BEYOND THE OTHER SHORE: GERMAN INTELLECTUALS IN THE UNITED STATES

For over half a century, the American transformation of German philosophy and social thought has been a major theme of modern intellectual history. The main protagonists of this “cultural migration,” as the story traditionally has been told, were German-speaking scholars and writers who, fleeing Hitler's Europe, brought their erudition and indigenous methodologies to American shores. But beyond this beachhead lies a vast and unfamiliar terrain for the historian. What became of German texts and concepts as they traveled further inland? Who transported them—and for what ends? In The Closing of the American Mind, the philosopher Allan Bloom marveled at the ways in which nonacademic Americans had become complicit in the dissemination of German thought: “What an extraordinary thing it is that high-class talk from what was the peak of Western intellectual life, in Germany, has become as natural as chewing gum on American streets.” It was an extraordinary thing, but not a good one, as far as Bloom was concerned: We are like the millionaire in The Ghost (Geist) Goes West who brings a castle from brooding Scotland to sunny Florida and adds canals and gondolas for “local color.” We chose a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had as its starting point dislike of us and our goals. The United States was held to be a nonculture, a collection of castoffs from real cultures, seeking only comfortable self-preservation in a regime dedicated to superficial cosmopolitanism in thought and deed. Our desire for the German things was proof we could not understand them.