On Human Survival. How A World - View Emerged . Bound copies of English version of Vom Überleben, 1988 May

John H. HERZ

On Human Survival

How A World-View Emerged

Who talks of victory? Survival is everything
Rainer Maria Rilke

Contents

Pr ace
Introduction

First Part: A World Arises (Bliss and Terror)

Chapter 1. Geborgenheit
Family - Dwelling - City on the Rhine -
Family at Large, Friends of Parents -
Vacations and Travels

Chapter 2. Early Sorrows

i Chapter 3. The World Arises
| School and Teachers - First Falling in

Love, First World-View - The Kantian
Turning-Point

Second Part: Years of Studies and Migrations

Chapter 4: Friends and Teachers
The two Griters - Sunday Talks -
Attitudes and Theories - Spengler

i Chapter 5: Years of Study

Studying Law - Freiburg, Heidelberg,

! Berlin - Cologne, Kelsen, Pure Theory of
Law - Nicolai Hartmann's Ontology
(Theory of a Multilayered Universe)

Chapter 6: A World Breaks Asunder :
Emigration to Geneva - Changing a
Profession - First Writings

Third Part: New World, New World-Views

Chapter 7: Emigration, Princeton and Washington,
War and Peace

Meeting America - The Princeton
Institute - Howard University in
Washington - Office of Strategic
Services - Nurnberg Interlude - Howard
Again - The New Germany

(Chapter 8: The World-View of the Nineteen-Fifties)
City College in New York - Political
Realism and Political Idealism - World

(Fourth Part: The

Politics in the Atomic Age

World's Problems Conceived as Global

Problems)

(Chapter 9: The World-View of the Nineteen-Sixties

(Chapter 10:

(Chapter 11:

Appendix

The Scientific-Technological Process —
Acceleration and Stagnation - Culture
Criticism

The World-View of the Seventies and
Eighties)

Travels and New Insights - The
demographic-economic-ecological Global
Problems ~ The politico-strategic
Global Problems

The World Monads and Their World-
Views) . .

A Monadological Worldview - World-View
and Awareness ~ The Chances of Global
Awareness and the Politics of Human
Survival - A Life that Goes Downward ~
A World that Goes Down?

Preface

In 1984 I published a book, in German and in Germany, whose
title was Vom Ueberleben (On Survival). It was meant to be a
kind of intellectual autobiography, tracing the emergence of
what I called my Weltbild, my view, or rather, my views of the
world, through the evolving stages of my life. I refer the
reader to the Introduction that follows this Preface for a more
detailed explanation of my purpose.

The book was well received in Germany. But my efforts to
find a publisher for an English version failed. Since I now
approach the likely end of my earthly travel, I have decided to
translate the first half of the book myself and have it produced
in this form so as to make at least this portion of the book
available to those non-German-readers among my friends anda
relatives who have expressed an interest in it. The reason I
have not translated and thus am not presenting the entire volume
lies not so much in failing strength as in that its first
chapters are probably of greater interest to this group of
readers than the later ones. I have translated and reproduced
here the entire table of contents, from which the reader may see
that chapters eight to eleven, forming the second half of the
German volume, are more theoretical than the preceding ones,
dealing with the development of my political theories and ideas
without much biographical detail. On the other hand, the

chapters translated here are not only tied more intimately to’

the events of my life but also - and this may be the area of
most interest to the readers of this translation - to the
historical, political, cultural environment in which one Hans
(subsequently John) Herz grew up: conditions in Germany before
the Nazis came to power; how a young German Jew grew up in what
is now known as the "Weimar" period of German history; the

5

university life at that stage; his and his family's emigration,
and how he adjusted to life and conditions in his new country;
his chance to work in a Washington war agency in World War II
and, briefly, at the Nurnberg war crimes trial; his relation to
his old country and the people therein after war and holocaust,
and his ensuing attempt at self-identification; and so forth. As
for those who may want to know more about his later intellectual
development, they are referred to some literature in English on
his later world-views as well as some excerpts from writings
contained in the Appendix to this volume.

From the preface to the German volume I would like to
present here the names of those who helped me with the book in
its German version through reading all or parts of the
manuscript, correcting and/or refreshing my memory, and in
similar ways, for which I was and am grateful. They are: my
wife, Anne, and my son, Stephen; my brothers Gerhard and Werner
(Louisville); my sister Lore and my brother-in-law Joseph
Kingsley (Pacific Palisades); Eugene Anschel (New York); Ossip
and Lili Flechtheim (Berlin); Hans Jonas (New Rochelle); Ludwig
Kahn (Scarsdale); Hans Lehnsen (Millbrook, N.Y.); Karl Lenart
(formerly Vineland, N.J.); Grete Lippmann (formerly Kfar
Shmaryahu, Israel); Erich Wenderoth (Geneva, Switzerland).

Scarsdale, N.Y., May 1988

Introduction

This book was not conceived as "memoirs." Even Goethe,

Germany's greatest sage, was sceptical about the ability - not
to mention the desirability - of "knowing oneself":

"Man, by the way, is an enigmatic being; he
neither knows whence he comes nor wither he
goes; he knows little of the world and least of
all of himself. I, too, do not know myself, and
God forbid that I ever do."

"There are few biographies that can portray a
pure, quiet, steady progress of the individual.
Like the entirety which contains us, our life

is composed, in incomprehensible fashion, of
both freedom and necessity."

I do not presume to consider my life, composed as it may be
"of freedom and necessity", as important enough to be recorded
for its contemporaries, let alone those who will come after me.
My intention, rather, was this: My life having spanned this
tragic, dramatic century almost from its beginnings, I thought it
might prove paradigmatic, in particular, of how one whose
predisposition and preferences were rather "conservative", that
is, not basically questioning the given conditions of the world
(although considering it much in need of reform), toward the end
of his life arrived at radical conclusions concerning what to do
to safeguard the world's very survival.

"On Survival" (Yom Ueberleben) had been the title of the
German version of this book. This had sometimes led to
misunderstanding it as an ordinary autobiography dealing with the

vicissitudes of an individual life. Its English title was chosen
to avoid such misunderstanding. It is a political book. It deals
with an individual's - in this case a political scientist's -
views of the world - how they emerged and developed. And it is
the radical nature of the changes that have swept the world in
this century that were responsible for the radicalism of my
world-views as they evolved during my lifetime. In former times
radicalism would characterize youth, while conservatism would
develop in old age. In our times, in honesty to oneself and one's
insights, it must be the other way around.

Politics is our fate. Thus spake Napoleon. Now, with the
total, collective doom of mankind placed into the realm of the
possible, if not the probable, politics determines not only the
fate of individual nations or other specific groups but that of
mankind as a whole. As I have come to see it, there are two
groups of survival problems: those connected with the invention
of a weapon of annihilation that might lead to sudden and total
catastrophe; and those created by the more gradually evolving and
thus less directly felt developments in the biosphere that
threaten our human habitat: our global environment and its
resources. As in the case of the nuclear weapon, it is not a
matter of this or that specific policy; it's a matter of an
exploding world population collectively running out of basic
resources and livable environments.

If human survival is in jeopardy, radical changes in world-
views and in resulting attitudes and policies are required as
long as there still is time. But time is running out; hence the
urgency I have felt when writing this book. Radically new
policies require radical transformation in outlook, such as
comprehending the obsolescence of war because of the "inutility"
of nuclear weapons. After Hiroshima such change in outlook seemed
imminent, but since then most have returned to the traditional
views on war, including nuclear war - of the possibility, for
instance, of defeating an opponent while surviving victoriously.

The younger ones among us don't remember the great turnabout and
thus seem to live more or less comfortably with "the bomb."
Therefore it is up to us oldsters to keep reminding them.
Realistic world-views are of the essence, and this is why this
"intellectual autobiography" (as one may call it) is organized so
as to show the unfolding of successive world-views.

Views of the world, of course, do not grow in a vacuum. This
is why this apologia pro studiis meis, rather than limiting
itself to a dry description of ideas and theories, must also show
the human element out of which the world-views grew. It will have
to deal with the influence family, friends, teachers, colleagues
have had in and upon my life; with the social environment and the
cultural soil in which I grew up, first in Germany, then in
America. Yet, while the biographical will be strongly represented
in the first portion of the book, it will recede in the second
part (which remains untranslated here).

One last preliminary remark: My radicalism does not involve
utopian demands for unattainable goals (for instance such as
replacing the present state system with some kind of world
government). I do hope to have remained a "political realist". On
the other hand, the fact that the changes required, for instance
in the field of arms control and disarmament, or of population
control and development policies in the Third World, are not
likely to occur within the limited time still granted us may well
lead to pessimism. I admit to pessimism. But my pessimism should
not be confused with a fatalism that holds doomsday inevitable.
Just the opposite: While a facile optimism in times of peril may
render us blind to its scope and seriousness, pessimism may open
our eyes to the deadly threats and enable us to master them.

First Part

Wo: ses (Bliss and Terror

And if I add here another observation, I must
confess that in the course of my life that
first blossoming of the outer world has always
occured to me as the genuine, true, and
original nature, compared with which everything
that we experience later appears as mere
copies, which, however close they may come to
the original, yet lack the original's spirit

and sense
Goethe, Wanderjahre

I had started writing in German when I set out to describe my
origins which were in Germany - I then continued to compose in
German even those parts of the book dealing with world-views,
politics, and similar matter more familiar to me in the language
of my second country, America, and this led to its publication in
German and in Germany. But even then I used the English words
"bliss and terror" for the title of the part dealing with my
youth, because no German terms could better indicate the two
opposite feelings that characterized the first stages of my life.

Bliss, the happiness felt by a human being for whom the world
newly arises like a sun, the source of light that renders
everything under the sun visible for the first time - this basic
feeling in the sense of Goethe's sensing of "original nature"
compared with which all later impressions pale, has come back to
me whenever I tried to recall the first stage of my life. "That
first blossoming of the outer world" I relived with the "first
blossoming" of my son, and, since grandchildren were denied me,
with the blossoming of my Berlin friends' grandson. Perhaps it
belongs to the very essence of the world that "our world" becomes
“the world as such" time and time again by emerging in
innumerable multitudes. Subsequent scientific insights may add
many specifics to this basic feeling but can never replace Tt
entirely. ;

As we now know, the emergence of a world comprises eons,
periods during which worlds composed of stars, suns, planets,
satellites dash about, circle each other, crash into each other,
arise, disappear - something un-imaginable as long as there exist
no beings able to form "images" under the catagories of space and
time; eons during which there are no such beings, others, during
which such beings begin to exist at some place in the universe,

11
perhaps to disappear again. Finally an eon in which our solar
system emerges, with planets, one of which is the earth, our
earth. For billions of years this system remains without life,
thus still un-imaginable. Then there occurs the miracle of the
double helix: living beings, at first still without consciousness
of the world, least of all, of selves. Finally, there appear
beings equipped with sensory organs and a central nervous system,
enabling them to become aware of the outer world and of
themselves in it, to see, hear, feel, smell something that
appears as "world" to them. Perhaps there is some kind of
awareness of world and self already in the so-called higher
living species, such as mammals; definitely it emerges with the
appearance of man. His capacity to remember for the first time
renders possible life as a process, that is, as a course felt as
something singular and unique, and with the understanding of the
history of the universe, the earth, and mankind as a development
that occurred before one's time and continues to happen during
one's life and beyond.

Man structures his history through epochs (such as antiquity,
middle ages, modern ages) with ever more rationalistic visions.
Thus, out of the millenia of human history there emerges the age
of "modernity." History centers around a civilization called
"western", a civilization in which contemplation of nature is
transformed into domination over it. Inventions conquer space and
time. At certain spots of the globe the survival of ever more
humans who live ever longer becomes possible. The idea of
"progress" emerges: For all on earth the "good life" will become
possible, cooperation and peace will take the place of conflict
and war, humiliation and pain will yield to a life in dignity,
beauty in art and life chases away all that is ugly, there draws
near the golden age long annunciated by a few.

This was the era in which the world became "world" for me,
where, on the 23rd of September 1908, I "saw the light of the
world", That point in time determined much, place and

12

circumstances determined even more.

Chance and necessity: The future - the life and survival of
the many who are born to "see the world's light" - depends on
when and where they are born, at which spot of the earth's
surface, in which stratum of society, on who the parents are. How
many live only a few days or months, are even put to death as
unexpected or superfluous eaters, are neglected as orphans or by
unmotherly mothers, unparent-like parents, remain hungry, have no
abode worth being called home, are enslaved from early youth on
or condemned to hard work, exploited by their own or by people
alien to them, lack any chance to learn, must flee from
persecution - infinite possibilities. "Undeserved" - because, at
that early stage of life, still undeservable - is the good
fortune of those whose fate protects them from such misfortune.
On them, loving affection is bestowed, protection within a small
but expanding environment; for them the world emerges as Goethe's
“original nature", and their emerging view of the world opens to
them a goal, and a path on which to approach that goal, or goals.
Such good fortune was allotted to me when I came into a world
that in this case bore the address of Rochusstrasse 9, third
floor, Diisseldorf, Germany, Europe; into a world where parents
who had long waited for my appearance and had looked forward to
it, gave me the name of Hans Hermann Herz. I was born, that is,
in Europe, center of a civilization that thought of itself as the
most advanced one, as a German, that is, in a country that
counted itself among the most developed ones, as a Jew in an
environment in which discrimination of religious or racial nature
seemed to vanish, something shown by the very fact that my father
was a royal-Prussian judge and thus belonged to a caste that was
part of the so-called higher social strata.

All this "the fairy" placed into my crib. What has become of
it all?

Out of a feeling of bliss, grounded in protection, there was
born an earliest Weltanschauung, the view of a world striving

13

towards the bliss of all human beings. Out of an early,
primordial experience, that of the beggar, there arose an early
scare, terror, compassion with observed misery, a feeling -
partly altruistic but in part also egoistic - of a "this must not
be" and of a "what if that should happen to me". Thus "made to
know out of compassion" (Wagner's "Parsifal": “Aus Mitleida
wissend"), there emerged an early revolt against the suffering of
others, against unfairness and injustice - a concern that colored
my later life and that made me come out for "the downtrodden and
insulted ones"; it caused bad conscience because of having it so,
much better (something entirely "un-American" but within the
European tradition); it would, subsequently, create sympathy with
socialism and related attitudes and movements.

14

Chapter-1. Gel enheit

The world is so waste and empty when we figure
only towns and hills in it; but to know someone
here and there whom we accord with, who is
living on with us even in silence, this makes
our earthly ball a peopled garden

Goethe, Lehrjahre

There is no English equivalent for the German noun
Geborgenheit, which I use as title of this chapter. It indicates
a state of being sheltered, protected, taken care of, a state
that creates the "bliss" feeling which, with its contrast, i
"terror", informed and moulded my youth. I shall use it from here
on in this sense.

In Bad Ems, on the river Lahn. On the look-out tower. Again and
again I must ascend it. My heart beats when I look out inte the
green and blue world I perceive from up there. Grandpa Louis, who
has invited me and my mother to the bathing place Ems, has
promised me one penny for each red vineyard snail I counts how
many there are, emerging after the rain, on the forest trails. At
night, in bed at the inn where we live, a thunderstorm; I count
the seconds between the lightning and thunder and know how far
away the storm occurs. A blissful feeling of Geborgenheit the
shriller and louder the spectacle out there. At other times I
count the coaches of the freight train which passes by noisily
not far from where we live; I dream of the wide world the train i

SURI csc etasemsase

men will see. i
Earliest childhood memories - one says they are transfigured |
in remembrance. Just wait - "terror" of manifold kind wilt come
early enough, even in remembrance. But much of the bliss was
genuine. A Dutch beach: time and again rolling down the dunes,
shouting with joy, up and down, and then into the shelter of the
parents' wicker chair or with them (clad in their pre-war bathing
suits that, later, will look so terribly funny on old BHOESS) |
into the water, searching for jellyfish and similar ocean §
creatures. ; :
From Rochus street we turn into Mozartstrasse; I believe its
houses had brown walls, but this may be an error because Mozart, |

16

with the "o" of the name, is gold-brown for one like me for whom
vowels and sounds have colors. In my memory I am lying in a baby
carriage pushed by "Miss Therese" together with another "Miss"
pushing a second carriage - but this is certainly in error, that
far back into babyhood memory does not reach; it must have been
my little brother who occupied the carriage, with me trotting
along. From there into the "Hofgarten", a park where it smelled
wonderfully in spring, after the light rain; its paths were
covered abundantly with blossom leaves, and swans passed by in
the big pond. Occasionally we went to the "People's Park"
(VYolksgarten) instead; this park was less "distinguished" but
more exciting, because it was close to the express trains roaring
by toward the main railroad station.

Flooded with light is most of what emerges from the depths of
this primeval time. Thus the "salon" of the Rochusstrasse
apartment; in it, the grand piano, and a blond young woman, my
mother, playing it, also, sometimes, making music together with
others, thus, for instance, playing a Haydn trio whose themes, in
the sense of Goethe's "original nature", have remained with me,
surrounded by the aura of the especially blissful. Later, the two
or three of us boys sing together "Reinecke's children songs",
accompanied by our mother. Certain extraordinary events were
expected with special eagerness: Halley's comet, or an eclipse
of the sun, observed through dark-colored glass. More exciting
still: The appearance of the first "Zeppelin" in the so far
seemingly inaccessible sky. Shortly thereafter, we were even more
excited by the news that the "air-ship" had somewhere crashed to
the ground and burned. :

The first drama I recall: I had hidden, just "for fun", in
the parents' bedroom; the intention was to allow myself to be
found soon, but I had wrapped myself in heavy drapes in such a
way that nothing of me could be seen. I heard first my mother and
then my father search around and call me ever more desperately.
The longer this lasted the more impossible it became for me to

a

|

19 |

a

characteristic of the rise of the German Jews from the time of
beginning emancipation (in the first half of the 19th century)
into the period of equal rights and assimilation (second half of
that century): Migration from countryside and small town into
the big city, change from small trader and peddler to businessman

and even member of the professions, in short: embourgeoisement. |

Both father and mother came from Cologne. My father's father :
was born in a small place in Southern Germany, where his |
forebears were land-Jews or cattle-dealers. His mother having |
died early, his remarried father sent him away to be trained in
business in Cologne. With long, tedious endeavor he managed to
puild up his own textile business which came to florish in the |
decades of economic development that followed upon the foundation 5
of the German Reich. His wife's (mother of my father) memoirs, as
such a rather dry, matter-of-fact listing of family events ("this g
man or that one married this or that woman at this or that 4
time:"), yet reflects touchingly how difficult it was to rise to
(relative) wealth: Once, when my grandfather, after one of her §
numerous confinements, promised her to fulfill a wish, her only
wish was that henceforth he might not travel to Calais, France
(from where he imported his laces) each week but remain with his
family also during week-days.

My father was one of two Herz- brothers who went to and,
graduated from university. This meant that, in contrast to his
four "business brothers", he rose in social status, because in|
Germany academic professions were traditionally considered a top
elite. For a Jew it was the acme of assimilation, in particular |
when he, having studied law, aid not (as most Jewish law students |
did) become a practicing lawyer, but a judge, thus representing, |
as a civil servant, the "state" before which Germans used toy
stand in awe. My father, however, was no "Yaccomodator"; strong-|

willed as he was in many mespectei he Bre terred to remain aj

20

accomodate himself to sharing a bench with other judges.

As a judge he was a model of fair-dealing. This assessment
was confirmed when, toward the end of a career that coincided
with the end of the Weimar period, lawyers defending communists
as well as those defending Nazis expressed their appreciation of
his impartiality in the numerous cases that came before him at
the time of latent civil war that preceded the end of the Weimar
republic. In the family, he likewise functioned as the "provider
of justice";in any conflict one could rely on his absolute
fairness; among his children, no one was either preferred or
disadvantaged. There was much of a "Prussian" in him, in the good
as well as the less good sense. I mentioned already his
economical bend; since civil servants were not highly paid and he
did not want to become dependent on the more well-to-do members
of his family, he was inclined to save. There was an urge toward
security not easy to satisfy during and after the war; also an
urge to be prepared for any forseeable untoward events.
Everything had to be planned, smaller things, such as travels, as
well as more important ones, like the future of his children.
Once he confessed that he had hoped to make it possible for me,
whom he believed to be more of a genius than was warranted, to
lead a life as a private scholar, free from financial worries; a
blessing that this plan failed!

I inherited some of these characteristics; also some of his
pessimism, micro as well as macro, which, unfortunately, often
proved more realistic than the optimism of the others. My uncle
Gustav Aschaffenburg, psychiatrist and an incorrigible optimist,
once happened to be at our house when news came that the United
States had broken off diplomatic relations with Germany; my
father: "This is the end" (i.e., of any hope for the victory of
Germany in the war); Gustav perservered in his hope, my father
proved right.

A certain tendency toward philistinism was balanced by
genuine interests as well as the artistic and general-cultural

21

atmosphere that was created by my mother. My mother was born as
the youngest of six children. If the Herzes provided the
efficient, down-to-earth element, from the Aschaffenburgs, my
mother's side, came the more "idealistic" bend of striving for
"higher things", of being beholden to the muses, and especially
to music. My mother's father came from a town in the Palatinate,
a family of rabbis and religious teachers. There were a large
number of siblings, of whom several emigrated to America. After
our own emigration we could locate some of their descendants
under names life Shaffenburg or Shaftsbury, one as far away as
Mexico. In Cologne, my grandfather had a business that supported
him and his family in moderate fashion, not comparable to the
wealthier Herzes. His wife, grandmother Julie, grew up at the
city of Muenster, in Westphalia, where her family had a
department store. A sense of humor came from that branch of the
family. Of that family, Feibes, there exists a family tree going
far back into past centuries, on which are represented almost all
Jewish families of the area Lower Rhine-Westphalia. Suprising,
there, the large number of members of the free professions,

especially of doctors and lawyers; or, perhaps, not so]

surprising, since these professions were almost the only ones to
which Jews had free access. This grandmother was very close to me

in my youth; she was all kindness, sympathy, empathy. Sitting |

next to her one did not need words to be sure of mutual

understanding; she would press my hand and her eyes would say: |
"we two, we understand each other". She was full of an urge to.
know. Her memoirs, beginning with her description of how, as a)

child, she experienced the revolutionary year of 1848, are of

more general interest because they reflect the rise of German:
Jewry to the rank of the educated and cultured, and also the,
humanism of the liberal bourgeosie. Her age was still that of%
striving toward knowing everything, a vision in which all things]
hang together, including ancestors and descendants in the family]

tree.

22

; In the aftermath of the first world war, when her income had
dwindled, she restricted her own life to the minimum in order to
be able to make presents to children and grandchildren. "If I
can't give anymore, she said, I don't want to live". But she was
by nature an optimist. That optimistic approach to things she
handed, on to my mother, whose optimism balanced my father's
pessimism and made it more bearable. Only toward the end my
mother's cheerful attitude toward life was Sidendérad and
eventually destroyed by the terror of events in the Nazi period
and after.

I have characterized her already through the description of
ny grandmother. As the last born after three brothers and two
sisters she was somewhat spoiled, something balanced by the
frugality of my father without creating major conflicts. Despite
an age difference of fourteen years, theirs was a happy marriage
(so important for their children's development); the suspicion of
some friends that she had married the much older Herz for
material reasons is proved wrong by their engagement
correspondence: those letters, sounding over-romantic today, yet
are evidence of genuine sentiments of mutual love. Something
almost uncanny: her psychological empathy, her feeling for other
Peoples feelings and problems; this applied even to people she
might have just met. Time and again she became their confidante
to whom they would reveal their problems and their secrets and
whose advice they accepted. Thus it is hardly surprising that she
became also her children's confidante and counsellor (for me into
the late years before her death). Also, her empathy talent
yielded a life-long interest in graphology. But her deepest
feeling was that for music ~ a feeling transmitted to all her
children.

We were (still are) four siblings. Together with the
Parental, my two younger brothers and my sister belonged to the
données immédiates of my early life, the givens of the emerging
world which one took for granted. How much poorer a world arises

23

for those who lack such early companions - that became clear to
me through the fate of my only child. The three brothers Herz
were born on the same 23rd of September with a three-years'
interval each. This statistically unlikely fact subsequently led
to a (probably apocryphal) story according to which, in order to
prevent further similar "accidents", after the birth of my
youngest brother, my father was locked up over night on each
evening preceding Christmas eve. Actually, there were no further
September-births, but there appeared, "irregularly", twelve years
after me, in December, a girl; here, too, a little (this time
true) story according to which my sister owed her coming into
existence to the above-mentioned "probity" of my father who, as
Prussian judge, held it impossible to become guilty of committing
the (then still) crime of abortion. To this probity we thus owed
something immensely precious - a little sister who was adored and
spoiled by all of us. Because of our difference in age - I, asa
student was often absent from home when she grew up - my relation
to her, perhaps, partook a bit of the uncle-like pedagogical.
There was something similar in my relationship to my brothers. I
remember how at night, in the childrens' room, when we had been
kissed goodnight and rewarded with a candy by mother and were |
supposed to fall asleep, I emitted hour-long "history" or |
histories, which, however, made the brothers fall asleep earlier
than I liked. ;
Naturally I was closest to the brother closest to me in age, |
Gerhard, although temperamentally we belong to opposite types - |
he extrovert, I (as also the youngest brother, Werner) introvert. ]
This shows that next to environmental influences, there must be
something genetic even in the non-physiological area since all of4
us shared the same environment while, genetically, my father was4
the introvert, my mother the extrovert one. i
In contrast to me, Gerhard, from early on, related to many q
boys of his age; he brought friends into the house who enriched;
the life of the entire family. I mention one, Otto Matzerath, aq

24

musical genius who played music with Gerhard and Werner and whom
my mother led to his subsequent career as a musician - a career
that, unfortunately, was stopped short through his all-to-early
death. Although not the oldest, Gerhard was the leading one among
the three of us. Leading in unending pranks; thus, for instance,
when a female friend of the parents was supposed to become
engaged to a gentleman invited to meet her in our garden; the
three of us had been strictly ordered to stay inside and not to
make an appearance in any sort or fashion. When those two, 4 la
Faust and Gretchen, were promenading in the garden, upon
Gerhard's signal we three, through a window, broke out into a
loud shout of "Poussier stengel" (meaning "love birds" or
something similar), which stimied the intended engagement. At
another time he had for some reason been condemned to stay in the
bathroom that went toward the garden, while the rest of the
family and some guests enjoyed having coffee in the garden.
Suddenly, the astonished coffee-drinkers witnessed the spectacle
of a toilet-roll slowly, slowly unwinding down the facade of the
house; no human face was visible. The witnesses' laughter showed
that the penalized one had succeeded in transforming criminal
sanction into applause for humor and cunning.

I cannot remember any conflicts with the siblings. Although
the eldest, I don't think I ever tried to exploit this in an
authoritarian fashion. We did not envy each other and helped each
other with homework and such. The only thing I envied Gerhard a
bit was his apptitude in physical exercises. But the inferiority
feeling arising from this directed itself against myself rather
than against Gerhard. Gerhard and I even seemed to incline toward
the same profession, the study of music. At that time, music
appeared to all of us as a kind of religion. Once, when the
Disseldorf rabbi, Dr. Eschelbacher, came to visit my mother,
asking her to see to it that her children participated in
religious instruction, my mother's reply was: "That decision I
must entirely leave to my children; music is my religion."

25

Eventually, it was Gerhard who became a musicologist; he was the
most musical among us and has become known as a Bach specialist
all over the world. For me, music was to remain the consecration
of the nonprofessional part of my life, which it has embellished
to this day. "Without music, life would be an error" (thus spake

Nietzsche). 4

"Geborgenheit" requires a home, a safe place from which the
lucky one sees and experiences a harmonious world into which he
becomes integrated. Whoever is born into a homeless world,
carried from place to place, perhaps from slum to slum, can only
perceive a chaotic world. True enough, to the lucky one the
"harmonious" world may prove to be a deception, and thus he may
encounter all the more difficult terror situations. When, in the
Thirties, my world collapsed, the separation from the "nest"
became all the harder. I shall never forget the day, in the Fall
of 1937, when I took leave from the house in the Goethestrasse,
convinced that I would never see it again - nor my parents who
remained; they did so in the hope, shared by many of the older.
Jews, that Hitler would allow at least that generation to die in|
peace. j

I mentioned Rochusstrasse, my place of birth. But our real;
home was to be the house at Goethestrasse, where we moved when I]
was five or six. It was a row house but of typically "gentry" |
type. Marble entrance and marble staircase. The second floor with]
the "good rooms". One of them the "salon", with the grand piano. q
Later a second, lent one, was added. In the Kristall-night bothq
were thrown out of the window (cruel joke of the time: What has
three legs, is black, ana flies through the air? Anwser: ry
Jewish grand). On its wall a painting by the Rhenish painter,
Ophei, which I loved: shimmering with sunlight, impressionistic.
Typical of the pre-Nazi, cultured Jewish elite were the events

26

organized there. I remember the reading of a short story by
Dostoyevsky by an actress from the Disseldorf theater we
befriended; the "premiere" of Lieder composed by an aunt who, as
a composer, called herself Albert Maria Herz (Albert the name of
my father's academic brother, a chemist) - her songs were in the
style of Schénberg's Pierrot lunaire, without, however, making
her immortal; occasionally, "table-moving" in the occult fashion,
half seriously, half jokingly - cult of the occult was the
fashion in the Twenties. In more philistine fashion, there were
the parties to which my father's colleagues, plus spouses, had
periodically to be invited; they were of the most formal type,
with servants'all dressed up formally - afterwards my father used
to count the tips the various guests had left for them, and
inveighed against the stingy ones.

I shall have to say a bit more below about the "patronage"
custom of many Jewish families. With us, there was Georg Szell,
for instance, who was our protégé when, very young, he was opera
conductor at Diisseldorf; he impressed us children with incredible
tricks and feats on the piano; already then, he was as impudent
as in his later life. Once, when he had taken the whole chocolate
cover from a cake, and my mother reproved him, he simply said, in
his Austrian fashion: "Milady (Gnadigste), don't you know that
this is the best part of it?" Occasionally Edwin Fischer, the
pianist, appeared; I shall never forget the apparition of his
beautiful wife, Eleonara (soon to be divorced from him).

Next to the salon the living room, where, after dinner, the
family assembled. What did one do, without TV? One read, singly
or one to the others, played "mah-jongg", then fashionable, with
its artistically beautiful pieces. One made music: Gerhard

- played the violin, accompanied by my mother; I played pieces for

four hands with her, thus becoming acquainted with an entire
literature of symphonies adapted for piano; a bit later there was
the trio Gerhard (violin), Werner (cello), and the already
mentioned young friend and protégé, Otto Matzerath, as pianist.

27 :
i
What high feelings of "Geborgenheit"; what experience compared |
with today's standards of passivity, what achievements! a

Next to the dining room, towards the backyard, was the,
‘master's room", my father's studio, where, after returning from |
court sessions, he would write his judgments (always in long-hand |
- he never learned to type). This done, he would stretch out on |
the couch, hands folded on his belly, snoring. The children, «
then, were strictly forbidden to make any noise. In that room was]
a big baroque bookcase (still a cherished possesion of mine), 4
with all the classics - like the music case in the salon, a kind#
of religious shrine; there, too, a smaller bookcase, containing }
some twenty volumes of "Oncken's World History", opening up th
history of the world for me; to be sure, it ended with the]
foundation of the German Reich in 1870. What I read there I wouldg
recount to Gerhard at night when in bed. Those volumes were sold
in financially bad times (presumably, during the "Greats
Inflation" of the early Twenties), but not before I had drawn ong
the contents for a drama of the Middle Ages (Count Eberhard, Lord
of the castle, Edith, his wife), which fortunately remained a
fragment.

From a backside porch - my favorite place for reading ~ a
stair led into the garden. It was narrow and long and, in typical|
German fashion, separated from the neighbors' backyards by hig}
walls. At its farther end there were arrangements for physical}
exercises with swing, bar, etc. We took lessons from an ex~J
sergeant whose ordering us around still terrorizes me when Jj
think of it. There was a gardener whose leftist pronouncements
excited us and were mysterious. Above the "good rooms" were two
more floors, with bedrooms, bathroom, rooms for the "servants" |
In good times, prior to the Great Depression, there was always 4
female cook and a maid. Once, prior to my puberty, one took nd
into her bed; she was dismissed. On top of it all was the attich
with views upon roofs, streets, gardens. As children we loved it
as we loved to descend noisily on the railings of the stairs4

28

Only once were we permitted to do that uninhibitedly, namely when
French troops had moved into the city (in 1922, I believe) anda
committee went through all houses to find lodgings for their
officers; the devilish noise we made successfully averted the
danger of billetting from our house. Eventually, when times
became harder, the uppermost floor was rented. For a while Oliver
Freud, engineer and son of the great Freud, lived there; he was
so obviously dominated by his wife, and so shy, that we referred
to him as the "repressed inferiority complex". At another time,
Ludwig Strauss, a writer and poet, lived there with his wife, who’
was the daughter of the (already then) famous Jewish philosopher
Martin Buber; I still see him, with his big white beard,
ascending the stairs to visit his daughter. I was proud when the
poet, then working on a book on Hélderlin, allowed me to assist
him, with the help of an atlas, in finding the routes that poet
had travelled; geography was one of my first loves.

I mention all of this, not for "name-dropping" but in order
to show how much of cultural interest existed and happened for me
at that time. When I moved away from home as a student, one room
on the top floor was reserved for me, there to sleep, work, store
my books. Also, it was the place of my first completed love
affair (I had to, and did, conduct it without arousing my
parents' suspicion). From there I also could view an opposite
abode where the daughter of my parents' closest friends had a
room: Luise Rainer, who later became a famous movie actress
("The Good Earth"), then a student at the Disseldorf playhouse;
my heart ached with yearning.

Prior to my parents' emigration, the house was sold for a
trifle to an "Aryan" buyer. After the war, at subsequent visits
to Disseldorf, I have seen it from the outside; I could not get
myself to re-viewing it from inside.

29

City on the Rhine

"Diisseldorf" - her greatest son, Heinrich Heine, said when
living in Paris - "is a beautiful city", and, when being far away
from her, so he declared, a strange and melancholy longing
befalls you. Today, rebuilt from the ruins of World War IT in the
style of the modern cities with their highrises and endless rows

of look-alike buildings, permitting cars and traffic to kill her
charm, the city is no longer what it was to those who grew up

there in the century's early decades. At that time, a hundred
years after Heine spent his youth there, the city, industrialized
as it had become, with its factories and the usual, ugly

apartment buildings for the workers, yet still formed an§
"organic" whole, like a pearl attached to the river Rhine, where

streets, churches, parks all fitted together. Above all, it

provided the young ones living there with something essential for §

becoming aware of time and epoch: the cultural environment
characteristic of the period in which we grew up. Those decades

around the century's beginning, I believe, were times of the
decisive breakthrough, away from traditionalism toward what we)
call "modernity". Dusseldorf was just the kind of city where that |
atmosphere could be soaked up most easily. In a cosmopolitan)
metropolis like Berlin this atmosphere surely was present, too,:
put one's identification with a place called home would have been
more difficult; in the countryside or a small town it would have
been hard to find; and in most other industrial cities off
Disseldorf's size the cultural tradition in which it excelled:
would have been absent. There was the old part of the city,
replete with old churches and houses; there was the tradition of;
Dusseldorf art, a specific "school" of 19th century painting, andg

that of the Lower-Rhine music festivals, going back to Feli
Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, both of whom had lived and
worked there; and even to Goethe, who twice had stayed at his
friend's, the philosopher Jacobi's, place at the then rural

30

outskirts of the town; that building, now in the center of the
city, has survived. Cologne, only half an hour's train-ride away,
the city where the parents had been born and which became a
second home-town to us youngsters, to be sure, had an even more
ancient tradition, perhaps a more valuable one, but Disseldorf
had something more elegant, like being on wings; its main
thoroughfare, the Kénigsallee, lovingly called "the K6é", with its
elegant stores and its chestnut trees lining a rectangular
stretch of water, reminded one of Paris rather than Cologne. My
father, who had had the choice of several places for his position
as a judge, knew well why he chose Dusseldorf.

Life in the city of the nineteen-tens and twenties was part
philistine, part sophisticated, and we young ones reacted to it
with that mixture of cynicism and sentiment which was the
hallmark of those living in the Weimar period. There was an
ironic distance but also a pleasant acceptance in relation to
customs and traditions such as the annual St. Martin's parade,
where one joined in with self-fashioned lampions, singing the old
Martin's songs. One had a feeling of belonging. One made the
acquaintance with the classics in the Playhouse, then one of
Germany's best theaters, or, from "olympus", the opera's
uppermost gallery, of Wagner and all the others; that was still
"tradition", but I remember well the breaking in of modernity,
with expressionist drama (I still see Franz Werfel, with his
thick black hair, accepting the applause for his play "Juarez and
Maximilian") and ultramodern opera (such as Alban Berg's
"“Wozzeck"); such pieces often had their first performance, or
performances, shortly after the premiere, at Disseldorf.

The same clash of bliss and terror, of the classical and the
modern, at the Tonhalle, the concert house. I went there not only
to concerts but, prior to voice-breaking, as member of the boys
choir which sang in the annual St. Matthews Passion, but also in
pieces like Mahler's Third Symphony, itself a mixture of longing
for the harmonious and "modern" despair. Bach's Passion meant,

31

besides the musical, a first view of certain basic givens in this
world: a feeling for the tragic element in life and its ending
in death, for loyalty, and betrayal, and denial, for the problen
of justice and sacrifice to an ideal; half-consciously, an
insight, too, into the text's political aspects ~ after all, the
trial of Jesus was a political trial, with a "criminal of
conscience", and with Roman and Jewish "reason of state" at |
stake. Thus, a world became accessible in which the secular and
the religious elements merged, and in regard to the latter,
Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish ones. Again, one was accepted
into the community of the performing and those in the audience,
again, a feeling of "Geborgenheit". The strength of this feeling: |
showed the degree of assimilation of Jews to Western, largely
Christian culture. That which separated seemed far away, anti-:
semitism a vanishing superstition. ]
Another "nest" was the more intimate Ibachsaal, a place for
chamber music as well as lectures. The latter revealed to me many
of the time's political, social, cultural problems and questions. |
There, Thomas Mann would read from his works, Heinrich Mann would |
discuss Weimar and Western democracy, Ludwig Klages talked about.
Nietzsche as psychologist . .. . There was the public library |
where I would spend many hours. The press was rather provincial,
some party papers but chiefly the nominally nonpartisan but in‘
reality nationalistic-reactionary Disseldorfer Nachrichten
(Disseldorf Times); our interest was mostly in music and theater |
reviews and critique, and there was ample space for scandals and |
cliques, rumormongering and sensations. :
The environment of the city -then still largely unspoiled - ||
lent itself to walks and excursions, to the nearby woods, to the
valley where Neanderthal man had been found, to old medieval,
fortified towns; hiking, or on motorbike (of a friend, myself on}
the backseat); never by car (we did not own one, very few of our
friends did). Only in the last years of Weimar, the years of |
economic depression and latent civil war, the city's face was |
y

32

distorted into grimace - the constant provocation through flags,
red ones in the workers’ quarters, the monarchical black-white-
red ones, and, increasingly, the Nazi swastika, of the bourgeois
and more well-to-do; the official republican black-red-gold was
hardly seen any more, and if so, mostly from houses owned by Jews
who, for the most part, maintained their allegiance to the
liberal democratic ideal. That was the time when attending an
autopsy, as an assistant to the prosecutor, for the first time in
my life I saw a human corpse, the body of a worker killed by Nazi
storm troopers. At the dark of night one could hear many gun
shots. The feeling of Geborgenheit in an urban environment was
utterly lost. .

Larger Family, Friends of the Parents, Vacations and Early Travel

The world, and therewith my world views, widened with my
coming closer to people beyond my immediate family, and
especially to the widely scattered relatives, many of them quite
well-to-do, who vied with each other to have the children of the
"poorer" Disseldorf branch spend their vacations with them. I
shall not, however, bore the reader with details about
innumerable uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. per se. My story here
has the twofold purpose to indicate who among them exercized
appreciable influence on my developing image of the world, and to
convey an ever so spotty and brief impression of the life and the
interests of an educated and assimilated German-Jewish society.

I begin with Alzey, an old town in what was then the Land, or
state, of Hesse (today, that portion of Hesse belongs to another
Land, Rhine-Palatinate). My mother's oldest sister had married
there, and the Levis owned the town's only department store. I
frequently spent my vacations there, which not only opened up the
rural landscape to an urbanized youngster, but, through my uncle,
nature as such. He was a follower of the materialistic philosophy
of Ernst Hackel, believing that natural science could, and would,

eee

33

solve all the world's "riddles" ("Weltraétsel", the title of one
of Hackel's widely-read, popular books). This became the basis of
my first Weltanschauung. That family's life in a small town was ;
characterized by its "enlightened" approach to all matters: In &
matters of religion, where Moses Mendelssohn's and Lessing's §
enlightenment philosophy meant the most liberal attitude and 4
custom, and also in their relationships to their Christian @
fellow-citizens; toleration and assimilation went so far that my ff
uncle became an elected deputy-mayor, a rather unique achievement
in then still monarchically ruled Hesse. '

Such liberal and enlightened attitudes characterized almost
all family branches. As far as customs were concerned, all§
celebrated Christmas, not Chanukkah, and the Christmas tree}
(although without a crib) was lighted instead of the Channukah:
candles; presents were exchanged beneath the tree. For us, it was§
not a religious symbol but that of a holiday which, together with!
others (like Easter, with easter-eggs and St. Matthews Passion),
gave the annual life-cycle its consecrations. Assimilation to}
part still Christian, part secularized culture was also shown in}
the above-mentioned patronage of art and artists; in the]
Aschaffenburg branch of the family, especially music andj
musicians. This promotion of artists and concern for cultural}

assimilated Jewry, a kind of "thanksgiving" for the entrance into
a culture permitted to a group traditionally excluded fron
participating in it. For the most part, it was not grandstanding
or showing-off (although it was that in some cases of "newlyf

my relatives - Jews became artists or writers themselves. Thq
Weimar period constituted the culminating point of thig
symbiosis. The Nazis' charge of "Judaized cultural bolshevism4

a

(Gébbels' phrase) merely revealed their utter ignorance of tru

cultural values.

34

A few examples of "Mazenatentum" (the German term for this
kind of patronage) and what I learned through it: At Cologne,
where my parents came from, we spent many a vacation in the
beautiful house of relatives (my uncle's, a brother of my father,
who had married a sister of my mother); it was built in the then
novel Jugendstil (art nouveau), where one met the musicians of
the then foremost string quartet (Rosé-quartet), and also members
of the circle around the playwright Frank Wedekind, centered in
Munich, through which I became acquainted with human archetypes

like Wedekind's "Lulu" (in the shape of drama as well as
,

subsequently, opera). Next to that house there lived relatives
who had "discovered", and made their "protégé, Emmanuel
Feuermann, called "Munjo", the cellist who was to become Casal's
most worthy sucessor; he later married one of that family's
daughters; his early death deprived the world of music of one of
its greatest. We used to attend with him opera and concert
performances in Cologne and profited from his remarks and
ABS SREmentEl, His advice, subsequently, became especially
important for my brother Gerhard. Once, when Gerhard, thinking of
becoming a professional violinist, had asked for Munjo's opinion,
the latter let him play some piece and then advised him rather to
become a musicologist; Gerhard took his advice. After Hitler had
come into power, I met him in Switzerland, his (and my) first
stage of emigration, and I shall never forget how he expressed to
me what he called his "undeserved" good fortune to have escaped
the Nazi hell and to lead, together with his wife and newly born
child, the fufilled life of a musician.

There was another house in Cologne where patronage was
extended, this time to a young pianist. But for me, it became
more important for a different reason: Gustav Aschaffenburg, my

. Mother's oldest brother, the aforementioned "optimistic"

psychiatrist, became for me the role model of the objective
scientist and committed scholar. In order to obtain a position as

- university professor, he had converted to Protestantism (prior to

35

Weimar, no Jew could expect such an appointment - baptism, thus,
became what Heinrich Heine had called "the entrance ticket to,
European civilization"). This did not affect his "scientistic"
approach. In psychiatry proper he was rather conservative
rejecting "new-fangled" ideas such as Freud's. His importance as
a scholar was in his application of psychology to criminology. In|
his seminal book "Crime and Its Repression" (1902) he was the.
first to apply sociological and statistical data to that field. |
He was the founder of the German "Society for criminal psychology |
and penal law reform"; as indicated in the name, it (and he) was
in the forefront of progressivism regarding crime and criminals;
it (and he) fought already at that early point for the,
decriminalization of abortion and other "crimes", or for insanes |
being treated medically rather than being put away in prisons; |
also for making prisons institutions for rehabilitation rather]
than "retribution". As a student, I had the opportunity to write |
book-reviews for the society's Monthly (in Aesopian language even]
into the Hitler period). Typical of his objectivity was any
incident I remember from the time of my study at Cologne,
University. Having participated in a seminar of my uncle's and|
given an admittedly very good report there, I received]
nevertheless only a second-best mark in order that - so my uncle}
- nobody would suspect him of (in this instance, literal)}
"nepotism"!
There follows Ménchen-Gladbach, a textile city not far frott
Disseldorf, where two other brothers of my mother owned and ran a
clothing factory. It would be a matter for economic historians to
find out how come, and why, the important textile industry of the,
Lower Rhine region was chiefly in Jewish hands. Gladbach, for the
Disseldorf Herz boys spending vacations there, was chiefly
enjoyed for the opportunity to play with, commit pranks with, ant
generally disturbing the peace of the place in the company off
cousins (of both sexes) of the same age. But both houses were
also places where "culture" (in the form of listening to, andy

36

making, music, or of Shakespeare being read to us by a literary-
minded aunt - of course in German, in the Schlegel-Tieck
translation deemed by many Germans to be "better than the
original"!), could be soaked up. "Mazenatentum" there, too: In
the house in the aptly so-called Mozartstrasse it was the young
Eugen Jochum (later of conductor fame) who was the protégé. And
in the other house one might find Edwin Fischer, who became the
teacher of my cousin Katia, whom, as a pianist, he later accepted
into his chamber orchestra. Others also went in and out. I
remember once having met there the philosopher Graf Keyserling,
who would call out "Who will take a walk with me?" and, at a time
of the worst food shortage, would order, and get, the two extant
eggs for his breakfast. My uncle Otto, friend of many musicians,
once met the composer Hindemith, who introduced himself as
"Hindemith, hinten mit (i.e., at the rear-end with) a tee-aitch",
whereupon my uncle countered with "Aschaffenburg, with the Asch
in front" (Asch = asshole).

Among my parents' friends was a family Fleck, he a colleague
of my father. But what interested us youngsters most was the
Fleck's patronage of a young, still entirely unknown sculptor,
name of Fritz Wotruba, who had emerged from the Viennese
proletariat to fill the Fleck's basement with his elongated
sculptures; he was politically interested and excited us with
revolutionary ideas and exclamations. Later, very much against
the wishes of the old Flecks, he absconded with their youngest
daughter, Marianne, to his native Vienna, to rise to world fame.
Other friends to be mentioned: Our trusted family doctor, Max
Bergenthal (to whom I confided my first sexual encounter and an
ensuing - groundless - fear of having contracted syphillis); his
wife was half-Jewish. Other friends, the Altschuls, were of
Jewish descent but baptized. Among friends there were those
living in mixed (Jewish-Christian) marriages, or philosemitic
non-Jews, or baptized ones; it was a kind of marginal zone in-
between unassimilated (or less-assimilated or more orthodox) Jews

37

and the gentile main group. Mixed marriages became more and more |
frequent at that time, and many pelieved that, within a couple of '
generations, German Jewry (provided there was no larger influx of
Jews from Eastern Europe) would have died out as a group with
separate identity. Hitler, of course, put an end to this ongoing
process. But I have sometimes wondered whether a similar process
has not set in in the United States; at least in the group that
came from Central Europe. Among the members of my family, besides
myself only my sister married a Jew (likewise from Germany); my
two brothers (as well as my wife's brother) married "gentile"
Americans, and all my nephews did, too, with their offspring
"lost" to Judaism; my own son is married to a gentile Swiss girl.
Whether this trend is to be welcomed is, of course, another §
matter. It depends on one's opinion of the value of Judaism and §
of Jews maintaining their character as a separate group.

Another way of broadening my image of the world was@
geographical; geography had emerged as one of my pet subjects ing
those early years, and to come to know "in reality" what had§
become familiar through the atlas was therefore a special kind of J
bliss. In those early years, switzerland or Tyrol, preferred
landscapes of later trips, were still out of reach, if only
pecause, in the difficult war and postwar years, the parents)
could not afford them. Thus it usually was the Rhenish and]
Westphalian hills that attracted us whenever vacations were
shared, not with urban relatives but with parents and siblings.
During the war, the chief objective was to find an inn or hotell
where one would get enough to eat to satisfy one's hunger. It was
the time when I learned to be penurious with everything, whethe?
a piece of "war soap" or a slice of wurst on the sandwich. This
urge to save and be careful with everything of use has remained
with me ever since - perhaps something odd in our present
"throwaway society". I remember one vacation day when my father!
Gerhard, and I wandered along a rural path lined with applq
trees, and our judicious, "law and order" - fa

22S PEE

38

to "touch" a few apples so they dropped from the trees and

could eat them. At later times, we would visit the home of ny
mother's earliest and best friend, Grete Berkenkamp, built by
her, her mother, and her sister in the hills of a Rhenish
mountain range called Eifel. Grete was a remarkable lady. In he:
youth she had been the girl-friend of Ludwig Kiages he
philosopher, whose psychological and graphological interests aie

shared and handed on to my mother. I became a kind of young

Bratedge of hers. For a short while, later, she fell for Hitler's
charisma but recovered quickly, and we remained friends though
separated through an ocean. On my visits to Germany, I used H
look her up in her charmed little Eifel home, where che lived .
utterly solitary but satisfying life, filled with reading,
fashioning little sculptures, and memories. She lived into =f
1970's, and I buried her there. °
; How vacation trips and formation of early political attitudes
nian coincide can be demonstrated by an excursion I undertook
with my father and Gerhard to the huge monument built senaunees
in Westphalia to the legendary Germanic hero, Arminius (who, a
ehisttads of the Teutonic tribe of the Cherusks, had heute the
ROnSHE in the year 9 A.D.); built at the height of the Bismarkian
Empire and meant to symbolize its power and glory, it contained
besides the huge statue of "Hermann, the Cherusk", four big
pcnes I used to carefully keep diaries of those early trips te
cremate tna oem gave up later), and I quote from one of
nineeces e first niche, sculptures illustrated Germany's
ion by Arminius, the second showed the wars of liberation
cwenaene wit and the third the war of 1870/71. A sad feeling
She aime eran us, for now Germany has forgotten its past. But
bins. ronete Sons when God will send us a second Arminius; then,
degeceenc ee will be filled. as a sign of Germany's
not ts viv e "second Ammindust was to come, but in a shape
ota ai ai ing. at the time of that visit, I was about 12 years
' my patriotic feelings were soon to be corrected through

39

the influence of a friend I shall speak of later. They were, |
however, paradigmatic of the general nationalistic fervor caused}
by Germany's defeat in the First World War. For me, it was th
beginning of my "Germanic" period, where I became deeply#
interested in German pre-history. In a subsequent chapter, y
shall have to deal with what this meant for an emergent conflict
caused by my being German and Jewish.
Geographically, the world widened further, when we undertook
vacations to the Black Forest, in Southern Germany. An almost
mystical - and likewise very "Germanic" = love of forests
developed at that time; somehow, it has accompanied me ever since
and has contributed to may present ecological concerns, now tha
the forests of the world seem condemned to die. Occasionally]
"terror" punctured that forest romanticism; thus when, close tq
our vacation place in the Black Forest, Matthias Erzberger, §
republican leader and Reich minister, was assassinated; it wag
one in a series of political assassinations by ultra-rightists}
whose victim, shortly thereafter, was Walther Rathenau, foreigi
minister and a Jew. The racist murder group had sung: "Schlag
tot den Walter Rathenau, die gottverfluchte Judensau" ("Beat deaj
that Walter Rathenau, the dirty, God-damned Jewish sow"). Tha
perpetrators were permitted to escape to Hungary — at that timef
under "Admiral" Horthy, the refuge of German radical rightistg
(groups that, soon thereafter, merged into the Nazi Party)g
Forest and political murder - bliss and terror. q

40

Chapter 2. Early Sorrows

For Beauty is Nothing but Terror's Beginning
Rilke

41

What kind of world-view emerges depends, to a large extent, «
upon one's sentiments vis-a-vis the world. I just said "vis-a- |
vis" the world, perhaps this was a Freudian lapsus. That blissful jj
"Geborgenheit" to which I testified in the preceding chapter |
should rather have created a sentiment of being "in the world".
But from earliest childhood on I have had a mixed feeling of;
being "within" and yet "yis-a-vis", of being present and yet
isolated, of being close to others and yet lonely - a feeling of |
being torn hither and yon, a confusion that belongs to thes

a

opposite of bliss, to the terror aspect of life.

Terror in this context means fear or sorrow rather than
frightfulness. It began with the most down-to-earth, my body. As§
far back as my memory reaches, I felt physically inferior tog
other children, whether at physical exercizes, wrestling, racing,

ke

or later, at every sort of sport. I was awkward, clumsy. Henceg .

the feeling of being different in the peer group and beingg
considered an outsider. As in the garden, so at school; at soccer
play, for instance, I was always placed where I could do the
least harm. I tried hard, but was never able to reach Gerhard's
achievements. In later years I did manage a mediocre tennis, and
skiing even conveyed pleasure, but in one's young years the
better is the enemy of the mediocre; at least, this was my]
impression. Intellectually precocious, I tried to balance
physical ineptitude with excelling in matters intellectual. Yet
it was not enough to really balance that inferiority and moreovel}
sometimes meant to be considered a "pusher". ]

Relations to other people were stamped by such feelings off
inferiority. True, there were no aifficulties in my relation#
with those close to me - parents, siblings, close relatives. y
knew them, could trust then, confide in them; it was different
"vis-a-vis" those who did not belong to the "nest". There I waq
shy, timid, embarrassed, unable to show my feelings. Playing witl
my peers: "Go out and play with the others". Nothing was morg
difficult, and since "the others" became aware of it, they quit”

42

naturally reacted to me as to one a bit strange. Later it became
torment in my relation to the other sex. In the times of my
youth, dancing lessons were the occasion to bring boys and girls
together, there being no coeducation at school. Attending those
lessons, I was plagued by a suspicion that other boys were, quite
naturally, preferred to me, and thus I never dared to approach a
particular girl and court her; I never knew what to talk with
them. Moreover, I was beset with "fear of blushing": The fear
that I might blush at a certain occasion would actually produce
the blushing, which, in turn, had an intimidating effect on me.
This shyness, although somewhat lessening later, has influenced
my relationships to others throughout my life, frequently
damaging them, whether it was in regard to school or university
teachers or, subsequently, to colleagues , and, time and again,
to girls and women.

The feeling of being different and separate was increased by
my being Jewish. How I became conscious of that-and how it
influenced my world-view I shall relate in connection with the
topic of Zionism. Suffice it here to say that the Jew in the
digepora is, so-to-speak, an outsider by birth. But this does not
imply that, qua individual, he must feel an outsider. Being
outsider as a Jew concerns the group as such, and not necessarily
each of its members. On the contrary, as a group member one may
feel especially close to other members, sheltered within the
group, exactly as often happens with other ethnic or religious

minority groups. However, as for me, this did not apply. Being ©

Jewish in my case was simply added to the other factors that
caused my feeling of separateness. I was "Jew and clumsy", or a
"typically Jewish intellectual". My feeling of being different
was. subsequently strengthened by corresponding anti-semitic
stereotypes, and this not so much through personal contacts as
through readings and what such reading seemed to reveal of the
world's view of Jews. As for contacts, I refer to what I said
about friends of the family, who were either Jews or philosemitic

43

gentiles; some of them were Catholic colleagues of my father, and
as such not (or not yet) antisemites; at school, too, one

experienced relatively little antisemitism, whether on the part &
of teachers or on that of fellow-students. The assimilation }
process was far advanced, and as an "educated" Jew one was by and
large accepted into gentile society and culture. This went so far @
that, as German Jew, one was to some extent an “antisemite" vis-

aA-vis those Jews who had immigrated from Eastern Europe §
(Qstjuden) and still formed a kind of ghetto in larger cities, |

preserving their customs and a kind of Jewish-German (not’
Yiddish) as their language. One used to make fun of them, look
down upon them - not a noble attitude, indeed. We were non-
observant Jews, not going to synagogue services even on the high
holidays (celebrating Christmas instead, as mentioned). Like most!
German Jews, we were not Zionists (only a small group was that,
at that time). Like most, my father belonged to an association of]
"German citizens of the Jewish faith"; one felt German and, at,
the same time, belonging to Jewry as a kind of "community off
historic fate" (if not for religious reasons). The association
named above was chiefly concerned with maintaining and asserting
the equal rights of Jews achieved through emancipation, and wit!

defending them against antisemitism and discrimination. Beyond
this one felt to be as German as any other citizen; one was proud
of that and would develop a patriotism as strong as that of any
non-Jewish fellow citizen.

My personal image of a Jew, and my image of myself as a Jew

was largely formed by those representations of Jews found i}
allegedly outstanding German novels, such as Gustav Freytag'{
"Soll und Haben" or Wilhelm Raabe's "Hungerpastor". These authorg
were 19th century novelists of the second rank, not comparable tq
European giants of bourgeois realism, such as Balzac or Dickeng
or, in Germany, Fontane or, later, Thomas Mann, but their novel
revealed the spirit and attitudes of a rising German middle;
class. And their presentation of Jews aid reveal widespreag

44

attitudes about character and status of Jews rising within that
no longer feudal-aristocratic but down-to-earth bourgeois
Germany. There I met with the contrast between Jewish and
Christian-Germanic types (or stereotypes): in Freytag's book the
dealing and wheeling, usurious Veitel Itzig, in Raabe's the
coldly calculating, egoistic, intellectual Moses Freudenstein
contrasting with the gentile heros, solid but feeling ana
compassionate, idealistically striving for higher values. I felt
two souls within my breast; I identified with the idealistic pure
souls, yet I could not deny feeling that I was somewhat of an
intellectual, like Moses Freudenstein; I yearned to be like the
"Germanic" types, but could not deny having inherited "inferior"
Jewish traits. At times I had a downright bad conscience to be
Jewish. This torn, confused feeling became even stronger when I
found in him who was to become my best friend a good many of the
traits I encountered in Raabe's Moses Freudenstein: the
stereotypical Jewish and leftist intellectual, with whom I
fought, both emotionally and intellectually, for my identity
often despairing, often desperate. And vis-a-vis the few gentile
friends I had, there was a triple inferiority sentiment: as "the
clumsy one", the bookworm, and the Jew.

Despite all of this I had from the beginning a great need of
communication which - unless I could fulfill it directly, as with
parents, siblings, later close friends - I amply satisfied
through letter-writing. Whenever, as student for instance, I was
BYBY from home, I would depose all I experienced in fielecwins or
similar communications. I always felt a need to let others
participate in my life, as I also wanted, the other way around,

wt
© participate in theirs. Somehow an experience (whom or what I

saw on a tri
ip, or a concert, or a theater performance) would not

be complete without at
least one other human being know
vit or, even better, : ons shout

sharing it with me. Thus man became homo

»communican
a sal a te me. Much later I broadened this felt need into a
x yo awareness", a theory regarding the coexistence of

45

people and nations, dealing with the role "world-views" play in
foreign policies and international relations: Without awareness
no world-view, without communication and mutual recognition no
conflict resolution - now, in the nuclear age, no chance of human
survival.

Thus, out of a feeling of being an outsider there grew a
yearning for being "perceived" by others. I am still of the
opinion that, as mental being, one "lives" to the extent one is
perceived by other mental beings. One's life is "Lived" to thes
extent one is in communion with others. If nobody knows of me, am
I still alive, except in the mere physical sense? Fear of@
isolation and the question: what will become of you, who has}
such difficulties to communicate with others, came to fore in a
moog" a@rean I had for the first time, I believe, in my twenties,
and which repeated itself in later periods. I find myself in ag
city I don't know, walking all by myself in a street that seems}
to go on endlessly, lined with apartment houses of the
"objective", decorationless style of the Twenties; the street is
completely empty, and I have a terrible fear of being lost;
abandoned, not knowing anybody, condemned forever to walk around
in the thicket of cities. |

I now feel that this state of being torn between bliss and
terror was closely connected with the “spirit of the times" intd
which I was born: times of transition. Since it is the purposq
of this memoir to relate how I have seen and interpreted thq
world, my world, in the different stages of my life, I must herd
briefly describe the epoch out of which I came - "my time" in thé
sense of a period that influenced me originally, that is, in th
earliest stage of my life. Perhaps one is inclined to overratg
the impact made by this initial period. But I believe there 1g
some objective validity in considering those two or three decadeg
that preceded the catastrophe of the first world war ag
constituting something extraordinary: These’ were seminal
decades, an epoch of the great breakthrough, from a more organiC]

46

reposed, "classic" age to the age of modernity which questioned
any and all traditions, whether it was the "classical" world-view
of Newtonian physics, disrupted through the theory of relativity
and quantum mechanics, or the traditional image of man and his
"soul", destroyed by psychoanalysis, or upset, in art,
literature, music and architecture, through expressionism and
cubism, dada and nontonality.

Perhaps it is also true that those decades were not only
times of radical innovation but also of an extraordinarily rapid
and concentrated evolution; this phenomenon of "acceleration" was
to become a fundamental phenomenon in my later world
interpretation. Of course, born in 1908, I could take real notice
of the events of this epoch only in the postwar years when I°
became capable of experiencing and having impressions, but I
believe that, somehow, those developments had an impact from my
very beginnings, in the bliss as well as the terror sense. This
became clear to me when, much later (I believe, in 1980) I
visited an exhibition of German expressionists in the New York
Guggenheim museum. Many of the paintings in that exhibition were
created around the year of my birth. Some, like Christian Rohlfs'
“birch tree" (1907) reflected a seemingly still intact, "sound"
world, that of impressionism, as did Paula Moderson-Becker's
self-portrait of 1906/7, recalling the feeling of "Geborgenheit"
and my mother's adoration of the entire "Worpswede" circle of
artists. But then came, in contrast to his birch tree, Rohlfs'
own, furious "dance around the sun ball" of 1914 (end of the old
era, year of the outbreak of the war), as, already before it,
Emil Nolde's "dance arould the golden calf" (1910, demonstrating
wae nt aspect of a "sound" world); there was Kirchner's

: et, Berlin" of 1913, witnessing the new, "modern" world
which I was to experience in the big city streets of the 1920's.
poke ware were the early signals of coming catastrophies, where

beautiful" actually turns into "terror's beginning", in
paintings such as Kokoschka's "Hans Tietze und Frau" (1909 -

47

bloodstained hands), Ludwig Meitner's "Burning city" (1913) and |
"Apocalyptic landscape" (1913), George Gross' self-portrait in
bloody red color (1916), and, finally, Max Beckmann's uncanny ff
"Frauenbad" of 1919 (picture of a synagogue — anticipation of the
gas chambers?). Only much later one became conscious of artists!

capacity to predict, or, rather, pre-feel coming horror. When pa

was young, most in this breakthrough to modernity seemed great&
and positive, one was intoxicated with the novelty and the
progress, even though, in my case, there was no rejection of the}
traditional and classical, at least in art, music, literature.
Modernity meant freeedom of phantasy and experimenting. But Jj
also had an early feeling for the fear and despair that
characterized works such as Mahler's symphonies, whose}
melancholic, parodistic disharmonies, in contrast to the last]
classics of symphonic music, Brahms and Bruckner, I felt to
belong entirely to me and my age. From Mahler my experience ledi
to Stravinsky, to the Dreigroschenoper, to Wozzeck. To the
earliest experiences of this kind there belonged an exhibition off
the art of "dada" in a Diisseldorf department store, as well as
"far out" painters exhibited in the Dusseldorf gallery of "Mother
Ey" (Otto Dix and others); they impressed me the way Mahler did
in music, in contrast to their being declared "crazy nonsense" b:
the philistines. Only in regard to subsequent developments in
music - serial music, etc. - I lacked understanding and thiq
remained so to this day.
Even though in my case the impact of the great turnabout cam

to pass in the postwar years, it seems likely that events likg
the four long years of the Great War did create attitudes and
character traits that became lasting ones. I mentioned already
the urge to save and prepare for future contingencies that wag
created by conditions of shortages and rationing, a concern thay
was to last a lifetime. But apart from that, the feeling of
Geborgenheit predominated, despite all the outward dangers ang
events. Subjectively, the world still seemed ordered and uniform

48

A child, most likely, must go through a stage of conceiving the
world as something uniform before being able to perceive that
which is disunited and problematic.

This, however, does not imply that the war was completely
ignored; it imposed itself on family as well as on myself. My
father, "Bavarian" reserve officer (before the war, Jews could
become officers only in then still rather liberal Bavaria), had
tried to enlist right away when the war broke out but was
rejected as too old (he was then 46). Cousins, uncles, and other
relatives who did serve, all, fortunately, returned unharmed;
subsequently, the gratitude of the fatherland was extended to
them through gruesome death in the gas chambers. I still have a
picture of an uncle and a cousin, both wearing the field-grey
uniform of the first world war, both decorated with the "iron
cross"; both were to undergo that cruel fate under the Nazi
regime. I myself pinned little flags onto the respective maps of
my loved atlas, flags that indicated first the advance and soon
thereafter the standstill of the German and Austrian armies; I
sang "So proudly wave the flag of black-white-red" and collected
the postcards that arrived from relatives at the Western and
Eastern fronts. Later in the course of the war there were air
warnings, and we had to line up against the walls at school.
There also were victory bells, and we were sent home to celebrate
whenever another "fort" of Verdun had been conquered - there must
have been hundreds of them! Toward the end, skepticism spread
when my father's aforementioned pessimism proved warranted. The
extras announcing the armistice and the armistice conditions put
an end to all hopes of victory; in my case, they marked the
ace of political interest. There followed the news of
aidtenination one of the proclamation of the republic, of the
the shill. aes ohten, iisbknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, bogies of
where the eens ical bourgeoisie, and soon the rampant inflation
wéne’ tiundred oe I had begun to collect were printed over with

ousand", "one million", "one billion" marks. The

49 50

fi

reality of the political world had opened up.
The state of my health may well have had something to do with |
war and postwar events; that was the time when I first § Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
experienced migraine headaches that were to plague me for many | But to be young was very heaven
years - they would always arrive on weekends, with pain,
sickness, and vomiting; no medication or exercises would help. I
am sure that it was something psychosomatic. It stopped when, as |
a student, skiing and falling in love, I became more relaxed. But
similar symptoms of disturbances did materialize later in life in)
the form of asthma and insomnia. 4
At the end of this chapter on fears and sorrow I would like,
to mention a book - perhaps the first one that greatly impressed
me in connection with my feelings of being torn and unsure in my]
emerging world-views; it was a book that showed the great}
conflicts between any number of Weltanschauungen thatj
characterized postwar Germany (and, perhaps, postwar Europe). Itsy
author, Carl Christian Bry, had given it the title "Disguised4
Religions", and it dealt with the innumerable theories}
doctorines, and "movements" of those times, from the folkish¥

Chapter 3. The World Arises

Wordsworth

racists to the pacifists, from the agrarian reformers and thej
vegetarians to Marxists, anthroposophs, Freudians, Wagnerians,

occultists, anarchists, prohibitionists, sexual reformers, and sq
on and so forth. For an emerging mind, curious to know the world
it was an utterly confusing atmosphere, and it was difficult tg
find one's way through and out of the confusion. :

52 52
Wordsworth's enthusiasm might seem the opposite of the bliss of discovering Goethe's "original nature". I know th
feelings of sorrow described in the foregoing chapter. but youth I overrated not only the rational structure of wentweem -
is not easily discouraged, and if I look over the enfolding story 4g knowledge but also the quantity of knowledge possessed by Shon
of my younger years, happiness still seems to prevail over inside : who were to transmit it. I stood in awe before teachers and ston
as well as outside "terror". And this was due, above all, to | specialists. Each "professor" (the title not only of visenedey
"learning", learning about myself and about the world. : teachers but, at that time, also of highschool instructors) w Y
Learning, studying, was "bliss". From the beginning I was ; a philosopher; today, myself a professor, I have come to r is i"
convinced that, if only one tried hard enough, one could get to | how full of wind instead of wisdom most of them were and are, oe
know what makes the world tick, one would know not only much but & It all began with geography. At an early time alread —
Neverything". In all fields of knowledge, so I believed, there by heart the maps of the atlas, the different colors that marked
was a set quantity of what could be learned, and for all of them § the countries and empires, the boundaries, the rivers and
there were people - teachers, for instance - who could convey mountain ranges, the big cities; to such an extent that even
what could be learned. This way to experience the world and to | today I sometimes have trouble to see in my mind's eye present
gain a comprehensive view of it became the ultimate aim of my boundaries instead of the totally different ones of the Europe of
life. And so I began to approach this aim, step by step, by means | 1914 or the colors of the old, colonial empires. Some ne thie
of inquiring with my parents and other grownups, of solving the 4 acquired knowledge, perhaps, was superfluous; still,I relicy
tasks set at school, and, above all, through reading as soonas I that to gain an image of the world, a "world-view' requires tink
had learned how to read. I did that, not in order to prevail over ; one has a sufficiently correct view of the Han habitat owe
others - I rather felt uncomfortable whenever I got the q today still chiefly the earth, which is present in otena ea
inevitable "very good" marks at school - and also not from an 4 whenever it is a question of what happens on earth *
urge to be recognized as an "intellectual" - I rather had that q interpret it. am and how to
inferiority feeling of being "clumsy" otherwise - but with a E And therewith on to history and its dates and events. Fr
feeling of joyful expectation. It was too early to realize that § early on process, that is, how things enfold and develo, : ot
aiming at "knowing everything" was aiming too high. My 4 have been in the foreground of my interests, even in fi — hee
rationalism made me hope that, with sufficient patient endeavor, q history seemed not to be their essential aspect eae
the world would open itself to me with all its mysteries j] instance, in religious instruction. I namédnnadl tine at ie os :
resolved. I believed that for all areas of knowledge there was were not religious; but I participated for a couple of care in
something like a rule for what, in learning, comes first, ‘then religious instruction at school, where, of course Lesso ow ne
what next and then what after that. When reading novels or Given to the Jewish students separately from eHe others What
similar literature I would ask others whether I was ready for ~~interested me there was "biblical history", not what - *
this or that book or whether it was still "too advanced" for me; | Yealm of miracles or the miraculous suck, as the tial n the
at school, whether one must have covered a certain subject-matter Creation or the miraculous weouulag Se tHe. REGS ia of
to understand another; and so forth. There was a measure of] children of Israel, but the provable and recorded ea y the
pendantry involved, to be sure; but at the time it meant the 4 "real" history of the kingdoms of Juda and oaeeet nc in athes

53

ESET

disciplines, I became impatient when the teacher did not deal

with what I had already read in the textbook. I knew what was
supposed to be "gealth with" now and grew angry when the class
did not get that far during the respective school year (in modern
histoy, this usually meant stopping at Bismarck and the
foundation of the German Reich in 1871 - what came later
apparently was too controversial). I knew it, but the others
should know it too! Perhaps an attitude that predetermined me for
teacherhood later on?

True, what one learned about history at school was often’
limited to cramming of dynastical dates and data, or of battles,
wars, etc., and, apart from antiquity, by and large restricted to
the history of Germany (especially Brandenburg-Prussia); only -
during my last highschool years greater emphasis was placed on ~
social, economic, and cultural history, and of Europe, not
Germany only; the non-European world, however, including America, |
still was largely neglected. Thus we studied all of Frederick the -
Great's battles in the Seven-Years' War but were not told that °
that war, as the French and Indian War, had equal impact in the 4
world balance of power. But those "external" dates and events 3
were not without initial importance for me. More from reading
than from studying at school I became acquainted with the gods
and heroes of the Greeks, with Troy and Odysseus, with the feats
ana fates of the Athenians, Spartans, Persians, with Alexander,
the Romans, the Popes and Emperors, Napoleon. I had a book titled
"Great Men" (women did not show up in it, as far as IT remember) ,
with portraits of Luther and Hutten, knights and minnesangers.
Little important as all this may appear to "scientific"
historiography, the child needs the more personal, sensuous
element to understand, subsequently, the more general and
abstract. One could still wax enthusiastic about heroes and their
exploits, saddened by their doom, triumph in their vitory, grieve
over their suffering or death. :

My enthusiasm for the historical extended to nature. Natural

54

history was what attracted me. My father subscribed to the
journal "Kosmos" (a typical product of the Hackel world-view I
had been imbued with by my Alzey uncle). I read every issue
Geology became "earth history", and soon I was familiar with all
the different geological epochs. As for the animal kingdom
Kosmos ranvijartzed me with the history of the different soenten,
ani is way, clearly d é
ae inter eta sale ce from the apes, I became a perfect
It does not follow that this precocious systematizin
categorizing, rationalizing meant neglect of the 1 ue
intellectual aspects of life. Thirst for knowledge did mak
involve being unfeeling; but in accordance with my siyweue 3
always had (and still have) difficulties to show my feelings vis-
a-vis others. What the allegedly "cool" conductor Riccardo Muti
is supposed to have remarked applies to me: "I don't have the
easy tears, but it does not mean I do not feel". And in ti
connection I may mention experiences that, in contrast to the
intellectual realm, concern the realm of phantasy, inemlnneton,
hea My nother used to read fairy-tales to us, and I anqeyea
nies neve ee one of the daagination and creators of "moods" that
the weeta orien on emerging views of, and attitudes toward,
x aces a aan which modern psychologists deem
dew e sinker. a child's enobronel development, never caused
Mie inmglancion complexes in me; I enjoyed them as products of
ae, lakee. be as I did enjoy those by Hans Christian Andersen
landscapes, Woche of une. And my attitude toward certain
by the ee cumblonal, Bees indeed, erotic affection were marked
Warldiatewn sedan en say about the impact of school upon emerging
ptaiidien wlan ave to be divided into two sections, the first
deal with the earlier school years, while the last

-coupl
ple of them will be dealt with in the next chapter because my

developm
el leetee, was tremendously strengthened and accelerated through
ence of two extraordinary teachers, the brothers Fritz

ana otto Griters,
upon my human and
School at tha

occu!

there to sta

Germany, aS iL
stage of what,

one entered at

the political,

atmosphere in

German youngsters.

the "lower classes" of wor

to "primary school" (Volksschule) until the age of 14 or 15,
n other ways to follow the

the middle
entered "gymnasium",
ity study. I
"university" meant
aduate study? in
s no intermediate
but part

thence to become appre

pations of their parents.
Neducated" strata,

classes, especially their
them for univers

y twelve years preparing
ther connection that

n America is called gr
s, there ai
is called college,
e" is purveyed under

two or three years of |
the initial years 4
aifferent now) }
vorschule (elementary :
1 of the same
tudy. This way |
merit or capacity put]
the elite in

shall explain in ano

(still means) what <
n other European countrie:

in the United states,
nts to the Nundergraduat
auring the last
one did not even share

of what college prese
the German system

Gymnasium. At my time,

of school with the Volksschule children (this is
hat was called

) but which was part and parce

school, if you please
t the next nine years of §

Gymnasium where ©
a small elite gr
chiefly by status of pare:
administrat
the nation. Jews,
elite of the "educated"
proportion to thei
1 gymnasium as well a
| Thus very few ¢
higher education,

supporting them to
but an additiona

in the company of kids

55

apart from my Pp
intellectual life.

+ time in Germany meant
Those - the vast major
kers, peasants,

age six W
ne spen

nts) to

xr overal

if only be

age 18 (oY,

which they woul

arents the first great i

ntices or i
Those descending from

oup was chosen (not by
become, later on,
and professional life of
heir urge to enter the
(in

ive, cultural,
emancipated and with t

(Gebildete) , were oO

1 number in the German
s at the universities.

lower ¢
cause their parents cou
at university, to age

hildren from the

1 reason for thei
a feel different and un

with the customs, habits, and ways ©

nfluence

two different things for

ver-represented

r absence was a

ity - who pelonged to
or similar groups, went

population) at

lasses made it through
1a not affor'

comfortabl

56

expression of
euiecamen sem tain class. This way, contact of the Gymna
paved Bi eanGReen pape was avoided throughout the oe
nok pniy wie hove and thereafter. During my time at shoal
"higher" middle cl ane coeducation!) from the more or 1 :
class, none from mee. there were few from the lower cliaaae
one positive etae ne eee elaee: However - and here was the
wan: 8f @ Bigh Seder wre sorry picture - academically Gymnasi' e
excellent So unation : provided the young ones with a gananaity
sean we socal dl wr achievements in the professions or oth :
peaveaine euonesdy 2 cultural life. The excessive, stat -
ava ASE BHTRE. hice, sports coloring school-life in the states
grades" - all curses no choles of "easy courses" with Neace
oynnasioms. ab my’ time nee obligatory within different types ey
classical languages, L ymnasium education was still based on ts
I began with nee on ten and Greek. But there were new toentee
WHaiadeler one could sh ourth grade, and French in the stice
oun: Brake aie monet fo} ose between Greek or English; I chose Ene
Greek (which I seavatt te tetien eo) on and sciences, thus nileeing
in English jl y) but getting a go ;
States. Theoeghoat, Gon Berets after my enigration a the Unites
811 ov_etuderta 5 imnasisn I had little contact with most ne ed
talented and esis Be an outsider. There were a few v y
Hitler's war, one a aii boys, one a poet who was idea.
non-conformist (rare nter, and I remember one who was a svploan
quite consistently doctac German youngsters of the times) who
States. There nize Seciaed for and did, emigrate to the unites
pastor and who, in 19 asa ninister''s son who himself haces
pied, had ceegoniier tos anay me te emigrate: The Jews, so ite
ater y positions in G :
Giuecs. courageously joined the smi cumme ae aarentateame
a

By and lar
ge, school belonged t
o the bliss-side of
my youth;

At was co oh - Vv i
;: Pp °
f the "nest"-type en ironment which my eit
Y

provided i
, and it contribut
eda large part of
the learning proces
s

57

so dear to me. My gymnasium belonged to the best in Disseldorf;
its principal had known how to attract able teachers; this was
his chief merit. When I had advanced to the upper grades he was
already somewhat senile. I remember that, when our teacher had
called him in to say a few words of praise to class, he reproved
us terribly; after he had left, the teacher blushingly
apologized: “Herr Director must have been in error". His chief
influence was one of instilling nationalism. The Weimar
Constitution had provided that, once a year, the new constitution
was to be commemorated in all schools. Geheimrat Erytropel (this
his title and name) would address us each year the same way:
After reminding us that the Constitution provided for a Reich
president, he would launch into an hour-long praise of President
von Hindenburg, the great ola field-marshal of the great,
glorious war, leader of an army undefeated in that war (thus
“hinting at defeat by socialists and other traitors behind the
front, the famous, or rather infamous "stab-in-the-back" legend),
and so on. Only later did I realize how reactionary and
nationalistic almost the entire educational ambience actually was
in Weimar Germany; it contributed essentially to the weakness of

the new democracy and to its eventual downfall.
As for the various disciplines, TI liked almost everything,

except physical exercises. Drawing (the only discipline in the

area of the arts taught at school - no art history or art
“appreciation” — likewise failed to arouse enthusiasm; I was |
typically clumsy and for years used to draw or paint the selfsame

pot over again. I learned about art through reading, travel,

visiting art galleries. But languages were studied with the same

enthusiasm as were history, literature, and music and arts.

Grammar and syntax, supposedly dry topics, opened a first access
to logic and thus to what is structural in the world; the same
with mathematics and the sciences, although physics, by and
large, still conveyed the Newtonian world. As for music
appreciation and music history, what Gymnasium provided was:

58

rather primitive. Teacher's question: "What was with Mozart when
Beethoven arrived in Vienna?" Answer: "He just had died"

Teacher: "Very good, you may sit down". The real story of angie
I had to get myself from what I played on the piano, from what I
listened to in family or public concerts, from what I read about
it. I don't have to repeat how much music meant to me from early
on. I mentioned singing in the boys' choir at performances like
Bach's St. Matthew's Passion. I took private lessons from a piano
teacher who was also my mother's teacher, a lady of great musical
sensitivity and understanding, who made practicing a joy rather
than a burdensome duty. Although not overly talented technically

I was admitted to playing in her students’ concerts, where I wad
quite successful with Bach Toccatas and similar pieces. As
happened in my very early years whith music performed by m:

mother and co-players (that Haydn Trio!), much of what I pla 2d
came to belong to those works that were surrounded, for me anne
a special aura, a feeling of something so special that it could
not be compared with works not carrying it. This applied to much
of Bach, also to Scarlatti, and much of Schubert, Beethoven, and

of course, Mozart. My understanding of literature (chiefly einen

bu -
a scene on also some French and English, made accessible
. oug, the two Griters, mentioned above) proceeded from prose

oa
Bey drama to poetry, and I waxed ever more enthusiastic by
cing from romantic stories by Wilhelm Hauff and Theodor

Storm
to plays by Schiller and Buchner, and thence to Goethe's

eee .
» and those by Hélderlin, Rilke, Stefan George. A very

ees and mind opened up to the "real" world.

Se corres, course, assume that the emergence of a

i aot ce ue the preponderant factor in the life of
m, presumably, are not even aware of such

59

factors, rather, form character. What primarily determines
behavior, attitudes, and actions is the sum-total of sentiments
like love and hatred, moods such as optimism and pessimism, bliss
feeling and depression, structural elements like energy and
apathy, courage and fear. And in all this the environment,
especially the very early one, plays its fateful role. I may
refer here to a yvemark in an article I wrote at a much later

time:

He who grows up in an atmosphere of warmth and ,
affection experiences the world rather as a
friendly place... .-- while others, who are
condemned to live without such an environment,
will experience their world as basically
hostile... . To the latter the world appears
as a realm of constant struggle and conflict,
while the former may view the world as
potentially one of harmony and cooperation.
This way, there arise contrasting world-views
and patterns of action.

Somebody (female) once remarked to me that I never do@
anything unexpected. It is true that I always was a "man of
order", somebody uneasy whenever he could not plan ahead,
"organize" his life. My world was supposed to be an orderly one,
or, at least, capable of being ordered. But this did not exclude]
the unexpected. And here I must mention something from the realm
of the affective that struck me, in these years of maturing, as
deeply as anything in later life; my first falling in love. Its
"object" came in the form of a girl who was a little older than
myself. I still remember her name, though so many later ones have
been forgotten. I met her at one of my visits to Gladbach; she}
was, so I presume, a girlfriend of my Gladbach cousin, Karl
Aschaffenburg, and I am sure she never suspected my being in love’
with her; I adored her from afar. Shortly afterwards I happened]
upon Stendhal's "De l'amour", and it hit me like lightning that

60

what I had felt as the "enchantment" surrounding the loved person
and everything connected with her had been described precisely b:

Stendhal as the phenomenon of "crystallization". I never nave
felt the power of this feeling, this rapture, so strongly as I
did then. And in no other relation, whether of friendship, or
enjoyment of music, or anything else, did Goethe's word of ithe
original nature" and its "first blossoming" apply to my condition
as forcefully as it did at that occasion. Compared with it

everything else remained a mere "coming close". Beginning with
that experience, there were fantasies of kissing and hugging, but
still without the really sexual. In that respect, too 1 was
perhaps different from my peers. But I don't know how much in
their stories, was boasting rather than fact. I remember how once
they: had talked about their successes with the young sales-girls
at Disseldorf's main department store, Tietz's, and had asked me
to come along after school. So I followed them to the beautiful
Olbricht building located between Kénigsallee and the then so-

“ called Hindenburg promenade. We entered it from Kénigsallee, my
,

oanraaee passed through the corridor, casting bold glances at the
ae , and - left through the Hindenburg exit. I was very
appointed. I assume that, at the age of dancing lessons, some

did
advance further, but generally, Victorianism still prevailed,

‘and i
oes 2 eonpare that period's self-denials and repressions
1 oday's sexual freedom, I cannot help feeling regret about

12 all-one @i
did deny oneself. But, perhaps, it was not quite so bad
'

consi i

Sphere that those who, today, "have sex" as an experience

cnduatlemce ere from having a good meal, are unlikely ever to
he enchanting phenomenon of "crystallization".

te Dest
Secon my early years at school, I must now relate what
eauiring ee connected with the first arising of my world:
? genuine friend, Ossip Flechtheim. Flechtheim and 1

61

became companions for life. In regard to my world-views and
ideas, I constantly debated and discussed them with him, orally,
by letter (especially after he had "reemigrated" to Germany in
the 1950's), and even without his direct participation, in inner
dialogue. His influence on me was probably stronger than anybody
else's. On this I shall have to report time and again when
describing later phases of my life. Only then this real character
will become apparent; in what follows now his image, by
necessity, will be somewhat distorted, because my first real
inner drama concerned a conflict in which he played a role that
could reveal his true character only partially.

We met when we were in the sixth grade at Gymnasium. He was,
born at Nicolaev, near Odessa, where his father, a German Jew,
had married a Russian Jewess (hence his Russian first name:
Ossip = Joseph), put they returned to Germany when he was only
two years old. In his outer appearance he looked, according to
stereotype, less "German" than I, more "Jewish". The Flechtheim
apartment, too, was a pit out of the ordinary. Plushy, dark. In
the darkest room, his Russian grandmother whom they had taken

along; he not only learned Russian from her but seemed to be |

closer to her than to his parents. To me she confided much about
"Oshka", she worried about his "radicalism". There were many

paintings by second-rank expressionists whom his uncle, the |
“Gallery Flechthein" (well-known because of his first exhibits of %

Picasso and other "ultra-moderns" at Disseldorf and later in
Berlin) used to store there. For me, it was a different,

mysterious world.
We used to go to school and return from there together, and

it was chiefly during these walks that the above mentioned

conflict became apparant in constant, boring, relentless 4
arguments inflicted on me that, in the course of time, caused }
real terror; yet I could not avoid them - he would not have]

permitted that, and I myself did not want to escape them because

I needed clarity concerning what he put forth for my own image of

62

the world. What he said was clear, logical, hard to refute. I do
not know when or how he had acquired his dogmatic Marxism. Quite
young, he was already admired as a child prodigy, thus when to
assembled grownups he could detail the exact representation of
the parties in the Reichstag or in the House of Commons. When we
met he was already familiar with the essential writings of Marx
and Engels and also with their leftwing interpreters, and thus
was able to apply the doctorine of Marxism to all political
events as well as anything else happening in the world, whether

relating to art (brought to his attention by his uncle), music’

(by me), or to the "bourgeois" customs and behavior patterns of
his or my family or others'. To render understandable the
affliction his arguments created, I first must briefly describe
the philosophical image of the world I had concocted for myself.
As mentioned before, it was a materialistic one in the
‘philosophical sense, a somewhat naive philosophical realism
interpreting the entire world, that is, nature, cosmos, as
composed of matter ruled by the causal laws of RUNBLGR BAM
chemistry; perceptions as well as all other subjective sensory
-data and phenomena were, according to Lockean empirical
philosophy, mere images, copies of true reality; religious or
idealistic-philosophical theories and world-views were

‘superstitions or the product of mental delusion; progress, in the

ara iD consisted of the uncovering of ever more of
ee riddles. This history I traced from its beginnings in
quity through the "dark" Middle Ages to the humanism of the

LAR i +
enaissance, where I enthusiastically greeted heroes of the

“newb i i
orn light such as Ulrich von Hutten, Giordano Bruno, Galileo,

“Spin
pinoza, and from there to the Enlightenment philosophers of the

tee on the great natural scientists of the 19th. About
a one i z shall report shortly. Before that,

loninere ~ e sharp critic of an abhorred metaphysics, of
: ccessors, Fichte and Hegel, were detestable

63

From Ossip, however, I now learned that Hegel's dialectical
system, standing it from its head upon its feet, could be made
the foundation of a philosophically materialistic and
historically deterministic Weltanschauung. That was what,
according to him, made up Marxism. The impression made upon me by
the Marxian interpretation of history (world history as history
of successive social classes and their struggles) and its
application to social, political, and economic events was
powerful and lasting; indeed, some Marxian insights into socio-
economic phenomena seem to have proved correct until this very
day. Marxism's utopian aspects (prophecy of a classless society,
etc.) were to me dubious already at that time, although the
Russia of the 1920's seemed still to justify some hope for the
rise of a "better", i.e., socialist world. My conflict with
Ossip, however, originated in something quite different: the
question whether economic determinism was applicable to cultural
phenomena. This was Ossip's (as well as every orthodox Marxist's)
view, and he defended it relentlessly. Something could perhaps
intellectually be said for considering Bach's Passion music or
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as belonging to the "superstructure"

over and above the modes of economic production, expressions of |

their respective feudal or early~bourgeois social systems; but my
soul, my aesthetic feelings, revolted against such reduction.

Whether Bach reflected something religious, or Beethoven :
something bourgeois-revolutionary, qua art their works seemed not |

amenable to the idea of historical progress; Beethoven was not
more perfect" than Bach, their works were not comparable in this
fashion, in contrast to the phenomena of the socio-economic-

political world, where the concept of progress might well apply. 4
And thus I placed the St. Matthews Passion in the field, against

the relentless dialectics of Marx's "laws of historical
development" - salvation of the soul by the spirit of music!
Inevitably, this way my friend, with his relentless defense

of those laws, became my adversary. Applying Raabe's stereotypes, |

«Kantian,

64

he appeared to me, the Germanic type, as a Moses Freudenstein,
the great but cold intellect, the "negating spirit";
Mephistopheles trying to seduce Faust, as a close friend of my
parents saw it at that time. As for me, it caused sadness; as so
often, I was torn between hither and yon. Much in his doctorine,
I admitted, was true, but not its entirety. My emerging political
attitude reflected this uncertainty. Communism seemed to be the
most "progressive" movement in terms of classes and class
struggle, and the Communist Party the one which fought most
honestly for the cause of the oppressed and exploited. Honesty
seemed to require supporting it. But how could I back a movement
whose doctorine rejected Bach or Goethe as "reactionary"? On the
other hand, my refusal caused bad conscience; might it not appear
as cowardice, or, at least, as inability to oppose my bourgeois
surroundings the way Ossip did? As before in regard to bliss and
terror feelings, I was, again, torn in regard to political
attitude and commitment, and the resulting terror accompanied me
for many years.

Although my "Kantian turnabout" occured in one of my later
years at school I shall describe it already here because it was
.in line with the development of my philosophical world view just
described, and also because in its essentials it has remained
with me ever since. It happened quite suddenly, in a conversation
IT had with one of the two brothers Griiters who became such
powerful influences upon my mental and general development. It
Was Fritz Griters, the one who himself had something of a
especially in his ethical stand for duties and
responsibilities toward others, who turned around my views on
meherial nature and consciousness, the relation of mind and
»brain, outside world and its image in the self. When I insisted
hat. everything "mental", that is, everything perceived, felt,

65

etc., "in reality" constituted brain matter and a chemical or
similar process in the brain, he said: One cannot compare the
incomparable; there is no meaning in asserting that the one is
“in reality" the other; you will recognize the contradiction in
such an assertion if you will calmly and cooly reflect upon it.
This hit me like lightning. However I reflected about the
mind-body problem later, it never again was in the simplistic
belief that perception was “in reality" merely that which is
perceived (the vision the viewed object, etc.). Only much later
did I discover that an English philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, had
called such identification of mind and brain a “category
mistake":
neurotransmitters can't be compared in any meaningful way a
specific thought or emotion". (1) I now understood that the
identification of what is unequal and thus incomparable is the
original sin of philosophical materialism. Whatever my later
ideas about the relationship between subject and object,
perception and the perceived, inner and outer world, "self" and
"thing-in-itself", it never again was a simple identification of
the one with the other. My ideas centered first around Kant and
Schopenhauer, then came Edmund Husserl and Nicolai Hartmann,
finally I accepted a kind of perspectivism a la Leibnitz. But I
never fell for the opposite of materialism, an philosophical
idealism or subjectivism which considers as provably "existent"
only the mind and what it contains: "Esse est percipi" (Bishop
Berkeley). As Schopenhauer had explained, the mind "can't help"
perceiving an external world of which we are aware, and we have
to accept the perceived world as being outside. But its
structure, its basic nature, paradoxically, tends to become the
more evanescent the deeper it is penetrated by the natural
sciences.
How relatively simple, so-to-speak tangible, were the basic
concepts of my early 'Kosmos"-period! Atoms as, to be sure, very

small but still understandable elementary .particles of matter, |

"aA description of electric membranes or:

a
4
2
a

q
i
7

|

66

SERIE and galaxies, light years away yet composed of the self.
chemical substances we find on our earth, filling "spa ant
changing in "time". Today cosmology works with quite wnle - ae
concepts, such as "open" or "closed" universes that ori cco, da
a "Big Bang", only to disappear again; originate trom what,
fate where? Similar evanescence in the area of ene
est" (quantum physics): Below the subparticles of the
atoms (electrons, protons) physics has discovered ever new and
ever more complex subsystems, whose designations ‘cqumbiion
Leptonsy bosons, muons, etc., all equipped with "anti" partioves:
anti-quarks, and so forth) reflect their unimaginabilit awa
which, so we are told, are "really" mere properties of reba
that somehow interact with each other. "Matter" thus becomes

comple _ i

mennanennd conete and, to some physicists, mere
But tf the "external" world becomes more and more
unrecognizable, the mind-matter, or mind-brain, problem likewise
gets more complex with each advance in neurology and related
fleldss This is shown by the presently so much debated aed

and investigations of A.I., artificial intelligence. Allegedl
computers can perform what the brain (mind?) performs - or st

least will soon be able to do so. This would prove that the brai
(mind?) is nothing but a machine. But: All the computer does ‘fe
pases on programming, that is, it requires a programming human
eing. Whatever complex and truly astounding feats it performs
(chess Playing, solving mathematical problems), it remains one
creveesnana “ne programming mind, and therewith remains the
ae a omen mind. And even if or when it should become
nechin aa nt, to "procreate", i.e. to create another
a fare wnt now a programmer it yet would remain programmed.
censen wees omologieal problem remains unsolved; no computer
dence, wa Ae depressed or elated. An A.I. scientist has
: he important thing in defining your own thought is

7 ‘ . i
© depersonalize your interior".(2) Again, the attempt to reduce

67

in the mind to something material! This
"Kantian turning-
How to explain

what is “personal"
ctionism I had abandoned at the time of my

This did not solve the problem, of course.
the relation between subject and object of understanding, between
internal world ("mind") and external world (matter?), which
"structures" are contained in the one and which in the other,
which "categories" of knowledge and understanding are in the

mind, which other ones in the "Thing-in-itself" - all these
wered in my own mind, which, later-on,

n an expert or professional capacity.
ions and perceived assumed a

redu
point".

questions remained unans

never dealt with them i
However, related problems of percept

vital importance for me,

I tried to gain as clear and correct a view as possible of the

world of human relations, in particular, international relations.
To this, therefore, I shall have to return in later chapters. As
far as the underlying philosophical problem is concerned, I shall
let it stand by quoting (although only half in earnest) some

well-known verses:

It was six men of Hindustan
To learning much inclined
who went to see the elephant.
(though all of them were blind)
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

(there follow the stanzas with ©

And so these men of Hindustan
Disputed loud and long
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong.
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong.

a professional political scientist, when:

jhe six different interpretations) |

68

as quoted by Richard Restak, in New York Times Book Review
ew,

(March 7,
materialism

1982). A recent refutati
is found in Hans Jonas: Macht. diez Srumene gee

Subjektivitaét, Frankfurt, 1981.

Marvin Minsky, as quoted by Jeremy Bernstein, The New Yorker,

December 14,

1981.

69

Second Part
Years of Studies and Migrations

For this seems to be the chief task of a
biography: to describe the individual in the
conditions of his time and to show how this
entirety opposes him, how it favors him, and
how he fashions out of it his view of the world
and of man.

Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit

70

As described in my first chapters, the world that arose in
the mind and soul of a child and youngster had not yet led him to
the formation of a thought-through, consistent Weltanschauung. In
the second part of a narrative that bears the subtitle "How a
world-view emerged" I shall deal with those years of a young man
that witnessed the awakening of a determined interest in great
problem areas of the world, such as world history and politics,
art history and work of art. This time of more conscious world-
view formation comprises the last years of gymnasium, my study
years and years of professional preparation up to the great
turning-point of 1933, when history, so far only observed and
analyzed, caught up with me, making hash of all previous planning
of life and also of a good part of views and ideas. The last
chapter of this section will deal with the first stage of exile
(or, better, emigration), my Geneva years.

}
i
!

Chapter 4.

71

eachers and Friends

72

Recalling the debating Hindustanis who showed up in the
je end of the preceding chapter, my recollection of
m my last years at gymnasium resembles a
y debating fighting-cocks. There was a
f all imaginable problems of

verses at t
the circle of friends fro
bit that club of furious]
never ending, unceasing discussing ©
life and world. But before I report on these Sunday discussions
and their participants I have to mention those of our teachers
who had the prime influence on our thoughts and attitudes; and,

among them, the most influential of all, the two prothers

Griiters: otto (nickname 6ttes) and Fritz.
Their father had been music director at Bonn; as such, he had

discovered at an early point the musical genius of the Busch -
family, and, among them, had promoted above all Adolf Busch who
ustrious violinist; Busch, subsequently

e older Griters' daughter, thus becoming brother-in-law Fi

of Otto and Fritz. Adolf Busch's daughter married Rudolf Serkin,
n entire circle of musicians opened up to

the pianist, and thus 4

the Griters-students. There was constant music-making in that |
a
zi

was to become an ill

married th

family.
Fritz was a family father, while otto remained a bachelor ;

until after my gymnasium years. In their life-styles and
h Goethe and Schiller:

character-traits one could compare them wit
like Schiller, the ethical Kantian, whose moral precepts §

Fritz,
could become moral standards for the lives of others; otto, more
Goethean, was the one to enjoy life in the sense of experiencin

human affairs in all their shapes and aspects. Fritz, typically,
adhered to a number of ideologies or, rather, movements, such as)
advocating land reform for the solution of economic and social
problems, or abolition (i.e., of alcohol consumption). Both}
however, were eminently tolerant, never trying to indoctrinaté
their students; they would present them with the respectiv'
leaving them to choose attitudes. This way we had th
r identities. There was only one limit °
t of the "reification" of things human

problems,
opportunity to find ow
criterian tolerance: tha

73

even of i
cncureion, we bea wo peangs Once, at the occasion of a class
wnat we wigne a foun a dying little hare; upon Fritz! question
Sane Ee nag ion ne 7 ny fellow students had proposed to let
alana se him. This was too much for Fritz!
sounaathetian, Gee Feely revealed his horror of such reifying
commercwae * Pe esting such "entrepreneurship" - nowadays
sieee net “land positive fashion - has remained with me ever
winee te ane istall-night", 1938, Fritz and Otto were th
ly parents at Goethestrasse y
natal kale , asking whether they
Their educational philosophy can be i
saia ee illustrated by w
nehevinw waa ean when she once had come to onan nin abowe
ee water an eaenad of her three sons (all three of us had
deen ws man a neeners at one time or the other: "Frau Herz
gos er ue mae ° tell you that, in principle, I take the
tye, waite Otte wee, + Fritz was the more critical-minded of the
fevtate wan oe ra to be more ironical. He reminded me of the
Wiener @ can ae m anatole France's "Rétisserie de la Reine
but also with Tish ofe newkantte alnchoutes oe the peor perme
ee L } -story of the i
ie ee. "Crainquebille", a story less aes and sane
tke caiman, e novel; my enthusiasm impelled me to translate it
When t
Wieuecrewen peed took over, both had to retire, as so-called
including theie oloenan had been a Jewess. Up to 1933 nobody -
ceSin, 40, Beiect eagues - had known or taken notice of thei
erian terms, "non-Aryans". Fritz retired with hie

re family to
j a small-town area where, although suffering from a

Serious h -

enemy deen ee es he was forced to dig trenches when the

thereatter, pero at the end of the war; he died shortly

faa Giada Ihde ee leaving Germany, in the middle Thirties, I

ieuta be what ieee and he admonished me to warn, wherever

donalgagea wie itler wanted war and was preparing for it. I
s my duty but found few open minds during idee

74

years of "appeasement". Otto proved his courage during the war
when a former friend and colleague of his - my English teacher ~
who in 1933 had quickly changed from member of the German
Nationalist Party to Nazi, had sent him a pamphlet in which he
named "scoundrel" anybody who listened to the "enemy propaganda"
of the BBC; Otto wrote him on an open postcard that he did so
listen, signed: “Your scoundrel Otto G". When, after the war, I
looked him up, he offered me the fraternal "thou"; it was one of
the proudest days of my life.

What distinguished the two Griters from most of their teacher
colleagues I tried to express in a letter I wrote to Otto anent
his 70th birthday; in it I said: "My very earliest recollection
of you and Fritz is of the day when I was told that I.would be in
a class with the two Griters (in Germany pupils were kept as a
group - or class ~ together, with the teachers of different
disciplines coming to them rathen than pupils going to different
teachers separately). Some fellow students commiserated with me
because there was a rumor that these two teachers were a bit
"strange", different from the others with whom one could play the
customary friend-foe game, that is, where the teacher was the
enemy whom one could defeat by studying as little as possible,
and, moreover, could make fun of through unending pranks. I found
out quickly that this merry but rather primitive attitude was
indeed inappropriate with the Griters. What we Griters students
experienced was that authority could be something different from
superiority based on the infliction of penal sanctions; that true
authority, originating in the natural superiority of the teacher
over the still learning ones, meant voluntary recognition of such

leadership and might end up in real friendship. We knew that the

wealth you bestowed on us woulda remain with us for a lifetime, ~
not only in the form of knowledge that one might also have
acquired elsewhere, but as something much more profound and ©

important: knowing of, and understanding human relationships and

humane attitudes ..- - Ms

ipa RR aw ee Sk

fee

HI
q

75

Le Politically the two Griiters stood out as the only "liberal"
ones among their generally conservative-nationalist colleagues;
y were open-minded vis-a-vis th i Cn
; e new Weimar experiment in
wenteatate open-minded, though critical, also toward a Marxist
radicalism that could be freel:
y professed to them by thei i
Flechtheim. I can still see voy eed
. Otto's smile when on i
. ce told by Ossi'
nak r come the revolution, he would have to condemn him to death
as a "reactionary", but, as a "de
cent" reactionar
ome d ; Yy, not through
nging but by shooting. Such irony, appropriate with Otto, night

perhaps not have been quite & propos with Fritz; with him one’

might rather have discussed in serious fashi
revolutionaries should deal with their defeated opponents op mew
ene yonte of the secuivghy ns re of such free spirit even in
; y so liberal atmosphere of Weimar was
revealed to me when, in the Sixties, I ha
book on my former gymnasium where I coud a conttinucion by ;
former teacher of mine whom I had revered as one who was aa ke
evoke enthusiasm in his students for the great ones in Gemma

literature, for the "storm and stress" poets, for Goethe's

"Prometheus", and especially for their anti-bourgeois
oetabaashnent values and attitudes. What a disappointment une z
nectative ful of pnitise the history of the gymnasium! A
ratty ine criticism of Weimar - i
ee et ee te ee of students “obsessed with janut cue
afin em oma ee impact of Nazism on teachers and teaching,
nthe ten craters at Of Naetan among Jewish students, nothing
cupie consiaint i ikewise Nazi victims in a sense); instead,
groupe ot honchone ond atanentes during the war years, when
ents were sent to rural areas t
escape the bombed-out cities, to areas such as Moravia i i
beeen Czechoslovakia, where the German students veconguewed tha
lands of the East". Complaints about such "deportations",

ei
on but nothing about other deportations of the time, to
a é: '
chwitz, for instance, where some of my fellow students found

76

their death. It was the spirit of traditional German
authoritarianism that had been concealed behind a fagade of
apparently liberal estheticism, penetrating even the seemingly
free, “golden" years of Weimar democracy. Most of us had been
unaware of its persistence. youthful enthusiasm for the new, for

modernity had repressed it. Only too soon it was to overrun us in

renewed and more gruesome shape.
There was one, however, my fellow student and friend Max

Levy, who had well understood the anti-liberal, reactionary
trends of the times; the anti-semitism he experienced had made
him a Zionist at an early point in his life. And therewith I come
to our “Sunday meetings" with all their "world-view"-type of
discussions. In those last gymnasium years a circle of friends
used to meet most every Sunday afternoon at the different homes
where the respective parents used to regale us with chocolate and
cake; it became a place of Geborgenheit for me; here, I did not
feel an outsider, here it was the books one had read, the
problems one had argued about at school, the experiences one had
made on trips, oF in theaters and concerts or lectures that would
pecome the objects of our talks. And this way the feeling - long =
foreign to me - that I had acquired genuine friends and true |
friendship added to the "bliss" of this period of my life.

True, there still was that feeling of being torn this way and
that, of intellectual uncertainty and confusion that had
characterized my relation to Ossip Flechtheim, my first real
friend; now it depressed me, in contrast to the certainties my .
friends had gained in respect to their world-views; and it was,

o Flechtheim, above all Levy who enjoyed such certainty of
for certainty of.

next
views and attitude. I myself, although striving
views and convictions with all my soul, was too sceptical, ®
perhaps also too versatile intellectually, to fully embrace one
or the other of the Weltanschauungen represented within the:
circle of friends. I have pointed out what separated me fro

Flechtheim's Marxism; here only some remarks concerning Levy'

77

Zionism. Compared with Marxism, it was a world-view much less

t . ‘
ie Bites, tee uncriem, bert more practical regarding one's plans
nahera and yeu een ‘communism, and similar doctrines one might
adhere | | e abe - at least for the time being - to
cont in one s life in accustomed - i.e., "bourgeois" - fashion
me be epton Lian onhex hand, one had to decide whether owe
we oe prebuse one an, in the environment in which one had grown
ee prepare eset , hic ot nunc, for something entirely novel
ceoy, who oe pee existence in a foreign country. Max
Sa a - or echal Levy", continued to be our friend in
attey tiniauiny aie oe in 1982, was sure about what he would do:
noo contivnea ate studies in Germany and even before the Nazis
saideated te (th prophecy of doom for Germany's Jews, he had
on es nl Estsohine te live there, first as pioneer in
Israel's technological wiivmelty aback. ne @ Geen) at
ot a cee ee a eae eionest credo proved "right" in view
: , e? One is tempted to answer
we dhie  e thek ee that the Zionist decision baer see yea
a ee =r SS meee s° many who otherwise might have fallen
vecieny. naa seats (Levy's own parents - non-Zionists - did
per en) ean oe a was not converted to Zionism. The
cons Sorat ion we ot ers of the friends' circle opposed to his
eae men Mameksr a aes as for any other persecuted groups there
viveacy eee on earth anymore and that, consequently and
vaiacttie ore e at ake time, the Arab inhabitants of
Nehein country meee oeeaneteln nae vee to Jewish settlement of
; y has proved all-to-correc i
nee er are conflict having by now developed into one of the
eoiheone Ieuan eo cee crises. And even morally, although
revaiiig wwe ne eS take its side, I cannot one-sidedly take
and in aes = ne HERE here stands opposed to another right
efending its right, Israel behaves neither better nor

wors iti i
e than politically organized groups have done throughout

78

history. It would be unjust to demand from Jews more than from
other groups — certainly in view of all they have suffered over
years and centuries - but it would be equally unfair to
subordinate to their right that of others (in this case that of
the Palestinian Arabs). One thing my friend supported, namely the
establishment of a truly pinational state with equal share in
power by Jews and Arabs in Palestine, a plan suggested and
promoted by such German-Jewish leaders as Martin Buber,
regrettably did not work out. It might have saved Jews as well as
Arabs, indeed, the entire world, unending suffering and conflict,
put nationalism (on both sides) prevailed.

In regard to those of us who rejected zionism there yet
remains the question of why we failed to recognize the strength
and threats of a deeply-rooted German racist-antisemitic
nationalism; foolishly, over-optimistically, we believed in an
inevitable and continually progressing process of assimilation;
we simply felt to be Germans, members of a culture into which we
were born, members of a community in which we were so geborgen
that we disregarded the change in the attitude of so many who,
before our very eyes, were moving to the right; we played down
the abominations of the rightist extremists revealed in political
assassination, such as Rathenau's, or in libel, such as the one
that contributed to the death of Friedrich Ebert, the first,
stoutly democratic Weimar president (to be replaced by the arch-
conservative Field-Marshall von Hindenburg, who subsequently was
to appoint Hitler chancellor, thus handing over the state to Nazi
rule). After the catastrophy, those of us who did not emigrate to
Palestine, have come to feel themselves to be citizens of the
country that received them - in my case,
most of us, like members of other immigrant groups in America,
Irish, Italians, etc., have never been able to abandon completel)
a sense of connectedness with the country of our origin, despit

all we had to go through.
as for our general political attitudes, those of us who ha

the United States - but

79

no i
pe cones skent philosophy like Levy and Flechtheim generall
red the liberal-democratic, progressive views of the najouiey

of G
erman Jewry. Most German Jews were "liberals" in this broad

se i
nse for two reasons: first of all, as members of a minority

xr
coaden qcsnee stm cn they were interested in the protection of
ir rights and their equal status; also in that of their

busi i i
iness rights since most of them belonged to the middle class

of trad x
ers and entreprenuers; second, because of a Jewish

traditi i i j
ition to improve social justice and help the disadvantaged

Th i
e Jewish vote thus usually went to the left wing of the

liber i i
(Social (in Weimar, the German Democratic Party), or to the SPD
al Democrats), whose originally more radical socialist credo

unde i i
xr Weimar (as now in the Federal Republic) had moderated

itse i
1f into a democratic reformism. This Weimar social

liberali
tnenenciat quite strong at the beginning, throughout the 1920's
betie tagiy est to the conservative-nationalist forces ana
so e Right and the Communi

‘ unists to the Left i
a endlen ; with all
vvathed at the neg (except the Catholic Center arity) to be

a e end by the onslau
ght of the Nazi P.
end, hardly anybod “the German
y but Jews i
Temesnabke Zante still voted for the German
Mt fad .
Ise eee political views were still rather vague. Perhaps
nennee iced by Blechthe ity I was more than the other iibougeoten
nee s of our circle in favor of a (not communist-dictatorial
emocratic) socialism and, a
, as far as internation
meee 3 al relations
Suewhen a une a pacifism opposing traditional militarism and
peace system through the Lea i
Wola, fqveriesiew 1 gue of Nations; opposed to
impact of Upton Sinclair's "
national best-seller wi and du devor'or
at that time in Ger

Mees : many) and in favor

ational self-determination" of the colonial people - India ana

n

Gandh
i were constant subjects of our discussions. As for domestic

affai
a na E ws impressed when one of my uncles expressed himself
or of a plebiscite demanding th i i
corn ; g e expropriation of the
er monarchical rulers in Germany who, over the centuries, had

80

amassed vast properties. Nobody else in my family or among our
friends took that "radical" attitude, which in reality was merely
i-feudal, bourgeois principles. The
symbolizing the weakness of Weimar
democracy: While democratic, rule-of-law, principles determined
its formal structure and procedures, yet, substantially an
authoritarian world-view still characterized the decisive forces
army and police, the administration of justice,
-unions of the working class.

ertainty and confusion in my
more generally, social and
um years I managed to

the expression of ant
plebiscite was defeated,

in society:
education, even the trade

yet, despite a good deal of unc
mind about matters political and,
economic, toward the end of my gymnasi
arrive ata clear-cut Weltanschauung, based on Oswald Spengler's
philosophy of history. I arrived there by way of aesthetics.
Those where the years when, after the earlier revelation of

works in the field of fine arts and poetry were revealed

music,
"original" impression that

to me in the nature of that Goethean
surrounded them with that strong aura of exceptionality. Thus, on
a trip to Holland to which I had been invited by Cologne
relatives and on which I promptly fell in love with one of my
I was this way struck by Vermeer's "portrait of a Young
Woman" (one may assume that falling in love contributed to it).
Some of Goethe's and Hélderlin's poems, as well as some of
Kleist's prose and drama struck me in similar fashion. But what
proved decisive for my developing world-view was that literature
and art now began to appear to me as expressions of their
respective periods, and history as a sequence of styles; that is,
instead of a unilinear progress, aS distinctive forms reflecting
the respective "spirit of the times" (Zeitgeist) - The Griters had
referred me to two authors, the art historian Heinrich wé1lfflin
and the literary historian and Germanist Fritz Strich, whose
pooks (Wolfflin: Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe,
concepts of Art History, and Strich: Klassik und Romantik,

cousins,

Classicism and Romanticism) provide

Basic ©

a those dichotomies of forms

81

and styles i
wiaetiem = like "classicism and romanticism", "linear
eoeohe be oe be used for characterizing entire hist ten
every ex rich himself pointed toward music, religion indeed
Gere ea of culture" (jegliches Kultursystem) as 1 naive
ied Ss it y. endi
iucopeeeetemn,, a basically esthetic ahikaeteniicaiien ext
conecen . From there it was only a few steps to S a
a '
om one ve philosophy of alternati rere oe
civilizations. oe See
Before reportin
g on my Spenglerism
Sow ne Mi , however, I must sa
oats ome ulecunn abstract and theoretical approach a
erature did not exclude eile
ooeeeines ta an oftentimes en i
eppre een of the individual piece of art as such nme Se Ge
. ‘ . at i
ee jonas oe the context of its epoch did not detract tron
on it made as a concret ae
rae @ phenomenon. In a
memeuudine wn abstract-concrete approach I can ap oni te | na
q A
otnen * se antitheoretical Goethe as my crown adbeo i ce
s first trip to Ital “style ha
; y, a temple of th i 4
seitietae c e archaic styl
nein ee to him as "bothersome, even ASSALT “be
4 soon collected myself; é
of ait, gamma a6 m y + I remembered the hist
: y mind the period wh iri na
ctyle of ; ; whose spirit found
te cculptase ana tn. appropriate, récalled the austere style :
ia me and in less than an hour I felt at home". it ; os
te ee more T "felt" the Zeitgeist, the more I could fo
wteenecs bei it. Moreover, certain epochs and Mégiee
ara nesomne emotionally more strongly than others, thus woul
ane -_ more than classicism (an expression of veuEH -
oe ie ve). A veritable intoxication with the ee
oque churches and ees
; palaces with thei
adam ‘ eir sculpture
tee hecnlecion t me toward the end of my gymnasium years; I ‘ wrea
ee mee on to submit a study of such buildings in — " se
becuetinnne ah eres for the final gymnasium exam iecetee “oe
eptpamite ° ana travelled widely through Rhlneliand and
o study them. And duri i
be misono ; uring my first university te
Y' from Freiburg criss-cross through Southern Germany to
°

82

inspect its glorious baroque churches and monasteries. I came to
compare such fine art works with what I considered corresponding
music: Bach toccatas and fugues with the interior of the Cologne

cathedral, or Verdi's Requiem, first heard at Freiburg, with the
filigrane structure of the Freiburg cathedral spire. Never, later
such intoxication with something I experienced!
Comparable, at that time, only with experiencing nature? The
snow-covered hills of the Black Forest, conquered on skis in the
sweat of one's brow (no easy skilifts yet!); or the sun rising,
illuminating by and by the infinite Alpine mountain chains

observed from one of its summits.

in life,

What attracted me to Spengler was not his particular approach
to political problems of the day; on the contrary, his

glorification of the "Prussian spirit" and his general

conservative-nationalist opinions were repellent.It was his

Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), his grand
historical-philosophical opus that proved seductive, and here,
again, not the specific prophecy of Western doom (that had made
the work a bestseller all over the West) but his "morphological"
study of Kulturkreise, civilizations whose rise, blossoming, and,
eventually, decline made up what we call human history through
o had seen cultural phenomena, like music,
and embedded in, "their"
jeult to understand a more

the ages. For one wh
art, literature, as produced by,
particular epoch, it was not aiff
general philosophy that saw each and every phenomenon of
life, including economy, society, politics, up to culture,
science, arts, even philosophy itself,
of a particular civilization that,

a plant, for instance,
epoch. Spengler's thus was a cyclical interpretation of history,

one where a limited number of civilizations had come into

human

as symbolizing the spirit -;
like the life of an organism, |
had come into existence at a specific;

83

exis i
Slohe, cach to go theowoh eininas at different spots of the
similar stages of develo
sate semen. pee 2 perish and give way to another civilization,
De TARIEN Gned, CHAE BE GiaesGRdaeA AntSquity,, eke hed Eee
; ; = n Antiquity, etc., hi
aoe tae eristios: thus, according to Spengler, Western
ofa, Wath Vik  anatiecinn forever striving toward infinite
See nce oon Ce hntanity rested harmoniously within itself;
traits", while ‘es latter was dictingatened ty Whe prafimdaant
: Me nguished by its i
Seuelcversts @ But since each was to undergo ag sane cycle of
ara a. florishing, decline), events or works or
compared to those Pareieurar BHAS® in this development could be
sora thue. °. ahother sivilizationts similar developmental
enonglor a an a political system called Caesarism by
*e tick untied by newaue rulership, as characteristic
predicted as the age of caesarian vale in weston vaultuce, thet
is, for our times. mp canenrey wnat
; Again, it was one of the two Grite
intre rs, Otto, who
invited, @ conup woreiene c At our last year of high-school me naa
oe ihe mane aa or ten of his students to meet each week
ageed to study the tno vouunes on the wectine oe th aed with
e ecline of the West"
oan ee ete he one specific subject. Mine was eh tyes
congeving end woue ematics within the different Kulturkreise
due anaitcntetes raseins them, thus Euclid's in Antiquity with
ctednaanenen oe one he - by Spengler so-called - "magical"
produced algcbes, wath ear East (Byzantium, Islam), that had
nein, at Western-"Faustian" integral calculus, and
Inbermusewuton ae e by now was my early, materialistic
culture, weodace nature and world! Then, everything, including
cee ce eects oe the mind like philosophy, etc., had been
n nature conceived as material "cosmos". Now

84

everything, including mathematical and other scientific
discoveries and perceptions, were considered phenomena reflecting
the character of specific civilizations and their respective
developmental stages. The Spenglerian world-view impressed me at
that time as eminently plausible, almost self-evident, and it was
a novel type of "bliss" for me to be able to interpret any
imaginable events in human history under the label of
civilizational cycles. Even today, when Spengler's
"morphological" laws of history have become more than doubtful to
me, certain particularities, especially in the realm of culture,
still seem intelligible in Spenglerian, comparative terms. After
all, it was at Spengler's time, i.e., the time of my youth, when
non-Western civilizations like the Chinese or the pre-Columbian
Indian ones had come to the forefront of Western interest. And ny
Spenglerism began to comprise even those "primitives" whom
Spengler himself had excluded from his "high civilizations" but
whose cultural characteristics as well as their specific ideas
(e.g., on space and time) impressed me as eminently comparable to
those of the "grand" civilizations, thanks to my study of Levy-
Bruehl's book on the "Spirit of the Primitives" that I had
discovered about the same time I encountered Spengler.

Some of my intoxication with Spengler continued to accompany
me beyond my gymnasium and even my university years and was
occasionally transmitted to others. Thus I remember from my
Geneva years a first visit to Rome, where I tried to aistinguish
the remnants of "antique" civilization from those of the "magic"
ana then the "Faustian-Western" ones; there I met a very young
American, who had never heard of such typically European
speculations, impressing him so strongly with Spenglerian ways of
viewing things that, for a while, he became a "disciple". We
remained friends into my American years, until his elitist-
aristocratic philosophy caused a break; his name: clifford
Truesdell, a by now illustrious mathematician and physicist.

Perhaps I should qualify what I have said about my

85

Spenglerian, rather historicist world-view. It was more strongly
rooted in the esthetic sphere, less so in most others
particularly the socio-political one. There, besides some vinewsans
(where I would even agree with some "social-dialectical"
interpretations of cultural and art products, as, e.g., with
Kracauer's interpretation of Jacques Offenbach), it was aneve all
Max Weber and his dealing with the ethical problems raised in and
by politics that affected me strongly. His distinction of an
ethics of responsibility and an ethics of conscience (in his
essay on "Politics as a Vocation") was to become important for my
later studies of "Political Realism and Political Idealism", as
was his value relativism (in his "Scholarship as a Vocation") for
my attitude as a social scientist, where my own strong value
relativism has lately given way to a value absolutism of a sort
under the impact of the threats to global survival. All of this
was beyond Spenglerian estheticism. Moreover, a world-view that
had added to the sense of Geborgenheit of my school years would

no longer have this soothing effect once I had to leave the
"nest". Separation from home added, in my case, a "terror"
element to the new situation because of the problem of choice of
profession, where, throughout my years of studies, I suffered
from a typical weakness: not being able to make straigtforward

decisions, in this case, to come to a definite decision
concerning my future.

86

Chapter 5. Years of Study

Our will is nothing but a prediction of that
which we shall do under all circumstances.
These circumstances, however, seize us in their
own fashion.

Goethe

87

Choosing my profession belonged to the most difficult
decisions of my life. For me it was not, or at least not only one
about a future "career," about how best to earn one's living, how
best "to make oneself marketable," as most of our youngsters
strive today when almost everything by way of careers is couched
in terms of "marketability," of how best to sell oneself in the
market of professions and occupations. At my time, deciding about
one's profession was for most of those who had a chance freely to
choose one a decision about one's calling; avocation, rather than
vocation.

Why was entering upon university studies so decisive? As I
mentioned when describing my gymnasium years, graduating from
gymnasium meant (and still means) something like getting one's
B.A. in America. Absent a college stage in-between high school
and university, entering university meant (and still means)
beginning graduate studies, like law, medicine, etc. (1) At my
time, most German universities were divided into sections
(Fakultaeten) for the study of law, medicine, theology
(Protestant or Catholic), and, finally, one called
"philosophical" for everything else, from arts and literature
through history and social studies, and, of course, philosophy
proper, to the "natural sciences." Finishing studies there would
lead to the only academic degree, the doctoral one (thus, the Dr.
phil., corresponding to the Anglo-American Ph.D., the Dr. jur.
corresponding to the J.D., and so forth). However, to enter the
respective professions, additional state exams had to be passed,
thus, in the case of lawyers, a first state exam, to be taken
after finishing one's legal studies at the university, making one
a kind of preparatory civil servant with a couple of years in-
service with courts, district attorneys, practicing lawyers,
after which, upon. passing a second state exam, one's path would
be open to serve as a judge or prosecutor (both, in Germany,
state-appointed) or to become a "free," practicing attorney-at-
law. Thus, after passing my final exams at gymnasium I could no

88

longer postpone making up my mind about whether to enter
university (there was not much doubt about that) and, if so,
which Fakultaet; this would pretty much determine what to make of
my life. I had a hard time at it.

From early on, life had appeared to me as something to be
fashioned, step by step; hence the question of my "calling:"
what was I meant to be, or to become? And this in the sense not
only of what I might be best qualified for but also in which
areas I might do something of value to mankind. The diversity of
my interests as well as the uncertitudes of the times and the
confusion of their tendencies produced new terror when faced with
the necessity of choice that became imminent in the last period
of my high school years; the complete freedom of decision which
my parents allowed me in this question contributed to the terror;
a bewilderment of choice. I remember that at night, before going
to sleep, I would constitute myself as a kind of parliament where
representatives of different parties discussed the various pros
and cons time and again, but there never was a clear voting
result! In retrospect I recognize that this kind of attempted
"political" decision-making, in the "predictive" sense of the
Goethe motto at the head of this chapter, might have predicted
that I was preordained to become a political scientist - only
that, unfortunately, there existed at that time neither the
concept nor the profession of "political science." I envied
Flechtheim, who, whatever he might study, seemed preordained for
"politics as a profession." I envied Levy, whose Palestinian
pioneer existence seemed to be sure. Most of my other fellow
students knew what to do. There was one to whom Europe was too
"narrow;" he wanted to emigrate to America, and soon did so. I
myself felt so strongly rooted in Germany - even in the Rhineland
as "local" home, Heimat - that I could hardly visualize a life
"entirely elsewhere." And that which in the sense of a career
seemed doubtful - to study musicology, art history, literature,
even philosophy - was most attractive, indeed; but two things

89

90

seemed to render it impracticable for me: One, the perturbing
diversity of my interests that existed regarding these
disciplines, too; none of them predominated in the way musicology
did in the case of my brother Gerhard. The second factor that
spoke against selecting one of these fields was my life-long
feeling of insecurity, if not inferiority: I feared never to be
able to achieve something of a creative rank sufficient to
satisfy me and others; not even the rank of a minimally original
and important university professor, the only practicable
profession in those disciplines. Presumably I imagined most
professors to be of the stature of a Strich or Wélfflin. And thus
there appeared the profession of a lawyer - the profession of my
father - as the best way out of the dilemma, because it did
include, within the areas of law, a variety of possibilities: to
become a judge, like my father, or a defense lawyer in the
service of the poor and oppressed, according to my inclination to
see justice done, - I would not consider becoming a business or
corporation lawyer - or, finally, the chance to enter an academic
career as university professor - a possibility eventually to
become the reality, to be sure, in the "very own fashion" of
Goethe's "circumstances."

I remember that I caused my father great anxiety when,
during my studies, I threatened time and again to give up the law
and change over to other fields of study. I never did. There was
at that time still the great "academic freedom" not only to
change universities, to wander from one to another like the
medieval "scholar," but also to attend freely courses of
different Fakultaten; there were no final exams for individual
courses, one was free to attend or go. But my non-legal interests
were never dropped, either. Especially during my first four terms
I attended more courses in philosophy, history, germanistics, and
musicology than courses in the faculty of law where I was
matriculated. And as for courses in law, I typically considered
the study of law as primarily one of legal science (as history of

law and legal systems, as philosophy of law, etc.), rather than
as preparation for practicing the law.

The time of my studying was relatively short, lasting from
1927 to 1930, but to me it is the most impressive evidence of
Bergson's distinction between "Scientific" and subjective,
"lived-through" time: So much "lived-through" experience was
compressed into those few years that they seem to me now like
decades, while later decades, especially the most recent ones,
seem only years. I spent those years at four different

universities - the first two semesters at Freiburg, then one at’

Heidelberg, one at Berlin, and finally two at Cologne (with some
courses taken at nearby Bonn) in preparation for my doctorate as
well as the first state exam; in addition, a vacation term at the
university of Grenoble in France. All in all a short period of
time that opened the world to me.

Freiburg, summer and winter of 1927 - my best-loved among
German cities, nestled at the foot of the Black Forest mountains;
here I enjoyed my first real freedom after the eighteen years of
regulated life at home.

Two of my Dusseldorf friends were with me at Freiburg. There
was Gerd Voss, "Germanic" ideal of my early years; as an
idealist, he later became seduced by Nazi ideology but remained
loyal to me nevertheless; his father, for many years a friend of
my family, turned out to belong to those sorry characters who,
after 1933, would not "know" us any more at chance meetings,
while my friend, the decent one, was to die in Hitler's war. And
there was Ossip Flechtheim, who now openly joined the Communist
student organization. I can still see him marching with very few
comrades in the rather empty streets of Freiburg, celebrating May
Day. Quite generally, students at German universities at that
time were strongly organized: not only in groups affiliated with

91

political parties or "movements" (like the Nazi one), but, more
traditionally, in fraternities, most of them of the feudal,
duelling kind, where membership, highly selective, was the first
step on the ladder leading to high positions in government,
administration, the judiciary, the way to “infeodate," instill
feudal-aristocratic, militarist values into generations of
middle-class sons. They were traditionally antisemitic, and were
thus closed to Jews. There was a big chasm between the already
then self-styled "Aryan" students and the Jewish ones. The
proportion of Jewish students was rather large, especially at the
big-city universities like Berlin and Frankfurt. There were a few

Jewish fraternities, even a duelling one (my father had joined -

one, wearing the honorific duelling scar for the rest of his life
- as did Hans Morgenthau). I myself was satisfied with being part
of the non-organized student body. As before, with Flechtheim at
the left and Levy a member of the Zionist student group, I
remained in the "secular" middle.

A joined an informal group of fellow students, boys and girls
(more and more girls became students in the 1920s), most of them
from the Rhineland, most of them Jews. We would meet at evenings
in our respective students' Buden (rooms rented in private
houses, there being no dormitories), constituting ourselves as
Goethebund, (Goethe circle), not, I am sorry to say, to honor the
great classical poet but because of his reputation as ardent
lover of large numbers of females. I felt greatly animated. For
the first time after the disappointing experiences of the dancing
lessons there were closer relations to the other sex, and
promptly I fell in love with a sequence of at least three girls.
There was some embracing and kissing but nothing else, at least
in my case, with my usual timidity. I don't know how far the
others got. In principle, all of us were in favor of sexual
freedom. The actual practice is perhaps illustrated by a case I
still remember: that of one girl in our group who seemed to be
on the verge of entering a "partnership" with a rather leftist

92

fellow-student; Papa took her home in the middle of the term, and
she became subsequently engaged to a more “establishmentarian"
young gentleman.

However that might have been, for me these were new and novel
experiences. A few kisses, exchanged when resting from a skiing
trip, opened heaven. To learn skiing for the first time meant
being able to do something with my body, not only with my head;
my migraine headaches disappeared. At week-ends there were
excursions, up the Black Forest hills, bicycling down the valleys
toward the Rhine. During vacations I sometimes cycled alone, but
without the feeling of loneliness - I mentioned already my week-
long trip to the South-German baroque treasures. As for studying,
I attended Edmund Husserl's course, somewhat disappointing: the
great philosopher turned out not to be a great lecturer; I
learned more about his "phenomenology" through his writings. A
far better lecturer was one who introduced us to Roman law, an
allegedly dry topic that yet inspired me through the "classical"
conceptual clarity of Roman legal rules and institutions; so much:
so that during the second semester I attended a Roman law seminar
where I worked and reported on a comparison of certain Roman with
English legal institutions - a comparison that produced (to me)
surprising similarities in the development of the two sega
systems, both of the unwritten, "common law" type; once again, my
interest was in history and theory rather than practice

Heidelberg, summer 1928. There were, again, several members
of our Goethebund, and also Ossip (who had spent the preceding
winter term at the Sorbonne). I still did not attend the core
legal courses (such as civil law and law of civil procedure) but
I dia attend the one on criminal law, given by Gustav Ragbruch,
one of the few progressive criminologists of the time, he
advocated a general reform of the (still rather meng
code, a reform that, of course, had no chance under the there ae
was put into practice only much later. During this term t as
an election to the Reichstag, the central German parliam ‘

93

i Si
was the last one in which the Social Democrats were victoriows:
i BE
Radbruch became minister of justice, an event we Se SE Ee hw
a torch-light procession in his honor. Little did we kno
i to be.
hort-lived a victory it was .
° Heidelberg - perhaps the freest, most lighthearted days ony
life. There were excursions, alone or with Frience! robe
; i ite medieval towns of en
castles or the still qu a ma
Palatinate, among them Albersweiler, where my eenagaanenne
: i rela
? ith a co-student cousin to our
forebears had lived; or W MF ee evanee
i toward the end of the month, my
at Alzey, especially when, ef or
monthly stipend had gone (although no tuition had to be pal or
German universities - still isn't - expenditures for room
board were a burden on my not too affluent parents) ; there, we
i s
would at all times be welcomed and fed in the most generou
manner. ‘
Between Heidelberg and Berlin I attended summer courses a
i i e.
Grenoble, lovely university city in the Savoy aa on ae
‘ Bate)
i isi i d trips to the Provence, Pp
Including a visit to Paris an 2 . a a
i jon of a foreign culture;
me with the first great impress 3 ee dew
far. The greatest riches of a
been all-too-"Germanic" so 5 ra
from immersion in the French language; like every ees .
reflects a specific approach to the world, in this Se _
classical style built upon logic and clarity - at least, nin the
how it affected me, perhaps again 4 la Spengler, * Soe in
i i the e
i tiquity at Nimes, or
remnants of classical An ee tne
i into which I was introduce!
Paris, or French literature in ‘ ate
university There also was a trip to Geneva, including a wanda
; 4 t our
i had discussed so often a
the League of Nations we : ‘ i ny
meetings. I could not know that this city would be the first Y
station of my emigration a mere seven years later. nap odes
Berlin, winter 1928-29; a culminating point o Yy rn
'

ecaus was e ic ir '
because it was th real encounter with "my time," a time of the

sty t cultura
preakthrough of "modernity" tha to deal with it

been great and creative in the past,

94

affirmatively but also critically. What today is considered as
one of the highpoints of this development, indeed, a highpoint in
the cultural evolution of the twentieth century, in shorthand
called "Weimar," occured in those few fleeting years of the
Twenties primarily in Berlin, and I had the great good luck to be
present at the highpoint of this summit.

I lived in a rather primitive Bude I had rented in Moabit, a
low-middle class, proletarian section of the city. I wanted to

save as much as possible of my monthly stipend for attending

plays, concerts, opera performances. Incredible how much was

offered in this respect. To mention only three different opera
houses, at one of which George Szell was chief conductor,
providing me occasionally with tickets. The Sunday-afternoon
concerts in Philharmonic Hall, with Furtwaengler presiding over
the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and to which my uncle Willy,
youngest of my father's brothers, would take me. There was
another of his brothers in Berlin; he had become a wealthy
business man, residing with his family in one of the "best"
sections of the city; he would invite me and his brother Willy
(who had not succeeded in business and whom he employed in his
firm) for Sunday dinner - Willy, who collected stamps and also
some good paintings, among them a Liebermann self-portrait that,
much later, came into my possession and whose presence in my
house saddens me whenever I look at it - Willy who was abandoned
to cruel death at Auschwitz when his brother, the only one who

was rich enough to give him an affadavit for coming to America,
refused to do so.

For me, the "Weimar" experience in Berlin can be summed up in
my attendance at the Brecht-Weill "Dreigroschenoper" ("Three-
Pennies-or Beggars'-Opera"); it was the season of its first
performance, and I was so enthralled that I went to the
performances at the Schiffbauerdamm theater several times. What
impressed me so much was not only its acid satirical anda
revolutionary character but above all the underlying sadness

95

about the fact that there are beggars (my early "beggar"
experience!), that there is exploitation and so much moralistic
hypocrisy about it, that crime is good business and business
crime; beyond all this, a basic grief over the “condition
humaine," over all the physical and emotional coldness man must

suffer

in diesem Tale das von Jammer schallt
(in this valley that reverberates with despair).

Thus, blissful enjoyment of all that the creativity of the
ages had wrought combined and often clashed with sadness,
despair, even feelings of terror over the world's "“injustice;"
estheticism yielded to criticism. It was perhaps the most socio-
critical, socialist (if not communist) period of my life. Pity
with the poor as well as revolutionary revulsion were provoked
when I witnessed, in my "proletarian" North of Berlin, poor
peoples' looting of coal (it was a bitterly cold winter),
brutally put down by the police. Was there a premonition of what
was to come within less than a year: the Great Depression that
would reveal the phonyness of the economic boom of the Twenties
and bring to the attention of anybody who was willing to see it
the miseries foreshadowed in "The Beggar's Opera?" Politically I
developed a rather incongruous mixture of demands for
transformations in economy and society of the Marxist kind, for
bourgeois-democratic reforms of state and laws, with an admixture
of resigned, elegiac acceptance of what Spengler had
characterized as "late stage" phenomena of a dying civilization.
There was also a strong feeling of Germany's authoritarian
backwardness, of the special nature (what later was called the
Sonderweg) of this nation's socio-political evolution as compared
with that of other Western countries (an interpretation of German

history I subsequently encountered in Thomas Mann's "Doctor

Faustus").

96

Emotionally, therefore, there

enthusi

a eee, Ep Ata "at one" with my time and despair about

beraua an nen aye the question of what would become of me

Over the neon : ly studies, which I hag somewhat neglected
of the cultural events, yet showed me that I

ch as I had hoped; in contrast

was rapid alternation between

gymnasium, I was outcompeted in t

in by numbers of tal
ented, especiall i
henenenn OF r y Jewish, fellow
x inferiority complexes regarding my dram: een
; yer sneted= But I was helped to escape this nd of dewresetn
ri = ey of a legal theory which, like 1
what I t i
se tee chenoneney oe the scientific-philosophical foundation
aw: The so-called "
al ; e Pure Theory of at
Snolmeser eee Reine Rechtslehre) of dia vies oe
° non’ pablic law and jurisprudence, Hans Kelsen vemnese
: .
‘be sa serie — personally at Cologne, where he went from Vie:
g of 1929, My Giscovery of his theory occured b tone
efore

, at the Berlin i
Public (state) lib
* . 7
myself in his voluminous writings and = aminttiy eee

s
pell. I wrote to my father at that time:

kind of depression
ightning, revealeq

"These foundatio
ns I
I shall deal with them a bit more

. i i
closely when describing the work for my doctoral a ssertatio
ion

under Kelsen.
Cologne, where I spent m
my doctoral and first stat

Coming. I took a " ude" a 'Y grandmothe: é
Kk Bude" at m ‘and: r Julie's apartmen: s
t " thi Julie! ti t. Thi

hers. Their death
it spared them the shattering

£ Wi : *
Ollowed. With them, there disappeared the last generation that

97

funeral (cremation, no rabbi - this, too, symbol of her
enlightenment attitude) for the last time her entire, wide-spread
family gathered together - soon to be dispersed (as far as they
survived the holocaust) over the continents of the world.

My: studies at Cologne and Bonn now were increasingly devoted
to the law. Exception: Lecture courses by the philosopher
Nicolai Hartmann? he impressed me greatly, and I shall have to
come back to his influence when describing my new world outlook
pelow. Equally important for my evolving attitudes was my
participation in seminars offered by my uncle, the psychiatrist’
Gusav Aschaffenburg. AS I have mentioned before, besides
psychiatry proper he was also a specialist in criminology, reform
of criminal law, and law enforcement (in particular, prison
affairs). For this reason, many law students went to attend his
seminars. I remember my first report delivered before a larger
audience; I had considerable stage fright. The report was on mass

(or mob) violence, and, somewhat influenced by Freud's "Mass
Psychology and Ego-Analysis," I concluded that in such cases,
often of a political nature, it was not the "hypnotized masses"
that could or should be held criminally responsible put their
leaders, OY, rather, seducers. As for my uncle's reformist

opinions ana demands, I ag
reservations in regar
"substantive justice" mig!
security, @-9-1 when, as my uncle,
or psychiatric experts, proposed that m
judges should decide on legal competenc

if necessary, send them to indefinite cus

from repetition of their acts.
rights to a fair court trial should preva

t "experts!" endeavors? I subsequen

mean
1 realism and political idealism.

ideas in my theory on politica
puring my last term I "went home"

(traveling to Cologne only for a few courses),

reed with most of them but had
a to those where the interest in
ht clash with the requirements of legal
together with other penal law
edical experts rather than
e of accused persons and,
tody to protect society
I thought that the accused's
il over ever so well-.

tly generalized these

and stayed at pisseldort
there to take the

98

"cram course" preparing me for the
rae state examination.
Since wows ee legal courses during their onivencity
comes a eae on such sengentrated cramming prior to the
a eaniatadeer den or this: kind of instruction was given by a
aoaamaubene enero chan ant Wenderoth, who possessed more
Phen coscthesy ceay n all my previous university instructors
eee poaethe a nvexsant with all the different fields in which
vrepene ue ton ani aken, he, managed within half a year to
nueceeefutly pa tea ome wae informed by those who had
tnecinabre en the exam, he would acquaint us with any
cenoeintty aueing th ns, traps, and tricks we might expect
csrema.btve ooifens oral PArE of the exam where a mixed body of
Nexiounel" with a good deal of humor he invented his own
neeeea a ; umor he invented h
ececiatee ove enue pie made studying with him an Snjovanie
en in the driest legal subject-matters. I shall come

back to Wenderoth, who became a life-long friend
'

connection. in some later

Leaving aside the
evolvement of my K i
vorlacten 3 y Kelsenian~Hartman:
ee et (to be nelated in connection with my doctoral samy
Whererena 2 briefly with events of those years where ..
ar an in-service law trai henge
oe eocen rainee), I had to pass throu
Ene ve cee) ee of this practical training (at aierevene
" i is could be done at one!
courte: ore s residence, i.e., i
oniay bane ween and so I was home again, were a ma
- But a feeling of loneliness predominated. Most of ny
3 my

university friends, male and female
= ; . , were now back i
Souauus, teem ema and I acquired few new ones. One a weotian
secovapnions voctaoat seat of his motor-cycle, I enlarged my
clon anced i sien through excursions to nearby German
hen te lds o aotn nae and Holland. I myself never learned
oun netatioee oe - ike, not to speak of driving a car (few of
ete : riends possessed one). However ~ this happened
, already under Nazi rule - I tried to geta driver's

99

license in preparation for my emigration. At the exam I ore
several times onto the sidewalk; I was already giving up wnen ne
examiner asked me: "Why do you want a license?" Me: Ip. an n
emigrate." "Where to?" Me: "To Palestine." "To i
that case I can give you a license." In contract to this ed
report on a case that happened much later, in see eerie
after having purchased a car, I still had to take the io ee
test. After having failed twice, I went back to the car ea. :
and said I would have to go back on my purchase. He ae cles we
try it once more and, prior to the test, place two bo - ne
Whiskey on the back seat. I did; this time I was spar ne
manoeuvre I had failed previously (parking between two s on en.
I believe) and passed gloriously. And fortunately, ina i" e
decades of my subsequent driving I have never endangered human
oe nose early years of the 1930s were the times when one vs
invited to dance parties arranged by the (Parente of ween
daughters. With my usual shyness I hated nothing: more than ees
to dance and make small-talk at such occasions. z was .
outsider again, incapable of sharing in all that tlarting ant
afraid to be secretly ridiculed by the lions (ana lionesses) “
the ball-room. Knowing that the respective Parente haan
inspecting me regarding a possible "match" made my revulsion
me whee were also the times when the importance of one
emotional in life and world became more strongly felt. 88
works of art I was now able to appreciate not enly the J rons
(or gothic or baroque) kind but equally the cuakeice ener
ing that both elements could even be combined in one w i
nae "The Tempest" or in the classicist

i ni," or
such as "Don Giovanni, ede ea ied

lace. A la Husserl,
elegance of a "baroque" pa
ob phanoseiteiei of the different branches of el
; i 7

distinguishing the work of art that exists and continues to ex

inti eds
in space (such as sculpture or painting) from that which ne

100

performance to come to itself (like music or play); that which
depends on "interpretation" (like the latter ones) from the one
that doesn't need it; the one that is meant for use (like
architecture) from the one that constitutes l'art pour l'art; and
so forth. My manuscript has been lost to posterity, no great
loss, I presume. But for me it was a preparatory step toward
forming a world-view consonant with Nicolai Hartmann's ontology.

As for politics, I must mention that it was the time when
Ossip Flechtheim changed from party communist and dogmatic
Marxian to an undogmatic socialist. It was the effect of a trip
to Russia, which showed him that Soviet communism under Stalin
had become a dictatorship over the proletariat, where the ideal
of a classless society and of a state “dying away" in practice
had been transformed into its opposite, totalitarian rulership
("dictatorship of the Secretariat"). More remarkable, perhaps,
than this realization and even the relatively early point in time
where it was made (Stalin had just then established hegemony over
competing leaders) was Ossip's characteristic intellectual
honesty that would not permit subordinating facts to ideological
requirements. This also meant that - unlike so many other ex-
communists - he never fell victim to an ideology of extreme anti-
communism. His critique remained empirical, and the numerous
changes that since have characterized his world-view reflected
always the inclination to draw theoretical insights from nothing
but observed reality. And although even after his big
"conversion" our respective opinions and views have frequently
differed, mutual understanding has never been lacking; indeed,
during our last decades many of our views have drawn close to
each other. I cannot write his intellectual biography here, but 1
shall at occasion come back to his insights and opinions in
connection with the development of my own.

The political atmosphere in those last years of the Weimar
Republic became more and more oppressive. Whatever hope there had
been that the economically normal years anteceding the Great

101

Depression might stabilize the young democracy vanished under the
impact of the Great Depression, with its armies of unemployed.
There developed a civil war atmosphere; extremists on both the
right and the left, Red Front communists and Nazi storm troopers
clad in their brown uniforms engaged in daily street battles. The
seemingly moderate bourgeois "establishment," concerned about its
property rights, turned ever more to the Right. Administration of
justice, traditionally "“plind in the right eye," continued its
partiality in the ever more numerous cases of political violence
brought before it. For me, as a young lawyer as well as one who,
since his early youth, had always been strongly affected by
seeing injustice done, observing these trends was particularly
painful. Compassion and urge for justice turned into indignation,
indignation into attempted activism. It was at that time that I
began to collect the evidence. If justice could not (yet) be
done, at least posterity, if not those presently living, should
know what had happened. As for the present, those responsible for
partiality and injustice should this way at least be prevented
from establishing a one-sided view of events which then might be
used propagandistically to create a distorted world picture; this
urge predicted something of my late world-view of "perspectivism"
with its insistence on the importance of image creation for world
politics in an age of threatened human survival. This impulse to
see justice prevail or at least be brought before the eyes of the
public has never left me since. Over my life-time, it meant
writing unceasingly "letters to the editor," some actually
published, more of them not. It also meant spending much ~-
perhaps too much — time on reading newspapers: To get a more or
less "correct" world-view one had first of all to get sufficient
information about world affairs. At the time in question, it was
primarily the Frankfurter Zeitung, Germany's then foremost
liberal paper, that provided this kind of information; indeed,
into the initial years of Nazism it was not completely controlled
and was able, in Aesopian language, to report on early Nazi

102

atrocities (true, one had to develop an ability to "read betwee:
the lines" to get hold of the information). Later, in Geneva =
Wee the urna es Na ons that provided the fhlececear

information, especially on world events connected with the L °
of Nations. In America, it was at first the Washington peak ove
then the New York Times, two still liberal papers amon "a
decreasing number of such papers within increasingly eonaaneey

print media in the United States. For information about Boites

Germany I first subscribed to FAZ, Frankfurter Allgemein
Zeitung, the conservative successor to Frankfurter Zeitung, a i
when that took too much time, to the liberal weekly Die zeit and
besides the daily paper(s) I kept up my readership of weeklies
or sinilar magazines providing political as well as cultural
overviews, such as Die Weltbuehne of Weimar fame, or in America
The New Yorker and, lately, The New York Review of Books. To be
sure, to be truly informed one would have to get out of other
"wovaa paper"-type of press organs, such as Le Monde, the London
Times, or Neue Zuercher Zeit , additional information, but I
believe that my reading was broad enough to "get the han "of
situations and events. A more serious question that may be mais a
ab this connection would be whether reading predominately feet
i.e., liberal publications does not provide as distorted a world
overlook as that of rightist-conservative ones would do. True
there is no complete objectivity, selection per se implyin 4
certain tendency; but the left is bound to view more sekevaur
what the respective "establishment" is up to. sieeeceren
liberalism implies presentation of different views - if not all
of them, at least the more "significant" ones - even though
editorially, presenting its own, liberal-progressive cena een
(thus, the New York Times, regularly has conservative columnists
presenting their opinions on its pages, a custom not usuall
followed by the conservative press). ’
The rise of extreme nationalism in Germany caused me to
recognize something that most socialists and most liberal or

103

leftist intellectuals failed to see: the vaaeeure aed oomplan,
d in vo. sh,
group loyalty containe
appeal to group adherence an i
re Germanic-national-racist attitudes and movements; even
non. igh class-
i dually came to outweig
ng the workers, it gra
sccnanitenemema and its appeal to "proletarian" group loyalty.
today we observe the appeal of subnational "ethnic" groups ve
- i tionalism
i i traditions and emotions of na
in countries with strong sore erie
in; in the Germany of the 1920s a:
like France or Spain; but in
1930s it was still the nation as such that formed the center of
"national" emotionalism.
" To me, as a German Jew, this caused renewed emotional
"
eeneaunen, To feel that one still belonged to "Germany ow
: i the Nazis called it,
i "people's community," as
eee somrmuma dh i tionalism and
i i lt as extremist natio
became ever more difficu
antisemitism grew. But even this wave of nationalism failed to
i asa
i la find "community" in Jewry
make me a Zionist, who wou : ory eee
i to a "blue-and-white
roup. I remember once going ;
wants a girl pulled me to her bosom and asked me: an hed ok
: inst this kind o
i i i a always revolted agains
like being with us?" I ha wd anes, acting
i "togetherness," and so I
overly close and stifling
this up. But my yearning for belonging continued. At that moment

I was expelled.

i 1 not
And now to Kelsen, Hartmann, my doctoral thesis. ‘eee :
burden the reader with details. My later, es ae wee
concerns moved away from legal theory and ete - wore -
i i lopment of my ideas bo
earlier stage in the deve ad
considerable importance, and Kelsen's theory, by see engi
i tional relations thoughts
have an impact on my interna ; : i?
initial phase at Geneva. Thus a brief outline may be of an
i fo}

Having started my studies with law, my urge a ene nna

i i 0:

foundations of every phenomenon - in this case, legal ni

104

legal systems ~ found in Kelsen's "Pure Theory of Law" its (ever
so temporary) satisfaction. Kelsen seemed to provide the most
intelligent, the most evident explanation of what "law," "legal
norm," "legal order" amount to. During my studies I had found
that the question of how to define law had been contested
throughout history, beginning with Antiquity. The fundamental
problem seemed always to have been its relation to "justice."
Some languages (including German and French: "Recht" and
"droit") have one and the same word for the objectively existing
sum-total of legal norms: "Law" (as in "penal law" or "British
law") and for the subjective "right" one may have against
somebody. (2) While this already leads to confusion, the term
"right" (or "Recht" in German) leads to additional confusion
because of its underlying connotation of "being in the right," of
something being not only lawful but also "just" (in German
"gerecht"), in conformity with "justice" (a term used, in
English, also for the administration of "justice" and even for
judges:. "Mr. gustice Holmes," for instance). Thus the question:
How does that which is legally valid (the law) relate to what is
just, in the sense of being morally justifiable? To this question
legal theorists, philosophers of the "law of nature," and others
had forever given differing and often contradictory answers. What
happens when certain rights, such as "basic human rights" to

life, freedom, non-discrimination, etc., are not,

or not
sufficiently,

protected in a concrete legal system of a given
country? Are the respective rules of law of that country's legal
order not valid for that reason? How does a legal norm providing
for capital punishment of specified crimes relate to the ethics
of one who considers human life sacred under all circumstances?
Or, to cite some more mundane examples, what about property that
under some legal System can be expropriated, and a moral
conviction that considers property rights inalienable? What, on
the contrary, about a legal order that declares such rights
inalienable, and a believer in the collective right of society to

105

deprive owners of their property under certain icf
Must the entirety of specific, state-issued, sovcalled poet we
law be scrutinized under viewpoints of its ee ee a —_
moral sense? And if so, who determines what is moral? H vow
advocates of nationalization of industries or those who be at
in abortion rights within certain limits, aEESans “nm ed
justified may be abhorrent to "free enterprisers," OF to "rig
to lifers." Which way out of such confusion? ; ;

The Vienna school of "Pure Jurisprudence" tries to pear
by clearly separating “positive law" - the legal rules one om
the legal order of a specific community, such as a sta or nee
are issued by specific, rule-making anes Se on enna tne

xecutive, organs - from moral or ;

oe cmaecenaent from rules set by a state or similar cone
and thus may be in conflict with them. Thus onei can, oon eect
statutory rule of positive law providing for capital ee oe

as legally valid and yet reject the death Renalty un x =e
considerations. The way-out of this dilemma is legal re orm *,
in case of moral turpitude of an entire system (such as © : ee
Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia), trying to get rid ore
system as such (through revolution, if necessary). Those su ee
to a legal system are bound to obey ite rules? yet, as more
persons, they may strive to amend and abolish them. A eon mi
as well as the entire system to which it belongs; acer i Lis
Kelsen must partake of "effectivity," that is, it a -
"executable" in practice; its normative Coen og ox oe ceainy a

stain from doing that; if you fa ° '
veanetion" (punishment, or seizure — ae Cees an
oral norm, in contrast, is va ;
siresindln ee wanationing. It belongs, in Hartmann's terminology
(on which below) to another "layer" of existence. . ot the
Kelsen's theory constitutes the culmination oe no
"positivistic" approach to law. It solves ene age-old Te eanie
the relationship between law and justice by ¢

106

distinguishing law, as something enforceable and actually
enforced, from ethical (or religious) norms that are independent
of whether they are lived up to in practice and are peremptory.
The validity of law depends on law enforcement. This does not
imply an immoral or amoral attitude. Kelsen himself was a life-
long democrat. As legal theorist he recognized the legal validity
of non-democratic legal systems; as human being interested in
politics he fought them. He thus emerged as the creator of a
democratic constitution that replaced an authoritarian one: that
of the first Austrian Republic.

For Kelsen, "state" was only another expression for "legal
order;" "sovereignty" was merely an (according to hin,
unnecessary, ideologically-motivated) term for the legal order's
regulating everything within this order, from legislation to
execution (enforcement) of the laws and administration of
justice. "Forms of states" simply indicate whether the basic
rules (also called "constitutions") permit more or less
participation in "government" (i.e., in lawmaking etc.) by those
to whom the law is addressed, i.e., the people, and this way
distinguish democracy from non-democratic forms of government,
such as monarchy, aristocracy, or dictatorship. Similar political
distinctions divide legal systems into centralized ones (unitary
states) and those where certain jurisdictions are allowed to
subdivisions, which may, misleadingly, also be called "states"
(as in the United States) - we then have federalism -, or to
local units. The legal order also determines whether there are
certain rights and freedoms the legal system protects against
interference, in which case we may speak of a "liberal" system.
But all of these distinctions are of a political nature; they do
not affect the legal character of any system as long as it is
"effective," i.e., controls the actual behavior patterns of those
under the system.

One basic problem that confronts the Kelsenian interpretation
of state and law concerns the validity of a "legal system," or

107

state, in time and space. Since no system has ever controlled the
entire surface of the earth nor existed forever, what are the
rules that determine its limits? Where do we find them? According
to Kelsen, there is a legal system that, because it determines
these limits, is superior to the individual legal orders; is is
the totality of rules called “international law." International
law determines spacial limits (frontiers), usually through
agreements between the respective units (treaties); it also
contains rules about the conditions under which a state ceases to
exist (e.g., through merger with another state, through
annexation, etc.) and rules specifying that a new state has come
into existence (including rules of “recognition"). States may,
and do, create further rules of international law by agreement
(treaty-law) or by usuage (customary law). But by thus
considering international law as a (superior) legal system, the
pure theory of law is confronted with the problem of whether its
rules are enforceable (as, according to the theory, any legal
system requires for its validity), and how? Which are the
"sanctions" (like punishment in case of internal law) for the
case of rule violation? Kelsen, recognizing the utterly
"decentralized" nature of the system (no central law-making nodyin
no "world police"), here operates with the concept of "self-help
of those who are the "subjects" of international law, the states,
and distinguishes two kinds of self-help actions: so-called
"reprisals" and war in self-defense. But since war is as often
conducted agressively as it is in self-defense, and since a
state's power usually determines whether or not it can afford to
use reprisals or risk war, a basic criticism of the entire theory
is warranted; for me, it became the starting-point of my
deviation from Kelsenism in my Geneva period.

As soon as I heard that Kelsen had accepted a professorship

108

at Cologne University, I went to meet him; he was still living in
a hotel, pending his family's moving from Vienna to their new
abode. Thus I became his first Cologne doctoral student. As topic
of my dissertation I suggested the problem of the "identity"
(i.e., legal continuity) of a state in case of revolution or
change in territorial jurisdiction. The topic lent itself not
only to an analysis of a large number of rules of international
law currently considered as valid, and of corresponding policies
and practices of states (such as: Did the German revolution of

1918 make Germany a "new" state? Did the October Revolution’

affect the identity of Russia as a state? Did the establishment
of Yugoslavia make "Serbia" disappear as a state? Was Kelsen's
own "new" Austria identical with the anteceding Austria-
Hungary?); it also touched upon the theoretical questions of what
"state" meant, of its relation to international law, all of these
being problems that had been discussed within the Vienna School
in often conflicting fashion. I dealt critically with the
aifferent approaches. To some extent I deviated from a
fundamental Kelsenian theorem by distinguishing the state as a
psychological-sociological phenomenon from the legal order
created by the "sociological" state. According to (then) Hans
Herz, the state was that community of people which, in contrast
to other communities, such as religious groups or social classes,
had for its prime purpose the maintenance of a legal order
regulating its political and general life through the making and
enforcing of the law. Within a legal order the state may, and
usually does occur again as subject or object of rights and
obligations, e.g., when the law permits a person to sue the
state. Thus, I made a distinction between the "sociological" and
the "legal" concept of the state, something anathema to most
Kelsenians. I further criticized Kelsen for having wrongly
formulated the international law rule that deals with the
"identity" of the state in cases of revolution or territorial
change; I thought to have found out that that rule was the only

109

one which permits us to consider international law as a legal
order over and above the states (so-called "primacy" of

i nal law).
en a proof of Kelsen's tolerance that he accepted my
It was

"deviations." Of course, I dia not
him tly interesting to
t my thesis sufficien
rt him. But he though te a
wend AE to Rudolf Aladar Métall, his most loyal tooo neory
Geneva a man who watched over the "purity" of the a etry
wich eagle eyes. Métall, in turn, found the work not only
wi A

Law’
i Journal of Public

iew in the (Vienna)

cronies at a gratifying Cologne product of the
a for its publication (in
t I was

dissertation despite my

(concluding with calling it "
vienna School") but subsequently arrange! ea the
somewhat abbreviated form) in that same ee Oe aa
mber of the "Vienna .
ized as a scholar and a me ea
re my doctorate in 1931. In the years Se eolidan
" training at the Diss
i inuing my "referendar £
oaniin,. ocho ae an assistant to Dr. Wenderoth, the "crammer,
ibion me and put me to work on cases, mostly
in which he as practicing attorney

a is meant
represented clients at the Appeal Court at Disseldorf. Thi

ignifi he continued
More significantly,
i independent earnings. ;
oem 7 en after the Nazi takeover, when employing Jews
I have never forgotten the

courts,
who had taken a liking of
of a civil law nature,

my employment ev N ;
meant taking considerable risks;

ion.

e he showed at that occaslo: a ; one
a + forgotten other career possibilities; the

oe eusity te After I had taken

aera einen - cowed ae Em era ayoolt for a position
ecialist in constitutional and international law cone
i . . d to become vacant at Cologne at around that m
ciee, ae ders of a theoretical "school," he looked out
pon o oA os his followers in academic positions. But —
cntonve wie mukednd an end to all planning. Kelsen himsel
Fae e eh and politically committed, was affected by the cone
mations revolution" earlier than he would have been

as u
my doctorate Kelsen a

110

remained in Austria. He had accepted the offer by the Social-
Democratic Prussian education minister to come to Cologne because
he feared the victory of Austro-Fascism, under which he would
have become persona non grata in Vienna. Now German Fascism hit
him at Cologne five years before it would have hit him in Vienna.
I was greatly attracted to him personally. He had charisma and as

a scholar was full of brillant ideas far beyond the limits of his
particular theory; as human being,

he showed great empathy with
the problems of others;

as a Viennese he combined charm with a
sense of humor. Now, in the spring of 1933, he, with his family
(including two lovely young daughters), had to pack up and leave.
Having given up his Austrian citizenship, he now lost his German
one. Benesch, then still in control in Czechoslovakia, made him
(as he did also for Thomas Mann) a Czechoslovak citizen, and so
he at least had a Passport. His German post at Cologne was given
to Carl Schmitt, famous nationalist political theorist, who was
to become Hitler's "crown jurist." Kelsen got a professorship at
Geneva,.and there I was to meet him again.

Kelsen's "pure theory of law," which had attracted me owing
to its logical order and theoretical purity that excluded all
political-ideological distortions from the legal sphere and thus
agreed with my critical sense for system and order, continued to
be a central topic of discussion for me and fellow students at
Geneva (among them Flechtheim). Besides the doubts that had
arisen already before, in connection with my dissertation, I now
became increasingly skeptical not only about the approach's
applicability to international relations (on which below) but
even in respect of its "positivism," that is, its value-
relativism concerning all political systems. The "purity" of the
theory required clear ordering of norms in a legal system, and
absence of contradictions. This might be found in liberal-
democratic systems, with their clear distribution of competences
and where any rules could be tested regarding their fitting into
the system (their constitutionality). Such clarity of rules is

111

doubtful in unstable or dictatorial regimes. Where can a be
found in a Junta-kind of dictatorship where one ruler er ove
another one in quick succession? Where in a system in vn en
dictator like Hitler, disregarding any and all still exis oe
legal norms, has a group of opponents put to death neon ° =
an appearance of trial (case of Roehm et.al., in July 19 maken
action "justified" by Carl Schmitt's etatement “The ney xe
the law")? Or where, by secret decree contradicting all — _
laws, "mercy killing" of people deemed "unworthy of life an
practiced on a grand scale? Indeed, where on an even gran :
scale entire groups, whose members had not even a chance :
comply with norms, are being "exterminated," like ae nstine
gypsies under Hitler, or arbitrarily selected people ; *
Stalin's "purification" programs? In such instances: et teat
considerations inevitably interfere with Kelsenian mer
"purity." A system that lacks the most elementary a ar ce
generality and publicity of its legal rules, that is, t e ™ st
elementary legal security, cannot be called "legally ons a
any meaningful sense of the term. Would one have Fe conse or eet
Hitler's holocaust as a legally valid enterprise? Can Ho
"positivistic" rule of potestas facit legem be applied te eurEene
circumstances? Schmitt answered this question in Wis, RerSesntives
would the logic of Kelsenism compel one to follow suit?

When I was studying in Cologne and was still in the stage of

my full-fledged Kelsenian enthusiasm, I had attended Ps tees

of the Cologne professor of philosophy, Nicola a vay

Hartmann, descendent of a nara mage ‘ber wenocunals we
ing and as usual I did no

inti. he I was deeply impressed by TE eee ne eee

way of presenting his views; everything he said had J as

on observed phenomena, metaphysics had no chance to inv

112

clear and incorruptible conclusions; that which remained
inexplicable was stated as such, as an "aporia." His descriptive
method characterized his subsequent ontological work entitled
"The problem of spiritual existence, Investigations on the bases
of the philosophy of history and of the spiritual sciences" (Das
Problem des geistigen Seins, Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der
Geschichtsphilosophie und der Geisteswissenschaften), which was
published in 1933.

Hartmann's ontology encompassed the totality of the universe
accessible to the human mind. It was a Schichtenlehre, a theory
of a multi-layered universe, that is, the universe was conceived
by him as a totality of layers, or strata, where geistiges Sein,
spiritual existence, constituted only the highest level. I tried
to insert the Kelsenian system of legal norms into that
stratified totality.

In Hartmann's stratified universe each layer depends for its
existence on the respective lower level, while, except for the
lowest level, adding to it something new that is not contained in
the lower one. Thus the stratum of the biological, that is, of
organic life, is determined by the causal laws of the lower
level, the material-physiological world, but adds to it something
teleological, the novum of "aliveness." In Hartmann's
terminology, the living world "overarches" the physical one. By
the same token, the realm of the soul, or mind, of consciousness,
overarches both the strata of the organic and the physical. And

the "spiritual worla" (das geistige Sein), in turn, overarches
all three "lower" layers of existence.

To that highest level belong, according to Hartmann,
phenomena such as language, ethics, law, all works of art qua
art, all insights of science. They constitute the "ideal" type of
existence that, although produced by the mind and thus still
connected with the lower levels of existence, yet is independent
of its being thought, felt, or otherwise, "realized" by humans,
existing in its own way outside time and space, so-to-speak. At

113

the time, I could agree with Hartmann in regard to the
"objective" existence of norms, whether ethical or legal,
distinguishing, however, the legal ones from idealities such as
mathematical or logical "laws" or moral norms; law, requiring
effectivity for its validity, seemed to me to be more closely
connected with the reality of social and cultural existence than
those others. Thus, while logical theorems are "valid" regardless
of their being "perceived" or "recognized," legal norms were, in
my terminology, of "lesser ideality" (minderer Idealitaet),
because, in order to be valid, they must be observed and, if need
be, enforced in and by human societies. With this qualification I
managed to insert Kelsen's "legal order" into Hartmann's
Schichtenlehre; legal theory became part and parcel of ontology.
Once again, I had succeeded in forming for myself a consistent
belief about the entirety of the world. (3)

Today I am skeptical in respect of the "ideality" of norms
and corresponding phenomena of "spiritual" being; I rather
consider them as belonging to the next "lower" stratum, that of
the mind, of consciousness (Bewusstsein). But I have never since
done systematic work on ontological or similar areas of spiritual
endeavor. Since the totality of being that was the area of
Hartmannian and similar ontological endeavors is now endangered
in its presence on earth, I have rather become concerned with the
threats to its continued global existence. But the synthesis of
Kelsenian and Hartmannian insights satisfied my thirst for a
coherent world-view at that time. And despite my subsequent
doubts I still believe that in the systems of my (then) masters,
Kelsen and Hartmann, there may be found parts of that which, as
"truth," is at all accessible to human beings.

1.

114

This is why the usual comparison (in the U.S.) of ig)
: ( ) high
not only German) figu Po

: res of university att j
misleading and unfair. One r. YY attendance is both
attendance in Europe with that cr gicane compare cniversity

United States. ate studies in the

Thus Hegel's title "Rechtsphi *

philosophie" in § i :
wrongly rendered "phi n English is always
"Philosophy Sf baa” Philosophy of Right" instead of ¥

I published these insights i

z ed Sights in an article entit a i

sooo ned totality of existential layers" (hoes oo

theoretital aeosge eee This, like subsequent legal-
i "| =

“house organ" of the Pave haony ee oat ee gene nn

(Czechoslovakia) periodical

orie des Rechts (appearing i

7 a c g in German

journal, wae published until March, 1958, ston Niersere”

anwae one pe eghostovakia put an end to its appearanca

depending, not for ite eosrat eet Corts oa .

San Shane! onthe ieee lee for its existence in time

115

Chapter 6. A World Breaks Asunder

"For me it has been clear for a long time that
the world is driving toward the alternative
between complete democracy and an absolute,
lawless despotism... . Only one does not yet
like to envisage a world whose rulers might
forget about right, welfare, productive work,
and so forth, to rule, instead, in absolutely
brutal fashion."

Jacob Burckhardt
"Strange experience that, while one happens to
be abroad, one's country runs away somewhere so
that one cannot regain it."

(Thomas Mann, 1933)

116

on January 30, 1933, President von Hindenburg anbeine’ eel
Hitler German Chancellor. A few weeks later, a new haw rr tne
Restoration of a Professional civil Service," providing id a
@ismissal of all "non-Aryan" civil servants, led to 2 ee
severed from the service. Since university teachers were 1 ous
civil servants, any chances for that profession had also gone.
What did this mean for my life and my attitudes? ne

As happens often when hit by blows of fate, one ae
inclined not really to believe that what has Se meetin
happened; or to belittle it. Sometimes I dreamt that every ing
was an illusion and, in my dream, awakened to the rea a
before 1933. Awake, I proclaimed a "state of emergency ; a
myself; unfortunately, this did not lead to decisions ae :
to the emergency situation. At the time, the situation net
appear as the complete disaster it later became for vows ne
other opponents of the new regime; Hitler was cunning ona a
proceed on his policies of annihilation step by step, giv a
"non-Aryans," for instance, a feeling that only the oe ieee
might have to emigrate, while one would allow the old on _
live out their lives in peace at their present abode. Moree a
optimists, in those early years of the regime, aoe erant. weet
early demise, discovering in any and every untoward even Ae
as the Réhm revolt of July, 1934) the “beginning of the end.
remember how Herr Wenderoth (for whom, as mentioned me eret
continued to work) once took me into his inner sanctum (so * ne
to be overheard by his employees) to tell me that "it aarseeis
last much longer;" he had that from his "best" (ivesy ae
sources. Most everybody overestimated the - economic and o al
difficulties Hitler was facing, while he, to one's surp y

i with all of them. _
mae Tee never been one for making quick aguas aN
continuing my service in that ec aciney es aw CaaS mene te
out. From time to time I looke' nies

a e tiving abroad. Primarily for positions in publishing oF

117

book-selling. What else might one whose specialty was German law
look for? Thus I travelled to Holland, where the book trade was
largely in Jewish hands, only to be told that - in those years of
economic depression - there was no chance. Once there seemed to
be a possibility at a bookstore in Bucharest, another time at one
in Riga (then still independent Latvia); that these did not work
out was a good thing, since there I would hardly have survived
the gas chambers. In London I was introduced to the former
director of the Berlin Graduate Institute of Politics who now
headed a London institute of international relations; he told me’
that, had I come two days earlier, he might have made me his
assistant, but another young German-Jewish international law
expert, Georg Schwarzenberger, had forestalled that. Sometimes I
have asked myself what might have become of me if I had gotten
that position and settled in Britain; an Englishman, the way I
did become an American? Surely not a knight, like the (now) Sir
George S. Does it make sense asking what "might have been?" Is it
more than futile phantasizing if one asks what might have become
of the world if January 30, 1933 had not occured and therewith no
Hitler regime? Perhaps a "German-nationalist" government of the
presidential-dictatorship-kind Carl Schmitt had advocated during
the last stages of Weimar, with Germany "peacefully" acquiring
new Eastern boundaries and the world spared a second world war? A
continued multi-power system in Europe and the world, spared the
invention or at least the production of the atom bomb and thus
without atomic "superpowers?" Reading Karl Bracher's book on "The
Dissolution of the Weimar Republic" (Die Aufloesung der Weimarer
Republik, 1955) one gets the impression that, in those last
months of the Republic, things might easily have turned out
aifferently; and one recognizes to what extent the great
historical turning-points are often determined by seemingly
insignificant, trivial, even chance events.
And yet, London was to become the great turning point for me.
I met there Kelsen, who had just been appointed professor at the

118

Geneva Graduate Institute for International Studies. That school,
at the time the only institution of higher learning specializing
in international affairs, had been founded in the 1920s to train
officials for the then new international organizations (League of
Nations, International Labor Office, etc.). It was independent of
any Swiss or other official sources, subsidized by the
Rockefeller Foundation. It dealt with all areas of international
relations: political, economic, legal, and was staffed by a
mixed group of american and Western European professors, experts
in these fields; French and English were the official Institute
languages. It was headed at that time by two "co-directors:"
William Rappart, a Swiss who had been born in the United States,
professor of international economic relations, and Paul Mantoux,
a French professor of diplomacy. Both were liberal, humane
persons who made it a point to accept as students (and, as the
case of Kelsen showed, professors) who had become refugees;
refugees not only from Nazi Germany; political refugees, not only
Jews or other racially or ethnically persecuted ones. For them,
there were stipends, and Kelsen advised me to enroll there as a
graduate student. I did, and thus became a student again for
three more years, 1935-38. Somehow, it again meant dragging out
final decisions: Instead of going right away to America (as my
prother Gerhard did) or to Palestine, there to begin a new life,
I was to delay once again that final step for a couple of years.
put somehow it did predetermine my future: somewhere, most
likely in America, an academic career in the social sciences.
Geneva meant something else, too: As far as my attitudes and
my basic interests were concerned, it meant shifting from the
area of the normative (law) to that of facts and events, the
prutal realm of politics. And brutal they were. They had
destroyed my idea of a planned, orderly life and career in an

ordered, minimally decent, reformable environment. Now the chasms

of the 20th century were revealed: the abyss of racism that was

to end in the holocaust; total war, already foreshadowed in the

119

blood-filled trenches of World War I; absolutely brutal

rulership, as prophesied by Jacob Burckhardt. All of this
winccteapte weeses of still existing rationalistic belief in
e progress." The world became a theater of the absurd
and I became more and more pessimistic. Suicide might have b ;
the logical consequence. I weighed the idea from time and bine,
put youthful energy prevented me from taking the final ram
Shifting my attention to the realm of world politics, I : oad
that complete resignation was not a propos. If not exon cx
fascism might, perhaps, still be destroyed from without mes ah
. ,

my theoretical interests in analyzing situations there was added
a very practical interest in action:

What c
promote such an objective? ould be done to

To be true, I did not become a "resister," not even a memb
of any political organization combatting the Nazi regime ih
still at Dusseldorf, I would occasionally smuggle ile aA
qiteratire from Holland into Germany (which, when alavovars’
my frightened father, would be immediately burned); or I serv 3
as messenger for an anti-Nazi group, travelling from Geneva
Berlin to provide arrested regime opponents with legal def
(politically unsuspected, I still had my German poawrenk. “En
sovalists ne BS many did, go to Spain, there to fight with the

gainst the Franco fascists; for that I was too passive
and not courageous enough. Rather, I saw my challe i
enlightening the world about the true character of Secdeue ‘the
victory in Germany had shown what political propaganda ment
achieve; how exploiting its possibilities brutally and without
any moral inhibitions might lead to what some author at the tin
had called "the rape of the masses." Now, after having come to
power in Germany, Hitler, through his "peace speeches," w :
trying to reach the same effect through deceit in FncaBtegn
relations. The book I wrote in Geneva (and on which more ahem,
served the purpose of revealing the deception. Unfortunately its
effect remained limited due to the atmosphere of tappanaendit®

120

that prevailed in those years. The West simply refused to
recognize Hitler's policy as one of agression and expansion. That
became brutally clear at the very moment I arrived in Geneva,
when Mussolini's Ethiopian war became the great test-case for the
League-of-Nations system and, through its outcome, the turning-
point in the development toward World War II.

Only by recalling how, with trembling heart, a young German
emigré followed day by day the events that tested the functioning
of the novel Geneva experiment in collective security, can I
today still realize how high the stakes were at that moment in’
history. "Never to have war again" after that terrible first
"world" war, one had founded an organization, the League of
Nations, whose every member would be deterred from starting war
by knowing that, in that event, it would have to face the
overwhelming coalition of all the others, committed to assist the
victim of agression. And in case deterrence should fail,
sanctions would be available to restore the victim's rights. This
seemingly so rational system had failed in 1931/32 when Japan had
assailed China; still, one could reassure oneself considering
that this had happened "far away." But now, in 1935, the agressor
was found in the very center of the system, surrounded by the two
mightiest League members, Britain and France, and dependent on
continued access to those Italian colonies in Africa whence the
attack upon Ethiopia was to be launched. Today many believe that
the Geneva system was condemned to failure from the outset
because, so the argument goes, "sovereign" states would always be
guided by their own interests, and not by any interest in world
peace. But one merely has to realize how much more difficult it
was to prevail over Hitler, the Japanese,

of years later, in order to see that in 1935/36 it was in the
sts of the members of the League to
To achieve that, military
ini off from oil (a

very own, national intere
defeat Mussolini's aggression.
sanctions were hardly necessary; to cut Musso
measure even the still isolationist non-member, the united

and Mussolini a couple

121

States, was ready to cooperate in), or at worst, closing the Suez
canal (still controlled by Britain and needed by Italy to reach
Ethiopia) would have been sufficient. And public opinion in the
West seemed favorable. Mussolini's bluff that he would mobilize
his "mighty navy" (how deficient it actually was was World War II
revealed) was not called, however. Fear, anxiety, undecidedness
prevailed in Britain and France. It sealed the fate of the
League. Moreover, I am convinced that it involved the final turn
toward World War II by giving Hitler the green light for marchin
into the Rhineland (demilitarized under the treaty ckinalin@iesnd
of Versailles) and for his subsequent steps (taking over Austria
and Czechoslovakia). It was the end of mankind's non-utopian, at
that time realistic and realizable experiment in isolatin
aggressors through collective action. In my opinion, it had edn
touch and go. Had one gone the other way, much of the tragedy of
later events and present predicaments might have been avoided
Another "might have been"... . .
With that tragic failure of preventing aggression there had
also gone our, the German refugees', hope that one might be able
to get rid of Hitler and his regime without war. Now nothing
seemed to block his further expansion. And besides Mussolini's
triumph with its ensuing entrenchment of the Nazi regime there
were further blows: the victory of the little Spanish dictator
over Spanish democracy, assisted, as he was, by Hitler and
Mussolini; Stalin's "purges," and therewith the triumph of a
communist totalitarianism that did not yield in anything to the
barbarian of the fascist one. Truly, reason enough to cause
resignation, if not despair, to a Geneva observer of world
events. But strangely, those Geneva years of mine turned out to
constitute a mixture of despair and satisfaction, even bliss. The
terror created by events, at least in part, was cancelled out by
a feeling of gratification that was caused by being able to work
in freedom and in cooperation with people of similar attitudes
and opinions. To be sure, Geneva was not Elysium; still, it was a

122

temporary haven for those who, driven out of country and
accustomed work, thus could start a new life.

"Neu-Beginnen" (a new beginning, starting from scratch), that
was also the name of an association of disappointed socialists
and communists who wanted to fashion a new conceptual foundation
for a socialism that had foundered because of the split of the
left in Germany. Ossip Flechtheim had joined the group. He had
come to Geneva, and with him new and old friends with whom one
could discuss, argue, share ideas and ideals. Thus the evenings
when Hans Mayer, fellow-student of Cologne memory, read to us,
chapter by chapter, his newly conceived book on Georg Biichner,
genius of German drama, who had died early in Swiss exile,
remained unforgettable, as did his novel approach to literature
in sociological fashion - an approach that, after the war, made
the jurist turned Germanist a leader in postwar German criticism.
Above all, there were outstanding teachers at the Institute, who
made me view the international world and world events in novel
fashion. There was not only Kelsen who, for an evening seminar in
his house, assembled some of us younger ones to discuss problems
going far beyond "pure jurisprudence," such as Plato's and
Aristotle's ideologies or the world-views of the so-called
primitives; there were historians such as Carl Burckhardt, grand-
nephew of the great Burckhardt and sophisticated friend of the
poet von Hoffmannsthal, and the great Guglielmo Ferrero. exile
from Fascist Italy, who gave us explanations of the political
motivations of actors in world affairs that, for me, became
foundation stones of my later theory of the "power-and-security-
dilemma" of nations. He talked of "la grande peur" of those who
had acquired power illegimately, and of the impact of this fear
on their behavior patterns and actions. Such teachers created an
atmosphere of intellectual tension such as I hardly ever had
encountered or was to encounter subsequently. In such an
atmosphere creative work had a fertile ground. In retrospect, and
compared with subsequent and slower ways of production, my Geneva

123

productivity appears astounding: there was an entire book

numerous articles published in German, French, and English also
Book reviews, seminar reports, and other works, But nore
important than quantity was content. There was a dual concern:
one, more theoretical, to analyze the structure of the
international world, of international relations; the other, to
call the attention of the world to the dangers that :

thri i
from National Socialism. satened it

My more theoretical concern related to the question of how

international law, apparently a system of practical, enforceable '

norms binding upon nation-states, can be ocnceived as a
normative, functioning system ana whether and how it can be
strengthened in practice. As I intimated when describing Kelsen's
Pure Jurisprudence, considering international law as a trul

legal system encounters serious doubts. True, had the Ait ete
security system established at Geneva worked, it would have lived
up to the Kelsenian requirement of a functioning system of
sanctioned norms; at least, it would have constituted a beginnin

in that direction. The failure of the experiment, on the ther

hand, made it easy to conclude that international relations were
essentially still anarchical in nature;

in other words
1 power
relations among "sovereign" units not

subject to any actual or
legal authority. such realistic insight made expectations of an

evolving "world rule of law," of world government or world
federation, appear utterly utopian. At a time when even lesser
expectations such as that of states retaining their sovereignt:

but being able to act collectively to prevent aggression had
proved wrong, more far-reaching ones for overcoming international
anarchism were even less justified. All one might, perhaps, hope
for was an improved collective security system, an improved
League of Nations. How one might achieve that I tried to outline
later on, in America, when plans for a postwar world were the
order of the day. (1) These ideas, of course, could not
anticipate that the actual postwar system, atomic and bipolar,

124

would affect the very bases of collective security; but they went
already in the direction of Hans Morgenthau's political realism,
an approach that would emerge as the foundation of my later
"liberal realist" theory. .

This was a few years later. At Geneva, my chief concern still
was to fight for those ideas and procedures that might strengthen
the collective security system, and to indict policies of member
states or of organs of the League itself running counter to those
principles. This I did, e.g., in an analysis of the new Montreux
statute of the straits of the Dardanelles, published in the
(Geneva) Friedenswarte, a journal in which its editor, my teacher
Hans Wehberg, internationalist and pacifist, fought tirelessly
for peace and peace systems; or in an essay on the Sino-Japanese
conflict that criticized Stimson's, the American State
Secretary's, doctrine of the non-recognition of the "fruits of
aggression" (published in the Brussels Revue de Droit
international et de législation comparée); in it I tried to show
that such a "doctrine" remains empty oratory as long as there is
no system efficient enough to deprive the aggressor of such
"fruits." How about international law in the broader sense?
Aren't there, despite the absence of an effective peace system,
functioning, i.e., generally observed rules regulating at least
certain fields of inter-state relations, especially by way of
treaties and in the more technical fields, such as maritime law
or the law regulating the conclusion and validity of treaties
itself? In an article published in March 1939 in Kelsen's Brno
journal, that was brought out at the very moment Hitler took over
remnant Czechoslovakia, (2) I tried to distinguish rules that are
legally valid on the basis of the will and intention of the
respective states (contained either in written treaties or
verifiable from unwritten, so-called customary law), thus
constituting a partial law of nations, from non-legal agreements
that regulate the more fluid and more political inter-relations
of states that can be discontinued at any time, such as

125

alliances. To these problems I returned once more much later, in
.

the nuclear age, in m
: y last article deali
international law. (3) ng with problems of

The second of my chief Geneva conc
book entitled Die V6lkerrechtslehre de:
Nazi doctrine of International Law),
ve assumed name of "Eduard Bristler" at Zurich, Switzerland but
: im a preface dated from Paris and an introduction by a Beenie

nternational lawyer, all this in fo}
xder to protect my family t
: wy hen
838) still living in Germany. I don't think the Nazis ever
ound out about me as the aut
hor. Of course, the boo
‘ ; ; Kk was
prohibited in Germany right away, and I was proud to see the

respective notice in the Reich Pp
a ublic Gazette, sign i
Fuhrer SS, Heinrich Himmler. ‘ oped BY Reien

Despite its political nature,
Pamphlet but the product of meticu

erns found its abode in a
S Nationalsozialismus (The
which was published under

the book was not a political

lous research, analyzi
; : ; yZing the
doctrines German international lawyers had produced in the first

five years of Nazi control of universities and minds Most of
then were theories trying to justify an allegedly wears a
policy of Hitler's, expressed in a never ending array of spe c
and statements asserting the peaceful, non-aggressive and mune
expansionist aims of Nazi foreign policy. International law :
expounded by the Nazified professors of public and international
nace was, in most instances, therefore based on doctrines of
natural rights" possessed by nations, rights - ana here th
interests of Nazi Germany camé to the fore - such as the right 5
equality (allegedly denied under the Versailles system) vile o
Peart for purposes of self-defense, and so forth. At thee
time, law was minimized in its functioning, by alleged gene a.
disregard it in situations of "emergency," by minimizing the edie

international organizations like the League of Nations were to

play in international affairs, and so on. By showing up this

iegitimizing role of alleged scholarship, its character and
function as a politically motivated ideology could be revealed

126

After my book had appeared, this function became even clearer
when Hitler's foreign policy, after having fulfilled its purpose
to appease Western leadership and publics in order to gain time,
turned less "peaceful" after Munich; at that very moment Carl
Schmitt, after having worked out one of the main "natural rights"
theories, now produced a contrary doctrine (shaped after the
"Monroe doctrine" of an expansionist America) of the right of
great powers to rule over "large spaces" and the smaller
countries and nationalities contained therein; foreign big powers
had no right to interfere in such "large-space order."

In the last chapter of the "Bristler" book I tried to reveal
the true nature of Hitler's foreign policy, as simultaneously
concealed and revealed by his ideologists. His doctrine had been
there for all to read in his "Mein Kampf:" doctrine of the
German master-race destined to rule over inferior ethnic and
racial groups; need to defeat both "Wall Street capitalism" and
"Moscow Bolshevism" and to annihilate the group that controlled
both: the Jews; means: war, at first to wipe out France,
keeping England neutral, then to turn East to conquer the vast
"living space" to be settled by the master-race; ultimate
objective: to control all of Europe, if not the world. But
exactly as, prior to 1933, one had not taken Hitler's "rantings"
seriously within Germany, now, outside, one perceived of Hitler
as the matured or at least maturing statesman, believing in his
and his ideologists' assurances, trusting his forever repeated
statements that "this" or "that" demand was his very last one.
Those who saw through his tricks were few (among them, of course,
Churchill). Thus my book found few readers; published in German,
its audience was restricted to some Swiss, and some emigrés who
were convinced anyway. I had prepared an English version,
submitted to the Institute for its bestowal of a degree. I tried
to find a British or American publisher, without success. My
congenital timidity prevented me, as so often before and
afterwards, from approaching professors or others who might have

127

recommended me, or from taking other steps.
publish adaptations of certain chapters aft

the States, thus one on "The National Socialist doctri

international Law and the Problems of Slewetaeihe, ve
Organization," (4) another one, authored together with Senter
Flechtheim, that compared the Nazi doctrine of internati oe
ven the Bolshevist one, a comparison which may even ueliey gener

arry some interest. (5) This wa

Scholarship at least minimally usetul in mekoee nd
some effect, since the articles appeared at the an ne wien
traditional American isolationism fought its last unbtie wien

hose who advocated intervention o e side of the ant
t. r t n th
forces. (6) .

Still, I managed to
er I had arrived in

~Axis

Back to Geneva. Lest there be the wrong impression of

oirmerienl intellectual life centered at the Graduate Wigitiate,

mus e said that, besides the "bliss" i ;
scholarly productivity, there ee dee oe ee ef
blessings and more emotional bliss feelings, some love
affairs with Swiss girls, of short duration but for me, lat
Somers intoxicating. And there was, finally, Anne Klein peal
emigré, a young Jewish girl from the backwoods of the Fav tan
Forest, fresh like spring from the green and the fragrance of des
firs. We fell in love. In America she was to become my wife. H :
stay at Geneva was of short duration; to live, she had to A te
London, as a maid to some English families. Occasionally we i
meet, in the "middle," So-to-speak. Thus at Paris; I ‘atk mee
her arriving there for the week-end, carrying all she needed ter a
hat-box. or at Florence, where we met at "pensio :
Aschaffenburg," opened up by two twin daughters of my ie
Gustav. An example of the light-hearted spirit that animated :
at times - perhaps better called "gallow's humor" -; ew

There were some love

128

inscription I fastened to the door of our room there: "Dass wir
hier arbeiten, verdanken wir dem Fihrer" ("that we are working
here we owe to the Fihrer"), the text of what the Nazi "Labor
Front" had inscribed on every factory door in Germany; indeed,
without the Fihrer we might never had met.

There was occasional humor, or irony, in our relations with
the Swiss authorities too. Thus when those who, like myself, were
still allowed to get small monthly transfers of money from
Germany (the Swiss having insisted that German-Jewish students
were not to be discriminated against as compared with the "Aryan"
ones): before the bank would pay out the amount we had to prove
that we actually had spent the previous month's transfer. There
was some ground for the Swiss's suspicion that we might try to
save some of it for our future emigration to America. So there
developed a lively trade in receipts, from landlords who rented
rooms, from restaurants, even from houses of ill repute: non
glet.

There was little access to indigenous Genevese families. We,
students and faculty of the Institute as well as the large number
of those employed by the international agencies, lived in a world
separate from the "natives." For them, the many foreigners
constituted a danger of their being overwhelmed by aliens; their
conservatism caused them to suspect the foreigners'
internationalism, if not radicalism. In them one found little of
the spirit of their great son, Rousseau, more of that of their
other great son, Calvin. In addition, they were afraid that the
spirit of the "people's front" government of Léon Blum in
neighboring France might spread to the francophone canton de
Genéve, where at that time a charismatic labor leader seemed to
stir up the workers. And among the students there were not only
German Nazis but also some Swiss ones, mostly from the German-
speaking portion of Switzerland. One member of the Swiss-Nazi
"National Front" lived in the same pension where I had my room.
Our sometimes heated arguments at the dinner-table had the

129

advantage (for me) to render me more fluent in French.
however, the Swiss were still friendly toward us,
They still generously admitted us to stay with th
temporarily. The cruel policy of non-
political refugees trying to escape the concentration camps and
gas chambers came only later. That was after my time, and thus
personally, I have remained grateful to the Swiss for having
given me a refuge at a critical moment of my life. °
Toward the end of my stay there, resignation and even
pessimism and a feeling of depression set in.
the dark and uncertain could no longer be Pp

darkness of my own fate seemed tied to the da
Europe,

Generally,
the intruders.
em, if ever so
admittance of Jews or

ostponed. And the

rk fate threatening
my only accustomed world. My going away appeared to me as

a taking leave from a continent doomed to die. And wha
me, the new world, seemed utterly alien,
wide-spread European prejudice that perceiv
of a "mere civilization,
"culture." True,

t expected
still couched in the
ed America as the Rome
"in contrast to the Greece of European
: I had tried to get some closer acquaintance with
America through reading and through talking with American
students and teachers at the Institute;
could only be acquired in the country its
a trace of that "pioneer" spirit that ha
of immigrants.

but genuine familiarity
elf. In me there was not
a animated so many waves
It was at that time - the only time in my life -
that I tried to give poetic expression to my feelings of resigned
leave-taking. I sent a few of my sonnets to Thomas Mann, asking
whether they might be found publishable in his exile journal
"Mass und Wert." He appreciated them but rightly called them

"halbfertig," only partly complete; the term was & propos to me
and my life also.

Now the leap into

130

"power Politica and World organization," American Political
Science Review 36(6), December 1942, pp. 1039-1052.

Einige Bemerkungen zur Grundlegung des vVélkerrechts (Some
Observations on the bases of International Law),
Internationale Zeitschrift fiir Theorie des Rechts, vol.13,
1939, p. 275ff.

"The Pure Theory of Law Revisited: Hans Kelsen's Doctrine
of International Law in the Nuclear Age," in Salo Engel and
R.A. Metall (eds.): Law, State, and International Order,
Essays _in Honor of Hans Kelsen (Knoxville, 1964), pp. 108ff.
At the time of this Festschrift Kelsen lived (and still
taught) at the University of California at Berkeley. If here,
as in the following chapters of this book, I refer to
articles and other publications of mine, it is not to provide
a comprehensive "Herz"-bibliography but merely to draw the
attention of readers who may be interested in details of the
development of my world-views and ideas to the respective
source-material.

Political Science Quarterly 54(4), December 1939, pp. 536-
545.

See Ossip K. Flechtheim (publishing under the assumed name of
"Josef Florin") and John H. Herz (I now could drop my
pseudonym since my family had arrived in America):
"Bolshevist and National Socialist Doctrines of
International Law," Social Research, February 1940, pp. 1-31.
The subtitle: "A Case Study of the Function of Social
Science in Totalitarian Dictatorships" indicates the authors!
intention to criticize ideologies.

After the war, the Bristler book might have obtained the
practical function of assisting in the denazification of the
universities through indicating those who had spread the Nazi
doctrine. But since I did not return to Europe for any
length of time in the immediate postwar period, I missed the
chance to make the book available in occupied Germany; thus,
most of those who had more or less actively promoted the
regime remained in their positions.

131

Third Part
w World ew rld Views

One should not long for anythin

that is past; there is only and”
forever the new that is formed,

among other things, from the elements
of the past, and true nostalgia should

always be productive, create i
new and better. ‘ Peness

Goethe

Princeton and Washington.

132
War and Peace.

Emigration.

Chapter 7.

133

On August 12, 1938, I embarked at Le Havre on the SS
Washington for New York. We arrived on August 18. It was the
time when the distance between the continents was still
measurable and thus could be experienced. In Le Havre Anne had
met me, to accompany me from there to Southhampton. We did not
know how long our separation would last. At Le Havre I also had
met with my brother Werner, who had embarked at Hamburg. In New
York the other brother, Gerhard, was awaiting us. As "pioneer,"
he had gone over already two years earlier and had just then
obtained his first employment as college-teacher at Louisville,
Kentucky. Thus he appeared to us already as a real American who
might. teach us the tricks of American traffic and similar
behavior patterns and also an amount of "slang;" but this more
to my brother Werner, who accompanied him to Louisville. When,
subsequently, my parents settled there too, that city became our
new family center, our new-old Kentucky home. (1)

I remained in the giant city, all by myself. It seemed that
the age-old, fearful dream of lonely walking the city streets
had become reality. Never before had I felt so lonely and
abandoned. On my old, delapidated type-writer that I had taken
along I wrote about a hundred letters of job applications to
colleges and universities, accompanied by letters of
recommendation; in vain. The depression was still on, ‘and even
young American applicants had little chance. Moreover, I had
little confidence in what I could offer. In states of occasional
despair I made plans like one of hiring myself out, with a girl
I had happened to meet, as "servant and maid." There never would
have been something more unsuitable! The terror situation was
complete. At that moment there happened - once again - a
miracle. Gerhard had met the Florentine antifascist brothers
Rosselli when living for a short while in Italy before his
coming to the United States. Shortly thereafter the Rossellis
had been killed in France by assassins hired by Mussolini. But
through the family Rosselli Gerhard had gotten a recommendation

134

to Max Ascoli, an Italian antifascist who had emigrated to the
U.S. and had been appointed professor at the New York "New
School for Social Research," whose graduate faculty was composed
of German, Austrian, Italian, Spanish exile scholars: "The
University in Exile." Ascoli, in turn, knew the brothers
Flexner; the Flexners were the scions of a German-Jewish family
of 1848ers who had settled in Louisville. Bernard Flexner, a New

York lawyer, worked for the settlement of young German

-Jewish
scholars,

and it was upon his recommendation that Gerhard had

come to Louisville. Bernard's brother, Abraham Flexner, known ‘

all over the world as reformer of medical studies and medical
schools in the United States, had founded the Princeton
"Institute for Advanced Study," which - unique in the world, at
least at that time - offered to outstanding scholars a place
where, unmolested by teaching duties, they could devote
themselves to research. After 1933 physicists like Einstein

mathematicians like Hermann Weyl, .
Panowsky,

art historians like Erwin
had found positions there. All of them were permitted
to employ young scholars as research assistants. Abraham Flexner
was the Institute's first director.

Gerhard had given my name to Bernard Flexner. I had already
applied at many an office of the kind headed by Flexner, without
success. All of them were overrun by emigré-applicants, and thus
I came to Flexner without much hope. When he looked me over I
asked him furtively whether he was perhaps a relative of Abraham
Flexner. Well, said he, my brother Abraham, took off the
telephone receiver, spoke with brother Abraham, and I had become
a "member" (i.e., a research assistant) at the Institute.

135

Princeton

I remained there, with one interruption, for almost three
years (1939-1941). Like my Geneva years they belonged to the
most rewarding and most productive years of my life. They
afforded the opportunity - an unmerited good luck - to become
accustomed to the American academic atmosphere without having to
look for a teaching job right away, as so many other young
refugee scholars had to do. This way I had the occasion to
become familiar with American ways of life and modes of thought,
to study American history, literature, politics, and, above all,
to develop further what I had begun at Geneva: my concern with
history, structure, and theory of international politics. This
chance was offered me by the one and only social scientist at
the Institute, the historian Edward Earle. Earle was greatly
interested in the young European refugee scholars and had
assembled a number of them as his assistants at Princeton. They
would meet in a weekly seminar and, individually, be furnished
with research tasks. The seminar discussions centered around the
phenomenon of war. Of its members I mention Felix Gilbert, young
German renaissance historian, and Albert Weinberg, American
historian of United States isolationism, who had just finished
his book, "Manifest Destiny." As seminar guests one could meet
scholars such as Charles Beard, father-in-law of another seminar
member, Alfred Vagts, with whom one would hotly debate actual
problems of American foreign policy, like the issue of isolation
versus intervention in regard to the war in Europe that had just
begun. At afternoons, one followed the English custom of "high
tea"-hour, during which one had the occasion to meet with the
"great ones," like Albert Einstein. Individually Earle charged
me with researching the history of the European - and in
particular the English - balance of power policies in theory and

practice.
This happened to be in the center of what I had begun to

136

study at Geneva: the history and structure of the modern st:
system and its foreign policies. In my structural anal. i "ie
history of the last three centuries of the modern fhabfonencare
system in Europe had been characterized by a con tant
alternation of power balance and attempts to destroy the bal ee
and establish hegemony of one particular Power (with the ca ital
P, indicating the status of a big nation in terms of aoe: 7
that is that Powers like, at first, Spain, then, twice, ‘hee
'

finally Germany, who had tried to attain hegemony, were
,

prevented time and again from doing so by the coalition of the

other Powers under English leadership;

nomten, England, as an island

had been interested in the maintenance of the balanc
of power on the Continent in order to have its back free bs
pursue the building up of its empire overseas. Whenev :
MACESSar Yr this rebalancing was effected by war - the "gr; =r
coalition war" against the hegemonist, for instance the wa ” ed
defeated France under Napoleon, 1813-1815. Thus the joeinemen ra
power system, while not preventing war as such eurecnmetiosa oi
preserving a multipower system in which not all (see the case _
the division of Poland!) but at least most of the Euro .
countries could preserve their independence. pees
As I interpreted it, the First World War was the first

instance in which the "grand coalition" of anti

~he
on amie gemony powers

‘ even with England as usual rallying to the weaker
side, to defeat the would-be hegemony power, imperial German

All they could achieve was a stalemate, and thus for the Fined
time a non-European power, the United States, had to intervene

to perform the traditional British function, defeating the
hegemonist. At Versailles, however,

; one forgot the lesson
Vienna Congress where, <li

after the victory over N

was restored to the position of one of ibe ccsential baleen
powers of Europe. Woodrow Wilson rejected balance policies ae
something "negative," "pure power politics," trying to replace
the "old system" by something better: a system and a policy of

137

collective security. Yet his prainchila, the League of Nations,
could be considered as an institutionalized balance tool, where
a great coalition of member-states was committed to counter
"aggression" and, if need be, defeat the "aggressor." I had
observed the failure of that system of Geneva. Now it seemed
that, once more, a great coalition of world powers under
American leadership would have to be formed to defeat the Axis
powers. This, indeed, turned out to be the result of World War
II, but with consequences that, compared with the usual results
of such antihegemonial wars, were entirely novel. The structure
of this new, bipolar and nuclear world system was to be analyzed
after 1945.

There was something else in modern history that in those
late years of the 1930ies had begun to draw my attention. A
balance of power policy was something relatively rational. In
contrast to a policy which aimed at the maintenance of a
rational structure of human coexistence, however, there had
surfaced time and again mass movements that were grounded in
more emotional concerns; the more extreme among them, such as
the French or, subsequently, Russian revolutionaries, had for
their objectives not status quo but the attainment of the
"altogether aifferent," such as a classless society and,
internationally, of world peace among prother-nations - the
utopian ends in the cases of the French and the Bolshevist
revolutionaries. To this “utopian idealism" actual balance
policy appeared to me as a more realistic alternative, one which
involved a realism that had the advantage to prevent power
politics from ending up in hegemony or else in complete
international anarchy. Adding to these insights the idea (gained
from Ferrero in Geneva and from others, like Hobbes and carl
Schmitt) of the "security dilemma" of nations that is grounded
in mutual fear and suspicion, I now had already rallied the
chief theoretical ingredients of what was later assembled in my
pook about "Political Realism and Political Idealism." The

138

material for that I dug out in the old Princeton Library (so
different from the present, technically more perfect one, with
its little turrets, alcoves, bays) and, later, in the Library of
Congress. It was preeminantly historical research. I was - and
still am -- convinced that history is necessary for any
meaningful research about human relations. Whoever fails to make
history the foundation of his world-views arrives at mere one-
dimensional insights into world events - views of a world
WEEHONE depth and shades. Without historical background nothing
is explained and understood. The same applies to actors in
history: He who controls the past, that is, the image of the
past in the minds of those present, to a large extent controls
the future.

In this connection I may also mention another research
project that started to occupy my attention at Princeton and
continued to occupy me for many years, without, however,
resulting in something complete: the history of the German
image of America, that is, Germans! attitude toward America,
from Goethe's "America thou art better of" to the absolutely
negative one of the Nazis. I began to collect material for this
project at Princeton and continued with it in Washington, but
there were always more urgent concerns, and today there is so
much available about this topic that it would hardly be
worthwhile to dig out the old stuff again. Clearly, the idea
emerged from the actual situation in which I found myself at
that time, the urge to gain a more profound insight into my new
country, America. But it also reflected a more theoretical
insight that had begun to grow at that time, my understanding of
the importance of world-views for action and events - in that
case of the perception one nation has of another nation, and of
how such perceptions influence its action, especially in foreign
policies; and how such representations in the minds of the
reflecting and the acting ones change in the course of time.
Later in my life the problem of the role of "perception" was to

139

become a keystone for my own interpretation of the world.

My own image of America emerged rather slowly. Professor
Earle provided his Eupoean seminar members with lists of
important American literature, such as basic political writings,
from the "Federalists" to Walter Lippmann. Through him I got the
permission to audit courses at the university. Also, I followed
his suggestion to spend the summer of 1939 at a college where
there was no summer school and where I thus could freely use the
library. This was the case at Dartmouth, and thus I spent a few
hot and mosquito-ridden months at Hanover, filling my sheets
with notes on American government, U.S. domestic and foreign
policies, constitutional history and Supreme Court decisions -
cram courses in preparation for what I later might have to
teach, but for me, as usual, also a welcome occasion to delve
into areas of knowledge that had been inaccessible before. At
that time I gave my first lecture in English, at a nearby Jewish
country club; I had tremendous stage-fright. I unbosomed myself
of a carefully prepared lecture on "the origins of National
Socialism in German political romanticism." The date happened to
be the first of September, 1939, outbreak of the war, and my
audience was more interested in questioning me about that than
in exploring past doctrines.

My America interpretation was largely influenced by the
writings of the "Progressives" (Vernon Parrington and others)
and the then new practice of the New Deal. I learned to
comprehend the difference between a society that had hardly
known feudalism and those of Europe that were burdened with a
monarchical-feudal tradition. I had to learn the differences in
terminology: "Liberalism," in Europe connotating chiefly "free
enterprise" and market economy, in America meant social welfare
policy, while "conservatism," in Europe connected with
aristocratic or even authoritarian traditions, in America was
used to define a free market system unencumbered by social
welfare regulations. Thus I became a liberal in the American

140

sense, backing a development that had only recently began in

country or, rather, a Conti i,
nent where social Darwini
: ; sm had
prevailed much longer than in Europe. The New Deal this wa
rendered the Americanization of John H. Herz easier than we
woure have been in an environment of a still uninhibited free
or- j .
tne ee Today, for a largely conservative younger generation
reformist social~welfare enth
; usiasm of the New Deal
generation may be difficult to understand, let alone share ‘i
one of the most acute Euro sane
8 pean observers of the pre

political scene in the united States has put it i souls
,

now almost as bad as communist." (2) In the Thirties, as
° ; a

newcomer to American political ana economic life I most Liket
overrated the chances of a social, if not socialist peed
rage in a country that had never known a European-style
abor movement and where equality of opportunity had meant

upward social mobility for many des

herders. pite strong plutocratic

chuene gent of American foreign policy I owed to Felix
, who just then was working on hi w
Address," and to Albert Welsibexrga "innigent Destiny ieee
and forces that had determined U.S. foreign policies pe heen
mooted in the missionary ideas of the Puritan immigrants who =
mies Gee world the "altogethr different" where to build the
n in the wilderness," a Continent from which the pow
struggles of the old world would be absent; it was the nication
of succeeding waves of immigrants, who had come to escape bee
oppression, discrimination, and wars of Europe, to meneienls the
gestiny coneanent - this was their God-ordained, "manifest
AY. sequently, the idea of "mission" produced two
opposite foreign policy attitudes: that of isolation from th
singut power-system of Europe (never mind that, in practice n
American version of power politics came to prevail in West mn
Hemisphere relations), and interventionism 4 la Woodrow ton,
who considered it to be America's task to render the whole anid

"liberal sounds .

141

“safe for democracy," that is, to extend the American version of
democracy to the world. It was a new form of idealist utopianism
that, in practice, marked America's entrance into the so far
European balance-of-power system. It was soon to confront
American leadership with entirely novel problems.

The author of "Manifest Destiny" and fellow-member at the
Institute, Albert Weinberg, was a strange human being. For a
while, each of us had a room in the same private house, on
Mercer Street. Sometimes, late at night, he would wake me up,
asking me what time it was; he had not had lunch yet, had
forgotten everything over his studies. That house was only two
houses away from Einstein's; introduced by his secretary, I was
from time to time invited for supper and the ensuing music
presentation; Einstein played the violin, not like Menuhin, to
be sure, but with touching enthusiasm. The great man was a
touching human being, one who would put you at ease, made you
feel right away that he was "like anybody else" and did not want
to be admired as the genius he was. One was not quite so readily
put at ease. at the house of the other genius then making his
home at Princeton, Thomas Mann. He kept his distance, an
attitude that was symbolized by the fact that he and his family
had rented the only place in Princeton completely surrounded by
walls, in the German fashion. I visited him once, accompanied by
Flechtheim, who had to talk with him in a matter concerning
emigrés. Mann was at that time very helpfully occupied with
assisting opponents of Hitler to escape from Europe (his own
brother and fellow-author, Heinrich, among them). We had half an
hour with him; he was friendly and interested but "in reserve;"
perhaps it was his North~-German nature and upbringing that
prevented him from being more warmly "human" & la Einstein. Much
later, at Pacific Palisades which had become his final American
home, my sister, who had moved there too, and I would discover
him from the car, walking his dog. One did not dare to approach
hin.

142

In the meantime, many others had arrived: Ossip, as
mentioned, and Anny (now Anne) Klein, with her parents and two
brothers. She lived with them in a Manhattan apartment, looking
for, and getting, an office job. We would see each other on
week-ends. Our love and affection grew, but there was no
question yet of marrying. We still shared the old-fashioned
opinion - ridiculous under present-day standards - that as a
husband one had to have a "solid" position, able to support a
family. I was far from fulfilling that requirement. As member of

the Institute I made something like 125 dollars a month, just

enough to support myself. And one was told in no uncertain terms
that one could not stay there forever and had to look for
something else. Earle, trying to be helpful, would introduce us
to his professorial colleagues at the annual meetings of the
respective professional associations, in my case those of the
American Political Science Association, without much success.
Quite naturally those other professors would try to find
teaching jobs for their own graduate students, and thus the
"slave market" did not yield anything to recently arrived
refugees. One of these meetings, held at Columbus, Ohio, gave me
the first chance to see the American "hinterland." I can still
hear Harold Laski, dean of British political scientists,
proclaiming that no Labor government would be allowed by the
capitalist ruling class to nationalize industries in peaceful,
parlimentary fashion; this was only five years before Attlee
did; this did not advance my respect for "scientific" forecasts
in the field of the social sciences.

At one point, opportunity seemed to beckon. Earle had heard
that Trinity College at Hartford, Connecticut, was looking for
somebody who, during the spring term of 1940, could fill in for
somebody who had had to leave suddenly. Earle: "John (I just
had exchanged the German Hans for its English counterpart),
that's your chance." I had to jump in literally from one day to
the other. My very first experience at Hartford showed me the

143

real meaning of American democracy. My arrival had pees
announced for a certain time, and I had been informed a
somebody would pick me up at the railroad station: on arr’ i
looked around and, seeing somebody who likewise seemed to 100.

around, approached jim and asked: "Are you perhaps from Trinity

College?" "Yes," he said, "I am the president," took my suitcase
there.

ane weedy ever had I sweated so profusely as IT did over vee
first lecture courses of mine, in particular since nope of -
were history courses (Trinity at that time still ES eas

political science in the history department) . I soon neice i
however, that even as non-historian I knew of European ee
as much as my colleagues there, not to speak of e
undergraduate students. I found out quickly that the eee
American college could at best be compared ‘oan tne last years
of high school in Europe (that is, with Gymnasium in Germany) 7
most students had never peen taught modern European history, an

thus it was easy to cope with those courses; for those in

American government I needed more preparation; I coped a
the time-honored system of always keeping ahead of the stu sc .
by one text-book chapter. Of course, the low level of studen

ica was (in part, still is) counterbalanced

aration in Amer :
oy th merican system of

i Jraracter of the A
by the more democratic ¢

education, with college students arawn from all a
society; at that time at least, this compared favorably wit: e

more elitist European systems.
t
In those three months at Har
I had in the anteceding one and a half
years at Princeton. Life at Trinity College had still sone
of English college life. Thus, as a pachelor I joined aan
bachelor colleagues for dinner in a large hall seating the p ore
on an elevated platform from which we looked one seo elentt

the campus, where §

a students. I had a room on

seo ce topics or their own problems. On

ford I learned more about

education in America than

would come to discuss course

144

Sundays, chapel service was obligatory for them. One day I was
asked to talk "in chapel." Horrified I tried to refuse, claiming
that I was an agnostic. Never mind, I was told, I could talk
about any topic that came to mind; thus I spoke about what had
become of German universities under the Nazis. Hartford also
gave me my first chance to put my hands on journalism. The
Hartford Courant, a good liberal paper, asked me to write a
series of articles on the events in Europe. Those were the weeks
of Hitler's invasions of Norway, the Low Countries, and France.
Typical of my theoretical inclination, I tried to put into
popular terms an interpretation of Nazism that explained Nazi
doctrine and practice as that of a movement and a regime that
intended to solve great world problems such as nationalism and
internationalism, or capitalism and socialism, by simply
applying power and establishing control, domestically and
abroad. I wrote those articles like one obsessed, a would-be
praeceptor Americae driven to warn his new country of the fate
threatening it and the entire world if Hitler should win.
Subsequently I fashioned a more detailed theory of the nature of
National Socialism to which I shall return.

But Hartford also taught me something less satisfactory
about my new home country. My stay there remained a short
episode because one preferred another applicant for the position
I had filled temporarily and on short notice, an "Aryan" one. A
Trinity colleague of the now almost defunct liberal-Republican
faith told me, full of embarrassment, that my "non~Aryan"
background had been the reason for rejecting me; my
qualification for the job had been generally recognized. And so
back to Princeton, for another year. There I had another
opportunity for mixed scholarly-political activity. John
Whitton, a professor whom I had met at Geneva, had established
at the university the Princeton Listening Center with the object
of listening to the Axis shortwave radio broadcasts and to
analyze them for Washington government agencies; it was the

145

first monitoring enterprise in America. I was not occupied with
listening or analyzing but had to research the role of radio in
international politics from the beginning, when Moscow appealed
"to all, all, all" to rise in world revolution, unto the
Thirties when Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy urged
"exploited" people and nations to liberate themselves from
Anglo-Saxon tryanny. After "Bristler" this was the second time I
had a chance to tear the veil of sanctimonious idealism from the
face of Nazi-Fascist propaganda. Subsequently the results of the
Center's inquiries were published in a book for which I wrote
the introductory chapter on "Radio in International Politics."
(3) I immersed myself in this work with considerable enthusiasm;
it satisfied my life-long urge to "enlighten" the public about
disinformation and unfairness wherever it may occur, whether, in
the past, in the partiality of Weimar judges, or, in the future,
in the equally unfair white-washing practice of denazification.

To Whitton who at that time had delved into the problem of
the confiscation of American oil holdings (in Mexico and
elsewhere) I owed another research opportunity: exploring the
problem of expropriation in international law. In one article I
applied Kelsenian positivism by analyzing the role of the
respective rules in the system of international law (4); but a
turn away from my interest in positive law toward its social and
political bases was indicated by a second article that explored
the institution of expropriating foreign-held property in its
connection with power systems and the homogeneity or else
heterogeneity of international society. (5) The first of these
two essays was published in the most prominent American journal
of international law, something of considerable help in my later
teaching career.

What most concerned all of us emotionally at that time was
rescuing those closest to us, in particular our parents. When we
emigrated it looked as if it meant leave-taking forever. But
now, after the pogrom of November 1938 ("Kristallnacht"), it had

146

wecone clear even to the elderly German Jews that they had t
heat Germany to save their lives. At that night, SA ruffi :
, a
ne esnvaded and devastated our house; they threatened to beat _
cols ne (70) when my mother (Fidelio-Leonore-style) Etaned
se protectively in front of
him. The authoriti
ore ‘ es had
eines] permitted that emigrating Jews might use what. fund
ey still had to buy and take a
along some f i
household utensils. Sinc So, BY Gavan
. @ money was non-transferabl
did so, and this wa tiie 8 tee ben
y they could offer at Louisvi
; ; Ville a new
to my still unmarried brothers and to my sister aoe
them from England. ‘

For my sister there was added concern for

Konigsberger of Aachen, her friend, Joseph

; to whom she was quasi en

having been arrested several times and placed ina concent Alen
camp, he had fled to Brussels, ote, dies
Hitler invaded Belgiun,
time.

together with his parents. When
there were no news from th
em for a lon
fumes ae ae we heard that they had escaped to southern
an ad landed in a French i
Vichy-control
non , olled
conen ration camp (at Gurs), where conditions were as bad as at
cen cares there were epidemics, they became deadly sick but
ered, found each other, and th
’ en managed to cross th
Pyr i .
lene: and, via Spain ana Portugal, reach Brazil. From there
°
womelie ae ar they came to the States. Engagement —
med: Bliss for Lore and all o
fo us. But there h
i ; ad been
ones alarming news. One was that one of my mother's sisters -
°
reenee es to her - also trying to escape from Brussels to
- e, had got stuck at the frontier in a train crowded with
re ugees; despairing ever to reach a safe harbor, she had cut
er i
nee verns and died. Her daughter, with husband and little boy
,
i Shee to reach France, where all three of them, until
‘ z
ee on in 1944, had hidden in a small mountain village where
YY were taken care of by French peasants. It showed that
'

_ 4 .
mong the multitude of bestial monsters, there did exist

compassionate and helpful human beings, often among the despised

who had joined |

147

lowest of the low. But another cousin had not been able to
emigrate from Cologne; he, his wife and their young daughter
were deported to the East, never to be heard of again. My
father's youngest brother, living in Berlin, had to undergo the
same fate; as I have reported before, he had not been able to
emigrate, his own brother, now living in New York, having
refused him his affidavit. He had fallen victim to a Gestapo
agent who, posing as a friend, had promised (for the entire
money my uncle still had) to get him out to Sweden but then
betrayed him to the Gestapo; he was assassinated at Auschwitz-
Birkenau a few months later. We heard about that after the war
through his wife who, as "Aryan," had remained unaffected. I
still have, together with his yellow "star of David" (which,
like all German Jews, he had to wear), some letters dated
"Auschwitz" he could still write to his wife before his death -
shattering to read.

My parents never got over these losses. Like so many of
those who survived the holocaust, they reproached themselves —-
without reason, of course - for perhaps not having done enough
to rescue those who did not survive, to their own end brooding
over what might have been done to save them.

Yet there were moments of joy amid the sadness of this dark
and somber period, such as two weddings held in the summer of
1941. First my own, after I had finally secured a "real"
employment, at Howard University; it took place at New York,
where Anne's family had settled. My Louisville family could not
come, the trip being too expensive, but they were represented by
my brother-in-law to be, Joseph Kingsley (this his new,
Americanized, name, Kénigsberger proving unpronounceable in
English). At the wedding, to the consternation of my mother-in-
law, I wore a colored shirt instead of a white one - symbolical
remnant of my youthful anti-establishmentarianism. At the
ceremony at City Hall, the officer meant: "John, if I were you,
I would give Mrs. Herz a kiss." In my excitement I had forgotten

148

that. A few weeks later I, together with my newly kissed wife,
travelled to Louisville where the Kingsley wedding was
celebrated. This took place in the presence of both pairs of
parents and all the Herz brothers: ‘double bliss.

Washington I

In Washington I spent eleven years of my life, from 1941 to
1952. They were of decisive importance for the development of my

world-views, since they were years of radical change in and of

the world: America's entry into the second world war, defeat of
Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese militarism, thunder of the atom
bomb, emergence of two superpowers and therewith of a bipolar
global power structure, partition of Germany. Much of this
change in world-view will be dealt with in following chapters,
when I shall undertake a closer analysis of those global
transformations and of my writings based upon them. The present
subchapter will take up some of the more significant events that
formed my life and my ideas during that period.

When we came to Washington, the city was in the stage of
transition from provincialism to worldly, capital-type
sophistication. There, for the first and last time in my life, I
had the chance - although in tiniest measure - to participate in
policy making. That was in OSS, one of the war agencies. But for
the first two years, it was teaching, my first academic job, at
Howard University.

I owed my appointment there to Ossip. When looking for an
academic position, he had received an offer from Ralph Bunche,
chairman of the political science department at Howard. Having
just then accepted an offer from Atlanta University, he
recommended me instead. Thus I had gotten a position which
promised to be of longer duration, and I could marry. Howard,
like Atlanta, was a black university, the oldest of all. It had
been founded at the time of Negro emancipation in order to

149

provide for the higher education of blacks. When I came,
students were primarily sons and daughters of the then still
small, today growing so-called "black bourgeoisie," and thus
representative of an elite rather than of black masses. The
faculty was composed almost equally of blacks and whites. Most
of them were qualified, but only a few were outstanding. Among
them was Ralph Bunche. For me he became not only a friend but a
jmodel of a committed human being, one ready to sacrifice himself
for a cause; this cause, for him, was decolonization, that is,
the freeing of colonial, for the most part colored, people
through the United Nations in whose service he literally worked
himself to his all-too-early death. When I met him he had just
finished writing, together with Gunnar Myrdal, the fundamental
work on the discrimination of blacks in the United States ("An
American Dilemma"). Personally he was the most modest, friendly,
warm person, open to whites as well as blacks. From his own
experience of discrimination he had special understanding for
refugees like my wife and myself.

I never sweated more fruitfully than for the very varied
lectures of my first two Howard years. One surprising experience
I had right at the beginning. After a few weeks I had become
completely "color-blind;" that is, I did no longer recognize the
more or less black color of my students. And what perhaps, half-
consciously, still existed as "race prejudice," the idea that
blacks were "different," perhaps even less gifted than whites,
disappeared as soon as I found - with colleagues as well as
students - the same personality traits and, on the average, the
same talents and qualification as among whites. To be sure,
their cultural background determined certain special traits,
such as talent for rhythm, dance, jazz, something that has been
their particular contribution to American culture. Thanks to my
Howard experience I understood those blacks whom I later met as
colleagues or students right away and much better.

Looking backward I am saddened by the antagonism that has

150

since grown between blacks and Jews. There was a time when, with
a history of shared oppression and discrimination these two
groups felt close, and liberal Jews (most of them were liberal)
fought "Negro" discrimination and tried to help. There was some
black antisemitism, to be sure, especially among the poor: blacks
of the inner cities who felt exploited by frequently Jewish
apartment house managers and retailers. But that was hardly
comparable to the present situation where the two groups fight
over access to better positions, "affirmative action" and
similar issues. "Neo-conservative" Jews and more radical "black
nationalists" have taken up extreme positions, and that older
feeling of a shared, common fate has given way to "racist"
sentiments on both sides. Having enjoyed the friendship of a
Ralph Bunche and many of his fellow-blacks, I persevere in my
feelings of attachment and brotherhood.

Back to Howard. The president of the university was a
strange character. Like many presidents of black colleges and
universities he was a baptist minister who in his preachings to
faculty or student body could raise heaven and hell, from
fortissimo to pianissimo and back. He was outstanding in his
main job, that of getting the necessary funds, in this case as
appropriations from Congress, Howard being the only "federal,"
that is federally financed academic institution in the United
States (apart from the military colleges). Used to European
customs, I thought I had to introduce myself personally to him
right after being appointed, and thus, upon a Sunday afternoon,
my wife and I went to see him. When we told him that we had come
from Germany, he launched into a lecture on Hitler's ideas being
related to Plato's. That was the end of my personal relation to
him.

We lived in a modest apartment at the rim of the black
neighborhood around the Howard campus. When our street block was
"conquered" by the blacks (with one black family getting into a
house, the entire block would be "evacuated" by its white

151

inhabitants), we nevertheless stayed on the second floor of the
house where a black family now lived downstairs; I thought that,
as a teacher at Howard, I would not have to observe the
segregation pattern. But we noticed soon that we were not easily
tolerated in and by a now black neighborhood; we understood why:
Considering the shortage and inadequacy of black housing, they
did not see why whites should occupy even one apartment
"belonging" to them. And so we moved away.

Even though colleges like Howard have done much for black
education, the race problem as such has not been solved by the
rise of an increasing number of individual blacks into America's
middle class. Despite the antidiscrimination législation of the
1960ies actual discrimination persists in most fields of life
and occupations, chief cause being the insufficiency of
elementary schools in inner cities with de facto still
segregated housing facilities; this has hampered the rise of
even the most gifted time and again. And the emergence of an
underclass that prevents large portions of the young black
generations from entering the production process has meant that
the situation of blacks vis-a-vis whites has deteriorated rather
than improved.

Two events connected with these first years at Howard are
perhaps worth brief mentioning. The first illustrates the
linguistic difficulties that would beset especially the older
ones among the refugee scholars. My uncle, the psychiatrist
Gustav Aschaffenburg, had found a part-time job at Catholic
University in Washington and would come over from Baltimore,
where he and his family had found a rather modest abode, to give
his weekly lecture on criminology, after which he would come to
us for lunch. Once, completely bewildered, he reported that,
when dealing with the incidence of crime among different groups,
he had constantly talked of "monks" as "monkeys," and that at 4

Catholic institution! After the lecture a student had drawn his
attention to the error. We tried to comfort him by pointing out

152

that Americans are very tolerant in such matters and certainly
did not mind his mistake.

The second event was that Ralph Bunche asked me to write an
article on National Socialism for a special volume of the
“Journal of Negro Education".dealing with the great movements
and ideologies of the times. (6) This provided a chance to
analyze more thoroughly ideas I had developed when writing
articles for the Hartford Courant. I interpreted Nazi practice
as the "Gordian knot solution" of all the problems that the

world crisis of that time had posed to humanity. Whether it was ~

the economic problem of laissez-faire capitalism versus
socialist planned economy or the social problem of elite rule
versus democracy or the problem of basic values with its
conflict or religious and humanistic principles, Nazism, rather
than searching for one or the other solution or deciding on a
meaningful "third way" compromise, cuts the knot by mere fiat of
whatever serves its power; thus - to give one example - in the
area of the economy, decrees deemed necessary for the
preparation of the war planned by Hitler would be of the more
"capitalist" or the more "socialist" varieties as the situation
required, and thus "war economy" would mean neither "brown
Bolshevism" nor "red capitalism;" nor would their dealing with
problems of religion and churches mean principled decision for
or against Christianity. One thing seemed certain: Nazi victory
would replace traditional Western civilization and culture with
the entirely value-empty, absolutely brutal rule of the
victorious power elite.

Perhaps I had gone too far with this interpretation. The war
had just then begun, and my analysis may be considered as that
of an "ideal type" of fascist-totalitarian systems in the sense
of Max Weber. Two books on Nazism that appeared shortly
thereafter, Franz Neumann's "Behemoth" and Ernst Frankel's "Dual
State," were more realistic in their interpretations, although
Neumann's presentation of Nazism as an entirely "systemless"

153

side-by-side of four competing and conflicting power groups
(party, bureaucracy, military, and big business) probably went
too far into the direction opposite to my interpretation, namely
that of interpreting Nazism as "anarchy" in the sense of
complete absence of central control. (7)

In 1943, when most American students had been drafted into
war service, my job at Howard came to an end. I had a choice
between three job possibilities. A professor of international
politics who was interested in the problems of how to organize
the world when the war was over and who had read my article on
“power Politics and World Organization" (mentioned in the
preceding chapter), was interested in having me do research at
his Institute at Yale University. Another choice was to accept a
grant from the Social Science Research Council for studying
demography. I had begun to be interested in the great global
population problems, in particular, that of population increase
threatening to develop into a veritable "population explosion,"
with which it seemed high time to cope. What today has become
generally known as a problem that in its impact on world
resources, human habitat and environment, threatens the very
survival of mankind, was little noticed at that time; the
present tragic situation has its cause in that there were too
few who cared in time. There were books with titles like "our
Plundered Planet" (by Fairfield Osborn) which warned of the
planet's shrinking carrying capacity for a rapidly increasing
population, but action was delayed (as it still is today, by and
large). My interest in these problems - problems that by now are
in the center of my "survival" concerns - had emerged already at
that time. The third alternative was to enter one of the war
agencies set up by the government to deal with special problems
concerning the conduct of the war, such as OEW (Office of

154

Economic Warfare), OWI (Office of War Information), or OSs
(Office of Strategic Services). This was what I decided to do.
This war would decide about victory or defeat of the greatest
threat to Western civilization in the last centuries, and I
wanted to contribute whatever I could to ensure the victory of
my new country.

The Office of Strategic Services was a strange animal. Today
it is remembered chiefly for the exploits of its spies dropped
behind enemy lines or similar "airborne" boldness. Less well
known are the activities of what one may call its "chairborne"
division, its R and A (Research and Analysis) branch, whose main
task, besides collecting information, was to prepare for
immediate postwar problems, such as what American policy should
be in regard to defeated enemies; occupation policies in Germany
and Japan, for instance. The second world war was a genuine war
of opposed systems and ideologies and exactly as a victory of
the fascist systems would have meant the extinction of any and
all democratic and liberal values, it seemed to be the
legitimate objective of the Western democracies to introduce or
reintroduce these values into the defeated enemy countries.
Thus, the Central Euroean Section in the R&A branch of OSS had
assembled a group of experts in German (and also Austrian,
Hungarian, and Czechoslovak) affairs to prepare for American MG
(Military Government) policies in the respective countries. As
far as Germany was concerned, it was clear right from the outset
that denazification and democratization ("reeducation," as one
called it at the time) would not be easy; it would not be
something that could be left to Germans right away. There was
less unanimity about how to deal with the seemingly paradoxical
problem facing the occupant, namely, to decree freedom so-to-
speak from above ("Forced to be Free" was the significant title
of a book that appeared shortly after the war). Today one
usually distinguishes two attitudes that, so one believes, had
opposed each other in the United States and also in Britain: a

155

punitive one, advocating prolongued occupation, if not
partition, of Germany to impress the largely Nazified German
population with the misdeeds of their rulers; this attitude was
at the basis of the famous, or infamous, plan promoted by the
then Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, suggesting
deindustrialization of Germany in order to deprive the country
of any future warmaking capacity. This plan was shelved before
the war ended. An opposing policy was advocated by those who
wanted to see Germany rebuilt economically and otherwise as fast
as possible, so as to have a bulwark against Soviet power,
which, so one feared, would emerge from the war immensely
strengthened.

While this second kind of policy became the one that
actually prevailed as soon as the war was over (with the
beginning of the "cold war" between East and West), there was a
third type of policy, promoted by many American liberals: it
was a policy that proposed, not to punish all Germans for the
misdeeds of their Nazi rulers but to prepare them for liberal
democracy, a task that should be given precedence over an
economic (and possibly military) reconstruction that might not
allow sufficient time and effort to denazify and democratize.
This was the policy line that was accepted and pursued in the
Central European Section. It was a strange group of people that
had assembled there, for the most part emigrés, most of whom had
not even acquired American citizenship and thus, technically,
still were "enemy aliens;" and this in one of the "most
sensitive" war agencies! That the government was able to
distinguish between such "friendly enemy aliens" and not so
friendly ones, attests to its political acumen.

A further OSS paradox lay in the fact that the three
intellectually leading persons in the section were leftist
German social scientists who had been active in the famous
Institute for Social Research that had migrated from Frankfurt
to New York: Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and otto

156

Kirchheimer. All of them were Marxists and had belonged to the
left wing of the German Social Democratic Party. It was as if
the left-Hegelian Weltgeist had taken up temporary residence in
the Central European Section of OSS! of late, as one of the few
surviving members of that group, I am constantly asked
(especially by younger, left-leaning social scientists in the
United States as well as in Germany) how come that avowed
socialists could collaborate with "capitalist" Americans in, of
all organizations, an intelligence agency? It was indeed a
strange alliance. But there was common ground for cooperation.
Those politically motivated intellectuals could agree with a
"bourgeois" government executive (as they did also with their
non-Marxist colleagues in the section) at least on the first,
immediate objective: victory in war and establishment of
democracy in the enemy countries. As a matter of fact, those
three's idea of post-Nazi Germany was the moderate one of a
liberal democracy that would leave open the way to subsequent
socialism. They realized that in a traditionally authoritarian
country like Germany, with its few and weak democratic roots,
the first step would have to be to create liberal, "rule of law"
(Rechtsstaat)-type foundations that would do away with Germany's
feudal-authoritarian forces in the military, the judiciary, in
economic and administrative bureaucracies, and even in schools
and labor unions. Socialism would have a chance when, ina
system of freely competing parties, a united (so one hoped)
socialist party would come to the fore.

This way, liberal-democratic goals were at the basis of all
our endeavors in the section: Endeavors that comprised the
writing of "Civil Affairs Guides," which contained directives
for future American military government officers. How much the
practitioners' practice deviated from our theoretical goals
became clear as soon as the war ended. In many instances the
guides did not even reach the respective MG authorities, or they
came too late, or were simply disregarded. Thus, as far as

157

denazification was concerned, a fairly reasonable and, as I
believe, practicable directive was distorted into a stupid
practice of questioning the entire population (millions of
people!) to find out how they had behaved under Nazism; small
wonder that, after a short period of putting vast masses into
internment camps the vast majority of even deeply involved Nazis
would be released, "punished" with small fines, amnestied, or
similarly "white-washed," free, with few exceptions, to enter or
reenter offices and occupations; a result that was deeply
disappointing not only to our "socialists" but to us liberal-
democratic minded also.

There was a more general lesson I could draw from OSS
experience. It concerned decision-making. What we in our lowly
section worked out and suggested had, first of all, to survive
the scrutiny of an endless number of committees, intra-agency,
then of other war agencies, from there to Department of State,
War, and Navy; finally, the American draft had to be adjusted to
and with the British counterparts (there was, as far as I know,
no cooperation with the Soviets, nor with the Free French, for
that matter). This way what evolved was frequently quite
different from what we had brought forth. Never had it been
clearer to me how little that which the "experts" on the lower
level work out compares with what the top decision-makers
ultimately decide. Whatever details, distinctions,
qualifications are made, refined, suggested "below" disappear,
are simplified, changed, made subjects of compromise on their
way to the "top" so that, not infrequently, the very opposite of
the original intention prevails. Often the "terrible
simplificateurs" submit to the overworked ministers, presidents,
or similar decision-makers on one page, and simplified to the
utmost, what learned expertise had submitted on hundreds of
pages in minute detail.

What I owed to OSS above all was my friendship with Otto
Kirchheimer. To get close to Marcuse or Neumann was difficult;
they kept their distance, sometimes a bit overweeningly. Not so
Kirchheimer. He could be brusque, or even rude, and this way he
alienated some. He did not suffer fools gladly. People who
wanted something from him without really needing help he would
reject curtly. But I can testify to the fact that he would
generously assist those who needed his assistance, above all
persons who, during the McCarthy period, were persecuted without
justification as being "disloyal" or constituting "security
risks." People who, without having the necessary intelligence
yet claimed to be intellectuals he would make fun of. Thus,
about one who had gone from OSS to the Library of Congress, he
quipped: "Now he is happy, because now he has to look at the
books only from the outside." But if one refused to accept his
rudeness one would be recognized as an equal and might even
become a friend. This happened to me. I had met him briefly in
New York, and we met again in a downtown Washington roller-
skating rink that had been taken over by OSS on short notice. We
worked there at long tables. One day, when working there I
noticed that a bulky person had sat down next to me and had
begun to expand his realm against his neighbors. It was Otto. We
greeted each other and I remarked: Here is the line. Your
territory begins to the right of it, and mine to the left. This
was the beginning of our friendship.

He was one of the most brillant human beings I ever met,
full of sharp insights and intuition. His main difficulty was in
organising his ideas. That is why he never built a scholarly
"system" in the usual sense. His creativity was in his at times
almost uncanny ability to lift from the limitless data furnished
by history that which is relevant, and to analyze it in highly
original fashion. He was above all an initiator, instinctively
at the frontier of knowledge. His business, as he once put it,

159

was "to uncover the basic mechanisms of political order and
disorder," a task, however, where "the urgent need of criticism
was not to overshadow the idea of a constant objective -
creating conditions that make sense and are worthy of human
beings." To that goal he steadfastly held from his beginnings as
a young socialist and Marxist to his end. Although at his later
stages he no longer believed in Marx's utopia of a classless
society, Marxism remained for him "the best method for analyzing
social phenomena." Next to Marx there remained, though in
decreasing measure, the influence of his teacher, Carl Schmitt,
whom he followed above all in evaluating the "concrete features"
of a given situation. With Schmitt, this often meant to consider
the "exceptional" as the "normal," a tendency which led his
student Kirchheimer at times toward extreme conclusions, for
instance, when, in his doctoral dissertation on the political
doctrines of socialism and Bolshevism, he characterized both
liberal democracy (of the Weimar type) and Soviet communism as
"non-states," the one being an "empty legal machine," the other,
a world-wide "interventionist movement." Later he renounced such
youthful extremism and thus became more convincing. Thus - to
mention only one of his best-known analyses - he recognized
already at an early point in the postwar period the
transformation process of European political parties from class-
or group-based ideological parties to what, with a felicitous
expression, he called "catch-all parties," that is, parties
appealing to any and all sorts of groups and interests (the term
"catchall" being paradigmatic of his faculty to coin startling
expressions for concrete developments.) He regretted that
because it signified the waning of meaningful oppositions, in
whose place opposition now tended to become a mere "appendix
(Wurmfortsatz) of the official state power."

In the late stage of his political thinking his genius for
concrete analysis came strongest to the fore, making him less
pound to theorizing and open to recognize what is, or was, of

160

value even in the formerly despised liberal polity. In sharp
contrast to Schmittian antiliberalism he would for instance
recognize something positive in the functioning of the
authoritarian but liberal monarchies of the 19th century, which
left "free space" to their citizens to some extent. He pointed
out the value of such "free spaces" when he wrote his one
comprehensive work, "Political Justice," a work in which he, as
one reviewer put it, "with’ cosmic objectivity, but with a
feeling for the human beings involved - both judge and judged,"
traced the use, or misuse, of legal institutions and judicial
procedures for political ends; it is a study in political
sociology relating the techniques of political justice to any
number and types of society and constitutional order. Here, too,
he emphasized the "judicial space" left to judges in liberal
systems, in contrast to judges functioning as mere instruments
of control in and for totalitarian regimes. In his last essays
one notices a certain resignation, a pessimistic outlook on man
no longer a citizen participating in a political community, but
being transformed into an alienated individual in a consumers!
society where even the worker, now called "executant," no longer
shares values with his "class" or any other group.

When working together in OSS I could help him to structure
his ideas in such a way as to render them readable essays. He
was the originator, I, as "man of order," the arranger. But he
could accept ideas of others, too. We came closer to each other
also in that he could not tolerate injustice and unfair
behavior-patterns. He concealed utter decency behind a facade of
rudeness. His statements were often of refreshing frankness.
Thus he once said to me: "John, you belong to the few people
who are more intelligent than they look like." This could be
interpreted as praise or the opposite. Of course, I preferred
the first alternative.

Otto loved wine, books, paintings, and nature. He had
settled with his family in a remote house near Washington,

161

surrounded by woods. We often drove with him and his wife into
the forest "wilderness," with his wife doing the driving; he had
never learned how to drive a car. Besides the house-keeping, his
wife served as chauffeuse who drove him, friends, and visitors
pack and forth. His house was forever full of visitors. In
addition, Anne Kirchheimer managed all his financial and
professional affairs; in short, she sacrificed herself for hin.
At times, when driving us around in the woods and he had become
rude, she would simply ask him to get out. We would come back
after half an hour to pick him up again; in the meantime, he had
reconnoitered the area, collected mushrooms, and cooled off.

His love of nature, unfortunately, was to be his undoing.
Even after he had begun his teaching in New York (first at the
New School, then at Columbia), he had been unwilling to give up
his home in Silver Spring and commuted by air between Washington
and New York. He suffered from a heart condition, and when one
day he was late and rushed to get on his plane, he collapsed.
His death came all too early; he just had turned sixty. Since
then I miss him, as human being as well as one with whom to
share one's ideas. (8)

Nurnberg Interlude

My return to Europe ~ seven years after I had left - came
somewhat unexpectedly. In OSS we had, of course, heard about the
Nazi atrocities - especially those committed in the East, and in
particular the holocaust - that word was not yet in use, one
called it genocide -, and we had participated in the preparation
of the trials of those whom, according to the Moscow Declaration
on war crimes (1943), the Allies had committed themselves to
pursue "unto the end of the world" to bring them to justice.
Now, at Nirnberg, they were sitting on the defendants' bench,
all of them (except Géring) broken, rueful figures, claiming not
to have known of anything.

162

That a group of Central European OSS members had come to
Nurnberg we owed to the sometimes rather strange notions of OSS
director William Donovan, known as "Wild Bill Donovan." Not
content with the adventurous wartime exploits of his spies
dropped by parachute behind the enemy lines, he wanted to have
his fingers in the pie even after the war was over, wherever
something interesting seemed to occur. And so he had talked
Supreme Court Justice Jackson, whom Roosevelt had appointed
chief U.S. prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal,
into adding to his staff at Nurnberg a few of his OSS experts.
By itself, this was not unjustified, since Jackson, for the
preparation of his briefs, had at his disposal chiefly officers
who in civilian life were perhaps divorce or patent lawyers or
such. Now, at short notice, they had been ordered to occupy
themselves with criminal cases involving very different legal
systems, with codes and rules couched in foreign language,
everything quite alien to them. We were supposed and able to
help out. But anybody with a modicum of psychological insight
would have known that not much good would result from such
cooperation. For those officers it meant that they had to open
their documents and papers to young, fresh, Central European
upstarts, most of them Jews to boot, and to stand corrected in
much of what they had worked out. This could not but hurt their
self-esteem. The atmosphere became rather tense. When meeting at
the only bar of the only hotel that had remained undamaged,
debates, after some drinks, threatened to develop into violence.
Thus our contribution to the common effort remained moderate,
and most of us were glad to return to the States after some six
to eight weeks we spent at the trial.

Since this is not the place to deal with the (legal,
political, moral) problems raised by the war crimes trials (for
instance, whether justice handed down by judges from victor
nations did not mean "victors! justice;" whether one should not
better have entrusted anti-Nazi Germans with trying their

163

compatriots; what to make of Roosevelt's master-idea to make
"waging aggressive warfare" a crime under international law as a
deterrent to future aggression; and so forth), the following
pages will contain only some more or less personal,
impressionistic details of my short trip.

My first transoceanic flight - to Paris, by way of Bermuda
and the Azores. Good old Paris, almost undamaged, full of GI's;
the girls on the Champs Elysées, whispering into your ear:
“Cing cents francs pur un tout petit moment." Waiting for a
plane that was to take us to Nurnberg. Did not come. Therefore,
accepted the offer of a GI to fly with him and one of his
comrades to Nirnberg in a tiny, one-prop plane. Did not realize
what that meant; that pilot had not the slightest idea of
direction, lost his way, intimated need of emergency landing, in
which case we would have to use the parachutes fastened to our
backs. I had not the slightest idea how to use them and prepared
myself for my last minute. Eventually we found our way, and I
found my sleeping quarters, somewhere in a suburb. - Somber
impressions of a bombed-out city. Where were the old churches,
with their stained glass windows shimmering silver and blue? The
fountains, the old houses? A little story may show how difficult
it was to find one's way through the ruins: One of my Oss
colleagues, lieutenant Sharp, had some business in the nearby
Bavarian Forest and took me along in his jeep so I could inspect
the house of my wife's family at Cham, her birth-place. There, a
rumor that a representative of the Klein family had arrived to
take over house and business of his father-in-law had spread; of
course it was not my intention to "take over" anything. I merely
talked with the owner, who clearly showed his bad conscience of
having very profitably acquired the property when my father-in-
law had had to emigrate. When, later in the evening, Sharp and I
returned to Nirnberg there was a dense fog, and we lost our way
to "the" hotel in the maze of the ruins. Never felt so lost -
uncanny. Suddenly an MP. I did not wear a uniform; as an

164

inveterate civilian I had declined to wear the uniform of an
officer with the "assimilated rank of a colonel," and thus the
MP suspected me to be a German violating the curfew. Neither was
I in the possession of the usual army document (the army having
failed to provide me with one); all I hada was my recently
obtained U.S. passport. Such a one the MP had never seen, and my
thick American accent did not contribute to diminishing his
suspicion. He was at the point of arresting me when Lieutenant
Sharp intervened. Pulling rank he shouted "Don't you know that

you have to salute an officer?"; I used the developing debate to

disappear in the fog, and after a while found my way back to the
hotel. - At another time, Sharp and I drove to Munich where,
over night, we were installed in a hotel which was "open" at one
side, that is, the wall had been bombea away and we had to lie
down close to the other wall so as not to drop down into empty
space. Sharp, with his humor, would later calumniously maintain
that I had wanted to seduce him and that he had had to make
quite an effort to resist! :

The atmosphere in Germany was oppressive. Fraternizing was
prohibited, and thus I could not converse with people who, after
all, had been my compatriots not too long ago. To visit Otto and
Fritz Griiters, who lived in the British zone of occupation,
proved impossible. However, as a member of the Nurnberg
prosecution, I could interrogate Frick, the former Nazi minister
of the interior. There he was, pale and run-down, his trembling
hand accepting an offered cigarette, and deposed. It might well
be true that he, although officially the superior of the
Himmlers, Heydrichs, Eichmanns and the other mass murderers, was
less responsible than these, who had enjoyed direct access to
Hitler. Yet I am convinced that his conviction and execution
were justified, because he had covered everything with his name.
But, unlike many, I had no feeling of revenge satisfied, of
having "settled accounts." My concern was to help present to the
world, and to Germans in particular, a correct and clear picture

165

of what had happened. And in this respect Nirnberg and what
followed by way of subsequent war crimes trials unfortunately
remained rather ineffective; only after many decades has mankind
taken notice of the frightful event, now called holocaust. After
about eight weeks of Nirnberg, I was relieved and glad to return
to my new country.

Washington IT

When finishing the last sentence with the words "my new
country," I have to qualify that. Coming back, I had to face the
problem of self-definition: Was I now an American or still a
German who now could return to "his" country again? For those
refugees who had considered the period of Nazism and war mere
"exile," an inevitable episode of "being abroad," return now was
not only a possibility but a chance - an opportunity to help out
in that post-Nazi Germany for which they had waited and prepared
themselves during their enforced absence. Most of these were the
political refugees, who considered it their duty to take over
positions where proven anti-Nazis were needed to replace Nazi
incumbents - whether in the administration or the newly formed
or old and reformed parties or at the universities. Many of them
were also Jewish (though, for the most part, non-observant
ones), such as - to name only a few of those who played a role
in my life - Ossip Flechtheim, who returned in the early
Fifties, or Ernst Frankel; Franz Neumann was on the point of
returning when he died in a car accident; Otto Kirchheimer, much
later, in all likelihood would have accepted a professorship at
Freiburg if his death had not put an end to his plans.

For the less "political" ones, like me, the decision was
more difficult. For me, like for many others, a period short in
years but filled with frightfulness had been less "exile" than
"emigration;" one had started to plant roots in the new
environment and was hardly prepared for impending "remigration."

166

In my case, a child had been born in America and was growing up
as an American. And what had happened in Germany was not so
easily put out of mind. Could one simply decide to become a
German again? Didn't one have to ask oneself at every meeting
with a former compatriot whether he or she had not been a Nazi -
either out of conviction or for opportunistic reason -, possibly
even one enmeshed in Nazi criminality, co-responsible for the
death of one's relatives and friends? Only with those one knew
as above any suspicion would one be able to renew relationships
without such concerns. But the decision not to return was not an
easy one either. There was so much by way of cultural roots that
tied one to the country of one's origins and one's youth, so
much music, literature from the classics of Thomas Mann (who,
himself an "exile," eventually would return to Europe, if not to
Germany), art from Direr to the German expressionists. Thus one
had first of all to gain an impression of that mysterious
country, a country one had believed to know so well. The
question of how it was possible that a civilized people which
had contributed so much and so vitally to Western culture had
fallen into lowest barbarism had first to be answered; a
convincing answer has remained absent to this day.

In 1953, on a study trip to Germany, I met an official of
the Bavarian education ministry who asked himself and me (whom
he knew as the author of the "Bristler" book) whether a certain
former Nazi should be offered the chair in international law at
the university of Munich; I could give him some information
about the applicant (who had not been a convinced Nazi but an
opportunist). I quote from a letter to my wife: "At the end of
the conversation, that man asked me whether I would not come
back to Germany, Munich had such a beautiful climate, etc. I was
at the point of asking him whether he might offer that
university chair to me instead of the former Nazi; perhaps he
wanted to provoke that with his question. But I did not have the
courage for that. Does one know what one wants to or should do?"

167

Later in my life, there were occasions for me to return, thus in
the Sixties, when the chair for international politics at the
Free University of Berlin was offered to me. I declined.
Paradoxically, one main reason for that decision was our son:
We did not dare "uproot" him. As it turned out later, he was not
so deeply "rooted" in America and had difficulties to adjust to
life at American schools and colleges. Eventually it was he who
went to Europe, settled in Switzerland where he became a teacher
and married a Swiss girl, now speaking German with a Swiss
accent; in short, the born American has become Europeanized,
while his "European" parents have stayed in America; strange
paths of fate.

My image of Germany was somewhat clarified when I read
Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus." Leverkihn's fate seemed to me to
symbolize that of Germany. At the novel's pinnacle, where
Leverkihn makes his confession, one reads:

For it hath been said 'Be sober and watch!'

But that is not the affair of some; rather, |
instead of shrewdly concerning themselves with
what is needful upon earth that it may be better
there, and discreetly doing it, that among men
such order be established that again for the
beautiful work soil and true harmony be prepared,
man playeth the truant and breaketh out in
hellish drunkenness; so giveth he his soul
thereto and cometh among the carrion.

My interpretation of this paragraph was to the effect that
Germany, for some two hundred years, had turned its back to the
allegedly “lower material" problems of human society, away from
the utilitarian "what is needful upon earth," away from concern
about people living harmoniously together in an order in which
the "beautiful work" finds its soil. This way, concerned with
the allegedly "higher and spiritual" at the expense of the
merely utilitarian, Germany's cultural elite abandoned the realm
of the material order to the men of power who, “in hellish

168

drunkenness," commit holocausts. Leverkihn has purchased his
creativity with his lack of interest in the allegedly lower
realm of a humane order of human societies.

Thus he is the devil's, because - as Thomas Mann, humanist,
asks - what worth all cultural and spiritual creativity unless
it is accompanied by a humane concern with human life in
economy, society, and politics? The Ninth Symphony, even
conducted by Furtwangler, while elsewhere the victims of the
Nazi system are being tortured or suffocate in gas chambers,
means transforming "joy's godlike spark" into a shriek of
despair, "embracing" only the "millions" of corpses, the victims
of spiritual arrogance and of the chance such pride offers to
sadism. (9) :

My definitive meeting with postwar Germany took place in
1953, but first I will report about the years between Nurnberg
and my 1953 travels. Like my later decades, they, strangely,
appear to me now as having been more empty of lived-through
experience than all the anteceding years. Perhaps that had
something to do with aging that makes time to pass faster than
does youth: also, my first three or four decades had actually
been the more dramatic ones, richer in personal as well as
general-historical events. That dramatic period ended with
positive as well as negative events. A child was born, something
not unconnected with the more optimistic world-view created by
the victory over Nazi fascism. The atom bomb caused a radical
change of this attitude. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were responsible
for a growing pessimism that henceforth informed my ideas about
the future development of world conditions.

At the end of 1945 the research portion of OSS was
transferred to the State Department as its research and
intelligence branch. Already at oSS-times our work had often
been frustrating because of the relatively little attention paid
to it by the high-level "decision-makers;" now, with peace
restored, it became even more so. The Department's "operating

169

desks" that were in charge of policy-making tended to view the
Marcuses, Neumanns, Kirchheimers as Central European
intellectuals who could have only little understanding of
America's national interests. With an incipient "cold war" these
interests were increasingly seen as demanding above everything
else the "containment" of a Soviet communism that was
interpreted as expansionist and aggressive; interest in
denazifying and democratizing Germany receded into the
background. Realizing that my memoranda sooner or later would

end up in the respective operating desk's waste-paper basket, I

occupied myself with collecting material about the success or,
more frequently, the lack of success of denazification as
practiced in the American zone of Germany. An article
summarizing my findings ended with the warning "yideant consules
et proconsules,". (10)but even some letters I sent to the New
york Times containing similar warnings failed to change the
situation.

Above all, however, I occupied myself in those years with
working out ideas that had begun to ripen already prior to the
end of the war and now were put down ina manuscript on
political realism and political idealism. Breaking with
chronology, I shall report on these in connection with tracing
the development of my ideas in the 1950s. (11) From the State
Department, my friends, one after the other, turned toward
academe, and thus I, too, looked out for an academic resting
place. Ralph Bunche, whose Howard chair in international
politics had become vacant through his going into the United
Nations, recommended me as his successor. This led a a
conversation probably unique in the annals of the American
academe. My first position at Howard had been that of a lowly
little lecturer without tenure; now it was the question of a
professorial position. In my talk with Howard President
Mordechai Johnson, I started right away with raising the "brass-
tack" question of remuneration; I remarked that in my government

170

position I was getting 6000 dollars (at that time quite a nice
Salary) and that I expected something similar at Howard.
Mordechai: "But that much we pay only our full professors." Me:
“Well, in that case make me a full professor." Which he did.
Thus, for the next four years I was with my black students
and colleagues again. My prime occupation was working out my
lectures which comprised almost the entire range of political
science, from political theory over comparative government to
international politics. It was a rather comfortable position. If
one was lazy, having once prepared one's lecture courses one was
not required to do much more and would have security to the end
of one's academic life. That did not satisfy me, however.
Intellectually, Howard was not very stimulating, a kind of
scholarly dead-end. Thus I looked again for something else.
Franz Neumann had heard of a vacancy at the New York City
College (CCNY), and I applied there (Ralph Bunche, too,
recommended me, and whenever in subsequent years I met the CCNY
President, he said, "Ah, you're the fellow Bunche sent to us").
True, my attempt to stage another coup a la Mordechai Johnson
failed. Sam Hendel, political scientist at the college, had been
charged by the department to "look me over." When I told him
that, being a full professor at Howard, I expected to obtain a
full professorship at CCNY also, he explained to me that this
was not that easy and that I would have to be satisfied with an
associate professorship for the time being. Despite this
"demotion" I accepted. CCNY not only had a prestige quite
different from Howard's but a much higher level of scholarly
demands (as far as students were concerned) and achievement (of
professors). It was considered "the Harvard of the proletariat."
Here the most talented among the children of those immigration
groups that had recently come to America, especially Jews, were
educated, and many among the teaching staff were original,
independent thinkers and outstanding teachers. For me it was a
challenge. I stayed there for the rest of my academic life, that

171

is, from 1952 to 1977, the year of my retirement; and, after a
couple of years, I did yet reach the full professor rank!

From time to time I asked myself - and friends would ask me
- whether I had not, so-to-speak, got "stuck" at CCNY, and why I
had not gone to one of the still more prestigious universities?
Indeed, after my two main books had appeared and obtained
considerable acclaim, I probably would have had an opportunity
for a change. Chief reason for my "sticking" to City College was
my congenital weakness in making decisions and a disinclination
to change a situation to which I had become accustomed. Also,
there were time and again visiting professorships that offered
temporary change in scholarly environment. Once, when a
professorship at the University of California at Los Angeles
(UCLA) seemed beckoning, I used as an excuse before myself the
assumption that this would constitute an unwise change for our
son, who at that time was in the last stages of high school. In
reality that highschool, whose reputation had been the main
reason for our moving to a New York suburb, Scarsdale, had
proved anything but suitable for him; it offered little to
students who, though gifted intellectually, had contact
difficulties; made them outsiders. Thus we became "stuck" in
that place, too; we continued to stay there even after Steve had
left school and are still living there.

In Washington we had many friends with whom we shared life
and interests; also much music. At that time it was still
possible, once a year getting up at 5 am, to acquire tickets for
the Library-of-Congress concerts for the entire season; these
concerts were highlights of chamber music. Also I shall never
forget how much "musical offering" we enjoyed at hifi record
evenings carefully programmed by our friends, Paul and Jean
Lewison, in their beautiful house at Arlington, Virginia. Too
many of these friendships were lost when we moved to New York.
Quite generally, I regret that my congenital shyness made me
lose many friends I acquired during the various stages of my

172

life - years of study, Geneva, Princeton, Washington. But some
"basic friendships" have remained. I have always cherished a
letter I received from Ossip Flechtheim, at a time when life
seemed dark to both of us. I translate a sentence or two:

"I am now healed of both my great youthful
illusions ('humanity' and ‘love'), that is,
I am now somehow a "grownup." "Believe" I
still do in our friendship - that was never
an illusion and shall never become one."

In the postwar years a number of new friendships did occur,
however. Thus the one with Gwendolen Carter (called "Gwen"), co-
author of a textbook at which we worked together for many years.
"Major Foreign Powers" dealt in comparative fashion with
government of and politics in the most important countries
outside the United States. Already its first edition (in which I
did not yet participate) had excelled through its then novel
functional approach in the place of the traditional more
formalistic one; that is, it placed prime emphasis on how
institutions, such as political parties, function, as well as
upon their historical and sociological background. This fully
agreed with my own inclinations, and thus, when Gwen's friend
Louise Holborn, sister of the historian Hajo Holborn (both known
to me from OSS times), suggested that I take over Germany for
the second edition (Germany had not been dealt with in the
first), I accepted with enthusiasm. The book went through six
editions, and its individual country sections were subsequently
published as separate paperbacks. An extensive general
Introduction, in which I collaborated, was likewise brought out
separately later and went through several editions under the
title: "Government and Politics in the Twentieth Century." The
U.S. Information Service saw to it that translations appeared in
about a dozen different languages, among them exotic ones like
Hindi, Korean, and others; since this meant that our liberal
tenets were spread around the world, I had no objection. Non

173

glet.

Working with Gwen Carter meant coming to know a person one
rarely meets in one's life. Since early youth, because of polio,
tied to the wheelchair or, in better periods, walking on
crutches, she yet managed to travel to more countries and meet
with more people than most, including specialists in foreign
governments. By nature open to people and events, she arrived at
a truly cosmopolitan world-view. Her chief concern has been
promoting the cause of the awakening colonial people, now called
Third World countries, above all those of Africa. Her early
work, "The Politics of Inequality," became the standard work on
South Africa's apartheid policies. Even her physical handicap
served her to advantage: Since people tried to be helpful most
everywhere, she did not hesitate to accept assistance whenever
it was a matter of seeing something interesting and useful. Thus
she once persuaded the American ambassador in Cairo to enlist
the aid of the Egyptian navy to carry her up and down the steep
path to the Asswan dam! As an inveterate optimist she
eccasionally assuaged my pessimism when I was overly inclined
toward it in our common writings.

Another, likewise paralyzed person needs to be remembered
here, because in those war- and post-war years he became a
valuable conversation and disputation partner. It was one of my
Gladbach cousins, Karl Aschaffenburg, with whom in my youth I
often read stories and engaged in other youthful exploits. He
grew up to be a kind of "man about town;" through an accident he
became paralyzed and spent his remaining life in a wheelchair,
taken care of by a rich uncle who had let him come over to the
United States. At his uncle's estate, his "golden cage," I came
to visit him regularly, travelling from Princeton and, later
from Washington, to Plainfield, New Jersey. In no other person I
have met in my life have I ever observed a transformation of the
kind he underwent. He withdrew into himself, became a kind of
"sage," without, however, giving up his interest in human beings

174

and events. On the contrary, he became intensely interested in
psychology, studied, all by himself, graphology which, in its
serious shape, he made his professional occupation, contributing
to its recognition as a branch of applied psychology. In those
years we exchanged and debated our concerns regarding world
events and other problems of burning mutual interest; for me,
communicating with him, also about my ongoing work, became
almost indispensible. After his uncle's death he moved to
Princeton, married (a German woman), and we saw less of each
other. Since his death in 1982 I am missing, again, one of the
few "monades" whose views on world and human events have been
important to me. Reading Canetti's memoirs I have come across
his description of a paralyzed friend that fits to an
astonishing degree my cousin and friend: "I admired him
because, through his spirituality, he gained a superiority that
transformed him from an object of compassion into a figure to
whom one went on a pilgrimage; not, however, a saint in the
usual sense, because he was devoted to life and loved it."

Back to "Major Foreign Powers." My participation in writing
and rewriting it meant a chance to make my ideas on Germany
accessible to entire generations of American college students.
At times we had "cornered the market" in comparative politics,
and this made me, as author, probably better known in the
academe than did my more theoretical publications. Whether this
was desirable is another question. If one wanted to pay a fair
amount of attention to developments, each new edition required
almost as much time as one had spent on the original writing -
time that might have been spent upon more scholarly efforts. But
at least it gave me. a chance to obtain a clearer image of
Germany and the Germans in my own mind. A considerable portion
of my textbook chapter on Germany was reserved to German
history. Sometimes against considerable opposition on the part
of the publisher, I insisted on that. How could one hope to
understand contemporary Germany without, for instance, realizing

175

the impact of the repeated defeat of liberalism in the 19th
century on the "illiberal," authoritarian structure of the
Bismarckian Empire and the weakness of the Weimar Republic, not
to speak of the rise and nature of Nazism? Only this way could
one clarify that typical German conflict between spiritual and
cultural inwardness (Innerlichkeit) and politics which had
characterized the German elite, as I had seen it symbolized in
"Doctor Faustus." But it also meant a chance to show what seemed
positive in the emergence of the new Germany, especially in its
Western portion, The Federal Republic.

I gained a closer look at the new Germany when, in the late
1940ies and the early 1950ies, hordes of young German social
scientists came to the United States in order to become
acquainted with a branch of social studies that had been
neglected in the old Germany: political science. All of them
proved to be very "“un-Nazi," with minds open for Western
liberal-democratic ideals and realities; it seemed that we in
America had generally overestimated the influence of Nazi
indoctrination on the German youth. But what formed my image of
the new Germany most strongly was a trip of approximately four
months which I undertook in the summer of 1953 in the employ of
the RAND Corporation to study the political attitudes of the
West German civil service.

The RAND Corporation was (still is) an institution
maintained by the U.S. Air Force which, at that time, was
interested in political, especially foreign political, problems.
The (then) director of its social science section was Hans
Speier, a former German and a specialist in war research. He put
together a group of seven scholars whose charge it was to
undertake "field studies" through "in-depth" interviews with
members of the West German elite groups to find out their

176

attitudes toward foreign policy issues. Kirchheimer was asked to
study trade union leadership; I was to be in charge of the civil
service. The results of our efforts were subsequently published
in a volume under the title "West German Leadership and Foreign
Policy." (12)

I cared less about the specifically foreign policy ideas
than about general attitudes and positions. I criss-crossed the
country, from Schleswig in the North down to Freiburg and
Munich, included Berlin, visited big and small cities, met with
officials of all ranks and branches of the administration,
including the administration of justice (where I conversed with
judges of the Constitutional Court, among others); in my
interviews I tried to investigate not only their political
attitudes but also their more general ones concerning life and
society.

Initially I was impressed with "things" rather than persons,
an attempt to recover my own past. I did not find it. I quote a
few (translated) sentences from letters "home" (i.e., America):

Concerning the destruction: "It seems as if the Lord had taken
aim at one building for each of the gassed ones." A propos
motorization and noise: "The people in these cities give the

impression of a new species of living being who have no
knowledge left of what was previously; oneself feels pre-
historic, an anachronism like the (Cologne) Cathedral." What I
somehow had failed to take into consideration was the urge,
caused by necessity, first of all to build up again, to create a
life in what was no longer a state of emergency. And so one
proceeded thoroughly, as one always had done in Germany, in the
most up-to-date, modern fashion, making use of all available
forces, among them those of the expellees from the lost Eastern
provinces. Hence "economic miracle," hence "Americanization" of
all ways of life. No looking backwards, hence no catharsis. or,
to correct this last remark: I soon found out that, among civil
servants as well as other groups there were two sections: a

177

minority for whom recent history had begun with the year of
Hitler's coming to power in 1933, and a majority for whom 1945
constituted "the year zero" from which to start, thus
suppressing in their minds what had gone before. The minority,
in contrast, expressed sorrow and regret for what had happened
and was determined to create or restore not only democratic-
liberal institutions (independent courts, freely elected
parliaments, etc.) but, above all, attitudes and practices that
would replace inherited authoritarian ones with new, "liberal"
ones; these would protect one's own as well as others' rights
and freedoms vis-a-vis all kinds of authority and any numbers of
authorities.

Members of this minority were frequently found at the top
level of administration, but quite generally they were officers
without an army. Below that level traditional authoritarianism
was still rampant. How could it have been otherwise, with
denazification a failure? "Personal continuity" meant that
incumbents had stayed in office - or had been reinstated after a
brief interval - who, as they saw it, had loyally served the
"state," whether it was the pre-Weimar Empire, the Weimar
Republic, or the twelve years of Hitler's "thousand-year-realm,"
anda thus could claim with good conscience that they had "done
their duty." When the question concerning participation in the
extreme policies of the Nazi regime was asked, everybody had his
own philosophy of exculpation. By and large one could speak of
"restoration," not of Nazism but of the more or less
authoritarian pre-Nazi system of governance. This should not be
misunderstood: In some respects one had learned from Weimar
experience. Democracy as a form of government, in contrast to
Weimar, had become legitimate. The civil service no longer
constituted an "estate," identified with and protected by a
conservative class of nobles and itself conservative in
attitudes and ideas; rather, the civil servant now felt to be

the "functionary" of a group that had turned unpolitical; for

178

reasons of opportunity, he would become a member of one of the
democratic parties (all three of them: Christian Democrats,
Social Democrats, Free Democrats had incorporated the term
"democrat" in their names); but their chief interest was in
protecting their "established rights" to tenure, salaries,
pensions, etc. Those who had been Nazis now did not want to hear
or speak of "politics" anymore. With the general population they
shared a positive attitude toward the new form of government,
the "rule-of-law" type of democracy (Rechtsstaat) without,
however, recognizing or even understanding that a democracy of
this kind must be built upon genuinely liberal attitudes of,
e.g., tolerance of minority groups and minority opinions and
impartiality in dealing with opponents. Like in Weimar times,
and especially in the judiciary, one found again "blindness in
the right eye," hardly surprising where judges who had been
active at Hitler's "blood courts" were still members of the new
republic's benches.

As I expressed it in the conclusion of my RAND report,
"quite generally, the Bonn Republic strikes one as a more sober,
pragmatic version of something déja vu; good sense but little
espirt; Weimar minus Tucholsky." (13) If what I said was
critical, it was less so than that of many German writers, such
as Ginter Grass and Heinrich Béll, who indicted the petty
bourgeois-philistine or else decadent years of the economic
miracle. It must be recognized that in the 1950ies a spirit of
moderation and pragmatism, of live and let live, had replaced
leftist or rightist extremism, and this especially in regard to
foreign policies. The spirit of the nationalist-racist doctrine
of the Teutonic master-race was markedly absent. Even the
partition of the country was accepted, although, here and there,
one blamed the stupid Americans for not having rallied in 1945
with the Germans to march against the Russians. One was
satisfied to be protected from further Russian expansion through
Adenauer's alliance with the West, and there was hardly any

179

protest against remilitarization. On the other hand, even the
new Bundeswehr did not revive the spirit if old-Prussian
militarism; there was no Junker class any more that, in olden
times, had formed the Prussian officers' class, and no longer
any preferred position of the new military in the ranking order
of the elites. Finally, the traditional German feeling of
superiority toward the despised "Polacks" or Czechs had
disappeared (not to mention the French, formerly the "heredetary
enemies," now considered friends). This attitude, almost
naturally, led to the policy of detente, which, in regard to
Europe, had been initiated by the Federal Republic's Ostpolitik.

With the experience of this trip I could now, somehow, solve
my identity problem through the compromise formula of being an
“American of German-Jewish background." As an American but with
an amount of distancing myself, I could now, after the initial
enthusiasm of a grateful immigrant, take a more critical stance
toward my new country whenever events and developments required
it; thus, when McCarthyism distorted the basically liberal-
humanitarian character of American politics. I explained it to
Germans as one of the not infrequent "falls" of the rightful
into the "sin" of overpatriotism, of seeing the world in colors
of black and white, or rather red and white, only; but, as in
the subsequent case of Vietnam and the reaction to it, the

strength of the basic attitude seemed to prove that such "falls

from grace" were incidents whose exceptional nature proved the
rule. Today, with an apparently long-range turn from traditional
liberalism to conservatism with sometimes hysterical bursts of
an anticommunist, quasi-religious ideology, the optimism of my
interpretation, if not shattered, has been reduced.

With the same self-identification I could now be also more
objective vis-a-vis my former homeland, giving equal weight to
the positive and to the negative elements in its developments.
Like the "remigrant" Flechtheim in Berlin, I more and more
tended to see the developments in both "our" countries in the

180

context of global trends. During the 1950s, Germany (at least
the Germany of the Federal Republic) had become a consumers' and
welfare society, a Western-type country whose politics,
ideologies, and general life-style were no longer different in
any essential ways from those of the other developed industrial
or "postindustrial" countries. Its parties, no longer of the
extremist, dogmatic-ideological kind, had become "catch-all"
parties, to use Otto Kirchheimer's term, i.e., moderate parties
appealing to all sorts of people. Other "catch-all"
characteristics, lining up German political culture with other
Western ones, are, alas, an increasing measure of corruption
penetrating business and political elites, and hostility to
resident foreigners (with the Turks and other "guest workers"
replacing the Jews). And the new Germany now confronts the same
overall, global issues with which the other developed nations
are faced: the problem of nuclear weapons and the ensuing
threat of annihilating nuclear war, as well as the global threat
to the environment of humans, issues with which both Flectheim
and myself have become increasingly concerned in our later
years. This concern has made us true cosmopolitans for whom the
national identification as German or American or Jew ranks
second to that of "world citizen" who tries to comprehend
humanity as one entity - an entirety whose problems can no
longer be solved by victory or defeat of one or another side in
national or ideological conflict but only by novel world-views
and radical new policies.

With such new attitudes, and as a "wanderer between two
worlds," I made many trips to Germany in the years and decades
that followed upon the travels of 1953. Thus I participated in
many conferences to which old or newly acquired German friends
would invite me (to mention only one: E.0O. Czempiel, one of the
outstanding German specialists in international politics);
whatever the specific subject, it was always a matter of world
problems and global views. Or I would teach as visiting

181

professor at universities such as Marburg or the Free University
of West Berlin, this way getting to know the frequently
sympathetic and world-open views and attitudes of students as
well as younger teachers. The last of these visiting
professorships was named after Carl von Ossietzky, German
pacifist of the Weimar period, who was murdered by the Nazis; my
main subject was contemporary American foreign policy placed
into the context of the above-mentioned global problems; I
noticed that the foreign policy attitudes of Germans and the
foreign policy of their government were more considerate of
global issues (including Third World development policies) than
those of other Western countries, including America's.

Some more personal, emotional elements in my attitude toward
Germany and the Germans can be seen from a statement I made at
the German consulate in New York anent the bestowal of a medal
of merit upon me by the Federal Republic; I quote a few
sentences (in the original English): "Allow me to mention a few
of the stranger situations which the strange, oftentimes tragic,
sometimes absurd happenings of our century brought about from
time to time in my own life. My first book, published under an
assumed name in German but outside Germany during the dark days
of Nazi rule could not be read by Germans in Germany ....
Some thirty-five years. later I had the satisfaction of seeing my
collected essays in international politics published in German
and in Germany by a publishing house that was once that of a
fellow exile, Heinrich Heine. It was a nice kind of
'Wiedergutmachung'.

Another example: Shortly after arriving in America, when,
for a second time in our century, our countries were at war, I
found myself, together with some other German refugees, working
in an American government office on German affairs. There we
were, so-called ‘enemy aliens.' permitted to work in one of the
most sensitive war agencies! We were to prepare for the time
when Germany, liberated from tryanny, would have a chance to

182

become a liberal-democratic polity again. Right in the middle of
war, foundations were laid for future friendship.

A last remembrance: I recall my youthful German patriotism
when, as a young boy, I pinned flags on the map of France and
other countries we, the Germans, were conquering during the
First World War. America, at that time, prevented those
conquests from going too far. A quarter of a century later, I
found myself on the other side, praying for its victory.

If there is any meaning in such seeming absurdity, it is the
lesson of the meaninglessness of nationalism. It is in learning
that only through knowing each other better, the good and the
bad, warts and all, we can hope to avoid, ina future that
sometimes looks utterly forbidding, catastrophies like the two
world wars, or racism and despotism.

When I first went back to Germany after the war I met so
many people, friends old and new whom I could not hold
responsible for what had happened in the dark years even if I
had wanted to, that I decided then and there to devote myself to
strengthening the bonds of understanding between our two
countries .. . . On the other hand, some of those who had
shared my fate as refugees could not, in this sense, go home
again. I respect their feelings but I do not share them. In one
sense, to be sure, as Thomas Wolfe said, ‘you cannot go home
again,' but in another sense one can never separate oneself
altogether from one's origins even if one wanted to. There are
many forests in the world, and many river landscapes, but the
remembrance of the Lower Rhine landscape where I grew up, or of
the Black Forest at the foot of which I began my studies, has a
special, irreplaceable aura. Bach and Hélderlin, the Cologne
Cathedral and the South German baroque churches belong to the
world, true enough, but if you have encountered them in the
prime of your youth, they belong to you in a special way. So
also with human beings, former teachers, friends of one's
younger years... .."

ouisville, of all places, became the family center
turned out to be as great a piece of luck as had been my
parents' choice of Dusseldorf as their and their future
children's home in Germany. Louisville was (and still is)
exceptional among middle-sized, provincial cities in the
United States in that it has a cultural tradition and an 5
in the broadest sense - liberal atmosphere hardly foun
anywhere else among comparable American cities. Its
independent, liberal, and enlightened daily paper, the
Louisville Courier-Journal, sets standards otherwise found
only in the three U.S. world papers, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, and, lately, The Los Angeles Times. To its
cultural life old German-Jewish immigrant families such as
the Brandeis, have made their European-rooted contributions,
and it has since been the great opportunity of the more
recent refugees from Central Europe, such as my two
prothers', to continue a tradition of cultural patronage
that had been theirs in pre-Nazi Germany. Thus Gerhard;
besides becoming a brilliant educator in musicis a
Louisville's university, made it his special business to
create a Louisville chamber music tradition and an audience
that can annually listen to world-standard, top groups 0
musicians.

Marion Grafin Dénhoff, in Die Zeit, February 21, 1986.

Harwood Childs and John Whitton (eds.): Propa nda Short
Wave, Princeton, 1942 (my chapter pp. 3-47).

i i f:
"Expropriation of Foreign Property," American Journal _o
dnter national Law, 35(2), April 1941, pp. 243-262.

"Expropriation of Alien Property," Social Research, 8(1),
February 1941, pp. 63-78.

Journal _ of Negro E ation 353-367.
Journal o egro Educ ti , July 1941, pp.
Characteristic of my inability to spread my ideas and reach
wider audience, the article was published in a perio ice
read perhaps by a couple of hundred professors and students
at black universities.

In recent German historiography, far from being settled, the
conflict over interpretation continues.

dered
irchheimer's sudden and unexpected death I consi
rae Tonorable duty to trace the development of his ideas
in a lengthy introduction to a volume of collected essay
published by the Columbia University Press (cf.Politics. a
and Social Change, edited by F.S. Burin and K.L. Shell,

184

York, 1969, ix - xlii); co-author of this introduction was
Erich Hula, colleague and friend of Otto's, whom I had known
since his time as assistant to Kelsen at Cologne, and we
have remained friends for life, closer still through our
common remembrance of Otto Kirchheimer. - More recently I
had the chance to attend a symposium on Kirchheimer that was
organized at the Free University of Berlin anent the 80th
anniversary of his birth and the 20th of his death (in
November, 1985); I gave the keynote address on "Otto
Kirchheimer, Life and Work." I noticed that, in recent
years, interest in Kirchheimer's writings has greatly
increased, especially in Germany and the United States.

I laid down this interpretation of German history (which is
now accepted by many historians as that of Germany's
"special course" (Sonderweg), different from that of its
Western, less authoritarian and earlier unified neighbors)
in an essay I wrote for the literary journal "Perspective"
(autumn, 1949, pp. 65ff.). I was brazen enough to send the
article to Thomas Mann. By return mail a handwritten answer
arrived (dated April 15, 1949). Here my translation:

"Dear Mr. Herz,

Your Faustus essay is a valuable document to me;
many thanks! I collect with strange zeal all
statements concerning this book, and yours goes into
an already crowded drawer.

I cannot quite agree that the work is less an
art-work than a think-piece (this I had said in my
essay, contrasting Faustus with Buddenbrooks, JHH).
It is a well-constructed work of art (durchkonstruiertes
Kunstwerk) and tries to be that of which it deals,
namely, constructive music. But its character as
work of art also implies that it cannot accept, and
does not want, an all too "one-meaning" kind of
interpretation (eine allzu eindeutige Auslegung).
True, the "German" in it is strongly emphasized,
almost like in the "Meistersinger," only not so
densely. But that Adrian L. simply means Germany,
as some maintain, that is not correct. For that, he
is too much a person and an individual case and, on
the other hand, to the extent that he is representative
he goes too much beyond that mere "German" in him,
into what is more generally problematic.

Again my thanks. Yours truly, Thomas Mann."

Dare one object? Surely, Faustus-Leverkihn represents more
than something merely historical or political. But, after
all, the novel ends with these words of his biographer and
friend, Serenus Zeitblohm: "May God have mercy on your

10.

11.

12.

13.

185

soul, my friend, my fatherland." And in a letter written by
Mann at the time he was working at the novel, one reads: "I
am again working at the melancholic novel which, basically
(im Grunde), deals with Germany."

"The Fiasco of Denazification in Germany," Political Science
Quarterly, 63, 1948, pp. 569-594.

See below, chapter eight, not included in this translation.

Hans Speier and W. Phillips Davison (eds.): West German

Leadership and Foreign Policy (Evanston, Illinois, 1957); my
contribution, pp. 96-135, also appeared, in slightly
different form, in World Politics (October 1954, pp. 63-83).

Tucholsky was one of the best-known liberal-democratic
writers in the 1920ies.

186

APPENDIX

187

As I mentioned in the Preface, chapters 8 to 11, comprising
the more theoretical, "political science" portion of my book,
are of less biographical nature and interest than the chapters
here translated. As a matter of fact, after the more dramatic
first half of my life, after the eleven years passed in
Washington D.c., after having founded a family (with my son,
Stephen, born in 1946), and after moving, in 1952, to New York
(first to the city, then to its suburbs, at Scarsdale), and
having accepted an appointment at the department of political
science of the City College of New York, nothing very dramatic
happened anymore. I continued teaching at the college and,
subsequently, also at the City University's Graduate Center,
until my retirement in 1977. There were eccasional escapades to
more or less foreign shores: Visiting professorships, not only
in the neighborhood (at Columbia University, the Graduate
Faculty of the New School, the Fletcher School of International
Law and Diplomacy at Boston), but also in Germany (University of
Marburg, Free University of Berlin, thus fulfilling my ancient
dream of becoming a German professor of sorts). There were
conferences attended not only in this country but also in such
"exotic" places as Seoul, Rio de Janeiro, and Jerusalem; indeed,
Israel was the place of several visits, one, at the occasion of
another conference, at Israel's technion at Haifa where I met
not only the old idealistic-Zionist friend of my youth, Max (now
Mordechai) Levy but also Hans Jonas, the philosopher, whose
ideas of an ethics of responsibility to the future coincided
with what, at that conference, I proposed as a "survival ethics"
urgently needed in an age of run-away technology to save mankind
from the drab threat of nuclear annihilation and the ecological
destruction of its global habitat.

This leads me briefly to refer to the later developments of
my ideas on the world and international politics. As pointed out
in the translated chapters, already at Geneva and subsequently
at Princeton I had become involved with the history of power

188

politics and the structure of the modern state system, the
system of nation-states, where power politics obtained. " had
been a history of power balances forever endangered and
restored, But in 1945 the absolute novum of a weapon of
universal annihilation, the nuclear bomb, had rendered nations
so far defendable "permeable," and a balance of two and only two
now so-called "superpowers" and their blocs has been maintained
only through the mutual threat of suicide, i.e., through mutual

nuclear deterrence. War among them, for "restoration" of

balances lost or for whatever other purpose, now seemed without '

BUrpOSe , irrational. And yet, arms races and, indeed
proliferation of nuclear armaments and non-nuclear war aang
non-superpowers have persisted, and the world has become
immeasurably more unsafe than it ever was in human history.
Theories trying to explain what had happened were laid down
in two books of mine in which I tried to develop my "world-view
in the nuclear age" and to which I refer readers who have borne
with me this far, for the details of my more theoretical
mullings: Political Realism and Political Idealism (1951) and
International Politics in the Atomic Age (1959). In the first
book I developed a theory of the function of power and power
politics centering around the concept of what I called the
"security dilemma," a dilemma in which units such as nation-
states, lacking the superior authority of a world government
find themselves when trying to protect their people, territory,
and resources from threats by fellow-units. Not knowing what dite
other one is up to, one develops means of defense; the other
one, now becoming suspicious of the first unit's intentions
starts arming likewise, and this way on to power seupetition,
arms races, wars. Power politics thus is not (or not
necessarily) due to an "innate power urge" of nations or their
leaders (which, of course, may well exist in specific
instances), but rooted in the situation of international
"anarchy" (in the sense of absence of superior authority and

189

enforceable superior rules).

In my second book I tried to apply this theory to the
nuclear situation of the postwar world. I developed a theory
according to which the protective power of units like nation-
states had historically been based upon the development of their
means of defense, that is, weapons. While in the European Middle
Ages, for instance, only small units, such as castles or walled
towns, could be "protected" from attack, the invention of gun-
powder and artillery permitted larger units, "territorial
states," to become units of protection and therewith subjects of
international politics. Thus the rise of the modern nation-state
system, with its balance of power, wars for the restoration of
the balance, and so forth. But the invention of the nuclear
weapon put an end to the protective function of what I had
called "the hard shell of defensibility" that had surrounded the
territorial state; even the most powerful, the superpowers, had
now become "permeable." At that point the security dilemma had
reached its acme. What to do about this in terms of arms
reduction, diplomacies of detente and realization of interests
in common survival, etc., I set out in my book and later
writings (articles, contributions to edited books). (1) In
connection with this threat of nuclear annihilation as well as
the second threat to the future of mankind, the ecological one,
I put my later efforts, especially since my retirement, into
propagating what I have called "survival research," that is, the
need to study the political, social, economic and related
conditions of global survival in the face of the dual threat to
mankind's future. I emphasized the importance of "perception"
(and, consequently, communication and information), the way in
which people and their leaders conceive of their world and
become aware of threatening developments, such as a still
ongoing population explosion, rapid exhaustion of vital
resources, pollution of environments, etc. This, in a way,
constituted a universalization of my age-old urge to arrive,

190

personally, at a consistent world-view. What was urgent now was
to find achievable ways and means to counter the threats.

In this respect, what I was and still am aiming at has been
a combination of realism and idealism, avoiding both the
extremes of a cynical super-realism that indulges in enemy
images and an ensuing need of armed "readiness" of "sovereign"
nations, and a utopian idealism that dreams of a "world-rule of
law" where national power yields to that of a world government.
In our common predicament salvation, if there be any, can, so I
believe, be found only in the realization on the part of nations
and their leaders that the mutual, collective interest of all in
the avoidance of war and the maintenance (or restoration) of a
viable human habitat must be given precedence over all more
parochial (national and other group) interests. I conclude these

rather sketchy remarks with quotes from two outstanding
theorists in world affairs:

"Our world is at present faced with two unprecedented
and supreme dangers. One is the danger not just

of nuclear war but of any major war at all among
great industrial powers - an exercize that modern
technology has now made suicidal all around. The other
is the devastating effect of modern industrialization
and overpopulation on the world's natural environment
- + + . Both are urgent. The need to give priority

to the averting of these two overriding dangers has

a purely rational basis - a basis in national interest -
quite aside from morality."

(George Kennan, 1985)

"The most basic division in the world today is not
between communists and non-communists, between blacks
and whites, between rich and poor or even between
young and old. It is between those who see only the
interests of a limited group and those who are
capable of seeing the interests of the broader
community of mankind as a whole."

(Richard Gardner, 1970)

191

Those interested in some more details of my later world-
views I refer to observations made when invited, with a group of
other "senior" members of my profession, to relate the emergence
of our ideas on the world and on international politics; this
was at the annual convention of the International Studies
Association in Washington, DC in 1985 - our remarks were
subsequently reprinted in the International Studies Notes of the

Association. (2) And herewith salve et vale.

—

192

Collected articles of mine on international politics were
reprinted in a volume entitled The Nation-State and the

Crisis of World Politics (1976). My introduction to that

volume can serve as a short outline of the emergence of my
respective ideas.

See also the enlarged version of these remarks in a forth-
coming volume, edited by James Rosenau and Joseph kKruzel,

entitled Journeys through World Politics: Autobiographic
Reflections of Distinguished Scholars. My chapter bears the

title: "An Internationalist's Journey through the Century."