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PARTISAN REVIEW
Not only in philosophy or poetry, in which Germans had a long and dis–
tinguished tradition to draw upon, but even in fields such as painting and
architecture, which had been barren in the nineteenth century, Weimar
culture produced breakthroughs of enduring significance.
What accounts for this amazing efflorescence is still not entirely clear.
Peter Gay surely provides some answers when he argues that the' 'outsiders"
of Wilhelminian Germany had now in large part become "im;iders" that
found support, grudging though it often was, among at least some of the
administrators, politicians, and opinion leaders of the regime . In addition,
World War I had broken cultural continuities and shattered tradition more
brutally in Germany than in other western countries . The break with the
past was more pronounced in the country that had lost the war than among
the victors. Moreover, it may well be that the very instability of the Republic,
its lack of firm institutional moorings which so distressed political observers
and filled some of them (rightly so, as it turned out) with dark forebodings,
provided at the same time the preconditions for restless questioning and
acute cultural sensibility. Throughout the period , German intellectuals
found themselves in what the existentialists among them called an extreme
situation, one that encouraged them to explore the limits of cultural ex–
perimentation .
Laqueur does not investigate these questions in any depth . He lacks
the analytical virtuosity displayed in Peter Gay's earlier
Weimar Culture
(which, curiously enough, Laqueur does not even mention), but he provides
a plethora of factual information that will provide indispensable material
for anyone who wishes to probe more deeply in the future.
In
The Sea Change ,
H. Stuart Hughes explores the migration to Britain
and America of German and Italian intellectuals in the nineteen thirties.
He follows a course that is markedly different from that of Laqueur in that
he is highly selective . Yet I fear that he did not take full advantage of that
selectivity in order to search more thoroughly than Laqueur's encyclopedic
approach would have permitted. Hughes deals with some of the crucial
figures of the German and Italian emigration from Salvemini to Mannheim,
from Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse to Borgese, Wittgenstein, and
Tillich. He presents sharply drawn vignettes of their lives and work, but
rarely examines in some depth the sources of their creativity in their adopted
environment. He wishes to inquire "how the experience in America altered
the character of their thought, " but does not sufficiently answer his own
query . While he provides a novel illumination in his pen portraits of people
whom he has known personally, and brings to life some psychoanalysts such
as Hartmann and Erikson, he is less successful with Wittgenstein or the
writers of the Frankfort School, especially since much more thorough treat-
