The German Genius

introduced a long time ago, in ancient Greece (“the best model”), and subsequently by mainly German thinkers—Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber, Husserl, and Heidegger; or, as his critics alleged, that he was out of date and that culture should now be regarded, as one critic put it, as “a kind of ethnic carnival.”
    The furor has rumbled on since then, never really going away, and one eventual result was a conference held at Bard College in New York in August 2002, titled “Exile, Science, and Bildung,” attended by scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Hungary. The thrust of the conference was that the debate over Bildung had entered America in 1930 with the publication of Abraham Flexner’s book, Universities—American, English, German , and they wanted to see how it had fared. Flexner, secretary of the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Foundation’s first educational philanthropy, argued that neither American nor English institutes of higher education were really any more than secondary schools, while “Germany alone, building on the historic initiatives of Wilhelm von Humboldt, knew genuine universities.” 94 Bildung was the chief purpose of a university.
    The aim of the Bard conference was to examine the careers, publications and friendships of a raft of German émigré scholars in America, to see to what extent they brought with them the German idea of Bildung. The figures examined in the conference included Thomas Mann, Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, Erwin Panofsky, Paul Lazarsfeld, Ernst Cassirer, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim, and Paul Oskar Kristeller—many of the names considered in this and previous chapters.
    The conference found that, once in America, many of the émigré scholars lost their obsession with Bildung. Whether the experience of exile was just too much, whether America was just too different, no one could say. At the same time, aspects of the Bildung culture were incorporated into American life but Americanized in the process, in three areas in particular. First, the idea of a critical sociology, rather than number-crunching, seems to have gathered pace as a result of the Frankfurt Institute’s work in America. This has not hindered number-crunching sociologists, but postwar critical sociology in the United States did flourish as a result of what Adorno, Horkheimer, and others brought to the table.
    Second, was the German challenge to the empirical tradition. Their philosophers understood that there were “impersonal forces beyond their control that governed their fate.” This was not just people like Hegel and Nietzsche, but Heidegger too, whose attitude that we should “submit” to the world as it is, that we should “care” for it rather than try to control it, was an ethical stance not exactly congenial to American materialist thought, but was an attitude that flowed from the Bildung approach and would grow in importance as the postwar decades passed.
    But the Bildung concept with the greatest resonance in America, and the concept that was most Americanized, was the notion of “self-realization.” At the same time that Bildung self-realization entered the American vocabulary, so did Freudianism and its concept of individual self-realization. Psychoanalysis, the psychological approach, was, as might be expected, deeply personal and individualistic. Its moral content was confined implicitly to the doctrine that a (mentally) healthy citizen is a better citizen than an unhealthy one. It did not explore, as traditional Bildung, traditional self-realization did, what it meant to be a good citizen in a moral or political sense or what it meant to be “a cultural-ethical personality.” So, yes, Bildung had arrived in America, but it was in an impoverished form.
    We shall return to these matters in the Conclusion. For now we may say that the relatively small number of German émigrés who lived in exile in the United States had an influence out of proportion to their size, but that they were themselves much influenced (and in some cases defeated) by the exile experience.
    It was somewhat different in Great Britain.

“His Majesty’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens”
     
    W hile 130,000 German émigrés settled in the United States, the equivalent figure for Britain was roughly 50,000. 1 Proportionately, this was a bigger figure, since America had four times the population of Britain and ten times the