The German Genius

Vienna in 1926 by Moritz Schlick, and together they set about forming the circle. 55
    They enjoyed rapid success but, as we have seen, since many of them were Jewish, the advent of the Nazis forced them abroad. Charles Morris, at Chicago, who had spent several years at the German university at Prague, and Willard van Quine, at Harvard, sponsored Carnap. He obtained a position at Chicago, where he taught until 1952.
    In America, Carnap produced Logical Foundation of Probability (1950), which had a big influence on Nelson Goodman and Hilary Putnam. In 1953 Carnap accepted the chair at UCLA that his friend and Berlin colleague Hans Reichenbach had held. 56 Between them, Carnap and Reichenbach did much to establish logic and linguistics as integral to American philosophy. In 1971 van Quine described Carnap as “the dominant figure in philosophy from the 1930s onward.” 57
    Paul Tillich’s journey from Heidegger’s Germany to Union Theological Seminary in New York has already been outlined. Once in America, although it took him a while to learn English properly and to disengage himself from Germany, and though he always retained a strong German accent, he became a prolific author, achieving fame well beyond theological and philosophical circles, most of all with The Courage to Be (1948). 58 Many former Marxists were becoming disillusioned, especially as Marxism manifested itself in East European and Chinese Communism, and the secular world that became especially visible after World War II seemed to many devoid of meaning, even as prosperity blossomed. Tillich proposed a “spiritual cure” for “uneasy souls.” 59 He personally found the non-authoritarian, even anti-authoritarian ethos of America very attractive, and the theology he offered in The Courage to Be was a form of religious existentialism that arose from this absence of authoritarianism—people could find God wherever they looked, it was the looking that counted. After he retired from the Union Theological Seminary in 1955, he became a professor at Harvard and then moved on in 1962 to Chicago where, for the last three years of his life, he was professor of theology and, as Lewis Coser says, “an American institution.” 60
    The successes of Tillich did not go unnoticed by Peter Berger, who was born in Vienna in 1929 and immigrated to the United States after World War II. Berger was one of the first to notice that religion was not declining as the secular social scientists had predicted, and he cannily argued that in an increasingly globalized world the experience of faith was changing: it was no longer taken for granted when people were growing up; and more and more individuals searched for a personal religious preference. This was an early sighting of what became known as “expressive individualism.”
    T HE B IAS IN H ISTORY
     
    German history was not well established at American universities before World War II. 61 This provided opportunities for the roughly three dozen historians who found refuge in America, among them Hajo Holborn, Hans Rosenberg, Felix Gilbert, Paul Kristeller, Hans Baron, and Ernst Kantorowicz. 62 The most important (and the most “imposing,” according to Coser) was Hajo Holborn (1902–69), who taught for many years at Yale, becoming the only refugee historian to be elected president of the American Historical Association. 63
    Historians were in a special position in Germany, as already noted. Germans were responsible for the very concept of historicism which, among other things, meant that historians were taken seriously. By the time of the Nazi takeover, almost all the professors there had been trained either by or in the tradition of Sybel, Treitschke, or Droysen (see Chapter 21), and so all were in the Prussian mold who looked back more or less fondly to Bismarck and the Wilhelmine Reich “when the professoriat had been considered an essential pillar of the Prussian and German political establishment.” 64 On the other hand, the refugees were usually younger, mainly in their thirties when they emigrated, and in many cases were students of the intellectual historian Friedrich Meinecke at the University of Berlin. Meinecke was unusual in that, while he had his traditionalist side (and had signed the Manifesto of the 93 in 1914), he made an accommodation with the Weimar Republic (he famously described himself as a monarchist at heart but a republican by virtue of reason) and this set him implacably against the