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The Institute of Social Research

Dubiel: Can you tell me something about the early history of the Institute of Social Research, that is, since the time you worked at the Institute? The earliest history of the Institute, up to its formation in 1924 and then including the first two years of its existence, have been described and documented in Paul Kluke's book Stiftungsuniversität Frankfurt am Main .^[1] Martin Jay, too, deals with this period, and thus we need not refer to it. So, tell us about the time you were at the Institute.

Lowenthal: I am not familiar with Kluke's book. Leaving aside the matter of the earlier history, the Institute as we know it is clearly Horkheimer's intellectual creation. It became evident as early as, let us say, 1926, and surely by 1928, after Carl Grünberg's illness, that Horkheimer was to become the Institute's director. I joined the Institute in 1926, but only part-time; I was in close intellectual contact with Horkheimer and Pollock, though. First I worked on my essays in the sociology of literature, now collected in Literature, Popular Culture, and Society . Our collaboration became more in-

[1] Paul Kluke, Stiftungsuniversität Frankfurt am Main 1914–1932 (Frankfurt am Main, 1972).

tense in 1928 and 1929, when Grünberg's retirement was expected. There now was the matter of preparing for Horkheimer's directorship, which was not simple. Horkheimer was only a lecturer [Privatdozent ], and a regular professorship was a precondition for the directorship. He had not yet published much—his only published works so far had been his dissertation and an essay on Mannheim in the Grünberg Archiv .

Dubiel: Are you referring to the critical review of Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia ?

Lowenthal: Yes. One of the things that occupied us at that time was the completion of Horkheimer's Anfänge der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie, which appeared as a book in 1930. I collaborated on that a great deal, at his request. In general, my editorial labors wind like a red thread throughout my connection with the Institute. In 1929 a large part of the activity at the Institute was devoted to strategic planning, as it were. And we were successful: Horkheimer became a professor and director of the Institute. Shall I give you some details?

Dubiel: No, they are contained in Kluke's book.

Lowenthal: So, in 1930 Horkheimer became the Institute's director and I became one of two full-time chief assistants—the other being Henryk Grossmann, who dated back to the Grünberg period. By saying this, I do not mean anything detrimental concerning this wonderful and distinguished man. But in matters of theory we had very little in common.

Dubiel: During this phase were you already planning to emigrate?

Lowenthal: The decision to emigrate, or rather to prepare to do so, took place on September 14, 1930, when 107 National Socialists entered the Reichstag. These elections were crucial. During the previous months we had not paid much attention to the general state of the world, for we were still celebrating our honeymoon at the Institute. However, during 1930–1931 it was becoming clear

how the situation was developing. The emotional and political atmosphere was such that emigration had to be seriously considered. The day after the Reichstag elections Felix Weil, Max Horkheimer, Fritz Pollock, and I had a decisive meeting. We asked Felix Weil to provide the funds to establish a branch office in Geneva. The idea of a Geneva branch was Horkheimer's, and it was jointly accepted and immediately executed. In Geneva, Pollock knew Albert Thomas, then the director of the International Labor Office. Pollock told the ILO that we wished to set up an international research office there, and he succeeded in winning Thomas's moral support. This request was quite natural, given the Grünberg tradition of the Frankfurt Institute; Thomas, himself a good socialist, knew and respected Grünberg. We then found a Dutch sociologist, Andries Sternheim, who at first worked alone at the Geneva branch office and cultivated friendly relations with the International Labor Office. That this branch was to be the focal point for our emigration was not to be publicized. Therefore, we followed normal routines: Horkheimer went to Geneva frequently, as did Pollock, and I went occasionally. The university was to get the impression that this branch was a bona fide institute. Also, in 1931 we shifted the foundation's funds from Germany to the Netherlands. At the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt we kept only a letter of credit that barely covered the Institute's monthly requirements. This is why the Nazis didn't get anything from us. Only one of the employees, who had forgotten to pick up her check early enough, lost any money—we compensated her for it. We donated our library to the London School of Economics, a library that, through Grünberg, had become a choice collection of documents from the history of the labor movement and had been expanded by Horkheimer with innumerable valuable texts on philosophy and cultural history. It was not so easy to transfer ownership to the LSE, though, so the title to the library had to be transferred first to a Swiss foundation whose name I have forgotten. This foundation, made up mainly of a board of Swiss citizens, then

transferred title of the library to the London School of Economics, whose director, Sir William Beveridge, accepted the donation. Then, when the Nazis came, the London School of Economics would be able to save the library. You know that this did not work out. Mr. Ribbentrop told the British ambassador that we were a bunch of Communists, and so the British did not make any effort to save the library from the National Socialists' interference. Eventually, during the war, the library went up in flames. It may even have burned, by an irony of history, as the result of a British bombing.

Dubiel: As far as Europe is concerned, the international reputation of your Institute was almost meteoric, judging from the famous names among the Zeitschrift 's reviewers.

Lowenthal: Everyone we invited to lecture at the Institute came: Raymond Aron, Edmund Husserl . . .

Dubiel: How do you explain that?

Lowenthal: I'm afraid I can't be very specific about that. Our guests were lavishly received, and the University of Frankfurt had a certain reputation. Through Horkheimer's skill and personality, we had excellent relations with the university's curator, vice-chancellor, and its leading intellectual figures such as Paul Tillich. You must also remember that many talented left-wing students were drawn to the Institute. We organized seminars on Hegel and Marx that drew large crowds—although no university credit was given. Also important were the connections with the Piscator Theater and the Malik and Marx-Engels publishing houses. As you must know, the Institute was dubbed the "Café Marx"—first in friendly fashion, later not so friendly.

Dubiel: Can you tell me more about the emigration?

Lowenthal: As I mentioned before, we, unlike others, realized early on how quickly totalitarian terror would spread in Germany. Many were naïve, and because of their narrow academic interests they refused to recognize the catastrophic situation in Germany.

Later they paid bitterly for it. I was the last one to leave the Institute and Frankfurt—on March 2, 1933. On March 5, the SA [Sturmabteilung, or storm troops] occupied the building. Later we read a grotesque article in the local Nazi press, which I showed you, listing the dreadful items they had seized—including an alleged sadistic correspondence with my mistress!

We had made connections with Celestin Bouglé in Paris—he had been one of Durkheim's students. He immediately offered to set up a branch at the Sorbonne. He also facilitated relations with the Félix Alcan Press, which offered to take over our Zeitschrift . Then we decided to form another branch in London, at the Institute of Sociology in the Le Play House. This policy of forming branches was part of our tactics. We were like the child who had been burned once—we were not too sure about our situation in Switzerland. We needed our branch in Paris because our publisher was there. The London branch, in turn, was a gathering place in case things didn't work out in Switzerland. You know that the history of Switzerland during the Hitler period was not exactly a glorious one. You have to imagine our situation in Geneva. Only Horkheimer had an unlimited residency permit, so only he could have a home with all his furniture there. Pollock, Marcuse, and I could not do this; we had to keep our libraries and furniture in a bonded warehouse. We remained visitors. We had only tourist visas, and every few weeks or so we had to go across the border to Bellegarde and reenter with a new visa. And there was much more. We often found that Jewish emigrants were scrutinized closely, and in their cases regulations were enforced most strictly. We took this as an indication that fascism would eventually spread to all of Europe; at that time we still did not anticipate a war.

Then there was the matter of the United States. Julian Gumperz, Pollock's assistant, was an American, and Erich Fromm had already been in the United States. And so the idea of emigrating there began

to take hold. There were invitations from leading universities such as Chicago and Columbia. We decided in favor of Columbia on the basis of New York's proximity to Europe. We knew very little about the United States. We thought, for instance, that one could not take a walk in Central Park, although at that time one could still do so. Columbia University was quite generous: organizationally and legally they offered us the same conditions we had enjoyed in Frankfurt. We turned into the "Institute of Social Research, affiliated with Columbia University," and obtained a house on University Heights, which we kept into the late 1940s. The move to the United States took place in 1934: Horkheimer and his wife were the first to leave; Marcuse followed, then I, then Pollock, and finally our wives and children. Fromm was already there. One of the complications we ran into in New York was the publishing of the Zeitschrift . It was still put out by Alcan in Paris, and it was therefore important to get the material there promptly. I recall how many times, late at night, I rushed by car to the post office so that material would reach the Ile de France or another ship in time. There was no airmail service yet.

Dubiel: Did you have someone in the Paris branch arrange for the final editing of the Zeitschrift before going to press?

Lowenthal: At first the Paris branch was managed by Paul Honigsheim, a left-wing Catholic who had been a professor in Cologne. When Honigsheim left for the United States, he was succeeded by a Dr. Hans Brill, who did a good job looking after the Zeitschrift . The Paris branch stayed in operation until the Nazis marched into the city. Because we hardly knew any English—Horkheimer and Pollock had a smattering of it, Marcuse and I scarcely anything—it was necessary to get help with the language. We were lucky: through academic recommendations we were able to hire two young men who later became important scholars. One of them, M. I. Finley, is today one of the most important classical

scholars in Cambridge, England, and a friend of mine.^[*] The second was the late Benjamin Nelson, who became a professor at the New School for Social Research. Part of my activity in New York was devoted to developing the review section of the Zeitschrift . Among other things, this section was an important means of getting financial aid to intellectual emigrants. If you leaf through the journal you see many well-known names. We also commissioned and paid for many reviews knowing full well that we could not or would not publish them. Recently, I was looking through some of my old papers and came across an exchange of letters with Kurt Goldstein, an outstanding psychiatrist. In one letter I confirmed that I was sending him an honorarium of nine dollars. Don't be surprised at that—do you know what secretaries were making then? Fourteen dollars a week. That's why we had good secretaries: on Wall Street at that time they would have earned only twelve dollars. That was during the depression, but we weren't very aware of that. We were so concerned with building our own German island that we nearly forgot what terrible times America was going through. Well, we remained an island, no doubt about that.

Dubiel: It seems to me—and this is shared also by Americans who had intellectual contacts with you—that the most important period of your life, and intellectually the most formative, was that which you spent at the Institute. I think that this was true of all members. Would you agree?

Lowenthal: I certainly do. In my case this period extended for almost a quarter of a century; I was associated with the Institute full-time from 1926 to 1949. True, during the first years—I mean in the late 1920s—I was still teaching high school, but my intellectual home was the Institute. And at the end, in the late 1940s, I was the only one of us living alone in New York. But, as you know from the huge correspondence with Horkheimer and Adorno, our close association remained intact.

[*] Professor Finley died in 1986.

Dubiel: You received so many formative impulses from this group—from the overall perspective, what would you single out? How has the Institute affected your style, intellectual habits, theoretical approaches, ways of evaluating traditions, choices of books?

Lowenthal: Well, that's quite a big question. The whole atmosphere of the Institute, not just the influence of Max Horkheimer, allowed me to further develop my view of the world, of nature, and of life. Of course, the basis for this was already there, characterized essentially by a concern for independence. This is best captured by our slogan of nicht mitmachen, not playing the game. The Institute's intellectual tradition made it possible for me to achieve a satisfactory synthesis of my philosophical, literary, sociological, and hedonistic feelings. In a sense, I relived my student years at the Institute. My first years there were a sort of anticipated utopia: we were different, and we knew the world better. Looking at it in retrospect, our history seems quite extraordinary. First of all, Horkheimer's becoming the director and the founding of a new periodical represented something new. The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was like Karl Kraus's Die Fackel [The Torch], although written not by one person but by a group working closely together. Then there was our anticipation of the decline of the Weimar Republic and the preparation of our flight abroad, along with our conviction, at that time, that the spread of fascism was more likely than a world war. We had left for the United States and built there an island of German radical intellectuals. This in itself was rather significant. If I were to elaborate on all of this in detail it would add up to a unique fusion of intellectual talent, worldwide political perspectives, and a far-ranging imagination molded by an upper-class Jewish lifestyle. None of us believed that all this would be confirmed by the reputation earned by the Frankfurt group. Nor could I say with certainty that I am happy about all this, because I am not sure whether this "integration" isn't also part of this society's ability to integrate and thereby defuse everything. But there it is. First of all, it was a miracle we survived and were able to overcome all the obstacles to

emigration, to rise eventually from the ashes from the 1950s onward. For we really have become an ineradicable part of Western intellectual life and, in a certain sense, of political life. So, this is my long reply to a complex question.

Dubiel: What has often surprised me is the astounding certainty, the almost instinctual deep-seated self-assurance, in the organization of your theoretical work. In all of you I feel an extraordinarily precise topography, a very detailed theoretical map on the basis of which every theoretical task can be quickly identified as to its immanent quality as well as to its intellectual-political relevance.

Lowenthal: You remind me of my opening statements in the address that I gave in 1974 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt. At that time I pointed to the Zeitschrift 's format to explain the meaning of Critical Theory: that is, it is a perspective, a common, critical, basic attitude toward all cultural phenomena, that never claimed to be a system. The Zeitschrift contains the critical programs of the founding fathers, if I may call them such, on philosophy, economics, psychology, music, and literature. Critical Theory, then, must be understood as nothing but such a collective denominator. It was an expression, by the way, that we never used with as much emphasis during the first twenty years as may appear to posterity. This is my reply: it is a perspective. For that reason I'm always a bit baffled when someone requests that I offer a seminar on Critical Theory—I never know how to deal with that. I usually call my friend Martin Jay and ask him to define the main characteristics of the so-called Critical Theory. Now I'll ask you—after all, you wrote a book about it.

Dubiel: It's really impossible to come up with a few general characteristics and say: this is Critical Theory. In the case of so-called traditional theories it is frequently possible, because with the aid of given central premises one can derive one's own hypothesis. For a while, in reaction to this problem, I took an agnostic stance

and maintained that Critical Theory was a myth fabricated by self-serving second-rate literati, supported by the commercial interests of publishing houses, having no relation to reality. But, now that I have known you for quite some time, I feel that you represent a specific style of thinking and living. On the one hand I consider myself privileged to be able to partake of it, and on the other I resist reducing a theoretical tradition to a personal physiognomy. I find it difficult to abandon the idea that theoretical theses must also be cognitively transportable and that they must not exhaust themselves in the authenticity of a person. For this reason I reiterate my question: what are the symptomatic characteristics of what is known as Critical Theory?

Lowenthal: Well, something of it is codified, in particular in Horkheimer's great essay "Traditional and Critical Theory," and in Marcuse's supplementary essay.^[2] But I should like to say something else. Recently, in one of my seminars, one of my most gifted students attacked our group, saying that our attitude was Olympian, that we had separated ourselves completely from Marxism and had lost sight of reality. I replied that such criticism missed the meaning of Critical Theory: we had not abandoned praxis; rather, praxis had abandoned us. I have often talked about the great trauma represented by the developments in the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. But of far greater significance was the insight that the idea of the proletariat's revolutionary potential was historically dated. This was then especially clear in the United States, and now it is clear throughout the world. Here, as well as in most of Western Europe, the so-called proletariat is now a petit-bourgeois group with a massive interest in the status quo. Yes, in a mediating sense,

[2] Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell et al. (New York, 1972); and Herbert Marcuse, "Philosophy and Critical Theory," Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1968).

Critical Theory was always in favor of praxis. The essential difference between Critical and Traditional Theory was this: the problems that concerned us—whether it was the critique of liberalism or of phenomenology, literature, or music—were determined essentially by the given historical situation. Our main interest was not methodology but the hopefully successful attempt to analyze critically those tendencies and movements that stood in the way of reestablishing a possible unity between politics and theory. So, Critical Theory did not in the least regard itself as esoteric; its most crucial feature was a reflection on the relation between theory and praxis.

Dubiel: You—as a group—have answered such a reproach concerning Critical Theory's lack of practical political interests by saying that today's labor movement has itself become confused, that the separation of theory and practice was the fault of praxis.

Lowenthal: I recall having heard in intellectual and personal conversations the reproach that one could not always be critical, that sometimes one should also be constructive. We were always scandalous troublemakers. You are familiar with the famous reproach to Erich Kästner: "Herr Kästner, and what about the positive aspects?" Well, it is exactly the negative that was the positive: this consciousness of not going along, the refusal. The essence of Critical Theory is really the inexorable analysis of what is.

Although I do not agree with Horkheimer's excessively religious symbolism during his last years, when he defined the "completely other" of this society by referring to the name of a God who must not be named, this reticence points to something that unites us. What man can do in freedom should not be anticipated, and one must always say no to what is happening because it is not happening in freedom. We cannot escape from Hegel's antithetical position. How could we really do so? After all, the synthesis is to be made by the subjects themselves. We are the involved collaborators of the negative phase of the dialectical process. It was this belief that held

us together and gave us so much strength. It helped us avoid seduction by reality, which is not to say that we do not, on occasion, enjoy the good things life has to offer. Yet none of us has ever succumbed to the Faustian warning: "If ever I say to any moment: Linger, you are so wonderful."

Dubiel: When I now use the word "attitude," I do not mean it negatively. After all, this attitude of critical distance was developed on the basis of historical experiences and was not a departure point. During the early 1930s, when you all defined your theoretical direction still as materialistic, you still considered yourselves, at least morally, part of the labor movement. This definitely changed in 1936 (I mention this date because of Horkheimer's classic essay). Since then you have considered yourselves as, in Adorno's apt description, a Flaschenpost [a message in a bottle]—a lonely, marginal group critically examining the course of the world.

Lowenthal: I agree with that.

Dubiel: I want to get back to what the core of Critical Theory is. Clearly, that question cannot be readily answered. There are so many different perspectives from which one can view Critical Theory.

Lowenthal: If it were a dogma, the question could be readily answered. In fact, this question derives from a positivistic way of thinking, even though it may be asked by well-meaning autonomous individuals.

Dubiel: I would like to pursue the notion of "perspectives." Can you compare your group's theoretical orientation with what the Institute stood for in Frankfurt in 1930? How would you describe yourselves in relation to the frequently mechanistic, even historically unreflected, materialism of people such as Grünberg and Wittfogel—and even Henryk Grossmann? Comparing the table of contents of the last issue of Grünberg's Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung with the program of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung reveals a surprising shift toward

problems of philosophy and cultural critique and, in general, superstructural problems.

Lowenthal: Yes, there is no doubt about that. The emphasis did shift to superstructural problems, but not entirely. Don't forget the works of Pollock and his collaborators—especially during the 1940s the political-economic works of Pollock and Franz Neumann were crucial to us. I am referring to the theory of state capitalism and Behemoth . Even Henryk Grossmann's earlier theoretical conviction that the collapse was imminent is part of this context, which represented a counterweight to the program of a materialistic philosophy of culture. But these studies were not the core. Its character was also determined by personnel contingencies, intellectual qualities, and the ability to be heard within the group.

Dubiel: Let us now turn to the relation to Marxism. In West Germany, and even more here in the United States, Critical Theory is seen as an enlightened version of Marxism.

Lowenthal: That was never abandoned. I would go even further and say that Critical Theory is a progressive form of Marxism that no longer mechanically accepts Marxist categories in changed historical situations. The theory of immiseration, the unmediated reduction of the superstructure to the base, the theory of the crash as deriving from the fall in the rate of profit have all turned out to be untenable. But basic Marxist themes have never been abandoned. The hypothesis that world history can be described as the result of the struggle between outer and inner nature, and the theory of productive forces and class relations, have never been given up. What have been abandoned are certain economistic categories and predictions that have proven to be wrong. That was entirely in Marx's spirit. He always referred to tendencies and countertendencies. You are right: our interest turned toward a cultural area neglected by the Marxist tradition—psychology. Psychology does not exist in classical Marxism and so we have surely added something to that theory. This, of course, does not fit into that petit-

bourgeois catechism of Marxism as proposed by Bukharin. Thus, if the Russian tradition is seen as the legitimate successor of Marxism, then we have not been Marxists.

Dubiel: The theoretical development of Marxism cannot be separated from the practical movements that appeal to it. Your Marxism was defined by opposition to the Social Democratic and Bolshevik versions of Marxism. Other perspectives could be chosen to represent Critical Theory, such as its relation to the Enlightenment tradition.

Lowenthal: Indeed! Like the young Marx we have always considered ourselves critical continuers of the radical Enlightenment tradition.

Dubiel: Do you see the theoretical and intellectual development of the Frankfurt circle between 1930 and 1950 as in some way typical of, say, the socialist emigré intelligentsia between the two world wars?

Lowenthal: No. We were completely isolated; ours was a singular story. Please do not consider it presumptuous, but we did not wish to be typical. Of course there were other schools, for example, the logical positivists, but they had no political purpose.

Dubiel: How about comparing you with clearly political groups such as the SPD in exile? I am referring to the New Beginning group.

Lowenthal: We cannot be compared to these groups.

Dubiel: So, the uniqueness of your group then seems defined as "in between" unmistakably political groups on the one hand and scholarly groups on the other.

Lowenthal: Perhaps the psychoanalytical movement can be roughly compared to ours. But this, too, would be inaccurate. Such groups must always be perceived against the background of specific political constellations. Think of the beginning of our interdisciplinary orientation and collaboration within the framework of our political philosophy, to our determination as emigrés to

uphold this tradition, as the only progressive voice of German intellectual life—that was something out of the ordinary. Adorno's metaphor of the Flaschenpost couldn't have been more to the point. In the 1960s, of course, all of us were surprised at the pop this bottle made when it was uncorked. But we all reacted differently.

Dubiel: There is another question I want to ask. You were not a homogeneous group. What subgroups or factions were there, and what conflicts arose from this?

Lowenthal: In the 1930s the basic conflict involved the Soviet Union and the trials. There was quite a split about that, and it frequently resulted in heated conversations and unpleasant scenes. The defenders of the Soviet Union were Wittfogel, Grossmann, and Bloch—although the latter was not strictly a member of our group. It went so far that one of these three called us the "swine on 117th Street" (that was where our Columbia house was located). I can still remember one such scene involving Horkheimer, Marcuse, Wittfogel, and myself. It took place at a luncheon in a New York restaurant, the Tip-Toe Inn. In the course of our conversation Horkheimer remarked that it would not surprise him if an alliance developed between Hitler and Stalin, if Hitler made only the least overture. At this, Wittfogel leaped up as if bitten by a tarantula, threw his napkin onto the table in a rage, threw out some insulting remarks that I shall not repeat, and left the restaurant in a huff. We even had to pay his bill. We had various scenes like this one at the Institute itself because he constantly sought to justify the trials—and he was not the only one.

The disappointment over what took place in the Soviet Union and in those countries that called themselves Communist is a key to our political development. For instance, when people say that fascism and Communism are the same, I disagree. Soviet Communism is a perversion of a theory, a moral system, and a style of thought that are essentially good. Hitler's fascism, in contrast, is bad for the very reason that its basic conception of man is inhuman.

A Jew can never be saved, while a capitalist can freely declassify himself and convert to a new religion. That this does not happen in practice is not the fault of Marxist philosophy.

Dubiel: Now I should like to touch on a subject that would have been obsolete had it not been raised again in the recently published biography of Benjamin by Werner Fuld.^[3] You know better than I the background of the accusation, going back over a decade, that during the late 1930s the Institute in a sense blackmailed Benjamin ideologically, threatening to cut off funds in order to make him give up his allegedly strict Marxist course. There are certain forms of malice against which even the most honest arguments are powerless. That's why this legend is still alive today. Can you comment on this?

Lowenthal: I feel extremely sad about this matter. On the basis of our conversations, the documents and the correspondence that you have seen, you could have convinced yourself that, within the constraints of its relatively limited funds, the Institute did indeed spend large sums in helping emigré intellectuals. Walter Benjamin was one of those who from the very outset, and uninterruptedly, benefited from this solidarity on the part of the Institute. It is true that Benjamin was not a formal member of the Institute, but he was a close friend of Adorno and his wife, and we all knew him well. Since the Frankfurt days and since his aborted attempt to earn a university lectureship, we were in almost constant contact with him personally and, later, through letters. As you know, Benjamin always remained a seeker, a doubter, and a lone wolf; he had strong moral and intellectual ties to Zionism, to Communism, to aesthetic theory, to Jewish mysticism, and to literature. He had an extraordinarily complex relation to art in modern society and to the role of popular culture and the mass media. It was unavoidable that the intellectual motifs of such a many-sided and brilliant person

[3] Werner Fuld, Walter Benjamin: Zwischen den Stühlem (Munich, 1979).

were frequently contradictory, and this sometimes brought him into conflict with those close to him. All this is well documented in his correspondence with Adorno. I myself had an argument with him over Knut Hamsun, although he later admitted I was right. We were glad that Benjamin regularly wrote articles for the Zeitschrift . He was in no way a merely pro forma colleague, but someone who intellectually, if not physically, belonged to our group even though he lived on the other side of the Atlantic. Of course, it was easier—after all, you know how the Zeitschrift was edited—to deal with a co-worker in the New York office in making changes and adjustments relating to differences of opinion. Unfortunately, Benjamin was far from the scene. It was Adorno's main task to look over Benjamin's essays and to correspond with him about them. All of us, of course, also read them and discussed them directly with Benjamin or through Adorno. Correspondence may at times have a more irreversible and quarrelsome effect than conversation, in which misunderstandings can be immediately removed. The charge that we blackmailed Benjamin has been raised by the journal Alternative . Certain sources in East Germany have added to it, as, unfortunately, did Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt—both of whom I greatly respect.

This matter is especially painful for me because now I am the only survivor who, from an intimate knowledge of the entire staff, can say that an infamous distortion took place here. The Institute never politically censored its co-workers. Of course, we discussed editorial changes and proposed them to the authors. As far as Benjamin was concerned, we always secured his approval. You will look in vain for a letter from Benjamin in which he protests against any alleged deletion by us. By the way, at the request of Rolf Tiedemann, the editor of Benjamin's works, I wrote a letter that is reprinted in the second part of the first volume of Benjamin's collected works. In that letter I described how we handled editorial matters and stated that the imputation of political censorship was

downright grotesque. It was true—as the managing editor of the Zeitschrift I plead guilty—that at times we stylistically reformulated certain expressions that might have been misunderstood politically; but this was always with the approval of the authors in question. This involved all of us—Horkheimer, Adorno, Pollock, Marcuse, and myself; none of us was spared. We proceeded this way only because our Zeitschrift was essentially the platform for Critical Theory and we were pursuing a clear, philosophical, scientific, and political line. At any rate, the charge that we were making arbitrary changes behind an author's back or that we financially blackmailed a man like Benjamin is an insult to the members of the Institute, not least to Benjamin himself. To claim that he had to accept changes in his essays to secure modest financial assistance is a posthumous insult to Benjamin. I hope that I have contributed something to burying this legend at last.

Dubiel: Now I wish to touch on another complex matter. As you know, I have a clearly defined picture of the pioneering theoretical work of your group during the Frankfurt period before Hitler—I mean the project of an interdisciplinary social science. Generally speaking, when one engages in theory one always seeks to transpose particular theoretical efforts into an overall framework. What has fascinated me in some texts—especially in Horkheimer's inaugural address at Frankfurt University, in the preface to the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , and in various passages he wrote on dialectics—was this project, which Horkheimer called the "theory of the historical process." This reveals an intention to provide a theory of the present historical process by social scientific methods, in the best sense of that term. Was that really the case?

Lowenthal: Quite correct so far. At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s a metaphysical and basically antihistorical reaction occurred in Germany: Husserl and his followers, the materialist metaphysics of Nicolai Hartmann, Max Scheler, Jung's psychology, Ludwig Klages, and a whole configuration of new

"perennial philosophies." Early Nazi ideology was also an ahistorical, pseudo-metaphysical play with history and society. Our group attempted to trace the historical self-consciousness that had been achieved; to heighten critical historical consciousness was our theoretical agenda. Is this what you are after?

Dubiel: Exactly! But is there something else?

Lowenthal: Well, that's what we did, we carried out the intention.

Dubiel: How?

Lowenthal: In a broad study of Rhineland workers and employees, which was an attempt to investigate the question of what holds a society together in a postfeudal period, in other words, to determine what the social-psychological cement of that society is.^[4] The operational plan was to carry out research on authority. It was unorthodox in the history of organized intellectual and academic life to bring together philosophy, technical, and scientific reflections and then translate them into research. After all, we had learned from Marx that the theoretical requires the empirical, as well as the reverse. So, the unity of theory and empirical research was something we assumed from the outset. Although we were no longer able to do much about changing society, our interpretation of events enabled us to save our lives.

Dubiel: You have now touched on it yourself. There was the attempt to unite general theoretical perspectives with detailed empirical work. So, there was the goal of integrating philosophy with various particular scientific approaches. Well, that's fine. But to what extent was this methodology made explicit? Did you discuss this epistemology together, or were these exclusively Horkheimer's private views?

[4] Erich Fromm, The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study , ed. Wolfgang Bonss, trans. Barbara Weinberger (Leamington Spa, 1984).

Lowenthal: That's difficult for me to answer. All of that tends toward an organizational form. . . .

Dubiel: Which is exactly what you and Marcuse have always argued against.

Lowenthal: All of this took place rather informally; it was not organized.

Dubiel: If there was indeed such a methodology, as part of the basic principles you all shared, then it must have been somewhere.

Lowenthal: Well, if you really want to know, it came through more in the preliminary editorial work and in the conferences over the studies to be published in the Zeitschrift .

Dubiel: That's what I thought.

Lowenthal: There you would hear such phrases as, "you cannot put it that way," or "we mean this in a different sense," or "we do not use such an expression," or "this expression we employ differently," and so forth. This is how the language of Critical Theory began. In common theoretical work a collective opinion emerged within our group.

Dubiel: All right. Was there in this rhetoric an awareness of the project, which I call the fusion of philosophy and scientific disciplines and the integration of the scientific disciplines themselves? Perhaps it was really through organized research by way of various personally assigned roles, so that Marcuse's task was in technical philosophy, Lowenthal's in literature, Adorno's in music, Pollock's in economics, while Horkheimer worked out the synthesis in his programmatic essays. Could your editorial sessions be pictured as having that formal structure?

Lowenthal: It did not take place that formally. There was no such planning of our work, such that Marcuse, for instance, would write an essay on political philosophy, Adorno on music, and I on literature. Each of us worked in a definite field on the assumption that something would eventually come out of it for the Zeitschrift and for our common theoretical perspectives. What you are imput-

ing as the special competence of each one of us was valid only for music. There Adorno was indeed the "specialist" whom none of us could match. But in other areas the situation was different, because none of us was entirely ignorant of what everyone else was doing. Horkheimer was very knowledgeable in philosophy, but also in political sociology, literature, psychology, and history. The same was true of Marcuse, Teddie, and myself. Although specialists in the narrower sense, Pollock and Fromm were also highly cultured. None of us had chosen narrow fields of study at the university. This was a good basis for our collaboration.

Dubiel: Well, I get the feeling that I'm insisting on a personal idée fixe .

Lowenthal: In many cases our conversations stimulated future works. I think I have already told you how I came to write my essay on Hamsun. In conversation with Horkheimer and Marcuse, the latter claimed that Hamsun was the greatest living novelist. At that point I became very agitated and took issue with him, stating categorically that Hamsun was a fascist. Horkheimer then proposed that I explain this in an essay.^[5] Until then, in 1934, there were still no leads on that subject. And so this study came about, as did many others, through conversations. When Mortimer Adler wrote his history of culture from Aristotle to the movies, Horkheimer thought this was a good opportunity to clarify our theory of popular culture. That's how the essay "Art and Popular Culture" came into being.^[6] Again, in my essay on Hamsun there is a long footnote signed by Hektor Rottweiler—Adorno's pseudonym. In it he

[5] Originally published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6, no. 2, in 1938; English version appears as Leo Lowenthal, "Knut Hamsun (1860–1952)," in Lowenthal, Literature and the Image of Man, vol. 2 of Communication and Society (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986).

[6] Horkheimer, Critical Theory, pp. 273–90.

brings out that in Sibelius's music the same motifs reappear as in Hamsun's works. You can see from this how careful we were in reading one another's essays.

Dubiel: Now I want to ask you about Autorität und Familie . Basically, this was the first major collective project.

Lowenthal: Yes, Studien über Autorität und Familie [Studies on Authority and the Family], published in Paris in 1936, is a beautiful example of this type of collaboration. The idea was to study authority as the cement of society, that is, the idea missing in Marx: a theory of the mediating psychic links between base and superstructure. We asked ourselves whether there were mechanisms other than the pure use of force to explain conformity. A theory of the family as an agency of society was formulated by Fromm on the basis of Freudian theory. It appeared theoretically and empirically promising to investigate the family as a matrix of what authority meant in modern society. The very title expresses the unity of our interests.

Dubiel: Would this project's result have been different if history had followed a different course and if you had not been forced to emigrate, if you had had sufficient time and resources to carry the studies through according to plan?

Lowenthal: I think so.

Dubiel: Would you agree that the published volume was, after all, only a sort of report on work in progress?

Lowenthal: Yes. The work was uneven. Yet the first part, containing the theory of authority in modern society—a survey of the treatment of authority in philosophy from the Renaissance to the present time and a social-psychological discussion of authority with special reference to the family—would presumably have remained unchanged in a more developed version of the project. I myself would probably have written more on how this program was reflected in literature. And were it not for Hitler, the empirical

research would have included additional sections and would not have restricted itself to the study of workers and employees in the Rhineland; it would have extended to other regions, such as Bavaria or areas east of the Elbe River. Had we had the means and the personnel, we would have undertaken comparative studies in other European countries. In a more refined version, we would have either omitted the third part of the study or structured it differently. That part contains a wealth of reports on scholarly literature written by persons from outside our circle and was devised largely as a means of supporting emigré colleagues in distress. Perhaps all of this might have developed in such a way that the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung would have published research reports on other inquiries. The book was not very successful. But how could it have been otherwise? It was a huge work printed in German in 1936 by Alcan in Paris! It turned out to be a somewhat damaged Flaschenpost . I must reiterate: we never believed in fame and never sought it. But we all shared Adorno's urge to publish the work in German in spite of an uncertain future. In a sense, that publication, as well as the Zeitschrift, was a body of work by emigrés conceived in sadness and filled with hope.

Dubiel: Your reply to my query as to how the Studien über Autorität und Familie would have turned out had history not intervened with fascism strikes me as a little too pragmatic. My question should have been more subtle. I was in fact alluding to Horkheimer's formulation in the preface. In a passage referring to the crude character of the overall undertaking, Horkheimer says that it "would be possible for the issues involved in the investigations to disclose their true significance only in the context of an all-embracing theory of social life." What about this formulation?

Lowenthal: This was the principle for continuing to differentiate our individual works to the point of obtaining a theory of society, but surely it would not have led to the writing of a volume entitled Theory of Society .

Dubiel: So, this information was only an option for some sort of theoretical utopia.

Lowenthal: Well, yes; what we meant was a theoretically adequate approach—a successful grasping of the whole mechanism of modern society.

Dubiel: But couldn't Horkheimer's formulation be interpreted differently? Let me just read this formulation my way: "The volume at hand is a preliminary component of a theory of the historical process." When one mentions a part and a whole in a methodology, individual operations and an anticipated overall view, then one must conceive of certain rules that govern their interconnection. There would have to be the formulation of a methodological parameter by which one could gauge the progress of the historical development up to the point of a theory of historical movement.

Lowenthal: I don't think so. You are attributing to all of us foreign theoretical motives. All this would be aimed at a system, whereas Horkheimer's style, and Adorno's as well, were always in the direction of aphorisms.

Dubiel: For the period we are talking about, the 1930s, I would simply question whether the aphoristic form would have been adequate to Horkheimer's way of thinking. Besides, I do not mean to ascribe to your group a systematic approach. What interests me is what a methodology and a research technique would look like, and perhaps also what the literary form would be of a scientific work that attempts to formulate, on the basis of a "concrete totality," a theory of the historical process.

Lowenthal: Now listen. In reality, Horkheimer never wrote such a book. This is not an accident. You may, if you wish, collect essays, as has already been done, choose a title for publication purposes, and call it Critical Theory . And yet, this will not provide a systematic theory.

Dubiel: Leo, I'll stop pressing that point. I want to touch on other problems: questions of the continuity and discontinuity in

the biography of your theory. When we talked about difficulties in locating constants that might characterize Critical Theory, we established that each theoretical contribution was interwoven in the historical moment. If that is so, then the theory changes with its subject. In that sense, Critical Theory is not a set of tenets that can be applied anytime, but only at a particular historical juncture.

Lowenthal: That's very much in the Marxist tradition! Mankind sets for itself only those tasks that it can solve. The task we set for ourselves at that time was the analysis of the social situation in which we found ourselves, in particular, the situation in Germany and Central Europe.

Dubiel: Good. In the preparatory work for my book on your group,^[7] I read the texts in the following order. With regard to fascism, for instance, I excerpted and documented all pertinent passages in letters and all allusions in theoretical texts and entered them on a time scale from 1930 to 1945. It was then that I came upon some interesting points. Although it was the year of your emigration, for you 1933 did not seem to be the break it is commonly perceived as in contemporary accounts. Your group saw a much stronger continuity between the last years of the Weimar Republic, especially those since 1931, and the first years of Hitler's rule than is normally understood. In other words, fascism came gliding in. You did not experience Hitler's chancellorship as a historical watershed. According to your view at that time, fascism developed gradually out of monopoly-capitalist conditions. And this theory of fascism as the adequate political form of highly developed monopoly capitalism also determined your historical perception. I recall a letter Marcuse wrote to Horkheimer in which, on the occasion of Horkheimer's essay in Studien über Autorität und Familie, he discussed the question of periodization. There in 1934, alluding by analogy to the

[7] Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).

National Socialists, Marcuse stated that this fascist bunch of gangsters did not necessarily introduce a qualitatively new epoch. Later on, all of you, especially Marcuse, became much more skeptical. A good document is the 1939 essay "The Jews and Europe."^[8] That essay still assumed that fascism was a great force in Europe before the war. I was surprised to learn that in 1939 there were eleven countries in Europe with fascist or quasi-fascist governments. In addition, many of the "still"-democratic states had strong fascist movements. Under these historical circumstances your group must have considered fascism as, indeed, a quasi-universal historical phenomenon—something you shared with many contemporary, exiled historians—and the political-economic interpretation of fascism gradually disappeared. Other explanations then surfaced, either in terms of a philosophy of history as in the Dialectic of Enlightenment or in terms of social psychology as in the later Studies in Prejudice . What I want to ask is this: would you agree that your view of fascism developed from a political-economic interpretation to one that rested in a global philosophy of history, before evolving into a social-psychological interpretation?

Lowenthal: I'm afraid not. This is the first time in our conversations that my position differs drastically from yours. I have no idea how you have reached this conclusion. It does indeed reflect the view of some people within our circle, but never that of the hard core that determined the Institute's theoretical orientation.

Dubiel: Not so fast. I need hardly tell you that I am alluding to Marcuse's beautiful essay on liberalism and Pollock's first two essays in the Zeitschrift .

Lowenthal: Well, Marcuse was not at the Institute in 1930 and 1931. Pollock did have such tendencies but, thank God, we were able to steer him in a different direction. Horkheimer, Fromm, and

[8] Max Horkheimer, "Die Juden und Europa," Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 8, no. 1 (1939): 115–37.

I have never believed or stated that fascism was merely—as you put it—a new political strategy of monopoly capitalism. None of us ever said that.

Dubiel: But now I will cite you chapter and verse. Today, what writer has become a classical reference of a most solid and precise formulation in almost all theoretical texts on the interpretation of fascism along capitalist lines? Which writer do you think?

Lowenthal: Franz Neumann?

Dubiel: No, Horkheimer. The most precise thesis I know by heart: "If you do not want to talk about capitalism, then you must also not mention fascism."^[9]

Lowenthal: This had a totally different meaning: one should not grovel before the United States.

Dubiel: One should not grovel before a social order that tends likewise to give rise to fascism. As a highly developed capitalist country, the United States is not immune to fascism. This is what Horkheimer meant. You must be familiar with another passage in which he gives a political-economic interpretation of anti-Semitism. There he states, similarly, that fascist anti-Semitism was a sequel to the liquidation of the circulation phase in highly developed capitalism. If this is not an economic interpretation of fascism, then I don't know . . .

Lowenthal: It can also be said differently. After all, fascism is not simply just another manifestation of high finance. Once it comes into the historical arena it represents a qualitatively new social order. It is not necessarily the intention of monopoly capitalism to exterminate the Jews and to execute the gypsies and the insane or to plot a world war. These passages in Horkheimer must be viewed dialectically. National Socialism must not be interpreted as a continuation of the economic strategy of high finance, as Franz Neumann's analysis does; nor must fascism be reduced to an inde-

[9] Ibid., p. 115.

pendent petit-bourgeois mythology that accidentally seizes and maintains power. Both tendencies are seen as unequal partners in an overall historical process. It became clear to us all, even before January 31, 1933, that political life had taken on a new quality. This is why we emigrated. This is why we believed that political normalcy would no longer dominate and that high finance would not prevail, that it would eventually cast off small businessmen when it no longer needed them. But this does not mean giving up the theory of a class society organized by finance capital. The logic of events had probably driven both wings, big capital and the Hitler power apparatus, to unleash the world war. Despite the terrible sacrifices, I sometimes say: Thank God! I believe I already told you this story: when I took a walk with Horkheimer in the summer of 1934, he said that fascism in Germany had one positive effect, namely the politicization of society. This had never occurred so extensively, throughout the entire population. People now found that what happened in the political sphere concerned them directly, and this meant an end to public apathy as a characteristic of German political life—a topic about which I have written frequently. Such a politicization of the population is contrary to the interests and ideology of big capital.

Dubiel: This is only a marginal note: Is it not surprising that this apathy should, immediately after 1945, reappear more strongly than ever before in German history?

Lowenthal: This only proves our thesis that fascism creates a new political context characterized by the total mobilization of society, where everyone is a fellow prisoner, fellow culprit, and conscious fellow traveler of the political order. When this authoritarian and totalitarian terror apparatus disappears, the society falls back into public apathy—everywhere, not only in Germany. Fascism has not succeeded in politicizing the American nation; during World War II the population here was as unpolitical and uninvolved as ever. Let me repeat: this economistic interpretation is one-sided. We surely would not have feared to remain in Switzerland merely

because big capital was in power. We feared that a specifically fascist political culture would arise in Europe and that the inner and outer realms of one's life would no longer be secure.

Dubiel: So, we could reformulate: Developed capitalist societies produce the socioeconomic conditions under which fascism can develop. But when the political apparatus of the society organized by capital has fallen into fascist hands, that system takes on a new quality no longer compatible with the interests of finance capital.

Lowenthal: This is exactly what I meant. This was our theory.