his autobiography, Doppelleben ( Double Life ; 1950), he included a letter Klaus Mann had sent to him from France, which showed, he admitted, that Mann had judged the prewar situation better than he had. By then it was too late. Klaus Mann committed suicide in May 1949. 21

B EYOND H ITLER: C ONTINUITY OF THE G ERMAN T RADITION UNDER A DVERSE C ONDITIONS
     

The “Fourth Reich”: The Effect of German Thought on America
     
    W hen the American philosopher Allan Bloom first went to college, at the University of Chicago in the mid-1940s, just after World War II had ended, one of the things he soon noticed was that “American university life was being revolutionised by German thought.” At that time, in Chicago anyway, Marx was revered, he said, but the two thinkers who generated the most enthusiasm were the sociologist Max Weber and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who in turn, as Bloom put it, had both been profoundly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche. Between them (plus Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Tönnies later on), Bloom argued, “Freud and Weber are the immediate source of most of the language with which we are so familiar…part of that great pre-Hitler German classical tradition…Equality and the welfare state were now part of the order of things, and what remained was to complete the democratic project. Psychotherapy would make individuals happy, as sociology would improve societies.” 1
    What we were witnessing, Bloom insisted, was an Americanization of German pathos that the Americans were not aware of. Americans, he said, were now straining in a search for inwardness, but the main effect of German thought on America (and perhaps, by extension, on the rest of the West) was its historicism, its rejection of universality and cosmopolitanism in favor of a culture rooted in a nation’s history and achievements. “Our intellectual skyline has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than has our physical skyline by German architects.” 2
    Henri Peyre agreed. Peyre (1901–88), professor of French at Yale, was one of five people who contributed to a series of lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952 on the topic of “the cultural migration.” The others were Franz Neumann on the social sciences, Erwin Panofsky on the history of art, Wolfgang Köhler on psychology, and Paul Tillich on theology. Peyre, in speaking of the effect of immigrants on literature in the United States, said it was already clear that they constituted “one of the most vigorous elements in present-day American intellectual life, around periodicals like the Partisan Review and Commentary .” Particularly in their capacity for work and their concern for intellectual values, he said, they had transformed many university departments, with American pragmatism and fondness for factual empiricism being strengthened by “German patience” and the Germans’ habits of collection of data, adding “those exiles from Germanic lands have enabled American speculation in many fields to leap forward with unheard-of boldness.” He concluded: “Philosophy has invaded many academic curricula; psychological or sociological generalisations fascinate college youth. Tocqueville…wisely remarked that ‘the Americans are much more addicted to the use of general ideas than the English.’ In several respects, American intellectual life is today closer to the German than to the British.” In fact, he said, the British contribution to American intellectual life was “surprisingly far behind” the German contribution. 3
    T HE D E -P ROVINCIALIZATION OF THE A MERICAN M IND
     
    The pithiest way to show how German refugees affected American life is to give a list of those whose intellectual contribution was such as to render their names, if not household words, then at least eminent