648
PARTISAN REVIEW
She said that even within such groups "authoritarian" personality traits
are subject to wide variations - which might or might not be activated
in particular political or social crises. The idea of intolerance of
ambiguity is still used for understanding the psychological roots of social
unrest and, more broadly, for describing a fundamental deficit in
contemporary political culture in America as well as Germany.
These two examples show that forced migration engendered analyses
of social issues with implications beyond their roots in reflections on
Nazism. By integrating European and American intellectual traditions
and research methods, the emigres helped make American science and
culture more cosmopolitan. Such an approach still represents the best
way of finding common ground in a multicultural world.
As returnees to or commentators on Germany, some emigres acted as
living, though deeply ambivalent, bonds between their former homeland
and other cultures. A number of them, including Kurt Lewin, worked
feverishly on Allied plans to "reeducate" the Germans after Nazism's de–
feat. Others were deeply skeptical of such efforts. As early as 1943,
Thomas Mann refused social democratic politician Ernst Reuter's request
to formulate an appeal to the German people with these pointed re–
marks: "I believe we have little to teach the Germans and nothing to
warn them about.... The people of Europe, including Germany have,
after all, passed through a purgatorial experience through which most of
the emigres ... have
not
gone." This fundamental discrepancy in personal
experience shaped emigres and Germans' feelings about one another for
decades to come.
The bitter reality Hannah Arendt encountered on her first visit, in
1950, confirmed Mann's prescient comments. She wrote of the "absence
of mourning for the dead," and of "the apathy with which they react,
or rather fail to react, to the fate of the refugees in their midst." For her
these were signs of Germans' "deep-rooted, stubborn and at times vicious
refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened." The self–
pity or self-absorption at work came out most clearly when she revealed
to her interlocutors that she was a Jew. "This is usually followed by a
little embarrassed pause; and then comes - not a personal question, such
as 'where did you go after you left Germany?', no sign of sympathy, such
as 'What happened to your family?' - but a deluge of stories about how
Germans have suffered (true enough, of course, but beside the point);
and if the object of this little experiment happens to be educated and
intelligent, he will proceed to draw up a balance between German
suffering and the suffering of others." The emotional gulf between Jews
and Germans had become greater than ever before, marked all the more
