The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay
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as mentioned earlier, helped cement the sense of group identity; and the common experience of forced exile and regrouping abroad added considerably to this feeling. Within the Institut itself, a still smaller group had coalesced around Horkheimer, consisting of Pollock, Lowenthal, Adorno, Marcuse, and Fromm. It is really their work, rooted in the central tradition of European philosophy, open to contemporary empirical techniques, and addressed to current social questions, that formed the core of the Institut’s achievement.
If one seeks a common thread running through individual biographies of the inner circle, the one that immediately comes to mind is their birth into families of middle or upper-middle class Jews (in Adorno’s case, only one parent was Jewish). Although this is not the place to launch a full-scale discussion of the Jewish radical in the Weimar Republic, a few observations ought to be made. As noted earlier, one of the arguments employed by Felix Weil and Pollock to persuade the elder Weil to endow the Institut had been the need to study anti-Semitism in Germany. It was not, however, until the 1940’s that this task was actually begun. If one were to characterize the Institut’s general attitude towards the “Jewish question,” it would have to be seen as similar to that expressed by another radical Jew almost a century before, Karl Marx. In both cases the religious or ethnic issue was clearly subordinated to the social. In Dämmerung, Horkheimer attacked Jewish capitalists who were against anti-Semitism simply because it posed an economic threat. “The readiness to sacrifice life and property for belief,” he wrote, “is left behind with the material basis of the ghetto. With the bourgeois Jew, the hierarchy of goods is neither Jewish nor Christian, but bourgeois. . . . The Jewish revolutionary, like the ‘aryan,’ risks his own life for the freedom of mankind.”91 Further evidence of their de-emphasis of strictly Jewish as opposed to social oppression was their indifference to Zionism as a solution to the plight of the Jews.92
In fact, the members of the Institut were anxious to deny any significance at all to their ethnic roots, a position that has not been eroded with time in most of their cases. Weil, for example, in his extensive correspondence with this author, has heatedly rejected any suggestion that Jewishness—defined religiously, ethnically, or culturally—had any influence whatsoever on the selection of Institut members or the development of their ideas. He has also insisted that the assimilation of Jews in Weimar had gone so far that “discrimination against Jews had retreated completely to the ‘social club level,’ ”93 with the result that the Institut’s neglect of the “Jewish question” was justified by its practical disappearance. That the Institut was founded one year after the foreign minister of Germany, Walter Rathenau, was assassinated largely because of his ethnic roots seems to have had no personal impact on the “assimilated” Jews connected with the Institut. Wittfogel, one of its gentile members, has confirmed this general blindness, arguing that he was one of the few exceptions who recognized the precariousness of the Jews’ position, even of those who were most assimilated.94 What strikes the current observer is the intensity with which many of the Institut’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities. Assimilated German Jews, as has often been noted, were surprised by the ease with which German society accepted the anti-Semitic measures of the Nazis. Self-delusions on this score persisted in some cases as late as the war. Even so hardheaded a realist as Franz Neumann could write in Behemoth that “the German people are the least anti-Semitic of all.”95 His appraisal of the situation seems to have been supported by almost all of his Institut colleagues.
In the face of this vehement rejection of the meaningfulness of Jewishness in their backgrounds, one can only look for indirect ways in which it might have played a role. Certainly the overt impact of Judaism as a system of belief seems to have been negligible. The two possible exceptions to this were Leo Lowenthal and Erich Fromm, both of whom had been active in the group comprising the Frankfurt Lehrhaus. Lowenthal had been one of the contributors to the Festschrift dedicated to Rabbi Nobel in 1921, writing on the demonic in religion.96 He continued to find his way into the pages of such publications as the Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt as late as 1930, although by then he had left his truly religious period behind. Still, one would be hard pressed at any time to find echoes of Lowenthal’s interest in Judaism in the work he did for the Institut. Fromm, on the other hand, has often been characterized as retaining secular versions of Jewish themes in his work, even after he left Orthodoxy in the mid-twenties.97 Frequent comparisons have been made between his work and other members of the Lehrhaus group, particularly Martin Buber. What these similarities were will be made clearer in Chapter 3. Only Lowenthal and Fromm (along with Walter Benjamin, who was to write for the Zeitschrift in later years) ever evinced any real interest in Jewish theological issues. To the others Judaism was a closed book.
If the manifest intellectual content of Judaism played no role in the thinking of most of the Institut’s members, one has to turn to more broadly sociological or cultural explanations. In his recent study of the predominantly Jewish left-wing literati who wrote for the Berlin journal Die Weltbühne, Istvan Deak has had to ask similar questions to those that arise in a study of the Frankfurt School. He has correctly noted that the high percentage of Jews on Weimar’s left—the Weltbühne circle was much larger than the Institut’s, but the same correlation still held—was no mere coincidence. It was due, he wrote, “to a specific development: their recognition of the fact that business, artistic, or scientific careers do not help solve the Jewish problem, and that Weimar Germany had to undergo dire transformation if German anti-Semitism was to end.”98 However, the members of the Frankfurt School deny ever having had such a recognition. “All of us,” Pollock has written, “up to the last years before Hitler, had no feeling of insecurity originating from our ethnic descent. Unless we were ready to undergo baptism, certain positions in public service and business were closed to us, but that never bothered us. And under the Weimar republic many of these barriers had been moved away.”99 Their radicalism is thus difficult to attribute to a conscious awareness of socialism as the only solution to a keenly felt sense of ethnic oppression.
And yet, for all their claims to total assimilation and assertions about the lack of discrimination in Weimar, one cannot avoid a sense of their protesting too much. If in fact Weimar was an environment in which anti-Semitism was on the wane, which itself seems questionable, it must be remembered that the Institut’s members all grew up before the First World War in a very different Germany. Even the most assimilated Jews in Wilhelmian Germany must have felt somewhat apart from their gentile counterparts, and coming to maturity in this atmosphere must surely have left its mark. The sense of role-playing that the Jew eager to forget his origins must have experienced could only have left a residue of bitterness, which might easily feed a radical critique of the society as a whole. This is not to say that the Institut’s program can be solely, or even predominantly, attributed to its members’ ethnic roots, but merely to argue that to ignore them entirely is to lose sight of one contributing factor.
Once in America, it might be noted parenthetically, the Institut’s members became more sensitive to the Jewish question. Adorno, for example, was asked by Pollock to drop the Wiesengrund from his name, because there were too many Jewish-sounding names on the Institut’s roster.100 Paul Massing, one of the few gentiles in their midst, has said that his non-Jewishness was a slight but still significant factor in keeping him apart from his colleagues.101 Assimilation was paradoxically more difficult in America than it had been in pre-Nazi Germany, at least so many Institut members felt.
Besides the sociological explanation of the effect of their origins, there is a cultural one as well. Jürgen Habermas has recently argued that a striking resemblance exists between certain strains in the Jewish cultural tradition and in that of German Idealism, whose roots have often been seen in Protestant Pietism.102 One important similarity, which is especially crucial for an understanding of Critical Theory, is the old cabalistic idea that speech rather than pictures was the only way to approach God. The distance between Hebrew, the sacred language, and the profane speech of the Diaspora made its impact on Jews who were distrustful of the current universe of discourse. This, so Habermas has argued, parallels the idealist critique of empirical reality, which reached its height in Hegelian dialectics. Although one cannot draw a