The German Genius
all: in his time Moser has been president of the Royal Statistical Society, warden of Wadham College, Oxford, pro-vice chancellor of Oxford, chairman of the British Museum Development Trust, and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a governor of the Royal Academy of Music, a member of the BBC Music Advisory Committee, a trustee of the London Philharmonia Orchestra, and chairman of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. He became, in effect, a one-man establishment.
Hardly less multitalented was Ronald Grierson. Born Rolf Hans Griessmann in Nuremberg in 1921, educated at the Lycée Pasteur in Paris, he moved to London in 1936, and went to Balliol College, Oxford, but was interned before joining the army and seeing action in, among other places, North Africa, where he was mentioned in dispatches. After the war he was assigned to the Control Commission for Germany where his most delicate task was to persuade Konrad Adenauer out of his sulky retirement (Adenauer having been dismissed as mayor of Cologne). Later in the 1940s Grierson served at the fledgling United Nations, and at the European Commission in Brussels in the 1970s. He was a director of S. G. Warburg, chairman of the General Electric Company, and in 1984 took over as chairman of the South Bank Centre, the arts complex on the south side of the Thames in central London that houses the National Theatre, the National Film Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall, and the Hayward Gallery. He found contemporary music by far the most contentious art issue he had to face: the Centre was charged by the government with presenting “challenging music,” but halls were often more than half empty. He was knighted in 1990. 23
Among the many German-born scholars who settled in Britain and made a name there we may include Max Born, George Steiner, Rudolf Wittkower, Edgar Wind, Marie Jahoda, Max Perutz, Peter Pulzer, and Richard Wollheim. Probably the most well known was Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations , his second masterpiece after the Tractatus , was published in 1953, two years after his death from cancer at the relatively young age of sixty-two. In this book one of his main arguments was that many philosophical problems, as construed, are in fact false problems, mainly because we are misled by language. For Wittgenstein, the concept of mind was unnecessary, and we need to be very careful how we think about the “brain.” It is the person who feels hope or disappointment, not his or her brain. Talk of “inner” and “outer” in regard to mental life is, for Wittgenstein, only metaphor.
Wittgenstein’s book was part of the attack on Freud that was growing in the late 1950s and 1960s. Freud himself had died in London in 1939, soon after arriving from Vienna with his family. After Sigmund died, his daughter Anna, who had trained with her father, set up a Hampstead War Nursery, and later another clinic, to examine the effects of wartime stress (including being orphaned) on children. 24 It was now that she came into conflict with another German-speaking female child psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein.
Klein was also Jewish and had been in psychoanalysis with both Sandor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham. 25 Born in Vienna in 1882, she too was interested in children and was invited to London by Ernest Jones. Klein had a rather unsatisfactory personal life, but she did have a sensitivity toward children and was the first to observe that a way into the thinking of disturbed infants can be through play, in particular their treatment of toys. 26 This gave rise to her theory of object relations, which states that the ego settles into a characteristic way of facing the world, and that this inflexibility is the cause of many problems.
She and Anna Freud had a long-running battle about the inner lives of children. 27 Anna Freud discerned distinct developmental stages that children go through that affect the presentation of symptoms, whereas Melanie Klein saw mental life as, in general, an oscillation between depressive and manic phases. 28 The two were never reconciled, and the British Psychoanalytic Society remains formally split in its training division into Kleinian, Anna Freudian, and Independent sections.
Norbert Elias (1897–1990) was introduced earlier. In Germany, he moved in a circle that included Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, Leo Lowenthal, and Gershom Scholem, but the real influence on his life was Karl Mannheim, whose
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