AMERICA AND THE EMERGING EUROPE
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have given us some of the most profound and complex accounts of the
cultural breaks and reconstructions characteristic of modern life. Many of
them reflected on the roots of Nazism, authoritarianism and anti–
Semitism. Some extended these reflections to postwar Germany. Now,
post-unification Germany raises fundamental questions about the
continuity of the emigres' legacy. Unification, and with it a growing re–
nationalization of German culture, have come just as the last of these
emigres are leaving us.
The most specific distinguishing feature of the forced migration of
German Jews under Nazism is the deep insult so many of them felt to
their own identities when they were singled out as foreigners in their
own country. After 1933, the emigres rarely left on the basis of criteria
that were comprehensible to them, but were required to do so after be–
ing deprived of their livelihoods, their citizenship, and ultimately their
right to live, on grounds utterly foreign to their views of themselves.
Even when they maintained Jewish lives and identities at home or in
public, which many did not, these Jews took their membership in
German or Austrian culture seriously.
Despite the common experience of unexpected expulsion, the emi–
gres were by no means a unified group. The numerous organizations cre–
ated to aid them only accentuated existing personal and intellectual dif–
ferences. The result was a wide variety of emigre experiences, from the
self-enclosed milieu surrounding the Institute for Social Research, whose
leading members Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno published for a
time in German, to the somewhat smoother though rarely easy integra–
tion of other scientists and scholars into existing laboratories and uni–
versities, to the struggles of academic and professional women - many of
whom became secretaries or housekeepers in order to keep their families
going in the Depression.
Even if they eventually found niches in American academic, profes–
sional or cultural life, the emigres learned quickly that they had not es–
caped anti-Semitism. American consular and immigration officials were
notoriously reluctant to grant visas to Jewish refugees. The activities of
the German-American
Bund
and the popularity of demagogues like Fa–
ther James Coughlin were prominent features in the America of the
1930s. Both the experience of exclusion from German culture and of
anti-Semitism in America led some emigres to convert biography into
theory, as Edith Kurzweil has put it - to respond to their situation as
exiles by reflecting more deeply on the impact of that experience.
The intellectual emigres from Nazism faced profound challenges to
their thinking as well as to their identities and professional standing. As
