PART I—
I NEVER WANTED TO PLAY ALONG:
INTERVIEWS WITH HELMUT DUBIEL

1—
The Weimar Republic

Dubiel: There's a conventional method of interpreting the biographies of left-wing intellectuals. The resistance to the Weltanschauung transmitted by paternal authority is explained psychoanalytically by the Oedipus complex. Does this fit in your case?

Lowenthal: Actually, my complicated relationship with Judaism is a classic illustration of the Oedipus complex. My grandfather on my father's side was a strict orthodox Jew who taught at a Jewish school in Frankfurt. This school, the Samson Raphael Hirsch Schule, was named after the founder of German-Jewish Orthodoxy. He also ran a boarding school where orthodox families from all over Germany sent their sons. Here the parents could be sure that the kosher laws would be strictly observed and that the boys would lead the life of pious Jews in accordance with the religious precepts. But my father took exception, and this really did have an oedipal significance.

Dubiel: So your father rebelled against your orthodox grandfather?

Lowenthal: My father wanted to be a lawyer. But my grand-

father—according to my father, at least—refused to grant him permission because he thought this would mean that my father would have to work and write on the Sabbath. Consequently, he prevailed on my father to study medicine, which my father did, though his heart wasn't in it at all. But then he took his revenge—either consciously or unconsciously—when he later became totally "free": not just irreligious, but decidedly antireligious. He was a convinced adherent of the nineteenth century in the sense of a mechanistic-materialistic, positivist way of thinking. My first "serious" readings were from Darwin, Haeckel, and a popular philosopher of the Darwinist school, Carneri. My father encouraged me to read Schopenhauer. In short, the whole atmosphere at home was secular, enlightened, and antireligious. I hardly knew anything about Judaism, for example about Jewish holidays—with the exception of Yom Kippur, when we had a particularly good dinner at home because a cousin of my father's, who didn't "live religiously" but lived in a kosher-run boarding house, did not get anything to eat on that day. I still remember when they divided us up for religious instruction in sixth grade. When the teacher told the Protestants to gather in one part of the classroom, the Catholics in another, and the Jews in a third, I remained seated—I really didn't know what religion I belonged to!

Dubiel: Later in your life that changed considerably for a time, in the form of an "about-face," a return to Judaism. Not in the sense of a religious renewal, but rather as a political identity mediated through Jewish tradition. Can it be put this way?

Lowenthal: Well, it didn't happen quite so quickly. At first the Jewish element was introduced very indirectly. Through the influence of Luise Habricht, an older educator and close friend of Walter Kinkel, a professor of philosophy at the University of Giessen, I became involved with the Marburg neo-Kantian school and consequently with Hermann Cohen. Although Hermann Cohen was a

liberal Jew, he nonetheless had a very intense relation to Judaism and to Jewish religious philosophy, which was imparted to me through exchanges with various intellectual friends I had at that time. But at first that was still very abstract. This changed when I began my studies at Heidelberg in 1920 and joined certain groups of Zionist and socialist students. At that time, Zionist students were politically on the left. They stood in direct opposition to the KC [Kartell-Convent der Verbindungen Deutscher Studenten Jüdischen Glaubens; Syndicate of Organizations of German Students of the Jewish Faith], the assimilationist student organization, which was an offshoot of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith [Zentralverein Deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens]. I hated the latter because I saw them as fellow travelers of German nationalism.

Dubiel: The term "assimilationist," then, refers to those Jews who believed in total integration into the German nation?

Lowenthal: Yes, but only now do I realize what I hated about that assimilationist group. Not that they as Jews wanted to be human beings like everyone else, but that their convictions were essentially capitalist. It was most likely the socialist-revolutionary factor that caused me to cast my lot with the Zionist students, whom I generally liked as individuals. It's also characteristic that in 1923 I married a woman from Königsberg who came from a relatively orthodox Jewish family. A sort of Jewish cult was forming around the charismatic Rabbi N. A. Nobel in the circles I was involved with in Frankfurt and Heidelberg. He wasn't technically orthodox, but conservative and well-educated in philosophy. He attracted a following of many young—but not only young—talented Jews. Under the influence of this Jewish atmosphere, which also contained some philosophy, socialism, and even a little mysticism, there developed in my young wife and me the desire to live a conscious Jewish life. She was already a Zionist (as was the rest of

her family); I myself was amiably disposed toward Zionism, but only half-heartedly. I can come back to that later. We decided to keep a kosher Jewish household, to go to synagogue, and to observe Jewish holidays. Of course, this had a catastrophic effect on my father, who took an immediate dislike to my wife because she came from Königsberg (for him, that was Russia!)—he automatically considered any Jews who lived east of the Elbe Ostjuden, which was quite absurd, of course. But he didn't like any of this Jewish atmosphere, and when we began to keep a kosher house—I still remember it very well—he broke out in tears of anger. It was a terrible disappointment for him that his son, whom he, the father, the true scion of the enlightenment, had raised so "progressively," was now being pulled into the "nonsensical," "obscure," and "deceitful" clutches of a positive religion. Well, the kosher household didn't last very long, but the relationship to Judaism and to Jewish questions and issues remained central in my life for quite some time. You know that my first publications were essentially concerned with Jewish problems. The very first is an essay, published in a Jewish student journal, on Jakob Wassermann's book My Life as German and Jew .

Dubiel: In the early twenties you engaged in political, pedagogical, and organizational activities that illuminate your relationship to Judaism at that time. I'm thinking first of all about the circle around Rabbi Nobel, then about your work on the Advisory Board for Jewish Refugees from Eastern Europe [Beratungsstelle für Ostjüdische Flüchtlinge], and finally about your work together with Ernst Simon on a Jewish weekly. Who actually belonged to the Nobel circle?

Lowenthal: A few names: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, Erich Fromm, Ernst Simon, and several others. The names of the most important members of this circle can be found among the contributors to a festschrift for Rabbi Nobel that appeared in 1921. These names convey a good impression of the sort

of Jewish renaissance that developed around Nobel and that later found its institutional continuation in the Jüdische Lehrhaus.

Dubiel: There is always mention of "the circle around Rabbi Nobel." What was this actually, in more precise terms? In our sociological jargon, was it a loosely organized group of intellectuals [intellektuellenbund ], or was it some sort of cult or sect?

Lowenthal: In a certain sense it was a cult. This man was a rabbi, originally from Hungary, who had also studied philosophy. He knew Hermann Cohen and represented a curious mixture of mystical religiosity, philosophical rigor, and quite likely also a more or less repressed homosexual love for young men. It really was a kind of "cult community." He was a fascinating speaker. People flocked to hear his sermons. He kept his house open to all, and people would come and go as they pleased. Of course, that was a godsend, especially in the chaotic times after World War I. If I were to place this whole story about the Nobel circle in a broader context, namely that of my somehow politically motivated return to Jewish tradition, I would say that it was the Zionist, anti-assimilationist impulse that first motivated this new identification. Then came, encouraged by these groups, the acceptance of a Jewish style of life, and very soon thereafter, professional activity in Jewish organizations.

Dubiel: Before you talk about your work with the Advisory Board for Jewish Refugees from Eastern Europe, can you explain what the Jüdische Lehrhaus was?

Lowenthal: Well, the Jüdische Lehrhaus in Frankfurt was a kind of Jewish center for adult education [Volkshochschule ]: its spiritual fathers were Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. The Lehrhaus also saw itself as a secularized form of Jewish-Talmudic doctrine. Today I can't even say whether all the lectures there concerned Jewish themes. I myself can remember having given a few lectures on Buddhism. Martin Buber lectured there, Ernst Simon, and others. Franz Rosenzweig was already too ill to actually take part in the

lectures. The Jüdische Lehrhaus in Frankfurt remained in operation until the Nazis came to power in 1933.^[1] My association with it became progressively looser in the late twenties. For that reason I can't give any reliable information about its later development.

Dubiel: Perhaps you could talk about your work with the Jewish social welfare agency.

Lowenthal: Yes, my job with the Advisory Board for Jewish Refugees from Eastern Europe—I got this job through my friend Ernst Simon, who was very influential in Jewish circles in Frankfurt. I had the pompous title of Syndikus [trustee] of this advisory board. It was also a quasi-juridical position. The board's main purpose was the following: as a consequence of the upheavals of the war and the postwar period, progressively more Jews were coming to the West—not just from Russia but also from Poland and from the Polish areas of Upper Silesia. Most likely they left partly because of manifestations of anti-Semitism there and partly because they hoped for a better life in the West. So, there was a great exodus of mostly illegal emigrants. These people—often naïve to the point of simplicity—generally arrived without papers, without a passport or identity documents. They wanted to settle in Germany and work there, which was in most cases impossible, although we did manage, a number of times, to find them—especially the younger people—jobs as apprentices to merchants or artisans. Mainly, however, we had to try to get these people to France, a country that, as you know, was traditionally more open to refugees than Germany. But we often had to try to obtain at least temporary residency permits in Frankfurt for our clients. On the one hand, I had to see that money was at our disposal; on the other, I had to deal with local authorities, especially with police headquarters and the head official in the alien registration office. That was very interesting. I remember this gen-

[1] The Lehrhaus was revived in November 1933 and remained open until 1938.

tleman perfectly. His name was Polizeirat Schmidt, and he looked like Hindenburg. For some reason he took a great liking to me. We always had the best of relations. In general, whatever I requested, he approved. But I'm sure that good old Herr Polizeirat Schmidt didn't always act only out of goodwill, but also because he was obsessed with the anti-Semitic legend of the vast power of Jews, especially at that time in Frankfurt. This attitude, nourished by a deep-seated misconception, but very advantageous for us, functioned so well that I often had to make concessions; that is, I had to take less than he wanted to give, because other wise his subordinates would certainly have created insurmountable difficulties.

Dubiel: Was this organization a local phenomenon limited to Frankfurt or a part of a wider net?

Lowenthal: It was part of a broad system. Its organizational support was the Jewish Workers' Welfare Office [Jüdisches Arbeiterfürsorgeamt] in Berlin. But the name—"Workers' Welfare"—shouldn't be taken too seriously for this Jewish organization. After all, there weren't many Jewish workers in Germany. Essentially we dealt with immigrant Jews from the East, and this had the effect, of course, that the Workers' Welfare Office wasn't a popular organization because nobody wanted to identify with Eastern Jews. The Jews who had lived in Germany for generations preferred to identify with the Germans. An especially characteristic phenomenon for this Jewish type of social help is the following: imagine that for some reason we wanted to send an individual or a family to Berlin, Hamburg, or Paris. The most obvious thing to do would have been to buy a train ticket for the destination, say, Berlin. Of course, this would have been possible only if there were a national Jewish parent organization that administered the monies of the individual Jewish communities in a national fund. But precisely this kind of fund didn't exist because all the small Jewish communities on the road wanted to contribute their own empirically identifiable bit of compassion. So, if I wanted to send the man to Berlin, I gave him a

ticket for, say, Kassel. The community in Kassel gave him another ticket that got him to Hanover, in the welfare jurisdiction, so to speak, of another Jewish community, and so on.

Dubiel: An interest in palpable, concrete charity to one's neighbor, as it were, not in an abstract principle of charity that would be paid into the central fund of a national organization.

Lowenthal: Yes, that is an expression of the Jewish tradition of mitzvah, the duty to do good deeds. And they wanted to do these good deeds in a concrete and palpable way. All my organizational attempts with the Berlin branch to make funds centrally available failed. But in spite of that, in many cases we did some good and interesting work. As I said, sometimes we managed, especially for the young Jewish emigrants from the East, to provide training and occasionally a job as well. Many of them later emigrated to Palestine.

Dubiel: Before we go into the fundamental problematic of the relationship between Jews and Germans, I'd like to hear something about your work as editor at the Jüdische Wochenzeitung [Jewish Weekly] with Ernst Simon. When was that, actually?

Lowenthal: Around 1925. Ernst is now a highly respected professor emeritus of pedagogy in Jerusalem.

Dubiel: Can it be said that this was a Zionist newspaper?

Lowenthal: Yes, I suppose it was a Zionist newspaper, but with the quite naïve ambition of being an internationally known publication, which we of course weren't. We published our own and others' articles about the international situation, especially on international problems and Jewish politics, a lot on cultural politics, book and theater reviews. Above all, the newspaper was concerned with specifically Jewish matters. It was a modest enterprise; financially it was never a success. I finally left because I increasingly disagreed with its Zionist tendency. That is, inasmuch as I came to see Zionism no longer as an oppositional movement but rather as a short-sighted political reality, stripped of all messianic ideas and

robbed of its utopian elements—through this policy of settlements in Palestine. . . .

Dubiel: What was your stand on this policy?

Lowenthal: Negative, negative. It was my impression that the settlement policy carried out by the Zionist central organization was very inconsiderate toward the Arab population. At that time I wrote an article in our newspaper entitled, "The Lessons of China." I referred to contemporary events in China and wrote that dealings of these Jewish organizations with the rich Arab landowners would result in the creation of a great mass of discontented, landless Palestinian peasants and rural poor, a development that sooner or later would have negative consequences for the entire Zionist movement. As it turns out, I wasn't all wrong. After that I broke with the movement and stopped writing for the newspaper, particularly since I was by then starting with my own Marxist-oriented literary-sociological studies and on the verge of working for the Institute of Social Research.

Dubiel: If we were to draw up a kind of balance sheet for this period, could one say that this turn to Jewish tradition, aimed against your father, was less religiously motivated than . . . what should I call it . . . politically? Or is that putting it too narrowly?

Lowenthal: "Political" isn't the right word for it. I would simply say oppositional. I was a rebel, and everything that was then oppositional, that is, to quote Benjamin, on the side of the losers in world history, attracted me as if by magic. I was a socialist, a supporter of psychoanalysis and of phenomenology in neo-Kantian circles. I took a job that brought me in contact with Eastern European Jews, something that, for example, was extremely embarrassing for my father and for Adorno's. . . . It was nothing short of a syncretic accumulation in my brain and heart of aspirations, tendencies, and philosophies that stood in opposition to the status quo. I still vividly remember reading Lukács's Theory of the Novel and his indictment of "the infamy of the status quo." This formulation

summed up my fundamental feelings—namely, to hate and reject as "infamous" all elements of the status quo. This was deeply rooted in me.

Dubiel: I'd like to shift from this group of questions to the problem of anti-Semitism.

Lowenthal: Perhaps I should quickly add one story that is very characteristic of this entanglement of intellectual and Jewish traditions, namely, the development of psychoanalysis during the Weimar Republic. Throughout Europe, but especially in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, psychoanalysis was extraordinarily esoteric. I don't want to elaborate on that here. I first came into contact with psychoanalysis through Erich Fromm, a friend from student days. My then-marginal contact with the psychoanalytic movement was mediated through the relationship that developed between Erich Fromm and the woman who was later to become his wife, Frieda Reichmann. Frieda was a psychiatrist in a sanatorium near Dresden. In 1924, or maybe 1925, Frieda moved to Heidelberg, where she started a psychoanalytic treatment center. My wife Golde and I joined her and Erich Fromm there. The sanatorium was a kind of Jewish-psychoanalytic boarding school and hotel. An almost cultlike atmosphere prevailed there. Everyone, including me, was psychoanalyzed by Frieda Reichmann. The sanatorium adhered to Jewish religious laws: the meals were kosher, and all religious holidays were observed. The Judeo-religious atmosphere intermingled with the interest in psychoanalysis. Somehow, in my recollection I sometimes link this syncretic coupling of the Jewish and the psychoanalytic traditions with our later "marriage" of Marxist theory and psychoanalysis in the Institute, which was to play such a great role in my intellectual life.

Dubiel: Do you mean in particular Fromm's studies and essays on an analytic and materialistic social psychology?

Lowenthal: Yes.

Dubiel: Leo, I'd like to ask you a little about your own personal everyday experiences of anti-Semitism during this time. I'm re-

minded of two contradictory impressions. In conversations I've had with Marcuse, with Horkheimer, and with you, everyone emphasizes, even with a certain pride, that your group around the Institute of Social Research was able to foresee the disaster of 1933 because of an alert historical-political sense and relevant research. Both you and Marcuse have frequently told me that although you knew about the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, you were seldom directly victimized by it. You probably know Franz Neumann's radical thesis, that before Hitler's rise to power in 1933 the German population was the least anti-Semitic in all of Western Europe. How do these two facts fit together: on the one hand, the quite clear presentiment of the rising specter of national socialism, and on the other, this trivialization—I don't know what else to call it—of anti-Semitism in the late Weimar Republic?

Lowenthal: I've probably always overstated or understated this point. Let's just say it was generally very clear to me that I was a Jew. My parents' social circle was limited essentially to Jews. I can scarcely remember a non-Jewish friend of my father's. And later, my closest friends in school and at the university were almost all Jews.

Dubiel: When was the first time that you came physically into contact with anti-Semitism?

Lowenthal: Well, it was well known that in Wilhelmine Germany a Jew couldn't become an officer and that it was difficult to become a professor. But personally, we hardly experienced it at all. To answer your question, though, I remember Kiesstraße in Frankfurt, the street around the corner from where I lived. That was a "proletarian" street; workers lived there. And if you walked along Kiesstraße, you had to be pretty brave, because it could happen that one of those unfriendly young scamps would yell "Yid!" at you. That was actually the extent to which I had personal contact with anti-Semitism. We always noted with a certain amount of humor that there was a tiny hotel in Frankfurt—I've forgotten its name—that had a sign, "Jews not welcome" or "Jews not allowed." And

there was a little spa, Borkum-bei-Norderney, that was "reserved" for anti-Semites. But we didn't take all that seriously. That was vulgar anti-Semitism. The people in Borkum or in that hotel in Frankfurt were pathetic repressed, petit-bourgeois nobodies.

Dubiel: At some point later that must have changed. At the end of the twenties, did anti-Semitic attacks become more noticeable in everyday life, commensurate with the growing strength of the National Socialist movement?

Lowenthal: Yes, there were people who acted more shamelessly. But these were isolated incidents. I'll tell you a few such episodes. In 1929, I think it was, I was with my friend Siegfried Kracauer in Oberstdorf in Bavaria. This area was particularly anti-Semitic—you know, it started very early in Bavaria. I remember once going through the dining room of our hotel with a cigarette. I asked someone for a light, and he said no. It was obvious that he didn't want to light a Jew's cigarette. The other episode I'm thinking of occurred at the annual Convention of Germanists; I believe it was 1931 in Munich. I went into one of the halls where a lecture was to take place later. Hardly anyone was there except Hans Naumann, a then well-known specialist in Old High German from Frankfurt. Later he became a leading Nazi in Bonn. At the end of the twenties Hans Naumann and I knew each other well; we were practically friends. He had tested me in my exam for my secondary teaching credential, and I remember him holding me up to his students as the example of a well-trained Germanist because I could translate the first stanza of the Hildebrandslied into all Franconian dialects! So, I amiably went up to Hans Naumann to shake his hand. Without offering me his hand he asked me, "Herr Löwenthal, where is the men's room here?" I turned right around and left him standing there. It was completely clear that he no longer wanted to have anything to do with Jews. And I have one more story. This was around the end of 1932, when it was already clear that the Nazis would come to power. I was telephoning the director of the city

library about some matter concerning the Institute—I was then the acting head of the Institute, because the others were already in Geneva. I remember that he said on the phone, "Hello, Herr Löwenstein." I hung up immediately. He had known my name for five years, but suddenly all Jewish names were interchangeable. Such little things should perhaps be mentioned. They helped to call into question my notion of an apparently completely successful emancipation. Suddenly these little pinpricks signal that you're an outsider, that you're not accepted. At that time I was teaching at a Gymnasium and had some interesting discussions with one of my pupils there, a high school senior. His name was Friedrich, and he was a fervent Nazi. We would discuss politics quite openly together. I asked him once in jest, "Well, Friedrich, you'll see to it that nothing happens to me later, won't you?" For some reason, Friedrich had great respect for me even though he was an ardent anti-Semite. He answered, "No, that's out of the question. We have our principles. You're just as bad as all the others. That has nothing to do with my respect for you."

Dubiel: In view of these kinds of experiences, what do you think about Franz Neumann's statement that before 1933 the German population was the least anti-Semitic in Europe?

Lowenthal: Yes, I always said that, too. I think I even wrote that sentence somewhere. Now, your question regarding the extent of anti-Semitism and the predictability of fascism in the late twenties concerns two different things. We foresaw Hitler's rise to power not because we thought that the German people were becoming more and more anti-Semitic, but because through political analysis and insight we believed very early that the Nazis would come to power and that resistance was so poorly developed, particularly in the Liberal Democratic and the Social Democratic parties, that they wouldn't be capable of any great resistance against victorious fascism. Moreover, we grew increasingly disappointed and pessimistic, first independently from each other, and then in the political

exchange of opinions within our group, about the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement. And then developments in the Weimar Republic made us more and more worried and uneasy. Of course there was progressive literature and progressive theater, but in the final analysis these were only futile fringe-phenomena. No, precisely in cultural matters one could notice, from the middle of the twenties on, that Germany was becoming increasingly conservative, if not reactionary.

But back to anti-Semitism, la vie quotidienne . Well, then, in everyday life it really made no difference if one was a Jew or not. One could go into practically any hotel, join almost any club. We always laughed about the fact—precisely because it was such a phenomenon of the fringe—that the island Borkum didn't allow any Jews. I only learned about a kind of anti-Semitism—that which made it impossible for one to go to certain restaurants, hotels, or clubs—here in America. To be sure, I had heard about this already in Germany, but I couldn't believe it. So, I came to America in 1934, and in 1935 I wanted to take a vacation with my wife for the first time. We went for advice to a very elegant travel agency in Rockefeller Center. They gave me the addresses of some twenty hotels and resorts to which I then wrote, always adding at the end, "Please tell me whether Jews are welcome." I had been advised to do this by friends who had already lived some time in America. Of these twenty letters—and you have to keep in mind that this was 1935, at the high point of the depression in America—at least half weren't answered at all. Some of the others wrote that they generally rented to older people, which was quite ridiculous, since I hadn't mentioned my age at all. And others wrote that of course they had nothing against Jews but that we might feel "uncomfortable" with their other guests. So, in short, we suddenly discovered that something like a real everyday anti-Semitism did exist here and that as a Jew one couldn't freely take part in all social spheres. That was a nasty disappointment. That hotels and clubs, even whole professions,

were simply closed to Jews—that didn't yet exist in Germany to such an extent. German anti-Semitism in relation to other European varieties of anti-Semitism is still an issue. Look, Jews were driven out of England, France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Turkey, and who knows where else. That sort of thing was quite rare in Germany until Hitler came. To be sure, then he drove the Jews straight into the gas chambers.

Dubiel: As a former German and a Jew you have, so to speak, the moral right to speak about non-German types of anti-Semitism. Any gentile German who did that would expose himself to the suspicion of trying to relativize or to trivialize German anti-Semitism and its apocalyptic consequences. No German has the right to relativize Auschwitz. Do you actually see an essential difference between German anti-Semitism and that in other parts of Europe or in America? Was German anti-Semitism under Hitler just an extremely pronounced and artificially whipped up mass hysteria, used as an instrument by the Nazis?

Lowenthal: Now you're talking about the anti-Semitic atrocities committed under Hitler. Well, there are antecedents to that which reach back to before Hitler. Our friend Paul Massing wrote a good book about that.^[2] Yes, there's a great difference, I believe. It's a bit difficult to answer the question conclusively, because my present formulations are based on methodologically different sources. What I have to say about German anti-Semitism is based on what I personally experienced. What I know about American anti-Semitism—I can't say anything verifiable about types of anti-Semitism in other European countries—is something for which I have my own theoretical and empirical experiences, also as a "participant observer." I would say that German anti-Semitism was derived from the feudal estate structure, which excluded certain groups from society. Thus, for example, a professorial career at a university

[2] Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction (New York, 1949).

was usually unattainable for Jews, as were the ranks in the bureaucracy and the military. Something like a latent institutional anti-Semitism existed there. But, as I've said, it was here in America that I first experienced an anti-Semitism that manifested itself in everyday life.

I have to expound some on this point. After all, it's a fascinating fact that in all known history there exists no single social or ethnic group that became so much the symbol of something perhaps extraordinarily admirable but also, and principally, detestable, as the Jews. It originated in Roman times and has never ended. How is this riddle to be solved? I consider anti-Semitism a perverted and suppressed form of utopia. The Jews represent something that others would like to be. Let's just go through the topoi of anti-Semitic prejudices: First, "clannishness." That can, after all, be interpreted as "community." Then second, the Jews live by exploiting others, that is, they themselves don't really work with their hands and by the sweat of their brow. Now, if you will, this refers to the elimination of heavy physical labor. Third, Jews love luxury, they're lascivious, they like good food, they throw their weight around in spas and summer resorts, they're loud, they're expressive. All of these "characteristically Jewish" modes of behavior can be summed up within the concept of a hedonistic life-style. Jews do things that are forbidden. Nobody knows exactly what they're really doing. They slaughter Christian children, rape Christian girls, they like to eat dill pickles, they eat kosher food, they have weird holidays during which nobody quite knows what happens, they carry around that strange Torah, they build huts out of tree branches, they play a trumpet. . . . In short, Jews know something about a life that is more than everyday life, and, because of this whole aggregate of unencumbered pleasure, they enjoy their lives fully; they know a freedom for which one doesn't have to pay continually, the obvious lack of a necessity to constantly battle with nature. For example, think about the Jewish joke, "The Jew doesn't belong in

nature, the Jew belongs in the coffeehouse." Well then, that also means that one doesn't have to exert oneself so much. So—if Jews aren't heavy manual workers, or in heavy industry, either as workers, as businessmen, or as managers—so what do they do? Supposedly, they control the media, they control the so-called sphere of circulation, banks and so on, they control insurance companies—all areas where manipulation rather than physical labor is most important. The psychology of anti-Semitic reaction, of anti-Semitic rage, of anti-Semitic mass actions and outrages is connected with this. The fact is that all I've pointed out—the entire communications industry, banking, parts of the consumer industry—aren't the sources of actual social power; they don't represent strong political or military power. In short, anti-Semitism sees the Jews ultimately as a colossus of clay. It will suffice to give the Jews a little kick, as one might kick over a vase, and the whole thing will collapse. For that reason I consider the terrorist activities of 1948 in Palestine the worst blow to anti-Semitism: it demonstrated to the world for the first time that Jews, too, could commit violent acts. Of course, I'm exaggerating, but that way it's clearer: I support anything that destroys this anti-Semitic image of the Jew as a weakling, as castrated and effeminate.

Dubiel: Leo, I'd like you to talk about the formation of your political consciousness. Can one say that your father influenced you, either by recommending certain books to you or by his own political positions?

Lowenthal: Oh yes, one can certainly say that. My father was politically committed. He was a liberal democrat, a member of the Liberal People's Party [Freisinnige Volkspartei], later known as the Staatspartei, and was a great admirer of the formation of democratic parties in Germany. I have in mind such names as Eugen Richter, Ludwig Bamberger, and Friedrich Naumann. My father very much encouraged me to think in a politically liberal vein, and not nationalistically. He was such a dyed-in-the-wool democrat

that he called me crazy when I told him that I was going to emigrate because of Hitler. He was firmly convinced that there would be new elections that would do away with the Hitler regime.

It was decisive for the development of my own political consciousness that from about the age of fifteen I was strongly influenced by a maternal friend named Luise Habricht. She was a socialist, a feminist, and a pacifist. She was extraordinarily well educated in philosophy and literature, and I'm very indebted to her. And this woman, the private tutor in a wealthy friend's house, "radicalized" me, so to speak. She was a socialist without being revolutionary. She was a pacifist and fought for women's suffrage. I would say that she was a radical reformist. It was quite impressive for a young person like me to be acquainted in the middle of the war with the works of the pacifist movement, which was naturally illegal at that time. The German Pacifist Association [Deutscher Friedensverein] and similar organizations couldn't carry out their work openly at that time. There was a representative in the Reichstag, Ludwig Quidde. He was a very brave man whom I met in Frankfurt through my friend Luise. I was proud when he entrusted me with the illegal and secret task of mailing leaflets.

Dubiel: That was perhaps your first practical political act. . . .

Lowenthal: Yes, I was fifteen or sixteen years old at that time. It was, in fact, my first political and at the same time "illegal" activity. It can't be said that this activity was particularly risky or dangerous. It was much more dangerous later, in 1920 in Frankfurt, to flee over rooftops from the police. Early, in school, my friends and I were predominantly liberal or socialist. I already told you that many of my classmates and most of my friends were Jews. In their parents' homes, too, the war was generally thought of very critically and openly discussed. We greeted the Russian Revolution in 1917 with enthusiasm. In school we secretly read antiwar novels by Henri Barbusse and Leonhard Frank.

Dubiel: Can you elaborate on that, please?

Lowenthal: I saw the Russian Revolution as an act of human liberation, not just politically but also culturally and philosophically. You understand, we saw it as a great democratic revolution, and continued for quite some time to see the Communist movement as a liberating democratic philosophy. I still remember the horrid five months I spent as a soldier in Hanau. I only knew one person there, a cousin of mine, and he was a member of the Spartakusbund.^[3] At his place I felt at home.

Dubiel: Was the connection between developments in the Soviet Union and the politics of the Spartakusbund as close then as it was in the late twenties? Was the Spartakusbund already perceived as a sort of German branch of a Russian-dominated international movement?

Lowenthal: Well, not in the sense of being seen as a kind of Soviet envoy, which in the late twenties was more or less the case for the KPD [German Communist Party], which is why I finally lost all sympathy for the party. No, at that time it was a kind of brotherhood; in any case, I saw it that way.

Dubiel: Let's speak for a while about the postwar years.

Lowenthal: I became active in the socialist student movement. In Frankfurt I joined the General Student Parliament [Allgemeiner Studentenausschub /ASTA] in 1918. While still in Frankfurt, along with people such as Franz Neumann and Ernst Fränkel, among others, I helped found the socialist student group at the University of Frankfurt. That was 1918–1919. When I transferred to the University of Heidelberg in 1920 I became friends with the then president of the German Socialist Student League [Deutscher Sozialistischer Studentenbund]. He was a Greek by the name of Karanikolos. He hired me and granted me the pompous title Secretary General of the German Socialist Student League [General-

[3] The Spartacus League, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, was a forerunner of the German Communist Party (KPD).

sekretär des Deutschen Sozialistischen Studentenbundes]. It didn't last long—the money soon ran out.

Dubiel: The name German Socialist Student League suggests that this organization wasn't limited to Frankfurt and Heidelberg. Is it accurate to say that this organization was influential in student politics, or perhaps even in general politics?

Lowenthal: Hardly in national politics, but certainly at the university. We were definitely in the minority when compared to groups on the right, such as those linked with fraternities. At this early stage we had had some vehement discussions with these groups but as yet no violent confrontations. That changed by the time of the Kapp Putsch in March 1920.^[4] At that time I was still in Frankfurt; I only started in Heidelberg in the summer semester of 1920. We socialist students were then very active; we not only demonstrated, but a group of about ten or twelve of us one day even searched the houses of the most reactionary fraternities for weapons. We were practically trespassing, and all for nothing, since we didn't find any weapons. These people then—justifiably, I'd have to admit today—brought a complaint against us to the president [Rektor]. A group of four or five ringleaders, including me, was called before him. He was a good-natured man named Kautzsch, an art historian by training. I remember him perfectly: he was a nice, kind, old man. He summoned the so-called ringleaders into his office and informed us of his intention to institute proceedings to have us expelled. Half in a state of shock, half out of impudence, I had a good idea. I said, "Herr Rektor, you can, of course, do as you please. But if you institute expulsion proceedings against us, every streetcar driver in Frankfurt will go on strike tomorrow." We were immediately asked to leave the office, and nothing ever happened to any of us. His behavior was certainly based on the fantasy that there

[4] The Kapp Putsch was an unsuccessful attempt by right-wing military elements, the so-called Erhardt brigade, to seize control of Berlin and install Wolfgang Kapp as chancellor. It was defeated by a general strike.

are certain social groups that possess mysterious powers. Somehow that kindly old art historian must have imagined secret links between the socialist students and the Frankfurt labor unions. Unfortunately, such links never existed in reality. I had just made it up. The affair with Kautzsch is similar to my dealings with Polizeirat Schmidt and his fantasies about the powerful influence of Jews in Frankfurt.

Dubiel: So the moral of this story is that the president was foolish? That the socialist student groups of your youth were just as lacking in influence and alienated from the workers as those of my generation?

Lowenthal: No, Helmut, your formulation is too radical for me. After all, the parties and the unions recruited large numbers of cadres from students and young intellectuals. As you know, Franz Neumann and Ernst Fränkel, whom I just mentioned, both later became legal counsels for large labor unions, one for the metal workers' union, the other for the construction workers'. So there were connections, especially in cultural politics. I can mention myself as an example. I mean my later advisory work for the People's Theater [Volksbühne ]. This is just one example that shows how the Social Democratic Party recruited young academics for their cultural work.

Dubiel: Which grouping in the socialist camp was most open to intellectuals?

Lowenthal: Well, without being able to remember precise data too well, I'd assume that the USPD [Independent Socialists] and, initially, the KPD were more interested in intellectuals, because they had hardly any mass basis, at least not in the early years of the Weimar Republic. It was somewhat more difficult with the Social Democrats, you know, because of the influence of the party bosses. But nonetheless, even there the intellectuals weren't totally ignored.

Dubiel: Could you now describe your political development in the course of the Weimar Republic—not only which parties you

actually belonged to, but also your changing preferences for certain political groupings?

Lowenthal: I don't know exactly, any more. I just know that I was a member of the USPD in 1919 and 1920. When the USPD split into a left and a right wing—I think that was around the end of 1920—I remained in the left wing. Already early on I had regarded Social Democracy as something petit-bourgeois or bourgeois, as the betrayer of the revolutionary cause, so to speak.

Dubiel: Betrayer of which revolution, the Russian or the German?

Lowenthal: The two can't be separated. The Russians betrayed the German revolution—at least, that's how we saw it then.

Dubiel: Can you give dates or events after which you saw things that way?

Lowenthal: Actually, it already started in the Hölz revolts, with the government in Saxony-Thuringia, in which Karl Korsch was involved.^[5] Already one could see that the Russian support wasn't there. That became extremely obvious.

Dubiel: Of course, there are big differences between how such events are experienced by contemporaries and how they are reconstructed by historians. I'm just recalling the arguments of people who, although not really apologists for Stalinism, hold that the Russians simply lacked any resources in the twenties with which to help revolutions in foreign countries. But I'd like to ask once again, because I'm not really well acquainted with this argument, especially in this clear form and in reference to this early period. First of all, can the estrangement from the Soviet Union felt by this radical intelligentsia, which belonged to neither the Social Democratic nor

[5] Max Hölz led an unsuccessful rebellion in the Saxon Vogtland in April 1920. Korsch was a left Communist theoretician and activist, best known for his Hegelian Marxist study Marxism and Philosophy (1923; trans. Fred Halliday [New York, 1970]).

the Communist Party, be dated this early; and second, can it be interpreted as a function of the disappointment felt because of the lack of support from the Soviet side for the German revolution?

Lowenthal: There's no doubt at all that we in Germany saw it that way. In America it took another twenty years. Developments in the Soviet Union were really traumatic for large sections of the radical intelligentsia in the Weimar Republic. And the trauma lingered on. The high point and, in a certain sense, the working through of this traumatic experience came with the show trials in the Soviet Union during the thirties, then the Spanish Civil War, and finally, of course, the Hitler-Stalin pact.

Dubiel: Leo, I'd like to formulate an impression of mine and test your reaction to it. Today's perception of the critical and radical intelligentsia during the Weimar Republic always focuses on their relation to the development of the labor movement. This is even true of people like you and many others who were not involved in the practical organization of the labor movement. When I read memoirs of, for example, Wolfgang Abendroth who, so to speak, worked at the heart of the labor movement organizing effort, I get the distinct impression of a strong difference between an intellectual like Abendroth and the type of intellectual you represent. However, one really can't call your sympathy for the labor movement just that of a mere observer. How would you describe your own relation with the labor movement and that of your friends at the Institute?

Lowenthal: I definitely had contact with workers' groups. I remember that I often went into the country on USPD business to give lectures to workers, to hold training courses, and the like. And at the time of the Kapp Putsch we worked together with the workers and organized defense squads against the Kappists. It came as a great shock to us when we came to America and discovered that all these Communist and Trotskyist organizations were nothing but small sectlike groups without any mass support. No, it was quite

different for us then. For us there was never any doubt that as a socialist one had to work together with the workers.

Dubiel: It's always struck me how in the twenties and early thirties your circle seemed imbued with a sense of unabashed fellowship with the labor movement, without ever translating it into a concrete organizational form. But nonetheless, there were places between organizations in which you were active, which couldn't be called definitely KPD- or SPD-oriented. I'm thinking, for example, of your work with the People's Theater.

Lowenthal: That was certainly a political activity. And it's probably a bit naïve to take activity within the internal organization of one of the socialist parties of the Weimar Republic as the only criterion for partisanship for the labor movement. What developed in the course of the twenties was a sort of free-floating intelligentsia, not in Mannheim's sense,^[6] but in the sense of a generalized revolutionary attitude. I never wanted to conform; I always saw myself as somebody who was in opposition. Already in 1920 at the university, I was forever "against"—that was my fundamental attitude. For that reason I attacked Jaspers, for example, because he was then a positivist and thus perceived by us as fundamentally reactionary. To a large extent we didn't attend lectures, because that seemed like bourgeois fraud and ideology to us. Besides, we were all expecting the great socialist revolution any day. In my memory now, that seems perhaps somewhat exaggerated; when I leaf through my papers I see that in spite of it all I studied quite diligently. Be that as it may, my basic feeling during my university years and the first years at the Institute was: We're outsmarting bourgeois society. They have no idea of our dream of a radical revolution.

[6] Karl Mannheim posited a "free-floating," unattached intelligentsia in Ideology and Utopia (1929; trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils [New York, 1936]).

Dubiel: So you saw yourselves as people who were somehow mimicking bourgeois society?

Lowenthal: We always perceived ourselves in opposition to the status quo; we were radical nonconformists. We didn't want to play along. Probably if we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have survived. Ultimately the thought of the disasters that resulted from "playing along" never left us. Everything we did later in the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt (already at that time it was known in the academic community as "Café Marx") was tinged with this radical conviction.

Dubiel: Was that really possible? If I compare it with the chances today at West German universities to express Marxist attitudes, there's such a pressure to be labeled as a Spartacist, a Maoist, as the representative of some group or another, that such an independent Marxist attitude—as some malicious people say, "left-bourgeois"—is just not possible any more. Wasn't it similar at that time? Even within your own circle, weren't there people who pursued an orthodox course? After all, there were some committed Social Democrats among them. Didn't this "dissent" function as a barrier against the independent humanistic Marxism you describe?

Lowenthal: Very little. Well, in any case the orthodox didn't belong to the innermost circle of the Institute.

Dubiel: Weren't you attacked by any group at that time? I'm thinking for example of a biographical interview with Wolfgang Abendroth, where in reference to you and your Institute colleagues, he says, more or less, that you were insignificant marginal figures on the Frankfurt political scene. At that time, you played no role for Marxist theory and politics. One could easily back up Abendroth's perception with a comparison between, say, Horkheimer's rhetoric and that of organized party people. What for the former is "struggling humanity" is for the latter the "forward-storming proletariat."

Lowenthal: We've always been accused of that. We retained our

independence from all sides, but our sympathies were quite obvious. This political and intellectual independence was made easier by the fact that we had money. Actually, the Institute could do what it wanted.

Dubiel: Leo, a passage from Horkheimer's Dämmerung^[7] just occurred to me. I can cite it only approximately, but I'd like to know what you think about it. He said that one can't criticize socialist parties and organizations from the outside—you know what I'm referring to . . .

Lowenthal: I think so. I believe the formulation was as follows: One can criticize Communism only if one simultaneously criticizes anti-Communism. It has to be done dialectically. Communism and Social Democracy are bad enough, because they stand in opposition to the principles they once stood for; but those who criticize Communism the most sharply must be criticized sharply themselves, because they are guided by motives that are far worse yet.

Dubiel: Now I don't know which passage you're referring to. I just remember the two last sentences of the passage I was thinking about: a critique of the socialist revolution and its supporting groups on the part of bourgeois intellectuals is a logical impossibility. So anyone—in 1929 Horkheimer apparently thought that way—who criticizes a socialist party ought to apply this criticism within the framework of this same organization. That's quite a strong moral postulate.

Lowenthal: A moral postulate, indeed. But not an organizational one.

Dubiel: Organizational, too: a morally formulated postulate of organized political activity.

[7] Published under the pseudonym Heinrich Regius in 1934; translated into English as Dawn and Decline (New York, 1978).

Lowenthal: One should, so to speak, keep it in the family. But that doesn't mean that one has to be a member of that party. However, one shouldn't embrace the opposite extreme, as happened so frequently later, when erstwhile radicals came to identify totally with political reaction.

Dubiel: Let's talk about that later. First I'd like to discuss the beginnings of your intellectual development. I'd like to start once again by asking about paternal influences on your intellectual development.

Lowenthal: My father was, so to speak, both a formal and a material influence. As a formal influence he succeeded in making an intellectual out of me. My father, an idealist and an intellectual, stood in contrast to my mother who was materialistically and hedonistically oriented. I readily admit that I myself still haven't completely resolved this conflict.

Dubiel: (laughs)

Lowenthal: Even today I feel very indebted to my father. He was a typical representative of the educated German-Jewish middle class. I was encouraged to read Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Darwin. I was encouraged to go to concerts and to the theater, to prepare myself for operas and the like. Later my father was very dissatisfied with me because I pursued my university studies without a definite goal, changing from one faculty to another. Quite frankly, I studied everything besides medicine. That certainly has to do with the justmentioned Oedipus complex. Sometimes I'm sorry about that. I think I could have become a quite wealthy psychoanalyst!

Dubiel: (laughs)

Lowenthal: Substantively speaking, I owe my own materialistic orientation to my father. Naturally not Marxist-materialistic, but materialistic in the nineteenth-century sense. Haeckel's World Riddles, Darwin's Origin of Species, and the standard popular scientific books by Carneri were extraordinarily important for him and

then later for me, too. He also urged me to read Schopenhauer intensively. But I've already told you about all this.

Dubiel: How great was the influence of school?

Lowenthal: Very great. Most of the teachers in the higher grades of the Goethe Gymnasium in Frankfurt were excellent. They were so good that some of them became honorary professors at the university in 1918. Particularly strong was the influence in the classical subjects. I'm still proud today that I excelled in Greek, Latin, and German in the Abitur [general examination after completion of the Gymnasium ]. At the same time I regret to this day that I was drafted in the last year of the war and consequently missed part of my senior year. Sometimes I think that this gap in my education still shows. The attitude of these teachers, by the way, was not nationalistic—a "Wilhelmine" tone was hardly in evidence. My teacher for German and history wrote the standard history of the city of Frankfurt. The other influence came from my schoolmates themselves. Many of them came from prosperous Jewish house holds. There was really an esprit de corps among internationally oriented young people who often, encouraged by their parents, got together after school to read and discuss. I still remember reading Dostoevsky. We read Freud, Zola, and Balzac. We would voluntarily meet in the afternoons in school to do this. Many of my classmates later had distinguished careers. I remember, for example, my late friend Otto Kahn-Freund, who later became one of the most distinguished English legal scholars.

Dubiel: And your university studies? When did you actually graduate from the Gymnasium ?

Lowenthal: I graduated in early 1918 with the Notabitur [an emergency examination necessitated by the war effort]; then I was drafted into the army. The boys from middle-class families in Frankfurt would go into either the 63rd Artillery Regiment in Mainz or the 81st Infantry Regiment in Frankfurt. By bribing the corporals, during their training period they could live at home or

on their own, have their own uniforms, and eat what they wanted. My naïve father dissuaded me from doing that. One of his patients, who was also a friend, was a captain in the reserve of a railway regiment, which was stationed in Hanau. My father thought that his friend could pull a few strings to make my life in the army more palatable. So I reported there, as a simple recruit, of course. As was to be expected, no one there knew this Captain Schröder, who by then was stationed somewhere in France. So, believe it or not, I ended up in a workers' regiment made up of sons of proletarians and poor peasants. Poor devils, rough, sometimes brutal, uneducated men. We had to live in the barracks and eat the horrible swill there; we weren't allowed to have our own uniforms but were given the sweat-covered uniforms of previous "grunts." Besides drilling and shooting (which I was really not good at—the rifle butt would almost always recoil and hit me on the cheek), we were mainly kept busy loading rails for railroad tracks. Once a rail fell on my fingers; you can still see my crooked fingernail. I was the constant object of mockery. At that time I experienced the potential anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism of the German proletariat and peasants. It was an awful time. I tried everything to get out of there. I volunteered for the front; I would have preferred to die. I was rejected. I then applied to become a cadet officer so that, as an officer, I could escape those circumstances. Refused. All of this was for me—and I am not exaggerating—a kind of anticipatory concentration-camp experience. It certainly contributed to the strengthening of my alleged elitist arrogance as an intellectual. As you know—we've discussed it often enough—I don't consider the accusation of elitism an insult, but rather praise. We felt that the war was already lost, and that we were thus involved with a fundamentally meaningless business. Sometime I'll show you a couple of pictures of me as a soldier in 1918 along with my company. Looking at these photos, one might say that I should demand a veteran's pension from the American government! I was really the epitome of a "sad sack," a

personal representation of the "stab-in-the-back" legend, so to speak. But enough of that.

Dubiel: When did you start your university studies?

Lowenthal: I started at the University of Frankfurth in the winter semester of 1918. In the summer semester of 1919 I went to Giessen, together with my maternal friend Luise Habricht, whom I've already mentioned. She was—as you remember—a friend of the philosopher Walter Kinkel, who taught there. He wasn't a very significant philosopher, but he was a good Social Democrat who appreciated good wine. In Frankfurt I had started out, under paternal pressure, with the study of jurisprudence, and I promptly gave that up in Giessen under the influence of Luise and Kinkel. I had also heard some lectures on philosophy in Frankfurt; I still remember those of Hans Cornelius quite well.^[8] I heard the Germanist Peterson's lectures on Goethe, Cornelius's lectures on Kant, Kautzsch's—I've already spoken of him—lectures on medieval art, and Schönflies's introduction to higher mathematics. This interest in mathematics was influenced by my great sympathy with the Marburg philosophical school—for which a certain understanding of infinitesimal calculus was important. I also took part in classical proseminars, and I heard lectures on ancient history, aesthetics, and psychology. My intellectual tastes were very eclectic. I wanted, so to speak, to get everything into my head—a little Faust, if you will.

Dubiel: Could we proceed to your time in Heidelberg? Pardon the feeble metaphor, but Heidelberg at that time must have been an intellectual hothouse. Even for my generation it's still well known. I always think of the Max Weber circle, which was, of course, a prewar phenomenon, but I imagine its offshoots are still present there.

Lowenthal: Well, if you want to call his brother Alfred an "offshoot," then okay. Karl Mannheim didn't come to Heidelberg until

[8] Cornelius, a heterodox neo-Kantian, also influenced other members of the Frankfurt School, including Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock.

1921, when I was a student. Ernst Bloch was there frequently, and Jaspers was a member of the Weber circle. As for figures of really international stature, there were Heinrich Rickert, Karl Jaspers, and Alfred Weber. Also very significant were the historians, such as Hermann Oncken and Karl Hampe; the economist Emil Lederer, whose lectures on nationalization I attended at that time; and the Germanist and close friend of Stefan George, Friedrich Gundolf. Gundolf was for me a political issue. I didn't attend his lectures regularly because he was too reactionary for me. I attended lectures on philosophy: that was part of the Marxist tradition—it was necessary to be educated philosophically if one wanted to be a young nonconformist, a revolutionary thinker. I should remind you once again that I was fundamentally imbued with the conviction—don't forget, this was 1920, 1921—that the world revolution was around the corner and that this whole bourgeois lecture business would soon be done with.

Dubiel: Can we now turn to your first small publication, "The Demonic,"^[9] and give some examples of those intellectual influences that really had an effect on you? How did this text come about, anyway? Perhaps you could begin with the anecdote about the row you had with Jaspers.

Lowenthal: I'd prefer to start with Rickert. In the winter semester of 1920–1921, Rickert held a seminar on Husserl's phenomenology, and in the same semester, Jaspers gave a course on his recently published book The Psychology of Worldviews . The Rickert seminar was particularly important for me because, as you know, I was originally committed to the Marburg neo-Kantian school of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, which was what one might call a hostile sibling of the southwest German neo-Kantian school. I be-

[9] Leo Löwenthal, "Das Dämonische: Entwurf einer negativen Religionsphilosophie," in Festgabe für Rabbiner Nobel (Frankfurt am Main, 1922), pp. 50–62.

lieve that this was the first time that Rickert dealt with Husserl's Ideas—General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology . My impression at the time was that they would destroy each other—Rickert and Husserl were, after all, bourgeois philosophers—and I, as a Marburg neo-Kantian and Marxist, would win the day. To repeat once again, Rickert's intention was the critical destruction of phenomenology. My own attitude was one of ambivalence. On the one hand, profoundly steeped in Kantian philosophy as I was, I found it difficult to understand Husserl's concepts in the first place, let alone accept them; on the other hand, I thought I discerned an intention to go beyond the mere formalism of Kantian philosophy in the direction of a metaphysics that could possibly be of use for the kind of philosophical, revolutionary radicalism to which I was then committed.

Dubiel: Was it for that reason that you finally found yourself closer to phenomenology than to Rickert's neo-Kantianism?

Lowenthal: Yes. I myself realized that for the first time in the course of the Jaspers affair. At that time, Jaspers was exactly the opposite of what he is now famous for. Today, Jaspers is renowned as a metaphysical philosopher; the Jaspers of those days was a psychiatrist-cum-philosopher, essentially a scientistic positivist. The decisive book was The Psychology of Worldviews .

Dubiel: I must admit, to my shame, that I've never read the book. But the title sounds rather like a psychologically reductionist theory of Weltanschauung systems, some sort of vulgarization of Dilthey.

Lowenthal: On that point I'd defend Dilthey against you, but let's not get into that now. Yes, it was a reductionist book; unfortunately, I no longer own a copy. It was lost like so many other books of mine. At one time I had a library of ten thousand volumes, including an extensive collection of radical works from the German revolution, publications that, as people from the Hoover Institute in Stanford later told me, would be worth thousands of dollars.

Before we left for America, Horkheimer insisted that such works be either burnt or given away. He was afraid that we would be immediately deported if they opened my boxes of books. Nobody ever checked a single box.

Dubiel: Back to Jaspers.

Lowenthal: Right. Helmut, a couple of days ago I showed you suicide notes from 1920. At that time, I was in a mystical, radical, syncretic mood, a mixture of revolutionary radicalism, Jewish messianism, infatuation with an ontologically conceived phenomenology, acquaintance with psychoanalysis. . . . All of that was blended together to form a very missionary-messianic Bloch-like rapturous philosophy, if I look at it today. For instance, I was terribly agitated by Jaspers's book; it was, so to speak, the devil incarnate. Topics for presentation were distributed quite mechanically in the seminar, and I got the chapter on the demonic, which, as you correctly assumed, was essentially reductionist. Wherever the concept of the "demonic" came up in the history of literature or philosophy, it was reduced to merely psychological categories, which I have long since forgotten. In a kind of trance, I wrote as an oral presentation for the seminar this article, which flew in the face of all that Jaspers taught, and I referred to this psychologistic-positivistic method of explanation with obvious contempt. Jaspers became furious, even aggressive and insulting. He showed no pedagogical understanding whatsoever for this young student who had just let these ideas pour out. After Jaspers's outburst, I stood up, bowed to my fellow students, and left the seminar room, slamming the door. The episode became known all around Heidelberg. So that was the business with the "demonic." Later Ernst Bloch read it and was quite enthusiastic about it. It was finally published in the Nobel festschrift, although there were some critical protests from Franz Rosenzweig, who was the editor. There were also criticisms from Siegfried Kracauer, who was then my closest personal and intellectual friend and mentor. The syncretic elements in my essay were

typical for that time. I had friends and allies active in various intellectual spheres—psychoanalysis, Marxism, the Kantian school, Zionism, the religious Jewish movement—and I must have been a kind of focal point for all these intellectual currents.

Dubiel: One can see this phenomenon in a general sense, namely, that many of your intellectual fellow travelers at that time were given to syncretic tendencies, albeit to varying degrees. In Benjamin's case there were certainly also very heterogeneous aspects of his orientation as a whole, and that's no less true for Bloch.

Lowenthal: And, to a certain extent, for Lukács. Just look at Soul and Form or The Theory of the Novel —these works are far from History and Class Consciousness .

Dubiel: For Lukács it's quite simple. You just have to take The Destruction of Reason . All the people he attacks in that book represent the currents that he had to overcome in himself.

Lowenthal: Yes, an awful book.

Dubiel: Let's now turn to your dealings with psychoanalysis. How did that start?

Lowenthal: Like so many other things in life, quite by chance. I already told you that I fell in love with a woman—it must have been around 1922—who originally came from Königsberg and then lived in Frankfurt, and who was at that time a friend of Erich Fromm's. She later became my wife. Since her youth, she had been good friends with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Through my wife, Golde Ginsburg, Erich Fromm got to know Frieda, who later became a physician in a clinic near Dresden. I also became acquainted with Frieda through Golde. Before 1922, I was only somewhat familiar with psychoanalysis; I believe that there are certain allusions to this in the "Demonic" essay. But all of that isn't so important, just as The Critique of Pure Reason says: the empirical beginning can be established, but the conceptual origin is elsewhere. The systematic interest that must have spawned this fascination with psychoanalysis for me and many of my intellectual fellow travelers was very likely the idea of "marrying" historical materialism with

psychoanalysis. One of the fundamental problems in Marxist theory is, after all, the absence of mediating elements between base and superstructure, which psychological theory might supply. And for us, psychoanalysis came to fill this gap. I probably foresaw this already in the early twenties. It became consciously apparent to me and to all of us starting around 1930, perhaps already in 1927–1928. Intellectually, it was terribly exciting to familiarize oneself with psychoanalysis and to maintain psychoanalytical contacts, because it was so avant-garde. Later, in the circle of my colleagues in the Institute, we often referred in jest to my having brought Fromm to the Institute as one of my major contributions. In those days, he was certainly one of the most important influences. Particularly during the Frankfurt years the connection with Fromm was extraordinarily stimulating, even though at first he wasn't a formal member of the Institute and was usually not in Frankfurt.

Yes, and I might mention my modest role in connection with awarding the Goethe Prize to Sigmund Freud, in 1930, I think. At that time, no one wanted to grant Freud an official prize; psychoanalysis was a despised and scorned science; it was anathema—extreme and avant-garde. For that reason, for the city of Frankfurt to grant Sigmund Freud the Goethe Prize was quite extraordinary. I was indirectly involved, since through the People's Theater movement I was friendly with Gottfried Herzfeld, an important member of the selection committee. Another incident, perhaps less noticed, was the establishment of a psychoanalytical institute in Frankfurt at the end of the twenties. At that time we made it possible for this institute to hold its lectures in the rooms of our Institute of Social Research. That was only possible because from 1930 on Max Horkheimer was the director of the Institute and we owned our own building on the university campus. This situation was optimal in Germany at that early time—the mere fact that a psychoanalytical institute was allowed to use rooms on a university campus was then almost a sensation.

2—
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.

3—
The Voice of America

Dubiel: Today I'd like to talk with you about the time you spent working as a communications specialist for the American government. First of all, could you discuss how and where you worked during the war? Perhaps you could start by naming the institutions where you were employed, either part- or full-time.

Lowenthal: For nearly the entire war period, I held an advisory position in the Domestic Media Department of the Office of War Information. Later, in 1944, I worked for the Bureau of Overseas Intelligence, on German material specifically. This bureau was a part of the Office of War Information. While I was working in Washington, Marcuse was working for the Office of Strategic Services, and we often saw each other there. Several of my colleagues from the Institute worked there: Neumann, Kirchheimer. Pollock was an advisor for the War Production Board. Adorno and Horkheimer didn't hold any government jobs.

Dubiel: It would be hard to imagine that they could have.

Lowenthal: I can't say much about my work for the Domestic Media Department. It wasn't especially exciting—mainly routine. My job after 1944 in the Bureau of Overseas Intelligence was more interesting. There each of us had to evaluate radio programs and press materials in our respective languages. My job was to analyze

the radio programs of the German armed forces and German press material, both of which were supposed to yield information on what was going on in Germany, particularly concerning morale. I worked with interesting people there. At the desk next to me sat Ruth Benedict, the famous anthropologist, who worked partly on Germany and partly on the Netherlands. I still remember our conversations comparing Westphalian and Dutch eating habits! Nonetheless, I must say I remember my time in Washington as a very frustrating experience. There were too many people, and there was a great muddle of bureaucracy, professorial vanity, and phony intellectuals—I didn't find it satisfying. So I wasn't too unhappy when my duties called me back to the Institute, to take an active part in a study on anti-Semitism among American workers. This study, financed by the American Jewish Labor Committee, was never published.

Dubiel: Marcuse told me that his job in the Office of Strategic Services consisted of identifying, along with other specialists, the groups in fascist Germany who contributed to its economic recovery. As you know, that happened as a preparatory stage of the later, poorly carried out denazification process. Did you also work in this context?

Lowenthal: Unfortunately, no. I would have much preferred to work in the Office of Strategic Services. But for personal reasons, that didn't work out. There were some really interesting people working there: H. Stuart Hughes, Carl Schorske, Felix Gilbert. They carried out interesting, historically oriented studies, whereas our work was then often very short-term and unmethodical. We neither did much good nor caused much harm, I believe.

Dubiel: I'm amazed that your work in the OWI was so disorganized. I've always thought that when governments hire intellectuals for such functions, they must have a clearly defined research plan with a clear organizational hierarchy and precisely defined questions and instructions.

Lowenthal: I don't mean that everything was totally chaotic. It

was, you know, wartime, and the American governmental apparatus was inflated with new agencies and personnel. And, to tell the truth, it wasn't really prepared for such things as intelligence work. In this respect, the United States had no real tradition in international politics, as existed in the European countries and especially in the totalitarian systems. No, the work there was not especially satisfying. That was not the case later with the Voice of America; the work there was an intellectual and scientific challenge.

Dubiel: Could you explain that in a little more detail?

Lowenthal: My task consisted of setting up a research division that was to evaluate the effects of the Voice of America radio programs. And I did just that, in fact, setting it up for a broad, international area. My immediate superiors in the State Department helped me a great deal in this, and many American social scientists assisted me to an extraordinary degree. We employed many experts in the social sciences and maintained contracts with university institutes and commercial research firms. All of the plans for these widespread activities were worked out in our office. Above all, we approached the effects of mass media in a quite different manner than was usual in American studies at that time. Unfortunately, this new approach didn't last long; that was one of my biggest disappointments. American studies at that time were influenced essentially by the needs of the advertising industry. Our work had two primary target areas. The first of these was the Soviet Union and its satellites, and here our work was basically archeological. Naturally, we couldn't examine the effects of the programming in the Eastern Bloc directly, so we had to develop completely new methodologies. One was the questioning of refugees. That was a very dubious method because it involved such a selective sample. Other material for our investigations came from the reactions of the Soviet Union to our broadcasts, including its jamming of them.

The other important investigations involved communication habits. One can't naïvely assume that all nations and cultures respond in the same manner, for example, that reactions in the Near

and Far East to printed or electronic media would be the same as in the United States. In this context we examined the formation of public opinion leadership: What sources supply public opinion with information, for example, in rural areas? How are opinions formed and disseminated? In the café, by the mule driver, or by the messenger who goes from the village to the big cities and brings back information? Our task consisted, as I already said, of evaluating the specific effects of the radio broadcasts, but we also studied other media. Of particular theoretical and methodological importance was the set of questions aimed at revealing the conceptions an average inhabitant of another country would have of America, of American culture and politics. How was one to know whether and to what extent a conception can be traced back to a certain source—a certain broadcast or a certain film? It was interesting to pursue in detail the question of how the image of America is influenced in different countries.

One other important aspect of our work involved our relationship with the producers of the radio broadcasts. Here our task was fundamentally to bicker, that is, to criticize what was being produced in the broadcasts. For that reason, we weren't exactly popular with the programming directors. After all, we were investigating the relationship of the radio producers to their public. We were, so to speak, their auditors.

Dubiel: I don't understand something here. Now, the Voice of America was an agency of the State Department. I thought that in the United States there were only private radio stations. Or is that a dumb question?

Lowenthal: The Voice of America was an arm of the State Department, later of the U.S. Information Agency. You're confusing that with the American radio industry, which covered the domestic market. We were forbidden by law to transmit any of the Voice's programs to America. The Voice's programs were—and still are today—broadcast by radio stations in Europe and Asia. Some were

also broadcast from New York, for example, the German-language Stimme Amerikas—but you're much too young, you've certainly never listened to that. No, your question isn't dumb at all; there were and are private radio stations that had and have a commission similar to that of the Voice of America: Radio Liberation and Radio Free Europe. These are semiofficial government agencies whose credibility is, on the one hand, strengthened by the fact that they don't appear as direct agencies of American foreign policy. On the other hand, they are often rather excessive in their radicalness. You surely know that; sometimes the administration was caused a lot of embarrassment and effort because these semiofficial propaganda agencies went too far. For example, in 1956 during the Hungarian uprising, it was difficult to prevent Radio Free Europe from encouraging the Hungarian population to engage in further useless bloodshed.

Several things interested me as a sociologist in this work: the development of new methods in communication research; the relationship—of which I experienced a good deal myself—between the scholars engaged in evaluation and the producers of media programs; and finally, the contact with the hierarchical competitive struggles in the various sections in the State Department, especially in the Foreign Service. Diplomats and other high government officials who worked in Washington looked down on this enormous propaganda apparatus and the information service much more than the officials working out in the field did. To their way of thinking, this was no way to conduct foreign policy; they treated us with great condescension. Whenever they wanted to know something from us, they would always demand immediate answers. For example, I often gave lectures in the Foreign Service Institute, and I might suddenly be asked, "So what do we have to do to make the Russians like us or so that this or that happens, and how can you prove this or that assumption?" While they had disdain for our nondiplomatic activities, they nonetheless demanded quick answers to difficult,

complex questions. I felt as if I were in an echo chamber, where from all sides I was pummeled with questions, none of which I quite understood. My biggest and most fundamental mistake at that time was to equate American with German government service. I was around fifty, and if German standards had applied, I probably would have stayed in the foreign service until retirement. Today I sometimes have to laugh at my naïveté then. I didn't realize the internal mobility and politicization of the governmental apparatus. I finally came into great difficulties when the Republicans took over the helm and, besides that, the entire agency was transferred to the organizational framework of the U.S. Information Agency. Then they made my life very tough, broke up my department, and reduced my research funding in order gradually to force me to quit. But I only resigned after I was offered a professorship at Berkeley.

Dubiel: How did that come about?

Lowenthal: Like a bolt from the blue I was offered a visiting professorship at Berkeley, for which I obtained—with some difficulty—a leave from the government. I was then invited to spend a year at Stanford's Center for Advanced Studies, where I did enough sociological research to be offered a professorship at Berkeley. In that connection a concrete example of the sociology of role change occurs to me. As director of research for the Voice of America I was often approached by the director of the Voice, who wanted to use our results, of course, only to the extent that they were advantageous for him, that is, in order to expand his staff or his budget. The senior officials in the State Department, however, wanted to know only the critical side. So I was tugged back and forth between the wishes of the director and those of his superiors: the one wanted only justification, the other only criticism. That was a precarious position. I have many more sociologically interesting stories from that job, but that would take up too much time here.

Dubiel: Leo, I have a burning question. At that time in the early fifties, with your political past and in that politically sensitive position, surely you would have been an ideal victim for McCarthy?

Lowenthal: Yes, in fact, one of the main targets of attack of McCarthy and his henchmen, those loathsome lawyers Roy Cohn and David Shine, was the information service of the American government. According to them, the Voice of America was controlled by Communists. They constantly harassed us in New York. They had set up their headquarters in the Waldorf Astoria in order to better interrogate us. (I believe I already told you that the main offices of the Voice of America were located in New York.) They continually summoned the political and technical directors and the various division chiefs of the separate departments, in both secret and public sessions. They never summoned me. That was astonishing, because I was, after all, the man from that odd institute in New York, I held a quite high position in the propaganda apparatus of the State Department, and I had a past they certainly knew about. I was convinced that they would interrogate me one day.

At that time I used to keep my writings stacked on the desk in my office. On top of the pile I had placed an offprint of an essay with the title "Portrait of the American Agitator." That was an advance copy of my later book Prophets of Deceit . If I had been summoned to testify in Washington, I would have taken that stack with me and placed it so that the committee and the television crew could have read the title. Then if some senator, outraged at the unambiguous allusion, had asked me to explain myself, I would have calmly said that I brought the books along for the sole purpose of demonstrating my scientific qualifications to the honorable senators. Unfortunately, I was never given that chance; I was never called to testify. I've often thought about it, but I've never quite been able to figure it out. Perhaps it had something to do with my institutional independence; after all, I could have just gone back to the Institute. I can only tell you the following story, which I learned from the executive director of the Voice of America. I simply said to him, "Ask around why I haven't been called to testify." So he asked one of those unpaid assistants of McCarthy's, the well-known William F. Buckley, a very rich, archreactionary journalist belonging to the farthest right

wing of American journalism. And he said to the director, "Yeah, that Lowenthal. We had him at the top of our list, we looked into every corner of his past, but we couldn't find anything against him." I was aghast, of course, and said to my informant, "Do me a favor and go back and tell them that I'll help them find something!" But nothing happened.

In connection with the State Department's efforts to get rid of me, I had to go through another security investigation. That was a favorite way to humiliate the people they wanted to get rid of. As a rule, the investigators who carried out such supplemental security investigations held at least the same civil service rank as their "victim." At that time I was director of a department, so I should have been interrogated by the director of the security office of the foreign service or his representative. But in order to humiliate me even more, I was interrogated by a petty civil servant whose name I'll never forget: Mr. Spence. He was a kind of glorified nightwatchman at our New York office. It must have been a trauma for him, because from his perspective I was a bigwig.

On his desk were the questions—written by someone else—that he was to ask me. He sat at a little desk, in front of which were a few chairs and a comfortable armchair, in which I sat. Then came the stereotyped questions—I'll just mention a few of them. Among others: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" I could answer that with no. Then: "Do you now or have you ever had sympathies for the Communists?" There I said yes. He just about fell off his chair. He made sure that I had understood the question correctly. I said that I now no longer had sympathies for the Communists; my official position and area of activity spoke for this. But I was born in 1900. "In 1917, the revolution broke out. We were pupils in one of the most liberal high schools in liberal Frankfurt. We hated the Kaiser and the world war, and we saw the Bolshevik revolution as an act of liberation for humanity." And, I added, I would hope that the American government would never

place anyone in a sensitive post who was of my generation and yet had never felt sympathies for international Communism. The man looked at me in astonishment and asked, "Should I write all that down?" I said, "You don't need to. I'll place a State Department memorandum in the files"—which I did, too, and nothing happened to me. And then the man, still following his instructions, accused me of having only investigated the material of right-wing agitators in my book Prophets of Deceit . I told him, "I'm sorry, but the American Jewish Committee paid me ten thousand dollars to write a book about anti-Semitic agitators." The Communists might well be very wicked, but in the United States they aren't anti-Semitic, at least not in terms of their ideology. The next question contained the accusation that in my lectures at Columbia University I had paid inordinate attention to the works of Karl Marx. To that I answered that when I accepted the job as lecturer at Columbia I had taken an oath to be scientifically objective, and consequently I would have been committing an act of considerable dishonesty if I had given a lecture on the history of social philosophy and simply ignored the most important social philosopher of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, and his followers. And so the questions continued, each more stupid than the preceding one.

Dubiel: This interrogation, this security examination, then, was a degradation ritual to make you quit your job. But it surely had some connection with the McCarthy interrogations to which others were subjected? And didn't the fact that they suddenly no longer wanted you at this post have, possibly, something to do with your ideological and scientific background?

Lowenthal: I hardly think so. More likely it coincided with a new trend. First of all, they wanted a Republican to fill my post, and second, there was a strong bias against the scientific orientation of our methods. The Republicans were old-fashioned and set all their hopes on the intelligence apparatus. They were no longer willing to spend money on scientific research. It's also not true that so many

people were fired because of the McCarthy trials. Very few who had secure positions were actually fired. This is all very interesting sociologically. If somebody were writing about the sociology of the state machinery, there would be a lot of material on that from the McCarthy years. There were many people who served as informers for McCarthy, among them officials from the Voice of America. But even more important than one's party affiliation, in an American-type government, is which governmental branch controls your office. Of course, Republicans and Democrats aren't friends, but Congress and the executive branch are even greater enemies. If—and this happened frequently during the McCarthy years—somebody from the executive branch would say something to the Congress people that could hurt the executive, that was the greatest crime. We had a man in our department, a unit supervisor—I don't want to mention his name—who was one of the head informers and was constantly going over to the Waldorf Astoria to relate his horror stories to Cohn and Shine, and probably to McCarthy as well. The man had a secure position; he couldn't be fired. I remember a meeting in which I took part. We realized that we couldn't fire him, but we had to "punish" him somehow. So he was transferred to Kabul, Afghanistan.

Dubiel: Can you talk some more about those events?

Lowenthal: The McCarthy committee wasn't at all liked by the members of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. When McCarthy began to interfere with the business of this important congressional committee, they formed their own subcommittee, the so-called Hickenlooper committee. This committee summoned me and asked me about the effects of the Voice of America in the Soviet Union. The next day the New York Times published my testimony on the front page. I thought I was going to be famous! But, as it turned out, it was a media flash-in-the-pan, even with my photo and testimony on the front page. The senior officials in the State Department were very annoyed at this sudden public vis-

ibility. I was severely reprimanded for my testimony. Well, all of that's probably not so interesting, but it is interesting that the two committees were at loggerheads: while the McCarthy committee had no use for me, the Foreign Affairs Committee treated me with a great deal of respect.

Dubiel: Could we speak now a little more generally about foreign policy in the United States?

Lowenthal: Well, I had my views on American foreign policy insofar as my work provided some insight into it. The interesting thing was how much the entire mode of thinking was influenced by domestic interests and conditions, by events in domestic politics and in business life. Let me give a few examples. I was always amazed at how little interest the Voice of America and other propaganda agencies had in South America. People would always say, "We've got them in our pocket." And I would respond in conversation, "Those are authoritarian feudal societies. There are surely groups other than these military juntas who in the distant future could determine the destinies of these countries." They ignored that. This attitude was manifested in the fact that only second-rate people were used for the programs destined for South America, and little attention was paid to them. Perhaps in this respect the behavior of my department was representative of the entire State Department. That's one good example. The other was Africa. For Africa there was simply nothing. I wrote memorandum after memorandum suggesting that we do some programming in Swahili, but nothing came of it (that changed later on). I must say that in my time, as I saw it, Africa scarcely appeared at all in the immediate realm of American foreign policy. What amazed me most was the undifferentiated thinking with regard to Stalin's anticipated death. This was in 1953; he was already very ill, and it was obvious that he would soon die. Endless position papers were written, full of speculations on what would happen after his death. Would civil war break out, would tensions between the military and the party

become critical, would the political apparatus be able to take the strain, would unrest result, would it possibly even be a good opportunity for intervention? You can't even imagine all the nonsense written in those days. Of course, little Leo Lowenthal wasn't asked for advice, but if I had been given the opportunity, I would have predicted that nothing dramatic was going to happen. I would have said, "The whole governmental system has been in the saddle for almost forty years now, the majority of the people living there don't know any other system, the government and the military apparatus are dependent on each other; the country is in a stage of industrial reconstruction after a horrible war, nothing extraordinary will happen that could threaten the system." At that time, they took me for a fool, but I was right. It left a deep impression on me, this official wishful thinking and anticipation of the Soviet Union's collapse after the death of Stalin.

Dubiel: Leo, when you talk like this about American foreign policy from the perspective of your work, it occurs to me that though your description of foreign policy is critical, it is, so to speak, critical only of immediate circumstances. You mentioned that whole hemispheres, for example, Latin America and Africa, were ignored because the Americans supposedly "had them in their pocket anyway." You've also told me often enough about American blindness toward certain developments in Communist China and about the personalistic image many officials and politicians had of the development of the Soviet Union. You've mentioned to what extent American diplomats and other employees of the U.S. foreign service remained estranged from the country in which they were stationed, always assessing local conditions, so to speak, from the cultural-imperialist bias of the United States. They generally wouldn't learn the language well enough to communicate, had contact only with the country's upper classes, and consequently seldom gained a realistic picture of social conditions, even in the countries where they were considered friends and allies. None of

this goes beyond the limits of immanent criticism. I could well imagine that you'd write memoranda about all of this, concluding with the recommendation that the foreign service be reformed. In short, what surprises me is that you didn't come up with a more radical critique of American foreign policy. Only once, when you were speaking about the disappointment of all of your political hopes—and you also brought postwar political development in the United States into this global disappointment—you came a little nearer to my expectations. My generation, that is, the social scientists who got their political education through the experience of the Vietnam War in the context of the student movement in the late sixties, had very specific and clear-cut criticisms of American foreign policy. So, the combination of this political socialization and a relatively good knowledge of Southeast Asia and Latin America has made me firmly convinced that the United States represents an imperialist power. For that reason, it's considered astonishing—and the target of these accusations has, of course, usually been Herbert Marcuse, but I've heard them made in reference to you, too—that people like all of you, with a clear-cut intellectual, socialist tradition, who are counted among the founders of Critical Theory, had no qualms about entering the service of a power that, just one generation later, was unequivocally seen as imperialistic. What do you say to the charge that the United States is an imperialist power?

Lowenthal: I'm not interested in posing as an ardent critic of American foreign policy. I looked at it from the vantage point of my specific function; after all, I was only the director of a certain department within the American propaganda apparatus that didn't make political decisions itself. I'm emphasizing this only in order to make clear that what I'm about to say is merely an aphoristic marginal note, not a conclusive assertion. The governmental activity didn't compromise either Marcuse or me. For practical reasons I was forced to find suitable employment. As you know, the Institute's funds had become diminished, and already beforehand I had ac-

tively tried to find an acceptable academic position, an endeavor in which I finally succeeded after this "detour" in government. The "cunning of reason" sometimes works for the individual, too. I've already told you the story about M. I. Finley, a respected professor of classics; when he was denounced by the Committee on Un-American Activities, he was fired from his crummy job at a tiny college and ended up being offered a great position in Cambridge. But, to get back to the subject, I'd have to say that neither during the war, when I worked for the Office of War Information, nor in the postwar period did I ever have the feeling that I was working for an imperialist power. At that time, American foreign policy was essentially reactive and in no respect active. I consider it false radicalism to say that the politics of the cold war were nothing but a manifestation of American imperialism. After all, there were two superpowers opposing each other, and it's difficult to make out just who—the United States or the Soviet Union—engaged in the more imperialistic politics right after the war.

Dubiel: Now you're starting to take the defensive, probably because the category of imperialism is so morally loaded. Because of that, your answer sounds a little like a justification. Let's take a sober look at the term. There are certain elements of definition on which we can quickly agree. And when these elements are applied to the process of foreign policy precisely in this period right after the Second World War, the term's meaning becomes clear. I am following the accepted formulas of established American political science. By imperialism, I mean the establishment of a permanent military establishment; the setting up of a defense industry that is independent of war cycles, that is, an industry specifically implemented for the production of military goods; the setting up of a permanent crisis staff that, in the American case, is ultimately more influential than the Secretary of State but is located not in the normal institutional apparatus of the government but rather, as it were, adjacent to it. (I refer here, of course, to the National Security

Council, which is basically a war agency—no Western European country has anything analogous.) I'm also thinking about simple historical facts that, as far as I know, became known only in retrospect—for example, that under Truman the military budget was suddenly doubled with the justification that the role of the United States as the guarantor of international stability or as the leader in world politics could not be made plausible except by a permanent war readiness. These are all things that became obvious only after a whole series of interventions. At least since Vietnam they have been unmistakably evident. My question is, was there at that time a consciousness, for you or among your colleagues, of imperialism as I've just defined it?

Lowenthal: I concur completely with your description. Nonetheless, in those days, as I was working for the government, I wasn't really conscious of it. What was always present, and still is today, although the Americans usually have to pay bitterly for it, is the belief that in order to carry out foreign policy effectively, it's necessary to form an alliance with whatever class happens to be on top at the moment, without an exact analysis of what sort of scoundrels those people may be and what sort of real support they enjoy in their society. I've often said to you that American foreign policy is essentially reactive. They let the world name the topics, as it were. It's a strange mixture of Calvinistic moralism and politics for capitalist interests, which are incorporated in an opaque and often very contradictory synthesis. Charlie Wilson's outrageous saying, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country," is a perfect expression of the American mentality. In this country, many people really do believe that what supports the economic system and its values is simultaneously compatible with a moralistic line on how to live one's life, equally in the private and in the public context. Consequently it happens that they have dealings with those scoundrels in Iran and those criminals in Vietnam and God knows where else. When they finally realize that it isn't working out, they

go off—in the exact same short-sighted and reactive manner—in search of new allies, with whom the same process starts all over again. The Americans are in this respect like a Hegelian thinker, who always supports as "logical" whatever party happens to have the power at that moment. This policy leads nolens volens to relativism and even amoralism. Most American politicians aren't even conscious of this policy.

An undialectical concept of American imperialism is questionable. Essentially what that means is that American foreign policy is on the one hand forever trying to counteract, by means of armaments, alliances, and intervention, its constant fear of being outdone militarily while on the other hand trying simultaneously to forestall the ever-present threat of a global economic crisis, by gaining new markets and protecting old ones. If you want to call that imperialism, fine. I think it's nothing more than a clear-cut emanation of the capitalist production system.

Dubiel: You're paraphrasing Lenin . . .

Lowenthal: Yes, and all this is by no means so different from what is happening on the other side, in the Soviet Union and now also gradually in China. Already in 1950 I said that the United States and the Soviet Union are very similar systems, differing only in details of institutional processes. I don't believe, for example, that the National Security Council is so unique. I'm sure that similar institutions exist in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.

Dubiel: That is to say, today you support—like many of your former colleagues and allies—a sort of negative, critically interpreted convergence theory.

Lowenthal: You have to keep in mind that the United States's role as a world power is very new. Just how long is this business going to last? The Americans became an international power, involved in modern world history, only toward the end of and after the First World War. That's just a bit over half a century ago. Many

peculiarities, particularly institutional ones, of American foreign policy are very simply explained by the fact that in this respect—unlike the Western European nations—the United States has no tradition reaching back into the nineteenth century or even earlier.

Dubiel: I'd like to offer one more observation I've made on the basis of a closer acquaintance with American postwar history. The ability to recognize precisely the imperialist character of American politics was, after all, very much hampered by the following circumstance: if you judge foreign policy strategies by the same right-left parameters that you can apply to domestic politics, then the pertinent contending factions of the postwar period present a very confusing picture. The people who already during the war and later in the postwar period were interested in a leading world role for the United States were, after all, the liberals with strongly moralistic—if not messianic—pretensions. In contrast, most of the conservatives at this time felt a strong interest in keeping America sheltered from world history. Today we tend to identify imperialist strategies with the right-wing, conservative, or even fascistic groups in the United States. And precisely this perception makes the assessment of American foreign policy so confusing for Europeans. But that also illustrates very nicely what you just said about U.S. foreign policy being a contradictory synthesis of Calvinist moralism and the politics of capitalist interests.

Lowenthal: Besides, Helmut, we don't want to forget that America's primary enemy in both world wars was Germany, first a Wilhelmine and then a fascist Germany. And if these enemies weren't a good moral justification for a policy of liberal intervention, then I don't know what would be. The anti-interventionists in the United States on the eve of the Second World War were practically fascists. This "America first" movement was a very precarious affair. The fascistic and anti-Semitic fringe groups I examined in my research were at that time, as you know, fanatically

isolationist. Even within certain strata of the working class, insofar as these were anti-Semitic, there was the attitude: how does all of this concern us?

Dubiel: I'd really like to continue our discussion, but unfortunately our conversation has to fit into one book. So back to the biography. In the course of your work with the Voice of America you traveled more or less all around the world. What especially interests me now are the trips to Europe, your return to Germany in the early postwar years. Please continue.

Lowenthal: I first returned to Europe after the Hitler years, or as Germans usually say—regrettably—"after the war," in 1949 on business for the Voice of America. My first destination was England. At that time, of course, there were no jets that were able to make the whole journey nonstop. We had to land in Shannon, Ireland, and were forced, half-asleep, to disembark and wait in the airport café. As soon as I saw the waiter I was struck by an impression—of the servility and assiduity with which the dreadful coffee was served. As I contemplated this specific type of servility and assiduity, which I never experienced in quite the same way in America, I thought I noticed beneath the obsequious politeness something hidden, namely the resentment, the rage and envy, felt by the proletarian class toward the bourgeoisie that had just arrived in that expensive airplane. I hadn't seen that for fifteen years in America: Americans, after all, are fooled by a completely successful middle-class ideology—tomato juice unites us all beyond any class differences! Shannon was the return to an archetypical experience. My entire political memory was revived when I reexperienced this sharp class difference in a psychologically recognizable form. This was Europe.

Dubiel: Leo, a similar experience occurs to me, which complements yours in all aspects because it also took place in an airport, in Los Angeles. A black waitress in a cafeteria in the TWA building started up a conversation with two passengers, a well-off

couple who had just returned from a vacation in Miami. The three of them exchanged remarks about their life stories, and the man, who clearly belonged to the upper middle class, told how he had acquired his business. At that point the black waitress responded, without a trace of reserve or distance, that she'd tried to make her fortune in business at one point, but "I didn't make it." In this small conversational scene, two classes were personally represented: upper middle and lower middle. They dealt with each other without a trace of psychological class barriers. Here in the United States there's an ideological egalitarianism that permeates every facet of social life. That really is different in Europe. Even in those societies where the integration of the proletariat into bourgeois society has taken place smoothly, as in the case of the Federal Republic, there are still remnants of a once-intact class consciousness. The status anxieties of the petit bourgeois, the helpless resentment against the upper class, which manifests itself in all that silly talk about "the little man"—it's all a perverted, lingering trace of this.

Lowenthal: That's just what I meant, you've formulated it perfectly. Suddenly, all of that was there once again: the class differences that express themselves in this reserve, in the distance, the gestures. These signs signaled to our group that we lived in another, socially different world.

Dubiel: Yes, Leo, in this we agree, but what can we do with it? It can be said that the American dream is the perverse apogee of a thoroughly ideological class harmony, which the ruling strata in the Federal Republic can only dream about. Their ideological motto of "social partnership" certainly hasn't taken root to the same extent; the residues of a once-intact class consciousness must still be too strong. But then again, I'm inclined to defend this psychological class harmony, without a theoretical backup for my position. The United States represents the most perfect bourgeois society the world has ever known, including its positive aspects. Everyday life here is so easy and pleasant, so free from the authoritarian-Wil-

helmine fuss that still characterizes much of political life in the Federal Republic today. It's reminiscent of the concept of competition in the third volume of Das Kapital: bourgeois equality is such a massive psychological reality in the United States that it really does determine a good part of daily behavior. Here I'm ambivalent to the point of helplessness. . . .

Lowenthal: Yes, when I first came to America, I said: this is capitalism without a bad conscience. When someone in Germany called someone a capitalist or spoke about capitalism, a friend-foe relationship was immediately established. Here it's different. Nobody tries to deny that this is a capitalist society. This is probably because America's emergence as a society occurred at the height of the bourgeois age. America had no feudal mortgages on its future. Here there are unfortunately no pretty ruins of castles or other historical relics of earlier times, but similarly lacking is that feudal ideal of obligations to those above and below, the ritual maintenance of social boundaries. But I'd better get back, finally, to the waiters in Shannon and to my first trip back to Europe. The airplane landed in London. There I saw for the first time the destruction caused by bombing. The city made a most depressing sight, characterized by extreme lethargy: very little reconstruction work was under way. One of my most embarrassing experiences—this was once again at the airport, waiting for my flight to the Continent—was to see the stout, overly well fed, loud, and uninhibited German-speaking businessmen. At that time I heard the absurd story that Germans were sending their English friends "Care" packages—don't forget, this was 1949. There I thought to myself, for once in my life I'm on the winning side, whereas otherwise I generally feel more comfortable among the losers. And yet here it was no use to me anyway, for the tables had already turned again. From London I flew to Italy, and from there I traveled by train through Austria to Germany. The next morning I woke up in my sleeping car in Innsbruck and saw bombed-out Austrian buildings

for the first time. I admit quite freely today that at the moment I said to myself, "Not enough, not enough." Suddenly the whole rage, the fury, the grief at all the horror Hitler had brought about, exploded in me. An old acquaintance picked me up at the train station in Munich. He suggested that we go directly to the Oktoberfest, and I agreed, half out of politeness and half out of melancholy. On arriving there, I just about turned around and flew back to America. The whole crap had started up anew: there were those loud, fat, boozing oafs in the giant tents, making a ruckus drinking, eating sausages, and swinging their mugs, the oom-pah-pah bands were blaring. It was ghastly.

Another experience I remember was Dachau, where I went with a group of colleagues from my office. I was walking, in a kind of daze, in the little cemetery in front of the ovens, and I suddenly saw that one of my American colleagues was pulling out his camera to take a picture of me. I came at him like one possessed and shouted, "Jim, you can't take a picture of me here." He didn't understand that at all. The thought that I, a Jew who had survived through no merit of my own, would stand in front of the memorial at Dachau and have my picture taken for "fun," as it were, was more than I could stand. From Munich I traveled to Frankfurt, where I stayed awhile. Frankfurt was the headquarters of the High Command. Yes, Helmut, I had some experiences in Frankfurt, but should I tell about all that?

Dubiel: Yes, by all means.

Lowenthal: Well, then, I was quartered in a V.I.P. hotel, the Hotel Carlton by the train station. And there, after all those years, was the same manager who had been there in the early thirties, before Hitler. He recognized me right away; in earlier days I had frequently eaten there. He asked, "Herr Dr. Lowenthal, what brings you to Frankfurt again?" He was astonished when I told him that I was an official in the American foreign service. Then I asked him what I could do that evening—it was a Sunday. He suggested a

cabaret, I think on Lindenstraße. When I checked my coat at the cloakroom, I heard from the stage of the cabaret a soubrette singing a melody from the Threepenny Opera . I must have muttered to myself out loud in English, "Well, that's how I went out and that's how I come back!" The cloakroom lady looked at me with astonishment. I had only wanted to say, half subconsciously, I left with Brecht, and here I was, returning with Brecht.

And another story occurs to me just now. The next morning I was picked up from the Hotel Carlton by an official American government car. The driver was a young German, about eighteen years old. When I walked out of the hotel, he diligently opened the rear door of the car, and I said to him in German, "No, that's not necessary; I'll sit up front with you." He was completely amazed. Then we began to talk. He was greatly impressed by the fact that I spoke German so well and especially by the fact that I could chat with him in the Frankfurt dialect. I told him that, as a German Jew, I had emigrated in time to avoid Hitler and that I had, so to speak, made my fortune in America. Then this boy said to me in Frankfurt dialect, "Ja, Herr Doktor, that was really dumb of Hitler to start in on the Jews. After all, everybody knows that Jews have money." That was one of the saddest experiences I had. This innocent boy, who must have been born around 1931, was chronically afflicted with this ideological poison that Nazism had spread and left behind. At that time I didn't feel capable of enlightening the boy. In any case, it was a depressing experience and colored my first impressions of post-Hitler Germany. Shall I go on?

Dubiel: Yes, yes.

Lowenthal: One of the few people in Germany who impressed me positively at that time was the then vice-chancellor of Frankfurt University, Franz Böhm. I can't remember when I had seen him last, but he knew who I was. Even before I got around to formulating my impressions, he said, "Isn't it depressing? Nobody ever knew about anything. Everywhere you find this feigned ignorance

about the goings-on in Germany during the Hitler years." Böhm had great moral integrity. My meeting with him was actually my only uplifting experience of that visit. During a business trip to Heidelberg I also visited a prominent social scientist, who, as a well-known Social Democrat, had immediately been fired from his post by the National Socialists. So I went to see him, and, typical for a German professor, he continually called me "Herr Doktor" to establish the proper distance between himself, the "Herr Professor" and a commonplace "Herr Doktor." When I asked him how he was doing, he immediately began to complain about the American occupation authorities. He complained about the planned but long since shelved school reform that would have done away with Latin and the learning of other classical languages. I couldn't resist asking him what he really had to complain about. After all, with the help of the American victors he was back in his job, and he was doing well materially. After this conversation about the school reform that hadn't been carried out, he asked me what had impressed me most in Germany, and I told him about my encounter with Franz Böhm. I also repeated to him that again and again I had run into the phenomenon of Germans claiming not to have known anything about the atrocities committed under Hitler. To this he responded with a slightly smug smile, "Well, Herr Doktor, you in America carry out so many empirical studies. Have you ever done a study on how fast the living forget their dead?" After he used the almost incredible pronoun "their" in connection with "dead" to refer to the Jews and the other countless victims murdered by the Germans, I bowed and took my leave. It was a shattering experience. But enough of that now.

Dubiel: You wanted to tell about the behavior of certain American officials with whom you had dealings during your travels in Germany.

Lowenthal: Yes, Helmut, I'll start off with an amusing story that is very characteristic of the mentality of both the Germans and

the Americans. In my research department in New York we didn't do any of our own research on the effectiveness of the Voice of America programs because the American occupation authorities in Germany maintained their own research department. It was precisely this agency that I was to visit. It had already struck me in America that a surprisingly large number of listeners commented unusually warmly and cordially on the Voice of America. I simply couldn't believe that they had been listening so zealously or that they had been thinking so benevolently about it. So I asked my colleague—that was, so to speak, my official task—"What do you do, exactly? What approach do you use? How do you find respondents?" "Well," he said, "we send a postcard to the people whom we want to interview stating that on a certain date an American official of the High Commission will come to ask them a few questions." My immediate response was, "Fine, I understand everything." The Germans, the defeated, wanted to make a good impression when they had dealings with Americans, and they could easily guess what the Americans wanted to hear. This anecdote is equally characteristic for the authoritarian German character as for the indescribable naïveté of the Americans, who, after all, must have known from their methodological training what an interview prejudice is.

But there were also more serious stories. I flew with a military airplane from Frankfurt to Berlin; that was the only way—it was the time of the blockade. I flew together with a rather highly placed State Department official who also worked for the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). The airplane had hardly taken off when he turned to me and said, "Leo, since you're in Germany, why don't you buy yourself some jewels?" I said to him that I had never bought jewels in my life and that I didn't have the slightest intention to buy any in Germany. At that time, despite the German currency reform—you're probably too young to remember that, Helmut—the cigarette economy still prevailed in Germany, and it was easy for

the relatively well-off American occupiers to buy up jewels and other objects of value. In Berlin we were picked up by an official government car with a German driver, as usual. Even before we reached our office the car stopped in front of an apartment house in Charlottenburg. My colleague got out and said that it wouldn't take long and he would be right back. At this point the German driver, who had found out that I was of German origin, turned around and asked me, "Do you know what the gentleman is doing up there?" Without being asked he proceeded to inform me that my colleague's jewel dealer lived there. Helmut, this is by no means an isolated incident. Many of my colleagues urged me to buy jewels, furniture, and china at that time because everything was so cheap. I was appalled at this mentality, not because I had any great sympathy for the Germans but because the fact that government officials were so set on plundering the Germans for a few cents was really repugnant. Furthermore, these government employees, who often weren't career officials and who after the occupation years settled back into civilian life at home, had something in common with the senior diplomats and military men, namely, great ignorance about Germany. Hardly anyone made the effort to learn the German language or to establish contact with the German population. I remember how one high official of the USIA urged me to stay on in Germany because they could really use me there. I told him that I was in the process of setting up a large research agency in the United States, and that he wouldn't accept my conditions anyway. He asked, "What are your conditions?" I would have demanded a binding promise from all my employees that, first, they would not engage in black market activities; second, they would be able to converse in colloquial German within a year; and third, they would have to name me five German families with whom they interacted socially. This was, in my view, the only way to carry out the politics of information, or any politics whatsoever, in a democratic manner.

Well, I don't have to tell you that these conditions weren't accepted. Fine. A year later an equally high official in Austria made me the very same offer, and I smilingly named him the same conditions, and he naturally laughed, too. Those were sad experiences.

In 1951 I once again took an extensive trip to Europe, visiting, among other places, Scandinavia. I was in Sweden first, and I came away with a most uneasy feeling. I had always called this nation the land of "psychological isolationism." Modern world history had always bypassed the Swedes. They made a lot of money selling their ball bearings to both the Nazis and the Russians—to whomever was a good customer. They kept out of the war, the country blossomed, there were more Cadillacs to be seen on the streets of Stockholm than in New York. Already at that time Sweden was a consumer society, especially as seen by someone coming from England, as I did. By the way, I forgot to mention that on my first trip from England to Germany I could hardly sleep because of the constant noise of construction. The Germans were hauling rubble away until late at night, and early in the morning they would start up again. Not just I, but many people coming from England to Germany were struck by this. It was already possible to see how things would develop. Also, I often heard the Germans lament the magnificent buildings the Americans had bombed and destroyed. But on none of my trips, whether in 1949, 1951, or 1953, did I ever hear a German express regret at what the Germans had done during the war. And that was certainly not limited to the bombing of beautiful buildings.

From Sweden I continued on to Oslo. There I was picked up at the airport by an English-speaking driver. That was an amusing incident. I had never been to Oslo before, and yet when we drove into the city I knew the precise locations of the Grand Hotel, the Café Central, the theater, and so on. The driver asked me if I had been in Oslo often, and I had to tell him it was my first time. Then I explained to him that I had worked on Hamsun and Ibsen and was

well acquainted with Norwegian literature. Seeing Oslo was something like déjà vu.

Dubiel: That's really a beautiful story.

Lowenthal: Another good story comes to mind, the one about the Edvard Munch collection. Have I already told it to you?

Dubiel: No.

Lowenthal: As you know, I'm a great admirer of Edward Munch. In fact, I just made a special trip to Washington to see the Munch exhibition. At that time there was no Munch museum in Oslo, as there is today. The paintings were still in the National Gallery. Unfortunately, I was always busy during its opening hours. So I gathered up all my courage and called the director of the National Gallery and asked him if he could suggest a way for me to see the paintings in spite of my schedule. In response he asked me, "What are you doing right now?" I answered, "I'm on the phone with you." Thereupon he said, "Then hang up the receiver and come to the front door of the museum. I'll open up for you, and you can look at the Munch paintings to your heart's content." And that's how it happened. Sometimes I say jokingly that I hope that was the only time I consciously misused the "power" of my official position for private ends. But I'm not ashamed of it.

There's another interesting Norwegian story I'd like to tell. As you may know, Helmut, the Nazis wanted to make Oslo the center of their international radio communications, both military and civilian. At that time they forced the Norwegians to erect an enormous building full of state-of-the-art radio equipment. This monster was naturally much too big for Norwegian purposes, and when the director of the state radio agency showed me the many rooms and studios, they were mostly empty. I asked the director—it was an obvious enough request—to acquaint me with the department concerned with audience research. He replied emphatically: "We don't have one." I was astonished and said, "You, perhaps the most democratic nation of Europe, you don't have one?" "Yes, perhaps

precisely for that reason we don't. Because we are such a democratic nation, we also have cultural-political and pedagogical intentions. If we were to test listeners' preferences to see what the people out there in the country, in the fjords, in the little towns, liked to listen to, they would surely ask for hillbilly music and the like. That's just what we don't want; we want to offer them a highly cultured program. So we don't ask them in the first place." I've often had to think back on this story; it's a wonderful example of the paradoxes of modern democracies.

Dubiel: Yes, when one takes a look at the programming of the mass media here in the United States, that sort of authoritarian nurturing of culture can appear thoroughly worth consideration.

Lowenthal: Perhaps I could tell one more story.

Dubiel: As long as I can light up another cigar.

Lowenthal: Go right ahead. For me as a sociologist, certain experiences in Spain and Greece, particularly in the countryside, were interesting. At that time it struck me—and this made an enduring impression—that the poorer people, especially the rural people, seemed considerably more satisfied with their lot than corresponding groups in Western Europe or, especially, in America. In these countries, which are still in the early stages of capitalist development, I always had the impression that where the entire hinterland wasn't yet completely in the clutches of capitalism, human beings lead a more relaxed and contented life. I can still see in my mind's eye—and this is the archetypical experience I wanted to tell about—a Greek peasant sitting at the side of a country road with a glass of wine, gazing into the distance. I saw that in Spain and Portugal, too. Agreed, the distance between what such people know and what would be available and possible for them at the height of capitalist development is so enormous that the "good life" doesn't even enter the picture, neither on the plane of their objective experiences nor on that of their psychological experience potential. For me, as I said, that was another of those archetypical experiences—in

contrast to the waiters at Shannon airport. Greek or Portuguese peasants aren't Irish waiters.

Dubiel: Well, okay, Leo, but what of it? What can be done with this description of idyllic and bucolic ways of life? What does one do with this nostalgic romanticism, this romantic criticism of industrial society, which I'm also prone to express? I lived for a long time on a farm, but I'm always ashamed to articulate that kind of romantic critique of civilization out loud.

Lowenthal: Yes, Helmut, but one just can't help asking oneself—and here a conservative element comes into my perception—if the price one must pay for integration into modern society isn't too high. Perhaps in this idyllic, preindustrial way of life there lives on, in a murky form, a bit of that utopian dream about a human approach to nature.

Dubiel: I don't find that conservative at all. If one puts you in the theoretical context of your one-time colleagues at the Frankfurt Institute, then this memory of archaic forms of life and experience is something like a utopian imago . Utopian not in the sense of the labor movement as the designation for the anticipated highest level of social development, but rather in the sense of a comprehensive critical philosophy of history such as that offered by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment .

Lowenthal: After all, in a certain respect I've been a specialist for nature ideologies ever since my Hamsun essay. The conservative-reactionary content of Hamsun's glorification of nature really has nothing to do with what I've been saying.

Dubiel: This irritated antimodernism, which often occurs in the form of a critique of technology, was certainly more than just a conservative phenomenon, at least in German romanticism. That today, more than a hundred and fifty years later, this antimodernism has acquired a progressive function, that's the dialectic of history. This whole bundle of alternative movements, which you can see here in California more strongly than anywhere else—holistic

medicine, macrobiotics, rural communes, baking one's own bread, natural childbirth—all those are, after all, just variations on that theme.

Lowenthal: But I reject all of those things: those are completely artificial things. You can't turn back history. It's not possible.

Dubiel: But just what do you mean, then?

Lowenthal: I don't want to say more than the following: this archetypical experience with the Greek farmer taught me—and this makes me simultaneously sad and happy—that human beings can also live that way, that their lives are in order without being driven by an unending restlessness, as ours are. Their way of life is a utopian spark that shows, I'll say it once again, what was once possible. Today on the spot where I saw the Greek peasant there probably stands one of those hideous hotels for mass tourism. I don't know whether this relationship to nature can ever be restored. I don't think so. But it really took hold of me, that scene then; I'll never forget that man on the bench in front of his house, there on the way from Athens to the foothills of Sunium.

4—
Scholarly Biography

Dubiel: In the early twenties you wrote many articles—in part politically oriented, in part oriented toward the history of ideas—that could be summed up under the bibliographical rubric "Judaica." In Jewish newspapers and community bulletins you published articles on Lassalle and Marx, on Tolstoy and the German spirit, and on the Jewish philosophy of religion of Hermann Cohen. Some of these writings on the history of ideas were systematically collected in a long omnibus article, "Judaism and the German Spirit." All these articles, if taken together, recall a thematically similar short article by Walter Benjamin on the role of the Jews in the recent German history of ideas. Could you tell me what you consider to be the uniting link of these essays?

Lowenthal: My intellectual and political interest in Jewish affairs developed very strongly in my student days by contact with the philosophy of Hermann Cohen and under the influence of his student Walter Kinkel, by contact with the Zionist student movement in Heidelberg, and by the great influence of the charismatic Rabbi Nobel. I believed that Jewish philosophy of religion, especially that of Maimonides, contains a progressive rationalism with strong secular tendencies, which, though garbed in religious symbolism, also connote the idea of a paradise on earth. At the time I

was intent on capturing in this secularly oriented redemptive thinking the utopian element that Marx, Heine, and also Freud at least inherently display. It is probably not by chance that I often gave lectures in Jewish communities and synagogues, in part to earn some money as a struggling young scholar, in part out of conviction about the Jewish element in the utopian aspect in socialism. However much I once tried to convince Martin Jay that there were no Jewish motifs among us at the Institute, now, years later and after mature consideration, I must admit to a certain influence of Jewish tradition, which was codeterminative.

Dubiel: I found among your papers the draft of a project with the title "Judaism and Jewishness in Recent German Philosophy." I read this short manuscript, as well as a few letters from Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, who reacted very positively to this idea. Was it the intent of this project to gather together in one volume your scattered works in this field as a sort of German-Jewish intellectual history?

Lowenthal: Do you have a particular year in mind?

Dubiel: Yes, 1925.

Lowenthal: That was just one year before I became associated with the Institute of Social Research. This project was an attempt to find a basis for an intellectual, perhaps even an academic, existence. At that time I was not thinking of a professorship; it had only been two years since I had received my doctorate. With Buber's and Rosenzweig's help I tried to obtain a grant for this project from the Moses Mendelssohn Foundation, which was a kind of Jewish Ford Foundation. I don't remember anymore why it failed. Maybe it wasn't judged favorably; maybe Leo Strauss didn't like it—he was very influential in the foundation at that time. In any case, my association with the Institute of Social Research began soon thereafter. I would have liked to have worked on a philosophically and politically oriented study on the interrelations of Jewish and non-Jewish philosophy and Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual life. That also

was connected with my earlier essay "The Demonic" and my dissertation on Franz von Baader. Even though nothing came of it, the moral impulses that motivated the project remained alive in me.

Dubiel: Leo, I would like a few more comments from you on those articles of yours that have a purely political orientation, especially those you wrote in the Jüdisches Wochenblatt, published by Ernst Simon. Judging by their titles, the articles are often primarily about current affairs—for example, "The Situation of the Jews in Poland" or "The Concession Law in Poland." But I'm especially interested in the essay "The Lessons of China," which contains a very sharp critique of the Jewish settlement policy in Palestine. As a reminder, I want to read you a few sentences from your article of June 25, 1925:

China's revolution must be a lesson for Palestine. If, especially in earlier years, one looked at Zionism's ideological products, it would be easy to remark ironically on what bloody laughter it would cause in the world if, for instance, a remnant of Celts scattered on a remote island were to travel to France today and claim its territory as a national property belonging to them by historical right. Zionism's dangerous vice, its ethnocentric naïveté in historical matters, found in Jewish history a fertile field. . . . The Arab question was therefore approached in about the same way the Zentralverein Deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens conceives of its relation to anti-Semites, i.e., how shall we deal with this unsavory, numerically overwhelming element? In other words, one could say that Zionism's borrowings from the arsenal of European diplomatic weapons were ill advised, that is to say, Zionism took out a larger loan than it had originally intended: for it engaged in European colonial policy against the Arabs. . . .

And on looking around with open eyes, one is keenly aware that Arab youths today are studying at European universities and working to prepare for the hour that has now struck in China. Here, too, a national majority is screaming

for justice. Here, too, a tremendous "danger" is approaching. It will require the concerted moral energy of the entire Zionist generation living today, indeed the entire world Jewish community, to demonstrate a willingness to change not merely its tactics, but its mentality as well. I am not so politically naïve as to make a favorable prognosis without hesitation.

Lowenthal: You know that in my student years in Heidelberg I was a member of the Zionist student organization. But I had joined because I believed most strongly in Judaism's messianic mission, its utopian political task. I had hoped that Eretz Israel would be the model for a just society. However, my experience with Zionism followed a path very similar to my later experience with the Communist world movement and the Communist Party. I experienced great disappointment; I felt that the Zionist movement was suffering more and more from what my friend Ernst Simon at that time so convincingly called the "intoxication with normality." Ideologically, I was not so blinded as to refuse a critical analysis of the settlement policy of the Jewish organizations in Palestine. As I saw it, the Jewish land purchases were an alliance of big Arab landowners and Jewish money at the expense of the Arab peasants and farmworkers. I instinctively foresaw that this could lead to bad conflicts, if not catastrophes. My comparison related to the occupation of China by the European powers and the establishment of extraterritorial zones. I believed that a lesson should be learned from the Boxer uprising, that a population had to be listened to and could not simply be raped. This article, which I signed "Hereticus," resulted in my abandoning the Zionist movement and also, quite concretely, the newspaper. This does not mean, I would like to repeat, that I had given up my relation to Jewish motifs or my support of Israel.

Dubiel: As I was going through your papers from the 1920s I found, in addition to the manuscript of your dissertation, many

other manuscripts testifying to your philosophical activity. One feels in all your writings not only that you studied philosophy but also that philosophical orientations are present in all your scientific works, even though you did not write a philosophical treatise in the strict sense, apart from your dissertation. In the 1920s you wrote about the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. I also found a manuscript on Thomas More and Campanella, and one entitled "Power and Law in Rousseau's Philosophy of State and in German Idealist Philosophy." Then I found a longer manuscript on Helvétius's philosophy, a manuscript that was projected to be your inaugural dissertation but could not be completed because of your emigration. First, comment a bit on the works just named.

Lowenthal: You have traced something decisive in my intellectual life. You know that here in the United States one often has to present one's professional calling card. Someone asks, "What do you do?" and then I say, "I'm really a philosopher." My relation to philosophy began very early through my father's influence, especially through his recommendation that I read Schopenhauer, and it continued throughout my intellectual youth. There is no semester in which I did not register for a few classes and seminars in philosophy. As a very young man I went to Giessen just to study neo-Kantian philosophy. Hermann Cohen was very reactionary and nationalistic, but it must not be forgotten that one of his greatest students was Paul Natorp, who at that time was a socialist. Walter Kinkel was himself a socialist. Natorp and Kinkel have shown that Kantian ethics and socialist consciousness are compatible. The interest in Enlightenment philosophy you were just speaking of came about mainly through my Marxist orientation. You know that Marx was indebted to the Enlightenment; he criticized the Enlightenment philosophers only because, although they postulated the right goals of society theoretically, they did not state practically how these goals can be translated into revolutionary praxis. This subject has always interested me; therefore, I studied the left

wing of Enlightenment philosophy very intensively: Holbach, Helvétius, La Mettrie, Diderot. You see here in my library the first editions of Holbach, La Mettrie, and Helvétius, which were dearly paid for with my scanty savings. In the mid-1920s there were no good German books about the French Enlightenment in existence. There were hardly any modern translations—for example, no translation of the introduction to the Encyclopédie, no translation of Helvétius, hardly any of Diderot. If you look at my bibliography in the Helvétian manuscript, you'll see how scanty the secondary literature was. It was also politically interesting that in Germany the mostly trivial German Enlightenment philosophers, such as Wolff, were praised to the sky, but the French Enlightenment was almost totally ignored. After all, Helvétius was one of the sharpest critics of German class society.

Thus the philosophical motifs in me always remained alive. Look at my later literary studies. When I write about Corneille, I also write about Descartes. When I write about Molière, I also write about Gassendi, and when I write about popular culture, I also write about Pascal and Montaigne. For me, philosophy is still the queen of the sciences, and, like most who think as I do, I mourn the present situation in which philosophy is undergoing a decline. If metaphysics is still being taught in the universities here, then it is mostly by arrogant, old, boring "nuts," while fashionable interest is inclined toward linguistic analysis, which in most (although not all) cases is a technically oriented methodology of the sciences and shares with authentic philosophy only the name.

Dubiel: In the years 1928 and 1931 you wrote a few works that were not published, I believe, until 1971, under the title Erzählkunst und Gesellschaft [Narrative Art and Society]. These essays show Lowenthal as he would later be known. Indeed, these writings comprise a first and very self-confident realization of a program for a materialistically oriented study of literary history. The volume contains something like an ideologically critical reconstruction of

bourgeois class consciousness in terms of its most prominent literary representatives.

Lowenthal: Yes, with the exception of the first essay in that volume, on the social situation of literature, which first appeared in 1932 in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the other essays originated from a compendious lecture series I had developed in the League for Popular Lectures. I lectured on all areas of European literature, although my main interest was German literature, because as a good Marxist I acted according to the principle of beginning with criticism at home, and at that time Germany was causing me to lose a lot of sleep. In its methodology this work is characterized by an as yet—how should I put it?—unmediated Marxism. Maybe I am doing myself an injustice by this judgment, for in these works I also apply the psychological mechanism of mediation, particularly by taking into account the socially codetermined private reactions of the literary personae. Most of what I wrote or began writing in Germany before my emigration expresses the attempt to track down the decline and disintegration of bourgeois consciousness and to delineate it in a critique of ideology. My special interest concerned the documents of literature and the documentations of literary influence. And if you take a look at the subtitles added fifty years later to these sections, they express this theoretical intention: for example, for the chapter on Goethe I choose the title "Bourgeois Resignation"; for Gottfried Keller, "Bourgeois Regression"; and so forth. These studies are part of a larger project to describe and analyze the specific course of German bourgeois consciousness and why there was no bourgeois revolution in Germany. As I said, these essays were motivated by political critique. As far as I can remember I stopped working on this material in 1930, because I was then too burdened with Institute business, especially with the founding of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung .

Dubiel: On reading these old works I had the impression of a specific continuity and discontinuity, similarity and dissimilarity,

with the essays that appeared a few years later in the Zeitschrift . As regards your early work, I would speak of a methodological indifference. But the studies that appeared in the Zeitschrift can be summed up under the intention of a study of literary history based on the materialistic and social-psychological study of the history of literature. I like the freshness of those early works and the unself-consciousness with which cultural processes were related to the substructure. I always asked myself, how does he do that, what methodological authorities does he refer to? Do these works comprise a sort of Nullpunkt [moment of absolute beginning], or in what theoretical, or more precisely, literary-critical, tradition does he really stand? You yourself name Georg Brandes in connection with these questions, and of course Franz Mehring; you also name contemporary Russian literary studies—very heterogeneous points of reference in time and content. So, in brief, I had the impression that you were just rolling up your sleeves and beginning to write.

Lowenthal: Precisely, Helmut, a fresh dilettantism, if you wish, though originating in a political attitude and on the basis of a more or less solid knowledge of literature, but still in the sense of a fresh impressionistic discourse—I let myself be carried by my own enthusiasm. That was the case to some extent with the work on Baader and the works on Enlightenment philosophy. Although at that time I did not yet know Walter Benjamin's wonderful statement that history is always written by the victors, I was always interested in writing the history of the losers. Baader was such a loser—a lone figure of German Restoration philosophy.

In this book we have been talking about, Erzählkunst und Gesellschaft, I speak of the literature of the Young Germany [Junges Deutschland] movement in light of the history of the revolution that didn't take place. The essay on Mörike traces the state of melancholy of the great German poets, who did not get from their public anything near the resonance that would have been matter-of-course

in France or England. There was no public in Germany such as Victor Hugo had in France or Shelley and Byron had in England. And last but not least, I wrote on Friedrich Spielhagen, who, though he was no great artist, was a very conscious, independent, and radical analyst of bourgeois society. I was intrigued with dealing a blow to the widespread reception of Gottfried Keller's and C. F. Meyer's so-called greatness and with honoring the lost and neglected streams of German literature.

Dubiel: Thus documenting again and again the thesis that there was no genuine bourgeois consciousness in Germany, or in sociological terms, that there was no significant and influential carrier group of a liberal worldview.

Lowenthal: And consequently no carrier group of a political liberalism, either, or any historical chance of an alliance between socialists and enlightened liberals, who could have prevented the disaster in Germany. That is again the theme of my works on fashions in biographical subjects.

Dubiel: Leo, I'd like to come now to the essays you wrote in the Zeitschrift: first the essay "On the Social Situation of Literature," which appeared in 1932, then the 1933 essay on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, then the 1934 study on Dostoevsky, the 1936 essay on Ibsen entitled "The Individual in Individualistic Society," and the famous 1938 essay on Knut Hamsun. The 1932 essay does, to a considerable extent, contain a methodological program in which literary history is conceived as the critique of ideology. Compared to those earlier works in Erzählkunst und Gesellschaft, one might say that the articles in the Zeitschrift, under the influence of Max Horkheimer's ideas on the critique of ideology, have a sharpened methodological consciousness. Would you agree with that?

Lowenthal: Yes, one can certainly say that. You know how these things originated historically. The first volume, no, the very first number of the Zeitschrift, was supposed to contain a sort of program, a position adopted by all the major collaborators of the

Zeitschrift concerning what united them—namely, the materialistic conception of history—focused on and applied to the fields they understood best. Horkheimer wrote about philosophy, Adorno about music, Pollock about the economy, Fromm about psychology, and I about literature. I challenged established literary scholarship, its idealistic arrogance, its distinctively political reactionary function. At the same time I tried to develop a kind of program for a set of studies I considered important. When the next essays appeared—you have just named them, the one on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and the other on the Dostoevsky reception (this was, so to speak, a pioneer work)—they also fit into the analysis of the decline of the bourgeoisie: C. F. Meyer's heroes and their exemplary attempts to magnify themselves as symbols of the superior, sovereign, and leading class; and the enthusiastic reception of Dostoevsky, who was the most widely read author after Goethe, or at least the most published novelist in Germany, as a reflection of what Fromm called the anal and sadomasochistic character of the petit bourgeoisie, if not of the broad strata of the middle classes in general.

Dubiel: Does your work on Ibsen also fit into the framework of the critique of the disintegrating bourgeois consciousness?

Lowenthal: Yes! I was not naïve about Ibsen's patriarchal character. The essence of Ibsen's drama, his method, as it were, consists of taking bourgeois consciousness completely seriously on the level at which it articulates itself and then showing how hollow, fallacious, and in every sense untenable it is. Death, deception, bankruptcy, and the smashing of all interhuman relations among friends, between husband and wife, between parents and children, are the price that must be paid for the bourgeois system of competition. His decisive statement is that the bourgeois principle of competition penetrates into the intimacy of human relations and destroys them and—very important in Ibsen—that those who are furthest removed from the competitive struggle and at the same

time most deprived of rights in a society based on the principle of competition, namely women, are the bearers and heralds of a better system. This then belongs to the context of my theory of marginality, which we should speak about when we come to Literature and the Image of Man .

Dubiel: Yes, let us now speak about your Hamsun study. This study to some extent goes beyond the methodological program of a critique of ideology. I have frequently found it listed under the rubric "Theory of Fascism" and not as an inherently literary-sociological work, which it claims to be. To my disgrace I must admit that in my late puberty I was a great, almost rapturous admirer of Hamsun. . . .

Lowenthal: A pardonable offense! You weren't the only one!

Dubiel: Your essay had an enormous prognostic quality. For Hamsun's sympathy with the Nazis became manifest—as far as I remember—only in 1940, when the German troops invaded Norway.

Lowenthal: Yes, precisely. This prognosis of mine did not go uncontested in our circle. Marcuse and Walter Benjamin both defended Knut Hamsun. But I insisted that the subtitle of this essay, "On the Prehistory of Authoritarian Ideology," was not accidental. I tried to document my thesis not only with what Hamsun had produced in manifest political statements, but also by an immanent analysis of his characters and his principles of literary construction. It was an immanent critique, an experiment carried out in the spirit of Adorno's beautiful statement: "Art does not come to society, but society comes to art: society should originate in the work of art and not the other way around." In the Hamsun essay, and even in the Ibsen essay, one of my methodological convictions is developed—namely, that the private is unmasked as the socially mediated. Works of art can give us information about the social dimension in the private sphere of men, how society is present in the love relationship of two people, in friendship, and in an individual's

return to nature. Hence, literature is treated as the documentation of social representation in the psyche of the individual. In later works I once formulated this to the effect that literature provides the best source of data for information on a society's pattern of socialization.

Dubiel: May I rephrase this in order to appropriate it? So literary sociology is meant not in the sense of a sociology of literature, its production and circulation; rather, it means understanding literature as the material, along with other cultural documentation, in which social and cultural structures can be identified. Such a kind of literary study uses literature as the medium and material for an analysis of society.

It was also then, the second half of the 1930s, that those discussions about the relation between aesthetics and politics appeared in the Zeitschrift . I am referring to Benjamin's essay "On Art in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility" and Adorno's essay criticizing it, "The Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Hearing." Also, if I'm not mistaken, Herbert Marcuse's essay on "Affirmative Culture" appeared in the same volume as your Hamsun essay. All these essays, even if they are not as explicitly interrelated as is often underscored in contemporary literature, really constitute the three sides of a problem triangle. This could be designated as, first, the relation of art and science; second, the relation of art and mass culture; and third, the relation of art and politics. I want to describe quickly, in very crude simplification, three possible approaches to this problem and then hear from you how you classify yourself in this scheme.

Marcuse defended the thesis, and actually maintained it until his death, that art has a dual function in bourgeois society, an ideological one and a utopian one. Art is ideologically functional in the sense that it constitutes the realm of all collective imaginations and desires, whose political realization is denied in society. All unrealized possibilities of action in bourgeois society are repressed in their political-practical frame of action and banished to the realm of art.

The great classical bourgeois works of art represent at the same time the bourgeoisie's utopian consciousness. Marcuse, at least in his writings of the 1930s—and this distinguished him then from Benjamin and especially from Adorno—was not interested in the way the aesthetic consciousness of bourgeois society could be transposed into politics directly and without consideration of the evolutionary difference between culture and politics. I am alluding to the fascist propagation of mass art, indeed to the aesthetization of political life and war that Benjamin noted about fascism in general. Thus, fascism represents the false abolition of the relation between art and politics. Benjamin—this is his most famous thesis—ultimately interpreted the development of the relation of esoteric art to a mass culture made technically possible with political optimism. In crude terms, by smashing the uniqueness and almost cultic aura of works of art through new techniques of reproduction, new historical chances for the politicization of art are released. All the same, no one saw more clearly than Benjamin himself the danger posed by the political instrumentalization of mass art in fascism. Adorno, who formulated exactly the opposite thesis, thinks of mass art as the degeneration of art only in the framework of a repressive ideological exercise of domination, and consequently he attaches political intentions only to that art and those forms of art that refuse to serve mass culture. The utopian functions of art noted by Marcuse in the late-bourgeois epoch, that is, under the conditions of a mass culture, can be realized only through extremely esoteric art.

I came across this problem in an unexpected way when I read your book Literature, Popular Culture, and Society . I hadn't known that the phenomenon of mass culture is not at all a phenomenon that first emerged in late-bourgeois society. In fact, you show that mass culture, and also the political problem of the relation of the esoteric and exoteric, goes back far into the eighteenth century. The whole problem we are speaking of is not necessarily typical only of mass societies. The three authors I was speaking of apparently assume

that the whole problem first arose when the means of reproduction were technically revolutionized. Now, Leo, can a point be given in the history of bourgeois society, and particularly in aesthetics, when autonomous art was forced to define its relation to mass culture? Or is it just a matter of the gradual evolution of an intrinsic, ever-present tension?

Lowenthal: I would say this is another leap from quantity to quality. But I first want to respond to what you said before. I naturally find it very hard to take as clear a stand as you demand. Of course I agree with much of what Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse said, although I never wrote about it systematically except in the foreword to the book you just mentioned. So first of all on the Benjamin thesis, to the extent that we perceive his position accurately: he really seems to say that the dissemination of works of art made possible by mechanical and electronic means of reproduction can also have a positive political effect. I consider this wrong. It runs counter to all our political experiences. But it is possible that we have misunderstood him. If you read this Benjamin essay closely, he himself moves very quickly away from the positive aspects of the technical revolution and describes the aesthetization of politics as it had become manifest in fascism. He definitely saw this more clearly than others. But he also said that in Communism art is equally politicized.

Art is really the message of resistance, of the socially unredeemed. Art is in fact the great reservoir of creative protest against social misery; it allows the prospect of social happiness to shine dimly through. I myself indeed tried to show that even in works of art that in their ideological coloring, with regard to author and target group, are very conformist and conservative—such as Lope de Vega in Spain, Corneille and Racine in France, also Goethe in many respects—the protest shines through in many a passage. The most important thing about bourgeois art is that it depicts the individual as threatened by bourgeois society. The best works of art

are, in my opinion, those that do not stand in a conformist framework: Cervantes, most of Shakespeare, Racine, and later Ibsen, not to mention Romanticism. It is precisely the marginal minor characters in such great works that often become decisive bearers of utopian protest. I therefore have essentially tried, as Adorno says, to proceed "micrologically" and to analyze intimate, private, personal situations and modes of behavior in order to uncover in them just those unredeemed utopian elements that await social happiness. For I really believe that Walter Benjamin's thesis that history is always written by the victors is refuted in works of art. The work of art gives voice to the losers in history, who, it is hoped, will someday be the victors. A secular philosophy of redemption is visible in this theoretical nexus of aesthetics and politics. In mass culture, on the contrary, nothing is ever redeemed, everything always stays the same because it ought to remain the way it is. In Hamsun, for example, even the minor characters are scoundrels; there is absolutely no redemptive phenomenon, no assertion anywhere that things could and should be different. And that was a touchstone for me to use in distinguishing between what is and what is not genuine art.

But now to the other part of your question, the relation of art and mass culture. As long as art has existed as an institution, there has also been its opposite, in Greek antiquity as well as the Middle Ages—for example, the entertainments in the church square after the religious service presented by jugglers and performers to entertain the masses. But the essential thing is the development of this relation of high and low art, which can be observed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when in many countries of Europe the predominantly agricultural mode of production was complemented by the urban forms of production of manufacturing and industry. In short, with the beginning of bourgeois forms of life and thought, an ambiguous philosophy about the role of art also begins to develop—or perhaps one should say the role of leisure, of

which art seemed to be an essential part. In my book I expressed this symbolically through the counterposition of the philosophies of Pascal and Montaigne. Montaigne suggests that man needs relaxation and distraction under the pressure of modern life, whereas Pascal says that if you seek distraction you lose your life's meaning. This motif of Montaigne's, that the greater burden of life in the bourgeois age is eased through distraction, namely, distraction through art, occurs again and again in literature—for example, in Schiller in the speech of the "weary citizen"; and Goethe, too, in his "Prologue at the Theater," speaks of how "the men arrive bored, the women to show their beautiful fashions."

Dubiel: But the joke in this linkage of art and leisure against mass culture is probably that this function of distraction must not be detached from the ethical function of art, isn't it?

Lowenthal: Quite right, exactly. Art is here a kind of mental hygiene, an ethically important leisure occupation. In the eighteenth century in England, where bourgeois forms of life and ideology developed the fastest and strongest, there was clearly a great movement among the intellectuals to elevate the citizens' taste. Many of these authors, like Richardson and Oliver Goldsmith, are quite schizophrenic on this point; they are uncertain whether what they produce as literature is art or not, written for the market or for art's sake. Goldsmith says that the time of literary patrons is over and that the market is now the patron. Marjorie Fiske and I studied the literary scene in eighteenth-century England. There already existed literary genres that have become quite popular today, such as, for example, books on love, on how to win friends, on how to obtain a big dowry, popular and popularized versions of Homer and other items of classical literature, a whole world of journals and libraries with literature for entertainment. In short, all these phenomena of an ultimately market-oriented mass culture were already taking shape at that time.

Dubiel: Can you give a reasonably accurate dating of the origin of this contrast between art and mass culture?

Lowenthal: Certainly! That begins with the Spectator and the Tatler, Addison and Steele's journals, and it reaches its peak in Romanticism and also in German classicism. Wordsworth and Coleridge then first declared war on melodrama and shallow entertainment-literature. They decried the fact that now everything is written from the standpoint of quick comprehension and enjoyment so that one wouldn't have to exert oneself.

Dubiel: But the development of this relation of high and low art, of esoteric art and mass culture, can be derived not only from the perspective of the development of mass art itself, but especially also from just the opposite perspective. For the phenomenon of an autonomous art following only its own laws is a relatively late product of bourgeois consciousness. So, if it is true that an esoteric art conscious of its own laws arose only relatively late, then that must affect their relation to so-called low art. I mean that in the period we were talking about, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the difference between high and low art must have been much more indefinite than in the late nineteenth century.

Lowenthal: Yes, much more gradual, of course. In any case, the concept of mass art is rather complex. When we speak of masses we mean of course only certain bourgeois strata in a few urban cultural centers, although Ian Watt maintains the interesting thesis that the reading strata in eighteenth-century England included not only the well-to-do housewives but also their personal maids. But aside from that, of course, there can be absolutely no question of reading in petit-bourgeois circles and the proletarian masses, for they were completely overworked and did not even have the money to buy themselves candles for reading. There is a marked change, however, in the course of the nineteenth century as literary and reading material rapidly increased. We enter the era of a big culture industry that is made possible because printing techniques become cheaper. More and more books, booklets, magazines, and newspapers became available in large quantities before radio and cinema were introduced.

On art and culture industry all of us generally held the same position, although there once was a period in the development of Marcuse's thinking in which he put greater value on partisan literature and spontaneous political art. He later abandoned this view and came around again to a firm belief in the utopian character and independence of the great work of art. Adorno's position that art has been pressed more and more into defensive positions is in my view perfectly justified. The greater the dangers and seductions become for an artist, who after all is also a member of the bourgeois-capitalist world, to earn money through circulation figures, film rights, and so on, the more difficult it becomes to preserve the integrity of artistic consciousness. The artists and writers of the nineteenth century worried about this constantly. I mean, it is trivial, but in such a situation the technique of esoteric communication becomes the weapon for the integrity of the artist; I am thinking of Kafka, Joyce, and Proust, who are "inaccessible" in a certain respect, but precisely this "inaccessibility" is their goal. The same thing applies to abstract painting. But bourgeois society has a big stomach; we have always underestimated how much it can assimilate and digest.

Dubiel: If we examine the objects of your literary analysis, it is always a matter of paradigms of the bourgeois consciousness that didn't come about in Germany. That is really relevant only in the framework of the critique of ideology. In positive paradigms, for example in Ibsen, it is only the depiction of immanent bourgeois self-critique. What we have just formulated in positive terms about the political purpose of esoteric art is, in your case—in contrast, for example, to Adorno—not positively stated in individual studies. You have never written about avant-garde literature. Sometimes I wonder, when you make such an emphatic distinction between the cognitive and the symptomatic significance of art, whether that can still be maintained for avant-garde literature.

Lowenthal: Yes, I plead guilty. Adorno urged me repeatedly to write about contemporary literature. I didn't do it. Perhaps I am

more a literary historian in the conventional sense. At any rate, to this day I refuse to make binding "sociological" statements about modern literature. I have two reasons for that. The first is that modern literature has not yet passed through the sieve of history and it is more difficult to distinguish what, in the Lukácsian sense, will one day be typologically significant for a knowledge of social contexts. The other reason is that, for me, sociology of literature is supplementary to a purely aesthetic contemplation. If, for example, I want to examine changes in the relationship of genders or of generations, I do not need literature, which, after all, provides only indirect access. I can study these phenomena empirically. They are accessible, whereas the human phenomena I have analyzed in my writings have become inaccessible; my studies are, if you wish, great obituaries on the patterns of socialization and acculturation of former centuries. I can only repeat: other sources are available to analyze our modern situation.

Dubiel: I just want to make sure I've understood you correctly. The specific nature of your social-scientific study of literature consisted of using literary historical documents as material for your sociological interpretations. To judge the representativeness and validity of this material, the sieve of history—as you so beautifully put it—is indeed indispensable. Now this type of study of contemporary and avant-garde art is impossible, not because it would be impossible to distinguish whether we are dealing with real art or not, but because it cannot be determined to what extent these documents of modern art really stand in a reciprocal connection to significant social tendencies. I have sometimes been bothered by the self-assuredness with which Adorno identified, for example in Stravinsky, certain decoded sound patterns with political options. Adorno did not seem to have the same scruples you have just formulated. The combination of immanent analysis of avant-garde art and political attribution he practiced sometimes seems questionable to me.

Lowenthal: Well, I don't know. Of course I was very happy when he was so friendly as to add a footnote on Sibelius to my essay on Hamsun, showing that the same symptoms I discovered in Hamsun's work could also be seen in Sibelius's. I wanted to point out one other aspect, since we happen to be engaged in assigning grades. I always asked myself whether I'm not smart enough to apply my analysis to modern materials. Let's take Kafka. People say that this or that in his work reflects the alienation of the modern world, the entanglement in the bureaucratic maze of highly industrialized civilizations, the administrated world. They say that absurd theater critically reflects the impossibility of real communication in the modern world. And that Thomas Mann reflects the disintegration of the bourgeoisie. So what? What has been said? Certainly nothing about the artistic value of these products, and from an advanced vantage point of social philosophy you're still in the realm of banalities.

Dubiel: I'm glad that our prejudices on this point coincide.

Lowenthal: I would only apply to this literature something I have already experienced elsewhere. It is quite different when I write about Shakespeare. I know what happens to Romeo and Juliet only from this source itself.

Dubiel: Leo, I would like to talk with you about your two biographical studies. By that I mean first the essay on the "Biographical Fashion," which appeared in 1955 in the first volume of Sociologica, the festschrift for Horkheimer, although it was written much earlier. The English version of this essay appeared in a festschrift for Marcuse. The other essay I am alluding to is one with which you made a name for yourself here in the United States, "Biographies in Popular Magazines." How did you come to write these?

Lowenthal: Well, the essay that appeared under the title "Biographical Fashion" deals with popular biographies of German writers, such as Emil Ludwig and Stefan Zweig. I would like to

mention here two motives for writing it. The first is interest in the genre; I wondered what kind of literary form popular literature uses. One of the least understood problems of the sociology of literature is precisely genre. This was first developed magnificently in Lukács's Theory of the Novel . Generally in the sociological analysis of literature it is a matter of content aesthetics. My biographical works are thus a parallel case to my Dostoevsky study. Dostoevsky was the most widely received novelist in Germany, at least shortly before the end of World War I. And biography was the most widespread form of nonfiction writing. And so I asked myself why, which leads to my second motive for writing about this. If you ask what really was the common denominator of the people at the Institute, the answer would probably be the shared concern for the fate of the individual. Horkheimer's "Egoism and the Freedom Movement" or Marcuse's "Affirmative Culture," some works by Fromm, and my own literary studies are variations on the theme of the increasing fragility of the bourgeois individual. And here, biographies seem to me to be an especially characteristic genre, in which individuality makes an appearance and is at the same time destroyed. The German popular biographies combine two extremes: while describing the heroes with tremendous superlatives as creators of something unique, they at the same time bring those same heroes down to the level of ordinary people. This coincidentia oppositorum, that they are on the one hand unique and on the other hand like everyone else, deadens our consciousness of history and politics. The repetitiveness of this literature has a lulling effect. Just as, for example, entire passages in various novels of Hamsun could be interchanged, so could various biographies. The representation of Hindenburg at that time was barely different from that of Jesus. With great glee, I compiled entire lists of superlatives and other stereotypes that were repeated over and over again. Historical data was debased to the level of commodities for mass consumption. I finished writing the essay in the 1930s. We did not publish it then

out of courtesy, for a good many of the authors I analyzed were German-Jewish emigrants who were having great difficulties at the time. Some even committed suicide. I first published it only after the direct references to contemporary authors had lost their sting.

Dubiel: Let us now get to the second work on biography, "Biographies in Popular Magazines." The extraordinarily positive reception of this essay by American social scientists somehow illustrates its genesis. Wasn't this essay the result of a suggestion by Paul Lazarsfeld?

Lowenthal: Lazarsfeld knew of the unpublished essay on biographies we were just talking about. He asked me whether I would be interested in doing that sort of thing in the framework of American literature. This coincided with my experience at the time, that every single issue of the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's, extraordinarily popular consumer magazines then, always contained biographies. I looked at all the issues from 1901 to 1940 from the methodological viewpoint of their "symptomatic" significance and reflected on the extent to which these market products might be indicators of social processes. I found that in the first twenty years of this century the heroes of these biographies were taken from the field of production: successful merchants, professionals, inventors, and entrepreneurs. In brief, it soon became clear to me that these biographies served as political-educational stimuli. Their motto was "It can be done"—in short, the unbroken Horatio Alger myth. These heroes were models, and to follow them meant to join the competition of the free enterprise system. Not everyone could be a general, but every dishwasher had a chance to amass the bank account of a millionaire.

That situation changed radically at the end of the thirties. The so-called heroes were suddenly people from show business: movie actors, radio stars, famous impresarios, singers, in other words, people from the entertainment field. A good number of sports heroes were also featured, as well as a whole group of freaks, mean-

ing people who were carrying on some kind of business or had invented something odd or comical. In short, the heroes were no longer the heroes of production. The theme was no longer the industry of individual enterprise but a matter of characters who were supposed to entertain us. But that was only one side of it; the other side was the change in categories through which people were portrayed biographically. Their consumer habits, their hobbies, were particularly stressed. Whereas in the first phase you had producers, about whose productive qualities statements—however banal—were made, in the later period the consumer hero, with consumer needs and preferences, became the theme. This corresponded exactly to two modern tendencies: first, that in the society of corporate capitalism the rise of the entrepreneur increasingly becomes a pure fiction; and second, that bourgeois society turns into a consumer society. People are interested essentially only in consumption. This theory of consumption-heroes can be harmonized with David Riesman's typology, and also with Fromm's "market-oriented personality." Anyway, Robert Merton, one of the most cultured and progressive American sociologists of the late forties, praised this essay as one of the few successful examples of a synthesis of the European theoretical stance and American empirical research. I was very proud of this. My friend Paul Lazarsfeld, who unfortunately died a few years ago, then said to me, in his typically empiricist-positivist way: "So far you have shown what a bad biography is; now you ought to demonstrate what a good biography is." Thus he failed to see the political and analytical meaning of my study.

Dubiel: I would now like to discuss the Prophets of Deceit . This study appeared here in America in the year 1949, as a single volume in the series Studies in Prejudice . In 1970 Prophets of Deceit was reissued in the United States with a very now-oriented introduction by Herbert Marcuse. I will first try to characterize this book, and if this description stimulates or annoys you, feel free to react to it. It is

a reconstruction of the typology of fascist agitators, collated from speeches and articles by American agitators of the interwar period. Do you agree with my characterizations that in this book you essentially limited yourself to grasping typologically and collecting the usual topoi, figures of argumentation, and rhetorical figures of agitators?

Lowenthal: Yes, we tried to collect the rhetorical stimuli on the basis of speeches, pamphlets, journals, and similar materials. I would characterize the technique of agitation basically as turning psychoanalysis on its head. Moreover, I would say this of mass culture in general. It makes people neurotic and psychotic and finally completely dependent on so-called leaders. I tried to translate the manifest stimuli of these agitators into what they actually mean. My purpose was to unmask the aggressive and destructive impulses hidden behind that rhetoric. The American edition has as an introduction a kind of ideal-typical montage of an agitator's speech. This montage, incidentally, was constructed by Irving Howe, one of the best-known intellectuals of this country, following our detailed instructions. At the end of the book we added a speech that decodes the introductory one, to show what the agitator really means: kill the Jews, destroy the democratic institutions, follow me and no one else, and so forth.

Dubiel: An essay from this time that impressed me very much, despite its small size, appeared—as far as I remember—in January 1947 in Commentary . Its title was "Terror's Atomization of Man." In it you write about the disintegrative tendencies of man under the terroristic conditions of concentration camp internment. As far as I know, this essay goes back to a lecture you gave at Columbia University during the war.

Lowenthal: Yes, that was in 1944 as part of a whole series of lectures at Columbia University on National Socialism by Pollock, Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, and myself. This essay, which stemmed from that lecture—I don't find it easy to talk about—is an

analysis of the first terrible reports about what was going on in the concentration camps. I got hold of this material even before the end of the war. I then tried to describe how, under the conditions of totalitarian terror, the victimized individual completely disintegrates, how he almost takes on the features of the murderer, how under such conditions any sense of solidarity with other people ceases to exist so that humans seem to regress to an animal phase. I was much inspired by Bruno Bettelheim's important article on behavior under extreme conditions. Apparently my lecture was very effective. The audience consisted mainly of Columbia University students and professors, that is, people of good will who were very shaken by what they heard. One of the best-known professors, Robert Lynd, author of the famous study Middletown, told me that I absolutely had to publish my lecture manuscript. At his suggestion it was then sent to the American Journal of Sociology in Chicago for publication. The editor at that time was a teacher of a whole generation of sociologists in America. He sent the manuscript back to me with the statement that unfortunately it could not be published because the empirical data base was too slight. I then wrote back to him and sarcastically excused myself that I was not in the concentration camp myself and so could not have gathered my data right on the spot. I often since had to shake my head at this political and historical naïveté not untypical of American social scientists. I then sent the piece to Elliot Cohen, the editor and founder of Commentary, and that is where it was published.

Dubiel: Leo, can you again give us some information on the Studies in Prejudice series in general? The institutional framework in which these studies were made was the research department of the American Jewish Committee. Did this integration of many members of your former group with another research team really mean a substantive break with your theoretical past?

Lowenthal: No, the task of this research department consisted basically in applying to the area of anti-Semitism all the decisive

theoretical and empirical insights we had developed in the Institute over the decades. It was also similar to the format at the Institute and on the journal in that essentially the work was done by members of the group, but other intellectually friendly scholars could be called upon to collaborate. We had already worked with Marie Jahoda before; then Bruno Bettelheim, with whom we had also had contact, joined, and Morris Janowitz in Chicago, and the psychoanalyst Nathan Ackermann. We wanted—quite in line with Critical Theory—to accomplish scientifically meaningful work in a manner that would allow its application to political praxis. Horkheimer's dream, which was never fulfilled, was that each of these books in the series Studies in Prejudice should be rewritten in the form of small booklets in popular format for distribution in a given situation of anti-Semitic political outbreaks or the like here in America—namely, to teachers, students, politicians, that is, to so-called multiplicators. That was sort of the idea of a political-educational mass inoculation program, a "fire brigade," as the Americans say. Unfortunately, it never materialized.

Dubiel: That's interesting, I didn't know that. I do remember the introduction to The Authoritarian Personality, in which the idea of a preventive democratic mass-education is formulated, but I considered that to be just a rhetorical ornament.

Lowenthal: No, that was meant quite seriously. You're talking about a foreword by Max Horkheimer not only to The Authoritarian Personality but to all the volumes of Studies in Prejudice . We meant that quite seriously.

Dubiel: Were these various volumes of Studies in Prejudice conceived in relation to each other only in their original conception, or also in the actual execution of the research—be it methodologically, or by the exchange of materials, or in drawing up the analytical framework? Did you, for example, try to coordinate your work with that for The Authoritarian Personality ?

Lowenthal: Now, these are all very different questions. On the

whole it was a research strategy about which Horkheimer consulted a few leading people in the American Jewish Committee and us. The Authoritarian Personality is really a direct continuation of our interests, which started with the Studies on Authority and the Family . In California Horkheimer met Nevitt Sanford, the founder and first president of the Wright Institute and a good friend of mine. Sanford took a great interest in our problems and subsequently brought us together with two of his colleagues, Else Frenkel-Brunswick and Daniel Levinson. I participated in the preliminary discussions for The Authoritarian Personality , and at Horkheimer's request came to California to discuss with Sanford the general organization of the entire research project.

Dubiel: Prophets of Deceit became quite well known in its time. You once showed me the folder with the reviews of this book. It got a lot of attention, not only in scientific circles but also among the nonscientific general public. Might one say that Prophets of Deceit is better known in the United States than The Authoritarian Personality , or is that a false compliment?

Lowenthal: I must reject that compliment in all modesty and with indignation. The most important book was The Authoritarian Personality , which still has strong influence today. Compared with that, Prophets of Deceit had a relatively modest influence; one might even say that it stood in the shadow of The Authoritarian Personality . But I don't want to understate my book's influence. It did have an influence, especially among students and instructors in the field of mass communications research.

Dubiel: Now we come to the 1950s. The appearance of Studies in Prejudice coincides with the beginning of your work with the Voice of America; we spoke about your various activities there on another occasion. I suppose it would be accurate to describe the nature of your work basically as research organization, as a result of which you produced only a few scholarly products during that period. Do you agree that we now skip that time?

Lowenthal: Yes, let's speak of the time after that, when I have a much better conscience about my output. That was 1955–1956, when I was working in Stanford at the Center for Advanced Studies. My ever-faithful friend Paul Lazarsfeld, who had been instrumental in getting me invited to the Center, said to me then: "In this research year you have the alternative of either embarking on what the Americans call 'having a good time,' and at the end of the year you can become a dog-catcher in Palo Alto; or you can write a few books and subsequently become a professor." Lazarsfeld's advice really proved to be sound. Since I was not very interested in catching dogs, I sat down to write. In that year I wrote the book Literature and the Image of Man . The German title, Das Menschenbild in der Literatur , originated in part from the revision and systematization of older essays that had already appeared in the Zeitschrift . The Shakespeare chapter in the book was completely new, as was the one on the French drama. The chapter on Goethe already existed in a rough version but had not yet been published. In addition I wrote the longer study with Marjorie Fiske on the relation of art and mass culture in England during the eighteenth century. Immediately afterward, in the fall of 1956, I was appointed professor at the University of California in Berkeley.

5—
Berkeley

Dubiel: I think it's safe to say that you're the only member of the Frankfurt circle who became a typical American professor, with all the connotations of that title. To be sure, cognoscenti also know Horkheimer's name, since he taught for a time in Chicago; Adorno's name is also quite familiar here in the United States. After all, his name appears first among the authors of The Authoritarian Personality .

Lowenthal: You shouldn't forget that Herbert Marcuse was a professor at Brandeis and after his retirement continued as a professor at the University of California in San Diego.

Dubiel: I was just getting to Marcuse. Marcuse, I'd say, is more of a cosmopolitan phenomenon that can hardly be ascribed to American social science. After all, he's really a partisan in this entire "scene"; he can scarcely be considered part of American social philosophy.

Lowenthal: I disagree with you there; as professor of philosophy at Brandeis he was for many years a regular member of the teaching faculty. I occasionally heard his lectures when I visited him at Brandeis. I think you're exaggerating somewhat.

Dubiel: Okay, I'm speaking comparatively. He's much less integrated into the social science community of the United States

than you are. Your integration into this community—here I'm recalling our earlier conversations—can be traced all the way back to the Institute's years in New York. For example, you found it much easier to work with Lazarsfeld than Adorno did. That was most likely no coincidence. Lazarsfeld, even though he was of Austrian-German origin, and Adorno represent, to a degree of almost ideal purity, the incompatibility of American and German scholarly culture. In your case, from the very beginning that was different.

Lowenthal: Well, I come from the same scholarly tradition as Adorno. I think it was just easier for me to combine the theoretical and historical outlook with the empirical requisites of sociological research. Robert Merton put it this way: the German style of social-philosophical thinking is not incompatible with the American methodology. He referred to my study on popular biographies as a paradigmatic example of such a successful synthesis. It may also have something to do with the fact that in my own career I've been forced to deal with concrete things. I was a teacher and a social worker, and I was strongly involved in the practical affairs of the Institute, both financial and administrative; I was simply more concerned with social reality than Adorno was. And this was most likely also reflected in our academic behavior. Besides all this, there's the fact that one of the key areas of my work, both theoretical and applied, lay in the field of mass communications, which for a long time was one of the most important themes of American social science. The war provided a great impetus for differentiated studies, stimulated especially by the demand for effective propaganda techniques for both domestic and international use. And the applications were not limited to politics and the advertisement industry; pedagogical innovations, too, came to be regarded more and more as problems of the electronic media and thus played an increasing role in the theoretical and empirical fields of interest to American social science. Through happenstance and interest I became closely

linked with these areas of research. Finally I also learned—it wasn't particularly difficult—to assert my own individuality as a sociologist, while at the same time familiarizing myself with what seemed to be significant and important in American social research. Later I attempted to convey this synthesis to my students. When in 1955 I became a visiting professor and then, the following year, a regular faculty member at Berkeley, circumstances forced me—more than my colleagues at the Institute—to come to terms with the methods of American social science, which I had already been familiar with from my work for the government.

Dubiel: That's just what I wanted to ask about. I'll start off with a general question. In Germany you're perceived as a German professor who lives and works abroad. That was also my perception; I was actually quite astonished when I came here and discovered how matter-of-factly you are perceived here, both in the literature and in the conversational remarks of your colleagues, as an American intellectual. So, in this vein, first of all a superficial question: with whom and with which theoretical-political factions among American social scientists do you have particularly good contacts? According to theoretical-political interpretations of American sociology, such as those of Alvin Gouldner, structural functionalism, which prevailed here in the fifties, is always contrasted with symbolic interactionism, which followed later. You're in the no-man's-land between these two camps. Do you sympathize more with one of them, or do you reject this entire interpretation?

Lowenthal: How should I put it? Both approaches are equally close and both are far from my own. In a certain way, after all, functionalism is related to Marxist methodology, only with the difference that the development of functionalist theory essentially serves the purpose—and this, of course, gives it an ideological tinge—of constructing a balance of the various functions of a society in order to produce an almost conflict-free societal system.

Everything always fits together, doesn't it? But functionalist theory also contradicts the rather hollow metaphysical perceptions of society, and in this respect it definitely has a sort of materialistic character.

Symbolic interactionism isn't completely alien to me, because I'd say that it's concerned essentially with problems of mediation. What we so sorely missed in Marxist theory, namely the mediation between the fundamental economic and social forces and actual human deeds, is, after all, a theme that is developed in interactional theory. The part of interactionism I can't accept, however, is the dissolution of social reality into symbolic forms of interaction. That leads to a trivialization of the problems—for this very reason I am most critical of the currently fashionable ethnomethodology, which sometimes, strangely enough, refers to itself as "phenomenology." In the work of Goffman and his students, interactionism has led to a sort of neo-idealism. The only reality that still exists for them is formed by human self-perception. One may well ask at this point, where does reality then remain? When you read, for example, Goffman's book Asylums , the very institutions that the book purports to treat end up disappearing. They're merely a welcome empirical occasion for making unempirical observations. For that reason I call this a type of neo-idealism.

I'm quite familiar with these new currents, but I'm often polemically disposed toward them. This is certainly related to the fact that these aren't the intellectual traditions I grew up with. Those, for me, were Marx, Dilthey, Simmel, and Hegel, neo-Kantian philosophy, Rickert, and Max Weber. Half-unconsciously, I probably still defer to my ancestral fathers, whether they were friendly fathers to me or not. Thus I occasionally pass rather condescending judgments on the Americans, for which you've sometimes reproached me, Helmut. However, I must immediately add—and in this respect I'm different from my former colleagues at the Frankfurt Institute—that through my more prolonged exposure to American

intellectual life, I've learned to understand that the way in which we criticized pragmatism, for example, or George Herbert Mead's theory, was simply superficial. I've come to recognize that these are, after all, completely respectable theoretical approaches and methods of research, even if my background doesn't allow me to adopt them. I mean, what disturbed me most of all about American social science was the so-called empirical research enterprise, where one had the feeling that the research was actually being done only for the sake of the method and not for the sake of the objects of research. Almost always, the historical context of the phenomena under study seemed to me to be totally lacking. Empiricists always acted as if the phenomena popped into reality at the precise moment when the researchers focused on them with their methodological instruments. Every new research project defined new realities. But that's all changed now. In general, much in American social science is changing. You yourself have been here a while, and you can see how great the interest and commitment are among our younger colleagues and students for theory, history, and philosophy.

Dubiel: I'd like to pursue this question. This was one of my first enduring impressions when I came here as a German social scientist, an intellectual tourist, so to speak: that the European, particularly the German, prejudices and categories I brought along—such as "excess of empirical research," "opposition of structural functionalism and interactionism," and so on, are hardly relevant. Thus I'm interested in hearing your advice on this aspect. From your perspective as an outsider, can you recognize a new typical structure? Do you see any emerging new theoretical-political obstacles? Or is American sociology now in a phase—as I think is true at present for sociology in the Federal Republic—where "anything goes," that is, a phase of very strong dissolution of the structures and boundaries that had prevailed in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies?

Lowenthal: I think that all these categories of different

"schools" are just as outmoded as the categories of intellectual disciplines. But this is similar to the Marxist scheme of superstructure and base; it just proceeds very slowly. You know my cynical remark that the division of the social sciences into different academic departments is just a means of limiting structural unemployment among intellectuals. Today, for example, it really makes no sense to say, this is a political scientist, this is a sociologist, this is an anthropologist, this is a social psychologist. Those are all outmoded terms.

Dubiel: Does what you say have descriptive character, or are you speaking normatively?

Lowenthal: It's not just normative, it's simply the way it is. Just take a look. I mean, it's already obvious in personnel matters: a few years ago Reinhard Bendix, who used to be a sociologist, decided to switch over to the political science department, and Martin Trow, who also used to be a professor of sociology, is now a professor of public policy. As for me, I could just as well be in comparative literature. . . .

Dubiel: So you mean to say that this interdisciplinary intertwining of the different social science disciplines is more strongly developed here than in Europe, even the Federal Republic?

Lowenthal: Just take a look at such institutions as schools of business administration, law schools, and medical schools—you can see how many sociologists are wanting to get in there. You know how closely associated I am with legal-sociological studies here. It's a novelty that sociology is being taught at the law school now and that sociologists are becoming professors there.

Dubiel: Has there been a negative reaction on the part of the medical or law faculties?

Lowenthal: Of course, some resist it; to be sure, not always the best!

Dubiel: Can this be attributed to a certain ideology on the part of these disciplines? I'm only asking because in our small social

science province of the Federal Republic—and specifically as a consequence of the student movement—a situation arose wherein, often under pressure from students of various disciplines, sociological approaches were established, sometimes even in the form of new professorships. This was particularly strong in the humanistic disciplines, but also in medicine, and somewhat less in jurisprudence. For quite some time now, however, a very strong affective reaction against sociology has been apparent in broader scientific circles.

Lowenthal: No, that doesn't exist here. Nor was it the case, according to my observations, that the process I described was instigated solely by student pressure, although that may have had something to do with it. I believe that what resistance there is, especially in the juridical institutes, represents rearguard battles. The need for more psychological and sociological orientation is growing. Maybe you're right, after all, that student interests are behind it. Many medical students want to study more social medicine and public health policy, law students want to learn more about community law in order to better represent the legal interests of the poor. Many business students here want to contribute to the building of more social involvement within large conglomerates. I think this sort of development will continue and expand. The danger at the beginning of this development lay in the old, petrified tradition that a good sociologist must work in a department of sociology, and it was often difficult to attract the best people to these other areas. The old traditionalists tended to look down on these "interdisciplinary sociologists." That's changing in places like Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, and here.

Dubiel: In the Federal Republic there are, or at least there were a little while ago, certain people who perceived this trend as a danger. Under the motto "sociology without sociologists," they saw this migration into other fields or into "hyphenated sociologies" as a manifestation of the dissolution of general sociology. In my view,

this is based on the need, particularly in sociology, for a paradigmatic, disciplinary unity that unquestionably doesn't exist, at least not yet.

Lowenthal: That doesn't exist here, that fear that sociology will dissolve. I've always said that these disciplines such as sociology or political science are conglomerates, organizational units of very heterogeneous elements. No, that need to hold the ranks together in order to survive as a profession, that doesn't exist here.

Dubiel: I didn't mean that so much in the professional sense, but more in terms of the interest to have clearly defined disciplinary identity. This interest probably originates in the analogy, most likely false, to the development of the natural sciences. Sociology is, to paraphrase Thomas Kuhn, an immature science. If we go on working for, say, a hundred years on the fundamental concepts of general sociology, then . . .

Lowenthal: Now this is really the dialectic of world history. When I came here in the thirties, that was still the prevailing model: sociology was supposed to be a natural science. That's changed completely here. Today people would laugh in your face if you even expressed such ideas at all. What you really can observe here in America today is an increasing penetration of sociology by philosophical and psychological concerns. At the good universities and in good departments, the leading sociologists intellectually are no longer purely research technicians. Rather, they're also always interested in the interdisciplinary, theoretical, political, and sociopolitical contexts.

Dubiel: Well, that's certainly not the rule in the Federal Republic. There are many sociologists whom I wouldn't count among the intellectually leading figures but who tend to determine the image of sociology because of their advisory role in politics, their professional politicking, and their role in the major foundations; and the orientation of these people bears a striking resemblance to American sociology of the thirties. Their scholarly approach is very prag-

matic, to the point of limiting themselves to technical issues; they mostly have very specialized areas of interest and are more like administratively oriented research technicians than theory-oriented intellectuals. This development, however, is determined in a very dialectical manner by the classically bad reputation sociology has in Germany, which in some respects is still a belated effect of fascism.

Lowenthal: I can certainly believe that. We really experienced a culture shock when we came to America. You know, in our time, sociology, like psychoanalysis, was generally considered esoteric. Thus it can't have been a coincidence that both of them came together at our Institute. Sociology and psychoanalysis were avant-garde pursuits. They smelled of leftist politics, of Jewish intellectualism.

Dubiel: Well, that really hasn't changed fundamentally in the Federal Republic. The prejudice against sociology was simply reinforced by the postwar development of Critical Theory and then especially by the student movement in the 1960s. Perhaps this fascistic image of sociology would have changed gradually over the course of the decades, but the student movement then, in reaction, so to speak, reactivated it once again. Even the established and politically flexible sociologists have to fight this prejudice in politicians, and so they are constantly obliged to present a low profile. That is, we're just "methodological technicians"; we're just supposed to furnish data; the information we provide is only to assist decision-making processes; and so on. And good old Max Weber is splendidly suited to give theoretical blessing to this self-castration.

Lowenthal: That's interesting. Is that really the case? Well, I can't see it that way in the people I know there. I don't see that in Jürgen Habermas or Ralf Dahrendorf or Ludwig von Friedeburg, or even in René König, who, after all, is more American than many an American. But perhaps these people aren't representative. Even though I've traveled several times to the Federal Republic, and various German colleagues have been here in Berkeley, I don't know

enough people there to be able to form a definitive judgment. But it's interesting to see how you portray it.

Dubiel: Leo, now I'd like to address another matter. It's somehow delicate. . . .

Lowenthal: Women, money, wine?

Dubiel: No, no, not that. You know, Adorno once coined the beautiful formulation that he could imagine the political message of Critical Theory only in the form of a message in a bottle. He was probably amazed at how quickly and with what a bang that bottle was uncorked by the German student movement. My question is this: are there intellectual currents here in America that uncorked that bottle, and how do you assess them? I'm referring now to the editorial groups of the journals Telos and New German Critique. The NAM (New American Movement) group, which is influential in certain circles in the United States, also involves the tradition of Critical Theory in its theoretical positions. Of course, these are very small groups, but the public response to them and their influence on publishers are extraordinarily great. It simply astonishes me as a German to see what recondite and difficult writings are being published here now. Yesterday Benjamin's book on Baroque tragedy came into my hands—you should give yourself the pleasure of reading its English introduction. In short, Leo, how do you evaluate this whole neocriticism, as I shall call it, here in the United States?

Lowenthal: I'll answer very impudently. In America, the intellectual currents come and go just like the political ones. At the end of the First World War, America got involved in a big way in the business of imperialistic and economic international politics for the first time. What I experienced as a negative shock in the thirties was in response to an intellectual and cultural provincialism, relative to the technological and political development here. Intellectually, America was then practically a province. Just in our own field, think how late the works of Max Weber and Durkheim were translated. If Parsons hadn't come along, perhaps they still wouldn't be trans-

lated. Think of Dilthey, who to this day isn't properly translated. Not much of modern German literature has been translated, and the great documents of the French counterrevolution are still, with few exceptions, mostly unknown.

So, the key word was provinciality. Today, one can't speak of that any more. A sense of disappointment, disillusion, and outrage over what had happened in America after the Second World War slowly spread among the more enlightened young people. The broader public was not convinced that the Americans had defeated Hitler and Mussolini; fundamentally, it appeared to have been merely a matter of destroying armies, not a political system. Leftist intellectual circles reacted to this disappointment with a strong interest in political philosophy. And in this context the Frankfurt School was discovered. Most likely the new interest derived largely from the great popularity Herbert Marcuse enjoys in this country; at least, that's what I suspect. Then, of course, there's the factor of the ideological disputes on the left, which, to be sure, never had a mass political basis. There were, for instance, the many Trotskyist-oriented discussions at the end of the thirties. Today it's like that again, except that now it's much more cosmopolitan. This is the context in which we find a fairly broad reception for many of the ideas of the Frankfurt School, as well as for those of a good number of French thinkers. Intellectual curiosity is great and nearly unquenchable. But all this excited curiosity and intellectual activity can't replace real, politically oriented activism. Ultimately, none of this has any real political meaning.

Dubiel: All of what you say could be perfectly well applied to German circumstances. These extremely heated discussions of sectarian circles are only possible in the hothouse of complete political isolation.

Lowenthal: But I always have the feeling that that could quickly change in Germany. A great economic crisis or who knows what could change that.

Dubiel: In reading Telos I'm amazed to find a lot of paradigms

that were in vogue in Germany over a decade ago. For example, the endless discussion about whether your circle was the representative of authentic Marxism or whether it consisted of infamous Marxist dissidents; you know, that overheated atmosphere in which the Benjamin legend arose, I find it here once again. It's really astonishing. In Germany, it was at least related to the rising student movement and the problems involved in orienting a social movement. Here it really isn't anything more than an excited academic affair.

Lowenthal: I have nothing to add to that; you're quite right. They really are small groups, but in America even small groups count simply because the country is so large and it all eventually adds up. In some sense all of this is a "catching up" phenomenon. European intellectual circles used to be strongly characterized by intellectual partisanship. As a philosopher in Germany, for instance, one belonged either to the Marburg School or to the Southwest School, and one engaged in disputes and polemics; one was either a Kantian, a liberal, or a Marxist. And this current endorsement of Critical Theory—which, as a concept, has become so diffuse that I myself don't know anymore what its constituent elements are—is probably an attempt to found a philosophical-ideological party, a search for a unified scientific-political perspective. It's a protest against every form of scientistic positivism, and here Critical Theory functions as a guideline.

Dubiel: That is to say, a stimulus to different scientific-political and ideological orientations.

Lowenthal: Yes, but a stimulus that is attractive precisely to many extraordinarily bright people. In my experience, it's always the best students who become partisans of Critical Theory. That's my impression. I don't think that happens just by chance.

Dubiel: Leo, let's talk about the student movement. We're in Berkeley, you've taught here since the fifties, one could say that things began here when you were at the high point of your university teaching career. It can also be said that Berkeley, at least chronologically, was the leader of the worldwide student movement.

Dr. Victor Lowenthal, 
Leo Lowenthal's father, 
c. 1934

Rosy Bing Lowenthal, 
Leo Lowenthal's mother,
c. 1940

Leo Lowenthal in the Goethe Gymnasium, Frankfurt am Main, 1912 
(third row, third from left)

Leo Lowenthal in the Kaiser's army, 1918 (top row, center)

Lowenthal as a young schoolteacher, Liebig-Oberrealschule, 
Frankfurt am Main, c. 1928

Theodor W. Adorno, 
c. 1921 age 18

Lowenthal as a schoolteacher, Liebig-Oberrealschule, 
Frankfurt am Main, 1930

The young Siegfried Kracauer,
Frankfurt am Main, c. 1925, age 36

Max Horkheimer, New York (?),
 c. 1940

Lowenthal's mentor, Luise Habricht, Giessen,
 c. 1919, age 40

Lowenthal's mentor, Walter Kinkel, Professor of 
Philosophy, University of Giessen, 1919,
at about age 45

Lowenthal and son Daniel on the roof of the 
Institute building, 1927

Lowenthal's first wife, Golde, and son Daniel, c. 1936

Leo and Golde Lowenthal, 1936

Lowenthal at the Voice of America, c. 1950

Marjorie Fiske, Lowenthal's second wife, c. 1955

Lowenthal at the Center for Advanced Study,
Palo Alto, 1955

Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse at Lowenthal's wedding
 to Susanne Hoppmann, 1977

Lowenthal and Jürgen Habermas in Crete, 1980

Leo and Susanne Lowenthal, Laguna Beach, California, 1979

Lowenthal and Martin Jay, Berkeley, 1984

Susanne and Leo Lowenthal and Helmut Dubiel, Munich, 1980

Lowenthal receiving the Federal Republic's Distinguished Service 
Cross from President Richard von Weizsäcker, Berlin, 1985 
(Photo courtesy of Elke Petra Thonke, Hölderlinstr. 11, Berlin)

Lowenthal: Yes, that started, I believe, around 1960. The first student demonstrations then must have been on the steps of City Hall or the courthouse in San Francisco, protests against the Committee on Un-American Activities, a kind of successor to the McCarthy committee. I congratulated the students in my classes. I said, "I'm glad that you've finally awakened from the great hibernation of the fifties." And then when the Free Speech Movement started in 1964, drawing its support mainly from the civil rights activists from the South, I was really enthusiastic. As acting chairman of the Sociology Department, I endorsed the faculty protest against the university administration. I then joined a faculty committee that worked very closely with the student organizations, and we, together with the students, assumed an adversary position toward the chancellor, the president of the university, and the governor. And, in the end, we won, too. But about that later. First I became a member of the so-called Muscatine committee [Select Committee on Education, chaired by Charles Muscatine], belonging, so to speak, to its left wing. This committee had the task of working out suggestions for educational reform, which were later published in the book Education at Berkeley in 1968. I can only speak for myself, but for a time I had the feeling that this movement would really gain political momentum and that perhaps a third party would develop in America. Whether one could have called it "socialist" I'll leave aside. At least, that was my hope then. But it didn't happen.

Dubiel: When did the first signs appear? Are there any key events?

Lowenthal: In 1966, that is, two years later. I realize this now in light of experiences I had in 1966 during an extended trip through the Federal Republic, when I often had contacts with West German students. But especially here in Berkeley, I soon gained the impression that it was essentially more a matter of satisfying certain psychological needs than of realizing realistic political goals. There are enough examples of how, as time passed, these private psycho-

logical projections often translated themselves into frustrations and tragedies in student circles. At first I thought that this would be different in Germany, that the student movement would be much more strongly linked with other political movements. Isn't that a fair assessment of what happened?

Dubiel: No. Various disoriented parts of the student movement joined various other feuding groups. But one can't say that the student movement as a whole placed itself in the service of another political force. I don't quite understand your criticism, though, Leo. Just what sort of an argument is this about psychological satisfaction?

Lowenthal: Perhaps I put it badly. I noticed that it never really came to a consolidated, politically oriented movement. I saw that many of these young people enjoyed the state of upheaval they had caused on campus with their activities, that they experienced this as an atmosphere that mitigated certain psychological frustrations in the academic as well as the personal sphere and allowed them to retreat into the background. But this hardly translated into a viable political movement. At first I thought that this conflict between protesting students, who were supported in part by openly protesting employees, and the police, with their constant hail of tear gas grenades and so on, could develop into a real movement. But that didn't happen. You see it yourself every day: Telegraph Avenue is now a bazaar; People's Park is a collection of little vegetable gardens. But at that time I was happy about it, and I was a part of it, too. Then in 1970, the invasion of Cambodia took place, and those were the days when the students wanted to "reconstruct" the university. Well, I have to admit that I wasn't completely sold on the idea of an intra-university democracy. The students at that time had a kind of vague notion of a Soviet council–type community of professors, staff, and students. When my students refused to meet on campus for our seminar because it was impossible to do any work there what with all the police and tear gas, we met privately. Out of this

grew my private seminar, which today, nine years later, still exists. Another example of the cunning of reason!

Dubiel: Today, in retrospect after ten years, one really has to say that it was an extremely dramatic and critical political situation. I think it's pretty much agreed that the antiwar movement reached its high point with the protest against the invasion of Cambodia. Ronald Reagan was governor at that time, and the unrest on the Berkeley campus was his most important and most attractive campaign issue. Even though the student movement in the Federal Republic lasted longer and possibly also reached somewhat deeper, it never reached such a dramatic critical point in its development as here. In the entire area around Berkeley and San Francisco the antiwar movement was very strong; on campus, it was a situation more or less of civil war.

Lowenthal: You're right there. What I described previously was, so to speak, the one side. The other side was, of course—and this mustn't be underestimated—that it had led to a great protest movement throughout the country, which was joined by other important groups of the population. I think that one can really say that the Vietnam War was brought to an end by the pressure of student and nonstudent movements, that the ending of the Vietnam War was, to a great extent, a victory of the American student movement. But out of the actual Free Speech Movement, nothing developed. After the awful war came to an end, everything else also came to an end; the movement practically disappeared overnight. The campus became quiet, and although people say that there are a number of underground activities, one doesn't see much of them. Since then there have been recurrent efforts, especially centered around the problems of minorities and women, to repeat the victory that the struggle against the Vietnam War ultimately gained, but so far they have failed.

Dubiel: Yes, I've also observed that here. I always explain this phenomenon to myself in simple theoretical terms: one can't deter-

mine the cycle of social movements independently from world history. For that reason, such immanent appraisals of political movements that don't take into account the opportunities offered by historical events are always somehow inadequate. So, with the end of the Vietnam War, it all fell apart. But at the same time—and this is the tragedy of the American student movement—this tremendous political success formed expectations among the American left by which the success of other activities is measured even today. It's no wonder, then, that here apathy goes deeper, that the nostalgic mystification of the sixties is much more intense than in Germany. I've attended several conferences of the American left here—they were nostalgia festivals! You might recall that last September here in Berkeley there was a big festival at which the sixties were to be officially buried. Now the motto is: the sixties are now!

Lowenthal: All that confirms precisely what I've been saying: these are just psychological calisthenics, nothing more.

Dubiel: No, it's not that simple. You can't just ascribe everything to the psychological mechanisms of these people. It certainly has more to do with the fact that the cause they're representing does not at this moment inspire general social sentiments sufficient to rally the masses behind it—it simply lacks political explosive force. These are obviously highly respectable needs, which, however, don't seem to be symptomatic of a general social conflict structure.

Lowenthal: And you want to accuse me of having become a pessimist! Is that the behavior of a youth who claims to be politically motivated, that you have to search around to see whether there are any political situations with which you can identify? What happened to spontaneity? After all, world history continually confronts us with new tasks and challenges.

Dubiel: Leo, I don't think it's that simple. In history there just doesn't arise that often a constellation of situations, a series of events that come together in such a way as to make it possible for a large political movement to react to it with closed ranks, or even to

forfeit the opportunity to react. In that respect—this would make a nice afterword—your own life was full of such mostly negative situations, which we often, in retrospect, recognize as dramatic historical crises: the October Revolution, the German revolution of 1918, fascism, the end of the war. This kind of historical explosion isn't experienced every day. But that leads me to something else. As you know, in my book I took great care to examine the formation of political consciousness in your circle in the thirties and forties. There I found an increasing development away from a skeptically distanced support of the "progressive forces of humanity," which was a sort of embarrassed rhetorical flourish showing that you could not fully identify with either the Social Democrats or the Communists, all the way to an apocalyptic skepticism toward world developments as a whole. Even today I often find traces of that skepticism, that world-historical pessimism, the most concrete examples of which I found in the early forties. You probably remember the evening we spoke about Iran with Herbert Marcuse. There I noticed that attitude, which doesn't lead merely to skeptical comments on all specific political events; more than that, it provides a pitch-black background against which everything appears totally gloomy and hopeless. This view of world developments as an inescapable continuity of doom—which is documented in numerous places in the writings and letters of the members of your circle—apparently stayed with you all, including you, Leo. In many conversations, when we've touched on essential matters, I've often perceived you as someone who sits, so to speak, in the foxhole of a world-historical pessimism and describes everything from this perspective. Would you say that this is a fairly accurate description?

Lowenthal: Yes, maybe.

Dubiel: Well, as a younger man I can, for simple psychological reasons alone, scarcely adopt that view. At the same time, however, I see—and here I may sound a bit nasty—that you've set yourself up rather comfortably in this world. Lukács once characterized this

life-style with the malicious mot "Grand Hotel Abyss"—you know, that formulation was coined referring to Horkheimer and Adorno. You appreciate your comfortable life-style, you like to eat well, you enjoy good wine. In short, you live in very pleasant circumstances in a very pretty house in one of the most attractive areas of the United States. What I'm driving at is this: in contrast to former times, the experiences on which you base that pessimism are no longer connected with the immediate sufferings of today's generations. Then, in a very dramatic and brutal way, the opposite was the case. To be a socialist and a Jew in fascist Germany, to have to emigrate because of that—just yesterday I was reading your letters from the late thirties when you were trying to get your parents out of Germany via Lisbon—your individual fate was inextricably linked with world history: you had just escaped Hitler. Others in your circle, Benjamin, for example, weren't so lucky. The most dreadful repercussions of world history affected your intimate circle; the anguish of the world of that time was existentially tangible for you. Now for my question: is your present pessimism or profound skepticism just a deeply rooted aftereffect of the shock of those days that you have never completely overcome, or are there also present-day political developments that provide a possible source of your pessimism? Forgive me, Leo, that I've talked for so long, but this is an important question for me.

Lowenthal: First of all, Helmut, I'd like to state one thing very energetically. I'm sorry to see you in the company of those who take us to task for the alleged contradiction between radicalism and the enjoyment of the good life. We were always of a different opinion: luxury is not an evil. The proletarian resentment of the upper strata is not productive for theory. Enjoyment leads to a higher sense of differentiation, unless one becomes the victim of unbridled hedonism. So, Helmut, I think that the environment in which one lives should be as beautiful as possible, and traveling well and comfortably, enjoying a good meal and good wine, socializing with

friends—all these things are surely positive experiences. This is how human beings should live. Whom would it help if I were to voluntarily lower my standard of living—as if only the very rich were entitled to the so-called good life!

Dubiel: I'm a little intimidated to say anything more. Perhaps here I'm also a victim of that fundamentally Protestant sympathy with the proletariat. . . .

Lowenthal: I don't sympathize with the proletariat. Marx didn't sympathize with the proletariat either: the proletariat was to be abolished! Proletarian life-styles are hardly a model worth imitating, nor are petit-bourgeois life-styles that attempt to emulate the life-styles of the upper classes. Today, however, many members of these upper classes engage in the glorification of a rural communal life in primitive circumstances. I reject that as well. I would say quite directly that luxury is the anticipation of utopia. Perhaps Marx might have found more sophisticated formulations and made more subtle distinctions had he lived in better circumstances. But back to your question. So then, pessimism is a term I would rather not use. I'd prefer to just say, sadness. Pessimism presupposes an anthropology I don't share. I still have not completely shed the utopian ideas that motivated me as a young man of seventeen or eighteen. Fundamentally, if I may put it arrogantly, I never abandoned politics and the revolution; rather, the revolution abandoned me. I'm not against progress, and certainly I'm glad to see the "good guy" and the "good cause" win a victory in the political arena, but this only amounts to avoidance of a greater evil. I think that the shock to which you referred was caused not only by the disappointment over a failed universal revolution after World War I but also by the disappointment resulting from the developments after World War II.

Dubiel: Do you mean the lack of ideological consequences of the battle against fascism?

Lowenthal: It's rarely been much fun to find oneself on the side

of the winners. Usually one feels better in the company of the losers. The end of the war was experienced as the defeat of the German, Japanese, and Italian armies because of their inferiority to the military power of the allies. The military inferiority was there, of course, but the demonstration of that was hardly the purpose of that war. We had hoped for a real change in the world, not only in the countries formerly ruled by fascists, but also in the United States, which, after all, is hardly in a state of moral and political innocence. It was a great disappointment for us to realize that the war was waged practically without ideology. "Getting it over with" seemed to have been the principal goal.

Dubiel: If you, Marcuse, Pollock, and Neumann had no scruples as intellectuals to work for the American government during the war, you were probably also motivated by the belief that this was also a war of ideologies.

Lowenthal: Certainly. As for me, that was still the case when I was working for Voice of America.

Dubiel: Was this, then, the second shock, after the traumatic experience of emigration and the eventual failure of the Weimar Republic—I mean, the shock that America, although it entered the war, did so with cool rationality and not in the name of the unequivocally superior cause?

Lowenthal: I don't want to exaggerate. You overinterpret me a bit. First of all, it is a positive fact in world history that Hitler's Third Reich lasted not a thousand but only twelve years and that Mussolini and other political criminals have disappeared. Of course, new ones emerge all the time, but those were the worst so far. No, Helmut, what makes me so sad is that there aren't any real political movements with which I can identify, at whose disposal I could place my meager resources. I feel very isolated. For a time I tried to identify with the organization Americans for Democratic Action, the left wing of the Democratic Party. But that turned into

an exercise in futility, a pastime for left liberals devoid of theoretical basis. I can't do that, I simply can't do that.

Dubiel: This reminds me of a passage in a letter by Horkheimer that I just came across. In the postscript to a letter dated September 1, 1939, he writes—I'm paraphrasing—the most dreadful thing about the present historical situation is that one cannot have even the slightest sympathy with any of the fighting powers. He wrote this on the eve of World War II. Could you today subscribe to this position?

Lowenthal: Helmut, I can only restate my position of political nonidentification. If you wish, you might interpret this as a weakness. This attitude probably goes back to what I have just described to you, namely that in my memory I'm still so strongly rooted in my political youth, that is, the period from age seventeen to twenty-two when I really believed in utopia. I believed in the possibility of a successful revolution and the realization of its goals. I really believed that we could change the world. Already then such deep-seated utopian expectations served as a rationalization for disengaging myself from the tedium of concrete political activity. Perhaps my youthful hopes have been so profoundly disappointed that I can no longer muster the patience to identify with movements that are dedicated to mere improvements. Of course, my heart beats faster when the utopian seems to throw off sparks, if only for a moment; but disappointment follows all too quickly. Just take a look at the world today. Tell me, just where should one plant one's political sympathies and hopes?