The German Genius

synthesizing tetralogy, The Age of Revolution , The Age of Capitalism , The Age of Industry , and, most recently, The Age of Extremes . 15
    Both Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayek had continued their attacks on socialism and historicism begun in the 1940s. In 1959 Popper published The Logic of Scientific Discovery , in which he set out his view that the scientist encounters the world—nature—as a stranger, and that what sets the scientific enterprise apart from anything else is that it only entertains knowledge or experience that is capable of falsification. For Popper this is what distinguishes science from religion or metaphysics; it is the very embodiment of an “open” society. Hayek left Britain for the University of Chicago in 1950 and could have been considered just as easily in the chapter on emigrants to the United States, though later still he went back to German-speaking Europe, to Salzburg and then Freiburg. In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, he published The Constitution of Liberty in which he extended his argument beyond planning—the focus of his earlier book—to the moral sphere. His argument now was that our values have evolved just as our intelligence has and that the evolved rules of justice are liberty. The concept of “social justice,” which would become so popular in the 1960s, and “the Great Society” was and is a myth. Being evolved, law is “part of the natural history of mankind” it is coeval with society and, therefore and crucially, it antedates the emergence of the state. The imposition of “social justice” is an unwarranted (and unworkable) interference with natural processes. Neither Popper nor Hayek were cultural pessimists in the traditional German fashion, but they were recognizably Darwinian in their approach. In 1974, Hayek won the Nobel Prize for Economics and in 1984 he was made a Companion of Honour in Britain. Popper was knighted in 1965.
    A publishing-literary-historical venture of a different kind was the Holocaust Library put together in London by Alfred Wiener. A Berliner by birth, he fought in World War I and won the Iron Cross. Always mindful of the threat of National Socialism, from as early as 1928 he set about documenting its activities but in 1933 he was forced to flee, first to Amsterdam, then to London. After the war he established the Wiener Library, one of the major resources in documenting the Holocaust. 16
    Leo Baeck (1873–1956) was a similar figure, even more impressive in some ways. Born in Lissa, now in Poland but then in Germany, he studied philosophy in Berlin with Wilhelm Dilthey and became a rabbi. In 1905, in response to Adolf von Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity , he published The Essence of Judaism , which mixed neo-Kantianism with Jewish ideas and the success of which made him something of a hero to his fellow Jews in Germany. 17 He acted as an army rabbi during World War I and thereafter performed in one capacity or another as a guardian of the Jewish community, remaining in Germany, serving on committees and bodies designed to protect Jewish interests. Eventually, in 1943, he was deported to Theresienstadt, where he became a member of the Council of Elders; he was still there when the camp was liberated by the Russians in May 1945. After the war he transferred to London where he published a second book, This People Israel , which further enhanced his standing. In recognition of his role during catastrophic times, the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of German-speaking Jewry was established in 1955. He died a year later. There are now Leo Baeck centers in Melbourne and Toronto and Leo Baeck Institutes in London, Jerusalem, and New York.
    Émigré journalists in Britain crowded most around the BBC and, in print, David Astor’s Observer , which published Sebastian Haffner, Arthur Koestler, Richard Löwenthal, Ernst (“Fritz”) Schumacher, and Isaac Deutscher. The other strength of the BBC, besides journalism and plays, was, of course, music, and here the impact of émigrés was as substantial as it was in science, publishing, and social/political theory. In the postwar years, up to the 1970s, three Viennese émigrés had a disproportionate effect on the output of the broadcasting corporation: Hans Keller, Martin Esslin, and Stephen Hearst.
    Born in Vienna just after the Great War had ended, Keller escaped from Austria after the Anschluss and made his way to Britain, where he had a sister.