The German Genius

among their peers: Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Rudolf Arnheim, Erich Auerbach, Paul Baran, Hans Bethe, Bruno Bettelheim, Arnold Brecht, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Breuer, Hermann Broch, Charlotte and Karl Bühler, Rudolf Carnap, Lewis Coser, Karl Deutsch, Marlene Dietrich, Alfred Döblin, Peter Drucker, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Hanns Eisler, Erik Erikson, Otto Fenichel, Ernst Fraenkel, Erich Fromm, Hans Gerth, Felix Gilbert, Kurt Gödel, Gottfried von Haberler, Eduard Heimann, Ernst Herzfeld, Julius Hirsch, Albert Hirschman, Hajo Holborn, Max Horkheimer, Karen Horney, Werner Jaeger, Marie Jahoda, George Katona, Walter Kaufmann, Otto Kirchheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka, Erich Korngold, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Krenek, Ernst Kris, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Fritz Lang, Paul Lazarsfeld, Kurt Lewin, Peter Lorre, Leo Lowenthal, Ernst Lubitsch, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Mayr, Ludwig von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern, Hans Morgenthau, Otto Nathan, Franz Neumann, Erwin Panofsky, Wolfgang Panofsky, Erwin Piscator, Karl Polanyi, Friedrich Pollock, Otto Preminger, Fritz Redlich, Max Reinhardt, Erich Maria Remarque, Hans Rosenberg, Arnold Schoenberg, Joseph Schumpeter, Alfred Schutz, Hans Simons, Leo Spitzer, Hans Staudinger, Leo Strauss, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Paul Tillich, Eric Voegelin, Kurt Weill, René Wellek, Max Wertheimer, Billy Wilder, Karl Wittfogel, Hans Zeisel, Heinrich Zimmer, Fred Zinnemann. This list is, of course, nowhere near exhaustive. 4
    Brecht described their experiences this way:
    Hounded out by seven nations,
Saw old idiocies performed,
Those I praise whose transmutations
Leave their persons undeformed.
     
    But who could remain undeformed, even when there were so many Germans in Washington Heights in New York that it became known as the “Fourth Reich”? Most of the refugees arrived during the 1930s, in the Great Depression, when unemployment was high and the general mood was not especially favorable to newcomers, however distressing their circumstances. Even so, they made their world. The Deauville restaurant on East Seventy-third Street in New York, the Éclair on West Seventy-second, the Café Royale on the Lower East Side, or the Blue Danube in Hollywood, operated by Joe May, a Berlin director down on his luck, became homes-from-home, as close to the old life as they could find. * 5
    Most who were to become famous (and “de-provincialize” the American mind, in Anthony Heilbut’s phrase) were under forty. They were flexible, but even so it wasn’t always easy. One historian found American students disappointing—“They’re so unequipped. I’ve never had one student from whom I learned a thing.” 6 More than one remarked that “Americans were the kindest of people and the dullest.” 7 Paul Lazarsfeld found German more precise than the “commercial discourse” of America. Theodor Adorno and his colleagues found American popular culture to be uncritical, a latent form of propaganda for commercial society. 8
    T HE G OLDEN A GE OF P SYCHOANALYSIS
     
    Probably the greatest single influence that the refugee Germans had in America, certainly in the more immediate aftermath of war, was in the realm of psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular. Social psychologists like Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) and Gestalt psychologists like Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967), Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), and Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), all exerted some influence, in the case of Lewin on such people as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and in the case of the Gestaltists on such behaviorists as Edward C. Tolman and the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow. 9
    Freud had formed a rather warped view of the United States after his visit there early in the century (he thought America was “a mistake”) but despite this, psychoanalysis had become popular in the United States even without fresh German input. Between the wars it had been incorporated into the medical establishment, in contrast to Europe where “lay analysts” were far more common, and this may have had something to do with its high prestige. Between 1940 and 1960 the membership of the American Psychoanalytic Association grew fivefold, making this, says Lewis Coser, “surely the golden age of psychoanalysis in America.” 10 Coser puts this down partly to “America’s more optimistic temper,” but whatever the reason, the insights of several of the refugee psychoanalysts passed into the language.
    Born in